When I heard that the British naturalist, poet, and writer Helen Macdonald would be coming through the San Francisco Bay Area as part of a North American book tour, my first thought was "We should go birding." Macdonald is, famously, a bird lover—she authored the best-seller H Is for Hawk—and her visit was timed for spring, the ideal season to catch the huge flocks of migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. Point Reyes National Seashore would have been the perfect spot, but Macdonald’s schedule was too packed for an all-day excursion. Plan B, however, wasn’t all that bad: a morning-long hike through the redwood groves that drape Mount Tamalpais, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Redwoods aren’t exactly the best place for birding—unless you’re really into jays—so it was a nice surprise to catch a red-tailed hawk cutting through the canopy as we made our way down the Bootjack Trail. There were ravens in the treetops and chickadees down below, and Macdonald croaked and whistled back at them with practiced accuracy. We made our way to one of the upper waterfalls on Redwood Creek, just outside the boundary of Muir Woods National Monument, and set up a snack of oranges and black tea on a streamside boulder.

For the next hour, the conversation rambled wildly, from the craft of narrative writing in the 21st century to the challenges of creating a more ethnically diverse conservation movement. Here’s an excerpt.

MARK: Earlier on the hike, we were talking about how people have been taught or encouraged to only engage with wild nature by watching or looking. But it strikes me that one of the motifs of H Is for Hawk is sort of that watching is an active verb. Observing is engaging.

MACDONALD: Yeah. I guess that distancing is always there, right? I talk in the book about how one of the things that drew me to the hawk was this kind of parable of the aviator’s eye—the sense that if you posses this kind of panoptic vision, looking down on the world, looking at everything from a distance, you feel safe, you feel … your identity is unchallenged. But it becomes a relationship that can be quite problematic, I think. You don’t get your hands dirty.

You know, I grew up watching birds and flying hawks, and I’ve always been very interested in those two kinds of ways of interacting with the natural world in that particular regard, in particular with birds. When I’m watching birds on my feeder, I’m watching goldfinches and stuff. You can watch their behavior, and you can see them from a distance, but they always seem to me like paintings, like pictures. You can watch them for a long time and sort of understand their behavior, but ultimately they don’t really interact with you. I like those relationships where you feel that you’re incorporated into something of the life world of the creature that you’re watching. I mean it sounds like I’m just wanting to be seen in a way, and that’s not really it. There’s a bit in the book where I see a herd of deer, and I find myself kind of desperately wanting to make them see me, even if it makes them run away, because I want to be in their world. And that’s one of my problems with watching: It’s a sense there’s a kind of glass pane in between us and the rest of it.… Having said that, what’s that noise?

MARK: There was a Homo sapien that went by.

MACDONALD: I mean, I’m not saying everyone should go out and try to hug bears or anything like that. I’m just saying that seeing the natural world as something you can really look at like a TV screen, for me has some knock-on problems.

MARK: Yeah, but while totally recognizing those problems, it’s also important to recognize that, at the same time, we’ve grown so unaccustomed to quiet observation. You make this nice point in the book how the word “patience” comes from the original root “to suffer.” It’s pain. We don’t really have that observational fortitude anymore. So, for some people, just the watching might open them up to a new relationship with wild nature.

MACDONALD: Yeah absolutely. There’s a lot of history to that. I mean if you go back to the 19th century and the 18th century and think about a lot of field sciences, the ways in which the veracity of observations were guaranteed was through suffering, right? I mean, you went out there and you looked at the rocks and you traveled the mountains and you watched the birds. And people believed what you saw because you had a hell of a time getting those observations. So yeah, it’s not just sitting in a comfy, heated front room and looking out the window. I think that connection between patience and observation and suffering and truth is a very old one, and it goes right back to those kind of monkish traditions of contemplation.

MARK: And solitude.

MACDONALD: And solitude—absolutely. And those things are all wrapped up in how we see the natural world, both scientifically and in the everyday stories about how we should do it.… When I’ve had this coffee, I’ll be much more articulate.

MARK: It’s tea.

MACDONALD: Oh it’s tea? Even better.

MARK: I was trying to meet you halfway. Looking at what you’ve been writing for the Times, the column is titled “On Nature.” It seems like more properly it should have been called, “On People Looking at Nature.” I guess my question is, is this just where we are with—for lack of a better description—nature writing today? I mean, you can’t just be John Burroughs looking at something. 

