The Trump Administration has revoked a Clean Air Act finding dating from 2009 that has been the basis for climate pollution regulations here in the United States. That 2009 finding determined that pollutants from developing and burning fossil fuels, such as methane and carbon dioxide, could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. For more than 15 years, that scientific determination formed the legal backbone of federal climate protections. Known as the “endangerment finding,” this rule recognized what decades of science made clear: air and climate pollution harms people.
​
The Environmental Protection Agency now argues that the Clean Air Act does not give it the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The administration’s decision comes after three of the hottest years ever recorded. On February 12, 2026, the Trump administration repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and the environment. In other words, the Environmental Protect Agency will no longer regulate and control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. 

This action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather.     <continued--please read>

Led by a president who refers to climate change as “a hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be. They have rejected facts that have been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon (whose top adviser six decades ago warned of the dangers of climate change) and President George H.W. Bush, who first signed an international climate treaty.

This irrational reversal aids the efforts of a small group of conservative activists—along with oil, gas, and coal interests—to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and other nonpolluting energy. “This is about as big as it gets,” President Trump said at the White House as a smiling Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, stood by. “We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding,’ a disastrous Obama-era policy.,” Trump called it a “radical rule” that became “the basis for the Green New Scam,” a label the president gives to any effort to curb emissions or develop renewable energy.
​
The Trump administration asserts that scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change, and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy. The false claim that ending the rule will save Americans $1.3 trillion, primarily through cheaper cars and trucks, did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change or the costs of pollution-related health issues.  

This reversal is not merely a regulatory tweak. It is this administration’s declaration that climate change doesn’t exist, and that the federal government has no role in addressing the pollution and industries that cause it. It has no basis in law, science, or reality. The Trump administration is officially denying both settled science and the government’s legal obligation to address climate change.

Particularly galling is the fact that the decision comes while Americans are facing increasing and intensifying wildfires, hurricanes, and other climate-change-fueled disasters. From intensified storms and chronic flooding, to extreme heat, to worsening smog that aggravates asthma — communities across our region are grappling with the impacts of a warming planet every day.

Multiple  environmental and public health organizations are defending our bedrock environmental laws in court and advocating for state-level climate policies and legislation that will make our communities more resilient. We must act to protect clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for the next generation.
​
No one voted for dirty air or a broken climate! We must fight for our region and begin a new era of climate protections. The science has not changed, and our commitment to protecting southern communities has not changed. Together, we can build an environmental protection movement that endures across the South and the country.  

. . . . Information from the New York Times, Southern Environmental Law Center, the Sierra Club, National Public Radio, EarthJustice, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others was used to develop this Viewpoint piece. We are grateful to the rigorous reporting by journalists associated with these organizations who diligently work to provide accurate, truthful information about our world. 
​

In July (2025) the U.S. Congress passed (with only Republican votes) and the president signed and enacted the BIG federal budget bill—which amounts to “the most aggressive, sweeping attack on America’s environment and public lands in our nation’s history – and now it’s law.” Yet the dimensions and details of this atrocity has been barely reported or mentioned by the national news media, or for that matter the Democrat “opposition party” leadership.
 
Jim Pattiz in his “More Than Just Parks” July 11, 2025, online newsletter analysis condemned both the legislation and the inept media coverage and weak defense, saying that “every passage [in this legislation] that affects our public lands . . . would be bad on its own. Together it’s the most aggressive dismantling of public lands protection in American history.”
 
 In brief summary, according to Pattiz, the legislation:

