creatures

Writer and marine ecologist Alexander McMaster charts our familial connections with creatures of the sea both ancient and contemporary, tracking a course through our tempestuous times by way of reintegration with the broader world.

To mark Remembrance Day for Lost Species (30th November) and the closing of the innovative ONCA gallery in Brighton, we are republishing a piece written in 2014 by their former co-director Persephone Pearl.

'how do we translate / the algorithms of the heart?' The poetry collective EcoBody explores the threads of connection with other ways of being that weave through a single word. With art by Victoria Bathurst and music by Alex MacInnis.

Conservation biologist Nicholas Wilkinson begins to tell the story of the dove, 'Ectopistes migratorius', and is overwhelmed by the number of wings around him and the difficulty of accounting for one of the most notorious extinctions ever to occur on the planet: the destruction of the passenger pigeon.

Erika Howsare introduces her newly published The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors,  an unflinching look at a wild and mysterious creature that has run through our human lives since the Palaeolithic era, and now faces us with the complexity and brutality of the Anthropocene. With an extract of her meeting with the Korean-American 'deer artist' artist Meesha Goldberg.

'The future we expected has changed shape.' In a story originally written for our special issue ARK, Liz Jensen tells of staggering personal loss in the midst of the world's cascading crises. Her book about her biologist and activist son, Your Wild and Precious Life, is out this month. With an image by Angela Cockayne.

An endangered tortoise speaks through a poem by Rachel White, asserting its right to exist using the only language it has: that of its desert landscape. With tortoise photographs by Adam Elliott.

This week in our archive month, Anthea Lawson selects Mat Osmond's penetrating essay on the visionary artist Meinrad Craighead and the relationships between, attention, heart, imagination and the living world. From Issue 13.

In our second selection for this month's archive series, Sharon English introduces two poems by Em Strang from Dark Mountain: Issue 16 –REFUGE. With artwork by Kate Walters originally featured in Issue 13.

In our second report from India, we go to the forests of Assam with researcher Shrishtee Bajpai to hear the story of the sacred Hajong lake. and how Indigenous storytelling is a key to a  reconnection with the living speaking Earth.