It's always seemed to me (from Tom and Huck, at least) that Twain's respect
for nature was so premordial and primitive as to be animist--all those
superstitions about the owl and the snakeskin etc.  From there, eventually,
you could
come full circle to the nearly mystic environmentalism you can see in Earth
IN
the Balance.  Twain's doesn't get very far along that arc, maybe, but his
descriptions of the river fog, thunderstorms, etc, in Huck, plus his late
misanthropy, that there was a potential environmentalist at work there!

Dan Walker