Coming Home
This reading asks students to think about how our ideas of travel, success, and personal growth affect the environment. Educator Samrat Pathania suggests that paying closer attention to the plants, animals, and places around us is a simple yet powerful way to live and learn more sustainably.
Our planet’s diverse ecosystems are highly interconnected networks—tapestries of species that interact with each other and with their elemental surroundings. And change is the fundamental constant in the natural world, the ever-beating rhythm of these networks. Ecosystems have resilience to change, but over long time scales; in the short term and at local scales, life is hard and, in many cases, tenuous and fragile. Species adapt to their environments in the long term, generation by generation, but many individuals of those species die young while that adaptation occurs.
There are now 8 billion humans spread all across the globe. And many of us don’t stay in place like we used to; a privileged and sizable group of modern humans now travels regularly to destinations on the far side of the world from their homes. We humans continually change environmental conditions, on large scales and at high rates, in ways that interfere with the feeding, sheltering, and reproduction of many species. In other words, we cause disturbance much harder and faster than most species can handle.
The presence of a single human in an ecosystem might not have a significant effect. But the presence of thousands or hundreds of thousands of humans a year produces immense disturbance, which stresses delicate natural systems, breaks natural cycles of interdependence between species, and ultimately causes biodiversity loss. This should be intuitive. You might be able to accommodate one or two guests in your home for a week or so, but imagine opening your door to thousands. What would be the effect of that influx of humans on your water and food resources, your sheltering structures, and your relationship with your neighbors?
Tourism brings excessive numbers of people to ecologically unique areas. Many people want to travel to experience beautiful landscapes and exotic creatures—the coral reefs of Australia, the tortoises of the Galapagos, the mountains of Tibet, and the forests of Colombia. We want to enjoy and appreciate these ecosystems. But we disrupt their cycles and productivity by visiting them—and, even worse, we usually produce immense greenhouse gas emissions by flying to these locations.
Tourism creates a massive carbon footprint (and pollution)—airplane flights and cruise ships are among the most carbon-intensive ways to travel. Just a single round-trip flight from New York to Paris produces more emissions than the per capita annual emissions of 1.5 billion of the world's poorest people. Carbon emissions drive climate change and ocean acidification, two of the biggest threats to global biodiversity. This loss of biodiversity threatens the health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, who depend on healthy ecosystems for food, fresh water, and fuel. It also increases the likelihood of future pandemics.
So what might a vision of sustainability look like? Our modern culture has viewed travel, especially travel to faraway ’exotic’ places, as a beneficial activity, one that is thought to develop a person’s mind and virtue by ‘broadening one’s horizons’ and encouraging an understanding of the world beyond oneself. But we do not honestly acknowledge the costs of recreational travel or rationally weigh the benefits against those costs. We are currently in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in the history of our planet, one driven solely by human beings. Over and over again, we are damaging the very landscapes and creatures that we seek to connect with.
There is another way. If we were, as individuals and as a culture, to prioritize the protection and conservation of all species and all ecosystems, we would find that we have a wealth of interesting living species right outside our doors. Some of our most interesting species might be very, very small, or only active at night, or only bloom for one week in May. But once you find and connect with one of these creatures—for example, a metallic green sweat bee, a flying squirrel, or a trillium flower, if you live in the Northeastern US, like me—you find yourself both entranced and more deeply connected to your home. If we were to stop encouraging travel as a path to individual fulfillment, we might find the greater fulfillment that comes with serving to protect local species and habitats in a time of ecological calamity.
Who is living beside you, around you, whom you might connect with and learn about? What bird is that that sings in the morning outside your bedroom window, and what does she feed her babies? What mushroom is that, popping up in the corner of the lawn, and what plant is it in symbiosis with? What tree grows beside the road, and what birds and insects find shelter in its boughs? The future of our species and those we share the Earth with might crucially depend on our ability to cultivate a deep interest in such questions.