• Mandates massive logging on public lands, with huge increases in required logging of forests – regardless of any protection status—on US Forest Service-managed national forests and Bureau of Land Management-managed lands. Required increases in logging every year by 250 million board feet on national forests and by 20 million board feet on BLM lands.  Regardless of being old-growth forest ecosystems and presently roadless wild areas, regardless of dangers of increased wildfires, regardless of designations of protected wildlife habitat or special natural areas.
• Extends timber cutting contracts from one to twenty years or more in duration.
• Rescinds 50-years-long prohibitions on timber cutting and road building in more than 150 million acres of federal lands that had been previously reserved as wild “roadless areas.”
• Silences public review and defunds environmental safeguards, with a short-term review period allowed to assess environmental impacts of proposed development and extraction. The legislation’s objective is to limit meaningful oversight and allow extractive industries to bulldoze and ignore public concerns while lawsuits die in the courts.
• Defunds endangered species defense and recovery, while funding their destruction. Driving many more species into extinction.
• Slashes federal funding for climate data collection, wildlife refuges, national parks management, communities’ and parks climate resilience projects. Thus it authorizes environmental destruction while defunding protection.
• Fast tracks leasing to industry without ability to study or review potentially harmful timber cuts or mining and gas leases.
• Eliminates to zero the century-long requirements on federal agencies to return revenues from timber cutting and resource extractions to local communities for public schools, roads, or other local needs. All timber cutting revenues now instead goes to the federal Treasury, and not even to the land management agencies. Consequently, communities where the increased logging operations occur will get no federal funding and more truck traffic, road damage, and environmental degradation.
• Mandatory oil, gas, and coal-mining leases on public lands with fast-track permitting time requirements and bargain-sale rates in many Western and Gulf coast states, with speculators enabled to lease huge swaths of land at rock-bottom prices.
• Cedes over four million acres of public lands immediately for coal-mining leasing (in some places allowing mining without even requiring leases) and cuts in half the federal royalty rates from coal mined on federal lands, thus starving federal and state budgets. Federal coal reserves are effectively privatized.
• Freezing most environmental safeguards at the weakest possible baselines and prohibiting federal agencies from specifying site-specific environmental protection restrictions, like for special wildlife habitats or buffer zones for streams and rivers.
• Rolls back royalties to “fire sale” $1.50 per acre return to federal funds and without competitive bidding requirement.
• Vastly expands oil and gas drilling in Alaska wilderness area.

 
Pattiz concludes, “how do you even begin to process the totality of this destruction?! . . . Why are they so hell-bent on turning America into a third-world country . . . to rip apart our own land, strip-mine our future, and sell off everything that makes this place worth living in, just to line the pockets of a handful of already wealthy men? . . . intent on dragging us back to a feudal society, where the wealthy do whatever they want and leave the rest of us to live in the wasteland they’ve created, fighting over the scraps they toss down to keep us quiet. This is America. We were the envy of the world. Today the world looks at us and sees a dumpster fire. A country willingly tearing itself apart. Trading its once bright future for someone else’s quarterly profits. And for what? So a handful of people who already have everything, while the rest of us lose everything that actually matters. . . . They want us quiet, tired, and resigned. Don’t give them that satisfaction.”

The Fight Is Not Over!    

"We breathe the same air, eat from the same sources, share the same turf, need the same water [as all other living creatures]. Once we humans were just another animal, living off the savannas and shores . . . we still do—and we believe otherwise at our own peril. But—a big but—we’re now so distracted by our planet’s uncorked climate blowing away our rooftops, firebombing our forests, mauling our coasts, and scorching our crops that, too often, we forget that one of the biggest phase shifts in Earth’s history, a global holocaust against life itself, is also underway.

Like two vipers coiled in a deadly double-helix, the unbridled climate and mass extinction are "one indivisible crisis—a global health emergency,” as the world’s 300 top medical journals wrote in masse to the UN in 2023. Meaning:

• A third of humanity’s food supply doomed, should pollinators succumb.
• Protein famines after 2 degrees C, when virtually all corals die along with fish and shellfish who depend on the reefs.
• Tropical plants for our medicines withered.
• Monocultured crops, their genetic stocks extinct except for a few frozen relics in seed banks, defenseless from pandemics.

As all that happens, tempers shorten and violence heightens—any police blotter can correlate heat with mayhem. Wars break out over dwindling water. Refugees flee parched lands, stoking fears of hungry invading hordes, emboldening dictators and vigilantes to stop them. Like thawing glaciers, laws melt.

As pernicious new human pathogens race around a teeming, warming planet, governments like the US and the Dutch print extra money to sustain millions of quarantined citizens, quenching panic but inflating their economies. Even medical miracles that quash viruses can’t cure grocery sticker shock, so angry, anxious people turn to autocrats who promise to revive an affordable, mythical past when no ravenous foreigners threatened to steal their jobs. The easiest way for the autocrats to fuel their reign is to drill more, so temperatures mount even faster. Fires spread, winds roar, rivers surge, coasts shrink, species fade, and panic returns.

