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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...

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Retrieval, 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...

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Evolution 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...

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At 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...

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Beyond 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...

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Of 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...

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What 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...

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Autonomous 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. –...

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Flight 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...

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The 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...

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Inside 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...

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Depth 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...

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Riders 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...

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Genius 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...

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Fighting 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...

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The 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,...

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A 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...

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Regeneration 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...

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Wild 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...

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Beyond 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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