Traveling time's arrow into the blizzard of the world

After a rain                               jay moynihan

This was originally a local newspaper column (Ashland Daily Press column on sustainability), I did when I lived up north, called “A Wider View”. Wrote it in early 1990's.

How much does the environment matter? Maybe more important, how much does it matter to you? Can you gauge it in any way that approaches objectivity? Probably not.

Our thoughts are composed by experience, input and hardwired tendencies. Each of us, corporate apologist or tree hugger is a work in progress, our parents genes traveling time's arrow into the blizzard of the world. For each of us the environment is at any point in time about one half of, well, reality. Behavior is the relationship between a phenotype and an environment.

You may think I have used the word environment in two different senses. You are partially correct. The environment is what you are in. There is no exit, no escape. You are also part of the environment of everything outside your skin. It is a web of mirrors each reflecting the other, forever.

So the environment is obviously very important to each of us. But how we judge its quality and importance varies from person to person. This makes perfect sense. No two people have exactly the same point of view. It has been said that you cannot step in the same river twice. The fact is that you cannot shake hands with the same person twice. At multiple scales all is change. It is only the patterns that abide. For awhile.

You may say that what is correct is what is natural. What the human has done is strayed from the natural. Oh.

 There lives a species of Aztec Ant in Central America that creates its colony in one specie of tree. The tree has no defense mechanisms. The ant lives in its bark. The ant's sole food is tiny balls of plant proteins and sugars that cover the bottom of the tree's leaves. The ant attacks any vine, insect, or fungus that touches the tree. No bird will nest here. When the colony is firmly established, its member fan out from the base of the tree.

Any living thing that is not that specie of tree, its seeds or sapling, is destroyed. Researchers have found areas of a few square acres bare of all cover except for this tree. The tropical sun bakes the ground. The rains erode it. Eventually the trees fall and the forest recovers the area. The ants are gone.

 If Disney did a movie about this ant what would we see? Would executive ants give PowerPoint presentations on square yards cleared? Would activist ants destroy the pheromone scent trails the workers had laid and argue that monoculture is an adaptive dead end? Would they form stakeholder committees to try to reach consensus?

 We are natural. What else can we be? All we do is natural. What else can it be? To say otherwise is to deny that we are of the world. To be animal is to seek short term advantage. Animals do not plan for the long term. No, but we can. Will we?

 Our vision of the world and ourselves is far more complex than that of the ant. We are, as the ancient Maya called humans, "those who bear the burden of time". Our basic needs and behaviors are the same as other animals. But the prodigious nervous system we each carry creates a whole universe in each head.  The environmental science graduate may go to work for the power company and end up attending endless meetings with stakeholders and community groups. Would he be there if he was not paid to? Another environmental science graduate derives great pleasure from spending time in the wilderness when she can, and when back home serves tirelessly in grass roots groups. She opposes any logging activities.

The logger is paid by the load. He will never be able to afford to take off a month to hike around a wilderness area. Some of the logs are ground into cheap particle board or thin veneer.

 The processed wood is part of the table and chairs purchased at the discount store by the single mother of three. She has a minimum wage job. Her marriage hit the skids when she and her husband lost their jobs when the battery and spark plug plant closed. It went to Mexico.

As she leaves the store a young man hands her a pamphlet (soy ink, 100% recycled content and chlorine free to boot) about how the store's products are produced unsustainably. She could care less. Tonight her kids will sit at a real table and they will eat together.  The information worker was handed the same pamphlet. A few months later he carefully buys a new table that is made from non-endangered trees by co-op farmers in a third world country. He hauls it home in his sport utility vehicle that was assembled in Mexico.