Eventually people overthrow self-serving, inept demagogues, but it’s a changed world. Amid the madness, the Center for Biological Diversity’s ecologists and lawyers keep on, submitting new candidates for protection. . . . It’s not just about them. Every weed, snail, or slug they shelter also means saving land and waters where they dwell.

The US still isn’t a signatory to the UN’s 30x30 goal of conserving at least 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030—the biggest conservation plan ever contemplated: more than doubling global protection of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal regions, and quadrupling marine protection. But in 2021, to circumvent entrenched fossil-fueled politics blocking participation, the US simply began its own 30x30 plan, entitled America the Beautiful. . . .  [but then, after publication of this book in 2024, came the Trump 2 administration and recession of practically all of the US environmental protection and land, water, wildlife conservation regulations and programs]. . . . 

The 30 billion tons of CO2 we still emit annually has us on a trajectory for a 4.3 degrees C (temperature) increase by the end of the century, unless business as usual radically changes.

It must. It comes down to two simple things humanity can do to rein in both runaway temperatures and the loss of at least a third of all species—likely more, as each loss cascades into many others.

Stop running modern life on ancient carbon, and let forests return.
. . . The alternative is we lose control of the situation. . . .  (S)o does it really matter that more than two-thirds of all birds now are chickens we raise? Life seems to go on, right?

It’s a question that’s unanswerable until it’s too late, when we find out the hard way. “No jobs on a dead planet,” notes Center for Biological Diversity co-founder Peter Galvin, reminding us that it’s best to err on the side of caution. It’s never smart to see how many foundation bricks you can remove before the building falls on you.

Either way, the biodefenders’ work will have been worth it. If humans aren’t among the species that survive into this planet’s next hotter phase, some percentage of the flora and fauna they’ve managed to load into the ark will replenish the Earth, just as in five previous extinctions—like the birds, who, against all hope, survived Chicxulub.

Or, if we’re lucky enough to be among them, they’ll be our companions. And our food."
​
May we thrive together.   NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO WATCH THIS PRESENTATION BY AUTHOR Alan Weisman:

​“. . . [W]hile I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will [and you should] never give up. . . .

[W]e will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice, and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld. . . . 

And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square, and we will also wage it in quieter ways, in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor, by always using our strength to lift people up to fight for the dignity that all people deserve. The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work; hard work is good work. Hard work can be joyful work. And the fight for our country is always worth it. It is always worth it. 

To the young people [I say] it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be okay. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing, here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power, and don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before. 

You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. . . . [D]o not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.

This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. . . . 

So let their [the young people’s] courage be our inspiration. Let their determination be our charge. 

And I’ll close with this, there’s an adage and historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages, the adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service. And may that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America. . . .”

The land ethic will need to help reform the traditional economic worldview to include conservation concerns in a meaningful way.
Can the land ethic have deep and meaningful impact on the human economic enterprise? This is the 750-pound gorilla. For all the discussion of sustainability in recent decades, conservation has had a hard time gaining a full hearing within the dominant schools of neoclassical economics. Especially with rapid globalization and technological change driving economic development, conservation receives scant attention in the salons of high finance and international trade.
 
Is there room, in the long run, for true reconciliation of economic and ecological worldviews? Is there any safe way out of our current addiction to the quarterly earnings report to a sincere commitment to the seventh generation? . . . . . . . . .

Leopold worded his own views with extreme care: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Leopold thus held out the possibility of loving and respectful use. But he took no comfort in the early expressions of the post–World War II economic boom. He saw a society “so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.” He did not live long enough to see the obsession become the norm.
 
