Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet

This one has knocked me sideways: on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I’ve read all year… It’s a really brave examination of self and of humankind, but ultimately it’s a beautiful love letter to the Earth.

- Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio

This is a book about our relationship with the planet that sustains our lives. From London to Norfolk, the Falkland Islands to Africa, McNeil’s limpid prose conjures a lifetime of encounters with an environment breaking under the stress of human activity. Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect.

- Julia Bell, author of 'Massive' and 'Hymnal'

Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil’s brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change. McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. In this book, she describes her diverse adventures, including touring the cloud forests of Costa Rica, training as a professional safari guide in Kenya, joining a scientific expedition to Greenland, trekking the savannas of Namibia and South Africa, exploring the Falkland Islands, and spending months on the ice fields of Antarctica with a movie crew. Her language is fresh and probing. She marvels as a herd of impala “chevron over the land as they perform faultless arabesques,” observes the “gruff seagulls stutter[ing] outside,” and considers the “scar of bustards in the sky” and the “whisper of the swishing land-sea-grass in the wind.” McNeil writes often about the transformative power of land, which she describes as “a spirit mentor, an aggrieved giant white bird, an old, old will.” She stresses the impacts of climate change, which she sees as the tragic consequences of humanity’s destruction of the planet for profit. She predicts a future where the emerald grasslands of Kenya are cracked and tarred and the “hardscrabble” town of Ilulissat, Greenland, is a mecca like Paris when much of the planet is too hot to survive. She writes, briefly, of conservation successes in Costa Rica, where 25 percent of the land has been set aside for national parks and natural areas. But her emphasis is on documenting the effects of climate change, not proposing solutions. Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change.

- Kristen Rabe, Foreword Reviews

In this meditative essay collection, McNeil draws from decades of travel to the world’s most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she’s recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose: a group of rhinos approach, “sweeping back and forth like a cadre of Mennonites scything the fields”; waves raking a reef off the coast of Kenya “appear as a lace hem to an endless blue garment.” McNeil’s deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It’s captivating stuff.

- Publishers Weekly

In LATITUDES Jean McNeil evokes the elusive and vanishing places she has, in a lifetime as a writer, conservationist and teacher, given herself over to - the Antarctic, Greenland, the Namibian desert. These remote and elemental places survive just on the periphery of the Anthropocene era, which has gripped and is smothering the Earth that sustains us. Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse - and sometimes hear - what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance. McNeil's life time of exploratory journeys have taken her into landscapes that vanishingly few of us will ever see. In shimmering prose, and with her fiercely ethical and sharp eye, McNeil conjures maps of lands known and unknown and, in her search for a way to write outside of the narrowness of human perception, of the soul. It is rare that one feels so strongly the writer as companion and guide, but in LATITUDES, that is what Jean McNeil is. Her shimmering prose, which walks us through the most remote of lands and sails us over the darkest of oceans - both psychic and literal - gives solace and new ways to imagine how we might live cooperatively with our planetary home. How we might both love and fear it. How we might protect it. LATITUDES is a book of great beauty. Both elegiac and hopeful, it is both tribute and testament to the places Jean has loved, feared, attended to, listened to, and felt with such nuance.

- Margie Orford