This summer seese the SPWC revisiting the original Landscape Readings held in and around Toronto in the late 1980s and early '90s. Landscape Readings were public walking tours led by artists of outdoor environments that held an intellectual or personal interest for the artist. They were a hybrid that combined the attraction of authors reading their own works with a bracing picnic outing in a setting which combines the context for a lecture on ecology, geology, history or biography. The readings were a project initially conceived by SPWC founder, Whitney Smith, to provide a venue for writer and poet Christopher Dewdney to share his extensive knowledge of palaeozoic geology, among other things, and his sense of humour. In July 1987 he gave the first landscape reading of Toronto's High Park Carolinian forest, which was documented in the following issue of The Journal of Wild Culture. Other artist guides included Gordon Rayner, Hank Hedges, M.T. Kelly, June Callwood, Larry Zolf, Joyce Weiland, and architect Donald Schmitt.

Now, this summer, they're back! Join Whitney Smith once more for a series of 2 1/2-hour walking tours (followed by retreat to a local watering hole for some food, drink and talk) that trace the distinct geography of certain areas of Toronto. These new Landscape Readings combine different ways of looking at the built and unbuilt environment of the city from various perspectives: political and social history, commerce & economics, ecology & earth sciences, meteorology, urban planning & architecture, transportation, and of course culture in its various forms encountered along the way.

2 pm - 5.30pm
July 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th
August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th

$15, $10 with an SPWC membership card.


Image credit: Shoshonah J MacKay

This expression of Stones/Water/Time/Breath comes out of a performance I gave in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, of my text score of the same name.  You can view the score alongside this video by following the download.  In one respect, the score was composed in response to the many text scores I have encountered over years as a practicing artist.  I had written off composing these kinds of scores because they seemed anachronistic and tendentious to the point of irrelevance.  More recently, however, what became apparent through the work of my peers was that much remained to be said.

The performance that the video documents was given at a pond named Nine Mile Pond. This pond is located in my childhood hometown. To give the performance, I rented a car and drove to Wilbraham from where I was living in nearby Northampton. I arrived with my wife, Karin, just before sundown and we gathered rocks together. Then we found an appropriate location to play the piece, a small beach by the side of Boston Road. Karin set up a video camera and the performance lasted about 18 minutes, almost all of which you see here.

Stones / Water / Time / Breath
to Christian Wolff

Site-specific: outside, by the water, any body of water, like: a pond, the
ocean, a lake, a stream, a river...

Materials: stones. As many or as few as desired. Maybe they are already
there.


Performance:

Arrive, set a start time, start.

Use the stones as elements or implements to make percussive sounds on the
water.

Play the water with the stones.

Play singly, together, rhythmically, with solos, tuplets, common rhythms,
irregular rhythms, cycles, patterns, with no rhythms.

There can be pauses.

No speaking.

When you feel the piece has ended, end the performance.

For any number of performers.


Dean Rosenthal
May 12, 2012
Edgartown Great Pond

Dean Rosenthal is an American composer of instrumental and electronic music, sound installations, and field recordings. He also serves as co-editor of The Open Space Web Magazine and is a contributing editor to The Open Space Magazine.
http://www.deanrosenthal.org/
http://the-open-space.org/

It’s impossible to draw very definite conclusions from something as large, sprawling and diverse as the Venice Biennale – a six month-long extravaganza that sees historic sites such as the Arsenale, Giardini and sundry grand palazzos across the slowly sinking city play host to contemporary art from across the globe. Or, rather, perhaps it’s too easy: with so much work on show, there will almost always be something that fits into the pre-existing interests of the critic in question. Certainly this year, as somebody interested in humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and how that might be rethought, there is much to comment on.

But before we get there, it’s arguably just as impossible to take seriously any professed attempts to question our treatment of the natural world, without overlooking the fact that the Biennale itself sees so many critics, curators, artists, decision-making administrators, collectors, celebrity-spotters and hordes of art-loving tourists flying into the city’s two airports, arriving by yacht or by vast cruising ship. Works of art are packed and shipped and unpacked. Millions of flyers and books and press releases are printed out, put into tote bags, taken home and binned. It’s impossible to overlook the waste that art generates, but everybody does…
 

It’s impossible to overlook the waste that art generates, but everybody does…

Each instalment of the Biennale centres on a theme, which this year, for the 55th, is Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, or The Encyclopaedic Palace. Chosen by the 2013 curator – Massimiliano Gioni, the youngest ever – the concept stems from a 1955 application to the US patent office by Italian self-taught artist Marino Auriti, in which he proposed to construct a vast tower that could function as the repository for the entirety of human knowledge. The central exhibition – split across two vast gallery spaces in the Arsenale and Giardini – is therefore concerned with ideas around knowledge – its construction and storage – as well as anthropology, systems of classification, and the increasingly fashionable concept of outsider art.



That means that, for an event that is supposedly a championing of contemporary art, at its heart is surprisingly little contemporary art. Instead there are all manner of historical artefacts, museum objects and the strange scribblings of nineteenth century ‘visionaries’, South-East Asian shamans, or early twentieth century self-taught artists, or ‘artists’. Much of what contemporary work there is plays on a similar aesthetic – Ed Atkins’ video portrait of the personal collection of Andre Breton, for example, or Danh Vo’s transposed temple. All art here, it might be said, aspires to the condition of the artefact.
 

Steady streams of water drip down from clouds above, and run off into puddles below.

Outside of this sprawling double centre, the Biennale is largely made up of national pavilions, in which various committees from countries around the globe decide who ought to represent them on the world stage. Artists here are free to respond to the centralised theme or not, as they see fit, and this year a surprising number have – notably Khaled Zaki’s Sphynx-esque pieces in the dimly lit Egypt Pavilion, the work of Petra Feriancova and Zbynek Baladran for the Czech Pavilion, and Whitney McVeigh’s installation of cluttered academia in the Gervasuti Foundation [pictured above], one of many collateral events that spring up across the city around Biennale time. The Estonian pavilion, meanwhile, consists of a scrupulously careful archiving system that would have been right at home in 2011.



Whether or not it’s a result of Gioni’s overarching theme, or symptomatic of a more broadly shifting attitude, or simply a reflection of the critic’s ability to find what he’s looking for, man’s relationship with nature seems to be a prominent source of interest this year. Inside the Encyclopaedic Palace, for example, are works such as Kan Xuan’s Millet Mound – a double-banked display of some 70 screens intertwining Chinese landscape, agriculture and political history. Meanwhile, artist-hermit Patrick Van Caeckenbergh’s strange trees (half-housing; half-alive) [pictured above] bring a troubling sense of faded mythology. And Lin Xue extends such mythology forwards into the future, with amorphous fantastical landscapes, painstakingly drawn with sharpened bamboo dipped in ink. Steady streams of water drip down from clouds above, and run off into puddles below; somehow rooting these tiny floating worlds – shifting quilts of texture and form – amid the otherwise empty blank expanse of clean white paper.



This sense of rooted inter-relationship is literalised in both the Kosovo and Belgium Pavilions. For the former, Petrit Halilaj presents a mud-constructed covered walkway, through which the visitor must tread gingerly in semi-darkness. Portholes provide a view of featureless gallery white, overhung by a canopy of twigs and, bizarrely, coathangers. In the latter, JM Coetzee curates the work of Berlinde De Bruckere [pictured top]; his introductory text setting the tone for a fantastical intertwining of something resembling mankind with a crippled kind of nature. The work – a colossal sculpture of a fallen tree, its branches intertwined to form a single trunk-limb, patched up and bandaged, pollarded and felled – is especially powerful under a grey, gauzy, slowly waxing gloom. But as ever with fantasy, it’s a fine line away from ridicule, over which this arguably teeters.
 

Laitinen chopped down a large square of Finnish forest and rebuilt it arranged by colour.

Similarly ‘rooted’ is Antti Laitinen’s work for the Finland Pavilion [pictured above]. On show is documentation of an old work, The Island, for which the artist constructed an island in the Baltic Sea, one sandbag at a time, as well as the more recent Forest Square series. This involved Laitinen chopping down a 10x10 metre square section of Finnish forest, sorting all the different materials – soil, moss, wood etc – and rebuilding the forest arranged by colour. Outside the pavilion when we visit, he’s busy nailing trees (back) together.

Environmental issues are just as prominent in the Bahamas Pavilion, which sees Tavares Strachan present large images of hummingbirds created out of collages of other endangered species, as well as two lightboxes each containing a block of ice. One is taken from the North Pole and set to -79°C, the other a clone, and set at -86°C. Ice is also present in the form of a melting monolith outside on Riva Ca de Dio, the work of Stefano Cagol for the Maldives Pavilion, which is generally a little simplistic in its foregrounding of tension between residents, tourists, business and conservation.



More complex in terms of exploring relationships with nature is Simryn Gill’s work in the Australian Pavilion, including photography, a mini-library, and a large-scale collage of ink and tiny scraps of paper on wooden panels, that hints at swarm behaviour and the troubling way in which language can both open up a relationship with the natural world, and close it down. This might be compared with Aurelien Froment’s video piece, Pulmo Marina, [pictured above] on show at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac as part of the Victor Pinchuk-funded Future Generation Art Prize. Here, a simple, beautiful video of a jellyfish is presented with a blandly folksy US voiceover that explores our changing conceptions of these strange animals. Historical, mythical, and contemporary scientific understandings of jellyfish are all introduced, before the defining moment – a perfectly judged self-reflexive turn which suddenly jolts you into an awareness that this has not been filmed deep in some fathomless ocean inaccessible to humans, but in a carefully spot-lit tank in an aquarium in Monterey Bay. Jellyfish can’t be tagged (or they’d sink) and can therefore only be observed and studied in artificial environments such as this one. “Jellyfish just don’t fit the categories,” we’re told.

This idea of categorisation and its overrunning is to the fore in IF A DandeLION COULD TALK, an exhibition curated by Adina Drinceanu. The show focuses on a group of 1970s Italian artists who worked together under the collective name Sigma 1 and demonstrates their exploration of order and coding in the natural world – whether or not, say, geometry is somehow ingrained in nature or imposed by humanity upon it. One of the group, Ștefan Bertalan, also has a symbolically gridded structure on show in The Encyclopedic Palace, where such gridding systems are echoed by the graph paper drawings of KP Brehmer.



Something similar is at work, I think, in Thierry De Cordier’s 2012 sea paintings [pictured above] – darkly violent and uncontrollable – overlaid in gold writing or overlaying and half-concealed: delicately printed or handwritten text naming and taking control or pinning down in place and time: Tempete en Mer du Nord – Etude No3, for example, or NOORDZEE No2, 2. By contrast, a trio of Chinese painters in Culture World Becoming and Confronting Anitya – Zhang Fan, Mao Lizi and Guan Jingjing – each employ varying degrees of abstraction to demonstrate something untenable, unnameable, ever out of reach.
 

Perhaps it simply suggests that humanity’s relationship with the world is always a cause for discussion.

More different still – incomparable really – is Richard Mosse’s work for the Ireland Pavilion. Across both photography and a disorientating video installation, he uses now defunct military-grade infrared film to document years of violence in the Eastern Congo. The resulting work is dizzyingly beautiful and harrowingly direct, and at the same time. Like all great art, it prompts many thoughts, suggests many purposes, but, in the context of thinking about the environment, it makes us look again at landscape – suddenly, now, a place of both otherworldly beauty and hidden terror. Always able to be rethought anew.

But perhaps none of this is new after all, even newness itself. One of most obviously environmental exhibitions is in the Nordic Pavilion, for which Terike Haapoja combines trees and technology to explore ideas around death, decay and communication. How might nature speak for itself, she wonders. But in a sense she has no choice: the Nordic Pavilion, designed by Sverre Fehn and built in 1962, was constructed around three plane trees that the city of Venice wanted to preserve. Nature is therefore an unavoidable intrusion. So too is history. Whether this might be seen to represent some kind of humility on behalf of the architect in the face of nature’s authority or, on the contrary, a hubristic taking control, and boxing off of nature’s power: that is something continually open to questioning. Perhaps it simply suggests that humanity’s relationship with the world in which we exist is always a cause for discussion – for hope as much as for concern.



The 55th Venice Biennale continues across Venice until 24th November 2013.
http://www.labiennale.org

To get to the badgers you had to be prepared to get dirty. It wasn’t a long walk from our estate; you’d never believe that such wildness was so close. In hearing distance almost, the badger set disturbed by revving car engines and music and fireworks on bonfire night. So it wasn’t far, not far.

I found them one Sunday. Dad home from the pub after stopping in at the bookies, wanting peace and quiet, and mum busy with the ironing. I liked long walks. And the south end of the estate was still bordered by the orchards and fields that the houses had interrupted in the first place. Climbing a fence and scrumping the apples was a treat – the farmer didn’t come round too often and he was ok with girls, it was just the boys he hated and took shots at with his long gun. And just walking further, trying to recognise butterflies and birds from my wildlife book that I took from the school library. The song thrushes, and the chaffinches and brown female black bird. Sometimes you saw a fox, bristled and dingy. Rabbits.

The A2 cut through close by, leading all the way – a Roman route they told us, all the way back to the sea, to Dover then France and Canterbury and Chaucer. So I walked and walked, ignoring the nagging sound of the cars, the sun hot on my neck, the sweat gathering under the waistband of my jeans. At the furthest end of a field full of black and white cows – a field walked over carefully to avoid the flat discs of cow shit – was a small wood. A gathering of trees. Had to push through a tight hedge, hair and t-shirt snagged.

