The Blue Clerk
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The Want
Cyrus Simonoff
‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’
On Diane di Prima
Iris Cushing
‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’
The Lye of the Land
Derek Gow
‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’
In Conversation
Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky
‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’
Ways of Knowing
Lauren Wallach
‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
Scapegoat
Katharine Quarmby
‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’
Introduction
Isabella Tree
‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’
Shifting Baselines
Callum Roberts
‘Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.’
The Ard, the Ant and the Anthropocene
Charles Massy
‘I had somehow compartmentalised my mind: nature and my farm landscape stood either side of a deep chasm.’
Holding Up the Sky
Rod Mason & Charles Massy
‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’
Third Eclogue of the Vegetable Garden
John Kinsella
‘What you don’t know set / against all you want to know’
Symbiotic Rootscapes
Merlin Sheldrake
‘Symbiosis – the intimate association formed between different species – is a fundamental feature of life and enables new biological possibilities. Mycorrhizal fungi are some of the more striking examples.’
Water Is Never Lonely
Judith D. Schwartz
‘This water isn’t irredeemably lost, after all. It has merely been waiting for companionship.’
Survivors
Adam Weymouth
‘Salmon are the ultimate survivor. They’ve survived ice ages and cataclysms. But are they going to survive humans? It’s dubious, isn’t it?’
Creep
Caoilinn Hughes
‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’
The Secret Loves of Flowers
Dino J. Martins
‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Of the Forest
Manari Ushigua & Zoë Tryon
‘We Indigenous peoples know how nature works, how water, mountains, trees function and relate to each other, how stars in space are connected with the earth.’
Vultures
Samanth Subramanian
‘The death of the vulture is also the death of how we cope with death itself.’
Oh Latitudo
Amy Leach
‘The supervolcano has a supersecret underneath the surface, magma and hot mushy crystals.’
The Wolf at the Door
Cal Flyn
‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’
Prepare to Be Kind
Rebecca Priestley
‘Looking forward to 2100, it’s a choice between another thirty centimetres of sea level rise if we do everything we can to cut our carbon emissions, and up to two metres of sea level rise if we don’t.’
The Dragon’s Den
Tim Flannery
‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’
The Possibility of an Emperor
Patrick Barkham
‘I had always been told that the purple emperor was rare because old woods were rare.’
Aliens and Us
Ken Thompson
‘Japanese knotweed is a terrific late-season source of nectar for both bees and hoverflies, but that’s not much of a headline, is it?’
The High House
Jessie Greengrass
‘All those who might have lived instead of us are gone, or they are starving, while we stay on here at the high house, pulling potatoes from soft earth.’
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
‘Everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic. The future of the Arctic environment, and the Inuit it supports, is inextricably tied to the future of the planet.’
