Ideas - How the Anthropocene is Changing the Elements — and Us

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Renowned author Robert Macfarlane has described his work as being about the relationship between landscape and the human heart. As part of a series on the elements in the Anthropocene, Macfarlane talks about how that relationship with earth and water has changed. Humanity has become a transformative force, altering the very nature of the elements, with grave implications for the planet — and us.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The idea of the four elements goes back to antiquity. That earth, water, air, and fire comprised everything on and in the planet. While that notion no longer has scientific currency, wherever we humans have lived, the elements have shaped our world, our way of life, and what we are.

Earth and water are the elements that create a sense of place. Whether we think of our surroundings as awe-inspiring, a source of sustenance, beautiful, or simply home, earth and water are not just where we live, work, and roam. They're an integral part of us. I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us, and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. Robert McFarlane is one of the world's premier writers of natural history and landscape, and human relationships with them, how place molds the mind,

and how language gives form and meaning to landscape. As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or a peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays, yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places, but we are far less good at saying what places make of us. But there's been a seismic shift with the onset of the Anthropocene, a time when human activity is the defining transformative force on the planet. Humans aren't just made of and by the elements. They are altering the composition, properties, and behavior of Earth, water, air, and fire. Robert McFarlane is the author of such best-selling books as The Old Ways, The Lost Words,

Landmarks, and Underland. He was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Non-Fiction Award presented by the Writers' Trust in 2023. As part of a series on the elements in the Anthropocene, I spoke with him about the physical and psychological connections between people and earth and water, and how that is changing. Robert, you've described your books as being about the relationship between landscape and the human heart, and you talk about the way people carry landscapes with them. What do you mean by that? The metaphors we live by, to use that wonderful phrase, are very often taken from place, from landscape, paths, rivers, mountains. These are the founding forms of our oldest stories, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our ways in the world. So in that sense, they're deep in narrative, they're deep in story,

and they're deep in the ways we imagine ourselves. I've always been drawn to, I guess, archetypes in that sense, the path, the river, the mountain, and the underworld, and drawn to the ways in which we make sense of our interior terrains using these forms, the ways we navigate ourselves to ourselves, as it were. And so what specific landscapes do you carry with you? Well, I sometimes say my heart is made of mountains and always will be. And I think that's true. A river runs through me as it runs through everyone. There's a wonderful greeting that I try to use more and more. Instead of saying, where are you from? You say, who are your rivers? Which are your rivers? Where are your rivers? So who are your rivers? Well, I was just about to ask you the same. So will you tell

me? Well, sure, absolutely. You go first. Well, my river is the Red River in Winnipeg. Because in Winnipeg, Manitoba, almost the center of Canada, and has a lot of long indigenous history. And I grew up right next to it. It was very much part of my story. So what about your river? I think I have two. One big, one small. And they both start in springs. One is the River Dee, the Scottish Dee this is, which rises on the summit of the Cairngorms are arctic really arctic

mountains they're only 4 000 feet high but they're you know we're so far north in the north of Scotland that they really feel polar it's a tundra-like habitat up there and there the granite gets so saturated by rain and snow melt that it wells back up in the form of springs and then it runs away and runs away from that high point. And the other is another spring, but completely different, just near my home here in Cambridge, where the springs rise on 99 million year old chalk at the bottom of a very small hill called White Hill, and they flow away. And I've been visiting those springs for 25 years now. How do people react when you ask them that question? What are their rivers? Everyone has an answer. I mean, isn't that wonderful? Everyone has an answer to that

question. We all live in a watershed. That still strikes me as a kind of gong clash moment. We all live in a watershed. Water moves around us and through us. It irrigates our dreams, our songs, our stories. How early did you begin to think of landscapes as ways for us to see ourselves? It's such a hard question to answer. It's sort of when do we become conscious of having become conscious, as it were. But I date an analytic consciousness about the ways we carry landscapes within us, fall in love with them, are willing to dive for them to an encounter at a graveyard a climber's graveyard way up a glacier called the inalchak glacier in the tian shan mountains of central asia and i was in my very early 20s they were far too hard for me and i was suffering terrible altitude sickness as well and trying to recover from it and a climatizer base camp.

