A few days before Thanksgiving, my husband and I finally brought our houseplants indoors. In the past, we brought them indoors at the end of September, just to be safe, because at that time frost often fell in early October and a killing frost inevitably occurred at the end of the month. This year, the first killing freeze finally took place on November 30. our last first frost in history. My houseplants became outdoor plants for all but four months of the year.

The day we dragged the houseplants inside, the oak tree in our yard was clinging to the last of its russet leaves, but the maples had long since lost their abundance of red, orange, and gold . Their leaves still cover the garden, providing a refuge where insects and their larvae will overwinter. Left outside all fall, the potted ficus had acquired its own covering of exceptional leaves. I didn’t brush them off before moving the plant indoors. I thought their mold would be good food for this aging tree, which I purchased for my college apartment in 1983.

It turns out that those leaves at the base of the ficus were also home to a resident invertebrate. Perhaps confused by the heat of our family room, a small white butterfly quickly emerged from the leaf litter and crawled to the edge of the pot. I made a hollow with my hands, careful not to touch his powdery wings, and carried him outside, depositing him in a potted plant that stays outside all winter, its own leafy cover intact.

I didn’t recognize the butterfly and I didn’t think to take a photo of it either. Trying so hard to get it out safely, I didn’t even take the time to examine it carefully before picking it up. Identifying it later without a visual reference proved impossible. Was it a fall moth? A white flannel moth? A satin moth?

I still don’t know, so I can’t tell you how rare the butterfly I saved might be. I know I didn’t keep it for long. Most Tennessee moths overwinter as eggs, pupae, or caterpillars; adults die at first frost. You might wonder why I took so much care to save the little hitchhiker, and that would be a good question. My yard should have gotten cold weeks ago. This butterfly had already survived the time given by nature.

I’ve spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in that direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers growing in our garden when all the nearby emerald gardens are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why bother keeping the ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs that might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect the creatures of the night when all around me the houses are lit like airport runways? Why go to the trouble of planting saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I have moved out, to make room for another ridiculously large glow-in-the-dark house?

In the wake of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate denier party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to continue. Every effort seems Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the scandalously unqualified industry toads that Donald Trump appointed to run the agencies that protect our wild spaces, our air, our water. Our future.

More and more, I find it difficult not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: what’s the point of trying?

Recently I read an old essay by Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berrywho has written for more than six decades about the need to bridge the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” which appears in his book “What are people for?“, Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by its ability to change the world in the way we hope.

“Many protests are naive; it expects rapid and visible improvement, and it despairs and gives up when such improvement does not occur,” he wrote in 1990. “If protest depended on success, there would be few lasting or meaningful protests . History simply offers too little evidence of the utility of individual protests. The protests that persist, I think, are animated by a much more modest hope than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving in one’s own heart and mind qualities which would be destroyed by acquiescence.

At my lowest, I never completely let go of my belief that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been discouraged in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change – by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in whatever way I can to love it. . Individual efforts gain momentum through the individual efforts of others.

The men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the right to vote. Southern whites did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. These things happened, even if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.

But when it comes to preserving biodiversity, we don’t have years. When it comes to climate stabilization, we don’t have years. Once a species goes extinct, it stays that way forever. Once the climate reaches an irreversible tipping point, it will tip over. In this context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is difficult to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.

So I am comforted by Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of unceasing protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century titled “”Against child murder“). Even at 90, he doesn’t wonder what it’s for.

And I remind myself that any moth is a rarity to be cherished in its hidden places, to be nurtured in its silence, however many nights the warm world gives it. I delight in the sugar maples in our garden which presented a golden spectacle this fall the likes of which they have not done in over a decade, and the flock of cedar waxwings which has visibly diminished, winter after winter, but it suddenly came back in numbers I’ve never seen one before. I’m also grateful for the black-eyed juncos, which are still here this winter scratching among the fallen leaves.

Saving the leaves for moths, fireflies and black-eyed juncos, I try again. And if I try, maybe I can save my own soul.

This article was originally published in The New York Times.