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<\/a>In what may be the keystone essay of his 2018 collection,\u00a0The Bone Pile: Essays on Nature and Culture<\/i>, Maximilian Werner asks a crucial question: \u201cWhat is the purpose of listening?\u201d The essay is entitled \u201cEnvironmentalist,\u201d and it is a musing on the unfortunate labeling that adheres to this term, the polarizing nature of which tends to shut down listening.<\/h4>\nWith this simple question, Werner flays to the bone the nature of language, which names and identifies, but simultaneously distances and diffuses. It\u2019s all we have, this would-be tool of meaning and connection, but it is a tool that all too often forecloses meaning rather than produces it.<\/h4>\nBut Werner\u2019s answer to the question is encouraging: we listen to understand. Werner asserts that understanding, elusive as it is, can descend on us with finality. But it does not give us comfort or clarity, as we might wish. Instead, if we really listen and understand, we become \u201cunmoored,\u201d drifting away from our precious assumptions about our world, ourselves, and our hidebound visions of others, both human and beyond human.<\/h4>\nThis unmooring \u2014 this daring drift into understanding \u2014 is wild, beautiful, and a little scary, and it is precisely the work of this raw, honest, and deeply felt series of essays. Wildly, freely, without the strictures of a particular agenda, we travel with the author\u2019s astonishingly open and curious mind though a strongly biographical yet almost universally identifiable set of experiences, thoughts, and visions.<\/h4>\nAt times, as in the titular essay, Werner\u2019s voice is aphoristic, Thoreauvian in its declarative bent. Yet the questions that enliven this supremely readable work are bone-deep. They run all the way to the quintessential query: what is consciousness? This question simmers beneath the surface as Werner recounts navigating the world of artifice and technology, our simultaneous dependence on and ignorance of our many technologies, while noting how his mind \u201ccatches fire\u201d upon imagining an arc of sunlight making its way around this island planet. Werner captures here the suburbanite\u2019s trapped-ness, which carries with it a deep but too-often ignored awareness of the fragility of the artifices that distance us from life in the open, with its beauty, death, and suffering. The character here is liminal, dwelling within the suburban space but, like so many of us, wistfully musing on this citified existence: \u201cIf I could make the choice again, I would have stayed in the woods.\u201d<\/h4>\nAnd that is exactly where some of the most interesting work in this volume are based. Werner has sojourned to Montana\u2019s Centennial Valley, the Utah canyon country, and other wild corners of the West in his work as a researcher and writing professor. The author\u2019s crystalline yet nuanced visions of wildness, as drawn from these experiences \u2014 particularly the thorny conundrums around managing predators in rural spaces \u2014 resonate with reverence and a genuine struggle to listen and understand. The result is a truly moral work, free of dogmatism, that seeks to help us engage the <\/span>many connections each life and each story share.<\/h4>\nComplex as the world is, having Werner as a muse and navigator <\/span>in The Bone Pile<\/i><\/span>, serves as a reverent tour through experience that is often needle-accurate in its examination of how we make meaning and how we connect to the world \u2014 with no division between \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201chuman-made\u201d<\/span> \u2014 in which we dwell.<\/span><\/h4>\n\n
This unmooring \u2014 this daring drift into understanding \u2014 is wild, beautiful, and a little scary, and it is precisely the work of this raw, honest, and deeply felt series of essays. Wildly, freely, without the strictures of a particular agenda, we travel with the author\u2019s astonishingly open and curious mind though a strongly biographical yet almost universally identifiable set of experiences, thoughts, and visions.<\/h4>\nAt times, as in the titular essay, Werner\u2019s voice is aphoristic, Thoreauvian in its declarative bent. Yet the questions that enliven this supremely readable work are bone-deep. They run all the way to the quintessential query: what is consciousness? This question simmers beneath the surface as Werner recounts navigating the world of artifice and technology, our simultaneous dependence on and ignorance of our many technologies, while noting how his mind \u201ccatches fire\u201d upon imagining an arc of sunlight making its way around this island planet. Werner captures here the suburbanite\u2019s trapped-ness, which carries with it a deep but too-often ignored awareness of the fragility of the artifices that distance us from life in the open, with its beauty, death, and suffering. The character here is liminal, dwelling within the suburban space but, like so many of us, wistfully musing on this citified existence: \u201cIf I could make the choice again, I would have stayed in the woods.\u201d<\/h4>\nAnd that is exactly where some of the most interesting work in this volume are based. Werner has sojourned to Montana\u2019s Centennial Valley, the Utah canyon country, and other wild corners of the West in his work as a researcher and writing professor. The author\u2019s crystalline yet nuanced visions of wildness, as drawn from these experiences \u2014 particularly the thorny conundrums around managing predators in rural spaces \u2014 resonate with reverence and a genuine struggle to listen and understand. The result is a truly moral work, free of dogmatism, that seeks to help us engage the <\/span>many connections each life and each story share.<\/h4>\nComplex as the world is, having Werner as a muse and navigator <\/span>in The Bone Pile<\/i><\/span>, serves as a reverent tour through experience that is often needle-accurate in its examination of how we make meaning and how we connect to the world \u2014 with no division between \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201chuman-made\u201d<\/span> \u2014 in which we dwell.<\/span><\/h4>\n\n
And that is exactly where some of the most interesting work in this volume are based. Werner has sojourned to Montana\u2019s Centennial Valley, the Utah canyon country, and other wild corners of the West in his work as a researcher and writing professor. The author\u2019s crystalline yet nuanced visions of wildness, as drawn from these experiences \u2014 particularly the thorny conundrums around managing predators in rural spaces \u2014 resonate with reverence and a genuine struggle to listen and understand. The result is a truly moral work, free of dogmatism, that seeks to help us engage the <\/span>many connections each life and each story share.<\/h4>\nComplex as the world is, having Werner as a muse and navigator <\/span>in The Bone Pile<\/i><\/span>, serves as a reverent tour through experience that is often needle-accurate in its examination of how we make meaning and how we connect to the world \u2014 with no division between \u201cnatural\u201d and \u201chuman-made\u201d<\/span> \u2014 in which we dwell.<\/span><\/h4>\n\n
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