Nature and LandscapeOur favorites on nature
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The Sea Around Us byRachel Carson
Oxford University Press, 1950
Nonfiction, 243 pages
In The Sea Around Us, an awe-inspiring book about the natural world, Rachel Carson chronicles the history of the oceans, converting scientific details into readily understandable, at times transcendent, prose. The seasonal changes of the oceans, the phosphorescent fish that glow on the surface waters at night, the sheer depth of the water leave the reader in wonder. This book, for young and old alike, connects all of us to the planet we call home and the seas we need to cherish. N.P.
Excerpt
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea... So if I tell here the story of how the young planet Earth acquired an ocean, it must be a story pieced together from many sources and containing whole chapters the details of which we can only imagine. The story is founded on the testimony of the earth’s most ancient rocks, which were young when the earth was young; on other evidence written on the face of the earth’s satellite, the moon; and on hints contained in the history of the sun and the whole universe of star-filled space. For although no man was there to witness this cosmic birth, the stars and moon and the rocks were there, and, indeed, had much to do with the fact that there is an ocean.
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A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell
Random House, 1983
Memoir, 221 pages
Sue Hubbell raises bees in the Ozarks. In this journal of a year of her country life, she observes the rituals and phenomena of each season. In addition to the many interesting details of keeping bees and harvesting honey, Hubell describes and reflects on a variety of animal behavior—including human. She believes the host of creatures with whom she shares a habitat has an equal right to be there; she listens to coyote howls with equanimity and allows the termites to eat her wooden floor without interference from the exterminator. The more she observes the more aware she becomes of all she doesn’t know, growing in her regard for Nature’s intelligence, and in her appreciation for the impact one species’ actions have on all the others—the intertwining of all life. C.W.
Excerpt
One spring afternoon, I was walking back down my lane after getting the mail. I had two fine new flowers to look up when I got back to the cabin. Warblers were migrating, and I had been watching them with binoculars; I had identified one I had never before seen. The sun was slanting through new leaves, and the air was fragrant with wild cherry blossoms, which my bees were working eagerly. I stopped to watch them, standing in the sunbeam. The world appeared to have been running along quite nicely without my even noticing it. Quietly, gratefully, I discovered that a part of me that had been off somewhere nursing grief and pain had returned. I had come back from lunch.
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Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1991
Essays, 304 pages
Michael Pollan’s wit and charm shine through these entertaining meditations on nature and human nature. He writes of his childhood gardening influences (a grandfather who gardened and landscaped on a grand scale and a father who refused to mow his lawn), the lawn (an egalitarian conceit), composting (a moral imperative), tree planting (“Better to put a fifty-cent plant in a five-dollar hole than a five-dollar plant in a fifty-cent hole.), weeds (most are not indigenous to America), and seed catalogs (they’re “buzzing with social and political controversy”). Part philosophy, part autobiography, part social-historical perspective, Second Nature is a whole lot of fun. J.G.
Excerpt
The summer he stopped mowing altogether, I felt the hot breath of a tyrannical majority for the first time. Nobody would say anything, but you heard it anyway: Mow your lawn. Cars would slow down as they drove by our house. Probably some of the drivers were merely curious: they saw the unmowed lawn and wondered if perhaps someone had left in a hurry, or died. But others drove by in a manner that was unmistakably expressive, slowing down as they drew near and then hitting the gas angrily as they passed—this was pithy driving, the sort of move that is second nature to a Klansman.
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Grass Roots: The Universe of Home by Paul Gruchow
Milkweed Editions, 1995
Essays, 209 pages
In the beginning of Grass Roots, Paul Gruchow acknowledges his editor “without whom this would have been a much crankier book.” He’s still plenty cranky, however, and he has his reasons. As a native of rural America, Gruchow explains in these essays how he acquired his values and what troubles him so about modern attitudes and trends in agriculture. In prose that is thoughtful and precise, he prods the reader to think twice about farming and economic practices we take for granted, or simply do not see. C.W.
Except
We are fond of saying that we are living in an information explosion, but in some critical respects this statement is an absolute delusion. No group of Santee youth, standing on the shore of Lake Okabena two hundred years ago, would have been ignorant of its natural life or devoid of language to describe its landscape. No Santee child would have been unaware of the connections between the health of the earth and the health of human life. I think no farm child living seventy-five years ago, or fifty years ago, would have been quite so innocent of these matters either. Just as every species extinction deprives us of certain volumes of information, obtainable, even if unread, so the general decline of intimate relationships with the natural world, and therefore of our knowledge of nature, has left us bereft of information that no marvel of biotechnological engineering, however sophisticated or clever, can possibly restore or replace.
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The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
Penguin Books, 1985
Essay/Memoir, 131 pages
Gretel Ehrlich originally planned to go to Wyoming with David, her partner and co-worker, to film sheepherders in the Big Horn Mountains for the Public Broadcasting System. When David learned he was terminally ill, she was forced to go alone, and she stayed far longer than she had planned. In this collection of essays, as Ehrlich gradually warms to the charms of Wyoming and its people, she reflects on the sparsely populated landscape and the way its harsh weather and difficult terrain shape character as well as experience. Wherever we call home, Ehrlich makes us feel our connection to the changing of the moon and the seasons, the rise and fall of rivers, the pressures of storm and calm; and she makes us know we cannot insulate ourselves from the effects of the natural world. J.M.
Excerpt
The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
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All the Powerful Invisible Things -- A Sportswoman’s Notebook by Gretchen Legler
Seal Press, 1995
Memoir/ Essays, 193 pages
When she was a young girl, Gretchen Legler’s father taught her to fly fish, and she grew up to enjoy hunting of all kinds. In each of these essays, we accompany her on one of her outings—walleye fishing on Rainy Lake, grouse or deer hunting in the woods of northern Minnesota, or simply contemplating her neighbor’s plum tree from her own back yard. With the landscape and wildlife always the backdrop, Legler considers her life and all life—from her regard for the animals she hunts, to reflections on her sister’s suicide and a growing awareness of her attraction to women. C.W.
Excerpt
It was my father who taught me how to fly fish. And it was I who eagerly learned, never imagining that later, as a grown woman, the teaching would begin to feel like a molding. Never imagining that Fishergirl would grow to eclipse me, throwing a shadow over the many selves I wanted to become. I want to know, how much of me is this fishing girl and how much of that fishing girl is only borrowed, made up and put on? How much of Fishergirl is a sacrifice to my father’s dream of a daughter, to my friends’ desire for an eccentric companion, and how much is my own choice, my own desire? I want to let go of Fishergirl, shed her like a delicate snaky skin and start all over, making her up again, all by myself, as I go along.
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The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Viking Penguin Inc., 1987
Nonfiction, 293 pages
According to Australian aboriginal creation myths, the first ancestors sang the world into being. Fascinated by the connection between song and landscape, a man named Bruce Chatwin (this book is, author Chatwin insists, a novel) travels through Australia’s Outback with Arkady Bolchok, a native Aussie born of Russian immigrant parents, who is mapping the aboriginal sacred sites. As the narrator recounts his experiences, replete with intriguing and colorful characters, Chatwin muses on his philosophical hunch that humans are a naturally nomadic species, that it is the sedentary life that corrupts. Travel writing, memoir, or philosophy, The Songlines is rooted in landscape and offers much to ponder. C.W.
Excerpt
Trade means friendship and co-operation; and for the Aboriginal the principal object of trade was song. Song, therefore, brought peace. Yet I felt the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organised his social life. I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, ‘I AM!’
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Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Originally published, 1883
Memoir, 481 pages
In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes, in intricate detail, the Great River as it appears to a steamboat pilot. Once a steamboat pilot himself, Twain is well acquainted with his subject; navigating the river in his day required vast amounts of specific information and an attention to detail that modern times have rendered unnecessary. In the second half of the book, Twain revisits the river and travels from St. Louis to New Orleans; he observes and comments on the many changes that have occurred. The occasional, unexpected humor delights the reader, as his love and fascination for his beloved Mississippi infect, provoke, and engage. J.M.
No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he’s gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
Excerpt
No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he’s gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
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Heart Songs and Other Stories by E. Annie Proulx
Scribners, 1995
Short stories, 203 pages
“I believe if you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they’ll be in the right place. The story will come from the landscape,” said E. Annie Proulx in a 1993 Time interview. Proulx’s craggy characters step out of the rugged, rural landscapes of northern New England. Whether of locals who have learned to live close to the land, or of outsiders—city people drawn to dreams of pastoral solitude—her tales feature people buffeted about and hardened by poverty, greed, revenge, and passion. In this collection of nine stories, you will find yourself lingering over the rich language and stark beauty. L.R.
Excerpt
It was a day for birds. They would be lounging in favorite dust bowls, feeding languidly on thorn apples like oriental princes sucking sugared dates. A late patch of jewelweed with a few ragged blossoms in a wet swale caught my eye halfway up the ridge. There was a thick stand of balsam at the far end. The jewelweed had a picked-over look, and the balsams had good ground openings for walking birds. It felt birdy.
I breathed shallowly to keep my heartbeat from vibrating the air. I knew the birds saw me, knew that I knew they were there, and I waited for the wave of adrenaline to pass, for the hot blows of blood to subside. I slid the safety off.
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