Science begins in poetry…

Nature and Darwin

Ruth’s latest sequence of poems, Watershed, is on water, ranging from the scandal engulfing UK rivers to water in myth, to water as metaphor, as the unconscious, and the global crisis of water in nature and climate catastrophe. She is currently finishing The Elephant in the Room, a non-fiction book on Asian elephants to follow her non-fiction work on tiger conservation and her novel on king cobra conservation. She is a Life Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, has served as one of its Trustees and supports its conservation workl and served as Trustee for UK conservation charity New Networks for Nature. She is on the Board of Zoophilologica: Polish Journal for Animal Studies.

For her PhD on Greek tragedy and thought, she researched the history of medicine and Greek  Hippocratic writings. Natural history was part of her family background: the love of poetry she discovered as a child went hand in hand with love of nature. In 2001, researching her conservation-based memoir, Tigers in Red Weather, she began studying conservation biology and zoology, and included more science in her poetry: she wrote an essay on their relationship for the Guardian. Her book on migration features the complexities of cell migration, the physiology and psychology of bird and animal migration: the poems and essays reflect her interest in genetics, zoology and the impact of climate change and degrading habitat on migrating birds.

Her grandmother Nora Barlow was a botanist, grand-daughter and first editor of Charles Darwin. Ruth remembers her in an essay on the flower named after her, and in the Introduction to her verse biography Darwin,  A Life in Poems. She has written an Introduction herself to two of Darwin’s works, The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species. And when she first explored Asian forests, she took On the Origin of Species with her. 

‘I realized,’ she wrote later, ‘as I was kayaking rather fearfully down a jungle river in Laos, that while my great-great-grandfather’s journey, through similar terrain but on a different continent, resulted in the understanding of how species came to be, my own journey was a quest to understand how species go extinct.’ She visited wildlife research stations, talked to field zoologists in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Russia, Laos and Sumatra, and gave her tiger book a detailed Index which stresses the vital role played by science in wildlife conservation. Her reading of Darwin in those forests, as well as memories of her grandmother Nora, went into her work on Charles Darwin - her verse biography of him, and her BBC Radio 4 series Darwin My Ancestor, 

Her first novel Where the Serpent Lives, funded by a British Council Darwin Now Award, focussed on field zoologists in India. She researched king cobra conservation, in Karnataka’s King Cobra Research Station, and reviews of the book commented on the vivid nature writing. ‘A novel you will not lightly forget: only Emily Brontë has embraced Padel’s radical and sympathetic inclusiveness of creaturely life’ (Guardian). ‘A nature lover’s delight… compelling, acute, lyrical’ (India Today).

Her poetry collection Emerald, a farewell to her mother, another botanist and passionate naturalist, mines the meanings of ‘green’, and closes with a vision of the importance of nature and natural history in all our lives.  

In 2011-12, she explored the biology, myths, habitat and symbolism of British wild animals in a popular series of radio essays for BBC 3, Wild Things. From 2011-2015, to spread awareness of the conservation work done by the Zoological Society of London, she curated a series of Writers’ Talks, partnering a well-known author with an endangered wild animal, and a zoologist who spoke about the animal’s biology and conservation.

In 2017, she followed David Attenborough and Robert Macfarlane in curating an exhibition for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative in the Attenborough Building, Cambridge: a series in which figures allied to the environment movement chart their personal journeys into the science and practice of conservation.

“A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural word invests itself in our experience.” — Telegraph