Evolution does not happen by the gradual accretion of advantage,  it is jerked forwards by a change in environment.  That is what is thought to happen with our ancient ancestors.  A change in climate in eastern Africa constricted the forest, concentrating the apes that lived there and creating a niche on the edge, where the tall grassland encroaches, a space where only those apes with upright postures and opposable thumbs could hunt in.  Within the space of few generations,  certain humanoids have developed a specialised way of life; they became upright savannah apes that hunted in packs with spears and missiles.    

One advance creates the space of opportunity for other adaptations to occur. Using tools and  throwing missiles required a big, strategic brain to imagine, plan, predict and create.   Up to a point these abilities could be learnt by the small chimpanzee-like brain of our early ancestors, but those who had bigger and more clever brains were quicker and better at it, would survive at the expense of the others.   No longer did the strongest and fiercest inherit the earth by fear, the ability to create the future at a distance allowed the development of a meritocracy based on intelligence.  All that was required was the ability to project, not just physically, but literally throw one’s mind forward,  to imagine the way things might be, how others might think, to create a world out of our own mind.  Discovery always favours a mind, prepared by imagination and necessity.    And with imagination comes  strategy, planning, forecast, insight, hope, anticipation, and meaning; all the tools needed  to build a civilisation.

Survival on the savannah needed teamwork, the ability to work together as a group.  The maverick and loner would just starve.   Teamwork requires empathy and identification, the ability to project our wishes and desires onto others, to inspire them and create a group identity, based on meaning.  If people share the same meaning, then they will stay together and help each other.  So tribes stayed together and developed into larger communities not just because of a practical need, but because the tribe could preserve  the word, the identity that held them together.  Having an imaginative brain allowed human beings to derive meaning from things to make sense of their environment, to interpret, tell stories, invent Gods.

We begin to see the enormous advance the upright posture and opposable thumb, how these features allowed humans to project their minds into an infinity of intellectual space, rich in possibility.   

Godlike, we have produced a world in our own image and become adapted to that world.  We have determined our own evolution;  narcissism on an universal  scale.   No longer the tough stone age survivors, fighting to stay alive, dependant on the exigencies of the external environment, constantly on the move to where it is warmer and there is food,  we have tamed the wilderness and created a society, in which we can produce all we need, shelter, energy, food, water, entertainment. 

But in order to do this, we have had to forge ever more complex collaborations.  We have outgrown the narrow self centred confines of the tribe to develop much larger societies with different values, different priorities.   The ever increasing size of our communities from tribes to villages, to towns, cities, countries and finally a global community linked electronically, not only required a major logistic exercise in providing basic human utilities to everybody, but also created the need for civilisation, laws, morals and manners to keep such large in control.  Only those whose behaviour is compatible with the customs of society, will be allowed the freedom to live and breed in that society. Those who are more assertive and aggressive have been weeded out, killed, locked up, exiled. 

So we have we inbred domestication and passivity by our civilisation and laws.  We have selected out dangerous characteristics such as aggression,  ruthlessness,  physical strength and activity, and bred in other characteristics like laziness, passivity, dependency and overeating.  We have tamed ourselves.  And since aggression and physical strength are male prerogatives,  the new man has become more feminine. Civilisation means that men no longer seize their women by force, the power of selection is in the arms of the women, who arguably have a greater grasp of human nature.  And women are more likely to seek out sensitive, caring men to breed with.  They in turn will rear more sensitive children.     

All of this has created a different strain of human being, passive, a civilised, comfort seeking, intelligent and inventive creature.  Experiments conducted in Novobirsk, Eastern Siberia has shown that selective breeding over 50 generations has succeeded in domesticating Silver Foxes.  They become tame like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails.  In fact, they become like puppies.  Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

Has the same thing happened in human societies?  Has sexual selection succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics?   Are we all just big babies?   Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and in doing so become passive, lazy, needy and child-like?   And like the domesticated foxes,  have these social characteristics of being tamed, altered our appearance and the diseases we are predisposed to?    Has it, for example, caused us to become fatty and less hairy.  Has the combination of neediness and passivity predisposed to a plethora of diseases of civilisation; obesity, diabetes, heart attacks as well illnesses related to depression, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?

