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June 21, 2006
A tale from the American West
I've just read a fabulous book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, that I hope readers outside the United States will be able to find, because it beautifully presents traditional, iconic life in the American West along with changing consciousness about sustainability--and responsibility. It's the bad and the good, in an engaging memoir that may help you to understand us a bit better. It's also witty; I especially loved Dan O'Brien's observations about his neighbors, whom he is clearly fond of:
The lives and the pedigrees of my friends and neighbors were heavily vested in the belief that this land is 'cattle country.' In the view of some, their progenitors sacrificed everything to wrench the northern plains away from the dark forces of wildness, and they do not want to hear that the salvation of the land, and perhaps of the economy, might lay in a retrenching, a falling back to the greater wisdom of evolution. Hell, most of my neighbors don't even believe in evolution, even though they have been engineering evolution in the form of modified cattle for generations.
Dan O'Brien, ends the story with the launch of Wild Idea Buffalo, a company selling grass-fed free-range buffalo meat by mail order. Our first package arrives today, and we'll be eating it with our first peas.
Posted by Karen Christensen at June 21, 2006 4:19 PM