A Question to Ask Yourself

How to cause the least harm?

When the news is full of horror, namely wars and genocides, I turn for comfort to the natural world—its beauty, its intricacy, its genius, its urgent movement toward life.

We live on a globe of leaf-green continents amid blue-green oceans.

Over the last centuries, however, we humans have attacked our beloved home ceaselessly with weapons of mass destruction, destroying the very thing that supports and comforts us. We destroy the earth by fragmenting it. We cause more and more fragmentation.

Less forest, less prairie, less desert. More pavement, wider roads. More clearcuts. More shopping malls, resorts, power lines, parking lots, condominiums, fields.

We fragment not only by wiping out habitats and ecosystems, but

• by polluting,

• by lighting the night sky,

• by filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide,

• by overproducing,

• by dumping,

• by continuing to produce plastics,

• and by a million other knife-cuts.

I think about fragmentation because I come from a place where 99 percent of the native ecosystem is gone. Ninety-three million acres of longleaf pine flatwoods covered the Southern uplands, from Virginia to Texas, but by 1995, almost all natural forest had disappeared. This loss threw communities of highly adapted plants and animals—including the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise, indigo snake, and hairy rattle weed—into population emergencies.

The glorious old-growth longleaf pine of Weymouth Woods, North Carolina.

I’ve learned from conservation ecology that ecosystem fragmentation affects negatively the abundance and persistence of wild species. Fragmentation leads to isolation.

I also realize that fragmentation of the environment is mirrored in society. As we chopped up ecosystems we knocked down structures of cooperative human interaction. This led to marginalization, dysfunction, and brokenness. This led to neighbors not knowing each other, arguments breaking out at family reunions, estrangement.

Our fabric of civil society has become ragged. We are divided, conservative from liberal, white from black, gay from straight, boomer from millennial, endlessly, disgustingly, on and on.

Fragmentation means that the policies of the former president Donald Trump (policies that we all should recognize as dangerous) to democracy, allow him to say, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

As the Washington Post reported on Nov. 13, 2023, “Trump went on further to state: ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.’”

These policies are fragmenting our communities and our families and our neighborhoods.

Fragmentation in human society leads to isolation, which is a place of hopelessness and despair.

But the worst part of fragmentation is that it leads to violence. It leads to annihilation.

War is fragmentation between countries.

When habitat is lost, species disappear. When human community is lost, we lose each other.

We know community, then, both human and wild, to be a place of hope, of possibility, and of wholeness.

In 1988 The Nature Conservancy bought a relatively small piece of land in northern Florida in what is known as Pinhook Swamp. The dream was to connect Okefenokee Swamp, 660 square miles of freshwater swamp in southern Georgia, to Osceola National Forest, a vast pineland in north Florida. Finally, after two decades of dedicated land-purchases, a puzzle piece fell into place and the wildlands straddling two states were joined.

Now, the connected wildland, O2O, is more than 750,000 acres in size, and land keeps being added to this wild corridor.

What does it mean that we have preserved a territory of wildness straddling two states? Can it mean our great-grandchildren may hear a red wolf calling or a panther cry? Or the raspy bugling of whooping cranes? And might that mean they can better hear the cries of another?

If we can create places like O2O and step away (in the dominating sense of the word) then we can begin to leave the Anthropocene, a hopeless dead end, and enter a new epoch, the Ecozoic.

Surely, then, we can abandon the militarism of the Anthropocene and enter a new epoch of peace. Why not study peace the way we study war? Why not try, really try?

The most essential challenge before us in the 21^st Century is to figure out how we are going to live so that we don’t destroy ourselves, our communities, and our atmosphere.

• How to lead sustainable lives, lives that make sense.

• How to repair and restore what has been damaged.

• How to quickly reverse the climate crisis.

• How to share. How to help each other.

• How to escape the stranglehold of capitalism and religious intolerance, so that we quit killing the things we love—including people.

• How to live in peace.

I believe—I still believe—that we can use our language and our resources in the highest and best ways to repair the fabric of life, both human and wild.

One way to do this is to ask yourself of everything, Which action of mine would cause the least harm?

Then have the courage to take that action.