Let me tell you about a place.

Monarchs and hummingbird moths dart between overgrown gardens. Starlings and carpenter bees find homes among the 300-year-old frames. Luna moths fly under the flickering street lights. Barred owls call from the old trees along the stream, the ones growing among the old brownfields. And on the first warm nights of the year peepers and tree frogs sing you to sleep from a streambed older than the Atlantic Ocean.

In the early days of the pandemic, this place saved me. The traffic stopped. Exhaustive routines pulled to a halt. My mother’s garden became my world. I walked the country roads past old graveyards and grandmother trees, past grazing cows and church steeples and promised every day to practice finding one beautiful thing by taking a photo or spending twenty minutes writing. Old fence posts suddenly came to life in the setting sun. Tree stumps gained new life if you just looked a bit closer. I ran out of words trying to name all the shades of the sky. This place, this village taught me to find miracles in hell.

And now a corporation wants to destroy it.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

-Wendell Berry, “How to Be A Poet”

An investment firm bought this village’s water sources, two karst springs and the upper section of the stream that winds through the historic village and feeds a marl wetland with rare flora and fauna. They have already built commercial wells on rural parcels and want to pump an obscene amount of water per day from the aquifer that feeds the drinking water of hundreds if not thousands of people. They are ripping up streets and potentially Civil-War-era graves to run a pipe for almost two miles from their wells to the water bottling facility that will be built on a remediated brownfield site. They will then ship out the water in bulk using hundreds of semi-trucks that cannot even physically fit through the eighteenth-century streets of the historic village that is on the National Register of Historic Places. And, all those millions of gallons of water per day pumped from the eastern side of the village will leave a vacuum that will draw out groundwater contaminated with forever chemicals from the brownfield site on the western side of town — drawn out precisely toward hundreds of residential wells in the village.

They will suck the village’s wells dry, destroy a rare wetland, cause untold damage to historic homes, and leave an industrial wasteland behind. Welcome to your friendly neighborhood Sacrifice Zone, y’all.

Those of us fighting this company’s actions have been told they have a public relations agency looking into us. We who have been working day and night for weeks to research laws and gain support while they’ve had years and endless resources to figure out how to effectively exploit the law to turn a shared resource into private profit while the community shoulders all the environmental and social costs.

But let me tell you what they don’t have: my community. Many dozens of people came to a local Town Hall. Hundreds wrote public comments against the corporation. And at a local meeting to approve the corporation’s concept plan, more than 60 people made passionate and eloquent pleas against corporate greed and for environmental health. Many were shaking as they spoke. Yet still they spoke. The meeting — which should have followed a quick, routine agenda — went past midnight.

Our words were enough that night to stop it. The concept plan for the facility was rejected as incomplete because the lawyers for the investment firm failed to include the rural parcels that actually contained their wells. In other words, it was rejected on a technicality.

It wasn’t enough that this company is finding loopholes in the law to shove this down the community’s throats. It wasn’t enough they are profiting off a public resource and burdening the community with the costs. It wasn’t enough a corporation would turn us into a Sacrifice Zone to fuel their insatiable greed. It wasn’t enough that people’s homes and drinking water will be destroyed. It wasn’t enough they are desecrating a rare ecosystem. It wasn’t enough this is simply immoral and obscene.

One day, it will be enough.

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. - Rebecca Solnit

One day, it will be enough to simply say this will hurt people. One day, it will be enough to say this will take away our human right to water or even the rights of the waterway in its own personhood. One day, it will be enough to say this will stop the frogs from singing. Or the birds from migrating. Or the moths from reaching for the moon.

It will be enough. One day, it will be enough.

I don’t know what the next years will bring. The uncertainty runs my blood cold. I can barely hold back the tide of despair anticipating the cruelty that is about to be unleashed by our ruling classes. I fear becoming numb, and, yet I know that I can’t save everything. I can’t save everything. But I can save this. I can try.

We may not win this fight. Or the next. But we’re not going anywhere. Those of us who grew up in Sacrifice Zones played among the ruins of extractive industries. We picked wildflowers from the tumbled detritus of ancient greed. We know how to find miracles in hell. We can wait for victory. We can outlast greed. And while the corporations and oligarchs crow, we plant the seeds of a future we cannot yet see.

And in that future, it will simply be enough.

November 5th

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA new world calls from the woods
Too-too-too-too
Too-too-too-too
Will it fly now
On a strangely warm night?
Or wait until
The cold comes?

Remember
Hope is a feathered thing
In the deepening dark
And it does not know when to leave
Or arrive
But still it flies
Still it flies
And follows the crests of
Tree-covered hills
To its sky island home.

It knows the way
You must remember
That it knows the way
Home.

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.