It was quiet, with small collections of bluebells and white anemones pegged about on the mossy floor. I went in, and was collapsed by the green dark and the smell of the leaves, I was folded into nothing, just another part of the wood. I lay down, in the tradition of trees, watching everything and nothing. My breathing and the movement of light counted out time, but I wasn’t aware of how long I was there, lying down, my back pressed against the dirt. A tickle of tiny legs and feelers crawled across my stomach. An ant. Then another. And another. I lay still for the column of ants – grand word for the straggling bunch, but that’s what they call them, a column, like an army, like soldiers – a vast not-I, a whole lot of small others making their way over me, through me, becoming part of me.

I lay still until they’d finished. It seemed the right thing to do. The only thing to do. Lying there, unable to see the boundary of what I knew was a little woodland, I could imagine being lost, being able only to see the space between each tree from where I lay in the middle. The woods are historic, not like the field or the riverbank. Tree follows tree, and turning in a circle, you’re lost, unable to find the edge.

As it got dark, slowly the light disappearing, I heard them, snuffling, snouting at the soil. Grunts and growls. I turned my head and saw them. Three of them. One smaller than the others; a baby. Black and white striped faces, lumpy bodies, thick-legged. Badgers, wild creatures, as close to me as a neighbour’s dog might get. I could smell them, their worm breath, their bloodied fur. Fierce. Their noses poked at the air. They ignored me, or accepted me. I was the wood. I was part of them. Like the ants. Like the leaves.

Later, just a short while later, I walked home. Dirtier than usual.

And so later, after going there a few times and fixing myself against the woodland floor and watching them eat and play and fight, I knew that I belonged to them. No matter where I was, I belonged to the badgers. In the bright day, when I was looking for a job now school was done with, or doing my mum’s housework, I thought of them curled up in their set underground, a crumbly, paw-dug cave, with tree roots for a ceiling and a fur and grass nest. I was there, breathing and eating and scratching. There was no lack of warmth or love. No need for a job or a boyfriend or social workers or police or truancy officers or the dole office. I had everything and I was everything.

And so later, lying there listening and watching and being, the moon not up yet, but soon, my hands lost in grass, were grass; body broken down into particles so joining up, linking together all the particles, just one big mass of moments, of unspeakable things, too small, too vast for words. The black and white others feeding and prodding and showing teeth, leaving footprints and folds of shit on the ground. There we were.

And then he comes. He came. The farmer. Dressed in jeans and a tatty blue jumper. His grey hair cut short, close to his head. His eyebrows still black over his eyes. His face rough with stubble. He carried something in his hand. His large, dirty hand.

He said, “What you doing here then?”

And I answered. I told him I was watching the badgers.

He said, “You like nature do you? Like the badgers?”

And I probably answered yes. My heart flicking against my tits.

He said, “They’ll have to go. TB. Bad for the cows. Kills them. Costs me money. A lot of money. The government gave the go-ahead for the cull. Said 'go ahead'. A lot of money is lost to Bovine TB which spreads from them filthy badgers. You like them, do you?”

And I would’ve answered yes and would’ve been crying, because he had come to kill them.

He said, “Bet you’re a right heartbreaker. I bet all the boys do anything you say, give you anything you ask for.”

I shook my head, no. “No, that doesn’t happen. That never happens.”

And he said, “I don’t believe that, I reckon any man in his right mind would do anything a pretty girl like you asked him to.”

And he stepped forwards, his hands large and dirty. His chest and shoulders almost young, almost handsome – at least male and wide and hard. Smiling.

He said, “Have you got a boyfriend?”

I said no and so he said, “Bet you’ve got lots of them. Bet you do. Bet you could make a man do anything you wanted just by being nice to him.”

Later, just a short while later, I walked home. Dirtier than usual. Back through the field, back through the orchard and into the estate. My hair was tangled down my back. I walked past the pub where my dad would be and the bingo hall where my mum would be. I walked past the boys on the corner, their short-faced vicious dogs straining at their leads, their jeans hanging around their arses. Past their whispered offers of skank, skunk and crack. Past the rows of post-war houses, some with tidy gardens, planted with flowers, white net curtains hanging in the windows, the grey ghost flicker of a TV.

I walked up the path and through the gate into our garden, with my dad’s old car waiting for him to fix it. I opened the door and walked through the living room into the kitchen. Everything was the same. Mum’s ashtray full of butts on the side counter. The washing up done. Clean and tidy. The bathroom was next to the kitchen. I went in and turned on the taps. Smoked one of mum’s butts while the water filled the bath.
    
At least they’re safe. That was what I thought. The badgers were safe. I didn’t go back. I was too human after that. Too clean.



Heidi James’ novel Wounding will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2014. Her novella The Mesmerist's Daughter (published by Apis Books) was launched in July 2007. Her novel Carbon, was published by Blatt in October 09 and is published in Spanish by El Tercer Nombre.  Carbon is currently being made into a film by British film company, Institute for Eyes. She has collaborated with artists including Delaine LeBas, Gwyneth Herbert, Mike Chavez Dawson, Marisa Carnesky and Tara Darby. Her essays and short stories have appeared in various publications and anthologies including Dazed and Confused, Next Level, Flux, Brand, Mslexia, Another Magazine, Undercurrent, 3:AM London, New York, Paris, Dreams That Money Can Buy, Full Moon Empty Sports Bag, Pulp.net etc. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature.
heidijames.me

Image credit: Tom Medwell.

Heidi James: Here at the Journal of Wild Culture we're very much interested in the overlaps in human culture and the environment. Your poetry explores this interaction beautifully – is it your intention to draw focus to our relationship with space, or is it a case of being unable to write human experience without properly situating it?

Tim Cresswell: The human relationship to the earth is right at the centre of both my creative and academic interests. How do we dwell in and on the earth? I am certainly interested in, and delighted by, what people refer to as natural landscapes, or even wilderness, but I am much more interested in the spaces where the human imprint is obvious. And then I like to reverse that and think about how the wild is present in even the most human of spaces. I fixate on weeds and moss and lichens.

For example, I've been working on a poem about an old Morris Minor that has plants growing out of it. You know when you see those old cars with wood frames and signs of moss beginning to emerge? And that just leads to the image of buddleia growing out of the smallest bit of crumbling grout in between bricks on the side of a house. I'm not sure I would say that it's my “intention” to draw readers’ attention to our relationship with space as that suggests poems that are a bit too prefigured – but the way that poems emerge and then the way that the collection emerged certainly centres on these themes.





Heidi: Both your scholarly research and poetry are concerned with place and human experiences/encounters – how do you approach these different types of writing? Is there a difference for you creatively?

Tim: This is both a problem and an opportunity. It is almost a truism encountered in poetry workshops and ‘training’ that it is bad to prefigure a poem with a clear thought – we are supposed to let things just happen from some place deep within. Well, I find that difficult, to tell the truth. I have lived as an academic for over twenty years where clear thoughts are at the heart of my particular enterprise. So to suddenly be confronted with the possibility of writing from some place that is not a clear thought is something I find pretty much impossible.

Having said that, I do try and play around with writing practice that has different driving factors. So a poem like Possible Pubs is one which I am very fond of – I was just doodling with the sounds of paired words that turned into things that sounded like the names of pubs. Then I just made it get a little more sinister as it went along for no particular reason. The poem is driven by sounds and an emotional affect rather than something intellectual.
 

British poems are like little epiphanies. North American poets seem much happier with abstraction and ideas.

But I think there is something to be gained from starting with ideas, even abstract ideas, in writing a poem. I read TS Eliot, for instance, and I can’t help but see something like the Four Quartets as emerging from a philosophy of time that may not be thoroughly prefigured but is certainly abstract in nature and remarkably sustained.

North American poets seem much happier with abstraction and ideas. Someone from the US described British poems as little epiphanies. I think this can be true – and sometimes these little epiphanies are all we need. But then there are these American poets tackling huge issues. I've recently begun to understand Jorie Graham after years of not getting it. And she is really dealing with massive abstractions at the same time as she excels at minute attention. So what I am trying to say is that I think I need to cautiously embrace an idea- (and even abstraction-) based approach to (some) poems as something that may end up being a strength of my particular poetic practice.

Interestingly, the reverse is somewhat true. In my academic work I am looking to embrace a more creative side that is not so clearly charted out. I want to share thoughts and have no interest in confusing readers or obfuscating – but I do want to give readers of my academic work a choice of outcomes rather than insisting that they follow my logic. I have just started to play around with this following some of the writing experiments of Walter Benjamin in particular. I increasingly have very little time for the kind of writing that is referred to as ‘social science’. It seems to revel in destroying our delight in the world.





Heidi: The poems (in particular, Phase Shift) describe the infinite connections and accretions between all things, reminding me of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Does any particular theory inform your poetry?

Tim: This goes back to the previous question. I presume most poets (except those working in the tradition that is still referred to, somewhat quaintly, as ‘modernist’) would run a mile from the idea of a theory informing their poetry in any but the lightest way. I certainly read Deleuze and Guattari and write about their work in an academic context. I keep finding that I suddenly understand aspects of their work that made no sense to me for ten years. I certainly didn’t have their work by my side when writing Phase Shift or any other poem but it is entirely possible that their work may be lingering in the background.

As it happens, the evolution of Phase Shift reflects some of my anxieties about the poetry/academia interface and the final product is the result of me trying to shrug off the idea that started it. It comes from my interest in the idea of the ‘anthropocene’ – a name given by geologists to the period we now live in, an era that has been so influenced by humans that it is named after us. The argument goes that there is nowhere you can now go where the influence of humans is not evident in the material that makes up our world. A future geologist – ten million years from now – would be able to point to a layer of the earth and say, “This is due to humans!”

 

I wanted to create vertiginous shifts between forms of language and between the everyday and the abstract.

Well that thought is interesting. On the one had there is the idea that we humans have so influenced the stuff that makes up the world that we are the major defining factor in its constitution. In this sense the label “anthropocene” should alert us to our hubris. On another level though, the label itself is hubristic – to add insult to injury even the name of the era has us at its centre. How arrogant is that!

Anyway, I wanted to write a poem about the anthropocene. This is supposed to be a bad way to start a poem. I did it anyway – a very long poem by my standards, with words all over the page. The next stage was to take the central idea out of it as much as possible and centre, instead, on a man ironing. From there I decided to enact some shifts in language between the everyday and observational and the text-booky and even journalistic. I liked the idea of a man with an iron being a geologic force to be reckoned with – or living in a period marked by mammals and flowering plants. These are both true, but not the way we normally think of an individual human doing the ironing.

I was reading and beginning to understand Jorie Graham’s wonderful collection, Place, at the time and it was her, rather than Deleuze or Guattari, that most influenced this poem. I wanted to recreate some of those vertiginous shifts between forms of language and between the everyday and the abstract. This impetus is also true of the central sequence, Soil, where I wanted to mix up points of view and languages – science, mythology, the lyrical in a discombobulating way.






Heidi: Poems such as Rare Metallophytes and Dogfish, 21 are elegant critiques of rapacious human consumption and destruction of the environment (without any didacticism). Did you set out to write a collection with a theme in mind, or did you gather the collection from existing poems and the theme reveal itself?

Tim: I didn't set out to write a collection at all! I just wanted to write poems. The oldest poem in this collection, Dogfish, started in around 2008. I had been writing poems since my late teens but started to take it more seriously around 2008 after speaking with an academic colleague about creative writing and its relationship to our livelihoods. It was then that I started to attend workshops and seek the opinions of established poets as well as peers. I was in the first Faber 'Becoming a Poet' course with Daljit Nagra and have enjoyed the (very) critical support many of that group ever since. I did an Arvon course with Philip Gross and Susan Wicks as well as a week in Banff in Canada working with Canadian poets who have a different starting point from most British poets I think. I have been working with Jo Shapcott as a friends and mentor for three years and she is just wonderful in understanding my different impulses and imperatives. I have undoubtedly been extremely lucky to be able to do all these things.

The collection is a group effort and its themes only became apparent at the end of the process.

I started to get poems accepted in both traditional national poetry magazines such as the Rialto and more experimentally inclined places such as Poetry Wales and Tears in the Fence. It was only recently that the idea of a collection became possible as the poems accreted. The poems in the book are drawn from about twice as many that I thought good enough to share with Tom Chivers at Penned in the Margins who has been another huge stroke of luck. He has been a proper editor. He recognised particular elements of my writing as a whole that I did not even recognise myself. He gently led me to dispose of many poems and include some that I originally thought marginal. He led me to the final edit of Phase Shift.

We went through about four rounds of edits to end up with Soil as it now stands and much of its coherence is down to him. Some of the sequencing of poems that he suggested took my breath away when I realised some ongoing conversations between poems for the first time. This is a wonderful gift. Many poets manage to produce collections without an active editor these days. Tom spends the time and makes you recognise yourself more in the poems.

So the collection is very much a group effort and the themes that run through it only became apparent at the end of the process. And, by the way, there are more themes than the consumption and destruction of the environment here. One I insist on is hope. This is a hopeful collection in which elements of the stuff of the world insist on persisting despite, or even because of, our influence.




Tim Cresswell was born in Cambridge in 1965 but didn’t stay there long. Since then he has travelled, first as part of an Air Force family and then as a student and academic. As a geographer he is the author of five books on place, mobility and other key ideas in geographic thought. Since 2006 he has been Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He lives with his wife and three children in Acton, west London, but that is about to change as they are about to relocate (again) to Boston where Tim will transform into Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Soil is his debut collection of poems and is available from Penned in the Margins, Inpress Books and all good bookstores from July 1st, 2013.

