Nature

Not long ago, at the beginning of a course I was teaching on “The Literature of the Land,” I asked my undergraduate journalism students why they were having such a hard time thinking of things to write about. What, I wondered, was so hard about nature writing? A sophomore raised his hand. As often happens, the answer came back more succinct than I could have hoped. “It's hard writing about nature in Delaware,” he said, “because there is no nature in Delaware.” There was something emblematic in this comment, something that revealed the difficulty, at first blush, that young writers have in conjuring exactly what “nature writing” means. My first impulse was to list all the nearby “nature” out there that the student hadn't bothered to recognize: the Atlantic seashore, the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, the Appalachian Mountains on one hand; and DuPont chemical factories, massive landfills, and rampant suburban sprawl on the other. But instead I paused, and let the comment hang in the air for a moment. What, exactly, were we talking about? For the nonspecialist, “nature writing” can seem especially intimidating, since it seems, at first glance, to be a subject without human drama, without a narrative trajectory, without a beginning, a middle, and an end—as opposed to, say, writing about cops, or courts, or politics, or sports. It can seem overly technical, or ponderous, or misanthropic. It can seem abstract, even irrelevant, especially to urban audiences who think of “nature” as something they encounter on boutique holidays out west. Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, according to legend, was rejected by a New York publisher because “it had too many trees in it.” But it isn't “nature” that is lacking, in Delaware or anywhere else. It is imagination, or perspective, or a “way of seeing.” Granted, a place like Delaware is notably lacking in the 14,000-foot mountains, Arctic fjords, and equatorial rainforests that have come to represent “nature” for suburban Americans. But this is precisely why a place like Delaware turns out to be such a useful place to talk about nature writing.