The Living World

Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought

Samantha Walton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350153387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, The Living World asks how literature might help us reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's writing through an ecocritical lens, it reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new insights into Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. More than this, this book reveals how Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development.
Broken down into chapters focusing on themes of place, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd's writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers.

1

Place and planet

The Living Mountain is in many ways an extraordinary title. Unlike many classical works of nature writing, it says nothing about the place it represents. Compared to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803), John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) or Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1948), Shepherd’s title is all the more furtively nonspecific. The book might be a fantasy, allegory or work of philosophical literature, like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) or C. Day Lewis’s The Magnetic Mountain (1933), both published a few years earlier.

The cover of the 1977 edition – the first edition – reveals little. A purple graphite sketch by the illustrator Ian Munro, it depicts a low mountain range in the distance, while the foreground is dominated by a shaded area which suggests a scarp falling away from a central plateau. For those familiar with the Cairngorms, it may suggest any number of perspectives from Glas Moal to the Lairig Ghru. At the same time, it could show any escarpment in low mountain regions from Mongolia to California. Above it, the title The Living Mountain hangs stark and alone. It is only on the inside title page that the subtitle, ‘A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland’, is printed, along with a simple map outlining some major peaks and places (LM vii).

Recent reissues of The Living Mountain have corrected any uncertainty about where this text is placed. In 1996, scholar and editor Roderick Watson collected Shepherd’s four prose works for the first time in a volume entitled The Grampian Quartet. As well as announcing the location of these books in the Grampians – the lower portion of the Highlands running from Aberdeenshire to Lochaber – the cover is adorned with a golden-toned watercolour. The more abstract, perspective-distorting qualities of the original have been replaced with a conventional, golden, faintly nostalgic representation of the hills.

In 2008, Canongate reissued The Living Mountain, now with the subtitle marked boldly in its marketing and brochure. In a departure from the previous two editions, this one’s cover image of a brooding grey sky and inquisitive stags roaming across a rocky landscape of green and purple heather tethered it firmly to a Balmoralized tourist ideal of Scotland. These key symbols of the Highlands conspicuously root the work in its location, attracting Scottish readers interested in a revived local classic and enticing international audiences hungry for all things ‘Scottish’. The edition also contains a glossary of Scots words, copied from The Grampian Quartet. For a non-native reader of the novels – which use considerable dialect – this glossary is invaluable. However, The Living Mountain is written almost exclusively in English, with only a handful of Scots words (‘brook’ – soot; ‘rug’ – pull; ‘shalts’ – ponies; and ‘rossity reets’ – kindling). The glossary’s wholly unnecessary placement in The Living Mountain might be an editorial oversight or an attempt to plump up the volume. Either way, it gives a Scottish tang to the edition, evoking a sense of place through words, albeit ones which are absent from the text itself.

But it wasn’t with the 2008 edition that The Living Mountain became a bestseller. In 2011, the book found its way to readers again, now with a fresh introduction and two striking new covers. One edition, printed on a snow white card, shows a slim young deer standing alone on a bleached moorland. The other, also printed on white, shows a pair of antlers holding an eerie green sphere. While the 2008 edition with its ‘Monarch of the Glen’ appearance evoked the thrills of the hunt, the isolated foal is an impossibly vulnerable figure, the implausible quarry of shotgun-wielding hunters. Similarly, the antlers resist the iconography of death emblematic of the décor of a hundred Highland hotels. The green circle motif – a common feature of the ‘Canongate Canons’ series, of which The Living Mountain, was a part – has become particularly significant on the new cover. It undercuts old associations of the antlers with death: instead, accentuating the possibility of growth and renewal, and the deer’s relations with the holistic ecology of the mountain.

What can a potted history of The Living Mountain’s design reveal about Shepherd’s environmental thought and the theme of this chapter – place? Only that the way the book is read, and the way its author is placed, influences whether and how it is read: conferring value, meaning and shaping the understanding of both the text and the place it relates to as well. Many current readers of Shepherd’s prose and poetry may never have visited the Cairngorms. Some may make the journey there, inspired by her writing. Others will know the place intimately, like the readers who can pick up a copy in hiking shops in Braemar or Aviemore where, on my most recent visits, I spotted the golden spine of The Living Mountain glittering between hiking guides and local history books. Whatever a reader’s knowledge of the place, in Shepherd’s new moment of revival it is clear that she is being put forth as an authentic Cairngorms voice, capable of speaking of the place with intimate knowledge and the lived authority of experience.

