The Goal Now Has to Be to Listen: An Interview with Barry Lopez – The Georgia Review. Barry Lopez is one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers about human beings and their place on this planet.
Few writers have thought more deeply about that relationship or have written more powerfully and eloquently about it. The stories and meditations in his expansive new book Horizon (forthcoming in March 2019 from Knopf), as well as in such previous writings as Arctic Dreams (1986) and Resistance (2004), contain urgent messages for our time. Barry and I have been friends since 1984 when he first visited my school, Southern Utah University, to speak; an interview I conducted with him at that time appeared in Western American Literature in 1986. Barry made a return trip to Cedar City to speak again and to work with my students in a class on American nature writing, and we spent a week together talking about books, landscape, animals, indigenous people, and writing. We have stayed in touch ever since.
Dérive. Memory fields. Post-Traumatic Landscapes. Lockdown. Local - Keep it local (local walks) Single story. It aims to be 50% green space by 2050. □ Read more #london #unitedkingdom… In May 1951 Jacquetta Hawkes, British archaeologist, published "A Land. Sense of place. Word of the day: "temenos" - a sacred place, an area of landscape dedicated to worship or deemed to be divine. From ancient Greek τέμενος; in Latin, a "fanum. *****Robert Macfarlane: Word of the day: “psychogeography” - the exploration of cities & other landscapes by means of drift, play & randomly motivated walking, encouraging a re-imagining of familiar terrain & the exploration of how environments a.
Woodland Trust sur Twitter : "The Trees for London saplings are in the post and will arrive soon! #London’s biggest ever #tree planting weekend is on 1st and 2nd December - together with @QueensCanopy and @LDN_gov we can make London a greener place to liv. I'm going to be on @cnni's #GoingGreen this weekend talking about @LondonNPC #NationalParkCity. Here's an advance short clip. RIP Clive King. Stig of the Dump left a profound impression on me as a kid. I wrote about it in Outskirts.… Miss Watson has had a busy cake baking evening to celebrate her GCSE class in getting through their recent mock examinations ! #learningtosucceed… A nice green #NationalParkCity map is in this week’s @TimeOutLondon. It’s great to see @LondonNPC’s hard work is getting so much support from Londoners.… Here is one of my favourite cartoonists @tomgauld poking fun at geographers. Love it! You can buy his books on his website.
Question: where is the "smaller place" in a landscape with which you resonate, a modest or overlooked place that has deepened for you over time, for whatever reasons?…
"Landscapes Of The Mind": I wrote 17 short essays, each about place/space in a famous book, from Gormenghast to The Road to Cold Comfort Far… Fascinating project: These images are the average #London #tourist photos. They were created by layering hundreds of photos of famous sites… “British children now spend on average less time outdoors each day than prisoners” - @RobGMacfarlane #newsnight. Wellbeing enhanced more by places than objects, study finds. *****Degree of hemeroby (naturalness) of the overall landscape in the European Union (1996 - 2005) #Environment #Europe. Reading Geography – Compass. Jane Austen thought those who didn’t read were stupid.
More precisely, that ‘the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’. My 13-year-old sister would beg to differ. She thinks reading is stupid – because, and I quote, it’s boring. I’ve always been a reader, and a pretentious one at that (think the precocious figure of Roald Dahl’s Matilda), so have never shared my sister’s sentiments. What I did think stupid once upon a time, however, is Geography. Plato believed reading gave soul to the universe and wings to the mind. Word of the day: "edgeland" - transitional zone where 'town' frays complicatedly into 'country' (also rurban fringe, bastard countryside).
Marion Shoard's keystone essay on "edgelands" ("apparently unplanned & largely incomprehensible territory") is here. From my new favourite account. Hilarious map of #SanFrancisco by Sasha Trubetskoy. Word(s) of the day: “roaming radius” - the maximum distance from home within which children are permitted to play or explore unsupervised. Humans are losing touch with nature – it’s a tragedy with no quick fix. Research published on Monday suggests that British people are becoming increasingly detached from wildlife, the countryside and nature.
Seven out of 10 people in the Jordans Cereals survey admitted they felt they were losing touch with the natural world, while a third said they did not know enough about the subject to teach their own children. One in three people could not identify an oak tree. This detachment has negative consequences for conservation. People simply can’t and won’t rally round to save something they are not really aware of. A major report last year already warned that Britain is among “the most nature-depleted countries in the world”.
Pic of the week: 'health in the making'...archive image from Corporation of Glasgow - #parks have always been our #NaturalHealthService. Special Places. @JudithRoberts Summer 75. You see? Just like an advancing slug! "Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, That was, and still is, my ideal scenery." WH Auden Question: what is your "ideal scenery"? Mapping Stereotypes.
More of #London should be designed for a barefoot experience.. inviting us to get nature between our toes. #RiverPinn #BigWalkAroundLondon. *****Blind safari tourism (accessibility) As our land cruiser nosed through the brush, cicadas buzzed above us like power lines.
