Back to the future: the ‘new nature writing,’ ecological boredom, and the recall of the wild

Abstract

The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its continuing class and gender biases, and its paradoxical adherence to the very categories – particularly wildness – it wishes to confront. This article does not set out to dismiss the “new nature writing” or to assess which writers might be the best fit with it; instead, it looks at its indebtedness to the earlier literary and cultural traditions it claims to interrogate and deconstruct. This debt is often expressed in terms of belatedness, whether acknowledged or not, in relation to earlier notions of wilderness and wildness – inherently slippery categories that multiply and ramify in the “new nature writing,” which has neither managed to dissociate itself from wildness nor to redefine it for our ecologically troubled times.

Keywords:

• Belatedness
• ecological turn
• environment
• new nature writing
• wilderness
• wildness

Notes

1. Nature writing is notoriously difficult to define, not least by its own practitioners, some of whom reject a generic label that covers very different kinds of writing with equally different personal motives and/or political ends. The American critic Don Scheese usefully defines nature writing as a three-way conversation between natural history, travel writing, and spiritual autobiography (6), though this definition probably holds better for US nature writing, which operates within a more readily identifiable set of often religiously inflected cultural traditions, than it does for nature writing in the UK. The problem is exacerbated with the “new nature writing” in so far as it tends to challenge earlier assumptions about the genre and, indeed, about nature in general: as Tim Dee puts it, the “end of nature” crisis has “vastly lengthened the nature-writing booklist [to include] poetry, polemic and scientific prose,” sometimes all of these combined in a heady mixture, while the “old taxonomies, hierarchies and clarities” that accompanied earlier forms of British natural history writing have effectively disappeared. The Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie, who has been harshly critical of attempts to corral different writers into schools with catchy labels such as “the new nature writing,” is even unsure whether her own work is “nature writing”: “I don’t think there is a category [for it],” she muses in her collection of prose essays, Findings (2005), while elsewhere she wonders aloud whether there is such a thing as “nature writing” at all (“Four Fields”). See also Note 11 below.

2. Natural history is one of the foundations for what might conservatively be seen as a “Great Tradition” of British nature writing, where the key foundational figure is arguably neither John Clare nor William Wordsworth but the now largely forgotten eighteenth-century English parson-naturalist, Gilbert White (Worster). Natural history television à la David Attenborough has taken over this mantle, which looks to trade, as Attenborough himself does, on a distinctively English mix of professional charm and affable amateurism; but it should not be forgotten that American nature writing is also indebted to natural history, and that natural history’s combination of encyclopaedic knowledge and empirical method would also have a profound influence on its own foundational writers, notably Henry Thoreau (Buell, Environmental).

3. Attempts to distinguish wildness and wilderness have proven as varied, and ultimately as inconclusive, as attempts to define the two terms themselves. As Lawrence Buell helpfully explains in the glossary at the back of his book The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), “wild, wildness, and wilderness all share the sense of “undomesticated.” [But although] wildness and wilderness can be used synonymously […] wilderness literally refers to a spatial area, whereas wildness is a term of quality rather than location. […] Wildness is [also] a quality humans share with nonhuman entities […] whereas wilderness [typically] denotes terra incognita, […] the abode of beasts rather than humans: a place where civilized people supposedly do not dwell” (148–9). Like wildness and wilderness themselves, attempts to differentiate the two are often ideological, signs of a desire either to shore up the distinctive features of civilization or to create dividing lines between civilizations or cultures – and signs in turn of the cultural investments placed in nature itself.

4. To be fair to Snyder, there is a cosmopolitan dimension to his work that holds his American ethnocentrism in check, while in Turner’s defense, the over-emphasis on personal rather than social transformation is balanced by an ecological understanding of the natural world as an ensemble of “non-linear dynamical systems” (Turner 125) which outflanks any individual attempt to calculate and control it – a very different worldview to the self-oriented transcendentalism that informs his conception of wildness as a redemptive “journey of the soul” (Turner 101). Still, it is impossible to agree with Turner that “our ecological crisis is a crisis of character, not a political or social crisis” (20); and impossible – at least for me – not to feel profoundly irritated by his own distinctly Californian brand of nature mysticism, which turns its back on the materialism from which it profits, and which risks being seen as a form of anti-establishment narcissism in which the wild is little more than “a project of the self” (107).

5. Some critics have seen a parochial element in the “new nature writing” in so far as it looks to concentrate on particular places and locales, re-embedding national history in regional landscape while also displaying an attentiveness to human ecological interference, not least by choosing to stay close to home (Cowley; Watts). Macfarlane, who seems more comfortable with the NNW project than most, admits to wanting to rebuild a national tradition that has fallen on hard times, but rejects the “little-islandism” that might endorse it, while he defends parochialism by reconnecting it with universalism, that close scrutiny of the particular that might allow us to grasp fundamentals. “All great civilisations are based on parochialism,” he quotes from the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, and “in the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width” (Kavanagh, quoted in Macfarlane, “Wild Things”). Macfarlane’s defence of NNW is characteristically articulate and heartfelt, but it arguably overlooks, not so much the relation of the parochial to the universal, as the relation of the local to the global which can be found in nearly all the best nature writing, however place-specific its action and from whichever location it is written and read. Moreover, this relation of the local to the global is a feature of his own writing, which is drawn repeatedly to contemplate the natural and cultural consequences of movement over time. For further discussion of this, see Section 2.

6. I read WP as being influenced less by a “post-natural” view of the environment than by arcadian conceptions of “semi-natural” landscape that are based on a long tradition of human interference with the natural world (Harris and Van Diggelen; Schama; Worster). Semi-natural landscapes can be placed midway on the continuum between the wild and the domesticated (Westhoff). Given Britain’s environmental history, it is hardly surprising that many of its landscapes qualify less as “wild” than as “semi-natural.” Indeed, as Donald Worster suggests, much of the history of British nature writing can be read as a literary record, refracted through arcadian ideas and philosophies, of human encounters with semi-natural systems of different kinds.

7. I am drawing here on Clifford’s popular notion of “salvage ethnography.” For Clifford, ethnographic texts are “inescapably allegorical” (Clifford and Marcus 99), and one of the primary allegorical modes they enact is that of salvage, the means by which the disappearing “other,” in imminent danger of being lost in “disintegrating time and space,” is effectively rescued in the text (112). Salvage ethnography is usually redemptive, i.e. it seeks to rescue putatively “threatened” cultures for posterity; but it can also be ironic, reflecting on the impossibility of textual retrieval and on world history as a process of decay (119). “Salvage geography” is a less-used term, although it emerges from time to time in social science fieldwork, less as a mode of rescuing than of constructing social life (MacDonald). In WP, salvage geography operates in semi-ironic mode as a means of exploring the contradictory qualities of wildness. The allegory of salvage is not entirely shorn of its redemptive function, but the text also exhibits a heightened awareness of the inadequacy of its own strategies of retrieval – an inadequacy expressed predominantly in post-pastoral and post-primitivist terms.

8. Both Snyder and Thoreau are referred to repeatedly in the text, while the lengthy Thanks section at the end cites the author’s indebtedness to David Abram, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, and David Rothenberg – all Americans – although Macfarlane, who also supplies a puff on the back cover, gets an acknowledgment in his turn. I am not convinced myself that WEJ’s succès de scandale has been fully merited; but it is certainly an engrossing and, for all its snide remarks about scholarly language, deeply erudite text.

9. Rewilding obviously means very different things in different contexts; indeed, a properly contextual understanding of rewilding – of what it is appropriate to do and in which context – is integral to its success. The formal theory of rewilding is usually understood to have emerged from American conservation biology in the 1990s; and while it is now reasonably well established in Europe, it remains controversial there – including in the British Isles (Brown, Mcmorran, and Lewis 289). While there is some empirical support for its main contentions – that biodiversity is best served through “the protection of species at or near the top of the food chain in large, connected areas” (Brown, Mcmorran, and Lewis 289), and that such protection has a knock-on effect for other species – there is also evidence that it may cause social problems, particularly when rewilding initiatives are pursued without consent or when the competing demands of local people and imported animals are mismatched (Caro and Sherman). It is important to see rewilding as not just a biological but an ecological phenomenon, closely linked to the pursuit of sustainable development in industrially altered landscapes such as those of the UK. Again, the ultimate goal of rewilding, which notionally involves the move from reclamation to rehabilitation to re-establishment (Fraser 283), will vary from context to context, and even its most fervent apologists recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

10. It is sometimes argued that nature writers “participate in a mental movement from an ego-centered to an eco-centered perspective” (Scheese 135). Not so: nature writing, “new” or not, and irrespective of its motives, remains – much like travel writing, from which it substantially differs but to which it is significantly indebted – very much a self-oriented form. The so-called “ecological turn” (see Introduction) has not altered this, though it has otherwise transformed understandings of the role of human subjectivity and agency in a materially expanded world.

11. As I have been arguing throughout this article, what qualifies or not as “new nature writing” is moot, and of the three examples I have chosen here, only The Wild Places would generally be accepted as belonging to a category that is seen by some – notably Kathleen Jamie, whose excoriating 2008 review of Macfarlane’s text has become notorious – as prescriptive and privileged, performing the backslapping rituals of a predominantly East Anglian men’s club. Ironically Jamie, even as she has disowned the label, has much in keeping with the supposed imperatives of the “new nature writing,” including the interrogation of conventional understandings of wildness and the challenge to formative ideas of “nature” and “nature writing” itself. Other “new nature writers” who actively dislike the term include Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, whose 2012 study Edgelands offers a rigorous unscrambling of the wasteland/ wilderness dichotomy that Griffiths only partially debunks (see Section 3 above). My larger point is not to argue that the “new nature writing” is a viable category or that some authors are better suited to it than others, but rather to suggest that it is self-consciously continuous with the literary and cultural traditions it otherwise claims to deconstruct. It is belated, in other words, as can also be seen in H for Hawk, which is explicitly designed to pay homage to The Goshawk, T.H. White’s now-classic 1951 work.