Tramping Mobius: Methodologies of Infinitude
Joe Sheridan
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto.
Adjunct Professor, Department of Indigenous Studies, Trent University, Peterborough
parrysoundca@yahoo.com
Dedication
To my dear old friend Bruce “Haywire Brack” Brackney of Victoria, British Columbia
whose lifelong efforts preserve endangered legacies of boxcar freedom. ‘Brack’ was already dyed Red when he fled Minnesota on a dirt bike bound for sluicing gold in Northern California. In the company and cabin of Mayor Doug McGimsey of Burnt Ranch,
California we drank West wind along the Star Route
Trinity River Gorge
Shasta Cascade
Firing horse pistols
levitating bloodshot dawn
One fine Spring Equinox
Not so long ago
Evermore
Tramping Mobius: Methodologies of Infinitude
Joe Sheridan
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto. Adjunct Professor, Department of Indigenous Studies, Trent University, Peterborough
Dedication
To my dear old friend Bruce “Haywire Brack” Brackney of Victoria, British Columbia
whose lifelong efforts preserve endangered legacies of boxcar freedom. ‘Brack’ was already dyed Red when he fled Minnesota on a dirt bike bound for sluicing gold in Northern California. In the company and cabin of Mayor Doug McGimsey of Star Route, Burnt
Ranch, California we drank West wind along the Star Route
Trinity River Gorge
Shasta Cascade
Firing horse pistols
levitating bloodshot dawn
One fine Spring Equinox
Not so long ago
Evermore
Keywords: Edward Ricketts, Cannery Row, tramp methodology, space/time.
Abstract:
The genesis of ecology applied to the Pacific intertidal, poetry taxonomy
and philosophy was Ed Ricketts life’s work, shared by Joseph Campbell and John Steinbeck. Studying the role of nature in mythology stood shoulder to shoulder with meditations on the place of nature in elegant fictions. While each was an ecologist, they were
variously also tramps, bums and hobos. That each and their compatriots manifested ecological imperatives as lasting ethics in their lives and work is testimony to outdoor experience and the primacy and antiquity of space over time. Ongoing experiential decline
with open spaces has significantly altered environmental praxis leaving older environmentalists as last of the significantly spatially shaped generations. We oldtimers inherited
from Indigenous Cultures and migrants alike the cultures of movement, the outdoors and
folk process and becoming consistent with place and time but our continuity became displaced by nanosecond determinism ignoring oldtimers and space as superfluous.
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the
habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they
break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on
to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that
might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by
themselves.
John Steinbeck, Prologue, Cannery Row (1945)
All the time there was an American race singing in tune with the beloved environment, to
the measures of life-sustaining gestures…The ritualistic refrain of many of their prayer
dances is not, Lord have mercy on us, but Work with us, work with us!
Mary Austin, The American Rhythm (1923)
Prologue
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum1
1
I was raised beside Wasauksing First Nation, near Parry Sound, Ontario. My father ran a hunting, fishing and trapping/trading post and during winter, Ojibwa and Métis
trappers sat around a woodstove joshing, trading yarns. My task was to keep fire, pour tea
and listen. My paternal grandfather raised orphan wolf pups and served time at Burwash
Prison Farm outside Sudbury. He tended the buffalo herd making sure calves and cows
escaped to ramble the French River.2 Poachers killed them all. My maternal grandfather
ran security during W.W.II at Canada’s largest nitroglycerin production plant in Nobel,
Ontario, and captured four Nazi saboteurs. I never met my maternal grandmothers.
Bindle Stiffs
Trappers, bush Ojibwa and wolves populated my Laurentian childhood and remain among the neglected, if proper, folk knowledge and methodology of environmental
studies. So too are tramps3 I met in seven years riding freight trains, hopping coast to
coast and wintering in the great hobo jungle in Oroville, California. Near where Ishi descended from Lassen Peak,4 having never heard of Gaia or Deep Ecology. I sat fireside as
great boomer tramps spoke with precision about the geology and ecology of North America, some recall hopping freights across Russia and China. So vast was their witness of
Turtle Island that even at windblown locomotive velocities, Creation held them spellbound. Yet it is not only the First Cultures of Turtle Island that have been neglected since
professionalization of environmental knowledge corresponded with downsizing infinity
to temporal minimalism’s co-dependence with unslaked urbanization and nanosecond
technologies. Tramps have also been ignored and we honor cannery row’s (Skid Row)
habitués, perspicacious in tidal pool ecology, mythology and fiction. Among them, Edward Flanders Ricketts, commonly known as Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell and John
2
Steinbeck. Simultaneously, and as warranted, each one a bum, tramp, hobo and ecologist,
determined to show that the Great Whole is made of whole individuals and species, so
too the consciousness of the Great Whole bequeathed every part to achieve encompassing
sentience. Ishi would likely have understood himself as a self-organizing system. Most
outdoor cultures maintain this belief because of copious experiential evidence. The steps
before and away from mediated consciousness to embrace biological connection and reference living systems. Ecology, the verb and Creation, the noun. All my relations.
Is you is or is you ain’t?
Richard Astro’s introduction to The Log of the Sea of Cortez (1995) quotes biologist William E. Ritter’s contention, “ “The miracle of consciousness is man’s supreme
glory –not only “that he can know the world, but he can know himself as a knower of the
world” ” (xii). John Steinbeck celebrated consciousness and recognized, with Ed Ricketts
and Joseph Campbell, the limitations of consciousness in knowing reality and the challenge Ed Ricketts called, “breaking through.” James C Kelley (1997:1) equates this with
a holistic concept of the world ecosystem… Richard Astro explains (1995: x) :
…man grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments” he [John Steinbeck] also concedes (in
the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez) that man “might be described fairly
adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival,
limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.
Nonteleological (noncausal) thinking Ed Ricketts advocated was the incessant curiosity and intensely perceived reality of great tramps, Portland Gray and Fry Pan Jack
who sought to daily witness the enchantment of continental wonders and if referential to
3
theory chose the class conscious ecological vision of the Industrial Workers of the World
(1905), I.W.W., One Big Union,5 preceding academic ecology They harvested ancient
ecologies and whether struggling over oppression or in skookum parodies, Bread and
Roses6 or The Preacher and The Slave,7 they knew and humored the mirror’s other side.
