coming home

When I was young, my father taught me to hunt ducks in cypress swamps that are hundreds of years old. Those trees are dying now. Rising salty oceans make it hard for their roots to survive. Their primary seed disperser, the Carolina parakeet, has been extinct for over a hundred years. How do I live with the fact that I might outlive these forests? That they might survive only in memory?

This is the question I opened my Watson year with. I’ve sought out stories like the cypress trees—stories that show us that our world is not constant.

I started this year thinking about loss. That’s the story that climate change and the biodiversity crisis tell us. Things are gone. There is less life on this planet. But I don’t think these big, big stories really capture the way people experience the world. There is no amount of “climate adaptation” or “resilience” or “ecosystem restoration” that will save the cypress swamps I grew up near.

So much of this year has been spent trying to shift my way of thinking about environmental issues. I’ve found myself less interested in understanding how we solve problems—and more in understanding how we live through them. We spend much energy in trying to undo things that cannot be undone. I fear we are turning a blind eye to what we can create in moments like the climate crisis.

Grief and change ask people what they value most in the world. What has captivated me about this year are the spaces where humans and non-humans are carving out new lives for themselves. Change allows us a chance for new encounters, for new ways of being-together.

Below are snippets of audio collected through the past year, each from a different place, each presenting a story of the new cultivation of meaning.

I hope these stories give you a sense of what I’m trying to convey. I’ll leave you with one more.

Last August, just as I started my Watson, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, Always Coming Home. In the opening lines of this book, Le Guin asks the following:

As I read Le Guin, I thought about this tension between past and future, remembering and imagining. As we sit with the past, what lies under the great bell-curved Hill of Possibility? Taking the dead seriously, acknowledging the worlds we have lost and worlds we will lose, means that we must understand this world as a process of constant creation. We are making ourselves anew. Over and over again.

Over the past year, this has been a hard position for me to think through. The aim of the next section is to aid in doing that.

This is an exercise to help us think about the future, to help us imagine good possible things for ourselves.

Take one or two minutes to make a short list of the people or places or things that you most enjoy in life. This could be a town, a person, a hobby, a favorite food, an experience.

Note that this exercise works best the more specific you are (e.g. "the big oak tree in my grandparents' yard" instead of "trees" or "hiking with my partner" instead of "being outside").

Once you have finished, press submit and continue on.

I don't expect you to be able to give a clear-cut answer about how you might "endure" in the face of loss, about how you might "survive." Moving through loss is a process of constant experimentation. 

What has been most visible for me in the past year is that loss provides a moment of disjuncture. Moments of loss force us to return to our values. Why do we do the things we do? Why does it matter that something is gone? The year I applied for the Watson, I lost both of my grandfathers. While I was on my Watson year, I lost one of my childhood friends. Both instances pushed me towards a greater care for the people in my life—of nurturing and enjoying the time I have with people.

In Brazil, I learned that wildlife veterinarians have the single largest suicide rate of any profession in the country. My friend and colleague Kai, a veterinarian, explained this to me as follows: In Brazil, where deforestation and environmental crime are paramount crises, vets are people who witness death on a massive scale. Still, living inside this loss, the vets I worked with found value in the lives of non-humans, in treating them as thinking, emotional, cognizant beings to a degree I never had. They showed me a new way to attune my body to the world. My colleagues were so skilled in understanding an animal’s smallest movements. This knowledge had come from decades of losing animals, of seeing wildlife die. But for people like Kai, this loss transformed into a way of knowing-with other creatures, of endeavoring to save them.

Values emerge from communities on their own. They are not often something we can presage with any sort of accuracy. I remember a conversation I had with my friend Iben, an organizer at the housing justice cooperative I worked at in Indonesia. We spoke about the floods in North Jakarta, about how people living in flooded neighborhoods put every effort into rebuilding their homes—raising floors, jacking up cars, moving their lives to the upper levels of their houses. I knew this was a difficult way to live, but I understood why it happened. People care about the places they live. Where matters more than how. Still, it matters who articulates this valuing of place, as well as how it is articulated. Iben hates when people call this kind of survival "resilience." "The only people who use the term 'climate resilience,'" he said, "are people who have never had to live with climate change."

How might you feel if I offered that term, "resilient," as consolation for the things that have been crossed off for you above? "Don’t worry. You’re resilient. You’ll bounce back." Meaning, for the Jakartans affected by floods, comes not in the capacity to endure, but in the capacity to live—to make choices. To decide to stay. To choose what to value.

So I’ll ask more broadly, when you think about the kind of future you want for yourself and for the planet, what comes to mind? What values might you turn to decide the kind of future you want? In asking this, I don't simply mean descriptors, like "greater biodiversity," that have become all too cliché in climate discussions. What does biodiversity mean? Why have it? Do we want more life? More species? More ways of being? When you ask yourself what matters, I want you to drill down, a toddler asking why, why, why. I think it is easy to rest on notions of a good life, big weighty words like biodiverse, or sustainable, or healthy, without actually questioning what these phrases mean in concrete terms. 

There are plenty of ways you can move outwards from questions about values: where they come from, how they conflict with one another, who is allowed to communicate them. But value provides a crucial foundation for understanding how we make meaning in the world. 

For me, much of this is about moving from the big story of climate change and species loss to the small stories. Anything we call a solution will be for all of us to figure out.

When I presented this content as a roundtable in Saint Paul, I concluded with a quote from sociologist Bruno Latour. I'll conclude with it here as well:

I’ll leave you, alongside Latour, with these questions. Who are you? What do you value? Who is in this with you?