Environment – alive in the sea of information

an old western

Sketch of holiday cheer in Point Reyes Station. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

“In 1935, the National Park Service recommended an 83-square mile park, but there was no action until 1958. By this time, subdivisions were again being planned, logging was underway at Inverness Ridge, and the state was planning a freeway that would replace Highway 1 and open the area to suburban development. One lobbyist told a Congressional committee that by the year 2000

‘there will no longer be a Marin County. There will be a greater San Francisco..…the section we have under discussion today, gentlemen, will be as intensely built over as Palo Alto, or Burlingame or San Mateo.’

The MCL [Marin Conservation League] worked with Marin’s representative in Congress Clem Miller, who introduced and tirelessly promoted his Point Reyes National Seashore bill in the House, while California’s US Senator Clair Engle, pushed it through in the Senate…..In a compromise with ranchers, the park bill allowed cattle and dairy ranching to continue for 25 years in a 27-square mile “pastoral zone,” while livestock grazing elsewhere would be phased out. Congress passed the bill, and President Kennedy signed it on September 13, 1962. The park was authorized to include 83 square miles, just as the Park Service had originally recommended…..”

Excerpt from David D. Schmidt’s San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History (Humboldt County, CA: Backcountry Press, 2025) pps. 396-398.

scaling down

Guides to the Light. Robin L. Chandler, 2025

“Mass extinctions are extremely rare and catastrophic events, but the human-driven one is seldom deemed newsworthy by the dominant media. This is not an incidental oversight: the destruction of life’s diversity must remain invisible or obscure in the public domain, because it is fully entangled with the freedoms that people (are goaded to) value and seek.”

Excerpt from Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth: Towards an Ecological Civilization (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019) p. 142

unrealized hope

Glenbrook Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

“So while this is a book about the music of memory, it also necessarily becomes a book about the memory of music and the deeper social memory of art – its ability to recall the catastrophes of war but also the optimistic promise and gleam of earlier eras, or what the critic Walter Benjamin called, with touching simplicity, “hope in the past.” This book in fact draws inspiration from Benjamin’s vision of the true purpose of history: to sort through the rubble of earlier eras in order to recover these buried shards of unrealized hope, to reclaim them, to redeem them. They are, as he saw it, nothing more or less than the moral and spiritual building blocks of an alternate future.”

Excerpt from Jeremy Eichler’s Times Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) ebook p. 32

the collective good

Long-billed Curlews at Limantour Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore in Winter.
Robin L. Chandler, 2025

“Thomas Berry was a US cultural historian who introduced the broader legal concept of Earth jurisprudence early in the twenty-first century. Earth jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and human governance that says humans are just one element in a wider community of beings, and that the welfare of one speaks to the welfare of all. “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, “ Berry argued, and it’s through the work of people such as Stone, Berry, Kimmerer, Kolbert, and others that we are moving our collective understanding, and our will, toward a more environmentally just world. In the face of the ecological catastrophes beating down on us, we must remember the collective good of countless people as well as the rights of trees, and of the land that supports and nurtures us all.”

Excerpt from Daniel Lewis’ Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2024) pps. 42 – 43

but nothing fades away

Pt. Reyes on the Estero Trail. Robin L. Chandler, 2025

“…..And so I ride (which is my metaphor)

A full-sailed ship upon an endless sea,

A universe where nothing stays the same,

Sea, sky, wind, earth and time forever changing –

Time like a river in its ceaseless motion;

On, on, each speeding hour cannot stand still,

But as waves, thrust by waves, drive waves before them,

So time runs first or follows forever new;

The flying moment gone, what once seemed never

Is now, which vanishes before we say it,

Each disappearing moment in a cycle,

Each loss replaced within the living hour.

…..Though all four are of different place and kind,

Each comes from each, and to each returns:

Loose earth becomes a fluid, and as it flows

To water, water itself will change to air,

And air to fire which rises over it

To climb the highest reaches of the heavens.

