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The Wild Places

Robert Macfarlane (Goodreads Author)

4.26 · Rating details · 3,401 ratings · 382 reviews

Macfarlane embarks on a series of journeys in search of the wildness that remains in the British Isles. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story and a work of natural history, this text also tells a story of friendship and loss, mixing history, memory and landscape in a strange evocation of wildness and its importance.

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Hardcover, 340 pages

Published September 3rd 2007 by Granta

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Jan 04, 2016 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, 21st-century, british-isles

Well this is one of those travel books with a double journey. On the surface Macfarlane travels across the, well dare I say the British Isles given the long established fact of an Irish independent state, (view spoiler) Well this is one of those travel books with a double journey. On the surface Macfarlane travels across the, well dare I say the British Isles given the long established fact of an Irish independent state, (view spoiler), almost managing to flow sequentially from the hardest to the softest parts of these islands - meaning from granite to mudflats and salt marshes (view spoiler), though at the end he skips back to the moderately hard (view spoiler) Peak District for reasons of his own.

At the same time there is an inner journey as Macfarlane conception of wildness develops. At first he plans to visit the wildest (view spoiler) spots across these islands between Iceland and France, imagining finding some pristine landscapes not impacted upon by human activity at the fringes of these islands. Some of you may already be laughing at the innocence of this notion, and indeed after 126 pages he realises:
"Lying there on the drifted sand, under the white stars, I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys - inhuman, northern, remote - was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself. No such chaste land exists in Britain or Ireland, and no such myth of purity can hold. Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild. Every islet and mountain top, every secret valley or woodland, has been visited, dwelled in, worked, or marked at some point in the past five millennia. The human and the wild cannot be partitioned" (p127).

This notion is challenged by Roger Deakin, who draws Macfarlene's attention to the micro-wild such as the rich environment of a hedgerow. For Deakin the wild, as in something unregulated by human activity, is close at hand, while for Macfarlene it is remoter and reaching it in itself is an adventure, perhaps even a pilgrimage. As the book progressed my feeling was that despite Macfarlene's words above human and wild remained exclusive and opposite terms, that they were separate rather than interwoven in a complete ecosystem. Although he writes critically that "we have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference" (p203) my feeling was reading that the book itself evidenced how hard such a heresy is to abandon. Ultimately for him "wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us" (p307), which for me is to ignore the issue of their intrinsic worth in favour of assessing them on the basis of their value to humanity - which is a hallmark surely of the heresy of aloofness and belief in difference that he earlier pointed out as problematic.

The wild, we might surmise, is as useful to us as the dairy cow, and therefore we ought to cherish it. Supporting this idea much of the book is taken up by testimonial about the restorative power of, to use Macfarlane's term, 'the wild' not just as a place to visit but even as something to hold as precious in the memory. And I am one of those people who does find nourishment from even the memory of certain places, ah there is a good irony in how we can't stand the world that we ourselves construct, Homo Faber can't even serve its own best interest, but the notion is troubling since it is based, I suspect, on an implicit ideology of difference: there is something different I can escape to, or maybe I'm over critical here.

Let me type that I shrug my shoulders and then I can move on to a digression which is that I suspect that my affinity with nature is the result of nurture, early inculcation via my mother's milk of one of the stories about my maternal grandfather's paternal grandfather who would collect firewood from a forest every day and so lived to a lean and sprightly old age. Still daily contact with the revitalising force of the natural world didn't prevent him from being a supporter of various far right political groups, perhaps it even encouraged him to think of the value of getting a place in the sun rather than being stuck in the shade of leafy trees. But enough digression.

In any case the idea of difference persists: "The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us" (p316) he writes. 'We' here are something separate from the 'wild' of which on page 127 we were inseparable, once we take a pair of draper's scissors to the fabric of the ecosystem we make a nonsense of the whole cloth. Leaving this to one side we have an idea here of the strength of this phenomena which is not human only a few pages on to be confronted with "Wildness was here, too, a short mile south of the town in which I lived. It was set about by roads and buildings, much of it was menaced, and some of it was dying" (p321). Macfarlene's beloved phenomena is both incredibly strong, yet incredibly vulnerable, interwoven with us, yet completely distinct from us. This confusion of the inner journey makes a nice contrast with the logic of the surface journey from hard places to soft ones and provides the book with a curious vitality, by which I mean I'd snap awake reading it on my commute thinking - hang on, that's the opposite of what he said a few pages back. It is a picture of the complexity of the human mind - fully capable of holding a mess of contradictory notions within the confines of a single skull.

