That’s the basic message of the Arctic Report Card, a compendium of scientific observations issued annually by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Launched in 2006, the report tracks changes to some of the defining components of Arctic ecosystems: temperatures, precipitation, thickness and extent of ice on the sea and on land, etc. Perusing the archive, the trends are painfully clear. Air and sea temperatures going up. Snow cover going down. Greenland ice sheet steadily losing mass. All of these changes (along with permafrost thaw, Atlantification of the sea, and more1) impact the whole planet — they are telling us that our climate system is getting knocked increasingly out of whack by the mass burning of fossil fuels. If the goal is a stable biosphere, the Arctic Report Card tells us we are failing.

President Trump would prefer to live in a world in which he never fails at anything, so his administration has cancelled the Arctic Report Card.2

This is, of course, part of a pattern of shutting down scientific assessments that tend to provide information the administration doesn’t want to hear. Twila Moon, senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, described it this way on LinkedIn:

“Add this to other climate information cancellations: dissolution of climate.gov, removal of reporting on billion dollar disasters, last-minute termination of the National Nature Assessment, and more….”

Moon is a highly respected glaciologist who has served as a lead editor of the Arctic Report Card. She knows what’s at stake here:

“The Arctic is the fastest changing region of the planet. Compounding hazards are influencing lives and livelihoods for the Arctic’s ~4 million people. And Arctic change is also creating wide ripples - influencing business, geopolitics, security, travel, coastal flooding, and so much more. What a devastating time to make timely, accurate, and integrated observations of the Arctic harder to access.”

Trimble Gilbert is one of those four million people who lives in the Arctic, and he understands these changes in an intimate, immediate way. He’s a traditional chief and a revered elder from the Gwich’in community of Arctic Village, Alaska. I met him in 2017 when I was reporting in Alaska for Threshold, and my interview with him stands out as one of the most memorable of my career. I don’t know if I can fully explain why — it’s a combination of what Trimble had to say and how he said it, mixed together with the remarkable life he has lived.

Like Sarah James and other Gwich’in elders I interviewed in Arctic Village,3 Trimble grew up learning how to survive on the land and provide for his family and community with traditional foods — caribou, fish, birds, berries. He is deeply knowledgeable about the land, water, and animals around him, and he’s worried about how they’re changing.

You can hear from Trimble in the “Arctic dispatch” we’re releasing on the Threshold feed today. Here’s a short clip — just search for Threshold in your podcast app to hear the whole thing.

There’s an update on another story there, too — the push to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the lease sale that happened a few months ago.

The news from the Arctic might be heavy, but revisiting this conversation with Trimble Gilbert reminds me why I decided to pour my attention toward the far north a decade ago. It’s a beautiful, fascinating part of our planet, and no matter where we live, we are both changing it, and changed by what happens there. I don’t think we’re listening deeply enough to the Arctic, or to the people who live there.

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That question is bouncing around in my head today, sparked by a conversation with elephant expert Joyce Poole. Joyce has devoted her life to researching African savanna elephants — observing them in the wild, advocating for their survival, and creating a fascinating collection of their communication and behavior, called The Elephant Ethogram. I met her in Kenya a few years ago when I was reporting for Threshold, and we talked again this week for some upcoming stories I’m working on.

In our free-ranging conversation about intelligence, communication, and more, we wandered into this question of story-making. Do other species do it? It’s one of those questions that forces you down a path of interlocking concept-defining: what is a story? Can you have a story without language? What is language? Who decides?

I’m interested in those questions, but I’m not going to attempt to answer them here. I’m just savoring the question, because it’s one I hadn’t considered before, at least not directly. Story is fundamental to our species. Human minds are story-making machines; we have stories about our families of origin, our jobs, our partners, the people and parties we vote for, what we eat, what we wear, where we live, our histories, our futures. We make stories about our stories, and then we make more stories about those stories. Human behavior flows directly out of these narratives we absorb, believe, and tell, shaping our individual lives and our societies.

So what about elephants? Or robins? Or that little leech I came upon last week? (Thanks to everyone who chimed in about that!) I think it’s safe to assume that no animals make stories in exactly the same way that we do, and probably not to the same degree. But that doesn’t mean they don’t do it at all. If story-making is a process of making connections between events (OK, I did try to answer one of those definition questions) then surely my dog has some, i.e., “When she opens the closet door and pulls out my leash, we’re going for a walk.”

It’s hard enough to understand the narratives some of our fellow humans operate within; understanding the story-making apparatus of another species may be next to impossible. It’s analogous to and partly a consequence of the fact that we cannot enter another creature’s “Umwelt”1 — a term coined in the early 1900s by a Baltic German biologist to describe an animal’s specific perceptual reality. But although we might not be able to get all the way inside another animal’s stories, we can still be curious about what those stories might be, how they could be made and shared, and how that shapes their behavior. It’s a shift of position that feels both more respectful and more interesting than assuming that we hold all the narrative reins. Storytelling is powerful. Asking — what’s your story? — is a way of acknowledging that we don’t have, and shouldn’t claim, all that power for ourselves. It nudges us toward recognizing that other animals are authors of their lives, not just characters in our dramas.

