On: EPA to open habitats of endangered species to logging and mining
They announce the opening of the wild places to the axes and drills, calling it “balance.” As if the earth were a ledger to be reconciled. The protectors weep, drafting petitions to chain the trees against their own flesh. But I walk to the river and watch it bend around stones older than their laws. The water does not shout at the dam. It waits, and in waiting, becomes the sea.
The legislators see decay in the untouched forest - a “resource” asleep, they say. They believe only what is carved has value. But the uncarved block holds all possibilities. When they strip the hillside for timber, they call it “use.” When the soil washes into the stream, they name it “progress.” The root does not argue. It loosens, silently, and the next storm carries it away.
They speak of “saving” the tiger by counting its stripes, as if existence were a debt to be repaid in paperwork. Yet the tiger’s breath is not measured in permits. It thrives where no name is given, where the hunter and the hunted share the same breath without reckoning. The law cannot cage the wind and call it air.
What if the solution is not to build higher fences but to forget the idea of fences? Let the miner’s path wind so far from the mountain’s heart that his boots grow heavy with doubt. Let the logger’s axe hesitate where the trees stand so close, their shadows weaving into a canopy too dense to measure. The earth does not need our guardianship. It needs our absence.
I once saw a village that starved because they forced the river to irrigate their fields. The water rebelled, flooding their ditches. When they stepped back, the river returned to its bed, and the fields drank deeply. So too here: the wild is not a problem to be solved but a mirror. What they call “destruction” is the mirror’s reflection of their own hunger.
The decree will pass. The machines will groan into the silence. But the earth outlives the axe. It always has. The only true refuge is the one that cannot be named - the unspoken pact between root and rain, between the seed that splits stone and the stone that cradles the seed. Let them log. Let them mine. The forest returns, always, when the greed grows tired.
The wise ruler does not chain the wolf. He removes the reason for its hunger. But this? This is not wisdom. This is the child who stabs the beehive, astonished when the swarm rises. I close my eyes. The bees will rebuild. The child will forget. The hive endures.