Christopher Stocks

I’ve always found researching a subject far more enjoyable than writing about it, even though I call myself a writer (among some of the other things I call myself). Writing is hard. It’s boring, frustrating and – for me at least – almost ludicrously slow. But most of my research involves reading, and reading was my great love long before I ever attempted to write, so I guess that’s why I’ve always found researching a subject the easy part. Until now.

For the first time ever, a few weeks back, I managed to read myself to a standstill. After about a hundred books on forest-related themes my brain began to hurt. Like a sponge full of water it simply couldn’t absorb any more, and I’d got to the point where, yes, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

Still, it’s taught me an interesting lesson. It’s obvious that books (and feature articles, for that matter) benefit from being carefully structured, but this is the first time I’ve realised that it makes sense to structure research too. One more thing to think about.

After a few weeks off I’m looking forward to plunging in to reading again, even if there are still several hundred books to go. Given the book’s scope, at least they’re pretty varied, though some of them are more enticing than others: popular history is one thing, but some of the academic stuff has a certain lack of instant allure. I mean, would you enjoy reading this?

‘In this way, agents of nature are now seen as palpably active, not only in terms of their own biological constitution, but also relationally when bound up in the construction of ecological, social, economic, cultural, political and material formations. Harvey deploys the term “socio-ecological” processes both to encompass the non-dichotomous relations of human and non-human agency and to emphasize the need for careful consideration of non-human agency within such processes. He calls for a disaggregation of the homogenized term “nature”, into its various “intensely internally variegated[,] unparalleled fields of difference”…’

Wish me luck…