239:4,
include additional material as shown in bold [this is included to set in context
an aspect of Sulian's character that came into sharp focus only after first
publication of the book, as shown below]: ...Such is the warriorship necessary where steel is too blunt to cut the darkness,
and where steel is much too unforgiving.
Back
in Harris I had challenged Sulian on this – on the different levels of
engaging with conflict: physical, psychological and spiritual; a spectrum
running from violent to non-violent. Michelle Metivier’s team had been bugging
me. They wanted to know how, as a Quaker pacifist, I could justify sharing a
platform with a Warrior Chief, with a ‘man of violence’. ‘Well,’ I’d
answered them, ‘If I only did business with other pacifists, I probably
wouldn’t be talking to you!’ But later I took the point up privately with
Sulian. ‘Look at you, for example,’ I’d said to him. ‘I can see two
types of warrior in you. That of a military operator, yes, but also an emerging
spiritual warriorship.’
‘Don’t you
even joke about that!’ he exploded. It was an uncalled for, unexpected burst
of real anger. It etched his words on my mind. I knew that I had touched some
rift. He was not ready or willing to enter into it. At least, not with me. So
I’d backed off.
Calanais.
Gaunt stones. And here we are, again. We stand there for a long time. I
think of when I was little and we used to come to the Stones with visitors. I
think of the bleak times. The days I’d feel small and vulnerable in the cold,
very small. And I think of how the red-hot passion of spiritual work always
alternates with icy dark nights of the soul. I think, too, of this
world, and how the taproot of good so often gets besmirched with the grime
through which it pushes. Edwin Muir said it all so well in One Foot in Eden:
Yet
strange these fields that we have planted
So
long with crops of love and hate….
Evil
and good stand thick around
In
fields of charity and sin
Where
we shall lead our harvest in.
Yet
still from Eden springs the root
As
clean as on the starting day.
Some
of Sulian’s words the day we left Eigg come echoing back to me. ‘Don’t you
be too apologetic about old Angus,’ he’d said, in admonishment. ‘If you
were carrying what he carries; if you bore his weight of tradition, his burden
of leadership, and everything he’s been through, you’d probably be drinking
too!’
And
that’s the difficulty with spiritual activism. It means running with the
handicap of whatever your own limp might be plus, typically, that of whoever’s
running with you. What’s more, it usually means running on empty. Sometimes,
as Siddhartha told his beloved, all that you can do is wait, and fast, and pray.
That’s what makes for spiritual work. It’s why the deepest activism is
always spiritual activism. It’s the faith to hold the faith even when you
can’t see the object of your faith on the road ahead.
276:5 "We
had won …" [delete the 3
paragraphs that follow up to “Paulo
Freire”, and substitute a major new
ending as follows]:
We had won.
Except for Lafarge’s
appeal.
We had to wait the full
six weeks that they were permitted
before, at the very last moment, the
company announced that they intended to
appeal.
What’s more, they were
determined to fight it on two legal
fronts. One would try to overturn the
rejection of their planning application.
The second would attempt to re-invoke an
earlier planning permission granted back
in 1965. Most people thought this
‘grandfather’ concession was no
longer valid, but the company’s
lawyers believed they could prove
otherwise.
On the first matter we
suffered an immediate defeat. The
Scottish government were forced to agree
that their political decision rejecting
the superquarry had not been
sufficiently robust in law. Accordingly,
they withdrew their letter of rejection
and announced they would have to
consider the matter afresh. The long
waiting process would begin all over
again.
The other prong in
Lafarge’s strategy could, equally,
take years to work its way through the
courts. For the island of Harris, it was
the worst possible outcome. When the
economy of an area depends heavily on
tourism, people need to know where they
stand. There would be no point planning
for the future and investing in it if
that future was perhaps going to be
compromised by forced transition to an
industrial economy.
So it was that we were
all thrown back again onto watching all
points of the come-to-pass. It was then,
in the summer of 2002, that I received
an intriguing e-mail. It came from a
Monsieur Thierry Groussin, Chargé de la
Formation des Dirigeants in the Confédération
Nationale du Crédit Mutuel – the
big French bank that, unlike capitalist
banks, is owned and controlled by
regionally based committees of its
clients.
Thierry, as I came to
know him, explained that he had bought a
copy of Soil
and Soul while on holiday in
Scotland. He was particularly struck by
the early section discussing the village
economy in which I grew up: he realised
I was describing the same ideals that
had originally been the motivating force
that drove the ethos of Crédit Mutuel.
