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
Posts
