Melanie's journey of discovery gives cause for hope

HUMANITY’S relationship with nature has long been a fertile source of inspiration for poets and authors.

However, Melanie Challenger has gone further than most in her contemplation of the issues raised by human impact on the world around us — as far as the ends of the earth.

Winner of the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for her first collection of poems "Galatea", Challenger became artist in residence for the British Antarctic Survey for International Polar Year 2007-08. This led to her spending four months in Antarctica, the sub-Antarctic South Georgia Islands, the Falklands and Chile.

The results of these experiences and other journeys, or "peregrinations" as she calls them, feature in her latest book "On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature".

Taking her from childhood visits to London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornish coast to her experiences in Antarctica and — at the other end of the world — in the Inuit communities of Arctic Canada, Challenger looks at the causes and cost of man’s increasing distance from nature and the spectre of extinction, not only in the natural world, but also in relation to human communities and industries.

Now resident in the Black Isle, Challenger will be talking about her experiences and writing at the Edinburgh Book Festival this weekend.

What was it that compelled you to leave a comfortable home in Britain and embark on your "peregrinations"?

It sounds pompously earnest, which I don’t mean it to, but I was honestly compelled to travel in order to try and understand the world.

I would hate for anyone to think that I travelled cynically, as part of a book’s designs. I travelled where my research logically led me in order to try and make sense of the subject, although this was only possible because I was lucky enough to win a couple of research grants — without those, none of the travel would have taken place.

In what way does looking at issues and environments in the book with a poet’s/writer’s eye rather than a scientist’s alter our perspective of the challenges and issues?

It is a matter of time and culture. Scientists are under huge time constraints and also exist within a very particular professional culture — their graft yields many extraordinary insights but they rarely have the opportunity to muse on issues of value, for instance, or the wide sweep. I believe the writer’s eye is most needed when the writer is able to step outside of this orbit of concern and gaze in from this distance.

What effect is our alienation from nature having on us?

Most fundamentally and simply it makes us very self-absorbed as a species. Everything passes through the prism of our own needs and we think, let alone base whole political or religious systems of thought, on the basis that human needs are the primary interest. We often forget that this self-absorption has its basis in our evolutionary history but that it isn’t necessarily rationally justifiable.

Given the ominous title of the book, are there any grounds for optimism?

There’s so much grounds for optimism! We’ve come a huge way over the past few hundred years. Peter Singer, an American philosopher, speaks of circles of moral value, from the self to kin to friends to one’s community, and outwards.

Over time, we’ve widened our circle of concern. We’ve abolished slavery, recognised the rights of women, and, in recent years, become increasingly concerned not only about the other animal species with which we share the earth, but also plant species, even parasites and bacteria (although these aren’t usually seen on the cover of BBC Wildlife).

None the less, we continue to cause considerable disruption and destruction to the natural world. What I fear most is a set of conditions in which that circle of concern could be forced to contract again.

Has living in the Highlands allowed you to feel more connected to nature?

Yes, I do relish the beauty of the Highlands and the greater space given to wildlife here.

The Highlands is also a challenging landscape, as great swathes of it are managed for blood sports and the terrible history of the Clearances can mean the land feels very contested and the idea of "preserving" any of it and therefore controlling further development touches on those powerful and controversial histories.

I do believe that Inverpolly, in particular, is so spectacularly special that, although I wouldn’t want it turned into a theme park to nature, I would love to see it protected and saved from industrial encroachment.

I think it’s great for us, as a species, to accept limits and to impose them on ourselves.

But more than the Highlands, I would say that marrying and giving birth and raising my two-year-old son have connected me to the thumping reality of nature more than any landscape ever could.

Any future projects you can tell us about?

I’m currently working on a book about traditional song and our cultures.

It’s involving tramping about the countryside (as greenly as possible) talking to singers and learning wonderful songs from them. I’m off to Orkney next week.

The themes of the book continue my thinking in "On Extinction", but, in contrast, the subject is incredibly uplifting. I love meeting new people and seeing the endless diversity of folk out there.

It helps to remind me of how narrow-minded we can all become and that our world is so plural, with so much more depth of possibility and opinion than our mass media would have us believe.

And finally, is there one image or experience from your travels that sums up all your encounters and feelings about your journey?

My first sighting of a blue whale was spectacularly moving.

I was out in a boat in Chile with a group of scientists genetically mapping a population in order to try and lobby to have the area become a conservation zone.

The sheer magnitude and mesmerising difference of the beast had an immediate impact on my understanding of why the presence of other species is so necessary and valuable.

But later that afternoon, I found myself in the small kitchen of one of the local fishermen. His family were living pretty hand-to-mouth, and he told me about his father, who used to hunt the whales in the past. It was the knowledge of fishermen like his father that first alerted the scientists to the population of whales and its habits. His grandchildren couldn’t follow the family tradition of fishing because the stocks were low and because so much industrial-scale fishing had taken place. He wanted his descendents to leave the area and find opportunities elsewhere.

Yet he acutely mourned the passing of his way of life and of the intimate knowledge of place and nature that his family once possessed.

Two visceral human emotions all turning on the presence of a whale, and none of them easy to quantify or reduce to a simple value. It was this complexity that I hoped to express in my book.

•"On Extinction" is published by Granta Books.