…in my next life, I want to return as a geologist to perceive the world that once was and therefore, imagine what the world could become. Terry Tempest Williams, The Glorians

During the research for this essay, I’ve murmured to Pappy, the old dog beside me, I wish I had trained as a geologist. With a tilt of his head, Pappy takes in my tone, the urgency even in my murmur. He had heard it once before when trees were uprooted, and weathered bedrock was exposed, as if another world had emerged after Tropical Storm Helene hit the Catawba Watershed, my watershed. The onslaught of wild winds and 31 inches of rain triggered floods and landslides, killing many. In the early morning hours of September 27th, 2024, a landslide landed where my road meets NC Highway 9, stranding myself, Pappy and the 89 other households on the mountaintop.

The damage was mapped. Geoff, the geologist we hired, was calm in a way that matched his knowledge of geology. I craved that…to be able to see beyond the visible world. Geoff pulled a yellow field notebook from his back pocket and jotted notes. He cautiously answered my questions, especially when I asked if Highway 9 was safe to travel. He used a pointer to trace a crescent moon, instructing me to watch for a curve etched in the pavement. He spoke slowly: That’s indicative of a potential collapse.

🌱

When I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer in 2013, I was clear that my writing needed deeper research. Eleven years later, I became even more serious about organizing my notes, interviews, books and about being a better writer. The environment, both visible and beyond our vision, was threatened. I could wish to be a geologist in another life, or I could work in partnership with the Earth, now.

The material was available. I simply needed to find, understand, and translate it. I was thrilled by Alpha Lo’s interview with John Cherry, a noted hydrogeologist. Cherry sees beyond the visible world into the aquifers feeding our faucets. Humans need to know their water. Why? Clean groundwater is rare. And the source of our water matters and, if we don’t change course, even more so in the future.

How do we know what is beyond the visible world? That holy place, where the collaboration between sky and stone creates filtered, stored, and clean water? I have so much to learn. I’ve repeatedly asked myself why our Storm was so tragic. Many of the reasons made public seemed sensible. Clearly, our inland community was not prepared for a coastal storm or the conditions destabilized by climate change just outside my home. Yet I was haunted by my firsthand experience working at the landslide site. The extraction practices of my own community were bared: the stench of uprooted sewers, the lack of tree roots where clear-cutting had destabilized the land, and excessive digging for new homes, as well as pummeling the soil to bury cable for fast, faster, and ‘hyper-fast’ internet.

In the 1970s, environmental protection was cause for celebration. As Americans, we witnessed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more. Fifty years later, the dismantling of these Acts is difficult to witness, but we must. The 2023 Supreme Court decision in favor of the Sacketts (Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency) accelerated the erosion of the Clean Water Act.

The ruling extends beyond the basics of the case, an Idaho couple intent on building their house just yards from Priest Lake. The local became the national. The Sacketts became the legal instrument that narrowed the definition of wetlands. Under the new definition, a wetland must be ‘indistinguishably’ part of a larger water body. (The Wildlife Society). Even more recent guidance adds that the Clean Water Act authority will not extend to wetlands connected to jurisdictional waters by ditches, swales, pipes, or culverts. (liskow.com)

But, my friends, wetlands matter. The decision to strip wetland protections from the Clean Water Act was made without science; wetlands purify the water that comes out of our faucets. Just as kidneys filter toxins in humans, wetlands filter pollution. Wetlands are the kidneys of our land. All wetlands, permanent or seasonal, are essential to a clean water supply. Wetlands that do not function properly are candidates for a type of dialysis that does not exist.

Allow me to highlight one aspect of John Cherry’s conversation with Alpha Lo.

“…it’s now recognized that there’s a global water crisis. The World Bank and UNESCO pay lip service to that…But they never get to the point of what’s the nature of the crisis. It’s primarily a groundwater crisis because groundwater makes up 99% of all liquid water. … And most of the time, all of the water that flows in streams and rivers is groundwater. It’s called base flow. All wetlands are fed by groundwater, and most ecology that’s water-related has a groundwater feed. People just don’t recognize that because you don’t see it.” John Cherry

Underneath leaves, insects, bird nests and a top layer of soil, beyond our visible world, is a layer of crumbled weathered bedrock called saprolite. Saprolite acts as an underground wetland. Here in the Blue Ridge, saprolite serves as a transitional filter between what falls from the sky and the water that fills our aquifer. Saprolite is also called ‘rotten rock’. It is a soft, thoroughly decomposed, and porous rock. It is often rich in clay and found in humid climates.

My well water filters through saprolite and rinses clean against the thousands-of-years-old bedrock. Saprolite is specific to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Other places have their particular filter, be it red desert clay, limestone, loam, chalk, or something else. The health of these filters reflects the integrity, or lack thereof, of our kinship with land and water.

“Our fingerprints on storms range from the invisible to the catastrophically obvious. … What we pollute daily toward the heavens falls daily on our heads.” Jason Anthony, Field Guide to the Anthropocene, Whether the Storm, 3/19/26

I continue to filter information about the Storm. Yes, we had a week of rain as a prelude to the Storm, and yes, climate change is a factor, but my nagging sense is that something is amiss. We need to pay attention. Our relationship with land and water needs more thought, more care, more kinship. My concern has only grown as people distanced themselves from the Storm, much as they did from the pandemic. How to prepare for the next storm was spoken of more often than what we need to do to halt the disturbance of the mountain terrain that affects the saprolite filter. What needs to stop? And what needs to be brought back?

“Water’s source matters. Its course matters. Each river is differently spirited and differently tongued—and so must be differently honoured.” Robert Macfarlane

Was the saprolite blocked? Yes, in a way. Was something missing? Definitely. The answer, or what I believe to be the answer, was surprising. It was the absence of eels.

🌱

Eels migrate from saltwater to freshwater, make their homes in streams and rivers, and return to saltwater to spawn and die. Like salmon (but with a different migration pattern), eels play a critical role in the exchange of the ocean’s Nitrogen-15, which is a nutrient on land and in water. Nitrogen-15 is akin to a multivitamin; plants, trees, critters, and even bears are stronger as a result of the nutrient transfer between saltwater and freshwater. Carried inland on eel bodies, Nitrogen-15 feeds the very forest floor on which I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the forest floor above the saprolite.

At one time, American eels were found throughout North Carolina’s coastal waters, even described by early fish collectors as ‘everywhere abundant’. In 1889, noted fish scientist D.S. Jordan observed eels in the upper Catawba River as ‘everywhere common’.

Jordan could not have known what his field notes would mean to me, reading them a century and a half later, trying to understand a devastating Storm. What he recorded was not merely an abundance of eels — it was a system at work. American eels navigated the full length of the Catawba River, carrying with them the next generation of Eastern elliptio mussels. This mussel, to complete its metamorphosis from larva to juvenile, attaches to the gills of a host fish, such as an eel. American eels and Eastern elliptio mussels were a perfect match, and for centuries, they were a love story. Ninety percent of larvae that attached to eel gills became mussels. Each eel, traveling upriver, carried the land’s future on their bodies. And then the love story ended in 1904 with the construction of the first dam on the Catawba River. The blades of that hydropower dam and the ten others that followed, sliced full grown eels into pieces.

Like the Sackett decision, installing the hydropower dam was a local decision with far-reaching consequences. The eels stopped arriving. The mussels already living in the streambed continued their filtering but saprolite pores became blocked as the number of mussels declined. Each mussel ferried upriver on an American eel could be filtering 10-15 gallons of water a day. By my amateur calculations, the mussels in the upper Catawba River filtered millions of gallons of water daily before the dams broke the connection between ocean and river. The river’s kidneys failed below the threshold of human attention, in the dark where the saprolite meets the bedrock and water moves through ancient stone toward our Catawba faucets.

The Catawba River system is Duke Energy’s infrastructure; one dam has grown into eleven that generate 2% of the system’s hydropower and manage the water supply for millions of people in the Piedmont Watershed, the plains of the Catawba Watershed. The dams are an active hydropower infrastructure with enormous economic and political protection.

The continued use of dams as infrastructure is not a given. The American Rivers 2025 National Dam Removal report shows major momentum nationally. Pennsylvania removed 14 dams, and Massachusetts removed 11 in a single year. Yet the 11 Duke Energy dams on the Catawba remain, with none even retrofitted with updated blades that do not harm migrating fish. The eels remain blocked, the mussels are diminished, and the ocean-river system is broken. The Blue Ridge’s biological immune system weakens. Without the filtering power of mussels, we lose the sister system that filters our saprolite. Essential to this era is the willingness to correct what our ancestors created. To forgive what can be forgiven and to study the old ways, such as walking barefoot on the forest floor to listen to the messages of kin.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “Each species—large or small; feathered, furred, or finned—carries the larger story of planetary health in its cells.” Nitrogen-15 carried in the anadromous migration of salmon, from freshwater to years in saltwater and then back to their natal streams, can be found in the rings of Douglas Fir trees off the Pacific Ocean. And here on my side of the continent, eels, once proliferating in the Catawba Watershed, had a catadromous migration from saltwater to freshwater in the Catawba River, then back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die. Nitrogen-15, originating in the ocean, is found in trees here as well as in the cells of eel predators such as bears and eagles. Can you imagine? The exchange between fresh water and salt water is meant to be.

My cells agree with Williams. A ligand matches a receptor site to be allowed into the cell to create a change, like another form of a wetland. Some days, my mind filters the bad from the good, politics, conversations, teaching, and research, with alacrity. Some days, the world’s toxins are too great; I seek solitude to release salt tears.

The September 2024 Storm stressed every creature who calls the Catawba watershed home. Among the humans on my ridge, food was shared, and those with generators filled water jugs and offered showers. Neighbors removed tree limbs, repaired roofs, and worked at the landslide site. We got to know each other.

After Helene, the Eastern phoebe returned to the creek-bank ledge where her nest had been and began again with wet moss. The woodland salamander moved through a forest floor that no longer existed as it had, relearning the map of his own home. The black bear, in the weeks before hibernation, ranged beyond the debris fields that had swallowed her pantry. And the old mussels who still remained held on in the Catawba, just as they have since the eels left — filtering what comes through. All of us were there and are here, reorganizing around what remains and imagining what the world could become.

In kinship,

Katharine

Author’s note:

The relationship between water and land is systematic and practical when water is allowed to do what water does. The family of Earth elements, beings, species, water, and land must have seats at the tables where humans make decisions.

The following poem is taped above my sink as a bow to the water running from my kitchen faucet..

i bow to the

Catawba Watershed,

her River and her tributaries,

soaking through ancient saprolite,

filling the aquifer,

580 feet below my boots.

may this water

hydrate my cells,

may i be good kin

may i create radically practical work.

🌱

If you read this far, thank you! The research behind this essay was lengthy. There’s a story underneath every paragraph. My thought is to expand Beyond the Visible World into a serialized nonfiction manuscript on Substack. If this sparks an interest, please let me know in the Comments or a DM. Thank you. kbw

Resources:

Giles, Erica. Water Always Wins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Canada: Milkweed Press, 2013

Lohan, Tara. Undammed. Washington: Island Press, 2025 (also Substack)

Macfarlane, Robert. Is a River Alive? New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2025

Poppick, Laura. Strata: New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2025 (also Substack)

Prosek, James. Eels: New York: HarperCollins, 2010

Ross, John E. Through the Mountains: Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Svensson, Patrik.The Book of Eels: New York: Ecco, 2020

Substack:

Climate Water Project

https://substack.com/@climatewaterproject/p-178635931

, Field Guide to the Anthropocene,

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

Advice for Ancestors

Hello everyone…

Read more

3 months ago · 40 likes · 17 comments · Jason Anthony

https://substack.com/home/post/p-1484803

Whether the Storm and The Mysterious Eel

, Carolina Ecology

https://substack.com/@samharrelson/p-191513150

other resources:

Mathes, Karen, Coastal Review, May 20, 2021NC Wildlife Commission biologist Mathes cites the abundance of eels in the upper Catawba as well as D.S. Jordan, 1889 -eels “everywhere common.”

American Rivers, January 2026 Fireside Chat with Tara Lohan, author of Undammed. American Rivers

Before I was a River, I was a mountain.

Before I was a mountain, I was an ocean.

Before I was an ocean, I was hot molten.

The Swannanoa River has informed my sleeping hours for years, but we have not spoken in person since September 2024, before Hurricane Helene hit the Blue Ridge Mountains as a tropical storm. I once was able to read her kind messages through my fingers in her waters. Over time, she became firmer. She was looking for her rights to be recognized in court. She asked, “Why are your people slow to respect me?”

I didn’t know how to answer. So she gave me work. From the 20th-century blanket and paper mills that dumped dyes into her waters to the present-day allowance of a certain amount of pollution, these are avenues she has tasked me with exploring.

🌱

On October 12, 2024, my neighborhood returned to some semblance of civility after Helene turned inland on the morning of September 27th. Counters were wiped clean of 16-day-old grunge. Loads of laundry were lined up in front of the washers. Showers! Oh, the showers! The water flowed again. The lights revealed everything that had fallen by the wayside as we tried to piece our days together without all that we expected. The landslide that cut us off from the rest of the world is being bulldozed into a two-lane road. The project may be completed by 2026.

Water was the main character in the Storm and in the aftermath. We relied on helicopters, friends who could access our road, and neighbors with solar or whole-house generators to share this essential element that is often overlooked. The absence of water was surreal. It was weird to know that 280 feet below me, the aquifer continued on. Even though I knew we didn’t have power to the well, I would thoughtlessly turn on a faucet, puzzled at the hissing void.

🌱

I returned to the Swannanoa River’s headwaters when dear friend (and editor) expressed an interest. (She and her husband were the reason that Pappy had dog food and I had water, coffee, flashlights, and cookies to last through those days when there was no way off the mountain, except for an emergency helicopter.)

The headwaters are on the private land of Anything You Want to Rent (name changed). The building had been underwater during the Storm. Now the rental business was open again, the U-Haul trucks, bulldozers and other large equipment were parked outside. I wanted to be sure that we had permission to be on the property but the owner was busy with a customer. I could hear industrial sounds coming from the back. The smell of axle grease was in the air.

An assistant interrupted my thoughts, “May I help you, ma’am?”

“Yes, I’d like permission to come here on Sunday with my editor to see the headwaters.”

The owner popped up from behind his computer like a prairie dog emerging from his den. After looking me over, he nodded.

I peered around back as I was leaving. Just yards from the River, an employee was powerwashing a bulldozer. Rainbows of color sprayed the air…perhaps a child’s delight if the scene was not so egregiously wrong. Dirt, grease and debris washed off the exterior of the bulldozer. The wind pushed the mist toward the River. Streams of suds, dirt, and grease trailed through the wetlands. The bulldozer shone yellow in the sun.

I felt the chill from the River. She definitely was not talking to me. How unsettling it is — not to be able to answer her questions and not to feel her kinship.

“Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.”

There are Rivers in the Sky is a book I read, and read again. There are three characters, two rivers and a plot that connects them across time. expresses science and story with beauty and understanding.

Shafak calls water the great mystery of chemistry. Water molecules are drawn to each other. The hydrogen in one molecule is attracted to the oxygen in another—they bond loosely, constantly breaking apart and reforming. It’s the hydrogen bonding that makes water flow, rise, fall, freeze, mist, evaporate and return.

A single molecule is H2O. But joined with others, a few molecules become a droplet. Droplets merge into drops. Drops become streams. Streams become rivers—ancient, powerful and capable of carving mountains, grain by grain.

“Water remembers.

It is humans who forget.”

Elif Shafak

I choose not to forget. I was handed the tragic gift of living through the Storm. There is responsibility in bearing witness. To be in balance is work; I am unsettled by our inability to consider the rights of the more-than-human world. I shoulder that. I look for comrades, for cousin raindrops.

What follows is my letter to the River. I will read it on her riparian banks. If you want to pass along messages to her or to your water bodies, I will read them as well.

🌱

My dear Swannanoa River,

May I kneel beside you?

When I visited you after the Storm, the peacefulness I had experienced the prior year was gone. The Great Blue Heron was gone. She and her ancestors have fished your water for nearly 2 million years—almost as long as you’ve carved this valley.

Now your running water is audible from afar. What was previously a trickle is now a wide and rapidly moving channel. The Great Blue Heron preferred your shallow headwaters.

You and I were in kinship. We wanted the courts to grant you legal rights to flourish. Of course, you already have rights. But we wanted people to know that you are more than just an orphan river, more than a tributary of the French Broad River. You are twenty-two miles of mountain water who feeds the thirst of her citizens. You are named in a way that ‘contains’ you within Buncombe County with a township that loves you.

Or at least they say they do. We didn’t get very far, did we? We met many who said the right words. And yet you had to flood the town to get their attention. And even now, I don’t think people understand their peril.

I know your disappointment is deep.

As water, you are old and vast. You can be one drop or many. But the amount of you never changes. You are consistently the same volume of water at any given moment in the history of the planet. You are the mystery.

