WELCOMING THE WILD ESSAY
M
Welcoming the Wild Essay for Studies in Contemporary Architectural Theory, ESALA, April 2021. Theodore Shack, s1408444
Abstract This essay looks into the contemporary rewilding movement using a Storedijkian method of thought and analysis. In particular, it draws on the way that Sloterdijk describes Victorian glasshouses as ‘granting plants hospitality’. Running this Victorian practice alongside contemporary rewilding reveals interesting parallels through the thought-image of ‘hospitality’. This idea of showing hospitality to the wild can be understood in an historic context running back to practices such as leaving fields fallow but also conceptually to the gargoyles and marginalia of Medieval times. The word ‘hospitality’ also becomes a helpful tool for understanding the role of the human in rewilding, who can otherwise occupy an ambiguous or marginalised position. Seeing rewilding as granting hospitality to the wild reveals it as a highly relational activity as much about the wild guest as the person offering the ‘hospitality’. However, it also reveals the limitations of a human-centred lens when applied to looking at the wild. The notion of ‘hospitality’ exposes a false power dynamic in the host-guest relationship. We think we are the host, where in fact we are the guest. The essay closes by considering how rewilding can more properly understand the wildhuman relationship as one of symbiosis and how this transformed perspective can apply in the practice of architecture.
Cover image: Photo by the author taken on 12th April 2021. A sight along the path of my daily walk at the back of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh.
1
Rewilding The last decade has seen significant growth of interest in the idea of ‘rewilding’. The rewilding movement has grown from individual peoples’ love for wild landscapes, but has also come to be seen as an essential part of meeting the challenges of the ‘climate crises’. This has seen the term move from relative obscurity into mainstream public discussion; most recently, there has even been pressure at this Holyrood election for MSPs to declare Scotland a ‘rewilding nation’.1 Over the past century, there has been a progressive loss of wild spaces at every scale in this country. From hedgerows to forests, moors to urban scrapland, the quantity and quality of wild spaces in the UK has been steadily declining.2 This has largely been caused by blind intensification of land-use over the past two centuries. In addition to driving species to the edge of extinction due to habitat loss, the depletion of wild places also has profound implication for the sustainability of human life as we also rely on these ecosystems for our survival.3 Rewilding has emerged in reaction to this picture of loss, and seeks to redress the balance by foregrounding the relationship between humans and ‘the wild’ as being of fundamental importance to both parties involved. This involves both seeing what humans can do to protect the wild and also understanding just how much the wild protects us. This includes processes that are only recently becoming more understood such as sequestering carbon, decomposing waste, preventing erosion and flooding and creating accommodating weather systems.4 Alongside these tangible ways, there are also the mythic and poetic, but no less significant means by which we rely on the wild. Many of these are expounded on through the work of Macfarlane, Monbiot and Shepherd.5 In lyric terms, these writers express the reliance that we have on wild spaces for grounding our very being. As Macfarlane writes: “Our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits… such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.”6 Taking a model of networked and distributed intelligence, our connections to the surrounding landscape are not just a means to understanding but actual are understanding.7 They are essential for forming and expanding our vocabulary of thought. 1 Steve Micklewright, ‘This is how Scotland can become the first Rewilding Nation’, The National, 20 March 2021, https://www.thenational.scot/news/19174919.scotland-can-become-first-rewilding-nation/ 2 National Biodiversity Network, ‘State of Nature Report 2019’, NBN, https://nbn.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2019/09/State-of-Nature-2019-UK-full-report.pdf 3 George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life, (Penguin: 2014) 4 Ibid. and T. Shack et al, ‘London Wilds: Rewilding Architecture Design Think Tank, LSA, 9 March 2020, issuu.com/theo.shack/docs/london_wilds_-_rewilding_architecture_design_think 5 Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, (Penguin, 2013); Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, (Granta Books, 2017); Monbiot, Feral.; Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, (Canongate Books, 2011). 6 Macfarlane, The Wild Places, 203. 7 Adam Nicolson, ‘review’ in Macfarlane, The Old Ways; Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind, (University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jonathon Hale, Merleau-Ponty for Architects, (Routledge, 2017) 4, 20-21 2
