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An interdisciplinary genre which mixes art and science, nature writing is difficult to categorize. Under what category should prose by writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard be shelved? Autobiography? Literature? Philosophy?
Prose writing about nature was transformed by the 1854 publication of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. In listing her 15 favorite works of American nature writing, Lorianne focuses on texts written between 1854 and the present. Although this list (arranged alphabetically by author) is admittedly incomplete, it gives interested readers a place to start their own explorations.
The patron saint of eco-radicals inspired by his 1976 novel The Monkey-Wrench
Gang, Edward Abbey is best known for his 1968 nonfiction narrative, Desert Solitaire.
An account of his stint as a ranger at Utah's Arches National Monument, Desert Solitaire depicts
Abbey, a.k.a. Cactus Ed, in his favored persona as a crotchety, mad-as-hell renegade who rails against
the U.S. Parks Service's exploitation of what he terms the "Arches National Money-mint." In prime
prickly form, Abbey gleefully describes how he removes and hides surveyors' measuring stakes in order to foil road construction in his beloved canyonlands; in another memorable passage, Abbey rails
against park visitors who never leave their cars and suggests that motorized vehicles should be
banned from the National Parks. In our modern world of gas-guzzling SUVs, Abbey's book deserves more
than a second glance.
Born in Illinois, Mary Austin moved to Owens Valley, California in 1888. Her 1903 collection of short
sketches, The Land of Little Rain, describes the austere beauties of the California desert and
the hearty creatures--human and otherwise--which make their home there. Reflecting Austin's own feminist
sympathies as well as her appreciation for Native American culture, The Land of Little Rain offers
a memorable portrait of the Western frontier at the turn of the 20th century.
The Rutgers University Press edition entitled Stories from the Country of Lost Borders contains
two books by Mary Austin: The Land of Little Rain and Lost Borders. The latter work
concludes with Austin's classic story of "The Walking Woman," a must-read for any Mary Austin fan.
Thoreau wrote a collection of travel essays based on various trips to Cape Cod, but none of them hold a
candle to Henry Beston's The Outermost House. Based on a year spent living in a
small house overlooking Cape Cod's Great Beach, Beston's narrative explores the natural cycles of tides
and seasons, describing with a poet's eye the phenomena of shorebird flights, winter constellations, and
coastal storms. A poignant meditation on human mortality, The Outermost House also recounts
various shipwrecks that occurred on the shores of Cape Cod and describes the way that a tight-knit Cape
Cod community (including the Coast Guardsmen who serve as "surfmen") joins together to glean meaning out
of tragedy.
In 1962, before scientists fully understood the impact DDT had on the
reproductive systems of birds of prey such as the American bald eagle, Rachel Carson wrote her hugely
influential diatribe against chemical pesticides. Aiming her argument toward a popular,
non-scientific audience, Carson opens her book with a fable of a world
without birds. In the chapters that follow, Carson offers numerous anecdotes of the disastrous
effects of unbridled pesticide use, including a heartbreaking account of the death of a year-old child
and a small dog after a family applied a presumably benign insecticide in their Venezuelan home. In its
claim that chemical pesticides pass from mother to child prenatally and later through breast milk,
Silent Spring inspired a generation of women and men to mobilize against an environmental hazard
in their own backyards. Although much of Carson's science seems dated, the power of Carson's argument
and the prose with which she defends it remain undiminished.
In 1850, four years before Henry David Thoreau published Walden, Susan Fenimore Cooper (daughter
of novelist James Fenimore Cooper) published Rural Hours.
The first work of nature writing by an American woman, Rural Hours describes Cooper's
observations of the natural world
during her daily walks around her family home in Cooperstown, New York. Long before the 20th century
environmental movement, Cooper noted with dismay the decline in numbers of passenger pigeons and the
widespread deforestation that resulted from white settlement. Recognizing nature as a gift from God,
Cooper argued that her Christian compatriots should be better stewards of the natural world.
The University of Georgia Press edition of Rural Hours reprints Cooper's work in its entirety,
the first such edition since the text was abridged in 1887.
Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the 20th century equivalent of Thoreau's
Walden. A lushly detailed account of the creek running
behind her then-home in Virginia, Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning first book is deeply spiritual,
exploring the invisible link between creation and Creator. Originally
envisioning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a work of theology, Dillard demonstrates the flexibility
of the nature-writing genre. Through memorable descriptions of a giant water bug preying on a frog, a
pair of mating mantises, a child hiding pennies on the sidewalks of Pittsburgh, or a snake skin
presumably tied into an impossible knot, Dillard shows how one ordinary creek can provide a window into
the entire universe.
If you enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, check out Dillard's terser, less-accessible book Holy
the Firm, a meditation on suffering and beauty based on observations made during three days on Puget Sound. A challenging read, it's Lorianne's favorite Dillard text!
Although not technically works of nature writing, Emerson’s essays and lectures laid the philosophical
groundwork upon
which later nature writers relied. In his book-length treatise Nature, for instance, Emerson
explores Transcendentalism’s central tenet that “Nature is the symbol of spirit.” By equating the
study of nature with the quest for self-knowledge, Emerson inspired the kind of self-reflective,
personal account of the natural world made popular by writers such as Henry David Thoreau. And in his
famous “transparent eye-ball” passage, Emerson was among the first American writers to describe nature
(specifically Boston Common on a snowy January day) as a place of spiritual enlightenment.
If nothing else, every admirer of American literature should read (and occasionally re-read) classic
texts such as "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," and Emerson's Divinity School Address.
Although not technically a work of nature writing, Sarah Orne Jewett's 1896 collection of "local color"
sketches offers a vivid portrait of the fictional town of Dunnet's Landing, Maine. Narrated by
a nameless woman writer who spends her summers with the matronly Mrs. Almira Todd, an herbalist with a
penchant for gossip, Jewett's stories capture the mood of a down-and-out coastal community where
story-telling is the only link to a vibrant past. The characters who Jewett describes--Mrs. Todd's
mother, Mrs. Blackett; Abby Martin, the
so-called "Queen's Twin"; and Joanna, a woman who exiles herself on a lonely island after a doomed love
affair--point to the importance of community (especially female community) in a starkly beautiful rural
landscape. Not much happens in Dunnet's Landing, but Jewett's narrator learns that old lonely people
have vivid stories to tell, and it is important for a writer to listen to such stories. On the breath-
taking edge of land and sea, the inhabitants of Dunnet's Landing have discovered the secret of finding
a home in nature's lonely recesses.
A landmark text for environmental activists, Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac
(published posthumously in 1949) explores the
issue of environmental ethics: how should humans behave toward other living species and the
environment on the whole? Through engaging accounts of the Wisconsin seasons as well as his
experiences as an outdoorsman and forest ranger--including a memorable face-to-face encounter with a
dying wolf--Leopold presents his notion of a "land ethic" that would consider the environmental
impact
of human activities. In an oft-quoted passage, Leopold defines as "right" anything that "tends to
preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." Through a readable mix of
personal musing, natural observation, and environmental polemic, Leopold helped steer the modern
conservation movement and thereby created a work of lasting importance.
A semi-fictionalized account of Norman Maclean's attempt to help his reckless younger
brother, A River Runs Through It is a hymn to the redemptive power of fishing. Like Izaak
Walton's 17th century classic, The Compleat Angler, Maclean's narrative describes fishing as a
fraternal act, a chance for otherwise uncommunicative men to reconnect. In a family that draws no
distinction between religion and fly-fishing, the Maclean brothers feel most at home on the waters of
Montana's Big Blackfoot River. Maclean's prose is terse and evocative, clearly reflecting his love of
fishing, the Montana countryside, and a brother he is unable to save.
Once you've read Maclean's narrative, be sure to check out Robert Redford's 1992 film adaptation
featuring Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt. The cinematography is sublime!
At once a piece of travel writing and spiritual autobiography, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow
Leopard is a first-person account of a trek to Nepal's Crystal Monastery (Shey Gompa).
Accompanying the biologist George Schaller as he studies the mating habits of Himalayan blue sheep,
Matthiessen hikes with several goals: he wants to see a rare snow leopard, and he wants to attain
enlightenment. As Matthiessen describes in journal-format the progress of his personal pilgrimage,
he explores a wide range of subjects, including the history of Nepalese Buddhism, the habits of the
people and animals he encounters, and his own grief at his wife’s death. A winner of the National
Book Award, The Snow Leopard expresses the emotional highs and lows that all travelers feel as
they face both obstacles and accomplishments along their path. If you want to see whether or not
Matthiessen sees the elusive snow leopard and attains enlightenment, you'll have to take the journey
with him.
The founder of the Sierra Club and father of the modern environmental movement, John Muir was also a
prolific writer, capturing in his prose and accompanying pencil sketches the beauties of the
California mountains. Considering nature to be the handiwork of God, Muir wrote prose that tried to
capture the rhapsodic feeling of awe he felt in the presence of natural grandeur. In texts such
as My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir describes the extreme lengths he would go to--such as
climbing out onto a ledge overlooking Yosemite Falls--to get closer to nature. The Library of
America edition of John Muir's Nature Writings includes an illustrated edition of My First
Summer in the Sierra along with The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, The Mountains of
California, Stickeen, and selected essays. These writings provide vivid insight into the
motivation behind Muir's tireless activism on the behalf of wilderness landscapes such as California's
Yosemite Valley.
Upon moving to her familial home in Lemmon, South Dakota after pursuing a writing career in New York
City, Kathleen Norris faced the challenge of eking out an existence in a setting which seems
diametrically opposed to the cultural stimulation she and her husband had previously enjoyed.
Discovering that the Midwestern prairie is spiritually akin to the Middle Eastern deserts where
Chrisian monks and mystics isolated themselves as an ascetic practice, Norris suggests that seekers can
experience spiritual fullness by embracing physical deprivation. Juxtaposing her observations of
cloistered monks and other Dakota residents with brief "Weather Reports" that capture the Midwestern
prairie in its many changing moods, Norris traces the subtle connections that exist between one's
external environment and one's internal spiritual yearnings.
If you enjoy Norris's spiritual musings in Dakota, check out her meditation on Christian
monasticism, The Cloister Walk.
Although Henry David Thoreau wasn’t the first to write a description of the natural world as viewed from
one’s own backyard, Walden is certainly the most influential of such narratives. A
semi-fictionalized account of two years spent living in a cabin on a plot of woods owned by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Walden helped create the myth of Thoreau as a nature-loving hermit who scorned society in
order to “Simplify, simplify.” Although Thoreau wasn’t as isolated as this legend would suggest, by
compiling his experiences into a narrative of a single year’s sojourn in the woods, Thoreau popularized
the practice of mixing natural observations with philosophical musings and literary flourishes.
The Library of America edition of Thoreau’s Walden also contains his other book-length works:
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods.
A naturalist at the Utah Museum of Natural History, Terry Tempest Williams is trained to note seasonal
fluctuations of water levels, bird populations, and other natural
phenomena. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, however, Williams describes
two disturbing anomalies that occurred during the 1980s: the Great Salt Lake rose dramatically, flooding
significant portions of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, and several of Williams' female relatives,
including her mother, either died of or were diagnosed with cancer. Drawing a connection between
the disease which ravages her family and the environmental malaise that besets the Great Salt Lake,
Williams points to radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests as a possible cause of both. Personal and
deeply moving, William's narrative suggests that human and ecological wellbeing are intrinsically
connected and that it is her duty as a member of a "clan of one-breasted women" to bear witness to that
truth.
