Cultural landscape

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_landscape 

Neckertal pasture hillside Switzerland.

Cultural landscape is a term used in the fields of geography, ecology, and heritage studies, to describe a symbiosis of human activity and environment. As defined by the World Heritage Committee, it is the "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man" and falls into three main categories: 

1. "a landscape designed and created intentionally by man"
2. an "organically evolved landscape" which may be a "relict (or fossil) landscape" or a "continuing landscape"
3. an "associative cultural landscape" which may be valued because of the "religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element."

Historical development

The concept of 'cultural landscapes' can be found in the European tradition of landscape painting. From the 16th century onwards, many European artists painted landscapes in favor of people, diminishing the people in their paintings to figures subsumed within broader, regionally specific landscapes.

The word "landscape" itself combines "land" with a verb of Germanic origin, "scapjan/schaffen" to mean, literally, "shaped lands". Lands were then considered shaped by natural forces, and the unique details of such landshaffen (shaped lands) became themselves the subject of 'landscape' paintings.

Geographer Otto Schlüter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an academic term in the early 20th century. In 1908, Schlüter argued that by defining geography as a Landschaftskunde (landscape science) this would give geography a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (transl. original landscape) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (transl. 'cultural landscape') a landscape created by human culture. The major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.

It was Carl O. Sauer, a human geographer, who was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes. Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth's surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. His classic definition of a 'cultural landscape' reads as follows:

"The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result"

Since Schlüter's first formal use of the term, and Sauer's effective promotion of the idea, the concept of 'cultural landscapes has been variously used, applied, debated, developed and refined within academia. In the 1950s, for instance, J.B. Jackson and his publication 'Landscape' influenced a generation of particularly American scholars, including architectural historians Denise Scott Brown, and Gwendolyn Wright.

By 1992, the World Heritage Committee elected to convene a meeting of the 'specialists' to advise and assist redraft the Committee's Operational Guidelines to include 'cultural landscapes' as an option for heritage listing properties that were neither purely natural nor purely cultural in form (i.e. 'mixed' heritage).

Relevance of concept

The World Heritage Committee's adoption and use of the concept of 'cultural landscapes' has seen multiple specialists around the world, and many nations identifying 'cultural landscapes', assessing 'cultural landscapes', heritage listing 'cultural landscapes', managing 'cultural landscapes', and effectively making 'cultural landscapes' known and visible to the world, with very practical ramifications and challenges.

A 2006 academic review of the combined efforts of the World Heritage Committee, multiple specialists around the world, and nations to apply the concept of 'cultural landscapes', observed and concluded that:

"Although the concept of landscape has been unhooked for some time from its original art associations ... there is still a dominant view of landscapes as an inscribed surface, akin to a map or a text, from which cultural meaning and social forms can simply be read."

Within academia, any system of interaction between human activity and natural habitat is regarded as a cultural landscape. In a sense this understanding is broader than the definition applied within UNESCO, including, as it does, almost the whole of the world's occupied surface, plus almost all the uses, ecologies, interactions, practices, beliefs, concepts, and traditions of people living within cultural landscapes. Following on this, geographer Xoán Paredes defines cultural landscape as:

"... the environment modified by the human being in the course of time, the long-term combination between anthropic action on this environment and the physical constraints limiting or conditioning human activity. It is a geographical area – including natural and cultural resources – associated to historical evolution, which gives way to a recognizable landscape for a particular human group, up to the point of being identifiable as such by others."

The concept of cultural landscape is useful for the sustainable management and conservation of heritage. Adopting a cultural landscape perspective can interlink individual aspects of cultural heritage, such as historic buildings, regional material resources, and vernacular construction techniques, into a unified notion of identity and place. This can unify tangible and intangible heritage, expose risks within complex system dynamics, and draw the focus of conservation from the protection of past fabric towards the management of future change. It can be a vehicle for people centred approaches, which support local ownership and participation at cultural heritage sites. This paradigm aligns the management of the historic environment with contemporary attitudes to environmental management in general, which are also influenced by cultural landscape persepectives.

Some universities now offer specialist degrees in the study of cultural landscapes, including, for instance, the Universities of Naples, St.-Étienne, and Stuttgart who offer a Master of Cultural Landscapes diploma.

Examples

The World Heritage Committee has identified and listed a number of areas or properties as cultural landscapes of universal value to humankind, including the following:

Tongariro National Park, New Zealand (1993)

Tongariro Mahuia River in the Tongariro National Park, New Zealand

"In 1993 Tongariro National Park, became the first property to be inscribed on the World Heritage List under the revised criteria describing cultural landscapes. The mountains at the heart of the park have cultural and religious significance for the Maori people and symbolize the spiritual links between this community and its environment. The park has active and extinct volcanoes, a diverse range of ecosystems and some spectacular landscapes."

Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Australia (1994)

"This park, formerly called Uluru (Ayers Rock – Mount Olga) National Park, features spectacular geological formations that dominate the vast red sandy plain of central Australia. Uluru, an immense monolith, and Kata Tjuta, the rock domes located west of Uluru, form part of the traditional belief system of one of the oldest human societies in the world. The traditional owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta are the Anangu Aboriginal people."

