Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Lauren Laverne
Prize-winning nature writer and teacher, best known for books including The Lost Words and Underland, exploring landscape, language, and the hidden world.
Eight records
I guess I am a bit of a Nature Boy, but I also think it's just utterly gorgeous, that voice of his, that famous voice of his. And lyrically, I think it's one of the most perfect songs I know. It's about this sad boy who travels melancholy and bittersweet very far, very far. But he learns one thing. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. And that seems to me an unforgettable truth.
Ghost of O'DonoghueFavourite
It's my walking song. I know Johnny now. I write music with him now. But I knew this song long before I knew Johnny. And I don't think I could ever out-listen it, really. I know every note of every song of Johnny's music, I think, but this is the one. And it's the one I've set my pace to in the mountains on the long paths. And Johnny's voice is just it's like this kind of weathered rock, really. It's wise before its time.
John Phillips and Michelle Phillips
This track always reminds me of my dad getting over the border into Scotland, having driven up from Nottingham where we were living on the way to the Cairngorms. And we'd get to the shores of Loch Lomond, and we'd have been going for five or six or seven hours. And he would pull the car over and leap out of the car and strip down to his pants or his swimming costume and leap into Loch Lomond and just sluice off the journey and be joyful at being back in Scotland.
John Linnell and John Flansburgh
This is for my partner, Juliet. We've been married nearly 21 years and we met at university. And she's my rock. She's my anchor. She's my inspiration. ... she's this one's for her because it was the song I was listening to when I was trying to work out how to make her date me. Yeah, I wanted to be, as the lyrics say, the only bee in her bonnet and for her to make a little birdhouse in her soul for me.
It arises from this. It's not the wild wood of the lost words, but it's the birds that flew from the topmost branches of the wild wood. It's a song called The Blessing that was written by some extraordinary musicians that Jackie and I came to work with, and they produced a set of spell songs, and they were very free adaptations often. And The Blessing is the last of those. It takes its inspiration from the Gallic naming or a psalmic tradition of praise songs.
This is for my students really. This is just to thank them for introducing me to new ideas, new texts and new music. And it's I wouldn't have come across this without my students. It's called Four Ethers. It's by Serpent with Feet. It's lush, it's Baroque, it's deeply strange. And I have no idea what the Four Ethers are, but I love this song.
This is for my children, and it's for my friend Roger, Roger Deacon, who died in 2006, far too young, of a brain tumour. And he and my children, in that decade, the 2000s, they changed the way I see the world. They pulled the scale back. ... Roger and my children just helped me see what was right to hand, right in front of my nose.
Quatuor pour la fin du temps: III. Abîme des oiseaux
Messien was in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag, and he managed to get paper and pencil off a guard. And he wrote this extraordinary piece of music, a multi-movement piece of music for him and his fellow prisoner musicians, one of whom was a clarinetist. And it was premiered in 1941 in the camp. 400 fellow prisoners and camp guards were there. And I get a tingle just thinking of that performance.
The keepsakes
The book
Gerard Manley Hopkins
they are springful of life and eye sharpening vision and detail.
The luxury
Particularly when climbing, they are my go to pick me up, and the capsaicin rush on the top of a cold mountain, or indeed in the depths of a blue sea level, I love.
In conversation
Presenter asks
When you began working on Mountains of the Mind, what was it exactly that you wanted to explore?
Mountains just seized me. They were where I wanted to be. For a year or two, they were where I thought I would die. And that was stupid of me. But that was the force with which they had my heart and my mind. And that became a puzzle to me a little bit later in my early twenties. I suddenly thought, gosh, what is this strange dance that I'm doing? This absurd, odd compulsion that I'm subject to. And I realized that I wanted to understand that, even as I was stepping away from it, and that to understand that, I needed to go hundreds of years back in history, because that is where the forces began that now draw so many of us up to the summit.
Presenter asks
Do you need a devil may care streak [to climb mountains] and has that always been present in you?
