Why try to create what Prescott Bergh, the Wisconsin farmer, calls a sustainable culture? Because the disparate efforts that we are making now, though essential, are too small for the task that confronts the world. Our myriad efforts to create a sustainable aspect of our lives together include sustainable agriculture, sustainable communities, sustainable energy, sustainable economies, sustainable ecosystems, sustainable bioregions, sustained yield in natural resources like timber or fisheries …

But apparently no one is trying to bring all those efforts together, to think about ways that we might create a sustainable culture that will take into account not only...

Perhaps sustainability is always more complicated than it seems. We devote our attention to recycling and discover that our public health is becoming public obesity and public diabetes. So we work to restore public health, only to discover that another element of sustainability has now slipped through our fingers, slick as fresh liver that we have to scramble across the kitchen to pick up. Indeed, I have spent time working on health issues in our town and, from there, gone to a meeting of about thirty folks in town forthrightly called the “racism committee.” For several years they got together...

Gary Snyder offered me another way to think about learning native wisdom in an important observation he called “The Three Lineages”:

Mythopoetically speaking, there are three human lineages. One is the Children of Abraham —a group who all believe in a very convincing story, and one which traces their contemporary existence back to the somewhat quirky patriarch Abraham. These people of course are known in the world today as Jews, Muslims, or Christians.

The next group is the Descendants of the Primates. These people are commonly found in universities, coffee shops, the upper levels of corporations, Hollywood, and the Democratic...

Sustainable cultures are to subsistence cultures as squares are to rectangles. That is, all sustainable cultures are subsistence cultures, but not all subsistence cultures are sustainable. Here I explore the nature of subsistence and look at what we might learn about our own sustainability from that exploration. Of course I do not think we should—in some romantic dream fog—try to return to the old ways of hunting and gathering. Nevertheless, I want to explore a tribal definition of subsistence by looking closely at contemporary traditional cultures with which I am somewhat familiar. From our place in a subsistence...

Imagine walking out into a glowing upper Mississippi evening in the spring. The blufflands above the great river are expanding into a green haze where the maples, anchored in steep hills, are just beginning to leaf out. The speed of that process thwarts the mind. In the morning the bud clusters of the red maple are sitting upright on the branches; by evening the red leaves are half unfurled, and by the next evening they are full, rich, and dark with red the color of dried blood; the bud clusters have been as “disappeared” as a dissident in Argentina. This...

The best education does not necessarily come from the best teachers or the best schools. Behind those happy elements lies an important factor not often addressed in discussions of the problems of public schools: a desire for self-cultivation, the self-discipline that insists on learning whatever the learning environment might be. Discipline is a constant in our conversations about schools. Self-discipline doesn’t often register on the radar in such discussions. In my experience, teachers most often talk to students about obedience to them and to the rules. I don’t ever remember a teacher talking to us about the importance of disciplining...

Perhaps the desire to create a sustainable culture begins with wonder that we are alive, participants in this most complex system of flesh and stone and stars and ideas and spirit that surrounds and sustains us and within which we “live and move and have our being.” Or perhaps the imagination is simply prompted by the same question Mary Oliver raises in her poem “Spring”: “There is only one question: How to love this world.”¹ Howdowe love the world—with all its frequent beauty and inevitable pain, its occasional gentleness and nearly ubiquitous violence, with riches for a...

There are clues about what sustainability might mean. As Ted Chamberlin suggested in a previous chapter, learning may be more about recognitions than about definitions or acquiring information. Perhaps we want to recognize rather than define sustainability. One way to create such recognition might be to ask, What are the characteristics of a sustainable culture? If we can determine those, then perhaps we can back into a recognition. Indeed, a sustainable culture begins in recognitions.

A sustainable culture recognizes relationships. That is, it knows that everything is connected. It knows that, as folks like John Muir, Wendell Berry, and Gary...

Alaskan oral historians Phyllis Morrow and William Schneider admit “we face an awesome responsibility: the certain knowledge that our words will return.”¹ The responsibility rests not only upon oral historians but on all of us. Our modern words are often ancient, ricocheting down the years to us battered and banged around by time, misspoken till they are hardly recognizable echoes of other tongues, not only Latin, Greek, Navajo, Sami, or German but Sanskrit, Etruscan, or perhaps languages lost now without even a linguistic trace. What is lost is a matter not only of vocabulary but also of the way words...

It is about 490 b.c. Confucius has been traveling around China, teaching, hoping to find a ruler who will not only seek his advice about running the country but actually implement it. He has had little success. A practical man, a disciple—one suspects he had ties to political insiders—comes to Confucius, asking, “If the Lord of Wei wanted you to govern his country, what would you put first in importance?” The question has the feel of a test question, a hidden agenda left unspoken and lurking behind the interrogative: “Answer this right and I’ll put in a good...

If you can suspend disbelief, as required by every drama, then believe this for a moment: Out of the word came everything we know. Nature. The world. The earth. All creatures, plants, peoples. Four-leggeds and two-leggeds. Wings, legs, heads, thoraxes, abdomens. Thoughts and visions and dreams. We are considering notions regarding Nature and spirituality, but when I hear many people nowadays talk about spirituality, I am puzzled. It seems as if the current definition of being spiritual simply means that I think about my psychological health, that I take refuge in Nature, that “I understand Native American spirituality and where...

What we yearn for in the midst of our lives of mostly minor-league chaos and occasional major-league catastrophes is some kind of stability, something solid and dependable, someplace to put that trust in life that we cannot live without. Part of our spiritual and intellectual discipline is to learn to trust the world, to discover that stability, and to keep ourselves together when our world falls apart. We once believed that we could put our trust in the “laws” of Nature; now we are not so sure. Heisenberg sends a shiver through us; relativity makes us wonder; we fear that...