Looks like Vivienne Westwood is going to help us out by dressing one of our artists for a magazine photoshoot. More later…

In case you hadn’t noticed, this year sees both 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his momentous On The Origin of Species, and earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending many of the events at Cambridge University’s Darwin Festival 2009 as a volunteer. Each day of this six day festival took a different theme, distinguished academics at the forefront of research into evolutionary biology and other disciplines giving presentations and taking part in panel discussions. Luckily they put me on babysitting the audio-visual system so I got to sit in on most of the presentations. Given Ginkgo Music’s mission to safeguard the future of this planet’s forest biodiversity through projects linking music & ecology we had to be there, particularly when a number of events were devoted to Charles Darwin’s impact on the arts.

Many highlights, and several themes I’d like to pick up on in the coming days. Here’s one: recent research presented on the origins of human cooperation. A commonly held assumption has been that early humans initially developed cooperative behaviour in order to fight it out with neighbouring tribes and so gain dominance over local resources. Professor Sarah Hrdy of the University of California presented evidence suggesting that almost the opposite may have been the case - that the initial driver for cooperative behaviour was the cooperative rearing of young or, as she put it, ‘alloparental provisioning’. Bringing up baby. Whilst an Orang-Utan mother may be in unbroken contact with her baby for up to 8 years and can therefore rear only one youngster at a time, early humans and hunter-gatherers had the advantage of being inclined to pass baby to aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings and friends - and mothers could therefore rear more than one child at a time. I find something tremendously hopeful in the implications of this understanding of the way human beings evolved cooperative behaviour. It lays less emphasis on competition, fight for resources and ‘winner takes all’, more on community, and indeed, leaves space for culture to have its impact on our survival because culture mediates the way we cooperate. If it is true then perhaps we don’t have to accept the idea that we are hard-wired only to compete blindly for domination of local resources and shake spears at each other, but first and foremost to figure things out cooperatively. I will be following this line of research with interest.

In the next installment: Sir David Attenborough’s speech at the Festival Celebration Dinner, King’s College.

So, this week I’ve been mostly trying to get us to Ecuador. The plan, the dream, the vision, etc is to take our splendid, young and totally-up-for-it sound & film crew from Bournemouth University deep, deep, deep into the forests and then leave them there to be consumed by bugs and creatures and mulch. Hmm… that’s not right, although there’s probably a movie idea in there somewhere, with a series of ever-more-preposterous sequels no doubt. But ack-chew-leigh, we want to record the sounds of the forests for possible, indeed probable, inclusion on the album and the sights for our promotional film, which is certainly taking shape in terms of interviews with our contributing musicians. Now, here’s the even more interesting bit than the last interesting bit; we want to take Vivienne Westwood with us! Yes indeedy. Dom and I saw Vivienne talk at a discussion on Arts & Ecology at the RSA a few months back and were both totally blown away by VW’s passion for the rainforests; imagine the awareness we could raise with her support. We might even get to meet Ecuador’s president. So we’ve asked, and we wait. And then we thought it would be great if Virgin Atlantic could help get us there; Sir Richard Branson has committed $3bn over the next 10 years to fight global warming and we’ve heard a little rumour that he’s a bit interested in music (he had a shop or something), so the perfect choice, non? And then right, get this, I’m chatting with my friend Mandy over Skype (we both wore masks, but don’t ask) and she mentioned that at Virgin Atlantic’s 25th birthday celebrations, who should be on the guestlist but none other than Vivienne Westwood! I allowed myself a small squeal of delight. Are the planets aligning on this? Fingers, toes and everything-else-crossable crossed. I’ve also sent a proposal to Radio4 this week as I reckon our journey would make for marvellous, arresting and inspiring radio, And finally, could I just give a grateful shout out to Anna Francis at Mango PR who has offered to help us out with getting ground support from tour companies in Latin America. I’m constantly heartened by the level of generosity shown to us at Ginkgo Music; humans are alright.