Compost for the soul roundup: March 2025
Welcome to this month’s compost for the soul roundup!
It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time consuming all sorts of different media about our relationship with the land and the planet more generally. Quite a lot of this is captured in my monthly CPD roundups, but some is not exactly CPD in the conventional sense (and frankly I already do more than enough to meet the requirements of my professional bodies). And rather than letting these brilliant sources of inspiration go un-noted, I share them here, in a monthly roundup of inspiring and moving blogs, podcasts, films, articles, etc.
The idea is to showcase a few things every month that have either shifted my thinking or that have in some other way inspired, uplifted or motivated me over the month. They represent words and ideas that have taken root in my mind, and I offer them to you now, in the hope that you will find fertile ground in your life too.
And if you don’t want to wait a whole month for the next roundup, you might want to follow me on Instagram, where I share one of these every week. In the meantime, you can find previous summaries here.
Inside Europe 6 February 2025: Scottish peat bogs (45:41 - 53:22)
There’s a few things to love here, but the piece is broadly about how people are relearning how to experience the peat bogs of the Flow Country in Scotland. The whole segment is quite short, and worth listening to as a whole, but here’s a few quotes I picked out
“[The peat bogs of the Flow Country are] ... almost like a cloak that has been placed over the land. You get all sorts of reds, and oranges, and browns, and all sorts of ocres. It's a kind of place where you feel like you can breathe again.”
Jean Gillespie“What you really need to do is get out onto the blanket bog, even get down onto your hands and knees and have a look at what's below you.”
Millie Revel-Haywood"With the Flow [Country]'s new designation, those fast tourists are diminishing, and we're seeing a lot more of the slow tourists that are interested in nature and things. So rather than sticking to the NC500, they're making that detour, and stopping and taking time - slow tourism, people enjoying the scenery, enjoying nature."
Jason Watt
Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/inside-europe-6-february-2025/audio-71531306
Sestina for a spring in exile (Amani Saeed, commissioned for the Woodland Trust
Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t read as much poetry as I used to. I used to really enjoy it and respect its power to communicate in a way that ordinary language can’t. As I’ve got more and more into plain language generally, though, I tend to have a very hit-or-miss reaction to most poetry. It’s either breath-taking or trite. This one I would very much put in the “breath-taking” category. It expresses perfectly the mix of joy and anxiety I feel about Spring – excitement that it has arrived, but also anxiety about how it’s come much earlier than it should have. Here’s a snippet from towards the end, but do read the whole thing
Though they shall not change the beginning –
re-bud the flowers, turn back time,
halt the passage of the wind –
They might learn to listen again,
and know they speak the language of the trees
for the woods’ exhale, their breath – it is the same.
Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn? by Katia Moskvitch
I have to say, I originally went looking for a piece about this thinking it would reveal something fascinating about non-human ways of thinking and cognition, but actually it was this line about the terms of the debate that really caught my eye. Not just because it’s an intriguing debate, but also because it echoes something I have come to think about the debate as to whether machine translation and AI-based “translation” are really doing translation, as such, or whether we need to come up with some sort of new terminology for what is actually happening…
The debate is arguably not a war about the science, but about words. “Most neuroscientists I have talked to about slime mold intelligence are quite happy to accept that the experiments are valid and show similar functional outcomes to the same experiments performed on animals with brains,” Reid said. What they seem to take issue with is the use of terms traditionally reserved for psychology and neuroscience and almost universally associated with brains, such as learning, memory and intelligence. “Slime mold researchers insist that functionally equivalent behavior observed in the slime mold should use the same descriptive terms as for brained animals, while classical neuroscientists insist that the very definition of learning and intelligence requires a neuron-based architecture,” he said.
Available at: https://www.quantamagazine.org/slime-molds-remember-but-do-they-learn-20180709/
Evolution’s Other Narrative by Bradford Harris
I first came across this idea from mentions of the work of Lyn Margulis in The Wizard and the Prophet and I’ve been meaning to learn more. I haven’t had time to dive into Margulis’s work, but fortunately this article provides a really brief summary of history of the notion of symbiosis and cooperation in evolutionary biology.
Over the past several decades, these and other researchers have revealed that organisms’ cooperation and interdependence contribute more to evolution than competition. Symbiogenesis—the emergence of a new species through the evolutionary interdependence of two or more species—is at least as important in the history of life as survival of the fittest.
Available at: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/evolutions-other-narrative
Gentle Arms of Eden by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer
I don’t think this one really needs much explanation, it’s just a lovely, joyful song about the importance of loving and respecting the planet that is our home – and maybe even worshipping it.
Then all the sky was buzzin’ and the ground was carpet green
And the wary children of the wood went dancin’ in between
And the people sang rejoicing when the field was glad with grain
This song of celebration from their cities on the plain
This is my home, this is my only home
This is the only sacred ground that I have ever known
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlYJ-3T_S2M