On 'Nature Writing'

    'Nature writing': a writing that concerns the natural environment. This is pretty straight forward right? But let's dive in a little deeper into this genre, and I think you'll began that it is not as clean-cut as it might appear at first glance. Well in the UK, at least

    When I asked my friends what does 'nature writing' mean for them, the majority of who answered put it simply: "it is an observation [or description] of the natural world"; of faunas and floras and some did also mention bodies of water like the river. What this suggests for me a kind of distance between the writer, and even the reader, and the space of the 'natural world'. Why does this matter? you may wonder. Well, I think this reveals a way of viewing and experiencing that either be seen as an obstacle to the environmental question.

‘We’ve had the outdoors ripped from us’: What the growing trend of nature memoirs tells us about the state of the world' Independent, 2020

   i. 

   For one, the distance that it creates makes it harder to care enough about the environment. The reason for this might be that the vast majority of the recent English books categorised as 'nature writing' depicts mainly the British rural area, and are written by middle-class white people who have a lot of time on their hand - which is inaccessible to the majority of the population. Of course, you could say that the purpose then of nature writing is to bring the experience to the reader who can't access the place. Yet the notion of 'inaccessibility' itself raises social questions: is access to greeneries an individual's right? If so then it raises a lot of questions relating to the issue of inequalities. In the Guardian article "Nature writing is booming", Zoe Gilbert expresses her complex relationship with the genre, confessing that "experiencing meaning in nature, being enchanted by her myriad forms, now feels aspirational" and that "Nature, both a place and an idea, has become fraught with issues of privilege". This is because, although the writing acts as a bridge between the reader and the author, it works on the principle of giving a 'sense of place'. But this 'space' is monopolised by the singular voice 'I', and this singular voice is still often middle-class and white. Consequently, it can change the collective nature of the Natural world, into a more privatised ordeal.

   Is this a problem of the reader or the writer? Is it a problem of the content itself or the method of engagement in the writing? Those are some of the questions that I had after ponder about this article and the topic. According to Peter A. Fritzer, we should ask ourselves more “what man or humankind … does, or has done, in nature.”, rather than our "relations to nature". But what does it mean talk about what human has done 'in nature'? Is it about how we live, we use nature?[1] What have we done to change it? But is it us that changes it, or the other way around? According to the anthropocene, it would be the first. Yet, for instance if we look at the lives of fungi, it could suggest the later. Nature has had influence on us that we don’t even notice anymore. 

ii.

   Moreover, how should we relate to the Natural world? Anthropomorphism has often been used, but it has its limitation. On the one hand, talking about these organism with anthropomorphic imageries can be misleading. Yet, not the other hand, this has been the best way to approximate our understanding of these species, and helps us relate to them. Is the best way then to actually keep distance? I feel many authors have tried to play near this border. For instance in the fiction Drive Your Plow or creative non-fiction H is for Hawk, where Nature has a sort of human interpreter and only a certain person has the privileged to understand, and it also ascertains that cross-species translation is an objective thing[2]. Although this method does help us to empathise with the species the human narrator represent, it does presents a paradox, since technically all description are filtered to be fitted with recognisable human imageries, and even more narrowed in the case of British nature writing.  

   There is also the question of should 'nature writing' be just about the 'individual' in nature? Looking at the recent article from the Guardian where they showcase some of the 'pioneers' of the genre, it seems like it is so[3]. Moreover, they all have two things in common: they are white, and they are depicted as the lonely-wondering-hero-in-the-wild, and has that ubiquitous 18th century Romantic quality to them. Reading the popular ones, can feel as Jamie puts it in her article, as if "we’re in the company, however engaging, of another ‘owner’, or if not an owner, certainly a single mediator [of the natural world]". 

   But after reading more about the nature world, like Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement and Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, one thing I got from these books is that this climate and environmental issue is not exactly an individual's problem. These books even challenge the notion of 'individuality' - especially in Entangled Life, where through the exploration of the fungi network, the author reflects how much like these organisms, we are also made up of other organisms who live inside of us. Yes, that can sound a bit creepy, but it truly pushes the question of individuality to the front: where does one 'individual' ends and the other one starts? Likewise, climate change needs a chain of actions in order to make great changes. Collectivity is what this writing should emphasise more. Singular admiration might not make the cut anymore.

iii.

Granta, 102

   Furthermore, in an interview done with Granta for the issue The New Nature Writing, writer Robert Macfarlane repeats the comparison of going into the natural world as "always feels like crossing a border into another world". This reinforces the 'alienating' narrative of the natural world, even when mode of 'realism' is used to engage with Nature. This 'Othering' of Nature stems from, as Amitav Ghosh suggested, the emerging Civilisation. When it comes to sci-fi (which is arguably also nature writing, in the sense that it also engages in the human-nature relationship) as analysed by Ursula K. Heise, this alienation of the Natural world is heightened. In her analysis of "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" by Ursula K. Le Guin, depicts Nature as this "sentient super-organism"; one that is defined by its ultimate "connectedness", in comparison with the human experience of isolation. The human characters are divided into two groups: those who feel ultimately detached from Nature, and those who are one with (quite literally) with Nature, which suggests there are no middle-ground. This analysis also brings into question as to what should be categorised as 'nature writing'. Can only non-fiction be considered? Yet, imagining the alternative is so crucial in our battle with the current climate issues.

   However, at the very least, the pastoral kind of nature-writing engages in the immediate Nature with more of a sense of belonging than those found in speculative fiction. This is because in the sci-fi approach, there is also this sense of abandonment of the Earth: all narratives points to the solution of leaving the planet when facing environmental issues. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" sets in a future where human has migrated to different planets, Octavia A. Butler's protagonist in speculative fiction The Parable of the Sower, also engages in a similar philosophy and sees it as the ultimate goal. 

   How then, is the solution to this conundrum? Honestly, I don't really know. As I write this paragraph, I personally have not settled on any particular conclusion. As I hopefully have shown, the literary relationship we have with the Natural space is complex. But with the current climate emergency, I do feel that stories needs to imagine more ways for us to live with the changes, to live and make use of Earth and not search solutions in a different planet: because realistically, we don't have time. Yet, the current writing find in the British Nature Writing, I feel, lacks a bit of guts in this way. It is still in the pastel appreciation of the Natural world - which is good, but again in our current climate I think it should now move beyond that. Moreover, there are so many other voices in Nature Writing that I have not covered, and whose voice I would like to dedicate another blog post to - so watch out for that!

   Anyway, those are my thoughts on 'nature writing'. What do you guys think?

Footnotes:

[1] Can gentrification be a part of this writing then? 

[2] More is discussed in: Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? London, Penguin Books, 2012, p. 157

[3] Images from: Macfarlane, Robert, et al. “Country Files: Nature Writers on the Books That Inspired Them.” The Guardian, 22 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/30/country-files-nature-writers-books-inspired-them.

Bibliography:

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1). Reprint, Grand Central Publishing, 2019.

Clark, Timothy. “Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp. 131–49, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030826.

Colin. “Ghost Species | Robert Macfarlane | Granta Magazine.” Granta, 22 Jan. 2020, granta.com/video-ghost-species.

Heise, Ursula. “From the Blue Planet to Google Earth.” Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Illustrated, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 17–21.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures). 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Jamie, Kathleen. “Kathleen Jamie · A Lone Enraptured Male: The Cult of the Wild · LRB 6 March 2008.” London Review of Books, 21 May 2020, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/a-lone-enraptured-male.

Lilley, Deborah. “New British Nature Writing.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 5 Apr. 2017, www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-155.

Macdonald, Helen. H Is for Hawk. First Trade Paper, Grove Press, 2016.

Reporter, Guardian Staff. “Nature Writing Is Booming – but Must a Walk in the Woods Always Be Meaningful?” The Guardian, 30 May 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/15/nature-writing-is-booming-but-must-a-walk-in-the-woods-always-be-meaningful.

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021.

Times, The New York. “THE NATURE OF NATURE WRITING.” The New York Times, 22 July 1984, www.nytimes.com/1984/07/22/books/the-nature-of-nature-writing.html.

Tokarczuk, Olga, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel. Reprint, Riverhead Books, 2020.