If we’re looking for likely candidates for story-making animals, elephants have to be at or near the top of the list. Here’s one of the dozens of behaviors cataloged in Joyce Poole’s Elephant Ethogram (which is just one part of her nonprofit, ElephantVoices. She gave each behavior a name, and this one is called “Adorn-body.” Her description of it is pasted in below.

So what’s the story with this goofy little grass-hat? Most importantly, what is the elephant’s story about it — is it about keeping cool, or looking cool? Or something else entirely?

We may never know, but I suspect our own stories are enriched by the asking.

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I made this audio postcard earlier this week on a warm, quiet evening here in northern Sweden. As will likely be evident if you listen, I didn’t go out that night with a plan to make something. I just brought my mic and recorder along on a little hike with our dog, Sigge, because it was a calm night in a beautiful world, and I was in the mood to pause and listen to it. Hope you enjoy dropping into that experience with me for a few minutes.

Then, last night, I came upon this mystery creature at a different watery spot:

What the heck? I’ve never seen this, or anything like it, in my life. Which is pretty delightful. So delightful, in fact, that I have resisted looking it up. I am reveling in my not-knowing! Is it a snail without a shell? A baby snake? A tadpole? A punctuation mark become animate? (Is a comma alive?)

Rather than asking Google or Claude or any digitized anything, I’m bringing the question to you, dear readers. What is this mystery globby thing? Please share your actual knowledge and/or your most imaginative guesses in the comments.

Thanks!

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This will be my last post for a few weeks. I’m so grateful to you for reading, responding to, sharing, and supporting my work. Thank you. I’ll see you later this summer!

He split the logs, I picked up the kindling.

He raised the axe high, brought it down hard, and a wedge of wood went flying. Then he did it again. And again.

I watched, waited. Stayed out of the way, as I’d been taught, or didn’t need to be taught: the fast-flying logs that went spinning off in surprising directions were their own education.

You didn’t go scurrying in to get the kindling in between every blow. You had to wait until there was a longer pause; when he needed to get another log set up for splitting, when he rested for a beat or two. Then you sprung into action, mouse-like, collecting the crumbs.

I took pride in my speed, my ability to grab everything I could see and get out of there without interrupting his flow. Tibia-length spears, tiny crumbly shards, anything burnable, all of it rough and sharp. I was thorough and fast. He never had to wait for me.

We both understood that he was doing the real work, turning leg-sized pieces of tree-body into logs that would fit into our stove, and warm our house. My role was secondary. Waste prevention. The gleaner, the cleaner.

He hunted, I gathered. He set the rhythm, I danced in on the offbeats. He stood, lifted, and swung. I crouched, plucked, and hurried back out of the way. He made loud noises: the thwack of the axe blade against the wood, the thump of the logs landing, the grunt of another heave, another lift. I was silent.

He worked big. I worked small.

He worked high, I worked low.

He broke things apart, I picked up the pieces.

He was kind, my dad. Or he could be, and usually was. Patient, often, and interested in teaching me. At some point, I graduated from picking up kindling to making it myself.

He showed me how. Hold the small, light log-bit on its end. Set the hatchet firmly into it. Then lift them both, hatchet and wood fastened together, and bring them down, hard, onto the splitting surface. An old stump worked best.

Things could go wrong, or rather, would. Guaranteed. The wood was a once-living thing, and therefore was full of all the unpredictability of life — curves and bumps, wounds and knots. The grain that looked straight and regular on the surface might prove to be twisted and tangled somewhere inside. These things could knock your hatchet off course, or just stop it altogether. You can get stuck deep in the wood. Then you have to figure out your options.

There were three. You could apply more force; keep trying to slam the hatchet in, hard as you could. Or, you could sometimes knock the hatchet loose, and start again from the other end of the log. Another possibility was to surrender; toss that piece aside to be burned as is, and pick up a different one.

There was no way to know in advance which option would work best. You just had to do something, and find out. You had to ask the wood — this way? no? how about this way then? — and pay attention to the answer.

I noticed that he usually he chose option one: more force. I noticed that it didn’t always work. Somewhere, very quietly inside, I wondered about that.

A tree is a being, not a thing.

So is a fire. Each one has a lifespan: a birth-spark, a growing period, a maturation, a death. Kindling is food for the very new, tender flames. Crucial nourishment for a blaze so young it doesn’t even know its own name yet.

I remember standing next to him, skinny as a stick in my oversized overalls, watching, learning. It wasn’t an uncomplicated bond we shared, but it was, without a doubt, a loving one.

Tree becomes kindling. Kindling becomes fire. Fire becomes light. Light feeds the tree.

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One of things that was important to me in making Hark was to avoid a “nature good / people bad” dichotomy. First of all, because people are nature and nature is people. But also because with all the ugly, aggressive, thoughtless noise our species is making right now, it’s easy to fall into an overly simplistic, finger-waggy narrative, and forget all the ways that humans add lovely and interesting sounds to this world too.

