where you can get your energy back. From that, people really come to respect it, to feel the awe of it and under- stand the importance of it, not only in their daily lives to get those moments of tranquility but also its importance really long term. We need nature to thrive. For my work, having been a scientist and a chief scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I’ve been able to look at the data more than anyone. I look at how climate change is affecting the earth, how it’s affecting regional communities and regional ecosystems, and how I expect that to play out. I almost have too much information. What motivates me going forward is knowing what those futures are and trying to move us as a species, as a society, or as a business, towards those parts of the future that I want to see. I find a lot of calmness by going into nature to have those times of reflection, to feel that awe of the amazingness, be it of butterflies when I’m walking in the prairie in the summer, or if I’m along the ocean and I see a coral reef that is being restored and is coming back from a bleaching event that has recently happened. It’s seeing the amazing aspects of nature that make it all worth fighting for, and give me that power to continue. that volume is to envision about 7 million elephants of plastic going into the ocean every single year. So, while natural systems may appear vast and non movable, those systems are changing in response to us. Things are accu- mulating over time. They can also compound, and over time humans are having an impact. How does our understanding of changes that occur to a place during our lifespan nourish the wonder we feel as a part of nature, or discourage us from participating in its protection? There are some places of wonder where the earth seems so big, so vast compared to humans, that we couldn’t possibly have an impact on it. But over time, since our impacts collect and compound, we actually see that we have the ability to reshape nature. I think this broad awe of nature and its vastness, and seeing some of those impacts as they start to occur, makes us want to protect nature, makes us want to make sure that we preserve that for generations to come. And some of those changes, they can be reversible. For instance, rewilding farmland that is left fallow after it’s been used, you can actually have farmland return to grasses or prairies or even forests on longer time scales. But there are some changes that once they are lost, they won’t come back. Once we see glaciers removed by global warming, we will not see those glaciers come back without a major large cycle of cooling around the entire globe. Once we also have biodiversity loss, we don’t get that ecology back. I think that understanding that some things are fundamentally changed by human influence makes us want to protect it that much more. Art plays a really important part in helping us grasp our goal as humans in nature. It helps us see the beauty of things and not take nature for granted. It also helps us understand our relationship to nature. Art, along with science, allows us to know what our part in nature is, and to know our quantifiable impacts. But then also to respect it, to be able to want to have it into the future, to preserve it, and then to really be a part of it. People find it calming to be in nature. It is where you can think clearly, where you can rejuvenate, in terms of being creative in one’s own sphere. I think that’s why scientists really gravitate towards art and why artists are intrigued by different aspects of science, particularly the science of the natural world. Why is it important for us to grasp the impact of time on the earth’s systems? First, we have to understand that earth systems vary naturally. As you explore geologic time and longer time periods, you see that Earth changes gradually over many, many millennia. However, humans can have an impact during our short time here and the speed of that impact may be immediate or it may be decades before we see the impact. For example, glaciers covered the northern United States during the last glaciation 20,000 years ago, and then slowly started to recede. We have regions of glaciers in Montana and Glacier National Park and in California and in parts of the Pacific Northwest and people thought that they were these immovable objects — that they were always there. During the summers they would melt a little bit but then during the winters they would have more snowfall and they would grow again, staying roughly the same size over most of human time. However, in recent decades those glaciers have been melting in the summer much more than the snow that is falling in the winter, and so they’re starting to retreat. And, in some places, they’re disappearing. In Europe, we’re seeing this as well. Over the last 25 years, glaciers in the Alps have lost over 40% of their volume. So, we’re starting to see real impacts in a very short human time scale of our impact on the earth’s systems. We’ve also seen this in the ocean. You can see little pieces of trash from the stream going into the ocean along the shoreline. And you think that the ocean is so vast, this little piece of plastic or these little trash pieces can’t accumulate? But actually over human time, we’ve now seen the impact. The trash that is going into the ocean is accumulating. There’s over 5 trillion pieces of plastic now floating at the ocean surface, with 10 to 24 million metric tons of plastic going into the ocean every single year. Another way to imagine 103
