In the newspapers recently, I read about the successful breeding year experienced by a curlew colony in Antrim. Seventy chicks fledged, compared with fewer than thirty in the previous year, these healthy numbers attributable to investment made in protecting the nesting birds. Crucially, local landowners were integral to this effort, at a time when this loved species is close to extinction across Ireland.
The report demonstrated how blending emotional investment in nature with practical measures can bring about transformative change. After all, our collective consciousness is charged with awareness of our relationship to the natural world; and our ancient knowledge of the flora and fauna that surrounds us — their innate value, and their value to us — has not been swept away. It is only in abeyance.
Anja Murray’s new book captures this latent energy and catalyses it to absorbing effect. Both a spiritual rallying call and supremely useful handbook, Wild Embrace is gratifyingly full of practical tips on connecting with the natural world. For example: garden nettles not only provide a safe home for butterfly larvae, but can also, when lightly steamed, fortify our health after a long cold winter. But, she cautions, pick the leaves only in the spring; from June onward, they have a powerfully laxative effect.
The key, as the reports into the curlews of Antrim demonstrate, is to move from such personal epiphanies into practical, systemic actions
The book is most powerfully effective in its appeal to our deeper feelings, especially to the sensations of isolation, loneliness, and grief we increasingly feel as our rapacious economic systems drive species after species into extinction. Instead of wasting these sensations, they can be channelled to alter our own patterns of behaviour and of consumption. What Murray calls “little awakenings” — mindful ways of seeing, hearing, and smelling, approaching the world in a state of curiosity, pausing to admire the iridescence in a butterfly’s wing — are freely available to each of us in our daily lives: “in a state of receptiveness”, she writes, “otherwise mundane moments can transform into mesmeric experiences”. The key, as the reports into the curlews of Antrim demonstrate, is to move from such personal epiphanies into practical, systemic actions.
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Although Wild Embrace only glances at the logical next step, it is incontrovertible: to exert public pressure for the transformative changes to economic policy that will save not only the curlew but ultimately us all.
