I found it to be one of those rare books that forces you as a reader to see things afresh. Smyth in a condescending piece entitled: The limits of Nature Writing, manages to sound both negative and smug without really saying anything worthwhile. However it surely cannot be the case that a book published well over forty years ago should be taken as the last word on urban edgelands or ‘bastard landscapes’? Why lock the gates against variety and alternative ways of seeing things? As a reader, these books are firing my imagination and sending me to others (e.g. However, I don’t see why this has to mean that any writers addressing what remains other than in strictly scientific, political or ecological terms are in the wrong. As a reader I have also always preferred writing that isn’t easy to pin down, or neatly categorise. I am no expert on either the writing or the nature parts of the debate, but as a book lover I dislike it when people start making up absolutist rules about who can write about something and how they should do it (especially when, within their own articles, they exempt themselves from their own regulations). I was out for a walk yesterday and I saw some grey wagtails, a bird we don’t get in Orkney. There is a new sub-genre in literary circles, or to be more exact, in literary natural history criticism writing circles: it is called Mac-stabbing. In this vision only the approved type of controlled, knowledgeable, but unemotional prose should be allowed in – anyone writing anything else can have nothing worthwhile to add to our understanding, beyond some superficial guff about how they feel about plants and animals and landscapes. Then a week later I start on another Future Learn course, this time focused on weather. Death of a Naturalist is an amazing collection of poems focusing on rural Ireland, fragments of Heaney’s memories and thoughts. As you say, like it, don’t like or read it, but don’t act as though having a track record of published work/opinion on a given subject area entitles you to decide or define what anyone else who comes after can write or think about it. The fact that Macfarlane goes on to change his view about what might constitute the wild, isn’t the same as being in some kind of denial about the state of our planet. I write New New Nature articles (think pseudo-sub-genre): attempts at science, natural history, landscape history, local history, Macfarlish quotes, allegory, parody with the occasional garnish of the mot juste (well I like to think so) all woven into short stories. http://thequietus.com/articles/23446-landscape-punk-nationalism-politics, The Dark Side of Nature Writing, Richard Smyth, New Humanist, June 2018, Books found and books lost: another year of reading, A time for shelf analysis: New Year reading resolutions, Balham enters the Anthropocene: A Way of Being in the World, The Balham Literary Festival 10-12th June 2016 | Richly Evocative, A time for shelf analysis: New Year reading resolutions | Richly Evocative. I agree there’s an element of navel gazing to the whole thing – my piece included. blacktop N.AMER noun Asphalt, tarmacadam, or other black material used for surfacing roads. Further, he claims that, whilst the audience is probably bigger than ever before, the presence of ‘real nature’ is perhaps less cogent. However what could easily be a dull, industry centric debate over categorisation, has in the hands of some critics turned personal. The Nature Writing Debate – A Meta-Analysis | adventures in conservation, How to give a city the slip without leaving: a sidle through Nottingham, Lyrical by the sea: Clevedon's Poet's Walk. Of course Mark Cocker is not so distant in class and gender himself, but this doesn’t stop him from letting Macdonald off the hook for all that soppy, emotional stuff, because, well, she is a woman. It’s become customary, on this side of the Atlantic, stiffly to exclude all such personal narratives from writings about the natural world, as if the experience of nature were something separate from real life, a diversion, a hobby, or perhaps only to be evaluated through the dispassionate and separating prism of science. Death of the naturalist: why is the “new nature writing” so tame? The clue was sort of in the title. Aside from displaying a degree of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, all this really shows is that Cocker doesn’t much like this approach to writing about place and nature, which is fair enough, but then he is welcome to read other works of natural history that are more fact based and empirical. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. If you don’t like it, leave on a train or a bus and read something else. The Old Ways - Robert Macfarlane The jury is still out on Mr Macfarlane. And to end this blog on nature writing we offer you ‘Death of the Naturalist’ – why is nature writing now so tame? Sown in the spring, the plants were then harvested in summer. His fundamental bugbear seems to be with the amorphous character of ‘New Nature Writing’ as a label itself, which he regards as an irritatingly flexible, catch-all category, into which many publishers assign work he dislikes, alongside other material that he does deem acceptable. It was June: too late for alder and hazel, too late for willow. Wood – the Victorian naturalist whose biography I am writing – was often attacked and derided for being a populist by ‘professional’ scientific writers, but what they really disliked was his popularity with the public, and the commercial success that they didn’t have. Generally, I agree. Broadly, from Cocker’s perspective, this means that ‘Nature Writing’ now includes far too much writing that features literary, artistic and