Win bounds out, searching for her unconventional quarry, ready to herd. She spots a flock of about a dozen geese feeding on the well-manicured grass of Clove Lake Park in Staten Island. She crouches until her belly is almost on the ground, tucks her tail between her legs, and slinks toward the geese, fixing them with an intense glare.

The geese honk in alarm, first trotting across the lawn and then reluctantly spreading their wings and taking off. Win, her body still quaking, keeps up her fierce stare until the geese have disappeared.

Scaring off the ubiquitous Canada geese that see New York’s parks, cemeteries, and golf courses as a year-round salad bar is exactly the point. Joe Kohl is Win’s human co-worker at Geese Police, but he is the first to say that, when it comes to interacting with geese, his main function is driving Win from site to site. When he interviews potential employees, Kohl tells them, only half joking, “If the dogs had thumbs, we wouldn’t need you.”

The number of geese on the East Coast has nearly tripled in the past twenty years. Attempts to keep the birds and their copious feces off of lawns and away from airports have spawned an entire industry of companies with names such as Bird-B-Gone and Goose Busters. Indulging their inner frat boys, goose hazers have tried everything from lasers to fireworks. Geese Police claims to have pioneered the idea of using border collies, bred to herd sheep along the English-Scottish border, to scare off geese (a federally protected species) without ever touching them. Now the practice is so common that Geese Police lost New York’s Central Park as a client in a bidding war, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture employs a staff of goose-tormenting dogs.

But Win and I are both a little disappointed by the geese’s quick departure this afternoon. Win’s instinct is to gather them up and bring them to a human. I, on the other hand, was hoping the geese would land in the park’s lake so I could witness another border collie trick: kayaking.

Because geese often head to the middles of lakes to escape their predators, border collies have taken to the water in pursuit. They do their silent glowering from a kayak, leaving uneasy geese to wonder how the hell a wolf got so far out on the water. 

The geese in the park aren’t a problem today, but Kohl has arranged for me to see a kayaking dog, even if the outing is recreational. Win isn’t much of a kayaker, so another Geese Police duo joins us. As her crate is opened, Gail whines and shuffles before running toward the kayak. Joe Compton is the thumbs of the operation, and when he is situated in the boat, Gail effortlessly hops between his legs, facing the bow.

Compton paddles around the serene lake, green from the reflections of the lush trees that surround it. The scene is comically pastoral: a man and his dog, out enjoying the day. But though Gail looks relaxed, she is also alert. If a goose dared come close, she would drop her head, hunch her shoulders, and start the stare-down.

Project developers now figure it might be 120 gallons a year (winter temperatures in the Brooks Range village can drop to fifty degrees below zero), but that’s still a small fraction of the thousand gallons or more that existing homes typically burn.

An oil-revenue-fed housing boom in the 1970s and ‘80s brought modern housing to rural residents across Alaska. But the homes were built with little attention paid to lifestyle or energy use, and people in many communities now face a harsh predicament: existing homes are too expensive to heat and maintain, and new ones are too expensive to build.

Enter Jack Hébert and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC). Over the last year and a half, staff at the Fairbanks-based nonprofit have worked with village residents to design a home that meets local needs, takes advantage of local resources, and is relatively cheap to build and operate. Residents signed on because of the village’s acute housing needs; CCHRC staff saw building in the remote village, nestled in a windy valley one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, as a good challenge.

The final design blends traditional building techniques with modern materials. Like the traditional sod homes that inland Eskimos used for generations, the prototype home is built partially underground for protection from wind and cold and uses a chimneylike ventilation system. A staggered entryway helps keep cold air out. But the home also uses metal studs, soy-based spray insulation, and a spray-on plastic coating normally used for truck bed liners. “The old systems worked well,” Hébert says. “The old systems with good technology work extremely well.”

Thanks to a donation from the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, another nonprofit group, the home will be powered by the wind and sun. Refrigeration will come from the cold ground itself. The house is designed to fit on a single DC-6 cargo plane, and the goal is a three-week installation period. Ilisagvik College in Barrow is already training workers from surrounding villages to build the homes.

The house is expected to consume a small fraction of the heating fuel and electricity used in other homes, and it cost only $150,000 to build, shipping included. (Recent cost estimates for new construction in Anaktuvuk topped $750,000, according to CCHRC.)

With the first house barely finished, developers already have plans for more. The Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority, which is sponsoring the Anaktuvuk project, is seeking funding to build forty more homes in Anaktuvuk and other villages using the same methods. And CHRC is already working to design another home for the coastal village of Point Lay.

Hébert hopes the new designs—and more generally the new approach—will change how people think about building in rural and urban Alaska alike. “All of us live just a few generations away from living in a sustainable way,” he said.

Meanwhile, Anaktuvuk Pass residents are anxious to see just how efficient the new home is. “For now,” Paneak said, “people are pretty excited.” When workers installed the sod roof, village elders came out to make sure they did it right.

The fingertips are a border checkpoint of the human body, and through them the self reaches out to touch the world. Fingertips are diviners, lovers, poets of the perhaps, emissaries of empathy. They are feelingful, exquisitely sensitive to metal, dough, moss, or splinter. They are also one of the body’s places of greatest idiosyncrasy: a fingerprint is the body’s signature. Fingertips are at once highly selved and highly sensitive: they articulate difference and they distinguish difference.

Forced to erase the sign of themselves, people scar, burn, stitch, and staple their fingertips at U.S. borders too, and indeed wherever people fear that their identification will be used against them, not because they are criminals but because they are refugees and victims of war, poverty, and neo-imperialism.

Border checkpoints bristle with state control, and this control now encroaches within nations. In Britain, already the world leader in surveillance, the state is now pushing for nationwide ID cards. Identification, tagging, and surveillance are used to intimidate those at the margins, the borders of society: refugees, whose individual stories of blood and horror give the lie to the glossy brochures of foreign policy; the insane with their flashes of specific mind-lightning; those who stand out, eccentrically, for their beliefs, who poke and provoke with the demeanor of a pitchfork in the cutlery drawer; young people at the borders of adulthood; protesters, with their multifold cries of “see it otherwise,” demanding political alterity. All are harassed with surveillance.

Truly individualistic societies would cherish all such border crossers, not punish them. But the dominant culture is a society of intolerant homogeneity that bolsters racism, ageism, and conformism. It supports monoism, destroying variety from biodiversity to linguistic diversity. Like the monoculture of Hollywood and the monocrops of agribusiness, the monopolitics of world powers erase the particular, searing away the idiomatic dialect of the self, symbolized so specifically by each person’s fingertips. Burning away the signature of individuality, at the borders of those very countries that most profess individualism, is a metaphor of terrible reproach. And it tells a deep truth, for ours is not an individualistic society. Rather, it is a hyper-privatized one.

The word private originally meant to be “deprived of public life,” and most people today are so deprived. A vote every few years does not constitute a political voice. Terms for public political life, like solidarity, trade unions, co-operatives, or collectives, are unwelcome in a world of hyper-privatization. Employees engaged in public protest find their jobs threatened. Citizens are also deprived of public life in nature, fobbed off with parks and that hyper-privatized patch of green, the fenced-in private garden. Entertainment, traditionally a very communal affair, is now hyper-privatized, the individual watching TV in a room alone, where the sequestered self is more vulnerable to advertising.

Similarly, the etymology of the word idiot, from ancient Greek, refers to a “purely private person”—one who takes no part in public life. In this hyper-privatized world, it is as if governments would prefer their subjects to remain idiots, disengaged from the state’s process but suffering its intrusions.

Humans need community and public life: we also need the secluded intimacy of privacy, and the latter is threatened by surveillance. Those in favor of surveillance argue that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” but this denies the very significance of privacy—a cache to shelter our tenderness and our name. Telling one’s name is a gift. Withholding it is a right.

Through the twin prongs of ID cards and surveillance, the borders of the private self are invaded. I am declaring, here, that I am a sovereign state. I do not want alien states to use biometrics to crawl into my eyes like flies. I do not want my identity captured by strangers. But I, who am deprived of the human right to freely roam in my own free land, find that the state can roam freely through the territories of my self, violating the integrity of my borders.

When the state crosses the borders into my private self, it is an ugly act. But border crossing the other way—the self reaching outward—is an act of beauty and transcendence. Art, spirituality, environmentalism, and movements for political justice agree, seeking transcendence from the confines of the single self, and it is no surprise that people from backgrounds of faith, activism, and art are those who most vehemently oppose ID cards.

The perennial philosophy of a universal oneness suggests a reaching out beyond the ego. So does the traditional posture of fingertips touched together in prayer to set free the spirit, winged for infinity. Movements for political reform take wide, unprivate ideals, the wisest art goes beyond the individual, and at the heart of environmentalism is the extension of the borders of responsibility to encompass lands, times, selves, and species beyond the individual.

The human psyche, then, seems to find benevolence in the self transcending its boundaries. By contrast, the psyche finds malevolence in those who invade those boundaries: in the myths and mores of many cultures, people are wary about giving names to strangers. Belief in the Evil Eye is virtually a human universal, embodying the malignity of surveillance. Staring is inherently predatory, and we, as other animals, hate being watched because it is a prelude to attack. Mass surveillance—modernity’s Evil Eye—is peculiarly nasty because of its cowardice; the watcher is hidden, unknowable and faceless.

Anyone can recognize a sense of guilt merely walking (innocently) through airport customs. Being trailed by a police car provokes a similar guilt, even when unfounded. Surveillance provokes a pervasive sense of guilt and entrapment and this fusion has a practical history in the invention in 1785 of the Panopticon, the surveillance device designed to watch prisoners without their knowledge. If plans for compulsory ID cards succeed in the UK, we will be carrying our own Panopticons with us, and the protest against these plans is muted. In the U.S., thankfully, there is tougher resistance to ID cards, but a modern Panopticon, the microchip tag within the body, is in use already by an Ohio company (CityWatcher.com) whose business is in providing governments with surveillance tools, and which has inserted microchips under the skin of some of its employees.