Heidi James’ novel Wounding will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2014. Her novella The Mesmerist's Daughter (published by Apis Books) was launched in July 2007. Her novel Carbon, was published by Blatt in October 09 and is published in Spanish by El Tercer Nombre.  Carbon is currently being made into a film by British film company, Institute for Eyes. She has collaborated with artists including Delaine LeBas, Gwyneth Herbert, Mike Chavez Dawson, Marisa Carnesky and Tara Darby. Her essays and short stories have appeared in various publications and anthologies including Dazed and Confused, Next Level, Flux, Brand, Mslexia, Another Magazine, Undercurrent, 3:AM London, New York, Paris, Dreams That Money Can Buy, Full Moon Empty Sports Bag, Pulp.net etc. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature.
heidijames.me
 

Image credit: Bradley Garrett

They heard us coming long before I saw them, and the woods were now filled with strange sounds: yelping, roaring, whickering and a noise so deep that I heard it not only with my ears but also with my chest: a sustained, resonant drone, like the lowest note of a church organ. As we came within sight of the enclosure, the sounds intensified. The animals clustered around the gate. Thick-thighed, with small pert ankles and hooves, they looked like fat ladies in high heels. The rectangular blocky bodies were covered in dense bristles; their winter coats were almost blond. The delicate snouts were so long that they looked like little trunks. As the smell of the bucket reached her nostrils, the dominant female, crested and humped, a deep-bodied battering ram, barged the other beasts out of the way.

When the pellets were scattered on the ground, the boar purred and growled, occasionally exploding into shrieks and squeals as the big sow drove the others off the food. They ploughed up the soft soil, using not their little bleary eyes to find the food, but the sharper organs in their snouts. Close to the fence the earth was churned and gouged; throughout the twelve hectares of the enclosure there were ruffles and furrows in the ground. This was why the boar had been brought here: to grub out the rhizomes of the bracken, which prevent tree seedlings from reaching the light, and to disturb the soil so that seeds could germinate. Though the remaining trees, now ancient, rained seed upon the ground here, none survived, because the bracken, released by heavy grazing from competition, had swarmed the bared land beneath them, creating an impenetrable barrier.

I would struggle to describe these boar as wild: the Dangerous Wild Animals Act forces their owners to act as zookeepers. The boar, like the beavers I saw in Wales, live behind high fences and electric charges. But elsewhere in Britain, they are starting to re-establish themselves, without permission from the authorities. The first major escape from boar farms here took place during the great gales of 1987, when trees crashed down on the fences. Since then they have continued to escape from farms and collections, and they have now founded at least four small colonies in southern England and possibly a fifth in western Scotland. They breed quickly. The government says that unless determined efforts are made to exterminate them, they will become established through much of England within 20 or 30 years¹. It is a prospect that delights me, though I accept that not everyone shares this view.
 

The boar's reputation for ferocity has been greatly exaggerated.

Their reputation for ferocity has, like that of many large wild animals, been greatly exaggerated. It is true that they will attack dogs that chase them or people who corner them, but researchers who investigated this question concluded that, though they live throughout continental Europe, “we have been unable to find any confirmed reports in the literature of wild boar making unprovoked attacks on humans.”² The government believes that the chances that they could transmit exotic diseases such as swine fever or foot and mouth to livestock are low, but they will cause damage to crops. This, it says “is likely to be small in comparison to agricultural damage from more common wildlife such as rabbits”³. They can also break into pig pens, kill the domestic boars and impregnate the sows.

On the other hand, the boar will catalyse some of the dynamic processes missing from our ecosystem. They are another keystone species, shaking up the places in which they live. The British woodland floor is peculiar in that it is often dominated by a single species, such as dog’s mercury, wild garlic, bluebells, bracken, hart’s tongue,  male fern or brambles. These monocultures, like fields of wheat or rapeseed, may in some cases be the result of human intervention, such as the extirpation of the boar. To visit the Białowieża forest in eastern Poland, which is as close to being an undisturbed ecosystem as any remaining in Europe, in May, when dozens of flower species jostle in an explosion of colour, is to see how much Britain is missing, and the extent to which the boar transforms its environment.

I understand people’s concerns about the loss of those uninterrupted carpets of bluebells that have made some British woods famous. They are, I agree, stunning, just as fields of lavender or flax are stunning, but to me they are an indication not of the wealth of the ecosystem but of its poverty. One of the reasons why bluebells have been able to crowd out other species in the woods in which they grow is because the animal which previously kept them in check no longer roams there. Wild boar and bluebells live happily together, but perhaps not wild boar and only bluebells. By rooting and grubbing in the forest floor, by creating little ponds and miniature wetlands in their wallows, boar create habitats for a host of different plants and animals, a shifting mosaic of tiny ecological niches, opening and closing as the sounders pass through⁴. Boar are the untidiest animals to have lived in this country since the ice age. This should commend them to anyone with an interest in the natural world.




George Monbiot is an English journalist known for his political and environmental activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of several books, including Captive State (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse (2008). His latest book, Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, is published by Penguin.
www.penguin.co.uk/

 

Extracts selected by Dr Crystal Bennes.
www.crystalbennes.com


Notes
1. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2008. Feral wild boar in England: an action plan. http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/feralwildboar_tcm6-4508.pdf
2. M.J.Goulding and T.J.Roper, 2002. Press responses to the presence of free-living Wild Boar (Sus scrofa) in southern England. Mammal Review, 32, 272–282. DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-2907.2002.00109.x
3. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2008, as above.
4. Derek Gow, 2002. A wallowing good time – wild boar in the woods. ECOS 23 (2) 14-22

I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my waking hours; it haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which cannot be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason - closely followed by grouse shooting and deer stalking - for the sad state of the British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now possesses less than one third of the average forest cover of Europe¹. Their husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.

To identify the sheep as an agent of destruction is little short of blasphemy. In England and Wales the animal appears to possess full diplomatic immunity. Its role in the dispossession of many of the people who once worked on the land, as the commons were enclosed by landlords hoping to profit from the wool trade, is largely forgotten. This is what Thomas More wrote in Utopia, published in 1516:

 
“Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt … leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house … the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all: by one means therefore or by other, either by hook or crook they must needs depart away”.²
 

In Wales, the white plague has become an emblem almost as sacred as Agnus Dei.

In Scotland, where the Clearances were more sudden and even more brutal than the enclosures in England and Wales, some people remain aware of the dispossession and impoverishment caused by sheep farming. But in Wales, though sheep have replaced people since the Cistercians established the Strata Florida abbey in the 12th Century, and though these enclosures were bravely resisted by riots and revolts such as Rhyfel y Sais Bach (the War of the Little Englishmen) in what is now Ceredigion in 18203, the white plague has become a symbol of nationhood, an emblem almost as sacred as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, “which taketh away the sin of the world.” I have come across a similar fetishisation in Australia and New Zealand, North America, Norway, the Alps and the Carpathians.

There is a reason for this sanctification, but it is rapidly becoming outdated. While sheep were used in Wales as an instrument of enclosure in the 18th and 19th centuries, during the 20th there was a partial but widespread process of land reform in the uplands. In the aftermath of David Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, which increased income tax and inheritance tax for the very rich, the big landowners in Wales, many of whom were English, began to sell off some of their property4. They appear to have been less attached to their Welsh estates than to their English properties or their sporting land in Scotland, so these were shed first. Much of the land was bought by their tenants. Partly as a result, a smaller proportion of Wales than of England or Scotland remains in large estates. As the farmer with whom I have discussed these issues at length points out: “there is a great sense of national pride in the fact that the local population, after centuries of subservience, were able to reclaim ‘their’ lands, and were no longer beholden to the lord of the manor.”5

After the second world war, through the 1947 Agriculture Act and the 1948 Agricultural Holdings Act, the tenant farmers who continued to rent their land gained security for life. For 80 or 90 years, until quite recently, much of the land in Wales was controlled by small farmers, most of whom raised sheep and cattle6. During a period in which it faced mortal threats, they sustained the Welsh language and important elements of the national culture. Now the family farms are consolidating rapidly, into new agricultural estates. Despite the £3.6bn a year British people spend ostensibly to sustain a viable farm economy, the National Farmers’ Union reports that “21% of upland farms are not expected to continue beyond the next 5 years.”7 The brief flowering of small-scale farming appears to be coming to an end.
 

By the end of the 19th Century, mixed farming had been replaced by sheep and cattle.

Until the enclosures, Welsh farmers kept large numbers of cattle and goats in the uplands, and grew cereals, root crops and hay, even, in some places, on the tops of the hills. By the end of the 19th Century, and the coming of the railways, much of this mixed farming had been replaced by sheep and cattle. The enclosures consolidated a grazing culture which still resonates through the place names, ballads and oral traditions of Wales. Farmers moved their flocks between hendre – literally “old town” (the winter grazings surrounding the farmstead) - and hafod, rough huts in the summer pastures on the hills8. (I have seen a similar system in Transylvania, where, in the late 1990s, shepherds who rode fine black horses still slept in summer houses, or stînas, of sticks and shakes in the mountains, milked their sheep and cows in the pastures, made a white cheese which they hung in bags from the rafters, drank plum brandy and sang around the fire at night). Drovers walked the sheep along ancient tracks into England, driving the flocks from the Welsh uplands to markets as distant as Kent. Shepherds bred dogs and trained them to perform astonishing feats. Most of this has now gone, or persists – in the form of sheepdog trials – as little more than a ghost of the economy it once served.   

Subsidies after the second world war encouraged the farmers to increase the size of their flocks. Between 1950 and 1999, the number of sheep in Wales rose from 3.8 to 11.6 million. After headage payments – grants for every animal a farmer kept – were stopped in 2003, the population fell back again, to 8.2 million by 20109, which is still almost three sheep for every human being in Wales.

Since the second world war, sheep have reduced what remained of the upland flora to stubble. In 6000 years, domestic animals (alongside burning and clearing for crops and the cutting of trees for wood and bark and timber) tranformed almost all the upland ecosystems of Britain from closed canopy forest to open forest, from open forest to scrub and from scrub to heath and long sward. In just 60 years, the greatly increased flocks in most of the upland areas of Britain completed the transformation: turning heath and prairie into something resembling a bowling green with contours.
 

Though sheep numbers have begun to decline, the impacts have not.

Though sheep numbers have begun to decline, the impacts have not. More powerful machinery allows farmers to erase patches of scrub growing on land that was previously too steep to clear. This allows them to expand the area that qualifies for subsidies. In mid-Wales some farmers appear to retain a powerful compulsion, as they sometimes put it, to “tidy up” the land. Ancient hawthorns and crab apples close to my home, often the last remnants of the last hedges on hills that are otherwise devoid of trees, are still being ripped up and burnt, for no agricultural reason that I can discern, except a desire for neatness and completion. From my kayak in Cardigan Bay I see a sight that Neolithic fishermen would have witnessed: towers of smoke rising from the hills as the farmers burn tracts of gorse and trees.

The UK’s National Ecosystem Assessment shows that the catastrophic decline in farmland birds in Wales has accelerated, despite the reduction in the number of sheep: in the six years after 2003 their abundance fell by 15 per cent10. Curlews have declined by 81 per cent in just 13 years and lapwings by 77 per cent in only ten years. Golden plover, which have been the focus of intense conservation efforts, are now almost extinct: reduced to just 36 breeding pairs11. Even in the most strictly protected places, only seven per cent of the animal and plant species living in rivers are thriving12.

Overwhelmingly the reason is farming: grazing which prevents woods from regenerating and destroys the places where animals and plants might live, the grubbing up of trees, cutting and burning, pesticides and fertilisers which kill wildlife and pollute the watercourses. Almost all the rivers in Wales are in poor ecological condition, which is unsurprising when you discover that the nitrates and phosphates entering the water have risen sharply13. Sheep dip residues have been found in almost 90 per cent of the places scientists have surveyed14. Sheep dip is especially damaging, as it contains a powerful pesticide – cypermethrin - which can kill much of the invertebrate life in a river. Farming is cited as a reason for the decline of wildlife in Wales in 92% of cases15.




George Monbiot is an English journalist known for his political and environmental activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of several books, including Captive State (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse (2008). His latest book, Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, is published by Penguin.
www.penguin.co.uk/
 

Extracts selected by Dr Crystal Bennes.
www.crystalbennes.com



Notes
1. Woodland Trust, 2012. UK Woodland Facts. http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/news-media/fact-file/Pages/uk-woodlan...
2. Chapter 22.
3. David Williams, 1952. Rhyfel y Sais Bach: an enclosure riot on Mynydd Bach. Journal of the Cardiganshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 2, nos. 1-4.
4. National Library of Wales, 2004. Life on the Land: land ownership.  http://digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/XAM00001/ardd?locale=en
5. Dafydd Morris-Jones, 12th February 2011. By email.
6. The cattle gradually disappeared: partly, it seems, as a result of the loss of the suckler cow premium - a European subsidy - in 2003.  
7. In evidence submitted to the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 16th February 2011. Farming in the Uplands. Third Report of Session 2010–11. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmenvfru/556/...
8. Some hafod dwellings eventually became solid stone houses.
9. Statistics for Wales, 28th July 2011. Agricultural Small Area Statistics for Wales, 2002 to 2010. SB 75/2011 http://wales.gov.uk/docs/statistics/2011/110728sb752011en.pdf
10. UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Chapter 20, Figure 20.8 Short-term abundance of widespread breeding birds in Wales 1994–2009. http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx
11. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 2009. RSPB Cymru Submission to Rural Development Sub Committee Inquiry into the future of the uplands in Wales. http://www.assemblywales.org/6_rspb_formatted.pdf
12. UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Chapter 20, Figure 20.16. Condition of a) riverine species, and b) riverine habitats in Special Areas of Conservation in Wales. http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx
13. P. J. Johnes et al, 2007. Land use scenarios for England and Wales: evaluation of management options to support ‘good ecological status’ in surface freshwaters. Soil Use and Management, Vol. 23 (Suppl. 1), pp176–194.
14. UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Chapter 20, Figure 20.16. Condition of a) riverine species, and b) riverine habitats in Special Areas of Conservation in Wales. http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx.
15. UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Chapter 20, Figure 20.11 Threats to biodiversity in Wales. http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx

The promise of conservation used to be that by protecting the species you would protect the habitat. The Bengal tiger needs jungles to survive, so defending it means defending the rich and fascinating ecosystem that supports it. But in the United Kingdom, the species we have chosen, historically, to protect are often those associated with damaged and impoverished places, and to defend them we must keep the ecosystem in this state. Armies of conservation volunteers are employed to prevent natural processes from occurring. Land is intensively grazed: to ensure that the plants do not recover from intensive grazing. Woods are coppiced (the trees are felled at ground level, encouraging them to resprout from that point) to sustain the past impacts of coppicing. In their seminal paper challenging the conservation movement, the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin Speight point out that while coppicing might favour butterfly species which can live in many habitats, it harms woodland beetles and moths that can live nowhere else1. They noted that of the 150 woodland insects that are listed as threatened in Britain, just three (two per cent) are threatened by a reduction in coppicing, while 65 per cent are threatened by the removal of old and dead wood2.

