Charles Foster's Reading List

"Certainly no gentle nature ramble, and a very disconcerting book. I found it uncomfortable to read. I’ve just sounded off to you about how I was glad that nature writers were beginning to rub people’s noses in the reality of nature. Well, when I started reading Mark Cocker’s book, I wasn’t so glad to have my own nose rubbed in the political realities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He starts off by telling us that the natural world we like to rhapsodise about is vanishing. The figures are terrifying: 99% of our flower-rich meadows have been destroyed in the last 70 years or so. 44 million breeding birds have just vanished from our landscape. Britain is going silent: it’s going grey instead of green, and lots of us who love the natural world find that so unbearable that we don’t (and psychologically can’t) acknowledge it. So we retreat into books which tell us that it’s all alright; that the natural world of our imagination is still there. Of course it is, to some extent, but it’s retreating fast. So this book is an uncomfortable and urgently necessary wake-up call. First of all, he sets out to tell us how bad it is by citing a large number of extremely depressing statistics. He then points out that there is very little reason to suppose that things are going to get any better. We are told that we need one million new homes in this country, but the plans are to build lots of the proposed new homes on irreplaceable natural sites. There’s a proposal, for example, to build 5,000 new homes on the outskirts of Rochester, which hosts Britain’s largest single population of nightingales. Having told us how bad it is, and how much worse it’s going to get, Cocker then goes on to identify some of the factors in our national politics and our personal psyches which explain the crisis. The most telling reason he gives is that the dominant pattern in our thought processes is not the ecological circle but the straight line. We assume, for example, that we can put pesticides and herbicides on a field, that they will work, and then they will go away. Of course that’s not true. They will keep on circulating, perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years. The destruction of the natural world can all be explained in terms of our psychotic obsession with linear progress, coupled with the ludicrous notion (which all sane people, given a moment’s reflection, know to be a lie) that the important things in life can be quantified; can be bought and sold; can appear in an auditor’s spreadsheet. The delusional love of the linear is the principal axiom of Western governments. They will never be cured. Real, free, awake people are going to have to do all the work. “We’re desperate for dominion, but dominion of a really toxic kind—a kind that will eventually kill us” There are no straight lines in nature. But the artificial outdoors is often linear. Lincolnshire is an aseptic desert, defined by straight furrows cut by a GPS-driven tractor. We are pathologically comfortable with straight lines, with tidiness, with cleanliness, with predictability. Cocker talks about the inability of urban people to cope with anything that is tangled and unpredictable—with anything, in fact, that is interesting. Since men in suits fear and kill everything that they don’t understand, there’s a war against entanglement, complexity, relationality, and greenness. We have a really dangerous desire for something we can control: plastic grass is the demonic icon of the age. We’re desperate for dominion, but dominion of a really toxic kind—a kind that will eventually kill us. There is a good sort of dominion: a humble type of stewardship. It’s ethically inevitable. I also think it’s literarily inevitable. If you’re sufficiently connected to the natural world to have the authority to write about it, the natural world should matter desperately to you. If the natural world is being eaten, you must do something about it. Even if you don’t feel this, you should feel a moral duty to the thing which is giving you an income. Mere gratitude for your income, and mere self-interest, should generate this duty. Nature writing is a sort of farming, isn’t it? We farm images from the natural world. We farm pictures from the wilderness. If farmers look after their land, nature writers should do so too."

"I think it succeeds splendidly and very surprisingly. I was very suspicious of the book when I first picked it up. I thought, oh, here is a sort of ‘Bridget Jones’ Bee Diary’. Another account of someone who is being ‘redeemed’ by the natural world, and I was prepared to be extremely cynical about it. But my cynicism soon evaporated. It’s a very poised exercise in diffidence and understatement. Jukes doesn’t know what to expect when her bees come. She’s not lusting after epiphany. She doesn’t have any expectations of the bees, or indeed of the world generally. If you come to anything with no sense of entitlement, one of the paradoxically wonderful things about the world is that you get so much more than somebody who assumes that the world owes them something. Jukes’ strenuous effort at relationality—her effort to get to know these creatures which are so very different from her—results in her being humanised and personalised. She becomes more of who she is, and therefore she’s able to give more of herself to humans. There’s a vital lesson there. The bees give Jukes her man. There are three stages in their gift. First they make her herself. Then they make her a person capable of loving. And finally, by a beautifully mysterious route, they deliver onto her doorstep her white-haired lover. She doesn’t just find herself (and thus other humans). She also finds a place—the place where she happens to live. The bees root her in the very unpromising part of the wilderness which is suburban Oxford. They give her herself, and they give her a place, and they anchor her to a place in a way which was previously inconceivable. It’s a great testament to the power of humility to move mountains. I think our efforts to relate to non-human species are all extravagant exercises in empathy, and to empathise with something very different from oneself requires a great deal more empathy than empathising with someone or something who is very closely akin to you. Empathy, like everything else, is something which gets better the more you work at it. So an attempt to relate to non-human creatures is a sort of strenuous empathy gym. Helen, being the humble person that she is, realised quite rightly that she couldn’t get at all close to bees, and she concluded, quite wrongly, that that was a reason to give up. She should have realised, I think, that the process of continuing to fail was itself really useful and fecund and exciting. Had she been prepared to battle on, knowing very little, much more would have been revealed to her. That, after all, is the main message of the book. I agree. There never was a time when nature was entirely our friend. Or if it is friend, it’s a strange friend. The natural world will eat us all one day, whether by worms, fire, or fish. That’s one reason to be suspicious of people who get too cosy with it. It makes me wonder whether the epiphanic nature writers really know nature at all or have reflected on it properly."

"The first thing to say is that I’m fearful for this book. I’m concerned that it’s going to be characterised as a book that’s just about SAD, and it is so much more than that. It’s a book in which he uses depression as a sort of dark light to highlight some desolate questions: Who is he? What is his relationship to the natural world? What is his relationship to his family? His low mood has made him wonder what he is. Is he an agent at all? Is he ruled by his past? Is he ruled by some malevolent archetypes welling up from his subconscious? He’s one of our great nature writers, I think. He says that the wilderness always speaks balm. But he’s realistic. Near the beginning of the book, he talks about how maintaining his faith with the natural world will carry him through the winter. Then, right at the end of that paragraph, he says, rather tremulously, “or such is the hope.” In fact the hope is frustrated. Yes, there are moments in which he looks at his valley and thinks: ‘This is wonderful. Why have I alienated myself from it? Yes, this can keep me safe, or heal me.’ But it’s not long before the wolf creeps close to his hearth again, and he realises that these moments of balm are not real healing. They’re just tiny sparks in the dark. The only real healing comes from that part of the natural world which is his family. “All hermits, however great the view from their cave, and however attentive their non-human companions, are wretched” The big lesson here is that your human community (being composed of wild things) is part of the wilderness. It is of course true that we need to relate to the non-human world—for our health and for the health of the wild world. But the non-human world by itself can’t make humans thrive. All hermits, however great the view from their cave, and however attentive their non-human companions, are wretched. All our romantic beliefs about redeeming sunsets, interconnectedness, and our kinship with birds falter when they face a big test like the one described in Clare’s book. But our human relationships stand the test—or at least, if they don’t, nothing else will. Those human relationships are actually just a special example of the relationships which we should have towards the wider world—but so special that they have a curative and prophylactic effect against the evils of the human condition that nothing else (even the song of whales, or the summit of a holy mountain, or the nuzzling of your dog) can have. Yes. It is psychologically fatuous, sociologically deadly, and ethically dangerous to see humans as atomistic entities—islands. I had nothing to do with my own conception, and have had very little to do with most of the things that have happened to me since. We are all utterly dependent creatures. That dependence should be a source of intense joy—not of frustrated disenfranchisement. Yet the atomistic model of the human person is the ruling presumption of the west."

