Ecological grief and hope in Vesper Flights
Authors: Sophia Davis
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2020)

Grief is necessary. Reading that “we are already inside the apocalypse” might sound bleak, but Helen Macdonald sees her new book as an effort to give much needed meaning to the loss of nature all around us. Creeping climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinction can be too much to comprehend beyond the bare numbers of science. As Macdonald writes in Vesper Flights, a collection of essays on various aspects of the natural world, we need literature “to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them”. Macdonald gained acclaim for H is for Hawk, her deeply personal memoir about dealing with the loss of her father, which won her the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Her new book weaves the political in with the personal, calling us to reconsider how we relate to the non-human world. Together with her naturalist's eye, Macdonald's training as a historian of science is part of what gives such depth to her writing; things are and are not what they seem. Her sensitivity to the changing meanings associated with particular animals and landscapes lends a precious quality and arresting power to the essays. In Vesper Flights, each essay transports you to a different place, and while many of them focus on her native UK, others jump to different parts of the world. One moment we are gazing up at masses of migrating birds high above New York's Empire State Building, thinking about the history of using radar to detect them; and another, we are watching boxing hares in a field near Macdonald's Suffolk home, reflecting on their symbolism as harbingers of spring and how that season has shrunk of late. A theme that weaves through the essays is how we tend to see ourselves in animals. National and natural histories often blur, and Macdonald explores how English swans have long been entwined with nationhood and identity, how postwar cuckoos were read as clandestine birds of deception and quiet murder, and how territorial anxieties spilled over into labelling some animals as unwanted invaders while absorbing other visitors as celebrated natives. What we see also depends on our emotional state, and in other essays Macdonald examines how a creature or natural phenomenon revealed something about herself. As she told me over Zoom, “we need science to understand the complexities of ecosystems and climate systems, but we also need to think about our emblematic uses of animals and landscapes, how and why we value them culturally and at an individual level, and these two kinds of understanding need to happen together”. We can't help but see the natural world through the associations and metaphors we've built during our lives; encounters with animals are “always already emblematic”. Rather than attempting to deny what is there, Macdonald illuminates these often hidden meanings, that we might then work with them. Then again, our metaphors never quite fit. Another recurring refrain is Macdonald stepping back from symbolism to emphasise that nature is not there for us. In one essay, falcons nesting on high-rises seem to shift their identity as romantic icons of threatened wilderness into a reflection of our own fascination with vision and surveillance. And yet, she writes, “their greatest magic is that they're not human at all”. Part of the essays’ brilliance is their dance between exploring and cherishing the emblematic meanings we project onto the natural world, and insisting that the non-human world is more. This is the sticking point of the instrumentalist idea that natural places are good for our mental and physical health. It's not that we shouldn't think about the value of the natural world for us, Helen told me, but we also need to extend empathy towards creatures that aren't like us, and value other species for themselves. A beautiful landscape to us might be like a desert for many species. Perhaps the most overarching theme of the studies, though, is the sense of needing to take stock of the natural world while we still can. The essays repeatedly chart losses of non-human life, like the disappearance of a meadow she adored as a child. “None of us can bear too much reality”, Macdonald writes, but she points out that in an earlier sense of the word apocalypse, it meant a revelation. As we talked, she explained that “bearing witness” is a big aim of the book, adding that “we need to feel grief first in order move forward and grant ourselves agency to bring about change”. One essay reflects on our incomprehension of systemic climate change, and in our conversation, Helen was clear that we need more than the dominant narrative of individuals making small choices to help the environment; we need to cause “good trouble” to help bring about “massive structural changes”. “Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action”, she writes, but many of the essays signal a stinging sense of hope, and as we talked, she stressed “the importance of hope that ruin is not inevitable”. The essays are a tribute to the complexity of non-human life and our relationship with it, and a call to notice change despite the discomfort that brings, with the hope that this might inspire positive action.