Conservationists sometimes resemble gamekeepers: they regard some of our native species as good and worthy of preservation, others as bad and in need of control. Unlike gamekeepers they don’t use the word “vermin” to describe our native wildlife. Instead they say “unwanted, invasive species”. They seek to suppress nature, to prevent successional processes from occurring, to keep ecosystems in a state of arrested development. Nothing is allowed to change: nature must do as it is told, to the nearest percentage point. They have retained an Old Testament view of the natural world: it must be disciplined and trained, for fear that its wild instincts might otherwise surface.

The result is back-to-front conservation. Wildlife groups seek to protect the animals and plants that live in the farmed habitats of the previous century, rather than imagine what could live there if they stepped back. They take a species like the red grouse, or a club moss or a micromoth, which happens to thrive in a place that has been greatly altered by humans, and they build their management plans around it, seeking to keep the land in the state which best secures its survival. In doing so, they shut down the opportunities for other species to establish themselves, either naturally or by reintroduction.
 

How can a native ecosystem be undergrazed by a ruminant from Mesopotamia?

Sustaining the open, degraded habitats of the uplands means keeping sheep. It does not seem to matter whom you talk to in the hilly parts of Britain: farmers, government officials and wildlife groups will all tell you that the answer is sheep – what was the question? If you challenge their management of the land they invariably invoke the horror of “undergrazing”. But how can a native ecosystem be undergrazed by a ruminant from Mesopotamia? Is our wildlife under-hunted by American mink? Are our streamsides under-colonised by Himalayan balsam, our rivers under-infested by red signal crayfish, our verges under-occupied by Japanese knotweed? It is a nonsensical concept.

Even the grazing of cattle or horses in the uplands, which some conservation groups characterise as the benign alternative to sheep, means maintaining habitats that would not exist without us. During the Boreal and Atlantic periods, when warm, wet weather returned to northern Europe, the giant aurochs, or wild cow, appears to have been a forest animal. Analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in its bones shows that it lived on woodland plants. Domestic cattle, by contrast, from their first appearance in northern Europe, largely ate grass, growing in clearings created by people. The chemical differences are so discrete that they can be used to distinguish the bones of wild cattle from the bones of domestic cattle3.

The wild horse seems to have disappeared from the British Isles around 9,000 years ago4: some 2,000 years after the last ice sheets retreated5. Though hunting by humans doubtless accelerated its extinction, the horse was deprived of what was likely to have been its favoured habitat - steppe grasslands - by the change in climate, which allowed forests to spread. In other words, the horse died out here soon after the lion6 and the saiga antelope7 and before the reindeer8. Though both horses and aurochs were intensively hunted, the aurochs survived for much longer: until 3,500 years ago in Britain and into the 17th Century on the Continent. This is one of several lines of evidence suggesting that climate change, not hunting, was the major reason for the horse’s disappearance9. Arguably, it no more belongs to our native fauna under the current climate than the woolly mammoth does. The large herbivore which is missing from our ecosystem is the moose or elk10, which became extinct here a little under 4000 years ago, largely as a result of hunting11. Moose are browsing animals which live in and around forests.

But even if horses or cattle were replacing native plant eaters, the absence of predators utterly changes the way in which they engage with the ecosystem. The grazing regime imposed by conservationists in upland Britain – whether they are using sheep, cattle, horses, yaks or pushme-pullyous - bears no relationship to anything found in nature.
 

If the protection of nature is to be extended, we need a radical re-assessment of what we are trying to achieve.

What we call nature conservation in some parts of the world is in fact an effort to preserve the farming systems of former centuries. The idealised landscape for many wildlife groups is the one that prevailed 100 years ago, regardless of the point at which they start counting. This is what they try to preserve or re-create, defending the land from the intrusions of nature. Reserves are treated like botanic gardens: their habitats are herbaceous borders of favoured species, weeded and tended to prevent the wilds from encroaching. As Ritchie Tassell says sardonically, “you wonder how nature coped before we came along.”

I do not object to the idea of conserving a few pieces of land as museums of former farming practices, or of protecting meadows of peculiar loveliness in their current state, though I would prefer to see these places labelled culture reserves. I do not object to the continued existence of reserves in which endangered species which could not otherwise survive are maintained through intensive management12. Nor do I believe that rewilding should replace attempts to change the way farms are managed, to allow more wildlife to live among crops and livestock: I would like to see that happen too. But if the protection of nature is to be extended to wider areas, as both conservationists and rewilders agree that it should be13, I believe we should first conduct a radical re-assessment of what we are trying to achieve and why.

This assessment is likely to show us that rewilding could offer the best chance of protecting endangered species. According to a paper in Biological Conservation, around 40 per cent of the creatures that have become extinct in Britain since 1800 lived in woodlands, and two fifths of those needed mature trees and dead timber to survive14. The paper warns that “extinction rates in Britain will rise this century without … restoration of woodlands and wetlands”.

A new assessment might prompt conservationists to focus less on species and habitats which happen to be there already, and more on those which could return. Rather than sustaining the sheepwrecked, open habitats of the uplands, they might begin to reduce the impacts of human management, to allow trees to return, even to reintroduce some of the great beasts which once lived among them. That, to me, is a more inspiring vision than sustaining a slightly modified version of the farming which is suppressing the natural world almost everywhere. Everyone should have some self-willed land on their doorstep.
 

George Monbiot is an English journalist known for his political and environmental activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of several books, including Captive State (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse (2008). His latest book, Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, is published by Penguin.

Extracts selected by Dr Crystal Bennes.
www.crystalbennes.com



Notes

1. Clive Hambler and Martin Speight, 1995. Biodiversity Conservation in Britain: science replacing tradition. British Wildlife, Vol.6, no.3, pp137-148.
2. This is not to suggest that coppicing has no ecological role: many woodland species must have evolved to take advantage of the habitat disturbance caused by elephants.
3. N. Noe-Nygaard, T.D. Price and S.U. Hede, 2005. Diet of aurochs and early cattle in southern Scandinavia: evidence from 15N and 13C stable isotopes. Journal of Archaeological Science Vol 32, pp 855-871. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2005.01.004
4. The Mammal Society, 2011. http://www.mammal.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25...
5. There are two references to horse remains beyond this date in the archaeological record. One, found in Kent and held by the Harrison Institute, is sometimes described as being 8000 years old. I checked with the institute: it appears that some people had confused BC (before Christ) with BP (before present). The institute tells me it has been carbon-dated at around 9760 years old. The other, a single tooth, was found in a Neolithic tomb at Hazleton in Gloucestershire, which is some 5700 years old. In correspondence with myself and the biologist Clive Hambler, Robert Hedges, one of the archaeologists who analysed the contents of the burial site, explains that the tooth itself is undated and the notion that it originated at the same time as the tomb is “an unsupported possibility only”. It is possible that it was found and carried into the tomb by Neolithic people. If horses had survived that long in Britain, one would expect to see a good deal more fossil evidence, before they returned in domesticated form, later in the Neolithic.
6. Derek Yalden, 1999. The History of British Mammals. T and AD Poyser, London.
7. R. Coard and A. T. Chamberlain, April 1999. The nature and timing of faunal change in the British Isles across the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. The Holocene vol. 9 no. 3 372-376. doi: 10.1191/095968399672435
8. The Mammal Society, 2011. http://www.mammal.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25...
9. Robert S. Sommer et al, 2011. Holocene survival of the wild horse in Europe: a matter of open landscape? Journal of Quaternary Science, Vol 26, No 8, pp 805–812. doi: 10.1002/jqs.1509
10. Alces alces
11. The Mammal Society, 2011. http://www.mammal.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25...
12. Hambler and Canney argue that rewilding protects a greater number of threatened species than any other approach. Clive Hambler and Susan M. Canney, 2013 (read in galley proof). Conservation. 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press.
13. John Lawton, 2010. Making Space for Nature: A review of England’s Wildlife Sites and Ecological Network. DEFRA. http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/biodiversity/documents/201009spa...
14. Clive Hambler, Peter A. Henderson and Martin R. Speight, 2011. Extinction rates, extinction-prone habitats, and indicator groups in Britain and at larger scales. Biological Conservation Vol 144, pp713–721. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2010.09.004

Continuous looping film footage forever repeats a fractured moment in my digital memory. Like the Japanese Haiku, fleeting moments are minimally and quietly observed in a series of sometimes only three to four select shots. These film sequences range between 5 and 45 seconds in length and reference a contemporary internet meme the ‘Gif’ in their editing.

This excerpt is from a series, shot in Scandinavia during an artist residency. The voids of populous and encroaching wilderness, characteristic of the Nordic landscape, prompts a potential rupture of confines and generates an exchange between contrary territories.  

The content of my films are neither staged nor directed, merely perceived en plein air, from spontaneous happenings I encounter. In this excerpt, time and space are foreshortened and juxtaposed to create a cyclical interplay between one and the same event: a young girl spontaneously performs around a tree outside her block of flats in Stockholm, ignorant of a young deer’s presence a few feet beyond the fence.

These acute intimate works investigate a merging of digital and organic memory, but specifically how we recall present time and event in an epoch of mass visual documentation, blogging culture and social media.


Verity Birt is a London-based artist, currently studying for her Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
www.veritybirt.co.uk

Gliding thinly over wet glass, hardly grazing the pristine polished surface – rushing through still winds towards Ailsa Craig, rapidly rising in the distance. Perched aboard this ex-military boat heading out from Campbeltown with the entertaining and knowledgeable Mike of Mull of Kintyre tours is a strangely serene experience, with the sea this glassily calm. The island itself, ten miles off the west coast of mainland Scotland, was once home to pirates, then a haven to Catholics in the 16th century, and now, following the eradication of the island's imported rat population, it's a bird sanctuary of some significance. Owned by the 8th Marquess of Ailsa, and leased to the RSPB until 2050, the island has actually been up for sale for some time – and is currently available for just £1.5million...

As our boat slows, a line of white is etched out aft for a frothing moment, then gently wiped away. Afore, columns of birds clamour and rise and swoop. Manx Shearwaters skim the flat sea's surface; cormorants dry themselves on the low rocks; guillemots hurl themselves through the air in endearingly ungainly fashion; and softly yellow-headed gannets (36,000 pairs of them) squabble and squawk and circle. In the water, a pair of seals lounge apart like big wet dogs; and a trio of porpoises arch across our eyeline. Tiny clown-beaked puffins launch darting raid missions – spokes emitted from the island centre and out into the Firth of Clyde. One skitters low across the boat, its beak crammed with fish, like the silver-tipped moustache of a retired and red-faced colonel.



Ailsa Craig may be one of the most famous bird sanctuaries in the United Kingdom, but throughout our time on Kintyre, the diversity of the birdlife is astonishing. We're staying in The Ferryman's Cottage, a Landmark Trust property right on the shore at Saddell on the east coast of the peninsula. All around are wagtails and skylarks; swallows and house martins darting round the house; ringed plover standing solitary and serene. Every day brings new treats: rock pipits zipping amongst the boulders; sandpipers trotting along the shingle; oyster catchers shouting out their territories, red-beaked and plumply comic. Each day, too, the daily heron: “first the shadow, then the bird”.
 

This really is one of the most beautiful places you could
imagine.

Most exciting perhaps is the resident otter. He's a regular fixture in the cottage's visitors book, described by sundry previous occupants cavorting on the rocks, playing the fool, or simply lazing in the sun. Hollowed-out sea-urchins lying on the shore are a tell-tale sign, and we spot the little fellow himself on most days of our stay – lolling about in the sheltered cove.

In the bright summer sun, this really is one of the most beautiful places you could imagine. Water clear and cold as crystal, framed by a gently curving arc of scrabbly shore. Pebbles and lichen-spattered rocks give way to grass and ancient woodland, a neatly mown lawn, and brightly flowering hedgerow. The cottage itself is a solid, white-painted little house, built around 1930, and was once home, as the name suggests, to the local ferryman, whose job it was to offload provisions from the coastal steamers. But this was some 30 years after nearby Campbeltown peaked as the wealthiest town in the country, its fortunes built on whisky and shipping. Then the war came.



