Don’t Forget Your Mother Nature

I’ve spent more than 50 years working in the service of nature—restoring forests, reviving lost ocean pastures, and trying to bring life back from the brink. Some might say I’ve spent a lifetime tilting at windmills. I say the windmills are real, and they’re worth engaging in battle.

Every day, more people awaken to the brutal truth: our world is unraveling. Forests ablaze, oceans lifeless, insects vanished, skies disturbed. And then—almost as reflex—they ask, “Is it already too late?”

Let’s be honest. That question often isn’t a cry for truth. It’s a comfortable escape hatch, perhaps to where we might party ’til it’s all over.

Because if the answer is “yes,” then the personal burden lifts. If it’s already too late, we’re off the hook. No need to change, to sacrifice, to rise. We can retreat into distraction, despair, or indulgence in empty delaying gestures and call it what any “one” can do. Clicking that “Donate Here” button isn’t enough. Waiting for someone else to save the planet is the single greatest harm one can indulge in.

Here’s the truth: it’s late, but not too late.

We still have choices. We still have time—narrow, precious, and rapidly closing—to act. And in this twilight margin of agency, what matters is what we do now.

The planet doesn’t need your guilt. It needs your courage. It doesn’t need more doomscrolling. It needs more doing. This is the hour when selfless action becomes sacred. When determination must be stronger than despair. When ordinary people must pick up the tools, the science, the spades, the pens, and set to work healing and restoring what we can.

This is not about saving “the planet.” Earth will endure, but not the Earth as we like it. But our children, the wild kin we share it with, and the fragile beauty of civilization—they need you. Not later. Not when it’s convenient. Now.

Some will call such resolve Quixotic. I call it human. For the better part of our history, we’ve done the impossible in the darkening hours when the odds were longest.

If you think it’s too late to act, you’re half right. It’s too late to do nothing.

But it’s never too late to begin.

If you’re looking for proof that action still matters—real stories of hope, healing, and hands-on restoration even in these darkest hours—visit my blog at russgeorge.net. There, you’ll discover the true story of the Haida Salmon Restoration project, where an indigenous-led effort brought back ocean life and sparked one of the greatest blooms of marine vitality ever recorded. The ocean responded. Nature remembers how to heal—if we lend a hand.

Read, be inspired, and then pick up your oar.