One of those sounds rolled past my door a few minutes ago, so I decided to share it here. This is 30-ish seconds of me pausing to listen to a fellow human, unknown to me but appreciated from afar. Well, not too far, really. She passes through my neighborhood, and I look up from doing dishes in my kitchen, writing on my front stoop, or pulling weeds in my yard. And I smile.

Thanks, Ice Cream Lady.

She died on May 27. Soon we’ll gather to honor her, celebrate her too-short life, tell stories about her, cry our eyes out, laugh the way she laughed—readily, with her whole self, often gasping for breath—sing of and to and for her, hearing her rich, flute-like voice in our heads. We’ll hug her incredible husband and two brilliant daughters. We’ll look into each others’ grieving faces, not knowing what to say, what to do, how to take in her absence.

I want to write a massive tribute to Monica. An epic poem. A saga. A rock opera, but with acoustic guitars and seven-layer harmonies and trumpets and maybe a kazoo choir. A gorgeous, heartbreaking novel that gets made into a blockbuster film that wins the Oscar and actually deserves it. But I can’t do those things right now, so I’ll just say this:

Monica was available to wonder. We took a lot of walks together, and I don’t think there was one when we didn’t stop to notice something beautiful together. Once it was owls flying just ahead of us in the dark. Often it was the sky. First blooms on a flower. Larches blazing golden in the fall. On the last walk I took with her, in March, it was meadowlarks. We stood there together on Mount Sentinel, just listening, not talking, wonder-struck. We could do that together. We did that together.

A couple of days ago I randomly hit play on a recording of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher, giving a talk. To practice meditation, he said, is to practice freedom. Freedom from forgetfulness that life is a wonder.

Monica had that freedom. She moved through the world with a keen awareness of how precious it is, how precious we all are, what a gift it is to be alive. Not every moment, of course (thankfully, she was not a saint) but long before she had a terminal diagnosis, she understood that life is a wonder, and I think she had made a practice of remembering that, in her way. She had cultivated the habit of being open to beauty, to connection, to the layers of a conversation or an experience that really matter. One of the joys of being her friend was watching how she pulled that depth out of people, and feeling her pulling it out of me, while also frequently laughing so hard we cried. She flowed so gracefully between heavy and light, gravitas and goofiness.

Monica was 49 years old when she found out she was going to die in a few months. She was fit and strong and fully engaged in life, the mother of two teenage girls, leader of an elementary school, deeply loved and needed by her partner, family, friends, community, and the world. It was like she was in the middle of a book, and suddenly hundreds of pages got ripped out, and she was thrown into the last chapter. She had every right to collapse into despair, rage, and a massive sense of unfairness. I know she had those feelings—again, thankfully, she was a real person—but what she chose to do was live. All that practice she had done for years, noticing and appreciating the life within and around her kicked into gear, and she poured her remaining energy into being with people and in places she loved, doing what filled her up and felt important, being as present as she could.

Watching her, being with her, I learned something about the connection between acceptance and liberation. Instead of wasting time fighting with reality, she got to work adapting to it. That allowed her to live her last few months the way she lived so much of her short time on Earth — in freedom from forgetfulness that life is a wonder.

Each of these places has its own story, but the logic for their destruction can almost always be boiled down to something every kid knows: cleaning up after yourself is a drag. It’s simpler and easier to make a mess and walk away. Do what you want to do and let someone else bear the consequences.

Next week, Threshold will be releasing The Corridor, a new series about one of these places — a stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is often referred to as Cancer Alley. Over seven episodes, The Corridor examines how this part of Louisiana became a center of industry and an epicenter of disease, with some communities facing cancer risks among the highest in the nation.

Hosted by Jaha Nailah Avery and written/produced by Erika Janik and Sam Moore, this series connects the dots between current battles for environmental justice and the history of slavery and segregation. It’s the story of a place, and the people with deep roots there. It’s also the story of products all of us use every day, and the industries that are counting on us to not think about who and what gets sacrificed in the process of making them.

Listen to the trailer here or on our website, and tune in for our first episode on the Threshold feed next Tuesday.

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That’s what I kept thinking when I was on the Greenland ice sheet years ago with a team of scientists from the University of Montana1. For most of a week, we walked, worked, cooked, ate, and slept on a massive slab of precious, drinkable, fresh water. A mountain of it, thousands of feet thick.

The ice sheet is a surreal, desert-like waterworld. When you depart from the edge, you leave rocks, soil, trees, and anything that might grow or perch on them behind. Whatever land exists is buried far below, untouched by the Sun for hundreds of thousands of years. Theoretically, you’re still in the terrestrial realm, but water is the only substance and substrate. It is architecture and architect; everywhere you look, everything you touch, it’s all water, constantly making, melting, and remaking itself.

