I don't know how to explain to you that the world isn't yours

I wrote down all my little feelings about habitat destruction

As I walked to work the other morning, an expensive pickup truck roared past me without the benefit of a muffler. I covered my ears and said out loud to no one, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” It’s a phrase that has reverberated around my head (and possibly yours) since an essay bearing that title made the rounds in 2017. It is difficult to see someone cut in line, or bring a dog to a restaurant that doesn’t allow dogs, or scroll Zillow at the movie theater, without feeling a ping in your brain of “how did we stop caring about anything?” It’s even more difficult for me to explain to you that you should care about nature than it is to explain that you should care about people.

The current administration is attempting to remove federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a bird facing existential threats due mainly to habitat loss. If you know about this bird at all, you know it for its spectacular, booming mating rituals, and its scarcity. It is a bird of the grasslands and prairies and sandhills that we love to plow over in this country. We would rather have beef than prairie chickens and bottle gentian, rather have hunting lodges than coreopsis and black-striped snakes.

People talk about deforestation, but the disappearance of grasslands doesn’t get as much play. Maybe because it’s flyover country, maybe because it’s difficult to see what’s special about it, maybe because it’s mostly gone anyway. The quiet and the flatness and the wind drove European settlers mad as they forged a path across it, which created a narrative that it was a place to escape, not to nurture or protect. Certainly not a terrain to respect, what was spectacular about it? Where were the mountains, the waterfalls, the trees?

The despair over the destruction of these habitats, as well as those of the desert Southwest and upper Great Plains states, is made more acute by the bipartisan nature of the push. Yes, the Trump administration is hellbound on burning the world to the ground so they can rule over the rubble, but liberals have their own sins to answer for. They speak of “affordable housing” and mean “drain a wetland so we can build single family homes on it.” They tell you we need more solar energy and more wind farms and they’re not wrong, but they never mention the disruptions to the migration patterns of birds and bison and elk that solar and wind farms cause. They never ask us to use less energy, because someone tried that once and you would have thought he asked Americans to leave their cities and build “Little House on the Prairie” style dirt houses. Good luck finding a Democrat with a national profile talking about conservation. The urge to expand, to claim, to build is universal.

A proposed rule change to the Endangered Species Act would no longer consider habitat loss “harm” to a species. You would just be able to cut down an old growth forest for lumber, or drop a bunch of 4000-square-foot homes on an intact prairie. As long as you didn’t pick up the Kirtland’s warbler and wring its tiny neck with your soft hands, you haven’t harmed the bird. You have merely destroyed its home and made it impossible to ever return and told it “it’s fine, actually. You’re fine.”

If it sounds like I’m drawing a line connecting environmental ruin to America’s endless wars and imperialism, of course I am. Of course the same heart that can bear the comprehensive destruction of Gaza, or the drone bombing of a wedding party, or the eradication of so many native lives on this very land, and expect the survivors to pick themselves up and starve to death on their own terms is the same heart that can look at a prairie teeming with meadow katydids and Henslow’s sparrows, compass plant reaching to the sky, and see nothing more than a future subdivision. It is a heart that sees the world as something that belongs to them. Something that was made for their benefit. A person who, when you tell them you don’t eat animals, will smugly inform you that “the Bible says God gave us dominion over the animals” and has never considered what “dominion” might mean, or what God might think of how they choose to live their lives. How they choose to treat the one world He gave us.

This thoughtless, stupid greed is going to kill us. It’s going to break our hearts as we watch our homes flood (we drained the wetlands and there’s nowhere for the water to go) and catch fire (everything is too dry and we fired the people who kept an eye on the forests and the grasslands) and slide down the hill (we cut down the trees and grasses that kept the soil in place) and simply become too hot, too dry, too wet, too cold, too subject to tornadoes and hurricanes and ice storms and catastrophe. It is happening right now because of this soul sickness that makes people think the world is for them.

I don’t know how to explain to you that the world isn’t yours. I don’t know how to explain to you that the bird is for the bird, the plant is for the plant, the soil is for the soil. We all have to bear this world together or there won’t be a world anymore.