Welcome to the News and Reflections area of the GreenSpirit website.

My Green Spiritual Journey #4 – A Gradual Unfoldment, and Twisting and Turning Path by Santoshan (Stephen Wollaston)
From an early age I pencil-sketched reams of pictures whenever I could, quite naturally discovered ‘art as meditation’, cherished quiet moments in my parents’ East End council house garden, ran energetically around with friends and my family’s dog in local grassland parks and nearby exquisite densely wooded regions of Epping Forest, and enjoyed family outings to the sea or countryside. I would lose myself for hours drawing, being in amazing and magical green spaces, creating, playing music when I took up bass guitar at 13, or simply staring wondrously at the shapes of mesmerising morphing clouds and the gyrating activity of bees hopping from flower to flower while they made intriguing buzzsaw-like sounds…more

Film – Minamata – Review
Starring Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy, Minamata is essentially two bittersweet true stories that become intertwined. Depp plays Life magazine’s photojournalist William Eugene Smith in his twilight years in 1971, who has become a risk for the magazine as he isn’t completing assignments and drinks heavily. He is reluctantly persuaded by two people from Minamata to take on what was to become his last assignment in Japan to document a largely fishing community fighting for justice against a chemical magnet polluting local sea water…more

Latest News on Rewilding in the UK: Four out of five Britons support it!
An opinion poll commissioned by the charity Rewilding Britain shows that 81% of Britons support rewilding, with 40% strongly supportive and just 5% of people opposed.

Rewilding Britain defines rewilding as the large-scale restoration of Nature to the point it can take care of itself – restoring habitats and natural processes, and where appropriate reintroducing missing species.

Leading pollsters YouGov asked 1,674 Britons: ‘To what extent do you support or oppose rewilding in Britain?’ The poll, conducted last October, also found that 83% of the public support Britain’s national parks being made wilder, with areas set aside for rewilding. This huge level of support is significant as the UK Government has just announced a 12-week public consultation on how to ensure these national landscapes can do more for nature, climate and people…more

Film – Don’t Look Up – Review
This film is about a large asteroid heading for the Earth which would devastate much of life on the planet. The story is about a small group of scientists and helpers trying to alert the world about this impending catastrophe. They find so many obstacles in their way and are exasperated to find that a simple, clear, scientific truth gets distorted, manipulated or dismissed by vested interests…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #3 – ‘The Long Road Home’ by Marian Van Eyk McCain
As a young child, I lived in the city. And in WW2 my city, Plymouth, was one of the most heavily-bombed in the UK. So my early experiences were almost totally shaped by war – as I chronicled for the BBC WW2 History Archive. But the one thing that for me was not affected by the war in any way was my fascination with the natural world. I used to spend hours in our little garden, watching the birds and the beetles. I scooped up frog spawn from a pond in the park and put it in an enamel dish that I made into a mini-pond with stones and moss so that I could watch the eggs hatch into tadpoles and slowly become frogs. Most of all, I loved those very occasional times when my mother took me walking on Dartmoor or my great-aunt took me blackberrying along the Devon hedges…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #2 ‘My Healing Journey’ by Ian Mowll
I was brought up in the Evangelical Christian tradition. Whilst I felt the loving energy of a divine essence, most of the rest of the religion felt like a lot of rules and constraints. And so, during my adolescence, I questioned and challenged. I really wanted to find answers but to some, I was too much, and one person described me (in a prayer meeting) as “an attack from the devil” – which got a loud round of “amens” from others. And so, I left the safe shores of my upbringing and began a long quest for a spiritual home…more

Music – Luminosity – Review
The performance of this piece of music in October 2021 in London was inspired by the book The Universe is a Green Dragon by Brian Swimme. Therefore, it’s all about the amazing unfolding of the universe from the big bang to the present day…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #1 ‘Caring for All Creatures’ by Margie Schneider
I grew up in a steel town in Ohio, where industry rather than Nature played a huge role. I also existed in a very strict Byzantine Catholic environment, where I was sent to a Catholic girls’ school which was equally strict, and upon graduation I got married young, and worked as a secretary, and then later became a nurse. It seemed that even during my young adult years I was oblivious of the importance Nature should play in my life. As a result, the jobs I took and the religions I followed seemed to lack something for me, but I still did not realize what that might be…more

Any views expressed in this section are personal and are not written on behalf of everyone involved in GreenSpirit.