Although it straddles the equator, Mount Kenya is usually capped with ice and snow. At 17,058 feet, it is Africa’s second-highest mountain; glaciers nest in its ragged peaks, forests blanket its slopes. This ancient extinct volcano, which rises in the center of the country that shares its name, has long been a wonder to all who beheld its icy peaks gleaming with sunlight.
Living in the harshest of climates, the indigenous peoples of Russia’s far northern Arctic have survived for thousands of years through knowledge systems and practices that revere the spirited landscape they inhabit.
On a hilltop in the French city of Chartres stands a cathedral renowned as a testament to human builders inspired by faith in the divine. One of the world’s best-preserved medieval cathedrals, it is a Gothic architectural achievement that has been called a miracle of stained glass and stone.
Green patches of woodland dot the landscape of India — from bamboo groves on the eastern coast to clumps of trees in the northwestern deserts, and from jungles in the tropical south to dense Himalayan forests in the north.
The Black Hills stretch across western South Dakota, northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana and constitute a sacred landscape for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Omaha.
A world-famous natural bridge located at the northern edge of the Dine (Navajo) Nation, Rainbow Bridge is the site of hundreds of thousands of tourist visits every year and is recognized as a National Monument.
Snoqualmie Falls, 30 miles east of Seattle, Washington, is sacred to the Snoqualmie Tribe of the Puget Sound region. They believe it is the place where First Woman and First Man were created by Moon the Transformer, himself the son of an Indian woman and a star.
The wetlands around Lawrence, in eastern Kansas, hold over a hundred years of memories of Native children forced to grow up in isolation from their families and cultures. These memories bear their traces in unmarked child graves and a medicine wheel erected by contemporary Haskell students.
What was once Quechan land is now prime gold mining territory, and the off-reservation sacred landscape around Indian Pass in the California desert is endangered.
In the Yunnan Province of southwestern China, strong indigenous cultures have lived for centuries in a dramatic landscape of vertical mountain slopes, high plateaus and deep river gorges.