It is the evening of April 21, 2020 as I write
this—the eve of the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day—and two things are
on my mind. First, today would’ve been the 107th 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 50th 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 50th 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 29th 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 others 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 are 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 interconnections 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.
