in an introduction to wallace's 1986 book, the untamed garden, ohio state university english professor john muste wrote: "wallace, i think, is in love with the planet we inhabit and with those who share it with us, but his love his unsentimental. it includes the recognition that nature is not benign or hostile, it is itself, obeying no human laws... wallace shows that the american landscape and most of its ecosystems have been altered irrevocably by what we have done to them and that we simply do not have anything like enough knowledge to have any idea of the long range effects of our tampering. at the same time, wallace is no jeremiah threatening us with destruction. he specifically rejects the role of the nature-elegist who weeps literary tears for natural changes. in a thoughtful essay on those who write about nature, he reminds us that the idea of nature as loser is a myth, once useful in the encouraging of the growth of civilization and of knowledge. but it is only a myth: 'nature is not a loser because it is not a competitor.' there is a sanity in these essays that rejects easy formulations, whether elegaic or sanguine."