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Another Article in Otago Daily Times about this ancestral journey..

http://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/248738/journey-discovery

Interview with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand National

Last month I was interviewed by Jim Mora, host of Natonal Radio New Zealand's popular afternoon show.

"Kathleen Scott sailed to New Zealand with her husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to see him off on his expedition to the South Pole. Now Kathleen's granddaughter Zoe Young is making the same journey her grandmother did in 1913, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Terra Nova's return from Antarctic with the news of the doomed expedition."

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/aft/aft-20130215-1409-captain_robert_falcon_scott_remembered-048.mp3

Conservation and Power - reflections at the request of Mayor Familton of Oamaru, New Zealand

The Scott 100 commemorations in Oamaru opened for me a new chapter in an epic ancestral tale of romance, exploration, science, adventure.. and heartbreaking loss at the very ends of the earth.

Perhaps it is partly this ancestry that fired my volcanic love for nature - and associated fear of catastrophe. Though i am still young, by name if not by nature, It feels like a lifetime I've spent already in study and struggle, filming and writing, story telling and science, all for a future in which our own descendants may continue to thrive.

This particular story began more than a century ago. in 1910 Captain Robert Falcon Scott left behind his baby son Peter and gypsy-hearted sculptor wife Kathleen - with her encouragement - to lead the British Naval expedition to the South Pole. As so many now know, Scott's party perished in a blizzard, leaving letters that stir the soul. They included his last 'to my widow' - ie my grandmother Kathleen - suggesting that she 'interest the boy in natural history' and keep him a lot outdoors.

And she did. Sir Peter Scott's love of adventure, of sailing, painting, ducks and geese certainly did his dad's memory proud. As well as his mum's. My late uncle Peter may be now best known as the father of 20th century conservation. He co founded the World Wide Fund for Nature, initiated the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, and kick started IUCN's 'Red List' of highly threatened species. Sir David Attenborough credits him as inspiration.

Peter's younger brother, my father Wayland Young - aka Lord Kennet - was born to Kathleen with her second husband, Hilton Young. A politician and war hero who had lost an arm, the much courted widow Lady Scott noted in her diary that my grandfather was also shy, and knew all the songs of birds.

Their son, my father Wayland, worked together with his wife of half a century my inspirational mother Liz, and introduced to the UK a Royal Commission on environmental pollution, a parliamentary office on science and technology amd much more. they saved threatened old buildings, legislated against female genital mutilation and worked and wrote for systemic international peace, justice and conservation of what we all need to live well. My mother continues this journey now my Dad has gone: nearing 90 and increasingly frail, she still corresponds with generals, asks difficult questions of the powerful and edits a blog, Mrs Elizabeth Young.

I came along late to this story, and I soaked it all up as a child. My parents took me to a Save the Whale demo when I was about six, and I wore the campaign T-shirt till it frayed. i founded a conservation group at primary school to save 'slimy things' - strangely it didn't catch on. I chose a vegetarian diet as soon as i could, and as a teenager, I wanted to be a scientist and a sailor, and to go to sea in little boats to confront the destruction of life. I simply couldn't understand why all the work of my parents and grandparents' generations hadn't made the necessary changes in technology policy and investment, why everyone wasn't as concerned about our cetacean, avian, amphibian, and forested brothers and sisters, and why everyone didn't see anthropogenic climate change as the threat to our children and grand children that the scientists were suggesting it was.

Is.

Now the Polar ice seems to be thinning, weather patterns shifting, cities even in superpower North America starting to go beneath the waves.

It hurts, because we as a species knew this could happen, back when i was a little child. People like my grandmothers' first husband, Captain RF Scott, gave their lives on expeditions to bring us the data we need to observe the dynamics of our world. But those of us who grew up worrying and studied the science in depth, who observed the anti-social behaviour of big business and so went to block shipments of rainforest timber, to climb trees and put our bodies in the way of new roads and runways; those of us who shun agribusiness meat and dairy and corn oil and plastics because of their impacts on the woods and rivers and seas - we are STILL dismissed as cranks in a media all too often controlled by 'the big'.

