Landmarks

"I love this book. Macfarlane is another evocative writer and the premise of it is fascinating to me. In the introduction he writes that he was dismayed when he saw a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary and realized that some natural history words were replaced by tech words. That was his motivation. His research project, as he explains it, was to find as many words as he could, in the various ancient languages of the British Isles, that describe the landscape or ecology or species dynamics. He collated a compendium or glossary of all these words. There is a chapter on uplands, on waterlands, on coastlands, on underlands, on edgelands, and so on. Each of these chapters is filled with words and each of these words describes a phenomenon of the natural world, or the human interaction with the natural world, that opens your mind to a whole new way of seeing it. That’s the beauty of this book. There are words that describe things that we didn’t know there was a word for. And, in the meantime, he writes colorful and engaging essays that connect the glossaries. I have a friend, David Lukas, who wrote Language Making Nature , a parallel to Macfarlane’s work. David suggests ways for readers to invent your own words. You can do this anywhere: in an urban or rural landscape, you ask folks to look at their observations and see if there’s an observation for which there is no word and ask them to make up a word for it. Using these books together is very interesting. I love David’s book too, enormously, and I mention it because it complements Macfarlane so well. I think there’s a whole new genre of environmental writing that brings all of this together. It changes perception. It deals with the questions of grief and celebration. What’s new and different is the way these books link deep human history to these questions, evoking a deep natural history. These books all do it and some of them are brilliantly written: The Brilliant Abyss, written by a marine scientist, explores the deep ocean. It points out how little we know about these incomprehensible depths, and how they are just an absolutely extraordinary, unexplored habitat that holds so much wonder and information in it. She opens you up to that world in a way that is picturesque and thorough. At the same time, she describes why, to this point, we’ve known so little about it and why a lot of the science about it has been largely wrong because we had no data. There is also a threat to the deep ocean bed because of its deep-sea mining potential for the rare minerals and materials that we think we need for tech. So, it’s an emergent environmental challenge. In this book, Helen Scales brings it to public attention by citing the threat, and describing the mysterious beauty of the deep sea. Cynthia Barnett is an excellent environmental journalist. She looks at the deep natural and human history of seashells. She engages readers by writing about her childhood shell collection. She explores why people collect seashells, but then moves from there into how seashells provide so many clues about the Earth’s history, the fate of the oceans, how we look at the edge between land and sea, the fate of human species: there are countless other ways of understanding the natural world—all through seashells. I love the way she takes something that everyone is familiar with, and everyone loves, and brings to it a whole other level of understanding. I love the idea of nature rebounding and the courage that it took for Cal Flyn to explore abandoned places, places of toxicity or places that appear monstrous on some level, but where so much ecological. restoration takes place amidst the abandonment or toxicity. Again, she’s a fine writer and I was very attracted to the concept in the book. First of all, it helps us deal with the question of hubris. Yes, we are powerful enough to destroy places, but we’re not powerful enough to stamp all life out because these places are rebounding in very interesting ways just because we’re leaving them alone. Given the number of disturbed places there are throughout the world, this gives us a way to think about them, how they become wild in their own right. Again, it changes your perception of how you move through the world. It brings a kind of faith and hope in the possibilities of resilience. These are new ways of thinking about environmental learning as opposed to, ‘Let’s just go out in the woods and hug a tree’. I don’t mean to sound cynical because there is a sensory awareness that you develop when you do that. But this book suggests, ‘Have the courage to go and look at abandoned places because there are likely to be some in your own community, right in your backyard. They’re all around, you can find them anywhere and there’s a lot that you can learn from them.’ This is some of the best writing I’ve seen in any venue in a long, long time. Rebecca Giggs is a great, great writer. First of all, her understanding of the language is magnificent. The breadth of her learning, the dimensionality of her research, her journalistic eye, her sensibility, are fascinating. The book starts with a dying whale and its decomposition on the South Australian coast. She writes about this with great compassion, and great mystery. You can see she’s going to write about whales in a way that’s going to help us better understand our own, human condition. The whale is such a complex, intelligent, and mysterious creature, and she’s going to bring all of this to bear as she looks at the history of whaling, our ecological understanding of whales, our understanding of whale communication, and finally, whales in relationship to the deep history of humankind. In this book Suzanne Simard looks at the whole system of the forest—the entanglements, the communication systems, the relationship trees have with their own kin, that they have with other trees, that they have with mycelium and soil microorganisms. The writing is not as polished as the other books, but the content and the concepts are. She is the model for the character in Richard Powers’s great book Overstory , which might be the best environmental novel I’ve ever read. Paul Stamets, the great mushroom visionary, describes mycelium as the original internet. If you compare the number of mycelium or soil scientists and the number of lawyers and bankers, you can’t even scale it. Yet arguably, some of the most important information about how the planet works is located in the forest beneath our feet. By the way, Macfarlane writes about this too in his book Underland and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake covers this as well. Those are also fine books, it would be a nice trio to read Sheldrake and Macfarlane together with the Mother Tree book. All of these books open our vistas in remarkable ways. They bring out this notion of perceptual reciprocity that I mentioned earlier. You realize in reading them that there’s so much happening around us that we don’t understand or that we don’t see—because we all live in our heads so much and we’re surrounded by screens. It’s hard to make good choices about what we should look at next and anything that we can do to present people with clear reasons for making good choices makes sense. That’s my emphasis in addressing your fine questions. These books bring more depth to our lives: that’s why I chose them."