Rice Terraces of Philippine Cordilleras (1995)

The Batad rice terraces, The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, the first site to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List cultural landscape category in 1995.

"For 2,000 years, the high rice fields of the Ifugao have followed the contours of the mountains. The fruit of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next, and the expression of sacred traditions and a delicate social balance, they have helped to create a landscape of great beauty that expresses the harmony between humankind and the environment."

Cultural Landscape of Sintra Portugal (1995)

"In the 19th century Sintra became the first centre of European Romantic architecture. Ferdinand II turned a ruined monastery into a castle where this new sensitivity was displayed in the use of Gothic, Egyptian, Moorish and Renaissance elements and in the creation of a park blending local and exotic species of trees. Other fine dwellings, built along the same lines in the surrounding serra, created a unique combination of parks and gardens which influenced the development of landscape architecture throughout Europe".

Portovenere, Cinque Terre, and the Islands (Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto), Italy (1997)

"The Ligurian coast between Cinque Terre and Portovenere is a cultural landscape of great scenic and cultural value. The layout and disposition of the small towns and the shaping of the surrounding landscape, overcoming the disadvantages of a steep, uneven terrain, encapsulate the continuous history of human settlement in this region over the past millennium."

Hortobágy National Park, Hungary (1999)

Hungarian Grey Cattle in Hortobágy National Park.

Hortobágy National Park is the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe, which means that it was not formed as a result of deforestation or river control. The first Hungarian national park (established in 1973), it is the country's largest protected area (82 thousand hectares). A significant part of it is Biosphere Reserve and a quarter of its area enjoys international protection under the Ramsar Convention on the conservation of wetlands.

Matobo Hills, Zimbabwe (2003)

The Matobo Hills area exhibits a profusion of distinctive rock landforms rising above the granite shield that covers much of Zimbabwe. The large boulders provide abundant natural shelters and have been associated with human occupation from the early Stone Age right through to early historical times, and intermittently since. They also feature an outstanding collection of rock paintings. The Matopo Hills continue to provide a strong focus for the local community, which still uses shrines and sacred places closely linked to traditional, social and economic activities.

Dresden Elbe Valley, Germany (2004)

"The 18th- and 19th-century cultural landscape of Dresden Elbe Valley ... features low meadows, and is crowned by the Pillnitz Palace and the centre of Dresden with its numerous monuments and parks from the 16th to 20th centuries. The landscape also features 19th- and 20th-century suburban villas and gardens and valuable natural features."

This landscape was struck from the World Heritage list in 2009, due to the construction of a four lane highway across the Elbe.

Lavaux Vineyard Terraces, Switzerland (2007)

Lavaux vineyards at Saint-Saphorin

"The Lavaux vineyard landscape demonstrates in a highly visible way its evolution and development over almost a millennium, through the well preserved landscape and buildings that demonstrate a continuation and evolution of longstanding cultural traditions, specific to its locality."

West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou, China (2011)

"The West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou, comprising the West Lake and the hills surrounding its three sides, has inspired famous poets, scholars and artists since the 9th century. It comprises numerous temples, pagodas, pavilions, gardens and ornamental trees, as well as causeways and artificial islands."

Qhapaq Ñan (Inca Road System), Northwestern Argentina, South Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Chile (2014)

Qhapaq Ñan is an extensive Inca communication, trade and defense network of roads covering 30,000  km. Constructed by the Incas over several centuries and partly based on pre-Inca infrastructure, this extraordinary network through one of the world's most extreme geographical terrains linked the snow-capped peaks of the Andes – at an altitude of more than 6,000 m – to the coast, running through hot rainforests, fertile valleys, and absolute deserts. It reached its maximum expansion in the 15th century when it spread across the length and breadth of the Andes. The Qhapac Ñan, Andean Road System includes 273 component sites spread over more than 6,000  km that were selected to highlight the social, political, architectural and engineering achievements of the network, along with its associated infrastructure for trade, accommodation, and storage, as well as sites of religious significance.

Cultural ecology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_ecology 

Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment. This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it, is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions. In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology, another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter Island Syndrome.

History

Anthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) coined the term, envisioning cultural ecology as a methodology for understanding how humans adapt to such a wide variety of environments. In his Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), cultural ecology represents the "ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment." A key point is that any particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge that allow people to live in an environment. This means that while the environment influences the character of human adaptation, it does not determine it. In this way, Steward wisely separated the vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a culture that occupied a given environment. Viewed over the long term, this means that environment and culture are on more or less separate evolutionary tracks and that the ability of one to influence the other is dependent on how each is structured. It is this assertion - that the physical and biological environment affects culture - that has proved controversial, because it implies an element of environmental determinism over human actions, which some social scientists find problematic, particularly those writing from a Marxist perspective. Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a region.

Steward's method was to:

1. Document the technologies and methods used to exploit the environment to get a living from it.
2. Look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment.
3. Assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patterns meant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly. This belief system may not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops can be taken for granted, or where irrigation was practiced).

Steward's concept of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism. Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of technology and its effects on environmental adaptation.

In anthropology

Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).

