By Adam Flake
In many ways, the motivations that lead me down this career path are not unique. I started off my pursuit of higher education with every intention of becoming a scientist. My passion for the mind and the brain lead me to cognitive science; my experiences in the lab made me realize that I enjoyed learning about science more than actually carrying out the experiments, collecting the data, and spending inordinate amounts of time analyzing the results. Since middle school, I have had a passion for creative writing and communicating ideas and science writing seemed like a perfect marriage of my two worlds in a time of uncertainty about my future. These are all true statements but they belie the core of my motivations.
The deeper reasons for my wandering down this path are more nuanced and philosophically driven, but also in a way simpler. My entire life I’ve been a day-dreamer, a space cadet, out-to-lunch so to say. My mind looks at the world through narratives and I am in essence a storyteller. I have a knack for parsing vast amounts of disparate information into a cogent coherent tapestry from which my worldview is composed. Communicating this quilt of ideas is what I’ve always done, with family, with friends, with anyone that will listen. So once the direct route of hard science didn’t fit, I was fairly certain I would eventually turn to writing and storytelling as a path forward. I just needed to figure out the kind of stories I wanted to tell.
In March of 2017 my senior year at Occidental College I went on a camping trip with friends to Castle Valley Utah. We arrived late, camped along the banks of the Colorado River in the shadow of the vermillion buttresses that define the area, and endured a brutally cold night before having the opportunity to explore the area. The next day we woke up to one of the most captivating environments on planet earth. Some of us cooked breakfast and wandered by the banks of the river, others simply enjoyed the views. For my friend Eric and I the path was clear and laid out, we were going hiking, just the two of us like always. As far into the valley as our food and water would take us. Our goal was to reach the towering sand and limestone monoliths on the other side. After ten miles or so where the mesas appeared virtually no closer than when we had started it became clear our goal was overly ambitious even for hardcore hikers like ourselves, but we had gotten the experience that we were seeking. To be thoroughly in the thick of a completely wild place far from any signs of human activity. Except for one sign, an oddly placed picnic table in the middle of the valley seemingly existing in this particular location for no discernible reason. This stray picnic spot seemed like the perfect place to stop look around and prepare for the trek back to camp. So we sat down not talking, words are always few and far between when Eric and I hike, it’s the reason we don’t typically invite company along with us. So in the heat of the sun in the middle of surreally beautiful landscapes, my mind began to wander and see the valley through my natural perceptual prism of storytelling. I started laying down the foundations, world-building, imagining the valley as the shallow sea it once was, slowly eroding, draining and depositing, ocean currents gradually being replaced by rivers, wind, and rain, the coral reefs decaying, fossilizing, being replaced by desert fauna. It became clear that the central theme of this tale was entropy, this valley standing strong in the face of time and incredible forces only to be chipped away by the chaos one piece at a time. On the macro scale with the massive soft stone structures whittling down piece by piece, but standing until gravity breaks their resistance, and on the micro-scale with each shrub and cacti twisting upwards in organized patterns desperately trying to cling to that order in the face of chaos oblivious to the inevitability of decay. As one dries out and crumbles several sprout and resist in its place. This thought lead me to others, and I began to do what I always do stitch one narrative thread into another. I began to think about anthropomorphic climate change, and how at its core it is an entropic problem. Our species obsession with achieving further levels of organization and mastery over the forces of chaos that define our lives, has slowly over the course of millennia and quickly over centuries and decades created the ultimate problem of chaos and complexity. Climate change is our very nature as living organisms turned against us, our struggle against the entropy of the universe cruelly and ironically manifested in a problem with so many facets no single person can conceptualize it in its entirety. Its chaos runs fundamentally against the ways in which we have evolved to resist and to solve problems. The tools and technologies we’ve created to protect ourselves from our environment in the short term are making it uninhabitable in the long run. As a student of cognitive science, I know that all human behavior, organization, and structure originates in the brain, and so it dawned on me that this existential issue was a cognitive one. This was my eureka moment (even though it took a year or two to realize it) this was the story I wanted to tell. How our brains intersect with the climate and conspire with the entropic universe to demolish our ordered lives. It’s a tale of epic proportions, almost religious in scale and importance, in the span of a few short generations this ecosystem, our ecosystem has been put in jeopardy, and it is up to a single generation (mine) to solve it. Yet in order to do so, we must fundamentally change the way we think and orient ourselves towards the world.
This is the truest reason I’ve decided to become a science writer, because in the end I believe that this is the foundational problem of our species, and I cannot bear the inevitable thought of having done too little, too late. I don’t know how to solve the social, political, technological, or even cognitive challenges climate change presents, all I know is how to tell stories, and I think it’s about time people heard this one.
Telos 