#18: Nature Writing and The Long Shadow of Climate Change

I don’t need to explain climate change to you, but I will offer a definition of nature writing. Noted nature writer David Rains Wallace said in 1984 that works in the genre “are appreciative esthetic responses to a scientific view of nature”, and alongside essays there is “nature fiction, nature poetry, nature reporting, even nature drama, if television documentary narrations are literature”. He called it “revolutionary”.

I based my poem on a glow worm experience in Lamington National Park with one of my Americans. Not only did his visit inspire the endeavour (you never really think of exploring your own region by yourself), but the sheen of new-place enthusiasm in his eyes would rub off on yours if you looked long enough. Long after he left, I would drive across the Story Bridge or down a particularly dramatic hill and feel enough to cry. During the visit, I smiled our way up the winding and pot-holed road to Lamington – enjoying mother nature making us work for it.

My American came and left in the August heatwave, when temperatures never sank below 25C.

We attended a guided tour, a dozen in the group. The guide took us on a short bus ride from the tour centre down to a walking track, where we waddled single-file with red lights in hand. White light would burn the glow worms, so we squinted and huddled away from funnel-web spiders and gympie-gympie. When we arrived at the viewing site – three rows of benches a creek away from a wall of dirt overhung by moss – the water vapour around us had condensed into drops on the tips of our noses. Two kids swung around their red torches until they were wrested away, and the glow worms appeared blue on the wall after thirty seconds of darkness.

Our guide relayed glow worm facts to us one at a time in low tones, seconds of silence to let us soak it in. This is one of the only known glow worm sites left in Australia. Other sites have been destroyed by overtourism. Adults are flies which only travel a few metres in their life. Even the red light can hurt them. 

The next line was not really true. 

They’re actually yellow, he said. They only look blue to the kids because their eyes are damaged from screen time.

To be clear, Australian glow worms are blue. This is a story to scare children off their iPad. But it sparked a kind of grief in me: the rarity of the worms, their decline, that we wouldn’t recognise them as adults, that we maybe don’t recognise them either way. My American challenged me to write about the experience, and I couldn’t help but come back to this sense of loss. That if you think hard enough about any aspect of nature, you get to the part where we’re losing it.

Laura Pritchett, a modern nature writer of the American West, says acknowledging climate change is essential to the genre. She wrote in a 2024 piece that the best nature writing centres “the idea that caretaking of the planet is worthy of exploration, the highest of human endeavors, the best survival story of all survival stories … The themes are driven by enormous existential questions not about love or religion or economies, but the fate of life itself.”

A work of nature writing can be “celebration or advocacy. Delight or deep ecogrief. Investigative or informative” but the modern nature writing voice is often “stronger, more intense, more laser-focused” on the changing climate than before.

“It’s like the gentrified tea parties of yesteryear got taken over by ragers.”

Write what you know, I guess.

I can’t share the whole poem with you, but here’s a snip of the end:

Word Count: 739