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Women Writing About the Wild: 25 Essential Authors

A primer on who to start reading and who you've been overlooking for too long.

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Women who write about the wild cannot be easily labeled. They are conservationists, scientists, and explorers; historians, poets, and novelists; ramblers, scholars, and spiritual seekers. They are hard to pin down but for their willingness to be “unladylike,” to question, and to seek.

The following list is in no way definitive, but if you want a primer on some of the best nature writing you probably haven’t read yet, you’d do well to start with these 25 women. We present them in order from historical to contemporary.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Henry David Thoreau is considered to be the father of American environmentalism, but he owes much of his philosophy to nature writers who came before him—and one writer in particular is overdue for credit. For his 1854 book Walden , Thoreau consulted Rural Hours , written in 1850 by Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Rural Hours is a record of a year around Cooperstown, New York, where she lived, and it’s the first American book of place-based nature observations.

Despite its anonymous publication “by a Lady” and Cooper’s status as an amateur naturalist, the book caught the attention of leading scientists of the time. Cooper lamented the changing landscape and anticipated concepts central to ecology when few others did. And she did so personally and lyrically: “The varied foliage clothing in tender wreaths every naked branch, the pale mosses reviving, a thousand young plants rising above the blighted herbage of last year in cheerful succession.” Choose the 1998 University of Georgia Press edition of Rural Hours —the 1968 version cuts 40 percent of the original text and much of Cooper’s environmental commentary.

Gene Stratton-Porter

At a time when most women were homemakers, Gene Stratton-Porter was a prolific novelist, naturalist, and conservationist. She also wrote at a time when the Limberlost wetlands and swamps of her native Indiana were vanishing: 13,000 acres of this biodiverse area were drained for agriculture by 1913. Before they disappeared, Stratton-Porter captured the wetlands’ rich habitat by setting her internationally popular fiction there. This includes two novels: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), the latter of which influenced many young girls, including author Annie Dillard, profiled below, and was adapted to film four times. The self-reliant teenage heroine, Elnora, loved the outdoors, especially hunting moths. Stratton-Porter made a fortune from these romantic novels, with a stunning 10 million copies sold by 1924. She also wrote ten natural history books between 1907 and 1925. Stratton-Porter was the first American woman to form a movie and production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, Inc., and used her position to help conserve parts of the Limberlands you see in Indiana today.

Mary Austin

Anyone interested in the natural history of Southern California—what came before sprawl, smog, and Kardashians—should pick up Mary Austin’s 1903 classic The Land of Little Rain . More than a century ago, Austin presciently captured a disappearing cultural and physical landscape: the people, plants, politics, and sense of place in California’s Owens Valley. She did so ten years before the city of Los Angeles diverted the Owens River in 1913, a period in history known as the California Water Wars and immortalized in the film Chinatown . Austin disregarded prescribed gender roles about how women should explore and talk about the natural world, and she did it with wit, verve, and lyricism. You can hear her wry voice here, channeling Jane Austen: “It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.” She is known for writing essays, poetry, plays, and novels; for her pioneering work in science fiction; and as an advocate of indigenous cultures.

Karen Blixen-Isak Dinesen

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was also Baroness Badass: She shot lions, had a love affair with English game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and was enamored with the idea of vultures picking her remains clean when she died. She wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen in Danish, French, and English, including the superlative Out of Africa , her 1937 memoir made into a film about running a 4,000-acre coffee plantation in British East Africa, now Kenya, from 1914 to 1931. Though some readers feel that a European arrogance appears at times in her writing, she wrote with great feeling and affection about the people and landscape of the African continent: “The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.”

Nan Shepherd

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live.” —Nan Shepherd

Men have written hundreds of mountaineering books, but who wrote one of the best? A Scottish poet and novelist named Anna “Nan” Shepherd. The Living Mountain is her meditation on high and holy places: a walk into rather than up mountains, a caress rather than a conquer of peaks, a whisper of “let’s see closer” rather than a testosterone-fueled bugle of “ I did it!”

She writes, “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” Shepherd was a localist who deeply immersed herself in the Cairngorms, Scotland’s eastern Highlands. She swam in streams, watched wildlife, and slept outdoors—a deep engagement recounted in luminescent prose. The Living Mountain was written during World War II, when Shepherd often went “stravaigin”—a Scottish term for wandering. For reasons unknown, she left the manuscript in a drawer for nearly 40 years. It was published late in her life, in 1977. Today, Shepherd’s writing is justifiably experiencing a renaissance—so much so that the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a new £5 note with her portrait in 2016.

Rachel Carson

“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.” —John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

Rachel Carson’s day job was in marine biology, and she wrote the prize-winning book The Sea Around Us (1951), which spent 86 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But Carson is best known for her 1961 book, Silent Spring , which directly led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. With a title inspired by a Keats poem, Silent Spring originated when dead birds began turning up in the garden of one of Carson’s friends after rampant spraying of the pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). A landmark in the environmental movement, Carson’s book demonstrated the harmful environmental effects of pesticides including DDT, leading to its ban. In the book, she asks, “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home of insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintance who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” In 2006, Discover named Silent Spring one of the 25 greatest science books of all time.

Ann Haymond Zwinger

Ann Haymond Zwinger was studying for a doctorate at Harvard when she met her husband, an Air Force pilot. As a military wife, she raised three daughters during their transfers around the country, finally settling down in Colorado Springs in 1960. When the couple bought 40 acres, Zwinger started cataloging and illustrating plants she discovered there—the beginning of a career writing natural histories of mountains, rivers, deserts, and canyon lands of the American West. Over 30 years, she wrote more than 20 books about her quiet observations of the wild. Meticulous and graceful, Zwinger’s writing integrated geology, botany, archaeology, and history along with personal reflections. Start by reading her 1975 book, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the West . You’ll feel as if you’re in the boat with her: “Raw, open sand dunes spread over the right bank, white prickly poppy and masses of yellow mustard and sand-verbena blooming across them.”

Annie Dillard

You feel as though you’re sleepwalking through life. You decide you need to get off the grid. As you head for the solitude of a cabin, bring Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It is, like Thoreau’s Walden , a “meteorological journal of [her] mind” (in her own words), a meditation, and a nonfiction book about seeing the world more intimately. At age 29, Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim , and the book remains one of the finest in nature narratives. What sets Dillard apart is her desire to behold the sacred and divine along a creek in the Virginia woods. She observes her own way of seeing in poetic, scientific, mystical ways: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Edward Abbey called Dillard the “true heir of the Master” (Thoreau), and she has been compared to Gerard Manly Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, John Donne, and William Blake.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

“What it takes to dazzle us, masters of dazzle, all of us here together at the top of the world, is a night without neon or mercury lamps.” —“Mt. Lemmon, Steward Observatory, 1990”

Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Hawthorne Deming is a rare interdisciplinary cross-thinker: a poet who writes about science. From the miniscule to the stellar, she explores science, the physical world, and poetry with exquisite observations and memorable juxtapositions. With seven volumes of poetry and five collections of essays, there is no one best place to begin exploring her work, though the essay “Science and Poetry: A View from the Divide” is a good one. As the title suggests, it coalesces Deming’s thinking about the creative process and shared language of the two disciplines. Also good: Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001), in which she writes passionately about the importance of nature writing in reconnecting people to the natural world and enhancing our spiritual lives, and her most recent work, Stairway to Heaven (2016), a collection of poems reflecting on the loss of her mother and brother.

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich debuted in 1985 with The Solace of Open Spaces . It is a bareback, elegant collection of essays—a mix of memoir, meditation, and poetry—set in Wyoming and capturing the stoic people who call the arid landscape home. After the death of the man she loves, Ehrlich throws herself into hard ranch work—delivering lambs and calves, punching cattle, learning to ride. You can practically smell pungent sagebrush and feel the texture of dirty sheep’s wool as she works to regain personal happiness. To herd sheep, Ehrlich observes, “is to discover a new human gear somewhere between second and reverse—a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed.” She has a knack for describing the people and places of Wyoming with mystic expression: “The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties into an unquenchable appetite for life.” Ehrlich’s 11 other books shimmer with a keen perspective on travel and place, including her 1991 narrative nonfiction, Islands, the Universe, Home —ten essays on ritual, nature and philosophy—and A Match to the Heart (1994), an unsentimental account of healing after being struck by lightning.

Kathleen Norris

“Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the Holy.”

Don’t shut the book if you feel a prairie wind blow through you while reading Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by poet and essayist Kathleen Norris. It may happen. The book is a prairie-based spiritual meditation about learning to see more in less. In 1974, Norris and her husband moved from New York City to her grandparent’s farm in isolated Lemmon, South Dakota, where she discovers a community of Benedictine monks and revives her Protestant faith. “Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are.” Norris’s spiritual quest continued beyond this book when she became a Benedictine oblate in 1986 and wrote The Cloister Walk in 1997 and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith in 1999.

Diane Ackerman

A grad school friend once argued, “Diane Ackerman is just too lush.” And I said, “That’s precisely why I’d like her.” If you’re in the mood for a velvety, layered wine by someone who revels in playing with language as much as writing about the physical world, reach for Ackerman’s books. One of the finest narrative nonfiction writers (you may know her bestselling book The Zookeeper’s Wife or Pulitzer finalist One Hundred Names for Love ), Ackerman also ponders diverse subjects in natural history. In The Natural History of the Senses , she encourages readers to see the common with fresh eyes: “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.”

Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is the story of a shell-shocked World War II veteran trying to regain his peace of mind. When first published in 1977, it deeply resonated with returning Vietnam vets and has gained more relevance as mental health and post-traumatic stress syndrome in vets is better understood. The story follows Tayo, a vet of mixed Laguna-white ancestry who has returned home to his reservation, having lost his will to live after enduring the 65-mile Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Alternating between prose and poetry, the book tells the events of Tayo’s life and shows how ancient Laguna rituals reconnect him to his Pueblo people, plants, and animals. Silko is regarded as the premiere figure in the Native American Renaissance. A Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white storyteller, she infuses all her work—novels, poems, films, short stories, and essays—with concerns for traditional Native American culture and the restorative power of ancient rituals. Raised in the sparse beauty of a New Mexican plateau and a debut recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award in 1981, Silko deftly explores complex relationships between humans and nature.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer blends her scientific understanding as a professor of environmental and forest biology with her heritage as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses , won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. Her second, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants , won the Sigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing Award. In both books, Kimmerer weaves close observations of nature with indigenous views that invite us to reflect on our relationship with plants, animals, and the land—“an ancient conversation between mosses and rocks … About light and shadow and the drift of continents … an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy.” Kimmerer manages to invoke ecological spirituality while never veering toward unsubstantiated facts (that’s the scientist in her).

Amy Stewart

Earthworms, wicked bugs, deadly plants. The flower industry. Botanical ingredients of the world’s great drinks. These are subjects of Amy Stewart’s bestselling books. For Stewart, a Texas transplant in California with a trademark wit, the story of the natural world is the grandest and most important human story. “Our quest to understand the natural world, to preserve it, and even to profit from it and make use of it, is in some ways the only story,” Stewart said in an email exchange. A personal favorite of mine is The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks , filled with liqueur recipes and horticultural history. We learn how to plant citrus and sloes, and how to make a sloe gin fizz or a red lion hybrid. It’s neither easy nor recommended, but I now plant my garden with a cocktail glass in one hand and a spade in the other.

Carolyn Finney

What percentage of visitors to America’s national parks are black? Seven percent, according to a survey commissioned by the National Park Service. If black people comprise twice that percentage of the U.S. population, why don’t more people of color venture into America’s public lands, and does that mean they aren’t engaged with the natural environment? These are potent questions of race, identity, and connection that Carolyn Finney, a writer, performer, and cultural geographer, addresses in her 2014 book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors . A mixture of scholarship, memoir, and history, the book is an academic yet probing read, braiding analysis with interviews to trace the environmental legacy of slavery, racial violence, and Jim Crow segregation while also celebrating contributions black Americans have made to the environment.

Terry Tempest Williams

“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

By 1994, nine members of Terry Tempest Williams’s family had undergone mastectomies. Seven died of cancer. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place , her sixth book, Williams weaves memoir and natural history to tell the dual narrative of her mother’s cancer from atomic testing and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Rooted in the sprawling landscape of her native Utah, the book pivots between the natural and unnatural, between a family devastated by exposure to 1950s atomic bomb testing and a bird refuge despoiled by developers. And she writes in such a shimmering manner that decades after reading Refuge for the first time, I can still see the egrets, owls, and herons on the Great Salt Lake. It’s also there that Williams once found a dead swan, placed its body in the shape of a crucifix with two black stones over the eyes, and wrote, “Using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan’s black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather.” Refuge has become a classic of American nature writing in its meditative search for meaning in the rhythms of life and death.

Janisse Ray

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets,” writes Janisse Ray at the beginning of her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (2000). That home was a junkyard in rural southern Georgia, where Ray writes about growing up in a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. It’s also a book about the longleaf pine ecosystem, 99 percent of which is gone. Ray mourns the apocalyptic deforestation of these pines, a valuable tree to merchants and the U.S. Navy. It grew from Virginia to Florida to Texas and has been replaced by faster-growing commercial pines. The author of six books, Ray focuses her work on rural life, agriculture, human rights, and environmental sustainability. What sets her apart as a nature writer? “Southerners in general have a deep relationship with land, history, and place,” Ray said. “Which makes nature very important to the Southern psyche. Because of the terrain, our emphasis is more botanic than geologic, more rural than urban, and more deeply rooted in story rather than statistic, generally speaking.”

Helen MacDonald

“Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.”

By page 50 of H Is for Hawk , savoring each sentence like pearls on a string, you realize you’re holding a new classic in nature writing. H is the third book for Helen MacDonald, a British poet, illustrator, falconer, and historian. Her first, Shaler’s Fish (2001), is a collection of poetry, and her second, Falcon (2006), is nonfiction—and it didn’t just put her on the map, but rocketed her to international acclaim. The book masterfully chronicles the collapse of reality when MacDonald’s father, who shared her passion for birding, unexpectedly dies on a London street. To deal with her grief, she throws herself into taming and training a goshawk, a bird she calls “a Victorian melodrama” and “as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell.” Taking seven years to write, H is, simply, a masterpiece. It also stands apart from much nature writing genre for its dark, sweary, and funny bits—traits practitioners of more traditional nature writing often shy away from, but shouldn’t. What can we expect next from MacDonald? She hasn’t decided yet. “Whatever it will be,” she told me, “I think it will build on one of the deepest themes in H Is for Hawk : investigating how we unconsciously use the natural world as a mirror of our own selves and concerns, and how this relates to the way we give value to particular landscapes and creatures.”

Camille T. Dungy

“I am never not thinking about nature,” Camille T. Dungy wrote in an email, “because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.” A professor at Colorado State University, Dungy has written four poetry collections and edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009). This widely influential anthology features nearly 200 poems, from 18th-century slave Phillis Wheatley to recent poet laureate Rita Dove. It challenges the notion that the tradition of nature writing has been solely grounded in the pastoral or wild landscapes of America and Europe. The voices within the collection show nature as a devastating legacy of slavery, with people forced to work the land; at the same time, portraits emerge of writers who saw nature as a source of hope, with seeds of survival. Dungy’s poetry is vivid, personal, and lucid and stays with you long after you close the book. The poem “Trophic Cascade” appears to be about a changing ecosystem after the introduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but the last lines deliver a curveball: “All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” Her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History , was published in June.

Andrea Wulf

“All my books are about the relationship between humankind and nature,” said Andrea Wulf, a historian and writer living in Britain. “I dislike the categories that are imposed upon books, such as ‘biography,’ ‘history of science,’ ‘garden history,’ or ‘nature writing.’ I hope that we can transcend these artificial boundaries.” A prize-winning writer, Wulf is the author of five natural history books, including The Brother Gardeners (2008) and The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2012). It is her detailed and arresting 2015 book, The Invention of Nature: How Alexander von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World , that has garnered the most attention. Wulf pulls the explorer von Humboldt from oblivion and writes in great depth about why his ideas were so astonishing in the mid-19th century yet commonplace now: “It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.”

Katharine Norbury

Following a miscarriage, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a letter from her birth mother, English writer and film editor Katharine Norbury set out on a journey: to follow rivers from sea to source in the Llyn Peninsula of Northwest Wales in the company of her nine-year-old daughter. This walking journey was meant to be a kind of family memory book that Norbury felt she might bind with leaves and shells, but it grew into an exquisite and profound reflection on the healing power of nature during times of grief and loss. The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is Norbury’s life-affirming personal narrative about marriage, motherhood, adoption, and self-discovery. Part travelogue and healing meditation, Norbury’s place writing is lush, sensual, and vivid: “Each retreating wave was an apnoeic gasp, gravel lungs filled with water, drowning without panic.” Her next book—untitled as of yet—is about the circus and belonging.

Melissa Harrison

The British are obsessed with walking, weather, and the countryside. It’s not surprising that a very good book about moody mists, damp drizzles, and downright deluges would be widely embraced and showered with praise. That book is Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) by English novelist and journalist Melissa Harrison. A patient and poetic guide, she invites readers to explore and reimagine one of the essential elements of our world, reminding us that to “experience the countryside on fair days and never foul is to understand only half its story.” Her third book, Rain , was nominated for the Wainwright Prize, an award given to the best writing on the outdoors, nature, and UK-based travel writing. Harrison has also written two nature novels: Clay (2013) and At Hawthorn Time (2015), the latter shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Hawthorn examines old secrets and a crumbling marriage against the unchanging backdrop of nature: “He remembered the graceful elms,” she writes. “So did the rooks, you could hear the loss of them in their chatter still. Things didn’t always turn out as you feared, though; the countryside was still full of saplings, but fugitive, sheltered in hedgerows and abetted by taller trees.”

Elena Passarello

A poet, professor, and actor, Elena Passarello is one of the finest essayists working today. Her second book, Animals Strike Curious Poses , is an exquisite collection of 16 essays weaving human and animal history together in narrative nonfiction that is playful, poignant, and deeply researched. Readers of this book as well as her first, Let Me Clear My Throat (2013), will not be surprised to learn that Passarello is a recipient of the Whiting Award for Nonfiction, a literary prize given to emerging writers with great promise. In Animals Strike Curious Poses , she takes us on a journey to a breathtaking range of places: the imagined mindset of an “endling” (the last of a species), the seemingly lost “crucial glance” between humans and wild animals, and her own childhood memories of “Lancelot the Living Unicorn.” In typical good humor, Passarello told me she brings to the practice of nature writing “a layperson’s sense of uncertainty, wonder, and often wrongheadedness.” What fascinates her is the nature of human thought and obsession, be it a song, a speech, or a salamander. “That’s why I’m as likely to write about the social practices of birdwatchers as I am the birds they seek.” What’s she writing now? Passarello said her next venture will take her outside “to do something a little crazy, something for which I have to undergo training.” Watch for it.

Amy Liptrot

After years of hedonism and drowning in booze in London, Amy Liptrot washes ashore on her native Orkney Islands in Scotland to try to save herself. Her debut book, The Outrun —winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for best nature, travel, and outdoor writing—is raw and beautiful, a painful rehab memoir. It follows Liptrot’s recovery and reconnection with the landscape she sought to escape for years. In atmospheric writing, she describes swimming in the cold sea, tracking puffins and arctic terns, and observing the night sky: “I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by 67 moons.” The best descriptive writers have close, repeated observations of particular place; Liptrot watches tides, winds, clouds, wildlife, and more. Learning folklore and rural traditions of the islands also enhances her new, celebratory sense of place.

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Book News & Features

The workings of nature: naturalist writing and making sense of the world.

Genevieve Valentine

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"In every generation and among every nation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they did not exist, those nations would perish."

-- Al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova. Among more detached details of its appearance, there is this: "It was like a large bamboo mat. It displayed the five colors, both pleasing and otherwise."

The attempt to ground the unknown within the familiar — and the editorial aside of "otherwise" — cuts to the heart of naturalist writing. Nearly 2000 years later, Carl Sagan did the same in Cosmos , condensing astronomy to its component parts: facts and wonder.

We've been curious about the natural world since before recorded time; the history of naturalism is human history. By the ninth century, al-Jahiz's multi-volume History of Animals combined zoological folklore with scientific observation, including theories of natural selection. In the early 20th century, Sioux author Zitkala-Ša wrote landscapes intertwined with the personal, which became a model for the form. In 1962, Rachel Carson's ecological manifesto Silent Spring was a deciding factor in banning DDT.

The best naturalist writing delivers both a secondhand thrill of obsession and a jolt of protectiveness for what's been discovered. Some of it reveals as much about the author as the surroundings. (Carl Linnaeus' 1811 Tour of Lapland manuscript cuts off a paragraph about wedding customs mid-sentence, picking up again with a breathless catalog of marsh plants.) And naturalists themselves are shaped by the lure of landscapes on the page. Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks explores the British countryside using others' writing as an interior map that challenges him to approach familiar places in new ways.

We love reading about nature for the same reason naturalists love being ankle-deep in marshes: Nature provides enough order to soothe and enough entropy to surprise. It's also why so many involve a person in the landscape; understanding our place in the world is as important as understanding the world itself. We read the work of naturalists to capture that sense of discovery made familiar. They present worlds we've never seen, and make us care as if they were our own backyards.

Not every naturalist sets out to be an activist; this is a literary tradition as much as a scientific one. But there are threads that connect naturalist literature, across continents and centuries. It's driven by an environmental curiosity that integrates the scientific and the spiritual; facts inspire wonder, rather than quench it. And every piece of naturalist literature, from al-Jahiz to today, makes a case for preserving the world it sees.

The Invention of Nature

Some naturalists actually do try to encompass the world entire. In The Invention of Nature , Andrea Wulf follows Alexander Humboldt's expeditions in Latin America and European royal courts, painting a portrait of a man whose hunger for knowledge — and constant pontificating about it — bordered on caricature. Humboldt's legacy is the 'web of life' his work conveyed to a lay audience. That interconnectedness made him an early conservationist; by 1800 he was noting adverse effects "when forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by European planters, with an imprudent precipitation."

But he wasn't the first to catalog the systems of life. A century before Humboldt, German-born naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian was in Surinam, recording her life's passion: butterflies, moths, and insects. Chrysalis , Kim Todd's biography of this amateur scientist who established the idea of a life cycle, aims for a sly impression of Merian, down to the subject matter: "Insects," Todd explains, "generally gave off a whiff of vice." Merian's engravings made life cycles palpable for a public who still believed rotten meat spontaneously transformed into flies; it was impressive enough to change assumptions about the natural world (though Merian's credit waned as male scientists began absorbing her work into their own).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. This is the dynamic at the heart of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which carries a touch of the hymnal (and a grim streak that has a grandmother in Merian's engraving of a tarantula devouring a bird), and Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud , a love letter swamps, bogs, and "the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." And few naturalists write themselves into their landscapes quite so drily as M. Krishnan. The essays in Of Birds and Birdsong carry a sense of magical realism; always scientifically rigorous (his bird descriptions are those of a man looking for a particular friend in a crowd of thousands), Krishnan writes himself as a resigned meddler in avian affairs; he could try to be invisible among nature's bounty, but then who'd train his pigeons?

Of course, some writers have to fight to be seen on the landscape at all. Enter The Colors of Nature , an anthology of nature writing by people of color edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, providing deeply personal connections to — or disconnects from — nature. Jamaica Kincaid's "In History" considers naturalism in the aftermath of colonialism, asking a crucial question for naturalism in a global context: "What should history mean to someone who looks like me?" And Joseph Bruchac's travel diary is pragmatism shot through with hope; "Our old words keep returning to the land."

The Colors of Nature

For others, the internal landscape and that hope for the natural world must be rediscovered in tandem. In Braiding Sweetgrass , botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship "which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land." That sense of connection, or the loss of it, is the spine of the book: mucking out a pond is a microcosm, agriculture becomes rumination on symbiosis, and mast fruiting of pecan trees parallels human and plant communities.

It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes — that sense of discovery that draws us in. Happily for armchair naturalists, mysteries of the natural world never stop unfolding; but increasingly, a sense of impending doom accompanies the delight of knowledge. Kimmerer mentions a language between trees as something awaiting more specific study; it arrives later this year in Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees . A no-nonsense writing style — he came, he studied, here's how to date a forest via its weevil population — frames a deeply conservationist argument: Trees harbor not only ecosystems, but feelings, vocabulary, and etiquette. Hidden Life is designed to be an arboreal Silent Spring .

For some places, however, no revelations are yet possible; the world being studied is simply too mysterious to be yet wholly understood. With meditative prose, 1986's Arctic Dreams chronicled Barry Lopez's expeditions in an ecosystem so punishing half an animal population can die every winter, and so otherworldly animal fat is preserved on bones after a century. "Something eerie ties us to the world of animals," he says, and it's both a warning and a promise. In The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Deep, Philip Hoare's marine obsession is similarly dreamlike; for him, what we know about whales and how they make us feel is deeply linked. After all, our 'discovery' of them is still in its first blush. Sperm whales were first filmed in 1984; "We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like." The only absolute conclusion in his book is a stern one: Humanity's damaging effects on nature and its fascination with the unknown has been devastating; if we're going to keep whales long enough to know them, that fascination will have to take a more protective turn.

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. These narratives are crucial, especially now — stories of the worth of nature, even just as a mirror of ourselves, build a narrative in which nature's something worth saving. It's imperfect; making nature an object rather than a subject prevents us from seeing ourselves as part of natural patterns of cause and effect. But in The Colors of Nature, Aileen Suzara pins it down: "The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice." The human voice that looked at the dark and saw a dying star is heard 2000 years later. If we're going to have another 2000 years, there's no time like the present to start listening.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

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Blog , Book Club Reading Recommendations , Other Recommendations , Recommendations

Six environmental authors who should be on your reading list.

As the days lengthen and the sun shines higher in the afternoon sky, birds begin to chatter and whistle returning to their northern homes. The Harbinger of Spring has graced our yards and greenspaces. There is no better time than now, especially because we are remaining indoors for the good of our communities, to delve into a book on the topic of the environment. Now that most of the hustle and bustle of the cities have dwindled to the occasional grocery store attendee and some people lounging in the park, there have been many many more occurrences of wild animals returning to the urban landscape, and natural spaces in urban settings becoming cleaner and more habitable to our fellow earth dwellers.

The resilience of nature shines through in these uncertain times. With these six authors one can find stories of strength, wonder, and excitement all pointing towards environmental themes and ways the human race can help or harm our planet and ourselves in the process.

This list is also available on Bookshop.org , which benefits independent bookstores. We also strongly encourage you to support your local bookstore by ordering through them online directly. They need our help more than ever, and we need them to stick around.

By Elizabeth Brownfield

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s novels often focus on both the impacts of global climate change on everyday rural citizens and intricate and strained familial bonds. The central themes of her novels tend to be about changes in the local environment and characters surrounded by political and social issues, many of which are environmental. The Poisonwood Bible , a book about a missionary family moving from the U.S. state of Georgia to the Congo during the fight for Congolese independence in the 1950s, is by far her most famous novel, however her more recent novels, Flight Behavior and Unsheltered reflect the uncertain times ahead and individuals uncovering adversity and abuse within the very environment in which they are rooted.

In her writing Kingsolver enjoys exploring the many different landscapes of places she has lived including rural Appalachia, the Congo, and Arizona. Her relatable characters are often discovering the climate injustices within their own backyards, or struggling to understand the new environment in which they have arrived. She has also written several non-fiction and short story accounts of her time living exclusively off local food sources and thinking about the ecological relationships between humans and nature.

Suggested reading: Flight Behavior

Mary Hunter Austin

If you’ve read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire then you should read The Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin next. Austin was one of the few women nature writers of the 19th century. Obsessed with everything about the desert, she observes the mysticism, allure, and deadly nature of the Mojave Desert. Utilizing illustrative, enchanting, and haunting imagery from her time in the desert, Austin weaves tales of the harsh, unlivable environment with the flora and fauna that have chosen and adapted to endure these unrelenting conditions.

If you need more reason to read her, in addition to advocating for human connection with nature and the rights of the people who live there, namely Native American Tribes, she was a proponent for women’s and immigrants rights. She produced every type of writing: plays, children’s books, essays, non-fiction. She wrote on water management, the mistreatment of Native Americans and the injustices and social restrictions of womanhood. Her life was full of hardships and she was unconventional in every way. She lived all over the world, argued often with John Muir, and kept company with Herbert Hoover, H.G. Wells, and Jack London. People she has influenced range from Willa Cather to prominent landscape photographer Ansel Adams to contemporary environmental writers such as Gary Synder.

Suggested reading: The Land of Little Rain

Michael Pollan

In preparation for spring and summer and arguably all the best foods to come back in season, I would recommend reading Micheal Pollan’s books. Throughout his many books, Pollan has explored topics such as the domestication of our food, the ways food can affect our thinking, and how the modern American supermarket has evolved to include corn in almost everything. He has investigated how weeds are linked to the very spaces that humans occupy. In elegant, well-thought prose, Pollan successfully conveys how to think more critically about the important food choices we make everyday and the ways that nature, by product of food and consumption, is a part of our everyday lives.

Suggested reading: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Harriet A. Washington

In her previous books, Washington focuses on work in the medical field, often about analyzing the mistreatment of African-Americans from the colonial period to today, secrets of the medical trade and destigmatizing mental health. However, in her most recent book Washington concentrates on how chemicals and pollutants are disproportionately affecting communities of color in America as a result of environmental racism. Washington writes primarily about the ways that chemicals can affect children and adults even if they are exposed to less than the determined threshold. Unlike the other authors on this list, she directs attention more on the detrimental effects of humans on themselves and the earth.

Suggested reading: A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

Wendell Berry

If you’ve already read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac , next on your list should be some of Wendell Berry’s books. Although the environment is that of the farms between the rolling hills of Kentucky and the sloping banks of the Kentucky River Valley, Berry, much like Leopold, concentrates on the American cultural norms surrounding agriculture, farming and nature and his criticisms remain noteworthy to this day.

Berry is an author, poet, essayist, environmental activist, farmer, and cultural critic. With insights into the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970’s, thoughts on sustainable farming and agriculture and illustrating a way of life that’s realistic for the future of agriculture within his writings, Berry emphasizes a connection to the land, sustainable agriculture and roots within your local environment. Descended from generations of farmers, he strongly advocates for anti-modernism, localization, and the education of farmers, bringing up points that the average city dweller today, inundated with sleek new technology and car commercials that romanticize rural landscapes, could never fully understand.

Suggested reading: The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Carl Hiaasen

Known for his best selling Young Adult novels such as Hoot and Flush and themes of crime, mystery, environmentalism, and crooked politicians, Carl Hiassen has a book for everyone from youth to adult. Full of action and adventure, Hiaasen has some of the best books for learning about environmental justice and local knowledge of land. Oftentimes his books are set in his native Florida and utilizes endangered or localized species to inform the plot. Hoot is a personal favorite. Set in Florida three unlikely middle schoolers band together to stop the construction of a Pancake House franchise in the middle of the endangered Burrowing Owls habitat.

Suggested reading: Hoot

Who are your favorite environmentally conscious writers? Let us know in the comments!

Visit our Reading Recommendations page for more book lists.

2 thoughts on “ Six Environmental Authors Who Should Be On Your Reading List ”

Beautiful visions, but a world of 8 billion needs more than words… incentives to grow from apex predators to cosmic gardeners. Humanity isn’t prepared for the Milky Way, manage environment on Earth sustainably. Ideology not enough: takes economic drivers: Green Household Behaviour tax offset and compulsory measurement of ecological footprint to cost Earth repair into products

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Nature » Nature Writing

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Nature Writing

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Last updated: May 06, 2024

Nature writing, celebrating and meditating on the non-human environment and our relationship with it, has a long literary pedigree, stretching back to the 18 th century. Beginning there, Lucy Newlyn discusses William and Dorothy Wordsworth , how brother and sister influenced each other’s writing and their commitment to writing about the every day and the sights and sounds of their environment. Laura Dassow Walls looks at Henry David Thoreau , an early advocate of simple living and ecology. T C Boyle chooses his best books on man and nature , and talks about why the Dodo didn’t have a chance and whether it really matters if lions, tigers and polar bears become extinct (it does).

Our nature interviews cover diverse parts of the world. Sarah Wheeler talks about the polar regions , and Michael Jacobs talks about the Andes . Paul Brassley discusses the English countryside and Hari Kunzru chooses his best books on the American desert .

Robert Macfarlane talks about wild places and Sara Maitland discusses silence . Jeremy Mynott looks at birdwatching and David George Haskell chooses his best books on trees .

More generally, Amy Liptrot chooses her best books on nature writing , Charles Foster his best nature books of 2017 , 2018 and 2019 , while M G Leonard chooses her the best nature books for kids .

The best books on Local Adventures , recommended by Alastair Humphreys

The forest unseen: a year's watch in nature by david george haskell, the path: a one-mile walk through the universe by chet raymo, on looking: eleven walks with expert eyes by alexandra horowitz, pilgrim at tinker creek by annie dillard, the backyard adventurer by beau miles.

Wonderful as it would be to climb Mount Everest or row across the Atlantic, not all of us will get the chance to go on an epic adventure. But that doesn't mean we can't go exploring. Alastair Humphreys , the British adventurer, explains the concept of 'local adventure' and recommends books that give a feel for what it's about and why it's worth pursuing.

Wonderful as it would be to climb Mount Everest or row across the Atlantic, not all of us will get the chance to go on an epic adventure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t go exploring. Alastair Humphreys, the British adventurer, explains the concept of ‘local adventure’ and recommends books that give a feel for what it’s about and why it’s worth pursuing.

The best books on The Scottish Highlands , recommended by Annie Worsley

The living mountain by nan shepherd, the poems of norman maccaig ed. ewen maccaig, sea room by adam nicolson, song of the rolling earth: a highland odyssey by john lister-kaye, at the loch of the green corrie by andrew greig.

The Scottish Highlands are known for the stark splendour of the landscape and the bellowing of the stags. They have inspired many classic works of poetry and nature writing, says Annie Worsley —the author of a memoir set on Scotland's rugged north west coast. Here, she recommends five books on the Scottish Highlands that portray the people and their place.

The Scottish Highlands are known for the stark splendour of the landscape and the bellowing of the stags. They have inspired many classic works of poetry and nature writing, says Annie Worsley—the author of a memoir set on Scotland’s rugged north west coast. Here, she recommends five books on the Scottish Highlands that portray the people and their place.

The Best Nature Memoirs , recommended by Victoria Bennett

Belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home by amanda thomson, among flowers: a walk in the himalayas by jamaica kincaid, thin places by kerri ní dochartaigh, trace: memory, history, race, and the american landscape by lauret savoy, upstream: selected essays by mary oliver.

Nature is intrinsic to our experience of being alive and reading about it allows us to connect not just with the natural world but with ourselves. Here Victoria Bennett , author of All My Wild Mothers, a memoir of grief and creating an apothecary garden, recommends five other nature memoirs, highlighting personal and reflective prose by writers including Lauret Savoy, Mary Oliver, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Nature is intrinsic to our experience of being alive and reading about it allows us to connect not just with the natural world but with ourselves. Here Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers, a memoir of grief and creating an apothecary garden, recommends five other nature memoirs, highlighting personal and reflective prose by writers including Lauret Savoy, Mary Oliver, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing

Ring of bright water by gavin maxwell, the drowned world by j. g. ballard, findings by kathleen jamie, feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life by george monbiot, the orkney book of birds by tim dean and tracy hall.

