At Home on the Earth Quotes

“Gary Snyder:

We are still laying the groundwork for a “culture of nature.” The critique of the Judeo-Christian-Cartesian view of nature (by which complex of view all developed nations excuse themselves for their drastically destructive treatment of the landscape) is well under way. Some of us would hope to resume, reevaluate, re-create, and bring into line with complex science the old view that holds the whole phenomenal world to be our being; multicentered, ‘alive’ in its own manner, and effortlessly self-organizing in its own chaotic way. Elements of this view are found in wide range of ancient vernacular philosophies, and in recent thought… and it offers a third way, not caught up in the dualisms of body and mind, spirit and matter, or culture and nature. It is noninstrumentalist view that extends intrinsic value to the nonhuman world.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know any certainty what was good for even us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world- to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity- our own capacity for life- that is stifled by our arrogant assumption: the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it…. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.

After more than thirty years I have at last arrived at the candor necessary to stand on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so much damaged by it, and as: What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should humans live in it?

I have not found the answers, though I believe that in partial and fragmentary ways they have begun to come to me. But the questions are more important than their answers. In a final sense, they have no answers. They are part of the necessary enactment of humility of teaching man what his importance is, what his responsibility is, and what his place is, both on the earth and in the order of things…

Wendell Berry”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Alan Thein Durning:

The extreme disruption of ecosystems will end. The question is whether people will end it voluntarily and creatively, or whether nature will end it for them, savagely and catastrophically... Humanity’s failure to act in defense of the Earth is conventionally explained as a problem of knowledge: not enough people yet understand the dangers or know what to do about them. An alternative explanation is that this failure reflects a fundamental problem of motivation. People know enough, but they don’t care enough. They do not care enough because they do not identify themselves with the world as a whole. The Earth is such a big place that it might as well be no place at all.

If places motivate but the planet does not, a curious paradox emerges. The wrenching global problems that the world’s leading thinkers so earnestly warn about- crises such as deforestation, hunger, population growth, climate change, loss of cultural and biological diversity- may submit to solutions only obliquely. The only cures possible may be local and motivated by a sentiment- the love of home- that global thinkers often regarded as divisive and or provincial. Thus, it may be possible to diagnose problems globally, but impossible to solve them globally. There may not be any ways to save to world that are not, first and foremost, ways for people to say their own places.

Here is the hope: that this generation becomes the next wave of natives, first in this place on Earth and then in others. This newfound permanence allows the quiet murmur of localities to become audible again. And that not long thereafter, perhaps very soon, the places of this Earth will be healed and whole again.

...AJ Auden said, “We have spent thee past 250 years in restless movement, recklessly skimming off the cream of superabundant resources, but we have not used the land in the true sense of the word, not have we done ourselves much permanent good. It’s high times that we settled down, not for a hundred years, but for a thousand, forever.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Alan Thein Duening:

Picture North America from space. Look at the upper left and start an imaginary line on the rugged coast of southern Alaska. Climb the ridges that encircle Prince William Sound. Cross the snowy teeth of the Chugach Mountains and descend through kettle-pond country to the feet of the towering Alaska Range. Rise again to the bitter heights and turning southeast along the crest, clip the corner of the Yukon Territory. Enter British Columbia and veer east through its folding north.

Turn your line south when you reach the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. Follow the divide down the thousand-mile spine of British Columbia, across Montana, along the buttressed ridges of the Idaho border and into Wyoming as far as Jackson Hole.

There, leave the divide and turn westward toward the coast. Following the swells and benches that limit the Columbia Basin, dip southward into Utah and Nevada, then northward again around the high desert of central Oregon. When you approach the Cascade Mountains, veer southwest through the tangled topography of northern California to the crest of the Coast Range. Just north of San Francisco Bay, descend to the shores of the Pacific.

The line you have drawn is an unfamiliar one. You won’t find it on maps. But it shows a geographical unit more real, in ecological sense, than any of the lines governments draw. You have drawn a biological region, a bioregion. Specifically, you have outlines the watersheds of rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rain forest zone with a fifteen-hundred-mile belt of rain forests along the coast.

The unity of this diverse bioregion is the movement of its water; every ounce of moisture that the ocean throws into the sky and the sky hurls down on the land inside this region’s borders tumbles toward the rain forest coast. If it does not evaporate or get trapped in underground aquifers along the way, water will reach that dripping shoreline through one of several hundred swift, cold rivers. Most likely, it will travel through the Columbia or the Fraser rivers, home to the Earth’s greatest population of migrating salmon.

