Of course, the Arctic is not blank, or featureless, or uninhabited. There may have been less tangible incentive to explore it than there was for other areas (although whaling tended to follow exploration in the Arctic, as trade followed the flag elsewhere around the nineteenth-century globe); the expeditions nevertheless returned a mass of data from their encounters with a landscape rich in its own peculiar properties. The Arctic demanded swift attention to the behavior of the ice that so dominated it scenery. It can even be argued that the success and failure of different British expeditions of the period reflects the degrees to which they were, and were not, imaginatively captured by a vision of the Arctic as bleak, blank, hostile. Those explorers least able to perceive the Arctic as it was — indifferent rather than harsh, full rather than empty, a problematic dwelling space rather than a moral playground — were also least likely to survive there.

But the perception of Arctic emptiness also allowed much more wild and florid ideas of the region, for blank space, like blank paper, can be scribbled over with the wishes of the onlooker. There was a steady thread of fantasy concerning the poles in the nineteenth century, ranging from tall stories to mad geographical theories: and this is leaving aside the deliberately fanciful use of the frozen North in children’s stories and fables. The kind of fantasy I mean involved real belief, even if only in the form of a con-trick, or a transparent delusion. It is as if the acknowledged status of the North Pole (and the South) as points both known and unreachable, real and not, allowed ideas to attach themselves to them that were likewise half-respectable, half-real, half-baked.

~ Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

It is at lion rock that i catch my first glimpse of the southern coastline and get a taste of what it actually looks like. After all that park-like landscape, the rugged desolation really takes you aback. New Zealand was one big dramatic postcard, as though a top Italian designer had drawn the landscape on a computer using top-of-the-range software with the aesthetic-maximizer function cranked up. This is different: primitive and rough, so beautiful, in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else, that at first it’s hard to call it beauty at all. The southern coast of Tasmania is beautiful in the same way as the rocky fells of Lapland are beautiful. There’s nothing inviting about it, nothing alluring; it’s a landscape that is perfectly aware of its own qualities and doesn’t feel the need to try to please anyone. It can afford to be aloof.

~ Johanna Sinisalo, Birdbrain

~ Karen McRae, Winter Wrapped Trees (via Helen McClory)

+

So I decided to look for some place to eat something — anything — and that wasn’t easy. To the north was Tiananmen Square, to the east was the Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall, and to the west was the Great Hall of the People, where the ceremony would be held. So my only choice was south. I went south. I passed several soldiers, with their eyes steadily fixed on the same spots just like some wax statues. Then I passed an old, high, western-style building, whose windows were broken, like a gothic haunted house. Then a beautiful public convenience, like a temple. Nothing to eat. I decided to go on. I crossed by the subway. In the subway I was quite taken aback by what I saw. Three monstrous beggars — maybe demented, maybe deformed, maybe just dirty, I couldn’t be sure — lying on the ground, covered with rubbishy quilts (obviously, they slept there in the night). I had no choice but to pass them, quickly, I must say. And at last, when I returned to the surface of the earth, I saw the KFC across the street. I had a great breakfast at KFC. These were just like a series of symbols, I told myself.

~ Kong Yalei @ Granta

If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with Shields that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture. That package may work for some, as I believe my student’s account of dramatic upheavals in the Mongol empire will work for many readers; it has its intellectual ideas and universal issues: but it doesn’t engage us deeply, as I believe my other student’s work might if only he could get it right. And this is not simply an issue of setting the book at home or abroad, but of having it spring from matters that genuinely concern the writer and the culture he’s working in.

~ Tim Parks @ NYRB

+

~ Tracy Metz @ Next Nature

+

And yet, and yet – so much of the ‘nature writing’ we see today still falls right into the same trap. We have seen it very clearly recently, in so many of the submissions we’ve received for our forthcoming ecopoetry anthology. Except that now, what is curious is that the poems which are focused on ‘poetic moments’ of admiring pretty daffodils are matched by poems that can only be described as self-flagellating guilt dumps. We aspire to an ecopoetry – to an ecoliterature – that moves beyond all of that. None of which is to say that guilt isn’t appropriate when we look at what we’ve inflicted on the planet – and none of which is to say that there isn’t still a need for very fine poems that celebrate the beauty and mysteries of the natural world too. But what we really long for is writing – whether poetry or prose – that connects the two conflicting responses to the natural world and then moves on. What we need from ‘nature writing’ is to replace it with genuine ecoliterature – literature that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world – those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect.

@ Earthlines

+

~ David Gessner

So I see the relationship of people to trees as a conversation that involves quiet, attention, listening. What people have always done with breath, with spirit, is make stories, and I have no reason to believe that trees don’t similarly shape their breathing. Trees listen, then they tell their side of the same survival narrative. We have this conversation continuously on the molecular level. When the trees speak they tell me of course of water (they even sometimes make the sound of it quite convincingly.) They also talk about light. When I breathe in deeply in a forest, a light brightens just behind my eyes as surely as I see a canoe when you say the word canoe or conjure my daughter when you speak her name. Trees tell me other things as well; they seem to know me. Sometimes they tell me things that I don’t know I’ve heard until a long time after. Our breathing, I imagine, tells the trees of joy and desire, anger and injury, and is often shaped into the long sighs of sorrow. We tell it all, in every chemical flavor, storytelling virtuosos who by now, after a couple of million years, know how by heart.

