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A Mary Oliver poem begins “Who made the world?” and ends with the line “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I wrote this poem in conversation with hers to express the complicated grief that comes with feeling the destruction of the wild, with seeing wild spaces within and without trampled and tamed.
It is meant to acknowledge that despair, while also reframing Oliver’s central question as a collective endeavor: What can we each do for wild places?
My poem, “The Last Place,” was published in the Explorer’s Club Spring Log.
Spring bird migrants cruising through the park are headed north for the season. The Crown Point State Historic Site, under the North Atlantic flyway, hosts a 
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A wilderness pioneer
Clad in a dark petticoat, wildflowers tucked in her waistband, Elizabeth Britton grips her walking stick and flashes a smile, posed in leaf litter against the skin of a tree. In the mid-1800s the conventions of the time dictated this attire, as she climbed Adirondack mountains to lay her expert eyes to mosses and flowers. An acclaimed bryologist, she was considered the foremost authority in mosses for her time, publishing hundreds of scientific papers and curating natural history collections for Columbia University and for the New York Botanical Garden, where she was a founding leader.
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