The Song of the Place to Itself

"The myth teaches that these sacred places are to be respected for their own sake, not for what human beings can make of them. Myth, in its most ecologically discreet form, among people who live by hunting and fishing and gathering, seems to be the song of the place to itself, which humans overhear.

Wisdom about nature, that wisdom heard and told in animated pattern, that pattern rendered in such a way as to preserve a place whole and sacred, safe from human meddling: these are theconcepts with which to begin an exploration of myth. Of these, the notion of the sanctity of place is vital. It anchors the other concepts. the stories remembered by the mythtellers were pictures of the flow of life and information most keenly. Once the power of the place is lost to memtory, myth is uprooted; knowledge of the earth's precesses becomes a different kind of knowledge, manipulated and applied by man." p. 50