literary journal worth checking out

Maybe I'm behind the times on this one, but I thought you all would be interested in this literary/environmental journal. Seems to follow a good environmental humanities approach. Ecotone.

H2Oil: animation

See this link for a great overview of the relationship between oil and water: http://vimeo.com/7408834

KUER: Rangers Make the Case for Dark Skies (2009-12-09)

Ross Chambless hits the airwaves and makes a compelling case about the importance of dark, night skies.

 Take a listen to Part 1 of 2 of his work on the "Dark Triangle". 

KUER: Rangers Make the Case for Dark Skies (2009-12-09)

Great job, Ross!

Guerilla Dinners

I figured this would be topical, considering how potluck-intensive this semester has been.

In class the other day, Alison brought up the idea of "guerilla dinners". The concept is basically this: coming together, cooking with and eating with friends. The idea is to eat locally, frugally, cook together and spend time together. Nice fit into our idea of community. We can take it further by dining in hard to access places, outdoors, etc. We eat together, but don't spend a lot of time cooking together. Isn't the kitchen where the magic really happens? 

In the spirit of eating, I think we should post some of our favorite recipes (Brussels Sprouts recipes are even invited to participate), and haikus about food in the comments section. If we get enough, maybe we can start working on an EH cookbook? Go Team!

-Alex Porpora

Red Rock Wilderness

KUER, our local NPR station ran a story today about how Emery County is forging ahead with its own wilderness act. This is in direct response to America's Red Rock Wilderness Act, which has been around in some form for about 20 years and would in its current form declare 9.4 million acres as wilderness. 

Emery County is a big deal, it is a highly contentious area that is home to the San Rafael Swell. The area that this wilderness bill at the county level would protect is half a million acres; the RRWA would encompass that plus another half a million. 

While Emery County is not breaking new ground with a county level bill, Washington County passed such a piece of legislation, it is different than Washington County in that it is somewhat less politicized. I definitely believe that an effort like this works better from the ground up, citizens should have a say. unfortunately wildlife doesn't pay attention to county boundaries. Where should consensus lie and where should we be willing to compromise?

While doing research for a large piece on Red Rock Wilderness I visited this area not just to hike but to ride an ATV. I had previously experienced areas of the Swell on foot, so I wanted to know what the "other side" was fighting for. The folks who took me out that day had an intimate knowledge of the land. They certainly agreed that some should be set aside, the problem seemed to be with Wilderness, (as opposed to "little w" wilderness), as defined by someone else and imposed on them. Perhaps by focusing on local levels and encouraging community engagement a bill can be devised that satisfies all needs. 

I feel a little scattered right now on this issue, probably because I've spent so much time on it. So, listen to the sweet sounds of Dan Bammes' voice as he explains what's goin' on: 

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuer/news.newsmain/article/0/1/1585981/KUER.Local.News/New.Wilderness.in.Emery.County

Your truly, clad in blue jacket, on the "Behind the Rocks Trail" in the Swell. 

-Alex Porpora

Beginnings and Endings

Those of us who participated in "Art, Advocacy and Landscape" taught by Terry Tempest Williams wrapped up our class this past week. Our final task was to create a project or piece of art that incorporated all of the themes we discussed, with an emphasis on community, advocacy and the environment. I am overwhelmed by the power of what we were able to create, both as individuals and a community. Everyone worked on something that was intensely personal to them, and that passion showed. I am grateful to know all of you. Even at the end of this experience, the momentum is there for us to carry on the knowledge that we have gained and to aspire to create the community we want to live in. 

I'm please that some of my peers were willing to share their work for this forum.  In their piece entitled "Cost Benefit Analysis" Ben C., Alison H., Ross C., Meags M., Lindsy F., and Katie P. created a world made out of currency and change that was photographed at a variety of locations around the state, including the Sun Tunnels, Energy Solutions Arena, Rocky Mountain Power, Kennecott, Temple Square and Pillars of the Community. This was a commentary on how we choose the value the world. All the money that was used will be donated to the Grand Canyon Trust, specifically Mary O' Brien's beaver re-introduction program. 

           CBA visits Energy Solutions Arena 

Earth in perspective at the Sun Tunnels

Andrea N. created a piece of art in response to the proposed bridge across Utah Lake. She said that she wanted to create something positive about the lake, rather than negative about the bridge. Working with friends, she created a bridge out of natural materials and set it out on the lake. The entire process was filmed, no coots were harmed in this production. 

These pieces are just the tip of the iceberg, there were maps of lives lived, sunset faces, air pollution dances, primate art, climate change spider plants and more. All of these projects made me so proud to be a part of this community. This is just the beginning of things to come. 

-Alex Porpora

Thanksgiving Inversion Hike

Well, despite the Thanksgiving holidays and my tight turkey-into-face-stuffing schedule, I'm also obligated to write something for our EH collective blogging effort this week. This is Ross by the way. This past Wednesday, 11/25, I was feeling lots of pent up energy. Having been chained to various tables in the library for the past couple weeks reading and writing papers, I was ready to burst come mid-week. So I rode my bike over to my old childhood stomping grounds, the foothills overlooking the Salt Lake valley and hiked to the top of mountain. Actually the mountain is best known as "the H-Rock", a giant black and white, spray-painted rock on the mountain side, a traditional symbol for nearby Highland High School. It's not a long hike to reach the top, but it's very steep. Hiking over sliding shale you have to take your time, lest you lose your footing and have an undesirable tumble backward.