Why won't we welcome 'greed is good' with all its shiny packaging, and gloss? Why wont we agree that money is the measure of all value, now and Because we are privileged, have enough money for food, and the leisure to run to these front lines, when our immediate lives aren't at stake?

Yes, yes, and also...

Because we've studied science, poetry, and the ways of the wild, and we know that human civilisations that get too greedy tend to create famine for others, and then to drive themselves into the ground.

Those we call Indigenous peoples now may often be the survivors of invasive cultures that used too much and collapsed, a few returning to the land - so it's worth listening to their wisdom tales. All that romantic stuff about being in touch with nature, listening to the birds? It's about love, and life, and survival over the centuries - with what's important to hand. Clean water. Fresh air. Health and peace and the time and space to fall in love and raise children to have their own adventures on the edge of wildness, and to thrive. Recent studies suggest that kids are less likely to grow up racist, if they learn to consider the needs of animals when they are young. It's all a question of empathy, in the end. Do we care, are we family, or are we cut off from each other, and the earth?

If we are not in truly desperate circumstances (as sadly, too many people are) The urges we feel for needing more more more - at the expense of others' suffering, now or to come - derive not from our real needs for happiness. They come from our disconnection from nature, and also from those companies etc who would profit from our weak spots, ie those with something unnecessary to sell. We have a choice, everyone of us, to notice the song of the birds and to learn from them and the trees, and to notice who has power in global markets, and how they shape our understanding of the world so that it serves their own wants for more. And then we can act on this information, wisdom where we can. Choose what we buy, what we don't buy, what we waste and what we don't. What we stand up for, what we take responsibility for, given the limitations we alll each face. THAT to me is true conservation: saving nature and understanding each on our own path, starting from where we are.

People who look at my work now - on finance, tax justice, with African women's human rights, learning with circles of spirit, producing food and reusing the old - may not see the connection with protecting the 'environment' per se. But I've learned that saving nature for the children is all about not being wasteful, and about understanding power, and challenging it where it is misused. It's easy to say 'save the whale' 'save the Antarctic', even 'save the obscure frog nobody knows about'..

But putting the needs of our brothers and sisters and grandchildren first is not easy. its not just about sending a donation or wearing a badge, because the real work to be done is challenging 'the big boys' to work differently, to put all our children first. Big business, big money, big banks, big pharma, big dairies, big oil, big weapons, big structures that perpetuate our fears .. exist to feed our greed. We can and probably should resist the easy urge to let them.

Thanks to my ancestry, health and associated privilege, I've been able to step into such stories that not everyone could. Ive been able - driven, even - to give something back, i suppose, for the unearned glory I've enjoyed. But for everyone, doing the right thing in their own circumstance - it's a challenge. The major challenge, perhaps, of life. Like everyone, I fail, and fail and fail again. I know what extractive industries do to people and rivers afflicted by mines and wars, but i use the advanced technology minerals make to record and share my impressions, stories and thoughts. I flew here, oil powered, to New Zealand from the other end of Earth.

And yet, and yet.

I hope that these resources may have been well used, may be recycled, be used to bring about change. Certainly i have been Welcomed like a prodigal granddaughter, in an island that could almost be home. And for this I am hugely grateful. Thank you, Oamaru and beyond..

I suppose, in reality, everywhere on Earth is our home. For Scott and his polar party, once they set off, their ship the Terra Nova, then their hut, then their tent, then the cold hard ice.. was home. We all have our feet on the same earth, wherever on the globe we are walking, however far we are jumping, slipping and falling down. How ever we live or don't live, we all return to the same place.

Ive learned here in NZ/ Aotearoa that Some people speak of Britain as 'home', and that many Maori see us Pakehu as outsiders too, though some of their tribes arrived here only shortly before. Maybe Some of us will always feel like vagabonds, amd see others as such too - whether by choice, or thanks to empire and to emigration, to clearances and enclosure of the land back 'home'.

