ABSTRACT
These lines appear on the cover of Not Man Apart (Brower, 1969), a coffee table book of Robinson Jeffers’s poems and photos of spectacular vistas of California’s Big Sur coast. Produced by the Sierra Club, the foremost environmental advocacy organization in 1965, it was one of the first ‘nature books’ with a message. It celebrates the ecological worldview of Jeffers’s poetry, in which Big Sur is much more than the sum of its details. Neither man nor woman nor surf or seabird exists apart from its context, which includes the physical details in view and a larger experience of wholeness incorporating the photographer, the poet, the reader and the creative intelligence and awareness of each. At the time, ecology, that branch of biology that studies relations and interactions of living things in context, was coming into popular consciousness. Its message: the best and most interesting things in life are not things but relations, communities.