My wife and I had been in Zimbabwe only a few hours. So far, our guide on our first safari drive, Alan, had already spotted several species of fleet antelope, and I was already concerned that for me—as a blind man—yes, this was going to kind of suck. I might as well be at a drive-in movie. Here, you try: Close your eyes. Over there is a kudu, whatever a kudu is. *****Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place - Paul Rodaway. Can't even begin to comprehend the epic scale of @DanRavenEllison's #BigWalkAroundLondon... Fun #map pokes fun of #SanFrancisco and #SilliconValley. How accurate is it?! High-res version by @MyBoyTrubetskoy. Why green spaces are good for grey matter Snap! @DanRavenEllison Not just beneficial for over 65's.□ @LondonNPC. I'm going on a 500km #BigWalkAroundLondon to help make #London a #NationalParkCity. Help draw where I should go.
BBC Radio 4 explores virtual reality in drama for the first time in Quake - Media Centre. The Japanese practice of 'forest bathing' is scientificially proven to be good for you. The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854 essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.
Now there’s scientific evidence supporting eco-therapy. The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing. Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as therapy.
Today will be remembered as the day Wales came to the mountain. #GetCreative □ #cerigreu. *****Word of the day: "wolf-light" - twilight, dusk. French 'Entre chien et loup', 'Between dog & wolf' - the time when the familiar becomes wild. Moscow edgelands. 0The BFI have just uploaded this amazing short Alan Garner (Weirdstone of Brisingamen) doc from 1968. How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations.
How Big Is Your City, Really? When our sense of a place distorts its actual size.
In almost every way in which we humans view the world, scale and context are crucially important. When we build a skyscraper, it’s impressive because it’s so much taller than what’s around it, or what’s come before it. When we learn of a new chameleon, it’s wonderful because it’s so much smaller than anything else we’ve ever seen before. But every now and then, we stumble across a fact that changes our sense of context, connecting two parts of the world with an understanding of scale that we normally lack. It turns out, for example, that the first moonwalk by the Apollo 11 crew only traversed a region no larger than a soccer field or baseball diamond. Indoor vs outdoor activities during summer break: Over the last 30 years 18-21 year olds halved their outside time.
A website by Edward (Ted) Relph exploring the concept of place, sense of place, spirit of place, placemaking, placelessness and non-place, and almost everything to do with place and places. Mapping emotions in Victorian London. Mapping Emotions in Victorian London is a crowdsourcing project designed to expand possibilities for research in the humanities.
The project has invited anonymous participants to annotate whether passages drawn from novels, published mainly in the Victorian era, represented London places in a fearful, happy, or unemotional manner. This data from the crowd allowed us to generate the maps you find here, revealing a previously unseen emotional geography of Victorian London. We now invite you to explore them, and the underlying fictional passages, to discover the ways in which London was constructed, navigated, and represented emotionally in its fiction. This project was led by a research team from the Stanford Literary Lab, within the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), with generous support from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. Woodberry Wetlands: London’s new wildlife oasis. Sir David Attenborough has opened a new nature reserve in London, a functioning reservoir, which has been hidden from the public for nearly 200 years As of 1 May, local residents of Woodberry Down – and, indeed, the entire general public – are able to freely visit and explore Woodberry Wetlands, London’s newest nature reserve.
This 11-hectare reservoir in Hackney has been closed to the public since it was built in 1833, but thanks to an intervention by the London Wildlife Trust, it’s now making an assortment of wildlife accessible to Londoners. The reserve was opened by Sir David Attenborough, who toured the Thames Water-owned site thanking volunteers for their efforts in cleaning up the wetlands. ‘I’ve spent the last 60 or 70 years hearing about this disaster or that disaster,’ he told an assembled crowd. ‘It’s marvellous to be here seeing the reverse, seeing things getting better. Sir David Attenborough and Woodberry Wetlands project manager David Mooney (Image: Penny Dixie) Cool to see three of my green city maps feature on @BBCBreakfast yesterday! Check out the clip below. Thanks to @DavidSillitoBBC! #Esri. .@DanRavenEllison: How my moods changed when walking the length of 69 cities and 15 national parks across the UK @NatGeo @NatGeoMag. Brain scanner maps emotions on cities tour.
Mood swings: The man mapping Britain's emotions. Image copyright Daniel Raven-Ellison National Geographic explorer Daniel Raven-Ellison has just completed a 2.5 million step walk across Britain's cities and parks and electronically measured his changing mood with each step.
Wearing an EEG monitor strapped to his head he collected millions of snapshots of the activity in his brain as he crossed 69 cities over seven months in the UK from June last year. The monitor measures the electrical activity of the brain from sensors located across key areas of the scalp. Its software provided metrics on how stressed, relaxed, excited, focused, interested and engaged he was during his walks. He says the monitor helped him become more aware of his response to his surroundings. Here's a 90 second tour of the UK from my recent #wildcities journey Best played with sound. #travel #OMGB. I'd forgotten how good this was. 'A Map of Every City' on a post-it note by @chazhutton. Welcome to the Town of Sweet Pickles (1977) "depictions of urbanism in children's literature"
Project aims to grow a 'city of trees' Image copyright City of Trees A project aims to plant three million trees - one for every man, woman and child - in Greater Manchester over the next 25 years.
