Bate, one of the most brilliant proponents of ecopoetics, ‘our inner ecology cannot be sustained without the health of ecosystems’. In his book The Song of the Earth (2000), a tour de force, or at least a tour de chant, Bate argues that ‘The dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination.’ The means by which we might do this, according to Bate, borrowing his terms from the American poet Gary Snyder and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is to understand works of art as ‘imaginary states of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems, and by reading them, by inhabiting them, we can start to imagine what it might be like to live differently upon the earth’. In a riddling conclusion to his book, Bate writes that ‘If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.’
Book plate of Erich Saffert, Doctor of Agriculture and Forestry Surveying, Austria, early twentieth century (courtesy Sieglinde Robinson)
Bad news: poetry is probably not the place where we will save the earth. And there is probably little evidence either for Bate’s contention that ‘mortals dwell in that they save the earth’. Mortals dwell, rather – or certainly have dwelt – in that they use the earth, from the Romans and the Saxons clearing British woodland for developing iron-smelting works, to the development of Forstwissenschaft (forest science) in Germany, where algebra and geometry combined to produce a kind of mathematics of the forest, by which foresters could calculate volumes of wood and timber and therefore plan for felling and replanting. Ecopoetics yearns for oneness with the natural world, but all of our experience suggests that separation from nature – domination, despoliation – is the norm.
So how to continue in this difficult relationship? How to find our way through the gloom? How to dwell with forests and with paper? Might we perhaps restrict ourselves solely to rotefallen, or wyndfallen wood, so-called cablish (from the Latin ‘cableicium’, or ‘cablicium’), in order to provide ourselves with fuel and with fibre for our books? Should we all become little Thoreaus, building cabins from small white pines? Perhaps we should further investigate alternatives to wood pulp in paper production – alternatives which include sustainable crops such as hemp, straw, flax and kenaf? At the very least we should respect our paper – if nothing else, as a sign of respect for ourselves.
Woodcut map printed on paper, sixteenth century
Redrawn from Capability Brown’s plan for Burghley House
© The Omnipotent Magician, Jane Brown, Chatto & Windus
‘Maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines,’ wrote the geographer J.K. Wright in his classic essay ‘Map Makers are Human’ in 1942. Times have changed: these days, maps are turned out automatically by machines, or at least by humans using machines known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the computer hardware and software that’s used to capture, store and display geographical and topographical data and which, according to one standard introduction to GIS, ‘is changing the world and almost everything in it’. Computer mapping systems were first developed by the Canadian government and then at Harvard University during the 1960s, and by now we’re all accustomed to maps that we can simply download, pinch, zoom and click rather than scribble on, fold and leave to rot at the bottom of a rucksack: atlases at our fingertips, giant globes in our pockets. Logically, the paper map should already be consigned to the glove compartment of history. But it isn’t.
This may be due to the fact that people simply like the look and feel of paper maps – with some people of course liking the look and feel of them much more than others. In 2006, a man called Edward Forbes Smiley III was jailed for stealing more than a hundred maps, worth $3 million, from collections at Yale, Harvard and the British Library. Smiley sliced the maps out of books using a razor blade, in much the same fashion as another famous map thief, Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer from Florida, apparently as unassuming as his name, who was in fact, according to his biographer, the ‘Al Capone of cartography’ – though without the violence, bootlegging, bribery and late-stage neurosyphilis. Bland, like Smiley, was really just a petty thief with a taste for antique paper.
So why do people steal maps? For the same reason they steal money and books, of course: because they’re paper marked with symbols that make them valuable. But perhaps more especially, people steal maps because a map is a symbol of conquest, so the theft of a map somehow represents the ultimate conquest: the possession of the means of possession, as it were. At least, that’s my theory. No gangster mapper, I have to admit that the temptation to snaffle old paper maps has occasionally been all but overwhelming: the seventeenth-century, gold-enriched, handcoloured, multi-tinted maps issued by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and sons, for example, on display in the Dutch Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, are so extraordinary and so exquisite that only the most dimly pixel-fixated could fail to feel the stirrings of desire (Blaeu had to design and build his own printing presses in order to produce work of such quality). Or the maps produced by Christopher Saxton under the authority of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, the first ever maps of the English counties, beautiful, simple, restrained, lovingly hand-crafted by engravers and artists imported from the map-pioneering Low Countries, and popularly reproduced on playing cards. Or John Seller’s seventeenth-century sea charts: full-fathom masterpieces. Or the maps of the great Sanson family of France – no relation – whose work, in the words of one authority, was ‘always dignified and attractive, with an ornamental cartouche’. If only.
Even my own modest collection of Half-Inch Bartholomew maps, with their tweedy Edinburgh elegance, have a kind of satisfying thickness to them, a fullness, like a wooden jigsaw puzzle, or an old Bakelite radio, a reminder that things were somehow heavier and thicker, more substantial, in the old days. The past always seems to weigh more – because often it did. My Bartholomew maps, some of them over a hundred years old and of printed paper mounted on linen, barely show their age except for a little fraying at the edges, and still sit sturdily in the hand on long hikes, like Arthur Wainwright’s ubiquitous pipe, or a greaseproof wrap of sandwiches. It just seems natural to find one’s way using a printed map – presumably because for centuries people have indeed navigated their way with paper, so we have become accustomed to them guiding us towards our destination: map-reading another of our many ingrained paper habits. In an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2008, ‘Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience’, Dr Toru Ishikawa, a cognitive-behavioural geographer at the University of Tokyo, found that pedestrians using GPS devices made more errors than those using paper maps (but that people using paper maps made more errors than those who were shown the route in person). Dr Ishikawa has also studied how people view art in museums using both audio-visual aids and traditional guidebooks and floorplans: those using the new technology tend to forget what they’ve seen quicker than those using the traditional guides. Good old paper, man’s best friend, trotting along beside us like a faithful retriever.
It can even be relied upon in virtual realms. In the Super Mario series of video games, for example – which includes the excellent Paper Mario, Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and the spin-off Mario and Luigi series – part of the appeal and attraction is not only that Mario can fold up into a paper plane, and a paper boat, feats which are of course excellent and impressive in themselves, but also that he often navigates the bewildering virtual
