Women. The earth. I think about both these days because both weigh on me with heaviness and urgency. Each is mirroring cracks and stresses in the other like a physical call and response. I chide myself. None of this is fact. Only the intuitive leaps of a mind over-trained in the poetics of literature.

Yet still I leap. And now that habit is working overtime and particularly when I engage with the news. The same week CNN headlines proclaimed that rivers all over the world were drying up, on quieter pages it shared the insights of eight American women living in overspent bodies. Exhausted as the rivers, they’re facing challenges and demands that exceed them. Yet they carry on and will continue to carry on. Until they can’t.

It didn’t surprise me to see women and rivers featured in the same week. I live with a form of madness that sees everything connected to everything else in one way or another. Besides—and as indigenous people believe—we are the children of the earth. The Great Mother. So as the earth suffers, so do those who like the Mother also bear children. Both have bodies that make life possible. Both are governed by the same systems control the earth and created this age we now live in: the anthropocene.

The Greek root anthrop speaks to the human; the suffix -cene to our current geologic time. To the recent and new. Taken together, the word speaks of humanity. How humans have become the dominant factor in planetary evolution. But does not say that this evolution is man-made devolution, emphasis on the “man.” Industry and the pillaging of natural resources for profit has been the province of men, of patriarchy. And like women too often have, the earth has surrendered to abuse, mostly without complaint. No longer. Now the earth responds with monstrous rages. Of drought, flood and fire. With loss of life and a catastrophic rate of species extinction 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. The planet is out of balance. And all beings must pay the price.

For centuries, we could more—or less—rely on climate patterns we could read in the stars, wind, sky and earth. While never 100% predictable, were predictable enough. We could say with more or less certainty that rivers—like the Colorado, the Rhine, the Loire, the Yangtze—would flow on all continents. Other watery bodies, created and natural, like Lake Powell in Arizona and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, would fill. If not from rain, then from the melted runoff of high mountain snows. Variances would never be so extreme as to vaporize those bodies into the atmosphere and leave behind a dry, brittle earth unable to support life. The Mother could withhold, for a season, sometimes more. Or during Ice Ages, for millennia. But that withholding always came to an end; balance would return.

That reliability is gone. But climate change is not real, say some. Science is a fraud. These nay-sayers and deniers: these are the people who are most likely to believe that life-giving human bodies exist solely to benefit others. Offer comfort and pleasure. Provide labor for the industries that abuse the earth. Serve those who control those industries and society itself. Their justification? Ideologies rooted in Darwin, in the naturally-ordained dominance of males. Or beliefs built around a white-skinned God created in the image of men. A God too often used by men to justify their supremacy over all living beings, including the earth. And their dismissal or calculated disappearance of what does not suit them.

In the United States, the law that protected uterine-bearing people, gave us final say over our bodies has also vanished. What remains is imbalance. This is what I see now when I look at a map of the United States. Only ten of fifty states offer unrestricted access to the abortions that were once our right. Eleven have banned it outright and the rest offer conditional access that could be revoked by legislative fiat at any time.

Knowing this, I feel the imbalance in my body as an anger that will not go away. I think of the eight CNN interviewees and read their words over and over again. The already overwhelming challenges of the many roles women play—worker/breadwinner, mother, daughter, sister, wife—have been compounded by those created by systems in post-pandemic chaos. Now we feel the despair of disempowerment. Confesses one 35-year-old, I’m fragile as a piece of china. I am cracked, broken and tired. Just like the earth.

If anti-climate change advocates rely on denial, pro-life advocates rely on wilful scientific misreadings. Or rather, transforming scientific doubt about when life begins into absolutes, like this pro-life Wisconsin website: “[Human embryologists have concluded that] embryos are very young human beings. Pre-born children.” The movement claims to liberate women—transmen never enter the conversation—by offering “life” as an alternative to “murder.” But that only enslaves uterine bodies to the violence of state coercion and the lie of unlimited resources. Climate change is not real. Science is a fraud. Without speaking its name, these wilful misreaders of science act for patriarchy. And for a system that “tamed” the rawness of America through dispossession and human exploitation then dared to call itself a democracy.

This disruption of nature will alter life as we know it. Through migration away from the ravages of flood, fire and drought. Through conflicts over water and eventually, temperate, arable land. The question isn’t how these changes will break us but how much. And the disruption of the American body politic through the battle over abortion? No doubt that will break apart a union that once appeared whole. Not that it was ever perfect or without other perennial divides like race and class. But uterine bodies will only deepen the divides that already exist.

Indeed, the disharmony we have created in her rhythms are no mere inconvenience. They threaten us and our blue-green planet home. We look into the rivers and lakes of this earth, the bodies that offer us the water with which we cannot survive. Rather take comfort in the abundance of nature, we see man-made destruction, like the drying of the world’s rivers, everywhere around us. Nature is reflecting the very worst of us back to ourselves. Teaching us—or trying to—that the way forward is not through the narcissism of patriarchy. But through the humility of self-recognition in nature. And in every living thing on earth.