From the earliest pagan offerings to the metaphysical peaks of the Romantic poets, the natural world has always been a repository for our dreams and nightmares. Alienated from our fellow creatures, we see nature as something “other”, full of hidden powers, magic, threats, portents and meanings that we can’t quite fathom. And in an era of species extinction and climate emergency, the yearning to understand our place in the natural world seems more pressing now than ever given the abundance of nature writing published in the last couple of decades.
Glancing at the shelves of my local bookshop, I find the usual classics – Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, The Goshawk by TH White. There are books about specific animals: hedgehogs, wolves, moths, homing pigeons, gannets. Two volumes on owls. Five on bees. Another category comprises what we might call the nature-as-healer narrative – Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. Some writers have concerned themselves with the hidden things of natural world – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Life of Fungi by Aliya Whiteley. There are a great many books on rewilding, conservation and foraging.
There are also a growing number of lamentations about what we stand to lose through climate change in books such as Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine; In Search of One Last Song, by Patrick Galbraith; Late Light: The Secret Wonders of a Disappearing World, by Michael Malay; The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, from Ben Rawlence to name just a few.
Concern about the depletion and loss of nature is nothing new. Anxieties about global ecological catastrophes have been present in dystopian fiction for at least the last century. Nordenholt’s Million, a 1923 novel by Alfred Walter Stewart (writing as JJ Connington) sees a pernicious bacterium, known as the Blight laying waste to the world’s soil. It’s a precursor to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) where the so-called Chung-Li virus decimates the wheat harvest in the far east before spreading across the entire Earth.
Worlds in other post-apocalyptic novels are scarred by pollution, acid rain, genetic mutation, overcrowding, fire and drought – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the genre is deluged by catastrophic flooding. In JG Ballard’s work of 1962, The Drowned World, the ice caps have melted, and England has been transformed into a tropical quagmire. While Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay (1978) takes us to a Great Britain of the year 3000, where rising sea levels have split the country into the Seven Kingdoms, making the Mendips and the Quantocks islands. More recently, we might think of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From and also Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, which reimagines King Lear in a half-submerged London.
How to interpret this fiction of prognostication? Are such novels simply exercises in creative extrapolation? Or can we see them as confessionals that acknowledge our culpability in the planet’s ruination? Is the suffering the protagonists endure in these stories a rightful reckoning for humanity’s environmental crimes? A suffering that not only results in a large-scale death toll but, perhaps more terrifyingly, the moral deterioration of the survivors. Apocalypse almost always equals atavism.
In The Death of Grass, as the impending famine grips the country and rumours spread of the government’s plan to use atomic bombs to reduce the population, anarchy ensues in the form of looting, rape and violent disorder. The main characters, a band of middle-class families attempting to get from London to Westmorland, soon accept that they will have to kill to stay alive, and they do. In one scene, three men, John, Roger and Pirrie raid a house on the moors for food and shelter, killing the farmer and his wife. “They had food and we didn’t,” says Roger’s wife, Olivia, coolly. “People fight over food now. We won, and they lost. It’s something that can’t be helped.” How quickly murder has become matter of fact.
My own novel, Barrowbeck, ends with the country at the threshold of a new and nightmarish dispensation. By 2041, the titular village has been swamped by successive long winters of rain. To some of the locals, it is retribution for the quarry that has carved up one of the fellsides. But it is also a punishment for the betrayal of a much older treaty between the first settlers 2,000 years earlier and the gods they believed to hold sway in the valley. The Celtic tribe who come looking for sanctuary are only allowed to stay on the proviso that they and their descendants remain as “servants” to the place and do not seek to abuse its resources.
Here, we cross the border and head into the territory of folk horror, which often finds its shocks and scares in the disruption of this kind of contract between people and place. In some cases, the horror stems from the violent and arcane rituals required to maintain the delicate balance of give-and-take that needs to exist between a community and the land on which it relies. Take the classic example of The Wicker Man and more recently Midsommar. In both these stories, the forces of nature are apparently appeased through sacrifice.
But in other instances, they come to punish specific offences. In David Rudkin’s 1987 television play, White Lady, the story of a single father renovating a farmhouse and teaching his two daughters the ways of the countryside is interspersed with images of animal cells mutated by the use of pesticides. In what is ostensibly a fairy tale, the man symbolises foolish humankind, while the scythe-carrying white lady of the title appears as the saviour of its next generation. “Poor sheep of a man,” she says of the girls’ father. “Once, long ago, he lost the land he lived from, next he lost his country, now he is losing the earth.” His punishment for allowing the world to be poisoned is for his daughters to be taken from him and replaced by changelings. His is the last generation. Through their destructive actions, humans have forfeited their right to exist.
A far more hostile entity appears in Lee Haven Jones’ 2021 Welsh-language film Gwledd (The Feast), in which a long-dead spiritual guardian of the land returns in the guise of a young girl, Cadi, to exact a gruesome revenge upon a family and their business associates who are plundering ancient ground for its mineral wealth. In these instances, the land is anthropomorphised. But in other cases, it plays its strange self. In Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, a scientist is consumed by madness as he attempts to commune with nature via a standing stone. While in the 2013 film, The Borderlands, a research group investigating an alleged miracle in a remote church discover that it has been built upon a labyrinth of tunnels which become increasingly – and in the end quite literally – digestive, as two of the party are dissolved by what appears to be hydrochloric acid.
The dangers of what lurks under the soil are sounded again and again throughout horror fiction and film, from Grant Allen’s Pallinghurst Barrow to MR James’s A Warning to the Curious to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw to my own novel, Starve Acre. Here, there is a penalty to be paid for disturbing the earth. Whereas in other cases, the natural world acts with malevolence for no discernible reason at all. In Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, Nat, the main protagonist wonders, “how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.” While Peter Weir’s dream-like Picnic at Hanging Rock sees three schoolgirls from Appleyard College spirited into (or by) the Australian wilderness for reasons unknown.
Our sense of estrangement from the natural world persists. Perhaps we’ve finally come to recognise that as the very root of the problem. Humans have always shaped their environment, that is why we have been so successful, but we have done so with progressively less and less regard for the impact not only on the planet but to our future selves. As Rachel Carson says in Silent Spring, “Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species [of insects] by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” In his book, Straw Dogs, John Gray argues that in the 21st century it is time to abandon our sense of specialness as human beings and replace it with an acknowledgement that we are, as a species, just as prone to expendability as any other thing that has lived on Earth. There is truth in that, unpalatable as it is. But looked at another way, it is the admission which will finally unify us with the natural world.
• Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
