By Annica Dickens
Breakfast with Hummingbirds
Mornings in Durango began early. By six, light spilled through my bedroom windows and layered bird calls heralded the morning. In the kitchen, my host, an 80-year-old wildlife photographer, was already seated at the table. We shared breakfast, reading the news and trading remarks about the headlines, occasionally interrupted by the buzz of a hummingbird at the feeder.
The house, set about ten kilometers out of town, blended into the hillside and surrounding woods. A garden curved around the structure, merging with wild vegetation so seamlessly that it was impossible to discern where cultivation ended and wilderness began. Deer wandered through the brush, lizards basked on stones, and chipmunks darted across the porch. The house itself was designed with the landscape in mind; its windows angled to capture winter rays and temper the summer sun.
Rivers on Paper
After breakfast, I biked into town, toward the office where my internship was located. My placement was with a Rights of Nature organization that sought to recognize legal rights for rivers, forests, and other natural entities. By affirming nature’s intrinsic value, this work places ecosystems at the center rather than treating them as resources for human use. For eight hours a day, my eyes were fixed to my laptop screen as I carried out these efforts. This rhythm is familiar to anyone who has worked in an office, but in my case, it felt especially dissonant: I spent my days writing about nature while being sealed off from it.
It is not surprising that an organization advocating for the rights of rivers and forests would do so through emails, pleadings, and memos; to gain traction within existing institutions, one must speak their language. Yet even as an intern, the inadequacy of these inherited frameworks was clear. The tools of the legal world adhere to structures—logical, adversarial, bounded—that were never designed to recognize the intrinsic value of ecosystems. They cannot hold the hush of water sliding over stones, the pooling of sunlight in a river bend, or the thick scent of air after rain. Nor can they account for what these moments do for us: how immersion in the natural world slows the pulse, quiets the mind, and restores a sense of belonging. When lived experience is flattened into documents, much is lost, carrying repercussions that reverberate outward.
Lost in Translation
The act of translating lived ecological experience into legal language alienates actor from action. On the surface, this estrangement is physical: translation happens in offices and courtrooms, far removed from the ecosystems at stake. Yet the deeper alienation is conceptual. Legal doctrines and administrative procedures force complex ecological realities into narrow forms, severing knowledge from the contexts that gave it meaning.
Temporal pressures intensify this distortion: for instance, a grant proposal may require quarterly projections for a watershed whose rhythms unfold over centuries. As relational and embodied understanding is compressed into formats the system can process, advocates are pressed into a mindset misaligned with the natural world. In turn, the advocate becomes estranged from the very knowledge they carry.
These structures also shape how we relate to others. Specialization confines workers to narrow roles, reducing opportunities for meaningful exchanges. In my internship, I rarely interacted with anyone beyond the other interns or my immediate supervisor. Within professional and academic settings more broadly, competitive pressures emphasize outputs over collaboration. In such environments, relationships risk becoming functional rather than generative, eroding our capacity to connect with one another and, by extension, with the natural world.
Finally, pursuing advocacy through institutional frameworks risks reinforcing the very systems it seeks to resist. The lawyers I interned with made conscious efforts to center Indigenous nations and local communities in decision-making. At the same time, they built relationships with these communities, walking their land, sitting in ceremony, and cultivating an understanding that can only be known through practice. Nevertheless, once back in the office, translation into legal language was inevitable. In that process, dimensions of experience—our responsibility toward the natural world, our attunement to nature’s rhythms, and our sense of interconnectedness—can get lost, rendering us pliable to the expectations of institutional rhetoric. Across the legal profession, advocates anticipate the expectations of courts, internalizing the conventions necessary to be heard. In this way, expansive, lived experiences are compressed and disciplined by institutional logic, forcing our thinking into lockstep with the very systems we aim to challenge.
Returning Home
At the end of each day, I biked back home. The ride—uphill, slow, quiet—offered space to reflect. There, I experienced intimacy with ecosystems; in the office, I worked within structures that demanded separation from them. This disconnect extends beyond environmental law: those shaping policies and legal frameworks are often removed from the landscapes and lives their choices govern. For those of us working within such systems, the lesson is not to abandon institutional tools, but to remain mindful of their limits.
What my mornings alongside the hummingbirds revealed is that advocacy must be held in balance: rooted in encounters with the living world, even as it moves through formal channels. Much like the structural forces that separate humans from nature, my living arrangements during the placement were determined by an organization rather than by personal choice. Yet my time there ultimately shaped how the rest of the placement unfolded. Living in town might have left the work abstract; evenings in the woods tethered me to what cannot be fully translated. The garden, animals, and mountain air offered me a grounded understanding that eludes the confines of language. Yet when we press such experience into forms legible to the legal system, it can slip away, and in its absence, we risk becoming replicators of the very systems we seek to challenge.