My family and I had planned to go hiking. I was in the car with my dad and stepmom, on our way to the trail. My sister was supposed to join us, but my dad got a call from her saying she wasn’t going to make it. She didn’t feel good; she had been throwing up all morning. “Are you sick?” my dad asked her, “hungover?” She insisted that no, she was neither of the two. She was anxious. She’d been doing this for the past few days now—waking up, immediately feeling anxious, and proceeding to get so anxious that she would find herself keeled over in front of the toilet, either dry-heaving or actually producing anxiety-induced vomit. I took the phone from my dad. I asked my sister what was wrong, what was she anxious about? She insisted it was nothing in particular, just overall anxiety that overpowered her waking moments. I guided her through everything I knew. I told her she had to breathe—that was the most important thing. Just always remember to return to the cyclic rhythm of the breath and find comfort there. I told her that she needed to start meditating as a part of her daily routine, and that through this she could literally rewire her brain to learn how to manage stress differently. I tried to get her to delve deeper into what was causing her anxiety. “There is obviously something in your life that is causing you discontent, so you need to take a step back and really consider what that could be,” I said. After we hung up, my dad and stepmom and I proceeded on with our day of hiking, but my sister’s anxiety weighed heavily on me. Her suffering made a home in my mind. Her hurting was my hurting, and not only because she is my sister, but because she is my fellow human being, capable of so much success and happiness and love. If she wasn’t living her life to its greatest potential, then neither was I.
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Earth, our planet, is dying. Some scientists say we have 11 years to stop climate change before irreversible damage is done. Others say these next 18 months will be the deciding factor in the fate of our planet. And still others say we have just until the end of 2020 to change our habits before Earth is beyond hope. Regardless of the timeline, the effects of climate change are evident all around us. Our forests are on fire. Our gulfs are flooding. Our ice caps are melting. Our coral reefs are eroding. And our animals are dying, their ecosystems collapsing.
Humans have been warned about climate change and its detrimental effects for decades. We have known that our actions are killing our planet, destroying the home of our future generations, interrupting the cyclic nature of Earth. So why has nothing been done? Why do humans continue to pollute the air, litter the oceans with trash, and power our lives with fossil fuels? Where is our empathy and compassion for Earth? Where is our empathy for our past, our present, our future? Can we not see that we are one with the planet? That by killing our planet we are killing ourselves?
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A research study by University of Washington graduate students examined 112 petri-dish microcosms, which are simplified, artificial ecosystems created to study and predict natural, real-world ecosystems (Beyers & Odum). Contained in the petri-dishes were varying species and combinations of algae, which acts as a producer, and bacteria, which acts as a decomposer, providing nutrients to the algae. The results of the study showed that the amount of algae produced in the petri-dishes over a year-long period varied greatly depending on the number of bacteria species also present in the dish. What this indicates is a complex and codependent relationship between producers and decomposers, meaning that biodiversity is positively correlated to the efficiency of an ecosystem (Stricherz pp. 2-6). Or, in other words, everything is intricately weaved together in a complex pattern and interlocking web of influence; nothing can occur without it affecting everything else. Life is dependent on life. And this research study is only examining things on a small scale—a highly condensed version of what we see everyday in Earth’s natural ecosystems. When one species thrives, all of the other species in the ecosystem thrive as well, supporting one another in a cyclic and mutually-beneficial nature. However, when one species begins to suffer, the whole ecosystem begins to collapse.
In the 1800s, gray wolves populated the area now known as Yellowstone National Park. However, the wolves were seen as both a nuisance and a danger to humans and livestock, and were intentionally killed off by 1930. Without the gray wolves there to prey on them, the elk population in the park skyrocketed. More elks in the park, who feed on vegetation, led to an increased consumption of the willow, aspen, and cottonwood trees along streams. Less willow trees, which the beaver population depended on for both food and to slow the water flow in order to allow them to build dams, led to less beavers. Less beavers led to a changing hydrology of Yellowstone’s rivers, and less trees providing shade along the river led to cooler water temperatures, both of which led to changing diversity of fish populations (Dolasia). Without the gray wolf, Yellowstone’s entire ecosystem was put off-balance. This phenomenon of codependency is known as symbiosis, which comes from the Greek word meaning “living together.”
