nature of writing meaning

What is Nature Writing?

Definition and Examples

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Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice , and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay . Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism , ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

• At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
• The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
• Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
• The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
• In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
• An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
• January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
• The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
• Migration, by Barry Lopez
• The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
• Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

• "Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . .. "The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs , literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . . "In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir's words, that 'the money changers were in the temple' continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature's wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs. "Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing." (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing . Norton, 2002)

"Human Writing . . . in Nature"

• "By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the  genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really 'nature writing' anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau's] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate." (David Gessner, "Sick of Nature." The Boston Globe , Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

• "I do not believe that the solution to the world's ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature "Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a 'nature writer' is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that 'nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. 'Nature writing' is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically 'nature writing' does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things." (Joseph Wood Krutch, "Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer." New York Herald Tribune Book Review , 1952)
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What is nature writing?

What we talk about when we talk about nature writing.

“Nature writing can be defined as non-fiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment.” This is actually its definition on Wikipedia.

For the purposes of this prize, we're accepting only non-fiction prose submissions (see last week's resources on breaking down the brief ), but in general, nature writing can mean many more things and cover lots of different ideas. As such, there’s a whole variety of approaches to writing a book in this genre. Different types of nature writing books can include: factual books such as field guides, natural history told through essays, poetry about the natural world, literary memoir and personal reflections.

Typically, nature writing is writing about the natural environment. Your book might take a look at the natural world and examine what it means to you or what you’ve encountered in the environment. You could frame this idea through a personal lens.

Perhaps you want to take a more focused or factual approach and look at individual flora and fauna in detail. Recent books that we’ve enjoyed have looked at topics such as beekeeping, owls, social and cultural history, trees, swimming, cows and have offered personal observation and reflection on their chosen topics.

You might be writing about the landscape, from farming to remote islands or city life. You may want to write about the fauna and flora of a whole region, or just one animal or a single tree. You don’t need to go out into the wilderness to write about nature and you don’t need to be hiking for three months in a remote area either. Most importantly, we believe the best books on nature writing convey a clear sense of place and mainly focus on the natural world and our human relationship with it.

The Nan Shepherd Prize aims to find the next big voice in nature writing from emerging writers, and we can’t wait to read about what nature means to you.

• Read an academic paper on New Nature Writing here .
• ‘Land Lines’ was a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is a collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Leeds, Sussex and St Andrews. The project carried out a sustained study on modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White’s seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald’s prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. You can look at their website here .
• Read about nature writing throughout history (this is a US perspective) here .
• Read about which nature books have inspired today’s contemporary nature writers here .
• Read this guide to nature writing from Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher of Dialogue Books, who teamed up with the Forestry Commission to find undiscovered nature writers here .

Over @NanPrize we’ve been sharing examples of our favourite nature writing books, so if you want to see some specific examples of recent favourites, that might be a good place to start. We’ve also got a collection here which will give you an idea as to what books we like to publish in the nature writing genre.

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Book News & Features

The workings of nature: naturalist writing and making sense of the world.

Genevieve Valentine

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"In every generation and among every nation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they did not exist, those nations would perish."

-- Al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova. Among more detached details of its appearance, there is this: "It was like a large bamboo mat. It displayed the five colors, both pleasing and otherwise."

The attempt to ground the unknown within the familiar — and the editorial aside of "otherwise" — cuts to the heart of naturalist writing. Nearly 2000 years later, Carl Sagan did the same in Cosmos , condensing astronomy to its component parts: facts and wonder.

We've been curious about the natural world since before recorded time; the history of naturalism is human history. By the ninth century, al-Jahiz's multi-volume History of Animals combined zoological folklore with scientific observation, including theories of natural selection. In the early 20th century, Sioux author Zitkala-Ša wrote landscapes intertwined with the personal, which became a model for the form. In 1962, Rachel Carson's ecological manifesto Silent Spring was a deciding factor in banning DDT.

The best naturalist writing delivers both a secondhand thrill of obsession and a jolt of protectiveness for what's been discovered. Some of it reveals as much about the author as the surroundings. (Carl Linnaeus' 1811 Tour of Lapland manuscript cuts off a paragraph about wedding customs mid-sentence, picking up again with a breathless catalog of marsh plants.) And naturalists themselves are shaped by the lure of landscapes on the page. Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks explores the British countryside using others' writing as an interior map that challenges him to approach familiar places in new ways.

We love reading about nature for the same reason naturalists love being ankle-deep in marshes: Nature provides enough order to soothe and enough entropy to surprise. It's also why so many involve a person in the landscape; understanding our place in the world is as important as understanding the world itself. We read the work of naturalists to capture that sense of discovery made familiar. They present worlds we've never seen, and make us care as if they were our own backyards.

Not every naturalist sets out to be an activist; this is a literary tradition as much as a scientific one. But there are threads that connect naturalist literature, across continents and centuries. It's driven by an environmental curiosity that integrates the scientific and the spiritual; facts inspire wonder, rather than quench it. And every piece of naturalist literature, from al-Jahiz to today, makes a case for preserving the world it sees.

The Invention of Nature

Some naturalists actually do try to encompass the world entire. In The Invention of Nature , Andrea Wulf follows Alexander Humboldt's expeditions in Latin America and European royal courts, painting a portrait of a man whose hunger for knowledge — and constant pontificating about it — bordered on caricature. Humboldt's legacy is the 'web of life' his work conveyed to a lay audience. That interconnectedness made him an early conservationist; by 1800 he was noting adverse effects "when forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by European planters, with an imprudent precipitation."

But he wasn't the first to catalog the systems of life. A century before Humboldt, German-born naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian was in Surinam, recording her life's passion: butterflies, moths, and insects. Chrysalis , Kim Todd's biography of this amateur scientist who established the idea of a life cycle, aims for a sly impression of Merian, down to the subject matter: "Insects," Todd explains, "generally gave off a whiff of vice." Merian's engravings made life cycles palpable for a public who still believed rotten meat spontaneously transformed into flies; it was impressive enough to change assumptions about the natural world (though Merian's credit waned as male scientists began absorbing her work into their own).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. This is the dynamic at the heart of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which carries a touch of the hymnal (and a grim streak that has a grandmother in Merian's engraving of a tarantula devouring a bird), and Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud , a love letter swamps, bogs, and "the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." And few naturalists write themselves into their landscapes quite so drily as M. Krishnan. The essays in Of Birds and Birdsong carry a sense of magical realism; always scientifically rigorous (his bird descriptions are those of a man looking for a particular friend in a crowd of thousands), Krishnan writes himself as a resigned meddler in avian affairs; he could try to be invisible among nature's bounty, but then who'd train his pigeons?

Of course, some writers have to fight to be seen on the landscape at all. Enter The Colors of Nature , an anthology of nature writing by people of color edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, providing deeply personal connections to — or disconnects from — nature. Jamaica Kincaid's "In History" considers naturalism in the aftermath of colonialism, asking a crucial question for naturalism in a global context: "What should history mean to someone who looks like me?" And Joseph Bruchac's travel diary is pragmatism shot through with hope; "Our old words keep returning to the land."

The Colors of Nature

For others, the internal landscape and that hope for the natural world must be rediscovered in tandem. In Braiding Sweetgrass , botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship "which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land." That sense of connection, or the loss of it, is the spine of the book: mucking out a pond is a microcosm, agriculture becomes rumination on symbiosis, and mast fruiting of pecan trees parallels human and plant communities.

It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes — that sense of discovery that draws us in. Happily for armchair naturalists, mysteries of the natural world never stop unfolding; but increasingly, a sense of impending doom accompanies the delight of knowledge. Kimmerer mentions a language between trees as something awaiting more specific study; it arrives later this year in Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees . A no-nonsense writing style — he came, he studied, here's how to date a forest via its weevil population — frames a deeply conservationist argument: Trees harbor not only ecosystems, but feelings, vocabulary, and etiquette. Hidden Life is designed to be an arboreal Silent Spring .

For some places, however, no revelations are yet possible; the world being studied is simply too mysterious to be yet wholly understood. With meditative prose, 1986's Arctic Dreams chronicled Barry Lopez's expeditions in an ecosystem so punishing half an animal population can die every winter, and so otherworldly animal fat is preserved on bones after a century. "Something eerie ties us to the world of animals," he says, and it's both a warning and a promise. In The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Deep, Philip Hoare's marine obsession is similarly dreamlike; for him, what we know about whales and how they make us feel is deeply linked. After all, our 'discovery' of them is still in its first blush. Sperm whales were first filmed in 1984; "We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like." The only absolute conclusion in his book is a stern one: Humanity's damaging effects on nature and its fascination with the unknown has been devastating; if we're going to keep whales long enough to know them, that fascination will have to take a more protective turn.

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. These narratives are crucial, especially now — stories of the worth of nature, even just as a mirror of ourselves, build a narrative in which nature's something worth saving. It's imperfect; making nature an object rather than a subject prevents us from seeing ourselves as part of natural patterns of cause and effect. But in The Colors of Nature, Aileen Suzara pins it down: "The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice." The human voice that looked at the dark and saw a dying star is heard 2000 years later. If we're going to have another 2000 years, there's no time like the present to start listening.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

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THE NATURE OF NATURE WRITING

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By David Rains Wallace

• July 22, 1984

NATURE writing is a historically recent literary genre, and, in a quiet way, one of the most revolutionary. It's like a woodland stream that sometimes runs out of sight, buried in sand, but overflows into waterfalls farther downstream. It can be easy to ignore, but it keeps eroding the bedrock.

There is some confusion as to exactly what nature writing is. It usually is associated with essays such as ''Walden,'' but there is nature fiction, nature poetry, nature reporting, even nature drama, if television documentary narrations are literature. All these have something in common: They are appreciative esthetic responses to a scientific view of nature, and I think this trait defines the genre. Of course, there was much writing that concerned nature before Linnaeus developed scientific classification in the mid- 18th century, but the fascination with nature itself that science evoked was new. Before Linnaeus, there were hunting stories, fables, herbals, bestiaries, pastorals, lyrics and traveler's tales, but nature generally was seen in only two dimensions. It was a backdrop to a historical cosmos, or a veneer over a religious one. Whether it was admired or scorned, the human figure stood in strong relief against it. After Linnaeus began to give even insects impressive Greco-Latinate names, nature rapidly acquired a new substantiality, and became a subject as well as a setting. By the 1790's, an English country clergyman who a century or two before might have been writing theological treatises or metaphysical poems produced a book (Gilbert White's ''The Natural History of Selborne'') wherein history and religion were interwoven with, sometimes overshadowed by, beech trees and earthworms.

Nature writing has been particularly prevalent in America, for an obvious reason. European colonists found here a world which was for them (if not for the Indians they displaced) empty of historical or religious association. In this world, they ignored nature itself at their own risk. The early Jamestown and Boston colonists succeeded in ignoring it to some degree, which perhaps is one reason they clung precariously to the coast for the first hundred years, but by Linnaeus's time, Americans had begun to observe nature closely, and to venture into the wilderness with appreciation.

They observed in a piecemeal fashion at first, and ventured without too much appreciation. Early naturalists, such as Cadwallader Colden and John Bartram, were more interested in extracting rare, valuable plants and animals from the wilderness than in perceiving it as a whole, an attitude in keeping with the Linnaean bias for individual organisms over ecological systems (ecology not having been invented yet). Bartram, a Philadelphia Quaker who collected Venus' flytraps and other curiosities for wealthy English patrons' gardens, saw the wolves and swamps of the wilderness as uncomfortable obstacles, and his descriptions of Florida and upstate New York in the 1750's and 60's reflect this. They are robust and accurate, but utilitarian. They are not quite nature writing as we understand it today, because an element of poetic sensibility is lacking from their genuine scientific interest.

JOHN'S son, William Bartram, supplied the missing element. An artist and dreamer who failed several times at storekeeping and farming, he spent four years alone in the American wilderness, and brought poetry to it as decisively as a rather similar figure, Johnny Appleseed, brought fruit. His account of Florida and the southern Appalachians in his book, the ''Travels,'' is a subtropical escarpment dividing dry Enlightenment from moist Romanticism. William's father had described the waters of one of Florida's celebrated limestone sinkhole springs as smelling ''like bilge,'' tasting ''sweetish and loathsome,'' and boiling up from the bottom ''like a pot.'' William saw ''an enchanting and amazing crystal fountain, which incessantly threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute . . . the blue ether of another world.''

If William's effusions have a familiar ring to even the most urban sensibility, there is good reason. After its publication in 1791, Bartram's ''Travels'' was devoured by the generation of young European poets that included the author of ''Kubla Khan.'' Bartram supplied Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, and others with genuine examples of the exotic, Rousseau- esque wonders they hungered for - not only ''caverns measureless to man,'' but noble Creek warriors, lovely Cherokee maidens, flowery savannas, fragrant groves, brilliant birds. The wonders seem a little overblown to us today, but they were real, honestly observed and vividly described. Fragments of their splendor still linger in today's condominium-laden Florida. The ''magnificent plains of Alachuah,'' where Bartram saw ''the thundering alligator'' and ''the sonorous savanna cranes,'' are now a state preserve, although there's an Interstate freeway through one corner of them.

