The American Habitat: From Sea to Shining Sea

“Blowing’ in the Wind” is a new column from America.  The reference to the Bob Dylan song dates me, my college anti-war activism, and a life spent trying to think and act compassionately and progressively in a nation increasingly selfish and conservative.

I’ll be writing about American cultural and political issues (like money, power, health care, sex and gender, nature, arts, religion, sports) from my experience and outlook: progressive, somewhat hopeful, white, wife and mother, beachcomber, reader, feminist, amateur naturalist and medievalist.  

I encourage you to read the linked blog “Political Animal” by Ed Kilgore, for a daily, more insider look at American politics.

Thanks to Dale for the invitation to write.  I hope readers will respond and make suggestions.

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I am a weekly volunteer guide at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Standing in front of the two story Kelp Forest Habitat exhibit filled with giant waving seaweed and hundreds of fish and invertebrates, I remind visitors that all our exhibits are presented as habitats, that is, neighborhoods, communities, not just one species. And that we all live in a habitat; we all want to find a place to live, as do these rockfish and sea stars and the kelp itself, where we can find dinner, not be someone else’s dinner, and be part of a family. 

I live in the habitat called America.  This is a big neighborhood with lots of inhabitants.  We worry and disagree about finding dinner (jobs, taxes, oil), not being someone else’s dinner (gun violence, bullying, the American military complex), and being part of the family (immigration, public schools, religion) – just to name a few.  Living in habitats is all about adaptation, improving the odds.  I fear my nation and fellow citizens are not adapting very well to new conditions.  Climate change is but one new condition that affects both me and my sea star friends, and we’re both in trouble. This column will look at our cultural adaptations as well.

At the Kelp Forest Feeding Program, as I wait for the diver to jump into the tank with food, I describe how this exhibit recreates the lush kelp forest directly off our coast, like the rain forest underwater.  I say, to a largely tourist audience that has probably already seen the giant sequoias,  “We in California are proud of our redwood forests and think of them as (hopefully) a symbol of who we are: old and wise and impressive.  (I add an ironic grin here.) So too might our kelp forest symbolize us: rich, diverse, productive.  Animals and plants love living here – there’s bounty, safety and community.”

The US is, I think more a forest of kelp than redwood; rich, productive and diverse, but not so very old or always wise.  We Americans are also big, optimistic, ignorant, entrepreneurial, angry, religious, musical – and many other adjectives I will try in these pages to describe. 

When I finish my inspiring talk at the Kelp Forest about California, I probably should then take visitors over to the Garbage Exhibit, where we show how marine animals are so adaptive they can find food, safety and family even in a discarded rusty can.  The star of that exhibit is a fish called the sarcastic fringehead.

Sarcastic Fringehead (http://animal.discovery.com)Sarcastic fringehead.  That’s not a bad description of Californians, if not Americans.  Each state selects a “state marine fish.”   Ours is the garibaldi, a small bright orange fish, the color echoing the color of Garibaldi’s soldiers’ uniforms; all our state things are golden – Golden Gate, etc.  But maybe we should change it to the sarcastic fringehead.  We are certainly sarcastic, if that means cynical, superior, proud that we own more and know more than anyone else.  And fringehead?  Just walk down the Castro or Telegraph Avenue or watch American Idol.

America is a diverse forest.  No way can we generalize about what is distinctively American about our politics, culture, religion, sports, arts.  There are too many of us and we are too different.  It’s sort of amazing that we get along at all in this vast habitat.  People ask all the time at the Aquarium why the fish don’t eat each other.  We have two tricks: we feed them well, and we don’t put predator and prey in the same exhibit.  (For example, you have to have sea otters to have a kelp forest; they eat the kelp eaters, abalone and sea urchin.  We tried putting sea otters in there to make it natural, but it became a sea otter exhibit in a matter of hours – they eat a quarter of their weight every day.  They would be a good American mascot also, hugely voracious.)

For a long time those were our two American survival habits also – produce and consume a lot (feed them well) and segregate a lot (separate predator and prey.)  Encourage people to buy buy buy, eat eat eat.  And build lots of walls, prisons, gated communities.  It sort of worked.  For some people.  But the American habitat is changing too, and how are we adapting?  We simply can’t go on consuming so much and building so many walls.

Some of my thoughts on the American landscape/character:  (I‘ll be writing on these in more detail in weeks to come.)  We are:

Individualistic – The Lone Ranger, Go West young man.  No one can tell me what to think, believe, do.  (Of course we are really a blind school of fish, to continue to marine metaphor, but we deny it.)

Materialistic – Our economy is all about consuming more and more, and so we define ourselves by what we own.  It’s tax time here so we are all reviewing our income and expenses from last year and trying to figure out how to give the least amount possible to the government, which the top 1% are very good at.  The income gap is huge.

