The Dipper's Attitude

Conversations with Northwest Naturalists

This ongoing collection explores who northwest naturalists are, how they attend to the natural world and why that matters. Above all, it celebrates a rooted community of people who seek greater understanding of the place where they live. The naturalists we profile are photographers, professors and poets, activists, lepidopterists and fathers. They practice natural history on ambulance calls, weekend trips and rare plant surveys. It is this combination of voices that ultimately defines what a naturalist is, and as the biosphere and humanity itself face destabilization, we must broaden that definition to include us all.

Interviews with Robert Michael Pyle, Libby Mills, Tim McNulty, Pat Buller, Paula Ogden Muse, Dana Visalli, and others, edited by Sara Joy Steele.

Excerpts

Libby Mills

"You spend all of these days completely drenched. You wear Gore-Tex, and you're completely drenched. So the next day you wear rubber, and you're still completely drenched. Through all of this rain the dipper is singing, and I started thinking: you know, this is a really good bird, the model of good cheer in the eye of adversity. What we all need in the early part of the 21st century is the dipper's attitude, because it's raining on us, and it's snowing on us, it's hailing on us in political ways. The dipper is such a cheerful bird to be around, and they're of the river and rivers are such a neat thing all of their own."

Dana Visalli

"Why be a naturalist? It has to do with living in a natural world. If you dimly perceive that we live in an organic context, it effects the way you perceive life, what you think about and what you think is important. For me there was this natural affinity for the natural world; the mystery is that everybody doesn't have it, because we are of the earth, of the air and sun and water. It's poetic, but it's simply physically true. That is what we are made of. You'd think everyone would feel that connection and it's stunning the degree to which our society has drifted away. Being a naturalist or being an ecologist is not so much a profession as what we need to be as a culture."

Paula Ogden-Muse

"I wasn't just talking to the park service people or answering a visitor's questions, I was on an ambulance call at a heart attack. The guy was in no great danger and we were talking. He said he was hearing a sound in his backyard at irregular times during the evening. It sounded like somebody's cell phone going off. I said, "It sounds like a saw-whet owl. Do you have a bird book?" He pointed to where it was and I got it off the shelf. I looked it up and we read it."

Tim McNulty

"Soon after my pilgrimage on the coast, I began planting trees. . . Some friends and I formed a tree-planting cooperative and we saw the extent that logging and clear cutting was heavily affecting the landscape. I really felt an urgency about the areas that weren't already saved. I wanted my poetry to address that issue in such a way that it would inspire people, the way I was inspired. I wanted it to convey a sense of urgency in the way that I felt a sense of urgency, that these last wild lands were slipping away acre by acre, road by road, species by species. I felt that this was my calling as a poet, which is a lot of freight to bring to trying to do something as difficult as write a poem. . . It was only by letting go of that other political agenda, steeping myself in the place and trying to accurately record, capture or evoke what I felt, that I began writing poems that did effect people."

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