As I write these words, my last seeds are dying. From my seat at the oak desk my father’s grandfather bought in a yard sale in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1948 for fifteen dollars, I look out the window at the furrows I plowed in the dusty soil and see my little green shoots withering. In the old thermometer hanging from the eaves, the mercury has surged past one twenty. Winter in Vermont. I feel like writing, for the first time in years. I think this is the end.

The beams above my head came from an eastern white pine that grew in the valley below. Like a sentinel it guarded the life of a thriving marsh – duck and warbler, frog and turtle, beaver and fox, moose and bear, reed and lily – until my father chopped it down with the axe that still hangs by the door. That was back in the summer of 2020, when I turned one and covid took my mother. My father bought this patch of land for sixty thousand dollars and drove up on the weekends to build a refuge. He saw what was coming. He built a home to last, he told me, and so he built it by hand, to leave behind something worthy in the world, something non-disposable, something that would nurture and not only destroy. But he also sought beauty, and so he picked the finest tree in the valley to kill for the roof beams. Only later, when he saw the stump he had made in the valley, still bleeding sap from the amputation, did he bemoan the selfishness that had caused him to see the tree merely as a source of wood, and not as a living multitude.

When I was little, I would walk down to the valley and sit at the edge of the marsh. I saw how the trees all grew to the same height, except for a few that rose above, and I admired their boldness, their ambition, and I thought them like kings. Then a storm came, and when I returned to the valley the kings had fallen. This regicide horrified me, for it seemed a sort of suicide. It was not the storm that killed them, I believed, but their inner vitality, which had caused them to grow taller than their roots could anchor. Their life force was actually a death force. All living things commit suicide, I told my father. He told me to wait. Later I returned to the valley, and I saw new life sprout from the bodies of the dead kings, and realized I had been ignorant of time, and therefore of life. But I was still ignorant of death.

I will never use the axe that hangs by the door, not because I have learned from our mistakes, but because all that it can fell has already fallen. Now there is no forest, no marsh, no wildlife, and the valley is a wasteland of fire-blackened rock. The air is a gritty fog, pale gray in the day and red in the evening, stained by the burning of distant fires. Now is the reaping of all that generations past have sown upon the earth. The endless reaping.

When the Amazon burned, my father told me, in the summer of 2026, many people snapped awake, people who had known what we were doing to the planet, who had known what the scientists said, but changed nothing of their ways, not knowing another way to live, not daring to make a new way. They awoke one day and read that the Amazon was aflame, and saw pictures from space of smoke spreading, and they wept at reports of mass extinction and the destruction of this wild place that existed for them only in their imaginations, but that they needed to exist there, as a primal consolation. All around the world people demanded and demonstrated and hurled furious accusations, but it was too late; in just one week the Amazon had vanished forever. A cloak of ash enveloped the globe. The stars disappeared. The lungs of the world choked. My father packed up his Honda and brought me here until the city returned to normalcy. We never went back. I have no memory of the place once called New York City. That too has vanished forever.

In my father’s books, I have read stories that predicted our demise. They all bristle with violence, with the gripping tragedy and horror of endless conflict. And yes, there was conflict in the years after the Amazon burned, when the Siberian permafrost thawed and released so much methane that the global temperature seemed to shoot up overnight. I would hide in the closet while my father negotiated with strangers, shotgun in hand, pleading with them to keep heading north. But his books did not predict the years that followed, the years after he died – the years of my maturation. They failed to see that devastation begets not chaos, but peace. For when death comes all at once, it does not clear ground for new life, it does not fertilize – it remains death, nothing more. 

Long I blamed the generations of my parents and my grandparents, who carried on living in willful indifference as the planet passed the point of no return. They conveniently thought the scientists’ dire predictions were worst-case scenarios, when in fact they were best-case scenarios. They blindly assumed that climate change would not imperil their lives; the crisis would only arrive at some hazy point in a distant, unimagined future, or never at all, for technology would save them. Only a few of my father’s generation sacrificed comfort in relentless pursuit of immediate and extreme emission reduction. They knew the final hour had arrived, that it was not enough to recycle more or put filters on coal plants or subsidize solar power, that the billionaires cared only to protect their kin and their profits, and that their governments were incapable of decisive action. They knew our only hope was for every living human to heed the moral imperative of the climate emergency:

DISPOSSESS THE CLIMATE PROFITEERS!

SILENCE THEIR EXTINCTION MACHINES!

