Relationships Require Feedback

A middle-age unemployed person very close to me has a dream of being employed by a large company again one day. He submits resumes to prospective employers daily, networks with colleagues old and new whenever the time seems right, and tries to connect with hiring managers or their HR representatives every time he uncovers their identity. Yet he still finds himself mostly passing time waiting for feedback. That lack of responsiveness threatens his sense that he is or can again be part of the US economy in any constructive way. It doesn’t just lead him to question his value, it makes him feel alone and even question the robustness and fairness of current economic models.

Another friend went through a bad divorce. He knew that something was not right in his relationship when the conversations he used to have regularly with his mate grew more infrequent, and he knew he was really in trouble when his stated desire to explore what possibly could have gone wrong was met with stone silence and a promise to “get back to you.” When the feedback stopped he realized he was no longer part of a marriage, and feared he might not even be suitable for a new one.

What does any of this have to do with the ecosystem? Like it or not, we are in relationship with the world around us… even though we have spent a lot of modernity removing ourselves from direct contact with it. By removing ourselves, I don’t mean we ever stopped breathing its air, drinking its water, eating its food, extracting its minerals, harvesting its lumber, or vacationing at its shores and mountains. What I mean is that we stopped looking for feedback. We began to assume the world’s resources would always be there for us no matter what we did. We began to act like the employer who believed the pool of job applicants was so large that he did not have to care how he treated any individual applicant, because there would always be more. We began to act like the spouse who found someone new and in fear of losing that excitement, began to ignore the person she knew better. In other words, because the world seems so large and because we think we know more about it than ever, we stopped caring to listen to anything new that it might be trying to tell us.

In actuality, we need the ecosystem more than it needs us. It doesn’t really “care” about us as individuals any more than we care about lone cells in our own bodies. But the environment is always talking to us. What we need now is a renewed desire to listen to what it is saying, and better ways to hear the many signals it sends.

It is not that some haven’t been trying. In mid-town Manhattan when you exit Penn Station onto 7th Avenue, there is a billboard posting the daily increase in greenhouse gases (GHGs) there are in the atmosphere. Does that “signal” move people to care and listen? My sense is no. It is too scientific, too sterile.

Image of Billboard outside Penn station, New York

When it comes to relationships we hear people much better. That is why throughout time man created images of their God as a person, because that made it easier for us to feel a closer relationship to all that is greater than any individual. Likewise we created the image of Mother Nature because it helped us understand that the world can be nurturing, but it can also treat us like a woman scorned.

Thus what I suggest is a return to classical Olympian interpretations of the relationship between man and his world, and then have fun with the metaphors. Instead of numbers to show the impact of man’s GHGs on the atmosphere, maybe we should depict a god whose job is to keep the earth’s temperature temperate… and as GHG’s increase, the size of this moisture-laden god keeps getting bigger since he can’t stop eating the food (gases) we are providing him. And as he gets bigger, the world underneath him begins to show signs of unevenness, some of it cracking as if it were an arid desert, and other parts flooding and snow-covered because of his constant dripping and the increasing shadows he creates. The purpose is to depict imbalance, and to highlight that one way to return to balance is to put that god on a diet.

What I am advocating is this. It is up to those who have insights into the complexity of the environment to speak for it, to create compelling images that give others knowledge of a relationship that they ignore at their own risk.