Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

Abstract

The work of John Charle Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genres - including exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature - these seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the authors, their work and the ways in which science and nature unite them. This title explores how our environmental attitudes have been influenced and shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-19th century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the 20th century. Bryson offers a literary-critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds, scientific training and geographic experiences represented nature through various kinds of natural science, from natural history to cartography to resource management to ecology and evolution, and in the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science itself.