Rose Brookfield

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‘Is writing about climate change a futile act?’: Daisy Hildyard on The Second Body and Emergency

The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, pp.72, £10.99
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Emergency, Daisy Hildyard, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022, pp.224, £12.99
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In your essay, The Second Body, you talk to various experts like Richard the butcher, Gina the environmental criminologist, and biologists Luis, Nadezdha and Paul. How did you choose your interview subjects, and how did they help you answer the question: What is Life on Earth?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I’ve been asked that before. I was thinking about who might have some insight. I’d always worked in libraries and archives and I wanted to talk to people who would have lived experience. Who has insight into the nonhuman world? One obvious answer was ecologists. But I was also thinking about people who work with animals – I wanted to talk to and think with people who were actually spending time with animals. I was thinking about butchers in that sense. They may have a relationship with animals that I feel people can be a bit afraid of, or distant from, and I wanted to treat it as a closeness or an authority. Have you done any butchering?

I actually have. I’ve never killed an animal. But I did spend a day with an Italian butcher, butchering a pig from nose to tail.

It was a really fascinating thing to do, because I was looking at this body and thinking well, that’s what I look like on the inside. Did you physically butcher any of the animals when you were at the butchers?

No. I’ve done bits of plucking or gutting of birds and rabbits when I was younger. But I didn’t butcher in the butcher shop. I feel the same: I do eat meat, but I’ve never been able to kill. I think it’s an ethical problem. As a meat eater, I should be willing to kill, because I am killing vicariously.

There’s something about almost having more compassion if you’re able to kill an animal because you understand what it is that you’re doing. It’s so cold to be able to eat an animal and not be aware. 

When you are writing, do you know from the start where you are going? Or does the direction become clearer as you go?

The direction becomes clearer as I go to a greater or lesser extent. I don’t necessarily know when I’m starting out. I have an idea and if I follow it through, sometimes it takes me somewhere I hadn’t expected it to, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess that’s part of the pleasure of it for me.

I read whatever I’m interested in now, rather than thinking of it as research. In the last few years, I’ve just read a lot of fiction very studiously. I also like talking to people as well, which I never used to do. I feel in many ways that is a more active way of learning for me.

In your novel, Emergency, and your long-form essay, The Second Body, you write about the first experience of feeling like an animal, which often happens in adolescence when you collide with your second body. In your essay, this happens during a flood at your house, where you didn’t notice ‘the atmosphere reflecting in my river’ amid your distress. For me, farming makes the first and second bodies collide since every action affects the natural world. Do you think we only face our second body because of climate change disasters, or can we experience it in other ways too?

I think it can happen in many different ways – more ways than I could imagine. The experience of being more than human, or multiple, or materially connected, has infinite manifestations because it’s just reality. It might happen when you have a vomiting bug and have a powerful sense of the little virus in your stomach. And then there are certain ways of being in the world that draw attention to this condition – farming would be an obvious one, or anything that induces a sense of the self in the environment.

That’s such a true feeling when you get really ill, and you think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m just an animal, I’m so vulnerable.’

You’re just a little organism, mechanical.

You reference Timothy Clarke a lot in your work. Climate change is such a vast problem that goes so far beyond our time and so far behind us. How can we really understand or fathom it? When writing, how are you able to cope with climate change and that reality? To engage with it, so head on, does that ever affect your mental health?

That’s an interesting question and a kind one I think. I would say that it’s a way of thinking about something that is present anyway. I don’t want to get too psychological about this, but it’s obvious that repressing things doesn’t make them easier.

Writing that book was a long process during a strange period of my life. I was trying to reckon with something that felt hard. But it also felt as though the more I pushed through to the question – what am I really trying to say or see with this? – the simpler the question became. I moved away from the research and toward plainer ideas.

