Nature writing

Arch - Carter Caves SRP, Kentucky

One of the criticisms lodged against nature writing is that much of it focuses on the scenic places of wilderness.  The criticism is that few if any people live in wilderness places so nature writing should be about the towns and cities where people live and work.  The premise of this criticism is not defensible.  The towns and cities that the critics bring up are a recent development.  The vast contamination of the natural environment is even more recent.  It has only been since the industrial revolution that the distribution of man made chemicals and emissions from man made energy production has been on a scale that the wilderness has been  polluted in the most remote places.

Wendell Berry wrote in the poem series Sabbaths:

Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned.

 
The wilderness is completely necessary for our biological health.   Additionally it provides a spiritual respite for us in a world of unabated stress.  If we are to have a time away from the artificial world of our workaday world we must pause to bring to mind the few precious places that we have.  If if we are able we must step into the few wild places that we have. If we are to continue to live in this world we must have wilderness.  Our understanding of the wilderness is fairly incomplete.  We strive to understand it more. 

Albert Einstein wrote:

 The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger...is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

Nature writing will be about the pristine places and the contaminated places.   It will be about natural places that are the subject of our concern.  Nature writing will by necessity describe wilderness places and sometimes  towns and cities.  Nature writing will include contradictions.  It will always provoke thought and sometimes provoke action as the very capacity of the natural world to serve as habitat for the creatures of this world is threatened.