I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago8
Young men, mixing denatured alcohol with codeine and grenadine,9 practicing
days of Dionysian and intellectual frolic found labor (having a boss) an impossible condition and chose a life of contemplating Creation, exploring freedom as movement stooping
to wage slavery only as necessary. Akin in their studies to colonial naturalists who, in
habits crossing the Atlantic from open sewer homelands, drank prodigious quantities of
beer. North America’s naturalist literature from Hudson Bay rum trading to contemporary
non-fiction has been fuelled by alcohol10 in hewing its canon. The ranks of nature poet
drinkers reads alphabetically as euphoria derived or devised and is how Ed Ricketts
sought the reality behind the mirror. In the tradition of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway and
Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. Ed Rickett’s favorite Chinese poet, Li Po, and IWW
songwriter T-Bone Slim,11 drowned embracing the moon’s reflection. Returning to awe
and inner wildness completes the feast one’s self sacrifices to death.
Kitchen-sink environmental realists and their acolytes bridle at the fact that the
trail to Walden Pond was littered with empty bottles and condemn beer loving colonial
naturalists.12 As John Muir, Ed Ricketts too walked from Indiana to Georgia after leaving
the University of Chicago.13 With fellow vagabonds, walked his way into nonteleological
thought, poetry taxonomy and philosophizing ‘breaking through.’ John Steinbeck (1995:
xix) wrote on nonteleological thought:
4
“…or ”is” thinking is essentially noncausal thinking. His [Ed Rickett’s]
major thirst in life was to see and to understand, that which he defined as
“breaking through” (a phrase he found in Robinson Jeffer’s “Roan Stallion” and quoted in his [Ed Rickett’s] “Spiritual Morphology of Poetry”)
to an understanding of what he called “the deep thing,” where we can see
and know, quoting William Blake’s “Visions of Daughters of Albion” that
“all that lives is holy.” ”
Before ecology developed academically, the concept still enjoyed archaic freedom. Ed Rickett’s 1939 study, Between Pacific Tides, was first an ecological description
of species not as individually identified but by location in intertidal zone invertebrate marine life and a thoroughly original investigation, employing a re-discovered14 habitat
ecology perspective that bore the fruit of ongoing theoretical discussions with Joseph
Campbell and John Steinbeck and providing witness and experience of the web of life
they subsequently and individually concretized. Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey fascination added primal collective unconscious to comparative mythology. John Steinbeck’s
socialist realism of the Depression recognized humanitarian solidarity in the wake of the
Dust Bowl, North America’s largest anthropogenic environmental disaster. Ed Ricketts
inspired Steinbeck’s Doc in “Cannery Row” (1945); Doc Burton in “In Dubious Battle”
(1936); Casey in “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) and Pippin in The Short Reign of Pippin
IV (1957). Eric Enno Tamm reports a mutual friend of Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck
surmised the friendship, “Rickets didn’t know how to lie and Steinbeck didn’t know how
to tell the truth…” (2004:10). What emerged from the trio ‘s long association was a transcendental principle and simple fact. Narrative, myth and ecology are expressions of each
other having developed their primal, primary essence in the legacy of human participation in Creation before language. Non-verbal ‘is-ness.’ The duty of language and its ecosystem as story and myth recalls the inseparable dimensions of their shared origin in the
primacy of Creation. Speaking time manifest as space permeates a sentient ethic born of
5
ancestral presence and practiced as an ethic certain they come from forever. Vast antiquity keeps language and story bound by mutual origin to honor spirit and soma perceptually
and conceptually engaged with miraculous, natural realities, grafting consciousness.
Narrative, mythology and science pull the same oars. Despite Ed Rickett’s active
dislike of matters mystical, his hardened realism sought ‘breaking through’ inconsistent
with deconstruction yet Dionysian when unleashing Trickster epiphanies. John Steinbeck
(1995: 228) asserts that Ed Ricketts was indeed a mystic in spite of himself. Building
consensus, the trio sought to utilize ecology as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche
powerfully chronicled in To A God Unknown (1933) and Log of the Sea of Cortez15
(1951), John Steinbeck’s first portrayals of humanity’s relationship to nature.
Yet, were there due credit, oral traditions that characterized Cannery Row’s intellects, whores and winos (Steinbeck: 1945:1) would have been recognized for what they
were as its articulation. Folk scientists and folk tradition bearers from nonteleological observation perspectives saw the natural world expressing Tao and Zen. Concluding in transcendence of human conditions as senescence completes the nervous system’s maturation
before evaporation contributes liquid legacies washing ashore in the intertidal. Forbears
much appreciated by John Robinson Jeffers in his epic, oceanic sanctuary in nearby Carmel. Ed Ricketts, a few miles away, championed the poet. Cavorting and sociable dimensions of the trio and their conviviality with locals fixed their star in moonlight rollick.
Each vitriolic against modernism strangling the antiquity upon whose avails they thrived.
Learning the Hard Way Makes Long Memories
Yet it was not frivolity that spurred these three to actively collected scientific
samples and sold through Pacific Biological Laboratories located just beyond the Pacific
6
littoral’s plant and animal habitats, between two defunct sardine canneries. Ed Ricketts,
Joseph Campbell and John Steinbeck (RCS), all highly local, ignored society to remain
intellectually engaged and self sufficient zeitgeist of contemplative company, whores and
winos. Low profile cannery row actively built intertidal zone ecology, RCS’ Big Rock
Candy Mountain16 were the intertidal littoral and a cannery row presbytery.
