When we first met Kai, he was a second grader with a boundless enthusiasm that made even the most familiar things feel new again. When he spoke, he had so many thoughts at once that his sentences often came out as garbled compilations of interwoven meanings. We met teaching “poetry” in Kai’s school.
Poetry is given quotation marks here because the kind of poetry that we’ve seen written by students of every age has nothing to do with adherence to a particular form, or ideas about who is a capable “poet” and who is not; and the poems written contradict any impulse to say of something written with so much insight, wisdom and acuity of observation, “That’s just poetry.”
Instead, we have come to see each person as the poem and what they witness as a recording of that poetry of which they already are.
On the fourth week of writing together, we began with a discussion of the famous line of poetry that reads: “May my heart always be open to the little birds who are the secrets of living.”
When we asked Kai’s class what they made of this line, Kai became completely still. His face and body were calm, and there wasn’t the buzz of thinking. He was feeling the answer in himself, searching his being for understanding. The particular suggestion he offered has faded into memory, but what remains is the image of the way he engaged the question.
We wrote just the beginning of his line across the board in the classroom: “May my heart always be open…”, and invited the students to make it their own. What would they always want to keep their heart open to? What can they, at their young age, hear, see, notice, sense, and know that adults have turned away from? Kai moved to his desk with the same quiet about him that had come over him before. A few minutes later, he was still sitting there, holding his pencil suspended in the air. It might have looked like he was “off task,” or “stuck,” but he wasn’t. When asked about it, words flowed from his being. He had so much to say that it was more than he could write down; he felt impeded by still learning how to write letters, but he knew what he wanted to express.
Over five minutes, Kai spoke a universe that he wanted to keep with his heart — blue whales, trees, mountains, planets, stars, his family, the sound of rain, the feeling of diving into a cool blue wave, the people across the world he doesn’t know yet, getting to invent things. The list is so much longer, these are the ones easily recalled in this moment of writing. Kai wanted to share his poem with the class, and he seemed to offer it in a single breath, pouring across the words without separation, as if it was all one single thought. Then he sat down in the middle of the floor and smiled.
We’ve worked with Kai every year since, and even at the edge of 7th grade, that spark is still with him. In fourth grade, we not only got to write poems with Kai, but through a partnership with Children for Change, a service learning organization and initiative to bring young students and families into greater contact with the local community and issues facing the larger world, we got to work even more with Kai. In our first year working with Children for Change, the students studied and focused their learning, action and advocacy on animal care and the environment. As we talked about endangered species, Kai decided that most important to him was the northern white rhino. He had never seen one in real life, but he didn’t need to; the connection was already there. At lunch he and his friends would lay across the floor of the classroom, huddled behind a computer to learn about the white rhino, and to understand what was happening. Each week Kai would have more to say. No one ever asked him to research or learn, or assigned him a project, but he created one.
Kai decided that to help raise awareness about the plight of rhinos all over the world, he and a few friends would design a t-shirt. They drew sketches, settled on a design, came up with a message, and even screen printed the first round of shirts themselves at a local shop. The shirt reads: “Peace Love Rhinos endangered” — all endangered.
The following year, Kai and a number of students were invited to spend a day in San Francisco at Salesforce. Kai wore his t-shirt with a beaming smile, and talked to every person he encountered about the history, necessity and future of rhino populations around the world. As he spoke, no one moved. No one could think, he was delivering information faster than anyone could respond to; but even more than that, he was delivering a feeling.
Not long after the day in San Francisco, Kai was invited to join Children for Change in helping to host students from more than 30 schools around the Bay Area in coming together for the Environmental Youth Forum and film festival put on by the California Film Institute (CFI). In particular, Kai was invited to attend a screening for the film “Kifaru,” which follows the lives of two Kenyan rangers, James and Jojo, who joined the Ol Pejeta Conservancy’s rhinoceros caretaker unit — a small group of rangers who were caring for the last male northern white rhino in the world. Sudan was this rhino’s name. He died on March 19, 2018.
As Kai stood in the lobby greeting other students, the director of “Kifaru” walked into the room, and with him were James and Jojo, on their first trip outside of Africa. Kai bounded over to the two rangers and introduced himself. He then proceeded to tell them everything he had learned, and peppered them with questions until all three of them broke into laughter as they all tried to speak at once. James and Jojo smiled with generosity and warmth and Kai presented them with t-shirts, and asked what more he can do. After the film screening, James and Jojo invited Kai to join them on stage, and together they spoke about the power of a single voice.
This past year, still wearing his t-shirt at least once a week, Kai came to a Children for Change meeting and we started talking about James and Jojo, wondering how their work has changed since Sudan’s passing. Kai held the cover of National Geographic we brought in up in front of him, and then wrapped it toward his chest, and again didn’t know what to say.
