Geology’s dry, rocky road

There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it be poeticised? Has the oh-my-oh-me-ism of recent nature books got out of hand? Can one not see a blackbird now without considering the nature of consciousness and the tragedy of existence? In short, shouldn’t the nature writers calm down a bit and become ‘more honest’, as one contributor to this row put it?

Egregious sentences were quoted out of context. Angry and hate-filled expressions were used. The tone seemed wildly out of whack with the slightly technical question at hand — how to describe plants, places and animals — but was perhaps fuelled by something larger and more anxious. In the current state of things, how are we to meet the world? Is the apparently objective and ‘unselfed’ description the truest? Or would that not remove the one quality that can seem most central to the encounter, the sense that in nature there is the possibility of hearing, seeing and feeling a kind of significant connection with another reality that is often absent from the rest of life? Is nature best described as an it? Or through the lens of us-in-it?

Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time (whose title rather pointedly resembles Robert Macfarlane’s recent, vast, baroque and richly self-engaged Underland: A Deep Time Journey) seems to be an experiment in the unselfed nature book. Gordon is a novelist and has edited an anthology about the writer’s life and craft and yet this is the most non-self-present book about an aspect of the natural world that I have read for years. In no way is it about her. Its method is journalistic: visit a scientist, discuss things with them and come home educated. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker is the master of this technique, and with great care and patient attention to correctness Gordon follows that path, hearing about ancient ice cores, the discovery of the nature of stratigraphy, the allure of meteorites, earthquakes and faults, chalky oceans, volcanoes, ammonites, the first plants, dinosaurs, the whole question of the Anthropocene and what might happen in the future to nuclear waste.