Ideas - Author Robert Macfarlane on the relationship between landscape and the human heart

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Robert Macfarlane says his writing is about the relationship between landscape and the human heart. His books share his encounters with treacherous mountain passages, mammoth glaciers flowing perceptibly into the sea, and harrowing descents into fissures inside the Earth. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 25, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm here in a little fragment of woodland close to my home. Beach and birch and ash are the main species here. You can probably hear that it's a windy day.

Renowned British writer Robert McFarlane walking to a source of inspiration in the chalk lands of England. And the wind is causing that wonderful compound marine roar, the sound of the surf, but far inland. It happens when a gale starts to blow through the heads of trees. This is a place that's been very important to my writing. It's called Ninewells Wood, and it has that name because nine springs rise here from the chalk on which I live. Spring sites are arguably the most miraculous places in the landscape. They're places that

have drawn people, pilgrims to them to drink, to bathe over thousands of years. They are life-giving places, they are river birthing places and today it's wonderful to see the springs pulsing away. And the water here is so clear that you can put your hand in it and watching and feeling where your hand hits the surface of the water is really the only way you can tell where the air stops and the water begins. Robert McFarlane's books tell of his encounters with subtly enthralling landscapes like springs, with treacherous mountain passages and mammoth glaciers flowing perceptibly into the sea, with harrowing descents into fissures inside the earth. with harrowing descents into fissures inside the earth.

He has described his writing as being about the relationship between the landscape and the human heart. A rich and complex relationship. In award-winning books like The Old Ways and Underland, he celebrates the awe and rapture, the terror and humility that landscapes inspire. And he laments how our way of life has made us increasingly indifferent to them. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. A common language, a language of the commons, is getting rarer. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious, a kind of word magic,

the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place. Robert MacFarlane became the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada, a $75,000 award to recognize excellence in non-fiction writing. Robert McFarlane accepted the award at the Royal Ontario Museum in September with a talk called The Nature of Non-Fiction. Bless you. The first thing to say after listening to that, I guess, is I can only disappoint you. There's that Dorothy Parker zinger. If you like duck pate, don't meet the duck. I'm the duck.

I'm here to quack at you a little bit. A modest 75, 80 minutes or so. No, I feel very moved, enormously grateful. My heart is full. It is an extraordinary honor, this. An affirmation, a joy, a wonder. And it fell from a clear blue sky. I had no knowledge that the award existed

because it didn't at that point. To be recognized like this by a jury of outstanding fellow writers and to be recognized for a body of work rather than for a single book. It's 20 years this year since I published my first book, Mountains of the Mind. And there's a generosity to this prize. It's hugely affirming. It's about the greatest encouragement a writer could want. Many of you here will know the author Barry Lopez, who died three years ago. He was my mentor, though he didn't know it, because as I'll tell you in a little bit, his writing meant so much to me. I came to know him a little towards the end of his life.

He was a North Star. And he told me once that he kept a Nord beaver log on his writing desk. Why? Keep going. That's what the log said to him. Keep going. This award, and I mean this in the best possible sense, is a gnawed beaver log.

Keep going, it says, and I will. Canada means a great deal to me. Canadian literature means a great deal to me. My journey into nonfiction, it began in Canada. I had a great aunt. Her name was Hazel, Aunt Hazel. She was evacuated to BC as a child during the Second World War to avoid the bombs of the Blitz. And she liked it so much that she stayed. And she lived out the majority of her life in a small town called Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. So I traveled out quite often to BC as a child. My dad has been spamming me with photos of my eight-year-old self looking slightly confused, but basically very, very happy to be in the Pacific Northwest. I fell really hard in love

with that region. And so it was that at 21, when I set out on a shoestring budget solo mountaineering and hiking trip, I set my compass for BC and the Rockies. My life changed on that trip. And I remember the moment. It was downtown Vancouver. I was heading off to hike the West Coast Trail and a man rollerbladed past me. He was wearing only swimming trunks, sunglasses, rollerblades and a live python coiled around his neck. I knew I was not in Cambridge anymore. I don't think it was fleeing him but I pushed open the door to a bookstore, MacLeod's bookstore, probably many of you will know it, and I found there on a table a book called Arctic Dreams by