One of the main reasons I decided to hike up this day was to see if I could actually get above the terrible smoggy inversion layer that engulfed the valley that day. Anyone who has lived along the Wasatch Front for sometime is familiar with what happens to our air quality on cold wintery days. Essentially the high pressure, warmer air presses down the colder air coming off the ground, and the enclosed, surrounding mountains don't allow it to escape. This has been a normal phenomenon in the valley forever. But in recent decades with our population growth, increased development, and more people driving automobiles along the Wasatch Front, things have gotten worse. Now we swim in a massive soup of our own automobile exhaust and factory and power plant emissions. Yuck! To read more about the inversion effect in Utah, this guy did a great job explaining it on his blog here)

From the top of the mountain I found a nice rock to perch on and I snapped off a few photos here with my cell phone camera. Having grown up here, I can testify that Salt Lake winters were never this bad. However, I do remember getting asthma when I went running when I was a high school soccer player, and that's when I began realizing what was happening.















It's hard to know what to do. Many of us can walk or bike, but for the most part we all still have to drive cars to get where we need to go. While UTA is pushing ahead with its mass-transit long range plan, we will just have to suffer through it. However, since the EPA revised its standards for stricter air quality to PM 2.5 (PM meaning Fine Particulate Matter), the State was given 3 years to reach compliance. This winter will be three years since then and the state will need to take serious measures to address our air quality situation. This is a good thing, but it also could mean restrictions on driving, incentives for taking the bus or Trax, handing out gas masks, who knows! You can read more about the State Implementation Plan (SIP) here. I for one favor any actions taken to get more people out of their cars and exercising.

"In The Tunnels You Can Actually Walk On Stars"

a found poem from the Nancy Holt/Helmet Sidney Loe interview in History of the Sun Tunnels Near Lucin, Utah using only Nancy Holt's words.

"I knew it was the right kind of sight for Sun Tunnels, because it was flat and barren and had no other use.

You could see time written on the rocks. In the mountains surrounding the area you can see the lines where the sea bit into the mountains. It was as if my inner landscape and the outer landscape were identical, there was a pervasive sense of oneness.

I don't think there is a way to build to the geographical scale of the environment ... it is so vast, so huge ... I don't think you can compete with the desert scale, even if you wanted to.

These spiraling lines may be the trajectory of bullets. It's not that bad, the lines have a certain energy.

Perception

Distance

Place

Solstice

Scale

I think everything I do is related to the site, to the environment.

It's just part of having something out there in the world."

(photo courtesy of: http://millyboarder.blogspot.com/2007/06/sun-tunnels.html)

Family and Community

Many who follow this blog are currently in a class called Art, Advocacy, and Landscape with Terry Tempest Williams. In this class, on a daily basis, we find ourselves wondering about ways to save the world. (I say that in jest, but it isn’t far from the truth.) Ways we, individually and as a group, can help our community fix its present problems. And those problems can include anything (climate change, human rights, environmental degradation, education, anything), the key is that it needs to be a community action for meaningful change to occur.

As I progress through the class, I realize that right now community, indeed family, is more important than ever. And for me, community and family need to expand to include each other, become synonymous with the other. Only through the mutual respect for people, a recognition that we all share the same blood, will true environmental change occur.

If we respect each other, treat each other as equals, that same respect will surely carry over to the land. Human rights and a broader sense of community and family are the building blocks of a true respect for the environment.

-- a. holland

Confessions of an off-road outlaw

While fishing for articles I came across this one about an ORV supporter turned land activist and it struck a nerve:

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/confessions-of-an-off-road-outlaw

I think it's important to remember that people can change, and that there are complexities to our beliefs. Sometimes all that's missing is an experience that opens someone's eyes to the situation around them. Not all ORV drivers and deaf and blind to the havoc they wreak on the land and the habitats they ride in, which this article is a testament to.

Perhaps what's even more important is making an effort to not polarize this issue- or any issue. Not much will get accomplished in an "us versus them" debate because there are people in the areas in between. It wasn't someone telling VeneKlasen that he was wrong that changed his mind, he had to experience it for himself. It's true that not all people are as open-minded and aware as this author, but it goes both ways.

So today or tomorrow or someday soon, practice keeping an open mind...because you never know what will find it's way in.

-Katie

Happy Campers

I thought we could all use some humor as time tightens and tensions elevate. Whether you like camping or not, this should make you chuckle. Enjoy Jim Gaffigan:

More serious things to come....

-Katie

Wisdom

Andrew Zuckerman presented to the world his project, Wisdom, with the premier at the State Library of New South Whales in Sydney, Australia on October 16th 2008. With the help of Desmond Tutu, Zuckerman interviewed 51 individuals over the age of 65 on their view of wisdom.

The official website states his concept as:
Inspired by the idea one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the wisdom project, produced with the cooperation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world. Presented against the same white space, all of the subjects are removed from their context, which not only democratizes them, but also allows for a clear dialogue to exist between them. In an attempt to create a more profound, honest, and truly revealing portrait of these luminaries, the project encompasses their voices, their physical presence, and the written word. This comprehensive portrayal of such a profound and global group is an index of extraordinary perspectives. Wisdom is an ongoing project. Additions to the list of contributors continues.

Here is the trailer/introduction video for the hour long film of all the interviews:

Wisdom - Introduction from State Library of New South Wales on Vimeo.

I really enjoy the words of Robert Redford and Jane Goodall.

