With our often transient lifestyles, it’s a question that many North Americans can’t easily answer. Alan Durning set out to answer this question for himself in the award-winning book, This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence, (free pdf), about returning with his family to the Pacific Northwest and founding Northwest Environment Watch (now Sightline). From skyscrapers in Vancouver to farms in the Palouse, Alan reflects on everything from the role that transportation plays in communities to the Northwest’s love/hate relationship with its natural riches.
On the 10th anniversary of our flagship book, Sightline is offering the book free in pdf form on our website.
On one of the early rainy days of autumn, it’s a great reminder of why I love my (adopted) Northwest home:
If you have never traveled these groves, understand that they are not tidy, bare-ground woods. They are jumbled, pungent, soggy, dripping, prickly, almost impassable jungles. The standing trees approach the maximum height allowed by physics—much higher and they could not draw water up to the top. The lowest branches are often a hundred feet up, and the trunks are the sizes of Volkswagens. —This Place on Earth
