The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Nature Notes
The nature essay has taken on a new status
in the environmentally conscious post-natural
age. It's more evidently, or inevitably,
political, and nature extends well beyond
plants and animals to geology, history, and
sociology. Conger Beasley, Jr., in Sundancers
and River Demons: Essays on Landscape and
Ritual (U. Arkansas P, $24.95 US), indicates
even in his subtitle that "sensitivity to the
nuances of topography" should imply a
simultaneous reading of ethnographic
nuances. According to Beasley, "the way we
perceive landscape can have a direct bearing
upon the way we preceive society and the
human being who comprise it. Dismissing
a landscape because it does not conform to
preconceptions is a prejudice as galling as
dismissing people because of the color of
their skin or the beliefs they profess. It violates
the biological urge toward multiplicity
and diversity that energizes our planet."
Conger's nature/travel essays search out,
consequently, landscapes and people which
preconceptions would dismiss: the apparently
stagnant Grand Turk Island, or the
bleached austerity of Santa Cruz Island.
The most moving of the essays is "Country
to Make You Weep," which sculpts the contours
of the South Dakota Badlands by
muffling and truncating the story of an old
Sioux woman whose daughter has died.
The bleakest of Conger's bleak landscapes is
"Point Center: Cairo Illinois," where a
young boy dies in the street: Conger's feel
for the poetics of nature writing where the
middle is a void, and landscape is absence,
should have a particular resonance for
readers of Canadian literature.
John A. Murray's anthology A Republic of
Rivers: Three Centuries of Nature Writing
from Alaska and the Yukon (Oxford: $24.95)
touches Canada at its northern boundary.
This chronological selection of short
excerpts also demonstrates the new politics
of the nature essay: an excerpt from Captain
Cook's journal, and Georg Wilhelm Steller's
closely observed account (ca. 1741-42) of
the now-extinct Steller's sea cow frame the
anthropological concerns in Richard
Nelson's recuperation of the Koyukon's
ecologically balanced subsistence cycle, and
the problematics of translations in transformation
legends of the Haida and Inupiat.
Two of the best contemporary nature writers
are represented with journals of river
journeys: Barry Lopez concentrates not on
"the vegetation...but its presentation," as he
follows the Charley and Yukon Rivers, while
Edward Abbey advances a more cynical
politics by quoting a construction worker:
"'We're here for the megabucks, and nothing
else."' But Murray's anthology is too
deliberately historical, and too inclined to
the two-or-three page excerpt to make as
satisfying reading as Beasley, or indeed as
Wayne Grady's anthology From the
Country: Writings About Rural Canada
(Camden House, $12.95), which in its sea
(Atlantic) to sea (Pacific) to sea (Arctic)
organization inclines to such writers as Edna
Staebler, Alistair Madeod, Norman Levine
or Heather Robertson, who have both a
keen eye and some flair for language. In