Environment and nature in contemporary British fiction and poetry

One of the most significant changes I’ve noticed in the last 5-10 years in the kinds of courses offered to undergraduates in English Departments in Britain and also in current research projects of literary scholars has been an increasing interest in environmental issues and a renewed engagement with ideas about place, nature and landscape. This has been matched by a growing appetite among the reading public for books about the countryside and the natural world, so much so that a new genre has been named and sells very well in British bookshops: the “new nature writing”. There is also a discernible rise in the number of books of all genres addressing a sense of environmental crisis and anxiety about what the future might hold for human and non-human life on our planet, whether this is expressed in lyric poetry or in more lurid ‘eco-disaster novels’. In this article, I would like to outline some of the major trends in this thinking and writing. In some ways, the writers working today are responding to the imperatives of rapidly changing political situations and to the revelations of the science of climate change, but in other ways they are continuing debates that artists have had for centuries about our relationship to the natural world.

The environment is certainly a hot topic for literary critics, and not just for critics of contemporary literature. For example, there have been special issues of journals devoted to nineteenth century literature and the climate, there are collections of essays on medieval literature and ecological understanding, and on science fiction and pollution. Various labels are given to this kind of work - ecocriticism, ecopoetics, the environmental humanities, geo-humanities.

* This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the 2017 Oxford - Russia Seminar, at Perm State University. The author would like to express her thanks for the interesting conversations and exchanges with Seminar delegates during her visit to Perm.

‘Ecocriticism’ is the term Pm going to use today and very broadly, it means ‘an earth-centred approach to literary studies’ (Glotfelty 1996, xix). So where a feminist critic might look out for the way that women are represented in fiction or the kinds of images used to describe the masculine or feminine, or look back into history to see what women’s experience was in the past or how women writers wrote about their lives, an ecocritic will ask what sort of images are used to describe nature in a poem or novel, or think about the kind of attitudes towards or ideas about the environment they might find in literary work, or they might look back into history to see what the literature of the past had to say about nature.

Both this kind of criticism and contemporary writers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction are responding to the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in in relation to environmental degradation, climate change and mass extinction of animals and plants. Nature is an important theme and subject in all national literatures and it has always been an important inspiration and object of discussion in British fiction and poetry. From early Anglo Saxon poetry about the sea, to Chaucer’s descriptions of the beauties of an English April at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, to the pastoral poets of the Renaissance who borrowed the forms of classical Greek and Roman poetry to write about the British countryside, English literature is full of wonderful passages praising the beauties of nature. With Romanticism - Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth - came more philosophical mediations on the effect of nature upon the poet’s mind, and a celebration too of the sometimes terrifying and ‘inhuman’ aspects of sublime landscapes such as the Alps or the deep sea.

While much poetry and fiction still continue these traditions of awe, homage and praise, in the 19th and 20th century a growing unease begins to creep into literary representations of nature. Natural landscapes changed or even disappeared as Britain became more urbanised and the effects of the industrial Revolution were felt. These changes have accelerated in the last twenty years. Recent studies have shown that 60% of all monitored species in the UK have declined; the population of all wild vertebrate species fell by a third; amphibian populations down by 42%. Readers of John Clare or Keats might feel a strong sense of loss when they hear that the birds they celebrated are under threat: there has been a 75% decline in woodland butterflies and numbers of woodland birds down by 30%.

It is not just a ‘local’ sense of loss. ‘Nature’ in its broadest sense as that which is separate from the manmade or human is also under threat. Scientists have discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the most remote and inaccessible place on the planet, the 10km deep Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean. 90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomachs. The question that may arise from such statistics is whether ‘nature’, as in ‘wildness’ or ‘wilderness’, exists at all anymore. The wildness that Wordsworth felt formed his poet’s mind is also the wildness that a romantic thinker like the American Thoreau embraces:

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. (Walden, 1854)

We are in danger of losing the untouched wildness which Thoreau feels so necessary. With our diminishing ‘wild’, ecologists and nature charities have introduced the idea of ‘nature deficit disorder’ which suggests that without access to that wildness which Thoreau talked about, we suffer.

If we think about the nature we read of in the those works mentioned above from the English Literature of the past, can we say that we still recognise the world they wrote of, do we still know the same nature they walked in? Some ecocritics even say that we are living in a ‘post-nature’ world. The wild flowers that Shakespeare lists in A Midsummer Night’s Dream may no longer be seen, or the birds written about by John Clare or Wordsworth may no longer be singing in our woods.

As a result, we’ve seen in some contemporary poets a necessary shift from eulogising the natural world to questioning our relationship with it. Do we understand it? Do we always interpret it according to our own human interests and concerns? Still thinking about birds, here are two recent poems, both by Scottish poets, which look at birds from different angles and ask different questions in their encounters with wild life.

