Mini-Riff: Saving the Planet One Word at a Time

If I told you just two short decades ago that I liked to Google blogs, you would have wondered if I had overdosed on baby-food and lost my adult vocabulary, so strangely unfamiliar would those terms be back then.

“Come again?” you might say.

“Ya know, surf the web on my laptop,” I’d reply and your confusion would deepen.

“Do what on your what?”

I might follow with examples of favorite sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, EBay, and Yahoo. At this point you would be humoring me with a nervous smile while you scanned the horizon for an escape route in case my incoherent demeanor was a sign of some dangerous underlying psychosis. If I ran on about how I collect tunes on my iPod or if I asked to take a photo of you on my cell-phone to download onto a Blackberry, you would be sure I was a deluded babbler (later: “First he went on about playing with his lap at some sort of wicked hootenanny -- Hooray or something like that -- and he said he kept music in a peapod. When he wanted to make a picture of me with some telephone in his skin so he could rub it on a strawberry…well, that’s when I got out of there. ”).

It is the case, of course, that the language of the present could not be understood in the past because we invent words to express what we learn as we go along, words that capture and convey new knowledge, realizations, perspectives, and technologies. Logically enough, words that are invented to name new things and activities follow what they describe. But words can also shape new behaviors -- pull them from mind into being. Words like “baptize”, “market,” or “democracy” help create what they describe. Words can merely light up what we are passing by or they can illuminate the path ahead.

If we can so rapidly acquire the new skills and understandings that we have gained by adopting computers and the WorldWideWeb into our worldview and our daily lives, then why can’t we also become ecologically literate and just as conscious of those other world-wide webs that enfold us? We could also acknowledge nature’s operating systems in our shared language. We could see how the ecological services we ignore or take for granted enable that close relationship we have with our technology that we express through our new Internet jargon. I mean, try e-mailing without food, water, and air and chances are “help!” is all you’ll want to say.

Hopefully, not too many years from now if I use terms like ecotone, threshold, keystone species, resilience, disturbance, biodiversity, nutrient cycle, and complex adaptive system, others around me will instantly and easily understand me, even if I am riding in a subway with strangers. This is more likely to happen if we consciously use such terms and teach the concepts they describe.

Take evolution, for example. When we think "evolution" we probably see in our minds-eye that iconic illustration of an ape, then a Neanderthal, then another hairy but less stooped caveman, and then, finally, a modern homo sapiens walking in a line, one after the other, getting upright as they go. That familiar illustration highlights the aspect of evolutionary theory that pinches the nerves of Christian zealots who prefer a creation scenario like the one painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel -- a grandfatherly God tagging a look-alike Man with life, finger to finger. But man’s common ancestry with primates is just a thin slice of what evolutionary theory is all about.

Evolution is about connection and relationship -- not just the linear connection of one species evolving into another (speciation), but about how species fit and fill niches created by one another, about how they interact and exchange energy and information, how they both compete and cooperate, and how all of them -- from microbial soils to migrating birds -- form dynamic communities that, in turn, are also connected to one another, web within web within web. Pull one thread of that awesome tapestry and you tug at all the others, so precaution is wise. Evolution’s intelligence is opportunity, synergy, and reciprocity that relentlessly play out over millions of years. Its scope and complexity are both humbling and inspiring.

The teaching of evolutionary science in schools, then, is not a sidebar issue. Evolutionary insights are the seedbed for the ecological sciences that have taught us, for example, the value of biodiversity in the resilience of stressed ecosystems and the important role that keystone species play in keeping ecosystems vital. If you do not accept and understand evolutionary theory, you are likely to also reject the need to protect biodiversity. Saving owls and restoring wolves may strike you as the crazy idea of extremists. You are also less likely to recognize when a natural system, like the earth’s climate, is getting pushed across tipping points or why you should care. Blind to the damage and having no eye for habitat integrity, you are ecologically illiterate -- awash in a sea of chaos you cannot fathom, unable to read the signs and navigate through the trouble ahead.

So, if you want a revolution, teach evolution.

New terms are invented and used, memed and spread. Some catch, some don’t. Once widely caught and shared, they influence how we see our world and how we behave. So, if you are already ecologically literate and know that vocabulary, then use it, share it, explain it, teach it, and spread it, especially among others who are not yet ecologically aware. Be bold - help everyone on the subway car learn and talk about what you already know. If you are not yet ecologically literate, get there soon. And keep learning and listening and sharing…maybe, just maybe, we can save the planet one word at a time.

Mini-Riff: Happy Dirt Day to You!

What we dismiss as dirt – common and plain – is actually quite unique, complex, variable, and vital. Soil is composed of decomposed blade, leaf, stone, root, bone, carcass, carapace, and flower – millions of tiny components that express the geology, biology, and land use history of that place. A spoonful of soil from any one location will be different from a spoonful of soil from any other location. Soil samples taken from the same place will change over time, too. Living within that mixture of debris and detritus is a universe of micro-organisms as variable as their environments, so many tiny species that we have counted but a slim fraction of them. A spade of rich garden soil may harbor more species than the entire Amazon Basin nurtures above ground. The bacteria in an acre of soil can outweigh a cow or two grazing above them.

