Tony Angell is For the Birds

Artist, educator, writer and conservationalist celebrates life of the Puget Sound

Watchful ravens standing sentinel at the entrance to the Mt. Baker Ski Area. A soaring bald eagle and playful river otters at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake.  A parliament of owls gathered on the Whatcom Community College campus.

Whatcom County is fortunate to have Tony Angell’s inspired avian sculptures adding beauty and grace to our local land- and cityscapes. These iconic pieces join noetworthy installations at the Seattle Aquarium, Woodland Park Zoo, Tacoma Art Museum, The Sleeping Lady resort and countless public libraries and schools throughout Washington, not to mention Cornell University and the renowned Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.

Under the influence of his powerful hands – Angell is a former University of Washington shot-putter, discuss-thrower and arm-wrestling champ – blocks of granite, onyx, marble, chlorite, limestone and serpentine reveal sinuous shapes of Pacific Northwest wildlife, often birds, but also orcas, turtles, salmon, salamanders and other denizens of our region.

“(While) I do address matters of detail and I am generally sensitive to accuracy of my detail, I don’t put a lot of it into my work,” Angell once explained in a radio interview. “What I am trying to do is emphasize the spiritual side of the subject.”

 

Angell is also a gifted wildlife illustrator, and has just published Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion,and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, a follow-up to 2005’s In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Both volumes are a collaboration with John Marzluff, Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the UW, bringing together the artistry and field naturalist skills of Angell with the scientific expertise of Marzluff to examine the fascinating, uncanny world of corvid behavior, the bird family that includes ravens, crows, jays, magpies and nutcrackers

Raised in the dry topography of Southern California, Angell fell in love with the natural world at a young age while hiking the Santa Monica Mountains, birdwatching, keeping snakes and reptiles in his room, even studying taxidermy so he could learn the inner workings of animals. Moving to Washington as a teenager, his intimate relationship with wildlife continued as he rehabilitated owls, trained falcons and hawks and built a rustic cabin on Lopez Island where he observed the marine mammals and migratory birds of the Salish Sea.

Alongside his prolific career as an artist, Angell is an elected Fellow of the National Sculpture Society and an active board member of Washington's chapter of The Nature Conservancy and he served as Director of Environmental Education for the state of Washington for 30 years.

“Angell's work is known for how it combines elegance and strength,” an art critic for The Seattle Times wrote, “but it is most remarkable in how it represents the convergence of his personality, passion and life…. Seattle novelist Ivan Doig describes him as ‘a rushing river threatening to break its banks.’”

A generous selection of his sculptural and illustrative work was collected alongside essays and commentary in PugetSound Through An Artist’s Eye, published in 2009 by University of Washington Press. He described the book as “an invitation to enjoy the world artistically, and in a way, inspire other people to be artists. Because there are plenty of people out there who can use art as their avenue of discovery and action and commitment and enjoyment of living here. Once you do that, you’ve invested in what’s here.”

But why is Angell so invested in corvids?

“When a raven was given to me many years ago, it soon became my most important emissary from the larger world of nature,” he explains. “My friend the raven “gifted” me a richer understanding of Nature in general and animal behavior in particular. They have given us fuel for our myths, song, literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture over tens of thousands of years -- gifts beyond measure.  Now science is just beginning to discover other gifts they have to offer us.

“Sometimes we hear people say, there are only two ways of looking at a crow, “you either love them or hate them,” he continues. “From our book I would hope that these two attitudinal poles might be replaced with a more middle ground of admiration for these special birds. I would hope that the readers, while seeing these species as a revealing subject for scientific discovery, would also consider them to be exceptional sources of subtle beauty and provocative emotional possibilities.  Should one apply his or her artistic mind to the corvids, the aesthetic gifts will be great.”

Falling in Love with the World: Thomas Fleischner works to revitatize natural history

By Christian Martin

Thomas Fleischner is a man on a mission. An environmental studies professor at Prescott College in Arizona, cofounder of the North Cascades Institute and founding president of the Natural History Network, Fleischner has worked in the trenches of conservation biology, environmental education and ecological literacy for decades. His latest effort towards these interrelated goals is the publication of The Way of Natural History, a multidisciplinary anthology featuring contributions from Jane Hirshfield, Robert Michael Pyle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Aiken, Dave Foreman, Scott Russell Sanders and others.

Fleischner lived in Bellingham from 1979-1988, attending WWU for his Master's in Biology degree, working as an Interpretive Naturalist and Backcountry Ranger for North Cascades National Park and serving as co-director for North Cascades Institute. I had the opportunity to talk with him while he is back in town, readying for his July 8 presentation at Village Books.