I’ve been learning your story, River. Before you were water flowing through this valley, you were molten granite crystallizing deep in the earth’s crust when continents collided to form Rodinia, more than a billion years ago. You were volcanic lava erupting as that supercontinent broke apart. You were the floor of an ancient ocean called Iapetus—tropical, teeming with early life, accumulating limestone from countless shells.

You were thrust skyward when Africa collided with North America 300 million years ago, becoming mountains as tall as the Himalayas. And then, for hundreds of millions of years, you were slow dissolution—rain and ice and gravity wearing you down, grain by grain, until finally you became what you are now: water, carving your valley from your own ancient body.

The rocks you flow over are pieces of yourself from a billion years ago. That’s how old you are, River. That’s what you’ve survived.

Before the Storm, you were sheltered by old growth trees. You had more shade than sun. You have nourished many species, some are still here: the Appalachian cottontail, bear, elk, deer, mountain lions, buffalo, raccoons, opossums, beavers, river otter, mink, tulip trees, eastern hemlock, buckeye, chestnut oak, hickory, walnut, sycamore, chestnuts, rhododendrons, azalea, mountain laurel, more than four hundred freshwater fish species and mussels, crayfish, salamanders and great blue herons.

I am like a raindrop. If I had confronted the man with the power washer, he’d say he was just doing his job. If I went to the owner, I don’t think it would have gone well. I need to bond with cousin raindrops to make a mighty river of difference in a state where we can’t even ban single-use plastic bags before the legislature slips a line in the budget, saying - no!

There’s work to be done. I am here for it. I am here for you..

I miss you, River.

Love from kin Katharine.

🌱

I don’t presume to know exactly how the River would respond. I don’t have the full context to speak for one who was born in deep time. I sense she contains her rage for now, but I will venture a guess that the River would say:

“Forests hold the soil.

Roots stabilize slopes.

Wetlands absorb floods.

The system has rhythms, checks, and balances. I illustrate the consequences of clear-cutting forests, and I speak in storms as a protest against your toxins in my waters. Your thoughtlessness compresses what is meant to evolve over millions of years into decades.

The landslide at the bottom of your road? I would have carved that valley eventually. I work grain by grain over tens of thousands of years.”

I think the River would add:

Pace matters. Scale matters. Reciprocity matters.

In kinship,

Katharine

Here are many of my resources.

My primary sources:

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak, 2024, Knoft

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman, 2011, Simon & Schuster

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, 2025, Norton

WRITE it! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire by & , 2020, Spruce Books

The primary inspirations for May I Kneel Beside You, River? came from Nickole Brown (Orion), (interview with ) and (Substack and her courses).

Matters of Kinship is here, thanks to Graeber, whose eyes, heart, and mind work in the wings. She’s written a beautiful guidebook for getting us through the Storm (or any hard time). It’s called After the Flood and it’s available at Malaprops and Sassafras on Sutton (or you can DM her).

🌱

Dearest Reader, thank you for coming this far with me. I regret the length of time that has passed since I last posted. Please know I work on Matters of Kinship every day; Love lives in this writing.

I desperately hope that we listen to our rivers.

I challenged myself to write this essay without mentioning Helene or Climate. I didn’t succeed with Helene and though I did not mention Climate, we all know that Climate ran through the writing just as the River did.

Let’s end with a delicacy. With a virtual bow to my two newly discovered and now favorite Asheville poets, and (thank you, !), here’s a prompt from their book WRITE it! 100 Poetry Prompts To Inspire…

“Often, the news of the climate crisis paralyzes us with a succession of bad news that makes us feel hopeless imagining everything we’re bound to lose. Push aside that worry for a moment by listing everything that no impending disasters could take away, like the color blue, your fondest memories, or the affectionate protectiveness between parent and child of many species, including our own.” Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown

“If language shapes how we relate to others — human and non-human — then the words we choose may determine not just how we treat them, but whether they survive at all.” Robin Wall Kimmerer

“Words make worlds. In English, we ‘it’ rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons.” Robert Macfarlane

🌱

In the years that I have studied Robin Wall Kimmerer and Robert Macfarlane’s work, I have come to more fully appreciate the power and beauty of language. For too long, the word ‘it’ pervaded my vocabulary. My mind is content when I say ‘kin” instead of ‘it’. The words we choose play an important role in the stories we tell. The words we choose, collectively, speak volumes about our culture. For a time, in the United States, the catchword was ‘whatever.’ An unenthused throwaway retort that could pierce the listener.

The latest cultural slang - ‘grab.’ is used to pressure a consumer or anyone to do something. Supplies might be scarce so get it now, or the sale might end, or the speaker is preoccupied with power.

The word ‘it’ has been associated with “objects’, including animals and even people. The globe became colonized and the dominant forces declared humans to be the superior species and all others as just ‘its'.’ We owe deep gratitude to Robin Wall Kimmerer for pulling back the veil to reveal that yes: rivers, ponds, streams, lakes and estuaries are alive, as is the ocean who gifts Nitrogen 15 to salmons who gift that nutrient to forests on their final journey to their natal stream.

We are kin. We are all essential to our ecosystems as well as the global ecosystem. In Potawatomi, Kimmerer’s First Nation language, animate beings are subjects, not objects. Kimmerer calls this the grammar of animacy. If grammar charts our relationship with others, perhaps a grammar of animacy will lead us to more peaceful ways. Kimmerer invites kinship into our language by asking us to consider using kin (plural) and ki (singular) as alternatives to “it.”

In Issue #34, I wrote about Raising Hare, the story of kinship between an abandoned baby hare (a leveret) and the author. In an experience Chloe Dalton describes as singular, she tends to the hare with the intention of an eventual return to the wild. Dalton calls the hare ‘it‘ until she knows that she’s a she (the hare produced leverets!). Initially, I was put off by Dalton’s choice of ‘it.’ Yet as I read on, I realized that Raising Hare demonstrates rare examples of kinship in action. Raising Hare is written in the grammar of animacy. Surely Dalton would call the leveret ‘kin’ were she familiar with Kimmerer’s work.

As such, the leveret changed Dalton and her relationship to the countryside of England. She adapted her life to the leveret’s. She left the garden door ajar so the hare could come and go. Thus, the self-described ‘London girl’ became acquainted with the sounds of the night: the owl’s call, the migrating geese.

Dalton did not turn on the electric lights because she wanted the hare to retain her night vision. Thus, she went to bed when she could no longer see to read. She found herself tiptoeing through the house so as not to wake the hare. She asked visitors to keep their voices down so as not to startle the hare.

As Padraig O'Tuama wrote in Poetry Unbound, Dalton “writes with an intimacy and privacy that I found deeply moving.” Beyond being Dalton’s memoir and the biography of the hare, nestled in the chapters is a thoughtful account of how the hare population in the U.K. and Scotland has declined by 80% over the past century. The most notable reasons are habitat loss and hunting.

There is slim research on this mythic and mysterious, quick-to-flee creature. Hares are sometimes mistaken for rabbits but they are faster, larger, and more playful, distinguished by powerful hind legs and dark markings on the tips of their long ears and tails. Their fur is a brilliant layering of caramel, sepia, and deep, deep brown. Their coat is so well designed that Dalton almost mistook the leveret for a rock on their first meeting.

Dalton’s home is a renovated barn that was once used to store tubers. Most of the year, the surrounding fields belong to hares, larks, deer, rabbits and grasses while potatoes grow underground. At harvest time, mammoth machines, optimized for efficiency, are delivered to the fields. After the hare came into her life, Dalton felt the need to take a closer look at the results of a recent harvest. Ten feet in, she came across the corpse of a leveret. “…pulverized, evicerated, churned into the dirt, along with the scattered potato roots around it.”

She writes, “I stood at the edge of the fourteen-acre field and wondered with a sinking heart how many other leverets, or indeed ground-nesting birds, had been crushed beneath those implacable wheels and now lay within the ridges or lost to sight against the rutted brown earth. It was just another day, just another harvest, a scene replicated up and down the land and across the world.”

Dalton turns back. She can not venture any farther into the battlefield of wounded hares, birds and fawns.

Reflecting on what she’s witnessed Dalton contends, “We have forgotten our dependence on the natural world, along with our appreciation for those who grow our food, who are in many ways the custodians of the land and who face relentless economic pressures. Our wider value system is distorted and the price is paid by the powerless, be they human or animal. As in so many areas of human endeavour, if we are not attentive, there is blood in the harvest.” Chloe Dalton

Dalton notes that fields were once ploughed at the rate of speed at which a man walked. This practice lasted through the 19th century. In Europe and in North America, even into the 1850-1870s, most ploughing was done with horse or oxen; the harvest was cut in slow, deliberate passes.

The advent of internal combustion engines initiated harmful changes to our nonhuman kin as the industrial age became a force. By the middle of the 20th century, tractors were commonly used on large farms. By the 1970s, harvesting machinery was capable of mowing hundreds of acres a day.

Hares are challenged with each technological advance that delivers efficiency to farmers. Brown hares evolved about 4-5 million years ago. Their rear legs are designed for speed. Their adaptation to stillness, camouflage, and acute hearing were tuned to grassland predators and seasonal rhythms. In their sensory support system, they have more than 100 million scent receptors, twenty times that of humans. What took millions of years to shape can be erased in a few decades of a mechanized harvest. Hares freeze when they sense danger. They read their surroundings as they make an escape plan. But by that time, the blades are already upon them.

Dalton wonders, “If it is possible to create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology to detect the presence of leverets, and fawns, and nesting birds, and could reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them rather than simply leaving them to be crushed beneath our machines?”

She also noted that we have unduly stressed the hares’ foraging lanes by eliminating hedgerows, using every inch of the field. Chloe rebuilt her hedgerows with the permission of her neighbors. They, in turn, converted the fields to organic farming, planting herb and legume tracks to improve soil structure and creating wide wildflower margins around each edge so that ground-nesting birds and hares might use them as shelter and breeding grounds.

🌱

Raising Hare has inspired other writers to examine their relationships with small creatures. Bill Davison, of the Substack - Easy By Nature, wrote “The Universe in a Rabbit’s Eye: Cottontails and the American Soul.” Bill’s essay is so evocative of Dalton’s style that I asked if he had read Raising Hare.

Bill responded: “I love that book! It is such a remarkable story. I read it a couple of weeks ago and that is what prompted me to write this essay. I intended on mentioning Chloe’s book and including quotes, but the essay took an unexpected turn.”

Bill writes, “What hunters know, and what science is now proving, is this: we are pursuing creatures whose intelligence operates in dimensions we can barely fathom. When a rabbit freezes at the first hint of danger, it's not paralyzed by fear but processing information—wind direction, distance of threat, proximity of cover—through senses so acute they make our perception seem like fumbling in the dark.”

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Language used in common metaphors can distract us from the truth. “Going down the rabbit hole” has become shorthand for spiraling into obsession or illusion — a reference to Alice in Wonderland, where a burrow opens into a world of absurdity and revelation. But in reality, rabbit holes are rare. Only one species burrows into warrens -the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), native to a small region of northern Europe. Although the species has been introduced beyond their native range, most places use the rabbit hole metaphor as if all rabbits lived underground in warrens. This metaphor contributes to the body of common phrases that disconnect us from ecological reality.

Most rabbits, and all hares, live exposed, above ground. The Appalachian Cottontail sleeps in grasses. A leveret is born in a shallow form on the forest floor. When we stretch the metaphor too far from ecological truth, we risk our already fragile relationship with our kin in the natural world.

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I now look beyond the beauty of my place for ways to live in kinship. I wondered if a local situation paralleled that of the hares’ dramatic decrease in the U.K.. What I found was surprising. Snowshoe hares once lived in North Carolina. It is worth noting that there is no known date as to when they went extinct. What we do know is that their demise happened during a broader period of range contraction related to climate change and habitat loss. We exert more pressure on the land than many species can tolerate. Silently, a species can slip away when we exclude the voice of nature in our votes, our town council meetings, our neighborhoods and our homes.

Appalachian cottontails were recognized as a distinct from Eastern cottontails in 1992. Already, they face the threat of extinction. They need cooler temperatures and shelter such as spruce-firs. They live at an elevation of 2000-2500 feet. Warmer temperatures, increased mountain top land development and hurricane damage challenge the Appalachian cottontails’ population.

Why does all this matter? Hares and rabbits are essential to their ecosystems, which in turn affects relationships in and between more ecosystems. Hares and rabbits contribute to soil health. They are food sources for larger predators.

If the Brown hare goes extinct, the grazing system will go out of balance. Hares are selective; they trim grass tips, stimulating regrowth and maintaining plant diversity. Many soil organisms and pollinators rely on the results of the Brown hare’s work. Hare droppings are rich in nitrogen and phosphorus. Without those nutrients, there could be changes in soil microbial communities.

Foxes, buzzards, owls and stoats rely on the hare as prey. These predators may stress other fragile species if they have to resort to hunting prey such as ground-nesting birds like larks.

When Appalachian cottontails go extinct (as they will without significant intervention), we need only to look at the fragmentation of their habitats, interrupted by roads (notably paved roads) and grand second homes in higher elevations. Their extinction would signal a broader collapse of the fragile mountain ecosystem. Each time they hop or make a nest or a bed, they aerate the soil. Every time they choose one of your lettuce leaves, that’s an indication that your soil is healthy. And they add to your soil’s health when they excrete pellets rich in phosphorus and nitrogen.

When Appalachian cottontails go extinct, predators such as the great horned owl, the red-tailed hawk, coyotes and bobcats will have less prey and may turn to other fragile species.

Despite Hurricane Helene, the Eastern cottontails are usually in view, given their preference for this meadowland. Yet our language that refers to ‘multiplying like rabbits’ is not indicative of a stable species. They are faced with the same threats that affect the Brown Hare and the Appalachian cottontail…habitat loss, pesticides and hunting.

An additional threat lurks that affects all rabbits: Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus Type 2 (RHDV2). The disease is in the western U.S. in native rabbit and hare species. Our North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission is actively monitoring the disease’s path with the assumption that RHDV2 will arrive here. The disease only affects rabbits and hares but the mortality rate is high at 80%. (The Appalachian cottontails are particularly at risk because their shelter, the spruce-fir forests, is declining due to disease and invasive species.)

Habitat conservation efforts are urgent for the long-term survival of our elegant kin who play a quiet but critical role in land management and the food chain. They are essential in the loop of reciprocity. A healthy, less-stressed cottontail population with food and habitat resources will be better prepared to survive RHDV2. If we lose the rabbits, we would lose the quiet stewards of the edge of the field and forest, yard and woodland. Their health and numbers reflect the quality of transition zones which are rich in biodiversity but vulnerable to development.

In my meadows, I'm planting Red fescue grass for its high protein content and Kentucky bluegrass for year-round growth—small acts of kinship that could make the difference between survival and extinction for the cottontails who visit my garden. Many of my neighbors are making greater acts of kinship for the land that they steward (or who stewards them). Lucy, down at a slightly lower elevation, teaches me the relationships between what she plants and who visits her large meadows. She and her partner moved here to make a small home and a large sanctuary for all the creatures. When I visit, inevitably, a bird or small creature will hop along at a safe distance as we walk the meadow paths. They trust Lucy. The crows follow her car while she parks, and yap at her until she delivers their treats. When I leave, I tell Lucy I’m taking some of her magic with me.

What if we could make peace with the natural world? What if we could make our language more tender, more reflective of our kinship, more solution-oriented? Chloe Dalton’s story is a lantern along our way to reverse the damage we have done to the earth. Chloe’s work elevates the tiny hare, steeped in myth and mystery, to the level of the large, exotic, endangered creatures who attract great attention. Presently, Dalton is leading the campaign, with the British government, to put limits on the hunting of hares. If Chloe Dalton, whose work is writing and advising foreign policy in high-conflict countries, can fall in love with a hare so much so that she brings her parliamentary speechwriting skills to us in the narrative of her life with the hare, imagine what any one of us can do.

I treasure your attention. Thank you for reading all the way through!

In kinship,

Katharine

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Resources:

Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton, Pantheon Books, New York, 2025

New York Times Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/books/review/raising-hare-chloe-dalton.html

The Guardian Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/01/raising-hare-by-chloe-dalton-review-woman-meets-leveret

The Democracy of Species, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Penguin Books, 2013

Is a River Alive, Robert Macfarlane, W.W. Norton, New York, 2025

Substack: Looking and Looking at You Looking by Padraig O’Tuama, https://substack.com/home/post/p-168653085

Substack: The Universe in a Rabbit’s Eye: Cottontails and the American Soul by Bill Davison, https://substack.com/home/post/p-168388302

Lauren Graeber, my outstanding editor 🌱🌎🩵

and all the interviews I could find with Chloe on YouTube.

Welcome, dear readers,

If my editor still worked at our local Indie bookshop, she would have pressed a copy of Raising Hare into my hands with the same enthusiasm she exhibited for Birding to Change the World. knows my love for nature books written by the likes of Trish O’Kane, Janisse Ray, Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, J Drew Lanham, and many more. Chloe Dalton belongs on this roster. Raising Hare is the book that Dalton did not set out to write. Yet, she co-created a kinship with a leveret, a baby hare, that might cause you to think her entire career was spent as a nature writer, or that she had long been a student of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Democracy of Species.

