Call of the wild: Britain's nature writers

A couple of weeks ago, I descended on a blazing Italian afternoon into a steep wooded ravine. Gnarled old trees hid overgrown ancient ruins, while waterfalls cascaded down limestone crags into mysterious caverns. Anyone with even a nodding classroom acquaintance with Romantic poetry or painting might have smelled a highly cultivated rat. Surely, this textbook vision of the sublime landscape felt just a bit too perfect to be true? Indeed it is. At the Villa Gregoriana in Tivoli, in the Tiburtine hills east of Rome, almost every "natural" element was remodelled in the 1830s at the behest of Pope Gregory XVI. His Romantic theme park made work for the town, attracted visitors and helped channel the Aniene river to prevent devastating floods.

In most of Europe, where nearly every landscape has been marked by history and moulded by humanity, we seek nature but find culture. Even the heather-clad peaks and moors of the Highlands, so often evoked as an untouched "wilderness", bear witness to ruthless enclosure, depopulation and the strong-arm conversion of a peasant economy into an aristocratic pleasure-ground.

For almost two centuries, British nature writers above all have known that theirs can never be an innocent quest for the beauty of wild things in wild corners. In the densely-people heartland of vandalistic industry, and the birthplace of suburban spawl, every author after John Ruskin has grasped that to celebrate nature means to register a protest, to pursue an ideal, to embody a dream or to struggle against loss. In old age, Wordsworth himself – the poet whose youthful imagination of the Lakes shaped ways of seeing landscape across two continents – penned a Nimby-esque poem against the building of the Kendal and Windermere railway. "Is then no nook of English ground secure/ From rash assault?" he grumpily asked. Evidently not, even in 1844.

In Europe at least, post-industrial authors must fashion their nature as much as discover it. And, quite rapidly, a gifted but unruly flock of British writers have found fresh ways to tell stories about humankind's connection to – or disconnection from – an ever-more fragile earth. A new issue of Granta magazine devoted to The New Nature Writing (£10.99) captures many of the hybrid forms – blends of memoir, ecology, meditation and travelogue – that have resurrected a mode long considered moribund. In 1938, Evelyn Waugh voiced the views of a generation of urban scoffers when he invented William Boot of Scoop, plugging away haplessly at his nature notes: "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." Remarkably, the questing vole has had the last laugh.

Granta editor Jason Cowley has harvested contributions from many of the most influential of the new naturalists: Richard Mabey, whose epic Flora Britannica in 1996 made him (according to fellow-author Adam Nicolson) the "big daddy" of this tribe; Mark Cocker, whose Crow Country reached the shortlist of the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize this year; Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet and nature-writer whose work proves that the craft does not belong to English lads; Robert Macfarlane, the dashing academic wanderer (whom Nicolson dubs the "Brad Pitt" of the new wave) – and Roger Deakin, who died at 63 in 2006, but whose toughly lyrical prose still invigorates his peers. These authors, and others, sell strongly and appeal widely to readers who – whether they hike, climb, stroll or simply chill in the park – find more urgent reasons every year to watch their carbon footprint and cherish the threatened treasures in their own backyard.

In this neck of the literary woods, ecology and elegy walk hand in hand. Macfarlane, whose volume of British and Irish journeys, The Wild Places, has fast become a manifesto of the genre, tells me that "this literature should be seen as a precipitate of environmental crisis. Writers and artists presently at work in this broad field are experiencing and reacting to a period of intense anxiety, local and global." But a dread of global warming alone cannot generate attractive books.

Macfarlane points out that new nature writing "is a largely hopeful form. It takes account of loss, but it often invests in wonder too... The melancholic and the optimistic, the toxic and the angelic, get mixed up with one another". In works such as Deakin's fluid, itinerant "journey through trees", Wildwood, or Mabey's recent Beechcombings, ideas and emotions come into play that feel just as dappled and nuanced as evening sunlight through broad-leaf woods.

Adam Nicolson, who explored the domestic pastoral of Sussex farm life in Perch Hill and the fiercer Hebridean shores of the Shiant islands in Sea Room, believes the revival of literary naturalism long predates today's worries about climate change or ecological ruin. Back in the 1950s, figures such as Robert Graves and David Jones voiced the fear that "the world of progress and science was not all it was thought to be". In the same era, JRR Tolkien – as many fans proclaim – inscribed deep green themes into The Lord of the Rings. In the 1930s, Nicolson argues, the rediscovery of the peasant-poet John Clare "was a completely formative moment for modern nature-consciousness: close-up, fragmentary, non-proprietorial, hurt, intimate."

