The Geographer: Animal Geographies (Spring 2021)

The

Geographer Spring 2021

The newsletter of

the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Animal Geographies

Human Interactions and Pet Perspectives • Supervet: Why Hugging is Good • A Perfect Planet with The OU • Tensions in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Horn of Africa • Companionship and Conflict with Animals • COP15 and the Hope for Biodiversity • Interviews with Michael Palin and Philip Marsden • Costa Rica’s Wildlife Corridors, Covid, and China’s Capital • A Plea from Belarus • Reader Offer: The Black Cuillin

“Some people talk to animals.

Not many listen though.

That’s the problem.”

A A Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

plus news, books, and more…

The

Geographer

animal geographies

W

elcome to this bumper spring edition of The Geographer, which should be arriving with you as the snows are finally away, the nights are getting lighter, and our spirits are improving with the optimism of spring and the roll-out of the Covid vaccines.

We hope you will find this magazine full of interest – with a core theme of ‘animal geographies’. I am grateful to Professor Chris Philo from Glasgow University, who has helped collate some of the leading voices in this field of study, and who provides us with our topical introduction on page 9.

I am also delighted to feature a guest article from the Supervet, Noel Fitzpatrick. His opening line comment that healing begins with hugging is poignant in a world full of social distancing constraints, but hopefully this year we can all begin to benefit again from this most basic of human interactions.

This edition is full of perspectives, stories and insights from around the world. We have interviews with Michael Palin and Philip Marsden by our Writer-in-Residence, Jo Woolf. There are topical articles and updates about some of the critical news stories from 2020, which may have fallen off the radar or in some cases not quite made it onto the radar, but are worthy of our attention. From Belarus to Ethiopia to Nagorno Karabakh, and from success with Covid in different nations to the eradication of wild polio in Africa. There is so much going on in the world of interest to geographers everywhere. And for even more inspiration, I am also delighted to work with the Open University to feature a beautiful article about the wonderful BBC series A Perfect Planet.

There is still a great deal going on in RSGS, and a lot of exciting schemes to bring to fruition over the coming months.

We will be running less-regular talks over the summer, and have a series of school resources both online and in published form, plus the latest Young Geographer. Please stay in touch with all of our work, and help support or promote our work where you can.

Meanwhile, stay safe, have a wonderful spring, and enjoy reading.

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org

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Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599 The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS. Cover image: Osprey. Image by Iain Poole from Pixabay.

Masthead: Sri Lankan elephant. © Mike Robinson

RSGS: a better way to see the world

Michael Palin at RSGS

In January, we were grateful to host RSGS Livingstone Medallist Sir Michael Palin for a special, one-off event enjoyed by more than 900 households of our members and supporters.

Delivered via Zoom, we aired a pre-recorded video of Michael’s talk, which focused on his recent adventures in North Korea, followed by an engaging live Q&A with contributions from audience members. After the event, RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf was pleased to interview Michael to learn more: see pages 40-41.

£3bn for nature At the One Planet Summit in Paris in January, the Prime Minister announced that the UK would spend at least £3bn of international climate finance on nature and biodiversity over five years. He said that humanity was destroying species and habitats at “an absolutely unconscionable rate,” and that the £3bn, which forms part of the UK’s £11.6bn contribution to a climate finance initiative, would go to “protecting nature, whether it’s marine life or timber conservation or sustainable food production. Obviously it’s right to focus on climate change, obviously it’s right to cut CO2 emissions, but we won’t achieve a real balance with our planet unless we protect nature as well.”

Covid-19 update Mike Robinson, Chief Executive Covid-19 restrictions continue to have a significant impact on the RSGS’s day-to-day activities. Staff are continuing to work mostly at home, with some limited presence in the office when essential. I’m afraid that we are still unable to welcome volunteers or visitors into the office, and we expect that the visitor centre will have to remain closed this summer, as it was in 2020.

However, we have grasped the opportunity to try some new ways of engaging members and friends with our work.

After the success of the online Inspiring People At Home talks and other social events, we are planning to run a few more online events over the spring and summer months, which we will advertise through our website and social media. It is still unclear when restrictions on public events may be lifted. We are currently compiling the programme of talks for 2021-22, in the knowledge that some events may still need to be held online. We hope that you will continue to bear with us and remain part of our RSGS family.

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Spring 2021

Counting elephants from space

Following the success of our Helping Hand for Schools appeal, we have produced the first online video lessons of a new series, aimed at geography students working at home. These ‘RSGS Chalk Talks’ will summarise topics in the Scottish Geography curriculum, from glaciers to coasts, cities to deserts, and everything in between. Videos will be uploaded to rsgs.org/chalktalks as they are created.

The population of African elephants has plummeted over the last century due to poaching, retaliatory killing from crop raiding, and habitat fragmentation. To conserve them requires knowledge of where, and how many, they are. The most common survey technique for populations in savannah environments is aerial counts from manned aircraft. But these can be costly and logistically challenging, and observers can make mistakes through exhaustion or poor visibility.

The first video is pitched at Higher students, and focuses on the atmosphere. It is presented by the Chair of our Education Committee, Alastair McConnell, who is Head of Geography at Dollar Academy. He said, “Recent months have been very challenging for all in education, and I hope these freely available Chalk Talks will take some pressure off teachers, pupils and parents. These short, punchy lessons will engage students in the subject matter as well as helping prepare them for the kinds of questions asked in assessments.”

Now, using high-resolution satellite imagery and deep learning artificial intelligence, researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Bath and Twente have developed a process that can accurately detect elephants from space.

Satellites can unobtrusively collect upward of 5,000km² of imagery in one pass captured in a matter of minutes, eliminating the risks of double counting and of disturbing species. And a computer algorithm allows the enormous quantity of imagery generated to be processed in hours, rather than months.

In developing these videos, we are grateful to a team of content creators at Dollar Academy, and to Mort&Pal Video Productions who have helped edit much of our online content of late.

Jeremy Bowen FRSGS In December, BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen received our Mungo Park Medal for his outstanding contribution to geographical knowledge in often hazardous physical and social environments. During a virtual celebration, we were delighted to include notes of congratulation from HRH The Princess Royal (a Vice-President of RSGS), and from fellow journalists Sophie Raworth, David Shukman and Lindsey Hilsum. We wish Jeremy our warmest congratulations, and look forward to continuing our relationship with him in the future.

Coffee catch-ups

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March

13th April

In February, we held our first virtual ‘coffee afternoon’ for some of our many volunteers across Scotland.

With the RSGS office and visitor centre closed, and all talks being delivered online at the moment, we haven’t been able to meet in person, so this was an opportunity to reconnect and exchange ideas.

animal geographies

RSGS Chalk Talks

Continuing Climate Emergency Summits Whilst the world’s focus is quite rightly on resolving the current pandemic, the climate emergency has not gone away. To this end, we have continued to hold regular Climate Emergency Summits over recent months, each time working with a different partner organisation. Most recently, these high-level meetings have brought together leading experts in sustainability to provide solutions across procurement (with Zero Waste Scotland), transport (with Paths for All), and land management (with the Scottish Land Commission and NatureScot). We are now planning further Summits, including one for journalists to explore how best this sector can report the science and solutions around the climate emergency. Following these online events, we publish our findings and submit these to Scottish Government. Please visit www.rsgs.org/climate-emergency-summits for more information.

Online Sustainability Hub

Drawing upon the expertise of its academics and researchers from across the UK, the Open University’s Sustainability Hub on its Chief Executive Mike Robinson reported on the latest project OpenLearn platform brings together a wealth news, and Collections Committee Chair Margaret Wilkes gave of diverse, freely available resources on living sustainably a presentation about the Bartholomew family’s connections to for everyone (see www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/ RSGS, past and present. There was also a chance to chat in sustainability-hub). From articles, interactive activities smaller groups with Board and staff members, and hear from and short courses, ranging from ecology, energy RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf about her latest work. and food choices, to economics and design Future ‘coffee afternoons’ are planned for Tuesday 16th March solutions, you can dive in and explore the issues, and Tuesday 13th April. Please contact enquiries@rsgs.org if you empower yourself with knowledge, and decide what you want to do to make a difference in an accessible manner. would like to get involved.

explore and empower

2 Spring 2021

news

Young Geographer III Meredith Adams, Young Geographer editorial team

read all about it!

RSGS advises RSGS is engaged in lots of formal and informal advisory work.

Recently, we have been working with the Lithuanian Embassy to celebrate the contribution of polymath and previous RSGS Chair J Y Simpson in arbitrating the boundaries of Baltic nations post-WWI; speaking at the Oxford Real Farming Conference with Farming for 1.5°C; supporting the ongoing Scotland’s Climate Citizens’ Assembly; chairing a Leadership Round Table with the University of Glasgow, Policy Scotland and Glasgow City Council; contributing to discussions about the University of Stirling’s plans for an International Environment Centre as part of their City Region Deal; working with the University of Dundee’s UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science on communications and outreach; and beginning a great collaborative discussion with the RGS-IBG, Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and National Geographic. And lots more besides. If you’d like to know more, please email us on enquiries@rsgs.org.

Terra Carta Leading environmental campaigner HRH The Prince of Wales unveiled the Terra Carta at the One Planet Summit in Paris in January, saying, “The Terra Carta offers the basis of a recovery plan that puts Nature, People and Planet at the heart of global value creation – one that will harness the precious, irreplaceable power of Nature combined with the transformative innovation and resources of the private sector.”

Deriving its name from the historic Magna Carta, which inspired a belief in the fundamental rights and liberties of people over 800 years ago, the Terra Carta aims to reunite people and planet, by giving fundamental rights and value to Nature, ensuring a lasting impact and tangible legacy for this generation.

The Terra Carta provides a roadmap to 2030 for businesses to move towards an ambitious and sustainable future. One of its actions was initiated at the Summit, with the creation of a Natural Capital Investors Alliance targeting $10 billion by 2022. See www.sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta for more information.

Highlands and Islands Airports Limited is leading a £3.7m project to develop a sustainable aviation programme that could transform short flight travel between remote communities.

Part-funded by UK Research and Innovation, the 18-month project involves a consortium of aviation industry specialists, local Orkney and Caithness businesses, public sector bodies and academia. It will create the UK’s first operationally-based, low-carbon aviation test centre at Kirkwall Airport, and aims to identify the next generation of air services and the operational airport infrastructure necessary to support sustainable aviation. It will include testing low-carbon aircraft using electric, hydrogen or Sustainable Aviation Fuels to replace conventional fossil fuels, and drone applications for supplying on-demand medical supplies to health centres.

Zoomshock City centres are likely to be among the most dramatically hit by the pandemic, according to a recent study published in Social Science Research Network.

Lead academic Dr Jesse Matheson from the University of Sheffield studied the impact of ‘Zoomshock’, an effect of more people working from home. Across Scotland, while Zoomshock might encourage positives such as better services in local neighbourhoods and reduced emissions via commuting, the economic effects in city centres such as Glasgow are expected to hit the poorest hardest. Dr Matheson indicated that a reduction in footfall in these urban centres would result in there being too many hairdressers, coffee shops and small retail outlets, putting at risk jobs which are often held by lower-paid workers.

University News

The Young Geographer is at the exciting final stages of production.

As an editorial team, we have been challenged by the pandemic, but we have still managed to collate high-quality articles and features on the theme of climate justice, a topic now more relevant than ever.

Publicity for the magazine will look different in 2021, as we will predominantly use digital channels and supporting organisations, such as Young Scot, to help spread the word to make the magazine digitally accessible.

Please keep an eye on www.rsgs.org/innovative-projects in the coming weeks in order to read the magazine, or contact enquiries@rsgs.org if you would like a hard copy.

Sustainable Aviation Test Environment

Cracking on with Croll Jo Woolf, RSGS Writer-in-Residence We’re making great progress in our new project to tell James Croll’s life story in words and pictures.

Our emphasis has been on tapping into the young, enthusiastic Croll who had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Dylan Gibson has already produced some fantastic illustrations and I’m putting the finishing touches to the text. Two hundred years after Croll’s birth, this special edition of the Penny Magazine will be such a lovely tribute, because he enjoyed the magazine so much as a young lad. We hope to have copies available for schools in the summer, with lesson plans to help with their use in the classroom.

Student Society of the Year Edinburgh University Geographical Society is Bright Network’s Society of the Year 2020. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it successfully transformed from a previously events-based society, to one of true versatility; offering opportunities for support, socialising, sports and careers advice, and becoming an online platform to champion innovation and inclusion.

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Hamish MacInnes OBE BEM FRSGS (1930-2020) In November, the mountaineering world lost one of its heroes. In a long lifetime of climbing, Hamish MacInnes achieved several significant ascents around the world, but perhaps his most important legacy is in mountain rescue. He was a co-founder of the Scottish Avalanche Information Service, and he developed the use of trained dogs to locate people buried in the snow. He established and led the Glen Coe Mountain Rescue Team, his International Mountain Rescue Handbook was a bestseller, and he designed and modified all kinds of climbing equipment for increased safety, including an all-metal ice axe and the ‘MacInnes stretcher’ for bringing casualties off a mountain.

MacInnes will be fondly remembered for his independent spirit, altruism, courage, modesty, and not least for his sense of humour. Thousands of people owe their lives to him, either directly via rescue missions, or through safety equipment and training. While he loved all mountains, his heart was in Scotland, where he said the climbs were just as hard as anything in the Himalayas. He was keen to see Scotland’s wilderness areas preserved, remembering that in his early years he had enjoyed “the most wonderful feeling of isolation, as if you had all the wild places entirely to yourself.”

Inspiring People talks success Despite the best efforts of the current pandemic, our 2020-21 Inspiring People talks programme has been a great success, moved online for the first time. We have managed to host our usual array of high-quality communicators, policy-makers, broadcasters and explorers via Zoom, and enjoyed audiences of more than 400 households each Wednesday at 7.30pm.

We have also held several special events, most recently with Jonathon Porritt. We look forward to continuing our online events programme on an ad hoc basis throughout the summer.

Please check our social media and website for updates.

The #OurSeas campaign has brought together an alliance of Scottish organisations, businesses, communities and individuals to support a more sustainable use of our coastal seas. One of the key asks is to re-establish a modern, coastal limit on bottom-towed fisheries to allow coastal zones to recover from this damaging practice. But the benefits of this possible legislation are not just environmental; investing in the recovery of our seas will build a better future for communities, fishermen, and the many who rely on a productive, diverse environment. Visit www.ourseas.scot to find out more and to watch The Limit.

In January, a team of ten Nepali climbers set a new world record by becoming the first to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second highest mountain, © Nimsdai PR in winter.

Mountaineer Nirmal Purja said, “We are proud to have been a part of history for humankind and to show that collaboration, teamwork and a positive mental attitude can push limits to what we feel might be possible.” One of only 14 mountains higher than 8,000m, K2 is widely considered the most demanding of all in winter, and is known as ‘the savage mountain’.

Wild polio in Africa One of last year’s events which received little coverage was the eradication of wild polio in Africa, a tremendous good news story. See page 14 for an article about some of the technological solutions that helped make this possible.

In 1996, Nelson Mandela launched the Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign with Rotary International’s support. At the time, wild polio paralysed 75,000 children each year. To protect communities from this crippling disease, African leaders, health workers, volunteers, parents, global donors and organizations united to reach every child with polio vaccines.

On 25 August 2020, after four years without a single case of wild polio, the African region was certified free of wild poliovirus. Now, efforts continue to prevent wild polio from returning and to end all forms of polio for good, both in Africa and globally. See www.africakicksoutwildpolio.com for more information.

New OU Geography degree The Open University has recently launched a new Geography (BA) degree, which explores how geography makes a difference to how we understand and might respond to the pressing local and global challenges posed by issues such as climate change and social inequality. The qualifications have a strong focus on the entanglement between human and biophysical aspects of our environments. Such issues and relationships are brought to life using the OU’s unique blend of printed and online materials, with innovative virtual fieldwork a particular feature of the degree, developing skills that set students up to complete their studies with a dissertation.

University News

The Limit

K2 winter ascent record

4 Spring 2021

news Climate Solutions commitment

The Economics of Biodiversity

As part of ‘building back better’ from the pandemic, there is now a strong policy focus across Scotland on ensuring the sustainability of our societies and planet.

Organisations need not just to be ‘climate ready’ or ‘climate aware’, but actually to have plans in place to deliver solutions. In support, our Climate Solutions courses are targeted specifically at the business community, delivered online to upskill staff quickly and efficiently, and outline what every manager needs to know about responding to the climate emergency. On completion, participants receive evidence of their learning, and are invited to join a cross-sectoral network to facilitate joined-up climate responses.

An independent, global review published in February has called for urgent and transformative change in how we think, act and measure economic success, in order to reverse biodiversity loss, and protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world. Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta’s review, commissioned by HM Treasury, presents the first comprehensive economic framework of its kind for biodiversity. Grounded in a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and how they are affected by economic activity, it sets out the ways in which we should account for nature in economics and decision-making.

be part of the solutions

We are delighted that a number of forward-thinking organisations have already signed up. Creative Scotland, Scottish Water and Highlands and Islands Enterprise have put a significant number of colleagues through the 20-hour Professional course. One commented: “Completing the course has been a key change agent within our organisation.”

The Scottish Futures Trust have gone a step further, and signed up their whole organisation, with senior staff undertaking the Professional course, and the rest of the organisation undertaking the shorter Accelerator course.

Doug Scott CBE FRSGS (1941-2021)

Until later life, Doug’s love of high mountains continued to carry him all over the globe. During the first lockdown in 2020, aged 79, he defied illness with a sponsored climb of his staircase to raise money for his charity, Community Action Nepal. When he died on 7th December, warm tributes flooded in from mountaineers the world over.

In 1975, the British Everest expedition received the Livingstone Medal, and in 2009 Doug Scott received RSGS Honorary Fellowship. A hugely popular speaker, he gave a number of sell-out lectures to RSGS groups.

See www.gov.uk/government/publications/ final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-thedasgupta-review for more information.

Chagos Islands The United Nations’ International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled in January that the UK has no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, criticising the UK’s failure to hand the territory over to its former colony, Mauritius, by December 2019, as earlier ruled by the International Court of Justice and demanded by a nearunanimous vote at the UN’s General Assembly.

In the 1960s, one of the larger atolls of the archipelago became a strategic American military airbase, to counter the potential expansion of Chinese military power in the Indian Ocean. The UK has said it will hand the islands back when they’re no longer needed for defence purposes.

In the summer 2010 edition of The Geographer, we reported on the UK government’s creation of the planet’s largest no-fishing marine reserve around the Chagos Islands.

Glasgow’s sustainable solutions Professor Jaime L Toney, University of Glasgow The University of Glasgow’s Centre for Sustainable Solutions is the new kid on the block but is pleased to be developing a reputation for action around the climate emergency. The Centre aims to enable individuals, communities and organisations to act sustainably through research, education and partnership.

We recently partnered with Policy Scotland and Glasgow City Council to host a series of green recovery dialogues to engage practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.

The new insights and identified areas for urgent action needed to implement green futures, low carbon energy, and rethink consumption were put to the leaders of more than 20 Scottish organisations. RSGS Chief Executive Mike Robinson provoked us in a call to action to break down barriers imposed by siloes and seek collective action at strategic levels to accelerate the pace of the just and sustainable transition.

