SOURCE: Johnson, Rochelle. “Walden, Rural Hours, and the Dilemma of Representation.” In Thoreau's Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, edited by Richard J. Schneider, pp. 179-93. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Johnson compares Cooper's nature journal with Thoreau's Walden, attempting to account for the very different response each received from American readers.

Mere facts & names & dates communicate more than we suspect.

—Henry David Thoreau's Journal

When Barry Lopez, surely one of this century's most gifted nature writers, posed the question, “What is a dignified response to the land?,” he raised an issue that has been central to nature writers for well over a century.¹ How best to represent a physical place, its various and interdependent life forms, and an individual human's response to this place are crucial and central issues for many. Place-based nature writing necessitates representing observation, perception, and experience...