David’s love of nature is deep, abiding, and dynamic. He is involved with a number of conservation projects across the UK, from Norfolk beaches to the island of Skomer off the coast of Wales, as well as protecting the endangered Curlew. The natural world features throughout his work in various guises and is only ever a heartbeat away.

In my interview with David, he spoke about the role of natural imagery in song-writing, his reimagination of time in music and the natural world, and what Skellig means. We also spoke about some of his new tracks in depth, what he is working on now, and some of his visions for the future, including a curlew-inspired tour idea.

It is a snapshot of the conversation he will have with curlew conservationist and writer Mary Colwell for Nature Matters’ special evening event this year (Saturday 20^th November, 20:00-21:30). This will be David’s first live event since before the pandemic, and during the conversation he will play a number of songs including the premiere of his new track ‘The Arc’.

Your most recent album, Skellig, is musically stripped back – you have spoken about it trying to get away from the noise of humanity. How much is nature entwined through the foundations of this album?

Nature imagery runs throughout my records to some extent, but it is easier to sense it from Skellig’s musical simplicity. The album is all about slowing down. Not all the songs are directly related to nature, but the imagery is never far away; it’s what I reach for.

The ocean-like lull and openness of the first song, the title track of Skellig, encapsulates the spirit of the record. It starts with an image that evokes whales: ‘Oh, that the song I’m singing was an ocean wide’. I must have registered at some point the theory that whale song can stretch almost as wide as an ocean, but the ocean in this song is perhaps a human ocean: one that lies between life and death.

Another track, ‘The White Owl’ came from the magical experience of seeing barn owls where I am in Norfolk. The owls became a symbol of this place for me. I began to realise I was marking my time here by my viewings of the barn owl: I was either seeing an owl or waiting to see another one. They have suffered such horrible declines that I rarely see one now; I used to see one every time I came here – now, I’m lucky if I see one in every ten visits.

The track uses this idea of the owl as a spirit bird that inhabits the place. I bound the mystery of my friend passing away to the bird, which is a very old shamanistic concept. These creatures and places have a strong power over me. A walk where I hear the wing beats of a thousand starlings passing over head would be the most important part of a day for me and puts me in my right place. The dynamo that powers the soul is shackled to this natural imagery, which also powers many of my songs.

In terms of the album broadly, it mattered a lot to me to know the precise details about the monks living on the Irish island Skellig, from which this record gets its name.

I learned about them living on top of those rocks for hundreds of years, exposed to Atlantic gales and surrounded by massive colonies of seabirds making cacophonous sounds. They were not only there for a life of contemplation, but also to save the word – the poem that was Christianity in its early stages – as elsewhere the books were being burned and people were being killed. The idea of nature in its purest and most overpowering form was central to these people devoting their lives by living in this almost inhospitable place.

I like to drink nature in as greedily and as often as I can, but the austerity and the power of the monks’ experience sent my mind spiralling dizzily up into how difficult it must have actually been. I was struck by the idea of what that commitment entailed: to feel something that strongly that you would flee to live in a sparse population in darkness. I realised that my own innermost yearning is similar and that song is that rock for me – I will crawl up on my hands and knees to get that feeling.

The idea of harmony is key to core conservation principles and the laws of the natural world. Do you see the same kind of collaboration – joining with other people in song – as integral to your music?

The massing of human voices is so moving. To intone a certain line alone is one thing, but the choral aspect of Skellig – having six fellow singers sing the same words to carry the whole song from beginning to end – makes it something completely different.

Skellig is far from a solo project. The fact that we are sharing the words – the innermost sanctum of the music – and having to hold those words and sing them softly, loudly, forcefully or quietly is such an intimacy. Making the record was an incredible experience: it was like discovering a new substance in the universe when we were singing these songs together and being wrapped up in the vocals.

Adding our voices together to help things is definitely a metaphor for conservation issues – we have to bind together. Especially with the current weaponizing of state machinery to make every form of protest illegal.

With the messiness and nonsense of our current situation, and the meaninglessness of political talk, I recently found myself wondering what I actually believe in. I worked out that it is music, people, and places. So, I thought I would put those three together and start from there, and had a vision of myself walking Skellig through the country (almost like a songline). The idea would be to make it a group singing tour where we would go from place to place with no plan. Even though I am not sure how feasible this is as a tour, I have still thought of just doing it myself and walking with the songs and trying to connect people.

I don’t believe in the culture of competition spurred on by the media. I believe in something quieter – but maybe it is too late for that. I’m at a point in my life where I feel something has to happen. For me, that involves being versed in the situation with the curlews as I am now. By talking to Mary Colwell at Curlew Action and being involved in curlew events, I have learned the mosaic of interests and problems that surround the bird. It is such a symbolic species that is part of the poetry and mystery of our island, but it is going down in large parts of the country. This generates an incredible sense of desperation in me – and then I start thinking mad thoughts about walking through the rain with a guitar until someone arrests me! But that’s how I feel – I want to do something beyond expressing concern.

The songs themselves on Skellig are very peaceful and meditative: what is the role of that calmness now? How can we take time out of the chaos for ourselves, for others, and for the natural world?

I am actually a person who finds it quite hard to be calm – I have quite a manic energy and become agitated. (I blame genetics and the world we live in). But the wonderful thing about music and art generally is that it can be so many things. It can be a confrontational statement as well as the opposite, making you slow down and observe songs at the pace of flowers blooming. That is vital: it is the power of art. It’s a very subtle, nuanced power.

When we sang that opening track, ‘Skellig’, for the first time as a group, I realised I needed an entire album that fitted that mood with nothing that disrupted the tempo or the atmosphere. It needed to be something drifting and almost tempo-less where words and ideas can float and resonate in a way they can’t under the driving beat of a drummer: it is very much about the 6/8 drift. There is something very internal about a 6/8 time signature, which is part of folk music because it is so natural and has a lovely circularity to it.

I think it is really important to slow people down and slow yourself down. It is not an easy thing to do; time has its hooks in us and there are clocks everywhere. Time is all about the workplace and enclosing people’s minds and hours: it is part of the mechanism of consumer industry and I think it has a very controlling, corrosive influence on our thinking. So, to step outside time is vital.

When we are in love, making music, or having fun, we are free of the clock. Time itself becomes different. There are accounts from Indigenous tribes in the Amazon who recall that before the missionaries came in with calendars and clocks a year had seemed so much longer. Many Indigenous cultures think in timescales of seven generations: that idea that you don’t inherit the world from your parents, you borrow it from your children. Over here, we are controlled to work like shire horses so there is no vision of the future.

I am shackled like everybody else, but I see music as a vital part of the resistance. When music starts to flow and I start to write, I become engrossed and let go of those constraints; it is impossible to just be in the moment if you are watching the clock. It is also one of the wonderful things about being on stage; you don’t have your phone and you know that for the next few hours you can just be in the moment.

The quietness here in Norfolk is really interesting for my music. I was worried about polluting the purity of this space with my work, but actually there is this whole new language and sense of space and possibility here. The other day when the geese flew over, we recorded them and put the sound straight into the song I was working on. In terms of the Skellig idea of slowing down time, there is more of a sense here of what that means and how you could extend that idea to make a piece of music that intertwines like brambles.

What does this year’s Nature Matters theme (‘Local to Global’) mean to you?

