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Read our interview with the author
Richard Mabey is often referred to as 'the father of modern nature writing' His latest book is a retrospective of occasional writings complied by the author over the last couple of decades. In the author's words; 'a sketchy reflection of a life's work does emerge'
For five decades Richard Mabey has been a pioneering voice in modern nature writing. From the rediscovery of foraging that led to Food for Free, through his groundbreaking expeditions in the 'edgelands' in the 1970s, to his reflections on the musicality of bird-song, he has consistently explored new ways of thinking about nature and its relation to our lives. In Turning the Boat for Home, he introduces pieces from his rich writing life that reflect on how his ideas evolved.
At the heart is a passionate belief that Earth is a commonwealth, of all species. Mabey recalls the fight against the commercial afforestation of the Scottish peatlands and recounts the experience of running a 'community woodland', one of the first in Britain.
Plants, the organisms that underpin all life, have been a source of constant fascination. In his encyclopaedic Flora Britannica Mabey explored how deeply they are embedded in our popular culture. But they are also autonomous beings with their own agendas, as experienced in his own 'serendipitous' garden 'in which wild organisms improvise their own landscapes'.
From a new viewpoint, 'the slow-moving carapace' of a boat on the Norfolk Broads, Mabey ponders the migration of geese and the home-loving whirligig beetles. His epiphany is that a sense of "neighbourliness" may be the best model for our relationship with the rest of the living world.
Throughout there is a commitment to writing and to language, which may be 'our greatest ecological gift'. In a celebration that links the work of the poet John Clare with the political warnings of Rachel Carson, Mabey suggests that 'the answer to the still present threat of a silent spring is for us to sing against the storm.'
Richard Mabey is the father of modern nature writing in the UK. Since 1972 he has written some forty influential books, including the prize-winning Nature Cure, Gilbert White: A Biography, and Flora Britannica. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of the Open Spaces Society. He spent the first half of his life amongst the Chiltern beechwoods, and now lives in Norfolk in a house surrounded by ash trees.
"[...] To my ear, this book has an elegiac quality. Mabey has faith that ‘life will find a way’; that one way of coping with the gathering crisis in the natural world is to ‘sing against the storm’. Nature endures; even now, in the most desolate urban centre or sanitised park, it will spring eternal. This mature work by our greatest nature writer goes a long way to justifying its author’s belief that the greatest ecological gift we possess is language."
– Peter Marren, British Wildlife 31(2), December 2019
"Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain. I don't mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop. I would read anything he wrote, but if such a thing as nature writing exists and flourishes today it is thanks almost entirely to him. I have lived by his books for all of my life. Pretty much all of what nature means to me, I know thanks to his own lifelong clear-eyed but loving investigation of what it means to him. He has allowed us all to think about modern nature – our world – but also, crucially, to feel it too. I cannot imagine a truer green man."
– Tim Dee
"One figure, like no other, looms large in setting the ground for the contemporary form that has come to be called then New Nature Writing. Richard Mabey is an author whose work has consistently pioneered new ways of thinking about landscape, nature, place, culture and the range of interconnections that all of these share. Often this has meant reminding us of old ways of thinking about these things but he has always had a sharp eye for the new meanings our modern context provokes."
– Jos Smith
"One of our most influential writers on the natural world"
– Gardens Illustrated
"A valuable contribution to a great cause"
– John Jolliffe, Spectator
"Poised where nature meets culture, he [Richard Mabey] is knowledgeable, politically savvy and wry, and an excellent naturalist"
– Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*
