Over an appreciable number of years I've come to rely on "mother earth." I expect the sun to rise somewhere to the east. I expect thunderstorms to be followed by windless days. I expect hot spells and cold snaps; brilliant fall forests; frozen lakes and snowdrifts. And, tulips in the spring. That's why the period from 1999 to 2013 caused me so much anxiety—fifteen years of steadily declining Great Lakes water. That's why I agonize over California. I may be old fashioned, but I want planet earth to be pretty much the way it has been for the past 10,000 years. I want my grandkids to know the earth as I have.

Which leads me to the introduction, by Robert Finch, to the 75th anniversary edition of Henry Beston's, The Outermost House:

The importance and the lasting appeal of The Outermost House, I believe, is its power to remind us how much, in our computer age, we still rely on the earth's deep, constant rhythms, its basic integrity and equanimity. We continue to count on the safe and stable context that it provides, even as we tamper with and begin to rupture its basic systems. It allows us our freedom, to perform our daring and reckless feats of enterprise, growth, and exploitation. Yet for all our obsession with freedom, we want it as children want it and need it within safe bounds. We want to know that, no matter how far out we walk, or how fast we race around the globe, the earth will be there to catch us if we slip and stumble, to lift us back from the brink of doom. The recurring cycles of the year, rooted in "the pilgrimages of the sun," are-not simply entertaining phenomena, to be noted at our convenience and for our enjoyment, but signs that the cosmos is still intact, that we remain included in something larger and more reliable than our own short-lived enthusiasms. It is for this that we need to know that insects will hibernate, that turtles and warblers will migrate and return, that the tide will retreat, the ice let go, the earth tilt back toward the sun, and the grass reawaken.