It means everything. In this country so much land is privately owned; the extent of enclosure here means that only 3% of England’s navigable waterways are open to the public. Fixing biodiversity issues and fulfilling the needs of niche creatures will therefore come down to local people: individual landowners or corporations with a vested interest in the produce of an area.

I think it can be disempowering when everything is addressed from an enormous global perspective. I know it is important to see the bigger picture, but the solutions are going to come from big decisions made by local people. And when local people join together, it has an impact.

We are going to have to make lifestyle and other sacrifices if species are to stand a chance, and we have to view creatures, spaces, and possibilities in the natural world as having a value. Currently, they don’t have a value for most people, and we have to take baby steps to bridge the gaps between people and their local surroundings. I believe in small-scale change and individual change.

Our culture is technology-obsessed and thinks it is evolving towards something, at the cost of losing some of the riches we once owned. I don’t know what is going to happen to the curlew. With my own music, though, I was in a wilderness where no-one was interested in it and that changed. We reached a tipping point where suddenly it was a stupid idea not to listen to me, and then it became a success. It came from nothing: a few people in a room with a handful of equipment, with no finance behind us, with no record company – but that record went on to sell millions of copies. Miracles can happen!

I am not saying that is going to happen with the curlew. But what I do know is that it is creatures like the curlew that actually taught us to sing. We see them as decorous aspects of our experience, but that’s where language and music came from. That’s why when you hear their sound there is a sense of deep time interweaving so many threads. We have that sound within us.

I have written a song for the curlew, for an RSPB album fully comprised of curlew tracks organised by the anthropologist and musician Merlyn Driver. The song is called ‘Arc’, and it is about stepping into the sound that the curlew makes and feeling connected to all the other times you have heard it, the place you’re in, and the people you have been with. And then, beyond that, a sense of deep time: the sense that this is the sound of these lands, a sense of deep ancestral connection. It is the idea of a dreamlike circularity that exists inside the song and what happens to the human heart as that beam of sound hits it.

The album will be released next year, but I will be premiering ‘The Arc’ during my conversation with Mary at Nature Matters on the 20^th of November. I will also be playing some of my other songs, including some from Skellig. It will be the first public event I have done since before the pandemic!

What is the role of songwriters and music making in the current moment?

Culture has a huge role to play. I feel my role is to make the natural elements of my songs tangible and real, to draw people in and make it an affair for their hearts as well as mine.

I find when music gets too preachy it just doesn’t work. That is not how my imagination wants to be engaged. Of course, I could counter that with many brilliant protest songs: ‘With God on Our Side’ by Bob Dylan or Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’, or Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.

Generally, though, I believe in a more unconscious mind and drawing it in: making the world something tangible and magical which identifies with our experience. I believe in the state of mystery that you encounter something in. For example, in the wild, this is often a moment of surprise then a slowing down in wonder, or something fast like a sparrow chasing something in front of your eyes which is gone in a flash. Or you might notice something in the sand dunes like a mushroom or flower that you’ve never noticed before, and then you slow down and enter the dreamy zone of dune-time.

Music has become commercial – a pollutant that exists everywhere: in shops, on transport – but it still has a role to play. As a musician I think you need to pay attention to your heart, to those around you, and the world around you, and make the best music that you can make. I don’t think there is anything more important as a human culture than to have albums like Astral Weeks or Nevermind.

Art is a powerful thing but it can’t be shackled comfortably to ideas, because then it becomes preachy and telling. For me, it has to be a mysterious thing.

(All photographs taken by David Gray)

Nick Mayhew-Smith is a researcher and writer specialising in environmental theology, sacred landscapes, and Celtic spirituality. His books, including The Naked Hermit and the recently published Landscape Liturgies, explore holy places in both natural and built environments.

Nick will be speaking on the panel ‘Nature and Spirituality’ at this year’s Nature Matters, accompanying Satish Kumar and Jini Reddy for a conversation chaired by Annabel Ross on the ways the natural world can reflect and define perceptions on what it is to be human or divine.

I spoke to Nick about the value of the locality of place, the role of religion – particularly early Christianity – as a bridge between humans and nature, and the margins of the landscape as important symbols for conservation.

We also discussed some of Nick’s work to restore some of the traditions and practices of early Christianity, including creating sacred places in natural landscapes and going skinny dipping. Nick believes that spirituality and place have an important role to play in both the environmental and mental health crises, and advocates positive attitudes towards the natural world as well as restored definitions of ‘community’ in order to tackle these crises effectively.

How can landscapes and features of landscapes connect us spiritually within ourselves, with each other, and with our natural surroundings?

Our very longest stories are recorded by place names which are embedded in the landscape, through which we store repositories of our community commemorations and significant events, and remember people over really long periods. I live in Wimbledon, for example, whose name derives from its tenth century name meaning ‘Wynnman’s hill’ (‘dun’ means ‘hill’ in Celtic) – some lucky chap called Wynnman owned the area as his farm. Landscapes are more enduring than human structures or organisations, so they facilitate very long connections across time, linking us to the joys and pains and triumphs of people who have gone before. In this way, the landscape for me is a place where we meet the bigger picture, with the emotions and feelings of what has happened there before still resonating today.

What does this year’s Nature Matters theme (‘Local to Global’) mean to you?

When I started presenting my research, I was – rightly – tripped up by somebody who said that all my celebration of place in Britain might lead to a narrow-minded, nationalist sense that we in this particular country are special and blessed by God. (I’ve written largely about how special Britain can be in its holy places and mountains because it is where I live and can therefore easily see these places). It tripped me up because that is exactly the opposite of my political views and beliefs.

For me, the relationship between the local and the global is that your local connection to place is a way to experience universal expressions of human truths. An example is the holy wells we have in Britain – and we have thousands because it rains so much here. You could say that we are particularly blessed in Britain by having so many holy wells, or you could see this as part of human nature that runs very deep: not just the need to supply clean water, but also a way of recording universal metaphors such as new birth; this is a pure spring coming out of the ground, a place where a river is born. It is very important to me that local veneration of place does tie to a bigger picture in this way, which connects it to a wider meaning.

I was teaching a course recently and a few of my students from the Philippines taught me that the holy mountains in the Philippines serve the same purpose as those in Britain. It is these global resonances and connections between holy spaces that are the important bits for me. Rather than a nationalist or culturally chauvinistic statement of our land being special and defining us, therefore, I see it as being part of the universal. That’s where spirituality and religion come in, with the idea that there is something that is bigger than all of us. And we can meet and encounter that in local ways.

Alongside your writing about nature, religion, and pilgrimage, you also write about nude bathing. Could you tell us a little more about the overlap between this affinity for immersion and your interests in Celtic tradition?

The early church mandated that baptism had to take place in flowing, natural water because it was seen to have spirit and life going through it, and it had to be done with no clothes on (to the point where women were even told to take off hair fastenings and jewellery). Nowadays, the church simply wouldn’t understand that. It’s all very polite and buttoned up these days: you put a few drops of water of water on the baby’s head and then all go and have tea together.

So, originally, baptisms used to have a deep sense of going back into and embracing creation physically and bodily. We don’t do that now – it’s no longer remotely possible in our culture and I wouldn’t recommend it either. But what you can do is ‘skinny dip’ in water in your state of innocence. It is to my mind a devout thing to not take anything artificial and plastic such as swimming costumes or wetsuits into the water with you; they all release microfibres and particles into the water systems. Going in as you were born, on the other hand, will have no effect on the water, and I quite like that as a statement, approaching the water as something to preserve from contamination.

