The Environmental Imagination – Thoreau | Nature Writing & the Formation of American Culture (Paper): Thoreau | Nature Writing | and the Formation of American Culture

With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination | a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination | the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone | Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception | the place of nature in the history of western thought | and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more ecocentric way of being. In doing so | he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and | at the same time | a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.. The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention | particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry | John Muir to Aldo Leopold | Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko | Mary Austin to Edward Abbey | he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment | the personification of the nonhuman | an attentiveness to environmental cycles | a devotion to place | and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness | an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments | yet engagingly and elegantly written | The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship | one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.