8 - Nature Walking: Marching Against Privilege

Summary

The problem of privilege and exclusion hinders the ethical credentials (and range) of new nature writing. This issue is being addressed with increasing urgency, by publishing houses as well as by ecocritics, and it receives direct treatment in several contemporary books about walking in nature. A subgenre is thus emerging which represents a new chapter in a long tradition of established literary connections between walking and wonder and enlightenment, as well as vagrancy. Yet the element of privilege in this tradition persists, a fact pointedly highlighted in Kathleen Jamie’s observation about ‘the association of literature, remoteness, wildness and spiritually uplifted men’, in her review of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The most obvious consequence of such privilege is white dominance. In the introduction to a prominent recent collection of nature writing oriented towards the Anthropocene, editor Tim Dee laments his failure ‘to find anything other than white contributors’. But there is an equally long and commonplace experience of finding rejuvenation and repair through retreat, and an established practice of walking as protest: both of these resources inform and reinvigorate the contemporary literature of nature walking. The politicised literature of nature walking in the British archipelago is often deemed to begin with Wordsworth, who ‘linked walking with nature, poetry, poverty and vagrancy in a wholly new and compelling way’, as Rebecca Solnit puts it. This essay is concerned with this Romantic legacy, and how Wordsworth’s particular constellation of ideas (walking, nature, writing, and social justice, understood as an indissoluble nexus) informs the contemporary literature of nature walking, written in the context of climate change, and fashioned by mutating forms of interconnected impoverishment. The defining textual effects and narrative features of this literary mode are my particular focus, but I want to keep its familiar topical concerns in view, the better to demonstrate how content infuses the form of this subgenre of nature writing.

Walking in nature as a form of protest is associated most strongly, perhaps, with the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932, a ‘protest for a greater right of access to the moors’. As Nick Hayes points out, the significance of the trespass itself was symbolic rather than material in effecting change; and this points to the configuration that concerns me, in which narrative spawns imaginings or re-imaginings of access to the countryside, which might in turn have a bearing on political praxis.