Robert Macfarlane on British nature writing | Books | The Guardian guardian.co.uk · Originally posted on Pinboard

What is required, therefore (and what is difficult to effect), is the translation of these impulses of wonder and joy at nature, into ecologically valuable patterns of behaviour. Into changed patterns of purchase, consumption, disposal, and travel. Into a shifted sense of the universal. We need, for instance, to retire our medieval vision of the skies, seas, rivers and soil as sinks of infinite capacity; free in what they give, and limitless in their capacity to absorb what we discard into them.