Today is #WorldEnvironmentDay

This year's World Environment Day is also the start of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration 2021 - 2030. I don't think I was aware of either event yesterday when we stopped by one of our favorite local, independent, bookstores, where I purchased two books that align nicely with World Environment Day and an Ecosystem Restoration Decade.

what's at the end of your rainbow?

Photo by J. Harrington

The first book was The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy, subtitle: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees. If you read this blog with any degree of regularity, first, thank you!, and second, you have probably read my complaints about our oak trees dropping leaves what seems like 11 months of the  year. I'm hoping reading Tallamy's book will help me develop a more positive perspective toward the many oaks with whom we have been sharing a seven acre homestead. 

The second book is one I've almost bought the last couple of times we've stopped by the bookstore. This time it spoke loudly enough that I knew better than to resist. N. Scott Momaday's Earth Keeper - Reflections on the American Land "argues that “it is the present and the possibilities of a future that must concern us. Ours is a damaged world. We humans have done the damage, and we must be held to account. We have suffered a poverty of the imagination, a loss of innocence. I would strive with all my strength to give [a] sense of wonder to those who will come after me.”

I hope most fervently that a decade of ecosystem restoration will lean heavily on the wisdom of indigenous peoples throughout the world and, especially, here in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, so that we may share in the delights of living on a restored earth.

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

By N. Scott Momaday

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to the earth

I stand in good relation to the gods

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful

I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte

You see, I am alive, I am alive

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