"this is what is wrong with us, we are bleeding at the roots."

i have been falling in love with terry tempest williams' new book: finding beauty in a broken world. i have to share some of it with you. you're going to love it too--because you're all such lovely and compassionate people, yes? well, i think so anyways.

"It is not my wrist that bleeds, but my words. Blood. Bloodwork. Perhaps this is the act of writing, of conservation, of trying to make peace with our own contradictory nature. We love the land. We are destroying the land. We are eroding and evolving, at once."

"Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out."

Q: "What will we lose if prairie dogs disappear from North America?"

A: "In 1950, government agents proposed to get rid of prairie dogs on some parts of the Navajo Reservation in order to protect the roots of sparse desert grasses and thereby maintain some marginal grazing for sheep.

"The Navajo elders objected, insisting, 'If you kill all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.'

"The amused officials assured the Navajo that there was no correlation between rain and prairie dogs and carried out their plan. The outcome was surprising only to the federal officials. The desert near Chilchinbito, Arizona, became a virtual wasteland. Without the ground-turning process of the burrowing animals, the soil became solidly packed, unable to accept rain. Hard pan. The result: fierce runoff whenever it rained. What little vegetation remained was carried away by flash floods and a legacy of erosion.

"Most people are not comfortable making a connection between racism and specism or the ill treatement of human beings and the mistreatment of animals. We want to keep our boundaries clean and separate. But isn't that the point, to separate, isolate, and discriminate?"

Read this book, you'll love it!

image via here.