Mark Cocker is an award-winning author, naturalist and writing tutor, with 13 acclaimed books to his name, including Birders: Tales of a Tribe, Birds Britannica, Our Place, Crow Country and his most recently published, One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth.
Between them, his last four works have been shortlisted for nine awards.
He has been writing country diary columns for The Guardian and Guardian Weekly for 36 years with well over 1,000 published articles to his name. He will be speaking at Action for Wildlife Day at Carsington Water in August.
We caught up with Mark recently to find out more about his work.
HHA: Tell us a bit about your typical working week, Mark.
Last weekend I was running a nature walk and then I taught a one-day masterclass in nature writing. The previous day I had given a talk at a Lancaster conference. Yesterday I wrote a Country Diary column for The Guardian, and then in the afternoon I went to look at some incredible European cave spiders and did a recce of a walk for all the Country Diarists at a site near Hathersage. So my life is rich and varied. My wife often say that I’ve spent 25 years ‘frigging around’ (as I call it) and 15 years writing!
But normally I’d be sitting at this desk writing and researching topics most days. I work hard, starting at 9 o’clock and finishing about 5 or 6 o’clock. I have a routine, but writing is often about waiting for inspiration, so it’s different to other people’s days.
"Nature doesn't work at the level of the single organism"
HHA: Your last published book is One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth. What prompted you to take this as subject matter for your latest book?
I’m obsessed with the concept of the connectedness of life. We are simply the inheritors of 4 billion years of living heritage. I always try to find ways to talk about the momentousness of life and nature, while at the same time talking about everyday events. The book is the best expression that I’ve achieved so far of that concept. The swift lends itself as a symbol that is very potent, and nobody fails to respond to swifts, so it became a great way to talk about the connectedness and unity of all life.
I think this matter of connection is a big part of what environmentalists have started to understand. We’ve suddenly woken up to the idea that nature doesn’t work at the level of the single organism and I think it’s very important that we have that as a central principle of environmentalism. That seems to be taking root amongst many of the rewilding projects that we’re seeing.
HHA: You’re working on a new book. Can you tell us about it?
It’s about the everyday nature of observation, and looking at the world with great scrutiny, so that you begin to see these connections. We think it’s a neutral act to look at the world, that it carries no great significance. But you can continue to look at the world in a way that sees nothing except what you want to see. In short, you see only what you have always seen. And that can be problematic. Birders are especially partial to observing nature but not seeing anything other than feathered species. We should try to perceive the full width of any scene and be more ambitious in our capacity to observe the wholeness of life.
And the book expands on this issue of observation and offers reflections about and how, when we look, we really recreate the world we see. It is also about what happens when you try to see the connections underpinning all life. I’m really excited about it. We’re now realising that being engaged with nature is so good for our mental health, our physical wellbeing, and is a source of enormous enrichment for us.
The working title is On Seeing: Nature, and I’m hoping it will be published next year.
HHA: You talk to a lot of groups around the country. Is that an important part of what you do?
I do enjoy it, and think that public speaking is important to get messages out. In the last 12 months I’ve done about 60 events from Inverness to Kent. And, of course, it’s a way of publicising your books, which is important for authors. My books are at the slightly more complicated end of natural history, looking at the philosophical, political and environmental consequences of nature. I don’t want to be seen as working in a particular silo, and I see this capacity to talk about connections as central to my work.
One of the most important questions I get asked about is ‘hope’. I often answer this with a quote from Irish Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney:
“Hope is not just optimism – a wishing that things will turn out well but rooted in a conviction that there is good worth working for”.
You do it regardless of whether you are expecting success, you do it because there is work to be done. Many of my fellow speakers at Action for Wildlife Day have that same conviction. Ruth Tingay is a shining example of that philosophy, in the teeth of massive opposition.
There is another hope. You just have to go outside to feel the kind of stuff that comes out of nature, like my trip yesterday to see the European cave spiders, or seeing a Grey Wagtail working its way along a river, or looking at the orchids at Hartington Meadows, for example.
"Nature has become important to all of us. The penny has finally dropped."
