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A Communion With Our Trash 

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I really don’t want anything more to worry about than I’m worrying about already. 
 
But like you, deep in the reptilian part of my brain I’m alert to threats even though (much of the time) there’d be comfort in being oblivious to them (or, as noted here recently, “choosing to remain blissfully unaware”). 
 
Well disregarding that survival instinct, I finally dove into articles I’ve been accumulating on life forms that are co-habiting with our plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and, far more arrestingly, how all life forms on earth (including these garbage patch creatures) have been ingesting, inhaling and storing micro- and nano-particles of plastic within our bodies for some time now. In a kind of poetic justice for our civilization, it appears that we’re finally being occuped by our own trash.
 
I originally thought the floating co-existence of other life forms with plastic waste in the middle of the ocean was fascinating. (Maybe we could learn something from them about how to live more successfully on our contaminated planet I wondered.)  On the other hand, the notion that plastic particles have been accumulating in my body—and may have been doing so for decades—doesn’t trigger curiosity as much as dread, particularly since there’s no apparent way to get rid of it and we don’t yet understand what this lingering debris is, or isn’t, doing to us. But it’s hard to imagine “anything good.”
 
(The image above puts its own point on this quandary. Taken by photographer Chris Jordan, it shows a decomposing albatross, with the plastic that remained in this great, sea-going bird’s gut after it perished.)  
 
So what do we do with this way-too-loose-for-comfort knowledge besides inducing a little short-term oblivion to get over the initial shock?
 
All I have are a bid to raise awareness, made some time ago after life-forms were first discovered co-existing with plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and some sang froid after further realizations more recently.

Pictures of Trash Islands currency—created by some cheeky British designers and denominated in units of debris—from when the notion of living with plastic waste was still something that seemed to be happening somewhere else.

I’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a couple of times before. In 2017 I was surprised by its discovery and captivated by how some enterprising Brits were calling attention to it with “a product line” that included a Trash Islands passport, postage stamps and various denominations of paper money. As we were to learn later, there were similar garbage patches in each of our planet’s oceans—it just happened that the one in the Pacific was the largest, a “gyre” of plastic waste swirled together by ocean currents that had grown to roughly three times the size of France. 
 
When more information emerged about the life-forms that were accumulating on this debris I wrote about it again—focusing, in particular, on some scientists’ urging us to refrain from removing these islands of plastic until we could learn more about the neuston (or variety of life-forms) that were co-habiting with our debris in this “new” environment. That post was We’re All Caught in This Gyration.
 
At the time, I guess I couldn’t rule out a future where we (humans) might be able to live with and even thrive along side of our plastic waste too. These neuston might even tell us something about how to do so.
 
I was also undeterred by The Ocean Clean-up (“TOC”)’s push-back against this wait-and-study approach. TOC was the only organization with boats in the oceans’ garbage patches already, netting and removing as much of the plastic debris as possible, notwithstanding “the Sisyphean nature” of the environmental challenge (since as quickly as they could remove it, more plastic kept being thrown into the oceans to replace it.) 
 
Still, I argued for a pause so we could try and understand what was happening between the life-forms and these plastics because (from a scientific perspective) they were “responding to an alien environment in real time.” Moreover, I thought we should try to do so without pre-conceptions or “new eyes” that might also give us clues about how to better co-exist with our polluted planet going forward. As I wrote at the time:

So if we’re not so different from these tiny creatures clinging to civilization’s debris, what kind of curiosity should we bring to the transitional environment that’s resulted–a place that’s unlike anything we knew in the pre-plastics world where all humans lived only 80 years ago? 
…
A plastic-infused environment belongs to these tiny sea creatures as much as it belongs to us and it won’t be disentangled from either of our life cycles anytime soon. Of course we should bring our fullest and richest forms of curiosity to the task of understanding it.

Luckily, TOC also didn’t view its reaction as an either/or. It could get rid of as much ocean plastic as possible while also being curious about the unique accommodations that were happening on top of it. And for those who were worried about the occupying life-forms that were being “collected,” TOC had some strategies to help at least some of them too.

Some of the neuston or life forms that were found to be living with ocean plastics.

Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine have focused on the diversity of sea-life amidst this floating debris and how The Ocean Clean-Up folks (among others) have been studying and protecting them, because as TOC’s work gained greater attention other non-profits and governmental agencies also began to take a greater interest in these plastics-based ecosystems.

Two weeks ago, the Journal reported (here’s a paywall-free link) that NOAA, or America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had found 484 marine invertebrates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch representing 46 different species. Moreover, most of “these hitchhikers” were coastal species that had apparently found a way to adapt to life out in the open ocean. Despite it being “a food desert for marine life that experiences punishing temperature extremes [close to the surface],” the neuston out there appear to be both growing and reproducing.
 
The same article quoted Matthias Egger, a scientist at TOC, talking about how the neuston are faring amidst the plastic:

’They’re having a blast [and] that’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.’ 

[For example,] anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand Dr. Egger went on to say, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like microplastics. Moreover, squeeze one of them and the plastic shards spew out, he said: ‘They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.’

A piece in Wired this week elaborated on TOC’s and Dr. Egger’s responses not only to this brave new world but also to their initial efforts to remove as much of it from the oceans as possible.  It’s headline summarizes the problem this way: “Patches of floating plastic are teeming with life, and cleanup companies hauling trash out of the water risk destroying an aquatic habitat.”

In response to this criticism, we’re told that Eggers and other TOC scientists are sampling the surface water around their clean-up operation on a weekly basis “to compare the composition of neuston, to understand which species to look out for, what effect the clean-up system has [on them]. and whether there are seasonal differences in how many neuston are present.” TOC expects to announce its findings about these and other aspects of this “aquatic habitat” shortly.

In the meantime, TOC is also trying to save as many of these life-forms as possible by revamping its netting process to give anything alive that it catches multiple chances to escape. (One worry is that if large amounts of neuston are killed, it could have a negative impact on the turtles, fish, seabirds and other animals that eat them.) So TOC has increased the mesh size of the nets to allow at least some of these creatures (like blue buttons and violet snails) to pass through their nets while continuing to capture the plastic waste. In addition, TOC is moving its nets: 

slowly through the water to allow mobile species to swim away. There are lights and acoustic deterrents, underwater cameras to detect protected species such as sea turtles, and escape hatches on the underside of nets for animals that get caught. [In addition,] before hoisting the nets aboard, the crew leaves them in the water for up to an hour to give animals time to escape.

