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If you came to this site it is because you are looking for information about the Conference forConsciousness and Human Evolution in London, right?

Here you will find all the information about the next live workshop

Continue reading

And I will explain what this live workshop event is all about, and how you can guarantee your participation and book your ticket, OK?

Every year in the city of London takes place the Conference For Consciousness and Human Evolution.

Where speakers and specialists in science and spirituality are invited, among them the famous scientistGregg Braden.

If you decide to join, the live workshop, here is what you will find

During these fantastic 3 days you will be given the tools and information to develop your consciousness

You will learn how to develop your mind in a way never presented before

You will have access to the research on the new science, you also will be presented to new technologies that will help you to transform your life, literally

This evolution conference event is the only one of its kind

Because of the topics the on science and spirituality are discussed deeply, and you will learn how to apply these universal principles to modern life in a simple, practical and objective way.

The Conference of Human Consciousness and Evolution will take place in London, and start on Friday the 19th of October and will end on Sunday the 21th October of 2018.

To Check the Time Schedule ?CLICK HERE

This event started in 2012

And since than, there was so many great speakers, but this year theConference for Consciousness and Human Evolutionwill be very special.

There will be the presence of several speakers

Each one a specialist in a different area, who together will impact and transform your life from the awakening of your consciousness and mind.

These are some of the confirmed speakers for the consciousness conference until this present moment:

1) Gregg Braden

2) Anita Moorjani

3) Rupert sheldrake

4) Lynne McTaggart.

5) Dr. Joe Dispenza

And many others The list is too big to put here, but for check the full list of speakers? CLICK HERE

Check here a sneak peek of what the live workshop is all about, and see for yourself the positive impact that this evolution conference can bring to your live Watch the vdeo

The live workshop in London it is absolutely incredible, and you`re probably thinking how to participate, where to get the tickets, right?

By now you`re probably thinking on coming to London and join the event

If so, that is great!

I will explain the whole process, so you can purchase your ticket over the internet, on the official webiste

Dont worry, the process is simple and safe, and I will explain how it works, step-by-step

By ?CLICKING HERE, or on the yellow button below, you will be redirected to the official website where you can guarantee your participation

For the Conference of Human Consciousness and Evolution London 2018.

On the next page you will need to click on the blue button that says Click Here to Book Now, and choose your ticket (there are several modalities).

Choose which ticket you wish to buy, I recommend you to choose Standard Ticket, because this way you will be able to participate for all 3 days of the conference.

Once your choose your prefered ticket, click on Book Tickets Now, on the following page check if your picked the correct ticket and click on Proceed to Checkout.

Fill in all your data (country, name, address, e-mail and phone number) remembering to fill in the address where your credit card is registered. Make sure your e-mail is correct (you will receive the confirmation through there)

You can pay by VISA, MASTER CARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS or PAYPAL, once the form has been filled in, click on Place Order and you will receive confirmation by e-mail, OK?

Told you would be very simple Now I will explain on how to get there

The event takes place inbetweenFriday, the 19th of October and Sunday, the 21th October of 2018, OK?

Check on the map image bellow the exactly location

Now I will show you how to get there

Here are the directions to Consciousness and Human Evolution Conference in London

The address is: Millennium Gloucester Hotel, 4-18 Harrington Gardens, London SW7 4LH and whith will be taking place in October 19-21 of 2018

If you are coming BY ROAD The Millennium Gloucester does have limited parking available onsite, there are also no parking restrictions on the Sunday or bank holiday Monday.

If you are coming BY UNDERGROUND The closest tube station to the Conference is Gloucester Road that is 2 minutes walk from the hotel.

Bus routes are available and we advise searching online for Gloucester Road tube subject to your travel destination. London Underground accepts contactless card payment for travel, please check for service disruption prior to travel.

Now you know all about the Consciousness and Human Evolution Conference. You now have only 2 options:

1) Close this page and miss this incredible opportunity, or 2) Click on the link bellow to book your ticket and join in

To Book Your Ticket Now?CLICK HERE

P.S. I want to say that this event really helped me to transform my life, the content taught by each speaker really helped me to walk in the direction of a successful life, and you can also make this change.

P.S. I have participated in this event for more than 4 consecutive years, and every year I learn more and more, because this is the only event in the world that brings together science and spirituality.

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Conference For Consciousness & Human Evolution London 2018

Image: Carl Sagan lectures to school kids, in a scene from Cosmos (screen shot).

On a new episode ofID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards, co-author ofThe Privileged Planet, continues a conversation with host Eric Anderson about Carl Sagan and a short video where Sagan fields questions about God. Sagan points out that there are different conceptions of God, but Richards asks, whats his point? There are different conceptions of nature. That doesnt mean that nature isnt out there and that there arent true and false things that can be said about it. Also, when the vast majority of people speak about God, they have in mind a powerful, conscious Creator of nature. Sagan plays definitional games by redefining the meaning of God. Listen in to learn how, to what purpose, and to hear what Richards thinks would be a better approach for atheists such as Sagan. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

See the original post here:
Jay Richards: God, Carl Sagan, and Word Games - Discovery Institute

Ransomware tactics have continued to evolve over the years, and remain a prominent threat to both SMBs and larger organisations. Particularly during the peak of COVID-19,research by IBMfound that ransomware incidents exploded in June 2020, which saw twice as many ransomware attacks as the month prior, taking advantage of remote workers being away from the help of IT teams. The same research found that demands by cyber attackers are also increasing to as much as 31 million, which for businesses of any size, is detrimental for survival.

In recent months, ransomware attacks have not left the mainstream media headlines. And with the number and frequency of ransomware attacks increasing, not to mention the innovation in distribution methods, this should be a wakeup call for organisations to strengthen their defences.Jack Garnsey, Product Manager Security Awareness Training and SafeSend, VIPREexplains that by taking a preventative approach, businesses can take the necessary steps to strengthen their cybersecurity posture. This includes a combination of education, processes, hardware and software to detect, combat and recover from such attacks if they were to arise.

Ransomware in the 21st Century

Ransomware is not a new phenomenon, but its use has grownexponentially, and has led to the development of the term Ransomware as a Service (RaaS), which is a subscription-based model that enables affiliates to use already-developed ransomware tools to execute attacks.

As ransomware incidents become more sophisticated and frequent, such as the increase in fileless attacks which exploit tools and features that are already available in the victims environment, the level of potential damage to a business is heightened. These types of attacks can be used in combination with social engineering targeting, such as phishing emails, without having to rely on file-based payloads. And unfortunately, ransomware is extremely difficult to prevent all it takes is one employee clicking on the wrong link in an email or downloading a malicious attachment.

No matter the size of an organisation, the effects of ransomware can be devastating financially, as well as inflicting longer-term damage to business reputation. The Irish Department of Health and Health Service Executive (HSE)were recently attacked by The Conti ransomware group, who reportedly asked the Health Service for $20 million (14 million) to restore access. This attack caused substantial cancellations to outpatient services, part of a system already stretched to the max due to COVID-19. Some ransomware gangs operate by aflimsy code of ethics, stating they dont intend to endanger lives, but even if a minority of ransomware organisations are developing a sense of conscience, businesses are not exemptfrom the damage that can be done from such attacks.

Additionally, in the US, Colonial Pipeline paid the cyber-criminal group DarkSide nearly $5m (3.6m) in ransom,following a cyber-attack which took its service down for five days, causing supplies to tighten across the US.Unfortunately when under attack, a majority of businesses, such as the major pipeline, often pay the ransom. Luckily for Colonial Pipeline,some of the money was later recovered by the American Department Of Justices Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force.But if they pay once they will pay multiple times. A successful ransomware attack can be used various times against many organisations, turning an attack into a cash cow for criminal organisations offering Ransomware as a Service. So much so, that there is now anongoing debatearound whether it should be illegal for businesses or an individual to pay a ransom in order to try and deter the attackers, or at the minimum, to at least report it to the necessary regulators.

