Contact with Nature: Three Transcendental Experiences in the Natural World: John Beatty at TEDxHull

so how do we see the world I think about the wonderful writing of Antoine santech super ray in this lovely little book the little prince on the opening page the scene is set two men are talking to each other one says to the other what's your house like and the answers my house is worth a hundred thousand pounds and the man asks him back what's your house like and he says my house is covered in roses and so the scene is set that there are possibly other ways of looking at the bigger world I've always followed a great American photographer called minor white and one of the great statements that he made in his spirited photography was this go out and photograph a lamb a landscape for what it is and then go out and photograph it again for what else it is and so it gave me clues that there are different ways of being in the world as a child I was brought up in a suburban household on the south of Manchester and we had a garden with surrounded by a hedge and there was a hole in the hedge and I was dying to go through that hole it was so important to go into this of the world and I'd squeezed through the hedge and disappear for the day and out there was a reverie of a new world it was quite without rules it was it was completely interesting to explore and I saw the hedgerows and understood things that I'd never understood before I saw the Sycamore leaves the frog spawn the small sticks and stones that I took home in my pockets and filled them and took them to school put them on the nature tray and learned their names it's so important to learn those names and as I grew up I got into what I regard as exploration in some way in my life explored the nature of the rock but it's treacherous end I was interested in the adventure for example of rock climbing I was doing a lot of kayaking as well and as I left my teaching career I suddenly realized there was more in the world it was more out there in the natural world than I ever imagined and then after traversing some great peaks in Scotland actually the Northface have been nervous initially I stuff it a terrible accident out there back in 1974 but continued to develop my skills both in glaciated scenery in the Alps and also in the wonderful cooling Mountains of sky but there was more and I decided to leave that teaching career and embark on a job that was going to pretty much change my life and I applied to go to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey and to go down this very brave boat the John Bisco back in 1981 into the fastness of another world my job there would be to look after a geological scientist and to take him out into the wilderness of Antarctic Peninsula into the mountains and across the negotiating seas and frozen seas and islands and collect samples of rock he was an eminent geologist and his name was Brian Brian's story we began in this Center this ice station on Adelaide island called Rivera and now our duty was to go out for three months out into the wilderness and camp and collect the rocks now these tents look unsophisticated but actually inside they're very sophisticated in life in the tent becomes comfortable three layers to sleep on until he lamp to warm your cell phone and so on and good communications with the outside world but we are gone for three months so we have three months food but on this occasion we were ensconced at one point for five days in a very very big storm the wind blew at a hundred miles an hour the tent was buried and we maintain communications with the outside world through our radio Brian was a good companion but I didn't know him very well the first encounter with with him was literally camping in the tent and going about the business of expedition and then one day I was reading a book a novel which traditionally we would tear a page and share it tear a page and share it he didn't have a novel but he did have something else and so I had this ghastly experience of watching him struggle with the Rubik's Cube until at last he solved it and we just share the novel again but during that time we also were allowed in 1981 to relay 100 words out outside of Antarctica back to Britain to a loved one and I'd only just recently left a girlfriend that I was very very keen on and I realized I was going to have to relay a message to her through this telex system in front of Brian so this was the worst and most ghastly occasion and the radio operator said come on John what's your message and looked at Brian I could see his toes curling already and my message to my friend Jan at home was as follows my darling Jan I miss you so much here in the terrible cold I missed the warmth of your body and your scent like flowers in the spring etc and the radio operator came up to Brian said come on Brian what's your message now to your loved one and he said my girlfriend's cauldros just put what John said and sign it from me so during during that storm one of the aircraft at rather a station one of our support aircraft actually took off and turned over on the airstrip and it was broken up and of course we had to leave Antarctica but I was contracted back with Brian to go on at the research ship Bransfield and to tour the Antarctic Islands and experience I simply didn't expect to have and so I saw wonders in Antarctica the most incredible things some sights and sounds and experiences deep into nature that would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to experience in any other way and so a door opened in my mind about the future of what I might do I might try and be a photographer but still was more exploring to do so having got home to England I straightaway mounted an expedition to attempt to ski across Greenland and this became one of the most significant events in my life and some things I've referred to always concerning some of the things that happened that expedition the distance across Greenland is 400 miles and we eventually took 44 days to cover that distance we took no radio we had no means of communication it was real commitment it was the real thing it was a complete unknown and it was the unknown that I needed and so we set off up to an elevation through great difficulty of stressed ice and ice lakes and crevasses up to the distance of 5,000 feet above sea level we're trying to follow a route taken by Namsan the Norwegian biologist 100 years earlier to us it was arbitrary it was a mere pencil line for our simple magnetic compasses but we followed the spirit of it until we were high on the plateau and experiencing some pretty nasty weather 70 mile an hour winds encumbered us and caused us to camp down for two or three days but the opposite side of it was that we were out in some wondrous light in the dorms and dusk switch for us was midnight the sky was lit with colors it was lit with this phenomenal par hylia formation where the Sun rises through the ice clouds at night and refracts across the horizon two hundred miles from the end near the centre of Greenland we came across huge crevasses we struggled for days and days made some ground but eventually decided to abandon the sledges and walk out and suddenly after