It Could (Will?) Be Worse….

One of the penalties of an ecological education is
that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Much of the damage inflicted on the land
is quite invisible to laymen.
An ecologist must either harden his shell
and make believe that the consequences of science
are none of his business, or he must be the doctor
who sees the marks of death in a community
that believes itself well
and does not want to be told otherwise.
—Aldo Leopold

Recently, on the Thursday following the Presidential election, when things were still very much up-in-the-air, I happened to be teaching my seniors about why viruses such as influenza and COVID-19 are constantly evolving.  We were in hybrid in-person mode that day, and as can only really happen when human interaction is direct, talk about the organism behind the pandemic naturally led to talk about the general uncertainty, fear, and angst my students have been feeling for many months now—feelings only heightened that particular day because of the uncertainty about the outcome of the election. 

It was a conversation that could very rapidly have gotten out of hand; so I kept trying gently to steer it back to the science when one of my students observed that I always seemed to be rather stoic about what was going on in the world (not her actual word choice) and asked whether I was concerned or not about the future (which for her adolescent brain meant next year). It was and is a fair question, and it was not the first time my students have asked it of me.  But it is one to which I replied this time, in one of those accidental moments of candidness that can happen before the teacher brain has the chance to kick in and edit: “I am not only concerned; I am frankly terrified for the future of your entire generation.”

Well, you can imagine the reaction to that! It took every skill I have as an educator to smother that fire rapidly and get everyone in the room back onto the task at hand and to keep the worry limited to “only” the pandemic, the election, and the social unrest in this country.  Yet as I have sat for a while now with the memory of that moment, I continue to wrestle with the fact that I am terrified for them, and here are only some of the highlights of what I could have told my students in order to explain why. 

We are now, for instance, less than a decade away from 2028, a year that is the first in a predicted range of about two decades when the last of the mineable phosphorus is pulled from the ground.  The significance of this fact is that without phosphorus, there is no artificial fertilizer, and without the artificial fertilizer that made the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1940s and 1950s possible, the consequent extra billions of people it also made possible cannot be fed.  And since we do not have the 250 million years for the phosphorus washed into our rivers and oceans to go through the geological phase of this critical element’s biogeochemical cycle before it becomes mineable again, we are in severe trouble as a species.  Unless we develop a technology to retrieve the mined phosphorus we’ve already flushed away through over-application and run-off, we will lose at least 50% of our agricultural capacity sometime between my students becoming thirty-somethings and entering middle age.

Speaking of agriculture, even if we do manage to avert the fertilizer crisis, we will still be overtaxing the planet’s capacity to sustain us.  In 2011, our species was already consuming 40% of the photosynthesis taking place, and that was when there were still less than 7 billion of us.  Our population estimate is now nearly 7.7 billion.  Furthermore, to add fuel to the flame, when I last taught this topic to my AP Biology students in the spring of 2019, that number was 7.3 billion.  That’s right, 400 million additional humans in not quite a year and a half.  Hence, I strongly suspect that we are now consuming far more than 40% of the photosynthetic production, leaving the entire rest of the natural world—every animal, every fungus, even the plants themselves—scrounging to survive off of what’s left, leading to the inevitable collapse of the ecosystems that sustain all life on this planet, including us.

And as ecosystems collapse, their inhabitants begin to come into ever greater contact with us, resulting in an ever-greater risk of zoonotic transmission of novel viruses and other microbes.  The rise of SARS, MRS, and COVID all within only a decade or so is strong indication that this transmission line is only increasing, making the possibility of events such as the current pandemic a potentially regular feature in our lives.  Imagine that instead of approximately every 100 years, a pandemic such as this one becomes a once-a-decade or two event.  The consequent social upheaval would resemble the last time humanity faced a similar situation during the Black Plague, and by the time that 200 year period drew to an end, three-quarters of the population of Europe was dead and the entire Medieval social order had collapsed.  It’s a pretty high price we could be asking the next generation(s) to pay.

What’s more, it’s not limited to just these three brief examples.  To give a sense of the scale of the problem, humans now move and manipulate more earth and land each year than the entirety of the natural forces of erosion do.  We chemically “fix” more nitrogen—a process that makes this element available to plants for their proteins and nucleic acids—than the entire planet’s soil microbe population that normally does it.  Moreover, since the Industrial Revolution, we have pumped several million years’ worth of stored carbon back into the atmosphere to the point where we are changing long-established weather patterns—which by the way will only contribute to our future agricultural problems.

