George Monbiot’s recent Guardian article on environmental language should be required reading for anyone in my profession.  In recent years, a number of authors, most notably Robert Macfarlane, have catalogued our deepening nature-illiteracy.  They have linked this back to our growing disconnection from nature, and forward to a future inability to respond to the needs of the natural world, due to our inability to articulate them.

Monbiot has now spoken a painful truth – that scientists and environmentalists must shoulder a significant share of the blame.  He points out that the language we use is cold and alienating – words like “reserve” (as he says, think of what we mean when we use that word about a person) or “sites of special scientific interest”.  For the latter, he suggests “places of natural wonder” is a better reflection of what people really seek when they visit them.

Monbiot goes further: not only is the language of environmentalism alienating, but it leads directly to a shift in thinking about our relationship with the natural world.  He hates terms like “natural capital” and “ecosystem services”, because they ‘[inform] us that nature is subordinate to the human economy, and loses its value when it cannot be measured by money.’
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Professional ecologists, he says, should recruit poets and amateur nature lovers to help them find the words for what they cherish. Having spent 35 years working as one of the thousands of amateur nature lovers who happen also to be professional ecologists and conservationists – and a few of whom are published poets – I find it striking how bilingual we are:  one language for describing to each other our feelings and passions towards nature, another for our dispassionate analysis and advocacy to outsiders.
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​I spent the spring of 2016 on a writing project of my own.*  I travelled north through Europe with the arrival of spring, between “places of natural wonder”.  In Catalonia I discovered Maria Àngels Anglada, the novelist and poet.  Anglada was also a conservationist, whether she realised it or not.  Moved by the imminent destruction of the Aiguamolls wetlands, she wrote a Al Grup de Defensa dels Aiguamolls de l’Empordà.  It foretells the cataclysm of the lost marshes:  “Will they invade this living refuge that so many wings long for from afar?  Will the bird of the north no longer find nourishing water and green retreats?” …. “Flamingoes, our friends the mallards, farewell, farewell, Kentish plover and lapwing, colourful princess of winter.”**  Lines dedicated to the local campaigners who were fighting against overwhelming odds. 

​The first drainage ditches had already been dug, and bulldozers entered the marshes.  The machines found their way blocked, though, by local activists, who stood firm.  Then in 1983, the leaders of the newly-autonomous region realised the political and cultural importance of preserving this vital link in an international network of refuelling points for migratory birds.  Anglada rewrote her poem, a sigh of relief:  “They have not destroyed this living refuge that so many wings long for from afar.  Here the bird of the north finds nourishing water and green retreats.” …. “return, return, Kentish plover and lapwing, colourful princess of winter.” 

Anglada grew up speaking an illegal language.  When the ice of repression receded, her words rebounded off the page, and the words she chose to use were those of nature.  Olivier Messiaen was a composer whose works were inspired by the birds he, and sixty years later I, encountered on the coast near Banyuls.  He wrote his first significant birdsong-inspired piece, Quartet for the End of Time, in Stalag VIII-A prisoner of war camp in Görlitz (now Zgorzelec, Poland).  For both Anglada and Messiaen, wildlife symbolised freedom and identity and their works mined deep reserves of personal and cultural connectedness to nature. 

In Finland I discussed the epic poem Kalevala with Minna Pyykkö, the face and voice of Finnish nature on television and radio, and an artist who has created many works inspired by Kalevala.  As epics go, it is relatively recent, completed in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot, a physician who used his spare time to collect and compile the ancient oral folk tales and myths of the Finnish people. 

“Birds play a big role in Kalevala”, Minna told me.  “They are companions to people, they whisper advice, they tease, they lift and carry tired travellers, they attack and fight with people. They also feel cold in winter and are happy when spring comes.”

When the original poems were spoken, the Earth was believed to be flat.  At the edges of Earth was Lintukoto, ‘the home of the birds’, a warm region in which birds lived during the winter. The Milky Way is Linnunrata, ‘the path of the birds’, the route the birds took on their journeys to Lintukoto and back.  In modern Finnish, lintukoto means a safe haven, an imaginary happy, warm and peaceful paradise.

