“Someone has to pay,” the woman in the white skirt tells my students. She’s sitting across from me, in a wonky circle we’ve made with the metal folding chairs we found stacked in a corner of the classroom. Her hands are on her thighs, and she’s leaning forward in her chair. She’s one of many guests I’ve invited to my class this week. In addition to my students, there are three environmental activists, and three activist artists, and, of course, the woman in the white skirt. I expected her to talk about her work as a community organizer, but she is instead talking about the BP oil spill, how BP has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of so many people all along the Gulf Coast. People have lost their jobs, their homes. Some have lost their lives.
“BP won’t pay the claims but they have no trouble paying to make those stupid ads,” says the woman in the white skirt, standing up out of her chair. She raises her voice, points her finger, but I’m not sure at whom. My students watch, motionless in their chairs circled around her, maybe, like me, surprised to be feeling accused.
One of the artists asks us to stand, to join the woman in the white skirt, to push our chairs toward the wall and out of the way. The artist asks us to imagine a spectrum of our relationship to the oil industry. “If your livelihood is very dependent on the oil industry, stand on this side,” the artist says. Then she gestures the other way. “And if your livelihood is not at all dependent on the oil industry, stand on that side.”
Many of my students stand with the woman in the white skirt on that side, on the Not at All Side. I want to stand there too. But I remind my students that in Houston, everything is tied to the oil industry, even, and especially, art. The major renovation of the Museum of Fine Arts is funded by money from oil; most of the major collectors in town became rich from oil; even the person who donated money to the university to found the art center where I work made his fortune because he invented fracking.
My students hang their heads as they shuffle toward me on this side, on the Very Dependent Side.
To be perfectly honest, before oil began washing up on our beaches, I’d never given it much thought. Years ago, when news that the Deepwater Horizon had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico reached us, my daughter, then only three, was home sick and I was newly pregnant with a second baby, nauseated by everything: my daughter’s illness, the smell of the sweat-dank blanket she insisted on lying under while watching hour after hour of Dora the Explorer, the dog hair in every crevice of the couch, the taste of my own breath. I sat in a chair across from my sick child and watched the footage of the oil gushing from the ocean floor on my laptop. I watched in total horror. But eventually I had to close my laptop and continue on with my day.
Since then I’ve learned a lot about oil. It is a clear to tar-black mixture of hydrocarbons and comes in many forms: crude oil is subcategorized as heavy if it is very dense, light if it has low density, sweet if it is low in sulfur, or sour if the sulfur content is high. Light crude produces more gasoline, while sweet crude requires less refining and produces fewer environmental hazards. Bitumen, another form of oil, is associated with oil sands, tar sands, and natural asphalts. Shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock from which petroleum can be extracted. Although the technology for doing this is relatively new, the word petroleum—Latin for “rock oil”—is quite old, appearing in 1546 in a work by German mineralogist Georg Bauer, who was the first to document the production, refining, and classification of the Earth’s “solidified juices.”
Thankfully, our understanding of geology has improved in the last 470 years. We know now that petroleum, like other fossil fuels, dates from an unfathomably earlier period of Earth’s development—so much earlier that Earth might as well have been another planet, and, in fact, it was. When the world’s petroleum reservoirs were created, Earth was mostly swamp and vegetation, and the only land mass above water was the supercontinent of Pangea. Now, reservoirs have been found on every continent except Antarctica. The largest of these are in Venezuela, which recently surpassed Saudi Arabia as the holder of the largest-known oil reserves in the world.
What I find fascinating is that these reservoirs were created almost entirely by chance, when dead organisms, mostly zooplankton and algae (not dead dinosaurs, as some would have us believe), collected on the seabed in vast quantities over tens of thousands of years, a relatively short period in Earth time. Slowly, layer upon layer of sediment accumulated on top of that rich layer of decaying organic matter, creating warmth and pressure that transformed it first into a waxy material known as kerogen and then, ever so slowly, into liquid and gaseous forms of hydrocarbon. This is not to say that all decayed prehistoric organic matter has been transformed into fossil fuels. On the contrary, the creation of the world’s reserves of petroleum all those ages ago was dependent on a perfect set of conditions: the layer of massive quantities of decaying organic matter needed layers and layers of rock at a sufficient depth to create enough pressure and heat to cook it for millions of years inside a reservoir rock porous and permeable enough to allow it to accumulate underneath a cap rock dense enough to trap it from escaping to the surface. The hydrocarbons collected by accident in these traps formed oil reservoirs, from which we now extract petroleum very intentionally by drilling and pumping and flushing and squeezing, and a variety of other processes that can be completed only at great danger to the people executing them.
