An unruly spirit, by Dennis Hamley
I read Kathleen Jones’s post earlier this month with mingled envy and anticipation. There she was in New Zealand, where we shall be for two months starting in January, in contemplative solitude, surrounded by beauty of a strangely specific nature in two isolated islands which have a different sense of time from the rest of us. Aotearoa is an ancient land. Its essential wildness is tempered by a slow moving peace where the imperatives of Darwinism never quite seemed to work. After all, there were no predators before the humans came, so creatures could evolve in their own time with little threat to which they need adapt. Sadly, they have still not cottoned on to the fact that they must. As a result, birds which never needed to fly are close to extinction and animals who found slow and stately movement perfectly adequate and stress-free are finding too late that it is often wise to run. A new imported animal kingdom of possums, stoats and weasels is making short work of them all. ...