The Daily: 24 July 2023

I took large chunks of the weekend — in which I could not do much vigorous work outside for all the Canadian smoke and could not write much for all the bugs in this machine — to clean up my house. (I think it’s actually not this machine but something iCloud-derived because it’s affecting my phone also, to a lesser extent. Son#1 says ‘they did something’ at Apple and now there is authentication mayhem… I don’t even use iCloud… ) I have sort of conquered the mess in the garage, mostly by throwing lots of damaged things in the bin. This included four boxes of kids’ books. Not even old store inventory, but childhood treasures from my own kids. I have photos of what I want to replace, but that was a sad afternoon.

After that, I thought I was done with the tossing, but my basement had other ideas.

It had been getting more smelly down there, not less, even though the water was gone and only a few damp patches remained in the foundation and concrete floor. I could not figure out what was wrong because the places that smelled the worst didn’t get wet. I didn’t want to sniff too much and follow my nose to the source because I’m not sure anything that smells like swamp rot ought to be deeply inhaled. So I poked around a bit and finally discovered that two wood chairs — chairs that I had painstakingly refinished not too many years ago — were covered in blue-green mold. The rugs I had draped over these chairs probably brought both the rot and the moisture, though, again, they were not the wet rugs but the merely damp rugs. However, now they are the garden weed mat rugs because they were also coated in that poisonous smelling blue-green mold.

I found a few other things supporting growth I don’t want in my basement. All of it was weird and all spread out all over. A butter stamp on one of the upper book shelves, when nothing around it was affected. The bin of newspaper that was in the driest part of the basement (for obvious reasons), but only the bin itself, not any paper surfaces. A terracotta pot that contained nothing but potting soil. The soil was fine. The outside of the pot was growing stuff. Except for the chairs, none of this stuff had large patches of mold. I probably could have cleaned it, only it was all porous material, and it’s impossible to eradicate the main part of the mold — that which is inside the surface. All I would have been doing is wiping off the fruiting bodies.

So it all went away, some to the bin, some to the side of the road for flood debris pick-up — which fortunately has not happened yet, our town being somewhat strapped on that front. (We don’t have town waste disposal; it’s private contract… hence we have to wait on the contractors to decide that they have an overtime budget for this extra work.) After taking it out, I went after whatever I thought might be susceptible to further growth with anti-microbial cleaner. The only good thing about this project is that it is cool in the basement.

While I was on this project, I figured I would finally tackle moving the houseplants to the front porch for what remains of the summer. This is a project that never quite got done because it was too cold for too long and then I got too busy with the garden. Also, this entailed cleaning the front porch which I also hadn’t done for the same reasons. As I was sweeping up maple mess and cleaning hair from the neighborhood cats off my porch seating, I found more stuff for the bin. This was not flood related. Some of it — rusted garden tools and odd bits of twine and broken pots that I once thought I could glue together — really should have been tossed before I moved here. In fact, a few useless things — things I really wanted to repair but never figured out how — probably went through at least two moves. So all that went away. Furthermore, the rugs that were in the seating area are just trashed. They aren’t molded, but they are faded to a faint greyish brown, no matter the original colors, and nature muck has been ground into the weave. So they are also weed mats now.

In the end I had a pile of trash, a bit of recycling, and a few rugs repurposed for the garden. I don’t like throwing things out, hence the broken pots I moved across the country. (In my defense, they had sentimental value. One was from France and the other from a Pueblo potter. I really didn’t want to chuck them… but they refused to be glued and I don’t know any other method to repair a pot.) But sometimes you just need to give up on things, and this flood has me in give up mode. But it also has made me think hard on what could be saved, both of the human detritus in my life and the land itself. This is not just a matter of being able to repair or repurpose something, it’s also a value question. What should be saved? And it’s part of a larger question that many people are trying to answer these days: how?

There are many attempts to describe how to save the world. There are books and blogs, countless essays, lists and TEDTalks, all talking about the ways we might preserve… things… And while I was tossing the flood debris, it occurred to me that we rarely discuss what those things might be. I think the central question is not how, but what. What do we save? We can’t answer the how if we aren’t clear on the what.

The assumption is commonly that we must save the human portion of the world. ‘World’ does imply humanity. It’s derived from an Old English word, meaning ‘human affairs’, though it also can mean ‘a very long time’. And there is much crumbling in the human world. We do need to fix human affairs. I’m just not convinced that we need to save all of it. I think to fix what is wrong, much of what is considered ‘the world’ of humans needs to be jettisoned. Some of the core parts of modern human culture — hierarchy and status, our ideas on private ownership and extractive economics, separation and isolation from ‘nature’ — are the things we need saving from. We need to collectively decide — that is, as a species, not merely the wants of the folks with loud voices — what part of the human world is causing the problems. And then we need to eradicate all that. Then we can save the world.

