Are We Being Good Ancestors? A Conversation With Robert Macfarlane
by Steve Marsh
For the last twenty years, Robert Macfarlane has established himself as one of the most accomplished nature writers alive. From his first award-winning book, 2003’s Mountains of the Mind, about humanity’s fascination with climbing to the top, all the way through to his ninth, 2019’s Underland, about humanity’s descent to the bottom, Macfarlane has proven himself to be a most curious and eloquent investigator of our natural habitat.
But somehow, despite this veritable stack of deeply considered work, the great German director Werner Herzog has threatened to shoot him. That’s because Macfarlane, along with the Australian musician Ben Frost, has adapted Herzog’s favorite nature book, the enigmatic British author J.A. Baker’s 1967 masterwork, The Peregrine into an opera, the first section of which will debut at this year’s Great Northern as Cold Air Rises. Macfarlane says Herzog doesn’t trust him despite their mutual admiration for The Peregrine—along with Virgil’s Georgics, it’s the only other book to appear on Herzog’s syllabus for his Rogue Film School. That’s because Herzog believes that Baker’s profound meditation on raptors, that Baker spent a decade obsessively stalking in his corner of the British midlands, to be fundamentally unadaptable. In Herzog’s mind, The Peregrine, with its violent poetics and horror movie-esque transformation at its heart—it’s basically the raptor’s own Iliad—is the perfect book, and should remain a book.
When I reach Macfarlane via zoom from his Cambridge, England study, we discuss the loophole that he believes exempts him from Herzog’s threatened condemnation, and exactly how he and Frost were able to take Baker’s book and make it into an opera in the first place. We also discussed Macfarlane’s own longstanding love of The Peregrine, why he was selected to write the foreword for its 50th-anniversary edition, how he sees the book as an elegy for our lost relationship to nature, and what we can do to restore a shared sense of poetry and hope.
Steve Marsh: Baker characterizes the peregrine’s British habitat as “a place of elm and oak and thorn,” which reminds me of my region of Minnesota. In Baker’s description, the landscape itself has this sense of feeling forgotten or maybe being imbued with self-pity, like, this isn’t the kind of place that people pay much attention to. And that does seem to be our group psychology in parts of the global north—even though we've colonized and controlled the world. Why is that? Is it guilt?
Robert MacFarlane: I think you're right to revise your term from self-pity to guilt.
SM: Or maybe shame?
RM: Shame. Exactly. I think in Baker, it's shame. As you said, the global north in many ways is the most conspicuous region in the world for all that it's done. But there are parts of it that are forgotten and there are parts that are shameful, and I think Baker thought he lived in the shadow of shame. I mean, he was writing in the '50s and '60s—he'd just lived through but not fought in the war. And he’d seen the effects of pesticides on biodiversity. He was living in a landscape that was undergoing big-field farming. East Anglia is a bit like your prairie—Midwest country. It's where the fields are biggest, it's where the grain grows tallest. So it's like the wheat basket, basically. And at that time, there were a lot of subsidies heading towards farmers to just rip out the old shape of the countryside. So the hedgerows were going, the woods were going, the copses were going, and meanwhile, the poison was being fed into the food chain. And Baker was a cultural conservative, definitely. But he was also what we would now call a conservationist, and he saw it happening much earlier than anyone else, especially with the peregrines. And he made it into this extraordinary elegy.
SM: How did you first come to the book?
RM: I first read it in my teens—15, 16—that kind of time, early. And it burst like a little tab of acid. Not that I’ve done acid.
SM: Yeah, you said in your Peregrine essay that you've never done LSD.
RM: I don’t need to, right?
SM: Well, I don’t know if you can say that yet.
RM: I wrote Mountains of the Mind when I was in my mid-20s, which is the first book about this relationship to imagination and landscape. And immediately after that, in 2003, I wrote a series of essays for The Guardian about writers who I considered to be incandescent place writers. Some of them were well-known in America, like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And I wrote about the wonderful Willa Cather. And one of them was Baker. At that time, The Peregrine, like, Herzog knew it and loved it, Barry Lopez knew it and loved it. But it wasn't really in print, it was passed around by hand, a secret totem of a book. And shortly after I wrote that [Guardian] essay in 2003, the New York Review of Books got in touch and said, “we want to reissue this in our classic series.” You probably know that beautiful classic series.
