I’m running alone beneath the zenith of mountain and sky. I’m running hard off-trail along the edge of treeline, trying to replace one ache with another. I weave through shaggy old-growth conifers catching carbon in their needles, hoary bark armoring up trunks broad and tough as turtle shells. This isn’t an old-growth forest, not officially, but there are survivors here mingled among the second and third growth whose seeding marked the bust of Leadville, Colorado’s mining booms. 

In the 1860s prospectors were said to have felled every tree in the high valley where my home now sits. Almost one hundred fifty years later, most trees near town are no wider than my arm, bunched together in choked stands known to locals as goblin lairs for their dark and snarling auras. When fire comes for these stands—and with hotter, drier summers and less winter snowpack every year, it will come—it will burn through these forests with astonishing speed and heat, leaping from stand to stand like blinking red eyes. This morning a friend and I had talked of fire, not in the abstract but the literal wildfire that had burned for weeks so near our homes we could see the glow of flames every night like an aurora. The flames missed our homes and town, this time, but we both agreed it was practice to help prepare us for next time; in the age of human-caused climate change there will always be another disaster. Her warning drums through me with each footfall as I run: If Trump wins no wilderness will be safe. But we all know what’s at stake; climate change is accepted science whether Trump accepts it or not. As a society, we’ve got the message. The question now is why, with this understanding, do we still carry on as we did one hundred fifty years ago? The philosopher, author, and climate advocate Kathleen Dean Moore says climate inaction is not a science issue, but a caring issue. We feel separate from the world, and so we fail to notice the wonders that are incredibly still here. 

Sick from anxiety and a wind sprint I frankly should not have undertaken, I ease up gasping and heaving in a secluded meadow sheltered by striated granite slabs and give myself over to the flowers. Old-Man-of-the-Mountains, each a child’s drawing of a small shining sun, clustered colonies of alpine forget-me-not with their yellow pupils set in dusk blue irises, pinwheeling columbines, tolling bluebells, Indian paintbrush drenched in fuchsia and scarlet, and many more buds make the meadow thrum with the songs of bees and hummingbirds. These tiny blooms are a wonder, blossoming, reproducing, and dying while the waning summer warmth lasts. While they live, their nectar sustains pollinators and their leaves and buds feed deer, elk, pika, and marmot, and at season’s turning their wilted stems melt back into the soil, replenishing nutrients that will feed the next generation’s blooms. I look around the meadow glowing with green glinting light and cast forward in my mind to the cold I know is coming. In two months’ time, maybe less, winter will have rusted out the land and a new snowline will blur the edges of last winter’s fields. Even today, fracture lines in the cliff walls sing of ice that cleaves stone, and frost creeps along creek corridors as biting wind bends the flowers on their stems. I wonder, do the flowers lament their brief time to renew the world as August rain turns to ice? Do they feel the cold on their delicate petals like I do on my skin? The flowers and I are both alive, and that kinship is enough for me to wonder about them. 

I gallop out of the meadow to a headwall of jumbled boulders and climb, knowing I will crest the rise of the boulder field to be greeted by lakes nested where glaciers once slept like hibernating bears, snowfields of glittering crystal and quartz, daisy and purple penstemon drinking sunlight and snowmelt, and the mountain’s vaulted summit above it all. But there in the gut of the stony gully, my breath catches, and I’m finally overcome by the terrible knowing I’d been trying to outrun: one person cannot unmake this wilderness; one person cannot protect it. It would take many of us to fell the trees, to divert and dam the water, to strip the meadows down to bare dirt for our own crops, to tear the minerals from the earth and siphon whatever carbon fuel sleeps beneath this place. Before the American West was even a part of the United States and subject to any policy, settlers were extracting, cutting, digging, and damming. There isn’t a single villain; there never has been. This is the thought that brings me to my knees in the boulder field, hands pressed hard against the stone. 

In the silence that surrounds my despair, I hear water flowing underneath the boulders. Though I’ve run this route many times, I’ve never heard water here before, whether due to my haste, or that I’d never stopped in this particular spot, I can’t say. I press my sweat-streaked cheek to the rock and smell sweet damp moss and rain-soaked soil. In my ears nameless headwaters echo as if from a cave mouth rumbling in the throat of the earth, sonorous as whale song, ringing stones in deep dark temples of rock. I listen to Earth’s wild music tolling through eons of time coiled in stone and I marvel. This channel will likely run snow-to-snow feeding the wildflowers below, which feed the animals, which feed the fruit and send nutrients into the ground, which feeds the trees whose breath rises along stony mountain sides to make rain and whose roots cradle the soil for all the tiny growing lives, which draw in and hold the snowmelt water in their roots and stems until the spiral coils again like a buzzard’s flight and all are buried in snow once more. As I clamber skyward, I feel wonder wash away despair. I don’t feel small, but rather endless, my aliveness meeting the aliveness of everything else and flowing into the spiraling of season after season. I have something to feed into the coils. I resolve to sustain this place as it sustains me, with wonder. 

Who else will ring the sounding stones in two months, in four? Who among us will sing out of the wonders they know and create from their voice a chorus resounding off stone? It’s just us, no villains or heroes will blunt the razor edge of ruin we balance upon, and it will take us all to overcome indifference with wonder, to protect what we sing of, and time is already short. I sing of the wonders, though my voice bends in the wind, of the cathedrals of flowing water, of trees drinking carbon, of summer green wrought by snow, of flowers whose lives remake the world, of the reciprocity of all living things, of singing stones that whisper, then wail. Sing out with me, sing!