How Robert Macfarlane is opening our eyes to the natural world and advocating for its protection, one word at a time. By JANA BEER.
I first stumbled across Robert Macfarlane’s treasure trove of words, Landmarks, while writing stories for the Department of Conservation. My love of nature and language was hungry to name what I saw, and its glossaries of words to describe nature floored me with their animacy.
Words like blinter – a northern Scots word meaning ‘a cold dazzle’ – tremble within its pages. The Devon term ammil delicately describes the sparkle of morning sunlight through frost.
Macfarlane unearthed these words from old languages and dialects of Britain and Ireland that had fallen into disuse. Intensely descriptive, they made me wonder about the meaning of the kupu (words) for nature in te reo Māori; a language that survived active suppression. They are just as poetic, vivid and relational.
Take our rare native gecko, hura te ao. The translation has two meanings: to reveal, and the break of dawn. The gecko has a yellow mouth, black eyes and a dark green body with galaxy-like patterning, reminiscent of how light appears in the darkness at dawn. It also suggests this lizard may choose to reveal itself to us.
Who is the writer, Robert Macfarlane?
Robert Macfarlane is an award-winning British writer who explores the interweaving relationships of landscape, nature, people and language. He also writes film documentaries and music, and since 2002, has taught literature at the University of Cambridge. In 2025, two of his books adapted for film will be released: Underland and Lost for Words.
In interviews, Macfarlane appears the quintessential mild-mannered Englishman. He is unassuming and polite, generous in his answers and of others he admires, and speaks as beautifully as he writes.
It is, therefore, difficult to picture him heaving his body out of a crevasse in Underland: A Deep Time Journey, or thundering down rapids in Is a River Alive?
He laughs, ‘I did it, so you don’t have to.’
Why re-wilding language is important
In 2007, as Macfarlane wended through a tawny Scottish landscape to research Hebridean words for Landmarks, an observant person noticed that the Oxford Junior Dictionary had culled almost 50 words related to nature. Gone were acorn, bluebell and kingfisher. Their replacements? Celebrity, broadband and chatroom.
To Macfarlane, the erasure felt alarmingly accepting of the idea that all children lived in urban environments and had no need for words beyond the edge of their computer screen.
‘We do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we cannot name,’ he would later write in the Guardian. This conviction galvanised his mission to re-wild language and help us see nature, place, weather and ‘creaturely-life’ anew.
What can re-wilding language do?
Macfarlane believes increasing our vocabulary for nature has the potential to enrich our lives, stimulate our imaginations and deepen our relationship with the natural world. He hopes it might even ‘irrigate the dry meta-languages of modern policy-making’.
After reading Landmarks, hundreds of people emailed Macfarlane to share how knowing the word sharpened their eyes to seeing the phenomena in the landscape, such as the Sussex word smeuse: ‘the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal’.
The words in Landmarks also inspired music. This atmospheric piece by Benoit Pioulard describes rionnach maoim, a Scots Gaelic term meaning ‘the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day’.
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Re-wilding language is political, too. ‘Landscapes that are generically apprehended and generically described are more vulnerable to misuse,’ Macfarlane explains. He cites the example of a wind farm application for a protected moor on the Isle of Lewis in 2004.
The engineering company based its argument on the description of Barvas Moor as a featureless wasteland. Opponents galvanised to counter this characterisation. Among their efforts was the Lewis Moorland Glossary, featuring 150 words to describe moors, canvassed from just three townships. In 2008, the Scottish Government rejected the wind farm application.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, a similar fight is playing out to protect the Denniston Plateau from further mining. Described as ‘scrublands and leftovers’ by a Cabinet Minister, the 40-million-year-old alpine sandstone plateau is a mosaic of tussock, wetlands, tarns and boulder fields of acidic rock. It is home to one of the world’s smallest conifers, giant carnivorous snails and insect-eating plants. It is also conservation land.
Writing for nature
Critics of Macfarlane complain that his writing is too tame, romanticised for a metropolitan audience, and more focused on literature than the crisis faced by nature. Others argue he is doing something just as powerful for nature through prose.
To readers, he gives the gift of noticing, to wonder who made that gap in the hedge, to delight in naming the dazzle of stars on a winter’s night, or to find meaning in sighting an elusive lizard.
For those of us working to protect the Denniston Plateau from mining, his writing becomes a subtle form of protest. It sharpens our awareness of the language we use to convey the richness of this land to fellow New Zealanders. It prompts us to ask: what kupu did tangata whenua give this ancient place before it was named after Robert Denniston, the first mine manager of the Westport Coal Company?
At a time when our biodiversity is in crisis and our landscapes are diminishing, every word we reclaim to re-wild our language is an act of reconnection and a seed of hope.
About the Author
Jana Beer is an artist and writer, covering a wide range of topics from the natural world to interior design and creative practices. A career highlight is publishing fifty stories about the people, places and species that make the Hauraki Gulf special during lockdown for the Department of Conservation. Jana lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland with her husband, two kids and their new pup, Moss.