“A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species, a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one — with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.” Robin Wall Kimmerer

Chloe Dalton’s career, like Trish O’Kane’s, focused on improving horrible conditions created by ideological divides, particularly in war-torn countries. Enter a hurricane for Trish. Enter a pandemic for Chloe. Their books tell stories of transforming tragedy into good kinship.

What drew me to interview Trish here on Matters of Kinship was her acknowledgement of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s role as a mentor in the writing of Birding to Change the World. In several issues, I documented her community work to save the wetlands of Madison Park after surviving Hurricane Katrina. Trish says she couldn’t save New Orleans, but she could work on a smaller scale, learning how to live on this earth without destroying it.

In Raising Hare, a one-day-old abandoned baby leveret came into Chloe Dalton’s care. As if she had studied Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, describing her movement to treat all living beings as kin, Chloe prioritized the leveret’s comfort and survival as if humans and hares are related.

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Early in the pandemic, Chloe Dalton retreated to her dwelling in the English countryside. Dalton was aware of her privilege — the freedom to leave London for her country dwelling, a renovated stone barn. Still, she brooded. She loved London. She loved her work as a foreign policy advisor.

“If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and travel, which I often had to do at a few hours’ notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen: glimpses of Bamako, Baghdad, Kabul, Algiers, Damascus, Ulaanbaatar, Tallinn, Sarajevo and Siem Reap.”

February 2021 arrived in the northern U.K. countryside with a freeze; the color of the sky blended with the frozen snow. Sheltered in her office, Dalton continued her diplomatic work virtually as she overlooked her garden wall to the farm fields beyond. And then, on one of her walks, Dalton encountered a novel, unrepeatable experience close to home.

The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.

The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.

Raising Hare is a memoir and it is a biography of a hare. It’s a string of adventures, research about early feeding, anxiety about appropriate care, it’s a love story, and it’s about kinship without mentioning the word ‘kinship’. The lengths to which Dalton went to understand her responsibility: to keep the leveret alive and respect her wildness, is a tribute to her compassion and her attention to a singular experience.

Dalton uploaded a photo montage of her observations of the hare’s behavior on Instagram when her book was published in the U.S. I urge you to stop by Dalton’s Instagram account @chloedaltonuk.

She opens with:

This account will be dedicated to Hare — a leveret, or baby hare — that was separated from its mother and endangered and that, by chance, I was lucky enough to raise.

Throughout Raising Hare and Dalton’s Instagram, we glimpse how Chloe lives and sees the world differently from the woman who lives out of a suitcase, always boarding flights for dangerous situations. She documents the hare moving freely from her home to the garden and eventually over the garden wall back into the wild. Dalton’s goal had always been for the little one to return to the wild, but the emotional reality of what felt like loss was harsh. She believed their time together was over. Yet the hare returned, and Dalton began taking the notes that would become Raising Hare. They settled into a routine; the hare slept in Dalton’s home during the day and hopped the garden wall at night, returning to the wild.

Through Dalton’s diligent care, Hare survived and gave birth to a lineage of leverets. Through Hare’s good care of Chloe, she noticed how she could make her home space more habitable for the native creatures of the countryside. She rebuilt hedges. She replanted her garden with creature-friendly plants. And she began to advocate for all Hares and their safety.

“The hare has given me a sense of an animal that is intelligent, wise, playful, and devoted. A sun-loving, frugal, dignified creature, raising its young on the few remaining scraps of land left to it in a hostile world. An animal that is not solitary by character, but out of caution; that gives every sign of taking pleasure in its existence; that has the capacity to learn; that is faithful to a stretch of land — and even to a patch of earth—for the duration of its life; and it will chase off a predator to protect its young. A creature of habits, set hours, and favourite places, that walks so lightly on this earth, and that can be trusting on its own terms.

The hare has reached an accommodation with me, on her own terms. She will never be tame. The language she listens to — the sounds her ears search for — are the sounds of the wild. But she seems to feel comfortable with me, and sometimes she rests near me. I have never resented adapting my life to hers, because I have always known that one day I will lose this opportunity.

I am content with the small part of her life that overlaps with mine.”

I have pressed copies of Raising Hare into the hands of dear friends, knowing they will find the reading necessary and magical. I hope my work here is a bit like pressing Chloe Dalton’s writing into your hands.

I am grateful for the time you gave to this essay. Thank you.

In kinship,

katharine

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RESOURCES:

Raising Hare, Dalton, Chloe, Pantheon Books, New York, 2025

New York Times Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/books/review/raising-hare-chloe-dalton.html

The Guardian Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/01/raising-hare-by-chloe-dalton-review-woman-meets-leveret

The Democracy of Species, Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Penguin Books, 2013

Chloe Dalton on Instagram: @chloedaltonuk

Hello and welcome to the last in the three-part series where we explore Thoreau’s enduring lineage, the strength of ’s environmental work, and my reflections on Hurricane Helene.

In Part I, I mentioned that reading Bill McKibben‘s introduction to the 2017 Beacon Press edition of Walden changed me. Bill expanded my understanding of Thoreau’s purpose by continually asking what’s needed for a good life, for a peaceful life, and what it means to live as a good citizen. These are my contemplative questions as I find durable ways to live in the 235 square foot dwelling that I now call home since Hurricane Helene turned west into the Asheville area as a tropical storm last fall.

This spring began like only one other.

The air is softer, the greens greener, and my neighbor’s hand-me-down pollinator plants perform with the character of survivors. I’ve planted her Yarrow, Lamb’s ear, milkweed, blue spiderwort, and a huge clump of thyme in the spaces I hoed out in the ancient clay soil around my new home.

I remember only one other time in my life when I witnessed a spring that was this gorgeous. That was early in the Bill Clinton administration, the spring that I left the corporate world. On a Central Park bench, surrounded by glorious and outrageous green leaves, I felt a lift in my chest. A new birth! Perhaps I was more aware after setting myself free from a company that had lost its moral compass. Perhaps I was surrounded by an unrealistic innocence of the writing life, and too curious about relationships in and between ecosystems to worry that I’d left the land of steady paychecks.

In this moment, this spring of 2025, I have had the heady and humble feeling of surviving Hurricane Helene and all the accompanying emotions about my relationship with the land and my contribution to her health. And I find myself humbled to witness the return of the rosy, mauve Rhododendron blossoms followed by the tiniest pink and white jewels — the Mountain Laurel flowers. I have much to learn from the shrubs and trees that are still standing.

Then last week I was reminded of the Storm when five inches of rain pummeled our region within six hours, replete with hail and two thunderstorms. It was the first significant storm since I moved into the tiny tiny house (also known as a fifth-wheel camper). I will admit: I held Pappy while tears streamed down my face. I understood this emotional response. During the pandemic lockdown, I spent hours studying the consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels. As Rachel Carson, David Brower, John Muir and Barry Lopez told us, and as Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, , , , , Trish O’Kane and continue to tell us, we have changed the earth. What I studied during the pandemic, I experienced on our mountain but I was not prepared for how the experience would strengthen my relationship with my work here. It feels more imperative than ever.

Thirty-six years ago, Bill McKibben heeded the ecological call with his first book, The End of Nature. He translated language typically reserved for scientists to explain how humans have accelerated the extinction of our kin species, how we’ve contributed to air and water pollution and intensified the frequency and ferocity of wildfires. McKibben picked up where Rachel Carson left off with her damnation of DDT in Silent Spring.

The End of Nature, published in 1989, caused an international stir with its portrait of the harm we have done to the planet. But it was not enough of a stir to convince us— as McKibben had hoped—to migrate away from fossil fuels. In 1995, at the urging of the environmentalist David Brower, McKibben published Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Brower exhorted McKibben to share stories about communities that managed to thrive without overconsuming their resources. We needed stories to remind us that living in harmony with our nonhuman kin is possible.

McKibben admitted it was a hard time for hope. Even in the optimistic, early days of the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore said, “We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary.” McKibben finished his manuscript in January of 1995, just “as Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took formal control of Congress, intent on watering down the environmental laws we already have.”

We did not know that 29 years later, the United States Supreme Court would redefine the meaning of wetlands bordering Priest Lake in Idaho, allowing Michael Sackett to build his dream house (Sackett v. EPA). The Clean Water Act of 1973 took another hit as the Judges applied their more liberal distinction to all U.S. waterways, negatively affecting wildlife, fish, and humans. We rely on these wetlands to act as the kidneys of the earth, filtering toxins before they reach our water.

Through the years, McKibben stayed true to Thoreau, finding his heirs, crisscrossing the country and the globe, and organizing the young and the old in 350.org and Third Act. He protested against the greed and deception of the fossil fuel companies and mentored thousands of students. His books and articles reveal the intersection of poetry and science…a life lived in the mountains of Vermont and ironically, as he admits, jetting around the globe as he collaborates, cajoles, and reminds us we won’t get out of this mess unscathed, even if we get off fossil fuels quickly.

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I am late to parts of the story. Not so much about the warming climate —I got that — but I had truly missed the fact that warmer air holds more water vapor. It is easy to gloss over those words until you live the experience. And last September I did.

On the morning of September 27th, I was working from home. For days, in the western part of North Carolina, we had been on the receiving end of rain from Hurricane Helene as she pummeled the Southeast coast. Our soils were saturated. Our rivers were swollen.

In the early morning hours, Helene turned inland as a tropical storm. Wind split trees, and rain became matter, more solid than not, tumbling cars, houses, people, animals, and vegetation down the mountain. The landslides sounded like runaway freight trains. The smell of human waste permeated the air. My dear Swannanoa River flooded Asheville.

I didn’t know any of this. I did not even know we were cut off from the main road. My house creaked under the strain of the wind. I felt like I was in a boat. Water was lapping. But where? I wasn’t sure if the crawl space had filled or if water was slapping against the foundation. I untangled myself from the dogs and looked out the window. To the east, I saw a river of water cresting the steps, down to the crawl space, by at least three inches. Pictured here is the result of the drainpipe crumbling under the force of the water flow, thus filling the front yard.

What I learned during the course of writing this three-part essay is that a similar deluge happened in Bill McKibben’s home state of Vermont more than a decade ago. In 2011, Hurricane Irene turned inland. Here is the description from Oil and Water.

“The worst rain was coming down just a few miles to the east, in the valleys of the Mad and White Rivers, which are isolated to begin with…the water was cascading down small streams and turning them into rivers; the rivers along the valley floors were raging as no one had ever seen them rage …Those bridges had stood there since Abraham Lincoln’s time, patiently taking everything nature could throw at them. But this was not the old nature—this was the new one we’d unleashed, that hybrid of natural and unnatural that is the distinctive mark of our time.”

“More than eleven inches of rain fell in Mendon, Vermont, the greatest one-day rainfall in the state’s long history. In an average year, Mendon gets thirty-seven inches of rain, which, in turn, is exactly the average for the whole United States. But that day it got a third of it all at once. That’s what can happen now—it’s what does happen, almost every day, someplace around the world. 

Had I read McKibben’s Oil and Water, when it was published in 2013, I would not have been surprised that September 27, 2024 was Asheville’s day to crap out. Western North Carolina and Vermont share common geological denominators: big mountains and narrow valleys. Fortunately, we have strong communities.

When asked where to move to be safe from climate change, McKibben says, “Anyplace with a strong community.” In his Oil and Honey years, McKibben advocated for sturdy, local economies to weather the storms. ‘‘In place of our too-big-to-fail systems of banking and energy and agriculture, we need squat, hardy, scaled-down versions. Small enough to succeed.” Yet, as he admits, we are fast approaching a time when neighbors may no longer be sufficient. Extreme downpours have increased by 30 percent over five decades. In 2013, McKibben wrote, “Across New England, it’s gone up 85 percent. Across Vermont, it’s literally doubled. The intensity of the largest rainstorm each year has grown by more than a fifth. And all of this with one degree of temperature increase.”

So what do we do? I have followed McKibben through his Thoreauvian approach — too much stuff distracts us from a peaceful, happy life. Too much stuff also wears out the planet and our nonhuman kin as we drill, dam, and drain to mass produce stuff.

McKibben wrote the Introduction to Walden in 2017, yet Thoreau’s belief in simplicity, nature, and justice is evident throughout more than a dozen of McKibben’s earlier books and hundreds of articles about our relationship with nature. What do we need? Thoreau asked. McKibben has repeated that question throughout his environmental leadership. His work between 2013 and 2025 represents stellar persistence. He made new collaborations at every turn and taught nonviolent protest against the forces that place profit above planetary health.

On Matt Matern’s podcast Climate Forward earlier this year, Matt asked McKibben, “What are you most hopeful for?” I was surprised by his answer:

“The only thing I’m hopeful for is renewable energy. I don’t think anyone is going to stop consuming anytime soon.”

This seemed like a departure from Thoreau’s philosophy. I asked Bill, “Is your year-long focus on solar an accompaniment to simplifying and using less, or as you mentioned to Matt Matern, a lack of belief that our species will use less?”

“I think using less is a very good idea (see my book Deep Economy, hopefully at your library.) But I also think that we’re not going to do it in large enough numbers soon enough to make it a realistic method for reducing the temperature — about 125 million humans enter the ‘consumer class’ each year, mostly in Asia as it grows richer. So I think that power from the sun and wind is our best shot at dealing with the emergency,” wrote Bill.

McKibben will dedicate 2025 to what may be a defining moment in catching up with the rest of the world’s migration to renewable energies in wind, solar, and batteries. He unveiled his plan to celebrate the news that solar energy has passed an invisible line, and it is now less expensive to install solar energy than fossil fuel energy. His team designed a celebration they are calling Sun Day, with a beautiful website to get that information out to people, like me, who thought they could not afford the total solar upgrade for their home.

“Sun Day is a day of action to celebrate the power of clean energy and stand up to the billionaires trying to stop it. On September 21st, people everywhere will be showcasing solar installations, electric homes and vehicles running on clean power. By organizing thousands of events on the fall Equinox, Sun Day will help accelerate the ongoing clean energy revolution: we have the technology and the solutions, all we need is to build the political will to scale-up and accelerate clean energy and make it accessible to all.” The website, sunday.earth has a great narrative about solar, wind, and battery energy. There’s also an interactive invitation to draw your own Sun Day logo. Here’s my sun with a big heart directed at the earth.

“This is the only way, we say,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “but there are as many ways as there can be drawn from the radii of one center.”

My new home came with one battery and two rooftop solar panels to power the lights and the refrigerator. The Storm convinced me that solar is essential for the heating system and the outlets. I began my solar search in March of this year. What I’ve heard to date is that no one knows how to upgrade this “solar-ready” camper to 100% solar.

I would have expanded my search in the current technology, but last week, McKibben announced the unanimous approval by the Utah state legislature for the very latest, very affordable solar technology, which can be parked in your yard and plugged into an outdoor outlet. Here’s Cora Stryker, of Bright Saver, answering McKibben’s question:

Is America finally getting balcony solar!?

Yes! We’re already doing installations in the SF Bay Area and we are looking for early adopters to help us start a “balcony” plug-in solar movement in this country like the one we are seeing in Germany. As you know, plug-in solar isn’t just for balconies. It can go almost anywhere - in the backyard, the side of a house, in front of a garage, etc. My cofounders and I started Bright Saver because we believe that the benefits of producing clean energy at home should be available to everyone, not just homeowners with good roofs who can commit to spending $20-30k, although our system is also great for folks like me who have maxed out our rooftop solar capacity and want more power. Rooftop solar is all or nothing - what we are offering is a more modular, lower-commitment, more affordable and versatile solar option as an alternative.

I expect that other states, like mine, will follow Utah’s example. Am I naive? Perhaps. Yet if Utah — the state that has yet to address the climate emergency of Great Salt Lake competently — can unanimously pass permit-free installation of incredibly affordable solar units, I’m taking notes. Balcony solar is exhilarating news and worthy of our attention. I envision this radical solution powering my home.

Might we do all the things? Conserve, use durable products, and power our world with renewable energy as a way of loving our homes. Thoreau spoke about his requirements for a house: protection from wind and rain, a vessel to heat a volume of air, and a place to put his possessions. Firewood was his heat source for the volume of air. If only he could see the choices before us now.

Thoreau did not talk about a house as a home. Home for me now covers a wide range, a bigger base than before the Storm. Like the soft mammal that I am, I carry home with me. I take home to the River. I work with my homeland more, imagining what the Milkweed, Daisies, and Yarrow will do for the quietude in me and the beings whose work is to pollinate this gorgeous, habitable planet.

When asked what I call the thing I live in, (Mom, you’re not the only one❤️) I smile, “It’s my nest — it’s my home.”

Thank you for being here. Truly.

In kinship,

Katharine

“If one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, and endeavors to live the life (s)he has imagined, she will meet with a sweetness unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau

Author’s Note: Acknowledgement sections are a continual source of wonder for me. I appreciate how an author appreciates the team who supported making the thing with the author’s name on it. Bill McKibben is a generous and dear writer of acknowledgements. Please note that when I refer to Bill as I do so many times, I also refer to thousands of people who care about this planet as much as he does.

