So the bear became synonymous with the cycle of the seasons, even the cause of the cycle. And the willful, ritualized little death that the bear undertakes every winter a sacrifice for the world itself. The world reawakens because of this sage-like, artistic, visionary, powerful figure who secludes himself in a cave and puts himself in a dream-like state of deprivation so that spring might once again come to the world. Sound familiar?

frozen by design
our calling becomes all calling.

I keep
a beautiful garden, all abundance,
indiscriminate, pulling itself
from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

We find strong evidence that indigenous territories with secure tenure not only reduce deforestation inside their lands but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas.

After intensive logging in the 17th century nearly wiped out Akita Prefecture’s native forests, the government undertook various programs in the 18th and 19th centuries to encourage trees be replanted and preserved for us future generations.

Conversing with human-animal relationships within other Buddhist traditions, this article explores the resonances between the presence of animals and ideas of successful labour, both physical and contemplative, amongst Australian Buddhists in a time of ecological crises. In conversation with notions of ecological health and renewal, native animals are often seen as companions, tutelary beings, and as being indicative of successful practice.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to environmental destruction is paved with hope, which is shaped like a phoenix.

When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation

The classic 1995 paper that introduced the term for how humans have a hard time seeing intergenerational change.

Everything is always at once a subject and object

A close reading of the medieval story of a boy raised by wolves and a wider meditation on man’s place in the world.

Let us now consider whether or not we, you and I, have prima facie obligations towards ecosystems, in particular, the obligation to avoid destroying them, apart from any human advantage that might be gained by their continued existence.

… the natural world does not function as home or household for its human children. Finding herself and her fellows to be outsiders, trespassers in a world that is distinctly “other,” she declares both nuturing and managerial responses to nature doomed

My God is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.

Here the ancient lava slid into the sea,
hissed up steam clouds, then cooled

What over the gable end and high up under tangled cloud
that the raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate…

you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians.

This book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. The lectures were the second in a series named after the family of Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin.

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

In that structure of feeling well, we had started taking acid…

A long and wide conversation on the author’s life and on our collective, possible futures.

Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music.
Dots and lines, strands and strings

Staying alive in the woods is a matter of calming down…

A poem of practical advice.

… the belief that we humans occupy a realm of being separate from the rest of nature encourages what he all-too-politely refers to as “environmentally irresponsible behavior.”

A history of modern conceptualizations of “nature” and an early defense of the so-called “first/second nature” split—a concept we now call “the anthropocene.”

… there will be resistance to giving the thing rights until it can be seen and valued for itself; yet, it is hard to see it and value it for itself until we can bring ourselves to give it rights — which is almost inevitably going to sound inconceivable

On the history, and future, of how we define property and rights.