5 ideas
In the whale hall of Bergen's natural history museum, Jamie stands beneath whale skeletons that have hung there for about a century and still slowly seep oil from the bone. The detail shows that an animal hung up as a finished specimen goes on being bodily and decaying long after it has been classified and put on display.
Places treated as pristine wilderness, like St Kilda and North Rona, carry the traces of people who lived, farmed, worshipped and died there: cleits, chapels, field walls and graves. Seeing them as depopulated rather than untouched turns the landscape from a backdrop for solitude into a record of human endurance and loss.
The aurora or an iceberg does not deliver a guaranteed sublime experience. The experience depends on sustained, patient looking, which includes waiting, confusion and the anticlimax of 'is that it?'. Wonder is something the observer practises, not something the phenomenon hands over.
Their trained ways of looking show her details a lone visitor would miss. The essay treats expertise as a set of lenses it can borrow, while keeping its own non-specialist, personal response.
The 'natural world' is not only out there in cliffs and seas. It also covers bone, bodily fluid, rot, a gannet colony's stench and guano, and our own mortality. Paying close attention to the unlovely parts of life breaks down the division between a picturesque nature to admire and the organic processes we ourselves are made of.