Spirit of Chinook Looking At Us

About the Book

“Spirit of Chinook Looking At Us” rages against the environmental crisis which threatens us all. The book includes jeremiads, three cartoons by the author, a couple of haikus, poems of grief and poems of hope. The intent is to stir the reader emotionally and engage him or her for environmental activism and social justice. The book is about what we have lost, what we are still losing and what we face to lose in the future. It is in part grim, in part humorous, in part hopeful and in part inspiration.

About the Author

I have an inborn affinity for nature. By the time I went to college I regarded the environment as an indispensable commonwealth. My college honors research project was about downstream migrant salmon and how immature fish might be guided around hydroelectric dams. The prospects in fisheries biology were discouraging—no funding was available to do meaningful research—so I went to medical school instead of graduate school. In 1994 Newt Gingrich launched the infamous “Contract on America”, which, according to emergency bulletins from Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited, proposed to commodify nature and disconnect humanity from the environment. I, however, still felt intensely connected to nature. In that heated context I designed a multi-eyed salmon in Northwest Indian totem style and wrote an accompanying poem. Thus Gritfish, this book and www.gritfish.com were born. I hope that what the poems lack in prosody they make up in emotional content for, as it is said, “What you do not love you will not save”. Gritfish