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chelseagirlHaving taught several classes on the literature of the environment, I’ve come to categorize it into two major groups: nature writing and calls to environmental action. The first stems from the Thoreauvian tradition, and celebrating the glories of the natural world, usually (although not quite always) a world of woodlands, perhaps gardens, certainly a place populated by wildflowers and butterflies, as well as the rich internal life of the author. The other, which may be more strictly scientific or more personal, is most famously exemplified by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and deals with some impending issue: global warming, alternative energy, water pollution, pesticides and so forth.
This isn’t to say that the Carsons aren’t effective and eloquent writers, or that the Thoreaus aren’t capable of inspiring their readers to work for change, but the majority of environmentally-related texts tend to fall into one camp or the other. One exception is Aldo Leopold’s important A Sand County Almanac, which both draws eloquent pictures of landscapes ranging from Leopold’s own Wisconsin farmland to far starker Southwestern landscapes, but also sets forth the notion of the biotic community, a forerunner to our thinking about ecosystems. Another is Amy Seidl’s Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World.
Seidl, trained in ecology and environmental science, writes of the rural Vermont home she has found with her husband and two young daughters. Her references to gardening and wildflowers and the tapping of sugar maples paints a bucolic picture, a paradise that is threatened by loss through the changes wrought by global warming – longer autumns, earlier springs, unreliable winter frosts. As a city-dweller living vicariously through Seidl’s stories of lilac harvesting and summer days spent gardening, I was sometimes so caught up in the Edenic aspect of the book that I momentarily forgot the looming crisis. But that paradise is in serious danger of being lost. Seidl has the science to back it up, too, explaining clearly just what is going on, in a manner that will be comprehensible to the general reader without being condescending. She interweaves the two sides of her writing in a way that’s quite effective. This slim, eloquent volume isn’t going to start a revolution, nor will it provide new information for the best-informed, but for everyone else, its fresh approach will be valuable. Its balance of the emotional and the intellectual is effective, and it will particularly appeal to an audience that appreciates its focus on family life and its low-key approach. Not a major work, but a welcome contribution to the conversation.
This isn’t to say that the Carsons aren’t effective and eloquent writers, or that the Thoreaus aren’t capable of inspiring their readers to work for change, but the majority of environmentally-related texts tend to fall into one camp or the other. One exception is Aldo Leopold’s important A Sand County Almanac, which both draws eloquent pictures of landscapes ranging from Leopold’s own Wisconsin farmland to far starker Southwestern landscapes, but also sets forth the notion of the biotic community, a forerunner to our thinking about ecosystems. Another is Amy Seidl’s Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World.
Seidl, trained in ecology and environmental science, writes of the rural Vermont home she has found with her husband and two young daughters. Her references to gardening and wildflowers and the tapping of sugar maples paints a bucolic picture, a paradise that is threatened by loss through the changes wrought by global warming – longer autumns, earlier springs, unreliable winter frosts. As a city-dweller living vicariously through Seidl’s stories of lilac harvesting and summer days spent gardening, I was sometimes so caught up in the Edenic aspect of the book that I momentarily forgot the looming crisis. But that paradise is in serious danger of being lost. Seidl has the science to back it up, too, explaining clearly just what is going on, in a manner that will be comprehensible to the general reader without being condescending. She interweaves the two sides of her writing in a way that’s quite effective. This slim, eloquent volume isn’t going to start a revolution, nor will it provide new information for the best-informed, but for everyone else, its fresh approach will be valuable. Its balance of the emotional and the intellectual is effective, and it will particularly appeal to an audience that appreciates its focus on family life and its low-key approach. Not a major work, but a welcome contribution to the conversation.
