!Society's task --- agk's diary 23 October 2025 @ 19:03 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC terminal to sdf server in the kitchen before math club --- In my 20s I helped save some old-growth forest from clearcutting. Victory is "for now." Everything that exists can still be destroyed, but we saved it. The next old-growth forest I tried to save was felled around us. We hadn't found enough endangered species. Trees I came to love Maxam reduced to decking, siding, mulch, dimensional lumber. Open understory, emerald with moss and fern, gone. Sentinels over the bay stood longer than my country, anchored moisture to earth and prevented drought, gone, never to return. One forest gone, one saved for now. We have all these scars to show. Our little defenders braved torture and jail, long legal processes, restrict- ions on speech, travel, and association. One died in the forest we saved. Pa and dad taught me to love wilderness, harvest deer till mountain lions return, find water, pay attention, leave no trace, steward. Dad's sister worked for decades with the US Airforce to buy corridors of land to facilitate migration. My brother and his son rest on kayaks in the river. Daughter and I rest in caves deep in the wilds. Land protected from conversion to raw materials, then rapidly to waste, needs a society of people to care about it. Public lands protected from develop- ment by buffers around endangered species are vulnerable to legislation or unfriendly judges. Private lands are vulnerable to purchase or eminent domain around pipelines, powerlines, or roads. Societies are always in the bombsights of economic liberalism. What societies protect is valuable, whether land, universal public education, universal public healthcare, disability, unemployment, and old-age supports, universal public childcare, time off work to care for a dependent, have a baby, or take a vacation. Destroyers may pick formerly protected treasures from a destroyed society, pick also unprotected labor that can only be had when the alternative's starvation. People don't want a bare life of labor or starvat- ion, without dignity, without something worth pro- tecting. We remember what's lost. We find people we think won't let us starve. We rebuild or build a new way of life together. This countermovement against economic liberalism's drive to place every- thing in a market, for sale, builds a new society. Some members of a society must sit with trees. Some know caves and herbs, farm, cook. Some raise children, teach, nurse, design, fix and build. Some look for endangered species, file injunctions and lawsuits. Some build the society's power in the legislature, anticipate changing social and political forces, recognize opportunities, aid strategic adaptation. Everyone can feel the decline of my country's empire. Everyone can feel the morbid symptoms, the succession crisis. Like the thirty years war from 1914 to 1945 over what world would replace the British-dominated one, opportunistic thieves exploit power voids to take what they can at the cost of instability, normalized sadistic cruelty, extermination, permanent losses. Some new world will replace the declining one. It won't be a heaven or a hell, but will be stable, better than this awful time of transition and war. Maybe some of our societies can work in arenas of states to limit the duration of the succession crisis and the depths of its depravity, save chest- nut and olive trees, prepare dignified, durable, less wasteful ways of life supported by policy for our poorer place in the world order after our empire. The life we save will feed the future.