When I was a boy, each Sunday, my father would take my brothers and me into the woods. Sometimes we hated it, of course. But I learned to love it eventually. We became great observers of the changing seasons. You must realize that each big or small city in Norway is surrounded by forests or mountains or the sea. There is no escaping nature.

So, when some reviewers suggest that I use the forest or the sea (as in To Siberia) as symbols, that is not so. It is simply there. I never consciously used a symbol in my life. What I really do not want to do when I write is what the romantics did, and that is to infuse the human soul into nature. You know, the sky is crying and all that stuff. I think it is the other way around. Nature seeps into us, changing the way we observe life. Humankind tries to avoid this, of course, by destroying nature.

~ Per Petterson

I’m not actually that interested in wildlife or having encounters with wild animals. I am interested in how language constructs nature and how the stories we tell about nature — whether this be in the vein of “frontier gothic” or the ol’ chestnut — create patterns of meaning in which we position ourselves as humans in relationship to the wild. I’m not sure exactly what this position is. I think it shifts quite a bit according to our purposes in telling stories — the first poem of Bear Stories, let’s say, in comparison with one of the later poems is a good example of what I mean about shifting positions.

~ J’Lyn Chapman @ Bookslut

Konik couldn’t stand the wild rabbits.

He didn’t talk to Eira about it. But if he had tried, he would have said that they were riotous and godless, that they were also perhaps in some inexplicable way dangerous. Who could say for certain that rabbits would never grow fangs and claws? He’d heard the wild rabbits hissing like lynxes; they’d probably start howling like wolves next.

~ Torgny Lindgren, Light

Sometimes when I fall asleep I have a dream
…that I have turned into a fluffy dandelion

~ An Owl’s Dream (via hermitlabs)

Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

To assert the unnaturalness of so natural a place will no doubt seem absurd or even perverse to many readers, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention. I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains. Each of us who has spent time there can conjure images and sensations that seem all the more hauntingly real for having engraved themselves so indelibly on our memories. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar enough be to be instantly recognizable to others. Remember this?

~ William Cronon

The point in which nature and humans collide is where I find inspiration. Natural disasters, weeds taken over a parking lot of a closed store, these are both reminders of the power of nature and man is always trying to established space within nature. People continue to build on the coast lines and then cry to the insurance companies when their houses fall in the ocean. When that house falls I see many ideas for my art.

~ Jason Middlebrook @ identity theory

Say you were walking through the woods and a wolf approaches. Novels have been written about this very occurrence, and films have used this to heighten the onscreen tension. A wolf is a notoriously savage beast, one it would seem difficult to stop if one were unarmed.

The solution is fairly obvious: The human must punch the wolf in the face. And I could do it. Easily.

~ Jonathan Messinger @ Please Don’t

The LBJ is a biannual publication dedicated to birds and creative writing. Its title is drawn from the acronym for “little brown job,” used by birders to describe those difficult-to-identify species, such as many sparrows.

While there are popular magazines (Audubon), scientific journals (The Auk), and other newsletters about birds, The LBJ is a uniquely literary venue, publishing creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, narrative scholarship, and literary journalism of the feathered variety.

The version of Peter & the Wolf most set in my head is the Disney telling, in which the duck isn’t eaten and all the animals live happily ever after — cute, but not much of a story. Suzie Templeton’s stop-motion adaptation is, aside from being visually stunning, a much more complex tale about animals and humans. After capturing the wolf, Peter chooses to release it rather than sell to an animal show, taxidermist, or butcher. Peter himself is trapped by the bleakness of the town where he lives, the high walls behind which he is locked all day long, and the constant threat of unchecked and aggressive soldiers harassing him, and still he gives up the money that would come from selling the wolf — even after the wolf kills his only friend, the duck — to allow the creature its freedom. The kinship suggested between boy and wolf isn’t the puppy dog sort in which the wolf would lick Peter’s face and they’d live on as great friends; it’s the kinship of knowing his own human life is made richer by the presence of wild, even dangerous animals outside the walls of his home.

As the boa constrictor of culture swallows the large, furry mammal that is the Web, you can see the lump traveling further down the alimentary tract, getting more fully digested day by day. How you feel about books explaining the Web depends on where inside the snake (oh, metaphor, don’t let me down!) you are.

@ Joho, presumably a flea on that large, furry mammal (making this site a single-celled fellow in the flea’s shadow?)