I took delight in the abundant crops of acorns and bright red madrone berries. The madrone trees were thronged with feeding robins and hermit thrushes, and the oaks were alive with squirrels, jays and woodpeckers. Although neither acorns nor madrone berries will be part of my Thanksgiving feast, my feeling of thanks for this bounty came easily and naturally.

Then, further up the trail, I passed through a stand of dead ponderosa pines. Throughout the West, many forest areas are experiencing severe conifer die-offs, and these skeletal dead trees represent fuel for the wildfires that we all fear. Looking up at them, I certainly didn’t feel any stirrings of gratitude.

But just then, a hairy woodpecker landed in the largest snag and began to hammer away, anticipating a feast of beetle grubs. For the woodpecker—and the beetle grubs—the dead trees were a gift, something to be grateful for.

So, what else was I missing? I looked down at my feet. There was the usual jumble of the forest floor: fallen leaves and conifer needles, bits of lichen, with some scattered manzanita berries. If anything in nature deserves to be called humble, it’s layers like this of decay.

But as soon as I knelt and focused my attention, there it was, waiting to be acknowledged: gratitude. From a nearby clump of brush came the sounds of a towhee’s big feet scratching through the fallen leaves. For towhees, the duff is a banquet table, spread with a cornucopia of seeds, insects, sowbugs and spiders. For the seeds, the litter of the forest floor is where they need to be, where they have their only chance to germinate and grow. For the insects, sowbugs and spiders, it is a world complete, their grazing land and hunting ground, the habitat that makes their lives possible.

I stood and took a long drink from my water bottle. That water came from the watershed surrounding me, its stream fed by snowmelt and filtered through the ancient granite soils of the Siskiyou Mountains. I took a deep breath. The oxygen that filled my lungs and keeps me alive is the gift of photosynthesis, produced over billions of years by plants and cyanobacteria.

To state the obvious, none of this—none —is humanity’s doing. The birds, the berries, the decaying leaves, the spiders and the sowbugs, the life-giving atmosphere and the life-giving water—all are gifts that we receive, some so essential we cannot imagine their absence. Others are so useful it seems they were made for us especially, and for those we sometimes remember to be grateful. Others appear to be of no use to us whatsoever, or even to be intended for our harm, and why would we ever be grateful for those?

But nothing in nature is wasted.

Every gift given is accepted: the dead tree by the beetle, the beetle by the woodpecker, the woodpecker by the hawk, the dead hawk by the scavengers, then by the decomposers, then by the germinating ponderosa pine seed rising from the fertile duff.

All of this is one oversimplified cycle of gift exchange. The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control. To be alive at all seems a miracle.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us imagine the world we share with every living thing. Let us give thanks for this planet, this blue and green ball spinning in a lifeless void, holding us all and making possible our every heartbeat, our every breath. And not just ours, but the existence of all life, and of all the interrelations that make our world healthy and resilient and diverse and beautiful.

This year, when I sit down to my Thanksgiving feast, surrounded by loved ones, I will try to be mindful of every kind of giving thanks.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and ecologist in Oregon.

The post Every kind of Thanksgiving appeared first on Writers On The Range.

That’s because after years away, I’m back in the West, living in western Colorado, near millions of acres of public land. If the love of wide-open spaces defines a Westerner, then our region gives us lots to love.

Alaska, which is 95.8% public land, may be king among all states, with so much wide-open space available to everyone, but Nevada is close behind at 87.8%, and Utah is next at 75.2%. Idaho ranks third at 70.4%, and Colorado has 43.3%, with most of that land west of the Continental Divide.

Until moving back West, I hadn’t thought about public land being vital for anything as basic as cutting firewood. Yet in most states without much accessible public land, firewood is an expensive proposition. Here, from May through October in Colorado, it’s ours for the permit, which costs about $4 to $10 for a cord of wood. That’s enough to fill a full-size pickup bed four feet high.

How much do you need? I’m told three cords add up to “just getting by” in Montana or Wyoming, but true winter wealth is more like six cords. While you’re gathering wood, you can also scout for a Christmas tree. That requires just an $8 permit — a world away from pricey conifers grown on a tree farm.

Writer Dave Stiller’s firewood-gathering advice is to take blowdowns or the slash piles left by logging companies. Once you’ve finished gathering, according to the Forest Service, “revisit and monitor the effects of your harvest… Become a steward of that place as you study the plants and how they respond.” In other words, think like an owner who cares about the land over the long haul.

Patrick Hunter, a Sustainability Studies student at Colorado Mountain Community College in Carbondale, thinks our public lands embody a “generational legacy” that’s become a cornerstone of our democracy. From young to old, the diehard fans of public lands are volunteers from nonprofits who “adopt” a trail, constructing and advocating for them.

Political cartoonist Rob Pudim tells of hiking a trail he’d worked on for several summers and feeling an onrush of possessiveness: “I own this land,” he recalls thinking. In a way, he’s right. We do own this land, though it is managed — even if we rarely see a ranger — by federal agencies.

No one knows how many people have gone to public land with one solemn purpose: to throw ashes of their dead into a stream or launch them into the air from a mountaintop, a practice that’s allowable in most Western states’ national forests. It forever connects someone to that particular place outdoors.

And for a lot of us, the best of life can be what happens during a summer of camping, mushroom hunting, fishing, wildlife watching or just “getting out there.” Some hunters also become advocates for wildlife and public lands, championing public access.

Still, the damage we’ve done to public lands in the West is visible and remains — mining, drilling, dam building, nuclear bomb testing, dumping nuclear waste piles along rivers and other sensitive places. Because of that legacy, the Superfund program, finally established in 1980, aims to restore these lands, some so altered that no real fix is possible.

Public land also serves as a link to modern history. Throughout the West we can still see architectural marvels built by Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago. And ghost towns that were once small cities continue to fascinate us as we think about the economic jolt that triggered their abandonment.

Today, we’re experiencing a similar jolt as increasing aridity alters how the West works. Or doesn’t work. Meanwhile, as we struggle to figure out what we’ve got to do to adapt, at least I know what I’ll say this Thanksgiving. I am forever grateful to the public land that gives us room to breathe.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives with his family in Durango, Colorado.

The post Public land — a true blessing appeared first on Writers On The Range.