John McPhee at UC Davis

John McPhee has been in Davis for the last few days. I caught his panel discussion this afternoon with two other writers of place, Gary Snyder and Robert Haas. Although none of these writers thinks of himself as primarily an “environmental” or “nature” writer, they all allow place to suffuse their work. And, as Gary Snyder put it, part of his project in writing is to confront the failure of our culture to realize that we live in a physical world.

I haven’t read John McPhee’s Assembling California, but Numenius went to a lunchtime talk where McPhee revisited some of the geological discussions he had with Eldridge Moores, a geology professor here at UC Davis and a long-time friend of McPhee’s.

It was an interesting day of pondering why it’s important to continue thinking hard about landscape and what lives in it, including us. Robert Haas explained about the River of Words project where children are encouraged to write poems about their local watersheds, in the United States and across the world. As he says, if these children can’t think imaginatively about the world they’ll inherit, nobody will.