I never think of myself as a devil may care, but perhaps as a climber at times I have been. There is a selfishness in extreme climbing, and there's a selfishness in that summit selfie, as it were, that draws people at risk of their lives to the summit of Everest every year to get that ultimate summit selfie. So there is a selfishness and a solipsism to it, but there's also a self-abolition. I mean, mountains, they melt us because they exist, they live in deep time in ways that absolutely dissolve human units of being.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the author and teacher Robert MacFarlane. One of Britain's foremost writers on nature, his books, including The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks, have won many prizes and taken root in the bestseller lists. They're also shaping the way readers of all ages feel about the world around us. His children's book, The Lost Words, with illustrations by Jackie Morris, became a phenomenon, highlighting the language that was disappearing from British childhoods: words like bluebell and conquer. His most recent work, Underland, is an epic subterranean history of everything from the catacombs of Paris to an English forest's 400-million-year-old network of fungi. Though his love of the natural world began at a considerably higher altitude, he grew up in a family of mountaineers and spent holidays exploring the Cairngorms, nurturing a fascination which inspired his breakthrough debut, Mountains of the Mind. He says, My heart is made of mountains and always will be. They were my first love and they will be the last. Robert MacFarlane, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Robert Macfarlane
Hello, Lauren.
Presenter
So you started with your head in the clouds then, Robert. When you began working on Mountains of the Mind, what was it exactly that you wanted to explore?
Robert Macfarlane
Space
Robert Macfarlane
Mountains just seized me. They were where I wanted to be. For a year or two, they were where I thought I would die. And that was stupid of me. But that was the force with which they had my heart and my mind. And that became a puzzle to me a little bit later in my early twenties. I suddenly thought, gosh, what is this strange dance that I'm doing? This absurd, odd compulsion that I'm subject to. And I realized that I wanted to understand that, even as I was stepping away from it, and that to understand that, I needed to go hundreds of years back in history, because that is where the forces began that now draw so many of us up to the summit.
Presenter
You've said about people who heed that call, that the people who travel to the tops of mountains are half in love with themselves and half in love with oblivion, which sounds.
Robert Macfarlane
People
Presenter
There you rock and roll. Do you need a devil may care streak and has that always been present in you?
Robert Macfarlane
I never think of myself as a devil may care, but perhaps as a climber at times I have been. There is a selfishness in extreme climbing, and there's a selfishness in that summit selfie, as it were, that draws people at risk of their lives to the summit of Everest every year to get that ultimate summit selfie. So there is a selfishness and a solipsism to it, but there's also a self-abolition. I mean, mountains, they melt us because they exist, they live in deep time in ways that absolutely dissolve human units of being. And I find that humbling and modest work that they do much more interesting nowadays than the kind of ennobling narrative.
Presenter
Robert, you're sharing your discs with us today and your writing is actually often described as having a musical quality, and you've written songs yourself, so I'm guessing that music is important to you.
Robert Macfarlane
Yes, I mean it just flows through my life. I have no musical talent as an instrumentalist, as it were. I sing enthusiastically but badly, a bit like I write poetry, really. But yes, it's crucial to me. I listen while I write, I listen in my memory while I walk and while I climb. Music's kept me company on the page and in the mountains and on the paths. So, yeah.
Presenter
All right, well let's dive in. Disc number one then, if you would.
Robert Macfarlane
It's Nat King Cole's version of Nature Boy. I guess I am a bit of a Nature Boy, but I also think it's just utterly gorgeous, that voice of his, that famous voice of his. And lyrically, I think it's one of the most perfect songs I know. It's about this sad boy who travels melancholy and bittersweet very far, very far. But he learns one thing. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. And that seems to me an unforgettable truth.
Speaker 3
This he said to me.
Speaker 3
The greatest thing
Speaker 3
You'll ever learn.
Speaker 3
Is just too love
Speaker 3
And be loved.
Speaker 3
In return.
Presenter
And the
Presenter
Nature Boy by Nat Ken Cool
Presenter
Robert McFarlane, many people have talked about finding solace in the natural world during the course of the current pandemic. Some doing so for the first time, and there's been a lot of discussion about how time in nature can be good for our mental and physical health. What's your take on that phenomenon?
Robert Macfarlane
I think it's a huge opportunity. People who, in a way, who'd never noticed the need for nature, for nearby nature, found it there for them, giving anchor points, giving orientation, perspective, consolation, tiny moments of wonder and joy. And that's thrilling. And even those who drink deep of the natural world, I think, drank deeper.
