FOUR FIELDS

A BBC radio producer and nature writer visits four fields in England, Zambia, the Ukraine and the United States to reflect on humanity’s uneasy relationship with both nature and itself.

For Dee (The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, 2009), “[f]ields offer the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live within the grain of the world and against it.” He begins this collection of nine essays with the description of one field he knows best, Burwell Fen in England. An ancient seabed once covered by saltwater, humans learned to drain it and use the land for farming and herding. Ironically, the modern drive to repair damaged ecosystems and return them to their original states has subjected these “natural” spaces to still more human manipulation. Fields in less-developed parts of the world like Zambia have also not been spared from the interfering ways of mankind. All over the African continent, “[h]abitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities.” Like the Montana prairie where the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn took place, fields can also mark historical events, just as they can serve as symbols for the at-times tragic fates of the humans—in this case, the Plains Indians—who inhabit them. They can also suggest the way that nature can mirror mankind’s destructiveness. As the author shows in his essay on the meadows near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the land has become “a sink…[that] takes life in but gives next to no life out.” Sprawling in its descriptions of nature and of the histories that inform each of the places he visits, Dee’s work defies linearity. It is best read as one man’s idiosyncratic prose-poem meditation on the way human activities affect, for better and for worse, the eternal “transubstantiation of the earth.”

Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.