Nature Cure

Two quotes from this fascinating insight into our connection and need for the sustenance of nature that relate to the way I hope my work will be received.

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, London Chatto and Windus 2005

P12 the wood and the water, the ancient and the opportunist are I suspect the two poles of natural rhythms. Life begins in the water and reaches its full maturity in the forest and then it all goes round again…
Fitting in sharing territory discovering a niche making with luck a contribution and trying to do it all with a modicum of grace and inventiveness looks uncannily like the challenge our species is facing as it tries to find its own settlement in nature. The difference is that ecologically and globally we are bucking the whole emotional aspect of that settlement So often we are lectured that the great environmental crises of our time are just problems of household management writ large. If we are less greedy, stop breeding, budget our energy use recycle our waste, make compost then everything will be fine. What a hope! Who could ever run a house (if we must use that bossy domestic metaphor) while ignoring the unquantifiable tastes and habits, the needs and motivations of all its occupants? The list of our disastrous failures, from forest obliteration and oceanic pollution to the raising of the extinction rate a thousand fold bears all the marks of a species which no longer believes itself to be a part of the animal world at all.

P19Despite our science and our humanism our whole culture is infused with myths and symbols of landscape and nature, emblems of the seasons, of decay and rebirth, of the boundaries between the wild and the tame, myths of migration and transmigration, of invisible monsters and lands of lost content
We constantly refer back to the natural world to try to discover who we really are. Nature is the most potent source of metaphors to describe and explain our behaviours and feelings. It is the root and branch of much of our language. We sing like birds blossom like flowers and stand like oaks .