The Wild Wood and the Railway
I’m sorry, Mole old chap, but it just won’t do you know’. The Mole lifted his gaze from the golden coals of the fire. ‘What won’t do Ratty?’ ‘There’s something going on in the Wild Wood. We haven’t...
View Article‘Fled is that music’: following the nightingale
One evening last week I listened to a nightingale sing. It was about 8.30pm, and almost dark, in a block of scrub surrounding rough grass on the edge of a wood. The sky was mostly clear, and as the...
View ArticleEcomodernism and the Anti-Politics of Prometheus
Prometheus is the man (or immortal, depending who you read) from Greek myth who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity. Like other tales from the classics, this one has been co-opted in many...
View ArticleRewilding as Process
To his many readers, George Monbiot’s book Feral has come to encapsulate the idea of rewilding. His mix of gritty wilderness autobiography and sharp well-researched polemic is compulsive. His...
View ArticleOn the Conservation of Trolls
The strange and sad story of Cecil the lion (named for an imperialist, collared for science, shot on a private ranch outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe) has many lessons for conservation. The one...
View ArticleAny Colour You Like, But Not Green
What are we to make of the news that the German car manufacturer Volkswagen has been cheating on emissions tests for diesel cars in the USA? The first cries of ‘disgraceful’ from the media were...
View ArticleOut of sight/site, out of mind: the challenge of studying what really matters...
According to Marx, a defining characteristic of capitalism is the way that the social relations involved in the production of commodities are obscured: he called this ‘commodity fetishism’, suggesting...
View ArticleConservation Over There
Recently, I was talking about Conservation International’s Nature is Speaking videos with some PhD students and postdocs. I recalled that long before Harrison Ford brought his gravel toned menace to...
View ArticleConservation and the final frontier
A few weeks ago I settled down to watch a BBC TV programme called The 21st Century Race for Space, hosted by celebrity physicist and one-time pop star Brian Cox. I had spent all day thinking about...
View ArticleEarth Algebra
It is the time of year when newly arrived students gather around the university in uneasy groups, shuffling like swallows waiting to migrate. All have passed, quite recently, through the trial of...
View ArticleCOVID-19 and Conservation
These are strange, scary and fascinating times. Watching the COVID-19 pandemic grow throws us into the fantastical world of films or games. It brings disaster close to home, and to the people we know...
View ArticleFrom passion to professionalism and back again: the battle for the soul of...
The following article was first published in the Seeds of Change report produced by the Biodiversity Revisited project. With their approval I am reposting it here (with some very small edits to the...
View ArticleSilent Spring
The freedom to take an hour’s walk or bike ride each day has been one of the unexpected pleasures of the Covid shutdown. April was scarily dry, with day after day of blue skies. Blackthorn bloomed in...
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