We also need to recognize that the world is not just humans, not even for the world of human affairs. There is much to be saved from us, to be sure. But we need to remember that we are a part of this planet. Our lives are interwoven with the whole thing. We cannot save ourselves without saving a great deal of the rest of nature because we are part of nature and dependent upon the whole thing functioning well. We can have no well-being without a healthy biosphere.

The tricky thing about that is we don’t even know all the beings that support us. When we do talk about preserving nature, we tend to focus on the warm fuzzies, and we usually decide that those adorable critters with eyes and a reasonable number of appendages need to be kept far from us in order to survive us. But that is not the case at all. In fact, we almost don’t need the warm fuzzies, though they do make life more enjoyable and joy is a biophysical need.

But the warm fuzzies depend upon the same things we do— microbes and plants and earth systems — and we all need to be embedded within these communities of beings in order to live. There are many millions of other beings within our very bodies, regulating everything from digestion to neural function. Nature is not out there separate from humanity. Nature is inside us, surrounding us, enfolding us into a vast being of which we are merely cells. Nature does not function when we try to separate ourselves, and we do not function either, even if all we do is try — because it is not possible to truly separate ourselves. If we truly achieved the independence from material nature that we so desire in this culture, we would die within seconds. And then our bodies would revert to interdependent matter anyway…

I could not begin to know what all keeps us alive. Most of the essential things are not even known enough to be named, and they all live in ways that I can’t experience, nor sense in any meaningful way. So I can’t make a list of what to save. However, I can look at human cultures that have lasted a long time and infer that their way of life probably didn’t destroy the biosphere. In these traditional cultures there are commonalities. I can also look at my garden, the place I grow the food I eat, and come up with a list of beings and things whose lack would make producing and distributing food very difficult. Finally, I can study the few ecosystems that are still in balance and deduce the necessities, both for human survival and for planetary survival. If I can do that, other humans can as well. But here is a short list of what we should all seek to save if we mean to save anything at all.

Number one: soil. This is not just one thing, but it functions, when it functions, as a single organism. Soil includes sediment, organic material from decayed organisms, water, air, microbes, fungi, roots, insects, and small animals. There are so many components tied together in such complex webs of interdependence that it is difficult to comprehend and it is impossible to remove any given part without weakening and ultimately destroying the whole. Humans have gotten into the bad habit of conflating soil with dirt and, from that, thinking we can just add what nutrients are lacking or just kill off what we believe to be harmful. Both will destroy the balance and functioning of soil. Both will kill not only the things we want to kill, but most things within or dependent upon soil, including the plants we want to grow, including us. Both will reduce soil to lifeless dirt that can support nothing and that can not even maintain its structure. Soil traps water and nutrients and builds up over time. Dirt sheds water and nutrients because it has nothing in it to bind and retain either, and so dirt erodes, usually very quickly. It may take years to build up a layer of soil using the best composting and regeneration techniques or decades to let natural processes grow topsoil, but mature soil will resist erosion. Dirt is created with just a few applications of herbicide or synthetic fertilizers, and then it is a matter of minutes to wash away an entire field under a moderate rainfall. (Dirt is, by the way, a very good comparison for the life humans would have if we could be independent and free from all other beings. Gives nasty, brutish and short new meaning.)

Number two: trees. Trees may not generate the most oxygen for the planet’s atmosphere; that designation goes to oceanic plankton. But trees clean the air directly around us of carbon compounds and release oxygen directly into the air we breathe. Trees do much more than contribute to creating the atmosphere that supports human life. Trees are an essential part of soil, both in its creation and its retention. Trees hold the surface together. Trees also paradoxically create pore spaces in the soil for water and air, making soil as porous as a sponge — and just as effective as a sponge at holding moisture and anything suspended in that water. Trees trap sunlight and combine it with carbon from the air and turn this mixture into sugar, food for trees and food for other living beings. Trees, herbaceous plants, and other photosynthesizing beings are the life support systems on this planet. There is no food and no breathable air without photosynthesis, and trees provide not merely the basics but many kinds of wonderfully flavorful and nutritious food. Trees also provide cooling shade and protection from heavy wind and rain. Trees are, themselves, organisms of many beings, being bound up with soil and hosting myriad others in their bodies, from microbes that regulate leaf respiration (what we have named ‘guard cells’) to the animals that make their homes in wood and branch to the organisms that break down dead tree tissues, releasing bound nutrients back into the soil and atmosphere. Trees are the reason we exist.

