Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist, author, broadcaster and naturalist whose self-confessed mission is to reconnect people to the world around them, and to the nature at their feet. In nowhere is this clearer than in his new publication, Common Ground, which looks at a small, seemingly nondescript patch of ground near Cowen’s home over the course of a year. In a fascinating mixture of analytical prose and personal, lyrical writing, Cowen spends cold dawn mornings, sultry summer days and long dusky evenings with a myriad of creatures in his small patch of the countryside, proving that the wilderness is sometimes much closer than we all think. I begin by asking him if he’d planned his latest book, or whether it simply evolved from his experiences. “A writer writes!” Cowen replies. “This book just happened.” Having lost his job in the recession and moved away from London to Yorkshire, Cowen went freelance, giving him more time to wander around a small tangle of meadow and woodland behind his house making field notes. “I eventually realised both work and the landscape was important, and realised there were stories there,” he says.
Common Ground looks at a new way of writing and reading about nature and how we interact with it by focusing on one small spot of land, forcing the reader to examine and experience it in detail. “As everything that our world is predicated on slowly dissolves, people are looking for something greater. They can find that in nature.
“We need to draw maps, to lose maps, to redraw old ones – we need to be outside!” Cowen tells me fervently. “When I worked in London, I felt I’d lost my connection to the outside world – I needed to get back to it. I used to go up to the moors with [co-author] Leo, just to escape the city and to meet with nature.” The pressures of modern living can all too easily squash those connections, especially with internship and graduate schemes pulling students into the city. “But remembering the outside is important”, Cowen says. “It shapes who we are.”
And Rob Cowen doesn’t just write about this reconnection to nature through stories; he lives it, too. Cowen is director of Untold, a travel and content consultancy that focuses on the importance of storytelling in a digital landscape. As well as this, he writes weekly outdoors columns for both The Telegraph and The Independent. Cowen tells me that he sees this weaving of business and authorship as important in the modern age; “I’m not separating them but bringing them together. You always need to be doing other things!” Travel is important to Cowen in journalism, and narrative and storytelling are ‘emotional currencies’ for travel, he tells me. “Even Google now priorities stories. They’re looking for new storytellers, new travel brands. They’re acknowledging that stories are important.”
Using his small patch of common ground as a microcosm for the world at large, Cowen shows us where we fit. “It is a celebration of edgelands, of truly wild places. You don’t have to go to national parks to find these places. Local wildernesses have human fingerprints on them in a much more natural way – they are places that have been recolonised after we’ve left them.” Cowen teaches us that these brownfield, edgeland sites are magical, absorbing places to explore. “It shows the otherworldliness of nature, that it’s indifferent to us. We’re just part of a biosphere. As the world becomes a busier place and people look for more ways to ground themselves, these places will become even more important.”
These may seem like big ideas to swallow, but Cowen’s distinctly lyrical writing mixed in with sharp analysis of the natural world makes the book effortless reading. Cowen tells me that taking a personal approach to the writing, integrating his own stories such as the birth of his son into his field notes, helped him to better interpret the landscape. “The difference between a report on the landscape and writing about it is the personal connection,” Cowen says. “It can very intense, very close – a billion interactions, and I have to reduce this into something to get it across to the reader. Using poetic language stops it from becoming a list. It also makes this style very individual. It works for this book, but maybe not the next.”
It’s clear from our conversation that Rob Cowen is someone intimately connected with the landscape. Buzzing with stories about his travels out in the edgelands of Yorkshire, he tells me that as little as 20 minutes in a natural environment reduces stress – something I might try in my next essay crisis. Our discussion mirrors his book: full of small joys, unexpected discoveries, and absorbing tangents. Common Ground is indeed a wonderful book, and well worth a read. If you want a tip, read it outside, out amongst the trees or in some hidden thicket by river. You’ll thank me later.
