Gone are the days when one could write about nature the way Edwin Way Teale and Euell Gibbons did. I grew up on those books, and others like them. Books like those were so optimistic, as though nature would always be what it was then.
Not that there weren’t ominous clouds on the horizon. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring during that same era. But she, too, could still see nature as something fairly stable. Her trilogy on marine life showed that same innocent quality as Teale and Gibbons.
Nature writing isn’t like that anymore. You can’t read any recent nature writing without grim warnings about climate change, or mass extinction, or other global catastrophes. Innocent enjoyment of nature has gone the way of every other kind of innocence.