Barry Lopez. I'd heard neither of book nor author but it had a really glittering iceberg on the front and I'm a cryophile, I really like ice. So I bought it and I carried it on the trail and I read it and it blew my mind. A day without a sunrise, under a moon that had not set for six days, I stand on the frozen ocean 20 miles off Cape Mammon, Mackenzie King Island. To the south, I can see a thin streak of violet and cobalt sky stretching across 80 degrees of the horizon, but the ice and snow barely reflect these colors. The pervasive light here is the milky blue of the reflected moon. It is possible to see two or three miles in the moonlight,

but the pale light gives nothing an edge, except for the horizon to the south, the color of a bruise. The world is only moonlit ice and black sky. And that was the book that made me a writer, and it taught me about what non-fiction could be. It combines natural science, anthropology, reportage, travelogue, a pristine prose poetry that seemed lawless and thrilling to me then and still does now when I return to this book. It gyres from the phenomenal to the philosophical and that showed me that metaphysics could arise from primary encounter as a river makes mist. A key word in Lopez is grace. He writes of grace and he writes gracefully. And he also has a fiercely moral gaze. And that taught me that while place writing begins in the aesthetic often,

it must always tend to the ethical and beyond. Attention is devotion, yes, but attention is also a means of intense scrutiny non-fiction and i'll come back to that word lopez showed me it could be spectacularly coruscatingly experimental and bespoke i didn't then and i still don't really understand our normalization of this term non-fiction it strikes my ear still as odd at best non-fiction why do we define this form of literature negatively and reductively for what it is not we don't have a better word but i do want to crack that one open a little bit to me as a reader what non-fiction is is possibility is multiplicity is versatility is invention non-fiction can be as supple as water

and as sharp as obsidian. Nonfiction can open a space in which the obdurate, and I mean that word positively, responsibilities of fact can keep company with the shimmer of image and trope, and where historical stories might braid with the bright and momentary specificities of human and other than human meetings.

Nonfiction possesses plot, character, dialogue, tempo, suspense, just as the novel does. It can span the vastness of geological deep time or it can engrave upon the two inches wide of ivory to which Jane Austen compared her novels gauge. in compared her novels gauge and non-fiction's political and social consequences can be immense for the warp and weft of communities identities and values I'm fascinated by the rhythms of prose and prose can be as prosodically intricate as poetry it's just it requires a bit more of a kind of long-distance runner's commitment to making the rhythms work across chapters, across whole books. I read as an undergraduate, I read it so you don't have to, it's one of those books, a 508-page history of English prose rhythm, which was published in 1912 by George Sainsbury's.

It is a true geek text, and I still geek on it. And one of the things it did to me was taught me to listen to prose. And it's been a practice of mine ever since to read the penultimate draft of my books aloud in my brain, as it were, like silently so that no one else has to listen to it, but so that I can hear them,

to sound out those sentences in my mind's ear and listen for where the tongue stumbles. And sometimes it's good for the tongue to stumble, and other times you want it to move swiftly and smoothly, like green water in a rapid, and you learn pace by listening. Waiting for Godot was once described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. J.A. Baker's The Peregrine is a book in which little happens, hundreds of times.

Dawn. Baker watches. The bird hunts. The bird kills. The bird feeds. Dusk. Thus again, over seven months. repeats dusk thus again over seven months what baker understood was that to dramatize such reiteration he had to forge a new style of description and the style he created was as sudden and swift as the bird to which it was devoted and one that like the peregrine could startle even as it repeated itself baker gained his effect by a curious combination of surplus, the proliferation of verb, adjective, metaphor and simile, by deletion, the removal of articles, conjunctions, proper nouns, and by compression. This mixture of flaring out and paring away results in the book's shocking energies and its hyperkinetic prose.

There are the adjectives Baker talks into verbs, the north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges, and there are the verbs that he incites to misbehaviour, four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse. An hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write. A book is a river alive? My nine-year-old son said, that's going to be a short book because yes, obviously, a river is alive, but that'll be my 10th book. But I still have that go-to shelf of text, which I reach for when I need inspiration or I need guidance. I'm sure many of you writers, readers alike,

will have that go-to shelf. And on that shelf are books which, for me, exemplify the vitality and the range of nonfiction. Arctic Dreams, of course. Nan Shepard's beautiful, slender praise song to the Cairngorm Hills of Scotland, the living mountain. Bruce Chapman's In Patagonia, which shattered the travelogue into little glittering mosaic pieces.

