“I’m a ground person, not a figure person.”

--Deborah Stratman

"You've got to take your anger and make it beautiful, like Dr. J going to the hoop or like Duke Ellington."

--David Hammons

Map of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta (1859)

As artists our job is to look where others don’t.

--Alfonso Cuarón

Georgia O'Keefe

Charles Sheeler

Romantic reverence for wild nature paradoxically disserved the natural world, idealizing nature to the point of obscuring much of its reality. When Romantic environmentalism did not own up to the ways that law and technology produce both the nature we encounter and the ways we encounter it, its ideal of pristine, wild nature grew narrower. This narrowing encouraged the Romantic habit of disregarding, even disdaining, places that do not meet high standards of sublimity and inspiration, segregating the natural world into a few cathedrals and vast tracts of profane land, with most of human life relegated to the profane regions.

--Jedediah Purdy

The Great Grey Owl Siting at Prairie Creek State Park, Humboldt County, CA (circa 2015)

Perhaps wildness is always a trespasser disrespecting the artificial boundaries of power.

--Daegan Miller

1848 illustration of the great Tule marsh of the Sacramento Valley

US Dept. of Agriculture Map of the State of California (1901) courtesy of the Prelinger Library