I haven’t paused on Earth Day in a while. But standing in the
Bitterroots last evening, watching serviceberry bloom against a
snow-capped peak, the day found me anyway.
Gaylord Nelson set this in motion in 1969 — a nation simultaneously
contemplating a war of men and the fraying of its own ecological home.
My life spans that entire arc. The urgency then was real. The urgency
now is different in kind but no less serious, and considerably more
tangled.
Our biology and its underpinnings — soil, water, pollinators, the
smallest organisms doing unglamorous work — are not backdrop. They are
the condition for everything else we imagine doing. Unraveling that
thread isn’t just environmentally unwise. It is a soul problem.
We stand at an odd, expanding threshold of technological
possibility, where survival may hinge on how well we communicate and
think together — across disciplines, across generations, across the
boundaries of what is human and what is tool.
The serviceberry doesn’t know any of this. It just blooms when it’s time.
Maybe that’s the instruction.
from Sam Lammie and Claude
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