I’ve always believed in nature’s power to heal
Richard Mabey looks back on his five-decade writing career and how our attitudes to wildlife have changed
One April day in the early Seventies, I took the sleeper from London to Inverness with a mad plan to write a philosophical piece about the ospreys that had returned to nest at Loch Garten. It was my first stab at environmental journalism, and I couldn’t have foreseen that it would mark out the contours of all the work that followed. I walked the last few miles through Abernethy forest in a Highland dawn that was like the world before the Fall. Roe deer slid through the trees in front of me. Crossbills and red squirrels showered the track with pine cone nibblings. As I neared the loch I could hear the calls of the last wintering whooper swans echoing across the water.
I’d booked in to do a day’s remote wardening from the RSPB’s observation hide, as part of Operation Osprey. These magnificent, 5ft-wingspanned fish hunters had been wiped out in Britain by so-called sportsmen in the early 20th century. But a pair had returned to Loch Garten in 1955, in high secrecy. When they began to be harried by egg-collectors, the RSPB mounted a ground-breaking scheme. It decided to let the public in on the secret, but on rather unusual terms. A large area around the nest tree was declared a legal exclusion zone, and was rigged with trip wires, microphones and CCTV. More than 200yd away was the hide, in which I spent an enchanted day, as have thousands of others over the years.
The slightly odd thing about the piece I subsequently wrote was that it wasn’t for some “country” magazine, but – Highland spring rhapsody included – for the weekly social science journal, New Society. I was fascinated by the successful marriage of conservation and recreation that the project represented, and by the way it turned upside down the power relationships between nature and ourselves: the ospreys were flying free and the humans were effectively in a cage.
I don’t remember the term “nature writing” being used back then. Anything remotely connected with wildlife was regarded as part of “country writing”. Despite Ronald Blythe’s unflinching account of modern rural life, Akenfield, being published in 1969, the countryside, our manipulated version of the landscape, was still regarded as the “proper” place for nature, and farmers and landowners as its rightful and honourable stewards. But attitudes were on the brink of change, not least among those of us who weren’t from a bona fide rural background.
I must make another admission about that Scottish trip. I wasn’t on some bespoke safari but moonlighting from a work trip to Edinburgh University. I was working as an editor in the new education division of Penguin Books, in an office set in the hinterland of derelict canals and rubbish tips near Heathrow. The landscape I explored in my lunch breaks was an extraordinary self-created wilderness of buddleia forests and flooded pits where great-crested grebes nested on discarded car tyres. I found this sense of nature having its own agenda a revelation, and in 1973 wrote my second book about my edgeland wanderings, called The Unofficial Countryside. My first, Food for Free, an early foray into what has become known as foraging, was quirky and a bit hippy, but essentially in the traditional “country writing” genre: mushroom hunting and sloe gin brewing were hardly ecocentric innovations.
Over the decades that followed these two poles – nature as culture, and nature as autonomous subject – debated with each other in my work, just as they did in public discourse. The Seventies and Eighties saw a flourishing of interest in cultural landscapes, perhaps in response to the way in which commercial forestry and agribusiness were trashing them. And parallel with that, a growing fascination among younger ecologists and writers with nature’s own powers of repair and adaptation, a position given powerful backing by the astonishing natural regeneration of woodland that followed the 1987 storm.
In 1980 I bought a small wood of my own near my home in the Chilterns, and decided to run it as a community project, the first such in private hands in the UK. I wanted to test out many of the ideas I’d written about in rather abstract ways. The experiment proved that local people (kids especially) could be engaged in a wood’s life, and that nature had the powers of renewal I’d always believed in. Rare ferns migrated around the wood, and young trees sprang up of their own accord wherever we let in the light.
In the 2000s I hit a bad patch, and needed to start my life anew. I moved to Norfolk and wrote a book about the experience called Nature Cure. To tell the truth I was cured before I got there, but the impact of a new landscape was transformative. The wetlands seemed electrifyingly alive, full of nuance and surprise. Water energised them, imbued them with a sense of possibility. In the fen, I felt like a water creature myself, squeezing water through the peat, ferrying seeds.
I’m constantly surprised by how plants push themselves into prominence in what I write, maybe because they are so often dismissed as passive entities. But they’re not. Primroses were existential symbols to the Romantic poets; the fly orchids I hunted on the Chiltern Hills send chemical messages to pollinating insects; socalled weeds are greening our otherwise barren wastelands.
I suppose Flora Britannica (1996) is the book I am most proud of. It’s a kind of Domesday Book, recording in the original contributions of thousands of people, the roles of plants in contemporary culture. What I have written most recently about plants celebrates their possession of agency, and maybe intelligence, just as I saw they did in the Heathrow wilderness. But this doesn’t contradict their cultural role. As we try to get closer to nature in our environmental crisis, wild organisms are becoming seen as partners, creative cultural subjects, not just objects.
Out on the East Anglian salt marshes, where I foraged for edibles in the Seventies, the sea is being allowed in to flood abandoned farmland. The natural vegetation that develops is proving a more effective buffer against rising sea levels than any artificial sea wall, and a counter to our hubris.
I don’t remember the term ‘nature writing’ being used back in the Seventies
In the 2000s I hit a bad patch. I moved to Norfolk and the impact was transformative