Four Fields

In the grand nature-writing tradition of examining the ways humanity and the land change one another—how we are both intimately part of our environment and profoundly separate—bird-watching explorer Dee (A Year on the Wing: Journeys with Birds in Flight) focuses on open fields around the world. Dee describes fields as “the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live both within the grain of the world and against it”: spaces as ephemeral and hardy as grass. His explorations alternate among Kenya’s hoof-trampled Masai Mara; the prairie battlefield of Little Bighorn, Mont.; an Exclusion Zone full of mutated animals at Chernobyl, Ukraine; and the seasonal changes of the fens near his home in England. Dee interlaces careful descriptions of his experience of being in these spaces with the human history that turned these lands to agricultural use and then permitted nature to reclaim them, winding lyrical stories of the interaction between person and place, history and physicality. Equally at ease with people, birds, and old guidebooks, Dee tells the story of the world’s survival, with us and despite us, urging us to see our deep influence on the world we have created, and to credit it for much of what we are. [em](Jan.) [/em]