Selected Bibliography:

McKibben, Bill, The Bill McKibben Reader, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 2008

McKibben, Bill, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 2007

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, United States, Random House, 1989

Bill McKibben (editor), American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, United States, Random House, 2008

Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making A Life On A Tough New Planet, New York, St. Martins Griffin, 2011

Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, United States and Canada, Little Brown, 1995

Bill McKibben, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, New York, Henry Holt, 2013

Bill McKibben, Wandering Home, United States, Crown Journey, 2005

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, Beacon Press, 2017 Edition

Bill McKibben

Welcome to Matters of Kinship~

“So, I’ve been to jail ten, twelve times. It feels stupid each time. Why would anyone be required to go to jail in order to get leaders to take physics seriously?” Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989, and remains in print thirty-six years later. McKibben admits he naively believed that once world leaders understood the consequences of putting politics before physics, thereby contributing to the demise of life on the planet, they would immediately pay attention. Imagine.

When Bill McKibben is not in jail or organizing 350.org and Third Act, you can find him writing a book. McKibben says the years between 1989 and 2025 have helped him process the grief of bearing witness to the inertia of our species. How human, though — his frustrated tone of voice when he expresses the stupidity of going to jail for protesting the egregious behavior of the fossil fuel industry. He will tell you he was arrested outside the White House gates. Yet in that same article, he doesn’t tell you he was invited to the White House with his wife, Sue Halpern, the writer, during President Biden’s term. They did not attend the ceremony because their flight was grounded due to inclement weather. As you might imagine, Bill had a comment to make about climate.

This issue of Matters of Kinship is dedicated to and his moral compass, his enthusiasm, his patience and his love for the planet. My words, mostly his, actually, are also dedicated to the people whom he has touched with his translation of Thoreau’s legacy of living simply and stopping the destruction of the planet. Bill, if you are reading this — please know that your generosity is noticed. ((Trish O’Kane (Birding to Change the World which you blurbed) and I were singing your praises when I interviewed her.))

Bill McKibben turns to nature for solace. It’s from this perspective that he introduces Walden, which I reference in Part I. His opening to Thoreau’s writing is a beautiful reflection on releasing oneself from the cacophony of modern society. Days into a long hike, he reports still hearing “my own little CNN delivering an around-the clock broadcast of ideas, plans, opinions: what was I going to work on next? Who would win the presidential election? What were some neat things I could buy? My mind was buzzing, following all the usual tracks though I was deep in the woods.”

Then he reaches another state.

“That night I was aware of every second of the endless sunset: the first long rays of sun as the afternoon turned late, the long twilight, the turn of the sky from blue to blue to blue to — just as it turned black, a heron came stalking through my tiny cove, standing silently and then spearing with a sudden spasm; I couldn’t see her, not really, but I knew where she was. The sky darkened, the stars in this dark place spread across the sky bright and insistent. We were unimaginably small, this heron and I, and extremely right.”

In Part One of Thoreau, McKibben, the Storm and me, we honor the connection between Henry David Thoreau and Bill McKibben, both writers with moral compasses, both expressing wonder and concern for the world. Between the 1845 publication of Walden and the 2017 reissue by Beacon Press with Bill’s Introduction, our species has managed to exceed Thoreau’s fears of the industrial age.

Even Thoreau believed, “At least the air is safe.”

And yet the damage to the ozone layer is extensive. We have — if we are disciplined and work incredibly hard —roughly four and a half years to cut our carbon emissions in half, or we will irreversibly harm the planet. As McKibben says, “We’re not going to get out of this unscathed.” The trouble is not only our failure to be curious about Thoreau’s sense of thrift. It’s that we have pulled out of the Paris Peace Talks a second time and destroyed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) while government officials promote fossil fuel when the price of solar has dropped an astonishing 90%. It is now less expensive to install a solar system than a system that uses fossil fuel. In Bill’s words, “The cheapest way to produce energy is to point a piece of glass at the sun.”

During Thoreau’s two-year experiment on Walden Pond, he built a small house in alignment with his precepts: protection from wind and rain to establish a volume of air that could be heated and a place to put his things. He accomplished this with his labor and the sum total of $28.12 in building materials. As McKibben said, Thoreau was “a Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store.” Bill reminds us that understanding the whole of Walden is a hopeless task. His advice: read Walden as “a practical environmentalist’s volume” and “search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relationship to the planet.”

Bill McKibben is one of Thoreau’s heirs. As Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson said in her magnificent book What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures:

“Bill has been turning reasonable fear into smart climate action from the beginning of this movement. He’s an esteemed leader, collaborator, chronicler, and elder to myself and thousands of others. He’s a phenomically prolific journalist who has published twenty books and hundreds of articles, and now shares weekly dispatches in an influential climate newsletter. He co-founded, in 2008 with some of his Middlebury College students, the now-global, grassroots climate activism group 350.org. From fights against oil and gas pipelines, to campaigns to get universities and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, he’s been helping to lead the way.”

Much of McKibben’s brilliance in shouldering Thoreau’s legend is his translation skills in expressing just how convenient and yet complicated our lives have become since the invention of electricity. McKibben's first long essay for The New Yorker sourced everything in his apartment on Bleecker and Broadway. He followed every pipe and wire. He went to Brazil to follow Con Edison’s purchases of oil. He went to the Artic to research the giant hydro dams that send power to New York. And he went to the Gulf of Mexico to study the natural gas supplied to the process.

Bill sent me the link to that essay, “The Apartment” and noted that it will be forty years old, next year. You can see how writing “The Apartment” in his early twenties influenced the trajectory of his writing career. He was a journalist on a trail of discovery and a writer on a mission to create change. While I would love to meet Bill (he did send a quote that shows up in Part III), the generosity with which he shares his knowledge via books, podcasts, New Yorker articles, and his weekly Substack provides an amazing path to understanding the importance of his work for the planet, the elements, and all beings.

In his book EAARTH McKibben writes:

“For most of history, society was small, nature large; in a few decades we’ve reversed that. Between 1990 and 2005 retail space per person in the U.S. doubled – a reminder that we can’t take modernity as “normal.” We’ve been “giddy, high on oil.” We’ve had one big national project after another – settle the continent, crisscross it with roads, get to the moon. Now that we have no such project, big is no longer appropriate, and we need to start shrinking – carefully.”

In his book The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, he writes that the average house is “twice the size it was in the 1970s even as the number of people living in it has steadily shrunk.”

I ended Part I with the news that my tiny house plans were on hold. My priorities for the tiny house remain: functional, elegant and simple. The Dutch doors would match the main house, my old home. I wanted to build my tiny house before Election Day. Between the lengthy bank refinance and the Storm the week following the approval, I had to let go of that date. Then I thought to at least complete my tiny house before the Inauguration. As November turned into December, I had to face reality — this was a nonstarter until the construction business found a more even keel. It would be years before licensed builders were available in Western North Carolina. And by that time, we might be feeling the full effect of tariffs. I didn’t want to be partway through building a house or any project with that uncertainty.

On December 4th, Ricky and I were whizzed around hundreds of campers in a golf cart with a yappy salesman. We stopped when I found one with a kitchen counter. I tried to imagine living in it. This was my idea; I was processing the reality. My mind was in two places at once. I was in the bunkroom of a camper, wondering if the beds could be replaced with my desk and books, and I was home picturing how the unit would sit on our land.

We were exhausted from keeping our businesses afloat in the aftermath of the storm. We had invested too many hours and encountered too many obstacles to keep following the path to the tiny house. We bought the camper. The temple has been built.

I mentioned in Part I that I am a creature of small spaces but this is stub-your-toe territory. At running weight, even I have to inch myself around the perimeter of the mattress to get to the closet. Yes, a closet!

I wanted the sun to power the camper. That was one of the lessons I took from 16 days without electricity in the aftermath of Helene. I didn’t know that when the salesman said “solar”, he meant “solar ready”. Or that the furnace ran on propane and the outlets were electric. The lights and the refrigerator actually do run on solar. I didn’t know the breakers pop if the microwave and the heater run simultaneously. I didn’t know that I would be purchasing a composting toilet.

We had already spent $1500 for a licensed septic guy and a bulldozer to disrupt the land nine times for the septic preparation test. There was another $500 for the permit. The septic system would be another $5000. But maybe, after experiencing the language of Hurricane Helene - hands off my world— we were more sensitive. Maybe the land didn’t need another bulldozing. Maybe we didn’t need to spend another $5000 to install a septic system when the main house already had one. Maybe I could live with a composting toilet.

Finding home again is a complicated reconciliation. Thoreau’s precepts for a house are important; they are practical and spare. We are fortunate people when we are warm, when we have shelter from the storm and a place to put our things. We are very fortunate people when we have running water.

I do think there’s something incredibly sad about walking by my old home every day. That Dutch door would have been so pretty on the tiny house. But, perhaps this is my Walden.

The big surprise — that I might actually enjoy living in a camper — arrived with the Daffodils and the Goldfinches. Oh my, the bird song! The crazy red cap of the woodpecker! And the wildest thing is my views. While they were amazing before, now I’m about twenty feet up from the main house, and I can see forever. At the same time, I’m closer to the Earth. I have a closer relationship with her detailed doings.

I have written Thoreau’s dream quote in the front of my notebook. Walking confidently in the direction of my dreams means many things, including my mission to find more of Thoreau’s heirs. If you are one of them, please join us in the Comments.

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau

I will meet you here again in Part III to discuss McKibben’s plans for a good revolution that will extend solar energy everywhere.

This week’s is an indication of McKibben’s thoughts on the requirements and dreams necessary of our species to be good citizens in a world that needs our love vows more than ever. Please, please read.

Thank you for your attention.🌱

In kinship,

Katharine

Resources:

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, Foreword by Al Gore, Edited by Bill McKibben, 2008, The Library of America

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, Edited by Bill McKibben, 2024, HarperCollins

Eaaarth: Making a Life On a Tough Planet by Bill McKibben, 2024, Henry Holt

The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, 1989, Random House

Natural History Essays, Henry David Thoreau, 2015, Gibbs Smith

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, Introduction and Annotations by by Bill McKibben, 2017, Beacon Press

What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, 2024, One World, HarperCollins

The Moral Math of Climate Change, On Being, Krista Tippett and Bill McKibben, December 10, 2009 https://onbeing.org/programs/bill-mckibben-the-moral-math-of-climate-change/

Bill McKibben on the Power That Could Save the Planet, The Ezra Kein Show, November 15, 2022

Bill McKibben on Renewable Energy, Political Battles, and Hope for the Future, A Climate Change with Matt Matern, February 6, 2025, Episode 175

Dear Reader,

In this issue of Matters of Kinship and the next two, I turn to Henry David Thoreau and for their wonder and concern with their worlds. We begin with Henry David Thoreau’s documentation of his years on Walden Pond.

Even Thoreau’s admirers hold various opinions about his life on Walden Pond. They vary from the mundane: the number of chairs he had and whether he had a closet in his house to whether he would join the environmental movement if he were alive today. McKibben maintains that Thoreau scoffed at Reformers and would not participate in environmental activism. McKibben introduces the 2017 Beacon Press version of Walden with the following:

Thoreau was “the American avatar in a long line that stretches back at least to Buddha, the line that runs straight through Jesus and St. Francis and a hundred other cranks and gurus. Simplicity, calmness, quiet — these were the preconditions for a moral life, a true life, a philosophic life. Thoreau believed in the same intense self-examination as any cross-legged wispy-bearded Nepalese ascetic. Happily, though, he went about it in very American ways — he was a Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store. And it is that prosaic streak that makes him indispensable now.”

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I am a creature of small spaces. When I lived in New York City in the 1980’s, I had a 600 square foot condo with a view of the Hudson River. My bed folded into the wall. My writing desk was built into the closet. And all of New York City was my backyard.

I did not know that Bill McKibben was beginning his writing career at The New Yorker during my New York City years. I did not know that his first long form essay involved sourcing Con Edison’s electricity path to his apartment on Bleecker and Broadway. I did not know I would be changed by his Introduction when I reread Walden after Hurricane Helene.

Back in the 80’s, I was enthralled with the City, my work, running, writing, reading, especially Walden. Walden, also known as Life In the Woods, is an account of Thoreau’s experiment — living simply on Walden Pond from July 4th, 1845 through September 6th, 1847. Thoreau wrote most of the book in the small house he built on the property of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

McKibben states that Walden, as a book, is the sea.

“Understanding the whole of this book is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scriptures: ideas condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings—psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind, though, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist’s volume, and to search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relationship to the planet.”

I would add that Thoreau’s accounting prowess is worthy of our attention. He was specific to detail - the texture of mud, the depth of ice, and when particular wildflower species bloomed at Walden Pond. To this day, Thoreau’s records are referenced in climate change calculations.

Thoreau built his one-room cabin from timbers recycled from a neighbor’s shanty. In Economy, his first chapter, Thoreau itemizes the supplies he used to construct his 150 square foot house: boards $8.03, two second-hand windows with glass $2.43, nails $3.90, two caskets of Lime $2.40 and so on to total $28.12.

McKibben offers this simplified version of Thoreau’s precepts for the functions of a house.

1. A house shields you from wind and rain;

2. A house provides a volume of air that can be heated; and,

3. A house offers space for the few material things you need.

McKibben elaborates on the third point: “In Thoreau’s case, that list included a table which doubled as a desk, a chair, and a bed. It didn’t include a closet.” Thoreau wore the same clothes most of the time. He opted for simplicity. He believed that we traded time for things. Thoreau believed that economic questions can be reduced to a single decision: whether you will increase income or reduce expenses. His experiment on Walden Pond was an exercise in “what is necessary of life?” Thoreau writes:

…Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a one as their neighbors have….It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

Thoreau’s questions have lingered over my decades. Walden motivated me to create space and purpose as a writer. I was influenced by Thoreau’s conviction that one can step confidently in the direction of one's dream.

Walden also influenced me last July when my former partner, Ricky, and I decided to rearrange our homes and live in separate dwellings on the land we both love. Ricky would move back into our house after living away for some years. I would move out of it. The house is 60 years old and needed Ricky’s woodworking skills to maintain it. For me, we would build something small, something that would offer space for the few material things I needed, a Tiny House. It would be sturdy. I imagined an open floor plan and a sleeping loft, two Dutch doors, windows, a large farm sink, and space for my desk and bookshelves. I wanted a small but elegant structure, around 500 square feet.

I read McKibben’s Introduction to Walden this fall after Hurricane Helene. I thought about the size of Thoreau’s house and his necessary possessions and thought twice about the size of my own. I also thought about Thoreau’s second precept: A house provides a volume of air that can be heated. Now that I was sensitive to the timing of the climate crisis —the decision on how to heat the volume of air assumed more significance. Thoreau did not have heating choices on Walden Pond. He didn’t even have an option to heat with electricity. That became commonplace in homes a generation after Thoreau wrote Walden. Thoreau heated with firewood. Already, he noted that trees were becoming scarce in the woods around Walden Pond. His mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had purchased the land to conserve the woods as townspeople had freely availed themselves of the reserves.

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When Ricky and I moved to Western North Carolina in 2007, climate change was not our major consideration. We had left Rhode Island because of the pervasive taint of corruption. The mayor of Providence was forced to resign during both of his mayoral tenures due to felony convictions. We wanted to live in a kinder environment where we could be outside more often. Rhode Island was ground zero for Lyme Disease, which Ricky contracted twice, the second time landing him in the hospital with Bell’s Palsy.

The house we purchased in Western North Carolina was heated with a fireplace and electric baseboards. After the ferocious 2009 ice storm, we replaced the wood-burning fireplace with a propane unit as our primary heating source. In hindsight, I wish we had explored solar.

As life was last summer, we depended on our refinance to fund the Tiny House build. The loan almost fell through because the bank was nervous about our road which joins our home to 88 other neighbors, and down to North Carolina Highway 9. In these parts, our type of road is known as an ‘orphan road.’ The term deserves an essay of its own. In short, during the middle of the last century, prominent landowners built lumber roads into the mountains. They sold property lots at $500 an acre. However, road agreements were not formalized. Over time, our community formed a road maintenance association. But what was accepted locally wasn’t understood by the big bank that bought our local one.

After three months of wrangling, the bank approved our refinance.

A week later, Hurricane Helene buried our road under a quarter mile landslide.

On September 27th, with a weird turn inland, Hurricane Helene tore up the mountains of Southern Appalachia. Between 7:30 and 9:45 in the morning, the deluge of rain caused part of the ridge above our road to crumble and slide.

This was not supposed to happen here. People relocate to Asheville to feel safe in the mountains, but the Storm taught us that there is no climate immunity, there are no sanctuary spaces. As Harriet Newton Foote proved in 1856, carbon dioxide (the product of burning fossil fuels) heats up and holds heat longer than regular air. We are experiencing the effects of the more extended equation. Warm air holds more moisture. Thus, the deluges. More people are now expected to die from inland flooding than from coastal flooding. We are unprepared for this accelerated warming; we saw this with Helene. In Buncombe County, my county in the mountains of Western North Carolina, 47 people died, far more than the coastal deaths related to the Storm.

