Category Archives: Book Review

Book Review

Shaping the Wild, by David Elias

Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a
Welsh Hill Farm, by David Elias.
Calon, 2023.
ISBN 978-1-9152-7934-7.

There are plenty of nature-on-farms books written by anxious conservationists, telling how everything is falling to bits (and it’s the farmers’ fault). There are not a few written by nature-loving farmers, telling how farmers are the people closest to the land and the nature on it.

There are rather fewer written by lifelong conservationists, who’ve chosen to visit and study one farm for a period of years, and try to understand the constraints on the farmer, the shifting tides of policy, and the balance that will actually benefit wildlife. In fact, I rather suspect this is the first one.

Craig-y-tân is a hill farm in the Eryri (Snowdonia) national park. There are some tiny stone-walled fields near the farmhouse; some rough pasture down by the river, the Afon Lliw; some old-fashioned broadleaved woodland on the hillslope, up to the mountain wall; an area as big as all of the above of “steep ffridd”, bouldery mountainside; and then a large area of upland blanket bog. The neighbouring areas include another isolated house, two footbridges, a ruined farm, a waterfall, and a chunk of 20th century conifer plantation.

It is difficult to make money on a hill farm. Traditional life was close to subsistence. Lambs were lost to foxes; hay was hard to make in wet Welsh mountain summers; peat was cut by hand. Governments have offered money to “improve” the land by draining or reseeding. Constant changes of farming policy have meant that one action was required to get a grant: then another. The blanket bog was filled with drainage ditches; now there are grants to stop up the drains and restore the peat, which stores large amounts of carbon: as long as it stays wet.

Conservationists have scratched their heads about how to manage wildlife on hill farms. If you take the sheep off the land, birch and willow trees spring up, their shoots un-nibbled, and the attractive rough grass, with its flowers and birds and insects, disappears into forest. If you add sheep, the farm may make more money but the flowers are grazed down to nothing and you again lose much of the wildlife. Just a little bit of conservation grazing, then? Elias notes the doubtful looks he gets when he hums and hahs in answer to a plain farming question, what to do. Possibly the farmer is doing really rather well, given all the trade-offs.

As for trees, governments in the 20th century encouraged economic forestry, meaning plantations of Sitka spruce, a non-native tree. This can all the same be good for wildlife, as young conifers compete with sallow, birch, rowan, and bramble, with homes for reed buntings, tree pipits, whitethroats and other warblers, along with butterflies and dragonflies. But as the spruces get tall and dark, all of that disappears, and there is a bare forest floor, shaded by a dense canopy, which supports a few specialist birds like siskins and crossbills. When the trees are big enough, they are harvested all at once with an enormous “sexy-looking Finnish machine” that enables one man to cut the trees, strip the trunks, slice them to length, and stack them for transporting without leaving the machine’s cab.

If you could have the conifers in small blocks of different ages (more like a traditional coppice woodland), then you would get a mosaic effect, with much more wildlife; even better, you might mix in some broadleaved trees for the insects and birds they can support. Of course, harvesting then becomes less convenient.

That’s not even to mention climate change. Many of the most-prized species are vanishing as the climate warms. Familiar upland birds like the curlew have all but gone; the farmer’s son doesn’t know them at all. A day spent searching the upland bog for large heath butterflies finds none: apparently there were only 2 sightings in the whole of Wales. Elias admits that in 50 years as a naturalist and conservationist, he has seen “a quiet draining away” of wildlife from many landscapes.

This is Elias’s first book. I found the first two or three chapters a little repetitive, as he chews over the issues slowly and carefully; a bit of copy-editing would not have gone amiss. But he warms to his work, and the later chapters are more direct, more fluent, if still grappling with the tangled conservation and farming issues.

His familiarity with farming legislation, carefully footnoted, and his evident sympathy for the Welsh hill-farmer make this an informative and distinctive book. Shaping the Wild doesn’t offer easy answers; but it steers clear both of despair (conservation has achieved nothing, hill-farming is doomed) and of facile optimism (the next government policy will fix everything).

