A Provocation for Writing about Nature and the Environment

I have never glued my fingers to a train nor brought motorway traffic to a standstill. I’m interested though, in writing as activism and how to write about nature in the heart of the Anthropocene. As we have lately come to understand (driven no doubt by the climate catastrophe) the obligation to ameliorate how we conduct our lives and the impacts of our actions upon nature has never been more urgent, nor necessary. Humans are part of nature, but that sense of belonging brings with it responsibilities.  As writers therefore, our task in the face of the existential threat being played out on this miraculous blue sphere and all its inhabitants, is to show that world, in all its troubled nature and absolute brilliance. It has never been more necessary to acknowledge our weakness as humans and our complicity in the climate crisis, as well as differentiating between the things we can and cannot control. At the time of writing, wildfires rage across the world as temperatures soar; what better illustration of the clear and present danger of the times we are moving through. In Rhodes and in Portugal as elsewhere, communities, homes and livelihoods are literally under fire whilst airlines continue funnelling tourists into locations from where those same tourists report to the folks back home what a nightmare it all is. The disconnect, or one might say the ability to speak the language of carbon, is astonishing and utterly revelatory. Thus, we writers must take up our pens or sit at our laptops.

Fiddling with a laptop whilst Rhodes burns might seem a redundant idea, yet as a community of nature and environmental writers our work is to reveal something of the beauty and meaning that resides at the heart of this astonishingly beautiful world. If we are able to communicate something at least of why this matters, alongside demonstrating the glorious, meaningful lives of the animals, insects, plants and systems that exist around us, then we can also hope to germinate seeds to show that, given the right circumstances, nature – and humans – can and do change for the better; a subject worth fighting for in whatever way is open to us to fight.

A Provocation for Nature Writers 

• Use language and stories to get at the heart of living things – and why they matter
• Pay attention to the languages of others, be they plants, animals, insects, landscapes, ecologists, scientists or writers 
• Strive for intimacy, but understand that nature might be indifferent about human intimacy, or about writing 
• Speak out for those unable to speak for themselves – the citizens of the non-human world
• Understand that nature is vast, and we cannot know it all
• Whilst it is useful sometimes to admit you don’t know, continue to arm yourself with knowledge
• Act locally; think globally
• Speak truth to power
• Be political
• Be kind to yourself; we live ‘in a world of wounds’
• If there’s a story that needs to be told, run! run! towards the flames