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JEAN ARNOLD

"From So Simple a Beginning"

Evolutionary Origins of
US Nature Writing

In the last sentence of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously

states, "From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been and are being evolved" (460). His readers
understand, of course, that the phrase, "from so simple a beginning,"
refers to the first few rudimentary forms of life that would evolve over
eons into the millions of plant and animal species that now inhabit the
Earth. Yet I would refocus Darwin's statement about a beginning in
order to critique his written work, and to propose that The Origin of
Species is an origin in itself, for the text lays foundations for nature
writing, also an "endless form... most wonderful that has been and is
being evolved..." in response to a cultural need (460). Darwin's nine-
teenth-century work on evolution has long been recognized as a foun-
dational work of science writing, containing the unifying principle for
the study of biology. Yet The Origin cannot be contained solely within
the realm of science writing, because its author's ideas exerted too
vital an influence on the world views of his entire culture, and be-
cause his work became too important a rhetorical model for subse-
quent nature writing.
While Americanist ecocritics have often acknowledged the works
of Henry David Thoreau as a basis for the US nature writing tradition,
critics focusing on Victorian Britain have uncovered valuable insights
into the influence of Darwinian discourses on British literary works.1
However, I would like to focus on Darwin's Origin as a transatlantic
predecessor for contemporary US nature writing, for it is Darwin, in
The Origin, who defines laws that form a conceptual basis for ecologi-

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10.1 (Winter 2003)

Copyright © 2003 by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
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cal views found in recent US nature writing. The Origin of Species an-
ticipates contemporary nature writing with its two main original
ideas: First, the theory of natural selection reveals the active interrela-
tion between all living things; secondly, the theory of common de-
scent effectively decenters the human place in nature.2 Concepts this
broad and all encompassing could only have been formed in the con-
text of Darwin's Victorian culture, for, at that time, scientific questions
were asked and answered outside the academy. While Darwin's meth-
ods were scientific, they were based on his own observation and expe-
rience out in the natural world, where he "grounded his sensibility
and his style in an amateur tradition of English natural history" (Finch
and Elder 159).3 He was therefore able to develop a holistic view of
nature, endorsed by uniformitarian impulses of the period.4 What is
more, his vision was conceived in persuasive language understand-
able to the British and American reading public, for his argumenta-
tion focused on changing his culture's established views about the
natural world. In tribute to Darwin's resulting influence with reading
audiences across the Atlantic, Lawrence Buell has observed that the
publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, was "as catalytic an event
for American thought as John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry the same
year, 1859" (6).
Darwin's texts must be critiqued as a basis for US nature writing,
just as Thoreau's writings have been spotlighted.5 It is important to
consider definitions and the usage of labels here, for talking about
Darwin's science writing as an origin of nature writing quickly be-
comes a consideration of genre. Recent US nature writing is based on
the assumption of an ecological point of view, defined by Donald
Worster as a "philosophy of interdependent nature" (318); furthermore,
Worster analyzes Darwin's evolutionary theory as an origin of this
ecological point of view:

The single most important figure in the history of ecology over the past
two or three centuries is Charles Darwin. No one else contributed as much
to the development of the idea of ecology into a flourishing science, and
no other individual has had so much influence generally on western man's
perception of nature. (114)

