Loren Eiseley Archives | Numéro Cinq

Nature Writing in America: Adam Regn Arvidson

Jan 262012

Adam Regn Arvidson has completed his epic (nearly a year) exploration of nature writing in America, including essays on Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch and Loren Eiseley plus a special craft essay/digression on imagery and invective (in the work of Edward Hoagland). Adam also explores the profound political and cultural effect this particular kind of nonfiction prose has had—these nature writers have altered the way with think about the land we live in (we are talking about the invention of Green). In the last year, Adam also had a new son and completed a nonfiction book on landscaping and the environment that will be published by W. W. Norton this fall. —dg

Introduction

Loren Eiseley’s Two Cultures

Edward Abbey’s Access to Wildness

The Enigmatic Edward Hoagland

Criticism Through Imagery

The Power of Rachel Carson

Joseph Wood Krutch’s Natural Personality

The Place of Wendell Berry

Adam Regn Arvidson

is a landscape architect and writer in Minneapolis. He has published numerous articles on design, planning, and landscape in a variety of magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Planning, and Metropolis. He is founder of Treeline, a design/writing consultancy that assists public and private clients in telling the story of their land through landscape architecture and writing deeply rooted in place. In 2009 Adam won the Bradford Williams Medal, the nation’s highest award for landscape architectural writing, and he has a book forthcoming on environmental practices in the nursery and landscaping industry (W.W. Norton, 2012). This fall, Adam will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Nature Writing in America: Joseph Wood Krutch’s Natural Personality — Adam Arvidson

Oct 242011

Rational thought. Calm, reasonable, gentle persuasion. It was this quality of moderation in his writing that most impressed me, for my own inclinations tended toward the opposite, the impatient, the radical, the violent.

That’s how Edward Abbey described Joseph Wood Krutch in an essay that appeared initially in the journal Sage and then featured in Abbey’s 1988 collection One Life at a Time, Please. The piece, called simply “Mr. Krutch” (that’s “krootch” if you’re reading aloud), recounts Abbey’s 1967 interview of Krutch—the last formal interview the latter granted before his death in 1970. The circumstances and content of the interview say much about both men: it took place in the desert burg of Tucson, it resulted from Krutch’s acceptance of Abbey’s simple cold call (Abbey admits to having simply looked up the well-known Krutch in the phone book), and it features a palpable tension as then-debutant Abbey tries to direct the conversation but is instead led along by Krutch. It’s an excellent read.

Abbey, of course (as described in an earlier installment of this series), is known for his passionate defense of and writing about the desert. Krutch, perhaps exactly because of that more “reasonable” voice, is far less well known—he is probably the least recognized name among those profiled here—but he also comes to mind mostly because of his desert writings. That late 60’s interview brought together two men with similar loves at the very moment the environmental movement was in the midst of legislatively changing the world. It is a pivot point on the environmental timeline.

Moving forward, Abbey would publish Desert Solitaire less than a year later in 1968. Within two years, Edward Hoagland and Wendell Berry would be on the scene, the Clean Air and Environmental Policy Acts would become law, the elder desert sage would publish his life compendium, The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch, and Krutch would die, just two months after the first Earth Day. Moving backward, Krutch published books contemporaneously with Loren Eiseley (whom Krutch admires specifically in the Abbey interview), Rachel Carson, and Peter Mathiessen. Krutch was born in 1893 (the only major mid-century writer to see the turn of the last century), and in fact his writing should have been contemporary to Aldo Leopold (born in 1887), except that Krutch came to nature writing quite late.

Krutch began his writing career as a theater critic and professor at Columbia University. He wrote biographies of Edgar Allen Poe (1926), Samuel Johnson (1944), and–who else–Thoreau (1948), as well as a book-length thesis critical of science and technology (The Modern Temper, 1929). The Thoreau book, initially just another biography project, made Krutch take a closer look at environmental topics. This is from his 1962 autobiography More Lives Than One:

One winter night shortly after I had finished Thoreau I was reading a “nature essay” which pleased me greatly and it suddenly occurred to me for the first time to wonder if I could do something of the sort. I cast about for a subject and decided upon the most conventional of all, namely Spring.

That first essay, “The Day of the Peepers,” led quickly to Krutch’s first nature-focused book, The Twelve Seasons (1949). He was 56 (by contrast Abbey published Desert Solitaire at 41 and had by then already written three novels). Krutch’s most famed volume The Desert Year came out in 1951 (the same year as Rachel Carson’s best-seller The Sea Around Us). The Voice of the Desert expanded on the earlier book in 1954, and travelogues on the Grand Canyon and the Baja Peninsula followed in 1957 and 1961, respectively. Other books, more philosophical in nature, alternated with these environmental tomes, making this an extremely prolific time for Krutch: including the Thoreau biography and his autobiography, 11 books in 14 years. It was almost as if he was making up for lost time.

Abbey describes Krutch’s style exactly right. The quote above from More Lives Than One is a perfect example of the lilting, matter-of-fact, discover-as-you-go tone of Krutch’s nature writing. (How ironic it is, by the way, that Krutch’s autobiography is called More Lives Than One and Abbey’s last essay collection is called One Life At a Time, Please.) Though I think Krutch’s language matures a bit through his career, that by-golly sense of wonder is always present—tempered, though, by hints of the intelligentsia of which Krutch can easily be considered a member.

Some examples: first from “Don’t Expect Too Much from a Frog” (1953):

The whole philosophy of frogs, all the wisdom they have accumulated in millions of years of experience, is expressed in that urrr-unk uttered with an air which seems to suggest that the speaker feels it to be completely adequate. The comment does not seem very passionate or very aspiring, but it is contented and not cynical. Frogs have considered life and found it, if not exactly ecstatic, at least quite pleasant and satisfactory.

“Urrr-unk” and “feels it to be completely adequate” are delightfully opposing semantic poles.

And from “Journey in Time,” part of the 1958 Grand Canyon book:

As soon as nature has made a mountain, she seems to regret it and she begins to tear it down. Then, once she has torn it down, she makes another—perhaps, as here, precisely where the former mountain had once towered. Speed the action up as in those movies of an opening flower, and the landscape of the earth would seem as insubstantial and as phantasmagorical as the cloudscape of a thundery afternoon.

The first sentence here is decidedly low-brow, but then comes “phantasmagorical” and “cloudscape.” Even Krutch’s essay and book chapter titles are a little aw-shucks. The first four chapters of The Desert Year are “Why I Came,” “What It Looks Like, “How to See It,” and “How Some Others Live Here.”

