Many of us grieve what is happening to the places we love, but how often does it occur to us actually to apologize to them?

Daniel Dancer is an artist who creates art for, in, and about endangered places and species. In his Art for the Sky projects, he works with communities around the world to incorporate people themselves into poignant images which he then photographs from the air. Here he describes a private act of observance he recently made:

Making apologies to the wild Earth is of the highest importance to me these days. On Earth Day, in a magical grove of wild giant coast redwoods, I made apologies to them. 95% of California's ancient redwood forests have been cut down. Standing in a glade with them towering all around me, I spoke out loud and then I put the essence of what I said into form using materials at hand: the peel from my mandarin orange. I took a picture, put the peels in my pocket and left feeling heard somehow. As I walked on I thought about how natural it is for us to apologize to fellow humans whom we have hurt and yet how foreign it feels for most of us to do the same regarding the Earth. I wonder if everyone, now and then, went to a wild place or stood before an endangered species in a zoo, or at the site of a dammed river or even before a favorite tree in their backyard and apologized for the careless acts of our species (with absolutely no thought of forgiveness) if things might shift a bit somehow.