‘The Dipper’ (Kathleen Jamie, 2004)

It was winter, near freezing,

Fd walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song.

It isn't mine to give.

I can't coax this birth to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.

This bird is a ‘dipper’, a bird which dives into the water to chase its prey. While the bird ‘knows’ the river, and its song is ‘undammable’, it is of a different order of life. The water sweeps ‘stupidly’ on, it doesn’t communicate but the bird seems to. Now Jamie asks herself a poet’s question - can she ‘give’ that song? Can she reproduce it for her reader? She says she can’t, she can’t coax the bird to hand, I think she means she can’t translate the bird’s song for us. In a sense, the poem’s title could also refer to the speaker of the poem, who is also a ‘dipper’, dipping into a world other than her own.

In another contemporary poem, ‘Wild’ by John Burnside (2006), he tells of seeing a buzzard ‘making a kill/on the roadside verge’. The speaker is with a young boy:

‘as the wings folded around what Lucas called

‘the prey’.

He wanted to know if buzzards took children, or cats;

then, as we slowed to look, he chose to admire the plumage and the fierce light of its eye.

The important word here is ‘chose’. The context of the poem is not entirely explained, but we understand that Lucas is a child, probably the speaker’s son or grandson, and when he first sees this bird he is afraid of it: he asks if it will try to catch children (like him, he must be thinking) or cats. Lucas calls whatever it has caught ‘the prey’, in the second stanza it’s called ‘a kill’. It’s significant that whatever animal it is which has been caught doesn’t get a name and is not identified, all our attention is taken by the bird. But Lucas then ‘chooses’ to see the bird in a different way, to admire its plumage and the ‘fierce light of its eye’. Burnside devotes a poem to this one short encounter, the forming of an opinion by one child about one bird, but he is also saying something about how we name and define different kinds of animals and how we choose to judge or interpret them. Instead of being a ruthless and scary killer, Lucas chooses to see the bird as a beautiful warrior.

In both poems, the poets express love and affinity for the natural word and the birds they observe, but there are also questions for them about how they can write or represent or choose words for the animals they admire.

These birds are still here to be written about: but what of the nature which is under threat or has disappeared? I next want to discuss the ‘new nature writing’ which is proving so popular among general readers in the UK at present. One reason why this work might be so popular is that British people feel that they have lost touch with wildness or even with the relatively civilised pastoral landscape. In our increasingly urban world, our relationship to the ‘countryside’ has changed.

One of the first writers to notice this shift was Richard Mabey, in his 1973 The Unofficial Countryside, which tracks the unloved and ‘edgelands’ and scraps of the natural world found in urban and brownfield areas. He writes:

Our attitude towards nature is a strangely contradictory blend of romanticism and gloom, We imagine it to belong in those watercolour landscapes where most of us would like to live. If we are looking for wildlife we turn automatically towards the official countryside, towards the great set-pieces of forest and moor. (1973, 5)

Mabey was writing in 1973 when there were still areas of London which were bombsites, where flowers and grasses had grown over the ruined buildings and streets; he wants us to look for nature and wildlife in other places too:

A crack in the pavement is all a plant needs to put down roots. An old-fashioned lamp-standard makes as good a nesting box for a tit as any hollow oak. Provided it is not actually contaminated there is scarcely a nook or cranny anywhere which does not provide the right living conditions for some plant or creature. Think of the sites inside an urban area which can provide this opportunity: the water inside abandoned docks and in artificially created reservoirs; canal towpaths and the dry banks of railways cuttings; allotments, parks, golf courses and gardens; the old trees in churchyards and the scrubby hawthorns at the back end of industrial estates; bomb-site in old parts of the town and building sites in the new; [...] Every patch where concrete has not actually sealed up the earth is potential home for some living things. (7)

Mabey’s book was one of the earliest examples of the genre which is now being called ‘New Nature Writing’. The appellation ‘new’ differentiates it from older forms of natural history or scientific writing and signals a response to nature happening in the period we are learning to call the Anthropocene, where human intervention has irrevocably changed and threatened the balance of the environment.

