Evelyn Waugh did a splendid send-up of nature writing in his novel Scoop. His hero William Boot writes a newspaper column called Lush Places. A typical column begins “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole …“
How times have changed. Thanks to global warming, the lush places are either too lush or have dried up and the vole might have ceased questing for evermore. Now a branch of literature that in the past has often seemed a bit leisurely and indulgent has taken on a new urgency. Maybe getting people galvanised about nature will stem the tide of climate change. But how do we galvanise readers?
Keen birdwatcher Jonathan Franzen says he likes nature writing with a story or an argument.Credit:
Jonathan Franzen puts his finger on the problem with nature writing in his introduction to Spark Birds, a collection of stories, essays and poems about birds he has co-edited. A keen bird watcher, Franzen nonetheless gets bored reading long lyrical evangelistic passages about birds or their environment. “I’m a lot more likely to read an essay that begins ‘I hate nature’ than one that begins ‘I love nature’,” he writes.
Another challenge for nature writing is that photography, film and sound recording make nature instantly accessible to viewers in ways that a book can’t replicate.
Franzen believes nature writing needs a story, an attitude or an argument to succeed. A particularly strong piece will focus on nature, but the dramatic stakes will be emphatically human: “We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.”
In Australia, as in other countries, we’ve seen a number of initiatives to encourage nature writing. One is the Nature Conservancy Australia’s Nature Writing Prize, “created to celebrate the art of nature writing and encourage a greater appreciation of Australia’s magnificent landscapes”. The writer of the winning essay on the theme of “Writing of Place” will receive a $7500 prize at a ceremony in Melbourne in November, where novelist Tim Winton, well-known for his campaigning to protect the Ningaloo Reef, will be the keynote speaker.
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I can’t guess what kind of essay will win, but possibly there’s some indication from the three winners of the Britain’s 2023 Wainwright prize for nature writing, for books that “inspire readers to explore the outdoors and to nurture a respect for the natural world”. The judges loved biologist Amy-Jane Beer’s “regrettably topical” memoir, The Flow: Rivers, Waters and Wildness. Other winners were Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain and Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston’s children’s book, Leila and the Blue Fox.
In Australia, the Wilderness Society has the Karajia and Environment Awards for Children’s Literature, won this year by Victor Steffensen’s Looking After Country with Fire, Jaclyn Crupi’s The ABC Kids Guide to Loving the Planet, Michelle Kadarusman’s Berani and two books by Jess McGeachin, Kind and The Tree at Number 43. It would be good to see similar prizes for adult books.
One author defying Franzen’s opinion that nature writing must be human is New York writer and artist Tom Comitta. His The Nature Book is a collage of nature descriptions from 300 canonical novels combined into a single story. Human characters and objects disappear: the focus is entirely on animals, landscapes and weather patterns in a variety of natural settings. Jonathan Lethem is a big fan: “Here it is at last, and what a bloody relief to at last have it: The Novel Without Us.“
No disrespect to Comitta’s magnum opus, but I’d like to see more nature writing with us. We are part of nature, after all.
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