Hope and Literary Activism - by Karen Lloyd, Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library
There is a Muslim prayer that begins, ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment.’ The writer Fanny Howe talks about bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics; a conceptual approach that fosters an enchantment with language and meaning. In my own practice I have come to think of bewilderment as an underpinning that allows me to dwell sometimes in certainty but often, perhaps more frequently, in uncertainty.
My work is mostly concerned with the natural world and our relationship to it, and necessarily, because the climate and biodiversity crises are ever-present, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I might tell stories in this time of profound uncertainty.
The world is full of stories. Frequently – mostly in fact – they are orientated towards the negative in terms of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. Post Second Word War, the American conservationist and forefather of contemporary nature writing Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
The potency of Leopold’s sentiment has increased exponentially since it was written in 1949. It has acquired legitimacy as a touchstone to those of us who choose to entangle ourselves with the more-than-human world through our lives and our writing. From this, I believe, it is more important than ever to consider what hope might look like in the eye of the storm.
Through my previous research I’d become aware that afforded the right conditions, nature has an immense capacity to return. Too often though, stories of restoration and recovery don’t make it into the public domain. Consequently, in 2017 I set out to research a book that that fostered notions of hope in readers and beyond.
I wanted to become an evangelist, if you like, for the precedent that nature recovery is not only possible, but taking place all around us if only we knew where and how to look, ranging from tiny projects to those of epic landscape scale.
Sometimes recovery can occur through land abandonment, and sometimes through giving certain species legal protection; often it is a result of human activism.
The book was a series of literary essays. Essays, because I was interested in testing new ways of writing, of experimenting with physical structure through the braided or fragmented essay, say, alongside the kinds of rhetorical devices that could potentially and in combination accrue layers of understanding to how the resulting stories were received.
I think of my writing as a kind of literary activism, or a sympathetic counter-touchstone to Leopold’s, say, albeit one that does not seek to misrepresent the challenges of climate chaos but which leads to increased understanding of the possibilities of repair and recovery.
However, as we know the word activism has been misappropriated by the fossil fuel industry and systematically and intentionally misrepresented by large sections of the media. But activism is inextricably bound up with hope, and hope is the wellspring from which repair and restoration of all kinds are founded.
Hope and activism are coterminous, or to use a more natural metaphor, they exist in symbiotic relationship. ‘Hope,’ writes Vaclav Havel, ‘is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.’
Restoring habitats or conserving the wondrous wildlife that surrounds us in the face of the climate crisis might feel a bewildering prospect, but this does not mean we give up.
The resulting book, Abundance, tells the stories of conservationists and others across Europe, from my home territory of the Lake District, to Scotland and the Hungarian steppe.
In the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania I spent time in the mountains with forest rangers on the trail of bears, wolves and lynx. I met a Roma community tending nurseries of tiny hardwood forests ahead of replanting where illegal logging had left mountainsides bare and vulnerable to erosion.
The rangers were also protecting the forests from illegal logging; further north in Romania, rangers had been shot and killed by illegal gangs for doing the same.
In the Netherlands, wolves were crossing the border from Germany and Belgium and establishing new territories in the Veluwe forest.
At a conference at the University of Wageningen I met Peter Venema, the conservationist consulted by the government to consider, philosophically, what, after an absence of 150 years, the return of the wolf meant for the Dutch as a nation.
As Peter talked and my bewilderment at the thought of a government engaging in philosophical enquiry about the return of a predator became apparent, Peter’s response elicited one of those striking moments my friend the poet Karen Izod tells me is an unthought known; ‘Well of course,’ Peter said, ‘how else should we have done it?’
During my residency at Gladstone’s Library this July, I’ve continued the work of engaging with hope and telling stories, but this time for a new book exploring nature in urban spaces and the ways in which humans and nature are inextricably entangled, like it or not.
Gladstone’s Library brought me out of what has possibly been the longest and most bewildering period of writer’s block I can ever recall. But as I attended to my notes in the garden and the reading room, words began to tumble out onto the page and thence to my computer.
When I mentioned that journey of recovery to Andrea, Gladstone’s vibrant warden, she responded, ‘Oh yes; you just have to walk into the library, and something magical happens.’ For this, and for such warm hospitality, I shall be eternally grateful.