is the a burzum of nature's great cathedrals?

I've been reading a lot of naturalist/conservationist writing over the past several months, trying to get a jump on the greats - it's related to my field of study. However, I hate how religious most of it is, and how purple and overdone. I am not ready to give up on the genre by a longshot, and I know there must be stuff out there more suited to me. I do not want to hear flowery talk about nature's cathedrals and god's artistic hand. I want beautiful, simple writing about nature. Is it out there?

Title is a joke, btw. I do not support forest fires (lol), but I do not want to ever EVER hear or read the term "nature's cathedral" again.

Did you accidentally a word from the thread title?

my mans sigurd f. olsen

is there a burzum of nature's geat cathedrals? lol

scuse me, olson, i always f that up

i am totes down with annie dillard pilgrim at tinkers creek

like def a great hey nature is dangerous and would happily kill you angle that i appreciate

that is some Edmund Burke shit right there

http://www.impawards.com/1997/posters/edge_ver2.jpg

did u ever find what u were looking for, roxy?

i know u hate thoreau-bros but in my brief survey of post-walden nature writing i did find that a lot of it was misguidedly 'purple and overdone', like rhapsodizing w/ lots of figurative language would be the only thing that could possibly get the nature and nature-experience across to readers. that seems to be one thing thoreau gets straight, simplicity of expression.

seems like a thing that gets worse the later in time - john muir can still seem pretty solid, but on into the 20th century nature writing seems to have become primarily a literary enterprise.

i haven't read mary hunter austin's 'land of little rain' but i think it might also avoid some of this. in 'the environmental imagination', which you might dig, lawrence buell makes her out to actually do well at representing the physical environment 'as the primary reality which must shape human thoughts and choices' (a bugbear in that book as writers get more aware of the need to escape romantic projections of human junk onto nature).

i'm biased to like terry tempest williams because she's a local celeb and pretty much got fired by the university of utah for being too much of an activist, but to be honest i haven't read all that much of her work. she's maybe a little corny but has her moments iirc, and lately i think she tackles that false division between natural and human worlds in her own way. seeing her appear in a mid-90s public tv special on the great salt lake is a treat, all turquoise earrings and slit-mouthed western liberal lilt.

slit-mouthed? like cuzza how they talk?

she never opens her mouth very wide in that special. she talks out of the corners of her mouth for some reason. i feel like it was a 90s eco-activist thing here but i don't really know.

make a sound like the desert wind by not enunciating too broadly, terry. let's try that again.

well it's very dusty?

good point

https://apartirduneant.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/michael_parks-kill-bill.jpg