Nearby, along the lane, stand the Victorian-era Shore Cottage and the 16th century tower house of Saddell Castle. Completed around 1512 by David Hamilton, Bishop of Argyll, this is the origin of the estate. Sacked by the Earl of Sussex , left in ruins for a hundred years, then renovated by various earls, it's a strange sight. And although Antony Gormley once threw a party here, it's easy to see why Colonel Donald Campbell gave up on the castle and built instead the grandly Classical Saddell House just down the road.
 

Rescued buildings do not become museums, to be peered at over a rope.

All of these properties are now owned by the Landmark Trust, purchased from their previous owners, Colonel and Mrs Moreton, in 1975. They've since been renovated and given a new lease of life as holiday lets. This is largely the pattern adopted by the Trust, which was founded in 1965 by banker and Conservative politician Sir John Smith and his wife, Lady Smith. The purpose of the trust is to rescue historic buildings of historic or architectural interest that would otherwise fall into disrepair, renovate them to exacting standards using local crafts people, equip them with all mod cons (power showers, branded soap, Le Creuset pots) and then rent them out. The idea is that the rescued buildings “do not become museums, to be peered at over a rope” but living places, to be inhabited and enjoyed.

Today, under new director Dr Anna Keay, formerly of English Heritage, the trust has some 190 properties, primarily in England, Scotland and Wales, but also in France, Italy and the United States. These range from a Lundy Island lighthouse to a converted train station in Staffordhire, an ornate Lincolnshire water tower to a Huguenot house in Spitalfields, and cottages and a carpenter's shop in Cornwall.



It may sound trite, but each of these varied venues comes with an acute sense of its own place – within the environment and within history. Meticulously researched folders introduce visitors to the unique histories of each property, whilst small libraries are packed with place-relevant books and leaflets. Our shelves are laden with such gems as the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain, Tarka the Otter, George Hendry's surprisingly fascinating Midges of Scotland, and Eddie Macguire's Birds of Machrihanish. Eddie is the Warden at the Machrihanish Seabird and Wildlife Observatory– a short drive away, and an amazing place to see rare visitors such as Sabine's Gull through high-powered telescopes and binoculars. Eddie is a fascinating man, and the observatory is a wonderful place. The sight of sundry gannets repeatedly plummeting into the ocean is one that will stay with me for some time.
 

It is at the edges that something approaching the 'natural' can begin to thrive.

There's a strange contrast between the management of the property, with its sensitive attunement to place, and the management of much of the woodland of Kintyre. Immediately adjacent to the cottage is ancient, mixed woodland, one of the key reasons for the peninsula's diverse range of birdlife. But up in the hills inland it's a different story, and what look like beautiful woods on my OS Explorer Map are in fact scrupulously managed plantations – row upon row of pine trees, planted so close together as to block out the light, making it all but impossible for anything to grow within their murky midst. The result of Forestry Commission Scotland's policy of afforestation is a monoculture that dominates the landscape. According to a case study on forestry.gov.uk, the “manager’s objective is to maximise returns by producing large volumes of sawtimber for the market”. And so, periodic patches are felled, leaving vast swathes of broken stumps and scarring across the landscape.

It is at the edges of these intensive timber-production areas that nature – or something approaching the 'natural'– can actually begin to thrive. Ferns and foxgloves encircle each commercial plantation, and my hot walk through the woods is punctuated by yellow flag iris – like elegantly rotting daffodils – beautiful heath-spotted orchids, and bird's-foot trefoil. It's also here that I'm mobbed and pursued by a gang of hungry horse flies. Less nice.

Returning, tired, to the Ferryman's Cottage, every evening is quiet and perfect: lazing side by side in striped deckchairs on the shingle, as the midges begin to circle. The dusk descends lightly, and the water strokes the sand, as it did for the ferryman and the bishop, and now for the otter, and for us.



Tom was staying at the Ferryman's Cottage, Saddell.
www.landmarktrust.org.uk

Image credits: 1-3 © Dr Crystal Bennes; 4 © The Landmark Trust

An elegantly dilapidated Anglican chapel provides a sumptuous centrepiece for Biped's Monitor – a mixture of immersive theatre, performance art, music and dance conceived by multi-disciplinary collective Arbonauts and taking place every evening this week inside Nunhead Cemetery in south London. Reprised after its sell-out run at the same location in 2012, the project takes as its starting point Italo Calvino's Il Barone Rampante, or The Baron in the Trees– a tale of a young boy who, in a fit of rebellion against his sister Battista, climbs up into the trees and refuses ever to come down again. With its history of formal arrangement, then neglect and now semi-management, and resulting diversity of tree species (ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, even a formal Victorian avenue of limes) the beautiful Nunhead Cemetery is a perfect site for the performance to take place.

The evening begins before dusk, and we process one by one up the long, straight avenue towards the grand ruin of a chapel, long since roofless due to arson. On either side stand crumbling memorials (a headless and handless Anne-Marie looms large) and by them, rows of white-robed acolytes chanting in haunting, semi-avian tones.

From here, we're left to explore at our own pace, wandering amongst the beauty of the cemetery – tired and broken headstones, dense with overgrowing foliage; purple-flowering dead nettles; choruses of crows caw-cawing in the distance. In amongst it all, the performers drift and bustle. The young baron himself cavorts in languid fashion inside a teardrop framework, suspended from the branches. A white-clad girl leaps up to join him. Another, more bird-like, hurries up and down the pathways, tutting and chirruping, pausing only to writhe gently on a nearby swing to the soft backing of the choir.
 

As the sky drifts to darkness, cavorting sisters don funnel-like, beaky structures.

 
Elsewhere, lank-haired flunkies marshal proceedings – ushering small groups of visitors into a large white-box, temporarily trapped inside and leered at by those next in line. Perching for a moment on a tombstone some time later, I pick up one of the many old books dotted around inside the cemetery. “'What would you like to do now, Milly?' inquired Amy Long of her little visitor.” is as far as I get, before I'm moved on unceremoniously by a pair of hunched and grunting henchmen.
 
A horn sounds to summon us back to the chapel, and we funnel inside as violins strike up. A steeply angled banqueting table forms the focal point, around which the baron's sisters wail and warble, clad in sleepily ethereal white undergarments, structural bustles limiting every movement. Places are set simply with cross-sections of wood; cutlery goes flying as the flunkies scrabble around or stand aloof. Floating choral music is punctuated by the scrape of slipper on stone.

Then the tale is told, with gradually increasing lunacy, of a baron making “speeches in defence of birds”. Then, “sometimes the squirrels would carry off a letter of the alphabet”. Here, that hardly feels surprising. Up above, the open-air chapel wears its own crown of wispy-threaded buddleja. As the sky drifts to darkness, the cavorting sisters don strange masks – long, funnel-like, beaky structures – rise, and process back down the avenue. The bipeds have fused, reality reigned in by “progressively thinner and less palpable threads”, and by nightfall, they've disappeared. Now it's our turn.



Biped's Monitor is taking place at Nunhead Cemetery until 4th August 2013.
arbonauts.org

NATIVE

Cities including London, New York, Paris, Rome, Istanbul and Berlin have all been the subject of Maslen & Mehra’s experimental photographs. Heavily built-up urban landscapes are photographed in the early hours, when they are devoid of human activity. The artists take this fleeting opportunity to re-introduce native species into the picture in the form of mirrored sculptures. Roe Deer appear to graze in Canary Wharf, a financial district of London; an American Eagle takes flight in Times Square, New York, capturing a skyscraper and brilliant neon on its mirrored wing.

Eagle Owl - Reichstag - Berlin

Roe Deer - Docklands - London

American Eagle - Times Square - New York

Mirrored

For the Mirrored series, Maslen & Mehra appropriate imagery of people, whose silhouettes are then made into mirrored sculptures. By placing them into the landscape and photographing them in this new context, Maslen & Mehra forge an unusual synthesis at first sight: the juxtaposition of highly urban people and wide-open spaces. The result of these forced symbioses raises issues of the human existence and alludes to the impermanence and fragility of mankind.

Hells Gate Death Valley

Highway 190 Death Valley

Inferno Crater Waimangu New Zealand

Salt Creek Death Valley

 
Working in a diverse, imaginative and experimental graphic language, Maslen & Mehras' collaborative practice engages in dialogues which compare, contrast and juxtapose the natural and human world in which we live. Works by MASLEN & MEHRA are included in collections such as Tattinger Switzerland, Art Es Collecion Madrid, and the Altered Landscape Collection, Nevada Museum of Art which includes artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Burtynsky, and Fandra Chang. Solo exhibitions have been staged in New York, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Dubai, Istanbul, Sydney and Berlin. A monograph titled MIRRORED was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg with support from Arts Council England with texts by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith and Eugen Blume.
http://www.voidgallery.com/

Since 2001, Cape Farewell has collaborated with the world’s leading climate scientists and some of its most influential artists to instigate a cultural response to climate change. Cape Farewell employs the notion of ‘expedition’ – arctic, island, urban and conceptual – to interrogate the scientific, social and economic realities that have led to climate disruption. Each expedition inspires the creation of artworks that are motivators for change.

This year's expedition set sail around Shetland, Orkney and Fair Isle, Scotland’s most northerly islands. 27 leading artists and scientists explored technologies, projects and practices supporting the resilience of Scotland’s island communities and their ecologies and cultures.

Yasmine Ostendorf, a city girl from Amsterdam, had never sailed before she joined the Cape Farewell team. Here is her personal diary from her week at sea.


 

Day 1 – Last Day on Land

I arrive in Scalloway, on the west side of Shetland. Apparently our boat for the next ten days, a 113 year-old ex-herring-drifter called The Swan, hasn’t arrived yet. It is still sailing with Cape Farewell's first group of artists and scientists around Orkney, where they're learning about using waves as a form of renewable energy. Though the absence of the boat implies less time at sea for us, I quite enjoy that we just have to wait. You can’t influence the boat's arrival; so you have to immerse yourself in the fact that you can’t do anything about it. I’ve gotten very used to waiting and biding my time as I lived in Dar el Salaam for a while – there, you're lucky if your dala dala shows up at all. Waiting time is perfect for non-utilitarian thinking and staring. Two things I feel we underestimate in life.
 

This is the kind of landscape that makes you want to overthink your life.

So I stare at the water, trying to spot the first contours of a sail. The Shetland landscape is different from anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s rough, misty, eerie and gloomy. It makes me feel melancholic. It’s the kind of landscape that makes you want to overthink your life. I spot David Buckland on a rock, director of Cape Farewell, doing the same: staring.

Then I realise I’m wrong – I have seen this image before. It’s like I’m standing in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, and David is the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog: “His hair caught in a wind, the wanderer gazes out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog.”




 

Day 2 – The Impossible

The Swan has arrived, but this doesn’t mean we immediately set sail. The wind is causing its own challenges.

In our (my) daily city life I never make decisions based on the elements. “Sorry! Can’t come to the office today, its raining!” is generally not accepted as a great argument. In the city we don’t really have such a thing as weather, but when it comes to boats it's a very different matter. All your decisions are based on the elements. The tide, the wind, storms, rain: they will all massively affect your journey, and if you don’t take them into account they could kill/severely damage you. This is the reason we don’t sail to Foula, the island we were supposed to go to. It's a big disappointment for some people but inflexibility and boats have proven to be a dangerous combination.
 

Inflexibility and boats have proven to be a dangerous combination.
 

The 1983 film Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog tells the (true) story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the rainforest. Some people wish for a little house in the countryside, but not Fitzcarraldo; Fitzcarraldo dreams big. With his crew he travels through the Amazon rainforest by boat, searching for a territory rich in rubber that will finance the opera and realise his dream. The area seems impossible to reach over the water but persistent as Fitzcarraldo is, he comes up with the magnificent idea to haul the enormous steamship over a steep hill in order to access the territory.

Interestingly, as the documentary Burden of Dreams by Les Blank shows, Herzog clearly identified extremely strongly with his main character. In making the film, Herzog insisted that the ship should really be hauled over the hill. No special effects. Nothing, it seems, is too grand when it comes to boats and dreams.





 

Day 3 – Who is our Hercules?

Eventually we set sail, and I've never felt so clumsy. The boat vocabulary is completely new for me (mizzen? halliards? jib?) and I keep on grabbing the wrong ropes. At first I felt really proud when hauling the main sails, until I realised the two strong men behind me were actually doing all the work. If you left me on this boat I probably wouldn’t survive a week. I think about my friends in Amsterdam and how useful they would be if we were to end up on a ship at sea (working in the area of climate change I think a lot about disasters related to rising sea levels). We know when is the best time of the day to put something on Facebook to have a maximum amount of ‘likes’ but we don’t know how to make fire, hoist sails and would probably have trouble simply killing a fish.

 

Though we're with a diverse group of people, I doubt we'd survive a voyage to the end of the world.

Another film pops up in my head: Jason and the Argonauts, a 1963 film by Don Chaffey with amazing visual effects by Ray Harryhausen. In order to voyage to the end of the world (Colchis) to find the Golden Fleece, Jason must carefully choose the crew for his boat. He selects them based on their amazing qualities and skills. Some are great at throwing, some are smart, and most of them are very strong. Together they can conquer the seas.

I think about our boat, our crew on The Swan and our different qualities. Though we are with a very diverse group of people – including poets, artists, writers and scientists – I doubt if we would survive the voyage to the end of the world. I bet no one could push that boulder out of the way like Hercules did for Jason. Could we shoot the angry Titan with arrow and bow? Who is our Hercules on board The Swan, and what would my contribution be, knowing I’m no good at hoisting sails? Plus, now my iPhone is out of battery...

Day 4 – Shower vs Internet

The battery of my phone has been dead for about three days now, which is a personal record. It feels liberating, but also wrong. I have a strong desire to Google (on my phone?) whether there's internet in Unst, the next harbour where we'll arrive. But quite quickly I realise this is a ridiculous thought. Just the fact that I feel like a pirate because I’m on a ship doesn’t mean that islands in Great Britain don’t have internet any more.

The rumour goes that the harbour of Unst has SHOWERS.

 

The problem with one person taking a shower is that then everyone needs one.

Though I had a secret shower in an empty hotel room in Scalloway (I was feeling very adventurous because this is an expedition after all!), I’m now desperate for a fresh one. The problem with one person taking a shower is that then everyone needs a shower because you can smell the difference. At least now we all smell bad. The shower rumour catalyses a conversation about having to choose between a hot shower or using the internet. In the short term the decision seems obvious (shower), but what if you had to choose for the rest of your life?

Both seem like modern necessities, but on the boat have turned into luxuries. I would have to give up discussing the gossip in Amsterdam over Skype with my friends and the Youtube parties where everyone tries to impress each other by playing the most obscure videos – both things I cherish very much. And what about my Wikipedia obsession? I tell myself a cold shower is good for the blood circulation.

At the end of the day, when we all had both showers and access to internet we sit around the table and poet Sabrina Mahfouz shares her work inspired by the dilemma. I couldn’t have said it better.





 

Day 5 – Flapping Mackerel

Today we caught three mackerels. Tam tried heroically to kill them by hitting them on the head. It looked very dramatic but was very ineffective. They kept on flapping. Their saviour was shipmate Ailish who had a more practical approach, and, with two fingers, elegantly pulled out their gills. I was in sheer shock. Suddenly there was blood and the fish still had spasms. “That’s just the muscles,” Ailish comforted me. I love eating mackerel – especially with mayonnaise on a sandwich – but after this incident I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy it quite the same way ever again.

In the afternoon we attended a lecture at the Marine Centre, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands. Several experts informed us about the fishing industry in Shetland. I never quite realised how big this industry was, and how famous Shetland is for fishing. Apparently all the MSC certified scallops and crab come from Shetland and it's also the second most important fishing port in the UK. Seafood is unsurprisingly the most important industry on the island, worth more than £300 million. It's even more important because the land alone is insufficient to support the island's population. Hence the saying that an Orcadian is a farmer with a boat, and a Shetlander is a sailor with a croft.
 

An Orcadian is a farmer with a boat, and a Shetlander is a sailor with a croft.

The 2005 documentary Our Daily Bread presents a very clinical and actually quite aesthetic portrait of modern food production and its technological efficiencies. It’s a complete ‘no judgement’ approach, which is very refreshing: there are no comments, no music, no moralistic voice-over explaining how bad it all is; just a camera showing the clinical reality of where our food comes from. No judgement indeed, but it made me want to stop eating at all.   

Sabrina lives with the ethics to only eat what you could kill yourself. She reckons she could kill chicken and fish, but she couldn’t kill a cow. Then again, we discuss, you can live of killing one cow for a long time, and for the same amount of meat from a cow you have to kill lots of chicken or fish. That seems a bit unfair? Is it better to kill one cow or to kill 20 chickens?

Towards the end of the day a dead whale is reported to the skipper. It's big and white and dead, with birds sitting on his back. I feel sad looking at it, but I also wonder if we could eat him. It would save so many cows.




 

Day 6 – Seasick Stories

For the past five days now, I've been surrounded by the same group of people in a small space. Skipper Richard optimistically tells me that a real estate agent would call it a cosy and compact living space. Amazingly, I’m not feeling irritated by anyone in the group, but I do notice I’m becoming quieter than I usually am. This is because our main activity in the evenings is storytelling (and I don’t have a lot of stories just yet). We hear stories about being lost at sea because of a Green Peace campaign (Jens); stories about a flying pan of curry on a sinking ship (Ruth); and stories about puppies being used as bait for whales in Greenland (David). I suppose the sea always comes with stories. Either you're experiencing your own sea adventure, or you're listening to the sea stories of others.

 

Charles Edward Smith's story shows the great importance of creative expression.

My first sea story is a very common one, as yesterday I was terribly seasick. I puked over the railing of the boat about eight times and I was so cold I went back to my berth and shivered for 20 minutes. I was desperate for distraction and put on my headphones. I brought my iShuffle to sea as this is the smallest device I own to listen to music and, of course, I was trying to travel light. I once heard a famous blogger saying you should reveal the most embarrassing things about yourself on your blog because that’s when you get most followers. I don’t share this mission in life, but will share with you that my iShuffle is filled up with very bad music, varying from nineties house to a selection of the cheesiest of Les Plus Belles Chanson Francaises (“pour un flirt, avec toi! Lalalalala…”). The great thing with the iShuffle is that it always has a surprise for you, so while I was shivering in my berth, throwing up in a paper bag, suddenly there was Scott McKenzie reminding me I should wear flowers in my hair when I go to San Francisco.

I started singing along, distracting myself, visualising myself dancing in psychedelic clothes in the Sixties and it was unbelievable how the song immediately took me to San Francisco, far away from cold and puke.

Earlier this week Ursula was telling me about a book called In the Deep of the Sea, which she came across in the archives of the Shetland Museum in Lerwick. It’s a diary from Charles Edward Smith, a sailor on a whaling and sealing voyage between Greenland and Canada in 1877. They got stuck in the ice for months but a few of them survived on hardly any food. He wrote the diary every day, though they were freezing and dying from hunger. What kept him sane was the writing. To me that shows the great importance of creative expression. When things get tense, we have the power of art.






 

Day 7 – A Year Alone

We are getting towards the end of our journey and as a goodbye gift the sun starts shining for the first time this week. Though I’m still cold, as my clothes never really dried, the impact of seeing the sun is amazing. For most of the week I experienced the sea as something intimidating. It comes with overwhelming force, it’s wild and untamed and the waves come so high that they can easily bash you against the rocks. But with the sun shining, the colour of the sea has changed from black to dark blue, and looks at me innocently with her soothing little waves.

After spending a week at sea I start to get nervous about getting back to the city. Like an old grandma who’s never been to the city, I imagine London as this diabolical place where thousands of people are running around, shouting in their phones, bumping the horns of their cars, and everyone is too busy to even register you. Though I’ve been with a group of people almost non-stop this week, being at sea has made me feel isolated. Away from everything. And against my expectations, that felt really good.
 

It's a fantastic feeling to be part of a community, to need each other when pulling ropes.

Last year I read Thoreau’s Walden and on our last sail to Lerwick I contemplate if maybe now is the time to spend a year alone. A year away from everything and everyone, just me and nature.

In Walden Thoreau describes his immersion into nature, with the goal of improving his understanding of society. Only by stepping back, living simply, alone and self-sufficient, can you really find personal introspection, independence and spiritual discovery. I am happy in this remote bubble at sea and would like to stay in it. Maybe now is the time, now that I’ve renewed my love and empathy for nature, something that I have previously forgotten about because of my love affair with city life.

Then I think about the amazing stories, the jokes, the discussions, the caring, the singing and the learning of this last week and realise I’m not ready for a year alone. What I want is quite the opposite of that. Much more than being a week outside of the city and this being an expedition about the sea, this was a social experiment and an expedition through my own psyche. I learned about being vulnerable and dependant on others. It's a fantastic feeling to be part of a community, and to need each other when pulling ropes. The feeling that there is always someone there to back you.

Above all is the realisation that even the strongest person in the world cannot hoist their sail alone.




Yasmine Ostendorf is Programme manager for Cape Farewell, an international not-for-profit programme that instigates cultural responses to climate change.
www.capefarewell.com

You can read the Cape Farewell blog here: www.capefarewell.com/2013expedition

Spiderwort
Tradescantia species
Spiderwort Family

My meetings with spiderwort in several places have always been on sandy soils. I’m always attracted to the threepetaled blue flowers and spidery leaves. Among the associated wildflowers, I’ve seen yucca, sego lily, scarlet globe mallow, rush pink, salsify, Rocky Mountain beeplant, and evening primrose.

For Quick Recognition. Spiderwort flowers group where leaves attach to the stem. They consist of three greenish sepals and three petals that are usually blue but may also be pink, purple, and rarely, white. Six stamens, yellow-tipped in the photograph and hairy, surround a spindly pistil. Linear leaves, essentially parallel-sided, appear folded lengthwise.

Where and When Found. You find spiderwort in woods as well as in such open sites as grasslands, roadsides, and railroad embankments. It lives in southern Canada and in all the lower 48 states except Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada. Spiderwort blossoms from April to September.

Of Note. Spiderwort is also known as wandering Jew. “Spider” refers to the spidery leaves and “wort” is from the Old English wyrt meaning plant or root.

Tradescantia (trad-uh-SCANT-shuh) is named for John Tradescant, who lived during the 1600s and was the father of a father-son team of gardeners for Charles the First of England.
 

Triple Verse
Triplet blue petals
backdrop six golden stamens,
glee in sets of three.

Alan M. Cvancara has nurtured a passion for wildflowers for more than 40 years. Cvancara is a retired geology professor and the author of 11 nature books: Edible Wild Plants and Herbs, A Field Manual for the Amateur Geologist, Sleuthing Fossils, Bare Bones Geology, Designs of Nature, Canoe Tripping and Life, Exploring Nature in Winter, Sleuthing Fossils, At the Water´s Edge and Showy Wildflowers of Casper and Muddy Mountains, Wyoming. He and his wife have co-authored Windows Into Legacy, a poetry-photography book. Cvancara is also an artistic photographer.

Buy Wildflower Personalities through Xlibris

Yellow Pond Lily, Nuphar lutea, Water Lily. 

I first faced yellow pond lily one June in Yellowstone National Park’s tiny Isa Lake, near the Continental Divide east of Old Faithful. Stripped of boots and socks, I waded with eagerness for a close-up photograph of the globe-like blossom. I punched off several shots before pausing to peer into the water. Seeing several 6-inch leeches undulating toward me was enough call to scamper from the lake, and absorb the saffron beauty from a leech-less vantage.

For Quick Recognition. Usually six petal-like sepals make up the most obvious parts of the yellow flowers, 2 to 4 inches across. These sepals, often tinged with green or red, partly conceal numerous stamen-like petals as do reddish-purple stamens. The stamens are not visible in the photograph. Capping the obscured petals and stamens is a yellow disk-like pistil. Egg-shaped to heart-shaped leaves float on the water’s surface.

Battery charging, with friend. 

Where and When Found. Look for yellow pond lily in ponds, at margins of lakes, and in quiet streams. It occurs from Alaska and the Northwest Territories south to British Columbia, east to Newfoundland, south to Maryland, and west to Idaho. This water lily blossoms during May to September.k.

Of Note. Nuphar (NEW-far) lutea (lew-TEE-uh) also has been named Nuphar variegata (or variegatum) and Nuphar polysepalum. Nuphar is from the Arabic name for pond lily and lutea is from the Latin luteus, “golden yellow.” Other names for yellow pond lily are yellow water lily, Indian pond lily, bullhead lily, cow lily, and spatterdock.

ALAN CVANCARA has nurtured a passion for wildflowers for more than 40 years. Cvancara is a retired geology professor and the author of 11 nature books: Edible Wild Plants and Herbs, A Field Manual for the Amateur Geologist, Sleuthing Fossils, Bare Bones Geology, Designs of Nature, Canoe Tripping and Life, Exploring Nature in Winter, Sleuthing Fossils, At the Water´s Edge and Showy Wildflowers of Casper and Muddy Mountains, Wyoming. He and his wife have co-authored Windows Into Legacy, a poetry-photography book. Cvancara is also an artistic photographer.

Buy Wildflower Personalities through Xlibris.

Cover photo by Nancy Hill.

The northern temperate forest gives way to the trees of the boreal forest.

In Northern Ontario the landscape can seem like the left over wreckage of one pre-historic cataclysm after another. Comet impacts, mountain and cliff forming movements of earth, thousands of years of crushing and scraping glaciation, and torrential flooding events when those ice sheets melted, have formed an environment at once brutal and comforting.

The Algoma Central Railway (ACR) rocks and lurches through one such tract of land that is just about as close to wilderness as this planet gets anymore. It leaves Sault Ste. Marie on the St. Mary’s River, between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and heads north by northwest to Agawa Bay on Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes.

Agawa Bay is one of those places that reliably emanates a heighten reality. Like many areas on Superior, it seems to possess a consciousness of its own, a genius loci. Birds can behave fearlessly there, walking down paths in front of you like temple monkeys, dancing in front of you and displaying their fanned tails like miniature peacocks.

The Agawa River mouth, where it quietly flows into the lake, gives little hint of its tumultuous course. A few kilometers away, on rock faces coming right out of the bay, are red petroglyphs that have not been washed off by centuries of waves, sun and winter weather. A horned creature with a dragon-like back and tail seems to be the very spirit of Gitchigoomie, the name of the lake in the Chippewa language.

Agawa River.

The train turns away from the bay and heads up towards the Agawa Canyon on its 296 mile trek to Hearst, Ontario. The canyon is the last refuge of the colourfully deciduous sugar maple. This is the northern edge of the northeastern temperate forest. At its southern edge in the Carolinas and Northern Florida it grows yellow pine, tulip poplar and gum trees. Up here it grows not only sugar maples but white and red pine, jack pine and black oak mixed in with increasing amounts of paper birch, poplar and black spruce.

