Karla Armbruster
One might well wonder how scholars who study “nature writing” can possibly cordon off their subject; human encounters with the natural environment have long been a defining feature of the American literary tradition. The oral traditions of Native Americans reveal a deep interdependence between specific cultures and the places where they lived; early Europeans first arriving on this continent often reacted powerfully to the new, wild, and strange landscape, whether with wonder, greed, or fear; settlers’ writing reflected the importance of learning to cultivate the new lands; and Romantic‐era writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman insisted on the importance of reflecting the unique natural features of the country. And of course, “nature” itself is a remarkably capacious concept, described by Raymond Williams as “the most complex word in the [English] language” (1976: 219).
However, the term “nature writing” generally refers to a more limited category: an Anglo‐American tradition of non‐fiction prose that Thomas J. Lyon has described as “one of the stablest genres in literature” (1991: 8). Most scholarly studies of this genre trace it back to British curate Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selbourne (1789/2013), a collection of letters describing plants and animals he encountered in the countryside around his home. While the practice of natural history writing predated White’s efforts, his affectionate, playful accounts of direct experiences with living entities – including a non‐native, quasi‐pet tortoise, Timothy – distinguished him from his contemporaries, who worked from stuffed or dried specimens. White’s book eventually won a wide audience, becoming “one of the most published books in the English language” (Stewart 1995: 20), and its combination of engaging style, detailed facts about the natural world, and personal reflections established the general parameters for what would become the genre of Anglo‐American nature writing.
Lyon (1989) influentially argued that all works of nature writing incorporate three dimensions: natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature. His taxonomy classifies works into seven categories based on the degree to which they emphasize each dimension, ranging from field guides and professional papers (mostly scientific information) to essays on experiences of “solitude and back‐country living” (weighted toward personal response) to contemplations of “man’s role in nature” (more philosophical). Despite this variety, though, he argues that all works of nature writing share a fundamental goal: “to turn our attention outward toward the activity of nature” (1989: 7). Elsewhere, Lyon develops this rhetorical focus, making the case that every work of nature writing “model[s] a way of being” (1991: 13) that enables readers to imagine (and even work for) a restored and healthy world; specifically, he identifies the genre’s “lyric core” as the expression of a sense of oneness with nature that subverts modern human alienation from the world around us.
Henry D. Thoreau (1817–1862) is widely considered the first, most influential American nature writer. While he worked as a teacher, surveyor, and innovator in the manufacture of pencils, he most loved reading, writing, and walking the fields and woods near his home in Concord, Massachusetts; like White and the American nature writers who would come after him, Thoreau found deep inspiration from a specific place. He is usually studied for his contributions to Transcendentalist thinking, valuing nature as an avenue to spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, in his two years living a dramatically simplified life on the shore of Walden Pond (documented in his classic work Walden [1854]), he put Transcendentalist principles into practice: as Bill McKibben puts it, he was “Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store” (McKibben 1997: xxiii). However, Thoreau’s interest in nature for its own sake grew stronger and stronger throughout his career (Buell 1995), and some of his later writings are considered works of proto‐ecology.
Thoreau built on a thriving tradition of American and colonial natural history writing, including William Bartram’s Travels (1791), which eloquently describes his exploration of what would become the southeastern United States. However, Thoreau also achieved something unique with his complex, playful, and deeply radical works. His style goes beyond the merely literary to what McKibben calls a “magic density” that is by turns lyrical, ambiguous, hyperbolic, and hilarious. In his quest for universal truths, Thoreau ranged widely, both physically throughout the woods and fields around Concord and intellectually, drawing on his own reading and study of other cultures, including the Bhagavad Ghita and the history and practices of Native people in his area. While Thoreau is often popularly perceived as escaping to the wilderness during his time at Walden, he represents his cabin and accompanying bean field as a middle place between wilderness and culture: the perfect vantage point for contemplating the relationship between the two. Perhaps most remarkable is his degree of writerly self‐consciousness, ranging from his penchant for word play to an overarching sense of the paradoxes and challenges involved in capturing non‐human truths, whether natural or spiritual, in human language.
Living in an area where forests, wetlands, and wild animal populations were already diminished by human use, Thoreau also moved toward a stance of advocacy for the non‐human, beginning his essay “Walking” (1861) with the proclamation, “I wish to speak a word for nature” (1861: 194). He goes on to presciently convey the importance of preserving what is wild (from wilderness itself to the wild spirit of domesticated cattle who break out of their pasture) for the health of both nature and human civilization, summing it up with the famous statement, “In wildness is the preservation of the world” (1861: 260).
