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Not One Is Dissatisfied

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, / I stand and look at them long and long. . . . / They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, / They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, / Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Nature-Deficit Disorder?

Richard Louv Asks Whether We’re Raising Our Children Under House Arrest

So though our fears and restrictions arise from the best intentions, we have to ask what effect they are having on the health of children, and on the earth itself. Environmentalists and conservationists, almost to a person, had some transcendent experience in nature when they were kids. If we take that opportunity away from today’s kids, who will be the future stewards of the earth?

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

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.

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.