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Sunbeams

If you see a whole thing — it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Sweethearts Of The Rodeo

We tore across the back field, our heels digging into their sides. We pulled them up short and did somersaults off their backs, or handstands in the saddle. We turned on a dime. We jumped the coop, the wall, the ditch. We were fearless. It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one, before boys.

Waiting For Salmon

How global warming will affect the fate of chinook salmon, and all that’s tied to them, is one of the many Gordian knots in natural history blithely dismissed by Americans still trying to pull Charles Darwin’s pants down.

Sunbeams

It is horrifying that we have to fight our government to save the environment.

Ansel Adams

Redneck For Wilderness

Earth First! Cofounder Dave Foreman On Being A True Conservative

I think that civilization and real wilderness can coexist in North America and elsewhere, but we’ve got to allow room for wilderness and wild creatures. A favorite word of mine is wildeor, which goes back to the time of Beowulf and the origins of the English language. It means the “self-willed beast.” From the very beginning, civilization has tried to domesticate the beasts, and if we can’t domesticate them, then we destroy them. We’ve got to allow land to be wilderness, which means, in Old English, “self-willed land.” Letting some things have a will of their own, not trying to control everything — that is the challenge.