10 Fab websites about Wilderness & Wildness

The links below lead to places I've selected because they might move you out of your routine and trappings into the landscapes and mindscapes which transform lives and societies. Break that job habit, just for six months. Read the fine print on the papers they gave you in Human Resources, claim your grandma is dying, and then get the fuck out into the wind and sand and wait for an animal who knows nothing of politics or profit to smile in your face and welcome you into a new world.
  • Gregory Colbert - There is Colbert, and then the rest of the amateurs beating the bush. Peter Beard might have blazed this trail, but he could never have imagined his work leading to the majesty of Gregory Colbert's art pieces. Colbert makes Cirque du Soleil look like lowbrow trash for plump tourists.
  • The original artist in the bush, Peter Beard - He does a special for ABC-TV twenty years ago, and brings a friend who knows the bush intimately, one of those white hunters who becomes a sympathiser and artist himself, as a sort of penance for blowing away all the little beasties, and Beard and this pal come across a rhino. And the rhino charges them, because of his bad eyesight, says Beard, and of course it isn't Beard but the friend who goes flying through the air to land on his back, bones broken. And Beard just marvels at the scene. Wishes he had his camera for that one!
  • Loving Turtles - One of my first encounters with the wild was catching turtles in the streams in the hills above the tourist hellhole of southern Spain. Then it was catching turtles by accident when we were fishing for barbel. As a beer-swilling hothead teenager, I killed one turtle by cracking its head to pieces with a tentpole, trying to rescue my hook. I have been doing penance ever since, believe me. I can't think of an animal more beautiful than a turtle mother laying her eggs in the sand. This website is for divers who love turtles. You'll hate Japan after reading some of the entries. (Consider this listing my indirect fury at Japanese policy toward whaling, too.)