Still, some marine life remains with the plastic waste that is removed. And even for the successful escapees, the future could be complicated. Will they continue “to thrive” with plastic particles throughout their bodies or will the consequences for them be far more dire?

Harmful consequences for tiny sea-creatures in the middle of the ocean may be difficult to contemplate, but we’re even less willing to consider what might happen to us when these plastic micro-particles enter our bodies.

Mark O’Connell begins his recent, harrowing essay in the New York Times (here is another paywall-free link) by contending that our bodies are just as suffused with microplastics as the bodies of the anemones in the oceans’ garbage patches. (And from the limited research I have done—including consulting the authorities he cites—there seems to be little dispute about it.)

There is plastic everywhere in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we’ve learned of it, these ingested plastics have become a source of profound anxiety.
 
Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments — bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics — is washing through us [eventually] and causing no particular harm. But even if that were true, we’d still have the impact of knowing that there is plastic waste in our bodies. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has a whiff of divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own trash.

(In addition to lending this post its title, O’Connell also pointed me towards the Chris-Jordan albatross photo that announces it.)  

When I read his essay this week, his words hit me like the biblical Jeremiah’s. O’Connell believes that by recklessly consuming our planet, trashing it with our throw-aways, and naively assuming that there will be no consequences when all of this trash breaks down, we plainly deserve whatever it is that comes back to haunt us.
 
On the other hand, (like with the neuston’s uncertain fate) O’Connell readily admits that neither he nor the scientific community knows what these internalized particles of plastic are doing to us—if anything—in the long run.  At the same time however, he brings more than his outrage and his eloquence to his assessments. 
 
Some of the power of his essay comes from the fact that he’s been a kind of canary in this particular coal mine. O’Connell suffers from I.B.D, a chronic autoimmune condition. While not life threatening, it periodically saps him of energy, sometimes making him unable to work for weeks at time. His suffering led him to discover a 2021 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that found significantly higher levels of micro-plastics in the bodies of I.B.D. sufferers than in the rest of us, although he adds that only circmstantial evidence as opposed to  “direct causation” was established.
 
But to add to the coincidence as it relates to humans, O’Connell also mentions scientific studies on the harmful impacts of micro-plastics on sea-life from 2018 (documenting lower growth and reproduction in fish), 2020 (changes in fish behavior), and just last month (intestinal tract disease in seabirds). But again these are early trials, none involved human subjects, and the causal links that were identified were tenuous when they were made at all. 
 
So nothing is conclusive, but there is more than enough to feed our apprehensions. And then there is the rough justice that comes from realizing that, at last, we may be reaping what we have sown. As O’Connell writes in his powerful conclusion,

[T]he idea that we are eating our own purchasing power, that we might be poisoning ourselves with our insistent consumerism, burrows into the unconscious like a surrealist conceit.

From this vantage point, could the sea-life in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch really be “having a blast”?
 
And it seems even harder to look at ourselves—now effectively in their place—with new, fresh and anything like shame-free eyes. 

Will our culpability help or hurt the ways that we’ll respond?

This post was adapted from my May 7, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Common Beat

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I’ve been finding lately that the biggest obstacle to feeling the common beat is other people.

It’s just easier to imagine sharing the rhythm and release—that universal correspondence environmentalists always wax-on about—when it’s all of the other living things and people aren’t involved. Just the animals that hop, the birds that soar, the fish that ride the waves and the trees that are always reaching towards the sun: you wouldn’t call any of them mean, selfish or lost in their petty concerns. They all know (all the time) that they need “the rest of their world” to live and thrive, as I was reminded in a brilliant episode of Nature this week called “Soul of the Ocean.” But we’ll get to that….
 
I was in John’s yoga class this week and finding it even more of a blessing than usual after way too much work (“Thanks, man!”). He began, as he always does, with a reading to pull us from the preoccupied places we’d brought with us to where he always hopes to take us. This is some of the bridge that he thought might help us out last Thursday, from The Book of Awakening:

If you place two living heart cells from different people in a Petrie dish, they will in time find and maintain a third and common beat. (Molly Vass)  This biological fact holds the secret of all relationship. It is cellular proof that beneath any resistance we might pose and beyond all our attempts that fall short, there is in the very nature of life itself some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love. This force is what makes compassion possible, even probable. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away? 
 
This drive toward a common beat is the force beneath curiosity and passion. It is what makes strangers talk to strangers, despite the discomfort. It is how we risk new knowledge. For being still enough, long enough, next to anything living, we find a way to sing the one voiceless song. Yet we often tire ourselves by fighting how our hearts want to join, seldom realizing that both strength and peace come from our hearts beating in unison with all that is alive.

I know, I know. This sort of thing is for the chanting voices, murmuring drums and free-floating love in a yoga room, not for life on Philadelphia’s “Blade Runner”streets, where we’re hitting and running and shooting the life out of our neighbors except, of course, when the Eagles are on TV. (It’s worth noting here that “in an earlier life,” John had been a police officer.)
 
Because this post is about the kind of heart that yearns to beat with all the others that are alive, and further, because Valentine’s Day will be giving us its own version of that before too many more days, I thought of another attempt to capture the common beat in this City. 
 
At the Franklin Institute, which is our science museum, there’s been (since the year after I was born) a Giant Heart that (at 28-feet wide and 18 feet high) is said to be big enough to fit into a 220-foot tall person. For several of the decades that followed, it was a rubbery cavern where streams of school children would relieve themselves until its smell became so intolerable that “a deep cleaning” was performed and a new advertising campaign was launched—as you can see at the top of this page. 
 
Pictures of that Giant Heart itself follow as we explore (first) how living things have often evolved into finding the common beat in nature and (last) how supposedly lower forms of life can coral supposedly higher forms of life into doing their bidding because both have come to embrace that we’re all “in this” together and might as well help one another out when called upon to do so.

There are a million examples in nature that show us how we can flourish by sharing instead of destroying the world around us. But we’ll have to broaden the limited reading of human advancement that we’ve enshrined in our ideologies and other excuses to truly see them. 
 
In an interview in the Times this week, author (Braiding Sweet Grass) and scientist Robin Wall Kemmerer chastened capitalists generally, and (I think) American capitalists in particular, when she said:

Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and the liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But what are the costs that we pay for that? ….We have to think about more than our own species, that these liberatory benefits have come at the price of extinction of other species and extinctions of entire landscapes and biomes, and that’s a tragedy. 
 
Can we derive other ways of being that allow our species to flourish and our more-than-human relatives to flourish as well? I think we can. It’s a false dichotomy to say we could have human well-being or ecological flourishing. There are too many examples worldwide where we have both, and that narrative of one or the other is deeply destructive and cuts us off from imagining a different future for ourselves.

Another concept besides “freedom” that includes our aspirations as well as punishments is “survival of the fittest.”  While the concept has unquestionable evolutionary benefits, ever since “forward thinkers” dragged it under the canopy of Social Darwinism it has also produced tragedies, including thinking that our dominance, subjugation and pillage are the necessary (collateral) damages for our social advancement. But in addition to motivating centuries of conquest, colonialism, and “milking of the Earth,” the continuous need to demonstrate that “we’re the fittest” has also given us the distorted picture that we’re only operating in the ways that Mother Nature does. 
 
The problem is:  the natural world doesn’t operate in this one-sided way and never has, however much we want to anthropomorphize its internal dynamics to feel greater comfort about our own means and ends.
 
In a recent book called Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, science writer Kristin Ohlson takes our mistaken alignment with this social theory on directly:

Even many scientists don’t grasp how pervasive cooperative interactions are in nature. Consequently, we seem to have developed a zero-sum view of nature, suggesting that whatever we take . . . comes at the expense of other living things and the overall shared environment.

To challenge this self-serving view, Ohlson cites the remarkable “give-and-take” that happens throughout nature, including in the soil that’s as close as our back or front yards. Microbes, fungi, wild flowers, scrubs and trees not only share nutrients and dispose of waste, they also message one another via neural-like networks that actually “challenge what we mean by cognition.” Reading this I was reminded of the new “Avatar” movie and (like in the original) its subsurface webs of mutual aid, support and resilience that the colonists missed until they “crossed-over” into the natural world. While Darwin himself hardly needed reminding, Ohlson introduces the rest of us to one of his contemporaries, Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin, who wrote the following at the same time that Social Darwinism was on the rise:

Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another? We at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.

Fittness, then, is more complicated than simply surviving or coming out on top. It also includes a great deal of cooperation.
 
If you still have any doubt, I recommend the visual and (sometimes) spoken-word feast of Nature’s “Soul of the Ocean” episode this week. (Here’s a link to watch this “never-before-seen look at how life underwater co-exists” on whatever viewing device you happen to be using.) 
 
This nature documentary invites us “to dive into a better world.” It’s a place where “everywhere you look, fish aren’t eating one another but cleaning each other.” There seems to be “an older alchemy” where all of the inhabitants are playing in a vast game with rules that hold the entire playing field in a delicate balance. Some of it is “surely the ancient biochemistry of cooperation.”
 
My favorite examples included the colorful goby fish who maintains a permanent relationship with a tiny shrimp “that does its housecleaning” during their lifetimes together. (Off the coast of the Philippines where they live, it’s said that one has never been seen without the other.) In other examples, each clown fish has “its own” stinging anemone for protection, and species of fan coral have their own identically-colored species of seahorses. A carrier crab gives a poisonous urchin a ride, perhaps for additional protection, while in a gorgeous sequence on traveling jellyfish streaming long tentacles behind them we get a glimpse of “a delicate medusa fish” hitching a ride “in a fragile mobile home”—or maybe something else is going on, since we can never stop understanding nature through our excessively human ways of looking at things.
 
Nor do all examples of mutuality in nature seem fair, or fully balanced. Just because cooperation is needed to maintain the overall harmony, one party in a shared arrangement may have the far easier job—and it’s often not the one you’d expect who ends up “running things.” 

“Make sure you all visit the bathroom before going inside.”

It’s easier for us to imagine that when one party in nature seems to come out on top while the other seems to be working “much, much harder,” the over-worker must be staying in the relationship out of “love,” or at least some “alchemy” or “biochemistry” that we still can’t totally fathom. Such is the case with a parasitic plant that gets a rare island rabbit to continuously do its evolutionary bidding, a startling new story that’s still revealing its secrets somewhere on the Amami Islands off the coast of Japan.
 
The plant is balanophora yuwanensis (no friendly name has yet been given, so just “BY” for now). It’s a bundle of “strange, red globes” that (straight out of “Avatar”) look like “strawberries crossed with red cap mushrooms.”  Instead of producing the energy that it needs from photosynthesis, BY leaches its sustenance from the roots of other plants, making it parasitic by nature. The developing mystery involves how BY—with bad tasting seeds and no wind to carry them about—has managed to propagate itself throughout these remote Islands.
 
Enter the only dark-furred rabbit in the world (called, somewhat unimaginatively, the Amami rabbit.) This past week, two Japanese scientists documented “an evolutionary bargain” in which the root-sucking BY gives food in exchange for this rabbit’s seed dispersal services, an arrangement “that [apparently] has never been documented between a mammal and a parasitic plant” before.    
 
Nocturnal filming allowed the scientists to capture Amami rabbits regularly chowing down on BY’s less-than-appetizing “strawberries” and “red caps.” Meanwhile, a follow-up investigation revealed that considerably more viable seeds were able to pass through these rabbits’ digestive systems than those of other seed-consuming rabbits. As if that weren’t enough, the Amami species conveniently likes to burrow (and release the BY’s seeds) at the base of large trees and close to a new host plant’s roots (or exactly the food source that baby BYs will need access to).

“In other words,” according to these scientists, “the rabbits’ dropping patterns are less random [and infinitely more desirable] in the evolutionary eyes of the parasites.” Unfortunately for us, while revealing this extraordinary example of inter-reliance between species, the research has yet to explain why Amami rabbits are attracted to these unappealing seeds in the first place, or agreed to do almost all of the work in this admittedly unusual relationship.
 
Now imagine (if you can) a similar example of cross-species reliance where the supposedly less sophisticated species somehow convinces the more sophisticated one to do its bidding. In this scenario, Wally the resident terrier, who’s playing the role of the dominating plant, somehow convinces the author to play the gullible, hard-working rabbit in yet another “evolutionary bargain.”
 
As I’ve eluded to in recent posts, Wally has been suffering from a serious digestive aliment and it’s been requiring higher amounts of medication (including steroids) to kick the nasties out of his system. The meds also make him thirsty and drink far more water than usual. Well this past week began a life-on-steroids regime that involves my taking him outside to pee every few hours (whether I’m asleep or not) if I wish to avoid accidents in the bed (his preferred place for sleeping, of course) or elsewhere. How did my little guy negotiate this evolutionary advantage I wonder as I stagger down the stairs every night at 12, 3 and 6 am, put on my parka and brave the sub-freezing temperatures in order to “accommodate the two of us”? 
 