SM: Yeah, the classic edition is so pretty. You wrote the forward for this reissue of The Peregrine.
RM: The first cover they put on the re-issue, they didn't consult me, and clearly no ornithologist was in the building when the decision was made. They put a picture of a red-tailed hawk on the cover of their lovely new editions! I was like, oh, guys, that’s like putting a dolphin on the cover of Moby Dick. So anyway, there's an interesting sidebar here about nature literacy.
SM: Let’s talk about your own nature literacy. When did you start writing about the natural world?
RM: I grew up in Nottingham. So that's the middle of the middle, basically. As far from the sea as you can get, but we always went to the coast or the mountains. I grew up climbing and walking, that was just what we did.
SM: When I think of Nottingham I think of Robin Hood, of course. Is it still a big forest?
RM: Well, there's not much of it left now.
SM: Ah. They cut it all down?
RM: I grew up in a ghost of a forest, basically. But the other notable thing about Nottingham City is that it's a city of caves. It's built on sandstone and it's an absolute underworld warren. So something of that fed through later into Underland. I definitely have a dimensional memory of growing up in this city where you could enter a building in one place and then leave via another door on the surface in a different block. So, yeah, it had a fairytale magic to it as well as a roughness.
SM: Did you do scouts or anything?
RM: We call it “Adventurous Training.” That was what we did on the school trips, we'd go caving and climbing and hiking. And I'd learnt all my early mountain skills, such as they are, then, and I've just never stopped really. Even though I live in the flattest place in England and I grew up on a rolling farmland, I've always been drawn to the edge of a great height, I guess.
SM: So climbing was your first love, and how you got involved so deeply with nature.
RM: Yeah. Passed through a kind of unwise decade. But in my late teens through to my mid-20s, when I was climbing at altitudes and circumstances that were beyond my ability, they were thrilling. I was in big ranges, high altitudes. I was rock climbing a lot and quite a few accidents were happening around me. I was losing friends and people I knew. And then I got married quite young and had kids quite young. And so really, the Mountains of the Mind, the book I wrote, was an attempt to explain how this obsession had entered my brain and also how it entered western culture.
SM: So that's why you don't need to do LSD, man. You killed your ego by scaring it to death on the edge of a mountain!
Brocken spectre from Wikipedia
RM: Well, yeah, mountains kill the ego and they stroke it, too. They're the double touch, definitely, all the time. But once you've seen your own Brocken spectre, which is this radiant double that gets projected on you in frozen mist, you don't need drugs.
SM: Speaking of death, the New York Times recently ran an op-ed by Matthew Walther who claimed that poetry died 100 years ago when T.S. Elliot wrote The Wasteland. Now, I suppose poetry is like God, in that somebody is always claiming its premature demise, but this writer’s rationale was compelling. He says the underlying reason for the death of poetry is that we no longer have a shared language of nature. And sadly, I think there is something to that argument. Maybe we don't know what natural things are called anymore because we don't need to know—we're not foraging or hunting for our meals, we don't rely upon nature in the same way. And maybe that's why we're alienated from it. Now, birders like Baker seem to have an obsession, even a fetishization, with collecting natural language, but do you have to be a weirdo like Baker in order to know the language of the natural world?
RM: First of all, I spent a lot of my life over the last decade working on what we might call nature literacy—reanimating a basic common shared language of recognition and reciprocity between ourselves and the beings we share the world with. And I think there's a real danger in the fetish, in the idea that you have to possess specialized knowledge or be an expert taxonomist. I mean, what could be more alienating than that? That if you don't know the exact right words, the world will not unlock itself for you. But there is this beautiful, accessible common language that can be added to and drawn from. And so these books I made, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, which just call back 20 common names for “Acorn” or “Bluebell” or “Heron,” they've really struck a chord with readers around the world, particularly children who relish that ease of common naming. So I think the commonality is really important here.