The bottom line is that we humans are effectively manipulating the entire biosphere, and as we do so, we undermine that biosphere’s capacity to sustain any life at all, let alone us.  This is the world into which my current students are going to enter adulthood and live out their lives, and while it is bad enough that my generation and the others most immediately after are leaving them with a damaged world, it is even worse (as I have explored in Chapter 9) that we may also be leaving them with brains not fully prepared to tackle the repairs.  Add in the harm the pandemic is causing to our children’s learning (because as epidemiologist, Jennifer Nuzzo, points out “it seems as though they get prioritized last” [Bowie & Reed]) and we are looking at the distinct possibility (if not actual probability!) for some serious suffering heading the next generation’s way.

It is why I share Vicky Meretsky’s sentiment that “I always regret the recognition I see in my students’ eyes when I read them (the Aldo Leopold passage above)” (p. 163) and then have to teach them the environmental science behind the stark truths about their world. It is also why I so desperately did not want to follow up on my response to my current student’s question the other day.  She and the others in that class were all already laden with the burden of the current realities of the immediate now without me risking driving them to an even deeper sense of despair.  I know firsthand—and too well!—my own burden with having to walk around with all this knowledge actively at work in my own head each day without wanting to add it to theirs in this moment.

Yet, as I wrestled with some of my own reactivated despair from my student’s question and was writing this post in my on-going conviction that “hope is a verb” (which I’ve written extensively about here), I also happened to be reading my educational mentor, Parker Palmer, when I came across this passage:

It’s unfair to lay all the responsibility for the future on the younger generation.  After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up.  Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—the young and old together—hold the future in our hands.  If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort. (p. 33; original emphasis)

Palmer suggests that we stop using the tired, old metaphor of “passing the baton” to describe the intergenerational transition (perhaps because it feels too much like “passing the buck”) and, instead, to use the metaphor of an orchestra, with each of us contributing to the music so that “together we can compose something lovelier and more alive than the current cacophony” (pp. 33-34).

Reading Palmer’s wisdom has filled me with both a sense of renewal and a commitment to return to my student and her peers and to answer her question.  But to answer it in such a way that I not only help another generation understand some hard truths but that I also share my own struggles and battles with those truths, how I have fought to address them, and how together, in partnership, we can affect the necessary change.  For as Leopold also writes, “we shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people.  In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive” (p. 155).  As partners.  Together.

Coda

Two days before I finished posting these thoughts, I had the opportunity to hear an alumnus of my new school, Dr. Eric Van Dang, speak as part of the STEM Speaker Series for which I am now in charge, and in his talk, he shared the research that he and his team at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School are doing on a vaccine for COVID-19.  They are working on what is known as an attenuated vaccine (one that involves a deactivated but live virus), and their work is being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because this type of vaccine could be easily distributed in equatorial regions as well as more temperate climates (think oral polio vaccine).

What makes Dr. Dang’s research possible, though, is all the research done about a decade ago on the SARS virus.  It turns out that COVID-19 is not such a novel coronavirus after all, and that the only reason all the researchers world-wide have been able to develop vaccines for the pandemic as rapidly as they have is because COVID-19’s protein spikes are nearly identical to SARS’s protein spikes.  When asked how long vaccine development would have taken with a truly novel virus, one whose protein spikes science had never seen, Dr. Dang’s response was a minimum of 3 years and potentially as long as a decade.

So as we approach the end of year one of this pandemic with multiple vaccine candidates in sight, keep those 3-10 years in the back of your mind.  It may not feel like it, but we actually got lucky with COVID-19; it really could be worse!

References

Bowie, L. & Reed, L. (Nov. 10, 2020) Schools Begin Rolling Back In-Person Learning Plans as Coronavirus Cases Rise.  The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-coronavirus-schools-reopen-20201109-phxlyzpmwzfr3kwbtiwsvkisvu-story.html.

Leopold, L. B., ed. (1953) Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold.  London: Oxford University Press.

Masters, J. (December 2014) A Wacky Jet Stream is Making Our Weather Severe.  Scientific American.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-wacky-jet-stream-is-making-our-weather-severe/.

Meretsky, V. (2010) Teaching Outdoors. Teaching Environmental Literacy, ed. By H. Reynolds, E. Brondizio, & J. Robinson.  Bloomington:  Indiana University Press.  Pp. 158-164.  

Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old.  Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Sussman, A. (2011) Teaching and Learning about Planet Earth. The Paul-F Brandwein Lecture Series. https://brandwein.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Art_Sussman_Brandwein_Lecture.pdf.

Vaccari, D. (June 2009) Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phosphorus-a-looming-crisis/.