Cultivating Wilderness: The Place of Land in the Fiction of Ed Abbey and Wendell Berry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Novelists Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey consider the natural world in a way most or their predecessors did not: the land itself as a complex character which deserves the respect of its human inhabitants. “Cultivating Wilderness” presents an overview or this relationship in Abbey's and Berry's fiction relating not only how the authors contrast characters attuned to the land and its patterns with others who arc “out of sync” with the natural world, but also how both ferry and Abbey deal with the interaction or human and natural communities—especially in a “modern world” which seemingly prefers to control nature and eradicate mystery. While it is not the role of fiction to offer blueprints for economic, environmental, or social policies, the novels and short stories of Wendell Berry and Ed Abbey do address important issues and eloquently call for a new paradigm for human behavior—at individual, community, and national levels—within and toward the natural world.I felt, rather than knew, with a sudden keen taste and appetite, what it was to be a farmer in Islandia. I sensed the absorbing interest of the immediate task that also is integrated with rill the other tasks of one's life into a rounded whole, because one's land und one's farm is larger than oneself, reaching from a past long before one began into a future long after one is dead—but all of it one's own.