Synaptic

I was amazed at the way Katelyn was able to “connect” so many stories and “dots” into a cohesive picture of her own sustainability autobiography. I also appreciated her voice throughout the journey.

-Mark Stark

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We had traveled thirty-five miles to reach the top and realized that we were still on the shortest mountain all around us. We were so small: we were so insignificant compared to everything else…

I used to go to Colorado at the beginning of August every year for a hiking trip with my youth group. We would travel thirteen hours from Lake Rathbun through Nevada and into the Poudre Canyon area. We always set up base camp at a site across from this mountain that looked like an elephant. There was one bathroom, if you could call a hole in the ground surrounded by a small wood shack a bathroom. There was no running water except for a small section of river that we would jump in at the end of the trip, even though the water was freezing and we were terrified of being swept away. We just wanted some form of bath.

It was a five day trip, and we would do all we could to lessen the amount of weight we had to carry in our packs. One girl only brought one pair of pants and others sawed their toothbrushes in half and left deodorant behind altogether. The thirty-five mile hike up was never boring, from snake and fish catching towards the bottom to snowball fights a mile under the peak to free climbing, at last, a forty-foot tall pile of giant rocks to reach the highest point on the entire mountain. We sat there, leaning against the tallest boulder that was too jagged to climb and looked around. We had traveled thirty-five miles to reach the top and realized that we were still on the shortest mountain all around us. We were so small; we were so insignificant compared to everything else. I imagine this is how Henry David Thoreau must have felt when he said “the universe is larger than our views of it.” It was hard to believe that I was such a small part of the world but my species and I have so much influence over it, almost to the point where we have no more control of our influence.

At the beginning of the second day when we were packing up our tents and dreading moving forward so early, our trail guide Rachel told us a secret. “When we get to the top of the mountain there is a vending machine that has pop and snacks that are flown in every month.” Tired and gullible, those of us who had never gone on the trip before honestly believed her. I could just imagine it: a green and black pop machine featuring the latest Mountain Dew flavor we were obsessed with and next to the pop machine, a big black snack machine. It would have a clear front featuring a revolving selection of delicious sandwiches that we knew were amazing compared to our trail food. It would sit right at the base of that giant pile of rocks we painstakingly climbed.

Five years ago I was so excited for those imaginary machines to be there; however, now that I am going back this coming August, I would be so devastated if it were true. Humans had already degraded that area enough as it was. Damming the river upstream to build a bridge, only to then release the water later on and knock out the bridge, led to several trees being torn down along the path. Hikers would throw them across the river to avoid having to get their feet wet. We refused to use those trees which led to the other side and instead removed our shoes and rolled our pants up to cross the river the “old fashioned way” as Rachel called it. This eventually led to my first panic attack when the water was much deeper than anticipated, but I digress. All throughout the trip, we carried out our trash in little baggies at the tops of our packs, we dug holes for our natural bodily functions, and we did our best not to disturb anything. I didn’t get it at the time. I complained about how gross it was to keep trash with you for nearly a week. Rachel tried to get me to see reason, but I would not understand until I was much older how one person and her decisions can create such an impact on the environment around her.

The Hunger Games: A Humbling Dot

I had the fortune of meeting Rivkah Gardner-Frolick my junior year. She was an international baccalaureate student who switched into our AP Environmental Science class to avoid having to take IB art, which we all heard was brutal. Rivkah had this strange caring complex, especially for those facing poverty and hunger. She founded Central Academy’s first Hunger Club, which we all thought had something to do with The Hunger Games at first (but was completely unrelated), and she seemed to think that I would be a tremendous resource to the club. She recruited me early on to help with networking. One of our biggest events of the year was our Oxfam Hunger Banquet, which, is defined by Oxfam America as “an interactive event… [where] the meal that you eat… [is] determined by luck of the draw just as in life some of us are born into relative prosperity and others into poverty.” We were trying to change “the way people think about poverty and hunger” (Oxfam America). If you still don’t know what I’m talking about I will explain it as simply as I can.

