What role might the Arts play in addressing an “environmental” movement? For an anthropologist, a culture’s art is not just a collection of facts about how, practically and concretely, these people went about their lives. It animates the spirit of those lives. To someone who is sensitive to such things, art paints a picture of what specific human cultures understood and valued. Their behavior and choices make sense to us, not because we would have made the same choices but because we see that they had a rationale and one that must have been deeply compelling to them. I think it is clear that, even though the word “rational” is part of the word “rationale,” it seems far more accurate to understand human behavior as being fundamentally motivated by feelings and values, rather than by a rational mind. We are not computers, though reductionist science is not averse to thinking our brains are simply this and no more. Nor are we robots of rigorously rational consumption, though modern economics seems to want to define mankind in this way, and to further define the beautiful, wild and dynamic earth as a “free market.”

An environmental movement that tries to argue for change using only rational and utilitarian arguments will not bring us closer to a wise relationship with the place in which we live. Good science and clear thinking has a great role to play. But if our rationale does not include affection for the places where we live, our cleverness and accumulated knowledge won’t matter. We need good stories, told compellingly by people who care about the land they stand on, the water they drink, and the creatures with whom they share living space.

The name of this blog is taken from the title of a poem by one of America’s greatest poets, James Dickey. It is a fierce poem, deeply felt, beautiful in its rage and near despair.

FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be

For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,

Surrounding himself with the silence

Of whitening snarls. Let him eat

The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough

For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea

Stream into his gnarling head

That he no longer has a thing

To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun

Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it

With all his meanness and strength.

Lord, we have come to the end

Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers

And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel

With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach

Looking straight into the eternal

Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle

Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.

Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate

To the death in the rotten branches,

Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come

Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills

Of ice screaming that it cannot die,

That it has come back, this time

On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall

On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon

Riding into battle into holy war against

Screaming railroad crews: will pull

Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,

You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion

Of being the last, but none of how much

Your unnoticed going will mean:

How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s

Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing

Thing,” with himself, to eat

The world, and not to be driven off it

Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,

Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die

Out.