The last chapter agrees that the countryside has changed beyond recognition, but insists that many people who are not conservationists enjoy nature, from farmers to mountain bikers. They’re the audience. And the farm? Elias considers whether

Craig-y-tân is an anachronism maintained at considerable public expense, or a beacon of hope and a way forward. It is still a beautiful place and rich in wildlife, especially by current standards; it is also a viable, if subsidised, working farm in the hands of a local Welsh-speaking family committed to their community and way of life. — Ch. 13 In the End

May it long continue.

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I received a review copy of this book.

Book Review, Environment, Natural History

The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot

The Outrun: A Memoir, by Amy Liptrot.
Canongate Books, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-78211-549-6

Amy Liptrot goes to live in London to escape the cramped life as a teenager on Orkney, a group of windswept islands off the north of Scotland. Her father was sectioned under the mental health act the day she left. At least she was free of the constant pressure from her happy-clappy Christian mother. In London, she parties, she drinks, she smokes, she takes drugs, she has sex. Is she happy? No. She drinks more and more, she loses one job, then another, then her boyfriend and her flat.

Something needs to be done. She’s not sure if she can stick with Alcoholics Anonymous’s talk of God, is that her mother all over again, but she tries it anyway and goes sober, along with the drug addicts and no-hopers:

“I had never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison, mugged an old man in the park, or been through six detoxes and four rehabs, painfully relapsing each time. My family still spoke to me, and I had not turned yellow.”

She goes back to Orkney, still sober. A woman tells her she’s washed up: painful because not entirely untrue: but she’s on the mend. Her father’s farm had a small neat area of little fields near the farmhouse, and a big wild area where the sheep could graze, the outrun. Perhaps Amy had been away on her own outrun for those ten troubled years in London.

She stays with her mother for a bit in Orkney’s little capital town, Kirkwall. It rains for 54 days in a row in the winter; then at last some “dreamy sunsets reflected on calm sea”. She goes back to the farm and spends days building drystone dykes, thick heavy double-walls of stone. She rebuilds herself at the same time…

Greatly daring, and knowing nothing about ornithology, she applies to the RSPB to spend the summer mapping the distribution of all the breeding Corncrakes on the Orkney Islands. She gets the job. She spends the summer staying up all night, driving about and stopping the car to listen for the extraordinary “crex crex” croaking noise that gives the bird its Latin name.

Corncrake, Crex crex

She maps 31 of the elusive birds dotted about: one island has exactly one male bird. She sees a Corncrake exactly once in the entire period. Once, she arrives at a stone circle at dawn: nobody is about. She takes off her clothes and runs around it.

She discovers that the RSBP’s house on the island of Papa Westray is used to warden the bird reserve there only in summer. She asks if she can stay there in the winter. It’s not insulated, normally left empty then. She gets it: the rent is very low: “I decide that I will spend my time in the kitchen with the fire, leaving the rest of the house to the cold.” It’d be a perfect place to drink… nobody would know… but she stays sober. “There are no flatmates or close neighbours to hear me crying at night.” She recollects in tranquillity how she was sexually assaulted in London: she fought the man off, he was imprisoned; and how she crashed her car and was banned for drunk driving. She notices each day the

“moment, looking back, facing into the northerly wind … when my heart soars. I see starlings flocking, hundreds of individual birds forming and re-forming shapes in liquid geometry, outwitting predators and following each other to find a place to roost for the night. The wind blows me from behind so strongly I’m running and laughing.”

Her nephew was born soon after she went sober. “He will never see me drunk.”

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Art, Book Review, Environment, Natural History

Book Review: Two Lights, by James Roberts

Two Lights: Walking through Landscapes of Loss and Life.
September Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978-1-9128-3617-8

You and I have read plenty of nature books that wax lyrical about the beauty of the liminal, the unfathomable gritty reality of walking along a muddy track on the outside of town between the sewage treatment plant, the football stadium, and the business park, and suddenly being transfixed etc etc by the unearthly and astonishingly loud song (for such a tiny bird) of the wren, rising etc etc above the mundane roar of the traffic and the air conditioning fans to transport the lonely naturalist into the unparalleled ecstasy of the mundane.

Fortunately, Two Lights is nothing like that.

