Free Thinking Festival - Old Ways, New Directions.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 November 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the hunger for new ideas, are we forgetting the hard-earned lessons of the past? Rana Mitter chairs a discussion recorded in front of an audience at this year's Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead . James Rebanks is the Cumbrian shepherd sharing his farming knowledge with thousands of followers on his twitter account @herdyshepherd1 His book A Shepherd’s Life has been reprinted several times since its publication earlier this year. Professor Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist based at Durham University and the author of The Meaning of Water who has worked with communities all over the world exploring how they think of their relationship with the non-human and the land.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Hello, how sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot? The words of William Blake in 1789. But is it still true in the industrialized world of the early 21st century? Well, today at Sage Gateshead, we have the man who can tell us, from personal experience, |
| 0:55.0 | Cumbrian Shepherd James Rebanks, also known as at Hurdy Shepherd One, and also a best-selling author. |
| 1:03.3 | With us too is Veronica Strang, a cultural anthropologist who spent years living with a group of Aboriginal Australians in Queensland. |
| 1:10.7 | And we'll hear from her soon, |
| 1:12.1 | but first, James, your family have been sheep farmers in a particular Cumbrian Valley for some |
| 1:17.2 | 600 years, at least that's according to the paper trail, and it's probably longer as far as the |
| 1:22.2 | land itself remembers. 200 years ago, William Wordsworth hailed the Lake District as being, quote, the perfect republic of shepherds. |
| 1:30.7 | But he thought it wasn't long for this world. |
| 1:33.1 | So, James, your book, The Shepherds' Life, a tale of the lake district, suggests that that romantic poet was maybe getting a little bit ahead of himself. |
| 1:40.6 | I wonder, James, if you just read a bit for us now. |
| 1:43.7 | There is no beginning and there is no end. |
| 1:46.1 | The sun rises and falls each day and the seasons come and go. |
| 1:49.6 | The days, months and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow and frost. |
| 1:54.9 | The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring. |
| 1:58.3 | The earth spins through the vastness of space. |
| 2:00.6 | The grass comes and goes with the warmth of the sun. The earth spins through the vastness of space. The grass comes and goes |
| 2:01.6 | with the warmth of the sun. The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. |
| 2:07.1 | We're born, we live our working lives and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. |
... |
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