"Maybe the sacred, today, is someone misspelling "scared," then loving the skewed meaning caused by their misspelling. Maybe that reasonless loving is a sacred act."
- Thomas Soares
I'm a now 20 year old product of fervent belief on the simplicity of the American dream, and yet, I generally have a memory like a young child or a slippery jetty rock. Yet, for some reason, anything with a remote semblance of nature-relatability implants itself like a metal stud, drawing me in with an air of magnetism. I can narry remember where I put my keys, but I can close my eyes and picture the tiny stream from which I pulled turtles and frogs as a rogue 4 year old.
One of these earliest memories is the symphony of thousands of fireflies lighting up the sky on a summer night. So many summer nights I spent illuminated by fireflies, catching little pieces of saved sacred light, going to sleep with their constant ghastly flickering. An old high school friend of mine lives on an old farm, old enough to be haunted deeply by its past. It was there, during an old summer bonfire years ago, that I laid eyes on my 1st group of blue fireflies, an Appalachian native rumored to be possessed by the spirits of Confederate ghosts. Maybe all fireflies have some sort of ghost. Maybe that had reasons to stick around, but the world that they decided to stick around to was too fast and left them behind in the dust and this is all that's left.
Fireflies are disappearing all throughout the East. Too many bright lights out at night have outshone their ancient mating glows and now people no longer look at open fields on summer nights in the same type of awe that they used to inspire.
Last week, we had the Strawberry Moon, the full moon of June that glowed a reddish hue and signaled the ripening of wild strawberries for thousands of years for native peoples. Under that moon, things began to shift. Cicadas began to emerge back in Central Pennsylvania, fireflies began to start to appear, although not in their old numbers. That same day, however, things began to shift in our political scales. The Senate announced a bill that would open up over 3 billion acres of American public lands, the birthright of our nation and its citizens. The bill would also open up large amounts of oil and gas leases in Alaska and across the West.
American public lands are what separates us from the rest of the Developed World. Almost nowhere in places like Europe are there the opportunities to hike, forage, hunt, and fish as freely as we do. Wildlife and wild places belong to the people, not to some pompous aristocrat. That is the promise that was issued for the American people and was secured in blood with the American Conservation Movement. And this new bill erodes away at all of that. Support agencies like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, rage, give your elected officials the hell that they all deserve. For more information: https://www.backcountryhunters.org/take_action#/487
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