One of my newer magazine subscriptions is The Nature Conservancy, published by the deep-pocketed conservation group of the same name. The magazine is slightly oddly-sized, and it’s full of great nature photography, and the small handful of issues I’ve read regularly so far have impressed me with the breadth and sensitivity of their prose. The feature-length articles are as good as anything I find in my beloved National Geographic, although in the latest issue to reach me, even those feature-length articles were beat out by a bright little feature called “Writers by Nature.”

With text by Amanda Fiegl and wonderful color illustrations by Stan Fellows, the piece highlights some of the great writing that’s been inspired by lands protected and upkept by the Nature Conservancy, from the California mountains of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden to the Adirondacks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, from the Nebraska prairie of Willa Cather’s My Antonia to the ponds of Maine that are immortalized in Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea:

Here were creatures so exquisitely fashioned that they seemed unreal, their beauty too fragile to exist in a world of crushing force. Yet every detail was functionally useful, every stalk and hydranth and petal-like tentacle fashioned for dealing with the realities of existence. I knew that they were merely waiting, in that moment of the tide’s ebbing, for the return of the sea.

Fiegl includes other writers, figures like Wallace Stegner, TC Boyle, and of course Annie Dillard and her Blue Ridge Mountains, and she adds a few poets as well. And that’s it – no great page-length, just a rest point in between the issue’s bigger articles. But I loved it, and I’m coming to expect such grace notes in every issue. It’s certainly nice when some corner of the Penny Press does nothing more controversial than simply convert me into a fan!