This place, defined by water running to woodlands, has no perfect name. You can call it Rain Forest Province, the North Pacific Slope, or Cascadia… Natural units of place such as this have always mattered more to people than has humanity in general or the planet in its entirety. Indeed, history is unequivocal; people will sacrifice for villages, homelands, or nations, even giving their lives. But humans seem unwilling to sacrifice for their planet, despite the fact that it is now suffering proportionately greater losses from social decay and environmental destruction than most countries at war.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Alan Thein Durning:

I was in the Philippines interviewing members of remote hill tribes about their land and livelihood. A frail old woman who was revered as a traditional priestess asked through an interpreter, “What is your homeland like?” She looked at me with an expectant smile, but I was speechless. Should I tell her about our neighborhood on the edge of D.C. where we could not let our son play outside because of the traffic? Should I tell her about the neighborhood we had previously fled… serial killers, helicopter lights in our windows, riots, and for the first time, it shamed me. In America, I finally admitted, we have careers, not places. Looking up, I recognized pity in her eyes.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“from John Hanson Mitchell:

I am not one who is particularly obsessed with the measurement of hours or days. But ceremonial time, an interesting aspect of Native American shamanistic thinking, did not come so easily and steeped as I am in Western tradition, it is likely that I will never be able to thoroughly free myself from the belief that time flows linearly from past to present to future. But after I learned about ceremonial time, I began to try to use it as a tool to explore the past… I found that when the moment was right, by concentrating on some external object, an arrowhead, for example, or the running walls or foundations of the area, I was able to perceive something more than a simple mental picture of some past event was like. I could not only see the event or the place in my mind’s eye but would also hear it, smell the woodfires, and sometimes, for just a flash, a microsecond, I would actually be there or so it seemed. It was simply a heightened awareness or perception of the way things must have been.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Melissa Nelson:

Where was my Native American family in the deep ecology philosophy? Haven’t these ideas been part of traditional cultures for thousands of years? Yes and no. Within the deep ecology movement people often make a distinction between an anthropocentric worldview and a “biocentric” one. This distinction can support a people versus nature type of thinking that has very little meaning for indigenous peoples. Native restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez, has said, ”we need to move beyond the anthropocentric-biocentric dichotomy and see that we are really kin-centric”; meaning we must recognize the reality of our extended family- the rock people, the plant people, the bird people, the water people- and human beings’ humble place in this web of kin.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Thomas Berry:

When we arrived, we brought with us an attitude that the region was here for our exploitation. Even though we broke our treaties with the Indian tribes, we did recognize their rights and made treaties with them. It never entered our minds that we should have also made treaties with the rivers and with the land and with the region as a whole…Such as treaty, or some such spiritual bond, between ourselves and the natural world is needed… the river and its valley are neither our enemy to be conquered nor our servant to be controlled…it is the ultimate psychic as well as the physical context out of which we emerge into being and by which we are nourished, guided, healed, and fulfilled. As the gulls soaring above the river in its estuary region, as the blossoms along its banks, the fish within its water, so, too, the river is a celebration of existence, of life lived in intimate association with the sky, the winds from every direction, the sunlight.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Thomas Berry:

Tell me a story. How often we said that as children. Tell me a story. Story illumined the world for us in childhood. Even now we might make the request: tell me a story. Tell me the story of the river and the valley and the streams and woodlands and wetlands, of the shellfish and finfish. A story of where we are and how we got here and the characters and roles we play. Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone, and everything about me, the story that brings us together, a story that brings together the human community with every living being int eh valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens a night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Gary Snyder:

I heard a Crow elder say: “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough-even white people- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land.” Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways. It is not enough just to “love nature” or want to be “in harmony with Gaia.” Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience. This is so unexceptional a kind of knowledge that everyone in Europe, Asia and Africa used to take for granted… Knowing a bit about the flora we could enjoy questions like: where do Alaska and Mexico meet?

It would be somewhere on the north coast of California, where Canada Jay and Sitka Spruce lace together with manzanita and Blue Oak. But instead of northern California, let’s call it “Shasta Bioregion.” The present state of California (the old Alta California territory) falls into at least three natural divisions, and the northern third looks, as the Douglas Fir example, well to the north. East of the watershed divide to the west near Sacramento, is the Great Basin, north of Shasta is the Cascadia/Colombia region, and then farther north is what we call Ish River country, the drainages of Puget Sound.