As the nineteenth century rolled toward the twentieth, the environmental degradation that troubled Thoreau picked up momentum. The nature writers who came after him increasingly confronted the need to protect the natural world they cherished. According to Paul Brooks (1990), some nature writers poetically recreate their own sense of unity with or appreciation of nature, while others actively alert readers to environmental threats and advocate for changing attitudes, behaviors, and policies. As this essay will discuss, throughout most of the twentieth century, American nature writers such as John Muir and Rachel Carson attracted large readerships, so it was quite possible for them to aspire to real advocacy, pushing readers to think and act in ways that would improve human relationships with the natural world. However, not all nature writers took this path and, in fact, some felt a tension between creating something artistically complex and beautiful and directly arguing for a particular position or political shift. As we will see, each writer has responded differently to this tension, often in ways that deepened the complexity or expanded the impact of the nature writing genre. For some, writing (and even acting) in defense of specific landscapes or species or wilderness itself became an overriding passion; for others, a natural complement to their celebrations of nature; and for still others, a vexing distraction difficult to integrate with more literary pursuits.
The two major figures who emerged after Thoreau – John Muir and John Burroughs – powerfully demonstrate both sides of this tension (with Muir a fiery advocate and Burroughs inspiring appreciation) and, in doing so, set the parameters for twentieth‐century American nature writing. Meanwhile, Mary Austin pursued a more mystical, artistic vision that was nevertheless rooted in a relationship with the non‐human nature of a particular place and paralleled her work as an activist.
An immigrant who moved with his family from Scotland to the United States at the age of 11, John Muir (1838–1914) became, in many ways, the rugged individual setting off alone into the wilderness that so many incorrectly imagine Thoreau to be. While Muir’s writing is less critically celebrated than Thoreau’s, his pantheistic vision and rhapsodic style have persuaded many readers to engage more intimately with the natural world, and his powerful advocacy for wild places deeply influenced the history of environmental preservation. Muir grew up in Wisconsin, where his fundamentalist Christian father forced him to memorize the Bible and work almost night and day. This difficult existence did not diminish his curiosity about the world, though, which he indulged by exploring the countryside and inventing machines. At the University of Wisconsin, he learned transcendental philosophy and sciences that included botany and geology. While working at a wheel factory in Indianapolis, he suffered a serious eye injury that left him blind for a month. This traumatic experience sent him exploring the country’s wildest places in earnest, beginning with a thousand‐mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1868, he found the place that captured his heart and became his home: the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which he dubbed “the Range of Light.”
During his time in the mountains, Muir became a respected naturalist and contributed to the science of glaciology. Although he married, raised a family, and managed the orchards that belonged to his wife’s family, he still traveled and explored wilderness areas, from the Sierras and Alaska to China and Japan. As essays like “A Wind‐Storm in the Forest” (1894) reveal, Muir was drawn to some of the most dangerous, spectacular aspects of nature, climbing a swaying tree to experience wind more fully, rushing in the direction of an earthquake, or paddling toward icebergs calving from glaciers; with his attention turned unfailingly outward, he typically survived with minimal supplies and often persisted despite cold and hunger.
Muir took to writing most seriously later in his life, producing a dozen books, most of them published after 1900. Muir’s rhetorically lush, often ecstatic style dramatically contrasts with Thoreau’s enigmatic, self‐conscious commentary, but in his own way, Muir continues Thoreau’s quest to experience and testify to the spiritual aspect of nature, “combining natural history with a pantheistic spiritualism” (Payne 1996: 84–85). Repurposing the religious language and images of his youth, Muir rejected the anthropomorphism of traditional Christianity in favor of a vision in which humans can participate in the sacred by submerging themselves in the greater whole of wild nature. He also conveys a deep familiarity with the appearance and habits of plants and animals, and his naturalist’s knowledge no doubt assisted him in surviving his more reckless‐sounding adventures: he does not select a tree to climb in “Wind‐Storm” at random, instead choosing a Douglas spruce for its elastic resistance to breaking.
One hallmark of Muir’s philosophy was the belief that all living things are interconnected, as expressed in one of his most widely quoted statements, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (1911: 211). As Thomas Lyon explains, this belief meant that for Muir, everything wild had a place and purpose, including reviled creatures like the alligators he encountered in Florida. He was less accepting of certain domesticated animals, famously referring to the sheep that grazed mountain meadows down to their roots as “hoofed locusts” (1911: 75). Unfortunately, Muir also displayed prejudice against certain groups of human beings, sometimes disparaging Native Americans and ignoring the fact that they traditionally lived in the areas he wanted to protect from human interference.
Muir’s first political act on behalf of wild places was a newspaper article calling for California legislators to limit logging and fires set to improve pastures for sheep, since these practices harmed the health of soil and streams. More articles in this same vein helped push Congress to create Yosemite National Park in 1890. In 1892, Muir and some of his supporters founded the Sierra Club to, in Muir’s words, “do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.” Muir’s conviction that natural places should be preserved for their own sakes, not just conserved for the human uses like grazing and logging, deeply informed the growing national conversation and influenced political figures like Teddy Roosevelt. His efforts climaxed in the battle over Hetch Hetchy Valley, where the City of San Francisco planned to dam the Tuolumne River to provide power and drinking water. The defense of this beautiful valley brought out his full rhetorical power, but he was not able to save it and died the next year (1914) of pneumonia. Nevertheless, his campaign affected the way Americans thought about nature, fueling the process that resulted in the national parks system.