To use a thrice removed quote, Mark Tredinnick, in his unique exploration of writers’ home landscapes, The Land’s Wild Music (Trinity University Press, 2005), pulls this Krutch gem from Frank Stewart’s A Natural History of Nature Writing (Island, 1995): “[Nature writing is] experience with the natural world, as opposed, for example, to science writing, which is knowledge about the natural world.” Krutch happily admits to being a novice. In the essay called “On Being an Amateur Naturalist” he says, tongue-in-cheek, “I think I know more about plant life than any other drama critic, and more about the theater than any botanist.” That humility is a refreshing departure, and one that lets the reader feel ignorant without shame. A recurring story in The Desert Year sees Krutch trying to discover why bats always spiral a certain direction when exiting a cave. He writes to scientists and even imagines himself gaining some recognition in scientific circles for raising this apparently never-before-asked question. He wonders if they go the other way in Australia. He envisions some non-verbal compact among the bats, to eliminate traffic accidents.

For to Krutch, the bats are sentient and are possessed of personalities. So are the spiders and the birds and even the saguaro cactus. This belief sets Krutch apart from the other writers of his time, hearkening back to a more romantic notion of nature found often in the writings of John James Audubon and, at times, John Muir. Tredinnick in The Land’s Wild Music goes so far as to put Krutch in a box with Leopold, Henry Beston, and Carson, while the opposite box has Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and “all the other Thoreaus of the baby boom” (ugh! a group Thoreau reference–see my rant about Hoagland, here). This belief also set him against the prevailing science of his day, which relied on dissection to study living things and considered all plants and animals mere machines governed by instinct and natural selection. Krutch’s writing believes in the real lives being lived in the natural world: the joy, the sorrow, the patience, the humor.

For instance, in The Desert Year, he watches courting lizards:

When I first noticed this pair the male had just made a direct, crude approach toward the female and she, quite properly resenting this matter-of-factness, scurried away as from an enemy about to devour her. The male stopped disappointed; shrugged his lizard shoulders; started off in the opposite direction; and was then obviously surprised to discover he was being followed at a discreet distance….

Besides the advances and retreats which are the essential features of all courtships, this one consisted principally of poetical speeches or amorous arias, though I could not be sure which since the sounds were completely inaudible to me, at least through the window…. [The] lady would listen intently, move a little closer, and then edge away again when her suitor approached to ask what effect his eloquence had produced.

Ahh, the rigors of flirtation, and life, for all creatures, not just we humans.

The other day I hiked with my youngest son Mason for the first time in a state park. He is six months old and was strapped to my chest, contentedly looking up at the silver maples. A small woodpecker exploring along the trunks caught my eye. Soon the bird flew to different branch where another woodpecker was already tapping. As the first bird arrived, the resident woodpecker pecked aggressively in his direction, spread his own wings wide, and called out a series of shrill staccato tones. The interloper followed suit and the two danced on the branch, arms outstretched, beaks threatening.

I imagined what they might be saying to each other—or, rather, what Joseph Wood Krutch might imagine them saying to each other. I am sure he would have exactly the right dialog.

Proceed to the next essay, on Wendell Berry; or return to the Table of Contents.

—Adam Regn Arvidson

Nature Writing in America: The Power of Rachel Carson — Adam Regn Arvidson

Sep 262011

I was almost finished reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I authorized the application of Garlon to 3300 square feet of vegetation surrounding a new commercial building. Garlon is an herbicide: a chemical officially called triclopyr—a cocktail of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and chlorine arranged in a particular structure that makes it fatal to broad-leaved plants.

I visited the application site after a few days and the plants had already started to wither. Garlon takes a little while to act, but over the course of a week or two, the lambs-quarters and creeping charlie browned and fell to the earth. The company I hired later arrived to mow the whole thing down.

Silent Spring spends an entire chapter (ominously called “Elixirs of Death”) on how exactly the various pesticides and herbicides work. Garlon is more recent, so it doesn’t appear, but it shares many of the chemical properties of the chlorinated hydrocarbons and organic phosphates Carson describes. “Elixirs of Death” occurs early in this seminal (some would say THE seminal) environmental work. Carson, an otherwise soft-spoken science writer, sets the book’s tone with the chapter’s title, and with stories like this:

On another occasion two small boys in Wisconsin, cousins, died on the same night. One had been playing in his yard when spray drifted in from an adjoining field where his father was spraying potatoes with parathion; the other had run playfully into the barn after his father and put his hand on the nozzle of the spray equipment.

Dwell on those words for a minute: “had run playfully into the barn after his father.”

Chemical diagram of triclopyr (Garlon)

I am a landscape architect, which means I typically come up with designs for parks, homes, and commercial properties, then leave the maintenance to others. At some level I suppose I understand that a broad array of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are being sprayed on my idealistically created landscapes. But what they do is their business—out of sight, out of mind. On the particular commercial project I mention above, though, I was thrust into a management role due to some contract discrepancies. The responsibility of maintaining the native prairie grasses I had seeded along the building’s main walkway fell to me. I called a prairie expert who told me herbicide would be the best way to get the weeds under control and allow the little bluestem room to grow. I wavered. Then agreed.

Hanging up the phone I was wracked with guilt. Carson’s book has a way of making one feel that way, if one is in any way complicit in the use of pesticides or herbicides. Silent Spring is both fact-packed and heart-wrenching. It leaves a reader feeling emotionally spent, yet unable to find relief in the possibility that the stories are either exaggerated or untrue. And that, of course, was its intended effect.

It’s hard to know exactly where to start a new essay about Carson, since of all the environmental writers in American history, she has been more researched, praised, referenced, essayed, and reprinted than anyone but perhaps Thoreau and John Muir. Certainly of all the writers covered in this series, no one sold more books and no one had a more direct effect on legislation than she did—even though she only wrote four books and succumbed to cancer a mere 18 months after Silent Spring was published, at age 56. If you want biography, read Linda Lear’s excellent and honest Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. If you want homage, go for Courage for the Earth, edited by the venerable Peter Matthiessen. You can find Rachel Carson children’s books and Rachel Carson school curricula. (I’m thinking of starting a line of “what would Rachel do?” bumper stickers and coffee mugs.)

It’s hard to know where to start with Carson because so much has been said already. What I will add is this: Silent Spring struck me in two ways. Foremost, I felt like a direct subject of criticism, because of the Garlon, and the book has made me rethink some of my professional practices, even though it is near 50 years old and wildly out of date factually. I also felt a deep admiration for Carson because she, I believe, deliberately altered her writing style in order to have the desired impact. Silent Spring, in tone, subject, and language choice, is markedly different from her earlier works about the ocean: Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (a 1951 bestseller), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Though this earlier trilogy—completed a full seven years before Silent Spring—has notes of warning, it is above all a paean to the sea, in all its glory and poetry. I read The Sea Around Us immediately before delving into Silent Spring, and the contrast was stark.

