Nature writing is enjoying a resurgence. Here John Lister-Kaye, one of Scotland’s foremost environmentalists, charts the history of the genre and suggests just why it is that we’re so keen to discover the natural world again.
Nature writing is not just back, it’s come home, all bushy-tailed. It started here with Gilbert White’s great classic The Natural History of Selbourne (1789), which sparked a whole new way of observational writing on natural history, rather than the long-established convention of killing and collecting specimens. But in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries the genre went west to salute the new and uplifting wildernesses of America. Fired with transcendentalist zeal, Henry David Thoreau’s journals – all three million words – single-handedly laid the foundations for an American genre of philosophical, elegiac, anecdotal nature writing that was enthusiastically carried forward by such prolific environmental luminaries as John Muir, Mary Austin, Ernest Thompson Seton and many others.
In Britain the genre lay fallow for most of the twentieth century. With the outstanding exceptions of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1959) and J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1962), nature writing remains firmly American; witness Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Gary Snyder, Loren Eisley... the list is long. Every good book shop in the USA had a section labelled Nature Writing – not so here. Our few brave exponents struggled to find a niche for their work.
Now a new spirit pervades the UK. Perhaps it is fear. Perhaps the reawakening of such environmental conscience as we ever had, as concerns about climate change inch their way up the political agenda, has fed a resurgence of interest in nature. Springwatch achieved audiences of 3.6 million, and Coast has been hugely popular on television. Perhaps, over decades, the drip feed of the Attenborough phenomenon has raised a generation of nature-savvy viewers who suddenly feel estranged and want to engage at a more personal level. Perhaps the Thatcher and Blair years of rampant consumerism have left an inner void to which writers and readers have responded. Now, suddenly, the observational first person is back. It is open-hearted, shamelessly emotive, highly personalised and often lyrical.
There was a notion, too, that unless nature writing was scientifically endorsed, which usually meant written in the stodgy third person with a graph or a table or two thrown in for good measure, it was somehow invalid. Now we have a new generation of nature writers, who seem to salute science only in passing and when they need to, their first-person, anecdotal evidence in the lead role: William Fiennes in The Snow Geese (2002), Richard Mabey in Nature Cure (2005), Kathleen Jamie’s Findings (2005), Jay Griffiths’ Wild (2006), Mark Cocker’s Crow Country (2007) and Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2008). These writers have redefined nature writing in the UK, firmly re-asserting the craft as a stand-alone genre quite apart from the nature compendia, monographs and field guides of our time.
John Lister-Kaye's latest book At the Water's Edge is available now.
