Loyalty to the Earth | Bound

This is the Earth: the way life moves through life; the way one presence ripples outward through everything; the way the loss of one can unravel all.

Take the small and humble prairie dog. Their burrows are homes, not just for prairie dog families, but for burrowing owls, snakes, beetles, and salamanders. Their digging aerates the soil. Their grazing shapes the prairie. And predators—coyotes, foxes, bobcats, eagles—rely on them as food. Remove the prairie dogs, and the land hardens. The owls disappear. The predators move on or starve. The grass changes. The song of the plains is altered, silenced.

We don’t see it, not really. We see a hole in the ground and call it a nuisance. We see a predator and call it—not he or she, but it—dangerous. We see a beaver dam and tear it down; we see a human dam and call it progress. We see the extinction of species and tell ourselves the world will go on. And it does, in a way, for a while—but not the same world. An impoverished world, a fraying world. A world that will not last for long.

We treat each being as separate—as if the fate of the owl has nothing to do with the rodent or the old tree, as if the fate of the orca has nothing to do with the herring, as if the fate of the frog has nothing to do with the forest and wetlands, as if our own fate is somehow exempt from these threads that bind us as one. But this world is a conversation, a chorus, a poem. And when one voice falls silent, the whole shatters.

This isn’t just poetry. It’s physics. Biology. Ecology. The ancient laws of life on Earth. We cannot keep pulling threads from the web of life and expect it to hold.

This is also love. What else but love explains the way a wolf shapes a valley, the way a beaver shapes a stream and a wetland? What else but love explains how the lives of grasses and insects and herring and salmon and bears and trees and rivers and wolves and prairie dogs and beavers all lean into one another, how they all depend on each other so completely?

We must stop pretending we are above this. We are not the exception to the law of connection. We are bound by it. Saved by it. Undone by it.

How many threads will we cut before we remember that everyone  we love is tied to everyone else?