The author hoped that trough making known more widely the loss that the British avi-fauna has sustained and the possibility of the reparation of at least a part of it, something may be done towards hastening forward that time when the people shall at least cease to banish the rare native birds, and instead prepare the way for rehabilitation of those that have already been lost.
In the following pages will be found not only descriptions and plates of the birds themselves, but, wherever possible, notes on their ways and habits have also been given.
Housing may be the Third World's most intractable problem, but mud, adobe, earth-bricks, soil-cement and other traditional building materials are cheap, readily available and can be made and used by the poor people themselves to build their own homes. Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for building the millions of houses which will be needed over the next twenty years.
The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.
