Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffithsis an award-winning British writer and author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Anarchipelago, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon and Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
two issues want
I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.
buddhist believe world
In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.
media ideas academia
Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.
schedules measurement emotion
The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.
media voting important
A functional media is as important to democratic freedom as voting.
heretic
Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.
hate light shining
All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.
ice-water air fire
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
ocean blue whales
Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence.
grace timing individual
Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.
subjects wild-creatures creatures
A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own
space needs branches
Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.