Embrace the Wrinkles of Your Life

So I've just returned from a week above 10,000 feet. Three days in the Ansel Adams Wilderness east of Yosemite, and then we crossed over into the national park via Donohue Pass at 11,100 feet for four more days in the high country. Whew :-)

What struck me most on this trip was the combination of diversity and fragility of life. We saw marmots by the dozen, all fat and waddling through the alpine meadows. We saw chipmunks, deer, a bear (from 100 safe yards away), frogs, fish, more than a dozen flower species, hawks and other raptors too numerous to count, dragonflies and mosquitoes, several types of pine and fir, and grasses and reeds in abundance whose names I never learned. All this at two miles high or more, and the species I saw and am aware of make up just a tiny portion of the complex web of life. Microorganisms are doing their invisible work all the time, as are plants growing beneath the surface of the alpine lakes. Lichens and mosses are processing sunlight, and countless insects are filling niches in the ecosystem in ways that we can barely begin to understand. In the moments when I was able to step back even a bit and try to take it all in, I felt awed by the scope of life in which we hiked, slept, and nourished our spirits.

In between the profound moments of awe, I also felt a huge amount of sadness at the destruction that we humans are perpetrating on the earth. The Bay Area, where we left from last Sunday morning, is a bowl of pavement and human infrastructure surrounding the San Francisco Bay. To get to Yosemite, we drove through the Central Valley, which is completely full of large mono-culture orchards and farms where the farmers are drawing down water supplies and washing away topsoil. The park is relatively protected from our tendency to lay waste to the natural landscape, though even in the national forest where we entered, there are two large dams, built decades ago, above 7,000 feet in elevation. Everywhere that humans settle and fill in the landscape with our activities, we tend to wipe out the fragile, previously-existing ecosystems and replace them with asphalt, concrete, and farms to meet our perceived needs for food and shelter.

I think that homogenization is a good way of characterizing human activity on the planet. We take what we find before human settlement and reorganize it to meet our needs. As the Europeans swept across North America, we cut down the forest to make lumber, paper, and firewood, as well as to simply clear land for farming. We build huge dams to create lakes for irrigation, flood control, and electricity production. We extract resources from the ground to either burn up or re-shape into products that we use, from soda cans to computers. We turn wetlands into compacted salt flats devoid of life except for another set of cookie-cutter homes.

All these activities create a more homogenized world, and destroy the previously existing biodiversity. When you deforest a landscape, the trees can't recover and a few invasive species take over while the animal population also becomes less diverse and more skewed towards a few species. An economic plantation of a single species of palm fruit trees in Indonesia has a tiny fraction of the diversity that the tropical forest had before. When we filled in the Central Valley (or any other area in the world) with single-crop agriculture fields, we destroyed the diversity of plants and animals that lived there previously in inter-connected web of life. 1000 acres of a single type of almond tree can't support the same variety of life that the previous, diverse grasslands did. As we continue to expand our cities and pave over more and more areas of the earth, we compact the soil, change water percolation patterns, and pollute the air. These all radically change the habitat for all life that existed there before the opposable-thumb bipeds came to town.

As always, I was also thinking in the wilderness about other "meta" levels of what we're up to with this whole homogenization process. I can see it in all aspects of our modern culture, which I feel quite sad about. Wherever we can in modern America, we put up big box stores that are identical to the ones in the next large urban area. We put up more and more fast-food restaurants to serve us more food in our increasingly busy lives, to the point where we go to them when we travel abroad (Pizza Hut in Bangkok?) and can eat an identical meal to that in Fresno, California. We pay huge amounts of money to see formulaic Hollywood love stories that sell us a simplistic, candy-coated story of two people meeting, over and over again. You can choose any flavor of baby toy you like at Babies R Us, as long as it plays jingles, has a soft color scheme and rounded corners, and is cross-marketed with the latest Disney movie. We spent the past twenty years creating suburbs all over America, ensuring that all the little boxes came with large lawns, no sidewalks, huge garages, and big neutral-colored rooms to fill with Ikea furniture. We work long hours to pay for these things, and spend our recreation time ingesting calories and media that come from an increasingly small number of large corporations, who study ways to make us want their product even more. You catch my drift :-)

What's behind all this homogenization? I think it's coming from the same drive - fear of the unknown. We used to clear land around the villages to create a border between our homes and the dense forests, for fear of what lay in that wilderness. When you have a big, flat space, you have the feeling of safety from what you don't know about in the darkness of the trees. Perhaps this is simplified, but I think it is also accurate. We began with agriculture as a way of feeding more people, and to do so we cleared the land so we could have the feeling of control. Agriculture turned into cities surrounded by farms. In the cities we developed more and more ways of making things 'safe' and predictable. We made the surfaces hard so as to travel over them easily, and made the buildings more complex and energy-intensive so we can control the inside climate (from the Romans' plumbing all the way to air-conditioned condos).