"There are many reasons. David Lack’s book is a love story, really, and it’s an indication of what you can do by simple observation and dedication. When Lack did his fantastic study of the swifts he had no gadgets. There’s a chapter written by his son which describes what has been learned about swifts since 1956: it’s gratifyingly short. Yes, there has been lots of work with things like geolocators. We now know in a fair amount of detail the routes the swifts take and the speeds they travel during their migration to and from Africa. No doubt David Lack would have been fascinated by those things. I certainly am. But most of what we know now we knew in 1956, as a result of Lack climbing repeatedly up and down the steps of the tower in the University Museum, peering into the nest boxes, gazing into the sky, scouring ancient texts, reading poems, and corresponding with amateur and professional naturalists across the world. The book shows that proper scientists (by which I mean people who are interested in the truth about nature), acknowledge no boundary between that which is traditionally and arbitrarily designated as science, and everything else. David Lack wanted to understand swifts. A typical modern scientist’s way of doing that would be to collect data, reduce them to figures, and then squeeze the figures into a box made out of materialist, reductionist presumptions. But the real world is always far too big, complex, and exciting to fit. The box never, ever holds the whole truth. “If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and the humility to be a scientist” Modern scientists forget that science is just a method , not a religion. They’re fundamentalists—just as irrational, faithful, and zealous as the Creationists they rightly despise. Lack had the humility to know that a lumpen, Earth-bound creature like him could only hope to understand anything about these astonishing birds if he suspended all his cherished presumptions and recruited everybody and everything in the effort. The book reads like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century naturalist’s potpourri. The poetry rubs shoulders with the figures which detail the clutch size, or whatever. He airs speculation, he retells anecdotes. If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and (yes, here’s that word again), the humility, which are the main qualifications for being a scientist. That sounds like real hero worship, doesn’t it? There are less benevolent heroes than David Lack. Yes. There’s a lifetime of wonder distilled here. The wonder began when Lack was a boy, and it never left him. Indeed, it crescendoed rather than diminished as he found out more about these birds. It’s often the other way round with boring, nerdish scientists. He wondered; he reflected. He didn’t just collect his facts and stick them in the boxes we call ‘articles’ in academic journals. They were obviously turning around in his mind all the time as he ate and slept. He lived and breathed these birds all his life, and the book shows what can happen if rigour and passion ride together. It is certainly a scientific book, but it’s a scientific book in the true sense: a book that seeks to understand—not merely to describe using the conventional scientific adjectives."

"I picked it up and read it because I am passionate about the West coast of Scotland. It is a strange read. Its architecture is simple and rather artless. Not artfully artless, in the way that some books are. In many ways the architecture seems rather old-fashioned: Ansell just goes to places and describes them, as travel writers did a generation or two ago. There are occasional episodes in which he reminisces about previous travels and previous relationships when something in Scotland makes him think of those things. Those episodes often don’t seem to relate very obviously to the Scotland that he’s viewing. The language used for the narration is very simple, sometimes to the point of near banality. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . And yet the book works. I’m not quite sure how. I don’t know if it works because of or despite those characteristics. Certainly its naiveté is disarming, and it made me suspend my normal critical instincts. When I did that, something rather wonderful came in. It’s a mournful, wistful, elegiac book, but that elegiac quality isn’t generated by any obvious device. Again, I can’t say how he does it. It’s tremendously hard to give a general answer to that question. But thinking about it in the context of Ansell’s book, since he doesn’t discuss anything with an actual or metaphorical companion as he walks through Scotland, there’s no dilution of the power of the language with which the land is described. His eyes tell us, very simply, what they see. That generates a sort of intensity which is very unusual. It means that we see ferns and birds and deer and mountain summits more accurately than we normally do, because they’re uncontaminated by opinions. Most nature books are narcissistic and discursive. The writer goes into a wood and describes his (yes, male writers are far away the worst) feelings about the wood. Those feelings almost never have anything to do with the wood itself. So: what does solitude do? It can still the distracting voices. It can turn the senses of the writer and the reader away from the usual mental toys with which we fiddle, and on to rocks and waves and leaves. It can also produce such terrible psychological pain that you can’t see the trees through the red fog, or hear the birdsong through the hiss of panic. That’s what it tends to do to me. But Ansell is a better integrated human than I am. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here at all. Ansell doesn’t seem interested in himself in the slightest. That’s what gives the book its power. Ansell allows himself to be a lens through which the world is seen, rather than wanting himself to be the object upon which our eyes rest. That denotes and expounds a haunting love of the landscape. This is not a book about Neil Ansell. I can’t think of any other book in which the writer is so invisible. Invisibility is the mark of a very good writer. When Ansell does introduce himself, he does so reticently and almost formally, so that nothing of what we know about him bleeds out to contaminate the landscape. The West Highlands aren’t filtered through his personal hinterland. But we do learn about his failing hearing and his failing heart. That makes the book unforgettably poignant, and his voice, when he’s describing the land, unforgettably plangent. Often the simplest songs are the most moving aren’t they? We feel Ansell’s own loss and potential loss. He is undemonstrative and wholly un-self-pitying, but we sense the parallel between his personal losses and the wider loss of the natural world. The natural world is being progressively lost to him. He can’t hear birds anymore. Because his heart’s weak, he’s teetering, he knows, on the edge of eternity. He knows that soon he’ll lose the whole world. Being mortal, we feel solidarity with him. We begin to know how desolate it would be to lose the natural world – whether by our personal death or blindness or deafness, or by a multi-storey car park being built on it. So we’ve come full circle. Acute nature writing necessarily makes political points, and it makes them more impressively if it doesn’t ram them down our throats."

