Tracking Tom Brown, Jr. in May 2013

To sit down and write, one must first stand up to live. Henry David Thoreau
The tragedy in life is not what men suffer, but what they miss. Thomas Carlyle

This month our reading hours are minimal, as we "get out there." The goal is to immerse ourselves in nature by using our full complement of human capacities, especially those that are dormant and compromised by our comfort-loving modern ways of life.

Tom Brown, Jr. has made a career of mentoring others through this "deconditioning." Part I of his book Nature Observation and Tracking guides us through specific exercises and thought experiments--to fine-tune our senses, release our inhibitions, and break through our habitual blindness.
In the coming weeks, we each embark on a personal discovery following his path. At our next meeting we will report on our experiences and practice as a group some of the skills we have learned. This last book of the season also sets us up for a summer of diving deeper than ever into naturalist adventures.

Mr. Brown himself is a controversial fellow, a brief span of web surfing calls into question his autobiography as a bit of commercial mythmaking. Brown supposedly was mentored from childhood by an Apache elder named Stalking Wolf, from whom he learned his philosophy and wilderness acumen. Whether this is true or not, Brown's methods do have power if one has the courage to try them and the patience to develop them. Brown is a darling of the survivalist set, he has authored multiple works of fiction and nonfiction and draws participants the world over to his workshops in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and in California.

Two other authors should be mentioned here. Joseph Cornell was early in the vanguard of the nature awareness movement. His Sharing Nature With Children sold 500,000 copies in over 20 languages, sparking a worldwide revolution in nature education and becoming an instant classic. Cornell's books now serve as popular nature-education resources all over the globe. See some of his nature activities here.

Richard Louv, in The Last Child in the Woods, hatched the concept nature-deficit disorder, and spawned an international movement to reconnect children with nature. He is a tireless advocate for the crucial developmental impact of unfettered play and exploration in the natural world. His newer title, The Nature Principle, translates this effect to adults. Citing extensive research, he shows how we can tap into the restorative powers of the natural world to boost mental acuity and creativity; promote health and wellness; build smarter and more sustainable businesses, communities, and economies; and ultimately strengthen human bonds.

 

 

LETS GO SWAMP WALKING!

 


PVNWG welcomes salamander season with our April author David Carroll's Swampwalker's Journal: A Wetlands Year.

From the Barnes and Noble site:

David Carroll has dedicated his life to art and to wetlands. He is as passionate about wetlands, and the creatures who live there, as most of us are about our families and closest friends. He has stayed in touch with individual turtles for twenty years, watching them dig into hibernation in the winter, greeting them as they emerge in the spring, following them as they breed, feed, and roam through the warmer months. He knows frogs and snakes, bears and beavers, muskrats and minks, dragonflies, caddis flies, birds, water lilies, pickerel weed, cattails, sedges, and everything else that swims, flies, trudges, slithers, or sinks its roots in swamp, marsh, or bog.

In Swampwalker's Journal Carroll shares his knowledge and passion with the rest of us, taking us on a miraculous year-long journey, illustrated with his own elegant drawings, through the wetlands, and revealing why they are so important to his life and ours - and to all life on Earth.

Boston Globe

But it is Carroll's gift of sensing the ecosystem while detailing egg mass or footprint that sets him apart. The fact that he can set this all in prose and finely crafted pen and inks and watercolors proved that he is of Renaissance caliber. His hungry eye devours all of life.

Entertainment Weekly

In the final volume of his "wet-sneaker trilogy" (following The Year of the Turtle and Trout Reflections), naturalist Carroll covers four seasons of wading through mashes, swamps, bogs, and fens. [His] eye for detail serves him well, whether he's spying on a tiny garter snake struggling to suck down a much larger wood frog or watching a raccoon savagely digging a turtle out of its shell.

