Corridors of Wildness

Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.

Has it been a year? Oh well. Ahoy from Chicago!

In this edition of The Close Read, we’ve got about four parts diatribe to one part poem. Mix at will, but don’t miss Girmay’s [When I come home they rush to me, the flies].

In this essay, I will..

In May, I moved to Chicago. I’ve been working in climate technology. I’ve been working in finance. I’ve been working in marketing. I’ve been working in software. I’ve been doing content marketing for a firm that gives money to software companies to help things like solar panels and batteries run better. What it is is a job. What it should be is dry.

But it is not dry. My writing for this firm has been a welcome new challenge, full of words and concepts and misused metaphors (“boil the ocean”?), all centering around the question of how to make a climate-friendly human world. And also how to make a profit.

Oop. That last word isn’t necessarily a pleasure to write. Layering profit on top of the climate challenge is like waltzing to a 4/4 beat. Someone’s going to stumble. The climate simply isn’t capitalist; this has been biologically proven. And our sacrifices for Earth’s survival may simply be sacrifices—not investments for future financial profits. But this is one of the doors through which to walk, so let’s enter.

For a while, biologists did think that nature was capitalist. I learned recently that the view of nature as competitive rather than collaborative became popular in biology circles starting in 1947—in parallel with the Cold War. During a series of biology conventions, it was decided that nature was too Communist. So, plants were studied as capitalist, “individualistic” structures. The aster battled with the goldenrod, each vying for its sun and water until one became a multinational corporation and the other was drained for parts via an all-you-can eat shrimp buffet.

Forty years later, the Cold War warmed, and plants were allowed to be comrades again. The aster and goldenrod were understood as collaborative: the deep purple partnered with bright yellow to become technicolor in pollinators’ eyes, attracting more activity than either could on its own. (Read more about all of this in Janine Benyus’s essay “Reciprocity,” from which much of this diatribe has been propagated.)

This idea of complementary growth has been on my mind quite a bit recently. As I’m exposed to more and more human innovation, I’ve been struck by the deeply intelligent innovation of the natural world, as well as the incredible importance of the indigenous cultures that have carried the wisdom of these ecosystems through thousands of years.

I think about this intelligence when I hear new climate tech pitches. “Here’s a program to help you install solar panels for maximum energy generation!” “Here’s software to monitor the grid so you know when to charge your EV!” “Here’s a program to sell your extra solar energy back to the grid!” “Here’s software to help you anticipate weather trends for your wind energy!” “Here’s technology to improve your battery storage!”

These inventions are great! So important! So helpful!

And! Then I think of forests. I think of mycelium. I think of fruit. I think of airborne pheromones. I think of seasons.

Mother nature has seen these startups before. She knows efficient energy collection: the leaves that follow the light, the ones that stiffen when overcooked, that curl open when underfed. She knows of energy management: of waiting to fill her batteries of apricots to the brim until just the right time, of knowing when to let them drop. She knows the electrical grid: the waves of nutrients that surge to the branch, bud, leaf just as needed. The sprouts that rest, dormant, until they have the right conditions to thrive. I think of silent, soft, subtle optimization. Of perfect equilibrium.

The modern Western world wants so badly to invent nature. We spend so many millions to create smart solar arrays. And yet, here before me: my small pot of succulents. My solar array.

I think of EVs. Friends, aren’t we all electric vehicles? An EV is an object that moves through the deployment of energy that has been (ideally) captured by the sun, stored, and distributed. Tell me, am I not such a vehicle? Is my motor not the strength on my arm? My battery not the meat on my bones? Is my charger not the strawberry in my bowl? We think we’re so creative with all our varieties of cars—small, square, green, whatever that cybertruck is—but Mother Nature made her EVs into centipedes! Bats! Butterflies, pufferfish. Explosive rainbow shrimp, ballooning spiders. Romping bears, scuttling horseshoe crabs, orbing jellyfish. All the ways we can move! All our delicious, abundant, ever-changing batteries! Earth, you inventor of inventors.

