Writing About Nature

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 23.02.01

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. Content Objectives
  3. In Nature: Three Approaches
  4. Teaching Strategies
  5. Classroom Activities
  6. Appendix on Implementing District Standards
  7. Resources
  8. Notes

Why Nature? Noticing and Writing in the Wild

Brandon Barr

Published September 2023

Tools for this Unit:

In Nature: Three Approaches

In the “Writing About Nature” Seminar, Jill Campbell facilitated conversations with Fellows around a wide range of texts that focused on writing about nature. A number of these different readings raised valid questions about the role that nature plays in the modern world. Some of these questions include wondering how nature could be turned to for spiritual renewal, introspection, wonderment, and physical well-being. We thought deeply about how different groups responded to these questions. We also thought about how some groups have been actively excluded from the benefits of nature, and how we share a collective responsibility to correct historical wrongs such as racism and environmental injustice while also supporting efforts to combat climate change. The works associated with three very different types of nature writing serve to deepen my student’s understanding of nature. From learning about the concerns of these nature writings and writers, my students will be positioned to think about the challenges and opportunities that are associated with nature.

My thinking about nature started with wanting to dive deeply into the world of the Transcendentalists. My original unit proposal was narrowly focused on the Transcendental Movement; Transcendentalism was my introduction as a teenager to the promise and possibilities of nature. In many ways, the cabin that I own in northern Michigan and even my becoming an English teacher can be partially connected to my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Joyce Biel. Her passion for American Literature made texts come alive for me, Walden being one of them. However, as we dug into our seminar readings, it became readily apparent that if I focused on just the Transcendental Movement, I would miss out on a number of rich and varied voices that my students also need to hear in their journeys in connecting with nature. I therefore broadened my thinking a bit to pull in other concerns of figures like Rachel Carson and J Drew Lanham to illuminate that people have different preoccupations and purposes when it comes to writing about nature.

The Transcendental Movement

Slowing down and being present is nature is not a recent invention. Even during the 1800’s, there was a group of individuals in the Northeastern United States that felt that advances in modern living weren’t necessarily improving the quality of life of individuals. Rather than participate further in society that was increasingly complex, this group of individuals looked for ways that they could be deliberate with their thoughts and actions. The Transcendental Movement of the early to mid-1800’s encouraged deep reflection and consideration of an individual's relationship with the universe.12 The movement had a few core beliefs that drove key figures to engage in social experiments such as living in a cabin by Walden Pond (Thoreau) or forming utopian communities like Brook Farm. Among these core values are the importance of the individual, the importance of imagination and creativity, and the divinity of nature. These beliefs were a radical departure from societal norms before the 1830’s. The notion that humanity was innately good and that society corrupts individuals was a stark contrast to dogmatic thinking of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s that only organized religion could act as an agent of redemption for a fallen world and humanity.13 In a society that increasingly valued logic and reason, Transcendentalists saw the need for guidance from intuition, that there was a guiding force that resides in each individual and that it is innately good. 

This intuition is best represented in the symbolic “transparent eyeball” that Emerson used to explain the approach to make it possible to commune with nature. In this metaphor, Emerson notes that it is important to take all of nature in without bias to connect with nature. According to this thinking, communing with nature can be a divine experience likened to the awakening that many people often experience participating in organized religion; all one would need to do is be in nature in order to encounter the divine spirit.14 Nature was holy in the eyes of Transcendentalists. These values resonated with many at that time period, but they transcend the time period and are relevant to life in society today.

The world has changed a lot since the height of Transcendentalism in the mid-1800s. Despite the difference in times, there are ideas that are relevant in the modern world. In Walden, Thoreau articulates a number of arguments and principles. He felt that Americans were leading lives of quiet desperation, or sleeping through life; he wanted to bring people’s attention to focusing on the essentials, intentionally crowing like a rooster to “wake my [Thoreau’s] neighbors up.”15 When something of substance happened, he felt that people should be compelled to act in ways that were moral and just, but too many individuals were consumed with trivial news or reading low quality writing, much as people today often scroll mindlessly through social media posts.16 By exploring these ideas with students, they may feel a deeper connection to the natural world by noticing things that they might not otherwise notice without being given the time and space. 

