All of a Piece

“I thought of you,” my friend texted in the middle of the night. He sent along a link to a website filled with cosmic panoramas, evidence of a bigger scheme of things, and also the remarkable patience of a photographer who took years to meticulously assemble the images.

So many stars! So many planets! So much dust!

•••••••••••••

I live among rainbows. Crystals hang in most of my windows, so on sunny days I have company from sunrise to sunset. Light travels 93 million miles across space to splash color on my kitchen clock, on cabinets, walls, floors, doors, stairs, chairs, lamps, beds and ceilings. Clever light!

The sun arcs across the sky sending my rainbows — pods of rainbows — to drift in invisible, radiant currents whose trajectories are slightly altered each day as Earth slowly circles its star. They migrate according to precise mathematical rules and fade as day turns to night.

To wake up in a room filled with rainbows is the very best way to know that you are on a planet, circling a star, at the dawn of the latest in a series of days stretching back 4.5 billion years.

Space. Time. Context. Got it.

••••••••••••

I stared at the photograph of our home galaxy. It was once fantastic (definition: extraordinarily good; remote from reality) and also elemental (literally — this is where elements are forged). It took J-P Metsavainio, an astrophotographer whose modest telescope is housed in an often snow-covered, small bubble of an observatory in Finland, a dozen years to document the cosmic neighborhood from constellations Taurus to Cygnus. Working methodically section by section, it took 1,250 hours to make hundreds (thousands?) of images, and countless more to stitch them together into a massive, heavenly, digital quilt.

Nebulae glow with the blinding light of trillions of stars, but it is the shadowy dust between them that enchants me. The Milky Way? It looks more like the Dusty Trail to me.

BACK ON EARTH

The Preservelette

A little more than a year ago, when Covid changed everything and the world locked down, I began taking daily walks around my neighborhood — which is how I came across a hike/bike trail I never knew existed. For a long stretch the trail follows the path of a series of giant electric transmission towers. Prairie grasses and native flowers grow tall on either side. It is landscape that hums with insects and electrons, biology and physics, nature and not.

The trails runs past a 13-acre nature center with a 3-acre, WPA-built pond. If not for a stack of canoes on the other side of the fence, I never would have noticed it, or the little turn off leading to the parking lot.

The Presevelette, as I have come to call this magical, unexpected Brigadoon, is bounded on its other four sides by a spur line of the Chicago “L” and some sleepy suburban streets. The train tracks limit access by car, so unless you know the one street that goes through and how to wind around a frontage road, it is not all that easy to find. And for years, I didn’t find it.

But if you happen to be a goose, a duck, a hawk, an owl, a heron, a sora, or any number of songbirds in need of a migratory pit stop or a place to nest for the season, it is easy to spot. From the air the small patch of forest and pond stand out. For everything that hops, skips, slithers, swims, flies, burrows, nibbles and jumps, this is heaven: an oak savanna with a touch of prairie, patches of ephemeral wetland, a place to swim and paddle, and, after sunset, no people.

As nature preserves go, this is all “edge habitat,” not nearly large enough to be considered true wilderness. Yet somehow, like Dr. Who’s Tardis, it feels bigger. In summer the small patch of forest is dense enough to hide whatever wants to be hidden. In winter you can see right through it. Close your eyes and the hum of traffic from a nearby underpass seamlessly segues into an insect serenade. And when ice and snow seal the pond into frozen stillness, the footprints of rabbits, and the coyotes who chase them, are evidence of dramas unwitnessed and connections unseen.

••••••••••••••••

Months rolled by. I bought a green safari vest with too many pockets, tucked my long, lockdown hair under a sun hat and started carrying a bag to hold a water bottle, a notebook, a pen, binoculars and a couple plastic bags to use for sitting on a bench when it rains. I have turned into Miss Hathaway or perhaps Ms. Frizzle, but maybe a little Jane Goodall, too. Most of the time I have no idea what I’m looking at, but I keep looking.

Who knew that that blossom would turn into that fruit? Or that seed heads could be so endlessly fascinating? I know I miss most of what is happening right before my eyes, so it feels like a triumph when I glance down to find a bullfrog quietly keeping me company at the edge of the water. Or I glance up to see a pair of fawns nibbling their way into a clearing.

I now know that red-winged blackbirds will dive bomb anything, including geese showing off newly-hatched goslings. I learned that snapping turtles have the unblinking, time-shredding stare of a species that hasn’t had much need to change since the Jurassic. I was there for dragon-and-damselfly day when the surface of the pond shimmered with iridescent urgency. I learned that duckweed is amazing.

