L'Uomo: interview with Robert Macfarlane

After months of inactivity, of measuring our steps in centimetres, of roaming only within the confines of our anxious thoughts, or flitting from one online platform to another, the moment has come to venture out into the woods and forests, abandon the beaten track and reconnect with something larger and more physical. Wandering off the map is a pursuit that appeals to climbers, navigators, great walkers and philosophers eagerly seeking an unmediated relationship, placing their total trust in nature, like Henry David Thoreau in Walden. It’s time to set off (one of the best verbs in the dictionary) and get back to living through our senses – feeling the buffeting of the wind, seeing the traces of animals, or noticing the changes in the cycle of seasons and plants. As the philosopher Leonardo Caffo writes in his book Quattro capanne (“Four Cabins”), to recover this natural bond is to rediscover the simplicity of life, a seamless experience with no separation between the environment and the self. In other words, living life as if you’re part of life itself.

But it’s not easy to break free from the protective accoutrements of our roles. We have forgotten the language of nature. In order to start again by articulating and valuing our feelings, we need to unlearn the artificial complexity imposed by society, where we are sheltered from our errors, and be re-educated in the simplicity and uncertainty of direct experience. We need the example of a multitalented explorer: someone who can climb a mountain and at the same time find the right words to kindle our inner thirst for adventure. The perfect guide is the 43-year-old British author Robert Macfarlane, the great contemporary nature writer and winner of the E. M. Forster Award for literature in 2017. An environmental activist and fellow at Cambridge, he has written numerous books describing his own real-life expeditions, from The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin) to The Wild Places (Granta Books) and Mountains of the Mind (Granta Books), in which he considers why some people are willing to risk death to satisfy their passion for climbing and experience a physical contact with rock and ice.

Photo by Simen Johan.

What stops people from choosing a path of adventure nowadays?
Today everything is within reach, but little is in touch. Technology now mediates so many of our adventures. We’re always locatable by GPS; we can preview almost any routes, places or conditions. So many of us spend so many hours each day virtualised and dematerialised through screens and the internet. I think this is why mountains still exert such a powerful pull on so many. Because they’re unbiddable, resistant to our attempts at mediation and prophecies. They retain a wildness in the old sense of the word in English, meaning “self-willed”.

Do you think the pandemic has shown us that we need to change our relationship with nature?
I’m very sceptical of what I’ve come to call “pandemic utopianism”. Early in the lockdown, people were amazed to hear the chattering and delicacy of the birds singing around them, to which they had been deaf because of the traffic noise and indifference. Suddenly, nearby nature gained a quasi-theological significance. It was elected as salvific, consolatory, philosophical, even homeopathically healing. Meanwhile, grotesque misanthropic memes circulated claiming, “We are the virus, Corona is the cure.” I came across this in my local forest, with one word written on the trunk of each of eight beech trees. Now that the lockdown is lifting, people are flocking back to the coasts and mountains, leaving tons of litter behind them. Car transport is escalating, carbon emissions are peaking. So no: I don’t think even the shock of the pandemic “Anthropopause” will be enough to reshape our collective relationship with nature into one of sustainability.

Could a richer vocabulary of nature be of help?
We make do in English – perhaps in Italian too – with an increasingly impoverished language and vocabulary for the natural world. The most widely used children’s dictionary in Britain has dropped many common words for everyday nature – acorn, willow, otter, kingfisher, crow – because they are felt no longer to be much used by children or relevant to their lives. But language is the lens through which we see as well as speak the world. It’s a prism, a focusing (or a blurring) device. An enriched hoard of words for precise aspects of the living world (weather, creatures, plants, landforms) is reciprocally fulfilling. It’s a lexis that allows us to understand and value both the ecological complexity and the wonder of individual entities. But alongside this “salvage-language”, which sharpens the vision of what is being lost or going unseen, we need an evolving Anthropocene lexicon which registers the precarity, calamity and hybridity of the distorted world we are continually remaking at scale.

(Continues)

Read the full interview in the October issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands

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