The narrator of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence keeps a stack of Hard books and Lazy books by her bed. Unlike Tookie, I have only one pile somewhere in between. I learned long ago not to read a juicy novel right before bed at risk of staying up too late and being a zombie at work the next day, but in the vast realm of nonfiction it took me ages to discern what sort of books might soothe without being soporific. Philosophy is too demanding at the end of the day, politics and much history too potentially distressing; literary criticism put me to sleep too soon. Then The Hidden Life of Trees found its way onto my nightstand bookstack. The ways that trees communicate with each other are so fascinating I stayed awake till the end of each chapter and then drifted off to sleep with images of the forest in my mind. Nature writing turned out to be the ideal genre for my bedtime reading.
Imagine my dismay then when I learned that some critics consider nature writing a “bourgeois form of escapism.” In reply I could point to the solar panels on my roof and the electric car in my driveway to show that I’m not fiddling while Rome burns, but that might just seem like bourgeois environmentalist bragging. Still, the nature books I read before sleep are more than the literary equivalent of chamomile tea. They feed a soul that has found solace in the outdoors since childhood, a woman who hikes and gardens. From classics like A Sand County Almanac to contemporary essay collections like Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, these books do more than put my mind at rest before bed. They stir in me a reverence for nature that plants me firmly on this earth and makes me want to protect it.
Nature writing also puts daily life and the very real woes of the world in a different perspective. Though not a replacement for being outdoors, it helps me feel connected to something larger than myself, a web of life in which I have a home – and at the end of the day a place to rest.
The Kingdom of Enough 