This afternoon several of my alums and I talked about what it means to be an environmental writer and storyteller right now. We look back on those who inspired us and, much as we love their work, we recognize that our own writing needs to respond to a different moment.

I’ve been revisiting a number of the writers who inspired me this year: Rachel Carson, Ursula LeGuin, Kathleen Dean Moore, Henry Bugbee, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Parker Palmer, Wendell Berry, John Elder, Gary Snyder, Wes Jackson, Bill Vitek, Robin Lee Carlson, Cindy Crosby, Suzanne Simard, Norman Wirzba, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Thomas Berry, Dan O’Brien, Aldo Leopold, Terry Tempest Williams, Strachan Donnelly…the list is longer than that, but those ones are a good sampling.

Each one has their place in my personal canon. Each one has helped me see something where and when they live. Each one brings their experience and shows me how they use it. Kathleen Dean Moore’s job might be most like my own; Aldo Leopold’s and Cindy Crosby’s landscapes are most like mine. Robin Lee Carlson has helped me become a better teacher. LeGuin has helped me to imagine worlds differently. And so on.

My alums both feel deeply the urge to make a difference with their lives. Both have earned graduate degrees, and do good work in their fields. But they—and I—share the sense that we need good stories.

The question is: what do those stories look like right now?

A.I. is a new challenge. How long until we are hit with a deluge of words not handcrafted crafted in the forge of human imagination but mass-produced by machines?

Another challenge: some say idylls and paeans to nature are a luxury we can no longer afford. Others point out that we are already weary of lamentations and nature obituaries.

Many of us want to write words of hope, be we also know they have to be tempered with sobriety.

For today, at least, we have settled on this: right now, as we welcome our children and grandchildren into the world, we want to bear witness, to testify to what we see, while we see it.