In continuing to  think through what might be learned from Cliff McLucas’ work – particularly in terms of my own interest in the future trajectory of deep mapping in an ecological context – it seems clear that it’s necessary to see how his project with Joop Mulder on Terschelling developed after his death. (I obviously have in mind here some of the points he makes in Ten Things I Can Say About These Deep Maps). I heard from Joop today that he is still working on the project – now called Sense of Place – and he has very kindly said he will send me information when he’s finished his current stint ‘on the road’.

As it happens I am due to go to Terschelling in June to speak at an event dealing with rising sea levels and the role creative activity might play in helping to reframe environmental change in relation to social resilience. So I’m taking Joop’s kind response as a good omen in relation to my current attempts to pull together a number of possibly related hunches – and they are nothing more than that at this stage – about relationships between what I think Cliff McLucas was advocating through his deep mapping projects and the notions of ‘translation’ I’m trying to develop in advance of my time at NUI in Galway. Hopefully by the time I get to Holland – and maybe even manage to meet with Joop in person – I’ll be clearer about how all these threads do or do not interweave.

Certainly at present I seem to have nothing but a scattering of hunches that are slowly being fleshed out in various clusterings of ideas. These may or may not converge. The first cluster will get an airing in Falmouth on Saturday. I’m presenting a paper called ‘Grounding Ecosophy: Reviewing Guattari’s “ecosophy” and Tim Ingold’s “animist meshscape” through the uncanny lens of the “supernatural Border ballads and the visions of Isobel Gowdie’ at the Haunted Landscapes event. This is my first public attempt to present the thinking I’ve been doing around Tim Ingold and Felix Guattari’s Neo-animism and is an attempt to move my understanding of the necessary shift from uni- to poly- versal thinking along the lines implicitly in Guattari’s notion of ecosophy on a bit.

Hopefully I’ll soon have something worthwhile to add to this site out of this work.