As transdisciplinary project

One 2000s-era conception of cultural ecology is as a general theory that regards ecology as a paradigm not only for the natural and human sciences, but for cultural studies as well. In his Die Ökologie des Wissens (The Ecology of Knowledge), Peter Finke explains that this theory brings together the various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history, and that have been separated into more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the evolution of modern science (Finke 2005). In this view, cultural ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. As the dependency of culture on nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, are gaining interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and natural evolution is increasingly acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution (see Finke 2006, 2007). Thus, causal deterministic laws do not apply to culture in a strict sense, but there are nevertheless productive analogies that can be drawn between ecological and cultural processes.

Gregory Bateson was the first to draw such analogies in his project of an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1973), which was based on general principles of complex dynamic life processes, e.g. the concept of feedback loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within the mind itself. Bateson thinks of the mind neither as an autonomous metaphysical force nor as a mere neurological function of the brain, but as a "dehierarchized concept of a mutual dependency between the (human) organism and its (natural) environment, subject and object, culture and nature", and thus as "a synonym for a cybernetic system of information circuits that are relevant for the survival of the species." (Gersdorf/ Mayer 2005: 9).

Finke fuses these ideas with concepts from systems theory. He describes the various sections and subsystems of society as 'cultural ecosystems' with their own processes of production, consumption, and reduction of energy (physical as well as psychic energy). This also applies to the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own internal forces of selection and self-renewal, but also have an important function within the cultural system as a whole (see next section).

In literary studies

The interrelatedness between culture and nature has been a special focus of literary culture from its archaic beginnings in myth, ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales, in the genres of pastoral literature, nature poetry. Important texts in this tradition include the stories of mutual transformations between human and nonhuman life, most famously collected in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which became a highly influential text throughout literary history and across different cultures. This attention to culture-nature interaction became especially prominent in the era of romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of literary stagings of human experience up to the present.

The mutual opening and symbolic reconnection of culture and nature, mind and body, human and nonhuman life in a holistic and yet radically pluralistic way seems to be one significant mode in which literature functions and in which literary knowledge is produced. From this perspective, literature can itself be described as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of "cultural ecology" (Zapf 2002). Literary texts have staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman "nature." From this paradoxical act of creative regression they have derived their specific power of innovation and cultural self-renewal.

German ecocritic Hubert Zapf argues that literature draws its cognitive and creative potential from a threefold dynamics in its relationship to the larger cultural system: as a "cultural-critical metadiscourse," an "imaginative counterdiscourse," and a "reintegrative interdiscourse" (Zapf 2001, 2002). It is a textual form which breaks up ossified social structures and ideologies, symbolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally separated. In that way, literature counteracts economic, political or pragmatic forms of interpreting and instrumentalizing human life, and breaks up one-dimensional views of the world and the self, opening them up towards their repressed or excluded other. Literature is thus, on the one hand, a sensorium for what goes wrong in a society, for the biophobic, life-paralyzing implications of one-sided forms of consciousness and civilizational uniformity, and it is, on the other hand, a medium of constant cultural self-renewal, in which the neglected biophilic energies can find a symbolic space of expression and of (re-)integration into the larger ecology of cultural discourses. This approach has been applied and widened in volumes of essays by scholars from over the world (ed. Zapf 2008, 2016), as well as in a recent monograph (Zapf 2016).

In geography

In geography, cultural ecology developed in response to the "landscape morphology" approach of Carl O. Sauer. Sauer's school was criticized for being unscientific and later for holding a "reified" or "superorganic" conception of culture. Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment. These cultural ecologists focused on flows of energy and materials, examining how beliefs and institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were as much a part of the ecology as any other organism. Important practitioners of this form of cultural ecology include Karl Butzer and David Stoddart.

The second form of cultural ecology introduced decision theory from agricultural economics, particularly inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov and Ester Boserup. These cultural ecologists were concerned with how human groups made decisions about how they use their natural environment. They were particularly concerned with the question of agricultural intensification, refining the competing models of Thomas Malthus and Boserup. Notable cultural ecologists in this second tradition include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner II. Starting in the 1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism from political ecology. Political ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the local-scale systems they studied and the global political economy. Today few geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural ecology have been adopted and built on by political ecology, land change science, and sustainability science.

Conceptual views

Human species

Books about culture and ecology began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the first to be published in the United Kingdom was The Human Species by a zoologist, Anthony Barnett. It came out in 1950-subtitled The biology of man but was about a much narrower subset of topics. It dealt with the cultural bearing of some outstanding areas of environmental knowledge about health and disease, food, the sizes and quality of human populations, and the diversity of human types and their abilities. Barnett's view was that his selected areas of information "....are all topics on which knowledge is not only desirable, but for a twentieth-century adult, necessary". He went on to point out some of the concepts underpinning human ecology towards the social problems facing his readers in the 1950s as well as the assertion that human nature cannot change, what this statement could mean, and whether it is true. The third chapter deals in more detail with some aspects of human genetics.

Then come five chapters on the evolution of man, and the differences between groups of men (or races) and between individual men and women today in relation to population growth (the topic of 'human diversity'). Finally, there is a series of chapters on various aspects of human populations (the topic of "life and death"). Like other animals man must, in order to survive, overcome the dangers of starvation and infection; at the same time he must be fertile. Four chapters therefore deal with food, disease and the growth and decline of human populations.

