Perspectives II

On Writing

When I look at my bookshelves – and I’ve got some pretty extensive bookshelves – one thing strikes me.

Almost all of my favorite authors are from an earlier time.  And nobody today is filling the footsteps they leave behind. 

Here’s one of my favorites, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.  Leopold was a true pioneer, a visionary, and an inspiration.  His land ethic, described in that seminal work, shaped the thinking of naturalists for a generation to come, and his theories of wildlife management forever changed that science. And after that work, he brought us the Round River essays.  From his tiny shack deep in the Wisconsin woods, he showed us the interconnectedness of all things wild.  He worked to steer wildlife managers away from the wasteful and meaningless wholesale eradication of predators, and to wean society away from runaway development.  He held the first chair position in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Game Management.  Leopold was a naturalist, writer, hunter, and kindred soul, and his work speaks to me as much today as when first I read it.

Another favorite here on the shelf is Edwin Way Teale’s A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm.   From a youth spent observing insects to a career as a writer in New York City, Teale’s life journey led he and wife Nellie to an overgrown Connecticut farm.  I remember reading this work as a teenager; Teale’s words transported an Iowa teenager to the woods and fields of Trailwood, and the easy familiarity of his prose and the obvious love he had for his surroundings paralleled my own for the hardwood forests of my own Northeast Iowa home.

The first of Teale’s books I read as a boy was his classic Dune Boy, a chronicle of his adventures on his grandparent’s Indiana farm.  Later, I read his Circle of the Seasons, and from that began to form some of my own understanding of the great roundness of nature; how humanity seems to lay things out in straight lines, but all in nature seems to ebb and flow in cycles. 

Teale was inspired in part by Henry David Thoreau, the pioneer of American naturalists, whose Walden also holds a place on my shelf.  And in a great irony, Thoreau’s words are all too often quoted, out-of-context, by chair-bound urban “environmentalists,” who would no doubt be shocked to learn that Thoreau hunted his own meat.

Here is Hal Borland’s Penny, a beautiful story about a dog who came to visit one snowy day and stayed for a lifetime.  And a favorite fiction work of mine is Borland’s When the Legends Die, a tragedy that ends in an epiphany, the travails of a nation told in the metaphor of a young Ute Indian seeking to find his future by learning to understand his past.  But Hal Borland also wrote observations on Nature; his Sundial of the Seasons is but one example.

On my shelves there are also books my men of science; prominent among them a beautiful, leather-bound copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, outlining his observations that came to form the very cornerstone of modern biology.  And there are books of photography, practical works on camping, backpacking, hunting and photography: a thousand or more tomes on a variety of topics, from the evolution of Man to the brewing of homemade wine. 

But the books I mentioned, those are the ones closest to my own soul.

Why is it that no writer today seems to be able to parallel these works?  “Environmental” writings today seem to be no more than recitations of political cant.  It’s revealing that the term “naturalist” has been largely replaced with “environmentalist” in modern parlance; the modern “environmentalist” is all too often an urbanite, perhaps one who visits the wild places for a hike on the weekends, but lacks the deep understanding of nature  (the root of “naturalist”) that Leopold, Teale, Thoreau and Borland spoke of so effortlessly. 

Maybe it’s a symptom of the ongoing urbanization of our society, that so many seek to reach out to the natural world they have lost the ability to truly understand.  And maybe the American populace has lost that bit of its soul that sought expression in works like A Sand County Almanac.  Maybe it’s none of those things, and no greater reason than the odds of probability are to blame for the dearth of naturalist writers today.

But the books on my shelf are still there to speak to me on lazy Sunday afternoons in my library.  When I walk in the Colorado mountains among the firs and cedars, Borland’s ghost comes to whisper in my ear.  When I sit beneath the great oaks of my childhood Iowa home, Teale and Leopold are there with me, the breeze brings their spirits to commune with me as the chipmunks gambol about and the wood thrushes peal their songs into the morning. 

It is that legacy, the ability to speak flawlessly across the generations that makes great writers great. 

I’m lucky indeed to have their works gracing my shelf.  As a naturalist and writer myself, I can never hope to replace them.  I can only hope to succeed them.