But however we roam the planet and carry our ancestral baggage along, if we feel the earth as home we rarely feel ourselves truly alone. And though we may lose our people to snows or wars or depression or invasion and disease, while we live we have the earth beneath us, and sky above, suns rays. And as long as we love and look after them like family, we have brother and sister plants and animals and rocks and rivers to eat and feed and warm and flow and dance with all around. That's why I was so heartened to spend time in Omaru with local people who grow local food organically, challenge the madness of big dairy cruelty and pollution, and dance, and sail, and promote a just Transition to more sustainable ways of life.

And of course to hear tales from the Ross Sea of New Zealanders saving the whales. Thank you, on all our parts - it's needed!

Victorian New Zealand

And I'm here. The other end of Earth from home: summer when it's winter, evening when it's morning, everythingupside down. And still the coffee stays in the cups, and the lakes don't seem to spill. They are an amazing bright blue colour through, made from glacier ice, melting down great hills.

If people who said they could improve my website actually could, I'd be able to upload pictures to this blog and show you some of the wild nature, cultural resonances encountered already. But there you go, Drupal is hard so no pictures, and a clunky website still, sad to say.

So for the moment I'll keep using Facebook, much as I dislike the politics behind it. It is a good tool for sharing direct with interested friends and family. You can find me there at 'zoeyou'.

But already in my first hour in Oamaru I've heard the last organ Captain Scott Heard. A twinkly lady in Victorian garb told how how students in late 1950s Christchurch made snow shoe footsteps from our grandma's statue of Con over to a nearby bar, and then another set of steps, all wonky, back to his pediment.

This town is styled as NZ's steampunk capital, so the are old and strange items like rusty rockets, steam engines, skellingtons etc here and there. It feels Victorian, in some ways, a friendly little town.

The local paper here is ful of news about the Scott 100 events this week. one article is based round an interview with my cousin Nicky, (Kathleen's eldest grand daughter, daughter of my uncle Peter and Aunt Jane,) saying how pleased she is to come. And mentioning that her family had been raised fiercely never to use the Scott heritage 'for gain.'

It's an ethic that I recognise, (though it feels odd to see it in black and white). Her words reflect a value system that I think our branch of the family also shared. Scott died doing what he felt he had to do, for the greater good. He and his wife, our grandmother, shared a sense of honour, of doing the right thing at whatever cost to ease and personal comfort. It's clear that the right thing does not include making money from someone else's effort or worse, sacrifice.

This maybe why it has taken me until my early 40s to even think about exploring my Scott related heritage. I was too busy making my own adventures, testing my own and society's edges, being interested in conservation science and natural history, exploring my own understanding of honour and refusing to sit back into any kind of easy life from my ancestors' incredible work.

So while we would not exploit their wild and terrible ancestral tales, we are still shaped by these experiences of our preceding generations, at a deep and sometimes invisible level.

For me at least it's time now to reflect.

That's why I'm risking turning upside down.

To the Ends of the Earth - Tomorrow.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Relatives, near and far.

Tomorrow I leave London for New Zealand, in the footsteps of our Grandmother Kathleen Scott, nee Bruce.

100 Years ago K was travelling to meet her husband, the explorer Captain RF Scott, returning from the South Pole. But he wouldn't make it back.

'Her wireless' reached her ship on 19th February 1912, far out in the Pacific somewhere near Tahiti. The rest of the world had known the news for more than a week.

There will be events next week in Oamaru, South Island, to commemorate the centenary of Scott's ship, the Terra Nova, returning to port.

As a family representative I will be reading from my sister Louisa's biography of our grandmother, opening an exhibition of Antarctic inspired art and talking to various groups about K, her son Peter Scott, and the resonance of these century-old events in my own family and life.

After the ceremonies are done, I plan to visit some of the places where Kathleen went on her journeys - Port Charmers near Dunedin, where she'd seen her husband off two years earlier, Lyttelton Harbour and Christchurch where K's monument to Scott was felled at the feet in the 2011 earthquake...

I'd love to visit with good people, help out on boats and farms, walk and ride and sit and write and read and think and take some magical photographs.. As far as possible I plan to sleep outside - as Kathleen chose to do when she could.

