Ethnobiologists and cultural anthropologists have discovered that there is a direct correlation between indigenous peoples and biodiversity. In areas where indigenous cultures are present there is often a high level of biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem. This also holds true for areas diverse in languages; of which the world is rapidly losing many as traditionally oral cultures give way to the Western world. Seems obvious, yet humans, at least modern Western humans, seem to be grappling with the relearning of many fundamentals of the human-nature connection. The world has lost vital knowledge of natural history and culture as generational story telling and oral cultures have gone by the wayside. Surely we lost a large portion of our elder Native American storytellers with the colonization of this country and in turn failed to tap into a reservoir of wisdom. The story-place connection has been an integral part of cultures around the world for millennia. In American culture though it seems to often be confined to a genre of environmental writing that includes such authors as Sue Hubbard, Terry Tempest Williams or Barry Lopez. It is not an intrinsic part of American culture to connect a person or families bioregion with myth and story relating the culture and the land. Was it as one point this way when the land still seemed fresh and new and challenging to American settlers? Leslie Marmon Silko discusses the subject of the story-place connection in her piece titled "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination." Traditionally everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and to be able to recall or tell a portion, if only a small detail, from a narrative account or story. Thus the remembering and retelling were a communal process^?A dinner table conversation, recalling a deer hunt forty years ago when the largest mule deer was taken, inevitably stimulates similar memories in listeners. But hunting stories were not merely after dinner entertainment. These accounts contained information of critical importance about behavior and migration patterns of mule deer. Hunting stories carefully described key landmarks and locations of fresh water. Thus a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers, and lost pinon-nut gatherers, have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock. I believe that we could learn how to connect to our surrounding natural world with story and thereby follow a more bioregional approach in our lifestyles. Story in turn could serve as a creative and enjoyable vehicle to transmit important information about how to live in harmony with a particular bioregion and its ecosystems. Many of us think the idea of storytelling holding an important place in our culture is an unnecessary indulgence. However, it seems that in the present time of environmental destruction and concern a bioregional story telling and sharing approach could open our eyes to much that we are not aware of in the surrounding natural world. It could also open the way to a new sensibility of the natural world, a fresh and creative new approach to our relationship with nature and with each other. Landscape, history and the American imagination...