The poetry of nature calling humanity back home

One of the most beautiful poems about the magical pull of nature has to be Irish poet Seamus Heaney's ‘Death of a Naturalist’. The poem is about a festering flax dam, pungent and alive with dragonflies, butterflies and frogspawn. In the persona's young imagination, the dam is a place of endless wonder.

The boy collects frogspawn and delights in watching it become tadpoles, then frogs. But after learning about reproduction and the mechanics of life in school, he returns to the dam to find that the frogs are no longer enchanting but threatening.

The poem evokes rural life with extraordinary power, reminding us that as we grow older, we often acquire knowledge that quietly robs us of a child's primal fascination with the world around us. Nature has slowly become somewhere we visit rather than the ecosystem in which we live.

Through the poem, Heaney, who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for works of "lyrical beauty and ethical depth", offers a fitting creed for our age.

We are living on the cusp of one of the greatest leaps in human history. Ours is perhaps the last generation born into an ambience of verdant forests, crystal clear streams and the mysterious life-giving magic of the natural world even as we usher the next generation into a world dominated by shopping malls, fast food and glowing screens.

We are a people straddling two worlds. Many of us older folk walked barefoot throughout our childhood. That was not necessarily an age of poverty and want. It was also a beautiful world, a world when thousands of birds chirped from trees everywhere you turned to look.

A world where clean water oozed from the bowels of the earth, gathered into streams as it coursed downhill, merged into roaring rivers before eventually finding its way to the sea.

Young boys and girls played on grassy knolls, filling their lungs with fresh air, scenes that Kenyan environmentalist, founder of the Green Belt Movement and Africa's first female Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Muta Maathai vividly recalls in her autobiography, Unbowed: A Memoir.

That world was, however, far from perfect. People did not walk barefoot because they consciously sought the magical embrace of Mother Earth.

In truth, most children longed for their first pair of shoes. That yearning is memorably captured in Arthur Gakwandi's novel Kosiya Kifefe, where the protagonist delights in kicking dew-covered grass rather than washing his feet after receiving his first pair of shoes on joining secondary school.

Kosiya Kifefe’s story is in many ways the story of many adults you see today sipping exotic drinks in Nairobi's malls.

Nor was that earlier and now seemingly ending world gentle. Many of those who grew up in the era of telegrams, public telephone booths and the old face-me matatus, where passengers sat on narrow benches facing one another while others squeezed into the aisle, swaying with every pothole as they clung to an overhead iron bar, endured a brutal childhood.

We were beaten at home by parents whose sense of parental responsibility was shaped by the colonial experience. At school we were whacked sore by teachers trained to beat the African daylights out of us while turning us into worshippers of European languages at the expense of our own. Children caught speaking their mother tongues were sometimes forced to wear crude sashes fashioned from old gunny sacks bearing the words "I am an idiot".

Today's children inhabit a completely different universe. These digital natives learn to manipulate smartphones almost before they can speak.

They have little idea that only a few decades ago communicating with someone 400 kilometres away meant writing a letter, buying stamps, posting it and waiting weeks, sometimes months, for a reply.

Today we speak to relatives abroad as though they were next door. They scarcely know a world where villages disappeared into darkness after sunset and homework was done under the dim glow of a paraffin tin lamp, if the family could afford paraffin at all.

That earlier generation lived much closer to wildlife, which explains why their moral and literary imagination was shaped by fables. In the evening fireside tales, animals spoke, reasoned and schemed like human beings as the elders taught children about greed, courage, deceit and generosity.

 Today's parents worry instead about whether the cartoons their children watch or the strangers they meet online are corrupting their minds.

The tragedy, as many in the older generation see it, is that while we have advanced spectacularly in concrete, steel and digital technology, we seem to be retreating from the fundamentals. Nature, even for people who grew up herding cattle, hunting or harvesting traditional vegetables, has become somewhere we visit rather than the ecosystem in which we live.

Children encounter nature mainly in school sand pits or during Christmas trips upcountry. The rest of the year they are glued to screens or eating junk food in shopping malls.

Even we who grew up in a greener, cooler world have become guilty of the same disconnect. We interact with nature mainly during official tree-planting exercises or weekend pilgrimages to Karura Forest and other scenic destinations, excursions that all too often end as another excuse for junk food, selfies and copious amounts of alcohol.

Lost in this tech-driven civilisation is the stubborn fact that we remain living creatures sustained by other living things. Trees provide the oxygen we breathe. Our ancestors survived through indigenous knowledge of herbs, drought-resistant crops and other forms of heritage fast disappearing into the misty past. Mercifully, literature continues to call us back to this forgotten wisdom.

Henry ole Kulet's Vanishing Herds portrays a Maasai community confronting climate change, prolonged drought and the disappearance of both wildlife and a pastoral way of life. Dr Isaac Kalua Green's memoir, Green for Life, is also a case of nature calling us back home.

My own view is that, since we cannot escape the fact that we are part of nature, we should immortalise the best of the older world in our literature for those who come after us.

As clogged drainage systems trap plastic and waste, turning parts of Nairobi into foul-smelling dumps patrolled by fearless rats, let us celebrate a time when rivers flowed unhindered from source to sea and marine life flourished.

Let us teach children that trees are not merely timber waiting to become furniture or buildings but our oldest relatives in the great web of life. Before children learn the science of nature, let them first learn its wonder. Let them discover the enchantment that Seamus Heaney's young naturalist found before knowledge replaced awe.

Only then will they grow into adults who conserve nature not because they were instructed to do so, but because they first fell in love with it.