Out Come the Wolves

       In Britain, we have 'ancient' paths that have survived into the modern day through constant use, or sometimes conversion into roads or other modernisation. I've written about roads in this series before, but though more explicitly about paths as I took a hungover walk on a loop along a river and through a woodland. The river path had recently been completely flooded, and was now laid bare of the usual vegetation alongside, and some mud and sediment deposited here and there. There was also evidence of human repair; a little barrier tape or fencing, material moved from where the flood had dumped it, and gravel filling in holes. The woodland path on the loop back was much simpler than the sand, gravel and occasional tarmac of the river path; just a dirt path on a terraced bit of slope in among the trees- but noticeably flattened through use, compacted underfoot. it made me think of the Gaelic word bánóg, "a patch of ground levelled out by years of dancing."*...

  August Sander; Young Farmers, 1914. Photo taken from  Here We have been removed over the generations from the land, and particularly from the everyday activity of getting our hands dirty. In the cities, there is less and less land to get to grips with, and the constraints capitalism puts on the populace at large to earn their rights to life through currency rather than through connection with natural resources has, over history, forced most to work in factories and industry. In rural areas, technological leaps in machinery and practice has meant agriculture needs fewer workers. Industry in rural areas has thus become more abstracted; I often think of those strange, lonely industrial estates blighting the landscape in the middle of nowhere. Even if you wanted to grapple with the land, the rights and ownership in the UK has become ever more restricting and dense; we have an incredibly unequal distribution of land, with half of it being owned by less than 1% of the population. ...

  Dundreggan rewilding estate, Scottish Highlands. Picture my own (2016) Time, and especially timescales, though human inventions, are a challenge in rewilding theory. In order to imagine a future for a rewilded area, no matter the size or intention, we need to tweak our preset inclinations toward timescales that represents a single human generation, or even worse, the unnatural square number- fifty years, a century. Our imagining of time through what we experience in a lifetime, or that we learn from our immediate predecessors, creates a ‘shifting baseline,’ where the baseline of which we expect a natural habitat to be flourishing degrades over time because humans will think of the safe or healthy moment to be one from their experience; someone might be shocked to see one fish swimming in a river when they used to see ten when they were younger, but ten generations before there might have been hundreds of fish. Rewilding requires us to think on a scale not in the history of hu...

Until recently I was dealing with a conked out computer that wouldn't let me upload content to this blog, but would to my other blog of literature and culture related content. As a result, for a while I simply put up articles that would go here, there. Now I've got a new PC I can finally access this blog, so I present to you:  Abandoned Cities 2: Flaw in the Design and  Against Anti-Nature thanks for hanging in there and be sure to read the others in the Abandoned City Ecology series! 

For Humans, the road represents our endless plight of exploration, discovery, and domination. The Roman Empire was connected by long, straight and powerful roads; moving the stones that made the road's border was a crime punishable by death. The American interior was harnessed by settlers through extensive roads and railroads, much like the resource-rich areas of Africa 19th century colonial powers hungered for. Modern roads, in their constant use by motorized vehicles, are arguably the most dangerous, causing at least uncertainty and at most death for any being that sets foot on them. Previous roads could be considered mostly-harmless 'paths' along with modern routes free of cars that, in theory, don't cause environmental harm. It is important to bear in mind that the road that passes through the forest, does not pass through the forest for the sake of a nice view or because it has always been there. The road barrels through the trees because the forest is a reso...

Since finishing up at university, i've read a lot less nature writing. The books on this list are books that I read in my first year out of study, after finishing my Master's in Environment, Development & Policy at the University of Sussex. Aldo Leopold- A Sand County Almanac After using small excerpts and recycled quotes from Leopold throughout my Masters, I finally sat to read the full collection of his writings, which range from still-life journals to reflections on pinnacle realizations and moments in Leopolds career, including looking back at the senseless extirpation of wolves from Yellowstone which he was a part of, and advocating for their return. Masanobu Fukuoka- Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security. This may be Fukuoka's later work, but it shows a full lifetime's introspection and attention to nature, snowballing into a heavy hitting look at the possibilities for a harmonious relati...