MACDONALD: I think that on the edge of the sixth great extinction, it’s absolutely necessary to interrogate what we bring to the party, right? Trying to tell stories about nature as this untouched and pristine wilderness which we can kind of look at and gaze upon in awe—I mean I think that would be a mistake now. And one of the big things in my book, and in the columns, is my fascination in how we use nature to naturalize our concepts, to prove our own ideas to ourselves. We value nature in ways that are always connected with our own social and cultural assumptions.

I’m not saying there isn’t a real nature: There are pigeons out there; they’re not just empty receptacles for human signifiers. They live and they breathe and they coo and they do their own pigeon thing and they’ve got their own Umwelt—their own life-world. But it’s really important to try to piece together and to sort out why we value the sort of things we value and the reason we value them. Because, for me, the only way we can think about saving all this stuff is to think about why we feel it’s valuable. I think it’s an essential thing to do, and I just do my small part of that.

MARK: Not to be too highfalutin about it.

MACDONALD: Be highfalutin about it—that’s good.

MARK: It’s the responsibility of the nature writer, or the scientific journalist, in the Anthropocene and amid the sixth mass extinction, to help people navigate this pretty fraught relationship. So I guess the question is "What are you trying to help people see as you’re reflecting back to them?" 

MACDONALD: Ultimately, I’d love if they read the column and thought to themselves, “You know, ha, I didn’t realize that—what we think about wild boars has got to do with us.” But also, I’d love it they thought, “What if boars are amazing?” I want that double view, which is what I hope is possible. It’s trying to understand the human meanings we give creatures in the natural world. Then you can try to slip past those kinds of meanings and try to look past them and see something that is much stranger and weirder and more inhuman and peculiar, and fascinating—which is something more like the actual thing in itself. I mean, of course that’s impossible in a really strong sense of the word, but I’m a great believer in loving difference. We spend so much of the time thinking everything around us is about us and for us, unconsciously. And when you look at a robin pulling worms out of a log as alien, it’s kind of peculiar and thrilling, right? Yeah, it’s nice to see that.

MARK: Animals are a portal to wilderness—wildness, I should say.

MACDONALD: Yeah, wildness rather than wilderness. Recently, I’ve been talking about this a lot. I had an interview with a journalist in Germany who really gave me a hard time about this, and rightly. He was sort of saying, “If you think that nature makes people better or sort of different, or it helps them or whatever, what happens if you grow up in a city?” And I said, “You don’t need to travel to see this stuff. You can see it in a spider in a windowsill, or you can see it in a sparrow bathing in a puddle, right?” I mean, this stuff is everywhere. Obviously, these tend to be depauperate, impoverished ecosystems, compared to some other ones. If you want to see that wildness and feel transported, it’s possible to do that anywhere. 

When I was a kid, I used to destroy my parents’ rock garden. I used to go out every morning and pull these things over and pick up centipedes and bugs. That was my world. I used to put my nose up against these things because—because they were other, I guess. My book is about othering, in a sense, not just the othering of the hawk, but T.H. White as well, who had his own issue with sexuality and othering and the whole othering of death. 

MARK: There’s a fine tradition of that in nature writing. Of course, there’s John Muir going off into a deep wilderness. But there’s also John Burroughs and Annie Dillard looking at something in the garden very close up.

MACDONALD: Yeah, yeah. I’m always interested in whether that’s a gendered thing or not. I mean, that old tradition of domestic spaces being supposedly female and the great open wilds being male spaces—not just spaces to go encounter the wild, but sporting spaces or hunting spaces. I mean, that’s kind of fascinating to think about. What I did with Hawk was, I guess, a bit unusual in that I didn’t go out and try to find wilderness out there. I brought it inside the house imaginatively, and that was in many ways a really unusual thing. And kind of dangerous as well. I mean, it did kind of mess me up mentally, living with this bird.

MARK: But at the same time, you did go and look for succor in wildness. You write that as Mabel became more tame, you became more wild, and that was a balm.

MACDONALD: Yeah, absolutely. This really strange projection and transference.

MARK: I know this is well-trod ground, but I’m still curious to hear your answer: What is it in a wild place, or in an “other” place, that offers that kind of healing? How does it work?

MACDONALD: The healing? Well, I guess the book isn’t … it’s really important, and I always try to say this isn’t a book that says, “I was really sad. And then I got a bird of prey. And then I was happy again.” It was a really complicated set of identifications and assumptions and transferences, and I messed up with this bird. I wanted to be more like a hawk than a person. And I wanted to be wild, and I left the whole domestic, human world behind in my imagination—which was kind of disastrous for me. I feel a bit disloyal sitting here in Muir Woods because, of course, I used those quotes from Muir. We have these old stories, these romantic stories about finding solace and renewal in nature. I realized that, in many cases, that’s not helpful. In my case I took it too far.

MARK: The retreat is not helpful.

MACDONALD: The retreat is helpful. But the sense that the natural world is a place of infinite solace and renewal, when you’re broken, it will fix you—I think that’s a problematic thing.

MARK: How come?

MACDONALD: Because it’s not. And because it is. Here we are in this exquisite, cathedral-like forest. We’re in a kind of, I don’t know, a gulch? A minor ravine. And there’s light filtering through the redwoods’ needles, and it’s like the most beautiful place on Earth. And I do feel refreshed here. But I’ve increasingly come across articles and suggestions that we should value the natural world because it’s good for our mental health. Absolutely we should—as far as it goes. But trying to see that as the reason we should value nature is a terrible error. It’s not all about us, right?

MARK: That’s like touchy-feely ecosystem services. It’s like the touchy-feely version of nature’s instrumental value.

MACDONALD: Exactly—it’s the ecosystem services/instrumental value thing. For whatever reason, growing up in a godless household, I got a pretty weird, dimly religious view of all this. I mean look at it. It is like being in a sacred place. And when I was writing the book, it was really fascinating. I kept finding myself using sacred terms or religious terms to describe experiences I was having. There weren’t any secular terms for them. I used terms like "grace." So, yeah, I think we’re all really confused creatures. We’re all brought up with a million different stories about how we’re supposed to react to these kind of places.

MARK: Do you perceive that the conservation movement has lost some of its commitment to the intrinsic value of nature, and is now more on an instrumental value kind of trip?

MACDONALD: I think it is, and it certainly is in Europe. And part of me sees very good reasons for doing that. You know, if the world is run by the precepts of late capitalism, then maybe it’s the only way to get in there and try to save stuff and try to assign to it some kind of value. But part of me really grieves that that’s how it’s sort of going. I’m a nature-has-intrinsic-value kind of person.

Naturalist and writer Helen Macdonald takes a breather in a redwood grove while on a book tour. | Photo by Jayms Ramirez

MARK: Jumping around here a bit, but it’s worth recognizing that contemporary conservation biology is quite intensely hands-on. You can’t do it without the banding, the GPS, and the radio collars.

MACDONALD: The radio collars and tracking stuff is absolutely fascinating to me. People always say it’s like drone operations— the biologists are sitting in their houses looking at screens. They’re not out there. But they’ve got to catch this stuff, guys. Those field identities are still absolutely extant. I wrote a little column for the Times about satellite tracking and about those remote visualizations that we have of animals. And of course it was the Craigheads way back when that were doing it first with grizzlies in Yellowstone. And they had been ex-navy—I think they wrote the navy survival handbook during World War II. They were really badass people, and they sort of speculated we would eventually use satellites to track animals, and now we’re doing it. 

I did a talk last night, and I met a bunch of bird banders. And what’s great about that is how much it’s about getting your hand on a living creature. It’s a kind of culturally sanctioned hunting, basically. That’s what it is.

MARK: Well, the culturally sanctioned way at least among liberals. You’re thinking the right way to engage with nature is the citizen science? You have these people come out and sit on the beach for 12 hours somewhere for a sea turtle census.

MACDONALD: Oh, I love that stuff. Oh my god, I absolutely love it. Citizen science is one of my favorite things. I wrote a paper a long time ago about the beginnings of citizen science in Britain. It sort of happened in the 1930s with these great cooperative investigations into bird centers.

There’s a wonderful piece of writing in Britain about this, way back when, I think in the 1940s. One of these ornithologists was saying, “Maybe in the future, maybe there’ll be a great automated card index system, and robots will help us understand bird demographics.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you know, you were right.” I love that sense that everyone has a stake, everyone can invest in, and everyone can create, scientific knowledge.

MARK: Did you sign the letter—I think it was started by Tony Juniper—about the Oxford Junior Dictionary removing the nature words?

