A new mode of nature writing?

Madeleine Bunting writes in The Guardian on what she sees as a new way of writing about nature. She sees this as a visionary movement, where learning to pay attention to particulars has a redemptive quality that benefits both humans and the natural world (though I'm not sure that was a quality absent from previous modes of nature writing).

Bunting argues that books such as Mark Cocker's Crow Country, Kathleen Jamie's Findings, and Roger Deakin's Wildwood are "a new genre of writing. It doesn't quite fit to call it "nature writing", because what makes these books so compelling - and important - is that they put centre stage the interconnections between nature and human beings."

"The floods in Yorkshire last month were a sharp reminder of what happens when we don't understand the land on which we live. The sight of thousands of flooded homes made us realise what many previous generations would never have forgotten about the way in which water has to move through land. Renewing our relationship with the natural world, on which our wellbeing depends, is at the heart of this genre of writing - but it presses its case not with statistics and fear of apocalyptic scenarios of global warming, but with seduction, urging on readers an aesthetic case for the spectacular beauty that lies beyond their windscreen if they can be bothered to stop the car and get out.

It's the British equivalent in the 21st century to John Muir, the legendary writer who founded the US Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, and who in 1901 wrote that "thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home". We may have hills rather than mountains, but that's what summer holidays should be about - going home."

Sounds like a good group of books to add to your reading pile. Bunting mentions that all of the writers she discussses have pebbles to hand, or lined up on their desks. What pebbles do you have lined up on your desk? I'm tending currently toward smooth, water-rounded stones nearest my desk; the fossils are six feet further away.