It also shakes up people’s notions about what religion and spirituality is. In early church manuscripts there are pictures of saints stripped off and going into the water, which nowadays people would deem outrageous, saying that ‘you can’t paint Saint Cuthbert’s bottom!’ for example. But there indeed is St Cuthbert going into the sea at Lindisfarne; there is a full illustration of him going naked into the waves. There are also early pictures of Christ being baptized in the nude. There used to be a real sense that a full embrace of creation involves the human body. I think environmentalism is a very bodily thing – protestors are gluing their bodies to the road and putting their bodies in the way.

I would never tell people what to do when it comes to their bodies – the church has done enough of that – but for me skinny dipping is a real act of innocence and is very moving. My encounters in the landscape felt very exposed and raw and vulnerable. Whenever I go into the river I take a bag and fill up with as much rubbish as I can as an act of cleansing. I always go into these places and try to make sure that not only do I feel refreshed but that I also come back with a bag full of plastic. And you find bits of rubbish absolutely everywhere: so I want to strip not just myself but also strip the beach of this plastic junk.

The first time I did it was on the Atlantic coast of France, where I was following a practice of the early saints who would preach to the birds. There was a sand bar off the coast so I stripped off, waded into the water, and walked up to these birds – and just thought what the heck do I do here – it felt ridiculous. I realised that actually all I could say to these birds was ‘I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry’. At that point I felt a bump on my leg and I looked down thinking I must be having a miraculous encounter with a fish – but it was actually a bit of green nylon fishing rope washing about in the waves. I still have it now. I felt embarrassed and ashamed by the whole wretched situation. So, I spent the rest of the day collecting plastic from the beach. Just by going in with that real sense of my own fragility and failure became a way in which the environment and I formed a sort of continuum, experiencing for myself what the birds experience in their damaged habitat.

In addition to being a beach-lover, why do you think it is important that overlooked places – like churchyards – are given attention?

A common theme in the Celtic stories is ‘the hunter and the hermit’, where the hermit will be praying in a clearing in the forest when a hare or deer suddenly breaks into the clearing pursued by a hunter (usually a king or knight). The hermit will protect this animal in their space and prevent the hunter from killing it; in many stories the hunter is magically frozen, and the hounds are unable to enter the holy space.

That sanctuary in the landscape became the early churchyard; this area would be set apart in the land and the church would subsequently be built there. The Welsh word ‘llan’ does not refer to a ‘church’, as is commonly believed, but rather the clearing around the church: a grove of trees much older than the building. That was a space set apart from human interests and exploitation; you couldn’t hunt or take weapons into the grove – it was a nonviolent human space in the landscape.

The early Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who I’ve mentioned already, introduced a law banning Northumbrians from collecting eggs from the islands in the seventh century. That’s often held up as being one of the world’s first conservation laws; even today Inner Farne Island is a National Trust nature reserve, and is one of the richest places for bird life.

A lot of people – quite rightly – see religion as having done a lot of bad things, but I love the idea that you could regard a churchyard and other holy spaces such as hermit islands as being places where all of creation has the same protection. Celtic Christianity is all about reconciliation: the idea that all creation is good and needs to be respected. (Many early monks were vegetarians).

Your work and writing also goes beyond places like coral reefs and tropical rainforests typically associated with conservation towards images of labyrinths, depths, darkness, caves, soil. What is the role of those darker, less typically pristine spaces?

The margins of the landscape were seen in Celtic times as places that were slightly demonic or of the other world; people were afraid of them. There was a scepticism about the Christian God – a belief that this God would not have any traction or power in caves, mountaintops and the sea, which were thought to be places of darkness, full of beasts and monsters.

The early saints would work to prove to pre-Christian people that there is a God with dominion over all places by spending the night in a cave or on a mountaintop to show there was a harmony with all parts of creation, and light could be brought into these places. There are even stories about how the saints’ arms would actually glow and light up the cave with divine energy. They would also wade into the sea to pray. For them, bathing in the sea was a way of showing they could be kept safe and actually have a positive experience – showing that you can experience the divine in all parts of the landscape.

I like this idea that everywhere is touched and graced because it is created. I think you could extend that now to look at damaged and polluted landscapes as special; these are places which are important and for which we need to regain our respect.

Where does ancient spiritual tradition in the past meet the need for change – in terms of attitudes to the natural world – now and in the future?

The environmental story needs to have a positive message to it and a sense of hope in order to reconnect people to the landscape. The role religion has had in the past – and can have again – a mandate to regard natural places as special and sacred. If we were to capture people’s imaginations of place with a sense of magic and history and reverence it would give them a more connected enjoyment of the landscape.

I encourage people to re-adopt some of the very old relationships between humans and landscape that fostered a sense of reverence and care. For example, people used to come together and have councils at the foot of ancient trees which were regarded as meeting places. We don’t do that anymore, but I think local churches could meet at and re-sanctify ancient landmark trees in order to reconnect that relationship and foster the healthier idea of natural spaces as meeting places rather than as resources or even commodities. A lot of the answers are found in old communal patterns of human interaction with nature.

What role can groups like New Networks for Nature, and events like Nature Matters play in making change?

It is utterly important to network with other people and to create and share cultural outputs that have an impact. We need to gather and talk and share because a large part of our environmental problem is that we are all insulated in our own homes with our own cars; everything has become privatized and atomized. There is no sense of communal space. What I love is the idea that community can be a bigger thing, and New Networks for Nature has a strong sense of community at its heart.

Nowadays ‘community’ almost means the exact opposite of what it once meant. Community used to mean shared public space: a place everyone could go, like a market place, where people did not have to be similar but rubbed along together. Now, community means a collection of like-minded people interested in the same hobby or set of ideas.

New Networks brings in people with very different views. We have that communal space where we do not have to think alike but instead cohere around place, around a sense of loving the landscape. From the list of speakers, you can see there is a broad collection of people: it is community in the good sense rather than the narrow sense. My co-panellists, for example, have very different perspectives but I am honoured and flattered to be sitting alongside them. That for me is community: the idea we will support each other on our very different journeys, sharing stories and a common endeavour.

At Nature Matters, you will be speaking on the panel ‘Nature and Spirituality’ about humanity and divinity and the connections between nature and spirituality. What issues do you hope for the panel to tackle?

In my work and that of my co-panellists there is a sense of disembodiment and displacement and insulation from the natural world. Jini’s books talk about getting wet and rain thundering down in Scotland while Satish focuses on pilgrimages to cities. The connection is that we each put our bodies on the line, wading in in very different ways to find real joy and pleasure and an overwhelming sense of connection to the environment.

Nowadays a holiday is generally seen as being about luxury and self-indulgence. But there is also real pleasure to be taken from a walk in the rain in Wales or Scotland (though many people would say this is their idea of hell on earth) or a plunge in the cold sea. I hope we talk about these different ways we have put ourselves on the line and the healing of body and mind that results from it. (I’m still on a high now from some of my encounters sitting on a hermit island for a night in the middle of nowhere).

There is a real sense of depression and stress emerging from the lockdowns over the past year and a half which worries me. For me, the most important thing to achieve is to encourage people with reasons, excuses, and stories to follow us into the landscape – perhaps in less extreme ways – to make stories and connections for themselves.