emotional responses to landscape and nature. As a result he ends up addressing philosophical differences, rather than critiquing the book or books in front of him. Next – although indirectly via a quote from another reviewer in Ireland – he has a go at Helen Macdonald for using the natural world as a way to talk about personal grief. There will always, always be room on my shelves for books by scientists and poets, rationalists and dreamers – as often as possible butted right up against each other. Budden again on Nature Writing and Why we need landscape punk Which ones are by men? It’s so unnecessary as well this pompous gatekeeping. Saw R Macfarlane’s response in NS – a very fair, open and reasoned come back I thought. Alongside that, I will also be working on some creative writing and have a collection of exercises for creating ideas and kickstarting the word magic. For Cocker the danger is: “that nature writing becomes a literature of consolation that distracts us from the truth of our fallen countryside, or – just as bad – that it becomes a space for us to talk to ourselves about ourselves, with nature relegated to the background as an attractive green wash.”. I am looking at what nature writing is, why we read and write it and how has it changed. Rather it should be about campaigning, being in the field, sounding warnings about everything that we – this selfish, careless species – are set to destroy in the world. Learn how your comment data is processed. I urge you to download and read this Manifesto for Wildlife, which sets out a framework for saving what’s left and transforming our approach to the environment and the natural world in Britain – one of the most ‘nature depleted’ states in the world. The Answers: It moved like smoke, a persistent, particulate cloud made up of flakes of tumbled gold. I think you are right to point when that debate becomes private park rather than common ground. I will read journals, how-to books, travel narratives…from Bartram’s Travels to…well, whatever is popular today. I hear tawny owls, hooting at night, which feels very exotic to me, as the only owls we have in Orkney are the short-eared owls, which are silent. I am kicking off with a four week Future Learn course; William Wordsworth – Poetry, People and Place. Mabey’s book is excellent and remains relevant today; indeed, his writing here and in more recent works continues to be highly respected and appreciated by those who read in and around nature writing. This last is a practice that Cocker then proceeds to attack by invoking the Guardian’s Digested Read, thus showing his disapproval by quoting John Crace on ‘Macfarlish’ writing. Rewilding the Novel Common Ground, Rob Cowen, 2015, Hutchinson. We also wanted the contributions to be be voice-driven, narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the story…”. The critic makes himself sound peevish. This presupposes that there are rules about such things and that it is somehow wrong for a book that engages with the natural world in some way, to also involve personal anecdote and feeling. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. Overall the piece comes across as intellectual nose-thumbing with a similar Ya-Boo-Sucks tone to that of Private Eye’s pastiche Ted Hughes poems – ‘Owly Owly’ et al. I remember there were similar arguments about the Harry Potter books and you felt that rather then it being an honest interesting debate it was to bring down a popular writer. ( Log Out /  About me I grew up in Manchester. This chiefly involves critics and other writers taking to task either, or both of Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald for being successful. So I’ve been learning a new landscape. Exactly how I feel. Originally I was also going to look at what makes good nature writing but on reflection, I think that would be a good topic for next year once I’ve done a lot more reading and writing and learning. (Smyth’s TLS article seems to have been taken down as of June 2016 – though he expounds similar views in this piece for The New Humanist adding Phillip Hoare, Melissa Harrison, Rob Cowen and Roger Deakin as targets, as well as sniping at Robert Macfarlane – again. Indeed The Wild Places is in part about the loss in the British Isles of any extensive ‘wilderness’ areas. Essentially Cocker is irked that certain books designated by their publishers as Nature Writing don’t conform to his expectations of how such works should be written. By Mark Cocker. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? A Graham Swift, Waterland, William Heinemann,1983 Change ). rain noun The condensed moisture of the atmosphere falling visibly in separate drops. Add Grey of Falloden (Charm of Birds) and you’ve two examples of writing at its best: clear, totally unaffected and leaving plenty of space for the reader to fill in with their own thoughts. I feel I should rate him, after, all Roger Deakin thought so highly of… That particular issue includes work by Mark Cocker and Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie and Lydia Peele, amongst others. “In an interview, he was quoted as saying… natural resources are limited, and I need to take them before they’re gone.” Writer: Tony Juniper. What I find most troubling about Cocker and Smyth’s apparent attitude is the presumption that there is room for only one type, THEIR, type of Nature Writing. When the writer Aubrey Seymour suggested that the rook’s hoarse call has ‘an essence of Old England about it’, he may have been paying unconscious homage to this ancient national trait.”, D “A wave of golden air was working its way down the meadow, wheeling as it went. I am not a nature writing expert but it strikes me