WHY TAKING A WALK MAY BE ONE OF YOUR MOST IMPORTANT CLIMATE ACTIONS

I’d like to offer 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 - I hear Google Lens can be great too). 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 rural town a year ago I couldn’t have named more than three of the plants that tangled 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 foreign city as it was feeling lost in a featureless one. It wasn’t that I was overwhelmed at the sight of strange things, but underwhelmed by a perceived vacancy. Only through the process of actively noticing new plants and animals was the world suddenly populated with them.

In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes how our perception is limited by what we select from reality: “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.” This is true in metaphor and in fact, our brain’s visual processing system uses selective filtering to only serve up to our consciousness what it deems a priority. Scientists call this phenomenon “inattentional blindness.” In short, you are blind to anything your brain patterns find irrelevant, anything you don’t pay attention to. 

When you don’t know the names of the beings around you, when you have no relationship to them, they filter out of your perception. That handful of sand you call the world thins and empties out through the cracks in your fingers. If we only perceive an ever-vanishing sliver of reality we will feel increasingly alone in a featureless world. Dr. Kimmerer calls this species loneliness, “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

Lavender-cotton (Left), Pennyroyal (Center), wild Fennel (Right). All photos taken in Sonoma County by Spencer Scott.

However, there is hope in Pirsig’s metaphor. It isn’t that the world in and of itself is empty (it remains a rich landscape), it’s our awareness that is lacking, and the emptiness of our awareness is a self-fulfilling prophecy: what we don’t see, we trample on. Perceiving the world as empty serves to empty it out. If we desire to reverse this trend, we must make a conscious decision to pay attention to our blind spots, we must retrain our brain to see what has previously been background noise. 

No matter where you are, there is a world of life waiting to be known. In the cracks around your apartment, the birds that flit in your periphery, or the fungi composting some subterranean rot. Knowing their names is more than a utility. It changes your relationship to the world. It populates your perception with long-lost relatives, it helps situate you in the real world, instead of a featureless fantasy. It may even ease your spiritual loneliness. 

Before we can hope to be a healing force in the world, we have to be able to see it.

Mexican Plumeria (Right), Wild Carrot and Chicory (Center), Mexican Bush Sage (Right). All photos taken in California by Spencer Scott.

People in climate get asked constantly by concerned individuals, “what can I do?” And the answer is never easy. Climate change is the result of an incredibly complex system of interactions. Intervening in a complex system is almost always non-obvious. Although you can browse some of the most impactful solutions at The Drawdown Review, you haven’t identified the most successful strategy to move people to action. 

In Donella Meadows’s brilliant work on finding leverage points in complex systems, she postulates that one of the most impactful ways to change a system is to change the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, and parameters — arise. She says “there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing.”

One of the most integral mindsets of the Western paradigm is the commodification of the Earth. That mindset enclosed the world into discrete objects for valuation, making the world invisible except for its dollar value on the market. Donella Meadows counsels that the best way to change paradigms is to point at the failures of the old paradigm (this has become obvious to many in the past years), and bring people on an assuring journey into the new paradigm. What is this new paradigm? At its most basic level, it is the re-introduction of humans into the ecosystem, as one part within it instead of an imagined ruler over it.

All of the best resources I’ve read about what you can do to help the climate, from brilliant writers like Dr. Katharine Wilkinsonand Mary Heglar, compel you to ask not “what can I do” but “What can I do, next?” That type of commitment requires a paradigm change, requires that you see with new eyes. It requires that you re-introduce yourself to the world, that you build a relationship to the wondrous landscape around you.

Might I suggest a walk?

SPENCER R. SCOTT, PHD

I'm a scientist, environmentalist, and writer trying to help reconfigure our relationship to Earth and each other. I find it nothing short of a miracle we find ourselves conscious in this astonishing universe. I spend my days wondering what our society would look like if we acknowledged how precarious and precious our existence is. The values of modern society have left much to be wanted in the way of meaning and purpose. I try to interrogate what is missing, and imagine what might we create to fill those gaps. Through a great stroke of irony, climate change, the force that threatens to undo us, may provide the necessary wake-up call to give our striving purpose and help us find value in all that surrounds us.

To check out more of Spencer's work head to his website or Instagram.