Deep Time Visible: New Nature Writing from the Scottish Islands

In accounts of the challenges of the Anthropocene there is a widespread concern that we as human beings are ill-equipped to respond culturally both to its spatio-temporal scales and to its emergent effects and affects. While Dana Phillips sought to divert the attention of early ecocritics away from ‘one of literature’s more pedestrian, least artful aspects’, recent years have seen a renewed interest in nature writing within the environmental humanities. ‘New Nature Writing’, in particular, has been hailed as a site in which environmentally destructive anthropogenic impacts can be witnessed and, at times, railed against. Detailing how some of the newest forms of environmental writing have, in the shadow of the Anthropocene, returned to ways of planetary thinking inaugurated with the dual literary-scientific writing of the late 18th-early 19th century, this essay explores a selection of writings by Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, David Gange, and Amy Liptrot, which feature Scottish islands at the British archipelago’s furthest Atlantic edges. The landscapes represented in these works bring deep time into view, evoking temporal scales which range from 600 million years in the past to millions of years in the future. They also facilitate the contemplation of planetary interconnections, through oceanic tides which move to the pull of celestial bodies, and birds and marine mammals whose migrations trace lines across the globe. However, the essay will also argue that the texts studied here enable us to think through other, more elusive, elements of the Anthropocene. They provide a means for us to engage with its distributed agencies, its eeriness and its uncanniness, and with the way in which it requires us to imagine ourselves as spectres haunting not just human generations to come, but also the ‘deep future’ of a posthuman planet. In so doing, this essay links the most profound implication of the Anthropocene – that humans need to reconnect with their own ‘deep’ natural history – to the popular, topical genre of British and Irish ‘new nature writing’.