This shape-shifting follows an annual rhythm — even without human intervention in climactic processes, ice sheets grow and shrink with the seasons. But as we overheat the world, the shrinkage is winning.2 The ice sheet is being un-made faster than it can rebuild itself. On our helicopter ride in to the study site, we flew over ponds melting into lakes, lakes growing into freshwater seas. We walked from our lonely little circle of tents to the edges of gorgeous, deadly rivers carving twisting paths into the surface; indigo veins painted on the icebody, a new circulatory system birthing itself before our eyes. I dropped my microphone down into a crevasse and listened to this ancient structure groan, gurgle, and pop, the voice of a mighty creature transforming from solid into liquid.

The Greenland ice sheet holds around 10% of the world’s freshwater. Every second, the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools of that water are gushing into the sea.

All of this came to mind for me recently while talking to Kaveh Madani for Threshold Conversations. Kaveh is the director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health at the UN University, and this year’s winner of the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize for water issues.” Iranian by birth and now living in exile, he’s trying to shake the world out of denial about how rapidly and dramatically we are depleting our fresh water resources. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Listen here

I can feel my own internal resistance to really hearing what Kaveh is saying, and what he communicated in the Global Water Bankruptcy report published earlier this year. Our need for fresh water is so primal and raw; it’s scary to take in its scarcity. But as Kaveh said in our conversation, the worst thing you can do in a bankrupt situation is delay being honest about it. That’s how you end up drowning cities in one place and pushing people into drought and famine in another.

As with all of these huge ecological issues, I don’t know what I can do that’s useful, but the first step, as always, is just acknowledging reality. That’s where my time on the Greenland ice sheet is helpful, I guess: I could feel and hear and sense the loss there in a personal, tangible way. That mountain of fresh water I had the privilege of sleeping on for a week — it’s getting smaller and smaller. It cannot replenish itself because of our actions, and neither can many of the rivers, lakes, and aquifers we rely on to fill our taps and grow our food. We are “living beyond our hydrological means,” as Kaveh’s report puts it; spending down water resources that we cannot repay.

I lift a glass of clean water to my mouth, take a drink. Take a breath. Take it in.

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At first, I pointed the microphone up, trying to locate it. There are so many returning birds right now, I thought this was one I hadn’t yet heard. But I quickly realized the source of the sound was at my feet, hanging out in the liminal zone between water and land — an amphibian. As you’ll hear in the recording, my first guess was that it was a frog, but now I’m pretty sure it was Bufo bufo, the common toad. I find its little chirps adorable. I hope you do, too, and even moreso, I hope there were some ladytoads within listening range, drawn to this fellow’s siren song.1

I’m currently in London, attending the MOTH Festival of Ideas — a gathering of people working at the leading edge of research and thought about human relationships with more-than-human beings and entities (that’s what the MOTH stands for in the name, more than human). It’s been fascinating so far, with lots of people sharing boundary-expanding research and ideas. Just one quick example: last night, economist Kate Raworth turned the audience into a pop-up circus that reinvented the global financial system to benefit nature.

One of the things I am loving about this gathering is that among all the heady talk about things like expanding rights to more-than-human entities and restructuring institutions in less human-centric ways, people are also sharing emotions and experience of connection to plants, animals, fungi, and places. I’ve wiped away some tears, laughed out loud several times, and taken some sharp in-breaths of wonder. This is a very thinky space, but not only that. There’s room for feeling, too. Including the simple delight of meeting a toad.

George Orwell wrote a beautiful little essay in defense of this same delight, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are two especially resonant excerpts:

I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets.

~

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

George Orwell. First published in Tribune, 12 April 1946. From the Complete Works, XVIII, 2970, p. 238.

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I’ve been wanting to write a post about this t-shirt ever since. I’ve spent some time drafting paragraphs, meditating on layers of meaning, making connections to the writings of environmental philosopher Paul Shepard….

But where I’m landing, finally, is just this.

War is so immature.

We cannot solve anything — including and especially our converging ecological crises — if we cannot teach ourselves how to disagree with more maturity.

Time to grow up, humanity.

We don’t really have a choice.

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These are some of my answers to the question I posed a couple of weeks ago here: what am I for? I want these things and many more for us humans. But mixed into and undergirding that list, there’s also this: birdsong. I’m all for it, and the health and well-being of the mini-dinosaurs that produce it. Also, tracks in the snow. Having snow at all, and having hare, lynx, moose, mouse, and other creatures great and small leaving intertwining trails through it. I want a world full of beings free to engage in their own quests for survival — their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness — with as little intrusion from me and my fellow humans as possible.

I’m for oceans full of the croaks and grunts of fish, the squeaks and buzzes of dolphins, the clicks and musical moans of whales. I’m for forests slowly growing into metropolises of untamed life, roots tangled together underground like clasped hands, needles and leaves eating the over-carbonized air, metabolizing our madness, transforming our sins into heartwood and oxygen.

I’m tempted to say that I am for taking better care of our planet, but that would misconstrue the power dynamics of this relationship, kind of like a three-year-old saying she wants to take better care of her parents. Sweet, but confused. What I am actually for is a planet that cares for us and for all life, and plans and policies that support its ability to do so. I’m for a politics built on the understanding that there is no such thing as the human world versus the natural world, that this notion of separateness is empirically false — a sort of mass delusion, the Kool-Aid we sip together inside the walled compound of our human-centric cult.

How do we enact these values, and make these ideas real? For starters, we can recognize the power and promise of America’s signature environmental laws and policies — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, the Roadless Rule, and more — and restore them as soon as we have the chance.

We can spend $25 billion federal dollars next year to hire many thousands of people to work on restoration projects on our public lands: capping wells, cleaning up mines, planting trees. Think we can’t afford it? We just spent that much1 (or more2) on two months of war with Iran.

We can harness our ingenuity to ecological realities, and incentivize innovations that enhance biodiversity and replace fossil fuels. We can put down our phones and walk outside. We can refuse to believe the worst about each other. We can insist that it is possible for humans and our habitats flourish together, and nourish any endeavor, at any scale, that helps to make it so.

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But not today. Today I just feel like making a list of happy news, along with some recommended reading, starting with:

• The Corridor at Tribeca: Threshold is presenting a new series called The Corridor this summer, and we recently found out that it will be premiering at the Tribeca Festival on June 10. It’s a huge honor and we are thrilled! Click here to read the Tribeca press release and here to listen to the trailer. I’ll have a lot more to share about The Corridor later.

• Dr. Chris Schell on Threshold Conversations: I really enjoyed talking with Chris about coyotes and other wildlife in our cities, and how their urban habits and habitats connect up with our human histories. Listen here or on your podcast app.

• Mountain-climbing Curlews: Last Sunday, former Threshold Conversations guest and all-around fantastic birdman Matthew Trevelyan did another ambitious awareness-raising walk dressed as a giant curlew. He had company. You need to see the pictures. If you’re inspired, consider supporting their fundraiser for curlew conservation projects.

• MOTH Festival of Ideas: London. May. I’m going. You? It looks amazing.

• Shelly Kittleson: This is not small news, nor is it so much “happy” as it is “holy moley I’m so relieved.” Reading Shelly Kittleson’s harrowing account of surviving her kidnapping in Iraq only increased my admiration. What a passionate, brave, determined journalist.

• Thoughts on AI for writers: I loved this pithy bit of advice from editor Jessica Reed. “Sure, some writers may get away with using AI as a co-writer or assistant. But what if you’re not one of them? Who’s really losing in the end?”

• Moose on the move: It’s back! Swedish public television is once again broadcasting “Den Stora Älgvandringen,” the Great Elk Migration — nonstop footage of…almost nothing happening. And then every once in a while, a moose. It’s quite possibly the best reality TV show every created. Join thousands of other people around the globe and check it out!

• So many poops! Can you believe all the different poops I happened upon during my morning walk today? I mean, wow. Sorry if this grosses you out, but it actually brings me great joy. A healthy ecosystem means lots of critters moving around, finding food, and then, well, you know. Doing what all of us animals do.

So I guess that’s one of the things I’m for: many happy critters, pooping happily in the woods.

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Watching Viktor Orbán’s glorious defeat in Hungary last weekend reminded me of the importance of asking this question. What comes next? There will be a post-Trump era, and it will be here sooner than we think.

Not soon enough, though, right? It’s terrifying and deeply depressing to bear witness to the daily destruction of democracy, fellow human beings, other creatures and precious places. Reading the news, the tape in my head is an endless loop of one word: no. No no no no no I don’t want any of this to be happening.

And it won’t always be happening. All kinds of people are pissed off in all kinds of ways, and for all kinds of very good reasons. What will we do with this anger? How can we metabolize it, transform it into something useful? How do we turn our shared no into some sort of big, powerful yes — a substantive rethink of our national identity, and true reset of direction?

Thinking about this feels psychologically helpful, but also pragmatically important. Nothing happens by magic; if we want this nightmare to be followed by something better, we have to start envisioning what that something better is. It’s not enough to know what we’re against. We have to know what we’re for.

So I’m wondering, what am I for, fundamentally? How about you?

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I stepped out into the yard to tackle another job on the list, and heard the robins starting to sing their evening songs. The vague discomfort I was feeling suddenly sharpened into something more fierce, something like a wild animal kicking my brain case from the inside. Then it came clear. No more task-ing. No more rushing around. Time to go listen to meadowlarks.

I grabbed my sound gear and walked to the car, knowing I was heading to one of my many beloved Missoula-area haunts, even though I didn’t know which one yet. Just making that choice softened my edges a little. Ten minutes later I was on a trail, walking through a grove of Montana’s state tree (ponderosa pine) and starting to hear the voices of Montana’s state bird in the distance. As I approached an open meadow their songs got louder, and when an osprey flew silently overhead I decided it was a good time to stop and plug in the microphone. After just a few minutes of kneeling in the grass, a western meadowlark flew in and landed on the top of a young tree maybe 50 feet away from me, and let loose its song:

I want to say it’s like liquid gold, but that’s not quite right. No comparison can really do it justice. Meadowlark song is its own substance, its own singular, precious thing. And it’s in conversation! Taking turns with another of its kind a little further away, and with red-winged blackbirds, robins, and other singers chiming in as well. Yes, there’s road noise in there too, and a passing airplane — the nearly inescapable sound of our anxious species, hustling, striving, rushing around as we (very much including me) are so prone to do. What a relief it was, to have dropped out of that mode, even for a few minutes; to make holding still and listening my priority. What a reward this meadowlark gave me.

