Month: May 2014

In view of the results of the European Parliament elections last week and the high percentage of votes gained by right wing parties I didn’t want to let this slip too far down the blog entries. This is really serious and concerns us all! At the end of the day, if you are unable to respect people, regardless of where they come from, the color of their skin, what they believe and whom they chose to love, how can you hope to respect nature and the trees?

Every country seems to have its own breed of these groups, UKIP in the UK, SVP in Switzerland, Front National in France, Jobbik in Hungary, NPD in Germany and the list goes on… these groups feed off – and at the same time nourish – the disillusion and fears regarding the future of parts of the populations, serving them with populist, simplistic slogans and apparently easy solutions, baiting them with empty promises and identifying scape goats and legitimate targets for people to vent their frustrations and anger on, e.g. immigrants, Jews, Roma, homosexuals etc., who apparently are to blame for all of this.

We understand that it is not possible to dissociate oneself from theses developments, no one is on the sidelines and there is a necessity to take a clear stand in these matters. It would be deeply wrong to believe that a professional life can be split off from a private, emotional or political life, as we see this as all being an integral part of the definition of one’s self.

Treemagineers stands for a belief in certain core values, such as mutual respect, inclusion and tolerance. For this reason we cannot accept attitudes or ideologies that are racist, fascist, homophobe and/ or sexist.

We believe that by creating strong networks based on these values – mutual respect, inclusion and tolerance – , a better world can be achieved, step by step, starting in small, every-day matters such as how we interact with our families, co-workers and people around us.

We believe these are strong, affirmative messages to send out to all who preach intolerance and hatred by standing up to them and by answering their slogans with a clear “No!”.

Just stumbled upon this shot of Stanley Longstaff at ITCC in Montréal in 2003.

Those of you who met Stanley, I am sure will agree that he was a fantastic person to spend time with. I had the privilege when I met him the first time to attend one of his splicing workshops in Glottertal in the Black Forest back in 2002 – or 2001. Apart from being a inspired teacher in all matters dealing with ropes, Stanley was also extremely warm-hearted, charismatic and a great musician. Every time I listen to the recording of the gig he played at ITCC in Milwaukee in 2001 I crack up, it’s so funny – Raking Up is Hard to Do with Scott Prophett , Rip Tompkins and Dwayne Neustaeter as backing vocalists is a classic! But also very sad, because it reminds you what a big gap was left by his passing away.

Coming from a marine background one of the things that Stanley used to talk about that struck a chord with me was the necessity for rituals and songs to deal with tragedy and sorrow. In one of the Art and Science of Practical Rigging videos he sings a song a cappella for Pete Donzelli, a close friend of his who died on the job in 2000 during a tree dismantling job. I firmly believe this to be true, we need to incorporate such elements into our climbers’ culture, not just for sorrowful moments, but also to celebrate and to commemorate important ones. In that sense, to me this is part of Stanley’s legacy in which he lives on – that, and his songs.

I will be thinking of him when we return to Milwaukee this summer.

I picked up The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli from WH Smith’s in Heathrow as I had run out of reading matter.

I should have know better.

Anything that shouts at you from the cover “the million copy bestseller” should be treated with extreme suspicion. Should you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t bother getting it. I found it highly annoying. It consists of three to four-page chapters filled with platitudes, or things that – on the surface – initially seem interesting, but are then let down by a trite, uninspired treatment by Dobelli.

If you are looking for clear thought, you won’t be finding it here. Why did I get it? I must have been bored. Or in a daze. Or both.

Dobelli touches topics that have been discussed by others in a more interesting fashion, such as Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto, Complications or Better, Dan Gardner in Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us or James Reason in Human Error, all of which I can thoroughly recommend.

Sorry, Rolf, had to be said… and after all, this is merely my opinion.

Whew. Back home from Scotland, last of the bags that got lost in Heathrow just been delivered and feeling a bit drained…

In the 10 May edition of NewScientist, Alice Marwick wrote an interesting opinion piece that caught my eye titled “Plus ça change: social media’s broken promise”. 

In the article she describes the transformation of Web 2.0, that was initially heralded as a radical game changer that would encourage transparency, activism and creative pursuits to what it has become today where it re-inscribes a limited view of success and a narrow range of acceptable behavior, sentiments I would, at least to a degree, agree with.

In her article she writes:

“Those who weren’t company founders, but wanted broad visibility, used social media to strategically create personas that might appeal to wide audiences, using Twitter to promote themselves and position friends and acquaintances as “fans”. (…) One of the strategies I observed in San Francisco is known as micro-celebrity. Micro-celebrities use social media’s immediacy to promote carefully designed images of themselves. They think of their audiences as fans (rather than friends or family) and share personal information and intimate moments to create emotional bonds with viewers.”

In the past treemagineers has had very little social media presence – don’t expect this to change any time soon.

This was a deliberate choice on our part. We remain convinced that to ensure high-quality social interaction and a sense of authenticity, face to face meetings  are indispensable. In virtuality you loose all sorts of important aspects, such as body language, nuances in spoken language or the whole tactile dimension of human interaction. Yet despite this, people fairly regularly say things to me down the lines of: “You must be on the road almost all the time”. The answer to this question is “No”. Or at least not most of the time.

So, obviously, despite trying to ensure genuine interaction, there is still a degree of projection going on as to what we actually do, so I suppose the point I am trying to get across, is that if distortions occur face to face, how can this be avoided in virtuality? In my opinion, probably not… and, as Alice Marwick writes, in some cases, this ambiguity may even be deliberate and wanted.

All three of us, Beddes, Chris and myself spend the majority of our time doing tree work. For me this means working locally, within a 20km radius, in our tree care co-op, which for me is an essential, core part of my professional life. I enjoy working with my friends in the company, spending time around my family and just climbing, doing tree work –  I marvel, time and again, at how it is just the most fulfilling thing I can imagine doing to earn a living.

I know that Beddes and Chris feel much the same.

Having said that, I believe there is also an element of balance involved. I organise my year into blocks of work, i.e. I will do a block of treemagineers-related activities, such as the past three months, then plan a couple of months here at home, working in the company or doing the odd day of training here or there – and then switch round again.

I find that this kind of balance and diversity lets me look forwards to all the different facets of the actives I am involved in and lets me start into the next block with a sense of fresh appreciation for what I am doing and a renewed motivation to do it well.