Four Fields

November 10, 2014
In the grand nature-writing tradition of examining the ways humanity and the land change one another—how we are both intimately part of our environment and profoundly separate—bird-watching explorer Dee (A Year on the Wing: Journeys with Birds in Flight) focuses on open fields around the world. Dee describes fields as “the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live both within the grain of the world and against it”: spaces as ephemeral and hardy as grass. His explorations alternate among Kenya’s hoof-trampled Masai Mara; the prairie battlefield of Little Bighorn, Mont.; an Exclusion Zone full of mutated animals at Chernobyl, Ukraine; and the seasonal changes of the fens near his home in England. Dee interlaces careful descriptions of his experience of being in these spaces with the human history that turned these lands to agricultural use and then permitted nature to reclaim them, winding lyrical stories of the interaction between person and place, history and physicality. Equally at ease with people, birds, and old guidebooks, Dee tells the story of the world’s survival, with us and despite us, urging us to see our deep influence on the world we have created, and to credit it for much of what we are.

November 1, 2014
A BBC radio producer and nature writer visits four fields in England, Zambia, the Ukraine and the United States to reflect on humanity's uneasy relationship with both nature and itself.For Dee (The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, 2009), "[f]ields offer the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live within the grain of the world and against it." He begins this collection of nine essays with the description of one field he knows best, Burwell Fen in England. An ancient seabed once covered by saltwater, humans learned to drain it and use the land for farming and herding. Ironically, the modern drive to repair damaged ecosystems and return them to their original states has subjected these "natural" spaces to still more human manipulation. Fields in less-developed parts of the world like Zambia have also not been spared from the interfering ways of mankind. All over the African continent, "[h]abitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities." Like the Montana prairie where the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn took place, fields can also mark historical events, just as they can serve as symbols for the at-times tragic fates of the humans-in this case, the Plains Indians-who inhabit them. They can also suggest the way that nature can mirror mankind's destructiveness. As the author shows in his essay on the meadows near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the land has become "a sink...[that] takes life in but gives next to no life out." Sprawling in its descriptions of nature and of the histories that inform each of the places he visits, Dee's work defies linearity. It is best read as one man's idiosyncratic prose-poem meditation on the way human activities affect, for better and for worse, the eternal "transubstantiation of the earth." Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.

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November 15, 2014

Dee (BBC radio producer; The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life) was short-listed for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize for this title. The fields are a fen near his Cambridgeshire home, a southern Zambian grassland, a Montana prairie at Little Bighorn, and an exclusion zone in Ukraine, near Chernobyl. In four essays, one for each season, the author weaves the natural history of his local fen with the history and humankind's use of the area as it floods and is drained numerous times for various reasons throughout the centuries. In Zambia, Dee relates stories of a failed farm, following the honey guide in search of a bee's nest, and wildebeest migration. He investigates Gen. George Custer's last stand and the culture and past of Native Americans on the Montana prairie. Finally, the author travels with scientists to study the effects of the nuclear disaster in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl. Through metaphor, literature, and history, the author shares how humans have shaped the fields of the world and how nature has responded over time. VERDICT A lyrical exploration of four very different fields that will appeal to readers interested in our influence on the natural world.--Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove P.L., IL

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
Fields are utilitarian and ubiquitous, so what could possibly attract the attention of a poetically inclined nature writer? Pretty much everything. Dee, a BBC radio producer and birdwatcher, is nothing less than enraptured by the deep history behind the attempted domestication of the wild performed on the four very different fields he takes full measure of in this exceptional book of sharp observation, ardent research, exquisite language, and persuasive appreciation. Dee brings us to a primal English fen where land and water intermingle in perpetual metamorphoses. He considers the profound bond between grasslands and humankind in a field in Zambia and in prairies and battlefields on the Great Plains. He ponders the implications of a poisoned meadow in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Seen through Dee's informed and delving eyes, these hard-used lands are alive with plants, insects, birds, wildebeest, buffalo, and people, yet they are also haunted places of death both ordinary and catastrophic. Just as a field appears static even as it nurtures a vital web of life, Dee infuses each page with an astonishing fecundity of stories about innovation, folly, crime, and revelation, forever transforming our perception of civilization's seedbeds and graves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)