I am heeding the cry of planet Earth and will wield my pen in the war on climate change

Yesterday, while looking at our weanling cattle, I encountered some hawks flying over the farm.

They were in unison with the Earth, hunting, living and creating new life by these fields. There was, on the farm, a unison of nature, and it reminded me – even if I did not already need reminding – that the environment around us is our most precious commodity.

I care for the health of these creatures, our creatures both wild and domesticated. To care for another creature on this planet requires, I think, some semblance of love and affection. That is the basic ingredient of being a shepherd or cattle farmer, as I have learned over this intimate learning season.

Pope Francis wrote in his climate encyclical that the fate of creation is tied to the faith of all humanity.

Even the spiritual leader has talked about the dangers to health of pesticides and other irresponsible wastes leading to illnesses in children. He said we are mortgaging our future while getting ever sicker because we are not in unity with our home.

So I have come up with a new manifesto – a personal manifesto for the times we are in. The world, my world and yours needs more stories from the Earth.

Every decision we make on this Earth is an ecological choice – from the act of eating meat to the decision to recycle our waste. Health – true, real health – is a wealth that I wish to give to these farm animals and wild ones.

It is why I suppose I have been thinking that writing ecological, environmental works is the best course of action for me as a writer and as a person with a voice.

A few months ago, I travelled to northern Spain to document the journey of Atlantic salmon up the rivers of Asturias, but the salmon were no longer in the rivers, they had been fished out of the waters.

In my whole research trip there, fishermen and those who live by the river told me they cried about the loss of the salmon. There was a missing part of their world. This vacancy made me despondent at first.

Sadness haunted me in my days there, but then something else happened. I was radicalised.

As US novelist Wendell Berry says in his Jefferson lecture “it all turns on affection”. The soil, the farm, the animals. Our parents, I can see now, teach us the affection of the world, and if we are lucky, the affection for the world. My mother, for example, has taught me how to care for the animals. That less is more in this venture. And that our relationship runs deep. That we must, in short, not extract ourselves from the business of life. We must be part of it.

It is why, I suppose, I have found myself reading more environmental works, watching environmental films and documentaries. Because I feel we need stories from the embattled Earth.

Having finished writing about myself and unpacking a whole life, I see now that I need to take up my pen again to write about something bigger, something that calls us all to act – the cry of the Earth.

Being environmental is still a choice we have in the developed West, but that choice has already been removed from people in other parts of the world. The environment in, say, the Horn of Africa, has already turned away from growth and renewal.

Successive rains have not come. Crops and animals have died. Now people are dying too.

Not seeing those fish in those rivers woke me up to the care of our common home and taught me this is the most important battle to be a part of.

Seamus Heaney, no stranger to nature and animals, once said there was “a poetry of the living present”. Those stanzas and lines can only be written on an Earth that is not on an ecological edge.

When I write now, I will write about this environment that we live in.

In travelling down my local river for my last book, I saw a river full of animal life – a river that needed to be protected for the next generation.

I want my children and theirs to see the kingfishers, to see the brown trout, to know the intimacy of water and to know too that we are not above this world. We are a part of it.

Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce Native American chief, said “the Earth and myself are of one mind”. I am coming to that great man’s understanding that the measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same.

As he said: “Good words do not last long unless they amount to something.” We are called to act to share truly in the Earth.

We are all being called now to play our role in the song of life. For me, it will be through my books. Whether in fiction or fact, I want to document this world we live in and ensure that through those words we can all be radicalised in this new manifesto of the Earth. I hope you’ll join me. The time has never been more important.