The Bell is Tolling

Human rights and my lawn: terraphilia connects us all

My back lawn last fall

Hello Friends,

I am angry and anguished about what is going on in our country. The daily examples of greed and corruption; the lies, intimidation, racism and misogyny.

This is not the America I thought I knew. And I am not going to pretend everything will be okay. I don’t know if it ever will be. But I do know if we don’t each speak up, act up and stand up for what is right, it’s going to get much worse.

I want to tell you a story: It begins innocently enough with the carpet of fescue turf that runs between my back porch and the wall at the edge of my yard.

I do not love this lawn. If I had landscaped this yard, the backyard would be a lively native prairie, home to native grasses, wildflowers, pollinators and songbirds. A yard that reflects my terraphilia, my innate affiliation with this earth and nature, not a water-slurping food desert.

But lawn is what I have for now, and I am determined to keep it healthy without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Fortunately, I have the help of a smart and skilled guy named Angel. (That’s not his real name.) Angel understands the design and engineering of automatic sprinkler systems so well that even though he had never seen mine before, he quickly explained what was wrong when I couldn’t get it to start up. He spent part of a recent Saturday de-thatching that turf so it would be more drought-proof.

Angel also helped me figure out why the crabapple tree in the front yard was not thriving—the tree’s roots are losing the competition with the mat of grass roots that cover them. So I dug out a circle of turf around the tree’s trunk to give the roots more breathing room. I’m going to plant perennials for pollinators in that circle, which will make the tree and I much happier.

Turf-removal in progress.

In other words, Angel brings valuable knowledge and skills to this place. He wasn’t born in this country, but he’s been here long enough to have an established landscaping business. He’s a productive citizen.

As are Jesucito and Abram, who are putting the stone facing on the house under construction down the street. And the roofing crew on that house, whose names I didn’t learn, but whose English is better than my Spanish and who worked until dark several nights in a row to finish the roof before a snowstorm blew in.

They’re working to build good lives for themselves. Just like the rest of us. And just like Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who immigration officials admit was deported “in error” to El Salvador, despite a protective order allowing him to stay and work in this country legally. Abrego Garcia is now incarcerated in a maximum-security prison outside San Salvador renowned for human rights violations.

Prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 16, 2025. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP and Politifact)

Despite an order from the US Supreme Court, President Trump refuses to bring Abrego Garcia home. The administration portrays him as a member of El Salvador’s M-13 gang, although there is no evidence to support that, and in fact the protective order allowing him to legally work and live here cited the death threats his mother received when gangs attempted to recruit Abrego Garcia as a minor in El Salvador, before they fled to the US.

This week, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, where Abrego Garcia lives, flew to San Salvador to request Abrego Garcia’s release and visit him in prison.

“I’m asking President Bukele under his authority as president of El Salvador to do the right thing and allow Mr. Abrego Garcia to walk out of a prison — a man who’s charged with no crime, convicted of no crime and who was illegally abducted from the United States.” —Senator Van Hollen’s statement in El Salvador

Not only was Van Hollen not allowed to see Abrego Garcia, he was told by Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s Vice President, that El Salvador would not release Abrego Garcia because the Trump administration was paying them to keep him imprisoned.

According to White House officials, we taxpayers have already spent $6 million to imprison Salvadoran and Venezuelan immigrants in the Salvadoran mega-prison, and President Trump has said he plans to spend over $40 BILLION to house deported immigrants. (That’s okay because we are saving money by dismantling vital government agencies.)

No wonder El Salvador refuses to return Abrego Garcia—six million dollars with the promise of perhaps billions more to come is quite a bribe.

(You can check the facts of Abrego Garcia's story on Politifact.)

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If you think Abrego Garcia’s story has nothing to do with you, think again. He has never been charged with any crime, yet he is now in a US-leased gulag in El Salvador, and this administration refuses to bring him home—in defiance of the court’s orders. With that, all of our rights are in danger.

Call your US senators and representatives and demand Abrego Garcia’s return. Request that they stand up for his rights and our rights. It is time to speak up, speak out and act.

Because we are all connected: this country, this earth, and all the lives we share the planet with. Because what happens to the least of us affects us all.

As the English poet John Donne wrote so eloquently four centuries ago in “No Man Is An Island” (I presume he meant “man” to include everyone):

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main. …

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

The bell is tolling. It’s time for us to draw on the strength and grounding our terraphilia gives us, and stand up for all whose lives animate this beloved earth.

Blessings, Susan