The wild To help understand re-wilding, it makes sense to look at how the human relation with the wild has changed. Historically, the wild has been a perpetual outside to human habitation, deriving its very definition from the absence of human control and presence.8 The wild was something that people would arm themselves against with protective enclosures. From it could issue forth beasts and unknown terrors, forces of destruction that would threaten life. It represented a sort of infinite outside in contrast to the intimacy of our homes.9 But somewhere in the past century or so an inversion occurred. Through gradual and continuous encroachment into the wild for extraction and cultivation, humans, or those living in Western Europe at least, have found ourselves in a position where what was once that infinite outside has become pockets of inside, surrounded by land which is human-controlled. ‘Threatened’ ‘besieged’ ‘surrounded’, ‘marginalised’ are terms often used now to describe the Earth’s wild spaces.10 Like air which is only noticed by its absence, the wild places of the Earth weren’t seen as having any importance, invisibly taken for granted until we reach the point where by their absence they are noticed - the assumed suddenly rendered explicit. 11 The scales have turned, the wild is no longer considered a threat to humans, instead, we perceive the wild as threatened, it has been rendered no longer dangerous, and so we find ourselves trying to protect it and make room for it again. Hospitality for plants Here Sloterdijk’s images for thinking about greenhouses represent an interesting parallel. He uses the notion of ‘granting plants hospitality’ to consider the way in which the Victorians built glasshouses, climatic zones able to accommodate foreign and exotic visitor plants from all around the world.12 In a similar way, re-wilding also manifests itself as a kind of hospitality, re-welcoming plants and even whole ecosystems into places which have been rendered inhospitable by human action.
1. The Terrestrial Paradise, engraving by Athanasius Kircher, 1675.
2. Not the Last Wolf in Scotland Memorial by Beatrice Searle. A guerilla art piece on the site the last wolf was killed in Sutherland, 1700. Opposite the ‘official’ plaque, it indicates how attitudes have changed in the intervening years.
8 George Monbiot, Feral. 9 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Guidici, ‘Gardeners’ World’, Architectural Review, Feb 2021. 6-11. 10 National Biodiversity Network, ‘State of Nature’. 11 See Sloterdijk’s explication of air in Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Gas Warfare – or: The Atmoterrorist Model’, in Terror from the Air, Foreign Agents Series (LA: Semiotext[e], 2009): 9–46. 12 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Atmospheric Politics’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge MA: MIT, 2005): 945. 3
Both of these practices express a relationship to the strange, what Sloterdijk terms a xenology.13 In the first instance, the Victorians observing the strange and wonderful delight of the exotic plants, sought to collect and make a space for them close to their own homes by means of glasshouses. Meanwhile rewilding turns its interest to the once-familiar native plants and animals. For they have been re-rendered strange through their gradual marginalisation and our personal disconnection with them. In this way, they inspire wonder, and the desire to invite them back into areas closer to our own homes. There is something of a logical progression in this lineage from admiration of the curious from abroad before being able to appreciate the value of things which are closer-to-home. The intimacy of this place of interaction within a home environment is also key because as with traditional hospitality, out of this proximity new ideas and syntheses emerge. The Victorians’ practice of bringing back plants from across the world gave opportunities for their study that contributed to the discovery of new medicines. Likewise today, rewilding advocates trumpet the ways in which the study and classification of fungi in ancient forests much closer to home is revealing useful properties such as new anti-cancer drugs and ways of safely accelerating the decomposition crude oil.14 However, rewilding goes further than the hospitality of Victorian glasshouses which retain an element of imperialism, bringing the rest of the world under one roof in order to render it more useful as a kind of mass interiorisation.15 Given the very definition of the wild as a kind of ‘outside’, inviting it into human landscapes complexifies this notion of inside-outside. Has the outside become inside or is the inside turned out? In theory, rewilding would understand itself as primarily concerned with the latter. The theory of admitting the wild is at its core a letting-go of control and in so doing allowing ourselves to be surprised by something we do not fully understand.16 We are placing ourselves in a position where we are more likely to be amazed, not just as a one-off by a specimen plant, but continually by a dynamic changing ecosystem in an ongoing unexpected revelation of strangeness.
3. Illustrations by Jackie Morris from Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words. A children’s book re-rendering the familiar as wonderful through use of glorious gold burnished paintings and poems to inspire love for native wildlife.
