Advancing for the first time the concept of "post-pastoral practice," Reconnecting with John Muir springs from Terry Gifford's understanding of the great naturalist as an exemplar of integrated, ...environmentally conscious knowing and writing. Just as the discourses of science and the arts were closer in Muir's day--in part, arguably, because of Muir--it is time we learned from ecology to recognize how integrated our own lives are as readers, students, scholars, teachers, and writers. When we defy the institutional separations, purposely straying from narrow career tracks, the activities of reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing can inform each other in a holistic "post-pastoral" professional practice. Healing the separations of culture and nature represents the next way forward from the current crossroads in the now established field of ecocriticism. The mountain environment provides a common ground for the diverse modes of engagement and mediation Gifford discusses. By attempting to understand the meaning of Muir's assertion that "going to the mountains is going home," Gifford points us toward a practice of integrated reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing that is adequate to our environmental crisis.
In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty ...years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir's journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir's time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South's natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special.Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem-at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida-that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region's natural history, moving between John Muir's vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land-scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator-who describe the changes they've witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature.A Road Running Southward is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.
This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature ...in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers "back to nature" during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs's connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs's personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America's cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era's most effective forces for change: nature writing.
John Muir’s legacy as “The Father of Our National Park System” is often accredited to his publications that poetically and spiritually describe the beauty of nature to argue for its protection. This ...study explores the importance of science in his preservationist argument. Specifically, this paper analyzes decades of Muir’s correspondences, the majority of his publications, and many of his journals that are available digitally from the University of the Pacific. This exploration revealed that Muir relied of a narration of his scientific surveys in the majority of his articles, used his knowledge in various scientific disciplines to inform his detailed poetical writing style, and relied on his scientific connections and platform to start and perpetuate his preservationist argument. This paper adds a new interpretation of how Muir was able to convince readers of the need for more national parks, which ultimately connects Muir’s writings with his regular scientific pursuits.
Editorial McKim, Anne; Moffat, Kirstine
Journal of New Zealand literature,
07/2011, Letnik:
29, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A diverse range of perspectives on the Waikato, across a broad chronological span (1840-2008), is provided by the variety of writings about the region considered or included in this special issue: ...letters, journals, novels, history, memoir, short story, as well as the various captions that have accompanied a widely published representative photograph of colonial Waikato. Together, these academic and creative responses to the theme, Writing the Waikato', go a long way towards conveying how writers have depicted the Waikato, both realistically and imaginatively, from the points of view of missionaries, adventure seekers, soldiers, colonial settlers, a renowned environmentalist, school friends, dispossessed tangata whenua, and dislocated and alienated urban youth. Chateaubriand's romantic tale Átala on descriptions of Waikato Maori and the Waikato region by young French Marist priests whose mission first brought them to the Waikato between 1838 and 1843, for instance; or Thoreau's Waiden and other American transcendentalist texts on the environmentalist John Muir who, towards the end of his life, spent a week documenting his observations of the Waikato at the start of his six weeks' field trip to New Zealand in 1904.
Der dritte Abschnitt "Transatlantic Experiences" untersucht die unterschiedlichen Wahrnehmungen der jeweils anderen Hemisphären durch Humboldt und Jef- ferson und führt zu Kapitel 4: "A Transatlantic ...Network of Knowledge and Ideas". Kapitel "Engagement with the Natural World".
Waiting for It Snyder, Michael O.
The Virginia quarterly review,
01/2017, Letnik:
93, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Snyder shares his camping experience with his brother at Silver Pass. He struggled to sleep at night beset by the visions of being crushed by a wayward pine. Moreover, he learned that an ...unanticipated benefit of life in the wilderness is its persistent inconveniences.
Dog stories and why they matter Armbruster, Karla
Tydskrif vir letterkunde,
01/2018, Letnik:
55, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In On God and Dogs, theologian Stephen Webb notes the remarkable number of creation myths from "primordial peoples" that portray God as having a dog, with no explanation of where the dog came from. ...Since our deities are often imagined in our own, human image, it's tempting to think that these gods with their dogs reflect a sense that dogs have been by humans' sides since the beginning of time-a pairing so natural and necessary that the origin of the dog need not even be explained. Even today, many people still rely on dogs for help with hunting, herding, and protection, not to mention the growing numbers who find that canine companionship can alleviate crippling loneliness and even provide a way to connect with other human beings and lend a sense of purpose to life. Because of our ancient, intimate relationship, dogs can tell us a great deal about ourselves. ...dogs-both real and textual-tap into all of our complex feelings about our relationship with other animals and the rest of nature.
Developing a shared affinity with wildlife and coming to believe that they were both under threat by hostile forces, white elites "developed racially charged preservationist arguments that influenced ...the historical development of scientific racism, eugenics, immigration restrictions, and population control, and helped lay the groundwork for the modern environmental movement" (5). ...Leopold is known fundamentally as an environmental writer, and while he speaks in analogy here of race, it is impossible for Powell to prove that such thinking on race directly shaped his writers' thinking on environment, let alone how or whether it influenced the broader society's thinking on race. While the author is undoubtedly correct that the historical baggage American environmental ideas carry may make some non-whites uneasy about the movement or about nature itself, his references to non-whites' contemporary attitude to nature are limited to just three newspaper and magazine articles and a single page of a book—a list which is then repeated four times in the endnotes.
A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to ...meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War One.