"Victoria Whitworth is an early medieval historian who has also written some wonderful historical novels. Swimming With Seals tells us the story of her literal immersion in the seas off Orkney. The book originated as a series of Facebook posts – but there is a clear and arresting theme linking them. She has, no doubt because of her professional background, an appreciation of the way that the past is always present that we don’t have. So when she is swimming in the sea off Orkney, she is marinated in substances from all the millennia. The sea is a soup of the Precambrian, the Jurassic, the early medieval, benighted modernity, and everything before and in between. Swimming in it connects her with the place, Orkney, which itself is an amalgam of all these times, none of which ever passes away. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For me the real fascination of Whitworth’s book is the fascination of writers like Alan Garner: the continued inhabitation of material objects by the continually resonant past; a past that can still speak to us. For Whitworth, the past is still present in the natural creatures, which of course were shaped by the past. These creatures speak with the authority of many millennia. This isn’t really a book about swimming at all, but a book about how we are controlled by the voices of the dead; about how the whole of life is necessarily a seance. That’s a humbling perspective. I like to think of myself as a self-created being: autonomistic, atomistic. Whitworth’s reflections tell me that that’s ludicrous. Why am I talking to you now in the way that I am? Answer: because I’m descended from a mollusc. Answer: because I’m channelling my dead parents, both human and non-human. I’m not a self-created being. If I saw myself consistently that way I wouldn’t be as noxiously arrogant and presumptuous as I am. I don’t know whether the authors would acknowledge that ancestry explicitly, but I expect there is some debt owed. I see these parts of their writing as the descendants of longer-dead ancestors like Emerson and Thoreau, who talked in much more explicit terms than Deakin does about the need to be redeemed by the natural world. The more explicitly we acknowledge our need for redemption, the more complete our redemption will be. “I’m channelling my dead parents, both human and non-human. I’m not a self-created being” I’ve been re-reading Emerson and Thoreau just recently, (going back to the discussion we were having before). They not only foreshadowed but expressly explicated many of the tectonic ‘discoveries’ of modern nature writers. It’s rather embarrassing. We’re always leaping out of the bath, shouting ‘Eureka’, only to hear Emerson and Thoreau saying, laconically: ‘But surely you’ve read what we said?’"

"Yes, it’s a collection of essays. There’s a strand running clearly through almost all modern nature writers. It is, I think, respect for the notion of interconnectedness. But there is rarely any attempt to expound it. To get the ‘nature writing’ badge it’s generally thought to be enough simply to nod respectfully at the notion. Almost alone in modern nature writers of whom I know (Robert Macfarlane and Jay Griffiths are honourable exceptions) Passarello attempts a systematic anatomy of interconnectedness. Her foundational essay describes the emergence of a mammoth from the Siberian permafrost. The gist of her argument is that animal images crawl and prance and gallop through our ruling subconscious. They contribute importantly to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the wider world. We will function better if these animal images come out of our subconscious into our consciousness. “The wolf is St Francis-ised – the wolf is humanised. But St Francis is also wolved” On one level that’s a very trite thing to say. Darwin told us 150 years ago that we have furred and feathery and scaly faces just a few pages back in our family albums. But no one has described as eloquently as Passarello the place that animals have in our ruling collective unconscious. She makes it clear that there should be (for the health both of humans and animals) a vibrant reciprocity. St Francis looks after the wolf. And the wolf benefits. So the wolf is St Francis-ised – the wolf is humanised. But St Francis is also wolved. That’s what happens in any human relationships worth having. We need to abandon the idea of humans unilaterally ‘subduing’ the natural world. We need to be changed by it: to be subdued ourselves – or, better, humanised and vivified by it. If you go into a bookshop, there are loads of bookshelves with the heading: ‘ Birdwatching .’ It would be great if they were next to bookshelves headed ‘Being watched by birds’. That would put us properly in our place. That place would be a happy place to be. I think that is what Passarello’s book does. It tells us that for every twitcher looking through his binoculars at waders on a mudflat, there are tens of thousands of wader eyes looking in at us, and judging us with an antiquity which makes all our modern conceits look shallow, callow. Absolutely. What we have hubristically dubbed as our ‘creation’ is wholly and gloriously derivative. The tutor who has dictated all the lines in our best writing is the whole of the universe – in all the iterations that there have ever been."

"Well, when you asked me for my list of five books about nature, I was tempted, in order to make the point that I’m about to make, to choose a book which no-one would ever think of as a nature book. A book about the architecture of the inner city, say, or the biography of business mogul – just to hammer home the point that everything is nature . The biography is just as much a nature book as anything that Robert Macfarlane has ever written. Obviously the connection between Rupert Sheldrake’s book on spiritual practices and nature writing is clearer than the connection between the mogul’s biography and nature writing. Although Sheldrake is primarily concerned with the effect of various ‘spiritual’ practices on the human head and on the human ability to thrive, a lot of things advocated in the book demand the sort of express, ecstatic communion with the natural world that we’ve been talking about, and which is the main concern of lots of classic nature writing. Sheldrake talks about the need for us all to go and sit under a tree, and the need to be aware of the tide of our own breath in and out of our body. “Human thriving depends on having a physical connection with the natural world” Some of the lessons in this book will be familiar to modern readers. It has been conclusively demonstrated (and widely publicised) that human thriving depends on having a physical connection with the natural world. We know that there is much greater incidence of depression and ADHD in children brought up without access to a piece of green. We know that if you want to increase the productivity of your workers you should ensure that their workstations look out on trees. We know that hospital patients recover more quickly if they can look out on a field rather than the back of another building. In this book Sheldrake explores some of the reasons for these facts – as well as the reasons for the well documented benefits of gratitude, singing, religious affiliation, and so on. He also, appropriately and powerfully, uses the book to articulate some of the ideas for which he’s famous – for instance the idea of ‘morphic resonance.’ That laws of the universe are better described as a series of habits that the universe acquires. There are many exhilarating corollaries. We’ve touched on some of them already. The past continues to throb in every accumulation of molecules. We are profoundly affected by the things which have happened before. He speaks very potently about matters that relate to the way that we can appreciate a wood or a wild animal or a city street or our best friends, because he’s clear (as few people are) about the nature of the relationship between mind and matter. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think the most disastrous event in intellectual history (with the arguable exception of the Neolithic revolution – which made us sedentary animals, when we are constitutionally travellers) was probably the Cartesian separation of matter and mind. It put everything that you might normally lump with God, angels and so on into the ontological compartment, separate from matter. It disenchanted matter. It desouled the material world. And it led to nature being seen as a machine. If you see something as a machine, there’s no moral evil in tinkering with it or destroying it. You can draw a direct line between Cartesian dualism and Monsanto. The practices Rupert Sheldrake discusses are informed by his understanding of the principle that mind is inherent in all matter. This resonates much better with many people’s intuitions than the mechanistic model of fundamentalist materialism. We know that meditation is good for us. What happens in meditation? Well: many things. We discover something about the nature and functioning of our minds, and we realise that our minds are akin to other minds. To use some of the language that we’ve used already in our discussion, we discover that the boundary between us and the rest of the world (or at least that part of the world that can be called ‘mind’) is thin or non-existent. This entails humility – which generates gratitude. Sheldrake talks about the benefits of gratitude. To whom should we be grateful? We don’t have to be a theist in order to be grateful. It helps to say ‘thank you’ to the postman; it helps to say ‘thank you’ to the tree that shelters you. That sort of attitude (whether or not you accept the metaphysics behind it which Sheldrake wants you to accept), is exciting and rewarding both emotionally and intellectually. “We discover that the boundary between us and the rest of the world is thin or non-existent” This book is a useful exposé of the heresies of modern materialism. Those heresies are essentially religious in nature. The materialists assert, on the basis of little or no evidence, that mind is just a product of matter. The book is also an urgent call to arms. We are doing terrible damage to ourselves and to everything around us by hanging onto these fundamentalist materialist dogmas. The world is hugely more exciting and complex and vibrant than it appears in the materialist paradigm. It demands an ethical response from us which is entailed by animism, or a responsible view of stewardship, not by materialism. I completely agree. People know, if they are reflective even for a moment, that the way we live now is not the way we are meant to be. People rush for contact with the ground of their being, to put it pompously, in meditation. They rush out in cars to the countryside. They spend huge amounts of money on holidays – typically not on city breaks but in green places and the edge of the sea. They spend millions of pounds on dog food because they know they ought to have a relationship with non-human animals. Why? Because non-human animals have been part of what has sculpted them into the shape they are at the moment. They know they are better off if they have contact with minds other than the sorts of minds that they themselves have. So yes, I think this desperation is expressed on all sorts of levels. No doubt the reason that people spend money on nature books is part of the same phenomenon."

