Gila Cliff Dwellings

Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, Burroughs, and especially the Russian philosopher-mystic Piotr Ouspensky influenced Leopold's view of a living Earth. Ouspensky noted that "sometimes we vaguely feel an intense life manifesting in the phenomena of nature.." "Possibly," Leopold observed, "in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth--its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space--a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young."
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