Barnett anticipated that his personal scheme might be criticized on the grounds that it omits an account of those human characteristics, which distinguish humankind most clearly, and sharply from other animals. That is to say, the point might be expressed by saying that human behaviour is ignored; or some might say that human psychology is left out, or that no account is taken of the human mind. He justified his limited view, not because little importance was attached to what was left out, but because the omitted topics were so important that each needed a book of similar size even for a summary account. In other words, the author was embedded in a world of academic specialists and therefore somewhat worried about taking a partial conceptual, and idiosyncratic view of the zoology of Homo sapiens.

Ecology

Moves to produce prescriptions for adjusting human culture to ecological realities were also afoot in North America. Paul Sears, in his 1957 Condon Lecture at the University of Oregon, titled "The Ecology of Man," he mandated "serious attention to the ecology of man" and demanded "its skillful application to human affairs." Sears was one of the few prominent ecologists to successfully write for popular audiences. Sears documents the mistakes American farmers made in creating conditions that led to the disastrous Dust Bowl. This book gave momentum to the soil conservation movement in the United States.

Impact on nature

During this same time was J.A. Lauwery's Man's Impact on Nature, which was part of a series on 'Interdependence in Nature' published in 1969. Both Russel's and Lauwerys' books were about cultural ecology, although not titled as such. People still had difficulty in escaping from their labels. Even Beginnings and Blunders, produced in 1970 by the polymath zoologist Lancelot Hogben, with the subtitle Before Science Began, clung to anthropology as a traditional reference point. However, its slant makes it clear that 'cultural ecology' would be a more apt title to cover his wide-ranging description of how early societies adapted to environment with tools, technologies and social groupings. In 1973 the physicist Jacob Bronowski produced The Ascent of Man, which summarised a magnificent thirteen part BBC television series about all the ways in which humans have moulded the Earth and its future.

Changing the Earth

By the 1980s the human ecological-functional view had prevailed. It had become a conventional way to present scientific concepts in the ecological perspective of human animals dominating an overpopulated world, with the practical aim of producing a greener culture. This is exemplified by I. G. Simmons' book Changing the Face of the Earth, with its telling subtitle "Culture, Environment History" which was published in 1989. Simmons was a geographer, and his book was a tribute to the influence of W.L Thomas' edited collection, Man's role in 'Changing the Face of the Earth that came out in 1956.

Simmons' book was one of many interdisciplinary culture/environment publications of the 1970s and 1980s, which triggered a crisis in geography with regards its subject matter, academic sub-divisions, and boundaries. This was resolved by officially adopting conceptual frameworks as an approach to facilitate the organisation of research and teaching that cuts cross old subject divisions. Cultural ecology is in fact a conceptual arena that has, over the past six decades allowed sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers to enter common intellectual ground from the sidelines of their specialist subjects.

21st Century

In the first decade of the 21st century, there are publications dealing with the ways in which humans can develop a more acceptable cultural relationship with the environment. An example is sacred ecology, a sub-topic of cultural ecology, produced by Fikret Berkes in 1999. It seeks lessons from traditional ways of life in Northern Canada to shape a new environmental perception for urban dwellers. This particular conceptualisation of people and environment comes from various cultural levels of local knowledge about species and place, resource management systems using local experience, social institutions with their rules and codes of behaviour, and a world view through religion, ethics and broadly defined belief systems.

Despite the differences in information concepts, all of the publications carry the message that culture is a balancing act between the mindset devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and that, which conserves them. Perhaps the best model of cultural ecology in this context is, paradoxically, the mismatch of culture and ecology that have occurred when Europeans suppressed the age-old native methods of land use and have tried to settle European farming cultures on soils manifestly incapable of supporting them. There is a sacred ecology associated with environmental awareness, and the task of cultural ecology is to inspire urban dwellers to develop a more acceptable sustainable cultural relationship with the environment that supports them.

Educational framework

Ecocriticism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocriticism 

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It takes an interdisciplinary point of view by analyzing the works of authors, researchers and poets in the context of environmental issues and nature. Some ecocritics brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation, though not all ecocritics agree on the purpose, methodology, or scope of ecocriticism.

In the United States, ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts a biennial conference for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature and the environmental humanities in general. ASLE publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which current international scholarship can be found.

Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism", and is often informed by other fields such as ecology, sustainable design, biopolitics, environmental history, environmentalism, and social ecology, among others.

Definition

In comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened from nature writing, romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, television, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Cheryll Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment", and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing". Lawrence Buell defines "'ecocriticism' ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis".

Simon Estok noted in 2001 that "ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, firstly by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections".

More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than "simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function–thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds". This echoes the functional approach of the cultural ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies between ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially have an ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system.

