"We have only begun / to love the earth."

The sky over Frederick is the wrong color again.

Not the clean gray of rain coming, but a flat, sourceless ochre. Wrong, creepy. It’s like the light of an old photograph that was left too left too long in the sun.

It carries a faint campfire smell, but there’s nothing cozy in it. Campfire smoke drifts on the breeze, evanescent and companionable. But this smell is the breeze, is the air, is the atmosphere itself, and it hangs acrid and unhealthy over all of us here. Our sky is slow poison.

Somewhere to the north and west, vast, trackless forests are burning, and their smoke has settled over my town, over my neighbors mowing their lawns, over the kids playing ball, over millions of Americans checking their phones, as if nothing were the matter.

People adapt, I guess.

I am not, by my nature, a pessimist. I believe in our country, in our countrymen and countrywomen, in our abiding capacity for republican self-improvement and democratic solidarity. Our story is, as Barack Obama said, never finished, but it “depends not just on the consent of the governed, but the service of citizens.”

Fire concentrates the attention. Climate change—accelerated by the massive human use of fossil fuels over generations—is driving these fires, this year and in other years. And there’s something about the sky being filled with smoke—again—that makes even an inveterate optimist like me sag under the weight of it.

What we are seeing in our skies is the physics of our carelessness and cruelty towards our planetary home made visible, tangible, poisonous. Our efforts to undo the damage we’ve done seem puny.

Which brings me, improbably, to a boat.

Years ago I spent a day sailing off the coast of San Diego with Craig Venter, the buccaneer of the human genome—a big thinker, a dreamer, the kind of old-fashioned scientific rebel we do not make many of anymore.

Venter, who died last April at 79, was a pioneer of genomics, the study of the entire set of DNA in organisms, including human beings. In the late 1990s, Venter was frustrated with the slow pace of progress made by the Human Genome Project, a government-funded effort to decode the human genome. Venter thought he could do it faster and cheaper than the National Institutes of Health, and he nearly succeeded. In the end, he and the NIH made a joint announcement of the historic achievement in June 2000, with then-President Bill Clinton hailing the public-private partnership.

I met Venter on his yacht, Sorcerer II, in 2009, as he was pursuing his next quarry: engineered microbes that would eat carbon dioxide out of the air, that would turn our exhaust back into something useful. I have wondered over the years what became of that project, which seemed so magical and hopeful as he described it while tacking across a fresh breeze (at least that’s what he said we were doing; I’m no sailor, but the day was glorious).

So I did some research, and here is what became of that .

Craig Venter’s dream took the form of engineered algae, grown in saltwater ponds, sucking up CO2, and then tweaked and coaxed to produce oil out of it. ExxonMobil poured more than three hundred fifty million dollars into it over a decade—and spent tens of millions more advertising its own virtue—before quietly walking away in 2023. Bill Gates stepped in with some funding, but in 2025 Venter’s company filed for bankruptcy.

The buccaneer’s dream ran aground, as buccaneers’ dreams do, and not on the science but on the shorter patience of oil-company money.

So the dream died; the smoke won; the buccaneer sailed off the edge of the map.

This month, researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines—studying microbes that live in the deep dark beneath the Black Hills, a mile down in an old gold mine—announced that they had engineered enzymes that pull carbon dioxide straight out of industrial smoke and turn it into minerals for concrete. The process accelerates the carbon capture process from years to minutes.

And those scientists out on the American plains are not alone.

In Zurich, they have made a living building material—microbes set in a printed gel—that mineralizes carbon as it goes, so that a wall grows stronger over its life while drawing carbon down.

There’s more of this kind of research happening all the time. None of it is a miracle, of course. Pulling carbon from the air is still expensive, and dreaming that it will solve our climate challenges is foolish and becomes an excuse to keep burning. Carbon capture buys time; it does not stop the fires.

So I will mourn what we have done to our sky. But I will also remember that the human spirit is never irredeemable—just like our beloved country.

So let us hope, let us put our shoulders to the wheel. Let us not be discouraged.

And our poem today captures the conflicting feelings I’m feeling right now.

It’s by Denise Levertov, the 20th Century British-American poet who was a poet of both progressive resistance and profound Christian faith.

This poem is both urgent and hopeful. Levertov senses a rising of love to confront what we have done to the world, to each other. It is a mystic vision, and a necessary one.

The poem is dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood (a labor union activist and nuclear-power whistleblower who died under suspicious circumstances) and Eliot Gralla, who was also an activist against nuclear weapons and power.

by Denise Levertov

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea —“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
— we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet —
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.