Since I was a child, I have felt some sort of ineffable contact with nature. Not connection, that's too passive a word. Contact. It feels like a living spark passes between myself and a tree, myself and a rock, myself and a goose or a snail. I'm a secular person, but oh yes, there is a sacredness, and a one-ness, and a spirit, and it is this living earth. I have been on a hillside of waving golden grass in northwest India, at my daughter's side, watching as a tiger moved silently through the landscape. It is my deep love for the beauty of the natural world, and my deep love for my daughter and our bewildered species, that drive me to climate activism. Despite all the damage and the crises and the work to be done, it is easy for me to imagine a smaller, quieter, greener world in which my daughter and her loved ones breathe easy.

In my fantasy of that world, life and work, family and community, are intertwined because the commons are restored. My daughter, her family, and I, come together with neighbors to work in our forest garden during the day, and tell stories and make music when night falls. Our forest garden needs no fossil fuels. The work is done and the food harvested by ourselves, and by nature. In the world that's coming, there is no plowing that kills the soil and its microscopic life, there are no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers. My grandchild plays among bees that pollinate, birds that fertilize, and trees that enrich the earth.

That's the world I work for when I work for climate sanity. I work for restoration and for right relationship with the earth. I do it out of a deep sense of biophilia, and belief that our species will finally find its place. I do it for love.