This is a golden age.

Maybe all ages are golden for something. And maybe for more than one thing. At the moment you might say this is a golden age for German football, graphic novels, Iranian cinema and Nigel Farage. But the golden age I'm thinking of is the one that nature writing is enjoying at the moment.

In the last few days I've been reading an advance copy of H Is For Hawk, by academic and naturalist Helen Macdonald, which is published next month (Jonathan Cape, £14.99). It's a book about the author's attempts to train a goshawk. It's also about grief and literary history and about trying to capture the world around us in words. It's very good. But it's just one of many.

Over the last few years, the likes of Robert MacFarlane, poets Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie, Mark Cocker and the late Roger Deakin have all added to the canon of nature writing. Veteran nature writers such as Richard Mabey - who just over ten years ago was decrying the death of the genre in the pages of the Guardian - are still being published and sometimes by a publisher such as Little Toller, set up in 2008 to publish new and classic examples of the genre.

Online you can read nature blogs such as Caught By The River - set up by the staff of Heavenly Records and featuring contributions from the likes of the KLF's Bill Drummond and Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn - and, closer to home, Fife Pyschogeography. The material world is currently writ large in words.

Is this a good thing? The new wave of nature writing has its critics. Phrases such as "bourgeois escapism" and "nostalgic sentimentality" have been tossed around. But the form is too wide and too deep to be written off in a couple of words or over a couple of books. The writer AN Wilson once mocked nature writing as something for "the lovers of unwrecked England", but that is both Anglocentric and suggests the form deals only in a binary opposition between rural and urban. A reading of Edgelands, by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley, about the "debateable space" on the margins of towns and cities would suggest otherwise. Kathleen Jamie had a more telling criticism when talking of Macfarlane's book Wild, which she once argued "seemed like an act of colonial adventuring". It's an interesting take, though Macfarlane is in many ways - and understandably, given his literary talents - the poster boy of the new nature writing.

We'll come back to politics in a moment. But first it seems worth asking why, given that Mabey believed in 2003 that modernity had effectively killed British nature writing, it has made such a resurgence of late?

I'm speculating here but I wonder if the withering away of our interest in the associated genre of travel writing might have something to do with it as its big names have died (Chatwin), grown old (Jan Morris), or moved on to other genres (Bill Bryson).

Then maybe there's an increasing desire for some kind of materiality in an increasingly digital world. We want to get our hands dirty in some way.

I think this might be key. Macdonald reminds us in H Is For Hawk that the revival of interest in nature writing in the 1930s was born out of the trauma of the First World War and a fear of the next. So could the current revival have anything to do with the financial crash of 2008 and how it ended confidence in a particular mode of capitalist life?

Something that Kathleen Jamie once said has stuck in my mind: "I feel I might be striking a tiny blow by getting out into these places, and developing a language and a way of seeing which is not theirs but ours. And when we do that - step outdoors, and look up - we're not little cogs in the capitalist machine. It's the simplest act of resistance and renewal."

For some, then, nature writing is a way to stake a claim on the world.