Spring is finally there, in the northern hemisphere at least, and with it came an explosion of books on the joys of exploring, restoring and understanding the natural world. Everyone reveals how satisfactory these efforts can be, but efforts.
The former soldier, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, traces an accidental ground in his memories, Our oak bones: relaunch a family, a farm and the old tropical forests of Great Britain (Books of witnesses £ 22). Russell Crowe is one of the blurbers of this tribute to the repairing powers of Wilderness and Hanbury-Tenison himself once tried to play: he played Crowe's son in the 2000 film, Proof of life.
But he ended up in the army and, at the age of 21, made his first tour in Afghanistan, where his tank crossed a mine. He was physically unscathed but years later in 2017, after leaving the army for management council in London, he had a break.
Diagnosed with a complex SSPT, he fled to Cobilla, the Cornish Hill farm, his father, the explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison, had bought in 1960. His old tropical forest plot turned out to be an unexpected Savior for Hanbury-Tenison and his wife, Lizzie, who had suffered false checked.
They have set up a well-being retreat and a charitable organization to preserve their rare old woods, as well as a lifestyle that few Urbanites know. The description of Hanbury-Tenison of the way he tracks, shoots and Gut de Roe Deer is memorable. “The guts, the stomach, the liver and the kidneys come out first,” he wrote, then the lungs, the heart and the esophagus.
The idea that such exploits are the reserve of men, not women, is brilliantly sent by the British journalism professor, Sarah Lonsdale, in Faudly different: how five women have recovered nature in the world of a man (Manchester University Press £ 20).
Explorers, scientists and environmentalists, reveal Lonsdale, challenge the expectations of their sex for much longer than most imagine. Her story is told through the lives of five remarkable women, including Mina Hubbard, a young Canadian widow who braved bears, famine and icy rivers to map the wild nature of Labrador in the early 1900s.
There is also Ethel Hayythornthwaite, who devoted his life to saving the savage from the cutting-edge district of the United Kingdom; Mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and entomologist Evelyn Cheesman. His fifth subject is Wangari Maathai from Kenya, founder of the green belt movement to slow down desertification and plant millions of trees. All have faced enormous obstacles, including the attitudes of male opponents such as the British explorer George Curzon. He rejected the idea that women be accepted in the Royal Geographical Society of Britain, because they were unable to contribute to scientific knowledge and “their sex and their training also make them inappropriate for exploration”.
Things have evolved in the 21st century, as revealed by the conservationist Hannah Bourne-Taylor, alias the Naked Bird Girl, Nature needs you: the fight to save our samples (Elliott & Thompson 16.99 £). In November 2022, she went to the corner of Hyde Park's speakers, painted her head with feathered foot and carrying only boots and a thong, to emphasize the declining number of samples. The populations of migratory birds had stabilized in places that had encouraged the use of fast bricks, hollow bricks which they can use to nest in buildings.
Bourne-Taylor wanted to highlight the 100,000 signatures necessary on a parliamentary petition to make the bricks compulsory in new houses and create a generalized nesting habitat. The BBC has covered its efforts, just like Piers Morgan and, despite the trolls who told her that she deserved to be raped gangs, the 100,000 signatures were finally obtained.
Alas, it turned out to be the beginning of an exasperating cycle of exaltation and despair as Bourne-Taylor and his allies, including the former curator environment The Minister, Zac Goldsmith, fought with the thickets of Westminster and Whitehall. Despite repeated official insurance and the broad support of deputies, a mandate for fast bricks in new homes remains elusive.
Fortunately, things end in the charming illustrated of Hannah Dale A wild year: bring life back to earth (Batsford £ 14.99). Dale is an illustrator of fauna and in 2015, her husband Jack inherited Low Farm, a small property in Lincolnshire. The couple spent a few years trying to coax the stubborn field to produce profitable harvests before Jack reads Isabellaprice book Savage. Inspired by its story of a faulty Sussex farm transformed into a rich habitat, the couple took their last harvest in 2019 and, in Dale's words, “withdrew to see what would happen”.
The effort was not always smooth. Neighbors were offended to discover that the couple planned to plant 27,000 trees around the perimeter of the farm, in part to keep the concerns that the hectares rewilded spread the “weeds” seeds.
They fought and created a paradise that Dale describes as filled with an explosion of birds singing, where the hedges are bundle of flowers while “the soils are crawling and the herbs sparkled with insects”. It is an inspiring story about the speed with which the wild world can recover once it is left alone.
Join our online books online on Facebook in Ft Books Coffee And follow the FT weekend on Instagram And X
