This chapter argues that, while some recourse to received academic
paradigms in the study of environmental literature is inevitable, schol-
ars of the nascent field of Chinese nature writing^1 —both poetry and
prose—will need to develop new and rigorous forms of interpretation
and self-interrogation as we apply our “enterprise”^2 to this still largely
unexploited genre, select and create its canon, and formulate the
parameters of a discourse that will determine how we understand,
study, write about, and teach works of nature writing by Chinese
authors (in Taiwan, the PRC, and Hong Kong). By bringing to light a
common thread of anxiety running through nature writing and argu-
ing for its indispensability in scholastic interpretations of nature writ-
ing, this chapter is both an attempt to think through complex issues of
creative writing, language, interpretation, ecology, affect, and subjec-
tivity that are integral to nature writing, and an academic intervention
into established paradigms for the reception of new genres into literary
studies.^3
These issues are made manifest, as Thoreau intimated, the moment
a naturalist puts pen to paper. For no matter how noble one’s inten-
tions, to be an environmentalist and nature writer is to live a deeply
personal, anxious, and conflicted relationship to nature and one’s
experiences with it, especially vis-à-vis one’s inscription of nature into
poetry or prose. One can, for instance, take a stirring or transforma-
tive experience in nature and keep it to oneself, as a solipsistic
encounter. But one remains anxiously aware that such experiences are
drastically underrepresented in public discourse, devalued in contem-
porary social life, and that the spaces for such encounters are conse-
quently increasingly threatened, violated, and being extinguished.
Nature is disappearing. To maintain a private relationship to nature
therefore is to reject a responsibility—the importance of sharing and
reviving an appreciation of vulnerable or vanishing spaces in and
encounters with the natural world. It is also tantamount to abandon-
ing nature to those who would develop and defile it for economic gain.
Indeed, the instrumentalizers of nature are arguably the most impor-
tant audience one could engage and alert to the symbiotic relationship
between pristine natural spaces and the urban, suburban, agricultural,
industrial, and commercial spaces that threaten to overwhelm or defile
them. As Alfred W. Crosby has argued, “[I]f we must live here—and
there is, for the very long time being, no likely thereto go to—then we
should take an interest in the nest we are building, strengthening,
dismantling, and fouling here” (Crosby 1990: 1108).^4
To restate and elaborate the nature writer’s paradox: In an age
when opportunities for contact with nature are diminishing, while
86 Nick Kaldis