A New Voice in Nature Writing:
Kathleen Moore is hailed by critics for masterfully blending the physical world with the philosophical.

For as many years as Kathleen Moore can remember, she has walked in rivers: waded them, floated them and followed their banks. On her river outings, she carries a small notebook, scribbling the beginnings of essays that carry, as she says, "the smell of the willows and rainbow trout."

Moore, chair of OSU's philosophy department, recorded her reflections on moving water in her 1996 book of essays, Riverwalking, which received the 1996 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and was nominated for an Oregon Book Award. Her most recent book, Holdfast, reflects on still water - marshes, mountain lakes, edges of the ocean.

Critics have welcomed her as a new voice in nature writing, drawing comparisons between her work and that of John Muir, Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau,

Riverwalking and Holdfast are remarkable departures from Moore's previous books - scholarly texts on critical thinking and presidential pardons.

Although an academic, she wanted to begin writing books for the general public that would change the way people saw the world.

"What I try to show is a way of seeing that is more of an embrace, an alertness, an attentiveness to the natural world," she said. "People write to me and say, 'As a result of having read your book I'm more alert to the gifts the natural world can give. I see things I wouldn't have noticed before.'"

Moore notes in Riverwalking the maniacal laughter of a loon, polliwogs surviving in a desert, encounters with a rattlesnake, the courtship of the roughskin newt.

She draws meaning from her observations and in the case of the newt, questions why it exists and even further, "Why this, rather than nothing at all?"

"To my mind, it is the extraordinary fact that newts exist that needs explanation," she writes. "What I am looking for at the pond is a sense of their purpose, what Aristotle would call their final cause, an understanding of how they fit into the grand design. The search for meaning even in the life of a newt may be a farcical effort, based on assuming without evidence that nothing is without a purpose, that nothing is pointless, without meaning. But how hard it is for human beings to give up this faith."

Holdfast, released in 1999, takes its title from the name for the fist of roots that hold giant kelp to the bedrock.

"It seems to me that philosophers should be studying holdfasts," said Moore. "They should be asking how do we hold on or how do we connect to the values that sustain us?"

As the daughter of a field biologist, Moore spent the Sunday afternoons of her childhood trampling behind her father as he led nature walks and prepared for his field courses.

"We would to go a place and learn everything there was to know about it," she said, "what plants were there, what the names of the plants were, where the salamanders were hiding, where the bird nests were. It taught us a way of approaching a place that was very deep and rich."

Kathleen's husband, Frank, also is a biologist, and when family members have time to spend together, they spend it outdoors.

In her books, she describes boating with her daughter in the Alaskan wilderness, watching her son tie trout flies, bringing her father on a winter night to the headwaters of the Metolius River.

She believes that in connecting with the outdoors, one can establish roots. In Riverwalking, she explains how she hoped to nurture her daughter's connection with the land and home by taking her camping.

"I wanted her to inhale the smoke of a driftwood fire in air too thick to carry any sound but the rushing of the river and the croak of a heron, startled to find itself so far from home. I wanted the chemical smell of the tent to mix with the breath of warm wet wool and flood through her mind until the river ran in her veins and she could not help but come home again."

The Moores moved to Corvallis 25 years ago, when Frank joined the faculty at OSU. Kathleen began working as an adjunct instructor and built her career over the years, becoming head of the philosophy department about eight years ago.

Her decision to pursue nature writing was triggered by a conversation with English professor Chris Anderson about living unlived lives. Moore said she came to the realization that although she had always imagined herself sitting alone in a cabin writing about nature, she instead found herself in an office writing about ideas.

Anderson put together a writing group in 1994 in which members reviewed each other's work. Riverwalking grew out of this experience.

"In part what I wanted to do was combine my love of philosophy and ideas with a love of the natural world," Moore said. "By combining these two things what I'm trying to do is approach the natural world as if it had something to teach, to try to find meaning in the wilderness experience. It's kind of ironic that one of the main things the natural world has to teach us is how to create human connections."

She likes to think of essays in terms of osprey. As an osprey soars above a lake it will see a reflection or shadow below the surface and then dive.

"He takes an enormous risk when he tries to get below the surface," she said. "And I think that's what an essayist does. Fold her wings and drop and hope she can come up again with some new insight or new way of understanding."

The analogy might sound simple, but Moore finds that writing involves more than one swift dive. She rewrites endlessly.

"You really live with an essay," she said. "You carry it around, you prop it on the sink when you brush your teeth. You think about it when you go to sleep and you wake up in the morning with a couple of new sentences. It's more like raising a child than building a box."

After completing Riverwalking, Moore went to the campus bookstore to study the shelf where she wanted to see her book. She spent hours examining the books on the shelf before picking out three or four publishers to whom she sent the manuscript.

A week later while on a camping trip in Montana, she called to check her messages. She was amazed to discover a message from an editor at Lyons Press, who had decided it wanted the book.

"I had this vision in my mind I'll never forget of standing in the middle of a field in Montana at a pay phone and being soaked by a sprinkler ratcheting across the field as I was trying to carry on a conversation with this editor in New York," she said.

Moore has found the writing process to be addictive and admits it is hard not to be able to do it full time. She said she is not in the middle of another book but is writing when she can.

"I know exactly the book I want to write," she said. "It will be about islands. But it will really be about ethics, about environmental issues."

And as an essayist, it will be her job to ask the questions, sort through the answers - as she says, walk through the river, "stirring up the mud."

Philosophy department serves land-grant mission in a unique way
Kathleen Moore said her approach to philosophy, as reflected in her writing, is an example of what the philosophy department at OSU is trying to do: reach out to a broad audience and examine how to develop a meaningful life.

"President Risser calls our department unique in the nation in the way it serves the land-grant mission," she said. "People think of philosophy as being very abstract but actually philosophy is about solving problems intelligently and reasonably."

She said the department cast a critical look at itself eight years ago during a time of campus-wide budget cutting, realizing that people often look first to the humanities in determining what is expendable.

"Our conviction was that philosophy ought to be the center of campus life. We set out to create a philosophy department that reaches out to the campus and the community to provide people with the analytical skills to make better decisions."

The result is a philosophy department that is different from the usual model.

"Our department talks about and works on problems that arise out of people's lived lives - bioethical decisions, end of life decisions, the kinds of moral issues students face, environmental decisions," she said. "We are also interested in analytical tools to teach students to reason their way through complex situations. In some ways it's about skills and in some ways about courage and the notion that if you think about things carefully you can reach better decisions."

The department helps sponsor an annual Ideas Matter lecture series and cosponsors other forums, such as the "God at 2000" conference. In April, the department organized an undergraduate research conference focusing on moral issues that arise at the beginning and end of life.

Moore said about a third of the students who graduate from OSU will have taken an ethics course. The department offers an Applied Ethics Certificate, particularly designed for students in fields such as medicine, natural resource management or science.

"It's a program that teaches them how to analyze and identify moral problems that are going to arise in their disciplines," said Moore. "It is increasingly popular because students realize they can acquire all the technical skills they want but the real hard problems they are going to face will involve ethics."