Christopher Helm, ornithologist and publisher, passed away on the 20th of January 2007. His legacy lives on in the highly acclaimed range of field guides and other natural history titles published under the ‘Helm’ imprint and well known to birders around the world. The latest Helm title, published just after the sad news of Christopher Helm’s death, is the Birds of Northern South America. Read full obituaries in the Times and Independent newspapers.
Category: Biodiversity News
A Call to Arms for Nature Publishing
In a really excellent piece in the Guardian, Robert Macfarlane argues that we must reconnect with our environment through classic works of wildlife literature.
The suggestion – which echoes a similar call made by Lopez exactly 20 years ago in America – is that a series of classic works of nature writing from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland should be established and published. Such a series would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a “national” literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise. It would not vaunt a little-islandism, nor would it be blind to the spoliation of the landscape which has occurred. It would not adore landscape as a site for the exercise of middle-class nature-sentiment – a gymnasium for the sensitive.
It would, however, honour a form of care, and a form of attention, to the landscapes of the British Isles. It would discover in landscapes values which transcend the commercial and the consumerist. And it would restore to visibility a tradition of nature writing which has slipped from view these past 50 years.