Introduction

     I love the small things of the earth, these grasses, these maple leaves, that chickadee, the way the river moves in a glassy wave over the rocks beneath, or the way the foot of the Golden-crowned Kinglet hops over crystals of the year's first snow. I write about and paint what I love. Primarily I want to sing a song of the selves of the others, the birds and trees and animals---these peoples and tribes with four legs and wings and branches or leaves that hold the air and reach for the sun. I want to celebrate the world they love and I have loved. That, as simple as I can say it is what this website or book is all about.
 
    For those who want the short answer to what this book is about, read what you just read again and skip on to my poems and paintings. For those who want a longer answer to what this book is about read on below.........
    
I think that the universe was not created and there never was a "creator". It has always been. There is no "Creator", nor a creator /creatrure dualism. I never use the word creature because I believe that animals created themselves by interacting with their environment. They learned to live together, with minimal strife on this marvelous planet. These are a few of the strange thoughts you will find in this book.....

 
     I mean this book to be a work of art and poetry as well as a contribution to environmental philosophy, in addition to an expression of animal rights concerns. How one looks at treats and regards animals, birds and nature says allot about what kind of person one is. How a  society, political system or religion treats or regards animals is also indicative. I have written this book mostly for those who already care, for women who love animals, or men who have left the corporate world in preference for a life closer to nature and the earth. In general I write more for women that for men, since by far the most destructive gender on earth is male. But my best readers  of either sex are those who have not forgotten their childhood love of owls or lizards, birds and rocks. It takes a love of the night sky to enjoy this book, a willingness to go for a walk in the snow. This is not a book for those who kill or those who exploit others and count their advantages in dollars.  This is a book for those who, as the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevteshenko said, realize that when a human being dies what dies is their "memory of their first snow" or their memory of starlight, the whole world that their eyes saw. This book is a memory of the loving of my eyes.

         My paintings and poems are meant to be lyrical, joyful and full of color and wonder.  They are love songs to the threatened natural world, full of warmth, beauty and gratefulness for existence.  I would also add that they are not just about Nature, but also about seeing, and the necessity of looking honestly, or "humanly" at the world around us-- Looking not just with "objectivity" or the calculating, measuring mind, but with the heart, sympathy and concern.  As Thoreau put it, intelligence, by itself, can be something power seeking, self important and destructive, but "intelligence with sympathy", that is something to be aspired to. I try to open my eyes to the secret of color and form and to ask questions about the world I live in.

       There are different kinds of beauty, or rather one should not confuse the abuse and exploitation of beauty with beauty itself. There is the beauty exploited by markets, which takes female and male bodies, for instance, and tries commodify their beauty as fetishes for selling products. There is also the commidification of beautiful landscapes, such  as one sees in car commercials on TV, where expensive cars are shown conquering  pristine landscapes in an image of dominance and environmental conquest and destruction. This is not beauty, actually, but the abuse  and exploitation of beauty.           

     What i have learned from some years of wandering in the natural world is that beauty is an expression of a natural harmony.  Beauty is the way things are, a natural fact, not a Platonic or Hegelian construct. Beauty in the natural world is an expression of a fragile equilibrium. i have found that if one would seek justice from the abuses leveled against the natural world, one must first try to understand why nature is beautiful. If the beauty of nature is understood, the need for justice against those who harm it follows. One does not need revenge against those who harm nature. One need only show the beauty and wonder of the natural world and anyone with a heart or soul will begin to see the need to stopping the exploiters and getting justice against those who harm nature. Let the beauty of nature shame those who abuse it for selfish profits. I think it was Albert Camus who said that  "one day those who want revolution will realize the importance of beauty" ?

       I do not sing a Song of Myself here, as much as I might admire old Walt Whitman. I  do not see myself as the great exemplar or Hero of democracy as Walt did.  Whitman's notion of Heroic Individualism, like that of Nietzsche, is not for me. I do not much like gnostic inflations, spiritual or otherwise. I am probably more fallible and imperfect than Whitman and have made many more mistakes than he. My heroes are all very small, some of them despised, some of them threatened.  I sing a song of the others, the outsiders,  me included. Some days I am very happy and proud of my work. Some days I am not as proud, and think my work could be greatly improved. Certainly a few of the beliefs I had in the past or positions I have taken, I now regret. I doubt much is learned in life if one makes no mistakes. But I am not apologizing for what I have been both good and ill.  One thing I will never regret is my love of animals. birds and and nature.
     
