John Burroughs was a writer and an environmentalist whose work was tremendously popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a friend and contemporary of Walt Whitman and John Muir. Charlotte Zoë Walker is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Oneonta, where she teaches courses in nature and literature. She is also the editor of The Art of Seeing Things: Essays of John Burroughs, published by Syracuse University Press.