Friday 28 July 2017

Paul Evans, Field Notes From The Edge

Field Notes from the Edge; Paul Evans



 Paul Evan’s is a nature writer, Guardian Country Diarist, poet broadcaster, journalist and senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.  In Field Notes from the Edge he journeys through Britain’s secret Wildernesses.  Inquisitive and insightful, he explores hidden, halfway places – from ice-age caves to marshes and ridgeways.  The reader is asked to consider our relationship with these secret wildernesses that shape our land.
Below are my main points of interest from the book:-
·         Wildlife, wherever it is found, is every bit as wild as in those places we think of as wilderness. eg rewilded lochs on Louth Canal. Px
·         Wild is a quality of nature.
·         The more I look, the more I find the wild everywhere.
·         Hiding in plain sight.
·         Britain has no wilderness I am told!!!!  This depends on what we consider wilderness.  It could be argued that there is no wilderness left in the world.
·         Wilderness tourists make demands on Nature’s indifference, arguably more so than those who have lived for countless centuries.
·         The path is a linear progression between, away from and towards things................ These landmarks along this path lead to other places, other paths.  As such this is part of a web of journeying for people, birds mammals, insects and the flow of plants and fungi.  P.4
·         The act of walking is a performance. P.5
·         I love flowers in the ruins: Nature reclaims our most audacious works and they disintegrate, becoming colonised by plants and animals.  I love the romance of decay.  Ruins have a residual life absorbed by water and earth; they are a becoming.  Landscape and Memory – Scharma?? P49/50
·         It (the ruin) is a rainforest in miniature and without flowers, growing on rocks, waterfalls, tree bark, ruins.  Lean here much longer and I too will be greened over. P51
·         They (dog daisies etc) around the remains of a brick stand for milk churns which were collected by lorry every day at the end of the farm track.  This hasn’t happened for 30 years. P59
·         If the story I heard is true, no one has been to this derelict house for 30 years since the bodies of the old man and his sister were removed.........The marsh is claiming this slowly drowning land, sucking down the house into it like the old beer bottles. P78
·         We fear the spider and ignore the web.  Arachnophobia diverts attention from a more pernicious fear – a fear of wild Nature.........our society shaped by ecophobia continues to be driven by it. P120/121
·         The drama of the Greenham Common women’s protest against the military was inspiring to me and very much part of the advocacy for a wild Nature which, in restoring the ecology of a heath, also begins to heal wounds in society and right wrongs. P148
·         I follow slowly, walking on a narrow path not made by humans. P154
·         Whatever power we may imagine we have, Nature’s is greater. P171
·         ...but although we may now consider the personification of Nature unreasonable – Mother Nature, Nature’s wrath or Nature’s bounty – this is the way we talk about our experience of Nature; it feels reasonable.  Of course the normal way of living rarely touches these extremes and is a kind of coming to terms with Nature’s crushing indifference illuminated by momentary connections which bring other lives and places into consciousness. P196
·         P215/216  Mercury found in environments worldwide comes from coal fired power stations.  Every time we swith on our lights we are killing great northern divers from mercury poisoning.
·         In Revenge of Gaia James Lovelock writes that Gaia is suffering from a ‘morbid fever’. P216
·         Quoting James Lovelock ‘Gaia has become an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them’.  Gaia has responded to ecophobia and become the threat of retribution. P217
·         Gardening is the performance of the movement of Nature into culture. P222
·         The act of gardening, the performance of cultivation, is the movement of wild Nature into culture: the drama of civilisation............Gardens tell a story about the relationship between the wild and civilisation which began a very long time ago. Nomadic hunter-gatherers..... P223
·         The control of nature is necessary to keep us safe and preserve civilised values.  Even in modern times, an abhorrence of an unkempt garden, the moral dereliction of an overgrown plot, teaches ecophobia: a fear of Nature getting out of hand.  These anxieties are the glue that bonds cultivation to civilisation. P226
·         However we try to control the Nature we bring into culture, however sophisticated we believe our management of natural processes to be, the more fearful we will become of Nature’s response............Inadvertently, by moving Nature into culture, gardening has created a space between these two states where a very different kind of wilderness is emerging. P235


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