in which we are bound to the land, and the land is bound to us

I'm recovering HP and mana today by constructing a Vampire/Artifact deck for Magic: The Gathering. While opening boosters earlier, I came across a card in Zendikar called Landbind Ritual. It's a sorcery card that gives you two life for each plains card you control, and it has one of the most beautiful flavor texts I've ever read:

"Honor this place, for our children's children will stand here and speak these same words again." - Ayli, Kamsa cleric.

I would love it if this card was handed out to every person who visited a national park or unspoiled wilderness area. I would love it even more if people would speak these words to their children … and truly mean them.

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56 thoughts on “in which we are bound to the land, and the land is bound to us”

  2. Can I get a whole stack of those for our lovely New York governor, who doesn’t seem to want to leave office until AFTER he’s gutted our state park system?

  4. Amen to that, Wil! People also need to respect our natural parks and not crap them up with litter and empty beer cans. They totally miss the point of even going to them when they pull that kind of stuff.

  5. Wil: “I would love it even more if people would speak these words to their children … and truly mean them.”
    They do. They are people like you.

  10. That’s incredible…you just took something intended to be part of geek culture/entertainment and turned it into a reflection of something much larger and deeper. Kudos.

  12. Magic the Gathering is full of these great quotes and there has been even more of them in the later expansions. I have always had a soft spot for this one from one of the older expansions. Dwarven Soldier from Fallen empires:
    “Let no one say we did not fight until the last . . . .”
    —Headstone fragment from a mass grave found in the Crimson Peaks

  13. Wonderful sentiment! Should be printed on all Park guides/brochures/etc, too!
    We will rule over all this land,
    and we will call it…”This Land.”

  14. That's wonderful. I love that they put so much effort into the story and setting for Magic, even though most players don't really pay attention to anything beyond the stats.

  15. I’ve always admired the bit of verse in the Wilderness Act itself:
    “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

  16. We have a program here in Philly called CLIP (Community Life Improvement Program), and if you neglect your lawn or leave garbage around your property, believe me, they WILL show up at your door and tell you that if you don’t have it fixed up in a week they’ll issue you a hefty fine. It has its good and bad points like any city run program, but for the most part it has made a huge difference in how people keep their property maintained.
    I’m not sure how many other cities have programs like this, but IMO, if people just took the initiative to work on the upkeep of their yards and the land around their homes, we wouldn’t have to be taxed out the ass to even need the CLIP program in the first place.

  21. I think another card you would find interesting in the context of this discussion is Agent of Shauku from the Prophecy set. He has an ability that reads 1B, sacrifice a land: target dork gets +2/+0 til end of turn… and the flavor text follows:
    “Go ahead. Take it. You’ll be so very powerful… and what harm can it do?”
    …and there are plenty more where that came from. Magic really has a great design team behind each and every set in recent years. Flavor text can be a really hard element to balance properly… but when you find one like Landbind Ritual, it can be fantastically perfect.
    One of my personal favorite is off of Balshan Collaborator of the Torment set which reads: “Power, gold, crackers–every bird has its price.”

  22. For me the art, concepts, and fluff always came second to power building or anything. Though I only played friendly games with friends. Never competition.
    Makes me wanna go through my old cards again. I was always a fan of Green. The raw primordial essence of Nature was fascinating to me.
    Who do you play with? Your kids?

  27. The talk of connection to the land reminds of Chief Seattle’s speech. I know there is a lot of doubt as to its veracity, but it’s still an incredibly eloquent speech. This bit in particular seems relevant:
    We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished.
    Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits.
    And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

  28. This is why I went to school for Conservation and Wildlife Management. The worlds national parks and animals are so precious to this planet and need to be saved…My favorite animal is the tiger and one of the things I want to do before I die is visit India to see wild tigers in their natural habitat. And I want my children and my grandchildren to be able to do the same whether they want to see tigers or polar bears or the rainforests…now if I could only find a job (thank you crappy economy!) I could start doing my part to help educate people on the importance of conservation.

  32. If you handed that card to everyone who visited a national park you’d end up with a national park littered with MtG cards, which would be kind of weird.

  33. Thank you for sharing this post, Wil. As a park ranger in our National Parks I am always overjoyed to hear that others love these amazing places as much as I do. And it’s even more wonderful to learn that someone I admire as much as you appreciates them.
    Do you get many chances to take your family out to the Channel Islands, up into Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area or over to Joshua Tree National Park? You’ve got some incredible NPS units right in your backyard!

