Light, leaf, foot, hand, and wing,
Such order as we know,
One household high and low,
And all the earth shall sing.

~ Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

Famous Gulf of Mexico Walrus (Walrus Petroleumis)

If it weren't so sad, it'd be funny.

Photos & Quotes

"... If home is my destination on this pilgrimage, then hope is essential survival equipment--not the kind of hope that requires certain results, but a hope that can keep its shoulder to the wheel no matter what happens... No one can say for certain what the future will bring, regardless of how discouraging the current trends. That means there is always room for surprise and always room for hope. We have no idea yet what we are capable of achieving once we turn toward these challenges with our full hearts engaged. That story has yet to be written."

~ Kurt Hoelting, The Circumference of Home

"Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart... It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

~ Vaclav Havel

Recommended reading

The Circumference of Home, One Man's Yearlong Quest
for a Radically Local Life
by Kurt Hoelting
Da Capo Press, 2010

"... climate change, arguably the biggest challenge ever to face the human family, will never be far from my thoughts and meditations throughout this coming year in circumference, even when the contexts of my adventures are deeply personal and local. If there is a hidden gift embedded in this crisis, it is this potent new motivation to reexamine our lives, to make changes in the direction of more balanced and sustainable living -- changes that we have resisted for too long. That our overall quality of life may actually benefit from this effort is a prospect often lost in the public rhetoric about anticipated hardship and self-sacrifice that we've long associated with such changes.

... the climate crisis may be our last, best chance for a broad-based realignment of values that can finally extend our ethical regard into the deepest heart of the living world."

review: "Kurt Hoelting--fisherman, carpenter, mountain climber, storyteller, and Zen adept--is well-equipped for this adventure. He emerges from his low-carbon year feeling more fit spiritually as well as physically, and more hopeful about the human future. Readers will also come away feeling hopeful about our capacity for living more deeply in place and more conservingly on the planet."

~ Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto

"Conservation is not a goal but a never-ending process, one in which everyone has to be involved... By using all our wisdom, knowledge, passion, perseverance, dedication, and ever-lasting commitment, we can retain the beauty and health of our planet. After all, it is the only home we shall ever have."

~ George Schaller

The least bittern, Lxobrychus exilis, is a small, secretive wading bird, the smallest heron in the Americas.

"No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled."

~ Dag Hammarskjold

Pelecanus occidentalis (the brown pelican) in happier times (2006)

Top Photo: Tom Grey

For Julia

The starlings are singing!
You could call it singing.
At any rate, they are starlings.

~ James Schuyler

Photo: J.R. Compton

How is it that grief, rage, and a broken heart find comfort in poetry?

Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

~James Schuyler, 1951

Photo: Mark Carlson

What will we do, if we destroy the grace of the world?

Light from Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do the same.

~James Schuyler, The Crystal Lithium, 1972

President Obama, put BP in receivership

Article on BP by Robert Reich

On November 11 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Brown Pelican, a species almost brought to extinction by the pesticide DDT, was removed from the list of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act because its populations had rebounded.

Dry but fascinating reading: The delisting under “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Removal of the Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife”.

Obscenity

As bad as BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, it is dwarfed by the daily invisible spill of carbon into the atmosphere, which has led to dangerous, increasing acidification of the oceans.

When will ordinary citizens demand an end?