This is not though the surface reason for reading the book, instead that is provided by the pleasant nature writing, hawks and moors and hares and hares. The book reminded me of The Wild Rover with its enjoyment of the countryside and desire to experience night walking, although Macfarlene is less bothered about sleeping in the open and, like our old dead dog, he will strip off (view spoiler) and swim in any pool of still or sea water that he comes across (at least that's the impression he gives). Certainly a deeply felt book, certainly nicely written and engaging, even if its central premise is an awkward one - really if a wild place is one without humans then we can never know them, and on this planet is there any point at which we are not interacting with everything else? ...more

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Feb 08, 2015 Kelly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, romantical, brit-lit, history-british

This review originally appeared on my blog, Shoulda Coulda Woulda Books.

“When I woke in the corrie above Doo Lough that night, at some point in the small hours, the cloud had passed away, and the moon was pouring its light down on to the valley. I was thirsty, so I took my metal cup and walked to the side of the corrie and held the cup beneath the spill of one of the waterfalls. The water hit the tin and set it ringing like a bell. I drank and looked down over the dark valley. The shadows of th ...more

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Jul 21, 2012 Carol Smith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, travel

Simply lovely. A beautiful, lyrical meditation on wildness and whether or not wild places still exist in the U.K. The themes that flow through MacFarlane’s writing – friendship, life, death, the past, present and future of our species and our relationship with our surroundings – feel like a layered extension of the landscapes he observes so keenly. They ebb and flow through the chapters as much (and in much the same way) as the weather, seasons, water, and migrating birds he describes. He refere ...more

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Jan 05, 2020 Paul Perry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: english, non-fiction, male-author, british-author, read-in-2020, favorites, british, environment, natural-history, england

In The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane sets out to find if there are any such environments left within the British Isles. The book begins contemplatively, with the author journeying to one of his favourite local places, a beech wood outside the city of Cambridge where he lives, climbing a tree as is his wont, so he can sit and observe, and be part of, this sylvan idyll.

This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality o ...more

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Feb 08, 2018 Adrian White rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

My life has been enriched by this book - which sounds fairly pretentious, I know, but I don't care. Sharing the author's journeys to the Wild Places of Britain and Ireland has increased my awareness and appreciation of the world I inhabit. And the untimely death of his friend adds a moving and very human dimension to what is already a remarkable book. ...more

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Sep 21, 2014 Andree Sanborn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, january, goodreads-nature-group, 2015

I read that this is a classic, and I know why now. I was gratified to see it listed as a travel book, also, because it is. I've never wanted to travel to Britain as much as I do now. Macfarlane goes to natural places that are astounding. His writing is beautiful.

It took me longer than expected to read this, because I spent as much time in Google Earth as in the book. And that is my suggestion: a companion volume or new edition with photos and maps, with distances. I was trolling youtube, also, a ...more

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May 19, 2020 Charlene rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I expected to read this in bits and pieces over a period of months but instead, I enjoyed it so much that I read it straight through, with the occasional stop for wikipedia look-ups of places and vocabulary.

This book is classified nature/travel. It is Macfarlane's story of his search through the British Isles for "wild places", where nature is not disturbed or influenced by man. He doubts he will find any so his search starts on the tops of Highland mountains and on the remote islands of the c I expected to read this in bits and pieces over a period of months but instead, I enjoyed it so much that I read it straight through, with the occasional stop for wikipedia look-ups of places and vocabulary.

This book is classified nature/travel. It is Macfarlane's story of his search through the British Isles for "wild places", where nature is not disturbed or influenced by man. He doubts he will find any so his search starts on the tops of Highland mountains and on the remote islands of the coast. But then, he comes to realize (partially from his friendship with nature writer, Roger Deakin) that wildness still exists in micro bits in hedgerows, holloways, forest remnants and salt marshes of the more populated areas, too.

