As wilderness disappears, what happens to nature writing?
First, there was light—sparking, forking human consciousness. Then, an itch. Bears in Chauvet Cave, Japan’s Jōmon owls, a twenty-foot stone Kalahari python slithering from 68,000 BCE. We’ve always story-told the more-than-human universe. Even now. “Archaeologists dig up clues…” writes Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal, “and piece them together into a saga.”
I am on the hunt for a new environmental saga. The roots of Nature’s epic start in early time, but let’s begin at the trunk—Thoreau through John Muir, Mary Austin, branches of Ed Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, leafing out into Luis Alberto Urrea, Lauret Savoy, Drew Lanham. It’s reductive, but that’s what story does—condense the galactically unknowable into narrative.
When I was younger and guiding backpackers in West Texas, the shop where I lectured about bear safety and patched tents sported a library—knot-tying tomes, backcountry triage, and an 1854 memoir by a self-styled, pond-dwelling hermit who spied on loons. Though a mid-list author when alive, Henry David Thoreau occupies the top shelf of nature writing now. In , he focused on small lives, cataloging in detail, for instance, partridges. “ intelligence seems reflected in them,” he wrote (emphasis mine). “They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience.” A radical idea for what Descartes and Kant would have
