Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and McKay Jenkins’s 2016 ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World draw on tensions in Henry David Thoreau’s deep ecology. These tensions oscillate between exultation and activism, ecstasy in nature’s beauty, and horror in its industrial abuse. Each one of these authors leverages their own signature journalistic storytelling through subjective narration and felt detail dramatizing the human experience missing from abstract scientific discourse on the environment. But critics of deep ecology charge that subjective narrativity in this tradition has failed to forecast the Anthropocene, a systematic destruction of nature that has accelerated since the Industrial Revolution. Deep ecology’s liabilities toward anthropocentrism, however, are countered by the trajectory of environmental literary journalism toward a richer dialectic in which nature simultaneously functions as a source of human inspiration—visible in transcendent moments of ecstatic witness—and as a force vulnerable to human impact. This chapter will explore these tensions.