I felt on safer ground when I turned to artists who practiced what Deleuze and Guattari termed “becoming-animal”, that is, submitting to creaturely possession and shape-shifting into beasts, whether mythical, extinct or still roaming the earth. In Finfolk (2003), Marcus Coates, a modern day shaman (or charlatan, depending on your point of view) rose dripping from the sea, and personified fabled amphibians by barking gibberish at the camera; Cauleen Smith embodied the Yoruba Egungun emerging from the sea like Neptune covered in shells and seaweed; Lucy Gunning documented the self-empowerment of women who imitate horses and Rose English choreographed female dressage events, her “hyppodramas” of “coercion and obedience” performed with consummate skill by troupes of equine impersonators.^[18] My favourite animal mimic was Andrew Kötting, who in Klipperty-Klöpp (1984) donned a baggy coat and horsed around in a muddy field with what Jonathan Romney described as his “mock primitivism”.^[19] This travesty of a dressage event recalled Monty Python’s silly walks and satirised the daily grind of production-line labour under Capitalism to which the average worker must submit in order to earn a crust. Kötting refused to behave, and made an unbridled bid for freedom by becoming-artist-horse. And no animals were harmed in the making of his film.

So, where did that leave me? While I applauded the performative madness of Kötting’s equestrian efforts in a grainy monochrome landscape that would never make the cut in a travel documentary, I still felt that landscape traditions in art, adapted and mass produced in cinema, online and in broadcast television, developed a language that had calcified our aesthetic sensibilities; as T.J. Demos said recently, “aesthetics have been captured by institutions”.^[20] While I didn’t consider the institutional stranglehold on the beauty of landscape to be total, I felt that the power of the mainstream to interpret reality remained undimmed. I worried that when those formal devices, those high-gloss images of bucolic scenes were uncritically reproduced, they could sedate and soothe rather than challenge and transform. As Mark Cocker suggested, they ran the risk of producing an “art of consolation”, one that “distracts us from the truth of our fallen countryside”.^[21] Any eco-critical message, however baldly stated on the soundtrack and in surrounding contextual materials, however emphatically intersecting with campaigns for social justice, as Demos has advocated, could become diluted in the visual spectacle. 

This line of reasoning led me to the dead-end of what Robert MacFarlane called “inertial thinking”.^[22] So rather than dismiss all landscape works as inherently conservative and terminally polluted by a commercialised Romantic sublime, I needed to resurrect my long-held belief that language is not fixed; it is malleable and fluid. I decided that the final book should celebrate the variety and ingenuity of the strategies filmmakers have adopted to modulate modes of representation for the purpose of communicating their visions in and about landscape. So, I applauded those Sarah Ahmed dubbed “space-invaders” who trespassed their non-conforming, “other sensibilities” onto private land.^[23] I delighted in their queering of the landscape with exuberant theatrics in the wilderness. I sharpened my muscle memory, retuned my mirror neurons and empathetically experienced in my own body the plight of artists who sustained “injuries of the weather”.^[24] I agreed with John Akomfrah that although there are no innocent places, Romantic landscape traditions could become a zone of contestation in Afrodiasporic art and I celebrated the re-inscription of colonial history into lands purloined from indigenous peoples. I recorded the re-configuration of territories that were conventionally marked as exclusively white by practitioners like Black Men Walking, Vernon Ah Kee and Ingrid Pollard. I discovered artists such as Jenny Okun who in COWS IN THE GATE (1977) paid court to a herd of cows by serenading them with her flute, her playing briefly inspiring their curiosity before they returned to their grazing. Okun’s musical overtures constituted what Richard Mabey has called a “wondrous attention” to non-human creatures and embodied a sense of “neighbourliness”, a being-with animals, which I came to interpret as a symbolic act of reparation.^[25]  

I extolled the virtues of luring the elements into non-invasive collaborative works on film, creating analogies for, and enactments of, the one-world vision of climate activists. Finally I commended artists such as David Critchley and Pierre Huyghe who avoided burning fossil fuels by making armchair journeys to landscapes unvisited. I recognised that the environment was at the core of all the works I was drawn to and like Chris Welsby the artists experienced a “deep sense of loss and personal grief” when confronted with climate change, with species extinction and ecological ruin.^[26]