Photo, The Rio Grande River, Mission TX.

Today is World River Day.

A day to highlight the importance of rivers to our environment and what a large part they play in it.

Historically many of the worlds cities were founded on river banks as a place to have easy access to water, food, transport and often they were/are borders. 

They have such an important part in the geology of the land where rivers have over many thousands of years carved out the lay of the land into valleys, canyons and arches. Rivers carry large amounts of water to the oceans where it is evaporated eventually forming rain clouds thus feeding the land, the rivers and the streams. 
This water cycle is essential to much of life on earth. 
Rivers are very individualistic with no two being the same. 
They have many variables which means the riparian ecosystems differ a lot and are most interesting to study. 

Rivers take on a character of their own and are intensely fascinating in the way they form and the life they harbor. 

Sadly many rivers are under intense pressure from human development and are in varying states of decline along with the biological health of the surrounding areas of land. 

We need to treat our rivers with the rich respect they deserve for the vital function they perform. The river systems are the only homes of many species which are totally reliant on the rivers they live in being healthy and functional. 
They are also helpful to us as human beings and a reflection of our own health and wellbeing. 

They can act as an important form of therapy, a way of cleansing and relaxing our minds and hearts. Working to help clean up rivers is also an excellent way to serve the earth that sustains us and give thanks to the rivers. 
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If we sit next to or walk alongside a river we can hear the water speak to us in gentle and soothing tones. They are calming, stimulating, therapeutic and majestic.
They are capable of elevating so many positive emotions within us. 

To find out more on the healing properties of rivers and how they can help you please click on the links below: 

www.idahorivers.org/news/2020/11/23/why-we-love-rivers 

link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10311-021-01373-x.pdf

For more information on helping river systems in any way please see links below:

www.americanrivers.org/make-an-impact/national-river-cleanup/volunteers/
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Today is DH Lawrence's (David Herbert) birthday. 

He was a great writer and well worth celebrating and learning more about.
He was born in England in 1885 and passed away in France in 1930. These were times of much upheaval in the areas where he lived and where he travelled and he was witness to many of these dark events. Being an enlightened and reflective man he wrote extensively about them.

His writing was very pantheistic.
Lawrence venerated nature "because nature is one with and springs from God and God is a great urge, wonderful, mysterious, magnificent. God is not a mind, God is a creative force. God is nameless and imageless. God is the living God, the God of life, the force that creates life. God is life."

Lawrence spoke of humanity having "lost connection to the Life-Force and living as self important, self reliant, self centered ego, a self apart from God."
He had a hatred of machines saying they were "bloodless, having no possible connection with the elemental Life-Force, destroying natural beauty, enslaving bodies and stupefying the minds of they who work for them".

He wrote in 1928 in New Mexico "The whole life effort of man is to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain life, cloud life, thunder life, air life, earth life, sun life. To come into immediate felt contact and so derive energy, power and a dead sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact without intermediate or mediator is the root meaning of religion."

DH Lawrence was genuinely a man of vast depth and perception with an astute intellect. He was very much a reflection of the Romantic movement even though he was born well after the end of it. His mourning at the loss of humanity's heart from nature to industrialism and his belief at the loss of connection to nature puts him squarely within the realms of the Romanticism of the late 19th century. 

Sadly he passed away at only 44 years old of tuberculosis (Henry David Thoreau,  another splendid pantheistic writer, died of the same disease at the same age).

On the last page of his last book Lawrence wrote "We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

DH Lawrence was a pantheist whose literature is truly worth the time to get acquainted with. 

(DH Lawrence quotes from "Collected Poems" and "Last Poems").

Today is National Wildlife Day.

National Wildlife Day was founded by animal advocate Colleen Paige in 2005 to bring awareness of both national and international endangered animals. 
It is recognized on both September 4th and February 22nd which is Steve Irwins birthday.
National Wildlife Day can be a day to be recognized by us by getting involved with a local wildlife organization in our local area or helping out with land rehabilitation groups that help stop soil erosion and tree planting.
Planting trees or shrubs in our yards or parks with others is a great way to encourage birds and butterflies and is a wonderfully positive activity. 
Animal extinction and species depletion is a disturbing reality and to know we can in some way help reverse this is both empowering and enlightening.  

For more information on Colleen Paige and National Wildlife Day and volunteering  please see the below links.
www.nationalwildlifeday.com/
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​www.nps.gov/getinvolved/volunteer.htm

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September 3    Wilderness Act Anniversary    
On September 3, 1964, after 8 years of effort by conservationists, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Wilderness Act. The 1964 Wilderness Act provides the highest level of protection for some of our most iconic, wild landscapes through wilderness designation. This historic bill established the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) and set aside an initial 9.1 million acres of wilderness and called for further studies and public involvement on potential additions. Over the subsequent years,  as a result of citizen campaigns throughout the United States, Congress has added over 111 million acres to this unique land preservation system. The current 803 (as of 2022) wilderness areas within the NWPS are managed by all four U.S.A. federal land managing agencies, the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, and National Park Service.  We celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act in 2014.  The system continues to grow: 37 new wilderness areas in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah were designated on March 12, 2019 by the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. Unfortunately, some academics trapped by “indoor philosophy,” and now many social justice advocates, who should know better, argue that wilderness is an antiquated idea that ignores the fact that people lived in those places, regarding wild nature “as a transcendent realm apart from the Native people who inhabited those realms.” Close examination reveals that this “Big Lie About Wilderness” is a literary/philosophical construct little related to the Real Wilderness Idea that conservationists have used to establish the National Wilderness Preservation System. Wilderness has never meant “unpeopled” - the Wilderness Act very carefully used the much more accurate term: “untrammeled.”  Here are some essays which further correct this “big lie”:

• Criticizing Muir and misunderstanding the foundation of American nature conservation by Bruce A. Byers (October 22, 2021)
• Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs: Conflicting or Intersecting Perspectives on the Human-Nature Relationship?
  By Roger Kaye, Polly Napiryuk Andrews, and Bernadette Dimientieff in Rewilding Earth (December 8, 2021)
• Reclaiming Wilderness: It Tells Us Who We Are, and We Lose It at Our Peril by Kenneth Brower (June 4, 2014)
• The Real Wilderness Idea by Dave Foreman (May, 1999)
• For more information:
  https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/wilderness-act

Remembering the extinction of species by humankind; the last Passenger Pigeon died on this day in 1914 in a zoo. It is a psychological necessity to mourn in order to recover from grief. Just as funerals reinforce the awareness of loss, so the lovers of the land and life need to experience ritual and expressions of mourning. The need is vital as part of the grief work necessary to return to our task of protecting the Earth. For background on Species Requiem Day, see:
https://planetpatriot.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/species_requiem_day_wild_earth.pdf 
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