Amy Liptrot , whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

Amy Liptrot, whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

The best books on Sense of Place , recommended by Patrick Galbraith

South and west: from a notebook by joan didion, the crofter and the laird by john mcphee, the dark months of may by tom pickard, salmon: a fish, the earth, and the history of their common fate by mark kurlansky, jock of the bushveld by percy fitzpatrick.

Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a 'sense of place' in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.

Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a ‘sense of place’ in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.

The best books on Natural History , recommended by David George Haskell

The outermost house: a year of life on the great beach of cape cod by henry beston, dark emu: aboriginal australians and the birth of agriculture by bruce pascoe, a natural history of the future: what the laws of biology tell us about the destiny of the human species by rob dunn.

Natural history can offer a "portal into wonder and astonishment," says David George Haskell , the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen . But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.

Natural history can offer a “portal into wonder and astonishment,” says David George Haskell, the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen . But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.

The Best Books of Ocean Journalism , recommended by Laura Trethewey

The brilliant abyss: exploring the majestic hidden life of the deep ocean, and the looming threat that imperils it by helen scales, the outlaw ocean: journeys across the last untamed frontier by ian urbina, mapping the deep by robert kunzig, deep: freediving, renegade science, and what the ocean tells us about ourselves by james nestor, the wave: in pursuit of the rogues, freaks, and giants of the ocean by susan casey.

Humans have mapped only 25 percent of the seafloor, so the ocean is ripe for exploration and investigation. Environmental journalist and author Laura Trethewey recommends five books by 'ocean journalists' that explore the life, crime and science of the seas.

Humans have mapped only 25 percent of the seafloor, so the ocean is ripe for exploration and investigation. Environmental journalist and author Laura Trethewey recommends five books by ‘ocean journalists’ that explore the life, crime and science of the seas.

The best books on Islands , recommended by Gavin Francis

'the voyage of st brendan,' in the age of bede edited by j.f. webb and d.h. farmer, selkirk's island: the true and strange adventures of the real robinson crusoe by diana souhami, a woman in the polar night by christiane ritter, atlas of remote islands: fifty islands i have never set foot on and never will by judith schalansky.

Generations of writers, explorers and armchair travellers have found a focal point of fascination in the idea of the remote island. Why so? Gavin Francis , the award-winning writer, explains the everlasting appeal of the lonely isle – and why the fantasy is at least as powerful as the salt-sprayed reality – as he selects five of the best books on islands.

Generations of writers, explorers and armchair travellers have found a focal point of fascination in the idea of the remote island. Why so? Gavin Francis, the award-winning writer, explains the everlasting appeal of the lonely isle – and why the fantasy is at least as powerful as the salt-sprayed reality – as he selects five of the best books on islands.

The Best Books For Environmental Learning , recommended by Mitchell Thomashow

Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by robin wall kimmerer, earth's wild music: celebrating and defending the songs of the natural world by kathleen dean moore, the next great migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move by sonia shah, landmarks by robert macfarlane.

We are surrounded by nature but it's easy to miss it and spend time either in our heads or on screens. Here Mitchell Thomashow , a longtime teacher of environmental learning, picks books to broaden our vistas and help us see the natural world with fresh eyes.

We are surrounded by nature but it’s easy to miss it and spend time either in our heads or on screens. Here Mitchell Thomashow, a longtime teacher of environmental learning, picks books to broaden our vistas and help us see the natural world with fresh eyes.

The best books on Summer , recommended by Melissa Harrison

The summer book by tove jansson, the go-between by l p hartley, to the river: a journey beneath the surface by olivia laing, summer by ali smith, the hill of summer by j a baker.

Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere... summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison —the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.

Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere… summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison—the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.

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What is Nature Writing?

Definition and Examples

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Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice , and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay . Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism , ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

• At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
• The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
• Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
• The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
• In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
• An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
• January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
• The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
• Migration, by Barry Lopez
• The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
• Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

• "Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . .. "The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs , literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . . "In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir's words, that 'the money changers were in the temple' continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature's wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs. "Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing." (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing . Norton, 2002)

"Human Writing . . . in Nature"

• "By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the  genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really 'nature writing' anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau's] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate." (David Gessner, "Sick of Nature." The Boston Globe , Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

• "I do not believe that the solution to the world's ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature "Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a 'nature writer' is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that 'nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. 'Nature writing' is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically 'nature writing' does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things." (Joseph Wood Krutch, "Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer." New York Herald Tribune Book Review , 1952)
• Creative Nonfiction
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• The Conservation Movement in America
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• What You Should Know About Travel Writing
• The Essay: History and Definition
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Essayist
• Notable Authors of the 19th Century
• Thoreau's 'Walden': 'The Battle of the Ants'
• Genres in Literature
• Must Reads If You Like 'Walden'
• Top 5 Books about Social Protest
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene

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Nature writing is booming – but must a walk in the woods always be meaningful?

When so many of us struggle to find time and money to head outdoors, nature writing offers us vicarious enchantment – regardless of reality

N ature, as both a place and an idea, has become fraught with issues of privilege. Not everyone can access it, nor can they always afford to romanticise it. As biodiversity plummets, our attention becomes bittersweet, leaving nature lovers trapped in an increasingly tragic love story. Yet for any difficulty we may have in facing up to our collective destruction, writing about nature is booming. As readers, we relish these secondhand wanderings, recounted in gorgeous prose. We witness the author’s wonder, and aspire to similar experiences: the natural world as cure, as balm, as wise mentor; wilderness as a fount of authenticity in which we might find our wilder, realer selves.

My own relationship with nature writing is complicated. I am disappointed by my hesitancy when it comes to these books. After all, that most heady brew, where sublime language renders nature’s glories anew is one I personally aspire to concoct as a writer. And I’m often enchanted by writing that achieves it, such as Dorothy Hartley’s 1939 book Made in England , a favourite of mine. Hartley’s descriptions of landscapes and details as she strides out to document dwindling crafts range from the matter-of-fact to the downright fanciful. But all speak of a sharp eye and a guileless joy that make me wish I could tramp alongside her, spotting the small marvels she points out along the way. We might stop and notice the “tiny green tentative fingers” of growing things, or “the crackling cat-ice in the cart ruts” ourselves, but she is not going to linger over them on our behalf – she has work to do. Whether she is enchanted by her surroundings or not, we must infer; she will not tell. Whether you are enchanted is up to you.

Yet so much contemporary nature writing (Hartley sallied out almost a century ago) invites us – sometimes explicitly – to wonder not just at the natural world, but at the author’s experience. Nature writing offers us vicarious enchantment, for how many of us really have the time, the money and the tenacity to make regular, lengthy forays into the wild?

In Crow Country, Mark Cocker’s beautiful and epiphanic account of his growing obsession with rooks, this familiar bird that any of us might encounter in our urban lives becomes magical, “unsheathed entirely from any sense of ordinariness”. As he watches the flock (“an entoptic vision”), it “stirs something edgy” into his sense of wonder. For Cocker, “the underlying goal of any outing is to have an encounter of some meaning”.

He is right, of course. We all long for meaning, and the natural world is a good place to seek it out. But experiencing meaning in nature, being enchanted by her myriad forms, now feels aspirational. I suspect my resistance in the face of nature writing stems from stubbornness: against the implication that if only I connected properly with nature, I would be elevated somehow. On some days, a walk through the woods or along the shore can be disappointing, or even unpleasant, and that is all right. Enchantment is not everywhere all the time; it is an inner state that relies on mood and receptivity quite as much as the appearance of a fox or a grey seal or a charismatic oak.

Nature can also be found anywhere, if we are inclined to look at a certain slant. Books such as Edgelands , by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, or Clay by Melissa Harrison , remind us of this. While Clay is a novel, it is bursting with nature writing, showing us a scrubby city park in which “every tree and fencepost and path and thicket was charged with an almost mystical significance” for the boy protagonist. He yearns to belong to the world of squirrels and birds that abuts his housing estate. Edgelands celebrates the scraps of unruly wasteland that sidle up against the city – both Farley and Roberts having haunted such places during childhoods when they “wondered where the countryside actually was, or if it really existed”.

There is no doubting that a spot of communing with nature is good for us. Full immersion, then, might be even better. (Though there is nothing like a struggle to get warm and dry, or find your way to safety, to do away with the hunt for meaning.) Has the proliferation of nature writing led to a proliferation of countryside explorers? Are we following the example of intrepid writers and becoming re-enchanted with the world as a result? I rather hope so, though the cynic in me suspects that where nature is not Instagrammable, some will not bother to tread. Having feasted on the intense dramas and exquisite scenery of an Attenborough documentary, a poke around in a rockpool may lose its lure.

Though access to many wild places remains a privilege, access to enchantment and meaning need not be. The more we idolise extreme or unusual experiences of the natural world, the less inclined we will be to bother looking for meaning in our ordinary lives, on our own street, in our local patch of park. But a place that appears thoroughly disenchanting to one person may bewitch another, if they tilt their heads. Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words is an exemplar, explicitly offering us words as magic keys to open up the natural world. It is no accident that this a spell book, since spells alter reality using words. As Ursula Le Guin had it: “Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” Our world may not have much room for magic, but we all speak, write and read the language of enchantment – if we choose to see it that way.

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Understanding Ourselves and Our World: Why Nature Writing Matters

Nature writing is in its golden age, but as most of us know, the planet is sinking into an era of darkness. This flourishing of a genre is surely, and hopefully, a testament to the increased value people are placing on our environment, and a sign of the focus being ploughed into conserving it. So many writers are providing vital solutions to protecting our planet, and helping the individual to value and conserve local environments.

“​​I’m in awe at the skill and passion that writers are demonstrating, using beautiful language and good old fashioned story-telling to help readers understand and connect with ecological concepts and critical conservation issues that might otherwise seem dry and impenetrable.” – Craig Bennett, CEO of Wildlife Trusts

And where works are not polemic or directly calling audiences to action, nature writing is still incredibly important. Nature writing focused on the solace and healing powers that the outdoors can offer us, and our personal relationship to it, is radical in itself.

“Sometimes we forget that as individuals fighting for change, something as simple as recommending a book you loved that gives someone a connection to the natural world can be as powerful as being out on the streets marching with others.” – Roisin Taylor, co-director for UK Youth for Nature

Placing increased value on our natural world is a reevaluation of the ways in which we live. Modern living has left many of us dissatisfied; where urban environments fall short, nature can offer us something else –  a new way of seeing the world, living within it, and connecting to it. Observing and noticing nature’s small acts and moments can be wondrous and restorative, decentring us, and taking our mind elsewhere. The very values of environmental communities seem quite divorced from the capitalist structures under which most of us toll. As Robert Macfarlane writes, these are acts of ‘placing community over commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, the deep over the shallow’.   

“The current nature writing highlights a better understanding of the natural world and our place in it. In particular, we see titles that show nature’s importance in providing a restorative environment for individuals and communities.” – Amber Harrison, Co-founder of Folde Dorset

Nature writing has given us a chance to evaluate how we belong in the physical world, the history of the land, the movement of people, and the formation of community. It is wrapped up in our political, social, historical, and philosophical understandings of land and home. As we find new ways to grapple with these issues, a diverse array of people are reclaiming their right to natural spaces, and their stories within them.

Taking a tumble down the rabbit hole of nature writing can further expand on these feelings and sentiments that we may not be able to name. And where not all of us have access to grand landscapes and wild terrains, we can revel in the written word and the imaginative capabilities of our excellent nature writers.

“We are ever more immersed in nature. That includes nature’s place in our internal geographies, as we strive to reconnect with what we are losing or have lost. From profound revelations about how nature works or its deep cultural reference points, to nature’s interconnectedness with our mental health and our very humanity, nature writing now traverses a vast landscape.” – Mark Funnell, Campaigns and Communications Director at National Trust

Sometimes it is only when we are taken away from a thing that we realise how much we value it. During the Covid pandemic, many of us temporarily lost our natural localities, and it was during this time that we realised nature’s role in our life, its vitality, and lifeforce. Nature and conservation writing echoes such feelings, calling us back to our dwindling natural world, to value it in new ways, and to save it.

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Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

Michelle nijhuis thinks it’s time for some new perspectives.

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature , imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few.

The nature-writing genre emerged in the late 1700s, during the peculiar moment when nature, as Europeans and North American intellectuals saw it, was no longer fearfully mysterious but not yet endangered. The scientific classification of species had brought some apparent order to undomesticated landscapes, allowing writers such as William Bartram, a botanist who traveled through the American South shortly before the Revolutionary War, to perceive not a tangle of flora and fauna but “an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing.”

Such “appreciative aesthetic responses to a scientific view of nature,” as the writer and naturalist David Rains Wallace once described them, were products not only of their time and place but their culture and class. Scientific views of nature are not the only possible views, of course, and as many anthropologists and linguists have pointed out, the concept of “nature” as a collection of objects, separate from but subservient to humans, is also far from universal.

In the 19th century, many of the thinkers we now call nature writers took some exception to the genre’s original project. While Ralph Waldo Emerson famously saw human transcendence as the primary purpose of the non-human world, his rebellious protégé Henry David Thoreau was more interested in other forms of life for their own sake, and more willing to get his literal and metaphorical boots muddy. John Muir, though notoriously dismissive of the human history of the Sierra Nevada , had unusually egalitarian ideas about other species, considering even lizards, squirrels, and gnats to be fellow occupants of the planet.

As I learned while researching my book Beloved Beasts , a history of the modern conservation movement, the rise of the science of ecology in the early 20th century made it ever clearer that the boundaries between humans and “nature” were more linguistic and cultural than physical. Rachel Carson, who cited Thoreau as one of her primary influences, further expanded the nature-writing genre by tying the fate of other species to the fate of human bodies.

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders : mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males .

Meanwhile, writers in every genre and discipline are wrestling with the relationship between humans and the rest of life, recognizing that while writing about other species is often about wonder and uplift, it is also, inevitably, about survival—the survival of all species, including our own. Amitav Ghosh, whose novels often follow the connections among species and habitats—humans and snakes, tigers and dolphins, land and sea—recently published The Nutmeg’s Curse , his second book-length essay about the literature, history, and politics of climate change. (The first was The Great Derangement , published in 2016.)

Science-fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer returns again and again to the unstable boundaries between humans and other species, most recently in his novel Hummingbird Salamander . Margaret Atwood, a dedicated birdwatcher, wrote that the sight of red-necked crakes “scuttling about in the underbrush” in northern Australia inspired her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy . Historians such as Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the author of As Long as Grass Grows , and Nick Estes, the author of Our History Is The Future , document the damage done to Indigenous cultures and all species by centuries of capitalism and colonialism. These and many other works acknowledge that humans are both observers of and participants in the network of life on earth—and that our roles, while often destructive, can be constructive, too.

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

 __________________________________

Michelle Nijhuis’s book Beloved Beasts is available through W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 2022.

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The Problem of Nature Writing

By Jonathan Franzen

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “ The Peregrine .” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons.

Sometimes I consider it a failing, a mark of writerly competition, that I’d so much rather take private joy in birds, and in nature generally, than read another person’s book about them. But I’m also mindful, as a writer, that we live in a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life. There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion. The power of the Bible, as a text, derives from its stories. If I were an evangelist, going door to door, I’d steer well clear of the Psalms. I would start with the facts as I saw them: God created the universe, we humans sin against His laws, and Jesus was dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences. Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one.

Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it.

Unfortunately, no matter how felicitous the descriptions may be, the writer is competing with other media that a reader could be turning to instead, audiovisual media that actually show you the eagle or let you hear the loon. Ever since the advent of color photography and sound recording, lengthy descriptions have become problematic in all genres of writing, and they’re especially problematic for the evangelizing nature writer. To describe a scene of nature well, the writer is hard pressed to avoid terminology that’s foreign to readers who haven’t already witnessed a similar sort of scene. Being a birder, I know what a ruby-crowned kinglet sounds like; if you write that a kinglet is chattering in a willow tree, I can hear the sound clearly. The very words “ruby-crowned kinglet” are pregnant and exciting to me. I will avidly read an unadorned list of the species—black-headed grosbeak, lazuli bunting, blue-gray gnatcatcher—that a friend saw on her morning walk. To me, the list is a narrative in itself. To the unconverted reader, though, the list might as well say: Ira the son of Ikkesh of Tekoa, Abiezer of Anathoth, Mebunnai the Hushathite . . .

If birds are the writer’s focus, there do exist good stories about individual birds (the red-tailed hawks of Central Park) and individual species (the non-stop trans-Pacific flight of bar-tailed godwits), and I can tell, from the new-story links that nonbirding friends are forever forwarding to me, that reports of astonishing avian feats can overcome the public’s indifference to birds, at least momentarily. Whether such stories make converts—and I’ll say it here explicitly: my interest is in making converts—is less clear. The science of birds and their conservation should be interesting to anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, but the world abounds with things to be curious about. The bird-science writer is painfully aware that he or she has only a few hundred words with which to hook a lay reader. One tempting approach to this challenge is to begin in medias res, by a campfire at some picturesque or desolate location, and introduce us to the Researcher. He will have a bushy beard and play the mandolin. Or she will have fallen in love with birds on her grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He or she will be tough and obsessive, sometimes funny, always admirable. The danger with this approach is that, unless the Researcher emerges as the true subject of the piece, we readers may feel bait-and-switched—invited to believe that we’re reading a story about people, when in fact the story is about a bird. In which case, it’s fair to ask why we bothered getting to know the Researcher in the first place.

The paradox of nature writing is that, to succeed as evangelism, it can’t only be about nature. E. O. Wilson may have been correct in adducing biophilia—a love of nature—as a universal trait in human beings. To judge from the state of the planet, however, it’s a trait all too rarely expressed. What most often activates the trait is its display by people in whom it’s already activated. In my experience, if you ask a group of birders what got them into birds, four out of five of them will mention a parent, a teacher, a close friend, someone they had an intense personal connection with. But the faithful are few, the unpersuaded are many. To reach readers who are wholly wrapped up in their humanness, unawakened to the natural world, it’s not enough for writers to simply display their biophilia. The writing also needs to replicate the intensity of a personal relationship.

One of the forms this intensity can take is rhetorical. Speaking for myself, I’m a lot more likely to read an essay that begins “I hate nature” than one that begins “I love nature.” I would hope, of course, the writer doesn’t really hate nature, at least not entirely. But look at what the initial provocation accomplishes. Although it risks alienating the already persuaded, it opens the door to skeptical readers and establishes a connection with them. If the essay then reveals itself to be an argument for nature, the opening salvo also insures that the writing will be dynamic: will move from a point A to a very different point B. Movement like this is pleasurable to a reader. Fierce attitudes are pleasurable, even in the absence of forward movement. Give me the blistering prose of Joy Williams in “ The Killing Game ,” a jeremiad against hunters and their culture, or “ The Case Against Babies ,” as ferocious an anti-birth statement as you’ll ever read, in her perfectly titled collection “ Ill Nature .” Indifference, not active hostility, is the greatest threat to the natural world, and whether you consider Williams hilarious or unhinged, heroic or unfair, it’s impossible to be indifferent to her work. Or give me Edward Abbey’s “ Desert Solitaire ,” an account of his years in the Utah desert, in which he fans a simmering Thoreauvian misanthropy into white-hot fire and wields it against American consumer capitalism. Here again, you may not agree with the writer. You may wrinkle your nose at Abbey’s assumptions about “wilderness,” his unacknowledged privilege as a white American. What can’t be denied is the intensity of his attitude. It sharpens his descriptions of the desert landscape and gives them a forensic purpose, a cutting edge.

A good way to achieve a sense of purpose, strong movement from point A toward point B, is by having an argument to make. The very presence of a piece of writing leads us to expect an argument from it, if only an implicit argument for its existence. And, if the reader isn’t also offered an explicit argument, he or she may assign one to the piece, to fill the void. I confess to having had the curmudgeonly thought, while reading an account of someone’s visit to an exotic place like Borneo, that the conclusion to be drawn from it is that the writer has superior sensitivity to nature or superior luck in getting to go to such a place. This was surely not the intended argument. But avoiding the implication of “Admire me” or “Envy me” requires more attention to one’s tone of written voice than one might guess. Unlike the evangelist who rings doorbells and beatifically declares that he’s been saved, the tonally challenged nature writer can’t see the doors being shut in his face. But the doors are there, and unconverted readers are shutting them.

Often, by making an argument, you can sidestep the tonal problem. An essay collection that’s dear to me, “ Tropical Nature ,” by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, begins by serving up a set of facts about tropical rain forests. The facts are seemingly neutral, but they add up to a proposition: the rain forest is more varied, less fertile, less consistently rainy, more insidiously hostile, than the drenched and teeming “jungle” of popular imagination. It’s a very simple proposition. And yet, right away, there’s a case to be made in the ensuing essays—further expectations to be upended, new astonishments to be revealed. Wedded to an argument, the scientific facts speak far more compellingly to the glory of tropical nature than lyrical impressionism, and meanwhile Forsyth and Miyata, as neutral bringers of fact, remain immune to the suspicion of seeking admiration. The premise of Jennifer Ackerman’s best-selling “ The Genius of Birds ” is likewise simple and sturdy: that “bird-brained” ought to be a compliment, not an insult. Richard Prum’s 2017 book, “ The Evolution of Beauty ,” reached a wide audience by arguing that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which mainstream evolutionary biologists ignored or denigrated for more than a century, can explain all sorts of non-adaptive traits and behaviors in animals. Prum’s book has its flaws—the prose is gluey, and Darwin’s theory was perhaps not quite as forgotten as Prum represents it to have been—but the flaws didn’t matter to me. The theory of sexual selection was an eye-opener, and I learned a lot of cool things about a group of tropical birds, the manakins, that I otherwise might never have known. Such is the power of a compelling argument.

For the nature writer who isn’t a polemicist or a scientist, a third avenue to intensity is to tell a story in which the focus is on nature but the dramatic stakes are emphatically human. An exemplary book in this regard is Kenn Kaufman’s “ Kingbird Highway .” Kaufman grew up in suburban Kansas in the nineteen-sixties, became an obsessive birder (nicknamed Kingbird), and conceived the ambition, after he dropped out of high school, of breaking the record for the most American bird species seen in a calendar year. The record is quickly established as the dramatic goal, the protagonist’s coördinating desire. And then, immediately, we’re presented with an impediment: the teen-aged Kaufman has no money. To visit every corner of the country at the right time of year, a birder needs to cover huge distances, and Kaufman decides he’ll need to hitchhike. So now, in addition to a goal and an impediment, we have the promise of a classic road adventure. (It’s important to note that, just as we don’t have to be pedophiles to connect with Humbert’s pursuit of Lolita, we don’t need to care much about birds to be curious about what happens to Kaufman. Strong desire of any kind creates a sympathetic desire in the reader.) As Kaufman makes his way around the country, he’s attentive to the birds, of course, but also to the national mood of the early seventies, the social dynamics of bird-watching, the loss and degradation of natural habitat, the oddball characters along the way. And then the book takes a beautiful turn. As life on the road exacts its toll on the narrator, he feels increasingly lost and lonely. Although seemingly a quest narrative, the book reveals itself to have been, all along, a coming-of-age story. Because we care about the teen-aged Kaufman, we stop wondering if he’ll break the record and start asking more universally relatable questions: What’s going to happen to this young man? Is he going to find his way home? What sets “Kingbird Highway” apart from many other “Big Year” narratives is that it ultimately ceases to matter how many species Kaufman sees in a year. It’s only the birds themselves that matter. They come to feel like the home that he’s been yearning for, the home that will never leave him.

Even if we could know what it’s like to be a bird—and, pace J. A. Baker, I don’t think we ever really will—a bird is a creature of instinct, driven by desires that are the opposite of personal, incapable of ethical ambivalence or regret. For a wild animal, the dramatic stakes consist of survival and reproduction, full stop. This can make for fascinating science, but, absent heavy-duty anthropomorphizing or projection, a wild animal simply doesn’t have the particularity of self, defined by its history and its wishes for the future, on which good storytelling depends. With a wild-animal character, there is only ever a point A: the animal is what it is and was and always will be. For there to be a point B, a destination for a dramatic journey, only a human character will suffice. Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, and then deploys universally shared emotions—hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment—to engage a reader in the journey. If the writing succeeds, it does so indirectly. We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious. ♦

This is drawn from “ Spark Birds .”

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A new campaign wants to redefine the word ‘nature’ to include humans – here’s why this linguistic argument matters

Professor of Applied Ecology, University of Reading

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Tom Oliver has received research funding from BBSRC, NERC and Natural England for quantifying climate change impacts on biodiversity and developing climate adaptation plans for humans and other species. He was affiliated with Defra as a senior scientific fellow on their Systems Research Programme, with the Government Office for Science working on long-term risks to the UK, and spent four years with the European Environment Agency on their scientific committee. He sits on the Food Standards Agency science council and Office for Environmental Protection expert college. He is author of The Self Delusion: The Surprising Science of Our Connection To Each Other and the Natural World, published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

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What does the word nature mean to you? Does it conjure visions of wild places away from the hustle and bustle of people, or does it include humans too? The meaning of nature has changed since the word was first used back as early as the 15th century .

Now a new campaign, We Are Nature , aims to persuade dictionaries to include humans in their definitions of nature. This campaign, a collaboration between a group of lawyers and a design company, involves a petition and open letter , as well as a collection of alternative definitions supplied by various thinkers and authors (including me). Here’s my definition of nature:

The living world comprised as the total set of organisms and relationships between them. These organisms include bacteria, fungi, plants and animals (including humans). Some definitions may also include non-living entities as part of nature – such as mountains, waterfalls and cloud formations – in recognition of their important role underpinning the web of life.

Derived from the Latin natura , literally meaning “birth”, nature used to only refer to the innate qualities or essential disposition of something. But over time, it also began to describe something “other” or separate to humans. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines nature as :

The phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the Earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.

But how did we arrive at such a definition, which hinges on us being apart from, rather than a part of, the natural world? Since the 17th century, a rationalist world view prompted by philosophers such as René Descartes increasingly saw things from a mechanical perspective, comparing the workings of the universe to a great machine. Rather than any kind of divine spirit inhabiting the natural world, this perspective emphasised the split between the human mind and physical matter.

Anything non-human fell into the latter category and was likened to clockwork machinery. But that view has since been found to lead to animal cruelty , and many environmental bodies including the European Environment Agency suggest this disconnect is accelerating the decline of nature.

Is it OK to change words in a dictionary through lobbying? There are two lines of thought here. One might argue yes, if the scientific evidence suggests the distinction between nature and humans is illusory – something I have argued based on findings in biology, ecology and neuroscience.

A dictionary definition represents society’s framing of the natural world. This in turn influences our perception of our place within it – and the actions we take to protect nature. So, the words we use have real-world impacts: they frame how we think and determine how we feel and act. Linguist George Lakoff has argued that they ultimately structure our society.

My children are growing up in a world where humans feel disconnected with nature – indeed, the UK ranks among the most disconnected countries. Research shows this leads people to make fewer positive environmental changes to their behaviour , such as reducing their carbon footprint, recycling, or doing voluntary conservation work.

Conversely, when people feel they are enmeshed with nature, they are not only greener in their behaviour but they tend to be happier . So I absolutely want my kids to grow up feeling they are part of nature.

There are some words that I certainly recommend we use less. I dislike the term “natural capital”, referring to nature as an asset that can be commodified and sold . These words have a place with professional environmentalists and policy, but they can also create psychological distancing and make us care less for natural world.

One sustainability-focused communications agency found the best way to motivate people about protecting nature is through messages based on awe and wonder , rather than the economic value of nature. Scientific studies back this up.

Dangers of controlling language

But I’m torn. Another line of thought suggests it’s not OK to change the meaning of words through lobbying, and that dictionaries should reflect how words are being used – the OED takes this position .

Dystopian fiction, including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , highlights the dangers of a world where controlling the language allows control of the population. Dictionaries bowing to pressure from lobbying seems to set a dangerous precedent.

With regards to the meaning of nature, if a word is too broad, it may lose its usefulness in communication, just like a blunt knife is a poor tool for carving food. People wanting to articulate the natural world may simply use other words, such as “environment”. This word is derived from the French environs , explicitly describing something surrounding us.

Environment has already been replacing nature in our modern lexicon. This may reflect a subtle cognitive shift towards increasingly seeing human beings as distinct entities, separate from the natural world.

Nature v environment: tracking the use of these words

But the We Are Nature campaign is not just lobbying the OED based on a preferred use of language. The organisers have collated many historical uses of the word nature from 1850 to the present day, some of which include humans in the meaning, and presented the dictionary with this evidence. In April 2024, as a result, the OED removed the label “obsolete” from a secondary, wider definition of nature comprising “the whole natural world, including human beings”.

But to change the primary definition of nature from “as opposed to humans” to “including humans” will require more people to use the word in a way that reflects how humans are intertwined with the whole web of life.

The great thing is, by doing this, we rekindle the bonds of care towards the living world around us. And by dispelling the illusion of our separation from nature, we can also expect to live happier lives . Words matter – there is restoration and joy from talking about how we are nature.

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• Published: 07 May 2024

Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations

• Pratyusha Sharma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9053-4943 1 , 2 ,
• Shane Gero   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6854-044X 2 , 3 , 4 ,
• Roger Payne 2 ,
• David F. Gruber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9041-2911 2 , 5 ,
• Daniela Rus   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5473-3566 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Antonio Torralba 1 , 2   na1 &
• Jacob Andreas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3141-5845 1 , 2   na1  

Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  3617 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Animal behaviour
• Marine biology
• Marine mammals

Sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. While a subset of codas have been shown to encode information about caller identity, almost everything else about the sperm whale communication system, including its structure and information-carrying capacity, remains unknown. We show that codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure. First, we report previously undescribed features of codas that are sensitive to the conversational context in which they occur, and systematically controlled and imitated across whales. We call these rubato and ornamentation. Second, we show that codas form a combinatorial coding system in which rubato and ornamentation combine with two context-independent features we call rhythm and tempo to produce a large inventory of distinguishable codas. Sperm whale vocalisations are more expressive and structured than previously believed, and built from a repertoire comprising nearly an order of magnitude more distinguishable codas. These results show context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalisation can appear in organisms with divergent evolutionary lineage and vocal apparatus.

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Introduction.

The social complexity hypothesis 1 , 2 posits that animals in complex societies—featuring coordination, distributed decision-making, social recognition, and social learning of cultural strategies 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 —require complex communication systems to mediate these behaviours and interactions 1 , 7 . In humans, communication plays a particularly large role in complex social behaviours like strategising and teaching 8 , 9 , 10 . These behaviours require the ability to generate and understand a vast space of possible messages. For example, the sentence ‘Let’s meet next to the statue of Claude Shannon on the fifth floor at 3 pm’ picks out a specific action at a specific place and time from an enormous space of possible activities. This ability to generate complex messages, in turn, is supported by the fact that all known human languages exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure. (Throughout this paper, we use ‘context’ to denote conversational context—e.g., neighbouring codas—rather than behavioural context—e.g., diving—as is standard in the study of natural and formal languages. 11 ) To enable efficient communication, the meaning of most human utterances is underspecified and derived in part from the conversation that precedes them 12 . To enable many distinct meanings to be communicated, humans access a large inventory of basic sounds (phonemes) by combining phonetic features like place of articulation, manner of articulation, then sequence phonemes to produce an unbounded set of distinct utterances 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 . Contextuality and combinatoriality, especially below the sequence level, have few analogues in communication systems outside of human language 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 . Understanding when and how aspects of human-like communication arise in nature offers one path toward understanding the basis of intelligence in other life forms.

Cetaceans are an important group for the study of evolution and development of sophisticated communication systems 23 . Among cetaceans, long-term observational studies of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have described both a culturally defined, multi-level, matrilineal society 24 and a socially transmitted communication system 25 , 26 , 27 . Sperm whales are known for complex social and foraging behaviour, as well as group decision-making 28 . They communicate using codes 29 : stereotyped sequences of 3–40 broadband clicks (see glossary in Table  1 for definitions). Codas are exchanged between whales when socialising or between long, deep, foraging dives 24 . To date, scientists have described the sperm whale communication system in terms of a finite repertoire of coda types, each defined by a characteristic sequence of inter-click intervals (ICIs) as seen in Fig.  1 A. Coda-type repertoires can be defined manually or using automated clustering procedures, and have been used to delineate cultural boundaries among socially segregated but sympatric ‘clans’ of whales 25 whose members differ in their behaviour 26 , 30 , 31 . Past research has identified around 150 discrete coda types globally, with 21 in the Caribbean. But there is an apparent contradiction between the social and behavioural complexity evinced by sperm whales and the comparative simplicity of a communication system with a fixed set of messages. This contradiction naturally raises the question of whether any additional, previously undescribed structure is present in sperm whale vocalisations.

Sperm whales communicate by producing sequences of clicks. A Shows a two-minute exchange between two whales (with clicks visualized in blue and orange respectively) from the Dominica Sperm Whale Dataset. B Projects these clicks over a time–time plot, in which the horizontal axis plots the time in the exchange at which a click occurs, and the vertical axis represents the time of the click from the first click in the coda. The vertical axis serves as a microscope over the horizontal axis, revealing the internal structure of each coda. C Shows a time–time visualisation for the entire two-minute exchange (with lines connecting matching clicks between adjacent codas), revealing complex, context-dependent variation in coda structure.

We first demonstrate that some coda structure is contextual: When analysing codas exchanged between whales, we observe fine-grained modulation of inter-click intervals relative to preceding codas, as well as modification of standard coda types via the addition of an extra click. We term these contextual features rubato and ornamentation. Next, we show that the coda repertoire has combinatorial structure: in addition to rubato and ornamentation, codas’ rhythms and tempos can independently be discretised into a small number of categories or types. We show that all four features are sensed and acted upon by participants in the vocal exchanges, and thus constitute deliberate components of the whale communication system rather than unconscious variation. Rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation can be freely combined, together enabling whales to systematically synthesize an enormous repertoire of distinguishable codas. In a dataset of 8719 codas from the sperm whales of the Eastern Caribbean clan, this ‘sperm whale phonetic alphabet’ makes it possible to systematically explain observed variability in coda structure. While the communicative function of many codas remains an open question, our results show that the sperm whale communication system is, in principle, capable of representing a large space of possible meanings, using similar mechanisms to those employed by human sound production and representation systems (e.g., speech, text, Morse code, and musical notation).

Results and discussion

The dataset.

For this study, we used the annotated coda dataset from The Dominica Sperm Whale Project (DSWP), the current largest sperm whale data repository. The recordings of the Eastern Caribbean 1 (EC-1) clan were used in the analysis, comprising 8719 codas making up 21 previously defined coda types. This dataset contains manually annotated coda clicks and extracted inter-click intervals in data recorded from various platforms and various recording systems between 2005 and 2018, including animal-worn, acoustic, biologging tags (DTags) deployed between 2014 and 2018. The EC-1 clan comprises 400 individuals. 42 tags were deployed on 25 different individuals in 11 different social units. Three of these are less-studied units, for which precise size estimates are not available. We conservatively estimate that at least 60 distinct whales are recorded in the DSWP dataset.

