Terry Tempest Williams remembers the morning of November 9, 2016, all too well. The social and environmental justice crusader and author of The Open Space of Democracy and Finding Beauty in a Broken World (among many other classics of environmental literature) stepped outside her home in Castle Rock, Utah, went to the banks of the Colorado River, and began journaling her reflections on the previous night’s seismic election. As Williams, now 64, attempted to make sense of the shock of our new political landscape, she wrote about being a writer without words, struggling to find them. “I am trying to shape my despair into some form of action, but for now I am standing on the cold edge of grief.”

The words Williams wrote that morning formed the basis of Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2019), reviewed in Sierra’s November/December print edition. The lyrical book’s central question is familiar to any environmentalist alive during the Anthropocene: How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?

Williams’s previous work demonstrates her knack for writing about the intricacies of a specific ecosystem or animal while simultaneously crystallizing universal truths about the human condition. And while most of the essays in Erosion indeed focus on recent environmental damage, they’re also about the ways in which individual lives wear away. In heartbreaking particulars, the book parses the suicide of the author’s older brother, Dan. Prior to his July 2018 death, he’d expressed that the undoing of decades of environmental regulations had left him bereft of all hope.

Last fall, Williams stood before thousands on stage at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California, and spoke about how all environmental issues are inherently matters of social justice. During a radio interview afterward, Williams graciously fielded questions from the Bioneers production team as well as from Sierra. She spoke candidly and generously about grief, love, the limitations of democracy as we now know it, and about how environmental racism is more often than not the result of bad storytelling. 

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BIONEERS: Do you feel inspired by what you’re seeing in response [to the 2016 election]?

Terry Tempest Williams: I certainly think that what had been hidden has been exposed. Trump is a symptom as well as a manifestation of our shadow side of this country that’s always been there, that is now being revealed. Certainly, the youth climate justice movement, the activism that we are seeing in terms of gun violence, I think we’re seeing deep engagement. But I don’t think that makes up for what is being lost, and the kind of cruelties that are being exacted, whether it’s on the border or the gutting of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, or cutting Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in half.

In our community in Castle Valley, there is a Japanese tea master. After the election, she offered to have a tea ceremony, and that’s what we did that night. It was so powerful to just sit as a community in silence and contemplate what had just happened, how we wanted to sit with this, and what we were going to do in these next four years, both as a community as well as citizens. That really set the tone for me. So in the midst of all this, I’ve been drinking a lot of tea [laughs]—made with sage, which grows right outside our door.

BIONEERS: This divisiveness and the “shadow side” coming to light seems to have created a disintegration of the public conversation, of public dialogue. “Dialogue” may not even be the right word, because people are just sort of yelling at each other.

I don’t even know what we do when the rule of law is not respected, when you realize that the open space of democracy has remained open out of decency and a respect of one’s word and integrity, and that is no longer. If you are sent a subpoena, it doesn’t matter. That’s what worries me, is that there is no democracy if there is no respect for the law. And I don’t know what that outcome will be, if that’s taken to its limit. We’ve never been here before.

That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about these past few years: the idea of erosion. We live in an erosional landscape. We have four directions that are deeply marked to the south, the LaSalle Mountains; to the north, the Colorado River running red, carrying the sediments of sandstone to the ocean; to the west, Porcupine Rim holding the last light of day; and to the east, Castleton Tower, this wonderful monolith of free-standing wingate sandstone that has a pulse. We live in an erosional landscape. It’s not unusual at night to hear what sounds like a bomb, and you realize one of the cliffs has fallen or a boulder has rolled.

Then I started thinking: How does erosion play out in our own lives? The erosion of democracy? The erosion of decency? The erosion of compassion? The erosion of belief, of the body, of time? And I really believe that we are eroding and evolving at once, and that’s not a bad thing. That erosion takes stone to its essence. We see the stratigraphy of deep time in the Grand Canyon through all the different layers, even the Vishnu shifts 3 billion years of time. It’s hard for us to even comprehend that.

We, too, are eroding as a nation. And I hope that we will be weathered to our essence of what it means to be human at this moment in the climate crisis.

BIONEERS: What role do you feel that love—all of the different kinds of love—can play in bringing that about?

I think everything I do has to do with love. If you talk to any activist, or if we get to the heart of what it means to be a citizen engaged, it is about love—a love of justice, a love of equity, a love of fairness. And certainly the work that I’ve been doing regarding public lands is deeply about love—a love of place, a love of wildness, a love of other species. We’re not the only species that lives and breathes and grieves and loves on this planet.

We are all experiencing so much grief in terms of what is being lost, and the suffering that is occurring in real-time, in real places. And grief is love.

I think about anger as also a sibling to grief. I’m constantly asking myself, "How do I take my anger and transform it into sacred rage? What does that look like? Where do you take it?" And if I’m honest, I think I write out of my anger often. But if you go deeper, I write out of my love and questions.

BIONEERS: What would you say about the fact that we have this “erosion” of democracy, and at the same time, it is bringing forward such an enormous response?

