Godzilla to the Rescue: Monsters and Environmental Grief

Thoughts on writing for a disappearing nature: how monsters became my refuge from environmental loss.

Like many writers, I occasionally look back at things I've written or created during my childhood or teen years, and cringe a little. Especially my overuse of double-barrelled adjectives, Occasionally, I am a little awed by them – the ability to allow raw emotion to stream onto the page in an unselfconscious way. That is an ability I no longer have, or at least, no I longer indulge.

At the same time, I'm struck by two currents running through almost every piece. The first is that everything I wrote was riddled with animals and nature imagery. It was as if my very thoughts were small furred creatures burrowing for meaning in the undergrowth. The second is that all of my writing was infused with a sense of catastrophic loss. Where that stems from, I won't speculate here.

I no longer write about nature, though. I only ever come at it sideways. I am not quite sure when this shift occurred, perhaps after my zoology degree, when the natural world finally succumbed in my mind to a brilliant and systematised paradigm of thought. This fully stoppered up the flow of creative writing for several years, as the mastery of a formulaic scientific essay took precedence. It got me top marks in my university finals but caused my innate, animistic wonder at nature to go into hiding.

Later, I went on to do a masters and PhD on monstrosity, and monsters are what I write about now. They are fabulous, both in affect and literally; richly connected to the natural world, composites of real beasts, with their own unnatural histories. They keep me good company in my own personal monstrousness, too.  But straight nature writing: about my fascination with creatures; the transcendental experiences I have had in natural places; the giant moths I used to rear in my bedroom; my powerful dendrophilia – that, I now shy away from.

Why? One reason is that I became distracted by other parts of myself, which isn't uncommon through one's 20s. So many people lose their childlike fascination with nature or lose the means to indulge it. That is part of the nature-writer’s job: to reignite that latent passion in readers, to offer them the meticulously observed conduit to lost enchantment. Another reason is fear of failure. Nature writing is a hyper-saturated market.

These are excuses, though. Creatures have always been at my core, but the animals and their wild places have been overrun by the monsters. Despite their apparent terrors, monsters are far safer things to engage with.

A while ago I read a piece in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert called ‘How to Write About a Vanishing World‘ (8th October 2018). She dives into the lives of scientists seeing the golden toad disappear almost overnight or watching the polar ice vanish, the marine biologists broken by the coral bleaching of their study sites. I read it on the Victoria line, travelling back home after teaching.

One sentence I remembered long after:

‘After taking an aerial survey of the Great Barrier Reef, one of Australia’s most prominent coral biologists, Terry Hughes, showed the results to his students. “And then we wept,” he tweeted.’

And I wept too, right there in the tube carriage, in front of the bemused man opposite me, who seemeed deeply confounded by my crying .

I wept for the pure magic I had seen as a child: coral reef worlds bounded in several metres of balmy blue lagoon water, hordes of hungry caterpillars spilling over stinging nettles on Hampstead Heath, a leatherback turtle hauling herself up on to the beach to lay her eggs – that my own children, should I have any, would be unlikely to ever see. As if the loss of childhood should go hand in hand with the loss of the world itself that had cradled it. I wept for the scientists dedicating their love and lives to understanding the incredible intricacies of systems being erased before their very eyes. And I wept for the sheer mindlessness of it all - that people care more about smart phones and fast fashion and how they look on an Instagram post than the decimation of wonders.

Nature writing feels to me less about the bringing of enchantment and more about countenancing inevitable catastrophe, writing about a ‘world of wounds’, as Kolbert describes. It is less about wonder than grief, or snatching at hope. Even nature documentaries now shock as often as they revel in beauty - by necessity. It is too much for me: those two threads of loss and nature that suffused my writing as a child went hand in hand. Nature balanced the loss, healed it. For nature to be lost - that is too overwhelming for me to process into readable prose.

There are two approaches to writing about the ‘wounded world’: bringing to bear the full weight to catastrophe, to motivate the ignorant and reluctant; or trying to instil hope, to avoid the paralysis of hopelessness. I can’t really do either: I shy away from the indulgence of emotive catastrophising and my hope for the future of the world's biodiversity is shaky. The books that entranced me when I was younger – Victorian collecting handbooks, Gerald Durrell’s tales of zoo collecting – describe a world and a way of being in it that no longer exists, so I no longer try to emulate their writing.

So I have retreated to the world of childlike fantasy, amongst the manticores and the hydras, the dragons and unicorns. Monsters have always lurked in our minds, filling the interstices of our taxonomies and boundary structures, emerging from the shady places we try to ignore. Unlike the natural world, monsters are inexhaustible: there can be infinite chimaeras, there will always be boundaries to transgress, fears to dredge into waking awareness. As a way of avoiding environemtnal grief, I seek out the genesis of the things that go bump in the night, to understand the anatomy of monsters, the mechanics of denial and projection. Some of the collective psychological processes that have driven the biotic obliteration we are observing now.

What I have also learned about monsters is that they reveal what is hidden, whether that be fear, or revulsion, or guilt. They embody that which cannot be countenanced. So, in writing about the monsters of the modern age, or the Anthropocene as it is coming to be known, I come full circle to the thing I have tried to avoid. Some of the monsters of the big screen are the titans raining down Gaia’s revenge on the planet’s scourge: man. Godzilla, King Kong, Gigantopithecus, the revenant Jurassic dinosaurs. These behemoths are the ugly valkyries we have conjured up to undo the damage we have wrought to the biome.

Part of me, when I watch these films, wants the monsters to win. Perhaps we all want to feel like there are still monsters, somewhere, of vast strength and power, like children enchanted by dinosaurs. Because then there will still be wonder and terror and awe in the world.  

Without that, without even the fantasy of it, we are left with simply the monsters inside of ourselves, and the wasteland they are creating. And that is truly terrifying.

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For more explorations of monster-meanings, check out my book Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meanings, out now in the UK, US and Italy.