The Doe’s Latest Stories

I was in a bad place. I mean, really bad. Some days I could barely get out of bed. My whole body ached like I had the flu and even the simplest tasks felt daunting. I felt tired, depleted and drained of my lifeforce. My mood swings and depression didn’t help either. It was like my pilot light had been turned off and there was this sense of a dark unknown facing me. I went on this way for months and months without many answers. As a woman in her early twenties, I should have had all the energy in the world, but I didn’t. My mother was at her wit’s end with my daily phone calls crying and telling her I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I can only imagine how scared she was that her once vibrant daughter was struggling to live. Thankfully, she took me to a naturopath to get some help and a second opinion. I went into the office, a full breakdown on the way, and laid down on the examination table. This particular doctor practiced applied kinesiology, or muscle testing, to diagnose imbalances in the nervous system based on the external response of the muscles, which I had never seen before. Within minutes, he had determined I was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Relieved to have a diagnosis, I was still left feeling like it was just a blanket term for symptoms the medical world couldn’t explain. It felt like something deeper was going on with me.

As a woman in her early twenties, I should have had all the energy in the world, but I didn’t.

An Herbal Teacher Came to My Rescue

The treatment he prescribed to me was a laundry list of supplements, mostly extracts from animal organs, to be taken at different times of the day and I was left feeling exhausted just trying to manage when and how to take all of these capsules and pills. Though it’s not known what the cause of CFS is, it’s thought that viruses and psychological stress play a big role. What’s even more interesting is that upon doing more research, I found that it affects women significantly more than men, as well as young adults. Feeling completely out of control in my life and in my body, I knew something had to change. I couldn’t go on like this, and neither could my friends and family around me. Right around this time I was studying herbalism, the art and practice of using plants for medicine. I had always been intrigued by the natural world, having been taught at an early age about the ecology of Florida, where my family lived for generations. My grandparents would take me on walks as a kid and point out the trees, plants, birds and bugs we’d pass along the way. Their connection to the earth was instilled in me early on, so it was no surprise when I got older I wanted to learn more about plants and medicinal herbs. My herbal teacher, Emily Ruff, came to my rescue and helped me devise a plan to nourish my body with foods and herbs instead of supplements and pills. She first introduced the idea of food as medicine to me and taught me how to infuse restorative herbs right into my food. Soon, my mealtime went from feeling stressful to inspiring with the help of herbal allies. I’d make things like nettle pesto, packed with vitamins, minerals and kidney support, to slather on my breakfast toast or enjoy as a snack with crackers. Ashwagandha root was another herb I’d mix into peanut butter and honey, which helped to restore my energy, ease my anxiety and offer a restful night’s sleep. I was using fresh tulsi leaves (holy basil), an uplifting adaptogen that supports the body during stressful periods to add extra flavor to everything from pasta and grains to teas and salad dressings. Eating this way was by no means a new idea. Cultures across the world have been using herbs as medicine in everyday meals for thousands of years. But it has mostly been left out from the Western diet, like much of indigenous culture and history has been.

A Farming Internship Opened My Eyes to Medicinal Plants

After about a month’s time, I actually started feeling better. I had more energy, less anxiety and could function pretty normally throughout the day. I continued to feel more and more like myself, so I decided to deepen my herbal studies and apply for an internship at Herb Pharm, one of the largest producers of herbal tinctures in the country. Located in Southern Oregon, it offers a group apprenticeship program to live, work and study at the farm for three months during the summer season. I jumped at the chance to apply and got in. From the moment I stepped foot on the farm, I knew it was going to be a transformative experience, and I felt as if something pulled me there. Walking around the property—what was then about 80 acres of cultivated medicinal plants—I couldn’t help but notice how alive everything felt. There were rows and rows of bright orange and yellow calendula flowers, a magenta sea of echinacea blooms and sweet-smelling chamomile swaying in the breeze. On one of the first evenings of herbal classes, our teacher, herbalist Mark Disharoon, introduced us to a plant spirit medicine practice. Not only were we getting to see firsthand how to grow plants that were used as medicine to treat physical ailments, but we got to see how they also worked on more subtle levels. He had us take a few drops of a tincture, of which he’d only reveal the name after we tasted it and spent time alone outside in a quiet place to sit with that medicine. Sitting there, wondering what I was supposed to be doing, I felt this warmth in my chest. “That’s interesting,” I thought to myself. Then I noticed this gentle energy pulsing from my heart and a flood of emotion and memories came bubbling up out of nowhere. I let myself just cry and feel the pain that I had been carrying the past year. All of the self-doubt, judgment and sadness came pouring out in a cathartic release. Over the next few minutes, the pain transformed into a feeling of gratitude, love and a sense of connection that I wasn’t alone. It was as if something in me dissipated and, for the first time in a long time, I felt safe enough to let go and surrender to what I had been feeling. I collected myself and made my way inside to be with the other students and discuss our experiences. One by one, we all went around to describe what we felt and to everyone’s surprise, there was an exact similarity between our encounters. Each person mentioned how they felt a sensation in their heart or chest, how they grieved something and felt a release and that there was a feeling of love that washed over us. It was astonishing to me.

I felt safe enough to let go and surrender to what I had been feeling.

My Chronic Fatigue Has Faded Into the Background of My Life

As we wrapped up, Mark was finally ready to tell us what plant we were working with and it was none other than hawthorn. A plant known for its affinity to the heart and circulatory system, hawthorn has an ancient history of use. On an emotional level, hawthorn has been used to remedy broken hearts, depression and anxiety. “It’s a specific medicine for those who have a difficult time expressing their feelings or who suppress their emotions,” Rosemary Gladstar, one of my favorite herbalists, writes. “Hawthorn helps the heart flower, open, and be healed.” I felt an immediate connection to hawthorn and realized that Mark gave us this plant as an initiation to “meeting” the other plants on the farm. This introduction to the psycho-spiritual world of plant medicine opened the door for more messages to come through in dreams and waking life—especially when weeding next to the plants. I’d get ideas about what herbs I could be working with on a daily basis for support with my anxiety, depression and energy levels. I’d be shown memories or visions of the emotions I’d held onto playing out in current situations. It was like I was being shown a movie of my life that someone else was narrating. Since being on the farm and deepening my connection to medicinal herbs, my chronic fatigue has faded into the background of my life. I’ve come to think of that time as an important initiation in getting to know my own limits—trusting my intuition and taking care of myself in a more holistic way that not only allows me to feel more connected to myself, but to have a deeper understanding and empathy for those struggling to find answers and healing. Over time, I’ve learned how to create daily routines and rituals around incorporating these herbs into my food and self-care practices to help me feel nourished and supported rather than stressed and depleted.Like many who journey down the herbal path, I started to think of these herbs as my friends and companions, helping me see that there is far more to this world than what meets the eye and that healing really is possible. They were teaching me in their own way and in their own language, offering me advice, comfort and a sense of community. I’m not special by any means; anyone can do this. Try it for yourself. Sit with a plant, even a house plant, in silence for a few minutes. See what arises. In my experience, all that’s required to hear what messages plants have for us is a genuine curiosity and a humbleness to get quiet and listen.

Hope is sweet earth shaped like a popcorn-bedazzled wand. Mullein boasts a bouquet of fuzzy floret leaves that dance at its roots and invite the hand to touch her. Seasons before the global pandemic, mullein called to make me her ally. She’d dazzle and entreat me from her summer station on the lawn of my neighbor, a devoted, down-to-earth Nana with a grandchild who also danced like sunshine. Nana gave me permission to harvest whatever I saw coming up. I promised to share the medicine. Mullein follows one of my favorite patterns of the sweet earth: “Everything you need is nearby.” And so she grew on the lawn of this beloved, longtime smoker to teach me about the woman who needed her. The kinds of people who would need her soon. And how to prepare me for the grief that would surely sit atop my lungs like pneumonia. The sweet earth teaches us to read her patterns. The sweet earth has a pattern of death. When Brazilian carpenter ants outgrow the forests’ capacity to sustain them, parasitic cordyceps fungi cull the population to maintain the dynamic equilibrium of the forest. That balance is necessary so that one species can’t become too large, as to destroy the ability of the entire system to regulate life. Indigenous people hold sacred the life-death-life cycle. This worldview understands that the death of an excess of carpenter ants will create space for new and diverse life to flourish. This worldview understands the one group of beings does not hold the right to disrupt the homeostasis of the entire ecosystem. The power of disruption is checked by death itself. As an ecological activist and rootworker, I dissolve the false separation between the patterns of nature and social behavior. Human beings are shaped and governed by the ecosystems they inhabit even if those ecosystems contain iPhones, concrete and subways.

What we do in the world matters.

We Are Nature

All-natural even if our diets are genetically modified. Even if we feel separate and enact the violence that flows from our falsehood. What we do in the world matters. Our actions set off chains of reactions within the homeostatic ecosystem that is the earth itself. The disease that she experiences is reflected in the fractal of our bodies. Viruses and other bundles of genetic information called exosomes are exuded from bacteria, fungi and multicellular organisms, like pigs, in response to stress. Stress is a call for help, and this genetic information contains a diversity of adaptive genetic resources for the organisms to make use of. Everything that we need is nearby. The coronavirus received these genetic stress signals emerging from the animals, in particular, the massive pig confinement operations and herbicide-soaked fields of Central China and adapted as all beings adapt. As all beings must. And she came to us, with her sacred communication. From the Chinese case studies, I learned that older folks had the highest mortality rates and I saw corona as just, especially when it displayed the same patterns in Europe. Old people destroyed the world. Ate excessively and had me inherit this shitshow. I saw the earth grieving. Eastern philosophers remember that grief lives in the lungs. The lungs are the interface between the human body and the world. And so the coronavirus became our disjointed relationship and made her home there. The abundance of plants in my world gives me direction as to how much medicine will be called for later. In the early days, I distributed my abundance of mullein medicine to all the elders in my life and friends who knew my game. And I waited until the virus arrived on my side of the world. But my side of the world is wounded and scarred. It has a body politic that is shaped by its past conditioning. In yogic philosophy, past conditioning leaves an imprint or grooves on the subtle body which shape the response of the entire organism. These samskaras, or impressions, are in the words of yogi Dr. Kamini Desai, “Like channels that despite all the potential outcomes we have the ability to create, keep us reincarnating the same results into the reality in repetitive and predictive ways.”

The groves set forth by our racist history came alive during the pandemic and resulted in actual death.

Life in the Samskaras

The groves set forth by our racist history came alive during the pandemic and resulted in actual death. The groves of our racist history have impacted the physical redistribution of brown bodies in places where the air is sickened by the shitshow of industrial life. These folks are asked to be the buffer zone between white excess and its ecological repercussion. This grove, this samskara, is known as a zone of sacrifice. Seventy-one percent of Black Americans live in counties that violate EPA air quality standards. A Black family making up to $60,000 a year is more likely than a white family making $15,000 per year to live next to a toxic facility. Over 78 percent of Black people live within a 30-mile radius of a coal-fired power plant expelling toxic waste into the air. Black people are three times more likely to die from asthma than any other group. Black people are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than a white person, and the same goes for indigenous people. COVID mortality is directly linked to the air pollution that folks of color are positionally exposed to. According to a study by biostatisticians at Harvard University, even a small increase in long-term exposure to fine particle pollution leads to a large increase in the COVID-19 death rate. Black and indigenous disposability is a part of the cultural and ecological samskaras of this country. But hope is sweet earth shaped like a popcorn-bedazzled wand. The institutions created in the samskaras of America’s racist history are ill-equipped to dismantle the structural racism that results in Black and indigenous disease. As our precious communities undergo the pressure of dying under the weight of this empire, our bodies exude adaptive genetic resources in the shape of exomes and viruses, genetic resources that shape-change in the soil and waters surrounding us, that shape-change in the trees and the birds and the insects. Who carry the seeds of our green allies like mullein, so that we can also adapt to live another day here, to become the virus in the chest of this empire and sit our whole weight upon it so that it can die, suffocating under the burden of our grief.

The night that we evacuated started like any other night. I had been working on renovating an old house that my partner and I had just bought. I was exhausted and ready to unplug for the night. A windstorm was picking up in the dry September air. The darker it became, the harder it raged. At one point the power went out, so we checked social media to find that a small fire had started several miles away. In this rural area of the Pacific Northwest, blackouts are common and little fires happen several times a year. There was no cause for alarm at the time. A few hours later, our phones rang out with “Level 3: GO NOW” evacuation alerts. I had enough time to grab our cat, some essentials and a backpack full of clothes before we left. On the way out, after seeing charred maple leaves in the gravel driveway, it hit me that we may not come back to the same place. With no time to take anything in, we started up the car and drove out. We approached a string of yellow headlights and red taillights slowly drifting down the main highway back into town and merged into the procession. I called some family members who thankfully live in the closest city. They welcomed us in with blankets and shots of Scotch. My partner was rightfully ruminating on the impending destruction of the community that he had called home for almost a decade. I was trying to keep calm, repeating that we didn’t know the extent of the damage yet. Cycling through dismay, disbelief and relief from being in a well-lit home among family, we decided to watch Labyrinth and drink more Scotch. David Bowie finally sang us all to sleep around 4 a.m.

Friends and Strangers Stepped in to Help Us

I woke up the next morning to the sound of my partner crying next to me. He was reading the Facebook group for our rural community. Reports were coming in that the local school had burned down. The highway back home was closed off for dozens of miles, with almost everyone evacuated. Our new, old house and the cabin that we had been renting, which contained most of our belongings, were both located deep in the fire area. That was all the information we could get.It smelled like a campfire inside the house. Outside, the air was hazardous and smoky, with flakes of ash falling from the sky. That day, we left the valley to get some fresh air. The next week or two, we split time in hotels and Airbnbs, replacing some basic-necessity items, searching for information on what happened to our home, figuring out what shape our lives were going to take and trying to find some peace. The news of the fires spread quickly. We received an immense surge of support from so many different people in our lives—family members, close friends, old friends who we hadn’t talked to in years. Even random strangers. People reached out on every possible platform, trying to help in any way they could, offering to donate to help us. We were incredibly grateful, and even a little overwhelmed in responding to them. It was hard to put aside our pride and seek help, but we’re glad we did. That support really helped our morale and our ability to feel somewhat secure in the situation.We were lucky to be connected to a friend’s relative who had a vacant apartment that she had walled off in part of her house. We would come to know of many other neighbors of ours who lived in hotels, stayed at friends’ houses or camped in fields for far longer.

