The Manifold Letters

87. On Rewilding Dearly Beloved, Rewilding is now fashionable. It is attempt to recreate the natural condition of nature before man intervened. It is mostly associated with just letting go and allowing plants and animals to repopulate as far as they are able. That sounds all very simple but the reality is often more complex and requires a lot of work. The first problem is that the climax biotope in much of Europe is woodland or forest. England and Scotland could clearly do with more woodland and much of the moorland was indeed once woodland. So woodland is straight forward although you may have to cut out unwanted tree species.  If however you want to produce a riverside meadow things are much more complicated, if only because the price of success is continual vigilance and a lot of cutting of self- planted would-be trees so that the climax woodland does not re-establish itself. A herd of deer is needed to do that naturally but may not arrive when needed. Furthermore you may de...

86. On The Importance of Doing the Washing Up. Dearly Beloved, I was reminded by the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the world of my miss-spent youth. At the age of 20 I undertook to protect a University camera crew on one of the Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in 1968. Fortunately, despite the violence, my defensive skills were not tested, but at one point we entered a building where the organising committee was sitting. At the time there was talk of revolution. The demonstrations were supported by Trotskyists, Marxist Leninists, Maoists, Anarchists and numerous other groups and doubtless a few individuals who disliked the war for its own sake. The arrival of my camera crew was, understandably, not welcomed. During our brief visit I noticed an enormous pile of washing up, cups and plates, in a sink. Immediately I was reassured for it was clear these people were incapable of doing the washing up so it was unlikely they would be able to manage a revolution. The...

85 Seven Revelations  -- October 2020. Dearly Beloved, One It is now Autumn and with each new day the wind blows colder and harder, but through the grass by the River Cam cyclamens have emerged overnight. Two Dante describes his escape through a tunnel from the Stygian gloom, “the dead air” and ice cold of the bottom most circle of hell back into the light to describe the sky,“ Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro ” the colour of Oriental sapphire. He has escaped back to “the beautiful planet that induces us to love” Lo bel pianeto che d’amar conforta. He will walk onwards and upward to meet once again the soul of the love of his youth – Beatrice -- to travel with her in a chariot pulled by griffins. --see image attached below. Purgatorio 1 . The Divine Comedy Three In his Dearly Beloved Letter of 9 September Mark Thomas wrote about his tough and exhausting pilgrimage on foot to Walsingham, despised and rejected, but he tells us that on the return journey he received a ...

84. On Humility. Dearly Beloved,  When I worked in Switzerland for World Wildlife Fund International I became involved in a difficult argument with an American donor who was upset by my modest presentation of myself. She was positively offended by the fact that I was disinclined to boast about my history in wildlife conservation and my feats of daring do in desert mountains pursuing elusive and rare wild animals. As we were in Switzerland, and there is no greater neutral ground, I stuck to my guns, or rather my modesty, and both of us ended upset. When I mentioned this incident to an American colleague he said, “ Oh yes! American's don't do modesty!” Perhaps the extraordinary competitive nature of US society makes it unsafe not to blow one's own trumpet lest one be overlooked; perhaps being modest in the UK is part of our class system – indolent and poorly informed aristocrats perhaps did not want to be reminded that other people, their notional inferiors, did things whi...

83. On Providence and Wildlife.  Dearly Beloved My first intimations of the wonder of creation were evoked as I leaned upon a farm gate with my mother whilst she extolled the beauty of the English countryside. Then there was the Benedicite , omnia opera during Lenten matins, in which, (based on Psalm 148) all of creation joins in celebration and praise of God's providence. In this letter I wanted to celebrate God's providence and write " Consider the lilies of the field... even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matthew 6; 28/29) but working with wildlife it became apparent things were not quite so simple; indeed a part of creation is brutal. Once whilst standing in a river up my thighs in its water, there alighted on my arm the most glorious, large, green, dragonfly whose body sparkled in the sunlight. After I had admired it for some seconds the creature took wing and flew in a circle around me and then alighted back on my arm clutching a h...

82. On Social Class. Dearly Beloved, We English have a notable saying that “no sooner does one Englishman open his mouth than another Englishman despises him”. Surely our class divisions are firmer than the division between Montagu and Capulet and are as difficult to bridge. We do not even like to discuss them for fear of being lined up on one side or the other of the divide. To some extent the Church of England has merely reflected that division, especially in earlier times, where the family of the local Lord of the manor would have had a prominent pew with a door to themselves and a notable monument in the church, sometimes picturing a family of sons and daughters kneeling in grateful tribute to God, or perhaps, their father. Here in France there is social division too, it identifies itself not through regional accent but on the quality of spoken French and an evaluation of “ Le Standing ” of an individual. Here the the mass of French people follow the revolutionary tradition o...

81. On Compassion. Dearly Beloved, All my married life, my wife has had beside her bed a photograph of a statue of the Virgin Mary. It is an extraordinary statue which defies its stolid identity by portraying a playful love between a young mother and her child. This photograph was inherited from my spouse's grandmother. We had for sometime been attempting to identify it and had searched diligently through photographs of mediaeval European statuary but although we had found items of a similar disposition we had never managed to identify the original. Finally my wife took a photograph of the photograph on her mobile phone and asked Google to identify it using the Google Lens app which we have frequently used for identifying wild flowers. Having eliminated the frame, Google came up with the original which turns out to be The White Virgin of Toledo to be found in the cathedral there. Some restoration seems to have taken place since the original photograph was taken. We have no idea...

