Archive for the ‘Sky Island’ Tag
Santa Catalina Mountains Panorama: Western View from Wasson Peak– Image by kenne
“The day warmed and on the margins of a steep ravine splitting the side of the mesa I found dry rocks to scramble up. I liked that about the desert.
Morning snow and afternoon warmth, the winter equivalent of a spring freshet, but for which I had no word. In some ways, words were superfluous.
They didn’t help—no words came to mind—as I pulled on a loose boulder and leaped awkwardly out of the way of its crashing descent,
its delicate angle of repose inadvertently re-reposed. All the rocks in this ravine were similarly precarious, and I continued with greater care
as the ravine steepened near the top of the mesa. I had lost sight of the ravens, and they of me. I had not spotted a
bighorn sheep the entire day. I was pleased the boulder did not take me with it.”
— from 1/21/21 by David Jenkins
(Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (Routledge 2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet.
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Sonoran Sky Island — Images by kenne
“I feel again the poignant urge to grasp it, embrace it, know all
at once and all in all; but the harder I strive for such a consummation,
the more elusive that it becomes, slipping like a dream through my
arms. Can this desire be satisfied only in death? Something in our
human consciousness seems to make us forever spectators of
the world we live in.
Maybe some of my crackpot, occultist friends are right; maybe we
really are aliens here on earth, our spirits born on some other,
simpler, more human planet. But why were we sent here?
What is our mission, comrades, and when do we get paid?
A writer’s epitaph: He fell in love with the planted earth,
but the affair was never consummated.”
— Edward Abbey
“To the consternation of the “committed” reviewer, he is not a
conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable list of any other
kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another
color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.”
— from “A Few Words in Favor of Ed Abbey” by Wendell Berry
Sonoran Desert Eye
“He had the zeal of a true believer and the sting of a scorpion.”
— Wallace Stegner referring to Edward Abbey
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Goldeneye In Pima Canyon — Grunge Art by kenne
My mountains,
Santa Catalina, one
of the Sonoran Desert’s
sky islands, presenting
a life zone tour
of desert,
grasslands,
oat woodlands,
and pine forest
where climate diversity
is equal to a drive
from Mexico to Canada,
with panorama views
of surrounding Sky Islands —
where less becomes more.
— kenne
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