Alyssa Kreikemeier (ed.), Natalie Clott, Melinda Lituchy, Chinanuekepele Okoli, Cal Parise Jessica Schwarz, Matthew Siegel, Delaney Foster, and William De Rocco
Loving and Losing: Finding a Way to Say Goodbye
By Alyssa Kreikemeier, (ed.), Natalie Clott, Melinda Lituchy, Chinanuekpele Okoli, Cal Parise, Jessica Schwarz, Matthew Siegel, Delaney Foster, and William De Rocco
In the writing seminar “Nature/Culture in Crisis,” Boston University students wrote place eulogies and letters to ancestors and descendants.
“For action to be taken, first we must be sad, and then we become angry. We grieve, and grief is a powerful thing.” –Natalie Clott
Floods destroy towns throughout the Midwest; rising sea levels batter levees and subsume island communities; wildfires rip through the continent’s rugged mountains—even in winter when peaks are buried in snow. Wells run dry, and farmers battle Indigenous tribes and industrial giants for water rights. This is not a dystopian novel. Nor a prediction of the future. These stories do not come from movies but in fact, are daily headlines worldwide. These increasingly quotidian stories are dislocating communities with ancestral ties to land, charring homes, and wiping out crops. Birds are changing their nesting and migration patterns, and dying en masse due to forest fires in the West.[1] Moose and salmon are moving north and into cooler waters as their habitats warm.
**
We take from the earth for profit. We steal and pillage and destroy, driven by consumerism. Corporate desire for growth and power drives and responds to capitalist incentives, perpetuating greater consumption and a race to the bottom. Industries externalize true costs to generate profit, and we pay the price—living with pollution and the consequences of global warming. Those in positions of power continuously colonize and conquer unapologetically. These relationships of exploitation have deep historical roots that enjoin capitalist greed with colonial harm and the horrors of enslavement.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, European colonialism established a triangle of trade, importing millions of Africans taken as chattel into the Americas and extracting valuable resources to enrich budding European empires. Enslaved and unfree laborers in European colonies provided resources, which empires turned into wealth as they flowed back into growing market economies. The influx of precious metals from new colonies fueled the industrial revolution in the mid to late eighteenth century, which allowed empires to further expand their power and influence. At the same time, new understandings of the world flourished as the Enlightenment disentangled sovereignty from God, elevating reason and giving rise to the nation state. Meanwhile capitalism monetized land, leading people to view it as a commodity and creating a new property regime. By the 1780s, Lockean notions of private property, which is created when a man makes the land “productive,” offered a foundation for the newly freed North American colonies to establish an expanding settler colonial state.[2] Settler colonialism required land to become a highly marketable product.
The systems set in motion by the twinned rise of European colonialism and Enlightenment thought—nation states, capitalist economics, knowledge production grounded in reason and skeptical of feeling—form the basis for a worldview in which civilization justifies subjugation: of populations from colonized spaces, and of the non-human. This worldview rose to prominence out of a multitude of new ideas during the Enlightenment, changing the metaphor for the earth from that of an organism to that of a machine.[3] Yet this view was never totalizing, even as it influenced dominant systems of economy and environmental relationships responsible for grave injustices today. Exploitation of marginalized communities and exploitation of the earth are inextricably linked to the histories of colonialism and capitalism that formed the modern world, but these systems are also historical and contextual. They change over time and operate differently in distinct places. Amidst these shifting systems, practicing ways of engaging with the non-human in a way that resists objectifying life offers one way to imagine, and thus to enact, post capitalist and post colonialist futures.
I will never be able to escape the blare of mother nature’s warning alarm. It is a red-hot groan, a dying cry that burns my skin in boiling summers, and it is only growing louder. Yet, I have only grown more desensitized to the statistics of climate change and more frustrated with the people in power who refuse to move society in the direction it needs to go. This is a familiar feeling for climate activists. The need for action grows while motivation dwindles. —Mel Lituchy
Despite these climate injustices, all around the globe humans feel connection and wonder when they pause to look closely at the world that surrounds them: a body of water in the near distance, the open sky above, sunshine breaking through clouds, swallows making homes in the eaves of houses, or a tenacious plant poking through cracks in the sidewalk. When we become aware of our bodies moving through space, we begin to notice the contours of the places we inhabit, and the ways those places change. Bird song rouses us from bed in spring mornings, tree leaves turn gold and scarlet as autumn ripens the fruits of summer. Shadows stretch long as winter settles on the land. Noticing the ways places change from the vantage point of our own living bodies helps us to see that we too are shaped by the seasons.
