the whoa-that-is-so-wow school of nature-writing

The New York speech writer Clark Whelton has written a smart piece about the linguistic virus that he calls vagueness. It opens with a lovely example:

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!

Shelton writes, a little sternly, that the woman "never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel".

Meanwhile, for those who do like specifics in their nature-writing, Richard Mabey's new book is here and Robert Macfarlane's latest essay is here. more ...

ruth padel on our reactions to five wild animals

This week on Radio 3 the poet Ruth Padel reads an essay each night exploring our reactions to wild animals in Britain. Tonight's is The Deer. The other four in the series are on the robin, the badger, the butterfly and the fox. more ...

it's the book that's rare

In Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom - the book that Americans will be talking about in the coming weeks -  the husband, Walter, resigns from working for a mining company and moves into nature conservation. In particular, he tries to save a small woodland bird, the Cerulean warbler (left). A study of a marriage, Freedom also asks what exactly the cost is of Western affluence. The Economist says, 'Freedom is one of those rare books that starts well and then takes off.' more ...

the same lesson

In the current NYRB, John Terborgh reviews Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser. He writes:

Conservation is indeed not so much the management of nature, but the management of people.  And wherever one goes, people have distinct traditions, outlooks, and economies.  Every project requires deep insights into the psychology, aspirations, and circumstances of the local residents.  Huge amounts of money  - billions - have been wasted because international donors did not take such nuances into account - just as our military made serious miscalculations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan by failing to comprehend the historical and cultural setting of its engagements. more ...

life on the bin

In a blog for the LRB, Robert Hanks notes that grey squirrels round Hackney used to be timid, but now are evolving:

into larger, more aggressive animals, spurred on by a diet rich in our discarded protein. I watch one squatting on a bin, food clutched in its little hands, glaring back at me, and it hardly feels like nature at all. more ...

us versus them

In this Living on Earth interview, recommended in a comment today, E O Wilson elaborates on the similarities between humans and ants, which he has dramatised in his newly-published novel Anthill:

Wilson: It's true that many of the problems that arise in the human condition come from having strict group identity, it appears to be a deep instinct of people to belong to a group and the tendency then for us to not only belong to a group and get the security of belonging to a group, but for groups to be in contest with one another in one form or another. And for us to have powerful emotional response to our group—

Interviewer:  Not just us, but us versus them is the—

Wilson: Us versus them is the binary—ants have a parallel.

more ...

rooting for ants

As we blogged two years ago, the great biologist E. O. Wilson has written his first novel. This week's Economist reviews Anthill and the reviewer says, 'in Mr Wilson ants have found not only their Darwin but also their Homer'.

The Economist is particularly impressed by one section of Anthill that describes the rise and fall of four ant colonies in southern Alabama. (It was excerpted in the New Yorker and blogged by us here ).

The Economist's reviewer says: 'The tale within a tale is an astonishing literary achievement; nobody but Mr Wilson could have written it.'

The review concludes, 'One can't help rooting for the ants.' more ...

and then my heart with .. er .. hatred fills

Just heard about a website called I Hate Daffodils. Daffodils made Wordsworth's heart fill with joy, but they didn't have that impact on this blogger:

The problems are caused by people planting daffodils in the wrong places: in each case they damage the natural environment, providing no benefit to wildlife but making the countryside look like a garden. It's like painting lipstick on the Mona Lisa ... more ...

the new new thing

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying that geography is the new history. I take that back. Geography is the new current affairs.

Yesterday I tweeted: 'A volcano grounds a continent'. Today's Herald Tribune goes even further. It's frontpage headline reads: 'Volcano keeps world grounded'. more ...

take it from chekhov, nature doesn't weep

In his article on the American novelist and short story writer John Cheever, Edmund White makes a number of illuminating references to Chekhov.

White decribes Chekhov as an ecologist avant la lettre (see our Chekhov as proto-environmentalist) and goes on to quote a letter Chekhov wrote to the young Maxim Gorky in which Chekhov takes issue with Gorky's descriptions of nature. Chekhov characterises Gorky's anthropomophic approach as:

The sea breathes, the sky looks on, the steppe basks in the sun, nature whispers, speaks, weeps, and so on.

Chekhov explains to the younger writer:

In descriptions of nature, vibrancy and expressivity are best produced by simple techniques, for example: using simple phrases such as 'the sun set', 'it got dark', 'it started to rain', and so on. more ...

novel

Margaret Atwood reviews E. O. Wilson's first work of fiction. more ...

an unexamined prejudice

The Ecologist runs an extract from a new essay about art and climate change by Jay Griffiths, author of Wild - An Elemental Journey.  In the essay, Griffiths argues that for most of human history culture has been rooted in nature (cultus means cultivation):

The unexamined prejudice against nature within aesthetics will come to seem as vacuous and cruel as racism or sexism for, despite the pretence that culture is antagonistic to nature, it never really has been.

(Ht: bridgetmck) more ...

the salmon's tale

Richard Hamblyn on how the life stages of the salmon are marked by words unchanged since Chaucer's time:

Born in a ‘redd’, a shallow, gravel-covered depression dug by the female in the days before spawning, newly hatched salmon begin life as ‘alevins’, tiny, buoyant creatures with their yolk sacs still attached. Once the yolk has been absorbed, the fast-growing fish, now known as ‘fry’, are able to feed for themselves, turning instinctively to face the current in order to graze on drifting insect larvae. Some months later, the juvenile salmon, now known as ‘parr’, move downstream to deeper water ... more ...

perfect weirdness

Early on in Sebastian Junger's bestseller The Perfect Storm, one of the fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, describes the beauty of his work and how he gets to see things other people don't get to see: whales breaching, porpoises following the boat.

I've caught shit they don't even have in books - really weird shit, monstrous-looking things.

The sorts of barely imagined things, probably, that have also been captured on one of this blog's favourite blogs.

pic: John Hawkes, Mark Wahlberg, Allen Payne and William Fichter in 'The Perfect Storm' (2000)  more ...

spring forward

On Saturday night's edition of QI, Stephen Fry asked what takes eight weeks to travel from the southern-most part of England to the northern-most part of Scotland.

The answer, it turned out, is the spring as it advances north at about a third of a mile an hour. (One of the show's guests, Hugh Dennis, suggested that if you timed your walk correctly daffodils would keep popping up all along the way.)

Spring is traditionally defined in the Northern Hemisphere as the three-month period of March, April, and May. An eight-week difference within a three-month period (just in the UK) is fairly sizeable.

But it's more extreme than that. Fry didn't go on to discuss how the dates for spring have shifted (as season creep leads to earlier springs and longer summers) or how those dates might continue to change.

When Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 98: 'From you have I been absent in the spring ...', modern readers could find themselves imagining a time of year that's two months' adrift from the April mentioned in the poem. Phenologists have observed primroses, snowdrops and frogspawn in the first week of January. more ...

ants move centre stage

Two years ago this blog noted that the great biologist E. O. Wilson was writing a novel about ants. Reports said that his publisher had wanted him to include a few more details about humans, but it didn't sound as if his publisher was winning the argument.

Next week's New Yorker carries further proof of that. The New Yorker is publishing an extraordinary short story about ants by Wilson, which dramatises the life and death struggle of a, well, community would be too tiny a term, civilisation, perhaps too grand, but certainly a very sizeable collection of mutually co-operative ants.

Anyone who has read E. O. Wilson will recognise the way he overturns the reader's perspective by dramatising the lives of creatures most people barely notice. His story in New Yorker (this blog assumes it's only an extract) points to a book that will be quite unlike any other. more ...

fly me to the moon

Over their short lifetimes many migratory birds fly a distance equivalent to that between earth and the moon. Some people call them courageous. Hope is a thing with feathers.

Grains of Sand more ...

poetry and protest

When Daniel Defoe visited the Lake District, he thought it was hideous, even more hideous than Wales. By the time William Wordsworth (pic) had written about the Lake District, everything had changed - including the property prices.

On R4's Start the Week, the environmental historian Harriet Ritvo explained how the changing perception of the Lake District led to the first green coalition of interests to oppose a major new development.

Her new book The Dawn of Green - reviewed in the THES here and the Independent here - details how Wordsworth was responsible for a set of associations that turned the Lake District into 'a national sacred space'.

Start The Week's host Tom Sutcliffe remarked on how

an artist, as it were, composing poems, can set in motion a cultural change which has huge consequences
more ...

what i write plays for

For two years, the playwright Samantha Ellis kept a journal for us as she researched a new play about the plans to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands, a process known as 'faunal rewilding'.

This week Samantha is in Leeds for a student production of that play, The Last Wolf in Scotland.

As Samantha writes on her own blog,

It’s amazing (and surreal) to come up and find 30 people working on the play, all in T-shirts with the name of the play on, grappling with the plays various challenges—knitting, mending fences, gralloching stags, having wild sex on the Caledonian Sleeper—a lot of business.

Then 'Hungry Like The Wolf' starts blaring out, and the cast, mostly 18-year-olds and surely new to Duran Duran, are rocking out on the stage, clambering over the steeldeck that represents the Highlands, and this is what I write plays for, to see that energy and passion brought to a story I came up with on my own in my room.

(If you are unsure what 'gralloching' entails, the Deer Commission for Scotland provides a slideshow of photos and diagrams.) more ...

changing places

On Radio 4's Book Club, the travel writer/English don Robert Macfarlane considers defecting to the Geography department as that's where the most interesting things are happening. more ...