��Ī - nature writing

Poet, activist, bird watcher: exploring John Clare as nature writer

amb206 — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 08:00:00 +0000

The poet John Clare (1793-1864) was a keen natural historian who knew the countryside in all its moods. His various jobs saw him labouring in farms and gardens; his gravestone remembers him as the ‘peasant poet’. Best known for his verse, Clare also wrote prose accounts of the plants and animals he observed in his native Northamptonshire.

In a foreword to the anthology, The Poetry of Birds, broadcaster and bird watcher Tim Dee notes that Clare wrote about 147 species of British wild birds “without any technical kit whatsoever”. His records contain 65 first descriptions of birds for Northamptonshire alone. The term ‘nature writing’ had yet to be coined in the early 1800s – but Clare was undoubtedly ahead of his time in the way that he wove his detailed observations of the natural world into his writing.

Dee is one of the speakers who will be talking about ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ at a symposium held on September 15, 2017 at the David Attenborough Building. The event is a collaboration between the Centre for John Clare Studies (English Faculty) and the ��Ī Conservation Initiative (CCI), itself a partnership between ��Ī University and a cluster of conservation organisations.

CCI’s emerging programme on the arts, science and conservation is coordinated by Dr John Fanshawe, who has been seconded from Birdlife International. He explains: “Bringing together academics and practitioners is a core ambition of the community in the David Attenborough Building. John Clare, both as a poet and activist, is a perfect catalyst for exploring the close observation and in situ localism in which so much conservation is rooted.”

The symposium will bring together literary scholars with ornithologists, nature writers and artists to consider what it means to observe and record birds. How, for example, does Clare look and watch, and how does he translate what he observes into words? How do today’s artists and writers respond to his work?

“The idea is to raise questions about the act of bird watching, recording, understanding and classification, both in the early 19th century and the present day, dwelling in particular on the importance of localism and the distinctiveness of Clare’s environment and voice to his writing about birds,” says Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker from the Centre for John Clare Studies.

Academics speaking at the symposium include Dr Francesca MacKenney (Bristol), Dr Mina Gorji (��Ī) and Dr Jos Smith (University of East Anglia). Participants will also hear from printmaker Carry Akroyd, textile artist Anita Bruce, and nature writers Alex Preston and Derek Niemann.

Clare’s work has long inspired artists whose work celebrates the natural world. Akroyd says: “John Clare is such a visual poet. He wrote outside, his eyes wide open to everything, and wrote inside with visual memory. He switches between a wide-angle bird’s eye-view of the landscape to hand-lens detail, and even now makes us see more.”

Birds soar through the lines of English poetry, but for Clare’s contemporaries they played an especially important symbolic role. “Shelley’s skylark is transcendentally a spirit. Keats’ nightingale is significant because it represents a sublime kind of not-knowing,” says Houghton-Walker.

Clare, however, insists on the real and the particular. He knows exactly how and where the birds he writes about nest; he knows how many eggs those birds lay; and he leaves behind a meticulous record of every detail, right down to the appearance of the markings on each egg.

“He’s intensely interested in habitat, behaviour and song, but also, increasingly, in the threats to birds from his fellow men. He insists on a vital accuracy in his descriptions which continue to astonish scientific natural historians, and yet produces poetry about birds which can claim to be some of the very best in the language,” says Houghton-Walker.

“Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation of birds’ behaviour as it changes with the seasons. He scorns those poets who don’t take the time to watch and merely recycle, often inaccurate, poetic conventions.

His patient observation is rewarded with an intimate knowledge which is exhibited throughout his prose and poetry. He’s especially fascinated by nests – something that has been discussed by many critics.”

A determination to represent nature accurately led to struggles, too. Voicing his frustration at his inability adequately to transcribe the song of the nightingale, Clare wrote that “many of her notes are sounds that cannot be written the alphabet having no letters that can syllable the sounds”.

MacKenney says: “Clare was extraordinarily inventive in his attempts to get the sounds of birds into his own writing. But the ‘peasant-poet’ was not naive. Throughout his poetry Clare demonstrates a profound respect for the abiding 'mystery' of birds and their songs.”

Without binoculars and with nothing but his senses to rely on, Clare gave us some of the most compelling nature writing of the 19th century.

To illustrate some of the wonders of birds and their behaviour, the symposium will include a screening of ‘Murmuration X 10’, a short film by filmmaker Sarah Wood and Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, and a guided tour of the avian collection at the Museum of Zoology.

