Julian Hoffman is an award-winning fiction and creative nonfiction writer who explores the connections between humans and the natural world, underscoring an inescapable need for conservation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Hoffman’s first book, The Small Heart of Things, won the 2012 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.

In his book Irreplaceable, Hoffman celebrates the imperiled places that are increasingly vanishing from the world, including coral reefs, tallgrass prairies, ancient woodlands and meadows, along with the many species that live there such as nightingales, elephant seals, water voles, redwoods, hornbills and lynxes. It was the Highly Commended Finalist for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. His latest book is Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece.

 

What was the impetus for writing Lifelines?

I wanted to tell the story of the remarkable Prespa basin, where my wife and I live in Greece. But I also wanted to tell a bigger story of the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world, to explore how our lifelines are entwined. I wanted to see what we get right and what we very often get wrong, and how we might go about healing some of those divisions and building stronger and more resilient bridges between the two, because our lives are dependent on the wild world that we nest inside.

 

What are the most salient characteristics of the Prespa basin?

Prespa is a unique crossroads place where three countries come together around two ancient lakes that hold colonies of Dalmatian and Great White pelicans. While my wife and I live in Greece, on the other side of the borders are Albania and North Macedonia. This is also where Mediterranean species meet their Balkan relatives in these colder mountains and where a geological line down the middle of the basin separates limestone on one side from granite on the other. This geological collision means that different flora and invertebrate communities can coexist in the same place.

Because of the complex demographic and political histories of the region, and the borders that divide this watershed, it’s a place where conflict has often left terrible legacies that have been written into the landscape itself. But—and this is one of the key themes in the book—it’s also a place where bridges are being slowly and gradually built. Just like those other crossroads of geology and different communities of wild species, I believe borders are not only points of division, but also places of meeting and connection, if we choose them to be. The Prespa transboundary region is showing us a way forward, slowly and not without problems, that the key to change is to recognize that we are connected beyond borders. Climate change, for example, doesn’t recognize a line in the water but greatly affects us all.

 

Can you describe the loss of a habitat or species that holds special meaning for you?

So many habitats and species are at risk of extinction, and that list is growing daily. But one threatened species I feel close to that lives here in Greece is the Egyptian vulture. It’s a remarkably intelligent black and white bird, with a bright-yellow facial mask and beak, that has an ability to use tools, picking up stones in its beak to shatter thick-shelled eggs. In ancient times, it was considered sacred by the pharaohs of Egypt because it helped keep their local environment clean by disposing of dead animals, which could have been the source of pests and disease.

I’m reading a book right now by Edward Lear about his 1848 journey by horse through Greece and Albania that mentions a black and white vulture—the Egyptian vulture. He doesn’t say, “Wow! This is a very unusual and extraordinary looking bird.” He simply mentions it because, back then, it was such a common bird to be almost unremarkable.

Today, there are only six pairs of Egyptian vultures in all of Greece. That kind of catastrophic decline is shocking, but it also forces us to confront the idea of shifting baselines. We psychologically normalize a depleted world because of what we experience in our own lifetimes. It’s what the writer Julia Whitty calls “the phenomenon of forgetfulness.”

I cannot begin to understand the abundance of the past—what Lear saw when Egyptian vultures were found throughout Greece. Children are born into a world which has lost so much of its biological richness that this is their normal, their baseline. The 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins summed it up best when he said, “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

 

How do you process the grief of this extinction?

There is no grief without love, and there is no love without grief. They are dependent on one another, and it’s important to hold that connection close. The grief we feel is because of the deep love we have for the natural world around us, and that love can be an immensely protective power. In my wider body of work, I’ve learned from people that, because of their love of a species or place, its loss might mean grief, but it can also activate extraordinary energies that enable them to harness their capacities for protection, preservation and, hopefully, for a transformational and positive kind of change.

 

You posit that humans need to reimagine their definition of home. Could you expand on that?

In Lifelines, I write of what happened to us when the chimney of our house caught fire here in Greece. I was frozen with fear and panic, not knowing what to do. There was smoke everywhere, making it hard to see, but through the smoke, suddenly people in our village came running to help extinguish the fire and save our home.

Not only were we deeply grateful, but that experience also got me thinking about how the world might look if we were able to extend our sense of home beyond the physical dwellings that we live in to the wider places around us. What if we formed bonds with a greater landscape that were just as fierce and carried the same sense of obligation to protect it that our fellow villagers showed that day when they came out to save a house?

In very atomized societies where private property and individual freedoms are elevated over collective well-being, the commons are often forgotten. And yet, as pandemic lockdowns showed us when people valued so greatly those nearby green and blue spaces that were literal lifelines to many, it’s possible to shift the narrative so that belonging becomes a much bigger and more inclusive thing.

There was an incredible study published a few years ago in which researchers looked at over 15,000 different places in Australia, Canada and Brazil, and it showed that the population numbers of wild species were highest on lands that were managed either entirely or partly by Indigenous communities, while nature reserves, which we often uphold as the zenith of nature preservation, ran second.

What interests me about that study is that Indigenous people are often engaged with a much larger and more extensive network of lands and waters, a much bigger homeland. And I wonder what lessons the rest of us might learn from that more inclusive sense of home. How can we embrace places that exist beyond the physical footprint of just our house or our village and consider the connections we have with our wider landscape?

 

What is the importance of storytelling?

Extinction literally means the nullification of everything about a species. And with this disappearance, we lose all the grace, power and vitality of that part of the living world. I feel a great responsibility to bring some of these threatened wild species and places to the page. Stories are the engines of connection. They are how we’ve long communicated and exchanged ideas and perspectives. Long before the written word, we told stories around fires and painted stories on cave walls.

But not all stories have traditionally been accorded equal value, particularly in the Western world, where stories have frequently reflected centers of power—the stories of influential white men, or of winners over losers—neglecting the places and people that come from what are often seen as the peripheries. The point I try to make in Lifelines is that for those living on the “margins”, their home places are the very heart of the world for them. In a time of increasing climate chaos and biodiversity loss, it’s hugely important to elevate these other stories because of the knowledge and perspectives encoded within them or the sheer value of the worlds they’re describing, so that we can understand other ways of being that might be less harmful and more respectful of the living world.

 

Where do you find glimmers of hope?

There are glimmers of hope everywhere. When I was writing Irreplaceable, I met people who were working day after day to save some wild place or species from destruction. Sometimes, it was a place as small and seemingly unimportant as an urban park, but for those local people, that place meant the world to them, and what amazed and fascinated me was that every one of the people I spent time with were just ordinary folks. Very few of them were even professional ecologists or scientists. For the most part, they were bus drivers, teachers, machine operators or taxi drivers, and throughout the course of that journey, which took me to places around the world, I witnessed many of those places being saved because of the efforts of ordinary people carrying out extraordinary acts.

We all have a capacity for the extraordinary, to help bring about change through small actions, but the key to that is to stand together with other people. Through community and coalition, we become a much stronger force, no matter how small we might think ourselves to be, and in that sense, those glimmers of hope are absolutely everywhere, either in action today or in the potential for action tomorrow.

 

Sandra Yeyati is the national editor of Natural Awakenings.

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