The second chapter of this study will examine depictions of Nature and of nuclear science in the work of the little-known New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church, and the rather more well-known physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The histories of these two figures are entwined within a small area of the New Mexico desert, close to Santa Fe. This same area of land was also the site of some of the most significant events in the history of the twentieth century, as this chapter will outline. Like the Saharan landscape about which Paul Bowles writes, this area of New Mexico is a desert region. However, as the following chapters will demonstrate, a wide range of Cold War writers depict disparate, globally diverse landscapes in strikingly comparable ways. In this way, their nature writing transcends the specificity of place, and instead attempts a broader recalibration of the relationship between mid-century American society and Nature. As this chapter will go on to reveal, Church's own personal mission to communicate one specific area of land gradually transformed into a broader struggle to reconcile the nuclear and Nature in the aftermath of the development of the atomic bomb.

Since Church is a relatively obscure writer, a little biography is necessary to begin with. Church was born Peggy Pond in 1903, to parents who moved between Detroit, California, Connecticut and New Mexico during her formative years. Her father attempted a number of business ventures in the West, all of which were unsuccessful, until the establishment of the Los Alamos Ranch School on the Pajarito Plateau in 1917. Church spent only two summers on the plateau during her childhood; after her father set up the ranch school, she spent much of her time away at private schools in California and Connecticut. Despite such a fractured residence on the plateau, Church was deeply affected by these early summers spent at the Ranch School, and her childhood memories of the place – its landscape, geology and the Native American worldview of its Pueblo inhabitants – inflect almost all of the writing that she produced in the next sixty years. This latter influence in particular had a deep, underlying effect on her future literary production, the extent of which has not been fully acknowledged in the small amount of criticism that her work has so far attracted.