Lönnrot’s poetry inspired Sibelius to write the music that would in turn inspire the creation of independent Finland exactly a hundred years ago.  The natural world depicted in words and music, whether real or mythic, was an inextricable part of an emerging national identity.
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As George Monbiot says, ‘we are blessed with a wealth of nature and a wealth of language. Let us bring them together and use one to defend the other.’

Late in 2015, NATURAL LIGHT reported a remarkable case of environmental protest art that helped in the fight to save the magnificent beechwoods of Zilbeti, in the foothills of the Navarran Pyrenees. 
 
Mining company MAGNA, supported by the Government of Navarra, proposed to fell 54,000 trees to enable the extension of a magnesite mine.  People from the tiny village of Zilbeti and their supporters in neighbouring areas, local conservation groups and national NGOs such as SEO-BirdLife Spain resorted to guerrilla art to highlight the injustice, and the environmental damage, that would be caused by such a fragrant breach of EU law.

While SEO-BirdLife led a legal fight in the Navarran High Court, the local activists created Guernica de Zilbeti - a 25 metres wide by 15 high reproduction of Picasso’s Civil War protest painting, using harmless pigment on the trees themselves.  In October 2015, we reported a High Court victory, but that proved not to be the end of the story.  MAGNA, along with some local authorities, challenged the regional High Court’s decision in Spain’s Supreme court.  Two weeks ago, on 29 March, a definitive decision was made, once and for all, confirming full protection for the forest. 

​We are all with Paris, trying to understand the incomprehensible.  And with or without Friday’s outrage, in two weeks’ time we would still all be with Paris, trying to unravel the tangle of politics, science and human rights that is the climate change agenda.  Next month world leaders assemble there for the most important climate change negotiations to date, and tens of thousands of activists and fossil fuel industry lobbyists will converge on the city, too.  At the forefront of representing civil society will be ArtCop21, a climate festival of culture and arts, with over 120 events, exhibitions and installations across the city.  It’s a global festival:  artists are participating on all continents with over 420 events in total.

Meanwhile, Paris and the other great cities of western Europe remain in the minds and the hopes of a tide of refugees, many of whom are there already, most are yet to set off on the most traumatic and possibly hopeless phase of their lives.

​The world leaders at the climate summit will trade rhetoric on these issues, and the original purpose of their conference may be pushed into second, or even third place behind discussing (the oil-rich) Islamic State and the human tide flowing across our borders.  They will want to compartmentalise their agenda, keep these issues separate in their talks, they are each complex enough on their own.

​​But there is a case for keeping it all ravelled together.  If carbon emissions targets were simply about striking a balance between conflicting economic pressures on western governments, there would be no need to assemble in one place to thrash them out.  But we all know it is not that straightforward.  The pressures would still keep coming.  Expect the natural environment to fail across swaithes of poor-world and rich-world alike.  Expect a 100-year wave of climate refugees into the richer, less climate-vulnerable world if we get it wrong for them.  Expect the handy distinction between economic migrant and refugee from terror to disappear.
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​Politics has no language for this complexity, but art has.  Three reasons to look to Paris:  solidarity between grieving nations; hope for a climate deal that demonstrates governments can act together and with resolve; and a cultural focus that will help us all understand the world a bit better.

Jillian Steinhauer, writing for the website hyperallergic.com, reports a conversation with ecological artist Aviva Rahmani who has been working with activists just north of New York City.  Blued Trees is a project that attempts to stop the expansion of the Spectra Energy Algonquin Incremental Market pipeline by using an unexpected legal tool: copyright.

Blued Trees is a musical score painted (with nontoxic materials) onto trees growing in the path of the pipeline. In order to complete the pipeline expansion, Spectra would have to destroy the artwork, thus – it is argued - infringing Rahmani’s legal rights as an artist (“moral rights” in U.S. law).

