A
Time to Sow
I
should plant some seeds. That was my first
waking thought on November 6, as the sun rose on
a United States that would soon have to live
through another four years with a
climate-change-denying despot as its leader.
The
thought kept circling at the back of my weary
mind even as I agonized over what’s to come: the
attacks on environmental safeguards and climate
action, on immigrants, on gender nonconforming
persons, on journalists, and on the civic
institutions that keep our (admittedly
imperfect) democracy running. We’ve lived
through a version of this before, but I fear
President Trump 2.0 is going to be more vicious
and targeted in his efforts to undermine a
functional government.
But
the seeds. If you plant them now, come spring,
you’ll have peas, and carrots, and
bright-stemmed rainbow chard, and pretty
wildflowers, the voice in my head insisted.
I brushed the idea aside as frivolous. This was
no time to focus on flowers. There was much more
important work to be done. We had to find ways
to mount a defense against this slide into
fascism, and we had to do it fast.
But
when I turned my attention back to the even more
immediate task at hand — wrapping up our Winter
2025 print issue — I was confronted with seeds
again.
There
was veteran ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan
writing about the ongoing Israel-Palestine
conflict that threatens to displace the
painstakingly saved “crop seeds and their hardy
wild relatives” that “help humanity after wars,
floods, droughts, or famine” (“Refugee Seeds").
There was journalist Marisa Agha reporting from
the US Southwest about Indigenous farmers’
efforts to bring back long-lost seed varieties
(“Reviving Lost Relatives”). And there was my
colleague Zoe Loftus-Farren’s cover feature,
describing the brave conservationists in Ukraine
and how “a lush riparian forest” has already
reseeded itself on the bed of a reservoir after
an explosion drained it last year (“War and
Parks”).
The
message about seeds — about life itself — was
laid out in plain sight in these stories.
“In
this time of collapse of old worlds and
monumental transition, we must think like
seeds,” Rowen White, seed keeper and farmer from
the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, wrote in an
Instagram post just a few days later. “We must
breathe past the gut-wrenching fear of total
destruction, for just beyond that precipice is
life renewed, seedcoats coming undone to sprout
the endless creative potential of what is
possible for our children and
grandchildren.”
Yes,
the road ahead will be tough. There will be loss
and pain and suffering. There will be places and
people we won’t be able to help, which is hard
to accept. But if we keep up the work of sowing
and nurturing the seeds of justice, compassion,
and love, eventually beauty will re-emerge from
this chaos.
I
suppose I’ll go plant some seeds in my backyard
after all. Spring isn’t that far off.
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