Eric Enno Tamm (2004:xvi) and these authors complain the ecology in works by John
Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell has been “overlooked or grossly understated by many
literary critics and scholars even today.” Even more threadbare is Indigenous language
research that doubtless reveals names for ecology or ‘breaking through’ well before ecology’s alleged discovery in 1899 by botanist Dr. Henry C. Cowles. James C. Kelley
(1997:1) attributes presaging Deep Ecology to Steinbeck and Ricketts. Yet, despite archival research into literate intellectual sources, nonteleological thought ‘s ‘breaking
through’ is lived experience and perceptual and conceptual habits more convivial to spoken extempore than literary reflection. This is no claim that solitary writing is antithetical, rather suggests that solidarity and friendship bloom as dimensions of convivial conversation and that for minds to have their respective freedoms of unbridled inquiry, conversations maintain the alchemy. Most importantly, ecology, mythology and fiction became interchangeable embodiments of the ethic the triumvirate talked into being. Different expressions on the face of ‘breaking through.’ Yet, the fact that ecology was the
formative lesson and that ecological imperatives infused genres from mythology to fiction/socialist realism is the central lesson in knowing how to get and keep the words. The
late Cree scholar Walter Lightning once explained to me, “What is not enduringly true
and told correctly, powers-out over time. The opposite endures forever.” The name of
7
which was less important than John Steinbeck’s description of how Ed Ricketts embodied
and lived the ethic in his essay ‘About Ed Ricketts’ in The Log of the Sea of Cortez, “He
was walled off a little, so that he worked at his philosophy of ‘breaking through,’ of coming out through the back of the mirror into some kind of reality which would make the
world seem dreamlike. This thought obsessed him.” (1995:263). We’ll probably never
know exactly for what Ed Ricketts searched but the gentrification of environmental
knowledge and literary ecology are blameworthy for missing the ecological content and
context in Joseph Campbell and John Steinbeck’s work and in ignoring fieldwork and
traditional outdoor cultures where pulsations of life force ripple the Cosmos. Instead, the
gentrified remain tied to screens and libraries affronting human antiquity’s open sky legacy and enacting hardening of the categories masquerading as non-disciplinary study of
the environment. And just as “the Tao which can be Tao-ed, is not the eternal Tao,” neither is silicone and paper consistent with the nervous system’s visceral sentience and its
place in Creation, as longstanding neglect of Traditional Ecological Knowledge attests.
Ninety- nine per cent of the world’s naturalists were oral and chose fireside teaching because they were symmetrical biological realities as real as Creation itself and thusly and
handsomely self-sustaining. Life and story are hermeneutic osmosis. Life becomes story,
and story becomes life. The neglected ecological imperatives of First Nations and the
denizens of cannery row in Pacific Grove, California’s first gated community (Tamm:
2004:20), geographically compare to reservations, evidence that literary bias crowded out
lived experience, as a colonial force set against ecological and hermeneutic realities expressed in, by and through oral traditions. Persecuted as natural, Indigenous expression.
Literary ecology and armchair critics embody this conceit and are all too apt to be
8
the only one’s reading each other’s articles and sharing look alike contextual and contents. Lecterns and libraries continue to make poor naturalists that in turn produce halfassed ecologists reverting to Humanities rightful anthropocentrism. Advancing species
over habitat, a social engineering obsession (Jeffers: 1965: 39) revealed in a concluding
line, “A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?”
At a time of unparalleled rapidity of climate change and ecological havoc, anthropocentrism and literary agoraphobia prevails. Having surrendered biological imperatives to
thrive outdoors, they exist in caverns of illusion of image and symbol. Literary critics and
gentrified environmentalists wear their albatross. Not only is Eric Enno Tamm’s negative
judgment correct but condemns their Homo Sapien integrity. Why do they bivouac in environmental studies when their concern is so exclusively species specific as human?
Northrup Frye (1971: 225) famously observed Canadians identity is not so perplexed by
who we are as with where is here? Post-Neolithic obsession derived from what to do rather than where to be. Genius loci speaks only to one.
The Sun Never Rises on 24/7
The ascendancy of reinvented environmental thought primarily experienced
through electronic media is methodological cul-de-sac. Precious as varieties of environmental thought have been, matters of authenticity remain. Knowing about the object of
study, despite the implications in the very phrasing, implies knowing object as subject.
Knowing well enough for assignation of qualities, as totems. Why were common attributions of gender assigned to Earth as Mother and Moon as Grandmother and Great Sprit
male? Seeing ideologically rather than ‘breaking through’, the critic’s judgment is not the
Tao that can’t be Tao-ed. The important dynamic at work here is that environmental con-
9
sciousness is being treated as an object apart from lived experience that destroys itself in
terminal abstraction. One does not know Marie Antoinette by knowing her head. One
wonders what motivates something one rarely experiences? Without understanding that
environment is a dimension of Creation, the sacred correspondingly and magically appears to slow to inertia, the appearance diminishes Creation to secularity.
Ed Ricketts was a monk following the Pacific’s primal rhythms and crossreferencing related sources of knowledge, grasping the complexity of relationship and
influence of species, location and tidal patterns. Ecological exegesis practiced among fellow beings, pointed to eternal return. Living on the land and participating in activities
consistent with that ecosystem is anciently natural.
David Orr’s assertion that, “all education is environmental education”17 is thoroughly exemplified at Kanatsiohareke in Fonda, New York. This community works at
ecological, cultural and linguistic restoration and “is a sustainable, living Onkwehon:we
(Iroquois) community grounded in Rotinonhsionni culture - its language, land, and social
structure.”18 The essential dimension of Kanatsiohareke is ancestral knowledge and its
spiritual, intellectual and physical configuration of Onkwehon:we: Original People. Instead of disenfranchising ancestral wisdom or seeking revision, Onkwehon:we comprehend Good Mind by living its resonant truth in traditional territory. After centuries of
talking to one another, environmentalists still mostly talk among themselves. Onkwehon:we are not patrician, revisionist, environmentalists but Earthlings without the deceptions of a grandiose and awaiting Utopia, one they live in traditional territory. With
faith to their forebears, traditionalists seek to revitalize and restore to their lives and traditional territory consistencies of ancestral qualities and do not attempt to upend that cul-
10
ture by narcissisms of reinvention. Their sacredness is their ancestors’ sacredness, bespeaking their identity and their maturity; they are and will remain their territory.
