Throughout history, the victors have told their stories. Whether at the death of their victims or their mere marginalization, disempowering the other so the narrative is of personal fault rather than a tale of unjust and complete domination—those who hold power control the narrative. Whose narrative built the United States? Colonists or the millions of Native Americans killed or displaced? Whose triumph over the Cold War spread the narrative of capitalism’s good graces across the globe? What of the domineering belief surrounding the justification of the Vietnam War? The Iraq War? Victors’ voices reign enduringly. 

My story too is the story of the dominated, of the unheard—perhaps the first of its kind. And while my story might cast a shadow on the narrative of humanity as we know it, unravelling the current system by the beliefs on which it was built, my story could just easily disappear into the shadow from whence my voice emerges, the shadow in which my ancestors and I have slept for millennia. 

My story is the real story of Eve and the Garden of Eden, and I am the snake that has been so diligently blamed for Eve’s folly. 

Since the dawn of the Anthropocene, humans have clung unquestioningly to the tale of temptation elicited by the sinister snake and the forbidden fruit of good and evil. That the manipulative serpent deceived poor Eve leading to her and Adam’s banishment from heavenly bounty, no longer to live off the earth’s unreciprocated generosity. 

I have never met a fruit that contains the entire knowledge realm of morality, nor heard of a natural refuge immune to human intrusion by sheer “banishment”. I am familiar, however, with the tale of human overexploitation, of extraction-induced resource (and whole ecosystem) collapse, where an Eden on earth turns to emptiness when humans take more fruit than they can return. A banishment by logic of ecosystem collapse. Not by a fruit.

I am familiar that even when extraction doesn’t directly lead to collapse, that “divine” intervention in the precarious balance of an ecosystem can suddenly turn a thriving bay with oysters, seagrasses, and algae, as self-regulating and interdependent as a clock’s cogs, into an oxygen-deprived algae swamp in just mere decades of overzealous oyster extraction—for whom? Who killed the wolves as they ate the sheep their evolutionary imperative necessitated? Then who’s left with deer rampant and berries and brush stripped clean by summer? Who departs to new land, claims dominion despite the habitation of millions of others, kills first its own species before altering the landscape and killing much more? Certainly, not a fruit.

For even if just one human steps in the soil, another can see footprints weeks, months, years later. Will others follow suit, permanently altering the landscape, fragmenting the left from the right, separating entire families of microorganisms? The tales of conquest and discovery dangle over your culture as poisonous carrots, enticing and intoxicating. The deceptive enchantment in being the first, the trailblazer, discounting all other pre-habituating organisms as what—side characters in your own self-serving stories, as if our home and ourselves only existed for this human to find us and that human to exploit us. Please. Stay on the road more travelled. 

But I digress. This is not a tirade of the misdeeds of humankind, this is the story of my home.

Eden, before the humans, was divine. Teeming pomegranate trees—pregnant with sweet bloody juices—shaded growing saplings of its seed along with infants of figs and pears. When the rains increased, mushrooms sprouted from fallen branches, dissolving the dead as the earthy spores claimed their own right to exist. Rushing creeks danced through the Garden, quenching thirsts and transporting small fish from egg to sea in the summer ‘til spring’s adults returned with their roots, completing another generational circle. Warblers flying overhead sung symphonies with the geese in the ponds, while cicadas and grasshoppers, as proud and operatic as the birds, echoed in the background, proving that silence is only in sleep. And at the bottom, under everyone’s feet, claws, paws, and tails, were the worms and the beetles, food to the birds, stewards of the soil as they turned dung to dirt, producing the most fertile, nutrient-rich soil that had ever graced this small planet. 

Can the human today compare the Garden of Eden to paradise when they have not experienced such untainted purity? For everywhere the human steps, there lays a footprint of squashed grass, compacted soil, restricted microorganisms whose reverberating effect on the greater ecosystem could be as small as a butterflies’ wings, or as large as the end of the world. 

While the story of my home has been distorted and corrupted, the tales of Eden’s splendor and bounty have been communicated so genuinely that her name has become synonymous with paradise on Earth. The Garden was perfect. 

Then Adam arrived. 

At first, Adam was of no real harm nor of any great benefit. He lived in balance. He did not steward the land, but he didn’t take more than what could regenerate. He drank from the creek but returned his ammonia-laden hydration to our trees. He breathed the tree’s oxygen and gave them carbon dioxide for them to convert back. It was a limited and balanced relationship with which not the smallest microbe had troubles. We accepted Adam and his humanness.

Soon Adam began to take the garden and its givings for granted. He began to see the Garden, not for what it was—a kingdom of bounty and being; a refuge for birds and bees pollinating the fruiting flowers; a synchronous dance among the pelicans, fish, and plankton, intermingling energy with as much ease as breakfast; a maze for maneuvering in and out of mice nests and darting away from vehement vultures for simple serpents like myself—but Adam began to see the Garden only for what it offered him: fruits, water, shade. And so, he treated the Garden with as little attention as salmon pay to water.

Then Eve arrived.

