Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 322

By a strange coincidence this book arrived for review at the same time as George Monbiot’s new book Regenesis: Feeding the World without devouring the planet (Allen Lane, 2022). Monbiot’s case is that, ‘Farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife, and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis’ (Regenesis, p. 90). British farming is the elephant in the room in the book under review. On the one hand there are references to ‘the deracinated agricultural landscapes that now compose much of Britain’ (p. 75), whilst on the other hand there is this early statement: ‘British nature writing has sometimes unhelpfully framed farming and farmers as the enemy, although there are signs that this is changing with the emergence of authors such as James Rebanks and Isabella Tree’ (p. 22). Some writers would argue that it was not DEFRA, in its earlier incarnations, that actually grubbed up all those miles of ancient hedgerows and the later uses of the term ‘enclosure’ here seems to include the post-1947 ‘hollow victory of mega-farms’ (p. 184). It is strange that there is no reference to the prolific nature writer Mark Cocker’s 2018 book Our place: can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late? in which he explores the paradox of a nation of wildlife lovers having ‘allowed’ the post-war agricultural policies that decimated habitats and wildlife. This is odd because the theme of this book is very much about the paradoxes, tensions and uncertainties of British nature writing which it explores with often neglected examples and intellectual rigour that unsettles common assumptions, ‘debunks lazy clichés’ (p. 24) and challenges established commentators.

Modern British nature writing, a book wholly written by all five authors, declares that it is not a survey of (mostly) non-fiction prose nature writing. It takes a historical approach, but uses selected examples that ‘perform both an aesthetic and a political function’ (p. 24). As one might expect, the book starts with Gilbert White, but it ends with ‘Shades of White’ in which the book’s discussions of cultural diversity are extended to contemporary questions of inclusion and access. The Romantic period focuses on Dorothy Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith and John Clare, with new work on Thomas Bewick and James Hogg as representing both traditional observations with ‘emerging new understandings of the changeability of landscapes and species’ (p. 25). The Victorian chapter proposes ‘conservative idealism’ as a key to understanding the tensions between pastoral and georgic, aristocratic and bourgeois values, the empirical and the spiritual, ‘inchoate ecological consciousness’ (p. 26) and anthropocentrism. From John Ruskin to Richard Jefferies, and from stonemason Hugh Miller to mountaineer Leslie Stephen, nature writing is discussed as having an uneasy self-consciousness about its being a literary construct of a moral, or even mystical imagination, ‘valuing the natural world as a moral-spiritual aid’ (p. 26).

It is in the chapter on the Short Twentieth Century (1914–91) that a crucial transformation in place-based nature writing is seen to give it a ‘sense of a genre beginning to coalesce’ (p. 167). ‘The changes were particularly marked in attitudes towards farming, which in the early part of the century was almost synonymous with nature, but which, in the wake of the intensification of agriculture after the Second World War and the deployment of pesticides such as DDT, came to be regarded as one of the greatest threats to it’ (p. 167). The popularity of rural writing that followed the First World War has largely been discussed in its fictional form. Here notions of a fragile national consciousness invested in landscapes, under threat from modernity and its mechanizations, are explored first in the writings of Edward Thomas, then in the Modernist georgics of John Stewart Collis’s The worm forgives the plough (1973, but combining two books originally published in 1946/7) before turning to ‘two innovative female nature writers’ (p. 185), Nan Shepherd and Margiad Evans. Both wrote in the 1940s and fell out of print in their lifetimes, but Evans has yet to achieve the rediscovery from which Shepherd’s work has benefited. Evans’ Autobiography (1943) appears to be one of the resurrections of reputation achieved, here under the heading of ‘Earth Writing’, by Modern British nature writing. This chapter is concluded by a ‘Coda: Richard Mabey’s post-pastoral’ which discusses The unofficial countryside (1973), a reversal of Thomas’s fleeing the suburbs in search of nature. Mabey, always searching for positive engagements with an ever-adaptable nature, nevertheless fears for its future: ‘It will always fight back, but it cannot survive outright eradication’, he writes (p. 196).

So we come to ‘Nature writing after Nature’ in the contemporary period and the book’s most theoretically original contribution to current debates about the renewals and failures of so-called ‘new nature writing’. The focus here is on Robert Macfarlane’s The wild places (2007), Jay Griffiths’ Wild (2006), George Monbiot’s Feral (2013), Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands (2012) before comparing contemporary with earlier books about hawks and then about otters. Taking Edward Said’s notion of ‘late style’, the claim is made for the writers of new nature writing as being ‘late Modern, expressing deep-seated anxieties about themselves, their writing and their positions in a rapidly diminishing natural world’ (p. 29). Indeed, it appears that nature writing flourishes most during periods of such anxieties, not the least of which is represented by Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘weather-worlds’ in which human and non-human forces act upon each other, as discussed here in work by Richard Mabey and Melissa Harrison. But if ‘even the most self-reflexive forms of nature writing are likely to have limited environmental impact’ (p. 223), this book brilliantly and provocatively makes the case for nature writing and its discussion as exploring both what ‘environment’ is and the nature of human ‘impact’ and interaction. All further discussions of nature writing will need to engage with this book.