I am reading the Summer issue of Granta, "The New Nature Writing", and was immediately struck by Jason Cowley's opening assertion in his editor's letter:

When I used to think of nature writing, or indeed the nature writer, I would picture a certain kind of man, and it would always be a man: bearded, badly dressed, ascetic, misanthropic. He would often be alone on some blasted moor, with a notebook in one hand and binoculars in the other, seeking meaning and purpose through a larger communion with nature: a loner and an outcast. One such man was Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young educated American from a prosperous middle-class family who, in search of authenticity of experience and influenced by the writings of Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, dropped out from conventional society in the late 1980s to pursue a life of aimless wandering in the wild places of America. McCandless was disgusted by the excesses of our culture and by how in our rapacity and greed and arrogance we had, in his view, sought to separate ourselves from nature, had tried to place ourselves somehow outside or above it, so as to master it. In April 1992 he headed north to Alaska, because, he wrote in a letter, he wanted to ‘walk into the wild’. He ended up starving to death; his decomposed body was found in a long-abandoned bus. He had hoped his encounter with the wilderness of the Alaskan taiga would heal his wounds: instead, they were ripped open.

I've written about McCandless before and suffice to say, I'm not a fan of envisioning him as anything other than a depressed young man who happened to kill himself in a unique way ("suicide by wilderness"). Cowley goes beyond McCandless to Barry Lopez though, juxtaposing the two and concluding that the difference is that, "It was a moral enterprise: for Lopez, the wilderness of the Arctic was not a means to an end, a trove of oil and gas for Arctic nations to exploit, but an end in itself. He moved through this landscape with wonder, but also with care."

I have Arctic Dreams, Lopez's award winning book and there are parts of it that I love. But as someone who lived in a rather remote place and more importantly made a living sending aircraft all over the true wilderness, I found some of his conclusions about men and nature to be a bit simplistic. This is a problem I find with several different nature writers - that placing men in nature is always and only a bad thing unless they are there like McCandless; to find some higher purpose or worship the wilderness aesthetic. (Or unless they are somehow smart and "enlightened" like Lopez who I think is brilliant but still a bit too proud of that brilliance.) It seems like nature writers can sometimes miss the technology component and its usefulness in how we live with our natural surroudings. I don't mean covering the frontier with oil wells (not a fan of drilling in ANWR) but is it fair to suggest that it is all or nothing - either nature must be locked up to protect it or humanity will kill it simply because that is our habit?

Bookforum also has an issue out highlighting nature writing and Verlyn Klinkenborg's review of the new anthology American Earth directly addresses this notion of man's negative impact on nature. Here is he is quoting Wendell Berry:

Abstinence and fecundity—these are the critical terms in this anthology. To the extent that humans can withhold themselves, can abstain from destroying everything they come in contact with, the fecundity of nature will set things right. The trouble with abstinence (as we know from our own sexuality) is that it requires constant consciousness, the perpetual awareness of purpose. The beauty of fecundity is its blindness. Any real change in our fate depends on a species-wide change in consciousness, a new alertness. Again, Berry sums it up well. What we need, he writes, is not “the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but . . . a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care.” Berry is no romantic, either, for he adds, “Such possibilities are not now in sight in this country.”

I think this is part of why nature writing is not read as much as it could be - people just don't like reading that they are horrible and will be the end of everything. When we discussed Chris McCandless's choices from Into the Wild in grad school there were always arguments over what wilderness meant. Some of my classmates felt that no technology should be present in the wild at all (ironic since McCandless camped in an abandoned bus) and were angry about the presence of aircraft overhead in areas of Alaska. My response was fine - just don't ask us to come find you when you are lost, or medevac you out when you are injured or bring your body home to your family when you are dead. If you want the true wilderness experience then go have it the same way your hero did.

You can imagine how that went over.

In terms of nature writing itself though it seems that we have evolved into two distinct types of writing: investigative or historic pieces about damage to the environment and its complete destruction or eventual repair and more romantic writing about the very concept of nature and what it should or could mean. In the first, humanity is a critical component, both in a positive and negative way. In the second, if humans appear in the narrative at all it is always as the villain or doomed, misunderstood hero. Nature is king and only a precious few can worship it as others dance on its open grave. (And here's a question - when did environmental writing break away from nature writing and become a different genre?)

For my money Roger Deakin remains one of the truly great nature writers, which makes his death (from cancer) that much more upsetting. I reviewed his last book, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees for Booklist (it's due out in January - I'll post the review here when it is published) and found it as well written as his first, Waterlog. What Deakin did so well was blend both a care and concern for the environment with intimate observation of the forest, lakes and rivers around him. He didn't shy away from writing about grim situations but also considered that there were solutions that incorporated both man's love/use of nature and a desperate need for change in how that relationship was handled. Deakin saw beauty in wildness and he believed all men could be persuaded to see and protect that same beauty.

He was no Chris McCandless seeking redemption in the wilderness but Deakin knew that was asking too much. His vision of nature was both pure and pragmatic - a true 21st century way of seeing the world around us and how we fit within it.

[Granta excerpted some of the Deakin's diary entries in the Summer issue - a collection of those writings is now available in England as Notes From Walnut Tree Farm.]