In the Second Body you write, ‘Personally, I do not always find it easy to believe that I have two bodies. In a technical way. I believe in climate change, but I do not act much as if I do. (I take flights). I don’t really inhabit it. I have never bought a book with climate change in the title because I feel that I wouldn’t find anything real inside.’

I can relate – if I see a book mentioning COVID on the blurb, I automatically put it back. My brain just doesn’t want to engage. Do you think people have the same reaction to reading about climate change? And as an author, do you feel like you have to subtly slip climate change into your prose?

The ideas or facts that people have been taught don’t necessarily sit right with their experience. If you’ve been through COVID and you have all this heavy stuff to carry from it of your own, you don’t want or need someone to explain it to you.

Timothy Morton puts it well when he writes about – I’m paraphrasing – fact-dump books. Nobody’s going to stop living the life that they live because they get a load of stats dumped on their heads. These books can feel didactic or even judgmental. They are telling you what to do or to be something, but you can’t until you’ve assimilated that experience.

I went to a lecture recently given by a Welsh poet. In the lecture he argued that every generation of writers looks for a cause. And that this generation’s cause is climate change. Is writing about climate change a futile act? The poet referenced the book, How to Blow up a Pipeline and suggested that it was more advantageous to engage with that text than to write forced poetry. What is your reaction to that?

I think that’s a preliminary way of thinking. The distinction doesn’t seem to me to be in keeping with what climate change is. This idea that it’s a generational situation that will roll over, like a new political football; that there’s one problem like this after another.

People do what they can do – some are good activists and some can write a story. I don’t like telling other people how to respond to climate change. I think that the division between action, activism and other forms of being in the world is part of the trick of thought that has led us to this point where we imagine we can divide the world into a kind of material reality that has no relation to ideas about progress. There’s no hard boundary. It seems like a risk to me to say that there is only one route we can try to use to get somewhere.

Is fiction the best genre with which to engage with climate change?

For me, there’s something about fiction and the way meaning is not necessarily on its surface that creates room for a depth; a complexity that I can’t achieve in nonfiction.

In the Second Body you wrote that “the only way to truly experience the truth about your body is with pathological horror… your body is infecting the world—you leak.” Do you think horror is the best genre for writing about climate change and inspiring action? Would you consider writing horror?

No, I haven’t. I’d probably scare myself. I can see why other authors are working with genre fiction or sci fi to do interesting things in this area, though, because the genre creates this alternative space or world of conventions in which to work.

I had a conversation with a university professor recently who was frustrated that her creative writing students only write sci-fi and futuristic novels. Do you think those genres are purely escapism that lull us into a false sense of security?

I don’t have an appetite to read much genre fiction, personally, but I think that this accusation could probably be levelled at much realist fiction or literary writing too: some of it will ultimately be enforcing the status quo. I just read an academic article about that, on Jenny Offill’s Weather and Jonathan Safran Foer’s nonfiction We are the Weather. The argument of the article was that these texts ultimately enforce a business-as-usual mentality. I’m sure you can say that of some escapist or fantastical fiction too, but I think a lot of it is making people’s minds move in interesting ways. It makes them think about reality differently.

Timothy Clark’s Derangement of Scale describes the confusion caused by the gap between our global impact and everyday lives. There’s a risk of cli-fi inflating our sense of importance. Do you ever worry that fiction can be a bit like sugary sci-fi, that it gives us an idea that we matter more than we actually do?

I don’t have faith that individual lifestyle choices will make the difference. And that can be really problematic as an alternative to systemic change. In fiction, I haven’t got a lot of time for privileged grief stories: people who feel sad when they think about a bird that is going extinct on the other side of the world, or whatever. I can’t read it without feeling that the narrator is co-opting other people’s problems, and making them about their own suffering. I think that’s not necessarily fair as a universal comment on ecological grief narratives but I think it’s an outcome of the mass of them, their volume as a collective in a culture. I do have faith that in writing there aren’t any kind of rules or necessary outcomes. I wouldn’t want to do it if I thought that there were inevitable ways of doing it. As a reader I am waiting for a book that will tell a story about climate change in some new way, and make something that’s new or that makes me think about it or live it in a different way. And I do hold faith in that possibility.

