The Pine Island Paradox has been a great read. The paradox of islands is, on one hand, they are "symbols of isolation and exile" and, on the other hand, they are "highpoints in the continuous skin of the planet" evidence of "the wholeness of being" and "intricate interdependencies." I can certainly say that this isn't the philosophy of my youth (read undergraduate years), even though the author certainly knows that philosophy well. The author, Kathleen Dean Moore, is a philosopher (PhD in the Philosophy of Law) and chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University. In her youth, Dr. Moore called Ohio home, has won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, visited Aldo Leopold's farm on the Wisconsin River, and has her books published by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, MN; she has midwestern roots to accompany graduate work in Colorado and an academic career in Oregon. I came away from her book with a sense that really big water--the open Pacific Ocean--and the mountains of the Oregon, Washington, Canadian, and Alaskan coast can get a grip on a person with a squeeze that one feels to his/her mutually shared core. In a more modest fashion, the Great Lakes region with big water, heights of land, and indeterminate boundaries between land, water, and sky can have a similar hold on a person. Then there are also memories of sitting on the sand at Cam Rahn Bay and looking out over the South China Sea.

Dr. Moore re-introduced me to some concepts, such as, ecological philosophy, and introduced me to some new ones, such as, moral ecology, ethics of care, and ground-truthing. After reading and rereading Archbishop Chaput's homily given on July 4th marking the closing of the Fortnight of Freedom, I am left with the question: can this gap ever be bridged? How do we even communicate across it? No wonder nations go to war and folks come to blows as they shout across from one real or imagined canyon boundary to another in a language unintelligible to one other and yet spoken in the same dialect. The gap unseen by so many is in the underlying philosophy: How we think about who and what we are as human persons? What is our connection and relationship to this physical world? How we know what we know?

More later. Maybe. Maybe not.