The United States imports oil from these giant reserves—mostly from Venezuela, but also from Mexico, Canada, the Persian Gulf, and Nigeria—and it is pumped through giant pipelines thousands of miles long, or shipped on giant oil tankers across the ocean through the shallow waters of the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico, navigating the eddies spiraling off the Gulf Loop current until it at last arrives at the Houston Ship Channel, where hydrocarbons are separated from one another by type and distilled from crude into any of the myriad forms petroleum can take: forms like fertilizers, dry cleaning chemicals, solvents and adhesives, pesticides, and plastics, which we use to make everything from our streetlights to our cooking utensils. The keys on which I am typing right now are plastic. We even use petroleum to make fabric. The pants I am wearing contain polyester, a man-made, petroleum-based fiber. Elastic is petroleum based, as is most of the ink we use to print our money. Crayons are made in part from paraffin, a derivative of petroleum. The PVC pipes carrying water through my house are made from petroleum. The wires bringing power from the wall to this laptop rely on petroleum-based coating for insulation. Even the so-called clean power generated by wind farms in West Texas require petroleum, since the turbines must be carried individually by enormous gas-guzzling tractor trailers before they are assembled as windmills across the state. Petroleum drives our politics, our society, our technology, and our economy. And the fact is: it has driven us mad with an insatiable thirst.
“Holy shit,” mumbles one of my students, crowded, like the others, around my laptop open on the desk in our unlit classroom. This week we’re watching the archived footage of the spill. They’re seeing it for the first time: oil gushes at the bottom of the ocean in rust-colored plumes. An eruption keeps erupting in a place that looks so unlike Earth it might as well be the surface of the moon. The camera pans out and out, then stops so suddenly the camera jars, wobbles: a loose precarious thing. Robot arms maneuver in and out of the plumes, sawing the riser pipe free, now falling out of the frame.
Years ago, when the rig exploded 250 miles southeast of where we now sit, most of my students were still in high school, and, like most other high school students, they did not grasp the consequences of every story on the news. Now at twenty and twenty-one, they are bombarded each day with grim news about gentrification, terrorism, and climate change. They open their Facebook feed to stomach-churning video of a boy shot for carrying a toy gun on a playground, of girls gang-raped for getting drunk and being fifteen. The world they’ve inherited is not the one we promised them. We promised them the American Dream, the land of opportunity, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. But that dream, as my students keep pointing out to me this semester, is broken, and besides, it was never really their dream in the first place.
“Holy shit,” the student says again, shaking his head. He’s a man of few words, a bearded hipster—a stoner, I suspect. He reminds me of how white Christians must imagine Jesus. Another student, a Latina, “first generation,” majoring in photography, stands to turn the lights back on. The rest lean back in their chairs.
“Do you know what the most fucked-up thing is?” asks one student as she closes my laptop. She’s my favorite student this semester. One of my favorite students ever probably: a self-proclaimed mixed-race queer femme New Orleanian who could teach this class if I got out of her way. “So the fishermen couldn’t fish because of all the oil, right? So then BP hired them to take their boats out and spray dispersant into the ocean.” “Vessels of Opportunity,” BP called it. “The fishermen couldn’t say no because what choice did they have? But BP wouldn’t let them wear protective gear because they didn’t want the public to know they were putting poison in the ocean. They were more concerned with the optics than with doing the right thing.”
