Time out

The wolf is sitting on a rock.
High over Hugh Town on St. Marys, looking over Crow Sound, across to other Scillies Islands, watching the sun set.
Thinking.

Nothing unusual about that. He's starting to think he should get one in his house, he spends so much of his time sitting on them looking at horizons, stars, pasts and futures. Why not sit on one and look at the TV? Well the dust for one thing. Shows up really quick on laminate floors. And them tiny little red mites than run around on them (they do, look real close), not sure about them. Wouldn't work.

It's not the rock that attracts the Wolf of course, it's the height they are at.
The height gives the Wolf an emotional distance, a breathing space, a meditative pause; time out.

The thoughts? Concerned.

The Wolf is involved in an extremely complex and important project that involves him convincing people he likes, respects and knows, the local fishing community, to work with people they consider, well, enemies really. And working to convince them to let go of areas, grounds, that are as important to them now as it was to their predecessors. The worst thing is, the Wolf knows exactly how much what they stand to lose has cost them in money, work, lives.

So many groups now lay claim over land- and sea-scapes that they have not proved or tested themselves against, have risked nothing for. Their claim is, in the Wolf's opinion, aesthetic. A genuine (but particular) appreciation of the beauty and intricacy of the environment, or even the half-arsed 'nature good/human bad' discourse, so common among the Children of the Supermarket Age* is considered enough to grant a superior, a higher claim on these conflicted territories. So many of them too, want to abstract the human from these areas, considering them un-natural destroyers, killers. These same groups of course, who really understand and appreciate these environments, should be allowed free access and any benefits that may accrue from that access. Of course. The New Enclosures, driven by the same moral righteousness and spurious confidence that "stole the common from under the goose".

These arguments are of course far more nuanced than the Wolf has allowed here, he is as guilty of the second as anyone else on landscapes where people have left or are scarce; the moors, the hills, mountains. But these are not places which communities harvest for a living, producing distinct and special cultures, one of which the Wolf once counted himself proud to be part of. Those communities matter, their difference is part of the hybrid vigour every culture needs, to be able to adapt and survive what the world throws at them. The Wolf believes with all his heart the potential loss of these sub-cultures to our larger society is as damaging as the economic loss will be the communities at risk.

As a society, we praise and nurture the multi-cultural (and why not where it genuinely enhances), the foreign and the exotic, and yet demean and demonise those indigenous sub-cultures that existed way before, and evolved in parallel with the rise of the modern consumer hegemony; the stroppy working class, the soldier and his love/hate garrison town, the farming communities, the fisher, the miner, the quarry man. Especially the ones which kill things for a living. This always makes the Wolf smile, as all animal life kills to live (all flesh is grass), and nothing dies of old age in the sea, ever. Not all animals are lucky enough to have others do it for them of course.

So why is the Wolf involved in this righteous (or wrongeous) campaign to 'nicen up' the idea of The Sea, one of many seemingly determined to emasculate this brawling, pugnacious, awkward and brilliant land? Well, he thinks there's a chance, just a chance maybe, this project could slow the erosion of the communities he loves, could maybe get people to mentally locate fishermen back into their rightful place as part of the marine environment and not just a blight on it, top predators along with the other big brained killer mammals out there. And that maybe, during the process, he can explain that world to those who who buy their fish in packets and risk nothing but a parking fine to earn their living.

But to do that he has to tell people that he likes, things they really don't want to hear, again and again.
And listen to people who he doesn't like, whining and fretting about a world they nothing of.
Again and again.

*The Wolf is a child of the Atomic Age. Way cooler....