One month in...

This will be a short post, as I'm tired after a busy first month in my new role.

I'm also writing something longer about Braziers Park for a local newsletter, which I want to focus on, and share here once it is online.

In the past month there has been so much happening, including Tai Chi weekends, a large wedding, and international film festival, and more. I've also been getting to understand the community, and my own role here, better.

The drought has also broken, which is such a relief! I think the sense of being besieged was really impacting me, as I'm often up early to walk the grounds. It felt like the birds had gone silent, and I really missed their chatter. A few days of rain, and the clamour is back again. Teams have been harvesting fruit and berries – plums for days – we uncapped and manually centrifuged several honeycombs, and a small froglet was brought in for inspection at breakfast. Nature is healing, but we also looked at one of our fields for a possible water retention scheme.

Today I wandered around Wallingford's Bunkfest with a Kenyan academic and friend, catching up while enjoying tap dancing, music, children's performances and a brilliantly challenging Hausa talking drum session. The experience was a little tainted by feeling very conspicuous as some of the very few non-white people at a vast festival. My friend's community was shattered by the appalling lynchmob which targetted Jason Arday. I was very aware of the black-shirted paramilitaries in Kent the previous day. These things aren't representative of England, but they are harder for some of us to ignore, even on a bright and festive day.

I've been building new relationships, and figuring out logistics and systems, in my new role. I'm used to learning curves with new roles in new sectors. This is a little more complex, as I'm living in a new community as well.

There is a lot of more abstract but important things to think about as well. The interplay between independence and interdependence, which we all dance between in different ways. Personal growth and self-taught skills, and how they might be balanced with professional experience.

Braziers Park was founded as an ambitious peace experiment centred on improving communication and cross-cultural engagement. I've travelled far from seeing those concerns and solutions as central. I now think we need to change facts on the grounds, rather than through debates or political trade-offs – through technological change improving people's lives, rather than any kind of political revolution, or spiritual enlightenment.

Last week I travelled into London for a panel discussion by palaeontologists about deep time and the climate crisis. It was lovely to see some people I knew from TetZooCon, and authors I admire. I also found it a little frustrating however, because my own pathway to thinking about the polycrisis and solutions began long ago, and took me far from what now seem like simplistic analysis and solutions.

Yes, communication and persuasion are important, but there are limits to SciComm when people are disenfranchised. Yes, twenty billionaires and capitalism may be causing a lot of damage, but what are the deeper structural reasons which allow for that? Biologists and natural scientists should know better, a part of me feels, since they deal with huge impersonal mechanisms.

I do recognise this is a me problem. I need to spend more time exploring and sharing what I now believe.