Contemplating our connection to place, however small and personal that place may be.


** News of the world environment
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NEWSLETTER | OCTOBER 8, 2021
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** A River Kind of Mood
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This is a good time of year on the Hay River, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The fall colors. The spruce and wild cranberry. The smell of wood burning stoves. The nights are getting a little colder, with hints of the northern lights. The view out my window seems temporal. Nothing stays the same from one day to the next as we approach the deep dive into winter.

But these days, I’m taking care to better notice the river itself. I live in a small community of 20 or so houses nestled into a tight bend in the Hay River — the river surrounds our one-road neighborhood on three sides. For me, the autumnal colors and grayer skies have accentuated the river’s texture: the foam collecting on logjams, and the muskeg-fed waters the color of black tea.

When I fall into these “river moods” (which I often do), I like to reread the opening pages of a longtime favorite, John Graves’s Goodbye to a River. The book is both an adventure story and an elegy. In 1957, Graves and his “passenger” — a six-month-old dachshund — canoed a stretch of Central Texas’s Brazos River that was soon to be inundated by the De Cordova Bend Dam. Really, Graves’s book is about our connection to place, however small and personal that place may be. “You can comprehend a piece of a river,” he writes.

But that “piece of river” is undoubtedly connected to a whole. Graves continues: “A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean, and filthy water, is all kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores.”

I know, according to maps, where the waters of the Hay River come from — the labyrinth of peatlands just south of here — and where they go — the Arctic Ocean, eventually, via a series of lakes and deltas. It’s a complex place, the boreal forest and the wetlands of the North, greater than the sum of its parts. But for now, I can only take notice, and learn to comprehend, this place: this particular piece of river.

Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal

P.S. We’d love to hear about a “piece of river” special to you. Drop us a note at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) to tell us about it.

Photo by: Oliver Letellier ([link removed])
TOP STORIES ()
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** American Soil ([link removed])
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The US has long been purchasing land abroad, often to the detriment of local communities and the environment. Now, as foreign companies increasingly buy up US farmland, it’s getting a taste of its own medicine.
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** YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE! ([link removed])
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Earth Island Journal is a nonprofit publication. Our mission is to inform and inspire action. Which is why we rely on readers like you for support. If you believe in the work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to our Green Journalism Fund ([link removed]) .
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** See It to Believe It ([link removed])
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Zaria Forman’s stunningly realistic and breathtakingly beautiful pastel drawings of glaciers and waves are a powerful reminder of the urgency of the climate crisis.

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** Toxic Periods ([link removed])
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The average woman uses 11,000 disposable menstrual products over her lifetime. Those products are typically awash in plastics and chemicals, and are pricey to boot, which is why youth activists are blazing a new trail towards period sustainability and justice.
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** Public Lands Victory ([link removed])
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Hooray! Today, President Biden issued a proclamation restoring protections to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah and to Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England, reversing the largest federal land protection rollback in US history.

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** Celebrating Octopuses ([link removed])
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In honor of world octopus day today, we’re reflecting back on Sy Montgomery’s must-read exploration of our intelligent eight-tentacled friends, our evolving understanding of their minds and emotions, and her connection with one 40-pound, 5-foot-long giant Pacific octopus in particular.

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