This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical in that it is more often understood through, though by no means exclusively, the arts, rather than the sciences, which predominate in sections 2-10.
The rationale for the above approach is a belief that we cannot begin to build a better relationship without determining where we are, individually, collectively, past and present, in the great kaleidoscope of responses to the natural world, nor can we hope to be effective if we don’t have an idea of where we want to go. Of course, this is much easier said than done as we not only have multiple and complex responses to Nature individually, we have diverse cultural responses that are refracted through time and place…
Explore by Chapters
1.1 Articles
In newspaper articles, magazine and journal pieces, website commentary and submissions, ten writers and producers share their joy, wonder and grief at our relationship with Nature.
1.2 Art Installations
Artists past and present have broken out from the written word in their attempts to explore Nature and our place in it. From the breath-taking Chauvet paintings wrapped around cave walls, to the giant, computer-generated, images of Refik Anadol, C...
1.3 Books
In novels, historical non-fiction, economic treatises, love stories and racy tales of humour, ten of our best writers explore the complexities of Nature and why we find our place in it challenging, or inspiring, or opportunistic.
1.4 Buildings
To be completed.
1.5 Film, Documentaries, Podcasts
Chapter 1.2, Art Installations, started to break-out from the sometime confines of the written word and two dimensions, and in this chapter the transition is extended further as moving images and sound allow new and different insights into Nature ...
1.6 Music
The elemental power of music, its elegiac ‘truth’, cuts to the spiritual heart of Nature and our yearning to be enfolded in its meaning and to protect it from hurt. Four beautiful pieces have been selected and will be added to in due course.
1.7 Paintings
Paintings, like poetry, provide a wonderful opportunity for concentration of message and meaning. Whether it’s the comfortably, religiously structured Wharncliffe Hours of the Middle Ages, the surreal, grotesque and confronting Rabbiters of Depres...
1.8 Photographs
The internet, mobile phones and digital cameras have flooded us with photographs, but hopefully, not to the extent to cheapen their offerings for insight into the natural world and our place within or without. Chapter 1.8 brings us outstanding pho...
1.9 Poems
Poems provide us with a wonderful distillation of Nature, its essence and its surprise. Whether it’s the unapologetic cold brutality of Hawk Roosting (1.9.6), the unknowability of Tennyson’s Eagle (1.9.9), the meanness of the human spirit in Snake...
1.10 Spiritual Responses
Running through much of ‘Films’ to ‘Photographs’ to ‘Articles’ has been a spiritual presence, be it faint and unfocussed, or clear and exclaimed. As such, it is necessary to address it directly as it informs, at least in part, much of the human-Na...
Explore Other Sections
1. Build the Nature-Human Relationship
This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical ...
2. Reduce Consumption
I hope Reneé Descartes would forgive us for saying that, at least for the modern world, he was wrong. When, in 1637, he said: “I think, therefore I am”, he could not have anticipated that the majo...
3. Replace God of Growth with God of Quality
In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: ...
4. Work, Volunteer, Act for the Environment
What we do in our day-to-day lives can have great impact. Section Four divides up these actions into three groups – Work (4.2 & 4.3), Volunteering (4.4), and Action, e.g. voting, protesting, et...
5. Reduce Population
Even on top of Mt. Everest, in one of the remotest, most difficult places on earth, there is a great traffic-jam of people jostling for position. And yet, ever more vociferously, we deny that overp...
6. Ensure Media Acknowledgement of Environmental Context
The media is one of the three, great ‘poles’ of power in the world (alongside political and corporate power) and how they frame and present ‘the environment’ has a profound effect on how we respond...
7. Stop Further Loss of Natural Habitat and Species
New York is an exciting, mesmerising place. Human culture is extraordinary and often wonderful. Our powers of transformation of the natural world seem limitless. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be...
8. Assist Energy Descent and Transition
Our current energy largesse is an extraordinary ‘gift’, an unprecedented gift of the ages; millions of years to produce and from millions of years ago. Coal, oil and gas, forming...
9. Support New, Environmentally-Aware, Economic Systems
Just as with the previous section – ‘Energy’ – which is, inescapably, all about fossil fuels so pre-eminent and extraordinary has been their dominance and transformation of the world in the last 20...
10. Reduce Wastes to the Rate of Natural Assimilation
Section 10 will attempt to organise this enormous topic by addressing the context and status of pollution in 10.2, before focussing in on air pollution; particularly greenhouse gas pollution and cl...