They failed. Most people were too busy brunching and shopping and binge-watching to save the world. Did they not know that the eye of history was upon them, that to live normally in a time of crisis is monstrous, that their grandchildren would condemn them as worse than Nazis? Did they feel no shame?  I used to rage against them, to fling scalding blame, but no more. That season has passed, blown away like ash in the wind.

My father told me of a whale, the last of its kind, that swam the oceans singing for a mate. Hearing only the echoes of its lonely call, it swam on, circling the globe, until one day the oceans fell silent, and on a barren shore sand hissed across the whale’s washed-up bones. These words are my whale song. These bars of ink are the washed-up bones of my mind. 

Oh, I have cause to sing! For my father, who saw early in his life that he could not live in the way of his parents – he demonstrated, and organized, and occupied, and did all he could to rouse his generation to action. But in time he saw that the coming crisis could no longer be avoided, and so he narrowed his ambition and resolved to learn and practice the art of dwelling, to attempt a new way of living within nature, to no longer live against or abstracted from nature. I only knew him in his final years, a battle-worn man old beyond his time, slow and deliberate in his movements, burdened with the past, yet never losing the spark of play. What he thought fit to preserve of our humanity, he taught me.

We were a majestic species, he taught me, exceptional not in our capacity for cunning and violence, but because we embraced the pain and joy of others as our own. We were always leaping out of ourselves, daring to leave our defenses behind in hope of finding in some defenseless other a worthiness infinitely higher than the imperative of survival. To be worthy of care, and to care – this need we felt so deeply we could not renounce it without renouncing ourselves. We have always lived in circles of care, in shared meanings of co-creation, making the world our home. Society was never a social contract; it has always been at root a common oath of mutual aid and care, on which we stake our worthiness to our humanity.

What wonders we made for love! What sublimity stirred within us as we stood before the sculptures of our ancient brethren knowing somehow, improbably, that the same sublimity stirred within them! What temples we built! What arias we sang! How we danced and wept and laughed in joy at all we had in us to express! What pride we felt, to be human!

How came we to spurn these gifts?

Too many times to count, I saw my father bow his head, bearing what seemed to me the pain of all the lost histories of humanity, of all our beautiful works desecrated, of countless acts of good will violated for narrow advantage. Yet still, he made oaths and he kept them – oaths to the earth, oaths of care. He would say to me, “may our final acts be as our first: brimming with compassion.” I praise his courage to accept the truths he saw, and to see that our freedom meant we were free also to be unworthy of our humanity, and yet this made our humanity no less sublime.

I sing for the family that softly knocked on my door one hot morning – the man holding hands with two young children, the woman cradling an infant – still pursuing a future on our futureless planet. That was decades ago, the last humans I have seen. They stayed just one day, waiting for sunset to continue their way north, impelled like those who came before by vague rumors of a colony on Hudson Bay. They invited me to join them, but I refused, and gave them as much food as they could carry. I told them I feel called to bear witness to our destruction here, in the land I have known, and not in the North or any other land. I praise their tenacity to hope against all reason even in this ending time.

I sing for she who came upon me as I harvested my wheat field one bright spring day in the bloom of my life. I remember the curls of her earthen hair, her curving body, and the sad, keen pierce of her eyes, like she too was burdened to witness, to see through the surface of things, into the roots. Of her southern colony, she alone had survived a vicious plague, and yet somehow in the flicker of her smile there lived an incomparable lightness. Like the spring suns of those bygone years, her mind warmed and invigorated all it contemplated. For one blessed summer she lingered within these walls, waiting by my side for the firestorms to subside. At summer’s end, she could not understand why I would not go with her, and I could not understand her refusal to stay. Sometimes we are driven by imperatives that reside within us without name or justification – simple facts we cannot deny. In an autumn chill she left. I praise her ineffable spirit, which even as we parted seemed made to be revealed only to me, just as mine seemed made to be revealed only to her.

I think the ancients called this soul, the animating presence that lives in our every breath, in communion with the living Earth. We were the Earth’s soul. Soon the Earth will be soulless, a barren expanse of wind and stone.

The stone in the walls around me is over a billion years old. Two ancient continents collided, raising mountains higher than the clouds. Wind and rain carved those mountains down, and after an efflorescence lasting thousands of millennia, the brief huzzah of untold living beings, all that remain are the low ridgelines beneath my feet that stretch to the horizon, pocked like the gums of a toothless mouth. A billion years sounds too high to reckon, but we once were billions. I’m saying we once registered on the cosmic scale. We once were enough to reckon with the universe. We did not have to end this way.