Exchange plots: visualizing multi-whale calls

Codas, considered to be the basic units of sperm whale communication, consist of click groups generally less than two seconds in duration. Previous work has defined coda types and characterised coda repertoires by examining single codas outside the context in which they were produced. However, codas are not produced in isolation, but in interactive exchanges between two or more chorusing whales. Individual whales within a chorus tend to produce sequences of codas with a periodicity of approximately 4 seconds (see Supplementary Discussion Section  1) . Across a chorus, interacting whales produce codas both alternately (i.e., turn-taking) or near-simultaneously (i.e., overlapping). Therefore, sperm whale vocalisations demonstrate complexity on two different timescales: a fine-grained time scale that determines the makeup of each individual coda, and a longer time scale that determines the overall structure of the interactive exchange across codas within a chorus.

We depict these vocalisations using a new visualisation we call an exchange plot (Fig.  1 B, C). Both axes of this plot measure time: the horizontal axis shows the time elapsed since the beginning of a conversation, and the vertical axis shows the time since the onset of each coda. Exchange plots reveal the structure of codas in their interactive context, making it possible to observe both fine-grained differences between adjacent codas made by interacting whales, and long-range trends over the course of an exchange.

Contextuality

Visualising whale vocalisations with an exchange plot, as in Fig.  1 B, C, makes it apparent that characterising sperm whale interactions as sequences of fixed coda types overlooks a great deal of information. First, coda duration varies smoothly over the course of an exchange; variation in the duration of a whale’s codas is systematically imitated by interlocutors, even when coda-internal click spacing differs (Fig.  1 C). Second, some ‘extra’ clicks in Fig.  1 C appear at the end of codas that otherwise match their neighbours. We hypothesised that these smooth variations and extra clicks constitute perceptible and controllable features of codas independent of their discrete type, pointing toward a more complex sperm whale communication system with a greater information-carrying capacity than previously reported.

Rubato: codas exhibit fine-grained duration variation in addition to discrete tempo

A coda’s duration is the sum of its inter-click intervals. While durations tend to cluster around a finite set of values (Fig.  2 A), there remains substantial continuous variation within these clusters. Past work has described these differences as unexplained ‘within-type variation’ of categorical coda types 25 , 32 . However, the structured nature of this variation—which, as shown in Fig.  1 C, is temporally correlated and imitated across whales—has never been previously documented. We demonstrate that variation in coda duration is not random: individual whales modulate coda durations smoothly over the course of multi-coda exchanges without necessarily imitating click counts or inter-click interval spacing. An example is depicted in Fig.  1 C: one whale produces a sequence of codas smoothly varying in duration, while its interlocutor closely matches these changes in overall coda duration but not the number of clicks (this refines the finding in ref. 33 that overlapping codas were more likely to be of the same coda type than expected by chance: sometimes codas share a duration but not a discrete type). By analogy to the corresponding musical phenomenon, we call this behaviour rubato.

Sperm whale codas were previously hypothesized to comprise 21 independent coda types. We show that this coda repertoire is built from two context-independent features (rhythm and tempo) and two context-sensitive features (rubato and ornamentation). A Tempo: (Left) The overall duration of a coda is the sum of its inter-click intervals. (Centre) Coda durations are distributed around a finite set of modes, which we call (tempo types). (Right) Snippets from exchange plots showing codas of different tempo types. B Rhythm: (Left) Normalising the vector of ICIs by the total duration returns a duration-independent coda representation, which we call rhythm. (Centre) Codas cluster around 18 rhythm types. (Right) Examples of normalised codas showing different rhythm types. C Rubato: (Left) Sperm whales slowly modulate coda duration across consecutive codas, a phenomenon we call rubato. (Centre) Rubato is gradual: adjacent codas have durations more similar to each other than codas of the same type from elsewhere in an exchange. (Right) Whale choruses with imitation of rubato represented in exchange plots. D Ornamentation: (Left) Some codas feature `extra clicks' (ornaments) not present in neighbouring codas that otherwise share the same ICIs. (Centre) A density plot showing the distribution of the ratio between final ICIs in ornamented codas versus unornamented codas. Ornamented codas have a significantly different ICI distribution compared to regular codas. (Right) Examples of ornaments in the DSWP dataset. E Thirty minutes of multi-whale choruses: Exchanges feature imitation of coda duration across whales, gradually accumulated changes in call structure, and rich contextual variability.

To show that rubato is not random variation, we first evaluated whether changes in duration are smooth by measuring whether codas are more similar to their neighbours than other codas of the same type. To do so, we computed the tempo drift between two codas from the same speaker, defined as the difference in coda durations (Fig.  2 C). We computed the average absolute drift between (1) adjacent coda pairs and (2) random coda pairs of the same discrete coda type (according to its rhythm and tempo; see Section 5 for a discussion of rhythm and tempo and Supplementary Discussion Section  4 for additional details). We found that drift was significantly smaller between adjacent codas (0.05s on average) than would be expected under a null hypothesis that drift depends only on a coda’s discrete type (which would give a drift of 0.08s on average; test: permutation test (one-sided), p  = 0.0001, n  = 2593; see Supplementary Discussion Section  4.1 for details). Thus, within-type variation is context-dependent.

Second, we evaluated whether sequences of codas reflect longer-term trends. To do so, we collected coda triples of the same discrete coda type and measured the correlation between tempo drift across adjacent pairs. We found a significant positive correlation, compared to a null hypothesis that drift between adjacent pairs is uncorrelated (test: Spearman’s rank-order correlation (two-sided), r (2586) = 0.57, p  < 0.0001, 95% CI = [0.54, 0.60], n  = 2588). Thus, rubato is sustained across sequences of multiple codas.

Finally, we evaluated whether rubato is perceived and controlled by measuring whales’ ability to match their interlocutors’ coda durations when chorusing. We measured the average absolute difference in duration between (1) pairs of overlapping codas from different whales, and (2) pairs of non-overlapping codas of the same discrete coda type. Durations are significantly more closely matched for overlapping codas (0.099s on average) than would be expected under a null hypothesis that chorusing whales match only discrete coda type (which would give a drift of 0.129s on average) (test: permutation test (one-sided), p  = 0.0001, n  = 908; see Supplementary Discussion Section  4) .

Ornamentation: some clicks do not belong to standard tempo types

Figure  2 D depicts an exchange consisting of one six-click coda, followed by a long sequence of five-click codas. The first five clicks of the initial 6-click coda closely match those of neighbouring codas: if the sixth click were removed, we would identify the first coda as having nearly the same inter-click intervals as its neighbours (and assign it to the same discrete coda type). While not previously described, ‘extra clicks’ of this kind occur in (4%) of the codas in the exchanges of Eastern Caribbean whales. Additional examples appear in Fig.  2 D and Supplementary Discussion Section  5 . We hypothesised that ‘extra’ clicks play a different role from the other clicks in the codas in which they appear: they do not determine discrete coda type. Instead, like rubato, they constitute an independent feature of the sperm whale vocalisation system. We call these extra clicks ornaments.

We define an ornament as the final click in a coda containing one more click than the nearest preceding or following coda within a window of ten seconds, with this interval being based on the average response time (Supplementary Discussion Section  1) . To show that these ornaments play a distinct role from other clicks, we first computed the mean squared distance between each standardised, ornamented coda and the cluster centre of its assigned rhythm type. We then removed ornaments and computed mean squared distance between the standardised coda and the centres of rhythm clusters for adjacent codas produced by the same whale. The second quantity (0.0034 s 2 , reflecting a hypothesis that ornamented codas match their neighbours) is significantly smaller than the first (0.0053 s 2 , reflecting a null hypothesis that ornamented codas resemble other codas of the same type) (test: permutation test (one-sided), p  = 0.002, n  = 178). In other words, ornamented codas are less like other codas with a matching number of clicks, and more like neighbouring non-ornamented codas, if ornaments are modelled as a separate factor. To further verify that ornaments are distinct from other clicks, we compared ICIs (inter-click intervals) in ornamented vs. non-ornamented codas with the same number of clicks. We specifically compared the difference between the final two ICIs, normalised by the penultimate ICI, to reduce variance arising from rubato. This measurement exhibits a significant difference in distribution in ornamented vs non-ornamented codas test: Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (two-sample), D (150, 3688) = 0.51, p  < 0.0001, 95% CI = [0.42, 0.62], n  = (150, 3688), Fig.  2 D.

Finally, ornaments are not distributed randomly but appear in distinctive positions in longer exchanges. Within a single whale’s call sequences (defined as a sequence of codas separated by no more than eight seconds), a significantly greater proportion of ornamented codas appear at the beginning of call sequences than unornamented codas (test: Fisher’s exact test (two-sided), odds ratio: 2.00, p  = 0.0006). A significantly greater fraction of ornamented codas also appear at the end of call sequences compared to unornamented codas (test: Fisher’s exact test (two-sided), odds ratio: 1.71, p  = 0.008). Moreover, ornaments are predictive of changes in multi-whale interactions. We define a ‘change in chorusing behaviour’ as one of three events: a following whale begins chorusing with a leading whale, pauses chorusing, or ceases vocalizing for the remainder of the exchange. Compared to unornamented codas, ornamented codas from the leading whale are disproportionately succeeded by a change in chorusing behaviour from the following whale (test: Fisher’s exact test (two-sided), odds ratio: 1.56, p  = 0.009). Thus ornamentation, like rubato, appears to be perceived in multi-whale interactions.

Combinatoriality

The existence of ornamentation and rubato features demonstrates that codas can carry more information, and have more complex internal structure than their discrete type alone would indicate. Instead, they result from a combinatorial coding system in which discrete type, ornamentation and rubato combine to realise individual codas. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that categorical coda types might themselves arise from a combinatorial process, with a simpler set of features explaining the prototypical ICI vector for each coda type.

During rubato, consecutive calls from a single-whale gradually vary coda duration while preserving the relative relationship of ICIs (Supplementary Discussion Section  2) , suggesting that whales are capable of maintaining this relationship independent of its duration. Moreover, existing studies have noted that codas may also be discretely clustered according to standardised ICI 25 , 32 , 34 , a process that assigns codas with very different durations to the same cluster. Finally, some instances of chorusing involve whales producing codas with different ICIs (or different numbers of clicks) but matched durations. Together, these observations suggest that past inventories of discrete coda types (e.g., ref. 35 ) might specifically be interpretable in terms of two features: a normalised ICI category (which we term a coda’s rhythm) and a discrete duration category (independent of rubato, and which we term tempo). To validate this hypothesis, we measured (1) whether coda rhythms and tempos cluster around a discrete set of values, and (2) whether rhythm and tempo features are independently combinable (both with each other and with ornamentation and rubato features).

As shown in Fig.  2 A, codas with the same duration may have different internal click spacing (and even different numbers of clicks) but still span the same amount of time from the first click to the last click. Performing kernel density estimation (KDE) on scalar coda durations from the DSWP dataset reveals five distinct modes in the distribution of durations (Fig.  2 A), indicating that the number of realised coda durations is much smaller than the total number of identified coda types (Supplementary Discussion Section  3) .

Across codas, the relative relationships between ICIs are often repeated even independent of tempo. For example, in Fig.  2 A, note the existence of two five-click codas, one long and one short, but both characterised by the uniform spacing of the constituent ICIs. Past work has shown that these rhythms are reused; our analysis uses the 18 rhythm clusters proposed by ref. 35 (detailed breakdowns are given in Fig.  2 B and in Supplementary Discussion Section  2) .

Finally, to evaluate the combinability of these features, we computed the frequency with which each rhythm and tempo feature co-occurred in the DWSP dataset, as well as the frequency with which each combination appeared with ornamentation or rubato. Results are shown in Fig.  3 . Each rhythm type appears with at least one tempo types and each tempo type appears with at least three rhythm types. Moreover, (22%) of these combinations can appear with or without rubato and ornamentation.

Analogous to visualizations of the human phonetic repertoire, we propose a phonetic alphabet for sperm whales. Tempo types are plotted on the vertical axis, rhythm types are plotted on the horizontal axis, and the colour of each cell represents the number of occurrences of that rhythm/tempo combination in the DSWP dataset. Pie charts in each cell provide further information about the prevalence of rubato and ornamentation within each feature combination: the left pie shows the ratio of the number of codas that appear with rubato to those without, while the right pie shows the fraction of all ornaments that appear with that feature combination. While not all feature combinations are realised (as observed in human languages), sperm whale codas have a rich combinatorial structure with both discrete and continuous parameters and at least 143 combinations frequently realised (Supplementary Discussion Section  6) .