Science/Philosophy

This morning, waiting in my inbox, was an email from one of my favorite groups, The Imaginary Foundation. It was a reminder to check out their blog, which of course I did. For those of you new to The Imaginary Foundation here is a little background info from their site;

The Imaginary foundation was established in Geneva in 1973 as an experimental "think-tank" for new ideas. Created by an eclectic group of free thinkers, the foundation’s research spans
all creative endeavors and assigns as its goal; the wish to eliminate set conventions in favor of the humorous, the abstract and the visionary.

In his vision for the Imaginary Foundation, the Director(whose name is never mentioned anywhere...) knew that the human mind has more than one mode, that indeed it has an "ecology" of being. He knew that imagination, intuition, inspiration are basic to psyche. . . . A philosophy of research began to form: imagination as fundamental to all learning; artistic making as a model of integrating vision, materials, structure, and imagery.

"What makes true vision is the poetry of life and the richness of nature"

I have been a long time fan of their philosophy and tee-shirts, a medium The Director considers essential to getting their message out.

The post I would like to highlight focuses on music/science/cosmos/Carl Sagan. This is relevant considering the reading some of us just finished for Terry's class on Gaia and Lovelock, who had conversations with Sagan. It also touches on the level of the Universe which is something Jack Turner challenges us to consider. I find it funny that someone (this guy) would take the time to remix words of Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye to match beats!

Here is the video with subtitles so you can read along.



and the original IF post.

New Found Music

I have enjoyed this song over the past week and would like to share it with you all. It is by The Cinematic Orchestra and called Dawn.

I only recently stumbled upon The Cinematic Orchestra and did a little background check to see what they are all about. Formed in the late 90's they are a British based jazz band and their recorded albums bring together improvised live jazz and electronic elements by the turntablist/DJ.

The barn and mountains provide a great image to accompany the music but I always close my eyes and imagine snow blanketing everything. I love most music and use it for different purposes. This I find truly beautiful and while I do use music to fill the background empty space while I actively participate in something else, I find when this is playing I stop what I am doing to just listen. It is captivating.

Enjoy.

Cinematic Orchestra "Dawn" from JT GURZI on Vimeo.

for trees.

alpine loop, dre, october 2008

Riding TRAX last night, I met a man who introduced himself as "Tree".

That's a nice name, I told him. Where did it come from?

"Well, my mother named me Forrest but she said I was too much an individual, so I'm Tree."




"Trees, it could be said, represent the bones of our collective body."

John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce

Do you have a story with a tree?

I've had some music running through my head.

I thought I'd share it with you.






I know we've come a long way
We're changing day to day
But tell me, where do the children play?

Final National Parks

Thursday night's segment of Ken Burn's National Parks documentary focused on the years of the Great Depression and World War II. With the country in an extended state of crisis, National Parks struggled to remain in the public's attention. Yet, even during the economic turmoil, President FDR made the preservation of National Parks an important staple to his term. He even created jobs for unemployeed citizens within the parks. Do you think that this era, which managed to be environmentally concious while struggling to regain its economic wealth, could be compared to the current condition of the United States? President Obama has been faced with great pressure to aid a failing economy, yet also recognizes the need for change to protect our planet. There is a growing polutation that recognizes that economy and environment do not have to be separate entities, but could in fact work together. Do you agree?

National Parks Cont.

Last night the 4th segment of Ken Burn's National Parks documentary covered the span of time during the 1920s and 30s. The focus of that time was increase visitation to the parks, proving that they were a worthwhile investment to Congress. With the emergence of the automobile and greater mobility, roads became vital to visitor attraction.

Today we have the opposite problem. Salt Lake's beloved canyons are overflowing with people and cars, many say that they should have reached capacity 20 years ago. With the Wasatch Canyons Master Plan in the process of revision, it has been proposed to shut down the canyons to cars during peak hours and implementing a shuttle system. This would cut down on emissions and clear the roads, making them safer for bikers. Many say this could never happen, that cars in the canyons is how it always has been, yet take a look at Zion National Park, who's interior switch to a shuttle system about ten years ago. Do you think it would be possible to be car-less in the canyons? Is this a good idea or preposterous?

National Parks

Last night PBS aired the first of Ken Burns' 6 part series National Parks: America's Best Idea. Like many of Burns' past documentaries, he focuses on something with American origins, such as baseball or jazz. As PBS shares, "It is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone." The first 2 hour segment focused on the foundations of National Parks, specifically Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. As a whole the documentary had a very positive, feel-good aura to it, emphasizing the spiritual and religious appeals the parks had on the people who visited. I especially liked the segment on John Muir and his eccentric habits.

Though only briefly touched on, it was the role of the Native Americans and the parks that really interested me. Natives were first mentioned in the segment on Yosemite. The local Miwok tribe called the area Awooni, meaning "large gaping mouth," which I found to be not only a literal description of how the area looked, but also an example of their deference to nature. Directly contrasted, in 1851, L. H. Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion, thought to name the park Yosemite, which he thought sounded very AAmerican yet ironically, in the language of the local Miwok tribe translated to "those who kill." Is this story an illustration of the origins of our National Parks, which though an ingenious idea, forced out and brutally murdered many natives in the area. As an Native American park ranger in the documentary said "Yosemite didn't need to be discovered, it was never lost." While proposing National Parks was one of our nations greatest acts, was it also an act of violence? Does this taint our experience, or does it add to America's ever controversial history?

