Review of “Life Ascending”, Nick Lane, Eurotimes July 2009
This fine book on evolution was well reviewed at the time and won the 2010 Royal Society prize for science books. Here is my review from Eurotimes . Or rather…
Category: nature writing
Snipe and Woodcock at 33⅓ RPM: Listen The Birds 8 / Hoor De Vogels 8
I came across this birdsong album in my family home lately. As will become clear, I can’t find out much about it online, but I felt that the aesthetic of…
Silence in the Cairngorms – from Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”
Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened…
“Shouting about humankind being part of nature may mask a fear that it is nothing of the sort.”
From Peter Reason’s “In Search of Grace”, a passage on a theme that has often occurred to me. Philosophically, one can unpick the concept of “nature” and any separation between…
“The pilgrimage is not all plain sailing, not all peak experience” – Peter Reason on the messy human reality of pilgrimage
One of the charms of Peter Reason’s “In Search of Grace” is his human honesty at the gap between the lofty ambition of pilgrimage and actual experience. At the very outset of…
Peter Reason on pilgrimage, ecology and in-between space.
From “In Search of Grace”: “In modern times, the idea of pilgrimage falls within so many cultural and spiritual traditions that it holds no single meaning. However, it usually entails…
The surprising complications of tide-watching
Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ “Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth” has a title that sounds hyperbolic, but is endearing in its combination of a certain rhetorical restraint…
“Nature and culture have been replaced by landscape and literature”: Mark Cocker on the “New Nature Writing”, New Statesman, June 2015
I have previously cited this essay by Mark Cocker on the “New Nature Writing” as exemplified by Robert Macfarlane and Helen McDonald. Have been re-reading it and find, as often…
Séamus Sweeney 