"Patrick Barkham, who’s a nature writer for the Guardian , visits a number of the islands around the United Kingdom, wondering if there’s anything which makes life on those islands different from the mainland, and if so what it is – and, if there is something distinctive, if it is something from which we jaded mainlanders might benefit. Many of us have a romantic idea about islands. Many of us dream about living on islands. Why should that be? Is it because islanders are, by necessity, physically ‘edge people,’ because on a small island you’re near the edge of the place where you live? Is it the resonance between that fact and the fact that we humans are always on an ontological edge – poised on the edge of eternity – that makes life on an island more fulfilling than our normal lives? Barkham explores this and other theses in a number of conversations. One of the reasons I like this book is that Barkham is a wonderfully congenial travelling companion. He’s easy to talk to. And he’s a nice chap . He likes humans. He doesn’t want (as so many writers do) to sneer; to denigrate; to show how clever he is in relation to others. He is sunny company. It’s fun to wander with him through pages and along beaches. And it is also shrewd: his subjects trust him and open up to him. So, first of all, this is a book about how good it is to be good; how much more human beings reveal of themselves in the presence of mere kindness. “Many of us have a romantic idea about islands. Many of us dream about living on islands. Why should that be?” Jay Griffith’s book Wild, a few years ago, talked about consistently finding ‘wild kindness’ in indigenous, un-urbanised people. Patrick Barkham’s book is about how kindness can bring out the ‘wild best’ – and therefore (since we’re all, at bottom, wild creatures) the authentic best in everyone. What’s his conclusion? It is, I think, that when island-ness is done properly (and it’s often done very badly – diminishing people and pushing them towards depression and alcoholism) it can be an exemplar of how we all ought to live. Exactly. This isn’t terribly surprising, but it is well worth saying. It’s not possible always in the communities in which we live – I live at the moment in Oxford, you in Edinburgh (how I envy you that) – to know our communities. They are physically far too big and far too complicated. There’s a self-protective tendency in Oxford and Edinburgh to build a carapace around yourself which prevents you from forming real relationships. I talk about that in Being A Beast. It’s an experience of relentless loneliness; of dispossession from the physical place that we notionally inhabit. If you live in a community of several hundred, it’s possible to know the names and the concerns of everyone there. It’s less possible to maintain the corrosive Nietzsche-esque illusion that you’re a messianic superman. It’s possible, in a small community, to have a relationship with a physical place which I think is somehow – and I’m not sure why this is –impossible to have when there are a lot of people. I know I keep returning again and again to the notion of ‘thriving as a human being,’ but, since our most recent ancestors seeped out of the land (although our ultimate material origins are in the sea – a theme I’m exploring in the book I’m trying to write at the moment), our roots are in the land: we grow there like trees. To soil we will return. If we’re not properly rooted there, we wither and die. It’s easier to have an organic connection with a physical place on an island. It’s also possible to model community on an island in a way that’s not possible to do elsewhere. The danger is that rootedness in place becomes stagnancy. We’re made to walk, not to sit. Unless we walk, we die. How can we be rooted in the land, while remaining wandering hunter-gatherers? By some sort of continual, restless, cyclical pilgrimage around ‘our’ piece of land, I think. “Our roots are in the land: we grow there like trees. To soil we will return. If we’re not properly rooted there, we wither and die” Lots of my academic work is devoted to arguing for a communitarian model of human identity. What is Charles Foster? Well: he can be described only in terms of the nexus of relationships in which he exists. Take away that nexus and he won’t just be wretched, lonely and miserable. He will evaporate. Charles Foster will cease to exist. The more visible and palpable the community, the more solid and real he will be. And therefore the more capable he will be of enjoying red wine, of realising what he really thinks, what he really is, and so on and so on. When Barkham talks about the island of Eigg, he sees that rather sunny romantic model of island-ness made real. You have there, apparently, a community that works. When human beings work as humans (which is terribly unusual), everything else falls into place. Economy falls into place. Health falls into place. It’s ludicrous to think that you can sort out the economy without sorting out the hearts and minds and identities of people for whom economy is meant to be a servant. Perhaps islands can demonstrate that."

"Yes. It’s not as great as Sea Room , which took me apart when I first read it. That was when I was up in the Outer Hebrides. In that book he took me back to childhood, to the experience of the ecstatic immediacy of the natural world, which I had lost. But here’s the thing. He took me back there using sophisticated words and ideas. That was tectonic. He convinced me that as an articulate, educated adult, it was still possible to be a child. Sea Room is the most powerful articulation that I know of the Romantic thesis: that in order to know about the world, or to know what is worth knowing about the world, you’ve got to become a child again. I’d assumed that in order to do that it was necessary to abandon my reading. I’d assumed that language was an impenetrable barrier between me and that sort of ecstatic understanding. He convinced me that wasn’t necessarily so: That was a huge relief. It made nature writing – which has to be done in words – possible. But moving to The Seabird’s Cry , the most exciting thing about that book for me is the fact that you have – often in the course of a single sentence, sometimes in the course of a single clause within a sentence ­– both science and real poetic power. Let’s go back to the discussion we were having about the dislocation of the material and the ‘spiritual’ domains. Nicolson, in making the material and the spiritual cohabit and showing that each is more powerful because of that cohabitation, shows that they should never have been dislocated in the first place. And that that dislocation is not only unnecessary, but does a grave disservice to both. He demonstrates that science is sometimes best explicated in terms of ecstasy , and that ecstasy is sometimes best served by the invocation of scientific facts. An example: he summarises a lot of data about where seabirds spend the winter. And this accumulation of data is a really powerful evocation of the mystery of the world. You couldn’t get the same effect even with the weirdest Blakeian poetry. So he does in The Seabird’s Cry what he did in Sea Room : he puts back together the two human modes of understanding reality. The left brain and the right brain, if you want to put it that way. The rational and the intuitive, or the spiritual and the scientific. And the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts. “If we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it” If we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it. Adam Nicolson’s achievement is to show that these two ways of describing the world to ourselves are complementary rather than antagonistic. There’s a great political lesson here, of course. Political discourse tends to be conducted in the language of numbered reductionist propositions, and for that reason it doesn’t accurately describe the world, and it doesn’t engage people’s passion. The political elite (which has bought into the materialist worldview) tend to dismiss as fanciful less scientific ways of understanding the world. If those ways of understanding the world could be brought together, in the marriage that I think we see in Adam Nicolson’s book, that’s politically potent. He doesn’t spare us the political impact of what he’s saying. Many of these birds are disastrously endangered by our frankly psychopathic policies towards the environment. If we treated humans as we treat the natural world, we’d be locked up, probably forever, in a secure psychiatric ward. Yet we blithely vote for these psychopathic policies. We have blood on our hands. The anger I’ve just expressed runs through this book. It’s implicit in every paragraph. But because he’s such a brilliant writer, it’s not intrusive. He never sermonises – as I’ve just done. The most impressive sermons, of course, are the sermons that don’t sermonise. So: this is a masterly book. It brings together the fractured halves of human understanding, shows us how we can relate more holistically and therefore more satisfactorily to the world, and illustrates the techniques we need to use to persuade."

