The relationship between naming, knowing and nature has long interested Macfarlane.
It’s a book to thrill the lover of words, rich with the influences of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dorothy Wordsworth and the metaphorical nature of Old English kennings – the adder has sine-wave swerves, ivy scales are like sky-wire, the kingfisher is colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river’s quiver.
To wish for the restoration of this ‘positive connection’ is not to lament a “lost golden age”, says Macfarlane, or to favour nature to the exclusion of technology, “rather it is to engage with much broader inequalities within society, and to seek to increase both what is good for nature and what is good for children.”Ī report by the National Trust on Natural Childhood in 2012 set out compelling evidence that a decline in childhood wellbeing and mental health and an increase in obesity rates are just some of the costs of a generational decline in having freedom outdoors. A National Trust survey, for instance, showed that half of children couldn’t tell the difference between a wasp and a bee, yet almost all could name a Dalek and a three-year RSPB research project found only one in five children in Britain are ‘positively connected to nature’. “Online culture has boomed, screen time has soared and the ‘roaming range’ within which children can play and stray unsupervised has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years amid parental fears about traffic, ‘stranger danger’ and the pressure of school work.”Īfter Macfarlane read the ‘Pokémon paper’ (a study published in Science in 2002 by Professor Andrew Balmford from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology), he started to gather other evidence of a loss of ‘nature-literacy’.
“What we might call the ‘nature of childhood’ has changed dramatically in Britain over recent decades,” says Macfarlane, a Reader in Environmental Humanities in Cambridge University's Faculty of English.
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