The environmental humanities writing seminar at Boston University, Nature/Culture in Crisis, explored how we understand humans in relationship to the webs of life that sustain us. It sought to give students tools to critically analyze a multitude of issues related to the environment and the climate crisis. It also sought to expand our learning approaches to include affect and embodiment. Students spent time in different kinds of places, using their senses to observe and describe their surroundings. They practiced looking slowly and closely at objects and images, and they listened carefully to the sounds of different places. We used our location to uncover environmental history, with the guidance of a Boston historian to walk us through the traces of history that linger visibly in the buildings and green spaces of the campus.[4]
The course began by probing assumptions about what distinguishes nature from culture and exploring their entanglements. Students wrote essays that analyzed a green space they visited, determining how the place was “natural” and in which ways it was man-made. Next, we moved more into questions of climate justice, making connections to structural issues. The middle portion of the course analyzed social movements in some way related to the environment by using Nick Estes’ argument to transform the Green New Deal into a “Red Deal” that would address the colonial structures responsible for environmental injustices. Students wrote about wildlife conservation, Indigenous movements, the Rights of Nature, animal rights, environmental justice, and food sovereignty. They made connections between the dispossession of minoritized communities and climate change and showed how reducing the earth to a commodity prevented sustainability.
Finally, for the last weeks of class, we turned to the issue of time. We had looked at the histories which produce our current moment and the issues that students care deeply about, but to grasp the scale of the climate crisis we had to work against the tendency to distinguish past, present, and future. We also sought to feel the impacts in our bodies, to bring abstract ideas into our immediate experience in a way that helps us to feel connected to a broader web of life. Students used creative media, writing letters or eulogies to places, and then performing those letters and eulogies with video, images, and sound for their final projects.
Eulogizing My Source of Inspiration, Natalie Clott
At first, being presented with the task of writing a eulogy was daunting and, to be honest, depressing. I was thrown off by this project, to say the least. To be asked to write about the death of a world seems so final. It sets in stone that we are going to lose a place we hold so dear. It asked me to put in words my final goodbye to a slice of the environment, the topic I have dedicated most of my life to through activism and study. I hate goodbyes.
When I told family and friends about the project, they had no words, literally. They all stared at me and said, “Wow! That’s depressing.” I understood their reactions. Death is heartbreaking, and that is what I was embodying. I didn’t know how to approach my project, but I knew I was excited. However dark, the idea of writing across time and space to imagine changing landscapes was brilliant. Eulogies are written in the wake of death. And the project so perfectly captured a clear and blunt fact: the environments we know and love are rotting away. Our familiar and treasured places are changing irrevocably before our eyes. Every day anthropogenic climate change accelerates the loss of biodiversity, the exposure of front-line communities, the rise of sea levels and the scale of natural disasters. It may be pessimistic, I know, but at this rate, thousands of places we hold dear will be forever altered. There is no ‘might’ in this scenario. The Earth is warming. Species are dying. We are experiencing a continuous cycle of death. Yet, too many of us are undisturbed by the loss we are experiencing. Personifying death compels people to care and, right now, not enough people care. Americans need to be phased, they need to be daunted and depressed and distraught. We have become numb to the repetitive news stories of polar bears dying and glaciers melting, so writing that allows a person to connect with a place on a deeper level can be substantially more powerful.
To remedy the damage that has been done we must start viewing the environment differently. We need to see it through a new lens. Not as an object, but as a subject. Not as something, but as someone. When working on the eulogy, I was challenged to view the Colorado River as something other than a piece of land. It was this that led me to personify the river. Viewing the river as a loved one, I believe, was instrumental in the effect the eulogy has. You forget you are hearing about a river and start to see a person in front of you, dying. Choosing a place for the eulogy was difficult. So many places are faltering, it felt exclusive of all the other places by sharing the story of only one. I decided to call my dad, the inspiration of my environmentalism. He told me, “You have to do a river.” I dove headfirst into article after article about the effects of climate change on rivers. In many places, rivers are drying up and the species living in these areas are in trouble. I chose the Colorado River because to me, this river represents the power of nature, carving out the Grand Canyon and creating a unique and undoubtedly beautiful place. The boundaries of the river are decorated in brilliant colors and exquisite designs. The biodiversity it supports is tremendous and it is a picture example of the vast interconnectedness of nature. The Colorado river is a truly magnificent place, and it is disappearing. I thought that this was something people needed to know about. (Thanks, Dad).
