By Wendy Johnson, M.D.
The Coyote and the Cottonwood
How Kinship and Connection can Heal the Earth and Ourselves
THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD: How Kinship and Connection can Heal the Earth and Ourselves is based in the premise that our well-being is rooted in interdependence, with each other and the natural world. Western medicine sees our bodies as machines to be repaired, but a more apt metaphor would be a garden, we are a part of nature. Your body itself is an ecosystem, existing inside progressively larger ecosystems until we consider the whole earth itself. We cannot be truly healthy when those ecosystems are sick and dying. Our modern way of living in most of the Western World is incompatible with maintaining the healthy ecosystems on which we depend. THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD is aimed at raising awareness of the deep connection between our well being and the health of the natural world.
Meet the Author
Wendy Johnson, M.D.
Dr. Wendy Johnson is a family physician, writer, photographer and community activist whose career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing a large urban public health department and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, The Nation, and newspapers in Cleveland, Seattle and Santa Fe. She spends most of her spare time cultivating and rewilding her acre and a half homestead, and writing about health justice and the intersection of human and environmental wellbeing.
“I am not very hopeful about the Earth remaining as it was when I was a child. It’s already greatly changed. But I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we’re animals, that we need the Earth.”