American Nature Writing 1994
selected by John A. Murray, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1994; 229 p. $12.00 paper.
Does nature writing have a future? If, like John A. Murray, you are the editor of the first volume in an annual collection of American nature writing, then you are almost obliged to think that it does. "One has the sense," Murray writes in his introduction, "that nature writing is poised at the beginning of a period of wonderful exuberance. All of the excitement that attends the beginning of a new century, and the start of a new millennium, together with a growing awareness of the interdependence of nature and culture, cannot help but fuel this historic genre."
In "Writing Wild," an essay that appeared nearly twenty years ago in Red Wolves and Black Bears, Edward Hoagland was not so sanguine. Sent off to "wildlife refuges and salt swamps" to write about nature, he was startled to see how few other people he met tramping around in the wild.
How long will these readers continue to miss walking in the woods enough to employ oddballs like me and Edward Abbey and Peter Matthiessen and John McPhee to do it for them? Not long, I suspect. We're a peculiar lot: McPhee long bent to the traces of The New Yorker, Matthiessen an explorer in remote regions that would hound most people into a nervous breakdown, Abbey angry, molded by what is nowadays euphemistically called "Appalachia."
Edward Abbey is dead, but his presence is everywhere in this new volume, most obviously in an entry from his own journal that describes his misadventures on a bighorn sheep count, and in David Petersen's account of a pilgrimage to his hidden desert grave. Abbey's spirit is alive, too, in Rick Bass's scalding jeremiad on the destruction of the Montana wilderness (which comes complete with the addresses of Senators and Congressmen for those who are moved to join his protest).
This collection inevitably displays some of the qualities that have made American nature writers, at least since Thoreau, unpopular with many readers: not just their crankiness or anger, but their claim on the moral high ground, their sanctimoniousness, their insistence on the transcendent value of this pond or that forest, and their sometimes overheated paeans to the beauty of a praying mantis or a drop of pond water. Linda Hogan, to cite one example, waxes lyrical over the images sent into outer space in the Voyager spacecraft -- "an old man walks through a field of white daisies, and children lovingly touch a globe in a classroom" -- and finds them "more magical and heavy with meaning than the cave paintings at Lascaux, more wise than the language of any holy book."
Outweighing such lapses are the accurate, graceful, quietly moving observations that illuminate many of the other selections, including Kenneth Brower's loving catalogue of island beaches he has known. "The damp sands low on Galàpagos beaches," he writes, "are marked everywhere by the hieroglyphics that ghost crabs leave in feeding" -- the dashes, periods, and exclamation points created as they scrape and sift the sand. "The commentary of ghost crabs can cover a whole beach, between each erasure of the tide. The messages are all exclamatory, like those notes fifth-grade girls pass among themselves in class."
In another essay, Sherry Simpson tells of accompanying a trapper and a wildlife biologist on a project to research bears, "so I can touch with my own hands what frightens me most." Her opportunity comes when she is invited to feel the paws of a sedated bear. "I press my palm against the leathery pad. The curving ebony claws stretch longer than my little finger. Heat radiates into my skin." It's a marvelous moment, but Simpson is honest enough to acknowledge that there is something too easy about it. "I smooth the black pelt, then ruffle it again. I'm taking liberties I haven't earned. I know that." Nature subdued is not really nature anymore.
What does it mean to be a nature writer during the age of the "end of nature"? Now that the very existence of nature and the natural has been called into question -- now that we have tampered with the air and water, even the climate itself, beyond the earth's ability to repair our damage -- nature writers will have to redefine what it is they are doing. As they work out answers that satisfy themselves, nature writing (never a tidy category anyway) will become more and more intertwined with philosophy, psychology, history, and religion. This book provides some clues about the directions it will take.
Published in Wild Earth, Fall 1994.