"That’s right. He’s always written about places, and it seems to me that he’s always written about places in an attempt to grope towards a notion of ‘place.’ He served a strenuous apprenticeship in environmental activism before he decided that the activist agenda assumed an optimistic view of what was possible, and that in prosecuting that agenda as it is conventionally conceived you have to jump into bed with the forces of environmental destruction: become part of the machine; part of the problem. He decided that all that we can do is to recover and to re-tell the stories that have formed us as humans: stories that tell us how our shapes have been determined by the pressure on us from the non-human forces of the world. For me to say ‘all we can do’ is a stupid way to put it. There is colossal creative and redemptive power in these stories. So he left activism of the old kind, and then he left the UK, and now lives on the west coast of Ireland with his wife and his two young children. His whole ethical and literary life had been determined by a sense of dispossession. So he bought a field in Ireland thinking that by doing so he might finally come home. That he might finally know home. That he might finally know a place and therefore know what place itself was about. “He says that he can’t write anymore; that he may never write again” It’s not clear if he’s been successful, but if he has, it’s been – at least for the time being – at the expense of his writing. He says that he can’t write anymore; that he may never write again. That’s for two main reasons. First: to be a writer, you’ve got to be uncomfortable. You have to be an outsider. You have to deny yourself many reassuring certainties – not least because the only certainties in the real world are distinctly un-reassuring. You have to allow the generation in yourself of pressure that will eventually spurt out in prose or poetry. Second, and more fundamentally, language itself – and I’m sure this is your experience too – doesn’t correspond at all faithfully to the world. It always stalls; it always becomes self-referential and self-reverential. It’s also wedded to dialectic, which is an agent of that evil machine, which is the enemy of the natural world. And so it’s our enemy – whether or not we are writers – because all humans are part of the natural world. So this book is Paul’s reaction against the damage that he sees language doing to him, and the damage that he sees language and dialectic doing to the world more generally. Yes. Increasingly over the last few years, my writing has said, as Paul is saying: Please don’t read this book of mine. Because it’s written in human language, it necessarily misrepresents. The only experience worth having is direct experience, and language gets in the way of that direct experience. All I can do as a writer is to annoy my readers so much that they throw down the book and head outside, where, if they’re open to it, something worthwhile will happen to them. I’m overstating things rather hysterically! Because I’m a writer, I have to believe – for my mortgage payments, my own peace of mind, and my own mouldering sense of self-worth ­– that there must be a way of using language in a way that undermines and subverts language and makes it do its proper job of relating to the world and relating the world. But there are moments (no, there are whole weeks) when I’m not at all convinced about that. Maybe I should resolve to use only onomatopoeic words; which have embedded in them something of the wind or the wave; to reject any words – and particularly words from the romance languages – which invoke abstractions rather than the concrete things out there. You can tell I’m having exactly the same sort of crisis as Paul. The difference is that I’m trying to write my way out of it. He’s more honest and radical than I am. It’s very dangerous to put words into Paul Kingsnorth’s mouth, but I think he’d say that, in order to get your epistemology right (what a pompous word: it’s mine, not Paul’s: I mean ‘knowledge of the way that things are’), you have to try to see things through children’s eyes. Paul’s children are his main educators, as my children are mine. It’s not the digging of the garden itself that has given him the connection he feels with the natural world, but digging the garden as his children dig it with him. That’s the one of the great insights of the romantic movement, isn’t it? We’ve got to become like little children again. Children have forgotten so much less than we have forgotten about the things that matter."

"Everything Rupert Sheldrake has done has been a broadside against the reductionism that has characterised biological science for a long time. When Rupert brought out A New Science Of Life back in 1981, the then-editor of Nature , Sir John Maddox, described it as an “infuriating tract.” “The best candidate for burning there’s been for many years.” In a later broadcast Maddox said: “Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy’. It’s an extraordinary and revealing admission. Sheldrake had offended a sacred paradigm. So Sheldrake had prompted the editor of Nature to assert, without any apparent embarrassment, that the reductionist creed is just that: a creed. It’s a statement of essentially religious belief. The concordance of that religious belief with the way the world really is has been called dramatically into question over the past few decades. And by nobody more than Rupert Sheldrake. And why is it a ‘nature book’? Well, because (I think) lots of people who want to recover a sense of what the natural world is and what it means find themselves inhibited from doing so because they feel that they have to use the language of conventional reductionist biology to describe the natural world and to describe their feelings towards it. And that language is woefully and obviously inadequate. Sheldrake points out that the language is inadequate because the reductionist paradigm is inadequate. People rightly feel that to say that we are nothing but our genes, or our molecules, or other component parts – is to miss out on an awful lot. That nothing-buttery (the idea that we are nothing but lumps of matter, and that’s the end of the story) doesn’t do justice to the astonishing complexity and beauty of the world, or to our sense of significance and interconnectedness. We are indeed lumps of matter, but that doesn’t say everything that can and should be said. This isn’t an argument for naïve creationism or intelligent design, of course. The universe is an evolved and evolving place, and we know a good deal about the mechanisms by which complexity is generated. But we don’t know it all. A lot of humility and a lot of truly scientific scepticism are urgently needed. I see that humility and scepticism in Sheldrake. We’re back to iconoclasm, aren’t we?: our existing representations of the world, including the representations that we couch in scientific language and theory, fall short of the wonder of things; they constantly need to be dismantled and reconfigured. Sheldrake is the cataloguer par excellence of the difficulties with the reductionist worldview – a world view which is teetering on the edge of oblivion. He points out its shortcomings better than anyone else. He helps us to go into a wood and feel wonder, and feel all the other things which the natural world should be producing in us, without worrying that it’s in some way scientifically disreputable. Lots of the august canons of biological reductionism have fallen. For instance we now know that the old model of genetic determinism is the exception rather than the rule. It is possible to say in a few cases: ‘Right, you’ve got the gene for X. That means you’re going to get X’. But usually it is not so simple. We now know that there is a very fluid, articulate conversation between genes and environment. The effect of environment on genes is profound. It switches genes on and off. To put it another way, Lamarck, who proposed the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and was reviled for so long, is back – and this time he’s got tenure! The name ‘Professor Lamarck’ doesn’t appear on his door in the department: Instead the label reads ‘Epigenetics’. So, this book, together with his earlier book, Science and Spiritual Practices , is a map of some of the portals which have traditionally been used to reach the more-than-human world. That of course includes the natural world. All the practices increase the porosity of our shells, help us to see our own place in the nexus of things, and help us get closer not just to God (don’t be put off by the word ‘spiritual’) but also to badgers and leaf-veins and molecular biology and the faces in clouds. Yes. We’re looking for that and, as we’ve discussed, I think we’re also hoping for our own models, which we know to be hopeless, to be trashed – enabling us to make a clean start, more consonant with the sorts of creatures we are. Most of us have an intuition – which becomes a conviction when we look into the eyes of our dogs – that humans, although very special, are intimately connected with non-humans. This is a blindingly obvious thing to say, a trite evolutionary truth. But much of our personal, and all of our environmental, malaise is caused by denying it. We can’t really understand ourselves as individual humans unless we know the sorts of animals that we are as a species. We want to feel the fellowship with non-humans which is our biological heritage. We want to know our place in the web, and to be able to say, when a six-legged, compound-eyed relative lands on our head: ‘That’s one of our lot. His face is in our family album’. That sort of reflection allows us to locate ourselves: to feel less disorientated and alone: to know where we belong – not only in the genetic matrix, but also in geological time, which is otherwise terribly scary. Sheldrake can help us to have a more holistic understanding of our nature, and the nature of nature, and therefore of the relationship between us and the other-than-human world."