She’s right, of course. Oil itself is toxic enough, but BP arguably made the disaster far worse by applying 1.8 million gallons of the controversial dispersant Corexit to the oil gushing from the well in order to break it up into trillions of tiny droplets and potentially keeping it from floating to the surface, reaching the shore, and making apparent the full scope of the damage it had caused. Five years after the spill, the Gulf is still devastated: oyster beds have been destroyed along the coast; fish continue to wash on shore dead or dying; dolphins in the Gulf are dying at rates four times higher than before the explosion. People who helped with the cleanup are sick, unable to work; people on the coast are sick, getting sicker. BP doesn’t have much to say on the matter: “The environmental catastrophe that so many feared, perhaps understandably at the time, did not come to pass, and . . . the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” a public relations expert for the oil company writes. The depleted oyster beds? The dead baby dolphins? The fishermen bleeding from their ears and noses? That could be caused by anything.
Anyway, my turn is over. The student who reminds me of white Jesus holds up a photograph he’s taken of a half-demolished building. “This is what gentrification is doing to queer culture,” he says. The assignment was to document a problem that most people don’t see. The next student holds up his phone and shows us a photo of a Jeff Koons sculpture, one of the balloon animals, which has just sold for about a zillion dollars at auction, he tells us. We all agree it’s total bullshit. The next says he’s going to describe some graffiti that got removed in the neighborhood. “Describe?” I ask. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “I forgot my visuals.” My favorite student, the one pulling her blue hair up into a bun, uses her cell phone to play Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s “Time of Our Lives.” I raise an eyebrow. She holds up a hand to stop me from objecting and explains that the song is about the struggle to make ends meet and always failing, and that constant failure is why people give up and just go party instead. “We all have so many problems,” she says, “and because we can’t even solve our personal problems, like how to pay our rent, how can we even think about, much less solve, the big problems we all have in common?”
I’m still thinking about these questions on the drive home, about the “big problems” we watch unfolding in slow motion or, worse, the ones we can’t even see. Many of my students live near campus, in Houston’s Second Ward, which is home to the Houston Ship Channel, the second-largest petrochemical complex in the world. The Houston Ship Channel is where the oil industry’s dirty work is done: not only the refinement and distribution of petroleum itself, but also its vast network of ancillary industries, which each year release hundreds of millions of pounds of a number of dangerous chemicals into the air in service of the oil industry. These chemicals have been linked over and over again to rare forms of leukemia and other aggressive cancers. One study conducted in 2006 by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston showed that the likelihood of developing a rare cancer is 56 percent greater for anyone who lives within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel than for people who live anywhere else.
In fact, the Houston Ship Channel is what some might call a “sacrifice zone,” a term government officials coined during the Cold War to describe areas that had been hopelessly contaminated by the mining and processing of uranium into nuclear weapons. More recently, the term sacrifice zone has been applied more broadly to include low-income semi-industrial communities, often populated by African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites, whose disproportionate exposure to toxic substances forces them to sacrifice their health and safety in ways that more affluent people do not.
Although sacrifice zone is a term that is increasingly applied to the entire Gulf Coast region as a result of the primary and ancillary operations of the oil industry, it’s not a term that I think of as I pull in to my own neighborhood, on the west side of Houston, far from the polluting smokestacks and refineries of the ship channel. Houston calls itself the “energy capital of the world” because it is home to four of the world’s seven super-major oil and gas companies, and all of them are headquartered in midrise glass-plated office buildings perched on wide green lawns on the west side of town, near where I live. Most of my neighbors work in the oil and gas industry. They wave from their yards as I walk my dog. From a distance, they seem like nice enough people.
Would they still seem nice if an oil company built a refinery in our neighborhood? If the waterways in the park down the street were choked with toxic waste? If our children were breathing toxic fumes while they slept in their beds? If it were us dying of rare cancers? And, more importantly, if we can’t imagine being okay with that for our own neighborhood, our own health, our own children, why are we okay with it for anyone else?
There are no comfortable answers to these questions, but we need to keep asking them anyway. In fact, one reason we have decided as a class to join the woman in the white skirt in a protest at BP headquarters is to question the seemingly widely held idea that some lives—any lives, for that matter—are worth their sacrifice.
“IT’S TIME,” shouts the woman in the white skirt, and the crowd falls into line: youngish hippies, tribal elders, faith leaders, musicians, actors, artists, a group of Vietnamese fishermen, community organizers, my students and me. We’re gathered in a parking lot along Terry Hershey Park on Memorial Drive, in the Energy Corridor, less than a mile from the headquarters of BP America and about four miles from my house. We each have our duties. Those in the front hold signs with slogans like “The Gulf can’t wait any longer for restoration,” and “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STARTS @ THE SOURCE.” A couple of my students lift to their shoulders a model of a shrimp boat, in which there is a petition with more than a hundred thousand signatures demanding restoration for the Gulf Coast. I’m standing near the end of the line, holding a sign that says, simply, “JUSTICE.”