I wrote my eulogy as if my subject was actually a person who died. The Colorado River came to life and died with my words. I find it is necessary to create a more personal connection to the loss of a place. As I continued to work on the project, I saw it less as depressing and more as powerful. The reason I was writing a eulogy was less to commemorate what we were going to lose and more about reminding people of the beauty and importance of the river, and the fact that we can still save it.
As part of the project, we presented our eulogies in class. I felt as if I were living death after death in each unique place: from the Midwestern prairie, aglow in flames, to the rising sea lapping at San Francisco high rises, to New England forests paved over by asphalt. Each place was significant. Each place was purposeful. Each place was destroyed. The power that came through in my classmates’ descriptions made my heart ache. I felt the loss they conveyed. For action to be taken, first we must be sad, and then we become angry. We grieve, and grief is a powerful thing.
A Eulogy for the Colorado River by Natalie Clott
How does one recover from the loss of someone so loved and cherished? A beauteous entity. A living, breathing soul. A provider of life. An indulgence of spirit. How we will miss you.
But, you hid too well what you did not want to show. Or perhaps we did not look hard enough. Your death came slowly. The rocks became a barrier, growing continuously and ripping an ugly scar through your valley. It was a reminder of what you were becoming. A sickly look overcame your surroundings. The striking vibrant sandstone adopted a pale, feeble appearance. This illness only grew. You continued to lose more of your vibrancy and light.
As your death became more prominent, perhaps we started to notice. There were signs, and the symptoms of your sickness caused great attention. Different species of fish which you provided for, vanished. The vagrant and bright pines that shaded you caught fire. The smell of burning pine transcended through the atmosphere. It overwhelmed our senses and reminded us of your destruction. How could we not have noticed? You stood steady, appearing deceased. But we didn’t help. We watched you suffer. This malady that you had to undertake stripped you of every beauty we cherished. Until, one day, you were gone. Your illness vanquished and replaced your purity with sinful fire and drought.
And the worst part? We were your illness, and we are spreading.
Losing Home by Jessica Schwarz
I wish I could warn my younger self that I would have to pick a new favorite place. That the rising waves would eventually carry away the memories with the people I love, and that I wouldn’t be able to give my future children and grandchildren the same experiences I was fortunate to have at your shores.
That climate change and my disappearing adolescence would intersect in unsuspecting and ferocious ways. That the beach is ephemeral, and slow violence would triumph.
I wish I could warn her that it’s not my fault, and internalizing the global burden of climate change would benefit neither me nor the environment.
I am undecided whether this is a love letter addressed to you, the ocean, my love, perhaps my oldest acquaintance, or a eulogy. Slowly but violently you climb up the shore towards what does not belong to you. You erode shores, wave by wave. You are augmenting as the land is disappearing.
Your rise is eating away at the elements of my formative years. It causes deep pain to say goodbye when I can’t help but blame you, even though I know it is not your fault.
I hold such little agency over your malady yet feel immense guilt for your changes.
I cannot morally rest and be at ease when you are unwillingly put to war with land and fighting against a curable disease. It’s a battle you did not instigate; rather, it is driven by the capitalistic systems ingrained in modern society. The malignancy is ever-growing, and it’s slowly spreading through me as well. I disappear alongside you; I cannot be complete when my home is shrinking.
Perhaps this is a love letter after all, but surely unfinished. It cannot be completed until I witness the creature you will become.
Prairie Burn by Cal Parise
The prairie was beautiful. It was home to thousands of species, it was a key part of the North American ecosystem, and it was a wonderful, biodiverse area, teeming with life year round. But now it’s gone.
Now, we are left with a shattered landscape, charred and burnt. The sour odor of charred leaves and thick smoke have grown ambient, replacing the fresh smell of prairie flowers. That same swath of land that I grew alongside as an elementary schooler is now blackened, and the wind kicks up miniature tornadoes of ash that choke the air with dust.
No longer do April showers bring May flowers. In fact, I’m not even sure if there are any flowers left. Super-charged thunderstorms arrive once a month and spin tornadoes that rip through neighborhoods and tear houses to shreds. Worst of all, the Monarch butterflies, with their vibrant orange wings, no longer make their annual visit on their journey to find southern warmth.
As I sit here today, reflecting on the prairie that provided so much beauty and life for my home state, I wonder what could have been. What if we had paid more attention? What if we had followed our own advice and saved the Earth? Maybe then the orange wall of fire would once again be replaced with hundreds of thousands of delicate butterfly wings. But now it’s too late, and all we can do is helplessly watch as our home burns.