For more details and to book a place at the symposium ‘Clare and the Art of Bird Watching’ click here.

Inset image: Carry Akroyd's ‘Evening Crows’ linocut illustration from 'This Happy Spirit’.

At a symposium next month (15 September 2017) academics, artists and ornithologists will share their responses to the work of 19th-century poet John Clare, whose patient and accurate observations of birds in field and hedgerow continue to astonish and inspire.

Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation of birds’ behaviour as it changes with the seasons.

Sarah Houghton-Walker

Carry Akroyd

'Swifts' lithograph from Carry Akroyd's 'Found in the Fields' series (detail)

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Nan Shepherd celebrated: the Scottish writer who knew mountains

amb206 — Wed, 04 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000

The term ‘nature writing’ didn’t exist in the 1940s when Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain, a book in which she describes exploring the Cairngorm Mountains in north-east Scotland as a walker and writer. Shepherd sent her manuscript to a novelist friend called Neil Gunn. He responded with praise (“This is beautifully done,” he wrote) but suggested that Shepherd might find it hard to get her work published unless she added photographs and a map.

The Living Mountain defies categorisation. It was turned down by the one publisher to whom Shepherd sent it. Gunn remained the book’s sole reader right up until 1977, when the book was finally published by Aberdeen University Press (with a map but no photographs). In a preface, Shepherd notes that 30 years in the life of a mountain is nothing (“the flicker of an eyelid”), but that many things had happened in the Cairngorms between her writing of the book and its publication.

She lists the ‘eruption’ of the resort of Aviemore, the growing impact of tourism and terrible tragedies of lives lost in accidents. She follows her list with a message that speaks of her intense relationship with landscape in all its moods: “All these are matters that involve man. But behind them is the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its weathers. It is fundamental to all that man does to it or on it.”

Last month the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) announced the designs of two polymer banknotes to be issued later this year. Both feature portraits of women. The new £10 note will bear the face of the scientist Mary Somerville and the £5 note the face of Nan Shepherd.

The portrait on the new £5 note is based on a photograph taken of Shepherd as student at Aberdeen. Her calm face is framed by long hair parted in the middle and held by a headband. Shepherd was famously averse to notions of glamour (though she always walked in skirts, never trousers) and with her bold eyes, and steadfast gaze, she makes an understated heroine.

Shepherd’s appearance in the public sphere will raise the profile of an author whose work has at times risked falling from view, and whose writing helped to lay the foundations for the current flowering of writing about place, people and nature. The accolade accorded her by RBS has been welcomed by the growing number of readers who enjoy Shepherd’s prose and poetry – all of which is centred on her deep appreciation of the Scottish landscape.

Robert Macfarlane (Faculty of English) has written extensively on Shepherd, seen her poetry back into print after 80 years, and presented both television and radio programmes about her for the BBC. In an interview with the Guardian, Macfarlane called Shepherd a “brilliant, progressive choice” for the £5 note.

“She’s an incredibly inspiring figure, and an unusual one, in the sense of being a woman writing about mountains and the wilderness and nature,” he said. “She found her own path in life and in literature, and it feels like she’s so far ahead of us – we’re always only starting to catch Nan up. Philosophically and stylistically, she was extraordinary.”

Macfarlane spent many of his childhood holidays in the Cairngorms, where he developed a love for the Scottish Highlands. But he came across Shepherd’s writing only just over a decade ago. He has since read and reread her books and poetry, as well as teaching regularly on Shepherd and her work to both undergraduates and graduates.

In his latest book, Landmarks (2015), Macfarlane writes that reading The Living Mountain changed him: “I had thought that I knew the Cairngorms well, but Shepherd showed me my complacency. Her writing taught me how to see these familiar hills rather than just to look at them.” He was influenced by Shepherd’s emphasis on mountain-going as a pilgrimage rather than a conquest, and by her readiness to peer into what she calls ‘nooks and crannies’, in order to know better ‘the total mountain’.

In The Living Mountain, Shepherd describes making a similar discovery when she began walking in Scotland. She writes: “At first, mad to recover the tang of height, I made always for the summits and would not take time to explore the recesses.” A turning point came when a friend took Shepherd to Loch Coire an Lochain, a stretch of water that lies hidden in the hills. It was a September day, following a storm, and “the air was keen and buoyant, with a brilliancy as of ice”.

