Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of the Creation.

Braiding Sweetgrass is very much a book in a theme of books I have been reading this summer: Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and A Sand County Almanac, books full of beautiful writing about (more or less) living in greater accord with the natural world. Ultimately the persuasiveness of these books has not been terribly relevant to me, merely serving as aesthetic backgrounds to walks through the woods and fields and suburbs west of Boston - perhaps adding a bit of color to the way the light is shining through the leaves or the water gurgling through the creek. I am not reading them to adjust or even really re-evaluate my relationship with the earth; I recycle and compost, drive a hybrid and pay 2 cents more per kilowatt-hour for renewable electricity. Braiding Sweetgrass is I think the most powerful of these - Pilgrim looks about at things in wonder, Sand County poses a question, and Sweetgrass proffers a pointed answer (Thoreau is I guess just a lovable scamp in the cabin). The quote above got me, and the context and meaning in general was more resonant, three-dimensional, personal. Ecology is perhaps the coolest science.