Quotes from Gretel Ehrlich

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

Am I like the optimist who while falling ten stories from a building says at each story "I'm all right so far"?

To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate.

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.

I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June.

In 2007, I received a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to go around the top of the world and talk to Arctic people about how they've been impacted by climate change.

We assimilate a little this way, and a little that way. Life is only mutation.

We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. OBITUARY One of the largest sheep ranches in northern Wyoming went under this week.

A day goes by. Every shiver of grass counts. The shallows and dapples in air that give grass life are like water. The bobcat returns nightly. During easy jags of sleep the dog's dream-paws chase coyotes. I ride to the sheep. Empty sky, an absolute blue. Empty heart. Sunburned face blotches brown. Another layer of skin to peel, to meet myself again in the mirror. A plane passes overhead—probably the government trapper. I'm waving hello, but he speeds away.

My parents, who are older, think they don't have to be careful, so they eat the most contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.

Everything is moving, but there's so much we can't see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what's under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.

Those mountains are my mind's wall and wellspring. Down here, the light is peach colored, and as the sun shifts, one loose shadow, like thought, takes on a sharp edge.

Everything in your world has vanished. You have no money, no job, and no hope of finding one. That's how it is for thousands of people here. Please don't forget that feeling.

Every blade of grass counts if we are to survive.

Our "always in a hurry" ways of living seemed doubly insignificant. Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I liked to think that a "green light" glowed inside those animals, instructing them how to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.

Reluctantly, Kazuko accepts one of the tomatoes. "This is absurd. You have nothing and you're giving us food," she says. He stares hard at her: "The less I have, the happier I am.

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. Losing myself to it-if I can- I do not fall, or if I do, I'm only another waterfall. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.

That's how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.

its cold immensity mocking us as we lunged away into the dark curvaceous violence of the sea.