America's landscapes are not background. In the best books written about this continent, the land is an active presence: it shapes what can happen there, what has happened there, and what it costs to misread it. The tradition of writing about American land runs from Thoreau through Leopold and Dillard to Kimmerer, and the common thread is that all of them required sustained residence in a specific place before they had anything to say. The books that follow are each rooted in a particular American geography, and they are honest about what that geography demanded of the people who tried to inhabit it.
Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams spent four years traveling across the Arctic — the sea ice, the tundra, the Beaufort Sea — and the book is his attempt to render a landscape that defeats ordinary description. The Arctic is so large and so consistently hostile to human habitation that most writing about it resorts to either hyperbole or the language of exploration-adventure. Lopez does neither; he watches the light, the movements of animals, the relationship between Inuit communities and ice conditions, the history of failed European attempts to master terrain that did not recognize their terms. The book is about the limits of what a person from a temperate culture can understand about a place that requires a lifetime to read. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries this as the Arctic volume of what is essentially an American landscape library.
Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek stays in one place — a creek in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia — and goes deep. The landscape is ordinary by the standards of American geography: no mountains, no ocean, no dramatic wilderness. What Dillard finds there, in a year of sustained watching, is extraordinary anyway. The creek ecosystem is violent, extravagant, indifferent, and beautiful, often at the same time. The book makes the case that the American landscape does not require drama to be worth attending to, that the ordinary places are as full of information as the spectacular ones, if you are willing to look. The nature writing shelf holds this alongside Lopez and Leopold.
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is about a worn-out farm in Wisconsin that Leopold and his family spent years restoring. The almanac sections move month by month through the year, noticing what changes: the return of species, the behavior of geese, the quality of light in different seasons. The philosophical essays that follow ("The Land Ethic," in particular) draw the conclusions that the almanac sections demonstrate — that a healthy relationship to land is not one of ownership or dominion but of membership in a community that includes soil, water, plants, and animals as active participants. The nature writing shelf holds Leopold as the foundational figure in the American conservation tradition.
Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass approaches the American landscape from a position that none of the other writers here occupy: she is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she brings both bodies of knowledge to bear on the question of how human beings can be in right relationship to plant life. The book moves between Kimmerer's scientific career, her teaching, and the traditional ecological knowledge of her people — the latter comprising centuries of observation of the same landscapes that Western science studied for decades. The synthesis is not romantic; Kimmerer is a rigorous scientist. But the book argues that Western science's refusal to grant plants agency or interiority has cost us something, and it makes that argument with specificity. The nature writing shelf at byallo holds this as the most recent essential work in the tradition.
Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian represent the other side of this subject: what the American landscape cost the people who already lived in it when Europeans arrived, and what the violence of dispossession looked like in practice. Brown documents that violence from Indigenous perspectives; McCarthy renders it in the prose of an Old Testament that has run out of mercy. Both belong on the same shelf as Lopez and Dillard and Kimmerer — the full picture requires both the beauty and the cost. The narrative history shelf and the literary fiction shelf hold the historical and fictional accounts respectively.