Imagine

northeast shore in autumn
fireside of the pond
summer's last embers

--from "House-Warming", Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

For a day, ensconced in a weekend, we made this place our home. We tend to externalize the meaning of home, but metaphors begging for the interiority of home abound. A Christian saying suggests if you don't keep your home--the seat of the soul--swept clean, the worst possible influences will work their way in. Old Buddhists say if you haven't cleaned your bowls and swept your house--as the Buddha would say--"I am not done yet".

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

--Terry Tempest Williams.

The public lands are in effect our communal home. While we may not be Native in origin, our country has given us the opportunity to cultivate together a place, however diminished from ancient times, where we can live from time to time collectively, in solitude, and with relative freedom.

I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among...The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms--plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings--then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.

--Terry Tempest Williams

We often conceive of home as the place where we feel most secure, the place we know most and best, the place where we are most deeply tied to landscapes, family and community. We think of it as the place we defend, the place we protect, and the place we honor.

I had thoughtlessly accepted the common assumption...that the world is merely an inert surface that man lives on and uses...that summer, I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here...It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness.

--Wendell Berry, exerpted from "The Long-Legged House", in Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature

Our more recent forefathers have not been good to this place. David Orr's urgent lecture left out the damage that our carbon-intensive and synthetic lifestyles have and are wreaking on the ecosystems that make up perhaps the best--and certainly the most necessary--part of our home. Grand Teton National Park is expected to be hit and hit hard by global climate change, along with a number of mainly Western national parks and ecosystems.

US Fish and Wildlife Service
Global Warming Video

Losing Ground: Western National Parks Endangered by Climate Disruption
2006 Report

The world really is a very feminine place, a mother's place, conceptive, brooding, nourishing; a place of infinite patience and infinite elusiveness. It needs to be lived in more or less feminely, and the chief reason why we have never succeeded in being quite at home in it is that our method has been almost exclusively masculine. We have assaulted the earth, ripped out the treasure of its mines, cut down its forests, deflowered its fields and left them sterile for a thousand years. We have lived precisely on the same terms with our fellows, combatively, competitively, geocentrically. Nations have not struggled to make the world a better place, but only to make a more advantageous place for themselves. Man invented the State in the key of maleness, with combat for its major preoccupation, profit the spur and power the prize.

--Mary Austin

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams simultaneously recounts the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Refuge and her family's experience--most poignantly her mother the generations of women who have succombed to breast cancer--living downwind of the Nevada nuclear testing site.

Sad to say, this most precious and sublime feature of the Yosemite National Park, one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people, is in danger of being dammed and made into a reservoir to help supply San Francisco with water and light...The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people's parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able. Their arguments are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden...

--John Muir, "Dam Hetch-Hetchy!"

Sad to say, home seems at times the place where we confront our darker selves, where we live under conditions beyond our control, and where we must play the hand we are dealt.

US Fish and Wildlife Service
Draft Plan to Confront Global Warming
Appendix

Our duty, living in this place, what Gary Snyder has called our Earth household, is to reclaim it from our own degradation, remediate its wounds and restore both wildness and our sense of home to these places, places such as our narrow valley in Grand Teton National Park.

Grizzly Shot by Hunter: Teton Cub?
Jackson Hole News

And we are empowered to do so.

Bears Get Protection
Jackson Hole News 2

Exercise
Get in a comfortable place. Meditate for about five minutes, relaxing your breath, letting your thoughts come and go, contemplating the visual moments that softly come to mind from Saturday's journey. Now, visualize three other places, one at a time, as fully and deeply as possible, where you have been most happy or content. One way to do this exercise is to link three other natural places. But a potent variation is to link places where you feel most at home: a chair, your bed, your car, scenes with friends. For each one, touch your thumb and a finger of your writing hand. The fourth finger is reserved for the foot of the Tetons. Continue rotating these images until the emotions return with strength for each of these recollections.

Question
Of all the places that you will dimly remember, what visualization from Saturday's journey will you be recollecting most often?

Gladly we see the flies dancing in the sun-beams, birds feeding their young, squirrels gathering nuts, and hear the blessed ouzel singing confidingly in the shallows of the river,--most evangel, calming every fear, reducing everything to love.

--John Muir, "Yellowstone", Our National Parks

It may be far more parsimonious, today, to suggest that mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the earthly biosphere--a property in which we, along with the other animals and plants, all participate. The apparent interiority that we ascribe to the mind...[has] more to do with a sense that you and I are both situated inside it--a recognition that we are bodily immersed in an awareness that is not ours, but is rather the Earth's.

--David Abrams, "The Air Aware"
Orion Magazine

Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving...Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song and trememdous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

--John Muir, "Mountain Thoughts"

What we attend to is what we experience, and what we experience becomes our life and world. If you want nature to be a part of your live and world, then you have to pay attention to it. There are no substitutes or shortcuts. Theory and policy won't work. But for a day last week all of us did indeed attend to that wonderful river bottom riparian area near the Snake River. I noticed some things I have never noticed before, and I believe most of you did too. When your life is looking grim or you are being e-mailed to death, recall the peace and contemplation of our day together. Then go out and practice it on your own.

