LEONARD MCCOMBE / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES; HANK WALKER / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES; RICKY FITCHETT / ZUMA WIRE / ALAMY; PUBLIC DOMAIN; COURTESY OF ROBIN WALL KIMMERER; JASON MERRITT / GETTY IMAGESand no one was taking charge. Stratton-Porter organized peo-
ple and water and battled until cinders singed her slippers
and heat blistered her hands. The drugstore Charles owned
was destroyed in the fi re, but she saved the Shamrock Hotel
building, which also belonged to her husband and housed
the bank he owned. The local newspaper said Stratton-Porter
“would make an energetic chief of the fi re department when
that needed improvement is added to our village.”
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH had lived
through husband Charles’ aviation fame,
his controversial political views and the
kidnapping of their son by the time she
published Gift From the Sea, in 1955. The
surprise bestseller —a refl ection on seashells—helped
pave the way for the environmental movement.
RACHEL CARSON, who acknowledged
being infl uenced by Stratton-Porter, was
the century’s most signifi cant environ-
mental writer. Her 1962 book Silent Spring
galvanized activists (“Hey farmer, farmer,
put away the DDT!” Joni Mitchell sang) and ushered in
the Environmental Protection Agency.
ANNIE DILLARD recalled enjoying Strat-
ton-Porter’s Moths of the Limberlost as a
girl. Among Dillard’s own closely observed
chronicles is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Pil-
grim at Tinker Creek. “Examine all things
intensely and relentlessly,” she tells writers.
ANN HAYMOND ZWINGER, though
an Indiana native, produced most of
her natural histories in the West, from
the canyons of Utah to Baja California.
In 1995, at 70, she co-edited the essay
and photo collection Women in Wilderness with her
daughter, Susan Zwinger.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER, a member
of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes
about botany, combining empirical
science with an indigenous approach
in which “the observer is always in
relationship with the observed, and thus it’s important
that she know herself.”
CAMILLE DUNGY is an essayist and
American Book Award-winning poet and
the editor of Black Nature: Four Centu-
ries of African American Nature Poetry,
in which she makes the case that Afri-
can-American writers, while associated primarily with
urban themes, have produced a great deal of powerful
prose and poetry about the natural world.
“LOOK! A BALD EAGLE!” a woman in our group shouts. There
it is. White tail, white head, the unmistakable eagle circles over-
head. It reminds me that the Limberlost now is not the Limber-
lost Stratton-Porter knew. Back in her day, says Burnette, the
bald eagles “were all extirpated,” as were deer, otter, beaver
and wild turkey. They have since rebounded.
In 2009, to mark the 100th anniversary of A Girl of the Lim-
berlost, a beloved novel about a young Hoosier named ElnoraSpeaking Out
STRATTON-PORTER SET THE STAGE FOR AN INFLUENTIAL
NEW KIND OF WRITING BY AMERICAN WOMEN
BY JENNIE ROTHENBERG GRITZAt 1,500 acres,
the restored
Lobolly Marsh
covers less
than 12 percent
of the Limber-
lost’s original
13,000 acres.