Though less well known today, John Burroughs (1837–1921) achieved celebrity status during his lifetime, with his natural history essays used as “the model through which [school]children learned to observe and appreciate nature” (Walker 2000: xxiv). Born into a farming family in the Catskill Mountains of New York, he spent most of his life in the same area, which provided the setting for many of his essays and books about bird‐watching, rural life, wilderness, camping, and hunting and fishing. In keeping with his agrarian background, he was more likely than Thoreau or Muir to include people in his landscapes (Black 1996: 126). Even though he became friends with powerful politicians and industrialists, he did not engage in politics as Muir did. His contributions to public regard for nature grew out of his remarkable ability to engage readers with his personal voice and accurate, compelling descriptions.
Burroughs’s early writing was deeply influenced by the works of Emerson, but when he was unable to support himself and his wife working as a teacher and farmhand, he became more interested in appealing to public tastes. In 1861, he published a series of rural sketches in the New York Leader that demonstrate a more engaging writerly persona and plainer style. While working in Washington for the Treasury Department, he kept writing, and in 1871 he published his first book of nature writing, Wake‐Robin, which focused on birds of the Adirondacks and the Washington, DC area. Immediately popular, Wake‐Robin even prompted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to remark that it was like a “summer vacation to turn its pages” (Brooks 1990: 9–10). In 1873 Burroughs returned to the Catskills and bought a small farm.
Finding Thoreau too interested in the spiritual significance of what he observed, Burroughs took a different path, committed to realism and accuracy. However, he went beyond mere description, practicing observation as an art, which he discussed in “Sharp Eyes” (1879) and “The Art of Seeing Things” (1908). His passion for accuracy fueled his attack on the “nature fakers,” writers like Ernest Thompson Seton and William Long who crafted elaborate, anthropomorphic tales of wild animals without labeling them fiction. Even Theodore Roosevelt and Jack London joined the debate.
In contrast with Muir, Burroughs generally refrained from politics and advocacy in his writing. Nevertheless, he was affected by society’s inroads into nature. As Payne documents, the experience of living through the extinction of the passenger pigeon gave Burroughs pause, perhaps playing a role in the increasingly dim view he took of collectors, who killed birds and took their eggs to study them. And the tremendous popularity of his work almost certainly helped foster a public understanding of and sympathy toward the natural world that aided the efforts of early activists like Muir (Brooks 1990).
During her lifetime, Californian desert writer Mary Austin (1868–1934) was best known for her vigorous involvement in political causes including women’s suffrage, Native American rights, and conservation (especially water issues). More recently, her literary writing – especially her non‐fiction – has been celebrated for its poetic, mystical approach to the desert landscapes that she loved. In fact, the worldview she projects might strike a contemporary reader as ahead of its time, reflecting principles that we associate with ecofeminism and environmental justice. On the other hand, her notion of the land as feminine and her celebration of the cultures of Native Americans and Hispanics sometimes appear essentialist or prone to stereotypes. Nevertheless, Austin’s nature writing offers a powerful tribute to the gifts that intimacy with a specific landscape can provide along with an insistence on the ethical obligation to understand and protect that landscape and its inhabitants in return.
In her autobiography Earth Horizon (1932), Austin reports a life‐changing experience as a child in Carlinville, Illinois, standing under a walnut tree “when earth and sky and tree and wind‐blown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsing light of consciousness” (Austin 1932: 371). Attributing this mystical sense of oneness to God, she went on to look for – and sometimes find – this sense of the divine in nature throughout her life. After completing college, she moved to the high desert country of southern California with her family. They arrived in a time of drought, and the scarcity of water resounds through Austin’s literary work and her history as an activist. Nevertheless, she came to find in the desert a refuge from a difficult life that included a husband whom she eventually left and a mentally disabled daughter.
Austin’s complex relationship with the desert emerges most fully in her best‐known work, The Land of Little Rain (1903), a collection of regional sketches that captures “an austere sense of the Mojave desert and its various human tragedies but something, too, of the vast loneliness and stoicism of the book’s author” (O’Grady 1996: 37). The book’s title reflects the name given to the area by its Native residents. Having invested more than a decade exploring and observing this area, Austin warns her readers not to expect a similar experience: “The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer. […] the real heart and core of the country are not to be come at in a month’s vacation. One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions” (Austin 1903: x). Though O’Grady argues that the main character of The Land of Little Rain seems to be the land itself, Austin presents people as belonging in this landscape, integrating sketches of local characters with those of natural places and animals. Stylistically, Austin’s nature writing avoids the sentimentalism of her time and reflects a detailed knowledge of the region’s ecology, especially the role of water.
