Put that book down and do something

Author and critic Richard Smyth on the fuzzy point of nature writing

By the end of 2021, a total of 8,835 wildfires burned 2,568,948 acres across the U.S. state of California

Writing has always occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between doing nothing and doing something. In the field of nature writing – as ecological crises bite, the world begins to boil, waves of extinction loom before us – this tension has become unbearable; the market, accordingly, has buckled, and the age of activism-led nature writing (hardbacktivism, rucksacktivism, Robert Mactivism?) is upon us. Tom Heap’s Land Smart, Isabella Tree’s The Book Of Wilding and Nick Hayes’ The Trespasser’s Companion are among the recent books that dare to ask something of the reader beyond having a little read and a little think. No bad thing, in many ways. The case for action on the environment, local and global, is at this stage irrefutable; that most of us will need in some way to be stirred to action is almost as difficult to dispute.

Whether nature writing is the best way, or even a good way, to do this is another question. We’re here again: what is nature writing for?

‘Nature writers must ponder and engage with [the] troubling realities,’ the writer and birder Mark Cocker wrote in the New Statesman in 2015. ‘Otherwise, we are just fiddling while the agrochemicals burn. The real 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’.

In an essay in response, Robert Macfarlane, the lordly doyen of the New Nature Writing, first rebuked Cocker for his ‘unfortunate’ lapse of manners (in nature writing, manners are held to matter) and then, straightening his lace cuffs, laid out a twofold defence.