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.

The Radical Act of Defining Enough For Yourself

Not long ago, a colleague sent around some results from studies of human happiness which show that despite strong increases in the amount of stuff in people's lives in the developed world in recent decades, self-reporting of happiness hasn't increased all that much. The research shows that people tend to base their sense of what they need to be happy not on some absolute internal sense of well being, but instead on a sort of mental comparison between themselves and others. With such mental calculus, the feeling of "enough" is never constant, but instead is ever-rising. In systems terms, this way of searching for happiness has the same dynamics that drove the Cold War search for security through  assembling ever larger stores of weapons.

System dynamics teaches that there is one way out of any arms race, be it the race to obtain security by stockpiling more weapons than your enemy or happiness by acquiring more stuff than your neighbor. Arms races loose their fuel as soon as one party stops participating. The enoughness race, and its relentless impact on the Earth, would slow if more and more people found a way to set their own definition of enough and live by it.

Easier said than done, as seems always to be the case for true leverage points.

But, after a weekend of simple pleasures, from cheering for 8th grade basketball players, to walking in quiet woods, from listening to Christmas music, to cooking good food, it seems to me that defining enough may not be as hard as we sometimes think. And, not long home from the most recent UN climate conference, a simple fundamental solution, like defining what is enough, seems like it just might accomplish what geo-engineering, carbon markets, and new technologies might not. It might help us create societies that recognize and embrace the reality that our beautiful planet is also finite.

Seeing with new eyes thanks to the space station and twitter

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other. --- Joanna Macy

I'm as likely as the next mother to tell my kids to get off the computer and go outside, but I have to admit that one source of hope for me is the way that new developments in global communications seem poised to bring the people of our planet closer together than ever before.

I notice this in my work all the time. Tomorrow, for example,  I'll be offering a 'webinar' briefing on a climate study that will have me, in my home office in Vermont, connected to people not only in the US, but Europe, Asia, and South America. For 30 minutes, aided by GoToMeeting technology and the internet I'll be able to share important results about the implications of the Copenhagen Accord with concerned, knowledgeable people from around the world, people who will be able to do something with the information. And none of us will have spent a dollar on a plane ticket or burned any jet fuel to come together.

I've also recently begun to follow the 'tweets' of Astro_Wheels, an astronaut on the international space station who has been taking photos of the Earth from his vantage point and sharing them via "twitpic" (Did you know there is internet access on the space station, somehow?)

The photographs are breathtaking, but even more moving to me are the mixture of languages (and alphabets!) in the dozens  of comments beneath each picture. Seeing our shared home seems to elicit the same expressions of wonder and appreciation across cultures, nations, and languages.

Here are few of the comments in response to the photo above, of Japan at night:

wow coooooooooooll! im on this planet.

Thank you! Astro_Wheels! キャ～！！待ってましたよ。日本！綺麗ですね。海岸線が光のラインではっきりわかります。私の住んでる名古屋も輝いてます☆

que bella foto! gracias! increible saber que estoy en Güemes,Salta,Argentina y poder disfrutar

うわー！北海道から山陽山陰四国まで見えますね！I live 2cm point from the top of this photo!!ThanQ so much♡♡♡

huau muy buenas fotos¡¡¡ espero alguna de argentina

wow!!! very pretty!

maravilloso y sin igual esta imagen te deja sin palabras ....gracias

amazing

"It's my home country! I'm glad! I am hoping for safety of your voyage! Thank you! :-)"…From:One of these light."

These responses show who we are as a species, just as much as the needless wars, the painfully slow march to a global climate treaty, the unacceptable gap between rich and poor.

So yes, cooooool!! amazing, gracias,  Astro_Wheels. Keep the glimpses of our wholeness coming.

--from another one of these lights.

Falling in Love with a Piece of the World

We picked up our older daughter from a week at camp this afternoon.

In the backseat she pummeled her younger sister for news of home. How are Tango and Ishult (horses)? How are Nikky and Ave (parakeets)? How's Dusky (hen) and Chickadee (rooster)?

And then one that surprised me - How's the maple?

How's the maple? Before asking about friends or community news?

But it shouldn't have surprised me that a tree - that particular tree – figured so prominently in her questions of home. Ever since their Dad helped them hang a rope swing in the maple at the bottom of the hill, our girls and most of their friends have been busy falling in love with that maple.

They've invented games with complicated rules played in its branches (going down has the right of way over going up). They've given it a nickname (Mape). Our younger daughter notices every maple of the same species on our drives around town and points each one out with the breathless excitement of one who has discovered treasure. They both notice how the tree changes from week to week (a rotten spot at the bottom; some bright pink leaves that don't seem 'quite right') and both speculate about its past (did the last children who played in it, when it was a much smaller tree, the ones who built a platform high in its branches, discover the same route to the top?)

The neighborhood kids who go to school have taken to swinging in it while they wait for the bus. The kids who do their learning at home have taken (when they can negotiate it) to carrying their books down to work underneath its shade.

Younger sister's report was highly detailed and focused mostly on the fact that a branch had broken (not anybody's fault) but that the rope swing and the games were mostly unaffected by the change in architecture. It makes me sad, though, she said.

There was silence in the back seat for a while, and then: Yeah, me too, it makes me sad too.

E. O. Wilson has said that we will only save what we love.

Luckily for all of us, this love lives close to surface. Twelve feet of rope and sufficient unscheduled time to touch, clamber, and explore is more than enough to call it forth.

In this time of ecological crisis, giving ourselves – child and adult alike – that time might be the most important action we can take.

We might not even need the rope.

Beings Without Borders

Think about your left hand, feel it, move it, wiggle it. This hand that has been a part of your for as long as you have been a 'you.'

Think about the atmosphere. Colorless odorless air. Important, but not you. Air, out there, separated from you by the membrane that lines your lungs. Right?

Imagine life without your hand: hard, unpleasant painful, frustrating, it might be all of these. But, even hand-less, so many possibilities would remain before you – years and years of silly jokes and passionate embraces. Decades of walking in the wind and leaning backwards to see the tops of tall trees.

Now try to imagine life cut off from the atmosphere. Imagine your airway blocked, your body sucked under water or buried under deep snow. Without rescue your being would contract into a few last minutes of awareness. No more jokes, no more passion, the end of the feeling of wind in your hair.

So which is more a part of who you are, your limbs or the sky?

And why, against all the evidence, do we insistent that we are so small?

The Planet. The Population. The Big Hug.

I'm just back from a fast paced walk. In the sleet.

These words leaping onto my computer screen via an advertisement from Ford Motor Company are the ones that sent me out into the gray afternoon, arms pumping, angry thoughts churning:

People really like the Earth. And for the most part, the Earth really likes people too. Actually, it could be the longest-term relationship ever. At Ford, we are doing everything we can to keep that relationship beautiful. So we are constantly creating technology that shows the Earth lots of love. The Ford Escape Hybrid, ever increasing MPG, ever-decreasing emissions. People and Earth. Exchanging gifts. No receipt necessary.

For a mile or so, my mind took these few sentences and ran with them.

"I love you, my dear Earth", I saw people saying, zipping about town in their Ford Escape Hybrids. "An ounce of CO2, a token of love, the perfect thank you for the longest-term relationship ever."

Ever increasing MPG, ever decreasing emissions? Perfect. We'll just ever-increase MPG to to infinity, ever-decrease emissions to below zero until one day driving a Ford Escape Hybrid will be an act of public service, sucking carbon right out of the atmosphere! No need for pricey complicated research into carbon sequestration after all, just a fleet of Fords.

As for people and Earth exchanging gifts, haven't we all known people like that, artists of the one-way exchange? All take, no gift. Thanks for dinner and here's the check.

So my thoughts unfolded as I walked, but I couldn't keep it up.

I started noticing all the little miracles of this ordinary day – the tingle on my cheeks of the cold rain, the dark branches of bare maples against the clouds.

We all know that advertising plays upon our deepest hopes - to have love, to be enough, to not be lonely, to be thought worthy. Is it so surprising that a team at Ford Motor Company thinks that being in a relationship, a beautiful relationship, with the Earth is one of those deepest desires?

Actually, how could it be otherwise, for we who evolved at the edge of forests, digging in soil, bending down at stream-sides to drink cool, clear water?

And there it is, the beautiful opportunity, right in plain sight: there are so many better, easier, more beautiful ways to fill our longing to reconnect than the unlovely and expensive Ford Escape Hybrid.

Maybe not everyone would agree that walking in the November sleet is beautiful or their heart's desire, but eating a fresh picked apple might do it, for a moment, or biking to work, or planting box gardens at the senior citizens' center. There are so many opportunities, many of them free, many of them cheap, all of them truly exchanges with the Earth, all of them sealing the bond of the longest relationship ever. These pursuits don't give the gift of a little less harm, the give the gift of no harm. Sometimes they even five the gift of restoration.

