WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
I wrote this book because I am concerned about the future of wild places and the welfare of humanity, particularly the welfare of the next few generations who will inherit the world we leave.
I am motivated by a sense of urgency and mounting evidence that the time to establish a sustainable relationship with Earth is fast running out. The roots of these concerns about the environment developed early. I grew up on a family farm, where, from childhood, I was responsible for growing irrigated crops and raising a wide variety of livestock. There, husbanding animals and tilling soil, I grew to appreciate a well-run farm. However, my focus was not entirely on farming. There were wild places nearby where I was free to roam when my farm chores and schoolwork were done. Our farm overlooked the Merced River in central California at the transition between the flats of the Central Valley and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The headwaters of the Merced River drain Yosemite Valley, that long-ago haunt of John Muir.
My father trained me to do all the farm chores, but he also taught me to appreciate wild nature, especially the habits of birds—his first love. Likely because of these early influences, I would spend every available moment on or in the Merced River. However, my knowledge of the place where I grew up was not limited by what I saw in my ramblings, since my family had lived in the area since the mid-1800s. The stories of two great uncles who arrived in northern California as young boys in 1865, three years before Muir began living in Yosemite, were particularly exciting. Incredibly, one of them, Uncle Jim, was still active when I was a child. Those early days were, he said, a time of extensive wetlands and abundant wildlife, of rivers teeming with salmon, the ocean thick with whales, and most of the redwood forests still uncut. I never tired of those tales of what once was, but they also filled me with a deep sense of what had been lost in less than a century. However, I was also encouraged by the survival of unspoiled ecosystems near our farm, just an hour and a half drive from San Francisco, which we called The City and where I learned to value culturally rich urban environments.
My hope is that through this text, I can contribute in some small way to a sustainable balance between wild ecosystems, ecosystems managed for resource extraction, and urban ecosystems. It is my belief that a healthy future for humanity depends on achieving such a balance.
The core of what appears on these pages—the organization, topics, tone, and language—is inspired by what I have learned from the more than 10,000 students who attended my classes during my decades of teaching. Whether in the field, laboratory, or lecture hall, it was these students who taught me what in a subject is significant and how to communicate it. Through this text I hope to share a vision for sustainability with a new generation of students who will be the keepers of humanity’s future.
I am also motivated by the feeling that my career would be incomplete without reaching out beyond my academic publications to write this textbook, which I have written while living in mountains surrounded by old growth, mixed conifer forest, abundant wildlife, and fishing for trout when I have a spare moment.