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The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World
The introduction and 17 essays in The Colors of Nature movingly address the question, What is the earth to people of color? Exploring history, displacement, return, and relationship to place, these writers show that the ways Americans have impacted nature are inseparable from racism and inequities in economic and political power. Featured contributors include Jamaica Kincaid, bell hooks, Francisco X. Alarcon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Diane Glancy, and others.
232 pages, Paperback
First published August 9, 2002
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1317 people want to read
About the author
Alison Hawthorne Deming
26 books48 followersPoet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and women’s health issues for many years. A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer. Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems (1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge.” The collection, described by Deborah DeNicola in the Boston Book Review as “a dense, majestic, wise and ambitious book,” is listed among the Washingon Post’s Favorite Books of 1994 and the Bloomsbury Review’s best recent poetry.
Deming’s other poetry collections include The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), Genius Loci (2005), and Rope (2009). Genius Loci was praised by D.H. Tracy in Poetry: “Alison Deming’s title means ‘spirit of place,’ but be warned . . . Deming doesn’t belong, or want to belong, to a single place long enough to find its genius, and so she functions more like a naturalist of naturalism, classifying the spirits of place as she encounters them.”
In addition to numerous journal and anthology publications, Deming has published works of nonfiction, including Temporary Homelands (1994), a collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001). She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (1996), and co-edited, with Lauret E. Savoy, The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2002; second edition 2011).
Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.
Deming’s other poetry collections include The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), Genius Loci (2005), and Rope (2009). Genius Loci was praised by D.H. Tracy in Poetry: “Alison Deming’s title means ‘spirit of place,’ but be warned . . . Deming doesn’t belong, or want to belong, to a single place long enough to find its genius, and so she functions more like a naturalist of naturalism, classifying the spirits of place as she encounters them.”
In addition to numerous journal and anthology publications, Deming has published works of nonfiction, including Temporary Homelands (1994), a collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001). She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (1996), and co-edited, with Lauret E. Savoy, The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2002; second edition 2011).
Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
May 31, 2018
Full review to come soon.
Colors of Nature is an anthology of 32 diverse authors on the environment.
Divided into four sections of 8 essays each - Return, Witness, Encounter and Praise here is the teaser from the back of the dust jacket:
Colors of Nature is an anthology of 32 diverse authors on the environment.
Divided into four sections of 8 essays each - Return, Witness, Encounter and Praise here is the teaser from the back of the dust jacket:
From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in today's world is reflected in our richly various stories-stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature.
Including work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds, this collection works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the last value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.
Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.
April 10, 2015
This is a collection of essays (not short stories as another reviewer stated) that offers a variety of perspectives regarding interactions with the environment. This collection is essentially a response to the problem of the white-washed conversation of environmentalism, ecology, and appreciation of nature. Here, we see "environment" redefined as we are asked consider some challenging questions about environmentalism: What does race and poverty have to do with the destruction of our environment? What if "environment" isn't synonymous with "nature"? What if it also includes urban settings? Does our knowledge of history and culture affect our relationship with the land? Does our lack of national culture in the U.S. contribute to our waste of natural resources? Can we learn from our history and the way the indigenous peoples lived?
It's a provocative and moving collection of essays. I've assigned it to composition students to read, and they find it accessible and more interesting than some of the standard discourse about "going green." I highly recommend.
It's a provocative and moving collection of essays. I've assigned it to composition students to read, and they find it accessible and more interesting than some of the standard discourse about "going green." I highly recommend.
March 26, 2022
The Colors of Nature is an excellent collection of essays on "Culture, Identity and the Natural World"(its subtitle). Intentionally seeking out multi-cultural writers from diverse backgrounds, this book explores a wide range of modern perspectives on nature in the United States (with nods to other countries and cultures as to be expected from people with deep roots outside the USA).
As other reviewers have noted, not every essay will captivate every reader, but I've been pleased at how few haven't had something of importance to me, and I suspect those which didn't resonate with me may well be of interest to others. I also have to admit one essay, Jennifer Oladipo's "Porphyrin Rings" didn't do much for me at all until, at the very end, I realized she was echoing conclusions I was arriving at myself regarding the nature of "native" and "invasive" plants. She writes, "We know the the truth (about adjusting our ways to accept all peoples) just as well as we know that, no matter how much we fear spreading clumps of winter creeper, we can't yank them out without damaging part of the world around it. I will still remove foreign plants that overwhelm endangered local species, but I will think much more about the meaning of the difference, and my role in creating and maintaining boundaries.
