The Sweater Song is about Biodiversity Loss

"If you want to destroy my sweater, pull the string as I walk away..." is a line from my teenage soundtrack that sticks with me to this day. It's so catchy! I didn't think of it metaphorically then, but as an adult who's experienced countless questions like "So what does {This Species} do for ME?," I'm now convinced that Weezer was actually singing about biodiversity loss and climate change.

I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn about an opportunity to bioblitz-by-raft the Nolichucky River. The deepest part of my journey was a stretch that measures at least 50 feet. The myths about the Nolichucky as retold by our teenage raft guide are just as deep and murky. Regardless, The Nolichucky is famous for its ruggedness, rapids and beauty. It is about 115 miles long and flows through two physiographic provinces and two states. The only way through it is by hiking the still-active railroad or by the river itself. There are at least 20 state or federally listed plant species that call the Nolichucky home, not to mention numerous sensitive fauna as well, including the famous Hellbender.

LinkedIn continues to evolve its community-building features and lately one of these features includes the use of AI to prompt questions related to posts. On my post about the Nolichucky, in which I mention sighting the federally-listed Spiraea virginiana, it asked "What impact does Spiraea virginiana have on the environment?"

"If you want to destroy my sweater..." pops into my head, increasing in volume... "pull the string as I walk away..." Yep. Here it is again. You see - Weezer, I am convinced, and even Rivers Cuomo wouldn't be able to convince me otherwise, was really singing about biodiversity loss and climate change. The idea being that if you're wearing a shirt, and a single thread is snagged and pulled, it doesn't impact the overall effectiveness of your shirt. You're still protected from the elements, kept warm, looking fly. But as time goes on and you ignore the carefully written care instructions, more threads are pulled until one day you notice - your shirt is no longer operating functionally as a shirt. The subtleties of time were such that you failed to notice, and once you did - it was too late to change course.

This isn't just my metaphor. The idea of webs, networks, and connectivity are long-standing in the ecological and biological sciences. Scott Black of the Xerces Society is recently famous for his line "The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?" which is an adaptation of Aldo Leopold who, in Sand County Almanac states "To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." And so on and so forth - one could derive a phylogenetic tree off of similar metaphors throughout history!

The concept of biodiversity itself is intertwined with RESILIENCE - a term we're hearing quite a bit lately through the lens of climate change. Communities are being told to plan for climate change - have strategies for resilience and adaptation... biological terms applied now to infrastructure, economies, and social fabrics. Get it? Fabric?

A foundational concept about biodiversity is that with increasing diversity comes increasing resilience in the face of stressors. If a bowl of m&m's includes 6 colors, and your class of middle-schoolers only wants to eat the green ones, then the majority of your m&m's are safe. But if your bowl of m&m's is ENTIRELY green, then the whole bowl is at risk of being eaten and you're stuck with a class full of sugar-high teens.

Sweater threads, cogs, m&m's... it doesn't matter. The metaphor is the same. One may not make much of a noticeable difference, but at what point does it? And does it make sense to care about a single thread or cog or m&m or to care for the whole?

I can't answer LinkedIn's prompt; I don't know the exact ecological functions of a single species. A mis-step that I think conservationists have long-taken has been to talk about biodiversity through the lens of a single species and its function it may or may not perform for us. For example; "Well, many species provide us with cancer-saving medicines and we never know which species might be the next one that turns up to save our life!" This line of thinking has created a behavioral expectation amongst our audience that we must equate a single species to some human-centric purpose and thus; the Dreaded Question that is asked.

Stop it.

We have an opportunity with climate change to think about this concept of resilience and begin looking at complex systems as a whole. When Aldo Leopold wrote about cogs, he didn't have sophisticated technology to allow him to tinker in a virtual world to anticipate its impacts on the real world.

We do now. I live in the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS.) We talk about GIS as being the only technology out there that can model our environmental, economic, and social systems as one; creating an environmental digital twin that allows us to apply our silo'd knowledge of these individual systems and anticipate how they function together in a virtual environment. This technology allows us to make mistakes in our virtual world before we make real mistakes in the real world.

Environmental digital twins give us the luxury to study the threads, or cogs, or m&m's, and to help communities understand their gaps, understand where their diversity may be lacking (lowering resilience), and how to change course: How to launder the sweater before it becomes thread-bare.

But it doesn't happen magically. Technology requires input. Input is data. Data is, therefore, our greatest legacy second to that of our impact on this planet. If an organization isn't embracing data as its legacy, then it's failing to contribute its cog to the broader machine, which means it's failing to contribute to the whole and creating a critical blind-spot in our efforts to move to more resilient and sustainable ways of living.

Every organization has a story to tell and that story is told through data. It doesn't matter if you're a government agency regulating wetland impacts, or a multi-national non-profit organization fundraising for land protections - if your organization's operations aren't supported by a solid GIS strategy and implementation, then you're not able to contribute your value to the greater Sweater of the Whole... to the environmental digital twin that could help us chart this more sustainable and RESILIENT future.