Coyote Crossing

5 comments on "Christmas Tree Pass"

The Western Lands Project, a wonderful and effective small non-profit working to protect public lands in the western United States from encroachment and privatization, has just put out its newsletter. Aside from a nice plug for this here site, the newsletter also contains updates on desert solar, the Mojave Cross, and a few other current public lands issues. Check it out and if you like what you see, toss WLP a little cash.

0 comments on "More grist for the desert solar mill"

A cloud, constructed using Wordle, of the most commmon words in the first six chapters of the Joshua tree book.

2 comments on "Getting them in the right order, now that’s the hard part"

Doctor Science kindly reposted one of my articles over at Daily Kos, and there are more sympathetic and interested commenters there than I would have guessed, or hoped. It seems the campaign to inspire people to preserve desert wildlands has made some headway in the last couple of years.

And yet there are still the expected people who insist on holding to the notion that deserts are worthless by definition:

Deserts are called deserts for a reason - their ecosystems are marginal.

Or even better:

Last summer, I drove across the country[.]

After I got west of the Mississippi River, I found myself for much of the time driving through wasteland. An occasional ranch here and there, but not much else for miles and miles and miles and miles.

The land didn’t appear to be “usable” for anything - not even recreation. It was, frankly, quite ugly.

… There’s a whole lotta empty out there. Until you drive it, you don’t have an appreciation for just how much land is unused and unusable.

That last, of course, brought to mind Ed Abbey’s fabled quote from Desert Solitaire:

In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.

… as well as a line from Terry Tempest Williams’ Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, that I had coincidentally found and posted as a Facebook status update just yesterday:

These wildlands are alive. When one of us says, ‘Look, there’s nothing out there,’ what we are really saying is ‘I cannot see.’

But really, I think the most appropriate response — if I’m to sling quotes rather than write my own words — is this passage of Williams’ from a few pages later in Red. The words — as well as the epigram above — come originally from testimony Williams gave to Congress on a bill affecting wilderness in Southern Utah.

Mr. Chairman, if you know wilderness in the way you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate. We must ask ourselves as Americans, “Can we really survive the worship of our own destructiveness?” We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Senate Bill 884 falls desperately short of these ideals.

Who can say how much nature can be destroyed without consequence? Who can say how much land can be used for extractive purposes until it is rendered barren forever? And who can say what the human spirit will be crying out for one hundred years from now? Two hundred years from now?

We fool ourselves if we can gauge the worth of a piece of land by driving past it — or by discussing it via internet from the comfort of our desk chairs. We fool ourselves if we think our welfare is not irrevocably tied to that of the tortoise, the bighorn, the Mojave milkweed.

But beyond that, even if we could live without the desert wildernesses we’d so blithely pave to generate the power to run our blowdryers, there are those of us who would fight the destruction of that desert. It is the body of our beloved. You could live without your sweetheart, your mother, your sons and daughters. The world would go on were they to be tortured, held captive or enslaved. But would you? Would you engage in cost-benefit calculations over the commercial value of your loved ones’ skin and sinew, tell yourself that there were plenty of people left in the world to love?

7 comments on "Soullessness"

Elizabeth Eslami has written an extraordinarily generous review of Walking With Zeke.

Just the one line about Ed Abbey, Rick Bass and Barry Lopez will I think keep me grinning for the next week or so:

He’s a less prickly Ed Abbey, a tougher Rick Bass, a Barry Lopez with humor.

I am also a Mary Austin with back hair, but Liz wisely left that part out.

The only problem is, I’m currently reading Liz’s Bone Worship and now any review I write, which will necessarily be raving because I’m enjoying it so much, may seem to the more cynical like it’s some sort of quid pro quo. Oh, well, fuck ‘em if they can’t handle sincere admiration.

2 comments on "A very generous review"

This is some great desert writing with a fantastic ending, and I mean that “fantastic” in a couple senses. Go read it now.

0 comments on "Wow."

There is no natural taxonomy
that is internally consistent, no
consistent organizing scheme that fits
the world that is. All of your clever rules,
all of the frameworks on which you hang
your understanding of this fractal world
fall short, and do so unpredictably.
Set down a rule and life will counter it.
Some snakes have legs. Mushrooms are animals.
Heat makes the desert cold. As soon as you
pin down a thing, it moves, resists the box
you’ve placed it in, and all your bright theories
regarding the inevitable shape
of this bright universe break into shards.

6 comments on "Systems Analysis (a sonnet)"