I believe Thoreau had an idea of the trouble ahead, and McKibben agrees. ”And though Thoreau could perhaps foresee the ruination that greed might cause…he had no inkling that we could damage the ozone or change the very climate with our great consumer flatulence.”

“Thank God the sky is safe,” Thoreau wrote nearly 200 years ago.

Sadly, the sky is not safe.

Helene was many things: a hurricane, a tropical storm, a tropical cyclone, and a geological event. For my emotional health, I simply call Helene — the Storm. After the Storm, contractors were in emergency mode: there were more than one thousand landslides and the flooding of the Swannanoa, French Broad, Broad, and Pigeon Rivers to contend with. The priority was, and is still, building houses, shelters, and whatever can be patched together for people who have lost everything from a Storm so massive that the last time civilization experienced anything on this scale was in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina. Imagine if our bankers knew that, for a time, the only means of accessing our land would be by helicopter! Here is the link for the full story.

I continue to contemplate the wisdom of Thoreau’s housing precepts as the Tiny House is yet to be built. There is more to say about that in Part II.

There’s more to say about McKibben’s environmental work, as well. When I asked about his first long form New Yorker essay about the path of electricity from as far as Brazil to his New York apartment, he responded with surprise and the link. It’s here if you want a head start on Part II.

now that's a deep cut! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1986/03/17/apartment.

forty years old next year....

Thank you for being here.

in kinship🌱

Katharine

Sources:

Thoreau and the Language of Trees, Richard Higgins, University of California Press

What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures, Ayana, Elizabeth Johnson, ONE WORLD, 2024

Walden, Henry David Thoreau, Beacon Press, 2017

Walking, Henry David Thoreau, Tilbury House Publishers

Under this sun the rain dries quickly.

Cones from the sea-pines cover the ground again.

Where yesterday for my fire I gathered all in sight;

But the leaves are meek. The smell of alyssum that grows wild here

Is in the air. It is a childish morning.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and activist, wrote lines that continue to tap me on my shoulder decades after I first memorized them. “Thinking and its pain” from her poem “Small hands, Relinquish all”, comes to mind when I am overthinking my concern for the world. “Thinking and its pain” came to mind often in 2024, specifically this past fall. Close to home, the geological event that wore the names Hurricane Helene and Tropical Storm Helene topped my list of “thinking and its pain.”

Millay names nature by her appreciation for the shore, the texture of wet leaves, and the scent of alyssum, the fragrant, tiny, flowering plant native to Europe. Lyrically, in her poem Cap D’ Antibes, above, Millay also writes that “the land has forgotten the storm.”

But does the land truly forget storms? Was I misremembering Millay? Or was I asking too much of her poem?

I located The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the months since the Storm. (How quickly I lost my sense of organization without power and water for that long.) Weirdly, the spine cracked open to Cap D’ Antibes.

Yes, there it was, as it had been in my memory. Millay declared that the land had forgotten the storm. That was poetic, as well as the prevailing wisdom more than seventy-five years ago when Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote Cap D’ Antibes. She died in 1950 when the world was changing in ways few could anticipate.

Would I want one of my poems to undergo this level of scrutiny? Yes, absolutely, if we were, as we find ourselves, on the edge of all edges. We know more science. We can core the land and water as we do to trees — to reveal their history. A friend and historian believes that we should not hold writers from the past to today’s standards. Though I disagree, I see the benevolence offered. Still, the words we choose and the thoughts we express hold supreme power these days.

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Our Storm killed more than 100 people in North Carolina, damage has been estimated at $53 billion and as Eduardo Medina of the New York Times pointed out, “plunged thousands of residents into economic crisis.” Medina spoke with Philip Prince, a geologist who has researched landslide hazard assessment. Prince compared the Storm to the strongest category of a tornado. “It’s like the F5 tornado of the Appalachians — the most powerful focused event.”

I fear we will give Helene another label — a hundred-year storm, a label that engineers use to define building code parameters. The ten-year, twenty-five-year, and hundred-year models relate to storms that were somewhat predictable in bygone years. While the measures can be helpful, we need to acknowledge that if the very place that attracts climate refugees is no longer a climate haven — perhaps human activity requires a mid-course adjustment. Calling Helene a 100-year storm would be similar to ignoring Harriet Newton Foote’s 1856 backyard experiment that proved that carbon dioxide heats up and holds heat longer than regular air. Had we listened to Harriet’s warning and the many since then, we might have avoided the consequences of a warming planet. We might not have witnessed Hurricane Helene turn west into the sanctuary of the mountains around Asheville.

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I attribute my late-blooming environmental awakening to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a biologist and honored professor who is an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer is the author of three books: Gathering Moss, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Serviceberry. Her work focuses on kinship, and she teaches the reciprocal relationships between water, land, and people. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer mentored Trish O’Kane who you met in Issues # 25 and 28. She encouraged Trish to write the story of Warner Park and birds as teachers. She taught her how to organize the story threads: surviving Hurricane Katrina, her trauma, returning to school for environmental studies, saving a city park and brandishing novel teaching programs pairing college students with middle school students through a shared love of birding.

After reading Birding to Change the World, I found Trish through a network of Substack connections. A month before the Swannanoa River rose 26.1 feet, five feet higher than the flood level of 1916, Lauren Graeber (my editor, my dear friend, my fellow book geek) and I listened to Trish talk about how Hurricane Katrina changed her life path. She was angry at herself. Her house had water up to the eves, 11.5 feet of water, which took three weeks to drain. Trish realized the pollution she had caused by leaving her truck and a house full of chemicals to pollute the rising water and then the land as the water receded. How many more creatures would die due to her lifestyle, she wondered. She wanted to learn how to live on this planet without destroying it.

“I’d worked for the United Nations. I’d published two books. I had two master’s degrees. But I didn’t understand what a wetland was or what sea level really meant even though I’d moved to a neighborhood built on a filled-in swamp…I realized that before Katrina I’d never thought about water as a living entity with power and its own agenda,” Trish said.

I asked Trish if it was eery that, unbeknownst to her, the house she could afford in New Orleans was built on a wetland and then she moved to Madison, Wisconsin to study the environment and the Park across the street was on a wetland.

“It is eery, Katharine. Yes and no. This country has willfully destroyed more than 50% of our wetlands. My husband and I talked about it. When we realized that the little wetland [200 acre Warner Park] was threatened, we decided we had to do something about it. And it was because of Louisiana. We couldn’t fix New Orleans. It was a big huge horrible science fiction thing. But we said, maybe this [Warner Park] is something we can take on. We don’t have a choice. We walk by it every day. And we love the place desperately, so we have to defend it.”

You can hear more in our interview, especially the enthusiasm Trish brings to her love of Warner Park. What you will find in her book Birding to Change the World is a story of how a community banded together to save the land, the trees, the birds and all the creatures in Warner Park. The book is O’Kane’s memoir but also the Park's story. It gives me pause when I think of my pursuit of Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River — that maybe O’Kane accomplished more with her actions and her story than I ever would in the court system?

What if we give nature a seat at the table or a place in every conversation? Have we asked what our rivers and our wetlands think lately? That’s the story Trish was after. That rivers are alive. That wetlands are beings, too. That’s the story Robin encouraged her to write. HarperCollins got it. I think you will, too.

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On September 27th, 2024, I was forever changed by Helene, the vessel of wind and water that flooded the Swannanoa River banks and altered the Blue Ridge mountains with landslides.

Our terrain was soaked from torrential rainfalls the week before September 27th. Then, sometime between 7:30 and 9:45 on the morning of the 27th, the land crumbled and a quarter mile of tree trunks, gravel, and mud slid south, landing on the bottom of High Rock Acres, the community where I live. We were landlocked. North Carolina’s Forest Department would later inform us that two more landslides were behind the one visible. Our landslide was one of over 300 in Buncombe County and almost two thousand in the Southern Appalachian mountain range.

Helicopters ferried high-risk humans off of our mountain: a neighbor due to deliver a breeched baby, the gentleman with dementia, and the renters whose vacation time was interrupted by the weird left-hand turn that the Storm took into the mountains. The pilots were hobbyists who learned we were stranded from a neighbor who was agile on TikTok. Daily, at least two copters arrived with medicine, water, baby food, dog food, flashlights and batteries. They left with a carefully calculated weight load of humans.

Most residents stayed. About fifty gathered on the mountaintop every day for afternoon meetings. We used whiteboards to list skillsets: the engineer, the vet, the naturopath, the mechanical experts, the people who could wield chainsaws, and the people who could hike out if need be. Who had bulldozers? Who had generators? Who had gas? Who had solar? Whose well was running off their generator or solar power?

Internet was rarely available in the early days. Yet for those of us working at the bottom of the hill, where our road meets the state highway, the steady stream of emergency and military vehicles and semi trucks carrying gravel rolling by conveyed the scope of the Storm.

By the third day, the National Guard arrived. Convinced we were organized as a neighborhood and had already gone house to house, they told us we saved them two days work, tied yellow ribbons on our front entrances and left.

My notebook details the sixteen days that followed without water or power. It’s a hard story and one that I have yet to process. I can tell you that everyone on our mountain survived, and every house is still standing. I can tell you we are incredibly fortunate.

Lauren Graeber has been my source of strength. The roads were broken just a few miles south where Lauren lives and she evacuated with her family but she sent me this note on her way out of the area. “Make a list of what you need. John’s coming back to check on the chickens.”

This is the land and the people whom I love. This is Western North Carolina culture. To care. And when something as huge as Helene happens, we care more. We overlook our differences. I humbly acknowledge that every hurricane experience is different, yet the goodness keeps coming here.

Two days later, Lauren sent a note with John’s first load of supplies: dog food, paper plates, toilet paper, batteries, and almonds to make milk for the lactose-intolerant toddler.

“May any of this ease what is hard among you. Even a little, we hope. Soon, we will be talking words, their power, their reach. The land holds you.”

Lauren and I feel the responsibility of surviving the Storm. We have gratitude, beyond words, for Trish O’Kane. Her story made us strong even when we didn’t know we needed to be. I’ve reread Birding to Change the World since the Storm. Trish and I exchange emails. I have called her in tears. She is an extraordinary example of how a human can create greater meaning in work and in life after a tragedy.

My plans include more work with . Beyond that, I continue to see clients and pursue Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River. There will be changes. I’m taking my time.

Lauren has published a stunning writing guide called After the Flood, dedicated to “the ones who want to find the words.”

In her Introduction, she writes:

Why write about the storm?

Because writing is a practice that helps people heal.

I know this from my own life and from the many folks I have worked with as a writing teacher. When we find the words that explain what happened to us we gain the footholds we need to find a way forward.

I have called this process miracle and magic, but there are also academic fields dedicated to understanding how storytelling works within, on, and among us so maybe it’s science. Maybe it’s all of that.

What I know for sure is that writing about what was hard, what hurt, what was insanely frustrating, what wrecked us, what we lost, what we never saw coming and yet survived, the kind of writing that I’d like to help you do…it will not fix everything, but it will heal some things.

🌱

Yesterday, the winds were high here. That was troubling; the sound of the wind echoed the Storm to my ears. I stopped by the post office. Of the many kindnesses extended to our zip code, one was to pause the billing on postal boxes for three months, but now it was time to pay. It’s a small town post office. The smell of old paper greets you when you enter. Each time I see a notice on the door, I wonder if it is closing, but yesterday, the notice said the post office would close on January 9th for a national day of mourning for our only centenarian ex-president. James Earl Carter, Jr., who died on December 29, 2024. Carter was an environmentalist. He was responsible for installing solar panels on the White House that heated water for his family’s quarters and the cafeteria. In 1979 he said, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters.”

Ronald Reagan did not have Carter’s visionary view; he took down the solar panels.

And here we are again.

🌱

Kinship is a powerful remedy for what is unkind. Might we speak the language that honors nature? What if we remove the violence from the conversation and walk away from the sarcasm? What if we eliminate the omnipresent ‘grab’ from our verbiage?

Might we think about taking some pressure off the land? Might we honor our wetlands and floodplains? Our rivers?

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.”

The land has not forgotten the storm. I can not forget the Storm or the land. Despite my quibble with Millay, I applaud her nature writing. You see that beauty in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, in Lauren Graeber’s writing, in Trish O’Kane’s writing and in President Carter’s vision.

The natural world is also woven throughout Joy Harjo’s work. I owe her thanks for this issue’s title, a line from “Conflict Resolutions for Holy Beings”: The land is a being who remembers everything.

I look forward to the stories that shape equality consciousness for all beings, our kin.

Thank you for being here.

In kinship,

Katharine

Resources::

After the Flood: Writing Prompts & Exercises by Lauren Graeber, December 2024. To order your copy, send Lauren a message via Substack here.

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane: A Memoir, HarperCollins, 2024

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, milkweed editions, 2013

The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper & Row

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo, Norton 2015

Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands by Ann Vileisis, Island Press, 1997

The Carter/Reagan moment and the Biden/Trump moment, The Crucial Years by Bill McKibben, Substack, January 6, 2025

A Large Family Built Its Own Little Town. A Hurricane Killed 11 of Them by Eduardo Medina, New York Times, December 29, 2024

Welcome to Part 5 of An Exchange, where artists explore a topic through an exchange of their art.

This month’s exchange is on the topic of Kinship, a series of six pieces written over the past four months, poems from Brian Funke, author of Poetry & Process, and poems and art from Katharine Beckett Winship, author of Matters of Kinship. A newsletter will be published daily for six days, exploring different aspects of Kinship, each publication responding to and building on the prior piece from the collaborating artist.

Subscribe to Poetry & Process

Subscribe to Matters of Kinship

Kinship: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

TRUTH BE TOLD

One question.

One answer.

Two questions.

Two answers.

One more thing,

show me 

your road agreement.

hours.  

my many hours

tracing lines on a map

for this mountain road.

A county line separates McDowell from Buncombe

about a mile up. Another issue for the bank.

Western North Carolina culture, I say.

You share the water?

Show me the agreement?

More hours.

A refinance of my hours.

I want to say 

I share water with the Bears,

the Fox, and the Bluebirds.

Truth be told,

said the banker,

you could have written 

the agreements

on scraps of paper.

Aren’t these scraps—

this three inch pile of forest,

with a closing cost of $6378.48:

for the appraisal company, 

the appraisal management company,

the title search,

the title search insurance,

aren’t these

 just scraps of paper?

Truth be told,

this interrogation

leaks sadness into the soil.

Mother Earth does not deserve

these tears.

I pack the old house —

the one I shared with a long love.

I will build a tiny house

on a lane that looks over 

Grandfather Mountain.

But first, I must prove myself

worthy of the wood and the paint, 

the roof and the fence. 

I must ask the Field Mice,

the Squirrels who own the acorns of this land

and the Carolina Wrens—

will you loan me these 512 square feet of earth

to seed my words again?

Truth be told,

the Mama Bear concerns me.

Not in September.

She’s over there sniffing 

where the old fence stood.

She listens when I ask her to move on.

And behind her, far behind,

two cubs saunter.

They’ve been with her awhile.

When she returns,

we may bless the space between us.

With caution.

And extra caution in May 

when she brings new cubs.

Respect.

Respect for her lineage

and her well worn path.

in kinship,

Katharine🌱

Welcome to Part 3 of An exchange, a side of the Poetry & Process newsletter where artists explore a topic through an exchange of their art.

This month’s exchange is on the topic of Kinship, a series of six pieces written over the past four months, poems from Brian Funke, author of Poetry & Process, and poems and art from Katharine Beckett Winship, author of Matters of Kinship. A newsletter will be published daily for six days, exploring different aspects of Kinship, each publication responding to and building on the prior piece from the collaborating artist.

