Raising the Bar

Abstract

R a i s in g t h e B a r A n n R o n a l d A vertical line runs from Henry David Thoreau, past John Muir and Mary Austin, alongside Aldo Leopold to Edward Abbey. Our contemporary nature writers inherit a genre shaped by their prede­ cessors—Thoreau’s seasonal and cyclical structure, Muir’s loquacious effusions, Austin’s meticulous observations, Leopold’s judicious twentieth-century land ethic, Abbey’s energetic and engaging narra­ tive voice. Would-be Thoreaus and Abbeys inherit, as well, an abid­ ing human concern for the land itself and a determination to under­ stand man’s place in relationship to the natural world. Against this vertical yardstick, even if we don’t mean to do so, we instinctively have measured each new writer and every new book. During the last decade, this axis has spun to the horizontal. New nature writers cluster all along it now, holding the parallel bar steady by the sheer weight of numbers. So many dozens crowd the field that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish among them, often problem­ atic to sagaciously determine which authors to read. And if we use the traditional Thoreau/Abbey yardstick to make our judgments, we calculate feet and inches in an increasingly metric field. The tradi­ tional measuring tape is old-fashioned, the computations too easy, the numbers necessarily skewed. Recent innovations in the field of nature writing spin the axis in new directions. So rather than mea­ sure a group of new authors against touchstones from the past, I want to test them against themselves. A t the same time, I want to make some guesses about how and why nature writing is changing these days. I A n n R o n a l d might even try to predict where the bar may be located in the future. I’ll begin with Terry Tempest Williams’s Desert Quartet because that slim volume is the most daring of the books piled beside me. Its prose bodily integrates human and earthly sensuousness— an “erotic landscape,” as it were. “I dissolve. I am water,” Williams writes, “I receive without apology” (23). Her words spill on the page like riffles in the stream. She is trying to turn sensory experience into erotic onomatopoeia and to see how far she can extend the senses. “The fire explodes. Flames become blue tongues curling around each other. My eyes close. I step forward” (41). So Williams shakes off the constraints of the traditional tape measure. Also distancing himself from the conventional crowd is Bernie Krause, whose journalistic prose invites the reader to make musical connections with the natural world. Into a Wild Sanctuary, subtitled A Life in Music and Natural Sound, combines autobiographical details of Krause’s musical background with an explanation of his training in and fascination for bio-acoustics. He sculpts natural sounds in tradi­ tional symphonic form by using the natural world as a biophonic orchestra. I’m familiar with Krause’s Nature Company CD series but, before reading Into a Wild Sanctuary, I knew nothing about the process of capturing and comparing the songs of old and new growth trees, for example, or the conversations of gorillas or of frogs. Unlike Desert Quartet, this book makes no attempt to echo emotion. Rather, it pragmatically explores the aural acuity necessary to be a bio-acoustic sculptor. Like Williams, however, Krause manipulates the senses in new and apperceptive ways. At the opposite end of the playing field are writers who consider nature more intellectually than intuitively. Neither Paul Shepard, in his posthumous Coming Home to the Pleistocene, nor Michael P. Cohen, in A Garden of Bristlecones, lacks passion for his subject, but each man brings a lifetime of learning and thinking to his work. Each ponders connections and continuities between science, history, and the human condition. The former author, in a series of gracefully analytic chapters devoid of personal vignettes, addresses the ways in which evolution has shaped our human minds and bodies and spec­ ulates how we might reconnect our lives with our genetic roots. The latter interlaces the scientific with the personal and speaks as directly to the...