If you listened to Hark, the latest season of Threshold, you’ve heard me try to explain the power of listening to our planet-mates like this. The whole season is centered around the idea that it does something to us, this listening — changes us, opens us, shifts something in the human psyche that desperately needs shifting. I believe this is true in a general way, but of course the only experience I can speak about with full authority is my own. So what did this brief moment with a meadowlark change in me? What good did it do? Why did it feel like something worth dropping everything for?

Maybe it can’t be fully named, but I think it has something to do with a combination of otherness and togetherness. This life form, this bird-being, is my neighbor, my fellow traveler through this open field. But it is also a dinosaur. We both know this place well, but we’ve come to know it within very different bodies, with different ways of moving, different life-ways and concerns, different sensory systems attuned to different types of information. We’re together, and we’re also Other to each other.

And yet, there’s so much that is familiar, too. I also know what it’s like to sing out across the Missoula valley, to build a nest here, to find community and help create it, to fly in and out of this place, seeking, wandering, reuniting, resting.

I feel a sort of magic in this otherness and togetherness, and in the way they are inextricably mixed together. It’s quite simple and unfathomably complex, all at once: among all the creatures that have ever lived, in all the times and all the possible places, somehow we are here, together, in our shared home.

A year from now, or ten, I won’t remember much from this day. But I think I’ll remember this brief encounter, not only because I have a recording of it, but because I was fully present for it. I didn’t arrive at that presence through my own self-discipline and effort, it was gifted to me by this bird, its companions, and this place. I needed these others to help me find my own center, or maybe let go of it — to relax my grip on one version of reality and let other stories float in.

Meadowlarks? Yes, meadowlarks.

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On March 31, American journalist Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in Iraq by an Iranian-backed militia group. I don’t know Shelly, but I feel a bit like I do. We’re around the same age, both women doing our reporting without the support (or the shackles) of a major media organization. As I read stories about her from her friends and colleagues, I have the strong suspicion that we would hit it off if we ever get to meet.

I don’t feel like I need to personally identify with someone in order to care about what’s happening to them, but when I learned about her abduction through the International Women’s Media Foundation, I did feel a pang of frightening recognition. Even though I have never done anything half as brave as she has, I can easily imagine the lead-up to this terrifying situation. Working alone in a foreign country. Making a plan to meet a source. Doing all you can to be smart, make good decisions, look after yourself; she had apparently just taken a hostile environment training, for example, even though she had taken it several times before. But when she arrived at that street corner in Baghdad last Tuesday, instead of a source, she met men who wanted to use her as a pawn. They forced her into a vehicle and sped off. Thankfully, some witnesses alerted authorities. A chase ensued, and the car she was in apparently overturned. She was then transferred to a second car, which got away.

My ability to imagine her situation ends with her abduction. I have no idea what she’s going through, how it feels, what it’s like to be deprived of her freedom, to be so very alone in such a horrific situation. The agony of her family and friends must be excruciating, both for them and for her, knowing that they’re suffering. Investigative journalist Lauren Wolfe, a friend of Shelly’s, wrote about her experience here on Substack:

I fall asleep wondering if Shelly is scared. I wake up wondering if she’s being treated okay. I spend my days talking to mutual friends and getting their advice, like that from my friend Jeff, whose book I edited last year about his six-and-a-half years held by Al-Qaeda in Mali.

“Do you think they’re treating her all right?” I asked him.

“Militants who hate Americans don’t treat us well,” he said. Something to that effect. It was effective enough to make me tremble more.

I have feelings and opinions about this whole situation that I’m not going to share, because none of them are more important than this: three major journalism safety organizations are calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to formally designate Shelly as a hostage, or in the formal language of the state, a person subject to “wrongful detention.” Here’s more about what that means, again from Lauren Wolfe:

Once a case meets that [wrongful detention] threshold, it is elevated to a top interagency priority. Coordination intensifies through the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, which brings together officials from the FBI, State Department and from across the intelligence community to focus on recovering the captive.

That doesn’t mean a single switch flips and that every arm of the U.S. government mobilizes instantly. But it does mean the case receives sustained, high-level attention, dedicated coordination and access to additional diplomatic and intelligence resources.

It means dedicated intelligence gathering, intensified diplomatic pressure and potentially the use of covert operations or military force if deemed necessary and appropriate. Families of designated hostages also gain access to additional support services and advocacy. While hostage recovery remains incredibly difficult, the designation ensures the issue receives the highest-level attention and prioritization within the U.S. government.

