Tag: nature
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The Reality of Race
Over the last few decades there has been some confusion about the category of race, a category that was once so central to all the social sciences. If race often appears in quotes, does that mean it is not real? If race is a social construction, why is there still racism in institutions, feelings and…
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from ‘swims’
swims is a long poem documenting wild swims across the UK. swims starts and end in Devon, my home county, moving through Somerset, Surrey, the Lake District, London, Wales and Brighton. Each swim is conceived of as an environmental action, testing ways individuals might effect environmental change. swims is an overall sequence of twelve swims,…
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Not Just Fir Christmas
The fir tree has had a part to play in traditional winter festivities across Northern Europe for centuries, and a plaque marks the spot where an evergreen was first displayed in Riga town square as part of Latvia’s New Year celebrations in 1510. Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert is credited with popularising the Christmas tree…
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The Courtiers’ Anatomists
What did it mean to experiment with animals in the seventeenth century? There is much ambiguity surrounding the terms “demonstration,” “experience,” and “experiment” in this period, further complicated by linguistic ambiguity: “expérience” in French and “experientia” in Latin could mean what we know in modern English as either experience or experiment. The medieval term “experimentum”…
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Dolly
Everyone on Prospect Walk knew Pat Steggles had a problem with drink; it wasn’t just me. For as long as I’d known her she’d always had a glass in her hand, and I often saw her carrying an empty Martini bottle down Wellington Lane to the off-license for a refill. Nobody could fail to notice…
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Plant Migrations
With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…
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Mildew
Never forgive, I said that morning just as I do every morning, by the window, waiting for dawn. Never forgive. Whom? Constanza? Which one of them? Never forgive her, the young Constanza, or myself, the old one? I did not know, all I knew was: I was never to forgive. ‘It hasn’t been that long,…
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Murmuration of Starlings
A huge mass of black sweeps across the sky; surging, swirling and constantly changing form. This is a murmuration of starlings, an extraordinary natural phenomenon seen in the autumn and winter months. Such spectacular sights used to be more common when the birds flocked in greater numbers – in 1799, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge…
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Reliquiae
If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…
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I, The Thing in the Margins
It’s the sound that provides the first clue of something amiss. The loud, low growl of audio feedback fills a room already awash with bright green glare. Sitting upright in a shabby armchair is an inscrutable figure. Both feet rest evenly on the ground. Both arms rest evenly on the chair. Its head is turned…
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Bloom
Where to do plants belong? At the bottom of the food chain? At the centre of the world? In a pot? In the garden? Growing wild across moors and mountains, railways and roads… In Ben Cave’s book Bloom, plants are depicted both in states of careful order, neatly aligned in vases or jugs, and out…