Thursday, July 14, 2005

Macfarlane and the Pomona

A response today from Robert Macfarlane regarding The Herefordshire Pomona (see posts here and here). He writes “I didn't know the book, and was very glad to have made its acquaintance”. He has mentioned it in the follow-up piece on the recommendations for the classics of nature library which the Guaridan review will run sometime this month.

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Caspar Henderson said...

Here it is:

Where the wild things were

Robert Macfarlane responds to readers' nominations of the great classics of British nature writing

Saturday July 30, 2005
The Guardian

Over the past century, "parochial" has soured as a word. The adjectival form of "parish", it has come to connote sectarianism, in-sularity, boundedness. A mind or a community turned inward upon itself. A pejorative finitude.

It has not always been this way. Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was in no doubt as to the importance of the parish. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter, but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. "Parochialism is universal," he wrote. "It deals with the fundamentals."

Note that Kavanagh, like Aristotle, does not smudge the "universal" into the "general". The "general", for Aristotle, was the lazily broad, the vague and undiscerned. The "universal", by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Again and again in his writing, Kavanagh returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. "All great civilisations are based on parochialism," he wrote, beautifully: "To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience."

Last month, in an essay in the Review, I proposed that a library of the classics of nature writing from Britain and Ireland should be established and published. Such a library, as I imagined it then, "would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a 'national' literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise." Any book to be included in the series, I suggested, would "firstly have to evince the belief that the fate of humanity and the fate of nature are inseparable. Secondly, it would have to imply, however obliquely, that the natural environment must be approached not with a view to conquest, acquisition and short-term use, but according to the principles of restraint and reciprocity."

In the weeks since the essay ran, hundreds of recommendations have arrived for books which might be included in such a library. These recommendations have come in many forms. Some people sent parts of their place: in one envelope a feather, and a hoop of dried grass, combed from a Carmarthenshire field; in another, a folding of a bark-rubbing from a Strontian oak-tree. Favourite passages of writing were transcribed, or photocopied. Books and images were sent. All the letters were passionate, and very generous-spirited. Thank you to all those who wrote.

In many of the letters, reading, and the act of reading, emerged as a vital force for brokering dignified and durable relationships between people and places. One man titled his list: "Books that have helped me to feel that all is not lost." Several wrote of their hope that a corner had been recently turned in terms of ecological awareness.

Others spoke of feelings of despair at the state of the environment.
Numerous different types of book were proposed. Poetry, novels, memoirs, essays, journals, scientific works. Several historical studies were recommended, including Angus Winchester's Harvest of the Hills, an examination of the pastoral culture of the Border regions during the medieval and early modern periods. It is a book, its advocate wrote, "which details the close interrelations between work and place, as well as broadening into the history and archaeology of the landscape". John Stewart Collis's The Worm Forgives the Plough (1973), which was put forward by 11 people, is a memoir of - in the words of one of its recommenders - "Collis's experience as a land worker during the second world war on two farms in the south-east and south-west of England. He paints a rich picture of the way in which farms were run in the years prior to the major revolution brought by mechanisation, and introduces memorable characters from amongst the substantial manual labour force even modest-sized farms needed."

Some of the books were not place-specific, but were still deeply concerned with the relationship between knowledge and environment. These included William Cobbett's Rural Rides, Adam Thorpe's Ulverton, Hamish Fulton's Walking Journal, Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside, Roger Deakin's Waterlog, the poetry of Edward Thomas, and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital . Priyanka Wadhawan wrote from Los Angeles, "in the midst of the SUV culture", to suggest that the series should "include some Buddhist philosophy.

Compassion and respect towards nature, which is revered as a living entity, is the underlying basis for many eastern philosophies." One of the most elegant justifications for an author's inclusion came from Richard Swigg, who wrote of the poet Charles Tomlinson's work that it "exemplifies a profound sense of land and particularities: of upsets, stabilities and vivid change in terrain that, as he says, is 'dense in the usages of community'. He returns constantly to the theme that concerns him: a ground inhabited by renewed relation, not one under the ego's domination."

Among the many suggestions, three names recurred. The first was unsurprising: the Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864). Clare was a hider-away, a lane-haunter, a birds'-nester, a field-farer. His artfully simple poems ring with the suddenness and surprise of the discoveries which he made during his years of countryside foray. The second was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose nominations outnumbered those for her more famous brother. Dorothy's exquisitely exact journals - the Alfoxden Journal, written when the Wordsworths were living in Somerset in 1797-98, and the Grasmere Journal, kept at Dove Cottage from 1800-03 - support Wordsworth's own observation of Dorothy that "she gave me eyes, she gave me ears".

The third, and by far the most frequently nominated, was the novelist, memoirist and country-essayist, Richard Jefferies (1848-87). Jefferies was born near Swindon, and spent much of his life exploring the rural southern counties of Wiltshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire, and Somerset. His writings show him to be the exponent of a rare but deeply English materialist-mysticism. For he possessed and practised what the poet Jeremy Hooker has called "ditch vision" - an ability to find the extraordinary in the rurally local.