Like the International Phonetic Alphabet for human languages, this ‘Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet’ (Fig.  3 ) shows how a small set of axes of variation (place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicedness in humans; rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato in sperm whales) give rise to the diverse set of observed phonemes (in humans) or codas (in sperm whales). As in human languages, not all theoretically realisable feature combinations are attested in the DSWP dataset, and some combinations are more frequent than others. As in human languages, most coda variation is discrete: though ICIs can vary continuously in principle, only specific patterns (associated with specific rhythms and tempos) are realised in practice. Supplementary Discussion Section  2 shows the full set of codas in the dataset, organised by rhythm, tempo, and the presence of rubato and ornamentation for each combination of rhythm and tempo. Notably, these factors of sub-coda variation exist alongside another combinatorial process—the sequential ordering of codas shown in Fig.  1 E—in which codas of different types are combined in sequence to give rise to an even larger family of distinct vocalisations, reminiscent of the bi-level combinatorial structure of speech production in humans (see Supplementary Discussion Section  7 ).

Figure  3 also demonstrates that these vocalisations have a significantly greater information capacity than was previously known. Prior work identified 21 discrete coda types, and the system could be understood to have an information rate of at most 5 bits/coda. However, our analysis suggests that with 18 rhythms, 5 tempos, optional ornamentation, and three variations (increasing, decreasing or constant duration) in rubato, the information rate could be up to twice as large (details in Supplementary Discussion Section  6 ). The role of rubato within this coding system remains an important open question: it might be discrete (with some simpler inventory of contours explaining the patterns in Figs.  1 C and  2 C, as in the songs of birds 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) 42 , 43 ). Or it might convey continuous-valued information, analogous to the orientation and duration features of the waggle dance in bees (Apis sp.) 44 .

Limitations

Our study investigates the basic structural elements, and not the semantics, of the sperm whale communication system. As in several foundational papers on call structure in animal communication systems 42 , 45 , 46 , it provides no characterisation of call semantics and features no playback experiments. We believe our work provides a foundation for future research on the semantics of whale calls. However, this future research additionally requires interactive playback experiments with whales in the wild to ground hypotheses about the semantics and functional role of sperm whale vocalizations. In the absence of playback experiments establishing a causal relationship between the features and the meaning they communicate is challenging. It is necessary to have a deep understanding of the structure of the communication system enabling the creation of specific and unconfounded test stimuli prior to undertaking whale-in-the-loop experiments with potentially long-term effects on the population 47 , 48 , which in this case is extremely vulnerable 49 .

Concluding remarks

Our results demonstrate that sperm whale vocalisations form a complex combinatorial communication system: the seemingly arbitrary inventory of coda types can be explained by combinations of rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation features. Sizable combinatorial vocalisation systems are exceedingly rare in nature; however, their use by sperm whales shows that they are not uniquely human, and can arise from dramatically different physiological, ecological, and social pressures.

These findings also offer steps towards understanding how sperm whales transmit meaning. In some organisms with combinatorial codes, such as honey bees (Apis sp.) , the constituent features of the code transparently encode semantics (e.g., direction and distance to food sources). Further research on sperm whale vocalisations may investigate if rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato function similarly, directly encoding whales’ communicative intents. Alternatively, one of the key differentiators between human communication and all known animal communication systems is duality of patterning: a base set of individually meaningless elements that are sequenced to generate a very large space of meanings. The existence of a combinatorial coding system-at either the level of sounds, sound sequences, or both-is a prerequisite for duality of patterning. Our findings open up the possibility that sperm whale communication might provide our first example of that phenomenon in another species.

Data collection and coda annotation

Data from The Dominica Sperm Whale Project were collected under scientific research permits from the Fisheries Division of the Government of Dominica. The field protocols for approaching, photographing, tagging, and recording sperm whales were approved by either the University Committee on Laboratory Animals of Dalhousie University, Canada; the Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee of the University of St Andrews, Scotland; or Aarhus University, Denmark; and sometimes several or all of these across years.

Social units of female and immature sperm whales were located and followed in an area that covered approximately 2000 squared kilometres along the entire western coast of the Island of Dominica (N15.30 W61.40) between 2005 and 2018.

Codas were recorded using one of several recording setups: In 2005, we used a Fostex VF-160 multitrack recorder (44.1 kHz sampling rate) and a custom-built towed hydrophone (Benthos AQ-4 elements, frequency response: 0.1–30 kHz) with a filter box with high-pass filters up to 1 kHz resulting in a recording chain with a flat frequency response across a minimum of 2–20 kHz. No recordings were made during the short 2006 season. In the 2007, 2009, 2011, 2016, and 2017 seasons, we used a Zoom H4 portable field recorder (48 kHz sampling rate) and a Cetacean Research Technology C55 hydrophone (frequency response: 0.02–44 kHz) and no filters. During the 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2018 seasons, we used a custom-built towed hydrophone (Benthos AQ-4 elements, frequency response: 0.1–30 kHz) with a filter box with high-pass filters up to 1 kHz resulting in a recording chain with a flat frequency response across a minimum of 2–20 kHz. This was connected to a computer-based recording system as a part of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s (IFAW) LOGGER software package (48 kHz sampling rate) or PAMGUARD (minimum 48 kHz sampling rate) 50 .

In addition, recordings were also made through the deployment of animal-borne sound and movement tags (DTag generation 3, Johnson and Tyack 2003). Tagging was undertaken between 2014 and 2018 on an 11-meter rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB). Tags were deployed from a 9-meter, hand-held, carbon fiber pole, and were attached to the whales using four suction cups. DTags record two-channel audio at 120 kHz with a 16-bit resolution, providing a flat (±2 dB) frequency response between 0.4 and 45 kHz. Pressure and acceleration were sampled at a rate of 500 Hz with a 16-bit resolution, and were decimated to 25 Hz for analysis. DTag analysis was conducted using custom scripts in Matlab 2015b (The Mathworks, Inc., MA, USA). The variation in the frequency responses and sampling rates of the recording systems used did not affect our ability to record clean signals for both the coda and echolocation clicks produced by sperm whales, and as a result, the temporal patterning of clicks used in this analysis.

Whales, including the tagged whales, were identified through photographs of the trailing edge of their tails 51 . Identifications were used to ensure that only recordings from one of the two sympatric clans (EC-1, the Eastern Caribbean Clan) were included in the analysis to control for any differences in repertoires between vocal clans 27 .

To define the temporal structure of the codas recorded, absolute inter-click intervals were measured as in ref. 49 , using either custom-written Matlab tools and Rainbow Click Software (all years before 2014) or CodaSorter a custom-written tool (K. Beedholm, Marine Bioacoustics Lab, Aarhus University) in LabView (National Instruments, TX, USA). CodaSorter allows users to playback audio at various speeds and manually mark detected clicks as belonging to a specific coda. Estimates for each click for the angle of arrival, channel delay, centroid frequency, and inter-pulse interval (IPI, the time between the onset of the first pulse and the onset of the next pulse in the multi-pulse structure of sperm whales clicks 52 ) allowed for determining if the codas were produced by tagged whales or non-focal animals; and to ensure that, on days in which multiple tags were deployed, codas recorded by different tags were not double-counted. Photo-identification supported this process by identifying which whales were present and associated with the tagged whales at each surfacing.

There are two components to the dataset: Dataset 1, a large set of all 8719 codas that are annotated with information on their inter-click intervals; and Dataset 2, a smaller set of 3948 codas, which were recorded from animal-borne DTags, which remain in temporal order and are additionally annotated with information of the absolute time in the day of the first click of each of the codas and their associated speaker identities across the bouts. Experiments that do not require contextual information (those discussing the context-independent features of rhythm and tempo) use Dataset 1, whereas those requiring information about the relative ordering of the codas and their speaker IDs (those discussing the context-sensitive features of rubato and ornamentation), use Dataset 2. In both cases, rare, long codas were excluded from analysis (greater than 10 clicks, less than 5% of all codas recorded).

Additional discussion of statistical tests

Comparisons of coda durations (either with adjacent codas, when studying rubato, or with overlapping codas, when studying all features in the context of chorusing behaviour) use permutation tests to avoid making distributional assumptions about durations of codas and their absolute differences, some of which have non-normal distributions. All permutation tests are computed over 10,000 random resamplings of the data without replacement. Evaluation of Rubato additionally uses Spearman rank-correlation tests to measure longer-range trends across coda triplets (again based on initial observations that these trends appeared to be non-linear). Comparisons of coda-internal structure (e.g., durations of penultimate ICIs in ornamented codas) use Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, as we are interested only in distributional differences rather than orderings of mean durations. Finally, measurements of changes in vocalization behaviour following Rubato use Fisher’s exact test to compare proportions of these changes in different vocal contexts.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

All data generated and in this study has been deposited on GitHub at https://github.com/pratyushasharma/sw-combinatoriality/tree/main/data 53 .

Code availability

Custom scripts used for this study are available at https://github.com/pratyushasharma/sw-combinatoriality 53 .

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Acknowledgements

This analysis was funded by Project CETI via grants from Dalio Philanthropies and Ocean X; Sea Grape Foundation; Virgin Unite, Rosamund Zander/Hansjorg Wyss, Chris Anderson/Jacqueline Novogratz through The Audacious Project: a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED to P.S., S.G., R.P., D.F.G., D.R., A.T. and J.A. Further funding was provided by the J.H. and E.V. Wade Fund at MIT. Fieldwork for The Dominica Sperm Whale Project was supported by through a FNU fellowship for the Danish Council for Independent Research supplemented by a Sapere Aude Research Talent Award (1325-00047A), a Carlsberg Foundation expedition grant (CF14-0789), two Explorer Grants from the National Geographic Society (WW-218R-17 and NGS-64863R-19), a grant from Focused on Nature, and supplementary grants from the Arizona Center for Nature Conservation, Quarters For Conservation, the Dansk Akustisks Selskab, Oticon Foundation, and the Dansk Tennis Fond all to S.G. Further funding was provided by a Discovery and Equipment grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University and a FNU large frame grant and a Villum Foundation Grant (13273) to Peter Madsen of Aarhus University. We thank the Chief Fisheries Officers and the Dominica Fisheries Division officers for research permits and their collaboration in data collection; all the crews of R/V Balaena and The DSWP team for data collection, curation, and annotation; as well as Dive Dominica, Al Dive, and W.E.T. Dominica for logistical support while in Dominica. A big thank you to Alex Boersma for providing us with sperm whale caricatures used in Fig.  1 and to Roger Levy and the CETI team for helpful discussions and valuable feedback on the paper.

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These authors contributed equally: Daniela Rus, Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas.

Authors and Affiliations

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Pratyusha Sharma, Daniela Rus, Antonio Torralba & Jacob Andreas

Project CETI, New York, NY, USA

Pratyusha Sharma, Shane Gero, Roger Payne, David F. Gruber, Daniela Rus, Antonio Torralba & Jacob Andreas

Department of Biology, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada

The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, Roseau, Dominica

Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

David F. Gruber

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Contributions

P.S., J.A., A.T., D.R., S.G., R.P. conceptualized the study, P.S., J.A., A.T. developed the methods, S.G. and The DSWP team collected the data, S.G. and The DSWP team annotated the original dataset, P.S., S.G. and The DSWP team curated the data, P.S. conducted the analyses and authored the code provided, P.S., J.A., A.T., S.G. verified the analytical results, S.G., D.F.G., D.R., A.T., J.A. funded the study, P.S. wrote the manuscript, all authors contributed review and editing to the manuscript and gave final approval for publication.

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Correspondence to Daniela Rus , Antonio Torralba or Jacob Andreas .

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Sharma, P., Gero, S., Payne, R. et al. Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations. Nat Commun 15 , 3617 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

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