It is at lion rock that i catch my first glimpse of the southern coastline and get a taste of what it actually looks like. After all that park-like landscape, the rugged desolation really takes you aback. New Zealand was one big dramatic postcard, as though a top Italian designer had drawn the landscape on a computer using top-of-the-range software with the aesthetic-maximizer function cranked up. This is different: primitive and rough, so beautiful, in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else, that at first it’s hard to call it beauty at all. The southern coast of Tasmania is beautiful in the same way as the rocky fells of Lapland are beautiful. There’s nothing inviting about it, nothing alluring; it’s a landscape that is perfectly aware of its own qualities and doesn’t feel the need to try to please anyone. It can afford to be aloof.
~ Johanna Sinisalo, Birdbrain
So I see the relationship of people to trees as a conversation that involves quiet, attention, listening. What people have always done with breath, with spirit, is make stories, and I have no reason to believe that trees don’t similarly shape their breathing. Trees listen, then they tell their side of the same survival narrative. We have this conversation continuously on the molecular level. When the trees speak they tell me of course of water (they even sometimes make the sound of it quite convincingly.) They also talk about light. When I breathe in deeply in a forest, a light brightens just behind my eyes as surely as I see a canoe when you say the word canoe or conjure my daughter when you speak her name. Trees tell me other things as well; they seem to know me. Sometimes they tell me things that I don’t know I’ve heard until a long time after. Our breathing, I imagine, tells the trees of joy and desire, anger and injury, and is often shaped into the long sighs of sorrow. We tell it all, in every chemical flavor, storytelling virtuosos who by now, after a couple of million years, know how by heart.
~ Richard Hoffman
~ Paula Swisher (via)
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The Oven Bird by Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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“The ocean is home to fish, whales, sharks, and lots of other creatures, including those strange jellyfish that look like underwater kites. There’s room for all kinds. But there’s no room for bears, especially polar bears. When will they learn not to stick their noses where they’re not wanted? We’re tired of teaching them the same lesson over and over again.”
Paid for by an orca
~ Ben Greenman, When Animals Run Attack Ads
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7. Deer
I never saw the deer. It was one side of a fence and I was the other. It made a weird, primeval grunt. The noise connected with some primitive part of my brain and suddenly there were two voices in my head; the thought process that I think of as ‘me’ and an older, much older, fearful thing that was thinking backawaynowbackawayowbackawaynow. Despite knowing that I didn’t really need to move, I started to back away.
Fear 9/10. Shame 1/10. Discomfort 2/10. Total 12/30
~ Benjamin Judge, Top Ten Animals that have caused me to Experience Fear, Shame and/or Discomfort
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Times were, Americans knew how do deal with four-footed threats. Roughly 100 years ago, Recreation magazine solicited readers’ input on the “wolf question.’’ The many responses can be boiled down to two essentials: Poison ’em or shoot ’em. “The coyote, like the poor, is always around us,’’ reader Vic Smith wrote. In 1897, when Montana was offering a $3 bounty for every pelt, “I shot 37 coyotes in one week,’’ Smith reported. If the state raised the bounty to $10, Smith opined, it would “practically exterminate these animals in less than two years.’’
~ Alex Beam, Boston Globe
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Cats aren’t the only animals that are mentally stimulated by flashing and dancing lights, though. As it turns out, researchers at Wageningen University, in the course of their research on ethical livestock farming, noticed that pigs like to play with dancing lights as well. European regulations currently require that pig farmers provide mentally-stimulating activity for their pigs in order to reduce boredom, which leads to aggression and biting, and researchers at Wageningen University, in collaboration with the Utrecht School of the Arts, are currently developing a video game called “Pig Chase” for livestock pigs that is not unlike my cat’s iPad app.
@ Scientific American
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In what has been deemed “the worst case of badger baiting seen” by the investigating RSPCA officer, district judge Kristina Harrison heard how the defendants used a Bedlington Terrier with a tracking collar to locate the badgers in their underground sett.
