Esther Woolfson > Quotes

“In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself. The past is underneath our feet. Every day when I leave the house , I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch , oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. The living trees were cut down , their wood used to fuel the city's growth , it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round , ancient woodlands cut down , bogs drained , watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation , the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens , of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried , over-taken by time and stone .This is a stonemasons' city , a city of weavers and gardeners and shipwrights and where I walk , there was once a Maison Dieu, a leper house; there was song schools and sewing schools, correction houses and tollboths, hidden under layers of time, still there”
― Esther Woolfson, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary

“By the twentieth century, with true American enthusiasm for the task in hand, corvid colonies were being destroyed by dynamite. That this literal overkill, the use of bombing against birds, doesn’t appear to have made any difference to corvid numbers can only be a comfort to those who might question, in general, the results of disproportionate balances of power.”
― Esther Woolfson, Corvus: A Life With Birds

“These revelations were exciting and seemed transformative. If we live in a world of sentience and consciousness, shouldn't the knowledge alter the entire basis of our relationship with other species? If these organisms are able to employ their statocysts, their chemoreceptors, mechanoreceptors, their neurons and glia, their nidopallia caudelaterale and hippocampi, their every organ and mechanism of sense, smell, direction and feeling towards living their lives much as we do ours, on what basis can we still consider ourselves superior?”
― Esther Woolfson, Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species