Stopping to See the Fireflies

The first time I saw fireflies, I thought I was imagining them. Walking home in New York with my roommate, she stopped and pointed toward the field. Tiny lights blinked on and off, scattered across the dark. I stood there, watching. For once, the city felt less like concrete and more like something alive.

A woman photographing fireflies in the park. Photo by Bella Santos

Back home in San Diego, I grew up surrounded by nature without realizing it: beaches, hills, and the California coast were always close by. It was so constant that I hardly noticed. As I grew older and became involved in climate activism, I thought environmentalism was only about the big fights: climate marches, fossil fuel divestment campaigns, petitions, and policy reform. Those things mattered, but I measured impact by scale and urgency. Slowing down wasn’t part of the equation.

That mindset shifted the summer I found the Elizabeth Street Garden. I was wandering the neighborhood when I saw the gate open and stepped inside. Tucked between buildings, the garden was a pocket of green filled with roses, benches, and neighbors talking quietly. At the entrance, a sign read: Save Elizabeth Street Garden. A QR code linked to a petition to keep it from being redeveloped. I signed it without hesitation. At first, it felt minor compared to the campaigns I was used to. But the longer I sat there, the more I understood it differently. Here was a place where kids played, pollinators moved from flower to flower, and the community gathered. Protecting it mattered, not because it was large or high-profile, but because it was lived-in and loved.

That idea stayed with me when I traveled to Washington, D.C., later that summer for the Rachel Carson Council’s American Environmental Leadership Institute. Dr. Bob Musil repeated the same reminder throughout the week: slow down. I remember one moment especially. We were lined up waiting for a tour of the National Mall when he bent down toward the sidewalk and pointed at a patch of purple flowers pushing through the cracks. A few bees floated across them, unfazed by the traffic speeding by. It was such a small detail, but it caught me off guard. For years, I had thought of cities and nature as opposites. But here they were, pressed up against each other, hidden in plain sight.

Elizabeth Street Garden. Photo by Bella Santos.

Reflecting on my urban ecology class the semester prior, it gave me the words for what I had been noticing. Growing up, I had learned ecology through neat textbook diagrams of food chains and biomes, as if they existed in sealed-off worlds. But in class, we studied how a single freeway could carve up habitats, how light pollution scrambled insect cycles, how coyotes and raccoons survived on the margins of cities. Ecology that I once considered as untouched wilderness was right here, shaping and shaped by the places we live.

Those lessons stayed with me when I came back to New York for the rest of my internship. Almost every afternoon, I walked to a small park not far from my apartment, which was the same one where I had first seen the fireflies. At first, I brought a book and sat on a bench, convinced I was appreciating the space just by being there. But eventually, I noticed the ways I had been rushing past. The way the sunset light filtered through the canopy, scattering gold across the paths. How flowers shifted colors with the season, like a slow-moving calendar. How birders gathered along the paths, cameras lifted, eager to point out warblers and sparrows I never would have recognized.

Sign at Elizabeth Street Garden. Photo by Bella Santos.

And then there were the fireflies. The same field I had crossed countless times before suddenly revealed itself at night, lit by whole constellations flickering just above the grass.

On my last day in the city, I returned to the Elizabeth Street Garden. The sign at the entrance had changed. This time it read: The Garden is Saved. I stood there for a moment, thinking about how many times I had passed by spaces like this without really seeing them.

For so long, I thought environmentalism meant only protest and systemic change. But the garden, the fireflies, the bees in the cracks of the Mall sidewalk reminded me that connection and care are part of it too. The small, overlooked places matter. They are what give meaning to the larger fights, and they are what remind me why I keep going.

It made me wonder: how many times had I walked through this same space without ever pausing to breathe? How many details had I missed because I was rushing to the next thing, or assuming nature was somewhere else, far away?

Bella Santos – University of California, Berkeley

Bella Santos (she/her) is a Yale Conservation Scholar and incoming ASUC Eco Senator at UC Berkeley, where she studies Conservation and Resource Studies with a minor in Public Policy. Her work centers on environmental justice, climate education, and policy for community-led transformation. Bella co-leads UC Berkeley’s Fossil Free Research campaign and co-authored Under the Surface, a student-led report exposing fossil fuel influence over academic research. She also helps lead the advancement of a campus-wide Green New Deal, coordinating efforts around fossil fuel dissociation, climate literacy, and clean energy. As part of UC Berkeley Housing and Dining Sustainability, she contributes to building-level energy analysis and supports the campus’s transition to all-electric kitchens.