And I walked up the glacier and it's very far from any help. And there was a boulder and it had been converted over the years by all the climbers who had come into a makeshift cemetery. And there were little niches dug for the climbers who died on those mountains. And one of them was an Englishman and he was about the same age as me. and one of them was an Englishman and he was about the same age as me and I remember standing there in that bright egalitarian light falling on the ice, on the rock, on me and suddenly being placed outside the mystery that I'd lived in, the mystery of mountains and their magic

and the absurdity of the devotion struck me and I began really to want to try and understand and explain how a lump of rock and ice could come to have such a grip on the heart and the mind incredible of course it's it isn't just delight that you take in the landscape or water for that matter your writing is full of very visceral descriptions of the fear that some landscapes have made you feel when you've been deep inside them or traversing them. Can you tell me about one of the more intense experiences of fear that the landscape has invoked in you? Yeah, one very physically was all cities have their negative. All cities have been extracted from somewhere in order to be raised upon the land, and Paris' negative, its invisible inverse happens to lie directly beneath it in the form of the catacombs from which that city's limestone was extracted over the centuries, and was then converted into a great ossuary when the city's cemeteries began to overflow in the later 18th century. And there's literally hundreds of miles of catacomb network. So I went there and spent two nights, three days under Paris in the parts

of the catacombs that are, shall we say, not altogether legal to get into, require a little bit of manhole cover lifting and such like. You are under a city, you are entombed, you don't see the sun for three days, and that stone comes to grip you. There was one time when we were fitted like a coffin by the stone. Fear slithers up my spine and spills greasy down my throat. Nothing for it but to follow. So I lie flat, edge in, head first. The clearance above me 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. Claustrophobia suddenly grips me like a full body vice, pressing in on chest and lungs, squeezing breath hard, setting black stars exploding in my head. 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. Then the metro started up above us us it's a faint shudder at first but clear and now growing in strength and noise the ceiling the unstable ceiling is humming with tremor the vibrations are passing through the stone and my body then on into the

stone beneath me the rumbling rises to a thunder and I can hear clacks and clicks among the rumblings. We are directly underneath the metro and the overground lines. I want to shout, but I mustn't. I want to retreat, but I can't. So I just keep inching forward in silence. Just the rumble of the trains rising and falling away, heaving breath, drumming heart. Terrifying moment. I could barely get through that passage well me too in the physical sense yeah but i i think landscapes carry memory in them as well and i guess there's fear in that too so many landscapes have the memory of atrocity somewhere somewhere within them, born in their scars, born in their graves.

We are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world, its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits, as well as by genetic traits that we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied more than in any historical period before ours. I am interested in what the body can tell us, things that can't be learned in the library, in the archive. I teach here at Cambridge and it's very important to me to get my students out into the landscape, out of the seminar room, let them smell and see complexity and touch it and history and memory and those interlocking labyrinths that they form. And I think here of the wonderful writer of rock, of granite, Nan Shepard of the Cangor Mountains, whose slender book, The Living Mountain, is such

a landmark in mountain literature. Nan writes about how the focal point in the mountains becomes dispersed manyfold. She says, this is how the earth must see itself. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Nan Shepard. You make a point of introducing us to your guides along the way and how they inspire kind of your relationship with the landscape nan shepherd as you say author of the living mountain and she was talking about the cairngorms in scotland yes can you talk some more about how she influenced the way you think and feel about your own relationship with the landscape yes transformational for me as for so many people it's been a one of the joys of the last decade watching Nan's work reach new generations of readers. And she's now ended up, I mean, I grew up in a mountaineering culture that was very summit focused and it was pretty athletic and quite masculine, I guess you could say, though it wasn't only

men who participated in it. And it took losing some friends and some people I knew to the mountains, and then really reading Nan's book, which replaces the summit with the past, we could say, which replaces the goal, the victory with the pilgrimage, and it replaces achievement with meditation. And when you contrast it to a book like John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest, which was written in 1953 about the successful first ascent of Everest. They're just incomparable. One of them is it uses the language of war, siege, assault, victory, triumph. Nan is wonderfully quietly scoffing of such things. And instead, I think a relationship that many more people recognize with place, which is, to borrow George Eliot's wonderful phrase,

it enlarges the range self has to swim in. That doesn't require vastness of scale or remoteness or physical. Or conquering. Certainly not conquering. That conquistadorial ethic, if we can call it that, is banished, vanished, gone. And that's essentially how you think about mountains. Yes. I love nan's honesty that she does occasionally still feel what she calls the tang of height and summit fever and i do too i mean there is a something glorious about reaching atop and becoming the looker down but it's not an aggrandizing feeling for me anymore it's more a sense of the astonishing vastness of time and space.

