My friend Julia is a conservation biologist who is constantly
dismayed at the spoilage we humans wreak on the Earth, our home. “I
don’t get it, Angie,” she said. “All other animals know not to soil
their nests. Why should humans be different?”
Well, we don’t soil our nests, I said. Our houses are clean.
In fact, we go to terrific lengths to make sure that we have the
cleanest, shiniest, newest-looking houses possible. Not only that, we
spare no expense to ensure that our houses are as warm or cool, wired,
well-plumbed and well-lit as we could wish. They are big. They have
beautiful lawns; no bugs; paved driveways. We take great care
of our nests. In fact, our nests are the envy of the animal kingdom;
why do think all those mice and bugs are always trying to come inside?
(Nice try, mice. Build your own.)
But when Julia says nest, she's not referring to our houses. She means the planet, or at least the parts of the planet that we inhabit. There are quite a few ways to consider that:
• house
• city lot
• block
• neighborhood
• city
• county
• state
• watershed
• power grid
• agricultural region
• food distribution network
• climate zone
• tectonic plate
• country
• continent
• trade route
• global supply chain
• planet
• solar system
and so on. The difference between the mouse and me is that the actions I take to build and tend to my nest reach far beyond the four walls of my house and wherever in my next-door neighbor's yard I pick up some couch stuffing.
My couch stuffing—let's say the cotton part—could very well come from Georgia or New Zealand or India. And the nature of industrialization, and even more the nature of global industrialization, is that I don't have to make the couch or worry about where the stuffing comes from.
If the mouse uses up all of the couch stuffing (fat chance), she'll see it with her own eyes and she will immediately feel its lack. That's what we call a feedback loop, and hers is very short. We have a feedback loop too, but ours is LONG. If I use up all the cotton—well, I'm never going to use up all the cotton, because I'm just one person. But let's say the entire couch-buying public uses up all the cotton. Or better yet, let's say, the couch-buying public creates such a demand for cheap cotton that Georgia and New Zealand and India use all kinds of pesticides to make it quicker and easier to grow lots of cotton.
This pesticide might degrade the soil in these places and run off into the groundwater, which could eventually make it to the ocean, where it might cause all of a certain species of fish to be born without a left fin. Then entire schools of fish, instead of swimming in straight lines, would start swimming in clockwise circles and interfering with the ocean currents. Eventually, some very observant meteorologist would notice that the typhoons off New Zealand are spinning backwards and the story would be picked up by the Chicago Tribune. A group of eager meteorology students from Northwestern would take a class trip to New Zealand, where one of them would pick up a local ichthyologist in a bar. After a weeklong romance, the ichthyologist would wake up one morning and say "Remind me again what you're doing here?" and he would tell her, and she would say, "Funny, that reminds me of this weird thing that's been happening with the cuttlefish in the last few years . . . "
For the sake of keeping this short I will say that her cousin is a cotton farmer whose child also happened to be born without a left arm, and they finally put two and two together.
Eventually, the New Zealand EPA outlaws pesticide use in cotton farming, raising the price of New Zealand cotton. The couch manufacturers then start buying their cotton from India, where the meteorologists have other things to worry about during typhoon season, but after a generation or so they too catch on and eventually the American couch-buying public is astonished to learn that couches have become more expensive, and they start buying used couches off of Craigslist.
Ahem. This is obviously a fictional scenario; in real life it would never happen so quickly. But you get the idea: the feedback loop is long and winding and subject to the caprices of fate.
The moral of the story is this: if we as a species think it in our best interests to behave as the animals do and keep our nest clean, we should not go to Crate and Barrel and buy a new couch when we need one. Better to simply go next door and rescue the couch in the back yard before it starts to rain.
Julia Frost Nerbonne, this is for you.