Three: oceans. Or rather, the ocean, since are all one vast body of interconnected water. I can’t even begin to list all the benefits of a functioning ocean. But I can say that a destabilized ocean has been a factor in most extinction events and all of the big five. A dying ocean is also a large part of the human-mediated extinction event that we are experiencing now. The ocean is the Earth’s temperature regulator, and in combination with the atmosphere, the circulatory system for the planet. The ocean produces most of the mass on Earth’s surface, from carbon-based bodies to the atmosphere to most formations of sedimentary rock. The ocean, comprising over seventy percent of the Earth’s surface, is, for all intents and purposes, where Earth-beings live. Most of the planet’s organisms and life forms and all of the planet’s surface systems are part of the ocean. Furthermore, we are beginning to understand that a living, changing planet with subduction and crustal formation, mantle convection and exchange with the deep places within Earth, are also all bound up with a functioning ocean. There is water on the Earth’s surface because of interior convection and eruption, but it is also true that convection is iteratively dependent on complex ocean chemistry, ocean heat gradients and ocean circulation. Earth would not be alive without the ocean. Nor will we.

And the last thing for today, because this short list is already too long and will give us quite enough to be going on with: freshwater. Rivers, lakes, groundwater, streams. All bodies of salt-free water are essential to save, and yet we treat all of them as sewers. Freshwater is more than just the main component in our bodies. Freshwater is its own body, many bodies. Freshwater is an organism that grows and changes — and dies. Like soil, it is a compound organism, composed of what we call inorganic and organic materials; but all are living components, from the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to the beds of lakes and rivers to the lifeforms that live within and near water bodies. The ocean is the planet’s circulatory system, but freshwater bodies bring that circulation to the land. Moreover, most of the organisms that do not make their home in the ocean, live in freshwater bodies, particularly where ocean meets land.

I realize these are very broad strokes. It is hard to see the hows when the whats are so much bigger than us. But we have impacts. Obviously. If what we do had no effects on these other beings, then there would be nothing to save. There would be no destruction and destabilization. What we do has effects because there are so many of us doing it, but also because what we do is so particularly, essentially harmful. We have concentrated natural poisons and invented many, many more, spreading them around in abundance. We have altered Earth system chemistry and structures, doing everything from blowing up mountains to tossing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. We have made killing the central feature in our lives. And we take much more than we need to live in order to generate wealth and status, only giving back our noxious waste streams. We have effects, and most of them are bad, biophysically and morally — which really ought to be the same thing.

And that is the crucial clue to getting from what to how. The best way to do things that save the world is to make harming it immoral. There should be no difference in our emotional or judgmental reactions to killing a child versus spreading pesticides over a cornfield. The effects of both actions are the same. The pesticide will kill the child, as well as a host of other beings. The pesticide will kill the child because it kills a host of other beings — as well as being poisonous to the child in and of itself. Because life is interdependent, it is impossible to kill and contain the effects. By the same mechanism, it is also impossible to create and sustain life without creating ripples of beneficence. Especially if we choose to support the supporting organisms. Plant and nurture a tree and you will be saving the world. Protect local rivers and lakes and you will be saving the world. Build a garden of healthy soil and you will be saving the world. Stop using plastics that all ultimately end up in the ocean and you will be saving the world. You will also be saving that child, perhaps your own child. And you will be saving yourself.

This sort of moralizing can be applied to everything we do. In traditional cultures, this is called wisdom. The thing about how to save the world is that most of the proposed methods do not save the world. Not even the majority of human affairs. What we are talking about when we talk about saving the world is mostly saving our economic systems and all the associated detritus. We want to save our cars and grid energy systems and electronic gadgets and global supply chains and industrial food production and plastic crap — all things that spread indiscriminate death all over the planet — and at the same time not kill ourselves. And this is impossible because we are not separate from the planet — we depend upon the beings that we are killing. It is unwise to spread harm, not least because harm will always propagate through the system and come back to you. Wise people know how to navigate the balance of needs within a larger organism. This wisdom of balance is both the what and the how. When you know what to save, then how follows.

I should point out that if we were wise enough to recognize the organisms that support us, I would not have spent the weekend throwing out things I couldn’t save. Some I might never have acquired. Or I would have had more durable versions and probably the skills and resources necessary to restoration. I might live in a place that was not as susceptible to destruction. But most importantly, there would not be this imbalance and destabilization in the organisms that support my life and every other life. There would not be floodwaters in my mountainside home if we had wisely refrained from adding so much heat to the planet’s surface. Any logical being could accurately predict that this would not end well for us. A large number of humans did, in fact, make such claims. But we were too busy saving the shiny things of human want to bother with saving the world — including ourselves. And now here we are with the wrong set of what and no clue on the how.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023