ABSTRACT

Such expressions, playful and imaginative but also serious in their own way, point to the challenge we sometimes face when trying to describe how we encounter, live within, relate to, construct, and respond to the natural world. Especially the profound sense of intimacy and reciprocity, even shared life that often characterizes these encounters. To imagine oneself as capable of “thinking like a mountain,” or the landscape as thinking “itself in me” is to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a richly indeterminate and fluid world where subject and object, self and other, inner and outer landscape, ebb and flow together without clear boundaries. In ecological terms, such a space is known as an ecotone, a rich place of exchange between one ecosystem and another, characterized by biological diversity, abundance, and opportunity. But what about our own capacity for such fluidity and reciprocity, especially in the realm of ecological thought and practice? How does such deep identification and exchange with the natural world happen? Why, in this moment of deepening environmental degradation, does such a sensibility appear so increasingly rare (and, paradoxically, sought after)? And what might it mean-personally, ecologically, ethically, and politically-to retrieve the kind of intimate identification with the natural world that enables us, together with Aldo Leopold, to think like a mountain?