The Hopes of Snakes
City Wilds: Essays and Stories About Urban Nature
American Nature Writing, 2000
The Mountain Reader
American Nature Writing 1998
The River Reader
Grrr . . . Poems About Bears
|
The River Reader
(Lyons Press, 1998)
Essay: "Reversing the Tides"
Adirondack (Magazine of the Adirondack Mountain Club)
John Murray put together a wonderful collection of classic and contemporary nature writing. The placing of these pieces side by side gives one a real sense of the depth that nature writing as a genre has attained in this country in its 200-year history. . . Here are the wonderfully familiar pieces that many of us read in high school: Ernest Hemingway writing about “the best rainbow trout fishing,” excerpts from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. . . And here too are the new voices of American nature writing, Barry Lopez on the Colorado, Rick Bass on the Yaak in Montana, Annie Dillard writing about the flood at her beloved Tinker Creek, Kathleen Dean Moore on the Willamette, John Hildebrand on the Yukon. Original voices every one. . . Lisa Couturier manages to write hopefully about a river that may be as lost as any river could possibly be, the East River in New York City. Next door to the world’s largest landfill and surrounded by fuel tanks, abandoned buildings, highways, and pollution from a thousand sources, the East River and Arthur Kill (a large tidal strait in the Hudson Estuary) are home to thousands of egrets, herons, Canada geese and ibis. The birds stare across Arthur Kill at the huge silent storage tanks of the oil and chemical companies, DuPont, Citgo, Cyanimid, and Exxon. The heronry has absorbed millions of gallons of oil spills, yet the birds, somehow, continue on.
One hopes [The] River Reader will encourage at least some of us to continue on as well in the battle to save America’s precious rivers.
--Chris Angus
|