Getting Turtle Island Right: Settlers Version
John Mohawk (2000) warned about injustices associated with utopian endeavors,
red flagging conceptually similar views to the I.W.W. believing in organizing the unorganized to create systems of production for use, not profit. John Mohawk’s vision was
restoration not revision. Steinbeck’s description in Cannery Row could as easily describe
Skid Rows where Wobblies organized free speech fights or post-Hurricane conditions:
a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and
rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weed lots and junk heaps,
sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its
inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons
of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through
another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and
holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing. (Steinbeck: 1945:1)
Perhaps heavenly timed tides, pounding surf and California skies brought Ed
Ricketts poetry and ecology as lifelong devotions as unfettered holism, nature’s finest,
unifying Creation, animate and inanimate. Wobblies worked with the continent’s primal
ecologies. Holism advanced the logic of superorganism, the center of the IWW’s cardinal
directions similarly conceived.19 The ‘big picture’ resonated with John Steinbeck when
listening to William Emerson Ritter, “In all parts of nature and in nature itself as one gigantic whole, wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the
whole depend upon orderly cooperation and interdependence of the parts, but the whole
exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts” (Astro: xi). Knowing participant organisms’ totality demands communicating that knowledge identically. Known as
oral-formulaic method (Lord, Parry1960: 4), telling epics20 is metaphorically a wayfind-
11
ing/groundtruthing method through heterogeneous verse whose chorus pauses to get bearings on what’s ahead. Remembering walking through places whose sequential locations
make themselves memorable imposes their primary logic to recall narrative sequences
and recognize places. Aboriginal Australians memorize songlines backwards to sing to
people across the continent so they will know how to walk back to the teller’s home.
If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It
Enlightened organisms’ very being creates superorganisms as organizers. Ed
Ricketts and company kept quarters with the down and out, just as Dorothy Day and
Ammon Hennacy provided housing and services to migrants.21 Yet, for many living outdoors, the conditions of missions or shelters are disagreeable. The rules of the hobo jungle were cannery row‘s. Violators of strict behavior codes were exiled and though they
formed but a small part of the superorganism they didn’t abandon their own, modeling a
solidarity and friendship John Steinbeck captured as George and Lennie (1937) in The
Grapes of Wrath. Mac and the boys can’t be separated from the sardine collapse, once
among the world’s most productive until overfishing ended sardine harvests in upwelllings of nutrient rich waters from the Monterey Submarine Canyon, deep as the Grand
Canyon and speculated as the Colorado River’s ancient outlet. The sedimentary load’s
nutrients support diverse marine life (Ricketts, Calvin: 1948; McPhee: 1998). In this milieu (sardines were cheap after purse seiners catalyzed sardine depletion during the Depression) was a malfeasant ecological exploitation that extended the travesty to a social
and economic mirror in cannery row. Perhaps not as consciously numinous as SRC, it is
enough that Mac and the boys modeled humanity’s highest achievements, living in villages, depending on one another and their stories. As their Aegean cousins (Buettner:
12
2012), cannery row was steeped in enchanted oceanic time and climate convivial to outdoor life, surrounded by impossible to remember origins of geologic time spinning starlight unfathomable forever. The Big Rock Candy Mountain, real and mythic, whispers to
her recumbent wards beneath employment’s surveillance. Fathoming one dimension
knows the other to phrase identical axial wonder resonant with Lascaux’s teachings beyond nomenclatures of fact and history. Wonder, not sloth, is secularity’s life off the
clock, extending timeless wonder in a wino’s begging (Steinbeck: 1995: 242).
“I am a happy man,” the hustler proclaimed, and went on to explain how
he had arrived at the true philosophy of rest and pleasure. “You think I’ve
got nothing, Eddie,” the man lectured him. “ But you don’t know from my
simple outsides what I got inside...” “I’ve got peace of mind, Eddie. I’ve
got a place to sleep, not a palace but comfortable. I’m not hungry very often. And best of all, I’ve got friends. I guess I’m gladdest of all for my
friends…” “Why, Ed,” the client continued, “some nights I just lie in my
bed and thank God for my blessings. What does a man need, Eddie- a few
things like food and shelter and a few little tiny vices, like liquor and
women –and tobacco - ”
Therein is Gandi-esque unformalized, non-ideological simplicity. John Steinbeck
(1995:246) assures Ed Ricketts admired them as, “…any animal, family, or species successful in survival...” Steinbeck speculated (1995:257):
We thought that perhaps our species thrives best and most creatively in a
state of semi-anarchy, governed by loose rules and half-practiced mores.
To this we added the premise that over-integration in human groups might
parallel the law in paleontology that over-armor or over-ornamentation are
symptoms of decay and disappearance.
Strident assertions compromise environmental belief contrary to passifism’s
strength. Outrage is easily acknowledged when the discourse is death and destruction.
The quiet whispers to tramps is Mother Earth’s solace. Railroading on the Great Divide.
There’s a lake of stew, and one of whisky too
Ed Rickett’s life purposes turned balanced propellers. Taoist poetry and marine
ecology prospered the same intellect that basked amid wild intellects, non-institutional
13
Dionysian glory and divine mystery, their fire. Numinous surroundings eaten as soul
food, coastal horizons anchored expansiveness beyond ego. Ricketts and company were
post-industrial scavengers alike today’s squatters despite their subsequent varying fortunes. Recalling cannery row as the best time of their lives, practicing philosophical dialogue while lounging is what people have always done in the off-season, when off season’s season existed. By mid century the world’s urban population will be the size of the
world’s total population in 2002 and represent 70 per cent of the world’s population.22
Which explains John Mohawk’s Introduction to Basic Call to Consciousness (1978: 1):
What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent nonWestern political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern
world through Pleistocene eyes.
His temporal context with regards ancestral knowledge and memory is ‘geologic
perspective’ traces Haudenosaunee origin to the ‘beginning of time.’ Unadorned Onkwehon:we. Yet ‘Pleistocene eyes’ seem vastly unfamiliar to temporal dimensions of urban sustainability advocates. Nanosecond champions faithful that technological innovation and spun dreidels expect genius will salvage what never should have been. Finding
in urban preservation as unnatural a pedagogy as institutional environmental learning.
Technophiles are as guilty as developers worshipping altars of better mousetraps.
Ed Ricketts and John Mohawk’s Pleistocene fidelity prevented beguiling wraiths
of progress or positivism. Comparable to John Mohawk’s identification with Haudenosaunee homelands, Ed Ricketts identified with cannery row and Pacific intertidal native
creatures that revealed to him how to know habitat/homelands as did they. American23
science’s Jerry Garcia. Despite initial rejection of the methodology by Stanford University, Ed Ricketts was among the first to describe marine productivity limitations endan-
14
gered by industrial fishing, having observed sardine fishery collapse since 193624 (Beegel: xvi, Rodgers: 8). One eye on the territory and one on “consciousness of the Sacred
Web of Life in the Universe” (Mohawk: 1978).”25 Breaking through broke through.
Why Don’t You Work Like Other Men Do?
Environmental study in John Mohawk and Ed Rickett’s approach was holistically
vocational. They didn’t, as university conventions require, learn about nature. They
learned from nature fulfilling a nervous system’s antiquity to always learns the old way.
Learning nature, in contemporary English, a global language, is already a poor enough
form of communication, but linguistic, non-experiential exclusivity has rendered and biased nature as linguistically constructed, book learning but steps from ephemera. Talking
about thinking about nature learned from page 18 of Walden in a windowless classroom
near a pond. Environmental professionals construct hegemony, though their altruism is
commendable at a time of widespread somnambulism concerning the planet. Environmental knowledge, skill and belonging are birthrights and though endorsing ‘consumer’
identity is epidemic, the necessity of teaching and organizing isn’t getting due efforts.
Sustainability attempts to encompass an ethic without apparent metaphysics or
physical skills tuned to local ecosystems. Over-adornment provides the armor necessary
for Wendell Berry’s (1991: XXIV) despised ‘grandeur’ in addition to a pomposity rarely
going beyond the urban because endemic linguistic habits enfeeble the capacity to keep
company with folks without colloquy or silence. No one ever accused Sigurd F. Olsen,
Loren Eiseley, John Muir, Beatrix Potter or Henry David Thoreau, tramps and walkers
all, of talking and writing about nature in ways fellow naturalists couldn’t understand.
15
Overdue lessons in what academics call primitivism, John Mohawk’s Pleistocene
vision awaits the conceits of literary critics and armchair environmentalists. Finding wildness as witness, William Everson,26 calls (Fitzpatrick: 2006: 86) “the zone of mystery.”
The place (where) language hides. As if Hurricane Sandy chose climate change deniers.
Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life
Harry Kirby McClintock, better known as musician and hobo Haywire Mac was
the first to sing Joe Hill’s, ‘Preacher and the Slave’ and whose legendary drifting was
recorded in his version27 of ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain,’ Haywire Mac used hobo
folksong to describe the dream life and mythology of the hobo and tramp as Cannery
Row remains its realist depiction. Any talk of the songlines of Turtle Island must be spiritually referential. Dismissing myth as fantasy conflates reality’s realism with invention.
Loren Eiseley, a tramp turned homeguard, (1957: 489) wrote of the phenomenon
thusly, “… the need for the contemplative naturalist, a man who, in a less frenzied era,
had time to observe, to speculate, and to dream.” No description of vagrant life is possible without accounting for dreaming as the outcome of observation, experience and speculation. Loren Eiseley exactly described Ed Rickett’s research methodology as ‘beholding life.’ Rather than regard dreaming as aberrant, John Mohawk and the Haudenosaunee
(1998) conclude that spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. Salteaux
scholar Linda Akan and Elder Alfred Maniopeyes’ (1992) describe Elders’ methodology
as riding in Trickster’s vehicle, going to school in dreams and always walking around.28
That description equates research as ceremony (Wilson: 2009).
Richard E. Wentz (1984) said of Loren Eiseley what could be said of Ed Ricketts:
Eiseley's belief that science may have become misguided in its goals. Loren Eiseley thought that much of the modern scientific enterprise had re-
16
moved humanity ever farther from its sense of responsibility to the natural
world it had left in order to create an artificial world to satisfy its own insatiable appetites. Eiseley adds, "It would be well,” he tells us, “to heed
the message of the Buddha, who knew that one cannot proceed upon the
path of human transcendence until one has made interiorly in one’s soul a
road into the future.”
Spaces within stretch as far as those without. The comparable outdoor lives of
Loren Eiseley, Alfred Manitopeyes and Ed Ricketts richly enable a vast, elastic patience
seemingly unknown to nanosecond culture. The same poise, patience, wisdom and compassion are outcomes of being outdoors which is why divisions of class and hegemonic
linguistics barriers were disallowed by hobo (1889) rules.29 Ecology and imagination as
reciprocities (Sheridan and Longboat: 2006) is articulated by Michael Lind (2006) :
Before the rise of a self-conscious intelligentsia, most educated people –
as well as the unlettered majority – spent most of their time in the countryside or, if they lived in cities, were a few blocks away from farmland or
wilderness... At the risk of sounding countercultural, I suspect that thinkers who live in sealed, air-conditioned boxes and work by artificial light (I
am one) are as unnatural as apes in cages at zoos. Naturalists like Eiseley
in that sense are the most normal human beings to be found among intellectuals, because they spend a lot of time outdoors and know the names of
the plants and animals they see... For all of his scientific erudition, Eiseley
has a poetic, even cinematic, imagination.
Accomplishing marginality is the noble aspiration and salt of the Earth vocation
of monk, busker, pilgrim and beggar. In not being the center of attention they are in a
place and a time and of a mind securing an identity consistent with the tiny ecological
footprint of their mission. The might of that identity, methodology and hermeneutic was
Ed Rickett’s formula. A life of patient observation concluding in a distillation of factual
observation fell into place because its inhabitants, like he himself, kept that place. Ed
Rickett’s elemental universe and sensorial attunement to Pacific surf and symphony
achieved contentment with place in ecological spirituality as Beatrix Potter (2012):
17
I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make
myself a fairyland amongst the wildflowers, the animals, fungi, mosses
woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the country side; that
pleasant unchanging world of realism and romance, which is our northern
clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry and the strength that
comes from the hills.
