Nature Writing: conversation with Stanisław Łubieński and Iida Turpeinen

"Revisiting Natural History"

What roles do stories play in shaping our perception of living beings? How can narrating extinction or the fragility of creatures today awaken and heal inter-species bonds?

When Iida Turpeinen comes across the gigantic skeleton of an eighteenth-century sea cow at a museum in Helsinki—discovered following a shipwreck off the coast of Alaska and wiped out by human greed barely thirty years later—she turns it into the touching heroine of her novel "Beasts of the Sea" (MacLehose, 2025). This odyssey of Steller’s sea cow traces, across three centuries, the path of explorers, naturalists, zoologists, artists, and other collectors: their adventures captivate even as they raise questions about the effects of scientific bias and the human impact on ecosystems.

In a variation on the emotional and intellectual power of stories from the natural world, Stanisław Łubieński invites us to look up at the sky, to observe what dwells there and to remember what once did. As a humanist ornithologist, he passionately traces the most striking bonds between birds and humans, from cinema to first-hand expeditions, from the arts to history, stirring up, in a whirlwind of sounds and colours, empathy for a winged life that is fading away. A dialogue running from wonder to awakening, in which the melancholy cry of species already extinct or living on borrowed time echoes within our consciousness.

Fondation Jan Michalski, 30 September 2026