On Nature Writing

Writing in the time of the Everything Change

From its inception in Western culture, nature writing has evolved commensurate with our perception of the natural world. One of the earliest European collections of clerical texts about nature was recorded in the Exeter book, a compilation of poetry written in Old English and published in the 10th century. In my cultural anthropology study Weather - between the dog days of summer and the twelvenights (Duden, 2020), I describe passages from this work and their meditations on the natural world: On how the summers were spent in a frenzy of light and activity while the winter months allowed time to engage in writing. There are also riddles and elegies evoking the pale light of winter and the longing that comes with it, as well as kaleidoscopic passages recording the sound of ice and its impact on the human psyche.

Later, during the Age of Enlightenment, with the engagement and advancement of the natural sciences, tools, instruments, and methods like microscopes, thermometers, and hydrometers allowed people to look deeper into previously invisible realms. Natural phenomena were catalogued, becoming comparable and discussable, and the world grew richer with these findings, demanding new vocabularies and narratives to satisfy the canon of literature and life. German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began a correspondence with the English apothecary Luke Howard, the latter whom invented a nomenclature for clouds, which Goethe transformed into lustrous descriptions in his own cloud diaries.

Today, in a world of quantum computing and genetic engineering, where physics and biochemistry enable us to peer into the world from a molecular level, we need once more to rethink the way we use language and narratives to make sense of these transformations in and around us. Modern nature writing seeks to connect us with the cosmos we inhabit.

Connecting with the greater environment

Nature writing seeks to leverage our knowledge base in fundamentally human ways: It can serve as an interdisciplinary methodology to engage more fully with the world. Its output may take various forms, including but not limited to science writing, speculative fiction, memoir, poetry, opera, soundscapes and documentaries, combining qualitative research methods with sensory-based descriptions. Contemporary nature writing explores the emerging facets of the Anthropocene through a wide range of empirical and aesthetic lenses; current topics include everything from the inert beauty of viruses to the rights of rivers; bioengineered chimeras to the political ramifications of seed vaults; the colonial and cosmopolitan heritages of plants to even the love story contained within a mosquito’s ear.

Nature writing cultivates a sensibility for precise vocabulary, delves into the etymologies of words, plays with ekphrastic practices, and experiments with synaesthesia to unlock possibilities for innovative narratives.

Nature writing can also be a tool of exploration for the world we inhabit. It can inspire wonder, evoke joy, and become especially compelling if it showcases the needs of those who are inadvertently or deliberately unheard. Nature writing can thus be a practice for listening and observation: a platform to showcase and speculate, to extrapolate and world-build through logic and imagination.

Finally, nature writing can help us de-center our human perspective. It can reflect on the lives of animals, plants, and microbes to offer perspective and context; it can consider hyperobjects (from the OOO/ object oriented ontologies) as entities we need to deal with on an emotional and comprehension level; it may even evoke ghosts and mythical beings to explore real trauma or desires. When nature writing scrutinises landscapes, it need not only look at beautiful spaces, but can delve into ecosystems that may range from sacrifice zones like mining or dam sites to little-known deep sea topographies. Nature writing asks its practitioners and readers how they can engage and connect with the greater environment. Through playful and speculative assumptions, nature writing allows other elements of our physical and temporal dimensions to be probed. Consider, for example, time scales that extend beyond the human grasp and stretch from deep time to deep futures, some linear, others not. Meanwhile, the generated creative outputs can take on non-traditional forms, including fragments, anthropological reports, recordings of oral traditions, and much more.

Nature writing in the ecologies of the university curriculum

Information has never been as accessible as today. With only a public library account and a few clicks, most scientific papers can be downloaded and read immediately, while YouTube courses provide the background on everything from organic chemistry to fly fishing methods. Yet, despite this unprecedented level of access and ubiquity, knowledge has become fragmented and disconnected. ChatGPT and other Large Language Models may provide answers, but don’t stimulate us to think deeply about them. The practice of nature writing provides both the critical and creative tools to embody information and relate it to the world around us. It can serve as a means to understand a piece of data within the web of its relations, providing context before it is utilized in different forms of media.

From my experience of teaching nature writing, I often see a transformation in the way the students consider their initial premises. By bringing abstract facts back into their bodies in order to express them with language, something happens within the minds of the practitioners. Rather than replicating existing knowledge, they begin exploring the subject in both directions, inwards and outwards, in new and unexpected ways.

Michaela Vieser, May 2024