Fire warnings disappeared from the backs of school jotters at some point before I started teaching in 2002. Despite the fact that some kids still play with fire, the warnings on the back of all jotters was phased out. The 5 rules are written in 8pt small print and it is with supreme effort that I read the ‘fire rules’ that I must have seen 10,000 times and never read.

Not going under a bed with a burning match to look for your toys sounds like a good idea to me, but nowadays the sources of illumination will be phones. Levenmouth boasts a continued use of coal as a heating fuel in many proud ex-mining households - though it’s minority these days. As for the 4th one - what? How else are they clothes going to get dry? I seriously never read this, luckily I grew up with electric storage heaters (which were usually below room temperature).

I note the warning used what was probably the latest in 1970s psychology to reinforce the basic message. The headline + 6 rules adds up to 7 things which was then thought to be the usual amount of things someone can hope to keep in short-term memory. The 3-fold repetition of Fire! Fire! Fire! was done for emphasis and the mirroring with Danger! Danger! Danger! wasn’t poetic symmetry but an attempt at behaviourist association (think Pavlov’s dog) between the words ‘fire’ and ‘danger’. Finishing off this dramatic full-page warning is: Remember. Fire hurts - Fire kills. The use of 2 simple examples of the dangers of fire (hurts, kills) continues the doubling rhythm of the header (bit at the top). And of course, it’s an em-dash in the right place at the right time.

In 2026, we don’t have the warnings we have iPads. I’m dreading the day when our iPads become bogged down with health and safety warnings that we will soon have to click through: yes - I did wash my hands, yes - I know not to vape in public spaces, no - I’ve not forgotten to stay hydrated, yes - I know the dangers of energy drinks… no, I’m not presently driving a car…

Meanwhile - our beds are burning.

In Europe, the scale of the fires has been approximately double than the worst year, let that sink in. Literally twice as bad as the worst wildfire year. France, Greece and Spain were affected the worst, but also Dunwich Heath burned and by the way, it is located uncomfortably close to Sizewell B nuclear power station.

Nethy Bridge (population 650) had to be evacuated in the Cairngorms fire in late July which destroyed 25 square miles, including parts of the Abernethy reserve which boasted our remaining Caledonian pinewoods and 5000 wildlife species. The ecological assessment of the damage has not yet been completed.

Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh went up on 25th of May and 19-22nd of July, I could see the pillar of smoke across the Firth of Forth from Buckhaven beach. So as you can imagine I do worry about fires coming closer to home, indeed I have written about my experiences of fires on our campus.

On of my first Substack posts was about the dangers of fire in the community of the project. In September - our worst ever fire (2024), I documented my concerns that there was a real risk of our Willow Worlds going up in smoke, that we were operating in a hostile environment - under threat from bonfires, bin-fires, accidental fires and angry boys with lighters. I’m not going to go all over that again, but I should perhaps provide an update.

In the spring of 2025 we simply let the weeds grow over the area where most of the fires were getting set, and the problem of binfires and after-hours disturbances seemed to go away. The whole site in Bat’s Wood, has through the magic of rewilding become a lush area of green trees, thistles and nettles without obvious fire-raising potential. Rewilding in Muiredge Park’s has long grass which might ruin one’s expensive trainers thus deterring many mischief makers.

This spring and summer has felt wetter due to its epic cloudbursts and storms, but it’s actually a story of lower than average rainfall here in Fife. So the threat of fire is still here. It’s too early to claim that the Willow World’s design has proved to be fire-resistant - willow is certainly not immune to fire. I’m quietly waiting for the test - a trial by fire - to come. There will be fire damage but we’ll see how it goes. The causation of a fire is both so arbitrary and the outcomes so unpredictable that I don’t really hope to learn much from suffering a fire on our site. I’m hoping it doesn’t happen for a few years, and when it does - that it’s not too bad.

Willow is green wood, full of water. When we cut parts of it down for firewood in about 5 years time, we will need a place to dry the wood out for a year before using it to heat homes. Indeed that vegetation holds water is one of the reasons that trees are thought to be a good defence against wildfires. Trees slow the drainage of surface water, the cover of trees reduce how parched the ground becomes. Don’t get me started all over again about the ecological services of trees.

However, the big picture about rewilding is worth remembering - lest after the fires we decide to concrete over everything so there’s nothing to burn. The big picture of rewilding reminds us that we actually need a world worth living in, not just one that feeds us chips on the sofa. Obeying the rule of three - here’s a link to Scotland: The Big Picture - a rewilding group that maybe I should reference here. You might like them too - they’ve even got a rewilding conference coming up: Saturday 19th September 2026, it looks good.

Afterword

On the 11th of August our willows witnessed a ‘massive fire’ crossing the wheat field towards them. You can see our willows waving at the bottom of this photo.

The fire disturbed people enough that a drone went up and surveyed the damage afterwards - it could have been much worse.

This Substack has so far avoided moaning about plastic pollution, the whole project has the strategy of avoiding plastic altogether and to that extent it risks having the flavour of a moral panic.

A “moral panic” - a term from sociologist Stanley Cohen - is characterised by a lack of proportion in the way problems are handled in a society. Attempts to demonise plastic tree guards might be seen as an attempt to stir up a response resembling mass hysteria. Indeed, the word ‘demonise’ is a good word to link to “moral panic” as the phrase actually comes from the book Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

However, I would counter that by saying that seeking to simply avoid using plastic within tree planting schemes isn’t the call for a new revolutionary government some people are waiting for. Plastic is a big problem but we also know that plastic isn’t something any of us have given up using entirely.

When Trump supporters talk of “fake news” they do have a point about the problem of moral panics in the media. Don’t believe the hype, the simplistic and alarmist headlines and the phoney rhetoric that an honest person doesn’t have time to read. The irony is that these same supporters seem unable to digest anything beyond the headlines, while their more literary opponents fail to admit that they don’t know the right answers either.

“The Astro” at Levenmouth Academy.

Sports pitches have never been nature-friendly zones but football pitches will always be fields of dreams. After 10 years, the school is replacing its plastic astroturf pitch. The cost of such projects is usually about £300,000. At present the rolls of the old Astro sit in the school car park and it is an impressive pile of debris which most people assume will be going to landfill. In the video below you are looking at enough plastic waste to make one million large plastic bottles.

The sight of all this waste reminded me of a nature restoration event in America known as the Osbourne Tire Reef1 of the 1970s where millions of car tyres were arranged in the sea to create what fishermen hoped would become a coral reef and a good source of tasty fish. The idea was to make the tyres into surfaces for life to dwell by putting them in the correct place for nature to make use of them.

Unfortunately, car tyres are full of plastics (such as nylon) and this attempt at nature restoration failed and failed badly. Instead of adding to the fish stocks, the tyres polluted them, created a vast health hazard to fish and pescatarians. In 2023, the removal and proper disposal of this 50 year old project is still costing $2.5 million per year and only half of the tyres have been recovered from so far. What a mess.

The lesson from the Osbourne Tire Reef is that it is not good enough to believe we can simply put plastic waste to good use in nature. Even dumping waste in the right place is impossible when it comes to plastic. So you can appreciate how I felt as I picked up yet another plastic bottle from the ground and saw the old Astro. When our “fields of dreams” turn into poisonous plastic mountains every 10 years, what’s the point of worrying about a wee bit of litter every day?

But wait, this is a GOOD NEWS story.

Sportex, the company who are completing the work on the astro have a “360 degree solution” where they install, maintain, repair and recycle 100% of the materials that they use. It’s a closed loop system, that means the plastic in old sport pitches is used to make new sports pitches. Based in Grangemouth, our old sports pitch doesn’t have far to go before it is reborn as a new field of dreams somewhere else.

I have sometimes made the point that the main sources of pollution in a school do not come from the pesky pupils dropping litter but from the adults driving to work. I still think there is a lot to this - think of all those plastic tyres grinding away on the roads… but…

For once, the adults seem to be getting it right by getting Sportex in to replace the Astro.

We do still have a problem with plastic - I’m not going to reassure you that all is well in the world of pollution and plastic.

But more people are doing a bit more about it.

I’ll take that.

So thank you for reading.

Like most ideas, curriculum plans can be processed and polished within an artificial intelligence and given all kinds of bells and whistles these days. So while the short answer to our title question is “yes”, the next step is to prove it in the real world. I did use AI to create the introductory post and for all you know this too is digital slop. So I need to ground my answers to this question in an actual class.

This, as I write, is starting to grow arms and legs in my mind. Education research is action research, communities of enquiry within education research is a big topic and frankly I do not have time to document the whole experience of teaching an IDL class for 4 periods a week, as well as planning and delivering a full-time teaching job with 18 other teaching periods that deserve my care and attention, as well as writing about Willow Worlds on Substack and at the same time organising ourselves to look after our trees - those tangible living things that are the main point of the project. Wait: imagine those Spanish wildfires heading north and you’ll take trees a bit more seriously.

So no, I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of Willow Worlds as IDL in my classes at school. I would need a formal research project, it would be worth a PhD to some - though I have no desire whatever for such an enterprise. I’d be happy if someone else wanted to come and put themselves through it, I’d watch. I’d help. But I’m not doing it. There would be far too much representation and far too little reality to it in my view, and if we had to have both then I’d probably have to cut my hours and only teach the IDL.

This would be quite nice - but, in case you haven’t noticed, the research funding for such things is imploding, and really? What would I contribute to the advancement of educational science? I just don’t think it’s enough. At the end of it I’d say, in my particular school we did a wee project called Willow Worlds as part of an IDL and it went OK. There would need to be a large community of like-minded researchers all working together to really pull together anything universally applicable or something that contributes towards national policy.

The wider question is: how can schools make better use of their outdoor environments to both learn about and contribute towards their improvement in a world of runaway global heating?

But to answer it I’d need to be a sort of national development officer surveying Scotland and identifying places that are getting it right and helping to make national policies. Well, it would be a nice job it I could get it, but it’s not my job. Alternatively, I could just try to do it, see if it works and hope to get noticed.

As Gandhi said in my RME classes long ago: be the change you want to see.

So no, I’m not going to do any research about IDL here, even narrative research would be tricky because of the confidentiality issues and, I say again, I don’t have time. I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of my classes, how the school works or anything that identifies anyone. And no, I didn’t just describe my pupils as nuts and bolts. That would be unethical! Read it again.

What is in this Section of the Willow Worlds Substack.

1. A (draft) Curriculum Rationale for Willow Worlds in IDL.

2. Course description, some plans and organisation.

3. Some resources that I like.

4. Some photos of trees and other inanimate objects.

5. Some reflections.

I remember standing in front of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the gathering of esteemed and illustrious practitioners who had come to share their projects. If I had asked how many were vegetarian, I’d get a good show of hands. If I had asked who among the throng had a postgraduate degree, I think at least half would have raised their hands. If I had asked who had a University or college degree, perhaps almost everyone. If I had asked for a show of hands for who now had at least high school-level qualifications, I’m sure I would have seen a unified sea of hands waving as one.

I’m not saying something nasty like “we’re all nerdy weirdos,” but I do mean to say we’re not representative enough. Over one third of the community around Willow Worlds are without any, even high school, qualifications1. That’s quite striking in a place that can literally hear the school bell in its streets. And I intend to consider them as co-owners of the project, not participants in the study. I think community-lead research might fail if it puts up walls inside itself too much. So if I am trying to do something in our community, I need to know how they see it - bear with it, and respond positively.

Unlike ‘thinking with trees’ (see Knowledge Made Slow), talking to people is intensely and uncomfortably grounding. Talking to people happens unpredictably, it is an experience and not a model. It is needs no logic and it is full of contradictions, it’s about people trying to make sense, getting halfway there, giving up and getting on with the rest of their day - because that, at least, makes sense. Online I can do academic loop-de-loops in the privacy of my own mind or the silos of an obscure Substack that nobody reads(!) and avoid both conflict and reality. But when you get talking to someone, it is reality and it’s never completely predictable.

So I’m at the bottom of Martin Street with my camera, it’s hot and I stop to drink some water ahead of filming the walk to the Willow Worlds site. A door opens and a man a few years older than me comes out and he says:

Ah’m no being nosey but whit ye up te?

Me: I’m testing this camera.

Keith: I thought ye wir scanning the grund fir some’hing.

And so begins our conversation.

After 20 minutes talk I am exhausted because of all the loose ends and unexpected turns, fortunately the camera was left running and Keith says I can use the sound from the first few minutes and make a transcript.

Me: Nah, I’m filming my project over there.

Keith: The rewilding bit? CLEAR planted all that, aye?

Me: Well I did the circles in the middle with CLEAR, do you see them?

Keith: [silence]

Me: What do you think of it?

Keith: You dinnae want me to tell you that. Honestly.

Me: Ach go on, it’s no going to be an argument. It’s alright.

Keith: It’s just a mess! What was wrong with having a grassy field, honestly? It’s all right having wild animals and all that but… it’ll draw rats and aw.’ See that yellow field, I was out early mornings and there were thousands of rats pouring out of that field, not hundreds… thousands ee ‘em. I fish creels and I was going out for creel-bait on Sunday morning and there were troops of them pouring out the field - they [housebuilders] were testing the ground then - across the road. No hundreds of rats thousands of them, just a plague. I think something like that will happen in the rewilding area, still it might be all right, I don’t know.”

Me: Do you think the rats live in the forest or the field?

Keith: They live in the field, definitely in the field, there’ll be a nest of them somewhere… but I think the idea of this is saving the council cutting the grass. That’s what’s happening all over the place where there’s open space - they’re planting trees and they’re no cutting the grass and they’re saving money on manpower. It’s all down to money, saving them money.