The ''Travels'' didn't evoke as much interest in America as it did in Europe. Most Americans were unprepared for its glowing picture of wilds that lay only a few days' travel to the west. One reviewer found its subject interesting but its style ''disgustingly pompous.'' As the romantic sensibility filtered westward across the Atlantic, however, Bartram's poetic wilderness followed it. ''Do you know Bartram's 'Travels'?'' Carlyle wrote to Emerson, ''Treats of Florida generally, has a wonderful kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has grown immeasurably old. All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a future biblical article.''

If the more flowery passages in Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are to be believed, American pioneers were beginning to sound more like William than his father. In fact, early 19th-century frontier letters contain quite a few effusive descriptions of flowery prairies and soaring forests along with more prosaic matters, suggesting that nature-loving in the romantic mode had caught on.

Nature writing changed as romanticism evolved into Victorian pragmatic optimism. Its scientific orientation deepened, and at the same time it began to question the directions in which economic applications of science were leading civilization. It became increasingly aware of ecology, in other words. William Bartram hadn't given too much thought to the relationship of civilization and wilderness. (His patron had sent him to scout the Southeast's agricultural and industrial potential as well as to study its natural history.) But Henry Thoreau did, and John Muir after him. Pragmatic, optimistic men (both were mechanically skilled inventors as well as naturalists), they saw wilderness as a remedy for the enervations and constraints of growing industrial towns. They hauled it down from the garret of romanticism to the Victorian parlor and kitchen. ''We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce, or arbor vitae in our tea,'' wrote Thoreau, with characteristic pungency (and hyperbole). ''Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamp.''

Although they often are seen as opposed to 19th-century expansionism, Thoreau and Muir were men of their time, inhabiting a planet with about a quarter of today's population. Land speculators saw hope and future in quaking swamps too, although they differed from Thoreau in wanting to see them drained after they'd bought them cheap. One might say that Thoreau and Muir liked the expansive quality of the frontier so much that they wanted to make it permanent, to integrate its challenges and exhilarations with civilization. From this desire, expressed in Thoreau's New England swamp ruminations and Muir's California mountaintop raptures, arose the concept of the wilderness park, America's unique contribution to global culture.

As Victorian optimism ripened into Edwardian euphoria, the words of Thoreau and Muir struck increasingly responsive chords with the public. Expansion of the frontier was making America rich, but it was gobbling up natural resources so fast that the idea of preserving some wilderness for recreation, or at least for future use, had become respectable. Nature writing had a heyday at the turn of the century, especially during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a nature writer of sorts. It would be hard to imagine John Muir going camping in Yosemite with the present Republican incumbent, but he did with Teddy Roosevelt. John Burroughs, a less acerbic writer than Thoreau or Muir, enjoyed tremendous popularity with books about countryside wildlife, and went camping with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison as well as Roosevelt.

The heyday didn't survive Muir and Roosevelt. The scientifically conducted carnage of the First World War revealed the rot at the Edwardian core, and pragmatic optimism became a mark of naive boosterism. Many American writers were overtaken by a wave of nostalgia for the prescientific, for the nobility in which religion and history can clothe humanity. Muir and Thoreau had complained eloquently of human conceit and destructiveness, but they still had taken for granted a high degree of human significance. It was harder to do this after a generation of young men had been slaughtered in the trenches. The pragmatic remedies of progressives seemed inadequate to modernists, who sought utopias.

The modernist flight of American writers to Europe was a frontier in reverse. Nature writing meant little to its pioneers, Pound and Eliot, who turned their backs on Idaho and Missouri to embrace medieval Europe. Even the outdoorsman Ernest Hemingway had a medieval attitude toward wilderness. It was a place for hunting, fishing or war, not for seeking knowledge, transcendent or otherwise. Knowledge was for priests. D. H. Lawrence excluded Thoreau from his canon of American classics, regarding him as a coldhearted detailer of biotic mechanisms.

But nostalgia for the prescientific degenerated into fascism, helping bring about the Second World War and even more murderous applications of science. As though seeking an antidote in the serpent that had stung it, the postwar world turned back to pragmatic optimism of a sort, with much talk of new frontiers in the Arctic, the tropics, the oceans, space. Nature writing underwent a resurgence, partly as a result of renewed public interest in science, partly as a result of renewed public uneasiness about its applications. The popularity of Rachel Carson's best-seller,''The Sea Around Us,'' which eloquently introduced the public to many new discoveries about the biosphere, gave her the time and authority to write ''Silent Spring,'' which eloquently introduced the public to the many new dangers of pesticides and herbicides.

Carson and other outstanding postwar nature writers, such as Aldo Leopold and Loren Eisely, were somewhat different from their predecessors, reflecting American society's growing dependence on expert knowledge. Bartram, Thoreau, and Muir were amateurs, but Carson, Leopold, and Eiseley were institutionally trained and employed scientists. There were advantages and disadvantages to this. Carson and her colleagues could appeal to vastly expanded knowledge of the biosphere's interdependence when advocating wilderness preservation, while Muir and Thoreau worked more from intuition. On the other hand, professional positions may have inhibited postwar writers from the robust partisanship that let John Muir lobby unabashedly for birds and flowers in 19th-century Sacramento.

There's no doubt that Carson, Eisley, and Leopold contributed greatly to the wave of environmental partisanship in the 1960's and 70's. That surge has encouraged a new crop of nature writers; despite continuing shrinkage of wilderness, there probably are more nature writers today than ever. It remains to be seen whether we'll be as influential as our predecessors. At times, the prospects look dim. Since land development became a major industry, there has been an expectation in some quarters that wilderness simply will disappear eventually, replaced by artifice. Some writers seem to have accepted this. They write like undertakers: an elegy on every page. A new book about this or that last wilderness comes out at least once a year.

It's important for us to know how bad things are, but to me there's something unimaginative about the elegists. As dealers in myth, writers ought to know better than to let technocrats and salesmen mesmerize them into believing that civilization can conquer nature. They should understand that this is a myth too, what one might call the myth of nature as loser. But nature is not a loser because it is not a competitor: It simply is. We have better myths. Evolution, the vast, intricate story of four-billion-year-old wilderness earth, throws a cold light on man the conqueror. The nature- as-loser myth was useful when humanity was small and wilderness large; it encouraged the growth of civilization, and of knowledge. It's of doubtful utility to us, who are capable of reducing the biosphere to dust. It is not nature that will have lost in that event.

THERE'S a lot of work for nature writers to do. It's not quite the same work that William Bartram faced. Adventure is a luxury commodity today, packaged by tour agencies. The old, romantic, exotic nature writing is of declining relevance. I wonder how many people have gone to the library to read about something in their local woods and found books about the Arctic, the tropics, the oceans and space, but nothing much about their local woods. I certainly have: It's one more reason I started writing nature books.

Carson, Leopold, and Eiseley did much of their exploring in their studies. The most daunting challenge facing nature writers today is not travel but data. Somebody has to translate information into feelings and visions. This is not to say that nature writers now must spend all their time at computer terminals. Collecting mosquito bites always will go with the job, and there are still more places to do so, even in America, than some people think. They're generally the worse for wear, these places, but they're still alive, still holding up the biosphere, still part of what Wallace Stegner calls ''the geography of hope.'' B

David Rains Wallace is a naturalist and the author of ''The Klamath Knot,'' a collection of writings on the Klamath Mountains in California. He is working on a book about Florida.

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In this glorious Pocket Guide, Kerri ní Dochartaigh highlights the value of Nature writing, whilst sharing her personal tips, resources and opportunities on how you can get inspired to write. 

What do we really mean when we talk about ‘nature writing’? And what do we even mean when we talk about ‘nature’?

Nature writing , like pockets , is a politicised thing – embroidered with different threads; depending on your race , class , gender , (dis)ability, wealth or place in this world. Is there space here for you? Do you feel safe? There has never been a more important time to make safe space: for every single thing on this earth. The writing, then, will just do its own thing, you see. It will come and go as it pleases, like a moth to a big aul’ light.

How about a wee browse through these background reads , and then we might, in the words of Edwyn Collins , (the most inspiring nature punk on earth): ‘Rip it up and start again’?… (What is nature writing if not the constant riotous act of starting again? Of learning, again, to listen and to look, to draw close and keep our distance, to break and to weep; to get back up and love the world afresh?) In this NY Times piece three and a half decades ago, David Rains Wallace wrote ‘NATURE writing is a historically recent literary genre, and, in a quiet way, one of the most revolutionary.’

We’re ready for this revolution but who is going to lead it?

For far too long we have allowed a very particular voice, from a very particular background, with a very particular outlook – dominate bookshop displays, library shelves, reading lists, bestseller rankings and our own homes. This, the idea that there has only ever been one nature story, is wildly incorrect. Other standpoints, other views, other stories, other voices: have always been there. In ‘Heart Berries’ Terese Marie Mailhot summarises: ‘So, where are we? Where we have always been. Where are you?’

To write about nature with truth and integrity means to ask questions about the past and the future – who, where and what have been mistreated – and how do we make that stop, through how we approach this genre? I only want to be a part of any gathering where every single one of us is there as an equal.

So, who is doing the important work in this area? Where should you go to read more? Where should you send your fledgling words?

Let’s start with The Willowherb Review because I think they are incredible. Their aim is ‘to provide a digital platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour’, and already their writers have seen prize nominations and awards (all links on the site). Most importantly of all the writing is cracking; beautiful, raw and necessary. Jessica J Lee, the editor, has a no nonsense approach to the genre that I deeply admire. If you are a nature writer of colour, check out their website for submission dates.

Jessica has also organised a reading group, Allies in the Landscape , a fantastic support for nature writers and anyone wanting to widen their reading in the genre.

The folks at Caught by the River do stellar work for those who love the natural world across a plethora of genres. If you are in need of inspiration, or events to go to when we can, start here. You will not be let down. They read everything they’re sent but are a busy crew so – as with submitting anywhere, patience is kindness.

More folks with big hearts and brilliant writing are The Clearing .

The art of nature writing itself can be a children’s story, a poem, a list, a eulogy, a translation – it can be fiction or non – written or other – short or long; it is anything that takes our world and makes it sing. The best nature writing, for me, speaks of transformation – anything from a fiercely hungry caterpillar, through to strong women swimming themselves to safe places – making lists of yellow things for their sick fathers – moulding grief through sowing seeds: the best nature writers might not even call themselves that at all. Some books I have recently loved are: ‘ Trace’ by Lauret Savoy, ‘Braiding Sweet Grass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer Elizabeth J Burnett’s ‘ The Grassling’ , ‘ Bulbul Calling’ by Pratyusha, Seán Hewitt’s ‘ Tongues of Fire’ , Jessica J Lee’s ‘ Two Trees Make a Forest’ , ‘The Promise’ by Nicola Davies and ‘ The Diary of a Young Naturalist’ by Dara McAnulty. I return over and over to writers like Amy Liptrot, Kathleen Jamie, Annie Dillard, Robert McFarlane and others but I am constantly trying to find new voices, approaches and stories – new to me, not new in their existence, of course: it’s important to make that distinction in a genre such as this.

The important thing, needed now more than ever, is that they each take their place in this symphony of hope.

There is room, here, on these mountains and beaches, in these gardens and fields, in these bodies of water – in ASDA parking lots and unsafe spaces – on the streets, and in every place both ‘wild’  and not (both outer and inner) – for you and your story.

From me to you, here a few exercises I return to over and over as a means to get started…

Choose something – a moth, the colour blue, a tree, a wren, a pebble, the waves on the beach – and write about it as if the reader will have never before seen or heard of it. Really stay with the description for as long as you can, and try to get down to what it really is: its thingness. Make your description almost like a love letter in how much care you take with it, and the depth of your words. Another interesting take on this is to write yourself as the thing – to really imagine, say, going through all the stages of the cycle from caterpillar to moth – or the ebb and flow you would experience as a particular body of water etc.

Journal – at least three free-flow pages without thinking about them or rereading – every single day. This one really helps to get me out of my normal flow of thought, and does something to my brain that welcomes experiences, creatures and thoughts that are conducive to nature writing. It really doesn’t matter if I am not writing about nature in these pages, really that is not the point, I think it’s in the act of carving out space and time – bringing awareness to the act. The space in which I write these can be a cafe, on a train, or at home, and still I find myself in a wild place, one that is on the inside not the outside.

The thing that most helps me to write about the natural world is actually being in it – walking, swimming, running, laying, laughing, crying – just allowing myself to be outside as much as I can seems to be the best way for me to try to write about the world we share.

Once you feel more confident, you might be interested in entering your writing into a prize or sharing it online (an incredible amount of links can also be found in the hyperlinked pages too) and I can share only a fraction but here are a few that sing to me:

https://nanshepherdprize.com   This prize is changing the landscape of this genre. Every single section on the site is invaluable.

https://www.thenaturelibrary.com

Christina Riley has put such a wonderful thing together here. Have a browse / follow.

https://www.lonewomeninflashesofwilderness.com/about

Clare Archibald’s inspiring, inclusive site is really making ripples in this area.

https://beachbooks.blog/about/ A gorgeous, generous sea library full of joy.

https://www.elementumjournal.com  Submissions are closed for this journal but there is lots of fine work to peruse.

https://www.elsewhere-journal.com   This is a superb journal of place, and submission are open.

