How Do You Begin to Heal a Wound You’ve Never Lived Without?
On the koan of living in 2024
Someone once told me that if you live in California today, you’ve never seen a healthy forest. After almost two centuries of wall-to-wall exploitation and degradation of the land, we’ve rendered the mighty forests of the West feeble, sick and prone to disaster. When they burn, we burn with them.
In 2024, we live so far removed from anything that resembles real ecological health that trying to contemplate it boggles the mind. What was it like here when European settlers, my ancestors, first arrived here, rolling from the Cascades and the Sierras down to the valley, up again on coastal ranges and out into the sea? Back when the wild was so well-tended that the wilderness seemed like a garden. When it was said that flocks of birds flew so thick and strong over the skies that they blocked out the sun?
Now, we have deserts of silence where the soundscapes once overflowed with the music of life. Now, we have concrete oceans where people live isolated behind walls, unknown to one another, struggling through daily disasters of precarity and exploitation. What we’ve done to the land, we’ve done to ourselves. I don’t know which came first — exploiting the Earth or exploiting one another. I’m inclined to think the two cannot be separated at all.