Me: Well you know, our idea is like if we have trees it’s cool the place down, make the air fresher, get shade in summer…

Keith: [pointing at a 6 metre sycamore tree behind his garden fence] See that tree? It gives me shade and it gets on my [wick]. I’ve been on to the Council to put it back because believe it or no… see they branches? - They’re level with my extension at the back, when it starts giving off, my garden gets polluted with leaves and I’ve got to clean them all up. I mean hundreds! I’ve been on to them to cut it back and they came around and cut a few branches which were of no importance at all, made no difference at all to my garden. They said it’s a healthy tree - and I said all right, what about all the other healthy trees you’re cutting down all round about? Are they all rotten? Naw! They’re cutting them down for the sake of cutting them down.

Me: Aye, I think they are cutting down too many trees.

Keith: Dinnae get me wrong, you get a braw bit of shade off it in the summer. I think it’s the only tree here that’s not got a crow’s nest in it. About 20 years ago there were a couple of crows starting to build a nest in it, but I put a few spars of wood together and poked it out and they’ve never come back.

Me: They remember, crows…

Keith: Aye… that’s a good thing. Well look at it another way… did the Council give CLEAR a lot of money to plant they trees…?

Me: No. No.

Keith: Aw well, that’s all wrong then, but the Council’s encouraging this, this field’s meant to get turned into a housing scheme.

Me: No, that’s not right.

Keith: It’s no? We got told it was, like…?

Me: No, no I’ve see the plans - this park is safe. It’s the field on the other side of Bat’s Wood and the yellow field way over there, I’ve seen the plans.

Keith: When this happening like?

Me: [unsure] about 5 to ten years to complete, it’s 1800 houses. But this park: Muiredge Park and the other park - Sandwell Park - they’re safe.

Keith: Well everyone says they’re planting trees but all I see is them cutting them down… [but they’ll no cut the one I want cut back].

Me: I teach at the school, you know?

Keith: What’s your name then?

Me: Duncan Zuill

Keith: Mr Zuill aye? Mr Zuill’s Garden is up there. The kids call that bit up there Mr Zuill’s Garden…

Me: Seriously? It’s called Bat’s Wood - I wasn’t going to name it after myself!

Keith: Aye well, [Pupil’s name] was with you up at that bit…

[rest of conversation deleted by request]

“that bit”

Surprising to some, there is actually a strong tradition of confusion about place names in Buckhaven and here are a few examples. These examples need to be understood through the interaction of three factors: the industrial disturbance of the landscape, apparent community apathy, and the impositions of remote bureaucracies. All three are arguably present, but the industrial disturbance of coal mining is the most foundational, shaping the conditions in which the other two emerge.

The first layer of confusion seems to come from sloppy aerial mapping where the settlements were wrongly named in 1945 (see above). Further confusion occurred when the 1950s housing (‘bird’) scheme was built in Muiredge but actually designated as an enlargement of Buckhaven. The people’s postal address said Buckhaven but they actually lived with Muiredge Park to the north and the other part of Muiredge to the south. This is why nobody knows Muiredge Park as Muiredge Park - it simply doesn’t make sense to call it that. So it’s known locally simply as “that bit”. But that’s not then”that bit” Keith was talking about, his “that bit” is “my bit” which he says the locals call “Mr Zuill’s Garden” - a name a refute!

I named “my bit” Bat’s Wood for the following reason: when Levenmouth Academy was built there was an attempt to sell off the land to developers. This was effectively blocked by an appeal to the Secretary of State for Scotland under the Playing Fields Act (2006) which allowed the Secretary to veto the sale of playing fields where an objection was lodged. The objection was a report from an ecologist saying there were bats living in the trees (which there still are). You can hear the pipistrel bats here and that’s why I called it Bat’s Wood, and I put it on Googlemaps, so there.

Steve Howell is a local photographer (in his spare time) who knows where Bat’s Wood is but didn’t know where Muiredge Park was. Until I told him. Confusion like this is trivial, of course, but beneath the surface is the question of why: why is it trivial? In towns that have not suffered the huge disturbances of mining and housebuilding, there is likely to be a much more secure idea of what places are actually called.

But anyway, what did I learn from my conversation with Keith?

I accept that Keith doesn’t like his sycamore tree because the leaves “pollute” his garden and, rewilding might bring “a plague” of rats. That is an understandable concern which I hadn’t thought about much. He likes the shade but hates the leaves and the crows, I get that. Let’s take his ideas on board. Those are problems in addition to the ones identified by more academically defined ones like climate change. One might want to see open disagreement about whether the leaves are pollution or not; but that would not solve anything, it would simply become a third source of problems: conflict. I want to actually respond somehow to his concerns, even if I’m not myself concerned. I think that’s what community lead research should be doing.

The point is about getting the whole community to explore Willow Worlds as a particular, if small, change even when a large proportion won’t engage with my main environmental ideas, yet. That’s no problem. Maybe they will develop their own environmental ideas - ones that I will be forced to learn. As the willows grow, the effect is decades-long gradual experiential learning, not the bite-size conceptual chunks we deliver in class. As well as thinking our way through, thinking with trees and all that nonsense; we are living with people who make their own sense and, we have to work our way though that as well.

For some people, their screens have become a reality where a thing can become a ‘thing’ on the Internet and there is a new confusion about what is real and what is fake due to the fact that AI can represent things that have no basis in reality, and we can’t tell. Most of this is harmless, but some of us are increasingly untethered to lived experience and our own particularity. The public understanding of science suffers too now, because what is represented can be valid or fake evidence and again, in this new deep-fake screentime, we can’t tell the difference. A lot of understanding of science is made on social media, on podcasts and on-screen viewing. We are learning on YouTube but we are learning it all from a screen.

Think about the learning that cannot be learned from a screen. Of course, we learn that off screen - the world of lived experience still exists, albeit in a form more sanitised and safer than at any time in our history (disaster-zones aside). But how much time are we actually spending learning away from a screen, and what is lost when we fail to attend to the things to learn that aren’t on a screen?

A concern that we are media-smart but street-stupid is nothing new. Indeed, philosophers have long been suspected of living in their own heads, and many were. There is a rapidly rising suspicion that many of our greatest philosophers were neurodivergent. Not that what they had to say was wrong, they were all on to something but, why they (and not others) were on to it is worth considering and of course, we will never finally know. But in all of my reading, I have never once studied a philosopher who was simply described as ordinary and conventional. Have you?

Philosophers have been, almost by definition, different in their cognitive styles but some have been clearly “on the spectrum.” Immanuel Kant was very likely autistic, Wittgenstein and Bentham clearly were and Spinoza well, I don’t think so, but others do. Of course, I am not going to diagnose anyone but you think of Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida - they are all very distinctive in their cognitive lives. There was clearly a lot of work going on in their heads! What is left however is their prose and it’s in books and on screens, represented by words. Philosophical books are word games living in representation at its most abstract. For some philosophy has become a sort of Sudoku exercise of words referring to each other. Philosophy has a head start when it comes to disembodied representation.

In Part 3, I introduce Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain hemispheres as a way of talking about how we attend to things. In his theory there is not one mind at work but two that are a team, a team so well coordinated that it looks like one mind. In a healthy brain, the left attends the right visual field and processes information while the right hemisphere attends to the left visual field and grounds itself in lived experience. This last sentence is a massive generalisation of his work and I cannot recommend reading “The Matter with Things” enough. MacGilchrist takes anatomy seriously and has explored to a fascinating level of detail what happens to the mind when one or other of the hemispheres of the brain goes wrong.

For my purposes, I would say that the information processing left hemisphere is exercised by reading philosophy, the right hemisphere is exercised by applying philosophy in one’s life. It should all go to plan and philosophy should be useful, except now the cascade of abstract information doesn’t ever seem to stop and the left hemisphere works overtime in the processing of new and more additions to the representational models it needs to tell the right hemisphere about. It never gets finished. Maybe it never gets back to the right brain at all and we sit there - the right hemisphere frustrated, the left exhausted - doom scrolling down into brain death by screen time.

That is why I am so worried about representation. The stream of media, AI-chat and click-bait is a torrent that exercises the left brain relentlessly but makes the right (master) hemisphere almost unemployed. That’s fine if the representation is real and it’s something that the right hemisphere can make use of but what if it’s not reliable and the models within the left hemisphere keep shifting and rebuilding? Well, that sounds like a recipe for psychosis to me. But let’s bring this back to Willow Worlds - this Substack is not the reality, it is not even art anymore. It is a representation of a living thing and as such it is deeply suspicious, I don’t actually believe we can make a model of a Willow World.

I mean, I will!! But not without first discussing the limitations first.

I guess I am one of those philosophers…

And I, who claims to have reached the End of Philosophy, and become a Rortian Anti-philosopher and someone in a hurry (unlike Rorty ever was) to do something about the climate crisis… I NEED TO GET PAST ALL THIS AND GET THIS SECTION OF THE SUBSTACK DONE! So that’s it, I’m going to type a bit faster.

In keeping with my inclusion of the more-than-human, I should say that representation (‘mind’ and ‘abstraction’) is not just the preserve of human beings as some humanists would believe. I believe that even tiny microbes appear to consider things, that cells in the body exhibit what looks like desire and sometimes even deliberation and confusion. But I’m going to start with the really big and work down to humans and stop there else we’ll be here all day.

Laplace’s Demon refers to an intelligence of astonishing magnitude who was imagined to have a perfect model of the physical universe in his head. Pierre-Simon Laplace (known as France’s Isaac Newton) posited that an intelligence, probably up in space who would need to know only two things in order to have “the past and the future available to his eyes”. Firstly, the demon (as he was later known) would have to know the exact physical location of every particle in the universe at one point in time. Secondly, the demon would have to know the velocity of each particle at that precise moment. From that information, assuming a perfectly intelligent being, the past and the future would be as visible to it as the present.

Well. That wasn’t the first, nor was it the last iteration of a belief in a deterministic universe. By the end of the 20th Century however, the idea had worn thin and became the subject of an excellent comedy in the hands of Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), a computer known as Deep Thought (‘the second greatest computer ever to be built’) was programmed to find the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. Its impressive “teeming circuitry” worked for thousands of years to figure out that the Answer they were looking for was 42. Sheer comedy gold, the problem was that the computer had been wrestling with a badly formed question hence the answer “42”, while absolutely right, didn’t land on anything rational.

One might start to think about AI at this point, could it ever reach the potential of Deep Thought’s “teeming circuitry” and find the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything? Well, for a start it would have to at least model the universe correctly in the way that Laplace’s Demon was supposed to do. But of course there are many reasons why this is demonstrably impossible.

Firstly, Chaos Theory posits that there are some things that are simply too complex to model because they have a complexity that both has a shape and also has indeterminacy, we just can’t know its particularity. These tiny differences add up quickly to very large differences a short time later and bang goes your predictions. Similarly, the affordances of physical objects are unprestatable and this matters in the giant pool table of materials in physics, you’re just not sure what results are going to be obtained. Again, organic material and molecules aren’t like the weights inside an AI, they all have their own idiosyncratic details and particularities, you just can’t upload your consciousness because the you that is you is bound up with nonbinary, situational facts like the characteristics of your neurons which through their arbitrary history and randomness can never be repeated either in time or in the teeming circuitry of a data centre. Transhumanists - sorry, you aren’t uploading yourselves to live as digital beings any more successfully than the Pharaohs of Egypt who thought embalming would work out for them.

Lastly. Any data centre capable of modelling the entire universe would need a lot of power and that, for sure, would change the universe it sought to model. This complication is only the start of that problem but I want to just leave it for now. Oh another thing, some questions in the universe don’t have answers - I know it sounds strange - but paradox is a fact of life, not a solvable irritation. Just go ahead and ask yourself this question:

Will my answer to this question be ‘no’?

If you ask the AI it will return with a stub answer like: yes, it’s a paradoxical question, there is no way to respond to it logically. That however isn’t good enough for Laplace’s Demon, because it is supposed to calculate how you will respond each time you or anyone else tackles the question. And nobody can predict that because it is unprestatable, it feels like you have a choice and to all intentions and purposes you do.

So at this great scale, Deep Thought and Laplace’s Demon can’t model reality. We are not in any great computer simulation as our physical reality is not binary, it’s fuzzy and it’s fields of probabilities and it’s not got building blocks of any sort of uniformity. We are no Lego. We are not machinery. These metaphors are literally wrong, and while we may think that metaphors are all we have, we must remember they are bad approximations, not models.

Oh well, what about us, can’t we represent the world around us in our minds? Can’t we, as rational humans get ourselves a working model of a small part of the universe?

We do it every day. It’s always wrong but like Newtonian physics, it works well enough for our purposes most of the time. This to me seems like a really poor representation, but for most purposes we have to make do with it. The success of the model then, is not about the “teeming circuitry” but with the constant comparison between the representation and the reality with a strong preference for the latter. Now when we say that, one might wonder what the point of making a model is if the actuality always trumps it.

Well, we need to understand time and if we don’t take slices of time and measure between them then we are overwhelmed by the flow of all the stuff happening all the time at once. If we do take measurements however, maybe we will get mesmerised by the details and fail to see the bigger picture. How did we decide what to measure unless we already had a model, how can we have a model before we’ve even measured things yet? There’s a process, of course, but who’s got time for that? And if we are too ‘powered’ in our thought processing won’t we, by that powerful processing, change the things that we are hoping to explore?

