What Disturbance Can Teach Us ?

Maybe it’s the monotony of my own four walls, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens beyond the trappings of human life in tough times. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a phenomenon called “ecological disturbance.” The word “ecology” comes from the Greek “oikos,” or house. An ecosystem is a house that nature built, like a forest or a prairie or a reef. “Disturbance” is the word scientists use for an event in nature that places the ecosystem under stress, such as a fire or a flood or a blight.

In ecology, disturbance is inevitable. Change is the only constant in the game of life. Fire and flood and blights are going to happen, and a species’ success is only as strong as its response to these “selection pressures.” One stunning example is the Coast Redwood, known in Latin as “Sempervirens,” which means “ever-living.” The oldest known tree is over 2,200 years old, and the species’ lineage can be traced back almost to the time of the dinosaurs. Scientists call Sempervirens a “champion adapter,” and indeed its list of adaptations reads like an epic tale of challenges overcome. A redwood’s bark contains tannins that make it unpalatable to pests. Redwood needles “comb” fog, shedding their own rain on the forest floor below. Redwoods have an outer layer of “sacrificial bark” that can be consumed by fire without threatening the function of the tree.

What strikes me about the redwood is how it has adapted to disturbance by taking it in, rather than keeping it out. The fog-combing needles emerged from persistent thirst. The sacrificial bark grew from a fire’s lapping flames, not once, but again and again. It makes sense, when you think about it. Trees cannot pack up and run. If their house is on fire, they’ve got to find a way to shelter in place; and then, once the smoke has cleared, they’ve got to get on with it.

I think we can safely say that humanity is in the midst of its own disturbance. We have all been blighted by fever or fear, and our mobility, community and economy have been placed under significant threat.

But that is where our similarity to the redwood ends. The difference begins in our language. Instead of “disturbance,” we prefer more inflammatory words like “crisis” or “catastrophe.” We have declared “war” on the pandemic, which until recently was branded as an “invisible enemy” or a “Chinese flu.” Let’s look at how language functions here. Words like “catastrophe” and “crisis” give this experience a sense of dramatic, almost fictional tragedy. And terms like “enemy” and “war” externalize the threat, distancing it as a foreign “other.” All of these linguistic inclinations derive from the same societal phenomenon that my academic friends call “separative” thinking. We separate ourselves from disease and despair. We separate ourselves from our elders. We separate ourselves from immigrants. We separate ourselves into black and white. (We may eventually separate ourselves into “immune” and “prone.”) We separate ourselves from wilderness. We separate ourselves from natural processes, like carbon absorption or pollination or migration. We separate ourselves from death. In the aggregate, this means we separate ourselves from life.

Fortunately, our skill at tool use works alongside our skill at separation. They’re like a modern human one-two punch. Once an enemy has been identified, we deploy an arsenal of tools against it. We throw money at it. We throw medicine at it. We throw military might at it. And indeed, these tools are helping and providing great hope to us right now. We are surviving due to the life-saving drugs, the infusion of cash, and the reassuring presence of health care workers, first responders and the national guard.

But what happens after triage? What happens when the virus can’t be classified as “other” any longer, as it moves into our schools and restaurants and stores? If this is only the first of many waves of contagion from a mutating, intelligent germ, at what point does the posture of war become too exhausting, or too expensive, or too alienating?

Treating the pandemic as an enemy has surely saved us, for the short term. But over the long haul, if we are to survive and thrive, might we emulate the redwood with its sacrificial bark, which signifies the internalization of disturbance into its very DNA? Might we internalize this pandemic into our own intelligence, and use it to engender a better, more resilient version of ourselves? How might we evolve, if we were to view the virus not as an enemy, but as a teacher?

In order to embody resistance, our cells will have to wrestle with the virus until its lessons have been learned. And so will our souls. We would do well to take a long, hard look at our own role in the creation of this reality: our colonization of wild spaces and species, our reckless growth culture, our sense of exceptionalism. From there, we might re-envision ourselves not at the pinnacle of creation but as participants in its constant unfolding. And then we might appropriate our own agency in the creation of human health, and the health of all species. The virus would indeed be in our DNA, for good.

After this disturbance, let us emerge from the ashes of our great undoing. Let us mourn all that we have lost. And then, standing tall and sentient like Sempervirens, let us open our hearts to all that we can learn.

That is 23 year old me in front of a 500 year old tree.

Location : Kawal Tiger Reserve, Adilabad, India.