E = GREENHAM WOMEN

How many times a day, a week, a year, a lifetime, do we use the word energy?

And what do we mean by it?

If we trace the lineage of the term, we are offered a timeline that goes back to Aristotle and the Ancient Greeks:   ἐνέργεια or Energeia (4th century BC).  The term loosely meant ‘activity’ or ‘operation’. Back then, Energeia was seen more as a  philosophical concept, a force connected to the quality of life, to happiness and contentment.

In the centuries that followed, the term energy gained a stout patrilineage.  Energy became something that moved further and further from the notion of philosophy and quality of life, and became something to be named, tamed and contained.

Classical mechanics, biology, chemistry, quantum mechanics, earth sciences, cosmology – all these specialties have theories that name, tame and contain energy, with perhaps the most succinct and reassuring being the one we'd all heard of by the age of 11:

E = mc2

Ah, could anything be more reassuringly contained than in an equation.

Well certainly not the energy that was moved by, with and through the women of Greenham, although that is what the law, the media and the military attempted to achieve.

Over the coming weeks, this blog will explore the experiences of three women who were part of the force of nature that happened at Greenham in the 1980s.

Elaine Ruth White 10/03/2020

Photos below by Sandie Hicks