“We interfere with the optimism of nature; for, whenever we get this vantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with spiritual laws which execute themselves.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am not an optimist. Not at this time in my life, anyway. At some point in my single-digit ages, I became aware of the breadth and depth of human destruction. It may have been my teacher, who led a conservation-themed year book. It may have been snorkeling in the Bahamas. It may have been the PETA advertisements I somehow saw around the same time. But children find out about most things, eventually, and I believed that if everyone knew how badly animals and other life were suffering because of us, we would change. So I recruited neighborhood friends to post World Wildlife Fund (WWF) signs. I lectured my parents about animal testing. I stopped eating meat, forever. It would take me years to recognize that wasn’t enough.
In 1972, probably twenty years before my WWF campaign, the Club of Rome released a report titled The Limits of Growth, warning that our model of unlimited growth was unsustainable because it would deplete the very resources upon which it depends. That report, and another known as the World Conservation Strategy, argued that human life depends on ecosystems that are regenerative, but also destroyable. We received these warnings fifty years ago, warnings that urged us to value the world’s diverse ecosystems because we depend on them — whether or not we believe in the inherent value of non-human life. One can understand, then, why Greta Thunberg is so angry. Despite people in every corner of the globe arguing for better ways of life, none have proved more powerful than the false prophet of unlimited consumption.
My personal and lifelong battle, however, has not been in the broader climate conversation, but rooted in the particular horrors of factory farming — or, the rocket propellent of the climate crisis. I do not care about animals because we depend on them. Rather, I feel a deep grief and sense of moral wrongdoing when I see what factory farming actually involves. I think that’s why most people look away. We can’t imagine a life where we don’t consume our promotion steak or boardwalk ice-cream; we feel wronged when we consider abandoning tradition or habit. It is inconvenient, and - at times - something more than difficult, to turn away from the life society makes available to us, and choose a different way.
After I became a vegetarian, it took me 22 more years to become vegan. It has taken me decades to realize how much trash I produce and do something tangible about it. I am not an optimist because of how long this is taking me. Because of how long this is taking all of us. I am not an optimist because we do not have the luxury of time, and these small actions are not enough. Whole-scale systems and lifestyle changes are needed the world over, and they are not happening. There is no reason for optimism, at least optimism that depends on human effort.
In 2015, my husband and I were traveling around Maui after celebrating a friend’s wedding. We drove the Road to Hana, and set out on a hike up the old Haleakala volcano from the southeastern side. A mile or so into the Pipiwai trail, we came to a clearing and saw a god of a banyan tree—perhaps forty feet in diameter and hundreds of years old, with massive branches extending horizontally in every direction. My first reaction was to think it otherworldly. I would now recognize it among the most original and optimistic creatures this world has seen.
Such creatures inspired Richard Powers to abandon his professorship at Stanford to write The Overstory, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tale about humans who fall in love with trees. Several of Powers’ protagonists destroy their lives in trying to save the trees’ own, in challenging forces too hungry and powerful to be overcome. There is no happy ending, at least in the span of the human lives at the center of the book. But also at the center of the narrative are the lives of the trees, and their forests, which extend thousands of years before their failed saviors, and will extend thousands of years after. “[People] can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another,” Powers writes, “outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
Today felt like the first real day of fall, after a brutal summer of too much rain and then not enough. The hemlock in my yard, probably a hundred years old itself, is dropping small brown ornaments all over my front walkway. The oak tree joins in with his tiny acorns, delighting a gaggle of squirrels as a dozen sparrows pick seeds off grass we’ve let grow too long. The fig tree we’re raising in a large pot sits just in the shadow of another oak — this one dying. The power company took his top half three weeks ago.
A noisy wren steals small sticks from a nest abandoned in the bird house we attached to the garage when we moved in. The bird carries his loot to a home he’s building in the catalpa tree next to me. What I feel in this moment may not be optimism, but it’s certainly not despair.
“One way or another, we humans are on our way to becoming something else. The question is rather how gracefully or how violently we make that Ovidian metamorphosis. We will learn, as Thoreau says, to resign ourselves to the influence of the earth, or we will disappear. I don’t know how to calculate those odds.” - Richard Powers
“You listen and you know
you could live a better life than you do, be
softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will
be able to do it.” - Mary Oliver, North Country