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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Boyle
Read between
January 8 - March 26, 2025
Laughter changes little but the quality of our days. That sounds all right to me.
After four years of studying business, one thing stuck with me: in all of that time, not once did the word ‘ecology’ get mentioned. Even back then I found that odd. How could I claim to understand economics when I knew nothing of the natural world on which all economies ultimately depend?
Other vegetables were not a major part of their diet, probably because the weather there wouldn’t have been conducive to good growth. Instead they would eat seaweed – sea-belt, murlins, dillisk and sea-lettuce.
His father was also a rudimentary sort of dentist, using pliers and pieces of string tied to the door as his methods of extraction.
The philosopher Alain de Botton has said that ‘True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.’
I awake, not knowing what time it is. This has become normal.
find myself not caring what time it is, either. A privileged position to be in, it could be said,
Whatever time it is, it must be early. As I slowly come around I feel refreshed, and it feels good, natural, life-affirming to wake up with the light.
Soapwort contains saponins, and works just as well on your body and hair as it does on your clothes. Historically its use was conventional, and you can still find it growing wild around the sites of old Roman baths.
Being a frosty late autumn morning, my first concern was that my feet would get so cold I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the course. At first they did, but as soon as we got moving I was surprised to find them warming up. I could feel the blood flowing, and the nerves in my feet tingled, as if they were keen to explore. It felt like a foot massage and reflexology session rolled into one and, for the first time in my memory, they felt alive and connected to the great living, breathing, wild beast below them.
I found myself paying careful attention to every footstep, stepping over jagged stones and thorny plants, and noticing things I suspect I would otherwise have missed. I walked more sensitively, more consciously, not just trampling over things with the disregard that a common technology such as boots allows.
‘Habit is a great deadener.’
It is not so much survival of the fittest as survival of those that fit in.
For as Sydney J. Harris once said, ‘the real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.’
Knockmoyle
day I walked out of the office, down one of the aisles, and suddenly found myself frozen still. All I could see was wall-to-wall plastic. Cacao nibs in plastic packets, vitamin pills in plastic tubs, water in plastic bottles. Bananas from the Dominican Republic, sweet potatoes from Israel, mangoes from somewhere else not very near. For three years I had been ranting and raving about sustainability, but it only hit me there and then that even this organic industry was five thousand miles from being sustainable.
This particular advert is for a range of flatulence filtering underwear. I double-check it to make sure it’s not a satirical piece of art or subvertisement.
I wonder what stories the rings of trees that I have planted, and watched grow, will one day tell someone else long after I am gone.
walk to Kylebrack to fish for trout. Kylebrack, a neighbour told me, is an anglicisation of its original Irish name, Choill Bhreac, which means ‘the trout forest’. There’s no longer any real forest left in Kylebrack, and from what I can tell there are no longer any trout in this river either. I try to imagine what this place looked and felt like when it was first named by its earliest inhabitants, as I put away my rod and walk home.
When a man pulls on his brakes in Ireland, whole tracts of ocean and soil are laid to waste in places Western consumers have never even heard of. I tell myself that the bike is a very different proposition to our old Transit van, but only as a matter of degrees, and while it doesn’t pump pollutants and emissions into the collective lung, it’s still dependent on the same flawed ideology.
I don’t live in pre-industrial society, the local rivers are dead and my friends are scattered. Yet something inside me still feels that the future – or my future at least – is on foot.
Once, as I cycled through a wooded area of south-east England called Forest Row, I recall meeting a pure white albino deer – a significant creature in mythology and the only time I’ve ever encountered one – by the side of the road. I was spellbound, captivated, in awe. Energised by its sight, I was speeding along the road shortly afterwards when a new thought ran through my mind: what would I do if a deer ran out in front of me while I was cycling this fast? I’d seen it happen a couple of times in cars. Moments later a great beast of a stag comes out of the woods and parks himself in exactly
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found myself at the back of a large crowd of people who had gathered at the foot of an escalator that stretched from the bowels of the London tube system to the expansive universe beyond. I remember thinking someone must have collapsed and that everyone was waiting vigilantly for the paramedics to come. But it soon became clear that the emergency was nothing more serious than a broken-down escalator which had transformed the moving metal steps before the swelling crowd into what was once widely understood to be a set of stairs. If it hadn’t been for someone in the middle of the crowd shouting,
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The truth is that it takes a lot of effort. Take this evening’s dinner. The plain roasted potatoes (with rosemary) needed weeding, watering and mounding for months, as did the bowls of vegetables and mixed salad. I cycled 40 kilometres and spent three hours trying to catch the pike. Instead, it looks like I knocked it up in ten minutes.