4. Lion’s Mane mushroom has been found effective treatment for variety of issues from cancer to alzheimers.
13 14 15 16
Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Museum–School of Alienation’, Art in Translation, 6(4), 2014: 437–448. Merlin Sheldrake, ‘Radical Mycology’ in Englangled Life, (Penguin, 2020) 195-224. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘The Crystal Palace’ (2005), Public–Art/Culture/Ideas 37 (2008): 11–16. Isabella Tree, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, (Picador, 2018). 4
Historic hospitality to the wild To use a Sloterdijkian method of thought here, it makes sense to turn our attention to some historical precedents. These reveal both how the principle of showing hospitality to the wild is well established through human history but also ultimately the limitations of understanding this relationship as a guest-host dynamic. In the Old Testament, dictates on leaving fields entirely fallow every seventh year express a periodic or cyclical welcoming of wildness into the place of human control.17 Fallowing practices continued through Medieval Europe with crop rotation and have their parallels across cultures globally to this present day. In these, the practical is entirely bound up in the mystical, for the act both increases the fertility of the soil and also as a not immediately intuitive method requires humility on the part of the farmers, admitting their trust in something they do not fully understand and their interdependence with those forces. 18 Indeed, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the wild has had a surprisingly central role. It is an interesting feature that God as the ordering principle, the Logos,19 is repeatedly encountered in the places of disorder, the wilderness. From Moses’s burning bush to receiving the Ten Commandments on Mt Sinai to Jesus’s Transfiguration, the wild is established as a key locus of encounter with the Divine.20 This tradition continued through to the Desert Fathers in the 3rd-4th Century AD, who went to the desert to find God even as Christianity was becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. Although they left their society behind to enter the wild, the influence that their writings and teachings had on the early Church point to ways that the fruits of their own intimate relationship with the wild places was brought back into wider culture at that time.21 Something of this is to be found in the reverence for mystery as a Divine attribute revealed through the mysteries of Creation. This place for the wild retains a presence through Medieval Europe, finding curious manifestation in the carved grotesques and
5. A Mayan priest performing an offering ceremony as part of maize cultivation.
6. Transfiguration, Novogrod, 15-16th century. The black circle at the centre speaks of the of God’s mystery.
17 “Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field may eat. In like manner you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove.” – Exodus 23: 10-11. (NKJV) 18 Julia Watson, Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, (Taschen, 2019). 19 Genesis 1 and John 1:1. 20 Exodus 3 and 19, Matthew 17. 21 Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the desert : sayings from the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, (New Directions, 1970) 5
marginalia of her sacred spaces both architectural and scriptoral. The ubiquity of these curious wild creatures throughout sacred architecture and texts has baffled scholars ever since and up to the present day.22 Even at the time, there wasn’t much self-conscious clarity on why they were such a feature of sacred spaces. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in 1124: “But in the cloister, under the eyes of the Brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in the marvellous and deformed beauty, that beautiful deformity?”23 Whatever the reasons for them, they speak of a society that had a place for the wild and the strange and considered this to be not outside the sacred realm but as an integral part of God’s Creation. Given a place on top of the pillar capitals and in the edge of sacred books, these wild figures were important enough to be permanent witnesses to daily presencing of God in the Celebration of Mass. This ability to accept both the ugly and the ordered under one roof as part of the complexity of Creation expresses a certain non-totalitarianism, allowing for the ‘double-existences’ that are irrefutably part of life.24 However, in casting a view back on historic hospitality for the wild, we expose the bias of our own human perspective. What we might consider strange or ugly is merely a question of perspective, the crucial point in this being the implicit association of the wild with disorder. The ancients understood this when they put into the mouth of God the reminder that “your ways are not My ways”.25 In truth, the wild is only disorder insofar as we perceive it. The natural world and forces at play in it that constitute the wilderness are actually very ordered, but also incredibly complex, which is why there is much that to this day we do not understand about them.26 Yet this intuitive equating of wild with disorder is interesting insofar as it reveals the hegemony of our human perspective on things that we are wearing our human lenses.
7. Pillar capital grotesques at Wells Cathedral, ca. 1183-1260.
8. Marginal grotesques from The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40, which is full of the most marvellous creatures imaginable.
