You Won't Remember
For Earth Day 2025
“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by and , and supported with brilliant advice from scientists and . The story you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher .
You won’t remember what it’s like to wake in the early morning hours in the first days of Spring to the warbling, whistling counterpoint of a pair of blackbirds reveling outside your bedroom window in darkness.
You won’t remember the way a spray of honeysuckle blossoms fills your senses and clings to you for miles down the trail like the memory of a dream of a first kiss before you understood such things.
You won’t remember the cool shade of a Sycamore tree or what it felt like to sprawl in the grass in the dappled sunlight filtering through its leaves as they tremble and wave, breathing you in and giving you life.
You won't remember any of this because you haven't happened yet, and the lush, green, impossible wonder of the world I knew and squandered will only be a story I tell you from my fading memory as useless to you as a butterfly pinned to a card with a label that fixes a word to an idea but fails to capture the delicate, swirling, trance of flight.
Wow Ben, that last paragraph!! Stunning and powerful.
This feels especially relevant to me having grown up in Midwest America and seeing the monarchs take over in orange brilliance. It seemed like my entire neighborhood was full of milkweed just for them and town would be brimming as they grew up.
Now I am in the process of wilding a good portion of my backyard to accommodate as many native creatures as I can. To fight this, we must think of the small spaces. And my small space will be a haven if I can help it!
Thank you for writing and for sharing it with us. The present & future looks grim, but we can still make change. And stories like this and the rest of Future of Nature series will help us get back to a better state.