In the introduction to the book MacFarlane reminds us that in a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Gone were acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow to be replaced by attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. For goodness sake conker - gone. I have no doubt that the newly included words are important, but this is the heritage of our young people we are talking about. How can conker not be included!!
I was particularly caught in his writing by how often Robert MacFarland refers to the small close-up details in our landscape and how people find these of the utmost importance. John Muir, for instance for whom 'Every tree calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle.' And again he writes 'How typical of Muir to see dazzle, where most would see dullness.' He tells us that we now find it hard to image nature outside a use-ratio framework. He mentions one pro-windfarm local councillor on the island of Lewis who dismisses the island's interior as a 'wilderness' suggesting a space both empty of life and hostile in its asperities.
He discusses Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain about the Cairngorms, who, as a walker practiced a kind of unpious pilgrimage. She tramped around, over, across and into the mountain, rather than charging up it. There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer's hunger for the utmost point. He tells us that he thought he was familiar with the Cairngorm massif, but Shepherd demonstrated his complacency. He says that her writing taught him to see the familiar hills rather than just look at them. Shepherd argues that the body is made limber by the rhythm of walking. At the same time that Shepherd was writing The Living Mountain French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing his Phenomenology of Perception. MacFarlane argues that Shepherd's philosophical conclusions concerning colour, perception, touch and embodied knowledge are arrestingly similar to those of Merleau-Ponty.
MacFarlane goes on to argue that we are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experiences of being in the world - its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits. He says we are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied, more than in any historical period before ours.
In the chapter on woods MacFarlane quotes Roger Deakin who wrote, 'To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is where you travel to find yourself, often paradoxically, by getting lost.' I can empathise with this. Three days ago while making photographs for my BOW I walked through Chambers Farm Wood,one of the Lincolnshire Limewoods. A summer wood is much different to the same place in winter. The overriding impression is of green: lush green grass and bright green of new leaves. I walked for four hours in my wood and never trod the same path twice. In order to avoid going to places with which I was familiar I started in the end of the forest I had never walked before and then alternated right and left turns at junctions, however, narrow the paths. I became a Forest Flaneur - and lost myself in both the physical and metaphorical sense. Words I wrote in my notes as I walked include, wet, dripping, mud, puddles, soaking grass, wet boots, green, green grass, green trees, green air, dark, gloom, bird song, flowers, scents, wet, damp, earthy, green, honeysuckle. Some words I could have used from the glossary include after-drop, blashy, briskeno, dibble, down-come, dribs, dringey (light rain that still manages to get you soaking wet - from Lincolnshire), plothering, land-lash, smither, brattlings, daddock, dodder, ellern nubbin and many more.
Macfarlane writes of Richard Jeffries that he came to know Surrey, as he came to know all his landscapes, by walking. He says that like Jeffries, he is an edgelander. When MacFarlane first moved to live in Cambridge he barely recognised the 'bastard countryside' (edgelands) on his doorstep. The edgelands were there to be travelled through and left behind. The notion of developing a relationship with this messed-up terrain didn't occur to him. Disruptive of the picturesque, dismissive of the sublime, this was a landscape that required a literacy he didn't then possess. He suggests that like Nan Shepherd, Jeffries work foresaw the discoveries of phenomenology in the twentieth century concerning intersubjectivity. He notes that Jeffries eye was caught by signs of nature's irrepressibility: the desirable ease and swiftness with which it might return to absorb human structures.
He quotes John Muir who argued that most people are ON this world, but not IN it. Muir also stated that he was in the the woods and the woods were in him. Of Muir, Macfarlane says that his writing about trees amazes him in its commitment to attention and detail. Arboreal study for Muir was a full body experience.
MacFarlane mentions Rebecca Solnit who wrote about the long-term dormancy of the seeds of bristlecone pine, whose wood glows orange and gold, and the oldest specimens of which are nearly 5000 years old - having begun their growth when the pyramids were under construction. They were a favourite subject of wilderness photographer and mountaineer, Galen Rowell.
Chris Packham, naturalist, conservationist and TV presenter is quoted as saying that 'The disconnection from nature is greater now that it has ever been. The children out in the woods, out in the fields, enjoying nature on their own - they are extinct.'
And how terrible is that last statement. If our landscapes, nature and wilderness are to be saved for the future of the planet we need to make sure that this wonderful glossary of words is not also allowed to become extinct.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
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