"It’s a collection of essays about apparently very, very different things – from ancient seal meat to Chinese politics – and very different times – from the Neolithic to the distant future. As a writer, and as a publisher, you need quite a lot of chutzpah to put things so disparate together in one book, and you need a real, rather than a theoretical belief, that everything is connected. But Kathleen Jamie has a good track record of having that nerve and displaying that belief. It seems to me that everything Jamie has written has been about the natural world. It also seems to me that everything that has ever been written by anybody has only ever been about the natural world. Even a guide to the Manhattan subway has been written by a wild creature about another wild place. As David Abram says, “there are only relatively un-wild places.” A Manhattan subway station is just a relatively un-wild place. “It seems to me that everything that has ever been written by anybody has been about the natural world” But books that explicitly acknowledge their wild authorship and their wild subject matter are better than books that don’t, and Kathleen Jamie has always expressly acknowledged that she’s a wild thing writing about wild places. The main characteristic of a really wild creature is that it pays attention, and Kathleen Jamie is one of the great attention-payers – but not in the narrow, minute, overbearing, obsessive way that’s become fashionable in modern nature writing, where pages are spent in a breathless, pathologically adjectival and downright boring appraisal of a twig. This fashion does injustice to the non-twigs in the wood. It distorts the picture of the wood. A wood is not just a twig. But as Jamie walks through her world, everything is seen in its right relationship to everything else: she pays attention to context: to juxtaposition. And to do that for the human world of Chinese politics as well as to the expressly non-human world of a wood is a proper, useful job for a writer. It’s a quieter, less agonised, less angry book than those. But because it’s a quieter book, the wind and the waves are more audible than Kathleen Jamie’s words, and that is a great thing to say about any writer. I’m not suggesting that Jamie characteristically gets in the way of her subject: far from it. She’s a great writer – more interested in her subjects than in her words about those subjects. But I’ve already expressed my suspicion of language as a medium for conveying reality. Language is particularly hopeless and destructive if it is used colonially in a direct approach to reality. Reality doesn’t seem to like that: it retreats. Jamie shows that sometimes (though unpredictably), if words are used softly and obliquely, reality isn’t alarmed, and it comes slowly out of its burrow to be seen."

"They’re great friends. They meet and drink beer in the pub every week. Well, he went off grid, holed up in a cabin in Galway. That meant cutting the umbilical connection with technology and virtual realities that most of us have. He had no laptop, no phone, and no electricity. He wrote the book on paper. Remember that stuff? And with a pencil – one of those wooden things with graphite running through the middle. The book is a reflective account of what happened. It was not a stunt, it was not a pose. It was often lonely and uncomfortable. And you can read it if you want, with a sense of schadenfreude , as a catalogue of those discomforts. But it’s a lot more than that: it’s an inquiry into what it means to live as a thriving human being. It’s part of the age-old search for the good life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Living that way involves asking what sort of creatures we are. Very few people have the nerve to look at themselves, or to look at their species, as Boyle does. The results of his examination are not terribly surprising, but they’re vitally important. All of us have to choose whether or not we’re going to be ourselves. Most of us delegate the construction of our personalities to big corporations, or to industrial society, or to other abstract entities, or to networks of people we’ve never met and are never going to meet. But we don’t have to do that. We can opt for the adventure of being alive. And of being us . Few of us will. It’s scary and hard, as Boyle shows, and everything around us insists that it’s impossible. But Boyle shows us that it can be done, and that if we do it we’ll be immeasurably richer. I don’t think they’re saying different things. Paul Kingsnorth is saying that contentment’s disastrous if you’re going to be a writer . Paul identifies himself as a writer: it’s a crucial part of what he is. But I don’t think Mark Boyle self-identifies as a writer. Or, if he does, ‘writer’ would be much further down his list of self-defining words than ‘writer’ is on Paul’s own list. Paul would love to be content, which is one of the reasons why he sees the writing life as dangerous: writing stops contentment; contentment stops writing. So Paul Kingsnorth the writer has to adopt an approach to contentment that’s different from the approach of Paul Kingsnorth the family man."