Every time I walked through the gate — at least three times a week for the last year — there was something different, something new, something changed waiting to be seen. But the day I first sensed the mesh flickering at the periphery of perception, that was the most remarkable discovery of all.

I was sitting on a bench at the far side of the pond. The air was soft and sweet with spring, filled with the heady scent of petrichor and the exuberance of birdsong. Tiny insects danced in columns above my head, their members-only parties illuminated by shafts of tree-filtered sunlight. Grains of pollen hung almost motionless in the air. Then the ruler of that day’s roost, a great blue heron, unexpectedly settled on a high branch of an old cottonwood. I was being surveyed just as I was surveying.

And then I saw it, the mesh that connects everything to everything else with an effortless, nearly invisible, gossamer elegance. Where the heron left off and I began was no longer as obvious as it had been only a moment earlier.

With each breath I was taking in everything that everything else exhaled and shed: bacteria, virus, phage, dust, pollen, spores, scent — the flotsam and jetsam of the vast microbiome of the air. With each exhale, I was adding to the mesh. What the heron exhaled, I might eventually inhale, and vice versa. We were tied together and to everything else around us.

We were all breathing as one.

Profit & Loss

Up until that moment I had mostly bought into the conventional narrative of humans generally at odds with Nature, standing separate and apart. The human-made world — so full of concrete, steel and plastic, so scarred by petrochemical-dependent agriculture — disrupts, shreds and displaces wilderness. There is a reason nature photographs rarely include humans. We are “other,” with a long history of treating everything else on the planet either as a threat to be vanquished, or as commodity to be monetized.

It may sound noble to argue for the preservation of rainforests because somewhere hidden deep in the jungle might be a plant with a compound that might be able cure cancer (and yes, yes, yes, let’s save rainforests and cure cancer), but to assign value based on such a limited, reductionist, humans-first metric is a Faustian bargain. It implies that ecosystems with no such obvious, immediate and dramatic payoffs are expendable. It also assumes that we understand the workings of Gaia writ large, the sum total of all the biological and geophysical processes that over millennia have created our Eden: a pale blue dot of a planet where humans can thrive, not alone but as part of a greater whole.

When worth, or worthlessness, is determined solely in terms of profit, short term gains almost always end up as long-term losses. Less is not more. It is less and less until there is no more.

But work in tandem with nature’s mesh, cognizant of nature’s web, and stay within the environmental limits of what Oxford economist Kate Raworth calls the “doughnut”, and it is possible for everything to thrive. Less not only leads to more, but also to more resilient.

When Things Go Wrong: What Disease Can Teach Us

Microbes routinely upend the human construct of a separation between us and Nature. They break us apart and stitch us together, oblivious to boundaries and beliefs. Most of the time it works to our benefit, so we don’t notice. It is only when things go wrong that we look deeper to see what’s really going on.

Over the years I have covered a lot of disease stories (West Nile, SARS, Zika, Nipah, prion plagues, Ebola, Lyme Disease, Covid) and learned along the way that the medical definition of a zoonotic disease — “an animal disease that jumps into humans” — is at best a half truth. These are diseases that affect many species, sometimes dozens of species, including humans. Pathogens “jump” in all directions. They jump back and forth, too, interested only in landing inside a suitable host, oblivious to whether that means one species or many. This is about complexity, opportunity and chance.

Chaos theory is about predictability in a complex system, often explained through the story of a butterfly whose gently flapping wings set off a long chain of unlikely events that eventually affect weather halfway around the world. It may seem a stretch to connect a butterfly and a thunderstorm, but nonetheless the two are linked.

There is a disease corollary. This story of how West Niles Virus quickly conquered North America illustrates how easily and creatively macro and micro lace together:

A mosquito in Africa that carries West Nile virus (WNV) bites a human, transmitting the virus and infecting the human. A second mosquito bites the human and picks up the virus circulating in his blood. This second mosquito then flies into a plane that travels across an ocean to New York where it flies off the plane and promptly bites a bird. The bird, a crow, turns out to be an excellent host for the virus. The virus multiplies prodigiously within the bird. This very sick bird then sheds enough virus to spread the disease to other crows through proximity, possibly transmitted on surfaces such as wings, or even through air. Either way, no mosquito bite required.

But there are plenty of mosquitos biting all these sick crows, each capable of transmitting WNV to whatever animal it bites next, including humans. Within a few months, thousands of crows are sick and dying, millions of mosquitos are transmitting the virus, and humans are starting to show up in hospitals suffering from a mysterious illness with symptoms that sometimes include encephalitis and even paralysis.

The introduction of WNV into the US may not have happened exactly this way (hard to know for sure about the mosquito’s transcontinental flight), but it could have happened this way. Complexity, opportunity and chance.

The next part of the story is well-documented. Within a couple of years WNV was found to be carried by dozens of different species of mosquitoes, infecting hundreds of different species of animals, including birds, mammals and reptiles.

In the fall, birds from across North America fly south, coming in ever-closer proximity through the funnel of Central America. In 1999 that included birds from the East Coast infected with WNV. By the following spring migration, WNV had spread to several species of birds. As they migrated back north, they separated into different “flyways,” fanning out across the continent. Within a year the virus was coast to coast. By then mosquitoes were also transmitting WNV “vertically,” through their offspring.

A disease no one had heard of was here to stay.

•••••••••••••••••••••

Global trade and travel, the loss of wilderness, the collapse of ecosystems, the exotic pet and bushmeat trade have all played a role in accelerating the spread of pathogens across the world. There aren’t more diseases, but rather more opportunities for diseases to spread into more hosts and a wider variety of hosts. In fact, in some (perhaps most) cases, a microbe doesn’t cause disease in its natural host, but when it jumps into a new host, all bets are off.

For example, scientists suspect the virus that causes Covid — SARS-CoV-2 — can be traced back to bats. But the bat version co-evolved with its natural host over a long stretch of time, so likely causes only mild illness in bats, if it makes them sick at all.

After each of these increasingly disturbing disease outbreaks, there is always talk of “One Health.” It is a recognition of the connectedness of species, though seen only through the dark lens of sickness and death. Soon enough our default, human-centric focus prevails. It is not that we don’t care about other species, but rather that we care about our own even more. So we focus on expensive vaccines and drugs and forget about what got us to this awful point in the first place.

Three million people worldwide have now died from a disease no one knew existed a little more than a year ago, including more than a half million Americans. No one has yet tallied up the “long Covid” casualties, those victims whose lives have been derailed, facing months, years or longer with debilitating symptoms.

We cannot seem to hold onto the thought that it is all of a piece, that human health without everything-else-health doesn’t last.

Back to the Mesh: Connections & Cascades

The mesh is infrastructure, critical to making everything else run, or run better. The more complex and biodiverse, the richer and more resilient the mesh.

Nature responds to every rip in this delicate, dynamic fabric by quickly stitching what’s left back together, or by instantly weaving in anything new.

In Thinking Like a Mountain, an essay that helped establish the modern conservation movement, Aldo Leopold wrote about his first job out of college in 1909, working for the US Forest Service in the newly established Apache National Forest:

“…In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy…We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunters’ paradise…

…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for a while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades…”

Dramatic changes that affect any part of the web of life (killing off wolves to increase the population of deer) have repercussions not only on the ecosystem that we can see (the mountain), but also on the ecosystem of the mesh that we cannot.

Perhaps we do not see the bigger picture because it is so big, and miss the connections because there are so many. It can be hard to keep up when change is the constant.

Some changes are subtle: the angle of the sun, seasonal shifts in the lengths of day and night. Others are more abrupt: a native prairie plowed under to make way for a field of genetically near-identical corn, or a rainforest cut down for a soybean farm.

Still others are changes almost too hard to comprehend. In less than a century the human population has tripled to almost 8 billion people, while hundreds (thousands?) of other species have been pushed to the brink (and beyond) of extinction. The more of us it seems, the less of everything else.

And each change, incremental or overwhelming, cascades into more change.

Slow, then Fast: A Climate Tips

The transfer of carbon, molecule by molecule, from earth to sky eventually adds up. CO2, the proxy for a suite of climate-altering gases, is the chaos-causing butterfly of climate change, raising temperatures, melting glaciers, and making just about everything worse (floods, droughts, allergies).

Human-mediated climate change is astonishingly quick. Changes that ought to take millennia are happening in time for the evening news. Extreme weather is the new normal. Although it is isn’t asteroid-slams-into-Earth-and-kills-all-the-dinosaurs quick, it is almost beyond understanding that in only ten generations, CO2 levels have increased roughly 45%, from 290 ppm to nearly 420 ppm. The rate is also accelerating, with 450 ppm, considered a catastrophic tipping point of no return, on the horizon.

If there is any good news in being our own asteroid it is that there is still time (not much) to change the rate and trajectory of impact. That will require turning an Achilles’ heel — our chronic, species-centric narcissism — into a strength. If we can see past the boundaries between “us” and “other,” perhaps we can finally recognize and embrace the “other” as “us.”

•••••••••••••••••

The construct of the web of life focuses on who eats what, who eats whom, and trophic cascades. It is an organizational chart, with top predators and keystone species. It explains why you need krill if you want to have whales. And why killing off beavers poses an existential threat to any species that rely on their dams to create habitat.

The web is also a scaffold for the mesh, where connections flow in all directions. The mesh is where breaths of predator and prey mingle, scent trails waft, sand grains travel across oceans on trade winds, insects and arachnids ride thermals and pollen grains, bacteria, viruses and spores drift in the breeze. Now, troublingly, scientists tell us microplastics have become part of the aerial swirl, yet another toxic legacy of our fossil-fueled lives.

Each microbe in the mesh is like a speck of cosmic dust. Each complex organism a star. Each biome a solar system. And each ecosystem a nebula.

••••••••••••••

I sit on the bench at the edge of the pond no longer a spectator, but a full member of cast, crew and chorus, one more name to add to a long list of credits. Birds. Frogs. Turtles. Deer. Insects. Fish. Squirrels. Coyotes. Rabbits. Trees. Brambles. Flowers. Duckweed. Mushrooms. Trillions of microbes around me, on me, in me. Me. All of it. All of us.

With each breath countless bacteria and particles of virus are drawn into me. I am a promising host for some. Does this steady onslaught of generally non-threatening infection play a role in training my immune system, keeping it in tip top, defensive shape? Does it play a role in training the immune systems of the countless microbes of my microbiomes, keeping them in tip top, defensive shape, too?

Could breathing be like eating, a way for outside nutrients to get inside? Are my walks through the Preservelette a gourmet meal for the microbial companions in my nose, mouth, throat, trachea and lungs?

What exactly is in “fresh air” that makes it so delicious?

Revealing Rips

The microbiome of the air is as hard for us to see as it is for fish to see water. If we see it at all, it is usually through rips in the mesh.

We know that breathing polluted air can wreck lungs, trigger asthma, cause weight gain, possibly reduce cognitive function in older people, and god only knows what else.

We know that plant pollen can cause allergies. Hay fever, an immune response gone haywire, is an overreaction so intense that the host becomes collateral damage in its own protection. And thanks to record-high levels of CO2 in the air, not only are plants producing more pollen (CO2 can accelerate plant growth), but in our warming world the allergy season starts earlier and last longer. By 2040 pollen counts could be twice what they were in 2020.

We know — hat tip to Covid — that viral particles can float in the air for disconcertingly long periods of time.

We know that when something doesn’t smell right, it is probably best to stay away. Early theories of disease singled out “miasmas” — foul vapors and mists associated with decomposition — as a prime suspect. Malaria literally means “bad air.” Before microscopes no one knew that a parasite carried by mosquitoes was the culprit. But they made the link between spending time near swamps and other damp, smelly places (habitat adored by mosquitoes) and getting sick.

Of course, when something smells good, we can’t get enough of it. When raindrops splash on the ground in spring, plant oils in the soil are released and suddenly the world smells alive again.

The mesh is infused with chemical pheromones formulated to alter the moods of the furred, feathered and winged. Flowers generate scents for the benefit of bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t mean we don’t benefit as well. Spring fever is real. The nose has a direct route to the brain.

HEAVEN AND EARTH

It is my second spring at the Preservelette and I watch closely as the thick cover of ice on the pond breaks apart and melts. Geese, using their bodies as ice breakers, speed up the process, creating the future they want to see. Right on cue a few cells of bright green duckweed appear at the edges and soon grow into a patch. Buds swell and burst into leaves and flowers. Turtles that have spent the better part of the winter frozen solid in burrows clamber onto logs to bask in the warmth. Flowers on the forest floor make the most of their brief moment in the sun.

Like every other star that ever was, or will be, the sun was formed from dust in the cosmic mesh, and through its radiance connects our Gaia to the universe.

I can’t seem to get enough of sitting on the bench by the pond. I never know what I am going to see. In a world and at a time that often feels on the precipice, with tipping points wobbling and everything seeming to hang in the balance, it is a gift to witness the point of it all.

No matter what happens next, I know the mesh will re-weave and rebalance. Life in some form or another will go on. After each mass extinction, it is the mesh that has served as the reset button.

But I am in no hurry for a reset. Now that I know that I am part of a continuum connecting everything to everything else (across space and time!), I would like to be part of it for as long as possible.

So what is in fresh air?

Why a little bit of everything, of course.

Including a little bit of you, wherever you may be.

And a little bit of me, too.