Nature Writing: conversation with Joanna Pocock
The untamed part

For two years, gripped by a profound existential vertigo, Joanna Pocock leaves her London life behind for the wide-open expanses of Montana, accompanied by her husband and daughter. As she confronts her own inner upheavals, she measures herself against the myth of the American West—shaped by ideals of wilderness and freedom—while also uncovering its shadow side, where tensions, contradictions, and excess hold sway.

As great herds vanish, rivers and grazing lands grow increasingly polluted, and the Anthropocene continues to tally its devastations—with the tacit approval of many who see such losses as the cost of modernity—the spirit of the land reveals itself in more unexpected ways. Pocock also seeks out “peripheral dissidents”: those who dare to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world and ensuring its survival, even if it means stepping beyond the law. Advocates of rewilding, practitioners of revived ancestral skills, and proponents of ecosexuality populate the pages of Surrender —a journey against the grain of established civilization, a quest for lucidity and humility, if not joy.

Her second book, Greyhound, extends this meditation on the changing American landscape, probing the political responsibilities of art and literature in the face of ecological catastrophe.