Presenter
Is there a note of caution that should go alongside these new explorations?
Robert Macfarlane
We shouldn't take for granted what we have. I mean we've lost so much. So many bird species. A quarter of our mammals in this country are on the red list. We have so many bird species that are the plummeting, the starling, the curlew, the turtle dove. We know what we need now. We've been reminded of how deeply spiritually we are made and remade and recreated and sustained and healed by the natural world. But it needs our help too.
Presenter
Robert, I know that you're not the biggest fan of the term nature writing, but there is an artistic tradition that you're part of and it's booming at the moment.
Robert Macfarlane
There's a vicarious joy, I think, in experiencing nature through language, through media. But nature writing, if we want to call it that, has been happening in this island group for well over a thousand years. Some of the most extraordinary nature writing I know is early Celtic Christian devotional monastic writing, kind of field notes, these field notes from islands and headlands, where monks had gone in search of eternity and divinity and found them in birdsong and wave and shoreline. They're utterly beautiful, they ring so clearly across 1400 years.
Presenter
Robert, it's time for your next piece of music today. A second disc? What is it and why are you taking it with you to the island?
Robert Macfarlane
It's called Ghost of O'Donoghue by a singer-songwriter called Johnny Flynn.
Robert Macfarlane
It's my walking song. I know Johnny now. I write music with him now. But I knew this song long before I knew Johnny. And I don't think I could ever out-listen it, really. I know every note of every song of Johnny's music, I think, but this is the one. And it's the one I've set my pace to in the mountains on the long paths. And Johnny's voice is just it's like this kind of weathered rock, really. It's wise before its time.
Speaker 3
This is the calendar.
Speaker 3
These are the dates you'll know where you'll be You won't know what you'll see The roots might change So all that remains Is the pull from place to place
Speaker 3
We left our homes in the spring sunshine.
Speaker 3
Things came alive when I knew they weren't mine Falling in
Presenter
The Ghost of O'Donoghue by Johnny Flynn.
Presenter
Robert, let's go back a bit then. When preparing for our conversation today, I found a lovely photo of you as a toddler with white blonde hair peeking out of a baby carrier on your dad's shoulders, both of you looking quite windswept, I have to say. You were born then into a mountain loving family. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Robert Macfarlane
A little bit more about it.
Robert Macfarlane
Yes, I know that photo. I was taking what we call the dad of the elevator up, tucked in a little orange rucksack. And I do the same to my children now, to my littlest. I get on the dad of Vator. So my grandparents on my mother's side lived up in the Cairngorm, so we would often go there. That was the mountain range, I suppose, where I learned to map, read, and to walk and to be in winter, ski a little bit. And my parents, they've been amazing to me. All my family's medical, really. My father's a professor of chess medicine, now retired. My brother's a chess medicine specialist consultant up in the northeast. My mum worked in diabetic foot clinic and I was all about words and didn't really know what to do. But they never blinked. They just encouraged me and enabled me. Mum has this astonishing sense of wonder. They're in their 70s now and she's still amazed every day by something and wants to tell me about it, mostly nature. And that's a gift. It's an energy. And my father, deeply wise man, man of huge integrity, a very strong public service ethos, which I think is partly what made me become a teacher, a feeling of wanting to give. But he loves the world as well. Yeah, swimming. He's always jumping into cold water, much colder than I can do. Mum too.
Presenter
I don't want to
Presenter
You grew up in Nottinghamshire. Was it quite a free-range childhood for you and your little brother?
Robert Macfarlane
Okay.
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah, it was. It was. We grew up at the end of a country lane. We had horses and sheep in the fields and we gather the damsons from the hedgerows to make ice cream. We go crawling around and running and it was a life filled with animals and with space. And although mum does always like to remind me that I never offered to take the dog for a walk. I have to confess that here.
Presenter
Time for disc number three. What are we going to hear?
Robert Macfarlane
What are we going to hear? Oh, California Dreaming by the Mammas and the Papas. This track always reminds me of my dad getting over the border into Scotland, having driven up from Nottingham where we were living on the way to the Cairngorms. And we'd get to the shores of Loch Lomond, and we'd have been going for five or six or seven hours. And he would pull the car over and leap out of the car and strip down to his pants or his swimming costume and leap into Loch Lomond and just sluice off the journey and be joyful at being back in Scotland.
Presenter
Yeah.
Robert Macfarlane
And then he'd get back in the car and we'd we'd carry on up to the mountains.
Speaker 3
Safely wild things they're gonna
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Speaker 3
In a saturation
Presenter
California Dreaming, The Mummers and the Papas. Robert McFarland, tell me more about yourself as a teenager. Then writers necessarily start out as readers. What were you reading back then?
Robert Macfarlane
I was reading a lot of poetry. I was reading Seamus Heaney, I was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, I was reading Ted Hughes, I was reading Dorothy Wordsworth with rather more enthusiasm than William, I must say. And I was starting to understand for people like Heaney that language in this book, Seeing Things, that came out as I was a sixth former. I flew over to Belfast actually to hear Heaney read. He was an absolute rock star to me. Heard him read at Queen's and went up and shook his hand afterwards and he you know he bent and said a few kind words to me. And I remember I didn't wash my hand for a week afterwards. He was showing me that language could jump around, it could live its own life, it could turn tumbles, it could turn to stone, it could turn to lightning and air, it could even represent light and those were magical powers clearly to a teenager and I wanted a little of those although I never thought I'd become a writer.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Presenter
You didn't? No. You did go to study English at Cambridge University, though.
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah.
Robert Macfarlane
I did, yes. And and I went on to study a lot more of English, although I now think of myself as a bit more like a geographer, really. I work in in an area we call environmental humanities as a I guess as an academic and as a teacher, so where nature and culture meet and landscape and politics, environmentalism and the anthropocene all mingle with one another.
Presenter
It's interesting hearing you talk about that intermingling of culture and nature and worldview. I wonder when that crystallized for you? Because you've of course written about how your love of the natural world has shaped your values. And I know that you said when you were young you came I came from the middle of the middle, you know, middle class, middle of the country, but mountains made me interesting. When did you realize that it worked the other way around as well? It shaped the way you saw the world.
Speaker 1
Yeah
Robert Macfarlane
I don't know when that happened, but at some point language and landscape became the two things that interested me most int intellectually. I sometimes say I write about landscape because I think of landscape as a verb, or at least a noun that hides a verb, that's scaping. It absolutely escapes and shapes and sculpts us, and it's an infinite terrain of interest. I mean, I can never run out of things to write about or delve into. I wrote a book about paths. It took five years and 400 pages, and I barely got going.
Presenter
Got to make some time for the music, Robert. What's your next track going to be? And why have you chosen it to do that?
Robert Macfarlane
And what
Robert Macfarlane
Oh, well, it's the glorious Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants. Irrepressible Spirits of Music. Brilliant lyricists. I love their lyrics. But this is one for my partner, Juliet. We've been married nearly 21 years and we met at university. And she's my rock. She's my anchor. She's my inspiration. She was when I met her. Incredible scholar of Chinese history. She has so many languages at her fingertips. She can read and write classical Chinese and modern Chinese. She's gentle, she's calm, she keeps me steady. And yeah, she's this one's for her because it was the song I was listening to when I was trying to work out how to make her date me. Yeah, I wanted to be, as the lyrics say, the only bee in her bonnet and for her to make a little birdhouse in her soul for me.
Speaker 3
Only friend, I'm not your only friend, but I'm a little glowing friend. But really, I'm not actually your friend, but I am
Speaker 3
You can hear in the outlet by the light switch, who watches over you? Make a little birdhouse in your soul, not to put too fine a pawn on it. Say I'm the only bee in your bunny.
Speaker 3
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.
Presenter
Birdhouse in your soul, they might be giants. Robert McFarlane, alongside your love of nature, which is obvious, your work is infused with your passion for the English language, formal and vernacular. There's an extensive glossary of words in your book Landmarks, for example. That includes meebles, very small white round pebbles.
