'We all live in a watershed': How the Anthropocene is changing the elements and us

Ideas53:59How the Anthropocene is Changing the Elements and Us

Author Robert Macfarlane has always been fascinated with landscape and topography, the study of physical features in an area, like hills, valleys, or rivers.

We may not notice how a footpath is more than a way to get from A to B, but Macfarlane says there are stories on that path, a recorded journey that keeps us in touch with the planet in more ways than one.

"The story of the path is, in a way, one of our earliest technologies," he told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.

Macfarlane is one of the world's premier writers of natural history and landscape and our relationships with them. He explores how place moulds the mind and how language in turn gives form and meaning to landscape.

"We are adept if occasionally embarrassed at saying what we make of places, but we are far less good at saying what places make of us," Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways.

But there's been a seismic shift with the onset of the Anthropocene humans are altering the composition, properties and behaviour of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire.

Macfarlane spoke to IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about the physical and psychological connections between people, and earth and water and how that's changing.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

Robert, you've described your books as being about the relationship between landscape and the human heart, and you talk about the way people carry landscapes with them. What do you mean by that?

The metaphors we live by, to use that wonderful phrase, are very often taken from place, from landscape. Paths, rivers, mountains these are the founding forms of our oldest stories, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our ways in the world. So in that sense, they're deep in narrative, they're deep in story, and they're deep in the ways we imagine ourselves.

I've always been drawn to archetypes in that sense the path, the river, the mountain, and the underworld and drawn to the ways in which we make sense of our interior terrains using these forms, the ways we navigate ourselves to ourselves, as it were.

And so what specific landscapes do you carry with you?

Well, I sometimes say my heart is made of mountains and always will be, and I think that's true. A river runs through me as it runs through everyone. There's a wonderful greeting that I try to use more and more, which says, instead of saying, 'Where are you from?' You say, 'Who are your rivers? Which are your rivers? Where are your rivers?'

So who are your rivers?

Well, I was just about to ask you to say so. Will you tell me if I tell you?

Well, sure, absolutely, yeah.

You go first.

Well, my river is the Red River in Winnipeg. Winnipeg, Manitoba, almost the centre of Canada, [which] has a long Indigenous history. And I grew up right next to it. It was very much a part of my story. So what about your river?

I have two one big, one small, and they both start in springs.

One is the River Dee, the Scottish Dee, which rises on the summit of the Cairngorms our Arctic mountains. They're only 4,000 feet high. But we're so far north in the north of Scotland that they really feel polar. It's a tundra-like habitat up there. And their granite gets so saturated by rain and snow melts that it wells back up in the form of springs and then it runs away from that high point.

The other is another spring, but completely different, just near my home here in Cambridge, [UK] which is where the springs rise on 99 million-year-old chalk at the bottom of a very small hill called White Hill. And they flow away. I've been visiting those springs for 25 years now.

How do people react when you ask them that question? What are their rivers?

Everyone has an answer to that question. Isn't that wonderful?

We all live in a watershed. That still strikes me as a gong-clash moment. We all live in a watershed. Water moves around us and through us. It irrigates our dreams, our songs, our stories.

How early did you begin to think of landscapes as ways for us to see ourselves?

It's such a hard question to answer. When do we become conscious of having become conscious, as it were? I date an analytic consciousness about the ways we carry landscapes within us fall in love with them, are willing to die for them to an encounter at a climber's graveyard, way up a glacier in the Tian-Shan Mountains of Central Asia.

I was in my very early 20s. They were far too hard for me and I was suffering terrible altitude sickness, trying to recover from it and acclimatize at base camp. And I walked up the glacier. it was very far from any help. There was a boulder and it had been converted over the years by all the climbers who had come into a makeshift cemetery. There were little niches dug for the climbers who died on those mountains. One of them was an Englishman about the same age as me.

I remember standing there in that bright egalitarian light falling on the ice, on the rock, on me, and suddenly being placed outside the mystery that I'd lived in, the mystery of mountains and their magic. The absurdity of the devotion struck me, and I began to want to try and understand and explain how a lump of rock and ice could come to have such a grip on the heart and the mind.

Of course, it isn't just delights that you take in the landscape or water for that matter. Your writing is full of very visceral descriptions of the fear that some landscapes have made you feel when you've been deep inside them or traversing them. Can you tell me about one of the more intense experiences of fear that that landscape has invoked in you?

Yeah. All cities have a negative. All the cities have been extracted from somewhere in order to be raised upon the land. And Paris's negative its invisible inverse happens to lie directly beneath it in the form of the catacombs, from which that city's limestone was extracted over the centuries and was then converted into a great ossuary when the city's cemeteries began to overflow in the later 18th century. There are literally hundreds of miles of Catacomb network.

So I went there and spent, two nights, three days, under Paris in the parts of the Catacombs that were not altogether legal to get into it requires a little bit of manhole cover lifting. But you're entombed, you don't see the sun for three days. And that stone comes to grip you.

Listen to the full conversation by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.

*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.