Staff needed to be reminded of these
values to understand what was special
about the organisation for which they
worked. Would I, he therefore wondered,
consider coming to Paris to address a
conference of senior management? He
didn’t want anything fancy. None of my
high-falutin’ theories from MBA days
about discounted cash-flow investment
appraisal techniques discounting the
children’s future, or anything like
that. Simply stories about mutuality in
practice – the building of each
others’ houses, the sharing of fish,
and so on. As an Irish priest had once
advised me, ‘Tell them it in stories,
and they’ll never forget.’
Well, Thierry’s event
ended up as not one conference, but four
in total, also involving Camille
Dressler from Eigg and my French wife, Vérène
Nicolas, who specialises in
community-empowerment work –
which, actually, is what locally based
mutual banking is a part of.
During these visits I
was introduced to the ‘Co-evolution
Project’ – a small Paris-based
ecological think tank that Thierry ran
jointly with Mme Dominique Viel, an
economist with the French Ministry of
Finance, and a few other thinkers. They
were interested in the role of corporate
ethical responsibility in addressing the
present problems of the world. It
troubled them considerably to learn that
it was a French company, Lafarge, that
was now behind our superquarry threat.
In the summer of 2003
Thierry and his son, Adrian, visited the
Isle of Harris. He was delighted by the
way local cars on the single-track roads
would go out of their way to stop and
let you past, sometimes causing
mini-hold-ups as both parties flashed
their lights, inviting the other to come
on. ‘Look,’ I was able to say to
him, laughing: ‘this is the island
where people compete to co-operate!’
We drove along a mixture
of modern roads, where large volumes of
stone had been blasted and bulldozed
into place, and the old Golden Road,
where much more modest quantities had
been laid with care to provide beautiful
terraced support. The contrast between
profligate and respectful use of
resources leapt out to the educated eye.
Mind you, it has to be admitted that the
Golden Road was named not after the
island’s haunting sunsets, as tourists
like to think, but the construction
cost! But maybe that is, in part, the
way to go. Maybe, if we want to use
resources more sustainably, we have to
learn anew how to restore the human by
mixing our creativity more fully with
what nature provides. And maybe that’s
the beauty of it all.
The highlight of
Thierry’s visit was, of course, the
ascent of Mount Roineabhal. As we sat on
the summit, admiring the incredible view
that remained so much under threat, he
pulled out his mobile phone and started
calling up various business colleagues!
They, he told me, knew senior people in
Lafarge.
‘You know,’ he said,
‘Bertrand Collomb, who’s now the
chair of Lafarge, has developed an
admired reputation in France for raising
standards of ecological responsibility.
It would shock French people if they
knew what his company were threatening
to do in Scotland. Indeed, I wonder how
aware they are in Paris of what their
newly acquired English subsidiary is
doing?’
The outcome was that in
October 2003, Thierry, Dominique and I
were invited to visit Lafarge’s
headquarters in Paris. There we met with
Michel Picard, Vice President for
Environmental Issues, and Gaëlle
Monteiller, Senior Vice President Public
Affairs and Environment.
I must admit that I was
not very optimistic about this meeting.
Lafarge had, indeed, always appeared to
us like the ‘pan-European monster’
about which the Financial
Times had warned. However, my
prejudices were rather challenged when I
got there. The company’s vice
presidents seemed like thoughtful and
concerned human beings, determined to
use their positions to act as ethically
as they could. They told me frankly that
Harris ‘has become a problem for us’
and asked if I could set up a
fact-finding visit so that they could
come and listen to the positions of both
sides of the community.
I returned to Scotland,
my costs having been generously covered
by a charitable foundation, the Network
for Social Change. Working closely with
Morag Munro, the elected councillor for
South Harris, and John MacAulay, the
community-appointed chair of the Quarry
Benefit Group, I set up a series of
meetings for 15 January 2004. The same
two executives I’d met with in Paris,
together with Philippe Hardouin, the
company’s Senior Vice President Group
Communications, duly flew in to the
island. They came, they saw and they
listened carefully – particularly
to concerns from those on both sides of
the debate about ongoing planning blight
afflicting the island’s future.
They went away again,
but on 2 April they came back on a
chartered private jet. This time they
brought with them two of their most
senior English executives. In a simple
meeting in the Harris Hotel, an event
that felt almost ceremonial, they
announced that they would be withdrawing
from the project. They had seen that
further years of legal argument would
not be good either for the company or
for the local community. In making this
announcement, Philippe Hardouin told the
press:
Responding to
Michel Picard, Morag Munro wrote on
behalf of the island’s council:
The Lafarge decision had come about
partly because of ‘push’ from
pressure groups like Friends of the
Earth Scotland and the Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds Scotland, and
partly through ‘pull’ from other
groups working with them to raise
corporate standards. It later transpired
that the Swiss-based WWF International
(the World Wildlife Fund) had been
particularly instrumental working
jointly with its Scottish branch in this
respect, threatening to pull out from
its corporate partnership for
sustainability with Lafarge if the
superquarry went ahead.
