On connection

Considering that a forest is more than an association of trees, or, is diabetes the solution to the climate crisis?

Photo credit: Jennifer Hole. Taken last week at the Woodbridge Ikea.

I felt unsettled. What had moved me to pause my quest for modular furniture and photograph a supersized tray of pastries? (See car in bottom right of photo for scale.) Why had I doubled back to photograph the nutrition label too, just in case? And why was I still thinking about the brazen tagline, “Good for you - good for the planet,” days afterwards?

We’ll get back to the buns

It has been a spell since my last note about seagrass. As you may recall, I saw some unidentified birds flying over a gas station one evening at dusk, buried a ratskin bracelet under a fig tree, a squirrel absconded with my prayer flags, I learned beavers were rodents and that scallops can walk. It’s certainly obvious how all of these were leading me to a deeper understanding of the mysteries of life. But then a lot of actual life happened to the people around me and there’s been some surfing to do (that’s figurative, I don’t know how to surf). In the midst of all of that life, I lost the trail and when I tried to pick it up again… crickets.

(Literally, which I love, but also figuratively, which is more difficult.)

Whereas before it felt like someone or something was holding my hand and leading me, now I was all alone. I ate some figs (from that tree so I ate a bit of bracelet too), my kids started back to school (and then got sick and then started back again), I cast around for a path. Where am I going? What comes next?

Ikea came next. I saw the sign.

Self-talk

Ok, I said to myself, trying not to be that person who stops to document pastry propaganda in Ikea and then feels emotional about it for hours/days afterwards. Here’s the thing: people love cinnamon rolls. They are tasty. Let the people enjoy their buns. And we do need to shift towards more plant-based diets. A shockingly HUGE portion of the Earth has been converted to farmland (/cleared of natural habitat/not absorbing carbon/oozing nitrogen into water bodies/bad for seagrass) just to grow food for beefs, not to mention the land that is cleared so beefs can live in unsavory accommodation. Viva la donut!

But time passed and I was still thinking about that sign: Good for you - good for the planet.

What is it? myself asked.

I don’t want to write about the buns, I pleaded. Nobody wants me to criticize the buns!

Mammals!

My spouse has a penchant for collecting scientific papers in loose constellations orbiting around many of our shared spaces, like my bedroom. When the dust on top makes the dormancy of a particular stack obvious, I will intervene, but mostly they do their thing and I do mine. We’re amicable more than friendly. But this one was irresistible: “Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions” by Oswald J. Schmitz, et al (2022).

In a nutshell: The world is on course to shift to renewable energy by 2050 and also (less on course but working) to stop cutting down forests for toilet paper (etc) and beefs (etc) (see solutions: eat more pastry). Once we achieve these aims, humanity will stop adding more carbon to the blanket of air that surrounds our planet (the atmosphere). Plans are in place, we’ll figure out the funding/logistics. Great.

But what about the carbon that’s in the blanket already and will keep increasing while we figure out how to fix EV infrastructure, for instance? We need something called “negative emissions.” This means sucking down the carbon from the blanket and storing it safely somewhere in land or water. The cheap(er) and safe(r) options for sucking down carbon are protecting the forests, wetlands, coastlands, and grasslands that are still here, and then restoring and better managing natural systems like these because they store tons and tons of carbon in their plants, soils, and sediments.

And just take a look at this:

“Intensive sampling of 650 plots of 100 m^2 in a 48,000 km^2 tropical forest region in Guyana revealed that tree and soil carbon storage increased by 3.5-4 times across a gradient from 10 to 70 tree species. Yet, across a gradient from 5 to 35 mammal species within this same region, tree and soil carbon storage in the sampling plots increased 4-5 times.”

In case you skipped or started thinking about sweetrolls during that part: The more different kinds of plants in an area, the more carbon it stores, as a general rule. AND (!!!!), land where you find more different kinds of mammals stores EVEN MORE carbon. More diverse life in piece of land = carbon vacuum cleaner = planetary Tylenol.

“Enlisting animal functional roles for natural climate solutions requires changing the current mindset, which largely holds that wild animals need to be protected from human impacts and climate change. This mindset accordingly leads to the separate allocation of landscape and seascape space for animal conservation and natural climate solutions because it sees them as competing objectives for finite spaces. Changing the mindset to consider them as functionally interdependent creates new opportunities to increase negative emissions.”

I didn’t even finish reading the paper. I had found my way back.

Desperately Seeking Solutions

I’m not here to derail your confidence in science, but another way of saying what I read in the mammals paper could be: the way life has arranged itself for billions of years works pretty well. So instead of thinking we’re so much fancier than everyone else, even the octopi, we could pay attention to the rest of life and just try to, um, learn from it, kinda? (I know you’re gonna bring up how blue jays kill other birds and all that. Blue jays are not the villains here and they get a bum rap.)

What if we were to begin every discussion with this spoken question (literally, we say it before every meeting where any kind of plan is being made, including children’s birthday parties): How can we best care for life in this situation? (aka: maybe what’s missing is the mammals?). Would we get different answers than if we started from (read in robo-voice:) “how do we maximize for carbon?” or “which management regime has been demonstrated as most effective for minimizing species loss and how can we model a fifty-year forecast to guide us in propagating this solution on a global scale most efficiently and with the most certainty of meeting the several criteria on our checklist but possibly missing several other criteria and in fact, in hindsight, oops.” (It’s true this is a shallow and unfair categorization, except for when it is not, and those are the ones I’m talking about, not yours, my dearest.)

I’m guessing all those papers that sleep in my room would disagree with me, and there’s clearly a place in solution-finding for all of their dense language and rigorously controlled experiments. But somehow, when we build solutions in the same way that we ask reductive questions, the solutions… well a lot of times they don’t make a lot of sense and often a solution to one problem leads us right up against a different one.

