Director, Environmental Studies
Professor of English

TWO TAXONOMIES OF NATURE WRITING AND THE ECOSYSTEM APPROACH

Taxonomies have several functions

They identify and highlight diversity within this genre.
They tell us something of the qualities of nature writing.
They provides a vocabulary for analyzing nature writing.
They enable us to compare texts in terms of the categories.

Thomas J. Lyon's taxonomy of nature writing
This Incomparable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing. Ed. Thomas J. Lyon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Lyons proposes three main dimensions of nature writing
> natural history information
> personal responses to nature
> philosophical interpretation of nature

He expands this to a“spectrum” of types in which the three elements appear in different emphasis.
1. Field guides and professional papers: Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds (1961).

2. Natural history essays: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1950).

3. Rambles: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).

4. Essays on experiences in nature, with three sub-types:
> Solitude and back-country living: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854).
> Travel and adventure: William Bartram’s Travels (1791).
> Farm life: Wendell Berry’s A Continuous Harmony (1972).

5. Man’s role in nature: Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Great Chain of Life (1956).

Patrick D. Murphy's taxonomy of nature writing
Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Patrick D. Murphy suggests a broader category of “nature-oriented literature” that includes Lyon ’s nature writing as well as much more.

Murphy makes two crucial distinctions.

1. The first is between “writing” and “literature.”
> literature (especially poetry and fiction) is primarily driven by narrative and aesthetic considerations
> in writing rhetorical strategies predominate, even if narrative and aesthetic techniques are used.

2. The second distinction is between “nature” and “environmental.”
> In environmental writing and literature, there is a significant degree of “authorial self-consciousness about environmental issues and problems” (5)
> These are relatively absent in nature writing and literature.

Thus Murphy extends Lyons by
> including literature as well as essays
> including works on environmental problems as well as nature's beauty and value

This results is four "modes" of nature writing
> Nature writing (personal essay that presents a substantial view of nature and human-nature interaction, e.g., Walden)
> Nature literature (poetry, fiction, drama, and literary nonfiction that presents a substantial view of nature and human-nature interaction, e.g., Moby Dick )
> Environmental writing (on wilderness defense, environmental ethics, and sustainable agriculture, e.g., Silent Spring )
> Environmental literature (poetry and fiction that critiques environmental degradation and imagines positive alternatives, e.g., some poems by Gary Snyder).

The ecosystem approach versus taxonomies

Both approaches gives us a vocabulary to talk about the diversity within nature writing, but the ecosystem approach helps us to recognize the internal complexity of individual works by distinguishing seven basic elements found within texts.

Like taxonomical categories, the seven elements give us a general sense of various qualities of nature writing: natural history, personal experience, philosophy of nature, ecopsychology, social and cultural reflections, and ecopolitics . As such, the ecosystem approach gives us a vocabulary to analyze what is going on in a text. A taxonomy provides the vocabulary to do this, but then hinders this goal by locating a text in only one category. By highlighting various elements within one work, the ecosystem approach helps the reader analyze the shifts and richness of the text: one paragraph may present, say, natural history, while the next may articulate a philosophy of nature, and then turn to an ecosocial critique.

The ecosystem approach enables us to analyze the interrelations among the diverse elements. While taxonomies set up separate categories and isolate texts within one, the seven elements co-exist in a single work. Texts are not just collections of up to seven elements but an integrated network, and an important type of analysis concerns how each element affects and is affected by the others.

The elements give us a structure to compare different texts, in a more nuanced way than taxonomies can. Lyon places Walden and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House in the category of “Solitude or Back-country Living,” which helps us understand a basic similarity. But there are also substantial differences, which we can uncover by comparing all the elements in each text. A comparison of all the elements in each text would help us articulate both the similarities and the differences, thus underscoring how texts are distinct but interrelated, rather than being members of separate categories.

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