Over a sunrise coffee the next day, as we looked down at the cloud layer rolling across the valley like a frothy sea, Allie told me about how she felt Oscar’s presence in the tent. She didn’t yet know that he was actually with us, not only in spirit, but physically.

Goat Rocks Wilderness is a place of stunning beauty, with waterfalls and alpine meadows laced with wildflowers, glaciers and snowfields, and panoramic views of Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier (or what our daughter Rosie refers to as “Mountaineer)” around every corner. An oasis of calm amidst a devastating fire season here in the Pacific Northwest, the weather on our visit to Goat Rocks was perfect: mid-60s with a gentle breeze and occasional clouds.

After a hearty oatmeal breakfast we break camp, eager to get an early start on a big day. We chat with several Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers who are stoked to be in Washington. Having walked all the way from Mexico, they’d heard from the southbound PCT hikers (SOBO) that Washington was the most beautiful part of the trail. Judging by the views of Mt. Adams this morning, and everything I’d heard about the Knife, a narrow ridge we’d traverse latter in the day with massive views of Mt. Rainier, and what I’ve seen of the trail further north, I had to agree.

After two quick miles, we arrive at our new campsite. We pitch our tent, hide our bear canister behind a tree, and continue north with a single daypack. It’s stuffed with water, snacks, and a surprise I’d packed for Allie that’s hidden inside a Mission Tortilla bag. The big reveal was to happen at the top of Old Snowy, an attainable peak a few miles north of us and just off the Pacific Crest Trail.

She has no idea what it is.

“Are they matching t-shirts?”

“You mean like the matching ‘this is my boyfriend’ and ‘this is my girlfriend’ shirts with arrows that we should have bought in China 20 years ago? That’s be cool.”

“A flag with our kids’ pictures on it?”

“I wish.”

“A tortilla eating contest?”

“No, hot dogs.”

“Gross! Brownies? Cookies? Whiskey?”

“It’s traditional to have a sip at the summit, but we drank most of the whiskey last night. Your surprise is some artisanal baijiu.”

“No it’s not.”

She still had no idea, so I dropped a hint. “It’s actually our pet fish, Blue Flame. I figured that he’d like the view.”

Allie paused to think it over.

“It’s Oscar’s ashes, isn’t it?”

“You got it.”

“It’s perfect,” she whispered.

Oscar would’ve loved this place, with its peaks and alpine valleys, because goodness gracious could that dog climb. When he was just a puppy, we took him to Mt. Baker for a few days of hiking. Near the end of an especially challenging loop, he scaled a 20-foot granite cliff to avoid coming into contact with a group of strangers. A fellow hiker described it as “some real National Geographic shit.” It was that, and also typical for our sure-footed and people-skeptical dog, who ran up and down ravines with abandon, never once losing his footing.

Back on the trail, Allie and I struggle to cross a small snow patch. Without snow baskets, my poles sink too deep, and I walked gingerly to stay upright. After a slow 100 yards, we’re back on solid ground, and the trail comes to a massive cairn and signpost: the Knife section of the PCT to the left, the alternative PCT route and Old Snowy to the right. We turn right.

Old Snowy tops out at 7900′, but we’ve been slowly gaining elevation all day and are already at 7600′. It’s just a half-mile to the summit.

The trail turns south, skirting the mountain. It’s hard to follow and we lose the way, heading up through boulders towards a false summit. Though we try to disconnect from the world while in the woods, I have the AllTrails App running on my phone in case we get confused. Once the recriminations start flying between us, I pull out the phone, and we realize that we needed to follow the tracks through a second snowfield to stay no the trail. Off we go.

This snow crossing is easier, thankfully, and soon we were back on the trail, ascending. About 100 feet from the summit, the trail gave way to a talus field and a few choose-your-own-adventure routes up to the summit. I tap my poles, sure to always maintain three points of contact with the Earth. The climb is on the edge of our comfort zone, but achievable (on the way down, we see a group of soon-to-be high school freshmen getting ready to summit as part of a fancy private school orientation trip).

There’s company at the summit; a group of three we’ve been following on the trail all day. A dad in his late 70s, an adult daughter, and one of her sister’s boyfriends. They are charming and kind, Southern California to the core. After a short while, they cede the summit to us so that we can spread Oscar’s ashes before the next groups make it up. I pull Oscar’s bag out from its Mission Tortilla bag layer of protection, and cut the top off with my pocket knife.

The wind is blowing in from the north, towards the people who are ascending the mountain behind us. I let a pinch of Oscar go, and then stop. Spreading his ashes onto a popular route, and potentially hikers, feels off. It’s not what he would have wanted.

I look around. Just below us there’s a side trail that leads to an equally spectacular view without the crowd. That’s the spot for Oscar.

We leave the summit and go to Point Oscar. I turn to the north to catch the wind, but nothing happens. I turn around, open the top of the bag wider, and tilt it at a 45°angle. The wind senses my change and begins to swirl. Slowly, and then with increasing pace, the wind slices through my arms, goes into the bag, and lifts Oscar up into the air. He floats up as wisps of white cloud: up and up he goes until he’s into the jet stream and disappears into a bluebird sky as he’s carried away towards Mt. Rainier and Goat Rocks and Mt. Adams. It’s beautiful, magical.

Allie can feel his soul and sense his presence. She knows that he’s here, free, and ready to depart—ready to go back to nature, to a place he’d never been, but always needed to return to.

I sense him too, and know deep in my bones that, after a year in a box in my office, this was where he needed to be. His work with our family was done, his new life here awaits.

A few of his ashes remain at Oscar Point, flecking a yellow wildflower. I look down the ridge to the north, to the snowy face of Old Snowy, and see two sets of mountain goat tracks. Were they here last night to welcome Oscar? Was one of them Oscar?

If he gets reincarnated, it’s likely to be as a mountain goat. I turn to Allie and tell her that, if a mountain goat here ever gets uncomfortably close to us here, it may well be a reincarnated Oscar. She laughs in agreement.

I take some of the ash-covered rocks and use them to build a cairn to commemorate Oscar. Then I grab three more ash-covered rocks, one for each of our children, and place them behind the cairn so that Oscar can watch over the kids in spirit just as he had in life.

Allie and I have a cry, take a few deep breathes, and know that, to the best of our ability, we’ve done right by that dog.

Somewhere in the wind, we feel his presence looking down at us as a weight lifts, the winds shift, and all three of us are off.

The 360° view from Oscar point.

My plan was to sit here and edit my book proposal after lunch. I have all of my gear: notebook, printed pages, a pen. But cold and tired isn’t a recipe for sharp editing. And while the lake is a brilliant blue on approach, it’s plan gray from the water’s edge. Maybe the haze from distant wildfires had dulled its shine. Whatever the reason, I’m not feeling inspired.

Instead of reaching for my notebook, I turn to look at my speedo, which is on the rock next to me, waiting.

Here’s the thing: if you bring a speedo to an alpine lake, you’re legally required to use it.

I take off my hiking boots and lay a wet sock atop each boot to dry in the wind. Pants off, speedo on, I step into the water. The lake is cold to the toe, cold to the ankle, cold to the shin.

I pause and begin clapping my hands in an attempt to psych myself up. A Dad watches me with interest, smiling between casts. He catches nothing but water. His daughter, maybe 10, peers into the water, a tube around her waist. I doubt she’ll go in.

Striking up a conversation to delay the inevitable, I ask where he’s camped.

“Just up the hill there are a few pretty nice sites. I grabbed the upper one”

“How long you here?”

“Maybe two nights. I got in yesterday.”

“How was the hike in with kids? I’m thinking of bringing my oldest here later this summer.”

“If you don’t mind taking two packs for stretches, not bad. But it’s quiet here, and pretty. We summited Wright Mountain this morning. Pretty cool for the kids.”

“Where’s Wright Mountain?”

He points to the area behind us. “Just follow the old climbers’ trail past our campsite to the rock scramble. You can’t miss it. It’s only another 500 feet of elevation gain. Not bad.”

“Thanks.”

I’m here scoping options for a planned backpacking trip with my oldest son, Max, who just turned 11. An unexpected sunrise summit with hot chocolate would be quite the experience for him. You see, Max seeks summits; mountaineering is likely in his future. A primitive trail with an undefined scramble is just the thing to surprise him with. I decide to check out Wright Mountain.

But first, I need to swim.

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I wade a step deeper, careful not to slip off the rocks. Knee deep now, there’s nowhere to go but down. It’s time.

I submerge to the waist, and then I spring out, dunking my head. It’s cold; shockingly cold. I’d planned to just dunk and dash, but I see something in my moment of submersion: the water changes color 15 feet ahead of me, right where the lake bed falls away. My curiosity piques.

I swim out. Breaststroke and then freestyle: one, ten, fifteen strokes. Past the dropoff and into the blue. I dive down, opening my eyes. It’s ultramarine blue—the blue you see on National Geographic clips with sharks—a blue I’ve never seen before. Vibrant and alive. Lapis. Rich. Stunning.

I want to stay in, to sink down and immerse myself in the blue, to fuse with it. But my head is already throbbing. I know this feeling. I felt it over the winter when I went open-water swimming in Lake Washington with an old friend. It’s a warning that my body is too cold, that the pain is getting to me, that I’ll lose my grip on reality soon. I dive down once more, maybe six feet deep, and pause to look around, capturing the moment in my mind’s eye. Serenity envelops me.

I break the surface and swim back to shore where my towel and raincoat await. I bundle up, do a few high steps in place, and rub my hands together to warm up.

Before leaving the shoreline, I dip a plastic bag into Gem Lake, pour the contents into a filter pouch, and then squeeze the contents into my Nalgene. Though I can’t stay in Gem Lake for long, I want to take part of it away to be with, to meld with. I take a sip. Cold, refreshing, pure. Way better than the stuff from the tap.

I set off towards Wright Mountain.

I hoist myself up the narrow trail past a fine campsite and pause to envision where Max and I would set up our tent. I snap a picture. I’ll see a dozen backpacking groups on my back to the trailhead from Gem Lake later that Monday afternoon, and I don’t want to risk hiking all of this way with a kid and no site for our tent, so I strike this place off my potential backcountry-with-kids list. But in the moment, I’m giddy, smiling. I imagine heading down to the water to fill water bottles with Max to prepare dinner or our sunrise drinks.

The trail continues up. Always up. I pass two backcountry campsites that aren’t on the map posted at Gem Lake, and take note of them. I pass one rock cairn, and then another. They point the way. The trail runs against the edge of a sheer rock face, and then bends back towards the middle of the mountain between the rocks, before fading to nothing with about 200 feet of rocks separating the trail’s end from the summit.

I begin to scramble. My hiking poles do me no good here—the rocks are too hard, the incline, too steep—so I hold them in my right hand like a fool. I’ll wisen up and put them in my pack on the way down. But for now, I want to climb, to ascend, to summit. Big steps after small, feet on shaky rocks and solid boulders, up I go until I reach the top, where a tiny tree greets me. Though small, given the wind and terrain, this tiny evergreen is likely older than me—much older.

An eagle comes at me from the south, catches an updraft, and then shoots through the gap in the mountains and off to the north. I smile. Beyond the eagle I see Glacier Peak. That’s my mountain. The one I saw on my backcountry trip to Image Lake last summer. The only one I’ve seriously considered climbing. Beautiful and symmetrical, elegant and removed, I smile as I look up “my mountain.”

Clouds, haze, and snow meet on the horizon at Glacier Peak. Mt. Baker peaks out to the north, more rock than snow. The breeze is pulsing, intermittent; it hits different at the summit. The haze has cost the sun 10 degrees, but I’m still sweating.

The smoke arrived in Western Washington yesterday. I missed a perfect view of Glacier Peak by a day. But so it goes in the 2020s.

The smoke and haze are everywhere now: obscuring the sun, burning the lungs, embering the forests. The fires are bigger, more widespread, and earlier than before. I was supposed to be canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota with close friends from high school this week, but fires closed the area.

Fires that burned 72,000 acres, hopping from lake to lake. Fires that led people to sink their canoes. Fires that evacuated the region. Fires that wafted smoke down to where the rest of my family lives in Cleveland.

Fires and smoke will mar our summers for generations. I cringe.

I turn and face south towards Gem and Snow Lakes. There’s a pinch of snow left on the mountainside, but not much. In 20 years, will people visiting this area know why it’s called Snow Lake? Will they search for a whiteness in the water, a rock cropping, something that conjures the snows that have vanished?

It can be overwhelming—the sense of loss, the haze, the melting, the changes we’ve set in motion. And yet…there are a dozen groups of backpackers on their way into the backcountry, and scores of families hiking here on a Monday: young and old, racial diverse. Smiling. Laughing. Happy, but tired. Everyone out here is connecting with the woods, with nature, with the beauty that surrounds us.

There is hope on a crowded trail on a Monday. There’s selection bias too, of course. But I like to think about the connection that each of these people is forming with the outdoors. The joy they feel when stepping into the cold waters of Gem Lake or Snow Lake. The presence that comes from looking up at the mountains, unable to hear the sounds from the freeway, the clanking of the city, the noise of our urban lives.

I sense that a change is coming. One that is big and subtle, important and not fully understood. A reconnecting. A reawakening. A rediscovery of our connection to the planet, to life, to something bigger and more wonderful and awe inspiring than anything we can find in the city or experience through a screen.

The world that surrounds us, waiting to be taken in by us.

I sit atop Wright Mountain, capturing thoughts and phrases, trying to remember what is means to me to be here, to look for the joy as well as the loss, to be. I close my eyes, listen to the wind, and exhale.

Typical Americans check their phones between 200 and 350 times a day. That works out to over 100,000 times a year. This seems insane until you reflect on what you see when you look around.

Every time I go to a park, most people are walking around hunchback-style, lurching over their screens instead of enjoying the scenery or company of others. On a bike ride yesterday I thought that I saw a couple making out, which is rare here in Seattle but, hey, it was a nice summer evening and they were siting on a bench next to the lake. Quite romantic.

Oh, how wrong I was! He was just reaching around her to better position his phone for a selfie. Or maybe it was to reduce the glare from the setting sun so that he could split his attention between his partner and phone. Either way, it left me feeling empty.

What I hate about phones is how they’ve become omnipresent and socially acceptable escape hatches. You can disappear inside your screen to anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Viewed narrowly, this is amazing. Bored at dinner? Look up how much precipitation Antarctica gets, or check in on the latest sports score. Endless information is only a few taps away.

Yet this obsession with easy digital connection undermines our ability to be present in the world, to sit in silence, to walk without distraction, to be fully in the presence of others.

Last weekend, we went to the Hoh Rainforest National Park with our closest friends. Eighteen miles into the forest from the nearest highway, there’s no cell service at the Hoh Rainforest campground. Without really thinking about it, I decided to leave my phone in the minivan throughout our time in the woods. The other adults had their phones to take pictures, but other than that, we were completely disconnected from deluge of information we otherwise would’ve consumed in our own bubbles.

Without phones around, time wended in new ways. We woke up late, made leisurely breakfasts as the kids rode their bikes around the campsite, and let for our hikes unfurl when we were ready for them. Dinners around the campfire started later than usual and stretched for hours. There were moments of silence and wood chopping, fire blowing and s’more making, beer drinking and dish cleaning.

The five kids were fine. They didn’t get hungry, didn’t complain, didn’t ask for screens. They just hung out, played games in the tents, rode their bikes to the visitor center, and adjusted to a more natural rhythm of life. They did what kids in the woods are supposed to do: everything and nothing in particular.

What putting the phone down gave us was time. Time with close friends, time without requirements, time without distractions. Time in the present.

Thousands of years ago, large species like buffalo, jaguars, lions, and tigers roamed across continents. Buffalo herds with millions of members stretched miles in every direction across the Great Plains, blanketing the landscape. Imagine the picture above as nothing but a sea of dark brown buffalo. That’s how large swathes of North America should look.

But as human societies grew, more and more land was converted into pastures, agricultural fields, and suburbs. Today, 44% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture. It’s hard to imagine a massive herd of buffalo stampeding through areas that are now covered in endless fields of corn and soy. The corn may be contiguous, but animal populations are separated, scattered across parks and wild areas that have become virtual islands. Instead of roaming, animals circle; instead of thriving, they survive.

Wildlife ranges are starting to expand again with an unexpected assist from technology. It turns out that not all NASA satellites peer out into the cosmos. Many turn a watchful eye back on Earth, and conservationists are using these satellite images to help wildlife.