The Moth Nature Writing prize , The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition and others are great to look at too. There are courses, schemes and more online but I think the most important place to start is by looking and listening, reading and caring; by loving the world and by writing it down in any way you can.

For me, any time any of us looks and listens to the non-human beings we share this earth with – when we pause in humility to acknowledge the interconnectedness of us all – the threads tying us to each other; invisible often, but so strong – we are playing a part in making this a safer, fairer earth. To go one step further, and to write about this connection, to name, explore, celebrate and honour – whether we choose a swan or a stone, a moth or a lough, the wild sea or our gut flora; things nearby or faraway, the known or unknown –   we are shining light on one of the most important truths of this earth: our need to be alive, and to remain connected to every other living thing. There is power in trying to find traces of ourselves in the nonhuman, as well as acknowledging our difference. In searching for the beat of something unnameable;  the simple act of being alive, at the same time, as each other, and in the same way as even the smallest insect.

Nature Writing holds the hope, for me, of reminding us how to treat everyone and everything on the earth. The best nature writing shines light on places we need to see; on beings we need to learn to accept as our equal. It is only a proper telling of the earth if we can tread gently on the land and the non-human as well as human while we do it. If we can speak honestly of the places and the past – if we can find a way to write it where every single one of us is heard; where each one of us, and our stories, are kept safe.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is from the North West of Ireland but now lives in the very middle. She writes about nature, literature and place for The Irish Times, The Dublin Review of Books, Caught By The River and others. Her first book, Thin Places ,  is out with Canongate in January 2021. @kerri_ni @whooperswan

Published 7 July 2020

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29 Nature Writing

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds appointments in the departments of English and religious studies and in the curriculum in American studies. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance; A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620– 1660; the prize-winning America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (with coauthor James F. Bollman); Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical; and American Transcendentalism: A History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and was recently named distinguished scholar by the MLA's division on American literature to 1800. He serves as an editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article focuses on the idea of nature writing as adapted by the Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau is considered as the exponent of nature writing in American Transcendentalism. This article traces what nature writing is, what constitutes Transcendentalist nature writing, and why one author can be more successful at it than another. For more than a century some literary critics have bravely, if not fully convincingly, addressed these issues. One of the first twentieth-century commentators to do so, Philip Marshal Hicks, offered, in 1924, a very strict definition of the genre of nature writing. This article refers to the works of Thoreau and Emerson in relation to the genre of nature writing. Thoreau's occasion was the publication of a series of scientific reports issued by the state of Massachusetts, but he opened this essay with a moving meditation on the restorative powers of nature rather than with a mention of the reports' practical value.

We associate nature writing with American Transcendentalism and consider Henry Thoreau the form's greatest exponent, even as we acknowledge others in this movement's circle and penumbra as (albeit less successful) contributors to the genre. Yet we often do so blithely, ignoring the difficulty of defining precisely what nature writing is, what constitutes Transcendentalist nature writing, and why one author is more successful at it than another. Faced with such thorny questions, one might throw up one's hands and quote Henry David Thoreau himself: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,” Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled him saying, “as when you find a trout in the milk,” a homely reference to the unscrupulous farmer who dilutes his cow's milk with stream water before he brings it to market (“Thoreau,” Trism 667). In other words, one “knows” nature writing, good nature writing, and Transcendentalist nature writing, when one sees it.

For more than a century some literary critics have bravely, if not fully convincingly, addressed these issues. One of the first twentieth-century commentators to do so, Philip Marshal Hicks, offered, in 1924, a very strict definition of the genre of nature writing. He would so designate an essay, he wrote, if it “is based upon, and has for its major interest the literary expression of scientifically accurate observations of the life history of the lower orders of nature, or of other natural objects.” His narrow construction eliminates from consideration “the essay inspired merely by an aesthetic or sentimental delight in nature in general; the narrative of travel, where the observation is merely incidental; and the sketch which is concerned solely with description of scenery.” He thus was interested primarily in “the extent to which the facts of natural history have been made the basis of literary treatment in essay form” (Hicks 6). Hicks offers little guidance, however, as to what precisely constitutes “literary” expression. Moreover, his confident dismissal of, say, the “narrative of travel” makes us wonder what to do with the essays in Thoreau's Cape Cod and The Maine Woods . Similarly, to discount the “sketch” seemingly leaves little room for Thoreau's “Winter's Walk” or “Autumnal Tints” (essays that Hicks does, however, treat).

Around the same time, Norman Foerster, writing in Nature in American Literature (1923), hazarded another, broader definition. “With only two or three exceptions,” he observed, “all of our major writers” merited study, for nearly all “have displayed a striking curiosity as to the facts of the external world—an intellectual conscience in seeking to know them with exactness and an ardent emotional devotion to nature because of her beauty or divinity.” He begins his study with William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier before addressing the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and their fellow traveler, Walt Whitman. That all of these and a raft of others discovered in nature (rather than in any organized creeds) the chief inspiration for their understanding of humanity's place in the universe makes them part of what Foerster terms the “naturalistic movement,” which indelibly defines American letters (xiii). To him, any nineteenth-century writer who saw and was moved by a wildflower, bird, or waterfall and labored to describe it was engaged in nature writing.

Despite such opposing definitions of the genre, we can locate with some specificity a particular group of writers who, taking their inspiration from the nexus of ideas associated with American Transcendentalism, purposefully set out to write about the natural world in a distinctive way. Here the contemporary literary historian and ecocritic Lawrence Buell is helpful. In The Environmental Imagination (1995) he treats many writers, from the eighteenth century to the present, who are linked by their desire “to investigate literature's capacity for articulating the nonhuman environment” and among whom he regards Thoreau as a touchstone for understanding and evaluating the American variant of “literary naturism” (Buell 10). Buell lends support to an opinion about Thoreau's prominence in this genre promulgated as early as the 1880s, when his friend H. G. O. Blake, entrusted with Thoreau's voluminous journals, published excerpts in volumes named after the four seasons, and literary critic Edwin P. Whipple claimed, in his rich evaluation of American literature, that Thoreau “penetrated nearer to the physical heart of Nature than any other American author” (111).

Buell's criteria for literary naturism are four. In the best of such work (again, exemplified in Thoreau's prose), he writes, “the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.” Second, “the human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.” Third, “human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation.” Finally, “some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text” (Buell 7–8). Not all of these premises are necessarily found in each example of nature writing, but all in some variant underlie the most powerful and enduring examples of the form and contribute to the “environmental imagination.” If we add to Buell's list self-consciousness of the capabilities and limits of language for allowing one to write about nature in these ways, we approach an understanding of the achievement of what we might call the Thoreauvian school of “literary naturism,” as Buell terms it (431). But what within the Transcendentalist movement per se pushed its participants in such directions? And did others in it besides Thoreau contribute to and succeed at promulgating such discourse?

One thing is clear. When American Transcendentalism emerged in the early 1830s, the study of nature was not a chief concern of the coterie who embraced new currents in European philosophy and religion and applied them to their own situation as Unitarians. The contemporary debates in which they partook centreed on the manner and import of scriptural exegesis, as well as the implications of German Idealist philosophy on an understanding of consciousness and cognition. Such matters, and not the texture of one's relation to Nature and spirit, most exercised Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and others whose writings and activities marked the earliest phase of American Transcendentalism (Gura 69–97). These individuals were drawn to the “New Thought” as a way to revivify a Christianity whose adherents were devoted to religious and social reform, not from a belief that a deeper understanding of nature brought one closer to the spiritual life.

The initial impetus in this latter direction came from Emerson's publication of Nature in 1836. Throughout the early 1830s he, too, was embroiled in religious controversy, but at about the same time he began to develop an interest in science, and on a subsequent trip to Europe after he resigned his pulpit at Boston's Second Church, he indulged this budding interest in the natural world. When he visited the renowned Jardin des Plantes in Paris, for example, he was much impressed by the complexity and order of the world's flora and fauna. His interest in scientific classification whetted, he visited places such as the Cabinet of Natural History at the Collège Royale de France and attended various lectures on science in Paris and London ( EmEL 1:3). When Emerson returned to the United States to begin a career on the lyceum boards, he made various aspects of “natural philosophy” the subject of his first four lectures ( EmEL 1:86).

His maiden effort, “The Uses of Natural History,” delivered to Boston's Natural History Society in the early fall of 1833, augured what he soon immortalized in Nature , that is, a belief that nature serves humankind in many ways, providing (among other things) material comfort, aesthetic satisfaction, moral instruction, a language for our thoughts and feelings, and, not least of all, a way to spiritual self-knowledge. “It is in my judgment,” he said to his audience at the Masonic Temple, “the greatest office of natural science…to explain man to himself.” Is there not, he continued, “a secret sympathy which connects man to all the animate and to all the inanimate things around him?” ( EmEL 1:23–24). If, as Emerson learned from Idealist philosophers like Friedrich von Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, an individual's consciousness is the centre from which all knowledge radiates, nature provides the mind's language and metaphors. Nature, Emerson concluded, is a language “put together into a most significant and universal sense,” and “every new fact we learn is a new word” (1:26). “I wish to learn this language,” he continued. “I am moved by strange sympathies. I say I will listen to this invitation, I will be a naturalist” (1:10).

Less than three years later, he sent into the world an elaboration of these ideas whose degree of influence he could not have imagined. Nature , however, was more prospectus than field manual. One does not turn to it for memorable descriptions of the natural world but rather to be enjoined to open one's eyes to the world to see what always is there but which, in our self-imposed blindness, too frequently lies unobserved. “To speak truly,” Emerson reported, “few adult persons can see nature,” and most persons do not even “see the sun.” The lover of nature thus is “he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other” and for whom “intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.” Emerson thus counsels heightened awareness of even the simplest parts of the natural world, for when this occurs, “all mean egotism vanishes.” One becomes a “transparent eye-ball” with the “currents of the Universal Being” circulating through oneself. One is “part or particle of God” ( EmCW 1:9–10).

Important to our consideration of nature writing is the notion that through language one conveys this relation of humanity to nature and of nature to spirit, for just as “words are signs of natural facts,” so “the use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history.” Analogy pervades nature, and it is our task to see and proclaim it. “Man is an analogist,” Emerson argues, “and studies relations in all objects.” We (and our consciousness) are the centre, and “a ray of relation passes from every other being to [us].” Moreover, “neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man” ( EmCW 1:17–19). To know the world, in other words, is to know oneself, and thus, as he said a year later in “The American Scholar,” “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (1:55). The whole world is “emblematic,” and “parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (1:21). We are so connected to the natural world, Emerson believes, that we cannot exist, philosophically, without it.

To attend to nature in this way allows one to cultivate one's spirituality. One searches Emerson's prose works in vain, however, for passages that exemplify this vision, though admittedly it appears on occasion in his poetry, in shorter works like “The Rhodora,” “Each and All,” and “The Snow-Storm,” as well as in more ambitious pieces such as “Woodnotes,” “Monadnoc,” and “Musketaquid.” In the first poem, for example, delighted with his discovery of a beautiful flower, the rhodora, hidden in the woodlands, Emerson avers that “if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.” Thus, he never thinks to ask why such a rival to the splendid rose was tucked away inconspicuously, but in his “simple ignorance, suppose / The self-same Power that brought me there brought you” ( EmW 9:38).

Similarly, in his paean to the northern forest in “Woodnotes—I,” his “forest seer” is fully comfortables in the deep woods, for “Go where he will, the wise man is at home, / His hearth the earth,—his hall the azure dome; / Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, / By God's own light illumined and foreshowed” ( EmW 9:44, 46). Similarly, in “Monadnoc,” after climbing the famous New Hampshire peak, the poet rests at the summit and imagines the mountain as a muse who inspires him because “the world was built in order, / And the atoms march in tune.” “Complement of human kind,” he continues, “Holding us at vantage still, / Our sumptuous indigence, / O barren mound, thy plenties fill!” (9:69, 74). Through nature Emerson was inspired to know his place in the universe and in these and other verses articulates it memorably.

Other Transcendentalists—most consistently, William Ellery Channing the younger, and more occasionally, Jones Very—wrote strong poetry based on close observation of natural fact. But as Channing's paean to Thoreau, “Henry's Camp” in The Wanderer (1871), indicates, among his cohort Thoreau established the Transcendentalists' standard for writing about nature. Thoreau's prose writings are everywhere informed by the impulse to know oneself through the world and the desire to speak of that world as genuinely as possible. At Emerson's suggestion, he began his own journal keeping and soon enough was assiduously recording trenchant observations from his Concord sauntering as well as more discursive philosophical notes and queries. Significantly, in the early 1840s, when Thoreau attempted to place some of his writing in national periodicals, he turned to these recorded observations on nature to frame his essays.

As editor of the Dial , the Transcendentalists' house organ, Emerson expedited his protégé's first published work. In a brief introduction to his young friend's “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Emerson explained how he had begged Thoreau to “lay down the oar and fishing line, which none can handle better, to assume the pen” on this topic (“Introduction” 19). The result was not his most memorable prose but still an earnest indication of his future interests and achievement. In it we find exemplified Thoreau's gift of discerning and recording the import of the natural world in ways that most of his contemporaries, even Emerson, could rarely match.