Christian Martin: How do you define natural history as it pertains to your new book?

Thomas Fleischner: For some years now, I’ve defined natural history as “the practice of intentional, focused attentiveness to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy.” Simply put, it’s the practice of paying attention.

In this book, I gathered together a variety of voices—poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, scientists and others—to hear how this practice of paying attention to the wider world has served their work and play. Natural history is a fundamental human trait—and need.  Their stories show how many different ways this can be manifested.

CM: So, natural history involves a way of seeing the world?

TF: In my mind, natural history is a verb, not a noun—it’s the practice of attending, not just the body of knowledge that accrues from the observations. I’ve come to refer to natural history as the practice of falling in love with the world.

Natural history at its best involves integration between sciences, arts and humanities. It’s at the center of a liberal approach to education: we pay attention to the world around us and respond in a variety of ways—through a painting, a poem, an essay or a scientific monograph.

CM: What are the roots of this tradition?

TF: Natural history is the oldest continuous human endeavor—there’s never been people on this planet without the practice of natural history. But – and this is what concerns me—there’s never been a time in the history of the world when natural history was practiced less than it is today.

It’s important to recognize that natural history is more than just science, more than just a body of facts, more than dinosaurs and other dead animals. Natural history comes from the Latin “Historia Naturalis,” which literally means “the story of nature.” At any moment, in any given place, there’s an infinite number of stories of nature unfolding. We make choices about which ones we pay attention to—or if we pay attention at all. And that’s crucial: too many people simply don’t pay attention to Others in the world. As a species, as a contemporary culture, we’re greatly diminished by this.

CM: How is natural history related to the idea of "Citizen Science"?

TF: Citizen Science is a wonderful trend toward involving amateurs into the collation of important data. First, remember that “amateur” literally means “one who loves”—so we should never underestimate the importance of amateurs!

In many important cases, having the thousands of eyes and ears of citizen scientists makes a huge difference—for example, in reporting changes in flowering times as we experience climate change, or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. The Bird Count is a classic example of this: for over a century, all sorts of people have counted birds in a structured way. It’s the longest term, uninterrupted data set for any group of organisms ever, and it has shown major changes in bird distribution throughout the continent. Wonderful stuff.

All of these citizen observations are natural history. Of course, because natural history involves more than just science, the citizen science movement doesn’t necessarily include the arts and humanities as much as it could. I’ve been part of discussions that suggest we might try reframing Citizen Scientists as Citizen Naturalists. Then, we might encourage the writing of haiku along with the tabulation of bird numbers!

CM: From your vantage point, what do you think the future of natural history is?

TF: I’m ultimately optimistic. Humans are wired to do natural history—it’s literally what we evolved to do: pay attention. So it’s a matter of rediscovering who we are—not of trying to make ourselves into something we’ve never been.

I’ve been part of a national movement to help revitalize natural history, and it’s been really exciting and encouraging. The Natural History Network – which includes many members here in the Cascadia bioregion – was established for this purpose, and has received a super enthusiastic response.

CM: There are a lot of new ways to access and appreciate nature today without having to go outside. One can watch nesting birds from hi-def webcams, fly over national parks and mountain ranges via Google Earth, peruse stunning nature photography, listen to bird calls on our iPhones. Are these valuable outlets for our biophilia? Why do we still need to go through the hassles to get outdoors?

TF: These new technologies are wonderful, and provide all sorts of new channels into observing nature. I’m all for them. There’s lots of examples of ways they’ve helped us understand the world. These technologies are also really important in that they can provide an entry point for young people, brought up in this electronic world, to pay attention to what’s around them.

But it’s key that it doesn’t stop there. It’s vital that they take the next step and get out there and get muddy and watch what that bird is really doing, or how luminescent that butterfly’s wings really are, or how the beetle’s carapace glistens in the sun. Those are the experiences that create the opportunity for falling in love with the world.

Photo by Benj Drummond.

Gary Snyder on Ish River Country

Gary Snyder at Bellingham High School, 2004

"In the fall of 2004, I heard Gary Snyder read from his most recent collection of poems, Danger on Peaks.  In a calm, steady tone, Snyder delivered his selection to what is likely the most attentive audience that the Bellingham High School auditorium has ever boasted. His poetry is renowned for its ability to arrest and articulate specific moments in nature.  The simplicity and clarity of Snyder’s rendering almost masks the careful rhythm, which implicitly structures his voice.  His work blends respect for the natural world with Zen Buddhist thought, achieving truly innovative modes of telling.

