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One’s Place Upon The Earth

As I strolled through a glide of water clear as air, my fisherman’s heart did a somersault when I sighted, not twenty feet away, two chinook salmon easily twenty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.

A Test Of Our Compassion

Louisa Willcox & David Mattson On The Plight Of Grizzly Bears

Do we want a deeper, richer relationship with nature, or do we want to just kill everything and live through our smartphones?

Sunbeams

Natural law is the highest law, and it would be folly to figure that you can outwit natural law.

Winona LaDuke

Sunbeams

She loved the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.

Holly Black, Tithe

Sunken Treasures

Sylvia Earle On Why We Need To Protect The Oceans

We have measured a sharp decrease in oxygen in the ocean over the last fifty years. If the ocean has less oxygen, then less is going into the atmosphere as well. I don’t want to mess around with my oxygen-generating system. Ask any astronaut how important your oxygen-generating system is. Shouldn’t this be the highest priority of every man, woman, and child — to be able to breathe?

We Only Protect What We Love

Michael Soule On The Vanishing Wilderness

The reason we act when something threatens our family or our neighborhood is because we love these people and places. Maybe it takes a tangible threat to our home environment to make us realize that we really do love the earth.

excerpted from
The Round Walls Of Home

We need to send into space a flurry of artists and naturalists, photographers and painters, who will turn the mirror upon ourselves and show us Earth as a single planet, a single organism that’s buoyant, fragile, blooming, buzzing, full of spectacles, full of fascinating human beings, something to cherish. Learning our full address may not end all wars, but it will enrich our sense of wonder and pride.

The Skeleton Gets Up And Walks

Craig Childs On How The World Is Always Ending

We think of apocalypse as a moment — a flash of light, then you’re gone — but if we study the earth’s history, we find that it’s not one moment. It’s actually a long process. In fact, it’s hard to see where it begins or ends. Like right now: evidence indicates that we’re experiencing the planet’s sixth mass extinction — a period when the rate of extinction spikes and the diversity and abundance of life decrease. Each such extinction event takes hundreds of thousands of years to play out, and it’s generally 5 to 8 million years before the previous levels of biodiversity return. So are we at the end or the beginning of a cycle? This could just be a temporary spike. The pattern could swerve in a different direction.