Thoreau's occasion was the publication of a series of scientific reports issued by the state of Massachusetts, but he opened the essay with a moving meditation on the restorative powers of nature rather than with a mention of the reports' practical value. “Surely,” he wrote, “joy is the condition of life,” for “the spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair.” “Think of the young fry that leap in ponds,” he reminded his readers, “the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla [tree frog] with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon it wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current” ( ThEx 5). Compared to these, the din about religion, literature, and philosophy heard in contemporary pulpits, lyceums, and parlors was unimportant. Close observation of nature was what most mattered, Thoreau submitted, and if the reports under review (error strewn though he found them) brought us closer to it, so much the better.

By this point, Thoreau already saw in the intricacy of nature the universal laws that underpin all of life. “Let us not underrate the value of a fact,” Thoreau wrote in his final paragraph. “It will one day flower in a truth.” The true “man of science,” he continued, did not learn “by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy” with nature ( ThEx 27–28). This discovery of universal law attendant on the quotidian facts of nature, as well as the ability to translate this knowledge into memorable prose, hereafter became Thoreau's hallmark and provided a yardstick by which subsequent nature writers could be measured.

The results of Thoreau's gifts of observation and language are equally apparent in other early essays, in a format he would cultivate until his death, the travel sketch. A genre whose popularity emerged as literary periodicals began to flourish, such sketches were a staple of Putnam's , the Atlantic Monthly , Harper's , and other popular journals and sometimes eventuated in book-length productions. As early as 1844, for example, Margaret Fuller, who had preceded Emerson as editor of the Dial , published Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 , sketches of her trip to the Great Lakes region with her close friends James Freeman Clarke and his sister Sarah. Her early chapters in particular treat her encounters with a new environment but feature fairly conventional responses. Fuller wrote at some length, for example, of the natural wonder of Niagara Falls, but she observed that the cataracts themselves did not move her as much as she had anticipated because she had so often read of this wonder and seen so many graphic depictions of it. Rather, it was the rush and speed of the river that amazed her. When she walked the frail bridge to Goat Island, in the middle of the Niagara River, “and saw a quarter of a mile of tumbling, rushing rapids, and heard their everlasting roar,” her emotions overpowered her, and “a choaking [ sic ] sensation” arose in her throat. “This was the climax,” she continued, “of the effect which the falls produced upon me—neither the American nor the British falls moved me as did these rapids” (11). This virtual paralysis at the sheer power of nature is something that subsequent writers would feature as well.

If Fuller's experience at Niagara was conditioned in part by her preconceptions, her encounter with the vastness of the prairies and the expanse of the Great Lakes was utterly novel. “It is always thus with the new form of life,” she observed; “we must learn to look at it by its own standard.” On first viewing the stark flatness of water and land her “unaccustomed eye,” as well as her mind, kept saying “What! No distant mountains? What, no valleys?” But after a while, she continued, she went to the roof of the house where she was staying and passed many pleasant hours, “needing no sight but the moon reigning in the heavens, or starlight upon the lake.” Then she felt nearer to heaven because “there was nothing but this lovely, still reception on the earth; no towering mountains, no deep tree-shadows, nothing but plain earth and water bathed in light” (34–35), an experience whose peace and satisfaction would also be replicated among her successors in the genre of nature writing. Ending this section, she explains that what she sought in her writing was simply “to give the geography of the scene” as it affected her. She had no guidebook, she commented, and kept no diary. “What I got from the journey,” she observed, “was the poetic impression of the country at large,” and this was what she “aimed to communicate” in her writing (67).

Midway through her book, however, Fuller becomes more the sociological observer than the nature writer, particularly as she turns her attention to the Native American tribes she encountered and chronicles the harsh effects of pioneer life on the Eastern women who traveled with their families to settle the prairie landscape. She is particularly acute in her description of the treatment of the Native Americans at the hands of the mainly Protestant settlers. The Indians loved “French Catholics,” for they neither harmed the natives nor “disturbed their minds merely to corrupt them.” “But the stern Presbyterian,” she lamented, “with his dogmas and his task-work,” never even tried to be kind to the tribes. “Our people,” she concludes, “and our government have sinned alike against the first-born of the soil” (183–85).

Fuller's eye for social injustice had much to do with her own growing engagement with the women's rights movement and marked her difference from most of the men who penned travel sketches. More typical of the genre was George William Curtis's breezy account of his vacation visits to summering places like Nahant, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, in Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book (1852). Concomitantly, there arose a considerable literature of observations of and from rural life by gentlemen who had the means to enjoy such leisure, an effect of the rise of a suburban lifestyle and landscape on the edges of the Northeast's major cities; Concord, Massachusetts, now linked to Boston by a short train ride, was a prime example. Best-known among such “country” books were Nathaniel Parker Willis's Out-Doors at Idlewild (1855), Theodore Winthrop's Life in the Open-Air, and Other Papers (1863), and Donald G. Mitchell's My Farm of Edgewood: A Country Book (1863), though the most famous example is Thoreau's Walden .

Another writer with deep roots in rural life was Wilson Flagg, particularly significant because, when critics subsequently assembled a canon of American nature writing, some labeled him a “naturalist” whom Thoreau had influenced. However, Flagg had been on the scene earlier than such a judgment suggests. He attended Harvard College briefly in the early 1820s, and by the 1830s, when Thoreau was still in college, he began to write about nature, first for local (often agricultural) journals and later for the Atlantic Monthly . In 1857 he collected two decades of work in Studies in the Field and Forest , organizing his essays around the circle of the year. In his introduction Flagg explained the purpose of his book. He sought “to foster in the public mind a taste for the observation of natural objects and to cultivate that sentiment which is usually designated the love of nature.” As opposed to those who study nature as science, he sought to appeal to those who “survey the landscape, and its various objects, with a mind stored with poetic imagery, of which, in one form or another, almost every object is suggestive” (1–2).

Flagg's book is as good an example of natural history writing as one finds in the period, and yet one shies away from grouping it with the Transcendentalists' work. Thoreau himself provides the grounds for such a judgment. Shortly after Flagg's book appeared, he spoke of it to his New Bedford friend, Daniel Ricketson, who knew Flagg quite well. “Your Wilson Flagg seems a serious person,” Thoreau wrote, “and it is encouraging to hear of a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely.” However, he continued, Flagg “is not alert enough.” “He wants stirring up with a pole” and “should practice turning a series of somersets [somersaults] rapidly, or jump up & see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.” Let him “make the earth turn round now the other way—and whet his wits on it,” he suggested, “whichever way it goes, as on a grindstone.” In short, Thoreau urged, let Flagg “see how many ideas he can entertain at once” ( ThCorr 489).

Warming to this subject, Thoreau did not let it go and provided a strong example of what made his own prose style so distinctive and influential. For all Flagg's popularity, Thoreau argued, he was simply too “vague,” and before the reader got to the end of his sentences, he was “off the track.” “If you indulge in long periods,” he told Ricketson (who himself wrote poetry about nature), “you must be sure to have a snapper at the end.” Moreover, how and what one wrote should come naturally (a fluency missing even in Emerson's best verse), for “if one has any thing to say,” it should drop “from him simply & directly, as a stone falls on the ground for there are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a chance.” “New ideas,” Thoreau added, “come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody's castle roof is perforated.” To try “to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn and make it whistle a tune perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible” ( ThCorr 489).

Admittedly, in his early natural history essays Thoreau's prose only occasionally rises to this standard. “A Walk to Wachusett,” for example, recounts his and his friend Richard Fuller's four-day trip to the mountain by that name, thirty-five miles from Concord, which dominates the central Massachusetts landscape. On its summit, nineteen hundred feet above Princeton and three thousand feet above sea level—not an immense height—they still felt a “sense of remoteness,” so “infinitely removed from the plain” did they seem ( ThEx 37). They enjoyed looking to other mountain ranges, the Berkshires and Green Mountains to the west, the White Mountains to the north, and even arose early enough to watch the sun rise from the sea. By noon they were descending, to spend the night in the nearby town of Harvard. Evincing his uncanny ability to draw truths from natural facts, Thoreau noted that, even on the dusty road, they endeavored to “import a little of that mountain grandeur.” “We will remember,” he wrote, “within what walls we live, and understand that this level life too has its summit” and that there is “elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon” (45–46). The lines typify Thoreau's trademark eloquence.

So, too, the language of another early essay, “A Winter Walk.” On a journey even closer to home, out from town the morning after a deep snowfall, Thoreau manages to evoke the beauty of the new-fallen snow's transformation of the common landscape. Culled from his journal, his descriptions synæsthetically evoke the serenity and purity in the aftermath of a storm. “Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail,” he wrote, “and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow.” A cold and searching wind “drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it,” so that whatever we meet in the cold, we “respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness” ( ThEx 58–59). “In this lonely glen,” he observed, “with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side,” our lives “are more serene and worthy to contemplate” (62–63).

Not long after publishing these essays, Thoreau was at Walden Pond, at work on a more ambitious travel narrative, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), an account of a boat trip he and his brother had made in 1839 down the Concord and up the Merrimack rivers and back, with a midvoyage excursus on foot to the White Mountains. He modeled the work after other popular regional travelogues, which were becoming staples of the burgeoning number of literary (and, for that matter, agricultural) periodicals and, like the rural studies, were often collected into books (Hamilton, passim). One such work, for example, Joel Tyler Headley's frequently reprinted The Adirondack (1849), may have influenced Thoreau more than others; it was subtitled “Life in the Woods,” the same that he used for Walden , and bears comparison to The Maine Woods . A Week , however, is a book in which natural facts offer springboards for lengthy philosophical and literary reveries. In this it resembles Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes , in which descriptions of the dramatic landscape are mixed with trenchant social commentary. However, what Thoreau later said of Flagg's work could never be said of his A Week , for so great was Thoreau's willingness to entertain more than one idea at the same time that the book put off some readers. James Russell Lowell, for example, complained acerbically that “we were bid to a river-party—not to be preached at” (“Week” 51).

The importance of this book as natural history writing, however, is undeniable. Thoreau's extended description of sunrise on top of Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts, which he interweaves with his segment on the White Mountains, or his historical reverie about the Indian captive Hannah Dustan as he passes Amoskeag Falls on his return down the Merrimack are among his finest passages. In part they derive their power, as does all of Thoreau's best work, from attention to style, that is, his distillation of experience into language. As he puts it in the “Sunday” section, in the best writing “the little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done.” The strongest sentences “are verdurous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience,” not on extraneous flights of the imagination ( ThWeek 104). Anticipating his description of what he missed in Flagg's work, Thoreau observed that good writing “should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end” (107). In sure hands, vigorous and sincere language led to the “implication” Thoreau championed. We appreciate the “flow” in good books, he observes, because it rises “from the page like an exhalation” and washes away “our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves” (103).

Such self-consciousness about the obligation and necessity of writing well about nature is a hallmark of Thoreau's mature style and something not found, for example, in Flagg's writing, as lyrical as it sometimes is. Another important component in this writing, particularly in Walden but as well as in the essays that followed it, is Thoreau's increasing sense of the significance of nature in itself , that is, not just as a conduit to spirit. This is another way to talk about Buell's observation that in literary naturism “the human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest” (7). Thoreau's view also cuts against the grain of Emerson's assertion that nature is valuable not in and of itself but only as it helps man to realize the life of the spirit.

Walden , of course, is much more than natural history writing, for Thoreau's life at the pond provided the jumping-off places for his myriad social and philosophical observations. And what he learned of nature from his stay of two years, two months, and two days—which, like Flagg and another popular nature writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, in her Rural Hours , for rhetorical effect he conflates into a calendar year—was that “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages.” “And we are enabled,” he continues, “to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us” (97). At times like this, Thoreau suggests that Emerson's injunction to transcend reality, to move through nature to spirit, is wrongheaded. Nature is not to be used as a ladder on which to move to a higher consciousness. Rather, as we drench ourselves in the reality around us we realize that, as Thoreau puts it, “shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous” (95).

Such thoughts provide the entry into Thoreau's mature nature writing, for here he fully emerges as the “literary naturist” who so inspires Buell's admiration. In other words, what we think Thoreau writes as figuration he means literally— at a moment, for example, like that in the “Spring” chapter of Walden, when he peers into the railroad cut and finds himself as “affected as if in a peculiar sense [he] stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world” and had come to “where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about” (306). The rawness of Thoreau's sentiment—his gaze into the earth suggested among other things “at least that Nature had some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity”—only increases a few pages later, when he notes that we should be “cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast” (308, 318). Similarly, the overpowering stench from a dead horse in his path reminds him “of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature.” Truly to know the world, to know it as Thoreau did, is to see it red in tooth and claw and yet to marvel that it is “so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another” without any harm to its health, its sanity . “The impression made on a wise man,” he concludes, “is that of universal innocence” (318). All the operations of nature point Thoreau to this chief “higher law,” that nature is the final reality, not merely a way to move toward it.

In the classic natural history essays that compose his posthumous collections, The Maine Woods and Cape Cod , Thoreau buttresses and elaborates this truth. Consider, for example, his description of the experience of approaching the summit of Mount Katahdin, where he encountered a frightening solitude, a land “vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits.” There Thoreau felt as though the “inhuman” land held him at a disadvantage and “pilfer[ed] him of some of the divine faculty” ( Maine 64). What most surprised him was not an idyllic solitude as he had imagined, a place for fruitful contemplation, but the presence of a force so strange and overwhelming that it was “not bound to be kind to him.” Here, as in the railroad cut near Walden Pond, he is brought near Creation. “I looked with awe at the ground I trod on,” he wrote, “to see what the powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work.” “This was that Earth of which we have heard,” he continued, “made out of Chaos and Old Night.” The thinking man is not “associated” with this place, for here was “Matter, vast terrific, not his Mother Earth.” Thoreau contemplates in awe the sheer physicality of his own body and exclaims, “Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” (70–71).

