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”

When we arranged to have novelist Jim Lynch appear at the Learning Center to be a Sourdough Speaker a year ago, our timing couldn’t have been better — Jim’s then-forthcoming novel Border Songs is set in Whatcom County near the foothills of the North Cascades and is populated with an astonishing amount of natural history of birds of our region. Border Songs was released last summer to great critical acclaim, including a review in Crosscut.com that claimed Jim “could be the best new novelist in the region since David Guterson rolled out Snow Falling on Cedars in 1995″ and a similar rave from author Howard Frank Mosher: “Border Songs is a masterwork, and Jim Lynch, for my money, is our best new storyteller since Larry McMurtry: deeply in touch with the natural world, the absurdities of our era, and the hearts and minds of his unforgettable and endlessly surprising characters.” (Amazon.com has a compilation of praise for the new novel too.)

We’ve got a copy of Border Songs to give away to one of our readers– to enter the running, leave a comment at the end of this blog mentioning a book you’ve read recently, fiction or nonfiction, that included a healthy amount of nature in it. We’ll randomly chose a winner from everyone who leaves a comment at the end of next week.

Jim will be at the Learning Center Oct. 10-11, reading from his novels and discussing what it is like writing fiction set in Washington State, as part of our intimate Sourdough Speaker Series. For only $95, participants get to experience Jim’s presentation as well as enjoy a sit-down dinner and overnight accommodations in our lodges; breakfast and a naturalist-led activity the next morning is included too. We know of at least one book club that has been reading Jim’s books and will be joining us — what a great idea!

We want to extend a special thanks to Jim, and all our Sourdough Speakers, for coming up to the North Cascades to talk about their work — they all appear at the Learning Center on their own dime, helping us to raise money to support our various Youth Programs designed to connect the next generation with the natural world.

Here’s a book review I wrote on Border Songs earlier this summer for the Cascadia Weekly:

» Continue reading Jim Lynch at Learning Center, Oct. 10-11; win a copy of his new novel “Border Songs”

We’re extremely excited to welcome Lyanda Lynn Haupt and Martyn Stewart to kick-start our Fall 2009 Sourdough Speaker Series at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Join us at the Learning Center September 26-27 for a special evening celebrating Darwin and his theory of evolution, the wonders of bird life in the Pacific Northwest and the wild music of bird song.

» Continue reading “Crow Planet” book giveaway!

Guest post by Molly Hashimoto

Abby Williams Hill visited Horseshoe Basin in the North Cascades in 1903 after an arduous journey by steamer on Lake Chelan, on horseback and on foot.  Her commission from the Great Northern Railway was to create 22 oil canvases en plein air in 18 weeks, and much of that time was spent on trains, handcars, stages, steamboats and horses.  She endured the jeers of railroad workers and the discomfort of heat and cold, walking across snowfields, organizing baggage and caring for her children whom she often brought with her on her expeditions.

Learn more about this remarkable woman from Andrea Moody, consulting curator at the University of Puget Sound, at the next Sourdough Speaker Series event on April 25 at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. In addition to Andrea’s engaging presentation, you’ll enjoy comfortable overnight accommodations, healthful gourmet food, naturalist-led outdoor activities and the incomparable scenery of the North Cascades — all for only $95 per person. I’ll be assisting Andrea, showing slides of some of my favorite 19th century American landscape painters who traveled to wilderness areas and set the stage for the accomplishments of Abby Hill. It’s going to be a great night talking about the connections between art and conservation in the mountains!

» Continue reading A Woman Lured West: Abby Hill’s Legacy of Art & Conservation