Focusing on human biogeography as a research
endeavour may make sense to biogeographers, but in the academic
world generally, this particular scholarly niche has long been
filled by other rival disciplines such as sociology, human ecology,
geography, anthropology and archaeology. It may be true that having
so many ways of looking at ourselves as a species is a good thing,
but it can also be argued that this academic fragmentation of
effort has often nurtured the commonplace view that we as a species
are `above' or `not part of' the `natural world'.
Henry
David Thoreau is perhaps the most thorough of writers about 'humans
in nature'. In his descriptions of his home in Walden, his
journals, and his essays, Thoreau provides rationale and examples
for getting to know one place well. He criss- crossed his long-
settled community on foot throughout his life, becoming, as he
said, “well traveled in Concord.” In his great essay
“Walking,” he presents his methods of learning a
landscape, beginning with a tongue-in- cheek explanation of the
word “sauntering.” Thoreau’s walking is an art,
involving an absolute concentration on the present and freedom from
cares of everyday life. “What business have I in the woods,
if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” he asks.
Though he has walked almost every day for years in the same
vicinity, he continues to discover new views, and “two or
three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as
I expect ever to see.” He asserts that the landscape within a
circle of ten miles’ radius, “or the limits of an
afternoon walk,” provides enough material for new discoveries
for a lifetime of walks. It is the walks which provide material and
method for poetry: “He would be a poet who could impress the
winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed
words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in
the spring . . .; who derived his words as often as he used them,
—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their
roots.”
Windfall
The few miles of footpaths criss-crossing Skomer
contain all of Thoreau's requirements 'to impress the winds and
streams' into a personal relationship between 'real place' and
'aesthetic place'. Walking Skomer provides opportunities to
learn more productive ways of seeing, making it possible to convey
space as a temporal process. For example, the surprising cry of the
Skomer pheasant reflects the aspirations of the 19th century
tenants, Messrs Robinson and Davies, to be yeoman farmers, although
whether the birds have continuity with these agrarian sportsmen
remains a mystery.