Obesity and depression are the two most common illnesses of western society, affecting more than half the population.  Obesity is a disease of passive overconsumption and insufficient exercise.   We are consuming more than we need and we no longer need to work to get it.  There is an abundance of high energy food in infinite variety in our supermarkets.  Most of it is ready prepared and cooked and just requires reheating.  And without the basic requirements to hunt and fight, there is little need to exercise.  We travel to work in our cars and trains, we get our entertainment from the television, we do not even need to go out to work; we can work from our homes.  We don’t even need to get out of bed. 

In fact, we can exist without ever having to meet other people.  With personal computers, many people have their office at home.  No wonder we become quite isolated and depressed.    

If we remove the need to hunt, to build our own houses, to fight and compete, then we remove personal initiative.   And without human contact and something to strive for, life has little meaning.   We just exist, eating, drinking and sitting in front of the television,  rendered inert by the trappings of our own civilisation. Chronically bored, eating becomes less a necessity, more a displacement activity.  Many obese people are depressed.          

A few years ago,  I walked out from Malleleuca along Tasmania’s South Coast Track, carrying all the food I needed for 9 days on my back.  Meals were rationed; just enough for sustenance and no extra. I walked continuously from dawn to dusk across traversing precipitous mountain ridges interrupted by boggy valleys.  I felt more alive than I had for years and lost over nearly a stone in weight.

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I listened but couldn’t identify with Ron’s experience. It felt disloyal to do so. Hadn’t Dad been sent up to Orkney to risk his life protecting the Arctic convoys?  Hadn’t he crashed and nearly died up there?  Did he deserve to have his wife stolen, his family disrupted by one of the sailors he protected?   So I suppressed my curiosity. 

Many years later, I grew to love Northern Finland.   So when I spotted  ‘Running with Reindeer’, that described an exploration of the Kola Peninsula,  the destinations of the Russian convoys, over 10 years in the nineteen nineties, I had to find out more.  

But it was the author, Roger Took, who intrigued me.  Why on earth would a sensitive, rich middle -aged man, an art historian and museum curator, an establishment figure, want to spend so long in  what he described as one of the most unfriendly and inhospitable places on earth? 

But Took was a man obsessed.  In just one month, he learnt to speak Russian well enough to get by and arrived alone in the derelict port and abandoned goods yards of Murmansk with its grim government buildings and decrepit five story apartment blocks.   His stated purpose was to find the remnants of the Saami, the Lappish peoples, still living in the far north of Russia, and to discover how much of their culture still survived.  

But there was more to it than that.  Took went out of his way to court suspicion, discomfort and danger.  There was little that was uplifting in his book.   He trudges across the tundra in freezing rain with inadequate shelter and food, he falls up to chest into bogs, he spends a night in a filthy cabin where he witnesses a drunken homosexual gang rape,  he visits restricted inlets where decommissioned  submarines rot, their reactors disintegrating and turning the sea radioactive, he sees mountains devastated by open cast mines and  he records a landscape blasted and polluted by nickel smelting.   He does finds isolated pockets of Saami, but realises that their traditional way livelihood of reindeer herding, hunting and salmon fishing was ruined collectivisation, their culture corrupted by alcohol and prostitution. 

His is a grim tale with no redemption.   So why wasTook so attracted to this, the most devastated and corrupt aspects of civilisation that he returned again and again.  That question bothered me increasingly as I persevered with the turgid academic prose of his punishing narrative.  What was it about this guy?  There was an unrelenting darkness about him.  But why?  I had to consult Google.  

I was shocked to discover that Roger Took is in prison.  There is a long article, written for The Spectator in 2008 by Carol Metcalfe.   He had bragged in his blog about being part of a group of men, who raped and murdered a 5 year old girl in Cambodia.  Although Took dismissed this as fantasy, there were scores of incriminating images on his computer and he had been paying his step grand-daughter to have sex with him.  Wikipedia lists difficulties in his marriage, another woman he could not forget, sexual frustration and a fragile, sensitive personality.  Any review of his book, which was nominated for an international prize for travel writing, has been removed.           

 So were Took’s expeditions deliberately punitive or just an escape from the perversity of his privileged lifestyle?   Was his book an attempt to purge himself of some dreadful shame? 

What made Took a paedophile?  Did an unduly close and controlling relationship with his mother make committed  mature relationships with women seem too threatening.   Did the difficulties he had in his two marriages instigate the need for the kind of controlling sexual relationships, he could procure only  with emotionally needy and vulnerable children?  Did his celebrity and privilege create a sense of entitlement; the feeling that he could indulge his perversions?  

