Eat a Peach

Imagine a hospital bed. You’re lying on it, dying. A machine’s high-pitched alarm squeals somewhere in the background. Your heart has stopped; strangers bark commands as they work on your body. These sounds are fading. This is your last second here in this life. What moment will you spend your final thought on, what activity will you miss with all your heart?

Reading a story to your child nestled in your lap? A lazy Sunday afternoon joking with friends? Falling asleep in the arms of your true love?

Don’t worry; you’re still far from that hospital bed. But make a list today of those activities, those contestants for your final thought. Work on the list, tuck it into your wallet. Remember to take it out regularly and look at it.

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Think about a single white blood cell. Pick this one, for instance, coasting down the radial artery in your right arm now. Do you think it has any concept about the existence of you, the whole of you? Your hopes and dreams and your search through the fridge for something good to eat? Do you think it has any idea that its work helps your life to continue?

No, that white blood cell is simply cruising through the warm blood, happily searching out viruses. No existential angst about the big picture here. It’s doing this work because it’s hungry and those alien viruses taste great. It’s in the moment, busy in its life.

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The cougar waits. She’s crouched on a branch in a cottonwood tree beside the river. She’s waiting for a deer to walk down the path for a drink of water. The tip of her tail twitches.

If she were shot or scared permanently from the area, deer would come to the riverbank in greater and greater numbers, chewing cottonwood saplings down to nubs. Without predation, the deer would reproduce quickly, chomping through shrubbery and grasses. The plant roots holding onto the topsoil die, starting erosion. Within a few years there are so many deer, hungry, gnawing the bark off the grown trees, clambering down into the river to eat even the wetland plants, their sharp hooves cutting into the riverbank, muddying the water for all.

However, for now at least, the cougar is here. In the sun-dappled shade, you can barely see her, but her presence is easy to guess from the thick foliage around her. Scientists call this, ‘the Ecology of Fear.’ Along riverbanks where cougars live, researchers have found 50 times more cottonwoods than on riverbanks without cougars. So many trees mean more amphibians and wildflowers, lizards and butterflies. The entire system richer.

She waits on the branch. Her pale eyes intent, her strong body waiting. She is doing what feels good, what her body tells her to do.

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Think of a peach. A ripe peach. Press your nose against that fuzzy skin and smell its sweetness. You take a bite of its flesh. Even though you’re trying to figure out how to get your car to the repair shop without being late for work, you still note the taste of the peach, feel a shiver of enjoyment.

When finished, you toss the pit to the side. For the peach tree, that toss is actually the point, that walk you made, 80 feet from the tree, the way the pit landed on soil. The tree can’t lob its seeds onto fresh soil to grow. All it can do is offer a little sweetness as a bribe for you to do it.

You, white blood cell, you.

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You’re floating in outer space, wearing a lab coat. You’re as big as the sun. In front of you is a twinkling blue-green planet, what appears to be some sort of growth smeared like a skin around the hard rock. Lean down and cut a microscopic cross-section off the growth’s skin. Under your microscope, these cells –such differing sizes and shapes; oak trees and oysters and caribou-- become transparent silhouettes dotted with the blobs of organs inside each membrane.

Looking at each cell, you think only in terms of overall purpose, how it helps the planetary organism survive, just as you would when staring at a lung cell or brain cell. You don’t imagine individual struggles. You think this cell makes oxygen or this cell cleans the water or this one enriches the soil.

Collectively let’s call this uber-body not Gaia (such a cold distancing name). Let’s call it Janet.

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Salmon are one of the few cells Janet has that can pump the protein created in the oceans back into the forest. There’ve been studies showing without Pacific salmon swimming far upriver to die by the tonnage --their flesh feeding both local carnivores and the soil-- everything from the bears to the redwoods decline. Just as you require white blood cells, Janet requires this pumping of protein.

Imagine the pleasure of biting into a peach; magnify it. Imagine the drive to have sex; magnify it. For a salmon, the action of swimming upstream, beating its body to death on rocks along the way, must be sprinkled somehow with such intense pleasure that overall it feels better than anything else, including just floating lazily in the water, its heart continuing to beat for a few weeks longer.

Having had kids, I can imagine the pleasure of that exhaustion. When my youngest screams out in the middle of the night, I bolt out of bed, my head befuddled, my heart slamming in my chest. This part, this part is pain. Still I run to him, scoop his little body tight to mine, feel him comforted. Feel myself comforted. Oxytocin –the hormone of love and attachment-- pumping through my blood. The pleasure is intense.