We sat together, trying to understand how to be with the image. After a while, Kai decided he would like to write to James and Jojo, and ask them how they are doing, and what more he and all of his classmates can do to help. We found an email address for the Conservancy online, and without a pause, Kai began to dictate an email; again in a kind of single breath, single thought. “Dear James and Jojo, I would love to know how you are doing, and how your work is going? How are Fatu and Najin doing, and how are your families?”, the email began. Fatu and Najin are two female northern white rhinos still under the care of the rangers at Ol Pejeta. Kai still remembered their names without a single moment’s hesitation.
Two days after the email was sent, a reply came from James. It was not a form letter, or a thank you note, it was written as a correspondence to a colleague, paragraphs long about how life has unfolded in the months since the film festival, about the state of the planet, about Fatu and Najin (“the girls”), and about working together to prevent mass extinction. In just one excerpt, James wrote:
The girls are still hanging in there. The scientists are spending sleepless nights trying to figure out how they are going to revert their near extinction. They have so far succeeded for the very first time in the history to do an ovum pick-up from both Najin and Fatu which has subsequently led to the making of two embryos that carry the hope of saving these girls. Pretty tough, demanding, and invasive procedure, but what can these girls do, other than bear the weight of being remnants of their species and facilitate this tough human orchestrated procedure.
I hope this doesn’t happen to other species Kai! It is a very sad fate for them, but I hope that we have/will embrace the lessons that they hold in regard to species extinction, and the red-light warning they are at a time when the United Nations in May this year declared that one million more species are threatened with extinction.
Your effort and commitment at this contemporary time isn’t only crucial, but the very hope that you/we the younger generation should embrace in realization that biodiversity is the core of our life because we are going to be alive long, and our natural world, planet and environment is the every essence of sustainable development, food security, clean water, health, wealth, name them.
Kai printed the letter and framed it on his wall. For him, it’s a call to care echoing across the planet; and resonating with a call already present, and still palpable inside of him.
In the Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert writes: “Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five” (3). She further describes that just as human beings have developed the technology to be able to trace and understand the history of these five events, “people come to realize they are causing another one. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction” (3).
Kolbert opens the first chapter of her book with the story of the golden frogs in the town of El Valle de Anton, in Central Panama. She describes: “The golden frog, which is taxicab yellow with dark brown splotches, is endemic to the area around El Valle. It is considered a lucky symbol in Panama; its image is (or at least used to be) printed on lottery tickets” (4). Only ten years earlier, “golden frogs were so easy to spot in the hills around El Valle…One creek not far from El Valle was nicknamed Thousand Frog Stream” (4–5). However, the frogs started to disappear: “The problem–it was not yet perceived as a crisis–was first noticed to the west, near Panama’s border with Costa Rica” (5). An American graduate student studying frogs in the rainforest had gone home to write her dissertation, and “when she returned, she couldn’t find any frogs or, for that matter, amphibians of any kind” (5).
Over the next few years, the golden frogs disappeared from multiple locations. A group of scientists tried to preserve a remnant population and raise them indoors, but to no avail. Kolbert recalls that she first read about the golden frogs of El Valle in a nature magazine that her kids were reading. She remembers that the article had bright color photos of the golden frogs, and told the story of biologist efforts to help the species, but says, “it seemed to me, as a journalist, that the magazine had buried the lead.” She was thinking of the story of the sixth mass extinction: “The notion that a sixth such event would be taking place right now, more or less in front of our eyes, struck me as, to use the technical term, mind-boggling. Surely this story too–the bigger, darker, far more consequential one–deserved telling” (7).
Kolbert notes: “Extinction may be the first scientific idea that kids today have to grapple with.” She talks about the way even one-year-old children may play with dinosaurs of some kind, and by preschool can tell the story of dinosaurs disappearing. Referencing her own sons, Kolbert remembers the way that as toddlers they “used to spend hours over a set of dinosaurs that could be arranged on a plastic mat depicting a forest from the Jurrasic or Cretaceous. The scene featured a lava-spewing volcano, which, when you pressed on it, emitted a delightfully terrifying roar. All of which is to say that extinction strikes us as an obvious idea. It isn’t” (23). Where is the deeper inquiry taught, and is there a way that we overlay the stories of the far past on the reality of the present as if the current climate reality is normal? Further, what behaviors and phenomena have we naturalized and normalized; and at what cost?
Much later in her book, in a chapter titled “The Sea Around Us,” borrowed from the book of the same name by the pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, Kolbert moves her focus specifically to human history:
Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels–coal, oil, and natural gas–to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today–a little over four hundred parts per million–is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years (113).