While it addresses these large themes, the new nature writing is also often highly personal, reflective and often autobiographical. H is for Hawk, for example, by Helen MacDonald, is about the death of the author’s father and how her relationship with her tame hawk helped her to come to terms with her sadness and depression. Tim Dee’s Four Fields surveys the natural history and cultural importance of four fields around the world, from a field in Zambia to a field near Dee’s home in the Cambridgeshire Fens. There have been many examples of this kind of story: they often tend to be written in the first person and they track journeys, or walks in the wild, or relationships to particular places and animals. The writing is often lyrical and literary in style, very different from conventional scientific natural history writing, evoking feeling and aesthetic response as much as objective description of natural phemonona. Here, for example, is an extract from The Wild Places (2007) by Robert Macfarlane, note the poetry of the prose here:

That July day, down in the holloway, the bright hot surface world was forgotten. So close was the latticework of leaves and branches, and so tall the sides of the holloway that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances. Roger and I moved slowly up the bed of the roadway, forcing a way through the undergrowth, through clumps of chest-high nettles, past big strongholds of bramble, and over hawthorns that had grown together, enmeshing across the roadbed. Occasionally we came to small clearings in the holloway, where light fell and grass grew. From thorn thickets, there was the scuttle of unseen creatures. Any noise we made thudded into the banks, and was lost. A person might hide out undetected in such a place for weeks or months, I thought.

Lines of spider's silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting that were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies. (2007)

While Macfarlane’s work has proved tremendously popular, there have been some critics who have objected to the very lyricism and subjective response which has attracted so many readers. Critics have suggested that this kind of writing produces a kind of ‘armchair travelling’, where in metropolitan readers can enjoy the idea of nature without ever getting their boots muddy or worrying too much about the actual state of nature itself. Kathleen Jamie, whose poem we looked at above, has criticised Macfarlane’s writing for being overly romantic, and of exoticising landscapes such as the Scottish Highlands, which mean very different things to the people who work and live in them compared to those who view them from a touristic or literary distance. However, the new nature writing forms a bridge between literature and science which is sorely needed if artists and the humanities are to be of any use to scientists as they set about trying to convince politicians and the public of the need to address environmental concerns.

My final set of examples of works in which ecocritics might be interested are from another genre of contemporary British writing and these are works which are dealing directly and explicitly with environmental disaster. This genre even has a new name of its own -it has become known as ‘Cli-fi’, climate change fiction. Of the novels on the Perm Seminar list, Magnus McIntyre’s Whirligig comes closes to directly addressing this new world, albeit in a comic mode. But we can see some whispers of the sense of losing touch with the natural world in other novels. For example, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth refers to the new technologies of gene mutation. What the novel can do which the non-fiction new nature writing can’t do is to examine what the future of our world could be. Every year now, more novels are being written in Britain suggesting what it might look like, particularly if global warming takes place. This new ‘cli-fi’ is not quite a genre, as it doesn’t have a fixed narrative identity or an established structure. In fact we can break it down into further genres such as ecothrillers or ecogothic. If s also a tremendously popular genre for young adults or teenagers: we might include examples such as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, or Julie Bertagna’s Exodus series.

All sorts of disaster have been imagined by writers and of course this isn’t a modern invention. For example, there is a whole tradition of stories about the destruction of London which readers have been enjoying in different forms since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written in 1814, or since Richard Jeffries imagined a future where the geography of Britain was drastically altered by some unspecified natural disaster in After London (1884). In The Drowned World (1962) J. G. Ballard submerged London in prescient visions of a globally-warmed Europe, existing in 2145 as a tropical lagoon. In recent years, as climate change becomes a more pressing concern, Will Selfs Book of Dave, Stephen Baxter’s Flood and Maggie Gee’s The Flood have all imagined London’s death by drowning, while Adam Robert’s sci-fi novel Snow buries London under a mysterious blanket of perma-frost. Gee’s vision of a drowning London is an almost ecstatic conclusion to a satire which depicts a moribund city disintegrating in the steady fall of unnatural rain before the big wave hits.

However, if modern novels start to use environmental catastrophe as the inevitable backdrop to their own concerns and interests we may have some questions to ask about how such works might function as entertainment. Not all of these works just revel in destruction and despair. Some suggest solutions or signal some grounds for hope. In subtle and exploratory works, such as Gee’s The Flood the apocalyptic flooding of London takes place in slow increments which affect the poor first. They function as good dystopias do, as critiques of the present day and attitudes rather than just as horror stories.

This article has ranged widely around writers encountering nature in celebratory and melancholy forms. Critics and teachers can bring a range of environmental writers to the attention of their readers and students: poets trying to understand the ways of birds, the new nature writers who are trying to reconnect us with the landscape and the cli-fi writers who are busy imagining the worst. I will close here with one last piece of poetry, from the nineteenth century, written by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Its message is as urgent and important as it was when Hopkins first wrote it. He has spent two stanzas describing a river, tumbling by, and the poem hymns the beauty of a relatively humble landscape, ‘just’ a stream, but one which is infinitely precious to the poet, and he hopes to convince us, his readers:

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, О let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.