Indulge me in a side-by-side comparison. To make it a little more apples-to-apples, I’ll look at the same subject: water. Here is Silent Spring:

Here and there we have dramatic evidence of the presence of these chemicals in our streams and even in public water supplies. For example, a sample of drinking water from an orchard area in Pennsylvania, when tested on fish in a laboratory, contained enough insecticide to kill all of the test fish in only four hours….

For the most part this pollution is unseen and invisible, making its presence known when hundreds of thousands of fish die, but more often never detected at all. The chemist who guards water purity has no routine tests for these organic pollutants and no way to remove them.

And The Sea Around Us:

Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulation system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.

You will of course have to give me the benefit of the doubt that I have selected representative samples. Yes, there are glimpses of the critical Carson in the sea trilogy and of the enraptured Carson in Silent Spring (“those woodland sprites the kinglets…the warblers, whose migrating hordes flow through the trees in spring in a multicolored tide of life”). But it’s not a stretch to say that the sea trilogy is poetic while Silent Spring is analytical.

I believe that difference is not just because of the passage of time between the works, nor is it because of the inherently negative subject matter of the later book. As Ann Zwinger writes in her introduction to the 2002 reprint of Silent Spring, after World War II “The public endowed chemists, at work in their starched white coats…with almost divine wisdom. The results of their labors were gilded with the presumption of beneficence. In postwar America, science was god, and science was male.” Science also stood alone, in philosophical opposition to art and poetry. That dichotomy, which Loren Eiseley and others began to expose in the early 1960s, led to the intense social upheval that pitted “9-to-5-ers” and “hippies” against each other in the decades to come.

In order to have an affect on the science of the day, and on the general population, Carson needed to adopt an empirical rhetoric, mostly free of the soul-stirring prose that populates her earlier work but would be rapidly discredited in the context of her new subject. In fact, the chemical industry tried to do exactly that, launching a smear campaign that, among other things, labeled Carson a spinster and a madwoman—powerful and damning language in the late 50s. Carson buttoned Silent Spring up tight, leaving no space for the chemical establishment to set a hook and tear it apart.

However, if that had been Carson’s only trick, Silent Spring would stand as an excellent report to Congress, rather than as the “cornerstone of the new environmentalism,” as Peter Matthiessen calls it. Carson’s final book was embraced by an entire generation and many believe it led to not just the domestic ban on DDT application (for which it is best known), but also the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972—all of which directly address environmental pollutants like herbicides and pesticides.

The reason for Silent Spring’s longevity is that laced within the analysis are passages like this:

I know well a stretch of road where nature’s own landscaping has provided a border of alder, viburnum, sweet fern, and juniper with seasonally changing accents of bright flowers, or of fruits hanging in jeweled clusters in the fall…. But the sprayers took over and the miles along that road became something to be traversed quickly, a sight to be endured with one’s mind closed to thoughts of the sterile and hideous world we are letting our technicians make. But here and there authority had somehow faltered and…there were oases of beauty in the midst of austere and regimented control…. In such places my spirit lifted to the sight of the drifts of white clover or the clouds of purple vetch with here and there the flaming cup of a wood lily.

Or this, in reference to the “explosive power” of nature to reproduce and fill a void:

I think of shore rocks white with barnacles as far as the eye can see, or of the spectacle of passing through an immense school of jellyfish, mile after mile, with seemingly no end to the pulsing, ghostly forms scarcely more substantial than the water itself.

It has been more than a month now since I was complicit in the application of an herbicide. Today the site is a green swath of baby prairie grasses pushing their roots deep into the earth and covering the soil with their stems. Next spring there will be fewer broad-leaved plants and after another year this landscape will not need to be mowed, fertilized, watered, or treated with chemicals of any kind—ever.

My 3300 square feet is infinitesimal compared to the millions of square miles of neighborhoods, forests, and farms that used to be sprayed from airplanes with a mixture of DDT powder and fuel oil (can you imagine?!). And Carson’s last chapter gives me an out: perhaps surprisingly, she doesn’t call for outright bans, but rather a careful combination of biological control and chemical use applied where needed and for the right reasons.

She also calls for effective regulation and decision-making through sound science, and that sentiment became the foundation for the EPA and all the environmental legislation passed in the early 1970s.

So if you will indulge me in one more paragraph, I would be remiss in not mentioning current events.

I opened this series by referencing a January 25, 2012, speech by Newt Gingrich in which he proposed elimination of the EPA. He, the few remaining presidential hopefuls, and conservative members of the U.S. Congress have held that line for the past year. The standard phrase, crowed ad nauseum in debates and stump speeches, is that the EPA and the Clean Air and Water Acts are “job-killing” regulations. Gingrich and the other so-called advocates for business and jobs should take a moment to remember life before 1970: fuel oil dropped from airplanes on suburban neighborhoods, chemicals in general use so dangerous that children could die from touching a spray nozzle, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River so polluted it actually caught fire (that was 1969), cities across the nation dumping untreated sewage into local waters (yes, the Clean Water Act regulates government in addition to private business). Conservatives are holding a ridiculous and untenable position that essentially suggests businesses would pay more taxes and hire more people–if only they could pollute.

Carson described the 1950s as “an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests…it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truth.”

Silent Spring is 50 years old in 2012—election year. As I wrote in the introduction, it’s time for another reading.

Proceed to the next essay, on Joseph Wood Krutch; or return to the Table of Contents.

—Adam Regn Arvidson

Nature Writing in America: Criticism Through Imagery — Adam Regn Arvidson

Jul 152011

The rant comes easily to nonfiction writers—especially environmental and nature writers. Most feel the need to write about nature either out of pure love for the natural world or out of concern for its well-being. Inherently, the writer will offer opinions on who is at fault for perceived ills and what we should be doing about it.

Earlier in this series of essays on nature writing in America, I have noted that Edward Abbey rants plentifully (I even admit that I often feel he’s kicking me in the butt). The targets of Abbey’s criticism are very specific, beginning with the National Park Service and certain corporations and extending in some cases to specific individuals associated with projects he hates.

Not so with Edward Hoagland. In my previous piece on Hoagland, I mentioned how this author’s early works hooked me hard and how I wasn’t entirely sure why. Curious, I looked more closely, comparing his early work to the most recent collection, Sex and the River Styx. Beginning in The Courage of Turtles and on up through the big compendium Hoagland on Nature, the writing is nearly devoid of finger-pointing. I didn’t notice it at first because I clearly understood Hoagland’s message about caring for the natural world without throwing humanity out with the pond-water, as it were. But a careful reading brings no villains—characters, yes, even characters acting in ways Hoagland seems to want us all to avoid, but there is never any specific criticism, like Abbey lofts at the Corps of Engineers or Loren Eiseley levels (more softly) at academia.

