Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

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Bryson, Michael A. Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002. The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of these authors, their work, and the ways in which science and nature unite them. Visions of the Land explores how our environmental attitudes have influenced and been shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the twentieth century. Bryson offers a literary critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds, scientific training, and geographic experiences represented nature through various kinds of natural science—including history, cartography, resource management, ecology, and evolution—and in the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science itself. Ultimately, the book is an extended meditation on the capacity of using science to live well within nature. (Text adapted from University Press of Virginia website.)