Do you think that the way we write about nature still holds onto a past romanticisation of nature in nature writing? What I love about your work is that while you acknowledge the beauty of nature you never exaggerate it. Do you think that we need to start writing nature as it is, rather than what we wish it was?

This is one of the few things I feel quite positive about, though I don’t think things have changed that much yet. There is an understanding of, and a certain movement towards, different experiences of nature. That might be the nature that exists in the kitchen of an urban flat in a tower block. Or it might just be not a white single man, going off and climbing a mountain. There are different entry points. I don’t think that there is such a thing as true nature. There’s just so much going on. It’s the whole world. We need different perspectives on and visions of that.

I thought that was such an interesting point in your essay when you introduced the Green Criminologist and, then, towards the end of the text you examine Paul as if you were a green criminologist. Did the process of writing change the way you feel about yourself and humanity?

It really did. It completely changed the way I felt about myself and humanity. It was also a practical change: I had a funded research project for four years and was able to do research on my own terms for an extended period.

The research came to meet my experience, if you see what I mean – the way my interviewees, these specialists, described the individual, the body, evolution, the planet. All of it made sense to my experience in a new way and it felt exciting because of the possibilities that that opened up. It made me rethink.

Do you live your life differently now?

In some ways. But I’m not writing from a place of authority or a superior moral position. I may be writing from a position of being more than usually troubled or vexed by the difficulty of being a normal person trying to make sense of, and feel alright in, the world. I don’t think I’ve sorted out a good way to be.

There’s also a lot of humour in your writing. You talk about your pet hamsters and imagine the way that they might have died, and you picture the teaspoons in the cupboard. I laughed. And it was important, because I think you toe this very fine line of showing your readers the facts and telling us this is what’s really happening but also this is my human experience. You need to have laughter. Do you still find laughter easily? Or is it almost, like, you know, too much?

Yeah, I do. I do believe in it. I’ve heard a critique of comedy in the current climate: that it can be a way to dismiss or evade the big problems in the world now. And I get that. But from what I have seen of the world, which is just one person’s experience, I think that when people do go through hard experiences or suffering, there is often an emergent comedy or a better sense of humour that arises.

If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. That has a lot of truth to it. Have you got another project that you’re working on now?

I’m working on a bigger novel and I’m thinking of it as a historical novel though it’s not set that long ago.

If you were an animal, what animal would you want to be and what animal are you actually?

This is basic but when I look at swifts and swallows – and I think some other humans feel this way – they way they dip and move in the warm air, in the evenings and in the mornings, makes me envious. To spend half of your year in the Congo in the middle of an open landscape and then fly over to the Thames or a river in Yorkshire.

What would I actually be? I guess I have kids and a job, and then I write on the side – so some kind of working animal comes to mind.

Final question – do you write for your children? 

No. I love my children but writing feels to me like a space apart from my life and to some extent from myself. There’s a question here about the state of the planet too: I’ve been asked before whether having children has motivated me to write about climate emergency and again, I love my kids but…no. This idea about protecting the future ‘for our grandchildren’ feels contorted as a logic, for me (though I know it works for some people and that’s ok). Why do you invent imaginary babies in the future, and then project some dire experiences for them, and then care about that – but not care about the elderly people who are dying in heatwaves right now? And I don’t want to care only about people who share my genes. It’s strange how this spectre of a future can have power over life itself.

 

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Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Rose Brookfield is writer and bookseller based in London. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 2021, with a degree in English Literature, she spent two years working on regenerative farms in Europe, the UK and Australia. She founded the podcast, Farming for the Future, which aims to act as career advice for people who might be interested in entering the farming industry but don’t know where to start. She is a current member of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt. She has written forELAND and The Sustainable Food Trust.