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Lawrence Johnson is a native of San Diego, California, and spent most of his early life there and other parts of the western United States. From his earliest years with his parents he visited numerous American National Parks. He also joined, in due course, the Boy Scouts and the Sierra Club. From such roots he developed a passion for bushwalking and for environmentalism, first as a cause and eventually as a philosophy.
He has a wife, Elizabeth, and two children, Freja and Nicholas.
After his formal education (BA, Mathematics, PhD Philosophy) he took a brief position at West Virginia University before taking up a career academic position in Australia. He has written various books and articles of an academic nature. He is best known for, and most proud of, his book A Morally Deep World: An Essay on Moral Significance and Environmental Ethics. Currently he is completing a book on Bioethics. Lawrence sees his views and values concerning bioethics as being intimately connected with his views and values concerning environmental ethics, the common factor being an affirmation of life.
He likes to believe that these values can be glimpsed in the literary writing he has been trying to develop in recent years. He has produced a mixture of poetry and prose. His At Silverwood won the 2003 Satura Prize, being judged to be the best poem in the Friendly Street Poetry Reader for the previous year.
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SPINDRIFT
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It’s silent, what I’m doing
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– yet I’m not walking in silence.
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The richly foaming waves break on the shore,
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driven by the constant |
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– continuously variable – |
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on-shore wind, joining in an exhilarating but |
| soothing uproar. |
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| As yet unprostrated by time or rain, fluffy bits of spindrift |
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tumble across the beach, |
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blown ever smaller. |
| Walking along the windrows of spindrift left at the high-water |
| line, |
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I am minded of the rustle-crunch of walking |
| through autumn leaves, |
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and minded too of the crunch-crunch of walking |
| over shell dunes cast up |
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on a beach very near here in space, |
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though not in time. |
| To those experiences, their gratifying sound was vital, |
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whereas spindrift flys silently from my boots |
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in the howl of the wind. |
| Yet there is no less joy in this. |
| Is it perhaps the joy of upsetting the world |
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just a little bit, |
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as when petty-souled dolts |
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kick over mushrooms? |
| No. |
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| I have no care to change the world |
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– not this beach, anyway. |
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Nor do I think I could, where wind and waves, tide, |
| weather and time |
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leave it, |
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though always different, |
| ever the same. |
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| There is exultation in the thought that all trace of my |
| passing, |
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like the wind and the spindrift |
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flys vanishingly away. |
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