Bear River Bird Refuge
The connection ecocritics propound has also been reinforced by contemporary nature writers. Even though these writers typically make a living by venturing out into and writing about the distant wilderness, they frequently end up trying to carve out some ground for humanity within these wilderness areas. Terry Tempest Williams' book
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, for example, makes a titular gesture toward connecting her family and a natural place she has grown to love, which in this case is the Bear River Bird Refuge in northern Utah. She argues throughout the book that her family's history is irrevocably "tied to the land" (14). In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez makes a similar point but about a landscape much further from home;
he examines the arctic as one of the wildest landscapes left on the earth, but interestingly his study of this remote landscape leads him to the belief "that people's desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra" (xxii).
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, for example, makes a titular gesture toward connecting her family and a natural place she has grown to love, which in this case is the Bear River Bird Refuge in northern Utah. She argues throughout the book that her family's history is irrevocably "tied to the land" (14). In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez makes a similar point but about a landscape much further from home;
he examines the arctic as one of the wildest landscapes left on the earth, but interestingly his study of this remote landscape leads him to the belief "that people's desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra" (xxii).