I think a lot about this illustration from May Theilgaard Watts’ 1975 book Reading the Landscape of America. Watts was a completely singular human, whose expansive mind was able to draw intricate connections between operating parts of ecosystems and whose expansive heart seemed driven by a need to bring you with her so that you could enjoy/understand the natural world as deeply as she.
As you read the A track through this image, you can see how many of the places that appear to be natural actually represent a loss that is almost entirely irrevocable. And since Watts first wrote this, there are more stressors as yet unidentified to that little patch of shrinking forest - fly dumping, invasive species, climate change. This makes the need to fight for them even more dire.
Further, we can see when Trump talks about opening up our public lands for development, the extent to which his drilling, roads and walls will do more damage than merely to the immediate area and in the short term. Perhaps under another leader, certain concessions could be brokered for our country that were in good faith, but our racist dried apricot of a despot has proven that his only good faith is to himself. He must be resisted in every venue he brings his policies and rhetoric - even the places that are, for now, most quiet.
Brecht said you can’t write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen, but maybe we can write poems where the trees are teaching the policemen what justice actually is, how sharing works, the ways in which governing should also be a healthy, functioning ecosystem. Maybe May Watts was the best policeman we ever had.