      But  I do not hate myself or  leave myself out of what I write. I am not much interested in writing  or science that assumes the pose of divine disinterest or "apatheia", where the artist or scientist merely describes or observes  without being part of nature him or herself. The pose of disinterest is detached,  impersonal and often cruel.  I am not interested in either playing god or in being the most abject of the abject. The image of the martyred and suffering artist does not interest me either.  Sure, I have suffered, but I have no Christ complex. I am not "detached" from life or the world and certainly not "disinterested". I am alive and I care and this means I am attached to what I love and I am very interested in the world I live in.
  
     Many in the 19th to 21st centuries believed nature was "other" and a "wilderness" to be conquered and exploited.  The philosopher John Locke, for instance, thought of nature as "waste" unless humans "enclosed" it, applied "labor" to it, and "redeemed" it for human exploitation. The ideology of 'redemption" depended on atrocities against natural beings.  Locke's philosophy was  important to the founding of the American republic, with many disastrous consequences to nature, Indians and slaves. It was the Lockean mentality that justified the slave trade, and which also turned nature into a degraded object of human exploitation.  Nature became the slave of a market system.  The Marxist vision of nature as raw and exploitable was not an improvement over the capitalist version of Locke and those who followed him.  Russia and China have not been less environmentally destructive than Europe and the United States.
   
    I do not see nature in the way that either the Marxists of Capitalists see it.  Rather I sees nature as primary, as the basis of what humans ought to be, and once were, but so often are not. I find in nature the origin of both rights and care and the roots of democratic justice.  I believe that mankind's willingness to exploit and destroy animals, oceans, forests and birds is a testament to the failure of science, religion and other cultural systems of knowledge to accurately understand the world around them.  Nature is the conscience of humanity.  Nature and culture are not opposites; we will have a culture worth having when it harmonizes with the natural world.  Nature is the "steward" of humanity, not vice versa, as is commonly thought. "Mankind" is not supreme on the earth, and it is about time this arrogant belief be abandoned. Many animals, birds and ecosystems possess virtues far superior to human capacities.

    My paintings and poems explore what it means to be human in the natural world or conversely, what it means to be of nature in the human world.  I do not consider myself a "Wildlife Artist" because Wildlife art has its foundation in the hunting art of the 19th and 20th centuries, in addition to being connected to the world of animal collections and zoos, and the notion of animals as spectacle for human amusement.  I do not believe in the Linnaean invention of nature as a hierarchy of species with humans at the top.  Moreover, Wildlife Art tends to support a form of  patriotic nationalism, the notion of nature as a realm of sublimity that is nevertheless owned by a specific people or class.  Nature cannot be owned.  No one can own mountains or rivers, oceans and deserts, air or twilight.  Song birds never obey "No Trespassing" signs, and part of the love I feel for migrating  birds and animals is their willingness to disobey national borders, private property and the speciesism that prejudices most of human kind in favor of itself.  Of course there are some Wildlife Artists who do not subscribe to or fit the mainstream of the Wildlife Art tradition, and I respect some of them, but my preference is to remain separate from it.
         
     A few things should be said regarding my poems and their relation to the paintings. My poems are usually written separately from the paintings, but arise out of common concerns.  I consider myself more of a painter than a poet, but writing is an old habit with me and I seem to be unable to stop doing it.  I am not at all sure that I am writing poetry here. Perhaps I am not a poet.  It may be just a peculiar form of speaking about what I love.  However, I have long been interested in the suggestive interplay of images and words, and while my paintings should not be thought of as illustrations for poems or writings, they do mutually illuminate each other. Sometimes the relation of words to images is quite close, whereas other times, there is only a tenuous relation between word and image, but in either case, the interplay of words and images is intended to stimulate and amplify the imagination and emotions of the viewer. One sees this relation of word and image well used in Chinese painting, and though I am not imitating the rather elite nature of Chinese art, I do admire the sometimes moving relation of Chinese paintings to personal texts written by the artist or his friends. It makes the paintings less abstract, less impersonal, and allows the viewer into the world the painting depicts in a much more intimate way.
   
     Painting is mute, but says far more than words are able to express.  My paintings are intensely personal and are about what I love.  The writings help bring out some aspects of what they mean to me.  But there are more meanings in the paintings than the words can contain or illuminate. My paintings are always personal statements about my life and experiences, or the lives and existences of those who I share nature with, be they avian, four legged or two legged.  The paintings tend toward poetry, even while they are grounded in the concrete and the visual. The poems have a strong visual element and tend toward painting.
   
