âItâs the wonder of the natural world that makes it worth fighting for. And if we solve the problems of the natural world out of wonder â rather than out of fear and panic, it will have a deeper and more lasting impact,â said Dara McAnulty, the 16-year-old environmental activist and author of the award-winning book, Diary of a Young Naturalist.
McAnulty was in conversation with Irish Times journalist, Freya McClements on Friday evening in one of the closing sessions of Winter Nights, the Irish Times online festival.
McAnulty said that he hoped people would retain the greater appreciation of the natural world that they discovered during the Covid-19 pandemic. âI hope people will take it into the future and see how it helps us with our mental health,â he said.
A WILDLIFE filmmaker and author has said he is ‘indebted’ to his old teachers at the Castle School in Thornbury. Ben Macdonald, has travelled all over the world making documentaries, and says the school played a big role in fostering his ambitions. The 32-year-old has worked on the likes of Springwatch, and the Sir David Attenborough-narrated shows The Hunt and Our Planet. His interest in nature began when collecting butterflies as a pupil at St Michael’s Primary School in Winterbourne, and regular trips to Slimbridge Wetland Centre soon followed. “My parents were always very encouraging,” said Ben. “Anything that can fly has always been fascinating to me.
World literature In 2021, we will hopefully see theatres back open again. One of last year’s anticipated happenings that didn’t happen was the premiere of Zadie Smith’s first play, The Wife of Willesden, an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath. If it doesn’t get to the stage anytime soon, never fear, Hamish Hamilton are publishing the manuscript in June. It will be interesting to see what Smith does with the bawdy poetry of Chaucer. Jonathan Franzen isn’t known for breaking the fourth wall, but his new novel sounds faintly metafictional. Crossroads (4th Estate, October) is the first in a trilogy called The Key to All Mythologies. That name, of course, is taken from a book the insufferable Casaubon never finishes in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Crossroads spans three generations of the Hildebrandt family during the second half of the 20th century. Franzen is often called America’s greatest living novelist, which he’s not, because there isn’t one,
In August, there was cause for celebration following the miraculous rescue of two cousins who spent 15 hours stranded at sea. Ellen Glynn and Sara Feeney got into difficulty after going paddleboarding at Furbo Beach in Co Galway. A major search and rescue operation was launched after the young women failed to return to shore and many feared the worst.
1. Galway ‘miracle’ rescue
The next morning, however, the pair were discovered by local fisherman Patrick Oliver and his son Morgan. Oliver used his fishing experience to predict where the young women might have drifted and located them some 17 miles from where they had last been seen.
, by Melissa Harrison
If you haven’t heard Harrison’s soul-soothing podcast then this eponymous nature diary, following her move from south London to the Suffolk countryside, should be a joyful reason to do so. It’s the perfect companion piece to this chronicle of her journey to uncover the nature on our doorsteps wherever we live and celebrate its way of signalling the seasons.
Faber & Faber, £14.99. Wanderland, by Jini Reddy
Follow the author on a journey to connect with the magic in the British landscape in this shortlisted entry for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. Her travels which range from a coast-to-coast pilgrimage to a trip encountering a goddess worshipping group of women seek to develop a more spiritual, intimate relationship with nature. Born to Indian parents in the UK and raised in Canada, Jini offers a wry, unique perspective on the beauty of our landscape.