Exemplary Nature Writers

My photo of an ovelook at Cloudland Canyon State Park, Trenton, Georgia.

Read great literature in your genre. Several writing teachers have told me this and I believe they are right. I present quotations from a few of my favorites in this edition of Cranes Eye View.

"Billy had a degree in agriculture from Clemson University, and his family owned the biggest apple orchard in the valley, but he'd decided after college that his true calling was playing Snuffy Smith to fleece the tourists. He swore if could find a cross-eyed boy who could play banjo, he'd stick that kid on the porch and increase his business 25 percent." 

Ron Rash, Saints at the River

"Once in Sunday school, we were asked what we would have presented to the infant Jesus in the stable if we had gone there. The right answer turned out to be a pure heart or something along those lines, but I knew in my heart that it would be a pair of wood ducks, bright and friendly as the ones Audubon had painted." 

Franklin Burroughs, Billy Watson’s Croker Sack

"What being a naturalist has come to mean to me, sitting my mornings and evenings by the river, hearing the clack of herons through the creak of swallows over the screams of osprey under the purl of fox sparrows, so far removed from White and Darwin and Leopold and even Carson is this: Pay attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics with no field biology, or a political platform in which human biological requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell."

Barry Lopez, The Naturalist

Now I hear the sea sounds around me; the night high tide is rising, swirling with a confused rush of waters from the open sea, and it lies over water and over the land's edge, seeping into the spruces and stealing softly among the Juniper and the bayberry. The restive waters, the cold, wet breath of the fog, are of a world in which man is an uneasy trespasser; he punctuates the night with the complaining groan and grunt of a foghorn, sensing the power and menace of the sea.

Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know – rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

"I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of a vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover."

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

           "…As the only natural scientist, I chose a radically different subject and a broader time scale: species are going extinct in growing numbers; I wrote: the biosphere is imperiled; humanity is depleting the ancient storehouses of biological diversity. I was thinking like an evolutionary biologist in evolutionary time. 'The worst thing that can happen will happen,' I said, 'is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.'"

Edward O. Wilson Naturalist, 1994,

"No one can doubt that the whole world confronts an unprecedented impoverishment of the diversity of life."

Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, 1959

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The month’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out. She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

… those beseeching eyes seemed to haunt me. They do still. I have stood since in some of the cleanest, most hygienic laboratories in the world. I have also watched dirty homeless dogs and cats trot on to what must have been, for most of them, starvation, disease, or death by accident. I have never called a humane society because I, too, am an ex-wanderer who would have begged for one more hour of light, no matter how dismal. Rarely among those many thousands have I been able to protect, save, or help. This day I have recounted is gone from the minds of everyone. As for me, I have sought refuge in the depersonalized bones of past eras on the watersheds of the world.

Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours

Appalachia Needs no Defense. It needs more defenders.

Jeff Biggers, The United States of Appalachia

The world’s entire population of nesting short-tailed albatrosses,” Peter says sadly. A moment later, he grins broadly. We both do, feeling the same indelible thrill at having seen them. “Look, there’s Hiroshi!” He points to a lone figure sitting on a dune of lava underneath a snowstorm of soaring birds. We wave to him, and Hiroshi lifts his hat and waves back. As the boat turns north, and the sun begins to set in a thick welter of clouds, a recording of “Auld Lang Syne” gushes from the loudspeaker. Short-tailed albatrosses swoop and slide across the wave crests. One dives just off the bow of the boat, picking up speed as it enters the calm of the air. Now it turns across the wind, skates behind a wave, and then tips its wing, turns up, and rises fast, almost vertically, behind the wave crest, tilts around, and then starts across the wind once again, zigzagging at colossal speed. For some time, we stand in the glow of the setting sun and watch the albatrosses cartwheel over the waves, changing from white when it’s framed by the dark water to black when it’s framed by the paler sky. Positive and negative, it dives from the transparent air down to the thick gelid water and up again, lacing the sea and sky together with its swooping flight. It is the wind’s way of thinking about itself. At last, it flies straight down the sun street and out toward the horizon, under a tumultuous bruise of sky, where shadow haikus dance on the water, and disappears into a bright kingdom of clouds.

Diane Ackerman, Rarest of the Rare