The wildness of the seashore induces a similar reverence as well as reflection on the insignificance of humankind in the cosmic scheme. Inspired by the idea of walking the length of Cape Cod, he explained that to do so allowed him to get the cape under him, as if he were “riding bare-backed.” Seen this way, the landscape was “not as on the map or seen from a stage-coach,” but there he found it “all out of doors, huge and real, Cape Cod! As it cannot be represented on a map, color it as you will, the thing itself, than which there is nothing more like it, no truer picture or account; which you cannot go further and see” (50). And what did he see? It was “a wild, rank place,” with “no flattery in it.” “Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up,” the shore was a “vast morgue” with the “carcasses of men and beasts together…rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves,” each tide turning them “in their beds.” As on Mount Katahdin, there he saw “naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man” (147). Such knowledge and assurance of one's place in the universe came from a visit to a place others were beginning to discover for tourism, and Thoreau's inclusion of these sentiments in his essays provides one marker of his enduring power.

After his death, several more of Thoreau's essays that we now regard as “nature writing” were collected as Excursions (1863), a telling title. In addition to the early essays mentioned earlier, here one finds, for example, “Walking,” an essay devoted to the mystical sense of “wildness” that Thoreau expresses in Walden as well as very different works such as “Autumnal Tints” (1858–59), “Wild Apples,” and “The Succession of Forest Trees.” Some of these were parts of longer works in progress, into which Thoreau obviously put much effort in his last years. “The Succession of Forest Trees,” for example, composes part of what now has been published as Faith in a Seed (1993), and “Wild Apples” was from another equally substantial work recently issued as Wild Fruits (2000). Everywhere evident in these works is Thoreau's increasing interest in assiduous scientific observation, a growing tendency from the mid-1850s on that was sharply focused at the end of his life as he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859).

Even if in his later years Thoreau was moving down the road labeled “science” rather than “natural philosophy,” he retained his sense of the linkage between nature and spirit. In “Walking,” for example, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, we find his testament to what he always sought in nature, its essential “Wildness,” for in that is the “preservation of the world.” To those who asked him what Holy Trinity he worshiped, he had ready his reply. “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows” ( ThEx 202). What sort of writing might give expression to such sentiments? “He would be a poet,” Thoreau wrote, “who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring.” The true poet's words were “so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like buds” in the April sun (208). When the poets wielded such tools, they would indeed help us to “saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.” To experience such religious revival, Thoreau counseled, “we cannot afford not to live in the present” (222).

Another Transcendentalist who contributed to the flowering of the nature essay in the 1850s was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for most of the decade a Unitarian clergyman in Worcester, Massachusetts, forty miles west of Concord. Like Thoreau, he found an outlet for his work in the periodical press, particularly the newly founded Atlantic Monthly . By 1863 he had collected his essays on nature as well as other topics, such as health and physical education, in Out-Door Papers . At several points therein he pays homage to Thoreau and redacts the Concord saunterer's own observations of similar natural phenomena, as in Higginson's charming essay, “Water-Lilies,” on one of Thoreau's favorite species. Higginson also gave thought to the proper style of such writing, again echoing both Thoreau's and Emerson's injunctions. “Under the present educational systems,” he observed, “we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience,” for “on this flowery bank, on this ripple-marked shore, are the true literary models.” “A finely organized sentence,” he continued, “should throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer air” (254).

Higginson was also wary of the all-too-common sentimentalism that colored so many other writers' efforts to relate to the natural world, a drawback of, say, N. P. Willis's country sketches. “During the various phases of transcendental idealism among ourselves, in the past twenty years,” Higginson notes, “the love of Nature has at times assumed an exaggerated and even pathetic aspect” as “youths and maidens” made “morbid attempts” to make its contemplation a substitute for “vigorous thought and action.” Like Thoreau, Higginson sought closeness to nature that was unmediated and believed, contra Emerson, that “the direct ethical influence of natural objects may be overrated.” “Nature,” he declared, “is not didactic, but simply healthy,” a point of view that jibed with his embrace of physical education in general, typified in his essay on “Gymnastics” in this volume (252).

Some of Higginson's “out-door” essays read almost as though they were literary covers of Thoreau's. “The Procession of the Flowers,” for example, bears comparison to “The Succession of Forest Trees,” and “Snow” reads well against “A Winter's Walk.” One also finds in this writer a stylistic trait common to Thoreau: the combination of close observation and wide cultural and historical reference. In “Water-Lilies,” for example, Higginson ranges through Egyptian and Buddhist beliefs about the lotus flower as he makes his case for why the lily is so special, and in “April Days” he alludes freely to the classics, especially to Virgil and Horace, as he describes the onset of spring. In short, the manner and matter of his essays are often decidedly Thoreauvian, which makes one wonder what else in this vein Higginson might have produced had he not been pulled, first, into the maelstrom of antislavery and, after the war, into the editor's chair. Indeed, his involvement in and writing for abolitionism mirrored Thoreau's own commitment to the cause of antislavery. By the late 1850s, for example, both were drawn into the catastrophe that surrounded John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry (Higginson was one of the “Secret Six,” who knew of and aided Brown's plan, and Thoreau was Brown's most memorable eulogist).

To his credit, Higginson never left behind his love of the natural world, even if politics left less time for him to luxuriate in outdoor recreation. In his position with the Atlantic Monthly , he continued to cultivate the natural history essay and soon enough was regularly publishing another writer whom the Transcendentalists had greatly influenced. Beginning in 1860, with an essay on “Expression” that then editor James Russell Lowell thought had been written by Emerson himself, John Burroughs began to publish works that within two decades marked him as the country's best-known practitioner of the natural history essay.

Emerson most greatly influenced Burroughs, even though, to his discomfort, readers increasingly associated his work with Thoreau's. This was particularly true beginning in the 1880s, after Thoreau's literary executor, H. G. O. Blake, published excerpts from Thoreau's journals that stressed his observations of nature more than his social criticism. Indeed, given that Thoreau often labored under the impression that on the lecture platform he appeared but a lesser version of Emerson, Burroughs's anxiety of influence was eerily similar. At one point, for example, after a friend's observation of the uniqueness of Burroughs's voice, he joyfully recorded in his journal that this comment removed much of “the Thoreau charge” that he commonly heard. For his part, he saw “very little” of that writer in himself (Warren 33). Rather, Emerson's early essays, particularly Nature (1836) and “The Poet” (1844), had fertilized his imagination, ingraining the Concord sage's belief that the ideal permeates the natural world. In his ramblings in the Adirondacks, Burroughs saw such connections behind every bush and in every stream, and in his increasingly popular writings he tried to make the miracles of the quotidian evident to his readers, reaffirming Emerson's dictum that the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the commonplace. Burroughs repaid his debt through several moving essays on his acknowledged master.

Given Thoreau's increasing prominence as a writer of natural history, why did Burroughs object to the comparison? He certainly acknowledged his predecessor's stature, for he wrote frequently on Thoreau (as he did on Emerson) and in fair-minded and provocative ways. Burroughs also understood that there was something appealing about Thoreau's style. “I know,” he wrote to a friend, “his quality is very penetrating and contagious….Reading him is like eating onions—one must look out or the flavor will reach his own page” ( Life 2:331). Burroughs knew that by the 1870s there was an implicit public contest for Emerson's true successor, and he wanted the prize.

Burroughs also realized, however, that he and Thoreau looked at nature in different ways. “I never preach or teach,” he explained; “I simply see and describe.” As he continued, “I must paint the bird for its own sake for the pleasure it affords me, and am annoyed at any lesson or moral twist,” something he found everywhere in Thoreau ( Journals 74–75). At another point he confessed that he could never “lay siege to Nature as Thoreau did.” “He gave the wood-gods no rest—was before their shrines at all hours; and he could make the most of nothing of any man I ever read—he would take a page or two to tell of a leaf falling into a lake” ( Life 2:332). Burroughs even poked fun at Thoreau's much-vaunted skills as a field naturalist, for Burroughs was a much more accurate observer. He found especially amusing Thoreau's long-term fascination with the “night-warbler,” which he could never identify. Burroughs immediately knew that it was the fairly common ovenbird, a bird Robert Frost memorialized as well ( Writings 23:136).

However, there was more to Burroughs's defensiveness than mere truculence. He seemed almost to want to exorcise Thoreau's ghost. He had begun to write on outdoor themes before he met with Walden , he protested, and even after he had read it, he was “not conscious of any great debt” to that writer ( Writings 8:268–69). But on occasions Burroughs seemed to engage in his own measurement of the man and his worth. “I was thinking this morning of Thoreau's way of writing,” he once wrote, “and what a mistake I have made in not heeding it.” “I am afraid to try to say things in too pretty a way,” he went on, “aim to have the page too smooth, to have it read well.” “I am too afraid,” he admitted, “to give the mind a jolt,” while Thoreau did not care how many he gave; they added “zest to the page” ( Life 2: 335). In one of his last essays on Thoreau, Burroughs put it this way. In Thoreau “at his best there is a gay symbolism, a felicity of description, and a freshness of observation that delight all readers” ( Writings 23:120).

The real difference between the two, however, lay in another of Burroughs's observations. When one reads Thoreau, one rarely escapes feeling that he is as much the subject as nature. As Burroughs put it, “His philosophy begins and ends with himself, or is entirely subjective” ( Writings 23:120). Therein lies the quirkiness that Burroughs often complained about in his predecessor, what Thoreau himself might term his “extravagance.” Despite the fact that both men reported on essentially the same Eastern landscapes, Burroughs's nature is domesticated rather than unsettling, his descriptions crisp and accurate, yet lacking the frequent paradox that makes memorable Thoreau's simplest observations, “magnifying the little and belittling the big,” as Burroughs noted, and relying heavily on what Emerson termed his “old fault of unlimited contradiction.” “Thoreau's life was a search for the wild,” Burroughs observed, just as his was a search for the too-often-overlooked familiar ( Writings 23:142, 22).

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s other writers also contributed to the emergent discourse of nature writing, both in periodicals and book-length publications. In 1875, for example, Alfred Barron (who also published under the sobriquet of “Q”), of Wallingford, Connecticut, published Foot Notes; or, Walking as a Fine Art and attributed his interest in the outdoors to Thoreau. In 1862 Barron read in the Atlantic Monthly Thoreau's “Succession of Forest Trees,” an essay that “overcame a certain prejudice” Barron had had against him. He subsequently enjoyed other of Thoreau's essays that were appearing in that journal, and that led Barron to Walden , which had a signal influence on his life. Eventually, steeped in Thoreau's works, Barron “began to feel the presence of an invisible companion” on his walks and came to believe it was Thoreau. The spirit “never spoke to me, nor injected any thoughts into my mind to my knowledge,” Barron wrote; “it only seemed to want to be near me.” He seemingly absorbed subconsciously the kind of egotism Thoreau expressed in the first pages of Walden . “The writer was all eye when he wrote” his essays, Barron noted, and the printer “had to get new ‘ I's ’ before he could print it” because Barron believed that it was “as proper for a man to show himself in a book as to show himself in the street” (v–vi). His essays range far and wide—“Skunk Cabbage,” “Old Houses,” “Foot-Paths,” “Creed of a Woodchuck”—and display an acute observer, if not someone with Thoreau's capacity for verbal gymnastics.

Baron's contemporary Charles Goodrich Whiting began to publish his natural history essays in the Springfield Republican in the late 1870s and collected them a decade later in The Saunterer , whose very title invokes Thoreau. Whiting organized his book's lengthy sections—each composed of short, newspaper-length observations—around a cycle of the seasons, in the manner of Walden , and the author studded his gems with quotations from Emerson and William Ellery Channing the elder as well as from European Romantic authors, but Thoreau's shadow falls over all, from Whiting's meditation on “friendship” to his “Woodchuck Wisdom” and “The Art of Living.” It was no accident that The Saunterer appeared under Ticknor and Company's imprimatur, evidence of that publishing house's intention to cultivate the fields Thoreau had cleared.

By the 1880s, Thoreau's influence was pervasive. Consider for example, Prentice Mulford's Swamp Angel , his account of building, when he was forty-nine years old, a hut in the swamp lands near Passaic, New Jersey, where he lived a Thoreauvian existence for seventeen years. Commuting for a few hours to the city, where he worked for a newspaper, by noon each day he was back in his beloved wetlands, under a huge oak tree, tending his hens as Thoreau had his beans, and more important, thinking and writing, as Thoreau had, about the artificiality of civilized life and the joys of nature. Like Thoreau, too, he left the woods for as good a reason as he went, discovering that he could not live happily “largely independent of the rest of the human race.” “I found,” he continued, “that the birds went in pairs and flocks; that plants and trees grew in families; that ants lived in colonies, and that everything of its kind had a tendency to grow and live together” (73). Appropriately, Mulford's subsequent writings were central to the emergent “New Thought” movement, which was much influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg's notion of the correspondence of nature to spirit as well as Emerson's belief in an all-pervasive Over-Soul.