Why should we do this kind of visualization? It prepares us to begin to be at home in this landscape. There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land, they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into “native americans.” For the non-Native Americans to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Gary Snyder:

Our place is part of what we are. Yet even a ‘place’ has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time. A place will have been grasslands, then conifers, then beech and elm. It will have been half riverbed, it will have been plowed by ice. And then it will be cultivated, paved, sprayed, dammed, graded, built up. But each is only for a while, and that will be just another set of lines on the palimpsest. The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild. A place on earth is a mosaic within larger mosaics.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Scott Russell Sanders:

Since birth, my children have been surrounded by images of the earth as viewed from space, images that I first encountered when I was in my twenties. Those photographs show vividly what in our sanest moments we have always know- that the earth is a closed circle, lovely and rare. That is one pole of my awareness; but the other pole is what I see through my window. I try to keep both in sight at once.

I find a kindred lesson in the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: “This spot where you sit is your own spot. It is this very spot and in this very moment that you can become enlightened. You don’t have to sit beneath a special tree in a distant land.” There are no privileged locations. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look; and the influence of the universe converges on every spot.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Scott Russell Sanders:

What I am saying is that we are a wandering species and have been since we reared up on our hind legs and stared at the horizon. Our impulse to wander, to pick up and move when things no longer suits in our present place, is not an ailment brought on suddenly by industrialization, by science, or the European hegemony over dark-skinned people…Even agricultural settlements such as those associated with the mound- building cultures in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, reveals a history of arrivals and departures, sites used for decades or centuries and then abandoned…. Mobility is the rule in human history, rootedness the exception.

Nomads, whose name implies motion, must be scholars of their bioregion. As they follow herds from pasture to pasture, they trace a loop that is dictated by what the land provides. For inhabitory peoples, listening to the land is a spiritual discipline as well as a practical one. The alertness that feeds the body also feeds the soul. In Native American culture, ‘medicine’ is understood not as a human invention, but as a channeling of the power by which all things live. Whether you are hunter-gatherer, a nomad, a farmer, or suburbanite, to be at home in the land is to be sane and whole.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Wendell Berry:

My mind is never empty or idle at the joinings of streams. Here is the work of the world going on. The creation is felt, alive and intent on its materials, in such places. In the angle of the meeting of the two streams stands the steep wooded point of the ridge, like the prow of an upturned boat- finished, as it was a thousand years ago, as it will be in a thousand years. Its becoming is only incidental to its being. It will be because it is. It has no aim or end except to be.

Perhaps it is to prepare to hear some day the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for humans at all.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Wendell Berry:

There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty; the spirit of creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Now I have come down within the sound of the water. The winter has been rainy, and the hill is full of dark seeps and trickles, gathering finally, along these creases, into flowing streams. The sound of them is one of the elements and defines a zone. When their voices return to the hill after their absence during summer and autumn it is a better place to be. A thirst of the mind is quenched.

All waters are one. This is a reach of the sea, flung like a net over the hill and now drawn back to the sea. And as the sea is never raised in the earthly nets of fishermen, so the hill is never caught and pulled down by the watery net of the sea. But always a little of it is. Each of the gathering strands of the net carries some of the hill melted in it.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Wendell Berry:

Underlying this country, nine hundred feet below the highest ridgetops, more than four hundred feet below the surface of the river, is sea level. We seldom think of it here, landlocked. And yet the attraction of seal level dwells in this country as an ideal dwells in man’s mind. All our rains go in search of it and, departing, they have carved the land in a shape that is fluent and falling… the wild is flowing back like a tide.

The slopes along the hollow steepen still more, and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again. It is inexhaustible in its standpoints. A lifetime will not be enough to experience it all.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From John Haines:

You can kill off the original inhabitants, most of the world’s wildlife, and still live on the land…but a sure poverty will follow us, an inner desolation to match the devastation without. And having rid the earth of wilderness, of wild things generally, we look to outer space , to other planets, to find their replacements there…the prospect of an Alaska in which a million or so people are on the prowl with guns, snow machines, airboats, and four-wheelers is not only terrifying, it is finally unacceptable. An environmental ethic, believed in, practiced and enforce, is not just an alternative, it is the only one,…and it is sometimes possible to sense a genuine urge toward…a sane kind of plenitude, a fullness of spirit and being.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From John Haines:

I recall an afternoon in October many years ago, when I stood on the edge of that high overlook near Maclaren Summit in the Alaska Range and gazed down onto the wide sweep of the Maclaren River Basin. The cold, late afternoon sun came through broken clouds, and the tundra below me was patched with sunlight. The river, a thin, silvery-blue thread, twisted through the subdued autumn coloration of the land. I was entirely alone at that moment…the land seemed incredibly vast and empty. far below me, a few scattered caribou were feeding in the meadows of the river basin…I felt as if I were looking down on a landscape elementary to our being, and that nothing had occurred to change it since the last of the continental ice melted from the earth, and the first grasses and shrubs began to grow.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From Alice Walker:

I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them as least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. “Magic,” intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life-itself- will no longer be able to breathe in us. One day it occurred to me that if all the birds died, as they might well do, eventually, from the poisonings of their air, water, and food, it would be next to impossible to describe to our children the wonder of their flight.

