The answer, I think, was surprisingly enlightening.

The artist on the panel - Suneil Sanzgiri - said the first question you should ask yourself is “why does this thing need to exist at all?”

The audience laughed, but he doubled down. He said, in words to this effect:

“I’m serious. Why should it exist? There is so much art. There is so much art in the world. There is so much content on the internet. There is more stuff that can ever be looked at, watched, seen in an entire lifetime. You could do literally anything else with your time. Why should you spend it creating art?”

This stuck with me, possibly because the fact that I haven’t written anything for you in four months has been gnawing at me for a long time. For that, I apologise. It also echoed in my mind as I was taking photographs of the bluebells in Highgate Wood in London. Here’s one of them.

I guess I haven’t written for a while because I simply didn’t have anything to say.

I vented in December about my frustrations and bafflement at the direction of human society, and nothing has changed since. If anything it’s got worse. The only thing that world leaders consistently prove to me is that humanity hasn’t changed in ten thousand years. The bully with the biggest stick takes what he wants, everything else be damned.

The world is noisy, and I don’t know how useful it is for me to add to it. Seriously, have you been on social media recently? It’s like the ramblings of a lunatic moments before they run screaming off a cliff. Watching the news gives me the same vibe.

I don’t want to keep banging this drum because it’s interminable and you already know this, and there are much more intelligent people than me writing very informed analysis about the state of the world right now.

But I’ve also discovered that the internet’s content machine is utterly insatiable. The system relies on an endless churn of stuff which is rewarded by likes and comments - for what? Well, for audience engagement which drives advertisement revenue for tech companies, that’s what. But for me, what does having a few hundred extra followers on Instagram or Substack or YouTube tangibly mean? It seems to mean that I have to keep churning out the stuff to get more followers, ad infinitum.

I found myself just reaching for any old thing to write or make a video about because I felt compelled to by the system, not because I had anything meaningful to say or explore. The last four months have been paved by a litter of half-finished drafts and scribbled ideas, but the longer it took me to find something to post about the less I wanted to post anything.

Besides, everything posted on the internet now gets gobbled up by AI bots and vomited back out again. Not engaging with the content machine has been my own personal rebellion, of sorts.

Here’s another photograph.

Oh yes, the photographs. Why have I taken photographs of bluebells in Highgate Woods? The bluebells are there whether I take photos of them or not. They are lovely, lush carpets of purple (they should be called purplebells) and the dappled sun through the spring-leafed trees at this time of year is just wonderful - and difficult to photograph.

I could have looked at them with my eyes and not been burdened with the frustration of my photos not turning out exactly how I wanted.

Yet, I took photographs. I wanted to practice in difficult conditions. I wanted to document my trip, not for you or the algorithm or for anyone else, but for me. I might print some of them and stick them in a book and look at them the way photos are meant to be looked at - slowly and deliberately in real life, not as a blur as someone scrolls past a pixellated version on their phone.

In fact, there are tonnes of photos I’ve taken in the last four months that I’ve barely even looked at myself, let alone shown to other people.

But again… I like taking photos.

And when I take one that I really like, which is maybe one every one or two hundred, it gives me a lot of joy. And sharing that joy with others should be encouraged, right?

So here’s some blossom outside my flat in March. In’t it nice?

I quite like this one of a cafe I had lunch in.

Back in January, the River Lea froze over. I took some photos and didn’t do anything with them.

I explored the muddy estuaries of Essex in January, too.

A couple of weeks ago I visited my wife’s uncle in Yorkshire. He has a chicken that enjoys sitting on the windowsill. This pleased me greatly.

I suppose I haven’t shared any of this before because a) I couldn’t think of a convincing reason why these photos needed to be shared online, b) I didn’t want to feed the content machine, and c) you’re not my boss and I can do what I want.

But that said, I’m beginning to feel something. I might finally have something to say. Or at least, explore.

I have an idea for some art, and it’s been in my mind for a while now. It is not something I have seen someone else do, and as much as I try and ignore it, it keeps coming back. So I want to make it.

But I’ll need your help.

I love bookshelves. I think somebody’s bookshelf says a lot about them. Bookshelves are private places made public. They are shaped by aspiration, memory, guilt, pride and habit. People’s choices of books and other objects that share that space show us how they construct their identity, intentionally or otherwise. That is fascinating to me.

This year is the National Year of Reading, and to mark it I want to document our bookshelves. I want to create portraits of people without them ever appearing in those portraits.

Here’s one of mine. What do you think it says about me?

I want to build up a collection of these portraits over the rest of the year, and try and put together an exhibition, or a book. Something in person, something tactile, something people can engage with in a genuine way that doesn’t mean feeding the content machine for our dystopian tech overlords.

So my question to you, is would you like to be involved?

I’m looking for willing contributors who won’t mind me showing up with a camera to photograph their bookshelves. Just their bookshelves - not their faces. But their real bookshelves, warts and contradictions and embarassments and all, not their carefully curated Instagram-aesthetic bookshelves.

Because I’ve got this deep itch in me to create some art, and I’d love to create it with you.

So if you want to take part, please message me on Substack or email me at hello@thomaswinward.com. We’ll take it from there.

In the meantime, you can find me taking more photos and making films.

I may or may not do anything with any of it.

The cold that wraps around me and steals my breath, stings my nose, burns my lungs. The cold that stills the water and freezes the grass and cracks beneath my numb feet. The cold that keeps the pathogens at bay, that germinates the winter seeds, that swallows the insects and the hibernators in a deep sleep until the season’s turning.

The cold that is blissful and welcome, that sharp, aching, beautiful cold.

Before the last of the day’s bells toll the perihelion, I wanted to look back on some of the creative work I’m most proud of from the year.

No doubt you have already received countless 2025 retrospective emails already, so I’ll keep this brief and visual.

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Photographs

After losing my job earlier in the year, I took the opportunity to spend over a month in Barcelona.

The castells that pop up around the city - incredible towers of people with teams striving to make the tallest - were a magnificent example of community and culture, a welcome reminder of what it means for humans to create something beautiful and organic in a time of AI-generated slop.

The holy mountain range of Montserrat commanded views over much of Catalonia. A cool wind and hazy blue gradients reminded me of my insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

When the sun descended and the shadows lengthened each afternoon, I took a stroll around our neighbourhood near Horta. The light was golden and magical.

In the medieval walled city of Gerona, huge flocks of swifts circled the rooftops.

I took this photograph with a 70-year-old Helios lens from the Soviet Union:

In the midst of one of the UK’s heatwaves this summer, I took a train up to the blissfully windswept Northumberland coast to photograph puffins.

I always forget how close I live to Epping Forest. Just a 30-minute train journey out of London, I made the most of the autumn sunshine to walk its copper-lined paths.

Two people spent the afternoon talking at the foot of this old, old tree.

Films

The Essex Ways (runtime: 75 mins)

Over the course of his 400km hike around Essex to reconnect with its ancient landscape and shrug off its negative stereotypes, I documented James Lawrence’s passionate journey in a documentary.

Woodcraft (runtime: 8 mins)

My godfather spends most days in his workshop, creating complex automata from recycled materials. I made a gentle, relaxing short film about his process to celebrate his work and legacy.

I lost my job. (runtime: 4 mins)

A short video (are vlogs still a thing? It’s kind of a vlog) about my personal experience in Spain after redundancy.

If you want to catch up on any posts you missed from 2025, they’re free to read here - all 106 of them.

I want to thank you for all your readership and support over the last year. Many of you have been reading my work regularly since I started this newsletter in March 2023, and it’s because of your continued enthusiasm that I am still writing today.

If you want to support my work beyond just reading it, then sharing, liking and subscribing really helps tell the algorithm that this is worth looking at and is vital for small creators like me. If you want to chat, you can simply reply to the emails that you receive or contact me at hello@thomaswinward.com. I respond to every email.

You can also buy me a coffee here, either as a one-off tip or a monthly subscription. Donations go towards the production costs of the films I make. It’s thanks to the generosity of my supporters that I can keep creating art for people to enjoy for free, so a huge shout-out and a massive thank you to anyone who has supported.

More to come in 2026.

Have a restful, peaceful new year.

When I was young, I used to bundle up for the fireworks every 5th November, beneath layers and gloves and scarves. My breath would billow in frozen plumes and I’d stamp my feet to keep warm. This year I could stand outside comfortably in just a sweatshirt.

We had a blissful few days of cold temperatures a while back, where the ground sparkled with frost and mist coiled around the hulls of sleeping canal boats. Snow made a fleeting appearance, and for a moment it almost felt like everything was normal.

But all I heard was people whinging about it being cold. The Met Office issued an amber weather warning for cold wind. It was as if everyone had forgotten what November was supposed to feel like. And after a long run of way-above-average temperatures? Not a peep. Where’s the Met Office weather warning for something is terribly wrong with our weather patterns and we need to take immediate global action?

It’s now mid-December, and the cold weather doesn’t look like it’s returning any time soon. Nature hasn’t got a clue what season it is any more. The only reason I know we’re in the run up to Christmas is the endless loops of Frosty the Snowman everywhere I go.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m not feeling Christmassy right now. Instead, my spirit is in a kind of constant panic I can never quite shake. It’s always there, like a simmering pot. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable and I can crack on with my day. Sometimes it boils over and all I can do is curl up into a ball or cry for a bit.

It’s called climate anxiety, or eco anxiety.

It’s a rational response to an existential threat. When presented with the facts of what’s happening to the world - what’s going to happen - as a result of our addiction to fossil fuels, why wouldn’t I be worried? The wildfires, the floods, the hurricanes, the unbearable heatwaves, the droughts, the death of the coral reefs. Endless reports titled Things Aren’t As Bad As We Thought - They’re Actually Far Worse certainly don’t help. Neither do the scientists predicting the end of human civilisation within a lifetime.

Climate anxiety is not something modern humans have really had to tackle before. A few years ago I signed up for some meetings with Better Help, an online therapy sort of thing, to see if they had any ideas of how I can control this constant rumbling fear. The woman I spoke to was clueless. Her suggestions included going for a long drive to relax, and that 'the world needs oil.’

I try to get outside and offline as much as I can, but even that has been a test this year. My brain goes into overdrive when I see flowers blooming at the wrong times of the year, and it frightens me to see trees shedding their leaves in August because it’s so damn hot.

No wonder my primitive monkey brain is triggering fight or flight mode all the time.

When I was at school, I envisioned a career in the police. I studied with that in mind, but although my career took me elsewhere I distinctly remember my parents saying that a job in the police would be understandable, because I tend to see things in black and white. Right and wrong.

When I began working for a climate NGO a few years ago, it was because I had been presented with the black and white facts of climate change. It’s very simple arithmetic:

Burn fossil fuels + destroy habitats = the death of everything.

The solution to this equation? Also very simple.

Stop burning fossil fuels + restore habitats = the survival of everything.

In my mind, this is a no-brainer. I saw this equation and came to the conclusion that because I quite enjoy life on Earth I should take all the appropriate steps to prolong it. I decided to fly less. Eat less meat. Buy less. Donate what money I could to environmental causes. Replace my gas stove with a more efficient induction hob. Not vote for oil-funded climate deniers. I decided to switch banks to one that was investing in the energy transition. Why wouldn’t I do those things? What possible argument could there be to NOT do anything?

I sort of presumed that my fellow human beings were just as rational and clear-minded. Yet here we are.

Since 1995, there have been thirty meetings of COP - the UN’s Climate Change Conference designed to navigate our way through this mess. The latest talks finished just the other week, once again with zero progress on even agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels.

Earlier this year, despite the fact that we can make plastic from seaweed, the global talks to tackle plastic pollution collapsed.

Here in the UK, the government - elected partly with promises of ending fossil fuel expansion and protecting nature - is rapidly rolling those promises back and dismantling nature protection laws.

And I can’t even begin to explain what’s happening in the USA.