He brings so many stories into the book -- from fellow literary folks, from scientists & naturalists, artists and poets. Book is really more about the landscape than about nature & man's mark on the landscape is everywhere, even in remote places where the Highland clearances and Irish potato famines have left the land almost barren of people in modern times. He calls it "wildness as it is lived with humans".

I envy him the tromping around, the nights spent outside (although I can't imagine sleeping outside, without even a tent, in sub-freezing winds and rains), the views of moon and stars.

The book has a charming, whimsically drawn map but I really needed something more practical, that I could more easily follow his trips. I have spent much of my reading life in the British Isles but still not familiar with its geography and need more practical help with place names. A few months ago I read Paul Theroux's A Kingdom by the Sea with a British atlas in my lap so that had helped get a few places in my head already.

I now want to read more by Macfarlane and something by his good friend, Roger Deakin. And I realize that I've never read John Muir on the American landscape. I can even see re-reading this book again, just to savor his descriptions of the trees, birds, and history of the land. Lovely book. ...more

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Jan 10, 2015 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, reading-from-my-bookshelves

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book - I'm not normally a big fan of nature books or TV programmes - more my husband's area of interest. In fact I had bought this book for him to read, but was intrigued by it and started reading it. Then I was gripped and didn't want to put it down!

It has made me think a lot about how we live our lives - often too busy to notice the world around us - always in the car rushing from place to place with no time just to sit and look, listen and absorb what we ...more

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Jun 27, 2014 ♥ Ibrahim ♥ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: thinkers-i-adore

The words sing and lyrically flow from such an eloquent writer that I am reading based on the recommendation of the Guardian newspaper. You read his prose and you take it all in and you are bound to get a lot from his descriptive, beautifully flowing writing. He has the capacity to capture with the camera of his own pen what no other camera in the world can easily capture or portray. I feel like I have been on a journey to the English wild and savored every minute with him. I plan to read every ...more

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Jul 13, 2008 Lili rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Kick-ass prose. Thoreausian perspective with Brit speak and a fair dose of eccentricity. Fueling my fire for roaming the wild places.

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Jun 17, 2019 Paul Dembina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Fascinating stuff. Not only a paen to nature's wild places in the UK, but also including historical context that shaped the landscape such as the Clearances in Scotland and the Potato Famine in Ireland.

He's a bit bonkers though, deciding not only to scale a peak in northern Scotland in December but also to camp out for the night in just a sleeping bag. ...more

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Jun 05, 2019 Andy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I loved this book. The whole concept is gold and MacFarlane's understanding of the environment, nature, landscape, flora and fauna is entrancing. Whilst there were areas where I was less interested in the topic occasionally, the style, and the balance of description, personal, historical and anecdotal was spot on. ...more

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Jul 28, 2020 Sandra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I don't know of any other author who writes like this. Reading his books is like being outside when you're inside and like meditating while thinking hard about something important. This book is a gift to a reader. ...more

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Jun 29, 2013 Janet rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, natural-history, outdoors

A beautiful book, recounting the author’s journeys through some of Britain’s wild places, sometimes alone, and sometimes accompanied by one or two close friends who share his love of the wild. The language of the book is spell-binding, taking the reader on a parallel journey, weaving science and literature, knowledge and wonder. .

“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I re A beautiful book, recounting the author’s journeys through some of Britain’s wild places, sometimes alone, and sometimes accompanied by one or two close friends who share his love of the wild. The language of the book is spell-binding, taking the reader on a parallel journey, weaving science and literature, knowledge and wonder. .

“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”

“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”

“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”

“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”

Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.
...more

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Apr 06, 2019 Conrad rated it it was amazing

As a boy, I spent many hours in treetops enjoying the lofty view and the change in perspective from the ground. MacFarlane opens his book with a treetop perspective also before heading out on his peregrinations that take him to the edges of Britain in search of wildness (which he certainly finds). His most profound discovery, however, is that wildness exists all around us if we just take the time to really look and see. Humanity's grip of this planet is tenuous at best - nature is always forcing ...more

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Sep 23, 2011 Bettie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: radio-4x, published-2007, autumn-2011, bucolic-or-pastoral, nonfiction

1 - Robert Macfarlane's search for Britain's wilderness starts in Skye's sanctuary valley of Coruisk. Read by Richard Greenwood.

