What were you doing at the tail end of the pandemic? Perhaps you were finding your legs again, exploring the world, or perhaps you were reaching out to your friends. Yuvan Aves, environmentalist and musician from Chennai, was walking — in the spaces between land and water, in the places between grief and recovery, in intertidal zones that exist on the beach. In Delhi, I walked too — in scrub forest, biodiversity parks and the Aravallis.

For those who live away from the sea such as myself, Yuvan’s book Intertidal is a connection to Tamil Nadu’s coasts and marshes. It invites you to pay attention to one of our most neglected habitats — the intertidal zone, with its rock pools, fisherfolk, marine creatures, marshes and urban-wildlife interfaces. Aves tells me that the book began with campaigns for three coastal habitats against road, port and harbour projects: ​“I was part of different groups, trying to evoke stories of these places in the public’s mind, and made repeated visits to observe and document and speak with the artisanal fishers. The book grew out of this engagement, and into the different wounded coastal and wetland expanses in North Tamil Nadu.” 

Nature writing can be dry and tedious if it’s not well narrated, but with his field work and storytelling abilities, Aves’ writing stands out. I enjoyed his descriptive prose, and how his book is not content at being just about flora and fauna. Instead, it includes a plethora of voices, a multispecies world – marginalised fishermen, activists, frog music, pond skaters making their way silently across water and plants that grow on the margins. Intertidal then is not just about the natural world but also how accessing and fighting for nature is an inalienable right and privilege. 

There is an increasing body of nature writing which is interested in how nature collapses boundaries and binaries and Intertidal leans into this idea repeatedly: how we are never alone if we take the trouble to look at nature around us; how being connected is in a way being alive.