Feral Naturalist

Abstract

What is it about the huge emptiness of the Tibetan Plateau, a wild and raw terrain where lakes are the color of molten turquoise, that has so ensnared me, that has drawn me back again and again over decades of fieldwork? I am still uncertain. I don’t know why the trajectory of my efforts on behalf of nature has been “up”—up in Alaska, Africa, and Asia, up where mountains vanish into cloud, up with wind song and intense, pure light. I have been a cloudwalker up among mountains, hiking, dreaming. This has little to do with being a naturalist. But neither is it aberrant professionally, because a feeling of unity with a landscape and its creatures can be sought anywhere. My childhood did not predispose me to a special love of mountains or to any other particular terrain, and neither environment nor heredity bear direct responsibility for how I was assembled. Maybe I simply prefer the beauty of a hermetic world suffused with stillness.