Daily Musings No 12 — Concrete Growing, Health Over Planet, and Why Nobody Needs Another Newsletter
There’s this great line in Oliver Anthony’s I Want To Go Home. In the song he’s describing farm land being sold to a developer and turned into some type of commercial development. He describes how all the trees are cut down and concrete as the only thing growing from that point forward. He says: “Only got concrete growing around.”
I love when someone uses language in a way that it wasn’t intended to be used. Concrete we all know doesn’t grow. But it gives us a clear visual regardless. So powerful. So poignant. That’s the type of writing I aspire to achieve.
——
I think if you want to get people to care about the environment, the pollution, the land, the degradation of the planet, then you need to stop talking about the destruction of the planet and start talking about all the ways it impacts people’s health instead. Most people have never seen a glacier in person. Most people have never been to the Amazon rainforest. Most people have never been to the mountains or been on a hike or backpacked through the woods. Most people can’t understand how the ocean is running out of fish when every restaurant has fish on the menu and every grocery store stocks it by the ton (myself included). Most people spend the majority of their time indoors either in their car or in their home or at work. So to get them to understand what’s going on in the environment and care about it is a big lift. But there is one thing that most people have in common, and that is they have or someone they know has been directly impacted by chronic diseases.
Cancer, asthma, heart disease, COPD, neurological diseases, and so much more has been linked to pollution, plastics, fossil fuels, wildfire smoke, and pesticides. That’s the impact we should all be focusing on. Not the melting of the ice caps. Not the rising ocean levels. Not the increasing temperature (when some places still experience extreme cold). If COVID taught us anything it’s that’s people respond to immediate threats, not perceived ones that appear far off in the future and are currently undetectable by the naked eye. Getting people to care about the environment therefore requires getting people to understand that every river that’s polluted results in toxic drinking water. That an increase in the use of fossil fuels equates to a decrease in lung function. That an increase in the use of glyphosate and other pesticides/herbicides/fungicides like it equates to an increase in the occurrence of cancer and neurological diseases. It’s not about the planet. It’s about our health and the health of the ones we love.
We’re so obsessed with saying the thing that we think is most important that we forget what’s actually important to us is not necessarily what’s on everyone else’s mind. It’s so clear to us that it’s hard to imagine how it isn’t clear to everyone else, and if only we just told them what’s going on then surely things would change. But it doesn’t really work like that. Getting someone to change and see things differently requires meeting them where they are.
If we want to change the conversation we have to change the language. If we want to change the direction then we have to change the focus. Most people don’t and never will care about the environment as much as they care about their own health and the health of those around them. And I don’t fault them because I know my health is priority number one for me. And my health is what makes me care about the environment around me. It’s what makes me eat organic and regeneratively grown food. It’s what makes me exercise. It’s what keeps me from living in a densely populated city. It’s why I installed a reverse osmosis system for drinking water in my house. It’s the reason I compost my food because I know that rotting food in landfills is the number one cause of methane gas in the atmosphere. Why not make it about that? Make it tangible. About the thing that people care about and see how it changes the conversation?
As George Carlin said, “the planet is fine, the people are fucked.”
——
I like to make eye contact and acknowledge people when I’m walking by them. I mean I don’t like it, but I do it because I think it’s important. I mean I like saying hi to people as I pass them but a lot of times I feel like a creep because I’m clearly the one initiating the contact. I lock eyes with people’s faces until they give me a glance. They must feel my energy because most of the time they can’t ignore it.
I don’t get everyone, but I’d say I get 8 or 9 out of every 10 people I pass. There’s always that fringe 10 - 20 percent that are harder to capture. These are usually the people with sunglasses on at sunset, people pretending to be on an important phone call or just staring at their phone, or in conversation with the person they’re walking with. But I get the rest because, despite what we’re programmed to think, people like to be acknowledged. I know I do. That’s why I do it. Even if I hate doing it.
——
The difference between Jen and I is that she does not think about stepping in shit, both in the literal and the figurative sense. While I dread it as much as I dread anything shitty in life. I don’t ever want to step in shit, or find myself in deep shit, so I lookout for shit and avoid it with all my might. I’m always scanning and assessing. But Jen’s not like that. She doesn’t think about it. She’s not looking out for shit to avoid, she just walks and hopes. She just talks. If she does land in shit, she’ll just scrap it off, spray it with a hose.
When we first moved to Colorado we lived in a townhome in a development. There were a ton of dogs and most people didn’t clean up after them. So there was shit everywhere and I was always weary of stepping in it. At night I never walked on the grass. It was like minefields. But Jen did. She walked straight across the grass. She walked straight across poop alley (a strip of grass between two buildings aptly named that for the huge amount of shit that resided there) at night. Never thinking twice. I’d walk the long way around to meet her on the other side. In 6 months of living there neither one of us ever stepped in shit.
The other night we took a Kimchi class up in Boulder. The topic of water usage came up (Colorado is in a drought warning). A small group of us exchanged the normal talking points about the lack of water, how it’s impacting farms and ranches in the area, and what it means for our personal use. I made a comment about how brown our grass was because we hadn’t turned our sprinklers on yet. A round about way of saying what Jen said next: “Meanwhile all of our neighbors have been watering their lawns for months. They’re so unaware.”
One of the ladies in the group said, defending her sprinkler usage without saying it, “Well home use is such a small amount compared to agriculture.”
I thought what Jen thought. Crazy that people have been watering their lawns for months. But I didn’t say it because I assumed one of the people in the group has probably also been watering their lawns, and I didn’t want to offend one of them and step in shit. But Jen didn’t think about it. Doesn’t think about it. Or doesn’t care. Whatever the reason I always know I can count on her to wade through the shit with me.
The first time my father every met Jen we were out to dinner. We had been sitting for a few minutes, catching up, getting to know each other. Jen got up to go to the bathroom and right away my father turned to me and said: “She has no filter huh?” Surprised by his comment but not surprise by the nature of his comment, I said “No she doesn’t. Did she offend you?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
——
Why does every company think they need a newsletter? I mean I know why but also I don’t know why. There is no way that any of them get any real click through. I watch people all the time either scroll through deleting the newsletters and promotional emails that flood their inbox without ever reading them, or I observe how they have 12,000 unread emails, mainly of course newsletters that they are never going to read and promos they are never going to use.
But the newsletter has become the thing that every company must have. Everyone else has one, and it’s easy to pull one together with todays technology, and it costs nothing, so everyone just does it. It doesn’t matter the company. Shoe companies have newsletters. I bought a an off brand cell phone recently and started receiving their newsletter. Vitamin companies have newsletters. My farmer has a newsletter. They all try and find something interesting to share that relates to their industry and most of the time it just falls flat. And every time I get a new newsletter because I visited a website, downloaded an app, or anything else like that, I just cringe. Why do you think I want a newsletter from you? I don’t.
It also brings me to the flip side of the topic and that is people who receive these promotional emails and never unsubscribe but delete each email without ever reading it, and the people who just let them overrun their inbox. I wrote about this awhile back - still feel the same way (Your Inbox Is Stealing Your Time). The amount of time and energy people waste on things like this blows my mind. Take the time to unsubscribe. Your daily capacity is being diminished by the energy wasted on unread and unwanted email.