To the editor:

There has been much talk of mitigation regarding the South Lawrence Trafficway. But for those individual animals in the path of the heavy equipment, recreated wetlands and noise buffers won’t prevent the inevitable. Most are going to be crushed or buried alive by fill dirt. As a wildlife rehabilitator and as a fellow being that shares much of their genetic material and fate, this breaks my heart.

As ecologist Joanna Macy has suggested, there are no funerals for ecosystems and for the myriad creatures that inhabit them. Human society has no context for it. But as I’ve also learned from her, because humans are an intimate part of the Earth and because we have evolved the capacity for self-reflection, the anguish I feel in anticipation of construction is, in a very real way, the Earth’s anguish. I and the other humans who mourn this loss are not mourning alone. And, rest assured, we will be going to a funeral.