As Michael P. Cohen has observed, "if you want to be an ecocritic, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized." Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its "praise-song school" of criticism. All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation of some sort, but whereas the majority are 'nature endorsing', some are 'nature sceptical'. In part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimize gender, sexual and racial norms (so homosexuality has been seen as 'unnatural', for example), but it also involves scepticism about the uses to which 'ecological' language is put in ecocriticism; it can also involve a critique of the ways cultural norms of nature and the environment contribute to environmental degradation. Greg Garrard has dubbed 'pastoral ecology' the notion that nature undisturbed is balanced and harmonious, while Dana Phillips has criticised the literary quality and scientific accuracy of nature writing in "The Truth of Ecology". Similarly, there has been a call to recognize the place of the Environmental Justice movement in redefining ecocritical discourse.

In response to the question of what ecocriticism is or should be, Camilo Gomides has offered an operational definition that is both broad and discriminating: "The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations". He tests it for a film adaptation about Amazonian deforestation. Implementing the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism constitutes an "economic school of thought" as it engages audiences to debate issues of resource allocation that have no technical solution. Ashton Nichols has recently argued that the historical dangers of a romantic version of nature now need to be replaced by "urbanatural roosting", a view that sees urban life and the natural world as closely linked and argues for humans to live more lightly on the planet, the way virtually all other species do.

In literary studies

Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Scholars in ecocriticism engage in questions regarding anthropocentrism, and the "mainstream assumption that the natural world be seen primarily as a resource for human beings" as well as critical approaches to changing ideas in "the material and cultural bases of modern society." Recently, "empirical ecocritics" have begun empirically evaluating the influence of ecofiction on its readers. Other disciplines, such as history, economics, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, are also considered by ecocritics to be possible contributors to ecocriticism.

While William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism (Barry 240) in his 1978 essay entitled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism, ecocriticism as a movement owes much to Rachel Carson's 1962 environmental exposé Silent Spring. Drawing from this critical moment, Rueckert's intent was to focus on "the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature".

Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, "One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another's work; they didn't know that it existed...Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness." Nevertheless, ecocriticism—unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms—failed to crystallize into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the US in the 1990s.

In the mid-1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. During the late-1980s poet Jack Collom was awarded a 2nd National Endowment for the Arts grant, for his ground-breaking work in this emerging genre. Collom taught an influential Eco-Lit course at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado for nearly two decades. In 1990, at the University of Nevada, Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR, with the aid of the now-retired Glotfelty and the remaining professor Michael P. Branch, has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India (OSLE-India), Southeast Asia (ASLE-ASEAN), Taiwan, Canada and Europe. The emergence of ecocriticism in British literary criticism is usually dated to the publication in 1991 of Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition by Jonathan Bate.

Moving into the 2000’s ecocriticism’s second wave emerged and sought to redefine itself inspired by stories from global activists. Lawrence Buell former Harvard professor and proponent of ecocriticism attributes figures such as Ken Saro-Wiwa and Michiko Ishimure as some of these contributors. The second wave of ecocriticism seeks to distinguish itself from the first wave and to evolve the movement prioritizing the exploration of issues such as environmental resource distribution, environmental justice, minority and socioeconomic impacts related to environmental circumstances.

Ecofiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofiction 

Ecofiction (also "eco-fiction" or "eco fiction") is the branch of literature that encompasses nature-oriented (non-human) or environment-oriented (human impacts on nature) works of fiction. While this super genre's roots are seen in classic, pastoral, magical realism, animal metamorphoses, science fiction, and other genres, the term ecofiction did not become popular until the 1970s when various movements created the platform for an explosion of environmental and nature literature, which also inspired ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. Environmentalists have claimed that the human relationship with the ecosystem often went unremarked in earlier literature.

According to Jim Dwyer, author of Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction, "My criteria for determining whether a given work is ecofiction closely parallel Lawrence Buell's":

• The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
• The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
• Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation.
• Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.' 

Definitions and explanations

"The terms 'environmental fiction,' 'green fiction,' and 'nature-oriented fiction,' might better be considered as categories of ecofiction....[Ecofiction] deals with environmental issues or the relation between humanity and the physical environment, that contrasts traditional and industrial cosmologies, or in which nature or the land has a prominent role…[It is] made up of many styles, primarily modernism, postmodernism, realism, and magical realism, and can be found in many genres, primarily mainstream, westerns, mystery, romance, and speculative fiction. Speculative fiction includes science fiction and fantasy, sometimes mixed with realism, as in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin." -Jim Dwyer [Ibid. Chapter 2.]

"Stories set in fictional landscapes that capture the essence of natural ecosystems....[They] can build around human relationships to these ecosystems or leave out humans altogether. The story itself, however, takes the reader into the natural world and brings it alive...Ideally the landscape and ecosystems--whether fantasy or real--should be as "realistic" as possible and plot constraints should accord with ecological principles." -Mike Vasey 

The distinction of true and false ecofiction was made by Diane Ackerman. "Often in fiction nature has loomed as a monstrous character, an adversary dishing out retribution for moral slippage, or as a nightmare region of chaos and horror where fanged beasts crouch ready to attack. But sometimes it beckons as a zone of magic, mysticism, inspiration, and holy conversion. "False ecofiction is based on the fear that something will go wrong, but true ecofiction is based on an integrative view of reality." -Gabriel Navarre 

Another perspective is that ecofiction is not divided between true and false, but into three categories: "Works that portray the environmental movement and/or environmental activism, works that depict a conflict over an environmental issue and express the author's beliefs, and works that feature environmental apocalypse." -Patricia D. Netzley 

