I live, learn, teach and write in Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains. Glaciers, forests, rocks, and people’s lives here continually raise questions about how the world changes—and how we understand and participate in those changes.

My half-century of work brings together natural history, field education, wildlands policy, and philosophical inquiry. It grows from places and experiences: observing a rock beside a glacier, following how plants grow onto newly exposed ground, considering a decision about access to wild country. Such encounters lead into questions of time, relationship, stability, and transformation.

I am interested in how observation, scientific investigation, art, and contemplative practice contribute to understanding. Connections among them can open new questions and ways of seeing. Following those connections requires care, remaining attentive to what experience and evidence support—and where they challenge an appealing idea.

This site gathers writing, teaching resources, publications, and inquiries in progress. I welcome conversation with people whose experience or scholarship can extend—or challenge—what is here.

The larger inquiry centers on these questions:

>Is the cosmos organized with an inherent order, or logos? How can we understand that order? Does it have an ethical dimension? Can we influence events by blending with its power?

>How can we live well in an impermanent and unstable world reflecting this order?

>What are the relationships between contemplation and action? Specifically, what attitudes and techniques enable making a positive difference, while connecting with the transcendent and the immanent?

Presently partially complete, this website  includes:

1. Blog posts, an ongoing public writer’s journal. Ideas here are tentative and very possibly wrong: a place for exploration. Comments welcome.

2. Pages on projects and main topics of inquiry. I see these as a form of publication, alongside books, journal articles, and the like. They are less permanent, but with the benefit of being easily updated. Main headings include natural history, strategic advocacy, contemplation & action, wildlands policy and healthcare. Comments also invited here.

3. Publications and other finished work, including books, book chapters, articles, public presentations, and policy memos submitted to agencies and organizations.

4. Draft documents ready for circulation, comment and use, but not yet in final form.

5. Background, including a biography and an overview of my current work.

~Ben Shaine

 

The painting at the top of this page shows Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains and Copper River Basin as they may have been during a  mild interval in the last major ice age. The foreground is excerpted from a painting by Mauricio Anton. I added the Wrangell Mountains peaks in the background. Scientists have found 30,000 year old mammoth bone in the Copper Basin.