Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day

It is the evening of April 21^, 2020 as I write this—the eve of the 50^th Anniversary of Earth Day—and two things are on my mind. First, today would’ve been the 107^th birthday of my “Grandma Scrogum” (Vernice Scrogum, née Fuller) if she had not passed many years ago while I was still a college student. I always puttered around outdoors as a child, observing plants and animals closely, but Grandma Scrogum was the woman who taught me how to garden. She showed me how to plant seeds, tend and harvest crops, the names of so many plants, and how to really enjoy getting dirt under my nails. She wasn’t the only person to influence my connection to other species by a long shot (my mother, for instance, ingrained in me a deep compassion for other animals), and I’m not sure what she ever thought of Earth Day, or what she might have made of my career in sustainability. But I’ve always felt it a little appropriate that my gardening grandma had a birthday adjacent to a day meant to celebrate the environment which nourishes and provides for us all. Her birthday is how I learned to remember the date of Earth Day as young environmental advocate—first comes grandma’s birthday, and the next day is Earth Day.

Secondly, I’m preoccupied by the same thing so many other human inhabitants of Earth are in 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic. The need to practice social distancing means that many celebrations of this 50^th Earth Day which were months in the making have been cancelled. Normally people would gather together outdoors to honor the environment and our connection to it by, well gathering in nature and connecting to it together. So right off the bat, this Earth Day is like none before. In the midst of our response to this public health threat, there is understandably a lot of fear and stress. It’s probably true that households are generating more waste than they otherwise would have, as folks clean more, use and discard items they might normally have used infrequently or not at all (e.g. bottles from hand sanitizer, gloves, etc.), and dispose of some items they might previously have recycled either out of an abundance of caution, or because they don’t have space in their dwelling to store items they might normally have taken to recycling drop-offs or donation collection points. There’s a lot of uncertainty and a keen sense of fragility as people worry about being able to acquire what they need, whether that’s food, safe medical care, a paycheck, a hug from a loved one, etc.

But despite all this turmoil—in fact, perhaps because of it—I want to share with you the lessons I take away from this amazing point in history, this 50^th Earth Day during a pandemic. These are big ideas, and a little difficult to express, but bear with me as I try my best.

Lesson 1: Everything is connected. I’m an ecologist by training, so thinking about everything in terms of interconnected and interrelated systems is natural to me, but its abstract for many. People have a lot of things to think about on any given day—bills, work deadlines, making sure kids are doing their homework, making dinner, household chores, etc. Our most immediate concerns within a narrow sphere of interactions with family, friends, and coworkers dominate our minds. When environmental advocates or sustainability professionals talk about polar ice caps melting, the plight of a species of gecko you’ve never heard of, or the working conditions faced by other humans in a far off country-- or even in your home town but outside that sphere of immediate personal connections--you might feel like smiling politely and indulgently at their “sweet natures” or maybe scoffing and rolling your eyes. Wherever you fall on that spectrum of reactions, odds are you basically dismiss the cries for urgent attention to things that don’t directly and immediately effect you, because you’ve got other things to do and think about. But this pandemic is making the abstract concept of interconnection vividly concrete. The plight of someone in another country can quickly become a problem in your hometown. An inflexibility in a food supply chain that you never considered before can result in the shelves at your local grocery store lying bare. Reckless behavior by a few individuals can endanger the safety of a large population and counteract responsible behavior by a majority. This understanding of the importance of actions and events seemingly distant or removed from us, is a good thing, a silver lining amongst all the anguish. Responding to complex problems can be hard for humans because it’s hard to wrap our heads around that concept of interconnected parts of the systems of life on Earth. But for the next several decades, a concrete example of the interactions, for better or worse, of far flung parts of global environmental, economic, and cultural systems will be within our collective living memory. That will serve us well as we face the next pandemic, natural disaster, instance of “man’s inhumanity to man,” impacts of climate change, or other large scale, complex problem thrown our way. We’ll have already gotten over the first mental hurdle to figuring out a solution—understanding that things seemingly far away in time or space can be important right here and right now.

Lesson 2. Living with Interconnectedness in mind (aka systems thinking) results in strength and resilience. Some folks might say, “Well great, Joy. Everything’s connected, so we’re doomed! You’re telling me that it makes sense that a problem far away from me can become a threat right here where I live, a threat to me and my family! How can that possibly be a good thing? In fact, we should probably cut any ties we have power over. We should close our borders forever, stop interacting with anyone outside that immediate circle of family, friends, and coworkers, and just become closed off and self-reliant.”

No, I say in response, you’re panicking and letting your fear prompt you to make bad decisions. I understand why—realizing how interconnected everything is makes you think about how vulnerable we are to disruptions in our system, no matter where those disruptions are. But you need to remember that what makes us truly vulnerable is not the interconnection itself, but rather, living as if interconnection does not exist—in other words, the way human societies tend to operate, as if we are apart from a system rather than a part of one. It’s because too many people thought “oh that illness effecting vulnerable subsections of the population, or on the other side of the world won’t impact us” that responses weren’t quick enough and strict enough to contain the spread of COVID-19. Too many people thought of this as an external problem rather than realizing its reality as internal to our interconnected system of life on Earth. Nobody wants to think that something frightening might impact them, but it’s the delay in considering that the “scary whatever” could be a threat to you that’s the real problem, more so than the “scary whatever” itself.

