Sublime

This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms.

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson has written on his “Half Earth” proposal, an “achievable plan” to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature.

stories and to listen about how bad it had been, how hard it is still, and what methods are in place to locate hope, then follow it.

“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.” —Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh Nation

In his 1993 memoir The Thunder Tree, ecologist Robert Pyle coined the term “extinction of experience,” and since then many researchers have jumped into the fray. There are bodies of work on the demonstrable decline of kids’ contact with nature, as well as the negative impacts of this trend—most alarmingly captured in Richard Louv’s 2005 Last Child

Charles Davenport.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s guiding principle for Indian education, as summed up at the nineteenth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This principle resulted in a policy now widely recognized as the embodiment of cultural genocide.

the well-being of the whole determines the well-being of any individual part. We

In 1837 a packet operated by the American Fur Company in the Blackfeet homeland knowingly sent a smaller boat with traders who had smallpox deep into Blackfeet country. Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Blackfeet died of the disease, thereby ending their dominance. At that time a vaccine for smallpox had been readily available for at least