The Urban environment Book

Most of us familiar with John Fowles know Fowles the novelist, not Fowles the naturalist. Fowles got a lot of his impetus from his father and this extended essay shows how he absorbed and reacted to that early education.

I am one of those who believes we are the stewards of (and on) this planet. This view is very compatible with what Fowles is writing. I, too, may be waiting for a new melding of science and nature that doesn’t bend other species to our whims and desires but helps us understand an individual ecosystem and its value for the whole.

Fowles notes his father’s reaction to his vision. “…I do not cultivate trees in any sense that my father would recognize or approve. I think I truly horrified him only once in my life, which was when, soon after coming into possession, I first took him around my present exceedingly unkempt, unmanaged, and unmanageable garden…That his chaos happens to be my order is not, I think, very important.”

My edition contains the hauntingly artistic photographs of Frank Horvat that are not often meant to illustrate a particular point Fowles is making, yet reinforce the text. Like a big train leaving a station, this book takes a while to build its momentum. I hope that you find that staying with it is worth the journey.