Conservation

Stories

5th July 2022

Spending lockdown alone in the New Forest canopy

In spring and summer 2020, as lockdown stifled human life, wildlife filmmaker James Aldred found himself alone in a New Forest hide filming nesting goshawks. Goshawk Summer recounts those strange, wondrous weeks watching the natural world unfurl into the space vacated human activity. We asked him about that time, at once teeming and devoid of life.

Authors

Miranda Whall

Miranda Whall

Miranda Whall studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London and Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been a full-time lecturer and the director of the Creative Arts Degree course at Aberystwyth University since 2006. She has exhibited her work internationally for many years and has been the recipient of many Arts Council England and Wales Grants and Residencies, she was awarded the Major Creative Wales Award in 2012 and in the same year was artist in residence in Spain, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand and Wales. Recent solo shows include Passage, at The Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art (ICIA) 2015 and Crossed Paths at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown Wales, 2018. Whall’s multiplicitous crawling, staring, walking, growing and travelling practice is a practice of getting close, of becoming a creature of the mud, the matter and the flesh of the world, an exploration of our need to develop a non - hierarchical, more ethical and more complex relationship to our environment and to our relationship to non – human others: plants, animals and technology simultaneously. Through performance and film Whall develops an economical, conscious, cultural, meditative, radical, transformative and socially engaged practice.

James Aldred

James Aldred

James Aldred is the celebrated author of The Man Who Climbs Trees and an Emmy Award winning documentary wildlife camera man and filmmaker. He works with the likes of the BBC and National Geographic and has collaborated with Sir David Attenborough on numerous projects including Life of Mammals, Planet Earth and Our Planet. He specialises in forest filming, especially at height within forest canopy, where he uses ropes and canopy platforms to film orangutans, chimps and birds of prey.

Guy Shrubsole

Guy Shrubsole

Guy Shrubsole is a writer and environmental campaigner. He has worked for Rewilding Britain, Friends of the Earth, the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and New Zealand’s Ministry of Agriculture. He has written widely for publications including the Guardian and New Statesman. His first book, Who Owns England?, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. His next book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, is published on October 27th by William Collins.

Events

Durdle Door Wild Swim

2nd September 2017
Durdle Door, England