"Ecofiction is an elastic term, capacious enough to accommodate a variety of fictional works that address the relationship between natural settings and the human communities that dwell within them. The term emerged soon after ecology took hold as a popular scientific paradigm and a broad cultural attitude in the 1960s and 1970s." -Jonathan Levin 

"Ecofiction forms a literature-based path towards an invigorated understanding of nature's place in human life and is part of a new phase in nature writing that seeks to include a modern consciousness in narratives of place. The Hopper believes that in order to refashion our lives to accommodate the knowledge we have of our environmental crisis, we have a lot of cultural heavy lifting to do. To reacquaint ourselves meaningfully with the natural world we have to turn our interpretive, inquisitive, and inspired faculties upon it." Dede Cummings, Green Writers Press

Ashland Creek Press often states that "ecofiction is fiction with a conscience." -John Yunker

Characteristics

Given that "Ecocriticism seems to be inherently interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, syncretic, holistic, and evolutionary in its nature," it would seem useful to apply these traits to the large field of literature that is ecofiction, especially given its history, reach, and continuity.

Interdisciplinary and holistic: Ecofiction can be seen as an umbrella for, or laterally relative to, many genres and subgenres and works well within the parameters of the main categories of speculative fiction, contemporary fiction, Anthropocene fiction, climate fiction, literary fiction, eco-futurist and solarpunk fictions, magical realism, ecological weird fiction, and more. Further, while ecofiction is "fiction with a conscience," per John Yunker, as shown above, it reveals integrity in the concern for our natural world as well as what can be found on numerous storytelling platforms: mystery, thriller, suspense, romance, dystopian, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, Arcadian, futuristic, crime, detective, and so on. Given the upstream and downstream effects of such issues as climate change, fracking, coal mining, animal justice, pollution, deforestation, and so on, this branch of fiction is not inclusive and has no demarcation other than the environmental and nature impacts by which it is defined and explained.

Cross-cultural and syncretic: Ecofiction is written by authors all over the world. Environmental issues, the desire to protect our natural ecological systems, and the praise of nature is an all-encompassing intention of many authors, which crosses all borders, languages, ethnicities, and belief systems. Many ecofiction novels incorporate LGBT and other egalitarian social issues that mirror sustainable, peaceful, and just environmental futures.

Developing: Dwyer's field guide has hundreds of examples of ecofiction across time, from the roots and precursors---the earliest cave drawings, pastoral and classic, etc.--up through the 21st century. The continuity goes on. In May 2017, writing in The New York Times, Yale scholar Wai Chee Dimock reviewed Jeff VanderMeer's novel Borne and said, "This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the 21st century will be as good as any from the 20th, or the 19th."  Two months later, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment's (ASLE) 17th biennial conference focused on ecofiction as one of its main streams. Ecofiction continues to be alive and relevant, evolving into contemporary study and a way of thinking about new literature.

Ecofiction, true to its evolutionary nature, encapsulates the most recent of our environmental crises: climate change. By the time Dwyer's big field study was published in 2010, already climate change had been engaging authors to write cautionary or disaster tales for a few decades. In his field guide, Dwyer cited such examples of climate change fiction as The Swarm and The Day After Tomorrow—also noting that "Ecofiction rarely fares well in escapist Hollywood." [Ibid. p. 92.] The first anthropogenic global warming (AGW) novel may have been Arthur Herzog's Heat, published in 1977, though plenty of novels up until then imagined or speculated climate change or events. While ecofiction has included AGW fiction since the 1970s, the past decade has also introduced newer specific genres to handle climate change, such as climate fiction, Anthroprocene fiction, and solarpunk. Thus, true to the evolutionary characteristic of ecofiction, from early pastoralism to modern science's understanding of global warming, hundreds of authors have taken up the issue of climate change in the least as a backdrop to their novels or, more heavily, as a moral, didactic cautionary tale centering around this foreboding, current, and very real environmental catastrophe. An environmental fiction database lists hundreds of climate and other novels falling into the ecofiction genre.

History

While the term "ecofiction" is contemporary, as of the 1970s, its precursors are ancient and include many First People's fictionalizing nature in written form, including pictograms, petroglyphs, and creation myths. Classical literature, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Latin pastoral literature, continued this exaltation of nature as did Medieval European literature, such as Arthurian lore and Shakespeare's tales, followed by Romanticism, traditional pastoralism, and transcendentalism.

Dwyer notes that Kenneth Grahame's The Wind and The Willows, as well as many nonfiction authors, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Margaret Fuller, and John Muir, had "strong influences on modern ecological thought, environmentalism, and ecofiction."