As much as writers like Barron, Whiting, and Mulford in their different ways indicated the culture's increasing interest in nature writing, they never achieved Burroughs's prominence or that of his most popular contemporary competitor as a nature writer, John Muir, a Scots immigrant who, after spending his youth in the upper Midwest, made the mountains of California his home. Muir had discovered Emerson's and Thoreau's writings in the 1860s and, like Burroughs, was particularly influenced by the former, marking as one of the signal moments in his life his meeting with the Concord sage in 1871 in the Sierras. Emerson repaid such respect by naming Muir the last of “My Men” in a list he compiled late in life of those who had most influenced him ( EmJMN 16:188).

With a volume of Emerson's essays always at hand, Muir crisscrossed the vast Sierras and later in his life explored other wildernesses, including that around Glacier Bay, Alaska, which he was thought to be the first white man to visit. Like Thoreau, he believed that only by confronting “wildness” did one come to know one's place in the universe, and his essays and books are replete with the reverence this belief engendered. He traveled light, going off for days into the wilderness with only bread, tea, and a blanket in his sack, and flourished in adversity, seeking (as Thoreau did) to drive life into a corner and to suck out its “marrow.” Literature, however, was not Muir's main interest. As he put it late in his life, “To get these glorious works of God into yourself—that's the thing; not to write about them!” ( Wilderness xiii). Crowing like Thoreau, Muir wrote to convert people to his cause—in this case, the preservation of the California mountains—and toward that end sent essays to the Overland Monthly and other journals. Eventually, he collected them in well-selling books in which his growing readership heard him praise the mountains, forests, and wildlife of the West.

More than any of the other writers discussed, Muir was at home in utter wildness. Thoreau, as we have seen, seemed genuinely unsettled by his sense of isolation and cosmic dependence when he stood atop Mount Katahdin, Maine's highest mountain. In far more intimidating landscapes, Muir had different experiences and epiphanies. In his account of attempting to climb Mount Ritter, for example, a particularly remote California peak, Muir described scaling a cliff at the extremity of a glacier. He suddenly became paralyzed by the thought that he was going to fall. “When this danger flashed upon me,” he wrote, “I became nerve-shaken for the first time since setting foot in the mountains, and my mind seemed to fill with a stifling smoke.” However, “this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment,” he reported, “when life blazed forth with preternatural clearness.” “I seemed suddenly to become possessed with a new sense,” as though he had been “borne aloft by wings.” His deliverance “could not have been more complete” ( Nature 354–55). Restored to sanity, he scaled the cliff.

On another occasion, exploring one of the tributaries of the Yuba River after a storm had blown through, Muir wanted to experience the wind as he never had before. Ascending a high ridge to a stand of Douglas spruce a hundred feet tall, he climbed one of these great trees into its highest branches and swayed aloft for hours, frequently closing his eyes “to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.” “The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent,” he continued, “bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles braced, like a bobolink upon a reed” ( Nature 471, 469). Like Thoreau, who loved to crawl into a swamp like a mink with its belly close to the ground, Muir worked to assimilate the full, unadulterated experience of wildness.

Muir was not the only one to memorialize the vast Western landscape. In his Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), for example, Clarence King spoke with equal power about the intoxication of the high mountains. Nonetheless, Muir became the alpine region's chief advocate, and its conservation was perhaps his most important legacy, for his efforts resulted most spectacularly in the establishment of Yosemite National Park. Thoreau had noted that “we need the tonic of wildness.” “We can never have enough of nature,” he wrote in Walden , and must be “refreshed” by the sight of its “inexhaustible vigor” and “vast and Titanic features.” “We need,” he urged, “to witness our own limits transgressed” (317–18). More than any of his contemporaries, Muir lived by these words, and in his writings he proselytized for that wildness that, for him as for Thoreau, did indeed constitute the preservation of the world. In this, Muir was a true heir to the tradition of Transcendentalist nature writing, which he brought into the modern age.

Works Cited

Barron, Alfred . Foot Notes; or, Walking as a Fine Art . Wallingford, Conn.: Wallingford, 1875 .

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Fuller, Margaret . Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 . Boston: Little and Brown, 1844 .

Gura, Philip F.   American Transcendentalism: A History . New York: Hill and Wang, 2007 .

Hamilton, Kristie . America's Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre . Athens: Ohio UP, 1998 .

Hicks, Philip Marshall . The Development of the Natural History Essay in American Literature . Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1924 .

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth . Out-Door Papers . Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863 .

Lowell, James Russell . Review of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers . Massachusetts Quarterly Review 3 ( 1849 ): 43–55.

Muir, John . Nature Writings . New York: Library of America, 1997 .

——— . The Wilderness World of John Muir . Ed. Edwin Way Teale . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954 .

Mulford, Prentice . The Swamp Angel . Boston: Needham, 1888 .

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——— . The Maine Woods . Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972 .

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Whipple, Edwin P.   American Literature and Other Papers . Boston: Ticknor, 1887 .

Whiting, Charles Goodrich . The Saunterer . Boston: Ticknor, 1886 .

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Nature writing is booming – but must a walk in the woods always be meaningful?

When so many of us struggle to find time and money to head outdoors, nature writing offers us vicarious enchantment – regardless of reality

N ature, as both a place and an idea, has become fraught with issues of privilege. Not everyone can access it, nor can they always afford to romanticise it. As biodiversity plummets, our attention becomes bittersweet, leaving nature lovers trapped in an increasingly tragic love story. Yet for any difficulty we may have in facing up to our collective destruction, writing about nature is booming. As readers, we relish these secondhand wanderings, recounted in gorgeous prose. We witness the author’s wonder, and aspire to similar experiences: the natural world as cure, as balm, as wise mentor; wilderness as a fount of authenticity in which we might find our wilder, realer selves.

My own relationship with nature writing is complicated. I am disappointed by my hesitancy when it comes to these books. After all, that most heady brew, where sublime language renders nature’s glories anew is one I personally aspire to concoct as a writer. And I’m often enchanted by writing that achieves it, such as Dorothy Hartley’s 1939 book Made in England , a favourite of mine. Hartley’s descriptions of landscapes and details as she strides out to document dwindling crafts range from the matter-of-fact to the downright fanciful. But all speak of a sharp eye and a guileless joy that make me wish I could tramp alongside her, spotting the small marvels she points out along the way. We might stop and notice the “tiny green tentative fingers” of growing things, or “the crackling cat-ice in the cart ruts” ourselves, but she is not going to linger over them on our behalf – she has work to do. Whether she is enchanted by her surroundings or not, we must infer; she will not tell. Whether you are enchanted is up to you.

Yet so much contemporary nature writing (Hartley sallied out almost a century ago) invites us – sometimes explicitly – to wonder not just at the natural world, but at the author’s experience. Nature writing offers us vicarious enchantment, for how many of us really have the time, the money and the tenacity to make regular, lengthy forays into the wild?

In Crow Country, Mark Cocker’s beautiful and epiphanic account of his growing obsession with rooks, this familiar bird that any of us might encounter in our urban lives becomes magical, “unsheathed entirely from any sense of ordinariness”. As he watches the flock (“an entoptic vision”), it “stirs something edgy” into his sense of wonder. For Cocker, “the underlying goal of any outing is to have an encounter of some meaning”.

He is right, of course. We all long for meaning, and the natural world is a good place to seek it out. But experiencing meaning in nature, being enchanted by her myriad forms, now feels aspirational. I suspect my resistance in the face of nature writing stems from stubbornness: against the implication that if only I connected properly with nature, I would be elevated somehow. On some days, a walk through the woods or along the shore can be disappointing, or even unpleasant, and that is all right. Enchantment is not everywhere all the time; it is an inner state that relies on mood and receptivity quite as much as the appearance of a fox or a grey seal or a charismatic oak.

Nature can also be found anywhere, if we are inclined to look at a certain slant. Books such as Edgelands , by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, or Clay by Melissa Harrison , remind us of this. While Clay is a novel, it is bursting with nature writing, showing us a scrubby city park in which “every tree and fencepost and path and thicket was charged with an almost mystical significance” for the boy protagonist. He yearns to belong to the world of squirrels and birds that abuts his housing estate. Edgelands celebrates the scraps of unruly wasteland that sidle up against the city – both Farley and Roberts having haunted such places during childhoods when they “wondered where the countryside actually was, or if it really existed”.

There is no doubting that a spot of communing with nature is good for us. Full immersion, then, might be even better. (Though there is nothing like a struggle to get warm and dry, or find your way to safety, to do away with the hunt for meaning.) Has the proliferation of nature writing led to a proliferation of countryside explorers? Are we following the example of intrepid writers and becoming re-enchanted with the world as a result? I rather hope so, though the cynic in me suspects that where nature is not Instagrammable, some will not bother to tread. Having feasted on the intense dramas and exquisite scenery of an Attenborough documentary, a poke around in a rockpool may lose its lure.

Though access to many wild places remains a privilege, access to enchantment and meaning need not be. The more we idolise extreme or unusual experiences of the natural world, the less inclined we will be to bother looking for meaning in our ordinary lives, on our own street, in our local patch of park. But a place that appears thoroughly disenchanting to one person may bewitch another, if they tilt their heads. Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words is an exemplar, explicitly offering us words as magic keys to open up the natural world. It is no accident that this a spell book, since spells alter reality using words. As Ursula Le Guin had it: “Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” Our world may not have much room for magic, but we all speak, write and read the language of enchantment – if we choose to see it that way.

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The Problem of Nature Writing

By Jonathan Franzen

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “ The Peregrine .” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons.

Sometimes I consider it a failing, a mark of writerly competition, that I’d so much rather take private joy in birds, and in nature generally, than read another person’s book about them. But I’m also mindful, as a writer, that we live in a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life. There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion. The power of the Bible, as a text, derives from its stories. If I were an evangelist, going door to door, I’d steer well clear of the Psalms. I would start with the facts as I saw them: God created the universe, we humans sin against His laws, and Jesus was dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences. Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one.

Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it.

Unfortunately, no matter how felicitous the descriptions may be, the writer is competing with other media that a reader could be turning to instead, audiovisual media that actually show you the eagle or let you hear the loon. Ever since the advent of color photography and sound recording, lengthy descriptions have become problematic in all genres of writing, and they’re especially problematic for the evangelizing nature writer. To describe a scene of nature well, the writer is hard pressed to avoid terminology that’s foreign to readers who haven’t already witnessed a similar sort of scene. Being a birder, I know what a ruby-crowned kinglet sounds like; if you write that a kinglet is chattering in a willow tree, I can hear the sound clearly. The very words “ruby-crowned kinglet” are pregnant and exciting to me. I will avidly read an unadorned list of the species—black-headed grosbeak, lazuli bunting, blue-gray gnatcatcher—that a friend saw on her morning walk. To me, the list is a narrative in itself. To the unconverted reader, though, the list might as well say: Ira the son of Ikkesh of Tekoa, Abiezer of Anathoth, Mebunnai the Hushathite . . .

If birds are the writer’s focus, there do exist good stories about individual birds (the red-tailed hawks of Central Park) and individual species (the non-stop trans-Pacific flight of bar-tailed godwits), and I can tell, from the new-story links that nonbirding friends are forever forwarding to me, that reports of astonishing avian feats can overcome the public’s indifference to birds, at least momentarily. Whether such stories make converts—and I’ll say it here explicitly: my interest is in making converts—is less clear. The science of birds and their conservation should be interesting to anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, but the world abounds with things to be curious about. The bird-science writer is painfully aware that he or she has only a few hundred words with which to hook a lay reader. One tempting approach to this challenge is to begin in medias res, by a campfire at some picturesque or desolate location, and introduce us to the Researcher. He will have a bushy beard and play the mandolin. Or she will have fallen in love with birds on her grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He or she will be tough and obsessive, sometimes funny, always admirable. The danger with this approach is that, unless the Researcher emerges as the true subject of the piece, we readers may feel bait-and-switched—invited to believe that we’re reading a story about people, when in fact the story is about a bird. In which case, it’s fair to ask why we bothered getting to know the Researcher in the first place.

The paradox of nature writing is that, to succeed as evangelism, it can’t only be about nature. E. O. Wilson may have been correct in adducing biophilia—a love of nature—as a universal trait in human beings. To judge from the state of the planet, however, it’s a trait all too rarely expressed. What most often activates the trait is its display by people in whom it’s already activated. In my experience, if you ask a group of birders what got them into birds, four out of five of them will mention a parent, a teacher, a close friend, someone they had an intense personal connection with. But the faithful are few, the unpersuaded are many. To reach readers who are wholly wrapped up in their humanness, unawakened to the natural world, it’s not enough for writers to simply display their biophilia. The writing also needs to replicate the intensity of a personal relationship.

