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.’

During The Long Spring journeys I encountered my favourite mammal in only three places:  a distant sandy-pink coloured dog fox of the race silacea at the SEO/BirdLife reserve near Belchite, Aragón (pictured);   a bright red vulpes fox near Falköping, Sweden, and, during my periodic returns home to Yorkshire, monochrome glimpses of our local crucigera animals captured in infra-red light by my camera traps. This year, with the book safely packed off to Bloomsbury, I have been able to devote more time to my local foxes. 

​For one so ubiquitous in folk stories, myths and reality, it is a difficult animal to know.   Ours is a rural population, nocturnal, rarely seen, unlike the urban foxes that now inhabit many towns and cities in the UK.  Sometimes, it seems they wield strange powers: in 2011 Czech scientists discovered that foxes are somehow able to ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field, and use it for range-finding before pouncing on their prey.   My understanding of my elusive neighbours is almost entirely gleaned from footage recorded while I sleep:  

My two favourite pieces of fox literature are based on direct knowledge and experience of the animal, but make no pretence of understanding.  Instead, mystery and miscomprehension are the starting point for inner reflection, for a teasing out of the authors’ own self-awareness.

Rudolf Těsnohlídek's The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears appeared as a serialised comic-strip in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny – People’s News – in 1920, inspiring the seventy year-old Leoš Janáček to write one of the 20th century’s best-loved operas.  The Czech word Bystroušky, sharp-ears, has a double meaning, synonymous with cunning.  The Cunning Little Vixen, as the opera eventually became known in English, transformed the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death, and desire for a return to simplicity.
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Ted Hughes’s The thought-fox is a poem about writing a poem. In a room late at night the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is dark and silent, but the poet senses a presence ‘entering the loneliness.’  The night is the darkness of the poet’s imagination out of which a vague idea emerges.  It has no clear outline; it is not seen but sensed; it is compared to a fox, delicately sensing its way through the undergrowth.  The fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the night.  The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox:  ‘the page is printed.’  

Today I walked through the meadows of RSPB’s Adwick Washland, in the company of poets Brian Lewis and Matthew Clegg.  It was the final event for 2017 of a Ted Hughes festival based in nearby Mexborough, where Hughes grew up after moving from Mytholmroyd at age seven.  It was also a celebration of wildlife-rich meadows, today being National Meadows Day.  Brian and Matthew led a small group through a landscape whose history is one of change, where coal mining, farming, and wildlife have dominated in turn.  Old and new landscapes is a recurring theme in Brian’s work, in both miniature – Haiku and Tanka – and more extended form.  As the sun climbed higher, the air was suffused with skylark song, lapwings’ skirls, and the occasional ‘long scream of needle’ – as Ted Hughes put it - from swifts.
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Matthew’s exploring of landscape through words does not, as he explained, always involve making a literal connection.  One reading, at a stone-built viewpoint between two areas of marshland, was of his reworking of the rallying speech from Aristophanes’ The Birds, entitled Hoopoe’s Cuckoo-song.  Birds, real and literary, were always close at hand, from recently-fledged avocets – a local success story – to the ones featured in the final short poem of the day.  In this, Matthew described a flock of starlings landing on high tension electricity cable: ‘their song is a kind of current, and the current is a kind of song.’

When writers and artists across the English-speaking world heard about the decision by the Oxford Junior Dictionary to remove over a hundred everyday words connected with nature, the response was clear:  we must save words like conker, bluebell and buttercup from extinction.  Writers for whom the loss of such words from children’s vocabulary was unthinkable, from Margaret Atwood in Canada to Andrew Motion and Michael Morpurgo in the UK, wrote to Oxford University Press to complain.  Some, such as writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, are publishing their own celebrations of what Macfarlane has called wonder-words.

Now prize-winning children’s poet Chrissie Gittins has built her latest collection around forty of the lost nature words, with the message:  “Help save the names of these animals, plants and birds from extinction and be inspired to write your own poems using other words which have been culled!”

Chrissie Gittins was born in Lancashire and lives in south London. She worked as an artist and teacher before becoming a fulltime writer. Her poems have been animated for CBeebies and included in many anthologies. Adder, Bluebell, Lobster brings the natural world up close through dramatic and vivid poetic imagery.  

From Adder to Wren, forty fantastic poems celebrate forty amazing animals, birds and plants and their beautiful names.  Readers are invited to watch out for bossy Beetroot, be enchanted by a Bluebell witch’s thimble and spot a dive-bombing Lark or a cute Great-Crested Newt.
 
Adder, Bluebell, Lobster:  Wild Poems is published on August 4 by Otter-Barry Books, an exciting new children’s imprint aiming to make a difference.  It is illustrated by Paul Bommer, an illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer who worked with Chrissie on her book The Humpback’s Wail.

​#naturewords

I shall be spending World Wetlands Day in one of the World's most famous wetlands - Doñana, in southern Spain.  It is a place I know well and love, and it will be good to get back.  I was last there in spring 2014, on two occasions. In the March Julian Rush and I went there to make a programme for BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth.  A month later I was back with The Observer's Robin McKie.

It was part of an EU-wide effort to persuade governments of the vital value of wild places and the European legislation that protects them.  The EU Birds and Habitats Directives had been under attack for some time, with developers and some governments regarrding them as a barrier to economic progress.  The campaign demonstrated how false this idea was, and just before Christmas the UK government, which had previously been particularly negative towards the Directives, announced that it was not going to push for them to be weakened.

Another pillar of international protection is the Ramsar Convention, a global agreement focusing on wetlands.  Every year on 2 February, the anniversary of its adoption in 1971, the Convention secretariat organises World Wetlands Day.

Unfortunately, wetlands are often viewed as wasteland, and more than 64% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900.  Much of the remaining resource is suffering neglect and mismanagement.  Yet livelihoods from fishing, rice farming, tourism and water provision all depend on wetlands.  They host a huge variety of life, protect our coastlines, provide natural sponges against river flooding, and store carbon dioxide to regulate climate change.

Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods is the theme for World Wetlands Day in 2016. The aim is to demonstrate the vital role of wetlands for the future of humanity and specifically their relevance towards achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

An international poetry competition opens tomorrow, 10 January and closes on 24 January.  Entries will be judged by English-born Tasmanian poet Sarah Day whose most recent collection Tempo has been shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.  There is a prize of AUS$700 and AUS$100 for shortlisted entries.

​Click the button for rules and other details. Note the deadline is midnight on 24th Melbourne time - 11 hours ahead of GMT.

The reason for my visit to Doñana next month is to kick off a new project.  Between February and June 2016 I will be tracking the arrival of spring in Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic.  Starting on the North African coast, and visiting some of the most interesting wild places in Spain, France, the UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway, I will report back on what I find on www.thelongspring.com.
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I’ll be describing wildlife, places, traditions, culture and issues as I look for signs of the coming of spring. I will be finding out how spring is marked by people in the areas I visit, investigating people’s connection to their natural environment and seeing how this is changing.

I'll also use the blog to report on news from elsewhere, such as webcams from special places as the new season gets underway.  

The Long Spring is also the working title of my forthcoming book, provisionally scheduled for publication in early 2018, by Bloomsbury.

Fevered Sleep, the arts company whose Artistic Director David Harradine we featured last week, have responded to this narrative of loss and change with an on-line artwork, launched today, called An Open Field.  Last week Harradine told NATURAL LIGHT "When I read the report, and understood the scale of loss of species and habitats, I wondered what this meant to the people who live and work in those places."

"We invited people from various locations to take a walk with our Associate Artist Luke Pell, he recorded the conversations, and we've turned the words into a poetic landscape.  It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form.” 

Pell found that ordinary and remarkable things were shared and revealed from those places, and from those people’s lives. Memories surfaced and changes were noticed. Each encounter carefully excavated years of detail, unearthing how deeply people know themselves in relation to the places where they live and walk.

The words on-screen at anopenfield.co.uk are the words of the participants, and the final artwork is a poetic expression of the conversations that happened through each encounter as they walked.  





An Open Field is launched today and is produced by Fevered Sleep.  Developed and led by associate artist Luke Pell.  Design by Valle Walkley. Made with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

As the two organisations point out in their publicity to get young poets writing about nature, this is the time of year in which Tennyson’s phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” seems more than usually apt. 

The challenge is for poets aged 25 and under to write a poem about birds – anything to do with them. The YPN and RSPB suggest entrants read a 2009 article by Adam O’Riordan, about the enduring importance of birds to poets.

O’Riordan provides a succinct survey starting with The Seafarer, the Anglo-Saxon poem of spiritual longing and exile.  In it, birds become “astringent emblems of solitude” as earthly pleasures are traded for the "the gannet's noise and the voice of the curlew" while the laughter of men is replaced by "the singing gull".

In the Sixties, Ted Hughes found in birds the symbols of his own concerns, first in the shining, terrible, power of The Hawk in the Rain whose "wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet" and later going as far as to forge his own gospel story in Crow. 