In my new hobby of telling those around me that strawberries are batteries, I’ve come across the term of biomimicry—the practice of watching natural processes and entities in order to consciously inform our built products and systems. (Again, I recommend Janine Benyus. And I again use this newsletter to promote On Being.) This concept has given me so much hope that we have the natural world not just as an inspiration but as a tried and true model. Friends, we know what works.

I love the idea of biomimetic investing—of approaching business opportunities like a caretaker to her garden, thinking carefully: Do we have space for this? What resources will it take or give to the rest of the ecosystem? How will we manage its movements? How will we protect it? Is it beautiful?

To be clear, I think that climate technology—and investing in climate technology—is deeply important. But I don’t think we can save the planet by simply inventing it again. I think we need to manage our own behaviors so that these original, mind-boggling inventions, like bees, oyster mushrooms, and antelope, can thrive.

I have loved this time in Chicago. I have loved new work, new routines, and new idealistic lenses like this one. Most of all, I have loved the tenacious Midwestern wilderness stitched into the seams of this city.

Tonight, I biked down and up the Lakefront Trail. The trees—among them, oaks, beeches, pines—generously laid their solar panels above me, shading the saplings, breaking up the soil, shoring up the shoreline, pulling carbon out of the air, and on and on. I smelled beachgrass and needle beds and catnip. I sat for a while near the nature preserve: a patch of wildness hugging a small pond in Lincoln Park. I saw a tern drop from the sky to the water. I saw it surface with a fish. A wave of seagulls seemed to clear westward, away from the beach, in what looked like a commute. And can you believe it—there in Lincoln Park, with a view of the Lincoln Hotel and the Hancock Tower, there beneath a deep pink sky that was forecasted to thunderstorm but didn’t—I saw a beaver.

How good the world is to us.

I clipped on my helmet and coasted my bike home, pedaling slowly to stop the whir of my gears from disturbing the chatty redwing blackbird beside me. The fireflies welcomed me, then welcomed me, then welcomed me.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, but for the sake of being honest, I’ll tell you the love song I was humming back to the earth. From Sound of Music:

For here you are, standing there, loving me,
Whether or not you should.
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.

They rush to me, the flies.

Here’s a poem that’s been on my mind recently. I’m living alone for the first time and deeply engaged in a battle against a couple of fruit flies that hitched a ride on my farmers market haul. This poem, first introduced to me by Chen Chen during a writing workshop on Cuttyhunk Island as an example of a metaphor that respects its vehicle, is holding onto me as an instruction of softening.

I will say, I did try a biomimetic (or simply biological) approach to the flies by allowing a couple of zebra spiders to persist in my kitchen corners. But then one landed on my keyboard while I was typing and I bought a flyswatter. We’ll get there.

Aracelis is a deeply kind, gentle, intentional speaker. When I attended her workshop during my first semester at Columbia, I was quickly humbled by her earnest questioning that came down to: Are all of your words necessary? I thought they were. They were not.

Feel the care taken in the craft of this poem. Let it make you ever-so-slightly gentler to flies this summer. Let it make you call your parents.

Brainstorm: Biomimetic Models for Writing

• The tern traces the long curve of the pond in smooth figure eights, lowering, lifting, resting, circling. It dives.

• The beaver. His absurd square head. In his mouth, something thick with moss. He paddles slowly, then dips down, leaving a halo of ripples.

• Mayflies torrent above the milkweed, simultaneously creating and getting swept up by overlapping tornados. The cloud is so wild, but—even in the wind—so stationary.

• Evolution is a study in nature’s arc away from exclusion. There is enough room here for all of us. The truth is not in the conditional, but the ever-rebalancing.

• Life inside made decomposition so unsightly—like an old banana attracting flies. Can I learn to love the decomposing banana? Can I use my food waste for good? Can I learn to love flies? Who can I feed them to?

• Birds travel through corridors of wildness.

• How do I maintain my corridors of wildness?

It’s been wonderful to write to you all again. As always, please feel free to respond with corrections, additions, criticisms. Oh, and Chicago croissant recommendations.

May you feel a fly take you in its arms,

Robiny