Size is physical, but it’s also a mental construct that we grapple with as well. The problem is that our brains are not very good at processing how immensely big or small things can get once they are beyond our perceptual limits. As the English writer Helen Macdonald has observed, “We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change is too large to imagine.”
We don’t tend to think of our electricity as being made fresh to order, but it is. It’s made the moment we request it. When you charge your phone, as Gretchen Bakke writes in her book The Grid, the power you use is “so fresh, that less than a minute ago, if you live in wind farm territory, that electricity was a fast-moving gust of air. And if you live in coal country, it was a blast of pulverized coal dust being blown into a ‘firebox’—a huge, industrial, flash-combusting furnace. If you live in hydro country it was a waiting rush of water dammed up by a massive concrete wall. Picture it. The electricity you are using right now was, about a second ago, a drop of water.”
We like to think the water we drink is fresh, but scientists believe that water is older than the sun. When you next take a sip, take a moment to consider that the water you are drinking has been a cloud, an iceberg, and a wave, that it has drifted and meandered through canyons at the bottom of the sea. Before entering your body, it has spent, on average, three thousand years in the ocean and just over a week in the sky before falling as rain.
Our first blind spot is that reality is not human-sized. What we call reality is only a tiny sliver in the grand scheme of things.
Our second blind spot is that we cannot see how intimately connected we are to the universe around us. That in reality, as astronomer Michelle Thaller has observed, “We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky.”
Privately, the world’s largest food company, Nestlé, has calculated that if everyone on Earth ate like the average American, the planet would have run out of fresh water fifteen years ago.
With food, there are things we’d rather not know. And here’s the rub: we know we’d rather not know. Scientists have found that our brains will shut down information that doesn’t make us feel good, or that causes us stress, which is one reason why we tune out suffering. But as Margaret Heffernan writes in her book Willful Blindness, “Not knowing, that’s fine. Ignorance is easy. Knowing can be hard but at least it is real, it is the truth. The worst is when you don’t want to know because then it must be something very bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so much difficulty knowing.”
We tend to forget that on the scale of living things we are massive. To us, reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95 percent of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.
As human beings, we all live inside another kind of bubble as well: a psychological one that shapes our ideas about the everyday world. This is our “reality bubble.” Just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces “out there” that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with the business of our lives.
In the same way [as sound], electricity is a ripple effect. Driving through a city at dusk, you’ve likely seen the street lights come on all at once. That’s because the electricity doesn’t leave the switch and make its way down the street. As soon as you add one electron to the wire at one end, another will pop out the other end. That is, at the atomic scale, when the generator cranks the magnet over the copper coil, ripping electrons away from the copper atoms, the now “homeless” electrons have to go somewhere, and where they’ll go is over to the next available atom, joining its orbit. But in doing so, this will knock out the neighbouring atom’s electron, which then bumps over to the next atom, and so on.
Our inventions of the human clock and the manufacturing cycle—that rule our behaviour inside the reality bubble—have begun to wreak havoc with nature’s temporal cycle. Not only are we subject to the artificial beat of our own invented time but species throughout the plant and animal kingdoms are starting to feel this rupture as well. The changes around us are accelerating, and yet we have not even noticed that this fundamental break has to do with our own creation of time. Instead, as Bertrand Richard notes, faced with “climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread,” we do not slow down. Instead we do the exact opposite: we put the pedal to metal and increase our speed.
For most of history, if you held property it was assumed that what was above and below it was also yours; the space that “belonged” to you extended into infinity. The idea was based on a doctrine called ad coelum, which can be traced back to the thirteenth century. In essence, it declared, “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos,” which is Latin for “Whoever’s is the soil, it is theirs all the way to heaven and all the way to hell.” Pretty dramatic for real estate.
It is illegal to look too deeply at where our food comes from, and the same is true of our energy and waste systems. Businesses and governments can spy on us, but we are forbidden from spying on them, and in some cases even forbidden from openly recording a public protest.
We may think that ownership is the solution, but in many ways it’s the problem. And while ownership seems natural, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Evolution has crafted all kinds of other “natural” traits and behaviours that are now maladaptive, or even criminal. In fact, one way to define civilization is as the shared effort to mitigate the danger of evolved responses.
But there is another issue at the root of ownership. And that is, even if our species blindly believes it owns the world, that doesn’t mean it’s truly ours.
We are crushing our own spirits in the quest to own better things, to own more things, things that ironically we soon won’t want and will throw away. The worst part is, this dependence on acquiring objects tends to worsen when times are tough, because when we feel insecure, having something solid to cling to becomes a coping mechanism. Our possessions give us some semblance of control over the world. They give us power. We, the weak species of naked ape, did not rely on brute strength but rather on our brains to dominate. And we did it with our stuff. We became the masters of things. Things that made us stronger, faster, more powerful, better defended, more efficient, and more dangerous.