But Baker's interesting because he's anything but common, right? He's a single watcher, he shuns other humans, we hear nothing of his domestic life, and he works in a language and a style that is so intensified, so particularized, there is nothing common about it, and yet it has this power to explode onto the brain’s cinema screen. Even if the words that you are reading barely register with you cognitively, there is still this intense, visual kinetic energy and drama that is cycling through your retina, through your mind's eye, through your mind's ear. So when somebody asks Herzog, “what's the one book you'd give somebody who wants to understand film?” And he hands them not a manual about filmmaking, but a 140-page book, pure prose, not a single illustration in it, about watching a peregrine, you know something powerful is happening in that book.
SM: But in the same breath, Herzog says, “it's unfilmable!” He’s pleading with you personally, “please don't make a movie out of this!” So how are you and Ben Frost going to make The Peregrine into an opera?
“I wrote to Herzog and he wrote back saying, ‘there are some books that should never be filmed.’ He threatened to shoot me without trial if I filmed it!”
RM: I told that story where I wrote to Herzog and he wrote back saying, “there are some books that should never be filmed.” He threatened to shoot me without trial if I filmed it! But he said “filmed” so I feel that there's an escape clause there, right? We're not filming it, we're turning it into an opera. I'm hoping Herzog isn't going to turn up at my door with a loaded weapon. But three or four years ago Ben called out of the blue and said he had wanted to do this for about eight years now. He had actually acquired the rights. And he's such a spiky, experimental, neo-modernist composer himself. I mean, if he’s a nature musician, I hope it's in the same sense that I'm a nature writer, which is a kind of dark, complicated, systematized, capitalized, awkward nature. Ben is way further down that road than me, I think. So he tuned into something in Baker's post-war intensity of vision—it's about poison, it's about toxicity, it's about death, it's about a final glowing light of hope. And that's where we are now, so it felt very much of the moment. Ben got in touch and said, “should we work together on this? I'll score it, I'll direct it, you write the libretto working with Baker's words.” And I was, like, “yeah, brilliant. I mean, it's going to be hellishly hard.” And Ben said, “I want to set the whole thing in an air conditioning unit, I just want it cold.” So much of the book happens over this brutal winter of '62-'63.
SM: The winter writing reminds me so much of Minnesota. The middle of the book is the shortest day—December 22nd. It's bleak, and Baker references the “cold and indifferent sky.” The only plot is really about the changing light. Things are (very gradually) warming up, but there’s a tragedy embedded in the melting: it means the peregrine, which is a migratory bird, is getting ready to leave Baker.
RM: You’ve touched on so much here. For one, I feel like The Peregrine is coming home by coming to Minnesota—it's landing in a bleak, wintry, flat landscape. And so there's a lovely match there. I'm really happy that this is where the work will first show. And the second is, yeah, absolutely, what a fantastic but also intimidating challenge: a book that obsessively repeats itself. Kill/sleep/watch/hunt, kill/sleep/watch/hunt. I mean, how do you make drama out of that? In fact, the repetition is partly where the drama lies. But also, as you say, you start to track other forms of change: you track temperature change, light change, declensions, fine degrees. And from the very beginning, Ben had a very clear vision. He wanted a choir, a substantial choir that would be weather, it would be light, it would be bird cry. So we're working a lot with alarm calls, bird alarm calls, both within Ben's music and then within the choir's voice, as it were. Because alarm calls are obviously very distinctive—they're this incredible other-language of panic and danger that birds use to signal across space and to warn each other. So Ben is starting to build in not only field recordings of species-specific alarm calls, but also our alarm call. So in the music I've heard so far, he has air raid sirens, basically. When the falcon is overhead and is about to hunt and stoop, these absolutely spine-tingling air raid sirens go off. It's very classic of him. I don't know if you've watched Dark, incredible Netflix series.
SM: I haven’t. He scored all of that series, right?
RM: He scored all of Dark, and he also just scored 1899, another massive Netflix series set on a ship, a big ocean-going liner. And similarly, its motif in the score is this foghorn.
SM: So the music will be this mixture of nature sounds and manmade sounds, but also the choir singing.