In framing the land ethic, Leopold joined a long line of economic dissenters in the conservation tradition, stretching from George Perkins Marsh to Henry George to E.F. Schumacher to Herman Daly. That line took a new turn beginning in the 1980s. Economists operating under the banners of ecological economics and sustainable development began to challenge economic orthodoxy. Although they have not yet convinced their disciplinary colleagues of the need to see the human economy as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the global ecosystem, they have forced the boundaries of the conversation outward. They have explored new ways to value nature, redefine capital, and build conservation-based economies. Many a battle yet to come will be framed reflexively according to shopworn jobs-versus-the-environment myths. But conservationists are gaining new tools with which they can, not just wage the battle but dispel the myth.
 
The land ethic will need to engage, and find acceptance within, diverse disciplines, vocations, and professions. How can serious consideration of the land ethic be encouraged beyond its core devotees in the natural sciences, environmental and conservation groups, and resource management professions? An effective land ethic will require commitment from a wide spectrum of fields and occupations. Architects, designers, engineers, planners, artists, builders, bankers, clergy, teachers, doctors, farmers, manufacturers, business owners: all have an impact on land and the way people regard land. All may benefit from the innovative thinking that arises when land is regarded as more than just raw material or scenery.
 
In one of his lesser-known classic articles, “The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education” (1942), Leopold included a simple graphic of food chains to illustrate the “lines of dependency . . . in an ordinary community” of Wisconsin. One chain extended, rather conventionally, from rock to soil to ragweed, to mouse to fox. Another, however, linked rock to soil to alfalfa to cow to farmer. . . to grocer. . . to lawyer. . . to a Wyoming Wildlife student; another branched off, going from cow to farmer . . . to implement maker . . . to mechanic . . . to union secretary. Leopold's point was that to think of “wild community [as] one thing, the human community another” was erroneous.
 
When human communities are reconceived along such lines, all members have a role—and an interest—in formulating a land ethic. And new connections are made. It becomes possible, for example, to think of ecologically informed design, sustainable architecture, and the “green infrastructure” of cities. It becomes important to think of the relationships between individual and public health, the environment, and biodiversity. It becomes prudent to plan and account for true costs, with the ecosystem in mind. It becomes exciting to teach, and learn, across disciplines. The land ethic becomes not just a rationale for protecting nature, but a means of enriching community life.
 
The land ethic will need to promote awareness and critical thinking among young people.  
How can the land ethic, in the face of rapid changes in education and in society, encourage curiosity and critical judgment among students? In “The Land Ethic,” Leopold noted the dilemma educators face. “Despite nearly a century of propaganda,” he noted, “progress [in conservation] still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory.” He agreed that more education was needed. “No one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?”
 
Propaganda was not to be confused with education. The quality of conservation education depended, in part, on a positive understanding of land as a dynamic community, which in turn depended on “an understanding of ecology.” But, Leopold lamented, “this is by no means coextensive with ‘education’; in fact, much education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics.” At the heart of the matter: Modern education divides the world into subjects, disciplines, and fields, while effective conservation education requires an appreciation of relationships. We need, in David Orrʼs words, to “connect thought, words, and deeds with our obligations as citizens of the land community.”
 
Environmental education had made great strides over the last quarter century. Has the effort succeeded merely in exposing students to “correct” attitudes, or has it given them the tools to think, feel, and act with clarity and independence? It is a tough but necessary question to ask. For the land ethic to endure, students (of all ages) will need to be emotionally and intellectually engaged in the world around them. In a world where distractions reign, they will need to acquire the wisdom of their places: the rocks and weathers, soils and waters, plants and animals, origins and histories, people and cultures. And it will need to be more than a chore; it has to be an unending adventure.
 
The land ethic will need to provide encouragement and guidance for expanded community- based conservation projects.
How can the land ethic more effectively encourage local responsibility for land and stimulate cooperative measures to protect, restore, and sustain land health? “A land ethic,” Leopold wrote, “reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.” As Leopold recognized, individuals can act upon that conviction in various ways: as landowners, consumers, voters, students, parents, employees. Community- based conservation provides one more avenue through which individuals may act: as neighbors sharing a place.
 
The conservation movement has seen an explosion of innovation and energy at the local level, at home, and around the world. Nongovernmental, community-based organizations— conservancies, watershed
groups, land trusts, neighborhood associations, and a wild array of alliances, co-ops, partnerships, coalitions, projects, and councils— have transformed the social landscape of conservation. While there are older precedents to these efforts, the rise of community-based conservation is a new and potentially powerful force for change on the land and in civil society. It does not replace either individual or governmental action; it supplements them, providing new opportunities to reclaim common ground and enhance the public interest.
 