The same human lens is at play in the use of the image of hospitality to understand rewilding, exposing it as problematic. 22 T. Tindall Wildridge, The Grotesque in Church Art, (William Andrews & Co, 1899) and Alixe Bovey, host. ‘Knight fights giant snail’, BBC Radio 4 (podcast), 28 May 2020.: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/m000jgfv 23 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Letter to William of St. Thierry’, Trans. G. G. Coulton, Early Medieval Art 300-1150 Sources and Documents, Ed. C. Davis-Weyer, (New York, 1971), 170. 24 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Architecture as an Art of Immersion’, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 12 (2011): 105-106. 25 Isaiah 55:8 26 This is the project of modern science which finds order but also complexity and mystery. Particle physics is a case in point, but as is research into biological systems like the ‘wood wide web’ – Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017) and Sheldrake, Entangled Life. 6
Hospitality has a hierarchy within it, with the guest being allowed space by the host, who ultimately retains the power to evict at any moment. In understanding rewilding as hospitality we expose the fact that humans today are liable to consider themselves to be the host where in actual fact, as the only party genuinely vulnerable to eviction, we are the guest. The hubris of our self-appointed host status has manifested in the gradual transformation of our natural surroundings into something tamed in the service of our own economic priorities – what Heidegger identified as a ‘standing reserve’.27 Through the late Middle Ages, at the same time that this functional intensification of land use was developing, Europe’s enlightenment worldview started to cement the centrality of man as the agent of understanding. Value became attached only to that which could be rationally explained or empirically established, which pushed the mysterious and inexplicable safely to the edges of human interest.28 The wild, as something highly complex and apparently useless, was dismissed in favour of things more easily intelligible. This left society with little to check the urge to order the world under a logical framework that could ‘add value’ and ‘improve efficiency’ – the project of modernity.29 This ordering principle has ridden on to this day and still seems to advance irresistibly on places perceived as less ordered than itself. Humans and the wild It is precisely this capacity of human action and its effects in our landscape that the rewilding movement is reacting against. Seeking to de-centre the self-appointed host status we’ve been giving ourselves over the past few centuries is no small task and the knee-jerk response of many environmentalists confronted with landscapes entirely degraded at human hands is to see humans per se as the problem.30
9. A Buddhist Puja Ceremony at Mt Everest base camp asking permission from the mountain to climb.
10. Rainforest in Indonesia felled to plant palm oil palms.
27 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology & other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977). 28 Bristow, William, ‘Enlightenment’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.): https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/enlightenment/ 29 Peter Buchanan, ‘Critical Practice: Theory / Humanity and the Planet’, Lecture Series, London School of Architecture, October 2019 - January 2020; Bruno Latour, ‘Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization’, Harvard Design Magazine 30, (Sustainability) + Pleasure, Vol.I: Culture and Architecture (2009), www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/30/spheres-and-networks-two-ways-toreinterpret-globalization 30 Population Matters is an organisation with several high profile figureheads such as James Lovelock and Sir David Attenborough which argues this point (https://populationmatters.org/), however scientifically and ethically, it is entirely discredited - George Monbiot, ‘The Population Myth’, 29 September 2009. Monbiot.com, www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/ 7
The love of the wild is often a love of the untouched, the pristine, that which is remote and so hasn’t yet been ‘spoiled’ by other humans.31 However, when put into practice, association with these ideas has a deeply problematic heritage, aligned more readily with racist and totalitarian systems.32 The Nazi party, for example, were very keen rewilders, identifying themselves with the German forests and the ‘wild’ instinctive parts of human behaviour. When they conquered Eastern Poland, they created vast conservation parks from which people were forcibly cleared and often murdered.33 Appalling as this may seem, it is a practise which has continued across time and geography, most recently in the management of East African wildlife reserves.34 Certainly in Scotland, the passion for wild empty landscapes masks a troubled history, glossing over the painful story of the clearance of half a million people from the land. 35 This history and the way that we value the landscape it left behind can’t be separated so simply. In light of all this, Monbiot seeks instead to define wilds not by the absence of human presence but instead as ‘self-willed landscapes’36 that have as their own end lively, dynamic, changing systems. Humans as part of, not separate from nature, have a key role to play in that life. A good reminder of this is the knowledge is that we are keystone species, one of many, and like other keystone species can be biodiversity multipliers. Beavers are a good example of this, by engineering the environment according to their own needs, they incidentally create very varied habitats for other creatures. Similarly, humans in gathering about ourselves the means for our own highly various requirements can act to create varied landscapes that accommodate a great many other creatures. The book ‘Lo-Tek design by Radical Indigenism’ contains many examples of these biodiverse human landscapes across the world.37 And recent research shows how many of the world’s most bio-diverse landscapes are also products of historic human activity.38
