◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Tend the Living World I have spent my life watching quietly. I learned very early that if you shout at the forest, it does not listen. If you dominate animals, they do not reveal themselves. Only patience, attention, and humility open the living world. And that is why I must speak now — because what I see today is not ignorance alone, but a refusal to listen. America, the Trumpian worldview looks at nature and sees a resource to be used, a nuisance to be regulated away, a sentimental distraction from “real” power. I have lived among chimpanzees long enough to know that this way of seeing is profoundly dangerous. When we first discovered that chimpanzees make tools, use them deliberately, teach them to their young, grieve their dead, and wage territorial violence, it shattered the comforting illusion that humans stand alone, separate, superior, untouched by consequence. The truth is simpler — and more unsettling. We are part of a community of life. What we do to it, we do to ourselves. Trumpian environmental thinking denies this connection. It mocks restraint. It sneers at science. It treats care as weakness and domination as strength. But I have seen what happens when power is exercised without relationship. I have seen forests fall silent. I have seen chimpanzee mothers carry dead infants for days, unwilling to let go. I have seen species vanish not with drama, but with administrative indifference. Here is my yawp. Not angry, but urgent. Extinction is irreversible. You cannot negotiate with it. You cannot deregulate it away. You cannot bring back a species with a press conference. When protections are dismantled, when habitats are opened to short-term profit, when climate science is dismissed as inconvenience, what is really being expressed is a belief that the future does not matter. That belief is the most dangerous ideology of all. I am often asked where I find hope. Hope does not come from denial. Hope comes from responsibility. It comes from young people who understand that the fate of a chimpanzee in Gombe is tied to the fate of a child in Ohio. It comes from the recognition that every ecosystem is a web, and tearing one strand weakens the whole. Trumpian America speaks often of greatness. But there is nothing great about a civilization that destroys the very conditions that sustain life. Greatness lies in stewardship. In restraint. In knowing when not to take. So let me say this plainly, as someone who has watched generation after generation of non-human lives unfold. We are not the owners of this planet. We are its caretakers, temporarily. And history will not ask how loudly we proclaimed ourselves strong. It will ask what we protected when we had the power to destroy. My barbaric yawp, then, is not a roar. It is a call to remember. Remember that intelligence without empathy is cruelty. Remember that progress without reverence is ruin. Remember that the living world is not expendable. Because if we lose the chimpanzees, the forests, the pollinators, the oceans, we will not only lose biodiversity. We will lose something essential about what it means to be human. And that loss, unlike hope, may not return.