Sarah Caroline Crall
The bow of a canoe from the Quapaw Canoe Company.
In cover artist Sarah Caroline Crall’s story, “In Wildness,” she invokes the naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who famously said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” On a canoe in the middle of the Mississippi River, Crall discovers a profundity in the waters, in the wilds—in a river that has run just on the other side of a levee for her, all her life. She, like her guide John Ruskey of the Quapaw Canoe Company, realize a truth at the center of contemporary conservation efforts: Saving the world becomes more urgent once you have come to know it.
The theme of immersion into nature pervades this year’s “Into the Outdoors” issue—in which publisher James Fox-Smith jets twenty-five miles off the Mississippi coast to set foot upon Louisiana’s farthest shore, a vital habitat for dozens of species, many of them critically endangered. We also meet John Nettles, who hopes to encourage the long tradition of sourcing food from Louisiana’s bayous and forests; as well as a teenager writes about his dream of cultivating one of Louisiana’s great dying ecosystems, the Cajun Prairie. Featured in our monthly “Perspectives” column is the Mississippi artist Robin Whitfield, whose daily artistic sojourns into the swamp near her apartment resulted in its preservation, and its very name. And such tales cannot be told of this region without thinking of the conservation legend, Caroline Dormon, who once said, “I was born with something . . . I call it the gift of wild things.”