Surveillance creates conformity. Anyone queuing at border control attempts to look as “normal” as possible: like any animal under a predatory stare, humans try to fit in with the herd, not to stand out. The glare of surveillance is the opposite of the gaze of love, for under that gaze a person wants to be known, seen especially for themselves, flirting the peacock feathers of otherness, the distinguishing features of the soul. The law of evolution encourages individuation, and diversity is a signature of the vitality of nature. These laws of life agree with the law of love in nurturing true individuality, for the human heart cherishes “thisness,” the essential specificity of the beloved person.

“If you ask me why I loved him,” said the Renaissance French humanist Michel de Montaigne of his friend Étienne de La Boétie, “I can only say: because he was he, and I was I.” Delineating an exquisite uniqueness, it is as if their fingertips still touch, after all these centuries, and the fingertips of Montaigne’s mind, like all great artists, transcend the borders of self and time to touch minds today with the inalienable signature of love.

LAWLER: There are few people today who talk about science and spirituality in the same breath without criticizing one or the other. You are an exception.

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy. These are not two words that most people normally associate with each other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?

KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life. It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.

LAWLER: Or misused.

KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.

I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.

LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?

KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.

LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?

KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.

What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.

LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?

KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.

LAWLER: You have spoken about what would have become of Beethoven if he’d been born before the invention of the piano . . .

KELLY: That helps me think about the people born today who may be missing some technology that would allow them to be their best. That’s what technology is in the larger sense—the discovery of potential and possibility.

LAWLER: But tools are not creativity.

KELLY: At a deep level, the act of discovery and the act of creation are identical. The steps that you would take to find something are exactly the same steps you’d take to make something. So you can say that Edison discovered the light bulb and Newton invented gravity.

LAWLER: Wendell Berry might say that is all well and good, but technology doesn’t change the essential nature of humanity. It doesn’t make us better people.

KELLY: I disagree with Wendell. We have created our humanity. And I think our humanity has been created by technology. Our humanity is defined by things we have invented. Like the alphabet. Our culture is one thing we’ve created. But I also think there has been an evolution of morality. Culture and cultural inventions are part of the Technium—they are technologies.

LAWLER: But the Ten Commandments were likely tribal rules passed on orally long before they were written down. It was just the medium that changed.

KELLY: Language is part of the Technium too. And language allowed us to structure laws and rules, our ideas of inherent fairness and sense of right and wrong. These are associated with society and culture and all that Wendell is concerned about. And they were developed over thousands of years. Our humanity is actually a result of the invention and the distribution and the enhancement and growth of the Technium.

LAWLER: Man the Toolmaker—it’s an old concept. Surely we are more than toolmakers.

KELLY: But I don’t think the Technium is only about humans. It’s a type of learning. It’s a type of expression. It’s a type of possibility.

The Technium works as an ecology. Just as evolution has a longterm direction as we look 4 billion years into the past, so technology increases complexity and diversity, with increasing power.

LAWLER: So technology is part of evolution or God—that which drives the universe?

KELLY: Exactly. Some people call this the Great Story. Roving preacher Michael Dowd talks at churches about this alternative creation story. It is about evolution through God, that which started from nothing, grew into particles that gained mass and complexity, and then clumped into molecules and then became dust and planets and so forth. And technology is the latest variety.

LAWLER: So the Technium is one of the ways in which the universe is getting to know itself? And by increasing complexity, the universe becomes more self-aware?

KELLY: Exactly. I think of God as the intelligence of mind that is increasing the complexity of the universe.

LAWLER: That makes me think about the way new ideas appear to spread almost simultaneously. Five thousand years ago humans suddenly began living in cities from Egypt to India. There was something in the air. Is this the Technium at work?

KELLY: Simultaneous invention is actually the norm for science. That’s why we have patents. I’m not talking about the supernatural. Inventions never happen in a vacuum. Every idea requires the support of four or five other ideas. There’s a necessary subset of other surrounding inventions that are required. As they appear, the new idea becomes more obvious. It’s an ecological growth. There are two kinds of changes that we see in nature. One is developmental and one is evolutionary. And the developmental changes are fairly predictable in a certain sense. We know what the pattern is and I can map your developmental trajectory very clearly. You go from fetus to child to adolescent. I may not know what kind of teenager you’re going to be, but I can say you’re going to be a teenager. A lot of what we see in culture right now is developmental, not evolutionary.

LAWLER: But we can’t say that about human culture—we don’t know where it is going.

KELLY: We don’t, but only because we’re ignorant. I’ve looked at the sequence of discoveries and inventions around the world to see whether they follow generally the same sequence, and it seems that they do. Certain things you discover first. The moment a planet decides to wire itself up, to connect everything to everything, is an inevitable developmental stage in civilization. It is a stage like puberty or metamorphosis—pick your biological analogy.

LAWLER: I’m struck by an analogy you make between nature and the Technium—that technology also needs pruning. You pull the weeds in your garden or you won’t get vegetables.

KELLY: This is husbandry. You are not your garden’s puppet master, pulling each leaf off the tree. You train it in a general direction. The work is still being done by the tree. We are tending the garden of technology, moving things around, noticing a plant coming up here that would do much better in the sun over there. Or it needs a little more fertilizer. You don’t control it.

The banning of genetically modified organisms in Europe is a typical response these days. GMO critics instead would like us to use fruit produced through genetic gambling, which is what natural breeding is. If genetic gambling came along now, it would never be permitted. It’s all mutation, all random. The point is we’ve never had control. We get the best results by doing a little bit of training and pruning and letting things unroll.

LAWLER: So where does evolution come in?

KELLY: It’s very hard to unravel what is evolutionary and what is developmental. My suggestion is that evolutionary change is unpredictable, while developmental change is not.

LAWLER: There is a lot of fear around the pace and impact of technology. It is all happening so quickly. Isn’t fear of weapons of mass destruction, genetic modification, and advances in nanotechnology prudent and reasonable?

KELLY: That’s a good question and I may not have a very good answer for it. There’s no single source of this fear—it can be as simple as discomfort with change. And for all our talk about the need for change, people resist it—particularly if we are comfortable in the moment. Change brings discomfort.

LAWLER: So how can we cope with the increasing pressure to change?

KELLY: We’re now in a new regime of information. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, the manner of change on an individual’s soul and life was very minimal. That fostered appreciation for continuity and enduring values, and that persisted even though new inventions came along. Those inventions diffused slowly and generally didn’t happen within a single life span. That changed with the coming of science, and with that came increasing prosperity and a dramatic rise in population in the last two hundred years. The pace of change within an individual lifetime accelerated. One consequence was the invention of science fiction, part of a large-scale investigation of the future. It became a survival tactic.

LAWLER: You have said that the next century marks the great identity crisis of our species.

KELLY: Wendell is probably right that we aren’t really wired very well to cope with this. But I have no problem thinking that human nature will change, that we will change human nature, that we will engineer human nature amid this rapid change. The nature of humanity has been changing all along, but until now very slowly. And as I was suggesting earlier, part of the nature of humanity is wrapped up in our own inventions—it is, in fact, our own invention. Each time we make an advance in artificial intelligence, we redefine who humans are. Each time there’s a discovery in science related to intelligence or even the animal world, we redefine who humans are. At one time we defined ourselves as the toolmakers. Now we find out that termites and birds use tools, so we’ve redefined what it is to be human.

LAWLER: Are we moving toward something that shuts out the past, or is there a place in which low-tech tradition and high-tech science can meet?

KELLY: We generally reinterpret our older selves, rather than discard them. Right now we’re very biological; we’re very meatbased animals. We have the benefit of a very highly evolved sensual body. So whatever improvements we make, I think very few people would really want to evolve out of their bodies, though they may want to better the body. We contain 4 billion years of evolution, and it’s not a matter of casting that off completely. It’s a matter of reinterpreting it and enhancing it.

LAWLER: Already people are talking about designing babies for specific traits. Technology often starts with the best of intentions—to ensure a healthy child—then deteriorates into thorny and even nightmarish scenarios. In India now, you can go to a clinic to ensure you have a boy rather than a girl. The long-term implications—lots of male teenagers and few females—are horrific.

KELLY: My suggestion is not to take the technology away, but to educate those making the choice. What we want is greater choice. And these choices are always bound up in politics. I don’t think technology is neutral. But the proper response to bad technology is not to stop it—to stop thinking—but to have a better idea.

LAWLER: You go so far as to say that it would be immoral for us to put prohibitions on technology. Are there any exceptions to that?

KELLY: I haven’t been able to find any. What we want to do is find the proper home for technology. Technologies are like children. They’re often asked to do things that they’re incapable of doing, don’t really want to do, are ill suited to do. We need to find the right place for technology. DDT is actually a very good insecticide for eliminating malaria—used judiciously around the house, it’s very effective and does not cause much harm. Spraying it on 25 zillion acres of cotton is terrible. So you find the right home for that technology.

LAWLER: You could argue Rachel Carson did that for DDT, but only after a long struggle. How do we create a conversation, a structure, for making such decisions?

KELLY: Conversation is the correct word. Our current default is to not proceed to the next step until you can prove no harm. That doesn’t work. You have to use inventions to evaluate them, to
see them in action. Their consequences in the very complicated world are impossible to simulate. You have to have constant vigilance, to re-evaluate constantly. If they don’t work out, you don’t prohibit them, you move on to something else better.

LAWLER: What if they discover that this Diet Coke I’ve been drinking will increase my chances for cancer? Are you saying it should not be banned?

KELLY: It should not be prohibited for several reasons. One is it may only cause cancer in people who have some subset of genes. It may not have an effect on other people. Before we prohibit it for everybody, we have to find out what’s going on. First we need your DNA, and then we need constant twenty-four-hour self-monitoring. This idea that every five years we go for a checkup, well then of course people are going to get cancer from drinking soda. Most people will be lucky if they have their blood tested once in their life. We need noninvasive, constant information about our bodies so that we can determine right away whether something we drink has an adverse effect. The proper response is not to ban something—the proper response is better technology. If there is something wrong with aspartame, modify it. Find a new home for it.

LAWLER: What if you have a company that has spent millions developing and producing the chemical, and they hire lobbyists to argue for its widest possible use? Look at the tobacco or alcohol industries. And scientists with a financial stake in the system have been used to justify wide use of toxins. You make a logical argument, but one that leaves out the reality of the marketplace. Where’s “the conversation”?