    Despite being a painter and a poet,  I try not to be immune to thinking about what is around me, and how my own species behaves or misbehaves, and sometimes intellectual reflections accompany what I do or see or have experienced.  But that said, I do think intellectual discourse is rather overrated in our society.  I use it mostly as a means of defense for those who are underrepresented or not listened to.  So, paintings, poems and discursive writing are all represented in what follows, each allowing me different means of  showing how I see the world.
    

    A number of paintings from the last few years have been concerned with communities, not only of animals and birds. but of plants, waters, seasons, times and places. All life is local, and has a relation to a somewhere and a sometime. Abstracting one element from the whole, such as is done in bird or flower illustration, for instance, is artificial. Such artifice has its own meaning and purpose, as in the effort to make catalogues of natural history facts, botanical illustrations of solidago canadensis (goldenrod), or field markings of the Tringa Solitaria (Solitary Sandpiper). Identification books are certainly helpful.  But such catalogues are inherently human centered, and serve humans uses. There is nothing wrong with that so long as no harm is done to the birds and trees, mushrooms or insects. But the totalizing effort to catalogue the whole of nature, which began seriously with Linnaeus, clearly had domination and exploitation of nature as one of its ultimate purposes. There certainly has been harm in this, since it arose together with very destructive exploitive drives. The effort to collect specimens, catalogue species and assess possible human uses finally blends into the effort to manipulate and violate species integrity through human centered "management" practices. Eventually the effort to catalogue all of nature goes beyond "management" towards genetic cloning and splicing. And it has become increasingly clear that the drive to catalogue all species has facilitated the possibility to further altering these species through genetic engineering to serve human greed or convenience, making nature over in the image of corporate domination.  This effort has already progressed to the point of violating not just species distinctions but wholly disparate classes of species, such as the recent effort to conjoin the genetic material of sheep and spiders so that sheep would produce rope like silk instead of milk, in the hopes of creating rope for humans. This is the unconscionable ethics of slavery applied to nature. It appears in retrospect that the cataloguing of species ultimately had the violation of species for human exploitation as its goal.

        My painting obviously has some relation to the Animal Rights and the Environmental movements, two movements usually seen as being at odds with each other.  But I prefers the term "nature's rights" to either "animal rights" or "environmentalism".  I have criticized mainstream ecology, which, is often little more than an effort to preserve nature merely so humans can continue to exploit it. Most ecology remains anthropocentric and prone to corporate 'greenwashing'  or the effort to define nature according to a capitalist economic model.  Moreover, environmentalism generally has a very impoverished notion of species, largely based on reproductive strategies, and ignores individuals of a species, as if animals and plants were all type-cast by category. Speciesism is a prejudice or bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species. Speciesism is wrong for the same reason racism and sexism are wrong--because all beings interests should count equally. Animals suffer just as much as humans, and the arrogant belief in human superiority can never excuse making animals suffer.

        Speciesism is akin to racism in that it does not see individuals, but essentializes, based on a type.  Nature is nowhere composed of types, but of individuals with lives not less complex or of value to them than our own lives.  The natural world is not isolated, bracketed or discrete. It is vastly complicated and escapes categorization. Even the concept of "species" has many artificial, culture created aspects. The concept of "species" is largely a relic of the 19th century and emphasizes categorization based upon reproductive strategies, as if production was the only pertinent fact of nature. The concept of 'species' is  is a relic of 'essentialist' or Platonic thinking going back to Christianity and Platonism. It is the actions of individuals that matter in evolution, not species. The species concept is a generalization and not the ultimate category of nature. Treating all beings as "species" has enabled humans to essentialize them and excuse killing off individuals.
        Nature has its own value independent of the "right" of human uses and systems of categorization. It does not exist for human domination or exploitation. I have spent a lot of time outside wandering in the natural world, and I consciously leave numbers, categories, and science behind me. I go around or over fences to see Kingfishers or Bluebells. I try to silence myself and let them do all the talking. Nature is made of individuals living all together, with no boundaries, categories or conventions. There are no hierarchies, no "species" in any absolute sense---. as Ernst Mayr says in his What  Evolution Is , "the individual is the object of the selection" and not the gene or the species. (pg 128).  Yes, there are kinds and there are those who mate and those who do not.  But every kind of being is related to every other. We all share similar DNA. The majority of human DNA is shared by a yeast cell. The beech tree is equal to the hickory and shrubs grow side by side with ferns. Warblers sometimes fly with swallows and geese live with deer. The "miracle" of evolution is not about competitiveness in nature but rather the fact that so much life can co-exist in relative peace. Nature is not about competition but the effort to avoid competition, or to survive in spite of it, if possible. It is about co-existence and not the supremacy of one kind over another.  Ecology does not question the imperialism implicit in Darwinism sufficiently.  Nature is not about the struggle for power, but primarily is about the struggle against power.  This ubiquitous fact that so many species co-exist side by side and so little harm is done between them, over all, is one of the truly wondrous things about the natural world. This fact has been almost completely ignored because of  the  culturally conditioned Darwinist assumptions of competition and survival of the "fittest".  Nature is not at all the capitalist system in miniature.  On the contrary, nature is threatened by science driven capitalism precisely because capitalism and nature clash, almost always with nature as the loser and victim. So some of these paintings are meant to present the life of nature as it exists on its own, in all its wonderful diversity and interconnectedness, free of the need some humans have to dominate.

