tom m wilson

This is my last blog post for a long time, maybe forever. I began this site in 2005, with help from my brother. Thanks for all your help Sam. That year I finished writing my PhD. In 2006 I started writing a blog, and for the next six years I regularly contributed images and words about the natural world that had inspired me and whose inspiration I had wanted to share.

Meeting and staying with John Fowles at his home in Dorset in 2002, had, it turns out, been a major influence on the rest of my life. I won’t explain this influence here, but the book I published in 2006, The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles, contains much of my philosophy of life. In 2002 I also spent time on a tall tropical island in the Indian Ocean and while I was there I read Consilience and The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson. These two books and an experience of tropical mountains and deep, cool chasm-like valleys also had a lasting influence on who I was to become. The optimism and curiosity I got from E. O. Wilson, a sense of awe for the Creation, the greater natural world, and my certainty about who I am through many readings in evolution, psychology and history, all combined to create a standpoint which, if not religious, was a strong and serene position.

With this background I wrote and recorded the more than 300 blog posts and radio shows that you can find archived below. Sometimes I was digging into what it meant to belong to this bioregion in south-west Australia, a land of sand, banksia trees, blue skies and Noongar history. For two years I researched and wrote an environmental history of south-west Australia, a manuscript that may be published in 2013, and this process influenced what I wrote about in some blogs. Sometimes I was commenting on a poem by Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver. For a while I travelled around the planet taking photos and discovering other countries. For a time I commented on my experiences working at the Esalen Institute on the Californian coast. For three years I made environmental radio shows in Perth, interviewing people who I felt had some wisdom to share, from Tim Flannery to Michael Archer.

If I have a spiritual core, it has much to do with the embrace of wild and fertile nature, a feeling of belonging with a people and in a place. There there is love and there is affection, there is a bird’s song, and a green shadow strokes my senses. I’m glad I have contributed all that I have over the last ten years. Now I fall quiet. I resettle my perspective amongst the leaves and smile. Thankyou for visiting.

Over Christmas I took the opportunity to look back over some of the talk from 2011.  Here I bring you the words of the ‘moral leaders of the nation’.  The first comes from the American nation.  The second comes from the Australian nation.

The first comes from American author Bill McKibben, and the second comes from Australian senator Bob Brown. The first speech comes from Washington DC., from Powershift, a coming together of youth climate activists in Washington early in 2011. You’ll hear Al Gore after McKibben has spoken.  In the second half of the show we return to Australian politics.  In May of last year Bob met the press and turned the tables on some of the journalists in the Canberra media scrum.  Along with the recording of Bill McKibben and Al Gore, this bit of audio rated for me as one of the most interesting as I looked back on 2011.  Here is this week’s show.

Three of the most important environmental decisions you make each day:

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

With that in mind, Alissa Bilfield co-founder and director of the Cookbook Project is on the line from Boston in the US to kick off the show and tell us about her new slow food initiative.  Later we will hear from Tim Marshall, author of the just published bible on organic gardening in Australia: The New Organic Gardener.  Here is the show this week (remember you can also podcast the show off this site by following the ‘podcast’ link on the right).