Imagine each piece of knowledge gained through the (invaluable!) process of science is a lego block. And we’ve got this room full of legos and so we decide to build an elephant out of the blocks. That is gonna be one interesting elephant. We could even get an AI in on it and I bet together with that AI we could get that elephant to move. We could probably build a little channel through the middle with some mechanism so that hay could go in the front and sit in some chamber and then come out of the other end. Our lego elephant can poop. But if you put that fella out in the wild, none of the other guys are going to recognize it. It’s not an elephant. It’s just a bunch of pieces cobbled together in a clever way.

We need the pieces (and more pieces!) to understand better, but we gotta get some wisdom (or something) helping us with these here solutions. And not just the invisible hand.

This also seems relevant

During the increased shuttling of peoples that accompanies the return to school, I’m trying to listen to an audiobook in my car that is one nine-hour file with no chapter divisions. It resets to 00:00 after some unknown span of time passes, so each day I keep having to refind my place. This means relistening to some sections over and over (this is starting to sound a lot like life) while I wait to reach a red light so I can fast forward too far and then rewind too far. The point of telling you all this is to explain how I came to listen to the same part multiple times yesterday before the universe finally got through to me:

Before you ask for your prayers to be answered, before you ask life to change to fit the image you have in your mind, first look at what is and see what it can teach you. Seek to understand first, before you jump to find an answer.

Why do we have all of these problems of over-muchness and what can we learn by watching life? Where can considering interdependence and relationship lead us to better understanding of the nature of the problem (or the problem of the nature?)?

I sure as heck know this: the response to the problem of deforestation/land degradation/climate change — “the more sustainable for our planet” that Ikea is aiming for — is not to peddle diabetes by misinforming consumers about the health benefits of bargain danishes.

If you’re gonna eat a mass produced tray of sweetrolls shipped from another country a thousand miles away, then y—yes, using plant-based ingredients does reduce harm done in relation to a couple of global challenges. If you look at it through the lens of solving specifically for certain measurable indicators of those specific challenges then the shift would be (able to be reported as) better for the planet and presumably not worse for people.

But maybe a better tagline would be: “Not bad for you if consumed in moderation and as part of a diet that includes actual plants — good for the planet when compared to our previous roll while acknowledging that there are also many many foodstuffs that would also be delicious and, on the whole, have a much smaller footprint on the planet when you consider all inputs and factors and also we are aware that most people who shop at Ikea have access to more food than they possibly need and that part of “good for the planet” is making sure that the people without enough calories actually get some of them, I mean, we’re the ones who used the words “sustainability” and “good for the planet” as a sales pitch no one is picking on people who responsibly enjoy delicious sweetrolls but on those marketing sweetrolls like consuming them makes you an eco-warrior.”

Okay, I think that’s out of my system.

Hope

Where the mammals paper most excited me (it’s embarrassing but true) is in its assertion that the solutions live where we solve for interdependence. Connection. Rather than replacing every car with an electric alternative, some should be bikes or car shares. Some should be carpools where kids laugh together and argue about seatbelts. Some should be legs and buses and cities and communities designed to put people (mammals) into contact with life, to provide opportunities for loving life which is not the same as liking it but is the only place in the world where we are found.

Later in the mammals paper the authors provide an example of when the wildebeest population in the Serengeti plummeted because they got sick from living too close to beefs. The smaller number of beests couldn’t graze enough of the Serengeti’s seasonal vegetation and this led to increased fires (the number of them and how intense they were). These fires released a bunch of carbon —> warmer blanket. Since then, people, humans (who I maintain are good guys in this story), worked to restore wildebeest populations and what do you know, there are fewer fires and the ones that come are less intense, and now the Serengeti is once again sucking carbon down into the earth where we like it.

I appreciate that Ikea has made a veggie meatball, and someday I will even try one. In the meantime, I will keep my eyes and ears open for signs on the path, in whatever form - an ad, a paper, a mom at the soccer field - all the things that flow through a life. Nursing my hope and with a hunch that I’m determined to follow. I’m glad to have you along for the ride.

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Notes:

1. The use of “beefs” here is shorthand for sentient beings whose destiny is to become/produce food for human use so also includes nuggets / milks / bacons / sashimis / fancy feasts / etc.

2. Tropic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions, Schmitz et al 2022.

3. Which came first, the mammal or the carbon? Which is to say, is there more carbon there because there’re more mammals — or more mammals because more carbon? There are mechanisms by which mammals act to store carbon, so I think it’s the former, but just curious.

4. When will I learn to spell the word vacuum?

5. For my non-US readers, Tylenol is a brand of acetaminophen, a reducer of fever and inflammation.

6. I don’t know if it is technically correct to refer to a Swedish pastry as a danish.

7. I can’t figure out how to superscript a 2 in Substack. Please advise.

8. I absolutely refuse to add a note explaining what the invisible hand refers to and if you have not read Adam Smith describe chair production you are missing out.

9. The audiobook I’m taking a long time to listen to is Danielle LaPorte’s How to Be Loving.

10. Except in cases where it is a marketing ploy and the intention is to channel resources from well-meaning consumers to profit-mongering devils, the bottom line (wrong metaphor), the ultimate aim in reaching for sustainability is to care for life, right? I don’t think Ikea are trying to sell more buns, not entirely at least. I think they are trying to shift the market for good. They know that plant-based diets are a widely accepted ‘solution’ to the climate/nature crises and they have a goal to educate people about alternatives. These are all guesses, I haven’t been in any backrooms, but I’m willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt.