“True appreciation of landscape comes when one is alive to both its beauty and its meaning.” – Fritiof Fryxell
Mono Lake
Tag: Environment
subtler and more complex
“Why does ‘the land’ have to give something back to the writer? Why do we need to imagine, manufacture, or ‘experience’ some kind of bridge between self and ‘wild’ to give purpose to writing the land?” p.vii
“As globalization draws us together and industrialization and human population pressures take their toll on natural habitats, as species of plants and animals flicker and are snuffed from the earth, it may be worthwhile to ask whether an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources and sets into motion dire consequences.” p.1
“There are, of course, long traditions of the pastoral, poetry centered on nature or landscape, in both Eastern and Western language literature. I, myself, am less interested in ‘nature poetry’ – where nature features as theme – than in poetry that investigates – both thematically and formally – the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.” p.2
“Poetry doesn’t simply supplement the rational intellect but provides inherent and sometimes incommensurable forms of insight. Because its meanings are neither quantitative nor verifiable, poetry may offer different, subtler, and more complex expressions than the language of information and commerce. An ecological poetry might even…” p.3
Excerpts from Redstart: An Ecological Poetics by Forrest Gander and John Kinsella (University of Iowa Press, 2012)
Winter Reyes
The vernal equinox arrived and brought a blast of summer in typically springtime March. But I’m holding on to the memories of rain and wind, cold nights, frosty mornings, and blue winter light. And luckily, I can easily reconnect by opening a book that captures the feeling of winter in painting and poetry.
Inspired by my midwinter hikes, Winter Reyes rejoices in the hibernal beauty of Point Reyes National Seashore and shares the hope I find in nature’s resilience. My paintings and poems commemorate this jewel of the National Park Service. Copies of the book can be purchased on my website. I hope you have as much pleasure reading as I had in the making.
“reaching the bridge, the water parts, brush arches to the block page
Wet on wet, the work begins, the atmosphere emerges
Simple strokes render blacks now grays
The space the pause the absence speaks
When we permit the door to open”
the past is prologue
Robin L. Chandler, 2026
“Wake up, wake up
Wake up, wake up
Wake up, wake up
Wake up, wake up
Time we were all gently rising up”
Lyrics excerpt from the Irish folk music duo Ye Vagabonds song Wake Up (listen here on youtube).
an old western
“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
“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
“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
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
“…..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)
