McFarlane's Walking Books
I’ve now read three of Robert McFarlane’s books, all concerned with walking, crawling, swimming and climbing through the natural world and its interface with humanity. I’d rank the second (The Old Ways) as best, the third (Underland) as my least favorite.
While his writing can still be captivating and quirky, and while it is still heavily influenced by an understanding of the geological substrate of the landscape (which I love), he’s become an increasingly strident apostle of the apocalyptic school of environmentalism in his progression of books to the point where it’s a systemic disease that nearly kills Underland for me.
He call’s it a “deep time” view of nature, but his perspective is surprisingly shallow: basically the Pleistocene through the Holocene (or the “Anthropocene” as it is now fashionably called). He focuses on negative human impacts on the earth, while ignoring improvements of the last century that came from pollution control efforts, better preservation and husbandry of natural resources. And, as is common with this millenarian genre, he ignores the massive swings in climate, extinction, habitability of the earth that have characterized truly deep geological time. We’ve all heard of the Chixulub meteorite impact that (may have) finished off the dinosaurs, but how about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the Permo-Triassic extinction and a dozen others, of mostly unknown cause, scattered through the fossil record?