RM: We are using this opportunity with The Great Northern as a place to experiment really, a prompt to create. And we've been trusted to put on something fully raw and new here. And it will almost be the first time we've heard it. So we have a central figure, a singer-dancer and an incredible musician who I think you've heard mentioned: Keeley Forsyth, this extraordinary English singer. I think someone described the songs on her first album as, “blocks of metal fallen from a clear sky.” if you have a chance, listen to “Debris,” which is the title of the first track—you'll get a sense of how we’ve cast her effectively as both the falcon and the watcher. The whole drama of The Peregrine is this man who is so ashamed of his body, so ashamed of his species, so ashamed of his moment in history, that he focuses so intently on a falcon that he basically leaps the species' boundary and becomes that falcon to escape his shame. Because the killing of the falcon is guiltless, it's instinctual. But the killing of humans is knowing and it disgusts him. We didn’t want a puppet peregrine swooping on stage. We wanted to make one person pulled into these two beings, who are always trying to come together and then getting pulled apart.
SM: The frustration of Baker’s desired transformation comes up again and again in the book. His curiosity is that of a great detective—he's trying to figure out this mind of a killer, right? He studies the way the peregrine eats, realizing that it doesn’t chew, it tears and rips, and this affects how it tastes. Like maybe a human would find gull flesh fishy, but a peregrine wouldn’t. But despite his obsessive investigation, Baker continually falls short of total empathy and recedes back into his own shame.
RM: Yes! He goes to where the peregrine has killed, and then he starts to mantle over the prey, meaning he hunches over it.
SM: I think that scene is the one that specifically enraptured Herzog.
RM: It's horror-method acting. And you're right, it is a detective trying to get inside the mind of the killer, but in this loving, disturbing, almost erotic way. So the whole scenario is totally fucked up really, but also absolutely compelling. So we have a choir, which will be much smaller in the performance at The Great Northern, and then we have Keeley singing. And one of the things that Keeley does vocally—we begin in the very low gray dawn light and slowly, the day opens. But the scene that we're focusing on at the beginning, I don't know if you remember, it's near the middle of the book, which is when Baker comes across a heron that is frozen into the field, and he gives it peace. But as he approaches it, the heron is absolutely terrified, because it sees a human. And it's probably the most shameful moment of the book for Baker. It's dying, it's terrified, and he breaks its neck because that's the kindest thing to do. And then in this absolutely brutally misanthropic passage, he says, “we are the killers, we stink of death, we cannot tear it away from ourselves.” It’s this moment of self-loathing and self-knowledge that’s the worst of shame, I suppose, because it's so human-hating as well. It's a very confronting moment for the reader, because it's the one moment in the book where he points out at you, Steve, at you, Rob, you.
SM: Right. You stink.
RM: Yeah. We are the killers.
SM: This perspective is something that we struggle with as human beings.
In Underland, you touched on one of the reasons we have so many problems changing our behavior: we don't fear the repercussions of our actions because the repercussions won’t truly come for another 100 years. The human brain struggles with the conception of deep time. Even though we're obsessed with the idea of the ancient, whether its Game of Thrones…
RM: …or the English royal family.
SM: Yes. We're obsessed with the ancient past, but we cannot conceptualize the far-off future. Now in the case of Baker, I don't know if this kind of self-loathing or self-hatred is helpful in terms of political activism, but it certainly works as art. But as artists, is there any effective strategy to get the human brain to contemplate deep time?
“Jonas Salk asked, ‘are we being good ancestors?’ To be a good ancestor is different from being a good parent or a good grandparent. The real test comes when you step beyond your perceptible inheritors in the form of your offspring or the offspring of those you love and their offspring.”
RM: I mean, the phrase that is at the heart of Underland is this famous question that Jonas Salk asked, “are we being good ancestors?” To be a good ancestor is different from being a good parent or a good grandparent. The real test comes when you step beyond your perceptible inheritors in the form of your offspring or the offspring of those you love and their offspring. You have to become ethically responsible for people you will never meet. And we prove to be pretty bad at that. One of the most important questions any individual or community has to ask themselves is, are we being good ancestors? And if not—and the answer is almost always no—how do we do that better? Some legislatures are doing that, right? The Welsh government introduced what they call the Future Generations Act, which is basically good ancestry in practice. It's a powerful act, and it mandates all government departments to look 50 to 70 years ahead. But understandably, especially in the COVID era—when we all lived on two-week time spans—so many politicians work in the short term. We can’t make it to the end of the month, much less make it through a 70-year plan. So it's hard.
