Our Dramatic Relationship With the Natural World
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Nature writing has always been a little unsatisfying to me, I’ll admit. Unlike our relationships with other humans, which are tinged with friction and love and all the other ingredients of drama, our encounters with the natural world seemed fairly static. Nature exists out there: We walk through it, we enjoy its beauty, we sometimes feel its indiscriminate wrath. But there is not much back-and-forth. Or so I assumed. This week, Kelly McMasters gave me a lot to think about, and to read, with a about our connections to nature, a, which is about her experience swimming across nine American waterways, including the Hudson and the Mississippi, each time feeling personally transformed and acquiring a new, visceral understanding of the landscape. Or Terry Tempest Williams’s , about the Great Salt Lake region where she grew up, a geography, McMasters writes, of “fear and comfort,” in which a troubling rise in the lake’s water level was affecting the local humans and birds. In each of these books, people find themselves having a fraught—and dramatic—confrontation with the animals, trees, and land around them. Reading about these titles, I suddenly realized that one of my own favorite books of 2023 did exactly this same thing.