In other words, how did another “plant” convince his “rabbit” to do this?
 
I guess it brings me back to John, The Book of Awakening, the Franklin Institute’s “love our heart” promotion, all the LOVE that’s wafting around this “brotherly love” kind of city, as well as the “older alchemy” and “ancient biochemistry” of cooperation that exists among species in nature. When two hearts beat side by side, at some point they become “a common beat” that makes cooperation, compassion and (yes) even Love possible. 
 
Through all of his life Wally has done everything that his pure little heart can do for me so, of course, I’ll endeavor to do the same for him. While I’ve not always been happy to be “the rabbit to his plant” this week, I also can’t imagine acting in any other way. 

This post was adapted from my February 5, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Are We More (or Less) Ignorant Today?

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I suppose it’s good that I’m surprised by what I don’t know almost as often as I am by what seems to have escaped other people. 
 
“Ignorant” is a kind of general, all-encompassing category when you’re describing somebody. I don’t think I’m ignorant as a rule. It’s more that I lack essential and meaningful information about certain kinds of things, like combustion engines or how to use ChatGPT to write this newsletter.
 
An area where I’ve taken some pride in my comparative lack of ignorance is in the area of geography. (I first saw those maps in grade school and couldn’t stop looking.) That means that I’m also aware—somewhere near the periphery of my consciousness—that maps often get the scale of countries wrong, and sometimes even exaggerate their size and significance in the scheme of things, to the mapmaker’s advantage. 
 
Still I was surprised to discover the apparent enormity of the African nation of Sudan (much in the news this week for its outbreak of political violence). Not only was I unaware that Sudan is the third largest country in Africa by area, I was equally surprised to learn that Algeria (of all places) covers the most ground on that continent. So I guess this brought some light to another corner that was darkened by my ignorance, at least until “this week’s realizations” get pushed to the side by more pressing information in need of my limited “mind space” and I “forget” all about these countries’ comparative size (“What was that about Sudan and Algeria?”). 
 
As this anecdote hopefully illustrates, “ignorance” comes and goes in certain domains and is best viewed from several different vantage points if you’re interested in discovering its origins and impacts.  
 
In recent annals, few have taken on this task more delightfully and accessibly than Peter Burke in Ignorance: a Global History, a book whose opening is like encountering a familiar yet mysterious world. Despite the considerable weight of being an emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, Burke uses his “senior status” to have curious fun with the voluminous dimensions of our “ignorance,” including (but not limited to) listing 40 different ways in which it manifests itself in the book’s appendix.
 
This can be a bad thing (just when you thought matters couldn’t get any worse, here’s more varieties of stupidity) but also a good thing (like with Sudan, it can be helpful that ignorance returns in some areas so we have room for more pressing information).
 
I have to admit. At least at first, I wasn’t drawn to Burke’s “global history” by regular confrontations with my own ignorance. It was because of all those other people’s thoughtlessness.
 
For example, I’m still boggled by the recent revelations that a 21-year old, at a military reserve unit, could not only have access to materials from the NSA and Joint Chiefs of Staff but also take them home to share with his gamer friends. I understand that “information technology specialists” need some system access to do their jobs, but how can any “journeyman” with this role “play with” top secret information, entirely undetected, for months without our senior, so-called “intelligence” officials knowing about it?  After all, we’re talking some high-level and pretty consequential ignorance here. And where the initial reports were about security breaches from earlier this year, the New York Times reported yesterday that they began shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and went undetected for 14 months!
 
I know I’m not alone in facing news like this everyday and wondering out loud, really, have we fallen this far? (One newspaper columnist observed this week: “The U.S. has become a country where fantastic events occur almost weekly.” And while he ascribed this escalating problem to a lack of accountability on the part of our public servants, it is hard to miss that “the ignorance factor”—willful or otherwise—is also at regular play nearly everywhere we look.)  
 
In addition, on nearly every “cultural issue,” all sides of these divides have no doubt whatsoever that everybody who sees the situation differently is an idiot. So on top of my own shortcomings, I also feel that I’m confronted by other people’s ignorance more often than I used to be—but on either score (mine or theirs), am I really?
 
Burke’s book puts all kinds of helpful qualifiers around this answer, and I’d like to share a few of them with you so that you might pick up his fascinating book to discover even more of them too.

One of the concerns driving Professor Burke to grapple with human ignorance in the first place was his alarm about all of the knowledge we used to have but have somehow managed to lose in little more than our own lifetimes. As one of his book reviewers quoted and then summarized:

‘Although we are well aware that we know much that earlier generations did not, we are much less conscious of what they knew that we do not,’ [Burke notes]. He is especially troubled by our impressive ignorance of geography [again], history, religion (our own and others’) and the Greek and Roman classics.

These losses, taken one by one, may seem trifling, but together they indicate a loss of multiple perspectives that compound our already limited frames of reference. For example, almost any amount of historical perspective might convince us that our safety, health and economic circumstances are better today than ever, qualifying at least some of the doom-and-gloom that seems to oppress everyone. You think our politics are fraught or our families dysfunctional, read some Sophocles or Aeschylus. 
 
Moreover, how could we ever hope to understand places like the Middle or Far East, with deep ethical and religious traditions that (in material ways) could not be more different from ours, without more knowledge and curiosity about them?
 
That America could “ride to the rescue” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (yesterday) or Taiwan (tomorrow) without more knowledge than we have today about the roles that religion and ethical tradition play in such places is the essence of Ancient Greece’s notion of hubris—or as Burke would say, the kind of ignorance where we’re arrogant enough to think that we actually “know better.” Even though we’re aware that these kinds of knowledge exist, through “selection bias” and “delusions of grandeur,” we simply decline to tap into them. 
 
In this regard, he writes scathingly about “the full spectrum ignorance” of the Vietnam War in which civilian policymakers, military commanders, the public, the press, and even the soldiers on the ground could not speak the cultural language of either their allies or enemies. We knew it was different there, could have learned “that language” but chose not to, then adding to our folly in exactly the same ways—this kind of fatal repetition, the definition of insanity—in Iraq and Afghanistan.  
 
According to Professor Burke, the assault of 24/7 “news coverage,” which places more information at our fingertips than ever, leads to an equally confounding kind of ignorance.
 
If foreign policy and other “experts” indulge in “active ignorance” (or refusal to be informed by the available information), he argues that far too many of the rest of us subscribe to what he calls “lay ignorance,” a kind of “passive resistance to intellectual labor of any kind.”  Cosseting ourselves in feedback loops that reinforce “the limited amounts we think we already know” reinforces these essentially lazy impulses. That ignorance is bliss is similar: if I don’t know about it, it won’t bother me.
 
These particular flavors of ignorance sometimes operate in tandem with healthier, more intentional preferences. As I’ve argued in recent posts, the hour-after-hour assault of horrors, calamities and stupidities can cause us to “turn off the information switch”—or remain in the ignorant dark—because we know that our brains are simply not wired for “bad news” at volumes and magnitudes we are helpless to comprehend let alone respond to. This is how Burke characterizes the phenomenon:

In the past, a major reason for the ignorance of individuals was the fact that too little information was circulating in their society. Some knowledge was what the historian Martin Mulsow calls ‘precarious,’ recorded only in manuscripts and hidden away because the authorities in both church and state rejected it.  Today, paradoxically enough, abundance has become a problem known as ‘information overload.’ Individuals experience a ‘deluge’ of information and are often unable to select what they want or need, a condition that is also known as ‘filter failure.’ In consequence, our so-called ‘information age’ enables the spread of ignorance just as much as the spread of knowledge.

The key to countering “lay ignorance,” as well as a lapse into torpor or despair in the face of this onslaught, is for more of us to learn how to filter what we need to live and work today (and will need for living and working tomorrow) so that we remain hopeful enough to tackle whatever’s coming next.

There are many more varieties and permutations of ignorance that Professor Burke invites us to explore. But I want to end today with some more of his observations about geography, along with a couple of my own. 
 
Despite Thomas Friedman’s contention that the world is “flatter” these days and therefore more accessible to us than ever, it is hard to overstate how little most of us know about almost anywhere else. Writes Burke, we have not even begun to crack the surface of humanity’s ignorance in this regard:

It would be fascinating to read a global study of what people in each part of the world did not know about the rest, but such a study would depend on a multitude of monographs that have not yet been written. What follows will therefore concentrate on the ignorance of Europeans concerning the world beyond them, as well as discussing their lack of knowledge about Europe itself. [emphasis mine]

Burke notes, with some amusement, that “Westerners like us” have sometimes even admitted their cluelessness about the substance of the “great global game” they were playing. For example, a century and a half ago, after Europe’s great powers divided up the continent of Africa between them at the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, Burke reports that the British prime minister (Lord Salisbury) felt obliged to admit that “we have been giving away mountains and lakes and rivers to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains, rivers and lakes were.” In the spirit of Salisbury’s remark, both America and the EU should leave to Ukraine the lions-share of determining “who should get what” at an eventual peace table with Russia. 
 
I had a different perspective on European ignorance this weekend with Emily, who was visiting fresh from a recent trip to see friends in Vienna. At a party there with highly-educated young Austrians, she was struck by their “fixation” on America, their eagerness to interrogate her about America’s divides on guns, abortion, immigration etc., and to essentially charge her with complicity in a catalog of recent horrors. I tried to explain the ignorant place where this kind of rudeness came from (in part because I’ve unexpectedly found myself on the same kind of hot-seat when I’ve met similarly-fixated Brits, French and Germans). 
 
For the duration of their lives, young Europeans have been inundated by what’s often been presented by their own compatriots as the superiority of American art, fashion, entertainment, advertising, money-making, Apple, Google, Tesla, Beyonce, LeBron James, Pee Wee Herman (you get the picture) and they either feel let down by America’s attendant shortcomings or derisive about them given America’s cultural dominance. You (Emily) or me (David) show up as “the American” and get their fixation/disappointment/derision tapes as if we embody all of these contradictory signals and are somehow responsible for the worst of them. In other words, these reactive Europeans are ignorant to turn any individual into a scapegoat for their home country’s sins just like it would be ignorant for either of us to impute (say) responsibility to these young Austrians for their grandparents’ Nazi encouragements.
 
But American travelers bring with them a kind of ignorance too, I told her. Americans are often startled by perceptions of them in Europe (and elsewhere) because we fail to appreciate just how dominant our culture has been and the resentments (along with occasional admiration) it engenders. We don’t know how we appear to strangers on the world’s stage, at least in part because we know so little about “the rest of the world” and our home country’s impact (for better and worse) upon it. 
 
The best book review I read about Ignorance: A Global History was in the Washington Post because that review captured “how selective” our ignorance almost always tends to be—an aspect of this world-shaping phenomenon that Professor Burke returns to over and over again. The reviewer reaches his final, 5-star judgment by quoting Burke on how, by necessity, every society “focuses attention on a few features of reality at the expense of others,” and that the losers in this selection process are consigned to the dustbin of ignorance. But in illustrating this point, this reviewer gets personal, as if his own father had lived in a different country: 

My father could identify edible mushrooms, point out the constellations, name all the varieties of trees in the woods and recognize the tracks of a dozen animals.
 
[Not so long ago] people, quite ordinary people, knew such things. No more. For many of us in the 21st century, the natural world mainly consists of pretty bushes along a hiking path. What matters to us instead is knowing how to use a computer and a cellphone. After all, we no longer need to learn anything ourselves when we have ‘influencers’ to guide us, chatbots to do our writing and every kind of information just a keystroke away. Somehow, though, I can’t help but wonder if the trade-off has been altogether worth it.

However much we think that we know, we can swallow a much-needed dose of modesty by never losing sight of all the ways that we choose to remain ignorant.

This post was adapted from my April 23, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Artist Needs to Write Us a Better Story About the Future

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To make the hard decisions around climate change, we need the pull of a compelling story that tells us about all the great things that will follow and the ways we’ll be rewarded when we do.
 
Because changing the ways we live and work will be hard, disruptive, (and given the nature of change generally) uncomfortable, we’ll need to want, really want, what comes after if we’re ever going to bite all the bullets that we should be biting already. 
 
So far, there’s not been enough biting—and the clock is ticking, at two seconds to midnight or whatever, like a cattle prod—because our imaginations have yet to be captured by a version of the future that gives us enough to look forward to so that all those necessary changes, “our adopting simpler lives fueled by windmills etc.,” will finally feel like they’ve been “worth it” when everything settles down again.
 
Or to illustrate with a different, supposedly dumb animal, if we’re ever to get through the maze of our fossil-fueled obstacles and over the desire to consume our entire planet, we’ll need a really strong whiff of the new cheese in the middle—and our twitching noses just haven’t picked it up yet.
 