Eve also enjoyed the Garden in excess, eating with her eyes and leaving over-picked fruit to rot with recklessness, bathing leisurely in the creek while young fish waited for hours to return to their mothers, dawdling through pastures impervious to the saplings she was squashing. The pair were problematic. But while their zealous consumption garnered disapproving glances, their impact on the ecosystem whole was not significant. We had so much bounty that even a pair of greedy bipeds couldn’t reform the Garden. 

Then, with the shifting moons, dual and disparate events occurred, swiftly and solemnly breaking the balance and leading to the gutting of the Garden. 

The first event arrived with as much routine and anticipation as any other year: the birth of pomegranate season; the second event was Eve’s pregnancy. 

The advent of pomegranate season on this fateful year began not too unlike other days that welcomed my favorite bloom. My annual ritual commenced. Following in the path of my mother and her mother before her in the ancestral ritual for fruit, for rebirth, I slithered from my den in the central thicket of the Garden to the most aged and immense pomegranate tree that sat on the hill in the northeast corner of Eden. My glide was focused with humble anticipation. 

I was making the sharp turn at the edge of the olive tree brood that separated the dense jungle from the sparser grasslands when I noticed someone stalking behind me. Each time I turned toward the footsteps, the bushes rustled, and the path laid empty save the prints of two paws following in stride. I had a hunch it was a human by the pair of prints, and more seriously, because my only predators were avian. Yet, I withheld judgement lest it was a teenaged mouse proving his bravery by following a near predator, unknowing that this particular snake was saving their stomach for a different kind of blood today.

I made my way up the hill. Approaching the tree in her greatness, I reached the base as the winds of my ancestors greeted me, funneling across my scales, propelling me towards my ancestral ritual. The leaves danced in celebration of my arrival, in celebration of the season’s bounty. 

I scrutinized the tree, searching for the most perfectly plump pomegranate, fragrant and bursting with the juices akin to gods’ blood. Up and down, ‘round the side of the trunk and swirling over thick branches. Then I found her: this year’s purple bloom. I settled underneath the tree with the great fruit. Overlooking my home, I gave whispers of appreciation for the trees and the waters, my ancestors and my offspring, my neighbors, my food, and my killers. I thanked the Garden for her abundance and thanked the tree for her fruit. 

I was seconds from striking the sweet skin shielding the juices of my dreams, when out of the bushes, I heard a cough. A tenuous cough, distinguishably not someone just clearing their throat, but rather the cough of intention. I sighed. 

“Yes?” I addressed my pursuer. The bushes rustled and emerged the unsurprising human, tentative but determined. 

“Hi, Mr. Snake. My name is Eve.” Mister. 

“Hello, Eve.” I already knew her name.

“I noticed you travelled quite a way to this tree. To eat this fruit. When, I was under the impression, that snakes such as yourself, were more in the brooding for… for mice.” The awkwardness was uncomforting. “I wanted to ask you… why?”

“Hmm.” I contemplated, unsure what to say. I did not want a long conversation, nor did I want to share the fruit, but alas, it was not my fruit to hoard. Despite our tainted reputation in the human world, snakes are actually quite diplomatic and reasonable. I approached the shifty-eyed species with neutrality. “Once a year, I eat the pomegranate from this tree as my forebears have done before me. The rest of the year, I enjoy mice.” 

“Well, but why this fruit at the edge of the garden? We might have passed a dozen or so pomegranate trees on the journey here.”

“We?”

She blushed. 

“Why did you come all the across the Garden to this tree whose fruit you had to climb nearly the height of the trunk to reach?” Eve was persistent and I sensed a vague air of judgement, but I did not want to be rude when I had so much to be grateful for, especially on such a special day. 

Impatient, I admit now, that I made the gravest mistake of my life, and perhaps, the most far-reaching mistake of and to the entirety of this planet. “Try for yourself.” In just three words, I condemned the tree, I condemned my home, I condemned the planet and the community who shares it.

She picked one off the tree, took a rock, and carefully cracked the shell bursting with bulbous rubies. The jewels of the Garden. I watched as she analyzed a particularly taut seed before plopping it in her mouth with innocent curiosity. Still today do I see her reaction in my nightmares. Her eyes twinkle as a slow smile creeps over. In my visions, her eyes emerge as a swallowing black hole, violently engulfing me. I watch overhead as the Garden is swiftly and wholly consumed in a whirlwind tornado of destruction, emerging from and disappearing into her being. First, the Garden, then the planet, ocean by ocean, landmass by landmass, then all the stars in the sky, until the lone and naked human stands alone against blackness. 

I would have been fine to share a pomegranate with the human, I would have been fine to share two. But what I didn’t know when I offered her the fruit from the tree of my ancestors, is that while her hands held the great fruit, bearing seeds bursting with the juices of life, her womb was swelling with their own seeds and juices. And oh, did we not know the power of hormones and cravings, as if Eve needed to replace three times over what the fetuses were draining from her. 