Subscribe to Poetry & Process

Subscribe to Matters of Kinship

Kinship: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

WATER BODIES

river speaks to wetland:

hello, kin, 

how good to see you.

wetland responds to river: 

i bow to you.

i come with news.

er, and a request.

river:  it must be urgent 

for you 

to come this close.

wetland: the good people are organizing.

they are rebuilding your riparian banks

with river rocks and netting.

they have found a stormwater technician

who thinks like a wetland.

filter. calm down. filter. slow down.

river: that is good news indeed.

you know how to filter 

as only a mountain wetland can.

my trout send gratitude.

they like the cool, clean eddies.

but, wetland, 

i continue to make mist

when i consider the 

Supreme Court wetland decision.

wetland: oof.

i will flood your banks

if we talk about those idiots.

river: moving on.

what is your request?

again, it must be urgent 

for you to rise so.

wetland: remember the storyteller?

river: of course. 

your guardian child.

wetland: yes.

she wakes from dreams in tears.

she says to the dog: this can’t be happening.

river: she’s fine.  

long ago, 

i moved her 

to reside near your mountain spirits. 

wetland: yes, they talk.

the long Catabawba River has heard their laughter. 

river: good. 

i surrounded her with kin-oaks, pines, 

and for her delight ~ dogwoods. 

i gave her ginkgos to remind her:

time is folly. 

i sent her three lost dogs.

she’s fine.

wetland: she’s not fine. 

the ruffians who drain me,

then fill me, and build on me are dangerous. 

she is as sensitive as your trout

reacting to the tiniest change of water temperature.

river: she’s fine. 

she has kin: Kane, Solnit, Ray, Williams, Brower, 

O’Kane, Graeber, Funke, McDuff, Lanham… 

wetland: sigh. but she heard Lopez say: 

I hope they know what’s coming. 

river: she has his buddy Macfarlane. 

she’s waiting for his new book: Is a River Alive?

wetland: ahahahahahah. 

yes, but, River, 

she fears you are upset with her.

river: i am not. 

she’s building infrastructure.

that work is slow, and hard.

wetland: River, here’s my request: 

give her time with Great Blue Heron. 

he gives her perspective

as do the gingkos.

river: yes, she wants to remember 

what they know.

she will. 

yet, first she will tell your story,

how you need your Rights 

how you are the kidneys of Earth.

then she will unravel the stories

of the Supreme Court decisions.

wetland: no, that’s too much.  

there is silence

at the intersection of river and wetland.

it is an estuary moment.

river: you are right.

they are dangerous and wrong. 

here’s my decision:

ask her to tell your story.

your history, your mission.

wetland: and she’ll have time with Great Blue Heron?

river: yes, yes. 

send her to my headwaters.

wetland: good.

thank you.

until next time. 

river: peace as you recede.

in kinship,

Katharine 🌱

Dear Kin,

Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, an astronaut’s view of earth. In this short book, she captures a sense of nature writing in the wilderness of space. Harvey wanted Orbital to be “a novel about beauty, and about joy … the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home.” (NPR)

In her acceptance speech, Harvey said, “It’s hard to not acknowledge the imperfections of the world we live in today. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves.” She dedicated the prize to those who give voice to the voiceless, and to peace.

I am united with Harvey’s vision. I continue working through the mystery of Hurricane Helene's lessons. She has alternately been called a hurricane, a tropical storm, and more recently, I refer to her as ‘the storm.’ Yesterday, I read a neighbor’s post that named Helene as one of two storms that collided to create a major geological change. A geological change happens over decades and millennia (e.g. glaciers melting). Yet the geological change in the southern Appalachians happened within 48 hours. There were more than 1000 landslides, 300 in my county. Huge chunks of local roads and highways are missing. The Swannanoa River flooded. Winds gusted to 80 miles per hour. 52 days later, the military is still here. Our town may have potable water again in mid-December. That’s close to one hundred days without drinking water, and that’s the best case estimate. That means showering in community stalls, using bottled water to brush your teeth, and trying to remember not to wash your hands in faucet water because, inevitably, you’re going to touch your face. It means you are utterly reliant on the kind people of the National Guard when you fill your drinking water jugs at the potable water station.

We say ‘thank you’ almost all day long.

Before the storm, of Poetry & Process invited me to participate in his creation, the Exchange which he explains below. I finished my pieces just before the storm. Brian finished his last response recently. Then we went into production. I gasped when I re-read what I wrote. I cried. You may detect that. So, for my locals, if you are not up to reading about our Swannanoa River, I recommend checking my editor ‘s After the Flood guide. She provides epic writing prompts to work your way through what you experienced with Helene.

‘s work is exemplary, vital, kind, and so human. I believe we saw each other face to face, virtually, for the first time in one of ‘s writing workshops. Brian loves water. So, of course, I love Brian. Elena gave us a small number of minutes to do a flow write. Brian read his to our group. Without revision, just pen to paper, he brings you along to his cherished lake. Brian lives and loves poetry. At the same time, he has a job and family, including teenagers, to love. Here’s Brian.

Kinship: An Exchange

A brief introduction

This week, you will have a newsletter in your inbox every day as I launch the second Exchange hosted on Poetry & Process. For those new to the format, An Exchange is an artistic exploration of a topic chosen by two artists. Once the topic is in hand, it is probed through poetry, essays, photography, and art. One participant completes a piece, then the other responds with a work of their own, and this exchange continues until the exploration is complete.  

I am pleased to introduce my partner in this exchange, Katharine Beckett Winship. Katharine has been a supporter of Poetry & Process since the newsletter launched in May of 2023. I am beyond grateful for her support and the encouragement she has extended me throughout my poetic journey. 

Together, we decided to address Kinship, the idea that Katharine explores in her newsletter, Matters of Kinship. There, she writes about the reciprocal relationship in nature and advocates for rights of nature, the view that natural communities are not just property that can be owned, but should have legal rights that protect their autonomy, in the same way that humans have rights that protect theirs.

We began this exchange over the summer but were interrupted when Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, decimating the area of North Carolina that Katharine calls home. Much of Katharine’s work appears now as a foretelling of this event, and with that in mind, brings a different level of power and affirmation to the writing. For those personally impacted by Helene, particularly the Swannanoa River area of North Carolina, Katharine and I wish to express deep compassion for you.

When it comes to our human relationship to the natural world, there is a bravery that is needed at this time more than ever. The idea that kin is not just our blood relatives, but all our ancestors both human and nonhuman alike, is a truth that is paramount to the health of this world. Forgetting who is kin is the poison that ruins our environment, our politics, our homes, and our relationships with those who live next door. This forgetting is the root of a society’s downfall as it breeds desperation, greed, and hate. Those that remember our interconnectedness (in this case, the non-human society), while impacted, will live on past the downfall of those that forget. The question is, will we act from this view in a way where we are our own savior?

I hope you enjoy this series on Kinship. Part 1 from Katharine will be released on Monday, November 18, with a new part each day this week, wrapping up on Saturday. But more than just enjoyment, I hope these writings (and Katharine’s art) settle deep into your being, helping to open your eyes to just one additional kin in your world this week. See them, introduce yourself to them, and love them. We, the big collective we, need each other now more than ever.

Brian

Thank you for being here. If you’d like to hear Brian reading his letter above, hop over to his Substack . (There are no dogs in the background:))And if you meet one additional kin, as Brian suggested, please tell us about your experience in the comments.

in kinship, Katharine🌱

To my kin,

I am Katharine Winship, author of Matters of Kinship. I write about relationships in and between ecosystems. My feet are home in the creeks and on the mountain ridges of Western North Carolina. I believe science should be translated into stories. Please join me as I write about this land that claims me.

🌱

Due to Hurricane Helene's devastation, the next few issues will differ from my researched essays. I have used Notes to update you while deep in the trench work of restoring my community as we get our bearings after Hurricane Helene extended her reach from the sea to the ridges of our mountains. Services are iffy; my Notes stopped posting on Day 15. I’m switching to Posts. Please forgive the lack of polish. My editor, the amazing Graeber, is stuck behind washed-out roads and poor internet connections.

🌱

"I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be a danger to it."

- Wallace Stegner, Thoughts in A Dry Land.

“Such a profound piece of wisdom, especially pertinent to agrarians and localists. Our affections don't guarantee that we will be a blessing to a place. We also need to exercise restraint, patience, and draw upon the rich sources of place-based wisdom present in our communities.” Thank you for posting this in your latest essay and for your Substack friendship during Hurricane Helene.

🌱

Background: On September 26th, 2024, I canceled client appointments for the following week, locked my Pilates studio, and headed home up Highway 9. Western North Carolina was forewarned of the strength of Hurricane Helene. I had what I needed for five days: water, dog food, apples, tinned salmon, and coffee.

 DAY 18 after HURRICANE HELENE: Black Mountain, NC

Technically, Highway 9 is closed, but I obey the flagman: slow, stop, go. There is a new landslide on the right-hand side. Today, the electricity was restored by 16 linepeople (thank you for the word.) I sanitized the frig, made a list of protein foods, and headed down the mountain. I had lost 15 pounds through physical labor, adrenaline, and simply not having a way to store perishable food.

In the grocery store, my face, a reflection on the freezer door, looked haunted. I was chewed up inside, hungry for a hot meal. A burrito bowl? Nothing looked good—cardboard boxes with photos intended to look like food. I am self-conscious. Do I look as haunted as the other humans slowly walking the aisles? The National Guard people walk intentionally, without expression. In the checkout line, I insist that the uniformed man behind me go ahead. He has several items. I have a cart to restock my frig. We dither back and forth until he gives way and moves ahead of me. Young, capable, and with a cool haircut. We were humans with smiles again.

Last night, I moved my “go bag” away from my pillow for the first time since my phone blared Helene’s emergency warning. Today, I still keep the 24/7 County emergency phone number in my pocket. It’s a little square of paper that suggests someone will help.

Why do I tell you this? If Helene could hit Asheville, then the lines ~ we’ve crossed since 1856 when Eunice Newton Foote, scientist and women’s rights activist, proved in a simple backyard experiment that carbon dioxide heats up and holds heat longer than regular air ~ are catching up with us. Even the sanctuary spaces billed as climate havens are vulnerable and fragile.

Hug your people. Hug them hard.

DAY 21 after Hurricane Helene, Black Mountain, NC:: (for context, please see my previous Notes about Helene’s early days)

Miracle #1:

The mountain road that connected 111 homes to the world collapsed on Day 1. Landslides from the westerly wind and the sheer velocity of water battered a “solid” dirt and gravel road at 7:45 a.m. and washed it out by 9:00 a.m. Many mountain communities in Western North Carolina operate as Home Owner Associations. We do not; we maintain the road with an association board and volunteer effort. The $300 annual road dues are voluntary.

Early on, Melinda Halford and her Road Maintenance Association Board asked our capable neighbor, Paul Hansen, to lead the hurricane road repair with safety as the highest priority. I was voted in as an advisor to the board to support Paul. We called Stacy Ogle, owner of Ogle Grading. He showed up! Y’all, this was a miracle. The demand for repair personnel was urgent and overwhelming for people like Stacy, whose people go back four generations here and know the land, water, and how to run big rigs. Stacy chose us. He restored our road in 18 hours over four days. Melinda said, “He made a road out of thin air.” He did not charge us for his creek wisdom. He did not charge us for his connections —the gravel yard where resources were scarce. His bill was a pittance. I hope we tip him well.

And I have a store of essays to write about his water and land knowledge; he tutored me on his breaks.

There’s more to do on our road—much more. Paul, Stacy, and I decided to stop the work because we accomplished the goal of securing the road, and Stacy is needed in many more places.

Miracle #2::

My people. Thank you.

Thank you for your text at that precise moment, saying this is what I am here on Earth to do.

Thank you, Trish O’Kane, author of Birding To Change the World, whom I’ve written about in previous posts, for telling me I will be in shock for a long time and to carry a sweater because I will be cold even when it’s hot. She’s right.

Thank you to my New England family for forgiving me for saying that some nights were damn lonely. Thank you to my cousins for the surprise Venmo deposit. How many times can I cry?

Thank you and your family and your church for your brave husband’s trip to the bottom of my road when my five days of dog food and other supplies ran out. The flashlights!!

Thanks to my best friend for finding a way up the war zone of Highway 9 to deliver my absentee ballot! Thank you, Taylor, for being my twin. Thank you Pappy and Sunshine Price for being the best dogs.

Thank you to my community for bonding, wow, just wow.

I can’t thank you enough for being here. I feel your love.

I was gifted with lessons that will inform for years to come.

Hug your people. Hug them hard.

love, Katharine

PS My book recommendation is by WHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT? Magnificent!

Highlights

☕ I read the most in the morning

💌 I subscribed to 68 new Substacks

🎧 I listened to 195 minutes of podcasts

📽️ I watched 271 minutes of video

❤️ I liked 369 posts

💬 I left 195 comments on posts

📜 I scrolled 702 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 191 new posts via Notes

Top Substacks

Field Guide to the Anthropocene by Jason Anthony

A weekly essay/newsletter on the transformed Earth - as it is, as it was, and as it might be - that promises thoughtful, well-researched writing and a dose of pessimistic optimism.

Top post this summer: Road Ecology

Trackless Wild with Janisse Ray by Janisse Ray

Leveraging the power and wildness of story.

Top post this summer: They Tried to Wash Us Away

Homecoming by Julie Gabrielli

NatureStack journal, Building Hope essays, climate fiction, and my singing dog.

Top post this summer: 🍃01-02 | NatureStack: shared wonder

Share your own Summer Recap

You can see your own summer recap in the Substack app. I’d love to see what you’ve been reading.

Get my Recap

September 13, 2024

Friends,

Trish O’Kane and I had a fabulous interview about Birding to Change the World, her book published by HarperCollins in March of this year. And…we forgot to record! When I admitted our oversight to a dear friend, she responded, “Two sisters doing the thing and forgetting to do the thing…makes me chuckle.”

My editor, Lauren Graeber, received an advance copy of Trish’s book. She recognized Trish's critical contribution to the canon of nature writing, particularly her focus on muscular citizenship.

Trish writes from a rare perch. As a social justice worker, she is skilled in the art of interviewing people. In Birding, Trish writes about her change of focus to environmental justice due to the cascading effects of Hurricane Katrina on her community. Her book is a memoir of a place. After Katrina, Trish and her husband moved to Madison, Wisconsin. There, she focused on Warner Park, a two hundred acre city park with a troubled wetland.

Trish is a senior lecturer in environmental justice at the University of Vermont, where avians are her teaching assistants. She is a former human rights journalist in Central America and the Deep South, and she has written for the New York Times and other major publications. HarperCollins will release Birding to Change the World in paperback in April 2025. You can find my original story on Trish’s work in Issue 25.

Trish was vibrant throughout our conversation, even though she had recently testified at the Rock Creek Park hearing (Read more in Issues 26 and 27), where the lives of over one thousand trees will be compromised this fall for the sake of a golf course renovation. Thank you to all who spoke up to Deb Haaland at the Department of the Interior. Sadly, the planning commission of the National Park Service voted almost unanimously to send the trees to the chipper. (More on this when our Rock Creek friends release their new plans.)

I was nervous, and stumbled during the second take, but it was important to me to capture our conversation. At one point, I was so focused on whether the technology was functional that I lost the stream of my thoughts and you will hear that. Despite my flaws, Lauren and I wanted to publish the second interview in its original form. I hope you will listen to the Voiceover at the top of this issue.

in kinship,

Katharine

Author’s Notes:

Trish recommends buying Birding to Change the World at your local independent book store, if you have one. Also bookshop.org.

A postscript from Trish: If you want a signed book, order it from Trish's favorite Vermonty bookstore Phoenix-Burlington and they will ship it. 

The following is a list of authors we referenced in our interview:

William Cronon: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 1995, W.W. Norton

Bernd Heinrich, The Naturalist At Large, 2018, Mariner Books

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013, Milkweed (Lauren has an advance copy of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Kimmerer’s new book goes on sale on November 19, 2024.)

J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, 2016, Milkweed Editions

50 States, 50 Stories, & 50 Women United for Climate Action, 2023, Broadleaf

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989, Random House

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, 1999, Milkweed

prayers not meant for heaven, 2021, Toad Hall editions

Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands, 2012, Island Press

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 1991, Pantheon Books

Lauren Graeber can be found at: the previvor archives by . She created the art resting on the sister books 🌱

Additional Author’s Note:

In the future, Matters of Kinship may have a podcast component.( I’m still working out my relationship with technology.) In the meantime, here’s where the main interview points are located in the recording, which is up at the top of this issue. kbw

0.51. Trish O’Kane’s bio

1.55. Dedication to the wetlands and the rivers

3.38 Trish’s personal history with Hurricane Katrina

4.30. Recognizing water as a living entity

Decision to move to Madison, Wisconsin. How to interview a wetland?

“I swore I would learn to interview the water.”

New home in Madison was across the street from a city park with a wetland.

History of wetland destruction

8.20 “I want to learn how to live on the planet without destroying it.”

9.40 Warner Park: “…a cause we could take on.”

Chapter 9 is a case study of citizen advocacy for the geese in Warner Park.

11.03. Relationships that involved working outside together, attending city meetings, dividing tasks, and getting along despite differences.

17.25. The city’s plan included elements of GeesePeace’s model. Recognizing our role in creating the geese population problems.

23.20. How to reduce the geese population without killing them.

27.5. Geese formations in flight. What environmentalists can learn.

30.49. Trish’s writing coach and mentor is Robin Wall Kimmerer. The story!

34. We name drop some more: Bill McKibben, J. Drew Lanham,

36.44. Where to purchase Birding to Change the World and other authors mentioned. Paperback release 4/25. Another interview is in the works.

Many of you signed the letter to Deb Haaland, Department of the Interior, asking her to save more than 1,000 trees in Rock Creek Park. The National Park Service knows we are here and care about the trees and the life-giving work they do for all of nature.

After Issue #26: On Behalf of Rock Creek Park went out into the world, I received this email from Trish O’Kane, author of Birding to Change the World.“ There’s been a bump in the petition signatures. THANK YOU, KATHARINE!” All thanks go to you, my friends. You did this.

I’ve tended to this petition because I don’t understand why we lease public land to bad actors like oil companies. But I was so clueless that I did not know that public land is also leased out as golf courses. The thoughtful alternatives from Sam Krause’s group were rejected by the National Park Service (NPS) because they didn’t fit the golf course lease. As one of my golfer friends remarked yesterday, trees and turf don’t go together.

Hmmmm.

Trees lower temperatures in cement cities by ten degrees. This is crucial in a warming world. The clock is running out. We have six years to reduce the extractive and exploitive cost of human activity on the environment. Let’s use this opportunity to make ourselves worthy of the oxygen gifted by the trees. Harm done to one tree is harm done to all trees.

If you haven’t already, please sign the petition. Will you follow this link to support the trees and the creatures they protect? The last day to submit a signature is Monday, August 26, 2024.

Every signature counts. Every tree counts.

I bow to you for your time and your love for Earth and her beings,

in kinship,

Katharine

Author’s Note:

Up next: the interview with Trish O’Kane about conflict resolution within citizen groups.🌱🌎💙

I begin with gratitude. Trish O’Kane’s story — her advocacy for Warner Park in Madison, Wisconsin — was thoroughly reviewed in the Comments of Issue #25, showing how much this community cares about kinship in nature. For that, I thank you.

Amy Payne of Wondering read it and said she was glad to see another human promoting Birding to Change the World. “I was lucky enough to hear her (Trish O’Kane) read. She began the reading by having us all join in a Woodcock dance. She is beloved by her students and they lead the strut. Magic.”

A little later, I received the following email:

Ms. Winship - This is Jim Carrier, Trish's husband. Amy Payne alerted me to your piece. You really captured the heart of her book, and work. As I type she is headed to Yosemite to do a talk for the NPS. I read parts of your piece to her, and she would love to talk to you.

Trish and I plan to talk soon. In the meantime, she asked me to tell you the story of the trees in Rock Creek Park. In her own words,

Here's the lowdown: The National Park Service is going to cut down over 1200 trees in DC's Rock Creek Park for a golf course renovation. I've been trying for months to get an op-ed published about it and have struck out. Samantha Krause and her group are on the ground in the trenches, trying to save these trees and the birds. The meeting to decide these trees’ fate is fast approaching in early September.

I will be back at work next week. I would love to talk with you, then, and would be HONORED to speak with you. I can see from your work that you are one serious woman warrior. I am really interested in your ideas about "kinning" and would like to learn more about the Swannanoa River. 

But in the meantime, I have an urgent request. Since you are social-media savvy and have serious followers (I am clueless in that respect), I'd like to ask if you could blast this link: 

https://rockcreekparkgolfcourseforall.org/

Then Trish copied in Samantha (Sam) Krause, the young activist advocating for the trees and birds, and we exchanged emails.

I asked Sam, how did you get involved with the movement to save the trees of Rock Creek Park?

I moved to DC almost three and half years ago and got involved with a local land conservancy, where I met my mentor, a long time resident of Washington and retired Chief of Staff for the National Park Service, while out birding. Fast forward, she took me birding at the Rock Creek Golf Course where I have since spent countless hours birding and photographing wildlife on the course. I fell in love with the landscape, the trees and the wildlife. We've heard and seen Coyotes, Great Horned Owls, Nighthawks, Ravens, Whip-poor-wills, Woodcocks, among many other birds, which are all extremely rare in DC. All of the birds mentioned are rated as species of greatest concern in Washington DC. When I heard that the park was going to be destroyed last fall, I immediately began working on getting my local community and organizations involved to stop the plan. I now serve as the Minister of Birding for the DC Bird Alliance, where I have been active in spreading awareness and working with local and national environmental groups to protect the birds and all of our other kin that call the course home. 

How did you connect with Trish O’Kane?

I was recommended Trish's book, Birding to Change the World by my Aunt Deb. I voraciously read the book, staying up late and picking up the book at every free moment, finding inspiration and hope from Trish and her views on the interconnectedness of everything on this earth. I finished the book two days before the golf course plan was announced for approval. After despairing and ranting to my confidants, aka my aunt and uncle- my aunt recommended that I get in contact with Trish to help stop this environmental atrocity. I did, and Trish responded almost immediately, informing me that I was the first person to contact her requesting advocacy support since she published her book  Fast forward, Trish has become a mentor and immense ally. She has guided me through the ups and downs of being an activist, has connected me with academic and environmental community members who are working tirelessly to stop this plan, and has spread the word every chance she gets. 

There’s more to my interview with Sam, which you will hear about in upcoming issues, along with interviews with Trish O’Kane. But because the tree situation in Rock Creek Park is time-sensitive, I want to share Trish O’Kane’s op-ed, which is more than a powerful plea for help with the Rock Creek situation; it’s a love note to trees as kin.

                NPS: Please See the Forest Through the Tees by Trish O’Kane

            The good news is we now know that trees--especially large trees--are an effective climate solution. Collectively, large urban trees can lower temperatures in a concrete city by as much as a lifesaving ten degrees. They pump out oxygen. They filter and slow down stormwater.  They remove pollutants from the air, helping millions of children with asthma to breathe. And they provide food and shelter for city wildlife: one bur oak can host 500 species of butterflies and insects which in turn feed birds and small mammals.

             The bad news is that across the country, on public and private lands, citizens are struggling to protect our leafy allies. But as steamy summers turn concrete cities into InstaPots, weak or nonexistent tree protection laws, greed, contradictory government policies, consumptive recreation and ecological ignorance are colliding with climate chaos. Nowhere is this collision more evident than in our nation’s capital where the National Park Service (NPS) is planning to cut down more than 1300 trees in DC's Rock Creek Park for a $25 to $35 million-dollar golf course renovation and expansion.  Approximately 237 of the trees headed for the chipper are towering giants over 100 feet tall and over a century old, a small army of massive air conditioners.

            A scrappy coalition of tree advocates, birders, bat-lovers and dark-sky defenders are desperately trying to stop this proposal. They not only love the trees, they fear increasing urban heat due to climate change. Like many cities, DC has urban heat islands caused by concrete that soaks up the sun and boosts temperatures by up to ten degrees; concrete is why cities are hotter than rural areas. Rock Creek Park, which includes the contested golf course, is a 1,754-acre green lung that is a whopping 16 degrees cooler than DC's hottest neighborhoods. The NPS plans to cut the trees to reduce shade and improve golf turf conditions on a neglected public course. The agency's subcontractor also wants to improve public access and host children's programs.

            The NPS golf course proposal shows how the government is failing to protect trees. At the federal level, while the USDA distributes more than $1 billion nationwide to plant trees--a laudable Biden initiative to slow climate change and address environmental injustice--just nine miles from the USDA, the National Park Service prepares to chop down over 1300 urban trees. 

            The NPS proposes to replace mature trees with saplings at a 3:1 ratio, which is the prevailing wisdom: chop down a mature tree, replace it with young or baby trees. But trees are not replaceable widgets, although historically we've viewed them as such. And as climate chaos ramps up, there is no guarantee young trees will survive. Stronger hurricanes and storms are felling mature urban and rural trees. In a rapidly-heating environment, drought, new plant diseases, invasive insects and wildfires are killing hundreds of millions of trees.

            "The NPS is talking about removing large canopy trees. Once you lose them, you can never get them back. It takes over 60 years for a 40-inch tree to reach that size," explained DC's Delores Bushong, a 77-year-old award-winning "Real-Life Lorax."  

            Washington has some of the strongest tree protection in the nation because advocates in organizations like Casey Trees worked for two decades to craft the laws; DC is one of the only cities that protects trees on both public and private property. It is illegal for DC developers and homeowners to cut down large "Heritage Trees," over 100 inches in circumference, unless a city arborist declares that Heritage tree "hazardous" or "invasive." Homeowners and developers must also apply for a permit from the mayor (violators pay hefty fines). A developer can pay to move a Heritage tree but this is an expensive anti-ecological loophole that can kill the tree. The district also protects smaller "Special Trees," of 44 to 99 inches.

            Since Rock Creek Park is a national park on federal land, legally the National Park Service does not have to respect DC's hard-fought tree laws. Federal law also protects trees over 100 inches in diameter but the NPS is utilizing loopholes in federal law to justify this project.

            The NPS "Forest Stand Clearing Plan" came as a shock to DC residents because during months of community meetings to publicize the golf course renovation, subcontractors did not mention tree removal. But when the news got out--residents were not happy. Over 90% of the 3,212 responses to the NPS' own public survey opposed the tree chopping. And the omission during public presentations riled at least two DC neighborhood commissioners whose wards border the golf course. One of these wards has some of the highest heat exposure scores in the city; in June that ward passed a resolution asking the NPS to reopen the planning process and comply with DC's tree laws.

            The highly criticized NPS public process culminated with nearly three hours of blistering testimony at a May meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission. Citizens spoke two to one against the tree cutting with one young DC ecologist furiously yelling: "Keep selling out our community--black and brown folks--You always do." Another testified, "Trees on federal land receive less protection? That's outrageous." Commissioners agreed to "preliminary approval," but postponed final approval until the fall (full disclosure: I also testified). 

            This is why DC tree defenders have launched a vigorous campaign of summer love to save the 1300+ trees, themselves. Citizen scientists are photographing, videoing and recording animals that raise their families on the course, including owls, and endangered and federally-protected species like the Long-eared Bat. They are leading Thursday night nature walks. And they are consulting with golfers--many of them fellow nature-lovers--to create an alternative proposal that protects the trees.

            It's time for Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to intervene and listen to these tree advocates. If we keep cutting down mature trees, the only people playing golf outside will be wearing air-conditioned spacesuits.                                                                                                             

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My dear readers, let’s be kin.

Let’s kin! Here's the easy link to ask Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, to allow Rock Creek Park trees and their creatures to live. Final approval of the project is at the top of the agenda for the National Capital Planning Commission on September 5th at 10AM EST. As Sam reminded me, this is public land thus there is no residency requirement to sign or speak up. It’s our right as citizens to object to the destruction of nature, especially on public land. If you have signed the letter to Deb Haaland, and you want to do more, the link to testify, in writing or by video, is:

https://www.ncpc.gov/participate/guidelines/

So many thanks! See you in the Comments.

in kinship,

Katharine Winship

Resources:

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane, Ecco Books, 2024

Author’s Note:

I was introduced to Trish O’Kane’s Birding to Change the World through a sisterhood of kinship. I bow to my editor, Lauren Graeber, for being my first friend to introduce me to Trish’s work because she fell in love with it.

Then I did.

We hope you do. 🌱

Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

Wendell Berry

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Often a book tugs at me and won’t let go until I comply with its request. What a book wants varies. It might ask me to post about the author on social media. It might ask me to take notes on an index card system inspired by the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But what took hold of me and wouldn’t let go about Trish O’Kane’s 2024 Birding to Change the World is that her book is more than a book about birding. It’s a book that examines how our daily actions change the world. Initially, I found the title, Birding to Change the World, a little much until I realized that O’Kane didn’t say fix the world or save the world; she said change, and that’s a different narrative. Change is doable if we understand the assignment. Every action we choose, every day, every minute — changes the world.

Birding to Change the World asked me to ask you to read the book.

Beyond gorgeous writing, the book is a manual for doing the thing you desperately want to do—to make a difference. Trish O’Kane writes a step-by-step, collaboration-by-collaboration plan as well as an emotional accounting of what it takes to be a responsible citizen in the world we have set on fire.

Birding to Change the World did not receive the love it deserved from the traditional publishing world. Perhaps that world can’t help but glorify their established heroes. Amy Tan’s Backyard Birding Chronicles, a terrific book in its own right, eclipsed O’Kane’s book earlier this year. The ‘important’ New York Times book review, along with many others, went to Tan. Thus this essay is a plea for you to pay attention to O’Kane’s book; she translates the stuckness (that lands on so many of us these days) into reasonable action steps.

What woke up O’Kane? While in the environmental doctorate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she attended a lecture by the environmental philosopher and author Wendell Berry. A student asked him how we would solve the world’s environmental problems.

“Two generations of college-bred people have been indoctrinated to think that there are big solutions for big problems. I just don’t believe it. It’s going to take hundreds of solutions at the local level.” Wendell Berry said.

O’Kane admits she was one of those indoctrinated people. She had been a peace activist trying to change US foreign policy in Central America, then an investigative human rights journalist, then a human rights investigator for the United Nations, and then a hate crimes researcher in Montgomery, Alabama. “How to stop war, how to end economic injustice, how to end racism and white supremacy-those global questions were the focus of my work for fifteen years.”

O’Kane did not see the relationship between environmental issues and socioeconomic issues until her home was destroyed and 90 neighbors drowned in Hurricane Katrina. “I started thinking about the importance of place and knowing the place and the water where we live, intimately. I began to think about how to defend that place.”

Hurricane Katrina was a thunderbolt moment for O’Kane. She says we each have our various Katrina moments, but when she and her husband learned that their home was underwater, she could no longer ignore the impact humans have had on nature. When she realized she couldn’t live in New Orleans, she and her husband relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, and became citizens of their place.

After hearing Wendell Berry talk about hundreds of local solutions, O’Kane realized her dissertation had to contribute to one of them. O’Kane wrote: For millennia, our species has seen birds as symbols of liberation. Well, they were certainly liberating me. They’d liberated me from the worst depression of my life after (Hurricane) Katrina when I’d sunk into a hole of hopelessness. They’d liberated me from a journalism career that had gone stale after too many years focusing on the ugliest stories. They’d liberated me from the mental cage of a toxic decades-long relationship with my father, both of us stuck in old roles and victims of our respective cultures and generations — he the macho Irish patriarch from the Old World and I the rebellious “Wild Irish Rose” daughter from the New. And they’d liberated me from the tyranny of a life indoors staring at screens. Bird by bird, every chickadee, nuthatch, catbird, wren, and owl forged a new neural pathway in my brain, a joyful pathway. And then one bright birdy morning, I discovered that my feathered liberators were in big trouble.

We’ve talked here in Matters of Kinship about migratory birds and their need for protected natural places. Great Salt Lake is a prime example of a place where humans have over-extracted resources, resulting in the extinction of migratory bird species. Tens of millions of birds still rely on Great Salt Lake which scientists predict will not last through 2028. (I will link my articles in the Resources. I highly recommend Substack writer for her incredible and creative activism, along with Terry Tempest Williams and many others, to save Great Salt Lake.)

“This park (Warner Park) was so many things to hundreds of thousands of people, but what I loved most about it was that at the very same time, it was a major urban wildlife refuge, a living example of how we — the furred, finned, feathered, and human — could share the planet," says O’Kane. A mother fox taught her kits to hunt near the railroad tracks that bordered Warner Park, a killdeer laid her eggs on rocks nearby, and snapping turtles dug nests along the tracks. Over one hundred species of migratory birds nest and rest in Warner. Wildlife rely on half the 213-acre municipal park as their natural habitat. The other half is occupied by manmade structures: a baseball stadium that seats 6700 people, a 32,000 square foot community center, sidewalks, soccer fields, tennis courts, and parking lots.

As she recounts in Birding to Change the World, O’Kane discovered that Madison’s Planning Commission wanted to rebrand and develop the remaining natural space. Her book is a romp through the adventures of saving the Park. To continue the story, I am borrowing from the model that my neighbor, the singer, author, and activist David LaMotte, speaks of in his TED talk (noted in Resources.)

DAVID LAMOTTE’S MODEL FOR ACTIVISM

1. Find your thing.
   O’Kane and her husband, Jim Carrier, founded Wild Warner to save the remaining green space in Warner Park. They wanted to recognize the needs of wildlife, migratory birds, and humans. They were warned off by wizened politicos who let them know that once elected officials put plans in motion, there were egos and political legacies at stake. Trish and Jim persisted anyway.

2. Find your people
   O’Kane gathered with neighbors. Heddie, fondly called Our Lady of Applesauce, for welcoming new neighbors with anything apple made from the fruit of Warner Park’s trees, had asked why there were plans afoot to put in new sidewalks. This led O’Kane to use her old journalism skills to find that, indeed, there were construction plans beyond new sidewalks. The wetland where herons fished, and wood ducks raised their families would become a pontoon concession. Lights would be installed all over the park, and city planners thought the wild meadow would be a good place for another athletic field.

   Heddie’s daughter, known for getting things done, joined the group. O’Kane’s husband (the silent hero of this book) became the leader, and Wild Warner began.

   
   3. Make a short-term plan

   
   Wild Warner volunteers canvassed the neighborhoods affected by the new park plan. Very few neighbors were aware that the Planning Commission was going to revamp the Park. Many were opposed to the plans, and many were neutral - O’Kane said her sampling would not pass scientific muster given the number of folks who didn’t seem to register the ecological downsides for wildlife. Wild Warner forged ahead anyway. Committee members prepared three-minute speeches to present at the City Council meeting. O’Kane even got the director of the local Audobon Society to speak. The Planning Commission had expected immediate approval, but amazingly, Wild Warner prevailed; the plan was put on hold. 
   
   4. Rinse and Repeat: review the previous short-term implementation and prepare the next one.

   
   The next project involved an education campaign about the toxicity level of their annual fireworks display and the effect on the nesting season for migratory birds. Then, there were issues with the growing number of geese and plans to cut down historic trees, and in the middle of all of this, the City Planner announced a new plan for the Park.  

