“He had merely waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed there with a good conscience and a great idea.”
–Henry James, “The Next Time”
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau arrived on April 22, Earth Day. Edited by Bill McKibben, with a Foreword by Al Gore, and published by Library of America on acid-free paper, it is a volume designed to last for generations. But will the selection from 102 writers have relevance past our own age? Can environmental writing focus the debate on critical issues in such a way that, as Al Gore suggests, “American environmentalism will shape our standing in the world”? Will folks spend $40 to find out? Lugging around this thousand-plus page book will alter my gait, but will it change my “environmental perception”? The answer to that may be weeks away as I dig in. Here, scatter-shot, are my initial reactions.

Most overrated of the 102 writers. Edward Abbey. I know I cut against the grain here. McKibben describes Abbey as funny, crude and politically incorrect, “a master of anarchy and irreverence.” I don’t buy it. He was a misanthrope with a sense of privilege he expected others to respect. To wit, McKibben’s description of a day spent with Abbey at his “beloved” Arches National Monument: “Because he refused to let me pay tribute in the form of a $5 dollar admission fee to park rangers at the gate, we instead drove for miles, took down a fence, and forced my rental car through a series of improbable rutted washes to reach our goal, cackling the whole way.” Why not an all-terrain vehicle?

I tried to read Desert Solitaire, the primitivist record of Abbey’s experiment to confront “the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.” I find the prose dull, tedious; the thought shabby, dispiriting and at times appalling. He kills a cottontail with a stone and feels “a mild elation.” “What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul.” OK. Later, he contemplates the fate of a rabbit killed and eaten by a great horned owl. Abbey imagines the “genuine affection” the owl feels for the rabbit, and wonders if the affection is reciprocated, if the rabbit feels “gratitude” and “fulfillment” at being eaten. Then this:

In that moment of truce, utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, is it possible that the rabbit also loves the owl? We know that the condemned man, at the end, does not resist but submits passively, almost gratefully, to the instruments of his executioner. We have seen millions march without a whimper of protest into an inferno. Is it love? Or only teamwork again – good sportsmanship?

McKibben says Desert Solitaire “is a book which may last a very long time.” It’s been on my shelf, that page marked, a long time. I return to it time and again to see if it says what I think it says. It does.

Most underrated of the 102 writers. Annie Dillard is my favorite of the writers in American Earth after Thoreau. She gets one of McKibben’s shortest introductions in the book, and he mentions only her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but notes it won the Pulitzer Prize and “the bigger award: a raft of readers who felt as if their perceptions had been powerfully shifted.” Each of her books does that, including those she wrote while living in the Pacific Northwest, Holy the Firm and The Living. At times she’s out in nature’s primeval swamp. “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . .” And then she retreats: “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.” Much nature or environmental writing purports to be observation. But for Dillard writing is not observing; it is recalling what she’s observed, filtering it through imagination. A Dillard paragraph is a skein of transparent images coiled round an idea:

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping inticacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy, and texture is my present subject. Intricacies of detail and varieties of form build up into textures. A bird’s feather is an intricacy; the bird is a form; the bird in space in relation to air, forest, continent, and so on, is a thread in a texture.

Like Dillard watching a thistle seedcase scattering in the wind, I ride the winds of her words, “taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played.”

Most startling conclusion. McKibben writes: “An argument can be made that environmental writing is America’s single most distinctive contribution to the world’s literature.” This sounds silly, but deserves some thought.

The selections in American Earth comprise 974 pages of text, slightly more than half of it written since Earth Day 1970. If I’ve counted accurately, only four of the 55 writers in the first half are still alive; only 5 of the 47 who’ve written since 1970 have died. No more than a half dozen of these writers would be read in a standard college survey course on American “literature.” The significance of the 1970 break is that most of the earlier writers are “nature” writers as much as they are “environmental” writers, a distinction important to McKibben, as he makes clear in his introduction to the volume. He believes that environmental writing “takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of the world, and asks searching questions about that collision: Is it necessary? What are its effects? Might there be a better way?” It overlaps nature writing, “but it subsumes and moves beyond it, seeking answers as well as consolation, embracing controversy, sometimes sounding an alarm.” In other words, environmental writing describes a situation, some form of environmental harm, and calls for action. It often has a political context, and, as McKibben points out, sometimes leads directly to remedial legislation or other action.