Up through the late 19th century, classics such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, and Sarah Orne Jewett's The White Heron and Other Stories and The Country of Pointed Firs, among many others, had eco-themes. In the 20th and 21st centuries, nature-related fiction evolved and continued, including eco-feminist fiction writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Austin. Four "radical" authors also came on the scene: Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, B. Traven, and Upton Sinclair. Environmental science fiction also became popular from authors like Laurence Manning, George Orwell, William Golding, and Aldous Huxley. Regional environmentalists and authors, such as Zora Neale Hutson, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, also wrote about problems in their locales. Conservationists and environmentalists, such as Wallace Stegner and George R. Stewart, also contributed. J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology classics went down into history showing famous and iconic battles of industrialization vs. nature. Postwar ecofiction writers arrived too, such as science fiction authors who were cautionary about the environment: Clifford Simak, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few. Enter Peter Matthiessen and Edward Abbey, which Dwyer says are "arguably the most important and enduring new green voices to emerge in this period." And others, such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure, represented "presentations of the nascent environmental consciousness of the Beat movement." [Ibid.]

This brings us up to the 1970s, when, as Dwyer points out, "ecofiction in all genres truly flourished...which might be considered the década de oro (golden age)," heralded by John Stadler's anthology Eco-fiction, containing science and mainstream ecofiction written between the 1920s and 1960s. [Ibid.]

Eco-fiction, the anthology, starts with this premise: "The earth is an eco-system. It possesses a collective memory. Everything that happens, no matter how insignificant it may seem, affects in some way at some time the existence of everything else within that system. Eco-fiction raises important questions about man's place in the system: Will man continue to ignore the warnings of the environment and destroy his source of life? Will he follow the herd into the slaughterhouse?" The anthology included the authors Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, A. E. Coppard, James Agee, Robert M. Coates, Daphne du Maurier, Robley Wilson Jr., E. B. White, J. F. Powers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Herbert, H. H. Munro, J. G. Ballard, Steven Scharder, Isaac Asimov, and William Saroyan. Dwyer stated that the title of Stadler's Eco-fiction was his first knowledge of the term ecofiction. [Ibid.]

Jonathan Levin goes on to explain, "Two key events helped spark this new environmental awareness [leading to ecofiction]: the controversy surrounding proposed dams on the Colorado River that led ultimately to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam (begun in the mid-1950s and completed about ten years later), and the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's exposé of the environmental impact of toxic pesticides like DDT. Both generated widespread media coverage, bringing complex and urgent environmental issues and the ecological vocabularies that helped explain them into the American lexicon." 

Social impact

Ecofiction is often said to be an agent for social change. For example, in 2016, the World Economic Forum's Rosamund Hutt listed "9 novels that changed the world." Among these were two novels that may be considered ecofiction, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (about the dust bowl, which was caused by farmers failing to use smart ecological principles) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (about Chicago's meat-packing industry). Both novels reached far and wide, and are considered to be among the classics of social change novels.

Researchers have recently begun to empirically examine the influence of environmentally engaged literature on its readers. For example, scholars have found that literary fiction can make readers more concerned about animal welfare and climate change and raise awareness of environmental injustice.

Academic groups

• The Association for Literature and the Environment (ASLE)
• The Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC)
• Cambridge Ecofiction Bookgroup: An initiative of the MML and English Faculty Libraries at Cambridge University
• European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE)

Examples

• The Butterfly Effect, Rajat Chaudhuri
• Borne, Jeff VanderMeer
• Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta
• Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad
• Nature's Confession, JL Morin
• Rokit, Loranne Vella
• The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin
• Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
• American War, Omar El Akkad
• The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
• Oil on Water, Helon Habila
• The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
• Barkskins, Annie Proulx
• Float, JoeAnn Hart and My Last Continent, Midge Raymond
• The Man with Compound Eyes, Wu Ming-Yi
• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
• The Overstory, Richard Powers
• Side Chick Nation, Aya de León
• Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson

Popular science & Nature writing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_science 

Title page of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), an early popular-science book.

Popular science (also called pop-science or popsci) is an interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is more broad-ranging. It may be written by professional science journalists or by scientists themselves. It is presented in many forms, including books, film and television documentaries, magazine articles, and web pages.

History and role

As early as 1830, astronomer John Herschel had recognized the need for the genre of popular science. In a letter to philosopher William Whewell, he wrote that the general public needed "digests of what is actually known in each particular branch of science... to give a connected view of what has been done, and what remains to be accomplished." Indeed, as the British population became not just increasingly literate but also well-educated, there was growing demand for science titles. Mary Somerville became an early and highly successful science writers of the nineteenth century. Her On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), intended for the mass audience, sold quite well. Arguably one of the first books in the genre of popular science, it contained few diagrams and very little mathematics. It had ten editions and was translated into multiple languages. It was the most popular science title from the publisher John Murray until On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin.

Popular science is a bridge between scientific literature as a professional medium of scientific research, and the realms of popular political and cultural discourse. The goal of the genre is often to capture the methods and accuracy of science while making the language more accessible. Many science-related controversies are discussed in popular science books and publications, such as the long-running debates over biological determinism and the biological components of intelligence, stirred by popular books such as The Mismeasure of Man and The Bell Curve.

The purpose of scientific literature is to inform and persuade peers as to the validity of observations and conclusions and the forensic efficacy of methods. Popular science attempts to inform and convince scientific outsiders (sometimes along with scientists in other fields) of the significance of data and conclusions and to celebrate the results. Statements in the scientific literature are often qualified and tentative, emphasizing that new observations and results are consistent with and similar to established knowledge wherein qualified scientists are assumed to recognize the relevance. By contrast, popular science emphasizes uniqueness and generality, taking a tone of factual authority absent from the scientific literature. Comparisons between original scientific reports, derivative science journalism, and popular science typically reveal at least some level of distortion and oversimplification which can often be quite dramatic, even with politically neutral scientific topics.

