Nature cure for trauma
In his book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy mentions research carried out in a hospital in the 1980s. Architecture professor Roger Ulrich studied the medical records of patients recovering from gallbladder surgery. The ward where they came after their operations looked out on one side to an open space full of trees, and on the other side onto a brick wall, McCarthy tells BBC Culture. Over a number of years, there was no doubt that the people who had the view of the trees recovered more quickly, needed fewer drugs and had fewer post-operative complications than the people with the view of the brick wall.
McCarthys own story is one of healing. In 1954, when he was seven, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a mental asylum. McCarthy responded with what he describes as a coping strategy: indifference. At seven years old, I was not in the least bit concerned that I had lost my mother, he writes. Instead, he kept watch on a neighbours garden filled with butterflies. Every morning in that hot but fading summer, as my mother suffered silently and my brother cried out, I ran to check on them, never tiring of watching these free-flying spirits with wings as bright as flags Electrifying, they were. Filling the space where my feelings should have been.
The Moth Snowstorm describes how he was pulled into the natural world, discovering more than distraction in the shrubs, saltmarshes and mudflats of the Wirral in the North West of England. McCarthy found joy. There can be moments when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, he writes.
McCarthys book is one of several new titles combining nature writing with memoir: it features on the shortlist for this years Wainwright Prize alongside The Fish Ladder describing Katharine Norburys journey following a rivers path as she deals with a personal tragedy and Amy Liptrots The Outrun, about her return to Orkney as she battles with alcoholism. Launched in 2014, the prize rewards writing that engenders a love of landscape and respect for nature. The 2015 shortlist included H is For Hawk, detailing Helen Macdonalds attempt to train a goshawk after being knocked sideways by the death of her father.
It seems as though the latest books, part of a trend dubbed new nature writing as far back as 2008, are each in their own ways a natural history: of grief, of trauma, of the ways in which we lose ourselves. Wainwright judge Bill Lyons says, Were seeing an explosion of natural history writing as meditation, as a sort of healing process, using the landscape as a way of reflecting, often on childhood trauma, and using it as a way to heal. The genre, he argues, is speaking to the time we live in so many people live stressed-out lives. Were living in a public world of private troubles which we find difficult to share we can take comfort in wildlife and landscape.
Its not always bucolic landscapes, either: one that could be seen as forbidding was so embedded in Liptrots childhood memories that she longed for it when living in London. She describes hearing the crashing of waves in traffic noise and birdsong in a distant car alarm; she sees lighthouses and cliff faces where there are skyscrapers. Although as a teenager Liptrot longed to leave Orkney, returning brings a sense she is reconnecting with something she thought was lost. Ive washed up on this island again, nine months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean, like a pebble, she writes in The Outrun. Im back home, at the end of a rough year, in the winds that shaped me and where the sea salt left me raw.
Of course, this form of literature is nothing new. The 18th-Century ideas of the Sublime and the Picturesque, as well as the Romantics, celebrated the natural world often tamed by humans. Much of Wordsworths Lake District, mountainous and awe-inspiring though it might be, was a farmed landscape, writes McCarthy. It had people in it.
A group of American writers championed wilderness in the 19th Century. According to McCarthy, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau saw the unspoiled natural world as a way to spiritual truth. Thoreau, he argues, saw wild places not only as essential to human well-being, but also as a source of primitive strength. In an 1864 book, the politician and ecologist George Perkins Marsh claims that Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. This, McCarthy believes, is the true value of wilderness: it was where the harmonies of nature, the balance and beauty of the natural world, remained.