This disaster has brought out the best and the worst in everyone connected to it.

The Wildfire Taught Us Detachment From Material Objects

About a week into our displacement, we were sent a grainy photo from a crew of first responders that had visited our cabin. A low-lying pile of rubble sat where the cabin used to be. In the driveway, my school bus, which my family and I had converted into an RV, was completely torched. We knew at that point that we had lost our most prized possessions: the sculptures and molds that I had created, including a large, intricate model that had taken two years to make; a cedar-strip canoe that my partner had built and taken out on the river every summer; and all of our old journals, heirlooms and ephemera that we had saved for our entire lives. Thus began a process of detachment from objects. We had been fearing this and gradually began to reckon with it over the course of our displacement. Still, it stung, and hard.Much of my identity was wrapped up in my artwork. I could not escape the idea that all of that time I had put in for the last two years had gone to waste, as well as all the time I had spent on other art that I completed and kept. I mourn the art that was given to me by my friends, which carried a little part of them for me, and which I cannot replace. This regret has diminished over time, but it has by no means gone away in the months since the fire. But I try to focus on the facts. I have gained skills from those years of practice, and I still have those relationships, even if the objects produced from them no longer exist. As for the non-sentimental items, losing them has been more like an innumerable series of small disappointments and inconveniences. It’s annoying to realize a dozen times a day that you don’t have some little thing that you used to, like a tea kettle or a nightshirt. In time, I have stopped feeling those disappointments almost entirely and have just gotten used to it. We are fortunate that we have the means to replace them. Those means are a matter of privilege. We have the advantage of a supportive community. We had the outlandish luck of having bought a house less than two months before the fire—insurance has allowed us some compensation for what we lost. We have stayed afloat on the grace of the resources available to us.If this fire had happened two months earlier, we would have been in the same situation as hundreds of other people in our community, and many thousands in the American West, who don’t have that protection. There are families, often living in trailers or rental homes, who either couldn’t afford insurance or were gravely underinsured, and lost everything. We have worked to help them out as well by giving them a large portion of the donations that we have received and by encouraging others to donate to organizations that help them directly, such as the American Red Cross and local community-action movements.

Insurance Companies and Thieves Attempted to Take More From Us

This disaster has brought out the best and the worst in everyone connected to it. Right after the fire, as roads were opening up, there was a rash of break-ins that occurred due to thieves taking advantage of residents’ extended absence. Folks watched out for each other and stepped up to guard other properties against suspicious cars making their rounds and lurking in driveways. There have been numerous incidents in which some poor jerk lost their pre-1980s home and either couldn’t or didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for asbestos removal, so they loaded up the remains of their home into a trailer and dumped it into others’ yards. Neighbors have been coming together over Facebook to try and ferret out the dumpers responsible.We have also witnessed the tactics that insurance adjusters use to avoid paying out due coverage. Our own adjuster immediately tried to deny us coverage, arguing that our property had been seized or destroyed by a civil authority, not because our house was uninhabitable due to a disaster. This was obviously untrue. He tried to enter assertions onto the record about our situation that were false, and which contradicted our reports and evidence. If we hadn’t read his arguments and our contract carefully, we could have easily let him screw us out of our coverage. While being honest with them, we have had to be careful not to say anything that they could possibly misconstrue and weaponize against us. Truth be told, I’m nervous even talking about it for an anonymous article. I can only imagine that this must happen to plenty of people all the time. If you don’t understand a contract, get legal help. It’s worth it to not take these companies’ word for granted. Their profit motive is in line with not fulfilling their obligations.

The most important thing to take away from this experience is that stories like mine are becoming increasingly common.

Wildfires Will Continue to Ravage The Land Unless We Take Action

Our community is still scarred, but we are rebuilding. Logging crews and utility companies have been working long days to remove dead trees, control potential landslides, and rebuild downed networks. These days, we are witnessing crews of 50 or more volunteers helping with clean-up. Neighboring towns have donated tons of clothing and home goods that have gone to good use. Church organizations, and the local school that hadn’t burned down, have opened their doors to distribute donations to the people who need them. As my partner and I rebuild, we are leaning heavily into fire safety on our own property, because it could happen again, even more easily now that our forest is full of dead trees.The most important thing to take away from this experience is that stories like mine are becoming increasingly common. Our global climate is warming at an increasing rate. According to NASA, atmospheric CO2 has jumped up dramatically since 1950—about 37 percent higher than the previous largest concentrations of the past 800,000 years. Global temperature, which used to fluctuate up and down before 1940, has been steadily increasing since the 1960s in a way that is not consistent with natural behavior. We are now really starting to see the effects: according to data from the NIFC, the area burned by wildfires in the U.S. has steadily increased since 1983, when reliable estimates based on federal and state reporting became available.We have the technology to change this. We need to wean off our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to clean energy. This is a problem that runs deep in our transportation, production and farming infrastructures, and businesses need to be brought to task in taking their own responsibility for part of it. We all need to work together in our own societies and get our representatives to help this happen. We can volunteer and vote for those who take this as a priority, and we can limit our own carbon footprints by driving as little as possible and sourcing our goods as locally as possible. We can stop this cycle from burning us alive, but we need to deal with it urgently if we hope to reverse it.

The 1980s were an exciting time to be born. TV and movies preoccupied our minds with science fiction and outer space. Nintendo was fresh on the scene and robots captured our fascination. We watched reruns of The Jetsons, where Rosey the Robot kept the house clean and put food on the table. In movies, robots were tasked with terminating every last one of us. One thing was clear: The future, in terms of progress and problems, was tech.I was a normal, white privileged, lower-middle-class kid from a blue-collar town. I played street hockey outside with my friends, a very popular thing to do in the ‘90s. We developed skills to retrieve pucks from the sewer, how to look out for cars, how to get up from scrapes, falls and bruises. We played outside in the cold. We learned from the pain and we became stronger for it. We didn’t worry about helmets until much later, when they started to become essential bike-riding equipment. Better tech meant better protection from a dangerous world.It seems technology is what humans naturally develop. If we don’t like something, we try to improve upon it; with improvements come new challenges, and demands more innovation. This repeats until the future of our species and the direction of the planet now lies in its hands. Welcome to the Anthropocene: a testament to our innovative spirit.

Not even sex is safe from being replaced.

Computer Technology Provided Infinite Knowledge Immediately

Our family got its first computer in 1994: Windows 3.11 on an Intel 75MHZ processor, 1.19 GB hard drive, CD-ROM and a 28.8k dial-up modem. Meanwhile, I was in middle school making friends. Video games, computers and the internet provided a reprieve from the brutality of adolescent social life. Technology created a safe space, a digital womb.Logging on to the internet for the first time was like entering Stargate; we had to put sticky notes on the phones so nobody accidentally terminated our session trying to make a phone call. It took hours, sometimes days, to download songs from Napster. It was cool to get free music but it sucked having to wait so long. In only a couple of years, the technology changed. Suddenly we were always connected with high-speed broadband. Soon, infinite knowledge was at my fingertips. I wasn’t even out of high school yet and was addicted. AOL Instant Messenger took me hostage almost immediately. Being captive to the screen meant protection. It was a great, safe way to pass time indoors and be social with friends. Call it cyber Stockholm syndrome. It was a seamless integration, a usurpation of my attention. I knew technology was the future, so I followed what my friends were doing and enrolled as a CS major. After all, I was still a kid and just wanted to be accepted.

Smartphone Fever Pushed Me Into the Wilderness

Within a month of starting college, 9/11 happened. I was in between classes when I heard the news. It was a tech school that issued every student a laptop, and the first in the state to have wireless internet. Every single laptop in front of me in the lecture hall was playing the same devastating footage. The internet kept us informed about “what really happened” and privacy concerns in this new era of national security. The easy access to information was a rabbit hole. I had no idea what I was doing in school anymore. The digital womb was starting to feel like a trap. My inner animal wanted to be free, but it couldn’t ignore how the world was so rapidly changing. And because of our progress, I was able to stay informed from the confines of my laptop. Always connected, always informed, always aware of the environmental problems facing the world. After three semesters I failed out, eventually enrolling at community college to study liberal arts. The disruptive power of technology was gaining momentum. School and work rapidly became more and more computer-based. The computers got smaller and became smartphones. The internet was always with us and all this screen time was disorienting. I had had enough. I went to Oregon with only a backpack of clothes and my skates. I peeled myself from my screens and into reality, amongst the old-growth forests. It felt natural and right, surreal and alien, dangerous, but safe and calm. This was when I had a real opportunity to reconnect with the world around me, to reconnect with the lost ways of my early childhood; the here and now. I needed a new phone so I opted for the cheapest, most basic flip phone. This smartphone hiatus lasted three years. It showed me the attention-sucking nature of these devices. I hated how, in conversation with any number of my friends at any given moment, someone would lose interest in the “here and now” and compulsively check their phone. I felt like I was surrounded by addicts. I grew to hate smartphones. I hated how they owned my friends. But as I was preparing for a drive back East, I wanted a GPS, so I asked my dad to send me his old smartphone. Like any addict thinking just this one time, I relapsed.

We are more connected than we’ve ever been, unnaturally hyperconnected and yet also more isolated.

Technology Is Changing Our Relationship to the Environment

Is our technology just part of the natural world, some natural sequence of behaviors for any intelligent life? If making tools and technological progress is what we as a species are supposed to do, why even try to resist? Are we just mechanisms for entropy, converting matter from one form to the next in order to make our existence as efficient as possible? Do we exist to replace what already exists with that of our design? We are the changing universe, which is changing itself.Ultimately, technology is changing our environment and our relation to it. Every advance makes possible what once wasn’t. These changes don’t always jibe with the institutions of evolution that engendered us to begin with. At the same time, they create novel ways for self-expression and coping. Technology, while being a driving force for climate change, allows us to be whatever version of ourselves we choose, while also protecting ourselves from the dangers of reality. We can be whoever we want to be on the internet, and we have virtually zero consequences for our actions. We are more connected than we’ve ever been, unnaturally hyperconnected and yet also more isolated. Our brains are hyperstimulated as our bodies sit idle, staring at a collection of bright dots. (The solution? Stand-up desks!) Our progress is paradoxical, almost as if the more we try to avoid chaos and death, the closer we get to it. Some scientists predict that our species could be extinct in as few as 80 years. This may well not be the case were it not for our progress.

Tech Will Inevitably Integrate With Our Biology

Is more progress our only hope? While the world burns, we will have VR to experience education, concerts and waiting in line at the DMV. Eventually, our bodies’ cells will become obsolete, unfit for this brave new world. Artificial intelligence will become smarter and faster than humans in every way, and humans will have no choice but to integrate technology into their biology. We will preserve our sentience in an entirely virtual ecosystem. We will be bodiless gods of our own universes. Not even sex is safe from being replaced. Does the availability of online pornography and life-like sex dolls suggest that soon we won’t even need partners? Sperm and egg will be synthetic and made to order, and birth will be an optional, virtual experience for women. Reproduction will be created in labs by genetic counselors under very controlled conditions. Perhaps it’s true: There is nothing new under the sun. But, it will eventually die—and when it does, if we want to exist, we will need a way to do without it. There are plenty of other threats to our existence in the meantime. For example, ourselves. We have no choice but to find out if we can have our own subjective worlds without a biological substrate. We will keep working to be safe, making progress on the problems of our progress. In the meantime, go outside.

In below-zero temperatures, the lake holds onto its heat more than the shoreline surrounding it, causing a thick morning fog to float over the surface, the gravitational pull of a diaphanous moon to the water. Lake Superior is so large that it has tides like an ocean. It is December 2019, and I am sitting near the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota, almost 1,200 miles away from my apartment in Brooklyn, watching ice chunks float in the harbor. For a short period of time during my childhood, my father was the city engineer and in charge of this bridge, most known for letting iron ore ships in and out of the city. Earlier in the year, Duluth—situated in the most southern corner of Lake Superior—was named “the most climate-proof city" in the U.S. by Harvard researcher Jesse Keenan. When I first read about it in The New York Times, I laughed. Our Great Lake may provide an abundant supply of fresh water and a consistently cool year-round temperature compared to the rest of the continental U.S., but my experience growing up in Minnesota was of a state home to an almost cliquey kind of eccentricity I couldn't quite pinpoint to friends on the East Coast—and also a state government still actively reckoning with its positionality in the current climate crisis. I considered the term "Minnesota nice" an ironic joke, lying physically beneath "friendly Manitoba." Our state is more accurately home to road rage on I-94 and meat raffles held at local Lutheran churches. I recently returned to a photograph I have of two of my family's Siberian huskies from a camping trip when I was a kid—one red, one black, their bodies and bright blue eyes pitched halfway between the fire and the tent, the lake just visible behind them. It seemed more like a nostalgic Polaroid from a photo book than a real shoreline currently in the throes of relentless development.

I Can See Why Duluth Is Considered a Climate Refuge City

In many respects, Duluth could, in fact, be considered a ripe candidate to balance on both a metaphorical and literal precipice of change. The city stretches 30 or so miles along the steep shore of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world by volume, and is the most inland ocean port in the world. Its immigration history is as rich as its rock cliffs: Iron ore production began in the mid-19th century and was the main source of its initial population growth.In 1870, Duluth was the fastest growing city in the U.S., drawing thousands of families from all over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, Duluth, like many American towns that traditionally relied on mining exports for income, shifted to tourism and tech—so much so that finding a public campsite on the lake has now become almost impossible, due to the abundance of privately-owned land. It costs a hefty sum to see the sunrise these days: The lodge my family frequented growing up is now run by a resort chain that charges at least $130 a night depending on the season. There is a direct correlation between development and levels of runoff and septic waste into the lake, contributing to algal blooms that are increasing due to global warming. According to the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Lake Superior is one of the fastest-warming lakes in the world. My father says the increase in unpredictable weather contributes to the shoreline’s maintenance as well: “Because of the frequency of storm surges and rising lake levels, the shoreline sees continuous erosion issues that must be dealt with—many of those areas in tourist areas and having impacts to the local economy.”

Can a city really be climate-proof if it hasn’t dealt with the environmental impacts already leveled upon its neighboring indigenous communities?

Being a Climate Change-Proof City Is About More Than the Weather

Can a city really be “climate-proof” if it hasn’t dealt with the environmental impacts already leveled upon its neighboring indigenous communities? I started to ask myself, "What is a climate-proof city, anyway?" Certainly not one that is immune to its past, both its nostalgia and its history of colonization, beginning with immigration but one that continues on in the form of fossil fuel transport through indigenous lands. I thought of notes from Lorine Niedecker's poem “Lake Superior”: "So—here we go. Maybe as rocks and I pass each other I could say how-do-you-do to an agate. What I didn't foresee was that the highway doesn't always run right next to the lake." There is always a highway with gasoline-fueled traffic nearby, and now, the encroaching expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline carrying tar sands for over three hundred miles between Alberta, Canada and Superior, Wisconsin, right next door to Duluth. Proponents of the pipeline and Enbridge executives justify that it “already existed,” and yet, the “repair” expands and reroutes the tar path through indigenous lands with multiple treaty violations. The pipe will carry twice the amount of oil it previously did, slated to be the largest tar sands pipeline in the world. It will now cross more than 200 bodies of water and 800 wetlands that it can potentially leak into. If the local Minnesota government is serious about global warming, it should stop approving modifications of old infrastructures that pose harm to communities, specifically ones that have lived here for generations. There are eleven reservations in the state of Minnesota (under the names of Ojibwe, Chippewa, Dakota and Sioux), one of which has access to Lake Superior and houses a national monument run by the National Park Service that draws just under 70,000 visitors a year. Karen Diver, the chairman of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa from 2007-2015, has further stated in direct response to Keenan’s report: "Our way of life is so tied to a healthy natural environment. More people, more strain, more pollution. From my perspective, we haven't even figured out how to act in a positive way with our indigenous people here." The pipeline seems to be a further example of her point.

There is a world dying and a world being born every second.

Duluth May Not Be Capable of Welcoming Climate Migrants

While I don't have one singular response to Keenan's report, reading it has brought forth vital questions for me to consider in our inevitable future of climate migration: How do regions accept new groups of people, when they have yet to converse with their own sense of memory and loss, and especially when some have not even started to dismantle their violent relations with the local indigenous people? What kind of space does shoreline that was never "mine," but holds a deep well in my body and mind's memory, occupy? What I do know is that I am committed to preserving Duluth and its surrounding landscape as a place of community, beauty and healing, and not one of further exploitation.“In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground,” writes philosopher Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects. “It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are beginning to see.”Reading this, I’m reminded that there is a world along the shore that has already disappeared, and there will inevitably be another world that climate migrants move into. These so-called separate “worlds” are just prominent changes in one ever-unfolding experience. There is a world dying and a world being born every second. The constantly icy waters my sister and I dared each other to dip our hands into each summer is a world that is now gone—the warming shallows touching the pipeline is another world yet to come.

I went to Aspen for the first and only time in the summer of 2019. During my first night, I slept in my car on the street, masturbated to porn on my phone and woke up early the next morning to a Latino construction worker leaning on my passenger side window.“No, no, no! The steps going in over there!”It was a nice sunny day in Aspen and the first day of the Aspen Ideas Festival. I’d been invited through the Ideas Scholars program, which provides free festival tickets to “a diverse group of global leaders who are selected for their work, accomplishments, and ability to transform ideas into action.” At the time, I was a master’s student and on the Environmental Film Festival team at Yale. My guess is that my invite had something to do with those four letters: Y-A-L-E.That next night, I found myself alone in the luxury suite of a hotel. The space was far too big for me, and I thought for a second maybe that’s why rich men are always filling their homes with women and parties and shit because, otherwise, the cavernous-ness of wealth would constantly be whispering. I sat on the king-sized bed and looked at the fake fireplace that burned the decomposing fossils slowly ruining the planet and wished they’d have just paid me the cash for however much this room cost and I could go sleep in my car again. It’d help a lot with rent. I snapped back when my phone buzzed. There was an email from some folks at The Atlantic."The Atlantic requests the pleasure of your company for a private breakfast and discussion. “What policies will drive meaningful action on climate change?” Underwritten by ExxonMobile".

I think that basically nobody cares about climate change.

The Festival Headquarters Was an Anachronistic Fantasy

A few days later, I found myself struggling out of bed, hungover, but with just enough time to get to the hotel to talk to whomever about environmental meaningfulness. Walking into Hotel Jerome in Aspen is like being transported into a 1912 campaign rally for the Bull Moose Party, which gave us both meaningful conservation policies and meaningful eugenics policies—and thus, our National Parks and the Holocaust. Inside, it is artificially dark, suggesting some time before the lightbulb, and the walls are strewn with the heads of dead animals and the portraits of dead white men dressed in military regalia and American flags. The furniture is all built from some combination of the flesh of dead trees and the fur of dead animals. In every act of its public persona, Hotel Jerome hints nostalgically toward a time when the relationship between man and nature was intimate and ruggedly reciprocal. And yet, in reality, it’s a celebration of a time when the rich, white men in portraits traveled West to places like Aspen to nostalgically “LARP” a frontier-era that never existed. The real frontier was horrific, no place for blue-blooded, sport-hunting Ivy Leaguers. Which makes Jerome a confused place today.And so, there I was, in the lobby of Hotel Jerome at 7 a.m., when the next generation of white male Ivy Leaguers with invites from some of the world’s most powerful would gather to discuss the unchanging, abusive relationship between man and nature. I was standing there in the unrealistic darkness, in my Western-patterned button-down shirt, when a white woman in a white dress walked up to me.“Sir?”“Hey, yeah!”“Are you looking for the breakfast?”“Yes!”“Follow me.”

The Executives Greeted Each Other Like College Kids

As she led me through a labyrinth of hallways deeper into Jerome, we chatted. She was nice, about my age and had the graceful professionalism of someone working 60-hour weeks in Manhattan and seeing a therapist. The Wheeler Room in Hotel Jerome is as ridiculous as the rest of it. Everything’s white. Lacy drapes adorning 20-foot tall windows drift in the breeze and morning light. And in the middle is one gigantic table built for 30. If the rest of Jerome is a shrine to some imagined masculine earthliness and death, the Wheeler Room is a temple for the heavenly feminine, a place for more atmospheric or aspirational conversations.As I got there, people in suits were already sitting down at their assigned seats, backslapping and laughing in a way that suggested, “This is just like the old college days, eh?” I quickly found my name card and sat down. To my right was a reporter for Axios, who was frantically and only half-secretly scrolling to her voice memos app beneath the table. Record.The editor of The Atlantic seemed to be in charge. He was bald, kind and introduced the gathering with something like, “Here we are in the beautiful Wheeler Room in Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado. Look at this group! Exxon Executives, McKinsey Partners, and even academics from Brookings to Harvard to Yale! In today’s session, we will be trying to answer the question: What policies will drive meaningful action on climate change?”

The Environmental Discussion Focused Only on Nuclear Energy

After some more hopeful remarks and a casual bite of food that went down in a way that you know he didn’t taste because he was too nervous, he began. Here’s a brief, remembered transcript of the meeting: Atlantic Editor, to an Exxon Executive: You’re in charge of environmental policy at ExxonMobile. How have y’all been thinking about policies that will lead to meaningful action on climate change?Exxon Executive: Well, I know this sounds crazy but we think that nuclear energy is the future.Someone Else: Yes, I totally agree.Harvard Researcher: Well, here’s a small problem with nuclear but, yeah, I also agree.National Geographic Editor: Why are people so afraid of nuclear?Brookings Fellow: I know, I don’t get it! It’s so good.Chevron Advisor: I mean, yeah, it won’t work forever, but as a transitional source?Exxon Executive: Yeah, totally. It’s the only thing.Former USDA Undersecretary: If only we didn’t live in a democracy we could just like, do nuclear everywhere without anyone stopping us.Axios Reporter: I mean, do we live in a democracy?Everyone: [Quiet laughter.]Atlantic Editor, speaking to me: You’re the director of an environmental film festival, why don’t you tell all of these people what “meaningful” environmental storytelling is to you.Me: [Having just shoveled too many eggs into my mouth] Well, I think that basically nobody cares about climate change.[The room falls silent. One food server falls wide-eyed as he pours more coffee for the editor-in-chief of National Geographic. The woman in the white dress gasps audibly and covers her mouth with her right hand.]Me: Or at least…well, let me start over.[I think for a moment and look across the table at The Atlantic editor, who knows what I’m thinking and agrees. There is a serene moment when the editor and I stare at each other. The editor sees I’m finally realizing that the people in power are not up to the task of addressing our deteriorating environment. For generations, this has been true and nobody talks about it. The editor watches as I struggle to say something that would change the conventional minds of the table. For a moment, the editor regrets asking the question and putting me on the spot. For years, I will wonder why I was invited to this event in the first place, and the answer might be that sometimes the editors at places such as The Atlantic like to bring in young “global leaders” into white rooms in the back of hotels in Aspen over breakfast to show them what we’re really dealing with.]Me: [Having fully cleared his mouth of eggs] I mean, in practice, we’re all climate deniers. The question of what is “meaningful” has nothing to do with solving the material problem of carbon in the atmosphere. It has to do with whether our collective efforts and public policies align with huge mythical narratives of what we imagine as the good life. I mean, for me, any policies that incentivize the reassessing of cultural values in order to better respect nonhuman life on this planet—and push the public to feel more accountability and kinship with future generations of humans—would qualify as meaningful action. Exxon Executive: I mean, yeah, it might be important to think about why people don’t like nuclear.Brookings Fellow: Yeah because, I mean, nuclear is awesome. It’s our only chance.

I kindly excused myself from her presence, quietly threw up in a nearby garden, started crying and called my mom.

Our Globalized Economy Is Heading Toward an Iceberg

When I escaped Hotel Jerome and made it back out into the morning light, Aspen was just waking up and I felt like I wanted to punch someone. I turned to my right and there on the sidewalk was the only female chief art critic in the history of The New York Times. I didn’t punch her but wanted to.“You’re Helen Smith, right?”“What? Yeah.”“So what’s the deal with climate change art? Who’s making the best work?”“Uh, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that. People mostly just make art about identity these days, you know? But yeah, I’m not sure. I’d have to think about it…sorry, it’s early. I haven’t had coffee yet.”I’m not sure if it was the hangover or eggs or the portraits of old men or animal heads on the walls in Jerome. Or maybe it was just the simple experiential fact that we are sailing the Titanic of a globalized interconnected economy toward an iceberg with no one behind the wheel. But I kindly excused myself from Helen’s presence, quietly threw up in a nearby garden, started crying and called my mom.

When I was 19, my parents and doctor sent me to an eating disorder clinic for anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphia. After four months of working with a multidisciplinary team, I “graduated” from treatment. They advised me that to maintain the progress I made, I needed to participate in something every day to reinforce what I learned in treatment. For me, that meant AA meetings at a West Village LGBTQ center, mediation classes and therapy with a woman from the rehabilitation center.I didn’t realize until much later in my recovery that sitting in Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings only heightened my sense of isolation and depression. I concluded that, like an alcoholic or narcotics addict, I possessed a chemical imbalance that demanded attention. But unlike a drug addiction, sex addiction or alcoholism, we cannot live without food. It wasn’t until I visited a nutritionist in Israel two years later that I was opened up to the world of mindfulness in eating disorder recovery. My nutritionist explained the distinction between addiction and eating disorders, something that seemed radical to me. She emphasized the importance of self-compassion. I started to accept that there would be days that I returned to certain behaviors, but that didn’t have to mean my recovery was undone. Each day was separate, and each meal needed to be treated in isolation rather than in conjunction with the meals before and after it. Before then, I couldn’t distinguish between a chemical reliance and my eating disorder.

What Started as an Escape Turned Into So Much More

A few years later, I experienced real heartbreak for the first time, the kind that will lead you down all kinds of existential rabbit holes. It brought up an eagerness to return to my disordered eating behaviors: binging, purging, restraining and exercise bulimia. Determined to not allow this experience to erase all the hard work I had done, I decided to take action. I reached out to family in Humboldt, California to ask if I could stay with them. I knew I needed to remove myself from the situation, and thought it would be a pleasant place to heal.In Humboldt, I started working on a farm that practices radical sustainability. This is a process in which sustainability is addressed from the bottom-up. Set along the Van Duzen River, the farm values biodiversity and incorporates holistic planned grazing. This is a system of incorporating the rearing of livestock with the production of crops. The goal is to help regenerate the land and the soil through a total integration of all aspects of the farm. While I was there, they had chickens, turkeys, cattle and the oxen that provided draft power as an alternative to gas-powered tractors. The oxen require no fossil fuel and eventually they become beef, continuing the cycle of sustainable practices.

I believe regenerative agriculture can restore not only the damage done to both physical lands, but our personal connections to them.

How Mindfulness and Eating Disorders Are Linked

I was surprised to find a common link between some of the farmers and me. A few of us had experienced a similar history of yo-yo dieting and starvation. As we would make our way down the strawberry patches, harvesting berries and picking away the culls, we would share stories. Many of them included our personal history with anorexia, binge-purge and body dysmorphia.I believe regenerative agriculture can restore not only the damage done to both physical lands but our personal connections to them. It is the focus on the micro aspects of eating that allows an eating disorder to run wild. Thoughts of the self become all-consuming, putting our lives on autopilot. This extends to what we put in our bodies, when calorie-counting becomes a transactional matter leading to malnutrition and severe depression.On the farm, my favorite task was picking vine tomatoes and harvesting peppers. The hothouse was so warm that it made me sweat, and I loved being covered in a dusting of green tomato perfume. I looked forward to finding oddly-shaped peppers. Later in the season when we harvested squash, I looked for the ones that were the bumpiest and most misshapen and took them home.

