Wild by Jay Griffiths

"My feeling for wilderness or wildness was both a revolt from something and an impulse towards. Towards unfetteredness, towards the sheer and vivid world. Towards the essential freedoms, freedom of water, of fire, of ice, of earth, of air... My feelings now, personal and political, run to a savage love, and a savage rage.

"It is a rage against the cruelties committed for the sake of this bland consumer culture. A rage against the effects of factory farming, so a bird, flying exhausted, without seeds or hedge margins, drops out of the sky, falling dead to a desiccated earth. A rage against out of town shopping centres, placed on the last little chunks of the commons, the wild places on the edge of towns where children play, teenagers fuck, the homeless sleep and the artist idles into life. The commons up for sale - another enclosure. And the common flowers of the commons, sweet heathens, are rare now, and the sparrow, little brown jug of a bird, is scarce. A rage against the hollow men, the stuffed shirts who are the agents of the wasteland, making the Amazon arid and the Arctic an overheated suburbia."