MACDONALD: Absolutely. Absolutely, I signed it. That kind of impoverishment is insidious, isn’t it? They were taking out words familiar to me, words that referred to the natural world, and replacing them with other words having to do with the internet. My sign-on to that letter wasn’t to say that we shouldn’t know about words having to do with the internet. It was just that, if you don’t know the names …

MARK: You’re not going to have any relationship with the natural world.

MACDONALD: Exactly. We talked about it a bit earlier in the walk. There’s that sense that the natural world is this green blur, right? I’m absolutely terrified of that as a way of looking at nature. I think it’s really important to know all the names.

MACDONALD: There’s a wonderful quote from Barry Lopez, that you have to know the names to talk about the world. And I absolutely hold with that.… I’m struggling here because this is a difficult place for me to be as an English naturalist. I love being in England because, partly because I know what everything is, and here I’m like, “That looks a bit like a ... ‘thing.’” And I just desperately want to get a field guide and walk off, and leave the interview, and spend the rest of the day identifying things. It’s exciting. But then there’s that feeling that as you get older, you realize that even if you don’t know exactly what things are, they play similar roles in similar ecosystems, and that’s kind of nice. Know the names.

MARK: Know the names. Yet it can get kind of complicated—you wrote about this with the Dutch elms in England as well as the chestnut trees here in the U.S. The shifting baseline complicates the whole conversation horribly because it’s like we’re on this collective hamster wheel of amnesia. Each generation is going to have its own starting line.

MACDONALD: Yeah, it’s absolutely heartrending—I think we’ve lost 430 million birds in Europe in my lifetime. Everything’s getting quieter and more empty, but the macro landscapes look the same. So the countryside in England looks the same, but there’s nothing in it anymore. In one of my columns, one of the early ones, I talked about this heartrending walk with my niece in a really great bit of wet, primeval fenland near my home in Cambridge. She said, “Where do they bring the animals from? Did they come from the zoo?” Because she didn’t understand it was all like this when I was a kid. It’s very, very hard. My mom, when I was small, would drive around and say, “I remember when this was all fields.” And I’d kind of roll my eyes. I'm trying to unpack the nostalgia from the actual, demonstrable pain of losing all there is.

MARK: Hawk gets to this, too. There’s unproductive nostalgia, which is, I guess, sentimentality. But there’s also productive nostalgia—to just try and remember.

MACDONALD: There’s been a big renaissance of nature writing in Britain, I think, in the last sort of 10, 15 years, and I’m really honored to be a part of it. A lot of people who are writing are my age and a bit older, and what they’re doing is a kind of testimony, right? It’s one thing to write about the fact that there are no wood warblers in a wood; it’s another thing to write about what that wood means to you because it’s less now that there are no wood warblers in it. I think there’s a lot of testimony involved in this. There’s a lot of holding witness to the fact that things are not what they were. I don’t know, politically, what nature writing can do. If it can just make a few people love things more, or maybe feel that they have a stake in this, then that’s good. I don’t like the the sense that nature writing is always memorializing stuff that’s gone. That makes me sad. But it’s inevitable, right? That elegiac tone is kind of inevitable, that elegiac tone is kind of just threading through everything we’re writing about. 

MARK: Especially in the Anthropocene—whether you like the word or not—maybe it’s the responsibility of the nature writer to help guide people through landscapes that are going to shift dramatically. I mean, those English countrysides could start to look a lot different.

MACDONALD: Already they are. When I was a kid—and this is just an anecdote—we didn’t have any little egrets in Britain, and I’m pretty much sure that climate change is one of the factors behind their massive spread northwards in Europe. And now when I go to coastal wetlands or inland marshes, they’re dotted with these white birds. I still think, “My god, I’m in Spain.” They still seem alien and strange to me. And of course to younger birders, they’re a completely familiar part of everyday scenes in British life. That’s just fascinating to me. That sense of how we tie our ideas of nationhood and place through the creatures that are there.

MARK: Yet your niece is not totally incorrect, if you think about rewilding. 