The magnitude of our conservation needs, and the limits of both individual and governmental action in meeting them, are such that community-based projects must continue to expand. But it will be no small
challenge for these organizations to stay on course, sustain themselves, resist provincialism, and incorporate solid science in their work. The community-based conservation movement is one of the most helpful recent indicators that the land ethic is alive and well and dispersing into new fields. In the decades to come, the health of that movement will be a gauge of our overall societal commitment to the land.
 
The land ethic will need to build upon its roots in the American experience while remaining adaptable in other settings.
How can the land ethic continue to grow as it was, and is, the product of a specific time and place? The land ethic, as Leopold framed it, emerged in response to particular landscapes, cultural traditions, and historical circumstances. It is an achievement to be proud of, and defended with vigor. Just as the American people have struggled, so painfully, to free themselves from the original sin of slavery, so have we at least begun to emancipate ourselves from what Donald Worster has described as out “fanatical drive against the earth.” Much damage, to be sure, has been done—to the American land and to ourselves in the process. We have much to do to redeem past losses and to prevent new wounds. But in the last century, we have also created a national ethic to provide guidance along the way.
 
Meanwhile, the land ethic has outgrown its American origins. It has done so in different ways. Over the last half century, especially, the land ethic has contributed to the emergence of a global environmental ethic (through, for example, the decade-long international effort to draft the Earth Charter). It has crossed borders to influence the conservation policies of other nations. It has changed the way scientists, resource managers, policy makers, advocates, and business leaders are trained, regardless of location. But it has also inspired local conservation efforts in communities worldwide.
 
Still, the land ethic as conceived by Americans cannot be simply “transferred.” Ethics cannot be exported, only evoked. Even within the United States, the land ethic continues to evolve in varied ecological, cultural, and historical contexts. It sets high goals in Leopold’s language, safeguarding “the capacity of the land for self-renewal” and protecting “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community”—but no one prescribed path. To thrive, the land ethic will need to tell the stories, sing the songs, and dance the dances of people in their own home places.
 
These needs (and no doubt others) will shape the land ethic in unpredictable ways in the century ahead. Other realities will surely influence our land ethic conversations. To name a few: climate change, continued international tensions and cultural conflicts, the transition beyond oil-based economies, global patterns of trade and development, and population growth and migration. But as members of the “thinking community,” and citizens in a democracy that itself faces crucial challenges, we are obliged to continue “wiring” the land ethic, not only in words but on the land. That process has a long history on this continent and around the world. It began long before Aldo Leopold wrote his “tentative summary.” It will continue as long as we care about people, land, and the connections between them.

Writer and conservation biologist Curt Meine is also the author of the definitive biography of Aldo Leopold, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, available from University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Marshland Market, at www.aldoleopold.org.

Southern Conservation Partners is honored to partner with Earthseed Land Collective in Durham, North Carolina and to have served as their 501(c )(3) fiscal sponsor since 2019. Zulayka Santiago in 2023 authored and published a wonderful collection of her essays, meditations, poems, photos, and perspectives on life and nature that focuses on her experiences and observations gained while in residence on Earthseed’s 48-acres of woodlands, meadows, and gardens in north Durham. Zulayka is one of seven founding members of the collective and co-steward of its property purchased in 2016. Triangle Land Conservancy holds a permanent conservation easement over nearly 30-acres of the land, primarily consisting of the forested portion and its streams.

