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Book Review
| Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement. By Daniel J. Philippon. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. xv + 373 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.
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| As the book's title suggests, this study focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between nature writers and the environmental movement. Specifically, the author has chosen as his main subjects five writers, each of whom was significantly involved in the development of an environmental organization: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, and John Muir and the Sierra Club—key figures in what Philippon terms the era of "Progressive Conservation"—and Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First!—who were part of "Modern Environmentalism." |
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Using as his model of analysis what he calls an "ecology of influence" (p. 4), Philippon, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, examines the ways in which these nature writers both influenced and were influenced not only by the environmental organizations they helped to establish, but also the larger culture of their respective eras. Language, and particularly metaphor, becomes the key to understanding the effectiveness of each writer and his or her environmental group: As the author argues early on, "metaphor is the central figure of speech at work in the discursive frames that enabled these (environmental) groups to succeed" (p. 5, emphasis in original). Each writer employed a key metaphor in defense of a place or resource that ultimately resulted in original or strengthened species or landscape preservation: For Roosevelt, it was nature as "frontier" in behalf of wildlife in Yellowstone National Park; for Wright, nature as "garden" in behalf of birds in the Birdcraft Sanctuary in Connecticut; for Muir, nature as "park" in behalf of Yosemite National Park; for Leopold, nature as "wilderness" in behalf of national forests in wilderness areas; and for Abbey, nature as "utopia" in behalf of deserts in wilderness areas, national parks, and wildlife refuges across the American Southwest. |
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In the conclusion, the author suggests that we are in need of a new metaphor for galvanizing environmentalists in the twenty-first century: nature as "island," to complement the recent emergence of the field of scientific study known as island biogeography. As human population and consequent pressures on finite natural resources continue to grow, wild areas of the environment the world over are increasingly isolated from the rest of their natural surroundings, effectively becoming "islands" in a sea of human artifacts. Nature writers and environmental activists such as David Quammen and Dave Foreman have called our attention to the need for protection of these natural enclaves. |
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This book represents yet one more substantial contribution to the field of ecocriticism, a branch of literary criticism that has grown exponentially the past few decades. Each new study has focused on a different set of nature writers, depending on the critic's approaches and questions of analysis, thus illuminating the genre's many and diverse contributions to literature, the environmental movement, and the culture at large. By focusing on a largely neglected, but nonetheless important, aspect of environmental literature, Philippon has done ecocriticism a great service. Clearly written, meticulously researched, and carefully organized, with helpful diagrams in the introduction and revealing photographs of each author in the individual body chapters, Conserving Words will prove useful to scholars and graduate students in literary studies and environmental history in the years to come. |
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Don Scheese is a professor of English, American studies, and environmental studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Scheese is the author of Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (Routledge, 1996) and Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout's Life in the River of No Return Wilderness (Iowa, 2001). His latest book project involves a study of representations of ancestral Puebloans (the Anasazi) in art and literature. |
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