Dipping her fingers into the frost-cold waters, Shepherd listens to the sound of the waterfall until she no longer hears it. She lets her eyes travel over the surface of the water from shore to shore – not once but twice. “There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface,” she writes. “This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.”

Shepherd did not talk about walking up mountains but walking into them. Her writing is sometimes mystical but never gushingly romantic – water is “appalling” in its strength, birches are most beautiful when “naked”. She was a keenly acute observer, each of her words chosen with such razor-sharp precision that she feared that her writing would be considered cold and inhuman.

Sensual is one of the words Macfarlane uses to describe Shepherd’s work. She herself wrote that she found “a joyous release” in walking and climbing, often toiling through foul weather. The Living Mountain begins with the observation: “Summer on the high plateau can be as sweet as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature.”

It was through a process of immersion – sleeping outdoors, wading through streams, and sometimes swimming in the burns, watching and observing – that Shepherd got to know the colours and textures of the Cairngorms. Long before ecology became fashionable, she spoke about the interconnectedness of nature in a way that sprung from feeling rather than learning.

In an essay written to preface the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, Macfarlane draws attention to a passage in which Shepherd experiences the vastness of life. “So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, above me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain.”

For Shepherd there was a kind of magic in the act of walking itself and the way in which the human body adapts to the earth’s surface. "Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a coordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step will fall, even when watching land and sky." Countless walkers will have felt the same thing - but few will have put it into words so neatly.

For almost all her life, Shepherd lived in the house where she had been born. She travelled widely but always returned to the hills she loved. Macfarlane suggests that Shepherd’s focus on a particular place, one not far from her doorstep, led to a deepening rather than a restriction of knowledge. “The Living Mountain needs to be understood as parochial in the best sense,” he has written.

“Because it’s there” was the climber George Mallory’s famous retort to the question of why he climbed Everest. Shepherd’s reasons for walking the Cairngorms are imbued with the same intense ‘thereness’ but none of the high drama of conquest. She sought to know these rugged hills in a sense both quiet and fierce. “Knowing another is endless,” she wrote, “The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

The writer Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), who was quietly acclaimed in her lifetime, is the face of a new Royal Bank of Scotland bank note. One of Shepherd’s staunchest supporters is Robert Macfarlane (Faculty of English), who wrote the introduction to her book about the Cairngorms.

She found her own path in life and in literature, and it feels like she’s so far ahead of us – we’re always only starting to catch Nan up. Philosophically and stylistically, she was extraordinary.

Robert Macfarlane

Royal Bank of Scotland

New Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

'Besom ling and teasel burrs': John Clare and botanising

amb206 — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 08:09:00 +0000

,In his early years, the poet John Clare worked as a gardener at Burghley House, a Tudor mansion just outside Stamford. Later, he struck up a close friendship with Joseph Henderson, an enthusiastic naturalist and head gardener at Milton Hall, an imposing house set in acres of lush parkland to the north of Peterborough. The letters sent between Clare and Henderson reveal their exchange of expertise, and also their shared interest in expanding their botanical knowledge through the pages of the numerous botanical volumes in the Milton Hall library.

In letters and manuscripts now housed in libraries in Peterborough and Northampton, Clare describes his efforts to grow in his own cottage garden some of the species he has encountered at Burghley and Milton. October 1824 finds him working ‘in the garden at making a shed for my ariculas’. Later, in one of many lists, he records the names of the auriculas he admires but is unable to afford. In November 1824 he notes that he has ‘received a parcel of Ferns & flowers from Henderson the common Polipody…the harts tongue… the Lady fern… tall white Lychnis with seven new sorts of Chrysanthemums…”.

Clare’s deep interest in plants, his love of 'botanising' and the significance of plants in his writing, is the focus of a symposium taking place next week at ��Ī University Botanic Garden. The meeting will bring together botanists, nature writers, artists and literary scholars to look afresh at the poet’s relationship with the environment. It has been organised by the Centre for John Clare Studies in the Faculty of English, set up earlier this year by Dr Paul Chirico (Senior Tutor at Fitzwilliam College), Dr Mina Gorji and Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker, to mark the 150^th anniversary of Clare’s death.

It was at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum that Clare died, aged 70, on 20 May 1864. His gravestone in Helpston churchyard remembers him as ‘The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ and each summer children from the primary school that bears his name lay flowers on his resting place, in the form of Midsummer Cushions - a tradition dating back to Clare’s day of making cushions of turf studded with meadow flowers.

