The Bear Is Still Watching

193 Million Acres and the Illusion of Separation

Waters and Rivers. Acrylic and Oil. 48x36”. By @Saddha1

I spend a lot of time in my garden, in the forests, and at the Pacific Northwest's oceans — walking, foraging, planting, and just simply listening and paying attention. I know what it feels like to put my hands in the dirt and come up with something edible, to learn a trail well enough to notice when a particular tree is gone. That kind of attention is, for me, not separate from the rest of my work. It is the ground of it. I work at the intersection of communications and systems change. I’ve spent years thinking and learning about how we hold in our bodies what minds resist knowing, and how stories either deepen or sever our connection to what actually matters. The recent cuts to the Forest Service hit me the way a lot of things do lately: first as information, then as something I feel in my chest.

But I want to be precise about what I mean when I say “the cuts to the Forest Service.” I don’t mean simply a policy loss. I mean the specific unraveling of an ancient web of life. The 193 million acres the Forest Service oversees are not land in the way a parking lot is land — inert, interchangeable. They are living systems of almost incomprehensible complexity: mycorrhizal networks threading nutrients between trees across miles, salmon carrying ocean nutrients deep into watersheds and feeding bears who feed ravens who feed the soil. Old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest alone are habitat for hundreds of species found nowhere else — northern spotted owls, Pacific fishers, marbled murrelets, countless invertebrates and fungi whose names most of us will never learn. When we talk about what is lost when these systems are defunded, logged, or opened to extraction, we are not simply talking about “landscape.” We are talking about the interruption of relationships that took millennia to build, relationships that include us, whether we know it or not.

As shared in a recent Atmos article, the Department of Agriculture announced plans to restructure the Forest Service by closing all regional offices and relocating its national headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City — a well-worn tactic to reduce staff and drain institutional knowledge. The cuts are part of a broader pattern: the administration has opened 1.56 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to fossil fuel extraction, approved a $5 billion deepwater drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico, and invoked national security to exempt oil and gas companies from Endangered Species Act protections. Before those exemptions, oil companies were prohibited from dumping trash in the ocean or using loud technology that could disrupt sonar for species including the endangered Rice’s whale, with only 51 documented individuals left on earth, all of them in the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty-one. A number small enough to hold in your mind. A number that is almost a name.

This is what interbeing actually looks like when it unravels. The concept, drawn from Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching, is simple and radical at once: nothing exists independently. Every thing inter-is with everything else. The forest is not a collection of trees any more than a body is a collection of cells — it is a community of mutual arising, where the health of each depends on the health of the whole. When we clear-cut, we don’t remove trees from a background. We collapse a network. The elk who foraged in that stand now move differently, putting pressure on adjacent browse. The creek that was shaded by a canopy now runs warmer, and the salmon runs that Pacific Northwest Indigenous communities, bears, eagles, and orcas all depend on shift in turn. The orcas — already critically endangered in the Salish Sea — are starving not because the ocean is empty but because the web of causes stretching from inland forest to river mouth to open water has been frayed at too many points simultaneously. We are all downstream of the same decisions.

Understanding what is actually being lost requires moving past the policy language and into something older. In 1969, Gary Snyder sat down in a single night and wrote Smokey the Bear Sutra for a Sierra Club wilderness conference. He gave it away — no copyright, free to reproduce forever — because what he was writing was not just a poem, but a transmission. He modeled his Smokey on Fudo, the Japanese patron of mountain ascetics, fierce and immovable, surrounded by flame — a figure who goes into hell to save people whether they want to be saved or not. The sutra opens with the Great Sun Buddha addressing all assembled elements and energies: the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and even the grasses. Every being is present. Every being is counted. The poem insists on the interconnectedness of all life forms and calls for collective responsibility for their preservation. Snyder wasn’t writing about environmentalism, although it served the cause. He was writing about a deeper reality of non-duality — the recognition that the boundary we draw between self and nature, between human and animal, between the one who protects and the thing being protected, is itself the source of the wound.

