In her “Last Words” interview that was broadcast after her death, Jane Goodall talked about her calm in the face of “the dark times we are living in now.” She devoted her life to battling for conservation but attributed this serenity to the time she spent in the forest with the chimps. All those weeks and months and years of quiet observation.

Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it’s so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump admini

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