The term ‘Peasant Poet’, with its implications of lack of education, is a label that belies Clare’s intellect as someone hungry for knowledge and quick to learn. As the son of a poor farm labourer, his formal education was at best sporadic and confined to village ‘vestry’ and ‘dame’s schools’; he left school early to take a job to help support his family.

Clare read widely and engaged as much as he was able with contemporary debates on everything from politics to art theory, from religion to natural history. He tutored himself in mathematics and read a wide range of poetry, prose and drama. Many of his books are now housed in their original wooden bookcase in Northampton Public Library.

Houghton-Walker said: “We hope that next week’s symposium will encourage a conversation about Clare’s intense curiosity regarding the plants he observed in field and garden, and his desire to understand and catalogue them according to the latest scientific methods. He made close observations of plant habitats, recording how different species related to one other, and he collected many botanical specimens. His poems bear witness to his minute observations of flora.”

It is evident, however, that Clare struggled with the Linnaean system and its reliance on hard-to-pronounce Latin nomenclature. In his journal for October 1824, he records a plan to collect a book and ‘call it 'A Garden of Wild Flowers', as it shall contain nothing else with quotations from poets & others an English Botany on this plan would be very interesting & serve to make Botany popular while the hard nicknaming system of unutterable words now in vogue only overloads it in mystery till it makes it darkness visible’.

Clare enjoyed brief spells of acclaim during his lifetime and gained the support of a number of benefactors. But for many years his poetry lapsed into obscurity. It was only in the early 20th century that writers and editors such as Arthur Symons and Edward Thomas brought his work once again to public attention. Since then, he has been championed by poets such as Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, Elaine Feinstein, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. Today Clare’s close engagement with the natural world chimes with a resurgence of interest in nature writing.

The poet's celebration of flora and fauna is often discussed in terms of his love of wilderness and his resistance to the enclosure movement and resulting changes in farming practices that were threatening to destroy the countryside he knew ‘with its besom ling and teasel burrs’. Eager to record and preserve, in writing, the environment he felt was under threat, he set himself the task of documenting the natural world around his village in Northamptonshire. In 1824 he began to write down his observations in a group of letters which have come to be known as an unfinished Natural History of Helpston. Despite the increasing popularity of Clare’s poetry, these were not published until 1983.

The guest speakers invited to address the symposium reflect its aim to mesh together poetry and botany. They include Professor John Parker, former director of the Botanic Garden, as well as its current director, Professor Beverley Glover, who will lead a tour of the Garden’s systematic beds.

Professor Fiona Stafford from Oxford University, an expert on literature and landscape, will talk about ‘Clare and the Splendid Sycamore’. Stafford has delivered two series on 'The Meaning of Trees' for Radio 3. She said: “Clare's wonderful sonnet on 'The Sycamore' is based on first hand observation of a tree that has often been overlooked, and even condemned, for being common and invasive. Clare's great gift is to see glory in the commonplace - and, in doing so, open the eyes of readers to things so familiar as to be virtually invisible.”

As well as demonstrating his understanding of the interconnectedness of the environment, Clare’s poems reveal that his interest in botanical classification registered and responded to his own feelings about social class. He was born into poverty, one of a pair of twins, the only one to survive, and his tiny frame may have been a result of malnutrition. Like his father, he began work as a farm labourer while still a boy. Beset by terrible depression, he struggled to make ends meet all his life and, as a working class poet, formed relationships with people from different social strata but never felt entirely accepted by them.

Dr Sue Edney from Bath Spa University will look at the ways in which botanical classification is in itself class-based and how plants in their ‘place’ become caught up in this process of identification and division through naming. She said: “Clare’s mingling of Latin names with common English names, of Linnaean systems with ‘natural’ ones, is related to his self-positioning as a natural poet – a poet related to his place – combined with his desire to become an establishment writer.”

The writer Richard Mabey made his name in the early 1970s with his seminal book Food for Free and has since written extensively on people, plants and the things that bind them together. His 2007 book Nature Cure charts his experience of breakdown and recovery – and the role of nature as healer. As a Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, where he is working on a book due out next year, he will talk about ‘Clare and the plant’s point of view’, exploring Clare’s distinctive ability to put himself in the position of his poetic subjects – in this case, the plants he loved and wrote about.

Hetty Saunders is just embarking on an MPhil at Wolfson College, ��Ī, where she will be writing a dissertation on Clare and botany. In looking at the complex relationship that Clare created between plants, landscapes and texts, she will discuss the way that Clare often related his writing to plants of the field, and vice versa, as in this quote from his poem ‘Remembrances’: ‘… my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour/As keepsakes and pledges all to never fade away’.