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The scientists are beginning to look at Janet as a whole, to discuss her in their dry roundabout way. They’ve begun to step past their exclusive obsession with Darwin as he observes a single finch, writing his careful notes about competition. Raising their eyes to include the forest and sky and water beyond, they’re starting to study the interrelated system. They’ve come up with all sorts of new terminology: biogeochemistry, carbon cycling, trophic interactions. They discuss biological pumps moving nutrients around. Walking it, swimming it, flying it to where it needs to go.

That same basic research with cougars has been repeated with elephants, wolves, spiders and others. Without each of these species, the diversity and/or number of surrounding plants have decreased, the system as a whole less successful.

For after all, plants are the point. They are Janet’s stomach. Plants suck energy into the system, knit sunlight and carbon dioxide into flesh. Every cell in your body as well as everything on your dinner plate is made from that carbon, manufactured originally by plants. Every breath you take, every biological movement you’ve ever seen –from a parrot’s yawn to an amoeba’s creep-- is parasitized off plants. The energy they captured in the form of flesh just gets passed from life-form to life-form. The cow eats the grass, the human eats the cow, bacteria eat the human.

The more plants there are, the better we’re all doing. The more carbon they suck out of the atmosphere, the more energy there is in the system, the more elephants and geckos and fungi there are, the more Janet. Forget that religion term-paper you struggled with in college, those late-night insomnia episodes where you wondered if your dad was right and you should have been a dentist. Let your eyes drift past the cougar on the branch, to survey the thick trees all around her, the butterflies flapping past, the birds calling. This is the point.

This is why we humans love eating watermelons and raspberries, spitting the seeds far and wide or depositing them the next day in a steaming pile of rich compost.

Well, at least that’s how we used to deposit them, until we invented the concept and mechanisms of waste, something so alien to Janet. The watermelon seeds get spat now onto a plate, then scraped into an impermeable plastic bag. The raspberry seeds that miraculously survive our intestines drown in the giant vat of a sewage treatment plant.

Fascinated with our own inventiveness, we’ve forgotten the point of life.

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Looking at your car, normally you see a vehicle to get you to your meeting on time and to pick up your groceries. You notice the detailing and that scratch on the fender.

Examine it from Janet’s point of view. She looks at this car and sees nothing but a motor to pump out carbon.

Out the tailpipe what we are emitting is the life force, unknitting the carbon fabric, doing the reverse of what Janet has been working toward for three billion years now. We are transferring Janet’s stored biological energy into atmospheric energy: rising wind and drought. The scientists know the more CO2 there is in the air, the less life can exist on the planet. Carrying capacity, they call it. Pressing down on the gas pedal, we are squeezing the life out of polar bears and plankton in order to create more Hurricane Katrinas.

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I have a compost heap. Creating compost takes time. It’s not the simplest thing. I have to dump the food waste in the kitchen container, then when it’s full, take it outside and throw it on the heap. During the summer, the container attracts fruit flies no matter how often I wash it. Still, I get pleasure in turning the compost. I dig the pitchfork in, feel my shoulders creak. There’s the rich smell of earth, the sudden clumps of earthworms. If I’d dumped all this waste into a garbage bag, it would decompose without air, the anaerobic bacteria creating methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Instead I am knitting that carbon into earth, creating hundreds of pounds of rich soil each year, something that helps plants grow. Pushing a wheelbarrow full of this life, this carbon, out into my garden and spreading it around, raking Janet back into the ground, I hum to myself, feel the warm sun on my face.

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Remember that list of what you might think about in your final moment before you die. You are far from that hospital bed, still very much alive, but you are harried and tired by modern human life, don’t have time to eat well or exercise, much less hang with friends. Your child needs braces; your boss has mentioned downsizing. Your doctor is concerned about your last check-up. His voice is low and serious.

It’s so easy to misplace the list. After a while you aren’t even sure when you last saw it.

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Given the way our society currently functions --the vast population, the lifestyle props we believe our happiness depends on-- it’s hard to imagine what role humanity should have on the planet and how to move toward it. This is the knotty problem we all need to start to figure out. Now.

I can tell you the first few steps. We have to stop the frantic motor of our lives. Step out of the car onto the soil. Smell the air. Eat a peach. Taste its sweetness, jolts of Janet’s happiness zipping through our brains and hearts. Toss the pit onto some rich-looking earth. Toss thousands of seeds out there, millions. Watch the plants grow, eating carbon. Knitting life and our happiness back together.