stewardship – alive in the sea of information

Arethusa

Selections from my sketch journal made attending the Friends of the Inyo annual Owens Lake Bird Festival. Robin L. Chandler 2026

“Pleistocene-era Owens Lake formed eleven thousand years ago, when the huge glaciers that covered the Sierra Nevada melted and plummeted down the Owens River to the lowest point in the valley. It was over 200 feet deep and 200 square miles in area. That massive lake evaporated over time into Owens Lake, which covered 100 square miles and was slightly salty, mainly because of sodium bicarbonate, or “soda.” Then, settlers compressed geologic time into a matter of years. After the U.S. Army murdered or removed many of the regions Native Californians during the Owens Valley Indian War, white homesteaders began diverting water from the Owens River for farming and ranching. Then came Los Angeles and its aqueduct. By 1924, the lake was completely dry. The salts left behind precipitated into a crust of trona, burkeite, halite, potash, potassium, chloride, and borax. And dust. ….. By the 1990s, the bed of Owens Lake was releasing 76,000 tons of dust east year. It had the highest measurement of particulate matter in the United States. ….. Great Basin Unified Air Quality Control District, the agency responsible for enforcing air quality rules in the Eastern Sierra region, started monitoring air quality at Owens and Mono lakes in the 1970s. ….. With the law finally on its side, in the early 1990s, the air pollution control district sued the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over Clean Air Act standards. The big-city utility tried to starve out the rural regulation agency, filing seven countersuits. But in 1997, the courts decided in favor of Great Basin. They mandated that Los Angeles provide dust mitigation on an initial thirty square miles of lakebed. ….. They created a habitat where algae and brine flies flourished, providing food that attracted birds. ….. In 2002, the National Audubon Society declared the lake an Important Bird Area. Survey teams organized by the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society counted over seventy species in a single day, including fifteen thousand eared grebes, eleven thousand least sandpipers, nine thousand avocets, and twenty-seven thousand California gulls.”

Excerpt from Caroline Tracey’s Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) pgs.152-159

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

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

Coyote’s Basket

Coyote walking on the Inverness Ridge Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

“One day Old Man Coyote was bored, and so he decided to have some fun and made a basket. A big basket, round like an acorn storage basket, only much bigger and rounder…..he wove his tracks into the pattern to give a hint who’d made it. When it was finished, he put everything People would need, forever, into the basket. And then he put the basket by the trail to see what would happen.

Sure enough, along came some People, and when they saw the big basket they said ‘Hey? What’s this?’ They knew it was a basket, but they had never seen any basket this big before…..when they looked inside and saw that it had everything they needed, they said, ‘We can live in it!’ So they did.

Well. Old Man Coyote had put everything We the People would need into that basket, but he never imagined that there would someday be so many of us, and some of us would invent needs that Coyote could never imagine we needed! Pretty soon he began to hear lots of fighting and arguing in the basket. And before long some of his strongly woven strands began to tear, and the basket got holes in it, and some of the People who went in together got thrown out through the holes! Just imagine!

Well, again. Old Man Coyote wasn’t really surprised. He’s not surprised at anything, of course. Being a Trickster, he just wants to try something and see what will happen – which is why he put the big basket by the trail that day when he was bored in the first place. But…Coyote was a bit sad anyway, seeing that his gift basket had become the place for a big fight among the People. That’s why you sometimes hear him crying and singing to himself at night.” (p.178-179)

…..David Hinton, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, argues in his book China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen that Ch’an began during the Tang dynasty of ninth-century China as an intellectual and cultural rebellion. Ch’an practice was seeking to recapture the feeling and experience of immediacy and wholeness of the Paleolithic human mind and to overcome the alienation of humans from the world that resulted from the agricultural revolution and its modus operandi of humans taking control of wild nature. (p.195)

…..Shunryu Suzuki wrote in the prologue to his 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, that ‘if your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.’…..The bottom line would be that language and it’s constructs can get in the way of nondual, holistic perception and experience, of what Suzuki Roshi called beginner’s mind.” (p.196)

Excerpts from Bruce Byer’s Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere form the California Coast

…

the great dance that joins us

Black tailed deer in the forest near Drake’s Estero, Point Reyes. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how badly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page – for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity…”

Excerpt from a broadside by Wendell Berry produced to honor the legacy of North Point Press, 1980 – 1991.

what one touches

Limantour Estero, Point Reyes. Robin L. Chandler, 2025

“I think of two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see – not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out and in the tangible evidence you will sense a history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush – the resiliency of the twig under the bird, that precise shade of yellowish green against the milk-blue sky, the fluttering whir of the arriving sparrow, are what I mean by “the landscape.” Draw on the smell of creosote bush, or clack stones together in the dry air. Feel how light is the desiccated dropping of the kangaroo rat. Study an animal track obscured by the wind. These are the elements of the land and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it – like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between history and a catalog of events.

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernable, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song. That these relationships have purpose and order, however inscrutable they may seem to us, is a tenet of evolution. Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature – the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”

Excerpt from Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” published in the ebook Vintage Lopez (p.3 -4)

ash and bone

Walking along Inverness Ridge among the new growth of bishop pines after the Vision Fire (1995); in the distance are douglas firs burned in the Woodward Fire (2020). Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

We were afraid to go back

afraid to listen to the stories

ash and bone might tell

We wanted to believe our lives were immutable

untouchable by nature, fate or disaster

At twilight we skirted the base of the first burned hill

reclaimed her scorched shoulder

her ruined slope

The ground beneath our feet released puffs of smoke

like ancient ghosts they rose up around us

to disappear into wind…..

Excerpt from the poem “After the Fires” by Devereaux Baker published in California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology edited by Molly Fisk (p.15)

“When Sir Francis Drake spent a month in 1579 repairing his ship in the bay that now bears his name, the hills and ridges to the east would have been mostly open grassland or coastal scrub because of the Miwok’s liberal use of fire as a key tool of their ecological management and because of grazing by herds of elk, which benefited from the anthropogenic burning. The same was true when Sebastian Ceremeno, a Portuguese navigator and explorer sailing on the Manilla galleon route, was shipwrecked in Drakes Bay in 1595. Richard Henry Dana, visiting San Francisco Bay in 1840 described the herds of elk he could see on the open headlands.” (p.84)

“The [Mt.] Vision Fire started on October 3, 1995, and burned for about a week in an area mostly designated as park wilderness, eventually burning almost twelve thousand acres. Some local boys apparently thought they had drowned their campfire, but they hadn’t. It’s a story that reminds me of Henry David Thoreau; on a camping trip with a friend in April 1844, their campfire got out of control and almost burned down their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Many years later, that experience led Thoreau to investigate the fire ecology of his local ecosystem. He recognized the influence of past Native American burning on the landscape and became essentially the first published fire ecologist through his writing on the subject. The Vision Fire burned an area partly dominated by bishop pine, Pinus muricata. Bishop pine became so familiar with fire that it evolved a relationship that could be called “friends with fire.” (p.86-87)

Excerpt from the chapter “Making Friends with Fire” published in Bruce Byer’s book titled Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast.

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)

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