You don’t have to go somewhere else to have a sense of the sacred and the natural. The ground beneath our own feet is also important.

Are there any other questions and challenges you are taking to Nature Matters, especially post-COP26?

The important bit is how you embody what you talk about. I can have my experiences in nature and bathe in the river, but I still have a car and buy consumer junk from the shops. I do consume less and I am more aware through my work and writing, yet I am as bad as anyone – though hopefully on a downward curve – when it comes to my consumption. So, I will be interested to hear ideas on how we can overcome that hypocrisy.

I would also love to know more about how we can remember and remind other people that there is actually a lot of fun to be had in nature – whether from wild swimming, nature therapy or walks – and it is not all about misery. Everyone likes and understands a beautiful landscape as a healing place so if we can boost that side to it then we can help people get out there and feel better mentally too.

Nick will be joining Satish Kumar and Jini Reddy for a conversation chaired by Annabel Ross about nature and spirituality from 09:45-11:00 on Sunday November 21^st. The panel will discuss the role of the natural world in reflecting and defining our perceptions on what it is to be human or divine. See the full programme and buy tickets here: https://archive.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/2021-event/.

Written by Noa Leach

Julian will be speaking at this year’s Nature Matters with natural-history journalist Ben Hoare about the future of natural-history television and its dual responsibility to entertain and enlighten viewers (Saturday, 16:30-17:15). I spoke to Julian about artistic expression and the natural world, the ‘Blue Planet II effect’, and the role of storytelling in alleviating anxiety as well as inspiring action – which he will be talking about at greater length during his session at Nature Matters.

Julian is optimistic despite the urgency of the tasks at hand, and sees a clear set of challenges and questions facing the delegates at Nature Matters and the wider world. He believes that storytelling is at the heart of inspiring collaboration and local action.

In your eyes, what role do the arts and creativity play in forging connections between humans and the natural world?

One of the great things that the natural world offers to humanity is an almost infinite seam of expression. The arts – in a broad sense, including painting, literature, music, and dance – make emotional connections with subjects, tapping into the humanity of that expression through observation. Nature, with its colours and sounds and interactions, as well as its fragility and its relationship with us, is uniquely interpreted by each maker of art – and it is those interpretations which are so valuable.

This expression goes beyond anthropomorphism, which is just one small device of storytelling to make characters relatable to humans. Storytelling is at the heart of everything: it’s the bridge between humans and nature. After centuries of us trying to control nature and leaving such a large human footprint on our surroundings, the arts have never been more important in providing different ways to connect to the natural world.

The ‘Blue Planet II effect’ has become a buzzword for the power of successful media-led behaviour change campaigns. What can the entertainment sector and mainstream media achieve in terms of raising awareness and increasing public engagement?

The Blue Planet II effect was the result of highly innovative storytelling where we emotionally engaged audiences with the characters within the Blue Planet II sequences. The immersive and emotionally engaging storytelling allowed audiences to understand that animals live out their lives with plans to survive and raise their young. So when you add a major pollutant into their lives (in this case: plastic) then the connection between this very visible problem and its interference in those plans is implicit.

That’s what the Blue Planet II effect is; it’s about storytelling which makes the subject of the story (in this case the natural world) relatable, and therefore our relationship with it becomes very real. In the wider sense then, the important thing is to create that emotional engagement, which needn’t be around despair and doom and declining numbers, but can be around telling the stories of the lives of animals and plants such that we understand that our behaviour can interact negatively with it.

Just like that famous still photograph of the seahorse holding a cotton bud in its tail, the sequence of the sperm whale calf mouthing a large plastic barrel that once contained oil made the audiences realise that pollution is happening at every level and we all have to do something about it. It’s all about nudging audiences to understand the relationship with the wildlife around them.

Are those iconic images and very emotional visual scenes important to creating a legacy?

Beautifully shot images of nature are stunning, and we welcome their beauty and power into our homes. And then when you have images of fragility, it’s heart-rendering.

We are visual people, but the other aspects of storytelling are all part of the mix. Words (both how you say something and the cadence of how you tell it) and sounds are really important, while music supplements stories with incredible power.

What role do figureheads like David Attenborough play – as part of that mix – in telling stories and changing behaviour?

David Attenborough is a unique individual who has been around a long time as a trusted voice and an extraordinary storyteller. My team and I lean on trust enormously; audiences need to trust what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing, and what we’re making.

Audiences also like authentic voices. So if other people have a deep knowledge as well as a genuine and authentic love of nature, they also have a very important role to play in terms of getting the message out and attracting large numbers of people. And we have an important role in finding those new faces and voices.

The natural world is a global commons which belongs to everyone, and I think it’s wonderful that social media platforms allow everybody to share their perspective and knowledge (pitfalls aside!).

This year’s Nature Matters will take place in Bath which is not far from where the BBC Natural History Unit has been situated in Bristol for over 60 years. Why is the South-West such a good hub for interdisciplinary action?

In 1979 ‘Life on Earth’ was first broadcast which defined a whole new era: the big natural history landmark was born. This attracted huge global audiences over time. The upshot of this was that it acted as an incredibly potent magnet for talent; people came to the region to make wildlife films and to support the making of wildlife films.

The talent grew and sustained, and now, in 2021, Bristol has a vibrant and healthy ecology of the BBC and non-BBC companies in all aspects of the production process. We’ve been collaborating over the last 10 years directly with the University of the West of England (UWE) where the Natural History Unit, with UWE, runs a Masters in Wildlife Filmmaking. Those students come from loads of different backgrounds and they’re seeding a lot of that diversity in wildlife filmmaking.

Bristol has an enormously vibrant arts and music scene and its own theatre, and it’s a city which has for a long time celebrated its diversity with views and opinions and input from everybody. All of this cultivates and generates a creative environment in which conservation bodies, scientific endeavours and the media all interact – many of which have their headquarters in or near Bristol and Bath. It’s a really vibrant community of people who just love knowledge and content.

What does this year’s theme, ‘Local to Global’, mean to you?

Television is a global business: we bring the full scale of the natural world into people’s lives, giving them access to the wonder of the natural world wherever it is and wherever they are. Our role is to liberate stories of the natural world to provide people the exhilaration of escapism – as well as to immerse them in the fragility of the natural world at a global level.

But we are also interested in things which are local. We’re very proud of long-running strands like Springwatch which are very much part of the cultural vernacular of this country. Springwatch celebrates the natural world of the UK and the science behind the knowledge of the local habitats here. As a live programme, it allows UK audiences to really understand and immerse themselves in an agenda that isn’t theirs in the here and now while anchoring them in local natural history.

When it comes to the big international landmarks and campaigning, the BBC has to be impartial because that’s part of its charter and the trust we cherish and protect with our audiences. But what we do campaign about is our relationship with the natural world. We link up organisations with specific campaigns, a great deal of which are about local advocacy. I feel our job in this sense is to bring people together and empower local organisations.

Making connections is very important; one of the great things which has emerged out of these tense climate change talks is how our actions here can affect people thousands of miles away. People have real power to act locally in terms of who they support, what they buy, how they live their lives. These are the connections which are right at the top of the climate change and ecosystems agenda.

How can we support and encourage collaboration – across different media or between different disciplines?

