I have been working as a wildlife rehabilitator for 26 years. I will tell you briefly why.
One day in the late 90s I looked up from the book I was reading - I had been studying the westward expansion of the US, and reading women's diaries of the overland crossing, the details surrounding the "ill-fated" Donner Party, and of course the genocide of Native Americans that was part and parcel of so-called Manifest Destiny.
I looked up from the book, which was filled with nightmarish suffering, and looked outside - it was 4 am. In the eastern sky the last quarter moon was rising over the Cascades, Venus was just below and behind the mountains the sky was beginning to glow with the coming dawn. Suddenly the dome of sky was a vast expanse, and here I was, in it. In the mix with the Earth, the moon, Venus and the Sun. The mountains jagged in a mountainous perfection and all of the known world before me.
At breakfast later, I was reading the Seattle Weekly - an ad for the PAWS Wildlife Center asked "Want to Help Return and Animal to the Wild?" and I knew in my heart, in my gut as they say, that this ad was for me. I needed the real world, unmediated by books, just as I had seen at 4 am… real, concrete, actionable. And action, not study, is what I needed.
Even then, 1999, the world was in grave danger. The greenhouse effect had supplanted nuclear winter as the thing that was going to get us all in the end in the late 80s. By 1999 we were already calling that phenomenon 'climate change'.
I had moved to Seattle from New Jersey in 1993. It was the aftermath of the forest wars. As a reader, of course I had caught up with the science and political skirmishes surrounding ancient forests and old-growth logging. Timothy Egan's book The Good Rain was an excellent introduction to the Pacific Northwest and offered a concise history of the region including the battles to save the forests, and the most famous indicator species of forest health, the Spotted Owl. My reading had walked me right up to that moment at 4 am, and there I stood at the window, dissolved by the real and reassembled in an instant … In an instant the mountains were no longer mountains and the stars no longer stars and then they were, mountains mountains and stars stars again.
While I still had and still have so much to learn, it was then that I graduated into my real work. I needed to help with the ordinary grueling work of rescue. Rescuing what our world was treating as so much "overburden" - the forest and wild community that sits inconveniently above all that valuable mineral wealth, whether is is coal, or gold, or a good location for a billionaire's golf course.
Like most of us currently topside, I was born into a world that had a doomsday clock ticking. It has been a feature of daily recognition that bad times were coming, if we didn't change our ways and for over twenty we've largely known that it was too late. It was probably the nineties when it last seemed possible that we could have a future watching our great great grandchildren grow on a green Earth from our little corner of the afterlife.
From the vivid protests against the World Trade Organization, November of '99 to the launch of the destruction of Iraq in March of 2003 the prevailing idea, in America at least, was that the future was going to be a lot worse than it had to be. Avarice had outflanked prudence and care. The world was less profitable saved than burned. Money had spoken.
In the twenty some years since, we've lived through hope and dread in a cycle almost as dependable as the tides. But even our hopes, our accomplishments, such as marriage equality, the occasional killer cop who is charged with homicide, and so on, even these in each election since 2008 have been grounded in the inescapable realities of climate disruption and environmental catastrophe that we'd have to deal with - no matter how much reform and transformation we bring to the still pressing injustices of our daily world,
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