   While O’Kane was meeting with a legislator, a suggestion emerged. Beginning a children’s program based on birding might be a positive plus for Wild Warner.. Thus, O’Kane’s signature Birding to Change the World course, from which the book gets its title, was born. She paired students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s ecology program with middle school students. They learned how to bird. (At this point I can’t help myself — I really hope you read O’Kane’s memoir. There’s such a joyous account of the interactions between the college students, the middle school students, and O’Kane.)

Chapter by chapter, Trish O’Kane shows how she transformed herself from a traumatized citizen to a powerful advocate for the park. She and Wild Warner became indigenous to the Park.

Whether we are native to the land, newcomers, or just passing through, our job is to protect the species of the natural world, not drive them to extinction. Nature is like a democracy; we have to pay attention, continual, constant loving attention. When we love the land, water, and wildlife, we protect those without voices.

In previous issues, I have written about my quest for the Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River. I learned from Trish O’Kane that it’s possible to change culture just by acting as if our places are living beings. I continue to advocate for legal Rights of Nature. But in the meantime, I am grateful for how Trish O’Kane translates her experiences into a memoir with such enthusiasm, compassion, and wisdom.

I will continue to write about Birding to Change the World. There is much more content to discuss. I will also post some poignant quotes from the book in the coming days.

Trish O’Kane, if you are reading here, please consider this your invitation to join Substack. We are waiting for you!

in kinship,

Katharine🌱

Author’s Note:

The wetland issues continue to concern me. Trish O’Kane’s home in New Orleans was, unbeknownst to her, built on a wetland. In essence, nature reclaimed her land. In the 1960’s, wetland property was inexpensive and often purchased for use as airports. The airport next to Warner Park, as well as much of the park, was built on wetlands. When the Supreme Court voted in favor of Michael Sackett’s ability to backfill the wetlands on his Priest Lake property, they proceeded to remove half of the protection afforded to millions of wetland acres previously protected under the Clean Water Act. More recently the Supreme Court voted to remove Chevron Deference. That means that federal agencies no longer make decisions required by experts. Those decisions will be made by the courts. I will continue to cover this as the situation unfolds. On a local level, our voices need to be heard, now more than ever.

On a lighter note:

I find myself increasingly enthusiastic about Substack as well as Notes. Is it really possible that the culture here is so collaborative? It is. Believe it. If you want to know more about this magnificent movement, spend a moment with on this remarkable post. RECORDING: The Hamish McKenzie (Substack Co-Founder) Interview

Sources:

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane, Ecco Books, 2024

Nesting in the City: Birds, Children and a City Park as Teachers of Environmental Literacy by Trish O’Kane July 2015, PhD Dissertation.

David LaMotte’s TED talk: Why heroes don't change the world | David LaMotte | TEDxAsheville

The Great Salt Lake: winship.substack.com

Great Salt Lake (again): winship.substack.com

: This is the Substack to read if you want to think about PLACE. I am filled with gratitude for Janisse and her teachings. 🌱

Dear friends,

I am both a beneficiary and a victim of growing up in the mid-twentieth century. I don’t mean ‘victim’ in the sense of competing for who had a tougher life—that’s rarely a good path for a writer unless you are Barbara Kingsolver. But I grew up in a time when most male landholders believed the patriarchy’s version of Darwin’s theory of evolution: survival of the fittest. Some still believe that. There are even people who run for public office on the theory that men have dominion over the other 80 million species.

We now know differently. Scientists are translating the world of cooperation, mutualism, and collaboration found in nature. Women have walked into the science labs. They’ve undertaken field work. They have written literary memoirs about their work. They are credited for their observations, unlike Eunice Newton Foote who was overlooked for her discovery that carbon dioxide heats up faster and stays hot longer than ‘regular air’ as oxygen was referenced in 1856.

Collaboration instead of competition. We see a similar phenomena on Substack. The platform works because we all work together.

Last month, I was going through my email, deleting the Substacks knowing I would return to the app later that evening. I was just about to delete one from Substack writer Julie Gabrielli when I noticed it was actually a personal email. She planned to launch interviews with Substack nature writers. Would I be willing to participate, and if so, she included six interview questions. (My answers can be found in my previous cross-post from , Julie’s Substack.)

Julie Gabrielli lives a mindful life. She teaches architecture and writes stories and essays to cultivate hope in the face of climate crisis. She chooses to “align with the story that we belong here, we have a purpose, and we are loved. We are here to bear witness to the miracle of creation: to revel in joy, to sing, dance, paint, write, teach, tell stories.”

Here’s Julie on her connection to the natural world:

“A while back, my ancestors chose to deny their entanglement with the living world. Instead, they made an org chart with human beings at the top and the rest of nature below us. It’s a lonely legacy, this estrangement from brown bears and beetles, clouds, crabs, herons and honeybees, humpbacks, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and maize, oaks and uncountable others. That story of separation and superiority still dominates while the Earth burns and civility unravels. 

If only we could rediscover these relationships with non-humans, we might treasure them more and stop all this ecocide. We might begin to wonder how we could ever see a tree as mere timber, a river as a turbine driver, a mountain only as minerals. What if, instead, we meet them as sacred beings, as mysteries, lifeblood, kin?“

Julie’s work is powerful. She is a human guardian of nature. She collaborates the way nature does. By asking other Substack nature writers why they do what they do, she fosters relationships. I am grateful that she took the time to answer her own questions and sent along the egret photographed flying over the cove behind her home.

1. Why are you drawn to nature writing?

I write from a place of love, to express my love of the world, to share it with others. My wonder and awe—these are outward expressions of love. Tender, laced with joy and with grief. Loss and abundance. Delight and despair. None of this comes easily. Recently I was reminded that being awake hurts. There is no antidote for it. It’s the price of being human. More attention and more noticing are the only way through. 

2. How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?

Writing puts me in a reverie. It’s a balm that  soothes my innate anxiety and softens the rough edges of impotent rage about politics or the latest violation against a wild place. At its best, writing connects me with beings and messages that too often go unnoticed in my busy daily life of responsibilities, lists, and distractions. It’s a way to pay closer attention. Close attention is always rewarded. Quiet insights are possible, and even on rare occasions, revelation. 

3. While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost or in danger? 

Oh, yes. My mother instilled in me her own fear of boats and, by extension, water. (Luckily, she also forced me to have swim lessons as a kid.) So whenever I get on a sailboat, I bring that anxiety with me, even after years of sailing and racing on boats big, small, and in-between. Always. Feeling small has its pluses, though. I love that feeling when sailing in perfect summer weather under the blue dome of sky, that I’m just a speck and that’s as it should be. I’ve been in enough sudden storms to know for a fact that my presence here is a gift and can be revoked at any moment. There’s nothing like the zing of lighting’s energy on the nape of your neck and the fresh smell of ozone when water is struck nearby, to drive that point home. And don’t get me started on the wind.

4. What’s a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?

This feels shameful to admit, but I was mostly an indoor cat as a kid. Sure, I went camping with the Girl Scouts once a year, but have no significant memories of it (other than one sleepless night freezing in a summer nightgown woefully inadequate to the weather). I remember spelunking with my eccentric nuclear-physicist uncle in Missouri and maybe a very boring fishing trip on a lake in Texas with my dad. My mother was terrified of boats, so that outing may be imagined. The one thing we did outdoors every year without fail was go to the beach for a week. Once I befriended my fear of the water, I enjoyed jumping waves and body surfing, and on land the endless hours to beachwalk, scope out boys and read junky novels. My love of the outdoors has grown in my adult life, so my sense of wonder is a way of reliving my childhood and making up for lost time.

5. What do you hope for, for your writing? 

The visionary architect, R. Buckminster Fuller, said, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth, only crew.” I hope my writing draws people in to experience their own belonging, to know that they are welcome and needed. They are not bystanders. “Nature” and “the environment” are not places separate from us or inconveniences that we can overcome with technology. The very fact that we need words for them speaks to our self-exile. 

6. A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and the earth.

So many. I’d have to begin with Annie Dillard, whose book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek taught me at a pivotal moment in my career how to see what really matters, and that it’s fine to lose myself in the leaves on a tree. Wendell Berry’s essays always challenge me to think more expansively and to embrace nondual paradox. Thomas Berry, David Abram, Martin Shaw, Sharon Blackie, and Paul Kingsnorth expand my sense of reality, and emphasize storytelling’s critical role in the human experience. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful presence and writing in Braiding Sweetgrass give me hope—an all-too-rare commodity these days. Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant, honest and clear writer, clarifies hope for me: what it is and isn’t, and how hope is both intentional practice and unpredictable outcome. Journalists Amy Westervelt and Emily Atkin are fierce truth-tellers about climate. As are Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, whose anthology, All We Can Save, is full of positive action and activism. As I continue to write my way into more intimate reciprocity with my beyond human kin, I always return to the inventive fun of Brian Doyle’s stories, which I wrote about for “The Books That Made Us,” here.

🌱

You can find with her stories, essays and interviews with nature writers at .

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Next up for is a series of essays based on Birding to Change the World. Sound like an outlandish title? That’s what I thought until I realized that Trish O’Kane’s memoir is a step by step, story by story manual of how to organize for change, address city councils, educate to save green spaces, and find joy at the same time. I am eager to share with you!

in kinship,

Katharine

PS: Pressing the ❤️ button helps this publication along. Your comments brings us together in community. And paid subscriptions support my research. Many thanks for being here, however you show up.🌱

Scientists who can explain how nature works inspire me. I am particularly in awe of scientists who weave dry science into stories that we, the everyday people, can understand. I think you know that Robin Wall Kimmerer is that scientist for me. I look for writers like Kimmerer to share with you.

For several years, the marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has captured my mind and heart. Her work intersects marine science and environmental justice. She is the co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, she teaches at Bowdoin College, and she is the co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. Johnson, forty-three, is wildly intelligent, funny, and beautifully human. Her forthcoming book is What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.

The New York Times published an interview with her called “This Climate Scientist Has an Antidote to Our Climate Delusions” on May 18, 2024.

Johnson talked with David Marchese about possible climate futures: renewable energy, improved public transit, and reduced consumption. She echoes a message from All We Can Save — the climate solutions have already been invented; now they need to be implemented. She notes that Biden’s Infrastructure Act has already created training, jobs, and lower energy bills, especially in the very red states.

Johnson concedes that getting it right does not mean pristine or perfect. “I’m not an optimist. I see the data. I see what’s coming. But I also see the full range of possible futures.” Johnson's message echoes that of Robin Wall Kimmerer: we are one of many species, and our practice is to be kin.

What prevents us?

“We have a divided and underinformed populace, and that makes everything so much harder. The climate crisis is going to give us a lot of tests on how we can collaborate across various social divisions,” Johnson says.

David Marchese admits, “I don’t know how to think about the future.”

Johnson: “What are you afraid to give up?”

Marchese: “Comfort.”

Johnson: “That’s good of you to admit. I think we all want to hold on to our comforts.”

Marchese: “Is there an antidote to that kind of thinking?”

Johnson: “I think the answer is in community…You can maybe grip tightly onto your comfort in the short term, but the more we resist being part of the collective solution, the less likely the collective solution is going to happen. In a sense, you’re echoing a bit of this bunker mentality where we have these megaweathy people who are buying up land in New Zealand and wherever else trying to save themselves. That seems like such a sad way to see the world. Like, do you want to live in a bunker for a year eating canned rations? Is that the life we want to build? Or do we all try to make sure we have a world where there’s enough for everybody, where no one takes too much and we share what we have. I’d rather share.”

Johnson says she not calling out her interviewer. She says we live in a consumer culture. She shifts the burden of responsibility to the very small group of people who make the significant decisions that affect millions of species.

“There are actual fossil fuel, advertising, and big agriculture executives, and politicians who are enabling all of this. There are individual humans, actually quite a small group of them, who are making these decisions that impact life on the planet. That should make you mad because who are they to decide about life on earth and to be so callous and so short-term thinking and so quarterly earnings and shareholder dividend driven that they are jeopardizing biodiversity and the quality of life for everyone?”

That quote of Johnson’s is in The New York Times podcast version but not in the article. One thousand one hundred and thirty-nine people commented on the article before the Comment section closed. I read most of them. As a species, we sound somewhat cranky and, sometimes, confused. One astute commenter pointed to the exact spot where Johnson’s remarks — critical of big powers — begin and end on the podcast (14.10-14.55). The commenter lamented the omission in the written version.

Given the tremendous power that advertising revenue wields over the newspaper, it’s surprising that Johnson’s quote remained intact on the podcast. I acknowledge the paper’s prerogative to cut Johnson’s 45 seconds, which highlights the abuse of corporate power. Still, it’s a signal that quite a small group can sabotage the planet and influence how we live. In this example, they have muffled the communication between the scientist and the public.

I need a personal moment here. In this time of change in the publishing field, I appreciate what the big houses and publications can do for the greater good. Yet I really really appreciate Substack. As a writer, I am delighted that Substack provides a place where we can create and ship to our readers in an expeditious and caring way. That feels necessary right now. Thank you and crew. Thank you, dear readers!

According to Johnson, 62% of Americans feel a personal responsibility to help reduce global warming, and 51% say they don’t know where to start. How could we? It’s almost impossible not to be influenced by that small group of politicians, fossil fuel companies, big agriculture, and advertising executives. What happens when we subject our intellect to a constant barrage of advertising? What happens when a cultural institution cuts the truth out of the heart of an interview? How do we deal with the cultural desire to continue living the way we live?

We are at an inflection point. It feels, to me, like we are in an estuary. For some, estuaries can feel brackish or mucky. That’s understandable. Yet when we think about the many species that collaborate in estuaries, we might pause to study how they get along. Estuaries are those places where saltwater meets freshwater. They contain the rich biodiversity of the watery world. They breathe between the land and sea. What if we took a collective breath? What if we sat in council and passed the talking stick or the microphone? What if we listened? And what if listening to each other included listening to the estuary, the muskrat, and the Great Blue Heron — our 1.5 million-year-old cousin, with their genus Ardea, dating back 14 million years?

I’m going to channel , the master of nature and environmental action lists. What are the little things we can do daily that will make a substantial difference over time?

I’ll go first. For context, I tend to start small. It’s my way of taking that first step.

1. Keep a nature journal. Some days, I write a few lines. On other days, I’m more elaborate, writing extended pieces and dipping my paintbrush in water. My objective is to observe and record the more than human world. My attention extends to trees and water, chipmunks and acorns, and so many shades of green. I am an apprentice to nature.

   

2. Pick an environmental action community. I choose to work on Rights of Nature. The proposed amendment we wrote for our town charter is pinned to my bulletin board as we decide whether to expand our focus statewide.

3. Do the work that calls you. I love to write. My work here on is my way to research what others might not, and translate that into story.

4. Do what love calls you to do. Love calls me to summon my courage. I am inspired by writers who challenge society’s mores. In particular, I look up to Terry Tempest Williams. Just before I published this piece, the environmental artist Nancy Winship Milliken (my sister❤️) forwarded the Middlebury College commencement address featuring Williams. In recognition of the recent college encampments, Williams talked about her arrest for civil disobedience. Decades ago, the US government began bomb testing in the Utah desert. There was radiation fallout. Nine women in Williams’ family underwent mastectomies, and seven of them died from breast cancer. Williams attended a protest and was arrested. As one officer handcuffed her, another bodily searched her. The officer found her notebook and pen inside her boot.

Officer: “What’s this?”

Williams: “Weapons.”

Their eyes met. The officer tucked Williams’ pant leg back over her boot, notebook and pen in place. Williams says she became a writer in that moment.

I look forward to your comments.

in kinship,

Katharine

🌱Author’s Notes:

HONORING

I want to honor Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s co-editor from All We Can Save.

Katharine K. Wilkinson continues ALL WE CAN SAVE as a project with far-reaching social and ecological benefits. Her mission is to nurture climate leadership, and she’s curated a world of resources at allwecansave.net.

My friend Mallory McDuff, a Warren Wilson College professor and frequent resource for this publication, just returned from the latest All We Can Save retreat in Georgia. Mallory said the retreat was well-facilitated with faculty and staff working on climate, from student mental health counselors to climate scientists.

“I’ve admired and written about Katharine Wilkinson for years, since I first heard her give a version of her TED talk to a packed audience in Asheville, NC. As a writer, speaker, and facilitator, Katharine brings her full self to any endeavor — her keen intellect, her poise and grace, her emotions, and her belief that "all we can save’ is worth fighting for — not in a line of battle, but rather in a circle of caring for each other and the places we love.” Dr. Mallory McDuff, author of LOVE YOUR MOTHER: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice.

WHAT I’M READING

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

This book is traveling everywhere with me. I can’t put it down. Amy Tan pulled hundreds of pages from nine of her journals. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a record of Tan’s obsession with nature and her growth as an artist. I can’t wait to share more with you.

Sources:

This Scientist Has An Antidote to Our Climate Delusions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/magazine/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis co-editors Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, One World, 2021