Nature writing in Britain is probably as popular as it has ever been, but it remains critically undervalued. It is also frequently misunderstood. One source of misunderstanding is the view that nature writing supports the myth of stable order --social, moral, ecological-- while another is that it performs a consolatory aesthetics designed primarily to restore its readers to the natural world. These views overlook the significant conflicts that have been embedded within British nature writing ever since it emerged as a modern form in the late eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts are coeval with modernity. How can we know 'nature', and is it really possible to describe it? To what extent is 'nature' a projection of our own individual and collective (national) imaginings? How much can we appreciate it when there is so little of it left? The product of a collaboration between four leading scholars in the field, this project will be the first full-length study of its kind of modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White's seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. Between the two lies the jagged history of a genre that emerges under the sign of a triple crisis: the crisis of the environment; the crisis of representation; and the crisis of modernity itself. Emphasis will be placed on non-fictional prose, not because it is the 'truest' form of nature writing, but because it brings out one of the genre's most fundamental tensions: between the desire to set up a mimetic relation to the natural world and the awareness of the impossibility of doing so, for 'nature' is always other to what we imagine it to be, even if we are a part of it ourselves. Methods will be drawn from environmental history and philosophy as well as literary criticism, working together in the spirit of the environmental humanities, which seek to show how text- and discourse-based perspectives on culture, ethics, and history can work together with more empirical forms of scientific research, e.g. those connected with ecology, to produce enhanced understandings of changing human interactions with the natural world. The project will offer fresh readings of some of the classic texts of British nature writing, interpreting these in the light of current understandings of fractured subjectivity, post-equilibrium ecology, and the tangled relationship between humans and other animals in what some recent critical theorists have taken to calling an increasingly 'post-human', even a definitively 'post-natural', world. These understandings are seen by some as underlying the so-called 'new nature writing' that has emerged in Britain over roughly the last three decades; but this writing is not as 'new' as it appears, and one of the tasks of the project will be to confirm the historical grounding of contemporary debates. Only by seeing nature writing historically, it will be argued, can it be defended against the peremptory view that it practises a naive realism, or the hasty conclusion that it adopts a largely devotional attitude to the natural world. On the contrary, nature writing is a highly self-reflexive form: well aware of its own limited understandings, finely attuned to the inadequacy of its own language, and keenly conscious of the illusory nature of its attempts to achieve a three-way reconciliation between self, text, and world. Whether nature writing has potential to transform the world it describes is moot, but nature writing is not an escapist form and the project -- which will combine academic work with a variety of public engagement activities involving co-participants of all backgrounds and ages -- will show how it engages productively with a modern world that is both inhabited by possibly irremediable crisis and haunted by possibly irretrievable loss.