University News

Doug Scott was a pioneer of lightweight, alpine-style climbing, accumulating a raft of high-profile ‘firsts’, including his role in the first British expedition to scale the south-west face of Everest, led by Sir Chris Bonington. But it was often the failures that he remembered most: “You only tend to talk about your successes, but looking back on my climbing, I’ve had four goes at K2, four goes at Nanga Parbat, four goes at Makalu, and never got up. And actually, on these so-called failures… more interesting things happen.”

Professor Dasgupta said, “Truly sustainable economic growth and development means recognising that our long-term prosperity relies on rebalancing our demand of nature’s goods and services with its capacity to supply them. It also means accounting fully for the impact of our interactions with nature across all levels of society. COVID-19 has shown us what can happen when we don’t do this. Nature is our home. Good economics demands we manage it better.”

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Cat in court

Dave Morris FRSGS

A lawyer appearing before a judge at a virtual court case in Texas appeared on screen disguised as a cat! The filter, available on Zoom, was turned on accidentally by Rod Ponton, who said later, “I did not know that Zoom could turn me into a cat. And I did not know that a ‘cat Zoom’ could turn me into an internet celebrity.”

In January, we were delighted to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Dave Morris, former Head of Operations at Ramblers Scotland. Dave was one of the most important voices in developing Scotland’s access legislation, that allows walkers, cyclists, canoeists and horse-riders to cross most land and water, camp freely, and enjoy Scotland’s landscapes, provided it is done in a considerate, responsible way.

James Croll: from janitor to genius

Dave received the award at an Inspiring People At Home talk given by Stephen Venables. Cameron McNeish FRSGS added his congratulations, saying, “Scotland’s access laws have become the envy of the world: ground-breaking legislation that only exists because of Dave’s determination and vision, and his late colleague Alan Blackshaw’s forensic research.”

Professor Kevin Edwards FRSGS On 16th April, in an online whole-day meeting cosponsored by the RSGS and the Quaternary Research April Association, we shall be celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of James Croll (1821-90). A self-taught, stonemason’s son from Perthshire, Croll became internationally celebrated as a proponent and developer of the astronomical theory of climate change, with its implications for glaciation, oceanography and much else. Using a mixture of talks and videos, the Zoom-based meeting will explore Croll as a person and as a scientist, with specialists drawn from the worlds of science, history and popularisation. Details will be available at rsgs.org/events in March.

16th

Rewilding Scotland

Cumbrian coal and climate change Environmentalists have been in uproar over proposed plans to open the first deep coal mine in the British Isles for 30 years. While proponents point towards the economic boost this would have for local people and jobs in Cumbria, environmental groups argue that this investment in fossil fuel extraction is diametrically opposed to the UK Government’s emissions targets and the goals laid out in the 2009 Paris Agreement, and that the mine would undermine the leadership opportunities presented by COP26 which is due to take place in Glasgow in November. Cumbria County Council is reconsidering the mine application at the time of writing, and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick would be required to sign off a decision to go ahead.

Knee-high to a grasshopper

More than 75% of Scots would support, and only 7% would oppose, a Government commitment to rewild 30% of Scotland’s land. This is the finding of a survey of 1,000 people organised by the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, a coalition of more than 20 organisations. Rewilding could be achieved by restoring and expanding native woodlands, moorlands, peatlands, and marine habitats, but without compromising productive agricultural land. The campaign was launched with the help of RSGS Honorary Fellow Gordon Buchanan. Hugh Raven, Chair of Open Seas, commented, “The new opinion poll shows people know that nature’s health is our nation’s wealth.”

Personal space in the pandemic Professor David Humphreys, The Open University Government responses to Covid-19 relate to proxemics, an area of geographical scholarship on how individuals use space, including the distance they wish to establish between themselves and others. Social distancing and self-isolation are forms of spatial segregation that seek to separate healthy bodies from diseased ones. Individuals who have found it difficult to practice spatial segregation, such as key workers and those living in overcrowded or multi-generational households, have been most at risk of infection.

Geographers interested in proxemics will be taking a close interest in how people use personal space and relate socially post-pandemic.

University News

Long-standing readers of The Geographer may remember that in spring 2012 we reported on the announced discovery in Madagascar of the smallest known chameleon, Brookesia micra. Now, that record has been overtaken by the discovery (also in Madagascar) of Brookesia nana. With the © Frank Glaw adult male measuring just 22mm in total length, this may be the smallest reptile on Earth; it hunts mites, and hides in blades of grass to avoid predation. Dr Mark Scherz described it as “a spectacular case of extreme miniaturisation,” but said that research indicated it could be “threatened by extinction.” However, its montane rainforest habitat has been placed under protection from deforestation, so the survival of this unique, island nanochameleon looks safe for now.

© Desmond Dugan

6 Spring 2021

A two-way street: a ‘humanimal’ perspective Professor Noel Fitzpatrick, specialist orthopaedic-neuro veterinary surgeon, and Director of Fitzpatrick Referrals, Surrey

“Hugging is half of healing,” I often say in the context of veterinary surgery at my referral hospital, meaning that we care for the dogs and cats that come to see us as if they were our own family members in our own homes.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, people have grown closer to their dog or cat family member more than ever before and pet populations have soared, because we recognise their positive contribution to our mental and physical health through interaction and exercise. I have met many dogs, cats and their families who have revelled in the bond of unconditional love that they have built during lockdown. I recently consulted with an elderly man called Sean who told me that he had battled with depression and anxiety for years. He had felt so lonely and isolated during the first UK lockdown that he thought about suicide. Then Fred the westie came along, and he has never looked back. He told me that Fred ‘saved him from himself’.

how more than three-quarters of all new infections come to humans from animals. It behoves us to look after the bat and the pangolin so that a coronavirus or Ebola epidemic doesn’t happen again. It also behoves us to look after dogs and cats that get the same cancer and infection we do, since we could move forward faster with joinedup thinking.

“It behoves us to look after dogs and cats that get the same cancer and infection we do, since we could move forward faster with joinedup thinking.”

Yet, very few of us think about how animals save us all of the time. We rarely think of where our drugs and implants come from, and why dogs and cats remain the poor cousins of human medicine, in that they do not get the same advances in drug and implant technology that are afforded to us. In part at least, this is because human medicine relies heavily on experimental animals to deliver testing of efficacy and safety of drugs and implants, and then finance from such discoveries is recovered from the human medical world before it’s shared with the animals. At the clinical coalface, vet and human medicine remain poles apart. Is that an acceptable way to treat our ‘animal family members’?

However, in my experience, most models of One Health are set up to study animal disease to help humans, with little practical help for animals. This paradigm of One Medicine, which is the most important central goal of my life, and for which I founded a charity called Humanimal Trust, could help both animal and human medicine, but we must find ways in which the pharmaceutical and implant companies can make the same amount of money or more money by joined-up thinking.

Joined-up thinking is also necessary if we are to reverse the trend of global warming and rising sea levels, as we push the planet ever closer to an obvious and inevitable tipping point. But as we clear more forest for intensive agriculture, decimating the trees that replenish our own oxygen supply, and as we continue to rely on activities producing greenhouse gases and pollutants that clog our cities, fill our atmosphere and melt the icebergs, we don’t think of the loss of tomorrow, just the profit of today.

I have tried all my professional life to narrow this gap, believing that animals deserve a ‘fair deal’. I believe that there is a middle ground – where a superior model could be to provide new drugs and implants to dogs and cats with naturally occurring disease, within an ethically robust and carefully regulated framework of cross-collaboration, rather than induce the disease in a healthy experimental animal and then sacrifice them solely for our benefit. In so doing, we would potentially save the life of an animal rather than taking that life – to save ourselves.

I am a pragmatic realist and don’t suggest that this can be achieved quickly. I understand and am part of ‘the establishment’ that supports the status quo. In the UK there is a national centre for the replacement, refinement and reduction of animal experimental models in study designs (NC3Rs) which guides regulations nationally and internationally for the use of animals in scientific procedures.

Research has shown that public support for animal research is conditional on the 3Rs. I would add a fourth R – ‘reciprocity’. This could be a two-way street for development of drugs and implants, but this is challenging, since it isn’t the way that ‘business is done’.

This concept of ‘One Medicine’ is not new, and there are conferences all over the world on the subject of ‘One Health’ in recent years. People understand how naturally occurring disease may be a better model for human disease, and

A Labrador patient ready for a CT scan at Fitzpatrick Referrals Oncology & Soft Tissue.

What if we cared about all animals on the planet as if they were as important as our dog or cat? The lockdown of the Covid pandemic had given us pause to see fish return to canals, wildlife return to hedgerows, and birds return to trees in our cities – and ourselves to return to nature for a walk or a run instead of living in the bubble of the buildings we have created. However, I fear that all of this may be forgotten when lockdown ends.

I wonder what will our dogs and cats think when they are alone again whilst we are at work or out socialising? It will be some time before we realise that the cures for many of our diseases rest as much with the hairy ball of fluff on our sofa as does our mental health. It will be some time before a twoway-street of One Medicine is a reality. It will be some time

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Professor Noel Fitzpatrick with his dog Keira. © Ray Burmiston

One Medicine.

before we realise that our destruction of species and their habitats can result in the destruction of our own. Maybe we just don’t have ‘some time’.

Maybe Fred could save all of us from ourselves? If only we’d treat him and his friends fairly then we might be able to heal our physical as well as our mental wounds, and we might just heal the wounds of our planet too. Coronavirus came to us from animals because of our onslaught on the natural world. The natural world has screamed a massive wake-up call and time is running out. If we don’t ‘wake up’ today, we might not wake up as a civilization at all in the future.

It is ironic that we hold onto our animal friends more than ever to get us through the isolation of lockdown, whilst we cause isolation and lockdown for animals in their habitats and animals in experimentation by not holding onto them tightly enough. Perhaps we all need to learn that hugging is a twoway street; and we owe the animals something, in return for all that they give to us.

The Humanimal Trust (humanimaltrust.org.uk) drives collaboration between vets, doctors and researchers so that all humans and animals benefit from equal and sustainable medical progress but not at the expense of an animal’s life. This is One Medicine.

In How Animals Saved My Life: Being the Supervet, Noel shares the moving and often funny stories of the animals he’s treated and the unique ‘animal people’ he has met along the way, reflecting on the valuable lessons of Integrity, Care, Love and Hope that they have taught him.

8 Spring 2021

A biogeographical view Brian James, independent environmental consultant

I was very lucky to have an outstanding geography teacher at school. He had a rack of huge maps suspended from the ceiling of the classroom, and as he talked to us he would use a hooked stick and draw down wonderful detailed maps of Europe, the British Isles, or the world, conjuring up surprises according to his lesson plan or in response to questions from us. As the teacher prattled on about facts, flocks and flax, looking at a relief map of Europe, I was looking at hills, mountains, lowlands and river valleys, at the extent to the Arctic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south, and considering why Europe’s fauna was so impoverished compared with North America, why we had a lot of species in common or very closely related, yet others absent entirely here.

(deer, wild boar, squirrels, foxes, etc).

A familiar example of this jigsaw is the distribution of European mammals, exemplifying the impacts of expanding glaciers pushing animal and plant distributions south until constrained by sea, mountains and desert. In China and North America the fauna and flora could move north or south without such constraints, and hence both of those regions have a far more diverse flora and fauna than we have in Europe. The British Isles are an archipelago at the extreme west of the Eurasian landmass, and far enough north to have been severely impacted by the glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. As the last glaciers began to retreat, the fauna able to survive in cold northern temperate conditions would have been able to spread across Europe and colonise even the westernmost island of the British Isles. Mountain hares, red deer and stoats were able to colonise Ireland before sea levels rose enough to cut off other immigrants. Hence no roe deer, no reptiles, no brown hares and no weasels. In the absence of brown hares, the mountain hare became the Irish hare, occupying all hare niches from mountains to lowlands. In the absence of the weasel, the stoat in Ireland has evolved into a sub-species which is smaller, doesn’t turn white in winter, and the females are much smaller than males.

“Biogeography involves geological time and processes, the evolution of fauna and flora, and the opportunities and constraints imposed by barriers to dispersal.”

The same kind of questions buzzed in my mind looking at the world vegetation map in an atlas at home. Why is the fauna of tropical rainforests in Africa different to that of Southeast Asia? And why do they both have, nonetheless, a lot of similar species as well as the different ones? And why are those two zoogeographical regions both so very different from the tropical forest fauna of South America? It is as if each region is a superficially similar picture, reflecting latitude and broadly climate, but created from a separate box of jigsaw pieces; the pictures cannot be the same if some pieces are missing, or different ones are present.

Biogeography considers the geography of speciation, centres of evolution and how the geological history of a region has changed over time, and how that created opportunities for animals and plants evolving in different places around the continents to disperse and colonise new areas. It looks at the development of physical barriers to dispersal, such as deserts during a drying phase of a region’s climate or a region becoming isolated from rainfall as mountain barriers are uplifted, or sea level changes intervene, and the spread and retreat of glaciers. Thus, biogeography involves geological time and processes, the evolution of fauna and flora, and the opportunities and constraints imposed by barriers to dispersal. And it involves the interplay of species within a region too; processes of ecology and local adaptation.

A final thought: climate change is already having an effect on the distribution of our fauna and flora, as for example southern invertebrate species are advancing northwards. In nature conservation, we have understandably become very politically correct about native and unnatural distributions of plants for example in Britain. It enhances a feeling of continuity with nature and life on our planet to wander amongst vegetation that is in direct continuity with the environment of people hundreds of years ago here, or at least is natural. Who can say now what would be the natural distribution of the fauna and flora of Britain now in our significantly wetter and warmer conditions?

Those geographically varying factors produce interesting assemblages of animals and plants. For example, the mixture of medium size predators in western Europe includes a small cat, Felis silvestris, which is familiar to us as our Scottish wildcat. But in the cold temperate climatic region of the Far East, the equivalent wild cat is a species mainly known to us from its tropical range, the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), found from Pakistan and India to the jungles of Thailand and Vietnam and beyond.

More surprising probably to a European mindset is the fact that there are monkeys throughout the temperate forests of China and Japan, living alongside familiar forms of wildlife present (human persecution permitting) in equivalent climates in Europe Japanese macaques. Image by Andrew Tan from Pixabay.

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Animal geographies, old and new Professor Chris Philo, University of Glasgow

It is oddly pleasing to learn that maybe the first article about ‘animal geographies’ to appear in the Scottish Geographical Magazine, in 1893, was by someone called H B Guppy. Even more satisfying is that the article considered ‘the distribution of aquatic plants and animals’, although plants featured more prominently than did crustaceans or fish. Guppy’s core argument was that the ‘distribution’ of ‘aquatic organisms’ across the globe is determined less by ‘dispersal’ – how these organisms diffuse from watery place to watery place – and more by ‘the conditions in which they live’. This contribution fitted readily into what then passed for ‘animal geography’ or ‘zoogeography’, now updated as the treatment of animals in ‘biogeography’, being ultimately concerned with tracing, mapping and analysing animals in terms of their spatial distributions and environmental associations. One doyen of Scottish geography from the last century, Marion Newbigin (1869-1934), was an expert in this kind of plant and animal geography.

past or present, to Scottish universities and several whose research has centred on Scotland. The ordering of the articles loosely, but only loosely, follows a progression from animals domesticated by humans through to ones farmed or ‘harvested’ and then to ones wild, feral or fantastic. We begin with dogs as pets (‘companion animals’) being walked in the park or acting as assistance animals, plunging into the minute details of how humans and animals share lives, worlds and activities, very different from the relations of exploitation or danger signalled by Gilbert. We continue with cattle in Scotland, following their historic, sometimes perilous drove routes from the Highlands to Lowland livestock markets, and in Africa, learning about the entanglements of cattle health, by way of colonisation and ‘development’, with human health. Questions about shared geographies, about closeness between humans and animals far beyond the mere fact of the former eating the latter, are also central to these contributions.

This older version of animal geography only tangentially mentioned humans, technically of course just other animals, but a 1931 article in the Scottish Geographical Magazine

by E W Gilbert hinted that geographers might encompass relations between humans and animals. Proposing that “the distribution of animals exerted a considerable influence on the exploration of Western America,” Gilbert summarily identified “the beaver as wealth, the buffalo as food, and the bear as a hindrance.” Possible forms of human-animal relations were thereby specified and equated with different places across a continent under European colonisation: animals as resources to be exploited, maybe eaten or the basis of commercial products, and animals as problem, pest or threat. Here was an inkling of what, in more recent times, has become the focus of wide-ranging geographical inquiries into human-animal relations, sometimes termed ‘new animal geographies’, addressing an ever-expanding pantheon of animals – mammals, birds, lizards, fish and even insects – at a range of spatial scales from specific sites (gardens, farms, zoos, laboratories, abattoirs) to city neighbourhoods or countrysides, to particular named regions or types of environments, and to global patterns of animal migration, trade and trafficking.

Next we consider fish and birds: fish in the context of the Scottish fishing industry and the presently highly uncertain livelihoods of coastal fishing communities; birds with reference to their eggs and the vexed history of egg-collecting in the UK; and birds again through reflections on both the return of ospreys to Scotland and an osprey-eye’s-view of where to nest in the Scottish landscape. The penultimate article shifts from Scotland to India, returning to dogs, now feral street dogs, and introducing elephants, unfolding in so doing claims about problems arising when localities forsake older traditions of respectfully shared human-animal lives. That article also tackles matters of conservation, biodiversity, rural marginalisation and ‘our’ (human, often urban-based) failure to take responsibility for all ‘our’ earthly companions, two-legged or otherwise. Finally, we are asked, using Scottish examples, to contemplate geographical dimensions of animals that are imagined, mythical, magical, fantastic: adding a highly original twist even on the newest of animal geographies being reported here.

This newer version of animal geography is represented in this edition of The Geographer, which gathers together nine articles from academic geographers, all with connections,

“[It] has become the focus of wide-ranging geographical inquiries into human-animal relations, sometimes termed ‘new animal geographies’.”

FURTHER READING

Gilbert EW (1931) Animal life and the exploration of Western America (Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol 47) Guppy HB (1893) The distribution of aquatic plants and animals (Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol 9) Newbigin ML (1913) Animal Geography: The Faunas of the Natural Regions of the Globe (Clarendon, Oxford) Philo C, Wilbert C (2000) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (Routledge, London) Urbanik C (2012) Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations (Rowan & Littlefield, Plymouth) Image by Dae Jeung Kim from Pixabay

10 Spring 2021

The shared world of a walk in the park Dr Eric Laurier, University of Edinburgh

The path is available to both as a shared feature and one that comes to an end.

Drawing upon non-verbal communicative resources, the dog-owner turns around, reversing their orientation, with their body then facing toward the dog. Moreover, they bring the lead out of their pocket. For the dog, they can see their companion’s shift in orientation, they can see the lead dangling (a highly meaningful object for most dogs).

At this point, showing that they know what is afoot, some dogs might then run off and ‘play hard to get’, not wanting the walk to be over. For our dog, the tail drops (Panel 4), it slows down and the owner approaches it. There is little mystery to its human companion about how the dog feels about leaving the park. It stays still, head tilted slightly down, visibly waiting, while the lead is reattached. The dog is complying, showing this compliance, and the owner recognises this compliance and so continues and completes their part of the action. After the lead is reattached, the two companions shift from the relative freedom and distanced walking of the park to the close walking of the city streets. This is a brief description, but shows a little of how both parties are involved in successfully bringing the walk to an end.

