Hope for the grasslands

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lava Lake, Idaho

What would it take to get the grasslands back? I want to believe we can, because I hate the idea that there are whole ecosystems I’ll never get to see. How did we let ourselves fail so completely? How is it that in an era where so many people depended on the land to sustain them, so few realized that they were doing to it? We’re conscientious now of better management and we’re trying to restore, but the fact that we have virtually no grasslands left makes the scale of the project almost beyond comprehension.

I am, at my core, an optimist. But I read a lot, and it’s hard to do both. I want to believe we can solve things, but when I really pull back the curtain and breathe deep, politics is corporate, capitalism murders brown people (and poor white ones) every day, and climate change is accelerating. How do I acknowledge this reality and keep hope? I don’t want to be a radical. Or I do, but I want to be a radical like making people sweat, muckraking, being skeptical and calling Democrats on their shit. I don’t want to spike trees or burn down horticulture labs. Not because I’m opposed to violence and not because I’m unwilling to go to jail for what I believe in, but because I don’t think it will help. I know civilization and seven billion are unsustainable, but I don’t believe in ignoring reality when talking about solutions. I don’t want to tell two billion people to go die. I can’t move LA, Las Vegas or Phoenix. But those cities are ignoring reality be existing, and even knowing that, I feel powerless to resist. I can work on smaller issues and compromise, because that’s all I know how to do. I can teach kids to see the world differently, because that’s the one place I see hope. Maybe it’s cheesy (ok, it’s definitely cheesy), but I believe I can change more teaching kids how to garden and identify wolf tracks than I’d ever be able to change lobbing Congress. That thought should make me worry, but I guess I have up on Congress a while ago. At least for environmental things. But I still have hope, even if it’s silly and misguided. There are still wolves, trees, streams and people who care. And for now, I have to pray that’s enough to keep us moving and alive.