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outside, or if he had never developed an interest in writing about his experiences and reflections. To take one notable recent example, Lawrence Buell’s sweeping The Environmental Imagination adopts Thoreau and his writings as its dominant motif for the simple and unavoidable fact that, to Buell (and to countless others), “no writer in the literary history of America’s dominant subculture comes closer than he to standing for nature in both the scholarly and the popular mind.”1 The mind of one representative scholar, Scott Slovic, has taken the same starting point, setting out in Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing to examine certain of “Thoreau’s followers in the tradition of American nature writing,” finding his legacy so powerful that “virtually all nature writers in Thoreau’s wake perpetuate” certain of his practices and patterns of thought.2 The path is clear: to study American environmental writing, you have to start in or go through Thoreau ’s Concord, and to write environmental nonfiction, you end up positioning yourself, wittingly or unwittingly, in Thoreau’s footsteps. It is even difficult to escape Thoreau when simply enjoying the New England outdoors, at least if your head is stuffed as full of books as mine is: I hike through the Maine woods and find Thoreau everywhere ahead of me, tingeing the landscape with his words and ideas. While I may see shadowy Henry tramping the trails ahead of me, however, he wouldn’t necessarily have been happy had he turned I occasionally wonder about what shape American environmental writing and ecocriticism would have taken if Henry Thoreau had decided that, on the whole, he got much more enjoyment from making pencils than from walking around t w o Landscape with Figures Land & Tradition in American Nature Writing QR around and seen me following him, at least if we are to take him at his word. As he notes in his essay “Walking,” he has a predilection for strolling off “to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to the next,”3 and here too he sets the tone for subsequent writers and critics: the books and essays that the writers produce, and the interpretations that the scholars derive, tend to be largely unpopulated by humans — or, at least, those people who do occupy the landscapes in question and fall within the authorial sightlines take a decidedly secondary role to the nonhuman nature that the author and, after him or her, the critic has set out to explore and ponder. This comes as no surprise; the job of a nature writer or an ecocritic would seem to be, by definition, to write about flora and fauna, water and rocks, ecosystems and bioregions, and to do so is laudable and necessary. Through this work, perhaps we can learn a few things about improving our selves, our planet, and that planet’s future, as when Barry Lopez suggests that humans might “find a dignity that might include all living things” and “bring such dignity to one’s own dreams,” making their lives “exemplary in some way,” through “pay[ing] attention to what occurs in a land not touched by human schemes, where an original order prevails.”4 Moreover, there is a sense of justice in this focus on nonhuman nature: just as the oppressed and dispossessed in human society have increasingly come to find a voice and an advocacy in literature and criticism, so too has the abused and distressed earth gained the opportunity to present its experience , its perspective. Environmental writers give nature a voice, the ability to speak in the face of an exploitative culture; critics take it upon themselves to attend to and interpret that voice. In the context of this literary project, human voices other than the author’s come to seem irrelevant at best, suspect or antagonistic at worst. Here again the trail leads back to Thoreau. Sharon Cameron argues that, in his Journal, “Thoreau’s descriptions of nature bring us closer to nature than does any other work of writing,”5 and, moreover, that he is not just writing about nature or describing it closely but is in fact attempting to “voice nature or be nature’s voice,” to “incarnate its articulating will,” a project that amounts to a “subversion of the human .”6 Others have also adopted the conceit that, through the nature writer, nature itself is writing, that the author serves...

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