A passion for the poetry of nature: writer Robert Macfarlane is on a quest to reconnect children with the outdoors
In 2015, a published version of the first chapter in Robert Macfarlane’s last book, Landmarks, went viral. In it, the nature writer and academic talked about the deep, historic connections between language and landscape and mourned the loss of certain everyday words from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Acorn, bluebell, conker: all had been omitted. “For blackberry, read Blackberry,” wrote Macfarlane. “A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages.”
His wonderful new poetry book for children, The Lost Words, is Macfarlane’s response to this vanishing language. It’s a collection of acrostic spell-poems, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris, each one devoted to a word removed from the OJD. “The idea was that readers would feel a sense of walking into the book, like a landscape,” says Macfarlane. “We wanted to make a spell-book in two senses – in that children spelt these words but that there was also this great sense of enchantment; that old magic of speaking things aloud.”
I am walking through Wandlebury woods with Macfarlane in the countryside near his Cambridgeshire home. As autumn sunlight breaks through huge yew trees, the author of such classic nature books as Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places points out the large Iron Age ring-fort, a wide meadow rising into a chalk down, and the Roman road along which he walked in his bestselling book The Old Ways. Wandlebury woods also features in Landmarks and is filled with children’s dens, a secret garden, and his own children – Will, four, Tom, 11, and 13-year-old Lily – love it here, too.
He points out acorns, ivy, a magpie – some of those lost words. “The nature of childhood is changing dramatically. The increase of screen-time and decrease in roaming radius [caused both by an increase in parental anxiety and because there are fewer wild places for children to play] all point to that. Then there is the inability of children to name even nearby nature. It’s not about snow leopards and jungles and remote mountaintops – it’s about the living world with which we share our living days. I really wanted The Lost Words to be a book about everyday woods, fields and hedgerows.”
A proportion of the royalties from each copy will be donated to Action For Conservation – the charity that works with disadvantaged children and which is dedicated to inspiring young people to take action for the environment. Macfarlane is a founding trustee. “There is a huge inequality in the distribution of access to the natural world,” he says. “We need to find ways of addressing inner-city and otherwise socially excluded children. Ethnicity and class and postcode play huge roles. Initiatives such as Action for Conservation and the John Muir Trust [a charity dedicated to preserving natural landscapes] target children who wouldn’t otherwise get into nature.” He credits his parents and his grandfather for passing on to him an abiding love for wild places. “I remember seeing a golden eagle for the first time and was amazed that a bird could be so big.”
Macfarlane believes passionately that all children should have the chance to form such memories. Does he think the Government should do more to increase available green space near to home for all children? “Absolutely. I would really like to see nature and environmental well-being in Section 78 of the Education Act so that nature and our relationship with it becomes a part of life, a part of behaviour and ethics.” He mentions the Welsh phrase dod yn ?l at fy nghoed, which means “to return to a balanced state of mind”, but literally means “to return to my trees”. Should the Government appoint a nature tsar? ”I don’t want a nature tsar – I want a minister for nature.”
He’s also keen on getting The Lost Words into as many schools as possible. “The books we read as children take root in us and they can grow through us for the rest of our lives,” he says.
He and Morris are drawing up teaching notes for schools and running writing competitions. He believes nature should be integrated across the curriculum, and that learning outdoors needs to be more deeply ingrained in education. He cites the burgeoning Forest School movement, which teaches pre-school children outside, in all weathers. “Hearteningly, it has come to understand it needs to extend that ethos out to children who might not easily find their way to green places or into regular contact with nature.”
Landscape, and its relationship with history and collective memory, run as deep in Macfarlane and his work as seams run in rock. “There’s so much layered history here,” he says as we stand on an enormous tree stump and survey the land. “This high-ground has been inhabited since the Neolithic age, so we’ve got 5,000 years of continuous human habitation here.” Yet he acknowledges the difficulty of passing this sort of history on. “One generation mustn’t patronise the next.”
He understands the disinclination to get outdoors (indeed, one of his teenage memories is “sighing when Mum said, ‘take the dog for a walk’”). His children originally found it embarrassing when he read The Lost Words aloud to them – “the equivalent of dad-dancing”, he laughs – although they soon fell under its spell. “My daughter went on this conservation camp for the first time this summer, and she’d been sighing about going, but rang me on the first night in West Wales and said, ‘Dad – you know all that nature stuff you’ve been talking about my whole childhood – I used to think that was baloney but now I get it.’ And I thought, wow, it took a day! That’s all it took – without parents and without screens there. I loved that moment.”
Does he limit his children’s screen/social media time? “I think I’m probably worse at it now than they are!” Six months ago he joined Twitter and has amassed a huge following – his Word of the Day tweets take his project of “rewilding the language” and prizing its biodiversity into cyberspace – something he finds an “utter joy” and a “daily gladdening”.
Macfarlane wrote poetry in his teens and is an admirer of Hopkins, Hughes and Heaney. There are also echoes of Edward Lear and Edward Thomas in some splendid spell-poems. “I wanted to catch the eeriness and strangeness as well as the comedy and magic and beauty of nature. And with each ‘spell’ I tried to capture what Hopkins calls the ‘this-ness’, the quidditas, of each creature and what makes it astonishing to be close to.” As we walk, he delights in naming the creatures we see, soaring in the sky or scuttling on the earth. We forage for food and devour delicious blackberries and apples.
He has also written the script to a documentary, Mountain, about our love for high places, which has its UK premiere at the London Film Festival. It’s narrated by Willem Dafoe, and Macfarlane is still a bit star-struck. “When Dafoe came on board I was like, that’s my dream, I can die happy now with my words spoken by Willem Dafoe. It’s an experimental film – 90 minutes long but the script is only 820 words. We wanted to create a dreamscape, almost like a film poem.”
Does he have hope for the future? “The bigger picture is dismal. Plastic pollution, climate change, extreme weather events…” Contemplating the seriousness of planetary-scale problems, though, can throw people into paralysis – and paralysis, he says, is truly hopeless. “Small acts of care are crucial – grass-roots charities, individuals, books, words, are doing magic work – so to say there’s no point is an abandonment of everything. Hope is a greater agent for change than despair.”
The Lost Words is published by Hamish Hamilton on Thursday 5 October. Mountain premieres at the London Film Festival on Oct 9
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