One of the forms this intensity can take is rhetorical. Speaking for myself, I’m a lot more likely to read an essay that begins “I hate nature” than one that begins “I love nature.” I would hope, of course, the writer doesn’t really hate nature, at least not entirely. But look at what the initial provocation accomplishes. Although it risks alienating the already persuaded, it opens the door to skeptical readers and establishes a connection with them. If the essay then reveals itself to be an argument for nature, the opening salvo also insures that the writing will be dynamic: will move from a point A to a very different point B. Movement like this is pleasurable to a reader. Fierce attitudes are pleasurable, even in the absence of forward movement. Give me the blistering prose of Joy Williams in “ The Killing Game ,” a jeremiad against hunters and their culture, or “ The Case Against Babies ,” as ferocious an anti-birth statement as you’ll ever read, in her perfectly titled collection “ Ill Nature .” Indifference, not active hostility, is the greatest threat to the natural world, and whether you consider Williams hilarious or unhinged, heroic or unfair, it’s impossible to be indifferent to her work. Or give me Edward Abbey’s “ Desert Solitaire ,” an account of his years in the Utah desert, in which he fans a simmering Thoreauvian misanthropy into white-hot fire and wields it against American consumer capitalism. Here again, you may not agree with the writer. You may wrinkle your nose at Abbey’s assumptions about “wilderness,” his unacknowledged privilege as a white American. What can’t be denied is the intensity of his attitude. It sharpens his descriptions of the desert landscape and gives them a forensic purpose, a cutting edge.

A good way to achieve a sense of purpose, strong movement from point A toward point B, is by having an argument to make. The very presence of a piece of writing leads us to expect an argument from it, if only an implicit argument for its existence. And, if the reader isn’t also offered an explicit argument, he or she may assign one to the piece, to fill the void. I confess to having had the curmudgeonly thought, while reading an account of someone’s visit to an exotic place like Borneo, that the conclusion to be drawn from it is that the writer has superior sensitivity to nature or superior luck in getting to go to such a place. This was surely not the intended argument. But avoiding the implication of “Admire me” or “Envy me” requires more attention to one’s tone of written voice than one might guess. Unlike the evangelist who rings doorbells and beatifically declares that he’s been saved, the tonally challenged nature writer can’t see the doors being shut in his face. But the doors are there, and unconverted readers are shutting them.

Often, by making an argument, you can sidestep the tonal problem. An essay collection that’s dear to me, “ Tropical Nature ,” by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, begins by serving up a set of facts about tropical rain forests. The facts are seemingly neutral, but they add up to a proposition: the rain forest is more varied, less fertile, less consistently rainy, more insidiously hostile, than the drenched and teeming “jungle” of popular imagination. It’s a very simple proposition. And yet, right away, there’s a case to be made in the ensuing essays—further expectations to be upended, new astonishments to be revealed. Wedded to an argument, the scientific facts speak far more compellingly to the glory of tropical nature than lyrical impressionism, and meanwhile Forsyth and Miyata, as neutral bringers of fact, remain immune to the suspicion of seeking admiration. The premise of Jennifer Ackerman’s best-selling “ The Genius of Birds ” is likewise simple and sturdy: that “bird-brained” ought to be a compliment, not an insult. Richard Prum’s 2017 book, “ The Evolution of Beauty ,” reached a wide audience by arguing that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which mainstream evolutionary biologists ignored or denigrated for more than a century, can explain all sorts of non-adaptive traits and behaviors in animals. Prum’s book has its flaws—the prose is gluey, and Darwin’s theory was perhaps not quite as forgotten as Prum represents it to have been—but the flaws didn’t matter to me. The theory of sexual selection was an eye-opener, and I learned a lot of cool things about a group of tropical birds, the manakins, that I otherwise might never have known. Such is the power of a compelling argument.

For the nature writer who isn’t a polemicist or a scientist, a third avenue to intensity is to tell a story in which the focus is on nature but the dramatic stakes are emphatically human. An exemplary book in this regard is Kenn Kaufman’s “ Kingbird Highway .” Kaufman grew up in suburban Kansas in the nineteen-sixties, became an obsessive birder (nicknamed Kingbird), and conceived the ambition, after he dropped out of high school, of breaking the record for the most American bird species seen in a calendar year. The record is quickly established as the dramatic goal, the protagonist’s coördinating desire. And then, immediately, we’re presented with an impediment: the teen-aged Kaufman has no money. To visit every corner of the country at the right time of year, a birder needs to cover huge distances, and Kaufman decides he’ll need to hitchhike. So now, in addition to a goal and an impediment, we have the promise of a classic road adventure. (It’s important to note that, just as we don’t have to be pedophiles to connect with Humbert’s pursuit of Lolita, we don’t need to care much about birds to be curious about what happens to Kaufman. Strong desire of any kind creates a sympathetic desire in the reader.) As Kaufman makes his way around the country, he’s attentive to the birds, of course, but also to the national mood of the early seventies, the social dynamics of bird-watching, the loss and degradation of natural habitat, the oddball characters along the way. And then the book takes a beautiful turn. As life on the road exacts its toll on the narrator, he feels increasingly lost and lonely. Although seemingly a quest narrative, the book reveals itself to have been, all along, a coming-of-age story. Because we care about the teen-aged Kaufman, we stop wondering if he’ll break the record and start asking more universally relatable questions: What’s going to happen to this young man? Is he going to find his way home? What sets “Kingbird Highway” apart from many other “Big Year” narratives is that it ultimately ceases to matter how many species Kaufman sees in a year. It’s only the birds themselves that matter. They come to feel like the home that he’s been yearning for, the home that will never leave him.

Even if we could know what it’s like to be a bird—and, pace J. A. Baker, I don’t think we ever really will—a bird is a creature of instinct, driven by desires that are the opposite of personal, incapable of ethical ambivalence or regret. For a wild animal, the dramatic stakes consist of survival and reproduction, full stop. This can make for fascinating science, but, absent heavy-duty anthropomorphizing or projection, a wild animal simply doesn’t have the particularity of self, defined by its history and its wishes for the future, on which good storytelling depends. With a wild-animal character, there is only ever a point A: the animal is what it is and was and always will be. For there to be a point B, a destination for a dramatic journey, only a human character will suffice. Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, and then deploys universally shared emotions—hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment—to engage a reader in the journey. If the writing succeeds, it does so indirectly. We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious. ♦

This is drawn from “ Spark Birds .”

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Nature Writing Examples

by Lisa Hiton

From the essays of Henry David Thoreau, to the features in National Geographic , nature writing has bridged the gap between scientific articles about environmental issues and personal, poetic reflections on the natural world. This genre has grown since Walden to include nature poetry, ecopoetics, nature reporting, activism, fiction, and beyond. We now even have television shows and films that depict nature as the central figure. No matter the genre, nature writers have a shared awe and curiosity about the world around us—its trees, creatures, elements, storms, and responses to our human impact on it over time.

Whether you want to report on the weather, write poems from the point of view of flowers, or track your journey down a river in your hometown, your passion for nature can manifest in many different written forms. As the world turns and we transition between seasons, we can reflect on our home, planet Earth, with great dedication to description, awe, science, and image.

Journal Examples: Keeping Track of Your Tracks

One of the many lost arts of our modern time is that of journaling. While keeping a journal is a beneficial practice for all, it is especially crucial to nature writers. John A. Murray , author of Writing About Nature: A Creative Guide , begins his study of the nature writing practice with the importance of journaling:

Nature writers may rely on journals more consistently than novelists and poets because of the necessity of describing long-term processes of nature, such as seasonal or environmental changes, in great detail, and of carefully recording outdoor excursions for articles and essays[…] The important thing, it seems to me, is not whether you keep journals, but, rather, whether you have regular mechanisms—extended letters, telephone calls to friends, visits with confidants, daily meditation, free-writing exercises—that enable you to comprehensively process events as they occur. But let us focus in this section on journals, which provide one of the most common means of chronicling and interpreting personal history. The words journal and journey share an identical root and common history. Both came into the English language as a result of the Norman Victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For the next three hundred years, French was the chief language of government, religion, and learning in England. The French word journie, which meant a day’s work or a day’s travel, was one of the many words that became incorporated into English at the time[…]The journal offers the writer a moment of rest in that journey, a sort of roadside inn along the highway. Here intellect and imagination are alone with the blank page and composition can proceed with an honesty and informality often precluded in more public forms of expression. As a result, several important benefits can accrue: First, by writing with unscrutinized candor and directness on a particular subject, a person can often find ways to write more effectively on the same theme elsewhere. Second, the journal, as a sort of unflinching mirror, can remind the author of the importance of eliminating self-deception and half-truths in thought and writing. Third, the journal can serve as a brainstorming mechanism to explore new topics, modes of thought, or types of writing that otherwise would remain undiscovered or unexamined. Fourth, the journal can provide a means for effecting a catharsis on subjects too personal for publication even among friends and family. (Murray, 1-2)

A dedicated practice of documenting your day, observing what is around you, and creating your own field guide of the world as you encounter it will help strengthen your ability to translate it all to others and help us as a culture learn how to interpret what is happening around us.

Writing About Nature: A Creative Guide by John A. Murray : Murray’s book on nature writing offers hopeful writers a look at how nature writers keeps journals, write essays, incorporate figurative language, use description, revise, research, and more.

Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright by Gerit Quealy and Sumie Hasegawa Collins: Helen Mirren’s foreword to the book describes it as “the marriage of Shakespeare’s words about plants and the plants themselves.” This project combines the language of Shakespeare with the details of the botanicals found throughout his works—Quealy and Hasegawa bring us a literary garden ripe with flora and fauna puns and intellectual snark.

• What new vision of Shakespeare is provided by approaching his works through the lens of nature writing and botanicals?
• Latin and Greek terms and roots continue to be very important in the world of botanicals. What do you learn from that etymology throughout the book? How does it impact symbolism in Shakespeare’s works?
• Annotate the book using different colored highlighters. Seek out description in one color, interpretation in another, and you might even look for literary echoes using a third. How do these threads braid together?

The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland by Nan Shepherd : The Living Mountain is Shepherd’s account of exploring the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. Part of Britain’s Arctic, Shepherd encounters ravenous storms, clear views of the aurora borealis, and deep snows during the summer. She spent hundreds of days exploring the mountains by foot.

• These pages were written during the last years of WWII and its aftermath. How does that backdrop inform Shepherd’s interpretation of the landscape?
• The book is separated into twelve chapters, each dedicated to a specific part of life in the Cairngorms. How do these divisions guide the writing? Is she able to keep these elements separate from each other? In writing? In experiencing the land?
• Many parts of the landscape Shepherd observes would be expected in nature writing—mountains, weather, elements, animals, etc. How does Shepherd use language and tone to write about these things without using stock phrasing or clichéd interpretations?

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear : Even memoir can be delivered through nature writing as we see in Kyo Maclear’s poetic book, Birds Art Life . The book is an account of a year in her life after her father has passed away. And just as Murray and Thoreau would advise, journaling those days and the symbols in them led to a whole book—one that delicately and profoundly weaves together the nature of life—of living after death—and how art can collide with that nature to get us through the hours.

• How does time pass throughout the book? What techniques does Maclear employ to move the reader in and out of time?
• How does grief lead Maclear into art? Philosophy? Nature? Objects?
• The book is divided into the months of the year. Why does Maclear divide the book this way?
• What do you make of the subtitles?

Is time natural? Describe the relationship between humans and time in nature.

So dear writers, take to these pages and take to the trails in nature around you. Journal your way through your days. Use all of your senses to take a journey in nature. Then, journal to make a memory of your time in the world. And give it all away to the rest of us, in words.

Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World . She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal .

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WATCH: What Does Nature Writing Mean in 2020?

Bay area book festival #unbound presents a conversation hosted by josie iselin.

The natural world is full of mysteries, ones that writers and artists are uniquely equipped to unlock. In this panel sponsored by Heyday, four authors meet at a literary crossroads between hard science, lyrical prose, and visual sumptuousness. Naturalist, writer, and illustrator Obi Kaufmann turns his scientific acumen and artist’s palette on California’s most contested natural resource, water; while Josie Iselin wades into the deep end with an in-depth look at the magic of seaweed. John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren take us into the revelatory practice of nature journaling.

Together, they’ll get into the weeds with a conversation that raises, and answers, the thorniest questions. How do these multifaceted artists learn the ecological nitty-gritty of their subjects? How does science inspire not only the research that makes these books so fascinating, but also the artwork that makes them beautiful to behold? How does nature writing, as a literary genre, inform and deepen the impact of scientific research?

“Nature journaling is a trampoline for my curiosity, observations, my inquiry, and creative thinking.” – John Muir Laws

The Bay Area Book Festival  is a world-class annual literary celebration in Downtown Berkeley, attracting 25,000 attendees and featuring 250 authors in 130 programs. #UNBOUND, the year-round virtual branch of the Festival’s celebrated programming, amplifies bestselling and emerging voices across all genres, with a focus on social justice and diversity. We believe that books, and smart conversations about them, build bridges.

Obi Kaufmann, The State of Water · John Muir Laws, How To Teach Nature Journaling · Emilie Lygren, How To Teach Nature Journaling · Josie Iselin, The Curious World of Seaweed

Check  http://www.baybookfest.org/unbound  for additional episodes and information on our Bay Area Book Festival  #UNBOUND  virtual series.

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How To Write About Nature In 4 Important Steps

POSTED ON Apr 29, 2023

Written by Jackie Pearce

If you have ever stood in front of mountains, a large forest, or in front of the ocean, you might have felt a call to write about your experience.

Although a lot of us live indoors these days, nature still shapes so much of our lives and experiences in the world. Learning how to write about nature can make your novels even better.

