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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