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Showing posts from May, 2012

New Robert MacFarlane Book...

A new Robert MacFarlane book comes out next month... I enjoyed this Spectator Review An excellent quote from the book: Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion-causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket-screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment. This would fit in really nicely when planning how to teach about the landscape usin

Music and Landscape...

Just remembered today that Lac Leman in Geneva, pictured below was the Lake referred to in the title of one of my favourite pieces of music: Mike Oldfield's 1984 classic... Image: Alan Parkinson I remember this being an important piece of music when I was in my final year of undergraduate studies, when you had to chase down music... Picture taken a week last Thursday on the shores of the lake in glorious sunshine... Listen to it now, turn the speakers up loud... What are your favourite pieces of music that are connected to landscape features ?? Mike has done quite a few, including Mount Teide ....

Mountain landscapes...

Chapter 9 and 10 of the book feature the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and a lesson which involves applying for a job with a company that flies tourists into Milford Sound. Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be in the European Alps for the first time. After years of showing videos on tourism in Chamonix , I was able to wander through the streets of the town, and then head up on the cable car to L'Aiguille du Midi... Enjoy some of my images below... There were quite a few companies offering flights by small plane and helicopter over the Alps, so perhaps you could adapt the lesson to this location instead of using New Zealand, or maybe even a mountain range in the UK....

The hidden landscape

Underlying the British landscape is its GEOLOGY. This tip is a new feature on the BGS website, which allows the embedding of a UK Geology or Earthquake Map. Details are HERE if you want to make your own... Here's a GEOLOGY map - click on it to show the surface geology... How does this relate to the surface landscape ?

Dan Raven Ellison: Emerging Explorer...

Exploring landscape is important. Exploring the world is even harder... I can finally share some news I heard about a few months ago, but which has now been made public... Daniel Raven Ellison , friend and colleague at the Geography Collective has been named as one of National Geographic's 2012 Emerging Explorers. The press release is here. Dan is given the honour alongside other 'visionary young trailblazers' around the world. The 2012 Emerging Explorers are U.S. cyborg anthropologist  Amber Case ; U.K. digital storyteller and zoologist  Lucy Cooke ; U.K. behavioral ecologist  Iain Couzin ; Mexican underwater archaeologist  Guillermo de Anda ; chemist  Yu-Guo Guo  of China; conservationist  Osvel Hinojosa Huerta  of Mexico; U.S. pilot and educator  Barrington Irving ; conservation biologist  Krithi Karanth  of India; Swiss crisis mapper  Patrick Meier ; U.S. archaeologist  Sarah Parcak ; U.S. data scientist  Jake Porway ; U.K. guerrilla geographer  Daniel Raven-El

Robert MacFarlane

There's an event in London in June where you can hear Robert MacFarlane talk about his new book 'The Old Ways'. I am due to be in London I think on that day and will try to go along if the timings work..... How do the landscapes we love shape the people we are? Why do we walk? Join celebrated travel writer Robert Macfarlane for an evening exploring geography, memory, pilgrimage and adventure. For several years and more than a thousand miles, Macfarlane has been following the vast network of old paths and routes that criss-cross Britain and its waters, and connect them to countries and continents beyond. His journeys have taken him from the chalk downs of southern England to the remote bird-islands of the Scottish north-west, from the disputed territories of Palestine to the pilgrimage routes of Spain and the sacred landscapes of the eastern Himalayas. Along the way – along the ways – he has walked stride for stride with a 5,000-year-old man near Liverpool, followed t