Long ago in a far away blog post I linked this article by David Gessner.

Observe that freakish character -- The Incredible Shrinking Nature Writer. If you drew us to scale and made Thoreau a giant, and placed Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson at about his shoulder, you could keep drawing us smaller and smaller until you sketched in me and my crop of peers at insect size. It may be, as some suggest, that our time marks a renaissance of nature writing. But it's a renaissance of ants.

If nature writing is to prove worthy of a new, more noble name, it must become less genteel and it must expand considerably. It's time to take down the "No Trespassing" signs. Time for a radical cross-pollination of genres. Why not let farce occasionally bully its way into the nature essay? Or tragedy? Or sex? How about more writing that spills and splashes over the seawall between fiction and nonfiction? How about some retrograde essayist who suddenly breaks into verse like the old timers? How about some African-American nature writers? (There are currently more black players in the NHL than in the Nature Writing League.) How about somebody other than Abbey who will admit to having a drink in nature? (As if most of us don't tote booze as well as binoculars into the back-country.) And how about a nature writer who actually seems to have a job?

Gessner is Sick of Nature, or at least nature writing as it is most often practiced these days.

Oliver Morton has a job, as an editor for Nature Magazine. His name doesn't come to mind first when listing nature writers since for him nature is interplanetary and even intergalactic - capital N nature. In the large. His newest book, Eating the Sun, made The Independent’s Top Ten Nature Books list. Oliver posted this at Heliophage, his bookblog for Eating the Sun, which in his words explores the different attitudes to nature in Mabey, Macfarlane and Deakin, and others such, and in my own work.

Eating the Sun is definitely “in search of some version of ‘nature’”, and it is more of a first-person narrative than I necessarily expected it to be. But it does not share “a passionate engagement with ‘the land’”. Indeed rather the reverse. One of its original aims, which I think is probably fulfilled to some extent, but perhaps not as explicitly as it might have been, was to celebrate air as the basis of life — which it is for plants and thus, indirectly, for us. One aspect of this is to encourage an appreciation that the air is universal where the land is particular — the carbon taken in by trees in Brazil has come in part from your lungs and mine, the carbon taken in by the rose on my terrace has come from all the lungs of the world, not to mention coals that have sat buried for a million centuries.

One of my reasons for writing about photosyntheses was specifically this — that it was a way to talk about the living earth that did not have to be a way of talking about specific places (though there are specific places in the book, some of which I love deeply). I find ideologies of land and rootedness worrying intellectually and hard to partake in emotionally; I suspect them of being innately regressive and conservative. One of the great opportunities of the current carbon/climate crisis is to create what might be called an ideology of air — of valuing and caring for something common to all and intrinsically global, and of creating a passionate engagement with the open sky and the endless sun.

And a corollary of that stance further distances me from the tradition that Macfarlane is celebrating and reinvigorating. I have no back-to-nature yearnings. I see the golden age of humanity’s relationship with the natural world lying ahead of us, in large part because I greatly prize the role of understanding in that relationship, and I value scientific understanding very highly. Much though I admire the tradition that Macfarlane sees reemerging, I feel my writing to be drawn out of the future more than out of the past.

The tradition that Macfarlane is celebrating and reinvigorating seems to me to be denatured, a toothless gentrified nature, mock nature. Oliver's nature, OTOH, is authentic and entirely in tune with our times. He's looking at the innards and marveling at the cleverness of the molecular level. As intrepid boys of all ages once took things - even once living things - apart with hand tools and improvised instruments to see what made them tick, and so understand a bit more about ticking, modern boys do much the same with electron microscopes and DNA sequencers.

Though I am in fact rooted in particular land, fully engaged in a specific place, it is global in Oliver's sense. I have long seen it this way too. It isn't only the carbon but also the nitrates, synthesized in electrical storms and that falls in rain, and other minerals that fall from the dusty skies, carried across the Pacific from China on high altitude wind currents, as well as the things I put on that land - everything from Dutch grass seeds to British cattle genes via New Zealand. Even the weeds are immigrants from every continent - as am I.

I prize a vision of natural systems that explicitly acknowledges all of this in dynamic relationship. To truly see it you need to somehow split your focus to include the micro and macro, the very far and the very near, the past, present and future, all at once. It's hard to do, but worth the effort I think.