But what does it mean to be a writer of place, and what is the value of place-based writing? These are the questions this chapter will unpick, looking first to Shepherd’s legacy, then to ecocritical accounts of the place as a locus for ethical attachment and a ‘way in’ to caring about nature and environment. The idea that place-knowledge and feeling for place is a vital foundation for environmental action has long held sway in environmental thought and philosophy. A close look at two of Shepherd’s novels will show how place-knowledge is celebrated in these texts. Turning then to The Living Mountain, we find a book which celebrates the value of intimate knowledge and captures the distinctive understandings of the mountain held by the people who lived and worked there.

However, The Living Mountain does not conform to the simple model of a place-narrative. As Shepherd wrote, ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’ (LM 108), and the more intimate knowledge of a place is gathered, the more strange and impossible to capture and know t he place itself becomes.

Shepherd as place writer

As the title of The Grampian Quartet suggests, Shepherd’s novels, poetry and prose are all set in one region: Aberdeen and its suburbs, the crofting communities of the Mearns and the Cairngorm mountain range. These are places Shepherd lived, worked and walked, layering experiences over a lifetime in ways that obviously shaped her writing. Her prose reflects the social and environmental idiosyncrasies of Scotland’s north-east, describing local agricultural practices, sharing folk beliefs and tales, celebrating dialect and recording place names: the ‘ancient Gaelic names that show how old is man’s association with scaur and corrie’, as she puts it in The Living Mountain, from ‘the Loch of the Thin Man’s Son, the Coire of the Cobbler, the Dairymaid’s Meadow’ to ‘the Lurcher’s Crag’ (LM 77). These tales, practices and names reveal long histories of human inhabitation and place-making. Forgotten histories, vernacular geographies and local ecological understandings all populate her writing as vital and persisting ways of orienting ourselves in the land.

It is hardly surprising, then, that since her work’s revival in the 1990s, Shepherd has been marked and marketed as a writer of place. In Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, Louise Gairn describes how she combines ‘intuitive feelings of being “at home” in the wild landscape with a phenomenological viewpoint which relies on close, reverent attention’ to detail (2008: 124). Gillian Carter also reflects on how The Living Mountain in particular is written from the perspective of a ‘native dweller’. Carter describes Shepherd’s approach as a kind of ‘domestic geography’ and explains that

domestic geography describes a way of engaging with a landscape that is part of daily life for a native dweller rather than a traveller, tourist or scientist passing through a region. It alludes to a repeated engagement with a single landscape that is an important part of an author’s everyday space. (Carter 2001: 27–8)

Carter describes Shepherd as a native, though she also observes a contrary pull in The Living Mountain, as Shepherd constantly changes her perspective on the mountain, repositioning herself to imagine the needs of other people with distinct claims to the hills. As Shepherd was writing, the Cairngorms were being claimed and contested by multiple groups. Some wanted to develop the land for profit, others to protect it for its natural beauty. In these debates, the question of who was a valid ‘insider’ was particularly fraught. Lairds, sportsmen, landowners and crofters united to present an ‘insider’ Highland front, while ‘outsiders’ – walkers, heritage groups and conservationists – sought to preserve the magnificence of supposedly wild and uncultivated land (Smout 47). Shepherd’s perspective on these issues, Carter notes, is cautiously phrased and is open to the different claims and demands on the land being made by different groups. But, crucially, Carter proposes that this generous perspective is made possible precisely because Shepherd is so rooted in the place. Only an intimate, with a homely, daily knowledge of a place can know it deeply enough to understand its many qualities and needs.

In his 2011 introduction to The Living Mountain, Robert Macfarlane also commends Shepherd for being ‘parochial’. He’s not being intentionally insulting: he explains that he is using the term in the expansive sense suggested by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. Unlike ‘provincialism’, Macfarlane explains, ‘[p]arochialism is universal’. It is only by being parochial that we become acquainted with the specifics: what Kavanagh calls ‘the fundamentals’. Knowing the local intimately offers a ‘depth’, if not a width, of knowledge. This scale of knowing, which is often achieved best in writing of place, is thought to be more appropriate to the limited scale of human experience than sweeping, cosmopolitan narratives of travel and exploration (Kavanagh 281–3; Macfarlane 2011: xv). The Cairngorms are considerably more sprawling than the ‘field’ and ‘gap in a hedge’ that Kavanagh himself suggested was ‘as much as a man can fully experience’ (Macfarlane 2011: xv). Still, they’re rich enough subject matter for a collection of poems and a nature memoir. Accordingly, in Shepherd’s close and long attention to the lives of plants, insects, minerals and water, we find a writer who seems to share Kavanagh’s obsession with place and the fundamentals.

Ecocriticism and the ‘fundamentals’

A focus on the fundamentals has not only been cherished in writing of place but has also long been celebrated in environmental criticism and philosophy. In his introduction to the field, Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard devotes a chapter to place-based writing under the title ‘Dwelling’. As he explains, environmentalist activism and thinking have frequently foregrounded the importance of first-hand experience of a place as the foundation of meaningful and ethical action. ‘Dwelling’, as Garrard explains, ‘is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work’ (108). Originating in the classical Georgic tradition of agricultural writing, it was revived in the mid-twentieth and late twentieth century by writers and theorists concerned with humanity’s place on earth in an era of unprecedented environmental damage. Promoting a politics of ‘re-inhabitation’ – getting to know the place you live deeply, and so ‘dwelling’ there ‘authentically’ – this late twentieth-century movement proposed that to be fully human, to live on this earth consciously and purposefully, we must live in an intimate relationship with the long timescales and the intimate place-knowledge of dwelling.

The fascination with dwelling must be seen as emerging from the particular dislocations of modernity. The agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about dramatic changes to landscapes and people-place relations, uprooting populations, transforming landscapes beyond recognition and fuelling the flows of capital, culture and communities across the world. Global capitalism – and the colonialism, indigenous land-grabs and transatlantic trade in enslaved people from which it grew – exploded relations between people, place and traditional environmental knowledge. The mass movement of rural populations to cities and distant nations for w ork, initiated in the mid-nineteenth century, further dislocated people from nature, creating populations emotionally and mentally distanced from the waters, wildlife and weather of their new homes.

In response to this long, complex – and here incredibly simplified – history, nature writers and ecocritics often see their role as rebuilding a sense of place and homeliness in nature. Practices of ‘reinhabitation’ and ‘dwelling’ offer to revive and share place-based knowledge, in the hope of rebuilding a human–nature connection powerful enough to counter the devastating environmental cost of modernity. As the American nature writer Wendell Berry asserts, ‘without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed’ (68–9). Ursula Heise has termed this place-love the ‘ethics of proximity’. It holds that people are more likely to know and care about places that are close to them, meaning of course that places far afield are less likely to be the subject of ethical concern.

Support for this position comes from many quarters; Yi Fu Tuan’s theory of ‘topophilia’, for instance, describes how place-attachments emanate from the phenomenological experience of daily life, as any places larger than those that meet humanity’s ‘biologic needs and sense-bound capacities’ are too large to claim ‘the kind of affection that arises of experience and intimate knowledge’ (100–101). The ethics of proximity also suggests that people are closest to nature in places they know well. Mitchell Thomashow, for example, advocates for a ‘place-based perceptual ecology’ because ‘people are best equipped to observe what happens around them’ and likely to be ‘most in touch with the natural world’ in their ‘home places’ (5). The nature/culture divide – seen to be at the heart of so many of our modern environmental problems – is meant to be weakest when people are ‘embedded’ in local ecosystems and physically, imaginatively and culturally rooted.

The theory of ‘dwelling’ that underpins much place-theorizing was developed by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For Heidegger, humanity’s nature, our being-in-the-world, is assured through the building of home from the materials of the immediate locale. In authentic dwelling, people are rooted in place and co-create place through overlaid experiences of time, cultural memory, spirituality and mortality (Heidegger 2011a). Dwelling is a constant statement of becoming, a creative activity which takes place over long periods of inhabitation, in contrast to modernity’s tendency towards fast urban development and migration (Heidegger 2011b). Inspired by Heidegger, many late twentieth-century scholars concerned with environme...