I don’t know about you but the world is seeming pretty grim at the moment. With Alabama deciding women should be broodmares and the Bolton gunning for iran. There’s horribly grim news about Scotland with farmers having killed all the beavers they could before May 1st, and now there’s a headline saying that Koala bears have been determined to be “functionally extinct“.

KOALAS BEARS!

I ask you, how much bad news can this old woman take? Apparently not that much, because when I read this article yesterday it made me cry. Margaret Renki writes with a poignant and terrifying attention to detail. She didn’t overwhelm me with the list of horrors so much as the very last few crushing lines.

Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction

One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?

Last week, the United Nations released the summary of an enormous report that broke my heart in more ways than any backyard-nature observations ever have. The Times article about the report, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” called it “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.”

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

it’s a heart-wrenching and well written article, but it isn’t the panicked hopelessness that upset me. its the grim resolve that comes at the end. it’s not the giving up that makes me cry – it’s the stepping up that follows. like weak soldiers in a hopeless battle that you know you are going to lose, but you stand there anyway, at the front lines with your fists clenched and your eyes squinting uselessly into the smoke.

The odds are completely against us. This is a terrible, hopeless battle to fight.

But it’s our fight. The one we inherited from Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and John Muir and Cady Stanton. It’s the one the pioneers gave us and our ancestors pledged at Ellis Island or Plymouth Rock or Wounded knee. Hopelessness is horrifying and hard to bear. but it’s pre-determined, unsuspenseful, grim and simple to understand.

it’s the hope at the end of this beautiful eulogy that made me cry.

And I can remind myself, all day long every day, that there’s a difference between doing something and doing nothing. That “something,” small as it might seem, is not “nothing.” The space between them is far apart, limitless stretching distances apart. It’s the difference between a heartbeat and silence.