Daniel, John
John Daniel studied creative writing at Stanford University under Wallace Stegner and later taught there himself for many years. He is the poetry editor for Wilderness magazine and the author of The Trail Home.

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Even nature documentaries, despite their educational value, may tend ultimately to diminish the viewer's engagement with nature more than they enhance it. The Impoverishment of Sightseeing, 1992.

 

When push comes to shove, the settlement of North America has made clear, aesthetic values have a way of toppling in the practical path of progress. Ibid.

 

The timber or mineral executive reduces nature to a commodity, something to be taken out. The tourist seeking scenic beauty reduces nature to pleasing images, enjoyed and taken home on film. Ibid.

 

I'd watch them drop the Douglas firs. As a tree toppled and then fell faster, its boughs would sweep back, the whole trunk would flex a little just before it hit the hillside, a flash of wood showing if it broke somewhere. Across the distance the sound came late, and small, The saws sounded like hornets. Cuttings, 1994.

 

Like the sea, like the streams full of salmon, the ancient forest gave plenty&emdash;totem poles, tool shafts, bows, fishing floats, baskets, dishes, robes, roots, tubers, medicine. Ibid.

 

. . . Always, more each year, on both flanks of the range and sometimes high up toward the crest, you can see the white squiggles of advancing roads and the bare geometric patches of sheared ground. Ibid.

 

From the highways you see mostly trees. From the summits you can see where all those trucks are coming from. And almost every acre in your view is public land, retained in the ownership of the American people, part of a national forest system established a hundred years ago to hold good woodlands in reserve against the aggressions of the timber barrens. Ibid.