There’s a cultural document with which you are almost certainly familiar that for most of my life has occupied a place central to my cosmogony — the nature aesthetic, the trickster worship, the sharp inhalation of joy that each new moment in life
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I posted a screed on Burning Man five years ago. Since then I have found little reason to amend said screed.
It’s pasted below. For those of you with the tl;dr reflex, here’s the nut: “Faced with one of the last truly wild landscapes left in the
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… (continues)We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life. We are willfully becoming poor J.B.R., losing the ability to order and name and therefore losing a connection to and a place in the living world.
No wonder so few of us can
Last night, as some in the blog wannabe-pundit world blamed African-American voters for the passage of California’s Proposition 8, a couple of African-American guys struck up a conversation with me in front of CNN’s Los Angeles headquarters on
… (continues)I'm a natural history and environmental writer, an editor and photographer. I've lived in upstate New York, the SF Bay Area, Washington, DC, the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles. My writing has appeared in publications ranging from Camas and Orion to Bay Nature, California Wild, the Boston Globe, and about thirty daily papers nationwide when I was a syndicated garden writer for the Knight-Ridder chain. No, I never got to meet the talking car.
I've traveled extensively in the Mojave, Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, as well as in the steppes and slickrock country of the Colorado Plateau.
This blog has existed in one form or another since 2003. At first it was called Creek Running North, after Pinole Creek, near where I lived back then. I moved in 2008 and renamed the site Coyote Crossing, but about a thousand people* still link here under the old name.
My publicist tells me I should mention that my writing here has frequently been called the best on the Internet.
* May not actually equal 1000

All content Copyright © 2011 Chris Clarke. All Rights Reserved.
Banner painting by Carl S. Buell.