"An extremely valuable book."--Science

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CONSERVING WORDS How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement By Daniel J. Philippon Published by The University of Georgia Press

"Daniel Philippon does an extraordinarily thorough and lucid job of telling the life stories of these five writers, focusing on their involvement in the environmental movement. . . . In seeking to discern the political and social impact of environmental writing, Conserving Words makes an important contribution to one of the central issues in contemporary ecocriticism."--Scott Slovic, Professor of Literature and Environment, University of Nevada, Reno

"Conserving Words richly evokes the larger social context of American nature writing in the era between Roosevelt and Abbey. Daniel Philippon's skill in interweaving the literature with the friendships, letters, official reports, and public debates that informed it makes this book both illuminating and delightful."--John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home

The first study to link America's nature writing tradition to the development of its environmental organizations

How did American nature writers shape the environmental movement? To answer this difficult question, Daniel Philippon looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First!

These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Philippon calls "conserving" words. Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how "conserving" words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.

Each of these writers, Philippon contends, understood "nature" through a particular metaphor that best fit his or her time, place, and personal history: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), or utopia (Abbey). When these writers perceived an injustice to some portion of the natural world, they used these metaphors--and were used by them--to found advocacy organizations, rally concerned citizens, and preserve threatened landscapes.

Conserving Words is a significant contribution to the environmental humanities. An accessible examination of the "ecology of influence," it closely connects particular nature writers, their texts, and their readership to formative events in environmental history.

"[T]his book with its extensive apparatus ... might seem at first blush a monster of erudition, interesting to only a handful of academic scholars. In fact, Philippon has produced a readable, lucid examination of how five Americans shaped the environmental movement through their writing.... Making a significant contribution to the relatively new field of environmental humanities, this book--though classed as natural history--contains so much biography and anecdote that it will appeal readers across many disciplines. Summing Up: Essential. All collections."--Choice

"Though not intended as such, Daniel J. Philippon's Conserving Words functions as a valuable overview of the development of Progressive-era conservation and modern-day environmentalism... It is clearly written, illuminating, and grounded in the real world yet also aware of and interested in the subtle effects of language and culture on how we know--and might help save--that part of the world we call nature.... Conserving Words is an extremely valuable book for its case studies and for its thought-provoking Introduction and Conclusion."--Science

"Philippon shows in meticulous fashion how his five writer-activists played integral, complex roles in the development of these important organizations, and how often these people and their organizations interacted.... Philippon thus offers a microcosmic environmental history of the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century."--Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"By focusing on a largely neglected, but nonetheless important, aspect of environmental literature, Philippon has done ecocriticism a great service. Clearly written, meticulously researched, and carefully organized, with helpful diagrams in the introduction and revealing photographs of each author in the individual body chapters, Conserving Words will prove useful to scholars and graduate students in literary studies and environmental history in the years to come."--Environmental History

"Philippon skilfully weaves literary criticism, environmental history and biographical studies into a very readable text.... Overall this is a fine book, well written, with copious endnotes, and a good bibliography and index. Philippon demonstrates well that nature writers have much to contribute to our understanding not only of the origins of the environmental movement, but also of its future direction."--Environmental Politics

"Philippon's elegant narrative is tightly organized, clearly written, well-researched, and persuasive. It will be particularly suited for graduate seminars, in part due to the thorough historiographic quality of the chapters.... Conserving Words is important because it addresses how writers, and in this case environmental writers, can educate and promote change through literature as well as institution building."--Agricultural History

"Conserving Words is an important addition to the growing number of studies of the social and political significance of nature writing.... This is exactly the kind of approach ecocriticism needs in order to recognize the richness and social significance of nature writing. The social is interwoven with the environmental more often in this book than most environmental histories."--Capitalism Nature Socialism

"A well-argued, lucid study.... The breadth of Philippon's scholarship is remarkable, but he somehow manages to avoid becoming bogged down with a tiresome review of previous studies, using them judiciously as critical context for his own careful examination of the five writers at the heart of his study...."--Ethics, Place, and Environment

"A tight, challenging genre exegesis incorporating biographical and rhetorical criticism.... Each profile is dense with biographical detail, references to salient, relevant literature, and connected to one another along the thread of Philippon's deft weaving."--Writing Nature

"Writers who write about a need to protect the environment and readers who revere them should have high praise for Daniel Philippon's Conserving Words.... His examination of five of the best known environmental writers and organizations they are associated with ... provides a framework for a readable, at times illuminating, history of the American environmental movement."--Salt Lake Tribune

"Daniel J. Philippon ... has written an excellent history of environmental activism in the United States that reminds us that the conservation movement is also a literary movement as well as a tradition rife with its own lore and legendary personalities.... Beneath the historian's detachment in Conserving Words we find traces of the author's deep sympathy with environmental concerns."--Southern Scribe

"The reader sees beyond any romantic attachment to nature to different kinds of activism inherent in and prompted by the varieties of nature writing by these five well-known authors. Philippon's original literary study ... gets beyond the surface appeals of nature writing which is ordinarily lumped together by most readers."--University Press Book Review

"To better understand how these gifted writers framed the ideas that gave birth to the environmental organizations most closely associated with their activism, Philippon digs deeply into the metaphorical language they employed."--Journal of Forestry

"Conserving Words is a thoughtful and inspiring study, appropriate for both specialists and general readers."--Western American Literature

"Identifying the influence of writing on the public sphere, this study gives a clear example of the role of literature in environmental movements."--ASEH News

"Philippon deftly synthesizes relevant theoretical work on the analytical categories: nature, writing, metaphor, narrative, value, environmentalism."--American Literature

"A clarifying reading of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang is provided by Daniel J. Philippon in Conserving Words. Philippon distinguishes between sabotage (against property and mechanical functions) from terrorism (as directed against people and human life) and also appreciates Abbey's privileging of biodiversity over private property."--American Literary Scholarship

"Daniel J. Philippon offers a compelling analysis of the role that makers of natural history literature have played in the evolution of the American environmental movement.... Philippon's book is very worthwhile overall--and his analysis of TR and the Boone & Crockett Club especially prescient."--Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

"If you are interested in how nature writing has influenced conservation and environmental organizations, you will enjoy spending time with Dr. Philippon's book."--The Leopold Education Project Newsletter

"A useful and intellectually stimulating study.... The research is excellent, both thorough and imaginative. Everyone who has an interest in recent utopian thought will wish to read Conserving Words."--Utopian Studies

"Philippon has produced a valuable book for wilderness advocates. The introduction, 'The Ecology of Influence,' has concise discussions of important concepts in contemporary environmental thought."--Friends of Allegheny Wilderness Newletter

Daniel J. Philippon is an assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics. He is editor of a critical edition of Mabel Osgood Wright's The Friendship of Nature and coeditor of the anthology The Height of Our Mountains.