For example, Act Green, a NASA-funded project led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), uses satellite imagery, expert knowledge, and on-the-ground observations to identify where conservation efforts can most help bison, jaguar, lions, and tigers (you can play with their maps here).

As I played with the Act Green maps and clicked into the 2040s, I started to imagine how islands of wildlife habitat today could become archipelagos of opportunity and animal corridors tomorrow.

Conservationists don’t have endless resources, but strategic investments in projects like Act Green can offer animals a lifeline while we work to reorient our society to more deeply appreciate the wild. I believe that the more people see majestic animals like buffalo in their natural habitats — and not just in National Parks where the tourists outnumber the herds — the more likely they are to support organizations and policies that help the wild world thrive. The more we support the wild, the more quickly it will regenerate.

The truth is that we can have a future where landscapes are once again covered in buffalo. We just have to dream it, demand it, and do it.

The book is designed to take you from where you are today to a more rewilded, balanced, and happier self. It does this by introducing a GAIA rewilding framework that will help you become more grounded, attuned, integrated, and active. I deeply believe that if enough of us follow this path, we will transform our society from one that’s destroying the planet into one that’s committed to increasing biodiversity, beauty, and resilience on Earth.

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The parade of horribles on climate news continues. This week, the Trump Administration rolled back limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Earlier this month, they revoked the 2009 “endangerment finding” that required the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gasses. Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA must regulate substances that “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In the aforementioned “endangerment finding”, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health, which led the Obama and Biden Administrations to establish vehicle, industrial, power plant emissions regulations.

The Trump Administration touted the end of the “endangerment finding” as the “single largest deregulatory action in American history.” The malignancy and callousness of this action is hard to bear. It will endanger us all, leading to unnecessary deaths, more severe weather, and a less competitive economy. But for the Trumpist, it’s not about logic or positive outcomes for the people. It’s about enriching their people (in this case, oil executives) while “owning the libs” and anyone else who trusts the science on climate change.

This being America, we are taking our case to the courts. A group of NGOs including the Sierra Club, American Lung Association, Center for Biological Diversity, Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Defense Fund, and several others filed a lawsuit arguing that the EPA’s move was illegal. More lawsuits will surely follow. All of this is well and good, but I can’t help thinking that this strategy is bound to fail.

The Clean Air Act was passed 56 years ago in 1970. That’s a long time ago. To put that into perspective, World War I began 56 years before that, way back in 1914.

We simply cannot decarbonize the US economy by asking lawyers to interpret legislation from 1970 in a way that enables strong regulatory action, nor can we hope that all future Presidents will want to regulate our way to decarbonization.

What we need are laws. Not regulations, but laws.

Now I know that Congress is broken, that there’s too much money in politics, that our districts are gerrymandered, that we live in a culture of scarcity, and that the fossil fuel companies will go after anyone who pushes for climate legislation.

But even if Congress was magically functional again tomorrow, I don’t think that we’d be able to pass meaningful climate legislation. The climate change conversation is stale and self-defeating.

What we need is a new paradigm that is about hope and possibility, not doom and decay. One that people can rally around and be a part of. An updated framing that untethers climate change from the toxicity of partisan bickering.

I believe that such a cultural change will only happen if we reconnect with the planet and recognize that the Great Work of our time is to transform humanity from a parasite on the planet to a keystone species capable of increasing and nurturing life.

Until we rediscover this truth, our options are limited. Once we rediscover it, all things become possible.

Here’s a word for you: kakistocracy. It means government by the worst people, and it’s the answer to damn near everything that’s wrong with the United States right now.

• Murdering citizens in the streets and lying about it despite the video evidence—that’s kakistocracy.

• Threatening to seize the territory of an ally—only possible in a kakistocracy.

• Delaying renewable energy projects to death when there’s a surge in electricity demand and rising consumer prices—a spiteful kakistocracy.

• A President so on the take that he’s pocketed $4 billion since taking office while his wife nets $28 million for an infomercial posing as a documentary—quintessential kakistocracy.

It feels like we’ve tumbled through the looking glass and are living in a
Dadaesque piece of performance art. The difference, of course, is that this is the real world, and if the regime hasn’t yet come for you or your family, your friends or your community, your most cherished institutions or policy areas, know that they will. Know that destruction of the good and noble, the altruistic and kind, the functional and rules-based, is what they’re after. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “the cruelty is the point.”

So what are we to do? For those who are willing and able, following the example from Minneapolis and peacefully taking to the streets when ICE and CBP come to your city is the play. When faced with lawless brownshirts who glory in violence, overwhelming nonviolence is the answer.

But it’s only a partial solution. Not everyone wants, can, or needs to take to the streets.

The US Federal Government, for all its size and scale, cannot terrify everyone in the country at once—at least physically. Their ability to spy on us digitally and create a surveillance state, especially with the help of their all-too-eager friends in Big Tech, is another story…But from a physical perspective, the ICE goons are limited in where they can go.

That leaves most of us in a liminal state. We know that our society is being reoriented by the worst of us, and want to do something to push back, but aren’t sure what, or how.

So here’s a simple recommendation: build community with those around you.

Join a gardening club. Volunteer with the PTA. Discover a new hobby. Or if you’re like me, do God’s work and decide to coach a group of eight and nine year olds who will be playing kid-pitch baseball for the first time. Encourage your neighbors and friends to get involved in something—anything that builds community.

Get outside your house.

Engage with people in the real world. Meet your neighbors.

Laugh. Share a beer. Umpire a little league game.

Cheer like hell when Jimmy finally makes contact after seven games. Forget about the brownshirts, and build the community you want, the community we need. It’s the only thing that can get us pointed in the right direction again.

A forest, teetering on the edge for a generation, burns to the ground. We knew that the forest was unwell—that we’d taken it for granted and rarely considered its needs. But this—collapse—this seemed impossible. But it’s here, and so are we.

A generation ago, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich came into the forest and marveled at the possibilities contained in its white ashes, with their grooved bark and wide canopies. In these homes for caterpillars and woodpeckers, voles and owls, the men saw the timber they needed to make baseball bats. But instead of swinging for the fences, they aimed at their fellow Americans. Crack. Whack. Smack.

After 9/11, we built a bat factory. Most of these bats were bound for the Middle East, where we tried to sell the local people on the joys of baseball by hitting them with our bats. It didn’t work. Back at home, more sophisticated forest management practices siphoned nutrients from the soil and diverted them to the bat-making ashes and the most established oaks—the one percent that needed no help—leaving the rest of the ecosystem with less. Through mycelium networks and reciprocity, the remaining forest made do, but in a weakened state.

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Gail force winds met the next cadre of foresters as they arrived. They saw old trees lurching, their branches snapping, their trunks creaking. Instead of letting them become nurse logs for the next generation, they put a TARP over them, nursing them back to health while the nutrient-starved soil suffered. As these giants reasserted themselves, they forgot about the help they’d received, and stretched out their canopies, crowding out the sun for the seedlings that were struggling to grow. The foresters tried their damndest, introducing earthworms and beetles, clearing away some of the underbrush, but the forest became febrile, and the white ash stand continued to shrink as the pile of bats grew.

The next guy came with a simple cure—burn it all down. Replace it with a big, beautiful building cast in his own orange image, with a few oaks in the yard—not as splendid or important as the building, but with more space and less competition than before. Brush fires burned, but enough of the forestry team stuck around to keep the flames small. Yet after a generation of nutrient siphoning, those acts of arson destabilized the root network that kept the forest alive. The place was dying.

The next group diagnosed the problem and got to work restoring the soil, planting native species that’d gone missing, implementing solutions on a forest—but not human—timescale. In a society demanding instant gratification and quick results, the deep work below the surface was unseen, and so it was untrusted. We returned the arsonist to power.

He came back as his fully unbounded self, Agent Orange. After firing the foresters, he committed the ecocide he’d long dreamed of, exfoliating the land, poisoning the soils, eradicating animal life, and building monuments to himself. He reveled in the destruction. Having defoliated the place, he dropped a match to watch it burn—and burn it does.

Agent Orange will eventually exit the stage: the question for us, is what will we do in the ashes?

The hopeful version of this story—the one that I want to believe—follows the classic arc of rebirth. For while fire destroys, it also purifies and cleanses.

There are seeds underground—fire poppies and fireweeds—waiting for the embers to die out so that they can germinate and spring forth from the ash, enlivening the landscape in a shock of orange and pink. Beautiful and unexpected; healing and replenishing the soil with their beauty.

If we’re lucky, the fire will also coax a cone no bigger than a lime into opening its scales and releasing a few hundred cornflake-sized seeds into a nest of ash. Most of these seeds will turn to food, but a few will tuck into the uncrowded ash and begin to sprout roots. If all goes according to plan, they will grow for thousands of years, stretching over 300 feet into the air and spanning 25 feet across the trunk. Anchoring the landscape, creating shelter and habitat, inspiring awe, these are the giant sequoia.

We have the curse and opportunity of living through a hinge point in history. The fire is upon us; the seeds are in the ground. What grows back amidst the ash is up to us.

Have you failed to even set New Year’s Resolutions this year? Know that you’re not alone. I’m a rather diligent person, and yet my goals folder only contains entries from 2018 and 2022. I think about goals most years, but rarely write them down.

Looking back at my entries from 2018 and 2022, I can see why I often skip putting them to paper. Goals are intimidating. While most of us are voluntold to create them at work, it’s harder to set goals in our personal lives—the fear of failure outweighs aspirational desires. It doesn’t help that most of our goals are destined to fail or be achieved without delivering the intended transformation.

Why is this? Let me explain.

There are two types of goals: jumps and steps. Jumps are big, discrete actions—the headlines that should translate into transformations, the BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) of life. Things like moving to a new city or country, finding a new job, summiting a mountain, starting a company, or writing a book. Achieving one of these is supposed to be like dropping a rock into a lake, sending waves of change rippling outward to the other parts of your life. Yet all of the research suggests that once you meet one of these goals, you quickly revert back to the person you were before. You still have to climb down the mountain, and your time at the summit was just a movement.

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Is there anything more cringe than aphorisms that are true? It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Straight corn—but also deep truth.

Journeys start with one step, but only succeed when you take the second step, and then the another and another until you’re on a new path into the future. Staying on the route requires establishing new cadences or rhythms to guide you. Some routines are daily, while others are monthly, seasonal, or annual. Across each time horizon, integrating new rhythms into your life can result in subtle changes that don’t so much happen as slowly meld into the person you are, shaping your character and future.

With that in mind, here are a few resolutions I’ve set:

• More Time and Modes in Nature - I want to develop a suite of outdoor hobbies that keep me outside and in balance all year. In the mountains, I want to become a better skier; in the water, I want to open water swim in the lake six months a year (up from three) and do more kayaking and paddleboarding; in the woods, I want to spend longer stints in the backcountry with my family and friends; and in the parks, I want to get better at identifying birds and trees.

• Spending More Independent Time With Family Members - We spend a lot of time together as a group of five, which is great, but going all the way back to my 2018 goals, I’ve wanted to spend more 1:1 time with each member of my family. This year, I’d get some independent time with everyone once a month. It could be as simple as going for a walk or taking a trip to the grocery store.

• Evolving From Daily Writer to Author - I’ve established a daily writing practice that I’m proud of. I recently started working with a book coach, and have learned that there’s so much more to becoming an author than putting words down on the page. Writing a book is like launching a business. This year, I’m going to integrate the beyond-words parts of becoming an author into my writing time. This will lead to fewer articles, but should take me along my desired path.

• Strength Training - I’m good about working out, but I haven’t lifted weights in decades. Now that I’m getting a little older, it’s time to focus on getting those gains. Swole isn’t the goal, but having a little more power underneath me as I hike would be nice.

I’m don’t know where incorporating these rhythms will lead, but I think that they’ll make me happier, healthier, and more balanced. And if they don’t, I’ll jettison them and pick up new rhythms, feeling my way forward as I go.

If you’ve set BHAG resolutions, make sure to focus them on the steps of the journey that you can control. For if you don’t find joy in the journey, the destination will be hollow. If the journey is delightful and the destination is unexpected, you won’t look over your shoulder, longingly staring at the peak you were “supposed” to summit instead of enjoying the view from where you are.

If you’ve set rhythmic resolutions for the year, good for you. Writing them down is scary, but looking back on them and adjusting your objectives and rhythms accordingly is the best way to discover and actualize where you’re meant to go.

I wake up early on December 20th—the second shortest day of the year—to yet another dose of dark and rain. Last year, I would’ve looked outside, rolled over, and gone back to sleep. But not this year. It’s been a few weeks since I went on a hike, and I have the itchy foot. I miss the woods, the smell, and rhythmic cadence of poles to ground, feet over rocks. The Nature Pyramid, which mimics the food pyramid for nature, prescribes an extended session in nature once a month. Mt. Si which has 3,400 feet of elevation gain and takes about four hours to get up and down, fits the bill. I enjoyed my hike there in November, and despite the wetness, know that I need to return for my December dosage.

I pull myself out of bed and head downstairs to pack my bag. Coffee in hand, I start the drive to Mt. Si. It’s just after 6am on a Saturday.

It’s so dark when I get the trailhead that I become disoriented and park a few sections away from the trail. I get out of the car, put on my headlamp, zip my puffer jacket and rain coats up, and head up the trail. Visibility is around three feet. I follow the circle of light from my headlamp.

Half an hour in, I stop to take off my puffer and have a sip of gatorade. It taste like sugar ants smell when you smoosh them— metallic, pungent, sour. I thought nothing of the gatorade being 90% full when I took it off the pantry shelf, but now assume that the cap was breeched and it’s become a floating grave for sugar ants. I reflexively spit it out as it hits my tongue and pour the rest out on the trail. The light rain coming down will wash it away, down into the creek. I turn off my headlamp; daybreak is coming.

Just past the first junction, the impact of the atmospheric rivers becomes clear; cracked trunks, downed branches, and uprooted trees, some over one hundred feet tall, litter the area. I sink into the mud, and hop over the creeklet that slices through the trail.

It may just be confirmation bias, but I swear that this place seems more alive than any other spot on the trail. Tiny juncos emerge from below the logs and head into the stand of Douglas Firs that envelop the trail, where they are joined by robins. I always smile when I see robins in the woods. While they are synonymous with suburban America, they are deep forest birds by nature, and I bet that they’re happier here than they are dodging swing sets and power lines.

I continue up the trail as it snakes its way up the trail, always up. About two-thirds of the way up the mountain, the rain turns to snow, which covers the top half of the trees. With each step up the trail, the snow extends further down the trees until it reaches the ground, blanketing the area. Two trail runners and a dog pass my on their way down.

“How’s the summit?”

“Snowy, beautiful, perfect” one on them replies behind a wide smile and deep breaths.

I continue up the mountain; the snow gets deeper. I have microspikes in my backpack, but don’t need them. The snow is fresh enough that there’s not yet a layer of ice below it. I sink ever so slightly into the snow with each step as I follow the paw prints up the mountain.

I’ll be the sixth person to summit today. The five that I see on their way down—three trail runners, one dog, and two solo hikers—are all in a great mood. Smiles all around. It’s a certain kind of person who starts up a mountain in the predawn darkness on the last day of fall. I take it all in at the summit; the snow and freshness of the air, hoping that the clouds will break enough for me to be able to see where the rain blends into snow. Several additional hikers push through and reach the top.

A British hiker with a golden retriever puppy asks me to take their photo, which I do, and we talk about our hiking plans for the summer—Glacier Peak and the circumnavigation of Mt. Hood, Section J of the PCT, etc. Black and white, East and South Asian, speaking English and not, the diversity of the group is beautiful. Yet we are all here in search of the same feeling, that sense of stoke that comes from getting up and down a mountain, literally hiking through different climates, before most people have started their day.

I turn around, head down, drive home, and get ready to chaperone Rosie to a birthday party, feeling a little more centered, a whole lot more fatigued, and more grateful than when I started the day.

Raising kids is my greatest joy, but it comes with challenges. The public discourse focuses too much on what you lose as a parent (your schedule and body and time are no longer your own) and the overwhelming banalities of the days. Hours can meld into days, weeks, and months that offer little more than a procession of laundry and Zoom calls and school drop offs and playdates and grocery store runs and cooking two dinners a day to sate your picky children and sports practices and more drop offs and buying clothes for growing humans and never-ending bedtime battles and potty training and more Zoom calls and more potty training and more grocery store runs and cleaning a house that is always too messy.

