Nature and the environment are traditional themes in American literature and have a long history on the North American continent. Native American oral narratives invoke plant and animal life, weather patterns, and particular places, often viewing these elements of the natural world as animated by life spirits similar to those of human beings. The writings of early European explorers and early settlers contain descriptions of the physical world and people.

Nature and environmental literature, however, does not encompass all writing that features descriptions of the natural environment. Robert Finch and John Elder note that nature writing is defined by the “personal element—that is, the filtering of experience through an individual sensibility.” By the nineteenth century, writers such as Henry David Thoreau combined observations of nature with their emotional, spiritual, and psychological responses to it.

Contemporary nature and environmental literature continues to record the interrelationships that exist between the external and internal, the physical and metaphysical, providing a record of what one sees and of the self in the act of seeing.

The description “environmental” is a more inclusive term than “nature” when applied to literature. It underscores a relationship between human and nonhuman life, an idea supported by scientific discoveries about the interconnectedness of all living things. The term also encompasses writing about both rural and urban environments and encourages one not to treat “culture” and “nature” as mutually exclusive terms.

As writers in the late 1960s and 1970s began incorporating more social criticism into works about nature, environmentalism became associated with radical politics. In the introduction to Teaching Environmental Literature: Materials, Methods, Resources, Frederick Waage argues, however, that describing literature as environmental does “not imply a particular ideological or political bias.”

Although this body of literature reveals a great diversity of attitudes and perceptions, it is true that the tone of post-1970 nature writing changes. Starting in the previous decade, conservationist and preservationist movements had helped to generate a growing awareness of environmental degradation. Poets could no longer “write poems of pure celebration,” notes Denise Levertov in the foreword to The Life around Us: Selected Poems on Ecological Themes (1997); instead, she “is driven inevitably to lament, to anger, and to the expression of dread.”

After 1970, writers could not ignore increases in nuclear testing, industry, agribusiness, and the growth of suburbs and parallel loss of wilderness spaces. Although impelled to expose the ways human activities threaten natural environments, they also express commitment to, appreciation, and often love of the natural world.

But literary images of nature belie a multiplicity of perspectives that move beyond simplistic division between pro- and anti-environment. For example, the role of “protector” befits characters in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975); the novel advocates what came to be known as “monkeywrenching,” or any activity, legal or, more often, not, that preserves wilderness from human development.

Wendell Berry’s work, however, promotes the role of “steward.” In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), he defends sustainable agricultural practices, calling on us to become good stewards of the earth and its limited resources.

The essays in Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell (1974) suggest a “dependent” role when he writes, “we are not the masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of life as are the leaves or midges or fish.”

Several anthologies and studies serve as introductory guides to the world of nature or environmental writing while highlighting representative writers and works. The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), edited by Finch and Elder, contains key nature writers such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Peter Matthiessen. Their introduction also identifies ways to delineate and categorize nature writing, a difficult task considering the vastness of this field.

Finch and Elder trace a literary genealogy back to pastoral poetry and the natural history essay. In This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing (2001), Thomas Lyons categorizes works based on the “relative weight or interplay” of three characteristics he finds in environmental literature: “natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature.”

The focus of these two important works, however, is almost exclusively limited to nonfiction prose. For a rich selection of poems, students can consider Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry (1993), which features established nature poets Maxine Kumin, Dana Gioia, Joy Harjo, and Gary Snyder. Despite their differences in tone and style, all respond to the destruction of nature.

Until the late 1990s, studies of nature and environmental literature, like the anthologies previously described, focused on nonfiction prose with some attention to poetry. Making assumptions about the practical purposes and uses of writing, critics and editors tended to privilege works whose purposes were more didactic than entertaining, distinctions made by Finch and Elder, who exclude works that are imaginative rather than “real” because “the purposes of fiction differ sufficiently from those of nonfiction.”

Laurence Buell also discusses this distinction in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995). In Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (2000), however, Patrick D. Murphy challenges this oversight. Noting the “fiction” involved in the aesthetic restructuring of journals, chronicles, and natural histories such as Thoreau’s Walden (1854), he offers a more inclusive taxonomy of nature-oriented literature that includes work previously neglected in the field of environmental literary criticism.

