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Somewhere Along The Line

The Way Of The Hunter

An Interview With Richard Nelson

A Koyukon hunter once told me with great pride, “I’ve trapped this country for fifty years, and it’s as rich today as it was when I first started hunting here.” If you overuse or disrespect the environment, you’ll get a message back. Isn’t that exactly what’s happening to us now, on a much larger scale? The message comes to us in the form of cancers that invade our bodies, in the changing climate, in the erosion of soil, in the diminishing capacity of the earth to sustain us. The message is that we can’t go on living like this.

When Nature Is Larger Than Life

Imagine the humbling pause each of us felt to behold the faces of three naked and bruised whales just a few inches away from our own. For two solid weeks the global village never lost eye contact with these three neighborly ambassadors representing the mysterious tribe of great whales.

Descent Into The Mother

This Mother appears in many cultures as a two-sided figure capable of both creation and destruction, of nurturing and annihilating. When we give ourselves over to the Mother we have no individuality, no consciousness.

My Earth Day

We were all terribly sorry we’d made the earth pay for our pleasure these last 200 years. We had a fear-taste in our mouths. Maybe the earth is preparing revenge. In comic books, an exposure to toxicity creates superpowered heroes, but in this world we are not so lucky.

Progress And Other Lies

An Interview With Thomas Berry

The root of our contemporary industrial pathology is what I call a deep, hidden rage in the Western world against the human condition. We are devastating the planet in an orgy of destructiveness. We refuse to accept anything in its natural state.

The Legacy Of The Wild

An Interview With Gary Snyder

Another way of seeing the world would be to say our monuments would be our wild areas. Leaving behind wilderness for the future would be the monument of our civilization.

Curlews

We are immortal until the hour death first seizes our imagination. This goes for species as well as individuals. To die you must once consider death and think of it as beautiful. All spiritual advances are advances in aesthetics.

Sabbaths

On The Poverty Of Affluence

An Interview With Paul Wachtel

When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.