--Jack Turner, e-mail, Friday September 25, 2009

into the forest
a hunter at first
then leaving the gun behind

--from "Higher Laws"
Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

Thanks
David M. Hoza

Identification

a dandelion
now and then interrupting
the butterfly's dream

--Chiyojo, Far Beyond the Field

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of species were present or had passed through the open spaces we walked through, sat in, contemplated and meditated on. Many annuals had already died; trees whose spirits had left their bodies fallen and decaying back into the earthen floor, and those that had not. Insects frenzied with the soon to be dawning purge of their lives in the harsh bight of cold and the dark, frigid mantle of winter.

We are born in the minds of mountains. They hold our eyes on the horizon, shape our imaginations, and draw our gaze upward. We climb their peaks and touch clouds. We linger in the creases of their canyons and sit by streams and dream. Waterfalls. Wind rustling through the leaves.

--Terry Tempest Williams, The Range of Memory

The wild godesses and gods live in the wild plants. Once, all of our godesses and gods were plants and animals. The allies are the ancient goddesses and gods, their wisdom the ancient substrate of our volition; they are the maternal transmitters of our vision and dreams. Anthropomorphic goddesses and gods were the children of plant deities. that is why destroying wild habitat is parricide, because the goddesses and gods cannot live without their habitat, and it was the deities that made us, and gave us our culture.

--adapted from "On Wildness in the Plants", Pharmako/Poeia

At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that aroused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries...

--Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Weasel! I'd never seen one before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window.

--Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

What I mean to say is I have come to depend on these places where I write. I've grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes...I consider myself lucky beyond words to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow.

--Barbara Kingsolver, "Knowing Our Place", Off the Beaten Path

When you take me from this good rich soil
to slaughter in your heavenly shambles,
rattle my bones until the spirit breaks;

no heart of mine will scurry at your call
to lie blank as a slug in the ground where
my hips once rocked and my long legs willowed.

No heaven could please me as my love
does, nor match the bonfire his incendiary eyes
spark from dead-coal through my body's cabin.

When, deep in the cathedral of my ribs,
love rings like a chant, I need no heaven
Though you take me from this good rich soil,

where I grew like a spore in your wily heat,
rattle my bone-house until the spirit breaks;
my banquet senses are rowdy guests to keep...

--Diane Ackerman, from "Earth", Jaguar of Sweet Laughter

La Mariposa--Butterfly Woman
adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves
may be found in the post directly below.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders.

--Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

Exercise
Find a list of 10 plants, animals, birds, matter, insects, whatever, that you have 'botanized', identified, from Saturday's journey. If you have the time, memorize it. Sit in a quiet place the same way you did at the foot of the Tetons, and relax and breathe, using the list as a mantra. As you recite each of the identifications on the list, try to visualize them as you did when we were doing Kinhin through the narrow valley. When the visualizations become vivid, let them go.

Question
Can you identify 10 plants, birds, insects, matter, snakes, whatever, from Saturday's journey?

And so at last I climbed
the honey tree, ate
chunks of pure light, ate
the dark hair of the leaves,
the rippling bark,
the heartwood. Such
frenzy!

--Mary Oliver, "The Honey Tree", American Primitive

Oftentimes the Forest Woman, Sacha Huarmi, will appear, a vegetalista, a brilliant macaw headdress, nine necklaces of toucan feathers, twelve bracelets she wears, a skirt woven of bark, a feathered lance, and a little iron pot filled with medicines...

--adapted from "Plants as Teachers", Pharmako/Poeia

With a field guide in hand, our grandmother shows my cousin and me how to identify wildflowers. The flower before us is purple with a large green leaf that spreads out like a star and holds a droplet of water at its center. "Lupine--" she says. "Lupine--"we repeat.

--Terry Tempest Williams, The Range of Memory

lost in the woods--
only the sound of a leaf
falling on my hat

--Tagami Kikusha, Far Beyond the Field



David M. Hoza

La Mariposa: Butterfly Woman

Many people have lost touch with their ancestors. They often do not know the names of those beyond their grandparents. Spiritually, this situation causes sorrow--and hunger. So many are trying to re-create something important for soul sake. Here, the Anasazi once called to each other. Tribes came together here to dance themselves back into lodgepole pines, deer, eagles, and Katsinas, powerful spirits. Now, the hungry come to see something not everyone will be able to see, one of the wildest of the wild, a living numen, La Mariposa, the Butterfly Woman.

As the sun begins to set, the drummers begin to drum, drumming the sacred butterfly rhythm, and the chanters begin to cry to the Gods for all they are worth. She is old, very old, like a woman come back from dust, old like old river, old like old pines at timberline. One of her shoulders is bare. Her red-and-black manta--blanket dress--hops up and down with her inside it. Her heavy body and her very skinny legs make her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale.

The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine. Butterfly's hair reaches to the ground. It is thick as ten maize sheaves and stone grey. She wears butterfly wings. Her footsteps leave echos. She fans the earth and the people of the earth with the pollinating spirit of the butterfly. Her shell bracelets rattle like snake, her bell garters tinkle like rain. The spirit world is a place where wolves are women, bears are husbands, and old, lavish women are butterflies.

She carries the thunderworld in one breast, the underworld in the other. Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and sunset. Her left thigh holds all lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the world. She cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with night-dreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world. She brings opposites together. Transformation is no more complicated than that. The self need not carry mountains to transform.

--adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

David M. Hoza

Andy Ross

Identity

I only went out for a walk,
and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,
for going out, I found,
was really going in.