That “we” is you and me of course, a really specific and fairly small number of Earth’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants. That’s because (as Rebecca Solnit wrote about so well this week):

By saying ‘we are all responsible’ [for the environmental catastrophe], we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot. This is also a reminder that the idea that we need to renounce our luxuries and live more simply doesn’t really apply to the majority of human beings outside what we could perhaps call the overdeveloped world. What is true of Beverly Hills is [simply] not true of the majority from Bangladesh to Bolivia.

So the people who need to be convinced by a better story are the relatively few of us who either live in this “overdeveloped world” or in gated communities with gun turrets in the less-developed parts of it.
 
We are the ones facing the hardest, most disruptive choices. But, says Solnit, the only stories about what comes next and how we’ll get there are coming from scientists, with their mind-boggling charts and “climate models” and speculative technologies. Her call is for artists—on the scale of Dickens—or science fiction writers who can tantalize us with the promise of marvelous tomorrows instead of paralyzing us into “deer in the headlights” with their views of dystopian ones. (We really are like cattle, rats and deer.) Solnit also goes on to describe some of what these new storytellers should be weaving into their narratives and how they should go about doing so, but before we turn to her remarks a few words about the images—they’re photo collages—in my post today.
 
Because he includes “us” as passive spectators in our own disaster narratives, a 30-something visual artist who’s working in Brussels captures “where many of us are these days” quite affectively: tourists viewing their own apocalypse, swimming while the surrounding hills burn, jumping into the unknown when we could be helped to know (and even look forward to) whatever’s down there.
 
The artist’s name is David Delruelle, and by capturing today’s mood with his brilliant juxtapositions it’s almost like he wants to jar us out of our dumb-animal complacency. If you’re as captivated as I am by his work, here’s a link to a catalog that features more of it and another to a 4-minute video about the creation of these surreal visuals.

“La Boîte Verte (The Green Box)” or swimming while the rest burns.

The Solnit essay in The Guardian this week says it was adapted from a speech she gave at Princeton last November but in all the ways that matter it’s the most recent child of her 2004 book, Hope in the Dark.  That book’s important arguments showed how history is written by committed individuals who find the conviction to take the next small step, in difficult times, towards a goal that seems beyond reach and may never materialize. That’s why the brand of “Hope” that Solnit writes about there needs to find its conviction to act “in the Dark” instead of waiting for the imminent victory of a rising sun.

Her Guardian essay describes the folly of expecting the battle against climate change (or whatever we’re up against) to unfold like a Hollywood action movie, yet that is what many of us seem to be magically thinking. (We won’t have to make difficult decisions. All we’ll need to do is wait for somebody else to sort things out and turn the lights back on.)

These movies also encourage the myth that our salvation will come in battles, fought by loners, with “the capacity to inflict and endure extreme violence,” while the skills that we’ll ACTUALLY need (according to Solnit) are “solidarity, strategy, patience, persistence, vision and the ability to inspire hope in others.” At the same time, the rescuers that will save us “are mostly not individuals [at all], they are collectives—movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society [and]….We are sadly lacking in stories in which collective actions or the patient determination of organizers is what changes the world.”

A similarly fanciful lesson “from our [‘entirely inadequate,’ she’d say] films and fictions” is that there will be “a sudden victory, a celebration, and the trouble [will be] over.” From her own activism and from writing about social change for decades, Solnit has learned that “[c]hange often functions [more] like a relay race, with new protagonists picking up where the last left off,” citing the following example for resonance:

In 2019, a Berkeley city councilwoman decided to propose banning fossil-gas connections in new construction, and it was passed by the council unanimously. This small city’s commitment to all-electric new buildings could seem insignificant, but more than 50 other California municipalities picked it up, as did the city of New York. The state of New York failed to pass a similar measure, but Washington state succeeded, and the idea that new construction should not include gas has spread internationally.

The trick, as she describes it in Hope in the Dark, is to maintain your convictions and your hopes for the desired outcome at each stage of our real-world rely race, because without reserves of endurance during periods of uncertainty (and lots of new blood joining the chain), we often abandon our victories and concede our defeats too quickly. In that book, Solnit illustrates the quandary as well as our way out of it through this example, about the struggle for pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and [at the same time] that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished.

In her Guardian essay, Solnit introduces a dozen additional themes for inclusion in a story about the future that might motivate us to intensify our struggle against climate change in the ways that we need to—including these: 

– how ending “an era of profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many means changing how we think about [and imagine] pretty much everything: wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.” It’s both the challenge and promise of radical reinvention.
 
– how “we’ve largely won the battle to make people [who are like us] aware and concerned” already, but that the story also needs to mobilize us to take the necessary actions now (like cutting back on our consumption and valuing nature differently) for the sake of a future that can pull us towards it while never being a certainty.
 
– how improving our literacy about profound and fundamental change in the past (like the transformative nature of the Industrial Revolution, or even more recently, the rise of the smart phone) can fuel the effort to produce equally profound and fundamental changes for the sake of our future. 
 
Each of these elements is part of a new story that will need to take us beyond the crisis of climate change to a world that we want to live in far more than the one we’re living in today. That story also needs to show us how to “break things we’re attached to” in order to get there, while dazzling us with the promise of its wonders and fullness once we arrive. Because as Solnit says so well in this, the heart of her remarks:

Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.
 
We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. But what drives our machines won’t change until we change what drives our ideas. The visionary organizer Adrienne Maree Brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: ‘We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle’….
 
[And since we are,] for too long the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts. While we need their skills, we also need so much more. When I survey the field, it’s clear that what we desperately need is more artists.
 
What the climate crisis is, what we can do about it, and what kind of a world we can have is all about what stories we tell and whose stories are [engaging enough to be] heard.

“Great Mountain Fire” or jumping into the unknown. 

In reviewing old posts that I’ve written about the challenges facing the health of the Earth—including the hazards of climate change, global warming and biodiversity loss—I was surprised by how hard I’ve been looking for that new story (or at least some key themes) that will mobilize me to reduce my consumption, find new forms of gratification (beyond eating the planet), stop the environmental damage I’m causing, restore what I can mend (like how to bring rabbits, or certain kinds of birds back to my backyard), discover new ways of living and working, and help to build a future that’s more satisfying than the one I’m anticipating today. So in closing, I’d like to add a few of the storylines and themes that I’ve considered to the ones that Rebecca Solnit is proposing.

– how something called “the Clock of the Long Now,” which calculates time 10,000 years into the future, operates as a kind of “act of faith” in our long-term prospects, and how we reaffirm that belief and the value of such a clock whenever we invite a new baby to join us down here. (Bringing a Child Into a World Like This, April 24, 2023).
 