Glen Love also advocates greater attention to the connection between

our current ecology and its origin in Darwinian thought: "ecological
thinking," he writes, "must include a larger consideration of evolu-
tionary biology" ("Science" 75).
The main goal of this essay is to argue that Darwin's Origin, which
we readily designate as "science writing," is equally "nature writing,"
as it reaches toward an ecological, holistic vision of nature directly
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accessible to human understanding, the very qualities that define na-
ture writing today. Because US nature writing reenacts Darwin's sense
of personal science within the natural world, ecocriticism will need to
acknowledge fully the role of Darwin's thought in shaping contempo-
rary US ecological discourses.
While Darwin looked at the interactions between living things, we,
as readers, can look further into the interactions between types of writ-
ing about nature—science writing, nature writing, and other types of
nature-oriented literature. Here, we would recognize that genres of
writing about nature have evolved over time into specialized perspec-
tives that embody the divisions of knowledge the culture has produced.
It need hardly be said that in the twentieth century, science and the
humanities have become separate forms of knowledge that produce
the divergent genres of science writing and nature writing. Even so,
science writing and nature writing are two offspring of the same par-
ent: the human desire to experience and understand the mysteries of
nature. Yet, nature writing has defined itself in opposition to its sib-
ling, science writing, as it fills the void created by much of contempo-
rary science's retreat from human experience of the natural world.
Unlike the practice of science outside the academy in Darwin's time,
contemporary institutionalized science has splintered into professional
specialties that reach beyond the realm of normative human experi-
ence, toward esoteric physical and discursive spaces, often termed
"frontiers": the microscopic realms of genetic codes, the distant realms
of astrophysics and space exploration, the virtual realm of the com-
puter chip, or engineering on a nanoscale, in the submolecular range
"a thousandth the thickness of a human hair" (Monaghan 19).
While the predominant movement in the relation between the sci-
ences and the humanities has been one of divergence in knowledge
and forms of writing, we should count ourselves fortunate to be able
to acknowledge some notable exceptions among writers of the twenti-
eth century: Edward O. Wilson and Rachel Carson have each reached
distinction in both scientific writing and nature writing. Most impor-
tantly, because they were able to bridge the gap, they contributed sig-
nificant ideas to the larger culture. Wilson reveals a wholeness of vi-
sion toward the natural world in his sociobiological Pulitzer Prize
winning works, On Human Nature and The Ants, while his nature writ-
ing in Biophilia and The Future of Life places him among the genre's
most distinguished practitioners. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring dem-
onstrates the rigor of the author's scientific studies while having be-
come a nature writing classic that turned a Darwinian ecological sen-
sitivity into a catalyst for modern environmental debate. However, in
returning to the main point that nature writing generally fills the dis-
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cursive void created by the professionalization of science and by the
divergence of science and the humanities in contemporary times, we
could also note that nature writing thus expresses an ultimate cultural
need to represent human experience in nature, with a rhetoric acces-
sible to all people in their everyday lives.
What exactly is nature writing, then? In Farther Afield in the Study of
Nature-Oriented Literature, Patrick Murphy tells us that,

ecocritics such as Branch, Lyon, and Scheese . . . tend to converge on the

early nineteenth century in the United States as the period in which nature
writing as a distinct mode of representation of experience becomes estab-
lished. Such a type of writing makes use of natural history and scientific
observation techniques, relies on direct field experience, and refuses to
give up the inclusion of the personal, the subjective, and the literary. The
only element that might separate nature writing . . . from being labeled
nature literature is the continued emphasis on nonfiction. (46)

This description, with its inclusion of "natural history and scientific

observation,.. . direct field experience, and . .. the personal," easily
typifies Darwin's Origin of Species, too. Yet Murphy argues that the
nonfictional borders of US nature writing are restrictive in the litera-
ture classroom. Rochelle Johnson also questions nature writing's genre
boundaries as she suggests that Susan Cooper's Rural Hours (1854)
could be placed within nature writing's domain, even though the
work's factual content tends to eclipse any direct expression of the
author's subjectivity. In her essay "Placing Rural Hours," Johnson notes
that "Cooper's desire to see, study, and watch—and not wrap the world
around herself and use it as a means of self-knowledge—might be a
most useful starting point for placing Rural Hours in the nature writ-
ing tradition" (82). I would build on Johnson's critical view by placing
Darwin's Origin at the very origin of this genre. While Darwin's work
is not about self, subjectivity, or internal human nature, it is still very
much about the human experience of external nature. Taking a cue
from Murphy's and Johnson's critical output of the year 2000, as it
argues for flexible inclusion of a wider variety of works within this
field, I forward the notion that US nature writing texts of the twenti-
eth century echo Darwin's Origin of Species.
Three prominent examples of US nature writing that reflect a Dar-
winian heritage in both content and form are Aldo Leopold's A Sand
County Almanac, David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo, and Barry
Lopez's Arctic Dreams. Leopold adapts a Darwinian view of biotic in-
terrelations to US Forest Service policy that seeks to preserve wilder-
ness areas for animal habitats; Quammen adapts Darwin's biogeo-
graphical concepts to argue for plant and animal diversity within re-
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gional ecological systems; and Barry Lopez takes his cue from Darwin's
sense of awe in response to the sheer numbers of organisms in nature
and the unseen laws that govern their natural processes.

