Change Your Neighborhood

If we are afraid of being in the woods by ourselves, if we don’t feel energized by hiking through the mountains or walking on the beach of an ocean, then we have cut ourselves off from one of our main sources of wisdom.

When being in nature makes us feel alive, when we have a special place that renews our spirit, then we will work to protect it. This is where our ecology begins.

Our doing something makes a difference, even if it doesn’t seem like much. Imagine if everyone stood up and protected their sacred place in nature. The one percent standing up and protecting a small area of nature makes a difference. No, not that one percent.

You’ve seen the commercials. One person does something nice for someone else, like picking up a package that he 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. This is more than a feel-good moment. It’s physics.

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 than antimatter is the reason why we don’t explode into smithereens. You see, matter and antimatter don’t get along.

Trying to save the natural world can seem like such an enormous task that we give up before we try. How do I stop corporations from digging up and fracking the land into piles of waste and polluted lakes of slurry? By trying. 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 and using plastic grocery bags.

Aldo Leopold restored a denuded sandy area near 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. Inspired by his work, others started their own projects, like the effort to preserve sandhill cranes nearby in 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 on points of public policy, but who trust us because we help them with chores, 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 hundred others change their neighborhoods, a thousand people will see what we did, and they will make their changes, and then progress begins.