A Facebook page for reflections on this journey of remembrance is here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/To-the-Ends-of-the-Earth/137935859699527

It would be lovely to hear from you, here or there.

Thank You.

Technology on my Shoulders

I’m not sleeping well at the moment.

Anxiety, I guess.

Mainly, my angst seems focused on technology. What do I have, what can I afford, what’s an ecologically insane indulgence, what’s needed to tell my story in an information age, what’s a wise investment because I could make/write/share something someone might pay me for, what’s too bulky or heavy for a little thing like me to carry on my back on a journey involving bikes and camping…

For years I’ve been making little films. Campaigning docs for charities, and documents of some of the strange events I’ve been part of (global resistance to big capital, Polish punk pigs, rebel clown army ridiculous recruitment tour – you name it, I was filming it). This trip is meant to be a step away from all that.

A step into direct experience, into conscious engagement with the echoes of my family’s past. A step back, 100 years back, in order to get a glimpse of the feelings my grandmother experiences, and with that wisdom to see better into an uncertain future. To better understand our connection with the wild, with nature, in its rawest and most testing aspects. To better understand this unquenchable drive in me towards being some kind of spearhead for nature, for conservation models that WORK to save threatened species - including our own.

I won’t go into the details of that here except to say that one criticism I’ve long felt undermined mainstream conservation is its eternal quest for money, never mind where it comes from, with which to pay for the technology and expertise that conservation seems these days to need. For jeeps and binoculars and scuba gear and cameras and GPS and offices in nice places like Fiji.

When that money comes from multinational companies and high net worth individuals, cash for a few parks to watch attractive totem animals bubbled over from the froth of capitalist surplus, money derived from fossil fuel and mineral extraction, extreme exploitation of land, clearance of forest, of wild beasts and the ecologically quieter humans who once lived in some kind of balance with the wild. Well. I wonder if it mightn’t be more strategic for us privileged folk just to travel, exploit, consume and excrete a little less.

So here I am, loading up with camera and tablet, to fly across the world to explore all this.

Hmmm. With glaciers melting, Manila underwater, the ocean whirling with plastic particulates and Australia on fire, how can I explain what I’m doing?

With all this on my little shoulders, no wonder I can’t sleep.

To the Ends of the Earth… In the Footsteps of Grandma Kathleen - Captain Scott’s Widow

My grandmother Kathleen was the wife of Captain Scott, Antarctic explorer. 100 years on, I find myself following her journey to the ends of the earth, for the man she loved and lost.

February 2013 marks a hundred years since news of Scott's death in Antarctica reached Kathleen's ship in mid ocean - as she approached New Zealand to greet him coming back.

I have been invited to attend commemorative ceremonies in Oamaru, South Island, to open an art exhibition entitled 'Postcards from Antarctica', to read from my sister's book and address various audiences about our grandmother's amazing life.

What resonance does one man's extreme bravery, science and tragedy leave in a family - and the island where mourners found each other? What becomes of the widow of a famous explorer - suddenly both lone parent and unwilling focus of international public grief and hero worship?

I plan to follow in my grandmother's footsteps, and to see.

Kathleen was unconventional, independent, and a sculptor of great renown. Her marble likeness of her husband in Christchurch in New Zealand was broken at the legs in the devastating 2011 earthquake. How does remembering Kathleen and her Con feel now, in a land afflicted by its own wild extremes of nature?

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of ... effects of the geographical environment ... on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. This project will explore the resonances of Scott’s last expedition in New Zealand’s landscape, seas and culture.

With my award winning novelist sister Louisa’s excellent biography of Kathleen (‘A Great Task of Happiness’) to hand, I will explore the imprints of an epic polar expedition on we who were left behind. I will give talks and open exhibitions as part of commemorative events at the port of Oamaru, New Zealand. Occasions include a reenactment of the Terra Nova’s return from Antarctica bearing sorrowful news, a play and Flamenco interpretation of Con and Kathleen’s relationship. I will meet with other descendants of the expedition to the Pole, and explore new territories of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration - as seen through the eyes of women and children left behind.

I will maintain an illustrated blog, and longer commissioned articles. My experience as an international researcher, author and film maker, also acclaimed eulogist of my father (Wayland Young, Kathleen’s second son), should stand me in good stead.

My father and extended family would never have been born had Captain Scott returned to his wife, had she not remarried our grandfather. How strange is it to say, that he died, that we might live?

It's not cheap to reach and travel in New Zealand, so support, especially commissions to write, photograph and video my unique ancestral adventure will be very welcome.

If you can help, or have any comments or questions, please be in touch.

Thank You.

A Sailor's Way

Listening to my sister Louisa speak at Voewood festival yesterday, I heard her say something I probably should have taken on board years ago: our generation is the first centuries from which no one joined the Navy.foin

We come from a long line of sailors. Ancestors we know about included cabin boys and able seamen, officers, captains and admirals; pirates useful enough to the Empire to be given a formal role.

As young things, my siblings and I messed about in dinghies with our dad (an able seaman in WW2) and mum (a WREN in that same war). Later they sent me for training as 'competent crew', and at university, I crossed the English channel and raced round Ireland in a Tall Ship.

But in truth, I'm still a landlubber.

We are the first generation from which no one regularly heads out into the open ocean, losing touch with family and friends for months and years. We are the first generation with no one running away to sea to seek their fortune, honour, adventure, amazing sights over the visible horizon. We are the first generation not to face extreme hierarchy and discipline, navigation, weather, wetness, cold, sunburn, windburn, ropeburn, scurvy, weevils in the ships biscuits, possible (even probable) injury, disability and death... and still to go on sailing, bolstered by fresh air, exercise, endless horizons, the slap of sails and the wind in the rigging, the thought of 'a girl in every port' and a good tot of rum in the morning..

Suddently I have a whole new perspective on my own youthful urges: to travel to the ends of the earth and to peer from the crows' nests of diverse human experience, and to pursue perhaps unattainable challenges. Of course it was always different for girls - the ancestors of which i speak were almost all male. But with four elder sisters and only one brother I was 'supposed to be a boy', and find I have definite masculine tendencies. So perhaps now I understand why I'm always sailing into the wind on unlikely missions ... Why I'm happiest in a tight crew heading out to unknown oceans, navigating always with the bigger picture in mind and recognising ill winds and doldrums as a part of the journey.

Sometimes, anyway.

Othertimes, I just like to sit back and watch the sun setting over the water.

Reflections on 'Capturing Witches' at Lancaster, 400 years after their 'witch' trials

‘Capturing Witches’… Well.

So much to feel, think and say about this, and too little time/linearity to write about it. Here's a first bit, hope to make time for more:

Whatever the meaning of the word witch (and there are many – which witch would you be capturing today, Sir? Madam?) the English term for embodied occult malfeasance constellates a kind of existential fear at the heart of our civilisations. Or at least, it embodies a titillation with the sinister, a still rampant plague of violent misogyny and abuse, and also now a tumescent neo-pagan community ‘reclaiming’ the term for empowered, spiritual women and men – ‘Witches With Attitude’, if you will.

Last weekend in Lancaster’s University we dived deep into such themes, exploring witch hunts old and new and bathing in holy/unholy waters of Historical Diabolism, Frontline Human Rights and Law Enforcement, Artistic Experimentation, Wiccan Cultural Conjuring and Literary Dissection of Old Texts. The event marked the 400th anniversary of the 'Pendle Witches' – a group of local women (and some men) tried, imprisoned and executed 400 years ago for supposed supernatural crime. The conference was dedicated to memory of Alice Nutter, Old Chattox, Mother Demdike and others killed as witches, 400 years before.

Friends also took me to visit the outcastes' gravesite of Lancaster: shades of South London’s Crossbones) medieval prostitutes’ graveyard in that marginal space. There is something that draws me to honour the outsiders, the underdogs, those victimised for their differences, desperation or for speaking out, for challenging the powerful and their hypocritical mores - or for just being a wrong person in a wrong place at a wrong time. The wrong time may just be when social tension (ethnic strife, hunger, social change) is building and pressures seek an outlet, a scapegoat to blame. An accusation of ill will can be the pin that bursts the balloon and releases the flood – too often of blood… but doesn’t change the dynamics that led to the pressure. So witchhunts tend to come in phases.

