How Sustainable is the Idea of Sustainability?
[The following essay was written in 2002. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”] Having gone through a forestry education back in the 1970s, and being a skeptic by nature when...
John P. O'Grady Blog
Living Landscape – A 1997 Interview with Gary Snyder
In October 1997, I interviewed the poet Gary Snyder. The subject of our discussion was the influence the American West and its literature has had on him and on his work. Over the course...
The Goodie Life
I had just put my head on the pillow. Nap time. Or rather, that was my intention. But barking happens. The ten-month-old Collie Puppy started barking, a funny little bark, right next to the...
Softly Slippered Animal Spirits
In recent months, I have been engaged in some collaborative house-sitting at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Hartford, Connecticut. Harriet herself is on extended vacation. She occasionally drops us a line from afar, in...
Trees & Thoughts
A few years after publishing her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a brief essay celebrating a magnificent old oak tree she was fond of. She mused: “I sometimes...
Mary Earley’s Dark Angels
“I am always close to this.” –Dongshan The artist Mary Earley has become an elusive figure in the history of art. No surprise there. Oblivion is hardly an unexpected fate for an artist or...
Lester Rowntree: Vernacular Natural Historian
“As I settle down, relearning how to live the well-rounded life, I begin to perceive that the tame, as well as the wild, has its place when it comes to collecting myself.” So wrote...
Lives of Poets and Other Stuff
The wee hours, a few days before Thanksgiving. Done with sleeping, done with dreaming, I’m standing in my library watching shadows play along the bookshelves. What to do? A famous philosopher once heard a...
On Shaker Mountain
They are long gone, the Shakers of Hancock, those people who established for themselves a sacred space on the mountain above their village. Here was where they conducted their outdoor worship. Here is where...
Hey, It’s Spring
It was touch and go for a while, but the lilacs are finally blooming, the ovenbird has resumed his mid-wood teachings, and the cemetery groundskeeper is once again out there on his riding mower,...