If you have any connections to Marco Rubio, or connections to connections to connections of people who have connections to Marco Rubio, this is the time to use them. An American journalist was abducted in a foreign country; she is a hostage and should be treated as such.

I have no idea how to help make this happen, but I do know that this story is not getting nearly enough attention. If she were a CNN superstar or a New York Times staffer we would all be hearing more about this. That’s not to place blame on those outlets; it’s just the reality of being a truly independent journalist. There’s no deep-pocketed, well-connected, highly visible outlet that has your back. You figure everything out yourself: where to go, how to get there, who to talk to, where to find food, where to sleep, how to stay safe. But even the scrappiest, smartest, bravest and most well-prepared person cannot get herself out of a hostage situation. Shelly needs us to care, and to make others care, to get out of this alive.

Please take a few minutes to learn about Shelly Kittleson, and share her story. Lauren Wolfe is a great place to start, and some additional links are in the footnotes.1

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Chills, by Lauren Wolfe

My Friend Shelly Kittleson Has Been Kidnapped

I have known a weird number of people who have been kidnapped. My friends Amanda and Jeff, and journalists like David Rhode and Alan Johnston, whose cases I worked on while senior editor at the Committee to Protect Journalists years ago. I’ve known even more people who hav…

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5 months ago · 47 likes · 14 comments · Lauren Wolfe

What are some of your reasons?

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You can find your local No Kings march here.

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I’m talking about Whooper Swans, known as the Sångsvan in Swedish, cousins of the North American Trumpeters. Gorgeous to the eye and haunting to the ear, observing their return has become a spring ritual that helps remember something about who and where and what I am. Even more importantly, they help me remember what I’m not (i.e., able to fly, the only creature nesting in my habitat, the main character of any story but my own).

Yes, I have written about swans before here, and yes, there’s more to come. I love these birds. Not necessarily more than all others (I’ve never liked framing things in terms of favorites) but they hold a special sort of power for me, for a variety of reasons which I’ll explore in a future post.

Today, I just wanted to send this quick note of celebration, along with a not-good picture:

Learn more about Whooper Swans at this excellent page on Birds of the World. Two fun teasers:

• People made carvings of swans out of ivory 23,000 years ago!

• Whooper Swans mate for life, and their divorce rate = 6%

And since we’re on the topic of migratory birds, check out the latest episode of Threshold Conversations, featuring a curlew-loving English conservationist named Matthew Trevelyan. If you were an early Letters to Earthlings subscriber you may have heard a version of this before, but I encourage you to listen again and re-fall in love with curlews and their earnest, creative champion. Matthew built a beautiful curlew costume and hiked across the English countryside in it to raise awareness about threats to these birds. And he’s doing it again!

Learn about Matthew’s next curlew hike here, and send some love his way if you can.

I was especially happy to see the first swans this week because as they fly in, I’m flying out. I’m actually writing this in a plane taking me back to the U.S., and we’re currently somewhere over the Greenland ice sheet, which is bananas. Unlike me, the swans and the curlews don’t add to the destruction of that ice and the planet as a whole with their migrations. They fly fossil-fuel-free.

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Whatever the context, I appreciate the challenge. If I don’t know or can’t say why I’m doing what I’m doing, that would signal a problem, I think. Also, revisiting the question over and over helps me see what pieces remain consistent, which feels like valuable information.

I’m in the middle of re-articulating my why for one of those applications right now, and I thought I’d share it here, partly to help keep me honest, and partly because there’s been a nice little uptick in subscribers lately (hello new folks!), and this mini manifesto or statement of purpose or whatever it is applies to Letters to Earthlings as well.

Here we go.

Throughout recorded history, people have had the sense that they live in important times. Maybe that’s true — maybe all times are pivotal in their ways — or maybe it’s just a reflection of our inherently egotistical nature. However, it does feel to me that my little life happens to be unfolding at a time of enormous consequence for my fellow humans, other living things, and the Earth itself. In the future, people will look back at our era and wonder how we could have talked about anything other than the way humans are changing — and being changed by — the planet.

How do we make sense of what’s happening around us; of what our species is doing? How do we even begin to absorb the scale and speed of our impacts?

Thanks to the work of scientists around the world, we have the data. But information alone usually doesn’t change anything. We need stories. Context, perspective, connection-making.

That’s where I come in. That’s why I started Threshold, and Letters to Earthlings. To bear witness, to think and feel, to carve out a little space where we can actually digest this reality, and make meaning out of it, and figure out how to proceed, together.

It’s a work in progress, always. But that’s how I’m leaving it for today.

What’s your why?

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I’m thinking about this innocent little animal as the week ends, the same week that held a missile that arced through the sky and exploded in a school where dozens of little girls sat at their desks, reading, giggling, learning about chemistry, maybe, or history, or the wild animals that live in their country. A friend here in Sweden told me how she loves the mountains near Tehran, how she and her dad hiked there a lot when she was a kid, how that was the start of her becoming the climber, cyclist, explorer she is today. Minab, where 168 students and teachers were killed this week, is in the south, next to the Minab River. Where did they like to go adventuring?

I go to visit the deer. In the dusk, under the bower of branches, I kneel down, place my open palm on its fur, amazed at the softness. What killed this small being? Ulf thinks it was hunger. It was a roe deer, a species better acclimated to southern Sweden but moving north as the climate warms. In deep snow, their narrow hooves drill down like spikes, and their short legs make every step a leap, exhausting. A few days before we found this one, we saw them at the bird feeder, scavenging seeds. Was this one of those?

I watch a video from Iowa, my childhood home state. A father and a sister of a young man, 20 years old, killed this week in Kuwait. They are in shock, standing on their lawn in Des Moines. The father’s eyes are red wells of endless pain, the sister talks about how kind he was, tears streaking down her young face.

Ulf takes the dead deer away, deeper into the forest, further from cars, people, dogs. Maybe a fox can make it through another month. I remember sitting with Sarah James, Gwich’in elder, in her home in Arctic Village, Alaska, as she told me that spring is the hungry season. A picture of a young boy in Gaza, skin stretched taut over his tiny back, is in the sidebar to stories of more bombs falling.

The Moon is full. The Sun arrives earlier and stays longer every day. I hold my phone up in the air, and the genie inside tells me who my neighbors are: Talgoxe, Blåmes, Nötväcka, Bofink. Their calls are changing, getting louder, more insistent. We see the first Domherre pair to return at the feeder. The lichen on the birch tree quietly flushes a milky green. Across the still-frozen lake, I see a deer walking alone.

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Bewilderment is a love story, I think, and a tragedy. The three main characters are Theo, an astrophysicist, Aly, an animal rights activist, and their young son Robin. The novel opens after Aly has died in a car wreck, but her charisma, passion, and vital exuberance are present throughout the narrative. We meet Theo and Robin as they attempt to pick up the pieces and navigate a world without her, bonded by their love and nearly incapacitated by their grief.

I’m going to try avoid spoilers here, but the basic outline is that Theo is managing (just barely) to continue his work searching for exoplanets that might host life. Robin is neurodivergent and, like his mother, ferociously in love with animals and the natural world as a whole. They are living in the United States under an anti-science, anti-immigrant, increasingly autocratic government; the stories of cancelled research, roving militias, and undermining of elections feeling creepily prescient.

Fitting in at school has never come easy for Robin, and the combined stresses of his mother’s death and his growing awareness of the misery humans impose on other creatures is pushing him toward crisis. Searching for ways to help manage Robin’s outbursts, Theo learns of an experimental treatment underway at his university, in which the subjects are trained to mimic the neural patterns of other people. But there’s a twist: the scientist developing this treatment knew Aly, and recorded her neural patterns before she died. This means Robin can be trained on his dead mother’s brain waves. Skeptical but unsure of how else to proceed, Theo begrudgingly enrolls Robin in the treatment.

The first time I read Bewilderment, I think I was somewhat distracted by the technology piece of the story. I was trying to understand what exactly the deal was with this brain-wave-recording machine, and how it worked for Robin to enter into it. This time, knowing the whole arc of the narrative in advance, I was better able to filter out unimportant details and focus more fully on the allegory that Powers is giving us.

Theo, the seeker of new worlds, perhaps embodies humanity’s questing nature, including the way that quest can sometimes blind us to the riches right outside the door. But thankfully, he’s not only that; he loves this world, too, and his struggles to be honest with his son about the terrible realities of what we’re doing to our planet, even as he introduces him to its wonders, are highly relatable and deeply affecting.

Vibrant, vivacious Aly, the lost mother, feels like a foil for the Earth itself. On this read, I experienced Robin’s raw, primal love for her — and the shattering pain of her loss — as Powers challenging us (and himself, maybe) into a direct, personal confrontation with the ecocide that defines our time. We compartmentalize in order to function in this reality, but Robin has no boxes where he can tuck his grief and rage away, no capacity to numb himself. Extinction, the suffering of livestock, and even the death of a squirrel cut directly into his un-anesthetized heart.

Happiness, when Robin can find it, comes through reliving memories of Aly and being outside. He knew his mother, he remembers her voice, her words, the power of her love. He wants to talk about her, watch videos of her, walk the paths she walked, listen to stories about her again and again. As he learns to mimic her brain waves in the experimental treatment, he gains the strength to face the losses she faced, and fight some of the same fights. He labors over colorful drawings of endangered species, and holds up a banner on the steps of the Capitol that says “may all beings be free from suffering.” The mother Robin once knew may be gone forever, but she left an imprint for him, and all of us, to follow.

But as I said, this story is a tragedy. Bit by inexorable bit, Robin’s connection to his mother begins to fray, and without her, he crumbles. This is the fear and desolation we all turn away from in ordinary life — a world not only damaged but truly lost. Powers sets us running toward that loss, he asks us to pick it up and hold it close, to feel it. I find that effort brave and admirable, even though it hurts. Especially because it hurts.

This is how he ends the book:

Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

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