Julian Hoffman
on Finding Our Place in an Interconnected World
by Sandra Yeyati
Julian Hoffman is an award-winning fiction and creative nonfiction writer who explores the connections between humans and the natural world, underscoring an inescapable need for conservation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Hoffman’s first book, The Small Heart of Things, won the 2012 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.
In his book Irreplaceable, Hoffman celebrates the imperiled places that are increasingly vanishing from the world, including coral reefs, tallgrass prairies, ancient woodlands and meadows, along with the many species that live there such as nightingales, elephant seals, water voles, redwoods, hornbills and lynxes. It was the Highly Commended Finalist for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. His latest book is Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece.
What was the impetus for writing Lifelines?
I wanted to tell the story of the remarkable Prespa basin, where my wife and I live in Greece. But I also wanted to tell a bigger story of the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world, to explore how our lifelines are entwined. I wanted to see what we get right and what we very often get wrong, and how we might go about healing some of those divisions and building stronger and more resilient bridges between the two, because our lives are dependent on the wild world that we nest inside.
What are the most salient characteristics of the Prespa basin?
Prespa is a unique crossroads place where three countries come together around two ancient lakes that hold colonies of Dalmatian and Great White pelicans. While my wife and I live in Greece, on the other side of the borders are Albania and North Macedonia. This is also where Mediterranean species meet their Balkan relatives in these colder mountains and where a geological line down the middle of the basin separates limestone on one side from granite on the other. This geological collision means that different flora and invertebrate communities can coexist in the same place.
Because of the complex demographic and political histories of the region, and the borders that divide this watershed, it’s a place where conflict has often left terrible legacies that have been written into the landscape itself. But—and this is one of the key themes in the book—it’s also a place where bridges are being slowly and gradually built. Just like those other crossroads of geology and different communities of wild species, I believe borders are not only points of division, but also places of meeting and connection, if we choose them to be. The Prespa transboundary region is showing us a way forward, slowly and not without problems, that the key to change is to recognize that we are connected beyond borders. Climate change, for example, doesn’t recognize a line in the water but greatly affects us all.
You posit that humans need to reimagine their definition of home. Could you expand on that?
In Lifelines, I write of what happened to us when the chimney of our house caught fire here in Greece. I was frozen with fear and panic, not knowing what to do. There was smoke everywhere, making it hard to see, but through the smoke, suddenly people in our village came running to help extinguish the fire and save our home.
Not only were we deeply grateful, but that experience also got me thinking about how the world might look if we were able to extend our sense of home beyond the physical dwellings that we live in to the wider places around us. What if we formed bonds with a greater landscape that were just as fierce and carried the same sense of obligation to protect it that our fellow villagers showed that day when they came out to save a house?
Where do you find glimmers of hope?
When I was writing Irreplaceable, I met people who were working day after day to save some wild place or species from destruction. Sometimes, it was a place as small and seemingly unimportant as an urban park, but for those local people, that place meant the world to them, and what amazed and fascinated me was that every one of the people I spent time with were just ordinary folks.
We all have a capacity for the extraordinary, to help bring about change through small actions, but the key to that is to stand together with other people. Through community and coalition, we become a much stronger force, no matter how small we might think ourselves to be, and in that sense, those glimmers of hope are absolutely everywhere, either in action today or in the potential for action tomorrow.
Sandra Yeyati is the national editor of Natural Awakenings.