Creativity is a wonderful elixir, and we are all conjoined in our relationships with the natural world and the creative subject matter it provides us with. The research organisations – whether universities or government institutes or charities – originate the knowledge which we then package up as powerful storytelling on television or radio.

To work in partnership, you need to bring different things to the table rather than competing in the same airspace. Fostering collaboration requires leadership to help everyone recognize what they can offer.

What role can groups like New Networks for Nature and events like Nature Matters play in making change?

New Networks for Nature was originally self-assembled by a group of people interested in those who use the natural world for expression and want to share how nature inspires them, meeting to bounce ideas off each other and build creativity.

I believe that sort of essence of New Networks hasn’t diminished – it’s just grown. So New Networks elegantly brings together scientists, authors, naturalists, nature-reserve managers, content producers, presenters, musicians, poets: people widely across the arts and the sciences by an interest in the natural world.

This year the event is live-streamed and, while we’ve lived in difficult times during the pandemic, we’ve all learned to use video very well! But whether it be in the room or by video, people meeting and being and exchanging creative thoughts and making friendships in a safe space can only be good for our relationship with nature – and that’s what New Networks does.

In your session at Nature Matters, you will be discussing the conflicting obligations of nature entertainment to simultaneously enlighten while relaxing viewers. Can you give us a brief insight into how you think natural-history television can resolve this conflict?

People love being in the company of natural history and the awe and wonder of it all. We portray that with globally defining photography and storytelling.

Escapism is important; I’ve never known a time as we’re in right now where I have seen so much anxiety around. The messaging everywhere is apocalyptic and so much action is needed. We have an important role in portraying the natural world as a place of enormous global heritage and cultural value that it’s part of not just keeping us alive, but actually what makes us human. That, in some ways, is the entertainment side.

We also have to portray truthfully how the natural world is in decline and how our relationship with it has been hostile for so long that it looks like there could be a very dangerous end-point where ecosystems cease being functional. We therefore have to balance the wonder of nature with telling a story that allows people to act responsibly and to do more, and that is a constantly evolving process.

In addition to our documentaries, our big landmarks have had a big impact. They attract huge audiences and skilfully make people care about their surroundings in a way that doesn’t arrest in fear but actually makes them want to do more. That’s what I’ll be talking about at Nature Matters.

Has the change over the last few years left you feeling optimistic?

The work we do reaches the population at large – which is our main priority – but also reaches those that have enormous influence. I’m an optimist because we have to be. I am optimistic because we have a big role to play and a responsibility to do so.

As I look at COP26, the big message is that the treaties that are signed have to be about nations working together with a sustained plan that will mend our distressed planet – or more poignantly, allow the earth to continue to sustain us. The world did come together to take on a global pandemic, where science and change in behaviour worked; the scientific endeavour of the world’s nations did come together to solve the hole in the ozone layer, and quite quickly. Exactly the same has to happen with reducing the rise of global temperatures and, on a quicker time scale, restoring ecosystems. Measures and our behaviour have to reverse the destruction of rainforests, the draining of wetlands, over-development of coastlines to name but three – and of course for wildlife to share the farming landscape equably.

Geopolitics is very complex, but citizens are involved like never before – whether that is because of influence, social engagement, or the effects of work that we all do. I think attitudes of waiting until someone else has fixed it have gone away; there’s a palpable sense that it is everyone’s responsibility at different levels.

What other questions and challenges are you taking to Nature Matters?

I think it’s important that we keep at the heart of discussions that functioning ecosystems – not just habitats – are vital to a living world. The restoration of the biodiversity which allows these ecosystems to sustain on a large scale is the important agenda, as it is through the characters living within the habitats of ecosystems that we tell stories. That’s the important message for me.

Do you have a particular species that acts as a guiding force during this time?

I adore albatrosses. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about them! Albatrosses are the most wonderful oceanic aviators; they soar over the oceans and alight on very remote places to breed. (I love remote windy places, particularly in the Antarctic). They’re long lived, and both parents take equal duties in raising the offspring. They are so beautiful, but they are so vulnerable.

When I used to work with albatrosses on South Georgia in the 80s I used to love their smell: a unique albatross musty smell. The jacket I used to wear back then still has that albatross smell!

Julian will be joining Ben Hoare for a conversation about the future of natural-history television from 16:30-17:15 on Saturday November 20^th. See the full programme and buy tickets here: https://archive.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/2021-event/.

Written by Noa Leach

Sarah Gillespie is an artist who specialises in wildlife – particularly moths – and landscapes. Her mezzotints and charcoal drawings have an enchanting intimacy; an Alice in Wonderland of the art sphere, Sarah dives into projects that create microworlds in each line and tendril of her pieces.

Sarah will be speaking at this year’s Nature Matters on the panel ‘Arts and environmental awareness’ (Saturday, 09:45). I spoke to Sarah about the beauty in detail and how her work differs radically from the fast-paced world, and also about creative and ecological interconnectedness. She showed me sketchbooks full of moths, trees, and poetry extracts as she spoke of her immense gratitude to writers. We also spoke about the growing awareness of the importance of Indigenous knowledge within this year’s theme of ‘Local to Global’, and the unique nature of NNN which holds at its core the idea that the sciences and arts can offer each other more than what the public and political domains give thought to.

Sarah believes that making art can shift behaviour patterns towards heightened awareness and advocates taking a moment to try to encounter what Paul Shepherd calls ‘a beautiful and strange otherness’ in the more-than-human-world.

How can art change perceptions and even behaviour patterns?

There are two ways of thinking about this: firstly, from the perspective of people viewing or experiencing art, versus how creativity changes our own behaviour.

From the perspective of what creative people have to offer, one of our roles is to grasp what is lasting and calm and meaningful amid all the confusion, rush, and noise. The point of art is to bring joy and dignity and to stimulate and heal. We really need that now, and artists hold that space.

But I think we also have to have the humility to realise that as visual artists we are like compost heaps. We are slow, and it would be hubristic to assume we are going to do anything terribly dramatic in terms of changing peoples’ behaviours.

As far as practice is concerned, this quote from John Berger answers it for me: ‘Every artist discovers that drawing, when it is an urgent activity, is a two-way process. To draw is not only to measure and put down, but also to receive. […] The encounter of these two energies – their dialogue – does not have the form of question and answer. It is a ferocious and inarticulate dialogue’. The point of the practice for me is not actually about observation, rather it is about engaging with a world that is communicative, listening, looking, waiting. It seems to me that as humans mostly we talk to ourselves.

From the other perspective – that of the viewer – when people read a poem or see a piece of art, it moves them. It’s something akin to when you’re walking in the street and you suddenly hear a burst of blackbird song or suddenly the light is falling on some gorse or blossom: that sudden resurfacing out of the busy and rushed and mundane and awful into something that is connected and meaningful and restorative. I think that’s the best you can hope for as an artist – that, in holding that space, you might just be able to offer moments of blackbird song to other people.

Before I start work I will often randomly open a book of poetry from the stacks in my studio to set myself in the right frame of mind. There are many musicians and writers who play Bach while they create, and I do that too. So there’s another function of art: to reset to a truer frame of mind.

Is this something you actively seek to achieve with your own practice?

There is the danger of hubris to setting out to change people, but I think we do have a role in transforming and – to return to this image – composting what is unwanted, unloved, into something good.

