Grounding Biological and Cultural Diversity in a Postmodern World‪.‬

From this window seat, I can watch the large woodpecker as he circles the tree drilling holes in search of insects. I'm told that these birds are a natural enemy to the Pine Bark Beetles that are infesting the Ponderosa Pine Forests around Flagstaff. I notice that his coloring is different than the birds I've known down South, in Louisiana, where red-headed woodpeckers are sharply black and white. The Flicker is brown, with dark bars and light spots across his back, a gray head and bright red mustache on either cheek. Larger than the woodpeckers I've known, he is considered a totem animal by some tribal cultures indigenous to the area. New to these birds, and to this southwestern region of the United States, I received a Ph.D. a few years ago at LSU in Baton Rouge and crossed the country to take a faculty position at Northern Arizona University in the mountain town of Flagstaff. The bird's movements seem frenzied, now. He hops about from limb to trunk to limb again in a frenetic morning dance in search of food amidst the layers of crusty pine bark. My own morning has been frenetic, as well, moving from room-to-room, sofa to chair, floor to window seat on a search of my own--a search for language. Carrying my pencil, and a head filled with too many words, I sit down next to the window, lean back against the pillows, and look out across the landscape at the rolling terrain. Quieting now, I focus my eyes on a large volcanic cinder cone in the distance. There in the stillness, I am suddenly "aware" of something that I hadn't recognized only a moment before--that the world is a gift--I am reminded by the vibrance of this bird, so intensely engaged in what he's doing. I suddenly "recognize" that life is something that I share with this bird and with this tree and with this mountain. Yet, at times we humans in the West don't recognize the world around us as vitally connected to the body in which we live and breathe. There's a distancing in our perspective that keeps us separate from--and assuming we're above--other species on the planet. We apply this distance to humans, as well. We think less of other cultures that aren't like us--those who don't live within the lines of what we consider to be a modern, progressive worldview. We seek to change them, to make them like us. We measure with a yardstick that we've designed and against which we hold all others accountable.