Soil is not a thing, but a living process as the chemicals, nutrients, enzymes, bacteria, microbes and so on interact with one another and reconfigure over time. Soil, of course, becomes food if you add seeds, sunlight, and water. As important as that is, food is just one of soil’s blessings. Working together, the soil’s tiny creatures break down organic matter, store and recycle nutrients vital to plant growth, renew soil fertility, filter and purify water, degrade and detoxify pollutants, and control plant pests and pathogens. Without these fundamental ecological services, forests would wither and die, food webs would collapse, plants could not pull carbon from the atmosphere, and life on earth would eventually cease.

Our bodily communion with the physical world around us means that we carry the salt of the seas and the power of a star in our blood, but also perchlorate, lead, and dioxins because what goes into the soil can be incorporated into your cells. The boundaries we assign to “things” like uranium and kidneys are temporary, even arbitrary.

It is easy to dismiss process and relationship while embedded in a materialistic/reductionist culture that tells us that soil is not a living community, not the very ground of your being and not the genesis of your own flesh and blood, but merely a medium that props up trees and plants – a “dirty” and lowly thing not worthy of regard, let alone reverence.

Stones turn to dust, dust becomes soil, soil becomes food, food becomes you, and you sit on a stone and think about how very different you are from a rock. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, until we are conscious of what we are, we will not change what we do.

Mini-Riff: Bison Bones

Here’s a sad old story told new. An unexpected twist has been added.

We all know the tragic story of the American Bison. Buffalo hunters slaughtered them for their hides, left the precious meat to rot and the bones to scatter. The hide-scalper’s greed was encouraged by those who understood that an effective way to turn proud warriors into reservation derelicts was to pull the ecological rug out from under the Western tribes, though at the time they didn’t call it that. And then, of course, greed was joined by its’ favorite companion, reckless ignorance – passing travelers shot bison from railroad train windows for mere amusement. Very sad. Tragic, really. A shame.

But wait, there’s more. Settlers eventually moved across those empty and haunted killing grounds. They built farms and tilled the soil. The ploughs of the farmers in Kansas clogged with old bison bones. It was a problem first but then the farmers discovered they could collect the bones and sell them to fertilizer mills that would grind them up and sell them in bags and barrels, ship them here and there. In pre-chemical America, bone meal was a favorite plant food. The remains of the great bison herd were thus reduced to dust and the dust was churned into the soil of grain fields, fruit orchards, and home gardens across the nation.

For several years the essence of bison could sometimes be tasted in the succulent meat of a tomato, in the horn hardness of a cherry pit, or in the rich marrow of a summer melon. Bone became fragrant hedge and green blade. Bone became the flowers given by boys to blushing maidens. The real Ghost Dance was this fading of form, this morphing whisper as beings become bones and bones become food, seed, beauty, life.

Amazing, those noble bison. Even after death they surrendered one more generous and life-affirming gift to the very people who killed them.

Mini-Riff: What if Everything We Know is Wrong?

We take for granted that the cornerstone beliefs from ages ago were eventually proved wrong and then abandoned. That’s progress. But do we imagine that when a physician in the Middle Ages applied leaches to sick people to extract “bad humours” he did so confidently and was respected, believed, and obeyed by his fellow citizens? Or skip ahead to the Nineteenth Century when science had made astounding progress. Phrenologists were quite sure they could predict criminal behavior by measuring a person’s skull and they were praised in their day for their cutting edge studies. In every age, the prevailing empire of belief was widely accepted, followed, and honored without hesitation, doubt, or equivocation no matter how flawed it was eventually found to be.

How far back in history do we have to go to find evidence of such wrong-headed hubris? In the 1950’s our knowledge of how the world works was so advanced, that we even harnessed the atom, the building block of matter. Confidently and with authority, uranium miners, downwinders, atomic GIs, and weapon workers were told that the low doses of radiation they received were harmless, maybe even beneficial. In the meanwhile, forest fires were suppressed, keystone predators were hunted and eliminated from the land, and DDT was applied without protest to the crops we ate and the front lawns where children played. Lead was added to gasoline. We built so many nuclear weapons that we could destroy life on earth many times over. Ships loaded with old rusty chemical weapons were scuttled and sent to the ocean floor. Engineers were busy draining the Everglades and re-routing its flow through canals. Emotionally distressed patients were lobotomized.

That was just fifty years ago, a mere blink of history’s eye. But we’ve learned so much since then. After all, we have even unlocked the mystery of DNA and can create new life forms in our labs. We have acquired God-like powers to alter the web of life. Yes, I’m sure all that other ignorant nonsense is behind us and we’re on the right track now…