I don’t know if I’ve made the mechanics of this exercise clear. Probably many of the folks reading this have done the exercise with me and do not need this primer. But for the rest of you, here is how it works.

There are 57 total cards in the deck. We are discussing them one by one here, in this project. When you “do your values” with me, we sit across a table, or on a couch, or at the sidebar of my coffee shop. I tell you to imagine the last “timestamp” of your life. The year since your divorce. The five years since you got married. The time since you started a job, or retired, or lost a spouse. I remind you that the goal is to identify the values that have most affected your choices in that specific season.

You sort the entire deck into three piles:

* YES: Core and central to your thinking.

* MAYBE: Important, but perhaps not driving the bus.

* NO: Not resonating at this time.

Once the deck is sorted, I take the “Maybe” and “No” piles away. Then you take the “YES” pile and do it again. And again. And again. Until you end up with just five. Five central values that represent your life right now.

I am telling you this because Card #24 is the first card we have discussed that made it to my Top Five.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether to disclose my own choices. But I’ve decided that I will, because my choice serves as a lens through which to see this value. I first did this exercise in August of 2024. And when Protection of the Environment came up, I was surprised to see it survive the first sort. Then the second. Then the third. Until it sat there on the table as one of the five most-currently-important concepts to me.

This was surprising because I did not grow up around environmentalists. I didn’t grow up around conservationists. The truth is, in the community where I grew up, the prevailing belief was: “This is all going to burn.” Jesus was on his way back, and when he got here, he was going to torch the place. So what was the point in saving anything?

Compounding this was a political culture that viewed stewardship, (at least in the way I understand it now), as a little suspicious. There were several outbuildings on the farm where I grew up, and in each of them was a clock radio, or an old dusty boombox tuned to the local conservative talk radio station on the AM dial. Rush Limbaugh literally flavored my young life. Milking cows, feeding sheep, calves, chickens, rabbits, dogs, all under the thrall of the Golden E.I.B Microphone. I learned so much in my early life from that program, and the net effect was that I grew up not only not an environmentalist, but quite the opposite. I was an Enviro-Antagonist.

There are actions I took back in those days that I can now only describe as vindictive toward the planet. I have been present for the burning of countless pieces of plastic. I know how to play with burning styrofoam in a way that’s fun and destructive. I know exactly what sound batteries make in a burn barrel.

I know a guy who buried multiple vehicles in a single hole just to get rid of them. It was like a great middle finger to Mother Earth. My dad, whom I love, would save old motor oil to pour down fence posts to preserve them.

At best these acts were lazy and inconsiderate to anyone who may be living on this planet in the future. At worst it’s a hijacking of our children’s & grandchildren’s and great grandchildren’s good lives.

The cracks in that worldview came from two places. The first was the mentor I mentioned in the last essay—the guy who got me into coffee (and from whom I stole $250). He and his wife were Christians like me, but a different flavor. They represented a perspective that said, maybe we are supposed to take care of this garden. Differently.

The second was Biology 131, 132 & 133. This was a three-term course required for my ill-fated Forestry degree. I went into that class ready to get my “C” and get out. Instead, it changed everything. It forced me to look at the complexity of the biological world, and ultimately to appreciate and even love it. I learned the hydrological cycle, I learned about nurse trees, I learned about fungus and decomposition, and I learned that the smoke from my burn barrel goes somewhere. I learned that going away is a myth.

I am deeply grateful for that professor’s methodology that didn’t scorn or humiliate or disdain my past, but instead simply brought us along. And we learned that not all logging is terrible, not every use of a natural element is patently negative. But that a culture of extraction and profit will end up being problematic, for us or for our children.

But the moment it moved from my head to my heart was 2020. You may recall the world came unglued. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. George Floyd was murdered. Belarusians protested. And COVID shut us down. And then, the West Coast burned.

We experienced some of the worst wildfires in modern local history. 47 people died directly. More than a thousand died from smoke inhalation. We all downloaded apps to track the Air Quality Index. We huddled inside, taping up windows, building air filters out of box fans.

And I became enraged. We were smoked in for over a week. Orange skies, all day, every day. I look back now and see that was the moment I crested the mountain. I had been slowly learning about climate science for years, quietly changing my views. But in 2020, looking at that apocalyptic sky, I realized: The “It’s all gonna burn” theology came true. But it wasn’t Jesus doing the burning. It was us.

I believe in climate science. I believe we ignore it at our peril. I believe there are real consequences to a culture of extraction combustion and taking.

So, yes. This card is in my Top Five. I used to feed the fire. Now, I want to help put it out. I want to do more than not hurt, I want to make better. I want to leave it better than I found it in every situation that I can. So I avoid spraying chemicals on my land, and I develop water retention and soil micro-biome building strategies for my pasture, and I have a plan to mitigate the damage caused by this damned Emerald Ash Borer Beetle.

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