Joe Harkness was not a nature writer in the way that term usually works. He did not come from the countryside gentry pipeline or an Oxbridge English degree. He came from a council estate in King's Lynn, dropped out of sixth form, spent his twenties drinking and drugging, and nearly killed himself in 2013. Then he saw two buzzards displaying over a tree-line during a walk with his future wife Emma, and something locked into place. Within a few years he could identify birds by flight, call, and song — a speed of acquisition that astonished experienced naturalists and that, in hindsight, was a signature of the ADHD diagnosis that wouldn't arrive until 2022. Bird Therapy (2018) was crowdfunded via Unbound after readers of Harkness's blog raised £18,500 in five weeks. Bill Bailey donated £1,000; Chris Packham wrote the foreword and predicted the book would save lives. It was translated into five languages. Readers told Harkness directly that he had kept them alive. The book's core mechanism was simple and honest: here is what I was feeling, here is what I did outside, here is what changed. No mysticism, no literary performance, just a man telling you that watching a flock of finches slowed his breathing and shut down the repetitive thoughts. Harkness found the nature-writing establishment disillusioning — competitive, self-obsessed, a guild more interested in status than in the people the writing was supposed to reach. Social media amplified his anxiety. The more vulnerable he was online, the less engagement he received, which is a perfect machine for destroying a person whose self-esteem is already fragile. He closed his accounts and retreated to what actually worked: his family, his pupils with autism and Down's syndrome and ADHD at Parkside school in Norwich, and a growing obsession with moths. Neurodivergent, By Nature (2025) is the more ambitious book. Sparked by his ADHD diagnosis, it argues that neurodivergent minds are not deficits to be managed but assets for biodiversity restoration — that the hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and obsessive detail-gathering that make neurodivergent people difficult in classrooms make them exceptional in the field. The book features interviews with neurodivergent conservationists and was shortlisted for the 2026 Wainwright Prize for conservation writing. Harkness took his own life two weeks before the ceremony. His day job matters as much as his books. He taught pupils with significant learning disabilities at Cromer Academy and then Parkside, Norwich. He talked about mental health with his students every day. In 2023 he published Inside/Outside, a teacher's resource book for embedding emotional literacy through nature. The through-line across all three books and his classroom work is the same: nature is not decoration or escape, it is infrastructure for a functioning mind, and the people who need it most are the ones the system is least likely to offer it to. Harkness was born 23 December 1986 in King's Lynn, raised by his single mother, who worked as an administrator. He credited his maternal grandfather's quiet passion for the natural world with his later rediscovery of it. His mother described the young Harkness as very talkative, very bright, with boundless energy, a keen eye for detail, and a love of nature — and of the Argos catalogue. He is survived by Emma and their two daughters. A revised edition of Bird Therapy is due from Bloomsbury next year.
