On the Benefits of Exploring your own Backyard

I was recently sent a book to review that brought home to me the great benefit of wildlife blogging – the wonderful way in which it allows people to share their exploration of Nature in their own local patch in a collaborative, mutually supportive way.

The book, On Extinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger, is a long and often lyrical meditation on how people lose contact with their natural environment and the effect of this on the way in which we humans exploit and often abuse the natural world.  You can read a recent review of the book, by Kathleen Jamie in the Guardian, here but in essence it begins with the author, a poet, working in an abandoned tin miner’s hut in Cornwall, lamenting how little she knows about the wild flowers that surround her and contemplating extinction and the way in which advancing technology and human exploitation of natural resources have led to the loss of livelihoods, cultures and species. Over the following 133 pages she travels to an Antarctic whaling station in South Georgia, to the Falklands, Whitby and Baffin Island and visits the Inuit on the Arctic tundra, witnessing for herself evidence of humans’ impact on animals, their environment and each others’ cultures, with – along the way - numerous digressions into history, culture, literature, politics and economics, explaining how all this came about.   In the final chapter having - quite literally - travelled to the ends of the Earth the author, drifting downstream in her canal boat towards Wicken fen in Cambridgeshire, finds at least partial personal salvation in learning to identify the plants and animals around her - and so reconnecting with the natural world. She has discovered a fundamental truth – that nothing engenders respect for nature, and alertness to forces that threaten it, more powerfully than being on first-name terms with the wild plants and animals with which we share our local patch of the planet on an everyday basis. When they are part of the fabric of a person’s life, then it’s well-nigh impossible not to care about them and be aware of changes.

Having read and learned from many hundreds of fellow nature bloggers’ posts over the last two and a half years, it seems to me that this is a conclusion that many have reached and, perhaps even more importantly, have conveyed to blog posters around the planet, sharing their personal explorations that often venture only a few miles from home.

The first picture I posted on my blog was of a spider’s web and here, 450 posts later, is another such, in celebration of the modern technology’s web that connects people who share and care about nature in their own backyard. 

Wonderful resource the web, isn’t it?

On Extinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger is published by Granta. ISBN 978-1-84708-187-2. www.grantabooks.com