MACDONALD: Oh my god, such a hot topic now. It’s like Zoolander—"so hot right now." Putting stuff back. In England, we’ve reintroduced a lot of raptors. The red kites are really interesting. We had red kites in England in Shakespearean times, and they were everywhere—a bit like black kites in India, they were ubiquitous birds. There’s a great line in one of Shakespeare’s plays: “When the kite builds, look to lesser linen,” because they used to steal underwear off washing lines to line their nests with. And in the 20th century, there were only a few pairs left, in Wales. They’d been shot out everywhere else, and they were doing really badly in Wales. There was very little food for them, but they were a great kind of tourist draw. When there was a plan to reintroduce them to England, there was kind of a bit of outcry in Wales about it. They were like, “No, these are the birds of Glendower. These are Welsh birds.” And English naturalists came back and said, “These are the birds of Shakespeare!” I mean, there’s this stuff about nationhood tied up in these birds. So they release these birds, and they’ve done terribly well in England. They’re everywhere now—you can see them when you're driving down the M4. You can see 30 or 40 of them in the sky at once. It’s amazing. 

But these success stories often involve raptors and the sort of big, charismatic megafauna. The joy at their return often masks this insidious disappearance of many other birds. House sparrows are disappearing in England, and we have a terrible decline in farmland birds. There’s not enough insects for them, due to neonicotinoids. There’s the kinds of ways agriculture is working in England now—nests get destroyed with silage cropping and various kinds of ways winter wheat is planted and harvested. So yeah, we’ve got these great big birds that make everything look good, but actually things are pretty grim. So rewilding in that particular sense is interesting.

A perfect spot to talk about nature writing: Redwood Creek, just outside Muir Woods National Monument. | Photo by Jason Mark

MARK: Rewilding is a hopeful engagement.

MACDONALD: Yeah, I love the sense of, “Let’s bring lynx back to England.” And all the landowners are like, “What? We’ve got sheep!” But it’s not like the wolf situation here, which is really fascinating, and I’d love to really get to know more about that. It seems such an extraordinary, painful, and hopeful and depressing thing all at once, right?

MARK: That’s about right, yep.

MACDONALD: But I love that book [Feral] by George Monbiot. It’s a really hopeful book. And it’s really pissed off a lot farmers, understandably. We think these landscapes of sheep and open fen are natural. It’s like grouse moors, kind of invented ecosystems that just are made for burning heather. You know, they’re 19th-century ideas of what the wild is. There’s a kind of sudden sense that we should have forested uplands—that’s what they should be like.

MARK: I think Monbiot does a good job in that book of communicating how the kind of idealized English, or British, landscape—it’s a sheep landscape, right? It didn’t spring out of the head of Zeus. It was firmly human shaped.

MACDONALD: Absolutely. Obviously, the great difference between here and England is that sort of sense that … we really love that you’ve got these “wild” places and we don’t.

MARK: Though recent discoveries in archaeology and paleobiology would show that, no, indigenous societies were shaping the landscapes in often profound ways, through fire or whatnot.

MACDONALD: And just that horrible realization that happens when you do even a little bit of reading about what’s going on, and you realize that these empty landscapes have this history, generally of massive human dispossession, and erasure, and that’s always something to think about.

MARK: That’s the other difference between, say, a 19th-century nature writer and a 21st-century nature writer: You have to do natural history; you can’t just do Nature, capital N. You have to situate the whole thing.

MACDONALD: I really wanted to be a biologist when I was a kid, actually, and my math is so terrible that I knew that was never going to happen. Part of me wishes ... I would’ve been a great 19th-century natural historian. If I’d been born a wealthy landowner or something, that’s what I would’ve done. I’d have been off collecting specimens in Siberia. But that’s not how it is anymore.

MARK: The age of [Alexander von] Humboldt has come and gone.

MACDONALD: The age of Humboldt is over. Thank goodness, actually. That imperial quest is over, and I’m kind of glad about that, very glad about that.

MARK: Sure. Going back to something we talked about on the trail: You're a scholar, you’re head-down, you're writing poetry. You put out a book of poems, Shaler’s Fish. It goes into the poetry world. And then you write something that becomes a big hit. I just wondered if you could talk a little about what that’s been like.

MACDONALD: It’s been deeply strange and bewildering, and lovely. I wrote this book because there was a story, and I just wanted to get it on paper, on screen. I just felt like it needed to be told. That sounds kind of hackneyed, but it’s how it was. As the year went on with the hawk, I realized that the story that was going on was a story that was almost being told through me—it wasn’t just my story. It was a story about withdrawal, about being a hermit and escaping into nature and going kind of crazy, and then coming back—which is an old story, right? It’s the old explorer’s story, only it was a kind of internal story, I guess. And now here I am in California talking about "internal journeys.”

MARK: An essay is an internal journey.

MACDONALD: Yeah, but I didn’t think anyone would read it. I knew it was a weird book, particularly in terms of genre. It was nature writing and it was a literary biography of T.H. White, this extraordinary writer, and a memoir, and a grief memoir as well. I wanted to do some stuff with that book that.… When I was writing it, I just made some decisions that had very much to do with the nature writing tradition. As we all know, the traditional nature writer has been a white guy going out into the wild, coming back, and telling you all about it. I love those books. They have this slight whiff of that tone that goes, “Aren’t you lucky to have me explain all this to you?” And I love those books. I grew up with them. They make me very happy. But I think the days are over for that kind of narrative. And because I’d suffered this big grief—I’d lost my dad, who was a great naturalist as well as a real airplane enthusiast—I started to see that what grief does is shatter narratives. It shatters the stories you tell about the world and about yourself, and I sort of thought, “I want more than one voice in this book.” I want it to be more than one narrative. 

If you open the book, there’s a chapter that kind of starts straightforward nature writing-ish. Then there’s a chapter that’s literary biography. And then there’s a chapter that’s grief memoir. And as the book goes on, I wanted all those genres to start crashing into one another, splintering and getting confused, and that was a definite decision I made in terms of form of the book. The T.H. White stuff is in there because—well, lots of reasons, but one of the reasons.… The book is about trying to see through other eyes, and one of those is the eye of the hawk, and the other eye is that of White. In many ways, it was harder to get inside his head. 

He comes from a very different time. When I was going through his notebooks and journals, I kept finding these sections in his diaries that had been written in pencil, unlike everywhere else, and they were carefully erased, really carefully rubbed out and crossed out. I thought, “Wow, this must be something really horrible, really appalling, some terrible revelation.” So I photographed them, and I played with them on the computer to try and see what they were, and I discovered they were simply confessions that he had masturbated. He was so ashamed, and I just thought, my god … the revelation of how different the world was even in the 1930s, and that was just really poignant. It’s not just trying to see through the hawk’s eyes, but seeing through the eyes of a man who grew up in a world that is really lost to us now, I think. I’m glad it’s lost. It was a very dark time, especially if you were gay.

MARK: Yeah, especially if you were closeted. I personally didn’t find Hawk that difficult, or the genre to be difficult. I will say, I’m a light poetry enthusiast; I can barely remember if Manley Hopkins’s name is Gerald or Gerard. But with Shaler’s Fish, I think the poems are difficult.

MACDONALD: Oh, they are difficult. Absolutely. It’s kind of interesting reading those poems again. I wrote them a very long time ago. I was an undergraduate literature student. I was really into it. I met this group of poets in Cambridge who were popularly known as “The Cambridge School.” They were very unlike the kinds of poets who had mainstream success in Britain at the time—this was back in the early '90s. So they weren’t like Larkin or Hughes. They really took their lead from the Black Mountain School, Charles Olson, people like that. They were very serious, and they were very difficult, and they played a lot of tricks with language.

MARK: You play a lot of tricks with language in your poems. 

MACDONALD: Yeah, and what I think I was doing with those poems was I love to play with the great cadences of English romantic poetry, those kinds of Jamesian lines, and then cram them full of technical vocabulary—stuff that really isn’t supposed to be in poetry. But the concerns of those poems are pretty much the concerns of those of the Hawk book. They’re about flight. They’re about transcendence. They’re about carving nature at the joints, how we label the world and what we make of it. I always thought with those poems that difficulty doesn’t have to be an aggressive act to the reader. I always think of people who do those cryptic crosswords. People love tussling with those, and I always think reading a difficult poem is a bit like that. You sort of tug hold one part of it and think, What does that mean? Where does it go? What happens next? So that’s how I see difficulty. It’s weird reading them now. In some respects, I’m a little bit ambivalent; it’s a bit like reading your teenage diaries. It was a long time ago that I wrote them, but I’m proud of them.

MARK: You said that grief shatters narrative. That could be true of nature writing in the 21st century. Perhaps the grief of these things that we’re losing—species, biodiversity, the landscapes we’ve grown accustomed to loving—I mean that’s part of what the nature writer needs to do today.

MACDONALD: Yeah, Hawk is a book about loss. But it’s not just a book about humanity, about losing my dad. It’s a book about all this stuff, losing all the world around us. It’s a book about that. Looking at the natural world now, all those old stories about how we’re supposed to relate to it are up in the air right now.

MARK: There’s a line that I appreciated from your poem “Dale”: “The huge inklings of wonderment.” The kind pairing there between inklings and wonderment, that’s kind of what we’re hoping for. The four people who passed us on the trail—hopefully they would have a huge inkling of wonderment.

MACDONALD: Yeah, and they gave us kind of a side-eye as they went by, too. I think we’ve ruined the experience for them, sitting here, chatting away on a boulder. We’re not supposed to be here. I think, wonderment … “joy” is what Wordsworth would’ve called it. There’s a poet called R.F. Langley, and I think he’s one of the greatest nature poets ever. He’s passed away now, alas, but his stuff’s incredible. There was an interview once where he talked about that fantastic moment from one of Iris Murdoch’s books, which talks about watching a kestrel, hovering over a window, and she talks about that you can be caught up in your own concerns and your own grief, and you’re worrying about everything and you look out the window.… What’s the line? “Suddenly the world is all kestrel.” I think it’s that transporting wonder that has primacy in how we relate to nature as a whole. It sounds really cliché, but it takes us out of ourselves, right? That’s a good thing, for that to happen to us all.

MARK: We’ve got an editor at Sierra—he actually passed away recently—and he didn’t like that I had introduced the word “wonder” into one of his stories. He thought it was hackneyed. I said, "Well, what other word are you going to use?” You’ve got to use something. That’s the challenge.

MACDONALD: And that’s the perfect word for that experience. As I say, the other one that I use is “joy”—that’s even harder to use without sounding like you’re writing a children’s book. But the problem with these big, oceanic emotions and experiences is that language always fails in the face of them, always. So “wonder” works.

MARK: Which gets back to the impossibility of not projecting ourselves onto wild nature—even if the tree is the tree and the bird is the bird and the waterfall is the waterfall. I couldn’t help but notice in an interview, you said your favorite poem is the Coleridge poem “Frosted Midnight,” and there’s a line in there … 

MACDONALD: It makes me cry every time.

MARK: “The echo in the mirror seeking itself.” That seems to me the encapsulation of your nature columns.

MACDONALD: Absolutely, absolutely. I only ever want to talk about that unconscious need to project in order to say, "Of course we do this. We just have to understand that we do it." That’s all I’m trying to say. I guess, too, that has other political ramifications. I don’t know about other people who visit these parks. I don’t know what kind of demographic is here. Who comes to the parks? Is it a diverse community that comes here? 

MARK: Well, this park is kind of different because it’s what I’d call the “nearby nature.” We got here in 40 minutes, so this park might be different. If you’re talking about the big, open, remote, desolate wilderness areas, it’s going to skew white. It’s going to skew affluent. And unfortunately—those other two are both unfortunate, of course—it’s also going to skew older. To my mind, the biggest single political challenge to the American conservation movement is making sure that it reflects the diversity of this country.

MACDONALD: It’s the same in England. I read an extraordinary piece many years ago that made me actually very emotional. I can’t remember the details, I’m afraid, it was so long ago, but basically it involved some people who started to take older women from inner cities in Midlands, the north of England—places like Birmingham—and take them out into the English countryside for the first time. These were women who’d come from India when they were young, and most of them didn’t speak English, and they’d lived their entire lives in the cities in England that they’d come to. There was this one lady who had never seen anything other than the city, and she saw England’s rolling hills, and she turned to the driver and said, “I didn’t know you had an India here.” 

If anything gives me hope, it’s that sense that home can be anywhere. Another story I love is the one about when the British Council took Stanley Spencer, the painter, and a bunch of other artists to the Chinese premier—I think in the '50s—and they were all very worried because Spencer was quite a hell raiser, and they were quite worried what he would say to him. He sat down, and he knew that the premier had grown up in a village, and he said to the premier, “Let me tell you about my village.” And they had this conversation about chickens and what it’s like to grow up in a village. So I think that sense that anchoring yourself to place, it doesn’t necessarily have to be politically exclusive, it can work in quite generous ways. One of the things that agrieves me greatly about Britain is the same thing: Nature appreciation tends to be very white, very middle class—not exclusively, but in large part—and we just need more voices in nature writing. We need more women. We need more people of color. We need it.