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Katherine Rundell talks ‘possibilityism’ with Belinda Bamber

How did you choose The Golden Mole’s 22

‘living treasures’? They’re all endangered animals – which is true for almost every species on Earth. I wanted to offer a mixture of the unfamiliar, like the narwhal, and a fresh take on some you see daily: the aim being that, once you’ve read about crows being able to operate vending machines, you’ll see them with fresher, sharper eyes. The fi nal criterion was just love: creatures I longed for an excuse to spend a month or two reading about. The golden mole – the only iridescent mammal – is one of my favourites and lent itself to the idea of treasure.

The Golden Mole interweaves philosophy, myth and anecdote. Do you keep a

commonplace book? I do! Several notebooks and cascades of phone notes. Though Frank Cottrell Boyce, a writer I admire hugely, says a diary should be a single sentence: the most interesting, funniest, saddest thing that day

How did your childhood in Zimbabwe

infl uence the book? I loved being in the presence of wild creatures; it felt a privilege and solace if a bird or a rock hyrax or an impala allowed you very briefl y near it. I wanted to imagine what that wonder might look like in adulthood – when it has to be wider, sturdier, tougher and more disciplined, more able to encompass the realities of the world’s chaos.

You’re a Fellow of All Souls Oxford and recently wrote an acclaimed biography of John Donne, yet you fi rst published as

a children’s author. Why? I love children’s books for the huge possibilities they offer for vivid writing, wild imaginings. I fi nd that discipline a delight and a challenge… to distil enormous ideas – about our most vulnerable heart – into something tight and memorable.

Do you worry that for many children the world is fi ltered through a smartphone?

I think we’re right to be sceptical about social media in particular. So many of us,

The Golden Mole is a bestiary of some of the world’s most extraordinary endangered animals

children and adults, use it to calm and distract ourselves, which feels a brittle, diffi cult way to move through the world. If you tap Tiktok and Instagram they ring like money.

You’re donating half of The Golden Mole’s royalties to the World Wildlife Fund and Blue

Ventures. What can we readers do? We’re all now aware of the need to eat less meat, reinvest what money we might have in funds divested of fossil fuels, own less and treat domestic fl ights as the behaviour of the malarially unhinged. But it’s primarily a political problem: we need governments that believe in global cooperation, and have the will, purpose and courage to make bold decisions for the sake of the future of the planet.

Which environmental writers

inspire you? Wendell Berry, Frantz Fanon, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Greta Thunberg, Marilynne Robinson. And fi ction? I recently fell in love with the novels of Yoko Ogawa and The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Your next book? Another children’s novel. I think, after a lot of deletes and false starts, I’ve reached that fantastic feeling of something fi nally taking off.

If you could study another ‘living

treasure’…? In a dream world, I’d love to go to Cuba to see the Bee Hummingbird – the smallest bird in the world, which weighs less than two grams. It has an iridescent throat and is barely the length of a fi nger.

Do you still climb rooftops, walk tightropes

and cartwheel? I no longer start the day with a cartwheel: in my London fl at, I’d collide with the wall. Rooftop climbing is mostly for the joy of seeing a city from above (especially cities like London, where so much of the built landscape is inaccessible, owned by wealthy corporations) and the pleasure of trusting your own body: unmooring your sense of danger from your sense of beauty: trusting your hands and legs to do as you tell them when you’re up high. What makes you optimistic? I’m not sure I’m an optimist, exactly – there are too many, too starkly clear ways for us to destroy ourselves and everything around us – but we have such huge, vertiginously deep potential: the capacity and technologies to bring about vast change for the better. I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist – more, a ‘possibilityist’.

The Golden Mole And Other Living Treasure (Faber, £14.99). Full interview can be found on countryandtownhouse.com n

JOURNEYS INTO THE WILD

WATER courses through biologist Amy-Jane Beer’s deep-dive into the lyrical beauty of Britain’s rivers, as she navigates the loss of a fellow kayaker in The Flow (Bloomsbury, £18.99); low-carbon WANDERING propels Sophie Pavelle’s jauntier tour of climate-change Britain in Forget Me Not (Bloomsbury, £16.99); rewilding WISDOM guides Millie Kerr’s voyage around pioneering eco projects in Wilder (Bloomsbury, £17.99); WETLANDS stir in Fen, Bog & Swamp, Annie Proulx’s passionate defence of miraculous mud-life, oozing from Tudor England to Russia’s Great Mire (HarperCollins, £16.99).