 Let me not be misunderstood here. I have no doubt that evolution is a fact. Creationism is utterly defeated and essentialist theories are absurd. But I do not believe that Darwin's 19the century version of evolution is very accurate. Marx was right to state that Darwin's theory reproduced an English upper class view of the world. I am convinced tht capitalism is too destructive a way of life to be maintained anymore. In the end natural selection must select against capitalism, Marxism, corporations and religion. Evolution is a fact, but not the Spenserian, dog eat dog, bloody fanged, Wall Street variety.  Evolution is about the tendency toward peace, not war, and cooperation, not cut throat free markets.
 
        I hope one day for a science that does not serve politics, power and exploitation, but cooperates and harmonizes with the natural world, holding it in the respect and awe it deserves.  I have tried to be such a scientist myself, and to write of animals from a perspective of deep observation as well as deep sympathy.
 

Is That Human Harmful or to be Trusted?

        The whole notion of private property, or the erroneous idea that earth exists for humans alone, begins with the exploitation of animals many thousands of years ago. The idea of ownership of animals is harmful as is the notion that animals should be sacrificed for gods. This form of  exploitive tyranny will end when the lives and rights of birds, animals, forests and other biotic communities are recognized .

         The notion of "nature's rights" is the opposite of what has been called "natural rights" which is little more than a 18th and 19th century ideology of libertarian and human-centered property rights.
What I mean by nature's rights has nothing to do with property rights, on the contrary. A recognition that natural lives matter as much as human lives requires one must try ones best to listen to what natural beings say about their own needs and rights. Every living being expresses its need to live and continue. A colony of Red Headed or Acorn Woodpeckers is a very noisy place, and the noises are all about the rights of individual birds as they argue with each other about nests or mates or complain of other kinds of birds or animals who have infringed upon the area of their nesting spaces. When I was stung by four or five yellow jackets a few years ago, it was because I had lifted up a log under which they nested and they wished to protect what they care about. It was I that was in the wrong. I should have been more aware that they were there and paid attention. Care, concern, attention and love of one's own are more fundamental than competition or ownership. Nature is not about possession, much less greed, but about care of one's own, continuance, love of life. Respecting the rights of nature is an idea that is threatening to capitalist powers precisely because it accords equal value to other non-human beings than human beings. This is threatening to the exploitive and abusive ideological system that justifies ravaging nature for human profit. To understand nature's rights means to listen to the voices of other species and respect their spaces, their homes, their equal right to exist.

     I am skeptical about "deep ecology" because this movement tries to resurrect various aspects of the "spiritual" traditions, and to project them on nature.  Nature is not symbolic of any ideology or metaphysic: it is not Buddhist, Christian or Hindu,  nor Mormon, Marxist or Capitalist.  I differ from Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder who project their religious ideology onto nature.  Nature is not a transparency over an ideology. There is nothing "behind" or within nature that transcends it. Its beauty and meaning is in itself. To treat it as something other, something that illustrates human notions,  is to degrade it. The idea of "seeing god everywhere" reduces nature to a transparency over an ideology. Those who see god everywhere are really just magnifying their own egos to universal dimensions.  To look at nature and see god means that you have not looked at nature. Nature is not a fairy tale. To see god is nature is to commit the fallacy of "misplaced concreteness", as A.N. Whitehead called it. Those who make nature into an illustration of metaphysical ideologies are spiritual colonialists, trying to conquer nature for their faith. I made this mistake myself for many years. But eventually I was able to see through the fallacy. The wonder of nature is in nature itself, as an existing fact, and not behind or hidden deep within it as a mysterious 'essence'.