Deep Thought had an answer. It decided that its task was to design and build a computer so powerful that living beings would form the “teeming circuitry” and without knowing it, they would subconsciously perform the calculations through their lives on that huge computer that would simply be named: The Earth.

So we are back to Thinking with Trees, Thinking as a Community of Enquiry and trying to make sense in an increasingly worrying world. That’s the process of participation in and ownership of the research, we don’t have a model, we are who we are. We take some photos, maybe do a film and seek to thrive and continue to adapt. Maybe we have no Plan B, maybe this is the Last Chance to effect change.

As I write, I read that the sea surface temperatures are 3 standard deviations above late 20th Century norms, there is a storm outside my window, there are wildfires decimated Spain and France, just like they did in Australia and America not so long ago. Here I am on Part 4 of this Section called: Philosophy Department. It’s pathetic to be doing philosophy when there are literal disasters that tree planting can help to prevent. My only defence is that I’m just one person and I’m finding things to do while the willows grow and we put £20k into a decent ISA for a year.

It is at this point, I think that I’ve said enough about theory and the problems of representation to be able to articulate why the knowledge made useful is not an abstract representation but grounded, rooted in the real world of experience. Knowledge is made useful - in reality and not online - it’s nice to transmit information but the real work is to touch, tend and transplant tangible trees and for that we need to get our hands dirty.

I’m done here.

The Philosophy Department will remain closed until further notice, thank you.

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In 2022, I finished my Master’s Dissertation and finished off my M.Sc in Learning for Sustainability from The University of Edinburgh “with Distinction”. In 2025 someone asked me what I’d written my Dissertation about - they really wanted to know. Until that point, most people had been happy with “it was about outdoor learning, using a school campus for environmental education… and so on.” And that’s all I’d begun to remember. I mean, obviously I was the author, I had sweated blood over the 15,000 words and references and there was a lot of deep work in there. Since then, I had liked to think that what I was doing at school was informed by the carefully written and original dissertation and other work that I had completed over the several years that my M.Sc was spread over (I completed the postgrad while in the same full-time teaching job I have today). Buried in a folder sat my Dissertation, and over the last 3 years I can say that a lot of writing has passed through my keyboard since then - working at school, running a small charity, moving house, some family problems… the usual stuff of a busy life.

So, what was your dissertation about? Well, something about experiential education, outdoor learning and campus rewilding… Then I remembered, someone actually had read my dissertation and only the other day, related it to a thought-piece by Education Scotland called “Interdisciplinary Learning: ambitious learning for an increasingly complex world,” not only that but other key documents about Interdisciplinary Learning, and then composed a Substack post that gave a rationale for some IDL classes featuring the Willow Worlds. The post was a solid piece and I am glad that someone read and did something with my Dissertation, even if it was my NotebookLM.

Clang!

That’s right, I have to admit that I did put a post up on my Substack that was entirely AI-generated and entirely endorsed by myself. So pleased was I that AT LAST someone had read my Dissertation - I mean really read it, understood it and applied it to the latest relevant educational policy documents. How many people have dissertations that literally nobody shall ever make use of and is that not a shame? I recently heard that someone got a Doctorate on the topic of how some bird calls are a bit different sometimes. That person can go around calling themselves “Dr” from now til it is chiselled onto their gravestone, but will anyone actually read their work? Our institutions are good at rewarding good work (hopefully) but it would be better if they ensured that this work was used.

Now, for all future dissertations and doctoral theses, there will be the question of whether a large part of it is AI-generated? I can see why people would try to use AI to hack their way through the most boring parts of any endeavour but it’s also true to say that readers are getting mightily fed up with reading AI slop. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that it doesn’t even matter if the AI material is good or not, it’s the case that there is no authentic expression going on within the writing. As one recent writer on this topic said: I don’t see why I should turn up to read, if the author didn’t turn up to write. Or another writer, Sam Kriss writes “If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.” Anyway…

I hope he’s joking, because my post, apart from being a good reading of my Dissertation in a 2026 context, was entirely AI vibe-coded. At the time, I was a so happy to see how much sense my Dissertation actually made to a reader and the subject matter was so dull and workaday, I had done thinking about it and satisfied, I let it out on to my Substack, as a website-only addition. You can see, if you can bear to read it, that it isn’t bad at all - if you like Education-speak. But these excuses make it sound like some politician:

yes I did, but I didn’t inhale!

The present unrest on Substack concerning the addition of the “Scan for AI content” button is indeed very relevant to this Series of posts in Willow Worlds which I have called “Philosophical Surfaces” and hidden away in the a section called Philosophy Department. I really worry that any series that tackles philosophy should be correctly labelled and separated from the more general and fun Willow Worlds part of the research project. Not that philosophy doesn’t matter, but it should only be done in a well telegraphed way - some people just want to know if the project is working or not at an operational, spare-me-the-details level. And it is those people that have the best parties. Research however should take its terms seriously and think about its thinking and you know… thank you for reading this far, you can come to my coffee-in-the-garden, boring party one day.

I mean, I should give you more credit! You’ve already come quite a way. In Art is Dead I expressed the concern that all this writing and photographing (representation) couldn’t be called art, such is the deluge of AI into everything: but that the actual physically present installations in Muiredge Park could. In Dead Screens: Antonin Artaud Vindicated, I pressed the view that representation was in trouble and that presence had an invigorated significance to those who started to see their screens as abstractions and absences. In this post, I wanted to land on some of the problems with representation that Artaud didn’t land on, that is: problems in scientific methodology, but OK I’ve got distracted by this using AI in my Substack thing.

Our sponsor the RSE has the motto “Knowledge Made Useful” and so it is a good question to ask (in a side alley of the website) what our take is on philosophical questions such as how do we know stuff and what is this knowing of stuff anyway? I will look at knowing at a few different scales - given relevence the posthuman and the more-than-human in earlier articles. I will also show what’s fundamentally different between a living being knowing something and an AI knowing something and how that looks, at least to me - it should be reassuring to those who resist the claims that AIs will rule the world.

But I’ll pick that up again later. So I used to think that AI was bad. Then I thought it was good. Then I thought maybe if I paid attention then I could trust it. Now I think of it as a tool in the box which needs careful handling. So what model should I have of my workflow, what is the role of AI in this narrative research project?

Relying on my attentiveness and vigilance might work for some, but I’m an easily persuaded sort of bloke, sometimes called a good listener, and if I’m not careful I could nod along to whatever the AI is saying. And I’m wary of the writer who pointed out that people want to see some connection between the author and the work, so I want to bring myself back more firmly into the writing of my work. If sometimes ChatGPT makes a better point or highlights where I’ve made too much of a stretch - I still want to read that but it’s going to be a private conversation between me and my digital emissary.

Earlier in 2026, I read Iain McGilchrist’s work. I read both “The Master and his Emissary” and the two volume shelf bender “The Matter with Things.” The books are excellently constructed prose discussions from an unusual, but very distinguished psychiatrist within the professional community. I took a wee while to get to him because he is one author I can’t follow on an audiobook. I think I needed to read him in bursts of fast and slow in my own time due to the complexity of the material. I needed the distraction at that time. If you want to access that material, buy the books, but also listen to the various free podcasts (with MacGilchrist) that help discuss the chapters.

“The left hemisphere makes an excellent emissary but a very poor master,” he says of the human brain. Indeed, he doesn’t say it directly for his is a very careful scientist, but to me, the attentional mode of the left hemisphere is analogous to artificial intelligence. That is to say that when I am reading an AI, there is grammar, references, coherence, rationality and calculation in abundance and the things that are lacking are the sorts of qualities associated with the attentional modes of the right hemisphere: a sense of time, life experience, suchness (haeccacity), groundedness and authorship (originality). What happens when the right hemisphere is dormant, damaged or when the left hemisphere takes over? Psychosis, delusions and madness. What happens when you let an AI write for you? Nothing so bad as that, but it’s not going to be the idiosyncratic presence that only you are tracing upon this world.

Although I find that the AI is a quite careful and only a little biased, agent, it really does remind me of a psychopath. Not in the dangerous Hollywood mode (shadows on the shower curtain, kitchen knives and shrieking violins), but in the lost, delusions mode: when everything literally makes sense, no questions are left unanswered and all the conclusions arrive logically. And you can’t argue with him, you can’t keep up. It’s like being the Prime Minister dealing with that Civil Servant in an episode of Yes, Prime Minister.

So I’m taking steps, I’m talking, yes, talking to my phone to make voice notes. I’m capturing my thoughts as they come up and using my digital emissaries to process them and archive them and make summaries. Then I might get Gemini Notebook to make its own version of those thoughts over the day and then I’ll feed them to ChatGPT and have an in-house discussion. I notice when I do this that the weaknesses of AI emerge: the fact that an AI doesn’t know what reality is like, what the world feels like, its intolerance of loose ends and metaphor. And then, in the morning - I wake up, open an empty document and write my things.

In Art is Dead, I developed the idea that Posthuman Art was an alive collaboration between living beings; in this I am channelling my More-Than-Human (MOTH) interests and re-embedding the human into the living world. My AI pointed out that this is not the usual way people are talking about the Posthuman. One familiar version of the Posthuman looks towards cyborgs, digital consciousness and kinship with artificial intelligence. Mine looks in almost the opposite direction. I am using Posthuman in an ecological rather than a cybernetic sense: not the human enhanced by machines, but the human returned to a living world from which it had imagined itself separate. For it is not humanity which is moving into a Posthuman stage of development, no, humanity (online) is getting hacked by digital substitutes. Those of us who remain human (online) are discovering that nonhuman participants are increasingly indistinguishable from us. This is a huge issue, and I’m approaching it with a discussion about art.

The Art I claimed was dead was art encountered solely as representation on a screen. Including this. Screens weren’t always this way. For a long time, understandable processes connected viewers to the world: our screens were windows. We could believe these representations because they were grounded: they did actually arise from reality either through a mechanical process, or a human hand. On our small screens we saw all manner of realities represented for us to appreciate as part of our amazing life on Planet Earth. Images were of some thing. The words were of someone. We could say that seeing is believing, that a photograph was worth a thousand words. Now pictures are not necessarily of any thing. Now words are not necessarily of any one. In the future, will our screens be windows or walls? I say they are going to be walls, we will look at our screens with the blank indifference of a dog.

Screen-based representation is dead—or at least dying. It can no longer be securely counted as art merely because it looks like the product of human thought or lived experience. For there is now some sort of wedge between thought and expression in the case of digital art, and between capture and reproduction in the case of camera work. In the past, we loved art as it had something to do with life and a reliable connection to a living artist, an experience or something. The artificial animation of the online world with AI has simultaneously deadened our screens. When we can no longer tell if there is a faithful representation of either thought or experience, then it is no longer of artistic interest.

The most represented animal online is the pet cat, usually on YouTube. Funny cat videos were once indisputable evidence of living art on our screens. We saw people and their cats in some sort of intense happy, hilarious experience. They still point to a We that co-creates in the radical present, with the more-than-human, with places and materials. The funny cat video was an interaction between the artist and her cats and somehow a magic moment was captured and celebrated. But, now these things are drowning in a sea of new AI generated videos. Without the particularity of an actual event being depicted, we will start to lose interest. We become like dogs, we won’t even sniff the screen.

But.

Seeing how representation on our screens is itself in trouble, one of my favourite thinkers - Antonin Artaud - would feel vindicated by this. I’d like to explain why.

Antonin Artaud has to be described with care but not tamed. My AI preferred a responsible sequence of qualifications about mental illness and suffering. I understand why, but Artaud cannot be contained within a few clinically respectful lines. I have read three long books about him and I think I have tuned in to him. What follows is a sort of performance of Artaud, it’s my characterisation of him. A representation that would cause him to scream and laugh.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French actor, theatre director and thinker who lived with schizophrenia and led a gloriously self-defeating lifelong campaign against la représentation. He viewed scripts, films and even photos with suspicion, he suspected that there was something basically wrong with representational art. Ultimately, and he was always on the edge of things, he believed only an absolute intense presence could be artistically valid. For Artaud, the art of every artist dies at the end of every performance. His theatre stripped the artist of everything except the present moment. A performance might begin with a story, but the artist had to double it with something immediate and dangerous: an eruption from the heroic soul, or screams of failure and vulnerability. The artist must risk everything. They must double.

I wish I’d seen his Les Cenci (1935). It was his brave attempt to return the human from scripts, codes and imagery. I read him as opposing all art once it settled into inanimate form: painting that allowed the paint to dry, writing preserved rather than destroyed, performance reduced to a repeatable script. He died leaving a pile of 406 notebooks filled with furious prose, then ripped, slashed and defaced. Life is Cruelty - he said, by which he meant a sort of intensity and craze, the sort that comes with being either the villain or a righteous sufferer. He believed that a doubled-consciousness was necessary in any artistic performance, without recourse to anything dead, any representation, such as a script or an image.

Antonin Artaud refuses representation as a sort of caged vampire, undead. According to Artaud, art includes its own death - a furious final act to complete itself in an inevitable exhaustion, reaching an End that is also a Meaning. To be alive is to be mortal, performance therefore ends in destruction. And then the curtain falls and it is all gone. Fini!

He was deranged, but brilliantly so. It’s difficult to separate his insight from his mental illness, indeed that is part of his enigma. He was onto something deep inside the human psyche, and I will return to him in my discussion of my favourite psychiatrist (Iain McGilchrist), whose work is incredibly important, in a later post.

Artaud won disciples, but he lost the world. His ideas continued to influence experimental artists while mass culture moved decisively in the opposite direction: Hollywood, massive print runs, mass media, colour photos, reproduction, office printers, floppy discs, CDs and RAM drives - now the entire world of art in the palm of your hand, and now you can’t even drop it because it’s lighter than air - it’s in the Cloud… indestructibly dead!