Mid‐century writers produced some of the most enduring classics of American nature writing. Both Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson were first and foremost scientists, but they also drew on their professional knowledge and experience to create compelling, rhetorically adept books for general readers that eventually altered the way society viewed the human relationships to nature. Edward Abbey entered the fray as a writer, but one with an ecological knowledge and love of place that fit him squarely into the nature writing tradition, to which he added an unmistakable, passionate voice in defense of the non‐human.
Often called the “father” of the American conservation movement, Aldo Leopold (1888–1948) was born in Burlington, Iowa, just west of the bluffs of the Mississippi River, and grew up hunting, fishing, and bird‐watching. After graduating from Yale Forest School, he worked for the newly established US Forest Service, first in the Southwest and then in Wisconsin. At his urging, in 1924 the Forest Service created the world’s first officially designated wilderness area in New Mexico. In 1928, Leopold moved into academia, becoming a professor at the University of Wisconsin and eventually publishing a landmark textbook, Game Management, in 1933. For most of his life, he wrote as a scientist and a member of conservation organizations. As he grew older, though, he became increasingly committed to reaching the general public with his conservation message and spent 12 years painstakingly drafting a collection of essays designed to inform readers how the natural world worked and to persuade them to preserve its ecological integrity.
This book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949), includes three sections that progress from a more descriptive mode to a more philosophical and rhetorically persuasive one. The first section is the almanac, a month‐by‐month chronicle of conditions and events on the exhausted farmland in a “sand county” of Wisconsin that he was bringing back to health. While conforming to a traditional mode of natural history writing, Leopold’s almanac entries stand out for their simple, almost epigrammatic style that neatly captures profound ideas about human relations to nature.
The second section, “Sketches Here and There,” consists of vignettes from Leopold’s experiences in other parts of North America, including the well‐known “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which he describes killing a wolf as a young man because he shared the prevailing assumption that this would protect deer populations for hunters. However, watching her die as “the fierce green fire” faded from her eyes, Leopold experienced an ecological epiphany: a realization of the integral role that predators like wolves play in maintaining healthy ecosystems, since deer will overpopulate without wolves. Eventually, they will eat all the vegetation on the mountain, which leaves them starving and the landscape incapable of supporting new life. Paradoxically, he concludes, “too much safety leads only to danger in the long run” (1949: 130, 131), acknowledging the human desire to ensure safety and prosperity that inspires most efforts to control nature but gently teaching us how it can backfire. In a rhetorically brilliant move, Leopold added this story after a student warned that his narrative stance might alienate readers with its air of all‐knowing superiority; by showing himself making mistakes in the process of developing an ecological viewpoint, Leopold instead becomes a model for readers to follow.
In the book’s final section, “The Upshot,” Leopold delivers his insights more directly in philosophical essays including his most famous statement, “The Land Ethic.” In this essay, he claims that conservation efforts have been insufficient because they have appealed only to the economic self‐interest of those who use the land, ignoring elements of an ecosystem that seem without economic value but are essential to “the biotic mechanism” (1949: 205). Thus, “In our attempts to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial” (1949: 210). Carefully explaining the biotic mechanism, he advances an ecological, holistic model of what he calls “the land,” by which he means “not merely soil” but “a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals” (1949: 216). Humanity’s reliance on the land requires ethical acknowledgment, he argues, making the case that our sense of moral community should expand to encompass the non‐human through a land ethic that “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land‐community to plain member and citizen of it” (1949: 204). In this way, Leopold melds what is arguably a manifesto for a biocentric perspective with a practical sense of its scientific and economic benefits for humans.
If all nature writing combines information about nature with literary techniques to influence readers to better appreciate the non‐human, Rachel Carson (1907–1964) exemplified the very best of this tradition throughout her career, adding the stylistic originality and beauty of a true poet to a professional’s knowledge of ecology, chemistry, and other sciences. But her most remarkable contribution to American environmental history – perhaps even more profound than Leopold’s – came with the 1962 publication of her controversial masterpiece, Silent Spring, widely acknowledged as the catalyst for the modern environmental movement in America.
In an unconventional move for a woman in the 1930s, Carson chose science as a career, earning a master’s degree in marine biology at Johns Hopkins University. However, she was able to combine this background with her considerable talents as a writer at the Bureau of Fisheries and eventually for the public, using powerful imagery and figurative language to bring the ocean world to life. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), told the stories of birds, fish, and eels living along the eastern seaboard. While each story’s spotlight on an individually named protagonist could have pushed the book into inappropriate anthropomorphism, the fact that these creatures are propelled by instinct and often at risk of their lives infuses ecological realism into their tales. Together, the stories evoke the interconnectedness of these species’ lives and the way that the overall system flourishes while individuals come and go. Unfortunately, published one month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Under the Sea Wind did not attract the attention Carson’s next book would receive.
