SOURCE: Mossman, Mark. “The Rhetoric of a Nature Writer: Subversion, Persuasion, and Ambiguity in the Writings of Edward Abbey.” Journal of American Culture 20, no. 4 (winter 1997): 79-85.

[In the following essay, Mossman identifies principal traits of the American nature writing genre and places Abbey with this tradition.]

The genre of nature writing in American literature is rich in tradition and cultural significance. It has produced such canonical figures and texts as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and is now, with the many environmental pressures of these last years of the twentieth century, becoming one of the most frequented avenues for literary expression by the artists of our time. Indeed, with the recent rise in the genre's popularity, galvanized by such writers as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, some scholars are claiming that nature writing is “arguably the major genre in American literature” (Murray 73). The rhetorical intricacies of this essay-driven, advocacy-focused genre are elaborate in the least. The work of Edward Abbey in particular, Abbey being one of the most significant of modern nature writers, demonstrates the real rhetorical and theoretical complexity embedded within the genre.

In order to locate Edward Abbey in the intellectual and philosophical tradition of nature writing, certain key concepts which exist in the genre need to be defined, and certain key distinctions need to be made between those same concepts. In the genre of nature writing, there seems to be certain philosophical and rhetorical assumptions about such large issues as “nature,” “wilderness,” and “civilization.” These assumptions act as the controlling concepts of the genre, and provide the nature writer with a particular rhetorical environment or situation that conditions the discourse that is being constructed. Indeed, in even attempting to make these intellectual distinctions and definitions, we come immediately to a central rhetorical issue: what is the “nature writer” writing about?

In one sense, the definition of the genre and the answer to this question are simple:

[Nature writing] is a specific genre of non-fictive prose about nature, written in a way that remains faithful to the objective scientific facts, includes those facts as a significant element of content, and at the same time presents a human response and relationship to those facts.

(Bryant, Frontier Experience 205)

Yet in a deeper sense, in the very rhetorical assumptions of the genre, we discover something else: nature writing seems geared towards “discovery,” towards the delivery of “meaning,” “significance,” and “truth.” Another critic writes of the genre:

At its most characteristically American, it captures and reflects the peculiarly deep and detailed, if often troublesome, relationship between ego and ecos, or pysche and bios, in American history and culture.

(Fritzwell 153)

The same critic also argues:

It captures and explores the radically different modes of ordering experience that first attained full expression in Aristotle's Historia Animalium and Saint Augustine's Confessions and that later came together with particular force in early America. It is, in fact, largely the product of these two traditional modes of thought. It is likewise the largely unarbitrated expression of the two—geobiotic science and autobiography. …

(154)

Thus, nature writing is a genre concerned with the “egos” or the self, and the world that surrounds that self; it is, in fact, concerned most with that self's interaction with that world, with “nature.” The self is understood to be “historical,” to be layered with cultural and mythic contextualities which the writer either strips away or better understands in the naked, solely individual observation, exploration, and contemplation of the natural world; the function, indeed, of “nature writing” is to enact that process, to discover some kind of self, and also, importantly, some kind of “real,” “truthful” world—the self will discover something, must discover something, and must deliver that message, that discovery to the reader of the work, to the audience.

Inside this discovery, and inside the entire notion of “nature” or the natural world, there occurs an intellectual opposition between the concepts of “wilderness” and “civilization.” Put simply, wilderness is the place of revelation for the nature writer, the place of discovery, the place where the nature writer engages the world and comes to the real “truth” about reality, about the world. Civilization, on the other hand, represents the counter-concept of this place: it is where the nature writer is coming from, indeed what the nature writer is a product of, and often what the nature writer intends to either change or leave behind. Importantly, civilization also represents the audience of the discourse, the person or persons to whom the nature writer is communicating. Ultimately, that communication involves the delivering of a message, the “message” extracted from the truth discovered in the wilderness.