Contain and Report It

If a ransomware attack were to take place, it is important that the organisation works with local authorities to try to rectify the issue and follow the guidance. Often, many ransomware attacks go unreported and this is where a lot of criminal power lies.

Prevention is always better than cure, and damage limitation and containment are important right from the outset. As the United States President, Joe Biden, highlighted in hisrecent letterto business leaders around ransomware: The most important takeaway from the recent spate of ransomware attacks on U.S., Irish, German and other organizations around the world is that companies that view ransomware as a threat to their core business operations, rather than a simple risk of data theft will react and recover more effectively.

Most organisations should have a detailed disaster recovery plan in place and if they dont, they should rectify this immediately. The key to every disaster recovery plan is backups. Once the breach has been contained, businesses can get back up and running quickly and relatively easily, allowing for maximum business continuity.

As soon as the main threat has passed, it is recommended that all organisations conduct a full retrospective audit, ideally without blame or scapegoats, and share their findings and steps taken with the world. Full disclosure is helpful not only for customer, client or patient reassurances, but also for other organisations to understand how they can prevent an attack of this type being successful again.

The Support of Digital Tools

When it comes to ransomware, the importance of getting security foundations right must be emphasised. These attacks are not likely to stop or slow any time soon, but their success can be prevented with the right security armoury.

Particularly to mitigate the threat of ransomware, it is crucial to have secure endpoint protection in place which protects at the file, application and network layer across a number of devices, and respond to security alerts in real-time. This has never been more important than during the ongoing pandemic, where employees are dispersed and working from home in order to ensure all devices are protected and comply to the same standards.

Additionally, solutions such as email attachment and URL sandboxing are also vital, as these digital tools provide vital protection against malicious emails. They can help prevent dangerous links, attachments or forms of malware from entering the users inbox by examining and quarantining them. By filtering out this traffic and automatically restricting dangerous content, businesses can maintain greater control over email and the access points to the network.

The Human Layer

The users themselves are a key part of any security strategy. Those who are educated about the types of threats they could be vulnerable to, how to spot them and the steps to take in the event of a suspected breach, are a valuable and critical asset to any organisation.

Employees need to be trained to be vigilant, cautious, suspicious and assume their role as the last line of defence when all else fails. The final decision to click send on an email or a link lies with the human, but this one click could mean the entire organisation falls prey to a ransomware attack. The key is to change the mindset from full reliance on IT, to one where everyone is responsible.In order to strengthen a business human layer protection, security awareness training and education must be implemented across the board.

These programmes are designed to support users in understanding the role they play in helping to combat attacks and malware. Using phishing simulations, for example, as part of the wider security strategy, will help to give employees insight into real life situations they may face at any point. The importance of testing your human firewall was also outlinedin Joe Bidens ransomwareletter: Use a 3rd party pen tester to test the security of your systems and your ability to defend against a sophisticated attack. Many ransomware criminals are aggressive and sophisticated and will find the equivalent of unlocked doors.

Conclusion

Cyber security is a multi-faceted, complicated area, and one which must receive investment in each layer, from the technology to the people, to the tools we give to the users. Nevertheless, businesses of all sizes can safeguard their data and themselves from these types of ransomware attacks by investing in their cybersecurity and ensuring their workforces are conscious and informed of the threats they face.

Both detection and prevention play a key role in stopping ransomware, but it shouldnt be one or the other. The essence of a solid cybersecurity strategy is a layered defence that includes endpoint detection and response, email security, advanced threat protection, web security and a business-grade firewall for the security of your network at its most basic. But even with the most sophisticated software in place, hackers make it their mission to stay one step ahead of IT defences. That is why regular training, in addition to complementary security tools which reinforce security best practice, can provide a fortified strategy for users to mitigate the threat of a cyberattack.

Jack Garnsey, Product Manager Security Awareness Training and SafeSend, VIP

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Jack Garnsey, Product Manager Security Awareness Training and SafeSend at VIPRE

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Prevention is Better Than Cure: The Ransomware Evolution - ISBuzz News

Midland Mark Wystrach, Cameron Duddy and Jess Carson are due in the UK in September for their thrice delayed tour.

Fans can not only look forward to seeing the trio live once again but they can expect to hear songs from the trios recently released collection The Last Resort, a pre-cursor to their upcoming third studio album.

I spoke with the band recently to talk about The Last Resort, discuss their impending return to the UK and to find out about their musical evolution

Its nice to see the three of you. Mark and I spoke last year but its been a while since all of us have been together. How are you feeling about finally getting to the UK for this tour?

Mark: Very, very excited.

Jess: Its incredible to be able to go travel over to a place, that you would travel to otherwise, and be able to play music there. Its incredible. Weve had so much fun going over there and just being tourists (laughs) at the same time as getting to do the shows and seeing people come out and sing along with the songs. You see people wearing cowboy hats and its cool, we love coming over there.

You guys are usually relentless touring. Has it been strange to have to completely stop for the past 18 months?

Cam: Yes. It was a painful relief. We would have kept going and hammering the road, like we had been for the previous two years, and we had a lot to look forward to through the summer of 2020. Some pretty major opportunities and what looked like an accelerated growth pattern for us as a band, but the silver lining really was that we got to come off the road and reassess what we wanted to do with the band. You dont get that opportunity often unless somebody forces you to. We were able to put out The Sonic Ranch. Had we not been stationary, we never would have had the time or the inclination to put together a documentary telling our story and the genesis of Midland. I really do think that The Last Resort would have sounded a lot different, and probably would have been named something different, but because we were sitting still, we were able to get back to the root of the lifeblood of this band, which is telling stories through song and exploring different modes and motifs musically through the writing process. I guarantee we would have been writing album three on the road had we not been forced to go home. Whatever your mental state is typically informs the kind of music that youre writing, so I dont know if it would have been better or worse but I do know that The Last Resort would sound a lot different had we not been at home. Were all really proud of the music that weve evolved into and been able to put out.

The Last Resort is definitely an evolution. Its unmistakably Midland but its very different from what weve heard before with more of a Laurel Canyon/Eagles vibe to it. Did those influences come to the surface more because you had time to really put these songs together?

Mark: I think its difficult for us to pinpoint a narrative for that evolution. I dont think its intentional or conscious. I think those types of things happen as a result of the work that were doing. When you were playing music all the time, when youre writing all the time and when youre living all the time, you catch yourself evolving. You catch yourself growing, you catch yourself maturing, and you also catch yourself in different phases. Jess, Cam and I are are music fans as well. We are listening to different things all the time, we are going through phases just ike our fans are and like anybody else is. Its also one of those things where if youre around somebody all the time, you dont necessarily notice it change. If you dont see a friend for six months, you notice theyve changed their haircut and maybe theyve got a couple more wrinkles under their eyes, its kind of the same thing with us. We dont really notice those things until we go back to listen to the recordings when were doing the mixing. Thats when we recognise the evolution.

The fans are really keen to know if The Last Resort is a standalone project or if it will eventually be rolled into a longer album?

Jess: The Last Resort will be a full-length album. This is what we did with the very first music that we released. We released five songs and that became the full On The Rocks album. Its the same philosophy with it. I think the models changing for everybody. It used to be people didnt really release music before the full album, it was just a lot of build up and then here came 15 songs. Now its a lot of teasing new music and releasing stuff. We just chose to release this block of songs, which will be part of the full length album.

Mark: Its going to be a continuation of this world as well. The Last Resort is going to continue and were going to be in this world for a while. If the fans are enjoying this peek into it, I think theyre going to be incredibly pleased when we release the full length album.

When you guys are over here next month, will we hear any of the other new songs that havent been released yet?

Cam: Im pretty sure we didnt get a real chance to tour Let It Roll, over there, our second album. Musically were always trying to make the show interesting so youll never hear the songs in the same way. We cant possibly play this music the same way that we recorded it and we try.

Mark: I cant remember it!

Cam: I mean I cant remember it. Theres always covers. Because we dont play to tracks theres always that opportunity to create a happy accident. Come to the show and see Midland and you just may see us play an interpretation of our own music.

Midlands The Last Resort is available to download and stream now. Watch the video for Sunrise Tells The Story below:

Read the rest here:
Interview: Midland discuss 'The Last Resort', their upcoming new album and their UK tour - Entertainment Focus

Weve established there is plenty of great public-access golf around Pinehurst. Classic courses. Modern courses. Subtle layouts. Big and bold tracks. Its all there in the Sandhills.

And theres plenty of private layouts too, if thats your thing. On this trip, I sampled two such clubs: Dormie Club and Country Club of North Carolina. These two provide a great opportunity to compare and contrast the private offerings in the area.

Dormie Club, which ranks No. 10 among Golfweeks Best Private Courses in North Carolina, was designed by Coore and Crenshaw and opened in 2010. The club struggled financially for several years following the market crash that barely preceded Dormies opening, and the property was purchased by Dormie Network in 2017 as the eponymous flagship for a nationwide club network that allows members to play any of the networks courses. The new owners have lavishly improved course conditions while adding cottages, a clubhouse and a pro shop. The club became entirely private this year.

The course sticks nicely to Coore and Crenshaws well-established minimalist approach to architecture. On the opposite end of the architecture scale of Tobacco Road, Dormie Club lies relatively flat on the ground, making use of subtle native features wherever possible. The bunkers appear as naturally rugged scrapes in the ground, and the wide fairways are frequently dotted with exposed sand.

The Dogwood Course at Country Club of North Carolina, by contrast, is much more lush in its approach. Built in 1963 by Ellis Maples and Willard Byrd, the Dogwood was renovated by Kris Spence in 2016 and provides exceptional playing conditions for its thriving membership.

The Dogwoods relatively wide fairways are flanked by rough as opposed to the exposed sand at Dormie and several other Pinehurst-area courses. The layout navigates several ponds and lakes amid high-end homes, providing a relaxed and comfortable setting. Its a layout that can play as hard or easy as you prefer, depending on the tee boxes chosen.

The Country Club of North Carolina has been a favored Pinehurst destination for elite tournaments, including USGA championships. Hal Sutton won the 1980 U.S. Amateur here, and Doris Chen won the 2010 U.S. Girls Junior. The USGA came back in 2021, with Nicholas Dunlap winning the U.S. Junior Amateur. The Country Club of North Carolina also has hosted numerous iterations of the prestigious Southern Amateur, with winners ranging from Crenshaw to Webb Simpson, who grew up playing the club.

The recent Junior Amateur also featured the Country Club of North Carolinas Cardinal Course in the stroke-play portion of the championship. Designed by Willard Byrd and Robert Trent Jones, nine holes opened in 1970 with the second nine completed in 1981. The presence of 36 holes at the club gives the large membership plenty of opportunities to find a game.

The Dormie Club and the Country Club of North Carolina share some similarities: tall pines, rolling topography, clever use of water hazards. But they are very different in other considerations, with Dormie an intentionally rugged, bare-bones layout that encourages a bit of the ground game, while CCNC is extremely well-manicured and plush. Both are absolutely beautiful, just in different ways.

And thats one of the joys of the Pinehurst area as a whole. Theres variety, more than a first-timer can imagine. Public-access golf. Private golf. History meets modernity. Time marches on with plenty of upgraded amenities, but always with a nod to the past. Its the Home of American Golf, and theres no place quite like it.

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Where to play golf in Pinehurst, N.C.: Pinehurst Resort, Pine Needles, Mid Pines, Tobacco Road and more - usatoday.com

As Gawain in David Lowerys new film and David Copperfield in Armando Iannuccis movie before that, the actor is bending the arc of English literary tradition around him. Photo: Eric Zachanowich / A24 Films

I see legends, Gawain says to his uncle, King Arthur, as they look around a room full of aging heroes. Do not take your place among them idly, Queen Guinevere responds. Gawain, played by Dev Patel, takes her words to heart and sets off on a quest the kind of quest that places Patel at the center of an illustrious interpretation of famous English literature. The kind of quest that has, historically, placed white performers at its center.

In 2020, Patel was set to have a banner year of playing customarily white characters. Both David Lowerys The Green Knight and Armando Iannuccis The Personal History of David Copperfield were scheduled to premiere with Patel in the lead roles. Only the latter movie did, however, months before the pulpy, ahistorical Netflix series Bridgerton, these two projects jointly kicking off renewed discussions about the obvious opportunities and less-obvious pitfalls that come with fully color-blind casting as well as color-conscious casting.

By the time of The Green Knights 2021 release, weve made it far enough along in the debate to understand a few basic downsides to Hollywoods takes on inclusive-casting strategies. On one hand, color-blind casting or casting with no professed intention of considering an actors identity, la The Great runs the risk of rendering race and ethnicity neutral, of turning identity into incidental window dressing. It can ignore the history of the notion that the best person should be cast for the part, which, up until recently, almost always meant a white person taking on roles written for their complexion along with everyone elses. Laurence Olivier as Othello, Mickey Rooney as a Japanese landlord, Charlton Heston as a Mexican prosecutor, John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

On the other hand, color-conscious casting or considering an actors identity while casting has the capacity to overdetermine race and ethnicity, particularly when a director/writer provides little substance in the final product to back it up. Take Tim Burtons casting of Billy Dee Williams as the traditionally white Harvey Dent in 1989s Batman. Burton specifically chose Williams with the hope of setting up a Black Two-Face in a future Batman film. Valiant as that idea was, Burtons interest in the black/white thing, as he put it in the films DVD commentary, turned race into a tool to further his plot rather than a lived experience for Williamss character. Moreover, in 1992s Batman Returns, Burton cast Tommy Lee Jonesin the role of Two-Face instead of Williams.

And then there is the extremely unwieldy middle ground between color-blind and color-conscious casting, wherein the practice of scrutinizing someones skin and background for an artistic endeavor is not obviously conscious or considerate. There is Hamilton, subversive to some, who hail the musical for taking race onstage and its attendant audience expectations and flipping them on their head, and pandering to others, who shudder at the guilt-free patriotism afforded to audiences watching Black and brown people playing idealized slave owners. There is Bridgerton, seemingly a color-blind show until a late-stage expositional dump that offers an eye rollinducing logic for why there are so many Black aristocrats in Regency era Britain. The Green Knight, as bold and exciting as it is, seems initially to fall within this middle ground.

Here, the decision to cast Patel as Gawain is intriguing, foremost, for what he brings to the character. Patel has a reputation for imbuing roles with boyish charm, a natural sense of innocence, and pure curiosity. His turns on the British show Skins and in the star-making Slumdog Millionaire lean heavily on these qualities, though both admittedly have a lurid interest in how a young, vulnerable Indian boy moves through the world. The Green Knight is something of a natural evolution for Patel, who plays a young man on the cusp of knighthood in a medieval coming-of-age allegory. Hes naive, perhaps too trusting, and very much driven by his id, as a handful of regretful semen illustrates. Patel plays Gawain like a trust-fund kid whose mother still washes his chainmail, whos on the precipice of something resembling adulthood more than heroism. After agreeing to play a curious Christmas game with the titular Green Knight, Gawain must pay for the fame newly granted him, and Patels face beautifully milks every second onscreen as he rides, hikes, crawls, and trips toward his destiny.