This book was The Sea Around Us (1951), a “multifaceted profile of the sea for nontechnical readers,” beginning with the origin of the sea itself and moving on to topics such as the different zones of the sea; how sea water moves through tides, waves, and currents; and how oceans regulate climate (Glotfelty 1996b: 155). Instead of using non‐human protagonists, Carson addresses her readers directly, engaging them with detailed, accurate descriptions of scientific phenomena, poetic language, recountings of ancient legends, and her own subtle commentary. Readers responded powerfully, keeping The Sea Around Us on the New York Times bestseller list for a record 86 weeks. Due to this success, Carson was able to quit her job and write full time. In The Edge of the Sea (1955), Carson produced a guide to seashore life that reflected her profoundly ecological vision, presenting plants and animals for identification not as isolated individuals but rather in sections organized by ecological communities. Overall, Carson’s books about the sea not only bring its mysteries to life but also demonstrate an attitude of humility before the natural world (Glotfelty 1996b).
It was a sense of dire threat to the natural world that inspired Carson to change her tune “from one of gentle appreciation to one of grim alarm” (Glotfelty 1996b: 161). It began with a letter from a friend whose bird sanctuary had been sprayed with DDT as part of a state mosquito control program, leaving many birds dead and dying. Once Carson began investigating and writing, she drew on a wide network of colleagues and allies who provided her with relevant information. In the course of her work, she suffered multiple heath challenges, including breast cancer. Lauded by critics for its rhetorical effectiveness, the book she produced – Silent Spring – begins with a powerful allegory of a spring with no birdsong in a town where illness and death reign over humans and non‐humans due to chemical pesticides. Carson then explains how pesticides work, how they make their way through ecological systems, wreaking havoc on beneficial insects, birds, and even human health as well as their target pests, and why overuse makes them ineffective. She suggests that biological controls often produce better results and ends with a harsh critique of the assumption that nature exists “for the convenience of man” (Carson 1962: 297).
Although the chemical industry worked to block publication, Silent Spring became a bestseller, and Carson’s findings were corroborated by President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee. Numerous environmental reforms followed, including state pesticide bills and the Clean Air Act (1963), Water Quality Act (1965), and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). Carson made the case that what we do to the natural world, we do to ourselves, and in so doing, she shifted the conversation about human relations with nature in America from one about how to preserve resources and beautiful natural places to one that challenged that dualistic way of thinking with an awareness that the human body is interconnected with the natural environment through cycles of energy, water, and air.
Unlike Leopold and Carson, Edward Abbey (1927–1989) initially gained his reputation as a literary writer, one specifically associated with the desert Southwest, wilderness preservation, and an anti‐authoritarian taste for anarchy. Though his novels and non‐fiction are much more personality driven than Carson’s books or even Leopold’s revelation in “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Abbey’s life and work also had a powerful impact on the twentieth‐century environmental movement. His cranky, critical, sometimes troubling but often witheringly funny voice and professed desire to shock are no more striking than the passion with which he advocated for keeping wild places wild and the artistry with which he rendered the beauty of those places.
Born in Pennsylvania, Abbey fell in love with landscape of New Mexico and Arizona when he traveled the West as a young man, hiking and riding the rails. Despite his lifelong connection to the Southwest that followed, he moved around the country a great deal, holding jobs ranging from social worker to summer park ranger. Meanwhile, he wrote several novels, but he is best known for Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968), based on summers working as a ranger in Arches National Monument in Utah. By turns poetic, philosophical, and polemical, this book captures Abbey’s uncompromising stance on the value of nature and wilderness, especially in the face of the creeping “industrial tourism” that threatens to destroy the wild, forbidding desert landscapes that he loves.
Ever the contrarian, Abbey denied his place in the nature writing tradition, refusing “the mantle and britches of Thoreau and Muir,” suggesting that “Annie Dillard wear them now” (1968: xiii). Nevertheless, his non‐fiction fits squarely into the genre, displaying an impressive knowledge of landscape, plants, animals, and geology, which he brushes off by admitting that his “facts” are accurate because they are all “stolen from reliable sources” (1968: xiii). He also ponders the spiritual significance of nature, as when he chastises himself for allowing the otherworldly beauty of a river canyon to trick him into hoping for a vision of a deity. If our human capacity for imagination were not so limited, he argues, we “would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal, learning […] to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous” (1968: 200). Perhaps most telling, his works also recount a skeptical but persistent quest for a sense of oneness with nature, the very experience that Lyon holds up as the lyric core of nature writing; in Desert Solitaire, Abbey selects a particular juniper tree as the object of such a quest, explaining that he hopes to “discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond.” In typical self‐deprecating fashion, though, he reports, “Have failed” (1968: 32).
