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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.

The Dig

After a day in an archaeological excavation unit, surrounded by a stratigraphic picture two meters deep, you realize the present era, like the prehistoric community you’ve become a part of, will soon be just another layer chronicled in soil.

Bedrock Mortar Full Moon Illumination

Seeing the reflection of the full moon / in the rainfilled bedrock mortar holes / where earliest California Indians / ground acorns with circular grinding stones / And sensing how the full moon / is like a mortar stone in the sky

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.

Bad Magic: The Failure Of Technology

An Interview With Jerry Mander

In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world.

The White Man’s Vision-Quest Journal

It was dark by the time we got to camp. I felt as though I were entering another time zone. There were campfires and tepees set up. (Just as you had envisioned, Sarah, when you predicted that I would be traveling to Dakota!)

The Marvelous Adventure Of Cabeza De Vaca

In the days that followed, in my first desolate confrontation with slaughter, I saw a far-off light, heard a far-off strain of music. Such words serve as well as any: for what words can describe a happening in the shadows of the soul?

Defending What You Love

An Interview With Edward Abbey

But still, when all other means fail, we are morally justified — not merely justified, but morally obligated — to defend that which we love by whatever means are available. If my family, my life, my children were attacked, I wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to defend them. By the same principle, if land I love is being violated, raped, plundered, murdered, and all political means to save it have failed, I feel that sabotage is morally justifiable.

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.

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.