Daisy Hildyard examines three stories of atrocity that demonstrate how whiteness has inscribed itself onto the land through violence and how human history blurs into the nonhuman world. 1. Water Part amateur detective, part visionary, Hildyard’s voice is so intelligent, beguiling and important. Like Sir Thomas Browne or even Annie Dillard, her sly variety of scientific inquiry is incandescent.’ DH: People have different feelings about language, but I get a sense that many of us, perhaps especially those who are invested in environmental or ecological relationships, dislike and mistrust it at the moment. Language is a problem because of the fact that it segregates humans from other species, and it’s corrupted/corrupting because of the ugly histories that have formed and shaped it. (I’m writing about English here. I can’t speak for other languages, though I’ve read about very different relations with the environment that come through indigenous grammars.).

In the wake of the biggest natural melodrama of recent times, Emergency is a thoughtful, poised reflection on how much change we humans, among the animals, can ever bring to bear.’

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These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too – about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian’s own. Hildyard and her husband were awarded compensation by the government, which she used to take a cheap flight to a Mediterranean island with her daughter (“In a technical way I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do … I didn’t want to spend this money on more things”). Walking in the warm evening air she comes upon beached lifeboats, an immigration Portakabin, some Red Cross tents and “a queue of humans, some wearing blankets, waiting to be seen”. The connection is left implicit between her own experience, internally displaced by climate change, and that of migrants on the Mediterranean beach.

In refusing to privilege human drama over natural processes, Hildyard captures the ecosystem’s delicate interconnectedness and suggests a new way of writing about our toll on the environment.” I hope so. Certainly one thing among other things; I wouldn’t say, you know, the novel is going to solve the climate crisis. But yeah, I have faith in language to do some change in its own way.Yeah, like how delicious is a Fanta? Do I really, really want it? I don’t know… How do you sort of deal with that? Do you have a way of explaining it to yourself – or habits that you’re changing – or do you just try not to think about it? I feel like there’s this huge range of different ways that people respond to it. Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world. Even the patient who is anaesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeons’ lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on earth. I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it. I think she finds it really hard to look at this stuff every day and then kind of… close the laptop and, you know, go and see mates or something, and it’s just a weird experience of being in the world that I think connects with a lot of us. HW: In all of your writing you explore themes of our boundaries with the natural world, with time and space and the particular forms of matter. In this you have a basic distrust of language, and of the filtering and prioritizing that it requires. Can you tell me more about what the writing process is like for you, and how you translate your relationship with the natural world into words?