The Global Earth Repair Conference at Fort Worden back in May embodied our ‘Catch 22’ dilemma: If you’re still hopeful, you don’t understand the science. If you’re hopeless, well then, it’s already too late.

How can a species that screwed up the biosphere in less than four generations presume to know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Evolution did not prepare us to cope with a monstrous slow-motion catastrophe of our own making: a silent, invisible tsunami—the Industrial Revolution—that thundered across continents 200 years ago and continues poisoning earth, sea and air even today ‘when we know better.’

The profound grief many of us feel, as the staggering loss of habitats and species continues, can be overwhelming. Yet this very grief offers a way through to a sense of wholeness and meaning. If we are willing to hold each other, if we are willing to tell the truth, speak it aloud and share our grief, as we pay our last respects for all the lives lost, human and otherwise, as our hearts break and we embrace the full range of our feelings, we may catch a glimpse of what it means to be human.

As Mary Oliver offers in her poem “Wild Geese”:

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.”

If we truly want to know our place in the family of things, we will need to embrace and move through our deepest grief. Not around it. Not avoiding it. But through it and into our fullest possible being. Our emotional and spiritual lives come as a package deal. We don’t get to pick and choose what parts of life we might prefer. We must not exclude the darker shades in hopes of living in the light alone. It’s not even possible.

In one of his last poems, “On the Level” Leonard Cohen laments:

“When I turned my back on the devil

Turned my back on the angel too.”

Whenever we choose to do the right thing, even if there’s little or no hope we’ll succeed, something imperceptible shifts in the world. And if a significant number of us were to do the right thing? Who knows? We do know that no matter what we do, we are going to die. Each and everyone of us. So why not do the right thing?

There have been at least five previous versions of human beings before us Homo sapien sapiens. If we assume that each species contributed at least one significant advance to our ongoing evolution, what do you imagine our legacy will be, while we still have a chance?

Mary Oliver again “Summer Day”:

“Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

At least, with some sense of humility, let us begin the Earth repairs with ourselves.

(Hotchkiss is a Council Member of Local 20/20. Together with his wife Leslie and their two kids, Meredith and Rowan, he has lived in Port Townsend for eight years. At 80, he is quick to point out, his top priority before retiring is “downsizing civilization and reinventing the village.”)