Candice LandauLast Updated on April 7, 2025 by Candice Landau
Ever since I began writing about scuba diving, I’ve found myself at a cross roads, not quite sure whether to lean more toward writing about travel, culture and people, or about diving, wildlife encounters, and nature.
On the one hand, diving is all about nature and about the human experience within the natural world. On the other, writing about diving for an international recreational dive magazine focuses heavily on experiencing diving in faraway destinations like Palau or the Maldives, or the Egyptian Red Sea. It is by it’s very nature, a travel industry, especially when you consider many people either don’t live near enough to sites that are diveable, or do not want to dive the cold destinations they live in.
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When PR reps began reaching out to ask if I’d like to join this trip or that trip, I nodded to myself. Obviously, I’m a travel writer. I changed my bios and statuses to reflect this. I threw in the word diving and photography too. Keywords mattered after all.
Still, something didn’t quite fit.
Each time I sat down to write, I struggled. The narrative dive feature I was often tasked with writing began to feel shallow when focused on the travel. That, to me, wasn’t why the reader had picked up the magazine. Rather, they wanted to know what the destination was like to dive. Sure, a few packing tips and hotel recommendations would come in handy, but the real focus was the diving—who to do it with and why, what to expect on a dive, what made it different.
Slowly, I realized dive writing sat at the intersection of travel and nature. I could bend it either way. One article might focus on how to prepare for a dive trip to the Galápagos Islands, while the other might focus on the feelings and emotions of diving a destination so famous and rich with wildlife, that it didn’t feel real.
But, the question remained: what was travel writing and what was nature writing?
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During my creative writing masters program, I’d taken a course with British nature writer, Richard Kerridge. It was called “Writing the Environment.” Though Richard had us read widely within the genre, it was the Socratic in-class discussions that I most looked forward to and perhaps most learned from. At one point I remember Richard asking, have we gone beyond nature? He never asked these sorts of questions with a firm answer in mind, but rather, asked them to prompt us to think critically. It was something my ruminative mind hungered for. I would leave class and mull over questions like these for days. Even now I think on them when I look back.
Over the years I have come to realize nature writing encompasses far more than the Wikipedia definition would have you believe. Yes, it is about the natural environment. Yes it draws on science and facts. And yes it is often incorporates philosophical reflection upon various aspects of nature.
What it doesn’t tell you is that it is also like a gene bank, a place where memories of the natural world as they exist today are stored. It doesn’t tell you that is poetry, an attempt to capture an experience that can’t otherwise be accurately conveyed. And, it doesn’t tell you that it is necessary. That we are all so tied to the world around us. That someone has to point this out every so often so you can can better understand your place within it, and hopefully preserve some modicum of it into the future, because that now is the risk—will nature as we know it continue to exist?
As I write this I think about my the things my heart hungers for. My desire to be always near the ocean. My love for the thick forests of the Pacific Northwest. The longing I feel thinking of places I have lived previously, where nature existed on my doorstep, where I thought about it every day and immersed myself in it because it was there, where I found peace and purpose. In Dash Point, in Washington State, my garden introduced me to the sweet and delicate thimbleberry. The Puget Sound, and my microscope, revealed mats of silica diatoms so thick I finally understood why some algae felt grainy. In Orlando, Florida, I bonded with my cat as together we took joy in watching cherry-red cardinals demand I fill the bird feeder. In Wilmington, North Carolina I basked in the cooler spring air, longing again for summers that didn’t raise an instant sweat.
Nature has, I think, always been important to me. Perhaps it is to everyone, but I think for me, it is a lighthouse, a guiding beacon I couldn’t and won’t ignore. Could I live in a city if pressed? Yes. Would I become depressed? Quickly. Perhaps it’s easier to return to the quiet solitude nature offers as one ages, no longer desperate to follow scripts—get a good corporate job, find a partner, settle down, buy a house, have children. Perhaps it depends on the person. Now, I can easily imagine finding a place near the water, ideally near a forest too, and immersing myself within the natural world, daily.
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The other important role nature writing plays today, is that of conservationist. It’s a call to arms, without being a marketing campaign. Come, see, know. These things will be go if we do not protect them. They will go and they will never return. For the reader looking for solutions, practices such as rewilding and urban gardening come to mind. They are in direct opposition to the rampant capitalism we have allowed to destroy our natural world. They take back the very spaces they were intended to remove.
As I draw to a close I think I feel more sure about my direction as a writer. I will embrace now, the very genre I have, not avoided, but lost sight of. Yes, I’ll write about diving and about travel, but I’ll also focus on nature and my connection to it. on the world below. I’ll convey in rich, sensory detail the things that create a place. I’ll paint you a picture. When I take a walk on the beach in Okaloosa County in Florida, I’ll tell you about the driftwood I found in the surfline, studded all over with white barnacles, each rimmed in a lipstick-red hue. I’ll tell you that under a microscope the barnacle foot looks like raw muscle, that it’s impossible to cut through with a blunt knife. I’ll tell you I cannot take my mind off those logs, wondering, did the rising tide reclaim them? Will they live?
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And, I’ll reflect on what this says about me, that being near nature isn’t a nice-to-have in a place I’d like to settle, but rather, a necessity. Perhaps one day you’ll find me back in the Puget Sound where my heart feels more whole than its ever felt, depression and anxiety all dampened in feeling by the muffling sap-sweet scent of cedars, by the absorbent dark of nutrient-rich waters, and by the distant company of the snow-capped Cascades.
I’ll help you understand the science behind a Portuguese man o’ war sting. That in fact, these creatures aren’t jellyfish but rather are siphonophores comprising hundreds of thousands of colonial organisms all working together as one. I’ll tell you it’s possible to see the stinging nematocysts under the microscope, that they look like an umbilical cord in a womb and that they’re possible to activate, to send jettisoning under the slide by pressing down on it. That they’re as blue as a Curaçao cocktail.
I’ll also lament the things I’m not seeing. That Florida’s Panhandle has few plant-based food options, that rather the food industry it is driven by local demand for fresh fish. I’ll tell you about the site I dived and that rather than seeing many grouper, I saw one. That one, well-meaning hunter could over time clear that site of this fish, perhaps just for weeks, eventually forever. These things you don’t see, I’ll share. I’ll hope you understand my desperation. I’ve no desire to take away the joy of taste, of feeding a family with your own hands, but rather to prompt you to do see that change begins with one person, doing less of something or more of something else.
Above all, I’ll allow my own on-page ruminating to be a balm for my soul. And then, when I’m tired, I’ll lie back and pick up a book I haven’t yet read—”Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” “Silent Spring,” or “Braiding Sweetgrass,” and let it do the work for me.
