Richard K. Nelson's The Island Within: Environmental Life Writing as Ecological Identity Work

In 1989, the Anglo-American anthropologist and environmental writer Richard K. Nelson published a collection of ten interconnected essays entitled The Island Within for which he received, among other honors, the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for outstanding natural history writing in 1991 and in which he primarily recounts his numerous expeditions to an unnamed island off the coast of southwestern Alaska over the course of one year. In the preface, Nelson explains that both the chance sighting and the initial ten-day exploration of this island with his wife, Nita, left an indelible, intangible mark on him and that for this very reason he subsequently relocated to the area in order to be closer to what he immediately and intuitively identified as "home" or as "a place that wholly engages the heart and mind" (Island xi). Largely based on a journal, "The Island Within is," as Shin Yamashiro succinctly and elegantly puts it, "about Nelson's way of gaining a sense of place" (243-44), about, as Nelson says, his "efforts to learn about the island and understand [his] relationship to it" (Island xi). At first, Nelson writes, he was "mostly interested in exploring the terrain, experiencing the natural community, finding ways to subsist from the animals and plants, and integrating these activities with the teachings of Native American people among whom [he] had lived" for extended periods of time in the decades preceding this project (Island xi-xii). As the results presented in his "progress report" indicate, however, his "work," that is, his sustained experiential, intellectual, and emotional engagement with his new place on the coast of the Pacific, unexpectedly yielded other significant insights for Nelson (xiii, xii).

Exploring the various interconnected ecosystems of the island and its environs, particularly through material practices such as hunting, fishing, or surfing and reflecting on these experiences, particularly in the light of his in-depth knowledge of Native American cultures, ecology, and contemporary environmental thought are mutually constitutive projects that initiate, particularly through their narrative mediations in the journal and the book, a dramatic albeit uneven process of personal transformation that is far from complete at the time of writing. The Island Within captures and simultaneously advances this ongoing shift from an anthropocentric conception of the Enlightenment Self and its traditional attendant modes of autobiographical self-representation to a highly individualized ecocentric understanding of human identity negotiated in a cyclically arranged collection of essays. Nelson's ongoing transformation, to which I will refer in the following as his ecological identity work, draws on a morally considerate and highly selective appropriation of Native American world views, particularly those held by the Koyukon Athabaskan of central Alaska, and it reflects the influence of a variety of radical environmental philosophies and lifestyles, particularly deep ecology.

In many respects, Nelson's identity work in The Island Within is, as a glance at the reading list following the epilogue confirms, very much indebted to the writings of his literary predecessors, for example Henry David Thoreau or Aldo Leopold, as well as to those of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and some of his other contemporaries (see Nelson, Island 281-82). Thoreau's Walden in particular, which is usually regarded as the seminal urtext and perennial gold standard for the place-based or bioregional branch of North American environmental literatures that is commonly referred to as nature writing, functions here as an influential intertext. John Tallmadge poignantly describes The Island Within as "a personal ecology, a Thoreauvian experiment in living deliberately according to the combined wisdom of two cultures" (690). In addition to adopting the form of the personal essay, Nelson adapts, like many other environmental writers past and present, Thoreau's seasonal arrangement of chapters, and "The book's structure follows the cycle of a hunter's year, beginning and ending with the taking of the deer that feed Nelson's family" (Tallmadge 690). Nelson turns to hunting and other practices of work to gain a sense of place just as Thoreau commits himself to what he calls his morning work, tends to his bean field, or gauges...