My contribution to 'Capturing Witches' was a tale of modern day Ghanaian witchhunting of the old and ill, the ‘witchcamps’ where survivors find refuge, and how we came to make a half hour film for Ghana’s SOSYWEN women's empowerment network. 'What I Used to Know - The Road to Ghana's Witches' Camps', is available to watch online here: http://www.sosywen.org, and you can read my first account of the emotional process of making it here: http://internationaltimes.it/ghana-witch-hunts. Ours is just one of a surge of recent documentaries exposing West Africa’s witch hunts – ‘Saving Africa’s Witch Children’ is probably the best known, and features the conference’s co-organising charity, Stepping Stones Nigeria.

Researchers such as Birgit Meyer, Ronald Hutton, Sylvia Federici offer us knowledge in surfeit, and yet, and yet. Most of us still seem to be wandering blind. Perhaps it’s because ‘witchcraft’ deals with the ‘other world’, and real life witchcraft abuse is a crime in 2 dimensions that needs understanding in 3 (thanks to Andy Desmond, former detective and anti-human trafficking consultant, for that phrase). It’s hard for those of us raised in a ‘materialist’ culture like Christianity – where personal responsibility for sin can be got rid of as easily as believing in a 2,000 year old hippy – to understand the seriousness with which animist cultures take the magical realms.

Even most neo-pagan, self-proclaimed ‘Witches’ don’t seem to grasp the scale and nature of witch hunting. There’s a fetishisation of historic witch hunts in North America and Europe, and a mourning for the wounding of women’s spiritual place, plant-based healing capacity and the sacred feminine – all of which I can share. What I can’t share is the almost studied ignorance of witchcraft abuse affecting women and children alive now, and even in our own British cities where groups like AFRUCA work to stop more kids dying like Victoria Climbie – battered to death by her own relatives in a crazed ‘exorcism’ of demons, diagnosed by a pastor.

Few neo-pagan Wiccans (and self proclaimed witches outside this modern religious frame) seem awake either to the difficulties that their use of the term ‘witch’ creates for intercultural exchange. And it goes deeper than just the words:

“Do what thou wilt”, say neo-pagans, ‘if it cause harm to none”

but what happens when someone DOES use their connection to the realms of spirits to do harm? The harm comes back on them three times over, they say, an article of faith so it seems. Karma style. But what of those affected, where do they go for revenge? IF the magic is real that is, which the wiccans say that it is? Or is it just real when it’s nicely, when it’s celebrating the seasons, praying with good intent, for healing, not harming.. like the ‘cunning women’ of old. Old Chattox and Demdike of Pendle, so called ‘witches’ put to the death, were known as healers on their day, and feared lest they turn to the bad. When they did so, their like were called ‘witches’, and killed.

“Injustice is not anonymous”, say activists, “it has a name and address”

Condemnation and harsh sentencing, direct action, rough justice, vigilante mobs… Are these not all societies’ crude responses to feeling something ‘wrong’ ..? and to the fear of death, and the unproductive old women – crones - aging whores, small scale brewers, intheway infertile wives - who remind even the most powerful of death?

If there’s no belief in all powerful patriarchal deity after life or instant karmic process to sort out ‘evildoers’, what are courts and justice systems but an attempt to root out evil and protect the innocent from harm and worse, untimely death, here on earth?

Clowns, World Leaders, Britain.. Time to Make that Film Now?

Seems G8 world leaders return to Blighty next year - 2013.. I'm reminded of last time their gilded cages landed on our shores. I spent the preceding months embedded with a Ridiculous Recruitment Tour, entertaining, training and raising an army of undercover fools to speak truth to power.

Maybe now it's time to make that documentary. Tell a story,warts and all, of how a rebel clown army was conjured; how this meme, that's now worldwide, was conceived, born and nurtured here in Britain.

We need: a director. a producer. money. an outlet.

The archive, the researcher / co-producer / storyteller and the audience are ready.

Click here for more info, and a few sample clips