Eulogy for Orange Beach by William De Rocco
I recall the sun’s warmth radiating off the smoothed surface beneath my feet. It is miniscule yet plentiful. Alone, each of your grains is almost inconspicuous, but amassed, they form a vibrant white landscape, darkened only by green-tinted water crashing on your coastline.
The imprint of my feet upon your land is no singularity. I walk with past generations, breathing in the salty ocean scent and watching the sand wash away from between their toes. My grandparents watched as Hurricane Sally ravaged your coasts. What remained of your land was bare and desolate. It lacked the joyous cries of children running along your shore. It lacked life. It lacked spirit.
It lacked your spirit.
Mankind wasted no time to rebuild what was taken from you. 100-foot boats took to the sea, dredging the bottom of the ocean floor for sand and forcing it back ashore. You became our construction project, a means of returning to a life we once had that was lost to the sea. Such nourishment does not last and cannot be a viable solution to your livelihood.
It pains me to say that you are being swept from beneath our feet, but perhaps your death will enlighten us. Perhaps we ask too much of you, and perhaps we are oblivious to your needs and desires. Yet, it is not too late to change our course of action.
So I say goodbye for now, Orange Beach. I’ll see you soon.
A Reflection on Hope, Melinda Lituchy
Hope is hard to foster, but I must believe it lives in our hearts. It is the first bloom of spring: untrusted and shrouded in the coldness of doubt. It is a miniscule pocket of crocuses, usually unnoticed, but when appreciated, an overwhelming sign of goodness to come. The world will soon fall into the hands of a generation raised by limitless access to information and unbound connectivity. I watch the way my peers walk through the planet they inhabit. I read the way in which they relate to their Earth, their home, and I am hopeful of goodness to come. I am hopeful that the tension constricting the ecosystem of the earth will soon bloom into a sustainable society. I am hopeful because we have taken the ugly challenge of documenting change, grief, loss, and built it into something beautiful. May that beauty bloom as plentiful as spring wildflowers. May it root itself into every corner of the Earth and connect every human to a will to want to protect it.
Intention, Intimacy, Uncertainty: Forging Connection Through Letters, Chinanuekpele Okoli
When we were first assigned this project, I immediately knew that I would be writing letters to my Nigerian ancestors and my American predecessors. Being of a mixed culture, I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to explore both of these parts of my identity and the inherent implications of tradition and culture that each carry; I could do so in a way that let me confront my true emotions and not hold anything back.
Letters allow people to connect deeper to the person or thing they are writing to, and to be declarative. Whenever you write a letter to someone, you’re being intentional. You’re bearing your truth and are taking the time and effort to craft a meaningful piece of work for someone else to read and take in. Now, with this writing, a sense of uncertainty arises—will they like what you have to say? How will they respond? Will they respond? Did they even receive your message?
Much like the uncertainty that comes with sending a letter off, there is also great uncertainty as to the state of our planet—will our beloved birds, oceans, forests, and farms survive? How will the generations that come after us make do with the land that we leave them?
If there is one thing that is certain with these letters, it is that we, the writers, have recognized our role within nature and nature’s role within us. While we may not ever receive responses to any of these letters, we do see ourselves reflected in our words. That is because writing letters to address issues of environmental injustice reconnects humans to nature: what it was, what it is, and what it still has yet to be. As we navigate this cataclysm of grief, acceptance, and hope, we declare our honest commitments to doing better and being better. For ourselves, for our planet, for our past, and for our future.
An Exchange Between Forgotten Symbiotes by Delaney Foster
Hello, My dear friend the Spix Macaw,
The world has changed. When I was simply a seed being carried by you I never knew, could never begin to fathom, what the world is today. Sometimes I feel another bird land on me and wonder if I would miss you the same had you not been the one to bring me to my home. Yet, you may be my unintended savior for bringing me somewhere outside the reach of humanity, at least for the moment. I miss the others who have left no less, and I find myself in horrific suspense for so many others, whether they be trees, shrubs, birds, or fish. I spend most of my time mourning a future that will never be, unprepared for a future that forces me to experience the death of so many, until one day it is my turn.