How does he do this? In this installment, I’m taking a short break from the regular personal-reflections-on-a-mid-century-environmental-writer format to provide a craft essay. And like any good craft essay (especially one to be read on-line), I will narrow my scope—to one work.

Continue reading »

Nature Writing in America: The Enigmatic Edward Hoagland — Adam Regn Arvidson

Jun 132011

If one more reviewer or foreword writer refers to an author as some latter-day Thoreau, I’m going to throw that book in the nearest pond.

This knee-jerk reference is everywhere—each of the previous two authors in this series, Loren Eiseley and Edward Abbey, have been referred to as Thoreaus (a remarkable fact considering how unalike Eiseley and Abbey were). And there it was again, in the foreword of Edward Hoagland’s most recent essay collection, Sex and the River Styx (2011): “Edward Hoagland,” crows the title, “The Thoreau of Our Times.”

My beef with the comparison is that it sets up false expectations. I initially began reading Hoagland because quite a few people I was meeting told me that I should. During my first two trips to Vermont for my MFA studies, whenever I would say that my writing focused on science and nature, there was a good chance I would be asked if I had read either Annie Dillard or Hoagland. No? the incredulous inquisitor would gasp, You must read The Courage of Turtles. To me that sounded like a good bit of nature writing: the courage of turtles—a dose of ironic personification coupled with a straightforward description of subject matter. When I finally got to Hoagland, it was Sex and the River Styx first (start with the current stuff, right?). As I opened the book, the combination of writer friends’ swoons, a golden embossed tree on the cover, and that Thoreauvian header had me primed for something truly naturalistic.

But I was disappointed.

Let’s be clear: this is a complex and wide-ranging collection, which certainly touches on nature (its beauties, its dangers, and how we’re pretty much ruining it), but it remains more immersed in Hoagland’s mind than in the world around him—natural or not. So I went back to the source: the man’s seminal work, the now (unfortunately) out-of-print 1971 essay collection everyone had been recommending. I was surprised to find a dearth of nature even here. Tugboats, circuses, county fairs, and sex? Sure. Paeans to trees and reptiles and charismatic megafauna? Not really. Yes, the titular essay is about turtles, but those turtles are found in a bowl in an aquarium shop, painted up as curios at a boardwalk arcade, and in Hoagland’s own aquarium, kept as pets. Even the essays that do focus on the wild world, namely “The Moose on the Wall” and “The War in the Woods,” are about, respectively, taxidermy and bear hunting.

Strangely, though, I couldn’t stop reading. I sampled Notes from the Century Before (1968), about a summer in British Columbia; have begun Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), a collection examining the nature/city dichotomy, and am part-way through the 2003 collection Hoagland on Nature. I can’t put him down.

In “A Last Look Around,” one of the swan-songily named essays in Sex and the River Styx, Hoagland says:

I’ve been publishing books for forty years, and I don’t have a fastball any more, just a knuckleball, spitball, and other Satchel Paigey stuff.

That stuff’s hard to hit, but a lot of fun to take a swing at (or watch from the stands). Hoagland’s writing is about nature, but it comes at you sideways, through the tugboats plying the East River, through commercial coyote trappers, through the tame big cats and sad elephants traveling the country with the Barnums, through references to pharmaceuticals and lawn maintenance. Which means Hoagland gets our human situation (and always got it—I think his earlier work is Satchel Paigey, too, which is a compliment). We don’t live in nature. We live somewhere in between.

I loved metropolises and saw no conflict between exulting in their magnetism and in wild places.

That’s from another Sex and the River Styx essay, “Small Silences,” and it suggests we can live in both worlds. But there are hazards:

Yet a more authentic affinity with what we call nature is being lost even faster than nature itself. Into the void slips obsessional pornography, fundamentalist religion, stobe-light showbiz…and squirmy corporate flacks…. If gyms don’t substitute for walking, it’s hard to find a place to walk, as houses line every beachfront and scissor every patch of woods with cul-de-sacs for real estate.

And:

If you wait until your mature years to get to know a patch of countryside thoroughly or intimately, your responses may be generic, not specific—just curiosity and good intentions—and you will wind up going in for golf and tennis and power mowers, bypassing nature, instead.

These little rants in the latest collection are a departure from Hoagland’s earlier work, the hallmark of which is a blameless observation, crafted in a way that leads the reader to a conclusion without seeming to do the leading (more on that later, see the upcoming “bonus post” at the end). Sex and the River Styx, the essays in which were originally published between 2003 and 2010 in a variety of magazines ranging from Harper’s to American Scholar to Outside, feels, well, final. Start with the titles: “A Last Look Around,” “Last Call,” “Endgame,” “A Country for Old Men.” Hoagland is approaching 80. He has written hundreds of essays since “The Big Cats” appeared in Esquire in 1961. Sex and the River Styx has a tone of exasperation to it, as if he were saying, World, I’ve been trying to save you from yourselves for 40 years and this is the last time I’m going to tell you.

Perhaps that explains my initial disappointment. I read Hoagland the wrong way ‘round. I’m not there yet. I’m just short of 37 and have the strange notion I can still make a difference. There is a long arc to Hoagland’s work, which, taken as an oeuvre, is emphatically about how to take care of the world—without shaming anyone specifically (like Abbey does).

Also without sequestering oneself into a certain pigeon-hole. As a case in point, to find Hoagland’s work, I bounded up and down the steps of the Minneapolis Central Library, visiting the travel, literature, and science and business sections. He is anthologized in the 1989 nature writing collection This Incomparable Lande, but is omitted from Bill McKibben’s landmark American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (2008), which features about 100 works by authors including the well-recognized (hmm) nature-writers Woody Guthrie, Lyndon Johnson, and P.T. Barnum. Apparently, neither academia nor library science know exactly where to put Hoagland. (Considering McKibben’s pro-nature sensibilities, the omission of Hoagland’s “Endgame,” an extraordinary and wide ranging essay on threats to the environment, is an unfortunate oversight.)

If Hoagland had a pet subject matter, it was big mammals, especially wild predators. Yes, he is best known for a ditty about turtles, but it’s bears and mountain lions and wolves and coyotes that obviously capture his fancy. Hoagland began his adulthood traveling with the circus and working with lions and tigers, and that passion never seems to have left him. He broke into The New Yorker in 1971 with “Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion,” has essay collections called Red Wolves and Black Bears and Tigers and Ice, and has traveled to Africa to document both the human and animal tragedies happening there.