that Macfarlane has always supported other writers, encouraged his readers to read past and forgotten writers and make their own journey through nature, landscape and writing. Gary Budden on the importance of a plurality of voices responding to landscape – ‘the whispering swarm’ – not just Academics or Little Englanders. Cocker’s dismissive side-swipe at Rob Cowen’s Common Ground, made in passing by lumping the book into a sub-genre of ‘New Nature Writing’ is particularly unjust. Way back when I was doing my A levels, I wrote an essay called ‘E.M. I also suspect that many of the authors criticised for being associated with this genre, wouldn’t place themselves in it, or indeed claim to be first and foremost ‘Nature Writers’. Pingback: The Nature Writing Debate – A Meta-Analysis | adventures in conservation. On Nature Writing: The Cocker/Macfarlane exchange, Following the White Deer: On Myth & Writing by Terri Windling, World Enough and Time by Christian McEwan, Seasons and Syllables: A microlecture on creating a haiku. All use a number of writerly, stylistic techniques to express their thinking – for some it is simile, others personal opinion, quotation, the use of sub-clauses for qualification, or for dramatic effect – staccato punctuation. As a kid, I spent as much time… A. Baker and many others reprinted and read by a hungry, new audience? Reason 2: Damage Built Up in the Natural World It should be great fun and I’m very excited to be sharing some recent thoughts about topiary with people – and how it might work in a modern garden. Oh no – navel gazing and debate is good. Part of the problem is that Cocker’s vision of ‘fallen countryside’ assumes some kind of edenic state of perfection that has now been corrupted. Here are a few recommendations for great nature writing – some are free, some will take you elsewhere to buy the book…, All are well worth reading though, as they don’t just write about nature – but politics, capitalism, the economy and romance too…. Forster and the failure to connect.’ Something about the author’s urgent desire to bridge divides, to reconcile seemingly oppositional ideas and ways of seeing the world, struck home. But for now, here are a few bits and pieces I’ve already started on: Stephen Moss on Nature Writing from Nardine Groch on Vimeo. The browns and greens are unrelieved by splashes of colour; there is a sense of dimness, of almost oppressive growth.”, C “My own early encounter with the rook of our imagination makes me appreciate just how enticing the creature can be. Page after page is dotted with too-carefully chosen “lyrical” words: sluice, knapped, sintering, root-nooks, moiling, fust – perfectly fine words in themselves, of course, but their cumulative effect is to make the writing reek overpoweringly of the lamp.”. Conclusion: there’s room for everyone. To me all of the above are examples of informed, lucid, and in some cases, beautiful pieces of writing. The subject has subsequently been revisited by so many others that it is virtually a subgenre under the heading “edgelands”. And I enjoy both Macfarlane and Macdonald. I can’t honestly say that Smyth’s article taught me much about any actual ‘limits’ of nature writing, other than that some contemporary writers don’t measure up to his rather arbitrary and inconsistent rules about what such books should and shouldn’t do. By women? There’s a good’un. For most of its adult life it is olive green to yellowish-brown and has a snub nose. The delusional idea that markets are separate from nature has guided mainstream economic policy for a long time — and now we are seeing the consequences in mass extinctions, loss of topsoils, climate change, collapse of fish stocks in the world ocean, rising levels of pollution, and more. Life.Nature.You from Myles Thompson on Vimeo. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Macfarlane does a very measured and effective riposte in the NS a couple of weeks later. Meanwhile the reader enjoys the writing for what it is. C Mark Cocker, Crow Country, Vintage, 2007 I am a sucker for nature writing. I find it interesting, but what matters above all else is nature itself. In Cocker’s view, indulging in ‘re-enchantment’ means cloaking an innocent landscape, or environment, in literary finery and thus bestowing extraneous cultural meaning on a place through poetic description, or worse, referring to it though the lens of an earlier writer. Each taken from books I have enjoyed reading and from whom I believe that I have gained something and learned something. In particular Cocker dislikes some writers use of the term ‘re-enchantment’. Baker, John Stewart Collis et al), and that has to be a good thing. On the relationship between Victorian ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ naturalists and their writings, there is an ongoing research project of relevance: Constructing Scientific Communities http://conscicom.org/. It is also worth pointing out that Cowen’s book is very much grounded in a single place near to his home, in which he spends considerable time. ( Log Out /  How To Use Topiary In The Garden – Talk Via Zoom, The Telegraph Wrote About My Topiary Work Yesterday. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. It is hard to move through the forest because everywhere roots are tangled, and there are rotting logs across the path, some crusted with the satiny green of liverworts, others slick with damp moss. As a reader I find these distinctions pompous, limiting and utterly unnecessary. But which is the scientist? Catherine Buni explores the issue in an excellent, wide-ranging, essay in the LA Review of Books: Toward a wider view of nature writing. From the blurb on my copy of H is for Hawk it was pretty clear that the book was about Helen Macdonald and Goshawks and TH White and grief. Seasons and Syllables: A microlecture on creating a haiku from San Jacket on Vimeo. Irritating though it may be to some that Macfarlane’s endorsement, foreword or introduction now appears on so many books; surely the man is doing Nature Writing an enormous service by getting the likes of Nan Shepherd, J. In one of Richard Mabey’s own books, Nature Cure – very much an exploration of the intersection of human life and desires with the natural world – Mabey notes that: “[This book] will also, inevitably, be an account of my own life in the aftermath of illness, and of what I felt and thought dipping my toe at last into something approaching adult independence. Smyth in setting out to demonstrate these  ‘limits’ ends up adopting a contradictory overview, which at once manages to suggest that there is a right and wrong type of Nature Writing, (examples are provided), yet also claims that the genre shouldn’t be exclusive. Death of the naturalist: why is the “new nature writing” so tame? Although my teenage self clearly felt that Forster (in his novels at least) hadn’t succeeded in this progressive effort to unite different cultures and philosophies, I felt then, as I still tend to do, that he was right to try. D Olivia Laing, To the River, Canongate Books, 2011 This is all new to me – thanks for the introduction. Pingback: Balham enters the Anthropocene: A Way of Being in the World, The Balham Literary Festival 10-12th June 2016 | Richly Evocative, Pingback: A time for shelf analysis: New Year reading resolutions | Richly Evocative. A pollen grain is identified by its architecture and ornamentation; it can be porous or furrowed, smooth or spiked.”, E We stand now where two roads diverge. Blacktop Rain is a blog about urban nature, nature writing and the writing life. That is unless you write about yourself on a personal level in relation to Nature or are Robert Macfarlane. How To Sharpen Your Shears – A Video With Tips! Here Buni finds that, whilst a lot of white, middle-class men who write about Nature are getting published, there are other voices out there with their own alternative perspectives. I say so-called, because, as the author Melissa Harrison has recently pointed out in her blog about the matter, this argument in many respects is a creation of publisher’s marketing departments. Who these other voices belong to, and how and why it is so much harder for them to be heard, is explored in some depth in Buni’s essay. … the upland habitats we have chosen to conserve seem to be almost as dead, impoverished and lacking in structure or complexity as a parking lot… without trees, large predators, wild herbivores, rotting wood or many other components of a thriving ecosystem, these places retain only a few worn strands of the complex web of life. A smart, witty meta analysis (also pretty handy summation of the key points) of recent Nature Writing debates, by environmentalist Spike Harby – and a reminder that the writing bit tends to overtake the nature bit in all this, LA Review of Books – Toward a wider view of Nature Writing – Catherine Buni This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. This is nothing new. By, in effect, becoming for a time a fox, a deer, a hare, a young girl, a retired older man, Cowen draws the reader inside this world in a visceral, hugely potent and memorable way. So, September sees the diving in of this project!! https://www.chrispackham.co.uk/a-peoples-manifesto-for-wildlife, The limits of nature writing Richard Smyth Rob Cowen’s Common Ground, published in May, is the latest in this field.”. I weighed up the options: nettle or dock, plantain, oilseed rape or – but it was less likely – pine. In short these fanciful amateurs should get the hell out of the way and leave proper Nature Writing to the professionals. In his introduction to the issue, Jason Cowley simply states that the aim was to offer an alternative to the rather care-worn traditions and cliches of the ‘old’ pastoral nature writers: “we were interested less in what might be called old nature writing – by which I mean the pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer – than in writers who approached their subjects in heterodox and experimental ways. And you can find here more examples of the topiary I make with my sharp blades. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. Thanks. This is a fair point, or at least it would be, if the whole world of natural history writing had been taken over by a bunch of poets using landscape and mega-fauna as convenient metaphors for their own personal tragedies – gaia as one gigantic pathetic fallacy. As a result reading the book transmits a rich, multi-sensory impression of a very specific single patch of ‘bastard countryside’ in North Yorkshire. Lengthy essay on lack of diversity in published Nature Writing. Tried to convey the post from a reader’s perspective. The Revd. And to what extent does that matter? Recently both Mark Cocker, in the New Statesman and Richard Smyth in the TLS have written articles on ‘Nature Writing’. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. I’d rather have a mix of scientists who feel and poets and artists who protest, and use evidence and le mot juste. http://thequietus.com/articles/23446-landscape-punk-nationalism-politics, June 30 2017 Update – clearly this is an argument that will run and run… Click Here To See The Article About my Topiary Work In The Telegraph, © 2020 Modern Mint Ltd It is this last desire for the ‘writer to be present’ that seems to raise Mark Cocker’s hackles the most. 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