Our True Nature

You are not a thing.

You are a process.

Every cell, every tissue, in constant flux and turnover.

You drink water. That water becomes, for a while, you.

The air that rushes into your lungs is not the same air that leaves when you breath out. The air that leaves was, just seconds ago, you.

There is no environment that is not us.

Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency might better be called the the Agency for the Protection of Everything That Flows Through Our Bodies.

Furthermore....

We share this gorgeous planet with other beings, our relatives. 

Who also are not things. 

Who also are processes.

Some of whom regulate processes essential for our own lives. All of whom endow us with beauty and awe and amazement and wonder.

Even if we decided to sacrifice our own well-being, we have no right to sacrifice theirs.

There is a bright side on this dark day for environmental protection.

Through us water has voice.

Through us soil can march on Washington.

Through us air and climate and ferns and porpoises can be mad as hell.

When we fight for our lives and the integrity of our children's bodies we fight for everything because we are everything.

Making Things

There are deep snowdrifts outside and fierce, blowing winds. Inside the family is busy with projects. Phil is braiding a piece of wool fabric to patch the  rug that sits in the middle of our living room, a giant ten or more feet in diameter that my grandmother made thirty years ago. The girls are busy with projects they started over Christmas weekend - a lacy turquoise scarf and a warm earth-toned striped one, each perfectly matched to the personalities of the knitters.

Our Christmas was rich with hand-made gifts, too, My parents worked together to make beautiful wooden boxes for each of the grandchildren: sturdy tool chests with wrought iron hinges for the boys, delicate angled boxes for the girls. Phil's knitting needles were flying through socks and hats that weren't quite finished in time for wrapping. Spread across the kitchen table are the parts of a secret present for grandparents, aimed to be finished by New Year's when we'll see them next.

The pure satisfaction around here when the last stitch is knitted and the scarf is draped around a neck or the hat is pulled onto a head is a thing to behold. From the four year-old weaving pot-holders with his new loom under the Christmas tree, to his grandpa unveiling his beautiful wooden boxes, the desire to create things that are beautiful and useful runs strong and deep in most of us, maybe all of us. The products of this desire are as varied as the individuals with the compulsion to create:  well crafted sentences, paintings, patchwork quilts, six-layer cakes, or well-executed computer code. When I look at the people around me, it's the act of creation that brings the pleasure, as much as the finished product.

In the transition to sustainability we are going to need to call upon and depend upon all sorts of new 'high-tech" inventions, from smart-grids to super-efficient materials, but we are also going to need to shift to a world focused on quality rather than quantity, on designing things to be patched and fixed and re-used, rather than tossed away when a plastic part snaps or a circuit burns out.  In the world we need to be moving towards,  making thing will be not just a pleasure but, it seems to me, an integral part of life. Therein lies a blessing:  the forces pushing us to more sustainable ways of living seem to be pushing us towards more satisfying ways of living, at the same time.

Our younger daughter and her friend just came up the stairs to the room next door to my office. "I'm in a project mood" announces the friend.  While I write these few paragraphs, yarn and needles are coming out, the ideas are taking shape, and I keep overhearing snatches of conversation:  a serious disagreement about the definition of knit and purl and finally agreement:('the swirling things are knit and the things that look like braids are purl.' There's some sort of struggle with the 'darned slip knot', a quick lesson in casting on ('you point a gun and then go up with the yarn') and then the needles are clicking in earnest, and the two are chatting away like grandmothers on a front porch.

I worry about these children and their generation a lot of the time. But, along with the messes they are inheriting, they are, in the changed world they will inherit, going to  discover gifts, as well. If they dig deep enough into themselves, they will find, they obviously already are finding, aptitudes and attitudes that will carry them well through turbulent times. Or so I hope.

Balance: On the farm and in the atmosphere

Hazel, resting after her eighth calving.

Doing chores in the barn yesterday morning, my younger daughter and I paused for a moment to enjoy the sight of an hours-old calf.

Leaning over his pen, watching the little guy work on his first bottle,  I chatted with Kerry, owner and manager of the herd of Jersey cows here, about the health of his mother Hazel following his birth.

I noticed how often Kerry used the word balance in our short conversation. The health of Hazel today was related to the balance of calcium in her blood, bones and milk, which in turn depended upon the balance of nutrients in the pasture, the hay, and the grain she ate in weeks and months past. Managing a cow's health – in fact managing the whole of a farm – is structured around attending to balance, and acting swiftly to keep an imbalance from growing into a crisis.

 Of course, balance is a critical concept in the climate arena as well: it has long been true that emissions of greenhouse gasses are far out of balance with their removals to oceans and forests. On a farm an imbalance in the metabolism of a single animal can lead to sudden crisis and even death of the animal. The time between imbalance and disaster is a matter of hours, or maybe even minutes. Even in the slower metabolism of the soil, imbalance leads to poor yields in season or two. 

Unfortunately for all of us, in the climate system, the delay between an imbalance in the metabolism of the planet and the arrival of serious consequences is measured in decades, maybe even centuries.

Kerry is smart, hardworking, observant and dedicated. But so are most of the people I've meet who work in the world of international climate policy. Acting swiftly and effectively to restore balance is easier when the consequences of imbalance are strong and direct, and harder when the feedback is slow and initially weak.

That's a classic finding of system dynamics and at least one reason that explains why human beings, if they put their minds and hearts to it, can do a very good job at maintaining the many balances within a farm ecosystem, and why as a global species, we aren't doing such a good job attending to planetary imbalances.

From computer simulations to sophisticated policy instruments, there are all sorts of tools that could help climate policy makers do a better job, but today, with the conversation in the barn fresh in my mind,  I'm wishing for an even simpler shift, one that would help us see the Earth and its climate as alive and dynamic, just like an animal in our care or the body of a loved one - capable of beauty and productivity and longevity, but only when the conditions are right and only when life-giving balance has been maintained.