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 loo...

A Pagan Polemic curates the evolving perspective of Jack Loeffler—itinerant wanderer, environmental warrior, storyteller, and story collector—whose true education began when he was marched into the Nevada desert one day at dawn to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” during an atomic bomb test a scant few miles away. Since that day in 1957, Jack’s mission in life has been to record peoples of the borderlands and to bring “Indigenous mindedness” to the forefront of the conversation...

For over forty years aural historian Jack Loeffler has wandered the West engaging people in conversations and recording those conversations for posterity. When asked by the New Mexico Humanities Council to produce an anthology of interviews that would combine elements of two projects sponsored by the Council, the Between Fences traveling exhibition and a project focused on the Great Depression and New Deal, Loeffler turned to the landscape of the Continental Divide and the diverse cultures...

No writer has had a greater influence on the American West than Edward Abbey (1927-89), author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction. This long-awaited biographical memoir by one of Abbey's closest friends is a tribute to the gadfly anarchist who popularized environmental activism in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and articulated the spirit of the arid West in Desert Solitaire and scores of other essays and articles. In the course of a twenty-year friendship Ed Abbey and...

In 1984, Jack Loeffler produced a radio series entitled "Southwest Sound Collage." His primary listener was his great friend author Edward Abbey who said, "Loeffler, this radio series should be a book." Thus, "Headed Upstream" first appeared in 1989 shortly after Abbey's death. The challenging interviews that appear herein (Edward Abbey, Andrew Weil, John Nichols, Stewart Udall, and Gary Snyder, to name a few) reflect many points of view from anarchist to Marxist, from environmental to phi...

A Pagan Polemic curates the evolving perspective of Jack Loeffler—itinerant wanderer, environmental warrior, storyteller, and story collector—whose true education began when he was marched into the Nevada desert one day at dawn to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever" during an atomic bomb test a scant few miles away. Since that day in 1957, Jack's mission in life has been to record peoples of the borderlands and to bring "indigenous mindedness" to the forefront of the conversation...

Thinking Like a Watershed points our understanding of our relationship to the land in new directions. It is shaped by the bioregional visions of the great explorer John Wesley Powell, who articulated the notion that the arid American West should be seen as a mosaic of watersheds, and the pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold, who put forward the concept of bringing conscience to bear within the realm of “the land ethic.”Produced in conjunction with the documentary radio series...