There is a precedent, if not in the legal sense: in Alberta, Canada artist Peter von Tiesenhausen, fought natural gas pipelines by claiming that his entire ranch was a work of art. The developers eventually withdrew before the copyright idea could be tested.

There are many reasons to suppose the attempt will fail, not least the civil nature of any infringement meaning it may just be a matter of compensating the artist after the fact.  But as an audacious way of drawing attention to the case, it can only be admired.

John Luther Adams's music has a profound connection with the natural world.  He was born in 1953 in the American Deep South and brought up in the suburbs of New York.  His music is mostly closely associated with the culture and landscape of Alaska, where he moved in the 1970s and lived for 40 years.

Tom McKinney writes a blog that includes a 52-part weekly feature on birds that have influenced music.  He writes “as a way into the music Adams wrote in Alaska, have a go at Dark Waves, inspired by the Pacific Ocean of the Bering Sea. It was the first piece I heard by him, and I think it's pretty incredible.  It's massive music, slow moving blocks of sound, gradually changing textures that rise and fall with intensity. It's as big and slow as the Alaskan landscape and ocean.”

During Hear and Now, Adams describes his Earth and the Great Weather as “a sacred work of some sort” and “a kind of sonic geography; I’m still not sure what that means but is has something to do with the interrelationship between place and the human imagination.”  Written in collaboration with four native Alaskans, it includes natural sound, native drumming and Aeolian harps.  Adams reveals that, in his sixties and now living mainly in Mexico, he has returned to bird song as a major influence, decades after songbirdsongs.

Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales may seem like a strange inspiration for an artwork.  But a Pontypridd artist has chosen to interpret the story of the dipper, and research by one of the UK’s leading pollution scientists, in a new and very personal work. 

River Canary is Tara Okon’s response to the discovery that decades after we thought Wales’s rivers had been cleaned up industry’s legacy is having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds.

Tara, whose ink drawings have a geometric complexity reminiscent of her artistic hero M.C. Escher, uses a similar tessellation style to tell contemporary stories.  “I read about the impact of pollution on the dipper in an article by Professor Steve Ormerod, and something clicked.” 

Ormerod’s 35-year study of dippers showed that decades after the worst industrial and mining effluents had been cleaned from rivers like Tara’s local Taff, there is a lingering legacy.  The addition of newer chemicals creates a cocktail with surprising results.  Tara has noticed there are now more dippers on the Taff compared with years ago.  But Steve and his team at Cardiff University have found that urban dippers hatch fewer female chicks than those nesting in rural rivers nearby, while urban chicks are underweight compared with their rural counterparts.

Peter Sculthorpe was Australia's foremost composer, and the first to create a truly Australian musical voice.  It was on his return from studying in Oxford that Sculthorpe decided that his western musical heritage needed to make room for other influences, and these included aboriginal meoldies, the sounds of nature, and influences from neighbouring Asian countries.

Pieces such as the 1960s series Irkanda - “scrub country’ and Kakadu (1988) established him as the country’s leading painter of landscapes in sound.  The vastness and silence of the outback, or the thronging of Australia’s wetlands, became his primary influences.  He, in turn, became an environmental activist, contrasting the aboriginal peoples’ sense of being part of nature with the negative impact wrought by the arrival of Europeans.

He worked closely with aboriginal musicians, most notably didjeridu virtuoso William Barton, for whom he wrote Earth Cry, a piece that exploits traditional imitative music to invoke the sounds of wildlife such as magpie geese.

Kakadu, named after the famous National Park in the Northern Territory, is a typical example of his response to landscape and his use of native music.  “This enormous wilderness area stretches from coastal tidal plains to rugged mountain plateaux, and in it may be found the living culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants, dating back for fifty thousand years. Sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu or gagadju. The work, then, is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death.”

As composer Jonathan Dove prepares for the premiere of his 'Gaia Theory' at the BBC Proms this week, he took time out to explain how his recent work has been inspired by an Arctic voyage that proved something of a wake-up call about the future of the planet.

In the second in our Nature at The Proms feature series we talk to Jonathan about that voyage, the works it has inspired, and his future plans.