“It’s time for BP to pay!” shouts the woman in the white skirt as we begin marching out of the parking lot. Another woman jogs toward our line, waving to a group of people she knows. I recognize her from somewhere. She’s wearing a white shirt, white pants, a loose blue cardigan buttoned at the waist. She doesn’t see me; she smiles and reaches out to embrace a woman who approaches her. They lock arms in the line. We march past mothers who stop pulling jogging strollers from their shiny Chevy Tahoes; past children who play on the playground while their nannies eye us suspiciously; past a line of police officers with their hands resting on their black belts. “Someone has to pay!” the woman in the white skirt shouts as SUVs pass us on the road. The passengers wave and smile as if this is a parade and we are passing out candy.
“I’ve seen children who are sick,” one activist tells the crowd when we reach BP’s headquarters. “In the early days we had rashes and respiratory problems, but now it’s moved into cancers, very aggressive cancers. In parts of where I live in Louisiana, just south of us in Plaquemines Parish, they say they’re burying about a person a week.”
We’re standing on the sidewalk, in the sun, because the cops won’t let us approach the building. The cops stand on the grass, in the shade, between us and the BP compound, which spans several buildings and sits on ten acres of land. Above the main building—I kid you not—actual vultures circle overhead.
The translator for the Vietnamese fishermen raises her voice above the others: “They don’t have to answer to us?” she shouts with her hand raised, her finger pointing at the building. “They don’t have to follow our laws?” From windows in the floors above us, two white men in bright polo shirts and pleated khakis film our protest with their cell phones. They’re smiling and laughing, as if her accusations, her voice, her presence here, are a kind of joke. They wave and point and bend over laughing. The translator steps back into the crowd, shaking, spitting, too angry to cry, as we all now are.
Several of our group try to approach the building to deliver the petition. The cops stop them, turn them around, point them back toward the crowd. One of the fishermen steps up and demands firmly, “Talk to us.” The cops look past him too. The tribal elders join in: “Talk to us. Please, talk to us.” The youngish hippies join in, and the faith leaders, and the musicians, and my students. I see the woman from the parking lot, the one I recognize, joining in as well, but I still can’t remember how I know her. “TALK TO US! TALK TO US!” She and the crowd shout at the cops, at the building, at the two men in bright polos and pleated khaki pants filming us from the windows above.
I raise my voice too, though in truth, I know the executives aren’t in the building. They’re miles away in downtown Houston at the CERAWeek IHS Energy Conference, billed as “the premier annual international conference for energy industry leaders, experts, government officials and policymakers, leaders from the technology, financial, and industrial communities—and energy technology innovators.” This year’s theme is “Turning Point: Energy’s New World.” I imagine them schmoozing and congratulating one another and eating tiny croissants.
A woman comes out of the building to film us on her pink iPad. She’s wearing a white pressed blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt, a pair of shiny black heels. She stays behind the row of cops. People drive by in black SUVs. The crowd continues shouting: “TALK TO US! TALK TO US!” The shouting grows louder and louder, though the cops continue standing with their hands on their belts. The musicians join our voices with their drumming; the drumming gives way to music, to singing, which is at once full of rage and something that leads us, inexplicably, to dance, to turn to shake our asses at the cops, at the woman with the pink iPad, who watches the protest unfolding right in front of her on the tiny screen.
The vultures are still circling overhead when we finally dance away from BP headquarters, down the street, and back to the park where we’ve all left our cars. The woman in the white skirt passes out plastic bottles of water and snacks, hugs and high-fives, and invites us all to a crawfish boil at her nonprofit’s headquarters across town in the Second Ward, the neighborhood that runs adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel.