Tell me about her concept of bodily thinking, how that might speak to our estrangement from the natural world. That's such a good question. There's an amazing line towards the end of The Living Mountain where she says, hour on hour, I walk the flesh transparent. The mountains were her university, they're where she experimented, they're where she studied. And she was doing kinds of thinking about what we now call phenomenology, that philosophical tradition which is interested in ways in which the body thinks before or in ways different to the mind, the conscious mind, which tries to overcome what is known as the Cartesian dualism, that severance of the body and the mind.

And Nan writes with glorious relish about how indivisible her experience of the mountains and the thoughts that she has in them are from bodily feelings. So that might be, for example, her swimming naked, daringly naked in North East and Scotland in the first half of the 20th century in the cold waters of Loch Arn. It might be the scent, as she puts it, of kind of Corvoisier brandy that she gets off the birch trees in rain. It might be the way the eyes move as they follow the spiraling gyre of a golden eagle as it lifts on a thermal and reading her you you feel her your body is doing kinds of thinking that your brain is not able to so she beautifully communicates that so how do you see that phenomenon in the anthropropocene? Is it fair to say that the Anthropocene hasn't just reshaped our world, but also our own personhood? Certainly. I mean, the body doesn't only feel beautiful things, doesn't only know wondrous things, it knows terrible things too.

And Stéphanie Le Ménagier, I think, coins this phrase, the everyday Anthropocene. Stephanie Le Menagier, I think, coins this phrase, the everyday Anthropocene. This is the body burden that is born predominantly by the most vulnerable, which is that kind of accretion of scar, of suffering, of toxicity, the weight of being in the world that the Anthropocene forces increasingly and unequally upon humans. I've just been with an extraordinary young Tamil friend of mine from Chennai in Southeast India, a climate activist and a rivers activist. Chennai now suffers extraordinary heat, as you will probably know, kind of unprecedented levels of heat. And one consequence of this is that kidney stones are massively increasing among the instance of kidney stones. And this is because dehydration are massively increasing among the instance of kidney stones. This is because dehydration is greater. It's also affecting the non-human species in that part of the world. So sea turtles, in this case, olive ridley sea turtles, the sexing of the

hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the sand in which the eggs are laid. And the switch temperature for olive ridley sea turtles is around 28 degrees C. So these mother sea turtles come on shore out of their deep night journeys through the ocean. They crawl up in darkness, they dig their sand holes, they lay their eggs. But now in February, which is when a lot of this laying happens, the sand temperatures are 33, 32 degrees regularly. And that means that almost all the hatchlings are female. So vast numbers of female hatchlings swim back out to sea.

A few of them survive the gulls and the bigger fish. And they're all female, so they can't find a male to mate. So that's just two examples of, as it were, the everyday Anthropocene radically changing the bodily experience of humans and more than humans. Another big influence on you was Roger Deakin. What did he teach you about how to be in or with water? Yeah, how can it, how it can transform you? Oh, he was a water man, no doubt. I always think when I hear Nick Drake's song about the river, I always think of Roger.

He died in 2006. And before that, with this wonderful book, Waterlog, he really kickstarted the open water swimming movement in the UK, which is now hugely politicized in the face of kind of, as it were, pandemic sewage pollution, in the sense of being every single one of our rivers is now in less than good overall ecological health. But Roger, he made the landscape porous to me. He made its blue legible. I'd always look for the land, for the rock as a climber, but suddenly Roger deepened the map for me and I looked to the blue. And there were certainly years when I was under his influence, a wonderful watery word itself,

when I would throw myself into every river I passed, every lock, every lake. And again, hundreds of thousands of people also did that. And what we call wild swimming, but you very reasonably call just swimming in Canada, did that and what we call wild swimming but you very reasonably call just swimming in canada has become huge here and actually has has then folded as i say back into politics because that's become part of the enormous sort of pressure rising on water companies and government to really clean up water here swimmers are falling sick sick and sick and sick what do you think has happened to most people's sense of place their level of connection to a natural physical place that has an emotional pull on us as you say

during what we live in which is the anthropocene that's a huge question and a really crucial one i think two things i think one is that love is a function of loss very often. And therefore, in some ways, seeing the rate of change, the rate of damage has also intensified and accelerated feelings of love. And we, as it were, sublimate those feelings sometimes into elegy, songs for the dark times of what has gone, memorializing of places we once knew that are no more, but also in action. It's very exciting to see a kind of nature politics emerging, albeit very late, that is really gaining grip and purchase. And that's a functional need, you know, the need for clean water, but it's also a kind of function

of the heart, as it were, that we want to be able to swim and walk by need for clean water but it's also a kind of function of the heart as it were that we want to be able to swim and walk by clear clean water and the other thing i'd say is this word solastalgia which you may have come across as yes yeah it's a powerful one isn't it can you define it yeah i think we're all familiar with nostalgia which is the pain that comes from the longing for home but solastalgia was coined in the early 2000s by an Australian eco-philosopher called Glenn Albrecht. And he realized that there was no word for people who were staying in one place, which was their home place, but then seeing that landscape transformed around them so that what was home becomes unhomely without them ever having moved.