Artaud’s objections to representative art seem simply incoherent to a world bathing in an endless sea of imagery. But he dares you, he double dares you to believe that nothing on your screen can be art.

And now, from 2026 on - it is possible to say that. Artaud is at last vindicated.

Now there is a Dead Internet Theory - an internet full of chat-bots increasingly complex - crowding out the content created by humans. Now there is Big Box Theory creating vast galleries of digital content; a Cultural Singularity for digital artists to perish within, never getting to make anything artificial that AIs can’t beat or copyright first. Representation has found a place to die - the World Wide Web. That gravy train, once a gold mine, is now just a pauper’s grave. Even the influencers are getting displaced by AIs. That’s what I mean when I said that Art is dead. Let’s call scripts, videos and even recorded music - dead. How else could Michael Jackson be competing with Bad Bunny?

Artaud is really dead, but he had a point that I find myself wrestling with: for Artaud recordings of Bad Bunny are as alive as recordings of Michael Jackson. Neither of them will feature on my Spotify playlist, but should I add The Velvet Sundown when I know it is AI generated music that I’d probably enjoy? I might but I hesitate. As AI necrotises representational arts of all kinds - what about humans who want to work as artists after 2026?

It’s not my problem, I’m just a school teacher pointing out some new constraints in the world of work. But I think Willow Worlds counts as Art in 2026 (art that’s not dead). We have made something artistic that includes the more-than-human, collaborates with wildlife, remains situated in a particular place and emerges through material processes that we do not control. I have made it representational on Substack, I know that can’t be art: but the reality of the Willow Worlds displays itself in a park. It is a piece of art right now, performing a living show over decades in time to come - growing inevitably towards a moment of creative destruction as all life does.

The Willow Worlds Substack (here online) is importantly dead. My AI says it’s a trace, and I liked that idea. In calling Art dead, I had mistakenly undermined the point of my own writing here. The project needs a record, it needs a discussion and there are uses for dead things. I was guilty of hyperbole. However, I still intend to call Willow Worlds (those living branches) a work of art: a Posthuman Art. A Posthuman Art that is the alive among us. An elemental posthuman art. It is not a representation of collaboration among living beings. It is that collaboration: rooted in a park, growing beyond its makers, and moving in its own time towards transformation and decay.

The S1/S2 Willow Worlds course is a place-based interdisciplinary learning programme rooted in Bat’s Wood, the grounds of Levenmouth Academy and the wider Levenmouth community. It uses living willow, ecological restoration and practical environmental action as contexts through which pupils can apply knowledge and skills from different curricular areas.

The course is designed particularly for learners with Additional Support Needs and for pupils working across Early, First and Second Curriculum for Excellence Levels. It therefore combines clear routines, repeated experiences, practical tasks, visual learning and accessible language with opportunities for challenge, creativity and increasing independence.

The authorship of this post is discussed fully here.

A living bridge between subjects and action

The course is based on the idea that effective interdisciplinary learning requires both subject depth and meaningful connections.

Individual curricular areas form the pillars of the course. These include:

• science and ecology;

• literacy and communication;

• numeracy and measurement;

• technologies and digital learning;

• social studies;

• health and wellbeing;

• expressive arts;

• practical and vocational learning.

The Willow Worlds project forms the lintel connecting these pillars. Pupils do not study a series of unrelated subjects that happen to share an environmental theme. Instead, they use knowledge and skills from different disciplines to investigate a place, understand a problem, carry out practical work and communicate what they have learned.

For example, pupils may observe how willow changes through the seasons, measure its growth, calculate the number of rods required for a structure, investigate the species using the habitat, write about the experience and produce a digital record of the work. Each activity contributes to a shared and purposeful project.

Learning through place

Bat’s Wood functions as an extension of the classroom: a local environment in which pupils can encounter living systems, seasonal change, practical problems and the consequences of human decisions.

Working repeatedly in the same place allows pupils to notice change over time. A woodland, willow structure or habitat feature is not treated as a one-off outdoor activity. Pupils return to it, observe it, care for it and evaluate what has happened.

This repeated contact supports a stronger relationship with place. It also makes learning more concrete for pupils who may find abstract or decontextualised classroom tasks difficult. Concepts such as growth, biodiversity, weather, measurement, maintenance and responsibility become connected to things pupils can see and experience.

The local setting also helps pupils recognise that environmental issues are not restricted to distant rainforests, melting ice caps or global conferences. Climate action, biodiversity improvement and ecological restoration can also involve decisions made in a school woodland, community park or local growing space.

Learning to notice possibilities

A recurring idea within the course is that materials and places offer different possibilities depending on how they are understood.

A willow rod can be viewed simply as a stick. Through observation, investigation and practical experience, pupils may also recognise it as:

• a living plant;

• a cutting capable of producing roots;

• a building material;

• part of a shelter or windbreak;

• a habitat;

• a unit that can be counted and measured;

• a future source of more willow rods.

This develops pupils’ ability to look closely, ask questions and imagine alternative uses for familiar things. It also provides an accessible foundation for design thinking: noticing what is present, identifying what might be possible and considering how materials could be used responsibly.

Learning for Sustainability

Willow Worlds provides a practical context for Learning for Sustainability. The course connects particularly with climate action, biodiversity, responsible use of resources and ecosystem restoration.

However, sustainability is not presented only as a body of information that pupils must remember. Pupils participate in manageable, real-world actions such as planting, maintaining willow, improving habitats, gathering evidence, creating signs or explaining the project to others.

The emphasis is on helping pupils understand the relationship between knowledge, choices and consequences. They consider questions such as:

• Why was willow planted here?

• What benefits might it provide?

• Who or what could be affected?

• What resources are required?

• How will we know whether the intervention has worked?

• What should be changed next time?

This approach encourages pupils to move from learning about sustainability towards taking part in sustainable practices.

Agency, participation and contribution

An important purpose of the course is to help pupils see themselves as people who can contribute to the life of their school and community.

Many environmental issues can appear overwhelming, particularly when presented through narratives of crisis or individual responsibility. Willow Worlds instead focuses on collective, achievable action. Pupils experience how a group can make a small but visible change and how that change can be maintained and developed over time.

Agency does not mean that pupils are expected to solve complex environmental problems independently. It means that they are given meaningful roles, supported choices and opportunities to influence the direction of their work.

Depending on their stage and needs, pupils may:

• select a location for a habitat feature;

• decide what evidence to collect;

• choose how to present their findings;

• identify a problem requiring attention;

• suggest an improvement;

• explain the project to another class or community group;

• take responsibility for part of a practical task.

Success is therefore measured not only through completed worksheets or correct answers but also through participation, decision-making, communication, perseverance and increasing independence.

Inclusive and accessible practice

The course is designed around the principle that pupils should be able to participate in different ways.

Outdoor and practical learning can create valuable opportunities for pupils who do not always demonstrate their abilities through extended writing. At the same time, outdoor activity alone does not guarantee inclusion. Tasks must be carefully structured, modelled and adapted.

Teaching approaches may include:

• visual instructions and task sequences;

• photographs and video modelling;

• repeated routines;

• short, clearly defined roles;

• supported communication;

• sentence frames;

• paired and group work;

• concrete measuring and sorting activities;

• oral, photographic or digital alternatives to written recording;

• opportunities to revisit previous learning.

The course follows a slow spiral. Important ideas—such as growth, change, habitat, measurement, safety and care—are encountered repeatedly in different contexts. This supports learners who require additional processing time or who find it difficult to retain learning from isolated lessons.

Productive uncertainty and learning from outcomes

Living systems do not always respond predictably. Cuttings may fail, plants may be damaged, weather may disrupt plans and designs may require modification.

These outcomes are treated as evidence rather than simply as failures. Pupils are supported to ask:

• What happened?

• What evidence can we see?

• Why might it have happened?

• What could we change?

• What should we monitor next?

This gives pupils experience of iterative learning: acting, observing, reflecting and improving. It also supports resilience by showing that practical work often requires adjustment rather than immediate success.

Risk is managed carefully through planning, supervision and appropriate procedures, but uncertainty is not removed entirely. Pupils learn that responsible action involves making informed decisions while recognising that outcomes cannot always be guaranteed.

Documentation, reflection and communication

Digital technology is used to make learning visible rather than to separate pupils from the practical experience.

Showbie, iPads, photography, video, audio recording, Pobble and Scratch can support pupils to document change, explain processes and reflect on their contribution. Evidence may include:

• before-and-after photographs;

• annotated images;

• measurement tables and graphs;

• short written reflections;

• voice recordings;

• digital diaries;

• animations and simulations;

• interviews;

• short films;

• presentations for families or community partners.

These records allow pupils to revisit experiences that might otherwise be forgotten. They also provide evidence of progress in knowledge, skills, communication and independence.

Community and social value

Willow Worlds connects school learning with the work of Bat’s Wood SCIO and local community partners. This gives pupils insight into how environmental projects are planned, funded and delivered.

Pupils can explore how money, labour, materials and local knowledge combine to create community assets. They can consider the principle that expenditure may create more than one form of value: for example, paying local workers while also creating habitats, growing materials and improving public spaces.

Community participation also introduces pupils to different viewpoints. Environmental changes may be welcomed by some people and questioned by others. Pupils can learn that consultation involves listening, explaining decisions and responding respectfully to concerns.

Intended outcome

The course aims to develop pupils who can notice change, apply knowledge, work safely with others, care for a place and communicate why their work matters.

By the end of the programme, pupils should have experienced the connection between learning and action. They should understand that a local environment is not fixed, that people and other species shape places together, and that they can participate—at an appropriate and supported level—in making those places more resilient, diverse and useful.

The central purpose of Willow Worlds is therefore not simply to teach pupils about willow or environmental sustainability. It is to enable them to use knowledge from different disciplines to understand a real place and contribute to its future.

Forward

I love this photo. When I first shared it on Facebook many years ago there were a huge number of positive comments, indeed Steven Howell is an expert photographer and I’m happy he’s given me permission to reproduce it again here. It is so eerie that I suspect however that now people might suspect the involvement of AI in this photo. That’s a terrible shame but it’s also an interesting fact about the world today.

But I know those trees, I know those tree guards and I know that path. The cat is huge because Ripley belongs to a huge exotic breed. It’s the sort of cat that Rottweilers respect. The light in this part of Scotland can be exquisite, in contrast to the dark of the mines. This photo is not artificial and yet, will you take time to check?

Steven Howell certainly takes photos in Buckhaven and Methil and you can see Ripley making at least one more appearance on his professional photographer website.

The few people who actually know me will probably take my word for it. I estimate only 20% of online readers reading this will bother to verify that Ripley is real by checking the above website. Here’s my point: absolutely nobody has time to investigate this question every time they see a nice photo or a piece of art. We no longer have time to care whether it’s a bot or not.

Part 1

In an idle moment last week, I revisited the first series of the X-Files (1993), there is safety in the past. I don’t want to believe that the series is 33 years old. Not only are episodes such as “Squeeze” and “Space” cult classics but also, they have a sentimental value to me. I remember watching these as rented DVD episodes with friends in a flat after work in the 1990s in Japan, those were the days.

The episodes are now interrupted by adverts for incontinence underpants. This is not because the series is traumatic; it is rather because the viewers are thought to be old and male by marketing algorithms. I’m almost looking forward to my retirement home in a decade or two where we all rediscover the joys of Star Trek (Next Gen), The X-Files and Twin Peaks.

But I will not watch Lost again - tell the nurses, I have a tooth filled with cyanide.

The iconic shows and the targeted ads are both forms of screen art. But whereas a great painting can show off the artistry of one painter, these modern creations involve the creative talents of dozens of artists per episode. Every one of these humans is no doubt a successful professional who would be able to point to some aspect of the production and say:

I made this! 

Advertisers are unashamed that they have sold out artistically, creatives in the X-Files probably think they have sold out to an extent but maybe it’s OK to sell out. There are families to feed, it’s ok to be a commercial artist. One artist who found enormous success is Levenmouth’s most famous local painter: Jack Vettriano (1951-2025). He was criticized for his pop-art style but in the 1990s selling out was in, his paintings were selling like hot cakes.

Jack Vettriano painted his way out of poverty, he was 21 before someone gave him a set of watercolours. With these, he developed his brand of romantic and popular art. His point, I think, as an artist was to evoke simple human feelings. He dismissed the idea of painting the gritty realism of the mining town he knew because he thought people wouldn’t, and I think he meant - shouldn’t, like it.

His critics would have had him paint the grim life of the mines, of pit-ponies and black sweat. He’d been down the mines and thought he’d rather forget about that. His way of being true to himself was to remember that he’d rather forget about the mines and instead, paint what he thought was fire. That’s why you’ve heard of him.

In The Singing Butler (1992), two young lovers dance to the sound of a crooning butler holding an umbrella for them on a windswept beach. In Bluebird at Bonneville (2022) Vettriano captures the simplicity and passion humans have for fast cars and land-speed records. Most of his other work is generously described as erotic. My point is that our Jack was a fantastic elemental painter and appealed to us, perhaps too directly at times, as humans.

Jack’s recent death coincided with the moment that AI became impossible to ignore as a serious competitor in the art world. Some people think AI is just another tool for an artist to use. They imagine the cheese and wine at the gallery opening, the artists turning to see a computer scientist walk in, the party sniffs and sighs and turns away.

No. It’s not like that. Jack Vettriano is, I think, one of the last famous painters.

