Most supermarkets have a range of “Free From” food products. Mrs Blacka Blogger having various allergy problems usually lingers in the aisle where they are to be found. In the food case it’s often gluten free or dairy free that’s the key.
“Free From” in relation to Blacka came up at the 2006 Icarus Process at which we were invited to produce a ‘vision’ for the site. At the beginning the facilitators asked us to say what we most valued about Blacka. People mentioned various things like the quietness, the bilberries, the views, even the wildness etc.
At Blacka Blogger’s turn, feeling a bit stuck, I had to say that there were too many individual things to mention but there was one thing that encompassed what to me was special about Blacka making it different to every other comparable access space. That was the fact that it was or had been largely free from many things that sometimes compromised the value of other places. I then elaborated…..
Free from farming, from farm animals, from farm fences and gates, from intrusive farm practices and management, from farm vehicles, from the feeling that you are always walking in a space where someone is earning a living, in short feeling genuinely free. That’s not the same as expecting to have a licence to do just what I want. Valuing a place for being itself brings respect unlike that value that comes from seeing it as a convenient location to pursue one chosen activity.
Needless to say my vision statement was chucked out by the fundamentalist conservationists who perceived it as being a threat to their hegemony. But this vision lived on through the remainder of the Icarus sessions and it’s a measure of how powerful it is that the conservation people at English Nature and PDNPA were badly rattled by it having to resort to bad temper and underhand tactics to defeat it.
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