Below are the remarks I offered to writers on the opening night of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, which I direct:

This morning I woke up to find a freshly dead crow in my driveway. For someone who throws her own tarot cards every morning, this felt ominous. Or it felt like something. I have the incessant desire to make meaning out of everything.

I walked to the crow and placed my hand on its body, because one time I did this to what I thought was a dead owl on the highway and it woke up. It essentially resurrected itself and looked into my soul at close range. The crow did not wake up. Its body was still warm.

Ed, a Bread Loaf legend who works the front desk, told me he wasn’t as soft at heart as I was and that he’d come by with a dustpan, which he did, swiftly.

When I first started writing, I attended a reading where the outdoor writer Bob Shacochis claimed that Americans are hands off and puritanical when it comes to death, to truly bearing witness to what makes them uncomfortable, to sitting with loss in a deep and present way (I can’t find evidence of this talk to fact-check it, so all I can offer is the memory).

I think about my discomfort with death and loss while handling the crow. I think about it in my own life. I think about it as we gather here this week in a stormy, churning world of loss, trying to be present. Trying to see clearly.

Last week I was working with the Conservation Law Foundation on narrative strategy. One of the lawyers said to me that, in the wake of last year’s election, there was pressure to make every story about affordability. Am I supposed to pretend that it’s the only reason we might want to address climate change or save a species? the lawyer asked me. Is that all it is now? The bottom line?

We are in a moment where thinking and environmental policy is trending in a devastatingly anthropocentric direction – that precious marine sanctuaries protecting diminished species can be fished, that national parks can be developed, that weather data crucial to farming and fishing can be privatized. That the natural world is full of resources that we, as human, can make of what we wish. This, during a time of landscapes and communities wounded by war, and a president who said, of a recent bombing, that it would be “great for markets.”

I want to believe in more. That we are a species capable of better thinking, and, universe willing, better actions. Never has the universe seemed more like the EO Wilson quote where he stated that the “real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Recently, I helped award the Thoreau Prize to Robert MacFarlane, whose latest book asserts that rivers are not just here for humans to use – that rivers are alive and should be recognized as such in both our imagination and the law.

How will the markets register rivers that are too hot and too burdened to carry salmon? How will the markets respond to the starvation of a nation? To the last ghost elephants of Senegal who have evaded poaching? To a right whale calf boat strike when there are only 370 left?

In his remarks for accepting his award, Robert MacFarlane said that to change our perspective on the rights of rivers – or the rights of any non-human species – may call for a great reach outwards of the imagination – a future kind of thinking.”

And when I read Bread Loaf Environmental applications this year I thought: here are the future thinkers we need. Here are the people who are going to let the world know about the health of canals, rare birds, complexities of migration in this era, how a wounded world wounds each of us. Here are the writers who are going to use fiction and poetry to evoke important emotional truths and highlight the persistent wonders of the natural world alongside the sickness of this time.

This is our work as Writers. Listeners. Witnesses. To reckon honestly and deeply in this era with the greed of the human species, with loss, with godlike technology.

Someone told me once that there are writers who pull up the ladder, and writers who extend it to others - I hope you share what you learn this week with your communities. Please – open up more environmental conversations. Welcome people into this way of paying attention. Welcome them into this work. Be the third or fourth time someone hears an idea they find agitating but are now forced to consider. Write the op ed. Push back. Brake for butterflies and birds along the way to the town meeting. Ask the follow up question. Write the book. Take the mic. Be at least as loud and strategic as the developer who thinks old growth forests and salt marshes are a great place for luxury homes.

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You can hear me read these remarks here, starting at the 7:30 mark.

And, to close, a poem by WS Merwin, that reminds me to cherish the good that we have, while we have it.

Wishing you a peaceful & creative summer,

xo
MMB

The Present
WS Merwin

As they were leaving the garden
one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this
as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is
or what it is for
what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it
but you will not be able

to keep anything
yet they both reached at once

for the present
and when their hands met

they laughed