That cheese and wine is party is more like The Masque of the Red Death.

The computer scientist arrives like the hooded plague figure in Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842), the face is revealed and then all the faces in the room are infected and red, and horror… …and The Red Death held sway over them all. AI is reverse-engineering human-centred art like a red plague moving through a peri-apocalyptic Ballroom. It threatens to flood the world with every possible picture before a human artist has even begun. If art is ‘thinking outside the box’ then AI is making a box of data so vast that humans cannot think their way out of it. If you like, you can call it Big Box Theory. It is a box expanding so fast — mostly through bots creating slop for other bots to use — and becoming so vast, that modern human artists may never again feel outside it. Therefore:

Art is dead and AI has killed it.

That’s my headline statement, but I think it is wrong in an important way, and here’s how I think it is wrong. According to Bruno Latour, humans have never fully lived in the box at all. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour argues we never were the purely rational and independent individuals that the modern worldview told us we should be. The Big Box Theory is simply one part of us, there is always something wild in us that knows the box is not real. The posthuman sounds like something from the future, but it has always been with us. We are only realising it now that AI is displacing us; we are finally being forced to see that humans live in relationship with the more-than-human world. We don't live apart from or above the rest of the world at all, we live with it, despite the claims of modern thought.

In modern thought, we are told that a reasonable human-centred life is all we need. Live - Laugh - Love. We rationally sample the parts of the digital world that work for us as we manage our busy lives. Technology serves us and helps us to care for the humans we care about - that’s what we want to believe. As long as we can switch the screens off, we have control - don’t we? We never believed we were only what we said we were on our socials; we are more. We have always had the posthuman in us, because we have always been more-than-human.

For example, you might have a dog.

Dogs are the way to go when it comes to understanding the posthuman. Most dogs are not interested in screen time. Dogs see screens as mirrors that have something wrong with them. Shannon Vallor, a prominent writer on the subject of Artificial Intelligence has come to much the same conclusion in The AI Mirror (2024).

Remember Narcissus, she warns.

Yet the dogs in our lives are ahead on that score, most dogs look at screens with absolute indifference. Dogs already lead Narcissus-informed lives. A dog says that everything is a thing. Only humans think about whether things are things or not. When a human says it is “a thing” - they mean that it has moved from the realm of ideas (or minds) to things (or bodies). What nonsense. But it gets worse: ideas can become “a thing on the internet” and here humans believe there are “things” in the world of servers, bits and bytes.

Nothing on a screen is anything other than “a screen” to a dog.

Let me be a dog-poet for a moment, I’ve got a Pooch-human Poem.

First, give me a biscuit. Now I’ll begin.

Pixels are pixels. 
Screens are screens. 
Thoughts are thoughts.

Images aren't things. 
Screens aren't windows. 
Thoughts aren't texts.

A dog sees pixels for the tiny traffic lights that they are. Tiny little traffic lights in a wall of tiny little traffic lights. Dogs are phenomenologists, intensely aware of the material world as it is. They are not for a moment distracted by representations. If you have a dog (or any animal really) in your life, then you have all the inspiration for posthuman living that you could possibly need. When you turn off the screens, you are halfway to living with the more than human and the simplest next step is to follow his wet nose to other more than human (MOTH) life forms as well.

This is the first of three wee articles meditating upon the death of art in a world of artificial intelligence, and attempting to point outside the box towards a non-humanistic, un-hackable, posthuman art that I do think survives. Here is why:

Willow Worlds has screens dogs like.

A Willow World is a beautiful, more-than-human screen that cannot be turned off. The cross-hatched vertical surface of a living willow fedge is therefore posthuman MOTH screen art. It is art that grows on you. Dogs like willow fedge as much as any tree trunk. But its fiercest critics (deer) have not managed to do much damage. The most avid fans (wasps and hornets) are seasonal but when they do arrive it’s a carnival atmosphere with sudden and unpredictable violence (kestrels taking pigeons eating wasps eating aphids). The surface of the fedge affords aesthetic appeal with its sheltering foliage, bird songs, clean air and living wood. Where Vettriano appeals directly to recognisable human longing, Willow Worlds widens the audience: dogs, deer, wasps, hornets, kestrels, pigeons, willow, weather and people all become part of a beautiful live performance.

The other day I thought how slow I have been. The Willow Worlds idea, simple as it is, took far too long to develop. Years. I want to write this now, not in the spirit of self-deprecation, nobody actually likes reading that sort of thing, but in the spirit of solidarity with all the other people who have found themselves wondering: why, oh why, didn’t I do this faster? Why didn’t I think better - where was my critical thinking? As I unpick the last 8 years, I can see that the Willow Worlds idea always was possible, the elements were all there: circles, deer and willow. But the idea was slow to come about and here’s how.

When we were starting to plant in what was to become Bat’s Wood, I thought we needed a sort of outdoor classroom. So in January 2018, we planted the Goat Willow Circle about 12 metres in diameter. The Stacey Maguire (PSA) and I and our small group of outdoor learners had nowhere to shelter against the howling wind that whipped out of the Firth of Forth and out of the farm fields to the south west. We added a permaculture hugel to the circle (that’s the ditch you can see in the photo) and in only a few years we had a circle of willow and hawthorn.

So willows and circles had a first outing 8 years ago.

In 2019, we had the idea of growing a willow hedge to mark the orchard. We bought a £100 bundle of 5 foot willow from Rob Eves of Auldgate Willow, and Lewis (who worked at CLEAR at the time) set about installing a willow fedge about 70cm high. He did a good job but it was too low and too loose. At only 2 feet high the fedge disappeared below the thistles and nettles and the deer made short work of it, probably by trampling over it. Had that structure been in a garden, it would have been strong after a few years; but in Bat’s Wood it didn’t stand much of a chance. We hadn’t thought of it as way to protect trees, it was supposed to make the place look more organised - anyway, the deer walked straight through it.

It turned out that my father Eldon had taught Rob’s partner Biology in Glenwood High School back in the day. We chatted a bit and we got talking about the willow statues that Rob’s sister could make for us. We wanted some giant willow bats, of course. This is irrelevant but somewhere in the conversation I dimly remember Rob saying “I would make the willow fedge much stronger than that.” But we hadn’t bought enough willow to do it that year.

Our short, weak little willow fence was soon buried under the jaggies. Our attention turned to the Goat Willow Circle and for a few years we watched it grow. The willows turning into trees, making a sort of clearing in the wood. Unfortunately, the circle attracted too many out-of-hours visitors and a cycle of vandalism and bin-fire incidents spoiled our dreams of a conventional outdoor classroom. We ourselves risked criticism as our spot became Fife’s illegal fire capital and a moral panic picnic centre. Later on, the Goat Willow Circle became known as my Mr Zuill’s Fire Pit. Much to my horror and chagrin, I should add.

For a while I persisted, cleaning up the fires and the messes. I laboured to remove the layers of melted plastic wheelie bins. I told myself optimistically that the fires were diversionary and the police largely agreed. The fires in this lonely spot meant less fires in more sensitive parts of the community. Still, I tired of this stupidity. We stopped strimming the clearing and we let nature grow back. Goat Willow Circle is now filled with thistles and brambles and became a fairly wild thicket that people started to avoid.

The fires have now happened elsewhere.

Others will learn the benefits of rewilding.

Anyway.

Goat Willow Circle had been a Willow World inverted. It was a circle of willow designed to create a learning space for pupils - an outdoor classroom, enclosed. Goat Willow Circle was designed to keep people in rather than keep anyone out. The wind-break made sense. That part worked. But almost everything else about it was wrong for our site.

Attracting people was a very human thing to do, it was putting human use at the centre of what we were doing and it was wrong. Bat’s Wood needed a different starting point; an approach centred not only on people, but on the more-than-human presences in the environment. We had to include those non-verbal participants.

The Goat Willow Circle as an outdoor classroom and our first willow fences were modern humanistic ideas of enclosure. As the nettles and thistles submerged our structures and deer destroyed them, I started to think differently. I read and listened to a lot of books, and these are just the ones that come back to me most vividly:

How Forests Think (2013) Eduardo Kohn

Feral (2013) George Monbiot

The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) Peter Wohlleben

Staying with the Trouble (2016) Donna J. Haraway

Poverty Safari (2017) Darren McGarvey

Soil (2021) Matthew Evans

But then there was the pandemic, I think several parts of my brain got reset by the pandemic because in all the commotion I forgot about willow. I thought about soils, about drainage, about roots and compost and mushrooms… I saw trees growing out of the sky. Maybe it was a side effect of the vaccine, but incredible as it now seems I wrote my (‘with distinction’) Masters Dissertation without much mention of willow. I only said something about making baskets one day. However the willows continued to grow, Rob and I stayed in touch.

COP26 in Glasgow had been postponed due to the covid pandemic but suddenly it was all GO. I wanted to get pupils there and Bat’s Wood as a place of outdoor learning potential was starting to get noticed. In Feb 2021, a visionary at Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, Pauline Silverman and Fife Council’s Sustainability Officer Shona Cargill who was working on The Leven Programme got in touch with me to put together an application to make Levenmouth a “Climate Beacon for COP26”.

We got funded and we became one of five Climate Beacons for COP26 and, before we knew it we were going to Glasgow! I didn’t personally go, but I was thrilled to be able to send some pupils and colleagues, including Claire McLeod (PT Geography) whose support at the school has been vital throughout the 8 years so far.

I did get my hands on some funding and Hannah Swanson (who would be Pauline’s successor) and Lewis Coenen-Rowe at Creative Carbon Scotland (CCS) got me thinking about public art of some kind to encourage people to get out into nature, for healthier (socially distanced) living.

So we decided to line our winding Snake Path with about 12 meters of artistically planted living willow fence, and I had at that moment I did remember Rob saying he could a living willow project bigger and better. So Willow Worlds started off from a Creative Carbon Scotland backed project which we called “Creative Willow Planting”. We wanted to make some paths better marked with artistic carbon-capturing installations of willow on a budget of £1600. The pandemic was ending and we wanted to do something to get people outside. We believed that willow fedge was a gardening technique with aesthetic appeal. It was crafty and climate friendly. It made the paths feel more intentional.

After COP26 we repeated the project, simply because we liked it and another path was lined with willow fence-hedges (fedges). It was during that second time that I noticed something important. The deer weren’t doing much damage, that the design afforded protection, and on the third year we extended the Snake Path fedge. The deer-proof surface of the cross-hatched branches stretched around to make a circle, an exclosure protecting trees. I named the exclosures ‘Willow Worlds.’ We had our prototype.

About that time, a chain of Climate Beacon emails involving the OnFife (Dan Brown) and The Leven Programme (Hannah Swanson) told me about the Royal Society of Edinburgh/Williamson Trust “Healthy Planet, Healthy People” Catalyst Awards of £5000. The RSE’s strapline “Knowledge made Useful” seemed tailor-made for the emerging Willow Worlds idea. Muiredge Park was a perfect site for the project as we had had a similar development there in the form of a Wee Forest in 2022.

And this is the part that still bothers me a little: the ideas were there for years before I properly put them together. The willows were there from the start. The circles were there from the start. The fences were there from 2019. The deer were there too, making their point with admirable consistency. The failures were not subtle. The low fedge disappeared. The outdoor classroom became a fire pit. The human-centred plan kept running into a more-than-human reality.

For a long time, I mistakenly thought the willow was there to shape a place for people. A circle for pupils. A fedge to make the orchard look organised. A creative installation along a path. Something attractive, crafty, carbon-friendly, perhaps even educational. Only later did it become obvious that the willow could do something more important. It could make a worlds for young trees to survive in. It could slow the deer, shelter the saplings, mark the path, grow its own structure, and change the behaviour of the site without needing plastic tubes or metal fencing. It could bring nature and human beings more happily together.

That was the shift.

Willow Worlds did not arrive as a flash of inspiration, it arrived slowly and almost inevitably. The idea grew out of mistakes, weather, thistles, vandalism, deer, emails and half-remembered conversations. This is why I wanted to go over the development again. Not to dramatise my own slowness, but to defend it a little. I wish I had thought of Willow Worlds in 2018. Of course I do. But perhaps the more useful truth is that I did not think my way there.

We (plants, people, place) did. 

Some thoughts are slow 

because 

they need to be thought with trees.

That’s why Willow Worlds 2: Cut and Plant won’t be doing anything fast.

Thanks for reading - let me know what you think in the comments.

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The other day I was having a rant and I seemed to come to the following observation about our efforts to make the world a better place, and their ironies:

Many of us could list ‘sustainability’ projects that didn’t last much beyond the funding that oiled its wheels. I don’t intend to discuss examples and I am not saying: down with that sort of thing. No. I’m aware that funding matters and we all need to earn a crust somehow, and if 10% of sustainability projects can self-sustain after their initial funding has run out then the other 90% were, or can be seen as, necessary failures that might have worked had they had better luck. It’s really the job of the grant assessors to avoid the most obviously unsustainable of sustainability projects.

But, good projects don’t have to be sustainable. Meeting a need or doing something cool are agreeable enough in themselves. It’s inaccurate to try to call everything worthwhile ‘sustainable’ when lots of fabulous things clearly are not. Call me old-fashioned but I would like to reserve the word “sustainability” for those projects that can at least attempt to self-sustain indefinitely.

That was my line when I put in the application for the Change grant. Willow Worlds 2: Cut and Plant is environmentally sustainable because we are growing the materials for self-replication and purposeful action: coppicing, pollarding, charcoal making, basket making and willow craft. Willow Worlds is sustaining itself by, if nothing else, the annual question: what are we going to do with this year’s willow?

