Margaret Atwood piled more pressure on the Oxford University Press in a surprise appearance at the Norfolk Festival of Nature on Saturday.  She gave an impromptu response to nature writer Mark Cocker’s address to festival goers, illustrated by a looped series of slides depicting nature words cut from the OJD.  She proposed that to ensure that words like acorn, bluebell, poppy and otter were not dismissed as irrelevant in children’s lives, a new book be produced that celebrated those words instead.

Mark Cocker had been speaking on the final day of the inaugural week of the Festival.  It is to be a year-round celebration of nature in the cultural life of the county, and of the country.  Starting with a week of literary, musical, visual and scientific exploration hosted by Gresham’s School, Holt, Festival events will tour the county hosted by organisations as diverse as the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, National Trust, RSPB, Writers’ Centre Norwich and Waveney and Blyth Arts.  The list of collaborators is expected to grow.

As Cocker spoke, his words were accompanied by a poignant exhibition of his own photographs, alphabetically cataloguing more than fifty lost nature words:  acorn, adder, bluebell, catkin....kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, poppy....

He then invited renowned Canadian novelist and Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson to respond.  His focus was on the need to ensure children grow up with a love and understanding of the countryside, before they become a generation of uncomprehending adults.  Margaret Atwood then reminded us of the interconnectedness of nature and human wellbeing; our dependence on the health of the oceans; and the fact that birds, in travelling the globe, give us “an overview of the entire web of life.”  Atwood, Gibson and Cocker are among 28 literary figures to have written to Oxford University Press in support of the #naturewords campaign.

They, along with Festival Director Dr. Al Cormack formed a panel to take questions.  The first, from Jessica Lawrence, asked simply “which one word would you put back in the Junior Dictionary if you could?”

Atwood and Cocker both saw acorn as having the strongest symbolism – the seed of mighty oak trees, with their great cultural significance; Cormack felt it was unimaginable to omit Britain’s most popular flower, the bluebell.  Graeme Gibson, however, declared himself unwilling even to consider the question; for him, it wasn’t about trading odd words, but (he explained to me afterwards) about safeguarding nature literacy.

Meanwhile, Saturday’s Guardian Review devoted two and a half pages to Robert Macfarlane’s magpie-like gathering of those dialect words that enable a forensic specificity in describing nature.  His article bemoans the impoverishment of nature vocabulary symptomised by the OJD word-cull.  In today’s Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard interviews Macfarlane ahead of his forthcoming book Landmarks.  Appleyard cites the “disastrously edited” Junior Dictionary as an example of “virtuality replacing real contact with real things.”  Macfarlane tells him that some children are making and remaking our sense of place:  “I want to send people out into the landscape and down into the dictionary.”

It took just two months from the first meeting to the full programme - surely a record for a week-long festival of any kind!  In early October, my RSPB colleague, poet Matt Howard, and I sat round a table with other organisations to gauge interest in a festival celebrating the cultural ties that connect us to nature.  Earlier in the summer Mark Cocker, Matt and I had shared a few beers, bemoaning what seemed like a progressive unravelling of these historic links.  Mark phoned around and found plenty of takers for a meeting to discuss what we might do about it.

It was thanks to Dr. Al Cormack and his colleagues at Gresham's School, Holt, that what started as a tentative idea for 2016 will be a reality as early as February 2015!  Each February since 2011 Gresham's have run a festival, which in the past couple of years has focused on nature.  At the October meeting Al offered to open the programme to the group, and within a few days each organisation had come up with an event they will present in this, the first Norfolk Festival of Nature.  Click on the Festival logo or visit the NATURAL LIGHT What's On page for full details.

In the programme are a number of high-profile artists and authors including writers Patrick Barkham and Mark Cocker, illustrator Sheila Tilmouth and audio-visual artist Kathy Hinde, whose work with the RSPB we featured here in September.  Patrick Barkham will team up with the National Trust's Matthew Oates to present the Festival Lecture exploring Spirit of Place.  The RSPB presents a concert of nature-inspired music, an evening of audio visual responses to nature, and poetry readings.  The Hawk and Owl Trust, Norfolk Castle Museum and Art Gallery and  Norfolk Wildlife Trust are contributing talks on subjects as diverse as birds of prey, landscape and nature painting and the future of nature itself.

Educational activities will include a schools' haiku competition sponsored by Festival partner Bray's Cottage and a nature writing workshop in the woodland environment of Gresham's.

Later in 2015 the Festival partners hope to present further activities throughout the county, so keep in touch for regular updates.

Kathy Hinde presenting Piano Migrations at TEDx Aldeburgh.  Kathy will team up with RSPB North Norfolk Manager and NATURAL LIGHT editor Laurence Rose to present an evening of musical and audio-visual responses to nature.

The Norfolk Festival of Nature is in association with Bray’s Cottage, Gresham’s School, Mark Cocker, Hawk and Owl Trust, The National Trust, Norfolk Wildlife Trust, Norwich Castle Museum, Rialto Magazine, The RSPB, Wild Anglia and Writers’ Centre Norwich.