      The major religious traditions all subject nature to hierarchical denigration. Hinduism associates nature with "Maya", or illusion and the idea of "Karma", which styles nature as a lower and inferior realm. In Buddhism nature is "samsara"  conceived as an inferior domain which must be escaped through consciousness and enlightenment. In Taoism and Confucianism nature is the realm of the "ten thousand things", and human consciousness is thought to be transcendent and superior to this realm. In Christianity, nature is associated with "Original Sin" and the ugliness of the "flesh" and a sharp dichotomy is constructed between the "lower" "animal" self and the "higher" "soul" or "spirit".  The notion of a disembodied "spirit" that is somehow divorced and independent of "matter" is a fiction that has no basis in nature.  In all these systems and religions the natural and animal worlds are conceived of as lesser than the human  realm and inferior to a mythical transcendent reality. The "created" world of "creatures" is thought inferior to a mythic "creator", the "Nomenal" world is supposed to be superior to the phenomenal world, Kant thought. In speciesist prejudice 'essence' is thought superior to 'existence', and the sensible world is inferior to the 'intelligible' world. These ideolgoical attitudes play out  in reality and are revealed as abusive of nature and animals. Indeed, if one studies the texts of early Christianity or Buddhism, suhc as the writing of the Church Fathers and the Pali Canon  one find atrocious attitudes towards animals and nature.
         
     But what is striking in all the religious traditions is a relative ignorance of the actualities of nature and how humans are part of this. Transcendental thinking of a religious or a political kind denigrates nature and makes it merely symbolic. Such beliefs are fiction, sometimes very creative fiction, but fiction nonetheless. Nature it is not an advertisement for religion, science or any other mythology or human created system of knowledge.  The drive to co-opt nature for an ideology is very old. But it must be resisted.

    One of my concerns, evidenced in the poems, and implicit in the paintings, is the desire to bring into question mythical and ideological constructs humans have created to justify their abuses of the natural world.  In what follows I question Plato, Orpheus, gods, Hegel, Marx, science, religion and Darwin.  I love the later writings of Thoreau, especially those written after Walden and after 1951 or 1852, because of their non-mythological stand, and their willingness to question belief systems on the basis of his deepening understanding of the natural world. I love his writings from Civil Disobedience tot he late Journal. One finds a similar willingness to question transcendentalist systems of knowledge in other, more recent nature writers. I also like Edward Abbey's book Desert Solitaire, if not his other works as much. I like the anti-transcendentalist and anti-Platonist point of view in this book which is both accurate and true. Pablo Neruda has been a deep delight to me for some years. I have no interest in imitating these writers, but I do respect their courage, and I feel that anyone who really immerses their whole being, and not just their head or their stomach, in the natural world, will find that many myths, religions and ideologies collapse, when confronted with the complex mysteries and facts of birds, animals the biomes in which they live. Nature is no more an illustration of religious theologies than it is a justification for the union of science and business. It wonders and its beauty exceeds and brings into question these abstract systems of knowledge and power.

    Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote in his poem "Pied Beauty":  "Glory be to God for dappled things". But I would disagree with him. Glory be to dappled things for dappled things. Gods have nothing to do with it. Nature is not a transparency over an ideology. I once saw Trout deep in the waters on the Moukolumne River in northern California and they were dappled by the veil of sunlight  streaming through the rippling waters. The trout swam still in one place against the cool current. Glory be to waters and sun and the dappled veil on the speckled bodies of swimming trout. I no longer know anything about changeless, eternal and abstract truths. The truths I know are trout- truths, sun truths, truth of rivers and light through leaves falling on water. I no longer confuse nature with human projections, gods, or abstract entities.