Several of the animals he illuminates are on the federal endangered species list. The wolf, in fact, was one of the poster-fauna for the Endangered Species Act, which became law in 1973. A number of Hoagland’s essays predate that law, including those collected in The Courage of Turtles. Earlier, he contributed his wilderness memoir Notes from the Century Before (about the wild, grizzly-populated Pacific coast) to one of the greatest years for nature writing in the last century, 1969, in which Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, and John Hay all published important works.

I expect Hoagland would be horrified to learn that Congress recently stripped protection of western wolves by de-listing them in a rider to the budget bill signed recently by President Obama. No plant or animal has ever been removed from the Endangered Species Act by an act of Congress–politics trumps science.

For my part, I am still trying to figure out exactly why I have become so enamored with this writer, especially after my initial disappointment. Neither Eiseley nor Abbey affected me quite this way.

I am beginning to think it has to do with the reality of the writing. Hoagland is neither agitator, activist, nor rebel, but rather observer: of mountain lions, of bears, of kids spending more time in front of video games than outdoors, of red wolf trappers on Texas bayou plantations, of endangered animals in circus cages, of Viagra and pornography and overpopulation, of turtles. Of nature and human nature.

I don’t want to compare Hoagland to Thoreau just because both talked from time to time about plants and animals and human impacts on the environment (incidentally, Hoagland’s 1991 essay “About H.D. Thoreau” focuses on the 19th Century writer’s humanism and activism, which makes the Hoagland-Thoreau comparison a bit more apt). Hoagland seems more rooted in civilization, even as he dreams of an afterlife “thocketing among the boulders” of some creek as he washes out to sea to be gently rocked for eternity. Hoagland hits me a lot harder than Thoreau does.

For instance, at the moment of this writing, I am sitting in a campground at Wild River State Park in Minnesota. In front of me on the left is a two-person tent, where my three-year-old son is sleeping off the morning’s hike. In front of me on the right is a 32-foot motorhome, in which my father and his long-time girlfriend are doing the same. My laptop is on the picnic table on a plastic checked tablecloth purchased on the way up here at a Wal-Mart. This weekend get-away in the motorhome is Ethan’s 3rd birthday present from my dad. This is not the way I normally camp.

But this morning we were enveloped in a flock of yellow swallowtail butterflies on the banks of the St. Croix River (designated in 1968 as one of the nation’s first Wild and Scenic Rivers). We spied blooming wild geranium and trillium and false Solomon’s seal in the woods. We watched two giant russet and crimson cecropia moths mate on a tree near the visitor center. A tiny spider I cannot identify just jumped from the tablecloth to my arm, thought better of that decision, and jumped back to the tablecloth. There’s a light breeze in the oaks and the sky is blue.

I could get wrapped up in so many philosophical battles with myself (what’s the gas mileage of that motorhome? where was this tablecloth made? why have we let our rivers get so polluted that the federal government is likely to name three more Minnesota mussels to the endangered species list next year?). But I am too judgmental; I should observe more. And the most important observation? My dad took my son camping.

Which makes me think of this, from the title essay in Hoagland’s most recent collection:

And that’s not an inconsiderable recipe for life—to do no harm and to bear witness. The second is often harder than the first.

(My son, incidentally, seized my Hoagland on Nature, handing me Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go in return. A budding nature writer? Maybe Hoagland needs to grow on him a little, too….)

Proceed to the next essay, a closer examination of “The Courage of Turtles” with an eye to how Hoagland shares his (sometimes scathing) observations without placing much actual blame (a craft essay), or return to Nature Writing in America Table of Contents.

— Adam Regn Arvidson

Nature Writing in America: Edward Abbey’s Access to Wildness — Adam Regn Arvidson

Apr 012011

Sometimes I imagine getting a verbal ass-whoopin’ from Edward Abbey. I find it best to picture him half-naked and sunburned, next to some beat-up pick-up truck parked precariously halfway off the side of a gravel road. There’s not a single tree in sight. His beard is dusty and his thick hair snarled from a days-long sojourn down by some unnamed creek in a copse of cottonwoods. I detect the faint smells of bacon and tobacco, with a touch of permeating campfire smokiness.

As I sit there in my shiny black Jetta, prescription sunglasses on my face and REI gear in the trunk and backseat, I listen attentively to the tirade. Maybe I get one like this, from near the end of Abbey’s most famous work, Desert Solitaire (1968):

Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ… roll that window down! You can’t see the desert if you can’t smell it…. Turn that motor off. Get out of that piece of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs!

Despite the fact that I don’t have “dugs” or varicose veins (yet), and even though I like to consider myself just a smidge closer to nature than most of the folks Abbey rails about in Desert Solitaire, I need this kind of dressing down from time to time. I may not agree completely with everything Abbey wrote, but he was mostly right—abrasive, but mostly right. That delicate, tenuous, and sometimes counterproductive balance is the hallmark of Abbey’s life and writings.

Desert Solitaire centers on Abbey’s several summers as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument. When it was published in 1968, Abbey had already written three novels, but this was his first foray into nonfiction. It firmly established him as a cult figure among environmentalists with a radical streak, and was followed by more than fifteen other works, including, most notably, the 1975 novel The Monkeywrench Gang. His writing is often credited with inspiring a new wave of 1980s environmental groups that took the battle for nature from the courtroom and hearing room (a la the Sierra Club) to the treetops and logging roads and dams (a la Earth First!).

Desert Solitaire is an early hint at this kind of activism. One evening, after being visited at his dilapidated ranger’s trailer by a survey crew marking a new paved road into Arches, Abbey walks out into the desert and removes all the surveying stakes and flags. But that is the single act of civil disobedience he performs in the book. Of course he dreams of blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam when he reaches the end of his rafting trip down the then-unimpounded Colorado River, but most often Abbey focuses on the simple pleasures of being outside.

In many passages his rants become paeans. Pieces of petrified wood are “agatized rainbows in rock.” Rainstorms come down “not softly not gently, with no quality of mercy but like heavy water in buckets…drumming on my hat like hailstones and running in a waterfall off the brim.” Ample praise is reserved for the humble campfire:

One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West.

And the noontime sun is:

like a drug. The light is psychadelic, the dry electric air narcotic.

The book as a whole dances in a point-counterpoint between the beauty of nature and the threats brought by humans, specifically by the United States Government and the National Park Service. In the chapter entitled “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” Abbey rails against improvements—roads, visitor centers, etc.—being made in what he feels should be mostly inaccessible, immersion-in-nature sanctuaries.

Why is the Park Service generally so anxious to accommodate…the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and corner of the national parks?