Despite this, there is more joy and delight than tedium—and it isn’t even close. There are short videos that warm my soul—toddler Rosie swaying side to side as she sings “I love my popsicle/it’s very yummy/Gabe loves his popsicle”; Max and Gabe wearing capes and super hero masks, running around the upstairs of our house like superheroes, bouncing off our dog and jumping through the air; toddler Max demonstrating the finer points of the “Max dance”, which consists of leaning over and thrusting your right fist down to the ground and then back up to meet your right-angle locked left arm; Gabe toddling as a shaky 15 month old on vacation, wearing nothing but Allie’s hat, which he takes off and pees into because why not?

But when the day-to-day has really ground me down, when I’m feeling despondent and overwhelmed, when the videos aren’t enough, the grist that I use to build myself back up are happy memories. Most of them come from my family, my time in nature, or, most often, where they converge.

Rewilding our family is about increasing that overlap. When I peer into the future and imagine my kids together, I envision conversations and laughs about all of the times we spent outside together, with no screens or external demands to divide us. I dream of capstone backpacking trips with them in the future, and start planning for those adventures with the small trips of today.

Building a corpus of outdoor memories requires intentionality for city-based families like mine. It’s easiest to camp when your kids are small enough to carry without much protest (less than 18 months) or big enough to walk themselves down the trail (usually about seven). This creates a massive doughnut hole when diapers and tiny legs make the thought of sleeping in a family tent or hiking more than a mile intimidating.

These fears are real, but the rewards outweigh the challenges. Even before we got serious about rewilding our family, we found that the memories flooded in almost every time we put up our tent.

Our first family camping trip, back in 2019 when there were just four of us and a dog, was a single night at the Middle Fork Campground in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualamie National Forest. On the hour drive from our house in Seattle to the campground, I felt ashamed that we didn’t take more advantage of our proximity to the woods that brought us out to the Pacific Northwest. But the picky pallets and diapers and nap times and stuff that come with two small children made that distance feel insurmountable. One night, though…that we could handle. If things went sideways, we could throw everything in the car and drive home.

The day before the trip, our dog Oscar, who loved nothing more than to get a pack of dogs riled up and running in a big circle, zoomied so hard that he ran into the corner of the porch at his doggy daycare, puncturing his side. To help his wound heal, we dressed him in an old knock-off Saint Laurent t-shirt that was silk-screened to advertise the Mustache Brothers, a Mandalay-based group of slapstick comedians I’d seen when traveling through Burma years before. The shirt was too big for his slender, 60 pound frame. We put his front legs through the arm holes and secured the excess material with a rubber band ponytail of t-shirt. He looked ridiculous in the trunk of our Subaru.

As we got close to the campsite, our four year old Max asked if there would be any bears.

“Of course not, Max, there are no bears in Seattle,” we replied.

“No bears in Seattle,” he repeated to reassure himself.

The first thing we saw at the campground was a sign that a bear had been seen in the area. As we made camp, the people from the campsite next door wandered over to tell us to be careful with our food, lest the bear they’d seen the night before come and disturb us.

An inauspicious start, but the kids were oblivious and having a great time. Gabe laughed as we danced, twirling and falling down in the tent. Max found a long walking stick that he used to march around the campsite in search of critters.

Just before dinner, our friend Tuesday arrived with her two Bernese Mountain Dogs. This was good news for Oscar, who didn’t like most people, and had spent the last hour softly barking at the world from the comfort of his dog bed in our open trunk, but loved Tuesday and her dogs. He jumped out to greet Mika and Yari, leaping into the air, crashing against their massive bodies and tumbling to his side.

We spent the evening around the fire eating hot dogs, drinking beer and juice boxes. Gabe wore a winter hat with a pompom, fleece pajamas, and wearable blanket, which made him look even smaller than he was. Max was also in a hat and winter jacket. He carried his prized walking stick with him everywhere, and used it to poke the fire—a habit he maintains to this day—until it went out, at which point it was time for bed. The boys wanted Oscar to sleep in the tent with us, but he insisted on joining his dog friends. And so, after some sadness, the boys said goodnight to Oscar, who headed off to sleep with Tuesday.

Early the next morning, as the sun started to rise, we heard a noise outside our tent. Tuesday opened her tent to stretch her legs and investigate the noise when she saw the bear! Oscar sensed the danger, and sprinted out of her tent towards the bear, who dashed into the woods with Oscar in hot pursuit.

Oh shit, she thought. My friend’s dog is going to get killed by a bear; how am I going to explain this to the kids?

And yet, miraculously, Oscar returned to the campsite a few minutes later with his tail up; his job accomplished. The bear was never seen by me, Allie, or the kids. Even now that he’s gone over the rainbow bridge, we can’t help but smile when we think about the time our strange, beloved dog saved us from a bear. Because that was Oscar: loyal, sporty, fearful of the human, and fearless of the wild.

A pandemic and another baby, Rosie, born in late 2021, led to a pause in camping. But once Rosie could walk and vaccines were widespread, it was time to get back out there. In the Summer of 2023, we planned a weeklong family roadtrip that we hoped to turn into a tradition.

We borrowed a friend’s tent and headed south, first to visit family near Eugene, Oregon, and then to the farthest northern portion of California to see the redwoods before swinging back home via Crater Lake in central Oregon. We’d rotate between motels and tents, hedging against bad weather or camping misfortunes with the known, albeit underwhelming, comfort of roadside motels and diner food.

Our southern terminus was the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, where we arrived just after noon on a bluebird day in late August. Our campsite, which I’d selected six months to the day earlier, was ringed with immature redwoods that still stretched 150 feet into the air; mere saplings compared to the mature stand twice that height on the other side of the Smith river.

As Rosie helped me and Allie set up camp in that inimitable style of a two year old—that is, insisting that she was helping, crying that she was not doing the hardest parts, and generally making the process slower but more fun—the boys headed down the path that led from our site to the Smith river. A large, climbable boulder with just enough toeholds for boys who’d been cooped up in the car all morning sat just into the water, forming a calm backwater pool teeming with fry.

There are few things more thrilling and scary than seeing your kids on the top of an object that was easier to get up than it’d be to get down. But the looks on their faces—satisfaction, accomplishment, a sense of overcoming danger—caused me to tamp down the anxious, Jewish Mother tendency that is always in the back of my head, looking for something to fret over.

Gabe, 6, had the grace and poise of a mountain goat, leaping up and down boulders, downed trees, and steep trails on his toes, always seeming to land upright—and quickly righting himself whenever he stumbled, tough and self-assured. His brother Max, older and more cautious, has inherited my challenged balance, and is more plodding—especially on the way down. When he finds himself in a precarious spot, the tears tumble down well before the feet move. I took off my shoes and waded into the pool, which was chilly but refreshing, to guide him down, grabbing him by the waist as he slid down the last bit of rock.

That rock and pool were our spot for the next 24 hours. From the base of the rock, we’d push off and head to the smaller rock outcroppings in the middle of the river, the water so clear and fresh that I could see the pebbles on the bottom and felt tempted, but didn’t act, on the urge to drink some. The boys doggy paddled with me over to the mid-river rocks, my nervousness offset by years as a lifeguard. We’d rest on the rocks, laughing and warming up, lizard style, before heading back to the shore.

A small voice pierced the air, “Mama, come look!” I turned my head to see Max knee deep in the backwater pool, his clasped hands obscuring the broad smile on his face. Slowly, he lifted one hand ever so slightly to reveal a frog. After letting everyone in the family touch it, which interested and scared Rosie, he held onto it for a few minutes before releasing it into the water, where his little brother and sister began trying to catch their own first frogs.

Months later, Max was asked to write a personal narrative by his fourth grade teacher. In the past, his essays were always play-to-play retellings of a soccer match. The play-by-play remained, but this experience was wilder.

Me and my brother tried to catch small fish when my mom suddenly whispered “hey Max come see this frog”. So I came to see the frog she found. When I saw the frog I felt like it was the coolest, and I was going to catch it. The frog was light blue and turquoise colored. After I cornering it a few times with no luck I finally got it in both hands! I had caught the frog!! I was so proud and satisfied. After we all had a chance to hold the frog we left. The next day I would catch another frog, but this would always be my first.

Bear chasing dogs and the catching of frogs. Climbing boulders and camping with dogs. Memories formed, lore created. These are the moments that stretch out, shaping who we are, ballasting our trip into an unknowable and uncertain future. A little wilder, a little more self-assured, and a little more alive.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

I just read another depressing climate article in the New York Times: Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They are Losing the Information War. It rehashes many things we already know: fossil fuel companies encourage and fund climate disinformation that spreads farther and faster now that Facebook doesn’t fact check; there were 1,600 fossil fuel representatives at the COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, causing trouble; President Trump relentlessly claims that climate change is a hoax; etc.

The line that stuck with me, though, was from J. Timmons Roberts, a researcher at Brown University and executive director of its Climate Social Science Network, who lamented “[W]e thought that good ideas would get people to act.”

I think that this quote is both right and wrong. Good ideas will get people to act, but the way the climate community represented in this article thinks about good ideas needs to change—quickly.

As someone with a deep interest in policy, it pains me to say that the idea that we can lead the fight against climate change with policy and global regulations is a bad one. Most climate legislation is killed by fossil fuel interests before it gets passed. Even exciting and potentially transformative pieces of legislation like CSRD in the EU are getting watered down in the face of concerns about competitiveness, while the IRA was destroyed by the Trump Administration in a fit of pique to “own the libs.”

The truth is that our global system as it exists today, with all of our annual climate conferences and meetings, extracts resources and pushes the living world to the edges. The norm is climate change and habitat destruction, the shifting of lands from forest to cattle ranch to soybean field because it makes “economic sense.” Human appetites and desires over planetary needs. The eradication of species, billions of years in evolution in the making, to make numbers on a graph go up and to the right on an investor-relevant timescale. Writing something like “investor-relevant timescale”, and knowing that you will understand it as short-hand for the short-term, profit-seeking logic of the world in which we live, proves just how embedded those ideas are in our culture and times.

This might sound quaint, but even in our current shitstorm of disinformation, I believe that words and good ideas can change societal paradigms when they stir dormant yet powerful core beliefs. Look at Silent Spring. The possibility of an actual silent spring without birdsong shocked the American people into action and gave rise to the modern environmental movement.

We are due for a new paradigm. The system isn’t working for us. People are angry, disconnected, jaded, and confused. Emissions are rising, animals are facing extinction, and wild lands are becoming scarce.

I believe that rewilding ourselves and the planet is the shortest and straightest path to establishing a new paradigm that can reconnect to our own humanity, give the natural world the space it needs to heal, and create the precondition for collective climate action.

It may not succeed, but it’s worth a shot.

Climate grief, that shadow of sadness associated with climate change, habitat loss, and ecosystem transformation, is real. The future looks bleak. The primary solutions we’ve tried aren’t working as hoped. But there are bright spots in the darkness, where innovation and opportunity lie, and they are spreading.

The Gran Chaco illustrates this paradox. At over 1 million square kilometers (100 million hectares), it’s the second largest forest in South America, larger than Spain and Germany combined (World Economic Forum et al. 4). Spreading across four countries—Argentina, 62.2%, Paraguay, 25.4%, Bolivia, 11.6%, and Brazil, 0.8%—the Gran Chaco is home to over 9 million people, with 5.6 million indigenous people from 37 groups such as the Wichí, Toba Qom, and Guaraní, as well as 3,400 plant species, 500 types of birds, 150 mammals, and 220 reptile and amphibian species (World Economic Forum et al. 27). This bounty of life is made possible by the region’s ecological diversity: grasslands and savannahs, thorn forests and marshes, wetlands and saltflats, shrubland and riparian zones astride the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers, which trisect the region as they flow southeast from their Andean headwaters in Bolivia to the Paraguay river.

Unlike the Amazon and Cerradão forests, which are top of mind on the Global Sustainability Agenda (as I write, COP30, the annual UN Conference on Climate Change, is being held in Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon river), the Gran Chaco’s anonymity makes it particularly vulnerable to destruction. Since 2000, 13 million hectares, an area the size of England, has been deforested (World Economic Forum et al. 4).

The reasons for this deforestation are multifaceted, but the primary driver is increased soybean production (Fehlenberg et al. 24). As global demand for soybeans rises, large agricultural operations in the Argentina Pampas and elsewhere are shifting lands from cattle ranching to more lucrative soybean cultivation (Fehlenberg et al. 25). The profit from this transition is often reinvested to purchase cattle pasturelands in the Chaco, where the land is inexpensive, the protections afforded to nature are scarce, and drought resistant soybean varieties thrive (Fehlenberg et al. 32-33). Converting Chaco forestlands to cattle ranches is less capital intensive than a full conversion to soy cultivation, but still profitable, and makes for a logical intermediate step between forest and soy (Fehlenberg et al. 32-33). Be it a cattle ranch or soybean farm, the result is less space for native species to thrive, with the cycle of land transformations accelerating.

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The imperative for us is to go from deforestation and destruction to reforestation and increased life. The question is how.

The most common proposals argue that we can radically change the future by tweaking the levers controlling the human institutions of today. Books like Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson typify this type of thinking. It’s a fine book, filled with technocratic ideas about how to make government work better, and it touches on climate change, mostly in the context of scaling renewables, but exists on a plane of existence that is divorced from other plants and animals. (The closest we get to deep engagement with natural systems is the forest illustration on the dust jacket.) Other examples of this approach include Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and thought pieces from those who promise to solve climate change or deforestation in the 1300 words afforded to them in a New York Times op-ed.

This line of thinking can be seen vis-à-vis the Gran Chaco in the March 2025 World Economic Forum (WEF) white paper, The Gran Chaco: Pathways Towards a Sustainable Future. The advantage of this approach is that you can understand and track its success by reading reports, looking at satellite data on forest cover, and analyzing soybean exports data from the comfort and remove of your home. But there are disadvantages as well—namely that it doesn’t work because it suffers from four flaws that are endemic to this type of thinking.

First, the WEF paper focuses on the least impactful of the 12 Leverage Points for system change identified by Donella Meadows: Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).1 The WEF paper on the Gran Chaco is chock full of Leverage Point 12 solutions related to governance “coordinated efforts across international, regional and local regulatory and policy-making agendas, with a focus on improving land-use practices and aligning production with conservation goals”; finance “[p]ayment for ecosystem services (PES)...[that] aim to support conservation in Gran Chaco countries by compensating efforts to reduce deforestation and enhance carbon capture, while ensuring adequate financing to sustain long-term conservation strategies and expand incentives for regenerative agriculture and livestock practices,” and private sector opportunities for sustainable development “[t]raceability systems for market access [that] ensure deforestation-free production and compliance with international regulations, enhancing transparency, market competitiveness and supply chain accountability.” (To be fair, the report also mentions ecotourism, one of my preferred levers, as one of its 20 recommendations, but in a decontextualized manner that undersells its potential.)

The second flaw is its bloodlessness. Can anyone rally behind a vision like, “[b]y uniting, stakeholders can amplify their impact, pooling resources and expertise to implement solutions that halt degradation and foster resilience”? (World Economic Forum et al. 46) Reading sentences like this brought to mind the large red banners I saw throughout China celebrating Hu Jintao’ and the Communist Party’s work to “build a harmonious society.” It’s hard to make people care about deforestation and habitat loss when it’s hidden behind technocratic, Communist Party level prose; what people respond to are individual species, stories, and communities.

The third flaw is its hubris. It espouses a top-down, marionette-like approach to systems change—one where we can operate the world like puppeteers, pulling strings with each bullet point we write. If only it were that simple. The truth is that implementing the WEF changes would fundamentally restructure millions of individual and collective decisions that are made each day. It’s easy to write about engaging local communities, harmonizing regional regulations, and strengthening law enforcement. It’s much harder to actualize in the real-world. Indeed, I can think of no examples of anything being this well-designed at scale in the world of today, but I’d be thrilled to learn of counter examples.

The fourth and most important flaw is its implicit assumption that combining the theoretical best parts of the global system as it exists today—aligned, international policymaking; resilient, multi-stakeholder governance; the deployment of innovative financial instruments, etc.—will deliver an outcome that preserves natural systems while enabling people to thrive. This belies the evidence, which is that our global system extracts resources and pushes the living world to the edges and then to extinction. The norm is climate change and habitat destruction, the shifting of land from forest to cattle ranch to soybean field because it makes “economic sense.”