For some readers, the humor and self‐deprecation of Abbey’s narrative persona fail to make up for his inconsistencies and sometimes troubling points of view. In Desert Solitaire, for example, he insists on the value of all life but then casually kills a rabbit with a rock as an experiment in what it feels like to be a predator. He condemns tourists for the garbage they leave behind but (in some of his novels) creates heroes who throw beer cans out of car windows. His references to women (and the fact that he doesn’t mention his wife and newborn child as part of his experience at Arches) seem sexist, and some of his commentaries are racist and anti‐immigrant. However, some critics have accounted for these less palatable tendencies by comparing Abbey to the Native American trickster figure Coyote, a transgressive boundary crosser who violates every cultural norm in a way that challenges us to rethink our priorities.
Given the antipathy he often expresses for human culture and his corresponding desire to escape to the wilderness, Abbey may strike some contemporary readers as taking a giant step backwards from Leopold’s and Carson’s insights about the interconnectedness of humans and nature. However, his complex perspective reflects the preoccupations of his era in other ways, demonstrating a postmodern sense of the limits of language when he explains that Desert Solitaire is not a naive attempt to “get the desert into a book” but rather “a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than material” (1968: x). Abbey also demonstrates a nuclear age concern for humanity’s ability to destroy itself, including a long chapter on a family killed while mining for uranium and periodically imagining an apocalyptic future in which human civilization has disappeared. But for Abbey, whose stated allegiance is to nature over culture, the notion that the natural world will outlast us is a comforting one; as he writes, “men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear – the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break” (1968: 243).
Despite Abbey’s world‐weary, cynical stance, his unapologetic love for the desert wilderness compels him to advocacy and even direct action. In the introduction to Desert Solitaire, he tempers his pessimism about the impending development of Arches and the surrounding desert (expressed by metaphors of the book in readers’ hands as “an elegy. A memorial. […] a tombstone. A bloody rock”) by encouraging them to “throw it at something big and glassy” (1968: xii). Later, he models some minor eco‐sabotage by pulling up surveyors’ stakes mapping a new road into the park. But his most direct impact on environmental activism was through his novel The Monkey‐Wrench Gang (1975), in which the four main characters blow up billboards, disable bulldozers, and plot to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam in a way that gave rise to the term “monkeywrenching” for eco‐sabotage and indirectly inspired the direct action movement Earth First.
Despite the wide popularity of many twentieth‐century American nature writers, literary scholars typically overlooked them (excepting Thoreau), perhaps due to their focus on the non‐human or their sometimes polemical stances. In the wake of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, though, literary scholars emerged who were passionately interested in the fate of the natural environment and convinced that literature can powerfully influence human attitudes and behaviors toward the non‐human. For them, the under‐appreciated genre of nature writing seemed to hold special promise for guiding human imaginations in the right direction; in fact, promoting scholarly attention to this genre was one motivating impulse of ecocriticism, an approach to literary and cultural studies that took its most visible form with the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 1992. Often compared to other modes of political criticism, such as Marxist and feminist approaches, ecocriticism has been perhaps most famously defined as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” by Cheryll Glotfelty (1996a: xvii).
This sharp rise in academic interest paralleled a renaissance in American nature writing, with writers adapting the genre to a variety of late twentieth‐century preoccupations and to landscapes across the country. Some of the leading lights of this renaissance had been active for decades, but an influx of new voices provided a momentum that gave American nature writing a new visibility. Since it would be impossible to devote meaningful discussion to all of the fine writers who contributed to this renaissance, the following discussion focuses on just six who represent significant trends and tendencies.
Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Wendell Berry (b. 1934) each represent a life in intimate, sustainable relationship with a specific place: the Yuba River watershed in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains and Port Royal, Kentucky. Though Snyder is associated with wilderness and the bioregional movement and Berry with farm life, both emphasize how manual labor can strengthen and deepen human intimacy with nature. Both have also consistently taken stances of advocacy, with Snyder drawing on Indigenous knowledge and his own practice of Zen Buddhism in poetry and essays that challenge a dualistic view of nature and culture; Berry’s poetry, fiction, and essays reflect a critique of industrial agriculture in favor of small‐scale, sustainable farming (which he has practiced, using horses rather than fossil fuel‐powered equipment), the importance of community, and the traditional values (including those of Christianity) that can help sustain both.