Food Is So Much More Than Just Calories

A common issue during eating disorder recovery is that people push their bodies into recovery before they are mentally capable. When I found myself taking the time to pick through the wonky veggies or to look for the culls, it was one of the first times in a long time that I felt fully connected to food. Upset that no one else seemed to want these beautiful vegetable creatures, my mind was on food waste.When I was in the bulimia stage of my disorder, my food waste was off the charts. I would buy things just because I knew I could easily throw them up. Things like ice cream and sweets were always a go-to as I knew my body had been trained to reject them. Going to the market almost daily just to buy purge-inducing food was a very low point in my disordered behavior. Speaking to my peers, I have found this was not unique to my experience. Each week when I do my grocery shopping in my London neighborhood I’m shocked by how affordable excellent quality fruits and vegetables are here. Then I immediately think of my home in Los Angeles, and places like Erewhon and Whole Foods that have capitalized on wellness culture and made it nearly impossible for a person living on an average salary to eat locally-sourced produce.The United Kingdom has become a hub for innovations in the regenerative agriculture movement. Many restaurants in London have partnered with farms around England as a response to the demand for ethically grown produce. Even my local produce shops in Hackney sell ethically-grown foods, and my weekly tab never exceeds £32.

Focusing on our macro relationship with the food ecosystem rather than the micro personal relationship can lead to real sustainable recovery.

What Makes Farming a Viable Alternative Eating Disorder Treatment?

For people like me, with a history of disordered eating, conscious consumption is unavoidable. Early in my recovery, I believed this meant making sure I ate at the scheduled times and got in enough calories to satisfy my therapists, doctors and nutritionists. I have since come to understand that the last step in my recovery is giving food more thought. This includes reconnecting with foods I had previously written off merely for the sake of their higher caloric content. I have a deep sense of gratitude for the food I consume. Not only am I more aware of the hard work that goes into its production, but I am finally able to enjoy eating.Sending someone to a farm won’t automatically lead to a healthier relationship with food. But I hope it can offer an alternative approach to the standard Western treatment for anorexia and disordered eating. Hospitalization and clinical rehabilitations lack a connection between personal experience and the world at large. People who are struggling emotionally need to feel like they’re part of something. Finding this missing link is vital, and often transformative.Focusing on our macro relationship with the food ecosystem rather than the micro personal relationship can lead to real sustainable recovery. These days I look forward to biking to my local fruit and veg shops, planning what recipes I am going to cook for friends and family. It’s so far from anything I thought possible.Getting in touch with food through learning about biodiversity, regenerative practices and soil health can not only impart valuable life skills surrounding food, but they also offer a deeper kind of mindfulness. This is far from the “mindfulness” tips we see on Instagram, telling us to journal or run the bath to calm our thoughts of restriction and binging. This is a mindfulness that incorporates a radical self-care that considers what a person is struggling with—in this case, food—and provides more thoughtful alternative approaches.If you or someone you know is struggling, I urge you to look into treatment that can provide lifelong tools and a total expansion of the way we look and talk about food. I ask that you consider the harmful nature of the current rhetoric surrounding eating disorders in the West. We need to start to look at reconnecting with the larger food ecosystem as a method of healing and recovery.

Growing food with urine is safe and effective and should be a common practice. As a biology artist with a background in agriculture, I’m interested in the ways humans can shift their relationship to the earth from parasitic to symbiotic, and using pee to grow plants is one simple way. Synthetic fertilizer reduces biodiversity—it’s a leading cause of pollution and could easily be replaced with a daily byproduct of human life: urine. What if we could help dismantle the patriarchy and close the consumption loop? And what if pee helped? What if pee helped preserve and increase biodiversity? What if pee saved our relationship with the earth? What if pee saved lives? It sounds dramatic, I know. But hear me out.This article will touch on the extraction methods of synthetic fertilizer, briefly compare the makeup of urine to synthetic fertilizer, roast the toxic relationship the majority of humans have to Earth, provide a nuts and bolts how-to that anyone can do, and answer frequently asked questions around peeing on plants.

Mother Nature Needs Our Love for Us to Survive

I’m a sensitive person and know I’m not alone when I say that I feel the earth sort of groaning under the pressure of human life. I have nostalgia pangs over the biodiversity lost in all the places I’ve known for so long, and these pangs are usually followed by an urge to run away to a new place for a fresh start. With that fresh start comes a new baseline and an uncomplicated “just the facts, ma’am” getting-to-know-you of the place. A common human experience has been one where we long to escape the damage we’ve caused, fall into brand new love of a new-to-me environment and explore it—then we colonize the shit out of it. “Let’s see what’s under that mountain over there, and under that forest.” No stone goes unturned. We become the invasive species (here’s looking at you, Mars). It seems that, whether we go or stay, the vast majority of humans need to come to terms with our role on this rock and the wake that we leave, lest The Great Nothing That Consumes Everything stays on our heels. Up next, the Sixth Extinction, while we just chase our species’ tail and squabble over that last spacesuit.This might be a stretch, but what if we look at all that through the lens of patriarchy? We already do, it seems. Mother Earth and mankind are old tropes. Certain groups of humans have been trying to glorify and force their dominion over the earth for how long? She won’t submit, bless her, and she’s ready to swear off man altogether, threatening to burn the house down. I can’t say I blame her and she has never been known to make an idle threat.What if we could stay together, though? I imagine a sort of couple’s therapy, the earth and her most dominating and draining lovers. We’d promise to change and if she just wouldn’t be so withholding and get so worked up and always superstorm and polar icecap melt on us then…no, we’re past that point. It’s past time to listen to what she has been saying all along and be in this relationship, to give as much as we take. At this point, it feels like we can never make up for all the shit we’ve put our old lady through and we just can’t help it, but down the block, there’s this redhead, Mars, and she sure seems like a hot little number. She doesn’t have much, but she’s sweet. Nothing a little colonization won’t fix, if you know what I mean. But Earth is still so good for us and she just needs us to love her for it to work. Really love her. And she wants to try golden showers. Don’t be nervous.

Earth is still so good for us and she just needs us to love her for it to work. Really love her. And she wants to try golden showers.

Using Liquid Gold as Fertilizer

The use of properly diluted fresh urine as a nutrient source for plants is a safe and effective practice that protects human life and promotes a healthy environment. It’s a practice that has been commonplace for public works for petrochemical in other countries but is pretty much taboo for Western culture. Sure, we have reclaimed water for irrigation on golf courses, a similar concept, but we can simplify, broaden and personalize the application. Here are some rapid-fire fun facts.Urine is not a very effective vector for disease (as opposed to solid human waste), which makes it safe and simple to use as fertilizer. It has pretty much the same salt, mineral and general other constituents as the ubiquitous moist, crystalline, blue house plant food concentrate, but your body just makes it. For free. All day. The same house plant food company strip-mines and mountain-top-removal-mines for nearly the same salt and mineral content that we piss away multiple times a day. Those mountains are more than sometimes home to endangered species and indigenous populations of humans that are then “displaced” in order to access the materials under them. Urine is great news for all the mountains since it is so plentiful and free. Did I mention it’s free? Here are some other crazy stats, if you’re into that: The average American urinates into about 12 gallons of potable water each day, or 4,380 gallons a year, turning 1.25 year's worth of drinking water for one human into blackwater. Blackwater is a major contaminant to drinking water sources, lakes, rivers and bays, posing a health risk to humans and suffocating greater ecosystems. Meanwhile, a year’s worth of urine from one human can grow enough wheat to make 365 loaves of bread. We pee a loaf a day.

How to Change Your Fertilizing

Replace your mined petrochemical fertilizer with homegrown golden showers (for your plants). For house plants, mix one-part fresh urine with nine parts water and apply, repeating every third time you water. For herbs and veggies, mix one-part fresh urine with five parts water for a stiffer drink and water as usual. Vegetables are heavy feeders, so repeat every other time you water your garden.The great news about lawns? You don’t have to dilute if you don’t want to. You can put your urine in a watering can and sprinkle it sparingly over your turf. For general use, you will need to supplement with iron (compost, worm castings, blood meal, menses) every so often, but you will have to do that with the store-bought stuff, too, in most cases.Remember, the sun will swallow the earth someday, so hold her and love her and affect change for the better sooner than later.

Urine is high in nitrogen and is perfectly fine to consume after having been turned into sugars and carbon by the metabolism of a plant.

Urine Gardening FAQ

Q: Can I do this with orchids?A: Absolutely. Dilute the ratio to three-quarters or half-strength (one part urine to 13 to 18 parts water), feed and make sure to allow nutrient solution to flow through the pot as opposed to pooling in roots/media, the same as you would for any orchids. I put my indoor orchids into the unplugged bathtub and feed to avoid overflows and sogginess.Q: If I water my veggies with urine, like you say, am I eating urine come harvest time?A: If you rinse, as you would for any produce, you’re following best practices. You are eating minerals that the plants have extracted from the urine, just as they would from soil, manure or petroleum-based nutrient sources. You really are what you eat.Q: What about the smell?A: A two-part answer: It won’t have a detectable odor any more than that store-bought, blue house plant food. Having said that, dilution is key with both. Some people look at the directions and think, “If a little is good, a lot is better.” This adage perfectly sums up the fine line going from nutrient source to pollution. The more accurate phrase would be, “If a little is nutrient, a lot is pollution.” Secondly, don’t save it up for later. Aside from starting to smell, the precious nitrogen your plants need will escape into the atmosphere if it sits for more than half a day. That would be that ammonia smell of old urine. Besides, you will make more pee, I promise.Q: How best do I “collect” my urine?A: First thing in the morning is ideal, as it’s the most mineral-rich. But any point is fine. Some find it easiest to pee into a watering can or plant pitcher with a wide mouth. With—how do I say it—certain “tackle,” the world is your oyster. And by oyster, I mean piss pot.Q: What if I’m on medication or supplements?A: The main precaution would be to avoid using urine from a course of antibiotics. Wait two weeks before feeding plants again. Antibiotics are basically a nuke bomb on the rich microbiotic life that is the biome of soil, turning fertility into wasteland.Q: How come dog pee kills lawns if urine is so good for plants?A: The “dilution is the solution to pollution” rule applies here. I could burn my name into your lawn like Fido with a strong solution of blue crystal miracle-stuff. Q: First you said that urine is safe and then went on to say that it’s a health risk in drinking water. Which is it?A: I love this question. Both, really. Urine, like any fertilizer, is high in nitrogen and is perfectly fine to consume after having been turned into sugars and carbon by the metabolism of a plant. “Uncut” nitrogen consumed by mammals starves hemoglobin in the blood (and as a result, the brain) of oxygen. Following that pattern, excess nitrogen in bodies of water causes algal blooms, which starve the aquatic ecosystem of oxygen and causes mass die-offs of micro and macro-organisms.Q: Why are you like this?A: I’m not exactly sure, but I am uncomfortable with the plummeting levels of biodiversity and the stability of the ecosystem as a result of slipping into the Anthropocene. For further reading, enjoy this rabbit hole of amazing data about using pee for good.

I grew up in sunny, urban South Florida, with color and vegetation exploding at the seams. Sandwiched between the Florida Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean, the city that raised me is brimming with parrots, palms, hibiscus and tropical fruits.In the same breath, we sit at the forefront of the climate crisis. The beaches are not the same places that taught me the physics of sandcastles or how to treat Portuguese man o’ war stings. Instead, native vegetation has been removed, erosion has ensued, tides have risen and change proves itself once again as the only constant.Early on in my agricultural career, I began to realize not just how disconnected people were from their food, but also from themselves and their surroundings. Shifting circumstances seemed to arouse fear, instability, even abandonment. Farming was my framework for reorienting myself in an ever-changing world. It supported me in laying the groundwork on which to understand the importance of sustained health in myself and my community. All the while, the practice perfectly illustrated how everything is some kind of meal, feeding our minds and mitochondria, guiding me into a relationship with that which holds and heals.

Early on in my agricultural career, I began to realize not just how disconnected people were from their food, but also from themselves and their surroundings.

The Landscape Around Us Is a Living Organism

I, too, had been blind to the web of connection we are each so deeply woven into—the world of interdependence overshadowed by the story of the independent pioneer. At first, I found it hard not to be upset. The reality of understanding how many of these spaces are actually left to share, and who has safe access to experiencing them, highlights the trying balance of urgency and patience. Nonetheless, like the slow unfurling of a flower, it became clear to me how deeply our varying environments impacted wellbeing, from the individual to the collective. However uncomfortable, there is deep pleasure in lifting the veil of disconnection.Over the following years, I found myself farming in different parts of the country. Upstate New York was where I built my foundation in herbalism, where I fell in love with the wild and cultivated mint family, Lamiaceae (think mint, basil, oregano and thyme). They made my body feel alive. Northern California filled my eyes and heart with the golden hues of summers and sunsets, while my nose sought out the scents of dry heat, grass, eucalyptus and salt. Southeast Michigan taught me how to root, and provided me with nourishment through companionship. By growing crops like burdock, rose, elderflower and dandelion, I learned about the senses and energetics; bitter clarity, sweet protection and the umami of life. I often moved states with the seasons, snowbirding from parcel to parcel, chasing an endless growing season for a while. Then, I landed back in Miami. Revisiting the land that raised me was like settling back into a familiar hug from an old friend. Just like an old friend, time had passed, life had happened, we each stood with our own stories, the land holding eons to share. As I write this, I also want to explain why I have chosen to personify this place. The landscape around us is living. It is a multifaceted organism that has respirating, moving, living, dying, dynamic parts. It is a macro reflection of us, and we are a microcosm of them. As we step deeper into the pool of emerging tech, I hope humanity never feels so far from nature that we no longer recognize ourselves as a part of it. We are nature.

We are nature.

The Earth Is Always Changing, and We Must Bear Witness

As I begin again to work with the soil, so familiar and strange, I am often reminded of the variety of bugs, minerals, seeds and sediments, buried in this earth. Pushing back settled topsoil, the multidimensionality of every space, every moment, is revealed. This reflection acknowledges the same diversity in both myself and in surrounding communities. The planet feels exciting to come home to because it is always different. Just as there is an opportunity to be born anew in every moment, as we faithfully continue shedding skin and regenerating with each lunar cycle, we can too embody the new person already in existence without feelings of separation.The soil carries memories, holds bones, births flowers—is alive. In the humidity and heat of the South, things can change quickly. Imagine the heat generated from a compost pile and its ability to transform food scraps into rich soil in a matter of weeks. The climate acts similarly, embodying transformation. True to Heraclitus’ words, “All things flow, nothing abides. You cannot step into the same river twice, for the waters are continually flowing on.”There is courage in choice, and wisdom in acceptance. Like the seeds planted by our ancestors, may we continue to navigate an ever-evolving world with patience, resilience and care.

Some years back, I received acupuncture from a rather knowledgeable man in South Florida for some nerve pain that was following me around. He proceeded to treat me, an experience that was peaceful and relaxing. So much so, that he fell asleep while the needles sat in my body. Maybe the chi flow had an effect on the practitioner? I coughed to gently awake him from his corner of the room, and he came to and pulled the needles out. I asked him if he used Chinese herbs for his practice, and he said yes. Excitingly, I asked him if he ever grew them, and, sadly, he said no. He had “never even seen what the plants looked like in their whole natural growing state.” The session ended and after a brief chat, we stepped outside of his home office and into his front yard. I immediately recognized a close plant friend, Sida acuta, commonly known as sida, growing wildly in his grass. “Doc! You see this one? This plant is one of Florida’s great herbal antimicrobials, one we work with for infections as well as for complaints of allergies for its cooling and soothing effects. Pounds and pounds of this are sent to the Northeast for folks who are dealing with Lyme disease…” His mind was blown. “Wow! In my own yard? A medicinal plant? I thought that was a weed!” “And what is a weed, then?” I asked him. “A weed is just a plant whose name you don’t know yet.” He smiled big and nodded approvingly of my main message: Learn your backyard plants.

Learn your backyard plants.

There Is Strength in Knowing About Local Plants

It’s common for all people to learn and study herbs and medicines that come from the other side of the planet without first knowing what is actually growing at their own feet. But let’s not stop in the backyard. There is a special spot that only a few know about. It’s called a bioregion, which is defined “not by political boundaries, but by ecological systems,” and thank goodness for that. Plants, although some may suffer at the hands of politics, which is deeply unfortunate, don’t know who you voted for. And, they probably don’t care. They are here to live and thrive and maybe even teach us something. So, why look at bioregional herbalism? There are a few considerations, one of which has been highlighted in our story above with the acupuncturist. The first point is that there is a strength in knowing where your plants are coming from. You know what soil it grew in; you know if there is a reason not to harvest from that spot because of pollution; and, on a lighter note, you have the connection for this plant’s purpose before it even comes out of the ground. It is a spiritual work at the end of the day. Another point is that the plants growing close to you are the ones you need. I can’t tell you how many times I have visited someone who was suffering from this or that, and—lo and behold—not even three feet from their back door was the herb that they specifically needed. I’m not even surprised by it anymore, as much as I respect it deeply. Let’s say that these plants have an affinity for their environment, obviously, and because you also live in their space, they can help you with afflictions that may arise in that same area. The last point I will touch on is that just because the herb you’ve purchased from some far-off place has the “organic” sticker stamped on it, doesn't mean that it’s authentic. The adulteration of plants is a huge deal, and it happens daily across the world. There are of course reputable and valued companies who hold true to their practices with integrity, but nothing will ever beat you going out and harvesting your own plants, period.

They are here to live and thrive and maybe even teach us something.

Identifying Local Flora Can Be an Enriching Experience

So, is it “bad” to order a rare Pu’er from China or a really valuable and specific herb that only grows in the Amazon? Not inherently. Decisions like these have more to do with frequency and reliance than making the issue black and white, which erases the necessary nuance. Things have been traded across distances for a very, very long time, as evidenced by the recent uncovering of 3,000-year-old roasted quinoa seeds in Canada, far from its home.On my walk outside, I notice a beautiful gumbo-limbo tree with its distinct bark peeling off. I get closer and see oozing resin from a recent branch trimming. I remembered that this tree is in the incense family, Burseraceae, which also belongs to copal. My eyes land on Spanish needle, Bidens alba, a particularly common daisy family member that can easily occupy large fields. Folks hate it so much because the seeds stick to their pants, but I see an opportunistic friend who has adapted to long-distance self-seeding. This herb, combined with the sida, creates an herbal antiviral blend and can be powerful.And there, between my feet, and growing through a crack in the asphalt, I saw purslane. This plant is said to have been Gandhi’s favorite, rich in vitamins and used as a tonic to the stomach and urinary tract, amongst countless other things.And maybe the wildest part? All those plants above were found in a parking lot, on the way to the park. Oh, Florida, how I love you.

I’m here to break it to you now: You are going to die. Yes, it’s true. One day—very likely in a moment you do not anticipate—your heart will stop beating or your brain will cease to function. It might be a long, drawn-out affair, or it might be sudden. It might happen when you are asleep. Someone might do it to you. There’s really no way to tell how we will die, and for many of us, this inevitability is like: Nope don’t wanna talk about it. No thank you!There are many reasons to fear death. I don’t need to give you a list because you’ve already pictured at least ten reasons in your mind while reading so far. But the most succinct explanation is by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: annihilation. What a spooky word. It sounds like something out of a horror franchise. Death: The Final Annihilation. But that’s because it’s accurate. Whether you believe in God or reincarnation or karma or none of it, this body you have now isn’t going to be here forever. It’s going to grow old, wither, wrinkle, sag and slow the fuck down. It’s got a time limit. And what happens after we pass is highly debatable. Understandably, this makes quite a few humans feel like I’m gonna put that shit way out of my mind and not think about it.Americans, I have learned, are very good at not thinking about it.

You are going to die.

What COVID-19 and Solastalgia Have in Common

Our cultural death avoidance has reared its head mightily during the COVID-19 pandemic, to devastating consequences. Former President Donald Trump refused to wear a mask for months, downplayed the severity of the virus and inspired countless Americans to practice their self-proclaimed “civil rights” by emulating the commander-in-chief in public spaces. The result was, not surprisingly, numerous “superspreader” events from church gatherings to election rallies to family weddings. In some sort of bizarro inversion of Buddhism’s meditation on death as a means to live fully, many Americans have instead chosen to ignore death as a means to “live fully.”The parallels to the response to COVID-19 and the dissonance toward climate change are resounding. The coronavirus is not an isolated event born out of randomness. Experts have warned about pandemics for decades and were largely ignored. Human encroachment upon the natural world likely brought the bat that carried the virus to the Wuhan “wet market” where it was purchased, consumed and then infected a human host. Rather than examine our interconnectedness, our former POTUS deflected blame to China, referring to the virus as the “kung-flu,” propagating anti-Asian sentiments that have led to a rise in violent attacks against Asian-Americans in the past few weeks. Deflection and blame have been chosen over investigation and self-inquiry.

Death Shouldn’t Be Avoided as a Conversation Topic

I know something of death because I’ve approached it head-on before. I lost an uncle to suicide when I was 14, and only months later I came dangerously close to ending my own life as well. Ever since that first encounter with death, talking about suicide has been a means of therapy for me, exposing its root causes to the light. I learned quickly that the notion of choosing death is laced with cultural shame, even if you do not actually attempt to take your own life. The mere fact that I gave up on my desire to live in thought was simply too much for some of my loved ones. To this day, they cannot speak to me about it. The topic has been erased from our shared conversations. If I do attempt to bring it up—as means to create a better understanding between us—they swiftly pivot to another topic.

My life does not exist on its own. It has ripple effects far and wide, beyond what I can even see.

Climate Change Anxiety Is Really About Death

The best definition I have ever read of suicide was a “misplaced desire for change.” To me, the impulse to end one’s own life—or in some cases, the intense desire to simply not exist—is a deeply human feeling. It is meant to be examined, not avoided. Many of us experience moments of profound bleakness in our lives that we fear are permanent. Many of us long to escape our suffering, to be jettisoned somewhere else, to some kind of imaginary realm that we believe to be free of pain. In the worst of moments, death can seem like the only path to this place of relief.Speaking about my feelings saved my life. Acknowledging death as a presence in my thoughts freed me from what felt like insurmountable shame. It began a process of self-examination, and also of extricating myself from the isolation of my own experience. I recognized that my death would affect countless others, and that I was part of a greater human ecology. My life does not exist on its own. It has ripple effects far and wide, beyond what I can even see.

COVID-19 Has Given Me a New Appreciation for Life

In February, the U.S. reached a milestone: 500,000 deaths due to COVID-19. The number was reported clinically in my newsfeed: There was no collective moment of silence, no speech from President Joe Biden about the need for a communal effort to save lives. We speak more of opening malls and restaurants before mourning the dead. We speak of death as a statistic, not as an experience that deserves attention and empathy.When I read these numbers, I make it a point to observe the impulse to turn away. I take the time to examine the grief that arises when I consider the depth of this avoidable tragedy, and the dissonance I feel from our leaders. I look at death directly and I remind myself that I am grateful to be alive. I remind myself that I am existing in an intricate ecosystem, sensitive to the actions and movements and choices of every being. Rather than paralyze me with fear, these thoughts connect me to an invisible stream, a higher power that infuses me with strength to go on when my thoughts turn bleak. We are meant to acknowledge death, not so it rules us, but so we view every life around us—including our own—as precious and vital. It is up to us to make this an everyday ethic, a resistance against those in power dismissing our own humanity. To face death, I believe, is to demand our inherent right to exist, and our right to love and be loved. Always.

The moment of drop-off, when that wave of heat and sound washes over the kid stepping through the school door. Focus, boredom, distraction. Obnoxious boys imitating their dads’ casual misogyny, girls fighting back. Lingering in the school bathroom getting into small trouble. The relief of the walk to a friend’s house after school, stopping to buy candy with the dollars crumpled in their pockets. The secret lives in young minds: a multitude. Turn childhood social life inside out and you see it’s a magic box, much bigger on the inside than the outside, a vast interior. Incipient romance, searing pain, wild-eyed anxiety.My daughter’s life has shrunk, like it has for most of us. Early in the pandemic, we made a pod with a couple of other families, but then one of them moved to a far more functional country on the other side of the planet. Our daughter (let’s call her Z) wasn’t close with the other family’s son. The arrangement petered out. Winter set in.Now she spends her days with her screens—from iPad to Switch to school-issued Chromebook. We try to help her through the drudgery of a fifth-grade year happening online. We bring breakfast and lunch to her room as she listlessly completes math problems. We rub her back and try to engage her. She gets excited about Minecraft and not much else.Except chickens.

I have no clue what sort of consciousness, individual and collective, will emerge among this pandemic generation.

Where There Are Chickens, There Are Also Hawks

I was in a Zoom meeting when the hawk landed on some trellising, outsized like it had been photoshopped unskillfully into the scene out my office window. For a moment, I was frozen by the cognitive dissonance. I live in a small town in New York's Hudson Valley, where the nonhuman world is richer and closer than some places, but still greatly diminished. The hawk was too big and full of violent potential to make sense in my backyard.A second later, I was scrambling from my screen, calling out to Z to get her chickens into their run. She got outside first. The hawk must have left at the sound of the door opening, and so the chickens clucked their way safely back to the part of our yard we now call Chicken Alley.The hawk keeps coming back, though. Z spotted it in a tree maybe a hundred feet away. It has a favorite branch, where it is clearly waiting and watching.This life-or-death matter is compounded by the everyday drama we’ve lived with since we picked up our half-dozen chicks back in the spring. The pecking order isn’t just a cliché: Marshmallow is at the bottom, Chickpea is at the top. Cub is somewhere in the middle, and she tries to assert herself by attacking Marshy. She dominates the nesting box, bloodying anyone who needs to lay an egg.The consequence of these battles is largely sonic, and so we live our days against a backdrop of plaintive chortles and angry screeches, rhythmic bawks that loop and fade like a William Basinski album. At its most severe, the cacophony sends my daughter running outside to perform chicken conflict-resolution, sometimes five or ten times in the course of a single school day. So far, her teacher, on the other end of Zoom, hasn’t complained. Maybe she doesn’t know Z’s gone (camera off, mic muted). Or maybe she does, given that Z sometimes stays out for a half-hour, soothing her birds, separating combatants, cleaning wounds. Z’s a good student (Minecraft addiction notwithstanding), and I’m sure her teacher has enough on her plate trying to hold a virtual classroom together.Besides, there’s not much you can do once a kid’s left the screen behind.

One Is Too Few, but Two Are Too Many

I have no clue what sort of consciousness, individual and collective, will emerge among this pandemic generation, the kids like Z perched at the edge of adolescence, living online. She falls asleep at night to YouTube videos—ASMR soap cutting, slime smushing and bubble popping. If dreaming of electric sheep is a thing robots might do, what does that make all of us now?This posthuman social experiment might be a late stage in our transfiguration from flesh to data, or it might be something for which we don’t yet have an adequate language. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway famously and cryptically suggested that “one is too few, but two are too many.” Kids these days are living somewhere beyond the radical individualism of our failed American economic experiment, but that doesn’t mean that the alternative is simply more relationality, more of you and me. Pronouns are under serious pressure, and for good reason, but as troublesome as “he” or “she” might be, “I” may be an even bigger problem.I wonder whether Z’s screen time and chicken time might be more aligned than someone like me—born on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial—can easily see. She tells stories she heard on YouTube as though they’d happened to a friend.Z knows what happens to most chickens in this country; the PETA website isn’t hard to find, and while I wrestle with this decision, I’ve placed no parental controls on her devices. For most of us, chicken is, like any number of other “food products,” more metaphor than living thing—an amalgamation of imagery and ideas that have little to do with the lived reality of either factory-farmed chickens or those who are lovingly cared for like Z’s little flock. We hear “chicken” and think of the cartoonishly crisp-skinned, roasted chicken paraded online as comfort food, even as activists fight to win actual, living chickens a single square foot of space in the factories, where birds collapse under the weight they’ve been bred to put on too fast, and die and rot among the living. Z would tell you about these horrors, if you’d listen. During a class unit on human rights, she clearly rattled her teacher by asking, “What about chicken rights?”Z sees chickens as chickens, revels in their dust baths, expects nothing other than that landbirds will be landbirds. She doesn’t need them to be anything but what they are, yet still she identifies with them.

Z knows what happens to most chickens in this country; the PETA website isn’t hard to find.

