A Naturalist’s Leviathan

Memory is a funny thing. For instance, I can’t recall what I had for lunch two days ago, or the last time I saw anyone, say, unironically rocking a Members Only jacket. And yet there I was, not very far into British naturalist Jeremy Mynott’s superb new book, The Story of Nature published by Yale University Press, when an essay I read in The New Yorker years ago popped unbidden into my head. 

“What Moby-Dick Means to Me,” written by Mynott’s compatriot, Philip Hoare, when Hoare was artist-in-residence at Plymouth University’s Marine Institute (UK), was compelling for several reasons, not least Hoare’s vivid description of swimming with sperm whales (lucky bastard) “in the deep waters of the Azores.” 

In the silence of their world, listening to the rhythm of their sonar clicks, feeling the scale of their social cohesion…I’m reminded of a salutary notion: that the whales that inspired Melville were around long before us, and may, with luck, outlive us, too.

Most memorable of all, though, was Hoare’s blunt contention that Moby-Dick is not, in fact, a novel. “It’s barely a book,” he argued; instead, it’s “an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” That take on Melville’s weird, cabalistic creation as a union of human and natural history could serve as a succinct characterization of The Story of Nature.

Admittedly, it might at first appear that Mynott’s reach has exceeded his grasp. Setting out to tell “the story of nature,” after all, seems cocky in the extreme. To his credit, Mynott — the author of Birds of the Ancient World and, with naturalists Peter Marren and Michael McCarthy, The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus — explains how the book’s title and subtitle, “A Human History,” draw a boundary, of sorts, around what would otherwise be an impossibly unwieldy narrative. 

What is ‘nature’? Has it always meant the same thing? Are we a part of it?…This is a huge subject, of course, and it would be impossible to write a comprehensive and systematic account of it in a book of this length — or indeed any length. But…stories offer a different way of finding routes through such a vast, varied and difficult terrain and my story is only one among many possible ways of tackling this theme.

Mynott concedes “one other limitation,” too: namely, the book “is mainly…about the western world,” of which the author is inescapably a part. That he frequently cites examples from other traditions “to remind us that the concepts and frameworks of reference of other times and places do not always map straightforwardly onto our own” only augments The Story of Nature’s strengths.

“The book pivots,” writes Mynott, “around the central question of whether we are ourselves a part of nature; and if so, in what ways and with what consequences.” 

A monumental task, for sure. And yet The Story of Nature — a worthy addition to our current Golden Age of popular-science writing — triumphs despite its sprawling shape and utterly unclassifiable character. Again, like Moby-Dick, it is a book of natural history that examines the multitude of clashing worlds that live inside us all.

In Mynott’s telling, the story of nature through the eyes of humans (or other, now-extinct early humans, like Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons or Denisovans) begins in a vast period between 30,000-50,000 years ago, with cave paintings and rockface etchings in northern Spain, Siberia’s Altai Mountains, Botswana, and scores of other places around the globe. The rightness of this starting point is two-fold. First, the handiwork of these ancient humans — especially its heart-stopping beauty — borders on the supernatural. Mynott knows that thousands of years after it was created, cave art in places like Lascaux, Namibia, or Sulawesi (Indonesia) speaks to modern humans in a way that is elemental and mysterious. And who doesn’t like a good mystery?

Second, Mynott makes a compelling case that the very first rift in humanity’s conception of itself as intrinsically part of nature — indeed, the conception of humans as nature — might have begun here, in the dark, by torchlight, through the distancing mechanism of applying charcoal and ochre to rough, limestone walls and ceilings. 

What the best of [these cave paintings] demonstrate…is the intimacy and familiarity their creators had with their subjects, and their tactile, physical engagement with their world…They weren’t just expert ‘naturalists’, though. It was a far more fundamental affinity than that. Their lives and livelihoods depended on this knowledge.

It was in this same period, too, that “the acquisition of weapons as external implements…had perhaps been the first thing in evolutionary terms literally to put a distance between” animals and people, what Mynott calls “an early step in [humanity’s] separation from nature and the wild.” Ultimately, Mynott touches on one more potential culprit in our separation from the wild: “in particular, the evolution of a complex language through which to describe and discriminate between different natural features and species and think of them as distinct objects.”

