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Writers' Block
Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: nature writing has none of the trademark qualities that play well in 2007. So is it time for a change?
"Is there nature in Los Angeles?" people typically respond when I tell them that I write about nature in my city. The question sometimes betrays sarcasm, but sometimes not. L.A., after all, has long been decried as the Anti-Nature: it's the American megalopolis with brown air, fouled beaches, pavement to the horizon, and a concrete river. It's sort of the Death Star to American nature lovers. But I have happily ended up here, exactly because L.A. has become perhaps the finest place in America to think and write about nature as well as the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature.
In the past 25 years, the venerable American literature of nature writing has become distressingly marginal. Even my nature-loving and environmentalist friends tell me they do not read it. Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: none of these trademark qualities plays well in 2007. But to me,
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