Speaker 1
And there's
Speaker 3
Uh
Presenter
Uh And moogie, which is apparently Cornish for foggy. And of course, many listening parents will have have shared the lost words with their children. Why is this idea of your literacy about the natural world imp
Robert Macfarlane
important to you? Just seems like the simplest and most generous form of gift you could give a child would be naming and knowing the nearby nature. And children are naturals at nature. They they do it far better than us. They lie down in it, they eat it.
Presenter
And how do you stop them losing that interest? I think it's easy when they're kind of muddy puddles age and prepared to basically eat an insect, but what about when they're teenagers?
Robert Macfarlane
Well give them agency. They're distracted. They've got exams. They've got uh and also get them out into it. You know I would love I would love to see every primary school in this country twinned with a farm. I would love to see every primary school planting trees in the cities and the countryside around them. We've got a huge tree planting programme that's just rolling out. I hope it's going to see the right trees in the right places. But why not bind the people of the country into the trees of the country by getting them out, digging the holes, healing the saplings in? And I some of that is already happening, but we could do so much more of it. And in that way we grow together, people and place.
Presenter
I mentioned one of your most successful books there, The Lost Words, with the artist Jackie Morris. It is a very large, beautifully illustrated book with what I think you've called spells rather than poems. And they feature words which at one point were dropped from the children's dictionary, including acorn and bluebell. Tell me a little bit more about the life of that book, because it has been extraordinary.
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Robert Macfarlane
It's a bit like you accidentally drop an acorn out of your pocket and then up springs a wild wood. It's become the walls of hospitals, kind of floor to ceiling murals in patient and public areas. It's become card games, it's become stage shows, but most wonderfully it's been given by grassroots campaigns up and down the country to primary and secondary schools and to care homes and to GPs, surgeries, places where people are either gaining words as they are as young people in primary schools or losing them as they are often through dementia in care homes. And the book seems to have oddly catalyzed a means by which language can be found again, the language of everyday, very common nature, as you say, acorn, blue bug, conquer, catkin, all the way through to willow and wren by way of kingfisher and heron. And it's taken on its own life. And that as a writer, to see something you write become wild, become self-willed and go and move through the world like that is probably the greatest of thrills.
Presenter
I think we better hear your next disc.
Robert Macfarlane
It arises from this. It's not the wild wood of the lost words, but it's the birds that flew from the topmost branches of the wild wood. It's a song called The Blessing that was written by some extraordinary musicians that Jackie and I came to work with, and they produced a set of spell songs, and they were very free adaptations often. And The Blessing is the last of those. It takes its inspiration from the Gallic naming or a psalmic tradition of praise songs. And I last heard it played under the blue whale skeleton in the Hintsey Hall in the Natural History Museum just a few weeks ago. And it reduced me to floods of tears. I think a year of intense self-control leaving the body, something about fragility and beauty and nature's presence for us all. But anyway, I'll let your ears decide.
Speaker 3
Let new names take root and thrive and grow.
Speaker 3
And even as you journey on, past dying stars exploding, like the gilded one in flight.
Speaker 3
Leave your little gifts alike.
Speaker 3
And in the dead of night, my darling
Speaker 3
Find the gleaming eyes, darling.
Speaker 3
Like the little aviator, Sing your heart to all dark matter.
Presenter
The Lost Words The Blessing by The Spellsong's Musicians.
Presenter
Robert McFarlane, alongside your writing then, you have a full time job as a fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, teaching literature and environmental humanities. How have the demands of social distancing during the past year affected how you teach?
Robert Macfarlane
In one sense, awfully, so much of it has had to go online. But i in other ways, when it's been possible, it's forced wonderful improvisation. So in back in the autumn, I basically set up an outdoor teaching space under a tree, sort of slung a tarpaulin, got a couple of chairs, and I would I would see the students there and I w and then I would also walk and teach when I was seeing students one-on-one PhD students or undergraduates. And so I I remember thinking, Oh, oh, this isn't an hours teach, this will be a three-mile teach or a
Speaker 1
Then
Presenter
So I
Robert Macfarlane
Uh measuring it in distance.
Presenter
And do you think of yourself as a teacher as much as you do a writer?
Robert Macfarlane
Yes. No, I I hate dinner parties, but if I was ever to go to one and somebody asked me what I did, I'd I'd say a teacher. Um, probably put that on the passport. Ba back in the day when you had to declare your profession, quote unquote, on the passport, it would have been teacher, I think.
Presenter
The passport
Presenter
Many students around the country, of course, are a bit disgruntled with their university education and the general experience at the moment. Do you think they're getting a bit of a raw deal?
Robert Macfarlane
They've had an astonishingly hard time. My final year students, they've had the best part of two years of some of the best years of their life, turned remote and devastating. So yeah, extraordinarily hard. I do know that everyone I work with has the university, as it were, has done everything they can because we all we care for our students and we want to teach as well as we can and we miss everything that's lacking as well.
Presenter
We've got to make way for your next track. It's disc number six, Rob. What have you chosen?
Robert Macfarlane
This is for my students really. This is just to thank them for introducing me to new ideas, new texts and new music. And it's I wouldn't have come across this without my students. It's called Four Ethers. It's by Serpent with Feet. It's lush, it's Baroque, it's deeply strange. And I have no idea what the Four Ethers are, but I love this song.
Speaker 3
Baby.
Speaker 3
It's cool with me that you like to lie
Speaker 3
Cause I see the depression filling up your eyes.
Speaker 3
And I see oceans overflowing
Speaker 3
It is cool with me that you want
Presenter
Four ethers, Serpent with Feet. So, Robert McFollin, in 2019, your book Underland, A Deep Time Journey, was published to critical acclaim. It won a number of prizes. And it's a history of subterranean places through time all over the world. It's not always pretty, however. I mean, anyone who's read the frankly horrifying account of your claustrophobic experience, life in the catacombs beneath Paris, will probably never forget it. Perhaps. Was there a point where you regretted having the idea?
Robert Macfarlane
Well, as someone who loves mountaintops, it's an odd choice to make. A book is a relationship. I spend so long making sure it's right because the way I do it, it means it's something you're going to live with and in for five to ten years. So I never regretted it because I was committed to the project and I knew there was a mystery there, an immense mystery, which I was never going to fathom fully, but even fathoming kind of shallowly would involve an extraordinary journey. And the mystery is our relationship with darkness, really, and what lies beneath us, all the things we love to forget, but are drawn to nevertheless. We go into darkness to see. That's what I discovered really early on, very counterintuitively. It's not always a place of confinement and exploitation and incarceration, though it can be those things. It can also be a place of vision. Dark matter physicists go a mile under the earth in order to study the missing mass of the universe.
Presenter
It's time to take a moment for your next disc, your seventh. What have you chosen?
Robert Macfarlane
Oh, the swimming song by Loudon Wainwright. This is for my children, and it's for my friend Roger, Roger Deacon, who died in 2006, far too young, of a brain tumour. And he and my children, in that decade, the 2000s, they changed the way I see the world. They pulled the scale back. You know, I grew up as a mountaineer, it's all about the big scales and the epic deep time and long views from the top or whatever. And Roger and my children just helped me see what was right to hand, right in front of my nose. He swam through Britain. He wrote a book about the frog's eye view of our lakes and rivers and lochs and seas and so on. And yeah, he was a swimmer. And this song was the loss of Roger just was so huge at the time. I felt like a whole future had gone with him. He'd been my mentor and my friend. And we played this song at his funeral and it still stops me short. I can just about hear it without crying now. And I think of him with joy and my children with utter love.
Speaker 3
This summer I went swimming, this summer I might have drowned, but I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around.
Speaker 3
My on the brown, this summer I swam in the ocean, and I swam in a swimming pool.
Speaker 3
Salt my wounds, careen my eyes, I'm a self-destructive
Speaker 3
I'm self-destructive.
Presenter
The Swimming Song, Loudon Wainwright III. Robert McFarlane, you've been involved with various campaigns to help protect trees and in 2018 you were one of the co-editors of A People's Manifesto for Wildlife arguing for urgent and large-scale change in Britain's relationship with nature. What are we getting wrong and what would you like to see next?
