PRESENTATION

One way to approach writing about environment and ecol-ogy is to consider how writing as a medium in adult edu-cation can enhance “ecological understanding. ” I define ecological understanding as an awareness of the natural, nonhuman world and the human place in it. My ecocritical research examines the expressive nonfiction by one under-graduate-level former student through Buell’s (1995) four criteria of what makes an environmental text (p. 7) along-side his notion of “a mature environmental aesthetic ” (p. 32). My first finding is that the student text can be said to meet Buell’s criteria. My second finding is that these texts meet this criteria in part due to a naïve narrator perspective as a way of knowing environmental and ecological topics. The voice of the environmentalist is not necessarily best fo