It is possible to see our Willow Worlds as liabilities in terms of maintenance costs but that approach maintains a culture of failure. I see Willow Worlds as opportunity in terms of enterprise which mitigates the liabilities of living in a nature-depleted community. If we weigh up the local risks and the global risks equally - as global citizenship requires - I think it’s possible to contend that the difference in total risk between these two positions is trivial, and that being so, the preference in thinking should be to stop worrying and love our trees.

I want to say more about how and why it seems to be a part of human nature to be triggered by some issues and fail to get triggered by other issues that are demonstrably more important. I’m not brave enough to identify the issues that I think have been overblown, but surely, when there were 2 famines identified in 2025 (and that is the first time this century that two official famines in one year has been declared) you’d think that people would at least know where they are happening. But no, most people can name one and often they are wrong.

In case you didn’t know about the 2 famines of 2025, I’ll put a wee bit of grim reading at the end of this article for you. My point is that maybe what we do should be able to reference global problems and their causes when considering local liabilities and risks. Thinking about the most vulnerable must include the 41 million that didn’t even eat one meal last week.

World famine is a siren warning us, loudly calling however far away it seems. It tells us where ecological systems, human systems, and economic systems have fallen out of balance. Drought, soil degradation, conflict over resources, and climate volatility converge most sharply in the places where food security is weakest. Any environmental project that ignores this is working in partial sight.

An environmentally responsible project, then, is not defined only by what it builds or protects, but by the horizon it acknowledges. It asks: does this work contribute—directly or indirectly—to a world in which fewer people are vulnerable to hunger? Does it conserve resources in ways that could be replicated where scarcity is acute? Does it avoid displacing harm, exporting costs, or consuming materials that deepen inequity elsewhere?

This does not mean every project must solve famine. But it does mean every project should be conceived in its shadow. The measure of responsibility is not purity or scale, but orientation: a willingness to situate local action within global need, and to design with that awareness in mind.

Famine seems very far away from Scotland and yet, here we have vulnerability and need in places that also should not be ignored. This is the realm of relative poverty, which is a real, solid problem and not simply one borne of jealousy. So while not literally living without food, shelter or clean water - there are people in Scotland who deserve to be included in any socially just intervention. This brings me to another strength of our Change grant application: fair pay for workers.

Fair Pay - what about the volunteers?

Ever since David Cameron’s Big Society idea was that the world is full of healthy volunteers who love nothing better than to give up their spare time to save the world. That is, after 5 days in the office - organising some nefarious project to ransack the world for cash or, to secure some of that cash for oneself and one’s family from those who did get their hands dirty - after a long week of work, you’re ready to get into your 4x4 become an environmental activist. Aye right. Getting to this climate-friendly event in the old Chelsea tractor burns enough fuel to keep an African family alive for a year, but never mind - a beach clean, and get a Happy Meal on the way home - it’s a good day in the Big Society. Sadly, depending upon these “haves” to give up a couple of hours a week, isn’t going to do much for the “have-nots” and we need to rethink what the charity sector really is.

The life of a charity worker is skilled but low paid, it’s hard graft and it’s real work. We need to pay people to do the work and organise a largely symbolic voluntary sector and keep the party going. I know I do give up my time to think about such things but I also know that I’m unreliable and unsustainable too. If I manage to do something creative in my free time this year that’s fine but I should also remember all the years that I did nothing at all in this regard. The serious work is done by the people paid to do it, the ones that put their careers of 80,000 hours into it. Not someone like me: a school teacher who likes to type.

This insight was central to my application - to recognise the reality of environmental charity sector organisations and how they are staffed. Of the £25,000 a really large chunk of it goes on wages for practical work - the day labourers. It’s not about putting the well-meaning, “I will work harder” cart-horses to give up their leisure time; no, it’s about giving meaningful work to local people. I'm not knocking those professionals who find time to do pro bono work, I’m saying that we need them to construct social infrastructure for those that can’t. The teachers and lawyers are welcome to plant trees and pick litter if they want to, but if they are able to use their skills to help others in the ways only they can, then that would be good (probably better). The work that really needs done is the redesigning of the Big Society to pay people properly for environmental work. I’m not against the idea of weekend warriors but to suggest that their work is sufficient - to restore nature, to remove 200 million tree guards, to clean all our beaches, hills, forests, oceans and rivers, to battle the few-flowered leeks, to monitor the beavers and the lynx and the auroches and plant enough trees - to get near doing all that, we need paid workers in environmental charity organisations.

So, most of the money is going to other organisations?

Yes. Basically, £20,000 is allocated to whoever we partner with to harvest the willow and build more Willow Worlds. The other £5000 is for small projects, tools and harvesting - that won’t go far over the 3 years. Willow Worlds 2 is a lean, green machine.

So this celebratory post is a bit self-congratulatory, and I think that’s ironic. Ironic because we won the grant as volunteers who, in our application, made the argument for employing people to do the work for fair pay. We argued for environmental sustainability but all the while we are sustained by our day-jobs. I am the very same pro-bono worker who I said can’t be relied upon. But, as per the above toast, perhaps that irony is the right attitude and right even and especially if it is shared by vast numbers of people - whose reported deaths have been greatly exaggerated. That’s a very Scottish toast, a source of grim, stern, dark-humoured resilience and perseverance. There’s even a wink in favour of the Big Society, indeed there is room for us all.

A note about famines

The 2026 Global Outlook paints a stark picture of global food insecurity but also highlights pathways for hope. An estimated 318 million people face acute hunger – double pre-pandemic levels – with 41 million at Emergency levels or worse (IPC Phase 4+). Two famines have been confirmed in Gaza and parts of Sudan, marking the first time this century famine has struck two countries simultaneously. Sixteen hunger hotspots, from Haiti and Mali to Afghanistan and Yemen, remain at high risk.

I’m not saying that our news coverage is wrong, I’m just saying that we have little understanding of scale. A murder, a scandal, a fraud, a cover-up, a lie and a resignation - they are all important, but how does this look to one of the 41 million people presently dying for want of food? We must all seem like criminals - how else could we be capable of having a more detailed knowledge of petrol prices than mass starvation?

And yet, here I am worrying about willow and plastic pollution, so yes, I’m as bad as anyone else. My point was about how the difference between those who are anti-tree and those who are pro-tree is trivial, it is trivial because of the fact that it’s not life and death. We should think about differences that really make a difference to the life and death problems.

And, to bring things back to Willow Worlds: I think trees can make a difference to the life and death problems such as global heating, ecosystem failure, biodiversity collapse and plastic pollution; the anti-tree risk mavens simply can’t say the same about their strategies. So with only disagreements in how the risks are balanced at the local scale, why not take the opportunity and restore nature to the community and do something about the global issues that are part of the Climate Emergency?

It’s not bravado so much as a shift in mindset. As a botanist, Watney recognises that he already has tools—knowledge of chemistry, biology, and engineering—and begins applying them methodically. The famous line about “sciencing the hell out of this” isn’t a joke so much as a declaration of intent: survival will be an experiment, and he will be both scientist and subject.

What makes the moment compelling is its restraint. There’s no sudden rescue, no stroke of luck—just a decision to think clearly under pressure. The scale of Mars remains overwhelming, but it’s broken down into manageable pieces. In that sense, the real breakthrough isn’t technical at all; it’s cognitive.

Willow Worlds contrasts with The Martian. Here we are, down in the soil of a community, not dealing simply with Space-based loneliness but place-based desolation, not simply a lack of resources but social deprivation, pollution and poverty, not simply problematised by immediate exciting danger but by long-term, corrosive indifference. And of course, we are not dealing with some humanist Hollywood-based existential crisis - we are not alone, we are not individual, we sink into our late capitalist sofas and merge with the materials of our time.

Willow Worlds lives hopefully to create a plastic-free tree planting methodology which owns its means of production. As it grows, it replicates and it self-sustains. Living willow fence is scalable, it seems to have already gone viral online but it also has the property of physical growth. It’s as if solar panels could spawn more solar panels, we should remember to remain amazed at plant growth. The project is literally growing and should be able to grow at an accelerating rate.

How to describe that rate and how to manage it sustainably is, in my view, a very good research question.

Willow Worlds offers a live context for exploring that question—across ecology, education, and community practice. It invites collaboration from researchers interested in living systems, regenerative design, and social innovation. While resources are modest, the project provides something harder to construct: a functioning, evolving field of practice in which ideas can be tested, observed, and grown.

If you are interested please pop me a message.

Cutting back in winter is the healthiest for the tree. The willow wills us to cut in winter so it grows back in summer, as an ancient act of resilience and community. The very thing that sustains the project is the fact that it needs cutting back every year and we humans really should do our part and make use of the harvest. We have replaced the mammoths of the Pleistocene with the metal loppers of the Anthropocene; and we can’t change the rhythm of the seasons.

This spring (2026) is warm and wet - all the willow is going to grow fast and strong this year. But let’s have a review of where we are having come to the end of the planting season.

Muiredge Park: Willow Worlds 1 (WW1).

Willow Worlds in Muiredge Park consists of about 900 rods of willow planted in January 2025, the dry spring that last year slowed growth but the living structures are generally healthy. The thin green rods have been woven back in to allow the trees to get a bit more comfortable and established. It also gives the structure more strength.

During the year 2025, deer did only minor damage and the willow has made a decent job of self-repairing; worth noticing that the deer butted and nuzzled but didn’t (thanks to the weave of the willow) kill the tree.

There are some rods of willow that did die to become brown sticks in the fedge and something should be said about that. We did what we could to establish why the willow died, we identified 3 possible culprits which we can call the 3Ps: planting, poo and parched soil.

• Planting: rods not getting deeply planted enough into the soil.

• Poo: there had been too much hot manure in that part of the trench.

• Parched Soil: the spring had been dry.

Now, the dead branches are still there, slowly rotting. Next to them we have installed new rods for 2026, a sort of refreshment of about 50 rods from the 2.5m long willow crop at Bat’s Wood (Levenmouth Academy). This simple refresh only took an afternoon to complete and we are optimistic that these ones will do better - better planting, older manure and an already noticeably wetter spring.

And that’s about it for the Muiredge Willow Worlds site: the saplings are growing inside their enclosures, the enclosures are intact, self-repairing and reinforced and we intend to do absolutely nothing more for them in 2026. Willow Worlds is so sustainable that we can afford to do nothing to sustain it this year! Which happily enough, is what our income for the year 2026 affords, apart from the few pounds that this Substack makes.

So we’re set for 2026 to be a year of growth and laziness at Muiredge Park and with the warm, wet spring we’ve had - the willow is going to absolutely boom!

Other Local Willow.

You might remember that we had locally sourced willow for this project last year and if you think about how willow keeps growing back, you might ask: what happened this year?

So we cut it down and gave most of it away on Freegle.

Freegle is an app for giving things away for free, it’s a good mix of environmentalists, activists, good citizens and hoarders. Anyway, I did that and asked the people how they got on with it.

Some didn’t give me much detail, one didn’t turn up but from what they said I think the willows have a good chance of finding a new home:

On the other hand, Lucy in Newburgh sent lots of photos about her garden projects and she’s using willow for bank stabilisation as well as a fedge to hide a wooden fence.

Then there was John Scott a tree surgeon from Auchterhouse. He apparently had been thinking along the same lines as Willow Worlds and the advert on Freegle put us together. John bought a piece of woodland and says his…

The new willow in Auchterhouse marks a new beginning - John’s expecting a baby in the near future. Good luck to the young family and their new Willow World!

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It looked to me, as if some kind of missile had hit. I am drawing on years of lived experience using computer games so I know what I’m talking about even if you’ve never played Beach-Head, or the beautifully ironic: Call of Duty. Dysart Harbour took a direct hit from the barrel of the gun of Mother Nature. She was on a high tide, totting a winter storm with a full clip and, bam, bam, bam! Goodbye harbour wall. Well heck, it was a senseless attack. What a waste of money. Such violence only makes our problems worse. After all the duty-calls we’ve made to save ourselves from global heating, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and sea-level rise - you’d think that Mother Nature would step up and maybe just not keep making things worse.

While it is fun to make things up, some made up things are quite plainly serious. Make-up, for example, is taken seriously by over 7% of human beings. This Substack is serious - well, I make up bits but I’m trying to tell the truth somehow. Now - here’s my point: ‘made-up land’ sounded to me, when I first encountered it, like an imaginary place. Like Fairy-land, Middle-Earth or Gotham City. In fact, I was an old man before I heard that made-up land was a real thing, and not only did I learn what it was, I learned that people like me spend most of their time living on made-up land.

I didn’t believe it at first and I don’t expect you to either. I have proof. I took a photo:

Made-up land is the muddled up layer of the Anthropocene and most of us are living on it. Made-up land is land whose surface had been constructed, usually by bulldozers and it’s easy to tell if you are on made-up land. Just dig down and look for the debris of modern human life. In made-up land the soil has things in the wrong order: the stratification in the soil is all wrong. There’s a layer of bricks from a World War and 2 feet under that there’s a packet of Ringos from 1987. Under that, I found a bit of plastic rope. Tempted as I was, I didn’t pull too hard.

At the south of the harbour, there’s some headland that obviously has a sort of heritage preservation order on it. It’s a real-deal original headland - old red sandstone - decorated with walls and steps and a tunnel through to the harbour. I can imagine a cave man sitting on these rocks looking out over the sea, he’d be whale-watching - wondering how they’d taste.

