Nature Literature discussion

I really liked the piece on photography, "Learning to See." The inaccurate portrayal of wildlife and unrealistic expectations of park visitors rang a responsive chord for me as a naturalist and former park ranger. I believe the comments are as accurate today as when they were written. You could probably guess that I am no fan of theme parks.

John,
Like you I'd like to hear what others think about this topic. I think you've explained Lopez's position well. So, let's say he is correct that as more people see land as an ideal instead of as a specific - land and the animals inhabiting, could easily be exploited, because people don't have a deep and meaningful connection with place. But, maybe there is more to the puzzle?

I see technology, such as our devices, and our modern way of life as also helping to alienate people from nature. And technology homogenizes! What is the ideal for people addicted to their smartphones? Is it that walk along a trail in a park outside of Portland? Is it getting away for the weekend and taking a hike somewhere for a few hours and then returning to apartments and houses in suburbia.? Suburbia characterized by selected plantings and lawns...controlled homogenous environs...

I agree that homogenization robs us of all our diversity in nature and in culture.

I feel nature has become more and more a thing out there. Not so much part of something we are connected closely with. I am not thinking of myself- but of kids, grandkids, and various other folks I know.

Anyway, this is the best I can do at this time to address your thoughtful post. Maybe some others will chime in.

I have heard that all writing is place based. It may have been said by Wendell Berry but, I’m not sure. Your comments about a generalized landscape indicate that we should be fearful for the future of writing and reading because you cannot write a poem for the earth. it must be a poem for a specific place on earth. The statement is true for bot fictional works and nonfiction works as well.

I have been reading a lot of place-based writing lately and it is all written about specific places. Bill Hilton Junior wrote the piedmont naturalist all of it took in place

All of it took place within a short distance of his farm in South Carolina. Same is true for the homeplace by J Drew Lanham we read in this group a while back.
Famous true of the ecology of a cracker childhood by Janisse Ray.
Write a book about nature. It had to be a specific place.

I am suspicious of government attempts to attain environmental quality as well as the so-called sustainability movement. Robin Wall Kimmerer said that sustainability is an attempt to figure out ways of continuing to do what the larger society has always done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YuB1...

[going back a few days] John, thank you for the summary of "American Geographies". I knew I had to let this one sit for awhile and re-read it to digest it thoroughly. I think it's the best essay in the book.

It is both a love letter to the "myriad small landscapes" in this huge country and a call to action to be a voice for the land and its wild inhabitants.

While he reveres the people who know their own lands intimately over lifetimes of observation and immersion, I come away from this essay with itchy feet to travel and see and learn about as much of the undeveloped country as I can. Perhaps I have been seduced by the "attractive scenery", but I feel a fierce love for wild places, whether or not I have an intimate knowledge of them.

Thanks to those who voted for this book. I wouldn't have picked it up if it hadn't been for this group. It was a wonderful read. His gift for observation and description is amazing.

John, your place sounds beautiful and precious! Wish I could visit some day. For now, North America and the Caribbean will have to suffice as the stomping grounds.

Yes, I appreciate Lopez's concern about people not understanding that natural places are not designed to be "entertainment" for humans. I think, for too many people, he may be correct.
We can only continue to work towards spreading our appreciation for nature (on it's own terms!) to as many people as possible.

This book group helps! Continuing to explore and learn, whether deep into one place or by traveling, is important.

Cindy Ann wrote: "John, your place sounds beautiful and precious! Wish I could visit some day. For now, North America and the Caribbean will have to suffice as the stomping grounds.

Yes, I appreciate Lopez's conce..."

I think that the Lopez comment about unrealistic expectations is accurate. I once heard someone ask a ranger if he could walk down the trail, shine a flashlight into the trees and show them an owl.

Ray wrote: "I really liked the piece on photography, "Learning to See." The inaccurate portrayal of wildlife and unrealistic expectations of park visitors rang a responsive chord for me as a naturalist and for..."

I really liked this piece too. It resonated with me, as I too was once (for many years) passionate about photography. Where I went, a camera body and lens went. It has sometimes troubled me that I've fallen out of love with it for some years, the biggest reason being the "phoniness" that has come with post-processing, photoshop, lightroom, editing. I appreciate reading about Lopez's struggle with understanding this drift, too.. and his eventual decision to focus solely on writing.
On p. 226, Lopez says: "We talk about the fate of photography in the United States, where of course art is increasingly more commodified and where, with the advent of computer manipulation, photography is the art most likely to mislead. Its history as a purveyor of objective reality, the idea that "the camera never lies," is specious, certainly.." I couldn't feel more strongly in agreement. The camera is now being built to lie.
I also agree with what he notes on p. 227:
"..by 1978 I knew photography for me was becoming more a conscious exercise in awareness, a technique for paying attention.."
For many years, I felt the camera inspired me to look closer, see differently. Photographing snow slowly melt to drops of water in Spring.. the moss growing on an old cedar fencepost.. it helped me to discover so many ephemeral woodland wildflowers that go unnoticed my most. When I traveled, too, I felt it made me see differently.
I felt for him the odds of the love of capturing a detail, a scene, an experience - clearly something he's passionate about as experienced in his writing.. and the loathing for what has become of the misleading images fed to the masses, and expected by them, too.
I was intrigued to track down a copy of Robert Adams Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values" - as Lopez calls it "one of the clearest statements of artistic responsibility ever written by a photographer." I look forward to reading it.

It took me a few weeks to work my way through the hardcover copy I have on loan from the library. Having finished it, these are pieces that stand out to me:

Chapter 5: Flight.
My paternal grandfather was a pilot. He didn't fly cargo plane, but flew cargo in his private plane. He was a contract hauler, flying paper route here in Minnesota for the Duluth News Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press. He flew his route during the night so papers were available to readers first thing in the morning. A much smaller venture than those Barry Lopez writes about, but it added perspective for me, to just how much is being flown and shipped at all times, from points A to B and beyond.
I was lucky enough to fly with him when I was very young in his two seater Champ. The runway wasn't paved yet at that time, take off and landing were bumpy, bouncing along summer tufts of grass in the airfield. The plane felt, in my young memory, light like a grasshopper, or like a robin would hop along in the morning. My grandpa died, unexpected, two weeks after we celebrated his 60th birthday. I was just nine years old, and wish I'd had many more years of flying with him. He had also flown fire watch for the DNR for twelve years before he died. Soon after his passing, the county airport was dedicated to him, named in his honor. Anyway - I've been sentimental toward aviation reading ever since (hence my personal jottings here).

Chapter 8, The American Geographies
This was one of two pieces that stirred me the most, along with Chapter 13, Learning to See. The two felt connected.
I appreciated this line of thought explored:
"To really come to an understanding of a specific American geography, requires not only time but a kind of local expertise, an intimacy with place few of us ever develop. There is no way around the former requirement: if you want to know you must take the time. It is not in books. A specific geographical understanding, however, can be sought out and borrowed. It resides with men and women more or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and history for the turn of leaves and night sounds."
"These local geniuses of American landscape, in my experience, are people in whom geography thrives. They are the antitheses of geographical ignorance." (p. 132)
"Year by year, the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles."(p.135)
I felt Lopez pays homage to the unsung citizens, the people that belong to a place and vice versa. To indigenous peoples, those rooted in the land, who know it like that back of their hand.
I felt what he was saying apply to the rural region I've lived all my life, Northern MN. Romanticized for our 10,000 lakes, over 1,000 in the county I call home. To many: Summer Vacationland. To others, to be avoided, notorious for the size and number of mosquitos. Neither are a complete picture, or even close to a real knowledge of the place; its soil behaviors as frost heaves and works its way out of frozen ground in the spring. Its changing seasons, not just the ones that are fun for recreation - the challenging ones, too. The smells, the sounds, the patterns in nature. What grows, ebbs, flows, and when. Its people.
I'm reminded of the verse I learned in primary school: "Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land!'" (Sir Walter Scott)
I'm sure there are other interpretations of this. But learning it as a child, in the context I did, it stuck in my heart as the sense of belonging and home to geography, a place. (This recitation was followed by a performance of "Land of the Silver Birch")
The things we remember!

I also liked Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire about Anagama and the essay A Passage of the Hands.
I'm glad I invested the time in reading this.

It's great that you point this out, John.
We too, reside next to a neighbors that have / had incredible knowledge of this place. The wife is now 102, one of my dearest friends, it's been a gift to have that friendship, that sense of "neighborliness." She was born about a mile from where she eventually settled on 400 acres with her husband and raised a family (we eventually became their neighbors). She has traveled the world and seen a great deal for a rural farm wife of her time. Her husband passed away nearing two decades ago, in his early 90's at the time. Fantastic mind and man.. fascinating, knowledgeable, a jack of all trades, but like you say, his values and attitudes were different, and not always aligning with ours.
We call it "old farmer mentality." He homesteaded his land for a dollar an acre, cleared part of the forests to create fields, pulling stumps and boulders with a team of horses. They used dynamite when the stumps or builders wouldn't budge.
The hard work that went into it is like nothing we would imagine undertaking now.. so I understand his desire to keep trees off what was cleared. But I wonder now, as the fields are unused, unfarmed, what it would be like if they were reforested.
Many of the older farm practices were ones that have been let go long ago, as we've lived and learned.

I think it is a tribute of a terrific book when we all find we really loved different chapters. It's definitely been a thought provoking read- very enjoyable.

I have so enjoyed reading everyone's reflections.

Amanda wrote: "Ray wrote: "I really liked the piece on photography, "Learning to See." The inaccurate portrayal of wildlife and unrealistic expectations of park visitors rang a responsive chord for me as a natura..."

I may try to track down the book by Adams as well. I remember people criticizing another Adams (Ansel) for his "darkroom magic."I wonder what those people have to say about photoshop.

I also loved the chapter, "Effleurage". I'm not a potter, but I loved reading about the community that has built up around this kiln. And, like wine, this pottery has a form of terroir, both from its local clay to its local wood. Writing about working through the nights gave this narrative a surreal quality.

Here's the review of the book which I posted in my blog and on Goodreads:
This is a wonderful collection of essays. I listened to an abridged edition as well as read the essays. The Audible version of the book was wonderful because the late Lopez read his work.

The collection (in the book and on audible) begins with a memoir essay titled “A Voice.” In this wonderful piece, Barry tells the story of his young life, from his early years in New York, to moving and living much of his school years in California, and then back to New York for a few years before he headed off to Notre Dame. During this time, Barry experienced the world (often through his mother’s husbands and boyfriends). He even gets a first-hand view (although a somewhat skewed view) of what the writing life is about as he meets John Steinbeck at a summer camp. Steinbeck’s boys were at the same camp. I came away with the appreciation that Lopez never lost his childhood curiosity and these early experiences helped him develop a voice that has made him a beloved storyteller. This is the second book I’ve read of Lopez. Many years ago, I read River Notes.

One of the unifying themes running through these essays is the journey. While many of the essays highlight travels to faraway places (Hokkaido, the Arctic, Antarctica, Galapagos), others focus on the journey itself. In “Flight,” he jets around as a passenger on air freight planes while collecting information for a story. One day in Asia, the next Europe or South Africa, and then he’s back in the States. The whirlwind of travel informs the reader about modern commerce, but we also see how Lopez was intensely interested in everything, from walking the streets of Seoul in the early morning hours to learning from the pilots.

The essay “Apologia,” focuses on bits of travel around the United States as he stops to remove dead animals from the highway. This is not just a good deed as he has interest in each of the animals.

In “Speed,” he drives his brother’s Corvette from Chicago to the Amish Country of Northern Indiana, taking a friend who is scouting out locations to film a documentary. But the shooting location is a side-story. The main story centers on driving this muscle car on rural backroads. I found it intriguing that one known as an environmental writer would enjoy speeding in a Corvette, but then remembered stories of Edward Abbey tossing beer cans out of the window of this truck.

The essay, “Murder” finds Lopez driving from Sante Fe to a summer job in Wyoming. In Moab, Utah, he meets a woman who asks him to kill her husband. He quickly flees, racing through the sagebrush of the America West.

Another common theme in these stories are the skills displayed by others. Whether it is the building and flying of airplanes in “Flight,” or the firing of pottery in a dragon kiln in “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire,” or the gracious naturalist author in Hokkaido, Lopez appreciates talent. He also is constantly aware of his natural setting, whether it’s hearing the occasional “staccato cry of a pileated woodpecker” or the change in the air in the summer of ’76 in New York. As the nation celebrated the bicentennial, his mother was dying. Lopez always catches the details.

“The American Geographies” was my favorite essay in the collection. Part incitement of our lack of knowledge of geographies, Lopez acknowledges the “local nature” of geography. Few people have the time or opportunity to full appreciate the diversity of America’s landscape. He invites us to be more intimate with our surroundings, knowing the geology and the natural world from firsthand experience.

Now I want to pull off River Notes and reread it along with another book by Lopez.

Hello Jeff:
Thank you for sharing your thoughtful and detailed review. I hope you do get to other Lopez books and enjoy them also.