I’m Over White Male Nature Writing

Give me the stories of messiness and complexity that comes with a real life

Sometime around the onset of the pandemic, in early 2020, I stopped being capable of reading white male nature writing. This was strange because I’d spent a great portion of my life devouring the writings of famous white male writers like Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. My bookshelves were lined with their collections and I longed for those kinds of lonely nights spent staring out at the desert or up at the mountains in complete solitude that could finally awaken that creative genius that would help me write the next great nature book. 

When I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2015, I assumed that I’d finally unraveled the opportunity to have these kinds of solitary, sublime experiences that made for classic nature writing. Finally, I too would see mountains as cathedrals, deserts as philosophical wonderlands, landscapes as my muse. 

Instead, I found myself loading and unloading a tiny apartment dishwasher, scrubbing mildew out of bathroom tiles, writing grad school papers, watching Parks & Recreation to unwind, going out to eat, and just generally living life. There were plenty of weekend hikes and camping trips with friends, lots of time lounging in a hammock next to Boulder Creek, and other outdoor endeavors, but never that sort of wild solitude that made for a soul-shattering nature book.

Feeling like a failure, I tried to turn my own mundanity into these grand escapes and deep delves into the self, but that kind of writing rang hollow and forced and publishers didn’t want it (thank god). But instead of seeing those rejections for what they were — a cringe at a falsely crafted moment that didn’t honestly reflect my lived experience — I doubled down and tried even harder to deceive myself and my readers into believing I’d experienced nature in a way I simply hadn’t. 

Then the pandemic hit, and my ability to go on wild adventures came to a screeching halt. Even though I was living on a cliff edge of Boulder Canyon, on the perimeter of a nature preserve, with access to some of the most gorgeous landscapes, my writing completely stopped. Who would possibly want to read about the life of a 27-year-old just living in a town, walking well-known trails, occasionally identifying a bird or two? With no way left to even fake ecstatic reverie for the natural world, what was the point? 

I went back to my bookshelves seeking inspiration. But as I flipped through the well-worn pages covered in marginalia, I found myself thinking only one thing: bullshit. 

I think it was the callousness of the pandemic, its abrupt aggression, that made me see these books in a new light.

I already knew that Ed Abbey’s account in Desert Solitaire wasn’t entirely accurate; despite the title of the book and pages upon pages of lonely, solitary experiences, most of that time was shared with at least one of his four wives and children he had with them. These relationships are almost never mentioned, and when they are, it’s often to criticize the culture and his disconnection from the natural world. 

But even the other books weren’t holding water. Writers who had once sent me swooning were now leaving me with a scrunched-up face of disapproval. Where was the actual life in these books? The real, lived messiness and uncertainty and humdrum?  Where were the people and the partners and the children and the chores? Where was the complexity? And what about emotions other than disdain for all things human? 

I’m now convinced that these writers weren’t experiencing the world in a more profound way than I was, they were just better at faking it. 

Writer Camille T. Dungy takes this issue on in a recent article for The Atlantic (and as part of her forthcoming book Soil) saying, “People are part of the natural world. And yet, loads of canonical nature writing excludes people. Such writing spends so much time in solitary meditative observation that the writers ignore nearly every human experience outside their own.”

I’d take it a step further and say a lot of that writing isn’t even accurately reflecting their own experience. Perhaps I would say that canonical nature writers ignore nearly every human experience outside the only one our culture applauds — the rugged, individualistic, solitary, stoic, masculine. 

What is so regularly left out of nature writing (and what I so actively worked to remove from my own writing during my early years in Boulder) is any sort of feminine vulnerability that might depict an actual experience rather than an idealized experience. It is so common to omit this aspect of life in nature writing that I had truly begun to believe that these writers never experienced it at all. And worse, I endured countless years of shame and self-criticism that I would never be a great nature writer if I didn’t alter my writing, but also my life to match that of these supposedly great writers.  

The only way forward, I thought, was to strip myself of anything that even hinted at sentimentality or appreciation for my human form in a world in which humans supposedly did not belong. It seemed there were only two options (which continues to be my sign that something is seriously wrong): either hate humanity and dive headlong into misanthropy to demonstrate a deep respect for “nature,” or become a greedy, shallow capitalist obsessed with the glory of humanity. 

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says that,  “Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

The loneliness I’d once worshiped, the writing off of humanity as something so reviled, now seems extremely sad and fundamentally dishonest. That sort of disdain for your own human-ness is born from an acute lack of creativity and severe unwillingness to be in communication with your own body and its infinite relations to all of everything. 

I meet with a writing group every other week, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what a writer is responsible for including (or excluding) from their work. We are all women, I am the only non-mother, and again and again in our edits to one another we find ourselves saying, “I want more of you in this piece. I want more of your experience.” Which is to say, I think, I want more of your truth and authenticity and less of this facade that traditional nature writers have encouraged us to build.

Writer Melissa Febos says in her collection Body Work, “I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define.” 

Some of these nature writers have become so hard for me to read because I see through their words and know that their creative process did not merge with the process of good living. 

I want stories about the body, emotions, gender, family, community, relationships, intuition and I want them all to “count” as nature writing. Or I want the idea of nature writing to completely dissolve because it continues to suppose that nature is somehow separate from other forms of human existence. Whichever comes first is fine by me. I want what Dungy calls, “The thicket of human happenings—a different kind of woods”.

I also want to remember what Fabos says, that “resistance to the lived stories of women, and those of all oppressed people, is a resistance to justice.” 

A writer can’t cover everything. That’s the beauty of writing — we take the wholeness of life and whittle it into something that can be held in the palm of a hand. We decide what remains and what gets brushed off as sawdust. We aim (ideally) to craft for the reader a representative aspect of a life so that they might be able to run their fingers over it and say, “I feel what she feels.” What is not our work is to craft something that feels the way the reader wants it to, or expects it to, or feels the way the culture dictates it should. 

For now, all of those carefully crafted, perfectly smooth, easily holdable nature books remain on the shelf, admirable in their own right, but ready to be remade.