Member-only story
The #1 Easy Thing You Can Do For the Environment You’ve Never Heard Before
Having a hard time giving up meat? Still really want to take an airplane to a tropical beach? Not ready to chain yourself to an oil pipeline? Don’t fret, I will give you one easy solution to help with climate change. If you do this ONE thing well. You might find doing all the rest easy, too.
I want you to grab your phone, head outside, close the door, and… download an app. I know, I know, hear me out. My task for you is to download Seek. It’s like Pokémon Go but for the real life plants, animals, and fungi around you. (I promise this isn’t sponsored, it’s just the app I happen to use. Use a different app if that will make you happy). Now go on a walk, look around, really look, and start identifying any organism that jumps out at you. It’s okay if you get a little addicted. Don’t be embarrassed, nature is cool.
You might be wondering, “How is going on a walk to identify plants going to help with climate?” Let me rewind a bit.
When we moved to a small town called Guerneville a year ago I couldn’t have named more than three of the plants that tangle along the road toward town: blackberry, oleander, and poison oak. One food and two poisons, a minimum plant literacy. In our own backyard, I could of course name the world-famous Coastal Redwoods that cradle our home, but I knew nothing of the other trees which seemed to disappear in their anonymity.
In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer ponders the effect of existing in a world vacant of relationship to flora and fauna: “Names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you… I think it would be a little scary and disorienting — like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs.”
When we first moved here, one of my self-prescribed tasks was to learn the names of the beings around us. I downloaded Seek and wandered around the neighborhood pointing my phone like a child uses their first magnifying glass: funneling their focus into never before seen details. Through this process, I’ve come to understand that life beforehand was not as much being lost in a…