Robert Macfarlane
We're getting so much wrong, but I think we're possibly slowly learning to see what we need to get right a bit faster. I'd like to see access rights in England and Wales transform to become a lot more like Scotland, which is based in Scotland on more rights and more responsibility. It's based on trust, and you get to go more or less where you want. Nowhere near schools, not into gardens, etc. You know, it's common sense, you don't damage crops and so forth. But we have so much of this country that we can't get to. I'd like to see a specialist wildlife crime unit set up to investigate the killings and persecutions of raptors in the uplands that just keeps on going. I'd like to see our cities get loads more urban canopy cover. I think it's good for people, it's good for shade, it's good for pollution. So I'd like to build that up. I'd like to see tree cover in the UK go beyond 20%, right trees in the right place. You know, all of these things, they're there and we can do them.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
And when you say about the the tree cover, where are we at now? What's the percentage of the
Robert Macfarlane
Oh, it's awful. We're a really scalp country. I mean, it differs, obviously, in different parts of the country, but I think we're on 12, 13%. Areas of Europe, natural reafforestation, which is arguably the best way for this to occur, is reforesting enormous areas really fast. I have conversations with German conservationists. They're like, our problem is how to stop the forest growing. I would love that to be our problem, but it's not. So there's a huge will for tree planting right now, but it's got to be got right.
Presenter
It's almost time to cast you away, of course. What sort of island are you hoping for? Can you picture it in your mind's eye?
Robert Macfarlane
Uh at least 20% tree cover, please.
Robert Macfarlane
Limestone probably, a lot of tree cover, and then a really beautiful blue-watered river coming down that sparkling limestone. Am I allowed that? Maybe with a volcano in the centre? I don't know. I maybe this is probably I'm asking too much.
Presenter
Volcano in the centre active?
Robert Macfarlane
Uh no, just passive.
Presenter
Okay.
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah, exactly. Just a bit of recreational underlanding.
Presenter
I see you, Robert McCloud.
Robert Macfarlane
But I didn't know I could design my art. I mean, if you'd told me that, I'd have come with drawings and geologies and natural histories, all the rest of it.
Presenter
He said that.
Presenter
Now, Rob, frankly, you have no excuse for survival skills that are anything short of excellence.
Presenter
On this inactive volcanic island of yours, what do you think the biggest challenge that you can foresee will entail?
Robert Macfarlane
I'm missing my family, but I'm assuming they'll make regular boat trips out, so i it it'll be keeping my mind moving. How will you do it? I'd give a name, in the most sort of unadamic way possible, to everything, just so I could greet it, every creature, every plant, every tree. And I'd set myself to the impossible task of of mapping that island, every detail of it, even though I know I'd never gauge its incomprehensible totality.
Presenter
I'm afraid to say that your family won't be visiting. You'll be in isolation. How will you cope without people?
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah.
Robert Macfarlane
I don't know. I'm not very good at being on my own any longer. I spent a lot of time when I was younger walking alone and and as it were going solitary into wild places to think, and it just doesn't hold any appeal for me now. So that that's going to be a challenge.
Presenter
All right, well one more track before you go. It's your eighth. What have you got?
Robert Macfarlane
What have you got for us? Well, this is the dark and the light right here. You know, we've been in shadow and shine all the way through. And it's Messier, Olivier Messien. It's the third movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. It's Abindeswazo, which means abyss of the birds. And people probably know the story of the writing of this. But Messien was in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag, and he managed to get paper and pencil off a guard. And he wrote this extraordinary piece of music, a multi-movement piece of music for him and his fellow prisoner musicians, one of whom was a clarinetist. And it was premiered in 1941 in the camp. 400 fellow prisoners and camp guards were there. And I get a tingle just thinking of that performance. But this particular, perhaps we'll reach the bit where the clarinet suddenly bursts out of the abyss as the bird. And Messien has this wonderful thing. He says, the abyss is time in all its weariness and sadness. And the birds, when they sing, they are our desire for songs of jubilation, for stars, for rainbows, and for light.
Speaker 3
Uh
Presenter
Part of the third movement from Messian's quartet for the end of time, we heard the clarinetist Claude Dissimal, ending on Hope, Robert MacFarlane.
Robert Macfarlane
Yeah, that that wonderful clarinet there, the black bird is it I think of it as just impertinent and trilling and resilient and irrepressible, leaping out of the chasm to surprise us with its song.
Presenter
So it's time to send you away to the island. Rob, you can take a few things with you. Firstly, the books. I'm giving you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take one other. What would you like?
