Naturalist Sings, Writes of Love of Earth

Have you ever looked at a bright colored stone?

Asked what is your story, my friend ?

Were you born out of fire or pressure or time,

Are you now as you always have been?

Were you carried far from the place you began,

By glacier by river or stream?

Were you polished and worn by the wind or the waves?

Are you older than people can dream . . . ?

(From “What Is Your Story?” on Douglas Wood’s “EarthSongs” children’s album.)

Douglas Wood, a Minnesota naturalist and wilderness guide, writes music, books and essays, sings, plays guitar, banjo, violin and piano, hosts a radio show called “Wood’s Lore” and teaches environmental workshops in public schools. Shaping his multifaceted life is his profound love and respect for nature.

His “EarthSongs” album, originally produced by the Science Museum of Minnesota, is a poetic, often jaunty collection of funny and thoughtful songs about nature and our place in it; his recent first book from Pfeifer-Hamilton Publishers, “Old Turtle,” is a gentle parable for children and adults, illustrated by award-winning watercolor artist Cheng-Khee Chee.

“I’ve been writing songs about 20 years,” Wood said, “mostly making my living as a songwriter and performer. ‘Old Turtle’ has come along and just exploded in terms of sales, so I’m getting more exposure from that than anything I’ve done.

“I found that in my years as a songwriter, the lyrics have been the strength of my songs; they just seem to lend themselves to books and essays as well.

“ ‘What Is Your Story?’ came to me when I was walking through the woods in Minnesota. I picked up a stone and held it in my hand; it was round and smooth. I looked at it more carefully and began imagining where it came from and how long it had been there.”

Wood surmised that the stone may have lain undisturbed in that remote area for “about 10,000 years, since the time of the last glacier. Before that, it was a piece of granite worn rather smooth, probably formed 2 to 2 1/2 billion years before that.

“I thought, what an incredible story even a little rock has to tell. And if you can understand that story, you can understand much of the story of the Earth itself.”

Wood’s cautionary songs--”Wind Upon the Shoulder,” for instance, is a haunting list of the extinct and almost extinct, including “tomorrow’s children” if we aren’t careful--are balanced with giggly, pun-filled offerings such as “Outhouse Blues” and “The Minnesota Mosquito Song.”

Despite his sense of humor, however, Wood, 40, is passionate about his message. “The loss of wetlands, old-growth forests, the loss of coral reefs, of rain forests--they’re not just places that are being lost, but ecosystems with forms of life that have every right to exist” on what Wood sings is a “little green speck, on a little blue ball, in a big black sky all alone.”

But Wood, father of two, stresses that preserving the Earth also means people caring about people.

“When people don’t have the basic necessities for physical survival,” he said, “it’s difficult to worry about how we relate (philosophically) to the Earth and our environment. So the answers to these environmental problems have as much to do with how we resolve human problems and inequities, as they do with our relationship with the natural world.”

Which pretty much describes the theme of Wood’s children’s book, a deceptively simple story about an ancient, wise turtle who shows the creatures of the world, and then man, the common bond between them and the Earth.

“It is a spiritual book in that it deals with the depth of our relationship with the Earth,” Wood said. “It doesn’t impose any hard kind of dogma or theology; it talks about this wonderful creative force in the universe that human beings have always wondered about.”

Whether the word used to describe that force is God, “or Yahweh, or Allah or Gitche Manito, Wakan Tanka or Tao, it’s the concept that matters, in trying to understand what it means to be human and how we live on the Earth.”

“EarthSongs” audiocassette information: (800) 336-5666.