Rambling on
Anyone noticed anything different about this year?
Can the same be said about every year? Ever noticed how hard it is to recall with certainty what the snowfall was for the month of January this year? How about last January? What is it about continuously shifting details that make our brains not be able to keep up? Throw a grain of distrust into the solution and getting that memory to stick is next to impossible, at least in my Swiss cheese.
I’ve been following U.S. and world political stories closely for over 20 years so what is happening this year in America does not come as a surprise or shock me because it has been building for so long (44 years officially, but really it got started long before that). It takes a long time to shift policy in this country but they have done a magnificent job of coordinating years of effort in a singular direction, whether you agree with the details of it or not.
The same is true for the climate and the environment: I received my biology degree in 1994, deciding that science was the one thing I couldn’t teach myself, someone needed to, so I’ve been seeing the world through ecological eyes for even longer. In 200 years of effort, we have annihilated ecosystems on every continent, yet as we grow more aware of the effect of our actions, we don’t seem to be slowing down, at all. Why not?
I couldn’t get a good grip on the micro side of the world. The tiny atoms and how their building blocks (which seem to grow more numerous each year) relate to each other. Why a chemical bonds with this specific part of a molecule but not this other chain was too much for me to keep track of; I could see the world from the macro side so I can see and understand systems much better than their constituents. Only on rare occasions can I zoom my perspective in and out so I can see both the forest and the trees, as they say.
Ecology and sociology remain the lenses through which I see the world and the greater the perspective, the more I realize the two are connected. We can’t be independent of our environment; we live on this planet, in the midst of so many other beings and forces. Each of our actions has rippling implications throughout all of it: the environment on its people and the people on those that share the planet with us.
When the beetles were wiping out the trees above Silverthorne in the 90’s and 2000’s, I understood it was a combination of contributing factors but that we were really only targeting one in trying to control the situation: instead of recognizing that by clear cutting the trees in the decades before and not doing anything to help them grow back properly, they had overgrown the area and begun to choke themselves out, weakening the whole grove and making them extremely susceptible to invasive species of all sorts. How many others are aware that 93% of the forests in America have been logged in the last 200 years and as they have grown back, little or nothing has been done to help them? Once the value of the tree has been cut, the monied interests move on and no one is stepping into the void.
Immigration is a system we have all become more aware of in the last several years. How many know why Central Americans are migrating out of their countries and the direct role the USA has played in that? Who and what created the dynamics that forced populations to pick up and move, out of the environment that they knew well to one of mystery and unknown? When did that happen? We can delve into each country for a better understanding of the circumstances, but to treat one part of the problem without taking into account all of the implications that brought it into being seems to be as irrational as our solution to beetle killed trees.
But I can’t seem to get a handle on what part I am supposed to interact with to effect the change I want to see. I believe that at the root of it all is a place where my knowledge and understanding is going to have the greatest benefit to the universe. I’m looking for that one spot, where at just the right moment I can nudge things just enough to get the trajectory of 20, 50, 100 years to alter the outcome just slightly, 2 degrees.
Maybe that’s where I’m making my mistake.
Cheers