--John Muir

Narcissus saw himself in a still pool of water, and fell in love. Snow White's queen asked again and again, "Who's the fairest one of all?"--satisfied with but one answer. Perhaps we should re-think our traditional relationships to nature and reflection. If I grow so still inside and very present, and the I that I know vanishes, the Other filling my sense, what then?

Intelligence with the earth
myself partly leaves
and vegetable mold

--from "Solitude", Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

Des identified with the places she'd skied, Diane with the White Tara of Compassion; Steve with David Abrams, Dylan or Jack or Bryan with the native Shoshone songs of his tribe, Brooke with Yoga and the cycles of the moon.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself


Mark identified with charismatic megafauna, no one to my knowledge identified with the wasps; many of us identified with a good beer. I identified with landscapes I call home, and the names and places of stories that have grown dear to me.

The Murie Center
in partnership with Grand Teton National Park

After 30 seconds, a twittering bird is added to the ambience.

I had stopped to rest on a boulder on top of a low butte at the north end of the Elk Refuge. It was one of those fresh-cool days of early spring when you just walk out among the aspen trees, looking for things--anything that confirms what you already know.

--Olaus Murie, Wapiti Wilderness

The whole parade of plants, animals and birds goes on from this date, too fast, too many to count, too many keen impressions to chronicle. Yellowbells and purple phacelia by the garden, green grass, green buds everywhere, first robin, first yellow warbler, first sound of ruffed grouse drumming. Evening is the enchanted time...Suddenly we stand still and listen.

--Margaret (Mardy) Murie, Wapiti Wilderness

Exum Mountain Guides
Jenny Lake, Wyoming

Better to live in the presence of the wild--feel it, smell it, see it--and do something that succeeds, like Gary Nabhan's preservation of wild seeds or Doug Peacock's intimacy with grizzlies...We only value what we know and love...

--Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild

Teton Science Schools

I got to hold a live Great Horned Owl! Roger Smith, a former Teton Science Schools faculty member and founder of the Raptor Fund (based in Wilson, across the valley) visited the graduate students. Roger brought a few friends: Owlie the Great Horned Owl, and Ruby the Red Tailed Hawk. It was an incredible experience to hold these powerful and majestic birds. It totally spoke to the power of personal experience with wildlife--all of us were completely enthralled and wanted to know every single bit of natural history about the birds; I can imagine even a less-inclined crowd couldn't ignore the magnitude of having a bird that close to you. So cool!

--Maggie Bourque, Teton Science Schools Graduate Student

Exercise

Using nature as your mirror, take a walk through your favorite natural, feral or wild space and, letting go of your thoughts, walking in the style of kinhin, breathe in the self that you see, and breathe out relaxation and lovingkindness. Repeat until it's time to do something else.

Question

What did you most identify with on Saturday's journey? How do you see that as part of yourself, a part of your self image? What might be the significance of having that as part of the makeup of your identity?

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I am driftwood in the stream
Indra in the sky
looking down on it

--from "Solitude"
Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

David M. Hoza

--Andy

Immersion

picnic at the river
where wolves came down the mountain
became human

Winona Baker, from "Summer", Moss Hung Trees: Haiku of the West Coast 1992

You may remember that Jack Turner through readings and commentary pointed to the tragedy of commodified attention. Twitters and blogs, I-pods and Blackberries, cellphones and the internet shatter our oneness with the present, forever mediating our direct experience in ways that may ironically make us long for Turner's "poor substitutes".

We began our trip in the city, and wound through mountain peaks and sagebrush plains, meandering from state to state, immersing in the conversations of the day, the speedgoats, those busty Tetons, the hunt for wild game.

Psychotherapists and Eastern practitioners alike by the mid 1980's and 1990's recognized the waning capacity for immersion, that place where Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi located the experience of flow, the place where we become one with our environment and our activity, and attention is no longer divided. Thomas Moore in The Soul of Sex--a book not about the act of sex as about the relationship of Eros and Psyche--too recognized that in our sped up and divided lifestyles we were no longer attending to the rituals, journeys, images or sensations that bring us into a place of fulfillment and satiation, a place where craving gives way to deep satisfaction, where longing and desire are quenched with experience.

In The Desert Quartet, Terry Tempest Williams takes us on a journey--a journey rooted in place--descending into deep canyons, cave pools and the journey to the soul. Much alike, our journey began on a sagebrush plain, hiding in its crook the folds where forest and river preside, nuanced eco-regions living side by side, juxtaposing dryness and moisture, dessication and life-giving springs. Through a series of elementals we are swept into and out of Ms. Williams' experience, one not intended to mediate, but to exemplify and endure as sign in the absence of direct experience. A passage of depth into the tranquility of nature-based place and back from nirvana.

Present.
Completely present.
My eyes focus on one current in particular,
a small eddy that keeps circling back upon itself.

Around and around,
a cottonwood leaf spins,
a breeze gives it a nudge,
and it glides downriver,

this river braided with light.

Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 2001

It's not by accident
that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears
as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades.

It is not so coincidental
that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women
have similar reputations.

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, 1992

Haiku Moments
When the writer's sense of self
dissolves into egolessness
a dropping away of the boundaries between
self and world

the attempt to place us
in the world itself

As if the writer and her language
were not even there
intervening between us
and piece of the world
under consideration

adapted from Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku, 2009

There were numerous moments when we were immersed. Recall the moments spent chopping cucumbers, peppers or chicken. Recall Allison immersed in the process of dinner. Recall Meaghan speedgoat in a unitard, the shooting stars of the sky, the moodiness of our departure, the solemnity of our first steps, the settling in to the rhythm of the day.