Lauret Savoy's trace about geology, memory, and race. Robin Wall Kimmerer's pioneering braiding sweetgrass, which weaves, as many of you will know, botanical science and traditional ecological knowledge. They're all remarkable books. They're all non-fiction. They're all born of first-hand experiences with people, landscapes, and the living world. They're deep maps. They're subtle soundings. They're not synthetic, but synesthetic, and they thrive on volatility of encounter, of weather, of time. They, and the tradition of writing to which they belong, and I hope to contribute,

have always been at heart a human art. What Nan Shepard learns, and what her book The Living Mountain taught me, is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty, a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge. This is not a book that relishes its own discoveries. It prefers to relish its own ignorances. The water that is too much for her, or the dark line of geese that melts into the darkness of the cloud

and I could not tell where or when they resumed formation and direction. Shepard is compelled by the massif's excesses, its unmappable surplus. The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, she writes, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away. Canada carries on shaping my work. Earlier this month and last, I was in northeast Quebec, and I was following there the course of a river known in English as the magpie and in Innu as among other names the Mutaheka Shipu which means the

river where the water passes between square rocky cliffs it does this is a river who rises near the Labrador border who then flows south over and through the very, very ancient rocks of the Canadian Shield. I was in heaven. Nice. Nice. G-N-E-I-S-S. Some of the oldest surface rock in the world. It was everywhere. A great name for a great rock. It flows south. It reaches the Gulf of St. Lawrence, just about opposite the midpoint of Anticosti Island. And over 10 days, we paddled and we swam and we portaged about 140 kilometers of the river

from the northern tip of the vast lake, 75 kilometers long, which feeds the lower half of the Mutahakar ship all the way to that silver green seamouth at the St. Lawrence. And we camped as we went, of course, by rapids which turned water and sun into day-long rainbows,

we suffered the sanguineous attentions of your black flies. And we always, always listened to the sleepless river songs and stories. And it was among the most challenging and surprising and intense journeys I've ever made. And I know that that river will flow through my imagination and my pages for years to come. I have to just break with tone and say something about your black flies. I could hear the proprietorial pride,

and I know you don't want me to criticize them. I know they're close to the heart of all Canadians. But I come from Scotland, sort of. And if any of you have met the Scottish midge in full force you'll know that we have our own kind of B-movie versions of insect attacks so I thought I was pretty prepared but the black fly is the midge crossed with the horsefly that's the closest I've come to

nothing could have prepared me for it there was this awful moment where I saw one crawling on my head and I said, oh that's a nice little, they don't seem to be bitey. The first wave attack inflicted a hundred bites on the head and shoulders of a neck of my companion, Wayne, who actually, he was like one of those sacrificial presences. They were predominantly attentive to Wayne. His face swelled up so much that he couldn't see out of one eye for most of one morning, a sort of black fly Botox. It really went to work on the contours of his face. I insisted on taking a photographic record, which he didn't seem that keen on at the time, but

since I think he's worn it well. We learned later that black flies can kill mules. It's like, mules? Like, they are the indestructible presences of the mammalian world they're like shopping trolleys you know nuclear blasts don't kill mules they'll be there cropping irradiated grass after all the warheads have fallen we we agreed by the end of the trip that black flies could probably kill shopping trolleys. So that's where we got to. Sorry, it was a primal scene. I just had to revisit it. The river.

I was drawn to that river, the Mutaka Shipu, because in February 21, it became, as some of you will know here, the first river, the first Canadian river, I should say, to be recognized as a legal person. That is to say, with legal standing, the ability to bring cases in court, and as a living entity, a legal person, that is to say with legal standing, the ability to bring cases in court, and as a living entity, a river being. And it was also recognized as the bearer of nine

fundamental rights. Those rights were not bestowed by this recognition, they were recognized as having been pre-existing. The right to flow freely, i.e. to be undammed, and the politics of damming on that river and the remain to its east are intense. The right to be free from pollution and even the right to take legal action. These groundbreaking recognitions were declared in a, to me, conceptually beautiful joint resolution issued by the Innu Council of Ekwanshi, through whose homeland, Natasin, and the river flows, and the Mingani Regional Council Municipality. And it's part of a much greater ferment in the St. Lawrence region around river politics, and particularly river rights.