So it's that uncanniness. So mining, let's say, deforestation or drought, suddenly that which you knew is no longer present, but you have not moved. And so it's that pain, the psychological distress that comes from radical environmental change. distress that comes from radical environmental change. Was there a turning point in the relationship between humans and these two elements that you write about so much, the water and earth in the form of landscape, where we looked at them more kind of like resources rather than something that our lives were connected to or depended on? Well, I can certainly suggest some.

None will ever tell the whole story, but I'm thinking a lot about rivers at the moment. connected to or depended on? Well, I can certainly suggest some. I mean, none will ever tell the whole story, but I'm thinking a lot about rivers at the moment. I'm thinking a lot about how they fell away from being sacred. So for example, in Britain, we know that successive waves of kind of invader occupiers between the kind of pre-Iron Age Celtic period, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, and then the Christian church all regarded springs, wells, flowing clear water where it rises from the earth as sacred. And they named rivers as gods and goddesses. They gave offerings to the clear water. And this idea that each river has a different voice, a different spirit, water and this idea that each river has a different voice a different spirit a different texture is fascinating but now we deal with instrumentalism has really kind of risen and erased the difference

the river is let's say a source it's a sump it's a dump it's what supplies us with what we drink it's what takes away our waste. And that one dimensionality, that flattening out of water, that disenchantment of water, I would date really to the beginning of the 17th century, the rise of spatial coordinates, the rise of technocratic nation states. And we've been reinforcing that ever since, and it's brought extraordinary benefits as well, but we have lost something vital in that phase. You said you're into rivers right now. One of your current projects on rivers is the movement to endow rivers themselves as having legal rights. Yeah. What's the argument for that?

for that? Well, firstly, I would say it isn't actually an endowing, a bestowing of rights upon rivers. It's a recognition of rights that have always existed. There is behind this movement a beautiful, to me at least, recognition of a river as alive, as a living force, a life force, an enlivening force that is alive in ways that exceed the sum of the lives it contains. That makes perfect sense to me. And I think actually it makes pretty good sense to many people today. I know so many people, perhaps you're one of them, who have friendships with rivers, we could say. We talk to them, we dream with them, we try to listen to their voices as well. Does that make sense to you? It does.

The question that's always asked is if you're standing in a river, is it the same river? Two minutes after you've stepped into it, or are you the same person? Exactly. You've been rivered, right? Exactly. It always seems crazy to me that river is a noun in English, but we don't have a verb. To be rivered? Yeah, to be rivered.

How do you define being rivered? Well, I think it's happening to all of us all of the time. I think we talk easily about being weathered, but we don't talk so easily about being rivered. But time is the river and we're always within it, even when we think we're standing dry footed on the bank i mean to return to the legal question yes this extraordinary um young old global movement is springing up to recognize the rights of rivers the right to flow unimpeded to the sea the right to go unpolluted and and indeed eastern canada or the St. Lawrence region and Nitasana and the Innu territory, these are real kind of frontiers for this kind of thinking. Incredibly exciting.

I'll tell him all I can about the band. Robert McFarlane is the award-winning author of The Old Ways, The Lost Words, Landmarks and Underland. If he tells me all he knows about the way this river flows 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.

You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, 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. There's still debate over whether the Anthropocene began with the nuclear bomb,

the Industrial Revolution, or the rise of human civilization. There's still even debate over whether it should be officially designated as a geological epoch. There's little debate about what it means. That humans are a decisive force remaking the physical and living worlds, are a decisive force, remaking the physical and living worlds, even changing the nature of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. The Anthropocene is also changing us. In Robert McFarlane's reckoning, language is a crucial part of humans' relationship with the planet. When we lose words that describe and name places and things in the natural world, we're no longer having the same kind of intimate conversation with the earth. In one of McFarlane's most beloved books, The Old Ways,

he writes of how natural footpaths, grooved and ground into the earth by human footfalls, keep us in touch with the planet in more ways than one. falls keep us in touch with the planet in more ways than one. We live so much of our lives insulated from earth, insulated from water, insulated even from air. I was fascinated by paths. That's to say the marks we leave in the land with our feet, with our journeys. I think of paths as habits. It's pretty hard to create one on your own. They're wonderful communal structures. They connect, they relate place to place and people to people. They tell stories. The story of the path is in a way one of our earliest technologies.

