My Little Corner of the World

So, was I really going to spend the whole time here talking to you about how I couldn't maintain the plans I made to save the world from climate change? About how I failed my New Year's resolution so we were all going to die?

The other day, I had to correct a student who made fun of a tiny sculpture another student made out of a kneaded eraser I let him use.

The kneaded eraser is like a fidget spinner, allowing a kid to manipulate something with his left hand while he completes his work with his right hand. It's better though, because it actually functions as an eraser and allows for bits of creative endeavor in the form of sculpture. I love handing a kid a kneaded eraser to work with when they can't sit still and focus. It's all about focus.

There was one kid for whom it didn't work because he didn't need a fidget and could focus already and he got distracted from his work by playing with the thing. I'm learning to hand out the kneaded erasers judiciously.

So, back to the student who made fun of the other kid's tiny dinosaur sculpture.

"That's a terrible dinosaur," she said looking over her shoulder, away from her work. "It doesn't even look like a dinosaur."

I think she was aggravated because I'd given her the kneaded eraser that she'd dirtied the time before and she wanted the clean one. I looked at her until she made eye contact with me.

"Please don't make judgments regarding someone else's artwork. People are where they are in there work and moving forward from there, not from where someone else thinks they should be."

"Why not?"

"Because I want you to use compassion?"

"You can't change the world."

"I can work to change my little corner of the world and in it, I want people to express compassion for each other."

And then she went off on a rant about how her life didn't contain any compassion so why should she give any to anyone else? It made me sad. I neglected to point out that she currently held my pastels in her hand and was working on my toned and textured paper even though she was there, ostensibly, to learn her math facts. That was compassion, wasn't it? I had figured that if I could teach her to focus for longer and longer periods at a time, that was as important a lesson as any. But instead of lecturing her, I let her rant while I thought of my own corner of the world and what I needed to do with it.

I did want a freer sense of learning than I had seen in the rest of the world around me, one with less judgment and more encouragement. I wanted an environment in which students found curiosity and the love of learning instead of the drudgery of worksheets and learning to the test.

And I still wanted to do my part to save the world from climate change. But what was that role? Believe it or not, I've been thinking about climate change almost daily since I last wrote to you.

In his book, The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell stated that we do ourselves and nature a disservice by mentally separating ourselves from the natural world. We are not separate. He wrote that where people have integrated themselves into the scenario, the local environment around them had become more beautiful even if it is urban. An urban setting is often thought of as separate from nature. Don't think of cities as apart from nature, he said, but find a way to foster nature within them and they become better habitat for animals and people. At least, I think that's what he meant.

I loved his book.

But I read it two or three pages at a time just before I fell asleep every night. I can't entirely say that he wrote everything I believe he wrote or if my mind just took a line or two and dreamed on it and turned it into something else every night.

Either way, I loved his book. I plan to read it again. I don't do that very often.

This book changed my world view. It really made me think about how I am not just a being, but a colony of beings, including bacteria and mites, that cannot survive without the other beings around me. These include the people I depend upon, Mike, Nick, my friends, my acquaintances, and myriad people who invented the infrastructure I live within every day. I still want to thank the guy who invented guardrails.

It's not just people that I depend on.

Three Western red cedar trees hold my house in place on the steep hillside. I am grateful to these ancient beings. I sit under them and look up into their boughs. I watch how droplets of rain hang from the tips of their needles like jewels. I think of their roots, clinging to rocks and holding the earth underneath me. I foster the seedlings they plant in my flower pots. They have a network of plants and fungus that grows around them.

The greenery around me freshens the air with oxygen and I in turn breathe out carbon dioxide for them. Have you ever wondered the effects of looking at your houseplants when you water them? Do they breathe in the nice CO2 with the same joy with which I breathe in their exhaled oxygen? We are lovely together, the plants and I. We depend on each other.

But we are still exhaling too much carbon dioxide to maintain the nice balance we need. Coral reefs are bleaching. Polar ice is melting. The trees can't keep up and as an integral part of this environment, I want to keep trying to move toward a better balance.

Balance is the key to a fruitful life.

So, did you know that some bright scientist/inventor at a company called Blue Planet has figured out a way to harden concrete building materials with carbon? They're even saying it is more flexible to endure earthquakes.

I really think that Andy Weir said it right, "We need to science the shit out of this problem."

And it may be my job to tell you about these brilliant new ideas and discuss whether or not they're going to work for us.

No, I don't come up with the ideas, but I can definitely spread them and think about their consequences. Maybe that's my role in saving my little corner of the world.

And maybe I should start washing out my Ziploc bags.

Thank you for listening, jules



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Aliens May Be Watching Us Burn Ourselves Up

Do you remember your New Year's resolution this year?