Those behind City of Trees hopes the effort will not only green the region but improve our understanding of the benefits trees provide to society. These include reducing stress, improve air quality and the amount of time shoppers spend in retail areas. The project is also testing how trees can reduce flooding in built-up areas. City of Trees director Tony Hothersall explained that the scheme had three main objectives. "One is to plant three million trees, ie. a tree for every man woman and child, over the next 25 years," he said. National Geographic - There’s Never Been A Better Time To Make Our Cities Wild #neverbetter #wildcities.
BBC Radio 4 - Open Country, London: A National Park City? So, I recommend picking up a copy of the new @wildlifemag and reading my piece on making #London a #NationalParkCity! p30-33. @LondonNPC. How green is your city? UK's top 10 mapped and ranked. Treepedia: Mapping Urban Trees in U.S. Cities. Understanding and promoting urban tree cover has never been more important Increasing a city’s tree canopy contributes to lowering urban temperatures by blocking shortwave radiation and increasing water evaporation.
Creating more comfortable microclimates, trees also mitigate air pollution caused by everyday urban activities. Their absorptive root systems also help avoid floods during severe rains and storm surges. So overall, trees are pretty awesome. Cities around the world are recognizing this and many are developing strategies to increase green canopy cover. As cities around the world race to implement green canopy strategies, we’ve developed a metric—the Green View Index—by which to evaluate and compare canopy cover. Green View Index The Green View Index (GVI) was calculated using Google Street View (GSV) panoramas.
Via senseable. Landscape: John Berger quote from A Fortunate Man is the epigraph. Jude Rogers on the ghost sounds of psychogeographic rock. In quiet corners of the British Isles, a strange kind of nostalgic music is prospering. Some of it summons up disused railway tracks and endless childhood summers through guitar drones, samples and field recordings. Other examples evoke public-information films, abandoned airfields and other creepier elements of our collective history. Together, an array of musicians are making their own musical contributions to British psychogeography. Psychogeography is the study of the spooky effects of the geographical environment on individuals. There are few better musical case studies than Antony Harding's July Skies, whose fifth album, The Weather Clock, is released this week.
Chapter & Verse Article. Two days ago I almost threw a friend of mine out of the house. He had come round to confirm that he could drive me, at very short notice, to a rather important meeting, thereby saving me an almost impossible journey on public transport, followed by lots of tramping through fields. When he first entered my house not only did he say that he could help me out in a dire situation, but he also told me that a close family member had passed away the night before. You may well ask what it was that prompted me to want to grab him by the scruff of the neck and turf him out on to the street after such a selfless offer. The answer is simple and two-fold; he made various negative remarks about Morrissey and his music, and claimed that he liked the new single by D12. Long SheffieldMusicTourism FINAL. Is this the first published use of the term ‘psychogeography’? “The science of anthropogeography, or more properly speaking, psychogeography, deals with the influence of geographical environment on the human mind.”
J. Walter Fewkes, Bureau of American Ethnology, (1905) Presented in a paper ‘Climate and Cult’ published in the Report of the Eighth International Geographic Congress. 1904, pp.664-670, (Washington: Washington Government Printing Office, 1905). Lest you wake the old ones... A shopping trolley graveyard in #Ealing. 1686km, 15 #NationalParks, 69 #Cities later and I'm done! What an adventure. Thank you UK. #neverbetter #wildcities. Daniel Raven Ellison psychogeog of London: Make Your Cities Wild #neverbetter #wildcities. Oxford University academic who scaled Shard is spared jail sentence.
Getting set up for my #Chelmsford #wildcities walk starts with setting up a baseline with my @emotiv headset.. in the dark. Inspired by Utopia by Thomas More, Stephen Walter Presents New Works in Exhibition at Shapero Modern. ‘Utopia’ by Thomas More, a work of fiction and a political philosophy written in 1516, is an everlasting inspiration for both political theory and art. Nocookies. Scroll to 108: Psychogeography. Stats, Maps n Pix: Crowdsourced City Boundaries - Alasdair Rae (Mental maps) Intrepid Explorers: Urban Form and Microclimate Microadventure (public event) Tickets, Sat, 15 Oct 2016 at 11:00.
National Geographic - There’s Never Been A Better Time To Make Our Cities Wild #neverbetter #wildcities. Stepping off the main road reduces my stress levels straight away. #London #wildcities #neverbetter. The Haunted City. Daniel Raven-Ellison: Heading into nature to explore smart #wildcities. Right from the start, I knew it was going to be a different day from normal. Daniel Raven-Ellison #Canterbury walk. Wondering how the rain will effect my brain! #wildcities #wetcities #kent. National Geographic - There’s Never Been A Better Time To Make Our Cities Wild #neverbetter #wildcities. Smart cities don’t just connect people, things, and technology—they connect people and nature too.
In fact, I believe that smart cities … should be wild cities. To explore this idea further, over the next few months I will be walking 1,500km across the UK’s 15 national parks and 69 cities, looking at how people, things, technology, and nature are connected, and can be better connected. Thinkwhere – A Geo blog from Tim Waters @tim_waters.