Human appetites and desires over planetary needs. Incommensurate timescales. The eradication of species, billions of years in evolution in the making, to make numbers on a graph go up and to the right on an investor-relevant timescale. Writing something like investor-relevant timescale, and knowing that you the reader will understand it as short-hand for the short-term, profit-seeking logic of the world in which we live, proves just how embedded those ideas are in our culture and times.

This inability to think past tomorrow will eventually cause those numbers to go down, and much of human society to self-immolate, unless something drastic changes. But what? Again, I look to Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points.

Her second most powerful Leverage Point is the mindset or paradigm out of which the system–its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters–arises (Number 1 is the power to transcend paradigms, which is out of reach for mere mortals). These collective mindsets are as arbitrary as any other set of beliefs. As Meadows writes

The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs are unstated because it is unnecessary to state them—everyone already knows them. Money measures something real and has real meaning; therefore, people who are paid less are literally worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can ‘own’ land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.

The question, then, is how do we change these unstated assumptions? I believe that words and ideas can change mindsets. What makes words and ideas resonate, what allows them to change the paradigm in a society, is their ability to stir dormant yet powerful core beliefs. Look at Silent Spring. The possibility of an actual silent spring without birdsong shocked the American people into action and gave rise to the modern environmental movement.

We are (over)due for a new paradigm—technocratic tinkering, as I’ve tried to demonstrate above, is failing the Gran Chaco, the climate, and us. Emissions rise, forests are felled to make way for cattle and soy, animals go extinct before they are known to science. It all washes over us, next to ads and viral dances and memes on our phones as Amazonian indigenous leaders block the entrance to COP30 in protest, trying to shock us out of our collective stupor (Associated Press). Yet we remain distant, removed, detached.

In his masterful Carbon, Paul Hawken retells the story of a plant scientist who went into the rainforest with an indigenous youth guide. Hawken writes, “As they entered the thick and varied growth, the youth described one species after another, its history, name, and usage. His breadth of knowledge was a complete surprise to the scientists, who complimented him on his depth of understanding. The youth accepted the praise but replied with downcast eyes, ‘Yes, I have learned the names...but I have yet to learn their songs.’” (Hawken 175) That youth knew that true knowledge is not about facts in isolation, but rather the rhythms that bind.

These rhythms all pulse to the same beat, the very beat that I believe can move us to a new paradigm. It is the truth that humans are both an inextricable part of the living Earth and a keystone species with the unique responsibility to enable, protect, and nurture life on this planet. Our goal should be to increase the amount of life on Earth. Not money or capital or (only) human life, but all life. From this perspective, plants and animals become active stakeholders with rights—rights that are starting to be legally reflected as part of the Rights of Nature movement in countries from Ecuador to New Zealand. This legal movement is exciting, but it’s downstream of culture. For the Rights of Nature to become part of our standard approach to the law, we need to update the dominant paradigms in our society and replace them with one committed to the increase of life.

I believe that rewilding ourselves and the planet is the shortest and straightest path to gaining and spreading this new paradigm. I was reminded of the power of rewilding the other day when I read that the salmon came back to the Klamath river a few months after the dams that stood for 113 years came down (Sherriff). The salmon remember. Nature can restore itself, within limits of course, but only if we nudge it along. As Mike McHenry, a fish biologist who has worked on habitat restoration on the Olympic Peninsula for decades told me, “we’ve jiggered with natural systems so much that it’s only right that we rejigger to help restore them.” Rejiggering with the goal of increasing life requires the humility to learn from natural systems and the belief that they can be restored to a balanced state when we engage.

The best explanation of how rewilding works comes from Rewilding Argentina, which leads projects across the country, from the El Impenetrable National Park in the Gran Chaco and the Iberá wetlands in the north, to Patagonia in the south. In its 2024 Annual Report, Rewilding Argentina defined the four parts of its flywheel strategy as:

• Protected Areas - We help to create protected areas, build public-access infrastructure, and promote the parks as engines for a new local economy.

• Wildlife - We work to restore complete ecosystems, with abundant and observable wildlife that breathes new life into the local cultural identity.

• Restorative Economy - We build a territorial brand associated with world-class nature tourism experiences and exportable regenerative artisanal production.

• Communities - We work with local people to improve their well-being and pride in the land, for public empowerment, and for entrepreneurship. (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 133)

I needed to see this work in action, so I headed down to Argentina earlier this fall to kayak and explore. During my time with the Rewilding Argentina team, I was able to see how four pillars weave together like a carbon lattice, reinforcing and strengthening each other.

It all starts with protected areas like national parks, where human and non-human needs are most in balance. In January 2011, Manual Roseo, who owned La Fidelidad, a 250,000 hectare estancias straddling the Chaco and Formosa Province sides of the Bermejo River, was murdered along with his sister-in-law. In 2014, the 128,000 hectares on the Chaco side of the Bermejo became the El Impenetrable National Park, the largest national park in Northern Argentina. It’s a tiny spec in the overall scheme of the Chaco, yet because of its size and location, it is a critical wildlife oasis.

Getting to El Impenetrable wasn’t easy. We spent seven hours in a Rewilding Argentina microbus that took us from Resistencia, a mid-sized city in Chaco Province, to the park. The road passed through several of the Gran Chaco ecological zones, with the savannah giving way to a thorn forest, speckled with cacti and yuchán trees, which are also known as palo borrachos, and do look drunk, with bulbous, pot-bellied trunks slimming out and forking into a wide set of branches above.

The 20 kilometers of dirt road through the thorn forest was paid for by Rewilding Argentina, and is better maintained than the Forest Service roads I’m used to in the Pacific Northwest. Rewilding Argentina also built and ran our glamping accommodations at Los Palmares and El Bermejito, which were so nice as to shock me, complete with ensuite bathrooms, showers, and comfortable beds. My roommate Martin, a debonair Argentine, would ironically joke que sacrificio every time we looked out at the view of the jungle from the front porch of our glamping tent or sat down for another exquisite meal. All of it—the accommodations, the food, the roads, the microbus, were part of Rewilding Argentina’s commitment to public infrastructure and enabling world-class nature tourism.

Experiencing the wildness of the park required getting off the roads, and so after two nights of glamping and some light hiking, we set off to kayak the Bermejo river for three days with Destino Naturaleza, an ecotourism company that’s been working with Rewilding Argentina, first in Iberá and now in El Impenetrable, for a decade. Its owner and our lead guide was Juan Martin (Cucho) Rivas, who grew up on the shores of the Gualeguachú River in northeastern Argentina. He’s spent literal years of his life kayaking the rivers of South America, for months at a time when he was younger, mostly as a guide, but also as an ecoactivist, traveling with his journalist brother to raise awareness of the threats posed to efforts to build paper mills and deforest the region. He is a conductor of people, able to establish esprit de corps in moments; funny, humble, and smarter than he lets on. His favorite English phrase is “What the fuuuuuucccckkkk,” which can be used in anger, delight, confusion, or anything in between. Guides like him make these types of trips memorable.

Feeling more refreshed and rested than expected, we pushed off the shore and into the Bermejo on the third day of the trip. The river was silty, with a brownish tint that obscured a current that was strong enough to move us along at a good pace, but not so swift as to create whitewater. After our first morning on the river, we stopped for a lazy lunch and rest period, where we sat in the minimal shade provided on shore, waiting out the pounding midday sun.

I passed the time teaching English to Hector, one of the local kayaking guides who joined our group that morning. He grew up in a criollo family in La Armoniá, a tiny paraje next to the park and one of the poorest areas of Argentina. The park has provided economic opportunities for him and many other locals; he works as a kayak and hiking guide, cooks at the campgrounds, and pitches in as a receptionist when needed. He does whatever is needed to make El Impenetrable hospitable to tourists, supporting his wife and child–a true success story and part of the restorative economy. He can identify birds by ear, and manages to see them more clearly and quickly with his eyes than I can find them through my binoculars. He speaks literally no English, but wants to learn, believing that it will help his guiding work.

“Hello, my name is Hector, call me Cuchi. I live in Mira Flores and am from La Armoniá. My job is nature guide.”

He struggles through the phrases, repeating after me and shaking his head in frustration, when all of a sudden, everyone begins to yell and run into the river, imploring me to follow. About 300 years upstreams we see a large brown animal–

“Tapir! Tapir! Tapir! Tapir!”

Anita, who bubbles like a spring, effervescent, effusive, and full of life, has dreamed about seeing a tapir, and is the one yelling. Her face, framed by dark brown bangs, is warm and open. She’s an expert truco player, charming raconteur, and a kind soul. She’s on this kayak trip as part of her boyfriend Benja’s 40th birthday celebration, and is the first one into the river for a look. Her left upper arm and forearm are heavily tattooed. This is her moment.

The rest of the crew follows quickly, yelling at me to come in. I told my wife Allie that I wouldn’t get into the river—she was scared of something attacking me, and I’d seen enough caimans on the shore that morning to justify her fear, but the others assured me that caimans don’t bother people, and I was the only one with binoculars, and peer pressure is a bitch, and it’s so hot that I’ve got that thick, sticky, stuck-to-you sweat going everywhere and, what the fuuucckkkk, I really want to see that tapir too, and so I take off my sunhat, ditch my phone, and wade into the river. I see the brown animals with the hooked and distinctive snout—definitely a tapir—and pass my binoculars around. It’s a joyous occasion. Already in the water and having broken my commitment to Allie, I swim back and forth, with and against the current, in the refreshing, brown waters of the Bermejo.

There is something special about seeing more tapirs and caimans and majestic jaribu, the large black and white birds with multi-meter wingspans and red throats, than people, as we kayak to the rhythms of the river, totally connected to the present. A wildness and reorientation begins to happen. The river, the wild, the connection—it grabs a hold of people, like Cucho and Cuchi, people like me and Anita.

Further down the river, we run into Melina, another local community member who got connected to Rewilding Argentina through a local program designed to recruit and provide livelihoods to local people and is now a full-time employee. She was on a boat traveling up the river, making sure that the people fishing had permits, collecting fees, and of course keeping an eye out for animals. In fact, she’d seen a jaguar cross the river just upstream of our planned campsite for the following night.

In her 2024 Ted Talk, Kris Tompkins, who started Rewilding Argentina in the late 1990s with her husband Doug Tompkins, explained how they went from a focus on habitat protection and the establishment of national parks across Chile and Argentina to rewilding by quoting Lois Crisle’s observation that “Landscape without wildlife is just scenery,” (Tompkins). This realization got the Tompkins into the business of rehabilitating and rewilding animals. While they have worked with several local species, ranging from giant anteaters to giant otters, red-footed tortoises, and red-and-green macaws, their most famous work is with jaguars.

In El Impenetrable, the most elusive animal, the one that I most hoped to see, was the jaguar. Jaguars are native to the Gran Chaco and El Impenetrable, but fleeting rare; their habitat and connective corridors having been replaced by cattle ranches and soybean farms. When I arrived on the river, there were nine known and collared jaguars in El Impenetrable, the most famous of which was Nalá, a female born into captivity who was rewilded in Iberá and released by Rewilding Argentina into El Impenetrable in August 2024, and her cub, the first known wild-born cub in the region for decades. (Tompkins Conservation).

Our campsite that first night was on soft, muddy clay that captured the activity from the night before. Cuchi led a few of us on a walk from where the game trail exited the forest down to and along the banks, tracing the path of the tapirs, peccaries, an ocelot, and a jaguar. I didn’t see a live jaguar on the river, but I felt their presence, the sense that there was an apex predator, lounging in the bush, perfectly camouflaged and peering out at me and the rest of the kayakers with disinterested amusement.

Jaguars are getting slightly less rare in El Impenetrable. The big news at the La Fidelidad campground, where we ended our kayaking trip, was the sighting of a tenth jaguar, a male (or macho) who’d never been tagged or seen before and had recently arrived in the park from the Formosa side of the river.

Leandro was the man with the news. Slender with tanned skin, a silver hoop earring, and the pampero brand clothing preferred by Argentina gauchos from head to foot, he was one of the many earnest, twentysomethings who worked for Rewilding Argentina. Leandro began with Rewilding Argentina as a volunteer, and joined the staff in 2020 in the Iberá wetlands, where he was part of the team that monitored threats and checked on the health of rewilded giant anteaters.

He transferred to El Impenetrable in 2021, where he works with the local community. Most of his job is heading out to the bush to drink mate, bullshit about the weather, and build friendships with the ranchers who live here. It’s hard work—the criollo communities here are poor, scratching out a living near the river, often lack official papers for their property, and live off the grid. The proximity to jaguars can lead to conflicts with cattle, and members of the community fear the jaguars, incorrectly believing that they will kill people. Without people like Leandro, jaguar sightings and conflicts with cattle would surely lead to the killing of the big cats. Leandro helps to prevent this outcome by forging personal connections and dispelling the misinformation about jaguars, explaining their importance to the local economy, and looking to introduce solutions like electric moveable fencing that can help both the jaguars and cattle.

I ask what he likes about working in El Impentrable.

“It’s the energy and the people. It’s fun,” he replied. I can see the energy and excitement in his eyes. “At Rewilding Argentina, and especially here in El Impenetrable, things are just getting started. Everyday I can feel our impact on the people, the community, the land, and the wildlife. We’re changing the culture. ”

His English is great, and I ask if he works with people from anywhere else.

“I do. In fact, I just spent time with a group from Idaho and Montana. Ranchers there face the same issues with wolves and cattle as we do down here with the jaguars. We talk so that we can learn from each other.”

Of course, I think. The edges between the human and non-human, the places where we most interact with the wild, are similar, with the same pressures and opportunities facing the local communities. Sitting there looking at the Bermejo, I feel a sense of oneness and connectedness with the land, the river, and the people working to rewild El Impenetrable. I can feel, deep in my bones, how people like Leandro and Cuchi are slowly building a new paradigm rooted in the deep past, one that reconnects us with the wildness of this planet and within each of us–a wildness that we need to rediscover before it’s too late.

The leverage point, the bright spot, the paradigm shift, is rewilding.

Two days before announcing its third quarter results—$180 billion in sales and $17.4 billion in operating income, which would’ve been $21.7 billion if not for the pesky $2.5 billion legal settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and $1.8 billion in severance costs—Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees. In the hours after the results were announced, Amazon’s stock rose 13%. In a more just world, the juxtaposition of massive profits and layoffs would’ve caused investors to question why management lacked the imagination and creativity to harness the talent of its highly skilled workforce, which included people with 10 or 20 years of experience at the company based on my LinkedIn feed.

Writing to justify the layoffs to employees, SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti wrote, in part:

Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.

On the earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy claimed that “The announcement we made a few days ago [regarding layoffs] was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI driven — not right now, at least. It’s culture.” I worked at Amazon for almost eight years, and this sure feels like Day 2 thinking (stasis, followed by irrelevance, decline, and death) to me. If Amazon really believed in its leadership principle to “Hire and Develop the Best”, and was focused on customers and innovation, as it claims to be, then surely many of these 14,000 talented individuals could’ve defined, delivered, and created new and better solutions for customers.

But I’m less interested in what this means for Amazon than what it says about our society at large.

Also this week, the New Yorker published Information Overload by Stephen Witt, a look at the AI and Nvidia-chip crazed boom in data center construction in the US. The data centers being built require a gigaton of power—the same amount as Philadelphia—to operate; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks that we’ll need to add 92 gigawatts of power for AI. Renewables, which are intermittent and under assault by the Trump Administration, cannot meet this demand alone. Old nuclear power plants are being brought back online; mothballed coal-fired power plants are being retrofitted to use natural gas. Trillions of dollars are being spent on data center construction, accounting for two to three percent of US GDP. Sam Altman imagines a future landscape covered in data centers. All of this construction and compute increases emissions today and well into the future. Nvidia is now worth $5 trillion dollars. The first trillion dollar company valuation didn’t happen until 2018 (Apple) and now we’re at 5x that.

According to Witt’s article, 800 million people use ChatGPT every week. Relatedly, the ability to write without the aid of an LLM is beyond the reach of most college students.* Just this week, University of Illinois undergrads caught cheating in a data science course doubled down by sending similar, AI-generated apologies to their professors. The students were not punished because “In this case, the students’ behavior didn’t violate the policies outlined in her syllabus, so no disciplinary action was warranted.” For real? Even my toddler knows that an apology doesn’t count unless it’s genuine, and we should all agree that the purpose of college is to build your critical thinking skills—not to figure out how to cleverly avoid thinking.

A decade ago, I taught writing classes inside Amazon on the PRFAQ; now Amazonians are encouraged to write with Claude, and I doubt that anyone still teaches writing classes. Why bother with all of the work needed to form coherent thoughts and arguments when the AI can mine the work of people like me who poured tremendous amounts of effort into those documents to produce new ones that read similarly, but lack the same depth of thought?

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LLMs, of course, are trained on incredible amounts of data. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, paid $1.5 billion in copyright infringements for the pirated e-books used to train its model—mere peanuts in the grand scale of AI investments. The goal of all of this training was to generate trillions of weighted parameters that the model can use to create an output such as an essay that looks like, but was not, created by a thinking human. Some people are worried that AI will run out of human words to train models on by anytime from 2026 to 2032.

(Don’t worry about the AI companies, they’ll be fine; Nvidia plans to move on to “world models” to develop autonomous robots. WALL-E here we come.)

But back to the news on Amazon and other companies that are laying people off or curbing hiring to make way for AI. According to a recent report from MIT, 95% of companies are getting zero return from their investments in AI. Even if the results were different—even if 50% of companies were seeing a return—we should still ask if it’s really a good idea to replace entry-level humans with AI. In the short-run, perhaps this is an “efficient” way to cut costs and boost profits. I’ve seen how AI can handle the rote parts of work that used to be done by those employees. But by learning how to do the entry-level tasks, people develop the skills and context needed to innovate, evolve, and train others. All of this takes time and patience.

It seems to me that companies don’t want to invest in things like training and development because it’s expensive and cumbersome. Just let the machines do the work and hire more experienced people who have been trained by someone else to manage and coax the machines.

As a society, we are stuck in a short-term obsessed prisoner’s dilemma that’s evident with AI and elsewhere.

• If I don’t use Generative AI as a high school or college student, I won’t be able to compete academically or participate in all of the extracurriculars I need to do to land one of the increasingly few well-paying jobs available after graduating.

• If I hire and train new people, my P&L will suffer and I may lose my job. It’s safer to outsource the work to the robots, which makes me seem productive and technologically-forward.

• If I invest in my people as a manager, they will eventually leave my team and company for higher paying and more prestigious opportunities.

• If I stand up to the authoritarian overreach of the President, I’ll be punished, but if I keep my head down and put some money towards his East Wing ballroom or crypto scheme, I’ll be ignored and able to focus on making money. Things will snap back to normal in 2026 or 2028, and my cowardice will be forgotten. (This is wishful thinking that assumes that we aren’t walking into a new normal of crony-capitalism and illiberal democracy.)

We’ve made a collective choice to prioritize our own laziness and the short-term corporate profits of a tiny set of oligarchs at the expense of our overall welfare. Instead of investing in people, we cheer the ephemeral cost savings that come from replacing them with an inferior technology, forgetting about our responsibility to others and the next generation.

All of this feels eerily close to the climate crisis. We pollute and consume beyond planetary boundaries now, but at some point in the future, we’ll magically achieve balance with natural systems once our technology fixes things it will never understand—or we’ll move to Mars, or upload ourselves onto the internet.

As I look into this AI-future, I fear that we are lost at sea, adrift and enamored with technologies that make it easier to disassociate and disconnect from our brains and the physical world, yet harder to find meaning. I worry about the consequences this will have for our children, society, and planet. And yet the ease of mindlessly scrolling content served up from the AI is too easy, too tempting, and so we find ourselves stuck in the supposed ease of today, building data center after data center, unwilling to confront the awful tomorrow it will bring—for it’s never tomorrow, really, but always today.

*I will never use an LLM to help me write because my identity is tied to my ability to layer words into sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

My wife jokes that I fall in love with 95% of the dogs I meet. While that’s a slight exaggeration—I’m not one for droolers or pint-sized dogs—I have fallen in love with 100% of the giant anteaters I’ve met, starting with Patricio the orphan. I met him at al Centro de Rescate de Osos Hormigueros (Giant Anteater Rescue), which is run by Rewilding Argentina and co-located with the Estación Biológica Corrientes in San Cayetano, thirty minutes and a world more rural than Corrientes, a vibrant city in northeastern Argentina on the shores of the Paraná River.

The Giant Anteater Rescue is part of the Iberá Rewilding Program, which was established by Doug and Kris Tompkins to rewild Iberá through The Conservation Land Trust (CLT) and Rewilding Argentina. Iberá is subtropical and includes several environments, including “marshes, lagoons, small rivers, temporarily flooded grasslands, savannas, and forests” (Zamboni et al. 249). In her 2024 Ted Talk, Kris quotes Lois Crisle, who said “Landscape without wildlife is just scenery”—and this conviction guides Rewilding Argentina (Tompkins). Definitionally, rewilding is “species reintroduction to restore ecosystem functioning” (Zamboni et al. 249). The Iberá Rewilding Program is innovative, necessary, and controversial, as large-scale rewilding had never been tried in South America before.

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Over the last 150 years, Argentina has lost five bird and four mammal species; 13 of the 18 large mammal species that remain, including anteaters and tapirs, are in catastrophic decline (Donadio et al. 225). Iberá, long considered untamed and vibrant, was assumed to be a wildlife oasis, but a combination of cattle ranching, subsistence hunting, and commercial hunting to meet European demand for furs, leathers, and feathers decimated the populations there as well (Zamboni et al. 248) . By the turn of the 21^st century, giant anteaters, tapirs, green-and-red macaws, jaguars, giant otters and two of the three pampas deer populations were regionally extinct in Corrientes Province (Zamboni et al. 248). Species including the manned wolf, marsh deer, and cougar struggled on the edge of extirpation.

Amidst the decimation, the Corrientes provincial government established the 13,000 km² Iberá Nature Reserve in 1983 (Zamboni et al. 249). Despite being a reserve, it was a mix of public and private lands, and both cattle ranching and habitat degradation continued. Rewilding needs protected land to succeed, and in 1997 the CLT started purchasing land in Iberá with the intention of eventually establishing a National Park—the Tompkins were concurrently following the same strategy in Chile—beginning with the acquisition of the 11,400 hectare San Alonso Ranch on an island in the center of the Iberá wetlands (Rewilding Argentina). CLT continued buying land, eventually owning six private reserves. In September 2016, the land (375,000 acres) was donated to Argentina to establish the Iberá National Park (Becker).

The idea to rewild Iberá came after the initial land acquisitions. In 2005, Rewilding Argentina began convening workshops with local experts and scientists to draft recovery plans and prioritize which of the missing species—the giant anteater, pampas deer, collared peccary, tapir, green-and-red macaw, or jaguar—to begin the rewilding project based on conservation status and habitat availability (Zamboni et al. 249). They selected the giant anteaters.

With no blueprint to follow, the Rewilding Argentina team created and revised protocols and processes for every species. For giant anteaters, these now include hand-rearing cubs, radio tagging them, reintroducing them to an outdoor environment, dietary supplements, soft-releases, and post-release regular recaptures for health checkups (Zamboni et al. 251).

Several of these steps occur at the Giant Anteater Rescue Center. Established in 2006 as part of the Iberá Rewilding Program, it was part of the first successful giant anteater release in Iberá in 2007 (Rewilding Argentina). As of September 2025, Rewilding Argentina has successfully returned 113 Giant Anteaters to Iberá (Delgado), with numbers 114 and 115, Pirpi and Patricio, currently living at the center.

The Giant Anteater Rescue works with other species as well. The week before I visited, they successfully reunited two Giant Otters pups with their mother in Iberá, who had abandoned them for unknown reasons four months ago but accepted them into the family on that happy day (Delgado). Releases are the best part of the job for Ali Delgado, a biologist by training who has worked for Rewilding Argentina since 2006, starting in Iberá before transferring to the Giant Anteater Rescue she leads in 2010. Tall and lean with a bright smile and friendly dark brown eyes, she radiates the easy confidence of someone who has found her purpose.

The Giant Anteater Rescue Center is located a hundred yards from the entrance of a small park at the end of a long dirt road. It’s surrounded by farms, most of which included uncollared dogs lazing about near the road; one dog tried to herd my Uber so hard that we almost ran over him. I arrived a few minutes early, found a member of the Biological Station team in her office, and asked for directions to Ali and the anteaters. She led me to an outdoor map and she gave me instructions about which trails were closed in rapid Spanish that I didn’t fully understand before sending me on my way. I took a picture of the map, which was somewhat helpful for orienting, though it didn’t include al Centro de Rescate de Osos Hormigueros. It turns out that I was looking for the place marked Cuarentena (quarantine) on the map.

As usual, I started hiking in the wrong direction and got lost following a haphazard series of turns. My heart began to race, nervous that I’d be late for my appointment and concerned that I wouldn’t have enough time at the Center before the Uber I’d scheduled to take me back to Corrientes arrived. As my pace quickened I saw my first humming birds in Argentina, which cheered me up momentarily. I continued down the trail through an open meadow, past trees charred from a recent fire but still standing until I reached a sign. I followed the arrow to the right, and ended up at a scenic outlook of a murky river. Backtracking, I saw a guazuncho, the deer-like grey brocket, flash across the trail and into the brush near the junction with the dirt road that I took back towards the entrance until I saw a building. I banged on the side door, and Giselda (Gichi) Fernández, who helps care for the animals in quarantine at the Giant Anteater Rescue Center, let me in, explaining that Ali was waiting for me at the gate.

Ali returned shortly, and we all had a good laugh about my poor sense of direction. She led me inside to the kitchenette and offered me a drink of mate.

In Argentina, everyone drinks mate out of shared metal straws that are wedged into earthen bombillas filled with dried yerba mate leaves and hot water. It’s such a part of the national culture that Luiz, who kayaked down the Bermejo River in the El Impenetrable National Park with me earlier in the week, wore a baseball hat with a mate-filled bombillas on the front and an Argentinian flag on the side; not surprisingly, he offered the rest of us mate every time we stopped. He didn’t have much luggage with him—just a small backpack and a sleeping bag—but he brought enough mate for 10 people to share.

I politely refused mate the first few times it was offered to me on the Bermejo, weirded out as a post-pandemic, germ-conscious American by the shared straw part. I eventually tried it, staring at the straw with a suspicious side eye before taking a sip and passing it on. It tasted like sour loose-leaf Chinese green tea.

On the microbus ride back back from the Bermejo I’d learn that, although the straws are shared, the water never is. You gotta suck the bombillas dry. On the river I thought that taking a sip and passing it on with water remaining was the proper etiquette, but I was wrong—completely and utterly wrong. My attempt at etiquette was uncouth and impolite. Whoops.

When Ali offered me the mate, I was ready. I drank it all in one gulp, slurping at the end. Ali gave me a nod of recognition, refilled the bombillas, and drained it, slurping as well. We washed our hands, took off our boots, and put on the shared crocs that we soaked in a bath of water and disinfectant before heading into the sanitized quarantine area to meet Patricio and the other animals.

Ali leads me into the first room where I meet Patricio, who is three months old with a long, curved grey snout that’s wet to the touch and a coarse layer of white fur atop his dark brown coat. Gichi, who hand-rears many of the animals here and is feeding him a bottle, invites me to get closer. Patricio’s eyes are small and beady but welcoming, and he trustingly holds my thumb in his hand (much like my recently deceased dog Oscar used to do), and it melts my heart. He puts my pinky in his soft and toothless mouth, exploring it for whatever breakfast leftovers the soap didn’t get off between sips from the bottle. His tongue is long, purple, and cylindrical; it tickles ever so slightly. I love him. (When my kids see a video of him, they will become deeply attached as well.)

I eventually say goodbye to Patricio, and go with Ali to visit Paye, a red-and-green macaw who is recovering well and will be released soon. These vibrant, beautiful macaws were extinct in Argentina for 170 years (Tompkins Conservation) before Rewilding Argentina began reintroducing them to the wetlands in 2019. The tour ends with a peek into the empty jaguar enclosure and the room where the Giant Otter pups were raised.

We leave quarantine, put on our boots, and head outside to meet Pirpi, the larger juvenile Giant Anteater who came to the Center as a wee pup in October 2024 and is almost ready to be rewilded. He’s much bigger than Patricio—I’d guess he’s almost six feet long from snout to tail—and lives in a rectangular enclosure that’s dotted with trees and tall grasses. Pirpi pays us no mind as he casually strolls along the far fence, his long, shaggy tail raised ever so slightly off the ground, parallel to the end of his snout. He wears the harness and VFH transmitter that he’ll take with him to the northern section of Iberá, near Portal Norte Cambyreta, when he’s released in October. The transmitter will allow the Rewilding Argentina field team to monitor him. If his reintroduction is successful, Pirpi’s harness, which can cause wounds, will be removed after about two years (for females, harnesses are removed after two batches of offspring) (Zamboni et al. 251). For now, a slurry of catfood and water augment foraged ants, which are also the favorite food of the pale-crested woodpecker, with its shock of white-to-blonde hair (think Draco Malfoy with a mohawk) and red cheeks, that’s shimmying up one of the trees.

The last stop of our tour is the adjacent enclosure that houses a red-footed tortoise bound for the El Impenetrable National Park. These tortoises eat a tremendous amount of fruit, which is something that I can relate to, but their love has a more practical effect than mine—their dung disperses native seeds throughout the Chaco region (Tompkins Conservation). Ali picks the tortoise up without a problem and hands him to me; he’s heavy, but I hold him at face-level. He grumbles in a low, guttural voice before poking his head out for a better look at me. I smile back and put him down. He promptly puts his head back inside his shell. Ali and I head to the office for a chat.

Ali estimates that there are about 250 Giant Anteaters in Iberá, though no one knows the actual number because the park is massive and Giant Anteaters are elusive. Still buzzing about anteaters from my interactions with Patricio and Pirpi, she asks if I can see something upsetting. I take a deep breath and say yes. She opens a folder on her laptop and turns the screen towards me. I see the severed head of an anteater, followed by a picture of a Rewilding Argentina team member holding the same anteater’s tail, and then one of that same anteater strung up and hung from a meat cleaver next to a small boy, her fur-laden paw still attached to identify the species. Finally, Ali shows me a second picture of the tail, though this time her pup is burrowing himself into it for comfort. The nausea rises up from my stomach and into my throat as the tears well up in my eyes.

I ask Ali why they killed the mother.

“It’s out of hunger and ignorance. There people are hungry, their kids are hungry, and they need to eat. Sometimes Giant Anteaters are killed for meat to feed a family; other times they are killed because they fight with family dogs and are viewed as a nuisance.”

She’s speaking in Spanish that I can mostly understand, but I respond in English to confirm I didn’t miss a key word or verb that can change the meaning. She volleys back in a combination of English and Spanish to clarify.

“But what happens after Rewilding Argentina talks to these people?” I ask.

“Once the local people understand the situation and learn that Giant Anteaters are at risk, they stop killing them. It’s that simple.” She continues, “The problem is with the corporations that cut down the forests and destroy the lands, not the poor people who are struggling to survive.”

She’s right. People living on the grinding edge of poverty in tiny parajes aren’t the problem—when told about the implications of their actions, they stopped. Their struggles are an effect. The cause flows from the suits who sit in air conditioned offices in cities and live a life of abstraction, cluttered with meetings and Zoom calls and spreadsheets and a P&L that always needs to improve. A world of human-made forces and processes that obscure the physical world impacts of their decisions.

As someone who lives in a city and works as and with suits (though in the contemporary West Coast tech uniform of t-shirts and hoodies) I know the “I really care about sustainability in my personal life, but…” preamble all too well. I’ve accepted that the corporate machine wants the P&L to get better in the short-term, damn the longer term consequences.

In my view, the only way to change the machine is if the people running it have a change of heart that turns that “but” into a “so.” That won’t come from articles on the increase of carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, politics, or another global environmental threshold being crossed. Those are abstractions with long term and geographically diffuse implications that are hard for most of us to care about. What we need is a change of beliefs, a change in culture—and that can only come from lived experiences.

When Patricio held my thumb, I felt a connection, a shared understanding, a flow of energy passing between us. It was an instant, and yet it was so much more. Those connections stay with you.

If we don’t see the Patricios, if we don’t go out to the rivers and kayak and camp and stare at the stars and curse the mosquitos and hope that it doesn’t rain—if we stay in our cities, tucked behind the glow, brain-rotting away in front of the endless scroll—our lives become severed from what it means to live on and of this planet as conscious beings.

What inspires me about Rewilding Argentina is not just that they rescue, rehabilitate, and release animals–though that’s cool. It’s not just that they monitor wildlife in nature and work with local communities to protect jaguars and anteaters and macaws and tortoises–though that’s badass. It’s that they are doing this while building the infrastructure to make the system sustainable by establishing alternative, nature-based local economies that bring tourists who are nature-curious but not hardcore backcountry experts to magical places like the El Impenetrable National Park. And that’s transformational.

After finishing my kayaking trip down the Bermejo early one morning, we had a few hours to hang out at the La Fidelidad campground in El Impenetrable before dinner. I noticed a camera crew sitting at a picnic table and wandered over to ask where they were from. It was a team from a regional tv station filming a piece about the Park. They asked to interview me, likely because I was the only foreigner there. In fact, I was the first of the 209 visitors to sign the guestbook who wasn’t Argentine. Though I needed our kayak guide Cucho to help me answer the most complex questions, I was able to get off one sentence that I’m proud of: “Si no ves la naturaleza, no quieres protegerla” (if you don’t go out and see nature, you won’t want to protect it.)

What I want is for everyone, including the suits who make decisions, to go on a trip like the one I took on the Bermejo River, so that they can touch and see and feel and experience all that we have, some of what we’ve lost, and what we can gain, both spiritually and emotionally, from rewilding ourselves.

Works Cited

Becker, Martin. “World’s Largest Land Donation Led by Tompkins Conservation.” World’s Largest Land Donation Led by Tompkins Conservation, The Conservation Finance Network, 26 October 2016, https://conservationfinancenetwork.org/2016/10/26/worlds-largest-land-donation-led-by-tompkins-conservation. Accessed 14 October 2025.

Delgado, Ali. Personal Communication. Centro de Rescate de Osos Hormigueros,, San Cayetano, Corrientes, Argentina.

Donadio, Emiliano, et al. “Rewilding Argentina: lessons for the 2030 biodiversity targets.” Nature, vol. 603, no. 7900, 2022Nature, pp. 225-227, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00631-4. Accessed 11 October 2025.

Rewilding Argentina. “Who we are.” Who we are, https://www.rewildingargentina.org/who-we-are/. Accessed 11 October 2025.

Tompkins, Kris. A bold plan to rewild the Earth — at massive scale. Ted Talk. Vancouver, Ted, 15 April 2024, https://www.ted.com/talks/kristine_mcdivitt_tompkins_a_bold_plan_to_rewild_the_earth_at_massive_scale/transcript. Accessed 19 October 2025. Speech.

Tompkins Conservation. “In One of the Planet’s Most Threatened Forests, Red-Footed Tortoises Return With a Job To Do.” In One of the Planet’s Most Threatened Forests, Red-Footed Tortoises Return With a Job To Do, Rewilding Institute, 30 May 2022, https://rewilding.org/in-one-of-the-planets-most-threatened-forests-red-footed-tortoises-return-with-a-job-to-do/. Accessed 10 October 2025.

Tompkins Conservation. “Red-and-Green Macaws Released in Wildfire-Stricken Wetlands.” The Rewilding Institute, 19 July 2022, https://rewilding.org/red-and-green-macaws-released-in-wildfire-stricken-wetlands/. Accessed 10 October 2025.

Zamboni, Talía, et al. “A review of a multispecies reintroduction to restore a large ecosystem: The Iberá Rewilding Program (Argentina).” Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, vol. 15, no. 4, 2017, pp. 248-256, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2530064417301062?via%3Dihub#sec0110. Accessed 11 October 2025.

Gary Snyder’s work is marbled into contemporary environmental writing. I recently bought an anthology of his poems. Flipping through it yesterday, I stumbled upon the following poem in the “Little Songs for Gaia” section of his Axe Handles collection that spoke to me.

As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
      is to us,
            so are we to the trees

      as are they

  to the rocks and the hills. 

I sit on a bench that looks out from the Parque Mitre and across a narrow canal towards rusted out shipping infrastructure in Corrientes, Argentina. A boat that used to ply these waters, ferrying people and freight, is slowly merging into the hillside vegetation leading down to the trash-lined water’s edge. I turn over my right shoulder and stare into the Paraná River. It’s massive–wider and grander than where the Puget Sound meets downtown Seattle, or where I cross it on my frequent trips to the Olympic Peninsula. The scale of the Paraná reframes what a river can be in my mind–it’s easily a mile wide here, and expands to five miles wide in places. Here, it’s the natural border between Corrientes and Chaco Provinces; near where the water meets the horizon, just beyond the transmission lines in the distance, it divides Argentina and Paraguay.

I’m spending my free afternoon in Corrientes on the banks of the Paraná River because Cucho Rivas, the man who just led my kayaking trip down the Bermejo River in Chaco–a man who has kayaked through much of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay as well as portions of the Pantanal in Brazil–says that it’s one of his favorite rivers. I’ve learned to trust his taste–especially in waterways.

There’s no staircase down to the river where I am, so I leave the park and head west along Av. Costanera Gral. San Martin. As Carla, a fellow member of our kayaking group explained it to me, everything takes longer to say in Spanish–including, apparently, street names.

The second park has stairs down to the water, but the beach is so littered with garbage that I stop 15 feet short of the shoreline. The casual fisherman next to the town drunks catch nothing– water trickles out of a pipe that juts out from near the bottom of the 20 foot tall brick embankment that divides the city from the river.

I retreat up the stairs and walk along the Av. again, heading towards La Puerto de la Ciudad de Corrientes. It looks like a beach on the map, and I assume that the Door to the City will be beautiful. The sun is shining and the air is warm with patches of clouds; it’s a perfect afternoon for strolling. I pass couples power walking on the promenade, groups of teenage girls sharing mate from earthen bomballas and gossiping, an early years high school boy flirting with a girl who flashes a smile. Their school uniforms match. A grandma plays with her grandchildren in the patch of grass next to the promenade, the toddler boy in her charge walks unsurely, but makes sure to crunch everything that may crinkle. From over the edge of the waist-high embankment I see a man scanning the beach with a metal detector in one hand and an extended arm dustbin in the other, a submerged boat just off shore, perhaps an indication of riches. He stops to inspect something and, determining that it’s trash like the rest of what’s around, throws it further up the shore–the dustbin must be for treasure, not trash.

I continue on, passing two lizards on the top of the brick embankment. Embankments are meant to protect cities from the vicissitudes of rivers, but this one goes a step farther, severing the ties between water and city. Near the shore, the city has signs that say, “Take care of our local animals; if you see wild animals (animales silvestres), call 147 or 911.” Wild animals aren’t supposed to be here, on a lifeline of nutrients and the connective waterway linking this area to other rich habitats, right? Or are there?

Of course they are! There are birds living on the river, singing and flitting from one tree to the next if you stay still long enough to listen. Mostly sparrows and pigeons, like most cities, but there are also yellow-billed cardinals, with their red heads, bright yellow beaks, and black wings set against white bodies, as well as fork tailed fly catchers, and monk parakeets, the loud, green birds that travel in packs and repeat the same annoying and increasingly loud phrases, like a bunch of frat boys at a party.

I continue down the Av, arriving at the Door to the City. This beach is even more depressing than the last: the smell of trash mixes with a homeless encampment. Three dogs nap as two junkies blitzed out of their gourdes mutter incoherent nothings to the world from their fetid mattresses below a tree that won’t protect them from the rain–not that they care, and not that there’s rain in the forecast. The mess–chip wrappers, plastic bottles and bags, fishing line and a mostly buried bottle of Jack Daniels–is everywhere. Though I pick up litter everywhere I go, it’s too much to bear here; I get one wrapper, but feel helpless and overwhelmed. A gaunt fisherman casts a line, and I pause to take a picture of a dead fish with something white in its stomach. Perhaps plastic, perhaps bone–I don’t touch it, even with my boot.

I take three more steps–the air is still pungent with refuse, but I promised myself that I’d go into the Paraná. My plan was to take off my boots and wade into the river in search of its power and life (or despierto as Cucho calls it). But whatever life the river has is hidden, suppressed by the disregard the city appears to have for it. Here, the majestic Paraná is reduced to a highway to facilitate commerce, a place to scavenge for the desperate, a background for Instagram posts and power walks–as long as your eyes and camera capture the middle of the river and the far shore, which is too distant to see in detail. And from here, the Chaco shoreline looks wild, beach-lined, and mostly undeveloped.

I take another step and put my hands into the river. It’s silty like the Bermejo I just kayaked and swam in, but where the Bermejo felt clean and vibrant, this one feels like it smells: of disintegrating trash, the leftovers of human society mixing with sand. A stickiness remains as I take my hands out of the river and slowly walk back up the beach, past the fishermen–there are more here, mostly young, pulling in empty lines, including a Dad trying to teach his son to fish, the mother sitting in a lawn chair at their side–and to the stairs leading back to the promenade, where I find a bench to process my thoughts. As I write, a fat lizard stops on the brick ledge in front of me, staring, just like me, in a combination of wonder and horror, at the tugboat pushing four massive junks upriver to Paraguay.

At least the birds come and sing, Grayish Baywings and a Red-crested Cardinal–its head the same bright red as the Yellow-billed Cardinal, only tufted–House Sparrows and the Rufous-bellied Thrush (think Robin), yellow Cattle Tyrants and Swallows, Rock Pigeons and those frat boy Monk Parakeets. There’s all here, but no one else is looking up or around–just straight ahead or down into a glowing rectangle.

When I was on the Bermejo, I tried to feel and sense the life of the river, its despierto. I intellectually believe that the river is alive, and trust those like Cucho who are closer to nature than I am when they say it is alive, but I have more work to do before I can get there. And I’m alright with that.

But what I can sense–and perhaps this is just part of my personality, or maybe it’s that I first came to feel connected to nature and sustainability when it was inaccessible due to the terrible and life-altering pollution that afflicted Beijing when I lived there–is that this river is sick. That if the Paraná is alive, it’s where it’s wild and free. Here in the city, it’s a zombified shell of itself, in seeming disbelief that people who need the river–the people whose ancestors lived on and in this river–have become so removed and detached from it so quickly.

A plastic bag floats out from the shore; the deadening thud of the tugboat fills the air. The river aches. A swallow dips close to the water in its inimitable way looking for food, before looping over the avenue and into the city.

A few hours later, I leave the city in an Uber. As we head down the Av just a few blocks past where I turned around on my stroll we see the beach that everyone raved about–the clean one with acres of sand to relax in with the rest of the sun bathers. It’s next to the milelong bridge that will take me across the Paraná and into Chaco Province on my way to the airport. I look down at the sun umbrellas from the bridge, thinking that while, yes, that beach would’ve made for a nice afternoon, we don’t reveal ourselves where we put on a show, but rather when and where we think no one is watching.

But the river is always watching. It knows the truth of what happens when we live cut off from the river, the land, and the rest of life. When we believe that we need to call for help if a wild animal shows up, then it’s not those animals, but us who are lost.

It was a packed week: customer meetings and exploratory partnership talks, panel sessions and keynotes at our sister organization’s event, dinners and networking. I led three sessions at our customer forum and supported my teammate, Paula, with the one she led. All four sessions were on highly technical supply chain sustainability topics, by and for the deepest experts in our corner of corporate sustainability.

The conference generated collaborative ideas for how to make the apparel industry better for workers and the environment (apparel accounts for ~2% of global carbon emissions). Friends and colleagues come by to discuss these ideas and have a laugh before we all pack up and return home. Most are drinking champagne, and a few have had one or six pours too many, but I’m sticking with water to prepare my body for the big trip ahead.

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Whenever I had time, I headed to the outdoor pool for a swim. The pool was designed for lounging, not laps, with an infinity edge that’s ideal for staring at the Hong Kong skyline, but awkward for flip turns. I make it work. After more than 30 years of lapping swimming, I can swim almost anywhere; my mind wandering, my body on autopilot. I edit my session talktracks and rework the slides as I go.

This pool is the water of my youth: chlorinated and constrained, placed into a manmade structure of specific dimensions, often inside though this one is outside. It’s water that’s abstracted and altered from its nature—just like the rest of Hong Kong.

I swim another lap, the power of the mid-afternoon sun bearing down on my back and making my eyes squint. A Mainland Chinese tourist breaststrokes over to the infinity edge for a look. I swim around him, being careful not to splash him as my feet hit the wall. I push off, swim to the other side, and hop out. It’s time to get ready for the next slate of conference sessions.

This is my first time in Hong Kong since 2008, back when I lived in Beijing and came here for visa refreshes and to catch my breath in a more familiar milieu.

But now, 17 years later and more than a decade into the Xi Jinping era, the increased presence and power of the Mainland in Hong Kong is unmistakable. Most hotel patrons who aren’t at the conference speak Mandarin, including the hotel staff, which walks the tightrope between obsequiousness and attentiveness to perfection. Back when I used to come to Hong Kong, I rarely heard Mandarin, but rather a combination of Cantonese and British English.

The rooftop bar scene is also awash in Chinese characteristics. The Hong Kong skyline, always beautiful but historically elegant and understated, is now gauche with neon accents: lights on building fronts advertise everything from the time to Chinese banks to the latest in light shows. A ferry on the water shines green. My nervous system tremors.

There are no stars in this sky or mosquitos to bother us. There are few signs of life beyond humans and plants dividing the bar. But the pulse and energy of capitalism, of a rising China, of a humans-first or only world, is omnipresent.

In the cab on the way back to the airport the next morning, I pass jungled hills, each thick with more vegetation than I saw during a week in central Hong Kong. Though Hong Kong is now a concrete jungle, adorned with skyscrapers and noodle carts and merchants of every sort, this place is, in its heart, a tropical jungle.

Less than a week later and dozens of miles from the nearest streetlight, I look up at a sky that couldn’t be more different from the shores of the Bermejo River in the El Impenetrable National Park in northern Chaco Province, Argentina, some 40 hours of plane flights and a world away in an actual tropical jungle.

Marshal McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” And if the message of the Hong Kong night sky is that of a human commerce-first world, the message on the Bermejo is of life, wonder, and awe.

The stars—my God the stars—are alive, dancing and twinkling like the nursery rhyme says. As the sun sets on the Bermejo, a few stars appear in the pastel sky, followed by the outlines of the Milky Way (its name is obvious now that I can actually see it) and the slightest underside crescent of the moon. Once the sun dips below the treeline, more stars reveal themselves—scores, no hundreds, no thousands—an impossible number. I crane my neck, peering into the vastness, slack-jawed.

The mosquitos arrive like the stars, first in pairs, then with the force of raindrops in a tropical storm. These are attacks like I’ve never experienced in the north woods of the U.S. or Canada. The clouds forming around all eleven of us are so thick that mosquito whines pierce the soundscape, forming an ever-present background to our conversations, along with the rhythmic slapping of hands on arms, towels on shoulders, and aerosol release of OFF! on skin. A percussive ensemble. Benja borrows my picardin bug spray, looking for an edge, spraying with abandon: hair, face, arms, legs, feet, and hair again. Luiz waves a towel over one shoulder and then the other. Buzz. Slap. Buzz. Slap.

I am the only one with a mosquito headnet—my wife Allie convinced me to bring it at the last second–and along with my heavy rainjacket, my upper half is well protected, though the price is the sweat that pours out of me in buckets. On the plus side, my dehydrated self won’t need to get out of my tent to use the bathroom overnight. Despite pants and shorts, my legs are vulnerable. I give up counting once I get to 40 bites on my butt and legs in the tent the next morning. At least they don’t itch too much, and I have confidence in the Yellow Fever vaccine from two weeks ago.

Crickets and owls add to the nighttime symphony, as do branches breaking under the feet of pig-like peccaries that head out of the jungle along game trails and down to the river for a drink, careful not to get too close to the caimans that lurk, their eyes and nostrils exposed uncomfortably close to our beached kayaks and campsite. We hope that the tapir we saw a few hundred meters up the river will return. Life abounds.

The riverside land is soft and damp; the Bermejo will reclaim this land over the winter when the rains come. Its impermanence can be seen in how the sand arcs and bends, grooving and falling as if carved by a giant toddler with a sand rake, scraping her way from jungle to river. But for now, it’s ideal for camping. We get a fire going.

