Salman Ansari

We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet. 

Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature

A poet asked me to illustrate a book, and I realized I don’t think I’m an illustrator—I think I’m a bookmaker.

I can relate. Since illustrating my own book, I’ve spent a lot more time drawing, and this has brought up opportunities to illustrate other peoples’ books. But it just didn’t feel right. I want to tell stories, and often they come to me in words as well as drawings, and I like to show both. I think that makes me more of a multimedia storyteller, than what we might think of as an illustrator.