Again, considering our relationship to the land, I have been reading Monbiot's Feral. Some of it is irrelevant to me (and some quite, self-indulgent perhaps...) but a few themes stuck out. I hadn't written about them before, but reflecting on it, it feels more obvious now.
Mostly the idea of rewilding: not preserving nature but letting it take its own course. This would be aided by humans, giving it the best conditions it would need to do this. This relationship with the environment would be to mostly absent. Maybe we are too keen to interfere, or in feeling that we own it, take too much of a hold. For want of a better analogy, like a pushy parent.
There was also a concept that I had forgotten the name of, but was about how our baseline understanding of the environment keeps changing. We believe that the landscape of our childhoods (or even prior) must be the natural untouched one, but its history goes much further than this. For example, I had no idea that moorland is completely unnatural. So this relationship is nostalgia, but also confusion.
Finally, a quote from J.G. Ballard mentioned in the book. "The suburbs dream of violence". Again, an idea I'd had a while back, thinking about engaging with the country as pure ideology, or ambition with no *real* intention. Planned adventure, organised discovery. I'm not sure how to express this in a way that doesn't sound snobbier than I'm thinking it, or proposing that I am any different.
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