WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE

As a society - with our societal belief in consumption as a right, and desire as a finer force than need - we seem to tunnel on, deaf to the noise of the roof and walls collapsing behind us. Nevertheless, I want to offer a suggestion to close the gap between knowledge and place.

The suggestion - which echoes a similar call made by Lopez exactly 20 years ago in America - is that a series of classic works of nature writing from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland should be established and published. It would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise.

It would, however, honour a form of care, and a form of attention, to the landscapes of the British Isles. It would discover in landscapes values which transcend the commercial and the consumerist. And it would restore to visibility a tradition of nature writing which has slipped from view these past 50 years.

Such a series, as I imagine it, would reach backwards in time as well as outwards in space:

to Gilbert White's A Natural History of Selborne (1789),

to Duncan Ban MacIntyre's great long southern Highland poem, "In Praise of Ben Dorain" (1750s),

to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th-century),

to the medieval Irish saga of Buile Suibhne (Sweeney Astray, in Seamus Heaney's translation), which travels between the ancient wild places of Ulster.

It would of course include Tim Robinson in Aran and Connemara,

J A Baker in coastal Essex - the wonderful lost land of the Dengie Peninsula -

Jim Perrin in Snowdonia,

Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter in Dartmoor.

Other possibles would be Ronald Blythe's Akenfield in Suffolk;

Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill for the Welsh marches;

Gavin Maxwell on Camusfearna;

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male for Dorset;

sections from Cobbett's Rural Rides;

Auden on north Yorkshire;

W H Murray on Glen Coe.

These are only the most obvious names. There would be many more, as yet unknown to me: in other languages (Gaelic, Welsh, Breton), other genres (scientific studies, prose-poems); and other, less immediately glamorous, landscapes.

There would, to my mind, be two prerequisites for a book to be included in this series.

Firstly, it would have to evince the belief that - in Lopez's fine phrase - the "fate of humanity and the fate of nature are inseparable".

Secondly, it would have to suggest, however obliquely, that the natural environment must be approached not with a view to conquest, acquisition and short-term use, but according to the principles of restraint and reciprocity.

In this sense, each book in the series would be a subtle work of hope. Each would set itself against the unbalance and ignorance of the present time. Each would guide us some way towards the common ground.

NATURE WRITING Mapping nature

Cornwall
Freedom of the Parish by Geoffrey Grigson

Devon
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
Ted Hughes's poetry
Dart by Alice Oswald
Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore (also Somerset)
A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter

Dorset
Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels
John Llewelyn Powys's Somerset and Dorset essays

Somerset
Portrait of the Quantocks by Vincent Waite
Alfoxden Journal by Dorothy Wordsworth
Coleridge's letters and journal from the Quantock years
Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore (also Devon)

Wiltshire
Ridgeway Country by HM Timperly
The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies

Sussex
Nature in Downland by WH Hudson
The South Country by Edward Thomas

Kent
Window on a Hill and Small Moments by Richard Church

Berkshire
Where The Bright Waters Meet by Harry Plunkett Greene

Oxfordshire
Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
Lifting the Latch by Sheila Steward

Herefordshire
A Herefordshire Pomona by Hogg and Bull

Essex
The Hill of Summer by JA Baker

Suffolk
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
Corduroy, Silver Ley, The Cherry Tree by Adrian Bell

Norfolk
Waterland by Graham Swift
Coot Club by Arthur Ransome (it contains, its advocate explained, "wonderful atmospheric description of the Norfolk Broads as it was in his time. The concern for birds and their nesting requirements, the care for the environment, and man's thoughtless destroying of that environment written many years before Friends of the Earth was born")

Hampshire
Hampshire Days by WH Hudson

Gloucestershire
Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Pembrokeshire
The Captain's Wife by Lettice Peters

Cardiganshire
Wings Over the Valley by John Green
Welsh Journal by Jeremy Hooker

Snowdonia
Wild Wales by George Borrow
Skywalls by Clyde Holmes

Cheshire
Alan Garner, especially The Voice That Thunders

Shropshire
Mary Webb's novels (which were so stung at by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm)
A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

Yorkshire
The Hawthorn Goddess and The Rape of the Rose by Glyn Hughes
Life on Limestone by Anna Adams
Ted Hughes's Yorkshire poems
Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes (with photographs by Fay Godwin)
Swaledale: Valley of the Wild River by Andrew Fleming
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Cumbria
Hills of Lakeland by William Heaton Cooper
Selected Poems by Norman Nicholson
Cockley Beck, A Celebration of Lakeland in Winter by John Pepper (a finely written account of a man living alone in a mountain cottage for nine winters)
The Grasmere Journal by Dorothy Wordsworth
And of course William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey

Northumbria
A Border County by Henry Tegner

Roxburghshire/Berwickshire
Harvest of the Hills and Wigtonshire by Angus Winchester
My Childhood by John McNeillie

Aberdeenshire
A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (rightly described by Robert Wilkinson as "an exquisite prose meditation")

Inverness-shire
Song of the Rolling Earth by John Lister-Kaye
Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water trilogy

The Western Isles
Sorley MacLean, Selected Poems
Island Years by Frank Frazer Darling

Assynt and Sutherland
Norman McCaig, Selected Poems

The Orkneys
George Mackay Brown's novels and poems

· Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), which won the Guardian First Book award, and The Wild Places, a book about wildness in Britain and Ireland.

Nature Writing

Rock of ages

Robert Macfarlane on how Tim Robinson read messages from history in Aran limestone

The history of the British Isles could be well told through its five great rocks — granite, sandstone, slate, chalk, and limestone. There are others, of course: schist, shale, basalt, the clays. But these five form a strong mineral pentangle within which the islands and their pasts are contained.

Each of these rocks has its character, and each its literary keepers.

Granite is Ted Hughes's stone, and that of DH Lawrence in Kangaroo.

Chalk belongs to the southern downlanders: EM Forster, GK Chesterton, Gilbert White.

Sandstone to Hugh Miller.

Slate to Jim Perrin, Caradog Prichard, Kate Roberts.

Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional 20th-century writers. The first of these is WH Auden, who so loved the high karst shires of the northern Pennines. What most moved Auden about limestone was the way it eroded. Limestone is soluble in water, which means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear. Thus the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a metaphysical as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone a very human honesty — an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.

The second of the great limestone writers is Tim Robinson. On the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare, between the granite of Galway and the sandstones of Liscannor, rises a vast limestone escarpment, pewterish in colour on a dull day, silver in sunshine. The limestone begins in the area of north-west Clare known as The Burren — from the Gaelic boireann, meaning "rocky place". From there it extends in a north-west direction, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin, and Inis Oírr — or the Aran Islands, as they are also called.