And in the community, the Innu community, Ekwanshi, before and after the river journey, I spent time with this extraordinary poet and community leader, Rita Mestocosho. She writes in Innu and French, and her work is astonishing. And I urge you to seek out her latest collection, which was published earlier this year, which the Innu name is Atiku Ute, which translates into French as Le Coeur du Caribou, The Heart of the Caribou. And I'll just read you with her permission just a couple of lines people will translate that much better than me but but my go at that is my people wrote millions of books scattered across the land,

encyclopedias of rivers, dictionaries of mountains, geographies of forests. So my journey along that river and the interviews I carried out were part of the final fieldwork for this book, Is a River Alive? I've been writing it for two years now. The research has taken me to Ecuador, which is sort of ground zero for the modern rights of nature movement. They incorporated four articles guaranteeing the rights of nature into the 2008 constitution when it was revised. To Southern India, to Tamil Nadu, to Chennai, a river city

where the rivers have really been brought as close to death as any river can be. And yet still there are people fighting for the lives of the rivers and the lives that the rivers enable. As well along the I'm sorry to say deeply broken rivers of my own country of England it's a book about the lives and and deaths of rivers about their existence as beings whose life and whose enlivening power substantively exceeds the sum of the lives they contain and enable and it is about those fundamental rights that rivers and forests and mountains have always borne but that have been placed under amnesia and erasure by modernity by

extractivism by colonialism and other powerful forces ursula le Guin much missed in so many ways spoke with characteristically decisive lucidity on this subject one way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as natural resource is to class them as fellow beings kinfolk she said i guess i'm trying she says to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gotten us to subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt colonize and exploit, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination. A great reach outward of the mind and imagination. Some of you may have noticed a few minutes ago that I spoke of rivers using the pronoun who, the river who flows to the sea, the river who rises near my home in Cambridge where nine springs

emerge from the bedrock. It's a small but to me at least significant shift of linguistic posture away from objectification and towards what Robin Wall Kimmerer has called the grammar of animacy. That is language use which recognizes and honors the intense and binding reciprocities in which we exist with the living world. And while writing this book I've also begun to wonder about how I might try, in language, to bring skeptical readers closer to an understanding of, or even a belief in, a river as a living being, rather than only or merely as a geophysical entity,

which is fully predictable and exhaustibly knowable. Now, bringing alive is one of literature's oldest conjuring tricks. All of you here, I believe, will have shed tears. You'll have had your hearts broken and your spirits mended by characters who never existed beyond paper and ink. Imaginative writing, and I do include nonfiction in that category, as you will now be unsurprised to hear,

has long resurrected that which is dead or that which never had existence at all. But these ghosts have usually been human. My task in this book is at once easier and harder. It's easier because rivers and glaciers and forests flow and grow through time and life. They prove and reprove their aliveness. They are ancestors

and also inheritors. But harder maybe because they are not human beings. And so there is a historically constructed and potent philosophical bias against recognizing them as meaningfully alive. But I plan to try. And I know that language well used is a summoner of spirits it's quick and it's quickening in the beautiful old senses of those words from quick and quicken the old English for alive and enliven the etymology that also gives us that unforgettable phrase the quick and the dead so my journey down that river brief though it was catalyzed in me something of that great reach outward of the mind and imagination of which Le Guin spoke turned me upside down and it shook me out and it left me changed and more aware than in years of the infinitesimal fathoming of this world's mysteries that I've made

in decades of trying to take its soundings and after we'd been on and in and by the river constantly for nine days and a hundred miles or so always within earshot and mind shot of it deep in one of the vastest continuous forests on this earth one morning in a gorge beside an immense hourglass shaped world whirl of a god rapid which was made of white bears and angels and water comets a rapid which was a mouth and had a tongue and spoke in ways that were almost wholly incomprehensible to me and yet also utterly unmistakable to me. I wrote the final pages of this book and as I did so I knew absolutely that the river was in those moments my co-author, that I was thinking with and being thought by the river in ways more powerful and indubitable to me than any such collaboration I've ever previously known.

And the next day, we reached the sea at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the water was polished like pewter by the sun, and it boiled up in silver gouts and eddies, and we realized that the air was filled with the high, haunting cries of seals, hundreds of seals, which were singing from a low rock island out to sea that seemed to retreat in the measure that we approached it. And the seals were crying and I found that I was too.

