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From Fathoms micro plastic pollution of the environment is now so pervasive that there is virtually no ecosystem in the world and certainly not in the oceans that is now not infested with plastic. There seems to be no way it will break down in our current natural systems. 📚
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Goshawk Summer
I have been reading Goshawk Summer which manages to blend the nature diary with some of the queasy uncertainty of the initial outbreak of the COVID pandemic in the UK. The bulk of the book covers a spring and summer spent filming a goshawk nest in the New Forest.
Nature takes the foreground with divergences into the management of land and the balance of demands on the natural environments. The author grew up in the New Forest so occasionally there are snippets of nostalgia, autobiography and memory. The basic beat of the nature diary, the succession of seasons and inevitable drumbeat of live moving through it phases underpins this book in the way it does for the entire genre.
Later with the lockdown lifting the thoughts become darker as the forest fills with people, litter and anger. The respite of lockdown proves fleeting and as with carbon emissions the world rushes back at speed.
A passing mention of the inability to meet with family sets up a darker still epilogue that reveals personal tragedy and combines it with the impact of the forest visitors on the ground nesting birds.
The other diversions are to provide insight into the behaviour of animals and the ecology of the forest and biological systems in general. The balance of information is generally right here. Enough to inform, not so much as to derail from the central narrative.
Natural life exists within the turning of the seasons; but lurking at the back of everything in our current time is a clock ticking that cannot be turned back and which may advance without us and many of the other animals that cling precariously to their space within a human world.
Simply and directly written, the book moves swiftly and satisifies as the summer unfolds. The joy of the nature memoir is to share in the moments of sublime observation without the often difficult waiting that accompanies the wait. The successful writer brings us the beauty and allows us to elide the difficulties in experiencing it for ourselves. We live vicariously for better and worse through our observer. The elegant trick here is also to tap into the emotions of a recent shared experience and set it against ancient rhythms.
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Book review: Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a collection of reviews, recommendations and appreciations of books and authors. It covers a huge range of interests, fiction, history, biography as well as speeches and poetry. Themes recur in the selection including the writing by children of immigrants to America and most often Trump and the tumult that he brought to American life. Democracy is covered from de Tocqueville to Orwell and Arendt.
It has a number of beautiful full page illustrations with imagined covers for some of the titles in an art deco style. The book generally is beautifully presented from the text font to the structure of the pull quotes. It is something that is meant to be consumed as a physical book.
Sometimes the selections lead from one to another or circulate a theme but it is just as easy to select a title at random and navigate the book by chance.
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Book review: Orchard
I recently finished reading Orchard a nature diary written about each month is an “old” naturally managed orchard. By this it means laid down in the thirties and not intensively farmed.
With two author alternating chapters the book read as a series of essays that often repeated points across chapters or explains things multiple times. When it works though it is a wonderfully wrought picture of the complexity of ecosystems with animals in complex webs of interdependent behaviour over the course of the year.
It also highlights some of the madness of industrial farming techniques where trees are sprayed in pesticide which kills the pollinators that the trees need to actually grow the fruit that people are trying to farm.
There’s a moment when the EU gets blamed for its farming policies but in another chapter a part of Hungary is lauded for its traditional biodiverse farming methods. I felt that maybe the problem is a bit closer to home but I guess we’re going to find out soon whether the problem is really capitalism or government policy.
The cover is a beautiful geometric block print which is extremely handsome.
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