Thomas Palmer

Though he presents his findings as an illustrated daybook, this is no simple record of facts, but a thorough account of the distinguishing features of swamps, marshes, floodplains, bogs, and vernal pools, indexed to aid reference....Carroll's quiet manner and effortless sensitivity to detail suffuse his wet-bottomed landscapes with a dreamlike quality shaded by knowledge of how quickly such places can disappear.
— Christian Science Monitor

Kirkus Reviews

There is no greater wetland emissary than Carroll, who takes to the funk and spook of a swamp with avidity and returns to masterfully tell of its scarce-visited glories. "To have a bit of the landscape to oneself, to not be crowded in the landscape of the current epoch, one is almost obliged to withdraw to the swamp." Then again, Carroll  would venture there even if he were the last person on Earth, for he loves the place, along with vernal pools, marshes, floodplains, peatlands, fens, the whole nine freshwater-wetland yards. Here Carroll relates with enthusiasm, always gracefully pitched, the sheer pleasure to be had in visiting wetlands in all seasons. Nowhere else can you witness blue flag and red canary grass tipping the hand of an unmown pasture that is also a vernal pool come spring, complete with trilling thrush, drilling insects, five species of obligate salamanders, and a chorus of peepers that draws you in toward "a center of almost unbearable intensity

READ ABOUT OUR GROUP'S WETLAND FORAY  "A MARSH MARCH IN APRIL" in REFLECTIONS (click on image in left column).

Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces for March 2013

PVNWG members meet at a member's home on March 24 to discuss our impressions of Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces. 

Born in 1946 in Santa Barbara, California, Erlich began to write full time in 1978 while living on a Wyoming Ranch, after the death of a loved one. In 1985, she drew immediate acclaim with The Solace of Open Spaces, a collection of essays.

From the publisher: Writing of hermits, cowboys, changing seasons, and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this "planet of Wyoming" she has come to call home. She captures the incredible beauty and the demanding harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the depth, tenderness and humor of the quirky souls who live there. Ehrlich, a former filmmaker and urbanite, presents in these essays a fresh and vibrant tribute to the new life she has chosen.

 

"Ehrlich's best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilization." San Francisco Chronicle

 

Click here to read an interview with the author about her 2001 work Cold Heaven.

 

Click here for biography of the author.

 

Selected Works:

 

To Touch the Water, 1981,

The Solace of Open Spaces,  1985

Heart Mountain,  1988,

Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories from Wyoming, 1991

Islands, the Universe, Home, Viking Press, 1991

Arctic Heart: A Poem Cycle, Capra Press, 1992

A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning, 1994

John Muir: Nature's Visionary,National Geographic Society, 2000

This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland,  2001

The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold,  2004

In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, National Geographic Society, 2010

Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami, 2013

A Season in the Wilderness with Edward Abbey

For February 2013, PVNWG blasts away the chill with Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. First published in 1968, the book became the focus of a nationwide cult.  Rude and sensitive, thought provoking and mystical, angry and loving, both Abbey and his book are all of these and more. The book vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah--the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty.  But it is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as the tourist industry.

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania, in 1927. He was educated at the University of Mexico and the University of Edinburgh.  When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself.

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

For more on all things Abbey visit Abbey's Web.

Sources: Cover, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, First Touchstone Edition, 1990; Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness, video, 1993; Abbey's Web, http://www.abbeyweb.net/

A Winter in The Outermost House

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot."  --Henry Beston


For December and January, our group has chosen The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston. Beston is one of the deities in the pantheon of classic nature writers. His chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach was written in longhand on the kitchen table in a little room with windows overlooking the North Atlantic and the dunes. Capturing the vividness of each event as it is seen and felt, the author describes the wonder and mystery of nature--the migrations of shore and sea birds, the ceaseless rhythms of wind and sand and ocean, the pageant of stars in the changing seasons. Permeating these pages is his perception of the relation of man to the cosmic picture.


In a 1964 ceremony on the dunes, the house itself was officially proclaimed a National Literary Landmark.
For more about the author and his work, see the excellent site developed by the Friends of Henry Beston.
We meet on January 27th to discuss the author and The Outermost House. Details, see "Next Meeting" in left hand column.

