Illustration by Benoit Leva

Yesterday a writer, whose care for nature is as famous as his books are popular, posted this:

The Problem of Nature Writing

To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature. 

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer. Both the psalm-writer and I experience the same joy, after all, and other bird-lovers report being delighted by ornithological lyricism; by books like J. A. Baker’s “The Peregrine.” Many people I respect have urged “The Peregrine” on me. But every time I try to read it, I get mired in Baker’s survey of the landscape in which he studied peregrine falcons. Baker himself acknowledges the impediment—“Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious”—while offering page after page of tediously detailed description. The book later becomes more readable, as Baker extolls the capabilities of peregrines and tries to understand what it’s like to be one. Even then, though, the main effect of his observations is to make me impatient to be outdoors myself, seeing falcons.

Sometimes I consider it a failing, a mark of writerly competition, that I’d so much rather take private joy in birds, and in nature generally, than read another person’s book about them. But I’m also mindful, as a writer, that we live in a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life. There’s an urgent need to interest nonbelievers in nature, to push them toward caring about what’s left of the nonhuman world, and I can’t help suspecting that they share my allergy to hymns of devotion. The power of the Bible, as a text, derives from its stories. If I were an evangelist, going door to door, I’d steer well clear of the Psalms. I would start with the facts as I saw them: God created the universe, we humans sin against His laws, and Jesus was dispatched to redeem us, with momentous consequences. Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one.

Almost all nature writing tells some kind of story. A writer ventures out to a lovely local wetland or to a pristine forest, experiences the beauty of it, perceives a difference in the way time passes, feels connected to a deeper history or a larger web of life, continues down the trail, sees an eagle, hears a loon: this is, technically, a narrative. If the writer then breaks a leg or is menaced by a grizzly bear with cubs, it may even turn into an interesting story. More typically, though, the narrative remains little more than a formality, an opportunity for reflection and description. A writer who’s moved to joy by nature, and who hopes to spread the joy to others, understandably wishes to convey the particulars of what incited it.

Unfortunately, no matter how felicitous the descriptions may be, the writer is competing with other media that a reader could be turning to instead, audiovisual media that actually show you the eagle or let you hear the loon. Ever since the advent of color photography and sound recording, lengthy descriptions have become problematic in all genres of writing, and they’re especially problematic for the evangelizing nature writer. To describe a scene of nature well, the writer is hard pressed to avoid terminology that’s foreign to readers who haven’t already witnessed a similar sort of scene. Being a birder, I know what a ruby-crowned kinglet sounds like; if you write that a kinglet is chattering in a willow tree, I can hear the sound clearly. The very words “ruby-crowned kinglet” are pregnant and exciting to me. I will avidly read an unadorned list of the species—black-headed grosbeak, lazuli bunting, blue-gray gnatcatcher—that a friend saw on her morning walk. To me, the list is a narrative in itself. To the unconverted reader, though, the list might as well say: Ira the son of Ikkesh of Tekoa, Abiezer of Anathoth, Mebunnai the Hushathite . . .

If birds are the writer’s focus, there do exist good stories about individual birds (the red-tailed hawks of Central Park) and individual species (the non-stop trans-Pacific flight of bar-tailed godwits), and I can tell, from the new-story links that nonbirding friends are forever forwarding to me, that reports of astonishing avian feats can overcome the public’s indifference to birds, at least momentarily. Whether such stories make converts—and I’ll say it here explicitly: my interest is in making converts—is less clear. The science of birds and their conservation should be interesting to anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity, but the world abounds with things to be curious about. The bird-science writer is painfully aware that he or she has only a few hundred words with which to hook a lay reader. One tempting approach to this challenge is to begin in medias res, by a campfire at some picturesque or desolate location, and introduce us to the Researcher. He will have a bushy beard and play the mandolin. Or she will have fallen in love with birds on her grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. He or she will be tough and obsessive, sometimes funny, always admirable. The danger with this approach is that, unless the Researcher emerges as the true subject of the piece, we readers may feel bait-and-switched—invited to believe that we’re reading a story about people, when in fact the story is about a bird. In which case, it’s fair to ask why we bothered getting to know the Researcher in the first place…

Read the whole essay here.