My students and I drive away from the Energy Corridor in two cars, watching as sprawling subdivisions give way to townhouses packed six to a lot, to historically protected neighborhoods where all the houses have picture windows and wide porches, and then to taquerias and washaterias, leaning buildings where flowers sprout from planters on the stoop. Sidewalks buckle and crack, when there are sidewalks at all. One student in the car with me—the Latina, “first generation”—points out landmarks from her childhood. She grew up here, she tells us. She still lives just down the street.
We enter the nonprofit headquarters—a maze of protest signs, brochures, books, staple guns, and hammers piled on every surface. An elder leans forward in her chair, a pile of sewing in her lap. She motions us to the back of the building without looking up. We walk through a door and out to the back patio, where we discover the entire crowd of protesters sitting cross-legged on the floor, midway through a Mayan prayer ceremony.
My students look at one another, at me, as if to say, Really?
I shrug my shoulders in response. Sure. Really.
We sit on a table outside the circle and lean back against the cool brick of the building. The Mayan elder tends a small fire while speaking to the group through her interpreter. Those in the circle around her place small bundles of herbs and grass into the flames. “It is a trade,” the interpreter says. “You offer before you ask in return.” The musicians and artists are there, and each places a bundle into the fire. One says she offers art in exchange for healing. Another offers her voice in exchange for strength. The fire goes out very suddenly, and the Mayan elder shakes her head. Her interpreter says, “You give too little and ask for too much.”
When the fire is burning again, the woman in the white skirt puts a bundle into it and begins to speak. She is tired, she says, her voice low and full of grief. It’s uncomfortable to see her like this, after all of her shouting, her finger pointing, her bluster and bravado. “So much effort,” she says, “and so little progress.” All these years and the Gulf is still devastated: the dead marsh grasses, the dead baby dolphins, the dead fish, and dead fishermen, the children who are dead or dying. One of the artists wraps an arm around her shoulder, whispers encouragement in her ear. The Mayan elder stirs the fire. She’s humming, her song and the smoke billowing upward together in a single plume. The woman in the white skirt leans her head back. “Someone has to pay,” she says, long and low—to the roof, to the smoke, maybe to us all.
I look around the circle: artists and organizers and youngish hippies all sit, heads bowed, cross-legged on the floor. My students watch carefully, their eyebrows furrowed, their faces so earnest and eager and intent. The student who reminds me of Jesus has tears in his eyes. The one with blue hair—the queer femme from New Orleans, my favorite student ever—has one hand to her mouth, the other hand clutches her elbow.
And then it hits me: they are already paying for this, and maybe have been all along. At the end of the day, they’ll come home to this neighborhood. They will settle into bed breathing air that may one day kill them. And the fishermen and tribal elders sitting around the circle with their heads against their knees will return to their homes along the Gulf Coast. Or maybe their homes are already gone. I’ll drive across town, to where I’ve bought a house in a suburban neighborhood—probably with money I didn’t even fairly earn—where I grow vegetables in my garden and my children play in the green manicured yard. At night I go to sleep dreaming the American Dream. My students are paying for every benefit I reap. And the injustice of that is staring me right in the face.
Just as I’m about to leave, I notice that the woman I recognize from the protest is here too. She sits cross-legged on the floor, like the others, a bundle in her lap. “I’d give it all back,” she begins. Suddenly I know her: a student of mine from years ago, from a community writing workshop I once taught. On the first day of class, she introduced herself as a geologist working in the oil industry. She submitted her writing to the group only once: three short little essays, one about yoga, one about childhood abuse, and one about despair. “We do so little,” she wrote. She had been watching the news and saw only disaster. She stood in the oil fields and felt the planet crumbling under her feet. She started riding her bike to work and eating healthy, but she knew it wasn’t enough. She ended her last essay: “Someone should do something.”
By the end of that workshop, she had quit her job, talked of selling all of her possessions. She said she didn’t exactly have a plan but that she was thinking of walking across the country, maybe riding her bike. Whatever path she followed, it led her back here, years later: to this protest, to this fire, to the fishermen and the tribal elders, to the woman in the white skirt, sitting across from her. “I want nothing in return,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks. When she was in my workshop all those years ago, I thought she was having a nervous breakdown, but now I see it clearly: more than anything else, she wants to be redeemed.
