Rio de Dios

A Baedeker of Bon Mots

40 sections of the river’s course.The heritage of dusty cement will gradually be replaced by ambitious plans to breath life into the phoenix.The evolutionary context cannot be re-created, but there is exciting promise in these highly imaginative, highly necessary restoration plans. Imagination is as important to biology and politics as it is to cinematography and ethnopoetics,and we inhabit a time when we have been granted the chance to apply our full imaginations to this undervalued watercourse.To frame this process, I have been hoarding insights and quotations in my field journal—a collection of found poems and deep ecology wisdom which can serve as epigraphs to action.Any one of these could be outlined in gold and carved over the front doors of City Hall.Taken together, their acts of courage and imagination can sustain and inspire ours. a baedeker oF bon moTs “Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or a conservative activity. It is a sacred act.” —Paul Hawken, 2007 “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.” —Henry David Thoreau, 1851 41 “I agree withWendell Berry: If we each took care of our home ground (which is an investment in ourselves) the world would be so much better.Why Mars? Know your community, love your community.” —Scott Russell Sanders, 2007 “As a poet I was born in a particular place, a hillside overlooking the Tanana River in central Alaska, where I built a house and lived for the better part of twenty-two years. It was there, in the winter of 1947-1948, that I wrote my first mature poems. Many things went into the making of those poems and the others I’ve written since: the air of the place, its rocks, soil, and water; snow and ice; human history, birds, animals, and insects. Other things, surely, not directly related to the place: the words of other poets learned once, forgotten, and remembered again. Old stories from childhood, voices out of dreams. Images, a way of seeing learned partly from several years’ study as a painter and sculptor. And human relationship, life shared with another person whose existence mingled with my own, so that we saw the world as one person. But it was finally the place itself that provided the means of unifying all of these into a single experience.” —John Haines, 1981 “Nature is not only more complicated than we know, but it is even more complicated than we CAN know.” —Robert Bateman, 1992 42 “One morning, walking through fresh snow, looking for mountain lion tracks on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, a biologist with years of this behind him said to me suddenly,“It’s not in the data.” I looked at him.“It’s not in the data,” he reiterated.With his hands he made a motion to indicate his head, his chest. “It’s here.What I know is here.”We went on in silence. “But as a field biologist,” I said, “you must offer data or ——.” “We are not biologists,” he answered.“We are historians.” —Barry Lopez, 1983 “Scientific discovery is not a one-way transfer of information from unambiguous nature to minds that are always open. It is a reciprocal interaction between a multifarious and confusing nature and minds sufficiently receptive (as many are not) to extract a weak but sensible pattern from the prevailing noise. There are no signs on the Galápagos that proclaim: Evolution at work.Open your eyes and ye shall see it.Evolution is an inescapable inference,not a raw datum.Darwin, young,restless,and searching,was receptive to the signal.Agassiz,committed and defensive, was not. Had he not already announced in the first letter to Pierce that he knew what he must find? I do not think he was free to reach Darwin’s conclusions,and the Galápagos Islands,therefore,carried no important message for him. Science is a balanced interaction of mind and nature.” —Stephen Jay Gould, 1985 43 “And the narrowest hinge in my hand put to scorn all machinery.” —Walt Whitman, 1855 “The environmental crisis is an...