I.

Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949) develops the scope of

Darwinian ecology for eventual adaptation to US Forest Service pro-
grams for land conservation. Darwin had disparaged his culture's
"profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the be-
ings which live around us," as he focused upon the "whole machinery
of life" (Origin 68,132). Arguing against a mythic view that gives hu-
mans control over nature, Darwin offered a view that subsumed hu-
mankind under the laws and forces of nature. Both Darwin and
Leopold lamented their culture's ignorance, and saw themselves as
writers who must educate the public about biotic interrelations. In
Leopold's post World War II culture, the US government was fully
engaged in a program to build dams, develop powerful bombs, and
spawn nuclear power plants. Here Leopold disparages US cultural
ignorance about the deleterious effects of human technology upon the
natural world. He reasons, "it does not occur to us that... unexpected
chains of dependency may have wide prevalence in nature" (195). True
to Darwin's dynamically interactive view of nature, Leopold's "land
ethic" presumes that land is "not merely soil, [but] . . . a fountain of
energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals" (216).
In his famous chapter, "Marshland Elegy," Leopold mourns the pass-
ing of an ancient species of crane, while discrediting "the high priests
of progress [who] knew nothing of cranes" (100). As he mourns the
engineers' drainage of the birds' marshland habitat, Leopold asks ironi-
cally: "What is a species more or less among engineers? What good is
an undrained marsh anyhow to those who [do] not include soil, plants,
or birds in their ideas of mutuality?" (100). Gently yet inexorably,
Leopold presents human history from a natural point of view—in re-
lation to the rings of an oak tree, for instance—as he develops readerly
awareness of the complicated relations humans develop with the natu-
ral environment.
In furthering his focus on biotic mutuality, Leopold also notes in
his chapter, "Thinking Like a Mountain," that species relations exist
in a precarious balance that must not be upset by human cultural prac-
tices. Ranchers who shoot wolves that kill their cattle and hunters who
shoot wolves that kill deer cause an increase in numbers of cattle and
deer, who, in turn, overgraze the land, eventually denuding it and
causing erosion. To think "like a mountain" is to understand the his-
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tory of an effect that appears as a distant notch on the causal chain of
ecological events—to understand how predatory wolves may help to
balance ecological systems, and to preserve the land and soil humans
ultimately need to survive. Working within the framework of Darwin's
evolutionary perspective, Leopold recognized that destruction of habi-
tat leads to extinction of species; therefore he advocates that the Forest
Service preserve wilderness habitats from human encroachment and
damage. This idea led to Forest Service goals that have had profound
effects on early programs of conservation and on subsequent politics
of public land use in the U.S.

II.

Of the three works considered here, David Quammen's The Song of

the Dodo (1996) relates most directly in content to Darwin's Origin of
Species. Quammen focuses on Darwin's observation that a greater di-
versity of species exists across large land masses. Stated conversely,
the concept also holds that the smaller the land area for habitat—such
as an island—the fewer surviving species there are (Darwin, Origin
157). Quammen argues that, ultimately, human survival depends upon
the profusely diversified ecosystem that can only exist in large con-
tiguous territories. Looking back 140 years, we find Darwin asking:

Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous,
and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these
relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present
welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every
inhabitant of this world. (69)

