At Home on the Earth

Nature writing, as Thoreau knew, can be deeply subversive because it points to ways of living that diverge fundamentally from dominant attitudes. Thoreau would have welcomed these essays by America's most important nature writers, for in exploring our intrinsic relationship with the earth, they also consider our alienation from nature and how that alienation is manifested.

The book's principal focus is on the possibilities of being at home on the earth: Finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native.The collection begins with essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, who accentuate the links between culture and nature. Other essays speak to the loss of place and to being stewards of nature and of bioregionalism, nativeness, and of interdependent communities, be they in rural areas or urban neighborhoods. Several essays address how our current ideologies of growth and individualism run counter to a sustainable relationship to the land and to each other. In the final three essays, Gary Snyder critiques various views of nature, Alice Walker articulates a vision of a responsive universe, and Linda Hogan celebrates the interaction of nature and human habitation. The contributors' views, writings, and contexts are variegated, but all share a sense that human identity is intimately tied to the land one lives on. And as in an ecosystem, the collection's great diversity yields abundant riches.

At Home on the Earth represents the cutting edge of environmental thinking in the United States today. Throughout, the interactions between humans and nature convey a politics of hope, one sustained by faith in place itself. As Gary Snyder writes, "We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit."

David Landis Barnhill is Director of Environmental Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Preface
Introduction, David Landis Barnhill

PART ONE: LIVING IN PLACE
Americans Native to this Land
A First American Views His Land, N. Scott Momaday
Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination, Leslie Marmon Silko

The Loss of Place
from A Native Hill, Wendell Berry
Touching the earth, bell hooks
Shadows and Vistas, John Haines

The Possibility of Place
from A Native Hill, Wendell Berry
Settliing Down, Scott Rissell Sanders
from The Place, the Region, and the Commons, Gary Snyder
The Hudon River Valley: A BioregionalStory, Thomas Berry

Native Cultures and the Search for Place
Becoming Métis, Melissa Nelson
A Sprig of Sage, terry Tempest Williams
The Gifts of Deer, Richard K. Nelson

PART TWO: PLACE TO LIVE
Homesteading
from The Writer as Alaskan: Beginnings and Reflections, John Haines

Ranching
The Subtlety of the Land, Sharon Butala
A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk, Gretel Ehrlich
The Smooth Skull of Winter, Gretel Ehrlich

Farming
Learning to Fail, David Mas Masumoto
from A Country year: Living the Questions, Sue Hubbell

Living Between City and Country
On Willow Creek, Rick Bass
Ceremonial Time, John Hanson Mitchell
Into the Maze, Robert Finch

Urban Living
Water under American Ground: West 78th Street, Peter Sauer
from This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence, Alan Thein Durning
Nothing Lasts a Hundred Years, Richard Rodriguez
Fantsasy of a Living Future, Sarhawk

Coda
The Rediscovery of Turtle Island, Gary Snyder
The Universe Responds: Or, How I Learned We Can Have Peace on Earth, Alice Walker
Dwellings, Linda Hogan