Most life on Earth is experiencing the disruption that our species has initiated. I feel morally compelled to respond. Trying to encourage a deeper and more regular engagement with nature in others feels like a form of activism within my reach.
I have known for a while that I would like to bring a child of my own into the world as part of a family, but it’s likely that this won’t happen. I now also 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 ecology and natural domains.
I see nature to be the encompassing universe we’re from, having three broad domains existing on an interweaving spectrum. There’s that of physical matter and energy of which everything is made. There’s the domain of biological life in all its intricate and unusual forms. And there’s the domain inbetween, where matter and energy combine to express emergent properties and behaviours.
It’s this latter domain I’m particularly interested in. The unpredictable, self-organising, and self-perpetuating realms of weather and air. A part of nature wholly dependent and interconnected with life across the planet. I believe that through a closer relationship with these emergent domains, we can begin to feel more keenly the impact we’re having on the climate.
The challenge of communicating these ideas is bringing them to life with meaning. I don’t have the expertise to share from a position of specialist authority. So, it feels the best way to try and communicate them is by finding stories and characters that can carry them. For example, by profiling starlings and their murmurations as a way to illustrate the idea of emergence and the hidden shapes 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 that a lot nature writing creates barriers to be enjoyed by a wider audience by encoding nature in the language and privilege of writers. Most people work full-time jobs, living in and growing up in urban environments. Writing from a perspective they share, in a voice that’s within reach, with the honesty of not knowing the name of every plant, could be a way to relate nature in a clearer, more accessible way.
Written in response to the question ‘Why do I want to write about nature?’ for Granta’s writing nature workshop.