Sit. Stand. Walk. Observe. Listen. Smell. Sit.

Recall the fanning out of our pack, the slow motion of our tribe through tall grasses, through the dead and evergreen trees, across turquoise rocks wet with spring and river water. Recall Brooke immersed in stalking Jack Turner as if stalking her prey, recall descending shallow drains, ascending shallow rises, overlooking the bearded trees of a hidden wild place of beauty and moisture and forgotten histories of fingerling fish and winged ospreys. Recall the joyous breaking of the fast of silence, the evening's pliable communion, whetted with the Dionysian liquors of comraderie.

I
have often wondered about the rituals the Ancients used to prepare for the ceremonies that led to anthropomorphs and other petroglyph and pictographic images. An LA Times writer who recently spent time in Range Creek Canyon with members of our own Western Soundscape Archive pondered the possibilities of the sounds that scaped the world of the Ancients, whose rituals of gathering plants, preparing the dyes, chiseling the tools, and entering into the sacred space of oneness with the tasks at hand surely would have immersed them in the sounds of the canyon that may have influenced the images they left behind.

The Sounds of Range Creek Canyon

La Loba
Wolf Woman

They say she lives among the rotten granite slopes, though they say she has been found all over. She is known to collect and preserve especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. She creeps and crawls and sifts through the montanas, the mountains, arroyos, riverbeds, looking for wolf bones. And when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing. And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. Wolf Woman sings more and the wolf breathes, breathes, then runs down canyon. Whether by speed or splash in the river, caught in sunlight or the black of the new moon, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon. If La Loba takes a liking to you--count yourself lucky! She just may show you something of the soul.

--adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Exercise

Thomas Moore in The Soul of Sex cultivates something of the spell of the sensuous. If you have a partner, sit with your partner just the way you did at the foot of the Tetons. Relax. Breathe. Let your thoughts come and go. Close your eyes to sharpen your sense of touch. Let go of anything sexual, and immerse in the sensual. Holding your hands and forearms over your partner's, gently touch the crook of the elbow. Slowly and lightly, ever so lightly, brush your hand across their forearm. Get to know the hairs intimately, get to know their fingers, each joint, the jutting of the heel of their hand, the crotches of the fingers. If you have no partner, try one hand on the arm of the other, and see whether the left--or the right hand--arouses a greater sense of intimacy.

Question

We had a number of moments when we were immersed in experience. Recall a moment in detail where that sense of immersion was most vivid.

Simply allowing
the affairs of the human world
and the doings of the natural world
to resonate with one another

Haiku
eschews metaphor
and figurative language
to attempt to see
nature on its own terms
--not in terms of something else.

--adapted from Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

The Clouds. One's self then
becomes a wilderness, clouds
being within us.

--An Painter, A Coyote in the Garden, 1988

David M. Hoza

Impermanence

From Kumuka.com

Trying to hear
what is in the wind
I lose my own breath

...from "Economy", Walden by Haiku, Ian Marshall, 2009

As we communied in circular fashion 'round the yellow eye of campfire Saturday night, we mused our preoccupations and challenges from the day's near-unmediated experience in the feral lands footing the Tetons. Jack Turner in asides assuaged impermanence, the so-called truth of life and death; all things come into being and cease to exist; experience emerges, falls back into nothing.

Yet the week's end too wore a surprising array of juxtaposition and irony: scorching jet planes against wild nature; our birdsong of conversations as against the deeper immersion in the text of feral nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned the fleeting, ephemeral nature of experience in his landmark essay.

"Experience"
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-2nd_Series_2_Experience.htm

We are those who imagine the places we have been along with the ethics and practices that would preserve them for future generations' experience, yet another juxtaposition, another irony exists in the way we are called upon to make abstract signals and gestures that evoke--in what Thoreau might have called wild image and sign--the way to direct experience and the protection and sustainable use of our wild, feral, natural, open, communal spaces.

Exercise

Take five minutes or 20. In the first segment, sit more or less as you did in one of the places we took the time to sit and meditate. Imagine the bell ringing again, and use the triggers of recollection to re-situate yourself in that moment. Breathe. Try to recall the temperature of the still and breezing winds on your bare skin, the prickle of the plants beneath you, the sights, smells and sounds in as rich and vivid detail as you experienced them. Whether you can fully recollect, memories are embedded in your memory in exact and compelling detail. Remember that. Relax. Breathe. Close your eyes. Recollect the way your body felt from the wind in your hair to the feeling of your toes in sandals, shoes or bare, and all points in between. Recall the feel of the sun and distinctness of shadow, the sounds of the crickets and other insects, the bristling of the dead Western purple coneflower leaves yet living and yellow at their centers, in the gentle gusts of wind. Recall all the sensual details, as you would a body scan meditation, breathing in and our in the elbow, in the left heel, in the stomach, at the top of the head; just so, the view from that seated position, the smells, sights and sounds, specifically, one...and then another. Then let go. Breathe in, recollect. Smile. The neurochemistry may help you remember. Breathe out. Let go. Just breathe, meditate, let go of your thoughts, let them come and go, relax, let go.

--Diamondpoint Coaching

Question

The question for the day is this: Though we are apparently doomed to forget this experience, its meanings and epiphanies waning in the wake of what Ralph Waldo Emerson--or perhaps it was Thoreau--referred to as the tyranny of Now, what shall we remember most and most often? What will you bring back from our time at the foot of the Grand Tetons?

