An Interview with Gareth E Rees, author of Sunken Lands; an exploration of stories about humankind’s relationship with its environment.

In his new book, Gareth E Rees takes us on a journey through sunken lands, “past and present, real and mythical”. His journey begins at the flooded ancient forest at Pett Level. From there, he travels to West Wales, then to the Norfolk Fens, then to the Gulf of Naples, and finally, to Louisiana.  

Rees demands that we take notice of  places where “water and land are embraced in eternal cycles of flood and reclamation, erosion and deposit, destruction and renewal”; places affected by the dramatic flood events of the past, such as those precipitated by the melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 18,000 BCE, or the Storegga Slides, submarine landslides which caused a tsunami to flood the land bridge connecting Britain with mainland  Europe.

In Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds,  Rees traces a deep human connection to floods and rising waters, a connection which spans human history, and is evident in archeology, topography, geology, myth and folklore.

The power of stories

Gareth E Rees has a naturally “anxious brain”. He tells me this from across a small table at a bustling Hanushka Coffee House, rain pouring down outside. “I’m prone to catastrophising things… compulsive horrors, like walking down the road, I’m always imagining falling in on the cars and them smashing my head… on a cliff. I’m a nightmare”. 

Around 10 years ago, Rees’ anxiety fixed on the climate crisis as its effects caved in on his immediate and online surroundings.

Writing his second book, The Stone Tide, he became fixated on the Hastings coastline as an edge-land: unstable, constantly in flux, being eaten away by increasingly violent seas and climatic onslaught despite our efforts to manage it. He remembers the landslip in Rock-a-nore in 2014, and how it contributed to a sense of world-ending. This was exacerbated by ‘doom scrolling’ through endless accounts of unfolding or impending disaster: “Sometimes when I’d flick through, and it was just horrific stories after stories. I had to get to a stage where I had to ration my news to maintain a good frame of mind. I was being triggered by all of it, and it was making me feel like the world was ending around me. Which maybe it is.”

So, when he expressed to his publisher an interest to write a book immersing himself in lands sunken by climatically-induced flooding, he wondered if it was, possibly, a bad idea.

Yet, amidst this anxiety, he wanted to pass down a message to his children, something he could leave them with to deal with an increasingly urgent and existentially-threatening reality. Sunken Lands is not a panicked account of scientific evidence which says “we’re doomed”, nor is it an overly moralistic book, lambasting those responsible. It does not prescribe policy measures we need to take to avert the crisis, but neither does it say we’re all going to be fine.

 Instead, the book outlines a narrative we can tell ourselves about humanity’s relationship to the  environment, a narrative which can provide a foundation for a more harmonious future. This may sound wishy-washy, but he argues convincingly that narrative is powerful; if we can tell a story which elicits an emotional response we can motivate mass action. As Rees says, “we don’t need better facts, we need better stories.”

This feeling that facts are not sufficiently animating is a widely held belief among campaigners. Rebecca Solnit wrote in the Guardian that ‘globally, burning fossil fuels kills almost 9 million people annually, a death toll larger than any recent war. But that death toll is largely invisible for lack of compelling stories about it’. There are thinkers who have used cognitive science to flesh out why this is; George Marshall explains in his book Don’t Even Think About It that “stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: they are the means by which the Emotional Brain makes sense of the information collected by the Rational Brain. People may hold information in the form of data and figures, but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories’. The idea that we have a primary, ‘emotional’ system, which steers our rational system to justify its impulse, has been written about in many popular psychology books; Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and Daniel Kahnman’s Thinking Fast, and Slow. Stories engage our deep emotional system, facts don’t.

A new story

For Rees, the story of our current civilization – the old story – has failed. This is the story of the scientific revolution, of ever-increasing human rationality and objective knowledge of the natural world. It has failed because actions conducted on the basis of its narrative have resulted in “sea levels […] rising faster than they have done for 3,000 years, [with] the UN Secretary General warning of a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale.”

This story says that humans are the latest and most advanced entities borne of a linear evolutionary process, in which we broke ourselves from the shackles of nature, and, discovering reason, became able to control it. Motivated by the ideology of capitalism and profit, humans used and proliferated this story to extract, channel, straighten, sell, raze and manipulate the environment.

How revealing that despite ecological collapse and disaster happening all around us, there is still mass-belief in this story, the latest iteration of which is that humans will use their rationality to save themselves by finding new planets and new technologies to get there.

In contrast, the story Rees tells us is one of deep interdependence with nature. Indeed, he questions whether ‘nature’ should exist as a category at all. Having visited a nature reserve within the Norfolk fens, he reflected that the old story relies on this division, with nature pushed into a corner, contained, protected. Instead Rees’s narrative says “we are inextricably enmeshed. Humans are objects inside bigger objects, like the biosphere, the climate, and the solar system, with smaller objects within us, like bacteria, viruses and fungi. Nature is inside of us, as much as we are inside it, “whether we are in a protected fen or a suburban cul-de-sac.” If we truly believed this story, he says, “we’d each feel every hurtful blow against the biosphere, every oil spill, decimated forest and plume of toxic smoke, as an attack on our own bodies.” 

Rees’s narrative is also about the intricacy and unknowability of the processes that run through and sustain us; “the human and non-human are embroiled in complex interactions on infinite scales”, he says. In Rees’s story, humans are humble, in awe of this intricate system, adaptive to its changes and demands, conscious of its health. Perhaps this requires a belief in a God-like entity, a mother-nature figure, who we revere but do not fully understand.  

In his telling, Rees builds on countless myths from societies that experienced floods, like the tale of the sunken kingdom of the Lowland Hundred – now beneath the water of Cardigan Bay – who’s King was too arrogant to heed warnings of rising seas. Or, the tale of the Choctaw of Mississippi, who were warned of an apocalyptic flood by a spirit, by which the world began anew. At the heart of these myths  is a warning of what went wrong: a mistaken belief in human  rationality and the failure to recognise our “enmeshed existence” within dynamic and intricate natural processes.

And yet through his book, Rees sees himself continuing in a tradition of myth-making. The climatic changes that are occurring, to devastating effect, connect us indubitably with past societies; their experiences are ours, and so are their stories. In fact, Rees argues, when placed in a geological time frame, they are our kin; we exist together in a period which accounts for less than 0.1% of the history of life on Earth. From this perspective, Rees’ story that we have always belonged to nature rather than nature belonging to us is convincing, and makes the latter seem utterly ridiculous.

This article will appear in the upcoming issue of Hastings Independent, to be published Friday 26th April. Editing credits to Serena Ferrari and Ben Bruges.