A pilgrim at Brandywine Creek

It’s a little past 8 a.m. when I make my way down the hill. I walk carefully across Creek Road to the park that meanders alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek in Chester County.

No fishermen dot the creek’s rocky banks — not yet. The tire attached by a rope to a tree hangs empty. Across the water, a fish — likely one of the trout the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Coalition stocks in our area water — surfaces for a few seconds, then returns to the depths. Vultures circle lazily overhead.

The great blue herons who sometimes watch for dinner on the rocks are absent today. So is the beaver a neighbor mentioned recently. I stare at the logs that lie across the stream, hoping for a glimpse. Someday.

Over the past couple of years, I have come home from my hikes over this familiar ground overwhelmed by love, and by fear.

I don’t want the beaver, the herons, the vultures, or the trout to disappear. I don’t want our neglect, indifference, and active hostility toward making necessary changes to decimate this vibrant ecosystem.

There’s a name for this powerful sensation: “ecological grief.” It’s a psychological reaction to loss caused by environmental destruction.

As a journalist on the religion beat, I’ve been writing about the climate crisis for decades. There’s a grinding familiarity to the debates we are having now.

We don’t have dying coral in Southeastern Pennsylvania, or broiling sidewalks that send people to the emergency room. While we have experienced torrential rains, and a mom and her kids were swept away by floodwaters in nearby Bucks County, the devastation doesn’t seem to be of a scale that spurs most people to change their lifestyles, or to become climate activists.

What’s changed is the landscape around us. Incrementally. Subtly. One pest, dry spell, and flood at a time. When I moved out to the exurbs from the Main Line almost 20 years ago, the seasons had an innate order, a predictability, a set of disciplines. Over time, that reality has changed.

We had almost no snow this past winter, followed by a late, hard freeze. Spells of rain fell in torrents. And above all, there is a reluctance in some circles to speak the words climate change and to plan ahead — even now.

I’m not a “doomer” by any means. Conversations about whether these changes herald the “end-times” don’t engage me. Despair just leads to passivity.

A few years ago, I took money out of retirement investments to buy solar panels. Native plants throng my garden. Swallowtail butterflies, bees, and wasps circle the mountain mint and wild bergamot. Baby rabbits nibble calmly on the lawn, which I now mow every two weeks, hoping to provide more food for pollinators.

Many of my friends would argue that my choices are like spitting into the wind. In some ways, they are right: Most of the problems — and the potential solutions — require a weighty national calculus way above my pay grade.

Yet in random moments of grace, I stumble across another person whose life has been changed by the same concerns that have changed mine, who is making decisions that reflect their sense of urgency. We recognize each other.

As naive and inadequate as it is, I want to give something back — to provide a refuge to the birds, mammals, grasses, and wildflowers that have given so much to me.

A raccoon, accustomed to snacking on tidbits from my compost heap, saunters brazenly out from the trees in late afternoon. I watch it approach its meal from a healthy distance.

Is my stumbling, inept hospitality to the life around me too little, too late? Maybe. Deck chairs on the Titanic? Perhaps.

But as long as the goldfinches, bucks, and pollinating bees show up — as long as the water cascades over the rocks of the Brandywine Creek — I am here, bearing witness. Perhaps someday, even, that elusive beaver will show up.

Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance journalist in Chester County. Her writing has appeared in Religion News Service, the National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, the Washington Post, and The Inquirer.