We hosted an event where students and community members came to have a meal. They were randomly seated and served according to where they sat. Fifteen percent of our guests received a full meal; chicken, rice, and vegetables, with a choice of beverage and eating utensils. This fifteen percent represented first world cultures like Monaco whose gross national income was recorded as 6.4 million in 2012. Monaco is one of the most successful countries, and it doesn’t even have an agricultural system or resource exports (Europa World Yearbook). Thirty-five percent of our guests received rice, beans and water representing the thirty-five percent of humans who live in second world countries. Lastly, fifty percent of our guests received just rice to emphasize half of the world living in poverty. They also received a glass of “dirty” water we created using food dye to represent the countless communities without clean water. In Morocco, most of the country doesn’t have a way of transporting or disposing of their waste. They go outside in nature which pollutes their country and water. Creating a sanitation system is, at the moment, nearly impossible due to “costs of the pipe network, lack of water and serious environmental drawbacks” (Abarghaz). Everyone who had received the “dirty” water was astonished and most were very humbled by the experience, including myself. Clean water is typically a problem that we Americans attribute to primitive countries but it is a growing problem all over the world, including the United States. In a 2009 study by The New York Times, Charles Dughigs reported, “More than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease.”

Our Oxfam Hunger Banquet was unbelievable. It is crazy how I might not have been part of this group and amazing event had it not been for Rivkah thinking I had connections. Eventually I learned to view my connections as a personal, societal, and ecological concept. Rivkah’s link to me led to the culinary arts program that catered to and connected to our event. That connection sprouted for every guest we had and possibly connected all the way to the third-world cultures for which we raised funds through banquet admission. Although we were just an isolated, ill-named school club, we still had an impact and we weren’t so small once we made all of our connections.

The Ugly Truth: A Bold Dot

Our guests and I learned so much that day about how different it is living in a privileged culture where we take everything for granted. As Americans, we are so used to having as much as we want whenever we want. One hundred years ago, humans ate seasonally. As our technology industrialized and we developed more efficient ways of transporting and storing food, so did our food shed. James Farrell in his novel The Nature of College defines a food shed as the “area affected by our eating” or basically where we get everything we consume, which has become global in the past sixty years (76). Farrell’s concept of “distancing” explains how humans had begun realizing that we could use networking to get food that we may not have had access to before. This networking seemed great at the time and quickly became part of our culture. Oranges at Christmas time was a tradition for thousands of Americans for years, and we began to forget how often unnatural fruit consumption in winter truly was and still is. Wait a second, how could the invention of modern preservation techniques be bad if I can have fresh fruit all year long? How was I supposed to know humans were meant to eat seasonally if I can have access to anything whenever I want?

Let’s consider the fact that our food may not be as fresh as we believe it to be. We have developed this veiled idea of freshness originating from our culture no longer having to douse our meat and vegetables with sodium and brine or soak our fruit in sugar to keep them for an extended time period. Our food appears fresher than previously available but this fresh food is one) not indigenous to our region or, in most cases, to our ancestral diet, and two) contains countless chemical modifiers and poisons to keep them appealing to the eye. For example, bananas are a big food item in my family. My dad eats one every morning for his daily dose of potassium and my two-year old niece Ella asks for one every time she visits. I was always conscious of the fact that bananas don’t come from Iowa, let alone the US. However, I never really considered the jet fuel used to fly my bananas nearly six thousand miles from Argentina to Iowa just so I could give Ella a banana every week, nor the chemicals used to keep them ripe until they could be bought. It’s not just imported goods from outside the US, either. According to Dr. Farrell, “In eating one pound of hamburger we are…consuming the two hundred gallons of water it takes to make the beef… five pounds of grain…” and dirt “because the grain that farmers grow… cause[s] soil erosion” (78). “It takes nature about five hundred years to make one inch of topsoil” and “American farmlands lose 1.9 billion tons of topsoil a year” (17, 78). Through our monoculture and cattle industries, we are internally destroying the heart of our economic system. We are in deep trouble and I, like most Americans, was blind to the countless resources being wasted by our developed global food shed system and the destruction we’re causing through our devotion to short-term bypasses over long-term solutions.

