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Evelyn White and Terry Tempest Williams both discuss within their writing how their relationship with nature is driven by the fear of specific human presences within it. They both use anecdotal evidence layered with emotion as their literary weapon in an attempt to introduce their terrified gendered experiences; however, White explains that her fear is characterized by the humans who occupy the land, while Tempest Williams describes her fear with human-made technology and subsequent machinery.

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Tempest Williams uses a great deal of emotion to drive her story into a lasting state for her audience. She writes in a way that touches your heart; she offers a writing style that allows anyone to put her situation into their shoes. Her word choice is graphic and honest as she paints her ugly truth. This rhetoric is extremely evident when she writes, “I watched beautiful women become bald as Cytoxan, Cisplatin, and Adriamycin were injected into their veins. I held their foreheads as they vomited green-black bile, and I shot them with morphine when the pain became inhuman. In the end, I witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth of their souls,” (Tempest Williams 286). The consequences of the nuclear fallout have taken her family, and deteriorated their once healthy and strong to a form so simple and weak. Familial systems are a core complex that most individuals value most in life, therefore Williams uses this knowledge in choosing to share her own story. Any reader, regardless of their gender identity, can understand how painful her experience is due to the raw emotion she shares within her writing. The readers are put in a position to express empathy to Williams’ vulnerability as her writing is intertwined with words and descriptions that evoke all of our senses. Williams offers vernacular that is vivid and familiar to anyone who has lost someone near to their hearts. Specifically realizing that her pain could have possibly been avoided by living in another state is the most heartbreaking part.

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Just as we have seen in Tempest Williams writing, White additionally turns to emotive tactics in order to relay her message across to individuals of all demographics. Her literary choice in leaning towards a tragic story regarding the murder of a young child helps the audience to decipher the intensity of her fear surrounding the human race. “Emmett Till had been lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River with the rope still dangling around his neck for allegedly whistling at a white woman at a country store… Among Black parents, the JET [a magazine for blacks] with Emmett’s story was always carefully handled and treated like one of the most valuable treasures on earth. For within its pages rested an important lesson: how little white society valued our lives,” (White 380). A group of human beings were capable of inflicting this horror, therefore White’s fears extend to all human beings that occupy the land, as an avoidance technique to keep herself safe. No one is safe from heinous acts of racial discrimination; not even children, not even White. Having to grow up in an environment where these nightmares have become a reality is capable of inflicting irreversible trauma on a person of color, and this emotional prowess of a story drives forward the roots of her fear.

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“Nine years old at the time, I remember standing in my house in Gary, Indiana, and watching in horror as my mother ironed the black fabric that, in my mind, would align me with the bloody dresses, limbless bodies and dust covered patent leather shoes that had been entombed in the blast,” (White 379). White, within this specific moment in her writing, is the embodiment of fear. Her racial traumas have simply bled into every waking moment of her life, and are seemingly engrained in every innocent practice. This moment is bursting at the seams with emotion, and allows the audience to empathize with the young girl as she fights her reality. She has learned that her skin color makes her vulnerable to death and discrimination, therefore, these traumas have become a part of everything around her. White understandably gives a lot of power to her fears, as the consequences are so extreme. Her relationship with nature suffers because of the what-if’s. Freedom in outdoor exploration is not as easy as just taking a chance, taking a leap, or having faith in the possibilities. It is a fear of the people that sit outside waiting to prey on her skin: and that intensity cannot be trumped by any perceived beauty that nature has to offer.

