WSP05005

• File Number: 8021
• Description: Section D General Studies - Western States Water Council
• State: CO
• Basin: Statewide
• Date: 9/1/1990
• Author: Land Institute
• Title: The Land Report - The Land Report - Fall 1990
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Publication

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,native groups of North America overlapped... almost
exactly with broadly defined major bioregions."
Native Americans thus knew a tragedy of the com-
mons centuries before Mr. Hardin coined the phrase,
as they lost their homes and cultures to colonizing
Europeans. Mr, Snyder warns that we colonizers are
now inflicting a similar fate upon ourselves:

There will be no "tragedy of the
commons" greater than this: if we do not
recover the common-regain personal,
local, community, and peoples' direct in-
volvement in sharing (in being) the web of
the wild world-that world will keep slip-
ping away..

And how can we even think without such a
web? "Artificial intelligence" will take on new mean-
ing as ways of thought follow artif"Ice. "Tawny Gram,
mar" stresses that we are not rootless intelligences,
but think with "grandparents, place, grammar, pets,
friends, lovers, children, tools, and the poems and
songs we remember."
Friends of The Land Institute should remember
"Good, Wild, Sacred" from the book Meeting the Ex-
pectations of the Land. Reprinted in slightly different
form in The Practice of the Wild, it connects the
discussion of how our surroundings shape our
thought with observations of a culture which has
" known its surroundings for centuries. In "Blue
Mountains Constantly Walking" the poet-anthropolo-
gist,ecologist observes the Chinese interpretation of
Mountains and Waters as a dyad symbolizing wisdom
and compassion, then wonders about what they "say."
In the terminology of conservation biologists, the
Great Plains "say" bison,. ancient forests of the north-
'west "say" spotted owl. Mountains and waters,
wisdom and compassion, Mr. Snyder concludes, must'
"say" all beings.
The concluding essays provide additional
examples of the practice of the wild and how we might
learn of it and from it. "On the Path, Off the Trail" is
notable for its gentle weaving of Zen, art, and ecology.
We see that a forager, a person hungry for nourish-
ment, does not walk along the
path for long. Off the trail is
where sustenance is found -
and where we do our best work.
"But you must f"Irst be on the
path before you can turn and
walk into the wild," warns Mr.
Snyder. We can put ourselves
, on the path by learning the
creative processes of nature,
then, using those processes as a
model for our own actions,
gracefully saunter off the trail.

The Season Circle
Tracy Noel

Early in the fall during a "warm-up" session,
we had a discussiot;l about ritual. From as far back as .
pagan moonlight dimces, traveling the great cultural
distance to our modern day graduations, rituals have
been important in our culture. Sometimes it is diffi-
cult, though, to fignre out exactly what role some of
the modern rituals play.
Long ago, and still for some cultural groups,
many rituals centered around natural events. The
changing seasons, rains, ripening of plants for har-
vest, and the migration ,of animals for hunting were
of primary importance and widely celebrated. To-
day's society has lost touch with many of these
natural connections. 1\1' ow we celebrate the football
season with homecomings and Superbowls, and
imitate the cannons and gunf"Ire of years of bloodshed
with fireworks on the fourth of July. Some people
believe it is important to recognize and celebrate the
natural world, both individually and communally.
This requires a good bit of creativity, since much
must be created anew or redesigned from the
remnants of a largely forgotten past.
The idea of creating an "earth circle" or "season
circle" at The Land Institute had been floating
around among the interns for a month or two before
our warm-up discussion. As the fall equinox ap-
proached, we realized that it was the right time to
carry out plans for the circle.
We needed an open space with a clear view of
the horizon on the east and west. A small, sparsely
vegetated section of rocky soil east of the parking lot
near the Wauhob Prairie prove,q ideal. On the
afternoon of September 21 we dug a hole and set a
native osage orange pole to prepare for the equinox.
At sunrise two days later, we placed the first of
several limestone slabs embossed with ancient fossils
from eastern Kansas to mark the due east rising sun.
This point marked the radius for drawing the rest of
the circle. We used a strip of nylon webbing to make
a compass by tying one end to the top of the pole and
stretching the other to where we placed the stones.
Following this end around the pole we scraped a
circle in the ground and later covered the scrape with
wood chips. Just before sunset we collected stones
from the Smoky Hill River, which borders the west
edge of The Land. As the sun was setting we set the
largest stone on the circle directly in line with the
pole and the sun. We stacked the other stones on top
and watched the last summer sun disappear. Au-
tumn had begnn, and our season circle was com-
pleted-for now.
We invite future interns to set stones in the
season circle during the solstices and other occasions

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