{"id":6840,"date":"2016-12-07T08:36:34","date_gmt":"2016-12-07T08:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6840"},"modified":"2016-12-07T08:36:35","modified_gmt":"2016-12-07T08:36:35","slug":"wailing-and-nashing-of-teeth-at-defra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2016\/12\/07\/wailing-and-nashing-of-teeth-at-defra\/","title":{"rendered":"Wailing and Nashing of teeth at Defra"},"content":{"rendered":"

I, whimsically perhaps, thought that going to the Tate's Paul Nash exhibition might be a good preparation for last Friday's Defra meeting<\/a> and the discussion of the government's\u00a0grand 25-year post-Brexit plan for the environment. \u00a0Whilst the Defra event was never going to be\u00a0unspeakable and godless<\/em> as Nash remarked of WW I, at times it felt pretty\u00a0hopeless, <\/em>an adjective he also used.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nash, was something of a nature painter, particularly of trees. \u00a0The Tate show certainly does his treescapes justice with paintings from throughout his career, most memorably with his blasted battlefield images from Flanders, particularly, I suppose The Menin Road<\/em> and We are Making a new World.<\/em>\u00a0 The Tate devoted the first and last rooms of the exhibition to pictures that feature landscape with woods and trees, created at both ends of a painting life: from Dreaming Trees<\/em> to Equinox<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In between there was much too much surrealism and explorations of the unconscious for my liking. \u00a0In that it was rather like the Defra meeting which I commented<\/a> on yesterday. \u00a0The exceptions to surreal overload were some of the World War Two images of wrecked\u00a0German aircraft. \u00a0One of these is\u00a0his achingly beautiful\u00a0watercolour<\/a> Bomber in the Corn<\/em> from 1940. \u00a0But this was far too magnificent an image\u00a0for comfort, and the link to the Tate website (above) does not do it any sort of justice.<\/p>\n

But back to Defra. \u00a0The mere idea of a 25-year plan for anything these days is to invite ridicule, but a lot of\u00a0people at the Defra meeting last week took it seriously. \u00a0I didn't, and I may not have been alone, although I think that too many present were there just to stake their claim to be the key agency for Defra to work with on all this.<\/p>\n

This link<\/a> is the best I can find about what the plan might entail. \u00a0Whatever it is, has had to be revised, however, as it seems that the Brexit vote caught everyone at Defra on the hop. \u00a0The part of the plan we were supposed to be discussing was the\u00a0Connecting People with the Environment<\/em> strand, and I'll say more about this in a day or so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I, whimsically perhaps, thought that going to the Tate's Paul Nash exhibition might be a good preparation for last Friday's Defra meeting and the discussion of the government's\u00a0grand 25-year post-Brexit plan for the environment. \u00a0Whilst the Defra event was never...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}