Disconnected planet

This Earth Day, celebrate humans. We need it more.

Molten lava pouring into the sea. Buzz Andersen via Unsplash. I’ve seen a similar sight in Hawai’i, but my photos didn’t quite come out like this.

By the time this post goes live, my daughter and I will be on a marine research field trip with her school in the San Francisco Bay. We’re spending the day canoeing, collecting research samples, and exploring the bay shore. I’m looking forward to it because I love being out on the water, up close like that. I spent 7 years kayaking in Long Island Sound, catching sea bass, flounder, rockfish, and the rare clam (yes, I once caught a full-bodied clam with a jig skipping along the sea bottom. The chances of that—a clam opening its shell at the precise moment when a fishing hook bobs along the sea floor—are lower than winning the state lottery).

Very fitting, too, that the field trip has been organized for April 22.

Because I’ll finally have a chance to unplug on an Earth Day, unlike years previous.

The idea of celebrating Mama Earth for 54 years and not being able to give her the gift she truly deserves—us humans getting our act together and stopping the environmental rampage and destruction—has had many people scratching their heads.

When you dig through the numerous layers of a problem, no matter what the problem is, if you dig deep enough and distill long enough, you’ll get to the core issue, which is usually rather simple, even if difficult to pin down.

The problem with our not being able to deliver what our own planet needs from us is simple.

We are disconnected.

From the land. From the water. From the skies. From the animals, the birds, the insects. From the pathogens, the bacteria, and the viruses. From each other.

It’s not greed, as so many indignantly believe. It’s not the thirst for money, power, or status. Nor is it lack of imagination, technology, or political will. Those are realities of the second order. Underlying it all is the lack of connection.

Human, Interrupted

Of course, this is not and cannot be a blanket statement—many individual humans, and numerous collectives (be it villages, communities, tribes, towns) remain connected and interconnected, but the forces of extraction and consumption have grown too powerful to ignore, and potentially, to resist. Far too many of us now live fully dependent on supply chains that weave their way through fields and plantations, up and down mountains, across oceans, and down endless conveyor belts into the ravenous belly of truck after delivery truck. You remember the toilet paper wars during the pandemic. Shocking not shocking.

We touch an end product (e.g. a breakfast burrito) wrapped in cleverly designed packaging, instead of plucking a fruit from a tree in an orchard. We travel to work, to see our friends, to visit family, in machines built with minerals and materials mined in all corners of the Earth. We wear clothes whose fibers have been sheared off sheep on farms we’ve never been to, spun from plants in fields we’ve never tended, or blended in textile factories we’ve never heard of. We tap on our keyboards, enter strings of letters and numbers, and a day or two later a package magically appears on our doorstep—of course we’re aware of what it takes to fulfill an online order, but it’s so much easier not to think about it. We’re all so busy.

Some years back, a man was walking his dog along the same beach in Connecticut where we launched our kayaks to go fishing (the ones I mention above). A storm was brewing on the horizon. The water and the sky mirrored each other in their slate gray countenance, and wispy strings of rain smudged the horizon line that split the two. The man stopped, squinting inquisitively. He looked confused.

“What’s that?” he asked me. I looked at him, not wanting to believe he didn’t recognize the telltale signs of a distant storm.

“That’s rain,” I said. Stunned, he uttered an “Oh!” and walked on.

He probably still walks his dog along that beach; and perhaps he now remembers what distant rain looks like. But on the morning of December 26, 2004, too many beachgoers in Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka learned too late what it means when the sea suddenly retreats long and deep. That was no rainstorm. That day, Mother Earth took 230,000 lives offline.

54 years and counting

Since 1970, Earth Day has been celebrated on April 22. It’s thanks to the energy and interest mobilized by that first Earth Day that we have the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental laws such as the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act, here in the U.S. Its history is at once inspiring and sobering: inspiring to think that a mass environmental movement can spark and keep going for over half a century, and sobering when we realize just how fierce corporate and political interests are, and how far we still have to go.

Just as with International Women’s Day, or Hispanic Heritage Month, or other thematic calendar celebrations that pay lip service to what should be, by now, an assumed and integral part of human society, it begs the questions, Shouldn’t every day be Earth Day? Isn’t it a little disingenuous to pour on the PR one day out of the year and go streaming through the Internet’s streets yelling how important it is for “all of us to do our part for Mother Earth”?

Why, yes it should, and yes, it is. Leave it to Big Corporate to commercialize just about every attempt at joy and connection society makes. You’d be surprised how deep into our social psyche marketing strategies reach. And how does Mexico feel about Cinco de Mayo?

This is not to say we shouldn’t pay homage and we shouldn’t celebrate. Celebration unites and raises awareness—assuming it’s done with the proper respect and integrity. Ritual and celebration are foundational elements of our social and cultural experience. Whether they’re personal (birthdays and marriages), faith-based (Christmas, Ramadan, Yom Kippur), societal (Women’s Day, Father’s Day, etc), or environmental (Earth Day, Beach Cleanup Day, etc), these special days remind us of the passage of time and the rhythms and cycles of life. It’s also important to have special days to look forward to, if not least so we can mark our progress.

It’s a lovely thing to have an Earth Day. In fact, it is now more than a day; we now have Earth Week. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a full slate of events has been planned for each day of this week. Talks, demonstrations, activities, workshops, and happy hours, all dedicated to things we can all do, and just as importantly, the things we can all buy differently, to help out our beleaguered blue planet.

