Bookends

Today Paddy went to a sitter and I took a bus to Derry for the Environmental Gathering, a half-day meeting of Ulster's many campaign groups, which are fighting illegal dumps, intensive animal factories, a gold mine (with arsenic and cyanide processing), illegal sand dredging, and a highway through the largest remaining peat bog in Northern Ireland--the rare ecosystem that inspired Seamus Heaney's poems. The conference started with music and dancing.

Like they say, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. Or something like that. The first speaker was Feargal Sharkey of the Undertones.

He campaigns in England against the dumping of sewage into the pristine chalk streams. The UK has a pretty bad record on protecting trout and salmon rivers, NI no exception.

The people above are from just over the border in Donegal, where the detritus of an asbestos filled building was unceremoniously dumped on a lot in an industrial estate. The man in the middle lost his business after complaining to the county council, which decided he didn't have the right planning permit for his business.

It takes a lot of courage to fight the destruction of your community. The developers/extraction firms/agribusinss companies can outman, outfox, and outspend local citizens. But NI citizens have successfully fought back on a number of occasions involving incinerators and fracking. At today's meeting, we discussed how to inrease the odds of David against Goliath.

After the conference, I went to an amazing concert in Derry. I had a few glasses of wine in between, which seemed to enhance my appreciation of everything. For instance, walking across the peace bridge, I thought of how the S-shaped path meant your view of Derry kept changing. Coincidence?

So these lads were playing in the atrium before I went in--just a warm up act. The concert was called Transatlantic Sessions and brings together some of the best players of traditional Irish and bluegrass music from both sides of the ocean. This was the last stop in the tour and they clearly regretted it coming to the end. They play together so powerfully, each egging the others on. The two fiddlers were tremendous. And flute and accordion and mandolin and guitars and Irish bagpipe and dobro... A wall of sound.
I loved the piercing notes from the flute and tin whistles, the fiddlers sawing away at the strings, wave after wave of sound. It was joyous to witness. I was so grateful to be there. The rest of their tour dates were in England and Scotland, so I happened to catch the only one on these shores.

There were four singers. One from West Virginia, one from Nashville, one from California, and one from Scotland. Here's a song about the Deepwater Horizon spill by a singer songwriter called Gretchen Peters. She's in the songwriters hall of fame in Nashville. Each of her songs left an impression on me.

What an amazing day. Sometimes I can't believe my good fortune. I bought the ticket for Transatlantic Sessions the day before the concert. One of the few left.

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