Like any good naturalist, the author approaches the book’s “central question of whether we are ourselves a part of nature” from every possible angle, across 10 themed chapters with titles like “Taming Nature,” “Rationalists and Romantics,” “Conservation” (a hard look at the fraught history of environmental groups, especially those in North America and the U.K.), and “Future Nature” — the last an unsettling discourse on climate change’s role in, among other cataclysms, “a new wave of extinctions, on a scale and at a pace to count as a new epoch.”

Like any good storyteller, Mynott knows when to lighten the mood — a welcome gift in a work that dives deep into grim phenomena

Even as Mynott explores whether we have, in fact, lost (or willfully surrendered) our intrinsic place in the natural world, he refrains from categorical pronouncements. Terms such as might, may, and especially perhaps appear so frequently in the book that for a while, before the reader grows accustomed to them, they stand out like verbal tics.

Instead of edicts, the story’s 300-plus pages — along with 25 pages of endnotes, which are fascinating in their own right — largely feature portraits of, and observations by, legends of science (Linnaeus, Darwin, Lamarck), writers and artists (Vermeer, Coleridge, Thomas Cole, Picasso, Tracey Emin), and those who don’t fit easily into any category (Voltaire, Nietzsche, the self-educated, 19th-century British fossil hunter Mary Anning, Rachel Carson, and others). 

Mynott’s inclusion of voices from across the centuries, from every imaginable discipline, lends his book a refreshing intellectual pluralism. For example, he quotes the critic and painter John Berger to help place the reader, convincingly and immediately, alongside people who are at once very much like us, and wholly unknowable:

The nomads [Berger writes of those who created cave paintings in southeastern France some 30,000 years ago] were acutely aware of being a minority overwhelmingly outnumbered by animals. They had been born, not on a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped. Beyond every horizon there were more animals. [Emphasis mine]

Berger and the rest, the well-known and the obscure, serve as guides, leading us back again and again to the riddle at the heart of it all: If we’re not part of nature, why aren’t we? 

That there are no easy answers to the questions Mynott poses might be a problem if the author were a lesser writer. Happily, he’s skillful enough, and comfortable enough with nuance and ambiguity, that the reader is left more curious at the end of each chapter than when the chapter began. And like any good storyteller, Mynott knows when to lighten the mood — a welcome gift in a work that dives deep into grim phenomena like climate-driven human migration, plummeting biodiversity, and the one constant in the past several hundred generations: human folly. 

In other words, the author doesn’t let his vast erudition, evident on every page, get in the way of a good joke. When discussing the Medieval world’s approach to nature, for example, Mynott outlines how fantastical creatures routinely figured in the era’s artwork, poetry, and Christian iconography.

Fabulous beasts offered some advantages for symbolic purposes over more familiar ones…Occasionally, however, an actual encounter could undermine a stereotype, as when Marco Polo thought he had discovered in Java not just one unicorn but “great numbers and hardly smaller than elephants in size.” Ah, the Javan rhino, Rhinoceros sondaicus! And the creatures further disappointed him by wallowing in mud, not at all the sort of behavior that would have encouraged a virgin to fondle one in her lap.

***

It’s probably churlish, when discussing a book that covers so much ground, to point out where the author stumbles. And yet a reader could be forgiven for wishing for broader discussions of, say, the ways that humans have confronted, or trembled before, nature’s more terrifying aspects. Mynott spends a good amount of time discussing nature poetry — specifically the Romantics and, to a lesser degree, Victorians — but where is Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”? Where is Beowulf’s bloodthirsty, marsh-dwelling foe, the “shadow walker” Grendel? Where is the granddaddy of “Nature is out to get us!” poems, Lord Byron’s “Darkness”, with its terrifying scenes of famine, cannibalism, blackened forests, dead seas, and worse?

Maybe that’s a bit like asking for more gunplay in a Merchant-Ivory film. And yes, it’s not really the naturalist’s job to examine every conceivable human response to the natural world. That said, it’s also true that nature is violent and beautiful, indifferent and restorative, and it is only human in the face of such power to experience awe, in all its manifestations. The Story of Nature, as comprehensive and (let’s just say it) wise as it is, might have profited from a bit more old-school amazement and dread.

Such quibbles aside, Mynott has produced a book unlike any other that we’re apt to see published this year, or next year, or the next: a work of natural history that, like torchlight in a newly discovered cave, illuminates wonders, perils, and pathways — both forward and back — that we didn’t even know were there.