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My sister and I fought a ton growing up. If you asked me when I was 10 years old, I would have told you that my sister was the meanest person I’d ever met, though perhaps I would have used a different choice word to describe her. Our sisterly dissonance was a result of the usual sibling rivalry and pre-adolescent angst, but it's apparent to me now that another factor was at play as well. Our lives were, frankly, out of balance—I don’t think we ever knew stability. Our dad worked the night shift. My childhood memories of him consist of him shut up in a dark room during the day, sleeping while me, my sister, and brother had free reign of the house. He’d wake up as the sky began to shift to dusk, eat dinner with us when my mom got off work, give us each a side hug, and be out the door. He wouldn’t return until morning, when my siblings and I would hop and jump and hang all over him, asking him to wrestle us or chase us or play with us, and he would for a little bit, before he got too tired and had to go back to bed to sleep the day away again, my siblings and I left to entertain ourselves.
Growing up, my mom was the backbone of our house. She fed us, bathed us, made sure we had our homework done, our teeth cleaned, and our fingernails clipped. As with most mammalian young in nature, we probably wouldn’t have survived without her. She made sure we knew it, though. Even as a little girl, I could sense that my relationship with my mom was not a symbiotic one. It was not mutually-beneficial. She made sure to let us know how much she was exerting herself for us. We were a strain on her life. We made her house too messy and her days too loud and her wallet too empty. On the weekends, when both my parents were finally home and together, where we had any chance of restoring balance to our family, they chose to shut themselves in their room and have screaming matches with each other, odes to their mutual suffering echoing throughout the house while my siblings and I were left to our own devices, yet again.
Taking all of this into consideration, it's easy to see why my sister and I were constantly at war with one another. We were both at war with ourselves. We were both suffering. We were both yearning for attention, affection, and unconditional love. My sister, being the oldest of me and my siblings, had to bear the brunt of my parents’ divorce. When the family came crumbling down, a lot of it landed on her. I’ve always sort of looked at her as my third parent; she was in charge of me and my brother during the long days we spent alone in the house, she was in charge of driving us back and forth between my parents’ houses on every other weekend we would get to spend with my dad, making sure we had all of our stuff packed up on time, and, when my parents eventually refused to communicate with each other whatsoever, she was the poor little carrier pigeon between them, the vessel of their bitter messages bouncing back and forth. While my heart now aches for my sister when I think of the unfair responsibility thrust upon her as a child, at the time, it only gave me all the more reason to despise her. She was far too much like my mom—bossy, cold, and calloused. She was yet another person in my life threatening my autonomy and individuality, something I clung to desperately to keep me ever-so-slightly removed from the chaos of my familial life.
The pressure put on my sister still affects her today. It has shaped her personality. She internalizes everything. She sees every small issue as a potential catastrophe waiting to happen. I believe this is why she wakes up everyday and is wrought with anxiety. She is a product of her environment. Everything affects everything, and my sister’s childhood has determined how she perceives and interacts with her world. How can she grow from this? How can she escape the tension and negativity that is all she has ever known?
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In 1986, a nuclear power plant called Chernobyl in northern Ukraine blew up, releasing radioactive debris all across the area. The city near where Chernobyl was located, Pripyat, was evacuated due to the high levels of radiation, and later came to be known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Lallanilla). While it was originally thought that the animal populations in this area were suffering as a result of the radiation, having deformities and increased risks of disease and illness, newer research suggests that the animals are actually thriving—the 1,600 square mile wasteland having become a refuge to all sorts of animals, from wolves to beavers to horses to bears. Free from the harmful effects of human activity, biodiversity has begun to increase.
Chernobyl can be seen as a lens into the future, into what the world will look like when humans eventually die out. And we will die out. Human-caused climate change will not be sustainable for human life. We are killing the planet, sure, and tragically wiping out mass amounts of animal species as we do so, but what we are truly doing is killing ourselves. When we are gone, the natural world will adapt. It will return back to its cyclic rhythm. Plants and animals will thrive, biodiversity will begin to increase once more—Chernobyl shows us this. Mother Earth will—gracefully—win out eventually, we just won’t be around to see it, not unless we learn to integrate ourselves into nature once more.
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By constantly being at war with one another, my sister and I missed out on the greatest defense we had against the tumult of our childhood: each other. Through all of our fighting—our name-calling, hair-pulling, and clothes-stealing—we failed to see the pain that we were both in. We saw each other as villains in each others’ stories, as another enemy we had to defend ourselves from in a world that showed us that we could not trust it. Had we just let down our guards a bit, perhaps we could have comforted one another, compensated for each other what we both lacked from our parents.
