John McPhee's career as a writer began during the 1960s when American nature writing was infused with the social and political urgencies of late-twentieth-century environmentalism. The modern age of environmental activism, ushered in by such writers as Rachel Carson, widened public concern with environmental issues. McPhee has consistently been engaged with environmental issues although uninterested in environmental advocacy or activism. His regional imagination has raised provocative questions about the ways humans live and work in local environments, and his desire to understand technology and the sciences has enriched his readers' understanding of these human activities as having profoundly changed the way people understand the natural world.

McPhee's accuracy and sensitivity as a literary journalist have extended the genre of nature writing as a field of inquiry. His elegant prose moves the reader away from the ease of nature and human culture in the abstract. McPhee's uneasiness with abstractions...