Nonetheless, the nature writer’s recourse to discourse, to the
language of literature, involves not only procrustean but creative and
liberating processes as well. Granted, she or he must contort the
original experience with nature in order to make it conform to the
predetermined rules and ways of knowing the world that rational cog-
nitive processes and language prescribe. At the same time, however, he
or she can break language out of its pen and let it mimete^8 ways of
knowing world and self that only experiences with nature offer.
Through recourse to creative linguistic exploration, nature writing has
the power to intervene in the sometimes glibly affirmed notion that
thought and discourse mediate all experiences.
These are not mere semantic arguments. For it is within the realms
of representation that societies formulate their attitudes and actions
toward nature. If not for their conceptualization and representation,
their inscription—literary and otherwise—into social discourse, most
of us would not know or have cause to care about many species that
arguably have been saved by collective, textually enlightenedenviron-
mental agitation: the snail darter, the sea otter, the river dolphin, the
spotted owl, the black-faced spoonbill 面琵, and other such
species.^9 Nor would we have learned to value, (and tried to) protect,
and preserve places we may never see—places that for most people
exist only in the imagination: the ozone, the polar ice cap, the
Redwood forests, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Three Gorges, and other
places that often are brought to our individual and collective aware-
ness via the intervention of writers who immerse us in places, rela-
tionships, and ways of being that we experience nowhere else but in
their writings. In the process of reading such works our relationship to
living things and natural spaces is literally incarnated or permanently
altered, solely through linguistic mediation.
With other genres of literature (namely fiction), a hermetic textual-
ity frequently is the author’s self-conscious medium. This can be an
acknowledged and welcome necessity, as the inner world of the psy-
che, the world of emotion and imagination, has no concrete physical,
geographical, or social province of its own, outside of the forms
through which it is represented. From this perspective, many fictional
texts are purely representational, having no reference or representative
outside of discourse, even at their most mimetic. Nature writing, con-
versely, is the intersectionbetween the emotional, subjective, imagina-
tive mind we discover and explore through other literary genres such
as fiction, at the moment of its immersion in the natural environment,
the latter being an external, concrete place, a contextual realityaside
88 Nick Kaldis