NATCHEZ NATURALIST NEWSLETTER, THE BOOK

"In early 1997, at age 49, I pulled a tiny, hangdog-looking trailer into the woods of a large plantation a few miles south of Natchez in southwestern Mississippi and began living there." That's how I began my book, Natchez Naturalist Newsletter, which most people say is my best, and I agree. I stayed at this "hermit camp" until September, 2004.

I've been thinking about that book because this week I've made it easier for people to read by setting up a copy on the Internet that will adjust to today's small hand-held screens, even those on cell phones. This new mobile option is available online at http://www.backyardnature.net/j/books/natnat/

At the camp where the book was written I had electricity because once a house had stood where I put the trailer, and a line still went there, though the old house had rotted down. I strung a line to a nearby hunter's camp, tapped onto their phone, and in those earlier days of the Internet, using a dial-up modem connection, established an ecotourism website. When the hunters weren't there I exchanged emails with ecotour operators all over the world, and placed on the Internet my weekly newsletter, back then called the Natchez Naturalist Newsletter.

During those Mississippi years, when sometimes entire months passed without my speaking a single word to a human, I told myself that I had a firm philosophical and spiritual basis for doing what I was doing. Still, I always felt a little insecure about the whole thing. Some people considered me little more than a tramp lazing away my life. Others treated me nicely but I could see that they had no idea why I'd abandoned regular US life and lived as I did. A few people, as always is the case, were just wonderful.

I was obliged to confront my insecurity about living as I did on the day George Hackett, a Senior Editor at Newsweek magazine in New York, called me. He was writing about the newly launched Google search engine, and had "Googled up" my Newsletter describing how I'd identified a birdnest using Google. Ostensibly my part of the story would be how even a birdnest could be identified with Google, but since they wanted a picture of me instead of someone else, I knew what the subtext was: "If this backwoods Mississippi yokel living in the smallest, most rundown trailer you've ever seen can do something interesting with Google, you can too... "

Was I to embarrass my family, community, Mississippi and even the US by letting the outside world see how I was living, with no mention of my philosophical or spiritual context? With great hesitation I told them to come on and take what pictures they needed.

The story with my picture taking up a goodly part of a whole page appeared in the December 16, 2002 issue of Newsweek, page 50. No friend or relation ever said a word to me about it. One family member, when asked, admitted that he'd seen it, but said nothing more. I got the message. A small image of what appeared is at http://www.backyardnature.net/j/newsweek.jpg

Now sixteen years have passed and finally I've decided that I was absolutely right to let them publish that picture -- if only because people always need to be reminded that in this world you can break away from the dominating cultural paradigm you're enmeshed in, if you want to, and if you're willing to pay the price socially.

Back then the need to point that out wasn't perfectly apparent to me. For one thing, in those days of Bill Clinton's much publicized sexual infidelities, the conservative, heartland US society I had withdrawn from was enjoying fair success in presenting itself as the squeaky clean Moral Majority with its good-for-all trickle-down economics. How could I explain why I'd withdrawn from such a well meaning, well functioning, society?

But now the Moral Majority has revealed its real colors by choosing as its leader and avatar Donald Trump.

So, I'm glad that in 2002 I let George Hackett send his camera crew to photograph me in my dingy little trailer in the Mississippi woods. It was the most in-your-face statement I could make that I was in rebellion against a certain world view, a certain way of being, that in my experience was unforgivable, and I didn't want any part of it to trickle down to me. By the way, I was living on my own money then, and still am, with no government or any other kinds of checks coming in.

This week I've made the Natchez Naturalist Newsletter book more accessible because I'm still in rebellion, more now than ever. And still I figure that it's worth reminding anyone who will listen that some of those options to the dominant cultural paradigms we happen to reside in are relatively simple and low-impact, inexpensive, are interesting and fun, and help you stay healthy and happy.

At http://www.backyardnature.net/j/books/ the Natchez Naturalist Newsletter book is available in other formats, some with my own drawings, plus others of my books also are freely available there.