Episode 63: Jack Loeffler on Rewilding Human Consciousness and Tales From An Extraordinary Life
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Jack Loeffler, Author, Aural Historian
About Jack Loeffler
With the temperament of Santa Claus and the tenacity of a badger, Jack Loeffler reveals his compassion and concern for Southwestern traditional cultures and their respective habitats in the wake of Manifest Destiny. Working both as an individual and with comrades—including Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder—he was part of an early coterie of counterculturalists and environmentalists who fought to thwart the plunder of natural resources in the Southwest. Loeffler, a former jazz musician, fire lookout, museum curator, bioregionalist, and self-taught aural historian, shares his humor and imagination, his adventures, observations, reflections, and meditations along the trail in his retelling of a life well lived. He advises each and every one of us to go skinny-dipping joyfully in the flow of Nature to better understand where we’re headed.
Acclaim For “Headed Into The Wind”
“Over these pages, we relive Loeffler’s life and learn why he might honestly come to the title of America’s most interesting and thoughtful man.”—Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave
Topics
- Re-naturalizing human consciousness
- Counterculture, beat generation, bohemian culture
- Ed Abbey, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Stewart Brand
- Federal vs grassroots vs self governance
- Zen, Taoism
- “Nature Abhors A Maximum”
- “If you look at nature and don’t see yourself in it, you’re too far away.”
- The Song of the Leaf Cutter Ant
- Culture is shaped by the habitat that sprouts it
Extra Credit
Listen to this 54 minute podcast of a radio program Jack produced regarding Aldo Leopold in the Southwest that was broadcast over Public Radio in 2009
PBS interview from last year with Lorene Mills
Books by Jack Loeffler:
2013 Quivira Conference, Gary Snyder & Jack Loeffler
Director of Digital Outreach (D.O.D.O.) for The Rewilding Institute
Host and Producer of the Rewilding Earth Podcast
Jack started Rewilding work as Executive Director of Sky Island Alliance in the mid-1990’s, organizing the Sky Island Wildlands Network design, ripping up illegal roads on forest service lands, installing wolf acclimatization pens on Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch & conducting howling surveys to help make way for the final stage of the Lobo reintroduction program in the Southwest.
Through the years, Jack has worked with Dave Foreman and the Rewilding Gang to further Rewilding initiatives and education.