Our Educational System Wasn't Designed for the World We've Made

Our public education system, from kindergarten to universities, was founded on the idea that we were educating citizens for democracy, even if we’ve always fallen far, far short of that ideal. But now it treats students simply as human capital being shaped for use in the market—not entirely unlike factory chickens.Remote learning has only amplified this. Kids and parents alike now long for the everyday life of school that we’ve lost. Mental health professionals and scholars of education warn us of a crisis in the making. We subtracted the social part of school, leaving behind only content delivery, and found we had it backward: School, primarily, was the social part. What’s left is a chicken factory.When we talk about emergent distributed consciousness, we don’t usually talk about chickens. And we certainly don’t talk about chickens and humans together. If working through complex social realities is the heart of education, then this past year has in some ways expanded the social field for Z, tying her to a more-than-human social web both less and more real than what we pretended was normal before. From my office window, I often see the chickens roaming the yard, scratching at the grass and pecking, Z right with them—another biped bowing down to the earth. This seems, somehow, not as different from her constant stream of YouTube videos as one might think.Living another way means we have to watch out for hawks. In our rapidly warming world, hawks—broadly conceived—are everywhere. They’re a far more nuanced problem than the equations Z solves over and over on the math games she’s required to play on her Chromebook. Nothing’s natural now, anyway, or everything is, and so we’ll have to wake up from the illusory safety projected by the old way of thinking about the world. Self and other, human and animal, sky and land, predator and prey. We’ve been killing binaries for a while, but some aren’t mere projections. We aren’t individuals—humans are animals. Invisible particles way up there are slowly cooking us down here, but a hawk will kill a chicken, fast. Kids these days see our bullshit. And they’re increasingly comfortable muting it and running away, fast, toward what they can save.

Picture a grocery store with all the produce and products you could ever need under one roof, all in reusable jars, bottles, bags and other relevant receptacles. Now imagine that you can have any item in that store delivered to you via a tech-driven dispensing mechanism. Its backend would be driven by a production and shipping ecosystem that integrates with producers, and a logistics operation to collect used containers, so that no plastic or other non-biodegradable waste would be generated at any point along the way. This was the big, aspirational dream that my husband and I envisioned as we tried to concoct a new concept for a large-scale, zero-waste grocery store. We were motivated to come up with alternative models of food retail after learning that more than 20 percent of landfill waste in the U.S. comes from containers and packaging, and less than ten percent of plastic is recycled. To play around with the idea, we decided to visit our nearest grocery store and immerse ourselves in the exact kind of space we wanted to render obsolete. As we entered, we headed straight for the first row of the tens of shelves in the hangar-like building. Bang! A wall of mayonnaise. Hundreds of jars. At least 20 different kinds. We asked each other, “Could we ever convince people to choose between just two or three alternatives? How many people would react by calling it a restriction on their freedom or invoking the word 'communism'?” We dreaded the idea of turning the corner to the pasta aisle.

Our concept of a 'normal' grocery store is just over 100 years old.

A Grocery Store Without Waste Would Be a Return to Our Roots

I’m an entrepreneur and author, with a background in end-of-life care, who has set up several businesses around the world and consulted for Fortune 500 companies and government-led projects. I like to tackle hairy problems and unpack and challenge the underlying forces behind what is considered reality—while enabling others to see what appears normal or established in a radically different way. So I decided to dig into this space further and try to understand this problem and figure out if a new kind of grocery store might be the answer.As a lover of words and history, I decided to dig into the origins of grocery stores as we know them. I found that the word "grocery" comes from the French word grossier, meaning wholesaler. In the 14th century, products that didn’t come from a farm in the local area—like spices, sugar, pepper and, later on, cacao, tea and coffee—were sold in bulk. People would bring their own containers, wrapping and other receptacles to hold what they bought. It was only in 1916 that the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Much of its success stemmed from its neat packages and attention-grabbing advertising—a drastic shift from over-the-counter service where customers had clerks managing relatively undifferentiated inventory. Our concept of a “normal” grocery store is just over 100 years old. When they began, people were just transitioning away from horse-drawn carriages, bloodletting was still recommended in medical textbooks and movies were black and white, not to mention silent. In reality, we have a much longer history and deep roots in sustainable habits, including furoshiki, the ancient Japanese practice of wrapping gifts and items in beautiful reusable cloths, and the Seventh Generation Principle, originally from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a philosophy that upholds the idea that decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future.It is important to remind ourselves of this especially when we get news from the National Chicken Council boasting that Americans had 1.42 billion chicken wings during Super Bowl LV—enough to circle the circumference of the earth three times, when laid out in a line—and Whole Foods sells peeled oranges in plastic tubs.

Choosing the Focal Point for a Solution

Where did we learn to celebrate this kind of consumption? How did we actually buy into this? What is it that makes a wasteful lifestyle feel normal and aspirational? Well, naturally, living in L.A., it's easy to find some culprits in our neighborhood. It’s a widely known fact that U.S. media plays a major role in shaping the aspirations of people across the country and around the world. We must be wary of its impact, especially since life often imitates art. After all, when was the last time we saw someone in a movie or TV show wear the same outfit twice (other than when they are under incredible stress, or at a very low point in their life)? And what does that say about the kind of messaging we are getting about reusing? To paraphrase the brilliant sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, our dream life has been colonized by the American Dream factory. So if that is the case, then maybe what is pumped out could at least be wiser in the ways that we treat the ecosystems of which we are a part. Of course, the issue and solution must go beyond just the media. So, is it about the U.S., then? And is it really the best place to lead the change we need? My first reaction was, "Yes, of course!" The U.S. brand is about being at the forefront, so it should work harder to ensure that there is even a front from which it can lead the world into the future.At the same time, the U.S. economy is one of the biggest culprits and perpetrators of crimes against future generations and life on Earth. I mean, how confident would you feel about an anti-drug campaign being run by someone who massively abuses drugs? It’s essentially the same, but rather than illicit substances, the addiction is to convenience and consumption of the new, the bigger, the faster, the next thing. We could also blame those who hold the biggest levers of change, who can usually be found at the end of the money trail when you follow it far enough. There are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to dealing with waste, packaging, recycling and reuse that aren’t widely used simply because they don’t put money into the right pockets. So maybe it is up to others to take the lead while the catastrophic-clique figure out how to profit from it and make it the new norm.

Where did we learn to celebrate this kind of consumption? How did we actually buy into this?

A Massive Obstacle in the Way of Replicating Sustainable Packaging Practices

There are lots of great innovations from around the world being created by students, universities, nonprofits and government organizations that offer exciting advancements and easily replicable solutions. Take, for example, SCOBY, Roza Janusz’s graduation project from School of Form in Poznan, Poland, which is a biological, fully edible, fully recyclable packaging solution that comes from kombucha and can be easily grown by farmers to wrap their products and bring them to market with zero waste. There are clearly many more elegant solutions available, as well as enough technology to continue these efforts in various locations, paired with access to communication channels. And yet, they go unreplicated around the world. Why? What about each one of us? We all individually contribute to the problem. But is it willingly? Maybe “blame” is not the best word; our persistently negligent behavior and inaction at a massive scale could be a manifestation of our denial of death. But then again, what isn’t? This is what makes us feel immortal and immune to any consequences.So here I am with my thoughts, with the urge to run away from the seemingly insurmountable task of changing our relationship with life. All of the sudden, fixing the issue of too many choices of mayonnaise became completely trivial. A battle between a sustainable grocery store against the natural human tendency to self-destruct in pursuit of convenience seemed less and less like a good idea. So, back to the drawing board to find a new approach to survive our self-inflicted demise.

I started dreaming about living on a commune when I was still in high school. I had a friend who was a farmer, and we were both hopeful that forming our own community would allow us to let an alternative way of life flourish—one that was sustainable and anti-capitalist, where a community could support each other in domestic tasks, including child-rearing, while also pursuing scholarship and careers. We imagined a world so much different than the one we live in now, where it feels impossible to escape making polluting, unethical choices. Now, years later, a lot of people have similar dreams of homesteading. Even AOC has said she’s split between staying in politics or forming her own homesteading community. But after years of research on different sustainable communities, I have decided to leave this dream behind. Whether I was looking at uber-rich communities in the Middle East that are building “sustainable” gated settlements or more radical communes in poorer parts of the U.S., the lesson I learned from their examples was the same: Going off to live an alternative lifestyle with a group of likeminded people cannot and will not save us. It’s true that we need to learn how to organize our communities differently so we can consume, build and just generally live in a way that doesn’t exacerbate our dire ecological crises. But right now, as millions of people are being displaced by fire, flood and drought, and our agriculture system and infrastructure are starting to fail due to extreme variations in weather, we need to focus on pushing for systemic change through the Green New Deal. Right now there is nothing more important.

After years of research on different sustainable communities, I have decided to leave this dream behind.

Sustainable Communities Can’t Only Be for the Rich

A few years back, I studied an effort by some activists to put together a sustainable community in the South. Though they had the funding, they couldn’t get people to join in the effort, and it floundered. The two months I spent there, interning and researching, were a stark lesson in the racism and poverty plaguing this country. The segregation and desperation were unlike anything I had ever seen in the U.S. before. It struck me then that learning farming and building alternative economies are too much to ask of people who are struggling just to find a way to get to work—they don’t have cars and public transportation is nonexistent. When the water is undrinkable, you can’t expect people to put their time, energy and money into a plan that won’t support them until later on, in some undefined future. On the other hand, the rich cannot be trusted with exclusive areas of sustainability. When I was doing research on sustainable gated communities in the Middle East, what I saw was privileged islands where the wealthy could raise their kids in pedestrian communities among farmers' markets and solar energy. But just as the rich have the privilege to consume ethically when they want, they also have the luxury of consuming an enormous amount of commodities and services. The top ten percent of the population produces half of the world’s “individual-consumption-based” carbon footprint. The rich love to taut private consumption as an alternative to government intervention—but if they can’t cut their footprint down through organic quinoa, who can?In my commune fantasy, I’d finally be able to invest in my home: Not just renting and moving around, but finding a place where I could spend my time giving back to the land by building up soil and planting trees. In this way, I could prepare a safe landing place far from my current home by the sea, far from my ancestral home in the desert, two places that I can’t think to invest in as they’re practically doomed to be unlivable. But this vision isn’t that far off from how uber-conservatives act. If you take a quick look at Alex Jones’s online store, there are tons of books available on sustainable homesteading. How far off is your cottagecore fantasy from an individualistic prepper plan?

These projects can’t come at the price of putting our energy into large, infrastructural change that we need.

We Need Infrastructure Change, Not Commune Pipe Dreams

The other issue with a communal lifestyle is that it too often becomes this magical threshold: ”Once I change my entire life, I can contribute to the fight against climate change.” My advice? Live your imperfect, not always sustainable life, but set aside time every week to organize with people in your community to change your infrastructure, whether that means blocking pipelines, phone banking for the Green New Deal or using your professional skills to contribute to the cause in more specific ways. Of course, there are visions of communes that don’t have to be exclusive islands of sustainability, that can offer services to the communities they’re already embedded in, whether it's through composting, educational seminars, childcare, etc. But these projects can’t come at the price of putting our energy into large, infrastructural change that we need. If we can’t ensure that people can do what they need to do to survive—like get to work, feed their families and dispose of their waste—in reliable, non-laborious and carbon-neutral ways, then we aren’t solving anything.

Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? It's the idea that the smallest things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system, like the weather. In theory, if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the earth, its small wave of air will ripple out and affect everything it touches, and those things will go on to affect everything in their paths until eventually, it could cause a hurricane on the other side of the earth. Sounds crazy, right? But it's actually a very real part of chaos theory, which describes the idea that each and every action can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects on something seemingly unrelated in time and space. Its underlying premise is that all things are interconnected on multiple scales. It’s also kept my environmental optimism alive over the years.

I Was Immediately Fascinated by the Monarch Butterfly

In November 2011, my family and I drove north up the coast of California to visit five of the western monarch butterfly overwintering sites. We had been alarmed by the recent reports of dwindling numbers of western monarchs at their winter homes along the Pacific Ocean and wanted to go see them for ourselves. Every year, these orange and black beauties make a heroic cyclical journey to keep the species alive. In the winter, they search for a very specific habitat and microclimate: eucalyptus or Monterey pine or cypress, dappled sunlight, humid and close to the ocean, with no freezing temperatures or high winds. They stay there from September through March, at the latest, and then head east and north to reproduce.Along the way, they drink the nectar of many flowers, but can only lay their eggs on butterfly milkweed, which is what the larvae eat upon hatching. The larvae and caterpillars will feed for about nine-to-16 days and are inherently protected from the milkweed’s toxins, making them poisonous to predators at every stage of their development. Eventually, they move into the pupa stage, hanging under a milkweed leaf for about eight-to-15 days, before fully emerging into butterflies.When this next generation of monarchs emerges, they only live two to five weeks, and they repeat this cycle for about six months until the weather changes and they return to the coast. This means that it takes about five different generations of monarchs to make the complete migration. Those that return in the fall to the overwintering sites are the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of those that left in the spring. How do they know how to do this? No one really knows, but to me, it feels like they are each “cells'' of the larger “body” of the monarch species.

Confirming the Declining Monarch Butterfly Population Status

Our first stop on our visit to see the monarchs was an overwintering site at the La Jolla eucalyptus grove at UCSD. We wandered around an informal sculpture garden, enjoying the quiet campus and afternoon breeze, but didn't spot any butterflies there. It felt like an inauspicious start to our trip, but as usual, I didn't lose hope. Heading north, we made our next stop at the Goleta Monarch Butterfly Grove at Elwood Mesa. We parked in a cul-de-sac in an unassuming suburban neighborhood and found signage pointing to the butterfly path through the eucalyptus forest. I remember feeling discouraged because of its hilly, winding, random nature. But then we came upon some college students sitting under the trees and looking up. They pointed to the groups of monarchs clumping together, forming soft shimmering curtains, and joy welled up in my chest. OK, this was real! Witnessing this incredible miracle of nature for the first time, I took some blurry and unremarkable photos throughout the hazy late afternoon light. But the real image is still with me, marked in my heart forever.Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove was our next stop. I had been in touch with the park rangers via email for a few weeks, so they knew we were coming. They told us that their volunteers would train us and we could take an unofficial part in the butterfly “counts.” We awoke early that morning and headed to the grove before breakfast. The heavy marine layer hanging over the area made the quest seem almost mystical. The ranger greeted us and walked around with binoculars showing us how to estimate the numerous numbers of monarchs we saw. It felt like that school carnival game when you estimate the number of jelly beans in the jar. You count how many butterflies hang from top to bottom of a clump, then count the clumps across and determine how many butterflies are around the circumference. Then you multiply and add a “buffer” number. We each had a notepad and got the hang of it pretty quickly. Our numbers confirmed their previous counts.