These improvements, underway during Abbey’s Arches summers in the late 1950s, were collectively known as Mission 66, a massive National Parks infrastructure program spearheaded by landscape architect and Park Service Director Conrad Wirth. The goal was to improve visitor knowledge of and access to the parks in time for the 50^th anniversary of the service, in 1966. Mission 66 did change the face of the parks, from the mostly rustic, dirt-road, wood-and-stone character which Abbey experienced at Arches to the full-service, restrooms-and-vending machines vibe at the main visitor centers today. The Park Service’s chief landscape architect Thomas Chalmers Vint pushed for contemporary design in the parks—a legacy that includes the spiraling, concrete, seemingly Jetsons-inspired Clingman’s Dome observation tower in Smoky Mountain National Park and the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National Park, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Studio and sporting an abstract bas-relief metal skin.

Abbey was dead-on prophetic with some of his specific fears, as listed in Desert Solitaire. The geological formation called the Waterpocket Fold was incorporated into Capitol Reef National Park in 1970 (though it remains roadless, so whether its incorporation is a bad thing can be debated). Glen Canyon Dam did flood Cataract Canyon, create the rapidly silting Lake Powell, and make Rainbow Arch easily accessible to the motorboating masses. And yes, the surveyors did reset their stakes and pave the road into Arches National Monument (which became a full-fledged National Park in 1971).

I once took an Abbey-lite but still slightly ill-advised hike off the end of that paved Arches road, in the heat of midday with very little water. I was there from Indiana with college landscape architecture classmates. We parked at the Devils Garden Trailhead and hiked out to Landscape Arch. Stunned by the impossibility of the rock vaulting through the hot air, my friend Mark and I decided to head farther out along the trail. Our colleagues returned to the vans to relax. It was about 3 miles one way to Double O Arch and we had a few hours. On that quick hike we experienced the complete isolation and stillness and thirst and sun-scorch that Abbey describes throughout Desert Solitaire.

And here we come back to the almost-right-ness—for me—of Edward Abbey. The Mission 66 version of the National Parks is the one I grew up with. For five summers in high school and college, I would arrive with my church youth group at the Wrightian Beaver Creek Visitor Center to plan our hikes for the week. In college, I climbed the Clingman’s Dome tower with a few close friends escaping the flatness of Indiana. In every case (including my Arches hike), I watched people sort themselves by desire and ability. Some, yes, would stay in their cars, as Abbey says, “like sardines in a can,” while others would venture a few miles on the well-trodden paths, while still others would heft their packs and disappear for a week, or more.

In fact, I studied landscape architecture, initially, because I wanted to design National Parks. Though now I design different things, I still feel strongly that everyone should be able to access nature. So, though I agree with Abbey that we shouldn’t pave over the parks and wilderness areas, I also believe that giving people encounters with nature is important to the eventual preservation of wilderness. If Thoreau said, famously, and if Abbey echoes that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” then I say: in education and experience is the preservation of wildness.

And Abbey would be happy to know that the Park Service has begun managing even larger crowds by (gasp!) restricting automobile access. Most of the Grand Canyon’s south rim road is closed to private vehicles, and portions of Yosemite Valley are also bike and bus only. Abbey suggests these specific ideas in his “Polemic” chapter.

As to Abbey’s context in the mid-century environmental movement (and the other writers profiled in this series of essays), Desert Solitaire came out the same year the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed, and four years after the Wilderness Act. Both of these laws preserve, as roadless and undeveloped, certain American land- and water-scapes, including many of the rivers Abbey lists in his book as under threat. Abbey arrived on the heels of Loren Eiseley (from whom he could not be more different—in demeanor and prose style), Rachel Carson, and Joseph Wood Krutch (whom Abbey admired greatly and was the last person to formally interview). Abbey is regularly referred to as the “desert Thoreau,” but comparisons to John Muir are more apt. Both men are associated closely with the National Parks (Muir with their inception in the late 1800s and Abbey with their ongoing preservation in the face of development in the 1950s and 1960s) and both were profoundly affected by their failures to stave off dam construction (Muir with Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley and Abbey with Glen Canyon). This latter similarity is brought to light in the recent essay collection Sex and the River Styx by Edward Hoagland, a slightly later, along with Wendell Berry, contemporary of Abbey’s.

Perhaps most notable in this context is Abbey’s activism, or rather his tacit support of extreme environmentalism. He associated with Earth First!, the group that pioneered the tree-sit and once unrolled a massive image of a crack down the face of the Glen Canyon Dam. This direct-action aspect of the environmental movement still makes occasional headlines today, as activists harass whaling boats and blockade logging roads. In fact, Abbey’s very prose reinforces this in-your-face stance. Desert Solitaire, like Muir’s writings but unlike Thoreau’s and Eiseley’s, speaks directly to the reader (see the example at the top of this essay), often with provocative language deliberately designed to incite feelings of some kind.

As I write this, a long Minnesota winter—the longest winter I can remember—is (hopefully) melting into the rivers. In addition to reading Desert Solitaire, I recently watched, thanks to Oscar buzz, the movie 127 Hours, which traces Aron Ralston’s famous desert ordeal (days spent trapped in a canyon; amputation of his arm with a pocketknife), a story more intense but remarkably similar to Abbey’s experience in the chapter called “Havasu.” I also watched, thanks to my toddler son’s tastes, the animated movie Cars, about a sleek modern racecar stuck in a small Route 66 desert town bypassed by Interstate 40 (“see how the old road moves with the land,” says Sally Carrera, the lady Porsche soured on big-city life, “while the interstate cuts right through”). These three stories juxtaposed evocatively with each other and contrasted with the horrid weather outside.

I realized I was in a rut. Previously so diligent about getting my son Ethan outside no matter the weather, I had begun hustling him to the car in the morning for the drive to day care, then into the house at the end of the day. I had initiated Friday night movie night instead of moonlight walks around the lake. I was moving into my “sardine can” and taking my son with me.

On the whole, Abbey is farther into the wilderness world (and the extremist world) than I am. Nevertheless, I like to be lectured by him, from time to time, in my mind’s-eye, as it is always beneficial to be ranted at by someone who doesn’t exactly share your beliefs—someone who can catch your interest with some common feeling, then challenge you.

Desert Solitaire is entertaining and beautiful front to back, both during the natural history descriptions and during the rants. It gives me the inspiration to get outside, right along with the requisite kick in the pants. From now on, when I find myself driving too much, sitting inside too much, or standing by while commercial interests encroach on the limited wilderness we have left, I’ll conjure Desert Ed. I’ll picture myself at the side of some nowhere road, with Ethan strapped into his expensive car seat and Edward Abbey boring his eyes into mine, saying something like:

How dare you imprison your little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! Like women! Like human beings! And walk—walk—WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!

Proceed to the next essay, Edward Hoagland, who, 40 years after his seminal The Courage of Turtles, has just published his 21^st book: a melancholy essay collection called Sex and the River Styx), or return to the Table of Contents.

