My great-grandfather Robert Dickson came to Colorado over a hundred years ago at the prompting of his son, my great-uncle Henry. Robert came because he was dying of tuberculosis. Henry had been ill himself with the same disease. Henry swore Colorado cured him. He convinced his father that Colorado would cure him too, so my great-grandfather came west. And he recovered. My grandfather, Edgar, also sick, headed west with his father. He recovered. Other unwell family members followed. All of them beat the disease. As my father told it, once the Dicksons left the dank Illinois river bottoms, once they were able to enjoy the rarefied air of Colorado, they all became TB-free. The one Dickson who stayed behind, a fellow named Lloyd, who was helplessly in love with a woman who refused to leave her home, died before he reached 30--this after tuberculosis consumed his beloved.

Coming west to escape consumption is not just Dickson family lore. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Colorado was known as a sanctuary for those suffering from lung ailments. It was known nationwide as a magical, even mythical place of healing, where dry air gave soggy lungs a long-enough respite so that they could mend. It worked for the Dicksons.

Which is merely to say that numerous Dicksons call Colorado home, and to convey my own sense of place here. The fact that Dicksons have been in Colorado since 1887 doesn't give us special privileges over the land. Humans don't ever own land. They are but temporary tenants.

This is fact. The Westerner's fierce notions of ownership are at best backward. I say this not to insult anyone and not because Native American ideology is in vogue, but because those who believe they own the land are reading the situation in reverse. They've got the subject and object placement all wrong. Anyone who examines the matter will see what the Native Americans saw--they'll see what owns whom. Consider the power that the plot of land I ìownî--my house and yard--has over my life. My little landscape requires that I care for the vegetables, trees and flowers; it demands that I attend to the excess grass and layered leaves and piled snow and peeling paint, and it sends me to work each day in order to pay the bills to maintain ìmyî chunk of land. My Dickson cousins, the farmers who with their labor feed thousands of people, do so because the land they dwell on will produce food, second only to water in human essentials, and they like the farming lifestyle. But the land owns their days and much of their nights. And then there are the bigger facts, like the land's ability to spin a tornado where it pleases, to amass a crushing winter blizzard, to freeze a peach crop, to drown a recent planting of seedlings, to shrivel a field of wheat with a merciless high-plains sun.

The farming Dicksons have long lived with these facts. They shrugged and took what the land could give them. As the twentieth century progressed, they did what other farmers did: they adopted new methods to outwit the land, poisoning the soil and water and air with artificial fertilizers and biocides, all in pursuit of bigger harvests and fatter wallets. But they didn't own the land in doing so; as tenants, they merely exploited the land more intensively than they had before. No one saw anything wrong with this. The settlers of the West wanted to make a buck off ìtheirî land; any action or practice was legitimate as long as someone made a buck. Then the U.S. government and large corporations and developers showed us what land exploitation really looks like. Their projects have created the scars that mar this stunning Colorado: the mindless suburban sprawl and radioactive landscapes at the base of the Front Range, and the nerve gas surprises haunting the plains northeast of Denver and Summitville's cyanide-contaminated waters, amid the exquisite San Juan Mountains and Climax Molybdenum's biologically-dead holding ponds just behind the striking summits above Vail.

A child learns at some important age that if the source of her sustenance disappears--in her case, her parents--she's in danger. Adults are fully capable of recognizing that our own sustenance depends on the land and its waters, but we don't. Instead we rip, bulldoze, blast, drill, chop, gouge, scrape, poison and burn this Earth as if it were annoying us in some unceasing and unbearable way, as if it were plotting against us. Any extraterrestrial eyeing the situation on our planet could only conclude that the most able beings hereon perceive the air and water and soil as deadly enemies, for we continuously attack the natural world--this Earth, this Colorado, that healed my ancestors with its particular climatic traits, this dry western land and air that absorbs the sun and continues, as it has for eons.

Which brings me back to the glaciers, to the thick, frozen rivers that helped shape the Rocky Mountains just to the west of me. Just now they're absent, but they've come and gone repeatedly over the Earth's lifetime. When present, the glaciers dominate the highlands far more completely than we humans ever could. Cold, unmindful masses of ice, thousands of feet thick, shaped much of the massive uplands, ground it down to removable chunks, carving up bedrock like giant chainsaws applied to tender wood. Rushing waters sent the mountains--once Everest high--tumbling eastward where over millions of years the land piled up on itself and eventually became the flat high plain where my great-grandfather staked out his claim. Even more powerful were the giant ice sheets, continent-sized provinces of ice, miles thick, reaching down from northern latitudes, grinding and scraping and flattening as they went, hungrily licking the edges of Montana and restrained only by the unblinking sun.

