Chattermarks

By Kurt Hoelting
May 3, 2010

My new book The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radical Local Life grew quite seamlessly out of a yearlong experiment in car-free local living in 2008. I had been concerned about climate change since it first surfaced as an issue in the 1980’s. Yet my own carbon footprint had only grown larger in the ensuing years. The gap between what I knew to be true, and how I am actually living my life, had grown steadily larger. My wake up call came after I took my own carbon footprint online. I thought I’d do fairly well. After all, I was driving a hybrid car, actively recycling, keeping my thermostat low. But I was also flying a lot for work and pleasure, not noticing how thoroughly this jet travel was trumping all my other conservation efforts. I was shocked to see the size of the discrepancy between the two.

Yet fashioning an appropriate response proved elusive. I was too enmeshed in my high-carbon lifestyle to see any obvious way out of the conundrum. Feeling thoroughly stuck in the mire of this contradiction, I found myself sliding into a chronic depression. I had almost given up finding a way forward at all when the genesis of a creative response ambushed me one morning over breakfast with a friend. “What would it be like,” I found myself musing, “if I didn’t get into a car for a year? What would it be like if I spent an entire year living car-free within walking distance of home.”

Something in the audacity of this idea grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. I started scheming about places close to home that I could explore under my own power, hidden gems I had neglected in my rush to more distant places. I drew a circle on the map sixty miles in radius with my home at the center – a circle that traced a nearly perfect circumference around the Puget Sound basin. I took a sabbatical from all work and travel that would take me outside this circle, and on the winter solstice in 2007 I parked my car in the garage for a full year. Armed with my boots, a bicycle and a kayak, and public transportation, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime.

» Continue reading Reflections on “The Circumference of Home”

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of the finest writers in our country, a great teacher and generous spirit. We’ve gotten to know her over the past few years as she has been an instructor in our Thunder Arm Writing Retreat at the Learning Center, teaching writing skills alongside Rick Bass, Holly Hughes, Gary Ferguson, Ana Maria Spagna and Jim Bertolino. So, when we received a copy of her new book Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, published in early March by Shambhala, we were excited to plunge in to it and see what she has turned her attention to. Even better, we learned that she will be reading in Bellingham on April 2 and Seattle on April 3 (details and more dates at the end of the post).

In anticipation of her visit to the Fourth Corner, we struck up a conversation with Kathleen via email about her new publication.

NCI: What is Wild Comfort about? What were your motives in composing it?

KDM: Wild Comfort is about the healing power of the wet, wild world. Why does the sound of moving water calm us? What explains the gladness we feel in the return of tides, the return of spring, reliable morning after returning morning, bright in our eyes even if they are closed, or crying? How does the Earth transform dark into light, death into life, sorrow into a kind of peace that opens us to the wonder and solace of the world?

NCI: What did you learn in the writing of it? Did you end up somewhere different than where you started?

KDM: I had started out to write a book about happiness, examining times of gladness and by that means learning how to live.  But events overtook me, death after death, and my book became a different journey toward learning how to live.  Even though I was still writing about what I love the most — floating in fog, pitching camp in the desert, tracking buzzards and whales — I found myself on the trail of the hardest questions I know. How do we restore meaning to lives suddenly unmoored?  How can grief bring us into the deepest currents of life, and so connect us to sources of wonder and solace? How do we find the way to celebration and the courage to be glad again?

NCI: Do you have any specific hopes as far as how your essays in this book will be received by the reader? Anything particular you hope will linger in the readers mind?

» Continue reading Kathleen Dean Moore’s “Wild Comfort”

The days are getting longer, but slowly, and there are still plenty of dark, rainy evenings this winter for reading.

If, as a member of the Institute community, you wish to broaden and deepen your knowledge of conservation history – We are into “conserving and restoring northwest environments through education” are we not? – then I have the perfect read for you. As a bonus, this one book will take you through to spring. It is Douglas Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper, 2009, 940 pages).

While there are multitudes of books about Theodore Roosevelt, no one has explained and dissected how natural history and conservation were central to his life and work with the thoroughness and insight Brinkley brings to the task. He describes the young Roosevelt’s fascination with the natural world, the influences on his interests of his eccentric Uncle Rob, the centrality of Darwin’s theorizing upon his thinking, and how his fascination with the American West formed many of his ideas about land in general and public land in particular.

» Continue reading The Wilderness Warrior

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben, Foreword by Al Gore, The Library of America

I already own plenty of different anthologies of nature writing, but Bill McKibben argues in his introduction that “environmental writing” is different — “it takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of world,” he explains, “…it seeks answers as well as consolation, embracing controversy, sometimes sounding an alarm.”

If this distinction is too vague, you’ll soon get a sense of what this genre contains as you read the many different authors collected herein: Whitman, Muir, Pinchot and Roosevelt; Jeffers, Snyder and Abbey; Carson, Eiseley and Leopold; Lopez, Dillard, Bass, Momaday and McPhee; Pollan, Kingsolver and Solnit. Aside from the rousing, incisive, often epochal classics, McKibben makes some surprising choices, too: John Steinbeck, Philip K. Dick, Alice Walker, E.B. White, R. Crumb and Joni Mitchell.

The overall feel of the combined readings is modern yet empathetic. The tones are often urgent but seldom strident. Humanity may be in precarious position on Planet Earth, but without the thoughtful ecological influences of these gathered writers, it’d probably be a lot worse.

» Continue reading American Earth: book giveaway contest!

Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy
Bonnie J. Gisel with images by Stephen J. Joseph
Heyday Books

We recently received a copy of a fascinating new book that celebrates John Muir’s passion for botany. Revered the world over for his writing, which has inspired the modern conservation movement as well as many of our culture’s ideas about the importance of wilderness, his penchant for studying the plant world is less known.

» Continue reading John Muir’s love of plants, rediscovered