Quammen responds to the questions Darwin poses by investigating

island wildlife throughout the world, noting that the number of spe-
cies on any island relates directly to the island's circumference: the
smaller the island, the fewer the species. Tapping into Darwin's "prin-
ciple" that "the greatest amount of life can be supported by great di-
versification of structure" (or species), one could say that, when ur-
ban sprawl carves up wilderness areas, the remaining patches of un-
developed land become species-impoverished ecological islands, and
"islands," Quammen notes, "are where species go to die" (Darwin
157; Quammen 258). The implications are that vast wild areas must be
protected against human partitioning; in this way, highly diverse bi-
otic communities can be maintained, as we allow their profusion and
dispersal over large areas. Here I would extend Quammen's focus on
islands, recognizing that we often visualize the earth as an island-like
sphere in an ocean of outer space. This island image has become an
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integral icon in the culture's visual imagination, as a result of media
coverage of space explorations (Arnold 32-33). In response to
Quammen's research, one could say that humans around the world
also belong to a precarious island ecosystem whose natural limits are
contained within the Earth's perimeters. According to this view, hu-
man cultures should then gear their land use policies and practices to
ensure larger wildernesses where greater diversification of species
promotes the survival of all living beings. Quammen's nature writing
thus adds contemporary relevance to evolutionary theory and to
Darwin's original island biogeographical research described in The
Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species.6

III.

Darwin's foundation for nature writing extends equally to the aes-

thetic realm of the sublime, and this dynamic of aesthetics can also be
seen in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. Darwin's and Lopez's works de-
scribe the multitude of living forms that can never be counted or mea-
sured, and the speechless awe the narrators experience at the sight of
such overwhelming numbers in nature. Darwin's awe in trying to com-
prehend the number of individual living forms arises from two sources.
First, he focuses upon the individual life in nature. In Victorian cul-
ture, the prevalent myth of Christian creation looked at animals and
plants and saw species, types, and likenesses; by contrast, Darwin
looked at these same living forms and saw individuals, their differ-
ences, and the process of their biotic relations.7 In the nineteenth cen-
tury, German Idealism, Romanticism, and industrial capitalism coex-
isted with a cultural emphasis on individuality; this impulse to look at
a single life carried over equally into Darwin's view of nature. Sec-
ondly, the aesthetic lens through which Victorians filtered their views
of art also became a perceptual lens through which to look at nature;
concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in nature showed up not
only in landscape painting, but in Darwin's representations of nature,
as well. Aesthetic values of the beautiful and the sublime had become
diffused throughout Darwin's Victorian culture as a kind of experi-
ence most often accessible to the individual through the eye. When
Darwin saw fossils of extinct animals and strange living island spe-
cies, he envisioned the natural history of individual organisms in such
infinite numbers over such long periods of time that he experienced
an awe at being unable to fathom numbers of such magnitude.
In both Darwin's Origin and Lopez's Arctic Dreams, one finds what
Immanuel Kant terms the "mathematically sublime"(Kant 93-114)8;
Kant argues that "nature is sublime in such of its phenomena as in
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their intuition convey the idea of their infinity" (103). Here, authorial
awe first arises in trying to estimate the numbers of nature's individu-
als with the eye, rather than through mathematical computation; once
