| . | "He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last ... he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind." - Henry David Thoreau "There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace." - Jack Turner |
|
"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquillity of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquillity of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion. . . Whether the plane pass by tonight or tomorrow. . . the tree brings forth her blossoms in silence. . . "There are some men for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it down, for whom an animal has no value until it enters the slaughterhouse, men who never look at anything until they decide to abuse it and who never even notice what they do not want to destroy. These men can hardly know the silence of love: for their love is the absorption of another person's silence into their own noise. And because they do not know the silence of love, they cannot know the silence of God, Who is Charity, Who cannot destroy what He loves, Who is bound, by His own law of Charity, to give life to all those whom He draws into His own silence." |
| above: the varied moods of wild San Diego County -- rain falling on winter-bare willow, Cuyamaca Mountains; ocotillo blooms adorn a desert vista, Anza-Borrego Desert. |
| . | "... go into a great forest at night alone. Sit quietly for a while. ... Alone in the natural world, time is less dense, less filled with information; space is close; smell and hearing and touch reassert themselves. The wild is keenly sensual. In a true wilderness we are like that much of the time, even in broad daylight. ... The majority of Americans no longer know this experience of the wild. We are surrounded by national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife preserves ...We are deluged with commercial images of wildness. There are nature movies ... nature books ... yuppie outdoor magazines ... philosophical magazines, scientific magazines ... Zoos and animal parks and marine lands abound ... From this we conclude that modern man's knowledge and experience of wild nature is extensive. But it is not. Rather, what we have is extensive experience of a severely diminished wilderness ... a caricature ... But this is not experience of the wild, not gross contact." - Jack Turner |
|
|
above photographs: Observing humpback whales, west of Vancouver Island, BC. Kayaking in coastal BC. Clouds shroud the forests on Palomar Mountain, SD County. right: Beargrass, Glacier National Park, Montana.
|
 |
|
| "The wilderness is a place of rest -- not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance." -- David Douglas |
 | ||
|
| "... we listened to some of the grandest thunder which I ever heard, -- rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang, in succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky; and the lightning was proportionally brilliant. The Indian said, "It must be good powder." All for the benefit of the moose and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes. I thought it must be a place which the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced..." - Thoreau, The Maine Woods |