The Middle English poem upon which The Green Knight is based makes no explicit reference to the skin colors of its characters, and so, despite hundreds of years of assumed knowledge about who could convincingly take up the role of Arthurian heroes like Sir Gawain, there is plausible deniability behind the casting of Patel. Speaking to Vanity Fair about the traditionally very white story, director David Lowery said he was aware of the effect of his cast on the story, though he did not change his script once Patel signed on. When you introduce an element like this, are there any accidental subtexts? Im very sensitive to that, he said, and imagine what people might think. Not the trolls on the internet who were just going to complain; they can all go to hell. But just making sure that were not giving a message that we werent intending to give.

In The Green Knight, as well as in Armando Iannuccis The Personal History of David Copperfield, the lack of distinction between character played by an actor of color and character of color is key to the subtext, because, like many instances of color-blind or color-conscious casting before them, the narrative place of race isnt straightforward in either. Patels idealistic, scrappy, melancholic performance as Copperfield is supported by a host of British actors who were cast blindly with gleeful abandon. The likes of Tilda Swinton, Benedict Wong, Aneurin Barnard, and Rosalind Eleazar play characters related to, married to, and working with one another, all without any narrative contrivance. White Welsh actress Morfydd Clark (who most recently appeared in Saint Maud) plays Copperfields mother. Meanwhile, Nigerian British actress Nikki Amuka-Bird plays the mother of white Welsh actor Barnard. It presents a fictionalized historical Britain populated with anachronistic racial and class diversity, and thus a Britain that features no race, or at least no visible racism, at all.

In The Green Knight, there is more implicit racial math happening. British Indian actress Sarita Choudhury plays the British Indian Gawains mother (and King Arthurs sister). Gawains sisters in the film were consciously cast as a result; they are played by Nita Mishra, Tara McDonagh, and Atheena Frizzell. All of this, however, is similarly incidental to the films plot. Beyond the linear casting of Gawains immediate family, the film doesnt try to draw your attention to their race in relation to King Arthur (played by white English actor Sean Harris) and his knights, or anyone, for that matter. To be fair, that absence can be refreshing; rather than the didactic, corporate-mandated representation of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is something to the simple pleasure of watching a wide array of talented bodies and faces in a conventional period film.

But Patel, who received an Oscar nomination for his turn as the Indian-born Australian Saroo Brierley in the 2016 Australian bio-drama Lion, occupies a unique space in this conversation. Hes a prominent, young, undeniably hot actor of color who comes from a specific ethnic and racial cross section of the British empire born to Indian parents who were themselves born in the former British colony of Nairobi and whose two latest films adapt British history and lore for new audiences. His opinion on how his identity might factor into these roles has been somewhat vague. Around the release of Copperfield, Patel told Indiewire, What you do as an actor is, you want to be able to explore. The very nature of our job is to be able to step into different skins and be other people. Indeed, stepping into different skins is part of the job, but deciding which skin is off limits is where the trouble lurks. Patel seems to be growing tired of the topic. In a more recent New York Times profile, he said, All this talk of representation and Im here on top of a horse in chain mail, in the freezing cold, hoping I dont get diarrhea. His point gestures to the real issue: Its not on artists of color, specifically dark-skinned artists, to mark out territory for representation in their respective industries. Racism and colorism are problems generated by white, white-passing, and light-skinned people.

So where does The Green Knight stand in the timeline? Lowerys casting is inspired for giving Patel a role worthy of his talents, but it is hardly subversive and not every project that implements nontraditional casting needs to be. Lowerys film makes no indictments about British imperialism or historical conquest by way of its lead character which, as the director has stated, was never the intention of his story. Instead, Lowerys story is specific in its intentions as a meditation on fantasy, on myth, and on authorship of tall tales. Gawains journey is a test of self, a story that burrows deep inside Patels character, dissociated as he is from the epic world around him. More than anything, The Green Knight makes the case for imagination. Its Patel, playing a figure who in a later act of the movie ages from distressed and unemployed to hardened and burnt out in the matter of minutes, who handily makes the case for his credibility in the role.

The problem is that some audience members see any diversity as an antagonistic statement. (Take the backlash against the casting of Noma Dumezweni, a British-South African actress, as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and The Cursed Child.) Speaking to Indiewire last year about traditional casting strategies, Iannucci mused, It cant be the case that a whole group of amazing actors are prevented from having lead roles, because the whole point of making these films now is because we feel the story is relevant, and we should show that its relevant by how we go about making it. Relevance may not be the exact concept he was stretching for, but Iannucci stresses the most fundamental point in favor of breaking free of rigidity and faithfulness to a text by way of color-conscious casting: What does it give the actor, rather than the story, space to accomplish?

When Patel was asked in the same Indiewire interview if he would consider another famous British role, that of the historically white James Bond, he answered clearly: I also dont want to be gifted a role, just because of the tokenistic nature of me being a garnish Lets sprinkle some diversity into this! That doesnt make me feel good either. If it works for the story, and I feel like I can bring some truth out of this role or embody it well, then thats what it should come down to. With Patel at its center, The Green Knight still plays allegorically as a tale about courage, honor, and self-determination. But, more crucially, it allows Patel to bend the arc of English literary tradition around him and affords him the room to give his best performance to date.

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The Swashbuckling Fantasy of Dev Patel in The Green Knight - Vulture

We eat out of them. We use them as currency. We pick them out of the sand on a sunny summer day, and carry them home like treasures. We hold them up to our ears. But Cynthia Barnett is actually listening to them.

In "The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans," Florida author Cynthia Barnetttakes us on a global tour of archeology, anthropology and environmental science, by way of what she describes as "perhaps the most loved objects in nature."It's clear from Barnett's exhaustive research how our deep fondness for shells can and should be our way in to protecting them and ourselves, by extension from climate change, from overfishing, from our reckless relationship with our planet. Yet this not a scolding book; it's an awestruck travelogue and appreciation of something beautiful.

I read this wise, often funny book over my own recentvacation. Iwas on Cape Cod, stayingat a spotwhere the beaches and the souvenir shops and the restaurants were awash in shells and shell imagery. With each page, Barnett's meticulous insights soon had me marveling with new appreciation if not full blown conchylomania (shell collecting madness). I spoke to Barnett recently about her work, conservation,and why shells make great fact-checkers. As always, our interview has been condensed and edited for print.

Your book has so much humor, and such a sense of marvel and delight. It was infused with a light touch aboutcomplicated things.

That is a really tough balance to strike. You're trying to write about climate change and bring people into the stories of what's happening to the sea and its life and to the earth. But I think it's important to draw people with laughter, and just remember the joy of life that animals themselves exude.

You remind me of the line where you talkabout having empathy for these "soft, vulnerable animals." You spent six years in this world. What was it that drew you to taking on such a huge topic?

In some ways it's such a tiny topic. I also teach science journalism and environmental journalism, and one thing we always talk about to young people is how to take a really small thing to tell a big story.

The way this started was not something I had been thinking about for a long time, by any means. I had been invited to a small seashell museum on Sanibel Island to give a talk about a previous book. I was having dinner with the director after the talk and I learned that they had surveyed visitors to find out how much visitors already knew about seashells.

These are mostly tourists visiting Florida with their children. The survey had revealed that 90% of visitors to this museum didn't know that a seashell was made by a living animal. This includes children, but most of the visitors thought that they were some kind of a rock or a stone. I was just so moved by that. I was disturbed by that. I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it. I had wanted to write next about the oceans, because my previous books were about fresh water. Then I wrote a natural and cultural history of rain. Tor me, this is a really nice conclusion of the hydrologic cycle. But when I heard that statistic, that night, I couldn't stop thinking about it as I was falling asleep. I think by the time I fell asleep, I knew that I was going to write this book.

I did love seashells as a child, although I've never been in an obsessive collector. I think you either have the collecting gene or you don't. That's something that really hit me because I interviewed people over these years who are really obsessed collectors. But I find, like everybody, seashells extraordinarily beautiful.

I think they're perhaps the most loved object in nature, and a really collectible object. I came to think of them as really good ambassadors for what's happening to the ocean, and also the perfect metaphor, because we've loved seashells for their gorgeous exterior rather than the life inside. In just that way, we've loved the oceans as the beautiful backdrop of life. As a postcard, without really understanding what's happening beneath the waves or without understanding the oceans as the very source of life. I really was thinking of that broader audience of people and how to bring them into these stories of what's happening with climate change and what's happening with the seas.

I didn't know that shells are a profound window into our historical climate and environmental change. Can you explain what shells can tell us?

Mollusks use biomineralization, that is, chemicals and minerals in the surrounding environment, to build their shells. The carbon dioxide we send into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has turned the sea water about 30% more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era. Climate change in the ocean has begun to limit the carbonate that mollusks use to make their shells. Acidic waters are also boring into some shells, pitting or eroding them. Two big things are happening to shelled animals. One is that stress from ocean acidification is making it harder to build shells.

But secondly, there's the warming oceans, and this is something I'm not sure how well people understand. The oceans have protected us from so much warming already. They've absorbed some 90% of Earth's warming in the past century. That heat is transferred to the oceans and the animals to live in the ocean. Some parts of the oceans have already become too warm for marine mollusks. More recently, in the Pacific Northwest during that late June heat wave that we had, that heat dome killed some billion marine tidal animals, including mussels, clams and oysters. It's really all around us and all over the Earth.

How did you approach this book in terms of looking at it from the archeological side, the anthropological side? There are so many different aspects of the story of shells and our own relationship to them.

I thought the human side was really important. I approached it from the standpoint of humanity and archeology and our lives with shells. There's something fundamentally aesthetic for us about seashells, something that really pleases the brain. It turns out that that has been true since pre-humanity. You might remember the fossilized mussel shells at the Solo River in Indonesia at the site of Java Man. They had those geometric zigzags that are considered some of the oldest known art. But it also represents something more. It represents that early human cognition. I open the book with imagining a Neanderthal girl collecting seashells 100,000 years ago.

That was based on science, the science that archeologists know from the seashells that have been found in Neanderthal caves in Spain. What was important about those shells is that they helped scientists overturn these assumptions and poorly conceived science that Neanderthals were dimwitted brutes. Everywhere I went in the history and in the archeology, I found that shells were great fact-checkers, because they tell a story more accurately than the vanquishers who tend to write history.

That was true in every chapter of this book. That was really true in some of the colonial history that comes with the Tano people of the Caribbean. The only written records we have are what the Spanish wrote about the Tano, but their shells tell their story more accurately than those written records. That was true of the Calusa and the Cahokia. That's a beautiful thing in both the science and the humanities, that the seashells told the best stories, or I should say the most accurate stories.

As you point out, it's the people who had the closest relationships with the shells, who had the deeper understanding of the environment.

I loved the story of the Zuni. When we think about the history of science, we so often talk about the Greeks and the Romans and what they knew and how bright and prescient they were. But from the fossilized marine animals in what is now the American Southwest, the Zuni knew and believed that the sea had once covered the land and that these were living creatures that lived a very long time ago. It was all part of their cosmology.

I found all of that fascinating. That was the case in many different cultures. We're learning that's true in so many other ways now, such as with the wildfires that have been burning in the west and are becoming worse because of the warming world. Indigenous people had ways of managing fire that we have ignored that we're finally paying attention to. I think the same is true with marine conservation and how we live with the seas and our coastlines. Shells say a lot about all of those things.

There is a store in Provincetown that sells seashells. You go in watch people clustering around shells. You take that shell back home with you and it serves as this talisman, this object of beauty. But a shell is also food.

I had to make a conscious decision pretty early on that this book wasn't going to be about shellfish. At some point I decided to organize it around seashells that have been the most iconic to humanity. The first chapter is about those marine micro mollusks that came long ago before marine mollusks. I built the chapters around seashells that were iconic to us, but some of those are eating seashells, and those include the bay scallop, the giant clam and the queen conch.

So another thing I try to do in this book is I really try to be honest and humble and not preachy about my own life with shells and with the ocean. I grew up spear fishing with my father who also collected all different kinds of conchs to eat. When my kids were younger, I always took them scalloping. Through telling those stories, I am learning about the pressure on wild shellfish, including bay scallops. I hope that I am showing the reader that there are more sustainable ways to enjoy shellfish.

By the end of the book, I'm not eating wild scallops, but I'm still enjoying the Gulf of Mexico, and going to look at scallops with my mask and snorkel and taking lots of pictures. But I don't think I would ever eat another wild scallop having written this book. I do eat aqua-cultured shellfish.

I think the important thing is to help people understand that we're in this transition, and we can do this. We can do this like we've done other big things, like stopped killing plume birds in the early 20th century. Our ethics change over time and our ethical relationships with animals change over time. This is an example of that. It's an evolution that we're experiencing. There are some really great aquaculture projects going on with shellfish that are very promising all over the world, that also represent part of the solution for conserving the oceans and for helping us adapt to climate change. My hope is that seashells help draw a broader audience to some of those really deep and important stories and those solutions.

This book makes a case of contextualizing that shells are also animals. Our relationship with them is as objects and objects desire, but they are also, as you put it, these very vulnerable living creatures.

It's so interesting, the money we spend to conserve say, sea turtles and pandas. I do think it has a lot to do with their relatability and the fact that they look at us with those big eyes that look almost human. There are these extraordinary animals in the oceans and also on the land that are equally important to ecosystems and to the earth. Marine mollusks are among those. And they do have fabulous eyes, but just sometimes they're ontentacles.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and author of "A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles."

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Cynthia Barnett is listening to seashells and what they're prophesying doesn't bode well - Salon

"Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage" on HBO Max, directed by Garret Price, offers a thorough account outside context and all of pop culture's biggest trainwreck of the 20th century.

Everyone remembers the fires. Credit: courtesy of hbo

Content Warning: Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage features explicit scenes and descriptions of sexual assault.

Everyone remembers the fires. But do you know the story of how they happened?

Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage on HBO Max is a documentary about a music festival, but it is definitively not a music documentary. The disastrous mass gathering in central New York may have featured a genre-spanning cross-section of the top MTV artists of the moment, but the violent and filthy reality on the ground is the real focus for director Garret Price.

Threading together heaps of archival footage with new interviews from artists, attendees, and notably the event's two prominent masterminds, Peace, Love, and Rage reflects on a particular moment in history. But it goes further, too. Price's examination amounts to a searing indictment of the latent anger in U.S. society, particularly among white men, that was just starting to boil over as the 20th century came to a close.

