How dare you, Sir!

 And Ma'am!

William O. Douglas, who sat on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975, wrote lyrically about his native Pacific Northwest in his books My Wilderness, The Pacific West (1960) and My Wilderness, East to Katahdin (1961). Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson, wrote America’s Natural Treasures: National Nature Monuments and Seashores (1971) and several books about the desert Southwest. In the early 1950s, Joseph Wood Krutch, a theater critic and longtime professor at Columbia, moved to Arizona for his health and fell in love, writing hymns of praise such as The Desert Year (1951) and The Voice of the Desert (1954). Rachel Carson, though now known primarily for Silent Spring, was famous in her lifetime for her books about the sea and parts of America’s Atlantic coast, especially in Maine and Maryland.

All these writers worked in the tradition effectively established by the eighteenth-century English writer Gilbert White, whose still-compelling Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) documents, in loving detail, his native village in Hampshire. White is the father of topophilia, the love of place, as a mode of writing, a tradition that finds its purpose in the delineation of a single small environment: a pond in Massachusetts (Thoreau’s Walden, 1854), a creek in Virginia (Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974), a county in Wisconsin (Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, 1949), a valley in California (John Muir’s The Yosemite, 1912).