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Published in The Japan Times _
8th June 2006
By David Howell
Big Lessons from a Small Town
LONDON – Al Gore has been visiting Hay-on Wye. Who is Al Gore and where is
Hay-on-Wye?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. Al Gore is of course the
nearly President who just failed to beat George Bush Junior is the 2000 election
after feverish re-counting of the votes in Florida. Although defeated he now
seems on the way to resurrection as a mighty advocate of measures to check
global warming and climate change. He may even displace the somewhat mechanical
Hilary Clinton as the Democrats’ candidate, although he has yet to declare.
Hay-on-Wye is a tiny town on the borders of England and Wales and nestling on
the banks of the beautiful River Wye, which forms the frontier in these parts .
A thousand years ago it was a Norman stronghold for keeping the rebellious Welsh
in, or out, and long before that it may have been a Roman fortress when the
extremities of the vast Roman empire reached the remote Welsh region.
So for centuries Hay sat quiet and undisturbed, a simple and relatively poor
market town, huddled round its crumbling castle. But then in the late twentieth
century a remarkable transformation began.
Inspired by a local genius, Richard Booth, the town turned to books, millions of
second-hand and antique volumes which poured out of closed-down public libraries
and great country houses which their owners could no longer afford to maintain.
Mr.Booth filled a great warehouse with these books, and then another one. Other
booksellers began to move in , since the economics of book-selling favours
bookshops clustering together rather than confining each area to a single
supplier. Almost every other shop became a bookshop.
As the fame of Hay grew as a world centre for old books, tourists poured in form
America, Japan and everywhere else, hotels and restaurants sprang up and
ancillary and related industries, like leather-working, furniture and
wood-carving flourished. Sensing that big interests might move in on this
lucrative and dynamic scene, Mr.Booth and others declared Hay to be an
independent kingdom and struck up treaties with African tribal monarchs. It
seemed a frivolous approach but the idea behind it was serious – that Hay had
lifted itself up by its own internal efforts and did not want to be taken over
by official planners and giant supermarkets which would destroy the local shops
and crafts.
The idea flopped but the spirit of independence lived on. Now came the
masterstroke – again inspired by another local genius. This time a brilliant
young organiser, Peter Florence, decided to start holding an annual literary
festival at which the cream of the literary, journalistic and political worlds
would meet.
Beginning in 1988 this had grown within a decade to such fame that it attracted
world figures as its star performers– admittedly sometimes for big fees.
Ex-President Clinton was a visitor two years ago and now his Vice-President,
Mr.Gore, has been attending. Hay began to feel the problems of success, with
cars and people jamming the streets, new car parks having to be built and
property prices soaring.
The Al Gore message is an apocalyptic one. In books and now through a specially
made film he has raised the alarm about global warming and carbon dioxide
emissions as never before, depicting the flooding of great cities like
Manhattan, droughts, epidemics, horrific storms, not to mention a new ice age in
Europe as the warming Gulf Stream moves away.
To meet this hell on earth Mr.Gore and the environmental crusaders who think
like him want all kinds of grand strategies ands global plans to counter climate
change and save the planet, building on the Kyoto protocols, which are seen as
just a small start, and shifting the world’s energy patterns away from fossil
fuels completely.
And there is no doubt that he is striking a fashionable and increasingly popular
note with much public resonance. As growing numbers of public figures round the
world are finding, global warming has now come to the top of the political
agenda. They dare not show anything less than the most serious engagement with
the subject. This is despite the fact that some of the lost authoritative
scientific voices believe it is too late to affect the climate in this century –
too late to stop more Hurricane Katrinas, more tsunamis or more horrific
earthquakes like the latest one which has killed thousands in Java.
Yet at little Hay-on-Wye Mr.Gore may pick up a different message – not
necessarily contradicting his loud warnings but coming at things from a
different angle.
The message from Hay is that local people, operating very much at the grass
roots, can always adapt, shape their own community and build on novel ideas and
insights so as to survive and prosper in ways that global strategists may
overlook. Hay has survived through wars, revolutions, border raids, plagues,
depressions, invasions and countless other shocks and challenges over hundreds
of years. Now, entirely by its local efforts it has made itself a world famous
and highly prosperous place.
That story may be in a way more realistic and useful than Al Gore’s chilling
sermon. For what it says, quietly and reassuringly, is that human communities
can always adapt and change to outside forces and phenomena, that new ways of
living can be found and that the biggest changes in our societies can begin at
the smallest levels.
As world leaders thunder round the planet in their carbon-belching jets to
attend their great global gatherings and make their demands that the weather be
somehow controlled they might be wise to remember also this humbler and less
ambitious message from the little Welsh border town.
ENDS
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