At the end of line, Hearst is well into the boreal forest, and little notion of the south remains. It is too cold for all pines except some scrawny jack pines, but trembling aspen, poplars, black spruce, balsam fir and tamarack still thrive. Beavers and their dams can be seen everywhere and in the late spring and summer an infinity of insects cloud the air. Small songbirds come from as far away as South America to lay their eggs here and feast on the mosquitoes and black flies.

There would be no more landscape paintings from this country that aped Constable or Corot.

The railroad was finished in 1914 to bring lumber and ore down to the “Soo”, and Sault Ste. Marie still has steel mills and pulp and paper mills that almost miraculously have not relocated to China or Brazil. Right from the beginning the train was also used by people wanting to experience wilderness, and by painters, specifically the Group of Seven, wanting to capture the wild, northern landscape.

The post-impressionist landscape paintings of those artists and the canvases of others at the time, especially Tom Thompson, who died young in 1917, have had a lasting impact on the central Canadian psyche. From this time forward there would be no more landscape paintings from this country that aped Constable or Corot.

Montreal River, scene of The Solemn Land, by J.E.H.MacDonald.

Vibrant colour was now the Canadian birthright and all terrain less than a day’s drive from the populous south would become “cottage country.” Georgian Bay, Muskoka, Haliburton and Kawartha would be the summer places for any child of means, thanks, at least partly, to these painters. Reproductions of their paintings were hung in libraries and high school hallways. They were printed on textbooks, calendars and day planners.

By the late 50’s and 60’s a new generation of artists born at the height of the Northern Landscape craze were set to take over. They viewed all these pine trees very skeptically. They went to live in New York and were witness to Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. When and if they returned they were not about to take the Algoma Central Railway, and, if they did, certainly not about to take oil paints or brushes.

Among these was Michael Snow who, with his wife, the painter Joyce Wieland, did return to Toronto in the early 70’s. Snow’s “Walking Woman” works were pop-inspired images that he repeated and reworked over and over. He also made films and photographs and exhibited work at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and the Centre Pompidou. Perhaps his most popular piece is a sculpture of a flock of geese that have been unsuccessfully trying to fly out of the Eaton’s Centre, an indoor shopping mall in downtown Toronto, ever since it was built.

At mile 207 it says, “Height of Land – All water from this point northward now flows into James or Hudson Bay far to the north.”

In 1977, Snow produced an exhibition of photographs taken in the Group of Seven room at the National Gallery in Ottawa. This was the old National Gallery. It was a converted office building and the dreary, dysfunctional product of a committee of stymied and tortured imaginations.

Snow made all the photographs blurry. He said he wanted to make the paint fluid again and blend the colours together. He had originally wanted to do this in the Matisse room of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but ended up doing it in Ottawa. Perhaps because of Matisse and the fact that it was first exhibited in France, he called it “Plus Tard.”

It may be too that his intentions were more subconscious and Oedipal. It’s all fine and good to want to blur paint, that long ago dried, but it’s hard not to see a new generation taking the piss out of an older one. For someone born in 1929, these painting had been the altar of high art in this country forever. For a nation whose intelligentsia were constantly trying to come to terms with a collective self-identity, these had finally become real home-grown art. By the ‘70s they were also low hanging fruit for multi-media artists.

Riding on the platform between the passenger and the baggage car on the ACR this September, I unexpectedly found myself thinking about “Plus Tard.” Even though the train only gets up to speeds of about 35 mph (everything on this trip is in miles), the scenery seems to flash by.

Plus Tard, By Michael Snow. From 'The Solemn Land.'

You are given a modest information sheet when you buy your ticket that explains what you will be seeing at various mileposts. If you are looking at it instead of the scenery you will be told, “View at right of Mileage 84 into Batchewana River Valley.” At mile 207 it says, “Height of Land – All water from this point northward now flows into James or Hudson Bay far to the north.”

To take advantage of all the photographic opportunities, it is necessary to ride on the platform between the passenger and the baggage car. There is a sign prohibiting this but luckily it is not enforced and no one seems to mind you holding yourself out as far from the train as you can, intently staring through the viewfinder of your camera.

But the speed of the car still makes most of the pictures blurry in the foreground. Digital cameras are also confused by the movement of the train, not sure what light level to adjust to, or what to focus on. As a result most of my pictures were as experimental looking Michael Snow’s 1977 exhibition. Then I got thinking that maybe Snow had been on that train and that he was simply trying to give the same effect in the exhibition gallery. Or, I thought that maybe he had subconsciously picked up on all those generations that had boarded the train and experienced not only blurred photographs but a blurred visual memory of that terrain. Capturing movement was not something the Group of Seven tried with their painting, but they must have marveled at the rush of scenery at 35 mph back in 1916. I certainly did 97 years later.

Plus Tard, by Michael Snow. From 'West Wind" by Tom Thompson.

GENE THRENDYLE is a professional gardener who has been planning, building and maintaining private and public gardens in Toronto for overr 2 decades. He was a participant, consultant and in charge of maintaining the Artists’ Gardens at Harbourfront from 1998-2008. Gene is also an artist and has exhibited work and been involved in the arts in Toronto for over 20 years. He has featured in solo or group shows in Larh, Germany in 1989, Talinn, Estonia in 1991, St. Petersburg, Russia in 1993, Memorial University, St. Johns in 1992, Santiago, Chile in 2002, Glendon College, York University in 2003, Wade Project, Trinity Bellwoods Park in 2004, and York Quay Gallery, Harbourfront in 2008.

http://genedigs.com

Photographs by Gene Threndyle, ©2013. 

Agawa Bay, north shore of Lake Superior, late September, 2013.

The characters in the play

1) Thel, a young, diaphanous shade of a girl—not even far enough along to be a virgin.
2) A highly articulate river.
3) A cheerful, philosophically shallow cloud.

As the play opens, we see Thel standing on the bank of a river. A mindless cloud floats overhead.

CLOUD:  Hi, Thel, still deciding whether or not to get real?

THEL:  I am not like thee, little Cloud, because I can smell the sweetest flowers but still feed not these selfsame flowers. 

CLOUD:  Well, I don’t feed them either.

THEL:  Yes you do, you rain upon them bright watery nourishment by which they flourish and multiply.

CLOUD (thinking about it):  Oh, yeh, right. But then I’m gone. Used up.

THEL (rather impatiently):  But then you reform and appear again as another shape! Don’t you remember?

CLOUD (happily):  Yes, of course! I’d forgotten that’s how it works. But you see, I only hold memory enough for one shape at a time. When I’ve become a new cloud, then I have to start over with a brand new memory!  The one I have now is only twenty-five minutes old!

THEL:  But if I become a mortal woman, I will probably start alright…

CLOUD:  Do it! You’ll be beautiful! You’ll be a beautiful baby! You’ll be a beautiful teenager!  You’ll be a beautiful woman!  You’ll be a beautiful…well…matron!

THEL (continuing):  …But then I will also come to an end. I will not ever acquire another shape and another and another, the way you do.

She moves closer to the river and dips her right foot in the icy water.

RIVER: That tickles.

THEL (jumping back):  It does?

RIVER (casually):  Oh yes. A little. It was sort of nice.

THEL  You never stand still.

RIVER:  No. Rivers flow.

THEL:  Through time?

RIVER:  You can’t step into the same me twice!

THEL:  But I want to remain exactly as I am—for always I want to be the same me for eternity!

RIVER:  Don’t you think that’s a little selfish?

THEL (adamant): No!

RIVER:  Come, Thel, have a little dip! See where it leads you.

THEL (terrified):  I know where it will lead me!

RIVER (calmly):  No, you don’t.

(Curtain)

GARY MICHAEL DAULT is a critic, writer, painter, teacher and blogger who has left the city to live in a small town on the Lake Ontario between Toronto and Montreal.

Collage by the author.

The weight of celebrity in boosting the profile of a cause is elephantine. People take notice. Especially if you have a large foundation at your disposal.

Last week in mid-town Manhattan 150 New Yorkers paid $35 to hear Chelsea Clinton convene a panel discussion on battling the elephant ivory trade, proceeds going to the cause.

The event was co-sponsored by ABC Carpet & Home and National Geographic, which provided large photographs of elephants in the peaceful glory of their unpursued lives.

In this world where panel convenors often lack direction and backbone, the calmly eloquent Ms. Clinton, Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation, kept a firm rein on things. Good public service breeding in action, I suppose, or just a very talented advocate.

Stopping the voracious appetite of China for ivory means addressing the powerful cultural need of a booming economy to express its core values through artefacts using ivory as a favored artistic medium . . .  

Photograph, National Geographic Society.

The strategy to save elephant populations (which are just slightly less threatened than they were at the height of the crisis thirty years ago) focuses heavily on curbing demand, which, says Bryan Christy, wildlife investigative journalist for National Geographic, China’s appetite is voracious.

“By every measure, China is the world’s villain when it comes to illegal ivory trade, and the reasons are obvious,” reports Bryan Christy in the film Battle for the Elephants, wildlife investigative journalist for National Geographic. “China has a history of ivory consumption, it has a booming economy and they’re now looking back into their past for core values and they’re expressing those core values in ivory.”

Behind China, the United States is the second largest consumer of ivory.

Chelsea Clinton's gracious authority as the moderator of the event greatly contributed to the enjoyment and rigor of the evening

Other measures to stop the flow of ivory out of Africa involve tighter export controls, such as using radar to check shipping containers, and greater law enforcement in the poaching countries. Like the challenge the governments of Mexico and Columbia have fighting the drug cartels, criminality on the ground is run mostly by various factions of organized crime. it is also deeply rooted in the impoverished culture of Africa, and, as a result it is as dangerous and gory as it gets.

In addition to Mr Christy, Ms Clinton’s panelists included filmmaker John Heminway, who is also Chairman of Wildlife Direct; Joshua Ginsberg of the Global Conservation Program, Wildlife Conservation Society, and a representative of the Tanzania embassy who defended his government’s stance on stockpiling their vast stores of ivory, which are usually destroyed.

While we always make our films for broadcast, impact is often best measured in other ways.

Following the panel discussion, questions from the audience revealed how well informed several members of the audience were on complex factors in the elephant extinction and ivory trades issues. Deepak Chopra, who was in the audience, suggested that systemic factors in local African villages where the poaching occurs need to be addressed just as much as curbing the demand of ivory. He also underlined the need in such campaigns to tell emotional stories that engage the public and move political will.

“Elephants have this incredible knack of bringing unlikely people together,” said John Heminway, producer, director and writer of Battle for the Elephants.

“Making the film has taught me much,” said Heminway after the event. “While we always make our films for broadcast, impact is often best measured in other ways. I have been astounded by the power of small group showings. As a result of them, I see some progress. I do not believe the panel discussion with Chelsea Clinton would ever have happened without the film. Her eloquence and the well considered thoughts of the panelists will shift many minds and, in the end, do much to save the African elephant."

RELATED EVENTS COMING UP

For recent news stories on the battle to save the elephant, and the ivory trade, go to Wildlife Conservation Society. Both organizations take donations.

Check out WildLife Direct's current campaign, Hands Off Our Elephants.

The film Battle For The Elephants will be showing in Aspen, Colorado on the March 22 at the Wheeler Opera House.

Also, see what VETPAW (Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife), are doing to pull their weight for the cause.

WHITNEY SMITH is the Publisher/Editor of The Journal of Wild Culture.

Photographs by the author. Elephant photographs are the property of the National Geographic Society.

The Journal of Wild Culture wishes to thank Thinking Animals, a New York based organization that hosts a monthly lecture series on animal cognition, for introducing us to this event. 

Getting the Chinese to abandon their use of ivory is just one of the many cultural issues that is part of a system endangering elephants. They exist as well in African villages where poaching can be seen as an antidote to enduring poverty.

i was per-
haps. i am may-
be. Was nearly now, al-
most then. Ex-
tant, ex-
tinct, just visiting, dithering
with existence. Am
listed as critical. Was
history. Soon rumoured.
i am virtually non- un- on
the brink of unique,
(in)conceivably, (un)feasibly
a one-, two-, none-off.
Am RIP. Yet just as i re-
ceive a cairn of commemoration
i glimpse myself from the cor-
ner of my eye and

       it was about ten metres away when I first noticed it. Sun was going down and I was stuffed after walking all day so I was waiting by the stream for Jase to put up the tent and make a fire and whatever the fuck else he does when he says it's time to camp. Thought it was a dog at first – it was about the size of Jase's sister's Lab, the one that flobs all over you, kind of pale like a Labrador too, but then I saw the stripes, and its body looked weird – like heaps longer than it should've been. I was too freaked to move, just sat there, couldn't breathe, couldn't even reach in my shorts for my phone. And just when I'm thinking I'm so going to pass out here, it turns round and disappears into the bush. And soon as it's gone, Jase comes over – took his fucking time – and says I've got the fire going, Soph. This place is unreal! . . . Aw, what's up? You look like you've seen a

     dog- wolf-headed,
     zebra- tiger-rumped.
     i have bygonned
     my image
     on the rock. They called me
     coorina, loarinna,
     chimerical miracle.
     i am thresh- flesh-
     holding, solid as persecution,
     dwelling in the realm
     of (im)possibility where
     there are fewer eucalypts
     than there ever used to be.
     Was i a clever fake? The proof
     is (in)conclusive. My
     marsupial pouch holds
     only fables now –
     the bandicoot i toss
     to see which way it lands,
     stars miraging
     the loss of my before
     after. Yet as i dis-
     locate my jaw
     with a phantom yawn a scream,
     i dream clean pawmarks
     in the mud and

                                                     mate, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was gone midnight, I'd skulled a few beers and was driving home over the Burrenbidgee. Parked by the bridge and got a pretty good squiz – it was standing there, ears up, tail out stiff like the tail of a roo – and then I thought I'd hop out the van and get a bit closer.  Mate, if I'd only had the .308 Winchester with me – guys spend years out in the bush trying to bag one of these bastards. Tried to film it on my phone before it shot through, but it was too shit-dark to see, so I grabbed my torch from the van and hunted round for a while and found what I reckon was a paw print. Soon as I got home, I googled it and, mate, I was

right wrong,
(un)imaginable, (barely)
credible, a twilit wishful
think delivered
by the (un)conscious mind.
Whistle me up, make me limbo
liminal (in)visible,
see what you expect
hope grope to see. Am
psychopomp, tulpa,
(preter)natural personal guide.
Was a figment of my
hallucination.
(Not even) quasi-

Last known thylacine, named Benjamin. showing his wide gape. Photo by Unknown.