"the aesthetic estimation . . . is considered an absolute measure be-
yond which no greater is possible . . . (for the judging Subject), it then
conveys the idea of the sublime" (26, 98-99). As Darwin presents all
the living parts of nature—"leg bones," "drooping ears," "cow ud-
ders," "hyacinth, potato," the "wing of a bat, the "fin of a porpoise,"
animals, animal parts, plants, and parts of plants—he is continually
overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of physical forms: thus, his state-
ment, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
and are being evolved" (74-75; 460). James Krasner, who has written
so persuasively about Darwin's "entangled eye," describes the ways
in which Darwin's rhetoric translates into readerly experience:
"dazzled by the dynamism and complexity of Darwin's natural world,
the reader struggles unsuccessfully to categorize the multitude of flux-
ing forms . . . " (36). Here Darwin brings us to the threshold of a sub-
lime experience with the wonder he experiences over the profusion of
organic forms in nature. He continually acknowledges the grand in-
comprehensibility of the evolutionary system. "The whole subject must
remain vague, I think," he notes, before launching into a paragraph
on the breeding of domestic animals (80). "The laws governing inher-
itance are quite unknown" and "dimly seen laws of variation are infi-
nitely complex and diversified" (76,75).9 Darwin writes that he is "con-
fessedly ignorant," and that we do not "know how ignorant we are"
(440). In evolution, "the lapse of time has been so great as to be utterly
inappreciable by the human intellect... [to comprehend] the count-
less generations of countless species which certainly have existed"
(439). Within this "infinitude of connecting links," Darwin's Kantian
mathematical sublime reveals itself as he concludes that "there is gran-
deur in this view of life with its several powers . . . " (459-60).
In Arctic Dreams, Lopez includes scientific sections that open onto
the mathematical sublime. Lopez continually searches out "microhabi-
tats," which are the "particularities at [his] feet" (232). "These small
habitats," he explains, "like the larger landscapes, merge impercepti-
bly with each other." Lopez insists on the particular instead of the
general which exists as an "abstraction" (232). This dynamic of look-
ing at the particular and the individual is most poignantly described
in a passage that focuses on a scientist in the field, a botanist who
looks closely at the plant life through "a patient disassembly of a clus-
ter of plants on a tussock, a tundra mound about 18 inches high and a
foot or so across" (232). Like Darwin's "tangled bank" infused with
"plants,... birds,... bushes,... insects,... and worms," the botanist's
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mound in Arctic Dreams holds "live [and] dead plant tissue,... many
species of plants, . . . insects and husks of berries, . . . bits of things
nearly too slight to see or to hold without crushing" (Darwin, Origin
459; Lopez 232). Here the botanist's "process [takes] hours, and her
concentration and sense of passing time [becomes] fixed at that scale"
(232). Seeing nature's living forms as a scientist, minutely and indi-
vidually, can produce a sense of the sublime, as one moves toward an
attempt to visually estimate the magnitude of what exists on this mi-
croscopic scale; here the botanist's "mental movement combined with
the estimate of the object" awakens a "supersensible faculty" open to
an experience of the sublime, "in comparison with which all else is small"
(Kant 94,97; Kant's emphasis). In Lopez's words, the scientist lifts her
eyes to "the tundra that rolled away in a hundred thousand tussocks
toward the horizon, and . . . she could not return her gaze because of
that sight, not for long minutes" (232). Magnitude in nature is per-
ceived in relation to the particular, as the mountain compared to the
single stone, the flat horizon compared to the tuft of grass at one's
feet. In discussing the "biocentric sublimity" in Lopez's Field Notes,
Lee Rozelle corroborates the view that,