Learning How to Help Monarch Butterfly Population

As the fog burned off and the sun started breaking through, we were able to witness the daily magic of the monarch’s light activity. Some flew down from the trees, landing on us and transforming the grove into an otherworldly fairyland. Their prolific predecessors who migrated to this location had only lived several weeks, but this generation got to live six to nine months in relative stasis. Communing with these beautiful beings, in the midst of their presence, we suddenly felt very invested in their survival and asked the rangers why scientists believed the monarchs seemed to be disappearing and what we could do about it. At this point in time, one of the biggest threats to their survival was the lack of milkweed and other plants that feed them along California’s interior. The research all seemed to say “Plant more milkweed!”Immediately, we decided we would make and disperse milkweed seed balls to help the monarchs. That night, back in the hotel room, and continuing as we drove, I ordered all the flower seeds the monarchs needed to survive and found a source for red clay in San Francisco. After picking everything up in the city, we continued north and stayed at a friend's ranch in North San Juan. That week we made over 1,000 seed balls. We mixed the dry red clay with water, peat moss and earthworm castings before adding the seeds. It was a beautiful task. The hand-rolled balls were lined up in grids to dry on parchment paper in the sunlight of a large window overlooking the Yuba River. Later, we placed them into soft rubber buckets and loaded them into our car.

Some flew down from the trees, landing on us and transforming the grove into a fairyland.

Helping the Monarch Butterfly Population

We then headed back to Southern California on Interstate 5, which runs down the middle of the state and isn't known for its picturesque quality—there are seemingly endless stretches of barren fields and the overpowering odors of massive feedlot cattle farms. It’s considered one of the largest "food roads" in the nation, and it's where more than 12 percent of the total U.S. agricultural production comes from. Grapes, cotton, almonds, pistachios and citrus, all grown at almost unfathomable scales.But the extensive use of pesticides and herbicides in this region might be a large part of the monarch’s struggling numbers. Milkweed and other flowering plants, which naturally volunteer along highways and are fed by rain runoff, are routinely mowed down now by the California Department of Transportation. So, we had the challenge of looking for areas that wouldn't be mowed or subject to agricultural herbicides and pesticides, usually a bit back from the highways and almost always off on side roads. We made dozens of stops, turning what should have been a six-hour trip into a two-day drive.I remember stopping at a wildlife hunting range which was ideal because it was a very large area with "nature" intact so that birds and wildlife would take up residence, making it a bountiful place for hunters. As we were dispersing the seed balls and enjoying the relative peace of the wetlands, we started hearing gunshots. Since we weren't wearing fluorescent clothing, it didn't seem like a great idea to stay. We quickly ran back to our car.

Monarch Butterfly Population Statistics

Over the years I've checked back in with the yearly counts. They initially went up, I assume, because of the efforts by so many to spread the word and plant milkweed. During the 1980s, up to ten million monarchs had overwintered in California. The number of sites being monitored went up every year. By 2016, there were only 298,464, and the next year, 192,624 remained. But the 2018 and 2019 counts fell drastically to around 27,000. At this point, it was clear that the butterflies had crossed the threshold and would likely become extinct. The monarch butterfly population in 2020, following the annual western monarch Thanksgiving count, was below 2,000, a 99.9 percent decline since the 1980s. For some reason, they have not been placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, which is hugely disappointing. Experts still agree that their migratory habitats are threatened by a lack of milkweed and other flowering plants, exacerbated enormously by climate change.

You, me, a butterfly in my garden, a rainbow on the other side of the earth—we are all intrinsically connected.

I Remain Optimistic About the Future of the Monarch Butterflies

Looking back on that 2011 journey, I still feel optimistic about our efforts. To me, nothing we did was lost. The monarchs gave me so much while learning about them. Even though I can't see any causal relationship between our ecological remediation actions and the survival of the western monarch, I try not to lose hope. For all I know, the scale of time that these things take might be enormous.And like the butterfly effect, maybe our actions did help on some scale. Maybe out of the hundreds of thousands of seeds we planted, a few milkweed plants did sprout and grow. And since each monarch can lay up to 1000 eggs in their lifetime, maybe some were deposited on "our" milkweed. So while the latest monarch headlines are discouraging, should I give up? Do my tiny actions matter? I believe they do, partly because I can't live otherwise, in some sort of environmental nihilistic state. But also because I have seen how ideas can spread and turn into actions on a greater scale. I have been able to share with many folks over the years the need to plant the flowers that monarchs feed on.I deeply believe that we do have agency, and that is why this week, as I have done every year for 25 years, I plant seeds. I plant food, flowers and I plant milkweed, just in case even one monarch shows up here. You, me, a butterfly in my garden, a rainbow on the other side of the earth—we are all intrinsically connected, whether we know it or not. Let’s act as if we do have a stake in everything that matters.

“Should we slip it?” I asked my teammate as we looked down at the newly arranged slalom gates on the melting ski slope. We were getting ready to “pizza” around each pole in order to clear any excess snow in an effort to increase our speed for the race.“Coach said if we push away any more snow, we might be skiing on dirt,” they replied. The pathetically bare mid-January ski slope we stood on was yet another victim of our changing climate.I’ve been skiing since I could walk, and slalom racing since I could run. Since then I’ve traveled the world, shredding the gnar on mountains from California to Switzerland. There’s undoubtedly a certain amount of adventure and excitement that comes with flying to St. Anton, Austria, for some early-December skiing, but there’s also a more pernicious reason for the nine-hour flight and three-hour train ride: The warming climate has made snow patterns around the world less consistent. These days the average weekend warrior can’t just trek up to the Catskills in New York, the Green Mountains in Vermont or even the Wasatch Range in Utah and expect to find skiable slopes.

Our Ever-Shrinking Ski Season

The ski season is getting shorter. Every ski area in the United States is projected to lose up to half its skiable days by 2050, according to a 2017 study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. By the middle of the century, the U.S. is projected to have 90 fewer days below freezing every year, according to a 2016 study based on data from the federally funded North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program. New (and expensive) technologies—like cloud seeding, artificial clouds and snow guns that produce snow at temperatures above freezing—are being explored to counteract the shrinking season. But nothing can truly replace that fluffy champagne powder that nature’s lake effect so kindly bestows.The country has watched in horror the past few months as inconsistent snow has wreaked havoc on the nation. The western U.S. was hit with a series of early-season storms that seemed promising at first. But the storms stopped for too long a time, leaving the early season powder to freeze, melt and repeat until it formed a deadly base layer. When the snow came back in late January and eager skiers, boarders, snowshoers and hikers who’ve been cooped up in quarantine headed to the backcountry, they set off a series of avalanches that have already taken 33 lives, and may turn this into the deadliest avalanche season since records started being kept. Not that recent years have been much less dangerous. In 2008 and 2010, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center recorded 36 fatalities.

Every ski area in the United States is projected to lose up to half its skiable days by 2050.

Skiing Is a Family Tradition—and We’re Losing It

For as long as I can remember, skiing was my family’s safe space. When my great-grandmother died, we hit the slopes. When my dad lost his job, we hit the slopes. When my brother broke his ankle longboarding, we begrudgingly stayed home to give him some emotional support—but once he was healed, we hit the slopes. It was a way to let off stress, a way to bond and a way to mentor and teach. There was occasional drama: when my dad wanted first tracks on the corduroy groomers, but my mom wanted to work her legs on the moguls, or when I wanted to maneuver the obstacle course glades, but my brother wanted to speed down an untouched chute. By apres ski, though, all would be forgotten and we’d be one happy family yet again.Christmas through New Year’s and Presidents’ Day week were our designated family ski vacations. Every year we’d choose a new mountain, and no matter where we were in the world, we’d all make sure to be there. As the season has gotten shorter, Christmas through New Year’s skiing has been less reliable. Even mountains in the Northern Rockies, like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Whistler, British Columbia, don’t necessarily have enough snow coverage to justify the trip. And you can forget about the gems further south, like Taos. We’ve canceled our Christmas ski trip in recent years. So far, it seems that Presidents’ Day week is safe, but I wonder if that will be the case for much longer. Will it even be worth it for my future kids to learn how to ski if the season’s only a month and a half long like the data projects?

The slow pace of global climate action is doing little to stem the melt.

How Do We Stop the Melt?

The slow pace of global climate action is doing little to stem the melt. Mountain towns across the United States rely on winter tourism. For them, a bad snow season affects every facet of the town, from the resorts to the small businesses on Main Street. According to a 2012 study by Protect Our Winters and Natural Resources Defense Council, winter sports tourism generates $12.2 billion and attracts 23 million American participants. The study also found that the industry has lost over a billion dollars due to climate change over the last decade.We need people in positions of power to take action immediately and stop the melt. Corporations that own ski resorts should ensure that all their ski infrastructure developments are carbon neutral. They also must ensure that every tree they clear for a new trail is replaced. Lastly, many ski resorts are in states with climate-change-denying state government officials. Ski mountains must use their political and monetary clout to lobby their government representatives to take immediate action.The climate has changed, and the ski season has shrunk. With the proper action, the melting can be stopped and we can continue to ski on snowfall at or near our current level—which, while not as snowy as our forebears, is still incredibly fun.

Everyone wants a better planet for their family and children. This includes conservatives who hunt, fish, camp and farm for a living. It would seem logical that they actually have the most to lose from the planet being destroyed. They also usually have the most experience with tending to nature, but that’s not what you typically hear in the media. The environment is not a political issue, but it’s being used as a prop.The disagreement is not over whether liberals or conservatives want a more environmental future. This is a false premise that is used to divide American citizens, so we never debate the real issues. The lie that is sold to us is that the government can solve all of our problems, and if you don’t believe their narratives, then you must not like the earth we all live on.

The environment is not a political issue, but it’s being used as a prop.

The Keystone Pipeline Is a Good Example of False Information

There are plenty of people who actually believe this horrific lie put out by your federal government: that the government alone can "fix it." They think Greta Thunberg is a scientist. They believe that geoengineering can control major weather events. They think the Paris Climate Accord saves mankind and that ranchers don’t know how to manage their own properties without government regulation. All of this is a lie. It is used to keep us divided so we never actually take action by coming together.Take the Keystone XL Pipeline, for example. There are narratives that this massive project would destroy entire towns, pollute waters and cause irreparable harm to the environment. This became an entire political issue for eight years with disinformation on all sides. What the pipeline actually did was create a safe transportation method of fossil fuels from Canada to America that are up to the regulations of 2021, not the 1900s.Now that the Keystone Pipeline is gone, fossil fuels are not gone. They will still be imported from OPEC, the Middle East and places where we’re building pipelines along with other countries. Their regulations are not as strict as ours. They face many geopolitical problems like terrorism and sabotage, and we have to import that oil by ship and rail, which is inherently less environmentally friendly.

All of this is a lie. It is used to keep us divided so we never actually take action by coming together.

The Free Market Is Our Best Bet to Save the Environment

If this sounds insane, it’s because it is. Major donors to political PACs will receive contracts to import the oil in a much more irresponsible way. Military contractors will be used to guard the transit routes and add to the pollution. For example, the U.S. military uses around 400,000 barrels of oil per day, but you never seem to hear the outcry for their "carbon footprint." We also spend around 81 billion dollars per year to guard "fossil fuel assets," according to CNBC. However, it is easier just to blame the Texas cattle rancher or the union worker who was building a pipe, because if the violence and pollution are happening in another country, it’s out of sight and mind to the average American.I grew up on a boat. I watched destructive waste management destroy the ecosystem for fish that we needed to live. I devote my life now to helping people transition to solar panels. I don’t do it because I believe the world will end in ten years. We have already seen "climate preachers" like Al Gore get rich off of these inaccurate models and help their political pals. I simply believe that a first-world country should not have the most electrical blackouts of any developed nation. Solar technology is still a way from replacing anything, and there will be unintended consequences—like how to dispose of the batteries once they are spent. However, the true free market and entrepreneurship will figure these things out if the government stops advocating for its largest donors and lets innovation loose. We do not need more hyperbole and division. We need logic and solutions, and this will never happen if we continue to vilify each other and believe false narratives.

“Make a pair of shoes entirely out of paper that you can walk in.” This was the prompt for an “Intro to Industrial Design” course that caught my attention as a freshman in art school. Until that moment, I had little idea of what industrial design was, but it sounded like the perfect cross between art and problem-solving. Which, ultimately, is what hooked me. I’m 35 now, 13 years out of college, and I’m not an industrial designer, but I would be completely ignorant if I didn’t recognize how that program has dramatically shaped my life. To tell you why, I need to first tell you what my BFA in industrial design was, and, more importantly, what it wasn’t. In its simplest form, being an industrial designer goes something like this: Take a product or service and look for problems that arise when it’s used by humans. Research why this is happening and then design something that beautifully resolves it. The goal is to make life better, right? Unfortunately, the reality of being an industrial designer was predominantly rooted in our global consumer culture. So, instead of solving problems, the profession has turned its eye towards more consumption. Ergonomically improved utensils, quieter vacuum cleaners, badass-looking lawnmowers—the list is endless. Change the form slightly here, add new colors there, and voila: a whole new gadget to improve your life.

My Job Required Me to Look for Problems and Fix Them

It turns out that when you start training someone to look for problems, you’ll find them everywhere, including within the field itself. After a couple of years of exploring new ideas for seemingly first-world problems, I started to ask myself, “What are some problems truly worth solving?” And into the rabbit hole I went—economic inequality, homelessness, child starvation; unnecessary deaths due to preventable disease, increasing global pollution and, finally, climate chaos. And this is the moment that can’t be undone, when you feel that you’ve found the problem that overshadows all the others. In the most pragmatic sense: If climate change has the potential to end civilization as we know it, then everything else is secondary. How could I be OK with designing new kitchen appliances or better-looking power tools, knowing that they would probably end up in a landfill within a year or two? I started seeing the whole profession of “industrial designer” as synonymous with “landfill creator,” or even more to the point, “apocalypse designer.”And so, when I was set to graduate in 2008, amidst the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, the only job offer was to work for a lawn equipment company to “fancify” some leaf blowers. It was one of the most ironic careers I could think of, and I knew that I couldn’t do it. In essence, the thought of that leaf blower saved my life, and it permanently lodged itself deep into my psyche. It sharpened within me the questions that would guide my life to one that’s more connected and considerate of the world around me.This is the part in the story where it would behoove me to tell you that I dropped everything and went into the woods to live in a stump and forage for food. And I did. Just not in the way you might fantasize about.

