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| Redwood grove in Loma Prieta, by Gabi Hamm |
I have spent the past nine months participating in a global collaboration aimed at working through the COVID crisis to help the world become more sustainable and resilient. It's called Pivot Projects. I am an embedded journalist in the enterprise, and I'm writing a book, The Pivot: How Collective Intelligence Can Help Save the Planet, which is to be published by Columbia University Press next year.
Most everybody in the group, as far as I can make out, agrees with me that we're all in this together. But through the experience of being involved in this group, I have expanded what I mean by "we." I now include all living things—up to and including microbes, bacteria, and germs—plus all physical forces, mainly climate and weather.
Pivot Projects sees the world through the prism of systems thinking. That's the idea that the whole universe is a giant system of interrelationships between living things, other things, forces of nature, ideas, electrical impulses, beliefs, science, etc. It's a system of systems. The group believes that in order to address the world's most critical and complex problems, we have to understand the interrelated systems that come into play so we can intervene and help them achieve or regain balance (optimize them for sustainability and resilience).
This means we can't think about the fate of humans in isolation. We also have to fully take into account the lives of animals and plants. In a sense, even plants have "rights," like we do. This is what it means to live in balance with nature.
I started off this post with the photograph taken by my niece Gabi in the Forest of the Nisene Marks, in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. I asked her to take this picture for the book because in that forest, in a place called Loma Prieta, was the epicenter of the disastrous earthquake that struck the Bay Area in 1989. A lot of human-made things were damaged in the quake, mainly brittle things such as brick buildings, glass, double-decker highways, and bridges. However, when I went on a walk in the Forest of the Nisene Marks a few weeks after the quake I saw that few Redwoods had fallen in spite of the violent shaking. This was due at least in part to the fact that even though the root systems of Redwoods are shallow, the roots of Redwoods in a grove intertwine to provide added stability to all of the trees. It's a metaphor for humanity and for ecosystems. Cooperation is a critical source of resilience.
I read a couple of days ago in the New York Times that trees actually communicate with each other through their root systems, using funghi as network neurotransmitters. Those are some subtle signals!
We humans have a long way to go before we pick up signals like that from our natural environment. In fact, it seems like one of our primary skills is our ability is to ignore signals from nature, even distress signals.
For instance, today I took a walk around part of New Haven not far from my house called Fair Haven. It's an ancient village that was occupied by indigenous people for maybe thousands of years and has been occupied by European immigrants since the 1640s. For many years, it was a center for the oystering industry, and there's still one oyster company operating there. Down by the tidal Quinnipiac River, not far from the oyster company's docks, I saw evidence of a fish kill.
This is nature talking to us. It's telling us that it is in distress, and, if we are students of systems thinking, we realize that if nature is in distress, we humans are also in distress. Why aren't we listening?
On the way to the river, I walked along River Street, which is in a former industrial section of Fair Haven. It's mostly vacant lots along there, but there are a few crumbling old abandoned factory buildings, some restored buildings, and some remediated brown fields. In this forgotten zone, I saw a beautiful piece of art reminding people not to dump stuff in the storm sewer.
Somebody had made the connection between the storm sewer and the river/harbor/sound. But, clearly, not too far away, somebody else had dumped something into the storm sewer or the river that had killed a shitload of fish.
I have no way of knowing who and what had killed the fish, but I didn't have to look far to see evidence that humans are allowing potentially toxic material to get into New Haven's rivers. Just a half-mile away, I walked a bridge over the Mill River, which also empties into the harbor, and saw that huge piles of road salt mixture that had been piled beside the river had finally, after several years exposed to the elements, been covered with plastic tarps. Floating barriers in the river next to the salt pile suggested that the owner of the salt, Gateway Terminal, was trying to prevent something from spreading across the surface of the river. Who knows what? (By the way, the building in the background is an abandoned power plant built in 1929. It gifted lots of toxic material to the river over the years.)
We humans in the United States have been aware of the dangers of harming nature since the 1960s, when Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring. A decade later, the country created the Environmental Protection Agency. We have many laws and regulations protecting the natural environment —even after Trump has done his worst. Why can't we wake up and take this situation seriously? How can we be so careless? By killing nature we are killing ourselves.
