The Last Nature Writer

Abstract

In a time of escalating extinctions and immense losses of wild ecosystems around the Earth, I wonder if I too am part of a vanishing breed. Sometimes, I fear that I am the last nature writer in America. Not that I am the only person to do nature writing. Far from it. Several of my writing friends, and many others I don't have the pleasure of knowing but greatly respect, write splendidly and provocatively about the larger, wilder world that we humans inhabit. In fact, I'd wager that nowadays more people than ever write about “nature”—or, as some prefer to more blandly or abstractly call it, “the environment.” But, nearly all of them seem to shun the title of “nature writer.” Writers have their reasons, of course. Some, perhaps most, believe that to be called a nature writer is to be straight-jacketed, boxed in, diminished somehow. Others simply don't wish to be associated with a genre that has taken so many hard knocks in recent years. Nature writing is not only disparaged by literary critics, but by many of those who actually do—or edit or publish—nature writing.