Flying from KL to London I gazed out of the plane window, which I always like to do. I like being reminded of how huge the earth is, and how so much of it seems completely uninhabited. I spent a couple of hours passing across this landscape which (I had no idea where it was) appeared vast, uninhabited; mountainous and then desert. There were no roads, no buildings, no signs of habitation of any sort. And it went on, and on, and on. Eventually there was a long river delta, with little spreads of housing and farming around it, intermittently; that went on for about five minutes of flying time. Then more immensity of nothingness. My only reservation about all this nothingness was whether it had been devastated by humans or was a natural emptiness. I remember previously flying over Siberia for six hours or so, with absolutely nothing but wilderness (imagining herds of reindeer and steppe vegetation), but this seemed much more barren.
These endless views - similarly with crossing the sea - make me feel hopeful. There seems so much of it, and so little of us that I think maybe we can manage to be contained, in our reckless destruction and colonisation… Maybe the earth is able to cope, even with us, and will be ok one way or another, even if we destroy ourselves.