But those who enjoy going for pleasant walks and listening to birdsong on a crisp morning are branded as RADICAL ACTIVISTS for daring to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should shift our way of doing things to protect the beauty that makes our fleeting time in the universe not just worthwhile but possible in the first place.

I posted a video on my YouTube channel recently about how the woods and meadows where I grew up have been earmarked for development. I accompanied it with the (in my opinion) uncontroversial opinion that perhaps we should leave some space for biodiversity instead of smothering everything with concrete, because it enables us to do remarkable things like grow food and breathe air. It attracted comments from people absolutely outraged that I should suggest such a thing. Apoplectic that I should dare attempt to halt development. It was as if they couldn’t even begin to comprehend that a meadow should be anything other than a strip of land to build two thousand identical houses on. And that suggesting we protect it from development is tantamount to treason.

The directors of the residents’ association where I live routinely call for trees to be removed from the estate because they are ‘overgrown’ and ‘block light’. Then they cheer the erection of nearby skyscrapers because they are ‘good for the neighbourhood’.

I want to scream.

People will always spout some nonsense about the economy in defence of environmental demolition, and I am not sympathetic. What’s going to cost us more? Installing heat pumps and giving swathes of land back to nature? Or rebuilding major cities that have been wiped off the map? Call me crazy, but if our society uses an economic system that will cause the extinction of most life on Earth including us, then we need to change that system.

But that arithmetic - that ever so simple maths that I see in such black and white - eludes people still. The madness persists, all in the name of ‘progress’, although I’ve never had a clear understanding of what exactly we’re progressing towards.

And honestly, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know what I can do about it.

Because above all, I’m jealous. I’m jealous of people who can walk around as if everything is fine. People who can look at the weather forecast and not get palpatations. I’m jealous of people who can sit through weeks of record-breaking heatwaves and say It’s just summer! By the way, when’s Bake Off on tonight?

I don’t want to have to talk about any of this. I don’t want to have to say ‘let’s stop polluting all our rivers,’ or ‘let’s stop the world from heating to unsurvivable temperatures,’ or ‘I would rather have some trees here than an empty expanse of concrete,’ because it’s ludicrous that those things even need to be said. I don’t understand why preserving life on Earth is a topic of contention and disdain, and I don’t understand why people just roll their eyes when I mention it and make me feel like I’m the crazy one.

So I can see the appeal in just doing nothing. After all, it’s the global decision-makers holding all the cards. Governments should rightfully take all of the blame. And if the climate change-denying US government decides to threaten Venezuela with military action to nab its oil, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Maybe I should be able to find some semblance of peace in that. Sometimes I think I’d love to be plugged back into the Matrix and ignore all of it, because ignorance really does seem to be bliss.

But I’m not, and I still can’t sleep comfortably at night.

So it was cathartic to hear about the National Emergency Briefing, in which a panel of experts from economics, culture, faith, science and defence spelled out the reality of our situation to an audience of MPs. They explained that tackling the climate and nature crises requires a co-ordinated response not seen since wartime, and the chaos that would stem from further inaction is blood on their hands.

It was reassuring to see some sense in the UN’s Global Environment Outlook, compiled by nearly 300 scientists across disciplines which stated the blindingly obvious: that “investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions of dollars each year in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths, and lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty in the coming decades.” Conversely, burning coal, oil and gas currently causes £33.5 trillion in damage per year. Just scrapping fossil fuel subsidies could slash emissions by up to a third.

Maybe I’m not crazy after all.

I started this newsletter a couple of years ago because writing about this stuff was within my control. It was something I could do to try and make sense of the tempest that whirls inside my brain every day.

And I think - after all of this rambling for which I hope you’ll forgive me - that’s what it’s about. It’s about doing things that are within my control.

I was at Kendal Mountain Festival recently, where my film The Birdwatchers was screened twice. One of the questions in the Q&A was a request to leave everyone with some hope. I stole something that I’d read somewhere - I have to apologise to the original author who I’ve forgotten - but it was along the lines that whenever a person asks for something to be hopeful about, it feels like what they are really asking for is an abdication of responsibility. For someone to tell them don’t worry, we’ve got this, you go back to watching Celebrity Traitors and let others handle it.

Of course, that’s what we’re all searching for. Some external force to calm our fears and provide us with some inner peace.

But hope is something that needs to be earned. It doesn’t come from refreshing news sites or obsessively tracking every fraction of a degree of global warming. Hope comes from making the decision to do things a better way in our own lives. It comes from building community, it comes from peacefully resisting the forces trying to steal our attention. It comes from rejecting the status quo and questioning and challenging and standing up for ourselves and for those who don’t have a voice.

There is still action happening everywhere. The UK is gearing up to create Europe’s largest oyster reef. London Wildlife Trust has launched Rewilding East London to reintroduce white storks and beavers. Wind and solar generated more energy than coal this year. Denmark is on track to meet its ambitious emissions reductions targets. Conservation efforts have succeeded in bringing the green turtle back from the brink of extinction.

None of this is done in a vacuum. None of this has just magically dropped out of the sky. It is the result of sensible, focused people collaborating to build a better world and it all started with a decision to question why things are the way they are.

We’re all searching for inner peace and balance. I certainly am. But I can guarantee you that we’re not going to find it in Black Friday sales or Facebook or AI. We’ll find it by focusing on what we can control and acting with integrity and kindness and purpose. By spending our money carefully. By choosing who we vote for, what we eat, who we spend our time with and what we read. By opening our souls and our hearts to compassion, by filling our lives with art and connection and an undying love for this physical, biological, chemical marvel that we have the utter privilege of calling home for even the briefest of times.

That is resistance.

It’s fight or flight, and there’s nowhere to run. So fight it is.

“Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work.” - Charlie Kaufman

Thanks for reading this piece. It took me a long time to write it. I no longer offer paid subscriptions to Urban Nature Diary, but if you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or share this post.

Take a few minutes out of your day to watch my latest film about an incredible wood carver. He makes real-world human art inspired by nature that AI can only ever dream of achieving.

Now, on with the show.

Somewhere on a farm in rural Essex, my godfather wiles away the days in his workshop, creating works of art.

He builds complex automatons and intricate fantasy castles, all out of bits of driftwood and and old reclaimed materials he finds on his walks.

Back in the spring, I spent a day with him in his workshop, documenting his process and his reflection on his life’s work.

There’s something particularly fascinating to me about an artisan who continues to put the hours of work into his craft in a world in which tech juggernauts are desperate to sell us the dream of ‘creating’ art and music and film using AI. The dream of removing every part of the production process, the thousands of hours of trying and failing and getting frustrated and learning and improving.

The importance of this friction to the human spirit cannot be underestimated. This desire to create - to learn how to create - is what has built human culture for the last 10,000 years. To claim that we can do away with all skill and time commitment and still achieve the same output is to miss the point of creation entirely.

Yet here is a man in his eighties, still putting in the time to hone his craft, to allow himself to make mistakes, not because he is desperate to reach the finish line but because the process of creation is what makes him feel. To top it all off? His art is just for him and his family. He doesn’t sell a thing. He creates for the pleasure of creating.

He is, of course, inspired by nature. He’s inspired by the unpredictable nature of the elements. His work, as a result, has a uniquely organic feel.

Personally, I love it. And I’m proud of the film I made. If you’re watching on Substack, check out the link above. If you have any trouble accessing, there’s a YouTube link below.

If you enjoyed it, please drop a like or a comment or share it. I’d love to create more work like this and when people engage with films it really helps small artists like me.

Pushing, leaning, heaving.

People, pressing together, moving together, breathing together as one, something organic coalescing into a single shape.

People, climbing over others. Locking into position on shoulders, each becoming their own level of a tower growing from the human foundation.

People, climbing over them. With each step, the tower rises. For a moment, there is a swaying - a trembling - and the onlookers collectively hold their breath. But it steadies. The tower rises higher.

Until the smallest person - no older than five or six - begins the final ascent.

Tiny hands and feet, seeking and grasping knees, waists, shoulders. Deftly clambering to the very summit of a tower of people, the watching crowd wordless and transfixed.

And then, at the very top, when it seems the slightest breeze can bring it all down, the smallest person raises a tiny hand into the air.

The watching crowd erupts with applause and cheers. A band of pipers and drummers strikes up a tune. The tower begins to disassemble itself.

First its crowning achievement - the smallest child - shimmies down, sliding to the base where they are caught and lifted to safety. Then the upper levels of the tower unfold and descend in unison.

Then the mid levels. Then the lower levels.

Then the base - the solid foundation of the human tower - disperses, and becomes once more just a crowd of people.

People of all ages, celebrating their achievement. High-fiving, hugging, faces split into laughs of relief and joy.

The tower is nothing, until it rises once more at the will of its people.

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This is the castell - the human tower of Catalonia.

Of all the customs and traditions I have seen in my month in Barcelona, this is by far my favourite. Walking around the city, you stumble across them when you least expect it. Perhaps you hear the pipe music first, echoing somewhere around the sunlit streets. Then you turn into a plaza and the crowd greets you - both the enraptured audience, heads tilted skyward, and the thronging, living tower of people that rises high above the apartment buildings.

The event is competitive. Multiple teams vie to build the most complex, tallest tower. They begin with a handful of people, shoulder on shoulder. They culminate in vast organic networks of human structures and pillars. And each time, the smallest child ascends to raise a hand at the summit.

During national events, the largest castell - reaching up to ten levels - can be made of up to 500 people on the base alone.

It’s an astonishing sight. I can only imagine how it feels to be a part of it.

It is not without its danger. A hint of instability and the tower can collapse. Broken bones are common, and a child fatality in 2006 resulted in a law requiring helmets be worn by the smallest. The small medical tent and ambulance waiting nearby did little to allay my concerns while I watched them. It’s a nail-biting sight.

But perhaps the most striking aspect of all is the community.

When a plaza is hosting a castell, it bursts with energy. People of all ages turn out to watch. It’s just as exciting for the elderly folks watching as it is for the children scrambling up the tower. It’s a tradition that traces its routes back hundreds of years, and today castells are declared by UNESCO to be amongst the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Above all, it’s a union. For a castell to work, every person has their place. It’s a structure that requires deep focus and intense collaboration. It would be impossible to make without a strong sense of social community. Without loved ones holding firm as a rock solid foundation, the children would be unable to ascend.

This is more important everywhere now than it has ever been. Yet it is also the target of those grasping for power. Populist, far-right governments thrive on social division. They thrive on splitting communities, pitting them against each other and fracturing those foundations. We must resist this at every moment.

Earlier this year I wrote about the famous sycamore tree of Sycamore Gap, and its felling that sparked national outrage. The tree was an iconic symbol of Britain, and I am certain that many of you reading have a similar affinity with a tree in your own neighbourhood. For me, it is this oak tree that stands outside my childhood bedroom window, in Essex:

The field in which it stands - and has stood for hundreds of years - has been tended by the local farmer for longer than I can remember. But as is the case with much green space in the UK, the council is determined to smother it with concrete and turn it into a grid of a thousand new houses.

This green space is more than just a field. It is a home for skylarks, butterflies, beetles, buzzards, and for the local community to relax in. It is an oasis nestled within a network of a rail lines and busy roads.

If it was destroyed, the resulting pollution and habitat loss would be disastrous to both us and our already fading natural world.

So it has been joyful to see the local community unite with spirit and vigour to fight to protect it.

Heads have been hunched closely in standing room only meetings. Fundraising events have brought people together not just to raise money for a consultation to challenge the development plans but also for a sense of belonging, place, and identity.

When I watch the castells and I see the strength with which people come together to create a single structure, I can’t help but feel uplifted. And as our world continues to shift and fracture and malicious groups seek to take advantage, we will all need this strength of community in the times to come.

If you want to support the fields and the oak tree of my childhood, to stand up for nature and help preserve the woods and wildlife of Britain, you can. The action group has set up a GoFundMe to raise £10,000 for a consultation. They have already raised over £6,200.