—Adam Regn Arvidson

Nature Writing in America: Loren Eiseley’s Two Cultures — Adam Regn Arvidson

Mar 032011

Science is in a strange predicament these days. Political rhetoric for math and science funding abounds, but creationism, in some corners, has equal footing with evolution. Science is set forth as the savior of the nation: we will innovate our way out of this recession, our ingenuity is our greatest asset. But from the same mouths come cuts in funding for basic research, or else strings attached. Such fact-centrism unfortunately sets science at odds with the arts, which are being cut even more deeply.

In 1959 British novelist-scientist C.P. Snow called this dichotomy “The Two Cultures,” a phrase Loren Eiseley references in “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,” which appeared in The American Scholar in 1964. In his essay Eiseley, himself an anthropologist, distills his core belief:

It is because these two types of creation—the artistic and the scientific—have sprung from the same being and have their points of contact even in division, that I have the temerity to assert that, in a sense, the “two cultures” are an illusion, that they are a product of unreasoning fear, professionalism, and misunderstanding.

That theme—that science and art are born of the same mind and are therefore inseparable—permeates Eiseley’s writing and reverberates today. Eiseley was one of the earliest practitioners of, shall we say, philosophical science writing. He didn’t just examine the natural world and illuminate it in layperson’s terms, he considered the symbolism in scientific happenstance, and he ruminated on our true human place in the galactic flotsam.

The culmination of his career is The Star Thrower, a compendium published a year after his death in 1977. Eiseley organized much of the book himself, drawing from magazine articles; unpublished essays and lectures; and his previous books, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Firmament of Time (1960), and The Unexpected Universe (1969). The publication timeframe of those three major books puts Eiseley at the heart of the mid-century environmental discussion, right alongside Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and the other writers to be profiled in this series. What makes Eiseley’s work unique among this group is his struggle with science. He asks continuously whether is it all right for him, as a distinguished anthropological scientist, to feel.

The titular essay in Eiseley’s posthumous collection was originally published in The Unexpected Universe. In it, he walks along a beach and comes upon a man throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean, an act Eiseley first sees as futile. In the essay, he recalls the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Goethe; considers Darwin; and remembers the Biblical injunction “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” But, he writes:

I do love the world…. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again…. I love the lost ones, the failures of the world. [This is] like the renunciation of my scientific heritage.

The next day he joins the man on the beach in lofting starfish to the waves. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of “The Parable of the Starfish,” which took off in the 1980s and likely originated with Eiseley’s essay. But while the parable’s moral is about making a difference in the world, Eiseley’s story is more complex. As a scientist, he knows he should have no compassion for those starfish, he should not anthropomorphize them into beings that care whether they live or die. But he does. “It was as though,” he writes, “at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.”

That self-given permission to feel, in the context of scientific observation, allows Eiseley’s work to glide through long pages of evolutionary theory and the history of philosophy, then return to personal moments in nature: Eiseley rescuing, somewhat humorously, a snake and a desert hen, which had entangled themselves in an inadvertent death-struggle; Eiseley being joined for lunch beneath a dock by a muskrat; Eiseley wrestling playfully with a young fox, as if it were a puppy. And he lets himself edge toward fiction. The previously (until The Star Thrower) unpublished “Dance of the Frogs” and “The Fifth Planet” have a touch of the mystical. The former features a scientist skipping along a road in the presence of barely seen giant frogs; the latter tells of an amateur meteorite hunter obsessively seeking fossils of extraterrestrial life. These remind me a lot of Barry Lopez’s fiction: in particular Desert Notes (1976, one year before The Star Thrower) and Winter Count (1981)

This mixture of science and art also gives birth to an exciting and varied language. In one place (noticing a resemblance between eroded rock and the human brain) Eiseley trots out this tortured staccato:

The human brain contains the fossil memories of the past—buried but not extinguished moments—just as this more formidable replica contained, deep in its inner stratigraphic convolutions, earth’s past in the shape of horned titanotheres and stalking dirk-toothed cats.

And elsewhere, on the same general topic of human-nature correspondence, he keeps it simple:

For example, I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider.

So where does Eiseley sit in the pantheon of Eco-Lit? He’s an outlier, his name not often said in the same breath as Edward Hoagland’s or Carson’s. But The Immense Journey sold a million copies, making it an early anchor, just after Carson’s and Joseph Wood Krutch’s initial works and before Abbey and Wendell Berry. His work is perhaps less accessible than the others, prone to long probing philosophical passages that smack more of Ivory Tower than beachcomber. But always, just when he’s gone almost too deep into the mind, Eiseley, with the subtlest of transitions, lifts from his own experience an unforgettable tangible moment, rich with sensory detail.

Eiseley could be considered an unwitting instigator of what John Brockman calls “The Third Culture:” scientists that are also literary giants. This is a hot subject today. The Best American Science and Nature Writing is in its 11^th installment. Brian Greene (Mr. String Theory) regularly publishes physics books for the masses (he’s got one on the NY Times Bestseller list right now). Neil deGrasse Tyson has brought the stars down to earth with provocative titles like Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Mike Brown’s recent How I Killed Pluto interweaves the story of the ninth planet’s demotion with Brown’s own infant daughter’s first years.

I read The Immense Journey in college, while studying landscape architecture and also, for fun, taking courses in anthropology, cooking, raquetball, and nature writing. Back then Eiseley went over my head, but I picked up The Star Thrower this winter. I was reminded of an experience from a year ago.

Last March, during yet another cold weekend when I wished the long northwoods winter would just be over already, I took my toddler son to the zoo and lifted him up so he could reach into the tidepool exhibit and touch starfish and anemones. Ethan was utterly gleeful, maybe about the strange salty water, maybe about the leathery skin of the starfish, maybe about the way the anemone tentacles stuck to his fingers like tape, but certainly about nature. There was no scientific inquiry there, only feel. That’s what we are born with.

Science can either make us forget how to feel, or can augment our ability to feel by adding in the details, broadening connections to other things, creating excitement at the unusual. Art and knowledge, science and literature: Eiseley’s message is to keep both vital.

Proceed to the next essay, on Edward Abbey—the provocateur, or return to the Table of Contents.

— Adam Regn Arvidson

Introduction: Nature Writing in America — Adam Regn Arvidson

Feb 212011

Have you heard of the “Environmental Solutions Agency?” Newt Gingrich introduced this idea in a speech back on January 25, 2011, as something that would replace the Environmental Protection Agency and be “first of all, limited.” Then, about a month later, a couple of U.S. House committees set hearings on the “Energy Tax Prevention Act,” which would strip the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Also in January, western Congressmen introduced a bill to remove the wolf from the endangered species list. It passed: the first time that legislation, rather than science, has determined a species’ inclusion or exclusion.

