This astute anthology is a reminder to communicate with nature in a way that forces us to inhabit the present
‘Everything of Earth’s current matter is being determined by one short-lived, pedestrian ape’: a female polar bear leads her two cubs on a seal hunt, in Nunavut, Canada. Photograph: Justin Hofman / Barcroft Media
Last summer I attended the funeral of the eye surgeon and musician Andrew Tullo, in Oswestry, Shropshire. At the door of the church two mourners gave out sprigs of apple blossom. When I asked why, I learned of the community orchard that Andrew had helped create in a crescent of abandoned ground between a disused railway line and the B5069. The Cambrian Railways Orchard Project combines orchard, camp fire, party venue, beekeeping and conservation, and it is beloved by the townsfolk that care for it.
It is typical of the kind of community scheme inspired by the lobby group and charity Common Ground, which was founded in 1983 by Sue Clifford, Angela King and the writer Roger Deakin “to seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment”.
Now Common Ground has inspired the radio producer(he makes around 40 programmes a year), birdwatcher and author Tim Dee to curate an anthology of new work by some of the most exciting authors writing about the natural world today. A percentage of the book’s profits will go to the charity.
In his introduction to Ground Work: Writings on Places and People, Dee outlines his manifesto. “We are living,” he declares, “in the Anthropocene, an epoch where everything of Earth’s current matter and life… is being determined by the ruinous activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, shortlived pedestrian ape.”
Common Ground’s work, in terms of art commissions, community projects and practical assistance, is made “with an understanding that people and place are entangled at all levels”. It is this one idea – entanglement – that pulses and squiggles across the work in this anthology, and forms the knotted, twisted, magic clue that can guide us through the mess we have made of our world. “One of the reasons why nature writing is resurgent today is because of Common Ground’s steadfast belief in the value of exploring what the natural world – even the broken-down, rubbish-dump world – means to us,” writes Dee.
There are 31 contributors, each of whom was given 3,000 words in which to express themselves. There is no thematic development throughout the ordering of the chapters; only the accidental positioning of whose name follows next in a strictly alphabetical progression.
And yet, in spite of this, there is a resonance between the pieces – a conversation is discernible as a faint hum throughout the book. In A Box of Old Shells, Julia Blackburn recounts a chance encounter with a fossil collector, Ray, who invites her to come and view his beach finds. Through Blackburn’s conversations with Ray, who heaps her with fossils and bits of treasure, we find ourselves questioning ideas about ownership (of treasure, fossils, of land) and about our common, shared heritage.
Hugh Brody, in a meditation on the idea of home, recounts his experience of mapping the northern Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic to show all the places in which the Inuit have hunted for seal, walrus, narwhal, caribou, hare and polar bear. He records the places where they gathered blueberries, cranberries and the eggs of Arctic terns.
And to what purpose? To develop a legal basis by which the Inuit people might lay claim to the land that has sustained them, as hunter-gatherers, for millennia.
Ownership, the idea of what that might mean, and coming to terms with the converse notion of the loss of property is also the subject of Peter Davidson’s exquisite essay on the watercolour drawings made by John Aubrey, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, of his family home before he lost it, ruined at the age of 44, in April 1670
Last summer I attended the funeral of the eye surgeon and musician Andrew Tullo, in Oswestry, Shropshire. At the door of the church two mourners gave out sprigs of apple blossom. When I asked why, I learned of the community orchard that Andrew had helped create in a crescent of abandoned ground between a disused railway line and the B5069. The Cambrian Railways Orchard Project combines orchard, camp fire, party venue, beekeeping and conservation, and it is beloved by the townsfolk that care for it.
It is typical of the kind of community scheme inspired by the lobby group and charity Common Ground, which was founded in 1983 by Sue Clifford, Angela King and the writer Roger Deakin “to seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment”.
Now Common Ground has inspired the radio producer(he makes around 40 programmes a year), birdwatcher and author Tim Dee to curate an anthology of new work by some of the most exciting authors writing about the natural world today. A percentage of the book’s profits will go to the charity.
In his introduction to Ground Work: Writings on Places and People, Dee outlines his manifesto. “We are living,” he declares, “in the Anthropocene, an epoch where everything of Earth’s current matter and life… is being determined by the ruinous activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, shortlived pedestrian ape.”
Common Ground’s work, in terms of art commissions, community projects and practical assistance, is made “with an understanding that people and place are entangled at all levels”. It is this one idea – entanglement – that pulses and squiggles across the work in this anthology, and forms the knotted, twisted, magic clue that can guide us through the mess we have made of our world. “One of the reasons why nature writing is resurgent today is because of Common Ground’s steadfast belief in the value of exploring what the natural world – even the broken-down, rubbish-dump world – means to us,” writes Dee.
There are 31 contributors, each of whom was given 3,000 words in which to express themselves. There is no thematic development throughout the ordering of the chapters; only the accidental positioning of whose name follows next in a strictly alphabetical progression.