They then return, last first in backward order,

Fire in smoky air, from air to water,

And waves changed into marshes turn to earth.

Nothing retains the shape of what it was,

And Nature, always making old things new,

Proves nothing dies within the universe,

But takes another being in new forms.

What is called birth is change from what we were,

And death the shape of being left behind.

Though all things melt or grow from here to there,

Yet the same balance of the world remains.

…..And now the measure of my song is done:

The work has reached its end; the book is mine,

None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove,

Nor war, nor fire, nor flood,

Nor venomous time that eats our lives away.

Then let that morning come, as come it will,

When this disguise I carry shall be no more,

And all the treacherous years of life undone,

And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music,

The deathless music of the circling stars.

As long as Rome is the Eternal City

These lines shall echo from the lips of men.

As long as poetry speaks truth on earth,

That immortality is mine to wear.”

Excerpts from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses Book XV, the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Epilogue translated by Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Press, 2009) from pages 413 – 437.

the tangle of human failures

“After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a

part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us

overhead.

When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are

renewed.

There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart

might be just down the road.

Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindness of the

earth and sun; we exist together in a sacred field of

meaning.”

Excerpt from Joy Harjo’s poem Talking with the Sun published in her book titled Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (2015) (p.31)

Tumanguya: great spirit home

Tumanguya, also known as Mt. Whitney, in Spring. Robin L. Chandler, 2024.

“In 1750, nearly all of the world’s 750 million people, regardless of where they were or what political or economic system they had, lived and died within the biological old regime. The necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter, and fuel for heating and cooking – mostly came from the land, from what could be captured from annual energy flows from the sun to the Earth. Industries too, such as textiles, leather, and construction, depended on products from agriculture or the forest. Even iron and steel making in the biological old regime, for instance, relied upon charcoal made from wood. The biological old regime thus set limits not just on the size of the human population but on the productivity of the economy as well.

These limits would begin to be lifted over the century from 1750 to 1850, when some people increasingly used coal to produce heat and then captured that heat to fuel repetitive motion with steam-powered machines, doing work that previously had been done with muscle. The use of coal-fired steam to power machines was a major breakthrough, launching human society out of the biological old regime and into a new one no longer limited by annual solar energy flows. Coal is stored solar energy, laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Its use in steam engines freed human society from the limits imposed by the biological old regime, enabling the productive powers and numbers of humans to grow exponentially. The replacement – with steam generated by burning coals – of wind, water, and animals for powering industrial machines constitutes the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and ranks with the much earlier agricultural revolution in importance for the course of history. The use of fossil fuels – first coal and then petroleum – not only transformed economies around the world but also added greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere.”

Excerpt from Robert B. Marks’ The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Fifth Edition (p. 101 – 102)

The concept of the biological old regime, as discussed by Dr. Marks in great detail in Chapter One of the book, is based upon relationships, such as the rise of civilization and the agricultural revolution, the relationships between towns or cities and the countryside, between elites and peasants (also called agriculturalists or villagers), between civilizations and nomadic pastoralists, and between people and the environment

directness and certainty

Lodgepole Pines along the Little Lakes Trailhead. Robin L. Chandler, 2024

“In the beginning there were stories and the stories were made of Earth. Rocks and rivers, mountains and sea, these were the gods and the gods moved within them.” (p.225)

In 2013, the entirety of the novel Moby Dick was translated into emojis, those little ideograms of smiling faces and pets and objects that populate our phones and number around 1000…their appeal seems to be based on the strange and paradoxical combination of specificity and obscurity that they embody…they purport to transcend cultural difference and cut a line of sincerity and clarity straight to the nebulous heart of what we mean to say. Yet for all that, emojis, particularly in combination, open wormholes of ambiguity.” (p.228)

“Yet directness and certainty remain a dream despite our words, despite our codes, despite our cyphers. Who can state for sure the meaning of Moby Dick? ‘Of whales in paint; in teeth; in wood; in sheet-iron; in stone; in mountains; in stars’: Ishmael, its narrator, could find them everywhere. Yet the whale itself, the white whale, the named whale, is elusive. What did it mean to Ahab? Why the obsession, the desire, the pursuit? Everything can mean something else, if only we could agree what. Augustine wondered whether we could decide simply by pointing and naming. Remember that Moby Dick, whose title names its prey, itself begins with an act of naming: ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Yet in saying that, it is clear, too, that any name would have sufficed. The willow is also ‘sallow,’ is also ‘osier.’ In such simple acts lie a world of ambiguity, and a history concealed from the eyes of the everyday. Nothing is steady. Meaning sways like the hull of a ship. Ahab, with leg of wood, and scars on his body like the ‘seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree,’ hunts over ocean and sea in a vessel of timber from which a mast extends like a great oak into the sky above. Nailed to it is a gold doubloon and at its top a man sits, in the masthead, watching the horizon, searching.” (p.228-229)

Excerpts from Aengus Woods’ Of Trees in Paint; In Teeth; In Wood; In Sheet-Iron; In Stone; In Mountains; In Stars published in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape

a holy ecology

Mt. Whitney from a hilltop near Tuttle Creek. Robin L. Chandler, 2024

“…Beauty in the Song is clearly not the idealized, symmetrical, or abstract beauty of the Greeks, although occasional references to symmetry occur as in the images of twin gazelles and twin teeth (4:3, 4:5, 6:6, 7:4). The poet presents impressionistic images rather than a definitive likeness. Beauty in the song is visual, aromatic and tactile; it is textured and complex – a synesthetic experience. Beauty is a function of the abundance of the natural world. It is a function of aliveness. Beauty only becomes intelligible through the Song’s figurative language, which collapses the distance between the lovers and the land they inhabit. What beauty actually looks like in the Song is a luxurious land, alive with sheep grazing on hillsides, gazelles bounding through mountains, and trees laden with fruit.” (p.22)

An excerpt from Rabbi Ellen Bernstein’s Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading The Song of Songs in the Age of the Climate Crisis

“it’s not what you look at, but what you see”

Wit-Sa-Nap Creek Winter Sunset. Robin L. Chandler, 2024

“[According to the Avatamsaka Sutra,] Indra’s net is pictured as stretching indefinitely in all directions, and at each of the knots of the net is a glittering jewel. All the other jewels in the net are reflected in each individual jewel, and each jewel reflected is also reflecting all the other jewels. This metaphor describes what was called, in Pali (the original language of the Buddhist canon), paticca samupadda, “dependent co-arising.” Modern Buddhist teachers have called it “interbeing,” or “the harmony of universal symbiosis.” This is a theory of mutual intercausality, interconnectedness, and interdependence. It is a worldview from the same ecophilosophical galaxy as Alexander von Humboldt’s “kosmos,” the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation’s principle of hisuknis cawaak, and the “everything is connected” view at the heart of ecology. When Thoreau wrote that humans need to “realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations,” he had this kind of idea in mind.

We think in metaphors, often — and even scientists do. Metaphors are the templates of pattern, and having those templates helps scientists — and everyone — “see” the patterns and relationships underlying the superficial “data” of experience, which often appear chaotic. Thoreau wrote in his journal on August 5, 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Seeing deep patterns needs a metaphoric, poetic mind.” (p.166)

The Sierra Nevada Red Fox pictured in my painting is endangered; there are less than forty of these beautiful creatures remaining in the California counties of Alpine, Fresno, Inyo, Madera, Mono and Tuolumne. As an artist, I choose to make art that fosters kinship with the earth by capturing glimpses of the world’s beauty. I hope that inspiring others to understand our interconnectedness with nature will help preserve the earth- and in this case, the Sierra Nevada Red Fox – for future generations.

Excerpts from Bruce Byers’ The View From Cascade Head: Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast