Abrazo House

Arne Næss (27 January 1912 - 12 January 2009)

I was working quietly at the land on my own on a cold, clear day, doing late-winter tidying jobs: cutting brushwood, lopping a tree branch that overhung the road, clearing away some wet bales of straw, and thinking. I was thinking about Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and ecological activist, who died on 12 January aged 96.

I was lucky enough to meet Arne, albeit not in the wilderness surroundings usually associated with this dweller above the treeline of human thought. In fact we met in February 2005 in a suburban shopping mall near the flat in north Oslo where he lived with his wife Kit-Fai. Almudena was spending six months at the University of Bergen, with me and one-year-old Sofia in tow. For me this meant skiing and hiking (with S in a baby-carrier), playing in a band, trying unsuccessfully to write a book, and reading a lot, including some of Arne’s vast output. Visiting Oslo to stay with family friends, I thought this would probably be my only opportunity to meet the great man, and was surprised when Kit-Fai replied to my email and said they would be glad to meet us.

Arne at 93 was a mischievous grin, trotting sprightly with a pair of walking poles. Kit-Fai ordered tea for him and excused herself to do some errands. Arne chatted with Almudena and me while we watched Sofia exploring the mall’s indoor plaza with its café tables and potted palms.

Arne was, of course, exuberant, no surprise in one who into his 90s was still climbing mountains and boxing above his weight, or even his age. He reminisced about Spain and walking from end to end of the Pyrenees, over all the mountain tops (so as not to favour either side – though he admitted preferring the Spanish to the French!) Hardly a man troubled with regrets, but certainly reflective about his life, he wondered whether it would all have been different if he had made other choices. What if he hadn’t returned from California at the age of 27, tempted by the University of Oslo with Norway’s first chair in philosophy? Might he done more, had greater influence, at Berkeley than in the small pond of Norwegian academia? He reckoned he could still have spent three months a year at his spiritual home, Tvergastein, a hut high up on the flank of Hallingskarvet, the central Norwegian mountain Arne has described with reverence as “the father of the long, good life.”

Our meeting lasted no more than an hour; then, as requested by Kit-Fai, we escorted Arne around the corner to the local drop-in centre for the elderly, where he was greeted as a regular. Just another day in the quiet life of a living legend in his own country.

An unusually quiet day, it would seem - the following week Arne was knighted by the King of Norway, while at the same time appearing in a Norwegian feature film called Loop (we were to see his picture on the film poster when we got back to Bergen train station). Meanwhile, my hosts in Oslo were more than a little surprised when I told them we’d spent the afternoon chatting with Arne Næss, and shocked to learn of the apparently plebeian circumstances in which he was living.

My personal contact with Arne was limited to this one meeting, but his spirit and ideas have reverberated with me, before and since. He is often described as the founder of a philosophy called “deep ecology”, which is mistaken, because he really talked about being part of a deep ecology movement which links together people with all manner of different underlying philosophies - from anarchists to Zen Buddhists - united by (what for me boils down to) a valuing of nature in and of itself, not merely an appreciation of its value to human beings. “The front is long,” he said, and it is; we all live daily on the front line - all we who feel the kinship of a cherry tree, an earthworm or a kingfisher, yet struggle to survive in doomed and dysfunctional, oil-guzzling, money-dominated ecosystems. What Arne was saying is, I think, that it’s not a matter of creating or embracing a new philosophy of “deep ecology” to express this kinship with nature - though he did in fact develop his own “Ecosophy”, called Ecosophy T (for Tvergastein), which he recognised was one of an infinite variety of possible ecosophies. Rather he called for us to acknowledge the pivotal position of this particular aspect of our diverse personal philosophies - whether we are “for” nature as a whole or merely “for” humanity (or some limited subgroup of it) - at at a time when human beings are far more abundant than in any previous era, and well beyond our ecological carrying capacity.

Arne was, he said, an optimist for the twenty-second century, by which time those who survived the twenty-first would be back on course for the Garden of Eden. Well, if there is a 22nd century - by which I mean, if there is a continuity of human culture which would be able to call it that - and if Sofia lives to see it, as she well might, then she will be one of the few people still alive who once met Arne Næss, and she will be able to tell us if he was right. Myself, I go along with those who say that it is better to invent the future than predict it, and you could say that what I’m trying to do (both at the land and elsewhere) is to invent ways for Sofia and her contemporaries to survive the 21st century.

How to build a troll

So, as I say, I was working quietly at the land, thinking about Arne, his ideas, his spirit - fierce, playful, exuberant, peaceful, forever in dialogue with the world.

Thinking with my hands, which is often the best way, I started gathering together the brushwood and wet straw bales which I had been clearing up. My idea was to see if I could use them to produce biochar (as a soil improver, a method for fixing atmospheric carbon, and a way of disposing of materials which would otherwise hang around taking up space until eventually they rotted down.)

I made a sort of enclosure out of the wet straw bales, chopping up the brushwood into a dense pile in the middle, then covering it up with more straw bales, leaving an opening at one corner where I lit a fire. Once the fire took hold, things started to get strange. Instead of simply smothering the fire (reducing the oxygen supply so the brushwood would pyrolyse into biochar), the straw bales started drying out, steaming and smouldering. The pile of earth, wood and straw began to emit a damp, fragrant smoke that drifted across the valley. Picture a compost heap with fire in its belly… a fire that is not really under control, migrating from place to place inside the darkness of the pile. I realised I was playing with forces that I didn’t really understand, and started to feel a bit nervous - especially considering that I was only metres away from an unfinished straw-bale house. I ran a hose into the heap. This seemed to succeed in establishing a balance between fire and water which kept the straw charring instead of burning outright.

The pile had come to life. This was neither a bonfire nor a simple pile of sticks and rotting straw - this was a living Biochar Compost Heap, looking like something you might encounter in the gathering dusk looming by the path in the trees’ half-light, breathing and smoking - wild, hairy, heart-thudding. A sort of gigantic stomach digesting a hot stew of life, a creative frenzy of transformation. Impossible to know what is going on inside it, though by its sheer force of life, you know there must be a great deal. Troll was the name for it.

I dedicate this Troll to the memory of Arne Næss. Now everything is going on inside you, Arne. Now you have returned to Tvergastein, to Berkeley, to unnameable places in the Himalaya and the Mojave, and to the shopping mall in north Oslo. Now you have been globalised, both atoms and words.

I let the troll burn for twenty-four hours before I had to put it out by pulling it apart to expose and water its heart. Nearly all the brushwood had been burnt up to ash, so the result was maybe 85% unburnt straw and 15% black biochar. No soil organisms can digest this nearly pure carbon, so this represents carbon dioxide that has been stolen from the carbon cycle, probably for centuries – doing a tiny bit to slow down climate change. No doubt if I had let the troll live for longer, it would have continued evolving along the same path and produced more of the good black stuff.

The next stage in the development of the Arne Næss Memorial Troll will be to seed it with oyster mushroom spawn - one of the fastest and most effective ways to break down the straw and make its nutrients available to the rest of the ecosystem. To bulk up the spawn, I placed it in plastic bags with some sterilised wet straw; later, I’ll empty the bags into the middle of the pile and cover it all up with a plastic sheet. I’ll harvest mushrooms and plant seeds and seedlings through holes in the plastic; it’ll be a node of diversity in our burgeoning forest garden. Keep tuned for updates!