WORDS FROM THE LAND Encounters With Natural History Writing <i> edited by Stephen Trimble (Peregrine Smith: $9.95, illustrated)</i>

In his ponderous introduction, Trimble asserts, “Contemporary natural history writers speak for the earth.” Several of the authors take his claim at face value: Breezes become nature’s sighs, birds are transformed into symbols of freedom, every square foot of land trod by humans is a paradise lost. Unlike the modern masters of the genre, Loren Eiseley and Stephen J. Gould (both of whom are curiously absent from this collection), these writers seem less interested in nature and science than in chronicling their own thoughts and moods. A few of them, notably John McPhee, Edward Abbey and David Quammen, strike a balance between the internal and the external that makes for worthwhile reading. But in too many of these essays, the authors are so busy striving literary effects that they lose the forest for the trees-as-metaphor.