Annie Dillard (b. 1945) and Barry Holstun Lopez (b. 1945) take more poetic, less directly political approaches to nature writing, with unmistakable prose styles (Dillard’s prone to breathtaking pyrotechnics and Lopez’s understated, reverent, and evocative) that firmly anchor their work in the realm of literary art. As the title of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) suggests, she follows in the footsteps of the Transcendentalists, questing after spiritual truths as signaled by nature. Eschewing all social critique, she struggles to reconcile the existence of pain and cruelty with that of a benevolent God and exults in the ways natural phenomena such as a total eclipse can overwhelm the senses and break open the boundaries of the self. Growing out of the natural history tradition, Lopez’s non‐fiction treats Indigenous knowledge and folklore as sources of knowledge equally valuable as science and often explores the interrelationships between landscape and human perception. Perhaps his most consistent message is the importance of simply paying attention: listening to the land, the animals who live there, and the Indigenous people whose ways of life are intricately interwoven with specific places.
Terry Tempest Williams (b. 1955) and Rick Bass (b. 1958) both demonstrate a central premise of environmental thought: that love for a place (specifically, the Great Salt Lake area and Montana’s Yaak Valley) can inspire action on its behalf, but they experience the twin impulses of nature writing – appreciation and advocacy – very differently. In her autobiographical Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Williams charts the loss of her mother to cancer as she also loses a beloved bird refuge to a rising Great Salt Lake; ultimately, she reveals that the cancer experienced by so many women in her family is related to nuclear testing and pledges herself to speaking and acting on behalf of women and nature. For Williams, connection to a place leads quite organically, if sometimes painfully, to advocacy, and she integrates both elements into her literary writing. In contrast, Bass’s desperation to protect the Yaak Valley from clearcut logging does not coexist comfortably with his sense of himself as an artist (a role he seems to associate with writing fiction); he often worries that the demands of activism can destroy “the inner peace that can otherwise make art, or a life lived, fruitful” (1999: 81). And yet, he also holds out hope that a diverse, ecologically healthy place can sustain an artist, arguing that art can be seen simply as “one of the indicators of the richness of a place” (1996: 37).
Due to the accomplishments of writers like these, when Robert Finch and John Elder published The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990) they were able to write that “Today, nature writing flourishes in America as never before,” claiming that the genre “may well be the most vital form of current American literature” (1990: 24). Not quite 25 years later, the critical fortunes of the genre had fallen to the point that the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014) included an entry by Daniel J. Philippon titled “Is American Nature Writing Dead?” The story of how this shift occurred is a complex one. As ecocriticism developed, concerns and criticisms quickly sprang up in response to the ways nature writing had been characterized and to ecocriticism’s investment in it. Patrick Murphy suggested that ecocriticism’s “nonfictional bias” limited the questions it could ask and proposed instead the study of “nature‐oriented literature,” a broader category that also encompasses poetry, fiction, and non‐literary works (2000: xii). By the beginning of the twenty‐first century, ecocritics were resoundingly being urged to expand their attention “beyond nature writing” to a wide range of other literature: canonical literary texts, literature that gives voice to marginalized people who often experience environmental injustice, and writing that treats the urban and suburban environments where most of us live and work (see Armbruster and Wallace 2001).
With this expansion, it was becoming clear that nature writing as traditionally defined excludes the experiences of many people, being largely the product of white Anglo‐Saxon men who could afford to spend time alone contemplating the wilderness or indulging in a pastoral retreat from the woes of society. For example, the experiences of Americans of African descent, even when represented in works like nineteenth‐century slave narratives, tended to be overlooked because they did not fit the expectations of the genre. As explored by Melvin Dixon, Camille Dungy, Carolyn Finney, bell hooks, Lauret Savoy, and others, these experiences range from a historically justified fear of violence in isolated natural locations to a powerful tradition of attachments to specific natural or rural places – attachments often missed by those looking through the lens of nature writing, either because they emerged in the context of working the land or because they were disrupted by historical and cultural forces (such as those prompting the Great Migration).
Other critics, most notably Dana Phillips (2003), charged ecocriticism with a naive presumption that nature writing accurately represents the natural world, when the relationship between language and reality is far more complicated. However, critics like Peter Fritzell (1989) had already argued that writers like Thoreau, Abbey, and Dillard grapple head on with that complexity, highlighting the paradox of trying to capture the prized moment of oneness with the natural world in language, when language is the marker of human culture and self‐awareness – the very things that the writer must try to leave behind in the quest for an unmediated encounter with nature.
Perhaps the most damning criticism of nature writing came from its own practitioners and earliest cheerleaders. In his essay “Sick of Nature” (2004), David Gessner complains that the genre has devolved into a writerly straitjacket, demanding a genteel, humorless persona and quiet, reverential voice that preclude crudeness, a sense of fun, or the ability to ask vital questions about how humans should live in the world. In 2010, the editors of Orion, the magazine perhaps best known for publishing writing about the natural world, applauded “the dissolution of nature writing,” declaring it too earnest and antisocial to precipitate real environmental change. Both dismissals reflect the same concern that has shadowed nature writing since critics began questioning its value: the worry that it reinforces a sense that nature is separate from culture. Many ecocritics find this nature/culture dualism at the root of contemporary environmental problems, and how to deconstruct it is one of the central quests of environmental thinkers today, as evidenced in the work of scholars like Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton.
While all these concerns are justified by the broad outlines of the American nature writing tradition, needless to say, many individual writers and works take a more complex approach. Even Gessner finds a hero in Thoreau, discerning in Walden “a personal story [as well as] a pastoral one” (2004), and writers going back to Thoreau, Burroughs, and Austin represent humans interacting with less‐than‐pristine landscapes in many ways, not all of them negative. Much Native American literature reflects a sense of culture and nature as intertwined and emphasizes interdependence among humans and non‐humans; while these works often sit outside the non‐fiction boundaries of the nature writing genre, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977) is frequently included in courses on American nature writing. Southwest writer Ellen Meloy, often represented in nature writing anthologies, is known for humor and an interest in the flora and fauna of Las Vegas as well as the desert; critic Dianne Chisolm has even argued that Meloy’s representation of “erotic‐ethical affiliation between human and nonhuman life in experimental symbioses” (2010: 360) suggests the role that queer desire plays in nature and evolution.
As these critiques and calls for change gathered force, critical and popular interest in nature writing diminished. Given this decline, what might the future hold for American nature writing? Diverse writers are working to reshape this genre in ways that may yet allow it to regain its cultural power. For example, Sandra Steingraber, who is often compared to Rachel Carson because of her training as a biologist and focus on toxic chemicals and carcinogens, writes with a more overtly personal and political voice than Carson, integrating stories of powerful experiences – such as cancer, pregnancy, and childbirth – with accessible explanations of scientific phenomena and their political implications. She also writes about her personal activism, most recently as part of the anti‐fracking movement. Writers like David Gessner and Michael Branch work against the stereotype of nature writing as a serious, pious business, expertly employing humor not only to attract audiences but also to address issues that might otherwise be too overwhelming or depressing for most readers to engage with.
Stylistic innovation, one of the hallmarks of Britain’s new nature writing (Cowley 2008), is finding its way into American texts as well. For example, Amy Leach’s collection Things That Are: Essays (2012) defies genres with its poetic precision, flights of fancy, and depth of historical and scientific information. A quirkily personal and reassuringly omniscient narrator ushers the reader through a dazzling array of topics, with essay titles such as “In Which the River Makes Off with Three Stationary Characters” and “Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber.” Equally fresh and engaging are the works of the recently deceased Oregon writer Brian Doyle, who stretched the genre with list‐style essays such as “21 Laws of Nature as Interpreted by My Children” and novels like Martin Marten (2016), which incorporates deep, place‐based natural history into a fictional coming‐of‐age narrative about a boy and a male martin whose paths cross at crucial points in their lives. But Doyle also mastered the more traditional essay form, often directly addressing his readers with a conversational stance and rambling, musical, adjective‐rich sentences that radiate energy and joy. Acting as what he called a “story catcher” who pays attention to everything around him, he persistently found the miraculous in nature, both human and non‐human, and included his readers in the revelation.
Perhaps nothing sums up the current critiques of the American nature writing tradition better than David Gessner’s “Nature Writing by the Numbers,” a cartoon that uses a white man observing a frog to illustrate the following steps: “1. Find something, 2. Contemplate it, 3. Express awe, 4. Quote Thoreau, 5. Describe threats, 6. End hopefully” (2013: 84). While these instructions could be interpreted as helpful advice on how to generate a nature essay, in the context of Gessner’s other statements, it serves as a meta‐commentary on the genre’s predictability and lack of vitality. But if this narrow concept is what we look for when we seek out nature writing, what do we miss? Another meta‐commentary, Brian Doyle’s “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” takes a strikingly different view of the genre’s power to engage, move, and even transform. Directly addressing the reader as “you,” the narrator describes the process of reading the titular essay, starting with the way it hijacks you out of everyday life with the startling beauty of its imagery and draws you in with a “cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child.” Though it walks “inexorably toward[s] a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps,” it then confounds expectations by refusing to deliver them, veering away from the stereotypical “call to arms” or the stern admonition that “you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car that you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy.” Instead, it offers subtle threads of sadness but also hope, leaving the reader “with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek” so that “you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed” (2008: 80).
Thus, Doyle finds an inexhaustible well in the same genre Gessner has declared exhausted, and he does so by gently pushing its boundaries while infusing his works with a unique, personal vision of the world communicated through a captivating, equally unique voice – as the most successful nature writers have always done. It is true that the genre must continue to evolve to speak to a wider swath of readers and to address the specificity of their histories, everyday lives, and concerns. But as new writers join the tradition (consciously or not), it does evolve in these ways, demonstrating that artistic creativity is not at odds with nature writing’s mission to make a difference in the world but instead serves as the key to its adaptability and continued power to move its readers – both emotionally and, if they care enough, to political action.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 28 (CREATIVE NONFICTIONS).