KELLY: We need a more sophisticated system. That is why we are locked in a binary pattern—it is either approved or prohibited. There is the option of education—to take an approach to life that is more scientific.

LAWLER: Does that mean that if enough people have access to the data on chemicals, and could understand it, they could pressure a company to make a different choice?

KELLY: I haven’t thought about this until this moment. Let’s say a study finds the substance causes cancer, that it is really bad. Then the question is, what changed since the time of approval? Maybe you have to drink it every day for five years, so it is an issue of dosage. So what is a better dosage? And you could decide to use a different dosage or use something else instead. And you could use the substance for something else that would not cause harm.

LAWLER: How do you factor in human complexity—the corporate executive who wants a profit, the researcher who is more concerned with creating than monitoring? Such motivations can overwhelm scientific logic. Look at tobacco smoking—you can say it’s a bad idea, but people do it.

KELLY: I’m not talking about just the market solving problems. I’m assuming there is government to regulate. What I am proposing is that you have more choices than approving or prohibiting. When you have more choices you can have a more sophisticated response. I think prohibiting tobacco is the wrong idea, because we’ll get the same result as with Prohibition. But obviously you don’t want people addicted to smoking. We need to find the right home for tobacco.

The market and science and education can provide more creative solutions. Consider marijuana. The medical use of it here in California is interesting, because we are trying to find the right home for it.

LAWLER: So do you support funding bacterial warfare, for example, since it expands our knowledge?

KELLY: No. I would prohibit technology that kills people, for sure.

LAWLER: But you are against prohibiting use of technology.

KELLY: So nuclear weapons are okay, but using nuclear weapons is not. Take the AIDS virus. It’s nasty, bad stuff, but we can use the mechanism of a virus infection for good. You hijack it and use it for gene therapy. The technology of viral infection is okay. There is a way we can redeem a virus to make it into something good—but not if you prohibit the research.

LAWLER: You are walking a fine line—prohibitions for certain areas, but no blanket prohibitions.

KELLY: I think funding new ways to kill people is not a good use of technology. The same discoveries, however, can be used for better purposes. I’m not actually a pacifist. I believe that there should be restraint, but not necessarily killing. Killing is a binary response we fall back on, but there are other options.

LAWLER: How do you reconcile faith with logic and reason?

KELLY: There’s always the question of how the universe began. Then you ask, what was before that? Either you believe that it goes on and on by itself or you believe that there’s some ultimate
being which caused it. Both of those views are logically unsatisfying. Either could be true, but not both. And neither is provable. You come down to faith. Faith for me is simply experiential. My faith is that God unleashed creation as a way to know himself, to express and fully manifest his fullness. Our job as creatures of this creation is to surprise God. We’re co-creators in a certain sense—we have a divine spark in us. We have the same attributes as the creator of the universe, which is that we can create something. We can make something out of nothing in our small world. God has bestowed sparks of his creativity in the right places so they will surprise him. He’s allowing us to make something from our free will that maybe he would not have thought of making.

LAWLER: So we’re instruments of the divine?

KELLY: Right. Going back to the infinite game, the goal is to keep the game going for the purpose of maximizing the potential of this creation. We create other beings and other worlds. In so doing, we eventually discover different views of God, of the universe. Our own minds are incapable of comprehending the universe as a whole; we’re just too small and limited. But we can create other worlds, and technology gives us a sure hand to do so.

LAWLER: That feels so ineffable, so unquantifiable.

KELLY: My experience with God is no different than my own experience of my own consciousness and reality. Descartes’ observation is that in the end, the only certainty we have that we exist is that we think. But if we look at consciousness, it evaporates when we attempt to translate it into bits. The nature of consciousness is still a total riddle.

LAWLER: Why is there such a lack of sophisticated conversation between religion on the one hand and science and technology on the other?

KELLY: The only place we see it is among the theologians of our day, the science fiction authors who tackle the big questions. Religions appeal to tradition, to people who are afraid of change. But at the same time the Catholic Church has proved remarkably adaptable over two thousand years. There is a blockheaded rejection of evolution among Christian evangelicals, which has been tremendously harmful. It has turned a religion that was at one time at the forefront of science into an antiscience stance. I have little glimmers that in another generation or two, this will change. When it comes to climate change, for example, there has been rapid change toward recognizing the problem.

LAWLER: You are leaving out the spate of books by scientists which dismiss and even mock religion.

KELLY: There are fundamentalist atheists, just as there are fundamentalist Christians. The real conversation will happen in the middle and not at the extremes.

LAWLER: But how do you kick-start a more mature debate?

KELLY: My view of technology as holy is a minority view. Right now, technology is either the devil, or, if it’s embraced, it’s called neutral. Nobody is saying that it’s divine. An alternative view is not going to sweep the country overnight. It will require people smarter and deeper than me to work it out. Right now I’m a church of one.

What does that look like? Well, to start, it doesn’t have to mean handling guns. Even when the IRA was at its strongest, only 2 percent of its members ever picked up weapons. The same is true for the Underground Railroad; Harriet Tubman and others carried guns, but Quakers and other pacifists who ran safe houses were also crucial to that work. What they all held in common was a commitment to their cause, and a willingness to work together in the resistance.

A serious resistance movement also means a commitment to winning, which means figuring out what “winning” means to you. For me, winning means living in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more amphibians, more large fish in the oceans, and for that matter oceans not being murdered. It means less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. It means living in a world where there are fewer dams each year than the year before. More native forests. More wild wetlands. It means living in a world not being ravaged by the industrial economy. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get there (and if, by the way, you believe that “whatever it takes” is code language for violence, you’re revealing nothing more than your own belief that nonviolence is ineffective).

That’s fine, Derrick, but what do you want me to do?

Part of me wants to tell you to bring down the industrial infrastructure, the engine driving the destruction of the planet, converting so-called raw materials—read: living beings, biomes, and indeed the world—into products for sale. But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to suggest that, because I’m guessing you wouldn’t do it anyway. And besides, I don’t know you, and no one who doesn’t know you should ever tell you what to do (and if they do, you shouldn’t listen). In any case, ignoring what I have to say may not be such a bad idea, since what I really want is for people to think for themselves—not to bring down the industrial infrastructure because I tell them it’s killing the world, but rather for them to deeply attend to our current crises and come to their own conclusions about what we must or must not do, what we must unmake and what we must make anew.

But, Derrick, what do you want me to do right now?

Okay, here’s a list:

A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture—industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization—and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.

And this is just the absolute beginning of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but it makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.

Next, ask yourself what are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe. People sometimes ask why I write instead of blowing up dams, to which I reply that my only D in college was in quantitative analysis chemistry lab, meaning you don’t want me anywhere near explosives. Some people have said I should be an organizer instead of a writer. These people have never seen my work space; if I can’t keep track of my pens, how would I possibly keep track of anything more complex? Likewise, I’ve filed dozens of timber sale appeals, but it was a very laborious process for me; it took me twelve hours to do what others could do in two. And I write terrible press releases. I can, however, write books. Harness your gifts, and put them in the service of your landbase.

My third suggestion is to ask yourself: what do I get off on? One reason I don’t burn out as an activist is that I love what I’m doing. I was out one day with a wetlands specialist. We were trying to stop a developer from ruining a forest. The specialist dug into the soil, rubbed some between his fingers, and compared the color to a chart, which would help him determine if these were wetlands. I asked, “Do you get off on this?” He laughed and said digging in dirt was his second favorite thing to do after playing with his dogs. I laughed too and said I wouldn’t like to do that work. I, on the other hand, have condemned myself to a life of homework: I get off on trying to figure out, for example, the relationship between perceived entitlement, exploitation, and atrocity.

My next suggestion is to make protecting the land where you live—and by extension the rest of the natural world, since protecting the land where you live will be insufficient to protect anadromous fish, migratory songbirds, or anyone in a world being burned alive by global climate change—the most important thing in your life. That may sound drastic, but we’re talking about life on the planet here. There can be nothing more important than this.

So, Derrick, what exactly do you want us to do?

I want you to make the time to find what or whom you love—whether it’s salmon, sturgeon, a patch of forest, survivors of domestic violence, your own indigenous tradition, migratory songbirds, coral reefs, or Appalachian mountaintops—and I want you to dig in and defend your beloved with your life, and, if necessary, with your death. I want for your actions to positively contribute to the health and defense of the planet. I want for you to figure out how to make it so the world—the real, physical world—is a better place because you were born, and because you lived here.

All of this leads to the point, which is, put simply, to do something. Several years ago I was giving a talk to several hundred people about bringing down civilization. The audience was excited. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. I suddenly stopped and asked, “How many of you have ever filed a timber-sale appeal?” Four or five. “How many have worked on a rape crisis hotline?” Ten women. “How many have done indigenous support work?” Three or four. And so on. It’s all well and good to talk about the Great Glorious Revolution, but what are you doing right now?

The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.

Do something.

That’s what I want you to do. That’s what the anadromous fish and the Appalachian mountaintops want you to do too.

In high school, I read a dog-eared copy of The Stand over and over, until its ink smeared away against my fingers and its pages came unglued and fluttered to the floor. I never grew out of the fantasy.

But I am not alone. The Facebook group “The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will Be Pretending I’m Not Excited” has (at last count) 87,345 members. Nostradamus’s doomsday prophecies air regularly on cable. A fashion label called Scrapland produces a post-apocalyptic clothing line with mutants and mushroom clouds silkscreened onto t-shirts. The other day at the coffee shop, I overheard a conversation about the end of the world. “I’d go to Costco,” a twenty-something with shaggy sideburns and black-framed glasses said. I’m not sure if he pictured a meteor striking or a plague spreading, maybe a nuclear holocaust, but he had a plan. “And I would stack a bunch of stuff—like, tires and dog food and stuff — at the entrance. And I would eat granola bars and drink Vitaminwater until the coast was clear.” The young woman next to him took a sip of something frothy and raspberry flavored and said, “Screw Costco. Go to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s got guns.”

Pleasuring in Armageddon is nothing new. For years the public has gobbled up scores of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives like crazed end-of-the-world cannibals served an appendage braised with ginger—and titles like The Last Man, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Mad Max, Escape from LA, Soylent Green, Terminator, and The Stand endure as campy classics. But the past few years seem especially flooded with a black-watered tide of novels and films and video games. Oryx and Crake, Resident Evil, World War Z, 28 Days Later, The World Without Us, Children of Men, Far North, 9, The Book of Eli, Zombieland, 2012—to name a few. Exterminating mankind has never been more popular. And it’s no wonder.

Low-flying airplanes make people shudder. Ice caps melt and sea levels rise and the weather grows wilder, more erratic, as hurricanes swirl darkly out of the ocean and wildfires blacken hillside neighborhoods and tornadoes uncurl from the sky to vacuum up houses and cars and trees. The faces on subway cars are hidden behind surgical masks. Another suicide bomber detonates on a crowded street in Baghdad. Reservoirs and rivers go to dust. The stock market collapses. Suicides spike. Subdivisions are wiped out by foreclosures, their once immaculate lawns overgrown with weeds, their windows black and watchful.

The best horror stories take a knife to the anxieties of a time. Look at Dracula and the repressed sexuality of the Victorian era, Frankenstein and the scientific progress of the Industrial Revolution. Look at George Romero and his Living Dead series, its calendar of political commentary (1968’s Night: civil rights; 1978’s Dawn: consumerism; 1985’s Day: cold war). Look at the torture porn of recent movies like The Devil’s Rejects and Hostel and Saw, all of them intrinsically coupled with the grainy photos from Abu Ghraib, the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading. And so apocalyptic thought, the end-of-days fantasy, is the emotive product of our present reality.

And The Road is its signature text.

Most readers will be familiar with the story of the man and the boy—starved, exhausted, poisoned by fear—trudging across an ashen wasteland, evading thieves and gangs of cannibals, seeking out civilization in a world ravaged by an unexplained cataclysm. The 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy offers a grim deposition about “the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth . . . the crushing black vacuum of the universe.” McCarthy has always written in the naturalistic mode—with man struggling against nature, trying to survive a universe at worst hostile and at best indifferent to his fate. And yet, despite the nightmarish circumstances, love stubbornly endures, making The Road McCarthy’s most hopeful (and popular) novel.

Years ago, while watching the sunsoaked, blood-soaked film The Proposition, I turned to my wife and said, “This is like a Cormac McCarthy novel.” I wasn’t just talking about the horses and the six-shooters, the unforgiving landscape—it was more the mythic tone, the moral relativity, the hazy boundary between civilization and savagery. So I was thrilled to hear that the film’s director, John Hillcoat, had taken on The Road as his next project. This was of course before the Pulitzer, before Oprah, before No Country for Old Men won an Oscar. Before the studio execs realized they had handed over one of the most anticipated adaptations of this time to a no-name director—and long before they began their post-production meddling. (The film, originally scheduled for release in November 2008, was pushed back to December, and then pushed back again to October 2009, and then pushed back again to Thanksgiving.) I didn’t know what to think when I stepped into the darkened theater and took my seat.

I didn’t know whether my love for the novel predisposed me to hate the film—or adore it. I didn’t know whether all the noise about post-production squabbling would interfere with my ability to remain open minded, allow the images on the screen to wash over me freely. I still didn’t know what to think, two hours later, when I staggered out of the theater jittery and short of breath. I felt carved out, mindless.

When someone laid a hand on my shoulder and asked what I thought, I nearly slugged him. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to hide somewhere, nurse a beer, recover. Because the film, like the book, is a visceral experience.

I was father to a newborn in 2006, when the novel first hit bookstores. Back then everything seemed a threat—traffic, dogs, germs, the corner of a coffee table—and I spent a lot of time clutching my son, saving him from the perceived dangers of the world. The novel struck an exposed nerve. When reading it, I felt—for the first time in a long time—fear. The paralyzing kind that kept me up all night as a child, certain that a pale-faced, long-fingered demon would come slinking out of my closet the moment I shut my eyes. And during the film that old fear welled up inside me again.

When a mossy-toothed cannibal lunges for the boy with a knife. When bodies dangle from the crossbeams of a barn. When the man teaches the boy how to blow his brains out with a pistol or when the two of them creak down those cellar steps into a coffin-black darkness. When you realize, from a faded billboard or an ash-coated can of Coke, that this world is not a long way from ours. Yet two of the most horrifying scenes in the novel—when the skylight of a semitrailer reveals stacks of desiccated corpses and when a mother gives birth to a child only to cook it on a spit over a fire—are absent. Even the reluctant reader must admire the way McCarthy stares into the abyss and doesn’t blink, doesn’t waver, as the film occasionally does.

Never is this more evident than in the closing scene. Its cloying piano music and damp-lipped smiles and heartwarming dialogue could have been lifted from an episode of Touched by an Angel. Moments like this, I suspect, are the fingerprints of studio execs uncomfortable with the more abbreviated and somewhat ambiguous conclusion to the novel.

I feel about the ending the same way I feel about the pushy score and hypercolor flashbacks and the flat, unnecessary voiceover—that the film seems to fear the novel, its stillness and silence, the pain and repetitive drudgery of the long walk, the passages that linger on snow and rain and fire. We need more of these quiet spaces. Quiet will make us more aware of the bitter cold, the gnawing hunger, the endless march. Quiet will make us listen to the hissing of the wind, gaze intently at the blackened fangs of trees. People whistle their way past graveyards for a reason: terror hides in the silence.

There is a definitive moment, early on in the film, when a forest rises up in a roiling wall of flame. The man and the boy stand a hundred yards away, statue-still, their faces dimly lit, overwhelmed by the terrible beauty of what they are witnessing. There are no voices—or pianos—telling us how to feel. The image is enough. The same is true of the man, in his ruined childhood home, slowly flipping over a flower-patterned couch cushion to reveal its unstained bottom. And though the film occasionally falls short of this aesthetic standard, I mostly felt awestruck by the ugliness and loveliness of the production design. Hillcoat (collaborating again with production designer Chris Kennedy) tours us through the fire-ravaged mountains of Oregon, the abandoned, winter-pale streets of Pittsburgh, the flood-damaged sections of New Orleans. There is not a spot of blue or green among the deadfall, the twisted snarls of metal. The arcade of shadows thrown by the world we live in becomes a character in itself, as cadaverous and gray-hued as the man and the boy.

Some have referred to The Road as science fiction. The genre it more closely resembles is the western—in which a hero brings moral order to a lawless territory. In both the novel and the film, the boy is repeatedly referred to as God, or the word of God, and in like manner he serves as the moral compass. “We’re the good guys, right?” is his refrain. It is he who demands they offer a can of pears to a starved old man, who insists they return the clothes to the thief the father has stripped naked and left for dead. He reminds his father how to be good, and in turn the man teaches him to be hopeful, repeatedly assuring him that they will not die, that everything will turn out all right. The love between them—they are “each the other’s world entire”—is the antidote to the debilitating grimness of the narrative. The father tells his son that they are “carrying the fire”—and perhaps it is this, the light they carry with them, that makes the story ultimately redemptive and meaningful to so many: the warmth of its emotional core.

This is of course a trope of the genre, and one of the many reasons we keep revisiting the end of the world on the page and the screen. Even as we despair, even as we lament the selfishness and destructiveness of man, even as we understand the world will keep spinning without us, we stubbornly hope that somewhere in this great swath of ruin, sometime in an unimaginable future, we will do good, we will make things right.

At the beginning and end of each semester, I asked students if they themselves accepted Darwin’s ideas, and every semester, predictably, about half said they did, and half said they did not—a ratio that did not budge much over the course of the term. Mostly, those who had come into the class believing that humans had evolved continued to so believe, and those who came in hewing to a biblical account of the origins of life still hewed to it when they left.

One hundred fifty years have now gone by since the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, an anniversary that has prompted new scholarly reflections on Darwin’s legacy. Many of these speeches and papers have focused on the bombshell elements of his theory—how it blew the human race away from the center of creation, generating psychic aftershocks that reverberated for decades. Even the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy marveled at the consequences to ethics and altruism posed by “the establishment” of a common origin of species.

That was 1910. And yet there are still plenty of people blithely walking around in a pre-Darwinian world, admitting shared origins with no one whose last name is not sapiens. According to the Pew Research Center, polls conducted over twenty years reveal little movement in the percentage of the public who accept evolution. In a one-to-one ratio that echoes my own classroom findings, about 40 to 50 percent of Americans say they believe in it, and a slightly smaller percentage say they do not. Those who believe that natural selection is the driver of evolution (Darwin’s keynote point) are firmly in the minority at 14 to 26 percent.

With numbers like these, I am unsurprised that the findings emerging from an obscure field of study called epigenetics have not yet rocked the world. They are rocking my world, though, and they are also mounting a profound challenge to the traditional systems of environmental regulation, which presume that toxic chemical exposures create health risks primarily through the accumulation of genetic damage (mutations) and that people can be categorized as inherently vulnerable or resistant. (“Genetics loads the gun; environment pulls the trigger.”) Moreover, in the way that it upends our understanding of heredity, epigenetics offers a whole new way of appreciating Darwin.

Epigenetics is the study of gene expression. Genes, of course, are made of DNA and are strung like beads along the chains of our chromosomes. Each cell in our bodies has a complete set. We humans have more than two hundred distinct kinds of cells, and they all contain the same number of genes. What makes a prostate gland cell so different in form and function from, say, a salivary gland cell is not the genes contained within them but the activity of those genes. During prenatal life and infancy—and again in puberty—immature cells become differentiated when long strings of genes that are not needed for the specific tasks of, say, semen production or saliva production are silenced. The rest are allowed to express themselves. Epigenetic regulation of the genome is what makes development possible.

Unlike the human genome, which has been exhaustively sequenced and mapped, plans to decode the human epigenome are still in the planning stage. What we know about it now is that the epigenome exists, in part, within various bobbles attached to our chromosomes. Previously ignored by cell biologists, these ornaments play a key role in regulating genetic activity. Some are simple methyl groups and others are proteins called histones. Together, they hush the genes whose messages are not needed at the moment. Methyl groups and histones are highly sensitive to messages streaming in from the outside world. In other words, the epigenome guides the genome and, in turn, responds to environmental signals.