"Yes. Under the North Sea, between East Anglia and the Netherlands, lies Doggerland. It wasn’t there for long. It appeared when the ice of the last Ice Age retreated, and it was a paradise for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Then meltwater engulfed it. But trawlers regularly haul bits of Doggerland to the surface. They get mammoth tusks and rhinoceros horns. I have here on my desk a hyena coprolite which came from Doggerland. I was in Norfolk over the weekend, and my children and I found a large lump of Mesolithic peat lying on the beach. It was full of still glistening birch bark. Julia Blackburn, who lives near the Suffolk coast, went in search of Doggerland. Why? Well, partly, I think, because, like Doggerland, her dead husband is both near and invisible – and this book is an elegy for him. He was recently engulfed, but is still present somewhere out there. And also this: There’s comfort for mortals in knowing that both time-past and time-future is vast, and we’re not. It sometimes helps to see how big time is. If you think hard enough about Doggerland, you can laugh at the posturings of governments, or the potential of disease, or whatever it is that’s worrying you. “She mixes her late husband’s ashes into yogurt and eats him” Blackburn’s method, as with all her books, is both elusive and allusive. It’s a series of impressionistic dots, which, with the perspective of distance and time, resolve into a picture. It’s tremendously clever writing. As readers we preen ourselves at the end of the book, thinking that we’ve assembled the picture ourselves. Of course, it’s her artistry that’s done it, but the fact that we think it’s our work is the mark of a very good writer indeed – just as a really smart barrister convinces the judge that the barrister’s own argument is actually the judge’s own. Blackburn is wistful but never for a moment self-pitying. She’s splendid company. She potters around prehistoric bone collections in East Anglian kitchens and garages. She misses nothing. She understands how time works, and how we are lumps of clay spinning on the wheel, moulded by the landscape, and how the landscape reaches even in through the double glazing of those East Anglian centrally-heated houses to shape us. There’s one striking point in the book when she describes how she mixes some of her late husband’s ashes into yogurt and eats him. I think that a writer who eats her own husband should be taken very seriously when she talks to us about fields and birds and tractors and the other things which are the usual fare of nature writers. I think, when we meditate on it, it gives us a perspective that we don’t normally have: which is that to be alive at all as a human being is to live on the edge of a precipice. We have always done so as a species. We always do as individuals. We’re only ever a moment away from eternity. Julia Blackburn gently reminds us of that – and cushions the blow by reminding us that time is vast and we’re very tiny and that accordingly our own mortality perhaps isn’t the crushing catastrophe that it seems to us individually to be. I think we’re looking for sensual confirmation of our connectedness with the non-human world, which at some level we all intuit. Once we feel that connectedness, we are comforted, because we realise that we’re not alone. Aloneness is the main source of our angst, isn’t it? We feel we’re locked up in our own houses, in our own heads, condemned to commune only with our own thoughts. Good nature writing can remind us that we have endless defining relationships, and not just with other humans (although human relationships are far and away the most important relationships) but also with an almost infinite number of other non-human animals. That makes us feel less vertiginously isolated."

"Very much so. He examines the role that nature, and the absence of nature, has on children. He focuses on his own three children, and on the children he meets when he works as a volunteer at a ‘wild nursery’, and various ‘forest school’-type projects. He’s plainly a superb father, and on one level the book can be read as a touching account of the business of fatherhood and an illustration of the crucial principle that we learn far, far more from our children than they can ever learn from us. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If I’d written this book, I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to use my children as a platform from which to broadcast my own assumptions about the importance of the natural world. But what makes Barkham’s book remarkable is that he seems more interested in finding out the truth about the relationship between human children and the natural world than in preaching his own gospel. That’s very unusual. It demands a rare degree of respect both for one’s children and for the truth of the matter. And yes, as you say, it’s very timely. Everyone is talking about the damage that we do to our children by keeping them locked up. That damage is real. But there’s treatment available in green places. Barkham’s book demonstrates the reparative power of nature. I don’t think it’s too late, because human beings are naturally wild animals rather than suburban or inner city animals. We’re not made for suits or central heating. Therefore, however old and however urbanised a person is, they will react immediately and often dramatically to exposure to the wild. I’ve seen that again and again. I think one impressive piece of testimony is how little exposure to the wild you need in order to have the effect of protecting against ADHD or depression. And the same applies to physical illness too—not that there’s any real distinction between physical and mental illness. You really don’t need much of a view of trees through your hospital window to reduce significantly the time you’ll take to recover from an operation. We’re highly sensitive to the natural world; even tiny doses of it have a massive effect. All of this is expertly summed up by Patrick Barkham; he offers masterly summaries of the scientific literature."

"It has. It’s a lyrical account of his childhood on the Lake District farm that he’s made famous; an account of how he learned about stockmanship and community and the rhythms of the land from his father and grandfather. He details his own early intoxication with the idea of ‘progress’, his flirtations with technology and his later disillusion, and he details how he has slowly begun to see there are no winners in the race to industrial farming. It’s been a massive bestseller, as was his previous book The Shepherd’s Life . And I think it’s very interesting to reflect on why that should be. That’s not to say it’s not a wonderful book in its own right. It certainly is. But I think that the fact of its enormous success is significant. Not even 2% of the British population work the land. Many British people have no idea what mud is, right? And yet Britons feel themselves, despite that, to be at heart a rustic people. I think they buy the book because they think this is a book about themselves. Even if they work in an air conditioned office, they still regard themselves as farmers. “Most of us come from nowhere. We belong to nothing except a football supporters’ club or the payroll of a company” There is, too, a growing uneasiness with the food we shovel into ourselves, and a worried interest in where it comes from. These, I think, are some of the things contributing to the success of this book. But there’s something else, which is that this is a book about the importance of place and the business of belonging. Most of us come from nowhere. We belong to nothing except a football supporters’ club or the payroll of a company, neither of which could care less about us. We are desperate to learn how to belong; how to be rooted. We know that we are relational animals; that to thrive we have to give in a costly way—whether it’s by baking cakes for the village hall (if it’s been spared by the developers), or by visiting sick neighbours. What Rebanks does is describe agriculture as a holistic system of relationality; a system of existing in and for and by a place. It’s a mode of life characterised by a vibrant reciprocity. Most of us long for that reciprocity; it’s what we’re built for. But few of us experience it. Rebanks does. There’s a moving passage where he describes how, as he walks around the farm, the distinction between him and the place blurs until he doesn’t know where he ends and the farm begins. The great religions of the world know that when the self begins to blur like that, you’re onto something big; something connected very closely to human thriving and happiness. But that insight is at odds with everything that we are told by our ludicrous political leaders and by our economic masters, who all worship the idea of the atomistic self. Have you ever met an atomistic self? I hope not. You’d want to run a mile. Just think how dreary their narcissistic monologues would be. But people know, don’t they, that that’s not the way they’re meant to be? They know that the worship of the self is not only deadly for us as individuals, but deadly for our society and our ecosystems and our politics. Rebanks gives a picture of how human life ruled by the rhythm of the seasons and bonded to place might work, and we feel a desperate thirst for it—a half-remembered nostalgia. So I think that’s what he’s tapping into, very brilliantly. One of the many things I admire in this book is that, although there is anger and concern, there is no rancour. That’s very impressive. If I were writing about these things, I would never be able to swallow my bile. Rebanks is obviously a wonderful human as well as a splendid writer. Yes. We are used to thinking of Romantics as people in dandyish clothes who sit in raptures by mountain streams, thinking beautiful but rather irrelevant thoughts about the natural world and putting them down in rhyming couplets. Rebanks’ writing is properly Romantic, which is a high compliment. The Romantic movement was a reaction against the idea that matter is all there is; that matter is all that matters. It insisted that everything is connected to everything else."