four days of walking we came to the edge without her almost a hint because all the ground of the mountains on the west coast of Greenland was hidden and we stepped from ice onto rock and from rock onto Heather and suddenly the world was filled with new senses for loading in the sense of smell the earth the flowers cotton heads bubbling streams caribou musk ox Falcons stimuli that I did not expect that was overwhelming I looked back across the ice and imagined that I was an astronaut coming into land coming in from an area where had been so deprived I had simply forgotten the world I'd stepped away and as I made that 40 mile trek through the coastal mountains and tundra of the west coast of Greenland I began to fear the world ahead because the world ahead was relationships mortgages city underpasses traffic lights roundabouts commerce work and those things to me are more complicated in life than the survival experience I'd had where I merely took the pressure of the sledge pulling that weight across the ice and feeding myself at night where my only vision was the sky through my hood without communication to friends and I realized that survival was easier and I've taken that sort of metaphor throughout my life and used it as great strength for me in the future another extraordinary example of being in deeply immersed in the natural world is in contact with animals not just contact but eye contact and when a wild animal actually looks at you that in itself is an extraordinary experience and there's one particular event happened to me in the country of Namibia in Africa a moment I simply never expected to happen we were hiking up in the district called de Maryland which is north of the great Namib Desert it's a region of stony mountains covered in crystals and I'd heard that there were some wild mountain zebra out in that region they very rare animals that unlike the Plains zebras of Tanzania and Serengeti and so on and so I set off alone one day with a knapsack along a tiny mountain path just around the back of this mountain that you can see the animal track was only a foot wide and I disappeared around the edge to see what was round the back to see if I could create a viewpoint to see some of the open gravel areas worth zebras might be I came around the mountain suddenly I saw 20 30 40 baboons on the path and they're looking anxious at me and I knew straight away not to have eye contact with them but to look away and I just stood still perfectly still looking at the ground and I was aware that more and more baboons were amassing one baboon is okay two or three are just about okay but 4250 starting to get agitated by my presence clearly was very worrying so I stood still and just waited and sure enough after five or ten minutes they calmed down and they melded away down the gorge walls at the side and I proceeded along the path within 300 metres round the path and hidden from my initial view I came across an extraordinary sight it was a mound of crystals it was this high and atop the crystals was the skull of a baboon well this was very curious I was most interested who has built this can did the baboons build it did Himba Shepherds in the district very ancient Stone Age people build this can and revere the baboon by adorning it with a skull I didn't know but what I did realize is that while I was looking at the can of stones the baboons were returning and this time they were blocking my path home and so we now have forty to sixty baboons getting very agitated and screeching and picking up stones and appearing from other small channels and tributaries towards me and now I'm actually very frightened I'm not sure whether to run there's no point in hiding behind the can about boons were going to have me and as I watched this unfold I saw in the far distance one particular male baboon on a skyline and in my tremulous fear at that moment I decided instinctually to raise my arm in some kind of gesture I did not know what to the baboon and the baboon raised its farm it repeated the gesture and I lowered my arm and as it lowered its arm following my movement all the baboons quest and they flooded away quietly down the gorge walls and left me to walk home freely back to my Land Rover now that was an experience I knew not what I have no explanation we've had a day where we've heard a lot of science I have no science for that fact I could only relay this extraordinary experience to you and closer to home in the Peak District of Derbyshire in where I live I go out every day I find it very important to go out every day and to experience the landscape around me to try and connect it's like the great words of John Muir the great writer at the turn of the century he found that going out was actually going in to study those things to look like a child with child's eyes at that landscape that I've loved all my life and to understand it to even understand the science of it but what does it do to you and so as the winter approaches every year I get more excited because I love the winter I love the harshness and hardship of it and out on the moors near my home in the Peak District of Derbyshire we have high Moors that behave like tundra and every winter time I put my skis on and I go and look for an extraordinary animal the mountain hare the mountain hare is one of the few creatures in Britain that turns white in winter and so I go and pursue that thing it's only a small group and it's very rare in that part of England and then one day I decided that I'd come down in the dark and experienced the nighttime on the moors but snow at that time was nearly waist-deep I entered a woodland and as I entered the wood the moon rose and it's true it shown extraordinary light through the branches so strongly that they became patterns on the snow they were repeated like the roots of the trees they looked exactly like the roots of the trees but they were only light and shadow the air was filled in the snow so likely that I could not feel it around my legs and as I waded through the shadows and the light I wasn't stumbling I wasn't stumbling in the actual fact of them being tree roots because they weren't tree roots there were only shadows and light and as I told down the hillside in this drifting air I felt myself again leaving the world and had those same experiences I had crossing Greenland or climbing great mountains that it is possible to enter a reverie in a different way in connection with nature and I think about the wonderful words that Wordsworth said as he lays in the fields above tintern in the Y Valley all those years ago that serene and blessed mood when even the motion of our human blood almost suspended we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul while with an I made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy we see into the life of things thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 33,988

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: nature, tedx talk, tedx, journalism, science, english, ted talk, england, ted talks, ted x, adventure, world, ted, tedxhull, tedx talks, tourism, photography, culture, lifestyle, Travel

Id: 4uE6uBH1Smc

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2013