Note: You can Follow My Blog and reach my postings under Recent Posts or Archives in the column to the right. Coyote in Eden, an earlier blog of mine, has been discontinued.

Citizen Coyote is my public journal and diary.

What is a citizen? There is a dictionary definition for citizen, and any reader can look it up. I am more concerned with my personal approach to citizenship. I believe that my daily life is at the core of my citizenship. I believe that as a citizen I am responsible for how I live.

What do I believe? “My belief is what my whole life says.”[1]

As a citizen I am responsible for my relationship with the land and the Earth which sustains us. Aldo Leopold said, “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”[2]  He also said, ” All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.”[3]  And, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively: the land.”[4]  Whether we acknowledge it or not, all humankind is completely dependent on the land and the Earth. They are the source of  our natural lives.

Why coyote? Wylie Coyote was the name Walt Dabney tagged me with when we were young rangers in Yosemite. There are times when I feel as though I am living at the dawn of time and creation, and the Earth is still an Eden. I am interested in mankind’s place in nature, and how we live and ought to live on the Earth. I search for the wild wherever I am. Sometimes my destination is the thing we call wilderness. I remember a coyote in the canyonlands of Utah sitting on the slickrock and intently watching a a friend of mine picking pinyon nuts. Life is a miracle. Pay attention. The coyote does.
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[1]: Sound of the Axe: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford, page 80.

[2], [3], [4]:  A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, pages viii, 203, & 204.

My other blog: Coyote in the Book Stacks.

Header: The header photograph shows the Sierra La Sal from U.S. Highway 191 between Moab and Monticello, Utah. The view is to the north-northeast. The date is January 4, 2013 in late afternoon. The setting sun is to the left. (Note: From tint to time I will change the header photograph.)