Green Reader
Essay extract
Mary Austin – The land of little rain
“If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and cattlemen, will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land and going back to it.”
Gregg Mitman – Reel Nature
“Longing for the authentic, nostalgic for an innocent past, we are drawn to the spectacle of wildlife untainted by human intervention and will.”
John Daniel – A Word in Favor of Rootlessness
“I worry, for one thing, that we will settle in place so pervasively that no unsettled places will remain.”
Thomas J. Lyon – A Taxonomy of Nature Writing
“Often [wilderness accounts are] framed on the great mythic pattern of departure, initiation, and return, and always the account gains meaning from the basic American circumstance that wilderness, where the traveler and adventurer usually go, has always in our history been considered a realm apart.”
Green Reader 