Dinner—a roasted pumpkin and vegetables, and so much beef that I know that I must be in Argentina—will be slow-cooked over coals from the fire for hours. The fire starts before 6pm; dinner is plated in the pitch black darkness just after 9pm, which is typical for Argentina, but late for me, as I’m used to being in my tent by 8:30pm after a long day in the backcountry. As we cook dinner and hang out, I head off into the bush to go to the bathroom. The others yell for me to stop, explaining that I need to turn on my headlamp so that I don’t step on a snake. I see no snakes under my green light, but I do see a few spiders—though none of the local tarantulas, as they tend to be more active during the summer—and a supersized cricket.

Like me, our kayaking trip guide Juan Martin (Cucho) Rivas is a child of the water. But unlike me, he grew up on the shores of the Gualeguachú River, in northeastern Argentina near the border with Uruguay, where he swam and sailed and kayaked and played in the river. He’s spent literal years of his life kayaking the rivers of South America, for months at a time when he was younger, guiding and exploring, raising awareness of the beauty and potential destruction of the rivers as an ecoactivist. He is a conductor of people, able to establish esprit de corps in moments, funny, humble, and smarter than he lets on. After I fail to express myself adequately in sub-par Spanish, he tells us all not to worry: he “speaks Brittanic.” What he meant was that he learned British English, but the responding laughter of me and then nine other Argentine’s on the trip at this mistake and his joining in are both indicative of his spoken English and leadership. His favorite English phrase is “What the fuuuuuucccckkkk,” which can be used in anger, delight, confusion, or anything in between.

After dinner we see the lights of a likely poaching boat heading up the river in search of meat. Cucho yells “What the fuuuucccckk” at the captain, who most assuredly does not speak English, and then flashes our brightest light at the boat. The captain responds by flicking his stern light to red. A caiman continues to slowly swim up the river, looking for laziness, the scent of cooking steaks no doubt whetting his appetite.

The next morning, having just read Robert MacFarlane’s beautiful and provocative Is a River Alive?, I ask Cucho if the Bermejo is alive. “Of course rivers are alive,” he responds without pausing to think. “I can feel its [he searches for the right work in Brittanic] despierto (awakeness or perhaps consciousness) every time I come to the Bermejo. Its the despierto that guides me down the river, through its currents and around the branches in the water to safety. You can feel it inside you if you pay attention.”

I turn to Diego, one of our river guides who lives in a local paraje, or small village, La Armonia, just outside the National Park, to ask him the same question. He looks at me for a few seconds, as if the answer is so self-evident and obvious that the question needn’t be asked, before responding that “yes, of course the Bermejo is alive.”

An equally important question is why am I, an American who lives in Seattle, bouncing from a conference in Hong Kong to a kayak trip on the Bermejo River in Chaco Province, Argentina in less than a week later and asking my river mates about the sentience of a river–a thought that hadn’t ever crossed my mind a year ago, despite a lifetime in and around water.

The answer has to do with my wanting to effectively participate in the Great Work, or defining movement, for our era. Writing in 2000, the Catholic priest and philosopher Thomas Berry explained that “[t]he Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.” (Berry 3). In other words, a full restructuring and reorientation of human society–our goals, how we measure success, how we relate to the rest of life on this planet–everything.

I tend to think of this Great Work of restructuring in nautical terms, probably because Longfellow’s The Building of the Ship* and its Ship of State so captured my imagination.

In my day job as the VP of Sustainability at Worldly—a critical node in the consumer goods sustainability world that is a for-profit spin out of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (now Cascale) and has big name customers ranging from founding Cascale partners Walmart and Patagonia, to REI and H&M, Inditex and Vuori, VF and Lacoste, Nike and Primark, and everyone in between—my team builds tools and analytics that help brands, retailers, and manufacturers understand and reduce their product and supply chain environmental and social impacts. It’s inside out work that tries to point the tiller of commerce a few degrees towards a more sustainable future.

This work is critical and meaningful and rewarding, but it isn’t enough: global warming from pre-industrial levels is here and accelerating. The propulsive power of capitalism—the energy that I felt on the rooftop in Hong Kong cannot be restructured enough from within to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which was signed by 195 countries including the US, to hold “the increase the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” The work of corporate sustainability is necessary, but insufficient. For while we can mend and improve and steer the ship, this work will not change the seas.

So we must also work from the outside in, changing the culture that is upwind of our politics and business and shapes everything from the global economy to our daily interactions. And this gale, this tempest’s roar, is blowing in a foul direction—towards populist politics and a screen-first culture that is addicted to brain-rotting content, towards mindless consumption and nihilism to dull the pain of the world we’ve created. A culture that is moving further from books and, most critically of all, away from engagement with the physical world, especially in its raw and natural and rewilded state in places like the Bermejo.

Kayaking the Bermejo is the scenic climax of a journey to experience places and meet some of the people who are blowing the winds of culture away from the screens and towards the wilds that have stirred our souls and given our lives meaning since time immemorial.

As part of this outside in work, I’ve visited some of the places and people working to nudge us towards a more wild future: the Glacier Peak Wilderness, which was almost turned into an open-pit copper mine in the 1960s but remains, just a few hours from Seattle, one of the most beautiful and pristine protected areas in the contiguous United States today; the shores of the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula, which the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has been actively restoring and revitalizing since the dams that prevented the salmon from returning home and the ecosystem from being in balance came down in 2014; to the highways of Banff National Park in Canada, where people are creating animal bridges and underpasses that allow them to extend their ranges, increasing genetic diversity and species viability; to the people who help manage the increased number of human-animal interactions that come from these animals crossings and more wilded areas like the Bermejo and Montana; and finally to the Bermejo, where a radical and successful rewilding push led by the visionaries at Rewilding Argentina is creating a thriving area that combines tourism, local economic vibrancy, national parks, and the reintroduction and range extension of mega-fauna like jaguars and giant river otters and tortoises and giant anteaters.

In the process, I’ve also tried to rewild myself and my family, spending weeks of the summer of 2025 in a tent and picking my backcountry backpack up after decades in the garage when my focus was on starting a family and gritting myself into a career in corporate sustainability, to move closer to the rivers of the world than the pools of my youth, at least spiritually.

I’ve also read the literature on what the turn to screens means for our brains and society, as well as the philosophical foundations of the human connection to nature according to my own religion, Judaism, several indigenous traditions, and Deep Ecology, a radical group of thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s who deeply influenced Doug and Kris Tompkins, the couple that founded and initially funded Rewilding Argentina and many other global rewilding efforts.

One of Doug and Kris’ closest friends, Rick Ridgeway, was the founder of Cascale and Worldly, and the person who, unbeknownst to him, rekindled my desire to work from the outside in and to see the wild world during a talk he gave at Walmart in October 2024. It was Rick who connected me to the Rewilding Argentina team and led me to the Bermejo. Standing on that rooftop in Hong Kong just days before setting out for Argentina, I asked Rick about the Bermejo. He looked up as if peering into a distant land, and said that it was beautiful scrubland, and a place not many had seen. I told him that I was excited to find out.

I take off my mosquito headnet to stare at the stars in the Chaco sky, and then close my eyes to listen to the owls. I know, somewhere deep inside, that something important–something profound–something that needs to be shared–is happening here. I just hope that I have the skills to do it justice in the following pages.

****

Here’s the famous last stanza of The Building of the Ship

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel,

What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,

Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

What anvils rang, what hammers beat,

In what a forge and what a heat

Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

Fear not each sudden sound and shock,

‘T is of the wave and not the rock;

‘T is but the flapping of the sail,

And not a rent made by the gale!

In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,

In spite of false lights on the shore,

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,

Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,

Are all with thee, — are all with thee!

The established routes of the past are no longer sure things. Trumpists are breaking the government as part of a global wave of nihilistic populism; the impacts of climate change are apparent, severe, and accelerating; the screens and machines—first social media, now AI—are coming for our attention, children, jobs, and sanity. Amidst the swirl, there is comfort in rooting down, focusing on the present, and getting swept along by safe routines.

It’s early September, and our fall is already spoken for, between acclimating to a new grade, soccer practices and games, cello lessons and religious school, birthday parties and holidays, corn mazes and halloween costumes. Soon enough, we’ll need to decide on winter activities; by February, our summer will be blocked in an array of summer camps, family camping trips, and adventure weekends. The cycle repeats, going faster each year, hurtling us towards a future we didn’t consciously select and might not serve us, which might be the biggest risk of all.

I worry that, though well-intentioned, too much structure and routine will leave my kids brittle when what they need is the ability to flow over and around obstacles like a river. Rivers know to seek the sea, changing their paths in an effort to reach it; human children are less certain of their purpose. As a parent, I want to help my kids navigate the course of life, but there is no clear map and compass to guide them. The verities of my youth have been washed out by the tides of change.

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I’ve tried to step back and take a broader view, searching for something to replace them. I start from what I know to be true, and it is this: the story of our time is the human-driven reordering of the planet—the damming and polluting of rivers, the replacement of great plains and rain forests with cattle ranches and soon-to-be-abandoned farms, the removal of mountain tops and habitats in search of small piles of minerals, the extinction of our plant and animal brethren. Humans have taken an intricate system of relationships and thrown a wrench into it, breaking the hidden gears that hold it together in an attempt to make the system work for us, imperiling all of life in the process.

This breaks demands a new name for our times, the most popular of which is the Anthropocene (‘anthropo’ is Greek for human), a name rooted in the unalterable impacts of humans on Earth. While an apt description, there’s something sterile and self-centered about the Anthropocene. It gives humans all of the agency to change this planet without any reflection on the damage we’ve wrought, nor the responsibility to mend it.

E.O. Wilson got closer to the mark when he coined the term Eremocene (‘eremos’ is Greek for lonely), or the “Age of Loneliness.” He wasn’t thinking of the loneliness that comes from living a life intermediated by screens, refracted through the carnival house mirrors of social media—though he could have been. Instead, he was thinking about the existential loneliness that comes from living through an arbitrary and human-created mass extinction event. One that’s robbing our planet and lives of vibrancy, color, sound, and life.

Eremocene evokes the sense of loss, but like Anthropocene, it doesn’t provide enough space for what can be—for how this moment, instead of being the penultimate scene of a tragedy, can galvanize the transition to a better future. We don’t need to endlessly debate and strategize about how to protect nature; we need to realize that we humans are nature. Things will fall into place once we get back to that central truth.

Thomas Berry, the Catholic priest and philosopher, also realized that we were living through a period of “extensive disarray in the biological structure and functioning of the planet,” (Berry 3) driven by corporate interests that sought to control nature, a Technozoc era (Hope et al.) Yet instead of despair, he noted that previous generations have been defined by a Great Work, a movement that defined an era of human history, such as building the great cathedrals in medieval Europe or establishing the humanist tradition in ancient Greece. These were meaningful advances, but did not reach the scale of what is called for in the Great Work of today. Berry wrote, “[t]he Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.” (Berry 3). A full restructuring and reorientation of human society–our goals, how we measure success, how we relate to the rest of life on this planet–everything. An Ecozoic era in which humans will rediscover their creative orientation to the world and achieve the Great Work. Guidance can be found in many indigenous cultures. In writing about Aboriginal Australians, Berry sees "amazing achievements in their capacity for understanding and responding to both the physical and the spiritual dynamics of the world about them.” (Berry 54) A culture once thought by many Westerners to be primitive is, in fact, one of depth, beauty, and balance.

Joining in the Great Work can replace ennui and loneliness with purpose, creating a life that’s lived in, of, and for this planet. One that establishes new trails instead of following worn paths.

It’s trite but true that change starts with a person, a family, an act. Towards the end of last year, once Trump’s return to power was known and the pace of AI integration into daily life increased, I’d lie in bed and worry about how to prepare my kids for a chaotic, changed, and unknowable future. I hoped that they’d get some of what they need—integrity, flexibility, humility, an ability to think critically—through school, sports, instruments, and the life in our family, but I knew that this was only a partial solution–a compass without a map. The map, I now believe, is the Great Work. This map needs to be internalized, and that can only be done through immersion in the school that’s never static, but always responsive to close observation, the laboratory of awe and inspiration: the natural world.

And so at the beginning of 2025, I made a commitment to integrate my family and myself more fully into the Great Work. We’re less than a year into the journey, but I’m already seeing signs of change, tracking the benefits of our more human experience.

***

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. Crown, 2000.

Hope, et al. “A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry.” Trumpeter, vol. 11, no. 1, 1994, https://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/349. Accessed 10 September 2025.

Dawn’s breaking with a running start from the full moon that bathed our alpine meadow campsite in a soft glow all night.

I twist what little I can in my sleeping bag, trying not to wake up Kevin, who’s gone mummy style next to me to stay warm. I sleep hot, and am shirtless as I slowly flex my quads and point my toes to the sky, trying to get loose. Fourteen miles of hiking and 5,000 ft in elevation gain will exploit all of your weaknesses and errors. I packed too much food, not enough electrolytes, and wish that Image Lake had a human-friendly salt lick.

I wait for the alarm to go off at 4:59am, stretch one last time, and tell Kevin that it’s time to get up–we’ve got a sunrise to see. Once I’m sure his mumbles are transitioning to coherence, I dress and head out of the tent to greet the day. I survey the muted, kodachrome and dew-covered landscape and breathe in the mountain air.

We’re camped close to Image Lake, deep in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. By 5:15 everyone is astir, and we trudge over to the lake. This being a side quest, it won’t count towards the mileage and elevation gain for our trip, which is bullshit. We walk past a few tents at the other Forest Service designated site, and then over to the lakeshore where we filled our water bottles last night. I’d expected to see scores of tents here, but it was empty.

My knowledge of this place is dated–quite dated. In my head, this place is frozen in the late 1960s, when precedent setting battles about wilderness, conservation, and resource exploitation centered on this place. John McPhee opened his masterful Encounters with the Archdruid, a triptych of essays that follow David Brower, the “archdruid” and leading environmentalist of the mid-twentieth century, on trips through wilderness areas with would-be resource exploiters, with a hike to Image Lake.

McPhee, Brower, their pro-mining companion Charles Park arrived at Image Lake on a crowded early August evening–the same time of year we found ourselves there. McPhee wrote:

The sun was just setting, and we had arrived much too late. We walked past tents along the shore–blue tents, green tents, red tents, orange tents. The evening air was so still that we could hear voices all around the lake. We heard transistor radios. People greeted us as we went by. The heaviest shadows were in the northwest arc of the shore, so the air was particularly cold there, and space had been left. We took the space. We had come into the mountains from the east. These people had come in from the west. It had not been an easy trip for them, to be sure. (McPhee 58-59)

Damn right it wasn’t an easy trip from the west, my legs thought as we slowly circled the lake counter-clockwise to get to the northern side, where the reason for its name becomes clear: the trees, meadow, and Glacier Peak, rugged and craggy, with a conical and snow-covered summit, reflect perfectly in the small tarn. Glacier Peak is the most beautiful and isolated of the five stratovolcanoes in Washington State, the others being Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, Mt. Baker, and Mt. St. Helens. These volcanoes are known for explosive eruptions like the one that took the top off of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. Bill and Matt have summited all five of these peaks; Kevin and I have not summited any of them.

I sink softly into the moist ground as we walk. There are no tents pitched on the lakeside now. By my count, there are fewer than eight people camped at Image Lake, which is ringed by hills on all but the southern flank that enables the mountainous reflections.

I’d pushed us to start the trip early on a Friday morning, anxious that we wouldn’t have a spot to park at the trailhead or a place to pitch our tents at Image Lake if we left later in the day or, god forbid, on Saturday. I was wrong on both accounts. I wonder what’s changed in the past 55 years. Has the history and beauty of this place been forgotten?

Bill offers a more prosaic answer. “This lake isn’t Instagramable,” he says with a shrug.

“Why?” I ask.

“The hike’s too hard.” I ponder this as we spread out across the hill behind the northern edge of Image Lake, each of us staring at the snow-capped peak that descends through glaciers and exposed rock until it reaches the tree line, which continues down until it disappears into the cloud layer that tops the Suiattle River valley like a perfectly whipped meringue. The moon, amber and as big and bright as the sun, is setting over the shoulder of the peak, with the rays of a still obscured sun lighting the entire scene in an ever-changing combination of yellow, pink, and purple. All of this is reflected in Image Lake, a mountain tarn small enough for anyone to swim across without much concern.

We’re experiencing what David Brower called a scenic climax. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful, evoking feelings of awe in each of us. In his book Awe, Dacher Keltner wrote that “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” (Keltner 7) I can’t do better than that.