Instead I follow Seamus Heaney’s guidance: ‘Be kind, don’t be afraid, tell the truth’. If one sticks to that kind of mantra oneself as much as possible then there’s possibly some transformative power in that. I need it tattooed somewhere – maybe with a moth!

Your work is delicate, intimate and precise. How do you encourage people to seek beauty in the detail, and what role does close observation play in the current climate?

Paying attention has almost become radical. By ‘paying attention’ I do not mean mindfulness: it needs to go beyond one’s own body. It’s paying attention to the detail of what is other than us whilst acknowledging that everything is connected.

I think, to mis-quote Matthew Gandy, once you do this, you notice subtle visual differentiations between similar species of moths or learn to spot their cryptic patterns as they rest on trees, and on stones and lichen. What you’re doing when you slow yourself down and train yourself to notice at that level of detail is unlearning the degree of sensory elimination that characterises our lives. A great deal of where we go wrong is the search for speed. We’ve become poor at noticing things unless they’re very fast and very big and bright, and part of that is because we are used to looking on screens.

For the moth project I made images of common English moths, and there’s 2,500 of them compared to about 50-60 butterfly species in the UK. People write in the visitor books for the exhibitions that they had never realised these species were out there, in their gardens. I love showing people these details and their patterns and their quietness, revealing what’s not seen.

There are worlds other than us. It does us a power of good to be noticing something other than ourselves. You have to get people to stop in their tracks long enough to notice it – and that’s the challenge of the artist.

You have said you choose to work on moths as they are often overlooked. Why should we be turning our attention to these and other flora and fauna that are not typically thought of as ‘charismatic’?

My answer to that would be that I do think moth are charismatic! But here’s the thing:  We are absolutely failing to see things as complex systems.  Moths are like the canaries in the coalmine for wildlife in this country… Since The Beatles disbanded, moth numbers are down by over a third, and some of them as much as 80%. One of the most iconic species – the garden tiger – is down 83% since the 1970s. They’ve just crashed, and there’s a knock-on effect of that. Cuckoos need their woolly caterpillars for food. Cuckoos are more charismatic and have a bit more of a story to them than moths, so we notice their absence – but one of the reasons we don’t see them anymore is because we have eliminated their food source.

For me, it is really important not to separate animals out. I do not see blue tits, for example, as separate from the 30,000 caterpillars they need to raise their families – they’re just another form of moth in a different emanation! I think I’ve stubbornly stuck with moths in order to make that point.

Over half of us live in cities now and most of us don’t encounter animals other than on television, or on holiday, or walking through a field of cows, or we may have pets. The human biologist Paul Shepherd has said that ‘The grief and sense of loss that we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered’.

I think moths, far more than tigers or polar bears, offer us a real possibility of encounter if we just make a tiny effort to look in our own gardens: the possibility of encounter on a daily basis with a beautiful and strange otherness.

Which other species of flora and fauna capture your imagination?

Once you start looking, it’s all extraordinary. So, I suppose I’d say: all of them! That said, I had the privilege of being taken round Askham Bog by the botanist Alistair Fitter this summer and immediately started imagining a whole series on moss and bog plants, for similar reasons to the moths. We don’t think very highly of bogs. They’re dark, and their timescales are very slow but without them we are lost.

Having done the common moths, I’m also starting to look at the ones which are on the verge of extinction – of which there are quite a handful. The reason they are so endangered is usually to do with the fact that their larval food plant has been pushed out by modern farming. So, the next piece I’m going to make is about a moth called the White Spot whose larval plant is the Nottingham catchfly. As its name suggests, this plant was first observed on the walls of Nottingham castle. It now only occurs in just one tiny patch of coastline on the Branscombe undercliff in East Devon. People think it is a coastal plant but it’s not; it has been pushed to the coast, and as a consequence there is not enough of it to support its moth. I’m beginning to think about pieces that might speak to those relationships.

Your work resonates with themes of connectedness, from literary allusions to wider interdisciplinary conversations within the sciences. How do you see your practice within this network of exchange?

My overwhelming feeling towards poets, writers and musicians is one of gratitude. Poets in particular are way ahead of all of us. They have already taken the risks we hesitate on.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with the poet Alice Oswald on a couple of collaborative projects. I find that exchange with her enormously useful. She has an almost unique ability to inhabit other; to inhabit another species: to become part of the body of a moth or a raindrop or a tree. I think she’s extraordinary. I think all one can hope for is to be part of that exchange.

And how important are the viewers of art to that network?

I am hoping that a perceived barrier is breaking down a bit here. In The Book of Trespass Nick Hayes talks about edges and boundaries being entirely artificial and that all borders in nature are in fact permeable zones of transition. It’s an entirely human-made thing to make a fence or a wall and say ‘I am this and you are that’.

In the same way, I am hoping that the distinction between artist and ‘non-artist’ is another boundary that is dissolving. Look what people did in lockdown – they got creative; they made music.

What does this year’s Nature Matters theme ‘Local to Global’ mean to you?

My experience of the last two years has been terribly local – I’ve been very much here in my local village. So to answer this question I want to mention three books that have been hugely influential to me this year: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, and Nick Hayes’ Book of Trespass.

They all in their very different ways approach this subject of the local or the Indigenous or the native and try to reclaim that as a way of knowing who we are. These three writers talk about identity not just as political but as beings within the complex systems of where we live.

Hayes talks about the way we are kept out of place, and Kimmerer and Dochartaigh show how the entirely deliberate colonial practice of taking away of Indigenous languages and names has deprived people of their sense of themselves within and as part of place.

So that’s what this year’s theme means to me most at the moment; I’m really interested in ‘the local’ in the sense of what we have to learn from local knowledge.

You will be contributing to the panel on ‘Art and environmental awareness’ with Harriet Mead and Rachel Taylor. Can you give us an insight into the big questions or challenges facing conservation that you’re taking to the panel?

My encounters with the conservation world have been very friendly and welcoming – I’ve been amazed by the generosity with time and knowledge of conservationists  – the challenge I would give them is: how are you going to use us artists?

I think the conservation world understands wildlife art and knows what to do with that (using it to raise funds for conservation projects), but the art world is a much wider diaspora than that. We’re getting an increasing number of artists saying they want to align their practice with the concerns about things that are happening to the planet that we can no longer ignore. So how are you going to make the most of us?

The challenge is how to use artists to capture the imagination of a detached urban population that, for the large part, does not have any spare time or money to think about anything like where their food is coming from or what in the air is making them ill or whether our soil will yield crops in 20 years’ time. Many people don’t have any spare capacity for this. As Mark Rylance said recently, the very job of artists is to make us fall in love with the rest of our world again.

I think the key might be in this word ‘activism’. Conservationists are activists, really; as a conservationist you are actively trying to do something, to conserve something. Activism isn’t just for activists. I strongly feel there are different forms of activism and I think if artists such as myself who are engaged with biodiversity collapse or climate change and conservationists meet and recognise each other as activists, then we have possibly got a way forward. But I don’t think we quite know how to do that yet.

But then maybe not knowing is a good thing and we just have to carry on moving along. Maybe it’s the job of geographers and conservationists just to continue being generous and open with their knowledge, and the artists continue doing their work. I think that’s what conferences like this are for – for us to try to thrash this out. Either way we have to keep talking to each other.

What role can groups like New Networks for Nature, and events like Nature Matters play in making change?