11. The township of Stiomrabhaigh on Lewis, cleared in the 1850s.
12. Biodiverse agricultural landscapes, Palayan Rice Terraces, Ifugao, Phillippines.
13. Beavers act as biodiversity multiplies through engineering the landscape. Beaver dam in Bamff, Scotland.
31 Marfarlane, The Wild Places. 32 Brittney Bollay, ‘The Overpopulation Myth and its Dangerous Connotations’, Sierra Club, 21 January 2020, www.sierraclub.org/washington/blog/2020/01/overpopulation-myth-and-its-dangerousconnotations. 33 Monbiot, Feral. 200. 34 Ibid. 200-208. 35 Alastair McIntosh, Andy Wightman & Daniel Morgan, ‘The Scottish Highlands in Colonial & Psychodynamic Perspective’, INTERculture: International Journal of Intercultural and Transdisciplinary Research, Montreal, Vol XXVII:3, Is. 124, 1994, pp.1-36, www.alastairmcintosh.com/Articles/1994_interculture.htm 36 Monbiot, Feral. 37 Julia Watson, Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism, (Taschen, 2019). 38 Erle C. Ellis et al, ‘People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years’, B.L. Turner (ed), PNAS April 27, 2021 118 (17): https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2023483118 8
What captures the imagination of those interested in rewilding today is the potential for ecological restoration on a grand scale. In this, the wild is not valued just because it is wild, but because of its capacity to support life, both that of other creatures and our own. Projects like the Great Green Wall in the Sahel attest to this. This aims to plant a belt of forest from one coast of Africa to the other across the Southern Sahara to prevent desertification. As well as being the product of international cooperation, this is a grassroots initiative led by people who are already living in intimate connection with that place.39 In this there is not a removal of the human or the human perspective, but a profound sense that living next to a desert, this is not a host-guest relationship, but one of symbiosis. Human life and the natural processes present in the wild are woven closely together, they are entirely interdependent - everything one does affects the other and vice versa. This applies very fundamentally to architecture. We can’t separate out something that is only useful to us from its interdependence with our surroundings. Buildings today leave major footprints in the landscape; these extend beyond their immediate foundations to the sum total of all the places where the raw materials used for them were extracted from. When we see a new building, we should also be seeing the open cast aggregate quarry for the concrete, the oil refinery for the plastic insulation, the kind of forest that provided the timber. These landscapes are not separate from but entirely part of the finished outcome, and in some instances, even the greater part. There is a tendency to see the urban as an unnatural landscape and the rural as ‘natural’, but increasingly, it is the rural landscapes that bear the deepest, heaviest marks of human activity and where wildlife is most affected by this.40 Even what we consider to be the most immaterial parts of our daily existence, the digital and the ‘cloud’ have substantial real world footprints.41 Consequently, many architects are increasingly pointing contemporaries to consider what is going on in the rural as an area of concern.42 There is a need to better understand the relationship of symbiosis between what we design as our immediate architectural environment and the natural environment as a whole.
14. Tree planting in the Sahel, Africa, Great Green Wall project.
15. Clear felling at a Sitka Spruce plantation in Northumbria
16. Facebook data-centre in Luleå, Sweden, just south of the Artic Circle.
39 Great Green Wall, ‘Growing a World Wonder’, www.greatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall 40 Morgan Taylor. ‘Lecture for Rewilding Design Think Tank’, LSA Rewilding DTT, PiM Studio, London, January 2020. 41 Oliver Wainwright, ‘‘The countryside is where the radical changes are’: Rem Koolhaas goes rural’, The Guardian, 11 Feb 2020, Online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/11/remkoolhaas-rural-countryside-the-future-guggenheim 42 Antonio Pisano, ‘Lecture for London School of Architecture’, LSA, 23 January 2020, Lecture. and AMO, Rem Koolhaas et al. Countryside. A Report: Countryside in your pocket!, (Taschen, 2020). 9
Taking a rewilding approach to architectural practice is not just about the direct instances and opportunities for inviting other species into our built environment, although these are certainly part of it. By far the less noticed part of this is the effect that our building has on landscapes that we can’t actually see. Rather than just asking for embodied carbon figures, and feeling satisfied that we’ve chosen to build in wood, we need to be asking where that wood is coming from. For example, has the timber been sourced from a biodiverse forest using selective rather than clear-felling practices or is it from a mono-cultural Spruce Plantation? The difficulty of asking these kinds of questions is partly due to the fact that these landscapes of influence can be so remote from the place of construction, sometimes on the other side of the world. This calls for a need to draw building materials from places more close to hand, because with proximity, this knowledge and sense of responsibility come more easily. These activities, both at the scale of ecological restoration and in architecture constitute a radical expanding outwards of what is deemed a matter of concern for us. Expanding our attention to include so many and diverse things is difficult, it constitutes a sort of ‘thinking with the monstrous’.43 But this is possible when we start with the very personal relationship with the wild, with attention to small things. A tenth century monk living on the remote island of Enlli paused long enough to scribble a note in Gaelic in the margin of the Latin he was copying: ‘Pleasant to me is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins’.44 When we make a home in our hearts for the wild on a small scale, we are able to come out to meet its immensity, because the outside is not so outside after all.
