Dan Osmond’s Peace, Trout & Understanding
Earlier this summer I had the privilege of a very sneak preview of a new book that’s just been published: Dan Osmond’s Peace, Trout & Understanding.
I’ve worked with Dan on various mutual fisheries projects for several years now – me with my Wild Trout Trust editing and project management hat on, while he’s been brandishing electrofishing and genetic sampling gear for Exeter Uni and Westcountry Rivers Trust. But I won’t deny that I was quite surprised, not to mention completely flattered, when he asked me to edit his first collection of writing.
Some of these pieces I recognised from Fly Culture magazine and elsewhere, but they take on a whole new identity en masse. Dan’s writing voice is vivid, funny, honest, academically precise, and grounded in the unromantic realities of committing to the ecological, fishing and rock-climbing life whilst remorselessly grinding out a PhD – including living semi-destitute on the road for several electrofishing seasons in a succession of modded rattletrap cars and vans.
He fishes moorland streams, jagged coastlines, sewage-stinking urban rivers, and once or twice through lucky academic postings, mangrove swamps and coral flats. Not unexpectedly from a professional ecologist, several streams-of-consciousness also evoke Aldo Leopold’s recognition (now more relevant than ever) that having an environmental education of any kind means ‘living alone in a world of wounds’ with all the sickening cognitive dissonance, often verging on powerless rage, that this implies.
Above and throughout it all, Dan is obviously a frighteningly good angler, an erudite dirtbag fish bum for our time and place, with a true talent for capturing life’s highs and lows in words and on paper.
I’ve loved being his editor, and of course you’ll expect me to say this, but…. go get yourself a copy of Peace, Trout & Understanding from his website today!
