When it comes to sharing ideas and getting people to think, are we only reaching those who are already in our small circle of influence? But what if you want to make a much larger, even global difference?
We’re in the car at the end of the driveway, about to make a right turn on our way to the train station. It’s misting outside on yet another spring-like day in January, what the National Weather Service is calling a record high for Boston and more than 60 other cities in the eastern United States. I’m studying the row of rainwater drops clinging to the underside of the twigs outside while we wait for the traffic to pass. My spouse Janyce is in the passenger seat talking about her to-do list for the day.
“Shoot, I forgot my water bottle,” she says.
“Do you want me to turn around?” I say.
“I think we have enough time,” she says, looking at the clock on the dashboard.
The yard outside looks off to me, I think, while sitting in the idling car in the driveway. The sparse grass of our lawn is uncovered much too early this January, thawed out and dusty. I’m wondering if we’ll get any more snow this winter. Even my neighbor’s heavily wooded backyard has a slightly greening lawn.
Last summer, I watched my neighbor while I was sitting at the desk in our home office. He was paroling the outskirts of his property with a chainsaw and eyeing our giant tree that had fallen onto part of his yard the winter before. “He’s going to cut it up and add it to his firewood pile,” I said to Janyce. “Go talk to him.” Earlier that same summer, we watched while he felled several canopy trees to make way for more sunlight. His home is on part of a migratory path that the wildlife have used for years. It seems to originate from the woods out behind our two houses and cuts diagonally across his yard to ours.
Many deer, even a buck or two, have passed by our kitchen window in the pre-dawn on that path. I’ve driven home some nights to catch a glimpse of a red fox dash by my car headlights. We’ve watched a female coyote squat on the ground by our giant spruce tree, sniffing around a few times before trotting back along the same invisible line that cuts across to the woods on the other side of the street.
Our tree fell with a thunderous crash that winter during a heavy snowfall. It was the same tree that housed a family of raccoons for several years, and today is still a shelter to the red-bellied woodpeckers that feast on our suet feeder. When the tree hit our cedar fence, but didn’t break it, we left it alone— a shattered trunk lying on its side against the fencepost, covered in a swarm of vines.
“You know, I just can’t do it,” says Janyce, folding herself back into the passenger side of my car with the stainless steel water bottle in one hand and her other pulling down on the seatbelt.
“I keep thinking about those birds with all that plastic in their stomach,” she says. “I’m returning the shampoo I just bought. I found a place in Cambridge that we can bring an empty bottle to fill up.”
A friend on Facebook the other day posted a comment under a picture she took of a mound of cardboard boxes and plastic bubble wrap: In an attempt to be more environmentally conscious we ordered from Grove. Only to find stuff was shipped in massive amounts of packaging. I left a comment saying that I knew what she meant. We gave up on our Blue Apron delivery for the same reason, eschewing the plastic cold packs that supposedly were reusable, but instead just filled up our freezer. We were convinced by the marketing pitch that all of the extra packaging could be recycled, but that turned out to not be true. In fact, I’ve only recently learned that less than 2% of all the collected and separated materials in the U.S. gets recycled at all. We tossed out every individual plastic bag from the heavily packaged produce each month, regretting that it would never be recycled.
“I also ordered some toothbrushes made of bamboo and toothpaste powder packaged in paper,” says Janyce.
“Mmhmm,” I say.
Her commentary has me thinking about a new concept I learned over the weekend when I joined my best friend in Maine at an environmental film festival. “Permaculture” is this idea to use the principles of natural ecosystems for growing vegetables in a regenerative way by letting nature do the work for you. I got the feeling from the films we saw that day, and especially from the panel discussions after, that it’s also much more than that—it’s a lifestyle and a worldview. What I mostly noticed though, and something that I’ve been thinking about all week, was how the small audience was filled with like-minded people.
When it comes to sharing ideas and getting people to think, are we only reaching those who are already in our small circle of influence? But what if you want to make a much larger, even global difference?
The artist and environmentalist Chris Jordan spent many years filming and editing his documentary Albatross. Janyce and I watched it the other night and were mesmerized throughout the entire 97 minutes. I wouldn’t call it a strictly environmental documentary and nothing about it promoted an obvious call to action, either. Despite the fact that 500,000 of these weird, captivating birds are ingesting more and more plastic from our oceans, it turns out they are not dying off to the point of nearing extinction. Actually, they are proliferating. But Chris Jordan was driven to make his film as a social commentary and even more as a creative work.“The role of the artist is to respect you,” he says, “help you connect more deeply, and then leave it up to you to decide how to behave.” The beauty of Midway Island way out in the Pacific Ocean and the mystery of these unique birds kept him working on the film long past the limit of his budget and his abilities as a filmmaker. What he ended up with was a beautiful piece of art, even if not the most successful film, powerful and thought provoking all on its own.
I was lucky to have one of my poems featured on the MIT home page over the December holiday break. MIT has an enormous reach and the poem (along with a link to my blog) received more than 12,632 views in a few days. I was disappointed to find out that it only resulted in 7 new signups on my mailing list. So far, the subscribers I have amassed are mostly people from my own small personal sphere— my friends and colleagues, and only a few from my fledgling social media following. I’m excited when I see a new email sign up from someone I don’t know. But my list is still so small and my larger goal to publish in a well-known magazine this year seems so out of reach.
I feel that way about the problem of all the plastic in our oceans, too. Our small attempts each week to stop buying so many single use items, to reuse our cloth bags at the grocery store, and leave our trees where they fall in the woods behind our house doesn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things— that is, until it does. The funny thing about making an impact is sometimes you don’t see it coming, and you never know when the small efforts you make over and over again will eventually change the mind of someone else, and over time, possibly create some real change.
We’ve arrived at the station before the train and the sun is starting to emerge from behind the grey clouds.
“Wow, we just made it,” I say.
“What do you mean? Two minutes is an eternity in train time,” says Janyce.
“You know, my friend Dave reposted something inspirational on FB the other day about not giving up, ” I say. “He wrote something about playwriting almost becoming a thing of the past for him. He said he wasn’t getting his plays noticed or produced even though it had been years and years of trying and he was just about to give up on them, but it turns out that was exactly when he was offered three new opportunities in a row.” I say.
“You do know that you can be a little impatient sometimes,” says Janyce.
“His post is the one thing getting me through the day today,” I say.
“I think he’s right,” says Janyce. “Just don’t stop.”