That is why BABYLON 5 evolved into a great show. It didn’t start out great like “LOST” and flip-flopped during the rest of the series. It started out slow and built up naturally, like any good story.

I’m trying to get a message to Abi Sutherland – I hope I’ve got the right person? If not, do you have a contact email for Abi, please?

Can you let me know how I can contact you directly, please?

Thanks very much
Emme

It seems wondrous that so many things came together at the same time. That made landscape. The Calvinism limiting obvious ostentatiousness, while also looking down of the art subjects of the middle ages. Merchants competing to show off within the limits of that religious culture. Perhaps there is some deeper interconnection that made this effect likely to occur.

Your writing is lovely. Thank you for this blog.

The interesting personality to examine in this light is John Muir, who moved to the US from Scotland at the age of 11. His early life in America was on a farm (again, nature as a thing to be used for the good of mankind). He later went on to live in Yosemite and argue for its preservation from sheep-grazing. He founded the Sierra Club, and has a firm claim as one of the fathers of the modern concept of wilderness.

Be cautioned that the movie was not filmed extempore: it was carefully scripted, and the two characters are not intended to be the actors’ real-life personalities. Wallace Shawn has said that he would like to do a remake and take the opposite role, just to illustrate this.

This also makes me think about the British – and Dutch, of course – who went out from a more-developed, more human-affected landscape to explore and colonize the rest of the world. They carried with them a mental model of what a civilized landscape looked like. Those who were born in New World territories would have had a different mental model. It took some time before the wilderness changed from something to conquer into something to protect.

The liking for human-caused change in the environment is often related to how new it is. The graffiti someone carved into a tree last week is deplorable. The initials dated 50+ years ago are fun. Carvings or paintings that date back centuries are viewed as worthy of their own protection. “You kids get off my ecosystem!”

Huh. This is reminding me of Steven Gould’s Wildside, which I haven’t reread in a long time but probably still have around somewhere. I remember that on the wild side of the door the characters found flocks of passenger pigeons and a large predator of some kind, but I don’t remember any more than that about how he described the environment as different without humans.

That sounds like a very interesting book. But it also sounds very American to me; the British, at least, already have a very different notion of “pristine”.

Some background: My family have long been members of the California Native Plants Society. My uncle runs a native plants nursery, and is the kind of guy that gets called in to restore damaged habitats. I grew up in the mindset of Marris’ starting point.

Then I moved to Scotland. It’s post-glacial land: the ice retreated 10,000 years ago, and the humans came shortly thereafter. Although the media discusses wildlife in terms of “native” and “introduced” species (rhododendron is a particular problem), even the native species are really “introduced-long-enough-ago-to-find-a-niche” species. Ecologists tend to avoid the dichotomy and talk about the dates when things arrived.

When they were planning the Millennium Forest for Scotland, which is actually a network of related replanting projects, forestry officials avoided phrases like “virgin forest”, generally focusing on “restoring the forest as at the time of Robert the Bruce”.

The more I poke at the notions of virgin ecosystems that I grew up with, the more uncomfortable I get. It’s reasonably clear, for instance, that many Native American tribes used to set fires to control plant growth and reset the ecological cycle to a point that was more amenable to their needs. So if they were doing this—and many other things about which we don’t know—for centuries before the Europeans came, then how is it possible to know what a true virgin ecosystem was? It strikes me that pretending that pre-European equals virgin is another way to elide or deny the complex societies that lived in North America for thousands of years.

Besides, you can’t unring the bell. Pampas grass, Eucalyptus and Scotch broom are all established in California, and they’re not going away. Organizations like CNPS are important, for cataloging and preserving long-established plants, but the goal of truly restoring any historic ecosystem is probably unrealistic, and we should balance the resources we put into it with those we put to finding new ecological balances.

</rant> It sounds like an interesting book, and a more realistic approach. I’ll have to take a look.

ACW @7:

I haven’t seen My Dinner with Andre. It occurs to me that I might want to. But I recall a bit from Clutch of Constables, by Ngaio Marsh, where a group of people discuss whether a piece of litter whose color adds just the right visual balance to a natural scene is a good thing or not. There’s some deep similarity there, but I’m not quite sure how to connect it up.

I would love to hear a similar analysis contrasting Dutch literary esthetics (of which I know nothing) with those of the rest of Europe, especially with England (of which I know something).

Unfortunately, my reading rate in Dutch is far too slow to manage this. And I don’t know anything about Dutch literary esthetics at all, in any period.

There’s a resonance here with one part of My Dinner With Andre, when Wallace Shawn argues, to me very convincingly, that there is exactly as much reality to be found inside a tobacconist’s shop as there is on the summit of Everest, and that the apparent sublimity of the latter is illusory.

I would love to hear a similar analysis contrasting Dutch literary esthetics (of which I know nothing) with those of the rest of Europe, especially with England (of which I know something).

Also, this? ” I had to learn to see the transcendent beauty of the ordinary works of man.” This is is a wonderful sentence and concept.