Most of the life on Earth is experiencing the disruption that our species has collectively initiated. I feel morally compelled to respond. Trying to encourage a deeper and more regular engagement with nature in other people feels like a form of activism within my reach.
I’ve known for a while that I would want a child of my own at some point in my life, but there’s a chance that this won’t happen. I also now look to nature writing as a way of trying to share with others what I would have wanted to share with them; an essential relationship with our ecological systems and natural domains.
I see nature to be the encompassing universe that we’re from, having three broad domains that exist on an interweaving spectrum. There’s the domain of physical matter and energy that everything is made from. There’s the domain of biological life in all its intricate and unusual forms. And there’s the domain between, where matter and energy combine to express emergent characteristics and behaviours.
Our oceans and weather display forms of emergence. They’re unpredictable, self-organising, and self-perpetuating. Parts of nature, wholly dependent and interconnected with life around the planet.
Through a closer relationship with these emergent domains, particularly the weather and our skies, I believe that we can begin to feel more keenly the impacts we’re having on the climate.
The atmosphere is a delicate thing, balanced in a finely-tuned equilibrium with life, billions of years in the making. By changing our climate, we are pushing the atmosphere into a new equilibrium that is likely to be more hostile to life as we know it.
The challenge of communicating these ideas is making them felt as well as heard. They need stories and characters that can carry them. For example, by profiling starlings and their murmurations to illustrate the idea of emergence and the hidden textures of air.
Writing feels, to me, a form that is more fixed and permanent than visual art, more deliberate and considered. Deeper rooting. But it’s challenging because of that. A slow process, prone to failure.
I find some nature writing creates barriers to a wider audience by encoding nature in the language and privilege of writers. Most people around the world work full-time jobs, living in cities and urban environments. Writing from a perspective they share, in terms that are within reach, and with the honesty of not knowing, could be a way to relate nature to more people in a clearer and more accessible way.
This piece was written in response to the question ‘Why do I write?’ for Granta’s writing nature course.