Environment

In intellectual and artistic circles, much of the twentieth century was a prolonged festival of specialization. In research and artistic expression, human enterprise underwent a remarkably extensive process of categorization and separation into specialties and genres. One aspect of this celebration of narrowness was the creation of the two separate categories of "nature writing" and "ethnic literature." The unhappy consequence of that division was that the people known as "nature writers" were overwhelmingly drawn from white, middle class backgrounds. Meanwhile, over in the ethnic literature section of libraries, an abundance of poetry testified to the strong desires of writers of color to engage their imaginations with landscapes, skyscapes, wildlife, plants, and light. Redefine categories, and "nature writing" loses it's inadvertent segregation, and gains a rich supply of nature-directed writing by people of color. In historical studies, a parallel separation occured between "ethnic history" and "enviromental history," and a similar process of rethinking those categories will show how intertwined are the history of race relations and the history of human relations with nature.