“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
I found this quote by E. B. White several years ago and it alludes to the spirit of my internal tension.
As does this one by Aldo Leopold:
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
In addition to the tension between science and nature that found its way into my college entrance essay, there was a tension between “savoring” and “saving” the world. Science and nature, forward and backward, to feed my passion to experience it, or to honor my concern over protecting it?
Somehow I haven’t mentioned anything about the field of ecology in college. Ecology is the sister discipline to evolution, and it focuses on how things interact and function in the natural world. What interplay between biological and non-biological components underlies the stable state of things? What are the downstream consequences of altering the components of a given system? Ecology generates key insights for conservation.
I looked forward to taking Ecology 101 as much as any other course I took. However once actually in the class, for whatever reason I cannot put together now, it did not resonate with me; I couldn’t connect the black and white pages of abstract math back to the color and form of the natural world.1
On the other hand, around that same period, I also remember thinking that while I loved the field of animal behavior, I didn’t see how studying animal behavior would ever feed back to anything related to conservation, which of course I felt was important. There were some examples of how behavior theoretically could feed more directly into conservation 2, but the vast majority of it seemed only marginally relevant, if at all.
During one moonlit canoe ride on Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks the summer before my junior year in college, I realized that an ecologically-minded politician or businesswoman might actually have more widespread and concrete influence on conservation than an animal behaviorist. I didn’t see myself as a politician or a businesswoman. But I also didn’t think I’d make a strong ecologist. So, while it felt selfish for me to enter a field that seemed so unlikely to “pay back” the natural world and contribute to conservation, in the end, I decided being passionate about something, in my case the natural world, was a gift of a different kind to the world, and that was going to have to be good enough. 3
It was good enough, for a long time.
I kept myself plenty busy trying to create, and then succeed in, a career centered on discovering the evolution of the natural world.
But that tension still lived on in me. Once, while on a winter break from grad school, talking with one of my old friends, I observed that I loved what I was doing, but I was still so disturbed about mankind’s relationship with the natural world. It was only a matter of time, I told my friend. Someday I would have to reckon with those concerns.
Having a child precipitated that reckoning.
Having a child, and the wave of hormones that apparently flood your body as a result, really helps you get clear and present about a few things. It helps you keep your wishes for the world, and your fears about the future, really up front and center in your mind. You have a new calling, and that calling is to protect this vulnerable being from harm, and to help him thrive.
As I nursed my infant son, the course of his life stretched out in front of me. And any “normal” hopes and fears I might have had for him were overshadowed by what was leaking out of the news and into my brain. Climate Change. Real, vast, and massively destructive to everything that underpins, not just any “way of life,” but life itself?
How could I just go about my daily life, knowing? Seeing the storms on the horizon? Someday my child was going to ask me how I could have stopped short of doing everything I could to mitigate those storms. How could I tell him honestly that I had done just that? I knew better, and did nothing. Why did I do nothing? If not me, who? If not this, what? If not now, when?
In reality, it took me years to put my response together. Years during which our economies hummed, and crashed, and then hummed again, and years in which we kept burning fossil fuels, unabated, and CO2 continued to accumulate, and arctic ice continued to melt. For me, those were busy years, there were fulfilling and wonderful experiences in my career and work, and crushing stresses as well. However, in the dark, wakeful hours in the middle of the night, and in the interstices of an over-commited life, I managed to piece together some answers, and a plan.
Savoring and saving are two sides of the same coin.
Having a baby was…fascinating? I was in love with a completely vulnerable, totally dependent, useful-for-nothing-but-being-himself, little, pink, wriggly worm. His little face. How naked his little face was, with no learned expressions to mask his feelings or emotions. I could just sit and look into this face and watch him take in the world. He’d look at my face and maybe the trace of a smile would flicker over it. And then he’d almost lose control of his head, apparently from the distraction of that smile-inducing thought. In control of nothing, just witnessing it all. He’d hear a sound and turn to it—again, trying to manage that big head—his expression all serious. The dead seriousness of the infant face is a wonder to behold. Just open and listening and looking and reacting to external stimulation, internal implicit thoughts, and bodily sensations.
I just loved him. I was fascinated by him. I derived such pleasure just witnessing him. And I fiercely wanted to protect him. I felt so accountable for him and to him.
And at some point I noticed that my love for little Nolan was such an open, free thing. It came with no expectations, only hopes. It was then that I saw the twin sides of this kind of love; the pleasure that came from just experiencing, or witnessing this child, and the need to care for him, so that he would go on and thrive independent of me, for his own sake.
With time, as I worried about Climate Change, and thought about little Nolan’s future, and about the future of the world, and my career and life, it occurred to me I had the same kind of love for the natural world as I did for my son. Just witnessing it, just co-existing with it; how it just being there gives me joy. But with that joy and love comes a sense of stewardship. I realized loving someone or something gives in joy, but it takes in vulnerability. One can’t exist without the other. I came to the conclusion that these twin forces can be incredibly empowering. Such powerful feelings change the equation; such feelings could underlie a lifetime of work and sacrifice and fulfillment to their calling.
Hope is something you feel for something you love. Action is something you do to honor that hope.
It became clear to me: when you sacrifice something out of love, no matter how hard it is, it is no longer a sacrifice. It is a choice. I was choosing to take on Climate Change for the things that I loved.
[1] Lest I offend any of my ecologist friends, let me be clear that I fully understand my particular reaction to one course in no way reflects badly on the rich and wonderful field of ecology. ↩︎
[2] Did you know Wood Ducks will parasitize each others' nests if they aren’t hidden from each other in the woods? That’s good animal behavior with a solid conservation implication. ↩︎
[3] After all, football players are beloved and widely admired by the general public, and they aren’t worrying about their contributions to society! (Well, except of course, a lot of them do worry, and do make significant contributions…) ↩︎
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