The East Country is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed nature writer Jules Pretty integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. Pretty frames his book around Aldo Leopold and his classic A Sand County Almanac, bringing Leopold’s ethic—that some could live without nature but most should not—into the twenty-first century. In The East Country, Pretty follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. Pretty convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better.
Table of Content
Preface
A Geographic Locator
January
1. The Winter Hesitation
2. One Glossy Ibis and Many Ticks
3. Winter Gales and Beliefs
4. Walk the Line
5. The Weight of a Snipe
6. The Old Battlefield
February
7. Paths and Prints in Snow
8. Closing Time
9. To Iken
10. Saturation
11. The Box Valley
March
12. Disturbing Hints of Spring
13. The Beach Crows
14. Some Spring for Celandine
15. Blackthorn Days
16. The Blue Light of Spring
April
17. Two Buzzards
18. The Long Night of Hope
19. Mystery Solved
20. Nightingales and Green Men
21. Sailors’ Reading Room
22. The Assington Elms
May
23. The Owl and the Sun
24. The Bat and the Wild
25. Time Travel
26. Since Records Began
27. Bells in the Cow Parsley Section
28. Encounters
29. The Northern Sky
30. All Four Margins
June
31. Magic in the Thicks
32. The Lost Shore
33. Hollyhock Summer
34. A Submission
35. Lay-Bys of the A12
36. The Cottage Hospital
37. Come Back the Wild
38. Anniversary
July
39. Village Edgelands
40. Nature at a Nuclear Power Station
41. Digging for Victory
42. Under Another Atomic Sky
43. Heat Wave
August
44. Pause for Ragwort
45. The End of the Road
46. Nightwalk
47. Soon, the Departure
48. The Tinker’s Cottage
49. The Turn
September
50. The Path
51. Mud Birds
52. Angels in the Back Lanes
53. Season of Mist and Fire
54. In Memoriam
55. The Rhythym of Farm Names
October
56. Insect Life
57. A New Anniversary
58. Things and Doubt
59. Alarm Call
60. The Sands of Another Summer
61. Wait for the End
November
62. Bonfire Night
63. At First, Silence
64. The Night Hours
65. Leaf Fall and Mists
66. Beach Fishermen and Water Sprites
67. Much Can Change in a Short Time
68. Passing Years
December
69. A Marsh Murmuration
70. Poor Man’s Heaven
71. Dark and Wet at Solstice
72. Pruning and Planning
73. Dark and Wet, Again
74. An East Wind
Crossing the New Year
Acknowledgments
Notes by Tale
Bibliography
List of Photographs
About the author
Jules Pretty is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex. He is the author of many books, including The Edge of Extinction and This Luminous Coast, both from Comstock Publishing Associates, and The Earth Only Endures. He is coeditor most recently of Green Exercise.
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