Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology by Michael A. Bryson (review)

wife Harvena Richter's health problems brought them to Albuquerque. There the author came in contact with a dying breed ofcowboys and ranchers, homesteaders and their women, whose passing would signal the loss of old frontier ways. Richter listened and recorded the stories; they would serve as basis for short fiction and novels such as his first, The Sea ofGrass. As literary biography, Johnson's work is thorough, perceptive, and rendered in writing both clear and accessible. He appreciates Richter's uniqueness, for the novelist was an avid student of philosophical and psychological movements. Richter's biography offers an insightful reading ofRichter as writer, by a scholar able to appreciate Richter as a person aspiring to a life of higher possibility. Johnson's nimble interweaving ofRichter's personal history and artistic progress inspired me to read Richter. Before long I was taken with his strong, evocative prose. Even the flaws in The Sea ofGrass are instructive—so much so, I assigned die book to my novel-writing class. For teachers ofliterature, Western or otherwise, Richter's regional themes offer good examples ofhow die West has been represented in die early part ofthe early twentieth century as the frontier fast disappeared. Richter's fortunes rise as soon as he taps into the mythic version of the West Americans love: as full of larger than life men and women in a land still untamed, still full ofpossibility My students will get to explore the achievements and weaknesses in Richter's inaugural novel using Johnson's chapter on that novel. And, for those of us actively struggling with our own artistic demons, Richter's odyssey proves pertinent, and, dare I say it, inspirational. % Michael A. Bryson. Visions ofthe Land: Science, Literature, andthe American Environmentfrom the Era ofExploration to theAge of Ecology. Charlottesville: Virginia Press, 2002. 228p. Stuart P. Mills University of Denver Michael Bryon's Vision ofthe Land, part of the series "Under the Sign ofNature: Explorations in Ecocriticism," is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of ecocritical texts. His book is a thoughtful foray into a growing ecocritical field that explores the intersection of science and literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in American history and letters. It also serves as an important link in the chain ofAmerican ecocritical studies that began with Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Landin 1950 and Roderick Nash's Wilderness andthe American Mindin 1967. Bryson chooses to focus on readings from seven authors: 84 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2003 Reviews John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley. As Bryson states, "these readings foster a deeper awareness ofhow past ideas about nature and science have shaped our current attitudes and assumptions, and how they may indeed offer insight and guidance in facing present and future challenges" (xi). Bryson arranges Visions essentially by mode ofscientific inquiry, moving from geographic exploration in Part 1 (Fremont and Byrd) to the scientific management of nature and die human community in Part 2 (Gilman and Powell) to natural history and die ecological perspective in Part 3 (Cooper, Carson, and Eiseley) (xi). Each part is divided into two chapters. Part 1, "Narratives ofExploration and the Scientist-Hero," looks closely at the narratives ofFremont and Byrd. In this section, Bryson gives the reader a useful introduction to die burgeoning interest in scientific inquiry in nineteenth-century America. He comments on the growing deployment ofscientific exploring expeditions as the "motive force behind an aggressively expanding nation" (4-5) whose emphasis was increasingly quantitative instead ofqualitative. Chapter 1 looks at Fremont's journals and his Report ofthe Exploring Expeditions to the RockyMountains in the Year 1842, andto Oregon andNorthern California in 1843-1844, which are empirical and artful examples of a new trend in American exploration narratives. Fremont transforms the scientist-explorer into a mythicwestern hero. As Bryson writes, "By revising the identity ofone ofdie most recognizable male hero-figures in ninteenth-century literature, James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Fremont appropriates manliness and adventure for the rhetoric of exploration science. Equally significant is how Fremont objectifies nature as female, a passive space to be conquered by science" (5). The...