Nature stands out as a literary genre and resurfaces as one of the great themes of our time. Ecology, ecotopia, climatic emergency, the death of the forests, ecological art or nature as a sacred space, are some of the approaches presented by various recently published books. The barrage of naturalistic books is continuous, to the point that various bookstores have chosen to dedicate sections to this theme that arouses the interest and awareness of readers.
Planet Earth is not doing well and has been sending alarm messages for some time. It is no longer just climate change, global warming or the overexploitation of energy resources, but many other fronts that are opening up between cyclones, tornadoes, floods or volcanic eruptions, not to mention that little virus that came to change our lives.
From positions such as the one raised by Raimon Panikkar in Ecosophy: a wisdom of the Earth (Fragmenta, reissued in 2021), man breaks away from that anthropocentric pride from the Renaissance and consolidated during the Enlightenment, to stop being the center of the world and understand that we are part of nature and that we depend on it from the first breath of life.
Nature, consciousness and sacred space
It is necessary to change our consciousness and way of thinking, to create a new relationship with nature, closer to that of our ancestors, when the light and the moon were sacred, as were the mountains and rivers. See nature from a reverential gaze, contemplating it as a divine space in which all living beings coexist. This is how Karen Armstrong contemplates it in her new book, Sacred Nature (Critique). On this occasion, the author focuses her religious knowledge on the natural space and how to recover our relationship with it. The keys come from religions such as Jainism and its sense of ahimsa or non-violence towards living beings, the flow of Chinese Taoism or the ethics of reciprocity of Confucius. In its pages we discover from poems by Saint Francis of Assisi or William Wordsworth that become divine meditations on the natural world, to revelations about the Koran and its teachings on nature. Wherever we look at it, nature is a manifestation of the divine.
For his part, Christian De Quincey, from his philosophical knowledge, insists on transcending the concept of matter as something inert or dead in his book Essential Nature (Atalanta), proposing a new worldview that recovers the sense of the sacred in our lives. Body, mind, consciousness of matter and the spirit of nature merge as an organic whole. According to the author, “the desacralization of nature carried out by our culture has had profound effects on our way of relating to ourselves and to the world… Once we admit that matter feels –that it vibrates inside it–, we see that nature and the cosmos are intrinsically meaningful, purposeful and valuable.”
Collapse and climate emergency
A different prism is that of authors such as Francisco Lloret and Antxon Olabe, denouncing our malpractice in natural spaces or the evolution of ecological discourse within politics. The first of them tells us about The death of the forests (Arpa) from the experience of someone who has visited different parts of the planet to investigate the evil that climate change is causing, observe the dynamics of the forest, understand the new pests and verify how humans have systematically shortened the life of trees. As a professor of Ecology (UAB), Lloret offers a well-documented and technical study that succeeds in making us understand what the life of a tree is like.
In politics and the defense of the rights of the Earth, the Paris Climate Summit (2015) seemed to open a path of hope after decades of diplomatic failure. Today it seems that a large part of the world agrees to move towards the great transformation that the rise of renewable energies (wind, solar or biomass) represents in the face of the decline of fossil energies (oil, coal or natural gas). The main question, as Olabe explains perfectly in The Need for an Earth Policy (Gutenberg Galaxy), lies in knowing what will be the behavior of great powers such as the United States, China, Russia and India. Will they be able to lead us towards an ecological civilization or will they continue with abusive exploitation and consumption? The climate policy of these giants will determine the planetary health. Certainly, the climate emergency is a problem that we cannot delay.
Nature, art and healing
Books such as We all need beauty (Siruela ) by Samantha Walton, Evening flights (Anagrama ) by Helen Macdonald, We are water that thinks (Crítica ) by Joaquín Araújo, or An ecological art (Adriana Hidalgo Ed.) by Paul Ardenne.
Nature is not only a source of inspiration for poets of romanticism or Japanese haiku poetry, but can also be seen as a metaphor for healing. Walton tells us about the garden as a healing space for loneliness or a place for reflection, as the Zen masters or that almost lost Chinese wisdom that related small natural oases to well-being know well. In the forests we learn to embrace the darkness, beyond daily practices such as shinrin yoku. Sometimes, the mountain leads us to live life more intensely. This is the vision of adventurers like Robert Macfarlane and his already classic The Mountains of the Mind (Random House Literature).
Among the American transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, amb Nature (1836), was a precursor of this aspect that affects the healing power of nature. "For the body and mind that have been benumbed by harmful tasks and company, nature is a medicine that restores its balance."
Understanding that we are water that thinks, as Joaquín Araújo posits in his work, entails flowing with the springs or learning from their purity and honesty. Water is emotions and flow. As Lao Zi said, “if the water is united to the heart of man, it will be corrected. If the water is clean and pure, people's hearts will be unified, and they will show their desire for cleanliness." Water calms anger and anguish. Natural elements are sources of healing and learning. For its part, Evening Flights concentrates a series of essays on the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. The one that gives the book its title brims with originality and surprises with flight lessons from the swift birds that always succeed in making the best decision, from their privileged panoramic view of the heights. Swifts are very wise and fly very high.
Finally, Paul Ardenne offers an excellent journey through ecological art, the kind that starts from the sixties of the last century, when ecology took over the media scene and art as well. Painters, sculptors, land artists, photographers who developed works aimed at vindicating the natural in the face of contempt resulting from the great factory exploitation inherited from the industrial revolution. Artists such as Yves Klein and his cosmogonic achievements, the popular monumental land art of Christo or filmic outbursts such as Melancholia (2011) by Lars von Trier, go through this polyhedral book that concludes with a manifesto for an ecosophical and social art, not only green. We must naturalize ourselves and direct our senses towards nature and enjoy it from an intimate closeness in order to create, erasing the limits of the self with the natural environment that surrounds it.
Nature as a fictional character
Finally, we cannot finish this journey through the new literary naturalism without mentioning at least one recent exponent of the fictions that make nature their narrative epicenter. In this prolific and naturalistic year 2022, Orwell's Roses (Lumen) has been published, a non-biography in which Rebecca Solnit displays a very personal style. It all begins on All Souls Day 1936 when Orwell plants some roses before going to fight in the Civil War. From that point we witness the narration of someone who tells us about Orwell's life with an intimate and close approach. The creator of 1984 became a lover of the garden of him and nature. His words serve to close this review of the naturalist literature that confirms that something is changing in our consciousness and vision of the natural environment.
“Planting a tree, particularly a long-lived, hardwood tree, is a gift we can give to posterity practically for free and with little inconvenience, and if the tree takes root it will outlast the visible effects of any of our other actions, good or bad."
(Alexis Racionero is a doctor in Art History, a specialist in counterculture and Eastern philosophy. The author of various books, he has just published Ecotopía. Una utopia de la Tierra (Cuadernos Anagrama), where he updates and expands what was written in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach in his Ecotopia, a manifesto on the need to reconnect with the Earth.)