Consider this: identical twins are epigenetically unique; attached to their identical chromosomes are nonidentical patterns of methyl groups and histones. Moreover, in a phenomenon called epigenetic drift, twins become more different with time. As revealed in a 2005 study, younger twins are more alike than older twins. As twins age and have different environmental experiences, their genetic expression diverges. Twins who spend more of their lives together in the same environment have gene-expression portraits that are more similar than twins who go their separate ways.

As an adoptee, I can’t help wondering if the reverse process might also be true. Growing up together in the same environment, do adopted siblings experience epigenetic convergence? Is this why, as girls, my genetically unrelated sister and I suffered from the same allergies, developed identical digestive problems, and wore the same eyeglass prescription? More generally, might it be possible that the longer people share a common environment, the more their genes act like each other? Do we carry on our chromosomes a kind of extra-genetic memory of all of our past habitats?

There is reason to think so. Environmental epigenetics examines how environmental exposures influence gene expression. What the results of this nascent field of study reveal is the vulnerability of early life. When epigenetic regulation is disrupted early on, the process of differentiation can be thrown off course in ways that may raise the risk for many diseases, including cancer. We already know that Inuit people in Greenland who acquire high body burdens of persistent pollutants have fewer methyl groups attached to their chromosomes than their lesser-exposed compatriots. This is not good. In the laboratory, hypomethylation is associated with chromosomal instability. We know from lab experiments that certain chemical exposures in prenatal life can alter developmental pathways and lead to altered architecture of adult structures (such as breasts). But our current system of environmental regulation—with its narrow focus on identifying chemicals that cause mutations—does not screen for chemicals that trigger changes in development. And our current system of genetic testing—with its narrow focus on identifying carriers of certain genes that bestow notably higher cancer risks—does not consider the regulation of genes by environmentally mediated signals either.

Perhaps most astonishing of all, epigenetic changes can be inherited. This means that the environmental exposures we experienced as children can have consequences not just for us but also for our descendants. More philosophically, it means that, contrary to current biological dogma, the nineteenth-century idea that acquired traits can be passed down the generations may not be so wrong-headed after all. And this brings us back to Darwin, who developed his ideas before we had a working understanding of genes and who was agnostic on the subject of the heritability of acquired characteristics. The reality of epigenetic inheritance hardly overturns natural selection—indeed it shows us another route by which species can adapt. Finally, it shines a spotlight on one of Darwin’s lesser-appreciated insights: that all of life is interrelated—not only by our common origins but also by our common ecology.

“The thing we find the most of in Puget Sound is artificial vanilla,” he says, scooping water into a cube-shaped collapsible bottle.

Keil is an associate professor in the Keil Lab of Aquatic Organic Geochemistry at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. What he’s demonstrating is a water-testing kit developed by the lab’s new nonprofit effort, SoundCitizen. The group aims to build a citizen-based water-sampling network for Puget Sound. Its inaugural project, Environmental Spices, offers water-sampling kits online at soundcitizen.org. Designed for individuals or school groups, the kits include a few test strips, a sample bottle, and a postage-paid mailing label. Participants use the strips to test basic water qualities, like pH levels, before collecting water samples to send back to the lab along with a GPS location. The Aquatic Organic Geochemistry Lab analyzes the sample for spices, industrial chemicals, and perfumes, and posts the results online. Researchers can identify more than two hundred commonly found chemical compounds including caffeine, cooking spices, and additives used in cigarettes and household cleaners.

The program is already popular, with more than seven hundred kits distributed and lots of coverage in regional media.

“We’ve kind of become a holiday favorite,” Keil says. SoundCitizen can literally track the holidays by what shows up in the Sound. After Thanksgiving and Christmas, the water is laced with thyme and vanilla, re-entering the sound via water treatment plants. After Valentine’s Day, an excess of ethyl vanilla—used in making chocolate—turns up. The Puget Sound Indians had a saying extolling the region’s abundance of shellfish: “When the tide is out, the table is set.” It seems that when the tide comes in, the table is set again—with leftovers.

It’s all in good fun, but the program has a more serious side, too. On many fronts, Puget Sound is threatened. Seattle’s industrial history, from paper pulp mills to Boeing, has left a legacy of point-source pollution. Agricultural chemicals and leaky septic systems sully the water; storm water runoff from rampant development pours household pollutants into the mix. Pharmaceuticals and artificial hormones, which aren’t removed by water treatment processes, are also turning up in water supplies. So why not test the water for toxic things, instead of harmless cinnamon-latte runoff?

According to Keil, harmlessness—and humor—is exactly the point. SoundCitizen discourages people from using the testing kits to support water quality activism. That’s not because they’re unconcerned about water quality. Much of their research tracks emerging pollutants such as lilial and muskonate, fragrance additives that can become toxic in large quantities. But their main goal is education.

“We’re always telling kids, ‘everything you do is bad,’” Keil says. “We take kids out and talk to them about the environment and they think one of two things. They think: ‘People older than me have screwed up the environment.’ Or they think: ‘Everything is bad—I don’t even want to think about this.’” SoundCitizen wants to avoid that. Their kits provide a way of demonstrating the connection between people and the watershed without being a total bummer.

“I don’t mind if people laugh at us,” Keil declares, water sample in hand. “I don’t mind if kids laugh about vanilla pee or the guys in the bar laugh about whales getting Viagra. They’ve understood the concept of connection when they didn’t before.”

Knowing that I was also studying geology, Tom pointed me immediately to Angle of Repose and, subsequently, the biography of Bernard DeVoto, and then all the rest of it: enough books, it seemed, to last a lifetime. A book a year is a modest and sustainable quota for a writer, and even more modest for a practical and committed reader; would not anything more, on the reader’s part, be classified as stalking?

This was one of the things that most impressed me about Stegner, beyond the obvious vibrancy of his voice, and the specificity of his observations, and the confidence he exhibited with pace and tone: the fact that he was accomplished and artistic in both the broad and relatively gentle waters of nonfiction and the turbulent mountain-rivers of fiction. And though I was not an intellectual, I respected and admired the fact that he so clearly was one, and at a time when there was not necessarily an overwhelming degree of respect for such a temperament. Such integrity of spirit—the calm and resolute insistence upon being one’s self, under any conditions—seemed to me, and still does, to be one of the definitions of courage—the low-level step-by-step progression through the cumulative days, avoiding, at every turn, any possible shortcuts whatsoever.

Certainly, there have been writers who have worked with greater lyricism, word-for-word and sentence-for-sentence—who have produced more fluid and varied sounds from the language, and more vibrant imagery, and more intricate story turns—but Stegner’s particular genius, I think, was at the cultural and even spiritual intersection of geology and geography—in the shape of things at the surface, and the contrast, then, with what might lie below. Consider such geomorphology in “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” not just the emplacement of some of the elements we might view as requisite in “nature” writing (“The earth was full of animals—field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes”), but in his grounding of the reader within a space—a spaciousness—and thereby setting the boundaries for the story, the essay. A mapmaker, always:

The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from knowing intimately the creatures of the earth; I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea.

Time and again, his work includes landscape, and the connection between humans and that landscape, celebrating the far and relatively untouched, unmanipulated backcountry—the pristine benchmark of American wilderness—while also understanding and celebrating no less those frontcountry farms and ranches across which humankind had been spilling, the intersection of history and landscape.

TODAY THE WIND is howling, here in Montana’s Yaak Valley, bending the still-green marsh grass almost flat, swirling it like long locks of flowing hair. It’s the Fourth of July, and I just don’t feel like driving down into town and being around so many people. Instead, I’m delighted to be enmeshed in the steady, cool forest-wind and occasional birdsong of the newly hatched birds: tiny chatters of sora rails, as if laughing at a joke told among themselves. No one else for half-a-hundred miles is what it feels like, and it is almost true. Skipping the parade to work.

And doing so—laboring on this essay not so much about what Wallace Stegner means to me, but what I think he means to the country, in all his various personas—award-winning novelist and essayist; environmental activist and spokesperson for the seminal concept in the American conservation movement, the preservation of wilderness; and founder of the powerhouse creative writing program at Stanford University—I find that I’ve come without any subtle run-up or introduction straight to the heart of the question, Why do any of us do what we do?

I can’t imagine that the desire for acclaim was the sole or even primary fuel for such sustained and varied excellence, for surely such thirst would eventually have been slaked or muted. Instead, he kept on going, to the point where his life, in so many ways, seems almost like a parody of success. And then, as everyone must, he left, while the residue of where-he-was and what-he-did remains.

For a while some of us who looked to him for guidance in environmental matters fretted after he was gone. We were worried he would be forgotten by the next generation, and never known by the one after that. In the first years after his death in 1993, we watched and waited—keepers of the flame. It seemed that we could begin to see his legacy spilling through the cracks and draining away, and it was a fear that was sharpened by the old story or perception—dare I say myth?—that even in life, Stegner was, if not ignored, underread and underappreciated, particularly by readers and reviewers in the urban East.

Maybe he was. But perched here at the centennial of his birth, looking back before leaning into the deeper waters of the next hundred years, maybe not. There’s little doubt that he felt that way, and that we-his-fans felt it; but the truth is he somehow managed to sell 570,000 copies of Angle of Repose alone. It seems plausible to me that one day that number will be a million. If that’s obscurity and underrepresentation, I know more than a few writers who would be thrilled with being so overlooked.

To haul off and exit the stage with a Pulitzer as well as a National Book Award, to have taught at the greatest universities in the world, helping raise such an astounding intergenerational crop of writers (Evan Connell, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, James Houston, to name only a very few), to have served in Camelot, working in the Kennedy administration on, among other things, early drafts of the Wilderness Act, which would subsequently protect 3 percent of the American landmass—well, looking back, I think almost anyone would have to call it a good day’s work.

In Philip Fradkin’s biography of Stegner, Wallace Stegner and the American West, there is an excerpt of Jack Miles’s review, from the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, of Angle of Repose. The review deals in part with the habitual East-versus-West straw man by which Stegner and his work were so often discussed in his lifetime. Miles wrote of the “rough spirit” of the West that shaped Stegner, who “first fled it, then served it and turned . . . [it] into his art.” He spoke of “a Stegnerian habit of saving what we can from the Western wreckage.” He said, of Stegner, “[he] was calmly putting things together when I believed, instinctively, that what strong writers did was tear things apart.”

This is what great literature does: acknowledges loss, either through the lamentation of what has come and gone, or even the celebration of what-was, or what-is, or what-will-be: assembling stories of meaning and intensity from the absence of some things, or the presence of the wrong things, or the eventual going away of good things. Loss or impermanence is to me the foundation of it all, and the manner in which artists deal with that condition is what makes all the difference.

And in the case of Stegner’s beloved natural world, there was very much over the course of his life a net loss going on. What he did in the face of that knowledge—trying to hold on to what he found valuable, and trying to help put back together that which was broken—seems courageous and heroic, seems easily a value one could live one’s life by; and a good life, a meaningful life, at that.

WITH SO MANY BOOKS by Stegner, and such varied books, it really doesn’t matter where a reader begins, or in what order he or she reads the books. Part of the beauty of the mass and density and quality of Stegner’s bibliography is that it’s like a planet; you can land on it anywhere and begin making immediate discoveries. I recall branching off in several directions—The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the famed Wilderness Letter, etc.—becoming more and more impressed by the range of his talent and depth of his passion, as well as his constant commitment to excellence, sentence by dignified sentence. But these days, when I allow myself the indulgence of thinking of Stegner as the mortal man rather than the literary artist, Crossing to Safety is the book that intrigues and impresses me the most, for no other reason than that he wrote it not as a young or middle-aged man, but instead as a bona fide old man. I think that with regard to improving with age, Stegner accomplished at least as much with Crossing to Safety as Hemingway did with The Old Man and the Sea. I find that thrilling. I feel guilty for reading the text with such an awareness intruding upon a purer textual appreciation of the book, but I can’t help it.

I know nothing, or next-to-nothing, about the circumstances in Stegner’s life while he worked on this book, which is set in New England rather than the mountain West of which he was so accustomed to providing fluent descriptions—this in itself makes it a bravura performance, an old writer working in a new land, new from a literary standpoint, at least. And although the facts of his life would certainly be interesting, I don’t see how they can be any more so than the emotional map I have already constructed in my own imagination for how he approached that novel, so late in life, and with so much acclaim already behind him, and with every passion and power he had ever known—and there had been so many—in rapid flight from him now.

And yet something in him—something not darkly or crassly ambitious, but instead, something noble, some commitment to what in olden times was called the Muse—still burned and challenged him, tempted him to throw away his infirmities or diminishments and pursue one more time, one last time, the glory of excellence, and the intoxicating, transformative rewards of novel writing: the glory of an almost impossible challenge well met, and exceeded.

By that age he would have known precisely how difficult, how exhausting, the journey would be, and how easy it would be to fail, and how great the risk of failure—the capping of a great career with the humiliation of mediocrity rather than the ascendancy of further triumph. But he set out on the journey anyway. As if his desire and belief in the importance of the sustained creation of another, better-made world was for him the rootstock of all the other values for which he is so well known.

All the other things were important, too: the reasoned, passionate, intelligent articulation in his essays, the necessary political gruntwork of showing up and speaking out, and, as a teacher, the passing on of beliefs, techniques, values, and general knowledge to future generations; but I love that further into the second half of his life, he returned to the novel, and that he produced a great one—that he was fortunate enough to have one more story he wanted to tell.

STEGNER-THE-MAN could get angry easily, evidently. There were numerous dust-ups with reviewers, students, and fellow writers, which are instructive I think to we-the-living for the utter uninterestingness they possess, once the all-important present has so rapidly become the past. What I find fascinating is how the different extremes respected him—the “assemblers,” like Ivan Doig and Wendell Berry, who were concerned with reformation and social betterment, and the hip, like Ken Kesey, the deep spirits, like Terry Tempest Williams, and the laconic and hyperintelligent, like Tom McGuane. The sacred and the profane were deeply influenced by him alike.

Which brings me back to this idea of tearing down or building up: I think this may be the grand theory of unification, how the faces of respectability, such as Tillie Olsen and Scott Turow—the latter who helped endow the writing center that bears Stegner’s name—and the faces of gleeful disrespectability, such as Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder, have coalesced in different ways around Stegner’s teachings and legacy. They have all, I think, been interested in trying to put things back together, or hold things together, whenever they picked up a pen.

I simply don’t have Stegner’s drive, and, gratefully, I don’t have whatever inner wounds drove him so hard. Within the triumvirate of writing, activism, and family, I find myself trying to balance those first two things, particularly, with the other work, and with what seems to me these days to be equally important: sitting quietly, doing nothing at all. Why is that, and did he ever feel that temptation? The world certainly was no more unsettled, no more revolutionary, then than now.

I JUST GOT UP and went out to pull some weeds, to take a break from essay writing, and was struck by a couple of thoughts: one being that at this time of year, I prefer picking weeds to writing an essay, and the other being a deep mental exhaustion when I try to consider how in the world Stegner got all the stuff done that he did.

There is a feeling I get sometimes, here in midlife, when I am moved by a moment of perceived if not actual clarity. In those moments, it seems that with any of my enthusiasms, much less my obsessions, I am venturing into some sort of funnel, like those weirs that humans have used to trap salmon for tens of thousands of years. I want to draw back from such narrowing. When I look at Stegner’s life I see how every time he was faced with such a choice, he pushed forward, sometimes even bulled forward. It does not appear that he stopped to rest much.

I think occasionally—not overmuch—of the ridiculousness or at least insignificance of almost everything when measured against the finality of the long dirt nap—whether one was read “enough,” or appreciated “enough”! What really is the bottom line? Maybe it is only how a man’s or woman’s friends and family remember him or her.

Today, the wind keeps bending the luminous green marsh grass, as it does every July, and I find myself wondering: whether teaching, or writing, or working at activism, wouldn’t any of us, at the end, trade any of it for one more afternoon spent picking berries with loved ones? Then I consider this blasphemous question: what if, with all his energies and efforts—all his accomplishments—he was wrong to have worked so hard, and to have produced so much? When I am at my desk with my head down, darkening the pages, I sometimes worry that he was, at least in part. When I am in the mountains—particularly mountains he helped protect—I remember, or believe, that he wasn’t. He was noble and exemplary in every way—successful at more things than most ever even attempt or fail at—but in the end he loved the land, and his successes and efforts bought those of us who love these same things the luxury of even asking such questions.

The only possible answer now seems clear: we do what we do—spend our long hours writing or teaching or working—to preserve or create that which we find beautiful.

Something he touched upon, and grappled with, still touches some of us today, and here we are, still reading his books a hundred years after his birth. I feel confident we will be reading his books a hundred years after his death; that for his canon, there will be no angle of repose, but instead his texts will always be carried forward, from one generation to the next, for as long as there is a geography of hope, or the idea of a geography of hope. For as long as people can read.

I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. This story may sound familiar, but its significance has, thus far, been lost on the dominant culture, so it bears repeating: when the first settlers arrived here maybe 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. Salmon ran in runs so thick you couldn’t see the bottoms of rivers, so thick people were afraid to put their boats in for fear they would capsize, so thick they would keep people awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, so thick you could hear the runs for miles before you could see them. Whales were commonplace in the nearby ocean. Forests were thick with frogs, newts, salamanders, birds, elk, bears. And of course huge ancient redwood trees.

Now I count myself blessed when I see two salmon in what we today call Mill Creek. Another Tolowa staple, Pacific lampreys, are in bad shape. Just three years ago you could not hold a human conversation outside at night in the spring, and now I hear maybe five or six frogs at night. Salamanders, newts, songbirds, all are equivalently gone. The rivers are poisoned with pesticides and herbicides. All in less than two centuries.

Why? Or, perhaps more important, how?

Only the most arrogant and ignorant among us would say something that implies that all humans are destructive, and that the dominant (white) culture is the most destructive simply because somehow indigenous peoples around the world were too stupid to invent backhoes and chainsaws, too backward to dominate their human and nonhuman neighbors with the efficiency and viciousness of the dominant culture. They might even try to argue that the Tolowa weren’t actually living sustainably, even though they lived here for at least 12,500 years. But when 12,500 years of living in place won’t convince them, it becomes pretty clear that evidence is secondary, and that there are, rather, ideological reasons the person cannot accept that humans have ever lived sustainably. One of these ideological reasons is very clear: if you can convince yourself that humans are inherently destructive, then you allow yourself the most convenient of all excuses not to work to stop this culture from destroying the planet: it’s simply in our nature to destroy, and you can’t fight biology, so let’s not fuss about all these little extinctions, and could someone please pass the TV remote? It’s an odious position, but a lot of people take it.

If we want to stop this culture from killing the planet, we might instead try asking how so many indigenous cultures lived in place for so long without destroying their landbases.

There are many differences between indigenous and nonindigenous ways of being in the world, but I want to mention two here. The first is that the indigenous had and have serious long-term relationships with the plants and animals with whom they share their landscape. Ray Rafael, who has written extensively on the concept of wilderness, has said that Native Americans hunted, gathered, and fished “using methods that would be sustainable over centuries and even millennia. They did not alter their environment beyond what could sustain them indefinitely. They did not farm, but they managed the environment. But it was different from the way that people try to manage it now, because they stayed in relationship with it.”

That last phrase is key. What would a society look like that was planning on being in that particular place five hundred years from now? What would an economics look like? If you knew for a fact that your descendants five hundred years from now would live on the same landbase you inhabit now, how would that affect your relationship to sources of water? How would that affect your relationship with topsoil? With forests? Would you produce waste products that are detrimental to the soil? Would you poison your water sources (or allow them to be poisoned)? Would you allow global warming to continue? If the very lives of your children and their children depended on your current actions—and of course they do—how would you act differently than you do?