His book fails to provide any answers to these questions, but the final chapter does allude to encounters with teenage prostitutes in Murmansk in 1998.  Ron had also mentioned picking up Russian women in Murmansk; the Winston Churchill House of Friendships catered for the needs of foreigners,  but few sailors ever realised the terrible price the women would pay for friendship.

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Add an external force like dropping a pebble in a bowl and water will adopt a natural frequency of vibration depending on the configuration of the container.  Vibration may also be imposed by wind or obstructions to flow, creating ripples, that can be recorded on sand and rocks.  The gravitational effect of the moon exaggerates natural rhythm of water around the globe.  

Waves in open water are created by the wind on the surface or a rising sea bed close to the shore. Although the wave moves, the water in it just circulates. Rays and other fish swim like a wave through the static circulating water.  The wave ‘breaks’  when wind accelerates the top and causes it to overbalance or when the rising shore line slows down the base.   This creates a horizontal air/water vortex that churns and oxygenates the water. 

In contrast, the standing wave generated by the fall of water in a weir is static and water flows through it.   So the wave is a feature of water, but does not necessarily relate to its flow.  

An obstruction in a river or the flow of a stream of water into a static pool,  creates vertical vortices; paired boundary areas where fluids of different pressures coalesce and mix.  

Multiple sources, sinks and currents combine to create more complex fluid structures that has been compared to a symphony in which different instruments have their own entries and rests and are brought together by an invisible conductor.  Flow must be turbulent for exchange to  occur.  If it is channelled through a straight pipe, or settles at the bottom of a deep pool, it cannot form vortices, transfer of material cannot occur and water stagnates .

Water is a complex, sensitive medium that can respond to the environment to create a multiplicity of forms.  Living creatures start their live as suspensions of cells in water.  They must therefore be  influenced by flow patterns of the medium of suspension and develop out of these patterns   So simple multi cellular organisms living in water often adopt spiral forms.  Snails have a spiral shell.  The muscle fibres of the heart adopt a spiral arrangement with compartments forming at the junction of different flows (oxygenated blood from the lungs and deoxygenated blood from the rest of the body).  Movements of fluid are incredibly sensitive; they respond to minor change.   Nerve cells seem to line up at the boundary zones where the effects of those changes have most effect. 

Now if we imagine that the world and everything in it was initially composed of fluids initially, then we can see how solid forms in nature conform to a vortex configuration.  Vortices are consolidated in rocks when they cool.  Jellyfish are 96% water and resemble complex vortices.  When their mantle contracts, they produce mirror images of themselves in the vortices they leave behind.  And look at other vortex forms, the cochlea of the ear, the semicircular canals, which in the lamprey are still fluid vortices, the turbinate bones of the deer, the intestine of the lungfish is spiral in form, the intestine of the cow circular. Even the embryo starts off as a complex vortex of cells, whirling boundaries where things occur, cells are laid down, nervous connections are created.   We might even envisage organs being created out of paired vortices).     

Water cannot just be understood by its chemical properties.  It is the stuff of life, the circulation that runs through all living things.  Sensitive Chaos; creation of flowing forms in water and air was written by Theodore Schwenk (1910- 1986), anthroposophist, engineer and director of The Institute of Water Research and Flow Science in the Black Forest.  It is a remarkable, thought provoking book that escapes the stagnation of research protocols and methodology and allows the imagination to flow unimpeded; the sort of book that makes us reflect on what might be so.  That, surely, is the  essence of science.    

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Sea levels are going to rise, coastal erosion is going to take place all along East Anglia,  land is going to be lost.  You cannot stop it.  All you can do is try to accommodate it and limit the damage so it does not affect certain resources that just have to be sustained, like Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station, like Southwold, Lowestoft, Felixstowe and Woodbridge.   But to do this, other things may have to go.  Farmland may have to left to revert to salt marsh,  but protected by baffles and breakwaters  so that the run-off from high tidal shifts does not encourage further erosion.  Lighthouses and other coastal structures like Martello towers may have to go.  Land below sea level may have to be allowed to flood.   A controlled breach may have to be made in the elbow of the River Alde where fifty yards or so of shingle just separate from the sea,  but this would silt up Orford so that after 1000 years it would be landlocked like Winchelsea.   