If you are receiving this via email, you are one of 1,300 people to do so. If everybody who receives this email can spare just £2.99 - much less than the price of a cup of coffee - we’ll absolutely smash the target. You can help save St John’s Fields here.

In fact, if you donate anything to this cause, let me know afterwards by responding to this email or by emailing me directly at hello@thomaswinward.com, and I’ll gift you a paid subscription to Urban Nature Diary where you can read all my previous posts for free.

Let’s use this community to support another.

In other news…

My short film about urban birding in London - The Birdwatchers - is screening at a couple of events this month.

Conserve Sauk Film Festival, Wisconsin, USA. On Thursday, November 6, 2025 from 5:00pm to 7:30pm, at Carnegie-Schadde Memorial Public Library in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Book tickets here.

Kendal Mountain Film Festival, UK. Fri, Nov 21st, 4:15 PM at Brewery Arts - Studio; and Sat, Nov 22nd, 11:45 AM at The Box - Kendal College. Book tickets here. I’ll be there too - let me know if you’re around. It would be great to meet you.

My film The Essex Ways - about James Lawrence’s 400km walking adventure around Essex to reconnect with our home county - is available to watch for free on YouTube.

I was sitting on the hill overlooking the neighbourhood of Horta in Barcelona, where I am currently based.

There was a deepening red in the sky as the sun dipped below the mountain behind me, and far out to sea the moon was beginning to rise.

I was there to take some photos and videos, and I wasn’t alone.

The hill was busy. With families, who had brought up deck chairs and picnics. With couples, who were strolling or sitting on benches. With individuals, who were just there to watch the sun go down over the city.

I had only been in Spain for a couple of days before I could feel the tension draining from my shoulders. Barcelona is not a quiet city: between the barking dogs, the traffic, the sirens, and the yelled conversations between balconies, it’s a perpetual cacophony. But it’s a different type of noise.

The noise of London is one of hustle. It’s the noise of a million people desperately trying not to be late for a meeting that could make or break their career. The pubs and bars are crowded with colleagues trying to one-up each other to net that promotion or big project.

The noise in Barcelona is of friends catching up over coffee and tortilla. It’s of children swinging in the plaza playground while the parents set the world to rights over a drink and a bite to eat.

The wages are lower, but the spirits feel much higher. Businesses are not afraid to shut their doors so the owners can spend two hours with their kids over lunch. If it’s Sunday, or Monday, past 5pm or if the owner just isn’t feeling like it, a business will probably close for the day. The owner of the bar down our road isn’t working on his multi-step marketing plan to grow the business: he’s smoking a cigarette and reading a book.

I’ve written here before about the vanity of a society that strives to grow its economy to the detriment of anything else, but it’s a point worth reiterating. Infinite growth in a finite world is not possible, yet if you listen to any kind of media or political commentary in the UK that’s all you will hear people talk about. Politicial careers live and die by a few negligible percentage points of economic growth or decline.

Healthcare, education, happiness, social health, social mobility, soil health, biodiversity, water quality - nothing is mentioned to even a fraction of the intensity and passion at which people talk about economic growth, yet these are all vital indicators of the overall health of society, and much of it has only worsened as economic growth has increased.

I’m not saying that Spain has the answers to all of these. Far from it. It struggles with the same dependence on fossil fuels and overuse of water and soil degradation and biodiversity loss and people dropping dead in the street from fossil fuel-intensified summers that all countries are experiencing. But there’s something about the way its people seem perfectly happy just sitting and chatting for hours on a street corner instead of monetising their every waking hour that feels much more… human to me.

My wife is still on maternity leave, so we have taken the opportunity to move to Barcelona for a while - a city close to our hearts. I am now self-employed, and happy to take a significant pay cut by turning down projects for the sake of spending time with my family.

I’m fully aware of our privilege in being able to do this. Not everyone has the cash in the bank that allows them to take several unpaid weeks off work. But it was also a conscious decision to take the financial hit to do this.

Aside from the occasional week of holiday, I haven’t stopped working since 2014. My time working for a video production agency regularly sucked away my evenings and weekends, and the only thing I gained from doing that was a headache and irritated friends. In 2022, I left that job on a Tuesday evening and started a new job the next morning, with barely more than 12 hours to catch my breath.

I’ve never earned a lot of money - not much more than the average UK salary and considerably less than the average London salary - but I have always been a diligent saver and careful of only spending within my means.

And now I’m here, where waxbills and treecreepers flit between the pines, with no abitrary meetings to attend or a boss to report to or a timesheet to fill out, and I’m more at peace now than I have been in a long time. I can hone my crafts of writing, photography and filmmaking. I can sit outside a cafe for as long as I like.

Things will change, as they always do. I’m sure I’ll begin to worry when the money starts to run out and I’ll have to find some more projects to pay the bills. But I just don’t want work to be the driving factor of my life. I don’t want to lay on my deathbed and regret spending so much time in an office. I have been given this opportunity to slow down, to reset, to be present, and for now I am going to prioritise that over filling my coffers.

If you are ever presented with a similar chance, I urge you to do the same. Until everyone has the liberty to live an unshackled life, our society will never be truly healthy. But perhaps it’s something we can at least collectively strive for.

In case you missed it…

My latest film The Essex Ways is available to watch for free on YouTube. It features James Lawrence - known online as Man About Country - who spent 21 days walking 400km to rediscover the people, stories and landscapes of our home county of Essex.

Earlier this year, James Lawrence - known online as Man About Country - spent 21 days hiking over 400km around the county of Essex in England, a place in which we both grew up.

With the support of Essex Arts and Cultural Fund, he asked me to make a film to document his journey. I joined him at key moments, and along with extensive mobile footage he filmed himself I came away with over 15 hours of video on my hard drive.

I had to turn it into something watchable.

The goal of James’s journey was to alter the perception of Essex that has endured for decades - that its people are shallow, unintelligent, and layered in fake tan. Being from Essex as well, I’ve experienced my fair share of eye-rolling and lazy banter when I’ve mentioned where I am from.

But like James I have a deep sense of a pride of my home county. Of course it has its issues, like every part of the country, but there are plenty of stories, traditions, beautiful landscapes and warm-hearted people that make it a complex and fascinating place worthy of our affection.

It is also a place that is changing rapidly. Massive urbanisation is transforming the landscape, climate change is shrinking its coastline, and political divisions run deep. Change is the world’s only constant, and it would be impossible to keep Essex unmoving, fixed in one nostalgic point in time. But part of James’s journey was to capture a snapshot of Essex as it is today, still with living connections to the Essex of the past, to preserve the voices and perspectives of its people in the Essex Sound and Video Archive for generations to come.

When James called me to ask if I could make a film about his journey I jumped at the opportunity. It wasn’t just a chance to play a small part in telling the story of Essex but also to rediscover it for myself. To go again into the untamed marshes and the hedgerows and the woods and the towns, and see its diversity through the new perspective of having lived elsewhere.

I’ve learned a lot in the process.

It was a tough shoot, technically, and I’ve honed my craft throughout it. James had a lot of miles to cover each day, and I had to keep up with him. I had to line up shots for each sequence and make sure I had enough coverage, I had to make sure everything was in focus, correctly exposed, steady, make sure the audio levels were correct and the batteries were charged and I didn’t lose any kit - because I was carrying everything on my back with no vehicle, assistant, or base to return to.

Along the way I’ve discovered some hidden gems and met some fascinating people. It has reinvigorated a love for my home county that I’m thrilled to share with you.

Because the film is now finished.

Over 15 hours of footage distilled into just 75 minutes of The Essex Ways.

We hosted a little screening in Old Hadleigh Fire Station last week, and the full length feature film is now available to watch for free on YouTube.

So this is your invitation to pour yourself a cuppa, put your feet up, and explore my home with me.

Questions? Feedback? Opinions? Feel free to drop a comment or ping me an email. Other than that - enjoy.

Our seasons have been long tied to our calendar as a way of measuring how we work, how we live. Our ancestors rose with the sun, worked with the changing of the seasons, sowing and reaping in harmony with the Earth’s transit around the sun. The harvests weren’t always guaranteed: some drier than others, some wetter than others, but for the most part a stable climate created stable agriculture. This stability is what allowed hunter-gatherers to settle, paving the way for complex civilisation.

Take that stability away, and things begin to get shaky.

With a global food supply chain and industrial supermarket economy, you and I no longer have to rely on the seasons for our food. We can buy fruit whenever we it, not just in the month of harvest. Kiwis and satsumas and bananas, flown or shipped from warmer countries, are such familiar sights on our shelves every single day that it’s impossible to imagine a world without them.

It’s the same with our living and working spaces. With carefully air conditioned or heated offices, homes and vehicles, we have mastered the science of ‘room temperature’. Winter or summer, our spaces are homogenous, our thermostats are smart, and as the years have passed our lives have become utterly frictionless. My dad used to tell stories of the water in the toilet bowl turning to ice in the winter. Today I can tune my heating to within a fraction of a degree using my phone when I’m halfway across the world.

This might sound like a utopia, but there’s something innate that we’ve lost along the way. A kind of mammalian attachment to the orbit of the planet and the stars, an affiliation with the subtle shifting of the living world that indicates where we are on our cosmic journey.

Seasons should reflect not just the natural world but how we act within it.

Take winter. A time of dormancy, of rest and recuperation, of sleep while we wait for the green shoots of spring. A time to live on the reserves harvested from the summer’s bounty.

Yet for many, winter - with its Christmas shopping bonanzas and holiday sales - is the most stressful time of year. It has been commodified to the extent that for many businesses it is boom or bust.

If you work a nine to five office job you’re expected to show up and perform to the same standard day in, day out, every single week of the year. The next year your performance is measured against your targets and your targets increase. Your performance is expected to do the same. You become trapped in an endless pursuit of something you can never hope to complete. There are no cycles, there is no ebb and flow, there is just permanent work. For decades.

It’s no wonder we’re all losing our minds.

With detachment from the seasons comes a detachment from the living world itself. As our climate continues to heat up with the burning of oil and gas, the seasons themselves are beginning to fracture. Plants and trees that depend on the gradual use of energy throughout the summer are being exhausted by heatwaves before summer has even begun. Warm winters are confusing insects, throwing pollination patterns out of sync.

Here in Britain we could reliably depend on a fresh, sunny and damp spring to ease into a pleasant summer. This would give way to a crisp autumn, and with the falling of the leaves would come a cold, frosty winter. This year, rainfall has been pitiful. Climate deniers will ignorantly shout that ‘it’s just summer, it’s always hot’ even as record-breaking wildfires sweep our heaths and our farmland and the rivers and reservoirs run dry. In July 2022, when temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius for the first time ever in the UK, the trees shed their leaves from sheer stress.

In the coming years, these kinds of events will become normal, and we’ll bear witness to catastrophe on a scale we haven’t seen before. In the same way that I’ve never had to break the ice in the toilet, my children will never see a summer that isn’t thick with wildfire smoke.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a visit to a little gem of a garden in London.

OmVed Gardens is a learning centre, exhibition space, and sustainable garden that explores climate resilient ways of growing the food of the future.

I went to check out the exhibition of the garden’s artist-in-residence Vivienne Schadinsky, who was combining research into beans (a very sustainable and resilient food that effectively recycles nutrients back into the soil) with the ancient Japanese art of sumi-e painting.

It was there I discovered that as well as the broad strokes of summer, autumn, winter and spring, there is a traditional Japanese observation of kō - 72 microseasons, each lasting roughly five days, that mark the smallest and most subtle of changing patterns.

I love these. They show a deep understanding of the land and the air and the water and the way it changes over the year. They suggest an innate intertwining of our lives with that of the living world - by marking the dates of the human calendars with specific events in nature.