The other difference I want to mention—and essentially every traditional indigenous person with whom I have ever spoken has said that it is the fundamental difference between western and indigenous peoples—is that even the most open Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to something real. I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria about this, and he said, “I think the primary thing is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduce things to objects, whether they’re living or not. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.” That brings to mind a great line by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees, you see trees, you’ll treat them differently. If when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon, and, of course, for women: if when I look at women I see objects, I’m going to treat them one way. If when I look at women I see women, I’ll treat them differently. And if when I look at this particular woman I see this particular woman, I’ll treat her differently still.

Here’s where people usually ask, “Okay, so how do I listen to the natural world?” When people ask me this, I always begin by asking them if they have ever made love. If so, I ask whether the other person always had to say, “put this here,” or “do that now,” or did they sometimes read their lover’s body, listen to the unspoken language of the flesh? Having established that one can communicate without words, I then ask if they have ever had any nonhuman friends (a.k.a. pets). If so, how did the dog or cat let you know that her food dish was empty? I used to have a dog friend who would look at me, look at the food dish, look at me, look at the food dish, until finally the message would get across to me.

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like.

Two earlier pieces of writing inspired by the Andrews Forest residencies have appeared in Orion: Robert Michael Pyle’s “The Long Haul” (September/October 2004) and Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Web” (March/April 2007).

I TOUCH TREES, as others might stroke the fenders of automobiles or finger silk fabrics or fondle cats. Trees do not purr, do not flatter, do not inspire a craving for ownership or power. They stand their ground, immune to merely human urges. Saplings yield under the weight of a hand and then spring back when the hand lifts away, but mature trees accept one’s touch without so much as a shiver. While I am drawn to all ages and kinds, from maple sprouts barely tall enough to hold their leaves off the ground to towering sequoias with their crowns wreathed in fog, I am especially drawn to the ancient, battered ones, the survivors.

Recently I spent a week in the company of ancient trees. The season was October and the site was the drainage basin of Lookout Creek, on the western slope of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. Back in my home ground of southern Indiana, the trees are hardwoods—maples and beeches and oaks, hickories and sycamores—and few are allowed to grow for as long as a century without being felled by ax or saw. Here, the ruling trees are Douglas firs, western hemlocks, western red cedars, and Pacific yews, the oldest of them ranging in age from five hundred to eight hundred years, veterans of countless fires, windstorms, landslides, insect infestations, and floods.

ON THE FIRST MORNING of my stay, I follow a trail through moist bottomland toward Lookout Creek, where I plan to spend half an hour or so in meditation. The morning fog is thick, so the treetops merge with gray sky. Condensation drips from every needle and leaf. My breath steams. Lime-green lichens, some as long as a horse’s tail, dangle from branches. Set off against the somber greens and browns of the conifers, the yellow and red leaves of vine maples, bigleaf maples, and dogwoods appear luminous in spite of the damp. Shelf fungi jut from the sides of old stumps like tiny balconies, and hemlock sprigs glisten atop nurse logs. The undergrowth is as dense as a winter pelt.

Along the way, I reach out to brush my fingers over dozens of big trees, but I keep moving, intent on my destination. Then I come upon a Douglas fir whose massive trunk, perhaps four feet in diameter at chest height, is surrounded by scaffolding, which provides a stage for rope-climbing by scientists and visiting schoolchildren. Something about this tree—its patience, its generosity, its dignity—stops me. I place my palms and forehead against the furrowed, moss-covered bark, and rest there for a spell. Gradually the agitation of travel seeps out of me and calm seeps in. Only after I stand back and open my eyes, and notice how the fog has begun to burn off, do I realize that my contact with this great tree must have lasted fifteen or twenty minutes.

I continue on to a gravel bar on Lookout Creek, a jumble of boulders, cobbles, pebbles, and grit scoured loose from the volcanic plateau that forms the base of the Cascade Mountains. Because these mountains are young, the slopes are steep and the water moves fast. Even the largest boulders have been tumbled and rounded. Choosing one close to a riffle, I sit cross-legged and half close my eyes, and I am enveloped in water sounds, a ruckus from upstream and a burbling from downstream. Now and again I hear the thump of a rock shifting in the flow, a reminder that the whole mountain range is sliding downhill, chunk by chunk, grain by grain.

Although I have tried meditating for shorter or longer stretches since my college days, forty years ago, I have never been systematic about the practice, nor have I ever been good at quieting what Buddhists call the “monkey mind.” Here beside Lookout Creek, however, far from my desk and duties, with no task ahead of me but that of opening myself to this place, I settle quickly. I begin by following my breath, the oldest rhythm of flesh, but soon I am following the murmur of the creek, and I am gazing at the bright leaves of maples and dogwoods that glow along the thread of the stream like jewels on a necklace, and I am watching light gleam on water shapes formed by current slithering over rocks, and for a spell I disappear, there is only this rapt awareness.

EACH MORNING at first light I repeat the journey to Lookout Creek, and each time I stop along the way to embrace the same giant Douglas fir, which smells faintly of moist earth. I wear no watch. I do not hurry. I stay with the tree until it lets me go.

When at length I lean away, I touch my forehead and feel the rough imprint of the bark. I stare up the trunk and spy dawn sky fretted by branches. Perspective makes the tops of the surrounding, smaller trees appear to lean toward this giant one, as if conferring. The cinnamon-colored bark is like a rugged landscape in miniature, with flat ridges separated by deep fissures. Here and there among the fissures, spider webs span the gaps. The plates are furred with moss. A skirt of sloughed bark and fallen needles encircles the base of the trunk. Even in the absence of wind, dry needles the color of old pennies rain steadily down, ticking against my jacket.

I don’t imagine that my visits mean anything to the Douglas fir. I realize it’s nonsensical to speak of a tree as patient or generous or dignified merely because it stands there while researchers and children clamber up ropes into its highest limbs. But how can I know a tree’s inwardness? Certainly there is intelligence here, and in the forest as a whole, if by that word we mean the capacity for exchanging information and responding appropriately to circumstances. How does a tree’s intelligence compare with ours? What can we learn from it? And why, out of the many giants thriving here, does this one repeatedly draw me to an embrace?

The only intelligence I can examine directly is my own and, indirectly, that of my species. We are a contradictory lot. Our indifference to other species, and even to our own long-term well-being, is demonstrated everywhere one looks, from the depleted oceans to the heating atmosphere, from poisoned wetlands to eroding farmlands and forests killed by acid rain. Who can bear in mind this worldwide devastation and the swelling catalogue of extinctions without grieving? And yet it’s equally clear that we are capable of feeling sympathy, curiosity, and even love toward other species and toward the Earth. Where does this impulse come from, this sense of affiliation with rivers and ravens, mountains and mosses? How might it be nurtured? What role might it play in moving us to behave more caringly on this beleaguered planet?

These are the questions I find myself brooding about as I sit in meditation beside Lookout Creek. One is not supposed to brood while meditating, of course, so again and again I let go of thoughts and return my awareness to the water sounds, the radiant autumn leaves, the wind on my cheek, the stony cold chilling my sitting bones. And each morning, for shorter or longer spells, the fretful I quiets down, turns transparent, vanishes.

Eventually I stir, roused by the haggle of ravens or the chatter of squirrels or the scurry of deer—other minds in the forest—and I make my way back along the trail to the zone of electricity and words. As I walk, it occurs to me that meditation is an effort to become for a spell more like a tree, open to whatever arises, without judging, without remembering the past or anticipating the future, fully present in the moment. The taste of that stillness refreshes me. And yet I do not aspire to dwell in such a condition always. For all its grandeur and beauty, for all its half-millennium longevity, the Douglas fir cannot ponder me, cannot reflect or remember or imagine—can only be. Insofar as meditation returns us to that state of pure, unreflective being, it is a respite from the burden of ceaseless thought. When we surface from meditation, however, we are not turning from reality to illusion, as some spiritual traditions would have us believe; we are reclaiming the full powers of mind, renewed by our immersion in the realm of mountains and rivers, wind and breath.

AT MIDDAY, sunlight floods the gravel bar on Lookout Creek, illuminating strands of spider filament that curve from one boulder to another over an expanse of rushing water. At first I can’t fathom how spiders managed this engineering feat. The wind might have blown them one direction but not back again, and yet at least a dozen gossamer threads zigzag between the massive stones. Then I guess that the spiders, after attaching the initial strand, must climb back and forth, adding filaments. The stones they stitch together are as knobby and creased as the haunches of elephants. Even in still air, butter-yellow maple leaves come sashaying down. A pewter sheen glints from the bark of young Douglas firs tilting out over the stream.

Unconsciously, I resort to human terms for describing what I see, thus betraying another quirk of our species. We envision bears and hunters and wandering sisters in the stars. We spy dragons in the shapes of clouds, hear mournfulness in the calls of owls. Reason tells us that such analogies are false. For all its delicious sounds, the creek does not speak, but merely slides downhill, taking the path of least resistance, rubbing against whatever it meets along the way. Boulders have nothing to do with elephants, lichens are not horsetails, moss is not fur, spiders are not engineers, ravens do not haggle, and trees do not confer. Scientists are schooled to avoid such anthropomorphism. Writers are warned against committing the “pathetic fallacy,” which is the error of projecting human emotions or meanings onto nature. The caution is worth heeding. Yet if we entirely forgo such analogies, if we withhold our metaphors and stories, we estrange ourselves from the universe. We become mere onlookers, the sole meaning-bearing witnesses of a meaningless show.

But who could sit here, on this gravel bar beside Lookout Creek, and imagine that we are the sole source of meaning? Against a halcyon blue sky, the spires of trees stand out with startling clarity, their fringe of lichens appearing incandescent. Moths and gnats flutter above the stream, chased by dragonflies. The creek is lined by drift logs in various states of decay, from bone-gray hulks to rotting red lumps. Wet boulders gleam as if lit from within. Cobbles jammed against one another look like the heads of a crowd easing downstream. The muscular current, twisting over rocks, catches and tosses the light. The banks on either side blaze with the salmon-pink leaves of dogwoods, those western relatives of the beloved understory tree of my Indiana forests. Everything in sight is exquisite—the stones of all sizes laid against one another just so, the perforated leaves of red alders, the fallen needles gathered in pockets along the shore, the bending grasses, the soaring trees.