By the time my route came round again to home, the sun had come out.

A perfect rainbow, bright and unbroken, stretched the full expanse of the north sky.

Burning Bright

On the journey home from the West Coast last month I met an interesting fellow traveler and we struck up conversation about sustainability and the future. In the course of conversation I gave him an article Dana Meadows had written that I had carried in my bag all the way from Vermont to California and then to Oregon. I wasn't sure I'd ever hear from him again, but recently, I received this email:

I just finished my first read through of Dana Meadows article. It was great. What can one say – “she gets it” and has a simple and powerful way of communicating. This led me to your website which is also inspiring and the discovery that she died at 59. Sounds like a soul that had burned very bright.

I agree, about the soul burning bright, and imagine that those of you reading these words who knew Dana Meadows would agree as well.

But we are all burning, aren't we? Literally. We are flames, our cells burning oxygen with every breath. We take the world into ourselves with every mouthful of food and every sip of water, transforming carrot sticks and peanut butter into movement and sound, into violence or poetry.

I wish we taught our children this truth, that they are moving flowing rivers, never, not even for an instant, stagnant, and never, ever separate from the ocean or from the clouds, or from the dark and secret life of the soil.

I wish our leaders knew it. I wish they all knew and acted as though they knew that, as Buckminster Fuller once said, we are not nouns, but verbs. (" I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.")

That is my image for the day - people as flames. The delegates at the United Nations, my seven-year old at her math assignment, the people – soldiers, insurgents, mothers, babies – on the ground in Iraq.

All of us, burning bright.

Where Does The Atmosphere End; Where Do Our Bodies Begin?

Last night, I walked out onto our porch to shake out a dusty rug and the wind blew a gust of warm spring air across my face.

It has been a while since we’ve felt warm breezes in this valley where snow is still piled in shady places and the first spring wildflowers are only now beginning to bloom, and the sensation kept me on the porch long enough to look up at the night sky.

This is what I talk about and write about every day, I realized, rug in hand. This warm air. Those moving clouds. This is the atmosphere I talk about with terms like 'parts per million’ and ‘gigatons per year’. Colorless, odorless, invisible, it envelops all of us, all of our lives. The atmosphere is what moved through the tree-tops the first night I slept outside by myself. It blew up river from the ocean as I walked to the University each day of all of those years in graduate school. It ruffled my baby’s hair the first time I carried her outside. Now at this moment, as I write these words, it enters my body as I breathe in. What was, moments ago, 'the atmosphere' is now alive in somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother. And what was moments ago, the solid substance of my body is now, 'the atmosphere.'

This sounds like poetry and metaphor, and I suppose in a way it is. It is also simple biochemistry and physiology.

We should stop polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases because our survival depends upon it. And as we work to stop that pollution we might draw strength and inspiration from the realization that the atmosphere is also our deepest swiftest link with the rest of the planet, the flux that connects us to the oceans and forests and meadows of an entire world. We might stop and notice our breathing, and realize that between us and the atmosphere there is no boundary at all.

It Really Is One Planet

"Earth's climate is agnostic about the location and type of CO2 emissions and is sensitive only to the total burden of CO2."

That sentence has been ringing in my head all day, after it jumped out at me from the text of an otherwise fairly dry article about carbon policy (Carbon Trading Over Taxes).

That sentence is an academic way of saying what any schoolchild could tell you - the atmosphere is one seamless whole. No matter how willing we are to believe that we can divide up the solid parts of the Earth into my acre and your acre, my nation and your nation, the atmosphere defeats this logic. Fluid, invisible, essential, the atmosphere won't allow us the same illusion we have with farm fields and city lots and forests, the illusion of possession.

There's no way to keep "our" part of the atmosphere healthy and let the rest of it take its chances. Either it's all healthy or it's all not.

There is an ethics to this wholeness of the atmosphere, because it sets up the possibility we are living out today, that people who don't benefit from fossil fuel use still pay the price for it.

You know all of this, you've seen those beautiful photographs of our Earth from space, you've walked across a boundary line in the forest and known that the boundary means nothing to the forest, nothing to the Earth.

Climate change is telling us to trust that knowledge. Forget the fifth grade geography lessons, the outlines of nations on the map. Tell the politicians to look up beyond those lines of national interest and acknowledge physical reality. It's only one atmosphere. It always has been. It always will be.

Just ask the wombat.