The documentary necessarily strays far beyond the boundaries of the decommissioned military base in Rome, New York, where Woodstock '99 unfolded. We visit the White House and the U.S. Capitol. We gaze out over Times Square from the vantage of MTV's Total Request Live studio. We even spend a little time in Columbine.

That context is crucial to understanding how Woodstock '99 turned into a mud-and-shit-spattered riot that ultimately had to be defused by law enforcement. The documentary even takes some time to linger on that police response, as a crowd of predominantly white attendees including sexual assaulters and other criminal mischief-makers was peacefully disbanded.

The movie aims for the heavy lift, is what I'm saying. Price and his crew aren't content to offer a straight recounting of a single, violent weekend. The argument is that it's impossible to understand how Woodstock '99 fell apart without looking at everything from the evolution of pop music and its audience to the widespread and multifaceted anxiety surrounding "Y2K" fears.

The angry rhetoric and violence spurred from the stage by artists like Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, for example, speaks directly to what was a changing face of popular music in 1999. The progressive politics and boundary-breaking performers of the too-brief grunge era exemplified by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and a contrite Beastie Boys quickly gave way to anger-fueled nu metal, with rockers like Durst and Rock weaving homogenized gangsta rap, and no small amount of cultural appropriation, into their work.

While Woodstock '99 crossed through multiple genres in its lineup, the headlining acts were primarily white, male rock stars who sold anger to an audience that craved it. When they took the stage, that anger manifested in the crowd's behavior. But of course, it's the promoters who planned the events and curated this lineup who own the original sin of Woodstock '99, and Peace, Love, and Rage doesn't let them off the hook in the slightest.

Michael Lang, a co-founder of the original festival who is described at one point as the "Willy Wonka" of Woodstock '99, is the idealistic half of the promoter duo that takes center stage in this documentary. His ill-conceived idea to recreate Woodstock for a new generation failed to account for what that generation actually looked and acted like.

If the Woodstock of 1969 was a reflection of the hippie ideals of universal peace and love, the Woodstock of 1999 mirrored a much darker moment. With the exception of a few seemingly token female performers and socially conscious rappers, the cross-section of artists assembled for the '99 festival channeled the anger and fear of a (again, importantly: predominantly white) generation that had lots of pent-up aggression and no strong devotion to fight for a particular cause.

The real villain of Peace, Love, and Anger, however, is Lang's co-promoter, John Scher. As the more grounded half of the pair, it was Scher who led the way, speaking to the press and speaking for the festival in 1999. At multiple points, the documentary shows us a belligerent and combative Scher talking down to journalists as they raise tough but fair questions about the state of the festival.

At first, Scher and Lang come off as just one administrative piece of the disaster that was Woodstock '99. But as the documentary unfolds, we get a clearer picture of the two men. Scher in particular is quick to blame anyone and anything other than the top-level festival planning for Woodstock '99's failures.

In Scher's mind, Durst owns responsibility for setting off violence and riotous behavior. It's MTV that owns responsibility for negative perceptions of what happened during that July 1999 weekend in central New York. Of Kurt Loder, the face of MTV News back then, Scher actually has the gall to say: "He just wasn't on the team." In Scher's mind, Woodstock '99 was a messaging failure wrought by the press, misbehaving rock stars, and "a bunch of knuckleheads" in the crowd.

Never mind the overflowing portable toilets, the dismal state of the festival's cleaning facilities, and the grossly overpriced basic necessities, most infamously illustrated by the festival's $4 asking price for bottled water during a brutally hot and humid weekend. And never mind, too, the widespread accounts many captured right on camera of sexual assault.

For any outside factors that fed the trainwreck called Woodstock '99, there's no denying that the festival was badly mismanaged and set up to fail. Credit:

Everything you really need to know about Scher is encapsulated in his take on that last point specifically: "I am critical of the hundreds of woman that were walking around with no clothes on and expecting not to be touched. They shouldn't have been touched. And I condemn it. But, you know, I think that women that were running around naked are at least partially to blame for that."

I shouted angrily at my screen when Scher just comes out and says that in the late stages of Peace, Love, and Rage. This isn't some archival interview conducted in the weeks after the festival came crashing apart, not that this kind of take would've been any more acceptable back then.

Scher knowingly sat down for a 21st-century interview and said, with seemingly zero awareness of how stupid and regressive he sounded, that the women who showed up to enjoy the festival in their own way own the blame for the way men treated them. It feels like a line you'd hear from the latest perp on any given flavor of CSI series. But Scher said it, and we have to deal with that reality.

Peace, Love, and Rage is a superb accounting of a terrible event and the context that surrounded and fueled it. It doesn't let a single person, movement, or cultural shift off the hook in laying out the failures that led to Woodstock '99. The lasting takeaway is, as it should be, that Woodstock, the brand, is best relegated to the dustbin of history at this point. The people who wield its central vision don't really understand the modern world, and they're not equipped to entertain a wide audience.

It goes back to those fires. We all remember seeing images in the news of towering bonfires, stretching up into the night sky as a horde of shorts-and-tank-top-clad white men milled around to feed the curling flames. But we never really talk about what ignited the conflagration.

It was candles. Candles distributed by a nonprofit group focused on gun control. Their well-intentioned effort was to have festival attendees stage a candlelight vigil honoring Columbine victims. But festival attendees found other uses for those candles, and so the east stage burned.

It's impossible to ignore the parallel in that irony to Lang and Scher's efforts. While neither promoter comes out of the documentary looking great, it's also clear that they did go into this thing with the best of intentions. The promoters wanted to put on a show that could potentially recapture what Lang saw as the magic of the 1969 festival. But their unfamiliarity with modern pop culture and inability to meet the moment spelled their undoing in the end.

Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage is now streaming on HBO Max.

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HBO Max's Woodstock '99 doc carefully traces back the roots of white, male rage - Mashable

There are so many forms of annihilation, claims Rebecca Solnit in her finely crafted memoir titled Recollections of My Non-Existence. The book pivots strongly on one form of annihilation which Solnit navigates throughout her life the omnipresent and imminent possibility of gender violence. However, other claimants to annihilation politics are not far behind, whether these be questions of racial or class injustice, the suffering visited on indigenous peoples and generic forms of violence demonstrated vis--vis specific constituencies.

Solnit argues that the non-acknowledgment of peoples is often a prelude to an accompanying violence. It is a violence that does not harbour any guilt and takes away what rightfully is somebody elses. The United States, for instance, has sought to obscure its original violence directed against the native Americans to whom the land belonged. These examples of violence abound, as is evident from illustrations across the world. However, pervasiveness does not absolve a deep and fundamental wrongness of these acts.

An arsenal of erasure tactics is often deployed by the powerful to keep the voices of the marginalised out of sight. However, the truth is that these tactics are not always successful. Cracks show, voices break through these cracks and a single conscious voice, as Solnit demonstrates, blends with a burgeoning collective seeking a just recompense. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible.

Rebecca Solnit Recollections of My Non-Existence Granta Books, 2021

There is much that is going on in Solnits memoir. First, there is an incessant quest for patterns. Making sense of a complex world, Solnit has devised a strategy of reading sharply and discerning oftentimes the unsaid in conversations, both oral and written. She is patient and in the best traditions of journalism goes to great lengths to get her story right.

Second, she resides in awkwardness but finds an equilibrium in it. Solnit is keenly aware of the deep marks her childhood (poverty, a violent father and helpless mother) left. However, she makes coming from the margins in gender terms (notwithstanding her white privilege which she honestly concedes) her real strength. It offers her a perspective of her own where she can call out time and again the effacement of women in everyday life. Her struggles to publish her work, to find her voice and make it heard, to demonstrate professional rigour in a world of judgmental men and in her own way leave something of a legacy comes through with candour in this narrative. Solnit recognises that some stories set us free, or at least offer the promise of partial if not complete redemption.

