Ben Rawlence is the author of The Treeline, Radio Congo and City of Thorns. He is founder and director of Black Mountains College, a new educational institution in Wales dedicated to climate action and adaptation.

Tom Bullough grew up on a hill farm in Radnorshire, Wales, and lives in the Brecon Beacons with his children. He is the author of four novels: A, The Claude Glass, Konstantin, and Addlands. Sarn Helen is his first work of non-fiction.

Ben Rawlence and Tom Bullough on navigating the struggles of writing and parenting during the climate and ecological emergency.

Ben Rawlence:

Greetings from Slovakia where I’m celebrating New Year with my family. Although you’ll be reading this in an email in a week or so’s time, I’m writing to you on paper since New Year for me is a time when I try and avoid screens and spend time in the mountains. My dad moved to the Czech Republic twenty-five years ago and usually we visit when it’s snowy. I’ve been walking familiar woodland paths, now deep in snow, although the snow is only ankle-deep and not knee-deep or waist-high as it has often been in the past.

My kids are learning to ski here, in the Tatras mountains, on nursery slopes fortified by artificial snow. I am concerned that they are learning a destructive and soon to be extinct sport, unsustainable in the natural world without man-made snow. In the Alps this winter, there has been almost no snow at all and the skiing industry is facing existential questions. But this is true of so many everyday practices – the dissonance between how we live or what society considers ‘normal’, and the evolving reality of our planetary habitat. Skiing is just one example among many. And I am troubled by the difficulty of communicating this to my children.

‘The snow is not like last year,’ or ‘There isn’t much snow this year’, or ‘There might never be enough snow again.’ How to manage their exploration of a world that is changing so fast? What to tell the kids is, for me, one of the hardest challenges of this new era where the world is departing from the language that we have always used to describe it. As I have put it elsewhere: the anthropologists’ gap between the signifier and the signified is widening. In more simple terms, when the kids ask, ‘When will it be spring?’ I don’t know what the answer is.

Growing up should be about exploring the world, mapping your experience, testing your perception against those of others: do you see what I see? But today that journey into knowledge is complex and fraught with disappointment. As parents, we must raise our children gently into an awareness and acceptance of the loss that is unfolding all around them. No sooner have they learned what a turtle is than they are invited to save it. Their myths and stories of animals have become disingenuous – like the whale in the book that, in reality, is not swimming happily against a backdrop of coral reefs but floating past a crime scene with a stomach full of knotted plastic.

I had an unexpected moment of solace the other day when I set some of this in context: it helped to soften the blow, both for me and for my daughters. Talking about the changes in snow, my father offered the fact that, when he was little, the freezing of the lake in Essex where he grew up was so reliable that he had his own pair of ice skates. I inherited the skates but never used them in my lifetime – the weather conditions had already started changing, and now, for my children, skating is something that can only be considered in an artificial ice rink. The longer time frame helped to show that this was a process that had begun before Grandpa was born and was bigger than all of us, and, most importantly, that we were all experiencing it together, across the generations.

It helped, too, when we visited the Prague National Museum and saw the stuffed remains of a northern white rhino. There are now only two living rhinos remaining, both females, and thus the species is almost guaranteed to go extinct sometime soon. ‘Is it our fault?’ my six-year-old asked in a tentative voice. ‘No! Not yours, or ours, directly,’ I was able to say and explained the unfolding process of habitat destruction that has been accelerating since before she or I were born.

As we both know, there is a need for new stories, new narratives about what humans are, what society should be for, how it should be arranged, how we might relate to nature and regain our place within it. The new stories are the easy stuff. What is difficult is the bridge from here to there: how to explain to the kids the problems with the hydrocarbon reality they are growing up within, while they are simultaneously learning to normalise it. Their diets, their sense of distance, their experience of material goods, clothes and holidays are all framed and shaped by hydrocarbons. Beginning to grasp this, one moment they are militant about abandoning the car, never flying and picking up rubbish. But then the next minute, they want fluffy toys that they know are made of plastics.

