‘Almost’ religious joy

Simon Barnes is chief sportswriter for the Times; wearing his other boots he is a fervent eco-warrior, a spell-binding preacher, a missionary. His book is broken into small descriptive sections and each contains a moment, an exaltation at a contact with ‘the wild’. These are perhaps best read in snatches, rather than as a continuum, because their fervour is so intense.

By ‘wild’ he means anything that is not ourselves, not human, from gossamer to elephants, and he believes we need this contact precisely in order to be fully human. ‘I divide the whole world into lovers: you are either (a) a lover of nature or (b) a lover of nature who doesn’t know it yet. To say you are green, or not, doesn’t work; being green has come to mean that you take your bottles to the bottle-bank, and drive a car of non-megalomaniac dimensions. So let’s go for “wild”.’

In my case he is preaching to the converted, but he feels a need to resort to statistics, so desperate is he to get his point across. A survey of 1,200 office workers showed that they worked better if they had sight of a tree or a bush. ‘The point of all this is that wildness is not a wacky idea I have just come up with, not a precious little conceit of a bad birdwatcher … it is statistically verifiable.’

He wants too much not to frighten us, or allow us to think that we have to ‘know’ stuff before we can respond to it (although knowing makes noticing easier, we can train ourselves to look — which is true). He throws in slang, and the occasional matey expletive, to make us feel at home.