Olivia Sprinkel is studying at Royal Holloway College for an MA in Creative Writing: Place, Environment and Writing taught by Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott and Sara Wheeler.  When she heard about NATURAL LIGHT’s campaign she got in touch:  “I first read about the OJD removing nature words in a book called Towards Re-enchantment: Place and its meaning in an essay by Robert Macfarlane.  I was moved to write a poem which includes [in italics below] some of the words added and some of the words deleted, to highlight what is happening to children's childhoods.”

The Committee for Childhood has decreed by Olivia Sprinkel

Young people of today,
the Committee for Childhood has decreed
the following words are hereby deemed
superflous to your youthful need:

No longer do you need to know
the onomatopoeia of babbling brooks,
or recognise the glint of minnows as they dart.

Henceforth, no longer will earthy beetroot
or hedgerow blackberry stain your little fingers,
let’s keep them clean! Our official stamp
obliterates the porpoises who arc
between crystal sea and sky,
the heron standing proud and still.
The conk of a conker being conquered
or the lonely belly-deep bray of a donkey
from across fields far away -
you will not miss these sounds.

It is but childish to hold a buttercup
to a friend’s chin to see gold glow.
And why do you need to know
it is from acorns that oak trees grow?
We will provide.

Instead, we decree,
these are the frames
for what you see:
bungee-jumping celebrity
is, of course, compulsory.
Your souls will be formed
through attachments
to block graphs and databases.

The Committee welcomes you
to your citizenship of this world! 

Remembering the fallen in the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War needed a stunning and unforgettable piece of contemporary art. Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper certainly met that need.  The poppy as a symbol of remembrance arises from another work of art, whose centenary is next year.  In Flanders Fields was written by Canadian army physician Lt. Col. John McCrae (1872-1918), on May 3 2015.  

In the third and final pre-Christmas blog of this campaign, we look at some more words - poppy among them - that must be put back in the OJD, and hear from more people with recommendations for alternative books for children.  But first, a new poem.

The list of words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary two editions ago includes thirty of our best loved plants and animals, and a host of others relating to the countryside, farming and food.  The list of ins and outs is here.  As we pointed out in previous blogs, a generation ago, 40% of children regularly played in natural areas, now only 10% do so, while another 40% never play anywhere outdoors.  The physical fitness of children is declining by 9% per decade, according to Public Health England. There is no single reason why childhood has changed so radically in barely a generation;  if there were, it would be illegal:  it would simply not be permitted to consign children to a lower life expectancy than their parents as, for the first time in recorded history, we now have.

In a ground-breaking initiative the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts are calling for a Nature and Wellbeing Act in England to strengthen legislation for the creation of accessible green space, more resilient protected areas and an education system that reconnects society with nature as a matter of duty.

What has that got to do with a few words removed from a dictionary?  The toll of lost words will come as a surprise to anyone who still regards connecting with nature a vital part of growing up.  Sounding the death knell for outdoor play by axing some of the words most associated with it is to be part of a problem society cannot afford to just accept with an impotent shrug.

So to my final recommendations for alternative children's books this Christmas.  My RSPB colleague Suzanne Welch has worked in young people’s social development and learning for a range of different organisations from social care to environmental education centres.  “I am a firm believer that many young people learn and develop as individuals more effectively through experiential opportunities within the natural environment” says Suzanne. 

"I think The Beginner’s Guide to Being Outside by Gill Hatcher is lovely.  And one of my all time favourites is Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor with pictures by Peter Parnall. The beautiful illustrations and reflective process of finding the perfect rock for you is different and compelling."

Mark Sears is Director of the Wild Network, which brings together organisations dedicated to reconnecting children with nature.  “I have been lucky enough to get hold of any early copy of Learning With Nature by Marina Robb, Anna Richardson and Victoria Mew.  It’s aimed at adults who want to get their children learning outdoors.”  The official publication date is end of January 2015 but you can place orders now via the link.

Mark says: “it is beautifully set out with hundreds of awesome things to do with your wild one.  Whether its making flower fairies (a particular favourite of my 4-year old and me) or learning how to make shelters and fire safely, its all in this book in a really easy to read and digest way.  Every wild thing needs one in their rucksack.”

Today is National Poetry Day and for the next three days ZSL London Zoo is hosting its first ever annual poetry weekend, exploring the power of nature and wildlife in poetry.  Special events include a poetry trail around the zoo grounds, workshops and readings.  

