# "Children of the Fire": A Provocation in Five Parts What does it mean to inherit a tradition whose central moral lesson is that we aren't separate from nature? For Rochelle Johnson, the answer begins with remembering what we've lost in order to call us to our obligations to the more-than-human world. October 07, 2026 By Rochelle L. Johnson | Edited by Russell C. Powell *1.* ![Passenger pigeon flock](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-09/passenger%20pigeon.jpg?itok=DC0esekG) One evening last Spring, a class of senior Environmental Studies majors and I sat outside on the quad of The College of Idaho, where I teach, discussing the early American phenomenon of passenger pigeons eclipsing the sun, their flocks of thousands darkening the sky as far as the eye could see. The story of this bird’s rapid decline and extinction has become something of a cliché in environmental history, a warning of the human capacity to be blind to our own destructiveness—but my students wanted to know more about it. One began shaking her head. *Wait*, she said. *We have to wait. I just can’t…I have no frame of reference for this. So many birds that they blackened the sky for hours, across miles? I do not even know how to imagine so many birds.* She turned to look me square in the eye. Her forehead creased, she thrust her head forward, and she implored: *Can you help us? You’re older. Have you ever seen anything like that? Can you please imagine it for us?* I was taken by the earnestness of her plea, but I had to answer, *No*. In spite of my travels, in spite of being a lifelong birder, in spite of the varieties of plentitude I *have* witnessed, I cannot imagine passenger-pigeon-filled skies. Instead, I shared early writers’ descriptions of the phenomenon, and we found ourselves mourning an experience extinct to us, one no longer available to the realm of being human. My students and I wondered: how might such losses diminish our capacities—not merely for imagining abundance, but also for our understanding of ourselves as astonished creatures of this world? --- *2*. After decades of writing and editing for academic audiences, I turned a few years ago to writing for general audiences. I write in hopes of helping express the capacious grief so many of us harbor for the declining natural world. As I do this work, I often look to the Transcendentalists and their contemporaries as models of a sort. They lived at the dawning of public understanding of human-induced extinction, of agricultural and landscape practices harming habitats and waterways, and of deforestation impacting water supplies and local climates. I write about how nineteenth-century laments for a rapidly changing environment might inform our present sense of how to mourn a natural world now maimed to near-disablement. I write, too, about humanity as part of the nature we grieve. This work feels like my obligation. --- *3.* This past July in the *Guardian*, Megan Mayhew Bergman argued that “our culture has almost no language or rituals for” expressing environmental grief. “As a culture,” she says, “we know what to do when a person dies. We gather, tell stories and hold sacred space. We make room for sadness. But what do we do when a species disappears from a landscape? What do we do when a coastline changes beyond recognition . . . or when a rookery we love becomes an empty, ghostly landscape of broken trees and still water?”[\[1\]](#notes) For the most part, our tendency is to remain reticent—nearly silent as a society, but often restrained as individuals, too. ![Wildfire in Idaho](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-09/Boise%20fire.jpg?itok=vIeMsyEA) I read Bergman’s piece while at home in Boise, Idaho. We were three weeks into what would become a full *six* weeks of not being able to go outside without breathing polluted air. In the American West, millions of us spend the majority of the summer inviting particulate matter from wildfire smoke into our bloodstreams with each breath we take. You and I know the effects of this sort of exposure: systemic inflammation, as well as increased risk of high blood pressure, arrhythmias, heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, early onset dementia, Alzheimer's, and of various cancers, especially of the lung. Although these precautions don’t eliminate exposure, our family stays indoors, runs air purifiers on high, and wears masks when we have to go outdoors. But the vast majority of people in Boise act as if nothing is wrong, going about their business, no masks, even exercising outdoors, as if the quality of the air has nothing to do with our bodies. This is a sort of grief I don’t yet have words for. I grieve not merely the wildfires, their myriad human-induced causes, and the harm they cause to all creatures; I grieve that millions of Americans demonstrate little recognition of their own imbrication in nonhuman nature. I am not speaking of those whose poverty, handicap, enslavement, or victimization by war robs them of the ability to pursue connection to the nonhuman world. I am speaking about those whose lives *do* allow such connection—and about a culture and troubling notions of citizenship and selfhood that seem to discourage disconnection, instead. --- *4*. At the college where I teach, many students do not experience themselves as integrated with the natural world, as part of the assemblage. In their intensely indoor, AI-dictated, device-filled lives, they have little time when “all mean egotism vanishes” or when they feel “part and parcel” of “God” or the cosmos.[\[2\]](#notes) Many struggle to find value in the Transcendentalist notion that attentiveness to nature is an integral component of self-culture, or that it might deepen our capacity for finding meaning in our lives. Part of my responsibility is to share with students and readers that a handful of nineteenth-century thinkers saw the beginnings of a troubling human distance from nature, that they worried about that growing distance, and that we inhabit that distance now. --- *5.* In recent years, wildfire season extends well into my fall semester in Idaho. Last fall, some words from Emerson’s “The Poet” echoed in my mind while I walked to class on a particularly smoky day: “we are children of the fire.”[\[3\]](#notes) Written for a different time and context, Emerson’s phrase nonetheless resounded: “we are \[today’s\] children of the fire.” **Rochelle L. Johnson** holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at The College of Idaho, where she teaches the environmental humanities, and the 2026 Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A scholar of 19th-century nature aesthetics, Rochelle received the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and the 2025 *Georgia Review* Prose Prize for her essay "Phantom Pains," which was recognized by *Long Reads*, *Memoirland*, and the international scientific magazine *Nature*. She was the recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Idaho Professor of the Year Award and the 2024 Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award from the Idaho Humanities Council. ## Notes \[1\] Megan Mayhew Bergman, "We Know How to Mourn Other Humans—but What about Ecological Grief?" *The Guardian*, July 10, 2026. . \[2\] Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 10. \[3\] Ibid., 447.