Gretel Ehrlich
Gretel Ehrlich
Gretel Ehrlich is an American travel writer, poet, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEssayist
Date of Birth21 January 1946
CitySanta Barbara, CA
CountryUnited States of America
ocean school night
A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.
distance ocean sharks
Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.
ocean fog blue
The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before?
memories ocean fog
Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.
both morality nature sign taken
There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both morality and invigoration.
above descent line parts rise sink tree
To rise above tree line is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into birdsong, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.
drives people
What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.
arctic change climate council geographic grant national people received
In 2007, I received a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to go around the top of the world and talk to Arctic people about how they've been impacted by climate change.
arctic ends ice september starts traveling
I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June.
bears boats ecosystem hunt ice mammals marine people polar skin travel
People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist.
Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate.
console honesty medicine stronger
Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often hides.
mean practice grace
Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.
pain loneliness pie
From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.