“In Nature,” said Coleridge, “there is nothing melancholy.” I don’t know about that. I suppose there are lots of people who will greet American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau with joy, but both politics and temperament predisposed me against the book.1 I had agreed to review it in a moment of weakness, but when it thumped down onto my desk—115 extracts from 101 authors in close to a thousand galley pages of almost nothing but text (“80 pages of color inserts” will be included in the finished product, the publisher assures me), melancholy is what ensued.
Politics. The presence of that foreword by Al Gore and the inclusion of his 1997 speech at the Kyoto conference on climate change alert us to the fact that writing about nature has nowadays largely been taken over by leftist scolds and prophets of doom, urging us to REPENT! or the end of all things will be upon us.
What we are called upon to repent turns out to be free-market capitalism and our deplorable attachments to consumer goods, suburban living, and individual liberty. Environmentalists, one cannot help thinking, do not like human beings very much as we are. Some of them seek to improve us along the lines of New Soviet Man; some— Les Knight’s Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, at least—sincerely believe that the universe would be better off without us altogether.
Temperament.An innate, unprompted interest in the natural world is, like other aspects of the