During lockdown my local community formed a habitat watch on WhatsApp. It was so heartening to find that there were other people in the village who I didn’t know but who were also recording species, noticing what is now absent, or restoring land. New Networks for Nature feels like a larger scale of that.

There’s that cliché about conservationists treading water in a sea of despair, but I think it is true. Events like this build resilience and support.

You have been thinking with another of your collaborators, the writer Peter Reason, about Mahmood Darwish’s question ‘What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?’ How do you respond to this in the context of visual art?

There is a poetic answer to the question behind all of these questions. This is W. B. Yeats answering it in his own W. B. way:

All the words that I utter
And all the words that I write
Must spread out their wings untiring
And never rest in their flight,
Til they come where your sad, sad heart is,
and sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darkened or starry bright.

You can’t rest as an artist. In the last lines of her poem ‘The Watchman’ Alice Oswald says ‘Ours is not to sleep or walk away’. I think that that is another message: that we just have to keep going.

Do you feel that as a burden?

No. It’s positive – it’s good to have a role.

Sarah will be joining Rachel Taylor and Harriet Mead on a panel chaired by John Fanshawe on art and environmental awareness from 09:45-10:45 on Saturday November 20^th. The speakers will be discussing the ways in which the visual arts can raise awareness about the environment, and whether seeing problems through a different prism makes issues more accessible to a greater number of people.

Written by Noa Leach

By Jos Smith

We chose scale as a theme for this year’s New Networks because of the way it can challenge us to see the world afresh. As with the range of visible colours, or the range of audible sounds, we forget sometimes that we experience nature within a human range of scales, outside of which it extends away from us in every direction. Testing the edges of this range has always expanded our knowledge of, and feeling for, the world. But as much as it can help us to understand what goes unseen, it can also help us to appreciate what we have right here before us in new ways.

Heath Potter Wasps, Eumenes coarctatus

Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing teaches us the value of slowing down, of searching for the deep past beyond memory and holding it, here and now, with the quality of attention that comes from being truly present. Tim Dee’s Greenery opens our eyes to Spring as we’ve never experienced it before, tracking, through close observation of birds, an intercontinental blush of warmth as a whole hemisphere is revived into another year. Kathleen and Tim will launch our conference this year in conversation with Jean McNeil.

In an essay I have never been able to find since, John Burroughs once claimed that to describe the lives of insects, to write about them in all their drama and variety, and place that writing on the bookshelf next to classics, is to suggest a parity between natural history and history. He was arguing for the value of nature writing as a process of magnification, raising the life of a cricket, say, up to the scale of Achilles on the battlefield (and long before the ubiquity of the zoom lens).

Burroughs was arguing for a quality of attention that speaks for the little things of this world, that believes they might have something valuable to teach us. There is a deeper implication to his argument as well, though, that suggests the human dramas of ‘our’ history are not simply played out against a backdrop of the ‘natural’ landscape, but that they exist within a whole cosmos of other dramas, other histories, vying for our attention at all sorts of different scales.

Led by a curiosity to understand and a creativity to work with the world around us, we have narrowed our vision toward the microscopic and opened our minds toward (and beyond) the planet as a whole. Champion of ‘watching narrowly’ (as he described it), the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White famously claimed that ‘all nature is so full that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most studied’. Even he would have been surprised today to see just how right this would turn out to be.

News from below about quantum foam, epigenetics, the microbial life in a handful of healthy soil, can produce an excited vertigo in even the hardiest of stomachs. Our panel on ‘Microworlds’ will lean you over the edge of this busyness of being down there. Tom Oliver (speaking on this panel) tells us now that our own bodies might even be composed of a minority of human cells, that in fact non-human bacteria, fungi and viruses make up over half of the very matter of us. What does this do to the understanding of our relationship with nature?

At last year’s New Networks in York we heard about the importance of children’s literature in shaping this relationship. Well tonight, with my three-year-old just put to bed, this talk of scale brings to mind Dr Seuss’ classic, Horton Hears a Who. Some will tell you that The Lorax is Dr Seuss’ great environmental fable but Horton feels like one for our stranger times. For those who don’t have the book to hand, Horton (an elephant) hears a voice calling for help one day that seems to be coming from a speck of dust. Of course, he cannot see who is calling – he can hardly see the speck of dust – but he decides he will help: ‘Because, after all, / a person’s a person, no matter how small.’ The speck turns out to be almost a planet for the ‘Whos’ who live there and Horton helps them, despite never seeing them and despite being ridiculed by all the other animals. But it is Horton’s decision to help a ‘person’ beyond his capacity to see that I think is relevant here.

Thinking at the edge of human scale can stretch our moral sense in productive ways. Horton finds himself rethinking what counts as a ‘person’. This is no small question. In fact, it is one that has been running through the American courts in recent years thanks to Steven Wise’s visionary ‘Nonhuman Rights Project’. This is a legal campaign to recognise certain cognitively complex animals as ‘persons’ in the eyes of the law rather than as property.

Shifts in scale can happen in the centre too then as we question the categories with which we organise the world around us. This year we have a panel asking the question ‘What is A Species?’, promising to explore what is at stake at the shifting edges of the species boundaries. Part of the uncertainty here comes from the fact that all identities are contingent, they are constituted by difference and differentiation, by the whole network of relationships that species share with one another, and especially with us (the species who seems to get the final word).

Donna Haraway has written memorably that ‘beings do not precede their relatings’ in her Companion Species Manifesto. The idea of companion species draws attention to the intimate and mutual debts that we share with some of the animals we are closest to. Our panel on ‘Companion Animals’ will explore different ways of thinking about those exchanges and debts.

Shifts in scale often unsettle our anthropocentric view of the world. This can feel disturbing or it can feel refreshing depending on how comfortable you are with being a little displaced from the centre of your universe. Either way, such shifts help us to see the world around us with those fresh eyes again. And at a time when the world is changing in profoundly unsettling ways, fresh eyes will serve us well. Our panel on ‘Lost Worlds’ will explore, among other things, the vanishing of Doggerland to sea level rise 6,000 years ago, a story of environmental vulnerability that speaks to our own uncertain times.

And so, our programme moves up in scale to cross international borders. Following last year’s ‘New Directions for Nature Writing’ we explore ‘Nature Writing in a Global Context’ thinking about memory, human migration, relationships that stretch around the world as they bring us closer to the Earth. As ever, our panels will be complemented by music, poetry, artwork and even some site-specific drama this year from Steven Waters.

Finally, we explore a panel on ‘States of Emergency’ offering fresh perspectives on both the climate and the biodiversity emergencies unfolding around the world. When we look at some of the wildest parts of the planet now – the Arctic tundra and the Amazonian rainforest – we see disturbing evidence of our own influence staring right back at us. This final discussion promises to offer ideas, thought and debate that will carry you home equipped to weather the strange new normal of life in the Anthropocene.

Whether it’s the wriggling miasma of microscopic life or the shifting complexities of the climate system, such journeys in scale help us to reflect on what we mean by ‘nature’ and our place within it. Doing so is to perhaps feel a little more vulnerable today than we once did, but that vulnerability can also bring us closer to the other animals with whom we share this planet. And with that vulnerability also comes an intensified sense of how precious life really is. We hope you will come and join us in celebrating this life across all scales.

The origin of the New Deal for Nature report is the New Networks for Nature conference last year, 2018.

Afterwards, Jeremy Mynott and I talked. What nature policies do we really need – not only to reverse the decline of wildlife, but to capture people’s hearts and imaginations too?

What policies would really change lives, especially those of our own species who have too little contact with nature?

What would it take to restore wildlife and biodiversity for its own sake – and for our own human needs?

This all coincided with a major revision of the Green Party’s detailed policy on wildlife and habitats. I’m proud that this is a wonderfully democratic and inclusive process – and ongoing.

Of course, we already have lots of policy on nature. Including in our manifesto – for you all to see and scrutinise.

Nevertheless, in January, Jeremy brought together a group of friends, fellow conservationists, and nature writers. They set out to produce these independent recommendations – not least to inform my work in parliament.

It was not our plan to launch them during a general election campaign!

So why are we launching these independent proposals now?

Fundamentally, because nature needs to be at the very heart of the general election debate.

Even more importantly – nature needs to be much higher on the agenda for action in the next parliament.

Recent years have seen a profusion of titles. Many have been memoirs about a lifelong love of a particular type of animal or landscape – a love that has interacted with other profound experiences and questions. Some have been studies of animals or landscapes without the memoir element, but still full of stories and encounters. Some have been ‘door-opener’ books that take a particular object, species or landscape and use it to explore history and ecology in all sorts of places. Some have been nature almanacs or journals, recording the natural events in a place as the year passes. Many are concerned with the seriousness and the urgency of the crisis.

When this resurgence began, several commentators called it ‘the New Nature Writing’, claiming that there are vital differences between these works and earlier books in the genre. Most obviously, these new works are informed and impelled by the crisis; they see nature differently in consequence. It is not territory beyond human influence, or a permanent state of being that stands in contrast to the fleeting nature of human affairs. Wild nature no longer functions as a place of refuge from modernity. To turn back and face the natural world, anxiously, is one of the definitively modern things we have to do. What, then, are the aspects of traditional nature writing that we should value and continue, and what are the aspects that should be rejected? Do any dangerous ideologies lurk in the genre’s habits? How should the genre develop? Is it, after that first explosive reappearance, in danger of slowing? What are the limitations the genre must overcome? Does it represent the full diversity of our community? Is it sufficiently responsive to concerns about inequality, or does it evade them? Does it experiment with new literary forms, and does it need to?

At the New Networks meeting in York, a panel consisting of Zakiya McKenzie, Katharine Norbury, Anita Sethi and Richard Smyth will explore these questions. All are exciting new writers challenging tradition and taking the genre in new directions. The panel will open up new possibilities. I can’t wait to chair it.

Richard Kerridge

Street artist ATM is responsible for some of the most gorgeous and meaningful street art in the UK, creating large-scale images of species in decline. His newest piece is a massive mural on York’s Queen’s Street depicting a tansy beetle, an iridescent beetle almost exclusively found in York. It has been commissioned by New Networks for Nature, an interdisciplinary alliance supporting conservation, in advance of their three-day symposium in York in late October. I sat down with him to talk about snipes, street art, and saving nature. 

I first meet him finishing off a ghostly white outline of the tansy beetle on Queen’s Street, a far cry from the luminous finished piece. There is a reason why some people call tansy beetles ‘the Jewel of York’: these little beetles are a gorgeous shining green, with iridescent tinges of blue and orange. In the UK, they are found almost exclusively along the banks of the River Ouse, in an area of only 30 kilometres; they live amongst the bright yellow petals of tansy plants, a home at risk from invasive Himalayan Balsam and habitat loss. Both ATM and New Networks are keen on its potential as a symbol of York, particularly as the city has so little street art (aside from the massive, and massively famous, Bile Beans mural). As a street artist, the rare negative comments ATM gets are mostly from older people: an ‘anti-youth’ sentiment, as he puts it. In contrast, other young street artists are remarkably respectful: “There was a chaffinch I painted in Brixton- it’s got tags all around it, but none on the bird itself”. 

In his wildlife-based street art, ATM started by painting the mostly lost wildlife of Acton, his home; his first mural was a snipe in South Acton Estate, which would have once thrived in the area. There is a sense of the layers of time: a bird appearing on the very bricks that were paved over the grasslands which it would have once called home. He talks about the “ghost rivers” of London, rivers built over with stone, once flocked with snipe and other waterfowl, but still flowing, secretly; like Bollo Brook, which flows under Bollo Bridge into Acton. ATM’s art intends to bring such creatures back above ground. 

Yet, in the case of the tansy beetle, as with a green-eyed flower bee mural in Hastings, it isn’t always about looking below, but looking closer. In other cases, it’s about taking a fresh look at the nature we tend to view as mundane: the common pigeon’s shimmering purple neck, the trilling melody of the blackbird. “We need to see things without having their rarity in mind” he says, describing the noise of sparrows as “little pockets of comfort”. 

Above all else, he wants people to appreciate wildlife for what it is: there are no labels on his murals, just as there are no name-tags in nature. “It’s not about being utilitarian” he says, decrying trends in conservation that encourage thinking about animals only in terms of how useful they are to humans. Instead, his work encourages us to wonder wordlessly at the surprising presence of a massive chaffinch or kingfisher tucked in amongst concrete and brick. It tells us that we should just stop and look: at a blue jay, or a barn owl — even a tiny beetle tucked under a tansy leaf. 

This article was written by Gabriela Mancey-Jones.

It’s done! The Jewel of the North, aka the endangered Tansy beetle wall mural, is now on display in York. You can see it on 11 Queen St, near the city wall and the train station.

Just as a reminder, this is what Buglife say this about this bright green, charismatic beetle:

“The Tansy beetle was once widespread in Britain, but it is currently endangered, not just in the UK but across its worldwide range. It is now a UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UKBAP) priority species, which means that public bodies have a duty to protect it, together with its habitat. As the beetles are dependent on tansy as their sole food source, if a clump disappears the beetles have to walk to a new clump as they are not known to fly. Although Tansy is widespread, unfortunately pressures such as land-use changes and the increase of invasive species such as Himalayan balsam have resulted in a decline in Tansy plants over the past few decades. This has had knock-on effects on Tansy Beetle numbers as beetle populations have become increasingly isolated and can now only be found along a 30km stretch of the banks of the River Ouse, around York”.

New Networks would like to thank the amazing ATM, crowdfunders, and sponsors including The York BID, The Rattle Owl, SAY Scaffolding and BeeEater Gifts. And don’t forget, ATM and tansy beetle expert Dr Geoff Oxford will be speaking at #Time4Nature on 1st November. Get your tickets and come and marvel at the diversity of ways to celebrate nature.

Ticket available here. One, two or three day tickets on sale.

RAISING THE HARE TO BE SCREENED AT NATURE MATTERS 2019: TIME FOR NATURE

I am excited to announce that Raising the Hare will be shown as part of Nature Matters 2019: Time for Nature on Saturday 2nd November in York.

To mark this screening the film has been re-worked with new footage.

“I thought I could almost see myself in the hare’s eye, it was that close.”

The film looks at the entanglement of encounter between a hare, a farmer and the livestock that coexist within a field.

The film features two Welsh voices of the landscape – the musician John Cale (founding member of the Velvet Underground) who reads Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘The Names of the Hare’ and the artist Paul Emmanuel (Welsh Artist of the Year) who describes an encounter he had with a hare from horseback.

Filmed in mid Wales, between June 2017 and June 2018.

Music by Olan Mill.