Tell me the first feeling you had when you thought about what it was. It was failure, right? You got a heavy feeling in your gut and you felt ashamed to open your mouth. You wished you hadn't told anyone about it at all. You wished you hadn't even made a New Year's resolution.

If that's not you, then great. Now, I feel even worse. You've lost ten pounds. You're exercising every other day without fail. You're eating healthier than you ever have. You feel great. You can wear clothes that haven't fit you in ten years.

Great. Just great.

Not me. Well, I have been eating better than ever, but I'm still not losing weight. It's not fair how a body conserves more energy every single time it goes without during a diet. Fat people aren't sloppy over-eaters. They're people who have tried the hardest and  whose bodies have gone all war-mode rationing and using every single calorie to the greatest extent so they won't starve to death. Isn't that ironic? That fat people are the ones whose bodies think they are starving. Fuck.

Of course, I can't find that article now written by a nutrition expert at Johns Hopkins. You're going to think I'm just a fat person who made the whole thing up as an excuse. Fine. Think what you want. Diets don't work. They just don't. That's what I believe and I'm sticking to it. You can believe what you want, especially if you're a skinny-mini who has never struggled with more than four pounds from your so-called optimum weight.

Some of us haven't had it as easy as you.

I really meant to talk about my New Year's resolution today. I didn't resolve to lose weight. I won't. Not ever.

Mine was to look at my own carbon footprint and see what ways I could shrink it further, to educate myself about what is happening due to climate change, and to encourage the world to "science the shit out of that problem." Thank you Andy Weir. I love that line from The Martian.

I may not have posted in a long time. I started a new job and it required my whole brain for a while. Then, I got a cold and that saturated my whole brain for a while. And  then I felt absolute certainty that we're all going to die when the climate changes and the only animals that are going to survive are jellyfish, rats, and roaches. And hopelessness weighed my brain down and it sat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for a while where scientists have discovered that sea life there also has plastic in their guts.

Great. Just great. We're all going to die.

Eventually, a new species will reach the pinnacle of the food chain. I imagine intelligent aliens that might have been wondering about contacting us to warn us about other aliens that might come to Earth to kill us and consume all our resources. If we can't get onboard with sustainability, they won't even bother since we're killing ourselves just as efficiently on our own. Hopefully, they'll come to Earth anyway and quietly collect some monarch butterflies, the white rhino, and some of the undiscovered fungi in the Amazon that cures cancer and heart disease before it goes extinct along with all of humanity. Maybe they'll 'harvest' a few humans for their collection and plant them on a planet that could harbor our forms of life. Maybe we are an experiment in a huge laboratory. Maybe we're an exhibit in a zoo.

Okay, I'm back. It's hard to think big. It really is. There are so many possibilities I hadn't thought of, that I don't know.

But let's look at the ozone layer. The hole in the ozone is getting smaller. Did I already tell you that? I think I did. It is a tiny ray of hope for humanity. We had a problem and together, we solved it.

So, if we can beat that problem as a population, can we also work science magic on climate change as well.

The problem with my New Year's resolution is that there is no way for me to get a satisfactory outcome using a model of an independent individual acting on her own. This is a global fucking problem so there isn't going to be a single intelligent cowboy played by Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt who can solve it for us and bring Earth back to a balance that we had before the industrial revolution. (Notice that the hero is suddenly a white male in the movie. I hate when that happens. Somebody told me recently that it was a woman, Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the structure of DNA and not Watson and Crick. So maybe Sandra Bullock should save the world from climate change. What do you think?)

Climate change is something that must be achieved, not even as a nation, but as the whole of humanity working together. Humanity need to liberally fund climate change research so someone finds a way. Maybe multiple scientists can find multiple ways. Humanity needs to pull together to do what is recommended, even if it feels like we're rationing rubber for tires, sugar, and gas like our grandparents did during WW II.

You know that new movie that's coming out today, Pacific Rim? In that story, everyone in the world unites to defeat the aliens? You know how people in the movie Independence Day suddenly lost all their desire for war and started working together using their intelligence to outwit the aliens bent on genocide? That.

We need to think that way. We. All of us. Almost all countries in the world except for us have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump has no concern for our future. You can see that with the pipelines and the drilling in the Arctic circle and the reduction in National Park lands. The other country that held out for a while, Syria, joined not long ago. We're the only one that's staying out. What idiots. There are a few countries that have yet to ratify it. Did you know that technically, we're still in the Paris Climate Agreement since the first time we can withdraw is just after the 2020 election. That's cool.

At least, as a whole, humanity believes a tsunami of problems are happening regarding our climate. We  recognize it. It's a start.

But will we motivate ourselves as individuals fast enough to make global changes soon enough?

I'm seeing a whole lot of inertia, even in myself.

Thank you for listening, jules