In all this, there are two items of literary merit. First, look at the words they use: “Environmental Solutions Agency” and “Energy Tax Prevention Act.” Verbal backflips, if you ask me. And the wolf bill, in a way, proves the power of the sentence: the bill has only one sentence, which puts an entire species at risk. When the Endangered Species Act (ESA) came into effect in 1973, it was partly because of the wolf. At that time, there were only 300 left in the entire nation.

The ESA can also be credited, in large part, to writers (there’s the second literary reason, if you’re keeping track—and the more important one). In 1959, Peter Matthiessen published Wildlife in America, essentially a call for protection of endangered species. Three years later, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became a best seller. Concurrent to these works, Joseph Wood Krutch, Loren Eiseley, and Aldo Leopold were putting out nature writing that pushed a nascent environmental movement forward.

These writers were different than their predecessors, like Thoreau and Muir, who wrote in many ways as conqueror naturalists. This earlier wave of writers wanted to understand nature on a technical level, strove to set certain bits of it aside for posterity, and always looked at it from a place slightly above and to the side. Humans, they said, should protect and love nature, but not probably become a part of it (remember, Thoreau regularly went into town to dine with friends while living hermit-style at Walden, and ultimately gave up early on the experiment).

The mid-century writers, on the other hand, saw humans as part of nature. They sought the passion and emotion that nature brings through personal immersion in it. They spurred another round of legislation and regulation, this time not centered on large chunks of land set aside as preserves (like the National Parks), but on everyday nature: the air, the water, the plants and animals around us.

The late 60s were a time of upheaval in many arenas, and the environment was no different. Between 1968 and 1971, the world saw seminal works produced by Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, John Hay, and two by Edward Hoagland. Between 1970 and 1973, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Policy Act (which created the EPA), the Clean Water Act, and the ESA. Coincidence?

So, because so many of these environmental advances are under attack right now (and because the perhaps ironically named Newt is trying to redefine the EPA), I thought it might be interesting to look back on that mid-century eco-literary boom.

Included here are life and work profiles of six of these masters: Carson, Krutch, Eiseley, Abbey, Berry, and Hoagland. I am sure there are other favorites (Peter Matthiessen? Gary Snyder? John Hay?), but let me rule out a few that might be assumed to be part of this group. Everyone on this list was born between 1893 and 1934 and reached the peak of their writing between the 50s and 70s. They all experienced the Great Depression in some form, and all saw most of this environmental legislation passed (except Carson, who died rather prematurely in 1964). Aldo Leopold was too early, Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard too late. The last two are omitted simply because they probably didn’t affect this particular wave of environmentalism; they were affected BY it.

This group of writers took a diverse approach to the environment. From Eiseley’s mysticism and anthropology to Abbey’s radicalism to Krutch’s childlike curiosity, they manage to touch nearly every taste and temperament. They have certainly touched me, so on the following pages you will see both an analytical as well as a personal journey. This is the origin of today’s “green” thinking, and we are about 50 years farther along (Silent Spring, in fact, turns 50 in 2012). I think its time for another reading.

Proceed to the first essay, on Loren Eiseley, or return to the Table of Contents.

–Adam Regn Arvidson

There’s a Reason They Call it Show AND Tell: How to Reveal Thoughts, Emotions, and Motivations Without Sentimentality — Laura-Rose Russell

Oct 252010

Herewith an essay on the techniques for indicating thought and emotion in prose while avoiding the pitfall of sentimentality. Laura-Rose Russell is a former student and a recent Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate and a spectacular nonfiction writer. Please read her piece “Scented” in the Gettysburg Review and you’ll see what I mean. This craft essay is Laura-Rose’s graduate lecture at VCFA, a terrific example of the genre, at once fiercely intelligent and passionately engaged and packed with craft information, a lesson on reading, and a narrative of her development as a writer. She does something in this lecture I’ve never seen anyone try before. She actually takes an example text and strips out the representation of emotion, motive, etc. to further clarify the profound effect these techniques have on a piece of writing.

There’s a Reason They Call it Show AND Tell: How to Reveal Thoughts, Emotions, and Motivations Without Sentimentality

By Laura-Rose Russell

Sentimentality is an excessive expression of emotion, one that goes beyond what is warranted. The problem with sentimentality is that it actually diminishes the impact of events it is meant to enhance. Sentimentality also reduces the credibility of the writer or character that expresses such emotion. Debra Sparks says, “Sentimentality and coldness are falsehoods, two extremes of dishonesty. Sentimentality gives a moment more than it has earned, coldness less.” Sparks, in an article called “Handling Emotion in Fiction Writing,” points out that the word “sentimental” didn’t have a negative connotation until the 19^th century, when it came to mean, not only excessive emotion, but emotion period. To be sentimental meant “to be governed by sentiment in opposition to reason.”

But when we say that writers should avoid sentimentality, we don’t mean they should avoid emotion altogether. Tolstoy says, “Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them” (qtd. in Sparks). What, then, is excessive emotion? Is there a chart somewhere that we can refer to? How much emotion am I permitted when I lose my car keys? How much when I lose a loved one?

We are all familiar with the advice to show rather than tell, and nowhere is this emphasized more than regarding emotions. “Good writers,” John Gardner says, “may ‘tell’ about almost anything in fiction except the character’s feelings” (Burroway, 80). Janet Burroway discusses how Stanislavski, the founder of “Method” acting, “urged his students to abandon the clichéd emotive postures of the nineteenth century stage in favor of emotions evoked by the actor’s recollection of sensory details connected with a personal past trauma . . . Similarly, in written fiction, if the writer depicts the precise physical sensations experienced by the character, a particular emotion may be triggered by the reader’s own sense memory” (80). “Get control of emotion by avoiding the mention of emotion,” says John L’Heureux (Burroway, 81). The message seems pretty clear: don’t name emotions.

But during a recent workshop I attended, Douglas Glover, one of the workshop leaders, broached the subject of explicit versus implicit information. We were debating whether a character in a student’s story was essentially self-serving and taking advantage of another character or whether the character was fundamentally well intentioned but seriously misguided. Glover interrupted our debate to ask us where in the text were we getting the information to support one argument or another? We would cite this line, or that phrase, and Glover would point out that these words and phrases were actually quite ambiguous; we were coming up with a wide range of interpretation regarding points that were pivotal to the story. “Isn’t this what writing is about?” we asked, “suggesting things and letting your reader ‘read between the lines’?” Glover said as writers we do not have the leisure to be quite so ambiguous. Is it any wonder why we were confused? We were trying so hard to follow the rule we had been taught: show, don’t tell; show, don’t tell; show, don’t tell.