Crosscurrents North
Alaskans on the Environment

In this collection of 61 essays and poems, long-time Alaskans express admiration and awe of the landscape and its wild inhabitants.

Contributors span the state and include familiar names as well as new voices. All are passionate about their world--a world populated by icons such as whales, wolves, and bears, as well as a microcosm of mushrooms, sand lance, and berries, upon which all depend.

Leading with a preface by Bill McKibben and a foreword by the late Alaska Governor Jay Hammond, this anthology celebrates the wildness and wonder of Alaska's land and seas, and raises questions about how we humans live here.

Crosscurrents North is a beautiful, heart-breaking, and desperately important book. What the book says—in the measured tones of Native elders, in the wind-scoured words of Alaska's fine writers, in the blunt speech of trappers and fishers—is this: ‘There are people who love this bountiful, bruised land. Help us defend it. For all time.”
—Kathleen Dean Moore

This book is a pleasure. It brings to life in page after page the breathtaking richness and power of life in Alaska. It is full of writing of great beauty, intelligence, and force. And it is, of course, a necessary book.
—Robert Hass

If the land has the power to teach us--and I believe that it does—then Alaska is the greatest master teacher in North America and this anthology gathers the voices of some of her most eloquent students.
—Alison Hawthorne Deming

This is a book of being with the land. Most importantly, it is a book of living organisms, all of whom appear to know more than humans.
—Linda Hogan