Among the participants at the symposium will be two artists, Anita Bruce and Kathryn Parsons, members of the five-strong UnEarthed collective who have been resident artists this year at Clare Cottage, Helpston. Kathryn Parson’s ‘I Found the Poems in the Fields’ renders Clare’s intimate observations of nature in delicate hand-modelled porcelain. Her creations tell of the layered platelets of lichen colonies from Royce Wood and Lolham Bridges, and the bold architectural plants found at Swaddywell, all sites known and written about by Clare.

John Clare's Cottage was renovated and established as an educational centre in 2009 by the John Clare Trust, of which Paul Chirico is vice-chair. The cottage has a garden designed by Adam Frost which won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012. The landscapes around the village, though much affected by agricultural and social changes since Clare’s birth in 1793, still include many of the features that he loved to visit and described so precisely.

The symposium ‘John Clare and Botany’ will take place at the ��Ī Botanic Garden on 23 September. The event is fully booked.

Inset images: John Clare as a young man (Creative Commons); inscription from Clare's grave in Helpston (Geoff Shipp); sycamore tree (Creative Commons); John Clare's cottage garden with porcelain installations by Kathryn Parsons (UnEarthed)

A symposium taking place on Tuesday (23 September 2014) at ��Ī University Botanic Garden will unite artists, writers, scientists and literary scholars to look at the poet John Clare’s close engagement with the natural environment as a botanist as well as poet.

Clare’s mingling of Latin names with common English names, of Linnaean systems with ‘natural’ ones, is related to his self-positioning as a natural poet – a poet related to his place – combined with his desire to become an establishment writer.

Sue Edney, Bath Spa University

Anita Bruce (UnEarthed)

Swaddywell Pit near Helpston, Northants

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Yes

Landscape, literature, life

lw355 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:00:02 +0000

Over the past few years, the genre of ‘nature writing’ has seen a new sense of urgency, fostered by a growing awareness of a natural world under pressure. Dr Robert Macfarlane, from the Faculty of English, believes that writers have played, and continue to play, a central role in conservation by engaging our hearts and our minds.

Last November a new word – “scrattling” – emerged briefly into the world. The journalist Mark Cocker, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s Country Diary column, coined it to describe the sound made by starlings settling down to roost overnight in his roof in rural Norfolk. Cocker talks about the wild “excess of energy” in the arching movements of a flock of starlings and the “grey, clamped-down stillness” of November. In focusing on his own delight in the ebb and flow of a flock of birds in the darkening sky, he expresses something universal about our inmost connectedness with nature.

Country Diary has long been a tiny island of nature writing, taking readers away from their homes, trains and offices to the wilder and less-trammelled spaces of moor and mountain, coombe and common, wilderness and wasteland. There was even a sense that those who wrote for this slot and others like it were an endangered species, donning their boots to tramp back into a landscape that no longer held any relevance for most of us.

Not any more. Prompted largely by a growing awareness of a world under threat, a steady resurgence in forms of ‘new nature writing’ has been seen during the part decade. The human population is expanding and limited natural resources are under pressure; scientists recording the numbers and diversity of flora and fauna show us that precious habitats are being lost and vulnerable species driven to extinction. Nature writing is succoured by accurate description, while at the same time draws attention to large-scale environmental crises and local losses. It is driven by a sense of purpose that gives it an important role within modern conservation, informing us in ways that are both factual and emotionally affecting.

How literature shapes, and is shaped by, our awareness of nature – and how this awareness, or the lack of it, intersects with our behaviour – is central to the research and writing of ��Ī academic Dr Robert Macfarlane, who has made a substantial contribution to placing nature writing centre stage of recent environmental discussions in this country. His work explores the traditions of British, Irish and North American literatures that deal with nature and its relationship with humankind – from the late 18th century through to the present day. His research is located within the lively interdisciplinary field known as ‘cultural environmentalism’, which considers the ways in which not only literature but also sculpture, dance, film and music might influence ecological awareness and environmental activism.

