The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp Author

American Memory note: As more and more Americans made their lives in cities and suburbs, a generation of writers younger than the revered John Burroughs sustained the American tradition of the nature-essay to guide their fellow-countrymen into a continuing appreciation for the natural world. Dallas Lore Sharp was one of the best and most prolific and most popular of these, a Bostonian professor who excelled at writing charming, disarmingly personal, reflective nature-essays that were often especially articulate and perceptive about the human encounter with the natural world. Sharp's subject definitely is not wilderness; it is, rather, the pastoralist's woods and fields in which most Americans came to know "nature" at this time (one of Sharp's other books is appropriately titled Wild Life Near Home). Nevertheless, like Thoreau and Burroughs before them, Sharp and his peers prepared Americans to be sensitive to the natural world in ways which ultimately made wilderness, too, seem something to be valued and preserved. This book has particular relevance to the history of conservationism, because in addition to providing representative examples of Sharp's nature-essays, its chapter on "The Nature Movement" reflects on turn-of-the-century-Americans' infatuation with nature--a cultural trend to which early conservationism owed a great deal of its identity--and attempts to situate this movement within the history of American culture.