2 - The author's search moves to Strathnaver in Scotland, inhabited by man for over six millennia. Read by Richard Greenwood.

3 - The author takes a winter walk in the snowy Lake District, in his search for Britain's wilderness. Read by Richard Greenwood.

4 - Robert Macfarlane's search for Britain's wilderness moves to a reclaimed abandoned estate in Essex.

The author's se ...more

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Sep 03, 2008 Jan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There is a yearning in Robert Macfarlane, one that we've all experienced to one extent or another: to breathe in the air that's hanging above the most obscure corners of the world; to climb a tree and become part of the scene as it pulses and heaves with life. The wonderful thing about Macfarlane is that he doesn't travel to the farthest corners to do it: he attempts to discover the rich and wild life beating under his nose, and this book is an account of his travels around the British Isles, th ...more

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Jan 25, 2009 Ruth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

his person has the urge to go and experience wild in person, and goes around the wild places in the UK his friends suggest and tells us things about them and himself. Interesting that he could do all this without disappearing into the jungle or something that a lot of other writers have to do.

Just a note here too - there seems to be a nature writing triangle I am reading, Robert McFarlane is a pal of the late Roger Deakin who both know Richard Mabey. They all seem to live in the same area too

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Feb 02, 2017 Josephine rated it it was amazing

This book is sublime. I read it slowly and carefully, not missing a single word. I've yet to find a nature writer that has the same delicious turn of phrase, or makes you feel as comfortable and uplifted about the natural world as Macfarlane does. Liberally sprinkled with detail about friendships, habits, history, geology, collecting, memory, sleeping under the stars, swimming in the wild, walking, weather and exploration. It's a feast - definitely not romanticised - just a great book about our ...more

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Jul 06, 2020 Laura Hoffman Brauman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I was introduced to Marcfarlane's writing in Underworld and fell in love. In The Wild Places, he sets out to look at the wild places still left in the UK. Through the course of a year, he gets out into the wild (he is much more tolerant of cold than I am) and breathes in some of the most remote parts of the country. Day and night, summer and winter - he finds the beauty and the wildness that we often have lost. In the course of the year, though, he also recognizes the wildness that can be found ...more

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Aug 12, 2020 Adrian Fingleton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. The author sets out to discover a set of 'wild' places in Britain and Ireland and his musings on ecology, nature, why we exist and so on are very interesting. His evident love of nature shines through, and its interesting that along the way he realises that 'wild places' do not necessarily have to be remote, but can be just around the corner. And no less intriguing for that. I very much enjoyed reading the book and finding out more about some selected wild places in t ...more

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Dec 11, 2019 Sophy H rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: rambling lovers, nature lovers, camping enthusiasts, wild swimming fans, nature fans,

Shelves: outdoor-nature

Beautifully written book detailing trips to wild spaces in Scotland, Wales and England, to search for that "something" we as humans in the rat race have lost.

Macfarlane strikes the right tone between travelogue, prose and factual information with an easy style of writing.

The enthusiasm shown by the author seeps through in each page, and his excitement about walking, camping, wild swimming (often naked!!) and climbing is infectious.

Especially poignant is when he talks about his friend who died ...more

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Jul 29, 2018 Janneke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

'We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.'

What a moving and beautiful book about 'the relief of relief'. I finished it on a cold, stormy and rainy day on the west coast of Lewis. So appropriate. ...more

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Dec 23, 2019 Therese rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, wilderness-and-solitude, memoirs, travel

A beautifully-written, meditative account of searching for wild places in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Perfect for armchair adventuring and vicarious wandering. The meticulous moment-by-moment details make the scenes vivid and immersive, and you really feeling like you're there with him, nightwalking in the woods, swimming in the cold seas, freezing on forbidding mountain peaks, shivering before peat fires in remote cottages on the moors ... ...more

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Jun 17, 2010 Graham rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, natural-world

Essentially this book is a travelogue in which the author explores various parts of the UK that he considers to be "wild". The book is split into chapters, each one depicting a different type of locale - beach, mountain summit, forest, etc.

