Search For A Common Language

Environmental Writing And Education

edited by Melody Graulich & Paul Crumbley

Publication Year: 2005

A stellar group of writers, scientists, and educators illuminate the intersections between environmental science, creative writing, and education, considering ways to strengthen communication between differing fields with common interests. The contributing authors include Ken Brewer, Dan Flores, Hartmut Grassl, Carolyn Tanner Irish, Ted Kerasote, William Kittredge, Ellen Meloy, Louis Owens, Jennifer Price, Robert Michael Pyle, Kent C. Ryden, Annick Smith, Craig B. Stanford, Susan J. Tweit, and Keith Wilson.

Published by: Utah State University Press

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Our foremost thanks go to the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Foundation for providing major funding for the 2002 Tanner Symposium which led to this book. We also particularly thank Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish for representing her family at the symposium and for her dedication to the environment. ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-17

In A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949, Aldo Leopold defined the importance of an “ecological” education. “One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land,” he wrote, “is an understanding of ecology.” This understanding, he added, “does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological ...

Preliminary Reflections on Matters Environmental

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pp. 18-23

I am delighted to be here and honored to be asked, once again, to participate in a Tanner Symposium. I do so not only as the daughter of one of its principal benefactors but also because of my own deep concern for and commitment to matters environmental. That is my own catchall phrase: matters environmental. ...

Painted Lady

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pp. 24-

Who Lost the Limberlost?Education and Language in a Mis-Placed Age

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pp. 25-33

Once upon a time, we knew where we lived, and it was some place. Some where. Somewhere was someplace. Each and every where was a place. And each of us had a nice legible label safety-pinned to our jacket just like Paddington Bear. “Hello!” it said. “I’m Bobby Pyle. I live at 5040 Tejon Street, Denver, Colorado, ...

The Silliest Debate

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pp. 34-

CousinsWhat the Great Apes Tell Us about Human Origins

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pp. 35-45

On a sun-dappled East African morning four million years ago, several dozen small apelike hominids are foraging for plant foods in scattered forest along a river course when they come upon a large group of monkeys in an isolated tree. Some of the male hominids climb the tree, and although their upright posture and adaptation ...

Why Dogs Stopped Flying

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pp. 46-

How Science and the Public Can Lead to BetterDecision Making in Earth System Management

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pp. 47-58

My title is very much in line with my belief that the public must be educated and engaged in international debates surrounding global environmental issues, particularly climate change. I see a major difference emerging that separates both sides of the Atlantic when dealing with global change: Europeans have assumed ...

Martha (1 September 1914)

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pp. 59-

What Is the L.A. River?

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pp. 60-67

What is the L.A. River? For decades, that was Angelenos’ most common question about it. But during the last few years, as the movement to restore the river has accelerated faster than winter rains down the canyons, the river has reemerged on the city’s mental map. At least, even if many people can’t tell you where L.A.’s major river is, ...

The River Blind

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pp. 68-

The Unexpected Environmentalist Building a Centrist Coalition

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pp. 69-82

Since its beginnings in the late 1800s, the movement to preserve nature has been divided into two camps: the strict protectionists and the more liberal utilitarians. As a way of illuminating that division and proposing a way to heal the rift between the two camps, I would like to tell a story about two of the movement’s ...

Dermatophagoides

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pp. 83-

At Cloudy PassThe Need of Being Versed in Human Things

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pp. 84-87

In my office at the University of California at Davis, I have a small, much-battered cedar sign, brown with faded white paint routed into the wood. It reads, Cloudy Pass—Foot Travel Only. I didn’t steal the sign. In the late summer of 1976, if my fading memory is correct, one of my jobs as a ranger in the Glacier Peak Wilderness ...

Trying Not to Lie

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pp. 88-

Tuttle Road Landscape as Environmental Text

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pp. 89-101

When I first started thinking about the topic of this year’s Tanner Symposium, “The Search for a Common Language: Environmental Writing and Education,” it occurred to me again, as it often has in the past, just how language bound, how linguistically mediated, my relationships with the environments around me tend to be. ...

The Tarantula Hawk

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pp. 102-

Begin with a River

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pp. 103-113

Begin with a river, and you are guaranteed a story will follow. Perhaps river talk is our common language as riversheds are our common homes. John Wesley Powell saw correctly that the life of the West is organized around watersheds. Scarce water is the life-giving source in arid lands, and where water is plentiful, ...

How to Train a Horse to Burn

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pp. 114-

The Natural West

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pp. 115-127

On an invigorating autumn morning in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, with the first big snow of the season draping the sagebrush and the sun angle yet low enough that, as frost settles out of the intense blue, the heavens seem to be raining glitter, I strap on skis, whistle for my wolf hybrid to join me, and set out across ...

Sheep

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pp. 128-

Separation Anxiety The Perilous Alienation of Humans from the Wild

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pp. 129-134

It has been said that human joy is inseparable from wild places and wild things. A pessimist might add that, with our radically diminishing experience of the natural world, we shall soon become a joyless species. About this descent into lives of blissless artifice, conservation biologists and artists may be among the most ...

Largest Living Organism on Earth

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pp. 135-

Going South

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pp. 136-146

I can’t believe that I’m billed as a nature writer, even included in nature-writing anthologies. If I said to anybody in Missoula, “You know, I’m a nature writer,” they’d look at me flabbergasted. I don’t want people to ask me questions about activism because I’m not much of an activist. I tend to be pretty scattered. ...

“Now the Sun Has Come to Earth”

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pp. 147-148

The Pleiades

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pp. 149-162

The Pleiades is a small, tight cluster of bright stars located in the constellation Taurus, which lies on the ecliptic between Gemini and Aries. High in the sky at night from October through March, this group is sometimes described as a swarm of twinkling flies on the celestial bull’s shoulder, and sometimes as a miniature dipper, ...