Popular science literature can be written by non-scientists who may have a limited understanding of the subject they are interpreting and it can be difficult for non-experts to identify misleading popular science, which may also blur the boundaries between real science and pseudoscience. However, sometimes non-scientists with a fair scientific background and strong technical communication skills can make good popular science writers because of their ability to put themselves in the layperson's place more easily.

Common threads

Some usual features of popular science productions include:

• Entertainment value or personal relevance to the audience
• Emphasis on uniqueness and radicalness
• Exploring ideas overlooked by specialists or falling outside of established disciplines
• Generalized, simplified science concepts
• Presented for an audience with little or no science background, hence explaining general concepts more thoroughly
• Synthesis of new ideas that cross multiple fields and offer new applications in other academic specialties
• Use of metaphors and analogies to explain difficult or abstract scientific concepts

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_writing 

Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural history facts (such as field guides) to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays of solitude or escape, as well as travel and adventure writing.

Nature writing often draws heavily on scientific information and facts about the natural world; at the same time, it is frequently written in the first person and incorporates personal observations of and philosophical reflections upon nature.

Modern nature writing traces its roots to the works of natural history that were popular in the second half of the 18th century and throughout the 19th. An important early figures was the "parson-naturalist" Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), a pioneering English naturalist and ornithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).

William Bartram (1739 – 1823) is a significant early American pioneer naturalist who first work was published in 1791.

Pioneers

Gilbert White is regarded by many as England's first ecologist, and one of those who shaped the modern attitude of respect for nature. He said of the earthworm: "Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. [...] worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them" White and William Markwick collected records of the dates of emergence of more than 400 plant and animal species in Hampshire and Sussex between 1768 and 1793, which was summarised in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, as the earliest and latest dates for each event over the 25-year period, are among the earliest examples of modern phenology.

The tradition of clerical naturalists predates White and can be traced back to some monastic writings of the Middle Ages, although some argue that their writings about animals and plants cannot be correctly classified as natural history. Notable early parson-naturalists were William Turner (1508–1568), John Ray (1627–1705), William Derham (1657–1735).

William Bartram, in 1773, embarked on a four-year journey through eight southern American colonies. Bartram made many drawings and took notes on the native flora and fauna, and the native American Indians. In 1774, he explored the St. Johns River. William Bartram wrote of his experiences exploring the Southeast in his book known today as Bartram's Travels, published in 1791. Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, in their book, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, name Bartram as "the first naturalist who penetrated the dense tropical forests of Florida."

After Gilbert White and William Bartram, other significant writers include American ornithologist John James Audubon (1785 – 1851), Charles Darwin( (1809 – 1882), Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887), Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813 – 1894), mother of American nature writing, and Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), who is often considered the father of modern American nature writing, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) John Burroughs, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, M. Krishnan, and Edward Abbey (although he rejected the term for himself).

Another important early work is A History of British Birds by Thomas Bewick, published in two volumes. Volume 1, "Land Birds", appeared in 1797. Volume 2, "Water Birds", appeared in 1804. The book was effectively the first "field guide" for non-specialists. Bewick provides an accurate illustration of each species, from life if possible, or from skins. The common and scientific name(s) are listed, citing the naming authorities. The bird is described, with its distribution and behaviour, often with extensive quotations from printed sources or correspondents. Critics note Bewick's skill as a naturalist as well as an engraver.

Contemporary Europe

Some important contemporary figures in Britain include Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, and Oliver Rackham. Rackham's books included Ancient Woodland (1980) and The History of the Countryside (1986). Richard Maybey has been involved with radio and television programmes on nature, and his book Nature Cure, describes his experiences and recovery from depression in the context of man's relationship with landscape and nature. He has also edited and introduced editions of Richard Jefferies, Gilbert White, Flora Thompson and Peter Matthiessen. Mark Crocker has written extensively for British newspapers and magazines and his books include Birds Britannica (with Richard Mabey) (2005). and Crow Country (2007). He frequently writes about modern responses to the wild, whether found in landscape, human societies or in other species. Roger Deakin was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist. In 1999, Deakin's acclaimed book Waterlog was published. Inspired in part by the short story The Swimmer by John Cheever, it describes his experiences of 'wild swimming' in Britain's rivers and lakes and advocates open access to the countryside and waterways. Deakin's book Wildwood appeared posthumously in 2007. It describes a series of journeys across the globe that Deakin made to meet people whose lives are intimately connected to trees and wood. In 2016, Peter Wohllebens book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, was translated from German into English and became a New York Times Bestseller.

In 2017 the German book publishing company Matthes & Seitz Berlin started to grant the German Award for Nature Writing, an annual literary award for writers in German language that excellently fulfil the criteria of the literary genre. It comes with a prize money of 10.000 Euro and additionally an artist in residency grant of six weeks at the International Academy for Nature Conservation of Germany on the German island Vilm. The British Council in 2018 is offering an education bursary and workshops to six young German authors dedicated to Nature writing.