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"The overpowering rise of machinery pains and frightens me; it is rolling along like a thunderstorm, slowly, slowly; but it has taken its direction, it will come and strike." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as Susanne in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 
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“Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space...” --Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)  “Why does this strange man go into the wet woods and up the mountain on stormy nights? Why does he walk along on barren peaks or on dangerous mountains?” --Toyatte (Chilkat) “It has always seemed to me that while trying to speak to traders and those seeking gold mines that it was like speaking to a person across a broad stream that was running over fast stones and making so loud a noise that scarce a single word could be heard. But now, for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river.” --Chilkat chief Dan-na-wuk
"I am, alas, destined for a career that distracts me terribly from my studies.” --Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) Alexander longed to live "far away from the so-called intellectuals." “There was still an instinctive wariness of his brother’s more analytical way of thinking, and ‘the knack that logical reasoning has to kill off the spirit and the imagination’.” “While [Alexander's brother] was in the process of arranging his life down to the colour of his teapot, Alexander seemed to recoil instinctively against everything conventional and regimented.”  |
Chris Dunn, PhD
Researcher, writer, explorer*, photographer, thinker. Wrestling with nature, culture, technology. Archives
October 2024
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*When I use the term "exploration", I mean it in a personal sense (discovery for myself, or at a unique moment in time [everywhere after all--even crowded cities--endlessly await rediscovery--by new eyes and in new moments]), not in an absolute sense. With few exceptions (notably Antarctica), almost everywhere on earth has had other people around for a long time (though to varying degrees - high mountain tops or places like the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet for instance were far less visited and populated, and undoubtedly at least some pockets of the earth were never visited or populated). It is an enlightening experience though when on an isolated ridge in what feels like the middle of nowhere to wonder if anyone has set foot there but never knowing for sure. What is significant is that the landscape itself is left in such a condition that it isn't evident. Some places ought to be kept that way.
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