80. On the Tribulations of Tribalism. Dearest Beloved In a recent D.B. letter,  Reverend Robert set out, how, through marriage laws, the Church had effectively abolished tribalism in Great Britain and Europe, by encouraging people to marry a partner from a different area and social background. Tribal societies suffer, amongst other things, from the tribes becoming jealous of one another and it can be a problem which even affects wildlife conservation. In Oman there was a wonderful project to re-introduce the Arabian Oryx ( Oryx leucoryx ) to the Jiddat al Harasis, a region of central Oman, a flat plain on which grass and ephemeral plants grew following the pattern of rain from thunder showers. The Oryx, an elegant, pale antelope with long straight horns, had been extinct in the wild for a number of years as a result of hunting from vehicles. The project started well, a dozen Oryx were flown in from Santiago Zoo and they bred easily and the group was soon liberated to find food a...

79. On Honouring Contracts. Dearly Beloved, One day there was a scandal at the Ministry where I worked in Oman. Someone in the wages office had embezzled the wages of the Pakistani labourers who had not been paid. All the Omanis felt responsibility for the wrong that had been done because the sense of belonging is so strong in this Muslim community. There was much discussion about the rights and wrongs of the situation. Eventually the consensus seemed to be that a hadith had been contravened, that is a saying of the Prophet Mohammed. That saying was “a labourer should be paid before the sweat on his forehead is dry”. I was reminded of this incident when I read about the scandal surrounding the company called Greensill Capital. The scandal is immensely complex and there are to date 116 articles in the Financial Times on its various aspects. It seemed to me that there was a greater scandal in the background. In recent years many large companies have got into the habit of paying the...

78. The Compassionate Mercenary. Dearly Beloved, "A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, ... He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght." (Chaucer; The Canterbury Tales, The Prologue . c. 1387) I first met David when I arrived in Oman to carry out a conservation project on the rare goat antelope the Arabian tahr, in Oman. He met me at the airport smartly dressed as a Wing Commander in the Omani air force. He was accompanied by a young wolf on a lead. He had been asked by the Diwan – the Sultan's personal ministry -- to assess if I was up to the task of working in the mountains and to teach me the ways of the local people and what constituted good manners and respect for Islamic 'Ibadi life and practice. The first days turned out to be a combination of a Swiss finishing school applied to a Muslim society and a commando assault course as we cavorted unroped on the near vertical, 1600 meter cliffs, of the Jabal Aswad (Black Mountain). There David had effectively s...

77. On: The Battle against Malaria and The Great Vaccination Response against   Covid-19 Dearly Beloved, In late 1976 I was in Oman with a group of local wildlife wardens searching for populations of a rare goat antelope known as the Arabian Tahr. We had to first visit the local Walie , the Sultan's representative in the area, for permission to go into the local mountains. We arrived at one village to find it totally deserted, not a soul could be found. At last, after half an hour , a man emerged clutching his head. There was, he said no-one who was not suffering from malaria, the Walie's office was closed, every one was sick. So it was with other villages we visited that week. This was not so much an epidemic as seasonal endemic illness; every winter people were re-infected through mosquito bites or suffered spontaneous eruption of the plasmodium parasite into the blood stream from the liver in which it had lain dormant since the last infection. It has proved very diff...

76. On The Anti-Christian Nature of the Small State Ideology. Nearly Beloved*, The first time I heard the cry for a “Small State” in the political context, it was uttered by those involved in a dispute over US grazing lands. The “s cofflaw” , Cliven Bundy, refused to pay the Federal Grazing Fees or recognise his obligations to the US government's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on whose lands his cattle grazed. In 2014 and 2016, the Bureau's response was to round up his cattle and remove them. That led to the congregation of armed anti-government activists, including the Proud Boys. These armed groups forced the BLM to back down because the Bureau was worried about the safety of its staff and of the public and felt unable to protect them. The US Government failed to support its own laws and regulation in the face of armed threat. This, and similar range land incidents, occurred prior to the assault on the US Capital by armed activists in an attempt to reverse the result of t...

75. On Science, Heresy and Political Stability. Dearly Beloved, One of those questions which follow me around like a faithful dog is “Why did the industrial revolution happen in the UK rather than in Italy?” After all, up to 1600 Italy was a collection of rich, highly cultured city states and the seat of the Renaissance.  The answer may have been that apart from in the medical field, the religious persecution of scientists such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno effectively shut down science in Italy and so the technology dependent on basic science was slow to developed there. Both these scientists conceived of cosmologies unacceptable to the Church. Subsequently, both were found guilty of heresy. Galileo died under house arrest but the unfortunate Bruno was burnt at the stake in Florence in 1600. In the UK on the other hand, the tradition of tolerance initiated by Richard Hooker the theologian and ecclesiologist of the Church of England and promoted by Queen Elizabeth 1 st, may have ...