A Warm Welcome to the World

 

Ever since I discovered a love of the outdoors, environmental issues have been on my radar. Yet when I became a father last year I can't stop thinking about the long-term sustainability of our planet. It's put me in a really dark place as a result. Climate change has gotten worse, environmental degradation has gotten worse, ecological collapse is a possibility in the next century. 

To be clear, it isn't that I think the climate apocalypse is going to occur in my lifetime, I don't imagine myself fighting through a wasteland with my daughter in a shopping cart like we're in the Road or something. Instead, I have to imagine her future in an abused natural world, one that she loves now. She loves animals, and rivers, and trees, and lakes. She loves to be outside. We'll watch these things change for the worse, sometimes go away altogether. While this is an immense privilege compared to what will happen to the rest of the world in the coming years, our environment doesn't just sustain life, it's one major part of what makes it worth living. 

So now when I see the real-time destruction of our planet in the name of nothing more than profit, it sickens me like never before. Giant climate change-induced problems across the country and the world are haunting enough, but what's more immediately heartbreaking is the destruction in our own backyard. 

Sometimes literally in our backyard; our neighbor recently cut down a perfectly healthy tree because she didn't like raking leaves. Sometimes it's the change taking place in our community; dozens of acres of greenspace being bulldozed to build McMansions that won't even house over half a dozen families. 

Most recently I've noticed the beautiful Norwegian pines that border our yard have started to die. These trees have given our yard a private, densely wooded feel. I can look out my bedroom window and see nothing but pine. It makes our yard a great animal crossing to skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and deer (all of which I've seen rest in our pine thicket). They, along with every other exotic pine in our neighborhood, have been struck with a pine wilt disease that seems to be rapidly spreading thru Michigan since 2011. Many studies suggest it's exacerbated by climate change. 

Some trees in my neighborhood with pine wilt disease

Some arguments crop up, my own house sits on a plot of land that was once forest; people have to live. I obviously understand this and that we all have to reconcile our need to live and balance our quality of life against preserving our ecosystem. I would certainly be more tolerant of this argument if I felt that the destruction, extraction, and consumption of the natural world was being done with a balance in mind. If I felt humanity was taking seriously alternatives to lifestyles and methods. We are clearly not. It's unfortunate to see a forest get bulldozed to build anything, it's extra frustrating to see it's only for a few massive homes or a strip mall, it's simply unacceptable that many of these homes were for people who had perfectly fine homes to begin with or unnecessary strip malls, it's horrific when these homes and strip malls sit empty for years.

It's hard to say whether things feel extra bad now because they are actually that bad, or because I am now responsible for and profoundly invested in the life of my child the normal things just feel extra bad. Possibly some combination of both. All I can do is engage in the work of making this life more valuable for myself and others, commit to the institutions of change, and spend what time I have left making my daughter's memory of her lived experience an unequivocally positive one. 

The Passion of the Career

 Some thoughts on trying to do what you love for work.

Working in the talent acquisition space I think a lot about the nature of working for a living. I work closely with a lot of young professionals just starting out in their careers, whether they work for me directly or I work with them in their job search. I often witness this crisis - or rather I recognize it as the same one I went through at their age - where these former students watch their free time completely disappear at the same time they're devoting themselves to the very sterile, bottom-line-driven mission of their employer.

It's with this massive hit to free time and values that I watch these young people go into panic mode. Shortly into their career, they decide to "hack" this system by taking something they love doing or are passionate about and making it their full-time job. The logic being if you have to do something for 40 hours a week that's going to cut into your free time with some boring, unimportant mission you should try to transform at least the latter half of those variables. 

There are a lot of people who talk about this; doing what you love has become almost a famous platitude. Nevermind the fact that it would be impossible for everyone to follow their dreams - not many people have longed to be an HVAC technician or a logistics coordinator and yet these are essential jobs in our modern world - the conversation lacks the nuances of the sacrifices you're making when you try to make your passion your career. 

The exploitative nature of the American work life is going to be present everywhere you look. Non-profits notoriously pay awful and have terrible work/life balance, the same can be said of creative jobs. Is helping people your passion? It doesn't take much reading to find that nurses and social workers have been (especially lately) horrifically exploited. Are you passionate about education? The nation's teachers are under attack and people are flocking out of the position faster than they're going in, academia is harder and harder to break into without enduring an endless barrage of shit. Even if you love technology or learning a trade, tech workers are not immune from employer exploitation despite being one of the most lucrative types of workers in the market.

This is not to disparage any of these jobs or discourage entering any of these fields. The issue at heart is the nature of work can be oppressive across any field and there is no avoiding it. Rather than finding a job, you love, finding a job that allows you maximum free time while balancing adequate compensation is an alternative some don't consider. Which of course is only a short-term fix. The larger, more systemic change needs to be increased worker power. This can take many forms; legislative fixes like a four-day work week or federally subsidized leave programs, more worker representation in the form of unions and worker co-determination, and a great re-imagining of what work means in this country.