Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? In her latest book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate.

Moore’s essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends-of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter’s arrest for protesting the war in Iraq-affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane.

Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family.