And yet, in spite of this, there is a resonance between the pieces – a conversation is discernible as a faint hum throughout the book. In A Box of Old Shells, Julia Blackburn recounts a chance encounter with a fossil collector, Ray, who invites her to come and view his beach finds. Through Blackburn’s conversations with Ray, who heaps her with fossils and bits of treasure, we find ourselves questioning ideas about ownership (of treasure, fossils, of land) and about our common, shared heritage.
Hugh Brody, in a meditation on the idea of home, recounts his experience of mapping the northern Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic to show all the places in which the Inuit have hunted for seal, walrus, narwhal, caribou, hare and polar bear. He records the places where they gathered blueberries, cranberries and the eggs of Arctic terns.
And to what purpose? To develop a legal basis by which the Inuit people might lay claim to the land that has sustained them, as hunter-gatherers, for millennia.
Ownership, the idea of what that might mean, and coming to terms with the converse notion of the loss of property is also the subject of Peter Davidson’s exquisite essay on the watercolour drawings made by John Aubrey, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, of his family home before he lost it, ruined at the age of 44, in April 1670
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Richard Huws’s 1967 kinetic sound sculpture, Piazza Waterfall.
Mark Cocker discovers mystery and a portal to another world (an Otherworld, as the Celts might have had it) as he goes in search of spring gentians in Upper Teesdale; Nick Davies invites us into the Old Tower hide on Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire to watch the elusive, and fast disappearing, cuckoo. We are reminded again of nature’s ability to hold us in the moment, to hold us in the moment, to force us to inhabit the present.
Paul Farley uses Richard Huws’s 1967 kinetic sound sculpture, officially called Piazza Waterfall but known to Liverpudlians as the “Tipping Buckets”, as a way to explore the multilayered and complex history of Liverpool, which includes the difficult memory of the slave trade, conserved in the place names of the docks.
Tessa Hadley celebrates the wild in the City of London, and Philip Hoare writes brilliantly about the semi-industrial beachscape where he grew up, and to which he has now returned, and where he can be found swimming at 2am in the middle of winter, aligned with the turning tide: “As I grew up and felt more of a stranger in the human world – informed by the world that I was unnatural – so the natural world seemed more of a solace, since nature itself is queer.” Derek Jarman, he reminds us, was one for whom “nature elided with sensuality: for his common grounds were cruising grounds, like Hampstead Heath, another city-contained wilderness.”
Helen Macdonald affords a scintillating glimpse into the Theosophists’ community of Tekels Park, where she grew up, running wild, within the crumbling formal parkland of the estate. It is a vignette redolent of the world of WG Sebald or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. “So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it… defining our humanity against it,” she writes. “But this was nothing like that. It was a child’s way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship.”
Ground Work is an extraordinary and life-affirming book. Perhaps its greatest value lies in the multiplicity of ways in which its contributors connect and communicate with the natural world and with the places and people about them. One doesn’t need to be a farmer, or a conservationist, to justify a relationship with the wild. We just need to learn to look properly, and to find the common ground.
Richard Huws’s 1967 kinetic sound sculpture, Piazza Waterfall.
Mark Cocker discovers mystery and a portal to another world (an Otherworld, as the Celts might have had it) as he goes in search of spring gentians in Upper Teesdale; Nick Davies invites us into the Old Tower hide on Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire to watch the elusive, and fast disappearing, cuckoo. We are reminded again of nature’s ability to hold us in the moment, to hold us in the moment, to force us to inhabit the present.
Paul Farley uses Richard Huws’s 1967 kinetic sound sculpture, officially called Piazza Waterfall but known to Liverpudlians as the “Tipping Buckets”, as a way to explore the multilayered and complex history of Liverpool, which includes the difficult memory of the slave trade, conserved in the place names of the docks.
Tessa Hadley celebrates the wild in the City of London, and Philip Hoare writes brilliantly about the semi-industrial beachscape where he grew up, and to which he has now returned, and where he can be found swimming at 2am in the middle of winter, aligned with the turning tide: “As I grew up and felt more of a stranger in the human world – informed by the world that I was unnatural – so the natural world seemed more of a solace, since nature itself is queer.” Derek Jarman, he reminds us, was one for whom “nature elided with sensuality: for his common grounds were cruising grounds, like Hampstead Heath, another city-contained wilderness.”
Helen Macdonald affords a scintillating glimpse into the Theosophists’ community of Tekels Park, where she grew up, running wild, within the crumbling formal parkland of the estate. It is a vignette redolent of the world of WG Sebald or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. “So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it… defining our humanity against it,” she writes. “But this was nothing like that. It was a child’s way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship.”
Ground Work is an extraordinary and life-affirming book. Perhaps its greatest value lies in the multiplicity of ways in which its contributors connect and communicate with the natural world and with the places and people about them. One doesn’t need to be a farmer, or a conservationist, to justify a relationship with the wild. We just need to learn to look properly, and to find the common ground.
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