Regen/ Notes

“The most impressive solar eclipse visible from the UK in almost 30 years” and the last until 2090” Thoughts ahead of the much anticipated partial solar eclipse in the UK on the evening of the 12 August, with also the opportunity to witness an alignment of 6 planets predawn on the 12th, and then a real bonus star-show on the same night as we experience the peak of the Perseids meteor storm.

A few weeks ago I wrote No Mean Preacher, on how a song thrush, a throstle, singing in the pre dawn brought lines from Wordsworth’s The Tabled Turned alive for me. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! // He, too, is no mean preacher. Step into the light // let nature be your teacher Alcock Tarn, above Grasmere, frequently visited by Wordsworth whilst walking and composing verse aloud.

At the recent July Zoom Regenerative, reflecting on regenerative themes covered and topics that are calling to be hears, we arrived at a theme of The Right Relationship with Place and Craft The Arts and Crafts House. Baille-Scott’s Blackwell House, Cumbria. Biophilic Design in an earlier, Regenerative Renaissance.

It is good to read the news and reports of the new building in North Dakota Badlands that has decided the building isn’t in itself the star. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, opened on July 4th, situated on the edge of Roosevelt’s own national park, buried into landscape, with a two acre living roof of 140,000 hand-planted native plugs. It asks visitors to arrive by foot, bike or horse. For over a century, presidential libraries have been about the building as the monument.

Browsing for a book (Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold1) on my bookshelf, I came across an old paperback, that seemed to be beckoning, taunting “Remember me”? And oh, what a time capsule trigger that was, flicking through the pages, with pencil under-linings and a few note-scraps tucked in. Taking me back close on 30 years. It sits on the table now, the aging cover cracked from use, page edges faded, The Machine That Changed the World. In the nineties for a good while this was it.

Published this week, UK government’s England’s 30by30 Delivery Plan, is the latest attempt to reverse nature decline as “one of the defining challenges of our time, and one we must now meet with urgency” with the UK government committed to effectively conserve and manage 30% of our land and seas for nature by 2030.

When a song thrush greets the day with joy in the ash tree outside the window an hour or more before dawn, waking you and you know that your attention, and thoughts have been set for the day ... And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! ‘I am here, this is me, this is my song, today’ sang this mornings throstle This is not fell-song, that belongs to curlew and merlin higher up on Fairsnape and the Bowland Fells. This is lowland hedge-song. Thrush country.

Fractal sand patterns, Silver Sands, Moidart.©MnB 2025 Substack may have mushroomed over the last year or so - and shifted from a writing platform with a difference, and through the addition os Notes a social media platform with a difference.

Just dived into The Book of Birds - a seven-year work of love from Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane. A bird guide book to be read as story with stunning watercolour artwork. Text from the introduction leapt out at me Ours is a field guide with a difference, though. It asks not “What is that bird?”, but ‘Who is that bird?’ It wishes to help its readers to identify birds, of course, but also to identify with them. As well as classification - something like love.

London Climate Action Week takes place this year within a red alert heatwave, the very consequence the week (and all climate action) exists to address, arriving as a felt, ambient fact rather than slide or forecast from any stage presentation. There’s a temptation to call this poetic irony, yet it’s something more diagnostic.