In recent years nature writing has undergone a renaissance. Several anthologies of classic and contemporary writing about nature have been published, and a number of writers–Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Charles Bowden, John McPhee, Diane Ackerman, and others–have gained critical acclaim and popular support as interpreters of the natural world.
He gave himself the time to do so. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements,” he wrote in “Walking,” the summation of his philosophy of nature written shortly before his death. He covered a lot of ground in the Concord area, maintaining that there “is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius” and the human life span. “It will never become quite familiar to you.”
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Thoreau’s gift as a writer and philosopher lay in his ability to make something of his observations, to draw lessons from his daily walks. His description of the eroding railroad cut, for example, with its interweaving strands of water and sand, is a brilliant set piece that explains how the movement of the ground foreshadows the plant life to come; how the human body is built of its raw materials; and even how words evolved from letters and syllables, which evolved from the sounds and forms of the world itself. “Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature.” Thoreau does not merely describe the place he lives–he recasts it in language, striving to get as near as he can to the roots of both nature and language. He turns Walden Pond and its environs into a microcosm, one we can all understand.
Though that’s a nice way to look at it, such genres persist, perpetuated in no small part by books like On Nature’s Terms, a collection of contemporary nature writing. The 20 contributions reflect a surprisingly broad spectrum of styles, topics, and ways of responding to the world. How do their explorations of place differ from Thoreau’s?
If I wish to remember the details of “White Wilderness,” though, I need to go read it again, since they do not linger in my memory. If I read several of these essays on the same evening, their details ran together, as if I’d devoured a travel magazine in one sitting. This is nature writing as genre; the essay may be well crafted, but there is little reason anyone not already interested in ice, Eskimos, or Arctic wildlife would want to read it. This is nature writing as marginal literature; the writing does not universalize a place that is for most of us beyond our experience. In this sense much of On Nature’s Terms will not, I believe, be of interest to the general reader. The places explored by its writers do not grow larger than themselves the way Walden Pond does in Thoreau’s work.
Bowden’s essay is memorable because it vividly etches human characters–not only the hunters but Harley Shaw, a wildlife biologist whose study of mountain lions has become an obsession. He has written a book about them in which he has lost scientific objectivity. “He has gotten too close, and he knows it,” says Bowden. “‘I have begun,’ he writes, “to dislike the ways humans view themselves.’ He has begun to see the world through a lion’s eyes–he cannot see that world, he has learned too much, sensed too much to ever think he can see that world, but he has a feel for its presence, and that has changed how the things now look through his eyes. Now he is there, he is so close, it is all in his notes, in his mind, in his senses as he thinks about lions, and it is not nearly enough, barely a beginning. He has about studied himself out of a profession: biologist. As he notes dryly of his work, ‘You will be forced to reexamine your beliefs.’ . . . ‘Out there,’ he says suddenly, ‘out there alone without tools without shelter without food. Down deep I have an image of myself as being totally wild. And I know I never will.’”