  34. I've never been to Channel Islands, though I've always wanted to do one of those overnight trips I've heard so much about. Thanks for being a ranger!

  37. Canada tasks me! Canada tasks me, and I shall have them. I’ll chase them round the rinks of ice, and round the Siberian tundra, and round the Olympic’s Russian flame before I give them up!
    Frakking intense.

  40. I hope you do not mind but I am going to report this quote on my face book and twitter because it says it all. Thanks

  42. Hey Wil,
    I am completely obsessed with Magic the Gathering, like you, I started playing in the early nineties and like you, I find myself regretting that I didn’t buy that 80 dollar box with the mox’s and the black lotus. Sigh.
    Like you I stopped playing for a long time and only recently started again.
    As a fantasy writer, I often find myself enjoying the flavor text. The Magic world is quite rich, and it only grows more so. My favorite flavor text is from Guildpack, a set that came out a few years back. I wasn’t playing when it came out, but I got the card in the Planechase packs.
    It’s not as world conscious a statement as the one you mentioned, but the idea is so cool. I wish I came up with it myself so I could write it into a novel.
    Rumbling Slum
    Flavor Text:
    The Orzhov contract the Izzet to animate slum districts and banish them to the wastes. The Gruul adopt them and send them back to the city for vengeance.
    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=205354
    Thanks for the great blog. Break a leg.
    Michael

  43. Vampire/Artifacts..I haven’t had the pleasure of going against them yet. Mostly I play Elder Dragon Highlander, I got a really nasty Artifact deck for that

  44. I’m helping a friend of mine build a budget Vampires deck. Lots of fun.
    On a side note: did you have any thoughts on Team USA’s silver medal performance in men’s Ice Hockey last night? Ryan Miller has nothing to be ashamed of, IMO.

  45. Hey Wil, just wanted to stay that I recently started watching TNG and you have to be one of my favorite characters. Also was really stoked to see this environmental comment on your blog it’s really something to see people that actually care. My mom has dedicated most of her life to the preservation of the Everglades and Florida Wetlands. But yeah just wanted to say hey tell ya that I think you are doing a great thing and keep on truckin. Also have you had a chance to look at Star Trek Online at all, I started playing not too long ago and I have to say it is pretty sick.

  46. I was so distracted by the idea of a vampire/artifact deck it took me a second to realize you’d written something more meaningful. Are you only using zendikar cards for your deck or whatever? I have a blue/white/black artifact deck using stuff mostly from Alara expansions that I adore. Artifact decks are by far my favorite both in mechanics and in artwork/flavor text.
    More meaningfully: Most of the planet seems to have very little concern for the long term. Which is why ideas like climate change have such a hard time catching on. People have a very hard time figuring out why they should care about things 20 years from now when it’s all they can do to get by in the present. I would love a society that considered the long term view at least as important as the short term. In my secret nerd heart of hearts I always figured that people capable of a long term view would never have built their society around an engine that spews poison, and would not consider poisoning and air and ground and killing off many species a fair trade for getting some place slightly faster. Of course, I would then go on to envision a completely green technology that was all plant bio-engineering and living in plants that we engineered to be houses or something, so it’s possible my judgement on the matter is, uh, flawed.
    But wouldn’t it be something to live in a society where it was just common sense that you structure communities and design technology to have as minimal an impact on the ecosystem around you as possible?

  47. I know nothing of Magic the Gathering but that was a beautiful quote! I often wonder if my children’s children will have a planet to stand on.

  49. Beautiful quote, Wil. Our planet needs a massive dose of this. This goes way beyond our national parks. It goes to the heart of our relationship with Nature and our planet. Something is very amiss when people look at a group of wild horses and they see animals that need to be taken off their land “for their own good!” Or seeing an ice flow filled with beautiful baby Harp seals and envision fur coats and money. Are humans SO screwed up that we can no longer enjoy the beauty of animals for what they are???

  50. Hi Wil!
    Great flavor text on that card. I think there should be signs that say that at the enterence to parks and at each trailhead. Just a gentle reminder that these wild places are worth saving and savoring for us and the future.
    Also, gratz on your Streamy nomination! That is made of awesome!

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