I'm not really au fait with the travelogue genre so I didn't know what to expect with this one, but I found it to be a charming read. MacFarlane has a genuine warmth and enthusiasm for his subject matter that readily transfers to the reader so that they're cau ...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: uk-travel, british-non-fiction, favorites

This book has been a journey. I've been reading it for years. Snatches, short chapters at a time. Looking up most of the places he explored, which took a good deal of time but added tremendously to the experience of the book. His writing is pure description written in as beatiful prose as you will find anywhere. I half regretted not using those little passage markers for my favorite descriptive spots, but realized the book would have been so full of them that it would have been fairly useless. M ...more

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Aug 25, 2018 Kate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: big-heart, best-of-england-road-scholar, non-fiction, deserves-a-better-edition

I enjoyed The Wild Places. It occasionally dragged and at other times I thought he was daft for sleeping out in the cold at places like Ben Hope in Scotland. However, on balance, The Wild Places is a deep and moving account of the UK's and Ireland's wilderness. Macfarlane's prose is often lovely. It is a shame there were so few photographs in the book and I hope at future edition will include more photographs.

I read this as prep for a trip to England and Wales because it was on Road Scholar's r ...more

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Jun 22, 2014 Hugh rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, modern-classics, favourites, read-2006-09

Robert Macfarlane is a uniquely perceptive and eloquent writer on nature and landscape. In this book he travels to various British places in search of different types and degrees of wildness.

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Dec 02, 2018 Sadie Slater rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I bought a copy of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places in the Highland Bookshop in Fort William, mostly on the strength of there being a chapter about Rannoch Moor which I'd crossed on foot three days earlier, and I picked it up to read last week out of a longing for hills and open spaces instead of streets and houses and the flatness of the Thames Valley.

The Wild Places is MacFarlane's quest for what remains of the wild in built-up 21st century Britain and Ireland. From a beechwood near his Cam I bought a copy of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places in the Highland Bookshop in Fort William, mostly on the strength of there being a chapter about Rannoch Moor which I'd crossed on foot three days earlier, and I picked it up to read last week out of a longing for hills and open spaces instead of streets and houses and the flatness of the Thames Valley.

The Wild Places is MacFarlane's quest for what remains of the wild in built-up 21st century Britain and Ireland. From a beechwood near his Cambridge home, too close to civilisation to fulfil the desire for wildness, he sets off on a series of journeys: to Ynys Enlli, off the coast of North Wales; to Coruisk on Skye; to Rannoch Moor, Cape Wrath, and the Burren in the west of Ireland, seeking wildness beyond the reach of human influence. What he finds, instead, is wild lands with a long and complicated relationship with their human inhabitants, both influenced by and influencing them, and as he moves closer to home, visiting a Dorset holloway, the lonely shingle spits and saltmarshes of East Anglia, he finds a new definition of wildness; not something grand and lonely, but a smaller, more quotidian quality found in the range of places where the natural world has touched people's lives, and an underlying force that will reclaim the land after humans have disappeared. In a journey which is ultimately circular, or maybe a spiral, he returns to the Cambridge beechwood where his outward travels have enabled him, in the words of the passage from Four Quartets which open the final chapter, "to know the place for the first time".

The book is a wonderful mix of fabulously lyrical descriptions of the beauty that can still be found across the British Isles, scientific explanations of natural phenomena, a philosophical meditation on the nature of wildness and the relationship of humans with the world around us and a tribute to Macfarlane's friend and mentor Roger Deakin, who accompanied him on several of the journeys and whose sudden and untimely death is one of the book's pivots. I loved reading this, and will probably re-read it sooner rather than later. ...more

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Feb 27, 2019 Don rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, 2019, travelling, 2016, nature-scape, 2018

For me, this is the best of Macfarlane's books. It is an evocative, inspirational, thoughtful, informative exploration of some wonderful places all around the British Isles - and of the concept of 'wildness'.

He starts, as most people would, with a view that 'wildness' is to be found in remote places, austere and elemental. He learns to see other kinds of wildness, that 'of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity but ...more

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About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane

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Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.

Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountain ...more

Books by Robert Macfarlane

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

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Quotes from The Wild Places

“There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.” — 32 likes

“Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it.” — 15 likes

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The Wild Places

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Trivia About The Wild Places

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