Underminers
Having read and admired Keith Farnish’s first book, Time’s Up!, I played with the hope that his new book, Underminers: A Guide to Subverting the Machine, would be a fulfilment of the promise of that...
View ArticleRetrieval, resilience and wild planning
Resilience must be a central concept for retrieval – that is, for the capacity of communities to bring something humanly habitable out on the other side of the unpredictable stresses and dangers to...
View ArticleEvolution on fast-forward
Skindancing by Susan Richardson (Cinnamon Press, 2015) Ecozoa by Helen Moore (Permanent Publications, 2015) Susan Richardson knows her poems off by heart. She doesn’t read them; she performs them. When...
View ArticleAt the Mercy of Fools
Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Canongate, 2015) I. Mohamedou Ould Slahi first appeared on the radar of American intelligence in 2000. Slahi, a Mauritanian, was then living in Montreal, and...
View ArticleBeyond the Life of the Sun: ecomodernism and its discontents
Part I: Introduction Retreat from our predicament is not an option. We must push through the Anthropocene, indeed accelerate our modernity, and accept our species’ dominion over the Earth. — Leigh...
View ArticleOf Sun, Rain and Anti-Utilitarianism
So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a...
View ArticleWhat is This?
The Abundance by Annie Dillard There is to be a total eclipse of the sun. A man and a woman drive across country for five hours, from the coast to the mountains, to witness the event; they have never...
View ArticleAutonomous Nature
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. –...
View ArticleFlight Path
Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it. The...
View ArticleThe World-Ending Fire
About 18 months ago, out of the blue, I was offered something of a dream assignment. Penguin, the publisher, was looking to put together the first British collection of essays by the now-venerable...
View ArticleInside the Doughnut
I doubt many people would have betted that this year’s hot new concept for a healthy economy would be that bad food staple, the doughnut. But with the publication of Kate Raworth’s book, it’s come to...
View ArticleDepth and Breadth
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) Horizon, Barry Lopez (Bodley Head, 2019) In the Saami cosmos ‘the universe is arranged vertically into three layers – the...
View ArticleRiders on the Wolf
Riders on the Storm: the climate crisis and the survival of being, AlastairMcIntosh (Birlinn) Wolferland, Martin Shaw (Cista Mystica) A girl in a yellow raincoat sits in the street outside the...
View ArticleGenius Loci
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury) As someone who does a lot of long-distance walking, often with – ideally with – as little planning as possible, I...
View ArticleFighting for the Earth
A Review of How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021, Verso) One morning in early 2011, 75-year-old grandmother Hayastan Shakarian left her house in the village of Armazi, Georgia, armed with...
View ArticleThe Forest and the Map
Open this tome to any of its 600 pages, and you are likely to find a map. Perhaps a bay and coast, indigo water, rusty strand, coastal mountains in layers of olive and moss. Perhaps a salmon desert,...
View ArticleA Still Becharmed Panic
Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger by Peter Riley (2022, Profile Books) It is perhaps easy to forget in our era of marine safaris, plush toys, and ever more resplendent Attenborough...
View ArticleRegeneration from the Ruins
Thunderstone: A true story of losing one home and finding another, by Nancy Campbell (Elliott & Thompson, 2022) One of the most striking things about the covid pandemic was how everyone who...
View ArticleWild Elder
Stories of the Cailleach and mythic old women like her arise out of a time when the Earth was commonly represented as the body of a woman. Caves were thought of as wombs, rivers as veins or the flow of...
View ArticleBeyond Unimaginable Horizons
Fiction, and magic realism in particular, exists as a force of opposition to the established norms. As a genre, magic realism is built on the notion that the impossible ceases to be extraordinary the...
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