It’s going to take stamina to get what we need to do, done. I love Third Act. It’s a revolution in gray. You’ve heard the wisdom. It’s humbling, it’s heartening, it’s inspiring, and it feels right to be in conversation to organize and support Kamala Harris. I come to you from Castle Valley, Utah, lands traditionally inhabited by the Ute Mountain Ute and Pre Puebloan people. 

This summer, we’ve had devastating flash floods. Two in the last month. The night before last, there was a lightning strike and two fires ignited. Luckily, they were put out quickly. Like for so many of us, climate collapse is not an abstraction; it is our daily weather report. On June 22, Brook and I stood on the Berm that has protected our house from these seasonal floods for more than 25 years.

We watched it break. We watched the awe and velocity and force of Plaster Creek rushing red water, uprooting elder junipers and flushing them down-valley as the now raging river rushed past the splitting in two channels like a band of wild horses spooked, racing down the west and east sides of our home. It was a terrible beauty, adding a punishing debt to my own definition of awe.

It’s here that you embrace the paradox that the force responsible for this beautiful red rock country of buts and mesa stone arches inspires in all its erosional power, is the reason we wish to live here. And it may be the very reason we’re forced to leave. These last two recorded floods dropped rain at an average of 6.5 inches per hour.

An extreme drought, add to the equation, with extreme heat. In a state like Utah, the realities of climate change are still being denied. When our state legislatures and our governor were confronted in 2023 about our shrinking terminal Great Salt Lake—bold brave policies preparing for an uncertain future, a toxic future, a future where Salt Lake City might have to be evacuated—they were tabled in favor of prayer. Who can say Great Salt Lake didn’t momentarily rise in those years of record breaking snow because of the prayers statewide? But we need something more reliable than God. To quote my great-grandmother, Vilate Romney, faith without works is dead. 

Believe the long legged birds who are circling above us, desperately looking for water. Believe the forests that are burning, whose surviving trees will later stand as sentinels, charred witnesses to animal bodies reduced to ash. Believe in flash floods roaring through burnt canyons in the desert. Believe Great Salt Lake is retreating in plain sight as dust devils are whipping up clouds of cadmium and arsenic resting on the dry lake bed.

We are loose in the toxic world we have created. Before we can save this world, we are losing. We must first learn to save what remains. This is more than an ecological or political crisis. It’s a spiritual one. The earth will survive us. We are the ones being baptized by fire. May this fire fuel our collective resolve to keep the open space of democracy open.

May this fire be ignited within our own hearts, As we remember, the human heart is the first home of democracy. This is not about us. It’s about a future for those we love and our future descendants are grandchildren who deserve, alongside the descendants of all manner of creatures, the right to flourish as we have, long after our bodies are buried and sprinkled upon the earth.

We are EITs, elders in training, as my friend, Ted Strong, a true Yakama elder informed me. We can speak up. We can act out of the urgency of our broken hearts. And we can raise money, give money again and again, as we vote for climate leaders. Kamala Harris, our soon to be commander-in-chief, is one of those climate leaders. We are calling each other to action with the gifts that are ours.

Our great task now is to listen and support our young people, and when asked, share with them the truths of our own experience, and stand beside them as brokenhearted people who care. Let us put our love into action for Kamala Harris as president of what I pray is a more United States.

— Terry Tempest Williams