Money, I felt, was hindering me. It enabled me to buy tomatoes from an unknown producer in Italy, soya growth in ex-rainforest in South America, oil from the Middle East and fake leather boots from a factory in China, stuff I didn’t need from everywhere, all the while sheltering my senses from the sights, sounds and smells of everything necessary to bring them into existence: oil rigs, quarries, strip mines, the factory system, armies and everything else which I, thinking myself an environmentalist, had been campaigning against.
And so now the only people keeping the Great Blasket’s paths alive are tourists, like me, who gawk at the ruined remnants of a people made extinct by the homogenising, all-consuming factories of industrial civilisation. And to think that we call the people who drive such extinctions ‘innovators’.
During my time managing the organic food company in Bristol, I would regularly notice our customers, throughout August and September, walking past brambles heavy with fruit on their way to buy blackberries – £2.50 for a little plastic punnet – from our shop. Even at the time I found that strange.
between 1811 and 1814, the actual Luddites rebelled against the wealthy industrialists and their powerful political friends who, at the time of the land enclosures, were obliterating the cottage economies which afforded the common people a familial, purposeful and pleasant life. By then the steam engine – what Carlyle called ‘Stygian forges with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers’ – was enabling one man to do the work it would have taken two or three hundred men to do only a decade earlier. This effectively reduced a once proud and independent class of skilled craftspeople who
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A Social History of Ancient Ireland,
their legal system, Brehon Law.
The problem in the modern world is that it’s hard to know who our real predators are anymore.
Burren National Park, a 1,030 square kilometre World Heritage Site and national park in County Clare,
Rumour has it that J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent plenty of time here, based his map of Middle-earth on the Burren
too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
As the sun descends behind the ash and horse chestnut trees to the west and people begin to arrive, I reflect on the fact that I’ve spent much of my life producing little more than bullshit anyway.
There’s an interview with one woman who has fallen in love with her sex robot, and says they plan to marry. She’s not alone.
They say that if you can play music by ear it is very difficult to learn how to play by reading it, and vice versa.
a man renowned in these parts – asks me to play any song I know. Before I know it, each one of them – with their fiddles, squeezeboxes, bodhráns, flutes, tin whistles, mandolins and banjos – is playing along with me. I’m entirely out of my depth, but I’m not made to feel it. As each woman and man’s genius weaves itself together, I feel part of something bigger and more important than myself. Which is all I ever really want to feel.
Yet I have to remind myself that it wasn’t me who killed this deer. A car did. Cars aren’t vegan. Phones aren’t vegan. Plastic tubs of vitamins aren’t vegan. Chickpeas, soya and hemp seeds – none of it is vegan, not really. It’s all the harvest of a political ideology which is causing the sixth mass extinction of species, one which is wiping out one habitat after the next, polluting rivers, soil, oceans and every breath of atmosphere as it spreads.
acquaintances and random strangers who, at one point or another, must have got in touch about something neither of us can probably remember.
It strikes me now that while machines may be unparalleled at reducing forests to numbers, it is still the intimate human hand which excels at planting trees.
I asked them if they had ever experienced the same emotional response towards the corporations that make their own laptops and smartphones, considering they devastate entire habitats on their customers’ behalf without any permission from the life that dwells there.
resident scientist and author Stephan Harding on what he calls a ‘Deep Time Walk’. This is a 4.6-kilometre walk around the surrounding woods and coastline, with each step of the journey representing one million years of the earth’s history.
The final millimetre of the 4.6-kilometre walk, Stephan tells us, contains industrial civilisation, and in that one millimetre we are in danger of wiping out much of what came before it.
Once you slow down, good hand-writing becomes easier. Once you slow down, good anything becomes easier.
Paul Kingsnorth’s first novel, The Wake,
Why have I not used those manual clippers? I’m not sure. I’ve thought about it a few times. Maybe a part of me is wanting to let go of an old sense of self – that sharp, neat, efficient guy who was more at home in the city. Or maybe I’ve stopped shaving for the same reason I no longer want to scythe every square inch of the land. Or, maybe, I’m finally learning that none of this stuff is important, anyway.
At a time when the UN is declaring that the internet is a basic human right, the most basic right of all – to build a simple shelter where you can feed yourself and your family – seems to be drifting further out of reach than ever there. And pretty much everywhere.
A cover version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ is, rather absurdly, being piped through the airwaves as my piss disappears downwards out of a spotlessly clean urinal. It isn’t paradise, but it does have a parking lot. I had thought about going under the mature, lonely-looking oak tree next to the car park, but there were people everywhere, people who may not have appreciated me pissing there.
I’m reminded of Aldo Leopold’s words: ‘In the long-run too much comfort only seems to spell danger.’
