The Thread

Famous quotes are good ways to start essays; I read the quote, feel connected to it in some way, and then compare it’s relevance to the current moment. One that I have heard often in environmental circles is John Muir’s “when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” In essence, this is the study of ecology: how various species interact in a given ecosystem. 

For most of my environmental education, there has been a clear thread of connection between the actions of modern humans and the desecration of rivers, air, mountains, and forests. Nature is always defined in contrast to urban life; for many people nature is a place we go, not a place we are part of. But nature is not a place, it is an act. Nature does not stop where the pavement starts. 

Nature in motion is the seedling emerging from winter dormancy, the sunlight fading the color from a tablecloth left out all summer, rivers of rain washing down neighborhood streets after a downpour, the air that I breathe filled with particles of plants, bacteria, and molecules. Ivy wrapping itself around any fencepost or tree it can find. Wind blowing pollen from the trees in quantities that coat the car windshields in our driveways. Nature is the act of life, and of death. No amount of carbon in the atmosphere or pollution in a river will stop the act of Nature – it will seek equilibrium with the inputs it is given. 

The equilibrium that is eventually reached will not necessarily be one that is habitable for many of the current species we are familiar with, including ourselves. This is where it is important to recognize that humans – and the urban environments that we build, live, and play in – are as much a part of Nature as a faraway forest. The pollution that we output never truly goes away. It resurfaces in the lungs of children who live near power plants, in the breastmilk of mothers, and as cancers in communities downstream or downwind of military experiments.

By separating “pristine” Nature from the act of Nature, it becomes easy to disassociate the causes and effects of our proverbial “tugging” on nature, and to disentangle ourselves from Nature. I myself am guilty of preferring mountain wilderness to the urban jungle, of longing to hear the rush of a river instead of the rush of the highway. But that desire to get away from it all is exactly what I realize I must fight against. The city is my home; I spend the majority of my days here, so why have I relegated it to a lower status? 

What we do in our cities absolutely affects the global environment; we know that climate change is caused by an increase in emissions from human enterprise. Yet because the current infrastructure supports the status quo, nature as a separate entity remains entrenched in the design of urban policy. It could be different, and my own efforts to reshape how I envision Nature is a deliberate act. I actively seek the thread that attaches me to the rest of the world -wherever I may be – and think about what I’m tugging on.