Habitat

Halcyon curates the most significant nature-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with nature-related challenges.

Please see below selected recent nature-related change.

See also:

Please see below selected recent migration-related change.

See also:

• What's New? - Migration
• What's Changing? - Demographics
• What's Changing? - Economics
• What's Changing? - Equality
• What's Changing? - Money
• What's Changing? - Poverty

December 2024

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone - Herman Hesse

As a member of The Woodland Trust, I regularly signed petitions to preserve ancient woodlands and unique trees. Does this make a difference? The battle is an ongoing one, but worth fighting, if necessary tree by tree.

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life  - and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist - while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Are we now entering the Anthropocene, an age shaped primarily by people?  

Some geologists say we are already living in the Anthropocene age: the age of man. For example, almost 90% of the world’s plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role, thereby putting further strains on the planet's resilience.

"I thought I saw a swallow land, upon my hand, on summer day" - Roy Harper

For the gardener, this is the peak of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and weeks following Midsummer Day are a time of quietness, of flower festivals, of fragrant old roses around mildewed old church doors and of wandering among indecipherable gravestones and of coming hollyhocks and of lemon balm and of long, long ago memories, but always of "history is now, and England".