Where have I been these past few months? Sometimes I wake up in my bed and feel that question, looking out the window at Norway maples, old brick houses, lilies, college students, trays of kale sprouts on the porch. I've been stealing honey from the bees on faraway farms, chewing it down to the wax that rolls softly in mouth 'til I spit it in the fields of sprouting rye. I've been two knuckles deep in grease, feeling the races for traces or places where they may be pitted, cleaning the tiny perfect spheres of metal and packing them back into a bed of jelly from dinosaur bones, 10 million years later allowing me to make those pedals turn so smoothly you'd think you were about to take flight. I've mingled sweetly with family and memories, embedded in the smell of larch logs since peanut farmers ran the monolith of the modern world, dusty workbenches I've walked past since I could toddle, now full of rusty tools I coddle and discard in an effort to combat my genetic code that calls out to save everything for an unimagined yet possible future. I've become one with basil, nurturing it and tenderly testing it between my callous fingertips, willing it to grow as my own practice deepens like their roots, slowly and patiently in a pattern we can't hurry, envisioning broad leaves reaching their Italian cultivated potential in my new northern environment. I've been dreaming of water, forest fires, the courage of the Tibetan revolutionaries who have been left to hang by the rest of the world, friends who have had enough of a mysterious conviction to end their own lives, a world de-schooled and re-educated, fewer gatekeepers and more companions, climate banter and the tangible pace of my footsteps threading through a cool and silent morning neighborhood. I've also been thinking about scale...
There's a story about some tribe of people (now nearly apocryphal but often mentioned at cocktail parties) who had lived in a completely forested habitat, perhaps the Amazon, for countless generations. When at last they encountered open space in the Kansas sense of the word, either through deforestation of their ecosystem or forced removal, they were said to lack a sense of perspective for things far away. This is because the forest is so dense you get no practice in viewing things more than 30 yards away, and things tend to blend together into myriad shades of green and brown. At the edge of the forest, surveying the plain, they had trouble telling if the horses they saw were just tiny horses you could reach out and pick up or were simply further away. They couldn't tell how fast things were going far away or telling clearly if something was approaching or not. In this popular accounting of their story, they were unequipped to handle this new setting.
We've entered an age where we need perspective more than ever. 5,000 years ago, you didn't need that much perspective. Unless you lived in one of the few places with a slowly emerging empire, you could do what your fellow villagers had always done and count on the world to be the same next year and next decade. There were periodic droughts and floods, feasts and famines. For better and for worse, you didn't have to know what was going on 500 miles away because it didn't really affect you at all. If the next village over managed through great effort to deforest a whole 20 acres and keep it clear for cultivation, it didn't affect you in the least. Even the beginnings of small Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian kingdoms or empires didn't affect the rest of the world's population beyond the scope of their actual physical domain. While they did manage some occasional feats of environmental destruction (water pollution, deforestation, erosion from agriculture, etc.), they weren't making big splashes.
These days, there are so many big splashes it seems like the canoe is going to tip. We've got atmospheric bomb tests, the Three Gorges Dam, plans to drain the Great Lakes, McDonald's beef coming from the land formerly known as the Amazon rainforest, megatons of newsprint devoted to celebrity gossip, yada yada ad infinitum. In this new world, we like to feel that we're in the know and aware of what is going on around the block and beyond the horizon. Awareness of this type is a laudable goal, as the only way we can make thoughtful choices in our lives is to be informed.
Our desire for information, however, poses an interesting dilemma in an age where we continue to creep towards total information awareness and closing the feedback loop into realtime updates. What happens to us when we try to live our daily lives, with all the attention to mundane details that are necessary, and also track the big picture? How can we keep a sense of perspective in the front of our minds when we are awash in new data presented in novel ways each day?
I often think about soda/pop/Coke when I'm thinking about scale. (Did you ever go to the Midwest and have someone offer you a Coke, and when you say "Sure," they then say, " We've got Sprite, Coke, and Mountain Dew?" I love culture.) I have this tiny tidbit in my brain, sequestered there like CO2 from the coal-fired plant of the Infotainment Complex, that says the average American drinks the volume equivalent of 2 cans of soda each day. I feel like this was in the late 80's and early 90's before bottled water became all the rage. Let's round it down a bit ('cause I just did a brief Internet poke around) and say it's only 1.6 cans a day. Rough math:
300 million Americans x 1.6 cans daily = 480 million cans daily
How much space does that take up? Even if only 1/3 of that yet again is in actual aluminum cans, where do you get the aluminum for 160 million cans on a daily basis? How much water does that take? If each can takes 12 teaspoons of sugar, how many tanker cars of corn syrup is that? How big is 45,000,000 gallons of soda? That's the daily flow rate of a decent-sized stream.
It may not be important to have a handle on how much soda flows through the U.S. (let alone the rest of the world) an a daily basis. I concede that without argument. However, so much of our lives spreads out like veins which give and take from the massive, elaborate systems wrapping the globe that it seems foolish not to at least try to understand our planetary impacts. Keeping a sense of perspective and awareness of scale begins to seem terribly daunting when we think about our coal and oil flows, our water usage, plastic, garbage, wood, concrete, everything. The how, where, and why of our impact can seem overwhelming, but without it we can't really be scientific about where our global society is at and where it may be headed.
Where do we go with this Herculean mental task of knowing where we are, at all zoom levels of google maps? I'm not sure. My approach so far in life has been to try to develop a baseline framework for understanding my place in the world and how the world works. What does that mouthful mean? The world has a lot of people. I have yet to see any sign that we can come up with yet another technofix to adjust any current system so that the soon-to-be 7 billion of us won't continue to destroy this sphere that I've been enjoying a great deal. So let's talk about VOLUNTARILY and HUMANELY shrinking our numbers, so that when nature bats last it's not quite as ugly. Using fossil fuels makes climate instability worse while also depriving future generations of access to these limited resources. No matter how I rationalize my behavior or what I refuse to admit to myself, this is the case. I actually find that a hardline stance with myself, rooted in a reasonable understanding of how things work, really helps me to feel liberated and supported in choosing more sustainable options.
Basically, I get up in the morning just like you and I do my thing. I choose amongst biking, walking, driving, local food, bananas, lights on, lights off, hand tools, recycled materials, used books, new CDs, policy, action, preaching to the choir, being a black sheep, eating vegetarian, elk jerky, glass, plastic, cloth bags, toeing the line, bending the rules, smelling the flowers. I try to find courage to be thoughtful and different in meaningful ways. I get buoyed by others who are radical, or I can despair with one foot nailed to the floor. I write like I'm a SETI maniac scanning the night sky for you. Sometimes I can lay back down at the end of the day, smiling out at those Norway maples, and think about all of us doing the best we can and how we can do better.