This is the part in the story where it would behoove me to tell you that I dropped everything and went into the woods to live in a stump and forage for food. And I did.

I Began Living in the Wilderness Without Electricity

It was by no means an immediate shift to a sustainable life. It took me six years to find my stump. Six years of moving from one place to another, still so much of my life in contradiction with living “sustainably.” And I put that in quotes to acknowledge the wide array of interpretations of this word and that it’s often used in association with very hypocritical situations or ideas. So what does that word mean? For me, it’s very simple. It’s a little story that goes like this:We live within a finite system. It’s called Earth. The average American life uses resources from this finite system at a rate so great, that if the entire world mimicked it, we would need four planets. So, to live sustainably means that we would only use resources at a rate that one planet can provide without causing the collapse of vital biosystems that support all life on Earth. In 2013, after years of searching, I got invited to visit some colleagues at their home in Northern California, which, to my surprise, was an experimental tiny cabin-forest village. It was completely off-grid, so much that you had to hike 15 minutes just to get there. Everything was built almost entirely with waste or reclaimed materials and whatever else the forest had to offer. There was no fridge, no kitchen appliances, only a very small amount of solar power, and the living room was the forest. The shared kitchen was woven with bay and willow and then slathered with earth, a vibrant passion fruit vine growing along the interior ceiling rafters. And there it was, a round structure, nine feet in diameter, that looked like a giant redwood stump, vacant and ready to accommodate the dreams I held to start a sustainable life.To my delight, I would discover that the most exciting aspect of this place wasn’t that it was so intertwined with the landscape in which it existed, it was that there was a culture of creative problem-solving for some of the fundamental issues I had with modern consumer living. For the next seven years, in collaboration with other creative minds, I would experiment with a whole array of “nature-tech” ideas, from passive, solar water-heating to underground chambers for keeping food cold; from solar-powered ice machines to slow-sand biological water filtration; from hand-augering a well to making my own clothes; from building my own tiny home to starting my own mushroom farm. I could go on. Some of the projects were successes while others were failures, occasionally taking years of iterations to arrive at that conclusion. As much as I want to tell you that I’ve found a world where we all live sustainably together, I can’t. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible, I’m just saying that we are at immense disadvantages.

Our Sustainable Village Crept Back Into Modern Convenience

Some failures are immediate, while others are slow and hard to notice. It’s the slow failures that really have me at odds, the feeling that I haven’t truly found a sustainable lifestyle. Over time, the question of “Why is this failing?” becomes increasingly clear. One could argue that it's mostly due to our human desire for comfort. But I’ve come to believe that it’s almost entirely about the current constructs of global capitalism. To our credit, we have indeed found a way of living that is more sustainable than your average boomer living in suburbia. But over time, we’ve crept further and further back to the land of modern convenience. After years of exploring alternative refrigeration, for example, we ultimately arrived at bringing in grid power to run a deep freezer and an efficient fridge, intending for it to only power those basics. About a year later, every single structure had tapped into it. This is the kind of slow failure I’m talking about. It’s not very noticeable until you get there and, out of nowhere, you realize convenience won. Part of what’s happening is that we want to live in two different worlds simultaneously. We want to live in a sustainable relationship with our planet while also still existing within society, and this creates all sorts of ethical duplicities. Beyond all other efforts we’ve made to be independent, we’ve always been entirely dependent on the global food industry, which means we are still deeply a part of its waste streams. To live truly sustainably would require a fuller commitment to leave society on a deeper level—to live without healthcare, a global food system, virtual connection with others around the world, air travel, a Spotify account, packaged goods delivered to your doorstep. And it requires the commitment of others to create a devoted hyper-local economy.

I still strive to find a truly sustainable lifestyle.

Attempting to Live Sustainably Has Guided My Life

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In my mind, it’s a design problem, first highlighted to me many years ago by William McDonough’s book Cradle to Cradle. It looks at the concept of including “end-life-cycle” into the design process of any service, product or structure. If the costs associated with the end-life-cycle are the responsibility of the producer, then the need to consider this in the design process becomes one of financial necessity. All of that cost currently is incurred either by the lowest classes of society or by the planet itself. Let’s take the automotive industry, for example, one of the largest greenhouse gas contributors. If it costs more to deal with the bioremediation and global carbon recapture of petroleum-based fuels than it does to extract and sell them, then the design process would necessitate finding and prioritizing alternative fuel or energy sources. All of a sudden, biofuels and solar power become the cheap and obvious options. This story can be applied to all products and services, most importantly, buildings and transportation.This kind of change to the bottom line makes it very easy for anyone to live much more sustainable lives. Instead of requiring a monumental feat from each individual to circumnavigate the entire design of our current society, one can very easily exist within it and not be forced to make the compromises I’ve found myself making. As much as each of us attempts to live sustainably, I believe we will ultimately fail, unless we begin to embrace “cradle to cradle” within our global economy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for giving up. As much as this somber perspective is a part of my reality, I still feel called to strive for a truly sustainable lifestyle. The process itself has brought all sorts of beauty and meaning into my life. Contradictions aside, it has, without a doubt, palpably guided my life with a sense of perennial purpose. And I believe it can for you, too.

The night that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the U.K. would enter a national lockdown in the wake of the fast-spreading coronavirus, my family and I were celebrating my sister’s birthday—although after watching the BBC’s coverage of the breaking news, no one was in a particularly celebratory mood. Like other European nations, we were being asked to stay indoors for the next several weeks. Schools were closed, pubs, restaurants, shops and cafes were forced to shut, and people were told not to travel. Overnight, the roads, train tracks and skies around my home in London became eerily quiet. All my life, I have lived directly under the flight path of London Heathrow airport. As any resident of the area knows, you can usually see (and hear) an airplane every two minutes throughout the day. Prior to COVID-19, Heathrow was Europe’s busiest airport, recording an average of 1,300 daily flights in 2018. This changed on March 23, 2020.During the first few weeks of the spring lockdown, I can barely recall seeing any planes in the sky, as I worked from my new home office. In fact, during April 2020, passenger traffic at Heathrow fell by 97 percent from the previous year. As the weeks wore on and the lockdown was further extended, I began noticing the effect it was having on my local environment.

On sunny spring days, the air was purer and the sky bluer than I can remember.

Being Forced to Stay Home Made Us Appreciate Nature

One of my favorite places in the whole world is my local park in Southwest London. It is where I learned to ride a bike, took up my beloved hobby of running and spent countless weekends walking with family and friends. But it was never so important to me as it became during lockdown: my oasis, my sanctuary and an escape from the manic world around me.As I walked, ran and cycled around it each day, I became aware that the pond in the center of the park looked increasingly clearer. For the very first time in my lifetime, I could see fish swimming in the water. I knew that Venice was experiencing better water quality in its canals, but it was so exciting to be confronted with this reality in my own backyard.The lack of air pollution also became increasingly apparent. On sunny spring days, the air was purer and the sky bluer than I can remember. Before, you wouldn’t see more than a handful of stars in London’s night sky due to poor air quality, but we spent the summer nights of 2020 gazing up at the thousands of stars we could now see.

If in five years time, London’s skies are filled with thousands of planes each day again, we won’t have truly learned the lessons which 2020 presented to us.

It Wasn’t Just Humans Who Benefited

Residents in my area reported sightings of more bird species in the capital’s parks and along the River Thames, no longer scared off by the constant noise of commercial jets. I even heard the much-beloved naturalist Sir David Attenborough say the same thing about Richmond Park in London. In April, he told CNN, “The skies are so blue. The birdsong is so loud, and I can hear it over because there are no airplanes. Now, it's an event to see an airplane in the sky.”In my local park, people became fascinated with six eggs which a swan laid one hot July day. Walkers visited her nest regularly to check for signs of hatching. When the cygnets were finally born, locals adoringly followed the new family as they glided across the ponds. We even named them. Because we were working from home, had fewer distractions and had no other place to be, we were forced to appreciate the natural world around us. With so much bad news around us, these were the small gains of this new way of life. The impact of the pandemic on the global economy cannot be overstated. The health of the aviation industry directly correlates to the health of a nation’s economy, so its struggle is cause for concern. But having seen how the environment is enjoying some much-needed recovery so close to home, I wonder how we should move forward when life eventually returns to normal. With the mass-vaccination rollout, we are starting to get a glimpse into what life might look like post-COVID-19. But, if in five years' time, London’s skies are filled with thousands of planes each day again, we won’t have truly learned the lessons which 2020 presented to us.

In fifth grade, I was sent to a disciplinary school called Shallcross. I was kicked out of my last school for fighting, but, really, I was just seeking attention. This school was completely different from any other school I attended. My first day was like the TV show Beyond Scared Straight.I pulled up to the school to be confronted by six teachers. Well, I thought they were teachers. Mr. Scott walked onto the bus and yelled, "Y'all better wake the fuck up! Welcome, to y'alls first day of hell." The men who were waiting outside the school bus were all at least six feet tall and no strangers to the gym. Mr. Scott did most of the talking. "Walk off the bus in a single file line without talking, as you walk into the building. Take your shoes off and place them in a bucket. If you are wearing a belt, take it off and also place it in a bucket."

Looking back at it now, the school had so many similarities to prisons.

Reform School Is Basically Prison

We weren't allowed to wear backpacks; we held our work in our hands. They made it clear that we couldn't bring anything from the outside world into the school. I went from being an honors student to being in an academic prison with bodyguards who had the right to restrain me if I stepped one foot out of line.My new school ran on a system of rankings and every student started on level one, hoping they could make it to the fourth level—which is called the bulldog status. Gaining the bulldog status would mean I was a step closer to regaining my freedom. Bulldog status also came with many more privileges. When I finally achieved it, I was able to bring money and snacks into the building. That's how I made money. The students who weren't a bulldog would pay me to get their goodies.Looking back at it now, the school had so many similarities to prisons. Even when I am watching movies with prison scenes now, the first thing that comes to mind is this Shallcross.My journey to achieving my bulldog status wasn't easy. Once a month, you had an opportunity to move up one ranking, so I tried my best each day to show my teachers I was ready to level up. We were five months into the school year when I began to get comfortable with the flow of things, how things worked. I formed a decent relationship with most of my classmates, but in schools like that, you can never get too comfortable—at any given moment, anything could happen.

I cried myself to sleep that night because I knew this wasn't going to be my last time seeing that side of my mom.

My Mom’s Drinking Kept Me Down

I was days away from reaching bulldog status—that I had been praying for since I got into that sorry excuse for a school—when things came off the rails.Most days, after school, I would catch my mom drunk, drowning her pain away with some cheap liquor while watching her Lifetime stories. This day was different. When I got home, she wasn't there. She couldn't afford a cell phone, so I had no way to contact her. I stayed up way past my bedtime lying to my little brother: "Mom is at her friend's house, she'll be home soon." I made him some ramen noodles. My mind was racing. Where is my mom? Why would she leave without telling us? Why wouldn't she call to at least check and see if we'd eaten?I tried to remain calm and relaxed. I didn't want to alarm my little brother, but as the time got closer to midnight, my thoughts began to run faster. Laying in bed staring at my ceiling, praying that my mom was safe and nothing happened to her, my eyes got heavy. I started to go to sleep, but woke up to a hard knock on my front door around three in the morning. I popped up like it was Christmas morning. I ran downstairs to the front door, knowing that it wasn't Santa with gifts on the other side.When I opened the door, my neighbor yelled in a strong Jamaican accent, "Aye son, ya mama passed out on da porch." All I could do is stare. I was speechless; the neighbor walked away in shame. I looked at my mom and my heart was broken. This wasn't my first time seeing my mom drunk; this was my first time seeing that she allowed the world to know she was an alcoholic. I got her into the house and placed her on the couch, making sure she was as comfortable as possible. I started to walk back to my room when I took one more look at her. I felt my eyes getting watery.I cried myself to sleep that night because I knew this wasn't going to be my last time seeing that side of my mom. The next morning, I woke up for school and walked downstairs to see how mom was doing, but she was still asleep. I got my little brother prepared for school. Tension was in the air and I felt it as I brushed my teeth, staring into the mirror. I reminded myself everything would be okay. I assembled everything I needed for school and headed to the bus stop.

The Fight of My Life

When I arrived at school, I wasn't in the best mood. I was like a ticking time bomb ready to blow. I knew I wasn't the only student dealing with home or community problems, but that didn't make it any easier. My teacher was in a field of landmines and one wrong step could turn the whole classroom upside down. Rick, another student in my class, had his own issues and no intentions on becoming a bulldog. That day, one thing led to another and Rick decided to take his anger out on me. Usually, I wouldn't pay it any mind. I understood I was on level three and on my way to level four, but I was at my breaking point. I decided to react to him.Rick and I began to fight in the middle of the classroom: chairs were flying and our teacher was yelling out into the hallway for help. Within 30 seconds, two all-muscle guards pulled us off of each other, they threw us to the ground and put their knees in the middle of our backs. Rick and I were laying on the ground looking at each other eye to eye. I could see the fire in his eyes; he wanted to go for round two, I, on the other hand, was thinking, "In a blink of an eye, I lost four months of hard work, I lost privileges and now my teachers will treat me as if I don't matter anymore."I found that to be the new normal of my school experiences.My mistake was allowing the public school system to label me as a student with learning disabilities. My biggest mistake was believing in the label they smacked me with. I traveled from grade to grade with an Individualized Education Plan. I attended 11 different schools. I'd been kicked out of three different schools because of my "behavior." Time after time, I witnessed people count me out—I even counted myself out. I've faced a lot of trauma growing up and many teachers mistook my pain with behavior issues. I let the system destroy me in so many ways. And, now, and only now, have I began to find comfort in my past.