The One That Carries You Away: Essays

• Main Author: Braverman, Blair S.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Digital Commons @ Colby 2011
• Subjects: Useless Bay Washington; Alaska; glacier; chemicals in personal care products; safe chemicals legislation; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Finch; McKibben; Useless Bay
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/795; https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/context/honorstheses/article/1804/viewcontent/Braverman_HonorsThesis2011.pdf

What is environmental writing? Phil Condon, author and professor at the University of Montana's Environmental Writing Institute, defines it as any piece of writing in which an important factor is nonhuman—be it animal, place, weather, et cetera. At the same time, he acknowledges that the primary limitation of this definition is its lack of limitations; because humans are constantly interacting with—and affected by—the nonhuman, virtually any piece of writing could be considered environmental. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), the nation's predominant organization for the academic study of environmental writing, defines itself through its focus on “the natural world and its meanings and representations in language and culture." Nature Writing: The Tradition in English by Robert Finch notes that the most common form for the genre is the first-person narrative essay; but most of the pieces in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 are third-person profiles, generally of an individual or a specific discovery, with no mention of the writer at all. Annie Dillard‟s work is heavily lyrical, guided not just by the meanings of words but by their poetry, while Bill McKibben‟s writing is straightforward and journalistic, a call to arms. Although there is no standard definition, I have interpreted “environmental writing” as writing that communicates the emotions and ideas of the environmental movement, and/or depicts places that are worth protecting. Most of the pieces included here are first-person, and several (“Rangefinder Girl” and “Reindeer Boots”) could be described as place-based memoir. In other pieces, like “Wasteland,” I have tried to combine journalistic inquiry with personal narrative, while the three op/eds in this collection are more fact- than emotion-based, more indignant than reflective. The first piece that I wrote specifically for inclusion in my thesis was “Useless Bay,” which I composed in the middle of a very jet-lagged night in my grandmother's apartment ...