When summer is associated with holidays, winter with shopping sprees, and spring with the financial year, capitalism has taken complete control of the seasons. How much more in tune with our planet would we be if we measured the year by the emergence of insects, the singing of birds, and the blossoming of fruit trees instead?

Perhaps we’d be more in sync with the world around us, with the perils that face it, and take more urgent action to preserve the stability on which our civilisation depends.

You can explore the exhibition at OmVed Gardens here.

The Japanese 72 microseasons are:

BEGINNING OF SPRING

East wind melts the ice (Feb 4th - 8th)

Bush warblers start singing in the mountains (Feb 9th - 13th)

Fish emerge from the ice (Feb 14th - 18th)

RAINWATER

Rain moistens the soil (Feb 19th - 23rd)

Mist starts to linger (Feb 24th - 28th)

Grass sprouts, trees bud (March 1st - 5th)

INSECTS AWAKEN

Hibernating insects surface (March 6th - 10th)

First peach blossoms (March 11th - 15th)

Caterpillars become butterflies (March 16th - 20th)

SPRING EQUINOX

Sparrows start to nest (March 21st - 25th)

First cherry blossoms (March 26th - 30th)

Distant thunder (March 31st - April 4th)

PURE & CLEAR

Swallows return (April 5th - 9th)

Wild geese fly north (April 10th - 14th)

First rainbows (April 15th - 19th)

GRAIN RAINS

First reeds sprout (April 20th - 24th)

Last frost, rice seedlings grow (April 25th - 29th)

Peonies bloom (April 30th - May 4th)

BEGINNING OF SUMMER

Frogs start singing (May 5th - 9th)

Worms surface (May 10th - 14th)

Bamboo shoots sprout (May 15th - 20th)

LESSER RIPENING

Silkworms start feasting on mulberry leaves (May 21st -25th)

Safflowers bloom (May 26th - 30th)

Wheat ripens and is harvested (May 31st - June 5th)

GRAIN BEARDS & SEEDS

Praying mantises hatch (June 6th - 10th)

Rotten grass becomes fireflies (June 11th - 15th)

Plums turn yellow (June 16th - 20th)

SUMMER SOLSTICE

Self-heal withers (June 21st - 26th)

Irises bloom (June 27th - July 1st)

Crow-dipper sprouts (July 2nd - 6th)

LESSER HEAT

Warm winds blow (July 7th - 11th)

First lotus blossoms (July 12th - 16th)

Hawks learn to fly (July 17th - 22nd)

GREATER HEAT

Paulownia trees produce seeds (July 23rd - 28th)

Earth is damp, air is humid (July 29th - August 2nd)

Great rains sometimes fall (August 3rd - 7th)

BEGINNING OF AUTUMN

Cool winds blow (August 8th - 12th)

Evening cicadas sing (August 13th - 17th)

Thick fog descends (August 18th - 22nd)

MANAGEABLE HEAT

Cotton flowers bloom (August 23rd - 27th)

Heat starts to die down (August 28th - September 1st)

Rice ripens (September 2nd - 7th)

WHITE DEW

Dew glistens white on grass (September 8th - 12th)

Wagtails sing (September 13th - 17th)

Swallows leave (September 18th - 22nd)

AUTUMN EQUINOX

Thunder ceases (September 23rd - 27th)

Insects hole up underground (September 28th - October 2nd)

Farmers drain fields (October 3rd - 7th)

COLD DEW

Wild geese return (October 8th - 12th)

Chrysanthemums bloom (October 13th - 17th)

Crickets chirp around the door (October 18th - 22nd)

FROST FALLS

First frost (October 23rd - 27th)

Light rains sometimes fall (October 28th - November 1st)

Maple leaves and ivy turn yellow (November 2nd - 6th)

BEGINNING OF WINTER

Camelias bloom (November 7th - 11th)

Land starts to freeze (November 12th - 16th)

Daffodils bloom (November 17th - 21st)

LESSER SNOW

Rainbows hide (November 22nd - 26th)

North wind blows the leaves from the trees (November 27th - December 1st)

Tachibana citrus tree leaves start to turn yellow (December 2nd - 6th)

GREATER SNOW

Cold sets in, winter begins (December 7th - 11th)

Bears start hibernating in their dens (December 12th - 16th)

Salmons gather and swim upstream (December 17th - 21st)

WINTER SOLSTICE

Self-heal sprouts (December 22nd - 26th)

Deer shed antlers (December 27th - 31st)

Wheat sprouts under snow (January 1st - 4th)

LESSER COLD

Parsley flourishes (January 5th - 9th)

Springs thaw (January 10th - 14th)

Pheasants start to call (January 15th - 19th)

GREATER COLD

Butterburs bud (January 20th - 24th)

Ice thickens on streams (January 25th - 29th)

Hens start to lay eggs (January 30th - February 3rd)

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The endlessly hot weather has thrown nature into confusion too, with blackberries ripening and sycamore trees hanging thick with seeds before August has even begun. The grass has been bone dry and yellow for months.

So with a couple of days off work I was more than happy to jump onto a train with my family and head up to Northumberland for a bit of respite.

From Kings Cross we took the train to Berwick-upon-Tweed, then a bus down to Seahouses. In the late afternoon I stepped out onto a coastline where the grass was still lush and green, the air was light and I could breathe again. As swifts, martins and swallows swirled in the cloudless sky I was so much more comfortable I almost wept.

I wasn’t there to just sit around, though. I was there to see puffins.

In the distance I could make out the shape of Inner Farne rising gently from the sea. Last August I spent a few days here but at the tail end of the breeding season I was too late for most of the puffins. This year I hoped I was on time to stroll along the boardwalks and watch the puffins scurrying to and from their burrows.

But the weather had other plans. In this summer of drought, the day I had booked for the trip was - of course - the day that clouds rolled in off the North Sea and the rain came on us in great sweeps. The island closed for visitors.

But the puffins were there: my God, the puffins were there.

We took a boat around the islands, huddled in waterproofs against the driving rain, and watched them crisscrossing the sea and jumping from the clifftops.

And not just puffins, but shag and guillemots and gannets and kittiwakes and eider and terns and grey seals, thronging and clamouring, a cacophony of noise amidst the spray and the salt.

The boat rolled and heaved and I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, trying not to think about the breakfast churning in my stomach.

2025 marks the 100th year that National Trust has been caring for this rugged ocean sanctuary. Every year the puffins flock back from spending the winter rafting out at sea, and this year was no different.

But what I would give to have walked these cliffs just a few decades ago. The declines of these birds mirror the environmental crises that have unfolded worldwide over the last few decades.

John Walton, who spent 33 years working on the islands, chronicled his experiences in the June/July issue of The Northumbrian. He noted the population declines from the logbooks.

Eider: 1,800 pairs in 1983, 237 pairs in 2024.

Shag: 1,900 pairs in 1983, 61 in 2024.

Sandwich tern: 4,000 pairs in 1980, 173 in 2024.

Arctic tern: 4,500 pairs in 1983, 410 in 2024.

Common tern: 350 pairs in 1987, just 10 in 2024.

Even as the skies seemed thick with birds, and grey seals hauled themselves over the rocks, the islands were eerily quiet in comparison with years past.

The next morning, the clouds broke and a golden dawn seeped out across the harbour.

While my family slept, I sneaked out at 5 a.m. and headed onto the coastal trail that winds past the town along grassy cliffs.

I didn’t see another human soul, but the air was anything but silent. Instead, my ears filled with the sound of waves, of the cries of oystercatchers and kittiwakes.

It sounded like this:

On the way back to the house, I stopped to watch the first fishing boats arrive. One proudly waved a banner supporting Reform UK, and I wondered what kind of promises had been made to the young men working on that boat. A quick bit of searching later and I imagine they were enthusiastic about Reform’s proposals to double the size of Britain’s fishing zone.

But the party’s anti-environmental policies - to scrap net-zero and replace renewables with more North Sea drilling - would wreak havoc on the very fish that these guys rely on for their living. It doesn’t matter how big the fishing zone is, if we ramp up the boiling and polluting of our seas there won’t be any fish for them to catch.

All too soon, the return trip to London beckoned. But not before we spotted the steady rise and fall of a pod of dolphins just beyond the harbour.

They moved with such casual grace, slowly and calmly among the gentle waves. Watching dolphins at play is a privilege, and no matter what was happening that day I would have spent every minute I could with them. They made their way gradually along the coastline, towards Bamburgh, until we couldn’t see them anymore.

Beside me, my son peered out from his oversized waterproofs and watched them too. I couldn’t help but wonder what this place will be like even a few years from now.

But for now, we stood by the sea and we breathed deeply together.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, you’ll probably like this:

Or this:

If you haven’t seen it yet, my latest film is live on YouTube:

And a personal update from me - I am, as of this week, a freelance filmmaker and photographer. My biggest challenge, I think, will be self-discipline. Advice welcome.

If you want to support my work and read my previous posts, you can become a paid subscriber to Urban Nature Diary.

Or you can buy me a coffee.

Or you can recommend me the next time you hear of someone in need of video or photography content. You can check out my work and get in touch with me here. I’m based in the UK but I work internationally.

As ever, thanks for reading.

At school, we were strongly encouraged to take the traditional routes of Oxbridge education, studying English or Law or Mathematics. Art was viewed mostly as a hobby - an exercise in free expression to be done outside of hours, before getting back to the real, more important world of training to be a middle manager in a faceless corporation.

I’ve always loved drawing but found I could express myself better in other ways - through writing, photography, film, and screaming in the middle of a field. So it was thrilling for a small watercolour I painted of Walthamstow Wetlands to be shortlisted for the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition this year.

I was instructed to package it up and take it to the Royal Academy in London where it was to be judged. The atmosphere was fabulous. People carried enormous canvases on their shoulders, wheeled them in carts and unloaded them from vans. TV crews interviewed artists who had travelled internationally to bring their work to the RA. They wanted to know what they created, why they created, and what inspired them.

Ultimately, my little painting wasn’t chosen to be exhibited. But the process of being shortlisted suggests that what inspired me - a quiet sundown over a reservoir of coots and swans and cormorants - also triggered something in somebody else.

Nature is at the core of what I do. Looking back on the formative moments of my life, the commonality with all of them is some kind of connection with nature.

There’s something about creating art - especially the tactility of putting pencil or paint to paper to canvas - that helps people process an experience. In the same way an author could gush for pages on how they remember the evening light playing on the water of their childhood, or the sounds of a British bramble thicket in Spring, an artist can convey the same emotions with brushstrokes. It’s not so much a method of communication but of expression, of capturing a mood and a place and a memory.

There’s an imperfection to practical painting that scratches an itch that a perfect image wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

Today, AI generators can spit out perfect images in seconds. But there’s rarely a story to be told there. They might be pretty enough portraits, but by their very nature are simply amalgamated from every other wildlife portrait that exists on the internet - making them about as generic as it is possible to be.

Perhaps it’s this flawlessness - this ability for machines to churn out glossy pictures without breaking a sweat - that makes me seek out the beautifully imperfect work of human artists.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards, exhibited each year in London’s Natural History Museum, are a necessary annual pilgrimage for me. Each photograph is exquisitely composed and presented. But the ones that speak to me personally are the entries in the photojournalism category, which tell the remarkable stories of the intersection of human and natural worlds. There’s an unflinching honesty to them, and many that bring me to tears.

These photos would have been impossible to stage or replicate with the same effect. I recently came across the mesmerising journals of David Measures that glow with a similar honesty.

From his obituary:

Traditionally, paintings of butterflies were based on the observations of pinned, dead specimens — faithfully rendered illustrations of flat two-dimensional, albeit colourful, laminas. David Guy Measures was anything but traditional, and he was the first artist to tackle painting and sketching these winged wonders from life, going on to portray all of the British species from his own direct observations. He was not only a superb naturalist; he pushed and extended the boundaries of the wildlife art genre.