Third, there can scarcely be a better teacher than Solnit when it comes to dissecting the forging of political consciousness. From accounts of her own political awakening through her brothers anti-nuclear activism in the Nevada desert to joining forces with feminist struggles over time while finding her own voice, Solnit documents her political evolution. None of this comes easy. She ponders, searches and finds kindred souls, sees the value of engaging those who do not share her view and compels us like she does herself to squarely contend with our phantom and real fears.

Also read: How I Became a Tree is an Ode to All That is Neglected

Fourth, Solnit opens the reader up to the many worlds of mansplaining. She recounts a story in which a man is explaining a book to Solnit herself, unaware that she is the author. There are several other instances in which being male often presumes the privilege of pronouncing from a higher pedestal. The lack of knowledge in the relevant domains has never detracted these men. Women are invariably at the receiving end of this male gaze and smugness. However, women do not find it easy to ignore or dismiss these claims even though they know that these are untenable. It took decades virtually for Solnit herself to discover recurring patterns here and subsequently call the bluff whenever it showed its unpleasant visage.

Fifth, this memoir is not only about fears but also about things Solnit loves. Reading, language, archives and researching are all part of this heady mix. Each of these activities require careful attention but there is the excitement which Solnit conveys whenever she finds herself amid any of these activities. She is not afraid to take down by a notch or two the gurus of counterculture the Beat generation for almost entirely glossing over the gender question in their quest for creative freedom. There are many more well-known accomplished male figures in her narrative who for all their genius were oblivious to the dimension of gender equality. All of this makes for riveting reading and instructive learning.

Also read: Ian Patel Essays a Relentless Timeline of Britains Struggle to Keep Itself White

Finally, this is also a plea for at least one kind of robust activism political writing. Solnit is keenly aware of botched ideas and assembles together a set of new possibilities in the most unsuspected corners of our histories. There is an irrepressible optimist in Solnit who has a penchant for identifying the many barriers that separate us. She reminds us of our obligation to work towards their obliteration but in pragmatic terms incrementally. At least two powerful drives motivate her to write politically to record her deep resentment of some trajectories in politics and second to fight and argue for what she values as sacrosanct directing all her finite energy to secure their well-being.

I can see many women (and some men) wishing that they encountered this book earlier in their life. It is a book we must share liberally with our young across genders. Solnits brilliance of mind and clarity of prose cannot but shake us all out of our stupor even if only temporarily. The challenge is to sustain this critique and politically create the conditions for transformation along the lines suggested. Quite evidently, gender, race, class equality and a casteless society are monumentally incomplete projects in circa 2021 notwithstanding some meaningful strides in the preceding twentieth century. A lot of work remains to be accomplished and Solnit offers us key insights on getting going and inching towards desirable political metamorphosis. Are we listening?

Siddharth Mallavarapu is professor of International Relations and Governance Studies at Shiv Nadar University. Views are personal.

Originally posted here:
The Importance of Rebecca Solnit - The Wire

I know absolutely nothing about the McCanns who once lived in the small red-brick cottage on the grounds of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin in Dublin, but I cant help resenting them.

The near derelict old house in Glasnevin which has come perilously close to collapse carries their name now McCanns Cottage its called, at least by locals and the gardeners who tend to the flowers that grow all around it. But it should have a different name, it should have my name.

The house currently being saved from ruin by the Office of Public Works was built for a Pope William in the middle of the 19th century. Popes were born there, they were reared there. And they were carried out through its wooden green door in coffins sometimes adult-sized ones but far more frequently in smaller boxes.

William Pope is buried a few feet from the gardens where he lived and worked and from the house built for him. He lies over the wall in Glasnevin Cemetery.

He bought a plot there in the early 1860s for his daughter, Margaret. She was just three when she died shortly before Christmas 1861. Her brother Patrick followed her into that grave three days later. He was one.

Five years on Williams son John died at the same age as his daughter Elizabeth Pope died four years later at just a week old. The Popes buried in the plot by the Botanic Gardens from the 1860s on were taken by typhoid and bronchitis and congestion of the lungs and a weak action of the heart.

William passed away there in 1915, at the age of 81, having buried most of his children out of that house. I mean no disrespect to the McCanns, whoever they are, but they got lucky and if the cottage being restored today was to be called after anyone it should have been called after the Popes of the Botanic Gardens.

My grandfather Arthur was one of the fortunate Popes. He lived and so did his father Paddy.

Arthur was born in the house as the 20th century dawned and it was his home until he married in the 1920s. It might have remained his home until he died in 1966 but for a questionable decision made for him by his dad.

Arthurs first child, my aunt Betty, briefly lived in the cottage which looks like a tiny bungalow from the front but extends to three floors of very modestly proportioned rooms at the back as a toddler.

She stayed there as she she waited for her mother Greta to come home from hospital with my father. And it was to that small cottage that my father christened William after his great grandfather but called Billy was brought as a newborn in the autumn of 1932.

We believe, from our books that there were three Popes employed here over 93 years, although I know that Pope family tradition has it, there is a fourth generation, the director of the Botanic Gardens, Matthew Jebb, tells me as he takes me on a walk through the gardens in the full bloom of summer.

But its probably true . . . So it must have stretched well over a century.

I dont think theres very many people in the country have such a direct line of descendancy to something so special, explains Tricia Kearns, my first cousin, and the unofficial Pope family historian.

It all started with Patrick Pope.

He left his Waterford home as a young man in the early part of the 19th century and found temporary work as a labourer in the Botanic Gardens. He left for a spell before getting apermanent job there.

He lived locally and his son, William, obviously, would have been in and out of the gardens with his father and probably learning by his side. And he then became a gardener himself, Kearns says.

William climbed the ranks, becoming a foreman and getting a house.

And his son, Patrick Joseph (also known as Paddy) grew up in that house and would have been learning at his fathers side and took over as a foreman gardener in the glass houses when his father retired. His son was Arthur, our grandfather and he grew up here.

Paddy Pope retired in 1934, three years after Betty Tricias mother was born. She is the oldest surviving branch of the Pope family tree with a direct link to the Botanic Gardens. She turns 90 this month and recalls time spent in the gardens as a child.

My father having been reared here loved coming up on a Sunday. Hed walk around the garden and talk about the trees and the birds.

More than a decade separates Betty and her youngest sister Ann but the younger sisters earliest memories are also of the gardens.

My first memories were me walking with my father here on a Sunday morning after mass. Hed bring me for a walk and hed tell me things he did as a child, he used to get into trouble swimming in the Tolka and then sometimes theyd go into the glass houses and eat things they shouldnt have been eating, rare, precious things.

So on the one hand, you have Popes caring for and cultivating new flowers and making the gardens majestic and then on the other hand, you have Popes eating them.

Morto for me grandda.

Arthurs father Paddy loved the chrysanthemums and would get up out of his bed in the night if he thought there was frost coming to protect his plants, Betty tells me.

There was one plant Paddy might have protected more than most, the one that carried his name.

His father William had been given the job of cultivating an insect-eating sarracenia from seed and, against all the odds, and without so much as a page of a book to refer to, had grown it to full bloom. So delighted was the Botanic Gardens then director David Moore that he brought his foreman to Kew Gardens in London and gave the new plant the Pope name he called it Sarracenia Popei.

Apparently it was very unusual for an ordinary person, a foreman, to have a plant named after him, Betty says.