Walking has always been a way of finding out, a way of joining, whether that's very early on the being able to read the sign of the quarry that we were hunting ah this footprint joins that one and that leads in that way and in that way the mind is drawn into the the future as it were and a story is created but we walk most of our time on tarmac and asphalt and these are not substances that are easily impressed of course we we all know that if unless a pavement has just been set, that if we walk on it, we can't make an impression on the surface. But in that case, will it make an impression on us?

Ah, such a good way of putting it. Less so, I think. And we need surfaces like that, right? We need transactional places where we just need to get from one place to another. And we don't want them to wear us out. And then the place doesn't want to get worn out by us. But they're not the only ways to travel, as it were. And there's a lovely line from Flann O'Brien's, I think it's the third policeman, where he

says, the cracking of my feet caused the road to come up into my legs. I've absolutely mauled that. feet caused the road to come up into my legs i've absolutely mauled that but the premise is clear i think that there is a kind of reciprocity a return we think of the lifelines of the palm but of course our feet have prints too in these wonderful long ridge and thorough arrangements and the relationship therefore between print and print between foot and word is a very, very old one. And I love, as a kind of poet and certainly a scholar of poetry, I love the fact that we talk about rhythm and meter in terms of poetic feet. So let's talk about that, your kind of poetry, as you call it. In your books, you really make a point of using obscure and sometimes archaic words for things in the natural world.

Some examples in the early pages of Underland, like swallets. I hope I say these correctly. Swallets, grikes, scarp, and karst. 100%. Okay, thank you. Can you talk about the importance of such precise, very specific, very local language to describe places and the landscape yeah well firstly i find them beautiful in their precision i do i do think there's a relationship not an exclusive one between precision and lyricism i've always loved reading scientific language i was brought up in a

scientific household and i wrote my master's thesis about the relationship between quantum physics and poetry of the late 20th century. I think science is a gloriously specializing and particularizing endeavor. And why would I want to use a generic word where a precise one will do? Perhaps they come across as obscuring to me. Firstly, they encourage discovery if you don't know what they mean. And secondly, they can almost always be at least inferred from their surroundings so yeah greic and glint are wonderful words for the erosion patterns of limestone which is is eroded by carbonic acid which is formed really just when rainwater absorbs a bit of atmospheric co2 but it's enough to dissolve limestone given time and

surface limestone forms into pavements, which are kind of fissured, but also planed. And the words for the fissures are grikes. And swallets, what are those? Swallets are, there's also a limestone word where a stream has worn a hole, more or less directly down into limestone. So it's like a sinkhole.

So it's either where a stream appears or where one disappears very abruptly into the limestone so it's like a sinkhole so it's either where a stream appears or where one disappears very abruptly into the limestone. Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us. By instrumentalising nature linguistically and operationally, we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder. Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language

does not just register experience, it produces it. Certain kinds of language can restore a measure of wonder to our relations with nature. I love how you say that this notion that the loss of this language affects our capacity for enchantment and wonder with the natural world. And you even go as far as suggesting that the fate of the earth and us, humanity, depends on our capacity to become re-enchanted with the earth. Well, I mean, language points in every direction. And so the question is how we make meaning. One of the lexicographic projects of the Landmarks book was, I guess, an ethico-political one, which was to make available again a language, a linguistic commons, which would allow specificity, precision of denotation, the expression of love for place. and this seems to me vital i mean if if instrumentalism has reduced everything to what martin heidegger called standing resource it's it's all there for for conversion extraction conversion consumption disposal well firstly as don de lillo puts it bleakly what we excrete

comes back to consumer so it's gonna it's gonna for us at some point, and we can see that happening all over the world. But also, it's a mortified world. It's a dead world. So I am interested in language which undertakes what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls grammars of animacy and restore a liveliness and a reciprocity to our relations with land, broadly understood. As part of that effort, you advocate the urgent need for a counter-desecration phrasebook. How would a counter-desecration phrasebook counter the language of the Anthropocene? Well, I will take this moment just to say that the phrase was coined by my dear Gallic-speaking friend, Finley MacLeod, who passed away recently.

And the book Landmarks is dedicated to him, wouldn't exist without him. He really was a kind of dictionary of the islands, as it were. And place-specific language just flowed from him magnificently. I remember him telling me a runach muin, which is this wonderful Gaelic phrase for the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on Moorland on a sunny, windy day. And he introduced me to the kuchan, which literally means the kind of blind stream. And that's a stream which is so small, so overgrown by grass or heather that you don't see it, you are blind to it and therefore likely to step into it. And on and on this glossary that was within him went. His loss is a big loss then in that sense. Yes. And it's a reminder of the

exceptional richness of minority languages. I mean, we are living through a phase of language death as well as a massive background rate of species extinction. to borrow wade davis's phrase every language is an old growth forest of the mind old growth forest of the mind what a brilliant resonant phrase that is it has properties it contains and carries and embodies knowledge that cannot be known elsewhere and has been a long time in the making. I mean, development comes in many forms, but I sometimes think when I hear, for example, let's say the Narendra Modi development narrative in India, it's like, well, a coral reef has taken a long time to develop, a mangrove swamp has taken a long time to develop. These are extraordinary forms of development as well. I'd like to talk

a little bit more about your idea of a language that recognizes and advances the animacy of the world. Is it a recognition that earth and water are alive or at least full of life? Well, I mean, to give one example, I stopped using the word that or which, the pronouns for rivers. I started to use the more human pronoun who, the river who flows into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the stream who rises from the springs near my home. English, it has a deeply, I think, depersonalizing grammar. We it anything that isn't us, really. We objectify, we kind of denature. So if we think of grammar and syntax as sort of the sedimented underland of language, they're where ideology takes hard form and then becomes invisible. Well, this is a kind of control board, a switchboard for thought.

Well, this is a kind of control board, a switchboard for thought. So shifting a grammar back towards something more active, more cognizant of the world's liveliness, even by little things like who seems to me worth undertaking and part of a much bigger metaphysical project, which we have to pursue. But it's a great example of the use of language as a tool in the arsenal of conservationists. Yeah. I mean, Robin Wall Kimmerer in her great book, Braiding Sweetgrass, where she coins the phrase grammars of animacy, she gives the example of how the word bay in her nation's language is a verb.

You can't have a bay that's a noun. It goes back to our conversation about rivers. But it's kind of unthinkable in English that bay could be a verb. So let's verb on that. In the book Underland, I was really struck by your descriptions of the way you saw light and the sun after emerging from being underground. Yeah, that's good yeah in comparison i want to know what it's like being underground not just being on the earth but being in the earth how that changes one's perspective of landscape and water well firstly you feel yourself as a future fossil and that's a curious

subject position to inhabit even briefly you are down in the strata i remember being down in this stark matter laboratory sunk a mile below ground very hot in the hay light the rock salt band that was left when the zechstein sea evaporated across northern europe about 260 million years ago and left these huge bands of potash and then pure kind of hay like rock salt so the scientists go down there because it's what they call the quietest place in the universe. They can't hear the kind of atomic clatter of the upper world. And they're there listening for ghost particles, for dark matter, which we know is there, makes up the mass of the universe, but we can't get it to interact with our

stuff. But that was part of actually an operational salt mine which extended its tunnels eight miles out under the north sea and i kind of i mean i'm always interested in how the world humbles us and and abrades our sense of human exceptionalism and being under a mile of of rock is a very humbling experience. Does it change how you view water and landscape in general? Yes. I mean, one thing that being in a humanly made mine a mile down and under the North Sea does is remind you of our titanic, I mean, Anthropocene terraforming power as a species.

Our brilliant brains have devised technologies that and and mechanisms that are that allow us to remove entire mountaintops in search of the the coal they contain that allow us to dam immense rivers and divert them across watersheds that allow us to drill six million kilometers of oil boreholes and that allow us to create a warren of salt mines under the North Sea. This is astonishing, but it's also a reminder of how consequential we are to land, to water. What did it show you about how much we depend on what's in the earth for our way of life for our survival wow i mean we are a burrowing species we are a burying species and we are an extractive species

and we always have been i was up in the northwest lake district an area i know and love very much and there you have contemporary slate mines the honesta slate mine, Roman era lead mines. And then one of the most beautiful, bright winter days I've ever had, I scrambled down a very steep gully to reach a Neolithic axe factory, which is where they were using the tough T-U-F-F, a stone that flaked particularly beautifully to form hand axes that became so prized, partly because of the place of their making that they were then circulated around Britain and even traded across Europe during the Neolithic period. So, yeah, we have always been taking things from the earth. Are there many landscapes that have not been marked by human activity? Is there such a thing as a pristine natural world in the Anthropocene? No, there isn't. There are spam tins found in the Marianas Trench. We know that there are