Only cosmic arrogance tempts us to claim that all this reaching for sunlight, nutrients, and water means nothing except what we say it means. But if it bears a grander significance, what might that be, and what gives rise to such meaning? What power draws the elements together and binds them into a spider or a person, a fern or a forest? If we answer, “Life,” we give only a name, not an explanation.

THOSE WHO FANCY that humans are superior to the rest of nature often use “tree-hugger” as a term of ridicule, as if to feel the allure of trees were a perverted form of sensuality or a throwback to our simian ancestry. Of course, many who decry tree-hugging don’t believe we have a simian ancestry, and so perhaps what they fear is a reversion to paganism. And they may have a point. The religions that started in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—are all desert faiths, created by people who lived in the open. Theirs is a sky god, who would be eclipsed by a forest canopy. In every civilization influenced by these faiths, trees have been cut down not merely to secure wood for cooking and building or to clear ground for agriculture or to open vistas around settlements where predators might lurk, but to reveal the heavens.

Worship of a sky god has been costly to our planet. Religions that oppose the heavenly to the earthly, elevating the former and scorning the latter, are in effect denying that we emerge from and wholly depend on nature. If you think of the touchable, eatable, climbable, sexy, singing, material world as fallen, corrupt, and sinful, then you are likely to abuse it. You are likely to say that we might as well cut down the last old-growth forests, drain the last swamps, catch the last tuna and cod, burn the last drops of oil, since the end time is coming, when the elect few will be raptured away to the immortal realm, and everything earthly will be utterly erased.

But our language preserves a countervailing wisdom. In Latin, materia means stuff, anything substantial, and in particular it means wood. Materia in turn derives from mater, which means mother. In the collective imagination that gave rise to these meanings, trees were understood to epitomize matter, and matter was understood to be life-giving. Perhaps we could tap into this wisdom by recovering another word that derives from mater—matrix, which means womb. Instead of speaking about “nature” or “the environment,” terms which imply some realm apart from us, perhaps we should speak of Earth as our matrix, our mother, the source and sustainer of life.

It is easy to feel nurtured among these ancient trees. I breathe the forest. I drink its waters. I take in the forest through all my senses. In order to survive here for any length of time, I would need to wear the forest, its fur and skin and fiber; I would need to draw my food from what lives here alongside me; I would need to burn its fallen branches for cooking and for keeping warm; I would need to frame my shelter with its wood and clay and stone. Above all, I would need to learn to think like the forest, learn its patterns, obey its requirements, align myself with its flow.

There are no boundaries between the forest and the cosmos, or between myself and the forest, and so the intelligence on display here is continuous with the intelligence manifest throughout the universe and with the mind I use to apprehend and speak of it.

ONE MORNING beside Lookout Creek, enveloped as usual in watery music, I sit leaning against a young red alder that has sprouted in the gravel bar, its leaves nibbled into lace by insects. Everything here either starts as food or winds up as food. None of the alders growing on this ever-shifting bank is thicker than a baseball bat. The next big flood will scour them away. Beside me, the sinewy roots of an upturned stump seem to mimic the muscular current in the stream. The bar is littered with gray and ruddy stones pockmarked by holes that betray the volcanic origins of this rubble.

Where better than such a place to recognize that the essence of nature is flow—of lava, electrons, water, wind, breath. Materia, matter, the seemingly solid stuff we encounter—trees, stones, bears, bones—is actually fluid, constantly changing, like water shapes in the current. The Psalmist tells us, “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs,” and Dōgen, a thirteenth-century Zen teacher, proclaims that mountains are always walking. Both speak truly. Mountains do move, arising and eroding away over geological time, just as organisms grow and decay, species evolve, tectonic plates shift, stars congeal and burn and expire, entire galaxies shine for a spell and then vanish. Nothing in nature is fixed.

Conservationists have often been accused of wishing to freeze the land in some favored condition—for example, the American continent as it was before European colonization. Back when maps described old-growth as large saw-timber, scientists spoke of forests reaching climax, as if at some point the flow would cease. But we now realize that no such stasis is possible, even if it were desirable. If flux is the nature of nature, however, we still must make distinctions among the kinds of change. We cannot speak against the damage caused by human behavior unless we distinguish between natural change—for example, the long history of extinctions—and anthropogenic change—for example, the recent acceleration in extinctions due to habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and other disturbances caused by humans. The capacity to make such a distinction, and to act on it, may be as unique to our species as the capacity to use symbolic language.

Thoughts flow, along with everything else, even in the depths of meditation. And yet the human mind seems compelled to imagine fixity—heaven, nirvana, Plato’s ideal realm, eternal God—and the human heart yearns for permanence. Why else do we treasure diamonds and gold? Why else do Creationists cling to the notion that all species were made in exactly their present form? Why else do we search for scientific “laws” underlying the constant flux of the universe?

Our yearning for the fixed, like our craving for dominion over nature, may be another expression of our fear of aging and death. This occurs to me as I sit, transfixed, beside the narrowest, noisiest passage in the riffles on Lookout Creek. A dozen dead snags tilt above my head, their bare limbs like the sparse whiskers on an old man’s chin. Upstream, a gigantic Douglas fir has fallen across the creek, its trunk still as straight as when it was alive. Downstream, another giant has fallen, this one snapped in the middle. I can’t help imagining one of the looming snags suddenly toppling onto me and snapping my thread of thought, scattering this congregation of elements and notions bearing my name.

HIGHER UP THE VALLEY of Lookout Creek, in a grove of five-hundred-year-old Douglas firs and western hemlocks, a hundred or so logs have been placed side by side on the ground, labeled with aluminum tags, and fitted with instruments to measure their rate and manner of decay. Designed to continue for two centuries, this research aims to document, among other things, the role of dead wood in forest ecology and in the sequestering of carbon.

On a visit to the site, I stroke the moss-covered logs, touch the rubbery fungi that sprout from every surface, peer into the boxy traps that catch flying insects and fallen debris, and lean close to the tubes that capture the logs’ exhalations. The only breathing I detect is my own. I’m intrigued that scientists are studying decomposition, for as an artist I usually think about composition —the making of something shapely and whole out of elements. A musician composes with notes, a painter with colors, a writer with letters and words, much as life orchestrates carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other ingredients into organisms. These organisms—trees, fungi, ravens, humans—persist for a while, change over time, and eventually dissolve into their constituents, which will be gathered up again into living things.

Art and life both draw energy from sunlight, directly or indirectly, to counter entropy by increasing order. Right now, for example, I’m running on the sunshine bound up in pancakes and maple syrup. Organisms interact biophysically with everything in their ecosystem, and ultimately with the whole universe. By contrast, the symbolic structures that humans create—songs, stories, poems, paintings, photographs, films, diagrams, mathematical formulas, computer codes—convey influence only insofar as they are read, heard, or otherwise perceived by humans. What happens when we turn our interpretive powers on living organisms? Does raven, Douglas fir, spider, or lichen mean anything different, or anything more, when it is taken up into human consciousness?

What we think or imagine about other species clearly influences our behavior toward them—as notions about the wickedness of wolves led to their extermination throughout much of their historic range, and as new understanding about the role of predators has led to the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone and elsewhere. But aside from this practical impact, does our peculiar sort of mind bear any greater significance in the scheme of things? Is it merely an accidental result of mechanical processes, an adaptive feature that has powered our—perhaps fleeting—evolutionary success? Would the universe lose anything vital if our species suddenly vanished?

We can’t know the answer to those questions, despite the arguments of prophets and philosophers. We can only form hunches, and, right or wrong, these will influence the spirit of our work and the tenor of our lives. For what it’s worth, my hunch is that what we call mind is not a mere side effect of material evolution, but is fundamental to reality. It is not separate from what we call matter, but is a revelation of the inwardness of things. I suspect that our symbol-wielding intelligence is a manifestation of the creative, shaping energy that drives the cosmos, from the dance of electrons to the growth of trees. If this is so, then our highest calling may be to composition—paying attention to some portion of the world, reflecting on what we have perceived, and fashioning a response in words or numbers or paint or song or some other expressive medium. Our paintings on cave walls, our photos of quasars, our graphs and sonnets and stories may be the gifts we return for the privilege of sojourning here on this marvelous globe.

IF INTELLIGENCE MEANS the ability to take in and respond to information, then all organisms possess it, whether animal or plant, for they exchange signals and materials with their surroundings constantly. If intelligence means the capacity for solving puzzles or using language, then surely the ravens that clamor above me or the wolves that roam the far side of the mountains possess it. But if we are concerned with the power not merely to reason or use language, but to discern and define meanings, to evaluate actions in light of ethical principles, to pass on knowledge across generations through symbolic forms—then we are speaking about a kind of intelligence that appears to be the exclusive power of humans, at least on this planet.

Some contemplative traditions maintain that this meaning-making capacity is a curse, that it divorces us from reality, enclosing us in a bubble of abstractions. It’s easy to sympathize with this view, when one considers our history of feuds and frauds. Cleverness alone does not make us wise. Yet here among these great trees and boisterous mountain streams, I sense that our peculiar sort of mind might also be a blessing, not only to us but to the forest, to other creatures, to life on Earth, and even to the universe.

I recognize the danger of hubris. It’s flattering to suppose, as many religions do, that humans occupy a unique place in the order of things. The appeal of an idea is not evidence for its falsity, however, but merely a reason for caution. Cautiously, therefore: Suppose that the universe is not a machine, as nineteenth-century science claimed, but rather a field of energy, as twentieth-century science imagined. Suppose that mind is not some private power that each of us contains, but rather a field of awareness that contains us—and likewise encompasses birds, bees, ferns, trees, salamanders, spiders, dragonflies, and all living things, permeates mountains and rivers and galaxies, each kind offering its own degree and variety of awareness, even stars, even stones.

What if our role in this all-embracing mind is to gaze back at the grand matrix that birthed us, and translate our responses into symbols? What if art, science, literature, and our many other modes of expression feed back into the encompassing mind, adding richness and subtlety? If that is our distinctive role, no wonder we feel this urge to write, to paint, to measure and count, to set strings vibrating, to tell stories, to dance and sing.