Words: 3,125
43 Vincent Duclos, ‘Falling Into Things: Peter Sloterdijk, Ontological Anthropology in the Monstrous’, New Formations, 95, January (2019): 37–53. 44 Macfarlane, The Wild Places, 29. 10
Bibliography AMO, Rem Koolhaas et al. Countryside. A Report: Countryside in your pocket!. Taschen, 2020. Aureli, Pier Vittorio and Guidici, Maria. ‘Gardeners’ World’. Architectural Review. Feb 2021. 6-11.
Micklewright, Steve. ‘This is how Scotland can become the first Rewilding Nation’. The National. 20 March 2021. https://www. thenational.scot/news/19174919.scotland-can-become-firstrewilding-nation/
Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Letter to William of St. Thierry’, Translated by G. G. Coulton. Early Medieval Art 300-1150 Sources and Documents. Edited by C. Davis-Weyer. New York, 1971. 170.
Monbiot, George. ‘The Population Myth’. Monbiot.com. 29 September 2009. www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-populationmyth/
Bollay, Brittney. ‘The Overpopulation Myth and its Dangerous Connotations’. Sierra Club. 21 January 2020. www.sierraclub. org/washington/blog/2020/01/overpopulation-myth-and-itsdangerous-connotations.
Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin: 2014.
Bovey, Alixe. Host. ‘Knight fights giant snail’. BBC Radio 4. Podcast. 28 May 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jgfv Bristow, William. ‘Enlightenment’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2017. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/enlightenment/
National Biodiversity Network. ‘State of Nature Report 2019’. NBN. 2019. https://nbn.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ State-of-Nature-2019-UK-full-report.pdf Nicolson, Adam. ‘Review’ in Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways. Penguin, 2013 Pisano, Antonio. ‘Lecture for London School of Architecture’, LSA. 23 January 2020. Lecture.
Buchanan, Peter. ‘Critical Practice: Theory / Humanity and the Planet’. Lecture Series. London School of Architecture. October 2019 - January 2020.
Rovelli, Carlo. Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Penguin, 2017.
Duclos, Vincent. ‘Falling Into Things: Peter Sloterdijk, Ontological Anthropology in the Monstrous’. New Formations. 95, January (2019): 37–53.
Shack, Theodore et al, ‘London Wilds: Rewilding Architecture Design Think Tank’. LSA. 9 March 2020. issuu.com/theo.shack/ docs/london_wilds_-_rewilding_architecture_design_think
Ellis, Erle C. et al. ‘People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years’. B.L. Turner (ed). PNAS. April 27, 2021 118 (17): https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2023483118
Sheldrake, Merlin. Englangled Life. Penguin, 2020.
Great Green Wall, ‘Growing a World Wonder’. www. greatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall Hale, Jonathon. Merleau-Ponty for Architects. Routledge, 2017. Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology & other Essays. trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Latour, Bruno. ‘Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization’. Harvard Design Magazine. 30. (Sustainability) + Pleasure, Vol.I: Culture and Architecture (2009). www. harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/30/spheres-and-networks-twoways-to-reinterpret-globalization Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways. Penguin, 2013. Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. Granta Books, 2017.
Shepherd, Nan. The Living Mountain. Canongate Books, 2011. Sloterdijk, Peter. ‘Architecture as an Art of Immersion’. Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts. 12 (2011): 105-106. Sloterdijk, Peter. ‘Atmospheric Politics’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. (Cambridge MA: MIT, 2005): 945. Sloterdijk, Peter. ‘Gas Warfare – or: The Atmoterrorist Model’, in Terror from the Air, Foreign Agents Series. LA: Semiotext[e], 2009: 9–46. Sloterdijk, Peter. ‘Museum–School of Alienation’. Art in Translation. 6(4), 2014: 437–448. Sloterdijk, Peter. ‘The Crystal Palace’ (2005). Public–Art/Culture/ Ideas. 37. (2008): 11–16. Taylor, Morgan. ‘Lecture for Rewilding Design Think Tank’. LSA Rewilding DTT. PiM Studio, London, January 2020. Tree, Isabella. Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm. Picador, 2018.
McIntosh, Alastair; Wightman, Andy & Morgan, Daniel. ‘The Scottish Highlands in Colonial & Psychodynamic Perspective’. INTERculture: International Journal of Intercultural and Transdisciplinary Research. Montreal. Vol XXVII:3. Is. 124. 1994. pp.1-36. www.alastairmcintosh.com/Articles/1994_interculture. htm
Wainwright, Oliver. ‘‘The countryside is where the radical changes are’: Rem Koolhaas goes rural’, The Guardian. 11 Feb 2020. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/ feb/11/rem-koolhaas-rural-countryside-the-future-guggenheim
Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the desert : sayings from the Desert Fathers of the fourth century. New Directions, 1970.
Wildridge, T. Tindall. The Grotesque in Church Art. William Andrews & Co, 1899.
Watson, Julia. Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism. Taschen, 2019.
11
Image Sources: Cover image: Author’s photo, Arthur’s Seat, 12 April 2021. 1. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Guidici. ‘Gardeners’ World’. Architectural Review. Feb 2021. 7. 2. Beatrice Searle, ‘Foregathered wi’ the beast’. The Learned Pig. 26 April 2019. Website: https://www. thelearnedpig.org/last-wolf-foregathered/6484 3. Jackie Morris & Robert Macfarlane. The Lost Words. (Hamish Hamilton: 2017). 4. Erica Julsen. ‘9 Health Benefits of Lion’s Mane Mushroom’. Healthline. 19 May 2018. Website: https:// www.healthline.com/nutrition/lions-mane-mushroom 5. Photo by Feije Riemersma, in Julia Watson, Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, (Taschen, 2019). 133. 6. Novogrod Transfiguration Icon, from Kate Banks, ‘The art of Church Architecture, the luminous darkness of Westminster Cathedral’, Transpositions, Online: http://www.transpositions.co.uk/the-art-ofchurch-architecture-the-luminous-darkness-of-westminster-cathedral/ 7. Author’s photos of pillar capital grotesques at Wells Cathedral, ca. 1183-1260. 10 April 2021. 8. Marginal grotesques from The Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1325-40. British Library. Online: http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_fs001ar 9. Matt Dickinson, photo of Puja at Everest base camp. Matt Dickinson. ‘Let the Puja Begin!’. The Everest Files. Online: https://www.everestfiles.com/blog/let-the-puja-begin.html 10. Johannes Reiche. ‘Sustainable palm oil through deforestation alerts’. Wagingen University & Research. 9 Dec 2019. Online: https://weblog.wur.eu/spotlight/sustainable-palm-oil-through-deforestation-alerts/ 11. Photo by Geograph in The Scotsman. ‘7 villages emptied by the Highland Clearances’. The Scotsman. 14 June 2017. Online: https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/7-villages-emptiedhighland-clearances-1447472 12. Photo by Rob Kroenert, in Julia Watson, Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, (Taschen, 2019). 86-87. 13. Bamff, ‘Bamff Beaver Project’, Bamff. Website: https://www.bamff.co.uk/beaver-project/ 14. Lauren Kelly,Joy Butscher & Mees van der Werf. ‘Scaling the Great Green Wall?’, IEG World Bank Ground, 21 Jan 2021. Online: https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/blog/scaling-great-green-wall 15. Photo by Tom Allan in Tom Allan, ‘Country diary: the spruces’ time is up’, The Guardian. 14 Jan 2019. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/14/country-diary-the-spruces-time-is-up 16. Photo by Gunnar Svedenbäck in Wordless Tech. ‘Northern Sweden experiencing a Facebook Effect’. Wordless Tech. 29 Oct 2012. Online: https://wordlesstech.com/northern-sweden-experiencing-a-facebookeffect/
12