~ Richard Hoffman

It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune. Maybe The Mountain thought so. Or maybe not. Maybe The Mountain was too busy pointing his chair in the direction of the house he’d lost to think any of us deserved such things.

So we did what we could to convince The Mountain. We fed his hummingbird with a dropper. We built an enclosure for his baby deer. We bandaged The Mountain’s wounds after he fell asleep one night, but when he caught us tending to him, he brushed us away. When we walked him through the hospital we’d built for the animals, he said, you’re cold and ruthless. His tone couldn’t have been further from fury which made it that much harder to take. And when we tried to lift our heads to meet his eyes, we couldn’t see past his disappointment, big enough now to blot out the country we’d built in his name.

~ Paul Lisicky @ Tin House

Your books often deal with loneliness. Do you think that most people feel alone in the world?

We are locked up in our own minds, although we instinctively reach out to each other for compassion, solidarity, understanding, and we often succeed, it should not be forgotten. But we cannot know each other. You could call that loneliness, or you could call it character; making us who we are, being different from one another, which is a good thing. The unending conversation with ourselves, we all have, but it ought not to be the only conversation. How can we know ourselves, when there is no one to compare us with? We define each other, to a large extent, and that is also as it should be. But we don’t want to be alone, I am sure.

~ Per Petterson

Maine’s forests have been spilling outside of their imaginary borders for centuries: as masts, supporting sails and England’s colonial ambition; as containers, housing the products of West Indian slave labor; as logs, heating homes surrounding Walden Pond itself; and now, as L.L. Bean catalogues, circulating a nostalgia for an ideal their very pages ensure remains fictitious. But this is our world, and in it a “dream of deep ecology” as Jonathan Bate phrases it — we might paraphrase it in popular environmentalist idiom as a “dream of a world without loggers” — seems to me misguided and potentially disabling. By placing humankind as always already falling short, theoretically utopian — that is to say, unlocated — environmental perspective cannot envision human beings living well, or as best we can. Strictly speaking, this dream cannot take a text like Whitman’s or Eckstorm’s into account; it cannot appreciate the beauty of a shingle or a stick of firewood — a beauty which, “locked up” in nature, only emerges through material use.

~ Matthew Bolinder

+

~ What is Next Nature?

+

The axe leaps!
The solid forest gives fluid utterances;
They tumble forth, they rise and form,
Hut, tent, landing, survey,
Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade,
Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, jamb, lath, panel, gable,
Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library,
Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, shutter, turret, porch,
Hoe, rake, pitch-fork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack-plane, mallet, wedge, rounce,
Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor,
Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,
Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States,
Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans, or for the poor or sick,
Manhattan steamboats and clippers, taking the measure of all seas.

~ Walt Whitman

+

+

Everything is burning.
What is burning?
The eyes are burning.
Everything seen by the eyes is burning.

The ears are burning.
What is burning?
Everything heard by the ears is burning.

The nose is burning.
Smells are ablaze.
The tongue is burning.
Tastes are ablaze.

The body is burning.
The mind is burning.

~ Buddha

A book is a tree with an education, I suppose; taken from the forest, chewed up, and flattened into paper, the tree, studentlike, gets imprinted with all kinds of information, and those imprinted pieces of paper become bound into a volume that eventually stands on a shelf with a lot of other educated trees. Books about nature are thus almost kaleidoscopically complicated: reading one, you hold what was once a part of a forest in your hands, scanning it to learn someone’s ideas about, say, some other forest somewhere, and all the while you could probably turn your head and look out the window at some trees much closer to home, trees that you likely have your own relationships with and opinions about. Ideas about nature, experiences in nature, material manipulations of nature — all of these and more swirl around the act of reading a book like this one. In thought, action, and memory, you and I are positioned in many ways at once toward the natural world even at the moment of writing or reading these particular words on this particular page. While it may be conventional for many of us to oppose “nature” to “culture,” then, in practice it may be more difficult to maintain that separation than might at first appear. In fact, once we start looking closely at those landscapes in the world around us that we define as “natural,” our sense of the integrity of the border between these two conceptual categories might begin to dissolve completely.

~ Ken C. Ryden

When I enter the woods, I am often euphoric, but I’m also a bit nervous. I don’t usually feel young, even though I am; more likely, I feel kind of old, relatively speaking: my muscles tighten and my heart pumps a little more quickly than it used to. Unlike Emerson, I feel as though all sorts of things might “befall” me. Not fantastical stuff, like being attacked by a black bear, but more mundane, yet just as problematic, things: getting lost, slipping on a streamside rock and breaking my ankle, getting a flat tire in a little car that has no business being as far from a paved road as it sometimes is. And those moments in which I feel my “head bathed by the blithe air” are not as common as I’d like them to be. If I can see the sky in those areas of the Maine woods I often frequent, there’s a good chance I’m in an ugly clearcut; if I can’t, I’m probably feeling a little claustrophobic, picking my way through plantations not of God, but of Plum Creek Timber or the J. D. Irving Corporation, the vegetables not quite nodding to me so much as trying to rip holes in my pants or scrape my eyes out of my face with their prickly appendages.

~ Matthew Bolinder