Enrique Salmon's "Sharing Breath: Some Links Between Land, Plants, and People" that I've ordered a copy of his book "Eating the Landscape" and am picking up a copy of "Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science" at the library today.
This is a good book. Having come to the conclusion that books are a contact sport, I've dog-eared many pages and highlighted many passages. One I particularly want to carry with me is, "Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America; there was only the fertile continent, where people lived in a hard-learned balance with the natural world." (Lewis Owens, Burning the Shelter")
Fresh from thinking of wilderness as a construct of the unaware and of displaced plants functioning as a lesson about replaced peoples, and seeing myself as a vagabond in a land where people once had roots that went thousands of years deep, I have much to think about, and am glad.
As other reviewers have noted, not every essay will captivate every reader, but I've been pleased at how few haven't had something of importance to me, and I suspect those which didn't resonate with me may well be of interest to others. I also have to admit one essay, Jennifer Oladipo's "Porphyrin Rings" didn't do much for me at all until, at the very end, I realized she was echoing conclusions I was arriving at myself regarding the nature of "native" and "invasive" plants. She writes, "We know the the truth (about adjusting our ways to accept all peoples) just as well as we know that, no matter how much we fear spreading clumps of winter creeper, we can't yank them out without damaging part of the world around it. I will still remove foreign plants that overwhelm endangered local species, but I will think much more about the meaning of the difference, and my role in creating and maintaining boundaries.
Enrique Salmon's "Sharing Breath: Some Links Between Land, Plants, and People" that I've ordered a copy of his book "Eating the Landscape" and am picking up a copy of "Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science" at the library today.
This is a good book. Having come to the conclusion that books are a contact sport, I've dog-eared many pages and highlighted many passages. One I particularly want to carry with me is, "Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America; there was only the fertile continent, where people lived in a hard-learned balance with the natural world." (Lewis Owens, Burning the Shelter")
Fresh from thinking of wilderness as a construct of the unaware and of displaced plants functioning as a lesson about replaced peoples, and seeing myself as a vagabond in a land where people once had roots that went thousands of years deep, I have much to think about, and am glad.
Read
January 24, 2024Read for class. A great set of essays—will be returning to these!
April 22, 2023
Unless Americans, and all human beings, can learn to imagine themselves as intimately and inextricably related to every aspect of the world they inhabit, with the extraordinary responsibilities such relationship entails-unless they can learn what the indigenous peoples of the Americas knew and often still know--the earth simply will not survive. A few square miles of something called wilderness will become the sign of failure everywhere.
Francisco X. Alarcón
Anishinaabe author and cultural critic Gerald Vizenor's term "survivance" is important here. Meaning more than survival, more than endurance or mere response, stories of survivance are an active, evolving presence that resists rigid categories, racialist stereotypes, or "manifest manners" sustained in a literature of dominance. Perhaps through such stories we might more fully imagine and comprehend who and what we are with respect to each other, to the land, and to our shared responsibility. Lauret Savoy
So perfect to be reading this and reviewing it on Earth Day. Such a powerful survey of writers of color writing about this earth I love. I know, as Rebecca Solnit has said, "most nature writing is barricaded with omissions to make it just another gated community." I read a lot and can easily see the omissions, the white supremacist, Eurocentric voices of nature authors and it is woefully common. I seek out other voices on purpose, and hope others will too as I use their quotes to accompany my art in the small forum I have on instagram. (@wclpdenver). I am so grateful we are opening our minds and producing more of these collections, centering and amplifying the voices that have wisdom and ways of thinking the narrow western way has lost.
BIRTH WITNESS By Ophelia Zepeda
…
Who knew then that I would need witnesses of my birth
The stars were there in the sky.
The wind was there.
The sun was there.
The pollen of spring was floating and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not know of affidavits, they simply know.
"You need records," she said.
"Are there doctor's receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family Bible, you know, where births are recorded?
Were there letters?
Announcements of your birth?"
I don’t bother to explain my parents are illiterate in the English language.
What I really want to tell her is they speak a language much too civil for writing.
It is a language useful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth
It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain.
It is useful for speeches and incantations that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.
It is a language too civil for writing.
It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.
This is what I really want to tell her.
But I don't.
Instead I take the forms she hands me.
I begin to account for myself.
