One Percent Changes Everything

It makes a difference. The one percent.

You’ve seen the commercials. One person does something nice for someone else, like picking up a package she dropped or holding the door open. Someone else sees this and does something nice for another person down the street, and so on. A chain-reaction of helping others. But this is more than a feel-good moment.

An experiment with the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois found there was a one percent difference between the number of muons and antimuons that arise from the decay of particles known as B mesons. This one percent more of matter particles than antimatter particles is the reason we don’t explode into smithereens. You see, matter and antimatter do not get along.

Trying to save the natural world can seem like such a large task that we give up trying. How do I stop corporations from polluting and fracking the land into piles of waste? But we can save parts of nature where we live, whether this is blocking the company that picks up our trash from also dumping toxic waste into our landfill, creating a free recycling program, or convincing people to stop buying plastic water bottles. 

Aldo Leopold restored a denuded sandy area along the Wisconsin River that was once a thriving prairie filled with wildlife and birds. His efforts led to the formation of The Wilderness Society and the idea that it’s not too late to undo much of the damage that we’ve done to nature. Others saw his work and started their own projects, like the effort to preserve sandhill cranes near Baraboo, Wisconsin.

In practical terms, what I do on the local level won’t do much to slow global warming or save the glaciers from melting. Not by itself. But when my one percent is added to your one percent, and to the one percent of our friends, then we begin to affect larger matters. By working with our neighbors, who may not agree with us but who trust us, we help change their minds and they begin to do their one percent.

If I change my neighborhood, and you change your neighborhood, and a thousand others change their neighborhoods, a thousand people will see what we did, and they will make their changes, and soon we have made a noticeable difference.

The one percent in the world is capable of changing many things. I wonder if it will work with our wasteland of politics, run by money and not by compassion or common sense.