Primrose Hill, London

Nature Writing
Blame for the tradition's decline might be laid at the door of the kind of selfhood that has come to predominate in Britain: an acrid mixture of the acquisitive-materialist and the secular-humanist, which regards "nature" as a commodity, in no way connected with human enterprise. It might also be linked with changing employment patterns, which mean that more people work further away from where they live, and move more frequently. Fewer people thus experience what Lopez calls "the complex feelings of affinity and self-assurance one feels with one's native place", and there is a diminished sense of interest in any place in particular, outside one's immediate, and often temporary, domestic sphere.
Robert Macfarlane

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