Some Words for Nature

Abstract

Some Words for Nature William W. Stowe (bio) Rochelle L. Johnson . Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. xvii + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Steve Nicholls . Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. x + 524 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. "I wish to speak a word for Nature . . ." —Thoreau, "Walking" (1862) There can be little doubt that the earth's plants and animals, including human animals, are facing a crisis that threatens our survival. Timelines and rescue scenarios vary. Some imagine a catastrophic tipping point in the all-too-foreseeable future, while others urge the need to take action for the sake of later generations. Some see a "return" to "simpler" lifeways as our only hope, while others are convinced that human inventiveness will come up with a technological fix, "as it always has." Meanwhile, environmental historians, scholar/critics of environmental literature, concerned writers, and literarily inclined activists are asking what they can do to influence the way their readers think and to induce them to bring about necessary change before it is too late. A forlorn hope, some might suggest, and yet there are popular writers like Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Michael Pollan who have reached wide audiences and can lay legitimate claim to affecting public behavior, while historians and critics like Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, Leo Marx, and Lawrence Buell continue to affect the thinking of influential readers in important ways. How, then, should the concerned writer proceed? What sort of book will be most effective? How can a historian or a literary scholar contribute to the welfare of the planet? Rochelle Johnson's Passions for Nature and Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found suggest answers to these questions. Johnson begins her book by declaring that the "passions for nature" of her mid-nineteenth-century subjects "can help us clarify our contemporary relations with the physical world" and [End Page 506] figure out "just how we got where we are today" (pp. xii, xiv). She concludes by arguing that while our culture fetishizes something it calls "nature," it pays so little attention to the actual natural world that it has no "accurate understanding of nature, its phenomena, its behavior, or its health" (p. 232). What she proposes to remedy this situation is "'an aesthetics of humility,'—a celebration of the delight and beauty that is experienced by valuing nature's particulars" without any attendant drive to dominate (p. 236). Like Johnson, Nicholls analyzes the parlous state of the natural world and suggests a remedy. He announces in his preface that his book's "message" will be "that life—all life—is complicated and therefore, even in limitless abundance, fragile and wonderfully, endlessly fascinating" (p. 7). Hardly fighting words, but another argument takes shape as Nicholls moves from place to place and time to time, chronicling the decline of species and the waste of life, and presenting compelling evidence that "we have diminished nature far more than most people know." If only people did know what we as a species had done, he concludes, "the true realization . . . would, I'm sure, spur enormous efforts to repair the damage, for the legacy of humanity to be more than just an impoverished planet" (p. 459). He aims to provide some of this essential knowledge. While their goals are similar, Johnson and Nicholls bring different skills and experiences to their tasks and aim for different readerships. Johnson is a seasoned literary scholar, past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the country's leading expert on the work of Susan Fenimore Cooper. Her audience is made up of her scholarly peers: writers and teachers in the field of American culture and environment. Her table of contents offers the reader analyses of a tantalizing range of subjects, beginning with Cooper but also including the painter Thomas Cole, the architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Nicholls has a Ph.D. in entomology but has made a long, prize-winning career as a writer and director of nature...