Nature has been the topic of countless stories and personal essays throughout time. Even if you are writing a fictional book, there are most likely still elements of nature you will want to include throughout your story.

Nature can shape so much of a story, too. That is why so many creepy stories are set in remote cabins or in bad snowstorms. It adds a whole other element to deal with.

We will be going over some basics of what nature writing is, why it is important, and what you need to do to practice nature writing.

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Nature Writing

The interest in nature writing.

Since the dawn of time, nature has played a huge role in books.

Whether it was describing the weather, documenting their journeys through nature, the call of the wild, writing a story that includes nature, or something else, it has been a common theme.

Of course, more people in the past spent time in the natural world compared to today and our air-conditioned offices, but as a writer you might need to include more nature writing into your book .

While there are not specific rules on how to write about nature, there are a few things you can do to help practice nature writing, which we will get into in a bit.

What is Nature Writing?

While there is not technically one definition to nature writing, the Wikipedia definition for it is, “nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment.”

That is a pretty wide definition, so it can be technically hard to pinpoint what fits in the boundaries of nature writing.

For the purpose of this article, let's assume that you are writing a novel and you want to include elements of nature in your story, or make it the central point of conflict.

Why Write About Nature

There are a lot of reasons that people might want to write about nature.

You might want to write strictly about nature in a scientific way.

You might want to include nature as a huge part of the book you are writing. Most novels include nature writing in some way, shape, or form, even just to set a backdrop for where the characters are.

Some take it another level, and make nature a whole driving force behind the plot. For example, if characters are stranded at sea, the ocean itself is its own driving force.

Alternatively, you could even be creating a whole new type of planet or nature in one of your books, but you need to pull inspiration from certain aspects of nature in order to create it.

How to Write About Nature

Now that we have covered some of the basics of nature writing, now we will dive into some tips and tricks you can use to get started.

#1 – Spend more time observing nature

It is hard to write about something you do not know much about. It is a good idea to spend more time in nature observing everything you can.

Bring a notebook with you and notice how the ground looks, what colors are all around you, any animals you see, mythical creatures and characters you're imaging, the sounds you notice, and everything else you experience. Get your hands in some dirt and make a note of how it feels.

A lot of us did this in school when we were growing up, but lose touch with this practice over time.

It is one of the fastest ways to start writing about nature again.

#2 – Individualize the story

Whether you want to focus on the character's individual experience with nature or a personal story you are writing, you need to make the story specific.

Maybe you want to focus on a particular event, or a specific type of tree that is in your story.

#3 – Consider if the nature you are writing about has a deeper meaning

A lot of authors use nature to represent deeper meanings in their stories.

For example, sure, Moby Dick is about hunting a giant whale, but it is not really about that.

One of the interpretations of the whale is accepting the greater forces that have power over us, which some people refuse to submit to and instead spend their lives rallying against.

#4 – Utilize the other senses

One of the powerful parts of writing about nature is being able to tie the other senses into your writing to put your reader into your story.

Nature sounds, nature smells, and even the ways particular things in nature feel can help heighten the senses of the reader.

Even think of the difference between, “The wind blew” and “The crisp, fall breeze whipped through the trees.”

You can imagine the cooler breeze due to the cooler temperatures, or maybe you can mentally imagine a fall day.

Book Examples That Are About Nature

While there are tons of books that take a scientific approach to nature writing, we will look at different types of nature books.

Most of our audience is people who want to write their own novels, so here are some books that use nature as a backdrop or a huge influence in their work.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

If you did not read this book or see the movie starring Reese Witherspoon, it is the story about a 22-year-old woman who decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. As you can imagine, nature plays a huge role in this story since she is on her own in the wilderness.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

You cannot talk about nature books without mentioning Walden , since it is one of the most famous books involving nature.

This story is about Thoreau's journey into the woods where he lived for two years in his cabin on Walden Pond. It is about his time reconnecting to living a simple life.

Love Letter to the Earth  by Thich Nhat Hanh

This book is a love letter from the well-known Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, to the natural world.

The book focuses on the idea that we are not separate from the natural world, even though we feel like we are with all of our modern living.

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Writers of Color Are Redefining Nature Writing

In the winter of 2021, still very much in the midst of the pandemic, I started reading  The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde . Lorde was a queer Black writer who had become a literary hero of mine after I read her essays on feminism, sexuality, and racial justice. As I began exploring her poetry, I was immediately struck by how often she used nature to process the political realities of her life. “Love Poem” uses erotic descriptions of landscapes to capture the intimacy of her queer relationships. “The Brown Menace, or Poem to the Survival of Roaches” celebrates Black resilience, while “Second Spring” meditates on the dissonance of seasons changing as we are still mourning the past. Lorde writes:

We have no passions left to love the spring Who had suffered autumn as we did, alone Walking through dominions of a browning laughter Carrying our loneliness our loving and our grief.

When I read “Second Spring”—with the 2020 global uprising against police violence still relatively fresh and just weeks after the attack on the U.S. Capitol—the poem captured the spiritual exhaustion of the moment, how the Earth sometimes moves faster than our grief does. As a queer Latina writer who had spent years writing about nature, finding Lorde’s poetry felt like a relief. Finally, I had found a writer who wrote about nature in a way that was inextricable from every system of power we lived in. Before, when I had tried to read anything by someone labeled as a “nature writer,” the blatant omission of the forces that so deeply affected my outdoor experiences—white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy—made me feel distant from their work.

When Lorde published her first book of poems, her publisher, Dudley Randall, was quick to clarify, “Audre Lorde is not a nature poet.” I could relate to this impulse to separate her from the genre. Nature writing seemed to be unconcerned with the realities of oppression; it was writing that waxed poetic about the solace of the American landscape without any consideration of the historical context of that land, unbothered by the many communities displaced from it.

Now, however, what counts as nature writing—and who identifies as a nature writer—is beginning to change. In recent years, as the environmental movement has started to grapple with its historical connections to racism and xenophobia, a new generation of poets, essayists, memoirists, and novelists of color is taking up space in a genre that historically has excluded our perspectives. They include Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, Kim TallBear, Camille Dungy, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, among many others. They have raised their voices in anthologies like  The Language of Trees , edited by Katie Holten, and  A Darker Wilderness , edited by Erin Sharkey . Books like Sabrina Imbler’s  How Far the Light Reaches  embody a nature writing that centers the most marginalized and names the violent histories inherent in shaping our relationship to nature. More importantly, they remind us that oppressed people have always partnered with nature when seeking our liberation.

In his essay “A Family Vacation” in  A Darker Wilderness , Glynn Pogue writes about the first seaside enclaves and mountain towns that allowed Black people to own land, and the first Black-owned bed-and-breakfasts that thrived there. In “Concentric Memory,” Naima Penniman writes about how forests, swamps, and brushlands gave sanctuary to maroon communities of escaped slaves in Haiti and Latin America. Carl Phillips’ piece in  The Language of Trees  describes how forests became his refuge for queer intimacy, a space that provided “a sense of permission at least, to what can feel like—what we’ve been made to feel is transgression; if only temporarily, the trees erase the shame that drove us to seek hiddenness in the first place.”

In these pages, nature is inherently political. It is an active ally in the fight against oppression, a place where marginalized people can experience brief moments of life outside systemic trauma. And it’s a place where we find the examples we need to give us hope for our survival. In  How Far the Light Reaches , Imbler compares the “supernaturally hardy” resilience of feral goldfish that took over an entire river ecosystem in Southwest Australia—all descendants of a handful of pets someone dumped two decades ago—to the resilience they and their queer community needed to survive and “how each of our becomings felt like an unthinkable triumph.” Imbler writes, “A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”

In her book  Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape , Lauret Savoy writes about the Western Apache (Ndee) word  ni,  meaning both “land” and “mind,” which illustrates “the inseparability of place and thought.” “In ‘ni,’ earth and thinking converge,” she writes. “What’s crucial is to think and act with landscapes, as well as about and upon them.”

This insight revealed something I appreciate when reading nature writers of color: They write with landscapes, not only about and upon them. In so many of the environmentalist spaces I have worked in, I’ve often heard about “saving” the Earth—a message that implies a human superiority we don’t actually possess. Nature writers of color instead emphasize relating with the Earth. They write with an assumption of partnership and solidarity between humans and nature, both working toward a mutual goal of liberation, rather than an uneven relationship in which it’s humanity’s task to save everything else.

When Audre Lorde’s publisher said that she was not a nature writer, he justified his argument by stating that “her focus is not on nature, but on feelings and relationships”—as if those concepts were mutually exclusive. Today’s nature writers of color know differently, and Lorde knew it long ago: Writing about nature is writing about feelings and relationships, because our relationship with nature is constantly related to how we learn and think about ourselves.

Since reading Lorde’s poetry, I began teaching a workshop called “Reclaiming Nature Writing.” When I ask participants what they received from the course, an answer I hear often is “permission.” Too many writers still believe their stories about race, sexuality, or ancestry don’t count as nature writing. Once they read writers of color who validate their own unique relationship to nature, they allow themselves to write their own stories.

So much of the recent conversation around diversifying both the publishing industry and the environmental movement has focused on giving people of color “a seat at the table.” These new nature writers of color tell stories that change the table entirely. They don’t simply add a new voice to the discourse; they transform what and who is centered, what core assumptions about nature we first must dispel. In doing so, they provoke a radically important question: Who should have the power to narrate what the Earth wants?

In an essay titled “Brutes: Meditations on the Myth of the Voiceless,” best-selling author Amitav Ghosh argues against the idea of nature as a “voiceless” entity needing humans to stand up and defend it. He believes that nature has been telling us stories far before humans ever could. The task of human storytellers is to simply listen and to find ways to “imaginatively reassign agency and voice to nonhumans,” Ghosh writes. “This is a task at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.”

The more I read nature writing from writers of color, the more it’s clear to me that perhaps instead of seeking out new and innovative ideas to address the ecological crisis, we should be returning to ancient stories, the stories Earth has been telling us for centuries. We can confront this crisis not by trying to save the planet but by listening to it. And in doing so, we may discover that Earth’s story—of severed connection and exploitation—is much the same as our own.

This article was originally published by  Sierra . It has been published here with permission.

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We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing

Digital fatigue and environmental disaster have, paradoxically, lead to a resurgence of books on the power and meaning of the great outdoors. Here are some of the best

Nature writing - in which the beauty of the natural world is used as way of exploring inner turmoil - has enjoyed something of a commercial and critical renaissance in recent years. It's not hard to see why. Our obsession with technology has started to feel more like a trap, making the the great outdoors seem like an appealing balm. Meanwhile the encroaching disaster of climate change is forcing us to reevaluate our relationship with nature, and maybe even stop taking it for granted.

These memoirs or stories of intellectual reckoning, set against sweeping skies, meandering rivers and foreboding forests, are the best recent examples from a genre having a moment in the sun. Whether you're looking for guidance at a moment of crisis, or to get lost in evocative explorations of meadows and riverbanks, crack a spine and be transported.

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

At a moment of personal crisis in her own life, British writer Olivia Laing walks the length of the river Ouse, the stretch of water where more than sixty years ago Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Over the course of a week walking from source to the sea she traces the memories of the writer's life that lurk beneath the surface of the water, and in turn grapples with her own ghosts.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

You might recognise the striking cover from seeing it dotted around tube carriages and airport terminals a few years ago. This award-winning book tells of how, in a moment of grief after her father's death, Macdonald spent £800 on a goshawk and tried to train it. Released in the same year as Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with The Feathers, it begun a trend of books which look to animals and nature for answers on life and death.

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

The Quietus co-founder Luke Turner's debut novel opens in the wreckage of a relationship as he comes to terms with being bisexual. Against the backdrop of the Epping Forest, which Turner has grown up in the shadow of, Out Of The Woods fuses the history of the forest with the winding paths and dead-ends of Turner's own life. In doing so it achieves that tricky balance of feeling both deeply personal and totally universal.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

One of the most popular examples of the new nature trend, Liptrot's book finds her returning to her hometown of Orkney as alcoholism threatens to engulf her life. By swimming and walking the sparsely populated island, its patterns of rebirth are a symbol of perseverance and growth. In coming home she finds a way back to herself.

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin

Water is both a mysterious and unknowable entity and a soothing tonic in Deakin's book about swimming through the British Isles. From the water he gains what he calls a "'frog's eye view" of the country, after incidents like being stopped and held by water bailiffs in Winchester and mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands. This fresh perspective from water also offers a reflection of his own life.

Feral by George Monbiot

Distressed at capitalism and meaninglessness of life in modern cities, environmentalist George Monbiot retreats to rural Wales. The result of is a compelling case for the peace to be found from a simpler life and the solace that can be found in nature. A book that will have you longing to escape the rat race in favour of gulping some fresh air.

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

One the country's foremost nature writers, this book marked a departure for Richard Mabey who moved to a new part of the country following a bout of depression. There he renegotiates his longstanding relationship with the outdoors. The result is a book that sings with the restorative joys of nature.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit is mesmerising when writing on anything, be it Trump's election or mansplaning. This collection of essays is no different and finds a common theme in moments of uncertainty and change. In one standout, she ponders the fate of tortoises, threading together a memory of riding one in a zoo with their modern fate in our crumbling environment. Throughout, history, nature and Solnit's memories collide to create something meditative and stirring.

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