Our Connections

The following is an essay I wrote on climate change in the hopes that I'd get published in ISLE magazine.  It's a scholarly magazine which asked for submissions with regards to climate change.  

​Humans.  We are not solitary creatures.  We need to create and maintain connections with other people.   I’m a high school English teacher, and every day, when I sit down to plan my classes, it’s with the underlying assumption that a pretty large chunk of the kids who come to school each day come to hang out with friends.  They don’t show up to learn about the connotation and denotation of a particular word, or to discuss how an author sets a tone with the choice of one word over another.  They come to socialize.  For them, and for most people, nothing is more important than our personal relationships.  It’s natural, it’s normal, and it’s powerful.  I don’t think I have to work too hard to prove that we, as humans, need & crave personal connections; it’s a no-brainer for most of us.  Where I feel like I have to work harder is when I argue that a connection with nature is just as vital, even though it, too, should be a no-brainer.  

​But we are disconnected on such a profound level from nature that many don’tunderstand just how destructive and horrifying our existence on this planet is.  As an example, last spring I bought a little basil plant to put out in my teeny-tiny little garden area.  Actually, it’s not really a garden area at all: I live in a tiny condo, and there’s a section of unplanted, unused dirt in the common area by my front door, so I decided to hijack that space and plant some basil, a chili pepper, and a cherry tomato plant.  My little girl will be 4 in February, and I feel an obligation as a parent to make sure she understands where her food comes from.  So we planted our little garden, and a few days later, a slug came along and ate all of the basil.  Gabby and I were beside ourselves. The following day, I went to school and reported the destruction of my basil plant to my 7th period class.  But before I was able to relay the fabulous beer-in-a-cup solution that I found to my students (there was a witty ‘slugs are drunks’ punch line), one of my little darlings interrupted me with this gem as he rolled his eyes at me:  “Geez, Harris, what are you doing?  Just go BUY some basil and be done with it.  There are these things called grocery stores…”  

​I wanted to explain that food doesn’t just magically appear at a grocery store.  I wanted to illustrate that when an apple says “product of New Zealand,” that means it was grown & harvested in another country that’s really far away from Salem.  No Oregonian should be eating New Zealand apples!  I wanted to demonstrate how repulsive our meat industry is by walking him past a feed lot where cattle stand ankle deep in their own shit while getting fattened up for butcher so that we can buy cheap meat wrapped in cellophane in our grocery stores.  I wanted to proclaim that the “convenience” of the grocery store is a farce; it’s nothing but a very carefully constructed tableau standing on the backs of indebted farmers, migrant workers, and mother nature.  But all I could do was stand, take a deep breath, and blink those thoughts away.  There were several kids in the group who agreed with this boy, and we needed to discuss our literature.  We had already burned 5 or 6 minutes of class time, and we still needed to spend some time analyzing metaphors in “Fahrenheit 451,” a text I am certain this kid didn’t bother to read.  

​While I have some frustration at this kid who wouldn’t do his assigned reading, I still recall that conversation from six months ago because it was shocking to me to see a person so disconnected from the natural process of living that he couldn’t fathom why anyone would bother to grow their own basil.  I could have made a dozen arguments in favor of urban gardening, but none of them would have mattered.   He’d simply roll his eyes at my hippy-dippy notions and go about his day.  Sure, this kid needs lots more education, but I feel he’s an example of a significant problem: the millions of Americans who think exactly like he does – people who are happy to buy into the farce because it’s easy, convenient, and cheap.  

​There are as many explanations for ignorance as there are ignorant people.  But one explanation I find particularly destructive is our lack of connection with our environment.  The food example is one, but I could just as easily come up with handfuls of examples of people who don’t go outside.  People who have never climbed to the top of a mountain; who’ve never had a surprise encounter with a bobcat; who’ve never gazed up at a perfect blue sky from the canyon of a river and thought, “there’s no place I’d rather be, no possible way I could be happier, than right here, right now.”  Having never experienced such things, how could anyone feel a love for the natural world?  They’ll never understand why I get angry every time I eat a grocery store tomato because they’ve never tried a fresh one.  Without a connection to nature, there seems to be little problem with our lifestyles, and little need for urgent action.  

​I’ve taught American Literature for 6 years now, and I love it all!  I do – from Bradstreet to Poe, Longfellow to Twain, Steinbeck to Hemingway, I love teaching them.  I also love nature.  After some time, I realized that a careful reading of important works of American Literature is also a careful reading of our relationship with nature.  Melville portrayed nature as malevolent, mysterious, and spiritual in Moby Dick. Twain showed us how society corrupts and nature heals in Huck Finn.  Steinbeck likens human experience to that of animals in almost everything he wrote: Of Mice and Men, anyone?  Hemingway breaks our hearts when he sends the sharks to eatSantiago’s fish.  We love these works because they speak to us; they convey universal truths.  One of the most important truths is our dependence on and our connection to our natural world.  Nature is a part of who we are, and great literature reveals that.   Even among the greats, one author stands out every single year: Ralph Waldo Emerson.  My kids love him; they want to ignore every other author for the rest of the year so that they can read more Emerson.  Why?  Because he celebrates the individual; because he advocates for divinity within and among us; because he recognizes the power and beauty of the human spirit, which is connected, intrinsically, to nature.  He articulates better than any other American writer, our necessary connection to nature.  

Like Emerson, it seems to be necessary, for the thoughtful among us, anyway, to seek the solitude and guidance of nature.  There’s something about the connection with nature and the wild that heals and makes clear the important things in life.  As Emerson puts it in his Natureessay:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground…I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. (268)

Emerson writes that we experience the divine in our communion with nature.  That somehow through this connection, we become better able to see past ourselves and our selfish considerations to the greater things in life.  From Emerson’s standpoint, the destruction of our environment is nothing less than sacrilege.  When we destroy our connection with nature, we destroy our connection to the Sacred; we destroy our ability to connect with one another.  And what do we get at such a cost?  

​Very few of our personal relationships are effortless; we have to work to maintain our relationships with the people we value in life.  In order to maintain a connection, we have to do things like pick up the phone, make time for a lunch date, send a birthday card.  Not super difficult things, but maintaining the connections we value requires that we participate in the relationship.  In the same way, we have to participate in our relationship with nature.  We have to be aware of our presence in nature; we have a responsibility to understand how our lives and habits have an effect on our environment.  With that understanding comes the responsibility to change our actions.  If not for the love of nature, than at least as a means of self-preservation, we must re-evaluate and repair our relationship with nature.  We, as a community and a country, have to acknowledge that our daily lives are responsible for the destruction of our environment, and it’s our duty, our responsibility, to act accordingly.  We have to stop living as if there’s always going to be basil at the grocery store; otherwise, one day it’s simply going to be gone.