It’s interesting. And I do think that’s a great point: that we can hold contradictory emotions at once. We can hold a contradictory country at once. This is a time where rather than constricting ourselves and going inward, it’s actually a time to expand. We have to become larger as our country seems to be getting smaller in terms of its . . . I want to use the word “virtue.” We’re watching democracy collapse, and I think we, as citizens, have to be more expansive and responsive as a result.

BIONEERS: How do you feel that our undoing can be our emergence together?

When I lost my job at the University of Utah, I was crushed. I was brokenhearted. I felt exiled, and I really participated in a real soul-searching time. Was it my fault? What didn’t I do? Was I irresponsible? I think as women, we always take that blame.

That was a time of undoing. And because Brook and I had saved enough money, I could take that time off for six months and just contemplate what had happened. I wanted to grieve. I wanted to reflect. And I wanted to think about where do I belong if I’m not in my own home?

What I realize now, looking back, is I thought I would be there forever, but my soul had other plans. Looking back at that moment, my undoing, it has now become part of my becoming. I could never have imagined the kind of expansion of mind and soul that I’m able to participate in now at the Divinity School. And I’m grateful. I think that’s a common story; when we lose a job, when our marriage dissolves, perhaps an illness, my brother’s suicide. When these things occur, I think about Shinran, the Japanese poet who said, This happened. Now something else can occur. 

This happened in America. Now something else can occur. And that something else is up to us. We have more power than we know.

Sierra: This morning you told an auditorium full of people, “Environmental racism is the product of bad storytelling.” I was wondering how you came to that notion, and how we can best reframe that story to bolster racial and economic justice?

You know, I look at Willie Grayeyes, who is a Diné Navajo community organizer. He lives in his car. His family, for generations, has been living on Navajo land. He saw the injustices that were happening politically in San Juan County [Utah], one of the largest counties in the US, where there was gerrymandering predicated on race. And he took the county to court, and he won. And when he saw that space of democracy open, he thought, I need to stand inside that space, so he ran for county commissioner. He won. And as I mentioned this morning, Kelly Laws, his Mormon Republican opponent, after he lost, said, “This was an illegitimate election by an illegitimate candidate. Willie Grayeyes is not a legitimate resident of the state of Utah.” And it went to the courts, and it was brutal and it was ugly. It was a Trump-appointed judge, and the opposition made the point that [Grayeyes] had a place in Arizona, and that that’s where his kids went to school. Which were facts—quote unquote. 

Willie’s defense? “My umbilical cord is buried here. That is why I’m a resident of the state of Utah.” And he won his case. And the Trump-appointed judge gave one of the most beautiful renderings of what “dwelling” means I’ve ever read. You know, that is a different story. Racism, environmental racism, is a result of bad stories. The bad, majority-white Mormon story was “These are not human beings; they’re cursed. Their brown skin is evidence that they betrayed God,” and that was long the dominant story. Willie Grayeyes changed that story.

Sierra: Despite the fraught times we’re living in, you seem to remain optimistic—and also realistic. But a strong degree of optimism shines through in your storytelling. What’s your secret?

You know, I don’t think about optimism or pessimism; I just think the world is so beautiful. And no matter where we are—whether we’re watching a cardinal in a forsythia against a blue sky in spring or seeing ravens in a desert cavorting above and then come swooping down to where you can literally hear their wings beating—these are all things primary. How can you not just fall to your knees in gratitude or awe or joy? 

On the other hand, you see the frack lines. You see what’s happening on the edges of sacred sites like Hovenweep or Bears Ears, where oil and gas leases are being sold, lands that are now open for business. So again, it’s the full range—on that hand you have massive destruction on a scale that is unprecedented with oil and gas development, with the supremacy of the fossil fuel industry, just at the time we’re in this climate crisis. On the other hand, you see these beautiful young people marching, putting themselves on the line, being arrested, writing these powerful stories, changing the story, going to court to fight for the right of a healthy future. And then you say, “How do we bring these two hands together in prayer?” And for me, engagement is the prayer. For me, it’s about always being present—with one another, and in the vitality of the struggle. In finding the strength not to look away.

Because you can find optimism in paying attention. You know, after my brother’s death by suicide, I promise you, every night for six weeks, from five to nine at night, these two great horned owls would come and sit with me. I’d sit on the porch and they’d perch on a branch of a tree, maybe 10 feet away. They would just sit and stare at me. It made me think about what my father said when I asked about how he was doing after the loss of his second son. He said, “Terry, I’ve finally figured it out. We have to stare down grief.” That was my father’s way. I can stare it down. That may not be my way—grief for me is the raven that sits on my shoulder that you may or may not see. But for me the owls—they were staring me down. And they were offering me, I think, an insight, to their night vision: showing that we do have the strength not to look away, that we can learn to see in the dark, and expand the range of our vision. That’s where I think we are and can be. And the animals around us are offering us instruction; I believe that.