the all-encompassing vastness of an ecological organicism elevates the

mind to the Kantian supersensible. When this event occurs, the mind of
the human subject feels itself fixed upon, integrated with and submerged
into the ecosystem itself. . . . Lopez's characters have sublime flashes of
interaction with the natural environment that leave them immersed and
permanently decentered. (131-32)

While Darwin considers the evolution of all species through geologi-

cal time, Lopez develops his sense of the magnitude of geological time
in relation to the short human history in the Arctic. After coming across
some ruins from an old hunting camp, he writes, "You raise your eyes
from these remains, from whatever century, to look away. The land as
far as you can see is rung with a harmonious authority, the enduring
force of its natural history ..." (xxiii). Here the narrator experiences a
sublimity that Kant describes as "the elevation of nature beyond our reach
[so that it becomes] as equivalent to a presentation of ideas" (119, Kant's
emphasis). Sublimity inhabits both space and time in the work: while
the botanist considers the limitless quantity of life forms on the Arctic
tundra that stretches to the flat horizon, the narrator considers the
limitless time of the natural history of the region. The nineteenth-cen-
tury sublime in nature represents an emotional sense of wonderment
at the limitless, powerful, and timeless elements one perceives in a
landscape that minimizes human importance.10 Whether one experi-
ences the sublime in nature through the lens of philosophy, science, or
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exploration—in Kant, Darwin, or Lopez, respectively—awe at limit-
less numbers, geological magnitude, or geological time brings about a
sense of incapacity that miniaturizes the human place in nature and
prompts a consciousness of natural power. Here the mind has moved
from an empirical focus to the realm of abstract idea, what Kant terms
the "super-added thought of... totality" (90).
But it is important to also note that "a feeling for the sublime in
nature is hardly thinkable unless in association with an attitude of
mind resembling the moral," in Kantian thought (120). Morality
enters in as the onlooker sublimates his or her freedom to the idea
of a greater power, and the person "gains an extension and a might
greater than that which [is] sacrifice[d]" (120). This identification
with the land forms a belief system that, when shared, can trigger
moral action. Here one could identify a source for the belief sys-
tems that have fueled the environmental movement. Nature writ-
ing is indeed linked to the politics of land in this way: Darwin's
Origin of Species, which imagines an infinitude of life forms grow-
ing throughout an unimaginably long period of time on a scale that
covers the surface of the Earth, and Lopez's Arctic Dreams, which
depicts the explorer's, scientist's, and traveler's experience of the
Arctic, recreate the sense of the sublime in nature that calls forth a
dedicated moral and political goal of protecting wild lands from
the effects of Western culture's technological impositions.

IV.

In sum, Darwin's nineteenth-century perception of "the whole

machinery of life" leads to ecological awareness in twentieth-century
texts by Leopold, Quammen, and Lopez; ecological awareness in turn
prompts the authors' moral calls to political action to influence public
policy. Yet the connections do not stop here: Darwin's Origin also an-
ticipates nature writing because his rhetorical persuasion changes his
reader's vision of the natural world. In furthering this goal, he mod-
eled a rhetoric of argumentation about perceptions of nature that ex-
panded the views of a broad reading public. For example, in The Voy-
age of the Beagle, a journal of his five-year voyage that included the
Galapagos Islands, Darwin's descriptions expanded his readers'
knowledge of the Earth's terrain; here, the British empire and the field
of science globalized and destablized Victorian views about geology,
the age of the Earth, the classification boundaries between plant, ani-
mal, and human worlds, and the biological origins of life. In Descent of
Man, Darwin placed humans and human culture within the laws of
nature, and compared human sexual selection with that of the animal
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kingdom. While Darwin's ideas often reflected views on race and sex
current in his Victorian culture, his attempt to read natural, or animal,
impulses into human behavior and the human form produced a defi-
nition of humankind that was wholly different from Victorian precon-
ceived opinion, which separated humans from the rest of the animal
kingdom. Finally, Darwin's rhetoric includes the use of metaphor, so
often found in the genre of nature writing. In this respect, his work
parallels Thoreau's Walden. Nature writing critics have come to recog-
nize Thoreau's brilliance at combining natural fact with ideas gener-
ated from imaginative metaphor (Murphy 46). For example, Glen Love
has shown that Thoreau, out in his boat upon Walden pond, pursues
the imagined as well as the "real": as Thoreau casts his "line upward
into the air, as well as downward" into the water, his nature writing
catches "two fishes as it were with one hook" (qtd. in Love, "Roderick
Haig-Brown" 3). Darwin also uses metaphor to explain his idea of
evolution; his symbolic image of the ancient Tree of Life maps the pro-
cess by which species evolve, interact, and branch (Origin 171-72). Fi-
nally, like Thoreau, Darwin also reveals his private belief about nature
by concluding The Origin with these words:

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal de-
scendants of some few beings which lived long... [ago], they seem to me
to become ennobled. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its
several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into
one... from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being evolved. (458-60)