That message, importantly and not so surprisingly, as many critics have noted, is often counter to the normal, mainstream tendencies of the social and political environment in which the writer exists. For example, in a recent article, Thomas J. Lyon argues that the entire genre of nature writing in fact acts as a kind of constant subversive activity, a “suggestion” that we, as a civilization, as a culture, are living “a wrong way of life” (6). To Lyon, writers such as Thoreau, Muir, and then later Edward Abbey, experience the wilderness as something, an entity, a force, which can “break down the cultural orthodoxy that things have hard borders” (9). Further, he maintains: “there is an edge of meaning to any awed description of nature; what is being called forth is, in effect, the world before the Fall, before the disabling sense of alienation” (10). His point is, then, that the nature writer typically defines the “self” not as “alienated individual,” which is the result of “civilization,” but as a “part” of something else, of the wilderness. His further point is that when a writer actually engages the natural world, and when that nature writer discovers this concept of connection in the wilderness, that engagement and discovery essentially work against the cultural reality from which the nature writer has come. The telling of the discovery is, therefore, potentially subversive, potentially an act of resistance to the forces of civilization, and also an attempt to forge something new.

Lyon's overall position is supported by the scholarship of other critics. For example, some, such as Rebecca Raglon, have noted the important stylistic and philosophical differences between standard scientific and ecological writing and the genre of nature writing. For these critics, nature writing again concerns the self and its involvement in the world; scientific writing, meanwhile, such as that by ecologist and bee specialist Edward O. Wilson, concerns something else:

For Wilson, a bee is a mechanism to be studied; for the bee-keeper, her bees are creatures involved in a mutual dance of life. The fact that this type of observation constitutes in itself a critique of the assumptions necessary for scientific objectivity is a point often missed in attempting to define nature writing.

(28)

Nature writing, for Raglon, acts as a kind of constant critique of a “scientific” understanding or conception of the world: it involves interaction, not dissection, the discovery of meaning in the “dance of life,” not the “study” of scientific facts. The nature writer calls for this new conception of the world, and, in doing this, resists the traditional scientific worldview.

This line of thought becomes especially poignant when a modern rhetorician and theorist is taken into consideration. The conservative scholar Richard Weaver, for example, makes the argument that language, communication, even a simple utterance, is profoundly value-laden, a significant and complete attempt to convince the audience to accept a particular worldview: “rhetoric is cognate with language. Ever since I first heard the idea mentioned seriously it impressed me as impossible and even ridiculous that the utterances of men could be neutral” (221). In his essay, “Language Is Sermonic,” Weaver details in very broad terms several different strategies of persuasion, and even ranks them in effect: the definition of the subject's “being,” “essence,” or “nature” is first; the showing of relationship, the “similarity” or “disimilarity” of two or more things is second; the use of testimony or authority, though it is “ethically good” for Weaver, ranks a low third only because of the current lack of a “stable order of values”; finally, a simple demonstration of “cause and effect” ranks last (211-16).

The key in considering Weaver, however, is again his concept of language, of how language itself is rhetorical. Weaver maintains that in a writer's essay, in the formation of a writer's argument,

… the listener is being asked not simply to follow a valid reasoning form but to respond to some presentation of reality. He is being asked to agree with the speaker's interpretation of the world that is.

(210)

Thus, discourse, especially persuasive discourse, involves more than particular rational or emotional or ethical modes of argumentation. The actual writing, according to Weaver, whether it is intentional or not, is inherently and essentially an act of persuasion by itself, an attempt by the speaker or the writer of the discourse to convince the audience to agree with a particular understanding of reality, a particular worldview.

In this perspective, that is both Weaver's argument that discourse is inherently an act of persuasion, and also Lyon's position that the entire genre of nature writing is also basically persuasive and even subversive in nature, it would logically hold true that writers in the genre, whether they are intentionally and overtly political in their writing or not, are in fact advocates of some kind. Thus, John Muir, in describing a snowflake in Utah, or a meadow in central California, is just as political, just as much of a radically political activist as Edward Abbey, over half a century later, encouraging the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam, and the burning of every billboard in sight. There are, for example, these lines from the founder of the Sierra Club:

You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape and become part and parcel of the landscape.

(Muir 88)

The lines above come from an essay entitled “Twenty Hill Hollow.” This essay is a description of a part of central California in which Muir spent several seasons. Rhetorically the essay is, initially, a simple description of the place: in the essay Muir gives detailed accounts of the amount of rainfall which occurs in the region each year, the amount of sunlight which is available, and the different types of flora and fauna which exist in the area; he goes through several patterns of “cause and effect,” demonstrating that the vegetation in the hollow exists due to the amount of available water, sunlight, and so on. But at the very end of the essay, in the passage cited above, Muir does something else, and causes the whole rhetorical design of the discourse to change: he describes his emotions, thoughts, and feelings at that place, in that place. He demonstrates his interaction with the place, the area, and comes to a realization from that interaction: for Muir, one characteristic of life in the wilderness is that your “self” actually “blends,” melts away into the “landscape”; in living in the specific world of central California, you begin to realize that the self is not individual, separate, but a part of something far grander, a part of the wilderness—the “spirit-beams” of the sun, the “mountains,” “plain” and “sky.”

The essay becomes, then, in one way, the deliverance of a message, a new “truth” about the world. It also becomes, essentially, an advertisement of sorts, a proclamation of “self,” and also an argument, in Weaver's sense, for a worldview, for a way of understanding the world. Further, in doing this, in advocating this wilderness-focused view of nature, of reality, Muir is also advocating the continuance of that particular reality, the maintenance of the possibility of experiencing these great thoughts, these profoundly important moments of meaning. Muir comes to a new knowledge about his existence, and his experience of this knowledge occurs in the wilderness; what is implied is that it would be insane to destroy Muir's world, this wilderness, to foul the garden of his now public revelation. Thus, Muir, in simply describing his experience in Twenty Hill Hollow, is arguing both for “revelation,” for an interactive relationship with the world, and also for that particular world, for “Twenty Hill Hollow.”

The key to that argument, the key rhetorical strategy employed by Muir, is the development of a “persona,” a “voice” speaking to the audience from the hollow, from the wilderness. The reaction of the audience to that voice, to the ethical appeal of the essay, is the hinge on which the whole act of discourse swings. This voice has certain definable characteristics which make it dynamic, effective: for one, it is “visionary.” The persona of the essay promises enlightenment, a new state of consciousness from wilderness existence. Further, as evidence for this argument, the persona it seems has experienced this new kind of state: again, it is speaking to the audience from Twenty Hill Hollow, from the wilderness; it seems that it is trustworthy, that it is indeed delivering an important revelation, a significant message. It has also, in a way, proven itself knowledgeable and reliable: the beginning of the essay, in which Muir again simply describes for the reader the area of the hollow, creates a sense of trust in the voice, gives a feeling of reality and authority to the voice.

What is ultimately being shown here in this short analysis of Muir is that this kind of rhetoric, this rhetorical mode of writing, the “deliverance” of a message, of a truth, and also the advocation of a way of life, all of which again seem to be characteristics of the genre of nature writing, is certainly tied into a rhetorical tradition, and a historical context. In Muir's case, specific connections have been made between his work and that of the Christian saints, Paul and Augustine. For example, John Tallmadge has argued that Muir is writing inside “the paradigm of Christian conversion,” and that his conversion itself is to a kind of “natural religion” (66). The connection here to Paul and Augustine is, as Tallmadge makes clear, obvious. Indeed, other connections to the Western rhetorical tradition are also there, also obvious: again, we can understand Muir rhetorically, we can see certain persuasive strategies that he employs in his essays, when we look at his discourse through Aristotle's classical definition of the ethical appeal.

The complexity of all this, however, becomes much more evident when a modern, or rather post-modern nature writer is discussed, such as Edward Abbey. Both the connections to a rhetorical and nature writing tradition, and also certain individual strategies and elements of persuasion, are interestingly evident in the rhetoric of Edward Abbey's writing. Like Muir, Abbey relies heavily on the use of the ethical appeal in his discourse. Also like Muir, the message and the implied worldview behind that message, behind the persona delivering the message, is typically considered to be in the American tradition of the nature writing genre: that is, Abbey writes essays that involve both the presentation of scientific facts, and also the serious exploration of the “self,” of Edward Abbey, in the “wilderness,” usually the desert; these essays act as a kind of subversive enterprise in that the intended results of them, the ultimate goals behind the discourse, are against, are contrary to the standard mainstream culture of capitalist, “civilized” American society. It is not really surprising, then, that for most critics Abbey is undoubtedly in the tradition of nature writing outlined above:

Among other things, he is exploring his, and our, relationship with society and nature, and he's doing it in subtle and complex ways. He is also a skilled artist creating, within a literary tradition of which he is quite conscious, well structured works in which some of his art lies in concealing his art.