Today's rural renovators have other ancestors. The more philosophical often nod to WG Sebald, the great, melancholic German author who, after living for 35 years in Norfolk, made the coasts of East Anglia as exotic as Borneo in The Rings of Saturn. If the poetry of Ted Hughes lies behind plenty of the current prose that mourns or cherishes the natural world, then some of it seems to hint at another forebear: DH Lawrence, who looked for the wilderness beneath the winding-gear.

Contemporary writers also nose out those haunting borderlands where city, factory and suburb have left wild remnants clinging on in the margins of development. In The Wild Places, Macfarlane quits Highlands and islands to salute the untamed city: the tree root in the tarmac, the weed in the pavement. He now expects that his chosen form "will go fully post-pastoral: a move from the fields to the cities", and especially "the debatable lands where the natural and the urban mesh, cooperate and conflict." In Granta, poet Paul Farley and novelist Niall Griffiths evoke the Merseyside estate of Netherley, where both grew up, "bulging out like tiny hernia into the green". This liminal territory, "where the urban becomes rural", feels like a scenic trademark of today's Britain. Iain Sinclair made his name as the Virgil of inner-city grot, but his London Orbital broke fume-choked new ground in the literature of place by tracing a walk around – of all sublimely dull locations – the M25.

After Sinclair has soldered the numbingly man-made scenery of Dartford and South Mimms onto the tradition of Clare and Coleridge, where can the new naturalists go next? Perhaps Kathleen Jamie shows the way. Jamie, who has kept a sceptical distance from her more enraptured English peers, has a piece in Granta that delves into the hidden vistas of the human body. Tired of "primroses and dolphins", she visits a Dundee pathology lab and, microscope to hand, scales the cols and cwms and crevasses of diseased organs. This is a landscape after battle – a battle that the body will lose. Yet the inner scenery soon merges, in the writer's eye, with the outer one. A tumoured liver looks just like the Tay: "our local river, as seen by a hawk".

The good Romantics of the Villa Gregoriana – like countless writers and travellers since – projected a human craving for awe and thrill onto manipulated streams and stones. This love of nature, however intense, was inseparable from conquest. In an era of ecological calamity and post-industrial guilt, nature writers have turned the tables on themselves. For today's chastened voyager, the danger – and the wildness – appears to lie within.

New versions of pastoral

Mark Cocker
Crow Country (Vintage)

Birds and their presence in our lives and dreams have inspired much recent writing. Here, Cocker delivers a masterclass in literary ornithology. The rooks and jackdaws he observes at home in Norfolk and far afield take their place as true creatures of myth.

Kathleen Jamie
Findings (Sort of Books)

A rare woman in the mainly masculine club of new-wave nature writing, Jamie has scoffed at the cult of the "lone enraptured male". She has carved out a more down-to-earth terrain. Here, she gathers essays on her native Scotland into this sharp-witted, closely-focused ramble across its land- and mind-scapes.

Roger Deakin
Wildwood (Penguin)

A creative godfather for younger writers, Deakin first reached a wide audience with his journal of wild swimming, Waterlog. He died in 2006, and Wildwood stands as his memorial: a journey into trees, their history and lore, that spans art, ecology and travel, from his home in the Suffolk woods all the way to Kazakhstan.

Tim Robinson
Connemara (Penguin)

A Yorkshireman in the West of Ireland, Robinson ranks as the James Joyce of bog and cliff. Connemara begins a trilogy inspired by his home turf. Steeped in history as much as geology, Robinson takes care to restore people, and their pains, to his beloved land.

Robert Macfarlane
The Wild Places (Granta)

Something of an intellectual pin-up for lovers of our backyard wilderness, this Cambridge academic made his name with a study of the allure of mountains. The Wild Places sent him to stormy corners of these isles, from Irish outcrops to Highland moors, but also into Dorset woods and Essex marshes. He ends by defining "wildness" more as a state of the imagination than a site on a map.

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