forever chemicals aggregating in the livers of polar bears and on the declining sea ice of the Arctic. We live in our own shatter zone really now there's that bill mckibben book from 1989 i think it is which is called the end of nature and begins with an incredible scene of of watching a sunset and then realizing that the sunset is kind of artificially tinted as it were and that was the same year that climate change as we now call it global heating is in many ways i'd prefer to call it first arrived on on the political consciousness as it were margaret thatcher surprisingly being one of their world leaders who spoke about it and however i caution against the dream of the pristine wilderness you know we've seen that idea lead people into really problematic

country and directions in the past. For example, the fetishization of the unmodified North Americas prior to Columbus's landing in 1492, we know that now to be absolute nonsense. It just so happens that the modifications that have been carried out prior to that were broadly sustainable ones. I live in an archipelago and island group british isles if you want to call it that that's been modified every inch of it really has been modified for for more than 5 000 years so i i think i fell out of love with the dangerous dream of the pristine wilderness quite a long time ago i think we need to stay with the trouble, to use Donna Haraway's phrase, recognize modification is here and then think very hard about what forms of modification we wish to accept. Colonialists have often arrived in a place and chosen to characterize it to

themselves as pristine prior to their arrival, thereby erasing continuous trace of habitation for thousands of years. So I associate the pristine wilderness usually with a kind of erasure-inclined delusion. In fact, I mean, so much of the earth has been turned into cities anyway. And they're built up, they're paved over urban areas, and it's where most humanity lives. And I guess most of us would have close relationships with those human-made landscapes. I mean, the built environment is as various as the quote-unquote natural environment and wonderful monuments to ingenuity. I mean, I often also want to decouple the presumed opposition between, let's say say city and country or built environment and natural

environment so i mean cities are spectacular biodiversity hubs um partly because nature is so adaptational and improvisational so just to give two examples of that greater london has about a tree for every citizens that's like nine million nine million trees extraordinary uh yeah it's a wildwood it's a forest it's a green place and a blue place it has stag beetles it has peregrines it has fallow deer foxes yeah oh my goodness boulders brass are foxes yeah do you remember i do absolutely right in the middle of town yeah yeah they uh the fox glance is the equivalent of the two fingers, I think. It's like you can take it and stuff it, folks. Trudging the high street.

And over the past three days, I have seen two peregrine pears, the fastest animal we think ever to have existed on Earth. 270 miles an hour it can reach in the stoop. A pear is nesting about 30 feet above the central street of my city of Cambridge. Another pair nests in the chalk pit from which all the lime and mortar was extracted to build the city of Cambridge.

They're kulturfolgen as the Germans have it, culture followers, adapters, incredible adapters. Ice has a social life its changeability shapes the culture language and stories of those who live near it in kulusuk in east greenland the consequences of recent changes are widely apparent the inhabitants of this village are part of the precariat of a volatile, fast-warping planet. The most northern, most frozen places you've visited seem to be the ones that made you more acutely aware of the Anthropocene, as you mentioned. In Greenland, water in the form of ice and snow kind of is the land, isn't it? Yeah, not for long. Yeah.

Now that the ice and the snow are melting, how is that changing the relationship between the people who live there and the land? Oh, well, I can't speak for Greenlanders, of course. I mean, one of the things is Greenland is becoming green. Antarctica, too. You know, moss, vegetation is starting to move in and weather is changing sound patterns are changing i remember being in the small east greenlandic village of kulusuk and they live across the bay from as it were their local glacier and the older members of the community told me how when they were growing up they could hear the glacier across the way

they could hear it groaning carving but now But now with recession, that sound had gone. Literally the soundscape of their lives had changed as the glacier had receded. It's as if for people who have a very close relationship to the landscape, they're being displaced from their homeland by the Anthropocene without actually going anywhere. It's that concept that we discussed earlier, solastalgia. without actually going anywhere. It's that concept that we discussed earlier,

so nostalgia. How destabilizing is that for culture and people's sense of themselves from your vantage point? Well, I mean, vastly, vastly. I think we all live some version of it and maybe we just habituate ourselves to the nature of change. But I certainly see,