The tramping formula assemble its dimensions and methodology. Susan F. Beegle
(2006:16) writes of a 1932 trip to Alaska taken by Ed Ricketts, his writing partner Jack
Calvin, Mrs. Calvin and Joseph Campbell, making the case that the voyage, “…was the
first of a series of expeditions to conduct scientific and philosophical inquiries…by a circle of companions who shared a deep interest in marine science, ecology, and philosophy.” The consequence was Deep Ecology (prebranding) where context and interdependence were consequential theories from determined observation and curiosity. This is later
concretized as a methodological zeitgeist iterated in Ed Ricketts’ Introduction (1948:3),
“ecological arrangements cannot yet, possibly cannot ever, achieve the finality so characteristic of the taxonomic order…” and his moving pictures of ecology were reviewed as,
“…a stellar example of what can be accomplished by dedicated, competent amateur scientists.”30 Patronizing, but recall federal authorities imprisoned I.W.W. organizers for
holism’s class-conscious version. Susan F. Beegle adds (2006:20) that in Ed Ricketts’
years ahead he tried conceptualizing and articulating a “unified field hypothesis [that]
integrated the spiritual and the ecological.” Praise be the lack of capital.
Naturalism is Folk Methodology
Folk methodology sourced that integration whose methodology reversed many of
the effects of dominating Earth consistent in Western science since the Neolithic. Learning how to be on Earth, how to be here, begins by knowing place well enough to understand progressively larger patterns, genres, grammars and relationships. Cosmic capaci-
18
ties derive from inspired perception and conception that engages reality, not from monocultural, asensorial two-dimensional embrace. Portending a virtually total indoors and
mediated existence as a sustainable Nineteen Eighty Four, breaking naturalist faith since
Creation’s dawning. Of course, go-to identity may be all that’s left after post-nuclear
nano-second spatial extinction.. Starving self from ‘the big out there’ ultimately prevents
the maturity of spiritual vision that begins with and compliments thorough knowledge of
place to encompass the cosmos. Neil Postman’s diagnosis of terminal adolescence consistent with electronic media saturation (1982, 1985) approximating a similar conviction
held by Frederick Turner (1980) that genesis of juvenile anthropocentrism characterizes
the Neolithic and beyond. Volition, prediction and foresight augured and obeyed by Indigenous Peoples (Mohawk: 1978) is ignored by virtually all neo-environmentalists emblematic as human outcomes of habitual two dimensionality. Going no deeper than the
plane consumed with self construct. Belonging to place as essential to self, knowing who
one is knows Earthly allegiance only in death and blood memory. Though as smoke or
soil, identity and consciousness surrender as place. From organizes is.
The poetry lived by Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck, Joseph Campbell and Mac and
the Boys was tidal mantra syncopated and charismatic as progenitor of their dreaming. In
that sense, they performed antiquity’s preservation accepting reality, tragic or blessed, for
what it is. Their poetics and its representative antiquity were symmetrical with old
growth. If consciousness is The Big Rock Candy Mountain or Glooscap and the Crocodile31 and dreams are equally and three dimensionally epic, they know in legacies of
mammalian certainty (Frank: 646). Which modality is correct for seeing, understanding
and telling ancient reality? All great tales lead to and from ‘being here.’ Blood spilled
19
relentlessly in genocidal Utopian quests (Mohawk: 2000) to reinvent identity are consequent of the crisis of 1492.
John Robinson Jeffers built stone tower tribute to the same mythic spirit. Preserving in spiritual two-step the thousand nights and miles needed to leave the circle by walking back in. There are places where people go to be free and willingly pay admission in
blood and travail for love of that place. Never have these authors felt that affection in the
concrete of academic appointment nor experienced her wilder joys on committees. If the
freedom that is Indigenous to North America were in any way central to the pedagogy of
environmental education, environmental education would cease to be institutionalized.
Being tosses professional planning’s preparing to be into a cocked hat.
F.E.M.A. took five days to get water to New Orleans’ Superdome
Naturalism’s disrespect synonymously contrives romanticism. Naturalism, methodologically consequential to ‘breaking through,’ is extemporaneous, self-organizing reward. Practitioners are preservationists as interested in their ecosystems as the blessing of
living out/through deserved consciousness. Harry Smith32 is never mentioned in the same
breath as methodology where visceral experience defined being alive. Harry Smith, a
sonic Ed Ricketts, pyschoacoustician, listened to and embodied sound as aural landscape
curator. Arising every morning to listen.
Growing populations shy at any notion of returning to the source and finding in
that origin contentment with place and being placed. The lesson known to Indigenous
Traditionalists, travelling nations and monks lives an ineluctable center of a circular universe in whose enclosure they stand, arms clasped. The Two Row Wampum balances
dexterity by peace, friendship and respect for real work restoring what wages eradicated.
20
Environmental studies have lost their way in an amalgam of sensory denial, disembodied knowledge, lapsed skills and tormented solipsism dead ending at self-spun
complexity and attunement to a futurism inherent in the bedrock faith of Planning stripped to its deceptive conceit as human remedy amid ongoing biodiversity loss, imperiled
biosphere and catastrophic climate change. In part also because exegesis, when and if exegesis happens, is prevented without acknowledged canon. The tragic flaw was replacing
the study of Creation with the study of culture; that technology of appropriating Creation
within the distancing technologies apprehending Creation. Environmental studies is so
busy changing reality’s representation, literary criticism’s domain, it has accepted (now is
hardly the era for such abdication) the symbolic is its own reality, empowering poststructural parlor tricks engorging trebled fallacies whereby readers know more about
books than authors. Literary ecology’s authority must be accurate to be beautiful.
Indeed, with an imperiled future this egregious, factional and volitional revision
in environmental theory is resignation and accommodation to technological changes’
ubiquity and amassing aesthetic, more prominent when minus bush skills. Distant horizons bespeak war or neglect as each becomes expansionism‘s handmaiden. Environmental studies has forsworn itself a beachhead adopting increasingly Humanist context.
Contrast this with the sage. Frequently reluctant to be identified as such for legitimate fear of incumbent responsibilities, yet swearing fidelity to their arduous summoning to ghostwrite for whispering spirits cresting their shoulders. A version of John Robinson Jeffers‘ own ‘breaking through’ is prefaced in The Double Axe (1977) describing "a
philosophical attitude" he called “Inhumanism,” in his writing since Roan Stallion, Tamar
and Other Poems (1925). He described (1977:xxi) Inhumanism:
21
…a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.... This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor
pessimist...It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of
love, hate and envy...it provides magnificence for the religious instinct,
and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
To the same end is our plea that “poetically irrelevant details and complexities
that characterize civilization” (Jeffers in Coleman: 1967) no longer solely command our
interests and choose instead revival of the tradition and utterance of verse manifest in
those words voicing Mother Earth’s. This forms a cultural restoration and renewal in
keeping with environmentalism’s oldest traditions and most successful ethics and narratives. The aesthetic proposed is in making theory and medium equivalent to the strength
and beauty of Creation.
