A Nature Writer for the Anthropocene
Robert Macfarlane has spent the past two decades becoming a nature writer for the Anthropocene. His new book, Underland, culminates a first-half-of-life project in which he has worked to understand the mind’s encounter with nature. What do we look for when we go out to meet landscapes and nonhuman things? What do we find, and how does it change us?
In (2003), Macfarlane explored the lure of high places, and the ways Romantic literature helped to transform high altitudes from the terrifying and disgusting places medieval Europeans saw them as to the pilgrimage destinations they are today. (2007) described some of the least human-dominated places in the British Isles, guided by Henry David Thoreau’s theme that “wildness” is a quality of the imagination as much as of the world, and that being in the wild means adjusting the mind’s eye as well as strapping on crampons. (2012) followed paths and sea routes around the British land and coasts, stripping away the overlays of maps and GPS to find the feeling of navigating by stories and pictures held in the mind. (2015) rummaged through the word-hoards of Britain’s regional dialects, finding terms such as (on the Isle of Man, a hilltop seen from the sea) and (in Cumbria, a piece of land almost completely surrounded by water). The aim of was to recover words so particular that they tell you where you are: in what landscape, perhaps at what time of day, in which stage of the seasons and the place’s cycle of work. In 2017, Macfarlane co-published a beautifully illustrated children’s book, , that wove nature terms into spells for reenchanting a world that had lost some of its old magic. It became a best seller in the United Kingdom.
