Binge-watching of boxsets on
BBC iPlayer or Netflix is a growing habit. And binge-listening isn’t far
behind. Podcast series downloadable through BBC Sounds are all the rage (with a
little help from footballer Peter Crouch). Enter Radio 4’s ‘Forest 404’ – hot
off the press as a 27-piece boxset on the fourth day of the fourth month (4
April 2019). This is something I’ve been involved in recently: an experimental
BBC sci-fi podcast that’s a brand-new listening experience because of its
three-tiered structure of drama, factual talk and accompanying soundscape (9 x
3 = 27).
Try
to imagine a world in which not only forests but every last trace of the
natural world as we know it has been erased (almost……). This eco-thriller by
Timothy X. Atack (credits include ‘Dr Who’) is set in the 24th
century following a data crash in the early 21st century called The
Cataclysm (404 is also the error message you get when a website is unavailable).
The action follows lead protagonist Pan (University of Bristol Drama alumna and
‘Doctor Who’ star Pearl Mackie), a sound archivist who archives recordings
surviving from the early 21st century. These include items such as a
speech by President Obama’s on climate change, Neil Armstrong’s remarks after landing on the moon and
Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy
in love’.
Pan is merrily deleting them all (useless and senseless). Until, one day, she
stumbles upon a recording of birdsong in the Sumatran rainforest that
inexplicably grabs her. In fact, she’s
left intoxicated, almost falling in love with it. So begins Pan’s quest to understand its origin and purpose
– not to mention her mission to
reconstruct the meaning of an almost completely eradicated world of nature.
Over the past couple of years,
I’ve been working on a project with the world-famous, Bristol-based BBC Natural
History Unit (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), exploring wildlife
filmmaking over the past quarter-century. We wanted to include and support a
creative dimension going far beyond the project’s more strictly academic and
historical elements. Something poetic and performative that could take the
study of nature at the BBC into new territory, and away from the visual. But
the core theme remains the same: the value of the natural world and its representation
in cultural form. This haunting drama focuses on that cultural value very
closely by exploring an alien and alienating future world without nature – a
world where the only memory of its former existence is preserved in Pan’s sound
archive.
This is a deeply historical
approach that re-unites me with a piece of research I published some time in
the journal Environmental History (2005) what I called the strange
stillness of the past – how sounds, both human and non-human generated, were
overlooked by most historians. ‘Forest 404’ also ties in with another recent
AHRC activity led by my colleague, Dr Victoria Bates. The project was called ‘A
Sense of Place: Exploring Nature and Wellbeing through the Non-Visual Senses,’
and I participated as a volunteer. It was about immersing people in natural
sensescapes using 360-degree sound and smell technologies. The idea is that we
can potentially ‘take nature’ to people who can’t go to it for a first-hand
experience.
With my partners at the BBC
and Arts and Humanities Research Council, I see ‘Forest 404’ as part of an
emerging research area known as the environmental humanities. The starting
point of ‘enviro-hums’ is the conviction that a scientific perspective, no
matter how important, cannot do full justice to the complexity of our many
layered relationships with nature.
The humanities and arts have a
big contribution to make in helping us to appreciate the value of what
ecosystem services researchers call cultural services. This denotes the
so-called non-material benefits we derive from the natural world – its
aesthetic value (beauty), how it inspires imaginative literature, painting and
music, its spiritual significance, and its role in forming cultural identities
and giving us a sense of place. Last spring, Radio 3 broadcast a week-long
celebration of all things forest and trees, following it up with another week
in the autumn. ‘Into the Forest’ was all about how forests have supplied an
almost unlimited source of inspiration for creative activity. ‘Forest 404’
confronts us with the brutal possibility of a world not just without forests
and trees but even lacking a conception of nature. And it makes us think about
how that absence impoverishes us culturally and spiritually as well as the more
obvious ecological dangers we face.
Accompanying the podcast is an ambitious online survey devised by environmental psychologists at the University of Exeter and operated by The Open University. Data on how we respond to nature has previously concentrated on the visual. This focus on natural soundscapes will add a fresh dimension to what we already know about how contact with nature benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Give the podcast a listen. Then please do the survey – over 7,000 people have already done so. It takes less than 10 minutes.
Full details can be found on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06tqsg3
Peter
Coates, Professor of American and Environmental History
