In this guest blog post, Nick Thorpe, the author of our Book of the Month, Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness, reflects on his journey through the Carpathian Mountains and how it reshaped his understanding of wilderness and rewilding.
-by Nick Thorpe
‘You can drive out nature with a pitchfork…’ sang Tom Waits, ‘but it always comes roaring back…’ I thought of that line as I discussed the title for my new book with my editors at Yale University Press. Walking the Carpathians for my book changed my understanding of both wilderness and ‘re-wilding’. My book is a meditation on both, and on our relationship as locals and visitors to what is still wild in the landscape, and inside ourselves. I realised that what is ‘wild’ is contracting and expanding all the time, even in a world overwhelmed by spurts of news about machine-learning posing as intelligence. While we in the mountains are sometimes tempted to anthropomorphise animals and plants, we in the cities have already fallen into the trap of anthropomorphising machines. Bear intelligence dwarfs artificial intelligence. Whatever our differences or divisions, we’re all in this together.
Continue reading Journey to the Carpathian Mountains with Nick Thorpe