The first value that may have modern application is the concept that nature is accessible and that access to it should be democratic. The movement may not have to be as dramatic as removing oneself from the world like Thoreau, but individuals may gain a lot by means of looking around their lived environment in order to uncover and recover a connection to the natural world.  Students will compare this with an episode of This Old House with Bob Villa, who goes to the site of Walden Pond and interacts with a Thoreau impersonator. The Thoreau impersonator gives a tour of the cabin “he” built and answers Villa’s questions with passages shaped by what Thoreau wrote in Walden.17 Students will see that the idea of reconnecting with nature has influenced many and that some have gone to great extremes to be at one with nature.

Thoreau believed in fairness and justice. In his work “Civil Disobedience,” he makes the following observation about slavery: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also.”18 He was willing to not pay taxes to avoid supporting such systems and was jailed for an evening as a result. Given the time period that he was writing in, Thoreau’s views were markedly progressive. His beliefs point to a larger observation about the legacy of race and equity of in America. The natural world has often not been equitably accessed by everyone, especially by racial minorities living in America, and that environmental justice has a legacy that still negatively impacts African Americans in America today. My students will think about this by considering some of the experiences of J Drew Lanham, an African American naturalist.

Another Transcendental value that may have modern applications is the concept of an inner authority that each person has, that people have to trust they have something significant to stay and need to share their voice and talents with the wider world. Emerson writes the following in the poem “Fable,” “Talents differ; all is well and wisely put/If I cannot carry forests on my back/Neither can you crack a nut.”19 In this poem, Emerson creates an imaginary conversation between a mountain and a squirrel. In this conversation, Emerson plays with the idea of size and how a mountain could easily disregard something as small as a squirrel. The squirrel in this poem, in true underdog fashion, demonstrates pluck, noting how a mountain makes a “pretty squirrel track.”20 The lesson of the fable is that everyone has talents and that they take different forms. This poem could be useful in a number of ways. During the course of a “spirit walk,” students could notice an element in nature and think about the conversations that it might have. Students could also ruminate on the theme of the poem, thinking specifically about what it means to have different talents and why that is significant. It is a ripe text for teaching and imagining in nature. 

Rachel Carson: Reclaiming Wonder and Excitement within Nature

Rachel Carson lived an interesting life. She was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania on May 27, 1907. By the age of 11, she wrote a prize-winning story that was published in a magazine. By 1925, she decided to attend Pennsylvania College for Women in 1925 in order to major in English, but by 1927 she decided to switch her major from English to biology. She decided to pursue graduate study at John Hopkins University in 1929, earning a Master of Arts degree in marine zoology in 1932 while teaching at University of Maryland. In 1936, she took the civil service exam, scoring higher than all of the other examinees, and was appointed to be a junior aquatic biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service. The following year, her sister died and Carson took in her sister’s two daughters while writing for the Atlantic Monthly. She led a successful career at the Fish and Wildlife Service for 15 years while raising kids and writing, finally resigning in 1952 to devote her full attention to writing and to care for Roger, her grandnephew, whom she adopted in 1957. She wrote the article “Help Your Child to Wonder” in 1956 which was published posthumously as a book in 1965 after Carson had been recognized for her groundbreaking work, Silent Spring.21 Carson’s biography is remarkable; she was a college-educated working adoptive-mother and writer that made an extraordinary contribution towards raising environmental awareness when women were often marginalized in society. She broke a glass ceiling in advocating for nature. 

In the book The Sense of Wonder, Carson makes note of the importance of reclaiming the sense of wonder that adults have felt at one point in their lives towards the natural world. In reading correspondence from the Rachel Carson collection of papers housed at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, I was surprised to read some of the language that she used to describe nature in her private correspondence. Consider the portion of a letter that Carson writes to a contemporary:

It is a preoccupation that has yielded a rich store of memories—mental pictures of wild swans adrift on a mountain lake, repeating in their plumage the snowy white of the peaks beyond of salmon leaping in the frothy water of a mountain stream high in the dripping forests of the Cascades—of the beauty of the voory’s song in the green dusk of a wooded valley…In the darker hours of life I have often drawn upon such memories for deep and never-failing comfort, or I have gone out to replenish my store and find again the refreshment of the natural world. For in the words of Keats: ‘some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits.’22

Going back to the question of “why nature?” particularly in the context of an English Language Arts classroom, Carson’s views of nature are poetic. She is clearly moved by nature in ways that are echoed in poetry, even quoting a British Romantic poet in her own writing. Wordsworth expresses similar sentiments in “Tintern Abbey”:

Though absent long

These forms of beauty have not been to me,

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration… [23

Carson understood in both the poetic and scientific sense that being in nature is restorative and meaningful, her lofty language about nature closely mirrors that of Wordsworth. While poets waxed poetic about nature, she took practical action. As we discussed in seminar, Carson makes the observation that adults often neglect the powers of being present in nature. She emphasized how children need to actively practice what it means to be engaged in the natural world in the text The Sense of Wonder.24 Carson appreciated nature and advocated for the need to be in nature, ultimately as a means to advocate for change that would preserve nature as a trained biologist.

The start of Carson’s nature advocacy was rooted in her capacity from a young age to express herself in writing with the support of her mother. Recalling her youth, Carson wrote that there was no time that she could recall in which she “didn’t assume I [Carson] was going to be a writer…I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature.”25 Her mother helped to inculcate a shared passion of the ocean, and one key early memory that townspeople recall of her was when she found a fossil on her family’s property. While her home was situated on over sixty acres that included an orchard and small farm, the town of Springdale where she grew up was a growing industrial town until the panic of 1907; factories sprung up and the smell of the glue factory was evident as train passengers would disembark into town. Carson’s mother was also an educated woman who took great interest in educating her children and sharing her passion for natural history, particularly bird-watching, a hobby that was popularized from the 1870’s until World War I as a means to “put children in sympathy with nature.”26 Rachel’s mother would take her for long walks around their property using Comstock books. Anna Comstock developed books that contained lessons that suggested ways for nature-study. These lessons were intended to cultivate the child’s appreciation and love of nature and their imagination, and to build connection with nature in order for children to recognize the divinity of nature. Comstock books emphasized that nature was created by a Creator (notice with a capital C); and therefore conservation was an obligation that must be conducted with great care and zeal.27 This is clearly evident in the life work of Carson.

The influence of nature and poetry inducing individuals to advocate for scientific change was not unique to just Rachel Carson. Consider a figure like Charles Darwin. Charles Lansley, author of Charles Darwin’s Debt to the Romantics: How Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth Helped Shape Darwin’s View of Nature, makes the following observation:

Darwin’s strain of Romanticism was a different way of seeing and interpreting the world, from Darwin the naturalist in the field noting his empirical experiences to Darwin the ‘scientist’ reflecting on those experiences, drawing up theories based on his perceptions and the perceptions of other naturalists, reflecting on those theories, and then going back to experiencing Nature again through the filters of those theories.28

Darwin would go into the field and observe, just as I expect my own students to observe. He would reflect on those observations, just as I expect my students to reflect on their experiences. He learned to sympathize with the common beetle and felt “sublime ecstasy” from germinating seeds from bird droppings.29 It is evident that getting students into nature and having them engage in the action of nature writing may potentially induce them to connect with nature on a deeper and more scientific level later.

J Drew Lanham: Nature is a Place for All

Students of communities that have been historically marginalized may not have regular or equitable access to the natural world. In the text The Home Place, our seminar considered the importance of having equitable access to elements of nature. The author of the text is an African American birdwatcher who often conducts field work in regions of America that have a history of being openly hostile and racist towards African Americans. In recounting some anecdotes from his experience in the field, he raises some issues that pertain to instructional decision-making for teachers. Lanham centers his identity in nature, tracing back his connectedness to enslaved ancestors and their orientation and connection to the land.30 The same skills that he employed in birding are the same skills that his ancestors used to survive extreme deprivation. I am certain that there are many students of color could have found agency and voice in nature if given the same access and privilege as Thoreau, Emerson, Carson or Darwin. It is the role of the classroom teacher to help provide this access and create equitable opportunities for all children to get their time in nature.

