American Earth

American Earth, a thousand-page volume published last year by Library of America, is edited by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature. McKibben obviously took a lot of care with this book, and the result is quirky, intriguing, and often upsetting. I don’t recommend reading it straight through: I took it in three sections myself, beginning in December.

American Earth is subtitled Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, and McKibben in his introduction draws a distinction between nature writing and environmental writing, which examines the interaction of man and his planet, and which in this country began with Thoreau. For this reason, he finds room for documents that are significant but not necessarily sparkling, like Gifford Pinchot on natural resources, Benton MacKaye on the urban versus the rural, and William Cronon on the environmental impact of the native American.

That still leaves many pages for some exceptionally powerful writing. For me, some of the standout selections include Edward Abbey on national parks, Berton Roueché on the killing smog of Donora, Pennsylvania, Barry Lopez on beached whales in California, John McPhee and Eliot Porter on Glen Canyon, and David Quammen on the coming mass extinctions, a piece that may require you to lie down for a while with a damp cloth over your eyes. Along with familiar 19th century literary figures such as John Muir, McKibben also includes generous selections of fine but neglected writers such as John Burroughs.

Inevitably, even a thousand-page book doesn’t find room for everyone. For me, the most notable omissions were Bill Bryson on the Appalachian Trail, Tim Cahill on wilderness misadventures, Majora Carter on the Bronx River, Gretel Ehrlich on the West, Robert Finch (a great name for a nature writer) on Cape Cod, Bernd Heinrich on ravens (he was born in Germany but is surely an American writer by now), Jon Krakauer on Alaska, Peter Matthiessen on (perhaps) the fishermen of Long Island, and especially Edward Hoagland. I would like to have seen something from one of the three great essay collections Hoagland published between 1971 and 1976: The Courage of Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, and Red Wolves and Black Bears. (Hoagland, by the way, will soon be publishing Early in the Season, based on his journal of a 1968 journey to British Columbia.)