Thank you very much. Robert McFarlane is the award-winning author of books like The Old Ways, The Lost Words, Underland, and The Forthcoming, is a river alive. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia. On ABC Radio National. And around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA. And things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. For the past quarter century or so, I've lived in Cambridgeshire,

in the Fens, or rather the place where the Fens meet the chalk of southern England. Robert McFarlane, out for a walk in the Chalk Hills, landforms that play a prominent role in his writing. It's a flat landscape, very flat. There's an old joke around here that you can stand on a chair in Cambridgeshire and see into Norfolk, and they used to say that it was a landscape so flat you could fax it. And in that sense, it's an odd place for someone like me,

who writes and thinks and dreams a lot about mountains, to have ended up. I wrote my first book, Mountains of the Mind, here about how and why we fall in love with mountains in a Fenland basement, probably below sea level, I think. But here are the hills and they're modest, 73 metres above sea level at their peaks, but they're made of chalk. at their peaks, but they're made of chalk. And I've come to realise that in that sense they're a very appropriate place for a writer to live, because chalk is made of the bodies of countless animalcules who floated in a soft blizzard to the bottom of ancient seas and were then compacted into this substance. The chalk that I live on, Cretaceous era chalk, is about 99 million years old. And of course chalk is also one of our first writing implements. It's what we picked up and

scraped across a blackboard or the bark of a tree to make a mark to form a letter. And so I've come to realise with a quiet pleasure that basically I live on an enormous writing instrument the size of the south of my county and sometimes when I'm walking I bend down pick up a chunk of chalk and make a mark on the bark of a beech tree and one of the etymologies for our word book is from the old German bock meaning beach. Robert Macfarlane received the Weston International Award for Nonfiction from the Writers' Trust of Canada at the Royal Ontario Museum in September 2023. Following his talk, he was interviewed by another award-winning nonfiction author and a member of the award jury, Charlotte Gray.

Well, Rob, I sat there as you spoke, just loving this extraordinary tsunami of thoughts, images, provocations, adventures. But I wanted actually to start with your first book, which I must say was a revelation to me, Mountains of the Mind. And that book begins with your 12-year-old self reading about the doomed expedition of George Mallory and Andrew Irvin up at Everest in 1924. The last sighting of them had been by the expedition's geologist as they neared the summit in the far distance. They were never seen alive again. You wrote, I wanted to be nothing more than one of those tiny dots fighting for survival in the thin air. That was it. I was sold on adventure. Does adventure still motivate you in the same way?

Oh, thank you. And thanks, Charlotte, as well, for taking on this role. We were having a conversation last night about relationships with first books, because you look back across 20 years and there's a different you and a different voice and you meet you meet them as strangers almost and for example I'd never write the sentence that's it I was sold on adventure now but I'm quite I'm quite glad that my younger self did though there is one line in the first chapter of that book which is where I'm trying to traverse a snow ridge in the Alps, kicking in front-pointing with crampons and trying to move along. It was airy, as climbers say.

There was quite a lot of space beneath me. And I hadn't realised I'd written this line, but I went to do an event at a psychoanalyst's institute. And the first question I was asked was, is the mountain abreast? I said, okay. It's not going to go how I expected. And then the second question was,

quoted this line where I was describing traversing the ridge, and the line was, I looked between my legs and saw a whole lot of nothing. And yeah, there was a lot of talking to do after that. So I look back and I see the things perhaps I shouldn't have said and the things I should shouldn't have said and the

things I should have said. That spark of what adventure holds, which is still there, but it's changed. I have very little interest in risk. I have a considerable interest in fear, which I think is a separable circumstance, we could say. I was trying, as it were, to think myself back into that 12-year-old self which scours away all the responsibilities and the attachments and all the things that should stop you from being a tiny dot at 28,000 feet. And I would never go near Everest now and never wanted to. It's an appalling, tawdry concentration of all that's worst about adventure, I would say, now. But the drive to put myself in the way of places and people,

which is what I would call adventure, now, remains very strong. One of the things that's stunning about your books, your sense of wonder. You have been to so many places, seen so many extraordinary landscapes. How have you sustained that sense of wonder oh um descartes who i think gets a pretty unfair kicking for being the god of dualism he he said wonder is the first of all the passions i like that line and what descartes meant it because the scientific method was being born and he saw wonder as part of this two-stroke movement that initiates the

drive to explain so we're astonished by something and then then we have to understand the kind of causal mechanism um i don't think there has to be that second part though there's nothing wrong with it when it comes and it's produced many astonishments in its own right the rationalization process my my mum wakes up every day and is amazed by the world that she sees. And that's been a very inspiring force. I don't know what spring she drinks from, but I wish I had the coordinates. And that's definitely been one of her legacies to me, is to be amazed. But there is so much to be amazed at and so much to be appalled by. and so much to be appalled by.

And I do see a lot of activism and drives for what I see as positive change, which have their roots in wonder and plenty that have them in fear and anger too. And I think a plant can thrive on all three. I'm tired of both of these stories, Merlin Sheldrake says as we leave the lake. The forest is always more complicated than we can ever dream of. Trees make meaning as well as oxygen. Maybe, then, I say, what we need to understand the forest's underland is a new language altogether, one that doesn't automatically convert it to our own use values.

Our present grammar militates against animacy. Our metaphors by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphise the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi. We need to speak in spores. The notion of the aliveness of the natural world has been incubating in you for some time, and in Underland you highlight the need for a vocabulary that admits to our kinship with the natural world. Can you talk a little bit about our linguist estrangement from the natural world? And I'm always fascinated by this

specificity of your knowing the right terms well i think two things broadly in response to that one is that many people i i believe operate within an impoverished or an insufficiently nuanced place language and i am interested by people people who are drawn to precision, not just in terms of naming, being able to name nodes or presences within the matrix, because I think that's the first step to what's really important, which is relationality. And I think understanding the constituent parts of the river, the salmon, the bear, the deer, the water, the rainfall. These are amazing, but knowing how they relate to one another and how they ramify outwards in these inconceivably complex webs of relation,

that is where the real work lies. But at a very basic level, a literacy of the living world has fallen from us. And some of the work I've found most exciting in my writing life has actually been working with very simple acts of naming of nature with children and with young people through The Lost Words and The Lost Bells. You've done this wonderful book, The Lost Words, which just talk for a few minutes about that, because it illustrates what you care about.

That book, The Lost Words, has an origin story that I'll tell very briefly that is, I think, resonant, which is that in 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which was the most widely used junior dictionary for, I think it's the four to six-year-old category in primary education in the UK. A new edition came out, and it's a short dictionary. It's only got about 2,000 words in it, so they have to make decisions about what stays in and what goes out. And out from that dictionary fell everyday nature words, so acorn, bluebell, butterfly, conker, Wren, Willow, Otter, Heron, they all went. And in came Broadband, Blockgraph, MP3 player. Does anyone remember those?

The Otters are still around, though. And Bulletin Board, Chat Room, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And technology is incredible, but for many people, that simple juxtaposition of what's in and what's out really spoke of a much bigger divide between childhood and natural literacy and the living world, but also up and down the ages as well. So with this wonderful artist, Jackie Morris, we decided we'd make a book that tried to get these words spoken again through poetry and through art. it's six years on it's still turning into things we'd never expected gardens and ballets and operas and theater work and community groups and it goes into old people's

homes because older people lose words in different ways and but they can work with Jackie's art to see things. Anyway, so it's been a wild ride. And such a creative one, because it wasn't just that you revived the words and had a drawing and definition. It was poetic. It was wonderful in terms of the kind of language a child enjoys. I'm glad you say that, because I started writing these tremendously stiff and starchy acrostic poems we decided we make it a book of spells in two ways

it would conjure back the beings the words the otters the catkins the conquers um the bluebells but also we would we would turn them into acrostic but i was writing these awful stiff things and jackie said let language play language wants to play and uh and she said stop thinking you're writing for children because you'll end up writing down to them think you're writing for people and let language turn tumbles in on their tongues and so that's what I tried to do Otter. Otter enters river without falter, what a supple slider out of halter and into water. This shape-shifters a sheer breath-taker, a sure-heart stopper, but you'll only ever spot a shadow flutter, bubbles skeen and never, almost never, actual otter.

This swift swimmer's a silver miner, with trout its oar, it bores each black pool deep and deeper, delves up current steep and steeper, turns the water inside out, then inside outer. Ever dreamed of being otter? That utter underwater thunder bolter, that shimmering twister. Run to the riverbank, otter dreamer, slip your skin and change your matter, pour your outer being into otter and enter now as otter without falter into water. You like language to be playful, but you also like it to be unvarnished in the way of not being a euphemism. So I'm struck that you don't like the term climate change. Well, I mean, you'll have heard me use the phrase the living world a few times. So I'm struck that you don't like the term climate change. Well, I mean, you'll have heard me use the phrase the living world a few times. I tried to stop using the word environment some time ago.

There are contexts in which it functions and does good work, but I think broadly it is a chilly and alienating and separating term for something that is therefore made to be around us. So we should talk about climate breakdown rather than climate change, because change is too neutral. I think so. And I mean, we know that social justice

and environmental justice are inseparable. And we know that climate breakdown falls dramatically disproportionately on the most vulnerable and dramatically most proportionally on those who have caused least of it so climate change I don't feel particularly content with any longer. I'm always struck between the difference in attitudes to landscape and to the natural world between Canadians and English people. And obviously, I've actually absorbed both. You may not guess it, but I actually wasn't born here.