Beauty is all that can stand in counterpoint to the hastening dissolution of planetary integrity. What is left is all that can secure memories of how territory is supposed to
look. Consider G8 leaders locust reveilles following September 11th, 2001:
Western leaders, worried about the possibility of a recession fuelled by
terrorist attacks in the United States, are urging their citizens to spend
money, take vacations and buy new cars and homes. Jean Chretien,
George Bush and Tony Blair yesterday all called on consumers not to be
spooked by the cataclysmic attacks of Sept. 11. Mr. Bush urged Americans to "get on the airlines, get about the business of America" as he announced improved security measures on commercial flights. Mr. Blair
used a news conference at 10 Downing St. to appeal to the British public
to return to everyday life, including their usual spending habits, to fend off
recession. "People in this country ask what should they do at a time like
this," Mr. Blair said. "The answer is that they should go about their daily
lives: to work, to live, to travel and to shop -- to do things in the same way
as they did before Sept. 11." And Mr. Chretien urged Canadians to face
down terrorists with their wallets…Some American officials are even calling a trip to the mall an act of patriotism as the United States tries to rebound and rebuild. Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, has said
that his battered city needs "the best shoppers in the world" to return to
restaurants, Broadway shows and shops. And local officials in Florida
22
have declared this weekend "Freedom Weekend," a time for people to do
their patriotic duty and spend money."33
Wisdom and ancient knowledge’s provide the cure to intravenous habits that
skin-popped the Neolithic to mainline today. That universities embrace the paradigms of
globalization and technological fixes make them unqualified and inept at embracing the
folk wisdom they have ironically, preserved and destroyed. Rarely implementing. Universities are best at excluding any other way of knowing just as primal consciousness teeters on extinction, ours may be the last generation to have known those who lived the old
ways. Environmentalists should be docents to the best knowledges to have arisen when
old growth ecosystems and nature cultures alike were everywhere, else being utopian and
committing as heinous a legacy as colonialists (Mohawk: 200). Denial of the rightful
place of that knowledge in environmental studies sails the flight of Icarus. Allied with
temporal-centric praxis flying sunward.
Living in beauty, contemplation and vindication preserves the best of environmental thought where engaging in Earth damaging labor should once again be renounced
as conscientious objection. Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell knew the
joys, intellect and enchantment of Loafer’s Glory as surely as Socrates refutation of Plato’s entreaties to literacy by claiming that external records provide the illusion of
memory, a cognitive consequence of confusing map with territory, while destroying the
practice of memory as an accomplishment of the soul (Plato:551,552). Soul continues to
elude curriculum under environmental studies’ orthodox atheism and falls prey to its corresponding weakness and hubris in proffering solutions cast within the cognitive paradigms of the very environmental crisis that gave birth to the trade. Adoring the conti-
23
nent’s perfection was a tramps trade. Where others sought despoliation tramps found Zen.
The despoilers sought destruction at the sight of a beauty their culture could not comprehend and attacked to make their predecessor surroundings into those of the succession
into Neolithic scree. The difference revealed in differences that make a difference.
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence.
Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth imme
diately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for
what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de
Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel
its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and
space.1
Hemingway saw the blessedness as weakness that redoubles its strength:
If a person brings so much courage into the world that the world must kill him to
break him, so of course it kills him. The world breaks everyone and afterward
many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break it will kill. It kills
the very good, the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of
these things the world will kill you too but there will be no special hurry
(1929:137).
No vision of sustainability can endure without envisioning and conceptualizing
apocalyptic shadows. Some with Nazi ancestors. The canon I extoll are treasures as dear
as Denali, Yellowstone, Georgian Bay, Gross Morne, the Black Hills and Big Sur. Not
that entire canon is written, since time immemorial that knowledge was born in and
breathed fresh air in repetitions coursing intergenerational tongues.
Ed Ricketts proved that having time to contemplate his surroundings was his
methodology and gateway to understanding the Earth as the Earth is to be understood.
His embodied methodology was nonteleological but otherwise synonymous as a combination of determined curiosity and refused employment as a strategic freedom to know
24
the coast without interruption. So too, Robert Stroud, Bird Man of Alcatraz, whose authority on avian life was earned at being incarcerated for 54 years of his life, 42 of in solitary confinement. Spatial v34irtuosos. Mac and the boys, Joseph Campbell and John
Steinbeck had stories that were verbal restorations of the ecologies to which they belonged, their understanding of those places and cerebral, primal place in firelight minds
where listening and telling reside. Anthropomorphism implies artifice but they really
were beings of legend and lore.
Environmental studies should have learned not to deploy a rhetorical practice
known as metonymy in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the
name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. What is nature reduced to environment? What is nature in relation to Creation? Metonymy’s aspiration
makes a portion representative of the whole without having to define that whole. This is
accomplished through the use of its portion as a name and concept standing for a broader,
larger entity to which it is related, or of which it is a part. Life, being, Creation, and universe witnessed in the soul of campfire storytelling. Peaceable men whose selfimportance never challenged or dominated but whose ecological footprint didn’t exceed
the fancy to sleep out every night, moon for covers, genius loci their mistress. Never taking Neolithic bait, animating a filiopietistic past, sparing grim labour in a too short life.
Railroad Bill,35 he won’t work and he never will.
Old school sublime materialism, environmental thought’s ‘green fuse’ before retreat into Humanities’ unapologetic anthropocentrism, is new school environmental studies. Pretending a present improved by a future unimproved by a taxidermic past. A spiritual civil war, victimizing the most ancestral offerings by igniting temporal bonfires.