‘But look, it’s recycled, it’s OK!’ they whine.

Yet children continue to be the strongest source of hope. After a discussion about the communist history of Czechoslovakia and the meaning of socialism, fascism and capitalism, my nine-year-old wanted to know how the government of Wales fared in its commitment to systems of change. I explained that there were some grounds for pride.

‘I’d like Wales to have eco-laws for everything and then other countries could copy them,’ she said. ‘Or you could write a book about respecting nature and, if it was good, it would go viral and then people would ask their leaders to do more.’ Tom, you’ve just written a cracking book about how the view of the land – and history – changes as the climate changes. I hope it goes viral.

Tom Bullough:

Many thanks for writing, and for your kind words about Sarn Helen. Today there is snow here in the Brecon Beacons too. All is a splendour of light and shadow – even if the snow is the barest skin. Early this morning, as I walked with my dog to the top of Twyn y Gaer, the dawn was crimson – ominous, apparently – but January for now is clear and crisp, much as it ought to be.

Outside the window, the small birds are waiting in the cherry and the crab apple trees while a great spotted woodpecker gorges on their feeder.

In the air, as ever, is the thunder of aeroplanes toiling along the Atlantic flightpath.

Though these past few weeks have seen relentless rain, we did have another freeze back in December when the kids and I walked onto our hill, Mynydd Illtyd, to slide on the (very shallow) frozen ponds. On one, we got talking to a gang of teenagers slithering aimlessly around the ice. It took some moments before I realised that they did not know how to run and slide; they had simply never known the conditions to learn. When I was a child, on an upland sheep farm, we could be snowed in for a fortnight at a stretch. My latest message from Llanfaes Primary School reads: ‘Please could children bring in wellies (if not already in school) and a change of clothes so that they can go out and “experience” the snow – which has been a rare sight in recent years – before it disappears!!’

There is something so haunting about that word ‘experience’.

Yes, how to talk of these things to the kids? I suspect that you are better at this than I am. I am too quick to anger, too concerned to spare them my own distress. My daughter had an advent calendar recently, showing curlews in a snowbound landscape. I couldn’t bear to look at it. There was no snow. There are no curlews – or only a very few last pairs, each year failing to fledge their young. As an image, it encapsulated the dissonance you describe. But I agree, we must try to raise these issues gently – to talk of the recovery of red kites and peregrines as well as the loss of curlews and lapwings, to couple climate awareness with climate action so that the situation can appear to be one that we might address. I am struck by your thoughts on togetherness, on this being a multi-generational experience. It is true: it helps a lot. I am fortunate to have parents who have long been engaged in environmental issues; it gives me hope that my children will grow up empowered in the face of the climate and ecological emergency, knowing that to act in defence of their world is a fundamental part of life.

Whether our stories ought to be gentle, that is a different affair. There is always this tension in writing on the subject of climate and ecology: this concern that to tell the truth will simply alienate, simply switch people off. What are your thoughts? I would suppose, from The Tree Line and its many images burnt into my mind, that you tend to be less gentle where grown-ups are concerned.

To speak for myself, it has been a long journey to writing a non-fiction book like Sarn Helen. Until now, I have seen myself as a novelist; I have long addressed these issues aslant but have come to feel, in the past few years, that the crisis is simply too urgent for anything less than a direct approach. It is not always comfortable, when you’re used to writing fiction, to step out from behind your cast of characters, to try instead to present yourself as the protagonist for a reader to follow. But it is a relief as well, even a liberation, to be able to confront everything from farming to sea-level rise, extreme rainfall to mass extinction. And crucially, it seems to me, it has required no great shift in my identity. In the past, I have failed to grasp our situation fully enough, but all the same my subject for years has been our relationship with the natural world.

I was talking once to your partner, Louise, about how most writers seem to struggle to change, to put climate and ecology at the heart of their work. Louise was characteristically forthright. ‘Well, Ben did it,’ she said, with a shrug.