let's say in the song, in the poetry, in the writing of my country now, a deep longing on the part of people to be able to re-establish progressive sense of love of the land, of being stewards of it, of being rooted in it, but not in the old exclusive ways. in it but not in the old exclusive ways. Looking out from that summit I no longer feel awed and exhilarated but instead faintly sick. Sick at Greenland's scale but also by our ability to encompass that scale. There is something obscene both to the ice and to its meltings, to its vastness and its vulnerability. The ice seems a thing that is beyond our comprehension to know, but within our capacity to destroy. Do you think we should talk about the Anthropocene not so much as a technical term,

but as a way of describing this current era of human relationship with the landscape and the planet, and with the elements, specifically earth and water? Yes, I do. Well, in a way that's already happened. The idea of the Anthropocene is out there, and the idea is a formidable one, that we are such a legacy-leaving terraforming species that our signature will be legible in the strata for millions of years to come. It will be a kind of ethical archive of the way our species has lived in this incredibly short period of flourishing that we've had since the end of the last ice age, 10, 11, 12,000 years. Look at what we've done in that time. Absolutely astonishing.

So I think there's a moral tutelary lesson, the kind of, as it were, shock of the Anthropocene remains strong. And I see that taken well as an urge to action, an urge to responsibility and an end to apathy. You write about a kind of ethical attention to the natural world. One of your biggest influences, Ferry, called a moral gaze on the landscape. Can you tell me about that? About how that could help restore our relationship to the land and water? Yeah, Barry had such a powerful sense of vocation and he really was a star I steered by and learned from both as a writer and at some sense, ethically, I learned from him. My Tamil friend who i mentioned earlier

yuvan aves he writes in one of his books there is a form of attention which leads towards action and i think that's the kind of attention we need now i mean one of the things barry taught me which he in turn learned often from indigenous guides was no landscape speaks with a single voice we live surrounded by voices of river of forest of bird of creature and of course of other humans they all make up this great group now that we call land that we sort of weirdly singularize as land or country or landscape but it's a teeming bustling bristling poly. It's a great orchestra that's always playing. And I think that learning to listen to that range and that diversity of voice and note is the beginning to realizing that we are not alone, we are not supreme,

and we have responsibilities forwards and backwards in time and across in space to all the beings that we share land with. So, you know, there's an overwhelming consensus that climate change is causing huge amounts of death and destruction and suffering and financial costs. And yet so many of our governments and energy companies are doubling down on fossil fuel production and other activities that hasten all of this. So we definitely have a problem with short-term thinking. And you write about a concept called deep time. Yes, well, deep time is coined as a phrase, it's usually attributed to John McPhee, the great New Yorker writer, and he's really talking about time measured in geological units, as it were, in the Earth's eyes, so epochs and eons and eras, as opposed to our human instance of seconds and minutes and days and months and years and so forth.

We become crushed almost to an irrelevancy if we consider ourselves within the spans of deep time. Indeed, deep time thinking, the ancient age of the earth the long future of the earth has provoked a kind of inertial response oh well it'll all be all right in the end but that's an easy get out it's like an alibi it's a lotus eating and actually i think properly considered deep time flips into the future as well as the past and says look at this astonishing miraculous wondrous world we've inherited that we're part of this web of relation that we are just you know a trembling strand in and we stand with our toes on a brink as well as our heels we need to think forwards in time beyond the five years beyond our children's lifetime even our children's children's lifetime, if we have them. And this

takes us to the immunologist Jonas Salk's great question, are we being good ancestors? Yeah. Is there a part of you, Robert, that believes the Anthropocene could lead us to rethink our relationship to not just the present, but the future of the planet and our species as well? not just the present, but the future of the planet and our species as well? It's happening. The great turning, as Joanna Macy calls it, and women, in my experience, are the leaders often. It is happening. We have to maintain a belief in its possibility because every degree of every degree matters, is measurable in loss, is measurable in immiseration. matters, is measurable in loss, is measurable in immiseration. And so it's not an either or, will we, won't we? It's how bad will it get or how good can we make it? So despair is a luxury, I believe that. And so we keep trying up and down the scales in the park at the end of the road,

voting as citizens, raising our voices, lobbying, boycotting, divesting, if that's what we do. We can be all of these things or some of them or just one of them. And this all makes a difference to the great turning. Robert, I hope we run into each other somewhere on the banks of a river in some place. Red River? Sure. See you there. Thank you so much for this wonderful journey, all the journeys you've taken us on.

Thank you so much. Been a pleasure to speak. Robert McFarlane is the award-winning author of bestselling books like The Old Ways, The Lost Words, and Underland. He's also a professor of literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge University. Upcoming episodes in our series on the elements in the Anthropocene will look at the changing relationship

between humans and air and fire. This episode and the series were produced by Chris Wadskow. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.