Review
"Voices of the Earth" is a must read that presents a compelling bridge between the technological and the natural worlds, the scientific and the spiritual. Using the language and logic born of his scientific training and experience, author/geologist, Adam Chapuis, thoughtfully examines the role that our planet has played in nurturing and supporting human development into this current technological age, and the profound costs. The result is a profound vision of the choices that are already confronting us. --Robert Case, author Daedalus Rising
When the Earth speaks, we should listen. If we can get in tune with Mother Earth as Chapuis suggests, we can find harmony in our own lives first, then from there it can spread to the rest of our world. The Earth is speaking, you can hear it, you can feel it, it is just many times we ignore it. When we ignore it, we feel off - when we embrace there is a sublime peace that is possible. --EJ Thornton, author and publisher
"Voices of the Earth" is a must read that presents a compelling bridge between the technological and the natural worlds, the scientific and the spiritual. Using the language and logic born of his scientific training and experience, author/geologist, Adam Chapuis, thoughtfully examines the role that our planet has played in nurturing and supporting human development into this current technological age, and the profound costs. The result is a profound vision of the choices that are already confronting us. --Robert Case, author Daedalus Rising
About the Author
Adam was raised on a farm in Alabama. The early years were laced with fields of red clover and the smell of fertilizer in the summer. There was hay along with cotton seed hulls and meal for the cows in the winter. His family had a large garden for vegetables - common in their neighborhood. His father always had cows for milk and cream and to sell the steers.
The first house he remembered was small with four rooms and a tin roof. It had a simple fireplace that had been boarded up and a gas heater installed which was a good thing since a snake lived in the old fireplace too for the shelter and the warmth in winter. It was what his parents called a spreading Adder, yellow with black. They used to find it out in the yard occasionally until the dog found it first, then no more snake.
As a boy, he and his friends wandered through what they thought were deep woods, thick forests of oak, hickory, maple, sweetgum and countless other trees sprinkled with the occasional pine. They explored on foot, and on bicycle and sought to know every inch of the land at every time of day and night. When he was older, they did most of their exploration on horseback, not really because they felt like horsemen, but because you can pretty well go anywhere on a horse. His family s first horse was sleek and young and he thought she was imposingly beautiful. Later, he wondered what part of hell the horse had been born in. The problem was that she was very smart for a horse, she understood ritual and routine. It didn t take her long to figure out the entire family both as individuals and as a group. Individually she saw in Adam a scared little kid pushed by his father to ride the great beast; in other words something to easily torment.
Somewhere around the age of 13 in yet another summer of thick air and insects, lightning bugs and black-eyed peas, he noticed that many of their neighbors but a few miles away maintained dairy farms, and the rich black soil of their farms grew alfalfa and other silage for their cows. He remembered looking for that rich black soil on their own land and finding none. Adam s farm was on the flood plain of the Alabama River, nested in acidic red clayey soil that only welcomed and raised the likes of squash and green beans: no watermelon or cantaloupe. They were so near, yet so far away from that precious soil of the Black Belt that ran from Selma through Montgomery.
He didn t know it then but that soil grew dreams, in the same way it turned the imagination of any seed into full bloomed fruit. This was the first time he wondered about the Earth and he began to notice things, the shape of the land along the creek banks, and where the wild plumbs grew. It had not yet struck him that the precious soil of Earth was a medium that grew whatever was placed in it without question, without judgment.
He enjoyed the sciences in high school, not the studying of them mind you, but the idea of them and the physical experiments. He loved chemistry because they built rocket cars and in moments of boredom they chased and squirted each other with bottles of hydrochloric acid. He often wondered if his mother ever questioned where the holes in his shirts came from. When he arrived on campus for his undergraduate days, everything changed. Chemistry became inordinately un-fun and a series of life changes moved him to the study of geology which he recognized almost immediately as a true calling. After a Masters degree, he spent a number of years in various fields eventually directing a small Environmental Engineering and IT firm.
The author is a hiker, camper, bicycler, snorkeler, and diver, and enjoys playing guitar and African Drums. These days he lives in places where the beauty and power of Earth are easily touched. Being an Earth Monk is a state of mind. It is the way he perceives himself in his truest self.
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