I love these. They’re messy, unfinished, and perfectly capture the fleeting glimpse of a passing butterfly in flight. Surrounded by his field notes and observations, his work conveys that feeling of frantically noting something down before it’s forgotten; before it passes from sight and becomes a fading memory.

In 1768, artist Sydney Parkinson travelled with Captain James Cook on the HMS Endeavour to the Pacific, to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti and to explore what would later be known as the east coast of Australia.

Historically, there are deep, complicated colonial connotations to these voyages. But through Parkinson’s work, we can also experience a genuine sense of wonder at what his European eyes were seeing for the first time.

With no digital camera or zoom lens, he relied on his sketchbook to record what he saw. He quickly built up an extensive body of work of flora and fauna and landscapes of Australia and New Zealand.

His sketches give me the same feeling as Measures’ butterflies - of the attempt to note down an observation before it escapes, no matter how rough. It’s the work of someone deeply passionate about discovering the world around him.

Of course, Parkinson’s experience of Australia will only ever be through the lens of someone who would never fully understand that land. The Aboriginal people have been living continuously in Australia for 50,000 years, and their culture and art is complexly intertwined with the natural world.

But in a world in which cities are expanding, nature is disappearing and connection with it is almost entirely absent from many people’s lives, can we still find inspiration from the natural world?

The Romantics like Constable and Morris longed for a return to the quiet pastoral scenes of Britain they mourned as industrialisation transformed the land. As generations of people have grown up without attachment to a place and its seasons and its native species, nature has vanished from our music, our films, our art and our design just as it has vanished from our world.

At the current rate of environmental inaction, nature’s influence on our culture will soon be in memory only - an aching longing for what we had and a realisation that we took for granted what every generation of humanity has had in abundance before us.

The next time I go out, I’ll take a sketchbook with me and do my best to capture the fleeting beauty of a butterfly on the wing, or the sparkle of the summer’s light on the down of a drake, and hold it close before it disappears.

I encourage you to do the same.

It’s warm here in the UK. Hell, it’s warm everywhere at the moment. I hope you’re managing to stay cool and hydrated.

It’s an apt backdrop to last week’s London Climate Action Week, and it’s been a busy one for me. I screened my film The Birdwatchers at one event, and sweated my way through a screening of a great film about indigenous wildlife protectors courtesy of Prince William’s wildlife charity.

If there’s anything to lift me out of my eco-anxiety, it’s surrounding myself with people who understand and recognise the importance of nature and are taking steps to try and protect it. It’s something I’ve had the pleasure of doing for the last three years since taking a job at a global environmental non-profit. But for a few weeks, going has been rocky.

I can thank the U.S. government’s anti-environmental policies for a sharp drop-off in grant funding which has left the future of my role uncertain. So it seems likely I’ll be wrapping up there soon and looking for something else to do.

The question is what.

If you’re living with your eyes open you can see the world’s a hell of a mess, but unfortunately I still have to do things like “pay bills” and “buy food”. I never had the technical knowledge or foresight (or, let’s be honest, the energy) to earn millions from an app or a social media platform or a bank robbery so I still need to rely on income.

For the last eleven years since I entered the workforce after graduating (Law and Criminology, first class honours, thanks for asking) I’ve been chained to a desk from 9am until 6pm from Monday to Friday, and plenty of evenings and weekends as well.

Before I worked for the non-profit, I worked in advertising. A lot of my skills are still applicable to that world in the private sector. But I don’t particularly want to spend my time applying for jobs at corporations who exist only to cause harm. I don’t want to bust a gut for some startup to ‘cut through the noise’ and I don’t want to ‘thrive in a fast-paced environment.’ I’ve done a lot of that in my career and very little of it has been for the benefit of people other than my employers.

If I’m going to continue to work every day until I die, it needs to be for a purpose. It needs to be work that’s solving genuine problems and building a better world.

A friend of mine asked me a question the other day:

“Would you take £100 million to use today if it meant you died tomorrow?”

No, I answered. I don’t need £100 million that badly.

“Then when you wake up tomorrow, you should feel like you won the lottery because you value whatever mundanity tomorrow brings to be worth more than £100 million.”

I like this a lot. It reminds me of palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware who recorded the five biggest regrets of the dying. It shouldn’t be surprising that one of the top regrets was ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.’

The coming shift in my work situation is leading me to reconsider what I do and how I spend my time. The corporate ladder interests me less now than it has ever done before. AI companies are determined to replace me anyway. So perhaps this is an opportunity to reset. To prioritise filling my heart, not my bank account. If I can cover what I need to live a happy life, why should I sacrifice my precious time and energy chasing more?

If I only had a day to live, I certainly wouldn’t spend it thinking about work. I want to spend more time with my family, drink tea, and create art.

Is that so much to ask?

A couple of weeks ago I took some time off in Denmark with my wife’s family. My brother-in-law rented a cottage by the sea on the east coast, close to where he lives.

There wasn’t much in the way of activities planned. Just a short daily walk to the beach through a rose thicket bursting with blackbirds and yellowhammers, and some bikes in the shed.

The weather was glorious: clear blue skies and an endless azure ocean. (Seemingly endless, I mean. It eventually ends in Sweden.) One afternoon it rained and I stood at the high glass windows watching it come in off the sea in great sweeps. It felt like how I’d imagine a seed in a flowerbed to feel, with the watering can of a kindly old lady dangling above me.

As is my unconscious habit these days, I kept my eyes constantly peeled for wildlife. You can imagine my thrill when I first stepped up to the house and had to duck below a pair of swallows flashing right past the doorway.

The swallows were nesting in the eaves of the shed, which was wide open. There was also a swallow nesting above the back door. The nests were perfectly formed from mud and grass and both were home to three squat and ugly little baby swallows, sticking their little beaks out and looking at me disdainfully.

I kicked myself for not taking my camera with me, so I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with a photo from my phone.

I don’t think I realised how blue swallows were before I watched them so close.

For four days I thoroughly enjoyed watching these swallows dart back and forth past the house. When someone was outside they would float around or perch on the roof and patiently wait for them to step away again. On more than one occasion, a kestrel hovered above the thickets by the beach and the protective swallows would divebomb it, trying to chase it away. The kestrel mostly ignored them.

One thing I forgot about the Nordics in the summer was the confusing lack of darkness. The sun set briefly from about 11pm and rose again at 3am. One morning I was wide awake at four o’clock and I went and stood outside while everyone was still asleep. I looked at the sea and listened to the dawn chorus, which was magical and deafening.

Yellowhammers in the UK seem to be few and far between these days. I might hear one or two on a walk near a farm, but I’ve never heard or seen any in London or Essex where I grew up. Yet here in Denmark the bushes were full of them. A flock of eight or nine of them flashed past me and settled in a small tree, making it glow yellow.

It probably helps that the entirety of Denmark has a smaller population than that of London, but there were noticeably more birds and insects around in the few days I was there. And - my goodness - not a scrap of litter to be seen. No plastic on the beach, no plastic in the verge, no plastic washing up with the gentle tides. Just sand and stones and crab shells and jellyfish and terns diving off the coast.

One lazy afternoon, when people were napping, I took a bike from the shed and cycled down the coast. It was warm but not hot, the sun shining gold on the fields of gently sighing crops.

I could count on two hands the number of cars I saw in that 90-minute bike ride. For the most part I could cycle through open countryside past verges of poppies and feel entirely alone. My bike had one gear and a little basket on the front which I enjoyed very much. The light and the shadows and the sounds of the wheels click-clacking down the road danced together in a simple but beautiful choreography. Free-wheeling down the hills made me feel like a kid again.

I didn’t think about work at all.

Except, actually, I did think about work. Because over the weekend I read a book called Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber.

If you’ve ever worked a corporate job before, Graeber’s theory is compelling. He argues that most white collar jobs can easily be finished in 10-15 hours a week, and the rest of the arbitrary time we’re committed to the week is spent having meetings, sending emails, and filling out paperwork that achieves absolutely nothing. In fact, most work is not only pointless but actively destructive - psychologically as well as physically.

The jobs with the most tangible social benefit - like cleaners, waste collectors, bus drivers - are not just the lowest paid roles in society but the most derided. The jobs with the least tangible social benefit - hedge fund managers, marketers, corporate lawyers - are the highest paid, most aspirational roles in society.

Yet Graeber’s book is bursting with testimonials from people who feel frustrated, distressed and in some situations clinically depressed at being stuck in jobs they know are completely worthless, often despite earning enormous salaries. They are exhausted spending their lives being tied up in meaningless bureacracy, attending aimless meetings, and filling out forms nobody reads.

We measure the health of our society by the metric of economic growth instead of, I don’t know, human health or biodiversity or happiness or education. You don’t need to be a mathematician to realise that pursuing infinite growth in a finite world is only going to end in catastrophe. GDP is of course important, but as the only metric for society it’s a complete disaster.

Consider capitalism’s best friend and only judgement of human worth: productivity. Is someone who works on the London Underground being productive when they assist a disabled person onto a train? Is a mother being productive when they look after their sick child? Both require labour and skill and time and provide indisputable benefit to society, yet this kind of ‘caring economy’ is not valued in the same way as profit-making enterprise.

Do I think my job is pointless? No. But I also don’t feel like I need to be strapped to my desk for an arbitrary number of hours each day to achieve the same output. If anything, having more flexibility in my time would probably lead to better results because I could work when I’m most engaged and not when I’m forced to.

A 2022 study explored the impacts of a four-day working week on 61 companies. It was a ‘resounding success’, with 56 of them continuing with the four-day week and 18 confirming the policy is a permanent change.

The benefits were tangible:

‘Before and after’ data shows that 39% of employees were less stressed, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. Likewise, levels of anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, while mental and physical health both improved.

And more convincingly for business owners:

Companies’ revenue…stayed broadly the same over the trial period, rising by 1.4% on average, weighted by company size, across respondent organisations. When compared to a similar period from previous years, organisations reported revenue increases of 35% on average – which indicates healthy growth during this period of working time reduction.

David Graeber is unwilling to make any explicit policy suggestions in the conclusion of Bullshit Jobs, but he does float what he sees as the most convincing alternative to pointless work: universal basic income.

When everyone - rich and poor - is paid the very same flat rate that covers the basics of housing, food and bills, society is released from the compulsion of work for the sake of work. It creates a meaningful approach to how we spend our time, giving people the freedom to choose the path they want to choose. It unlocks time for creativity. Without a bullshit job sapping our energy every day, how much meaningful art would we create? How many life-changing novels? How many technological leaps of medicine and ecological sciences? How many people could leave harmful marriages without being financially impacted?

It would provide value to unpaid work - caring for our children, our sick relatives, our land, nature, ourselves. It would decouple livelihood from work.

This might sound like an economic utopia, but governments would be foolish not to at least consider it. They have to, right? Otherwise why would they be investing billions in AI designed to replace our jobs? We can either build a society where employment is valued so much that we will harshly judge the unemployed and invent meaningless jobs just to give people things to do all day, or we can build a society where AI runs our economy and leaves us with the freedom to write, paint, care, and make music. We can’t have it both ways.

It’s no secret that life is short. Imagine if we could spend it embracing our full potential instead of being forced to rot behind a desk just to be able to afford rent.

Last month, one Sunday, we took the train up the line a bit and went for a long walk in the countryside.

Cuckoos cuckooed, bumblebees bumbled, and we soaked it in.

Waiting at the station to catch the train back, an insect settled on my wife’s arm. It was a mayfly, and it seemed quite content to just rest for a moment.

The mayfly is known for its short lifespan. Its goal seems to be two things: hanging out with its friends and having sex. It will hatch, do those things exclusively for about a day, then die.

I don’t think I had ever seen one up close before, although I knew their swarms can be very impressive when they hatch together in spring.

I thought this one was alone - until I looked up.

Above us were dozens of mayflies. Whirling, spinning, flitting this way and that, a column of insects towering above us as we sat on the railway platform.

