I watched a man plant a tree he would never sit under.
He was the groundskeeper at a small church in the hills—one of those places where the building is modest but the land around it holds generations. He'd been tending those grounds for forty years. Knew every root system, every slope where water collected after rain, every spot where the bougainvillea would take and where it wouldn't bother trying.
The storm came through two seasons back and took the old mahogany that had shaded the churchyard since before he was born. Took it like it was nothing. Left a wound in Earth where the roots had been, and a gap in the sky that made the whole property feel exposed, unfinished.
He replanted. A young sapling, slender as a child's wrist. But the new tree wasn't taking the way the old one had. The soil was different now—something in its composition had shifted. The rains came at the wrong times, or didn't come at all. He adjusted. Amended the soil. Built a small barrier to protect the roots from runoff. Kept showing up.
Someone asked him once why he bothered. The tree wouldn't mature in his lifetime. He'd never sit in its shade, never see it hold the sky the way the old mahogany had.
He didn't look up from his work. Just said: “Somebody planted what I grew up under. I owe the same to somebody I won't meet.”
I think about him often. About what it means to labor for a future you won't witness. About the quiet, unwitnessed faithfulness of people who understand that responsibility doesn't expire when the reward disappears.
That man didn't use the language of moral obligation. He didn't speak of climate disruption or intergenerational ethics. But he was living inside the question this moment is asking all of us:
What do we owe to those who come after?
Every generation likes to believe it lives at a turning point.
Most are wrong.
Ours is not.
I've been sitting with this knowing for longer than I've had language for it. It started as a hum—something beneath the news cycles, beneath the policy debates, beneath the well-meaning conversations that always seemed to circle back to the same exhausted question: What can we really do?
The hum has become a roar. And still, we speak in whispers.
The Shape of What We Know
The defining feature of this moment is not political polarization, technological acceleration, or cultural exhaustion—though all are present. What distinguishes our time is moral clarity paired with moral avoidance. We understand what is happening. We recognize what is required. And yet, collectively, we hesitate.
Climate disruption. Mass extinction. The widening distance between those who have and those who are left to inherit the wreckage. These are no longer warnings. They have bodies now. They have addresses. They have names we will never learn because no one thought to record them.
The loss of land is the loss of home. Not metaphorically. Literally. Soil that held generations now slides into rivers that no longer stay within their banks. The poisoning of water is the poisoning of bodies—of children who drink what flows from the tap because no one told them not to, of mothers who learn the word “contamination” the way you learn the name of the thing that took your peace.
The destabilization of climate is the destabilization of meaning itself. It forces us to confront what we value, whom we protect, and what we are willing to sacrifice. These are not abstract questions. They have texture. They leave residue.
The Inheritance of Avoidance
For too long, ecological concern has been framed as optional: a preference, a political position, a lifestyle brand for people with the luxury of choosing their battles. But moral responsibility has never been optional. It is relational. It emerges the moment our lives become entangled with the lives of others—human and nonhuman alike—and when our choices begin shaping futures we will never see.
I think about the stories we inherit. Not just the ones told at kitchen tables, but the ones embedded in systems—in how we build, what we buy, who we believe deserves protection. These stories taught us separation. They taught us dominion. They taught us that Earth was a resource and we were its managers, appointed by progress to extract whatever we needed.
Thomas Berry called this a “pathology.” He named what many of us have felt but couldn't articulate: that ecological collapse is not primarily a technical failure. It is a moral one. A failure of imagination so profound that we forgot we were part of what we were destroying.
Berry wrote that the human community and Earth community “will go into the future as a single sacred community or we will both perish.” This was not poetry for its own sake. It was diagnosis. It was a man looking at the patient and telling us the truth we didn't want to hear.
What Falls Away
The stories that once organized our lives no longer function.
The promise that economic growth would deliver collective well-being—that a rising tide lifts all boats—rings hollow when so many never had boats to begin with. When the tide rises now, it swallows coastlines. It displaces millions. It turns “growth” into a word that tastes like ash.
The belief that technological mastery alone can save us collapses under the weight of unintended consequences. We engineer solutions to problems we engineered solutions to. The loop tightens. The air thins.
And the myth that humans stand apart from the rest of the living world—sovereign, separate, exempt from the laws that govern everything else—has revealed itself as both false and fatal. We are not above. We are within. And “within” is on fire.
The Widening Circle
In moments like this, ethics cannot remain theoretical. It has to have hands. It has to have a face you recognize.
Moral responsibility is not about purity or perfection. It is about orientation—the direction you face when you rise in the morning, the questions you let yourself ask before sleep. It asks: Toward whom are we accountable? What relationships define us? What obligations arise from belonging to a living planet rather than standing above it?
Religious traditions, when taken seriously, have always grappled with such questions. They have asked how humans are to live within limits, how power should be restrained, how suffering should be addressed, and how communities might orient themselves toward justice rather than domination.
In an ecological age, these questions widen. The moral community expands to include rivers that have carried prayers for centuries. Forests that hold memory in their rings. Species we will never name, and generations not yet born who will inherit whatever we leave behind.
This expansion is not sentimental. It is sober. It requires us to accept restraint in a culture addicted to excess, to acknowledge grief in a society that prefers distraction, to act without guarantees—knowing that the outcome may never reward us personally.
Hope as Orientation
Vaclav Havel once wrote that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out.
I return to this sentence often. I hold it the way you hold something fragile that you need to carry a long distance.
The groundskeeper understood this without needing to read Havel. His hands in the soil were an argument. His presence, morning after morning, was a theology. He wasn't optimistic. He was faithful—to a future he trusted even though he couldn't see it.
The work ahead does not promise comfort or applause. It promises difficulty, resistance, and uncertainty. But it also offers coherence—a way of living that aligns values with action, belief with practice, what we say we love with how we actually move through the world.
That coherence is its own kind of shelter.
This Year's Invitation
As calendars reset and resolutions take shape, the cultural script invites us inward: productivity, self-improvement, personal optimization. These impulses are not insignificant. But they are insufficient.
What would it mean to begin this year not by asking what we want to achieve, but what we are responsible for?
Responsibility does not require that we solve everything. It requires that we refuse denial. It asks us to locate ourselves honestly within the web of relationships that sustain us, and to act—however imperfectly—in ways that protect their integrity.
For some, this will take the form of scholarship that serves communities rather than careers. For others, it may look like advocacy, ritual, education, policy work, or the quiet acts of care that rarely make headlines but hold the fabric together anyway.
The form varies. The obligation does not.
What History Asks
To live through a moral moment is to be shaped by it. You don't get to pass through unchanged.
History does not ask whether we felt ready. It asks whether we responded. It asks what we did with our knowing—whether we let it move us or whether we looked away until looking away became its own kind of answer.
As this year begins, the question before us is simple and unsettling: When future generations look back at this moment—at what we knew, at what we faced—will they be able to say that we chose responsibility over comfort?
The answer is not written yet.
But it is being written now. In every choice. In every silence. In every hand that reaches toward soil it may never see bloom.
The old groundskeeper is still out there, I imagine. Still tending. Still planting toward a shade he's given up needing for himself.
The question is whether we'll join him.