Can nature writing save the planet?

Or - can storytelling and paying attention us?

‘Can writers save the planet?’ was a question asked by a recent episode of the BBC radio programme, ‘Rare Earth’. It was recorded at the Hay Festival, with the presenters Tom Heap and Helen Czerski joined by Mark Cocker, Philippa Forrester and Chris Thorogood. Although the question was about writers saving the planet, the content focused on nature writing.

An ancient yew tree in Kingly Vale, West Sussex

The panel agreed that nature writing could inspire people to take more of an interest in the natural world. One of the discussions was around humans being more attuned to the animal world than to the plant kingdom. We have a bias towards spotting movement - “Oh look, it’s alive.” A lot of work needs to be done to help us see plants in a different way, to overcome plant blindness.

Philippa Forrester spoke about all the animal books that she had read as a child. This reminded me of all the pony books that I read, and the Marguerite Henry books my American grandmother gave me, including Misty of Chincoteague and Cinnabar the One O’Clock Fox. When I was little older, I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and the children’s adventures in the Lake District. My grandmother also gifted me a copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, when I was a teenager, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of nature writing, although it was probably not classified as such then.

As I grew older, I was not aware of nature writing as a genre. I studied English Literature at university, and don’t recall any classes on nature writing being on offer then. There were writers who focused on nature who I read in my twenties and thirties, with Richard Mabey and The Nature Cure being a memorable example at a difficult time in my life. It was published in 2005, and Little Toller Books describes it as a ‘pioneering book in the genre that has since become known as New Nature Writing.’ New Nature Writing, according to Stephen Moss, is ‘not easy to define; but it usually puts the author at the centre of the experience, by celebrating what the cultural historian Joe Moran calls “our everyday connections with the natural world”.’ The Nature Cure relates how Richard Mabey recovered from depression by rediscovering his love for nature. It could be said that the theme of rediscovery of a love for nature and the healing aspect of this is a feature of many of books loosely classified as New Nature Writing.

In my late thirties, I did a year of a Masters course on Place and Environment Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. I had gone into the course intending to write narrative non-fiction, but found myself gravitating towards poetry instead. Maybe this was due to the influence of some of the tutors I was lucky enough to have, including Sir Andrew Motion, Kei Miller and Jo Shapcott, all poets. I think it was also due to the expression that poetry can give to the natural world, capturing its aliveness and essence, as well as the expression of the human emotional response.

In addition to poetry, we studied some of the classics of nature writing, including Walden by Henry Thoreau, The Peregrine by JA Baker and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. It was also the year that H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald was published, and our class of four women asked to add this book to the reading list, which was largely dominated by male authors. I found H is for Hawk to be astonishing and revealing about what is possible with the genre, or breaking boundaries of genre, combining the intensely personal with an intimate connection with the hawk.

The Hay Festival panel spoke about the tension between escapism and call to action. I believe that an engaged writer cannot ignore the climate and biodiversity crises. But there is a place for writing which draws us into the wonders of nature, which then hopefully leads to greater awareness and action.

The discussion led me to wonder what was the future of nature writing. At about the same time, I went to performance of Trio HLK with Dame Evelyn Glennie. Rich Cass, the drummer in HLK, spoke about how he was seeking inspiration for a solo piece. He went out for a walk and found himself listening to the song of the skylarks. This inspired him to record the skylark song and transcribe it for the drums. He played this piece, and then played the skylark song and improvised in response to it. This was the highlight of the show for me, being such a rich, multi-layered energetic piece - and highlighted that nature writing is not just about the written word, it could be the writing of music as well - as indeed the natural world has inspired composers throughout the centuries.

I’d booked this performance at King’s Place in London as I’d had to cancel tickets to a storytelling performance of The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. This was written down in the mid 1800s, by a doctor who collected the tales told in Karelia, eastern Finland. In it, the natural world is an integral part of the story, and indeed has a speaking part. For example, the birch tree speaks of its woes of being cut down. At one time, there was no nature writing or storytelling - all storytelling was based in nature, there was no separation. Nature was an inextricable part of life.

The other day, I picked up from my shelves David Abram’s book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. He writes about how writing and enshrining wisdom in books cuts us off from the wisdom of the earth. He describes going into a bookstore and seeing rows upon rows of books from around the world, and realising that despite of all this intelligence contained in books, ‘still, the heedless desecration and ruination of the more-than-human natural world was accelerating all around us.’ And then it strikes him, that it is because we have written the wisdoms down on the page, ‘effectively divorcing these many teachings from the land that once held and embodied these teachings.’

He writes of how many of the teachings, ‘whether the sacred stories of the Haida or the Iroquois or the Lakota, like the holy legends of Tibet or the wisdom tales of Ireland - were once embodied in particular landscapes.’ Capturing these stories in books cuts them off the landscape that they are part of and where they come from. David Abrams writes of how when stories are no longer told in woods, ‘human senses lose their attunement to the more-than-human terrain’, and we become less able to respond to what the land is telling us.

His conclusion is not that we must reject books. Rather it is that we must make space for listening and storytelling, to regenerate oral culture, with poetics an important part of this practice:

‘the practice of alert, animal attention to the broader conversation that surrounds - to the utterances of sunlight and water and the thrumming reply of the bees, or the staccato response of a woodpecker to the hollow creaking of an old trunk - and the attempt not to violate this wider conversation every time that we speak, but to allow it, to acknowledge it, and sometimes to join it.’ (David Abrams)

Perhaps if we were able to do this, we would save not only the planet, but ourselves - and of course, we are all part of the same whole.

Note: One reason for a break since my last Substack was that I have been working on the edits to my book. I hope that my book is able to play a small part in encouraging readers to listen to the world around them, and to hear the trees speak.

What does nature writing or storytelling - new or old or future - mean to you? What are your favourites? Please share any thoughts or recommendations, I’d love to hear from you.