"Delving and Carving Rude Nature"

Staple genres of American environmental literature such as nature-writing and the pastoral have tended to be by, for, and about privileged whites, typically Thoreauvian types whose relationships with nature apparently enable their self-recovery by seemingly offering a simpler, more rewarding life divorced from degraded urban environments. Rather than approaching nature as a privileged white refuge, race scholars, including environmental justice critics, postcolonial ecocritics, and a growing number of Asian Americanists, historicize the category of nature in order to understand how nonhuman environments and affiliated discourses are constructed. Through a process of historicization, so-called natural landscapes, for example, Thoreau's New England pond, John Muir's Californian mountains, and Aldo Leopold's Wisconsin sand counties, become national landscapes. The American ideology of geopolitical mobility may encourage the belief that all citizens are equally entitled to frequent or inhabit these national-natural landscapes, but, crucially, not all are afforded equal recognition in mainstream discourses as having been there, much less of belonging there, because these landscapes are racialized. As T. V. Reed observes in a slightly different context, “white folks go to play with wilderness, while others are locked into urban ‘jungles.’” ¹