Sunrise light warms the underbellies of multi-layered clouds near my home on a December morning in Boulder, Colorado.
Looking back at the human experience of this past year, it has involved tragedy for far too many families around the world, and fear and loss for a good many more. Co-inhabiting the space of loss, sorrow, dreams postponed, and relationships stalled is also a collection of lessons. I think this year finally taught the majority of us that ignoring climate change is like ignoring part of your house being on fire. Because quite literally people lost their homes to fire all over the west this last year. I grew up in Western Oregon, and it is hard to imagine the forests that I remember from my youth now immolated over such a vast expanse. Of course, record-breaking wildfires afflicted California, Washington, and many other places, as well as my current home state of Colorado. For those not living in fire-prone ecosystems, this past year also delivered more hurricanes than have ever been recorded in an Atlantic hurricane season. We also know that these storms carried more water and energy than they have in the past, and they tended to stall out once they made landfall, delivering unprecedented deluges to the land below. This water that is driven inland by battering winds falls on a landscape with fewer wetlands than at any point in the holocene, thanks to our industrious activities. Without wetlands to absorb moisture over large scales, catastrophic flooding is the result, and frequently in communities built ill-advisedly on floodplains.
Not to ignore the elephant in the room, there are also the lessons that COVID teaches us, should we care to pause and listen. Why is it that COVID-19 was able to make the leap from bat populations into humans? Ultimately, I think the answer comes down to the simple count of how many of us human beings there are on planet Earth at this moment in time. Via our quest for dietary protein, we have come to dominate Earth, and in many places protein takes the form of wild animals, and specifically bats in the case of COVID-19. We ourselves are a monoculture, from a biological species point of view. When one looks at wild places, what is striking is the biodiversity and the interconnectedness of successful, persistent life. Sir David Attenborough does an exemplary job conveying this tapestry of richness in his most recent magnum opus, "A Life on Our Planet." How successfully, then, will a monoculture survive and persist? As Attenborough advocates, we need to invest ourselves in re-wilding the planet and becoming custodians of its biodiversity.
Along with the difficult lessons, I feel like there has also been hope and a re-discovery of the importance of the relationships in our lives. I found an opportunity to connect more with my wife, and we now go on long walks together with the dog on most mornings before I have to retreat upstairs to the home office. I also get to hear my boys playing their instruments throughout the day. At larger scales, and despite a pandemic, more people in the United States participated in a democratic election than ever before in the history of the country. On average, the people have stated that they want a leader who will attempt to aggressively address climate change, and to do so while creating jobs in the process. For all of our sakes, I hope he succeeds. Imagine what could be accomplished if we really tried, and if we all began to pull in a constructive direction? We got to the moon once, could we not also figure out how to live more sustainably on this planet, our only home? Do we really have a choice?
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