~ Faces of the badger baiters
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Utah forbids hunting at night, but some people can’t resist. So the state uses a trap to lure violators. The Division of Wildlife Resources has five robotic deer. They’re placed near highways at night. They mimic deer movements. But like the monster in a Halloween nightmare, the deer don’t drop when shot. Instead, an officer emerges to seize your gun. A similar decoy in Georgia had to be replaced after being shot more than 1,000 times.
@ NPR (via)
~ Jeremy Mayer, Typewriter deer
A book is a tree with an education, I suppose; taken from the forest, chewed up, and flattened into paper, the tree, studentlike, gets imprinted with all kinds of information, and those imprinted pieces of paper become bound into a volume that eventually stands on a shelf with a lot of other educated trees. Books about nature are thus almost kaleidoscopically complicated: reading one, you hold what was once a part of a forest in your hands, scanning it to learn someone’s ideas about, say, some other forest somewhere, and all the while you could probably turn your head and look out the window at some trees much closer to home, trees that you likely have your own relationships with and opinions about. Ideas about nature, experiences in nature, material manipulations of nature — all of these and more swirl around the act of reading a book like this one. In thought, action, and memory, you and I are positioned in many ways at once toward the natural world even at the moment of writing or reading these particular words on this particular page. While it may be conventional for many of us to oppose “nature” to “culture,” then, in practice it may be more difficult to maintain that separation than might at first appear. In fact, once we start looking closely at those landscapes in the world around us that we define as “natural,” our sense of the integrity of the border between these two conceptual categories might begin to dissolve completely.
~ Ken C. Ryden
~ Zander Olsen, Cadair, Oak 2010
‘This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.’ (via)
A fascinating inverse of Myoung Ho Lee
~ Greg Garrard on Anti-Landscapes
In 2005 I set out to follow a hunch that cyberspace is permeated with the language of nature. Six years later my notebooks are groaning with proof that I was right, but until very recently I still couldn’t explain why we do this. However, I now suspect that the biophilia hypothesis might hold the key. Furthermore, as my forthcoming book will show, cyberspace is as drenched in biophilia as any other human environment, and that leads me to tentatively propose a new term built on Wilson’s original theory. I call it technobiophilia, ‘the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology’. It’s a somewhat clunky word and perhaps rather too stylised for its own good. I may yet change my mind about using it, but for the moment I’m offering it up as a way of getting to grips with the phenomena I’m working hard to understand. And time is pressing — the manuscript is due very soon….
~ Sue Thomas
The design of the beehive is unconventional, appealing, and respects the natural behavior of the bees. It consists of two parts: entry passage and flower pot outside, and glass vessel containing an array of honeycomb frames, inside. The glass shell filters light to let through the orange wavelength which bees use for sight. The frames are provided with a honeycomb texture for bees to build their wax cells on. Smoke can be released into the hive to calm the bees before it is opened, in keeping with established practice.
This is a sustainable, environmentally friendly product concept that has direct educational effects. The city benefits from the pollination, and humans benefit from the honey and the therapeutic value of observing these fascinating creatures in action. As global bee colonies are in decline, this design contributes to the preservation of the species and encourages the return of the urban bee. (via Inhabitat)
Now the urban hermit need not sacrifice style in the apiary; if my protagonist had known about these, he might not have been as eager to get out of the city… so it’s probably a good thing for me that he didn’t.
~ A neighborly coyote, via Universal Hub
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“Wolves are always given credit for being super-intelligent,” Coppinger says. His model suggests that their actions may be guided by simple rules — although Coppinger emphasises that his team has not proved that this is what happens.
If wolves do not communicate as they hunt, they may not be the social animals we thought either. Jackals or coyotes tend to live alone, forming packs only when their prey are clustered rather than evenly distributed. The same thing may be true of wolves, Coppinger says.
@ NewScientist
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“We have no evidence that there is a breeding population of wolves in the state, but it is quite possible for more wolves to arrive in the Northeast,” said Roland Kays, a curator at the museum. “There is substantial suitable habitat in northern New York and New England that could support a viable population of wolves.”
@ Times Union