“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” —Gary Snyder

For our summer pause, I felt a pull toward home. I spent these past weeks walking the woods with family in Michigan, hiking waterfalls in upstate New York, and traversing familiar dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Soon, I’ll be with the rest of my family among the mountains of Washington. The yearning for home does not belong to humans alone. In fact, the very root of the word eco is the Greek oikos meaning “house” or “home.” When we study every ecosystem, we see organisms that go to extraordinary lengths in order to build shelter for life.

Sociable weavers don’t just build homes, they build communities. These small birds construct massive communal nests that can hold hundreds of chambers and house as many individuals. They engineer these homes using sticks and grass gathered in the deserts of southern Africa, on sturdy trees and even telephone poles—anything that can bear their weight, which can reach up to a staggering 2,000 pounds. Within their walls and padded tunnels, these birds weave a life sheltered from predators, finding safety in numbers. Home is whom we share it with.

In tropical forests, army ants architect living structures. With colonies of as many as 200,000 individuals, they are constantly on the move, looking for new territory in which to feed. Rather than forage for new materials every 20 days when they translocate, army ants construct bivouacs out of their own bodies: complex conical dwellings containing chambers and tunnels made out of interlocking individuals, complete with air vents that open and close. Inside rests their queen, who gives birth to the colony’s young. Our bodies, too, can be a home.

On the Great Plains of North America, prairie dogs dig entire towns underground. These intricate burrow systems are sprawling, and subdivided by extended family groups as well as functions: nurseries for the young, pockets for food storage, and safe havens for adults foraging above. The largest town ever recorded was a black-tailed prairie dog colony in Texas that spanned 25,000 square miles, and was inhabited by 400 million squirrels. They are also built to withstand various weather conditions, from floods to fires. Most of all, home is where we find refuge.

Meanwhile, on the ocean floor, white-spotted pufferfish make mazes. Males will spend more than a week mysteriously following specific geometric patterns, digging trenches and ridges in concentric circles in the sand. Not only will these ornate nests attract mates, they will also provide the optimal conditions for raising young. The designs direct water flow, delivering oxygen efficiently while reducing stress on the eggs. A home can hold wonder and beauty.

A home can be a living, breathing thing. A container for beauty. A place for family and community to gather. A shelter for weathering life’s storms. Whether human or not, all beings deserve such a safe haven—a space that is inviolate. We all need sanctuary. The acute grief of watching ecocide unfold is not about the loss of some abstract environment, but of our shared home. It is a restless longing to protect what we know in our marrow we belong to. 

As I write to you now, I’m back at my wood slab desk in Brooklyn, in an apartment that I’ve called home for six years. Drenched in sunlight and overflowing with flora, vines crawling over shelves of myths and memories, it has held me through trials and transitions, plagues and puberty—my becoming. Yet for all the life I’ve lived within these walls, I know that I am home anywhere that rivers flow and trees teem toward starry skies: anywhere that nature grows.