In the sutra, the Buddha foretells an American era he will enter “to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.” Loveless knowledge. I keep returning to that phrase because it names something I encounter in my work constantly — the way institutions and systems can be extraordinarily sophisticated and almost entirely severed from felt consequence. In somatic practice, we talk about dissociation: the split between what we know intellectually and what we allow to land in the body. Capitalism has made that dissociation into infrastructure. The people who sign off on drilling in a whale’s last habitat, who shutter regional forest offices from behind a desk, are not necessarily evil. They are operating within a system that actively rewards the capacity not to feel the downstream effects of decisions — to treat the living world as a set of resources rather than a community of relatives. That’s not incidental to how extraction works. It is the psychological prerequisite for it.

Non-duality asks us to see through that prerequisite. Not as a spiritual bypass — not as a way of saying it doesn’t matter because everything is one — but as a direct confrontation with the illusion that humans are somehow separate from the web we are destroying. We are not standing outside the forest making decisions about it. We are inside it, of it, dependent on it in ways that our nervous systems still know even when our economics pretend otherwise. The loss of forest land is not a loss that happens to nature while we watch. It is a loss that happens to the songbirds whose migration corridors are severed, to the pollinators whose habitat disappears, to the Indigenous communities whose food sovereignty and ceremonial practices are embedded in specific stands of specific trees, to the children who will grow up without the particular quality of silence that exists only under old growth, to the parts of our own bodies — lungs, watersheds, immune systems — that are not separate from the health of the systems we cut. We are one animal species inside a much wider community of living beings, and we have confused our capacity to dominate that community with permission to do so.

This is where my work and my grief converge. Through EcoSattva training and my current Buddhist chaplaincy work, I’ve come to understand that the ecological crisis and the crisis of self are not parallel problems — they are the same problem expressing itself at different scales. The severing that allows a government to liquidate a forest is the same severing that allows most of us to go weeks without touching soil, without learning the name of what grows at the edge of our neighborhood, without letting the reality of what is being lost actually be felt. Snyder challenged us to see environmental degradation and social injustice as intertwined crises, and to understand resistance to industrial capitalism not only as political or economic struggle, but also as something spiritual — a path toward a more just, more sustainable way of being. I believe that. I also believe the spiritual work is inseparable from the somatic work: you cannot think your way back into relationship with the living world. You have to practice it. The grief of this moment is real, and I don’t want to move past it too quickly. Grief is information. In the Buddhist traditions I study, grief and love are not opposites — they are the same energy moving in different directions. You cannot mourn what you never cared about. And that love — stubborn, embodied, specific to this watershed, this stand of Doug fir, this particular season of chanterelles — is exactly what Snyder was pointing toward. He described the sutra’s basic message as the responsibility to “protect all of life — down to the smallest little creature, protect our community, maintain our own practice, and honor impermanence, all at the same time.” All at the same time. Not after the political situation stabilizes. Now, in the middle of it.

The question the sutra puts to us is not whether we can stop every cut, every closure, every extraction permit. The question is whether we can remember, fully and in our bodies, that we are not separate from what is being lost. That the Rice’s whale and the marbled murrelet and the mycorrhizal network under the Cascades are not causes to support from a distance — they are kin. They are the larger body we belong to. When that recognition lands as felt reality, something shifts. The refusal to keep pretending that the boundary between self and forest is real, and the commitment to act from that refusal, in whatever way we can, for as long as it takes.

I'd like to leave you with a question or an invitation. What would it mean to let this actually land — not as a news cycle, not as a cause, but as a personal reckoning? The suffering being caused right now — to forests, to watersheds, to the last 51 Rice’s whales, to the spotted owls and the salmon and the ten thousand species whose names we don’t even know — is not happening out there somewhere. It is happening in the same web that holds us. And the antidote to the loveless knowledge Snyder named is not more information. It is the willingness to feel it — to let the reality of other lives, human and non-human alike, actually matter to us. To practice, even imperfectly, even on hard days, what Thich Nhat Hanh called the most radical act: seeing yourself in what you might otherwise walk past. The mushroom at the base of the tree. The creek running warmer than it should. The silence where birds used to be. We don’t have to have it all figured out. We just have to stay open — open to the grief, open to the beauty that still exists, open to the possibility that our care, when it is genuine and embodied and shared, changes something. The bear is watching. And he is asking whether we are willing to feel what we know.