With a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter recounts the history of American nature writing in its many iterations. Like the essay in general, nature writing is a hybrid form. It is omnivorous, incorporating elements of travel writing, natural philosophy, ethnography, diarism, and epistolary writing. Nature writing of the period in question is filled with technical information on plants and animals, agricultural practices, and methods for hunting or navigating, but it also abounds with metaphysical speculations, theological pronouncements, elaborate landscape descriptions, and dramatic accounts of practices like hiking, camping, fishing, and farming. Authors of many of the most well-known essays had professional ties to disciplines like geology, botany, and forestry. Featured essayists in this chapter include St. John de Crèvecoeur, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon, among others.

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated preservation and protection from humans, for natures own sake. This schism left an unsatisfactory state of affairs which would only be reconciled in the post-war period. Meanwhile, the conservationist side could only recognize the value of material resources, not beauty or wilderness. The preservation side seemingly left out a place for humans. In the first half of the 20th century, American natural resource economics was firmly on the conservationists side of that schism. It developed an American theory of property rights and institutions distinct from other theories of externalities.

In “Wilderness,” Debbie Lee traces the conceptual origins of wilderness writing to the “wildēors” (self-willed land) of ancient and medieval texts like Beowulf and to Indigenous place-based language and storytelling such as that of the Nimiipuu. In addition to tracing a history of the “wilderness movement” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the writings of authors like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, Lee also suggests an alternative history of wilderness rooted in social and environmental justice and expressed in Black and Indigenous literatures. Using examples from the works of Barry Lopez, Evelyn White, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, and Cecil Giscombe, among many others, Lee demonstrates the diversity and range of wilderness literature, arguing that we should think of “wilderness movements” in the plural.