Students interested in identifying fiction that treats environmental issues will find Murphy’s study of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, ethnic American, and Postmodernist works useful.

Interest in nature and environmental writing has given rise to ecocriticism, a term coined in the 1970s to describe criticism sensitive to environmental themes. An interdisciplinary strategy, it considers history, ethics, philosophy, science, and psychology in addition to literary analysis to uncover explicit and implicit attitudes toward the environment.

Ecocriticism promotes the value of writing concerned with nature (by identifying important texts), while also attempting to effect change by creating awareness of the interconnectedness between humanity and the natural world (as expressed in the works they study). The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, provides examples from the field and traces the development of this critical movement from the 1960s.

Additional trends and debates in the field are addressed in Beyond Nature Writings: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001) and The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003 (2003).

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. The 1970s and Environmental Awareness
The 1970s ushered in the first wave of environmental legislation. Earth Day was established in 1970, as was the Clean Air Act. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. This context can be a starting point for considering the relationship between nature writing, ecological awareness, and environmental justice.

American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau (2008), edited by Bill McKibben, includes an array of primary works that describe and question humanity’s impact on the environment. As students read these selections, they might consider the following questions:

• How do the writers define terms like environment and nature?
• What kinds of environments are each of the writers interested in (wild, domestic, urban, suburban, agricultural)?
• What are the writers’ attitudes toward these environments and human activities within them?
• How do these attitudes support and/or challenge those held by the mainstream culture?
• What actions do they propose?

2. Understanding Pastoral in Environmental Literature
Pastoral is a term traditionally applied to poetry about shepherds and rural folk but now used more broadly to describe literary works that contrast rural life, usually idealized, with urban life.

In addition to describing form and content, pastoral can also impart a pejorative attitude when applied to works whose ideal representations ignore the material reality of the environment. In Pastoral (1999), Terry Gifford defines various uses of the term. Students might apply Gifford’s criteria to contemporary works about the environment, paying particular attention to how pastoral elements function with regard to theme, tone, and style.

3. Women, Nature, and Feminist Environmental Writing
Women writers have often been wary of invoking nature in their work due to stereotypes associating their gender with irrationality and confinement to domestic spaces. Since 1970, however, more women “have begun to invoke nature for feminist purposes or have used nature as an agent of resistance,” as noted by Barbara J. Cook in Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View (2007).

Students might use ideas from Cook’s essays to examine how women’s nature writing:

• Challenges the dual exploitation of the environment and women
• Questions the stereotypical association of women with wilderness
• Proposes alternative relationships between humanity and nature
• Challenges the notion that the wilderness is “no place for women”

Suggested works for further study include:

• Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991)
• Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990)
• Mary Clearman Blew’s Balsamroot: A Memoir (1994)
• Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992)
• Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988)
• Poetry by Mary Oliver

4. Native American Literature and the ‘Invisible Landscape’
In American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (2001), Joni Adamson writes:

“The outsider and the insider may view the same piece of ground, but where one sees mountains or valleys, the other sees the ‘invisible landscape’ of local and lived significance.”

This concept can help students explore connections between Native American identity and the land, and how environmental degradation parallels the loss of indigenous culture.

Works to consider include:

• Louis Owens’s Wolfsong (1991)
• Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977)
• Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988)
• Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses (1983) and Secrets from the Center of the World (1989)

For African American environmental perspectives, see Sylvia Mayer’s Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination (2003).

5. Environmental Issues in Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction
In “The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes: SF and Ecocriticism” (Beyond Nature Writings, 2001), Patrick D. Murphy discusses how science fiction raises environmental awareness through conflicts involving human-nonhuman relationships. These “ecological parables” reflect real-world environmental problems and choices.

Focusing on a particular work, students can analyze:

• Its presentation of the environment
• Human responses to environmental conditions
• The consequences of those responses

Suggested works include:

• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and Earthsea Trilogy
• David Brin’s Uplift Universe series
• Frank Herbert’s Dune saga
• Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993)

Students might also extend Murphy’s argument to other genres, such as Nevada Barr’s mystery series featuring park ranger Anna Pigeon, each set in a different national park and centered around an environmental issue.

Categories: Eco Criticism, Literature, Novel Analysis

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