I value time outside and being good to people.

I think the first one helps us learn to do the second, even if it may not get us all the way there. I value the awe and beauty of the mountains, and the way they teach us that we are part of something more, and bigger, than ourselves. I value how the mountains make us reflect—which sounds like a meaningless buzzword used mainly by people who drink lots of tea and don’t always wear shoes, but I mean it.

There isn’t a better word for how the taste of the evergreen air and the sound of the pine trees crashing together in the wind makes you think.

I get that on some level, growing up in Colorado and falling in love the Rockies should have turned me into a hardcore environmentalist. I am religious about recycling, but I still take twenty-minute showers. I get that my service work should be all about the environment and conservation, but it’s not, at least not directly. When I leave campus to serve, I’m not usually headed into Philly to do urban gardening, or to Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy to teach kids about the environment. I am a budding environmentalist, but in the same way that people who say they believe in gender equality aren’t feminists. I still hold the label “environmentalist” at arm’s length, as if attaching it to myself will somehow make me radical. Instead, I spend my Tuesday evenings leading teams of volunteers to make outfit packs for children living in deep poverty in and around Philly. I spend my Thursday nights teaching women at the prison GED math and reading skills. I spend my Friday afternoons at an equine therapy facility in Evansburg State Park, caring for the horses and helping during lessons. That’s really the closest thing I get to environmental service: my Friday afternoons at Sebastian Riding Associates. Three or four solid hours outside every week that return a sense of peace to me, a sense that the weeks in between steal.