The Green Mile: A Misunderstood Dot

Why do we not know about these things? I know that I grew up thinking that I was living a green lifestyle. Like many Americans, my ideas about what is “good for you” came from a long line of misconceptions. My idea of healthy eating came from my mother (and my grandmother who doesn’t believe in sugar) who is a nurse and hears about what is ‘good’ for humans on a daily basis and what I have always been taught is good to eat. My family gardens in the summer. I have my own herb garden as my grandma gave me some oregano and licorice to start with years ago and my dad cultivates a modest vegetable patch in the far corner of our backyard containing countless tomatoes, radishes, and gourds. We live in Iowa though, so we buy our vegetables from the grocery store at all other times of the year as does every other American who does not eat seasonally as I am learning I should consider. Additionally, in every school cafeteria I have ever entered, there is a large food pyramid (or now a food plate) showing exactly how much of everything I “need” to have. We were taught to have a glass of milk, some kind of meat, a grain product and a veggie to have a “well-balanced diet.” We run into problems immediately with the notion that a glass of milk with every meal is healthy. According to a survey conducted by USA Today in 2009, sixty percent of adults can’t digest lactose. (Wiese) The number of lactose sensitive humans has grown every year. When I visited Europe and requested milk for my cereal, I was laughed at. They explained that milk was for babies. Milk was never meant to be consumed after infancy. More conspiratorially, isn’t weird and unnatural that humans are the only mammal that drinks another mammal’s milk?

Why is it, then, that there is such a stress to drink three glasses of milk a day along with two to three servings of meat? Some, like Michael Pollen in his Eater’s Manifesto, would say that lobbyists for the multi-trillion dollar meat, egg, and dairy industry would have something to do with swaying the USDAs choices. What others would say, in all honesty, really isn’t significant. How much money would the CEOs of these companies lose if Americans begin to cut back on daily meat intake? “The average North American devours more than twice the daily protein requirement” (77). Wouldn’t the CEOs be sad when cutting our protein intake in two would also cut their salary the same way? Although, being honest, the working class would get laid off by the hundreds before a CEO would take a pay cut, as we all clearly saw in 2008.

`Furthermore, when it comes to misconceptions, many people think they are living green in regards to their energy and water consumption. The truth of the matter is; it doesn’t matter if you use energy saver appliances and light bulbs, never turn on your air or heat, and take two minute showers with low flow showerheads. A lot of the time, the measures we go through to live green don’t offset the little everyday consumerist exploitations that cause pollution. Like the fable of the hummingbird, it is important to do the best one can, no matter how little that may be.

As a strong, cohesive community, however we can do much better. Our society has a severe case of Affluenza, defined as extreme materialism caused by rampant consumerism. Our technologically focused society has this fixation on the latest and greatest. Take the iPad for example. The first iPad was released in 2010 and the latest, fourth generation, was released in 2012. What is the necessity of having a new model every six months for anything other than a shiny new toy to show off? Electronics contain a lot of components that are harmful to, potentially both, humans and the environment. Cell phones have “500 to 1000 components…such as lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium and hazardous chemicals, such as brominated flame retardants. Polluting PVC plastic is also frequently used” (Greenpeace International). I have had four cellphones since the seventh grade. If we use 85 years as a basis for average lifespan, I will use over fifty cell phones in my lifetime. That’s insane. In our innovative and mandatory updated electronic system we are putting thousands of chemicals on the market every day that will just become out of date in a couple of years and end up in a landfill polluting our earth. We are killing the dirt that we, and our future generation, will live on for the next few hundred years. If we don’t change our ways, the only soil around here that’s not covered by asphalt will be too toxic to produce food.

The Empire Strikes Back: The Final Dot

I was born, and have lived all my life, in Des Moines, Iowa. “The Great Flood of 1993”, as it’s so famously called, is a large part of modern Iowa history. My mom vividly remembers going to get water from a large pool filled up with filtered water flown in from surrounding areas. 250,000 people, in Des Moines alone, were without running water. (Wilkerson) In an excerpt from Man Killed by Pheasant, John Price discusses his proximity to Des Moines during ’93 and how the national media claimed it was “Nature Gone Mad!” (Price) Personally, I like to think of it instead as, “Nature is Pissed.” Our environment of concrete and asphalt covered soil, no longer allows for the absorption of excess water. When it rains, the water has no place to go besides our sewer system and rivers, which, in case you haven’t noticed, have a tendency to fill up rather quickly. Year after year our rivers flood and year after year we blame Mother Nature for the crazy hormonal shrew she is. Why don’t we, instead, blame ourselves for once and take corrective actions?