The thylacine, a striped carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger, is believed to have become extinct in the wild in the 1930s through a combination of culling, habitat loss, disease and predation by domestic dogs. However, numerous vivid yet unverified sightings of the thylacine, not only in Tasmania but also in mainland Australia, continue to this day.

THE WILD CULTURE SCRIBBLERS' QUESTIONNAIRE — Susan Richardson

1. What is your first memory and what does it tell you about your life at that time?
I am about eighteen months old. It's bedtime and I am in my cot, clutching a hard-backed picture book featuring Dougal from 'The Magic Roundabout'— evidence that books were important to me from a very early age.

2. Can you name a few poets who have influenced you who come to mind immediately?
This is always quite a difficult question to answer as echoes and influences of another poet may not become evident in one's own work until some years after having read the writer in question, and then only in subtle/not very obvious ways. So instead, I'll list some of the poets whom I admire and whose work has resonated at different times in my life, rather than state that they've had a direct influence: Alice Oswald, Les Murray, Jen Hadfield, Mark Doty, Selima Hill, Mario Petrucci, Pascale Petit, Juris Kronbergs, Jo Shapcott, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, John Donne.

3. Where did you grow up and did that place and your experience of it form your sense about place and the environment in general?
Though I was born in Wales, I spent the first four years of my life in a house by the sea in Somerset. In my adult life, I've consistently been drawn back to the sea and have always sought to live as close to it as possible, so this early coastal experience had a significant impact on me.

From the age of 5, I was in Wales again, living on the fringes of a so-called 'new town.' With its 1960s urban architecture, countless roundabouts, concrete and car parks, I never really felt at home there. We were fortunate to have a large garden though, as did my grandmother, and I spent a lot of time out of doors, climbing trees and building dens and creating my own mini-menagerie of worms, caterpillars and snails.

4. If you were going away on a very long journey and you could take only four books — one fiction, one poetry, one non-fiction, one literary criticism — what would they be?
The Waves by Virginia Woolf; Les Murray's Translations from the Natural World; Hélène Cixous' essay The Laugh of the Medusa. I'm finding it more challenging to narrow down my non-fiction choice; can't decide between The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich, and Wild by Jay Griffiths.

5. What was your most keen interest between the ages of ten and twelve?
Trying to persuade my parents to let me have a puppy. I don't have siblings and really craved, and relished, the company of animals. I spent as much time with my cousins' and friends' dogs as I could, but my parents didn't relent and let me have a dog of my own until I was nearly 12.

Where is the borderline between animality and humanity? What are the animal possibilities of the self?          

6. At what point did you discover your ability with poetry?
I am not sure if/when I discovered an ability, but I certainly discovered a love of writing — stories and short plays as well as poetry — when I was about seven years old. Being an only child, I made my own entertainment through writing; the characters, both human and non-human animal, that I was creating were like an extended family. 

7. Do you have an engine that drives your artistic practice and if so, can you comment on it?
I am a passionate believer in the potential of poetry to inspire shifts in perception and create new patterns of thought and experience, and, to that end, I feel committed to writing poetry with an ecological focus. I am also something of a perfectionist, which can be both a blessing and a curse: long after my work is published, I still itch to tinker with it.

8. If you were to meet someone who seriously wants to write poetry, someone who admires and resonates with the type of work you do, and they clearly have real talent and asked you for some general advice, what would that be?
Rather than offering technical advice, I'd be keen to talk about emotional survival strategies: the need for persistence, and how to keep bashing away in the face of rejection.

9. Do you have a current question or preoccupation that you could share with us?
For the past few years, I've been obsessed with, and written poems galore, on animal-human metamorphosis. My new collection of poetry, skindancing, themed around shapeshifting and our dys/functional relationship with the wild, will be published in 2015. My sources of inspiration include animal-human shapeshifting tales from a number of different cultures, from Inuit to Celtic, Native American to Norse, as well as the work of visual and performance artists — plus personal experience of shamanic journeying and shamanic trance dance. I am attempting to explore a range of questions; for example, where is the borderline between animality and humanity? What are the animal possibilities of the self? Is it feasible to believe that exploring the 'becoming animal' theme through poetry may help to reestablish the connection with the animal parts of ourselves, and with the wider natural world, where we are just one animal among many — the connection at that Western culture has lost?

10. What does the term 'wild culture' mean to you?
To write, paint, dance, sing while always sensing, in David Abram's words, 'the soil beneath the pavement,' and, even when indoors, 'the moon's gaze upon the roof.'

11. If you would like to ask yourself a final question, what would it be?
Returning to question 4, have you made that non-fiction decision yet?

SUSAN RICHARDSON is a poet, performer and educator based in Wales. Her latest collection, Where the Air is Rarefied, a collaboration with visual artist Pat Gregory, focuses on environmental and mythological themes relating to the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Her third collection, skindancing, themed around human-animal metamorphosis and exploring our dys/functional relationship with the wild, will be published in 2015.

www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk

Top photo: Archives Office of Tasmania.

DECEMBER 19, 1995

More typical King George weather. Cloud. Wind. Way too tired to write much. Home from hike to the Drake and Flat Top in time to load the lorry for Canada House. Man, I love their Queen’s English, especially Aerology Sasha’s—“lorry” describes that dependable old beater perfectly. Six helpers made for short work and all of them tried to teach me Russian: Ilya, Hilltop Sasha, Doc Sasha, Vassiliy, Biologist Vladimir and Sasha Radio. Break for lunch, yummy soup. Discover a feather in my hat. Vassiliy confesses. We communicate partly in English, partly in Spanish and the few Russian words I’ve learned.

Can’t believe these guys and their generosity. At dinner Bio Vlad gave me flash cards he made and a Lenin pin. Pins from Doc Sasha as well. This must be what it’s like to be one of the popular girls in class.

My kitchen is shaping up. Sergey gave me a massive pot to heat water, enamel basins to make a triple sink, buckets for recycling, and I stacked some of the wonky veneer cabinets for storage. Fridge and stove arrive tomorrow. Was working tonight when Maxim dropped by with chocolate, Jim Beam and a Moscow Times mug. The chocolate was delicious, but I passed on the mug of whiskey. Happy I did, as I’m conscious of the scandal it could create. He was good company as I set up my pantry. We got into a conversation about how to distill vodka when I told him my plan to collect recipes from all the bases. I asked him if he knew of any edible wilds on the island and got a recipe for the cookbook: sea cabbage salad made with laminaria (fresh kelp).

Maxim also thought of a recipe from the glaciology camp: caipirinhas made with whiskey and lemon instead of cachaça and lime. Love the way he wrote it—he is specific about the brands: Jim Beam or Ballantine’s. No doubt he knows his recipe is more whiskey sour than caipirinha, but I guess mixology rules are flexible when stores run low. Soothes the Brazilians as well.

Got to sleep now.

DECEMBER 23, 1995

Pizza night
Custard with rum sauce and candied almonds
Cooking hell. Will I get organized?
Deliver cookies to Chileans

DECEMBER 29, 1995, 2:00 a.m.

Carol, my friend, wish you were here and we could rehash the day.

Lena, Ilya, Radio Sasha, and Dima arrived 12:30 with Scotch to toast Sasha’s birthday and I feel included. Ilya has wood-burned two signs for us on weathered planks: a Canada House sign for our door and one for my kitchen, Dietary and Aesthetic Laboratory. It’s as if now that John and Sean are here it’s okay to see Lena and me socially. Weird but good.

You’d be pleased with John and Sean; they’re team players. Sean is pretty upbeat and has slid naturally into the camp manager role, but he could have waited a day or two before plastering all those site maps and work details everywhere, especially not in the dining room.

Stove still acting up. Kitchen walls are blackened, as is anything I bake or roast. Me too. No one knows for sure what is wrong, but we are dealing. Volodya Driver is making a valve in Diesel to control gas flow and Sean has found a passage in Lashly’s diary that puts things in a poetic perspective. He had the bright idea of reading it at the beginning of each camp or on an as-needed basis—ours smokes when the wind is in the north.

The ship is very comfortable, there is nothing whatever to grumble about as we live well, sleep warm and nice and have plenty of exercise. The only thing is we are troubled with a smoky stove when the wind is blowing hard. But I think other expeditions have suffered with the same complaint. He never got to the root of this trouble and when the wind was in the South the stove smoked so much that they had to do without it: Not nice in 52° of frost.

    —Under Scott’s Command: Lashly’s Antarctic Diaries, Discovery Expedition 1901–1904

Caipirinha (a Brazilian cocktail made with cachaca, lime or lemon juice,

sugar, and crushed ice) a la Antartica. Photo by Sandy Nicholson.

DECEMBER 26-30

• Camp 2 Debris Collection

• Stoney Bay Areas 2, 3 & 4: mixed waste

• Bellingshausen Areas b1-b3: 1 barrel

It’s not so different from what I see at home: you know the bush, where they have done mining or forestry for a while then abandon the camps. It makes you look a little differently at what you’ve got in your own backyard. —Volunteer on Russian-Canadian Ecological Project, 1995-1996

RECIPES FROM AN ANTARCTIC COOKBOOK

CRANBERRY FOOL

The Russians bring enough provisions for a year from home. Cranberries are an obvious choice because they keep well and are a decent source of vitamin C. A gallon jar of cranberries was my muse for this surprisingly luxurious combination.

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups water

3 cups cranberries

2 1/2 cups whipping cream
1 tablespoon sugar

1/4 cup Grand Marnier

Combine the 1 1/2 cups of sugar and water in a mid-sized pot and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Add the cranberries and return to a boil briefly, then lower to medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the cranberries have popped, about 10 minutes. Pour into a small bowl, cover and refrigerate.

When the cranberries have completely cooled, whip the cream in a large bowl until it starts to thicken. Beat in the remaining tablespoon of sugar. Add the Grand Marnier and continue beating until the cream holds stiff peaks.

Gently fold 1 1/2 cups of the cranberries into the cream. Alternate layers of cream and reserved cranberries for seams of colour and texture in each glass or bowl. Chill for half an hour before serving.

Makes enough for six to eight people.

Historic “Wild Food” Recipe. (Note from Carol Devine.) The Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection (1998) to The Antarctic Treaty bans disruption of flora and fauna in the Antarctic. This means individuals in Antarctica can no longer catch and eat ‘wild food’ (though at the turn of the century most Antarctic explorers and scientists would have died had they not eaten local foods such as seal, penguins, shags and even their imported Arctic dogs.) Consider substituting seal in this recipe with wild caught sustainable fish or fowl.

RECIPES FOR AN ANTARCTIC COOK

SEAL

(The following two recipes have been summarized from notes prepared at the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey station at the Argentine Islands, where the writer was cook from 1956–1957. His skill and initiative deserve acclaim amongst a wider circle. We therefore publish a number of his recipes based on local raw materials.)

The meat of young shags, seals and penguins makes excellent eating, but, in the natural state, it is rather too highly flavoured to be palatable. It should therefore be washed thoroughly and hung in the fresh air for a few days, or in the case of shags for a couple of weeks, before cooking. It is further improved by blanching; this consists of putting the meat in cold water, bringing the water to the boil, then removing the meat and washing it.

Antarctic moss. Photo by Wendy Trusler.

TOUREDOS OF SEAL PORTUGAISE

Seal meat Sauce: 2 oz. butter
Garnish: Tinned tomatoes, about 1 tablespoon flour

2 per person, tinned peas Tomato Sauce
Slices of fried bread Milk, salt, pepper

Cut meat into round pieces about 1 in. thick, season and fry quickly in butter

To prepare garnish. Heat tomatoes and peas in butter for a few minutes.

To prepare sauce: Melt butter in small saucepan and bring to the boil. Add flour and cook for a few minutes, stirring continuously. Add milk slowly with saucepan away from heat, stirring continuously until sauce reaches required thickness.

Season and flavour with tomato sauce.

Return to stove and re-heat, but do not boil.

Place each piece of meat on a slice of fried bread and garnish with tomatoes and peas. Top each tournedos with tomato sauce and pour remainder of sauce round the tournedos.

(The Polar Record, Vol 9, Cambridge, Scott Polar Research Institute, Edited by L. M. Forbes 1960.)

Read PART ONE& PART TWO of this series.

BUY THE BOOK.

WENDY TRUSLER is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer and food stylist Wendy was the expedition cook in Antarctica. Balancing a life of food and art for over twenty years Trusler has cooked and catered across Canada and internationally, food styled for film and television and developed an art practice driven by ideas around ecology, continuity and regeneration. Trusler’s design practice traces a similar orbit to her artistic impulses as she explores the potential inherent within found materials and reclaimed objects.