For Jefferies, the English countryside was rife with wilderness. Not in the North American sense of wilderness as a function of grandness of scale, a phenomenon to be experienced only amid the red-rock dihedral citadels of the desert states, or the vaporous magnificence of the Niagara Falls, or the vast mirror lakes of the Rockies. No, Jefferies located the wild in the strange and ragged interzones of a farmed English landscape - in hedges, ditches, ponds, spinneys - and he wrote about that landscape with the same astonishment and wonder that his travel-writing contemporaries were voicing in their reports on the Amazon, the Pacific, and the Rub al-Khali.

The oddest and most magnificent recommendation, which came from Caspar Henderson, was Herefordshire Pomona, by Drs Hogg and Bull. The Pomona (from the Latin pomum, meaning "fruit", and then "apple") was a vast guide to the apple and pear varieties grown in the county, and to the arts of their growth, husbandry, harvest and use. Six hundred copies only were printed. The book came in seven parts, published between 1878 and 1884, and was accompanied by 441 original watercolours of the various fruits, buds, blossoms and blights of the different cultivars. Even poor quality second-hand copies now cost about £10,000. In George Monbiot's fine and appropriately plosive description, "it constitutes a classic of late Victorian natural history, pedantic and passionate ... a poem in pomology; a history of rural England, rough, bitter and sad".

Not all the letters sent in were, it must be admitted, wholly sane. One began, enigmatically: "My dog told me I had to write to you ..." "Yours Sincerely, Mike and Polly," it signed off. "Woof Woof."

Around the same time that these letters were being sent in, the ratings phenomenon of Bill Oddie's BBC2 television nature programme Springwatch (3.6m viewers for its final episode, a huge 15% audience share), was becoming clear. Trying to explain the cult of Springwatch in the Guardian, Blake Morrison remarked that "the urge behind it is an old one: a dream of living in close harmony with nature", and he went on to suggest that Springwatch 's success was another indicator that the British public was "quietly falling in love with nature again".

I would like to believe Morrison. Indeed, on the whole I do believe Morrison. There does seem to be a resurgent sense of wonder - tinged with elegy - at what remains of nature in Britain and Ireland. And wonder is, potentially, an impulse which brings with it a sense of good environmental practice. The American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry (a writer who is admirably immune to eco-romanticism) once remarked that without a "fascination" for the natural world, "the energy needed for its preservation will never be developed". "There must," he observed during the acid rain years, "be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall."

Berry is right, of course. But it is important to note that wonder is not an automatic guarantor of care.

Consider, for instance, John James Audubon, the 19th-century American bird artist whose paintings are miracles of close attention - and who shot and killed more than 20,000 birds in his lifetime. Wonder can, too, become an easy substitute for care. This is why any suggestion that we are "returning to nature", or becoming "wild at heart" again, must be carefully scrutinised.

For the British have long specialised in a disconnect between their nature romance and their behaviour as consumers. Many of those people who coo over back-garden woodpigeons happily eat battery-farmed chicken. Many of those who hurrah at the vernal spawning of the natterjack toad order Thai king prawns in restaurants. Many of those who diligently fill their bird-feeders drive to work in a 4x4.

The problem is a failure of connection. King prawns - those thick pink commas of antibiotical muscle - are intensively farmed in vast PVC-lined prawn-pools in south-east Asia, and millions of hectares of fabulously biodiverse mangrove swamp have been gouged out to make way for these pools. A profligacy of carbon emission has led to climate change which may cause future screenings of Springwatch to fall in March, then February, then January - until finally spring is abolished altogether as an event.

A massive discrepancy, in other words, exists between perception and practice. British parochialism - its strong tradition of interest in the local - leads too often only to general conclusions: to a comfortable sentimentalism.

What is required, therefore (and what is difficult to effect), is the translation of these impulses of wonder and joy at nature, into ecologically valuable patterns of behaviour. Into changed patterns of purchase, consumption, disposal, and travel. Into a shifted sense of the universal. We need, for instance, to retire our medieval vision of the skies, seas, rivers and soil as sinks of infinite capacity; free in what they give, and limitless in their capacity to absorb what we discard into them. We need drastically to heighten our sense of the first principle of ecology: that "everything is connected to everything else".

Such a heightening is more necessary now than ever before in human history. Partly because we are approaching - have possibly crossed - an environmental rubicon concerning global warming, and partly because we are placing global ecosystems under such unprecedented stress that they are collapsing.

In 2003, the first report from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) - an inquiry board consisting of 1,300 experts from 95 countries - was released. Its dark conclusion was that 60% of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth are being degraded or used unsustainably. If these trends are not reversed, the report observed, the consequences will include "the emergence of new diseases, sudden changes in water quality, creation of 'dead zones' along the coasts, the collapse of fisheries, and shifts in regional climate".

Green politics are sometimes described as unconcerned with "real-world" problems of poverty and hunger: the lynx and the blue whale are loved over the starving child. The MEA report proves the nonsense of such a description. It shows the deep interconnection of environmental and human well-being. "Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty, hunger eradication, and improved health," the report stated, in an admirably forthright conclusion, "is unlikely to be sustained if most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies continue to be degraded ... The pressures on ecosystems will increase ... unless human attitudes and actions change. Achieving this [change], however, will require radical alterations in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making, and new ways of cooperation between government, business and civil society. The warning signs are there for all of us to see. The future lies in our hands."

• Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), which won the Guardian First Book award, and is currently writing The Wild Places, a book about wildness in Britain and Ireland.

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