Carfax Estate Nanny

I was going to get this up yesterday, hence the category, but didn’t finish it until today. Yesterday wound up being super busy, including onboarding for one of those contractor gigs where you have to set up accounts on several different platforms in order to work. It’s a setup that both makes me feel old, and reminds me of my library days when we had four different systems crosswalking just to accurately convey our journal holdings to patrons.

I was also finishing up reading Robert Moor’s new book In Trees, in order to review it for Library Journal. Like a lot of nature-oriented books I’ve read recently, Moor comes in heavy on themes of relationality and reciprocity. These aren’t novel, exactly, but I’ve noticed them getting more emphasis ever since Robin Wall Kimmerer’s excellent and affecting Braiding Sweetgrass, which many of these books (Moor’s included) cite as an influence.

It influenced me as well, both when I first read it and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I managed to escape the stuck-at-home-staring-at-screens phenomenon by taking off for nine months to Wilderness Awareness School. Constant masking and daily temperature checks notwithstanding, it was still a better way to spend those nine months than just about anything else I could imagine. I got to be with people. And trees.

It was an immense privilege, and it shouldn’t be. As people in the Immersion program itself pointed out, having to actively seek nature connection, as though we aren’t all connected to nature all of the time whether or not we’re aware of it, is indicative of a problem, one that has deeply pragmatic and material effects. I do happen to believe that sitting under a tree once in awhile or just noticing the birds outside the window are Good for us as humans, but as I’ve written before, not doing these things makes it so much easier not to notice that we’re driving the world off a cliff. The planet has survived mass extinctions before, but there’s a reason why some writers describe our current situation as the Sixth Extinction. And if we keep going like we have been, we’re going to kill off the species that make our own existences possible. Humans are the most adaptable creatures to ever live on Earth—I feel pretty confident saying that, despite the length of time life has existed on this planet. But whether we can adapt to the circumstances we ourselves are now creating is an open question.

And even if we could, the situation still sucks. I think people know it, too; it’s one reason fake AI stories about wild animals doing charming things are so popular on social media, to my everlasting consternation. My theory goes something like this: so many of us humans are so disconnected from the world in which we live that we view it as fundamentally unknowable outside the narrow slice that we understand. This makes us uncomfortable, so we gravitate toward relatable stories that present realities we find intuitively comprehensible. (This is also why fake news is both so seductive and so prevalent.) But precisely because of that disconnection, we aren’t equipped to recognize the unreality when we encounter it, and the people spreading it have a vested interest in not describing it as fiction.

Kimmerer talks a lot about reciprocity in Braiding Sweetgrass and in her more recent book, The Serviceberry. In its most fundamental and accessible form, this is the simple act of recognition of the necessary give and take within which each of us exists. We live, so we gotta eat. Sooner or later, other things will eat us. From this everything else flows. We exist and participate in a web of relationships whether we know it or not; this is as observable as the raccoons raiding our trash cans. Taking the time to make those observations begins for many of us as a conscious act, but the more you do it, the more habitual it becomes, the more you notice, and the more those connections become a thing that you’re aware of.

It’s a simple, small thing, but it changes so much. Among other things, it rejects the framing of human and planetary survival as a matter of completely abandoning modern ways of life. (Good luck getting people to do that, anyway.) Even people living in places so remote that calling them off grid is to understate the case have cell phones.

The hard part is getting this to happen on a big enough scale to make an actual difference, and creating space for people to do the things that will effect change. One of the first things you notice once you start seeing existence this way is how much capitalism in its current form makes everything into a state of emergency. What better way to ensure that no one has time to even notice what’s wrong, never mind do anything about it? Back in the late 1990s a book came out called Simple Things Won’t Save the Earth. That title was a response to the idea that individual consumer choices would make even the smallest dent in responding to the actual emergency then and now in progress.

So why would such a simple, small thing as a change in perception be any different?

I don’t really know, to be honest. It’s something I’ve been mulling over for at least five years, now, and probably longer.

But I do think it’s necessary, and inevitable. I’m just hoping it happens at a significant enough scale, before it really is too late.