We clearly love this old rock but we can see that pesky MN (Mother Nature) has been vandalising it over the years. Now it’s had to be reinforced with stainless steel pins and nets to stop rock falls - goodness knows how much that cost? A small wonder of the natural world, under attack from the natural world. Nature preservation is a costly business, however - positively valuing the natural world is something to be done and doing it may be priceless.

“Sustainable” is a word that gets bandied about; a word that walks with unabashed confidence and respectability in the streets of most towns. To some people it is a word that describes ‘that which everyone agrees to’ and to others ‘actions in harmony with the environment’. These are contradictory in most cases - ‘what everyone agrees to’ is business-as-usual and that’s been a huge environmental disaster. It’s a frustrating, eroding avalanche. Now, yes I am aware that I’m writing this on Substack and not the skin of a grass-fed cow.

When this word was first bandied around, sustainability was environmental sustainability. There was a nice but naive picture of getting back to the Garden of Eden or some sort of green utopia, think James Cameron’s Avatar. The problem with that vision, as Julian Barnes wrote, was that nobody gets old or sick in the jungle. Nature, he contended like Locke before him, was red in tooth and claw. In the jungle: one slip and you’re gone.

Environmental sustainability was always going to be moonshot-hard work and, if we’re honest maybe humans simply can’t manage to organise for that. Gorillas can organise to share bananas; humans can organise a football match—and the fact that we haven’t taken things much further suggests there may be activities beyond us. Directing our society to be harmonious with the more than human world might be a branch too high for us naked apes to reach. It is for me, tapping at my keyboard and wanting a coffee break, maybe even a banana.

Environmental sustainability in the 90s hit peak frustration, if I recall correctly, when Sting bought vast areas of the Amazon and gave it to its native inhabitants; who promptly sold the forest for Green Cards and went to live like Sting in the West. When the Exxon Valdez spilled its crude oil in the pristine waters of Alaska, and when Timothy Treadwell set out to protect the grizzlies and was eaten by them. The West took a realistic, pragmatic stance and got soft, deskbound and scared.

We gradually lost the argument that we could get old with nature, we bought into the idea that the welfare state was a better place to get old. That’s why the state of nature is rarely found in the same sentence as the welfare state. The two realms seem distinct and foreign to each other. Indeed, environmental sustainability became sustainable development to help business-as-usual pay for the welfare state. It’s possible to argue against business-as-usual but to argue against modern hospitals is, shall we say: unsustainable! So I’m a hopeless dreamer, one of those unrealistic hypocritical tree-huggers. I wonder if there was some other path we should have taken - is there a way to live with nature better?

Some people think capitalism and money is the problem and they want grants to help them fix it. If you want to find a project that is totally dependent upon grant money then just look for how often the word ‘sustainable’ is mentioned. Capitalism loves this word almost as much as it loves irony. Stephen Pinker wrote about one study that projected that the word ‘sustainable’ is multiplying in academic literature at such a rate that by the year 2070 academic writing will be composed entirely of the word ‘sustainable’ repeated throughout! The irony however is more provocative when one returns to the capitalism it seeks to criticise: few ‘sustainable’ projects continue after the money runs out. Here we find those delectable mountains of irony.

Hey.

So what has all this to do with Willow Worlds? Some systems are sustainable precisely because they don’t need to describe themselves as such. Given the self-generating nature of willow, its lack of reliance on manufactured goods and the fact that Salix viminalis has been here since the Romans rocked up, Willow Worlds might actually deserve the word “sustainable”. Willow grows as it always has.

The best I can do is write sustainable fiction.

Reflection has been a long time coming. Of the 2023 Healthy Planet, Healthy People grant award recipients, I am no doubt among the last to write up their project. When we received the grant, I pushed the start date back to November 2024. As strange as this may sound, it seemed as natural then to begin in November as it does now to end in December 2025.

This December brings the project to a close. The work now feels in a well-earned hibernation. Slower tasks also await: evaluations, accounts, and hints of spring.

Project overview

Willow Worlds aimed to plant three small areas of new woodland in Muiredge Park, Buckhaven, Fife. A core aim was to protect young trees from roe deer without using plastic.

Over 2025, this was achieved. Three plantations were established using willow as a plastic-free protective method. Partnerships were formed with local groups such as CLEAR, alongside interest from national organisations including The Tree Council. The system was tested in a challenging environment, and all three plantations remain intact at the time of writing.

Writing on Substack

On Christmas Day 2023, Hanif Kureishi guest-edited the Today Programme and described his move to Substack as an online author. This persuaded me that the platform could offer a coherent space for long-form digital publishing.

Two years on, Willow Worlds on Substack has just over 200 followers. This is not a large audience, but it represents a coherent body of work: 13 long posts and videos that document the project and remain closely aligned with its aims. I chose depth and continuity over the pressure to publish frequently.

Preparation and timing

When I delayed the project start to November 2024, I was responding both to seasonal rhythms and to the practical need for preparation. Planning, community consultation, advance willow ordering, and establishing a project presence on Substack all took place before formal delivery began.

The additional time also allowed me to describe the setting: the school and the surrounding community. I wanted to describe the known risks such as deer overgrazing, vandalism, and fire, so that difficulties would be met with preparedness rather than surprise.

I also needed time to address theory. Rewilding, the climate emergency, local environmental harm, apathy, moral panics, environmental education, deep ecology, and plastic pollution all shaped my thinking. Alongside this, a prototype Willow World was already developing in Bat’s Wood. Beginning “in the middle” shaped the project’s approach and led me towards post-qualitative research methods, which I explored in writing before setting them aside as groundwork.

Community context

Any new form of tree planting requires care. You are not only changing a landscape; you are changing someone’s community. While the project has an online audience, its most important audience lives alongside the trees. Consultation therefore continued even after permissions were secured.

Misunderstandings still abound about what Willow Worlds are. A local recently told me, with confidence, that the willow had been planted to stop the park collapsing due to coal-mine subsidence. An environmental improvement had been read as evidence of environmental decay. The traumas of mining, and the fear of subsidence, recede slowly even today.

Activity log – what happened

November–December
November is traditionally the time to harvest willow and the earliest possible moment to plant it. For this reason, it felt logical to begin then. In practice, little progress was made. Early planting failed, most partners were occupied elsewhere, and planning work dominated. In hindsight, January would have been a better starting point.

January–February
Late winter proved to be the most productive phase. As the project scaled up, machinery was hired to prepare the ground, including a small digger and tractor to manage trenches and manure. These tools were essential, and their presence increased engagement among secondary pupils. Planting was straightforward for strong adults but more difficult for others, leading to uneven results and some losses in summer drought. This highlighted the importance of appropriate tools.

March–May
Spring focused on monitoring and resilience. Some areas were watered while others were left untouched. The results suggested that soil preparation and manure retained sufficient moisture for survival. When rain finally arrived in mid-May, the willow responded rapidly.

June–August
Growth was dramatic. The willow doubled in height in places, sunflowers threaded through the structures, and deer interaction was observed without significant damage. The feared vandalism did not materialise.

September–November
By late summer and autumn, the project largely sustained itself. Minimal human intervention was required. The willow created areas of zero access for people and deer, allowing soil to soften and supporting insects and ground-nesting wildlife. These spaces began to function as small ecological refuges.

Tools, labour, and accessibility

This project reinforced the importance of giving volunteers high-quality tools. Skilled adults can adapt to almost any equipment, but beginners and younger participants benefit disproportionately from lighter, better-made tools. Too often, volunteers are given the poorest equipment. In practice, professional-grade tools are often easier, safer, and more satisfying to use. We are currently investigating the use of tree dibblers to plant willow at the correct angle.

Filming raised similar issues. To comply with data protection requirements, we moved away from phone-based filming to dedicated camera equipment and external storage. This was costly but has created a durable system for future collaborative work.

Dissemination and dialogue

The project was presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where I gave a short talk supported by video and physical props: a plastic tree guard, a wooden stake, and a willow rod. Questions focused on competition between trees and the long-term management of willow.

Trees do not only compete; they also cooperate, wait, and adapt. Willow may eventually be overtaken by other species, or it may slow them temporarily. These outcomes are not failures but expressions of biodiversity. Willow will require annual cutting, but this is a matter of organisation rather than risk. Surplus cuttings may in future form dead hedges linking planting areas.

Outcomes – what took root

Willow Worlds is now visible and public: three areas of new woodland protected by plastic-free methods in a residential setting. There is no indication that these changes are temporary.

As a small research community, we have gained confidence that Willow Worlds are a viable method for planting trees in areas of heavy deer pressure. Partnerships have strengthened, skills have developed, and the project has established a foundation for future work.

Limits and resources

The primary constraint on scaling Willow Worlds is access to suitable willow. Reliable supply depends on a balance of growing, local sourcing, and commercial purchase, each with distinct advantages and limits. Managing these sources will shape what is possible in future iterations.

Accounting

As regards the financing of this project, we are quite proud of the fact that we spent most of it on materials that will remain useful.

Epilogue

The project now rests. Its outcomes and limits are documented, its relationships remain alive, and its next movements are left to time, capacity, and season.

All the best for 2026, please contact me if you would like to help plan our next steps and especially - if you have a site where you could plant a Willow World near where you live.

This month there’s not much to do while the willow is growing — so I’ve taken up philosophising. Then I read some of it to the committee, and nobody understood what I was talking about and so, I’m going to be stereotypically British and talk about the weather instead.

The weather played a central part in this story. After a notably wet June, with Atlantic fronts bringing regular rainfall and thundery bursts, the dfitches held plenty of moisture and gave our willows a strong start. Early July was more mixed — sunshine between showers, the kind of “four seasons in a day” weather that Scotland knows well. Mid-July warmed again before further showers returned and August opened dramatically with Storm Floris. Yet the middle of August turned out warmer and largely dry, which gave our willows a lift. Across the UK it went down as the hottest summer on record, and here in Fife that warmth was tangible: faster growth where moisture held, even as some of the more exposed or newly planted trees struggled in drier patches.

The first thing anyone notices now is the sheer difference in height. In just six months we’ve gone from grassland to three-metre willows. The June rain sent them skyward — flexible but firm. The woven rods have held their shape, and in places sunflowers have sprung up to decorate the lines. They are strongest where we wove them into the structure, already forming small patches of shade and shelter that simply didn’t exist a year ago. In Willow Worlds 2 and 3, the addition of cow manure has driven vigorous growth, though the young trees are temporarily swamped by weeds and wildflowers. They will, in time, outgrow the competition. In Willow World 1, the grass remains much the same as last year and the young trees stand out more clearly. The conversation between trees, grass, and wildflowers will take years to complete. For now, we simply take photos and watch.

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Wildlife is beginning to claim its share. Long grasses hum with insects, and a hedgehog has been spotted scurrying around. Small birds flit between stems, using them as perches and launching pads. This summer we found our first nest tucked into one of the fedges. But the real surprise came in September: wasps. Hardly seen earlier in the year, they appeared in huge numbers around the older fedges in Bat’s Wood — more than I’ve ever seen anywhere in Scotland. Two pupils described being chased out of the willows by, as they put it, a whole Young Team of wasps. Willow fedges seem to suit wasps very well indeed, it’s actually quite mesmerising to watch them.

And there was the schools’ Tree Party, which helped us secure the final points for a Woodland Trust Green Tree School Gold Award. Dozens of pupils returned to see how “their” trees had grown. Some tied ribbons or left notes for an art display, others measured growth with The Conservation Volunteers (TCV). Local charity CLEAR Buckhaven & Methil provided a tree-themed lunch, some maintenance activities, and local produce to share. It was a relaxed, celebratory day — many of us simply sat together outdoors, enjoying the atmosphere.

Of course, there are challenges. The nearby plantation, still reliant on plastic tree guards, needed a lot of cleaning out and weeding. Some of our willows needed a little creative re-weaving. But a few stems browsed or bashed by deer had already sprouted defensive replacement branches, showing that with only a little support, the fedge can heal itself.

Now, as September cools the air, the first hints of autumn are appearing: yellowing leaves, softened ground after rain, and a sense of slowing down. Looking back on summer 2025, Willow Worlds feels less like a trial plot and more like a place — alive, changing, and rooted in both community and the climate.

I should add one date for your diary, we’re having an event during the Fif

e Climate Festival, so come along on Tuesday October 14^th for our Climate Emergency Lunch in the shelter of our willows (bring your boots). Here’s the Ticket link if you want to book, but you can just turn up.

That’s all from me this time, thanks for reading/listening, thank you for subscribing - it helps our project grow!

It’s been windy out, we just had Storm Floris (04 August 2025). The fire, in Edinburgh on Arthur’s Seat yesterday (10 August 2025) was made worse by wind fanning the flames up the steep slopes. Wind clearly made that incident worse—but didn’t we hear something about the world becoming less windy, and would that be a good thing?

Remember “Global Terrestrial Stilling”? Between about 1980 and 2010, researchers reported roughly a 10% decline in near-surface wind speeds over land. For a moment we worried that the planet’s winds were under threat. Since then, evidence suggests a partial rebound in many regions. So the short answer is ‘don’t worry’ - there will be about the same wind as always. Down in the boundary layer—the thin slice of air we live in—what most of us feel on a breezy day is about bicycle speed: 10–15 mph. Higher up it’s windier, more like car speeds: often 20–30 mph on average. Higher still, in the jet-stream zone, winds can exceed 180 mph at times. So here’s my disclaimer for all us armchair climate scientists: talking about “wind” as one thing is the trap that global warming never was.