From this legacy, Lanham sees himself as an activist and advocate, arguing that action needs to occur to ensure that African Americans that have been denied the opportunity to engage in wildlife biology one day have the opportunity to engage in the field. He recounts that some of these roadblocks still exist, that he has been followed by “hillbillies” going to a birding site in a remote region and encountered another birding station that had been defiled by the KKK. His white colleague, normally an astute and careful observer, had no concept of the range of emotions that Lanham felt when put into these situations that were shaped by “bad memories, misinformation, and ignorance.”31 It is incumbent on teachers to have a sense of what previous experiences students have had to remove this blindness. Teachers must reflect on ways to create opportunities for students who have been marginalized in the past so they might have the access and resources they need to be connected to the land as well. In order to have my students think about their relationship with nature and the collective need for action, I have suggested reading several excerpts from the text Nature’s Best Hope: How You Can Save the World in You Own Yard as a way to explore concrete actions that they could take to help improve the environment that are logical for middle school students.

Spirit Walks: Writing about Nature in Urban Environments

There have been many challenges to navigate returning to in-person instruction after the pandemic. Many students have struggled to express their thinking and seem very introverted; they spend a lot of time in their heads. Many schools, including my school Twain, have had to make social emotional learning a key component of engaging and acclimating students to the learning environment. Rather than make it more of a separate entity, one instructional goal I have is to incorporate tenets of social emotional learning (SEL) into content area instruction. 

Given the nature of this seminar’s content, it will be important to get students into nature in some fashion. In thinking about the best way to manage this, I came across one writer’s approach to engaging with nature that she refers to as taking a “Spirit Walk.” The key components of a Spirit Walk involve an individual going out into the closest natural environment, finding a spot to situate oneself, and listing what our five senses (not just sight) observe about the natural world in the immediate area.32 After a period of sitting in one place, the individual should get up and walk for a bit, stop and pick up something that can be handled like a rock or leaf and write about that item in paragraph form, listing all the details that can be noticed from the senses including how one’s body feels while observing the item. For the next part of the Spirit Walk, an individual is encouraged to “walk with awareness of your senses, your body, of the wildness around you and the emotions you experience in it.” The goal is to get the participant feeling fully present and aware of his or her emotions until the individual recalls a memory or feels emotions or has thoughts connected with the past. Individuals are encouraged to write these stories down once they enter the participant’s consciousness. 

I was drawn to this process for a couple of reasons. The first reason connects back to my concern about addressing SEL in an authentic way. This process is very similar to body scans that I will often use with students to help them regulate their emotions. A body scan is a mindfulness exercise in which an individual helps another person or group of people to “bring the mind to rest in the present” by getting individuals to sense a “progression of attention over the body… releasing emotions and judgment.” Students engaging in Spirit Walks would be similarly in tune with their surroundings and feelings as they think about their own emotions and perceptions as their awareness is heightened during the exercise. 

It is also relevant because it leads to stronger writing skills. Many students believe that they have to have a life full of adventure and excitement in order to have stories that are worth writing about. The written work that students do in response to their Spirit Walks or other more scientific observations would make writing feel much more accessible, encouraging students to “move away from broader experiences of life, to deeper experiences of life… [and] strive to create more concentrated perspectives of the world, views of life that are exquisitely depicted, original and authentic.”33 This is evident in a particular piece of writing that I would have my students read during the unit, “The Turtle.”

Even though it is not Transcendentalist, one text I would have students read while teaching the unit is “The Turtle” which is an excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. One of the key lessons that I teach my students about narrative writing is that you have to give the readers enough visual details to recreate the setting in the reader’s mind. This particular text serves as an excellent model of what it means to establish an item in its natural environment. Steinbeck uses metaphor in the excerpt to compare the plight of the Joad family being at the mercy of larger forces like the turtle in the excerpt. In the text, Steinbeck describes the turtle with such exact detail that the reader can picture it struggling to cross the highway and think about how that symbolizes the forces that push and pull on the Joad family.34 Elements of the natural world can be described in great detail to make a larger symbolic point. Spirit Walks allow students to practice this through intense noticing and thinking about how it feels to notice and be present with the natural world and our deeper thoughts. 

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