– how we’re finding new ways to cover the costs to industries and workers of changing today’s harmful environmental practices. Demonstrating a kind of “virtuous economic circle,” this is a storyline about New England’s lobster industry, a declining right whale population, and how valuing the whales’ contributions to ocean health differently could finance changes in lobster trapping so current methods no longer endanger these migrating giants.  (Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand, November 13, 2019).
 
– how the UK’s government has gotten behind a breathtaking proposal to value nature like an asset, and natural systems like portfolios of assets, so a dollars & cents world can finally join in finding sustainable solutions to biodiversity with “a common grammar” of economic costs and benefits. (Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story, February 21, 2021).
 
– and how the future can look better—more interesting and far more promising—when we put ourselves in that future and look back at how far we’ve come, because we’re finally experiencing the combined impact of the much smaller changes we made in the 2020s in areas like battery technology, urban design and soil management. (A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud, September 19, 2021).
 
Particularly as our political landscape degraded and the pandemic surged—that is, when the future seemed particularly bleak over the past few years—I dove into these stories to see if I could find in them “some hope in the dark” for me and maybe for you. And there was a kind of glimmer in the growing realization that our imaginations in the face of environmental peril might indeed see us through these daunting challenges.  
 
Now if only I were enough of an artist to write the compelling story that could help to carry humanity to a more sustainable finish line. Or that someone far more talented could.
 

This post was adapted from my January 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Patagonia’s Rock Climber

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Some food for thought (if you find that you’re hungry for it today) from Yvon Chouinard.
 
(He pronounces his name yuh-vaan shwee-naard if you’re wondering.)
 
Throughout, I’ll just call him Yvon, because he seems to invite that kind of familiarity with his plain-speaking forth-rightness. 
 
I’m going to be excerpting some quotes from a recent interview for you to chew on, while adding a few of the associations I made from his storytelling, although I encourage you to listen to what he has to say because you’ll know what I mean about “his plain-speaking and forthrightness” the moment you hear the sound of his voice.
 
When you see Yvon’s name you might expect French Academy, but when you hear him introducing himself it’s pure Lewiston Maine, which is where he was born from stock that likely wandered down from somewhere around Quebec. That’s why, maybe confounding our expectations, he comes across as a salt-of-the-earth American.
 
So if you haven’t heard of him or recognize him from his picture, who is this guy anyway?
 
Yvon’s interview, called “Giving It All Away,” was recorded just before Thanksgiving and I heard it just before I edited and sent out last Sunday’s post. The interview title speaks to the fact that he gave away the entirety of his billion-dollar company earlier this year in an unprecedented act of philanthropy. But perhaps even better, Yvon has been “giving it all away” for most of his life, spending himself in ways that I can only imagine.
 
So I guess if there’s nutrition to be found in his words, it comes from the arc of his remarkably fertile life and thinking about how we’ve lived and continue to live while he tells us about who he is and what he’s been doing.
 
Yvon Chouinard is the founder of outdoor clothing and sporting goods company Patagonia. In many people’s minds, the company is almost synonymous with sustainable manufacturing practices and products, protecting wild places (most notably in Patagonia itself, which comprises the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile), and creating a kind of “hive mind” brand of enlightenment in the company’s workspaces. 
 
Moreover, while striving “to do good,” Patagonia has also consistently ticked off that other big box when it comes to American success stories, namely profitability. Yvon’s company (until recently, solely owned by him, his wife and two kids) will bring in an estimated $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022.
 
So what does he have to say for himself?

Some outdoorsmen and women that Patagonia corralled into wearing clothing from its “shell” line of sportswear in a recent mail-order catalog.  On top of everything else, it’s about looking good and having fun while pushing one’s mental and physical limits.

The interview begins with Yvon’s “changed my life” story. This 81-year-old tells us that he was a “serial climber” early-on, which his poor parents interpreted as something that was pretty grounded until they were watching a local news program in California, where they lived at the time, and the news clip shows (in his words): 

a helicopter coming by the North American wall of El Capitan [in Yosemite National Park]. And then it zooms in on these guys hanging from hammocks underneath this big overhang 2000 feet up. And one of ’em is their son. They always thought when I said I was going climbing that I was [just] going hiking.

So boy were they surprised, but he’d already been “a serial climber” for years (which shows, among other things, how little parents know about what their kids are doing) explaining: “I’d spent two years just climbing cracks. I’d spent five years just climbing big walls, like in Yosemite. I’d spent years and years learning ice climbing.” And eventually all that verticality and danger took him to the Himalayas, to a fateful climb that ended in an avalanche, to him somehow surviving while others in his company did not, and to how he felt about the bookends of his existence from that point forward. 

[I]t kind of changed my life. I’ve had a lot of close calls, near death experiences, but always afterwards you go around sniffing the flowers and being really happy to be alive and everything…but after that climb, all of us were deeply depressed for several months afterwards, and I’ve read stories about people that have kind of died and come back and you resist coming back. And in fact, it’s taught me that there’s nothing to fear about death itself. It’s a pretty pleasant feeling [when you find yourself face to face with it].

I heard it as a kind of relief, a comfort, once you glimpse that just as much as living, an ending “without fear “also belongs to you. 
 
For the sake of his parents and his own growing family, Yvon cut back on extreme climbs after that, but the experience allowed him to settle into his life in a whole different way. “[Y]ou know, when my time comes, I’m gonna go out pretty peacefully.”

At first, I wondered how he could be so sure about that.
 
I’d already been reading a new book by Susan Cain, who is most famous for her TED talk and a previous book about introverts. She calls this new one “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It reminded me of the lengths our culture goes to minimize or hide sorrow, suffering and death even though all of them are universal experiences. So I could understand that when he was taken to a cliff edge by an avalanche at the top of the world, Yvon came to a kind of acceptance that his end was now as much a part of his journey as his moving-on from there, that there was a kind of peace that was waiting for him beyond the physical experience, and that there was a tremendous sense of relief in that deep-seated knowledge.
 
At this point in the interview, I wondered where I’d found that kind of confidence in the limits of my playing field.

I also marveled at how Yvon described finding his career path. It’s been a preoccupation of mine in several posts (for example, Why We Gravitate Towards the Work That We Do) as well as a theme in my book writing.

