̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Robert Macfarlane

̽��ֱ��Lost Words: a ‘spell book’ that closes the gap between childhood and nature

lw355 — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 14:32:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��Lost Words is a book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris that summons the magic of nature to help children find, love and protect the natural world.

Transcribing together

zs332 — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 09:27:10 +0000

Volunteers join together to help the Cambridge Digital Library transcribe the notebooks of notable British ecologist, Oliver Rackham.

Fake news, black holes and AI: Cambridge academics to speak at Hay Festival

mjg209 — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 11:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Series is now an established feature of the Hay Festival and is now in its eleventh year. This year’s speakers include experts on the localised effects of climate change, combatting fake news, black holes, food security and the impact of dinosaurs on the British landscape.

̽��ֱ��Series is part of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s commitment to public engagement. ̽��ֱ��Festival runs from 25th May to 2nd June and is now open for bookings.

Several speakers will address how experts navigate a world of fake news and artificial intelligence. Bill Sutherland, Miriam Rothschild Chair in Conservation Biology, will describe attempts to make global evidence available to all, improve the effectiveness of experts and change attitudes toward the use of evidence, especially in relation to conservation. Sander van der Linden from the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and Department of Psychology will speak about how we can counter fake news and whether we can inoculate the public against misinformation. His forthcoming book will investigate the psychology of trust and how to communicate about facts and evidence in a post-truth society. Rapid changes in the use of artificial intelligence and the social and ethical implications of these will be discussed by Adrian Weller, a senior research fellow in machine learning.

Other speakers will address how reading is being transformed in a digital age. Writer, editor and researcher Tyler Shores will explore reading in an age of digital distraction while literacy education expert Fiona Maine will speak about the potential of complex, ambiguous wordless picturebooks and short films as springboards for children’s critical and creative discussions about the world and how we live in it.

From the world of science speakers include Professor Nicole Soranzo on the evolution of human genetics and how new genetic evidence is being used to better understand the interplay between our DNA (‘nature’) and the environment (‘nurture’). Professor Christopher Reynolds will describe how black holes stretch our understanding of space-time to the limits and power some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. Neuroscientist Professor Paul Fletcher will explain how different processes in the brain can lead to seemingly irrational decisions when it comes to what we eat. Dr Catherine Aitken will explore how life in the womb affects not only children’s lifelong health and well-being, but maybe even that of grandchildren.

Responses to climate change feature in several Cambridge Series sessions: climate change scientist Emily Shuckburgh will speak about her research on modelling localised effects of climate change and will also be in conversation with former Irish president Mary Robinson about climate justice. Another Cambridge Series session on female voices on climate change will see a panel of researchers talk about what kind of adaptations may be required as global warming increases and how we bring a broad range of the public on board, particularly with regard to the more complex issues around climate change. Speakers include Chandrika Nath, executive director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, Professor Melody Clark from the British Antarctic Survey and two Gates Cambridge Scholars - Morgan Seag, co-chair of the international council of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, and anthropologist Ragnhild Freng Dale from the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Western Norway Research Institute.

Other sessions explore issues of identity. Professor Michael Kenny will take part in a panel discussion on Brexit and the politics of national identity in the UK with Welsh government minister Eluned Morgan and Adam Price, leader of Plaid Cymru, while economist Victoria Bateman will address the role of women in the economic rise of the West. Her new book ̽��ֱ��Sex Factor - how women made the West rich argues that, far from the Industrial Revolution being all about male inventors and industrialists, the everyday woman underpinned Britain’s – and the West’s - rise.

For those interested in the more distant past Anthony Shillito and Neil Davies will explore their research on how ancient creatures, from dinosaurs to giant millipedes, shaped the land around them and what secrets are held within their prehistoric footprints. Martin Jones, Emeritus Professor of Archaeological Science at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, will discuss the vital question of food security, showing how our prehistoric ancestors built resilience into their food supply and what we can learn from them.

Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: "Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is home to some of the world's greatest thinkers, at the forefront of debate and exploration in the arts, sciences and global affairs. We're proud to open those ideas into conversations that resonate around the world from our field in Wales. Join us."

Ariel Retik, who oversees the Cambridge Series, said: “We are proud to continue our valued relationship with Hay. ̽��ֱ��Festival is a wonderful way of sharing with the public the research and learning that happens in Cambridge. We have found that Hay audiences are diverse, engaged and intellectually curious. They are an incredible cross-section of the public: from potential students and tourists, to journalists and policy-makers – everyone is represented. They are always interested in the research and, importantly, ask fantastic and challenging questions! We are excited for another year of talks and debates around the research and emerging ideas from Cambridge, which have global relevance and potential for world-changing impact."

Other ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge speakers at the Festival include Professor Martin Rees, neuroscientist Giles Yeo, author and lecturer Robert Macfarlane and neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow. Charlie Gilderdale, NRICH Project Secondary Coordinator, will once again be running maths masterclasses with Alison Eves from the Royal Institution.

Book tickets

Full line-up of the Cambridge Series

Nineteen academics from a wide range of disciplines will take part in this year’s Cambridge Series of talks at the Hay Festival, one of the most prestigious literary festivals in the world.

We are excited for another year of talks and debates around the research and emerging ideas from Cambridge, which have global relevance and potential for world-changing impact

Ariel Retik

Sam Hardwick

Hay Festival

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��Lost Words: inspiring children to love and protect nature

lw355 — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 09:23:58 +0000

̽��ֱ��Lost Words is a book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris that summons the magic of nature to help children find, love and protect the natural world.

Nan Shepherd celebrated: the Scottish writer who knew mountains

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

̽��ֱ��term ‘nature writing’ didn’t exist in the 1940s when Nan Shepherd wrote ̽��ֱ��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.

̽��ֱ��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 ̽��ֱ�� 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. ̽��ֱ��new £10 note will bear the face of the scientist Mary Somerville and the £5 note the face of Nan Shepherd.

̽��ֱ��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. ̽��ֱ��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 ̽��ֱ��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 ̽��ֱ��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. ̽��ֱ��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 ̽��ֱ��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. “ ̽��ֱ��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, “ ̽��ֱ��thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

̽��ֱ��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

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

Yes

Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

amb206 — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:30:00 +0000

For more than a decade Dr Robert Macfarlane has collected endangered words. Not just any words but words for aspects of landscape – its contours, its feel underfoot, its weathers and moods – made fragile by the passing of time and the changing of practices. Lists of these words, organised into themed glossaries, form the backbone of his latest book Landmarks.

In the text that accompanies his word lists, Macfarlane travels from the peat bogs of the Isle of Lewis to the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens in search of hidden lexical treasure. Flying into Stornoway over the brown moorland expanses of Lewis, he overhears a couple joking that they have come to see nothing. Half an hour later, he’s talking to a Lewisian friend who is compiling a glossary of Gaelic peat-language: it encompasses 120 terms.

When Macfarlane wrote an article for the Guardian Review about Landmarks, he added a postscript inviting readers to send him postcards noting their words for landscape. He wasn’t sure whether people still sent postcards. They do. ̽��ֱ��cards reproduced here (with permission from senders) are just a few of the dozens that have found their way into Macfarlane’s pigeon hole at Emmanuel College.

View postcards on Flickr

A ‘dimple’, writes one correspondent, is Derbyshire for a pool in a wood or dell. ‘Geevy’, informs a card from Cornwall, is a mixture of mist and drizzle – “as in it’s a geevy old day”. A Radnorshire word for molehill is ‘unty-tump’. Written on the back of a postcard of the Cairngorms is: “eddish = 2nd crop of hay.” ‘Sprittin’ is “sprouting as in the hawthorn’s sprittin, spring’s on its way.”

John Birkett, who as a boy helped on farms in Cheshire, sent a handwritten list of more than 50 terms, subdivided and graded by x (possibly in use), xx (known to me as a lad) and xxx (known by my father in the 1920s). ‘Puthery’, meaning very humid, is “still used naturally by wife and I”. A cowshed is always a ‘shippon’: the word cowshed was never used as “it was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south”.

Each day brings more post. ̽��ֱ��latest is a letter from Mary West who lives in Westhorpe in Nottinghamshire. She writes to offer Macfarlane a large collection of words and sayings, recorded on index cards. She has been gathering words relating to the countryside for 40 years. “I’ve always collected things and I love words,” she says. “I’ve made around 25 scrap books about the lovely village where I live.”

