I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love the with the breath,
Smiles, tears of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

You probably know someone who you kept intending to visit but couldn’t seem to make the time for. When you heard that that person, perhaps an elderly loved one, died, you were stabbed with remorse that you never seemed to reconcile. You were left incomplete by predictable regret. You had known what was important, but had chosen what was urgent or expected or loomed too large in your eyes. You may even have had such a feeling when seeking an old home or haven that had been demolished, or a dead place in the body of life that you realize, in retrospect, meant everything to you and to your most beloved kith or kin.

Imagine what you might realize if you heard it was too late to save evolved life as you inherited it, but had been too busy to look after. What, then, would have been the point of all your busy nothings? Of doing the wrong, profane thing as fast as possible for as long as possible?

Not so very long ago, a citizen who experienced so-called sudden death on the streets of Seattle stood a better-than-even chance of earthly resurrection. A high percentage of citizens could do CPR; the emergency services were top-notch. Now, AIDs and other diseases spread by humans—and arising from human-damaged habitats and festering in those people who ‘fall out’ of modern society—have dissuaded us from touching the fallen.

Not so very long ago, the chances of a vertebrate species continuing to exist were better-than-even; now, more than half are gone for good, as are an escalating number of their habitats, erased from the possibility of speaking to us—erased from the possibility of their unique revelation of the sacred to those who had the eyes and ears to see it. And now restorationists are having to attempt the iffy exercises of predicting ecosystem collapse and rescuing Hawaiian ohi’a forests from a fatal fungal epidemic aggravated by invasive species.

Act now to protect threatened habitats near you. Don’t wait to be haunted by habitats that you love better after their deaths…