“Literature is just one of the cultural forms that shape our place-consciousness, and that carry out particular kinds of thinking about how we fit within the biosphere,” he explained. “The sculptures of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, and the scripts of the latest blue-chip David Attenborough nature documentaries also bear upon the ways we treat that web of species, interrelations, co-dependencies and chemicals that we have relatively recently come to know by the group-noun ‘environment’. ”

Increasing specialism within the conventional British education system has often set science and literature at opposite ends of a spectrum. In his teaching and research, and as the author of two highly acclaimed books of nature/travel writing (Mountains of the Mind, 2003; The Wild Places, 2007; and a third, The Old Ways, to be published in 2012), Macfarlane is keen to reconcile the two broad areas. Talking about his respect for conservationists, he quotes the poet W.H. Auden: “When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes.” He is eager, however, to highlight the role that literature has played in the history of environmentalism.

“Whenever I ask professional conservationists what first inspired them to get involved in the protection of the environment, they invariably mention either a book or a place,” he said. “The experiences of reading, or the physical effects of being in the landscape – of being exposed to the elements and feeling the land underfoot or under-hand – have proved profoundly influential for so many environmental policy makers and researchers. Nature writing has, in the past, been cartooned variously as reactionary ruralist or as sentimentalist. But, in many ways, and for many people, it’s been decisively life-shaping.”

Our everyday discourse is rich with metaphors and similes taken from earth, sea and sky – from the subtext of individual sounds in words to the grandest panoramas of desert and wilderness that have become symbols of states of mind. We live increasingly in cities, yet some of our greatest literature draws on nature not just as backdrop but also as active agent, shaping character, behaviour and morality. The classics of children’s literature, in particular, use wetlands and waterways, farm and forest as the settings and atmospheres for powerful characters and narratives.

Yet what we love, and what feeds us both literally and metaphorically, we also destroy. It is in drawing attention to the vulnerability of the natural world to greedy humanity that nature writers can play a role, believes Macfarlane: “Wendell Berry, the American farmer and essayist who is too little known in America, let alone in this country, once wrote that environmentally we require not ‘the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but ... a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care.’ I’m interested in how literature might have urged, or at least have tried to urge, such changes.”

“Every now and then,” he continued, “the imaginary forms of literature feed back into the lived world with startling consequence. They assume real-world agency in ways that exceed the cliché of ‘life imitating art’. In terms of environmental history, I think of John Muir, who took himself off to become a shepherd in the Sierra Nevada and whose essays became crucial in determining the national-parks policy of Theodore Roosevelt. Or I think of the thunderclap publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which led to the banning of DDT in the US and arguably stimulated the creation in 1970 of the State Environmental Protection Agency. And then there’s the vast and as-yet-unmapped influence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), a novel that chills its readers to their cores, and which the campaigner George Monbiot described as the most important environmental book ever written.”

Macfarlane has been working hard to bring lost or neglected works from the nature writing tradition back to light, and to introduce them to new generations of readers. He has written essays to accompany reissues of books by W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Nan Shepherd, J.A. Baker and John Stewart Collis, among others. Next year, HarperCollins will reissue works by Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land), Richard Jefferies (Nature Near London) and Hudson (Adventures Among Birds); all three will carry introductions by Macfarlane, who added: “Over the past five or six years I’ve become addicted to digging into the ‘lost decades’ of 20th-century British nature/topographic writing. I feel passionate about championing writing which I feel might change its readers’ relationship with nature.”

Next year an opera with music by the jazz double-bassist Arnie Somogyi and with a libretto by Macfarlane will be performed on Orford Ness, a vast offshore shingle spit on the Suffolk coast that is both ecologically and historically unique. The opera has been part-commissioned by the National Trust, which owns the Ness and is keen to explore artistic responses to this extraordinary landscape. For Macfarlane, it’s an opportunity to bring culture and environment together in a thoroughly unacademic fashion, and to create, with Somogyi, an artistic form that will be responsive to the character of the landscape. What Macfarlane and Somogyi find most fascinating and suggestive about the terrain is how the lean and tapering shape of Orford Ness is constantly shifted and reformed by time and tide – a scaled-up, slowed-down, stone-and-water version of the wild wheeling arc of starlings in the sky.

Whenever I ask professional conservationists what first inspired them to get involved in the protection of the environment, they invariably mention either a book or a place.

Dr Robert Macfarlane

Rosamund Macfarlane

Crummock Water, Cumbria

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Yes

�������������Ī - nature writing

Poet, activist, bird watcher: exploring John Clare as nature writer

Nan Shepherd celebrated: the Scottish writer who knew mountains

'Besom ling and teasel burrs': John Clare and botanising

Landscape, literature, life

��Ī - nature writing