The nature essay is a heterogeneous form that draws on travel narrative, philosophy, landscape description, environmental reporting, outdoor and recreational writing, natural and local history, autobiography and diary, prose fiction, and other genres. Strict boundaries cannot be drawn around the nature essay, which undergoes constant metamorphosis as it migrates through various historical and cultural contexts. The form’s aesthetic and literary dimensions are as variable as the rhetorical and political ends it can serve. Just as the word “nature” ranges in meaning to encompass many different ways of viewing and living in the world, the nature essay is not a monolithic tradition but a body of writings linked by a loose family resemblance.
Its history in English can be traced back at least as far as the 17th century to, for example, Sir William Temple’s genteel reflections upon gardens, country life, and Epicurean philosophy in “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” (1690). Temple connected classical philosophy to the pleasures of a specifically English rusticity, returning home, “after so much ramble into ancient times and remote places,” to contemplate the excellence of English apples, peaches, and grapes.
Neither Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1788) nor The Grasmere Journals (wr. 1800–03) of Dorothy Wordsworth are, strictly speaking, books of essays: White made use of an epistolary structure, addressing his careful observations of the world around him to two other English naturalists, while Dorothy Wordsworth recorded notebook entries on the places and people of Grasmere valley.
Both, however, provided models for later writers who sought to combine precise description of a specific locale with a carefully wrought, but seemingly spontaneous, prose style.
Most nature writing since the 19th century has explored, either directly or indirectly, the supposed rift between nature and culture. The assumptions that underlie this persistent dualism are often subverted, or at least subjected to fresh examination. Some critics see the nature essay as basically oppositional, a reaction to the rise of modern industrial society and mechanistic science. Many nature writers, however, take positions in harmony with modern scientific perspectives. Key concepts derived from science that have influenced nature writing include Ökologie (ecology), introduced by the German biologist Ernst Heinrich Häckel in 1866, and “ecosystem” (an interdependent system of living organisms) coined by the British ecologist A.G.Tansley in 1935. The influence of Darwinian evolutionary biology has been enormous, and a complex intertextual relation exists between Darwin’s writings and those of W.H.Hudson, John Burroughs, and many others.
The nature essay is often viewed as an essentially American genre, a tradition inspired by the 19th-century writers Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir, as well as by the enormous diversity and beauty of the American landscape itself. Although it is occasionally stigmatized as “subliterary” or as a minor genre, a substantial body of criticism and analysis has nevertheless sprung up around the nature essay. It is of central importance for understanding the relation of the self to the land, and the particular spatial configurations that shape American experience. In general American nature writing tends to combine description of particular localities with personal narratives and passages of philosophical reflection. The problem of representing the self in relation to a nonhuman natural world has occupied many nature essayists. Questions of identity, solitude, and human subjectivity repeatedly surface in American writers from Mary Austin to Gretel Ehrlich.
Interest in the form has revived since the 1970s, and some observers claim that the nature essay, particularly in the United States, has entered a new golden age, linked to the growth of ecology movements and green politics. A very selective list of contemporary American nature essayists would include Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Wallace Stegner, David Quammen, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ann Zwinger.