Always your Friend,
A Craibeira Tree
—
To a tree of gold,
I have seen much of the world, dear Craibeira Tree, and as such I do have some potential answers to the questions you posed. If we had lived, there may have been no movie made about us, which would be a tragedy. I’m not sure how the Spix Macaw would stand without disappearing from the wild. We may have been another silent death caused by humanity, but perhaps we served to inspire just a few to take action. In fact, I have heard that many view our reintroduction, as the humans call it, as hopeful. That brings me to the best wonder I can share with you. The future may seem bleak, but there is time, and many are dedicated to making a better future. One day it may be impossible to imagine a world that did not prioritize its environment.
Yet, I am one bird. A single piece of a much larger story, and I do not hold the stories of the past as you do. So please keep the memory of those who came before close to you. Do not forget the Spix Macaws who never had to be reintroduced, and do not allow the loss of them to stop you from hoping for a better future. Yet, I implore you to accept our tepid return with open arms and welcome us back into your canopy.
An Eager Friend,
A Spix Macaw
Of Oceans and Silence by Matthew Siegel
Dear Ocean,
I’ve seen you blue, green, brown, and clear, but I’ve only ever visited your edges, the
slivers of you that lie close to land. I’ve heard so much about you that I haven’t seen, and I wonder what you think of me.
We use your greatness to excuse our behavior, pretending our impact will disappear in your vastness. I’m worried that we’re killing you, and I often feel powerless to stop it. I think a lot of us do. It terrifies me to think that we’re destroying you, that the damages we’ve inflicted can never be undone
I’m not so sure what I’ll end up doing with my life, but I won’t sit by and watch it all happen.
That’s a promise.
—
Dear Child,
Please understand that despite my power and size, I have no desires. I want nothing more than to sway and watch as the earth changes. Let me tell you a little more about myself. I am the Ocean. I am a great number of different things, but because you’re the one I’m speaking to, I suppose that I’m exactly what you imagine me to be.
Mankind insists upon hunting, wasting, traveling, dumping, and polluting the air and water, and, for all my wonder and might, there is nothing I can do to stop you. I have no desire to stop you because like you, I am nature.
Please do not worry that you are destroying me, fear only that mankind is harming one another. You are hurting yourselves by diminishing the fish, disrupting the tides, and raising my reach. You take your own land and source of food, life, and energy. Though I might miss the creatures lost to the earth from your delusions, I am not unprepared for change.
Eventually, I will outlive you. If, one day, I dry up, if the coral at my floor dries to stone, if my beautiful creatures are lost, the sun’s rays never again shine through my surface to the plants in my belly, and I become a desert, then I will be a desert. You will be long gone without an ocean of water, but I will stay. An ocean of sand, sparkling in the sun as I used to. Changed forever surely, but as always, a part of the Earth left once again to remember the loved ones that I was powerless to protect.
I am what you believe I am because you have a power I do not possess. You have desire. I’ve seen billions of people use their desire to make change in this world. The kind change has always been up to them, on what they desire. This is a kind of power that neither waves as tall as skyscrapers nor ten thousand pounds of pressure can match. You yourself seem to have a particularly tickling dream. I implore you to follow that dream and love the earth as I do, to live amongst the waters rather than treading above them.
Letters to ancestors and descendants of Maplewood, NJ by Melinda Lituchy
Dear George Washington,
You fought for revolution in the woods that form my backyard. We are woven into the same mycelial network; I tread the leaves that decorated your forest and weave myself between the very trees that littered them. The air must have been electrified as you ushered in winds of change, drafted societal overhaul, and rioted for your beliefs. As you watched the sun sink behind British soldiers, what did you dream? What did you envision coming to stand in their place?
The future that rose from the ashes of the war has transformed the terrain beyond your recognition. A cluster of metal skeletons erupts one-thousand feet into the sky along the horizon, and the sprawling countryside is overlaid with a grid of black rock. The air is not as fresh as you knew it to be; it has become tainted by evidence of our inventions, polluted by our pursuit of progress.
America’s longevity is threatened by her unsustainable systems. I trust you understand that when the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is threatened, revolution is unequivocally called for. I ask you, the representation of American goodness, how do you foster a revolution? How do you convince the public to change the future? I ask for your wisdom, your inspiration, your fearlessness, your conviction. The potential of America is too great for our greed to burn away her lifeblood. I will not let this be the end of your American dream.
