“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of
what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” - Chris Maser

Hey friends,

This message was somehow pulled from the most fantastic display of procrastination. Each time I sat down to work on it I felt an unbearable welling up of negativity and resistance and walked away from it several times. After letting this cocktail of bitter brain slop steep for a few days, I took a quick trip to the river to ask it to help me pour some of it out. Of course, the world outside my head always reveals the true answers when I can find enough humility to sit and listen.

For the better part of a decade I've been visiting this particular river, enjoying long lazy days of silent solace on its shaded banks. The area was hit by a massive fire about six years ago and subsequently closed for a couple years due to dangers of landslides and falling trees. Now it's open but its scars are fully visible: scorched trees shooting up from the earth like needles pricking a forlorn sky that echoes the apparent emptiness of the land below.

The land is not empty, though. These days pioneer species, plants and animals who arrive to a freshly burned area to forage and settle, have moved in. Scrubby willows grow along once-bald riverbanks, wild daisies and the opportunistic (and invasive) scotch broom cluster at the feet of blackened pines, and fireweed flares in flowery flames of fuschia. Wind sifts through the sunwarmed soil gathering this year's seeds, promising the world new life in seasons to come.

Fragile and new, like a snake with freshly exposed skin, the land feels like it’s still in hiding while it rebuilds itself whole. Watching this forest that I long considered my home take shape again has been a privilege. To bear witness to the land regenerating, facing change with grace and humility, reorganizing itself as a community in constant symbiosis, helped me feel seen and held during periods when my life had been reduced to ashes. This time was no different, though it is harder to melt into these days as the world is drowned out by increasing human activity.

In the years since COVID the area has been discovered by an increasing number of locals, so visiting during summer can mean a lot less solace and a lot more stress. Most river spots get overrun by people there to drink, play music on speakers you can here a mile away, and ride all sorts of vehicles up the already eroded and compromised river bank.  People overtake the space, imposing their presence on everybody, loud and unavoidable. Our young forests, as resilient as they are, are forced to bear the brunt of humanity's abuses again and again. The forest is a place to party, and if you aren't participating then why are you even there?

It was difficult to find an open spot despite it being a weekday. The side of the gravel road I slowly drove was littered with cigarette butts, toilet paper, empty 40's, and discarded nitrous canisters, and the trails I walked were no different. We treat our world only as well as we treat ourselves.

I finally found a decent spot to set up as far away from humans as I could get — or so I thought. After sitting there for a half hour, a group of men stomped down the deer trail, inviting themselves onto the very small patch of open riverbank I had claimed, their cooler full of beer, their insufferable egos on full display. I was switching between painting and reading, clearly enjoying the peace and trying to let little disabled Charlie have uninterrupted time to explore on his shaky legs. The men showed no awareness of my intention for being there, and if they knew they didn't care. This was their river now.

I noticed one man kept looking over at me, and after a few minutes he offered me a beer. Drinking alone with men is something the older and wiser me will always decline. After I did, their behavior went from easygoing to aggressive as they shouted loudly, started throwing rocks into the river, and kept glancing in my direction.

There's no room for assuming the best in situations like this, so I packed up my things and my dog as quickly as I could. It never feels quick enough.

Only once my car door locked behind me that I realized the slurry of resistance I was feeling over the weeks had everything to do with a deep repulsion to our culture’s  pervasive lack of empathy. This carelessness was on display in all of the natural spaces I visited these past few weeks, which literally spanned most of the state. People driving dangerously, people inserting themselves into my space while on the river alone, and people riding their dune buggies through sensitive habitat. Even from a tent high up on a mountaintop in a lonely wilderness in southern Oregon we fell asleep to the distant pops of fireworks then woke up to a fire watch map lit up with hundreds of new burns, some already grown to thousands of acres overnight.

Our lack of empathy is killing us. It may very well be someone's right to dump their trash in the woods, to light fireworks every night for 10 days after the holiday (yes, I'm still being scared awake by them every night), and to be as loud and obnoxious as they please. But that's my point. When you're dedicated to defending your individual rights, the collective suffers, and so do you by proxy.

This week the government redefined the term “harm” in the vital Endangered Species Act so that more habitats can be open for mining, drilling, etc. despite the presence of vulnerable species. These people have no empathy for the impact that habitat destruction has on wildlife or humans (especially marginalized humans, who are negatively impacted the most). Decisions are made to serve them individually, treating everyone and everything as carelessly as they treat the burned forest trying to regrow or the lone woman sitting on the bank of the river: expendable, controllable, exploitable.

So often we go out into natural spaces without even really seeing them. And how can we love something we can't even see?

How can we love one another when our hearts and minds are closed to each other's unique ways of being, needs, and perspectives?

As I drove toward home, crossing the bridge that spans the beautiful river with its teal green glacial waters, the sharp and sudden BOOM of a nearby firework seemed to split my chest in two. I eased on to the main road, afraid for the fate of my beloved forest, leaving the roaring laughter and fireworks filling the sky with smoke behind me.