(Bryant “Structure” 3)

Another critic writes:

Abbey's disclaimers notwithstanding, he falls squarely in the tradition of nature writing established by Thoreau and carried on by Muir and Leopold—those leading figures in the conservation movement whose works we turn to most frequently for inspiration and insight. All four writers sought to instill a land ethic in the American public. Abbey is yet one more inhabitor of the wild—with two important distinctions. The environment he chose to inhabit was the desert; and he is the most radical, iconoclastic figure of the lot.

(Scheese 212)

This last point gives evidence to the most frequent perception and understanding of Edward Abbey: he is individualistic, “iconoclastic” even, a complete non-conformist. The basic surface strategy which governs Abbey's work does seem to be one of constant select protest, and constant individuality and eccentricity; it is also, as will be shown, one of constant posture: the writer is now taking a stand, communicating to you a specific message, a message that is counter to the typical attitudes in the culture, counter to the ideas of most individuals in the culture, a message that is, again, an act of protest and an advocation of wilderness existence. The end goal, likewise, seems to be simple enough: Abbey intends to “preserve” his wilderness, his place of discovery, specifically the American southwest. His way of attaining that goal, his most prevalent strategy to convince his audience to agree with his position at times takes different turns: sometimes he becomes humorous, other times he will be a passionate idealist, and at other times he will be a self-proclaimed “crank.”

The key to all of these different strategies, and also to the general perception of Abbey as a “nature writer,” again involves voice, an ethical appeal, the construction of a likeable, dynamic persona in the discourse. Abbey's most effective characteristic, and most persuasive strategy, is his ability to do this:

In my case it was love at first sight. This desert, all deserts, any desert. No matter where my head and feet may go, my heart and entrails stay behind, here on the clean, true, comfortable rock, under the black sun of God's forsaken country. When I take my next incarnation, my bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch under the rim of some far-away plateau, way out there in the back of beyond. An unrequited and excessive love, inhuman no doubt but painful anyhow, especially when I see my desert under attack.

(Home [The Journey Home] 12)

This passage is classic Edward Abbey; in it we have all the elements of the great persona, the great ethical appeal he creates: there is the deep love for the desert; there is the roughness in the expression of that love, the connection, for example, of “entrails” and bleached “bones” with the positive passion for the southwest; there is the obvious humor and rich associations in calling the desert “God's forsaken country,” and in mockingly considering reincarnation; there is, finally, the polemic, the suggestion of protest, of fighting for something under “attack.”

This voice, again, does change and shift in tone and character from essay to essay, from persuasive strategy to persuasive strategy. Often, for example, it will become shocking, disturbing, “cranky”:

Rumbling along in my 1962 Dodge D-100, the last good truck Dodge ever made, I tossed my empty out the window and popped the top from another can of Schlitz. Littering the public highway? Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

(Home 158-59)

Here Abbey exploits what he assumes to be the immense hypocrisy in mass popular culture: the push in America is to stop littering our public highways, which are to Abbey a kind of litter in themselves. The way this message is presented, however, is intended to shock, to surprise the audience into Abbey's personal awareness, Abbey's own way of thinking; the violence of the image in the discourse is itself, in a subtle way, shocking: a person is throwing beer cans out of a window; this jarring image works against our supposedly noble tendencies to condemn polluting, the polluter. Abbey intention is to use this shock, this reaction of repulsion, to push us into his significant revelation; again, for Abbey, the highways themselves are pollution, and the motorists, the reasons that the highways are built and most likely the readers of his essay, the polluters.

Often the voice of the persona will change drastically; instead of disturbingly humorous, for example, the persona will sometimes become righteous, openly angry:

Junk, trash, rubbish—our lives are debauched, our natural resources squandered, our native land ravaged in this mad production of metal, plastic, glass and paper garbage. … Like my old man always says, capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn't work; look around you and see what it has done to our country. And what it is going to do to our country—if we let it.

(Home 186-87)

Here the persona, “Abbey,” is a passionate figure, a figure who is certain about a particular issue and is calling for a change, for resistance. Indeed, in this passionate mode, sometimes the persona will slip again and become simply contradictory, rebellious, anti-establishment, “anti-American”:

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings. … The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

(Voice [A Voice Crying in the Wilderness] 108)

The key in all of these examples, however, is that in each one there is always a specific, identifiable, characterized voice. Some kind of “Abbey” is in the prose; the image of this strong persona is embedded in the discourse, is constantly being constructed and placed in front of the reader. Thus, when you read an essay, Ed Abbey, a person who cares about his world, the American wilderness in which he lives and finds meaning, a person who is even willing to tell the stories of his past experiences in that wilderness, is speaking to you, is communicating something to you. That communication, of course, has an edge, as a serious cause:

The first time I visited Yosemite National Park was in August 1944. The crowds were small, the waterfalls dry, and the hitchhiking tough. Since then everything I've heard and read about Yosemite has made it seem less and less worth returning to. But I went back for a big weekend recently to see for myself. Things are not as bad there as I expected; I was disappointed.

(Home 138)

What this voice is doing, again, is working for a kind of ethical appeal: the reader wants to believe the persona, to trust the persona, is at the very least entertained by the persona. Further, that voice is also, as critics have noted, and as we have already discussed with Weaver, presenting a kind of worldview in the discourse, in the message, an argument for a different way to interact with reality. Indeed, it is a worldview which does not involve penetration, does not involve the manipulation of the earth for economic use and gain, but instead some sort of interpenetration, some sort of communion with the world, with the wilderness:

I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

(Desert Solitaire 6)

Thus, in one sense, it is clear that Abbey meets the characteristics of a “nature writer”; he is doing the kind of writing outlined by Lyon, by Raglon: for Abbey, as with Muir, the individual finds their true self through and within the wilderness; further, the goal is not to penetrate, consume, dissect and “civilize” this wilderness, but instead to interact with it and preserve it in order that the same kind of interaction, the same types of meaning, will be available in the future, for the coming generations of the species.

There is, however, more to this, more to Abbey's rhetoric, something inside of it, something which confuses the seemingly clear purpose of his writing, something which clouds the rhetorical strategies of his essays. It is important to note that Abbey himself was always very uncomfortable with the term “nature writer,” or any other kind of term like that. For example, of his classic Desert Solitaire, and his other topographical works such as Cactus Country and Appalachian Wilderness, Abbey writes:

Although classified by librarians as “nature books,” they belong to the category of personal history rather than natural history. … They have little to with biological science. For I am not a naturalist.

(Home xiii)

What this shows is that perhaps the typical reading of Abbey is slightly skewed. It appears that inside the voice of Abbey, the image of the rebel, of the nature writer, someone with a cause, someone taking a stand, there is another image, another stance, another rhetoric that the reader is intended, perhaps, to pick up. For example, there is this insightful argument by one critic on Abbey's fiction:

Abbey, it seems, delights in luring us to make a commitment to one ideology or another, to one mode of reading or another, only to suddenly pull the rug out from under our feet.

(Slovic 101)

What Slovic is arguing here concerns Abbey's “aesthetic” in his novels, the way Abbey enjoys playing with words, manipulating the language. The rhetoric of the nonfiction texts, however, also suggests this same kind of intellectual illusiveness, this same slipperiness in argument, in goal, in what Abbey even intends with his essay, with his work. Abbey, obviously, is aware of the tradition in which he is writing: his numerous essays on a variety of nature writers, everyone from Thoreau to Annie Dillard, proves this point. It is also evident, when his rhetoric is analyzed closely, that Edward Abbey desires to be placed into this tradition of writers. Thus, there develops a profound double-sidedness to Abbey's essays: in one sense they are written to convince his audience to help in the preservation of wilderness; but in another sense they are written to ensure that the character of Edward Abbey, the persona of the artist, the novelist, is remembered in a particular artistic tradition, and is actually canonized in that tradition.

The critical reception of the book Desert Solitaire is a perfect illustration of this slipperiness, of this rhetorical ambiguity. Desert Solitaire is a book about Abbey's time as a novice park ranger in Arches National Park in south-central Utah. The critical interpretations of the text have traditionally varied widely with different critics, depending greatly and not surprisingly on the notion and understanding of Abbey as an individual writer. For example, Paul Bryant considers Abbey to be an “artist,” but an artist who uses the various contradictions of his art, his discourse, as a kind of “concealment,” as artistic expression in itself. Thus, when Bryant identifies the obvious contradictions that are apparent in Abbey's work and personal life, he sees the unified “artist” creating his “unified” art, not a voice that is possibly uncertain and ambiguous with separate political and social agendas, a voice that is profoundly fragmented, disjointed. Bryant writes of Desert Solitaire:

The book is presented through the eyes of a persona … whose special way of seeing, and of responding, informs the book thoroughly. Call it an angle of vision, a style of perception and reaction, an effort to elicit a particular response from the reader, whatever, it gives the book unity of tone.

(“Structure” 5)

Still, while some critics, like Bryant above, argue for unity in Desert Solitaire, others claim that the exact opposite is occurring; these critics instead celebrate the book's complete disunity. For example, David Copeland Morris writes:

The polyphonic voice of Desert Solitaire makes it difficult for opponents to identify and attack the center out of which Abbey's discourse flows; the multiple voices help defuse the resistance of the skeptical reader.

(Morris 25)

Thus, Morris identifies a completely contradictory rhetorical strategy in the book. Here it is argued that Abbey is able to cut off resistance and counter-argument, by cloaking a single, identifiable voice, by confusing the reader so much that the reader is unable to tell who at what moment is speaking, who is consistently making the argument: is it a crank, an idealist, a philosophy student, a park ranger, a ranch hand—all of these personas are developed in the text. The result of this, according to Morris, is that the audience becomes easier to convince, easier to manipulate.

My point, ultimately, is again that behind this double-sided ambiguity is the rhetorical essence of Edward Abbey's cultural situation as an artist writing about nature in the middle and last decades of the twentieth century. Abbey writes knowingly in a tradition that includes Thoreau and John Muir, that insists upon advocacy, resistance, and self discovery and revelation. But again he writes in this tradition with the knowledge of the tradition; this fact, this curse, simply undermines every stand Abbey may take because the question of purpose inevitably hovers behind the text. Further, it undermines contemporary Nature Writing in general in that the rhetoric of these essays, the creation of persona, the selection of audience, the presentation of argument, is tainted, is corrupted by its own existence, by its own deeply historical tradition, and its own highly political present.

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Touchstone, 1968.

———. The Journey Home: Some Words of Defense of the American West. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

———. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Bryant, Paul T. “Nature as Picture/Nature as Milieu.” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 54 (Fall 1991): 22-34.

———. “Nature Writing and the American Frontier.” The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature. Ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1989.

———. “The Structure and Unity of Desert Solitaire.” Western American Literature 28 (May 1993): 3-19.

Fritzell, Peter A. Nature Writing and America: Essays Upon a Cultural Type. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1990.

Lyon, Thomas J. “Nature Writing as a Subversive Activity.” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (Spring 1991): 6-16.

Morris, David Copland. “Celebration and Irony: The Polyphonic Voice of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.” Western American Literature 28 (May 1993): 21-32.

Muir, John. Wilderness Essays. Ed. Frank Buske. Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 1980.

Murray, John. “The Rise of Nature Writing: America's Next Great Genre?” Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing 4 (Fall 1992): 73-96.

Raglon, Rebecca. “Voicing the World: Nature Writing as a Critique of the Scientific Method.” Canadian Review of American Studies 22 (Summer 1991): 23-32.

Scheese, Don. “Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden.” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (Spring 1991): 211-28.

Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1992.

Tallmadge, John. “John Muir and the Poetics of Natural Conversion.” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (Spring 1991): 62-80.

Weaver, Richard. Language Is Sermonic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1970.