"What is Nature Writing?"
Check out this article, from the Magazine....

Quoted from Richard A. Lillard, "The Nature Book in Action" in Teaching Environmental Literature, ed. Frederick O. Waage (MLA, 1985), 35-44.

Traditionally, nature writing is
  • "a nonfiction work that is lyrical, informational, and apolitical."
  • has steady history of readers and writers since 18th century in Western Europe and North America
  • "concerns itself with phenomena that take their own time, with self-perpetuating activities that go on without help or notice from human beings:
  • is today hybridized with the "conservationist battle book"
  • usual subject is rural or wilderness areas or quasi-wild borders
    • It is not:
  • literary analysis
  • a taxonomic compendium
  • a collection of lore
  • a historical work on geological epochs or evolution
  • a topical research book
  • a thesis book built on research and travel


    • At best, the nature book:

  • "avoids sentimentality, personalification, and imputation of conscious purpose to natural events"
  • avoids imposing "on other species any human-being system for aesthetics, morality, economics, comfort, or danger
  • is "a personal statement, often charmingly literary, told at first hand by a well-rounded observer who is as much at home in the humanities as in the nature sciences, especially the biological studies," a "poetically inclined generalist. He or she is tolerant, eloquent, reflective, well-read, and also freshly and patiently observant...studies both books and nature, staying in one place, often a small precinct....shows in sharp, specific, sensuous detail how this person lives in harmony with nonhuman nature, adjusts to this nature, examines it--marveling at its features large and small."
  • Nature authors "will admit that their presence affects the nature they observe, but they wish to intrude as little as possible. the want to record, not alter; understand, not possess; leave alone, not replace; be in on something already a going thing, not in any way redirect or stop it."
  • "In its unmilitant, serious, informed way the nature book celebrates life. It implicitly rejects the notion that nature is dead or obsolete...It rejects the idea that in the long run humanity can win over nature."
  • "To all the destruction of the life in the environment, the nature book is a heartfelt reply....it announces unity, interrelations, the balance of an ecosystem.
    • The nature book is not quite the same as the conservationist book, written by "embattled crusaders"; rather, it presents "an ordered world in which humans and nature must work together as necessarily permanent parts of an organic-inorganic process operating through time in an ever-modulated harmony." Both work to "help humanity to correct its myopic economics, walleyed politics, blindfolded education system with its vocational and monetary bias, and environmental bad habits." 
    "Literary natural history, at its best, attempts to awaken us: to 'put nature in our eyes,' so that, for the first time, we see it whole and all at once. It attempts to have us be possessed by each of the parts--by even the smallest entities and creatures, and by their integrity and relationship to the whole. Writing of this sort prepares the reader's imagination to see particularly those plants, animals and phenomena that are, in many cases, impossible for most people to experience firsthand, those things that seem remote, exotic, and of no apparent personal meaning to us. Most amazingly, such writing prepares our eyes to see even those plants and creatures nearby, the ones we thought we knew.

     Through some combination of all our cognitive resources--metaphor and cold measurement, poetry and taxonomy--through literary natural history, in short, we begin to understand the natural world perhaps for the first time, both as a part of it and self-consciously outside of it. This way of seeing is the revelation in all great nature writing: the revelation that natural history, in its fullest sense, is also human history, that the parts and the whole are not separable." Frank Stewart, "The Nature Book in Action" in Teaching Environmental Literature, ed. Frederick O. Waage (MLA, 1985), 35-44.

    Thomas J. Lyon. Introduction to On Nature's Terms: Contemporary Voices (pp. 3-5)