So here is the question I would most like to ask. There is a deeply moral core to all of your work, but in recent years you have travelled from City of Thorns, with its focus on Dadaab, Africa’s largest refugee camp, to The Tree Line, which concerns the boreal forests and their future under a changing climate. Surely this marks a fundamental shift. How did that shift come about, and what have you learned that might help other writers to follow a similar path?

It is snowing again . . .

Rawlence:

Thank you for your letter. We just watched one of your favourite films, Back to the Future and it was amazing to think that the future they are heading to in the movie (‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’) is already behind us. My kids loved it. I did too, again, and despite the wince at the end.

You ask a good question about writing and one that raises many others about literature.

I can see why the journey from a book about the global refugee crisis to one about the climate and nature crisis might seem like a large shift from the outside, but from the inside it seemed like a small step. Both are about exploring how humans survive during uncertainty and, crucially, where they find hope in apparently hopeless circumstances.

It required doing lots of research and becoming familiar with ecology, but what book does not demand work? In some respects, the extensive reading needed to write The Treeline was less intense than the exhaustive interviews with refugees required to write City of Thorns. For me, and I am sure you have experienced this too, I cannot attempt a book that does not spring from an abiding personal concern.  The refugee camps of Dadaab were so shocking that I could not believe I had not heard of them before and I felt that I had no choice but to deploy whatever talents and time I had to telling the stories of the people who lived there. It was some time after the publication of City of Thorns before I felt similarly moved by a situation or an issue, one that would not let me go. As soon as I came across the fact of the moving treeline turning the Arctic green, I could not stop reading, exploring and deliberating ways to share the information I was learning. It was also a relief and to some extent a joy, to be able to channel the concern we all feel about the accelerating environmental disaster into something creative and concrete. And no, it’s not a gentle story, although it does try to take the reader on a journey of discovery while also delivering the bad news.

As for whether readers require optimism, I have to ask: optimism for what? The status quo is gone, and if we haven’t accepted that we must surely do so soon. This is where the psychological link between a life sentence in a refugee camp and climate change is perhaps clearest: false hope is not hope. Real hope stems from a rigorous encounter with reality and a parsing of options. In this case, an invitation to live differently which should be, could be, beautiful as well as necessary. People may not want realism but it’s still our job to try and supply it in compelling and truthful ways.

As for putting climate and ecology at the heart of our work, I think the planet is doing that for us. Serious, enduring work must have some claim to universality and that is always a moral quest. But to be good, it must be true, and that means it must reflect its context while also revealing something; a book must resonate with readers present and future.

I confess that I look at the book reviews pages of most newspapers these days and imagine that they will one day be read in a library, in the same way that fashion magazines from 1939 must appear absurd to readers today.  We must hold on to the goal of all literature: to make art that transcends our historical moment while also testifying to it. It never was easy! And yet.

Climate breakdown, similar to fascism or colonialism, is a totalising force: it will transform (is transforming) billions of lives and will make mincemeat of civilisations and cultures, and as such its artistic consequences and opportunities are limitless. This should not represent a narrowing of the territory, requiring all writers to produce earnest science and cli-fi or risk irrelevance, rather, the opposite: there is so much that is new and different about being human now. The current moment offers new perspectives on genre, plot, character, form, even how we revise and read the canon itself. A play about Indigenous people facing cultural annihilation, such as Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, gains new resonance when the loss feels more immediate and personal. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, about refugees fleeing drought, deepens in meaning for Americans who are used to considering the dustbowl and Great Depression as history, not current affairs.

Resonance is found in unlikely places. There is kinship and analogues with any society undergoing rapid change in the present or the past. So for writers who may feel climate breakdown is an issue, but one that is not theirs, or those who are worried about writing didactic stories, I’d say, think again. Climate disruption is adding layers of complexity to almost every human story: for many people the planet they think they live on no longer exists. If that’s not a rich seam of comedy, tragedy and drama, then I don’t know what to suggest!