Thank you
for your attention and patience.

From "Economy", Walden by Haiku, Ian Marshall, 2009...

A striped snake
lying still in the pond
as long as I stay there

David M. Hoza

Neozoon...fur coat graffiti

www.neozoon.org
While on the road to our Tetons field-trip with Jack Turner, these women came up in conversation. They use old fur coats, cut into the shapes of various animals, to 're-inhabite' urban environments with non-human animals.

Dylan

Boundary in Human/Non-Human Relations

In nomadic societies a boundary marks a sacred site where the being of power dwells, where its power is strong and its children are protected. These sacred locales and sanctuaries are everywhere in Aboriginal Australia. In societies where village life is more rooted, there is a tendency to situate the boundary between nature and culture. In either case, this separation of the mysterious and the familiar has a practical advantage. It segregates the world of mystery from the world human beings have control over. Without that boundary, the world of mystery does not stand apart from the world of human making; each world contaminates the other. On this side of the boundary, a space needs to be held open for ordinary human ingenuity and predictability: it cannot become dense with superstition. On the other side of the boundary there must be room for intelligent nature to behave in all of its wild unpredictability: that realm can never become uniform with the human capacity to remake the environment, as on the maps of explorers and colonizers. The societies that have not survived are the ones that have not respected boundary or that have had their sense of boundary obliterated.

Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers pg. 102

Dylan 9/17/09

"Wilderness is the red carpet to Socialism"

Somewhere in eastern Utah, there is a bumper-sticker that reads “Wilderness is the red carpet to socialism.” I’m not sure what this statement is supposed to mean. I have never, personally, thought there was anything ‘socialist’ about wilderness. The Wilderness Act of 1964 passed the Senate 73-12, the House of Representatives 373-1, and was signed into law by President Johnson. Say what you will, but it’s a stretch to say that the US had 73 Socialist Senators and 373 Socialist Representatives in 1964.

I don’t see environmental issues as political or economic, and am always frustrated when they are framed in such a manner. I see wilderness as something that nourishes the soul, among other things, but never as such a base issue of monetary gain or political power.

Dylan 9/16/09

For the last few months I have been casually compiling quotes about reading one's surroundings, or communication in some sense. Here are a few of these:

...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

-Thoreau

The field has eyes, the wood has ears; I will look, be silent, and listen.

-Hieronymous Bosch

The man failed to sense that here was something more than a bird call, that here was a secret message, calling not for rendition in counterfeit syllables, but for translation and understanding.

-Aldo Leopold

ALL THE WORM TRAILS UNDERNEATH THE BARK

OF A GIANT FOREST

write a name in a script

I cannot translate.

And I do not care to.

-Michael McClure

There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the land's marks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don't stop to read it.

-Rebecca Solnit

Dylan 9/15/09

Last weekend, I floated down the Green River, from Little Hole to the mouth of Little Swallow Canyon, with the BLM and various other state and federal agencies on a Bio-Blitz. There were two reasons for the trip: to eradicate teasel, and to map populations of Ute Ladies’-Tresses.

Teasel is an invasive species, introduced to North America from Europe as early as the 1700s. The plants are rather attractive in a prickly way, and are sometimes used in flower bouquets. The stems were previously used in fabric production, the thorns being used to raise a nap on wool. A single plant can produce over 2,000 seeds with up to 80% viability, so the plants quickly overwhelm other species, creating a monoculture. There are still relatively few of the plants along the Green River. An attempt is being made to remove them before they become a serious problem. Mostly, we removed the flower-heads from the plants so that they could not produce seeds. Some of the younger plants were dug out and pulled. There are plans to continue removing seed-heads, and a possibility of spraying the plants.

The Ute Ladies’-Tress is a native orchid. As a threatened species, attempts are being made to determine the full size of its population and range. It is not an especially showy flower, particularly when compared to other orchids. They blend easily into the grasses and sedges around them. However, like most things, these flowers reward closer inspection. Rooted in sodden, sometimes submerged soil on the edge of the river, the plants we charted had a spike of white, waxy flowers, rarely over six inches tall. The shape of the flowers reminded me of dragon heads on Viking ships.

Many of the people I worked with were botanists. They told me the stretch of river we were working on was in relatively good shape, considering all that had happened there. Flaming Gorge Dam altered the flow of the river and amount of silt in the water from 1958 through the present. This adversely affected the Cottonwoods, who do not reproduce as well as they once did. Tamarisk, Teasel, Russian Olive, Phragmites Bull Thistle and a non-native vetch are common, but still controllable. On the other-hand there are also healthy numbers of Buffalo Berry, American Licorice, and willows. Along the portion we floated, there was only a short stretch of private property that was overgrazed. All that grew there were Tamarisks

One of the biologists mentioned that it is sometimes nice to go places that are completely unknown to him, so that he can look at the landscape and see the beauty of the place, instead of the number of invasive, non-native weeds.

While on the trip I saw many Prong-horn, Mule Deer, Ravens, Turkey Vultures, Mergansers, Leopard Frogs, Horned Larks and Gray Jays. Also I saw Osprey, a Golden Eagle, a Coyote, Canadian Geese, Sand-hill Cranes, big Rainbow and Brown Trout swimming beneath our raft through the clear water, and a Great Blue Heron who I startled on the edge of the river in the dark. Other members of the trip saw a family of seven river otters.