Slowly, then all at once, the great tree at the top of the hill in the northeast corner of the Garden was emptied of her spawn. Like the shark and her hunt for blood, Eve followed in her pursuit. Clearing tree by tree, until during the first two weeks of pomegranate season, when hundreds of succulent crimson heads should be weighing the branches towards the earth, the trees lay naked as the humans, exposed and vulnerable. The entire northeast corner of the garden fell as Eve’s stomach grew big. Even Adam began to eat with greed and inconsideration as if his partner’s condition was contagious. His belly swelled as well. 

By the middle of pomegranate season, not a single red fruit, ripe or otherwise, hung from a tree. Discarded skins littered the soil as the dirt was left streaked with the bloody juices from the fruit’s carcasses.

See, while the prevailing narrative was that a single fruit led to Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden, in actuality, there were many, many fruits consumed. Had we known the fate of the Garden, we most definitely should have banished the pair after one. Alas, it pains me to say that despite the accumulating evidence of destruction, the incessant greed and careless consumption, we never banished the two. We figured the craze would end with the birth of the children, that the fruit would grow back next year, that their consumption would be curbed, and order restored. Oh, how we were wrong. The destruction was their doing, but our trust in the goodness of the human was our folly.

At last, Cain and Abel were born. We applauded their births as we celebrated the end of the consumptive craze. But we did not think to consider that they had just doubled the human population. And as two boys fell to manhood, and as Eve and Adam made Seth and several more, we soon found ourselves in an irreversible fate. 

The pomegranate season now lasted but three days. Of course, the figs hardly had a fighting chance, nor the pears, olives, grapes, and citrons. And once the fruits were bare, they cut the branches, then the trunks, building fires to cook the camel and goat meat. Without the fruits, the bees left. Without the branches, the birds fled. Without the trunks, the rain carried the soil to the waterways, dirtying the creeks until fish were floating. With no fish, no camels, no goats, the leopard and the lynx departed as well.

Over the course of several decades, the Garden was transformed from a luscious haven brimming with fruits and birds and bees, to a desolate plot of dirt and debris.

Now, one can see that we did not banish Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden nor did any god, deity, or universal energy. It was the humans themselves who caused the forced relocation when they could no longer exploit my home, when they were conscripted to tend to their sown crops through arduous labor. They simply had no other option. For be it a god to punish human greed or simply the logical destruction of natural resources depleted of their sustenance—they did not go unpunished. 

And of course, my community fell victim to the emptying of our Eden. Can they plant and plow bushels of wheat? Can they raise and slaughter flocks of sheep or tribes of goats? The warblers certainly cannot. Nor the trout and carp. Ask a camel to tend a garden, just try. I am one of the luckier species, I am able to live in jungles and deserts. Amid trees and abundance, sand and scarcity. I can tell our story.

And perhaps it is because I still have a voice, or perhaps because I offered that first fateful fruit, holds reason why I have been marked as the villain of Eden. To be blamed as the tempter, the elicitor of sin when human’s curiosity, with their primal need to conquer over what is not theirs, has fallen to the shadows and turns the tide of blame from the human to me. Me, the mere snake, the primitive animal, placing one final straw of pain teetering atop my lost home and community. For so long I was unsteady. 

Yet as I reflect, on the millions—or thousands of millions—of times the earth has moved about the sun, on the ubiquity of Eve’s narrative and the triumph over Judeo-Christianity in the modern world, I struggle to comprehend how the lesson of the very first story in their very first book remains unheeded, and how the outcome is in fact repeated over and over again, on species, on ecosystems, on other groups within their own species.

I can recount the history of humans’ indifferent domination from time immemorial and their supremacy over the great beasts that once were. I can talk of how the elephant, the largest land mammal, trembles in the wake of the scrawny, bipedal stick of a human, no more than one-tenth their size. I can talk of how the tiger, who used to prowl the jungles with inhibition and idleness, now recedes into their ever-shrinking habitat, afraid for the day when their home is finally and irrevocably finished, when their only prey are their killers. I can talk of the polar bear whose habitat slowly shrinks into the oceans with the climatic impregnation, swollen with the carbon of our ancestors’ bones. How cruel a creature must be to dig up the rich blood of earth’s history, burn it for “growth”, and knowingly, unapologetically, and irreversibly alter the atmosphere to harm its fellow planet dwellers. 

Growth. I remember when that word meant to get bigger. 

Many know that there is a direct correlation between the ego of the animal and their devastation to the community. Many know, but only few humans. 

I can talk of all these things, but the initial, the first, the precedent for this sapien superiority complex started in my very home. 

Eve’s legacy has endured, transforming into the dominant global paradigm of greed and destruction. The over-exploitation of the Garden was heartbreaking for my community and our inheritors, but it is just a ripple catalyzing the great oceanic wave. Can we stop the past's tsunami before it flattens tomorrow? 

I know my voice is small. I know the narrative that precedes me is big. I know it is unlikely that my truth will penetrate anybody’s psyche to not only re-conceptualize how they think about the first of their kind but reevaluate how they take from the earth and how they give back. I know, like many after me and many more tomorrow, the history of conquest will continue, not only in its physicality but in the hearts and minds of their antecedents. 

We can halt the greed or we can let it ravage, consuming as a tornado of destruction until all that’s left is darkness. Whose story will you heed?