AMPHIBIOUS SOUL

The creator of the acclaimed My Octopus Teacher documentary celebrates the merits of getting out into the real world.

Foster took up documentary filmmaking when he was assigned to a naval base outside Cape Town, working with the film-and-TV unit there. “The Cape’s African penguin colony had recently arrived and was steadily growing, having abandoned their island home in search of a better food source,” he writes. He wasn’t especially bothered by the arrival in turn of a huge population of great white sharks in the bay where he regularly dove. After military service, he took his camera into the desert, learning how to follow animal tracks under the tutelage of the San people. “The most seemingly insignificant signs on the ground or scratches on the trunks of the trees communicated a wealth of information,” he writes. Foster contrasts this Indigenous knowledge with the rest of humankind’s largely unnatural lifeways over the previous 95% of its existence, glued to screens and climate-controlled environments and such. Foster counsels that we instead take to the woods or fields and learn some tracking skills of our own, training ourselves how to identify plant and animal species and understand their lifeways in turn. The challenge isn’t exceptionally demanding, mostly involving a notebook, good walking shoes, and the investment of time, but the rewards are many. As the author observes, you will accumulate “your own nature dictionary that will ultimately transform your relationship with your environment.” There’s nothing especially original about Foster’s musings on nature and the value of spending time outdoors, but it’s a pleasant enough read, and it’s good to see the nature writing tradition of Laurens van der Post and contemporaries extended into our time.

A lucid invitation to build “spider threads of connection and love” with nature.