Today I was talking with my seven year-old daughter about having a family; how I look forward to one day her possibly having children.
"Do you think you'll have children?" I asked.
"Yeah. I want children. But, I'm NOT going to get married," she said, matter-of-factly.
"Oh really?"
"Yup. Boys are gross."
"But, you DO want your kids to have a daddy, maybe one like me, right?"
"Sure, but, I'm just not going to marry him."
"Oh, okay. I guess some people do that … you know I grew up in a house with only one parent. In fact, that used to be pretty common many many years ago. Do you know why?"
"Why, Daddy?"
"Because a long time ago people didn't live as long. Sometimes people died when their children were still very young. In fact, some of our own great great grandparents grew up without their parents."
"Why did people die so early, Daddy?"
"Because things were very different. Think about it, we had no electricity and all our houses were lit and heated by fire." "Cooking too, Daddy!"
"That's right! Aren't you smart? Can you imagine how common fires were back then?"
"Oh! And no telephones, Daddy! No one could call the fire department!"
"Yes! And what do you think the fire trucks looked like?"
"Were they horses?"
"That's right! They used horse pulled carriages to fight fires. … the big ones anyway. --
So, if there was a fire, which was common, they usually didn't get put out in time. And think about all that stuff burning in a house. People's lungs were always breathing smoke in smokey rooms. And think about the doctors, too. They needed to tell people what was wrong with them when they were coughing a lot. They didn't have any x-ray machines. They'd just put their ear to a patient's mouth and ask them to take a deep breath. When a patient made a wheeeezing noise the dr. would say, 'you're having trouble breathing!'" Annie snorts out a laugh. "But, what could he do about it? No medicine."
"Dad, I had that when I went to the dentist. They took a picture of my teeth."
"That's right! No cameras and no medicine. What else do you think was different?"
"I don't know."
"What about traveling? That was dangerous, too. If people want to go to California now they can just jump on a plane. But, back then they had to take a horse pulled covered wagon, like in The Little House in the Prairie. Do you remember that?"
"Yeah. They couldn't have pie, because they didn't have an oven. And, they almost starved."
"Oh yeah, that's right. Food was harder to get, too. But, you know what traveling by covered wagon meant? Do you remember what happened in the book?"
"Um, no."
"The wagons used to get attacked by Indians."
"Oh, yeah!"
"And some wagons going to California had to get over the cold frozen mountains. So, traveling long distances was very dangerous; if you didn't starve or get killed by Indians, you might end up freezing in the mountains. Things are much better now, aren't they?"
"Yup. I guess doctors know a lot more now."
"That's right. In fact, there have been a few times over the years when a really bad disease came and the doctors had no cure. Many, many people died."
"How many, Dad?"
"I don' know. But try to picture maybe almost half of the people on the earth dying suddenly."
"Oh, sort of like the dinosaurs when Dooms Day came?"
"What?"
"In the computer game Dino Run you're a little dinosaur running away from Dooms Day. If you don't run fast enough a wave of fire runs you over."
"Ohhhh. Okay. Yes, I guess that's a good example. When there was a giant meteor bigger than the size of our town and it hit the earth, scientists say all the dinosaurs died. Can you imagine that? A meteor the size of our town?" "Dad. It's too big to imagine," she says, defeated, "because it's too big to see all at once. I mean something you can't see can't fit in your head."
"What about seeing all of Boston from the hill on Route 2? Can you see that? Try imagining it."
"Yeah, but it's too big to imagine a meteor that big." She rolls her eyes and, smiling she closes her eyes and gives it a try. She holds her forehead. "It's just toooo biiig!"
At this point Annie covers her head and acts like it's a balloon getting filled with air, her hands stretching out pulling her hair to its full length and then out over her head wider and wider. "Oooh, my Goddd!" she screams, now in a deep giggle fit. "make it stopppp!"
Spinning around three times looking up in the air hands outspread, "It's just tooooo muuuuch," and she's off running away screaming gleefully, "Aaaaah!" and runs in circles from the dining room table, to the kitchen, down the hall, through the living room, back through the dining room, and repeating the circle around the inside of the house chanting over and over, "Make it stop! Too Big! Too Big!" With a mad scientist laugh, giggling authentically, "Wa hah hah hah! Wa hah hah hah!" And then, flopping down on the couch, "Oh, man. That was crazy. And I'm still not getting married, Dad."
---
As I had just had this incident fresh in my mind from this morning I StumbledUpon this story about a photographer (Chris Jordan) trying to depict the scale of e-Waste (embedded at top). He does this cool exercise of clicking his coffee table filled with cell phones many times, pastes them together, minimizes,more pasting, minimizing, until it just looks like snow on a tv set. Pretty cool. I love the piece on his site entitled E Pluribus Unum.
It made me realize the IMPORTANCE of depicting scale simplistically, but, interestingly. It also reminded me of something potentially as alarming or dangerous. This is one of our problems with global warming. It's just too big to imagine the true scale of it. It's so big that it wavers and oscillates between disbelief and paralysis.
I remember Gore's attempt at showing his chart in his movie An Inconvenient Truth and making the line go off the chart. This was not helpful to me! It makes it seem like fixing the problem is not workable.
I've been asking myself:
"How do we depict things in a way that inspires change?"
"Once we all agree climate change is a problem, what are the life altering changes we need to embrace and feel like we can visualize making a difference?"
The answer?
Get a proper perspective about the scale of the problem.
But understand the power to make a difference.
Look at your impact.
Simplify and visualize your success by tracking your footprint.
Quantify it.
Reduce it.
Now imagine everyone doing it. It starts to count.
Look back on your own progress often.
And reward yourself for it.
Then, inspire others with your story.
And keep doing it! Repeat the cycle.
And don't be afraid to giggle along the way. Make it simple and enjoy yourself.
And, after all is said and done, it may just have to be okay if you decide there are some things you're just not going to give up on. As long as you don't give up altogether.
--- If anyone's got cool depictions of the SCALE of the problem and the tools or graphics showing the SCALE of impact from the many solutions plug us in!
For some Big Picture stuff, check out this great 36 min. movie on Hulu (Cosmic Voyage, narrated by Morgan Freeman). Just as this piece helps you get a handle on the science of the earth, then go to the comments and see the social experiment that ensues. And, be prepared to use all you can muster up of reason, logic, patience, diplomacy, and personal spirituality. It gets pretty heavy into the intellectual design debate. One blurb was really relevant to this blog:
Our brains weren't built to ponder the complexities of the subatomic world or to imagine the strangeness of quantum physics or string theory. They were built to realize the here and now, like how to avoid predators and find food.
