Weekend Nature Reads #1

Here's some good reading — and viewing — about nature and the great outdoors to see you through the weekend.

11 Dec 2020 — 5 min read

The Big Read: is our desire for nature innate?

Grab yourself a brew, and settle down in the comfy chair for this one. It's a long piece by a neuroscientist (but don't worry — it's far more accessible than that makes it sound) who starts to explore how much scientific basis there is for biophilia.

The answer, as you might expect, is complicated. But this article is as much about the journey as about the destination.

UK acts to protect rare albatross

It's pretty unusual that we get good news out of the current UK government, but this seems to me to be unqualifiedly positive:

British Overseas Territory to become world’s biggest marine conservation zone in bid to protect rare albatross

Boris Johnson said ‘we are killing our oceans’ as he unveiled the landmark policy

The TelegraphHelena Horton

White Tailed Eagles over the Sussex coast

Over in the Isle of Wight, there's a translocation project underway. Young white tail eagles have been brought from Scotland and released, in the hope that enough of them will survive and bond with the area that we start seeing the species breed in England for the first time in centuries.

That's still a few years away, though. In the meantime, the young released both this year and last are satellite tagged, and this is a fascinating account of how they've been exploring, based on both sightings and the signals from their tags.

Excitingly, one of them flew just north of where I live…

Bringing Nature to Book

Outdoors and nature writing were of deep consolation to me during the deepest days of lockdown. I thoroughly enjoyed this meditation on the value and role of them by the editor of Outdoor Swimmer, Jonathan Cowie.

(I am slighly shocked that it's 21 years since Waterlog was published, though…)

(And I just discovered that there's a new hardback edition of Waterlog coming next year. Yay!)

Interest in moving to coastal towns booming

Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm delighted or terrified by the fact that my town is mentioned deep in this piece. Apparently there's been an 96% increae in interest in properties where I live — which is less than some, but still high.

We've had the best part of nine months proving that many of us can work remotely (it's exactly nine months today since I last went to London, in fact). Lockdown and social distancing has reset many of our expectations, and that's going to shift where people want to live. Given that we've been trapped in or near our homes for months at a time, people have had to face, square on, the nature of where they've chosen to live, without the escape of work or visits to family.

Some have come to appreciate where they live more — we certainly did. But others will have realised that they need to make a change. They're the ones heading for the countryside and the coast right now.

There will be many good aspects to that — but some bad ones, too, I suspect.

Reclaiming Nets

This is a fun, but quite shocking video, showing just how much of the sea plastic around our beaches hails from fishing. The people collecting the “ghost gear” here are Waterhaul, who make lovely sunglasses from the plastic they collect.

The White Van Plan

Some of the best outdoors content at the moment is coming from the specialist retailers like Waterhaul above. I have a severe case of lust for Millican's backpacks (I should put them on my list for Father Christmas…), and this little promotional vignette of an adventurous way of living from them is rather lovely.

Once you look past the obvious photos of the bags, there are some lovely images.

Food Foraging

Fancy a wee bit of foraging? Sian has you covered with some easy and safe things to find.

Campaigners are calling for more right to roam

I imagine this will see massive pushback — but the campaign is really only asking for what has been the case in Scotalnd for some years now, and without disasterous consequences.

I doubt this will be high on the government's priority list, but I hope pressure for this sort of shift will only grow.