I never wanted to be a businessman. I was a craftsman and I was a climber. And I just, every time I’d go into the mountains, I’d have ideas on how to make the gear better. The gear was pretty crude in those days. It was all made in Europe. So I just got myself a forge and an anvil and a book on blacksmithing, and I taught myself how to blacksmith. And that led to making these pitons and eventually ice axes. And crampons and all the gear for mountain climbing and never did it thinking that it was a business. It was at first it was just making the stuff for myself and friends and then friends of friends. And pretty soon I’m making two of these pitons an hour and selling ’em for a dollar and a half each. Well, not too, not too profitable, right? I kind of backdoored becoming a businessman.

I’m sure this sounds more home-spun than it actually was, but meeting his own needs and the needs of his outdoorsy friends was clearly the initial spark. It prompted me to replay my own journey from Perry Mason to courtroom, grade-school Show & Tells to writing in public. (For all of these reasons, if you have a few moments to spare after you finish here, I’d love to hear about the sparks that brought you to the work that you ended up doing too.)
 
When Patagonia (the company) got to the deliberation phase of its business, it had already begun to lose its way. Demand was growing faster than the company’s capacity to meet it, so Yvon had an extended conversation with his key collaborators about what was most important to them in moving the company to the next level. Those priorities grounded a kind of business philosophy that became Yvon’s 2005 memoir, “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.”

I mean the name of my book is ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ cuz we have a policy. If your child is sick, go home, take care of ’em, uh, no matter what. I don’t care when you work, as long as the job gets done and if the surf comes up, drop everything, go surfing. None of us liked authority. We really disliked authority and none of us wanted to tell other people what to do. So our management system is kind of like an ant colony. You know, an ant colony doesn’t have any bosses. The queen just lays there and lays eggs. There’s no boss in an ant colony but every single ant knows what his job is and gets it done. And they communicate by touching feelers, and that’s about it.

I’d call what he describes here the hive-mind of an enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced it once, and never in “the regular course” of any business that I’ve been involved with. The notable exception was a school. 
 
Several years ago I was a teacher in a school for autistic kids, some with significant challenges and all with unbelievable amounts of energy. Only in the inspired chaos of this place, with a teacher-to-kid ratio that approached 1-to-1, did I experience anything like Yvon’s collective working spirit, manifested in the “touching feelers” of my co-workers.  
 
The immediacy and aliveness of every working minute at Benhaven School in New Haven reminded me (years later) of how Rebecca Solnit’s described lower Manhattan’s citizen rescuers coming together after 9/11 and NOLA’s citzen rescuers after Hurricane Katrina, exploits that she chronicles in “Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” As I conjured hive-minds like these, and apparently at Patagonia too, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other places where I’ve worked over the years and how far they’d fallen short of the workers-paradise (at least to me) that Yvon and some remarkable others have helped to create. 
 
Sustainability is another ground-breaking concept for him. It’s about how you make something, but also (his company believes) what you do as a business once one of your products begin to wear out or your customers just get tired of having them around any longer. 
 
For instance, you show your customers how to repair the zipper on, say, your “Reversible Shelled Microdini jacket” or replace the buttons when they‘ve fallen off your “Organic Cotton Mid-Weight Fjord Flannel Shirt.” And when a Patagonia product’s useful life has ended for you, Patagonia even takes it back to try and refurbish it so somebody else can get a second life out of it too, or recycle it into something else if that’s not possible. Because if you pay a lot for quality from a company like this—instead of for one- or two-season throw-away clothes—shouldn’t that item have serial lives too? 
 
Here’s Yvon again, about the lifecycles that Patagonia is enabling for its products: 

[Some years ago] we did an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said, Don’t buy this jacket, and there’s this photo of this jacket and it said, Don’t buy this jacket without thinking twice. Do you really need it? Are you just bored? Uh, and if so, you know, don’t…[So] If they [our customers], if they made a commitment to think twice about purchasing, we were gonna back it up with our own commitment, which was guaranteeing that jacket for life, repairing it when it needed repair. Helping people find another owner for that jacket. And finally, when it’s absolutely shredded and can’t be used at all, we’ll recycle it into more clothing. And so to do that, we had to build the largest garment repair facility in North America. And we have a van going around to colleges and stuff, showing people how to repair clothes and repairing people’s clothing. We produced a bunch of videos on how to sew a button on so people can repair their own stuff. Cause that’s the best thing you can do is to buy the very best thing you can and try to keep it going as long as possible. And so we’re helping people do that.

When I heard him tell this story I was sorry that I’d recently given my first Patagonia, a full-length rain and wind jacket in a beautiful kind of orange (it had been a really big purchase for me at the time) to a church clothing drive instead of returning it to the company for renewal and transition. Because a circular economy like this is a kind of mind-set, a discipline that can be applied to almost everything if it becomes more engrained in our lives “as consumers”–but I’d never even considered what he’s offering here.
 
Yvon talks about many other things in this interview (and in his other interviews and writings and speeches over the years) and you might find it edifying to dive into more of his wit & wisdom as a result. But I want to leave you with one of my favorites from last Sunday’s gabfest, where he somehow manages to combine his first career with his current one—which involves lots of interactions with companies that see things differently and governments that almost always do. 
 
How do you convince these people to change the unsustainable and unhealthy ways that they’re doing things when you’re a powerful company like Patagonia or a powerful individual like its founder? 

I’ll tell you a little story about mountain guiding. There’s two types of mountain guiding. One is democratic where you, you’re guiding somebody up the Grand Teton, which is a pretty safe mountain. And the client starts freaking out. So you pull out your harmonica and you play your harmonica a little bit. You calm ’em down and you kind of, you know, take your time and, and you get up it, a very effective way to guide on a non-difficult mountain. Let’s say you’re guiding on the Matterhorn and you know, you’re 60 years old, and the guide and you got a family. And you know, you remember the client is always out to kill you. A mountain like that, it’s rotten rock. It’s thunderstorms every afternoon. And the client freaks out. The guide screams at him, pounds on ’em, calls them names, tugs the rope and gets ’em to the top. So what happens is the client is more afraid of the guide than the mountain. And that’s basically how we have to treat our government [and many of our corporations].

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for truth-telling when it’s wrapped up in a musical story like this. 
 
So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of his words, that you’ll have a chance to listen to Yvon Chouinard saying them too (because the atmospherics he weaves around them simply can’t be duplicated on the page), and that he’s given you some food for thought to take into the days ahead.

Yvon Chouinard is 81 today, which puts him in his mid-70s when this picture was taken in March 2016, “on a classic local route somewhere out West during a new hire orientation.”

Thanks for reading. Have good week. Signing off today as day-vid gr-icing (since I’m told that some people also find my name unpronounceable). 


This post was adapted from my December 4, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right

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David Griesing Twitter @worklifereward