Stay invested in wind farms. Wind is here to stay, wind is heat redistribution. It exists because we have a planet, an atmosphere, and uneven heating from the Sun. If winds stopped, the tropics would bake, the poles would deepen their freeze, and day–night swings would turn brutal. Thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, pressure and temperature gradients drive motion—so there will always be wind. We should worry about breaking the ecosystem but we shouldn’t worry about breaking the wind.

Which brings me to Willow Worlds. At six months old, they’re already acting as a local wind-break: the tallest branches are swaying 3 metres overhead. Some people calculate that this could cut wind by up to 50% directly behind it and create useful shelter farther out. That might mean someone sleeps better, that a house rattles less on stormy nights, and energy bills come down a little—exactly the kind of everyday benefit people mean by “ecosystem services.”

Of course, a bit of rewilding isn’t a substitute for housing reform or social work. But Willow Worlds is nice—and “nice” deserves respect. Greenery does furnish a life.

Willow Worlds also helped Levenmouth Academy to get short-listed for the Scotland’s Finest Woods (Schools) Award 2025, recieving this certificate. From our point of view, it has a ‘darkly comic’ design which we really enjoyed. (For those who can’t see it: The background to the certificate is a pile of chain-sawed tree trunks piled up as if on the back of a timber truck.) Scotland’s Finest Woods are very nice and we’re proud of our certificate.

Anyway, this project is now a year old. I think we’ve got a ‘proof of concept’ that it works in lowland Scotland. There is no other tree plantation method that reaches 3 metres in 6 months - so it’s time to start asking around for people to get involved for next year’s planting.

We want to create more Willow Worlds elsewhere, indeed the growing willows demand to be cut and planted elsewhere. If anyone out there wants a willow fedge planted this winter - please message me and we’ll work something out. Please help our project grow!

That’s all for now. Thank you for listening to the Willow Worlds Substack.

I recently learned about Solarpunk and I’d like to add Solarpunk as an attribute of the Willow Worlds project. I’m saying that Willow Worlds is Solarpunk, but what is Solarpunk? Solarpunk is both a literary genre and an artistic and lifestyle movement that imagines a positive, sustainable future where people live in harmony with nature. This Substack is Solarpunk but unfortunately, it would be Solarpunk even if it was entirely imaginary. There is certainly a place for imaginary projects and writing science fiction but of course the Willow Worlds physically exists and that’s the point of a community-led research project, even if it doesn’t sound as cool. There really are Willow Worlds planted to protect other trees, to cut down on plastic tree guards and improve the ecosystem services of Muiredge Park. But now you know: there is something Solarpunk about Willow Worlds, and if you’d like to tell me about your Solarpunk project, I’d like to hear from you.

Welcome to the June episode of the Willow Worlds podcast. In this episode we’ll cover the spring drought, the tree nursery, some deer damage, our tree and now wildflower experiments and how to name 35 species of wildflowers, and why.

PART 1: April Showers Bring May Flowers

April Showers Bring May Flowers: The proverb describes the familiar rhythm of the seasons: brief, light spring rains nourishing the soil, holding moisture until May’s longer days, and stronger sun, force life into full expression. Except in 2025, the April showers never came. April passed dry, and May began with the same parched stillness. The BBC report we received just 20% of the average rainfall, it was the driest spring in 69 years. In some areas, that figure dropped to a mere 2%. I’d never seen brown grass in mid-May before.

What did this mean for the Willow Worlds project in Muiredge Park?

For one, there was a startling bloom of dandelions — all at once. Great yellow constellations lit up the place, reflecting the warm weather. Whether you see them as cheerful wildflowers offering early sustenance to bumblebees, or as stubborn garden trespassers, their abundance was remarkable. But they vanished just as quickly and before most of the bees, it seems, who missed them. This kind of disarticulation — where flowers bloom before pollinators are ready — is the ecological unravelling warned of in Silent Earth by Dave Goulson. A recommended read for everyone interested in life on Earth.

On more positive note: the willow fedge of the Willow Worlds is growing well. Digging trenches, layering manure and loosened soil in winter — helped trap enough water for the willows to manage the dry spell. The middles of the willow worlds, however, remain over-exposed to the drought. The saplings there look thirsty, the soil is too dry so we spent a little time adding some water, just to tide them over.

PART 2: Treewilding Update

Drought isn’t much of a worry in our air-pruning nursery. A solar-powered pump manages the watering here, and though it has to spend winter in the shed, it's easy to reinstall it when our now hot, dry Aprils arrives.

Now, it’s early summer, the nursery is full. Chestnut, hazel, oak, yew, willow, sycamore, and others — all jostling for light and space. The box looks crowded, but the trees are content. Leaves are upright, growth steady, no signs of stress. After two years, they’ll be pressing at the edges of this wooden world, their roots well trained. Well, hopefully well trained: we’ll see what shape they’re in later.

For now, the nursery is thriving — a small win for the trees.

PART 3: Willow Worlds vs the Wildlife

Some pupils assured me that deer don’t come near the houses. I understood why they believed that — but gently explained they were mistaken. The deer pass through at night, as silent as Slender Man. Still, I like their confidence. A strong sense of place — even when it’s not quite accurate — is a valuable thing. It means they’ve formed a vivid, high-definition picture of where they believe they live. That kind of mental mapping is part of growing up, part of how we build relationships with the world around us. When you spend time in a place — even just a few minutes each day — you start to know it deeply. You remember its shapes, its air, its sounds. And if you’ve never seen a deer there, it’s only natural to think they don’t come.

But they do.

I’ve learned not to rely on digital wildlife cameras — they don’t last long out here in klepto-land. Instead, I plant “analogue sensors”: lone willow rods, placed like decoys. Deer find them irresistible. Every spring for three years, I’ve planted unprotected willow, and every year, the deer destroy them. I might as well be planting lolipops. The results are unmistakable — bark stripped clean, trunks left smooth and pale as bone. Today the sensors worked: there was clear evidence of deer damage.

Turning to inspect the fedge — our living willow fence — I was excited to see how it had fared. To my delight, 89 out of 90 metres showed no damage. This is a mystery but it is what I had hoped. Maybe the woven pattern had confused the deer, like a shoal of fish distracting a shark. Maybe it looked artificial, like an inedible wooden trellis. Or maybe the structure carried vibrations — alarming the deer with each nudge. I might never know.

But there was one breach. I found the one place where the deer had decided to strike, on the west side of WW1. The deer had given it the old college try and a battle had ensued between little antlers and woven willow. Happily, it looks like the fedge won. The deer, having made a hole, appears to have given up. No trees inside the Willow World look damaged and we can only guess at why the deer had decided to move on without going through the hole it had made. Roe deer are lazy. I think the deer simply couldn’t be bothered to jump in for such tiny saplings. Apathy is our friend in this situation, I wonder how long we can count on this laziness.

PART 4: Tree and Wildflower Experiments

“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.”

Janet Kilburn Phillips.

We had hoped to compare tree growth across different soil preparations — to test whether manure, or cardboard or topsoil or some combination made a measurable difference. But the topsoil never arrived, and so, the experiment changed.

It’s tempting to think the outcome would have been obvious: of course trees will grow faster in enriched soil. But part of me wonders if the question was too simple to begin with. Anyway, now our attention has shifted — away from just the trees, and toward what grows between them.

In Willow World 1, we’ve sown yellow rattle. It’s a curious plant — semi-parasitic on grass, it quietly suppresses the height of meadows, giving other wildflowers a chance to emerge. Bees like it. And once it’s established, it tends to return year after year. Kirkcaldy has had great success with it, though I’m not sure how they managed it so effectively.

We’re also pursuing biodiversity to create resilience in our increasingly unreliable climate. In Willow Worlds 2 and 3, we used a seed mix from Scotia Seeds, a local supplier in Fife. Their “Get Nectar-rich Quick” blend offers years of colour, pollen, and surprise. It isn’t cheap — so we’re supplementing the mix with hand-collected annuals and plug plants, grown for quick impact.

There is a discussion to have about the effectiveness of using plug plants. This is what we’re investigating in WW2 and WW3: How do areas planted with seeds and plug plants compare with areas where we just sowed seeds?

We welcomed the rain in late May which must have really helped our freshly sown and planted wildflowers. We really got the timing right on that - if we’d planted the plugs in April they would all have turned to dust by now. Again, apathy was on our side this time.

Part 5: Is it unreasonable to expect me to learn 35 species of wildflowers?

Naming wildflowers never has been my cup of tea. In this post, I’m trying to change that. Some people tell me that the names of flowers is a timeless thing to know, like great books it must be nice to know such things so you can feel a greater affinity towards the world you live in. In other words, it might make me a better person. Here’s a quote I’m still working on liking, or maybe understanding fully. It’s from Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Spells:

“As a species, we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name.”
—Robert Macfarlane (2020)

Why don’t I like it? Well, not to put a finer point on it, I find this romantic notion of naming equalling loving to be a stretch. On behalf of people like me with low IQs, I’m suspicious of such talk, I believe it’s possible to love nature while failing to name wildflowers. So I don’t like it yet, but maybe I should change my mind. Robert Macfarlane is too clever to go arguing with, he’s usually more right than wrong. I intend to find a way to agree with him without attempting a brain transplant.

My starting point is that it seems unreasonable to expect me to learn the 35 species of wildflowers in the Get Nectar-rich Quick seed mix - but I need to change that. Perhaps I should reflect that these plants that have lived millions of years as part of an ecosystem rich in meaning to itself and that I should give that fact the respect it deserves. Cars, by comparison, are simply a deadly species of sofa, invented only 140 years ago, yet I can identify over 35 cars just from their logos. Wildflowers, unlike dangerous furniture, have no interest in brand awareness - they are independent of our regard. They were pre-human, they are more-than-human and they will be post-human. I should take them a bit more seriously than corporate logos because of their awesome endurance and their unique contributions to their ecosystems. The identities of wildflowers are greater than the identities of companies. Hopefully 35 species sounds a more reasonable target now, I’m still not sure about this - I’m old, I don’t learn very fast any more but I’ll give it a go.

So I’m going to start with the wildflowers in Scotia Seeds’ Get Nectar-rich Quick Mix because that’s what’s going to grow in the Willow Worlds and they are pretty common wildflowers in lowland Scotland. At 8 seconds a species, this exercise will take about 4 and a half minutes to complete. I’ll give you a photo and a few seconds to see if you can identify it and then I’ll give you the name of the wildflower. This will be a sort of field flashcard exercise to end of this episode of the Willow Worlds Podcast, and if you’ve listened this far - thank you - but you’ll have to watch the video for this next bit to make sense!

Scotia Seeds – Get Nectar-rich Quick Mix

Annuals (30%): cornflower, corn marigold, corn poppy, mayweed.
Biennials (10%): wild carrot, teasel, viper’s bugloss, weld, mullein.
Perennials (60%): yarrow, clustered bellflower, crosswort, common knapweed, lady’s bedstraw, meadow cranesbill, wood cranesbill, water avens, wood avens, common St John’s wort, rough hawkbit, ox-eye daisy, toadflax, musk mallow, black medic, wild marjoram, ribwort plantain, cowslip, selfheal, meadow buttercup, yellow rattle, red campion, white campion, hedge woundwort, upright hedge parsley, red clover.

When I was 14, I grew some trees in plastic milk cartons and planted them in the woods. Of course, not all of them survived. One nearly didn’t survive being planted as I remember I broke the top off by mistake when I was carrying it. I planted the little oak anyway - and maybe that’s why I remember it. And now I can still recognise that broken crown, except it’s huge. It towers over me like I once towered over it. I feel very small next to this tree. I have been outgrown. The tree seems more substantial than I am - I have been outgrown and that’s a strange decadent feeling.

It’s alright if one of your children makes you feel small when they look down on you, at least you know that you might communicate. A tree doesn’t even look at you. A tree simply gazes into the sky or, more likely, the ground and gets on with its life. To get outgrown by a tree is odd.

People say you shouldn’t plant trees close together - but 35 years ago, I did - here are two rowans that grew up together quite happily and it even seems like they have supported each other. I grew them from seed. I remember planting them because they were so tangled together as saplings that it seemed too risky to pull them apart. So Akira Miyawaki is right about the cooperative nature of trees. We need not to pretend that ‘thinning the trees’ is a good idea unless you simply enjoy cutting down trees. In which case, just be honest about your problems, find a good therapist and come clean about why you really want to cut down trees.

It’s too late to plant any more willow now, spring has sprung and the sap is rising. In the Willow Worlds, the fedge is budding and coming into leaf fast. Shoots nudge upward, tiny leaves unfurl, and the living structures are taking shape.

It’s tempting to want to do more in Spring. But nature fears our impatience because every shoot is delicate. Growth isn’t something we can rush: we have to let Spring, do its thing. It’s a slow conversation between the elements — and our role is mostly to stay out of the way and add water. Water is always good for willow and why not plant some honeysuckle, or simple sunflowers, or peas or beans against the fedge, why should the willow have it all their own way?

When we started this project, we had a cunning plan. We set out to plant in a crafty fashion and see what the deer might make of them. Now, the willows are sprouting — we see deer damage all round, but our defences are holding them off so far. There are some little gaps in the fedge and we hope the deer don’t find them, but perfection is not our goal, we’re taking risks and not worrying too much.

Already, in small ways, the fedges are weaving themselves into the land. Green shoots where bare stems were, we imagine roots finding their way beneath our feet. In time, these will grow into places of shelter and shadow, a thickening of the boundary layer. We are raising the ceiling of the ecosystem to make room for birds and bats and better, healthier air.

We celebrate the simple fact that things are growing and try not to think about how one day we might all be outgrown. [Ed: out-groan?]

Thank you for putting up with this rather boring episode of The Willow Worlds podcast!!