Obvious glacial facts are comforting: glaciers are bigger than us. They don't plan or profit or plunder. They just go where climate patterns allow them. A well-placed glacier would grind to unrecognizable bits the strip malls that sully Colorado's main mountain valleys now; it would chew up the parking lots and neon signs. Even a small glacier would have its way with the imperious earthmovers and swaggering bulldozers that have so abused the West. A glacier would snatch up those yellow machines in its frozen maw and collapse them like empty seed husks, teaching them what it really means to move earth. The impassive glacier would then deposit the machines where it would and use the expansion and contraction of its ice to wrench those machines into harmless chunks of bright yellow metal. The glaciers are gone now, but they'll be back. It's simply a work of time.

And then there are the shapers of glaciers, the geologic forces that trump all on planet Earth. Faults and continental plates are no respecters of privilege or fortune; they'll collapse a ten-million dollar home on a bluff above a California beach just as completely as they will a maid's apartment. Effortlessly they'll shake 10-lane super highways to collapsed heaps of concrete and rebar. And the mountains, our stunning mountains--all geologic certainties, though we don't comprehend all the certainties. For reasons not fully understood, the Earth's inner forces thrust upward across central Colorado, creating the slopes we ski, hike, clear-cut and strip-mine. Maybe the murky origins of Rocky Mountain building is connected to plate tectonics, the force that continuously re-shapes our world, perhaps one day joining the Mideast to Washington DC, or placing South America back in Africa's corner. As humans hew and slash and burn, as we erect looming monstrosities or wantonly take the Earth's bounty without cleaning up after ourselves, my comfort is that geology is bigger than us, and it doesn't brook argument.

But I turn to something as big as plate tectonics only on the bad days. On a more common day, the coyotes suffice. They're everywhere now, all over the West and the entire United States; they moved in on a continent-wide niche that opened up when the European newcomers to North America systematically decimated their primary competitor, the wolf. So the wily coyote--smaller, faster, needing less territory than the wolf and much less fussy about wounded landscapes--has proliferated. On sleepless nights I hear them near my house in this city of 100,000. I see them on walks, while driving along parkways, while biking home. Tawny and determined, they slide soundlessly through the grasses in the open areas east of the plot of land that owns me. In broad daylight they gaze at me unperturbed because they run faster

than I do. They know of hiding places I know nothing of. They can jump or crawl under high barbed-wire fences I don't even know exist. Collectively they have outwitted hunters, homesteaders, and government-funded poisoners for several hundred years. I'm no match for them. Last spring a mother coyote gazed at me as I gazed at her five pups and den on a large estate. She seemed to know that I was no threat--not unless I told someone about them. Maybe mama coyote sensed that I'd do nothing of the kind. But even if I had alerted the estate dweller that there were coyotes in her acres-large backyard, mama coyote would have gotten away with one or two pups in her mouth before the exterminator completed his work. And in the long run, that's all mama coyote needs. A few to survive.

If humans succeed in poisoning themselves and much of the life on the planet to death--which any reasonable extraterrestrial can only assume is our intent --the coyote won't disappear. Billions of humans or none--mama coyote's successors will be around in either case. They'll hover in the bushes next to sidewalks, and whether those sidewalks are crumbled from long disuse or freshly laid won't matter. The coyote will always find a small rodent to gnaw on.

Which is another animal that makes me sleep better. Mouse, vole, or rabbit, quivering little creatures that breed and feed, the scuttling bread loaves of the wild, filling the bellies of snakes, owls, coyotes, foxes, wolves, hawks, eagles, cats of all stripes. Easily frightened and reckoned by humans as negligible or reason to put out a trap, they'll outlast the Earth's big creatures, transmitting to the future a mammalian blueprint. If a voyager to the future went forward 10,000 years and returned to report that there were traces of human and mouse in the year 12,000, but that only one had survived, my money would be on the little guy. Rodents spell dinner for a lot of creatures, but all that rodent breeding has its purpose.

