The Landmarks of Landmarks

Robert MacFarlane began the book that became Landmarks when he learned of certain words dropped from a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Among those excised were acorn, kingfisher, and pasture to make way for newly-essential terms such as bullet-point, celebrity, and voicemail. The move may very well be advisable for navigating the world we have made for ourselves and reflect (in the editors' words) “the consensus experience of modern-day childhood." Nevertheless Macfarlane convincingly argues the cull reflects the loss of something deeper, something shared between the people of a place in their language.

Landmarks is partly a lament for our lack of understanding of the natural world—and more precisely the very specific ways of talking about and living in very specific places. To name something is often to be able to see it: to learn that "smeuse" is a term in Sussex for the "gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal" means being able to notice something new on your walk through the countryside. Nine glossaries mark the chapters of the book, each filled with dialectical variants of terms for the natural and geologigical features of precisely experienced places from a writer equally captivated by language and landscape. They are a delight in themselves, but the narrative journey between these ideas, and through terms at once new and familiar, is irresistible.

"My eyes were in my feet." --Nan Shepherd

The beautiful, patient specifiity of Nan Shepherd's meditation on years of wandering the austere Cairngorm mountains in Scotland works on you like a spell, its prose worn over like the stones of a weatherbean plateau sat. The Living Mountain sat unpublished in a drawer for 40 years and then spent 40 more building its reputation as a classic of nature writing. As Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction to this edition: "Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different."

One wonders if the name recognition John Muir still enjoys as a principal author of our modern ideas of nature has so far outstripped his reputation as an author of actual books that the wilderness icon is destined to be forever more worshipped than read. This would be a shame.

The spiritual father of the national park system and literal founder of the Sierra Club was an irrepressible advocate for the power and value of time spent outside, yes. But anyone who finds communion in those ideas but has never dipped into his still-very-readable, infectiously romantic writings is denying themselves a special pleasure. If ever anyone deserved a Library of America treatment, it must be the nation's most eloquent tramp: his words literally changed the American landscape.

Muir is no exception to the a ongoing reckoning with the complicated legacy of the sainted figures of progressive causes. His work can survive this overdue contextualization, and encountering his thoughtful, ecstatically expressed sentiments on the page is itself a corrective to successive generations of uncritical hagiography. Alongside Thoreau, Leopold and Carson, this is the most essential writing about nature, period. It is also just plain enjoyable. You'll want to take a loaf of crusty bread up to a mountain meadow and read it under a tree.

Effortless and enchanting, Roger Deakin's Wildwood is unique in its weaving of encyclopedic appreciation for trees and personal anecdote. Simply if uncharitably put, Deakin looks into his navel and finds a forest. It's idosyncratic and beautiful, and you might find yourself checking prices on flights to southern Kyrgyzstan just to see if an actual lived experience can live up to his description of a walnut forest, or driving around Suffolk looking for his 400-year-old digs, or just wishing you could be half as observant as this writer, who spent a lifetime carefully looking around him and beautifully recording it. Give this amazing study of what he dubbed "the fifth element" (wood), a little time to take root, and something beatuiful will grow.