They circled around us, landed on our arms, our shoulders, on our son’s pram. Existing for just a single day, we found ourselves at the heart of their brief lives.

They had no concept of forms to fill in, or direct debits to set up, or two-factor authentication.

They had no interest in billboard advertisements or cherry flavoured Coke or collectible card games.

They had no opinions about football transfers or social media influencers or streaming services.

They had no notion of Microsoft Teams or emails or spam calls.

They emerged into the bright mid-May sunshine among blue water and green leaves and did what they were put on Earth to do.

They saw beauty, and they danced.

Disclaimer: if you make any purchases through the affiliate links in this post I may earn a small commission through bookshop.org.

It seemed to resonate with people, so if you missed it here’s another take on it - this time in the form of a short film.

As much as I enjoy writing here on Urban Nature Diary, I’m a filmmaker by trade and creating audiovisual art is another natural way for me to express myself.

I put some good hours into making it, and this work wouldn’t be possible without my generous paid supporters. So if you enjoy it and would like to see more, you can support me here on Substack or buy me a coffee.

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If this newsletter isn’t the place for you to watch videos, head over to YouTube instead and don’t forget to subscribe to keep up to date.

Oh, and thanks for your patience with the irregularity of my posting recently. Various life happenings and juggling a six-month-old with a full-time job has turned my brain into alphabetti spaghetti. But how is it for you? How often do you want to see my work in your inbox?

In the meantime I’ll be back with you soon with some brand new writing. Thanks, as ever, for your support and readership.

In Essex, where I’m spending a couple of days, there was a sprinkling of rain for a couple of hours. I hear in London there was a bit more. I hope there was. It’s the first time I’ve seen rain in well over a month. Maybe even two.

This spring is on track to be - if it isn’t already - the driest ever recorded in the UK.

The springs of my childhood were beautiful: sunny and fresh, with rain sweeping the land and lush green vegetation bursting into life.

This spring has been almost entirely without rain. Temperatures we’d expect to see mid-summer have risen in April instead. Soil is rock hard and cracked, plants and grass are dusty and browning, and rivers are low and quiet. Record wildfires have spread throughout the country.

Drought experts have met to discuss measures after reservoirs have shrunk, and more than one farmer has voiced alarm at the drought. "If rain doesn't come soon my crops won't recover,” says one. We can expect to see food prices skyrocket this year.

We’ve moved very quickly from being warned of the potential impacts of climate change to feeling them firsthand.

But for those of us brought up in a culture of abundance and consumption, the alternatives are difficult to imagine. The recent rain is nowhere near enough to fill up the reservoirs and water the crops. We can hope that ‘normal’ weather patterns will return but as long as emissions continue to rise and we continue to treat natural resources as if they’re infinite, things will only get worse.

Agriculture isn’t the only industry in need of fresh water. Microchip production for electronics, for example, requires a continuous supply of pure water. Drought restricts the production of microchips, which restricts the production of electronics, which disrupts supply chains and economies around the world. In 2022, the water levels of the Rhine in Germany were so low that shipping routes were affected. These are just some of the tangible economic costs of climate change.

When water does come, the ground will be so hard that we’re likely to see considerable flash flooding. This is how climate change manifests through water: either too little, or too much.

In 2021, Cape Town became the first global city to come close to running out of water. One of the more drastic water-saving measures implemented was the felling of non-indigenous trees to protect reservoirs.

Alongside dramatic emissions reductions to try and mitigate even worse outcomes of droughts, we need to completely reimagine our relationship with water.

A phrase I’ve often heard throughout my life - particularly at school when comparing the UK with countries around the world - is that the water we use to flush our toilets is cleaner than the drinking water of other places.

I don’t know about you but I always thought this was a strange boast. It didn’t make sense to me that we would flush our toilets with drinking water. But then seemingly infinite fresh water always came out of the tap so who was I to argue?

Using a single water supply for everything is certainly more cost-effective than using potable water for some taps and grey water for others. But our water systems were built with the short-sightedness that there would always be an abundance of fresh water on hand. That is no longer the case.

Grey water is the dirty water that is left over after washing the dishes or taking a bath. At the moment, that water is immediately drained into the sewers. A vision of a more sustainable society would be to put that water to better use.

The impact of drought is felt not just in industry but in the natural world, too. It reduces the amount of nectar produced by flowering plants, which negatively impacts pollinating insects. So if there’s one thing you can actively do to support bees and plants and trees, it’s give them some grey water.

Collect your washing up water in a bowl. Shower with the plug in. Water the soil with what’s left over. Soil and compost are good at filtering out contaminants so you don’t need to worry about getting some diluted shampoo on your rose beds. Mild soap detergents won’t affect plants - just don’t go dumping a load of bleach and harmful chemicals on them. Don’t use it on edible crops, either, as the bacteria and contaminants of untreated grey water can spread disease.

If you’re not sure about the chemicals in your grey water then consider how long you have to leave the tap running while you’re waiting for it to heat up. That’s litres of potable water going directly from the system to the drain. It’s a complete waste. So collect it and do something useful with it.

You don’t even need to have a garden to make use of it. I live in a flat, and the lavender growing by the street downstairs is stunted and withering in the lack of rain. But lavender is a valuable food source for bees of all types in the summer, so I lug my washing up bowl down three flights of stairs and give it to the plants. I do it at night so that 1) the sun doesn't immediately dry it out and the water has time to filter into the soil, and 2) my neighbours don’t think I’m a nutter.

Then again, what’s more sensible behaviour? Giving plants clean water we could be using for drinking? Or giving plants water we can’t do anything else with?

Imagine if a grey water treatment system was installed in every neighbourhood or even every house, filtering the worst of the contaminants to reuse in different places. This would help alleviate the pressures on the reservoirs.

Permaculturists have adopted the recycling of grey water through reedbeds. By filtering water from showers and dishwashers through layers of gravel and sand and then through reeds, the water goes back into the landscape in the form of a pond which supports a wider ecosystem. Nature is well adapted to filtering out contaminants so clean water can then be redistributed to vegetable gardens.

That’s just common sense.

Changing our relationship to water in a changing climate will require the same shifting cultural mindset we need to apply to everything. It can be summed up in two words:

Don’t waste.

We can no longer afford to extract what we can’t put back.

Installing grey water treatment and water recycling systems in every household is likely to be, well, expensive. But my counter to that would be to consider the alternative. When months of brutal drought grip our formerly rainy isle in the summers to come, what will the cost be?

Hundreds of millions of water are wasted every day through leaking infrastructure. Untreated sewage is continuously released into rivers and seas. Yet the bosses of water firms still walk away with millions of pounds in bonuses every year.

What’s the cost of not upgrading our water infrastructure?

What’s the cost of not changing our attitudes to water?

What’s the cost of not doing anything?

There will come a time very soon when we will be clinging on to every drop of water we can.

Adapting to that world begins today.

It is the only tree standing in the farmer’s field.

I don’t know why the farmer ever left it standing in the first place. I don’t know if it has a preservation order attached to it. I don’t know how long it’s been there but it is almost certainly the last of what a hundred years ago would have been an impressive woodland.

What I can say is that for 23 years that lonely tree has been a fixture in the view from my childhood bedroom window, and I feel a great affinity towards to it.

It stands vigilant as the seasons come and go, as the people in my life come and go, as the good things in my life come and go, as the bad things in my life come and go.

It stands vigilant in the rain and the heat and the fog.

It stands vigilant in the dead of night and in the brilliant noon sun.

My dad once envisioned hanging a set of four photographs of it on the wall in the house - a series displaying the tree throughout the year as it changes with the seasons. I don’t thing that ever happened, but I don’t think it was needed - I can picture that tree intimately even when I close my eyes.

When I was out walking with my friend James recently as part of our filming along the Essex Way, he stopped many times to - in his own words - ‘have a moment’ with a tree. A cool-looking tree that spoke to him on some kind of spiritual level. He would explore it, speak to it, pat its trunk affectionately, then turn and wish it a good day.

He was channelling what humans have experienced since before we even learned to walk upright - a deep relationship with these complex bioological systems that resonates throughout our history, culture, folklore and mythology. Trees are shelter. Trees are refuge from predators. Trees are life-givers, and homes of ancient spirits that know far more about this land than us mortals ever will.

I’m certain everyone has a relationship like the one I have with the tree in the field. Even if they’re not aware of it, it will be subconscious, subtle, a feeling they might not be able to quite put their finger on. But if that tree were to disappear, that connection would be severed and the feeling would be a horrible lurch of the stomach the same as it feels when you get bad news. The uncomfortable feeling that something significant has vanished from our lives and we didn’t have the chance to say goodbye.

All around the world, people felt a particular connection with a tree in Northumberland that was planted over a century ago.

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The sycamore at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall was a cultural icon. It drew visitors from across the country and overseas. It featured in people’s wedding proposals, celebrations, and moments of grief. As far as trees go in the public and private consciousness, this sycamore was a cherished celebrity.

In September 2023, two men cut it down in the middle of the night for no reason. They took a wedge as a trophy and left the rest of it where it fell.

The felling - and the despair and rage felt across the country - became international news.

The National Trust’s Andrew Poad was quoted: “We’ve been amazed and inspired by the offers of help and good wishes we’ve received from here in Northumberland, around the UK, and even from overseas. It’s clear that this tree captured the imaginations of so many people who visited, and that it held a special – and often poignant – place in many people’s hearts.”

The subsequent court case was widely publicised on British news. In the prosecution’s eyes, the two men became “public enemy number one” and were remanded in custody “for their own protection”.

On Friday 9th May 2025, they were found guilty of criminal damage. The maximum sentence could be up to ten years in prison. Prosecutors said the pair carried out the "mindless thuggery" as a "bit of a laugh”.

Just a few weeks ago, an ancient oak tree in Whitewebbs Park in North London was felled. The massive tree - of a size that made it one of only 60 in London - was over 500 years old. It was a significant ecosystem of its own, hosting hundreds of species and holding vigil as a cornerstone organism in the wider environment.

The incident prompted a similar response of outrage from the public. A criminal investigation was launched - and it was discovered that the tree had been cut down on the orders of the nearby restaurant Toby Carvery, as they had declared it to be “mostly dead and diseased” and posed a risk to the public.

Enfield council leader Ergin Erbil said this was false. “We have evidence that this tree was alive and starting to grow new spring leaves when this action was taken. Our team of experts checked the tree in December 2024 and found it was healthy and posed no risk to the neighbouring car park and its users,” he said.

Ecologists later said they expected the tree to live for decades more, had it not been felled. But the police dropped the criminal investigation, referring to it as a ‘civil matter’ instead.

This all happened in the looming shadow of a threat from Tottenham Footbal Club to turn the rest of Whitewebbs Park - a thriving ecosystem and vital green space for the community - into a private football training ground. The work would level much of the grassland and ancient woodland, replacing it with astroturf.

Local nature expert and filmmaker Ian Phillips explains it better than I could:

The public outcry and national news coverage of the destruction of these two trees speaks volumes about the cultural importance of nature, and how closely we hold individual elements to our heart. Seeing this conversation about nature so prominently at the top of the news agenda can only be a good thing.

Yet all over the country, all over the world, trees are felled in countless numbers every day and met with silence from the public. Here in the UK, the tediously drawn-out construction of the HS2 train line has resulted in the demolition of a vast amount of precious ancient woodland.

Trees are cleared constantly to make room for new roads, new housing developments, new warehouses, new data centres, every single day. Millions of square kilometres of rainforest around the world are cut and burned every year to make space for the beef industry. These destroy not just habitats for countless species - many of which are driven to extinction before even being discovered - but also the ability for the planet to regulate its climate. If you’re in the UK or the USA it might be easy to think that what happens in the Amazon is something remote and unrelated to your day-to-day life, but the record heatwaves and droughts and wildfires we are all experiencing are tangibly linked to its collapse.