In this moment, Darwin stands before nature with as much wide-eyed

wonder as any British Romantic poet responding to the sublime ele-
ments of waterfall, cliff, or cloud, or any twentieth-century nature
writer transfixed by the call of a loon or a flaming red mountain peak
at sunrise. So it appears that a wide-angle cultural lens would include
this text among the founding forms of nature writing, too.
While Darwin thus locates the basis of his authority within the sci-
entific method—using the word "fact" in the first two sentences of The
Origin—he equally evokes an imaginative realm as he ponders the
origin of life, a source he calls the "mystery of mysteries" (Origin 65).n
Here is where we find a contemporary likeness between science writ-
ing and nature writing: As Einstein put it, "the most beautiful thing
we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and sci-
ence." A nature writer's attraction to the mysteries of nature thus re-
veals a commonality with science writers, whether the mystery con-
sists of authorial concern for human identity within the natural land-
scape, or a desire to push back the boundaries of ignorance about
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nature's unknowns: the mystery is what counts. Leopold states sym-
bolically that he is "well content [that the behavior of geese—or any
other natural phenomenon—] should remain a mystery" (20). And
while Quammen reiterates Darwin's phrase, "mystery of mysteries,"
Lopez celebrates a "sublime innocence" in the face of the landscape's
"ability to transcend whatever we would make of it" (xix). All these
points gather around the question of where to place the nature-writ-
ing genre, as this cross-disciplinary mix of works relies on a wide va-
riety of epistemologies in interpreting the mystery inherent in the natu-
ral world.
Darwin endeavored to make sense of the human condition in the
face of a mysterious nature, and so he anticipates both science writing
and nature writing today. Spanning a whole spectrum of writing that
searches out nature's mystery, one could find factual science writing
at one end, while, at the opposite end, one could find prose, narrative,
and poetry. Nature-oriented writing, whether it is predominantly sci-
entific or humanistic, spans this spectrum according to its quantita-
tive mix of fact and idea. Yet the overriding point remains: the spec-
trum as a whole ultimately focuses on nature's mystery. Here these
genres reveal their similarities and their differences. Like science writ-
ing, nature writing dwells at the edge of what is known, to create new
perceptions that fill the void on the other side of nature's silences.
Unlike contemporary science writing that may exert its focus on a single
problem solved in the laboratory, nature writing represents human
experience that imaginatively constructs a wholeness of vision toward
the natural world. Nature writing thus contains this part of natural
knowledge that science cannot fathom, the part that must come from
human experience, from human self-awareness, from human commu-
nity structured through ties to the land, and from the human imagina-
tion, acting freely. For this reason nature writing—to adapt Darwin's
words—is an endless form most wonderful and most beautiful that
has been, and is being, evolved.

