The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

The research that I have been doing for the book I am currently writing led me to an interesting study. Academics have found that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and awareness of nature. This trend appears to be true in places as different as Indonesia and the UK.

The number of local plant species that people can identify tends to be inversely proportional to their income. The study did not reveal whether this was a cultural phenomenon or purely economic one, ie. do people know solely because they need to or also because they want to?

I was reminded of this study yesterday evening as I re-read an old favourite of mine, George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London‘. One of my favourite passages about the stars can be found in this book. Orwell is spending time with a ‘screever’, a pavement artist, and finds this…

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“This in-depth book gives us the tools to re-engage with our natural world in a clear and understandable way. I love it!”

Bear Grylls

Massive thanks Bear!

Regular blog readers will know that I am a bit of a fan of Robert Pirsig’s book, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance‘. I’m just about to finish the sequel, ‘Lila‘, which is also a bit of a positive mind-bender (that is if you have some alternative views, and possibly a negative one if you consider yourself a conformist. Come to think of it, a conformist wouldn’t buy the book, and if they stumbled across it would be unlikely to start it and if they did start it, would be extremely unlikely to finish it.)

Pirsig takes on some massive philosophical beasts in both books, but the freshness of his approach can sometimes be seen best in the way he deals with more simple and natural phenomena. This is his take on the fabled ‘green flash’ of the setting sun,

‘When Phaedrus started to read yachting literature…

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While sorting my photos from our summer holiday I came across this one on the way to Les Ecrehous islands. It shows a critical moment in the use of a transit line to navigate the potentially hazardous approach. Transit navigation works by the very simple (and totally natural) principle that if you can see any two objects lined up then you must be somewhere on an extension of that line. The approach to Les Ecrehous, northeast of Jersey in the Channel Islands is so strewn with rocks that even GPS is of limited use, since by the time it tells you you’re off course you could well be breathing brine.

Instead of one pair of markers, this part of the approach requires the navigator to line up the Bigorne rock inbetween two other rocks. Bigorne can be seen jutting up in the middle of the picture. In this part of…

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A walk in the woods yesterday revealed some natural and unnatural clues.

This primrose, the only one in the area, was unsurprisingly in a south-facing spot. The thick bed of south-facing moss that surrounds it on the beech roots should not surprise us. Moss grows in abundance close to the ground where moisture levels remain generally high, even in south-facing places.

The technique of trail blazing, marking trees to show others the way is ancient, but the chalk markings on this beech tree were a little disconcerting. Apologies, the picture is out of focus as I was hurrying to catch up with others, but hopefully you can make out the following: arrows showing the way, the words, ‘Tom’ and ‘This Way’ and a picture of a sad, perhaps perplexed or even angry face. Hopefully Tom is less sad now, having…

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Last night I spent a few minutes re-reading a couple of passages from Barry Cunliffe’s book about Pytheas the Greek. About 2300 years ago Pytheas went seriously far north for a Mediterranean, but the debate still rages about how far he went. Some of it seems to revolve around an expression about there being enough light to ‘pick the lice from your shirt’ at midnight. Now that’s what I call natural.