I can give you an example from my own life—I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 28. I felt a sharp pain and found a lump and knew how serious that could be. So I went to doctors and asked for a mammogram. At first everyone tried to convince me that I was overreacting, that it must just be a cyst, that I was too young to be really at risk, etc. I persisted though, and long story short, it turned out that lump wasn’t a cyst or even a tumor itself, but the blot clot that formed when an aggressively growing cancer tore through a blood vessel. I went through chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, and lived to give birth to two beautiful kids and be a middle-aged lady at this point. Cancer was a definite threat to my life. But the bigger threat would’ve been to delay my response out of fear or a false sense of security. If I had allowed myself to think, “oh this couldn’t be cancer,” I’d have died before reaching my 29^th birthday, no exaggeration. Cancer might have killed me in any case, but the failure to respond absolutely would have. The moral is interconnection means we’re vulnerable, sure. But what makes us more vulnerable is denial of our vulnerability, because denial keeps us from responding quickly and adequately to a systemic threat. When we’re conscious of our vulnerability and accept it, then we’re empowered to react in ways that will increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. We can’t live in a perfect bubble where threats don’t exist, but we can be better prepared to respond and survive simply by knowing there’s no such bubble.

Further, embracing interconnection—or rather, thinking and acting with the system in mind--makes us resilient and better able to address threats, not the false idea that we can cut ourselves off from the rest of the system. Let’s consider a few examples from our current pandemic. Think of the actions of people making masks in their own homes for people they’ve not met and never will. Think of people from all over the country, all over the world, donating money to help ensure other have access to food or medical care. Think of people doing what they can to support local businesses that are struggling because they can’t be open, or because their operations are greatly curtailed. Those positive occurrences are the result of people understanding their place in a broader system and acting on that to combat the disruption and make the system a little more stable. We need each other, now more than ever, even if we can’t be physically together. We’re still together within the system of life on Earth, and we depend on each other’s support.

Also, think about some of the challenges we’re facing right now. A lack of adequate PPE, for example. I see this as a symptom of a culture that doesn’t think about the long term and doesn’t design products that are meant to last, because we forget about interconnection. The masks widely used to protect against contagions like the novel coronavirus are, for the most part, disposable. That’s fine in a perfect, stable world where there are always more resources to make new disposable products, and a perfect production system that can scale up to make as many masks as we need at any time, and distribute them as quickly as they might be needed to wherever they’re needed. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a real, imperfect, dynamic system where conditions change and are often unpredictable, and where seemingly unrelated parts of the system impact each other in ways both subtle and dramatic. If we were adequately conscious of that then maybe we would predominantly manufacture masks designed to be easily sanitized and reused indefinitely, and we would only produce disposable ones as a back-up, to use during unforeseen circumstances when our supply of reusable masks was inadequate. Reusable masks are currently made, but they’re cumbersome, expensive, uncomfortable to wear, and off-putting or frightening from the perspective of patients. So, they’re the exception rather than the rule. I could expound upon the need for medical devices and other products that are easy to repair with readily available repair information, but this is already a long post, and that could be fodder for a separate discussion. Suffice it to say, we’ve been operating as if the world would remain stable, but that’s just not how real systems work. Interconnections mean systems are dynamic—they change, sometimes quickly and radically. We need to plan our operations and design our products with that dynamic reality in mind, so that when disruption occurs—we flexible and can adapt and respond adequately.

Lesson 3. We are small parts of the system, but all parts of a system have power. At first, when you recognize that you’re just a small part of a complex system of interconnected parts, that can feel so overwhelming, and you might feel powerless in the face of the magnitude of it all. But here’s the seemingly paradoxical beauty of systems. Even changes to a tiny part can have impacts that ripple through the entirety of the system. Think of it this way—have you ever taken something apart, like a watch, or small appliance, or tried to assemble a piece of furniture you bought, and found that you misplaced a part or that a part wasn’t included and just couldn’t get the device to work again or to go together right in the first place. A tiny screw, a little piece that isn’t there, or maybe is there but has been put in the wrong place-- and the whole thing either doesn’t work at all or doesn’t work as well as it could. The point is small things matter when interconnection exist. Those people I mentioned earlier, making masks for others whom they’ve never met. Individually, they’re each small parts of a large and complex system, but their small, individual acts could be a matter of life and death for the folks who receive their handiwork. And collectively, lots of seemingly insignificant individuals are working together to do truly significant things. For goodness’s sake, your deciding to stay home during this crisis is a relatively small, simple act, which could save lives. On this Earth Day, we are seeing how small changes on an individual level can collectively have global impacts. Don’t forget that power. Your actions matter. You are not powerless in the face of a large, complex problem. We all can do something positive to foster the well-being of the whole.

Happy Earth Day, my fellow Earthlings. Let’s live everyday like it’s Earth Day—like we’re all connected, that this connection is a strength as much as it is a vulnerability as long as we understand and accept it, like all of our actions matter, and like we’re all in this together.