IN HISTORY
Jamaica Kincaid
What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me:
Should I call it history?
If so, what should history mean to someone like me?
Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?
Why should I be obsessed with all these questions?
My history began like this: in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. Since this is only a beginning and I am not yet in the picture, I have not yet made an appearance, the word "discover" does nor sound an alarm, and I am not yet confused by this interpretation. I accept it. I am only taken by the personality of this quarrelsome, restless man. His origins are sometimes obscure; sometimes no one knows just where he really comes from, who he really was.
…
He, Christopher Columbus, discovers this New World. That it is new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it, does not occur to him. To cast blame on him now for this childlike immaturity has all the moral substance of a certificate given to a schoolgirl for good behavior. To be a well-behaved schoolgirl is not hard. When he sees this New World, it is really new to him: he has never seen anything like it before, it was not what he had expected, he had images of China and Japan, and, though he thought he was in China and Japan, it was not the China or Japan that he had fixed in his mind. He couldn't find enough words to describe what he saw before him: the people were new, the flora and fauna were new, the way the water met the sky was new, this world itself was new, it was the New World.
INVOKING THE ANCESTORS
Aileen Suzara
I write in recognition of Filipino as a mestizo culture and myself as part of it, the entanglement of histories, of borders interweaving, and name-making and name-taking. I write to syncretic Catholic faith that mixed piety with animism, to the mixed blood of language. I write to understand this psychological splitting of selves, to what has fractured and sustained our people as a culture.
How does a single mountain- or any geographic expanse, for that matter, whether a pond or an entire archipelago- acquire meanings that may vary from person to person, culture to culture? There is no single, discernible answer, if there is any answer at all. Instead, there is a range of patterns that can be sifted through, tracked, observed, and commented upon.
The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice. It speaks through and is brought into being through the human-nature dialogue, in our voices and our perceptions, an internal geography which is, in turn, shaped by the exterior environment. We are simultaneously the creation of our environments and ancestors, and the creators of the environment.
HOPE AND FEATHERS: A crisis in birder identification
J. Drew Lanham
Most black Americans would probably agree that there is something visceral about visiting the African supercontinent. It is a chance to get a little closer to the place from whence many of our ancestors were likely kidnapped and spirited away to places on the other side of the world that they were forced to call home. I know, from other black people who've been to sub-Saharan Africa, that the first trip "back" is often billed as nothing short of a life-changing pilgrimage to a place that provides the linkage between who we are and were.
Sometimes the birds are a balm, an avian anesthesia that numbs pain or blocks unpleasant things. It is the Zen of putting field marks together-plumage, shape, behavior into something that becomes a bird. This coming together, the gestalt, is what allows one to say what is seen, even when the views are fleeting and the song is incomplete. In that peaceful pursuit, the quarry is collected on a life list without having to give its life in return. It has been this way for most of my life: Me escaping to the birds. The birds providing something people couldn't -comfort in my own skin, peace in stressful times, and acceptance without question of who I am or what I do.
RECLAIMING OURSELVES, RECLAIMING AMERICA
Francisco X. Alarcón
Nothing could dissuade me from visiting the easternmost point of Mexico, where Francisco de Cordoba had first arrived on March 1, 1517, thus beginning the process of exploration, conquest, and colonization of Mesoamerica… Standing on a cliff at the edge of the island, all of a sudden, I was once again looking, for the first time at the mysterious mountains moving out in the sea, and also squinting my eyes aboard one of the approaching Spanish ships.
America was not "discovered" by Christopher Columbus, nor by Viking seafarers, but by the first people who came to this continent from Asia at least fifty thousand years ago. We would begin to understand the scope of the nightmare and holocaust that the arrival of the Europeans meant to the native peoples of this continent if only we could feel within ourselves the sorrow and despair of a native population of twenty million reduced to less than two million in a hundred years. No account is possible. Words are useless. We are forced to experience this knowledge outside language. We must feel again all the new fatal diseases that decimated our peoples. We need to bring back the deceased in order to continue living. We have to reclaim our suppressed tongues and spirits, our burned homes and fields, our slaughtered mothers and fathers, our enslaved sisters and brothers. By reclaiming ourselves, we will be reclaiming America.
I say "America" not in the chauvinistic tradition of "God bless America," or "America, right or wrong." America is a continent and cannot be monopolized by a single country like the United States. America has no borders. It actually runs from Alaska to Patagonia. "America" and "American" have been terms that for too long have been misused to dominate, exclude, su-press, and eradicate the historical consciousness of the native peoples of this continent. America did not begin five hundred years ago. America has fantastic and very deep cultural roots that go back many thousands of years.
"Americans" are all the various peoples that once lived on any given part of this hemisphere. For America to be America, it needs to remember its long and painful past with the same energy and dedication it devotes to its present and its future.
Francisco X. Alarcón
Anishinaabe author and cultural critic Gerald Vizenor's term "survivance" is important here. Meaning more than survival, more than endurance or mere response, stories of survivance are an active, evolving presence that resists rigid categories, racialist stereotypes, or "manifest manners" sustained in a literature of dominance. Perhaps through such stories we might more fully imagine and comprehend who and what we are with respect to each other, to the land, and to our shared responsibility. Lauret Savoy
So perfect to be reading this and reviewing it on Earth Day. Such a powerful survey of writers of color writing about this earth I love. I know, as Rebecca Solnit has said, "most nature writing is barricaded with omissions to make it just another gated community." I read a lot and can easily see the omissions, the white supremacist, Eurocentric voices of nature authors and it is woefully common. I seek out other voices on purpose, and hope others will too as I use their quotes to accompany my art in the small forum I have on instagram. (@wclpdenver). I am so grateful we are opening our minds and producing more of these collections, centering and amplifying the voices that have wisdom and ways of thinking the narrow western way has lost.
BIRTH WITNESS By Ophelia Zepeda
…
Who knew then that I would need witnesses of my birth
The stars were there in the sky.
The wind was there.
The sun was there.
The pollen of spring was floating and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not know of affidavits, they simply know.
"You need records," she said.
"Are there doctor's receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family Bible, you know, where births are recorded?
Were there letters?
Announcements of your birth?"
I don’t bother to explain my parents are illiterate in the English language.
What I really want to tell her is they speak a language much too civil for writing.
It is a language useful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth
It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain.
It is useful for speeches and incantations that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.
It is a language too civil for writing.
It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.
This is what I really want to tell her.
But I don't.
Instead I take the forms she hands me.
I begin to account for myself.
IN HISTORY
Jamaica Kincaid
What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me:
Should I call it history?
If so, what should history mean to someone like me?
Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?
Why should I be obsessed with all these questions?
My history began like this: in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. Since this is only a beginning and I am not yet in the picture, I have not yet made an appearance, the word "discover" does nor sound an alarm, and I am not yet confused by this interpretation. I accept it. I am only taken by the personality of this quarrelsome, restless man. His origins are sometimes obscure; sometimes no one knows just where he really comes from, who he really was.
…
He, Christopher Columbus, discovers this New World. That it is new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it, does not occur to him. To cast blame on him now for this childlike immaturity has all the moral substance of a certificate given to a schoolgirl for good behavior. To be a well-behaved schoolgirl is not hard. When he sees this New World, it is really new to him: he has never seen anything like it before, it was not what he had expected, he had images of China and Japan, and, though he thought he was in China and Japan, it was not the China or Japan that he had fixed in his mind. He couldn't find enough words to describe what he saw before him: the people were new, the flora and fauna were new, the way the water met the sky was new, this world itself was new, it was the New World.
INVOKING THE ANCESTORS
Aileen Suzara
I write in recognition of Filipino as a mestizo culture and myself as part of it, the entanglement of histories, of borders interweaving, and name-making and name-taking. I write to syncretic Catholic faith that mixed piety with animism, to the mixed blood of language. I write to understand this psychological splitting of selves, to what has fractured and sustained our people as a culture.
How does a single mountain- or any geographic expanse, for that matter, whether a pond or an entire archipelago- acquire meanings that may vary from person to person, culture to culture? There is no single, discernible answer, if there is any answer at all. Instead, there is a range of patterns that can be sifted through, tracked, observed, and commented upon.
The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice. It speaks through and is brought into being through the human-nature dialogue, in our voices and our perceptions, an internal geography which is, in turn, shaped by the exterior environment. We are simultaneously the creation of our environments and ancestors, and the creators of the environment.
HOPE AND FEATHERS: A crisis in birder identification
J. Drew Lanham
Most black Americans would probably agree that there is something visceral about visiting the African supercontinent. It is a chance to get a little closer to the place from whence many of our ancestors were likely kidnapped and spirited away to places on the other side of the world that they were forced to call home. I know, from other black people who've been to sub-Saharan Africa, that the first trip "back" is often billed as nothing short of a life-changing pilgrimage to a place that provides the linkage between who we are and were.
Sometimes the birds are a balm, an avian anesthesia that numbs pain or blocks unpleasant things. It is the Zen of putting field marks together-plumage, shape, behavior into something that becomes a bird. This coming together, the gestalt, is what allows one to say what is seen, even when the views are fleeting and the song is incomplete. In that peaceful pursuit, the quarry is collected on a life list without having to give its life in return. It has been this way for most of my life: Me escaping to the birds. The birds providing something people couldn't -comfort in my own skin, peace in stressful times, and acceptance without question of who I am or what I do.
RECLAIMING OURSELVES, RECLAIMING AMERICA
Francisco X. Alarcón
Nothing could dissuade me from visiting the easternmost point of Mexico, where Francisco de Cordoba had first arrived on March 1, 1517, thus beginning the process of exploration, conquest, and colonization of Mesoamerica… Standing on a cliff at the edge of the island, all of a sudden, I was once again looking, for the first time at the mysterious mountains moving out in the sea, and also squinting my eyes aboard one of the approaching Spanish ships.
America was not "discovered" by Christopher Columbus, nor by Viking seafarers, but by the first people who came to this continent from Asia at least fifty thousand years ago. We would begin to understand the scope of the nightmare and holocaust that the arrival of the Europeans meant to the native peoples of this continent if only we could feel within ourselves the sorrow and despair of a native population of twenty million reduced to less than two million in a hundred years. No account is possible. Words are useless. We are forced to experience this knowledge outside language. We must feel again all the new fatal diseases that decimated our peoples. We need to bring back the deceased in order to continue living. We have to reclaim our suppressed tongues and spirits, our burned homes and fields, our slaughtered mothers and fathers, our enslaved sisters and brothers. By reclaiming ourselves, we will be reclaiming America.
I say "America" not in the chauvinistic tradition of "God bless America," or "America, right or wrong." America is a continent and cannot be monopolized by a single country like the United States. America has no borders. It actually runs from Alaska to Patagonia. "America" and "American" have been terms that for too long have been misused to dominate, exclude, su-press, and eradicate the historical consciousness of the native peoples of this continent. America did not begin five hundred years ago. America has fantastic and very deep cultural roots that go back many thousands of years.
"Americans" are all the various peoples that once lived on any given part of this hemisphere. For America to be America, it needs to remember its long and painful past with the same energy and dedication it devotes to its present and its future.
November 26, 2025
It feels weird to rate this as it was creative non- fiction, but I genuinely enjoyed the essays, and I liked learning about how different cultures interact and view the natural world.
August 27, 2022
An interesting collection with a diverse range of viewpoints.
December 6, 2017
First of all, I had my DNA done and I am like 98% European. My father's side of the family has been in America since about a boat or two after the pilgrims. My mother's side Irish immigrants. The most meaningful t- shirt my husband has a is picture of Native Americans and says Homeland Security - Fighting terrorism since 1492. Makes me upset every time I think about it. Have read many books about this, but never in this context where the narrative out there about nature and the environment is from a white and probably overwhelmingly white male perspective. And that I too have that perspective for the most part. I have been reading some books addressing this issue with the latest being Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and ever so slowly educating myself. The essays, stories, poems, language by Native Americans, Japanese, Latinos, African Americans and Lebanese are all eye opening and thought provocative. I have to return this book to the library today, but am going to purchase it because first of all I want to re read it again, but also as a source for further writings by the authors and others.
Read
June 23, 2024Read for work book club. Love that collections like this exist and hope they reach a wide audience of nature readers. Enjoyed the second half more, which touched on nature in the way I’m familiar with it.
July 29, 2019
This is one of the most beautiful essay collections I’ve ever read.
November 17, 2023
The many essays vary greatly, but the best part was stumbling upon the one written by my great aunt!
January 18, 2023
I felt like this was a beautiful and thought-provoking collection of essays that challenged my thinking about the world around me and my place in it. While I connected more with certain selections than others, I think that this is an important book. I will definitely revisit and chew on some of the ideas integrated throughout this read!
