Author / Jon Woolcott

What happens when a tapestry that took millions of years to create begins to fray at the edges – and what does it mean that we are unstitching ourselves from other creatures, disentangling ourselves from those to whom we have been historically bound? We are living through those unprecedented questions now.

As we stand together for Remembrance Day For Lost Species, I want to raise a song for all of those beings knit together by the roots of prairie sod. Our work is not to eulogise them, but to fuel the fires of renewal.

The house sits atop a hill, half a mile inland off an unnamed road. Around it: fields, ferns, gorse hedgerows.

England was the country of my birth, but my parents, who were of Indian descent, were born in South Africa.

This was absolutely the countryside. The spinneys and fields had names, even if no mapmaker had ever thought to seek them out.