I motion to my students that it’s time to leave. We pick our way around the fire and walk toward the alley behind the building. The woman in the white dress follows us out, her eyes puffy and red, carrying an armload of foil-wrapped tacos. She puts one into my hands, hugs me, though I almost can’t take it. She smiles, holds it out, insists. “You can’t start a revolution on an empty stomach,” she says.
My students and I leave the alleyway, the street, the neighborhood. We keep walking: now two miles, now three. We pass under the interstate. We pass buses with no passengers. We pass through a park where a hundred of Houston’s homeless veterans used to sleep. They’ve all been evacuated. A sign posted at the entrance reads: “NO TRESPASSING / PARK UNDER RENOVATION / UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” There are no construction crews; the only evidence of renovation is that the park is now no longer safe for people to sleep. We pass the county jail, where prisoners play basketball in tiny outdoor pens, where mothers with their children wait outside the back door for their loved ones to be released. We pass under a highway, leaving the Second Ward, and enter a manicured park, the renovation of which was paid for by a large donation from the Kinder Foundation, the charitable arm of Kinder Morgan, that company whose pipelines wrap the world—and now we can’t even enjoy the park because we’ve seen how much it costs. A white couple pushes a jogging stroller while their white baby fiddles with the white blanket on her lap. The path before them is straight and safe and flat.
At the end of the day, hours later, my students and I pile around a picnic table at an outdoor bar—“Ice Houses,” we call them in Houston. We eat tacos and drink cold beer. Some of the artists and the musicians from the protest meet us here, and my students tell them about their perspective on the day. The protest, the prayer ceremony, the walk from there to here. Such a simple activity, they say, placing one foot in front of the other. They plan the work they’ll undertake now: a photo essay, a performance, a guerrilla installation. I won’t lie: sending them on this path offers me some small measure of relief.
In July 2015, three months after the fifth anniversary of the spill, BP agreed to pay a record $18.7 billion in fines over eighteen years to settle its federal legal disputes, bringing BP’s portion of the cost of the spill up to $54 billion, including what it has paid so far in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various government entities, and cleanup and restoration programs. Of that, $4 billion will go to settle a federal criminal probe and effectively nullifies all criminal charges against them. “They ought to feel that,” says Keith Jones, father of one of the men killed in the explosion that night on the Deepwater Horizon. “They ought to feel something,” he says. “Sometimes somebody ought to feel something other than greed.”
The question of whether it feels anything is a good one, because its actions show no remorse. BP, along with Shell and several of the super-major oil and gas companies, continues to purchase lease rights in ever more delicate ecosystems. For most people, it takes a traumatic event to change their behavior, but it seems the oil spill changed nothing. People still say it’s the worst ecological disaster in history, as if that means it was an isolated incident. Experts estimate that after eighty-seven days, roughly 210 million gallons of crude was spilled into the Gulf. Devastating as this was for delicate Gulf ecosystems, this crude would have been refined into enough gasoline to cover about a fourth of what we Americans consume in our automobiles in a single day. And gasoline doesn’t burn perfectly. For each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, we release five to six pounds of carbon into the air—as much as 2 billion pounds in a single year. If carbon were a solid, this would be like throwing a bag of flour out the window for every gallon of gas each of us consumes. But carbon isn’t a solid; it’s an invisible gas, and if we don’t see it, we can pretend it just isn’t there.
Now we hear news that the polar ice caps are melting, that Exxon knew that climate change was coming and covered it up. Scientists tell us that carbon levels in the atmosphere have taken us beyond the point of no return.
“Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes. I cannot count all the gifts I have received from the Earth and from others, but I know that money would be a poor expression of all the things I owe in return. I want BP to pay for the oil they’ve spilled in the ocean. I want to punish the bonuses and profits, the laughing midlevel executives in their bright polo shirts, the woman in the pointy black heels filming us on her stupid pink iPad. I want them to see the consequences, large and small, of their apathy and greed. But the crime is not only theirs, the harm isn’t even only the damage we can see. There is no sum of money the rest of us could exchange for a clear conscience for our part in how we got to this moment. Guilt itself is useless and is worth nothing.
But the relationships we have and make with one another, the obligation we might recognize that we have toward the Earth—that is a gift that could redeem us. To give at least as much as we take, to repair all that we’ve harmed.
Even now, the present rushes across continents and stirs our future like a stone.