Rising global temperatures are making habitats all over the world, including the earth’s oceans, inhospitable to the very life that emerged within such ecosystems, and that sustains life across the planet. Kolbert quotes marine biologist Jason Hall-Spenser, who explains in regard to the warming and resulting acidification of the ocean: “Because it’s so important, we humans put a lot of energy into making sure that the pH of our blood is constant…But some of these lower organisms, they don’t have the physiology to do that. They’ve just got to tolerate what’s happening outside, and so they get pushed beyond their limits” (114).
In “Are We in the Middle of a Sixth Mass Extinction,” The New York Times reports that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has evaluated 52,205 species and their ability to survive in the current conditions of their habitat. They found that 13 percent of all bird species are threatened, 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians. “Meanwhile, the number of unknown species may be in the millions, or tens of millions — many times that of what has been discovered.” Richard Pearson, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, and the author of Driven to Extinction: The Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity, summaries the numbers of known species under threat this way: “Nearly 20,000 species of animals and plants around the globe are considered high risks for extinction in the wild. That’s according to the most authoritative compilation of living things at risk — the so-called Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature” (“Protecting Many Species to Help Our Own,” New York Times). Pearson also explains what the current risk to species could mean looking outward into the future: “a study in the journal Nature last year concluded that if all species listed as threatened on the Red List were lost over the coming century, and that rate of extinction continued, we would be on track to lose three-quarters or more of all species within a few centuries.” And he emphasizes again that only about 4 percent of species are known.
At times in adulthood, the animal world, and connections like Kai’s to the rhinos, can start to seem distant. Pearson emphasizes, “It is often forgotten how dependent we are on other species. Ecosystems of multiple species that interact with one another and their physical environments are essential for human societies.” Echoing James’s words to Kai, Pearson writes:
These systems provide food, fresh water and the raw materials for construction and fuel; they regulate climate and air quality; buffer against natural hazards like floods and storms; maintain soil fertility; and pollinate crops. The genetic diversity of the planet’s myriad different life-forms provides the raw ingredients for new medicines and new commercial crops and livestock, including those that are better suited to conditions under a changed climate.
In Radical Transformational Leadership, Monica Sharma seeks to engage the world in dialogue about systemic change that can transform complex issues facing global society. She begins, “For the first time in history, our collective decisions will determine the trajectory of our earth and civilization–whether we destroy ourselves and the planet or survive and thrive” (9). How do we create the conditions, first within ourselves, to look directly at what is happening, to experience the living connections between every aspect of the natural world, and to respond wisely and effectively? How can we differently use technology to inspire greater feeling and awareness, and how can the outcomes of economic decisions and business ventures be weighed in relation to the benefit to the planet, as well as to profit margins and people?
The Afterword to Rachel Carson’s book, The Sea Around Us, begins with lines of poetry by T.S. Eliot, in which he expresses his sense for the infinite relationality of the world, beyond ideas of time and space, distinction and difference. He writes:
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity.
A few years ago, National Geographic produced what they called a Photo Ark, using the power of images to inspire people to learn more and to support on-the-ground conservation efforts. With the project National Geographic offered suggestions to address changes individuals can make in their homes, yards, neighborhoods, and communities to help ease the burden of plastic, chemicals, air pollutants, and the degradation of native species. Action is one part of the movement of restoration. First though, like Kai, still and searching within himself for the feeling from which to move, think and write, a feeling for rights and necessity of all life must arise for and through each person in the way that is experienced, perceived and expressed uniquely by them. From that place, new languages, stories and metaphors for expressing connection, new innovations for making change, and a new sense for community (human and with all of life) and communion can arise.
Questions
- Describe a relationship you have experienced to a particular animal or plant in your life, maybe as a child, or at any age? What do you remember most about the experience (not so much your thoughts), but your feeling, sensory awareness? What was significant to you about this relationship?
- One of the issues facing conversation about mass extinction and the loss of biodiversity is the painful nature of the issue, causing a human tendency to want to look away from the problem. How might each of us discover the courage and power of turning toward history/suffering, and strengthen our willingness to listen and to feel?
- How do you experience the role of art, poetry, music, movement, or other forms of creative expression in creating meaningful and life-giving change? What might these ways of expression enable in conversation between differing points of view, or argument over statistics, tactics, or strategies?
Works Cited
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: an unnatural history. Henry Holt and Company, 2014.
Bill Marsh, “Are We in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction?”, New York Times, June 1, 2012. Accessed online: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/01/opinion/sunday/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction.html?hp
Pearson, Richard. “Protecting Many Species to Help Our Own,” New York Times, June 1, 2012. Accessed online: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction.html.
Sharma, Monica. Radical Transformational Leadership. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017.