Big – We are a vast country, big open spaces. We take up a lot of room, and we are fat fat fat.  Those tourists in the Aquarium; I can usually tell the Europeans – thin, almost angular.  The Americans don’t dress as well and are bigger.  They often need something more to put in their mouth – they walk around with coffee or water in a single use plastic bottle (looking thoughtfully at the exhibit about reducing use of plastics) or pushing their kids around in a Sherman tank sized stroller.

Young - Well, we’ve got a lot of old people. I am a baby boomer, what we call the generation born after the World War II.  We are all about to retire at 65, get Medicare and Social Security and tax it to death, like a boat swamped by too much weight.  There is great fear here that all those fat old Americans will bankrupt our only so-called socialist safety net.  But folks over 65 are only 13% of the population.   Under 30 is almost 45%.  And we are not just young demographically, but we are a very young country historically.  Few old buildings.   Sort of shallow in our sense of tradition and heritage and ancestry. Like adolescents we care little about the past and think the future is unlimited.   That’s so 2011, we say with scorn. 

Diverse and Segregated -  With my kids grown and gone, I hardly spend any time with anyone under 50.  Now there is incredible diversity, ethnic, racial and class, in our urban centers (and over 80% of Americans live in cities or suburbs – the iconic small rural American town and voter is a myth of the Republican party.)  But they are also very segregated; race, class, age all hang only with their kind.  We’ve created a very unnatural American kelp forest, with all the sea stars on one side and anemones on the other and they never interact. My retired husband went to a mall in San Jose and was the only person he saw who was white and over 50. 

OK - this is getting depressing.  We are also practical and entrepreneurial, open to sort of crazy ideas, risk takers like Steve Jobs and George Gershwin and Oprah Winfrey.  Our ancestors and founders were enterprising younger siblings or law breakers who came here to make a new start. (Many early settlers like my ancestors came not for freedom of religion but freedom from jail.)  My writing partner, the local Zen Buddhist priest suggested this adjective.  A native Californian, she’s rebuilding her back yard garden and restoring old raised boxes that are falling apart.  Rejecting the suggestion that she needed a carpenter, she shored them up by wrapping them tight with duct tape.  She says, “I don’t care what they look like, what the neighbors will say, I think it will work.  I love duct tape.”  Duct tape is pretty American.

Musical - We have great music.  The title of this column came from a list of great American songs of just the 20^th century that our National Public Radio put together at the end of the last century.  Give my Regards to Broadway.  Take the A Train.  What’s Going on?  Summertime.  When I was a teeny bopper listening to the Beatles and Motown, my parents, who grew up on Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra said, “Where is the melody and why are they yelling?”  When my kids were teens listening to Wyclef Jean and Nirvana I asked the same thing.  We do like to turn it up loud.  But I love our music.  Even at the Aquarium our new jellyfish exhibit is modeled on the psychedelic music and art of the 60’s.  And we play surf guitar music in front of the kelp forest.  How hip is that?

Religious – 90% of us say we believe in God and 40% of us report that we attended worship in the past week. (Stats of actual attendance suggest that’s an exaggeration, another American characteristic.) Talk about diversity and confusion: over 500 different denominations, more Muslims that Episcopalians, a Constitutional wall of separation between church and state and yet “In God We Trust” on our money. 

Violent and Criminal - Well I guess I’ll end my list here. Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world (next closest are Russia and South Africa.) This month the Trayvon Martin murder in Florida has dominated the news.  What seems like a rogue Neighborhood Watch volunteer claimed self-defense in killing an unarmed black teen on his way home from buying iced tea and Skittles.  This kind of things happens regularly here; only weeks of pressure by the family, media, religious leaders brought this case out of burial in the police statistics. Our movies and TV and video games, which we export around the world, are incredibly bloody and cruel.  Studies show watching them makes kids and adults more violent.  22% of Americans own a gun. (Confession – I don’t go to violent movies and I hardly watch any TV at all because of the violence and the inanity.  My friend the Buddhist priest called me on that, she said I was avoiding reality.  That would be American too.)

So that’s some of the wind that’s blowin’ around America.  We’ll keep talking about it.  It’s easy for me to get frustrated or depressed about it, our politics, our ignorance, our isolationism, our imperialism both military and cultural. 

And yet I am hopeful about my nation.  I identify with that girl in the Paul Simon song, “There is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline.  And sometimes when I’m falling, flying or tumbling in turmoil I say ‘Oh, so this is what she means, she means we’re bouncing into Graceland.’”

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Comments

[Kathy Whilden]

Great essay Deborah.