This is our trend. We think we want more and more control all the time, and the way to get it is to homogenize our lives. Diversity requires acceptance of greater variety in life, including more encounters with the Unknown and therefore less control. Why take a chance at a local curry house in Shanghai when you could eat at McDonalds? Why go the local hardware store and risk that they won't carry the lumber you need when you can go to Home Despot and be sure to get it at a Third World price? Why watch an unknown Korean film with little dialogue when you could watch a reliably predictable Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy and turn off your brain? Why talk about what you love deeply when you could talk about the weather again?

Encounters with the Unknown or even Outside Our Usual Routine are scary! But they are also so good, and in true parallel to nature, they often hold much promise that we cannot imagine ahead of time. When we alter an ecosystem to pave it, mono-crop it, or build that next oh-so-critical Bed Bath and Beyond, we risk destroying all the fragile relationships of life that had evolved there over millions of years. When we encounter it close to its' wild form, we get such a rich experience. Who knew that this bird species lives only in that type of tree? Who knew that marmots need to eat this specific type of grass? Who knew that this particular type of frog lived only in that swamp? These relationships are beautiful, and yield so many wonderful things to appreciate, which at first glance we often don't even see.

The same is true for our daily experiences. When we homogenize our lives, I think we are making ourselves dull and deprive ourselves of much joy in the human experience. We read Danielle Steele novels and remain mentally unchallenged. We eat the same food all the time and it becomes automatic and thoughtless. We go to the same theaters for the same Pixar story, or watch the same plot thinly-veiled in new dialogue on the big screen dominating our living room. We drink the same beer at the same happy hour on an interchangeable Friday afternoon, and wonder where the spark has gone. We talk of the same mundane subjects, and slowly the part of us that yearns to share our dreams, fears, and love fades away inside, leaving an emptiness that we can't fill with an ordinary routine. We swallow the story of Us and Them from the government and chalk it up to unresolvable politics and religion.

On a brighter note, we CAN embrace a diversity of experiences, we are better able to stay awake and aware of what is going on around and inside ourselves. The simple example is trying a food you've never previously tasted, and really liking it. Beyond that, there are so many things to try. Learn to hula hoop. Try meditation - ALL the studies point to the trend that it is good for your physical and mental health. Fast for a day - yes, it will do you good. Go to a class for a skill that you just KNOW you aren't good at - you may be right and you may be wrong, but either way your brain will turn on in new ways. Buy recycled gold wedding rings, and tell people that you did it to avoid supporting such an exploitative and destructive industry. Rent a room to an interesting person outside your usual circle of friends. Read some alternative media and find out the real story behind global conflicts (here's a hint: water, oil, and space for population expansion). When someone asks how you are, and you're feeling anxious about something in life, tell them that and turn over a whole new leaf from the chit chat that wasn't taking you anywhere in the first place. In general, the guideline is simple: step outside your routine when you can and embrace what comes.

Every time you do something outside of the ordinary, you literally create diversity and make your life richer in unknown ways. When you go to Costco, you know what you are going to get, and it's not a story for your friends later about how neat the place was and how much character and charm there was in the creaky floorboards and the smell of old, oiled wood. But you might get that at the general store in your local small town. Or you'll get a whole other experience worth having, which is way better than the slick, pre-packaged, safe, everything-designed-to-make-you-buy-more-stuff experience you'll get under the fluorescent lights of Big Box Land. Instead you'll meet store owners, pleasant surprises, occasional frustration, new twists and turns, and other flavors of the Unknown. These are all so much better than a mundane life of Sameness that we sometimes think we want and keep trying to push on ourselves.

Breaking out of that box and embracing the diversity of life is a key part of waking up to the crisis that we are in. I think the more we can embrace diversity for the sake of itself, the more we will want to honor it and preserve it. All of our destructive trends on the planet come from thinking we want some form of control (certain foods year round in ever-growing quantities, more giant homes, completely sanitized households, dirt cheap and abundant plastic Everything for Everyone) to allay our fears of the Unknown. When we can let go of the desperate desire for control, and accept more of what comes, it's just like hiking into the wilderness in spite of your fear of bears, annoyance of mosquitoes, irritation of the weight of your backpack, and boredom of the same instant lentil soup over the campstove every night. In spite of all those things, the beauty of a diverse world washes over you and you suddenly realize what a joy it is to live with the Unknown and see what it brings.