Four contemporary poets are featured on Saturday lunchtime.  Fiona Sampson, is editor of Poem magazine, former editor of Poetry Review and has been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for her own work. Her most recent collection of poems, Coleshill, offers a “stunning engagement with both sensation and locale, and perhaps most importantly the rural environs in which much of it is rooted.”  Pascale Petit was featured on this site a few weeks ago and is the author of six collections of poetry, including Fauverie (Seren, 2014), The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001) and What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Wales Book of the Year, and named as a book of the year in the Observer. Ruth Padel is a renowned poet and non-fiction author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Zoological Society of London and a member of the ZSL Council. Her poetry collections includie Soho Leopard (Chatto, 2004)  and The Mara Crossing (Chatto, 2012), as well as the novel Where the Serpent Lives (Abacus, 2011). 

Niall Campbell is a poet originally from South Uist in the Western Isles. He received both an Eric Gregory Award and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2011, winning the Poetry London Competition in 2013.  His pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, was released in 2012 by Happenstance Press, whilst Moontide, his first collection, was published by Bloodaxe earlier this year.For the inaugural ZSL Poetry Competition the theme is conservation. The competition is open to all ages but entrants must enter in their age category.

The inaugural ZSL Poetry Competition theme is conservation. The competition is open to all ages and closes Sunday 12 October 2014.

Passionate about the natural world, obsessive about using images from nature to paint the darker side of human nature.  NATURAL LIGHT caught up with French-Welsh poet Pascale Petit ahead of the launch of her sixth collection, Fauverie.  A series of launch readings begins next week in Norfolk, taking in events as diverse as London Zoo’s first ever Poetry Weekend and the Resurgence and Ecologist Festival of Wellbeing.  
(See What’s On for full details)




Petit was taking time away from her home in London and back in her native Paris on a writing retreat, so we agreed to converse by email on this occasion.  I’d read that Fauverie is inspired by the big cat house of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and celebrates the ferocity and grace of endangered animals.  But I wanted to check my understanding: whereas her fourth collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale, displays an intense feeling for nature in its own right, the new collection invokes nature metaphorically, to tackle the darker aspects of human nature. 

“Yes I think that’s fair. The natural world is my passion, but my subject has often been my parents and human nature. I’ve written two books about my father (The Zoo Father and Fauverie) and one about my mother (The Huntress) and I’m working on another sequence about my mother Mama Amazonica.  So I guess on the one hand there’s my passion – the natural world – and on the other my obsession – to write about my strange parents.”

I’m keen to know how – indeed if -  Pascale separates these two very different ways of viewing nature;  or  is it a single, much more complex relationship? 

“I write intuitively and don’t analyse much as the poems come but I do know that when I write about the natural world just for its own sake it makes me happy. I also think that it’s harder for me to do that successfully. 

“When I write about my parents it’s not because I think anyone’s interested. As Sharon Olds has said, no one is interested really, why should they care? What I’ve tried to do with my father is to turn him into two books (he was an absent father), so I have these two books instead of him, and in them I deal with the evil things he did, and I change them by bringing in the natural world, especially animals, so that the recreated father I end up with is one I love, because he’s all these amazing animals. 

“It is a complex relationship. I am fascinated by the primitive and ferocity. I’m very drawn to Amazonian animals in particular, though others that are fierce, such as snow leopards and North China leopards, do it for me too. How could they not? North China leopards are especially savage and hard to keep in zoos, they keep their fierce natures and snarl a lot!” 

Why Amazonia?

“My fascination with Amazonian animals, anything Amazonian actually, the plants and peoples too, came from two trips I made in the Venezuelan Amazon in the 1990s. I went in 1993 and 1995, just two years before my father contacted me. I hadn’t heard from him for 35 years! So I visited him in Paris as he was an invalid, dying of emphysema. I took time out from those claustrophobic visits to go to the Ménagerie zoo in the Jardin des Plantes where I discovered there were many Amazonian species. So those two things – the Amazon and my father – became intertwined in my mind. I found I could only write about him through those animals. I read everything I could find about the Amazon, the flora and fauna, the landscape, its tribes, their rituals, and especially their mythologies and spiritual lives. When I started writing my second book about my father, Fauverie, I avoided going to the zoo and concentrated on Notre-Dame and the city of Paris, but I soon broke my veto and started going there more than ever, almost every day!”

Pascale Petit’s previous collection What the Water Gave Me:  Poems After Frida Kahlo, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.   Reading dates for Fauverie are listed in the What’s On section and start on 19 September at the Wymondham Words Festival.

The Peak District has inspired and informed poets for decades. Two of today's poets most inspired by the brooding fells,  Jo Bell and Tony Williams join forces this Saturday afternoon to lead an inspiration-gathering walk and to share their poetry and encourage participants to gather material and share theirs.  Williams's latest collection The Midlands includes many pieces inspired by the region.  Williams and Bell have selected poems to share along the route, which aims to gather ideas and images for informal writing and poem-sharing at the end of the walk.  See What's On for more details.