Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement [Hardcover]

Daniel J. Philippon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2003

How did American nature writers shape the environmental movement? To answer this difficult question, Daniel Philippon looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First!

These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Philippon calls "conserving" words. Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how "conserving" words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.

Each of these writers, Philippon contends, understood "nature" through a particular metaphor that best fit his or her time, place, and personal history: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), or utopia (Abbey). When these writers perceived an injustice to some portion of the natural world, they used these metaphors--and were used by them--to found advocacy organizations, rally concerned citizens, and preserve threatened landscapes.

Conserving Words is a significant contribution to the environmental humanities. An accessible examination of the "ecology of influence," it closely connects particular nature writers, their texts, and their readership to formative events in environmental history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Conserving Words richly evokes the larger social context of American nature writing in the era between Roosevelt and Abbey. Daniel Philippon's skill in interweaving the literature with the friendships, letters, official reports, and public debates that informed it makes this book both illuminating and delightful."--John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home

"Philippon does an extraordinarily thorough and lucid job of telling the life stories of these five writers, focusing on their involvement in the environmental movement. . . . In seeking to discern the political and social impact of environmental writing, Conserving Words makes an important contribution to one of the central issues in contemporary ecocriticism."--Scott Slovic, University of Nevada, Reno

"Gets beyond the surface appeals of nature writing which is ordinarily lumped together by most readers."--University Press Book Review

“Philippon shows in meticulous fashion how his five writer-activists played integral, complex roles in the development of these important organizations, and how often these people and their organizations interacted."--ISLE

"A valuable overview of the development of Progressive-era conservation and modern-day environmentalism . . . Conserving Words is an extremely valuable book for its case studies and for its thought-provoking Introduction and Conclusion.”--Science

"A readable, lucid examination of how five Americans shaped the environmental movement through their writing . . . Making a significant contribution to the relatively new field of environmental humanities, this book—though classed as natural history—contains so much biography and anecdote that it will appeal to readers across many disciplines."--Choice

"Writers who write about a need to protect the environment and readers who revere them should have high praise for Philippon's Conserving Words.”--Salt Lake City Tribune

"[An] excellent analysis for the eco-critic and academic."--Southeastern Naturalist

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

The first study to link America's nature writing tradition to the development of its environmental organizations.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820325767
• ISBN-13: 978-0820325767
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,240,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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