This blog
The impact of human life upon the natural world is as great today as it has ever been. In London, the city where I live, great woodlands and meadows have been grubbed out and developed for human habitation in the past 150 years, most tellingly in the postwar expansion of the 1950s and onwards. I am amazed by the ability of wild creatures to adapt and survive, to create niches and coexist in one of the most densely populated places in Europe. And I feel that we are missing a trick by ignoring nature’s influence over our own cultural heritage, language and design, and by failing to accommodate wildlife into our plans for the future – farming and development, for example – we fail to understand who we really are, and that we depend on wild creatures to maintain the ecosystems upon which we ourselves maintain our socities and, indeed, cities. But I’m not going to pretend I think wildlife should exist only to serve us. It’s time to accept that a community is not merely made up of people but also of the wild animals we have spent millenia sharing our hamlets, waterways and farmsteads with, the wild birds marking out their territories with song, the butterflies ferrying between weedy foodplants, the bees dying as they endeavour to pollinate our crops and gardens, and the fox skulking through the street. Wildlife deserves our respect, study and compassion.
On this blog I will share photographs, prose pieces and the odd poem highlighting nature, its proximity and great meaning to me in my life and, hopefully, to you and yours.
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Elsewhere:
Purple Hairstreak butterfly article, Lost in London magazine, Summer 2012
“Lewisham Borough is a stag beetle hotspot”, Newsshopper, July 2012
Regular contributions:
Video:
From Thorn to Orchid chalk grassland restoration film
A Springtime Walk in the Woods – BBC Nature
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All content published on this website, unless under the name of another (e.g. Guest Photographer) is © Daniel James Greenwood 2012, 2013.
You can contact me via email:
d.j.greenwood@live.com
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