Delicate Connections.

Earth’s life-forms have been swimming, eating, budding, flying, digging, and floating around for billions of years. And they haven’t been doing it alone of course — so, they’ve also been raising each other, and exchanging chemicals, and fighting, and dancing for each other. Finally, a creature developed that was able to think, ‘What is all this? What’s going on here?’ That creature is the homo sapien sapien — us! Over the thousands of years since we’ve been around (a mere blink of an eye in terms of the history of life on this planet), we have tried to answer these questions in a myriad of ways. Different cultural practices, religions, and philosophies have helped us in our attempts at making sense of this complex world, and the most recent attempt has been our use of the scientific method. Through observation, experimentation, data collection and evaluation, identification of patterns, and critical thinking we have been able to better understand ourselves and our fellow organisms (31). We now know that everything here is made of matter and that matter can be broken down into elements (34). In living beings, these tiny and unique substances (elements) combine to form one or more cells (life!) (38). A fact that truly boggles my mind is that there are 118 elements in the periodic table, but only six of them account for 97 percent of human body mass (sciencing.com)! These elements are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Elements manifest in different ways. Some can exist on their own, some have to form compounds with themselves, and some have to form compounds with other elements to be stable (39). The matter they create comes in three physical states: solid, liquid, and gas (34). These states, like everything, are subject to change. One of the most important ways in which matter changes, is through the transfer of energy.

Energy is the force that allows for actions and processes to happen; it is often defined as “the ability to do work” (39). There are two main forms of energy. One form is potential energy, which is stored energy in non-moving matter (40). Once matter is set in motion, the potential energy becomes the other main form, kinetic energy (39). We use energy to walk, to pick up a leaf, and to high-five our friends. We also use it, in much larger quantities, to power our homes with electricity and to make our cars and buses run. Scientists divide the energy we get from natural resources into two major categories: non-renewable energy and renewable energy. Non-renewable energy is from resources that “can be depleted and are not replenished by natural processes within a human time scale” (41). An example of this kind of energy is fossil fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal. The overwhelmingly large majority of the world’s energy comes from these sources, much to my disdain since learning about their driving of climate change and since becoming a climate activist a few years ago. These energy sources are able to be used through intense extraction from the earth in the form of fracking, blowing up mountains, and digging deep into the ground while destroying everything above it. Furthermore, when these sources are burned they release carbon dioxide, which is present in such large amounts in the atmosphere that it is causing the planet to warm extremely rapidly due to the greenhouse gas effect. This is disrupting ecosystems everywhere as they provide feedback loops and try to adapt, but all too slowly because they cannot keep up with the pace of our intense consumption of these sources (43). Renewable energy is energy that can be replenished naturally within a human time-span, such as wind power and solar power. While these sources still require a lot of extraction from the earth (for example, of metals), they do not contribute to the greenhouse gas effect nearly as much as burning fossil fuels does and hopefully within the next 10 years we will mostly power our societies using this form of energy. My favorite form of renewable energy that I hope really takes a big hold soon is energy from gravity. To my knowledge, it is one of the least environmentally-destructive options. How it works is that a really heavy weight of some substance, for example a large tub of sand, gets sent up and down an abandoned mine shaft to create kinetic and stored energy (gravitricity.com). I think that while we must make the transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as we can, another important step we need to take right now is decreasing our energy consumption in general. We need to be more conscious of the strain we put on the ecosystems around us when we want to power millions of buildings 24/7. Everything is delicately connected, and whether we like it or not we are connected to an unfathomable amount of diverse life every moment of our lives. Through food chain and chemical reactions with biotic and abiotic factors we at some point or another touch a vast amount of other lives. For example, let’s say you eat a fruit and throw the scraps on the ground while hiking in a forest (which you should not do because it is still littering if it is not a fruit native to that area, but for the sake of the example let’s say you did this). Over next few days or weeks, those fruit scraps will get nibbled on by animals and insects and bacteria. It will eventually end up replenishing the soil it landed on with nutrients, which will allow a wildflower to grow. A pollinator will land on that flower and many others, helping to provide food to the animals that eat the flowers. I could go on, but you can already see that your one action has touched the lives of so many beings in that one area of the forest! This connection will continue even to parts of the world one rarely thinks about, like the deepest parts of the ocean where creatures feed on the tiny fragmented debris of dead plants and animals in total and perpetual darkness. We will never truly know of all the connection between the diverse life-forms that exist here, but aren’t we so lucky that we get to be the animals to try? We are the Earth made conscious of itself! I strive to learn all about its mysteries and about the invisible strings that tie us all together as I continue to age here. How often do you think about your own connection with the non-human beings in your life? Word count: 1109.