Though nature writing is produced across genres and fields, it is especially important to the genre of the personal essay. In the American essay tradition, for example, American Transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, wrote nature essays to explore and celebrate the relationship between the individual and nature, seeking ‘an original relation to the universe’. This dedication to exploring the relationship between humans and nature continues in the tradition of the American nature essay, such as in the works of John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard and Scott Russell Sanders, just to name a few. These essayists range in their explorations from the positions of observers and lovers of nature to activists fighting to save the environment from further destruction. Given essayists’ attentiveness, in a variety of ways and roles, to the human–nature relationship in the tradition of nature writing, the genre of the essay might be well suited to meet and, perhaps, even lead in the contemporary posthuman turn. While the posthuman turn seeks to address a variety of ideas that are central to humanism – including its overemphasis on human perspective, as well as its privileging of the rational and the autonomous individual over affect and social practices – it also in no small part attempts to head off (or at the very least address) ecological crises. To do so, however, the essay would have to confront its humanist tradition of privileging the essayist’s perspective as the source of meaning-making.

In a characteristic (if provocative) example of the essay’s embrace of humanism, ‘Emerson and the Essay’ (an essay itself), essayist William H. Gass responds to, reinterprets and expands on Emerson’s famous claim that life is ‘but the angle of vision’. In ‘Experience’, Emerson states: