Feral

This book, an extended study on rewilding by veteran environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot, was, even moreso than are most of his books, eye-opening and incredible. I was lucky enough to pick up a pre-release signed copy at a SPERI lecture he gave at my uni last year, browsed through a couple of chapters over summer, and have finished it in a spurt of ecological interest over the last few days.

   It's about our misjudged place in nature: how this has been lost over the past few millennia of human civilisation gradually conquering and flattening the ecosystems it moves into; how this has been forgotten over the enforced retention* of systems that prevent those ecosystems from properly recovering; how this has been distorted by vast industrial processes reaping finite natural stocks and processes as though they were limitless income. Running common to these scenes of destruction and degradation are veins of hope and potential - rewilding, the main topic of the book. Rewilding is basically handing over control of ecosystems to nature; reintroducing missing species that play key ecological roles of predation, habitat manipulation, resource creation and such, helps revitalise the balanced diversity of flora and fauna in those systems.**

   The text resembles a sort of ecosystem of prose in itself: a jumbledly overlapping yet coherent and cogent mix of writing. There are impeccably-researched-and-referenced scrutinies of ecosystem development policy successes and failures, insightful discourses on biological and philosophical perspectives of man's place and part in nature, and enthralling anecdotes of George's personal experiences with people, plants, animals, landscapes that have helped inform and shape his perspectives. You will be bowled over by gorgeous descriptions of sublime natural explorations and encounters, wholeheartedly inspired by introductions to selfless hippy-type individuals involved in rewilding projects, shunted into enlightenment by a chunk of analysis and into astonished outrage or delight by a series of statistics or facts, often all within a page or two of each other. It really is a bizarrely multitudinous reading experience, and make so much the better for it. It strikes the head, the heart and the gut with equal measure, never supplanting reason for emotion but finding the root human passions that lie at the base of all his arguments and laying them together perfectly.

   It's a book that makes one want to re-engage with nature, to do all within one's power to remove human corruption from the ecosystems it has enslaved and despoilt, to hand control back to Mother Gaia. Anyone interested in ecology should read it for enjoyment, anyone interested in social and natural justice should read it to inform their opinions, most people should probably read it to broaden their anthropocentric worldviews and bring about pressure for change. Quality, timely, and deeply important.

* This book might make you rightly despise grouse hunters, fishing trawlers, and especially sheep.

** This book might make you rightly adore beavers, oysters, wolves and dead trees.

Is God anti-gay?

This book, a concise 80-page response to the controversial topics of homosexuality and Christianity by Sam Allberry, was roughly what I expected it would be. It was on a discount bookstall on a christian weekend away (I never can resist those discount bookstalls, but fortunately this time I only bought one book - this - so my wallet remained unbattered), and given its shortness I ran away from one of the ludicrously christian-weekend-away-esque sessions of organised "fun" and read it in a prolonged tea-fuelled sitting.

   Sam's book claims to answer its provocative titular question,* among other questions about homosexuality, the Bible and same-sex attraction. It does so quite well; the author identifies himself as experiencing SSA so clearly he is able to approach the issue in a thoughtful and sensitive way, avoiding the patronising, homophobic assumptiveness which often characterises christian viewpoints on issues of sexuality and gender. His points are strongly-reasoned, biblically grounded and gospel-centred, and though I half-wanted to I couldn't find anything that I disagreed with on theological grounds. His conclusions are positive (the chapter on how we construct our identities is particularly liberating), but one would have to subscribe to christianity to think so - which is where I think the book falls short. It is mainly aimed at christians: both those "struggling" with their sexuality to reaffirm the gospel to their context, and those who need their views on how to deal with the topic more sensitively while retaining a biblical grounding for it. Given these aims I think it's an excellent little resource. Obviously no 80-page book is going to revolutionise christian views on homosexuality, but if accessible enough one may ease the psychological and emotional distress of gay christians, and push other christians into dealing with them in a more reasoned, human, loving way - and I think this book may well do that.

   Returning to its shortfalls, I would've liked more discussion of mission to non-christians and homosexuality. There are many deep issues in how non-christians are to percieve God's commands in relation to the gospel and their [un]acceptance of it, and therefore how christians are to talk to them or relate to their lifestyles. Westborough Baptist-style public condemning of homosexuals who don't know Jesus is utterly useless, unfounded, even evil; it excludes them hatefully and prevents them from ever wanting to know more of the "gospel" that such "christian" groups proclaim. I also would've liked a more critical assessment of some of the biblical passages: fair enough they were already exposited very tactfully and with substantial contextual explanation, but surely a more in-depth analysis or consideration of normative aspects of language, culture, sexual psychology and such and how they might change the way we approach such passages could have shed light on the possibility of some different conclusions. It's only a short book though, so avoiding these deep bogs of meta-ethical and postmodernist-historical argument was probably wise.

   Overall, it's a decent book. If you're a christian who thinks they might not be entirely hetero, this book will assuage some doubts you might be having. If you're a christian whose views on issues of sexuality are lacking, this book will help bring you into a more thoughtful and tactful way to talk about them. If you're a non-christian, this book will probably offend you because its fundamental premise is Gospel-as-core-identity rather than sexuality-as-core-identity: so in the interests of me, a liberal freethinking christian, not wanting you to be put off the gospel by a book you approached with the wrong mindset, I only recommend reading it if you do so understanding that it is aimed at christian readers and certain aspects may grate.

* SPOILER ALERT: no.

The Humans

This book, a contemporary novel by Matt Haig, was entirely different to and better than what I expected. I received it as a 21st birthday present roughly a week ago and have devoured it already (it elbowed aside the other nine books I'm partway through by dint of being more engrossing), finally finishing it on the train to and from Manchester last night. I was expecting it to be a fairly standard funny-sharp-interesting read, but it had a completely unforeseen depth and strength which made it an enormously resonant experience. I guess one has to admit certain aspects of it make it indisputably a sci-fi but its core is a thoroughly feels-heavy drama.

   What's it about? Yikes. So, without giving too much of the plot away... There's a race of hyperintelligent aliens, who have achieved immortality and live in a perfectly logical utilitarian civilisation across the galaxy. They have reduced universal functions of all fields of knowledge - psychology, history, physics, whatever - into mathematics, which forms the basis of their mindset, and the means by which they assess goings-on around the universe, intervening whenever inefficiencies arise. An inefficiency arises: human mathematician Professor Andrew Martin proving the Riemann hypothesis, which has the potential to thrust humanity into a new epoch of technological capability, and humans are not psychologically well-equipped enough to deal with their explosively broadened potential, so the aliens intervene. Martin is killed, his physical form copied exactly and adopted by an alien agent (our compelling nameless narrator), whose purpose is then to remove all trace of the hypothesis's proof from Earth. This mission will entail deleting a few emails and killing a few people, including Martin's wife and son. However, the agent encounters steep learning curves: learning his way around human language and culture, learning his way around Andrew Martin's life, and learning his way around the emotional illogical aspects of humanity that are utterly alien to him. The first of these learning curves he overcomes quickly, albeit with some amusingly painful scenes toward the beginning. The second he blags largely, realising several aspects of the life of the man he's living in were not quite satisfactory (a depressed son, a neglected wife, an ill dog, a lack of appreciation for anything beautiful outside his work, an affair, no real friends, etc) and so in his stranger's assessment of them he makes fundamental character changes to "Andrew Martin" which throws up a variety of personal dramas. The third forms the central thread of the novel, heavily intertwined with the alien's learning to relate to Martin's wife and son, as he begins to experience feeling and see significance separate from blunt logic, even starting to question himself and his mission. All three pull together well, and the weirdness of the events befalling the human characters isn't clouded over by sentiment but are dealt with in ways that feel believable, driving up to a very hard-earned reward at the end.

   To pull off such a deep-relationship-feeling theme with such a weird-science-fiction premise is an undertaking of immense skill and sapience, and Matt Haig has done it pretty much bang on. The narration is as confusedly translucent as one would expect from a hyperintelligent being stuck learning his way about a human life; the dialogue feels natural and the characters are well-drawn; there is a rawness to the emotional aspects that is geniunely heart-tugging at points; and there is wisdom in spades. Not the motivational-poster contemporary-novel apothegms of it that we're so often hit with nowadays, but fully poignant nuggets of reasoned insightful wisdom that sound like exactly the kinds of things a hyperintelligent alien being would come out with once it had started reading Emily Dickinson and grown the ability to love.

   I'd like to go into detail with things it made me think about, but there were far too many, so expansive is the book's coverage of topics and yet contained its themes. Science and space and aliens, dogs' relationship to humans, technology's relationship to biology, peanut butter sandwiches, why poetry and music and wine are worth it, why clothes might not be and suicide certainly not so, fatherhood and matrimony and fidelity and the indefinable strings of semi-rationality that bind them in what we call "love", the links between logic and duty and emotion and how we define rightness based on them, how all subjects are effectively mathematics except the most important one which is living happily. There is much to provoke thought in this novel. 

   It's a very memorable book, written with equally warm intensity of head and heart and soul, very alien aspects melded into very human parts in an impressive and engaging character development. Even if sci-fi or drama isn't your thing, I recommend checking it out.