Bullough:

I do own my love of Back to the Future. Everything about it subverts itself – right down to the name of the town, Hill Valley, my all-time favourite oxymoron.

That step – that psychological link – between City of Thorns and The Tree Line makes perfect sense to me. I have been wondering for a while about how some writers seem to accept our situation more readily than others. I know several writers who have found themselves paralysed by the climate crisis, conscious that it has to change their work fundamentally but that this will make them other than the writers they thought they were.

And yet, as you suggest, it is not a step that means purging your work of light and hope. Take the example of farming in Wales. In Sarn Helen I include a conversation with Judith Thornton, a specialist from Aberystwyth University, who explains the implication for land use of the Welsh government’s decision to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. By her account, farmers will largely have to remove their sheep from the uplands – the unenclosed hilltops – by 2030, and will see some 180,000 hectares of productive land planted with trees. They will be required not only to produce more food on less ground, but also to replace all the ‘stuff’ we currently make from fossil fuels, from plastics to synthetic fabrics. The livestock industry, as we know it, will largely have to end. Put this way, the challenge can appear to be an existential crisis. But we have to remember that, since mechanisation in the mid-twentieth century, rural Wales has already been transformed. The average Welsh farmer has not always been a man over sixty, working alone and heavily dependent on government support. The story need not be conceived as threat. Indeed, there is a vision we might embrace of a landscape repopulated, both by people and nature: a place healthier in every respect, playing a vital role in our collective future.

Again, I find myself thinking of your daughters, your father and that longer time frame. In writing, I tend to look for two key components: shape and music. These are the forms that support the thoughts – often thoughts that have been running for years. With Sarn Helen, the shape came with the Roman road: the spine around which the book came together – and, in fact, I drew some confidence from the clear circular path of The Treeline. The ‘music’ derives from a resonance between a pair of basic thoughts. On my first day of walking Sarn Helen, I passed communities reeling from Covid-19 and from flooding caused by unprecedented rainfall – both, of course, symptoms of the climate and ecological emergency. I crossed hilltops reduced to a virtual wasteland, stripped of their biodiversity, but I also came across endless reminders of the post-Roman roots of Wales: the Age of Saints, when the natural world was held in reverence.

There is such energy, for me, in that disjuncture between who we were and who we have become.

You are right, there is resonance everywhere; this is, for all of its gathering horrors, a thrilling time to be alive. For me at least, the Age of Saints is awash with lessons for the twenty-first century. That too was a time of mass migration, conflict, pandemics and climatic upheaval. Born of the collapse of the Roman Empire, early Welsh society too required a new code of being – in that case, Celtic Christianity. Your word ‘kinship’ I find particularly useful. Of course, we can learn from all human experience, but for those lessons to endure then a sense of kinship is fundamental. The reason for Christianity’s success is that it absorbed Indigenous traditions, mapped onto the existing British culture. To its adherents, it did not seem an imposition but basically true to themselves.

I don’t need to convince you of the need to find and refine stories drawn from our own culture – whether tales of the Early Middle Ages or testimony of the collective effort during the Second World War. These are our most powerful emotional triggers. It is not only in rural Wales that we need a vision of a better future which is also, in essential ways, a return to the best of our past. But for me, as a novelist who for several years struggled to see any purpose in fiction, given the scale of challenge we face, these thoughts have proved to be enormously helpful. I can now see a future in fiction as well.

Rawlence:

I find it inspiring to think of the possibilities this moment holds for rewriting stories that have seemed immutable and for righting wrongs that have been allowed to fester.

There is such potential at this time for radical change and a popular hunger for it, and this should yield a rich vein of hope.

