John Burnside

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.

Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation's ledger books through false accounting.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.

I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.

The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions.

It's important to have quiet time and isolation.

Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't.