NONFICTION - Oct. 13, 1996

VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics by Daniel G. Payne (University Press of New England: $42 cloth, $15.95 paper, 181 pp.). In “Voices in the Wilderness,” independent scholar Daniel Payne traces American nature writing from Jefferson’s age (and before) to the present, and what he discovers is an evolving discipline that in many ways has come full circle. “Use but don’t waste,” said James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo; today’s “wise use” movement, the brainchild of corporate America, could well employ the same motto. The difference, of course, is that the unusual environmental ethic found in Jefferson’s and Cooper’s thinking is widespread today, having attracted relatively few adherents through the time of Henry Thoreau and John Muir but expanding with the patronage of outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt and virtually exploding with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

Payne, a lawyer, also makes one significant, scary point--that “Much of the most creative contemporary thinking in environmental protection is now exhibited in legal briefs, law review articles, and judicial decisions, meaning that one of the most important nature writers of the 20th century may turn out to be William O. Douglas.”