Snyder was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  Over the years he has undertaken many endeavors:  he was a logger in his youth, he studied anthropology at Reed College, then Chinese language at Berkeley, and Buddhism while living in Japan.  In the late 1950s, he was influential in the Beat Generation/San Francisco Movements (along with Ginsberg and Kerouac).  Snyder is now the critically acclaimed author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize (1975).  Until recently, he taught Creative Writing and literature as a professor at UC-Davis.

Snyder and I met on the morning following his reading in the lobby of the Fairhaven Inn in Bellingham....

Anne Greenfield:  You mention Bellingham in Mountains and Rivers Without End and, more recently, in Danger on Peaks.  How did you come to know Bellingham and how has this relationship changed over time?

Gary Snyder:  I was raised on a little dairy farm just north of Seattle, through the thirties and up early into WWII.  The country between Seattle and the Canadian border was mostly dairy farming or logging in those days. We had a little dairy farm, so in our spare time when we wanted to go out and travel and look at things we would go look at dairy farms.  That would bring us all the way up here once or twice to Bellingham, Sedro-Woolley, up the Skagit Valley, Mount Vernon, and back down.  That’s my first memory of Bellingham.

Later, from the age of fifteen on, I started mountaineering.  And one of those summers (I think 1946 or 1947) I came up with some Mazamas (a climbing group from Portland, Oregon) to climb Mount Baker. And I worked in the forest service, up the Skagit, in the summers of 1952 and 1953, when it was still the Mt. Baker National forest.  I often came to Bellingham with friends, particularly one friend who I’m going to meet for dinner tonight: Jack Francis, who’s lived in Bellingham all these years. I came through here with Alan Ginsberg in 1966 on my way to British Columbia.

So, Bellingham has been in my consciousness as part of Ish Country (the Puget Sound region) and the culture of Maritime Northwest Pacific.

AG:  Speaking of sense of place, much of your work is grounded in and speaks to location and specific places.  In fact, your recent collection takes up the 1980 blast at Mount St. Helens.  Have the recent eruptions there triggered anything new for you?

GS:  Well more thoughts of the same. Pacific Rim Circle of fire:  the chain of volcanic activity down the west coast as far south as Mount Lassen, actually as far south as Mono Lake.  The actual instability of the earth’s crust and that fact that every volcano that exists on the west coast is more apt to erupt again than any place that doesn’t exist as a volcano already.  Mt. St. Helens – if you look at its history- which I did – erupts every few centuries. It has been erupting every few centuries for some time.  Mt. Rainier is quite capable of doing a major eruption at any time.  So this is part of our life here. Except, being very short lived creatures, human beings, and being new to the region – that is to say the present American population has only been here for a hundred and fifty years – we don’t have much consciousness of it. I am exploring what that consciousness would tell us. So, having some recent events at Mt. St. Helens is hardly surprising.  It’s part of the story and the story goes on.  Who knows what comes next?

AG: Danger on Peaks has been deemed your “most personal collection yet.”  To what degree do you see your poems as autobiographical?

GS:  I’ve never written autobiographical poetry as such. On the other hand, whatever one does in poetry has to be grounded in deep personal experience.  But personal experience is not necessarily autobiographical experience because we are all vertebrate mammals.  And we live in very much the same body and the very same mind. To be grounded in your body is not autobiographical.  And to be aware of the world is our mutual heritage, but not everybody sees it immediately and clearly.  Which is something that my own artistic inclination, plus my Buddhist practice, pushes me towards: mindfulness in the present moment."



From "Grasping the Natural: A Conversation with Gary Snyder" by Anne Greenfield, published in 2004 in the Bellingham Review. Photo copyright Christian Martin.

Notes from Disappering Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund

Robert Sund is our bard of the Skagit River, a singer of songs celebrating skunk cabbage, frogs, muddy water, ducks, and the rising tide.

In the summer of 1973, the poet — who studied under Theodore Roetke at the University of Washington in the early 1950s — built a small dwelling on the pilings of a former fisherman’s shed in the estuary of the North Fork of the Skagit River. Access was only by boat and though his hermitage was only a short paddle from La Conner and downstream from the active artists’ colony at Fishtown, he felt worlds away, “far, far back,” from modern society.

This remove gave Sund time and space to closely observe the rhythms of the natural world, as well as the fluctuations of his own thoughts and emotions, and he recorded these impressions in a series of thin, 26-page notebooks. The tidal marsh surrounding his shack, formed where the glacier-fed Skagit mixed with the saltwater of Puget Sound, provided him with endless inspiration for more than a decade of on-again, off-again residency.

“Out on the river you know you are in the midst of a great creation,” he wrote. “You see the old work and the new work side by side: the ancient migration routes of all the birds, and the slow building of silt and soil in the estuary.”

The choicest tidbits from Sund’s 75-plus journals have been extracted and lightly edited to produce a new volume of work from the well-loved poet, who passed away in 2001. Assembled by Sund's close friends Tim McNulty and Glenn Hughes, Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund presents poem-like journal entries documenting life in the Skagit River estuary alongside spiritual insights, weather reports, and pithy celebrations of friendship and community.

“Robert was obviously not there to advise us,” explains McNulty, “but he was definitely looking over our shoulder as we worked on this project. We excerpted material that was pretty much intact and didn’t need to do much editing. Robert’s voice was rough and authentic and we wanted to keep it that way. Several friends have read these pieces and said, ‘This is like spending time with Robert again.' "

July, 1973
Snipe walking through the
  flowers & grasses
picking worms & bugs out of
    the mud —

Wren on the front porch
  tiny feet
  tick tick.

Robin, swallow
crow, seagull, heron
goldfinch, duck
blackbird . . .

Who needs a radio?

Song at morning
song at evening
and all day long ...

   This is the real news:
    Local, regional, & world-wide.

Though he departed more than a decade ago, Sund’s unique voice, as expressed through his poems, painting, and calligraphy, has risen in repute since the 2004 publication of Poems from Ish River Country by prestigious publisher Shoemaker & Hoard, home of Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, and Wendell Berry. The Museum of Northwest Art’s successful Fishtown and the Skagit River exhibit in 2010 only heightened interest in the unique countercultural confluence of art, poetry, and spirituality that flourished in the Lower Skagit in the 1970s and '80s.
The recent attention paid to to this now-gone locality contrasts the original inhabitants’ desire to be left alone, hiding out in the marsh grasses where they could be free to pursue their alternative lifestyles.

“(The) burgeoning community (of Fishtown) reflected the larger national impulse towards going back to the land, living simply, and disengaging from chaotic political and social events,” Kathleen Moles writes in Fishtown and the Skagit River, the catalog for the MONA exhibit.

Sund had a deep interest in Chinese literature of the Tang and Sung dynasties — as many drawn to Fishtown did — and his shack provided him a private place to live like the hermit poets he read at night by lantern light. The seclusion, hardships and exposure to the raw elements of storms, tides and bird migrations were a forge for his poetic aspirations.

“A river mouth, in and of itself, exerts an influence on human consciousness that becomes manifest in music, literature, and art,” points out Skagit Valley novelist Tom Robbins in an essay in the MONA catalog.

Sund’s journals contained unvarnished etchings of that Skagit-flavored manifestation, and editors McNulty and Hughes’ work to unearth new material from their friend also revealed insights in to the poet’s methods.

“Robert’s journals held his day-to-day notations; they’re perceptive, unique, sometimes dazzling, and of course poetic,” McNulty explains. “His observations offer keen insights into nature, record subtle personal reflections, and explore the experience of solitude in a wild, natural landscape. At the same time they're often happy and joyful. The journals capture those aspects of Robert’s process, personality, and aesthetic in an immediate way. Chip and I had a great time exploring the journals and delighting one another with new discoveries.”

April 24, 1977   4 A.M.

In the excited mind
          words fly.

The night is still, the water still ––
          & suddenly, in the mind

(as on the night river
          a beaver
breaks the silence)

the first ripple of a poem
swims almost invisible by the river bank.

Blades of grass standing in the river
          feel the waves rise and
                    pass through them.

McNulty further says, “I see a marked contrast between the experience of Robert’s journals and the way we’ve become so locked into gadgets and digital media. The idea of Thoreau-like experiences, of being alone in stunningly beautiful landscape and following the mind’s drift on a daily basis…it can’t hurt.”

In light of this posthumous collection of Sund's work, words he once wrote seem prophetic:

Maybe exalted gestures will be

            retrieved in our time.
Maybe our grandchildren will go through
            our trunks and boxes
                  and be amazed.

Poems are copyright 2012 Robert Sund Poet’s House. Top photo: Erik Ambjor; middle: Paul Hansen, untitled (Fishtown landscape); bottom: Christian Martin

John Scurlock's "Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North Cascade Range"

John Scurlock makes his living working as a paramedic for the Bellingham Fire Department, but finds his calling soaring high above the North Cascades in a small yellow aircraft that he built with his own hands. Flying in all varieties of unpredictable weather above the raggedy peaks and yawning glaciers of our “American Alps,” he circles his snowy subjects, does his best to focus his Canon 5DmkII 21 MP digital camera through the plexiglass canopy and captures vistas most of us will never see with our own eyes.

The results reveal a vast landscape buried in snow and encrusted in ice, a wintery terra incognito of terrifying beauty and austere grace: the frost-bound North Face of Mt. Triumph, impossible cornices on Cloudcap Peak, fire lookouts encased in rime, the Pickett Range hidden in mist, Mount Baker’s shining snowfields, Ripsaw Ridge and Skagit Queen Creek and Park Creek Pass in snowy, silent repose. This is the terrain that holds the world’s record for most snowfall ever recorded in a single winter, and Scurlock’s photography unveils the artistic potential of this seldom-seen northern range: “something primitive, forbidden and inaccessible, yet also profoundly and exquisitely beautiful,” according to Scurlock.

Scurlock's first book, Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North Cascade Range, is a coffee-table-sized collection of his aerial photography published by Wolverine Publishing in Colorado. It represents a culmination of several years of determined labor and features stunning reproductions of his body of work, plus essays by geologist David Tucker and mountaineering historian Lowell Skoog. A display copy in the window of Winthrop's bookstore has attracted more walk-in traffic than they can remember for any other book, and the initial print run of a few thousand seems destined to sell-out as word spreads through Scurlock's networks of climbers, nature photographers, NPS and USFS staff, pilots, naturalists, scientists and other friends.

Christian Martin: When did you first start photographing the North Cascades from the air?

John Scurlock: My first aerial photographs of the North Cascades were in the 1990s when I flew up there in a Cessna with a friend, looking at routes in the southern Picket range for a possible traverse. But my first digital aerial images were in early 2002, when I began photographing Mount Baker and got connected with Dr. Kevin Scott at the USGS/Cascades Volcano Observatory. That led to my meeting with his associate and friend, Dave Tucker from Bellingham. We've collaborated extensively since then, with me supporting their research into the geologic and volcanic history of Baker. I started photographing the rest of the range in winter after I observed the winter mountains while flying above and around Baker. Because of my familiarity with the North Cascades through climbing, I knew I was seeing the mountains in a condition that was really unknown, and I knew photographs of the range in winter either were very limited or didn't exist. That led me eventually to my great obsession…

CM: What were the outlines of your obsession?

JS: Well, I was familiar with the range from climbing and hiking in the summer, but I realized at the outset that seeing the mountains in winter was an incredibly altered condition from what I was used to. I marveled at their stunning beauty after this snowy transformation. I knew I was seeing things that no one else had ever seen or photographed, and that led to my determination to somehow photograph the entire range from the air during the winter. I didn't dive right in however, but rather gradually expanded my boundaries as I gained experience. At this point, I am fairly satisfied that's I've flown into every nook and cranny of these mountains during winter.

CM: When did you begin flying?

JS: I had always wanted to fly, since childhood. I had thought that nearsightedness disqualified me, until I found out in my 30s that I could still be a pilot, though not professionally. After getting my pilot's license, I wanted to own a plane, like all pilots dream of. It was suggested that I could build a better plane than I could buy, and so after some investigation, I started in on my plane, a kit called an RV6 from Van's Aircraft. It took nine years to build, as I traveled, hiked, and skied extensively during that time. It's a small, 26-foot, two-seat tail-wheel plane of conventional construction. It's very versatile, with a fast cruising speed, good handling at slow speeds, generally docile, and a service ceiling of more than 20,000 feet. The design has stood the test of time, and it has proven to be a really great airplane.

CM: What is your goal in photographing the North Cascades and sharing these photographs?

JS: My goal with all my photography, and this book in particular, is to share the amazing beauty of the North Cascades in winter, from every aspect and angle. I've been enormously privileged to see things that are nearly incomprehensible in their wildness and wonderful aesthetics. I've been so fortunate to be in the position to photograph what I've seen and share those images with everyone else. Photography is the means to accomplish this; digital photography, a great airplane, and obsession are the driving forces, and not a day goes by that I don't remember how fortunate I've been in this endeavor.

Northwest Natural Bookshelf: Notable regional titles in 2011

Reviewed by Christian Martin

Beneath Cold Seas: The Underwater Wilderness of the PacificNorthwest

David Hall (University of Washington Press)

Skilled diver David Hall is obsessed with the weird cold-water ecosystems found off the northern Pacific Coast, with their iridescent squid, ghostly salmon, glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, psychedelic nudibranchs, curious seals and neon anemones. It is a great gift to all of us landlubbers that Hall is also a photographer who, through state-of-the-art equipment, innovative techniques and plenty of fearless gumption, captures this hidden world in glorious images rich in color, detail and ecological context. It is bewildering to learn what unseen life dwells just off of our local shores, and how little we know about this mysterious and beautiful world.

Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness

Ana Maria Spagna (OSU Press)

Stehekin resident Ana Maria Spagna writes perceptively and generously about the ties that bind communities: people to people, people to place, self to story. Also serving as a memoir of her travels near and far, Potluck celebrates the ordinary rituals that define our lives.

The Way of Natural History

Edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner (Trinity)

An environmental studies professor at Prescott College in Arizona, Tom Fleischner’s local roots stretch back to summers spent working in North Cascades National Park and the founding of North Cascades Institute. Defining natural history as “a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world,” his vision of a zen-like study of the natural world is fleshed out in this volume with essay and poetry contributions from Jane Hirshfield, Robert Michael Pyle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Aiken, Scott Russell Sanders and others.

New Land, North of the Columbia: Historic Documents thatTell the Story of Washington State from Territory to Today

Lorraine McConaghy (Sasquatch)

A unique and entertaining way to explore our state’s history, Lorraine McConaghy – historian at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle – assembles a wide-ranging selection of documents from public archives to tell the century and a half story of Washington State. Presented in colorful, sharp images, these documents range from the first telegraph to the new Washington Territory from Abraham Lincoln, the Point Elliott Treaty and a program from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition through to FBI files on D.B. Cooper, blueprints for the Kingdome, radio transcriptions during the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, a handbill from the WTO “Battle in Seattle” and poster for SubPop’s Lamefest featuring an unknown band named Nirvana. Even ordinary artifacts like letters, wills, cartoons, menus, snapshots and advertisements provide insight in to the extraordinary trajectory of the Evergreen State.

The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for our Sustainable Future

David Suzuki (Greystone)

In 2009, Vancouver-based broadcaster, author and elder environmentalist David Suzuki gave a last lecture that synthesized his perspectives and insights on the fate of the world: where we’ve come from and where we’re going. This book expands on that talk, with a focus on exponential population growth, the technological revolution and the ecological footprint of a global economy. Luckily for us, Suzuki also presents his vision of a sustainable future that is within our reach. A harrowing yet ultimately inspirational presentation from a vital voice of sanity.

The Historical Atlas of Washington & Oregon

Derek Hayes (UC Press)

It is difficult to describe all of the riches that Derek Hayes’ latest atlas project offers to the armchair historian. Its 200+ pages brim with more than 500 maps, photos, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, illustrations, advertisements and other historical ephemera, all succinctly explained and consolidated in Hayes’ descriptive yet succinct text. The journey begins with the earliest known maps of Washington and Oregon drawn up by explorers like Quadra, Barkley, Quimper, Gray and Vancouver – scrawled yet often elegant relics reflecting the limits of knowledge of the first Europeans venturing in to this rugged landscape – and gains sophistication as missionaries, railroad workers, miners, loggers and other settlers begin to push in to the territory. Later pages are devoted to the development of the interstate road system, national parks and forests, irrigation and hydropower, floating bridges and atomic and aerospace industries. Open to any page of Hayes’ bursting compendium and you’re likely to be engrossed by the diversity of materials and depth of research.

Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North CascadeRange

John Scurlock (Wolverine)

Flying a small, yellow, home-built airplane out of Concrete, John Scurlock explores the North Cascades in wind, weather and light that inspires most people to be safe and cozied up at home. The results of his extraordinary forays in to the inaccessible corners of this range are photographs of a landscape seldom seen before, a wintery terra incognito of terrifying beauty and austere grace. *Snow & Spire*, a collection of Scurlock’s aerial photography and his first publication, is a culmination of several years of determined labor and features stunning views of Baker, Shuksan, Forbidden, Terror, the Picketts and beyond, plus essays by WWU geologist David Tucker and mountaineering historian Lowell Skoog.

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle

Thor Hanson (Basic Books)

Winner of the 2011 Northwest Booksellers Association book of the year award and a Library Journal Top 10 Science Book, *Feathers* tells the natural and cultural history of the feather – one of the most highly evolved objects in nature. Hanson is a conservation biologist with experience in the field studying everything from trees and songbirds in Costa Rica, bears in Alasks and gorillas in Uganda, and he possesses the rare gift of translating scientific concepts in to prose both captivating and poetic. Writing from his home on San Juan Island, Hanson takes the reader back to the Chauvet Cave in southern France, through Greek and Hindu mythology, up to recent discoveries using DNA fingerprinting, all the while exploring the development and uses of this evolutionary marvel.

Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug areKilling North America’s Great Forests

Andrew Nikiforuk (Greystone)

Celebrated in Canada as one of their most engrossing nonfiction books of the year, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk focuses his honed investigative skills towards the tale of an insect “the size of a rice kernel” that has killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska and northern British Columbia, down the Rocky Mountains range into Colorado and New Mexico. There are many villains in this man-made tragedy -- climate change, unsustainable logging practices, misguided science, a century of fire suppression – and the author makes his best attempt to draw lessons and look ahead into the unknown future of one of the world’s greatest natural heritage.

Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska

Hank Lentfer (Mountaineeers Books)

A finely-wrought memoir of a life lived in a remote town in southeast Alaska, Hank Lentfer weaves together threads of conservation, natural history, parenthood and family. Sandhill cranes, passing over the author’s home every fall on their journey between California and Alaska, serve as the inspiration for his quest to find hope in a world seemingly intent on crushing all things beautiful and natural.

Fire Lookouts of the North Cascades

I made this slideshow to accompany Gary Snyder's recent reading in Seattle -- he requested I create some visuals of the North Cascades that would put people in the right frame of mind for his poetry. It features images from a wide array of very talented photography, most of whom I work with at North Cascades Institute, and explores the cultural history of the upper Skagit Valley and North Cascades.

Slough, Decay, and the Odor of Soil

Log decomposition research site, Blue River drainage, Oregon Cascades

By Bill Yake

Trunks, once poised and upright, collapse toward

a two-century graduation into beetle and vapor,

moss, conk, and seed bed -- their boles intermittently

chiseled by woodpeckers uncoiling their barbed tongues

and probing grub-etched galleries within. Hibernacula.

Loosened bark. Sap and heartwood riddled with crawlways

where ants stalk wood-mining fungi, where inexorable

ant-infesting mycelia reciprocate. The odor of must,

cedar disintegrating through pungency to pulp and oil.

The plush, ripe scent of continuous integration.

What seemed solid, stains and softens decade by decade,

to be torn apart by bears after ants: the flavor

on their tongues that of dull sparks. All is relentlessly

hollowed, grain by grain, cell by cell, into sponge and grub

dust, salamander refuge, slug haven, frog shelter, and moss

-- all deepening to opulent, pre-ultimate, humus and duff.

From Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Spring 2011.

Road Trip to Yellowstone & the Grand Tetons

Around the summer solstice in June 2010, Hekter McElliott, Orbit and myself met up in Wyoming for a 10-day tour of Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole.

Hek and I had lived in the area before and done much exploring together, so we used this time to revisit many of our favorite places like Huckleberry Hotsprings, Leigh Lake, the Gros Ventres and the brewpub. We also discovered new amazing places like Druid Peak in the Lamar Valley, a great nap spot on Yellowstone Lake and the new and powerful visitor's center on the recently restored Rockefeller property near Phelps Lake.

Anyways, here's some of what we saw and experienced...

Moral Ground

Kathleen Dean Moore’s ethical response to climate change

Reviewed by Christian Martin

Because of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, we are warming our planet beneath a cloak of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Here in Washington State, rising temperatures and a warmer climate are causing our glaciers to melt faster than they can replenish themselves. This is leading us towards a future with less fresh water for agriculture and drinking and less resources for inexpensive hydroelectric generation. Over 40 of our coastal communities are threatened by rising sea levels. Sagebrush-steppe and alpine ecosystems will disappear as the tree line shifts, and growing seasons are changing in unpredictable ways. The loss of several amphibian species, alterations in bird and butterfly migratory patterns and invasions of unchecked, voracious insect infestations are already underway. Ocean acidification is choking the abundant life in Puget Sound and bays of the outer coast. Eastside forests are drying up and wildland fires will become more prevalent. We humans will face a deadly spike in infectious, respiratory and heat-related illnesses as the natural world around us smolders.

Heard this laundry list of doom before? Most likely you have, and it’s because scientists have done an impressive job of both studying the phenomenon of global climate change and communicating the causes and effects to the public. The effort has be so heroic that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

While the data, interpretations and subsequent warnings from the scientific community are essential pieces of this puzzle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, recognized that something was missing. Moore, the author of personal essay/nature writing books like Riverwalking, Holdfast and Wild Comfort, teaches environmental ethics and moral reasoning to students and she soon realized that the scientists’ arguments, no matter how comprehensive, were not going to inspire us to act to save our world.

“Clearly, information is not enough,” she writes. “A piece is largely missing from the public discourse about climate change: namely an affirmation of our moral responsibilities in the world that the scientists describe. No amount of factual information will tell us what we ought to do. For that, we need moral convictions.”

In Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Moore and co-editor Michael Nelson assemble 80 of the world’s leading visionaries, leaders and writers to create a compelling call to action. The goal of the anthology is to confront the challenges of climate change based on moral and ethical grounds. It is a chorus featuring the sterling voices of the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II, Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Hawken, Thich Naht Hanh, E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, bell hooks and many others from cultures and countries around the globe.

“Do we have a moral obligation to take action to protect the future of a planet in peril?” the editors asked of their contributors, “and if so, why?”

The answers – inspiring, creative, sobering and grounded in reason – are presented in thematic clusters, including “Yes, for the survival of humankind,” “Yes, to honor our duties of gratitude and reciprocity, “Yes, for the stewardship of God’s creation, “Yes, because justice demands it,” “Yes, because the world is beautiful.”

Moral Ground strives to start the conversation about “who we are when we are at out best, what we must do to be worthy of our gifts” and how we might live on Earth “respectfully, responsibly and joyously.” These are essential questions to ponder here at the most crucial turning point our planet has ever faced.

OlyPenn Road Trip

A trip around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in early spring. Destinations include Ozette Lake, Rialto Beach and the Quinault Rainforest.

Road Trip: The Olympic Peninsula

My first 2010 trip away from the Salish Sea occured in May when I caught the Keystone Ferry for Port Townsend and spent a solo week in Olympic National Park, hiking, paddling and observing the emerging lushness of spring. My first destination was Lake Ozette in the far northwestern corner of the state. I posted up at a nearly-empty campground on the northshore, dropped my sea kayak on to the lake and paddled a couple of hours south to a remote backcountry campsite at Erickson’s Bay. I was lucky to have decent, stable weather, no wind and Ozette — the third largest lake in the state — all to myself. Trails from the bay, as well as from the northshore campground, wind 3 miles through coastal forests, prairies and the remains of homesteads to the wild Pacific coast, where one can explore tidepools, view sea stacks, observe seabirds and seals and search for migrating grey whales and the famous Wedding Rocks pictographs.

At Ozette, with long agenda-less days stretching out before me, I started reading Tim McNulty’s wonderful book, Olympic National Park: A Natural History, recently updated and reissued by University of Washington Press. Tim’s amiable guide helped me to know the stories behind the nature I was so enjoying, like what the flourescent blobs in the tidepool were, or how sea anenomes and starfish interact, or where the whales were coming from and where they were going. I greatly appreciated not only the wealth of authoratative natural history information in the book, but also the friendly tone and poetic descriptions that Tim employs to make the unique “island” ecosystem of the peninsula come to life.

Sitting next to a campfire reading the chapter on the cultural history of the peninsula — and the amazing story of the Ozette Village archaeological discovery and recovery — inspired me to make my next stop at the Makah Museum in Neah Bay to witness the tribal artifacts that were discovered in the 1970s beneath a slumping mudbank facing the ocean.

Having the museum all to myself, I spent several hours marveling over all the different essential items of life that the Makah created from natural materials at hand : waterproof cedar bark hats, mussel-shell harpoon tips, halibut hooks made of bone, fishing nets woven from stinging nettle fibers — all well preserved from being encased in mud for hundreds of years. I was especially taken by the technologies that the Makah developed to stalk, kill and process whales that migrated past their villages every spring — the massive sea-going cedar canoe on display was amazing for its marriage of form and function — and could hardly imagine the fortitude and skill that was required to hunt these behemoths of the sea. I was also drawn to the displays of masks, rattles and other talismans that the tribe used to interact with the spirit world, especially in the long, wet, dark days of winter when families had retired to their shared cedar longhouses.
Leaving the northwestern corner of the park, I drove south, spent a night at Rialto Beach for more beachcombing, and then traveled on to the Quinault Valley. I was hoping to paddle around this lake too, but had a hard time finding a boat launch, and the afternoon wind was making the lake choppy, so I motored up the dirt road following the North Fork of the Quinault River until it dead-ended at another empty campground and trailhead.


The rainforest is a riot of green growth fed by 10 to 15 feet of rain every year. Within its verdant cathedrals lies a very deep and profound silence. After spending several days in the presence of this silence — interrupted only by the whirrrrr of divebombing hummingbirds, the kaw of ravens and the clacking of river stones being washed down to sea by the milky, glacial-fed river — everything slows down and you have more space to notice and appreciate what’s around you. In an age of information traveling at light-speed and the constant din of digital infotainment, a languid break in the Quinault was just what I needed. At the end of my week, I was very sad to leave this sanctuary, but made a vow to keep in touch with the tempo I had rediscovered there.
May is a superb time of the year to visit the Olympic Peninsula: no mosquitoes, no tourists, endless places to camp, low elevation (and therefore snow-free) trails and the full green goodness of spring. The national park facilities like visitor centers and ranger stations were not yet opened, but I knew what I was doing and so didn’t miss them. It’ll get quite a bit more busy for the summer once school is out, and then slow down again in September as the big leaf and vine maple leaves change colors and fall to carpet the forest floor.