SIESTA LANE BY AMY MINATO FOR NOVEMBER 2012

PVNWG members are reading Amy Minato's work Siesta Lane for November 2012, to be discussed at our meeting on December 2. Several of our upcoming books document a highly personal Thoreauvian experience. Here is info from the inside cover:

Part of me knows that it would be easy to go back to my busy familiar life where I am marginally successful and known to others, if not to myself.
But not to myself.


Amy Minato decided to abandon a life of consumption for one year.
She moved from the busy streets of Chicago to a quieter, slower, simpler, and more natural existence in the pristine countryside of Oregon.  The community she discovered, called Siesta Lane, became her very own Walden Pond.
Amy's experience there--in a group of like-minded men and women, all living in tiny cottages without electricity or running water--changed her forever. Like her reader, she challenged herself to see the bigger picture through a smaller lens.

Amy Klauke Minato is a poet, writer, and teacher. She holds advanced degrees in creative writing and environmental studies from the University of Oregon. 

Bernd Heinrich: A wonderful story of resilience and courage.  It touches the soul.
Publishers Weekly: Minato's lyrical prose tosses off beguiling evocations of the landscape and flora around her...
Robert Michael Pyle: A treat...we could all learn something we need to know: live simpler, live better.
Diana Abu-Jaber: Siesta lane is a beguiling story of self-discovery filled with the enchantments of the land and the body.

To join the discussion on December 2, email pvnaturewriters@gmail for details.

ROGER TORY PETERSON:I AM FIRST A TEACHER

The month of October 2012 we are devoting to Roger Tory Peterson. Members may read All Things Reconsidered, a collection of his previously published Birdwatcher's Digest columns selected by his publisher Bill Thompson III.  Click here for a review from the Seattle Times.

Also of interest is the biography Birdwatcher by Elizabeth Rosenthal which has earned much praise. If that is too much to chew, the site of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History has a short biography page and a nice collection of quotes. A sampling:

 “Birding, after all, is just a game. Going beyond that is what is important.”
The Daily Reflector, Greenville, NC Nov. 6, 1988

“A naturalist must always be a realist.”
New York Alive, Jan-Feb, 1988

“Butterflies fly too; they are elegant and vibrant, but they don’t sing. And flowers, lovely though they may be, are rooted to the earth. To me, as a youngster, chafing under the regimentation of the classroom and the demands of a stern father, birds seemed to have it all. They are attractive, they sound off with spirit, and they can fly wherever they choose, whenever they choose. Ever since that day in April, well over sixty years ago, birds have dominated my daily thoughts, filled my dreams, and dominated my reading.”
A speech to the NYS Legislature, Albany, NY, June 17, 1987

“Reluctant at first to accept a straitjacket of a world I did not comprehend, I finally, with the help of my hobby, made some sort of peace with society.”
Used in US News & World Report article, Aug.12, 1996

“Watching birds has sharpened my senses, made my hearing far more acute than most, my eyes more perceptive, my reactions quicker. This awareness has radiated far beyond the birds, embracing nearly everything that is alive, from my fellow humans to the least beetle or cricket.”
A speech to the NYS Legislature, Albany, NY, June 17, 1987

“Birds, with their high rate of metabolism and furious pace of living, demonstrate perhaps better than any other animals the life forces. They are indicators, quickly reflecting changes in the environment that we all share. They are sort of an early warning system, sending out signals when things are out of kilter.”
A speech to the NYS Legislature, Albany, NY, June 15, 1987

“It is inevitable that the perceptive person who watches birds, or mammals, or fish, or butterflies, becomes an environmentalist.”
A speech to the NYS Legislature, Albany, NY, June 15, 1987

“I am first a teacher.”
At the 10-12-96 RTPI Board of Trustees meeting Virginia Peterson stated that RTP often said this.