Tag Archive for: travel

The Treeline | Ben Rawlence

The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years. These vast swathes of forests, which encircle the north of the globe in an almost unbroken green ring, comprise the world’s second largest biome.

Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. Six tree species – Scots pine, birch, larch, spruce, poplar and rowan – form the central protagonists of Ben Rawlence’s story. In Scotland, northern Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, he discovers what these trees and the people who live and work alongside them have to tell us about the past, present and future of our planet.

At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees. The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Treeline is a blend of nature, travel and science writing, underpinned by an urgent environmental message.

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After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time | Charlotte Du Cann

What happens when the heroes disappear, when the battle for the city is over, when you return to the island and find a box in your hands? There was an instruction once that told us why the box should never be opened. But you don’t believe those stories anymore. You always open the box.

After Ithaca is a non-fiction work – part memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis. It is set in the Peruvian rainforest, in the backrooms of Suffolk towns, in Japan, in France, Australia, in the desert borderlands, in borrowed houses and Occupy tents, in kitchens and burial chambers, underneath a lemon tree on an abandoned terrace…

The book revolves around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, set by Venus, the goddess of love and justice: four territories that map this search for meaning and coherence in a time of fall. Each chapter starts with a memory of place as a clue to the investigation: the recovery of a relationship with wild nature, with being human, a kind of archaeology for the pieces of self that lie missing beneath a broken storyline, like the shards of a pot.

It is a personal story and also a social story, about the relinquishment of a certain world, that looks at writing as an existential practice: showing how myth can be a technique for finding our lost voice, our medicine of how to put a crooked thing straight.

How to pull ourselves out of the wreckage, and start again.

 

Purchase After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time at Dark Mountain Books

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The Rings of Saturn | W.G. Sebald

What begins as the record of W.G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present.

From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

‘The narrator walks a metaphysical path along coastal edge of Suffolk, past its abandoned great houses and fishing fleets, placing his melancholic gaze on the underbelly of Empire. A journey that weaves in the lives of poets and philosophers, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, the Empress Tzu, the silkworm industry of Norwich, the bombing of German cities in WWII, the invisible cruelty of hierarchies that keeps us caught in the repeating wheel of History.’ – Charlotte Du Cann, guest contributor to May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends

 

Purchase The Rings of Saturn from Hive online bookshop