About half of the world population lives in cities. That is not a bad thing in itself. Being closer together makes things efficient. Having more humans in one space can also help us to manage our impact on the planet. If everyone lived in a few big cities, then monitoring CO2 and the effect on the water table would be a breeze. However, I believe that living in the cities has done more to disconnect us from our planetary surroundings than anything else.
I will explain by telling you a story about one of my dear friends. She grew up as a city kid. When I say that, I mean she lived in a moderate city, smaller than Cleveland, most of her life and settled in Cleveland a decade or so ago. We stopped by a botanist’s home to see her rose test garden. While touring the grounds, my friend pointed to a cantaloupe growing in the garden and exclaimed, “Wow! I have never seen one of those in its natural habitat!” We raise our children so disconnected from the food we eat and the what it takes to raise it, that we cannot really comprehend our effect on the planetary ecosystem. I lived in a small town in Kansas as a child. While we did not have a farm, many of my friends were farm kids. On visits to their houses, I got to ride a horse, milk a cow, see pigs being fed, and even collect an egg or two from the hen house. I got the chance to see just where some of my food actually came from and how it was raised. I knew that hamburger came from a cow that was fed and watered and maintained for several years until it was big enough for it to be killed so I could eat my Big Mac. But as the story of my friend illustrates, I was not the norm. Many kids have never even fished or grown a tomato plant. Thinking of cities bigger and more urban than Cleveland, and you have a population that has little of no connection to the land, and thus no way of see how our food is raised. Kids grow up not knowing that outside NYC is not merely the mysterious city of Newark, but rather a whole country and planet. This planet has considerable resources that are being used every day to provide them with their life. They do not see the huge farms that are necessary to raise the chickens for KFC. heck, they do not even know what part of the chicken they are eating. If we are not teaching them the very basics of where our food comes from, how can we expect them to understand ecosystems and climate change?
One problem that we have acquired in this country is poverty. The haves and the have nots can live very close together, but live in completely different worlds. So while one family lives below the poverty line, less than a mile away lives a family with excess wealth. The strange thing about it, is that while they live so close to one another, the wealth can buy their way past many of the problems of the poor. Rather than send their kids to public school, they send them to private. Their children receive a better education, while those who have less to begin with struggle to keep their kids educated, even working long hours just to pay the bills, and thus leaving them little time to get involved in the education of their children. If there is no grocery store in this part of town, then those who are in better shape financially, can load up their SUV on the way home from pillates class with organic veggies from the Whole Foods across town and feel good knowing their family has eaten healthy foods and snacks. The working poor, on the other hand, are lucky if they can afford to feed their family Kraft Mac & Cheese or Top Ramen and thank their lucky stars that they are able to fill the bellies of their children. The working poor often have the worst diets, because cheap food is not good for you. So what is my point?
The planet is one large interconnected ecosystem. What is going on in Bejing can have a dramatic effect on the air we breathe in Cleveland or the ocean where we catch fish off Hawaii. In the same manner, we as a species are interconnected. Until we realize that our problems are all connected, we cannot really expect to raise awareness. If a family cannot feed itself, why would they care about their carbon footprint? If we can’t find a way to raise the quality of public education, how can we expect to teach our kids about ecology and planetary stewardship? If we aren’t sure that everyone has a home and meal, how can we expect to teach them where their food comes from, or how to responsibly raise it. We cannot expect to get more every day working Americans to get involved in the sustainability movement, if we can’t figure out how to teach them that those chicken fingers aren’t really fingers….
