13 Ways of Seeing Nature in LA

Well. This is an article I like very much but have not had time to finish. It's by Jennifer Price, who wrote a book called Flight Maps and is a yale history PhD (wm. cronon protege) who ended up deciding to work outside of academia, as a writer.

The piece addresses many of what I see as extremely pertinent questions for those who would be environmentalists and writers/historians: namely, what kind of "nature" is it that we choose to write about? If we really want others to examine/refine their relationship to the environment, shouldn't we talk about/prize the nature that most people see and work with every day, instead of canyons and hawks and dolphins?

Or, as Jennifer Price would put it far better than I just summarized:

"If L.A. symbolizes 'the end of nature' (to use Bill McKibben’s dangerously catchy phrase), it actually has more than enough real fodder for such tales, if you want to write about the sunset on Broad Beach in Malibu or the hawks soaring in Temescal Canyon or the dolphins leaping just offshore or how your heart soars like a hawk or leaps like a dolphin as you watch the sun set offshore from atop the trail in Temescal Canyon.

But there are so many more kinds of nature stories to tell here. I head for L.A.’s wild spots when I can, and delight in hawks, dolphins, and sunsets as much as the next nature lover. I have a special soft spot for ducks. But the anthologies ignore about 90 percent of the nature in L.A. and all the other places we live, as well as most of people’s encounters with nature on Earth. What the crisis of nature writing amounts to, in a few words, is that Thoreau really, really needs to Get on the Bus.

And my own list of favorite representative topics for a more comprehensive, on the bus nature writing in Los Angeles would have to include mango body whips, the social geography of air, Zu-Zu the murdered Chihuahua, and Mapleton Drive near Bel Air. And, of course, the L.A. River, where all the possible kinds of nature stories in L.A. converge."