Do the Mountains Still Call?

This week’s medley of readings, with the exception of Emerson, consisted of writers who became prominent in the years and decades following Thoreau’s death. Of these writers, I will focus on three—Emerson, Muir, and Leopold. Emerson and Muir have in common, along with Thoreau, that they are amateur naturalists, and their writings are celebrations of the awe-inspiring sublimity of nature. Leopold is a trained scientist, and his writings do, in some ways reflect this, often investigating specific aspects of the natural world and how they are connected.

The obvious questions are how Emerson, Thoreau’s contemporary, compares to him and how environmental writing seems to have developed since these two earlier writers. In some ways, the answers to these questions seem just as obvious. Emerson shares some notable similarities. His discussion of the stars and of the ownership (or lack thereof) of land are remarkably reflective of some passages out of Walden. Leopold is markedly different in content, being far more scientifically bent. In terms of subject, he is less philosophical than Thoreau or Emerson—he is tangible and rooted in the physical, measurable world. Muir falls somewhere between these two, in my estimation. He begins to move towards Leopold in statements such as his declaration in My First Summer in the Sierras, that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”. This is a clear allusion to the interconnectedness of nature, a key principle in the natural sciences, from ecology, to cell biology, to biochemistry.

So the differences are apparent and obvious. However, if you’ve been paying close attention to the brief discussion above you have probably already noticed that the differences highlighted are mostly derived from the content the authors write about. In other areas, their writings are actually quite similar. Thoreau by far, uses the most intricate and convoluted literary conventions. His sentences are long and winding and his writings are deeply steeped in metaphor and symbolism. But other stylistic and tonal aspects are held in common between all four writers—particularly Emerson, Muir and Leopold. Perhaps the most obvious of these traits is the tendency to use vivid, powerful imagery. Even Leopold is high descriptive in a way that is far more poetic than we would probably associate with scientific writing today. How many evolutionary biologists have you heard saying or writing “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution”? Few, if any, I would imagine.

In many ways, I feel like the deep interconnectedness between celebrating and studying nature, and poetic, engaging writing is lost on many researchers today, who bemoan that the public is losing interest science and discovery. They expect the facts and innovations they uncover to speak to the general public in the same way that the scientists themselves view them. By now, we should be learning that it doesn’t work this way. I firmly believe that a large part of bringing science back to the forefront of the public’s mind is returning to a way of writing about the natural world that has been left behind. The mountains are calling, but unless a new Muir or Leopold tells us, there’s no way most of us will ever know.