I remember walking on a dirt road that crossed a steep hillside somewhere in Switzerland. I was with my Opa, my German grandfather. I must have been about four years old. Opa had on his characteristic gray fedora with a blue jay feather stuck in the band. He had removed his shirt, retaining his starch-white A-shirt, so that the sun could warm his bare shoulders. We had left the rest of the family—my parents, an older brother, two sisters, and my Oma—back at our cabin. Opa and I had gone in search of Gemüse, in this case, wild...

Around the middle of the 1930s, Heidegger’s thinking took a turn away from an analysis of human being, or Dasein (which found its expression in what is often considered his most important work, Being and Time), to considering the unfolding historical movement of Being in general.¹ His exploration of the phenomenon of Being yielded the insight that being becomes manifest through humans, that being is dependent on the linguistic and sociocultural practices of humans (a word shortly about upper-case and lower-case usage). William Lovitt states that in his early philosophy Heidegger “is centrally concerned with the relation between man and...

In The Sunflower Forest, William Jordan defines ecological restoration as “the attempt, sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole. To do this the restorationist does everything possible to heal the scars and erase the signs of disturbance or disruption.”¹ He explains that the work of the restorationist is to restore all aspects of an ecosystem or landscape, including those elements, such as fire or flooding, that might seem dangerous or nonproductive; he concludes that restoration “is a deliberate attempt to return all the features of the system to some historic condition, defined ecologically and with a studied...

As a work of ecological restoration and the reformation of self, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood reinscribes the longleaf pine ecosystem into existence on a metaphorical or textual level. The restoration of the lost forest in turn creates a value system in the autobiographer such that she is able to rewrite her own childhood, insinuating a close intimacy with the natural world around her, including the vanishing longleaf pine forests. Telling the story of the forests and of the self provides a foundation for Ray’s identity, a way of being that allows the landscape to presence in its...

In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen identifies two basic forms of Native American literature, the ceremony and the myth. According to Allen, “the ceremony is the ritual enactment of a specialized perception of a cosmic relationship, while the myth is a prose record of that relationship.”¹ Both forms have the purpose of locating the individual within an interlocking and interconnected framework that includes the psychological, the social, the geographical, and the spiritual, all the way out to the cosmic. This holistic perception of the world—very different from the scientific, calculative way of thinking that separates and isolates things...

In the essay “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez suggests the way in which storytelling acts as a kind of ceremony that heals the rift between our inner and outer worlds. He defines “two landscapes—one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see—not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution.” Yet Lopez’s interest is in describing a less tangible aspect of this external landscape....