James Roberts is an artist as well as a poet. He is lucky enough to live in the quiet countryside of the Welsh Borders: and to enjoy some of the country’s darkest skies, so that he can see thousands of stars, the milky way and comets. And he writes about it simply and beautifully. But no, he does more. He lets his imagination, his atlas of the world, the journeys he made when he was young, what he has read, his father’s decline and death from Parkinson’s, his wife’s journey through breast cancer and radiotherapy, history, the loss of wild places everywhere, take him to different places, and express what everyone is feeling in these crazy times, love and loss and desperation and, yes, beauty despite it all.

Roberts is an experienced artist, with the gift to describe his subject plainly without either getting excessively technical, or talking down to his readers: “Most artists are obsessed with space. Positive space is the area of a picture which contains the subject, the details, the face or figure in a portrait, the arranged objects in a still life, the trees and rocks in a landscape. Negative space is the area of the picture which surrounds the subject.”

Johannes Vermeer: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. 1662 or 1663

He goes at once to the heart of the matter: “I’ve spent hours staring at Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, wondering how he managed to achieve the milky light in the room, the sense of silence, the open-mouthed expression on the pregnant woman’s face and the depths behind it.”

I don’t know about you, but I immediately downloaded an image of the painting – the book’s illustrations are all of Roberts’s own work – and spent several minutes with my new-found knowledge of positive and negative space, wondering how Vermeer had done it all so seamlessly, as if it was easy. Then I wondered how Roberts had written about it all so seamlessly, as if it was easy.

Two Lights begins with a chapter on the dawn, and ends with one on dusk, presumably the two lights of the title. Roberts says he is attracted to these times, these transitional lights, when forms appear or dissolve, when shapes shift, when negative space appears positive or vice versa, when birds sing, when what seems solid and permanent is revealed as constantly changing.

The book’s subtitle, Walking through Landscapes of Loss and Life, speaks of its themes: personal connection to a landscape and its wildlife, to all of nature; and within that, a connection between personal loss and the silent, invisible shockwave of human impact on all of nature, from the paleolithic to the present.

You might think that with global warming, deforestation, overfishing, soil erosion, draining of wetlands, damming of rivers, pesticides, pollution, growth of cities, nights so bright with streetlights that citydwellers never see more than half-a-dozen stars, nights without nightingales, corn without cornflowers, meadows without meadowsweet, hedges without “immemorial elms”, roadsides without primroses, garden Buddleia bushes without butterflies, the extinction of species… that we would need no reminding that we have lost something.

But Roberts is right, we’ve forgotten. Our leaders think of wars and armies, of immigrants and policies, of votes and elections, ignoring what is happening to the world all around them: like officers fighting on the bridge of a sinking ship.

He’s also right that lecturing doesn’t work. Perhaps the oblique, feather-light, razor-sharp insight of an artist and poet may do better.

Roberts walks the bare hills and valleys of Wales, recalling “the forest of my imagination … hiding beneath my feet, in these hills, waiting to regrow.” The trees were cleared thousands of years ago, the first people of Britain burning gaps in the forest to make way for their fields. Now:

“News bulletins have been covering fires in Greece and Italy, and also those in California … on the map, the brightest areas are in Africa. The whole of the Congo seems to be burning, Central and East Africa lit up, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, Kenya. There are fires in places where it is now winter, in Australia, New Zealand, Patagonia. Even in the cold and wet north, in Siberia, Iceland and Northern Canada, there are blazes seemingly everywhere.”

Of course, in Britain, there’s not much forest left to burn, its 13% coverage the lowest in Europe, its nearly-extinguished wildlife among the most impoverished in the world.

Roberts dreams of the Great Bear Rainforest of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, of its rivers so thick with salmon that they seem to overlap like fish-scales, of its bears fishing in the rich waters, their salmon-enriched scat fertilizing the forested hills for miles around, wild with wolves. The bears and the wolves are gone from Britain now, along with most of the trees and nearly all the salmon:

“This was part of the great border forest, home to the last wolves in England and Wales. There are few stories of them, though they were still here when some of the old oaks which stand in the fields were saplings.”

