Not only ladybirds

There were also these rather pretty pink flowers. No idea what they are.

And birds... um.... sort of... a great tit and a treecreeper, creeping away.

And, as ever, bark. The beech bookends the pine.

I was thinking about a line from the book i am relistening to (Headrick's Humans versus Nature). He said, writing of tsunamis and volcanoes and plagues and droughts, that to think of nature as a passive victim or innocent bystander is to get things very wrong.

Now, I have read books about animal resistance - and that take comes up in the work done on orcas, but also on animals in captivity. Plus I read one about the idea that climate change is nature's resistance... or at lest i think I did. These tropes - revenge or resistance - don't sit quite right with me. Though i would say that the tiger in Vaillant's book was seeking to avenge himself. It's perhaps that I think there is something both simpler and deeper going on that I can't quite put my finger on.

Let me see. well, I think innocence has this patronising edge - it is, after all, about "un-knowing". I think that nature is nocent. Knowing. And other animals too. Blamelessness... that's what people might be meaning... maybe... but that suggests that one does not have the capacity to act in a way that could be deliberately damaging... it's a lack. Like passivity. They immediately place the other in the need of our support and defense, of our voices because they can't do it themselves.

Resistance suggests, of course, that they can act on their own behalf. So far so good. But why do I resist it? Because, unlike in the case of the tiger, it's not personal... no... that's not right - the animals in captivity do bear particular malice to those who are cruel. And they seek to deliver themselves very specifically from captivity.

I know why I don't like it... it is because the terms of human social organisation are distinct from the organisation of other animals, who all have distinct patterns of organisation, and to use the label of our organising politics etc seems to confer inappropriate concepts, while at the same time, I assume (because of my ignorance of their concepts), fails to mark certain depths of the actions. It's like applying the rules of wrestling to snooker. I mean, it could be a metaphor... and yes, I appreciate everything is ultimately metaphor - but a very limited metaphor... or a translation that lacks depth and asserts all sorts of inappropriate nuances.

Anyway. Yes.