Edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield, featuring contributions by many ASLE members. Trinity University Press, 2020.

During a time when our nation is at a crossroads where politics and perspectives are colliding at mach speed, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (April 22, Trinity University Press), is an eclectic anthology of 130+ passionate letters to America, encouraging Americans to come to a common resolution about the environment and social justice through words of literature and art.

Since the 2016 presidential election, America has been barrelling headfirst toward a crossroads. Conflicting political and social perspectives reflect a need to collectively define our moral imperatives, clarify cultural values, and inspire meaningful change. In that patriotic spirit, hundreds of writers, poets, artists, scientists, and political and community leaders have come together sharing their impassioned letters to America in a project envisioned and published by the online journal Terrain.org—the “Letters to America” series.

More than 130 works, all calls to action for common ground and conflict resolution with a focus on the environment and social justice, are collected in Dear America. Taken as a whole, the work is a diverse clarion call of literary reactions to the nation’s challenges as we approach future political elections (especially the one coming this November).

Partial list of contributors:

• Bob Ferguson: AG of Washington. He holds the most successful legal record in the country against Trump
• Pete Souza: Official photographer for the Obama and Reagan administrations
• Elizabeth Rush: Pulitzer Prize winner
• Arthur Sze: National Book Award winner
• Jericho Brown: National Book Award finalist
• Alison Hawthorne Deming: American poet, essayist and teacher
• Camille Dungy: American poet and professor
• Lauret Savoy: Writer, teacher, photographer, and pilot
• Kurt Caswell: Writer and professor
• Jane Hirshfield: American poet, essayist, and translator
• Kathleen Dean Moore: Philosopher, writer and environmental activist
• Pam Houston: American author of short stories, novels, and essays
• David Hernandez: American poet and novelist
• Robin Wall Kimmerer: Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology
• Rick Bass: American writer and environmental activist
• Sandra Steingraber: American biologist, writer, and cancer survivor

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Excerpts from Dear America

Science Under Fire
Anita Desikan

Dear America,

Long before I became a scientist, I worked behind the counter of a pharmacy in San Diego. It was fall 2007, and the Witch Creek Fire had erupted across the region. Fanned by the powerful Santa Ana winds, the fire forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. I worked close to one of the affected regions, and on the day after the city ordered mass evacuations, one of the first customers I served told me their house had burned down—and their medications with it. Another told me they had evacuated and could not return home—they only had the clothes on their backs. Over and over I heard similar stories. I nearly broke into tears. But I took comfort helping fill their prescriptions, providing them with a needed service.

In San Diego, it is not earthquakes that we fear but fires. It was once a well-established fact that fire season occurred only in late summer or fall. But climate change has shifted that. Wildfires are now a yearlong potential horror, and they grow increasingly destructive. Every year, more people lose their homes; more people breathe in that terrible concoction of soot that leaves you gasping, wheezing, out of breath. The higher frequency of catastrophic wildfires in California has certainly been noticed by insurance companies, which are starting to hike prices or cancel homeowners insurance outright.

As a public health researcher with a keen interest in air pollution, science policy, and environmental justice, one of the most impactful lessons I have learned is that science has the power to improve both public health and the environment. When the best available science is incorporated into policymaking, it can deliver powerful benefits to the health and safety of our people and environment. So it was with a certain amount of horror that I witnessed the Trump administration turn its antiscience political machinations toward California’s incessant wildfire threat.

At first, the administration only wanted to spin wildfire tragedies as a way to bolster Trump’s own agenda. In August 2018 the Carr and Mendocino fires raged across Northern California—some of the worst wildfires ever experienced by the state. In the middle of this crisis, rather than speaking words of condolence, President Trump tweeted a message of hate toward environmental safeguards, blaming them for the severity of the fire by allegedly restricting access to water for firefighting purposes. And in this “tweet-to-policy” administration, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided to take the president up on his words. Ross ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) to sideline water-management procedures supported by the best available science. Specifically, NOAA’s Fisheries division was ordered to go against its own mission statement of regulating activities that might harm threatened or endangered aquatic species like salmon and instead divert water for firefighting efforts. Reality was thrown asunder—firefighters and state officials kept declaring in no uncertain terms that the state of California has enough water to fight these fires—and the pain and suffering of my fellow Californians were milked in order to declare war on endangered fish species like the Chinook salmon.

In November 2018 the Camp Fire struck, ravaging the town of Paradise and causing over a thousand people to go missing. This time Trump placed the blame solely on California’s poor forest management (in actuality, the U.S. government owns and manages a majority of California’s forests) and threatened to cut off federal funding for firefighting efforts altogether. But here’s a part of the story you may not know: in December of that year, Trump quietly issued an executive order that once again challenged the science underlying the wildfire threat. Apparently, the Trump administration believes that the best way to fix California’s wildfire problem is through logging. No joke. The executive order declared that, in order to prevent future wildfires like those that had struck California, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture must harvest more than four billion board feet of timber that will then be put up for sale—an increase of 31 percent from 2017. While it is true that increased logging may help quell a small percentage of the fires that occur near homes, it can do little to halt large-scale wildfires or stop the fires that are fueled by non-loggable but flammable plants, like chaparral shrub brush. It is hard to foresee with certainty the ecological impacts of the increase in logging, as it is dependent on how federal agencies implement the executive order. However, since market conditions of timber sales are required to be considered during the process, the most robust scientific evidence on how to safely and sustainably reduce trees that pose a fire hazard risk has the real possibility of being sidelined in favor of timber sales.