In the last two decades, human geographers have set aside their anxieties about anthropomorphising animals (seeing ‘them’ as versions of ‘us’) in order to study the practices that humans and animals jointly achieve. Indeed, human geographers have revisited the ‘morphising’ of anthropomorphising as a focus of new geographical studies, looking at how humans reshape nature, including human nature, to make distinct admixtures of humans and other forms of life. As geographers, we have focused on how space is central to the organisation of places lived in by human and non-human animals. This move has been about taking seriously shared worlds, in the face of a tradition of studying animal life, especially animal life in the city, that has long suffered from being overly humanfocused and, thereby, diminishing the lives of non-human animals. Here I examine a small part of how humans and dogs, as companion animals, go for a walk together as a shared, collective accomplishment. It is a familiar and common practice, of course, yet one where we easily overlook how remarkable it is.

“There is a great deal to learn, ethically and practically, about animal life in the city.”

When humans and dogs go walking together, their prime site of joint enjoyment is the public park. Set within a larger study of public spaces in the city, I and two colleagues used video recordings of a neighbourhood park in Stockholm to examine how humans and dogs organise an array of interactions: arriving at the park, greeting other walkers, avoiding other walkers, playing with leaves, toileting, and leaving. Addressing that final practice, I give a brief description of how two walking companions finish their parts in the walk and then rearrange themselves for walking beside busy streets.

The sequence of images shows common features of the park, recognisable to both dog and human: the path, the grassy areas, lamp-posts. Each feature brings different interests to human and dog; for the dog, prompted by its primary sense (smell). In Panel 2, the dog sniffs and then leaves its own scent as an interest for future dogs.

Yet, it is insufficient merely to highlight differences between dog and human here.

Turning instead to how their shared action of finishing the walk, let us examine how do they that together.

The co-production of the transition between spaces, and the forms of walking that go with them, is asymmetrically distributed, but we have for too long, as geographers, fallen in with cognitive science. We have treated non-human animals as different in kind and minds from us, as mere stimulus-response mechanisms, rather than trying to study and understand them from what it is that we share and the practices that we do together.

There is a great deal to learn, ethically and practically, about animal life in the city and in other places, from considering afresh just how we already are making and sharing lives together.

Transitioning from park to city streets. © Eric Laurier

FURTHER READING

Laurier E, Philo C (1999) X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Environment and Planning A, Vol 31)

Laurier E, Maze R, Lundin J (2006) Putting the dog back in the park: animal and human mind-in-action (Mind, Culture, and Activity, Vol 13)

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The geographies of assistance animals Jamie Arathoon, PhD candidate, University of Glasgow

Outside the Floral Pavilion Theatre, overlooking the Irish Sea, in New Brighton, Wirral, sits one of the few statues of an animal in the UK. The statue in question is of a guide dog, a labrador, sat wearing the iconic harness that identifies a guide dog. The statue commemorates the founding of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in New Brighton

by Muriel Crooke and Rosamund Bond. They became interested in dogs, mostly German shepherds, being trained

by American Dorothy Eustis, to guide blind and visually impaired war veterans in Switzerland after the First World War. They set to work doing the same in New Brighton. While historical paintings have indicated that humans have trained or relied on dogs for spatial navigation since medieval times, the formation of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association formalised the development of a new relationship between human and dog in the UK. Since the 1930s a range of trained assistance dogs with different jobs have emerged, including: dogs trained to alert humans to sound; dogs trained to help people with physical disabilities find, retrieve, and bring items, open and close doors, and switch lights on and off; and dogs trained to alert people to oncoming medical events such as hypoglycaemic events or seizures. There are also dogs trained especially as autism assistance dogs to provide calming tactile engagement, dogs trained to work with people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and a range of other psychiatric and therapy dogs.

For animal geographers such as myself, the rise in different animal ‘jobs’ offers points of exploration into the humananimal relationship and experiences of human-animal care. It brings together two distinctive areas of geographical inquiry, animal geographies and disability geographers, prompting sustained investigation into the bond between disabled humans and their assistance dogs, asking about their shared spatialities (experience, cognition, occupation and utilisation of diverse spaces, inside and outside the home). These geographies disclose multiple modes of ‘belonging’ shared between humans and assistance animals.

“Assistance dog partnership, and long waiting lists for such partnership, continues to rise across the UK.” Sal looking at Ava for direction as they train to carry shopping bags. © Jamie Arathoon

the human-animal bond already exists, and through the process of training the dogs move from companion and pet to an assistance dog. For many clients, the development of the bond with their dog through training is clearly important for their own confidence, wellbeing, and everyday social and physical mobility, concisely summed up by Megan who says, “He is everything to me. He is my world, and alongside my family, he is the most important thing in the world to me. He is my lifeline. Lots of people’s pets are regarded as family members, but assistance dogs have an extra important role of being lifelines too. They are absolute life changers.”

The research is important as assistance dog partnership, and long waiting lists for such partnership, continues to rise across the UK. There are currently 7,000 Assistance Dog UK (ADUK) partnerships in the UK with many more partnerships outwith this organisation. People have begun to recognise the benefits of partnership with a dog that include physical tasks, but also how assistance dogs can decrease social isolation, improve mental wellbeing, and help reduce anxiety for their human associates.

In my research I am working with the charity Dog AID. Unique in their practice, Dog AID help train people with physical disabilities to train their own pets to become assistance dogs. This offers me a distinctive window on the humanassistance-animal partnership since here

But it is important to note that the relationship is not just a one-way reliance on the assistance dog. As Mark says, “… just at the end of the day, I know it’s rare that I am in that position where it is a matter of serious health if she doesn’t do her job, but if there is that moment where I need her to get me out of a mess, then surely she should rely on me the same way.”

The relationship is therefore not about the human as beneficiary of care but one of mutuality and symbiosis, a disabledhuman-assistance-animal ‘dyad’, a team supporting one another. My work thereby reveals ways in which animal geographies can tell us about generous and generative two-way human-animal relationships.

Guide Dogs for the Blind Association commemorative statue. © Jamie Arathoon

12 Spring 2021

Faithful companions: explorers and their animal friends Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

Over the decades, animals have played an important role in the lives of explorers, sometimes chosen for practical reasons but always winning a place in their hearts. Here are just a few examples.

Cdr Edward Evans (Livingstone Medal, 1913) If you’re an animal lover, the fate of most of the animals that accompanied early polar explorers makes for distressing reading. In July 1914, when Queen Alexandra visited Sir Ernest Shackleton on his ship, Endurance, shortly before it sailed for the Antarctic, she was warned about what would happen to the dogs. In The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton, H R Mill recalled, “…on hearing that they were doomed never to return, she drew back, declaring that she could not bear to look at the poor creatures.”

There were some notable exceptions, however. When Commander Edward Evans lectured to RSGS audiences in November 1913, he had a grim tale to tell about the tragedy that befell Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions on their homeward trek from the South Pole – a fate that Evans himself only narrowly escaped; but in a glimmer of humour, he revealed that some of the dogs from the Terra Nova expedition had returned safe and well, and were being cared for by loving owners: “…one of the dogs had found a home in Banff… and others were now idolised in England.”

Thor Heyerdahl (Mungo Park Medal, 1950) The deck of the tiny balsa-log raft that was bobbing by the quayside in Lima, Peru, was heaped high with baskets and sacks that had been thrown aboard at the last minute. It was April 1947, and Thor Heyerdahl, a 33-year-old Norwegian adventurer, was proposing to sail this flimsy-looking vessel 4,300 miles across the Pacific, powered solely by winds and ocean currents.

One of the crew members, Herman Watzinger, had been waiting for Heyerdahl to arrive. He was clutching a cage. “Look after the parrot a minute,” he said; “I must go ashore and have a last glass of beer.”

“It strutted around the deck and performed acrobatics on the guy-ropes.”

The green parrot, which was a present from a well-meaning friend in Lima, was a

Frederick Marshman Bailey (Livingstone Medal, 1921) As a young soldier in the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, ‘Eric’ Marshman Bailey travelled with the expeditionary force that accompanied Sir Francis Younghusband to Lhasa in 1904.

While Younghusband engaged in discussions with Tibetan leaders, Bailey had leisure to play polo, take photographs, and observe the surrounding landscape and its inhabitants. Outside the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, he spotted an old lady with a pretty little dog tucked into her robes. He was very taken with it, and made enquiries with local families about how he could obtain one.

When Bailey returned to England he introduced the breed of Lhasa Apso (then known as the Lhassa terrier) to a doting public. Historically, Tibetans used them as watchdogs: they would stand on high walls to keep a lookout for intruders, and they would accompany travellers over long distances through mountain passes, running ahead of the yaks and horses.

During his adventurous career, Bailey entered forbidden territory to explore the Tsangpo Gorge, and after the Russian Revolution he lived on a knife-edge as a British spy in Bolshevikoccupied Turkestan.

miserable passenger for the first few days of the Kon-Tiki’s extraordinary voyage. As the raft pitched and rolled it sulked in its cage, but after the third night it was whistling and calling, and dancing to and fro on its perch. When it was eventually allowed out, it strutted around the deck and performed acrobatics on the guy-ropes, but it got into real trouble with Torstein Raaby and Knut Haugland, the wireless operators, when it bit through the wire of the aerial.

Irritation gave way to concern when tiny scraps of gold wire appeared in the parrot’s droppings and it appeared genuinely sick. Thankfully it recovered, and Raaby and Haugland became its best friends, allowing it to sleep in the radio corner. One day, however, a big wave washed over the tiny vessel and the parrot disappeared. No one saw it go overboard, but the crew assumed the worst. And as Heyerdahl sadly observed, “the Kon-Tiki could not be turned or stopped.”

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Christina Dodwell (Mungo Park Medal, 1989)

Freya Stark (Mungo Park Medal, 1935)

In 1980, while exploring Papua New Guinea, Christina Dodwell was given a white stallion whom she simply called Horse. A pure-bred Arab, he belonged to some ranchers who were selling their livestock; their only condition was that she should give him to Father Albert, a farmer and missionary, when she had finished with him. Christina and Horse stayed together for two months, wading through rivers and climbing up to mountain villages where the tribespeople stared at Horse in amazement; they had never seen such a creature before. On one occasion he was stolen, and Christina had to follow his trail and pay the thief a ransom to get him back.

In the winter of 1938, as the pavements of Kensington glazed over with ice and a fearful anticipation of war hung over Europe, Freya Stark padded her chameleon’s cage with hot water bottles and tried to tempt him with Parma violets.

In a country where horses were uncommon, Christina was astonished to come across a big equestrian event in the Mendi Valley. Ranchers, cowboys and Catholic missionaries, all of them male, were vying for first prize in a cross-country race and rodeo. On the spur of the moment, Christina entered herself in both. She and Horse survived the cross-country mudbath but for the rodeo she was allocated a wild stallion: “Suddenly it was real, he was bucking like crazy, the jerking jack-knifing of his movements jarring and wrenching my body in every direction at once.” Christina clung on for a few seconds before landing unhurt and laughing in deep mud. She won third prize.

Sadly, she parted with Horse that day. Knowing that her loyal companion was going to a good home was a small consolation as Father Albert led him away to his cattle truck.

She wrote: “My eyes stang with tears as I watched Horse disappear out of my life.”

FURTHER READING

The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton by H R Mill (1923) The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Thor Heyerdahl (1948) In Papua New Guinea by Christina Dodwell (1983)

She knew she shouldn’t have brought him to London. Several months before, while travelling in Yemen, she had rescued him from a Bedouin boy who was throwing him around like a plaything, and the little creature was rigid with fright. She christened him Himyar after an ancient kingdom in that region; he went with her when she returned to Aden and then sailed on a P&O ship up the Red Sea to Cairo, where she tried to settle him into her rented house.

From Egypt, Freya took Himyar to Greece, where he trotted around the Acropolis and the temple of Delphi in a little harness; at Freya’s villa in Italy, he slept at the foot of her bed and munched on clover and dandelions in her sunny garden.

But in the autumn of that year, as war with Germany looked increasingly likely, Freya fled to England, ultimately to offer her extensive knowledge of the Middle East to the Ministry of Information.

London was in a brittle but brilliant mood, and Freya attended weekend parties with the long-suffering Himyar draped around her neck. She was becoming known as an accomplished explorer, and her little friend gave her an air of exoticism. But the cold dark days did not suit him: the lightbulb over his cage could not replace the scorching sun of the desert, and he even refused the mealworms that she got from Selfridge’s.

Freya wept bitterly when he died. She had loved him, and in the tumultuous years that followed she often reflected on the stoicism of her ‘little lizard of the rocks’.

14 Spring 2021

Tech solutions that helped eradicate wild poliovirus in Africa Global Polio Eradication Initiative

Africa’s polio eradication programme has been transformed by technology and innovation.

“GIS allowed teams to target poorly covered areas and deliver vaccines.”

duplication of efforts. A system was needed that could monitor and visualize who went where in real time, on a shared server.

GIS mapping: data management with mobile technology

Geographic Information System (GIS) technology combines mobile devices and mapping software to capture, analyse and present data. While GIS software has been used for over 20 years to analyse health data and produce maps, no other programme has used GIS in the structured way that the polio programme has taken. First used in northern Nigeria after a surge of polio cases in 2012, GIS allowed teams to target poorly covered areas and deliver vaccines.

These systems are not limited to polio eradication. When an outbreak of Ebola began in August 2018 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, GIS surveillance data established for polio showed the location of cases and population movement patterns, enabling health officials to accurately target the 24 health zones along the 800-kilometre border with Uganda that were most at risk. Uganda, as a result, managed to avoid a large-scale Ebola outbreak.

AVADAR: Auto Visual AFP Detection and Reporting

GIS applications are used alongside traditional maps, such as this one showing residential areas targeted for polio vaccination, Hargeisa, Nigeria, 2019. ©️ WHO

To address this challenge, polio surveillance officers in Maiduguri, Nigeria, developed a small checklist, which then became e-SURV, an electronic form accessed through a mobile application that also records staff movements for accountability.

Rolled out in 44 African countries, e-SURV is now used beyond polio eradication to monitor routine immunization and identify disease outbreaks happening in an area.

Digital Elevation Modelling: improving environmental surveillance

A polio surveillance officer downloads data from vaccinators’ phones at the end of the day’s polio vaccination campaign in Jere, Nigeria, 2020. ©️ Andrew Esiebo / WHO

While traditional poliovirus surveillance relies on finding and testing children with paralysis, testing wastewater and faecal material along sewage lines can serve as an early warning system.

Environmental poliovirus surveillance is now used in 32 countries across the African region. In 2014, the addition of digital elevation modelling made it much more precise. It works by using three-dimensional maps that help teams adjust the location of sample collections to yield better results. The modelling also pinpoints with greater accuracy which areas might be affected if a sample tests positive.

Particularly helpful in isolating circulating vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV), digital elevation modelling has been used successfully in four cities in Angola with repeated outbreaks, prompting vaccination teams to respond quickly.

During an outbreak of cholera in South Sudan, the technology was successfully used to identify the area in which children needed to be vaccinated, allowing the targeted rollout of oral cholera vaccines.

A vaccinator opens up the mobile technology AVADAR on their mobile phone, 2020. ©️ Andrew Esiebo / WHO

Formal healthcare is sparse in some parts of Africa where there is insecurity or weak health systems with limited reach. In these areas, some 10,000 trained community members have been trained to use AVADAR, reporting cases of polio-like symptoms to the ministries of health and WHO using an SMS-based technology on their mobile phones.

The application was first piloted in 2016 in Nigeria, where insecurity had created blind spots in polio surveillance.

eLQAS:electronic tracking of vaccination campaign quality

Today AVADAR has also been used to find and report cases of Lassa fever, cerebrospinal meningitis and yellow fever, among others. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology and vast AVADAR community network has proved invaluable. WHO stays in regular contact with community members, sending explanatory videos to help them spot and report potential COVID-19 cases, which means health officials across Africa are better able to detect potential outbreaks.

Since 2008, various quality assessments have been introduced to the African region’s polio programme. The most important are lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) surveys, which measure the quality and approximate coverage of supplementary immunization activities, and highlight where and why children are missed. As with other data collection, this used to be done by hand. Each stage the data passed through, there was an additional risk of human error.

e-SURV: electronic surveillance for real time monitoring of field activities

Electronic questionnaires avoid these shortfalls. Programmed onto smartphones, eLQAS is used to identify areas and households that are missed during immunization campaigns.

In 2013, when eLQAS was used during supplementary vaccination campaigns in South Sudan, the results gave a much faster, more detailed analysis than previous paperbased LQAs. This information was then used to conduct mopup campaigns and improve subsequent campaign quality.

Data collection for disease surveillance was once all done on paper. When reporting a suspected case of polio, health workers and community volunteers would fill out forms, which would pass through a number of hands before they reached a health officer who could process the information and take action. This was slow, and often involved significant

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Mapping the distribution of reptiles Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

Alexander Keith Johnston / August Petermann, Zoological Geography. Geographical Division and Distribution of Reptiles (Reptilia) from ‘The physical atlas: a series of maps & notes illustrating the geographical distribution of natural phenomena’ (Edinburgh, 1848). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/135678715.

This map of 1848 showing the distributions of reptiles across the world is important for several reasons. It illustrated what was then a relatively novel idea, that a greater understanding of natural phenomena could be gained by studying their geographical distributions, a subject popularised by the German natural philosopher and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt’s famous depiction of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador (thought to be the highest mountain in the world when he visited it in the early 19th century) and the changing distribution of plants on it which corresponded with elevations, influenced many later thematic maps, including this one, with its cutaway profiles showing Mount Chimborazo to the upper left.

The stunning illustrations of reptiles also serve as a key to the particular distributions of the main reptile orders, their geographic range shown by coloured lines on the map.

For Alexander Keith Johnston (1804-71), who engraved the map and compiled the Physical Atlas that this map formed part of, the atlas did much to cement his scholarly

and cartographic reputation. The Physical Atlas contained 30 maps in four divisions: geology, hydrology, meteorology, and natural history, with detailed accompanying texts, drawn from the work of leading scientists. It also reflected collaboration and re-use of content from the earlier Physikalischer Atlas of Professor Heinrich Berghaus, who taught cartography and geodesy in Berlin and produced many influential cartographic works through the Justus Perthes publishers in Gotha.

Johnston had met with Berghaus in Gotha in 1842 to discuss collaboration, and several of Berghaus’ pupils, including Heinrich Lange and August Petermann (credited with drawing this map), came to work for Johnston in Edinburgh from 1845-47.

At this time the German school of cartography was preeminent and Johnston initiated an important tradition; John Bartholomew junior went on to study with Petermann in Gotha in 1855, and later generations of Bartholomews learned their craft from studying with the German masters.

“A greater understanding of natural phenomena could be gained by studying their geographical distributions.”

16 Spring 2021

Droving memories: the crossing of the Kyle Dr Richard Lowdon, University of Glasgow

Little more than 200 years ago, great herds of cattle, some stretching a mile in length, slowly trotted through the Scottish Highlands to great livestock markets located further south.

These herds were accompanied by groups of men known as drovers, on whom fell the daily responsibility of moving and tending the cattle on their long journeys.

After being entrusted to, or purchased on credit by, drovers from small hill-farms throughout the Highlands, cattle were driven in daily stages of 10-12 miles along gravelled roads and hill tracks. On these journeys, drovers faced numerous obstacles, including dangerous water crossings, unpredictable weather conditions, and the threat from cattle thieves. The droves rested at drovers’ inns and grazing sites known as ‘stances’, the selection of which was dictated by the availability of pasture and water, and by the limited daily distance which cattle could cover without losing too much weight. Identification of suitable stance sites required drovers to be proficient ‘natural navigators’ closely attuned to potential routes and landscapes through which they passed: a geographical knowledge infused with knowing the physical limitations of their animals.

the village of Kylerhea coincided with the slacker currents of full tide.

“Safe passage required drovers to make fateful decisions about the suitability of certain cows to lead the herd into the water.”

Further insights into crossings across the Kyle Rhea can be found on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps of the area. A small collection of rocks, situated close to the eastern shore of the channel, is named as Sgeir nan Laogh, translatable into English as ‘Calf Rock’. Oral records provide additional information about how mainlandbound drovers would deliberately separate young calves from their mothers and place them on a prominent rock at the far side of channel. Once removed from their mother, the frightened calf would start bleating, prompting the mother to swim towards the rock. The sight of the mother leaping into the sea would then encourage other animals to follow, until every beast was in the water.

For most drovers, their journeys ended at the great markets, known as ‘trysts’, held annually in early October. Until the 1770s the primary Scottish cattle market was at Crieff, before gradually being replaced by an alternative at Falkirk.

At its peak during the late-1820s, over 150,000 cattle were sold annually at the Falkirk Tryst, generating over £500k (approximately £55m in today’s money), underlining the significance of droving to Scotland’s historical agricultural economy.

Examining the journeys undertaken provides a fascinating insight into the Highland cattle swimming across Loch Awe. © Janey Clarke (Highland Livestock Heritage Society) intimate working relationships formed with their animals on the drove. Highly Although the regular swimming of cattle across the Kyle evocative descriptions of droves ‘in motion’ arise in accounts Rhea has ceased for over a century, the continued presence of sea crossings, the most well-documented being the Kyle of Calf Rock on contemporary maps, and its permeation into Rhea, a narrow tidal strait separating the Isle of Skye from local collective memory, illustrates the lasting toponymic the mainland. In 1761 Daniel Defoe described how cattle and cultural impact of droving on communities throughout were forced to swim across the Kyle: Scotland. Indeed, the heritage and folklore of droving is still “The Current there is so violent, that no Vessel is able to sail celebrated by local communities through cultural events such against it ... so that the Tide must always be observed ... They as the annual Drovers’ Tryst Walking Festival in Crieff, droving tie a Withe about the Cow’s Lower-jaw, and bind five of them re-enactments, and public exhibitions such as the Highland together; after which, a Man in the End of a Boat holds the Withe Drover Project exhibition in Dingwall. that ties the foremost, and rows over, carrying, in the Space of a few Hours, at Low-water, 3 or 400 Cows.”

Safe passage required drovers to make fateful decisions about the suitability of certain cows to lead the herd into the water.

Once in the water, the successful transit of the herd was then dependent upon a drover’s ability to cajole their animals and navigate them across the channel. Another factor was the position and strength of the tide, compounded by the lack of widely available tide tables and nautical charts. Consequently, any crossing required careful forward planning and prior experience of the Kyle to ensure that the arrival of beasts at

FURTHER READING

Cregeen ER (1959) Recollections of an Argyllshire drover with historical notes on the West Highland cattle trade (Scottish Studies, Vol 3) Defoe D (1761) A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Divided into Circuits or Journies (6th ed, Vol IV) (Browne et al, London) Haldane ARB (1952) The Drove Roads of Scotland (Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh)

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The return of the Banteng Suphat Prasopsin, Department of Conservation Biology, Mahidol University, Thailand; Brian James, independent environmental consultant The zoogeography of Bovini, wild cattle and buffalos, is interesting. There is one species in Africa, the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer); one in North America, the American buffalo or bison (Bison bison); there were until 17th century two in Europe, the European bison or wisent and the sadly extinct aurochs (Bison bonasus and Bos taurus respectively); and – the interesting bit – five species in mainland Asia (those mentioned below plus the yak). The evolutionary history is more complex than that, especially for Pleistocene bison species, and the geneticists and taxonomists are still debating Bos/Bison speciation, but that simplistically is the modern inheritance. In mainland South East Asia, there are, or were until very recently, four large species of wild Bovids: the truly awesome gaur (Bos gaurus), the largest of the Bovids; the now possibly extinct kouprey (Bos sauveli); the banteng (Bos javanicus); and the water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis).

Although its domestic counterpart is very widespread, there are apparently only four remaining wild populations of water buffalo. The banteng is the only surviving ancestor of any of the modern domestic cattle (Bali cattle, for example).

Given the money and effort expended to try and breed back to the ancient and extinct aurochs in the last century, and the continuing enthusiasm for rare breeds of cattle, it might be thought there would be excitement and interest in the conservation of the banteng. For the geography of domestication, the banteng is of importance. South East Asia was certainly the origin of domestic chickens, now perhaps the most widespread domestic food animal globally; its ancestor is the red jungle fowl which is only found in South East Asia. Did the South East Asian culture responsible for domesticating the jungle fowl also domesticate and export, at least locally, the cattle too? Are we in danger of losing an important genetic resource in the wild banteng?

The banteng was formerly found in several regions in Thailand and the other countries of Indo-China. A distribution map of banteng and gaur published by distinguished Thai wildlife scientists Srikosamatara and Suteethorn in 1995, showed pitiful numbers of banteng (and reduced populations of gaur too) in a widespread scatter of locations across Thailand. If those populations were lights on the map, they have quietly been going out over the subsequent years.

The pressures that reduced numbers continue, and with reduced and isolated populations, a lot of lights will fade out and The white rump is a distinctive feature of male and the species could well female banteng, unique in wild cattle. The females are more lightly built and graceful, reminiscent of follow the aurochs into the larger antelopes. Only the bulls darken with age. extinction.

The local boss Bos, a mature bull banteng in the Khao Nam Phu Nature and Wildlife Education Centre, Salakpra, Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

But exciting recovery projects are underway. The banteng has been declared an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the government of Thailand have started their first reintroduction programme at Khao Nam Phu Nature and Wildlife Education Centre in Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary in the Kanchanburi Province in western Thailand.

“The banteng is the only surviving ancestor of any of the modern domestic cattle.”

The project began in December 2014 with four captive-bred banteng, two males and two females, and more banteng were obtained subsequently. Three (two males and one female) were released into the Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary on 19th July 2016. By May 2019, ten banteng have been released and three calves have been bred now in the wild. In the captive breeding enclosures at Khao Nam Phu there are now 16 banteng.

The work at Salakpra is just the first part of an official programme to re-establish the banteng in the wild in areas of Thailand from which it had disappeared; other reintroduction sites are being considered as the success of the first stage is assessed. Preparatory work included assessment of the vegetation in relation to the needs of banteng, as well as security and other considerations. The banteng programme is actually the second reintroduction there; earlier success was achieved with the endangered Eld’s deer, Cervus eldii.

Both species (banteng and deer) are prey species of the Indochinese tiger, so the programme is a good fit with the parallel tiger conservation efforts. Public interest and support has been stimulated by television and social media coverage in Thailand (only in Thai). The combination of habitat protection, continuing protection of remaining banteng populations, and the new reintroduction programme, together offer a real prospect of success for the banteng’s future and all the other species dependent on the habitats where they live.

FURTHER READING

Francis, Charles M (2008) Mammals of Thailand and SouthEast Asia (Asia Books Co Ltd, Bangkok) © Peter Cairns

18 Spring 2021

Costa Rica’s biological corridor Jocelyn Timperley, climate and science journalist

Back in 2008, Costa Rica established its biological corridors program, following an analysis of where these corridors were required to connect its widely distributed national park system. Today the areas it targeted are part of a system of some 51 corridors, making up some 38% of Costa Rica’s mainland territory, providing connections between protected areas for many of Costa Rica’s most iconic species.

But the system is facing a new challenge: climate change. In 2014, the government conducted another analysis to map out its best effort of how climate change would impact these biological corridors by 2050. This set out some 12 ‘climate refuge’ areas outside the biological corridors.

“We did a review to understand which sites in any of the [climate] scenarios will see no changes, or where the changes will be minimal,” says Jairo Sancho Rodriguez, coordinator of Costa Rica’s national biological corridor program since 2015. “We need to incorporate these important sites into the management of [biological corridors] because they are going to be refuges for species.”

The newer focus on climate-impacted areas follows a long tradition of conservation in Costa Rica, which relies on two key strategies. The first is a national network of protected areas established in 1970, where little economic activity is permitted. But by the early 2000s there was a growing recognition that a complementary strategy was needed, says Sancho Rodriguez, which came in the form of biological corridors. These differ substantially from the protected areas they generally connect.

“This space, this landscape, between the two protected areas is already occupied,” says Sancho Rodriguez. “There we have people, cities, an economy, industry and commerce.”

Rica’s environment ministry have decided to use biological corridors as a conservation strategy to support protected areas, incorporating this complex urban and rural landscape, and especially ensuring a participatory approach with local stakeholders, says Sancho Rodriguez.

If a corridor goes ahead, the government supports a local committee to negotiate a five- or ten-year conservation strategy. “This is not to stop people from doing anything, but rather that they take some measures that facilitate the conservation of species within what they do,” says Sancho Rodriguez. “We give the responsibility of the management of this biological corridor to the communities, to the local actors. It is really the space where consensus is sought among all these actors to seek an agreement between them.”

This strategy may ask people farming pineapples – which tend to be large monocultures in Costa Rica – to maintain connectivity between the fragments of forest on their land, for example. Or it might target factories to ensure their waste is properly treated, avoiding local contamination. At the same time, the environment ministry works with local producers to support them to use cleaner practices and with poorer people in the community to develop alternative incomes other than cutting down wood or hunting. “What we want is to create economic alternatives to improve people’s quality of life,” says Sancho Rodriguez.

“The network of biological corridors in Costa Rica is geared towards a general connectivity rather than at certain animals.”

Biological corridors in Costa Rica can be established in two ways.

In the first case, the environment department identifies the area as serving an important ecological function, such as water conservation or a migration route for certain species, and proposes a new biological corridor. The second comes from local initiatives, with people deciding they want to manage their territory as a biological corridor due to the benefits it can bring, such as to protect water resources or support wildlife tourism in the area.

As a whole, the network of biological corridors in Costa Rica is geared towards a general connectivity rather than at certain animals, although several do target some keystone species such as jaguars, tapirs and macaws. In fact, Costa Rica has so many diverse microclimates that establishing any key animal for the entire country would be tricky.

In both cases, the buy-in of people living in the area is absolutely crucial, with locals ultimately deciding whether the corridor will go ahead or not, says Sancho Rodriguez. Costa

This last point is, of course, crucial. As anywhere where efforts are being made to help wilderness establish itself nearer people, there will always be conflicts to resolve.

But often these conflicts have been overcome by supporting locals to take advantages of the benefits biological corridors can bring.

Take the Baird’s tapir, Costa Rica’s largest wild land mammal which also provides important ecosystem services such as seed dispersal. The Tenorio-Miravalles Biological Corridor in the north of Costa Rica specifically aims to increase the connectivity of this emblematic species, but tapirs also invade local farmers’ bean cultivation and other crops, causing tensions. Rather than allowing this to escalate, however, locals increasingly saw an opportunity and now sell tapir tours on their land to tourists, as well as producing beans, says Sancho Rodriguez.

Since the climate impact analysis, the country has embarked on a new wave of biological corridor creation, so far adding two of the 12 identified ‘climate refuges”. Sancho Rodriguez hopes four more will be incorporated by the end of 2021, reaching half of the 12 proposed in 2014. It is, sadly, a moving target: Costa Rica still has little climate information, and much remains to be done to fully understand how climate change will impact its ecosystems.

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COP15: hopes and fears for nature in the 21st century Deborah Long, Chief Officer, Scottish Environment LINK

We are in the midst of world-changing events. We are suffering a global pandemic and human disease on a scale not seen since 1918’s Spanish flu. On top of that, we are in a climate emergency with global temperatures rising at unprecedented rates, and severely impacting on coastal communities and islands and coral reefs, for example. At the same time, we are in a nature emergency where the rate of species extinctions is rising exponentially, characterising the new geological period, the Anthropocene – where global changes are for the first time being caused by human activity.

While we can’t solve all three emergencies at once, one thing we mustn’t do is solve one while making the other two worse.

The Covid-19 pandemic has reached us as a result of close contact with wild species. It is a direct outcome of today’s nature crisis. Changes in the way we use land; the expansion and intensification of agriculture; and unsustainable trade, production and consumption are disrupting nature and increasing contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people. Almost all known pandemics, including HIV/ AIDS, SARS, and Covid-19, are caused by microbes from animals. The frequency of new diseases emerging in human populations is now increasing, and the reservoir of currently undiscovered viruses thought to exist in mammals and birds is massive: c1.7 million, 48% of which could have the ability to infect humans. This is clearly not going to be the last pandemic to come to us via broken natural systems.

This is why the international Conference of the Parties on biodiversity, COP15, later this year is so important. It is our best chance to agree a way to start to fix these problems. As a global issue, we need a global solution too.

What do we need to see coming out of COP15?

Leadership: halting and reversing ongoing biodiversity loss has no easy solutions, and compromises will have to be made. However, the need for change is incontrovertible.

The only way we can achieve the scale of change we need is through global leadership and commitment to legally binding targets for nature in every country. Nature needs an equivalent to the Paris Climate targets. Targets focus investment and human creativity. Without them, we lose the focus on action we need.

“Nature needs an equivalent to the Paris Climate targets.”

Image by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay

Realism: these targets must be realistic. By that I do not mean achievable under today’s conditions. These targets must be ecologically realistic and identify the action needed to halt habitat loss and destruction, to halt illegal wildlife trade, and to tackle the spread of invasive non-native species.

Many of these actions will conflict with vested interests.

However, unless we find a way forward for effective ecological change, we will continue along the road to our own, and the planet’s, destruction.

Partnership working: no single organisation, or single country, can do this alone. We need to come together to pool our resources and throw everything we have at this. That means agreeing international targets that work across borders, and working in partnerships within countries to bring governments, public, private and civic organisations together.

And in Scotland? Scotland has a role to play at COP15.

Firstly, Scotland is leading the Edinburgh Declaration, which paves the way for effective partnership working, globally, regionally and locally. It underlines the importance of governments, at national, sub-national and local level working together with society to tackle biodiversity loss. From discussions leading to the Edinburgh Declaration, it became clear that a high proportion of protected nature areas globally, probably well over half, are overseen and managed by sub-national and local authorities, rather than national authorities. They are crucial to action to reverse the decline in biodiversity.

Secondly, Scotland needs to put its money where its mouth is and invest in nature. Scotland’s nature and landscapes underpin our international image. Yet, investment in nature is critically low and fragmented in Scotland, which means the number and scale of actions we need to see are exceedingly difficult to deliver. If Scotland really does want to be seen as a leader in biodiversity, we need to show commitment and investment to do that.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Needham K, de Vries F, Armsworth P, Hanley N (2019) Designing Markets for Biodiversity Offsets: Lessons from Tradable Pollution Permits (Journal of Applied Ecology, 56)

20 Spring 2021

A perfect planet?

Stephen Lewis, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, School of Physical Sciences, The Open University

Flamingos at Lake Natron, Tanzania. © Darren Williams / Silverback Films

Despite huge advances over recent decades, both in Solar System exploration and in extra-solar planet detection, Earth remains the only planet known to support life. All living things, from a simple bacterium to a majestic blue whale, survive within just a few kilometres of the Earth’s surface.

We all thrive within an incredibly thin and precious spherical shell, in an otherwise largely hostile universe.

Over the last few years, I was fortunate to work as academic consultant for the BBC series, A Perfect Planet. As a researcher with a background in physics and planetary science, some of the material seemed outside my immediate areas of expertise, but the series approached the natural world from an intriguing perspective. Rather than being divided by the class of animals, or the geographic region that they inhabit, the series considers in turn five processes that combine to form the interconnected and complex environment that makes life on Earth possible. They provide the energy, nutrients, water, and even the air that life requires.

Each programme then shows how some animals have evolved to exploit every available resource and environmental niche.

Throughout the process I was constantly amazed by the remarkable behaviour of various species, many filmed, using innovative techniques, in huge numbers in their natural habitat.

Volcanoes do not only emit liquid magma, but vent gases and solid or liquid particles, known as aerosols, from the Earth’s crust. Their heat is supplied by radioactive decay of chemical elements in the crust, as well as leftover heat from the Earth’s formation: these elements are the products of long-dead stars, swept up as the Earth formed. This geothermal energy is the only significant source of energy on Earth that cannot be traced back to fusion reactions in the Sun.

Geothermal activity does not only produce new land and fertilise existing land with many trace elements, but many forms of life rely on the energy. Whole ecosystems surround vents in the ocean floor, so deep that the creatures there are cut-off from solar energy sources. Land-based creatures also make use of volcanic habitats: iguanas incubate their eggs in the warm ground and flamingos breed in vast numbers at Lake Natron, the chicks protected from predators by the caustic liquid.

Volcanoes have had profound impacts upon all living things and the history of the Earth. They have played a major role in past mass extinctions, radically changing the climate. The greenhouse gases that they emit have also meant that the Earth emerged from frozen periods, allowing the presence of liquid water at the surface and the emergence of diverse, new life. Our atmosphere and oceans that make life possible are themselves the product of volcanic activity.

Sunlight is the primary source of energy for life on Earth, supplying almost four thousand times as much energy at the Earth’s surface as geothermal processes. The rotation of the Earth (every 23.9 hours) gives rise to the day and night cycle, but these are only of equal length on the equator and at spring and autumn equinox elsewhere. This is the result of the Earth’s rotation axis being tilted (at 23.4°) rather than at right angles to the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Summer occurs in the hemisphere that faces more towards the Sun at that point in Earth’s orbit. In the summer, the Sun reaches higher in the sky at midday, as seen from the Earth’s surface, rays of sunlight are more concentrated onto the surface and days are longer than nights. This means that a given area of the Earth receives more solar energy in the summer than that same area would do in the winter.

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Animals and plants have developed varying strategies to survive, and even benefit from, the annual cycle of summer and winter. Some simply hibernate in the winter and are active only in the summer. Perhaps the most extreme example is the tree frog which can shut its entire body down and freeze solid, to thaw again in spring. Other creatures adapt to Arctic conditions, with fur providing excellent insulation like the wolf, and derive energy from hunting whenever the opportunity arises. Migration is another strategy. Large sea mammals and birds are the specialists. Some even cross from one hemisphere to the other as the year progresses, remaining in almost perpetual summer and never experiencing nights Arctic wolf on Ellesmere Island, Canada. © Alain Lusignan / Silverback Films

“I was constantly amazed by the remarkable behaviour of various species, many filmed in huge numbers in their natural habitat.”

that are longer than days. This can give them access to more sunlight than would ever be possible on a planet with no tilt.

Weather is simply the response of the atmosphere to the uneven distribution of energy from sunlight. The atmosphere moves like a giant engine to carry heat from warmer, lower latitudes to colder, higher latitudes. This cools the equator and warms the poles, making both regions more habitable than they would otherwise be. The atmosphere similarly reduces the temperature difference between day and night, which is 300°C on the airless Moon. Some other ways in which the atmosphere sustains life on Earth are discussed on the Open University website at www.open.edu/openlearn.

22 Spring 2021

The weather is governed by factors such as the temperature and water content of the atmosphere, the latitude at which the weather occurs (which determines how closely it is aligned with the rotation axis of the Earth), and the presence of continents and oceans at the surface. Critically for life, weather transports water and nutrients inland. Because weather patterns vary, the distribution of freshwater is uneven. Plants and animals adapt to environments that range from deserts to lush rainforests, where it rains almost every day.

The Oceans are driven by sunlight and the motion of the atmosphere, for example by wind at the surface or by water density differences that result from the addition of freshwater through precipitation or ice melt. The oceans are salty thanks to weathering of rocks, and more saline (saltier) water is denser than freshwater. Ocean salinity has grown over the age of the Earth as more substances are washed into the oceans, but pure water evaporates. In turn, the changing oceans drive weather, through the temperature or amount of evaporation from the sea surface. Salt from sea spray is a large source of nuclei around which cloud droplets begin to condense. Carbon dioxide in air dissolves in water and is deposited in the oceans, to eventually become carbonate rocks; perhaps half the excess produced by humans so far has been absorbed by the oceans. Everything on A Perfect Planet is coupled.

Ocean water circulates and mixes slowly around the planet, carrying nutrients and a whole hierarchy of life that feeds upon them, from plankton to large fish and mammals. This supports not only sea creatures but those which feed upon them. The marine iguanas on the Galapagos Islands rely on currents to supply nutrients which fertilise the seaweed that they eat. Large changes in ocean water, for example the El Niño / La Niña cycle in the Pacific, can bring feast or famine to fishing communities and to wildlife.

Humans are now rapidly changing our planet, at a speed that has no known precedent in the Earth’s history. From a global population of a few million only ten thousand years ago, the number of humans increased to one billion at the start of the

Marine iguanas on the Galapagos Islands. © Ed Charles / Silverback Films

Bactrian camels in the Gobi Desert survive on snow transported by winds. © Ed Charles / Silverback Films

19th century and will soon reach eight billion. This spectacular success story for one species has led to huge impacts on the Earth’s systems, threatens the survival of many animals and, unchecked, will also endanger humans, who rely on the same ecosystems. Human activity has depleted the numbers of many animals through both consumption and changes to habitat, polluted oceans, and increased levels of atmospheric gases, primarily carbon dioxide, that are now changing the delicate energy budget of the planet.

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It would be a mistake to think that the Earth was previously unchanging. Our atmosphere has been modified hugely by the presence of life; the oxygen that we require was first produced in large quantities by earlier, simple lifeforms. Larger climate changes have certainly happened before, and have caused mass extinctions, but the current rate of change is alarmingly rapid in comparison. It has caused some geologists to define a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which the impacts of human activity are seen in the geological record.

It would be easy to feel a sense of despair in the face of these changes, but human ingenuity is also impressive. As a species we have thrived as a result of our innovations in medicine, agriculture, engineering, and science. Life is tenacious.

Even when threatened by a loss of habitat, animals can find alternative survival routes when circumstances change. Just one example are the vampire finches on the Galapagos Islands that became stranded away from their original food sources and now obtain nutrition from the blood of sea birds. We must hope that sustainable projects, such as those illustrated at the end of the series, succeed and that humans turn our abilities to preserving our precious Perfect Planet.

“Weather is simply the response of the atmosphere to the uneven distribution of energy from sunlight.”

A man cares for an orphan elephant in Kenya. © Nick Shoolingin-Jordan / Silverback Films

24 Spring 2021

Entangled animal geographies of global health Dr Alicia Davis, University of Glasgow; Professor Jo Sharp, University of St Andrews

“New, interdisciplinary approaches to global health are bringing the study of human, animal and environmental health together to address these disease risks.”

Maasai and their livestock. © Alicia Davis

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to public attention the interdependencies of species health. Changes to humananimal relations – through deforestation, global trade and travel, and the hunting and sale of ‘exotic’ species for food and medicine – presents opportunities for disease ‘spillover’ from host species to people (see Zoonoses edition of The Geographer, winter 2013-14). New, interdisciplinary approaches to global health are bringing the study of human, animal and environmental health together to address these disease risks. Our research with livestock keepers in different parts of Africa highlights different ways that animal geographies are understood to be related to human ones.

The establishment of separate animal and human geographies on the ground can be traced to European colonial practices in Africa. Colonisers regarded the absence of visible transformation of the African landscape by native populations as evidence of their lacking ‘civilisation’, evidence that they should be considered part of nature rather than culture.

Drawing on Christian imagery, colonisers either viewed African landscapes as ecological (and set aside for conservation purposes) or moral (and targeted for improvement). Within this typology, open, undeveloped rangelands full of wildlife were categorised as wild natural landscapes. In contrast, farming, bringing the land into productive use, was regarded as the basis for a right of ownership. This framing was made possible because of the characterisation of pastoralists as merely roaming over landscapes rather than being ‘proper’ inhabitants.

Colonial states imposed quarantines to separate European herds from African herds (just as urban planning separated colonial from native parts of towns). As this regime entrenched, further separations occurred between dairy producers, meat producers, subsistence producers and market-based producers, each with their own distinct office/sector to control, tax, and oversee. Veterinary services focused on disease demanded compulsory procedures such as fencing, dipping, immunisation, removal of pastoralists, to transform African rangelands into economically productive environments. Western veterinary knowledge was privileged over pastoralist knowledge to control and understand disease. Laws, boundaries, fences and policing segmented different herds to stop the spread of disease, but also justified control over colonial subjects, particularly those considered to be ‘unruly’, ‘irrational’, and FURTHER READING

Davis A, Sharp J (2020) Rethinking One Health: emergent human, animal and environmental assemblages (Social Science and Medicine, Vol 258)

‘fierce’, like pastoralists.

For Maasai pastoralists in East Africa, human health is intimately tied to livestock health. Maasai believe that Engai (God) created and entrusted livestock to people. Maasai are responsible for these animals and the wider environment; so, when animals or other parts of the natural world are unwell, the Maasai feel that they too are unwell. Animals are part of the Maasai social network: from a young age, children become attached to particular animals, for their character, colour, demeanour, and their personalities, as well as their usefulness. This means that not all animals are seen equally.

For pastoralists, cattle are most valued and their loss is devastating, as one focus group participant explained: “when my cattle died, I cried. People thought someone was dead.”

Families are dependent upon their animals for immediate resources (such as milk) but also as an investment (cattle are literally mobile capital that can be sold in times of need).

Similarly, Bedouin in Egypt regard the ownership of sheep as of value greater than the narrowly economic. One of the most revealing things we were told, when we asked about the importance of sheep to Bedouin, was a story about the Prophet being chased by people wanting to harm him. He encountered a flock of goats and tried to hide amongst the animals, but they dispersed, leaving Him exposed. The Prophet ran on and came upon a flock of sheep. These animals surrounded Him, shielding Him from the view of his pursuers who ran on. The Prophet was saved.

Understanding the social role of animals is important for health measures. Interventions seeking to manage a singular disease may fail if the entanglement of health in aspects of life beyond the biomedical is not considered. For instance, our discussions with livestock keepers in northern Tanzania revealed that when making decisions about which animals to vaccinate (when household resources were too limited to vaccinate all), cattle would always be prioritised because of their social as well as economic value, even if risks of transmission to other animals were higher. Global health approaches must learn from the variety of animal geographies that characterise different parts of the world; for the livestock keepers with whom we have spoken, there are no separable human, animal and environmental spaces to be brought together because, for them, they are inseparable to start with.

Sharp J, Briggs J, Hamed N, Yacoub H (2003) Doing gender and development: understanding empowerment and local gender relations (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 28)

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Communities of the mind within the marine life environment Dr Natalie Ross, independent scholar

Within contemporary human geography, the marine environment has been reconceptualised as an assemblage of multifarious ‘actors’. Existing both above and below the surface of the water, these actors can be physical (animals, humans, technologies) and non-physical (ideas, processes, policies), temporarily settling into relationship with one another – long enough for a boundary line to form, delimiting who/what is ‘inside’ from who/what is ‘outside’ – before breaking apart again under external pressures. These actors might include fish, fishermen, fisheries organisations, boats, and harbours, as well as community views, political events and assumptions about how fish and fishermen behave.

Where there is commercial seafaring activity, such as fishing, wind farming or offshore oil, the sea has profound social and emotional importance, informing people’s sense of place, identity and contribution to the world. Where there is sea-fishing, related onshore activities tend to concentrate in territorial, place-based communities, with lives and businesses shaped around the everyday routines and rhythms of the fishing industry, being busier, generating more revenue and feeling better supported when the fishing is good, and buffering a lack of custom when the fishing is poor.

Repercussions of restricted fishing activity are felt throughout these communities, not least on the high street, in local schools, and within families and households. The sea plays a key role in bringing people together locally and giving both individuals and communities a sense of purpose and a sense of one’s place in the world, generating the will to help others and to contribute. Such depth of people’s identities linked to the sea, to fishing and indeed to the fish themselves is too easily absented from important policy decisions.

impairing the ability of the fishing industry to change and adapt, and undermining the self-sufficiency and flexibility required to fish sustainably.

The UK government has recently sought to recover ‘sovereign’ control of British waters through the UK-EU Brexit deal, giving the UK fishing fleet almost exclusive access out to 12 miles. UK politicians have hailed the deal a success for the industry as a whole, celebrating having tariff-free access to EU markets and gaining increases in herring quota in the North Sea. However, there are relatively few families that fish the herring, with the majority of fishing businesses in Scotland rooted in the whitefish or shellfish industry. In order to secure the aforementioned ‘wins’, the UK government has forfeited important whitefish quota and the ability of UK fishermen to swap quotas with EU fleets in order to secure the quota required to land the fish that they may now have the potential to catch in the 12-mile zone. From the abovementioned ‘communities of the mind’, the blind Brexit drive to regain sovereignty of UK coastal waters fails to take into consideration the finer details of the fishing industry and what fishermen actually need, which is sufficient quota with which to work within UK waters.

“The sea plays a key role in bringing people together locally and giving both individuals and communities a sense of purpose.”

The shared views and experiences of people in coastal communities have been described as fishing ‘communities of the mind’. In places like Fraserburgh, the Outer Hebrides and Shetland, fishing families have described knowing no other way of life than having deep emotional and personal attachments to their livelihoods, their fishing boats and the sea. There is a collective sense of dissatisfaction towards what are considered to be externally imposed policy measures, as well as a perception that decision-makers do not understand the practicalities of the fishing industry. Most government-imposed fisheries regulations are in response to fears of overfishing. However, new rules often seem restrictive,

In short, fisheries policy making reduces the activity of fishing and the people who live in fishing communities to oversimplified caricatures, and the ensuing feelings of powerlessness within the communities drive processes of boundary-making. A ‘we-other’ consciousness materialises between people in fishing communities and policymakers, environmentalists and the wider public.

Of course, fisheries management needs to have some boundaries: it cannot be so loose that it is impossible to make associations and connections that are productive or effective. At the same time, it will not work to standardise the life out of the industry. A balance needs to be achieved within policy-making, such that the marine environment can be recognised as a moving and growing assemblage of actors, with regulations, standards and rules designed in ways that enable all the actors within it to thrive, and not suffocate.

FURTHER READING

Anderson J (2012) Relational places: the surfed wave as assemblage and convergence (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol 30) Bear C (2012) Assembling the sea: materiality, movement and regulatory practices in the Cardigan Bay scallop fishery (cultural geographies, Vol 20) Ross N (2015) Understanding the fishing community: the role of communities of the mind (Sociologia Ruralis, Vol 55)

© Natalie Ross

26 Spring 2021

Nothing is over: a letter from Belarus Marta Shpindzer

The world was shocked by the news from Belarus in the summer and autumn of 2020. Images from the biggest marches in Belarusian history were broadcast all over the world. The hope was that democracy would prevail and the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko would accept the will of the people and stand aside following an election which was widely discredited. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, there were multiple arrests followed by the terrifying news of torture in Belarusian jails.

Unfortunately, the world press has found other important events to cover and we stopped hearing and reading about the continuing Belarusian protests. But although the media has moved on, nothing is over in Belarus, and the situation is getting worse.

participation in an ‘unauthorized protest’, and was sentenced to four years imprisonment.

In some ways we are lucky. Of course this is my personal tragedy – I love Eugene with all my heart and I really miss him. But he is alive and in one piece, he has me, his family, his friends who will support him.

Times like this make you appreciate basic things. I’m grateful that my boyfriend wasn’t killed like Raman Bandarenka, Aliaksandr Taraikouski and other victims of the regime. I’m grateful that Eugene wasn’t sent to the Akrestsina Detention Centre, where torture is endemic. He wasn’t beaten to the same degree as others. He wasn’t shot. Gas wasn’t sprayed in his eyes. I’m grateful that we are able to pass food to him; in several prisons food-packages are restricted now ‘because of COVID-19’, although Lukashenko has publicly denied the existence of coronavirus.

“Of course this is my personal tragedy.”

According to a report published by the Viasna Human Rights Centre, more than 33,000 people were detained between the beginning of the electoral campaign and the end of 2020. Most of these were subjected to short prison sentences or large fines. However, reports of the conditions in some detention centres are awful; there have been many reports of abuse. According to the Belarusian Attorney General’s office, the courts have instituted more than 900 criminal proceedings, and currently 220 people (and growing) are held as ‘political prisoners’.

Among them is my boyfriend, Eugene Kalinouski. We met at our local geographical olympiad in Viciebsk, Belarus six years ago. He went on to participate in the International Earth Science Olympiad in Spain (2014) and the International Geography Olympiad in China (2016). He is a talented geography student, who was top of his class at the Belarusian State University, a specialist in Geographical Information Systems, and just a very kind and open-minded guy.

On 14th July, people from all over Belarus took to the streets to speak up peacefully against the blocking of opposition leaders Viktar Babaryka and Valery Tsapkala from running in the election. People were walking, clapping, chanting slogans, with drivers honking horns in support of the protesters.

Although peaceful, the police started to detain people and clashes ensued.

Eugene found himself at the location of one of the most notorious clashes, where he witnessed brutal arrests taking place without any apparent reason, any explanation, any warning. Upset by what he saw, Eugene stood up for one of his fellow protesters, but was beaten by two policemen. Two weeks later, on 27th July, he was arrested in our apartment.

He spent six months in prison before the trial, accused of assaulting the police officer and active

In Belarus right now there is little trust in the rule of law. Lukashenko has made his position clear: “You know, sometimes there is no time for laws.”

Some of those imprisoned are notable political figures like the popular Maryia Kalesnikava, Head of the Campaign HQ of former presidential nominee Viktar Babaryka. She was kidnapped by masked men in Minsk and, along with two others, forcibly brought to the Ukrainian border to be expelled from the country. But she bravely tore up her passport, jumped out of the car, was arrested and imprisoned.

Some of them are journalists and vloggers, like Ihar Losik. He simply reported the situation in Belarus using his Telegram channel ‘Belarus Golovnogo Mozga’ and Twitter. He has been jailed for writing not only about the political situation but about problems in Belarus in general.

Some of them are medical workers like Artsiom Sarokin, a doctor at Minsk Emergency Care Hospital, who was arrested “for disclosing a medical secret.”

Artsiom published the documents refuting the statements of officials that Raman Bandarenka was drunk at the time he was beaten to death. Thanks to Artsiom Sarokin we know how the Belarusian government can lie.

Some of the political prisoners were volunteers helping run the elections. They tried to prevent falsification and fraud. And some of them are just caring citizens, like Eugene and many others.

It’s winter now and there is also the pandemic.

People are still being arrested, and a lot of talented people have had to leave Belarus, or be forced to spend the best years of their lives in prison. How can we help those who have been imprisoned, because in Belarus, nothing is over?

This article was supplied by RSGS member Bruce Gittings, who is campaigning for Eugene Kalinouski’s release from prison. See www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~bmg/eugene.k for more information.

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A crisis brewing in the Horn of Africa Jamie Robinson, student, University of Stirling

Characterised by chaos, uncertainty and loss, 2020 is a year many will wish to forget. However, the deep shadow cast by Covid-19 shrouded many important news stories.

The eruption of violent conflict in Ethiopia may have flown under many people’s radar, but it has proven to be a critical problem that requires international attention. What follows is a summary of the events that took place in Africa’s second most populous nation, the key players involved, and some of the geopolitical issues it has created.

Rising to power in 2018, Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy took the proverbial reigns from the unpopular Hailemariam Desalegn and began immediately to steer the country in a more liberal direction with an array of new political and economic reforms. The beginning of his term saw the release of political prisoners, the encouraging of foreign investment, and the unshackling of the media and cyberspace. Most notably, Abiy won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, largely for brokering a monumental peace deal with Eritrea after 20 years of tension.

Throughout his term, Abiy has utilised his political philosophy, titled ‘medemer’, an Amharic word for unity or coming together.

It has encouraged cooperation amongst Ethiopians to achieve peace and prosperity.

In a country with deep political scars and a federal system based on ethnicity, this is a poignant word that Abiy hoped would begin a new chapter in Ethiopia’s political narrative.

mediate peace talks between the two sides; however, this was largely ignored. Abiy wanted Ethiopia to remain autonomous in this situation, and instead ordered an attack on the state of Tigray, home to roughly five million people. The cutting of communications in the region led to an information blackout, making any news difficult to come by, but it is clear that Government forces captured the capital, Mekelle, on 26th November. However, despite government claims, TPLF have not been defeated and are still fighting, through guerrillastyle warfare. A protracted conflict seemed all too likely from the beginning, with TPLF enjoying strong regional support from the public and possessing a significant fighting force of nearly a quarter of a million people according to the International Crisis Group.

During the chaos of the past few months, other groups across the country have taken the opportunity to rise up against the central government or other ethnic groups, with reports of ethnic killings and violent uprisings in states across the country. Such division could lead to a full-scale civil war, unravelling everything Abiy has fought for up until this point.

“Such division could lead to a full-scale civil war.”

A major humanitarian crisis is unfolding.

According to the UNHCR, over 220,000 people have been displaced in Tigray, with a quarter of that number fleeing into neighbouring Sudan. The international community needs to recognise the severity of the situation and the human rights abuses taking place.

Image by David Peterson from Pixabay However, the optimistic philosophy that If Ethiopia were to descend any further medemer embodies now contrasts sharply into chaos in 2021, the impetus created could be enough with reality. Ethiopia is in turmoil, locked in a conflict between to destabilise many of the countries in the Horn of Africa. government forces and the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front Eritrea is dangerously close to joining Abiy in the fight against (TPLF).

TPLF after it was bombed three times by the regional party.

The TPLF is the governing body in the state of Tigray, the Somalia is suffering due to the lack of help from Ethiopian country’s northernmost region. A significant party in the troops against the Al-Shabaab insurgency, and Sudan is country’s history, it assumed a dominant and controlling entering into a border dispute with Ethiopia despite the position in Ethiopian politics for over 20 years. Abiy has since ongoing humanitarian crisis. mitigated a lot of the power the group had, causing relations It falls to Abiy to resolve this issue as quickly and peacefully between the two sides to slowly deteriorate over the course of as possible. Ethiopia is a country in urgent need of unity, with his term. The situation boiled over in the summer of last year, an ethnically divided and federalised political system that is when TPLF held illegal regional elections. As a consequence, only catalysing tensions amongst the population. An extensive this prompted each party to deem the other illegitimate; a political dialogue must follow any peace agreement to heal row which culminated in TPLF attacking government military this country’s deep scars. Whether this occurs or not will bases in Tigray. Abiy declared that TPLF had crossed “the last likely determine Ethiopia’s trajectory for years to come and red line” and promptly ordered a retaliatory military attack on could lead to the destabilisation of the Horn of Africa. It is 4th November of last year. time to see whether medemer is a political force for good, or

The African Union quickly sent a diplomatic delegation to

just a sadly ironic election slogan.

