undefined
I didn’t plan to start a tech business, yet here I am, joining the ranks of just 17 per cent of global tech companies with a female chief executive. Rarer still, I’d imagine, is the fact that I’m running an app company from a Suffolk village far from the bright lights of London’s “silicon roundabout” (or, in fact, any street lights at all).
Describing myself as a tech entrepreneur makes me smile; you could hardly find someone further from the image those words likely conjure. I’m a novelist and nature writer; my life is about walking, watching birds and animals, and collecting such interesting things as owl pellets and badger skulls. I write both about the living world and about the complex, private worlds of my imagination. I’ve published a book about the pleasures of walking in the rain and my last novel for adults, All Among the Barley, was set in a Suffolk farming community in 1934.
So it’s fair to say that my career has taken something of a left turn. I began to think about creating an app in the autumn of 2022. The seed of the idea that grew into Encounter — a nature journaling app — was sown, perhaps unsurprisingly, during the process of writing a book. Homecoming: A Guided Journal to Lead You Back to Nature encouraged readers to form a habit of jotting down the good things they experienced outdoors by pointing them gently towards what was going on in the natural world through the seasons, and giving them a place to record their observations. Keeping my own nature diary in my twenties changed my experience of living in central London. Noting down when things bloomed in the scruffy garden of my rented flat and the streets and parks around it reconnected me with the seasons and the natural world I’d loved as a child.
undefined
A growing body of research indicates that my experience is not uncommon. In 2016’s groundbreaking paper “Three good things in nature”, Miles Richardson found that when people wrote down their daily encounters with the world around them, their levels of nature connectedness were sustainably increased. His research, and that of others in the field, suggests that those who score highly for nature connectedness tend to enjoy better physical and mental health, greater life satisfaction and display more pro-nature behaviour: they become environmental custodians, something that’s desperately needed right now.
Homecoming was a way to nudge people on to the pathway that had proved so transformative for me, but the tricky thing about putting it together was that natural events differ across the country: not only are many plants and animals not found in all parts of the UK and Ireland, but seasonal phenomena such as frogspawn and hawthorn blossom can occur a month or more later in Scotland than in the South West.
undefined
Add to this the fact that yearly timings vary depending on the weather, and it occurred to me that marrying location and date-dependent information with the capabilities of a smartphone might be an incredibly useful thing to do. The key, I realised, would be to make the app a combined notepad and guidebook, without any of the social media elements that take people’s attention away from the real world and trap them inside their screens.
The truth is, I didn’t want to make an app; I wanted someone else to have already done it. But while there are apps that recognise birdsong (Merlin is magical) and apps for naturalists to send in their sightings (iNaturalist is great for biological recording), there was nothing that offered accessible information to nature newbies on what to look for based on date and location, or that gave them a place to journal with the weather, place and moon phase automatically attached.
So one evening, after a fortifying glass of wine, I wrote a post on social media: “Does anyone know how hard it is to make an app?” A friend replied, someone with experience in the field. I told him my idea, hoping he’d shoot it down so I could be free of the whole thing. Instead he volunteered to help me make it. I then told another friend about it a few days later, on a dog walk; she offered to become the first investor in Encounter Nature Ltd, the business I had yet to set up.
On April 16, Encounter will be officially launched — though it’s been sitting in the app stores for a few weeks now, quietly racking up thousands of users whose daily lives, going by their reviews, are being changed. “I’ve only been using this app for a few weeks, but already it’s having a significant impact on my experience of the world around me, and my general wellbeing,” begins one comment.
At the age of 50, my life’s been changed by it, too. I might always prefer looking at badger latrines to studying spreadsheets, but I’ve realised there’s strength in coming at something a little differently: there’s no AI in the app because we’re rooted in the real world, rather than the virtual; there’s no algorithm either; and the core team of developers are all women.
Would I do it again? Ask me in another year. What I can say is that I’m incredibly, burstingly proud of it, and that what I most need now is to find a sunny spot, perhaps on a riverbank, surrounded by the sounds of nature, and have a nap.
encounter-nature.com
Melissa Harrison is a novelist and the founder of Encounter
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram