Out Come the Wolves

  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! 

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...

Disclaimer: Article written with Bristol residents in mind; doesn't mean these tips don't apply wherever you are though! Food waste accounts for 7 million tonnes   of all waste created in the UK annually . Unlike other forms of waste, food waste has the potential to be easily diverted from landfill,   avoiding continued overfilling of landfills, pollution of the environment, and emissions from the transportation, industry and uncontrolled decomposition of this waste, not to mention the wasted man hours, soil nutrients, water, and additional costs needed to create any and all food. Grow your own vegetables By growing your own vegetables you can be in control of everything that will go into them, and eventually your mouth. Asides from the taste and health benefits, you’ll be more wary of wasting the results of your hard work rather than easily accessible supermarket produce; you won’t have to purchase as much produce as well, and so will sa...

I joined the Bristol section of ecojam as a voluntary writer in November 2017, and have since had a number of articles published on their website, and continue to write articles suitable for the site, which is primarily an environmental, ethical and local jobs/ carreers site. See below for the articles: How to Plant Trees in Bristol - this article looks at a number of ways Bristol residents can help get trees planted in the city 4 Reasons Volunteering in Bristol Helps Start Your Career - an article looking at ways that volunteering can help start and structure a career, based on a lot of what I learnt while volunteering myself. 5 Environmental Volunteering Opportunities in Bristol - a follow up to the previous, offering a guide on what organisations and tasks are on offer for different kinds of volunteering What Happens to Bristol's Sewage? - a researched look at the sewage process in Bristol, it's environmentally damaging faults and possible recycling and eco-friend...