But what I am also sharing with you is this thought- the Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. I realize now that I did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world do our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come where it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth…Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and you shall receive. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me- and to yourself. For we are one. “God” answers prayers. Which is another way of saying, “the Universe responds.” We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace.

Pass it on.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From bell hooks:

When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. the ancestors taught me it was so. as a child, I loved playing in dirt, in that rick Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land… from the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Seminoles methods for rice cultivation. Native people taught recently arrived black folks about the many uses of corn. Sharing the reverence for the earth, they helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone.

Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity…if we can think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept the mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Hopi Pueblo elders have said that the austere and, to some eyes, barren plains and hills surrounding their mesa-top villages actually help to nurture the spirituality of the Hopi way. The Hopi people might have settled in locations far more lush where daily life would not have been so grueling. But there on the high silent sandstone mesas that overlook the sandy arid expanses stretching to all horizons, the Hopi people must “live by their prayers” if they are to survive. The Hopi ways cherishes the intangibles: the riches realized from interaction and interrelationships with all beings above all else… The bare vastness of the Hopi landscape emphasizes the visual impact of very plant, every rock, every arroyo…each ant, each lizard, each lark is imbued with great value simply because the creature is there and alive, in a place where any life at all is precious. Stand on the mesa edge at Walpai and look west over the bare distances toward the pale blue outlines of the San Francisco peaks where ka’tsina spirits reside. So little lies between you and they sky. So little lies between you and the earth.
Leslie Marmon Silko”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“From the Emergence Place: Pueblo potters, the creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky. So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. ‘A portion of territory they eye can comprehend in a single view’ does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and their surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory they survey. Viewers are as much part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all that surrounds.

Leslie Marmon Silko”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“N. Scott Momaday:

A FIRST AMERICAN VIEWS HIS LAND

First Man
Behold:
the earth
glitters
with leaves:
the sky
glistens
with rain.
Pollen
is borne
on winds
that low
and lean
upon
mountains.
Cedars
blacken
the slopes-
and pines.

I tell my students that the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation…the Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here. That simple and obvious truth is one of the most important realities of the Indian world, and it is integrated in the Indian mind and spirit…the Native American’s attitudes towards this land have been formulated over…a span that reaches back to the end of the Ice Age.

Very old in the Native American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists. it follows logically that there are ethical imperatives in this matter: Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life. in the natural order man invest himself in the landscape and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. This trust is sacred.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Much nature writing has emphasized the beauty, integrity, and necessity of wilderness. But the notions of wild and wilderness often have been accompanied by dichotomies: wilderness versus civilization, wild versus domesticated, pristine wilderness versus active human presence. While Western culture has traditionally given positive value to the second set of terms, there is a growing tendency to hold that wilderness has primary worth…but still this belief is often based on the old assumptions: that nature and humans are distinct, and that nature is healthy only when it is free of human interference. To think instead about being in place is to assume that there is at least the possibly of living with the land and its processes. How can we live in place, truly inhabit the earth, and become native to our lands?

So we are engaged in an ongoing struggle, a search for a new relation to the earth. It is also an old relationship: to be in and of place, to truly inhabit the land rather than just live on it. Why is it important? The answer is all around us in the destruction of habitats, species, and individual beings…the answer also lies inside us, in a psychological rupture from the physical matrix of our life-nature, and our bodies. And the answer is in the way we treat each other: our debasement and abuse of nature is linked with our debasement and abuse of people. To heal the social and the psychological, we need to heal our relationship with the earth.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

“Classical theology saw nature as a book, reading its symbols in order to understand the mind of a heavenly author. Our culture reads nature like a map, defined by roads leading to roads leading to places of money, the land merely blank space…there is another kind of vision. The eyes feel the curve and slope of the earth as it flows, following the water to the sea. The mind follows as well, wondering what creek lies below, what stream below that, what river. It is a geographic vision. What is here does not end here; all is unbroken. Place molds the sensual mind.

The essays in this book are now also part of…the grain of this place. They explore with uncommon sensitivity what it means to be at home on the earth. There is no one way to do so; there are various kinds of settings in which this can and must be accomplished…what we make of ourselves and of our society is linked to what we make of the earth, and how we let the earth make us.”
― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology