Isn't it a question not only of different stances in nature writing
but of the different cultural spaces contradictory attitudes
occupy - and therefore of the cultural spaces available
to poetry and other kinds of writing? If I ask a roomful of
students what poetry should be about, the most popular answers
will probably be: 1. Personal feelings and experience. 2. Nature.
The space that `nature' occupies is often also the space allocated
to `the personal' - this is a widespread diffusion of the Romantic
tradition. Both `nature' and `personal feeling' are ranged
against `modernity', `work', `science', `economics' etc - all the
things from which people feel alienated. Writers who resist
confinement in such cultural spaces as `the personal',
`leisure', `fantasy', `nostalgia' etc, will be likely to be wary of
writing about `nature'.

The general suspicion of `nature writing' in British literary circles
must be because of the long tradition here of of identifying the
rural with the feudal, the pastoral and the pre-modern, against
the city as the site of everything progressive. In the USA,
nature writing is recognised as an important contemporary genre
and as the main form of literary expression for the environmental
movement. In Britain, literary `nature' has been mainly a discourse
of the right, at least since Wordsworth and Coleridge turned
against the French Revolution. In the 20s and 30s, in writers
such as Henry Williamson, nature-writing expresses a search
for refuge from the modernity that produced the war, often combined
with a fascination with violence. In his case nature-writing combines
with fascism. These are the things that give `nature' a bad name.
Contemporary environmentalism should change this, but is only
beginning to do so. I'm interested in whether poets such as
Colin Simms are offering a new nature-writing in these terms.

Even after BSE, it is startling how easily pastoral perceptions
of nature co-exist with some of the most heavily industrialised
farming methods in the world. The British rural landscape is one
of the most heavily polluted and regulated. At times environmentalism
seems to be everywhere - yet environmental priorities make so
little political headway, so little impression on the economic
calculations of governments and individuals. It is as if
environmentalism
has been defined, by the tacit agreement of the majority, as a
purely cultural practice, or even a leisure activity. In its many
cultural spaces, environmentalism can express and speak to the
intensest fears and yearnings, but outside those spaces we are
suddenly deaf to environmental arguments. Whether in the lives
of individuals or in social policy, environmentalism encounters
acute difficulty in moving beyond these cultural spaces, while
within them it is permitted the headlong rush of fantasy.

To put it crudely, the tourist industry and the food-production
industry make use of the same physical territory but
tell radically different stories about it. The contradiction
between these stories is usually finessed with little
difficulty. This co-existence of mutually contradictory
discourses and priorities was exposed and endangered
as the BSE story developed. Gaps between discourses
widened, became visible. The question now is
whether they will be covered over once more.

The perception of the countryside as pastoral landscape
persists with extraordinary durability . If the countryside is
our place of leisure, not work, it is easy,especially in areas
of dairy or hill farming, not to `see' industrial farming when
we look at the landscape: we are adept at shading it
out, not allowing it to intrude. Intensively reared animals are
concealed in buildings; pesticides and herbicides are invisible.
BSE disrupted the peaceful co-existence of the pastoral and
industrial perceptions. BSE was an intrusion of the industrial
into the pastoral, with the vengeance of a recognition
long-repressed.

Where does this leave poetry, and other nature-writing? I
guess - following the recent exchanges on
`openness' - an ecologically-aware poetry would be one
which was not only prepared to see the natural world
in more ecocentric terms, but was willing to mix the
pastoral and industrial discourses.

Sorry for such a long post, but this is a subject I'm
always brooding over.

Richard Kerridge




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