The genesis of this blog came from a wee article about landscape painting from a wonderful book by Richard Mabey,A Brush with Nature, 25 years of personal reflection on the natural world.
In the article he talks about the history of landscape painting, which originated from the great draining and redesign of the Dutch landscape in the 17th century. The point that interested me the most was the way we can see our landscape in two different forms "prospect" and "refuge".(1)

Prospect being the sweeping overview of landscape. " Just two centuries of these broad long focus capturings, the rolling farmland, the epic glens..., seem to have created archetypes for the countryside which have made us blind to the details,its contradictions and its movement through time".

I read this article and enjoyed it, but things only started to click into place after I had a conversation with Chris Walsh form the Kindling Trust, we got on to talking about the proposed Manchester Metropolitan University move to Birley fields which is just across from his office. I asked him whether he thought it would be negative losing the open space, trees and light. He wasn't certain as he said the area wasn't particularly thriving when it came to animal and plant life. I then put it to him that it was a good thing in the plans that they seemed to be keeping a lot of the trees. Chris while acknowledging the point, countered it by saying that trees are more for humans pleasure, what you also need is the foliage, good soil, scrub to create a good habitat for plants and creatures. The trees might make our streets look prettier, but lets not kid ourselves that they are doing all that much for the environment.

This brought me back to Mabeys article and how we see these big swooping vistas and landscapes, but don't see the refuge " the grass roots and hedge bottoms" that are essential to the picture. We lose the individual pieces that make the landscape special, and when we go about fashioning our new human shaped landscape we forget theses little details and placate ourselves by seeing big broad strokes.

Two more examples of this. I usually end up getting my rage on when I go shopping in the centre of Manchester. You start to get annoyed with the swarm, the mass of humanity. You have to take it apart to realise it is made of interesting people: mothers, bankers,strippers, and baristas.
We are not encouraged to stand out, or look at each other from a closer perspective. It is harder to be cold and calculating with one person, whether it is getting annoyed or falling in love.
With the group, whether out shopping, in an airport, or at a football game it just leads to one standard way of thinking, in my case, rage. The way to change that is to stand closer and have a better look and encourage the diversity of human behaviour.

My last piece on this is about the sea. Myself and my girlfriend Esther watched Hugh's fish fight and really enjoyed it( don't know if that is the correct word). It was amazing to see the fish being caught and thrown away. The mile long nets; just the huge number of fish that gets caught everyday with so many getting thrown away.
Discard is bad, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution to put in its place, but hopefully something will be agreed on by the EC.
It did get me thinking about the sea, and reading about how we will have made the oceans uninhabitable if we go over the 2 degree temperature rise, and how if we carry on coral reefs will be lost to our waters in the next 100 years.
Again we look at this big picture, we need to feed everyone so we need to catch fish. But we are not looking at what is happening to the fish and their habitat. If we are making the sea uninhabitable for the swimming sea snail, which makes up 45 per cent of Salmons diet we are not going to be eating salmon for too much longer(2).
Of course we have to look big, but the only way to do that is to start small and look at the individual pieces. My Mum and I always say how lucky we are that our house is by the sea, so that the surrounding area will never be built on. But alas that beautiful sparkling view can sometimes make us complacent and not see what is going on underneath.

References
1 Richard Maybey, A Brush with Nature, BBC books
2 Oceana survey
http://www.alternet.org/water/106762/how_climate_change_is_killing_our_oceans/?page=1