But everything has a way of working itself out eventually, and, now, my sister and I are closer than ever. My little brother was always just a bit too young and sheltered to comprehend the troubling reality of our childhood as it was happening, which leaves my sister as the sole person in this world who can come close to understanding my experiences as a child. I didn’t realize this until recently, though. Up until then, I had wallowed in the depths of what I perceived to be my own unique self-pity, distant and distinct from the childhoods of my siblings. But over time, as my sister and I got closer and closer and talked more and more, I recognized my own trauma within her. My perception of our familial structure shifted from my own narrow scope of what I alone had experienced, to a bird’s eye view of the interlocking web of relationships in my family as a whole. My family was one unit, an ecosystem of clashing personalities, egos, and emotions. I was not separate from them, as much as I tried to force myself to be. Everything that happened affected all of us.
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We humans like to think of ourselves as separate from the rest of the planet. We think of ourselves as the superior species, inherently better, smarter, and more important than any other life on Earth. Through our essential takeover of the planet, in which our population has increased by 7 billion people in just 200 years, faster than any other large vertebrate in history, we have more than halved the populations of wild animals. The rate of our population increase is directly correlated to the rate of extinction. We have taken over 40% of Earth’s land to use for our food production (“Human Population Growth”). Of the combined weight of all mammals on Earth, wild animals make up just 4%, with the other 96% being the weight of humans and domesticated animals such as livestock. As David Attenborogouh states in his documentary, A Life on Our Planet, “this is now our planet, run by humankind, for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world.” Where has our empathy gone? Does the collective ego of the human race truly think that we deserve more than all other life on Earth? Have we lost all compassion for plants, for animals, and for ourselves?
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Before you can fill the cup of others, you have to fill your own cup. When I first started doing yoga, this is something I would hear my online instructor say all the time, though I did not fully comprehend the extent of its truth until, well, I had filled my own cup. I had considered myself a “sad” person pretty much my entire life—I felt like the world was out to get me, I attracted negative energy. A year or two ago, I would have been in no position to give my sister advice on managing her anxiety. Not that I wouldn’t have cared, but I likely would have stood bystander to the whole situation, thinking “wow, that sucks for her,” and moving on with my day, wrapped up in my own multitude of problems and emotions. But when I healed myself, when I bathed myself in love and understanding and compassion, I could so much more easily recognize the cracks in others that needed to be filled with love and understanding and compassion as well, for we are so much more similar than we are different. When we realize this, having empathy is something that comes naturally, not something that we have to force or actively seek out. The suffering of others becomes our own, for we are one.
By tuning into ourselves, our bodies and our minds, we can better understand the world around us as well. If you think about it, we are an entire little universe ourselves, with our own little cyclic worlds ebbing and flowing within—our cells constantly working to sustain us, our blood pumping, our breath flowing, our thoughts and emotions constantly spinning. Anything we can observe in the outside world, whether in the environment or in the interpersonal or societal relationships at play, we can also observe within ourselves—however literally or metaphorically you want to take that.
To save the planet, we must recognize our oneness within it. But we can not see our place in this interconnectedness if we do not first see ourselves. Only upon coming to an understanding of ourselves will we see how connected we are to everything else. Humans have rendered themselves separate from the rest of the world, just as our egos often render us as separate from others around us, but if we all take a step back to see the bigger picture, we will see that nothing is independent. We are a string of fractal energies getting both endlessly bigger beyond what we can understand and endlessly smaller beyond what we can see, and recognizing these energies will bring a whole new significance to what it means to use clean energy. We are an endless habitat of love and solar, breath and wind, life and earth. Our journey away from a focus on the individual and into an acknowledgement of the collective is what will save Us.
Works Cited
Beyers R.J., Odum H.T. (1993) Introduction to Microcosmology. In: Ecological Microcosms. Springer Advanced Texts in Life Sciences. Springer, New York, NY.
Dolasia, Meera. “How The Removal Of A 'Nuisance' Predator Wreaked Havoc On Yellowstone National Park's Ecosystem.” DOGOnews, DOGO Media Inc., 15 Oct. 2020, www.dogonews.com/2014/9/18/how-the-removal-of-a-nuisance-predator-wreaked-havoc-on-yellowstone-national-parks-ecosystem.
Hughes, Jonathan, et al., directors. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Netflix, Altitude Films, 2020.
“Human Population Growth and Extinction.” Biological Diversity, Center for Biological Diversity, www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/.
Lallanilla, Marc. “Chernobyl: Facts About the Nuclear Disaster.” LiveScience, Purch, 20 June 2019, www.livescience.com/39961-chernobyl.html.
Stricherz, Vince. “Ecosystem Health Depends on Complex Relationship between Organisms.” UW News, University of Washington, 16 Feb. 2000, www.washington.edu/news/2000/02/16/ecosystem-health-depends-on-complex-relationship-between-organisms/.