What Next? What Now? – Some Ideas for Reading and Taking Steps
By Ralph Pite (ralph.pite@bristol.ac.uk)
Here are…
Five Top Sixes (and a Last Hurrah)
I hope they may be encouraging and helpful, thought-provoking and joy-prompting.
Have you read…
Kathleen Jamie, Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012), Surfacing (2020), and Cairn (2024)
these four books, each a collection of highly attentive and thoughtfully reflective moments of nature writing, are extraordinary and, to my mind, essential.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and The Serviceberry (2024)
integrates western science and indigenous knowledge, inspiring a new perspective on plants, animals and ecosystems, and a better understanding of how we might live on earth
Michael Malay, Late Light (2023)
prize-winning book of nature writing that explores what is vanishing before our eyes, drawing connections between non-human and human migration. Good to combine with Horatio Clare, We Came By Sea: Stories of a Greater Britain (2025)
Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
a long but completely gripping novel about trees, people, and interconnection.
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (first published 1973, reprinted 2021)
just a key book for seeing nature on our doorstep, within urban spaces and sharing them with humans
Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022)
showed us a unique ecosystem and landscape, present in fragments all along the western seaboard of the British Isles, that had not been seen or understood or appreciated for centuries
Would you like to read (or re-read)….
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (reprinted 2008)
long in the shadow of her famous brother, Dorothy Wordsworth has been re-evaluated; she writes acutely and sympathetically about the natural world and her sense of involvement in it and its communities.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878)
Hardy’s most in-depth and provocative account of human lives lived on and in and with their natural surroundings
Edward Thomas, The South Country (1909, reprinted 2009)
brilliant in its evocative descriptions of the countryside, Thomas’s book also brings into view the class and power hierarchies that shape its ‘natural’ world; arguably the best of this great poet’s works in prose
H. Hudson, Hampshire Days (1903) and A Shepherd’s Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs (1910) – many reprints of both are available
an expert naturalist, especially in his knowledge of birds and sensitivity to their unique ways of being, Hudson also grasps (more than anyone in his day) our interdependence with our environment
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1963; many reprints) and The Sea Around Us (1951, reprinted 2021)
a seminal book, Silent Spring has not lost its impact in a world of forever chemicals and neonicotinoids. Carson was by training a marine biologist: The Sea Around Us speaks from her personal fascination with the oceans, whose vulnerability she understood a generation before the great garbage patch appeared in the Pacific.
A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967, reprinted 2017)
lyrical and elegiac, Baker’s observations of this iconic bird in the Essex countryside where he lived, coincide with the effects of DDT on the species’ chances of survival.
And Poetry?
John Clare
(there are many editions – The Major Works (2008) or Selected Poems (2004) are both good and widely available. Also: The Poetry Foundation website (John Clare | The Poetry Foundation) and Poetry Archive (John Clare – Poetry Archive – with readings by Paul Farley)
Clare, lived in the countryside, working the land; his poems are unique in their closeness to the world of rural labour, well aware of its hardships. Clare is embedded in an environment that is, in equal measure, glorious and harsh.
‘I Am!’, ‘The Badger’. ‘The Mouse’s Nest’, ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’
William Wordsworth
(numerous editions and see Poetry Foundation)
A prolific and hugely respected poet, whose environmentalism was ground-breaking and far-reaching. It’s hard to select, but perhaps:
‘Nutting’, ‘Michael’, ‘Resolution and Independence’, The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets, The Prelude Books 1-4
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(The Major Works (2009) contains all the poetry; see also Poetry Foundation)
The extraordinary and vibrant language of Hopkins’s poems express the vitality and magnificence of the natural world in an unprecedented way, changing perceptions. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Hopkins voiced alarm about humans’ destructive impact.
‘Inversnaid’, ‘Binsey Poplars’, ‘Spring’, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘The Windhover’
Charlotte Mew
(volumes published in her lifetime are now rare; Selected Poetry and Prose appeared in 2017 and see Poetry Foundation)
Well-known when she died in 1928, Charlotte Mew was neglected until feminist scholarship and the environmental crisis renewed interest in her poems. Mew finds in the natural world a refuge and a source of joy, and she laments its ruination.
‘Moorland Night’, ‘Lord, when I look’, ‘The Trees Are Down’, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’
Mary Oliver
(many volumes and many editions; The Wild Geese: Selected Poems (2004) is a very good introduction).
Popular and accessible, Mary Oliver’s poems are more tough-minded and challenging than they can appear initially. They are well worth staying with.
‘Wild Geese’, ‘The Hermit Crab’, ‘Starfish’, ‘One or Two Things’, ‘Two Kinds of Deliverance’
Jorie Graham
(Separate volumes widely available; From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 (2015) and [To] The Last [Be] Human (2022) are generous selections)
Graham has been a leading poetic voice addressing, through poems that read like internal monologues, the personal and psychological impact of climate breakdown. Her volumes Never (2002) and Sea Change (2008) are to my mind, the most powerful of her interventions.
‘Dusk Shore Prayer’, ‘Ebbtide’, ‘Sea Change’, ‘Nearing Dawn, ‘ No Long Way Round’
And maybe in school?
Set-texts at GCSE and A-level can be looked at from an ecological perspective: the green Christmas in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the natural order and its revenges in Macbeth, the usurpation of natural energy that Victor Frankenstein seeks to accomplish. Alongside these, there are numerous books that help children and young adults address the climate and biodiversity crises. These are a tiny sample:
Octavia Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ (in Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)) and The Parable of the Sower (1993)
Speculative fiction of real depth and intelligence, raising questions about human beings’ place in the world, their relations to each other, across racial and gender divides, and their relations to non-human forms of life. Sixth-form?
Dara McAnulty, Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020)
Brilliant and direct account of an autistic teenager becoming a conservationist. And full of possible comparisons with Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968).
Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (2021)
A novel full of trees and showing how identifying individual species of tree is not a dry, scientific exercise but the beginning of a deeper relationship.
Florence Wilkinson, Wild City: Encounters with Urban Wildlife (2022)
Extracts from this are great for encouraging students to imagine other ways of living, other kinds of cities.
Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren, Nature’s Calendar: The British Year in 72 Seasons (2023)
Dividing the year into the 72 seasons of a traditional Japanese calendar, the authors describe the changes in the seasons, almost day by day. Brilliant for alerting students to the natural world’s processes, as they take place around them.
Michael J. Warren, The Cuckoo’s Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place (2025)
Written by a secondary school English teacher who is an expert naturalist, The Cuckoo’s Lea shows how place-names and animals, birds especially, are interwoven all over Britain. A history of interdependence emerges: a richer sense of our lives entwined with other non-human lives.
And online?
Here are some links to further resources and opportunities:
The CLARITY Toolbox – CLARITY – many of the resources are focussed on climate science; CLARITY is an exception in adding to the science, its emotional impact and the potential for creative response.
Home | Education Nature Park – a scheme for schools to identify and develop the biodiversity on their school site
Climate Education Action Plan – the University of Reading’s wide-ranging and valuable website
Climate Change Resources for Students and Teachers | Common Sense Education – a catalogue of apps (such as ARKive) that can be used to bring nature into teaching
Learning and education | The Wildlife Trusts – local wildlife trusts offer many opportunities for children to experience and learn about the natural world
Teaching Climate Change | A Practical Manual for Teachers – guidance for how to work and teach outdoors from The Outdoor School
And finally…
Michael Singer, a mathematician, has been fascinated by the peregrine falcons flying, roosting, and nesting near to where he lives in London; a the same time, Michael has been reading J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Quite unexpectedly last week, he wrote to me about his experience of the book and the birds. What he says exemplifies how reading can enhance watching and vice versa.
In his entry for October 12th, JA Baker observes that `…peregines rest in dead trees to dry their feathers, preen and sleep. …they look like gnarled and twisted oak. To find them one must learn the shapes of all the valley trees, till anything added becomes, at once, a bird. Hawks hide in dead tress. They grow out of them like branches.’
As an urban peregrine-watcher (though much less dedicated than Baker) this resonates. There is a peregrine regularly on the local church spire, and in that case one is looking for a slight asymmetry or additional bulge on the various pinnacles of the spire. I have never seen the bird at the very top, but there are four pinnacles surmounted by crosses and a further four statues (I don’t know whether evangelists or apostles). The eye is drawn to the tops of these features, and `anything added becomes, at once, a bird’.
It is ironic that urban peregrines are doing relatively well – Baker’s despairing vision of a country entirely without them now seems incorrect. But on the other hand, his descriptions of the sheer numbers of smaller birds that are prey to the peregrine, and the way they rise in panic almost like smoke from the hedgerows and fields—seem amazing today. I have never experienced anything like that, and I’m pretty sure I never shall, at least in the UK.
My urban peregrine-watching is largely confined to the thrill of seeing them on the tower. Generally, they lounge and preen but I was lucky enough to see a pair mating there a couple of weeks ago (17 January – seems rather early). Sometimes when I’m hanging out with my binoculars and looking up, a passer-by will ask me if there’s a bird there and recount a story: having seen them devour a pigeon up there or even having seen a stoop and a kill. Some swear that they nest there, though it seems more likely that the nest site is in a tower belonging to London Met University on the Holloway Road. I have completely missed out on many of the peregrine experiences described by Baker – I have never seen the birds rise on thermals or any of their hunting behaviour. It is very difficult, in the urban set-up, to follow a bird flying across parks, houses and potentially busy roads. Still, the thrill of just seeing them is real. While the scale of the loss of birds from the countryside is depressing, seeing these genuinely wild birds carve a niche from themselves in a city like London is, for me at least, a beautiful thing.