          Animal rights, in contrast to environmentalism, is largely is about mammals, specifically domesticated mammals, though not exclusively.  There is a notion in animal rights philosophy that  only "Key" species such as whales or "higher" mammals--- only "sentient" or "conscious" lives matter and ought to be protected, reflecting the human centered idea that "cognition" or "reason" is somehow a superior trait.  Such a supposition should be doubted. Plants and mushrooms, wetlands, deserts and mountain biomes are not any less deserving or our care, concern and ethical consideration than eagles, elephants, clams or butterflies.  Animals and natural systems have different ways of knowing that might possess qualities far more important to the survival of the planet than humanity's love of its own intellect.  This is not to say that nature is "irrational", but rather that it has reasons which science and human reason knows not of. I am not referring here to mysterious spiritual causes, but merely asserting that plants, biomes, and ecologies possess understandings whose reasons are largely unknown or ignored by human-animals. The knowledge contained in a wetland, a river, or the littoral zones of the sea,  is not just deserving of our respect, but of our awe.  Bird Migrations, for instance, are a marvel of natural wonder and beauty and humans are not only incapable of anything as complex and intricate, but have done much harm to birds in their movements.

     Animal Rights tends to be too limited and legalistic, not that legal avenues should not be pursued. They should be. But the problem of humankind's relation to nature goes much farther than can be addressed by human centered legal solutions.  What is required is a remaking of our culture and our minds on a much deeper level than merely the law.  Animals require habitats, clean air, clean water, intact forests, thriving wetlands, and a minimum of human incursion. But once they have all the requirements, there is no simple or definitive explanation for the being or existences of animals, birds or natural things and processes. We must learn to honor and respect the mysteries of other lives and non human processes on earth. Nature is not a Descartean machine. I prefer the term "Nature's Right's" because all beings, habitats, mountains, rainbows, climates, minerals, seas and rivers, in addition to animals and plants, microorganisms and fungi deserve a chance to live out their lives, unmolested by disrespectful and exploitive humans. Nature's Rights  and natural beauty, the art in nature, arises from existence itself, not from a legal contract. The only way to stop the harm we are doing to the earth is to change ourselves from the inside--- to change our minds, , our culture, our mentality, the whole way we look at the world around us
 

  This book was originally called Art in Nature because nature is the origin of beauty and beauty is an expression of justice. The nature of art is to be found in the natural world, which we are a part of. We separate ourselves from it to our peril.   Abstract art failed, precisely because it lost sight of this and came to serve self-interested power instead of truth and justice.  Abstract art finally became little more than the decorative art of corporate power.  The division between nature and culture is artificial, false and based on human conceit.  If you would understand culture, listen to birdsong, watch the dance of the fishes in spring or look at the plumage of birds.  Our culture has lost its way precisely because it has lost harmony with the culture of nature.  Animals, plants, birds and mammals live together largely without harm to their larger environment.  We once understood how to do this and have forgotten it.  We need to remember.

   I changed the title of this book to Nature's Rights because the emphasis must be on the danger than threatens nature and the importance of asserting nature's rights. This book or website is intended to celebrate the beauty of nature and to plead for Nature's Rights.
   
     Louis Armstrong's great song says, 'and I think to myself, what a wonderful world'.  Indeed, it is, and it is very important to remember the joy and wonder in nature as it is being destroyed at such a rapid rate that the love of beauty has become one of the sharpest forms of protest that there is.  This website is a presentation of my artwork as well as a literary work; but it is also meant partly as a protest.  It protests on the basis of a fierce love of beauty.

    Enjoy, and in enjoying, learn to respect and defend what is truly of value in the world.  The world belongs as much to goldfinches and wildflowers along the road side as it does to me.  'This land Is Your Land, this Land is My Land, from California to the New York Islands, from the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters', Woody Guthrie joyfully sang, and he should have included a verse that states the following:

 This Land is your Land, from the  Siberian Forests to the Elephant Savannahs, from the Condors Cordillera to the Mongolian Rivers, from the Polar Bear Ice islands to the Orangutan Rain Forest, this land belongs to all the beings of the world, from Seagulls to Wolverines, White Tailed Deer to Milkweed, Elephants and Pink Dolphins, clean waters and White Pine forests. Animal People, Bird people, four legged and the wings of the air-- these too have a voice and deserve, more than ever, to heard, for the sake of beauty and justice.

Note about the Paintings and Poems
       The majority of the paintings seen on this site were done between 1998 and the present. Some where done between 1986 and 1989 in California. The size of the paintings varies. The largest, called Water into Air, is approximately 3 x 5 feet. The smaller works are those from 1986-89. The mediums used extend from gouache and watercolor to acrylic, alkyd and oil. A few images are computer generated sketches and were done for fun for this page.
    The poems were all written since 2001.