The Weight of Things
“Grasses so tall that they can conceal elephants..”
This line from one of the documentary series ‘Our Planet’ leaped out at me as if saying, “Stop binge-watching me and wake up before it is too late.” It hit me hard not because I love watching elephants but because it brought to light my own ignorance in searching for a better world. I was looking for a better world, imagining that I don’t live in it already. Like a cat chasing a mouse, I have been chasing something that I thought was external or an object I would acquire in the future. This “acquisition of a better world” has only added to the problem. My ignorance is the concealed elephant that I have finally come face to face with. I realize today that I am already on the planet that becomes good, bad, and ugly based on what I choose to acquire and what I choose to forego. What an oxymoron this is, and I, such a moron, for not seeing this simple equation of balance that ensures that our natural systems run smoothly only when I learn to live well. It is a circular economy, and I need to partake in its health. As a race, we pride ourselves on becoming more intelligent thanks to science and technology. But this intelligence will be artificial and short-lived if a human layer of introspection is not added. In trying to automate every part of the planet, we are giving up control on how progress has to be in sync with a system that works towards reasoning why we are suffering today and finding ways to alleviate it.
I have spent the last few months mostly indoors staring at all things I have accumulated and wondering why? The things that I have accumulated have been staring back at me with no condolences. My cat, in turn, has been staring back at me with absolute disinterest. Sometimes I mistake her stares for the weight of my questions, but all she wants is fish. Once I feed her fish, she will assist me. But she prefers a nap after that.
After many naps, we decided to ask these things lying around the house “why do you exist”?
An old Cambodian saying goes like this, “If you put a spoon in a river, it will sink because of its weight. It would go to the bottom and stay there. But a flower is light. If we put it on water, it would float and be carried away gently away with water flow. It wouldn’t sink.” What this tells me is that it is our choices that make our life on this planet heavy or light. This is not a philosophical side note from an ‘Indian stranded in Cambodia’ but the elephant's actual weight that is beginning to stir. And as my Khmer landlady, Sophea, reminded me while tending to the food she is trying to grow in her kitchen garden - Reduce, recycle and grow. To cleanse the planet in a way that it lasts, one needs to make small changes gradually. An upcoming school of thought called Biomimicry has a simple solution to this conflict. It literally means to ‘imitation of the living’ and takes inspiration from natural selection solutions adopted by nature and translates to human engineering principles. The products, policies, and systems that come to life through this mirroring of the planet, sit more in harmony with the natural course of things and at the same time fair well as per the ‘benchmarks of efficiency’ we have set ourselves against. In many instances, these benchmarks need to be refined, and this requires a new way of observing, assessing, and valuing nature.
For example, architecture inspired by termite mounds to design passive cooling structures can greatly reduce our energy costs. Japanese bullet trains that mimic the shape of birds run faster by design, which can help conserve our energy systems. This is the right kind of weight, a weight designed to exist in symbiosis with something that makes life light.