NOTES

1. For example, Americanist critics Lawrence Buell and Scott Slovic look to
Thoreau as a source for nature writing. Walter Harding notes that, "with the
rise of the environmental movement in the 1970's and 1980's, Thoreau became
its patron saint. 'In wildness is the preservation of the world' became the slo-
gan of the Sierra Club. . . . With the revival of interest in American nature
writers, Thoreau became the most quoted of them all" (10). On the other hand,
writers like George Levine, James Krasner, and Robert M. Young focus on Vic-
torian Britain. George Levine has argued that Darwin's evolutionary ideas
w
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reveal themselves in the contents of Victorian novels through such issues as
chance, visual evidence in solving mysteries, and the mutual dependencies
within society. James Krasner has attributed modern British authors' visual
orientation toward landscape to the same visual tradition out of which Dar-
win formed his vision of nature as it changes across historical and geological
time. Robert M. Young writes that "Darwinism is the main scientific theory
that places humanity in nature. How we think about it plays a major role in
deciding the place of nature in our culture, just as it did in the Victorian cul-
ture" (preface). However, Begiebing and Grumbling give transatlantic consid-
eration to the literature of nature in English, and attest, in their introduction to
a passage from The Voyage of the Beagle, that this work by Darwin "possesses
sensitivity, vitality, and art sufficient to qualify as nature writing" (167).
2. Ernst Mayr defines natural selection as the "nonrandom survival and
reproductive success of a small percentage of the individuals of a population
owing to their possession of, at that moment, characteristics which enhance
their ability to survive and reproduce" (183). In short, natural selection could
be described as "survival [and subsequent reproduction] of the fittest." He
defines common descent as "the derivation of certain species or higher taxa
from a common ancestor" (178).
3. As proof of Darwin's combination of scientific method with a tradition
of natural history, Finch and Elder point out that Lyell's scientific Principles
of Geology and White's Natural History Antiquities of Selbourne are among the
books Darwin brought with him on his voyage aboard the Beagle to South
America and the Galapagos (159). In his work, Lawrence Farber substanti-
ates these broad claims for natural history: it "has yielded the major unifying
theory of the life science, uncovered some of the deepest insights into nature,
led to concern for the environment and attracted public interest for more
than two and a half centuries" (5).
4. One can note the nineteenth-century trend toward uniformitarianism
in science by surveying a few contemporary uses of the word "empirical." In
1830, Sir John Herschel uses the word this way: "If the knowledge be merely
accumulated experience the art is empirical, but if it be experience reasoned
upon and brought under general principles, it assumes a higher character
and becomes a scientific art" (Herschel 70-71). Here empiricism has a decid-
edly pejorative meaning, if its method yields only diminutive data and mi-
nutiae of meaning, but if the method allows one to arrive at a "general prin-
ciple" it is highly valued. In 1846, John Stuart Mill writes, "An empirical law,
then, is an observed uniformity, presumed to be resolvable into simpler laws,
but not yet resolved into them" (Mill, Book III. "Of Induction," xvi.i, 339). By
mid-century, empiricism was thus regarded as a set of observations that could
verify uniformity of natural law. Darwin developed his empirical observa-
tions in this way: in 1839 he published his episodic travelogue, The Voyage of
the Beagle, filled with atomistic observations recorded during his journey to
South America, and in 1859 he published The Origin, unifying his many ob-
servations into what Herschel termed "general principles."
5. Darwin's Origin was published in 1859, and Thoreau's Walden was
published in 1854. Darwin's lifetime spanned the years 1809-1882, while
Thoreau lived from 1817-1862. See Buell's discussion (417-23) in which he
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compares Thoreau and Darwin, noting that the rhetoric in Walden is decid-
edly "un-Darwinian" in its view of species as constant, while Thoreau's later
works incorporate a Darwinian view of flexible development of life forms.
Darwin and Thoreau each persuade their nineteenth-century English-speak-
ing cultures to change their ideas about nature, but they also differ in their
perspectives. Darwin launches an argument against Victorian mythic beliefs
in the catastrophic, divine creation, in order to persuade his readers to con-
sider a process-oriented, physical creation in The Origin of Species. By con-
trast, in Walden, Thoreau argues against the nineteenth-century American
work ethic, capitalist moneymaking, and consumerism, in order to persuade
his readers to experience life as an individual self out in nature.
6. For a different view on the general law linking biodiversity and eco-
system health, see Guterman.
7. See, for example, Joseph Carroll's discussion in "The Metaphysical Struc-
ture of Darwinian Thought" (310).
8. All references to Kant's The Critique of Judgement come from Part I,
"Critique of Aesthetic Judgement"; while both Part I and Part II appear in
this same volume, each is paginated separately.
9. Here my interpretation of Darwin's rhetoric radically diverges from
James Krasner's. Krasner attributes Darwin's reticent, self-demeaning, and
cautious rhetoric to "visual uneasiness." Krasner develops beautifully his
descriptions of Darwin's vision of nature: "Darwin's rhetorical humility in-
volves the description of the extreme lengths to which he has gone to dis-
cover, organize, and process data, followed immediately by the assertion that
the data is insufficient, the reasoning flawed, and the conclusions therefore
suspect" (177). I would argue that Darwin's "rhetorical humility" becomes
demystified when it is interpreted as a dynamic of the mathematical sublime
at the stage in which the data accumulates endlessly and indefinitely, coher-
ent and reasoned analysis becomes futile amidst the profusion of facts, the
inability of human reason to process all the evidence becomes apparent, and
so the idea of infinity is comprehended.
10. For a pre-Victorian Western history of the development of the sub-
lime in relation to nature and landscape, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Moun-
tain Gloom, Mountain Glory.
11. Darwin quotes an unnamed philosopher.

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