Environment

Rolf Halden

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501361913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Theorie der Literaturkritik

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is the environment, this elusive object that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel, and function; and how long and comfortable we may live? The environment is not only everything we see around us but also, at a lesser scale, a hailstorm of molecules large and small that constantly penetrates our bodies, simultaneously nourishing and threatening our health. The concept of oneness with our surroundings urges a reckoning of what we are doing to 'the environment, ' and consequently, what we are doing to ourselves. By taking us through this journey of questioning, Rolf Halden's Environment empowers readers with new knowledge and a heightened appreciation of how our daily lifestyle decisions are impacting the places we occupy, our health, and humanity's prospect of survival. With illustrations by Griffin Finke. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 Environmental Beginnings

Maybe it was because I grew up in the 1960s near Braunschweig, Germany, just west of the death strip of the Inner German Border, which sliced through my divided birth country. Or, maybe it was because my manic-depressive father, with his alarming split identity, created an ever-changing environment in my childhood home, where sunshine—without warning—could turn into a violent storm, triggered by the slightest irritation, imperceptible to those who had not yet experienced it or developed an awareness for such a force of Nature, such uncontrolled wrath.

Be careful. Always pay attention. Be vigilant of your surroundings or things may turn deadly. My siblings and I had seen our fair share of close calls at home. To be home does not mean to be safe. When everything around you is constantly at risk of being taken away, learning to take things for granted becomes much harder. To be cognizant and wary of my environment, by necessity, became second nature to me from early childhood on.

Getting out into Nature provided relief. An escape of sorts. It still does. Through fog-covered fields of sugar beet and rapeseed, dotted by the few native trees and bushes that had been allowed to remain in this 1970s’ German landscape dominated by agriculture and violated by “Flurbereinigung” (land consolidation), my legs and bicycle would take me away from home, transforming a fearful child into a fearsome explorer—or at least so I felt, in my naïve mind.

Maybe it was then, at that early age, when the desire was instilled to go out and see the world. To explore far-flung places and cultures, to trade the familiarity and trappings of my home for the freedom and danger to shape an environment different from the one I knew.

In those early travels into fields and forests, I observed the wariness of vulnerable prey, constantly on the lookout for the inevitable arrival of a deadly predator, knowing it will emerge when one is least prepared. So, I discovered the joy of observing life, of studying biology, and the existential need for practicing vigilance, everywhere at all times. And I discovered companionship with the newly hatched birds and the newborn fawn, with those others who were similarly vulnerable.

It’s good not to be alone. There are many of us. And we are not defenseless. Not anymore. As we grow and mature, a transformation sets in though. Roles become reversed, and they do so at different scales. Once just timid prey subjected to our Nature’s whims, we now have evolved into a species representing the planet’s top predator. We have usurped full control over what we call the environment. But one existential lesson remains to be learned.

It has taken me decades as a biologist, engineer, and human to fully comprehend this:

The boundaries we have internalized and observe are imaginary. They do not exist. The concept of self and the surrounding environment is a cherished delusion.

The environment is not simply “out there.” We breathe it. We eat it. We drink it. We wear it. We create it.

We and the environment are one and the same.

2 The Stuff We Are Made of

What a privilege it is to be alive! We experience this privilege each day, appreciate it, or take it for granted. This privilege was first extended almost four billion years ago; but we humans would only know this good fortune much later.

The year is 1988. I am clinging to a nearly vertical rock face of an icy mountain in the Andes at 18,000 feet altitude. My knees are shaking uncontrollably, and the realization has set in that my powers soon will expire, and my loosening grip will put an end to the precious privilege of life.

No rope. No plan. No future.

How on earth did I get here? How stupid!

It’s ironic, but true: We value things fairly and squarely only when they are about to be taken away from us.

The odds of being alive are so incredibly slim. Humble beginnings some 3.8 billion years ago on a rocky planet that, ejected by the Big Bang, found its place just right in a Goldilocks distance from the sun, a location perfectly suitable for the miracle we call life.

Initially our planet’s chemical inventory was limited to elemental building blocks tallied on the periodic table and arranged into basic minerals—like the rock I was holding on to, part andesite, part dacite. But long before this, way back near the beginning, the random assortment of matter soon began to swell as a result of physical-chemical reactions, transformation, and weathering. Rocks dissolved into water and, by releasing carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrogen, formed a primordial stew—precursors to what we would come to call “life.”

Random electrical discharges on this barren planet’s surface gave rise to amino acids, short strings of carbon atoms that, decorated with hydrogen and nitrogen appendices, became simple three-dimensional structures. Soon, the stringy amino acids combined by chance to form more complex corkscrew helices and stacks of sheets, giving rise to the first proteins, the macromolecules that catalyze most reactions in what we recognize as the “environment.”

After enough amino acids formed and combined by chance, a miracle sprang from the dilute, primordial soup. So, “life” began, a rudimentary membrane, not yet fit to recreate itself, a first take on cellular life.

But it perished soon after birth. Like a spark unable to find kindling, unable to start the fire burning in each of us. It happened again. And again. Until futile bursts of randomness, ongoing maybe for millions of years, turned into self-replicating cells. A second miracle, capable of sustained life, commenced—and endured.

Initially, our cellular progenitors only managed to increase in abundance, occupying more and more of the habitable space. The tiny creatures clung to rocky surfaces on Earth—not so unlike hapless me, clinging to the vertical rock face in the icy Andes so many years later.

But then these tiny creatures started a revolution, driven by the opportunity to coexist, cohabitate, and cooperate.

They became one, a remarkable success and inspiration—something our species has yet to emulate. Here’s what happened: They were just two cells, primed to compete fiercely for limited resources and living space. But instead of competing, they took an alternative path, and by doing so, invented new possibilities in the adventure of survival. One swallowed the other—but without destroying it. Two monocellular organisms unexpectedly merged into a single living organism, in an instant.

Rather than fighting each other, they began to cooperate. They divided essential chores, the bigger one creating an internal habitat for the other; and the small intruder in turn becoming a biochemical energy plant, known as a mitochondrium, powering the newly sprung cellular union. Then it happened again, this time giving rise to chloroplasts, the locus of modern photosynthesis. This happened about 1.5 billion years ago.

The gamble of cellular cooperation and co-inhabitation paid off in multiple, unexpected ways, creating an explosion of new possibilities. The newly formed eukaryotic cells, containing first a single and soon multiple mitochondria, were compartmentalized by membranes and contained a nucleus harboring their genetic blueprint. They began to rule our early world. From singular to multicellular designs, one new model after another ran off this assembly line of life: molds, mollusks, mammals, monkeys, and mankind. And the factory work is not complete.

Our cellular forebears paved the way for a comfortable future for humans, by inventing a supportive machinery that harvests energy contained in sunlight, an essentially unlimited source of power that freely traverses outer space to visit and penetrate us.

This was and continues to be the good fortune of a planet bathing in seemingly eternal sunshine.

Harvesting light energy to split water made all the difference for the future of life. Bacteria deserve credit not only for inventing the process of photosynthesis but also for the art of harvesting the energy contained in light and directing it at, and splitting, water.

The water-busting process released oxygen into the atmosphere. One by one, each water molecule split into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Two oxygen atoms held hands, forming molecular oxygen, or O₂—the quintessence of our atmosphere, and what we breathe today. Algae swalled the photosynthetic bacteria and adopted the art of photosynthesis and water splitting to soon evolve into plants that perform these tasks both in water and on land.

This life-induced change of the global atmospheric environment made possible our way of life. The food we consume, a smorgasbord of strings of organic carbon, generated mostly by photosynthetic plants, is incinerated in our bodies. Plants pull building blocks out of thin air in the form of carbon dioxide, a process powered by the sun. We in turn burn the plants’ biomass in our bodies and extract the usable energy. Rather than allowing this energy to escape as mere heat, we instead capture it and deposit the energetic power into our savings bank in the form of phosphate compounds. These tiny molecular phosphate batteries become charged when the foodstuff we take in with each breath reacts with the atmospheric oxygen. The output we exhale, carbon dioxide, is promptly taken up again from the atmosphere by the primary producers, bacteria, and plants, to complete the cycle.

Bacteria and plants are the ones that drive this endless cycle of life. We humans are born to be consumers, dependent on the products manufactured by those enjoying greater autonomy but also more modest returns. Our cellular forebears, and we ourselves, have a long history not only of consuming, but also of interacting with and changing our environment, and, with it, the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. No creature is ever outside this cycle.

In the past, the process moved along rather slowly, allowing various life-forms time either to adapt or to take shelter. But over the past two hundred years, we have rushed the process to a degree that makes adaptation impossible.

Petroleum accumulated in the Earth’s crust over time spans of million s of years is now being brought to the surface and burned up in a stupefying spectacle, releasing carbon dioxide that traps the heat of the sunlight. While enjoying the energy extracted from fossil deposits formed over millions of years to power our cars and air conditioners, we are dialing up the thermostat of our atmosphere.

This atmospheric change forces glaciers to melt and retreat. It is topping off our oceans—now—changing our entire Earth system.

The early bacteria that never adapted to the reality of a new atmosphere charged with oxygen, known as archaebacteria, can teach us a cautionary lesson. Clinging to a lifestyle not supported any longer by the surrounding environment did not work out well for them. Today, they are relegated to a life in the shadows. They reside deep in the soil, far away from oxygen. If we don’t pay attention, a similar fate may of retreat and demise may await us in the environment, atmosphere, and climate we create with our everyday actions.

Luckily, my death was postponed on that mountain face. Cooperation from an unlikely source saved my life and helped me to descend into safety from the ice-covered rock face I clung to high up in the Andes.

One hundred miles east of my hometown, Meine, a village near Braunschweig, across the Iron Curtain, in a part of Germany that was created by slicing the homeland in two from 1952 to 1990, another boy my age grew up. He read books penned by South American mountaineers and dreamed of seeing parts of the world other than the Soviet Bloc.

Risking his life, he crossed the death strip of the Inner German Border unharmed. After saving up a sufficient amount of money, he boarded a plane to Ecuador to fulfill his dream of climbing the legendary Chimborazo mountain, of reaching its peak and, with it, the point farthest from the center of the Earth. While his dream would not come true, he did arrive in time to save my life.

We met at the mountain’s base camp, the Whymper refuge at 16,400 feet altitude, two maverick travelers, used to relying on ourselves alone, yet deciding to climb together for an exploration of routes alternative to the main path up the mountain, which was plagued by an onslaught of falling ice and rock mobilized by the sun’s rays. I can still hear and see in my mind a rock the size of a baby’s head zipping by a couple of inches from my right ear a day earlier. It was traveling at a hundred miles per hour.

Stuck on the icy rock face without a rope and with my ice pick out of reach, strapped to the top of my backpack, the East German refugee, now a free citizen of the world, risked his life all over again, climbing my way without a safety rope to unfasten my ice pick, placing within my reach the lifesaving tool, and then guiding me back across the hazardous ice chan...