The Five Landscapes

Two thousand years ago, Tamil poets sorted the world into five landscapes: hills, forest, river plain, shore, and the parched land that has no place of its own. A flower or a bird in a poem told listeners where they stood, what season it was and what the lovers were feeling.Dr Aran Castro A J, a geologist who grew up on the Kanyakumari coast, reads those poems beside fifty years of satellite images. He finds poets who knew where the hills make the rain, why salt is a harvest of the shore, and how good land turns into palai. He tests the story of Kumari Kandam against the evidence of the seabed and the last Ice Age, follows the 2004 tsunami along his home coast and the 2024 Wayanad landslide down its valley, and shows why Chennai flooded in 2015 and ran short of water in 2019.Every important claim is marked settled, debated or unknown. Every chapter gives the reader a tool to take outside, from a slope check to a two-image test. The book also includes 16 maps and figures, a field card for any ground on Earth, and a guide to free satellite data.A book about reading land, and about what we lose when we stop.