Page 20 RAIN June/July 1983 KLAMATH KNOT Illustrations from The Klamath Knot The Klamath Knot is many things. First, it is a splendid ^ natural history of the Klamath mountain area—that unique borderland between Oregon and California. But the book is not just a provincial natural history of interest to Klamath area inhabitants and other naturalists. It is an explosive book, an experience similar to rushing along with Annie Dillard through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Wallace takes one's intellectual breath away with summaries ofscientific facts—what we "know"—about geologicalIecological evolution. From the knoivn facts, Wallace takes off with his own speculations, asking new questions which reveal further mysteries. The Klamath Mountain region itself is a perfect setting for Wallace's search through the unwritten history ofgeological and ecological time periods and for his own metaphysical search. Full ofgeological and ecological exceptions, this region is a freaky area that has served as a bridge for plant and wildlife during periods of expanding glaciers. With scientific objectivity, Wallace, through the description of one area on earth, unveils many causes for alarm about how human activity is affecting the global environment. He sees the key for finding theproper relationship embeded in our cultural myths. In this excerpt from The Klamath Knot, Wallace describes what he means by myth. (The Klamath Knot, David Rains Wallace, Sierra Club Books, PO Box 3886, Rincon Annex, San Francisco, CA 94119, $16.75 ppd., 1983, 149 pp.).—S] ^Few organisms survive in rapidly changing environments, and the world is changing faster than ever before. The fact that we've set these changes in motion doesn't mean we can control them. We must change to survive. No biological change will be fast enough now, though; we can't evolve as fast as the insects or rodents or microorganisms we've "conquered" because we reproduce so much more slowly. We must depend on cultural evolution. If our behavior is to change, our myths will have to change. Myths began as imaginative projections of human consciousness onto nature. Trees had language, birds had thoughts, spiders had technology. When science found that nature does not, in fact, have a human consciousness, some thinkers concluded that myth was dead, that there was no further need for imaginative views of a world which, they thought, had no consciousness at all. But they misunderstood science. That nonhuman life has no human consciousness doesn't mean it has no consciousness. Science has opened a potential for imaginative interpretation of nature that is enormously greater than the simple projection of human thoughts and feelings onto the nonhuman. It has allowed us to begin to imagine states of consciousness quite different from our own. We can begin to see trees, birds, and spiders not as masks concealing humanlike
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