To its credit, Brazilian ambitions to reduce deforestation in the Amazon seem to be working, and rates have been dropping steadily in the last two or three years. But the amounts cleared every year are still vast. And bafflingly, to prepare for the volume of people attending the upcoming international climate conference COP30 hosted in Belém, tens of thousands of acres of protected rainforest were destroyed to make room for a four-lane highway.

Nature, on every level, is deeply integrated into our everyday minds, our lives, our consciousness. Humanity is not separate from nature - it is interconnected in complex ways.

In my opinion, the corporate individuals who authorised the felling of the Whitewebbs oak should be subjected to the same criminal investigation as those who felled the Sycamore Gap sycamore. The outpourings of grief and anger that stem from the loss of just two precious trees are both tragic and joyous to see. They also prove that we as a species have not entirely severed our cultural connection with the rest of the Earth. At least not yet. So how can we expand our sights beyond individual organisms to consider nature as a whole?

Many, many, people around the world express deep anguish and despair at the harm done to nature by individuals and financial systems that will only ever lead to humanity’s self-extinction. If you are reading this, you are probably one of them. But many people still blithely go about their daily lives ignoring the grasslands turned into concrete, the woodlands replaced by unaffordable housing developments, the oceans dragged to oblivion.

Perhaps it’s easier to pretend it isn’t happening than it is to face up to the reality of the change that is required.

But change is required. And it will only come when we look around.

You can read more about Whitewebbs Park and how to protect it here.

The Woodland Trust is doing great work championing Britain’s woodlands. Give them a hand.

Here’s what you can do to help protect rainforests.

I don’t mean the walls of your house, the whitewashed fence, the nettles growing between the paving stones you keep meaning to pick and the third floorboard on the landing you instinctively know to sidestep in the middle of the night to prevent the creak from waking up the guests in the spare room.

I don’t mean the teacher at the primary school who plays in a jazz band on Saturday evenings, or the postman who has walked a little slower and smiles a little less since his wife of 23 years passed away.

I don’t mean the blackbird who visits your doorstep each morning hoping for crumbs of stale toast, or the sounds of the terrier barking at the paper boy three doors down at 6am.

You already know these things. Instinctively, if not consciously, you know them. And this is as much your home as anything else.

But what I mean is the land itself. Its ecology, its geology, its sociology. Its paths, its ways, its songs. Its stories, its traditions, the culture that seeps deep into the soil and has shaped it for generations even before you thought about living there. If you listen closely, your home will speak, and it will speak without judgement of the countless lives that have come before it, that have moulded it over time.

I grew up in Essex, on the east coast of England. Flat, dry, and bordered by marshes overlooking the North Sea on one side and a patchwork of agrarian greens and browns on the other, it is a land of myth and history and hard but loving people.

It was tainted, in the UK’s eyes, by The Only Way Is Essex, a reality TV show that painted the people of Essex with the brush of orange tans, fluorescent teeth, a coarse accent and people with nothing more interesting to talk about than themselves. Since the show first aired 15 years ago to huge success, it has defined the conversation with everyone I’ve met when I tell them I’m from Essex - even international travellers.

The reality is, of course, wildly different. The show centres on just one small town on the fringe of London, and doesn’t touch on the complexities of the other hundreds of miles of coastline, marsh, villages, towns and cities and the two million people who live there.

I’ve lived in both north and south Essex, both very different experiences, but after being in London for the last seven years I have begun to wonder if I truly understand my home county. There are parts of it I’ve never visited, landscapes I’ve never seen, folk stories and tales from history I’ve never heard before.

So when my friend James kicked off a project to travel 450km around Essex, starting in Epping and following the Essex Way to the north of the country before turning and heading south down the coastline to finish in Tilbury, my interest was piqued. When he asked me to come with him to document the journey in a short film, I jumped at the opportunity.

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James runs a blog called Man About Country and offers guided nature walks and storytelling sessions around the country. He shares his adventures on social media and I chatted to him about it last year. He lives in the southwest of the country now, but like me grew up in Essex and has a particular fondness for its fields, its beaches, and the eccentricities of its people.

He’s walking for 21 days in total, past ancient trees and Saxon wooden churches and historical landscapes that speak of robbery and war and love over the years. Sadly I can’t join him for all of it, but so far I’ve walked with him on and off for several days with my camera in tow.

His fascination with the world around him is endless and infectious, and it’s given me a renewed appreciation for Essex - not just its landscapes and history but the openness of its people. James has been updating his audience on social media with progress of his journey and more than one person has greeted him with enthusiasm and an offer to introduce him to a place or a story they love, recognising him from his videos.

He has met people from all walks of life, people who have opened their homes and their hearts to him as he journeys on foot through our home county. The walk is building a picture of a county that has been shaped and defined over generations by the people who have lived and worked there, and continues to change at a rapid pace today.

Many of its green fields are being bulldozed to make room for massive urban sprawls that will change the cultural identity of the place forever. The coastline shrinks and creeps inland beneath the seemingly inexorable bootprint of climate change. But there are people working hard to revitalise its natural spaces, to keep the developers from concreting every available inch of land, to bring the wild back into what was once a wild place.

All of it, for good or for ill, is part of the story of Essex, a story that will continue for centuries more, with the echoes of humanity imprinted into the landscape long after the Earth has shaken us off entirely.

It’s a story I am privileged to be a part of, and privileged to help tell even just a fraction of.

Production of the film is ongoing, but I’ll keep you updated with how it’s shaping up, and you can keep track of James’s journey on Instagram and TikTok. And if you’re in or close to Essex and see him passing, give him a wave and tell him your story.

The tree had been there for as long as she could remember. Maybe even longer than her grandmother could remember. She ran her hand absently over the wood, fingers tracing the lines of the graffiti etched into the trunk. Names and phrases from passers-by who had become a part of the tree, a part of the landscape.

The butterflies spiralled away and she brought her attention back to the present. She became dimly aware of words floating in with the late summer breeze.

The voice of her mother, calling her home.

She leaped up and ran, vaulting the low wall as she had done countless times before, disturbing a flock of sparrows that briefly shaded the sun like a dark cloud before dissipating and settling elsewhere.

The streets were busy; she weaved through crowds and dodged the wheels of a cart, its driver pulling the horse sharply and cursing her as she sprang in front of it. She took a back road past the baths and almost tripped over two old men playing knucklebones on the corner. She ignored their protests, ducked below an archway and paused in the doorway of her house, just long enough to brush the dust from her tunic, slow her breathing and pull a twig from her hair.

‘You’re late, Aemilia.’

The voice from behind her was that of her grandfather, face tanned and lined and carved into a permanently wry smirk beneath sharp blue eyes.

‘But I won’t tell if you don’t.’ He held out his hand and slipped her a stuffed date. She popped it into her mouth, wiped her sticky hands on her tunic, and they headed into the house together.

‘Four months?’ Aemilia felt her stomach lurch.

‘Close your mouth,’ said her mother, ‘we have company.’ Her grandfather busied himself with bread and cheese, keeping his eyes low and out of the conversation.

Her father’s voice was as gentle as ever. Aemilia had never heard him raise it, not even when he burned his hand so badly at the smith he kept it wrapped for several weeks and had to learn how to work left-handed. ‘I know it seems like a long time,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be so busy here you won’t even notice I’m gone.’

Four months. Four months without his laughter, without his hugs, without his calloused but gentle hands tousling her hair as the scents of coriander and fennel drifted from the cooking pot. Four months without her father. Aemilia’s eyes began to sting.

He guided her gently to the doorstep and pointed at a young tree in the peristylium. ‘Watch the leaves,’ he said. ‘You see how they are beginning to tinge gold?’ She nodded. ‘By the time I depart, the first leaf will fall. When all the leaves are gone, I will be back.’

She wiped her eyes. Watch the leaves. She could do that.

She remembered planting the tree when her father brought the sapling home years ago. She had helped dig the earth with her own hands, as deep as she could, and mix up the soil with wood ash from the stove. It had felt smooth and cool and smelled deeply of life. She had marvelled at how the death of one tree could feed another.

Now the tree was young, small leaves sparkling in the gentle sunlight that eased in through the open roof.

As they stood there, the leaves began to quiver. But Aemilia felt no summer breeze on her face this time, and in a moment the earth beneath her feet growled and hummed. Clay pots rattled on a nearby shelf, and an even layer of dust dislodged itself from the rafters and drifted down to dance in the sun.

Aemilia instinctively laid one hand on the wall to steady herself. Her father ignored the tremor entirely.

‘I will go with you,’ Aemilia said.

Her father laughed. ‘A ship is not your place,’ he said. ‘You’ll be sick as a dog before we even left port, and not even Neptune would be able to help you.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Aemilia pouted. ‘I can sail as well as any man.’

Her father squeezed her hand. ‘This is your home. Keep it, and tend it, and I will be back soon.’

She buried her face in her father’s tunic and the ground below them rumbled.

The grapes were fat and red. Aemilia made sure to sneak plenty into her pockets when her mother’s back was turned, although she was certain her mother knew what she was doing and turned a blind eye anyway.

The rest she cut and bundled into low wooden boxes. As the summer waned, the rest of the city turned out to do the same. Her mother whistled absently as they worked, and younger children chased each other between the vines. Aemilia had perfected her own method. With one hand she grasped the stem, with the other she cut with her little knife her father had made her. She knew exactly which angle to cut with to avoid the notch that had chipped while she had been trying to whittle hard wood three summers ago. Her father had offered to replace the blade for her but she had refused - she liked the new shape of it even if it meant she had to adapt how she used it.

The grapes tumbled into the box and she moved onto the next one.

She liked the routine of it. The motions were rhythmic, almost cathartic. She was surrounded by the same faces that worked the vineyards every year. Of course, some were more lined and worked a little slower than when she was a toddler, her mouth and hands stained red, following her mother as she whistled the same tune, but there was familiarity here. The grape harvest was how it had always been. It’s how it always would be.

Except when a cool wind blew in off the mountain and she looked up, she saw her father watching her with a cloak around his shoulders and she knew that change was coming.

She had never been fond of the mountain. Her friends had played there, scrabbling up boulders and slopes and exploring the cracks and crevices. She had been with them only once, but had tripped and skinned her shins on the coarse stone. Her friends had carried on regardless but she had limped home and her mother spent the evening picking stones from her flesh.

And now it just stood there silently, as motionless as her father who she knew wanted to stay as much as she did. She could see it in his eyes, dry and set but on closer look were deep wells of softness she felt she could swim in.

She cursed the mountain and she cursed her father and cried until he wrapped his arms around her and she was swallowed by the cloak that smelled of him.

She went with him to the port.

The ship was already waiting, its crisp white sails snapping in the wind. Gulls wheeled high, circling the glittering bay with their eyes on the fishermen mending their nets.

They pushed through the crowds and her father loaded the rest of the ship with the crew. She willed the moments to pass slower, for time to freeze, for the noise of the port and the sea and the city to diminish into silence. But it didn’t, and she sat on the jetty and watched fish dart in the shadow of the hull until her father laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ he said.

‘I will swim after you,’ she announced.

He laughed. ‘You would beat us to Rome, I am sure.’

‘I wish nothing was changing,’ Aemilia said, looking at her feet. She could see the cerulean water dancing between the wooden slats of the jetty.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wish every day would just stay the same.’ She shivered.

‘Me too. It’s called getting older,’ her father said. ‘It happens the best of us.’ He kneeled to her level. She couldn’t help notice it took him a moment longer to kneel than it had when she was younger and he could lift her effortlessly. A flicker of discomfort flashed in his eyes and was gone. ‘But nothing is really changing. I will be travelling for a while, and the only thing that will change is the season. Remember what I said about the leaves?’ She nodded. ‘And when I return we can watch them grow again together. Buds at first, then a gentle unfurling, like a baby waking from a long sleep. Or a phoenix rising again after death.’

