Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (review)

From the very beginning, American literary representations of wilderness have vacillated between celebrating a world of natural beauty that exists outside history, and lamenting the chaos of a tangled wood as yet unredeemed by human masters. Just as colonial American writers depicted wild nature as either earthly paradise or howling wilderness, contemporary American writers have also relied heavily upon polarized representations of wilderness, which is often cast either as a spiritual sanctuary (as in many retreat narratives, where both work and mosquitoes tend to remain suspiciously absent) or as grand antagonist (as in many mountaineering and hunting narratives, where triumph over nature supplies the climax). In Christopher Norment's Return to Warden's Grove, which is set in the remote northern "Barrens" of the Canadian Arctic, we have a more complex and more honest account of the experience of living in intimate contact with a wild place. Although Norment's experiences in the bush do inspire meditation and include adversity, he avoids essentialized depictions of the northern wilderness, instead exploring a number of unresolved tensions and doubts that add engaging depth to our understanding of wild places—and the birds and humans that inhabit them.

Christopher Norment is a professional ornithologist who first sees Warden's Grove—which is nothing more than a dilapidated cabin near the Thelon River in the northeastern corner of the Northwest Territories—while on an epic canoe journey during 1978, and is drawn back to this remote place three times (in 1989, 1990, and 1991) in order to study the population of Harris's sparrow (Zonotrichia querula) that summers and nests there. While the site of Norment's research in the remote wilds of the Barrens certainly qualifies Return to Warden's Grove as a wilderness narrative, it is a wilderness narrative profoundly shaped by the author's scientific pursuits and sensibility. Rather than being structured as a quest or pilgrimage, for example, the book is preoccupied with the quotidian rituals associated with the intensive field studies upon which Norment's sparrow research depends. Indeed, the demands of science condition the feel of the book, since the rigorous, detailed, and oft-repeated field observations in the small area near the cabin necessarily make the story intensely local. While Norment may be in the Great White North of the caribou and muskox, he spends most of his time with his head in the bushes looking for sparrow nests, or on his knees counting the spiders he captures in his arthropod transects.

Although Norment is a wilderness philosopher in the style of a Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, or Barry Lopez, his perspective as a professional scientist allows him to challenge the tropes and assumptions still relied upon by nature writers. For example, it has frequently been claimed by environmental writers living on the humanities side of the two cultures that the scientific collecting and naming of natural things—an ambitious taxonomic quest often associated with the work of such early naturalists as Buffon, Humboldt, and Linnaeus—was an imperialist program of domination that accelerated human estrangement from nonhuman nature. But Norment insists that knowing the names of things brings them closer to us. "My fundamental disagreement is with the notion that taxonomy—the science of naming and classifying living things—and by extension, science itself, must lead to disconnection and, ultimately, to subjugation," writes Norment. "Nomenclature can bring us closer to a full appreciation of the natural world. Names are not the things themselves, but they carry with them the possibility of understanding, and even wonder." Norment also resists the assumption that scientific language provides a superficial means by which to express engagement with nature. Instead, he argues—and, indeed, demonstrates through his own engaging scientific descriptions of Harris's sparrows—that the precision and detail of scientific language can both express and cultivate an intimate connection with the natural world. While his own prose is often quite lyrical, he maintains that...