Robert Macfarlane
I would like to take the complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the the Jesuit poet, nineteenth century poet. And when I say the complete works, I mean the the poems and his journals and letters, because hi hi they are springful of life and eye sharpening vision and detail.
Presenter
Do they exist as a book already?
Presenter
Yeah.
Robert Macfarlane
Yes, maybe. I mean, like we could maybe stick a couple of books together.
Presenter
And it's got to be a real book.
Robert Macfarlane
Uh okay, well in which case the the poems in the journal. Yep.
Presenter
You can also choose a luxury item, what would you like?
Robert Macfarlane
I would like a very heavy cropping, very spicy hot chili plant, please.
Presenter
Ah, you know, you're fond of chilies when climbing?
Robert Macfarlane
Very funny.
Robert Macfarlane
Particularly when climbing, they are my go to pick me up, and the capsaicin rush on the top of a cold mountain, or indeed in the depths of a blue sea level, I love.
Presenter
Chilis are yours. And finally, which one track above all the rest would you rush to save if you had to?
Robert Macfarlane
Ghost of O'Donoghue by Johnny Flynn. I can't fathom it. It's so beautiful, and it has these lines In the last days of my life I don't know whether I'll laugh or cry. And I know that I will laugh'cause I've I've been so lucky in the people I've known and the and the friends I've made and the places I've been.
Presenter
Robert McFarlane, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
Robert Macfarlane
Thank you.
Presenter
Hello, I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Robert MacFarlane. We've cast many writers and conservationists away over the years. They include Richard Mabey, Chris Packham and Isabella Tree. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or our Desert Island Discs website. Join me next time when my guest will be the lawyer, Nazir Afzal.
Speaker 1
Hello there, I'm Simon Armiturch. I'm just heading down the garden path, so this might be a good moment to tell you about the new series of my Radio 4 podcast, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed. This shed, actually. And the shed's been quite a lonely place this past year for fairly obvious reasons, so it's great to be able to plump up the plastic cushions, set up an extra fold-away chair, and natter about life and creativity with talented and thoughtful people. Guests include the Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda Owen, broadcaster DJ and gardener Joe Wiley, and Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr. Put your ear to one of the many knotholes in the wall by searching for The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed on BBC Sounds.
Presenter asks
What's your take on that phenomenon [of people finding solace in the natural world during the pandemic]?
I think it's a huge opportunity. People who, in a way, who'd never noticed the need for nature, for nearby nature, found it there for them, giving anchor points, giving orientation, perspective, consolation, tiny moments of wonder and joy. And that's thrilling. And even those who drink deep of the natural world, I think, drank deeper.
Presenter asks
How have the demands of social distancing during the past year affected how you teach?
In one sense, awfully, so much of it has had to go online. But i in other ways, when it's been possible, it's forced wonderful improvisation. So in back in the autumn, I basically set up an outdoor teaching space under a tree, sort of slung a tarpaulin, got a couple of chairs, and I would I would see the students there and I w and then I would also walk and teach when I was seeing students one-on-one PhD students or undergraduates.
Presenter asks
Was there a point where you regretted having the idea [for Underland]?
Well, as someone who loves mountaintops, it's an odd choice to make. A book is a relationship. I spend so long making sure it's right because the way I do it, it means it's something you're going to live with and in for five to ten years. So I never regretted it because I was committed to the project and I knew there was a mystery there, an immense mystery, which I was never going to fathom fully, but even fathoming kind of shallowly would involve an extraordinary journey.
“There is a selfishness in extreme climbing, and there's a selfishness in that summit selfie, as it were, that draws people at risk of their lives to the summit of Everest every year to get that ultimate summit selfie. So there is a selfishness and a solipsism to it, but there's also a self-abolition. I mean, mountains, they melt us because they exist, they live in deep time in ways that absolutely dissolve human units of being.”
“We've been reminded of how deeply spiritually we are made and remade and recreated and sustained and healed by the natural world. But it needs our help too.”
“I sometimes say I write about landscape because I think of landscape as a verb, or at least a noun that hides a verb, that's scaping. It absolutely escapes and shapes and sculpts us, and it's an infinite terrain of interest.”