Trouble is, it seems, no matter how much San Franciscans try, they’re just one city’s worth of individual people. No matter how much the residents of any city anywhere try, the impact of their collective efforts can only move the needle so far against the firehose-level pressures of the global manufacturing, transportation, food and energy systems. We’re still facing massive wildfires, floods, droughts, species extinction, pollution, and soil degradation on a scale humanity has never seen. Carpets of red algae. Mountains of trash. And microplastics everywhere, from the tops of mountains to the bottom of the ocean.

Does that mean it’s all for naught? Not quite. Prince Ea sums it up rather poetically:

But I’m not here to tell you to go clean up a beach. I’m not here to tell you to stop using single-use plastic containers, or eat less meat, or bike to work, or forgo your international vacation.

Because all of these things have been said, a million times, and many of us do do them, some of us on a more regular basis than others. Here’s the problem with this approach:

The focus shifts from the companies manufacturing the plastics and the packaging and all of the things they then market to us that end up clogging the planet’s arteries (and ours)—the focus shifts to us, individual human beings.

How is it any particular person’s fault the world is choked up with microplastics, or that the insect populations are crashing?

The idea that we, individual “consumers,” should pick up after the corporations, is disingenuous at best and malevolent at worst. Not to cry victim and aggressor here, but the decades-long advertising campaigns of convenience and portability have been quite successful. We’ve been trained. Willingly, too—our brains are wired to seek pleasure and avoid stress, and the corporations know that all too well. They’ve got the studies and internal research to prove it. So if you can have your convenience and choice, you’re more than likely going to take it—all while bemoaning the extra-strength hurricanes and floods and polar freezes.

Climatic shifts are getting worse, wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, we’re more sedentary and screen-addicted than ever, AI is taking our jobs (right?), and on top of that we’re supposed to be saving the planet? Whatever happened to our illustrious world leaders and heads of corporations and banks and think tanks, who hold the reins of the financial, economic and political systems that govern our lives?

They’re too busy running the world and dining in Davos to get mired in details.

We can certainly keep going this way—burning out, getting sick, not getting enough help with our kids, losing years off our lifespans (because no single individual is truly indispensable) until the system breaks, Whole Foods can no longer stock its shelves with a hundred different protein smoothie brands, and we go back to basics.

Or we can slow way down, and take the advice of our ever-patient flight attendants: “Put your oxygen mask on first, then assist other passengers.”

If we don’t take care of ourselves, how are we going to take care of the rest of the planet?

Not to say the planet is helpless—quite the contrary. We’re the ones who should fear the wrath of Mama Nature. But we’ve extracted enough resources, sucked enough aquifers dry, and restructured enough land and waterways that we have made a negative impact on the Earth’s ecosystems, and we need to take the appropriate responsibility, both on a collective and individual level. In order for the distribution of responsibility and action to work, however, it needs to be proportionately balanced. If a certain well-known beverage manufacturer pumps out 3 million tons of plastic packaging annually, it should take responsibility for the waste its products generate, instead of dumping that burden onto its customers—and misleading them into thinking if they just toss that empty bottle into a recycling bin, it will magically turn into a brand new bottle next month.

(Come on, Coca-Cola. You’re innovative, forward-thinking. Can’t you create fully edible packaging—if you’re really serious about composting? Maybe talk to your friends PepsiCo and Nestlé since you three are the world’s top… plastic polluters.)

How about this for a change

So here is what I propose this Earth Day. Make reconnecting a mantra. Reconnect to the food you eat, the body you inhabit, and the people (animals count too) you love. Do those three things, and your perspective on the rest of the planet will shift. It’s that simple.

These are things you can do today, and every day, and hopefully make them a habit, because the planet needs you—more than it does the plastic polluters.¹

Get enough sleep. It used to be cool among us entrepreneurs to get up at 4am, hit the gym by 5, have a protein shake for breakfast, and put in a few hours of inspired, ultra-efficient work by 9am when most of the regular employee masses start rolling into the office. You know that’s a pipe dream in most cases. Revving up your body from dream state into running a 6-minute mile that early in the morning isn’t ideal. No wonder so many heart attacks occur before noon. Sleep is king. Your body rejuvenates, your mind does its laundry, and you get a lot more done during the day with a lot more energy.

Eat well, eat slow, and eat with enjoyment. Your body is your temple, and the food you eat is the hymn you sing. Nothing better than fresh produce and home-cooked meals. Personally, I skip entire aisles in the grocery store—the ones with all the packaged food. And yes it takes a damn lot of time but it’s also worth its weight in gold. If I were a trader I’d say I’m long health!

Hug someone every day. Yes, hugs are good for you! This can be family, a friend, a friendly coworker—even a pet, if they’ll let you (those Komodo dragons aren’t too lovey dovey, a Golden Retriever might have to do.) This isn’t woo-woo stuff, it’s serious biochemistry and it works.

Get out there. Don’t sit at your desk all day. Sitting shaves years off your life. Step outside, go for a walk, smell the flower bush overhanging the fence in your neighbor’s yard. If you can work in a workout, even better.

Watch that screentime. If you must scroll… do so but scroll right past all the mindless TikTok dances and YouTube business guru sales pitches and toxic political gossip, and connect to something that… dare I say it, feels good in your soul. Like this:

Mama Nature will be fine without us.

She doesn’t care whether we survive as a species. She’s got planet-wide climatic and ecological systems in place that make the world’s largest global supply chain look like a Thomas the Train playset. Perhaps she’d even breathe a sigh of relief if we were to, you know, not survive the next hundred years.

But I sure as heck know I’d miss us. A lot.

1. I say this, of course, trying to finalize this essay at 1am the night before the field trip. Sigh. Luckily my nightly average is a good 7 hours.