WANDERLAND
By Jini Reddy
being traced out by a constellation of kebab shops and eponymously named pubs. It’s not until she reaches David Nash’s Ash Grove art work – 21 ash trees meticulously trained over 40 years to look as though they’re engaged in a fluid circular dance – that she finally feels the presence of a genius loci and is momentarily left in a state of awe.
It’s a reminder that travel is often travail, and that moments of sought ecstasy can be brief, fleeting. Reddy is candid about her own experiences; how she can feel anxious and selfconscious walking solo in the landscape, particularly because of her Indian heritage. She’s wary of entering pubs for fear of white tribalism and she notices rural folk stare at her just a moment longer than they need to – not unwholesomely she notes, it leaves years, he undertakes a globe-trotting exercise to imagine what information we will leave for our descendants, hundreds or even thousands of generations forward in time. Predictably, the results are not great. The fossil record from the early 21st century is likely to be one compacted with everything from ash released by the burning of fossil fuels, to millions of pieces of colourful plastic, to the dark sediment that clogs up the remains of dead coral reefs.
Megacities home to tens of millions will be crushed into an ‘urban stratum’ of broken concrete and glass, stained red by leaching iron from ageing steel. ‘After one hundred million years, what remains of New York or Mumbai may be a deposit no thicker than the shallow end of a swimming pool,’ he muses. her feeling like a painting, but do you always want to feel like a painting? Her self-claimed outlier status brings benefits to the reader, calling into question the cultural hegemony that hands down the St George and the Dragon myth and other Christian stories as if they are items of great value, not potentially unsettling tales of patriarchy and cultural repression. ‘What happened to the indigenous people in far off lands happened here too,’ she writes after a visit to Lindisfarne. You share her relief when she finds reprieve lying on a windswept Northumberland beach, finally enjoying her own Smultronstället or ‘secret place of the wild strawberries’, a Swedish word denoting a place of comfort and healing that you can call home.
What is certainly remarkable is how significantly we have already made our mark on the planet. From the massive release of prehistoric carbon into the atmosphere, to the dumping of radioactive material in the South Pacific and elsewhere, to the hundreds of thousands of pieces of microscopic space junk orbiting around the Earth, humanity has baked in changes that will take many millennia at least to return to a pre-Anthropocentric state.
‘Our future fossils are our legacy and therefore our opportunity to choose how we will be remembered,’ writes Farrier. ‘They will record whether we carried on heedlessly despite the dangers we knew to lie ahead, or whether we cared enough to change our course.’
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