See www.crisisgroup.org and www.usip.org for more information.

Image by wdkunze from Pixabay

28 Spring 2021

The world of egg-collecting Dr Edward Cole, University of Bristol

Birds’ eggs are some of the most beautiful objects in the natural world, being of perfect form and varied in size, colour and pattern. Egg-collecting was a very popular British activity between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, with collectors both young and older (but mainly male) taking eggs from nests themselves or buying them from specialist dealers.

Once the eggs had been emptied, they would be ready for storage and display, often in specially made cabinets taking pride of place in the collector’s home. Some collectors claimed that egg-collecting was a science, called ‘oology’, and called themselves ‘oologists’.

Voices of disquiet against egg-collecting, such as from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, grew in volume, and the taking of most birds’ eggs was made illegal in 1954.

Remaining loopholes were closed by further legislation in 1981, and today egg-collecting is a wildlife crime practised in the UK only by a few furtive individuals. Although many private collections were destroyed, others have been donated to museums. For example, Glasgow Museums holds collections of over 30,000 eggs in its Resource Centre, sourced from donations by individual collectors and their families.

Most of these eggs were taken from nests around the UK, but some originate from as far afield as Myanmar and South America. The research project ‘Handle With Care’, a collaboration between Glasgow Museums and the University of Glasgow, investigated the history of these collections, the wider world of egg-collecting, and the motivations of collectors.

A key source of information was the Oologists’ Record, a Cover of the first edition of the Oologists’ Record magazine published 1921 (1921). Material sourced from David Clugston. to 1969. Here egg collectors aimed to cement oology as a valid sub-field of ornithology, with careful descriptions of birds’ nesting behaviour, along with extensive lists of eggs collected and variations in their shells. Many articles nonetheless revealed the more visceral enthusiasm felt by collectors, celebrating tales of ‘derring-do’ such as close encounters with dangerous terrain and irate locals (avian and human).

Another preoccupation of the magazine, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, was to defend egg-collecting against its opponents. One line of argument for anti-collecting ‘protectionists’ emphasised the negative effect on bird populations, especially of endangered species. Pamphlets produced by the Scottish Society for the Protection of Wild Birds focused on the negative ‘psychological’ impact of eggcollecting, claiming that taking eggs caused great distress to the parent birds by thwarting their instincts to produce young. Concern was also voiced about egg collectors’ states of mind, since the “the destruction of birds’ nests can only

be done at the expense of his mentality and imagination” and by tolerating egg-collecting “we are rearing a nation of coarse-grained people in whom the elements of brutality find an easier growth.”

Collectors dismissed their supposed role in bird population decline, arguing that birds simply lay another clutch (set) of eggs if collectors remove the original clutch, blaming instead natural predators, loss of habitats caused by housing growth, and the shooting of birds by gamekeepers: “What is the good of protecting the eggs of the Marsh and Anti-egg-collecting pamphlet produced by the Montagu’s Harriers…

Scottish Society for the Protection of Wild Birds when they have all been (undated). Material sourced from David Clugston. shot?” Oologists also dismissed their opponents as sentimental fools, ignorant of ornithology: “Those who pursue this delightful study [oology] are vilified in every possible way by those who are supposed to have the interest of our wildlife at heart, and yet have neither an elementary knowledge of our birds nor a knowledge of what should be done to protect them.”

Some sought to make a distinction between the ‘true oologist’, whose thirst for scientific knowledge was deemed morally acceptable, and the casual collector whose mere acquisitiveness or idle curiosity was not.

“Today eggcollecting is a wildlife crime practised in the UK only by a few furtive individuals.”

In debates about the ethics of eggcollecting, the focus varied between the parent birds, the eggs themselves and the birds they might become, wider bird populations, and the motivations and psychological health of collectors. These often-vitriolic debates form an important episode in the history of this particular ‘culture of nature’, a type of human-animal interaction that now barely exists. Unearthing the historical geography of egg-collecting provides context for contemporary debates in conservation, and can also bring museum egg collections to life as objects of cultural value (and critique) as well as great beauty.

FURTHER READING

Cole E (2016) Blown out: the science and enthusiasm of egg collecting in the Oologists’ Record, 1921-1969 (Journal of Historical Geography, Vol 51) Jardine N, Secord JA, Spary EC (eds) (1996) Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)

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The nesting geographies of ospreys and humans Dr Ben Garlick, York St John University

In the course of researching 20th-century histories of osprey (Pandion haliaetus) conservation, the question of where (and why) a bird nests was one that I often considered. Not self-evidently a matter of cultural or historical geography concern, nesting was nevertheless a phenomenon many conservationists, assisting these migratory, fish-eating raptors in their recolonisation of Scotland, had tried to fathom.

The osprey, like many birds of prey, was persecuted in Britain throughout the 19th century. Caught between the guns of gamekeepers targeting hook-beaked ‘vermin’ and the cabinets of ‘naturalist collectors’, they disappeared as a breeding species by 1916. Then, in the mid-1950s, the osprey returned. Migratory birds, likely originating in Norway or Sweden, settled to breed in the forests of Speyside en route north from their West African wintering grounds. This success story at the hands of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is well-known. ‘Operation Osprey’ mustered volunteer wardens to guard ospreys at Loch Garten, Abernethy, against potential disturbance. In 1959, when chicks hatched, the RSPB site opened to the public. Today, the Society reports 200-250 breeding pairs in Britain, the majority in Scotland.

When the first ospreys returned, the question of where they might nest (and why) greatly concerned RSPB staff. Predictions that the birds would resettle old haunts, such as the castle ruins at Loch an Eilein, proved incorrect. Likewise, attempts to erect an artificial nest platform at Loch Garten using a cartwheel, something widely done in America, aroused little avian interest. An osprey’s perception of viable nest sites is influenced by its geographical situation as a fledgling. Upon reaching maturity, ospreys often seek sites akin to their natal nesting area.

Since adult ospreys tend to return annually to the same mate and nest site, localised nesting preferences – what ecologist Ian Newton terms ‘traditions’ – can form as a result of such ‘spatial imprinting’. Thus, those ospreys recolonising Scotland in the 1950s demonstrated a ‘Scandinavian’ preference for trees, not crags and ruins or American-style platforms.

Moreover, ospreys appear to favour opportunistically colonising existing eyries over building them anew. In the early-1970s, conservationists – informed by field encounters and extant ecological studies – attempted to ‘see like an osprey’, scouting potential habitats in the landscape. Key characteristics included: a prominent, open situation, affording views of intruders; a solid base supporting a bulky nest-structure; surrounding perches; low levels of human disturbance; and suitable fishing within 20km. Armed with this knowledge, honed through trial and error, artificial nests supposed to look ‘natural’, already established, were built, and over 50 such platforms appeared across Scotland. Many were ignored, yet enough were colonised by passing ospreys to expand the recovery. Nearly 40% of Scottish ospreys reportedly nested at sites constructed wholly, or in part, by humans.

Today, additional tactics abound to increase a built site’s

attractiveness, including using paint to simulate excretions from past tenants. Nests left unused, despite appropriate siting and enhancement measures, still suggest limits to human understanding of how ospreys Building an artificial osprey nest. © Ben Garlick themselves perceive the landscape. Contemporary nest-builders I interviewed hence practice a slower, more deferential approach, building where birds have been seen to exhibit an interest, rather than installing platforms anywhere that satisfies the list of habitat requirements.

As nest-building changes how conservationists look at the landscape, so has human involvement in nesting affected ospreys’ own place preferences and perceptions. Increasing lowlevel anthropogenic disturbance in their environments (ringing visits, nest inspections, public viewing opportunities, even music festivals) means young birds are more tolerant of nesting amidst humans. Furthermore, young birds raised on artificial platforms appear more likely to recognise other human structures as viable sites, evidenced by the recent phenomena of osprey nests appearing on Scottish electricity pylons. The outcomes of human involvement demonstrate, as many animal geographers argue, that other species’ relationships to place are not fixed, but historically and geographically contingent. The geographies of Scottish ospreys emerge because and not in spite of human presence in the environment

“An osprey’s perception of viable nest sites is influenced by its geographical situation as a fledgling.”

The history of osprey conservation charts the mixed success of human efforts to approach the environment on another creature’s terms.

Confidently checking off the requirements of ‘habitat’ is insufficient for creating useable nests relative to changing osprey site preferences. Instead, we, humans, are invited into ongoing acts of care: the annual repair of built nests, the opening up of further space, and the monitoring and protection of known sites. Studying the nesting geographies of humans and ospreys suggest that a hopeful future of cohabitation with nonhumans, rather than their removal or enclosure, is possible, as each species adapts to the presence of the other.

FURTHER READING

Dennis R (2008) A Life of Ospreys (Whittles Publishing, Caithness) Garlick B (2019) Cultural geographies of extinction: animal culture among Scottish ospreys (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 44)

30 Spring 2021

notes from the classroom

Language and landscape at Banff Academy Dr Jamie Fairbairn, Head of Humanities, Banff Academy (Scots Schuil o the Year 2020) How many times a year do I inform bairns that “there’s only one lake in Scotland, the Lake of Mentieth, famous for curling bonspiels, and the linguistic origin of that is laich or laigh, a Scots word meaning a low-lying site, from the Old Norse làgr?”

As a teacher of both Geography and Scots Language at Banff Academy in Aberdeenshire, I find myself fascinated with landscape and languages, and do my best to trigger in youngsters an interest in the names around us on signs and maps, what they mean and what pupils can learn from them. Why limit ourselves to ‘valley’, when glen, strath and carse reveal much more about their form and use? Why are fitba pitches often on the town’s haugh? Why is Linn of Dee so named, or the Bin of Cullen?

“I developed a set of resources allowing bairns to explore Scots landscape features and placenames.”

In a project to embed this knowledge in the curriculum in junior Geography classes and senior Scots language classes, I developed a set of resources allowing bairns to explore Scots landscape features and placenames, including the etymology of words (often Gaelic, Older Scots or Old Norse in origin). Now they know that the name of a local hill, The Knock, describes its position and shape as a symmetrical, isolated hill. They know that Bloodymire, near MacDuff, is likely the boggy site of a battle between Scots and Danes a thousand years ago. They know that the street name Golden Knowes relates to wheat fields on the hillocks and slopes down towards the shore. They know that names along the Moray coast with Ness, Head and Point are headlands and that the local hamlet Shank of Barry refers to a ridge of land.

The bairns become map detectives, and then create an island littered with created Scots names, a description of the island in Doric, and a road sign with local names of places (eg, Aberchirder is known locally as Foggie).

We need to take advantage of and marvel at the rich linguistic heritage we are lucky enough to have around us, which describes landscape features and placenames, and carries with them so much more.

Colour vision deficiency in the G Kathryn Albany-Ward, CEO, Colour Blind Awareness (www.colourblindawareness.org) Colour vision deficiency (colour blindness) affects one in 12 (8%) boys and one in 200 (0.5%) girls, but many remain undiagnosed and unsupported, putting them at a distinct disadvantage in the classroom. Imagine being faced every day with coloured resources, even exam papers, like the simulated map image.

Unfortunately, this is the reality for many students in our classrooms who are living with colour blindness.

Statistically speaking, one pupil in every classroom is colour blind, and this can cause difficulties in understanding even the simplest school tasks. Colour vision deficiency (CVD) is a hidden disability, but teachers are unlikely to have received any training so are unable to support students as they would wish to.

Fortunately, developments in technology allow us to simulate how classrooms and resources can appear to those with colour blindness, enabling teachers to develop strategies to help. The good news is that it is relatively easy to support colour blind students, even when teachers don’t know who they are.

What do geography teachers need to be aware of?

Although colour blindness is often referred to as red/green colour blindness, it’s a myth that colour blind people only confuse reds with greens; many different colours can appear as the same. Geography can present particular issues due to the sheer volume of coloured resources used: maps, graphs, charts and photographs. Teachers may not realise that information which is obvious to them in full colour can be completely lost to a colour blind student.

What can teachers do?

If colour information is labelled in some way, it will be accessible to all colour blind students, whatever the type or severity of their condition and whether or not they have been diagnosed. An effective first step is therefore to start with the premise that information must never be conveyed by colour alone.

How can you spot CVD? There are a few tell-tale signs teachers can look out for that may indicate colour blindness. For example: • using inappropriate colour choices in mapping, eg colouring rivers or oceans purple; • needing more time, or looking for other clues, to process information that relies on colour; • appearing to regularly misunderstand instructions in some worksheets or activities (is it because colour is involved?); • hesitating to participate in activities that involve colour processing, eg responding to questions on a colour-coded climate graph; • getting unexpectedly poor marks for homework when using software programmes – most educational websites are unregulated and don’t take the needs of colour blind students into account.

Fortunately, a few simple measures can make classrooms and teaching methods more CVD-friendly and won’t increase lesson preparation time once initial adjustments have been made.

notes from the classroom Geographer The

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Geography classroom Some key strategies for teachers: • Label equipment (pens, pencils, paints, etc) with their relevant colour name.

• Colour-audit textbooks, websites and other resources for potential problems, adding labelling where necessary.

• Avoid relying solely on colour to make teaching points; secondary indicators such as shapes, underlining, shading, bold font, etc should also be used.

• Avoid using colour alone to assess a pupil’s understanding, eg different pen colours or RAG (red amber green) schemes when marking.

• Photocopying worksheets to ascertain if information is accessible in greyscale.

•T ake care using coloured pens on white boards; some ‘green’ pens can be invisible to some students, and to others red pens can be confused for black!

• Maximise contrast as much as possible; overhead projectors and large screens can leach colours or reduce contrast.

• Sit students diagnosed with CVD in good natural light and check with them regularly, in private, to find out if they are experiencing any difficulties.

Finally, don’t expect colour blind students to notify you if they can’t see information – they won’t always know they are missing anything!

“Start with the premise that information must never be conveyed by colour alone.”

Normal colour vision.

Colour blind simulation.

32 Spring 2021

The future of conservation with elephants and dogs Dr Krithika Srinivasan, University of Edinburgh

There is widespread acknowledgement that modern human lifestyles (from the time of settled agriculture) have adversely impacted the planet and the non-human creatures that inhabit it, compromising the capacity of the biosphere to support life as currently exists.

One aspect of these adverse impacts is biodiversity loss, through both direct eradication of flora and fauna, and habitat loss following diversion to development activities such as settlement, agriculture, mining and factories. The field of biodiversity and wildlife conservation has emerged in response, but comes under sustained criticism for social impacts associated with conservation interventions.

Critics of conservation argue that it is usually the most socioeconomically marginalised rural people who bear the costs of conservation, arguably because what remains of valued wildlife and their habitats is found in those regions that have experienced less by way of ‘development’ and its depredations on nature. Such regions are home to people who are evicted and/or have their livelihoods curtailed in efforts to create protected areas (for wildlife), or who bear the costs of humanwildlife conflict such as crop losses, damaged homes, death and injury. Consequently, an important conservation challenge is how to protect wildlife without disproportionately affecting the poor, and how to do so on a planet with no people-free ‘wildernesses’.

though, they are not universally cherished (by people): they pose threats and inconvenience, they bark and bite, they are vectors of rabies, and they may be considered aesthetically displeasing.

Cartoon by Ashvini Menon commissioned by author.

Yet, as research in Chennai shows, they are considered integral parts of human settlements, reflected in the Tamil term ‘theru nai’ (street dogs).

Free-living dogs in India are not considered ‘stray’ or out-of-place. While they can be dangerous to people, they are viewed as ‘paavam’ (vulnerable), as ‘jeevan’ (life-forms) belonging in the city as much as people do. This recognition of the city as a more-than-human landscape in turn generates rich knowledges on how to cohabit with these risky animals, traditions of cohabitation now forgotten in regions where free-living creatures, whether valued wildlife or less obvious natures, have been eradicated.

“It is worthwhile to examine how we might cohabit with existing natures and wildlife.”

Research on street dogs in India and elephants in Sri Lanka offers insight into this conundrum. Investigating the drivers of human-elephant conflict near Yala National Park shows that, while the immediate causes of such conflict might be conservation measures protective of elephants, the ultimate drivers are broader development processes, including the modernisation of agriculture in response to international markets and economies. These processes have shrunk elephant habitat, devastated elephant populations, and forced the remaining animals into ever smaller spaces shared with the poorest rural people. These residual spaces and their animal inhabitants then become the focus of conservation, meaning that the human inhabitants here bear the risks of cohabiting with wildlife. Conserving endangered wildlife often involves the displacement of responsibility for, and dangers inherent in, living with other animals on to ‘faraway’, marginalised peoples and lands.

The everyday realities of people-street dog cohabitation in urban India provide a useful counter-example of what it means not to displace such responsibility and risk. Street dogs are not pets or human property. They are free-living animals, born, living and dying independently in ecological niches created by human settlements. They are better understood as varieties of urban wildlife like sparrows and squirrels. Unlike songbirds,

Street dogs do not fit the ‘valued wildlife’ bill. But a closer look at history shows that creatures such as wolves, red squirrels and elephants, now protected as wildlife, were ones exterminated previously as pests or as insignificant collateral damage in the pursuit of various human activities. They may of course be persecuted again when they reappear, thanks to conservation, in highly changed landscapes where strategies and memories of cohabitation have been lost.

Bringing together these elephant and dog studies suggests the need for a reorientation of approaches to conservation.

Instead of protecting endangered wildlife and nature in radically shrunk and transformed habitats, there is value in asking how we can halt the processes that cause endangerment in the first place. Instead of focusing only on disappearing or exterminated creatures, it is worthwhile to examine how we might cohabit with existing natures and wildlife. We may not consider them valuable at the moment, but, as history shows, that could well change in the not-toodistant future. Such a reorientation urges a shift in gaze away from distant lands, creatures and people to lands and creatures closer to home, and where responsibility (for preventing endangerment) and risk (of cohabitation) lie with us.

FURTHER READING

Adams WM (2004) Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (Earthscan, London) de Silva S, Srinivasan K (2019) Revisiting social natures: people-elephant conflict and coexistence in Sri Lanka (Geoforum, Vol 102) Srinivasan K (2019) Remaking more-than-human society: thought experiments on street dogs as ‘nature’ (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 44)

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Imaginative animal geographies: Scotland’s mythical beasts and monsters Dr Lorna J Philip, University of Aberdeen Recent animal geographies research creates intellectual space for appraising the roles and agency of animals in relation to the human world, but tends to focus on ‘living and breathing’ organisms. What, then, about the place of imagined animals?

“Scotland’s folk tradition includes numerous accounts of animals with special powers and mythical beasts.”

Scotland’s folk tradition includes numerous accounts of animals The ‘surgeon’s photo’ of the Loch Ness Monster that appeared in the Daily Mail. with special powers (hare, bull) and mythical beasts (nuckelavee, animal’, the only mythological beast to be adopted as the wulver, selkie, each-uisage, cù-sith, kelpie and unicorn). The faunal symbol of a nation. The Stirling Castle tapestries, latter – sometimes friendly, often fearsome – have strong depicting the hunt of the unicorn, are a popular tourist associations with specific places (Orkney and the horse-like attraction. They also stand as a metaphor for the unicorn nuckelavee) and specific environments (often water bodies), hunts promoted to visitors today by tourist and heritage and many retain a place in contemporary popular culture. organisations, a distinctively Scottish strand of place and Indeed, imaginary, fabulous, terrifying and magical creatures heritage marketing. Unicorns may hence be spied across become agents of 20th and 21st century place (re)creation Scotland, on the exterior of historic buildings, standing through which specific localities, or the nation as a whole, are guard at prominent landmarks, atop many a mercat cross imagined and marketed. and decorating numerous Since time immemorial, stories have circulated of an unidentified waterdwelling creature inhabiting Loch Ness, but improved inter-war roads along Loch Ness-side created new opportunities for ‘Nessie’ to reveal herself. Sightings of a dragon- or dinosaur-like beast were soon reported, including the now infamous ‘surgeon’s photograph’ printed in the Daily Mail in 1934, and since then innumerable visitors have come to Loch Ness hoping to catch a glimpse of Nessie.

objects d’art. Those hunting unicorns in Edinburgh can find the creatures atop entrance pillars to the Meadows, at Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

The Kelpies.