His wife recovers; Roberts’s depression doesn’t go away. He reflects on a saying of the psychologist James Hillman, that depression is sometimes a right response to a damaged environment; you may feel like that because that’s how things are, “a sign you’re still sane”.

Heron by James Roberts

The text is interspersed, accompanied and enriched, by full-page prints of Roberts’s evocative ink paintings. He uses ink, water, and salt which creates dark specks with paler surroundings, random but orderly, wild but controlled, like an ecstatic dancer following the choreographer’s steps but connecting with the hearts of the audience.

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I received a review copy of this book.

Book Review, Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature

Book Review: The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy

Moth Snowstorm, by Michael McCarthy. John Murray, 2016 (paperback), 2015 (hardback)

This is a powerful book, one of the few on nature that can simply be called great. Perhaps Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring was the last one.

McCarthy states that nature is under deadly threat from humanity. We build roads, dams, sea walls, houses, factories; habitat is destroyed. We drive cars, fly in planes, live in houses made of brick or concrete; oil is burnt, releasing carbon dioxide, causing global warming.  The extra heat warms the oceans, making sea level rise. The carbon dioxide makes the oceans acidic, threatening species-rich coral reefs. We buy food containing palm oil: the palm plantations march across the tropics, replacing species-rich rainforest. We eat hamburgers. Cattle grazing spreads across the world, replacing more rainforest; methane from cow stomachs joins the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Every habitat is under attack. A 6th extinction, to rival or exceed the great extinctions like the Cretaceous-Tertiary which destroyed the dinosaurs, is under way already.

McCarthy tells what this means in his own experience, his own country, England. When he was a boy, Buddleia bushes in the suburbs were covered in butterflies: now they aren’t. When he was young, car headlights and windscreens were covered in insects; any night drive in the country seemed to be through a blizzard of flying insects, the ‘Moth Snowstorm‘ of his title. Now, if he sees one moth, a single one, on a journey, it is worthy of note. Nature has been thinned out, not quite to extinction in most cases, but the great, joyful abundance is gone, in one lifetime. Half the farmland birds are gone. Common sights like a field of lapwings, a street of house sparrows, a tree full of starlings, are no more.

Nature matters, McCarthy writes, not just for worthy reasons of biodiversity conservation, or even for pragmatic ones like pollination of insect-pollinated crops like beans and apples and cherries by bees tame and wild. Probably, he suggests with grim humour, some scientist is even now hatching a crop plant that won’t need pollination: even honeybees may soon be redundant.

No, he argues, we need nature because our species, Homo sapiens, grew up with it for 50,000 generations. We feel well in nature, on a walk by a river, in the hills, in meadows with flowers and butterflies in the sunshine, on a wild coast whether of cliffs or salt marshes, with thousands of wading birds in great clouds, the wind on our faces. In a word, nature brings joy. Without it, life is sad and grey, missing something vital, whatever the distractions offered by online shopping and instant messaging and all the rest.

Pond-dipping in London Wildlife Trust’s Gunnersbury Triangle local nature reserve

Joy, argues McCarthy, is the one thing that can motivate people to fight for nature. Given that it’s threatened,  we need a powerful, universal feeling to drive our politics. As the human population rises and pressures mount, as global warming bites on every continent, we will need to fight hard to keep whatever’s left of nature alive. Our survival, the survival of whole ecosystems and millions of species, depends on it. We need, urgently, to teach people to love nature, for which we need reserves, in cities and outside them, where people can experience the joy of nature for themselves; where children (and adults) can walk and run and play and pond-dip and bug-hunt and laugh and see frogs and foxes and butterflies. Then, and only then, can we urge them to fight.

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Book Review

Book Review: Islamic Geometric Design by Eric Broug

Islamic Geometric Design by Eric Broug
Islamic Geometric Design by Eric Broug (with Moroccan Zellige tilework)

Eric Broug’s Islamic Geometric Design (Thames and Hudson, 2013) is as big and beautiful as Luca Mozzati’s Islamic Art. Like that book, it goes some way towards correcting the bias – the total blind spot to be frank – in Lynn Gamwell’s otherwise splendid Mathematics + Art on all things Islamic.

Broug’s focus is sharply on how to create such designs: both, how the Islamic craftsmen who made them did their job centuries ago, and how you can do it today. The book ends, indeed, with an Appendix of some 50 pages on “How to create designs”. The body of the book looks at Basic Design Principles, Grids and Polygons, and then 4-fold, 6-fold, 5-fold, and Combined Geometric Design. The focus is thus on geometry pure and simple, referring from there briefly to the history of each object covered.

Unfortunately, although the cover shows a fine example of Moroccan “zellige” tilework, the book is almost entirely devoted to the more rule-based geometric strapwork called girih, which one may guess was more interesting to someone like Broug, who plainly likes a tough geometric puzzle to solve. Girih can, it seems, be constructed either as was traditionally supposed simply with a ruler and compasses, or, intriguingly, with a small set of “tiles” (conceptual rather than ceramic), which can be assembled and arranged in an almost infinite variety of ways, including aperiodically (a fascinating aspect if you’re a mathematical physicist).

Many of the objects analysed in the book are walls, ceilings or domes of buildings, such as mosques, medersas and mausoleums. Happily, however, many other examples are taken from woodwork including minbars (pulpits), bronze doors, tiles and screens, with the occasional plate. Broug is mainly interested in the very strictly geometric Girih strapwork designs, which can be analysed rather thoroughly with geometry; he is less interested in the far less mathematical Zellige of Morocco, arabesques, or calligraphy, which are all important forms of Islamic decoration; and he does not concern himself with the making of artefacts such as glass, ceramics, paintings, or metal objects except insofar as they are geometrically patterned.

Book Review

Book Review: Islamic Art by Luca Mozzati

Islamic Art by Luca Mozzati
Islamic Art by Luca Mozzati

Luca Mozzati’s Islamic Art (Prestel, 2010) is rather more of a coffee-table book than Lynn Gamwell’s Mathematics + Art, but the text isn’t at all bad. Its main failing is that it concentrates nearly exclusively on Architecture. This at least permits some of the glories of architectural decoration – arabesques, geometric patterns, and calligraphic inscriptions – to be displayed in rich colour, but at the price of leaving out the enormous wealth of carpets, brasswork, wood-carving, glass, and all the rest.

There are to be fair some nice miniatures from Turkey and Mughal India; there are a few details of brasswork and tiles, the occasional wooden casket, and some parchments, but all the same, the book is seriously unbalanced. Perhaps the author simply meant it to be called “Islamic Architecture” and was overruled by his publisher. At least it gives an idea of some of the splendours on offer.

For a book on the principles of at least some Islamic architectural decoration (basically, just girih strapwork), see the review of Eric Broug’s Islamic Geometric Design.

Book Review

Book Review: Mathematics + Art by Lynn Gamwell

Mathematics and Art by Lynn Gamwell, 2015
Mathematics and Art by Lynn Gamwell, 2015

Lynn Gamwell’s Mathematics + Art, A Cultural History (Princeton, 2016) is a beautiful, magnificent, and rather large book. Given its size, its cover price ($50) is very reasonable. The topic is an enormous one, ranging from the ancient to the ultra-modern.

Gamwell makes a serious attempt to cover the ground comprehensively. The book begins with Arithmetic and Geometry (two huge areas in themselves), and a glorious image from a Bible moralisée of 1208-1215 of God the Geometer, measuring out the world – it looks rather like a geode in section, actually – with a pair of dividers.

God the Geometer (Wikimedia Commons)
God the Geometer (Wikimedia Commons)

Page 1 mentions “Mankind’s ape-like ancestors” and talks about the first symmetrical tools; 300,000 years ago, hand axes started to have elegant symmetry. Clearly Gamwell’s intention is to cover the interaction of mathematics + art in the whole span of human history and prehistory: it’s nothing if not ambitious.

The text sweeps rapidly through time, so that on page 3 we reach 3000 BC and the ancient foundations of recorded mathematics, with I, II, III tracking quantities; the Egyptians introduced ∩ for 10, so 12 was ||∩. Soon we are in Ancient Greece and the theorems of Thales (the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal…), and what the sculptor Polykleitos wrote about the perfect proportions of the human body in the 5th century BC. Attention switches to the elements and the Platonic solids (with a forward reference to Kepler’s depiction in Harmonices Mundi, 1619), Democritus’s mechanical universe, and Euclid’s Elements – all in the first chapter, and I haven’t even mentioned the detailed treatment of the birth of modern physics and Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which Gamwell actually explains with the famous inverse square law equation.

Julia_set_fractal (Wikimedia Commons)
Julia Set detail  (Wikimedia Commons /  Joshi1983)

The book, in other words, is big, and dares to boldly go where others fear to tread (Steven Hawking wrote in his A Brief History of Time that each equation halved the number of readers: Gamwell has plenty, and explains the symbols of formal logic, too.) She can cover the plans of Gothic cathedrals, the mysteries of perspective from the Italian Renaissance, Zeno’s Paradox (can Achilles catch that tortoise?), modern art from Mondrian to Henry Moore, Bauhaus to Bourbaki. It’s kaleidoscopic, and if you wanted a coffee-table book then you could just flick through it and enjoy the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, gloriously illustrated.

But of course readers expect and deserve more. The chapters cover Arithmetic and Geometry; Proportion; Infinity; Formalism; Logic; Intuitionism; Symmetry; Utopian visions after World War I; The Incompleteness of Mathematics; Computation; Geometric Abstraction after World War II; Computers in Mathematics and Art; and Platonism in the Postmodern Era. This is visibly a huge scope – all of mathematics, all of art, and all of their intersection (to coin a phrase from set theory).

But wait a minute: all of art? It’s certainly all of the time during which art has been created, bone flute (Hohle Fels cave, c. 42,000 years ago) and Lascaux cave paintings (ca 15,000 BC) included. The discussion of art cheerfully scoots about from Iceland to Renaissance Italy; from Russia to China to Japan; from a Hungarian-born Argentine artiss  (Gyula Kosice) to the American hand-blown glass and steel sculptures of Josiah McElheny. The reader grapples with fractals and their recursive algorithms; formalist mathematics and constructivism; Klein bottles and the odd behaviour of electrons in quantum mechanics. Gödel, Escher and Bach do their Hofstadter-esque dance of self-reference.

The Elephant in the Room

Missing from the book: Islamic Art. (Girih strapwork tiling, Green Mosque, Turkey)
Missing from the book: Islamic Art. Girih strapwork tiling, Green Mosque, Turkey. (WIkimedia Commons)

So what is missing? The 556 pages barely so much as blink in the direction of Islamic Art, of the dazzling complexity and virtuosity of its geometric designs and decorations, of its centuries-long contribution to mathematics – even the words algorithm and algebra come from Al-Khwarizmi’s name and his book of pioneering mathematics. Nothing. Zilch. Nix. Or as the Arabs would say, Zifr. Well, they invented it.

Did Gamwell simply not know about Islamic tessellations? Of Escher’s inspiration in the Alhambra? Of Girih strapwork all over the minbar pulpits of Egypt, all over the turquoise domes of Persia? Of the dazzling Zellige tilework of Morocco? Of the lustre tiles of Tunisia? Of the inlaid geometric stonework of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus? Of the airy Jali stone screens of the Mughal palaces of India? It seems not. Her index includes “Arabic numerals”, but she did not follow up that broad clue.

Gamwell has written a fascinating, beautiful, intriguing, and stimulating book. It is sometimes rather too academically picky; sometimes a bit too thorough in explanation, but then you may need more than me on some topics. It is perhaps a bit too much focussed on the twentieth century – after all, why that century, not all the others? Recentism is no reliable guide. But the glaring gap, or as a pretentious art critic would say, the lacuna of all lacunae, is the extraordinary lack of coverage of the whole of the Islamic world. Try a look in the Index – you won’t find Arabia (apart from Arabic numerals), or Morocco, or Syria, or Iran (or even Persia), or Moghul/Mughal. It’s just not there.

I think this matters, and matters terribly. If George Bush and Tony Blair had it in their blood that art, science, mathematics, medicine, poetry, music, pottery, metalwork, masonry, glass, carpets, and gardens all flourished in the Islamic world, for century after century, from the Moroccan Maghreb (“The West”) to Turkey, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan, all of the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia – would they have acted as ignorantly as they did? And more importantly now, will our future leaders be any better informed, or will they treat Sunni and Shia alike as ignorant savages? For what it’s worth, Daesh / ISIS / ISIL is not Islam, it’s a stupid and wicked splinter group, and has nothing whatsoever to do with a great cultural heritage. Especially, it should not colour our attitudes to Muslims and Islam.

Some of the white space in Mathematics  + Art can be filled by other books, such as Luca Mozzati’s Islamic Art, or Eric Broug’s Islamic Geometric Designs.

All the same, I felt sufficiently engaged at the lack of coverage to do something about it. I brought two Wikipedia articles, Mathematics and art, and Islamic geometric patterns, to “Good Article” status, pretty much rewriting them from scratch in the process. To make the whole area a bit easier to navigate, I also rewrote the navigation template on Islamic art. Together, these are seen – and perhaps read – by around 100,000 people a year, and of course they help to inform blogs and social media postings, so maybe they will have some effect. If you can suggest ways of reaching more people with this sort of knowledge, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Book Review

Book Review: England, the making of the myth, by Maureen Duffy

Maureen Duffy England

I generally only review books that I would recommend. However, all rules are made to be broken. You’ll see why.

As the author of a book on some of the odd habits of the English over the centuries, I’m naturally professionally curious about anybody else’s take on the same theme. Duffy is a poet as well as a novelist, and not surprisingly is strong on the influence of poetry on the English idea of themselves. She covers an enormous range of history (from before the English arrived to the present) in a small, novel-sized book. She brings undoubted skills to her ambitious task, as well as an informed outsider’s eye (she’s a radical campaigner with an Irish father, but has lived all her life in England) and a liberal leftist point of view.

The book is not without interest, and some enjoyably wry observations:

“Our gardens involve us in no embarrassing intellectual or artistic decisions. With nature, even our version of stylized nature, we can’t go wrong. Our plots are little stages on which we are the only players, making three-dimensional installation art as the stage designer does with a maquette and the final set.” (p. 149)

(for another quote from the book, see Paradise lost…)

But it’s a bumpy ride. If you’re going to talk about myths you need the olympian detachment of a Greek god (not that Zeus and co. were particularly objective): or else you need to be aware that you’re taking sides, and be witty and elegant about it; not something that Duffy manages. And if you’re going to gallop through history, you had better avoid sounding (as Sean O’Brien spikily remarks in The Guardian‘s review) like 1066 and All That. The pace, too, is noticeably uneven: after galloping through a period’s history in a paragraph, Duffy will devote a whole page to a lengthy extract from a poem and comments on it. The book, in short, falls down in several ways at once.

On gardening, for example – one area where Englishness and Nature intersect – she wrongly supposes that the ‘wild garden’ is an early 20th century invention, ignoring its 18th century roots in the influential show-off aristocratic grounds of Chiswick House and Stowe. If you’re going to give instant thumbnail sketches of a thousand complicated stories, you do rather need to get to the bottom of each story before you try to summarize it.

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Book Review, Love of Nature

Book Review: The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways completes Robert Macfarlane’s trilogy about the British landscape, the earlier (and excellent) books being The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. As in those books, nature is a major player in The Old Ways, along with the people that Macfarlane meets in the places he visits. The ‘old ways’ are not only footpaths; sea roads too find a place, as he sails in an open boat, the old way, with knowledgeable guides. The footpaths, too, are not only in Britain: there is a marvellous pair of chapters on the poet Edward Thomas, ‘Flint’ and ‘Ghost’, as Macfarlane tracks him across the South Downs, and then to Thomas’s death as an artillery officer on the first day of the Battle of Arras, poignantly described with “The morning is a triumph for the British batteries”. Yes, we think; but was it worth the loss of one poet’s life, thousands of other lives. This is fine writing, not escapism, nor yet history, but a walking meditation that encompasses human life past and present, situated in the natural and human world with all its elements—social, political, emotional, spiritual.

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Book Review, Conservation, Love of Nature

Book Review: Feral by George Monbiot

Feral by George Monbiot
Feral by George Monbiot

Well, what a terrifically interesting book. I’ll say at once that while I’m right up there with Monbiot’s dream of a well-rewilded landscape (with a bit of wildwood near you for peace and refreshment from the electronic world), Monbiot is so bold in his arguments that it’s impossible to agree with everything he writes.

The starting point for this book is that we all feel the need to be free of our society’s stifling artificiality. We quietly hate being stuck on commuter trains, boxed into offices, jammed onto pavements, trapped in front of screens, permanently at the beck and call of electronic devices and social media. Monbiot is very funny on this sad topic. He uses as evidence not all this stuff from today’s world – you know it already – but the results when people from our world have gone into tribal societies: they uniformly want to stay. Conversely, when tribespeople have visited our world, they always want to go back home. Wild, 1. Civilised, 0.

Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island: once this bare moorland was forest
Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire: once this bare moorland was forest. Photo: Ian Alexander

Monbiot moves to Wales, near the bare open heathery uplands of the Cambrian Mountains, that everybody tells him are beautiful. He finds what every hillwalker (myself included) must have noticed without thinking too much of it, that there are very few species up there: few flowers (save Tormentil, a marker of overgrazing as sheep won’t eat it), few insects, few birds.

“I hate sheep”, writes Monbiot, startlingly: no echoes of Wainwright here, no grudging admiration of those toughest of hillwalkers, the mountain sheep like the Herdwicks of Lakeland. He hates the bare sward, devoid of trees. Trees? On the mountains? Yes, he shows us the record from pollen cores: from the end of the last ice age, the Welsh uplands were covered in forest – hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch. “By 4,500 years ago, trees produced over 70 per cent of the pollen in the sample.” Then, Neolithic farmers cleared the wildwood, and by 1,300 years ago the trees had gone, replaced by heather. And domestic animals, sheep and cattle, replaced the great beasts of the forest: the elk, bear, wolf, wild boar, lynx, wolverine. Even the mild beaver was driven to extinction.

Just proposing to rewild the British Uplands would be controversial enough, though the process has begun with many small schemes and a few large ones – Trees For Life’s vast Caledonian Forest project notable among them, with (at its core) the 40 square kilometres of the Dundreggan estate becoming bushier by the year. Proposing the reintroduction – the release into the wild, not yet legal in Britain – of beaver and boar and elk and lynx is more dramatic still. But Monbiot would like the large predators, too. Gulp.

And he goes further. We are all guilty of “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” (let’s call it SBS for short, it sounds a horrible disease). We imagine the world should be as we recall it from our own childhood. But it was already depauperate then!

Monbiot would like to allow nature to rebuild itself, with a little help to get started where necessary. He observes a remarkable fact that again we hadn’t thought much of: if you cut a tree, or lay a hedge of hawthorn, hazel, oak, willow – it sprouts vigorously up from the broken trunk, the cut stumps, the splintered branches. Why did our native trees evolve those responses? Because, argues Monbiot, they are adapted to large herbivores. Really large herbivores: elephants, rhinoceroses. Oh my. He wants to bring those back too. Actually it was the straight-tusked elephant we used to have: and the woolly rhino, both extinct: but Monbiot suggests that the living species are good and close replacements. Clearly, getting the relevant permissions might take a little time.

These are just some of the big, meaty ideas in Feral. There are sacred cows in there: the conservation authorities value the bare uplands, and certainly they have a beauty, manmade or not. The story is powerfully told, enlivened and illustrated by tales of wild (and dangerous) personal adventures. Monbiot knows his ecology and his landscapes: he just interprets them differently from the establishment. Quite often, as with his descriptions of the disgraceful overfishing practised by Britain and the European Union, he is certainly right. At other times he is controversial, even combative, but always fascinating. Whether you agree or disagree, if you’re interested in nature – as I assume you are, given that you’re here – you need to read Feral.

Buy it from Amazon.com  (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Read the blog post:  “Meeting George Monbiot“