Though unable to respond personally, Macfarlane would like to thank all those who sent not just words but poems and stories. They include writers and academics, a Jungian analyst, a ‘lollipop man’ and a lady in Lancashire aged 96. Their messages suggest how much their words for landscape mean to them. Recording and archiving their contributions will be a project in its own right.

Macfarlane would like more people to write to him with their word-gifts. Contributors should restrict their offerings to words that describe aspects of the landscapes of Britain and Ireland (names for places but no place-names, please), and could come from any of the many languages, dialects and sub-dialects of these islands, from Gaelic to Welsh, Shetlandic to Jérriais.

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers these words is among the scores of people who have written to Dr Robert Macfarlane in response to his latest book, Landmarks.

A cowshed was always a shippon. Cowshed was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south.

Retired farmer, Cheshire

Ways to get involved and contribute more words

Send postcards to: Dr Robert Macfarlane, Emmanuel College, St Andrews Street, Cambridge CB2 3AP.

Send tweets using #livinglanguage

Leave comments in the section below.

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

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Cambridge academics head for Hay

bjb42 — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:00:16 +0000

A series of talks and debates by Cambridge academics on pressing contemporary issues kicks off this week at the Hay Festival.

This year is the 25^th anniversary of the Festival and the fourth year running that the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has run a series of talks there as part of its commitment to public engagement.

This year's line-up includes Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, who will be participating in three of the 10 sessions on in the Classics series on Herodotus, the “Father of History”, on Plato and on the aspirations and concepts of civilisation, democracy, drama, virtue, victory, liberty and xenia and what the study of Classics has meant in the wider world.

For the first time, Cambridge academics will take part in a series of debates about contemporary political and social issues, including Europe, democracy and urban violence. Among those taking part in the Europe debate is Professor Robert Tombs who has written a blog on the implications for France and Europe of the election of Francois Hollande as president of France.

Another debate covers the broader cultural implications of current events, with Professor Adrian Poole, Professor Alison Sinclair and Jennifer Wallace discussing the modern meaning of tragedy and literary representation of current events. Other speakers include Professor Susan Golombok on alternative family structures, Professor Martin Jones on the archaeology of food, Carolin Crawford on the birth and death of stars, Dame Patricia Hodgson on media regulation in the shadow of the Leveson Inquiry, Professor David Spiegelhalter on our risk society and Professor Stefan Collini on what universities are for.

Professor Lawrence Sherman will talk about how science is transforming policing in a session entitled “ ̽��ֱ��new police knowledge”. ̽��ֱ��session will be introduced by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O’Connor.

Brendan Burchell, senior lecturer in the Sociology Department, will be in conversation with Julia Hobsbawm, honorary visiting professor in networking at Cass Business School, about the future of work.

Other Cambridge academics speaking at Hay are Professor John Thompson, Professor Robert Macfarlane, Professor Martin Rees, Professor John Barrow, Dr Julian Allwood and Professor David MacKay.

Nicola Buckley, head of public engagement at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Cambridge series is a wonderful way to get the fascinating research being done at the ̽��ֱ�� out to the public. ̽��ֱ��Hay Festival draws an international cross-section of people, from policy makers to prospective university students. It is a fantastic platform for our research and this year’s debates aim to highlight the broad range of what we do at the ̽��ֱ�� and its relevance to the key issues we face today.”

Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, said: “What’s thrilling about this year’s series is how exacting it is about society. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge experts cut through the political and media spin on big issues and look at them with real attention and intellectual rigour - from policing to European integration and 21st century family structure and risk. It’s a timely reminder about the value of authority; an aspiration that ‘policy’ might be formed by the best ideas and analysis rather than doctrinaire inclination or what’s easiest to sell. What else would you want from the world’s greatest ̽��ֱ�� but the best thinking on subjects that matter?”

Cambridge is fielding a series of talks and debates by leading academics on a range of global challenges at this year's Hay literary Festival.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge experts cut through the political and media spin on big issues and look at them with real attention and intellectual rigour.

Peter Florence

Hay Festival.

̽��ֱ��main site at the Hay Festival.

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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. ̽��ֱ��journalist Mark Cocker, a regular contributor to ̽��ֱ��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. ̽��ֱ��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 Cambridge 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. “ ̽��ֱ��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; ̽��ֱ��Wild Places, 2007; and a third, ̽��ֱ��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. “ ̽��ֱ��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. ̽��ֱ��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 ̽��ֱ��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. ̽��ֱ��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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes