The Nature Pages at OUTRIDER BOOKS

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	Wisdom from a Rainforest The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist by Stuart A. Schlegel The University of Georgia Press, 2003		Stuart Schlegel (rainforestwisdom.com)
	While anthropologist Stuart Schlegel's account of the Teduray people on the Phillipine island of Mindanao is mostly a work of ethnography, the author's portrait of the society's deep spirituality and close-knit relationship with the rainforest achieves what only the best of nature writing approaches -- an understanding of man's role in the natural world.		It is vital that we realize that visions of a better world -- of utopia -- do not exist only in the minds of philosophical writers. They exist in the gall bladders and hearts of people like the Teduray and like many of my closest friends who organize their lives around an alternate vision in what they perceive to be a destructive world. They exist in the will of people like you and me.
	An Episcopal missionary among the Teduray during the 1960s, Schlegel later returned to live and work with the remote rainforest tribe as an anthropologist, writing several books and delivering hundreds of lectures on the their tolerant, gentle way of life.
	Describing this book as "intensely personal," Schlegel explains that his intent is to "introduce you to the thinking of these people in all its beauty and elegance... Their gracious, life-affirming, compassionate ways transformed the foundations of my life: my thinking, my feelings, my relationships, and my career. I hope a wider world will hear the voices I heard in that remote forest and realize, as I came to, that the Teduray speak eloquently to us all of tolerance, cooperation, grace, and gentleness, that their understanding of the world contains lessons that all of us persuing 'the good life' need to hear."		I described the way neighbors worked on each other's gardens, how they could not have done most of the stages of the swidden cultivation cycle without the whole neighborhood pitching in. In the ritual exchanging of rice this interdependence was dramatically enacted. Every family knew they were eating some of the rice from every neighbor's garden on which they had worked, in company with the spirits who had also made their indispensable contribution. A kanduli ceremonially stated and modeled the Teduray's most basic social truth. It said -- in music, word, and action -- that all persons were partners in the achievement of an abundant life and that they were utterly dependent on one another.
Browse our selection of new, used and out of print nature books.	Part memoir and tribute, and partly a how-to manual on conduct of life, Schlegel's book chronicles his contact and studies of the Teduray, reflecting on what he learned and the potential those lessons have for transforming much of what is wrong with modern society. Perhaps that is expecting too much, especially in light of the tribe's subsequent extinction at the hands of political extremists, but their wisdom and way of life lives on through Schlegel and his books, and where there is a voice for tolerance and cooperation and generosity there is still hope.