These actions by the Trump administration are downright dangerous because they mask the real problem at hand: climate change. Scientific research tells us that climate change acts as a threat multiplier by decreasing rainfall and increasing the temperature in the western United States (i.e., it can make California into a tinderbox). Since 1972, wildfires in California have grown 500 percent larger thanks mostly to climate change. In essence, global warming acts like a dose-response curve—for every degree of warming, larger and more frequent fires will result. Scientists and political officials from across the West have urged federal officials to adopt evidence-based measures to reduce the threat of wildfires, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change. But the Trump administration pursues few if any actions to prevent climate change, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I work now, has documented numerous cases in which federal scientists were directly censored or felt no choice but to censor themselves on the topic of climate change.

I became a public health researcher to use science to find evidence-based ways to improve the lives of others. I can’t help but think back to that day at the pharmacy when I listened to my neighbors’ stories about the wildfire that had threatened or consumed their homes. I believe that they, like all Americans, would have wanted proven, science-based policies in place that could have reduced the threat of fires. I doubt they would have supported policies that take away water from endangered fish or cut down large swaths of the forest as distractions from the very real existence of climate change. This is why I find the administration’s denials—and silencing—of the science so unsettling. We rely on science because it is the best method we have available to protect the health and safety of people, and of this land we call our home.

Sincerely,
Anita Desikan

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To Think Like A Mountain
Sarah Inskeep

Dear America,

In 2015 a lawsuit was filed by twenty-one plaintiffs against our government. All under the age of eighteen, the plaintiffs asserted that our government’s failure to act on climate change is a violation of the public trust doctrine and of the constitutional rights to life, liberty, and prosperity of generations to come. The case, Juliana et al. v. the United States, is still active.

What, dear America, will be the outcome? How do we begin to understand, let alone resolve, this conflict of interests? As an undergraduate I, like many young people, am acutely aware that my goals and dreams hinge upon whether or not we are able to bridge this divide. As a result I, like many Americans, am trying to figure out how we can leverage our power in this democracy to make the necessary changes. More and more I think that, for change to be possible, we must learn to perceive time differently.

Those who would dismiss the suit claim that because no harm is currently being done, there is no legal issue. This reflects clearly our present view of time on a human scale, measured by the variations of clocks and daily circumstances. On this scale, the natural world changes slowly; we do not see significant signs of alternation in a day or, historically, in a generation. Time, however, has other scales—measured by variations of rock layers and extant species—that we have yet to fully understand.

“[We] have not yet learned to think like a mountain,” Aldo Leopold wrote more than seventy years ago, and it seems many of us still haven’t. As a result, the land is often treated as a passive thing. The earth, however, is not passive. It is as sensitive and dynamic as we are. This concept is far from new to us—we know, from an early age, about the cycles of nature. We know the water in the river today is not the same water that will be in it tomorrow. Yet too often we act in response to what occurs in a small area or a small amount of time without considering what our actions might mean for the future, without acknowledging that we may be toying with systems far more intricate than we could possibly imagine. I think of the story Leopold tells in Sand County Almanac, about a great bear living on the mountain Escudilla. In the end, the bear walks into a set-gun trap and shoots itself. It’s only after this that those who acquiesced to the setting of the trap begin to question if doing so was really progress. We, like Leopold and his comrades, are playing by the rules of economic growth without questioning. We strive for gain but neglect to acknowledge the cost of that gain to the systems our lives depend upon.

Lauret Savoy, in her book Trace, augments Leopold’s call for a broader perspective and more inclusive ethic. “The pace and degree of such environmental changes are unprecedented in human history,” she writes. “Yet the embedded systems and norms behind them in the United States, the most energy-consumptive nation, are not. Their deep roots allowed and continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using nature, as well as human beings.”

Such problematic deep roots are not easy to accept, nor are they easy to deny. Though the Constitution was established to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” our current policies reflect little interest in securing anything for future generations. The Declaration of Independence decrees it to be self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—nevertheless, as Savoy points out, “without backing belief or means, ‘rights’ become limited and limiting to legal form and process rather than a moral imperative extending from heart and spirit.”

Savoy, recalling her family’s trip to Point Sublime on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, writes that the moments there “illuminated a journey of and to perception, another way of measuring a world I was part of yet leaving behind.” Throughout her life, she has remembered that day. “It’s impossible to step into that bright summer morning again,” she writes, “attentive to it, to parents alive, to an intact family drawn by hope and promise.”

We, too, are standing at Point Sublime, in awe of what is before us without fully acknowledging the meaning in those layers of rock or the direction we are headed. The difference is that for us, the bright summer morning has not yet slipped away. The sun is progressing across the sky, but we still have time to change the road we’re on.

A mountain’s moment ago, thirteen colonies declared independence from a king who had plundered their seas, ravaged their coasts, burnt their towns, and destroyed the lives of their people. He had refused his assent to laws “most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and “forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance.” Those colonies proclaimed that governments are instituted to secure the inalienable rights of their people, and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

Now, we plunder the earth’s seas and fill them with plastic. We ravage the coasts. Floods destroy homes by the thousands while droughts lead to wildfires that burn our cities to the ground. Though we are a nation built upon and made strong by diversity, and although the challenges we face demand greater understanding and cooperation among people of all nations, we are cutting ourselves off from the world. Science, which the founders of the country held in high regard, is denied.

We cannot declare independence from ourselves, but we can declare independence from an unsustainable way of life. This is the demand of Juliana et. al, and it is more than an issue for the courts. It is a demand that a country with the means to create positive change also summon the will to act. It is a demand that we at last learn to think like a mountain because, for a future to be possible, we must.

“America was ingenuity,” Ray Bradbury wrote. “It still is and could be.”

Dearest America, let us remember what we could be.

Yours,
Sarah Inskeep