But have you noticed that? I mean, you've spent quite a lot of time in Canada. Are you aware of sort of the differences in attitudes? Well, I feel like I've tread quite carefully here as I generalise about Canadian attitudes to land. So I won't do that. I will say that there's a Charles Olsen line from 1950 where he says, the first fact of America,

and I know you're not America, don't worry, the first fact of America is space, block caps. And I would say that the first fact of England is lack of space. We can fit eight Englands into Quebec alone and driving, as I did, 13 hours east, hard driving on an empty road along the Cote-Nord to reach the Moutaka-Shabu and passing forests that whole time,

and then travelling through roadless terrain, always enclosed within forest that ran to the brink of the water, was just astonishing to me. This is my generalism. I could understand why there may be an internalised sense which declares itself in certain cultural and industrial contexts of the inexhaustibility of this land. I mean, pretty much every scrap of the United Kingdom

or whatever we call it these days bears the mark of continuous, broadly speaking, human occupation. And that is fascinating. W.H. Auden says, the Lake District is a bourgeois invention like the piano which i think is probably taking it a little bit far but you realize in in the lake district for example which is the many ways the cultural crucible of quote-unquote nature writing wordsworth coleridge dorothy wordsworth and you know all the ferment of response to to

the living world that came out of that northwest corner of England. Well, of course, it's a highly acculturated landscape, and we were talking about stone walls, and yet it also exists in this strange doppelganger way in the contained English imagination as a wilderness, which it isn't, certainly not by Canadian standards. by Canadian standards. Deep time is the chronology of the underland.

Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant, epochs and eons instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around five billion years. We stand with our toes as well as our heels on a brink. Deep time. You use that phrase a lot to remind us of, in fact, the geological layers in our planet. And you have this wonderful in underland this wonderful ice breathes rock has tides we live

on a restless earth to remind us that even the things we think are immutable are actually the result of thousands and thousands of years does this mean that our lives are insignificant no um the opposite there is this um what i call the deep time alibi, which is the notion that because we know we exist in an Earth historical and Earth future context that unfolds for billions of years, and we've only been here meaningfully for tens of thousands once we'd obliterated all the other hominin competitors. the hominin competitors. Therefore, within that bigger picture, that deep time context, it doesn't matter what we do because the Earth will heal itself. There's a New Yorker cartoon

where two planets kind of meet on an orbit and one of them says, oh, you're looking down and the other one says, yeah, I've got a bad case of humans. And the other one's like, don't worry, it'll pass. And it's a great cartoon,

but I think it speaks to this lotus eating that the deep time perspective can give us. So I think it does the opposite. I think when we see ourselves as within these webs of inheritance and legacy, and that's why deep time always needs to be thought forwards as well as backwards, then suddenly it becomes so important. What we are making, the webs we are weaving, the threads we are breaking. Deborah Bird Rose, the beautiful anthropologist, she talks about the double death. And the double death is

the death that we deal in the moment, which is the ecological death of damage, let's say the deletion of a species. The doubleness, the second death, is the death that comes in the future, which is the death of the possibility of life making more complexity out of itself. And as we deplete in the moment, so we deplete possibility in the future. And so the idea of the double death keeps me feeling very alert. I think deep time charges us with huge responsibility. And yet you have kept in the most extraordinary way your sense of wonder every time you see a new natural phenomenon your your descriptions are extraordinary and i want to go and see them not not the catacombs of paris yeah that was in underworld the jury decided that none of us could have followed you down the catacombs of Paris.

Fear slithers up my spine, spills greasy down my throat. Nothing for it but to follow her. I lie flat, loop pack to foot, edge in headfirst into the tunnel. The clearance above is so tight that I again have to turn my skull sideways to proceed. The clearance to the sides is so scant that my arms are nearly locked to my body. The stone of the ceiling is cracked into blocks and sags around the cracks. Claustrophobia grips me like a full-body vice, pressing in on chest and lungs, squeezing breath hard, setting black stars exploding in my head.

