Underland by Robert Macfarlane

The Book in Three Sentences

Through concepts like ilira (the Inuit word for a sense of fear and awe, as subjective experience), Macfarlane explores the landscapes of forests and rivers, caverns and caves, and oceans and ice. Underland is a compilation of personal journeys into dark places where local guides share their knowledge about a specific place. While you may find yourself drawn to particular chapters, Macfarlane seeks to identify patterns and make connections to enrich how people might move and think together across landscapes.

The Underland

“Underland is a story of journeys into darkness, and descents made in search of knowledge. It moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe’s birth to the nuclear features of an Anthropocene-to-come. During the deep time voyage undertaken between those two remote points, the line about which the telling folds is the ever-moving present. Across its chapters, in keeping with its subject, extends a subsurface network of echoes, patterns and connections.” (p17)

“For more than fifteen years now, I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery — why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for the love of them — has unfolded unto a project of deep-mapping carried out over five books and around 2,000 pages.” (pp17–18)

Before beginning the journeys in the book, Macfarlane was given two objects, each with a request attached. The first is a heavy, double-cast bronze casket the size of a swan’s egg (what does that even mean?) that contains the ashes of many pages of angry letters. The second is an owl cut from a slice of whalebone (a talisman connoting magic). (p19)

“We are often more tender to the dead than the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.” (p27)

Language and Terminology

Solastalgia is a neologism (by Glenn Albrecht in 2003) that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is described as the lived experience of negatively perceived change. (p317)

The Potawatomi language is abundant with verbs: 70% of its words are verbs (compared to 30% in English). Humans, animals, and trees are not the only thing alive, so are mountains, boulders, winds, and fire. Stories, songs, and rhythms are also animate: they are, they be. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means “to be a bay”, and a bay is only a noun if the water is dead. (p112)

Ilira, an Inuit word Macfarlane first heard in Northern Canada, means “a sense of fear and awe” and carries an implication of the landscape’s sentience (subjective experience) with it. (p362)

The Wood Wide Web

Macfarlane meets with a dying friend and reads aloud “Birches” by Robert Frost in which the snow-white trunks of birches becomes a readying for death and a declaration of life. Note to self: go find the poem. (p87)

“Occasionally you encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on.” His dying friend introduces to him the concept of the wood wide web — or the interrelatedness of trees. When one of a number of trees is sickening or under stress, they can share nutrients by means of an underground system that conjoins their roots beneath the soil, thereby nursing the sick tree back to health. (p87)

Macfarlane introduces a young man researching the world wide wood by the name of Merlin in an interesting way: “there is something faintly antiquarian to him — a distant interest in disciplinary boundaries, a boundless curiosity — and something of the heroic-age plant hunter too.” (p94)

The possibilities of the wood wide web far exceed the basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi though. The fungal network allows plants to distribute resources between one another. Sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest: a dying tree might divest its resources into the network to the benefit of the community or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours. The network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. Anthropologist Anna Tsing likens the below-ground of a forest to “a busy social space” where the interaction of millions of organisms “forms a cross-species world underground.” Next time you walk through a forest, look down; a city lies under your feet. (p98)

The Invisible City

This chapter begins with a description of a fascinating map of the underground Catacombs in Paris. It’s made up of 16 laminated legal-sized pages, or about 10 square feet when tiled. The Invisible City exists across multiple levels of depth, connected to each other by staircases and wells. The junctures between levels are marked on the map with orange rings (wells and rung ladders), blue (well with sheer sides), segmented dark blue circles (staircases). Deeper-down layers are drawing in darker inks to emulate depth. The map’s place names are wide and varying, with examples like “The Room of Cubes”, “The Chamber of Phantoms”, “The Bermudas”, “The Clinic of Aliens”, and “Room Z”. Around the map, boxed-out cartouches tell stories about individual rooms and there are warnings for dangerous conditions. (pp129–131)

Note — I enjoyed this chapter a lot. It was captivating and reminded me of exploring abandoned buildings in my youth.

The Sea as Landscape

Refsvika, Norway has similarities to Newfoundland. Men fished cod in the winter and early spring, pollock and ling at other times. Between 1949 and 1951 — like many of the island communities along Norway’s coastline — the people of Refsvika were “brought in”. This meant they were relocated with the aid of government subsidy to larger settlements — in this case to Sørvågen on the lee side of Moskenes Island. Nothing was wasted: when the families left, the houses were demolished and the timbers and stones were carried by boat to Sørvågen to build new houses. (pp271-272)

“Good Friday on Andøya: my last day with Ingrid and Bjørnar. We have all eaten together: cod’s tongues, cod steaks, saithe fillets, big pink-skinned potatoes that your peel on the fork.” (p321)

“We walk down the shore, treading carefully on the sheet ice that lies over the sloping fields, placing our feet full and flat. The wind from the north is flayingly cold. It bites my ankles, burns my shins. Our breath is steel wool.” (p321)

Ice as Landscape

“Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language, and stories of those who live near it.” (p335)

“Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more.” It remembers forest fires and rising seas. It remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age 110,000 years ago or how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. (pp337–338)

“Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue... The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world — the blue of time...The blue of time is so beautiful that it pulls body and mind towards it.” (p338–339)

Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. The weight on 2,000-year-old ice can reach half-a-ton per square inch. Deeper still in ice 8,000 to 12,000 years old, the pressure becomes so great that air bubbles can no longer survive as vacancies within the structure of the ice. Instead, it becomes an ice-air mixture called clathrate. (pp339–340)

Concluding Remarks

“I think of the many people I have encountered in and throughout the Underland who been committed to shared human work rather than retreat and isolation. Mappers of networks of mutual relation, endeavouring to stitch their thinking into an unfamiliar scale of time and place, seeking not the scattered jewels of personal epiphany but rather to enlarge the possible means by which people might move and think together across landscapes, in responsible knowledge of deep past, deep future, and the inhuman earth.” (p418)