Small Forays Into Big Spaces
Eavesdropping at Meetings of Nature and Culture
by Robert B. Weeden

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Drawing on his experience as a student of ecology, his career in natural resource management, and his lifelong love of nature, Robert B. Weeden shows how living beings and their environments—foxes, bears, trees, ponds—have shaped the course of his life. An avid journal-keeper with a poetic sensibility, here Weeden has collected his thoughts and musings of the past thirteen years into an epistolary memoir that teaches us how everything is connected: pick up a feather and you will find the universe. By turns smart, funny, and touching, Small Forays into Big Spaces converses with other writers and scientists about topics ranging including natural history and human prehistory, creative imagination, humans’ evolving ideas of home, and the way we think of ourselves as both biological and cultural creatures. Above all, this book is an invitation to join the author in his small forays, and be inspired to create your own beginnings, full of childlike wonder at the miracle of life on Earth. Intended for lovers of nature, observers of the world, poets or poets-at-heart, and scientists reconnecting to the foundational aspects of our universe, Small Forays into Big Spaces is a book to take with you on life’s journeys, and to come back to time and time again.

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Robert B. Weeden has loved birds and the green world that produces them since his boyhood in New England. He received a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of British Columbia, then put the skills he learned there into practice during his decade with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He spent a further two decades teaching and developing courses on resource management practices, policies, and politics, as well as the premises and ethics underlying management of nature, at the University of Alaska. An avid explorer of every corner of the vast library of writings about prehistory, the spread of civilization, and the uneasy relations between people and Gaia, Weeden now spends his retirement years caring for his own patch of field, orchard, and wild land. He lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, with his wife, Judy. Small Forays into Big Spaces is his fourth book.

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Contributors

Author

Robert B. Weeden

Illustrator

Jeannie Paynter

Editor

Harry Bardal

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