But I think art does have a role in this, and nature has a role in it as well. Trees think and record and archive and represent time in different temporalities, they're slower. Rock does it slower still, and marine sediments, stalactites, the underworld–these are all differently calibrated timekeeping machines. And so we are good historians but bad futurologists. But I think art can help us think differently about the calibrations of future time. I think of Marcia Bjornerud, who wrote this book, Timefulness, which is her word for thinking responsibly into deep time. And think of Baker: He talks about the falcon’s ancient aeries. They have nest sites that they can come back to over and over again. So they inherit—so there is a generational legacy there.
SM: So what are you guys trying to do with this opera? Are you trying to get us to see our impact on our environment in order to change our behavior? Is it activism, is it art?
RM: Somewhere in between, I think. I mean, I've been doing a lot of adaptation recently, I just adapted this BBC World Service series, The Dark Is Rising, from this 50-year-old novel, and it was a huge midwinter hit all around the world. It was number one in Canada and America on the drama podcast, all about the coming of the cold, all about responsibility to the land. And now I'm adapting The Peregrine. I'm interested in what happens when we bring works from half a century ago into conversation with the present and find them to be prophetic and powerful, perhaps in ways that are even more intense than half a century ago. They were written ahead of their time as it were, that's what it feels like with Baker. So artistically, I think Ben and I are both committed to formal experiment and to collaboration and bringing word, music, song, and stage together to honor this late modernist work of complicated, splintery genius.
SM: What do you think Baker was trying to affect when he wrote it?
RM: He did write a couple of pretty angry, straightforwardly political essays after the book was published. He got a platform because The Peregrine became pretty famous in its first year. But I think, in the end, he found that to be less satisfactory. I think it's a howl of a text, right? It's a cold, fractured scream of a text, and it's saying, look what is happening. But it's also absolutely self-obsessed. I mean, it's this intense psychodrama between him and a bird. But it has had incredible power. I have one student who became a proper climate activist, and she absolutely dates her conversion to her encounter with The Peregrine and her push into direct action activism. I think I tell the story in that essay of a young musician who's as unlike me as could happen—he died of an overdose in a squat in his 20s. But he wanted to be buried with a copy of The Peregrine. It touches the strangest and widest of hearts, and that has something to do with its fierceness, its intensity, and with its sense of loss happening now, in the moment. And the positive side is that peregrines didn't die out in the UK. Pesticide use did come under tighter control, partly due to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and partly due to Derek Ratcliffe, the scientist who really blew the whistle on the effect on peregrines and sparrowhawks in the UK, of eggshell thinning dieldrin accumulation. And now in the UK, we have an incredibly healthy population of increasingly urban peregrines, right?
SM: Yeah. They're like whitetail deer—they do well in these fractured modern landscapes.
RM: Totally. They've got skyscrapers and their sea cliffs, churches and cathedrals, their mountainsides. They have a steady population of urban pigeon food, they take the woodcock that are migrating, or the golden plover. If Baker teleported back into modern Britain, I would take him to the crossroads near where I work in Central Cambridge and I would show him the pair of peregrines that nest on the reform church there, and his jaw would drop. The rage and anger and worry that he and others were feeling and expressing scientifically and culturally in the late '60s... it did something. I don't know if you saw this wonderful story from earlier today—scientists have finally released the paper which says the Earth's ozone layer will be healed from the CFC wound that was delivered to it in the '80s, and they've given a date for the healing. So we can do it. We really can do it.
Ben Frost: Cold Air Rises
World premiere (first section of forthcoming opera) commissioned by The Great Northern
Performed by MPLS (imPulse)
With dancer Amanda Sachs
Libretto by Robert MacFarlane
In partnership with Minnesota Opera’s Luminary Arts Center and American Composers Forum
Sat, Feb 4, 2 pm & 4 pm
Luminary Arts Center
Robert MacFarlane is the author of internationally best-selling books about nature, people, and place including Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012), and, with artist Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). His work has been translated into 30 languages, and widely adapted for music, stage, film, radio, and television. Over recent years he’s worked increasingly with musicians including Johnny Flynn, Cosmo Sheldrake, the Spell Songs ensemble, writing for opera, choir, and song. Macfarlane is presently writing Is A River Alive?, about the rights of nature movement and the new-old idea that the world is far more alive than is often allowed. In 2017 in New York he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.