But there are so many factors to consider in trying to think what might happen,  the height of the tides, the extent of coastal drift, the topography and geology of the land,  the bathygraphy,  and of course human activity.  Mr Peter Boggis, local engineer and landowner,  had taken matters into his own hands and dumped thousands of lorry loads of hard core onto the foreshore above Southwold to prevent the erosion of the soft sandy bedrock of his land, but the sea has just continued to undermine his efforts, eroding the underlying soft sand so that the hard core subsides and is also  washed away and the erosion continues.   In other placed they have tried to protect the Martello Towers and other coastal amenities, like Felixstowe Golf Course, by depositing a band of large blocks of Norwegian granite  (rock armour) along the shoreline, but rock armour is only as firm as the ground it is dumped on or leans against.  In any case, eddies are set up where the granite ends causing accelerated erosion down the coast.  There are always knock on effects.  

So where does the artist come in.  Well, as Simon expressed it,  the informed artist is an observer,  he applies a prepared mind to explore contingencies and consequences.   He has no vested interest and can therefore afford to have an  unbiased perspective and promote a conversation among other stakeholders;  environmentalists, engineers, landowners and politicians.  The perspective of the artist differs from that of the scientist because it is by necessity, exploratory and speculative and gives free rein to the imagination.  The informed artist has no idea what will happen, but, lacking vested interests, is in a good position to work out what might.  The scientist is programmed by Popperian philosophy to set up a hypothesis and try to disprove it.  He has already decided what will happen.  This scientific approach is much more rigid and focussed;  its methodology and statistics offer a ‘semblance’ of proof, but only under the rigid conditions of the ‘experiment’.  They tend to  foreclose discussion. 

In reality, we need both approaches.  The artist and scientist should work more together. The exploratory models, based on the intuition and imagination of the informed artist can help to focus and structure the scientific investigation so that it takes into account all contingencies and creates a much tighter null hypothesis that will lead to less ambiguous conclusions and more effective strategies.   

We are talking here about chaos and meaning.   Natural phenomena, like the patterns of flow that create the weather, the rivers and sea, growth and even human emotion and illness, appear chaotic and can all to readily escape the arbitrary rules we try to impose on them.   We need to make fully informed responses to them in the sure knowledge that while we cannot hope to control, we can understand and contain.  Philosophy requires the integration of imagination and reason, intuition and fact, information and speculation to achieve a more meaningful and effective response.  

 But philosophy requires freedom of thought and matters such as coastal management are highly political; people stand to lose or gain enormous sums of money.   The conversation can all too easily be railroaded by the political manipulations of landowners, farmers, entrepreneurs, developers,  powerful stakeholders with sufficient resources to employ lawyers to find loopholes.  The project could so easily be stalled and then abandoned by an incoming government, the ability to plan productively will be lost, and when the disaster occurs, the losses will be catastrophic. 

And all the while, the  unexpected can  happen.   This week there has been a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, pumping ash high into the atmosphere and grounding all aircraft coming in and out of the UK.   Simon informed me that the last time this happened, it caused widespread famine in France and initiated the French Revolution. 

On April 15^th, Simon Read, my brother,  talked about his latest exhibition of drawings to an audience at The New Cut Arts Centre in Halesworth, Suffolk.  He explained how he had abandoned the creation of works of art for their own sake many years ago, developing  his artistic intuition and skill to explore phenomena; light, movement, growth, the flow and turbulence and water; the essential meaning of things.  He has utilised the insights this has given him in the service of the debate on coastal management.                          

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Bird How is a simple construction, such as a child would draw; a rough stone box with a gabled roof , two windows and a door painted green.  It stood there, timeless and impassive, when William strode the coffin route from Ambleside with Dorothy scuttling in his wake, to take out a lease in Grasmere.  Restless beasts still bumped and sighed in the shippon and provided underfloor heating when Ruskin worried about industrial pollution from his perspective on Coniston and Mallory practiced the crags of Great Gable.    

The National Trust rescued the house in 1963. The conversion retains the character and feel of the original dwelling.  You enter into a simple living space, a chair a settee, a table and a fireplace with plenty of wood.  The kitchen is behind a curtain and two bedrooms are at the back, one larger with twin beds painted sky blue, the other with a double bunk. 

This accommodation has no bathroom. You wash in the sink or take a bowl onto the terrace.  But after a  muddy descent from the summit across Great Moss and down through the treacherous gorge,  what bliss to wash naked in the rain and pour warm water from the jug onto the shivering spot between the shoulder blades and then run inside to dry off by the chattering fire.     

There’s a chemical toilet in the shippon.  It doesn’t smell but the bucket has to be emptied into the cesspit outside; it’s that rustic.  We might have stayed three nights in a hotel in Grasmere for the same price, but the luxury would have spoiled us with excess and depleted our initiative. Bird How just provides shelter and basic necessities, but accepting the challenge to make a home in the wilderness creates a frisson of adventure and self sufficiency that can never be achieved in a hotel or on a package holiday.  Only don’t forget your sleeping bag and a spare box of matches.    

This article was short listed for The Guardian’s Travel Writing Competition and pubished in today’s paper.  

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 I have just returned from the taiga, a wilderness of forest and swamp in Northern Finland. And I began to sense that for me, the essence of nature cure is about living in the present.  For years now, or so it seems, I have spent too much  time regretting the past or dreading the future.  I have analysed endlessly, rationalised, explained, even understood, but none of this has brought peace.  I am not denying the pleasures of nostalgia or the excitement of hope, but these are too often tempered by guilt or fear, whereas the present just is.  You have to get on with it. 

Being out in the wilderness focuses attention on survival.  You have to engage with the business of collecting wood, building a fire, preparing a meal, even hunting or gathering, making sure you have shelter for the night, dealing with the midge, getting to the next place or just staying put. 

And with nature, there is so much going on all the time, light, weather, plants growing or dying back, animals, birds, the river, the mood of the lake.  It’s like a never ending test series, a book you can never put down, but much more so.  Nature captivates, asks questions, inspires curiosity, demands engagement. 

The book that accompanied my thoughts in Finland was Roger Deakin’s ‘Wildwood; a journey through trees’.   In the first section, entitled Roots, he described how his love of nature was kindled by an inspiring biology teacher, who took groups of boys on nature expeditions to the New Forest.  Over the course of 8 years, the boys made a detailed ecological exploration of a three mile stretch of countryside near Beaulieu Station.  One of their projects investigated the links between the unusual preponderance of the dwarf buttercup, myosurus minimus, and the ancient habit of corralling of wild new forest ponies for selling by the commoners.  They discovered how the tramping of the horses hooves and the heavy manuring of the ground destroyed competing plants but is ideal for the buttercup.  Another project demonstrated how half of the seedpods of the Needle Whin, Genista anglica, were infected by a weevil, Apion genistae, which was in turn eaten alive by the larvae of a chalcid wasp, Spintherus leguminium.   How wonderful to have a teacher who could inspire such curiosity and fascination. When mental energies are focussed on the meaning of the present, there is little time for regret and worry. 

Ernest Neal, my biology teacher, might have been an inspiration to me.  He probably was.  He wrote Woodland Ecology, based on the analysis of a Somerset wood and his dedicated investigation of the intimacies of the Badger led to the discovery of delayed implantation, an ovum fertilised one steamy night in autumn would not implant in the uterus until the following spring.  But the nearest I got to ‘understanding the importance of being Ernest’ was when he leant over my dissection of the sex organs of the Dogfish and said with feeling, ‘You know, Read, sex is a beautiful thing.’  In my innocence, I replied with an enthusiasm I considered appropriate for the situation, ‘Yes sir, I suppose it must be.’      

The books I read then, I still treasure;  King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz,  The Peregrine by J.A.Baker,  The Life of the Robin by R.Lack,  all products of  detailed observation over a long time, a fascination leading to a complete immersion in the object of enquiry.  I got the impression that these authors were happy in their own skin.  The same kind of self sufficiency comes through in A Fortunate Man, which describes the author’s life as a country doctor or Oliver Sachs account of his chemical childhood in Uncle Tungsten. 

Engaging with life in the present takes you out of morbid preoccupations with the self or a dependence on others and a happiness that derives from a fascination with the external.  It takes you out of yourself.  But you need courage to let go of the familiar and entrapping and a will to commit to a wider purpose.  

For too long,  I have sought enlightenment in endless analysis.  This has led to a kind of understanding of the human condition.  But happiness, health?  I question that.  The paediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott indicated that the purpose of emotional development was to enable people to be themselves in the company of others.  I would suggest that this might be extended to encompass self sufficiency in the natural world too.  Perhaps therapeutic camps could help those enmeshed in the misery off their lives.  Maybe whittling could be part of an analyst’s stock in trade.

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