Note (1/15/20): This piece was written in the summer of 2017 prior to my arrival at the U of M and in reaction to the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
I feel like I’m hallucinating… or at least high, that’s for sure. 36,000 feet to be precise, and somewhere above the general vicinity of the Galapagos Islands, I’ve spent the last 36 hours — in no particular order — tossing and turning on the floor of the Houston airport during an unplanned overnight layover, stumbling bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived from numerous point A’s to point B’s, and now, finally, finding myself on route to Buenos Aires for a dream musical tour with the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. Capping it off, as I devour the slim novel in my lap, with both fatigue and the lilting head of my slumbering seatmate creeping up on my shoulder, my mind is being blown… by a talking gorilla. To steal a few choice words from the Argentinians, Ay, Dios mío!
Whether through any exclamatory, extra-worldly forces or not, I’ve been in love with the natural world since my earliest days. Often, after heavy rainstorms, I’d toddle out into our backyard in search of “lost” worms on the puddled concrete, carefully picking them up one at a time and setting each gently onto its own promising, green leaf in the garden, because, as I explained succinctly, “They want to go home.”
Whether the renegade invertebrates actually appreciated their deportations will forever be unknown, but to say that not much has changed in the sixteen-plus years since is not an overstatement. Instead of finding worms, I now focus on finding plastic bottles and pieces of trash in the street. Instead of the long voyage to the backyard, I make the trip to China, for an environmental service study abroad program, and around the Milwaukee River Watershed, for the capstone camping trip of a semester-long, ecology-based, extracurricular class. And, I make the decision to attend the University of Minnesota. To pursue Global Studies and Environmental Sciences, Policy, & Management. To study, and make a life out of, the passions that have so long been a part of, well… my life.
As I write this, from our rented, remote cabin on the very tip of Wisconsin’s “thumb” in Door County, lacking wifi or cell service, I feel it’s rather difficult to summarize the impact that Quinn’s book had on me. To put in the simplest terms, it feels as though all of those aforementioned feelings — those rooted, passionate, worm-caring feelings — were finally articulated. The ones that send me a pang of guilt as I zoom to Argentina on a carbon-spewing hunk of human advancement, ill-feelings remedied only slightly by my careful saving of every throw-away plastic, wasteful, United Airlines cup and utensil for future recycling. The ones that lead me to introduce composting at home, to bike, as often as possible, the 20 miles round trip to my job with the Milwaukee Brewers, and to question (perhaps a bit forcefully) my family’s lifestyle habits, from purchasing to showering.
I jump back to my cramped seat in the cramped box in the sky, where I find my own jumbled thoughts mixing with Ishmael’s lessons, forming themselves into one central question: how can we possibly break this cycle of ignorant irresponsibility?
When over ⅔ of the world’s population, still in the various levels of pre-industrial, emissions-heavy development, aspires simply to have access to a washing machine, or basic sanitary services, or running water, the American-ized standard of careless luxury and consumption not even a pipe dream, how do we react, and where do we go? Do the Takers of the First World attempt to halt the development of the Takers of the Second World? Or how about the Third World?
Because if everyone reached the level of the American Standard; if everyone had overflowing mega-markets fed by aggressive, monoculturalistic agriculture; if everyone could drive gas-guzzlers, and live in suburban paradise; if everyone could have their cake and shove it down their throat too; if everyone could live rich, fed, and ignorant, that smokescreen obscuring reality more completely than those expensive Ray-Ban’s I just gagged at in SkyMall, well, now that just wouldn’t be sustainable for the long run, would it?
Oddly, but serendipitously, a lyric from Macklemore pops into my head: “With a veil over our eyes, we turn our back on the cause…”
We’re a culture of Takers doing what Takers do best, plying any nagging inhibitions about our unnaturally stressful modern world with drugs, alcohol, sex, wealth, mindless entertainment, Bible verses… Doing just that, rejecting the cause, and purposefully forgetting that, we too, are a single species governed by timeless ecological laws that don’t give a flying you-know-what about what an upstart 3500-year-old book written by humans says about them.
I don’t know what to do. Who does? What’s the solution? To paraphrase Ishmael, it’s the biggest problem humanity will ever face. But we can start by learning, listening, reading… then writing, then speaking, and traveling, helping, acting… perhaps above all, fighting, fighting to forever channel our inner spirit of the two-year-old catching worms, for whom saving the world meant nothing more than lending a helping hand.
Jake Marble 