Literature and the Environment
Nature and the environment are traditional themes in American literature and
have a long history on the North American continent. Native American oral nar-
ratives 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 envi-
ronments, 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 “monkey-
wrenching,” 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