And then there are the soaring creatures that so many humans love to hate: the magpie, the starling, the raven. There's enough diverse raw material between them to create a whole host of birds that may one day be as intriguing as the ones we humans are extinguishing. The lilting flight of the magpie holds promise for some future bird's abilities in the air. The shrill insistence of the starling guarantees that a form of it will continue, possibly bright and beautiful, possibly raucous and loud--but it will be. And the raven's cunning and unfathomable eye foretells an unceasing, even amusing, avian future. I've seen ravens circling high above me as I stood at 14,000 feet; I've watched them catch high thermal updrafts there and soar around mountaintops effortlessly. Their purpose? Unknown. Which reminds me of the mallard duck, the plain mallard duck and her mate and best friend that I once saw waddling up a streamside to the top of a mini-rapid. There one by one they climbed into the fast-moving water, slid down it with placid duck smiles, then climbed out of the water, waddled up the stream's edge to the same spot, and did it again. And again and again. If we humans aren't around some day to enjoy life's delights, I trust the duck to do it.

With such plucky companions on our Earth, we won't destroy all that is worthwhile. And our fight against the Earth's forces is only a phase--our several hundred years of enemy occupation on Planet Earth is but a beginning of a blink of the universal eye, a nanosecond in the larger scheme of things. There is no celestial registry of our existence--our parking-lot landscapes, our love affair with cement pillars, missile silos, toxic waste dumps, and super highways--none of these failures figure in the incomprehensible depths of space. That space will always and inevitably outwit us. Even if we find a way to exist in its cold depths, the ever expanding universe will out-step our rapacious appetites and our need to grow bigger, bigger, bigger because the universe grows bigger, bigger, bigger as well. And the universe's ìbiggerî renders our ìbiggerî just plain silly by comparison.

Which isn't to say we shouldn't curb ourselves. But my optimism is long wrung out. We won't curb ourselves. There's not enough money in curbing desire, even if the well-being of millions and perhaps billions of people depends on it. Mindless consumption leaves too many powerful people too pleased. For the foreseeable future, it will continue.

But so will the Earth's scrappy creatures. Even mountain lions, once nearly exterminated, are recovering. One or two or six or seven--they're too stealthy for any kind of a real count--live in the foothills west of my mother's house. One or perhaps several of them often slink into my mother's neighborhood in pursuit of the deer that graze there; one day last winter we found part of a deer carcass on her suburban grass. I hear tales that the mountain lion has so recovered that she has returned to the East, though under other names--catamount, cougar, panther, puma. She's said to haunt the Eastern Seaboard's forests again, which she had to abandon because those forests were just about all clear-cut by 1900. But those forests have sprung up anew--today I would find far more trees on the East Coast than my great-grandfather would have if he'd ever felt the urge to head eastward a hundred years ago. There are other survivors: in spite of millions of cans of pesticide, ten of thousands of spiders inhabit each city block. Skunks and raccoons and wriggly garter snakes live their little lives within sight of human dwellings, sometimes in human dwellings, and no exterminator can fully defeat them.

But my greatest comfort lies in the Earth's microscopic creatures. Seeds and organic bits surround us, composting gently into the future. They feed the bacteria that in a pinch could start this life all over again. Bacteria are the most ubiquitous promises of all. They're in my bathtub and my backyard, underneath big buildings and small, settled patiently under the thoroughfares and garbage heaps, impervious to surface disruptions like wars and biological attacks. When necessary, I picture them: they're under the big white structures that represent the zenith of human power in this great land, under our capitols with golden domes, under the majestic White House, under our supreme courts. I know those microbes will reproduce and reproduce without notice from the mighty bipeds walking the marble halls above. And the oblivious hardiness of bacteria will continue long after the small-minded figures overhead have moldered into their hermetically-sealed tombs.

When absolutely necessary, when despair threatens to move into my core, there are the stars, the distant suns that never sleep. They cast their light toward our Earth, unmoved and impassive, doing their gaseous or burning business and entirely untouched by the activity on the blue-green planet that circles a nondescript star many light years away. The stars don't care about me. They aren't warm and fuzzy. They simply are, and they are relentless in their paths across the cosmos. They represent a sane and steady reality. As another year ends in the most powerful country on Earth, I bow before those stars, knowing that they existed eons before our humanity became ascendant on this orb. And they will continue long after we've made our last mistake.