Todays director Matthew Jebb agrees and as he takes me to meet my ancestral plant, a hybrid between two wild species from North America. He explains the honour that would normally be restricted to people like David and Frederick Moore, who were running the organisation, the lowly gardeners, so to speak, were often in the background. They perhaps werent seen or recognised but it was very obvious David Moore recognised William Popes skill at not only growing these plants, but breeding them as well. It was something that you were creating that no one else had. So this one being named after William Pope would have been a tremendous honour.

Jebb says the Popes would also have cultivated a lot of plants, and assisted with material that would have been sent to Charles Darwin although Moore would have been an ardent creationist and would have regarded this idea of the origin of species being based upon natural selection as something to be very, very wary of.

The plant world suggested Moore was wrong about the living worlds roots, Jebb says.

Evolution works by the number of rejects, it is only picking out the best and most thrilling things to survive. This is brutal, brutal evolution and to be successful, youve got to be easy to grow. Youve got to be spectacular in appearance. And youve got to be fixed, you cant start varying through time your offspring have to be more or less identical to yourself.

The heavy wrought iron gates of the National Botanical Gardens first swung open in 1795 after the Royal Dublin Society decided the Empires second city needed a show garden to call its own.

While today its seen as a pleasant place to while away an afternoon surrounded by flowers and plant, its function in the early days was more utilitarian than aesthetic.

It was there to support industry and agriculture and give landowners and their labourers a practical education. A hay garden, a cattle garden and a vegetable patch were among the attractions. But then, in the 1830s when coincidentally, it should be said the Popes arrived, more exotic plants started to make their presence felt.

It wasnt the arrival of Moore or the Popes but the expansion of the British empire that caused the shift. Adventurers endured unimaginable hardships across Africa, Asia, South America and Australia to find new plants to ship back to Kew Gardens in London and its sister site in Dublin.

But the dual functions did not end. Research was crucial to the Botanic Gardens, never more so than in the 1840s when Moore and his gardeners took centre stage and could have saved many hundreds of thousands of Irish people if not millions from horrendous deaths.

The Gardens visionary director detected potato blight at Glasnevin on August 20th, 1845 and almost immediately recognised it as a sign of calamity.

Moore was already endlessly fascinated with orchids and insectivorous plants and, according to Jebb, was studying how a tiny orchid seed was dependent upon a fungus actually attacking it. As soon as the first potato blight was found in Ireland, less than a week after it had been detected in the Isle of Wight, the first place to be hit, he started investigating. He quickly deduced it was a fungus, Jebb says.

But others were not so in tune with the ways of plants.

The powers-that-be in the Royal Dublin Society said to him, its electrical, its got to be electrical, its to do with electrical storms that are prevalent at the moment.

So rather than allowing him to treat fungus-caused blight in the first days of the famine they had him set up all these elaborate copper wires over the potato crops he was growing here, Jebb says. He said, No, no, this will be a fungus thats causing this.

Moore knew a combination of copper sulphate and lime was used to treat similar diseases in Bordeauxs vineyards.

Theres a certain tragedy in it, Jebb says while acknowledging that a faster acceptance of Moores theories would not have solved the incredible crisis that unfolded at the time, it would have at least been a faster step on the road out of the crisis.

To have actually organised the spraying of the crops on that sort of scale in that particular year [would have been a huge task] because it wasnt as though it crept up on and over several years, it was sudden, and irrevocable, and it happened in just a couple of weeks.

The Popes' role in the fight against famine is part of family folklore, and a print of the Sarracenia Popei hangs in virtually all the family houses, but the familys link to the Botanic Gardens eventually ran out of steam even though, as Betty explains, her father would have been keen to follow his father into the Gardens.

Paddy Pope wanted all the sons to go into different forms of electricity. One was in the ESB, another worked on the railways and Arthur worked in the Customs house, she says.

Did Arthur Pope ever feel like he missed out on something by becoming an electrician? Ann reckons he did.

He had this creative side that he didnt let loose until his older years when he really began to push himself, you know, in the way of gardening.

While for many people the Gardens is a lovely place to go for a stroll, Jebb stresses that it still has a much more important function which he explains by way of a question.

Who is going to feed our great grandchildren? Will it be clever lawyers or accountants? No, it will be plant scientists. It will be agronomists, people who know about the growing of plants, diversifying new crops, knowing how to get the best yield from land. This is the most fundamental question that faces humanity at any time. You think that money makes the world go round, but actually, its the fullness of our harvests. Its the harvest that is absolutely fundamental to humanitys life on this globe.

If we can make sure that five or six children a year come through those gates, and become inspired to become plant scientists of any sort, whether thats in horticulture or the naming of plants, all of that will make a huge difference to not just Irish society, but to thesustainability and longevity of the globe.

All of the gardeners and staff I speak to as we weave our way through the Gardens share Jebbs love of the place and his passion for knowledge, although many have taken a circuitous route to get here.

One I spoke to was a sound technician and musician before finding his true calling. Another started a course in software engineering before realising he hated it and retrained as a horticulturist.

Cathal OSuillivan was tending to some vividly-coloured beds under his care and looked understandably flustered when I suddenly appeared by his side asking him questions about his career and the path that led him to the Gardens. A day later he decided he had not done himself justice in his answers and in an email he described them wrongly, as it happens as lame.

In a sign of the consideration people like him give to their jobs and their lives, he answered the question a second time.

I do try to remain conscious of all who visit here, no matter the age or knowledge. I try to heighten the frequency for them a bit. I also try to bear in mind all the life connections that find their way to this place be it to refuel or renew. The bees, the butterflies, the ladybirds and the many other creatures who we are surrounded with here.

Perhaps the main reason I got into gardening was for my soul, he continues. He said his mother is living with dementia and he has noticed many like her who have visited over the Covid period. He says he has been struck by the caring tenderness expressed by their sons or daughters as they review the 86 metres-long double borders he has planted and says it is pleasing to hear their now challenged minds recognise a plant, if not the name.

OSullivan says the gardeners receive lots of compliments, which is lovely and there are also hurlers on the ditch, those who love to tell you their dislikes and whats wrong. I enjoy the banter though and of course we all have different tastes. I do my best.

He says that one of the nicest pieces of feedback he has ever received will stay with me. A grandmother and her little three-year-old grandson walking hand and hand through the borders one particularly quiet morning. The day was good, the sun was out and there was a riot of colour. She shared with me that she had taught all her four kids their colours on visits to the herbaceous borders when they were also little. I thought what a beautiful memory for all of them.

OSullivan says he ran away from boarding school as a teenager, and worked in retail and hospitality for year in Ireland and New York before finally going back to college to study horticulture.

Since then he says hes been fortunate to have worked with some great gardeners in Ireland and the UK and now the jewel that is the National Botanic Gardens.

My mini and distinctly DIY Who Do You Think You Are ends in the house known as McCanns Cottage where so many Popes were born and too many died.

I think of Jebbs words about the brutal nature of evolution and the small contribution my ancestors made to horticulture and to the work of Charles Darwin and how maybe sometimes its the luckiest who survive and not the fittest.

Had Paddy Pope succumbed to any one of the diseases that took so many of his siblings then this branch of the Pope family tree would have withered a long time ago. I look at the original plaster, crumbling now but still covered in paint applied by Popes and the cast iron firepalaces where Popes huddled to keep chills away. I stare at thick roots embedded into powdery mortar and look up at the blue sky where roof tiles once were and will be again.

Everything is being carefully restored and replaced now to allow this house someday reopen as an administrative office but even when its shiny and new, the echoes of the Popes will linger, no matter what the cottage is called by the generations of the future.

See original here:
The Botanic Gardens and me: Conor Pope traces his family tree through the Gardens history - The Irish Times