With honor,
A kindred spirit
—
Dear future MAPSO youth,
Are you there? Or has the magic of my suburban hometown disappeared with the continental coastline? Please tell me you know of the South Mountain reservation, the woods that raised me. Season after season, I fell deeper in love with the intricacies of the forest: snapping branches under my toes, dancing leaves and mosaic sunlight overhead. The planet I witness is on the verge of cataclysmic downfall, yet from the serenity of the reservation, Mother Earth’s dying cries are silenced by her beauty. This perceived stability has bred inaction for decades, and now my generation finds themselves at a tipping point in remediating the consequences of our lifestyle: we either radically change our relationship to the earth, or it burns away and you are left to rise from the ashes.
I fear what the landscape looks like in your world. Does the air smell of raw winter and pine, or does it waft foggy toxins through a hollow shell of the earth? Can you see New York through the haze? Have the high-rise buildings collapsed into the rising sea, or were we able to turn the tide? I do not know what you have lost nor gained from your hand-me-down planet, but I pray my generation is able to manifest the societal change that will enable your—and your descendants’—existence. Promise me that if the goodness of reservation prevails, you will take your child to the woods, and teach them to ride a bike. Teach them to be in relation to the Earth, for fostering a deep-rooted connection to nature is the only way to cultivate a passion for protecting it. If your children love the wilderness as they do themselves, they will be sure to teach their descendants the same.
With love,
A child of the forest
Letters To Those I Will Never Meet by Chinanuekpele Okoli
Dear Great Grandparents,
I hope that despite the language barrier between us, you are able to understand this message.
In the 1940s, you are all Nigerian farmers: your hands tend to the land of tomatoes, plantain, ube, and corn. You walk barefoot along unpaved roads, palm trees and leaves guiding you along your way. You get cozy with the Earth; the luscious dirt, sand, and gravel coats the soles of your feet. You do this day by day, but it never gets any less meaningful.
In the 2020s, we live in the United States; despite retaining much of the culture and vivacity of Naija life, few elements of the landscape have come with us. We walk with shoes along paved, cracked sidewalks, oak and pine trees getting in our way. We hear the spurring of machines, the calamity of construction, the chirping of birds, and brief moments of silence.
We are not farmers. The tomatoes we once grew years ago are no more –we haven’t tried to grow anything for years and all of what we eat comes from bland, transactional interactions.
It is not to say that there isn’t any beauty within the land, but that there is tradition and beauty still lost, in small part due to our personal choices; in large part due to the choices of the greater powers of the United States. The choices to erode culture, defend capitalism, and promote this never-ending system of survival in exchange for power and profit –a system that you know all too well living under the colonial rule of Britain. Even if our personal relationship with our land is so much better compared to others around us, the standard should not be so low that we lose that sanctity and autonomy that comes with cultivating the land and cultivating life. While I’m weary of how long it will take, I’m sure that, through your ways, we can make the collective global land into one that we serve and one that serves all of us.
Love,
Chinanuekpele
—
To My Future Great-Grandchildren,
I hope this letter from the past finds you well in the future. Right now, it’s 2021; I’m 18 years old (shocking, I know), and I am just immersed in such beauty and tenderness within my own backyard. Still, I know that with each passing day, more and more of that beauty is being lost.
Do me a favor right now: please go outside to your backyard, or, if you don’t have one, just look out a window to the closest thing in your vicinity that acts like or resembles a yard. Engage your senses and tell me: what do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What does the air taste like? What do you feel?
In my backyard – amidst the sharp scents and blades of grass, the trees I can’t name, the summer night sunset – I feel safe. Somehow, I feel connected to the Earth among the ever-growing concrete and construction. I feel relaxed, despite my desperate pleas for the bees to leave me alone.
And yet, I still feel concerned. I have less access to nature than my ancestors ever had and you will have less access to nature than I will ever have. Our climate is rapidly warming, already creating devastation with severe storms, heat islands, and unnecessary casualties. We’re making things worse for ourselves and it means that you might not even be here to read this.
We need change. The capitalist, white supremacist systems under which we operate are working as they were intended to –against the people and for power and profit. While I’m weary of how long it will take, I’m sure that my generation can make the collective global land into one that we serve and one that serves all of us. It is through the ways of our ancestors that we will get back there and it is through our persistence that we will stay there – for you.
Let me know if we actually did it.
With Love,
Your Great-Grandfather
End Notes
[1] Joshua Rapp Learn, “Study finds wildfire caused massive bird die-off,” High Country News Mar. 31, 2021.
[2] While processes of settler colonialism were underway on the continent before then, Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785 created a blueprint for settler colonialism under U.S. governance that involved turning land into property and replacing its Indigenous population with a settler population.
[3] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperOne, 1990).
[4] Thanks to Maddie Webster for her instructive and delightful guest visit.