Thoreau's Legacy Read Online Free PDF

pan, which now shows up empty most mornings. We put out more pans. By day javelina sip daintily, and dozens of juncos and white-crowned sparrows perch on the rim, bending low to dip thirsty beaks. At night we have seen a white-throated desert pack rat slake its thirst. Desert hares, gray foxes, a coyote, wasps, beetles, and other wild creatures are regular visitors to the pans.
    Another visible effect of the prolonged drought is the precarious drop in a local aquifer, drying up springs that once trickled over parched ground across the region. And that brings us back to the tiny oasis in our back yard. We realize that we must offset the water we provide for wildlife by conserving water elsewhere. We have installed low-flush toilets. We consolidate household washing chores. When exotic trees and shrubs planted by previous owners succumbed to drier conditions, we replaced them with native species that provide forage and shelter for native creatures.
    One unexpected form of resource conservation is that we drive fewer miles for entertainment or purchase of “things” for the household, because we love to stay home and observe the never-ending drama of local wildlife. There is a direct correlation between our heightened happiness from interacting with nature and the decline in our material consumption.
    Conserving water is a small sacrifice compared to the enormous joy of seeing wild creatures slake their thirst at the little steel water holes. Looking out for other-than-human beings in our natural neighborhood is our way of responding positively to global climate change. The presence of these critters is integral to our daily life. Our small act moderates our consuming ways and gives new meaning to the phrase “providing for creature comforts.”

    Terril L. Shorb grew up on ranches and farms in the northern Rockies and now teaches at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona. He cofounded and directs the college’s Sustainable Community Development Program.

Calving
Tidewater Glacier
    Trude McDermott
    My perceptions as a working artist are strongly influenced by the changing landscape. In the last few years I have tried to capture the complexity and beauty of these receding icy giants, visual reminders that we humans must align ourselves with the balance of the natural world.

    Trude McDermott has been a painter and mixed- media artist for the past twenty-five years. She lives with
her husband in Coarsegold, California, near Yosemite National Park.

In Defense of Ice
    Carol Ellis
    HAVING BACKPACKED ALL MY LIFE, I AM BOUND TO
ice and glaciers over rivers of time. Today I see clearly how global warming threatens them. My connection to Glacier National Park began in the summer of 1966. On my days off from work, I hiked hundreds of miles, past Blackfoot Glacier, up to Sperry Glacier, and over Siyeh Pass with its three glaciers. At Grinnell Glacier my friends and I jumped crevasses, glancing down the yawning cuts into blue ice. We climbed along the bottom edge of a snow field, trying to reach the western slope of Salamander Glacier, which lies cradled in the sheer crest of Mount Gould. The rugged terrain stopped us.
    In 1971 my husband and I packed our young daughter along the Continental Divide on the back side of the mountain wall, where we scrambled up the notch to look down on Grinnell. From that elevation the glacier looked grayer than I remembered—perhaps because the sky was overcast, I thought. But in 1987, when we hiked from Swiftcurrent Valley toward Grinnell and Salamander, I was shocked. In twenty-one years Salamander Glacier had visibly shrunk. The tail had atrophied, the neck was strangled, the head was more diminutive, the belly had tucked and flattened up toward the spine. Grinnell had also changed. Its contracted surface area looked dirtier and grayer from the melting that had occurred. Many more rocks lay on the surface, as in the Himalayas today. The National Park Service had cordoned off more areas of instability.