The Hindu Business Line : Green ink

"Silent Spring is now noisy summer," wrote The New York Times in July 1962 about a compilation of Rachel Carson's persuasive writing it had serialised just weeks ago. In articles questioning the use of chemical pesticides, Carson had passed a scathing verdict on the feckless facet of science, well before it had bared itself. "The insects are winning: We're on a pesticide treadmill," she wrote. "On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh... Even the streams were now lifeless... No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves."

The book's compelling message of environmental connectedness found numerous takers, including J.F. Kennedy, so much so that the national debate the book triggered culminated in a ban on the domestic production of DDT. Four-and-a-half decades later, the book is as much a stirring reminder of the toll progress can extract from nature, as a tribute to the potential of nature writing in helping us command a view of the present and the future.

For a world caught in a tussle between economic growth and global warming, it makes sense to return to some of the genre's classics; their canvas straddling the joy of discovery and the anxiety of destruction, their narratives rich with intimate dramas, and their messages almost prophetic. On the man-nature relationship, little is as seminal as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, which establishes that to comprehend how one should live one's life, one must turn not to God, the State or the society, but to nature.

As someone who was undecided as a young adult on whether he wanted to become a writer or follow in the footsteps of his father, a Unitarian minister, and who did serve a brief, unsuccessful stint as a minister at Boston's Second Church to emerge antagonised by the era's rigid orthodoxy, Emerson in Nature foretells a lot of later-day science from the theory of evolution by natural selection to matter being made of energy, even suggesting a good 150 years in advance that all of physical reality might well be a holographic projection.

The miracle, stated Emerson, is life itself, in which God exists, in the "ray of the star", the "wavelet of the pool", the human soul. "We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants... Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?" Central to Nature is the belief that interdependence lies at the core of life.

Walden musings

Nature's lab: The cabin built by Henry David Thoreau on the shore of the Walden Pond.

It's more than a coincidence that Emerson had once examined Henry David Thoreau, 14 years younger to him, at a college. Records reveal that Thoreau often took Emerson's Nature out of the college library. It isn't clear how much Emerson influenced Thoreau, but the latter's Walden marks one of our profligate world's most contrarian experiments in living. A few days short of his 28th birthday, Thoreau built a toy cabin in second-growth woods on the shore of the Walden Pond and lived there "sturdily and Spartan-like" for over two years. Meaning to think and write there with minimal distraction, he couldn't resist studying the minutiae of the nature around.

Even as his friends and neighbours outside went about their ordinary pursuits of survival and status, he chose to distance himself to look closely at the meaning of life, his own and theirs, trying to figure out that if life thus stripped bare "proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

When first published in 1854, the book was largely ignored — the first 2,000 copies took five years to sell. A good 150 years later, look at how the Walden Woods Project, spurred by the book, continues to protect from land sharks the 2,680-acre ecosystem surrounding the pond. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau had observed. "Men have become the tools of their tools."

Dreaming in Polar colours

For literature of nature to catalyse a reorganisation of political thought, avers Barry Lopez, it is necessary "to pay attention to what occurs in a land not touched by human schemes, where an original order prevails". His own book Arctic Dreams, a meditation on the Arctic resulting from his five-year journey as a field biologist throughout the North, including Baffin Island, Siberia and Greenland, sets out to do just that for the endangered polar region, among the world's last, most extensive continuous wilderness areas.

In celebrating its flora, fauna and people, Lopez seeks to unravel the influences of landscape and its exploitation, and what it means to grow rich (which he equates with living at "moral peace with the universe"). His book, weaving biology and history into storytelling, emphasises that by making us "stumble", wilderness calls our attention to our "narrow impetuosity".

"It is precisely because the regimes of light and time in the Arctic are so different," he writes, "that this landscape is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general." Published nearly two decades ago, had Arctic Dreams anticipated the onslaught of human industrialism? Given that the Arctic Summer Sea is losing 10 per cent of itself every year to global warming and that polar bears are doomed for extinction in another 20 years, the answer might well be anybody's guess.

Pilgrim's progress

John Muir's The Mountains of California and Travels to Alaska are examples of the power of books in eliciting support for a conservationist ideology. The message of how "the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual" accompanies an evocative description of the natural drama on the verge of being lost. "Plants and animals," he observes of the close of the glacial period in California, "biding their time, closely followed the retiring ice, bestowing quick and joyous animation on the newborn landscapes." For someone who roamed the entire Sierra Nevada range with little more than sacks of bread and blankets, wearing a three-piece suit and a necktie to find evidence of huge vanished glaciers, the moving masses of ice represented spiritual beings, finding whom was tantamount to witnessing God in the act of creation. While writing about the melting glaciers and the logged and grazed meadows and forests of California or an Alaska systematically plundered by whaling, fur trading and mining, he demonstrated the profundity of nature's intricate working.

Annie Dillard's Pulitzer-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is what resulted when "a poet and a walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts" spent four seasons in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. This collection of essays (Dillard hated it being labelled so) resonates her little valley and even the most banal farms, outbuildings, barbed-wire fences, rough pastures, and bushes run over by beat-up beer-cans with pressing ecological concerns of our times.

Instead of panthers, wildcats, and buffalo, she encounters water bugs, muskrats, and starlings as she ranges through a landscape cleared for roads, motorbike trails and retaining walls for the creeks, all the while reflecting on the nature of the world and of the force that animates it. In many ways, she is more about celebrating the immediate nature around us than mere bucolic yearnings. For alerting us to environmental crises we can ill-afford to ignore, it's time the fast disappearing genre of nature writing received a breath of life from contemporary environmentalism.