Specific ideas that I'd like to consider further:
- the language used to identify things in the world around us (In History by Jamaica Kincaid)
- the language used to identify our place in the world (Learning the Grammar of Animacy by Robin Wall Kimmerer)
- labor and reciprocity vs abundance (This Weight of Small Bodies by Kimberly M. Blaeser)
- "pure" wilderness (Burning the Shelter by Louis Owens)
- decolonizing the mind (Becoming Metis by Melissa Nelson)
Specific ideas that I'd like to consider further:
- the language used to identify things in the world around us (In History by Jamaica Kincaid)
- the language used to identify our place in the world (Learning the Grammar of Animacy by Robin Wall Kimmerer)
- labor and reciprocity vs abundance (This Weight of Small Bodies by Kimberly M. Blaeser)
- "pure" wilderness (Burning the Shelter by Louis Owens)
- decolonizing the mind (Becoming Metis by Melissa Nelson)
July 16, 2022
Like any anthology, a mixed bag: some great essays, some impenetrable ones. The great ones, though, are excellent: thought-provoking, educational, and enjoyable. Even the less-great ones taught me and may make me a more considerate person.
The most discouraging line of the book was in the introduction: “The political temper in the United States, as this collection goes to press, is one of anger, fear, and hate-mongering” — and this was 2011. Oh, for those innocent days! The essays didn’t feel dated, though: in some cases, things have improved since then; in others, not so much, but the authors’ optimism carries through and has left me feeling, not exactly hopeful, but at least strengthened.
The most discouraging line of the book was in the introduction: “The political temper in the United States, as this collection goes to press, is one of anger, fear, and hate-mongering” — and this was 2011. Oh, for those innocent days! The essays didn’t feel dated, though: in some cases, things have improved since then; in others, not so much, but the authors’ optimism carries through and has left me feeling, not exactly hopeful, but at least strengthened.
Read
March 9, 2023Booklist calls this book; “An unprecedented and invaluable collection.” And that’s true. Originally published in 2002, and released as a revised edition in 2011, this collection contains writing by a range of prose writers that actually reflects America’s abundance. Essays and stories by Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Black writers and more offer glimpses into the varieties of experiences people have had on and in the American landscape. One other cool thing about this book is that the cover comes in several different colors. I picture the blue leaf here, but in my office at CSU I also have the red and yellow leaf covers. Collect them all!
August 21, 2024
I was introduced to this book in class freshman year and it just took me forever to finish. I really liked the collection of essays/short stories format, which allowed the reader to understand how culture and nature intertwine through the experience of many individuals. a great read for all environmentalists
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September 19, 2023It's one of the best readings in a while. The multiple authors have taken a perspective of how nature intersects all realms of colonialism, racism, and historical discrimination but also how important is our connection to the land. As many have spoken, it's a language of revival.
January 3, 2024
chill book, thought I’d like it better. 2nd half def saved it but it’s a collection of 32 short stories so not all are going to land with everyone. I esp liked the indigenous nature jnowedlege parts so I’m excited to read books like Braiding Sweetgrass in the near future
October 26, 2020
A collection of short essays mostly focused on environmental racism. Interesting and insightful.
August 17, 2021
Some of these essays were excellent. Unfortunately, there were some essays not as good as others, or that made the collection feel overly repetitive in its theme, and that brought my rating down.
April 22, 2022
So many excellent, evocative, and thought-provoking essays. I would love a second anthology with new ones.
May 9, 2022
Good mix of stories/short pieces. A few were hard to get into.
May 9, 2025
Read like half of this for class. Good.
June 11, 2025
Overall underwhelmed.
August 19, 2025
Had to read many of these for a class and it held my attention enough to (however slowly) finish the rest afterwards.
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November 9, 2025Read for masters coursework
August 4, 2023
Some boring some good essays. Everyone experiences the natural in their own way.
March 22, 2021
The Introduction to this collection of essays is absolutely terrible. But I didn't let that deter me and so far the essays are all really good. Fascinating to read about the meaning of land and home from all these perspectives: black, indiginous, people of color.
After finishing:
Essays are all solid, most are outstanding. Favorites are by bell hooks, Nikky Finney, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
After finishing:
Essays are all solid, most are outstanding. Favorites are by bell hooks, Nikky Finney, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
November 7, 2022
This collection of short essays is full of insight concerning diverse cultures and their interactions with nature. It was nice to read nature writing which was not from the point of view of a privileged white male.
July 15, 2008
Collection of short stories: some were completely boring to trudge through; others were beautiful.
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