Taking a grassroots approach to going wild in the country

Simon Barnes’ simple, clever book on nature turns the genre upside down, says Rosemary Goring

Simon & Schuster, £14.99

REWILD YOURSELF: 23 SPELLBINDING WAYS TO MAKE NATURE MORE VISIBLE Simon Barnes

NATURE, as they say, is having a moment. Of all the trends in publishing in recent years, this is among the most enduring. There have been books on different breeds of cows and sheep, journals of running a farm or croft, some serious, like James Rebanks’ account of his Cumbrian farm, A Shepherd’s Life, others semi-comic, such as Horatio Clare’s Running for the Hills, as townies take on the rural world and declare at best a draw.

Trees loom large in this genre, rather ironically given how many must be felled ahead of publication. Notable among them is Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees. Birds are also a bestseller, and no one is better at conveying the avian realm around us than Mark Cocker, whose Birds Britannica (with Richard Mabey) was a stupendous work of scientific knowledge and personal passion.

It all began with the campaigning, sobering work of Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring, published the month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a call to arms on behalf of a planet under threat of nuclear annihilation.

Since then, serious environmental books have followed, not in a flood, though faster than a trickle. Most were by specialists, ecologists and environmentalists appalled at the warning signs they encountered in their work, showing the animal and plant kingdom imperilled or already destroyed.

The rise of the sort of books that are now fashionable, however, are mostly not by scientific specialists, nor aimed at them, but fall into the category of armchair reading. They are the kind that sit under the Christmas tree: sufficiently serious not to be frivolous, but not so gloomy they’d ruin the festive spirit. They come with comforting, nostalgic jackets, reminiscent of old-fashioned Ladybird titles or pre-war designs for cosy crime fiction. Some of them lament the demise of wildlife, others offer easy-reading access to a wilder world most of us abandoned long ago. From the likes of Esther Woolfson’s Corvus and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, to John Lewis-Stempel’s The Wood and Jim Crumley’s naturewatching series, these books act as spirit guides, allowing us to walk in the authors’ footsteps and feel as if we too have spent a day in the Highland cold watching otters or coaxing wary birds to eat from our hand or kitchen table.

Such works are, you might say, the equivalent of canaries in the mine, chirping gamely while the atmosphere grows ever more toxic. Joining this parade – whose time will pass, as all fashions do – comes Simon Barnes, sportswriter turned amateur naturalist. What he offers is slightly different. Rewild Yourself turns the genre upside down, taking an entirely different tack from that of, say, Isabella Tree’s Wilding, about reclaiming a patch of Sussex countryside for nature, or the forthcoming Scotland: A Rewilding Journey, by Peter Cairns and others, about preserving our wilderness.

Instead Barnes offers almost literally a grassroots approach to nature. While drums are beating in the background, daily bringing news of drastically declining populations of birds, mammals and sealife, with intimations of imminent catastrophic climate change causing a national outbreak of goosebumps – turn up the heating! – he offers a little book of activism. Its quietness, its seemingly small ambition, is the key to its charm and, one hopes, to its power.

Rewild Yourself is a riposte to the half-cocked romantic arguments popular among those who have the money and influence (but not the sense) to reshape the countryside, probably for worse. While a Danish Highland estate owner yearns to put lynx and wolves on his land – he should speak to the French sheep farmers in despair over one rogue wolf in their district – Barnes tackles the issue of our disconnection with the wild from a much more pragmatic angle. It is not the land that should be rewilded, but us.

In many ways, this book has a spiritual, crusading quality. It is written with Barnes’ typical insouciance, his matey, unthreatening and humorous tone, in which he never shows off his knowledge, or his vocabulary, or his journalistic eminence. Instead he writes as an uncle would to his nieces or nephews, encouraging them to enjoy his love of the outdoors and all the beasts and birds it contains.

Although readers from as young as eight or nine would enjoy it, this is not a children’s book. It does, however, appeal to the child in us. And to the wild in us too. That is his point. Prefacing each short chapter with a quote, often from CS Lewis’s Narnia novels (which inspired it), or Harry Potter, but sometimes straying into more adult territory, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Barnes sets out to show us that nature is all around us, if only we would notice. Clearly, this is aimed at readers more in the Lammermuirs of life than the Cairngorms, yet there is something here for anyone who is captivated by nature and wants to get closer.

Also for anyone who simply enjoys descriptive writing that nails its subject. Here he is on gannets, “flying on six-foot wings and diving head-first from 50 feet, folding those vast wings back beyond the end of the tail until the birds assume the silhouette of an immense dart chucked at the treble-20”. Or on tuning into birds: “May is the best time to listen to birdsong, but the worst for trying to learn it, as if you were trying to learn the instruments of the orchestra by listening to the Ring Cycle.”

The premise behind the book is simple: “Now you don’t see it, now you do.” If you listen to Barnes, it suggests, you’ll discover a world of creatures within hand’s reach that you never even knew were there. And soon you’ll feel part of their world too. “There is