The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: rewilding

  • Foregathered wi’ the beast

    Foregathered wi’ the beast

    I am standing in a lay-by of the A9, 2 miles north of Brora. I am face to face, for the first time, with a stone that I encountered a photograph of a year earlier, in a book about the wondrous wildlife of Scotland. Paving slabs ascend the bank to a hefty lump of granite…

  • Architecture for All

    Architecture for All

    Maria-Chiara Piccinelli is director of PiM.studio Architects in London. She is a strong believer in the importance of public spaces for a city to thrive, and in the crucial role nature plays within architecture. She began her career in Italy, and has since worked in Tokyo, Edinburgh and Paris with Kengo Kuma & Associates, and…

  • Hildaland

    Hildaland

    Hildaland is a hidden island, said to rise in the mist between two tides. When spotted by a sailor, they had to sail towards it without taking their eyes off it, for if they did it would vanish. There have been very few sightings of vanishing islands in recent years, however few have been looking….

  • Rewilding the Exhibition

    Rewilding the Exhibition

    When artist Beatrice Searle approached me about co-curating an exhibition and symposium responding to the rewilding movement, I was struck by the potential richness of the topic. I had only met Beatrice once, to chat about her project For the Journey and Return, which I had written about for a magazine. Since then, we have…

  • Wild City Manifesto

    Wild City Manifesto

      the wild city is only the past repeating * wildness doesn’t begin or end at the edge of the city * the wild doesn’t shut at 10pm * wild things have their own sequence * bring back the seasons! * our material existence cannot be sustained without wildness * the wild city reverses destiny…

  • Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…

  • Plant Migrations

    Plant Migrations

    With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…

  • Parakeets and Purity

    Parakeets and Purity

    Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to simplify, the land becomes the fatherland.   George McKay, Radical Gardening         I live in north-west London. Sitting in the living room…

  • Editorial: Clean Unclean

    Editorial: Clean Unclean

    My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite. The line that separates the two is not as clear as I’d like. From the other side, my wife’s stately, slender Mac spaceship turns its…