Status Updates From Rhythm of the Wild: A Life ...

RTC

[There is] a fundamental conflict in national park management: that efforts to perpetuate natural conditions would have to be forever reconciled with the presence o large numbers of people.

We cannot come to terms with nature without coming to terms with our own work.

Greatly paraphrased - Both sides of this issue need to be taken into account for us to live side by side with nature. Perhaps this is the definition of environmentalism?

Sometimes it's overwhelming, all the serious problems in the world, the magnitude is so huge.

Try this. Fall in love every day. Fall in love with a friend, a flower, a cloud, a novel, a poem, an idea, a song. Fall in love with words, with life. Open your heart to the beauty around you every day.

In 1929, President Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed that the biggest challenge facing growth in America was the frugality of most Americans. Industrialists worried production would become so efficient it would soon turn out goods at a pace far greater than people's desire to have them. Their solution - create a culture that shifted from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

Some Alaskans still regard their national parks as being 'locked up.' They're not. They're locked open. Come on in. Learn to share. Be young again. Climb a mountain, run a river, sleep on the ground. Why? To reset your clock, repair your heart, rediscover what's real: the earth, your home, not a bad place to be.

learning was once through . . . , and story . . . the stories told in the warm light of a fire, the speaker and listeners gathered under the skins and furs of the animals they hunted and admired. In the arc of human history, this fire burned--and these listeners lived--only yesterday. Their stories, like treasured books today, were honored and passed down from generation to generation, made divine in their precision.

The land in made of stories. They color and texture everything.

I know now that love and companionship bring me my greatest joy, while open space and music make anything seem possible.

An hour after birth, a caribou calf can follow its mother. In one day it can outrun a human. If still alive and in good condition after one month, it's considered safe from wolves. In its first two weeks it will double its birth weight and be ready to swim powerful rivers.

We spend thousands of hours tidying our houses and tending our lawns while in the wilderness everything is right where it belongs; no raptor is too high or flowers too low, no river is out of place or mountain ill-designed, no stone is too angular or round. Nobody complains of leaves unraked, trees unpruned, grasses uncut. Everything is in order, and not always convenient.

music heals, it transforms. It makes us feel and think in ways we never have. It's not a luxury; it's a necessity, a profound way to express our humanity, the deepest part of ourselves.

Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere. And sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find yourself.

It's important to remind people that national parks don't happen by accident. They're established and defended through great commitment, vision, and force of character. They show us another kind of wealth, one that cools the fevered money culture of American capitalism. Big, wild national parks are the best thing we got going. Don't let people forget that.

Bill Truesdale

in winter their [black-capped chickadees] their body temperatures drop nearly twenty degrees F each night to slow their metabolism to help survivie the cold. Their hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory, increases in size in late summer as the breeding season ends and seed caching begins. The better the memory, the more easily they'll find the cached seeds needed to survive the bitter cold.