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Outside Agitator

How Darryl Cherney Set Out To Save The Redwoods And Ended Up Suing The FBI (And Winning)

A radical is somebody who goes out to the furthest edge of the debate in order to gain leverage with which to move the larger body of thought. If an ant wants to move an elephant, he has to move as far out onto the seesaw as possible. Then, through the laws of physics, he can move the great weight. That’s what activists do, only in a more psychological fashion. You go as far out there as you can in order to move society. The problem is that, once you’re out there, you’re perceived as an extremist and society is unwilling to embrace you.

The Doe

The scene did not look natural to me. A strong, healthy whitetail doe mired deep in Lowcountry pluff mud. Stuck just beyond the water’s reach, sunk to the base of her thick neck and the round of her haunch, she struggled to free herself.

Peril And Promise

Duane Elgin On Simplicity And Humanity’s Future

Simplicity lies at the intersection of spirituality and sustainability. If you put spirituality, or the inner life, together with sustainability, or the outer life of maintaining things, what you come up with is the simple life.

A Simpler Than Average Life

Details are my delight. In the country, many of the details have minds of their own: lady beetles crowding around, seeking winter hibernacula; knapweed flourishing everywhere; a raccoon and her pudgy kits climbing a cherry tree; a crow japing overhead. All this living, self-willed detail informs me in ways that cities no longer do.

Drowning Revisited

It is always someone’s fault. A drowning is rarely blameless. At the very least, there’s a lingering feeling that it could have been prevented. Your friend recommends a good vacation spot in the Bahamas to her neighbors; they go, and the husband drowns.

Singing To The Dawn

Thomas Berry On Our Broken Connection To The Natural World

If we want to survive and to remember what it is to be human, then we need to establish a viable pattern of activity for the whole earth community. This community should be governed by the principle that every being has three rights: the right to live; the right to occupy a habitat; and the right to fulfill its role in the ever-renewing processes of nature.

Six Henry Stories

In Henry I’d met a man with no sense of proprietorship in the presence of true words. In one sense I’d been, as I said, a mere parrot, but in another sense I’d plucked Henry’s insight off the radio and taken it to heart. Henry honored this second capture as the solo philosophical event it was. He was loving a neighbor’s insight as one loves one’s own. He was being a father whose nondogmatic stance let grace flow in an adoptive son.