Swans
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I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
--Walt Whitman
![[Pic: Martin Murie]](./portrait/mmurie.jpg)
Martin Murie retired early from his teaching position to go back to the land and write novels, poetry, and rants.
Murie grew up in Wyoming. He served in WWII with the 10th Mountain Infantry. With an undergraduate degree in literature/philosophy and a PhD in Zoology, he taught life sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Antioch University.
He is the author of several novels of ecological adventure -- Losing Solitude, Windswept, Burt's Way, Red Tree Mouse Chronicles, Seriously Insistent, and Breakout -- and regularly contributes to the excellent environmentalist bimonthly Canyon Country Zephyr.
He and his wife Alison live in the backwoods at the edge of the Adirondacks in New York State. To learn more about his work, please visit his Web site, Packrat Nest.
Murie has been contributing articles and essays to Swans since January 2006. His work can be accessed in the yearly archives, at:
A couple of examples...
• Rewilding (December 2006): Endangered species can't wait much longer for their endangerers to rewild the wilderness and practice corridor ecology.
• Dirt Places (March 2006): Dirt places and creative play. Real earth in real time.
• Froggers (February 2006): Direct experiences: Working in a biological supply lab and meeting frog hunters...Cold War, and McCarthyism era of frogging in California, with animals as commodities and predators as man.
• Trumpeters (January 2006): Direct experiences of animals and people collides with totally crass marketing of nature. Asking: what is wildness?