I sat down at my computer to write around 6 o’clock in the evening.  With a glance out the window near my desk, I was taken aback by the brightness that lingered outside.  The gray winter clouds that hovered overhead all day had relented somewhat, giving way, around dusk, to dusty blue ones smudged with pinks and reds.  I assumed last night’s snowfall, softly blanketing the ground today, was now reflecting the sun’s remaining rays, capturing a few more rare moments of lightness, of daytime.

But I am struck by the sky’s birthday-cake stripes.  They instantly take my mind from my desk to a Newark-bound summer drive from Rehoboth Beach.  My wee two-door car had been packed with friends, and one had the rest of us in a twisted tangle of limbs, struggling to take a photograph of the sunset through my windshield.  As her shutter snapped, another explained that the sunset’s vibrant patterns were a product of air pollution.  His claim unsettled me at the time, and I hadn’t investigated its veracity then, or now.  I suppose I feared, and still do, that in our human carelessness, we actually created in nature something we thought worth photographing.

In ways beyond the bleeding watercolor hues of a sunset, we communicate with the earth reciprocally, one reflecting the other.  As we blast the Appalachian range away, mountain by mountain, in search of coal, West Virginian communities are trapped in suffering.  Or, as the earth suffers, so do we.  As we ruthlessly ensnare migrant workers in Immokalee, Florida in modern-day slavery, the earth is bombarded with a vicious cocktail of herbicides and insecticides.  Or, as we experience injustice, so does the earth.  The way one so clearly reflects the other is sickening but also, seemingly, quite obvious.  So, why does environmental injustice ring loud and clear in every corner of this country, in every corner of this world?

Maybe we’d be more compelled to address this injustice if its reflection was as clear as the image of the steely winter sky in White Clay Creek this afternoon.  Standing on the bridge that has become my weekly refuge for contemplation and observation, the woods are quiet, aside from the rushing of the creek below.  The sound of the swishing, swirling creek, surprisingly so for such a small ribbon of water, fills my ears, and the chill in the air bites at my nose.

What a contrast from my last visit to the woods: the sun was streaming and the dry grasses that line the banks of White Clay Creek were swaying gently.  Geese were plodding through muddy puddles, and songbirds were calling to one another from tree to tree.  Spring was beginning.  Today, winter has returned, and these woods are hushed.  All is frozen.  The grass is motionless, the tree branches are caked with snow, and the birds are absent.  The muddy basin where the geese had pecked and pecked for food has frozen over.  All is still, except for the current of White Clay Creek, a swirling, whirling kaleidoscope.  River hydrology, though I know little of it, is an art, a joyful one in this solemn, snowy landscape.

This solemn environment matches the solemnity I felt as I read of mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia and slavery in the agricultural industry in Florida in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt this week.  In the face of so many wicked problems, it is easy to slip into a state of perpetual pessimism, especially because in many of these affected communities, the residents themselves rarely latch onto hope.  And for those of us who live outside of this wrong, we see the cogs in the system revolve around money, not justice.  Hope seems a slippery entity.

But maybe that’s a problem in itself.  Maybe we need to take the time to investigate whether or not air pollution does contribute to incredible sunsets, even if we fear the answer.  (It does indeed contribute, according to Scientific American.[1])  Maybe we need to cling to hope, like the babbling voice of the active creek in the silence of these snowy woods, even in the face of all destruction and injustice.  Like Mary Oliver writes in “The Ponds,” “Still, what I want in my life / is to be willing / to be dazzled – / to cast aside the weight of facts // and maybe even / to float a little / above this difficult world.”  In this world where we destroy mountains and enslave our fellow man and woman for the sake of cheap tomatoes, we must recognize that we’re all a part of it; we’re all connected.  So, maybe if injustice to any, earth or human, is injustice to all, then hope can be all-encompassing, too.