But pressure like this
can be effective only if it finds a
point of attachment among those at whom
it is aimed. After announcing their
dignified exit strategy from Harris, I
was subsequently invited by Michel
Picard to spend three days with
eighty-seven Lafarge managers, including
the new chief executive, Bernard Kasriel,
at a conference on quarrying and
environmental responsibility in Bergamo,
Italy, co-sponsored by WWF
International. It was impressive to
witness the workings of a large company,
some of whose staff were being dragged
kicking and screaming into a greener
future and others who were very much
doing the dragging, arising out of a
genuine personal concern for the world.
I came away all the more
convinced that it is the people that
matter and can make a difference: as
Jung said, individuals are the
‘make-weight’ that can tilt the
balance. A large company is, indeed, a
mindless monster, unless people all the
way through the system devote themselves
to making it otherwise. Then, and only
then, can it start to become more like a
community with values, and maybe even
something of a soul. But this means, as
with Groupe Crédit Mutuel, having an
ethic that serves profit but transcends
mere money-making. It is only human
goodness that can bring this about and
so humanise the otherwise inhumane world
created by emergent properties of greed.
I am not saying here
that Lafarge is always exemplary, or
that somebody like myself may never find
themselves standing against them in the
future. I just wish to place on the
record that, at the end of the day, the
company did right by us. We have made
friends and have, at their request,
opened a public debate about future
aggregate supply. The first airing of
this appears in the summer 2004 issue of
ECOS,
the journal of the British Association
of Nature Conservationists. It includes
contributions from Nigel Jackson,
Executive Director of Lafarge Aggregates
UK, Dan Barlow of Friends of the Earth
Scotland, and myself writing jointly
with Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud and Luc
Giraud-Guigues – the WWF International
staff members who lobbied Lafarge so
effectively as ‘critical friends’
from Switzerland.
It has to be said of
this happy outcome that things probably
would have turned out much the same even
if Lafarge had exhausted their legal
avenues. But by acting the way they did,
they probably did themselves as well as
us a favour. The involvement of the
Paris executives most certainly
accelerated the process. As one of them
put it, ‘The visit to Harris was the
key in the lock that unblocked the
process and moved it along.’ For that,
we genuinely thank them, and as Morag
Munro’s letter indicates, we do so
most warmly.
On the eve of Lafarge
making their historic announcement, a
small group of people assembled in the
Elder’s house on Harris. We re-read
Stone Eagle’s public-inquiry testimony
together and gave thanks for the
wonderfulness of what he, with the
crucial support of his former partner,
Ishbel, had helped to achieve.
We recalled his request
to us, before he went to jail, simply to
be prayed ‘with and not for’.
‘During the darkest moments in your
life,’ he wrote in an e-mail,
‘you’ll find that even your shadow
is gone.’
In July 2004, after
being released from prison, Sulian wrote
to us again. ‘While I was in Waseskun
healing lodge,’ he said, ‘the Elder
there worked with me and showed me so
many things that I must deal with and so
many good things I must dust off and
bring to the front. He saved my life!
The long house society has made me a
mask keeper but it is not time yet to
think in what way I have to use this
healing mask. They did not break me in
jail; they healed me at the Mohawk
treatment lodge.’
Only time will reveal
the progress and completeness of that
healing. It will inevitably be a slow
and even faltering process. Cognitive
skills not acquired in childhood are
easily caught up with later on in life.
But putting right emotional apparatus
that never fell properly into place at
the right time is very much harder.
Healing this requires far more than
cognitive therapies. It takes nothing
less than spiritual power. No
‘medicine’ can go deeper. None is
more needed in today’s wounded world.
‘And the next
thing,’ said the Elder on Harris
softly, as we sat beside a roaring fire
in his stone-built home by the sea
beneath the sacred mountain, ‘the next
thing ... will be to bring the
mountaintop home.’
Of course, unlike the
Irish, modern Scotland doesn’t really
‘do’ sacred mountains. Theologically
they’re dodgy, and in secular terms
they’re bonkers! Yet that is what I
have heard some folks calling
Roineabhal. As one native islander said,
‘If it wasn’t before, it is now.’
And the Elder leaned
back in his chair. He lifted his eyes in
the direction of the mountain out of
which so many good things had come for
so many of us.
‘It may be some years
before the summit rock is brought
back,’ he concluded, ‘but the
mountain can wait. And that too ...
yes, that homecoming too ... will
be for the healing of us all.’
Paulo
Freire says, ‘I am more and more
convinced that true revolutionaries must
perceive the revolution, because of its
creative and liberating nature, as an
act of love.’ He goes on to quote...