“I pay attention to beauty and brokenness, love and grief and the holy ordinary that appears daily. This practice brings me into a sharper relationship to where I live and with whom. I find myself torn between two minds. One mind loves the glorious indifference of each species to my human presence. The other believes they are responding. Perhaps both can be true when we recognize the deep interdependence between all life.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (Grove Press, 2026)
On the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, looking back to look forward.
From The Revelator: excerpted from the introductory essay by Terry Tempest Williams for the book, A Promise to a Utah Prairie Dog:
As a child, I watched the men I loved in my family lift their high-powered rifles and shoot one prairie dog after another and another for fun, and then walk away. They called them “pop-guts.” On the way back to our camp, I stepped over their small blood-soaked, blown-apart bodies left in the matted grasses of their prairie dog town. And then, a single prairie dog raised her head out of a burrow and stood up and faced me. I froze in place, unable to avoid her gaze. She disappeared underground.
On that day, I made a vow, short of standing in front of my father’s rifle, that I would be their ally. I have tried to keep that vow.
I graduated from high school in 1973, the same year the Endangered Species Act was signed into law. At that time only 3,300 Utah prairie dogs remained in 37 isolated colonies. Due to political pressure from ranchers and developers, they were not listed on the original endangered species list. Prairie dogs were seen as vermin.
In 1977, I lobbied the Utah legislature as a graduate student in education from the University of Utah. I had created a Utah Prairie Dog curriculum for the Salt Lake City school district. At the State Capitol, I was met with incredulity and disdain by representatives who insisted on calling prairie dogs “varmints,” the Speaker of the House handed me a recipe for “Prairie Dog Stew.”
Finally in 1984, the Utah prairie dog was added to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species List and remains on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
But in 2000, in a special millennial issue of The New York Times Magazine, the Utah prairie dog was featured as one of 10 species most likely to become extinct by the next millennium. Their fate was to become a ghost species. I wrote a book on prairie dogs. Every month I sent a picture of prairie dogs in different poses (one with a helmet and bazooka) to friends at The Utah Nature Conservancy, a playful nudge for protection. Did any of these gestures make a difference? It made a difference to me. This was my wild promise that became a vow I made to the lone Utah prairie dog who survived my family’s massacre.