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Nature is supposed to compliment the human race. Our two entities were intended in design to take care of one another. White, throughout her writing, has explained that her fear of the outdoors is completely influenced by the individuals who haunt the land; White’s monsters are fueled by their disliking of her colored skin. This fear has completely redefined her relationship with nature, in that, authentically experiencing the beauty of the land seems to be an impossible task. Any thought of her traveling to explore what the world has to offer is minimized to a dream; her fear leaves her paralyzed by the vulnerability of being alone in the wilderness. The audience is able to further understand this perspective when she writes, “I was certain that if I ventured outside to admire a meadow or to feel the cool ripples in a stream, I’d be taunted, attacked, raped, maybe even murdered because of my skin color… Each house-hunting trip I’ve made to the countryside has been fraught with two emotions: elation at the prospect of living closer to nature and a sense of absolute doom,” (White 378). White yearns for a sense of closeness with her natural surroundings, but her fear for her life simply masks these desires. Here, she recites that her fears are not directly linked to nature, however, her anxieties stem from what could happen to her within nature if she ever dared to explore. Her traumas of discrimination as a black woman have taught her that she is not safe.

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“... I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from the contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother — members, years later, of the Clan of the One Breasted Women.” (Tempest Williams 281). With this insight, the audience is given the power to begin deducting that Williams’ relationship with nature has been impaired by the detrimental impacts of these man-made machines on her family’s health. A nuclear fallout in Utah has been intrinsically linked to the diagnosis of breast cancer found within seven of Williams’ family members. She has lost an overwhelming amount of female relatives due to the location in which they live. Williams had always taken great pride and joy in the land that surrounded her, however, this land soon became known to host the testing of atomic bombs that resulted in a generational trend that altered the rest of her life. Her air became polluted with chemicals, which ultimately takes great tolls on human health, spread thusly by mothers and children. The intersectionality of both human health and environmental factors can allow Williams to additionally harbor a fear behind the willingness of individuals to conduct these nuclear explosions in such close proximity to human life. Her family had worked so hard in sustaining a healthy life and healthy body, all to be destroyed by the air necessary to breathe… that is unexplainably frightening.

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A very powerful resemblance between the two authors, Terry Tempest Williams and Evelyn White, is their fixation on elegy – a characteristic of literature that we had previously discussed in our lecture. Both of their pieces are driven by a raw emotion that carries so much weight because they are writing about themselves and their life. They are not telling a fictitious tale, or overwhelming their readers with numerical statistics or action items. They both have chosen to share anecdotes surrounding their fear for their own life, and all of the death that has subsequently occurred around each of them. Elegy involves a deep reflection, typically ensconced around the premise of death (whether described in the past, present or future). Both women lament the death of their family members and members of their community as the driving forces behind the development of their fears, and their stories. There is nothing scarier than life’s biggest consequence; death. However, I thought it was equally interesting how both authors additionally lamented the future deaths of themselves in their writing. The fears that they have derived from the human presences within nature have grown so powerful because they know that they could be next after everything they have observed. Their writing is powerful, personal, moving, emotional, and vulnerable because death feels too familiar, and could soon be a reality for them as well.

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Throughout the continuation of our course, we discussed the generalized qualities of literature. We noted within the lecture that reading literature is similar to unfolding an accordion, representing the complex levels and depth that can be found within talented writing. The closed accordion constitutes the main argument – and the tactics, motives and purpose of the piece often characterize the keys of the instrument as two arms pull it apart. In comparing and contrasting Tempest Williams and White as authors, I began to notice that their keys are very similar. Specifically, the social construct of each piece is nearly identical, in that both artists are making sense of their present day reality by focusing on what is familiar to their lives at that point. They both make their decisions and cultivate their assumptions about the world by analyzing the history of their ancestors, and each notices tragic patterns. White has observed firsthand instances of racial discrimination. She has noted this treatment against her ancestors and relatives and friends. She had noticed this trend within the newspapers: Emmett Till and the four little black girls, all murdered because of their skin color. White has learned, through historical contexts, that the people within nature must be feared. Similarly, Tempest Williams has analyzed her family’s medical history, and has based her fears off of the fate that has seemingly emerged within her generational family line. She has noted that her female relatives have all been inflicted with breast cancer since the nuclear fallout – not one woman within the bloodline skipping this fate. She found confidence in this conclusion as she later noted that the only other case of breast cancer in her family took place in 1960 – a completely isolated event. Tempest Williams has learned, through historical contexts, that the technology created by humans and thus introduced to nature, must be feared.

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Bradley, Mamie Till. Emmett Louis Till. 1955.

Cancer Genetics Editorial Board. Genetics of Breast and Gynecologic Cancers . 10 Mar. 2023.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, [2023]

Tempest Williams, Terry. The Clan of One Breasted Women. Northern Lights, January 1990, Volume VI, No. 1

Utah Humanities Council. Cedar City, Utah: Downwind of Nuclear Weapons Test Site, [n.d].

White, Evelyn. The Stories that Shape Us: Black Women and the Wilderness. Norton, 1996.

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Both writers additionally write from a female perspective. They explore the interconnections that can be derived from the relationship between women and nature, and each shine a light on the oppression faced by their gender within their specified contexts. Being a woman escalates both of their fears. For Tempest Williams, breast cancer is a diagnosis that is substantially more common in women, therefore she is at a much greater risk of falling ill to the adverse environmental factors in her area. Breast cancer takes over 40,000 female lives each year. Evelyn White offers her story of cruelty from the eyes of a young girl.  Women are typically connoted as the weaker gender, which results in the unfortunate truth that women are generally the larger target of violence in the world as it is. However, being a black woman brings an additional set of challenges – and White now acquires two qualities that are granted lesser power and fewer privileges than that of a (1) white (2) man per se. Their fears are catapulted by the idea that a woman within each of their situations has zero control over their eventual fate. They address the power dynamics of women against human presences in nature, and contribute to the social movement regarding the prejudiced dominance held over women in these environments.

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While both authors have developed a fear of human presences within nature, I would argue that their fears revolve around contrasting human entities. It seems as though White has developed her work alongside a perceived wilderness paradigm, while Tempest Williams has described her relationship as an ecological paradigm. Neither author is afraid of nature itself. White goes out of her way to describe the beauty of the natural world that surrounds her, and offers countless wishes that she could freely explore it. Her fear lies within the people that occupy the land; therefore, White describes nature and culture as two separate spheres. Humans are the enemy. However, Tempest Williams seems to follow the footwork of an ecological paradigm, in that, nature and culture are interconnected. She writes that the root of her fear is lodged within human-made machinery, and thus, ecological damage is capable of harming the human race. Williams takes great pride in her land, she is proud to be from her home state of Utah. However, the instances that occurred on the land have cultivated unsafe conditions for her female family members. Nature and culture work together, in that, the adverse effects of technology have created a dangerous land.

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Every author has a purpose when offering a new piece of work. A shared motivation behind the pieces of White and Williams is inclusive of an awareness of environmental injustice (an additional lecture topic that we have thoroughly discussed). Environmental injustice can manifest in many different forms, where White’s work specifically takes the form of environmental racism. They both call awareness to the injustices of our world, and share their stories in their struggles alongside these disadvantages. Definitively, this concept harbors the tendency of certain communities to experience different levels of environmental harm. Williams suffered in Utah because of her pinned location; she had no control over the placement of the nuclear fallouts. Not all natural communities are destroyed by these technologies. White experiences practices and instances of racial discrimination – she notices that individuals with her skin color are being murdered. Her race is completely disadvantaged due to the unjust prejudices held against them. Neither author can live out their lives to the fullest due to similar environmental injustices within their anecdotes.

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Tempest Williams continues to illustrate the injustices experienced by females in Utah when she writes,“the women couldn’t bear it any longer. They were mothers. They had suffered labor pains but always under the promise of birth. The red hot pains beneath the desert promised death only, as each bomb became a stillborn. A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land,” (Tempest Williams, 288). The only pain that is deemed bearable for a mother is the physical demands of labor and birth -- and this taxing experience can be justified through the gift of child bearing. However, the pain experienced through disease is an equally painful fight, with absolutely nothing in return. This diagnosis is not fair, especially when it is caused by the irresponsible placement of technology. Here, she additionally offers the idea that mother’s are being destroyed, and so is Mother Nature herself. The land is not benefiting from the chemical pollution brought upon by these explosions. There is not one female who has fallen unbothered by these environmental factors.