​In our view, Zulayka’s writing is masterful, inspirational, and lovely.  We highly recommend her book, Outside I Breathe Freely, for your reading and reflection.* Following are excerpts that may give you a taste of her sumptuous compositions. 
 <click "Read More," below right >

  [from the Introduction:]
"In the spring of 2020, our human-centered world came to a halt. There wasn’t a relationship, process, timeline, calendar, vision or plan that wasn’t dramatically altered by the coronavirus pandemic. Not only were we confronting all of the fear and uncertainty that came with a new iteration of a highly contagious virus, we were also coming face-to-face with our own mortality…. During that precarious time, we humans took on all kinds of creative endeavors to fill up our days, to help process our fears, to move some of these overwhelming emotions through our bodies. My refuge became spending extended time in the forest and writing about the gifts I received while listening with an open heart.  Forest bathing became, and continues to be, one of my life-saving core practices. To be still, to sit and listen to the wisdom of the many beings that surround me.  Contained here is a collection of reflections, poems, photos, and essays…. I asked myself: how could I ever capture in tiny words the majestic wonders of the natural world? … I believe these stories are worth telling. I am committed to writing some of this down because I believe it has value, for ourselves, our children, and other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) folx who yearn for this type of reconnection.

"The overarching purpose of this book is to encourage us to remember that we are not the only wise, sentient beings on this planet; to help illuminate the vast, complex beauty of the natural world; and to foster reconnection. Perhaps then we can begin to remember our intricate interconnection and our belonging. May these reflections bless your life as they have blessed mine. . . . 

". . . Earthseed is not just about us—we are also building relationship with this land for our broader community who also yearn to reconnect with themselves, each other and this great big beautiful natural world. We remember that our community also includes a countless number of species and beings that also claim this land as their sanctuary. Earthseed, the place and the people, served as context, muse, teacher, co-conspirator, instigator and inspiration for most of the writing I share with you here.

"It has taken me years of saying the words ‘being in relationship with this land’ to begin to understand that we humans are not the center of the universe. I am still early in my own learning journey of what it means to humble myself before the marvels and wisdom of the more-than-human world. I am understanding that we humans do not reign supreme over all other species and that the concepts of land ‘ownership’ or even ‘stewardship’ can themselves be problematic. I am troubling these concepts in my own heart in order to see more clearly the animacy of this world and my place within it. These are truths that indigenous communities (here and across the world) have been generously and patiently sharing with us. It seems to me that it is a fine time to listen.

Lately it seems that the practice of land acknowledgment has become more common, and sometimes it is just empty words. As I see it, land acknowledgments are about truth-telling and lifting the veils that have for far too long kept us disconnected from the wisdom and medicine that are at the core of indigenous cultures across the globe, including:

1. The acknowledgment of our Earth as animate: not a thing that can be used, pillaged and exploited for the benefit and entertainment of us humans, but a living, sentient being that provides for us all that we need and so much more.
2. The acknowledgment of the interdependence of all species (not just humans). Encouraging us to move beyond our human supremacist framework that is a precursor and byproduct of capitalism, towards acknowledging that humans are only one of an estimated 8.7 million species that call this planet home.

I am learning that developing true intimacy with a place is a lifelong, awe-filled, and humbling endeavor….I have faith that others, in the near future or sometime down the line, may be nourished and bolstered by what is include here—these gifts of wonder and praise.”

Outside I Breathe Freely (an introductory poem)                
Outside I breathe freely.
Within these walls I cling to the remembrance of that expansiveness.
The trees whisper to me, across distance and changing landscapes.
I carry them with me.
 
In every breath they affirm my existence, and I theirs,
Kindred beings extend far beyond my human family
As mycelial networks intertwine our fates—yours and mine.
 
We are here to continue expanding our circle of belonging,
to serve as witness, fuel, and compost for our collective dreams
of a more just and loving world.
 
We are here to remember that we are not alone.
This air, our connecting grace.
-------------
What follows these introductory pieces are more than sixty essays, reflections, poems, and dozens of gorgeous photographs.

  [from Zulayka’s concluding remarks:]
“I now know that I have a responsibility to stand with and speak up for the many, many living beings—beyond us humans—that make up this forest. I have a responsibility to continue listening deeply and watching intently so that I can continue to be a liaison between these worlds that in fact are one. It feels like a tremendous responsibility and the most precious honor. It should, and likely will, impact the ‘how’ of our work as Earthseed. It is a challenge and duty I wholeheartedly accept.”

*The original version of Outside I Breathe Freely was created as a small-batch print run of 125 copies: all have been shared with the world! The author is considering a second run and your interest may encourage her to make it happen. If you'd be interested in a copy for yourself and/or your loved ones, please fill out this form.