She understood, and accepted, and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Try not worry,’ he said. ‘Pompeii will always be our home.’ He spread his arms wide and flashed a bright smile. ‘The greatest city in the world.’

He stood and tousled her hair as he had done innumerable times before.

‘When the leaves fall, I will return.’

She sat on the jetty and watched the ship shrink beyond the bay, and white gulls followed it. She continued to stare at the horizon long after it had gone, until the jetty beneath her rumbled and the wood creaked and the ships rocked in the harbour. Sparrows took flight.

The crowds ignored the tremors as they had done innumberable times before.

The sun shimmered on the sea, and Aemilia turned her back to it. The mountain watched her go.

I think it’s important to build a sense of community wherever you are, and this is one of the few places in London I’ve been where it feels like the neighbours are still friends, or at least could be - a fading human tradition as people retreat indoors and behind glowing screens.

The street has its quaint characters and characteristics. In the spring, the geese from the nearby wetlands flood the road with dozens of goslings. They brazenly approach residents foolish enough to rustle their bags of snacks. They snatch sandwiches from people picnicing on the river. They leave their mess all over the street.

Personally, I love it. I think it’s fabulous that cars are forced to sit and wait while geese amble out of the way in their own time. I think it’s great that we share our space with nature. The proximity to Walthamstow Wetlands means we see sparrowhawks circling above us. Starlings and long-tailed tits and parakeets bound between rooftops. It’s a marvellous place to live and I’d wager not many, if any, streets close to central London experience the same thing.

Of course, as is the way with communities of humans living together, not everybody agrees. Some residents cannot stand the mess the geese make. Numerous times each year a resident will complain about it until the estate gardeners hose down the street, only for the geese to mess everywhere immediately the next day.

During No Mow May, when the gardeners stopped mowing the grass to encourage wildflowers to grow, complaints were raised that the estate looked ‘messy’ and ‘unpleasant’. It looked like this.

Even one of the directors of the residents’ association, charged with looking after the estate, recently raised a concern that the trees and hedges were ‘overgrown’ and needed to be cut back to ‘stop birds nesting’. This request was spurred by the financial damage they are perceived to cause to the buildings when they make their homes in the soffits - something I believe they have had to do because of a shortage of appropriate natural nesting habitats.

Here are some trees considered to be ‘overgrown’ at the moment.

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Don’t get me wrong, pollarding trees in the right conditions can promote sustainable growth and beats chopping them down completely. But when our experience of the outdoors is only through highly managed woodland, we lose sight of what a natural process is. Our vision of healthy trees is skewed towards one of tight human control.

Much of this stems from the central issue at the heart of all of human society: disconnection from nature. The perception that nature is an ‘other’ - something that belongs in the countryside, or on specialist reserves, the domain of birdwatchers and bug enthusiasts and not of the everyday people immersed in the ‘real life’ of spending eight hours in an office before driving home to watch reality TV all night. ‘I’m all for nature,’ they say, ‘I just don’t want it in my back yard.’ It’s the prehistoric mentality of fencing our caves to keep out mountain lions so we don’t get eaten. The outdoors is wild and scary, and has no place in proper society.

Of course, the reality is that homo sapiens are as part of the ecosystem as everything else, but the abandoment of this mindset produces a culture in which it is normal to replace our grass with plastic, replace our hedges with fences, spray the bushes with pesticides and cut down trees because they are ‘blocking the light’. Nature vanishes from our world and we respond with a shrug, if we notice at all.

The same isn’t for everyone, of course. Countless people are flying the flag for nature, building habitats in their own gardens and maintaining trees. The gardeners on our street have suggested building a wildflower meadow and a pollinator garden beside the canal, acutely aware of the plight of the butterfly and the bumblebee.

In 1993, when the estate was first developed, the plans included turning the entire far end of the street into a car park. A concerned resident overlooking the site wrote to the developers about how the end of the street was a pretty meeting point for waterbirds, a place for people to picnic, and requested they ‘reconsider sacrificing this little area to the Great God Car.’ The developers agreed and left it as a green patch where geese and people sunbathe in the summer to this day.

The proximity of this street to the canal, the nearby wetlands, and the abundance of wildlife is precisely why we chose to call it home. But for those who believe a neighbourhood should be free of greenery - or at least its greenery should be finely trimmed and exist purely for aesthetics - the idea that the grass should be left uncut once in a while is unthinkable sacrilege. To them, suggesting that maybe a patch of heather or a pile of deadwood or a birch tree or a nesting box might be a nice addition to the garden is like suggesting they convert to an entirely different religion.

In truth, I don’t know how to change mentality. It’s why I started writing Urban Nature Diary - to try and remind people of the importance of nature connection, and perhaps imagine a world where ‘normal’ human habitation includes an abundance of trees, wildlife, ponds and native wildflower meadows in every garden.

The key for me in all of this is balance. It’s of course impractical to expect people to put up with a hornets’ nest in their front room, or squirrels chewing through electricity cables. But with no allowance for nature at all, the scales have tipped dangerously far the other way.

Reconnecting with nature at home is the gateway to further action. Rethinking how we live - even in a small way - opens the doors to wider conversations about how we eat, how we work, how we consume. Top-down decisions on nationwide management and international regulation can make sweeping changes, but they will only come when pressured by those who understand what’s at stake, clamouring for a better way of life.

A way of life with thriving soils, plants, insects and birds, even in the heart of our towns and cities.

Today the sun was shining, a brimstone butterfly took to the air, and I had the pleasure of having lunch by the canal with my fiancée and our son.

Sometimes the notes of a place meet together in such harmony you never want the song to end.

I hope you are enjoying the changing of the seasons, wherever you are in the world.

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Yes, you.

Oh. Why does nature need helping?

Because the natural world is disappearing. Wildlife populations have declined by 73% in the last 50 years. Our rivers are polluted, our forests are vanishing, and the planet is heating up to scary temperatures.

Blah blah blah. Why should I care?

Human civilisation depends on nature. If you enjoy things like eating, drinking, and being alive, you have nature to thank for it. Without nature, we won’t be able to do those things.

I enjoy those things!

Me too.

So what do we need to do?

We need to reduce carbon emissions quickly in the next few years, and restore ecosystems so that the natural world can continue to function.

Wait. What have carbon emissions got to do with nature?

Climate change and nature loss are two sides of the same coin. Climate change is a symptom of our broken relationship with nature. And many of Earth’s ecosystems, like our forests and oceans, play a role in regulating the climate of the planet. When they fall apart, the Earth heats up even more.

Climate change is caused by 5G, right?

No.

What causes it then?

Burning fossil fuels.

So we should transition away from fossil fuels to renewables which are cheaper and more efficient?

Yep.

Isn’t this something the government needs to do?

Yes. So it is important to be politically active and use your voice. Vote for parties who champion the renewable transition and nature restoration. Write to your leaders and hold them to account for the climate and environmental pledges they have made. Join peaceful protests.

Isn’t environmental action expensive?

For you? No. Governments and companies will have to spend a lot of money to transition our economies and power grids. But it’s far cheaper than the damage that is being caused by extreme weather around the world. Without environmental action, our economies will collapse completely.

This is big stuff. What can I do?

As a consumer, the products and services you purchase have an impact on the world. Take protecting forests, for example. You don’t need to tie yourself to a tree, or even go to a forest to help it. Buying things like recycled toilet paper, food that doesn’t contain palm oil, and second-hand furniture all directly reduces deforestation - because then you’re not supporting the unsustainable harvesting of natural resources.

What else can I do to help nature at home?

Anyone can help to restore local habitats, which will help insects and mammals, which will help ecosystems overall. Also, having lots of greenery in your neighbourhood will make it much cooler in a heatwave.

I’m not an ecologist. Can I still help?

Do you have any access to green space?

I have a tiny garden.

Let it grow. Plant native flowers and shrubs to build habitats for insects and small mammals. Pile up deadwood to provide a home for invertebrates. Collect rainwater and use it in your garden instead of taking clean water from the pipes. Build a pond.

But I don’t like gardening.

You don’t have to. Just leave some parts of your garden to grow - especially in Spring - and you will be helping nature. Nature likes mess. Keep it wild.

Will that really make a difference?

One habitat is better than no habitats. If 10 people read this and add flowering plants to their gardens, that’s 10 more places for insects to thrive. If 1,000 people do that, that’s 1,000 more places. A garden with one bee is better than a garden with no bees.

My garden’s made of astroturf.

Ew. Get rid of it.

What if I don’t have a garden?

Get yourself a window box and plant some flowers to help passing insects. Or join a local conservation group to help build habitats in public green spaces like parks and nature reserves.

Will that cost me money?

Nope. Environmental and conservation groups are always looking for volunteers.

Shouldn’t we be using green space to grow food?

Agriculture depends on healthy insect populations and nutrient-rich soils to grow crops. By giving space for nature, we also increase crop yields. The best organic farmers grow food hand in hand with natural systems. You can support them by buying your food from your local farmers’ market.

My town doesn’t have a farmers’ market.

Yes it does, you just haven’t ever looked for it before. The vegetables from your local farms will taste better than the plastic-wrapped stuff that’s flown from across the world, too. Which reminds me, eating more vegetables and less meat and dairy is an easy win to reduce emissions too. The meat industry emits a lot of methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - and relies on deforestation to create pasture for cattle. Chemicals used in the industry also run off into our waterways, killing river life.

Don’t we also need space for crops?

Not as much as for cattle. We can use that extra space to rewild land and restore ecosystems, which recycles nutrients into the soil, which increases crop yields.

But veganism is part of the liberal woke agenda!

You don’t have to go full vegan to make a difference, just stop eating meat every day.

Buying food from my farmers’ market is more expensive than the supermarket.

Yeah, but the money is also going directly to the farmers instead of CEOs. Besides, you can save money by reducing what you spend on garbage you don’t need.

But I want to spend my money on clothes hauls from Shein and Boohoo.

Those clothes are trash and end up in the bin after a month. Buy less, buy better. Buy good quality stuff from ethical brands that minimise their impact on the environment. Buy to last. Repair broken items instead of just buying new ones. Buy second-hand to support the circular economy. You can get great clothes for basically nothing on sites like Vinted.

Sounds like communism to me.

Wanting to live a healthy life on a healthy planet is not communism.

Anything else I can do?

Talk about it. Most people are aware the environment is in crisis, but don’t know how to help. Support environmental organisations like WWF, World Land Trust, Fauna & Flora, The Wildlife Trusts, Client Earth, Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, Rainforest Alliance, Marine Conservation Society, Rewilding Britain, and all the many more local and international groups of people working tirelessly to prevent more damage being done to our world.

This all feels like a lot.

It is. But there’s great stuff happening everywhere. I live in the Lea Valley in the UK, and hundreds of volunteers have worked to bring the river back to life in just a couple of years. “Kestrels, weasels, shrews, wood mice and other small mammals had been slowly disappearing from around the River Lea until hundreds of volunteers began rebuilding their ecosystems with piles of logs, artificial food caches and by selectively cutting trees, known as coppicing.” You can read more here. And check out this awesome film of the whole project here. If they can do it, we can do it.

If I had to do just one thing to make a difference, what would it be?

Don’t waste. Don’t waste food, don’t waste water, don’t waste energy, don’t waste money on mindless consumerism. If everyone reduced their waste we’d cut our negative impact massively.

I’d rather sit on the couch and play video games.

Me too. But this problem isn’t going away if we keep ignoring it. Living in a society means we have a shared responsibility to look out for each other. But the world doesn’t need 100 perfect activists. It needs millions of imperfect activists. Nothing I’ve mentioned here today is difficult. It just needs people to show some altruism.

What does altruism mean?

It means caring about other people.

What if it’s all for nothing?

Nothing in life is guaranteed. You have to work to protect what you love. And things don’t have to be perfect. But they can be better.

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