Americans, like all people, have this habit of consuming landmasses. It all started with imperialism. Before concrete cities, Columbus, and America, Europeans (mostly) held an obsession for the conquest of land. If a nation held a lot of property they held a lot of power. England, Spain, and The Netherlands were sending out expeditions and trying to gain early spheres of influences in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Humans have retained this obsession of expansion and greatness and transformed colonization into urban sprawl. The bigger the concrete landmass of a city, the more important and powerful it is. For instance, instead of a few roads leading to the areas surrounding our capitol, Des Moines, the cities merge into each other, obstructing the lines where Des Moines ends and West Des Moines, Urbandale, and various other suburbs begin. Greenery is minimal. There are more signs along the road pointing you to where you think you need to go than trees along the Interstate. Even more threatening is the everyday population increase and United States tendency to spread outwards to accommodate instead of upwards like in smaller countries. It is almost like America has all of this open space, so we have to fill it like we are decorating a bedroom.

It’s A Wonderful Life: Seeing the Pattern of Dots

My sugarless grandma always taught me to follow the golden rule. She stressed helping others who are less fortunate than I, being open-minded towards others, and having an overall compassion for everything living. When I think about it, my empathy has developed over the years and isn’t limited to just people or animals anymore. As Bill Clinton said in an interview with Stephen Colbert, “I want to leave a better world. The reason you should do things for other people is selfish. There’s no difference between selfish and selfless if you understand how the world works.” Clinton and I share the belief that connections are boundless if one can step back and observe the pivotal points: from my first world selfish hunger on top of the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, to my involvement with Rivkah’s Hunger Club, to taking my first global sustainability class. These moments swirl in my mind, entwining and comingling, forming who I will be and how I will act in my upcoming years.

Global sustainability is defined as not “depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.” But, sustainability is, at its core, defined as the ability to uphold or support something: supporting each other globally. Steve Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Prospectively mapping out a clear and effective plan of action to save the world is impossible. We can, however, trust that green living will someway connect in our futures. We can believe that all of our small steps will eventually create a giant leap. We must learn selflessly to sustain our communities, our people, and eventually reduce our consumption enough to sustain our earth. We will connect the dots to realize that we were selfishly sustaining ourselves all along.

Works Cited

Abarghaz, Y., Mahi, M., Werner, C., Bendaou, N., & Fekhaoui, M. (2012). Ecological Sanitation in Morocco Promotion of the Urine-Diversion Dehydration Toilets-Case of Dayet Ifrah. American Journal Of Environmental Sciences, 8(3), 212-219.

Clinton, Bill. Washington University. St. Louis, Missouri. April 2013. Interview

Duhigg, Charles. “The Tap Water Is Legal, but May Be Unhealthy.” The New York Times. 9 Dec. 2009. Web. 26 June 2013.

Farrell, James J. The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2010. Print.

“Green Ethics and Philosophy.” Sage Reference Series; Green Society. Vol. 8. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2011. Print.

Jobs, Steve. Stanford University. Stanford, Connecticut. May 2005. Commencement Speech.

“Monaco.” The Europa World Yearbook 2012. 53rd ed. 2012. Print.

“Morocco.” The Europa World Yearbook 2012. 53rd ed. 2012. Print.

“Oxfam America: Working Together to End Poverty and Injustice.” Oxfam America: Working Together to End Poverty and Injustice. Oxfam America, n.d. Web. 13 June 2013.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Price, John. Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships: [a Memoir]. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2008. Print.

“What’s in Electronic Devices?” Greenpeace. Greenpeace International, 27 June 2005. Web. 19 June 2013. Wiese, Elizabeth. “Sixty Percent of Adults Can’t Digest Milk -USATODAY.com.” Sixty Percent of Adults Can’t Digest Milk – USATODAY.com. USA Today, 15 Sept. 2009. Web. 19 June 2013.

Wilkerson, Isabel. “THE MIDWEST FLOODING: On the Des Moines; Flood Damage Immobilizes Des Moines.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 13 July 1993. Web. 19 June 2013.