02

The I Ching says, There is no such thing as solitary affluence. There is also no such thing as an individual history, or the history of just one place. We know ourselves by knowing the land that sustains us, and by knowing others, expressed by how we behave towards each other, and by the ways we do - or do not - show gratitude for the sources of our nourishment. Our fixation on profit has made us relational paupers. We have grasped the corner of the tablecloth and are dragging the feast down with us as we fall.

The most dangerous politicians are those that have no relationship with the Natural World. For Donald Trump and others like him, the only significant time spent outside is on the golf course - a completely unnatural landscape. As a result, Nature is perceived as an alien threat to be plundered and controlled. He - they - do not understand natural systems, which are based on mutuality. It is not possible to govern effectively in a vacuum of ignorance.

How might we be (re)shaped if, for example, government officials, starting with the president, understood that 75% of the Earth's oxygen comes from plankton? They would know that plankton needs whales in order to survive and be healthy, and whales, in turn, need sonar-free, plastic-free oceans, safe from collisions with container ships.

Whales are architects of ocean health: with their massive bodies and undulating tails, and their immense plumes of feces and urine, whales are the great stirring paddles that weave the oceans with nutrients. When a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, it carries a lifetime of carbon to feed yet more life as it decomposes. Even in their diminished state, today's whale populations transfer 190,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere to deep water - about thirty-three tons per whale per year. (Trees, on average, absorb about forty-eight pounds per tree per year. One whale, in other words, is worth a thousand trees.) But whale populations are less than one quarter of what they once were. Blue whales are at a mere three percent of their former number. Because of this, the ocean cannot hold as much carbon, and essential nutrients are no longer circulating as they once did.

Before industrial whaling, there were more than twenty thousand bowhead whales in the Arctic and similarly staggering numbers of every other kind of whale. When commercial whaling began, sailors remarked that you couldn't see the sea for whales. Like salmon, elephants, passenger pigeons, bison and countless others, the precolonial profusion of keystone species was staggering. The natural state of the Natural World is exuberant profusion.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the slaughter of whales gained extra momentum as demand for fuel grew during the industrial revolution: whales were slaughtered for oil for looms, lamps and lighthouses; for baleen to make corsets and parasols; and for grease to coat the feet of soldiers in the trenches during World War I, to keep their skin from rotting in the mud. As whale populations plummeted, fossil fuels took over, with even more deadly results.

By 1900, barely three thousand bowheads remained. Southern right whales, blue whales, minke, humpbacks, and orcas all suffered similar fates. More than half the sperm whales killed were pregnant or nursing. Gray whales perished, too: gentle and quiet, they care for each other's young, and teach them the songs of other whales so they can have conversations during their seven thousand-mile migrations to feed in the Arctic and return to tropical waters to give birth. With their massive jaws, they scrape along the ocean floor, stirring up mud and silt releasing vast stores of minerals - and now, plastic, as they gulp their way along.

In addition to feeding whales, sea birds and other ocean life, phytoplankton capture thirty-seven billion tons of carbon per year and provide up to eighty-five percent of the oxygen on Earth. Without large numbers of whales driving the global 'whale pump' that mixes nutrients, and without the buoyant fecal plumes and urea that are part of that mix, surface phytoplankton are starving. Since 1950, ocean warming alone accounts for another forty percent decline in phytoplankton. Nutrient-rich feeding grounds cannot be sustained, and nutrient-poor breeding grounds are not replenished. Global fisheries, too, are severely impacted.

Knowing this, might our leaders think of whales when they step outside and take a deep, grateful breath? And, thinking of whales, might they not then take care to craft laws and insist on practices that keep phytoplankton abundant and whale populations robust? A global economy re-tooled to prioritize Nature would help us attune to a deeper rhythm that shapes our days and sustains us, to a sense of what one friend calls, belonging mind - the consciousness that knows that everything, including humanity, arises and returns along a cyclical continuum, shaped by Life's larger rhythms. Within that pulse, there is a place for humans to belong, and to thrive.

Surfing great Laird Hamilton speaks of physical conditioning, mental preparation, and techniques for using breath and knowledge to stay calm in the face of a life-threatening situation. He emphasizes the necessity of understanding the fundamental structure of waves as a way of handling life and death predicaments, and, crucially, the importance of approaching danger with the right attitude. I always say, whenever you’re out, and it’s big and you’re in the impact zone and a giant wave comes and you’re going to get caught by it, your intentions will tell me how you’ll react there, at that moment of truth... If you’re there for a pure reason, you will respond correctly. … And if you’re not, if you’re there for any other reason, then you’ll wish you weren’t there, and you’ll freak out. And at that point, you will be incapable of making the right decisions to help yourself out of that situation or to deal with it.

Sounds a bit like our global predicament in facing the Big Waves of climate collapse, failed leadership and the lack of a cohering narrative to live from. A society's underlying values are encoded in the over-arching cultural narratives that provide both context and coherence. Governments that are out of sync with Nature tend to be equally out of sync with the people they are meant to serve. Observe how different governments respond in the face of danger such as extreme weather, social unrest - or a pandemic: if a dilemma is perceived as a challenge to be met with the understanding of common jeopardy, then the response that meets the moment will be one that calms and unifies, as people are held in their common love for home and each other. Conversely, if a crisis is perceived by those in power to threaten that power, the government will react by attempting to shore up or increase centralized power rather than by drawing on knowledge and a shared vision of thriving.

In his retrospective book, Horizon, Barry Lopez says, On the northeast coast of Alaska is a place called... Naalagiagvik, "the place where you go to listen." The name refers to the practice of a particular Iñupiaq shaman who visited this area regularly to listen to the voices of animals and to voices not audible to others, like those of her ancestors. From this ensemble she built up the guiding stories her people steered by, the stories that gave them a direction in life and kept them from harm. So long as our story is focused on profit, we will fail to produce a narrative that delivers us to safety.

As the disasters of our own making bear down on us, we'll have to call on all our skills in order to ride them and survive. With the right attitude among leaders who hold themselves accountable to planetary health, we'll emerge once again from the salty chaos that threatens to drown us. We'll crawl out of the muck onto shore and take a deep, grateful breath of air, with thanks to the plankton and the whales.