From Gary Snyder:I heard a Crow elder say: You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough-even white people- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways. It is not enough just to love nature or want to be in harmony with Gaia. Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience. This is so unexceptional a kind of knowledge that everyone in Europe, Asia and Africa used to take for granted… Knowing a bit about the flora we could enjoy questions like: where do Alaska and Mexico meet? It would be somewhere on the north coast of California, where Canada Jay and Sitka Spruce lace together with manzanita and Blue Oak. But instead of northern California, let’s call it Shasta Bioregion. The present state of California (the old Alta California territory) falls into at least three natural divisions, and the northern third looks, as the Douglas Fir example, well to the north. East of the watershed divide to the west near Sacramento, is the Great Basin, north of Shasta is the Cascadia/Colombia region, and then farther north is what we call Ish River country, the drainages of Puget Sound.Why should we do this kind of visualization? It prepares us to begin to be at home in this landscape. There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land, they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into native americans. For the non-Native Americans to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island. ― David Landis Barnhill, At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

From Gary Snyder:I heard a Crow elder say: You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough-even white people- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways. It is not enough just to love nature or want to be in harmony with Gaia. Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience. This is so unexceptional a kind of knowledge that everyone in Europe, Asia and Africa used to take for granted… Knowing a bit about the flora we could enjoy questions like: where do Alaska and Mexico meet? It would be somewhere on the north coast of California, where Canada Jay and Sitka Spruce lace together with manzanita and Blue Oak. But instead of northern California, let’s call it Shasta Bioregion. The present state of California (the old Alta California territory) falls into at least three natural divisions, and the northern third looks, as the Douglas Fir example, well to the north. East of the watershed divide to the west near Sacramento, is the Great Basin, north of Shasta is the Cascadia/Colombia region, and then farther north is what we call Ish River country, the drainages of Puget Sound.Why should we do this kind of visualization? It prepares us to begin to be at home in this landscape. There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land, they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into native americans. For the non-Native Americans to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.
― David Landis Barnhill,

At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

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