I was visiting Victoria while teaching a course, Developing Environmental Understanding, at nearby Royal Roads University. “And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: A word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place.” There’s a corollary, of course, between endangered species, threatened landscapes, and endangered landscape terms, and what concerns Macfarlane most is that we are losing the sensibility, beauty, local knowledge, descriptive natural history, and perceptual experience contained in these words. MacFarlane seeks to redress that trend by resurrecting the extraordinary landscape lexicon that is now endangered. He explains that he was originally inspired to develop such a collection after noticing that a recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary for Children replaced numerous natural history related words with newer, trendy, tech-oriented words. A work of words that would encourage responsible place-making, that would keep us from slipping off into abstract space, and keep us from all that would follow such a slip.” MacFarlane implores his readers: “We need now, urgently, a Counter Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world-a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and should help us listen. I started reading the lucid essays that connect these wonderful glossaries. Landmarks is a taxonomy of several thousand words, organized according to the following sections-flatlands, uplands, water lands, coastlands, underlands, edge lands, earth lands, and woodlands. And the first word I saw was “cuilbhean.” It’s a Gaelic term that describes a “cup-shaped whirl in a stream or eddy. A random flip brought me to a section of words describing the water’s surface. I was captured by Macfarlane’s mission-to collect as many landscape words as possible from the various languages of the British Isles.

The cover and title were sufficiently appealing so I decided to flip through the pages. I’ve been slowly drifting away from traditional “nature writing” in recent years and at first glance I was deliberating whether to look inside the book. The new, paperback version of Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks was featured at the checkout counter. There’s a timeless quality about a classic bookshop.

I was reminded of the blissful hours I spent in Brentano’s mid-town Manhattan bookshop many decades ago. The stacks are neatly displayed amongst lovely, wooden tables in an elegant, stately building. Last summer I was browsing the shelves at Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia.

The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber