I suspect my resistance in the face of nature writing stems from stubbornness: against the implication that if only I connected properly with nature, I would be elevated somehow. But experiencing meaning in nature, being enchanted by her myriad forms, now feels aspirational. We all long for meaning, and the natural world is a good place to seek it out. Enchantment is not everywhere all the time it relies on mood and receptivity quite as much as the appearance of a fox or a charismatic oak For Cocker, “the underlying goal of any outing is to have an encounter of some meaning”. As he watches the flock (“an entoptic vision”), it “stirs something edgy” into his sense of wonder. In Crow Country, Mark Cocker’s beautiful and epiphanic account of his growing obsession with rooks, this familiar bird that any of us might encounter in our urban lives becomes magical, “unsheathed entirely from any sense of ordinariness”. Nature writing offers us vicarious enchantment, for how many of us really have the time, the money and the tenacity to make regular, lengthy forays into the wild? Yet so much contemporary nature writing (Hartley sallied out almost a century ago) invites us – sometimes explicitly – to wonder not just at the natural world, but at the author’s experience. Whether she is enchanted by her surroundings or not, we must infer she will not tell. We might stop and notice the “tiny green tentative fingers” of growing things, or “the crackling cat-ice in the cart ruts” ourselves, but she is not going to linger over them on our behalf – she has work to do. But all speak of a sharp eye and a guileless joy that make me wish I could tramp alongside her, spotting the small marvels she points out along the way. Hartley’s descriptions of landscapes and details as she strides out to document dwindling crafts range from the matter-of-fact to the downright fanciful. And I’m often enchanted by writing that achieves it, such as Dorothy Hartley’s 1939 book Made in England, a favourite of mine. After all, that most heady brew, where sublime language renders nature’s glories anew is one I personally aspire to concoct as a writer. I am disappointed by my hesitancy when it comes to these books. My own relationship with nature writing is complicated. We witness the author’s wonder, and aspire to similar experiences: the natural world as cure, as balm, as wise mentor wilderness as a fount of authenticity in which we might find our wilder, realer selves.
As readers, we relish these secondhand wanderings, recounted in gorgeous prose. Yet for any difficulty we may have in facing up to our collective destruction, writing about nature is booming. As biodiversity plummets, our attention becomes bittersweet, leaving nature lovers trapped in an increasingly tragic love story. Not everyone can access it, nor can they always afford to romanticise it. N ature, as both a place and an idea, has become fraught with issues of privilege.