"Merlin is a 32-year-old mycologist. This is his first book. He uses fungi to demonstrate the entangledness of everything in the natural world. For him, no questions are out of bounds. There are no canonical principles which cannot and should not be interrogated. And he approaches it with an effervescent, child-like enthusiasm. When I say child-like, I’m giving one of the highest possible compliments. I hope that follows from what I was saying about Patrick Barkham’s book. There’s a feeling of wonder about all of Sheldrake’s sentences which would disarm the most hardened cynic. Yet he’s a very serious scientist. Wonder and scholarship need one another desperately. “This is the true Enlightenment spirit—a spirit of unfettered scepticism” Excitingly, he demonstrates that our usual categories for filing information about the natural world must be scrapped. Fungi confound all our metaphors. However much we think we have understood, this book will make us realise how much we haven’t. It’s a subversive, samizdat deconstruction of our old, staid, epistemologies. After reading it you’ll think, ‘The world is a massively more exciting and colourful and charismatic place than I thought.’ I think that Merlin’s and his father’s work are both characterised by a refusal to take anything at all for granted. This is the true Enlightenment spirit—a spirit of unfettered scepticism. It’s an attitude which proceeds from the idea that the world is much bigger and more complex than any of our preconceptions might suggest, and so all available tools—from gas chromatography to iambic hexameters to altered states of consciousness—have to be used to try to understand any of it. The business of trying to understand how fungal mycelium—or anything—works is an enterprise so audacious that, in order to make any progress, you have to be not only a mycologist, but a physicist, a poet, a musician, a human being, and no doubt lots of other things, too."

"The basic idea of this book is that the usual scientific, materialistic paradigm— which says that there is nothing but matter—is inadequate, and is confounded whenever you look seriously at anything in the world, whether it’s an atom, poem or out-of-body experience. We know that mind is mattered, in the sense of having some relationship with brain tissue. But there is good reason to suppose, too, that matter is minded. The better we get at looking for consciousness, the more we find it. It seems ubiquitous, and doesn’t just inhabit brains, but also the atoms that compose the desk at which I’m sitting now, and the atoms on the other side of the universe. It is a fundamental characteristic of everything. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kripal supports his argument with a mass of evidence from many different domains, including out-of-body experiences. A large proportion of us have had such experiences. I’ll tell you about one of my own. A little while ago, I leapt—I thought swashbucklingly—onto a stage, fell, and dislocated my shoulder. They took me off to hospital and they tried to put it back under nitrous oxide. ‘I’ floated out of ‘my’ body—and ‘I’ looked down on the nurse trying to put it back. ‘I’ could see the bald top of ‘my’ own head, and ‘I’ could see the nurse’s centre parting. ‘My’ mind’s eye, which was describing all this, could see the boundaries of ‘my’ own head. So ‘my’ mind was plainly not restricted by ‘my’ skull. It was in some sense outside the bone-box which it usually thinks of as its home. If it could hover six feet above that skull, what else might it do? Where else might it go? And all the inverted commas in my last paragraph are strange and interesting. Yes. Surprisingly little is really impossible in principle. Should you ever begin to think that this is a drab, workaday world, open any textbook of quantum physics . If one electron has been close to another, they will each affect the spin of the other for ever, however far apart they are, instantaneously . Every bit of matter in the universe was once very, very close to every other bit—at the moment of the Big Bang. And so everything in the universe is intimately related to and continues to affect, instantaneously, everything else in the universe. Everything is one. Individuation is still possible, but has to be accommodated within the overarching fact of one-ness, and most of our cherished divisions are illusory. The corollaries of that are astounding, aren’t they? On every single level. If we just take the political and the moral, this means I have no reason to boast about my status in relation to any other human being, or any other non-human being, or any other collection of atoms. And think about what it means for the birdwatcher; it means that the woodpecker is resonating with her! It’s impossible to talk about these things without sounding insane. But that’s the sort of thing I was thinking about when I suggested that this was a nature book—because it gives a pretty fundamental explanation of what it means to say, as we blithely and often unreflectively do, that we are part of nature, and nature is part of us. Everything’s bound to everything by an eternally unbreakable knot of agency. And this should impose on everyone a glorious but crushing responsibility to treat everything else right. I think panpsychism has been around at least since the advent of behaviourally modern humans! Nature writing traditionally has, for obvious reasons, tended to take its cue from biology, and biologists have lagged far behind the physicists in their openness to these, frankly, mystical ideas. So I’m excited—and Jeff Kripal is excited—about how the humanities might be affected if writers put their imaginations seriously to work on some of the basic insights of the quantum physicists. In the quantum world, matter is congealed energy. The division between space and time is an illusion. Dark energy constitutes most of the universe. You can go seamlessly from those observations to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus . Partial differential equations are a type of mystical literature. It seems from everything that we’ve just been discussing that the best books on consciousness are actually written by physicists. So if the physicists have stolen all the good stories, what are non-scientists—including most nature writers—supposed to do? And hasn’t the literary scholarship of the last century made literature redundant? Why should anybody listen respectfully to a discipline, literature, whose central arguments often boil down to the claim that the only truth is that there is no truth at all. “Partial differential equations are a type of mystical literature” But maybe there’s a way of rehabilitating literature—and in particular nature writing. The humanities have, at least notionally, had the nature of consciousness as their core subject. Perhaps they’ve got something to add to what the quantum physicists have to say about consciousness. But they’ve got to pull their socks up. Really interesting nature writing, I ought to say, is very explicitly about the nature of consciousness and the interplay of different loci of consciousness. It’s about the consciousness of the bird, and the way that the consciousness of the bird is affected by the consciousness of the human observer, and vice versa, and about the Mind that seeps out of the hill and into your socks."

"Yes, and it shows very clearly that Helen Macdonald is not a one-book writer. This is a coruscating collection. She does a lot of things. She bemoans the fascist weaponising of English tradition. She speculates on our need to see in bird murmurations shapes that are familiar to us. She fears that modern children are going to learn to regard the constant disappearance of species as the ordinary way of the world. She talks about the hides the bird watchers use—suggesting that far from connecting us with the natural world, they divide us from it and encourage us to see animals and plants as spectacles. And lots more. It’s a wonderful potpourri. But, as she describes it, the message of this book is that our love of the natural world should not be self-love. We, too, easily see other lives, whether they are human or non-human lives, as mirrors of our own, and that sort of narcissism enrages the elemental gods. So this book is a counter to the others, really. The others have emphasised connectivity. They’ve said that the boundaries between us and the natural world are porous, if not completely non-existent. But Macdonald says, ‘Okay, yes, there’s a connection. But don’t forget that a badger is importantly different from you. You might adore badgers, but don’t go using them as vehicles of self-adoration.’ Yes. She is, in many ways, a very philosophical writer. Sometimes an infuriating writer. But she’s always immensely good company. Although she’s tremendously learned, she is also a great lover of the natural world. She says in this book that all her work is about finding ways to recognise and to love the difference between things. I know what she means, and it’s arrogant to think that I might know better than she does what her work’s about. But I’d have thought it rather better to say that her concern is with the moral and aesthetic difficulty of responding to a world which contains something wonderful like the soaring swift, and something horrible, like a paediatric oncology ward. It’s theodicy. It’s about the problem of whether it’s moral to be able to enjoy a walk in the woods. For Macdonald what makes the natural world so fascinating is its inaccessibility—rather than (as for me), the tantalising possibility of intimate relationship which rests on the physicists’ assertion of oneness. I tend to side with Kripal, and conclude that in exploring ourselves we necessarily explore badgers, stars, and the spin of electrons, and by exploring badgers, stars, or the spin of electrons, we necessarily discover something about ourselves. Part of our best books of 2020 series."