25
Synecdoche, where the whole is used to describe a part of something (New Yorker), requires the whole entity should be known and understood. Synecdoche first develops
knowledge and comprehension of the existence of the big concept as a way of knowing
the validity, authority and legitimacy of the contributing, representative parts and their
goodness of fit with/within the whole. Acknowledging Creation is then a logical necessity. This was Ed Rickett’s contribution, studying beings relative to their surroundings not
in solitude. Among Anishinaabe traditional knowledge must walk out of or back into the
Creation Story to be authentic. Whereby getting a part wrong can change everything in
the whole, hence, parts of knowledge must always be referential to the process and
grammar of life, being, Creation, memory and universe completing themselves in and
through each other. The latter is ecologically modeled thinking whereas the former does
not of necessity lay claim to or have a need for a larger picture and so disposes of context
beyond the logic of its discipline. With no prerequisite familiarity with high fiber reality
and environments, environmental studies plays with time as its formulaic strategy for fixing traditions by inventing and intervening to create newness and novelty. Fashioning the
assumption of the limitlessness of time, temporality becomes fashioned and mimetically
crafted to resemble what it is not and should never be mistaken to be. Creation. For those
of us that cut our teeth on actuality and granite reality, space defines our lives. We remain
Earthlings. Grounded and anchored in the flux of time when geosynchronous satellites
will be suspended in space for a period as long as the Earth is old (Paglen: 2012). Karl
Marx (1973: 538) was right predicting annihilation of space by time as capitalism cannibalizes itself and reinvents time by the very nanosecond that reared youngblood environmentalists to whom we oldtimers are somehow to pass the torch. Having lived through
26
60’s environmentalism to the present and witnessed a polar shift with time displacing
space, time becoming both infinitesimally tiny yet simultaneously immense. Space accordingly smaller after space travel and light speed acceleration.
A thousand blessings are the spirit and intelligence of Georgian Bay and Grand
River Territory and we wouldn’t exchange the gifts for nanosecond everywhere. We became what we experienced, the methodology was to never be distracted. We need no other. Growing old and thankful for our duration in Creation is enough and makes a fitting
farewell to water-comprised bodies that once more will fall as rain. Just as life and death
regenerate the other, the old gives way to youthful energy. But recall when that selfsame,
self-assured energy powered the conservation and revitalization of knowledge. Trusted
fealty to wisdom learned at the shoulder of Elder and Archdruid. Intergenerational canon,
once welcoming arrivées, watches émigrés, from times, places and old campaigns that
made us old. Greybeards enact the infinity that surpasses sustainability’s pallid, hobbled
temporality, to qualify for the fourth dimension. Dudes abide.
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again.
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Endnotes
1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uKbIkYGsIg
Retrieved Oct. 12, 2013.
2
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hfOAuPvGiHAJ:www.ontarionature.org/discover
/resources/PDFs/atlases/mammal_atlas_deer.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=
ADGEESikZ8Aq8RTT2pDPZ3tt-tQIvI-wQmz7qKM1Wt2vq1yzSPQmYIMJ3mFiTNQWSbG0F2zrNeztzYLY2eiYNCEplBJDIQJWWTn7JkCYzJzXozwzv1GgI24V9MnilrjRLZwfQyUEJK&sig=AHIEtbQDDzAAR8nI1IdvnLIHBjyuvk
b4IA
Retrieved October 13, 2012.
3
In the nomenclature of the traveling nation; a tramp dreams and wanders and won’t submit to
labor; a hobo works and wanders, a bum drinks and wanders.
4
In Yahi , his name was Wa ganu p'a.
31
5
http://www.iww.org/en/guides/branch/model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses
Retrieved February 20, 2012
7
http://www.folkarchive.de/pie.html
Retrieved February 20, 2012
8
http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/i/iwasborntenthousandyearsago.shtml
Retrieved November 22, 2012.
9
This cocktail is known as ‘Ricketts Folly.’
6
10
Stewart passim
11
Matti Valentinpoika Huhta
12
http://thenewprohibition.com/marin-institute.cfm
Retrieved November 22, 2012.
What judgment could be rendered against partridges for getting drunk a few days following the
first frost upon eating fermented Loganberries remains a mystery.
13
Rodger, Katie (30 March, 2012). Ed Ricketts, Between Pacific Tides, and Beyond Sitka Sound...
(Speech). University of Alaska, Southeast. Sitka, Alaska.
14
Re-discovered in this instance acknowledges that Traditional Ecological Knowledge was not consulted in
the claim of ‘originilaty.’
15
Chronicles of the March and April,1940 voyage aboard the Western Flyer on the Sea of Cortez.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYGCpGzFWh0
Retrieved October 25, 2012.
17
http://grist.org/article/orr/full/
Retrieved October 29, 2012.
18
http://www.mohawkcommunity.com/home.html
Retrieved October 29, 2012.
19
http://www.iww.org/en/about/official/wheel
20
Milman Parry, L’epithèt traditionnelle dans Homère (Paris, 1928), p. 16; cf. Albert B. Lord,
The singer of tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 4
21
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammon_Hennacy
Retrieved Oct. 30, 2012.
22
esa.un.org/unup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf
Retrieved October 30, 2012.
16
23
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2010/06/ed-head-alert-an-update-on-the-steinbeckauction/
Were any Beothuk peoples left in Newfoundland, I’m sure they would have arrived at the same
conclusion about over-fishing the Grand Banks.
25
http://www.ratical.com/many_worlds/6Nations/BasicCtC.htmlRetrieved November 01, 2012.
26
Poet laureate at University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1970’s and 1980’s. AKA Brother
Antoninus. William Everson (1912-1994) was a pre-Beat nature poet who identified with the Beat
Poets of the 1950’s as part of the San Francisco Renaissance.
24
27
Used in the soundtrack of the motion picture, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?
28
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_
SearchValue_0=EJ461785&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ461785
29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo
Retrieved October 31, 2012.
30
http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2011/03/06/book-review-between-pacidic-tides
Retrieved October 30, 2012.
31
Glooscap is a spirit warrior known for cunning and wit and as ancient as Creation. His deceit is
balanced by his teaching and naming the stars.
32
http://www.harrysmitharchives.com/1_bio/index.html
32
Retrieved November 09, 2012.
33
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines01/0929-04.htm
Retrieved November 09, 2012
34
35
http://wisdomoftheelders.org/2011/01/25/elder-wisdom/
http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1258
Retrieved March 15, 2013
33