Comrades:

Theodore Roosevelt

The president with the big stick really liked what I did to preserve wild lands. I wasn't fully comfortable with the whole big stick idea, however; in Teddy's case, that big stick was often a big hunting rifle leaving a trail of dead animals. I thought that hunting did nothing but bolster the president's image as a macho frontiersman; it wasn't like Teddy need to hunt in order to eat.

Still, TR did a lot of good for wilderness preservation on the whole, so I have to count him as a comrade.

Rachel Carson

I never crossed paths with Rachel, but she shared my view that nature writing should be less anthropocentric and more centered around the needs of nonhuman life. Back before the 60s, people wanted to think of nature as just a backdrop for sunny, pleasant human behavior—it was all singing birds and talking animals and magic waterfalls.

Rachel's book Silent Spring revealed how pollution and degraded ecosystems were a truer reflection of how people were interacting with nature. She put the teeth into nature writing; in fact, it was this scathing 1962 critique that finally made the environmental movement get real.

Henry David Thoreau

I can't say that I'm the kind of guy who gives up a real job to go live in the woods for two years (I like making money and being clean-shaven), but I dig this guy's attitude about living life. Thoreau wanted people to live life deliberately and close to the land. His most famous work Walden, was a major influence on my thinking and especially my writing. (Not my personal hygiene, however.)

Thoreau's nature writing is not just about describing scenery. In his writing, nature is more than just inspiration for a few poems about daffodils and fluffy clouds, and crickets and ferns and loons are more than metaphors for human experience. For Henry, these are all actual living things. Thoreau started the process of undoing the damage done to nature by human-centered interpretations of what nature is.

John Muir

I never met the guy, but it was John Muir who kept this whole nature-writing thing going in the generation just after Thoreau. Thoreau, Muir, Carson, and I were the poetic oddballs of our generations, the ones who were trying to write about nature as more than just something humans were given dominion over.

Muir saw the face of God everywhere in Yosemite Valley; it was like he was in church 24/7. He's important for ecocriticism because his religious or spiritual views of nature influenced people to act with reverence for nature instead of thinking that God had given them nature to use in any way they saw fit.

Rivals:

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that there wasn't anyone I could really call a rival. I came from privilege: I was a government employee, my family had the means to comfortably live through the Great Depression, and I had the luxury of writing when many people had to struggle to survive. Environmentalists discovered my writing in the 1970s, and when they did, they had few negative things to say about me.

The people who have taken me to task came much later. Let's talk about a few of them.

Dale R. McCullough

This guy is a well-trained environmentalist. He was taught that I was the man, that all language about environmental preservation leads back to me. Now, that's not completely true. As Professor McCullough points out, wildlife management programs existed at the University of Michigan, Iowa State, and Cornell at the same time I was teaching in Wisconsin; of course I wasn't the first guy to come up with this stuff.

Nevertheless, as McCullough points out, I was the first person to write about this stuff poetically. I took the scientific language of ecosystem studies and it in a literary way; that's why I'm considered the father of ecocriticism. I started the process of making science a type of literature all its own.

Tourists

Let's face it: tourists and their vehicles roar into the wilderness and create a lot of noise and pollution. They tear up trails, make messes, and then just pick up and leave.

I'm not a big fan of the National Park System. I think that only people with the proper mental state should be hanging out in nature; going camping isn't like going to the movies or to an amusement park. It's serious business, and it requires a special kind of person to appreciate it.

I guess that makes me sound elitist. I can't really argue against that. I admit it: I just don't like tourists.

Paul Errington

Paul was a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin. He thought I wasn't science-y enough in my writings. It's true that I didn't get a PhD in biology, and much of my writing reflects a naturalist's point of view rather than a scientific examination or disputation of specific hypotheses.

My discussions with Paul got kind of heated a number of times. Paul thought my spiritual view of nature got in the way of analyzing the science. I, on the other hand, thought Paul needed to let his hair down. He needed to not be such a robot and to allow his own imagination help inform his science.

Albert Hochbaum

Albert was one of my most annoying graduate assistants. If I think hard enough about it, his constant badgering challenged me to change my opinion about the killing of predators. Basically, my arguments with Hochbaum made me realize the importance of limiting big game hunting.

Because of Hochbaum's challenge, I wrote a story about the "green fire" I saw going out in the eye of a dying wolf I had shot. I wanted to make people realize how destructive the human influence was on the natural world by showing them what life might look like in the eyes of other beings.

It turns out that the "green fire" story became a major metaphor in ecocriticism and a major influence on environmentalism in general. So I've got to give Hochbaum credit for inspiring me to write that story.