There is something quintessentially earthy about turtles. Perhaps it is that they are low and slow, although some can move quicker than we can; perhaps it is because they are generally silent, though some are quite vocal in love; perhaps it is because they are at once enduring and helpless, strong and weak, flighty and fierce, exploited but unknown. Perhaps it is that individually they live longer than we do and are therefore capable of perceiving the foolish foibles of each of our lives, though maybe it is more because, as a group, they arose before our own tree-shrew forebears, bore witness to the rise and fall of dinosaurs, and thus see our species in a geologic context we will never comprehend.

      Turtles sometimes embody wisdom in literature, cartoons, television, and film, a wisdom born of both longevity and suffering. I look at them with both admiration and compassion, the first for their dogged, determined persistence, the second for their plight. Most folks don’t look to them at all. Rather, they unthinkingly destroy their habitats, eat them in soup, grind them into potions, drown them in fishing nets, and even purposely run them over on the road. It is the fact that most people will not even pause to dignify turtles with a glance that makes these denizens of Earth’s dark and unknown spaces such a perfect symbol of our dubious relationship with nature.

      Turtles entered my life when I was nine years old and never left. I saw early on how a turtle in a pond or stream or river or sea could break water, take in what is going on above the surface, and then dive back down to a secret, but fundamental, world that human beings would never know. I envied them that ability—which for humans requires discipline, devotion, effort, and qualified guidance through esoteric waters, but for turtles comes naturally and with neither stress nor strain. I became fascinated with them. They connected me to nature at a time when I lived in an apartment building in a concrete jungle whose only trees were planted in ordered rows and whose clouds were mostly punctured by the radio antennae on top of skyscrapers.

      Some of the species of turtles I knew as a child growing up in a Manhattan apartment are now functionally extinct, and even those that persist are hardly common in the wild. At the time of this writing, turtles as a group are the most critically endangered of all vertebrates. Early on, I had no idea of the threat they were under and no sense of contributing to their demise by participating in a pet trade that mortally drained wild populations. I simply wanted to be with them, to feed them, change the dirty water in their tanks, and see them blink in evident pleasure at their renewed world, fresh, clean, and clear. I wanted to watch them chase crickets, devour earthworms, suck down fish by making a vacuum cleaner of their throats, scoot joyfully through the water, stick periscope-like noses up for a breath of air, then retreat again to hide under aquarium gravel. In tending to them, I partook in a respectful, natural exchange of energy with the panoply of nature’s other sentient beings. Now, after more than fifty years of working with individual turtles representing a third of Earth’s extant turtle species, I am stunned by how many have been lost and how precarious is the position of the few that remain.

      In choosing to write about them in this book, I aim to help stem the tide against them and to draw upon an ancient tradition to help reframe the environmental, social, spiritual, and cultural problems turtles face. That tradition is Daoism, the religion in which I am a monk and which is perhaps the first coherent form of environmentalism. Turtles and Daoism became intertwined in Neolithic times in the part of the world later called China. In those early days, shamans—interlocutors between our world and the next—burned the bellies of river turtles with red-hot pokers until they cracked, then read the resulting lines the way back-alley fortune tellers now read cards or tea leaves.

      In one legend of the late Neolithic period, right before the dawn of Chinese dynasties, a turtle arose from beneath the surface of the Luo river right in front of Fuxi, an analogue to the biblical Adam, revealing a combination of broken and unbroken lines that would later underpin the Yijing (I-Ching), the divinatory urtext of Chinese philosophical culture. In another similar tale, the legendary Emperor Yu, who is reputed to have ruled wisely and justly from c. 2123—2025 BCE, was supervising the building of a dam on the Yellow River when a giant turtle surfaced before him. This turtle, called Hi, bore a message on its back:

      When Yu took a closer look, he realized that the numbers in the square had a specific property, namely that in every direction, they added up to fifteen. This diagram is important in feng shui, an art used all over Asia to design and build homes, offices, buildings, gardens, and even cities so as to best potentiate stability, prosperity, health, fecundity, wealth, longevity, and material riches. Today, stone turtles, often with stone snakes on their backs, greet visitors in Daoist temples all over Asia, and real live turtles swim in Daoist temple ponds.