Nature Writing: A Wilderness of Books

Abstract

Bulow Hammock: Mind in a Forest. By David Rains Wallace. San Francisco, California: Sierra Club Books, 1988. 170 pp. Bibliography. $17.95. "I want to be a nature writer;' Loren Eiseley declared as a youth, adding, "it is my duty to do what I can to make people realize that the wild creature has just as much right to live as you or I" (The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, p. 14). Judging by the profusion in bookstores these days of new (and old) works of nature writing, many authors have experienced a similar urge to speak on behalf of the rights of nature. The popularity of nature writing today rivals that at the turn of the century, when the books of John Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Jack London were best sellers and "nature study" was a fad among middle-class Americans. True, the current resident of the White House is not nearly as involved in the "back-to-nature cult" as was Teddy Roosevelt, himself a highly regarded writer on the outdoors. But in our age of ecological crisis, when Time proclaimed "The Endangered Earth" as "Planet of the Year" for 1988, increasingly more readers are turning to nature writing for information, adventure, and hope. A sure indication of nature writing's renaissance is its tendency toward selfreflection. Consider, for example, the considerable attention paid in the most current of the works reviewed here to the distinction between the terms "natural history" and "nature writing;' designations that have overlapping as well as distinctive meanings. According to William Beebe in the introduction to The Book of Naturalists, "natural history," broadly defined, is the expression of a general interest in nature. The genre dates as far back as Paleolithic cave paintings and thus, along with poetry, is one of our oldest art forms. Natural history acquired its modern meaning in the eighteenth century following two developments: the discovery of many New World species of flora and fauna, and the emergence, thanks to Linnaeus, of a standardized scientific nomenclature. By Darwin's time "natural history" had come to mean writing "concerned with the observation of living animals and plants in their natural wild state;' writing which, like literature, is intended to produce aesthetic and emotional effects but Nature Writing: A Wilderness of Books