Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey’s philosophy. Among other texts examined are John Muir’s
My First Summer in the Sierra
(1911);
Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson’s three books about the sea,
Under the Sea-Wind (1941),
The Sea Around Us
(1951), and
The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines’s
The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Barry Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams’s
Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies that we have become accustomed and
affirm the principles of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic
values go hand in hand.