What I love about the Age of Saints and the glimpses of the lives that you give us in Sarn Helen is that utter commitment to something more than human. ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, and not just the famous book by Viktor Frankl, but the quest that unites the ages, religions and cultures of the world. This is, for me, where the climate and nature conversations of the early twenty-first century all lead: the existential dilemma arising from the knowledge that our current systems are suicidal as well as ecocidal renders much conventional work meaningless or even complicit. The calls for hope that come up in the media and many other places, are, when you unpack them, either an unwillingness to face the reality that the status quo is unsustainable, or they are a plea for a vision of what meaningful work might look like in the midst of our affluent hydrocarbon bubble. That’s why I am spending time developing courses with Black Mountains College to explore the question: ‘How can we work within existing systems while simultaneously seeking to transform them?’ Of course this is what writers and artists (and saints) have always tried to do. To subvert and rework familiar cultural material into new forms to highlight new possibilities. And so we come full circle (perhaps) in our dialogue – back to what makes great art in the first place.

Bullough:

Greetings today from Aberystwyth, where these past three days, in the morning and evening, I’ve been gazing at the starlings as they depart and return to their roost beneath the pier. They are beginning to obsess me, starlings. It is one of the great natural phenomena: how a half-dozen starlings can drift across the front in the late afternoon, claiming no more attention than the scuttling turnstones, then, within minutes, multiply to occupy the entire sky, turning, stretching, ballooning, convulsing – their shoals (I can think of no better word) of such scale, such mesmerising spectacle that for hours afterwards, when you close your eyes, they are all that you can see. They swarm in mobs across the sea. They become one body of a single mind, then, individuals once again, torrent onto the wires and girders to seethe and clamour and defecate.

These evening murmurations I have seen many times. What I’ve not seen before is the morning departure, which is later than you might imagine, when the day has almost lost its pink. This is not so spectacular, but memorable all the same. The clamour builds over half an hour, while the starlings become increasingly agitated, small gangs scattering from place to place. Again, there is no discernible cue; there must be some tipping point in all that agitation. Suddenly it is as if the pier exhales and starlings in numbers beyond possibility surge to the north and surge to the south: once, again and then again – spearing into the gull-littered morning to spread and apparently, finally, dissolve until all that remains are a few bewildered pigeons shuffling around on the pier’s black frame.

They put me in mind of one of the many books you’ve recommended over the years – Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human – and particularly that scene when Kohn leaves a bus after a long, weary journey through rural Ecuador. Kohn rarely steps forward as a character, but on this occasion he describes a feeling of bleakness and despair, and then how his attention is taken by a certain bird standing on a rock in the neighbouring river. He is transformed by these few moments given to the experience of another species, cleansed, removed from his own concerns which become ordinary and manageable as he perceives a greater reality. This is it. This is what happens, attending to those thousands of starlings as they billow over Aberystwyth.

How these murmurations must once have been – starling populations having, of course, fallen by two-thirds during our lifetimes.

It is so easy to project onto the saints. We know so little of those sub-Roman centuries that they have been endless prey to romance. But we have their sacred places, and this stands for something. Last September I was lucky enough to visit Skellig Michael, the famous monastery off the west coast of Ireland with its dry stone beehive cells and its hermitage poised on a crag above the Atlantic – on the edge of the world, as it must have seemed. If the more modest llanau (holy places) of Wales do not make the case sufficiently clearly, then you cannot mistake the Skelligs in their blizzard of gannets and puffins and terns. This is a place of elemental awe. This was divinity manifest. Even if I wouldn’t use that term myself, that glimpse of the whole, of the greater reality, is as close to the saints as I can get – and it is there for all of us, all of the time. We have only to look.

As you suggest, it has long been the writer’s job to push against the limited-reality consensus – to use Russell Hoban’s phrase. And yes, this is not for writers alone. The fact that it is not core to all education is baffling and desperate. But then there is Black Mountains College, which has been an ever-greater inspiration over the past few years (even as it steals your writing hours). To watch it grow has been a wonder. To teach there has expanded my reality, both in terms of learning what is possible and in terms of the people I have met: the perspectives from so many fields of writing – travel, poetry, song lyrics, drama – and so many other fields besides, from silviculture to economics. It no longer feels to me like writing or nothing. Now it is all and anything in pursuit of our common cause.

Sarn Helen: A Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future by Tom Bullough is published by Granta Books.