Prose

In this Delve seminar, we will compare the ecological writing of Richard Powers and John Muir. Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, comes to us at a time when concern for preserving natural spaces has exploded into anxiety over the planet’s very future. While grappling with deforestation and global warming in fiction, Powers sees himself as a realist. He asks, “Which is more childish, naïve, romantic, or mystical: the belief that we can get away with making Earth revolve around our personal appetites and fantasies, or the belief that a vast, multi-million-pronged project four and a half billion years old deserves a little reverent humility?” Muir, something of a father for the national parks movement, used an ecological perspective in his stories of adventure and…