The Loch Ness Monster has entered popular culture, presented, reworked and reimagined in films, novels, children’s story books and artworks. It indirectly underpins the ‘selling’ of Highland Scotland to potential domestic and international visitors, while representations of Nessie directly support individual visitor attractions and tourist businesses, as well as spawning a brisk trade in Nessie-themed souvenirs from retail outlets nationwide. For tourist consumption, Nessie has become a three-humped, tartan bonnet-wearing beastie, a far cry from the 1934 photographic depiction of an aquatic brontosaurus.

Based on analysis of visitor figures for the Loch Ness area and related data, it is estimated that the Loch Ness Monster contributes £41 million annually to the Scottish economy.

Two other beasties, unicorns and kelpies, are intimately bound up in the selling of Scotland. In Celtic mythology the unicorn symbolised purity, innocence and (masculine) power, and was adopted as heraldic symbol and incorporated into the Scottish Royal Coat of Arms by James II in the 15th century. Ideals that the unicorn represented – pride, independence and strength – were appropriated by the Stewart monarchy to symbolise a nation that would not be conquered. It became identified as Scotland’s ‘national

Shape-shifting freshwater spirits, kelpies, normally taking equine form, are another fantastical creature from Scottish folklore. Identified with locations country-wide, kelpie tales have perhaps been used to deter children from playing around water bodies.

Attributed with the strength and endurance of 100 horses and the magical ability to transform into human, normally male, form, the kelpie now also recalls the heavy ‘horse’ whose power was harnessed to drive agricultural and industrial transformations across Scotland from the 18th century. Today the Helix regeneration park, between Falkirk and Grangemouth, is the home of the Kelpies: two striking, 100-foot-high horse heads, the world’s largest equine sculptures. Erected in 2014, they represent a cultural reimagining of the creatures of legend and a geographical repositioning of the beasts from rural to post-industrial Scotland. They have become extremely popular, widely visited and admired from cars on the M9 motorway. With an online presence, marketed by tourism bodies, and promoted via tours of the maquettes on which the sculptures were based, the Kelpies have generated a huge international profile, giving Nessie a run for her money!

This article has outlined how mythical beasts, in particular unicorns, kelpies and the Loch Ness Monster, have been represented and commodified as agents of Scottish place creation and promotion. Who knows what else an intrepid geographer could find if they opened their mind to the magical and fantastic world of imagined animals?

34 Spring 2021

An interview with Philip Marsden Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

A few years ago, when Philip Marsden decided to embark on a voyage up the western seaboard of Ireland and Scotland, he found a ready supply of pessimists among experienced sailors. A solo yachtsman, he was told, would be far safer going up through the Irish Sea: he’d arrive at his destination more quickly, and he’d get there in one piece. But such advice was entirely missing the point. The physical challenge, although daunting, was the framework for a less tangible quest, fuelled by a love of landscape, people, history and legend.

Philip describes his journey in The Summer Isles - A Voyage of the Imagination, published in 2019.

When I read it, I was struck with the idea of there being an extra layer to the topography of a country or a coastline: an invisible layer of stories and traditions, woven and perpetuated by the people who have lived there. I was keen to chat to him about his experiences, and I began by asking him about his particular fascination with islands.

He explained that one day, while out sailing near his home in Cornwall, he glimpsed a mirage which caused the rocks of an invisible peninsula to shimmer above the horizon, looking like uncharted islands: “Of course I knew it wasn’t real, but when something familiar is suddenly altered, it starts to alter everything. A curious mind-set kicks in. That is the ‘imagination’ of the book’s title, the vast area of our perception in which the real begins to fracture, opening up a world of projected meaning and fantasy.”

loved that idea: topography as text, landscape like pages of oral lore.”

Some of the earliest inhabitants of the western coasts and islands were monks and hermits who trod the lonely path of ‘white martyrdom’, a type of spiritual penance which required them to abandon home comforts in favour of a spartan existence on the fringes of the known world.

Many islands still bear testament to their presence, in the form of ruined buildings and a lingering atmosphere which is hard to define.

Stepping ashore, we still react instinctively. Philip remembers his children’s joyful response when he first took them to an island. These places, he says, “offer the solace of physical definition. On an island, you can sense the physical limits of your world. We all like to know our boundaries, children especially.

And once you feel physically contained, it’s the finer thoughts that go soaring. I have a notion that an island is a physical representation of the soul – a tiny thing in a great universe of sea. It was that, perhaps, that made these places so appealing to the early monks.”

“Philip listened to islanders who live on the threshold of land, sea and sky.”

Philip began to ponder the concept of islands, both real and illusory, and their potential as a setting for extraordinary events. He was already grappling with the notion of sailing up the west coast of Ireland, and this experience helped to focus his curiosity: “In terms of topography, it was the idea that where the land breaks up, along the Atlantic seaboard, so do those certainties that root us to the earth. The west coasts of Ireland and Scotland in particular are where the imagination takes flight, and the physical landscape seems to suggest the metaphysical. The numerous offshore islands are the perfect embodiment of that.”

Other factors fed into Philip’s idea: a love of sailing, a desire to venture further afield, and an interest in the survival of Gaelic and Celtic traditions on the western fringes of the British Isles. He delved into medieval Irish literature, in which heroes undertake echtrai, journeys to the otherworld, and immrama, literally ‘rowings about’, which developed into sea-quests for mythical islands. He notes that, long before Ireland’s interior was mapped, its sites were described in dinnseanchas, loosely translated as ‘the lore of high places’.

As part of their bardic training, poets would visit landmarks and recite by heart all the stories that were present there. “I

Over a coffee or a dram, Philip listened to islanders who live on the threshold of land, sea and sky. In some places there is a sense of traditions and livelihoods waning, while in others the inhabitants have welcomed change where it allows them to continue living in their spiritual home. Nostalgia is ever-present: we tend to think of it as a modern-day phenomenon, but in reality it has existed throughout the ages, fuelled by historical events as well as by tragic stories embedded in legend and folklore.

Philip believes that this heartfelt yearning is perennial, and “something which is common to all cultures, a vanished age or an idyllic life, both in the past and in the future – an imagined world both to mourn and to aspire to.”

The practical tribulations of sailing provided a counterpoint to philosophical musings. Problems with equipment demanded immediate attention, and calm weather could quickly turn wild. Philip navigated chaotic waters caused by tidal races colliding over submerged reefs; he clung grimly to the helm in mountainous seas, which he likened to being on a rollercoaster without rails. He was determined but not unrealistic, occasionally taking on a deck-hand to cross dangerous stretches of ocean. In the more serene moments he had the illusion of sailing not so much in water but through the air, an experience alluded to in early chronicles where ships were witnessed in the sky: “On a clear day with bright sunshine, the horizon disappears and the sea and the sky seem to fuse.

In several early Irish stories are instances of ships being seen sailing through the sky.”

In more recent times, the islands off the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland have attracted a wealth of visitors

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eager to immerse themselves in a way of life that has not been entirely lost. I ask Philip whether he thinks artists and writers are particularly attracted to these shores. He agrees that for creative people, the dramatic seas and extraordinary landforms have a capacity for revelation, but he believes the attraction is not peculiar to artists and writers. After all, many of us have been drawn to the west coast after lockdown, for a multitude of reasons – but fundamentally, perhaps, because of its uncompromising wildness. We can reconnect with nature, breathe more freely and allow ourselves to relax.

We can also free our imagination, just as our ancestors did in the distant past. The Earth may have been explored and mapped, but Philip believes that places of legend are just as important now as they ever were. “We may have purged our charts of the imaginary, but that doesn’t mean we do not long for mythical places. The ability to believe in places that are invisible, to build stories around them and inhabit them, remains the defining attribute of our species.”

And why is Philip drawn to these places himself? He was brought up in the West Country, and has lived in Cornwall for most of his adult life. A passion for ancient landscapes and an untamed coastline runs in his blood. “That oceanic seascape, the flat horizon, the dramatic coastline and islands – I know what they mean to me and the huge power they exert. That said, it’s always people and their stories that animate those places.”

Philip has travelled widely, especially in Ethiopia, in Poland and in Armenia. He believes strongly in the power of travel, and has seen exiled people return to places they knew as children. Such pilgrimages can be profound and life-changing: “We’re all exiles to some degree; that feeling of missing somewhere – real or imagined – is universal, and it’s what drives many of us to travel, to go off in search of it.”

No two experiences are ever the same, but there are echoes of this idea in Philip’s west coast odyssey. The memory of a dear family member, with whom he had glimpsed the Summer Isles from the mountains of Assynt, gives a gentle poignancy to his quest. As his journey unfolds, what he is seeking seems to shift before his eyes, like the mirage that he witnessed on the horizon; and it leads him to an awareness that resonates with all the stories that have ever been told about voyagers who set sail for unknown islands in search of enlightenment.

Thank you very much to Philip for taking the time to chat to us. We wish him every success with his future projects!

The Summer Isles – A Voyage of the Imagination is published

by Granta Books.

36 Spring 2021

The Covid pandemic: could do better…

Mike Robinson, RSGS Chief Executive

This pandemic has been awful on many levels, and we have looked on in horror as Covid-19 has spread through the population domestically and globally. While a handful of countries in the spotlight have seen very high infection numbers and rates (eg, the USA, Brazil, Russia, the UK), there are others where infection numbers and rates have remained very low (eg, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan).

and definitive; immediately clamping down on flights, and testing and quarantining tourists. And as their current Prime Minister is widely respected and trusted, New Zealanders have seemed more willing to follow the clear advice given.

With a population of c26 million, Australia attributed its success to following expert advice, closing borders, strict quarantines, broad public compliance, and a switch to telephone health services. Taiwan, with a population of c24 Throughout, it has felt difficult to separate fact from politics, million, gained from experience and there has been an awkward Cases Deaths Cases Deaths per 100,000 per 100,000 learned from the 2003 SARS balance between an appropriate population population outbreak, and from widespread clinical response (partly guided England 3,373,085 95,172 5,992.7 169.1 early adoption of face masks, by governments trying not to Wales 193,526 4,782 6,138.1 151.7 strict and monitored quarantine, exceed healthcare capacity), and Scotland 181,291 6,181 3,318.3 113.1 good compliance (a result of trust the huge economic, educational and mental health impacts. More Northern Ireland 104,721 1,878 5,530.1 99.2 in government and community than normal, a resolution lies in United Kingdom 3,852,623 108,013 5,767.7 161.7 culture), financial incentives for quarantining and fines for nonfollowing scientific advice, quick United States 26,322,785 443,774 8,044.1 135.47 compliance, and a programme clear action, a robust healthcare Brazil 9,229,322 225,099 4,406.0 107.46 of countering misinformation system, and a good deal of trust Russia 3,842,145 72,982 2,648.0 50.15 through clear communication and and buy-in from the general India 10,766,245 154,486 796.0 11.42 online videos using humour to public. Good clinical advice has Australia 28,824 909 115.4 3.64 quash rumour. been available throughout, but government advice has been New Zealand 2,307 25 47.84 0.51 At the time of writing, Scotland inconsistent and sometimes Taiwan 915 8 3.84 0.03 has tragically seen over 6,000 incoherent. deaths and 180,000 infections.

UK data compiled from coronavirus.data.gov.uk on 2 February 2021.

Global data compiled from coronavirus.jhu.edu on 2 February 2021.

The UK as a whole has seen over The UK healthcare system is 106,000 deaths and 3.85 million wonderful, if sometimes overly infections in a population of c68 bureaucratic, but austerity million. Along with the USA, only has left it weakened, and this India, Brazil and Russia have more pandemic has exposed that cases, but each have far higher more than ever. The economy populations, so our per capita too has fractured, growing only death rate is far worse. Scotland in pockets, and revealing deep appears to have a lower infection rate and a lower death inequalities in income and opportunity, resulting in massive rate than the UK as a whole, and although the numbers are government borrowing, the channelling of which hasn’t always felt transparent. And a lack of clarity and transparency changing all the time, it would be helpful to understand what factors have brought about that variation. has further strained our trust in politicians and institutions, already in decline due to political divisions and disputes.

The next few months are going to be difficult. Our patience

“There has been an awkward balance between an appropriate clinical response, and the economic, educational and mental health impacts.”

With so many different factors in play (geographical, political, economic, social, environmental, etc) there is a wealth of data to inform future academic analysis of countries’ differing experiences of the pandemic. But some clear patterns have already emerged, and perhaps we can learn lessons from them.

with lockdowns is stretching thin, but our anxieties remain heightened, and as we grow more used to distance, we risk losing some of our social skills and empathy. The vaccine will undoubtedly help relieve some of the pressure, but it is not a panacea; there are likely to be some restrictions for much of 2021 and possibly beyond.

The USA probably received the most headlines for mishandling the crisis. It was excruciating to watch as, led by President Trump’s divisive example, they struggled to limit the spread of both the virus and misinformation. With only c4% of the world population, the States now accounts for more than a quarter of all cases and a fifth of all deaths. Of course, the USA wasn’t alone in some people refusing to wear masks and believing the whole thing was a conspiracy. But the USA’s failure to cap the spread has been received with a good deal of astonishment. It has undoubtedly affected its credibility and status globally. Will this mark a moment when other countries begin to look elsewhere for global leadership?

Will the coming months see clearer advice from governments, and will we have the patience to follow it? Is the NHS exhausted, and what will be the impact of knock-on delays to other treatment, on patients and a very stressed workforce?

Will our teachers be given more priority for vaccinations as pressure builds for schools to return? And what can our political leaders do to earn enough trust and sustain the buyin from the general public? It has been more than a year since this coronavirus appeared on the scene. We have not coped well. We need to take stock and start to learn from those who have coped so much better.

New Zealand, for instance, found itself thrust upon the world stage in contrast. According to The Lancet, “the lockdown implemented in New Zealand was remarkable for its stringency and its brevity,” with almost no further importations reported within two weeks of their travel ban.

With a similar population to Scotland, its response was swift

Follow the numbers monitored by the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center (coronavirus.jhu. edu), the World Health Organisation Coronavirus Disease Dashboard (covid19.who.int), and the UK Government coronavirus data website (coronavirus.data.gov.uk).

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Beijing: 34 years documenting China’s historic capital Bruce Connolly, photographer, writer and broadcaster

July 1987, a sultry hot afternoon, arriving by train from Mongolia, I emerged onto Beijing Railway Station’s vast concourse. Hauling my baggage through a silent, staring, indeed bemused crowd, foreigners then a rarity. Large billboards advertised Japanese video cameras, not quite what I was expecting. My preconceptions vague apart from the Great Wall and a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong above Tiananmen Gate. From geography teaching days I recalled, however, the ‘quietest rush hour in the world’, home to nine million bicycles. Beijing then, a population over twice that of Scotland (now nearing 23 million).

Glued to a bus window, I sat transfixed on the journey out to my hotel. People strolled or sat alongside canals. Men, some carrying bamboo bird cages, mostly wore white cotton shirts.

Women in light summer frocks raised colourful umbrellas to avoid sunlight. So much, so different. Bicycle carts transported bountiful melons to outdoor markets, cycling commuters flowed along in unison, nobody trying to race ahead. A sense of harmony within everyday life prevailed.

Over the next few days, Beijing’s grandeur enthralled from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall and more.

To the north is Deshengmen Gate, once part of former Ming Dynasty walls, originating from 1437. Victorious troops, having fought off encroaching northern invaders, would return through the gate to heroic welcomes. Beijing symbolically faces south; from the north came both danger and bitter winter winds. Southern gates opened to mostly peaceful, settled lands of China.

A short walk from Deshengmen, Xihai is first in a series of waterways stretching ultimately to the Forbidden City. They create serenity, indeed beauty, within a contemporary and vibrant urban scene. Popular with visitors, the lakes were once a vital element of survival, indeed sustainability, for a city existing within an area of rainfall deficit.

people from those northern alleys to the Outer City beyond Qianmen (Front Gate).

A denser concentration of lanes with more haphazard groupings of living quarters, it morphed into a vibrant commercial, financial and cultural core, an incubator for numerous ‘Old Beijing’ festive customs.

Recent projects have attempted, with some success, to create a functional modern environment incorporating the locality’s uniqueness.

Fascinating to explore.

Post-1949 witnessed industrialisation, primarily beyond the city walls, but they are now mostly gone. For example, Shougang Contemporary Beijing: outdoor dining within the CBD. Steelworks, once China’s largest, was relocated after 2012 from west Beijing to a coastal location.

Part of ongoing measures to regain blue skies, air pollution levels currently a fraction of previous years.

The site, now a park incorporating delightful cafe bars within a landscape of 20th century industrial archaeology.

“Beijing’s grandeur enthralled from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall and more.”

Xihai has transformed recently from quiet backwater into pristine wetlands. Waters cleaned, it provides a breeding ground for ducks and migratory birds. Hard to imagine for centuries it was crowded with small wooden sail-powered vessels unloading cargoes into the then commercial core of the city. Since late 2014, water shortages have been alleviated by a mammoth ‘South-toNorth Water Diversion Project’ transferring excesses from the Yangtze Basin to Beijing and surrounding areas.

The foundations of present-day Beijing date back to Yuan Dadu (1271-1368), the ‘Great Capital’ of Kublai Khan’s empire, but developed considerably throughout the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Few historic cities can rival its layout.

Internal coherence hinged on a seven kilometre north-south axis line running straight through the Forbidden City. Walls, gates, principal avenues, temples, major residences were arranged around the axis in harmony. The capital, in relation to the needs and eternal powers of the emperors, was organized into a series of walled mini-cities. Along eastwest hutong alleys, some dating from the Yuan, courtyard residences (siheyuan) for palace officials and others were erected according to hierarchical building codes. Beijing increasingly claimed the heritage of Chinese architectural achievement.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) saw displacement of many

The 2008 Beijing Olympics fired a ‘starter gun’ for considerable urban makeover. A city to reflect its role as capital of a leading world economy. The construction frenzy of those days mostly subsided, increasingly an emphasis on quality living, raising environmental standards and more. Streets, public areas, constantly kept clean. Littering rare, smoking generally prohibited. Coal usage, once ubiquitous, replaced by clean energy, particularly electric for buses and increasingly cars. Public transport incorporates an ever-expanding metro system, light rail, maglev, tram lines, bus rapid transit, cycleways and more. The city sits at the heart of the world’s largest national high-speed rail network.

Smartphone technology has promoted a cashless society along with increasingly universal digital commerce. Parks, some former imperial gardens, are essential elements within the contemporary urban landscape. A skyline, historically no higher than the walls of the Forbidden City, today incorporates futuristic architecture reaching in the CBD upwards to 530 metres!

Amidst 21st century modernity, there still remains traditional life around the lakes, the canals, the alleys of Zhonggulou at the north end of the axis line and much, much more.

A passion emerging for Beijing in 1987, capital city at the heart of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, the fascination continues.

