November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Reconnecting with Mother Earth

(Page 3 of 3)

May - June 2008
by Chris Dodge 
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Find something new on it. One never enters the same woods twice. Just because you have seen mountain and black-capped chickadees before doesn’t mean that there are no chestnut-backed chickadees to be discovered. Be prepared for stranger things.

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Let it be. Some places don’t want humans dwelling on them. Desert is not the place for golf courses. Tundra is not the place for roads. Read John McPhee’s The Control of Nature about Los Angeles canyons, their debris flows, subsequent wildfires, and the ill-fated, hubristic human attempts to forestall the inevitable.

Help it be. At this stage in humans’ relationship with the earth, simply letting things alone will be fatal, like practicing only the Hippocratic oath—do no harm—when major medical attention is needed. Do some surgery: Identify and pull up invasive weeds, such as the spotted knapweed in my neck of the woods, tamarisk in canyon country, and buckthorn in south Minneapolis.

Support organizations working for healthy land. To name but two: the Trust for Public Land (www.tpl.org) and the Land Trust Alliance (www.lta.org).

Make your own maps. Put those colored pencils to use. Forget about the old borders. “At daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over,” Leopold writes. “It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.”

Former Utne librarian Chris Dodge dwells in Kalispell, Montana.

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