    "Four darkly titled books of the last decade seem to characterize our time, and our state of health, with ominous precision: The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant; The Death of the Soul, by William Barrett; Extinction, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and The End of nature, by Bill McKibben. The sense of terminus, which appears to be widespread, is perhaps strengthened by our approach to the year 2000, a date that (as McKibben points out) has assumed a certain mythic potency; but there are obviously deeper things going on. For one, many people seem to have realized, almost in a rush of recent agreement, that the Western, power-over-nature philosophy described by Merchant and Barrett has reached the end of its usefulness. We go on living daily life by this philosophy, to be sure, but with growing uneasiness. Numbers of us seem to be discovering, now, an awful, solipsistic emptiness at the heart of our traditional style. Furthermore, actual elements of the world--for example, hundreds and thousands of species of plants and animals, very basic proportions of gases in the global atmosphere, and (most quietly of all) topsoil--are being eliminated wholesale, altered in probably irreversible ways, or simply poisoned and lost, and all of this is going on at rates completely unprecedented. It is becoming clearer that business-as-usual strategies of mitigation won't be big enough and don't go deep enough. What is happening is happening on too many fronts to be solved in the managerial way; to admit this, finally, is to realize that we face a genuine crisis in human history. I think it is not an overstatement, under the conditions, to hold that our most basic attitudes toward the world--our whole sense of "man and nature," as the phrase has it--need to be revolutionized.

     Nature writing (to come down to the book in hand) reminds us of our essential, animal nature, the simple capacity of being here and experiencing. This reminding is revolutionary, because it opens up the wild again. It gives credit to basic aliveness and the natural givens--the lines of the hills against the sky, the towering up of summer cumulus, the interesting look of other animals. Traditional management strategy, by the evidence, ends up with another kind of list: plantation forests that produce warped, weak boards, monoculture farming that kills the soil, and bears with ear tags and radio collars. Stewardship doesn't work if there is nothing at the core of it, no outgoing, wild connection to the wild planet. Planning ahead, keeping every kind of record, mitigating our latest construction project's environmental effects, we just get farther away from the source. Most of us are so distractedly active, so thickly insulated with ourselves and our works, that we have to be hit over the head with a week in a wilderness area to come somewhat naturally alive again and know what world we're in.

    However, we do then (perhaps amazingly, under the circumstances) seem to remember. "You walk a stranger in a vegetating world," Mary Austin wrote in 1924, "then with an inward click the shutter of some profounder level of consciousness uncloses. . . ." At this level the nature essay originates. Nature writing affirms humanity as essentially unneedy.

    The significance of this reclamation may not be immediately apparent, but what it amounts to is a clearing-away of the entire mistaken strategy of progress. Our ruling myth has been growth: from humble beginnings, from rude life in caves, perhaps, or before that as members of chattering, savanna-roaming bands, we have ascended (one of our favorite terms, as in The Ascent of Man) to agriculture and settled, village life, to specialization of function for individuals, thus to leisure and opportunity for scientific discovery, to clever exploitations of the laws of nature through ever more ingenious technologies, to urban-industrial living, with its extraordinary powers--even flight--and its luxuriant goods and services, its confidence of further improvements ahead, world without end. This is the frontier mind, and we all have it. The last five hundred years of European success--call it success, for a moment--have ingrained it in us. We have gone out all over the world, and by one means or another converted it to our time sense and our myth.

    The desperate quality of this style, and its rather pathetic neediness and self-assertion, don't come clear to us as long as we're under the dome, cottoned in the folklore of comfort and control. Under the protective cover, our reference is only other people, and they're all under the same roof, too. "We meet at meals three times a day," Thoreau wrote with some sadness, apparently, "and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."

    Our stories, under these conditions, have certain limit. Our literary fictions, insofar as they occur indoors, so to speak, may only distract us from seeing that amongst all our little plots, our ups and downs, we lack something much more primary and elemental: the earth. We crave to come out from under the dome and have vivid seeing and experience. Nature writing, then, is a form of story confirming that we are still alive, still capable, and that fulfillment, after all our flailing around, might be in something as radically simple as a blue-sky day.

    But the genre is far from formulaic...A nature essay can be anything--or the loss of anything---in what e.e. cummings called the "world of born," including of course human nature. The urge toward connectedness that drives this writing, though--a quality of attention paid, a simple delight in seeing what is naturally here--is whole-making. This attitude is an identifying imprint, a wild signature or watermark in the text, a warrant of human origin."
    Thomas J. Lyon. Introduction to On Nature's Terms: Contemporary Voices (pp. 3-5)


    Scholars who study nature writing continue to define what it is that they are doing (and with what kind of literary and rhetorical work.) Literary ecocriticism, which embraces both literature (in all genres) and environmental consciousness, is the most recent definition, as defined by articles in The Ecocriticism Reader. Here are the questions "ecocritics" are asking....