Stephanie Mills

Watersheds are life-places. They outline and embrace distinct realms. They collect fluid intelligence from animate terrains.

In the 1990s, Jungian psychiatrist and naturalist Sterling Bunnell observed, “We’re in for some pretty rough bumping over the next century. The important thing is that we don’t totally lose our bearings and become degraded by it.”

What’s coming? Possibilities I hope for, probabilities to dread. Possible: A renewed stirring of love for the Earth. Respect for and reciprocity with all beings.

Revolutions in human ecology might usefully be grounded in a sense of humanity’s deep past, for that is where our power arrangements began.

As it has grown in numbers and technological might, the human race has become a force of geophysical proportion, on par with the asteroid that struck the Yucatan during the Cretaceous era, dethroning Tyrannosaurus rex. Extinction is final. Yet no species is immortal. Extinction has been part of evolution since life emerged on Earth.

The map of the area threatened by the BP blowout, comprising nearly half of the US’s coastal wetlands, looks like tattered lace. It’s a realm of islands, shoals, estuaries, marshes, swamps, bayous, and creeks, land speckled across water, water twining across land, all of it in flux…