My husband and I both like spending a lot of time in the outdoors – just not with each other. This is an important feature of married life where you ought to have some things in common but not all things in common.

It’s how his cheesecake is kept safe from my otherwise cake-consuming self and why he’s happy to shovel snow while I go for a run.

Neither of us has seemed to accept these clear differences, as is apparent when Charlie asks me to go snowshoe the property with him one afternoon. I don’t know how many feet long or wide it is, but it’s a five-acre geometrical shape.

“Like, just our property?”

“Yeah.”

“In circles?”

Charlie is always trying to get me to walk in circles. He has spent the entirety of our relationship building tiny circle trails all over our property. With great effort, many corners, and a wrong turn or two, one can cover almost very nearly an entire mile in a single lap. That was on our ten-acre parcel.

He must have heard my dismissive snort or condescending chortle, because he responded with, “I want to bond with the new land.”

My snobbery about outdoorsing will surely gain a measure of humility as I age and my own circles get smaller, but for now I’m still running around the thousand acres that surround our new property. We bought that land, I argue, because I’m already bonded to everything around it. There’s another reason though.

Years ago when I found the hilltop oasis, the drive there was a magical tour through stretches of birch groves, lush cedars and sun-dappled undergrowth. Wild roses and thimbleberry crept over the edge of the road, waving as my car rolled (okay, blazed) by. It was a forested invitation, a gravel-and-green carpet rolled out all the way to my mountainside perch.

Then someone bought the land below me. And, as is their right, they decimated it.

They logged. In November. The soggy weather washed away the hillside and the road. The equipment tore out every bit of life on the slope. The scars of greed and poorly informed land management left a gaping swath of fire hazard and destruction in their wake. And because we’re in Idaho, it was all punctuated by a travel trailer with a tarp tossed over it.

The next wind storm took down the few scrappy birch trees they left. The “pasture land” they intended to create became a wasteland of debris, burn piles that would turn into bonfires attended by UTV drivers, and the tromped-out mudscape that a cow or two make of a too-small pen.

I mourned the birch most of all – a tree that is finding it harder and harder to thrive in our changing climate. To wipe out such a rich grove seemed a tragedy. My drive home or my morning run suddenly felt stained with an inescapable awareness of the unstoppable ruination of our lands.

I never understand why one might move into the forest only to mow it down. And while I support the rights of private land owners, I lament the lack of education or awareness around the importance and methods of stewardship of that land so that it may continue to thrive long into the future.

I started running up the mountain instead, toward the state land that stretches into the Selkirks. Then a company came and ripped out a hillside of cedar and pine, covering my trail with branches and debris and promising broken ankles for me and the wildlife. The elk stopped traversing there. The carpet of moss and perpetual ferns disappeared. The road above it turned into a chalky dust basin.

Maybe that’s why Charlie’s circles were so tiny: Our untouched little slice of pie gave us the impression that nature was still winning the battle. Beyond our property, things looked more like a war zone.

So I took to running less out my front door and more to running in a conservation area near town. Any clipped cedar bough there would be seen and aggressively discouraged by the land owners and the trust holders. Signs remind us to stay on the trails and conserve the undergrowth. There, I’ve never seen a beer can, a dirt bike part or a months-long smoking pile of ash and oil.

The move to a new piece of land was not because I needed to be closer to town or I was tired of an off-grid life. It was an act of self-preservation and sanity. Like the forests, I am losing my resilience. Climate grief is not just another manifested maladaptation: It is an acute awareness of the death and destruction of living things. I needed a buffer.

It does not escape me that this house we’re building might well be made from some of those logged trees. And there are organizations out there successfully practicing sustainable methods of forest harvesting. The problems are complex and the solutions more so. The vast overwhelm of that – the semantics of the discussion and blame and justification – should not stop each of us from doing whatever small part we’re capable of.

Whether our circles are tiny or big, we have an impact. Walk a little more. Recycle where we can. Curate yards that feed and house the wildlife. And recognize that value is not just measured in feet of lumber.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com.