On a more personal or philosophical level, McKibben says environmental writing confronts two questions posed by Thoreau: “’How much is enough?’ and ‘How do I know what I really want?’” Lifestyle choices, not literary values. And McKibben finds it “disconcerting” that Thoreau saw the future so presciently, “speaking directly to our moment, far more directly than most of his immediate successors.” I can agree that environmentalism is a “diverse and multifarious concept,” and that American writing shows a heightened sense or the natural world, but I need to see a better definition of environmental writing or a more inclusive list of writers. The selection of pieces written since 1970 surveys the environmental movement and a variety of issues: nuclear proliferation, climate change, population and consumption dynamics, toxic waste, industrial agriculture, endangered species and species reintroduction, religion and the environment, environmental justice, and the local food movement. These themes have sprouted in American earth, and many have global implications, but that fact does not make the writing world-class.

American Earth is a political collection, not a literary one.

If “environmental writing” explores human relations with the non-human world, in terms of both kinship and difference, it will embrace more fiction and poetry than is included in American Earth. I think an argument can be made that America’s contribution to the world’s literature is the singular, distinctive voice — Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Thomas Pynchon, to name a few. Each deals with nature in a distinctive way, too. None is included in American Earth. Perhaps we’ll get that volume if American Earth and the earth survive the next few generations.

Omissions. The great thing about anthologies like this is that I get to grouse about writers not included. The national monument writers are here: John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold and Rachael Carson. And Wendell Berry, John McPhee, David Quamman, Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit and Dillard provide the latest news. But, considering only those environmental writers of the modern era, where’s Wallace Stegner? Leo Marx? Bernard DeVoto? Peter Matthiessen? And if the volume is intended to provide an overview of the political/cultural context of the environmental movement, where are those who have described the breadth of the issues we face: Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (on water) and Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian (the death-grip of 19th century federal resource laws, “the lords of yesterday”)?

And why not Lucy R. Lippard on art and the environment?

Poets Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin are good choices, but no Elizabeth Bishop (“The Moose”) or (A.R. Ammons (Garbage)? And song lyrics by Joni Mitchell (“Big Yellow Taxi”) and Marvin Gaye (“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”), but no Randy Newman (“Burn On”), or John Denver (“Rocky Mountain High”)? Kidding, but only a little.

Delightful curiosities. P.T. Barnum fulminating against billboards; Philip K. Dick on electric sheep and Scrappy the owl; and Janisse Ray, from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.

Bonuses. American Earth includes an environmental chronology running from 15,000 BCE to 2007. I hate to be pedantic here, but the chronology should include a reference to the 1871 “Joint Resolution for the Protection and Preservation of the Food Fishes of the Coast of the United States,” which provided congressional authority for hatchery fish propagation and transportation, programs at the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s salmon debate. The book also has two sections of interesting photographs, including ones of piles of buffalo skulls, sawdust and automobile tires.

Finally, the one thing I would add. Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, relates an anecdote about William Mulholland, who ran the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power during the early 20th century, when the city stole all the water from the fertile Owens Valley (a valley, which in turn, the farmers had stolen from the Indians a few decades earlier). This is roughly the story told in the movie “Chinatown.” Mulholland had a clever idea for getting more water for L.A. from the Yosemite Valley. Here’s what Mulholland told the Superintendent of Yosemite Park:

What I would do if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I would build them cabins in the Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all of the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs of it in every season. I want you to capture all of the colors, all of the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated. And then I’d print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I’d urge every magazine in the country to print them and every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then do you know what I would do? I would go in there and build a dam from one side of the valley to the other and stop the goddamn waste!

— Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water p. 91-92 (Penguin 1993).

Think of that when you thumb through books by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter or Ray Atkeson.