Those pillowy clouds obscure our path from the trailhead to the lake. After nearly an hour of strolling, pondering, and positioning for the best photos, we return to our campsite to make breakfast, takedown camp, and get ready for the day. Before we go, I take a last stop in the outdoor privy. This, Bill and Matt agree, is the cleanest, fanciest backcountry privy they’ve ever seen. It isn’t much–just a wooden seat perched atop a hole, but it isn’t overrun with buzzing insects, and the primary smell comes from the Douglas-firs that surround it, not the human waste. As I sit there to admire an alternative view of Glacier Peak, a family of five sooty grouse amble over, eating Douglas-fir needles and the occasional berry off the forest floor. There’s a gentle breeze rustling through the trees. Eden indeed.

I tell Kevin, an aspiring birder like me, about the grouses. Though he’s trying to get through the trip without visiting a privy, he goes over to take a few bird pictures for his kids, leaving the wooden throne untouched.

****

The trailhead is an easy three hour drive northeast of Seattle. Mountaineers are a punctual and early rising bunch when they need to be, and we set off on our hike at 9am sharp–exactly as planned. Matt and Kevin both start their watches, which will track our distance, elevation gain, and time on trail.

Matt is tall and lanky with a long gait. He has a quick smile and an expressive face. He’s open, friendly, and loves a good pun. I’m not a funny person, but I can be situationally funny with the right people; though I met him when we arrived at his house at 6:15am, we’ve already shared many laughs. Like all of us, he wears long pants and sleeves, a flat brimmed aqua and orange hat atop his head complemented by a neck gaiter and a large pair of tortoise shell sunglasses. He and Kevin were roommates in college 20 years ago, with Kevin serving as the Best Man at his wedding.

The most important thing to know about Matt at this point is that he hikes with pace. Those long legs eat the trail with ease, and we maintain a clip that’s just under three miles an hour on the flat sections. That may not sound fast, but with a large backpack, a trail that undulates, and streams that need crossing, it’s quick. I am naturally a slow walker, and I assume something between a fast walk and a trot to keep up. I hope that the pace will slow after a few miles, but it doesn’t. We will only slow down when the incline increases and the switchbacks start in earnest, but that’s ten miles into our future.

The initial part of the trail is wide–too wide. As part of a Forest Service improvement project back in the 1960s, dynamite was used to blow apart rocks, fell trees, and reduce the grade of the trail. (McPhee 71). Its future as a road to haul all of the copper out of the would-be open pit mine up on Miners Ridge seemed preordained. And yet the mine was never opened; the road never built.

Despite the torrid pace, Matt sees everything on the trail. He calls out banana slugs; both those on the trail so that we don’t smoosh them and the ones off the trail we should admire for their girth; a twinned set of trees sharing the same trunk from different species, a fir and a cypress, which he’s never seen before; marmots, where I see nothing but alpine meadow; a tree that seems to be a lost afghan true cedar; and copper in a streamlet. If a set designer makes a mistake – say, the height chart in a police station is missing a notch where 5’10” should be, implying that heights magically jump from 5’8” to 6’, Matt will notice, and it will upset him to no end. I’ve always wanted to be 6’ feet tall, and wish that those two inches didn’t exist in the actual world, but alas they do. Matt is well over 6’ feet tall.

In keeping with mountaineering conventions, Matt stops us every hour for a short rehydrating and snack break. I’m happy to take off my pack, which I’ll learn is the heaviest one, as I’m carrying one of the bear canisters, snacks, and two sandwiches for lunch.

Coming into the hike, my greatest fear – and one shared by Kevin – was running out of food. It’s an irrational fear on a three day trip, but I have a healthy appetite that’s nothing compared to Kevin’s. We packed twice the food that Matt and Bill did, and that doesn’t include Kevin’s sandwiches, snacks, and brownies for day one.

The thing is, all of the food and scented items–toothbrushes, trash, toothpaste, etc.–needs to go into the bear canister at night. Despite our massive dinner, a dessert of brownies, and snacks throughout the day, the bear canister would not close that evening. And so Kevin and I force ate the food that wouldn’t fit. Rarely have I wanted a hardboiled egg and an endless stream of crackers less than I did then, and yet I had no choice. Thank god I’d shared a dram of the good whiskey I’ve hauled up the mountain with Matt over dinner..

About that hardboiled egg…in a passing comment on the car ride up, Kevin asked if packing hard boiled eggs was a good idea. “Of course not,” came the reply from Matt. We all giggled. It was funny, but in a different way, when I met such an egg that evening. Thankfully, no one got sick on the trip.

Kevin has the body of a boulderer, with taut muscles atop a thin frame. Most people acquire some body fat by the time they turn 40, but not Kevin. He used to work with me on the Sustainability team at Amazon, but now he’s a mostly stay-at-home Dad. He coaches youth soccer despite never having played, inheriting coaching responsibilities for my oldest son Max’s team when I retired because I knew nothing about the sport. The kids were eight then; they are 10 and 11 now. He’s known as Coach Kevin in our house. He volunteers at our local elementary school and publishes Crossword Puzzles for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers. He lost the vision in one of his eyes from an accident in college, but that doesn’t slow him down. Despite his insatiable hunger, he refuses to eat fruit, and only drinks water–including, he thinks, for the toast at his wedding–though he started thinking about the milkshake he wants to get at the end of our trip early on day 1.

Kevin spent a year traveling around the world with his wife in the aughts, and he’s wearing the hiking boots and wide-legged zip-off to shorts hiking pants from that trip. Those pants are so uncomfortable that he has long underwear underneath them, which may help with comfort, but are inappropriate for the heat. It’s a hot Pacific Northwest 70 degrees. He wears a brightly colored, long sleeved DC Cherry Blossom half-marathon shift adorned with blossoms and, for some reason, a leaping orca on the chest. He eats a sandwich at our first stop.

Next in the line is Bill, who Matt described on the car ride up as a machine. He doesn’t look like a machine; he’s average height with the slight hint of love handles below his green Patagonia shirt, with streaks of grey distinguishing his blonde hair. He’s quiet, but funny–with a wry, sardonic sense of humor. He’s worked at Amazon for eight years as a research science manager, and was originally hired by Matt’s wife, Aimie. Aimie hooked Matt and Bill up once she learned that they both loved the mountains. The matchmaking worked, and the two of them scale mountains and backpack a few times each year. He wears an REI bucket hat and has a satellite GPS monitor on his pack. His sunglasses, which rarely come out, are the mountaineering kind that wrap around; I covet them. He’s an Eagle Scout. He finishes the first of his three nalgene bottles of water at that stop, explaining that he likes water with a shrug.

I like him and Matt. I’m happy that Kevin paired us up with them.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point during that first day Kevin and I learned that Bill had climbed Mt. Si, which he calls an exercise hill, more than 200 times. Mt. Si is an eight mile roundtrip hike with 3,300 feet of elevation gain 45 minutes east of Seattle. It’s generally considered a challenging hike. I did it once to prepare for this trip back in April, and my legs were sore for three days after I got home. Bill refers to distances and elevation gains in Mt. Si units, though he also uses Mt. Vesper/ Mailbox Peak units. Those hikes have slightly more elevation gain than Mt. Si. Sometimes, Bill goes to Mailbox Peak, Mt. Si, and Mt. Tenneriffe, a similarly sized mountain with a longer trail, on the same day. That’s about 30 miles and 12,000 feet of elevation gain. When he’s feeling lazy, he does the connector trail between Mt.Tenneriffe and Mt. Si, which sheds a few miles and thousand feet of elevation gain and descent. Once, he did Mt. Adams in a day. These are insane days for a mortal, but he’s a machine, after all. He usually goes to Costco after finishing a Mt. Si unit.

My right hamstring is tight, and I fear that I’m fucked. I’ve hiked a lot this summer, but not with adults. Instead of witty banter, my conversations are with my thrashing, talkative, three year old, Rosie, who rides in a carrier on my back. Sometimes, she wants to hike by herself, so I go at her pace, which is exactly one mile an hour, with all the stops, starts, pee break emergencies, skittle breaks, and diversions you would expect from a three year old in crocs, a dress, and sweatpants in the woods. These guys are in a different class of alpine enthusiast. I tried to pre-hydrate in the car like a camel, but I’m no dromedary, and pee most of it out before I need it. I take a sip of water at our first break, eager to conserve what I have. I eat the quesadilla I made myself. The skittles aren’t appealing now, or at any point on the trip. I am not Rosie.

What I want and crave is salt. It’s becoming apparent that I packed too much food, not enough water, and a catastrophic dearth of electrolytes.

At this point, fairness dictates that I describe what I looked like on the trail, so here goes. I started this hike in peak shape. I am part of an early morning Masters swim team that goes from late June to early August, and at the end of the season I’m in the best shape I’ll be in all year. The next 46 weeks are about scrapping to maintain the foundation I built over the brief swim season. Still, my metabolism has slowed since my teen years, unlike Kevin’s, and I weigh twenty pounds more than when I graduated from high school, which is noticeable on a 5’10” frame. Some of it is muscle–at least I’d like to think so–and whatever fat is leftover is in my gut. I’m wearing a longsleeved sunshirt; my “adventure” hat, which is a wicking Patagonia hat with a brim made with nylon that used to be in fishing nets; hiking pants, a pair of La Sportiva hiking boots I adore; and the yellow Target sunglasses that my wife rejected for goodrs. I’m trying to get used to hiking poles, which I’ve never used before, but balance isn’t my strong suit, and the pounding from going down Mt. Si without them left me sore for days. My hair is still blonde, with flecks of grey where my regular buzz cut transitions to a fauxhawk before my hair poofs like a Chia Pet. I’m trending towards fauxhawk.

My 65L backpack saw its first action on a trip through Western Europe in 2002. Since then, it’s been with me on many trips across China, Australia, and Southeast Asia, but this is the first time I’m using it for its intended use in the backcountry. Years in the garage have aged it, and the rubber padding that rubs against the small of my back is slowly transferring its gooey, black resin onto my new shirt. I initially think that I’m getting substantially dirtier than everyone else (which I am), but the filth on my shirt isn’t from user error, it’s equipment malfunction. I made a mental note to cover that part of the pack in duct tape when I get home.

Break over, we continue down the trail, which runs parallel to the churning milky white glacial melt water of the Suiattle River. The scenery is glorious: massive trees, moss, banana slugs, gentle mountain streamlets.

It’s peaceful. We pass a day-hiker who gives us a “yeah man” when we tell him we’re headed to Image Lake. We’ll bump into about 20 people during our three days on the trail, but most of the time we’re alone.

Two military flyovers of the valley about 30 minutes apart pierce the serenity. Matt said that this was typical, and figured that the jet (or two, we couldn’t see either of them through the trees) had come over from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in an attempt to fly low and let it rip where they’d disturb the thousands of creatures and a few backpackers instead of a suburban community.

There was more activity in the air in the 1960s. Back then, helicopters dropped miners, geologists, drillers, and equipment from the Kennecott Mining Corporation, which had a set of patented and unpatented mining claims all around Image Lake, the Miner’s Ridge we’re headed up, and neighboring Plummer Mountain (North Cascades Conservation Council 2). The Ridge got its name from miners who came up here with donkeys and mules and dug pits that were maybe ten feet deep; Kennecott planned to dig one that was 1600 feet wide and deep enough to fit the Space Needle into it (about 1000 feet) (Miles).

As the Sierra Club and David Brower famously stated in bold letters that filled nearly a third of a page advertisement with a photograph of an open-pit mine below, Kennecott planned to build:

An Open Pit,

Big Enough

To Be Seen

From The Moon” (Sowards 3)

I’m anxious to see the would-be open pit and Image Lake, but the business end of our hike lies between here and there. I ponder all of this as we take our fourth break, this one for lunch. Matt has his sandwich, Bill has a few salted Macadamia nuts, Kevin eats another sandwich–a bagel, cheese, and some meat (he’s a vegetarian when not in the woods)–and I force myself to eat the turkey and cheese bagel I packed. I sit in the dirt and grab my toes, trying to stretch out my hamstrings and right hip flexer, which is barking at me. As usual, my wife was right; I didn’t need to pack so much food, but here I am, with nowhere for it to go but down the hatch. I take another few sips of water.

This is where I’d planned for us to stop for the night, but in looking at the proposed itinerary Matt suggested that we push for Image Lake on Day 1. His plan was superior, though we’re all dreading the next push: 3200 ft in elevation gain in 4.4 miles, with the final 1200 feet of elevation coming in a mile of relentless switchbacks. That’s one Mt. Si unit of elevation gain to go. Giddy up.

As we head up the trail, we catch our first real views of Glacier Peak through stands of Douglas-fir, which stretch down the ridge to the Suiattle river and back up the other side of the valley. It’s a spellbinding view, and I pause to take it in and catch my breath.

At this point, Kevin takes the lead, picking up the pace. He recently rucked a half marathon with a 20 lbs pack and must be feeling good. Or perhaps he’s misjudged how much more climbing we have to do. The rest of us let him go, and continue at a steady, but slower, clip. We pass in and out of the forest; the sun, though not particularly hot, pours energy out of us as sweat. Every time we pass a streamlet, I dip my adventure hat in it and put the water, which usually has some silt in it, onto my head. I don’t care; it’s cold and momentarily refreshing.

By the time we get to the final junction, we’ve caught Kevin. He’s finished his water and, like a magician, Matt pulls a full nalgene out of his pack and gives some to Kevin. I can tell that their friendship stretches back decades, though they don’t spend that much time together now, and Matt is watching out for his old friend and novice backpacker. I decline the water, figuring that I can make it from here to the top.

Bill stands up, exclaims that he’s going to do this last section in his “glorious old man style”, which I take to mean that he’s going to slow down, and we restart our ascent. The tree cover is mostly gone, and the sun feels stronger by the minute. I’m pushing hard with the hiking pole in my left hand, willing my right hip flexor to work as it's supposed to. The response is sub-par. I need salt. As Bill and Matt push on, Kevin is falling behind me, and I pause to let him catch up. I’ve seen and tried the wild huckleberries over the last few miles, but they were all unripe, tart, and unsatisfying. But the beauty of a mountain is that elevation changes everything, and the berries that surround us are perfect. They aren’t as big as the ones that reached half an inch in diameter that Brower and McPhee gouged on in this exact spot 55 years ago, but they are tasty.

Kevin doesn’t eat fruit, but he’s desperate, and I get him to try one. I tell him that it has the sugar and liquid he needs. He’s skeptical, but I see his hand reach out for another, and then another. For that last mile, Kevin is a fruitarian, grabbing berries with his left hand when the switchback heads east, and his right when it doubles back to the west. He’ll forget all of this in a few days' time, burying the memory of a satisfying fruit experience.

Somehow, the top doesn’t seem to get any closer, but after 20 or so switchbacks, we make it to the ridge. Matt and Bill have been sitting on their packs at the edge of the trail for what they claim is five minutes, but I assume is much longer. “Glorious old man style” punked me and Kevin. There’s a retired fire look-out half a mile the wrong way, but we’re all too gassed to check it out.

I sit down next to Matt and Bill, cross legged, and feel my thighs begin to cramp, the pulsing rippling down to my knees. I fear that I won’t be able to get up. The only thing that dulls the pain is Glacier Peak to the south, the most spectacular scenic climax I’ve experienced.

“Fuuuucckkk.”

“My god.”

“That view.”

“I can’t believe we climbed that (Glacier Peak),” Matt says incredulously as Bill nods in agreement.

We glide though the last mile, pausing to look at Image Lake, and then set up camp; a marmot in the meadow to the east welcomes us to his neck of the woods with his shrill, ear-splitting call.

After a good dinner–dehydrated food for Bill and Matt, homemade air fried tofu with peanut sauce, spicy chili oil and kale over noodles for me and Kevin, a dessert of brownies, and the surprise hardboiled egg and crackers for second dessert, we call it a night around 8:30pm. It was a good day. Tomorrow is all about the mine that almost was, but isn’t.

Works Cited

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Penguin Publishing Group, 2023.

McPhee, John. Encounters with the archdruid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

Miles, John. “Lessons of Glacier Peak Wilderness.” Lessons of Glacier Peak Wilderness, Rewilding Institute, 16 April 2025, https://rewilding.org/lessons-of-glacier-peak-wilderness/. Accessed 16 August 2025.

North Cascades Conservation Council. “Showdown at Miner's Ridge.” The Wild Cascades, no. December 1966-January67, 1967, https://npshistory.com/newsletters/the-wild-cascades/december-january-1966-1967.pdf. Accessed 16 August 2025.

Sowards, Adam M. An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.