| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology. By Michael A. Bryson. xvii + 228 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $16.50.

Michael Bryson describes his book as "a meditation on the capacity of using science to live well within nature" (p. ix). It examines texts that span approximately 130 years of American environmental history, "from the apex of scientific exploration of North America in the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of the contemporary environmental movement in the 1960s" (p. xi). The book is organized into three parts, beginning with accounts of exploring expeditions by the explorer-scientists John Charles Frémont and Richard Byrd, moving to representations and assessments of scientific management of nature by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Wesley Powell, and concluding with the ecologically centered critiques of science in the writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley. In other words, Visions of the Land is profoundly interdisciplinary in its intent and largely successful in using a literary-critical methodology to examine the ways "we've defined the relations among science, nature, language, and the human community" (p. ix). This book will be valuable to many as a fine example of the practice of ecocriticism. To some, though, it will be most valuable as a model of graceful interdisciplinarity expressed through thoughtful analyses in lucid prose.

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