Drags scratch of bag behind me, pain already in the leg to which it is looped from the effort of pulling it. Movement is a few inches at a time, a worm-like wriggle gaining purchase with shoulders and fingertips. How long does this tunnel run like this? If it dips even two inches, I'll be stuck. The thought of continuing is atrocious. The thought of reversing is even worse. And the top of my head bumps against something soft. I think quite a lot of readers put the book

aside at that point. And I got all these emails saying I had to stop reading after page 86. And I, at first I was like, oh, damn. And then I thought, no, this is good. This is good. Like if they, if it's making them do this with their bodies, then literature is doing, doing something. But I thought I ought to get a little business card made up saying, I do these things so you don't have to. Robert McFarlane in conversation with the author Charlotte Gray. McFarlane then took questions from the audience. They have a question about rights of nature and this whole idea that nature has value outside of what it can do for us. Do you think the world is ready to accept that, acknowledge that? Rights of nature is not going to take its place

within international law any time soon. Neither is ecocide. But I think there is a, to me, fascinating jurisprudential drive of converging tributaries of what might be called wild law, earth law, of which the rights of nature is one very powerful current. And it's accelerating as a movement. It is finally starting to move from being a set of propositions, ambitions and hopes to actually enforcing change on the ground.

So I think things are moving very, very fast. You need only to look at the number of declarations, resolutions and indeed powerful legal outcomes of what is at heart an ontological question to see that it's really starting to change things now what's that that famous victor hugo line there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come and i think the time is coming for this idea and it's starting to to shift things and it's being driven from below as well. Indigenous communities, river guardians, forest guardians,

like it's rising up from below, and that's exciting and important too. Thank you for this evening. Appreciate it. Because of you, I read Waterlog earlier this year by Roger Deakins, and I understand that he was an important person in your life, and I wondered if you could maybe speak a little bit about the influence of Roger on your own work, and maybe how some of the ideas he explores in Waterlog maybe translate into what you're working on now. Those of you who don't know Roger Deacon, he died in 2006, very suddenly of a brain tumour. He came to writing very late in his life. He wrote a book called Waterlog that was published in 1999, which was recently republished by Tin House in North America.

Wonderful to see it finding readership over here. It's a very, very British book. And he called it A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, A Frog's Eye View of Britain. We have some huge problems with our rivers now, systematic underinvestment, high levels of capital flight, including into large Canadian pension companies, have left us with a rickety infrastructure and the sewage has nowhere to go other than

onto our beaches and into our rivers. But Roger was writing about river health and drinkability, swimmability. He was also writing about access, a huge debate in the uk at the moment sorry england specifically where we have really parsimonious and restricted um access provision uh and there's an amazing gathering movement that's really starting to change stuff in terms of breaking open access to land and water so roger was roger was ahead of all of that and he he wrote a book that as heathcote williams puns leaves you with a spring in your step and it really it really does and i i ended up just like jumping into basically every every body of fresh water that i could after i read waterlogged like lots of people

he did leave a very powerful legacy and he was a one he was a wanderer as well he was he was amazed by stuff and in a very democratic way as well so i think he was celebrating the democratizing power of open water swimming or wild swimming as it's now unnecessarily called or swimming as you call it in canada hi uh thank you for the wonderful talk my question is about the people who feel a huge sense of wonder for the living world and are excited by it and just filled with joy by it. People like scientists or researchers, those who work in labs,

but who struggle to communicate that joy and excitement to other people because their vocabulary for wonder sounds like jargon to the rest of us. What advice would you give to those people to communicate their wonder to the public, to those who don't understand their language? Oh, wow. What a brilliant question to end.

Thank you so much. I love scientific language. I love your specialised languages. Coleridge went to the Royal Society lectures on chemistry and somebody said, where do you go to the Royal Society? He said, to improve my stock of metaphors. I follow scientists around and I tug their sleeves

and I'm like that irritating little Labrador with its floppy tongue. What does that rock? When did that come from? What scat is that? And i i envy your specialized languages so i guess the first thing is to say like relish your knowledge um and relish the language that you use within it because there are there are gems in what may feel like a kind of homogenous bedrock there but it is glittering i think um and then tell tell stories with it I mean the research is just

amazing to me and I know that's because I don't have to do it so I don't have to do the schlep of it and so tell stories look for the glitter and keep on working for all of us Thank you so much. best-selling books include The Old Ways, The Lost Words, and Underland, and he's the first winner of the Weston International Award for Nonfiction. He's also a professor of literature

and environmental humanities at the University of Cambridge. This episode was produced by Chris Wadzkow, and special thanks to Robert McFarlane for recording himself in the chalk lands. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Gabby Hagorilis. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad.