For the past two years I have been living between a city centre and an industrial estate. The closest roads are main arteries to and from the city, and the biggest open spaces around are the shopping centre and the middle of the canal. It's fair to say that there has been very little nature to relax and inspire me. In these two years, I have made a personal discovery: I need nature to relax me. And since I have such a lack of green pastures and long walks in the fresh air nearby (the canal hardly counts - a single dirt track for the "riverside walk" leading to a built up shopping area in the docks) I have taken desperate measures to get my fix of plants and trees: I have turned to nature writing.
Reading about the natural world in vivid detail has become my escape from city blocks and dusty streets. I can sit in a cafe or an office and turn pages which conjure smells of the earth after rain, sights of ancient and unseen worlds unspoilt by civilisation, and the pain of exploration, survival and life at ground level. Good writing about nature makes me feel like I'm deep in it, experiencing the world from the point of view of bugs, plants, wild animals or great explorers, sharing the journey with them, and today I'm talking about three books which have done exactly that.
1. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science (2015)
The title is a mouthful (so I will henceforth be referring to it as The Invention of Nature) but it gets across concisely what the next 300+ pages explains. It is a beautiful, tragic biography of a man who gave so much to science, only to be forgotten following his death; a beloved explorer, botanist, and abolitionist whose work inspired new avenues of thought into preservation and environmentalism, and ushered in an age of scientific communication and cooperation which coincided with the rise of the superstar scientist. Through his diary entries, books, and letters to politicians and scientists the world over, Andrea Wulf brings together a picture of a man who was open and honest in his adoration for science and nature. One of his most influential contributions to science was the idea of Naturgemälde: the idea that all of nature is interconnected, and one cannot study a single aspect of it without understanding how it affects - and is affected by - other areas of nature. It was this idea that he brought from his Chilean explorations into the scientific community, and which allowed him to bring together ideas from across a wide range of disciplines and integrate them all into his writing. From there, his writing went on to inspire so many others: Charles Darwin, John Muir, even poets such as Wordsworth and writers like Henry David Thoreau. At the time of his death, his passing was lamented across the West, not just for his contributions to science but for the impact he made in all areas of life.
But this book is not all heroics and awe. It paints Humboldt's life as one of contrasts: his disdain for politics and the courtly life he was required to suffer; his financial difficulties even as he found ways to finance expeditions across the world; his struggles with family, particularly his mother's coldness towards him and his brother, and later his brother's worry over Alexander's own expeditious life. Even as he lamented the destruction of natural habitats in south america and the impact of slavery in the New World, his pleas for abolition and environmental preservation fell on deaf ears. For a man who found joy in every aspect of nature, he remarked that he was "married to science" when it came to aspects of love, and despite his many contacts and friends in the scientific community he was never happier than when he was in the wilderness comparing plants.
Andrea Wulf does a fantastic job injecting the pages of the Invention of Nature with the frenetic energy which must have filled Humboldt's life. We follow him from his noble origins in Prussia to the dizzying heights of mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, and then onto Paris in its cosmopolitan, post-revolution glory. Humboldt never stood still, and neither does Wulf, bringing us through the history of the man who brought botany into the modern age and skipping between the people he knew and influenced (there are chapters dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, Simón bolívar, and Charles Darwin) as they crop up in his life. Even after his death Wulf continues to explore his influence, noting the figures who drew from his writings and brought greater understanding to their own areas of expertise - George Perkins Marsh, considered by some to be America's first environmentalist, who wrote Man and Nature; marine biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, whose detailed illustrations of marine radiolarians became a point of inspiration for the art nouveau movement (though the less said about his views on "racial biology" the better); and the aforementioned John Muir, who was influential in the campaign to create America's National Parks.
And why was such a man forgotten? One who can inspire in others the power to become active and take an interest in the things which interest them, a hero of science who shaped how we see the world and how scientists interact with each other? Wulf puts this on the World Wars: anti-German sentiment erased any goodwill even for German scientists, and put paid to cross-border communication in the scientific community. In an atmosphere where "German Shepherds" became "Alsatians", Humbolt was forgotten in the West as a scientist from the Bad Side who was not worthy to speak of.
Overall the Invention of Nature in engaging and entertaining, and if you're anything like me you'll find yourself identifying with a man who lived nearly two hundred years ago and was devoted to his goal of unifying the sciences under one banner. It is a book with so much to say it might easily have filled twice as many pages, but Wulf's evocative and imaginative writing fit it neatly into a single book. It has been a long time since I found a book which made me want to read scientific literature afterwards, but it has started me on a quest to find translations of Humboldt's writings; one which I may never finish, but I will greatly enjoy, as if in tribute to the man himself.
2. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures (2020)
There was a mushroom documentary on Netflix that I really, truly wanted to like. I honestly did. But I couldn't, because after a short introduction to these strange biological wonders of nature, it took an immediate left turn into psycoactive substances, and I lost interest. When I say I want more media about how cool mushrooms are, I'm not just talking about the magic kind. This has been the case with a lot of media I have tried to explore about fungi - it very quickly veers off into how magic mushrooms are the future, how they can, like, open your miiiind, man! And I'm not particularly interested. I was worried the same thing would happen with Entangled Life, that I would be reading a book that was ninety percent about how trippy it is to take shrooms.
Merlin Sheldrake has taken shrooms. He talks about his experience for approximately one chapter, before returning to how awesome fungi as a whole are. I love Entangled Life because Merlin Sheldrake really loves fungi, and as he writes about them you can feel his excitement and his love for the subject. Not just as drugs, but as an order of organisms which are so unlike anything else on earth. He enthuses about getting covered in mud as he digs through the earth to track trails of hyphae - the thin, web-like root structures fungi send out to connect to surrounding nature - or as he gets close to the earth to try and smell the minute scent of truffles through the soil like a truffle dog. Sheldrake shows a passion for his field almost unparalleled, and certainly so in the non-fiction I have read.
The book itself is varied, and covers topics from the many ways in which fungi interact with the world, to using and making psychoactive substances, to the future of sustainability with fungi furniture, clothes, and building blocks. In some 250 pages he draws comparisons from fungi to various structures and organisations - an economy, the world wide web, labyrinths. But he always comes back to the same conclusion: fungi cannot be defined by comparisons to concepts in our human-centric viewpoint. Whenever we try to explain fungi through the lens of our preconstructed ideas, we oversimplify and miss out details of these strange and ancient structures
The topic of fungi, of course, all links back to Humboldt: it is only through the nature around fungi that we can understand the fungi themselves, their interactions with the trees, flowers and grasses that connect with them, and the insects and animals that affect them too. There are termites who have evolved to feed a particular fungus, which in turn nourishes the termites by digesting and composting grasses which would otherwise be too hardy for the insects to eat. There are fungi in turn which trap burrowing insects and digest them for nourishment, and of course the Cordyceps fungus, which can turn ants into zombies who are no longer in control of their own bodies, getting them eaten by birds to further spread their own spores. The interconnectedness of fungal life is at the core of Entangled Life, and it is this that Sheldrake uses to inspire a passion for fungi in others through his writing.
Sheldrake's writing conjures up pictures of damp forest floors and ancient trees, muddy rainforests and frantic truffle hunts. He is someone who lives and breathes mushrooms, and it shows in his exploration of the topic - interviews with scientists specialising in fungal studies who are blown away by new discoveries in the field, the obligatory appearance of Paul Stamets to talk about pschoactive substances and magic mushrooms, and personal history in which Sheldrake meets many people who encouraged his love for the subject. Sure, his writing at times feels rambling and long-winded - he has a habit of beginning to talk about a topic at the start of a chapter, only to drop it until a grand finale some twenty pages later - but his excitement for the topic is infectious, and permeates every page. The ability of fungi to make, to unmake, to entwine and to conjoin, is brought to startling life in Entangled Life, and it is a topic which is understudied and often misunderstood. With luck that will change thanks to this book, but it is another reminder that no part of nature may be taken in the individual, and that we are part of it, much as we may try to separate ourselves from it.
3. Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A World in the Making (2022)
It is difficult, if not impossible, to look at a fossil and imagine the environment in which it lived. Seeing a wall full of ichthyosaurs at the Natural History Museum, you get a sense of the animal from its calcified skeleton, but I find it difficult to visualise it swimming through the ocean, what it might prey on or be preyed upon by. We are separated from the lives of these fossils by hundreds of millions of years, a gulf in which the Earth itself has changed immeasurably. How can we possibly imagine the ecosystem such ancient creatures lived in, and their place in it.
Thomas Halliday managed it.
Otherlands: A World in the Making (or Otherlands for short) is Halliday's exploration of prehistoric worlds, discovering in-depth the flora and fauna of landscapes from the pleistocene to the precambrian. Reading Otherlands is like reading a transcript of a nature documentary we will never get to see: Halliday brings to life snapshots of prehistoric lands, focusing on the details so that we can build a complete picture of the place rather than trying to build a broad view of the world as a whole. In this way he places you into the setting, almost feeling the frigid wind as we learn about ancient horses at the dawn of humanity's rise, or tumbling through deep sea currents and glimpsing the alien anatomy of the cambrian explosion.
Throughout it all Halliday explains how we have learned about these environs, weaving summaries of fossil records and recent discoveries through the narrative effortlessly. Whether that is a discussion of the evolution of Australopithecus in the early chapters, or the discovery of hybodont eggs confirming a site in Central Asia as a spawning ground for ancient sharks, Halliday leaps from vivid description of surroundings and creatures to the structure behind the construction with barely a paragraph break. It's like visiting a theme park: while it may all look absurd and fantastic, it's a facade backed up by strong foundations.
One point I find against it is, it all tends to bleed together. While I read through it all, there was a lot which did not stick, and I could not tell you in which era we explored giant penguins or a forest of proto-trees. And while Halliday's writing is evocative, it tends to get mired down at times - it is difficult to keep every latin name straight in my head, and I found my mind wandering as I got around halfway through the chapter, wondering where exactly it was going.
Sometimes it's going precisely nowhere at all. Halliday delights in the exploration of these prehistoric spaces, but the structure of the book means there is often no resolution to what can be called a "narrative" in any chapter: the ur-horses do not freeze to death, but neither do they survive. They are forever trapped in this rime of ice, forever weathering the storm. Would it have been better to get some denouement from these vignettes? Possibly not - as Halliday notes, fossils preserve better in different environments, sometimes varying from season to season, so perhaps trying to form a conclusion to each focus is mere speculation.
But for all its detail without story, for all its exploration without function, it is a book which looks back so it can look forward. Thomas Halliday ends Otherlands with an environmental message: CO2 levels are rising to levels not seen since the Eoscene, 34 million years ago, and we are environmental engineers to such a degree we are causing a sixth, man-made extinction event. When we look back we see rising temperatures, increasing CO2 levels, and an ocean world to the point that the latter third of the book is all underwater escapades. Do we honestly wish to return to that?
And yet, Thomas Halliday maintains hope. In the face of all this change, we can look at the first trees which made their own environment unlivable through projecting vast quantities of oxygen into the air, or go back even further to cyanobacteria and early algae, some of the earliest creatures to photosynthesise - these living organisms which were so successful, but ultimately went extinct because they could not weather the changes they themselves were making - we can look at these prehistoric records of mass climate change, and know we have one thing they did not: the awareness to change course.
Above it all, Otherlands holds a mirror up to the present day. Through every extinction event, whether caused by some outside catastrophe or a number of earth-bound species, we see mirrors to our own situation today. Rising temperatures, changing balances of gases in the atmosphere, the slow subsidence of continents... these are not new problems. They are eons old. But thanks to this book, we can peer into windows of the past and predict what the outcome will be, and how we may change it.
Conclusion
I don't have any particular message here, beyond "read more nature books". But I enjoyed these. Reading about nature shows me how connected we are to the trees, the grass, the fungi. Reading about the history of the world shows me how we may change our course and how we may weather the changes we are making. Reading about historical figures shows me we have not changed as much as we may like to think, but also that people are fundamentally good, and though technology may change the pace at which life is lived, it has not changed our hopes, our fears, and our passions.
Ecology is not a field I have studied. It is not something, two years ago, I would have said I was interested in. But a pandemic and a lockdown puts some perspective on things: better to enjoy the nature we have now, and fight to protect the nature of tomorrow, than to languish in sorrow and wish things were better when they are not. In my outlook I wish to be more like Humboldt with his energy and passions, and in my perspective I wish to look as far as Halliday, into the past and the future. And in time, perhaps I can learn to be as flexible as fungi, and connect to my environment with such enthusiasm.
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