A Message from Executive Director Ethan Aumack

BY ETHAN AUMACK

Mending broken bones. Replacing knocked-out teeth. Stitching back together torn skin. In my younger years, I tested my mettle playing frivolous games and exploring wild places. And did so with enough devotion that I came to appreciate the healing process in a personal, visceral, and sometimes painful way. As I chose a life path in conservation, my sense of a need for healing, and my role in that healing process, broadened considerably. Aldo Leopold’s admonition quickly came to the fore — that I amongst so many others would be working “alone in a world of wounds.” 

Conservation and environmental justice work, by its very nature, is healing work. With policy and law, shovel and drip torch, placards and ballots as its instruments, this work aims to stitch back together and, in many cases, stitch anew a world that is vibrant, diverse, equitable, and just. 

This last year felt to me, and I believe to many of us, like the world was tearing apart. A global pandemic, divisiveness and division amongst friends, families, and communities, climate catastrophes, the painful but necessary quest for justice. This was a year of consequence, and it wasn’t an easy one. Emerging out of conversations among our staff, we decided it was timely to bring forward key elements of our work that are hopeful, restorative, and, in many ways, redemptive. 

In this issue of the Advocate, we update you on our work to restore Bears Ears National Monument, a cultural landscape that has been, since time immemorial, and will be, for generations to come, a place for healing. We survey the scars wrought by uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, and describe the work that will immunize the Grand Canyon from further mining, dam construction, and other ill-founded ideas into the future. We explore the path toward sustenance and community health through the lens of food sovereignty. And we present the medicant of hope in stories of a new generation of curious, committed, passionate advocates. 

Exploring the idea of reciprocity, Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that “as we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” We can’t thank you enough for partaking in the struggle and appreciating the gift that is our collective work to heal the Colorado Plateau. 

Sincerely,

Ethan Aumack