38 Spring 2021

Nagorno-Karabakh Audrey L Altstadt PhD, Professor, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The small region called Nagorno-Karabakh was much in the news in 2020. Nestled in the Caucasus Mountains, it is considered historic patrimony by two of the major nationalities of the south Caucasus, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and both want to possess it. Though inside Azerbaijan, Karabagh has been in Armenian hands since a ceasefire of 1994 that ended years of war. After sporadic fighting in spring and summer 2020, Azerbaijan launched a decisive offensive in September. In six weeks, its military retook from Armenian forces virtually the entire area. The victory was consolidated by a new ceasefire of 10th November, brokered by Russia.

Azerbaijan and guaranteed by treaties of Moscow and Kars between Vladimir Lenin’s government and representatives of the Turkish Republic. Zangezur was awarded to Armenia to separate Nakhjivan from the rest of Azerbaijan, so as to deny the Turks a land bridge from Asia Minor to the Caspian and from there to Turkic Muslim Central Asia.

Having thus dispensed with two of the ‘apples’, Moscow’s representatives led by Stalin divided the third.

“Karabakh (Garabagh in Azerbaijani, Artsak in Armenian) has been an apple of discord between Armenians and Azerbaijanis for more than a century.”

The south Caucasus is home to Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the neighbouring Georgians, but to their large neighbours Russia, Iran and Turkey, this is a border area where their three former empires once met and fought. The Caucasus is also a thick frontier zone between Christian and Muslim worlds. Peace or instability there affects the entire region, including the volatile Middle East. So, what is this conflict over Karabagh?

Mountainous (Nagornyi) Karabakh was a small autonomous zone when the USSR was dissolved in 1991. The larger region of Karabakh (Garabagh in Azerbaijani, Artsak in Armenian) has been an apple of discord between Armenians and Azerbaijanis for more than a century. Karabakh was demonstrably home and cultural centre for both peoples for centuries. Both shared it, their villages and pastures side by side.

With the advent of their national movements in the second half of the 19th century, Armenia and Azerbaijan claimed overlapping territories including Mountainous Karabakh. As long as the land was inside the Russian Empire and the local population had no control over boundaries or administration, the question was historical, culture, and emotional. In May 1918, after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and neighbouring Georgia declared independence, and control of land became a political and strategic issue. Fighting over borders began. The new governments published official maps of their countries.

These maps were aspirational; they depicted land claimed, not necessarily controlled. The three official maps together account for far more than the existing land on this isthmus between Black and Caspian Seas.

In April 1920, Soviet Russia’s Red Army coordinating with internal pro-communist factions took over oil-producing Azerbaijan and recognized its territorial claims. Once the forces from Moscow took Armenia the following December, communist authorities inherited the territorial dispute and spent the next few years trying to sort out the conflicting claims to three regions: Mountainous Karabagh, the region Zangezur to the southwest (now the panhandle of Armenia that touches Iran’s border), and further southwest Nakhjivan bordering Iran and the nascent Turkish Republic. The 1923 settlement of these apples of discord settled the dispute and served Russian interests. Nakhjivan was confirmed as part of

The region of Mountainous Karabagh became the site of a culturally autonomous region within Azerbaijan: Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region (NKAR). The Soviet government created such autonomous regions within many of the newly-annexed soviet socialist republics and in Russia itself. The Azerbaijanis resented NKAR’s extensive cultural and administrative autonomy – Armenians staffed party and state organizations, and their language was used in public as well as private venues – because it diminished Azerbaijan’s control over this part of its own territory as defined by the party and state of the USSR. The NKAR was drawn specifically to scoop up Armenians’ villages while excluding those of Azerbaijanis; hence its odd shape.

The Armenians were also unhappy because NKAR autonomy seemed to suggest the Russians accepted Armenian claims, but then placed it inside the neighbouring republic. Both sides were unhappy but powerless. Over time, Armenian representatives tried, behind the scenes, to get the NKAR moved into the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, but to no avail. The region was a convenient lever, like ethnic regions in other republics, for Moscow to manipulate in case of ethnic competition that they knew existed despite decades of official rhetoric about friendship of peoples.

It was only under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms seemed to signal the possibility of even greater changes, that the Karabagh Movement emerged in Armenia in 1987 with the public demand to transfer the NKAR to Armenia. Azerbaijanis were blind-sided by the upsurge of rhetoric and later of violence both in the NKAR and in Armenia’s capital Yerevan; Azerbaijanis in the city of Sumgait retaliated against local Armenians. Azerbaijani intellectuals rejected Armenian claims as Azerbaijan’s communist party prepared to surrender the region. In Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, popular demonstrations against not merely the Karabagh Movement but against Azerbaijan’s communist authorities spun out of control. Fighting between the two groups spread to both republics, replete with ethnic cleansing.

When Gorbachev dissolved the USSR in late 1991, the conflict became a war between two newly independent states. The Armenian administration of the NKAR declared its independence from Azerbaijan. Escalation was fuelled by the Soviet forces selling their weapons to both sides, as well as some arms from abroad. The better trained and armed Armenian forces in Karabakh/Artsak and from Armenia took the old NKAR and five surrounding regions inside Azerbaijan for a total of roughly 14% of Azerbaijan’s

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Emreculha, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

territory. After prolonged fighting and government upheaval in both republics, there were as many as a million internally displaced people (IDPs) and 20,000-25,000 fatalities. A ceasefire was finally signed in May 1994, freezing stunning Armenian victory on the ground: Armenian forces held the territory, and two-thirds to three-quarters of the fatalities and IDPs were Azerbaijanis. The ceasefire lasted, through prolonged but fruitless peace negotiations and despite numerous short-lived breaks, until 2020.

During the 16 years of uneasy ceasefire, the Karabagh question drove domestic politics in both republics.

Azerbaijan’s oil wealth allowed a fantastic arms build-up, buying weapons from Russia, Turkey, and Israel, while resource-poor Armenia struggled to support its own population as well as the occupied territories. Armenia has a military alliance with Russia, but Azerbaijan is an important trading partner for Moscow because of oil and gas, as well as the newly completed North-South Transit Corridor that links the Russian rail system with Iran’s through Azerbaijan’s territory. Turkey is a staunch ally for Azerbaijan and shares its ostracism of Armenia. In the West, Azerbaijan has handled its diplomacy and lavishly funded public relations with savvy and long-serving diplomats in UK and US. Armenia more frequent changed diplomats and relies on its influential diaspora to garner political support. Although much Western sympathy went to Christian Armenians, the Azerbaijanis played their hand cleverly and gained unprecedented clout.

The initial fighting of 2020 was, it appears, Azerbaijan’s testing of weapons, especially drones from Turkey. When the war restarted in September, surely initiated by Azerbaijan, analysts were fearful, not only of the death toll, human rights abuses, and destruction, but of interference by neighbouring powers or mercenaries. A prolonged war could have led to tens of thousands of deaths, mostly civilian, creating an unstable region that could provide a haven for extremists.

Image by InspiredImages from Pixabay

Despite horrific losses of an estimated 6,000 people, the war’s relative brevity (only six weeks) stopped those other dangers from materializing. The Azerbaijani victory has sealed the dominance of president Ilham Aliyev. Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is vilified at home and many commentators believe his political career is over.

Relief over the war’s brevity does not disguise its horrors.

Both Armenian and Azerbaijani forces engaged in indiscriminate killing, according to reports released midJanuary by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Cluster munitions and inaccurate bombs, as well as targeting of civilian areas, in eight instances by Armenia and nine by Azerbaijan, led to civilian deaths.

Russia’s facilitation of a new ceasefire strengthened its hand in a region it considers its sphere of influence. Turkey succeeded in projecting power as it has done in Syria and Libya. Iran avoided the feared spill-over of violence from the Caucasus to its multinational population which includes millions of Azerbaijanis.

Despite the end of fighting, peace is elusive. Armenia and Azerbaijan have spent the last two decades vilifying each other and urging sole possession of Karabagh as the only honourable outcome. The great task ahead for both peoples is changing attitudes and crafting a way to live peacefully.

FURTHER READING

Altstadt, Audrey L (1994) O Patria Mia: National Conflict in Mountainous Karabagh (Ethnic Nationalism and Regional Conflict; The Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, ed W Raymond Duncan and G Paul Holman Jr, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado) Oystercatcher. © Lorne Gill | SNH

de Waal, Thomas (2013) Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War, 10th anniversary edition, revised (New York University Press)

40 Spring 2021

An interview with Sir Michael Palin Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

Writing in the introduction to his North Korea Journal, Michael Palin reflects on the circumstances that led to his latest extraordinary journey. He says: “My philosophy of travel, such as it is, is that the more difficult somewhere is to get to, the greater the prize to be won by getting there.” On that basis, the two weeks in 2018 which he spent exploring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, one of the least accessible countries in the world, must surely have yielded an amazing experience, and his book goes on to reveal just how astonishing it was.

In January, Michael described his travels through the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ in an online talk for RSGS; his accompanying images showed aspects of the country that are rarely seen by outsiders. Afterwards I chatted to him about his attitude to travel and the things that first inspired him to explore the more remote and mysterious regions of the globe.

Firstly, I asked him about that famous episode, early on in his career as a travel presenter, when he was on a dhow in the Arabian Sea, feeling increasingly ill and knowing that the slow crossing was wasting time in his round-the-world schedule.

While the experience helped to shape Michael’s now-familiar presenting style, I wondered if it also changed the way he viewed the world and the people he met along the way.

He agreed that it was quite a significant moment, “…because, as often happens when things begin to go wrong, it brings out the best in you – and I’m not just talking about me, I’m talking about the whole crew. We knew we were going to be on this dhow for a long time, and it was not a place for any privacy. We were sharing it with 18 Gujarati fishermen, only one of whom spoke a bit of English, and the only loo was a barrel over the back. I think that situation created something which we weren’t immediately aware of. When we got to India, within an hour I was off the boat and in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel. Suddenly I was back in a world where people were giving other people orders, where people were being treated as inferior… I saw it terribly clearly, because for seven nights and eight days I’d seen a version – an idyll, really – of communal living. Now I felt as if I was in a world of inequality and greed! I know it wasn’t as bad as that, but it seemed like it at the time.”

© John Swannell

When Michael was a child, his father used to receive a box of dates every Christmas from an agent in Algeria. It was decorated with romantic images of the desert, and was invariably addressed to ‘Mr E M Palm’, which both amused Michael and kindled his curiosity about the world. He says: “That excitement and fascination with different places, particularly exotic places that were thousands of miles from where I lived in Sheffield, set in quite early in my life. It also came from books and magazines like National Geographic, and geography was one of my favourite subjects at school. I suppose I just responded to the magic and the mystery of places.”

was the Sahara. It looked empty, but he immediately saw the potential for a travel documentary: “I just felt at that moment, the challenge would be to look at the Sahara and see what’s there… who lives there, and how they live. It would add another dimension.

As soon as I started reading up about it, I realised that the Sahara had mountain ranges, lakes, ancient civilisations, ancient businesses and trade routes. When I went there to start filming, I ended up on a camel train carrying salt across the heart of the desert, and it was spectacularly interesting to see how people survived in this extraordinarily bleak landscape. The desert also offered up comfort, if you knew where to look, and there were places where you could actually live, albeit briefly, so a tree would suddenly become something terribly important.”

Decades later, after filming several series including Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole and Full Circle, Michael was reminded of the allure of the desert. He was returning home on a night flight from Kenya when he glanced at the live route map and was astonished to see that they were crossing a vast region that was shaded light brown. He realised that it

What is evident is that Michael has carried his youthful curiosity and passion for exploration into all his programmes and books. I asked him what he admired most in travel writing: “I think, most important of all, there has to be something of yourself. As an audience, you’ve got to know the person you’re travelling with. It comes down to what you’re

“’That excitement and fascination with different places set in quite early in my life.’”

The

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Spring 2021

like in person; how you want to engage with the world. I’m one of these people who are fairly inclusive. I gain strength from being in the right place with the right people, and I’m very much aware of how much I need people to help me on my way, to interpret what I’m seeing, and to keep me safe.

At the same time, I’m engaging with them and hoping that they will get something from me. That exchange has got to be part of travel writing. I think that’s why my travels were successful in the end – because, when things went wrong, and I acknowledged the hopeless person I was on certain occasions, or the brave person I was on other occasions, I needed the people who were reading the story as much as I needed the people who were in that story.”

In his RSGS talk, Michael spoke about the evolution of travel, and the modern obsession with selfies for social media. He said, “Tourism which is just selfie tourism… seems a waste of an opportunity to see the world. The best travel is travel where you learn about a country and you have to make your own way through a country.” There is also the impact on climate and environment to be considered, and Michael admits that there is no perfect solution. “I can’t travel myself and yet tell anyone else not to travel. I personally think the best way to travel is as minimally as possible and with a lot of local input – with someone who lives there and knows about it.”

“Michael has carried his youthful curiosity and passion for exploration into all his programmes and books.”

What struck me from talking to Michael is that, throughout all his adventures, whether he’s playing draughts with camel droppings in the Sahara or singing in a Tokyo karaoke bar, he is spreading goodwill and finding common ground at a very human level. Communication is sometimes difficult, but he can usually make himself understood in one way or another.

He believes this kind of understanding “…makes the world slightly safer – because otherwise, you are there as a sort of captive audience waiting to be told: Is this safe? Is this right?

Is that good? Is that bad? There’s far too much of that kind of headline stuff now.” He worries about increasing nationalism, “…because it’s doing what I think is the most dangerous thing, which is closing down rather than opening up, and saying ‘we don’t want to know about this.’ The negatives build up and then you have a real situation of people not understanding each other.”

In North Korea, the challenge of finding this mutual understanding was different from anywhere else Michael had ever been. In typical open-minded fashion, he went there to form his own opinions about the country, but he was acutely aware that apparently normal activities like photographing statues or chatting to a farmer or

even jotting down notes were watched with subtle but careful scrutiny. His account is fascinating for the rare glimpse it provides into the mindset and motivations of North Korea’s people.

Michael also proved, not for the first time, that laughter connects us all. As he and his crew waited for a flight that would take them to Mount Paektu, North Korea’s tallest and most sacred mountain, his director opened his laptop and showed one of their guides, Li So Hyang, the Fish Slapping Dance from Monty Python: “Chin on her arm, So Hyang stares at the laptop with great concentration as John Cleese and I perform our fish slapping with a military precision that North Koreans would surely appreciate. As I’m knocked into the water she laughs loud and appreciatively, though her immediate thoughts are not for the man who’s just plunged head first into a canal. ‘The fish,’ she asks with concern, ‘is it alive?’”

© Nick Bonner, Doug Dreger, Neil Ferguson, Jaimie Gramston, Jake Leland, Michael Palin

In May 2018, Michael spent two weeks in the notoriously secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a cut-off land without internet or phone signal, where the countryside has barely moved beyond a centuries-old peasant economy but where the cities have gleaming skyscrapers and luxurious underground train stations.

His resulting documentary for Channel 5 was widely acclaimed.

In North Korea Journal he shares his day-by-day diary of his visit: what he saw, and his fleeting views of what the authorities didn’t want him to see; the conversations he had with the country’s inhabitants; his encounters with officialdom; and his musings about a land wholly unlike any other he has ever visited – one that inspires fascination and fear in equal measure. Written with his trademark warmth and wit, and illustrated with beautiful colour photographs throughout, the journal offers a rare insight into the North Korea behind the headlines.

Sir Michael Palin received the Livingstone Medal in 2008, and is a Fellow of RSGS. Our thanks to him, both for the online talk and for his time in giving us this interview.

Follow Michael’s adventures on www.themichaelpalin.com.

BOOK CLUB

42 Spring 2021

The History of the World in 100 Animals

A Perfect Planet

Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster UK, October 2020)

The conditions of Earth are not just good for life, they are perfect.

Everything about our planet is perfectly suited to our existence, and our planet’s forces serve to nurture its spectacular biodiversity. Earth has always been more than the sum of its parts. Focusing on four key natural forces – global weather systems distributing fresh water to all corners; marine currents delivering nutrients to the deepest reaches of the ocean; solar energy warming and electrifying everything it touches; and volcanic activity fertilising the Earth’s surface – Cordey reveals a world populated with astonishing animal characters living remarkable lives. With over 250 full-colour images, this is a stunning exploration of life on Earth.

The New Climate War The Fight to Take Back Our Planet Michael E Mann (Scribe UK, February 2021) Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we’ve been told we can save the planet. But are individuals really to blame for the climate crisis? Seventy-one per cent of global emissions come from the same hundred companies but, according to renowned scientist Mann, fossil-fuel companies have waged a 30-year campaign to blame individuals for climate change. All is not lost though. Mann draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters – fossil-fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petro-states – and outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change.

Reader Offer – £5 discount

Offer ends 30th June 2021

The Black Cuillin

The Story of Skye’s only Mountains £17.00 Calum Smith (Rymour Books, August 2020)

(RRP £22.00)

The Black Cuillin, the most rugged mountain range in the UK, forms a continuous chain of narrow ridges, jagged pinnacles and wild, icescoured corries around the basin of Loch Coruisk in Skye. It has attracted visitors such as Boswell and Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, and J M W Turner. John Mackenzie, the first to systematically explore the range, noted that “nowhere in the British isles are there rock climbs to be compared with those in Skye.” Smith covers the history of climbing in these hills, from the discoveries and exploits of the pioneers for whom even the ascent of a single peak was a formidable prospect, right up to the athletic rock climbers of more recent generations who flock to these beautiful and challenging mountains.

Readers of The Geographer can buy The Black Cuillin for only £17.00 (RRP £22.00). To order, please visit www.rymour.co.uk and quote code ‘RSGS1’ at the checkout.

RSGS: a better way to see the world Phone 01738 455050 or visit www.rsgs.org to join the RSGS. Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU Charity SC015599

Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises Mark Carwardine (Bloomsbury Wildlife, November 2019) This is the most comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date guide to these popular marine mammals.

With nearly 1,000 illustrations and with detailed annotations pointing out the most significant field marks, this handbook covers all 90 species and every subspecies in the world.

Many of the world’s most respected whale biologists have collaborated on the concise text, which is packed with helpful identification tips from cetacean expert Carwardine, whose informative text is accompanied by up-to-date distribution maps and photographs. Beautifully designed, to ensure critical information is quickly accessible, this is an indispensable resource that every whale-watcher will want to carry out to sea.

The Secret Life of the Mountain Hare Andy Howard (Sandstone Press Ltd, May 2020) Among the most captivating of creatures, the mountain hare has inhabited Britain’s upland landscape since the last major ice age. Seasonally white or brown, usually shy and always charming, they can run like the wind. When they are at rest, which is their usual condition, their every gesture and facial movement is endearing. Howard fell in love with these charming creatures at first sight. Here, in a book first published in 2018 and winner of that year’s Favourite Scottish Nature Photography Book, he introduces them both as a species precious within the great wheel of the seasons, and as individuals with their own, delightful personalities.

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Printed by www.jtcp.co.uk on Claro Silk 115gsm paper.

100% FSC certified using vegetable-based inks in a 100% chemistry-free process.

Barnes selects the 100 animals who have had the greatest impact on humanity and on whom humanity has had the greatest effect. He shows how we have domesticated animals for food and for transport, and how animals powered agriculture, making civilisation possible.

He explains how a species of flea came close to destroying human civilisation in Europe, and how pigeons made possible the biggest single breakthrough in the history of human thought. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book helps us to understand our place in the world better, so that we might do a better job of looking after it.

Huw Cordey (BBC Books, November 2020)