Despite the linearity of books, stories are not always defined by the beginning and the from which they are told. Often the writer deliberately chooses a point in time at which to begin (because the story has to start somewhere), but this is not the only beginning, and the end is not the only end. Beginnings and ends are open to interpretation, as are stories. A life is shaped and defined by beginnings: in the form of events, experiences, and people; and in turn, how these relate to a person’s past and set of values. Sometimes these beginnings have the power to change the entire course of one’s life. The beginning to a story has power in the same way: where a story starts can shape the entire meaning of it.
I could start my story by writing about the time I tried to do a solo backpacking trip and it was a laughable disaster, or I could start telling the story of the “Tracy Chapman phase” of my life, or I could start by telling the story about the time my friend and I were hitchhiking and she almost died due to a freak accident. All of these would be great stories to tell, and would give a glimpse into the experiences and events that have shaped the person that I am. Each would give a sense of my values, or of my stubborness and my occasional recklessness (or love of adventure even if it means sacrificing some degree of safety), or of an attempt at feeling empowered in the face of struggle. But none of them would describe how I came to be an environmentalist, and then a writer. Both of these things were long engrained in my being, but it wasn’t until my 19th year that I had experiences that put them together and that I understood with clarity where I would like to direct the path of my story. As a child, my parents molded me into a diehard environmentalist without ever once telling me that I was an environmentalist. My accepted norms included things like cloth diapers, compost bins, bulk foods, homemade clothing, and solar panels. My parents raised me to live simply and to care for the earth. Early education only enhanced these values. It wasn’t until high school that I began to understand that my childhood was… unique. And even then, I didn’t fully understand the implications of being raised as a barefooted, vegetarian, hippie child. High school was also a sheltering place; it was a small public school surrounded by redwoods, where half the students had been raised in a similar manner, and the other half were raised in a community where they were exposed to people raised in this manner. Needless to say, it was a shock to move to Santa Barbara for university. This was for two reasons: first, I only understood environmental awareness in an informal sense. I started to take courses that taught me the science and theory behind everything, and suddenly my values became far more complex. It was no longer as crystal clear as, “how do you know that climate change is occuring? I just do, its so obvious.” It was fascinating to begin devouring this knowledge, but it was also exhausting and slightly depressing. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it and I felt like I needed to know in order to make a difference. This uncertainty about a direction, particularly one that was supposed to change the world, was the first thing to plant a seed of doubt in my environmentalism. Second, the nature-based simplicity of my childhood was drastically contrasted by the respective childhoods of my roommates who came from semi-conservative families in Southern California. Not only did this exposure show me a whole different world of thought, but it made me question the one I was raised in; it made me question the sanity of my parents, the parents who gave me a name like Joyful Rose-Fairwind Zendran-Kavanaugh. Being at a malleable age, I allowed the contrast to seep into my inner psyche, gnawing at the minimal confidence I had to begin with. Rather than growing into myself and embracing the environmentalist in me, I tried to blend into the crowd. I wouldn’t let the fact that I was incessant about recycling be the thing that came between me and my roommates. And this planted the second seed of doubt. So while I initially signed up for an Environmental Studies degree, I spent a lot of time questioning that path, for both these academic and social reasons. I explored nearly every other major, including Psychology, Political Science, English, Global Studies, and even Economics (which was ridiculous because numbers never made sense to me). Even after I moved in with a group of like-minded people my Sophomore year, I was still at a loss for what direction to go. Without the social considerations, the nagging voice inside my head just started saying louder that I was incapable of ‘making a difference.’ Direction seemed like something I needed, even though people kept telling me that I still had time to figure it out. So in a desperate quest for inspiration, I signed myself up for a study abroad program, thinking perhaps this would help. They always tell you that your study abroad experience might be one of the best experiences you ever have, but I certainly didn’t go into it expecting a grand personal transformation. It turns out, I’m a walking cliche, in the best way possible. I spent six months abroad studying New Zealand politics, pretty certain that if someone put a gun to my head and made me choose, that I would like to pursue a career in Environmental Policy. I spent six months where my weekends consisted of backpacking, swimming in unbearably cold water, and letting go of regular comforts to the demands of nature. I was filling notebook after notebook with my thoughts and experiences. The “study” abroad part was hardly my main focus. I was experiencing a million amazing people, places, and recreations in this breathtaking environment where the scenery seemed to be impersonating a painting, because how could something so beautiful be real? But it was real, because I had climbed those mountains just to make sure. I became a voracious and indulgent human, devouring every opportunity and experience (good and bad) that would cross my path. Sometimes I even threw myself in the path of experience instead of letting it come to me. I filled myself to the brim with this new idea of life, and it left room for nothing else. There was no room for the parts of me that were so worried about blending in with the crowd, or the parts of me that doubted my environmentalism, or the parts of me that questioned whether I was capable of ‘making a difference’ in a hopeless mess of environmental issues. Somehow in that reckless abandonment of who I had been trying to be (or trying not to be), I found myself – the fundamental, inherent parts that I hadn’t been paying attention to. This didn’t happen in the traditional, empowering, eye-opening kind of way. It took a lot of losing to feel like I had found anything. I got lost in the mountains (insert disaster solo backpacking trip here). I lost my feet to blisters and hiked four miles, barefoot, in the rain (on a separate backpacking trip). I lost motivation for school, being so caught up in everything else. And I lost my intention more than once, seeming to forget that I had come to find some kind of inspiration and direction. But in between the losing, there was Dunedin, the city that was my home. There were the mountains and the winding two lane highways. There were the beaches made up of tiny sea shells. There was the stunning flora, and the lack of native fauna. There were adventures with great friends, and there were the nights when we weren’t adventuring that we spent playing cards and drinking good beer. There was great coffee. And there was an overarching sense of freedom that comes from being alone in a place like that. In my freedom, I found a feeling, or perhaps lack of feeling, that can only be experienced in the wild and natural world. It’s a feeling of purity in the mind that makes room for what’s important, for an inner voice, and for intuition. The feeling came from the exhilaration of hiking, or skydiving, or jumping into ice cold water, but it also came from walking on the beach or in the woods, accompanied by a few breaths of that wild air. It came from a simple stillness in a world that is not filled with the buzz of technology. In my life at home, I often forgot the importance of a moment in the wild – or perhaps I simply denied the importance in my attempt to deny my abnormal childhood. New Zealand adamantly reminded me, with its pure and painting-like landscapes. The experience of this feeling – and its connection to my past, to the fundamental being inside of me – is what inspired notebooks full of writing. I discovered a slight rush for putting together words and creating sentences in just the right way, in order to try to describe that feeling in my writing. Not a rush like skydiving or bungy jumping, but a kind of rush all the same. Words can sometimes fit together like puzzle pieces in a way that is enough to make someone stop and think; if I could write words like these, perhaps I could use them to communicate to people in a way that might inspire them. I had never seen myself as a writer, but as soon as I started writing for myself and not for others, I realized I wanted to write for others (just not in the academic setting that I was too familiar with). The writing gave me a toolkit, a means through which to inspire environmental values. And though I know that a person’s habits or values will not be changed by a single sentence, it is a point from which to start. It’s amazing how an education outside of the traditional classroom setting can change everything. Six months where I was open to anything and everything, and I found the beginning to a path and a direction inside myself that had been there all along: the environmental advocate, and then the writer. My stubborn doubt for my own beliefs and values allowed me the freedom to define them as my own, and I was able to let of of them as something that was imposed on me by my family. Perhaps with time, I could have figured it out in the safety of my own ‘backyard’ in Santa Barbara, but that wouldn’t have made a very good story to tell.
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My full name is Joyful Rose-Fairwind Zendran-Kavanaugh. From that, many of you can safely assume that my parents were full-blown hippies, so I grew up loving tofu and other meat substitutes, learning how to compost, watching bees pollinate our garden, and developing an understanding of the natural world. As a child, I believed that the values and practices that my parents had instilled in me were customary. And it didn’t become clear to me just how unique my childhood had been until I left the small northern California town I had grown up in and moved here, to Santa Barbara. One of my first roommates consistently threw plastic water bottles and other recyclables in the trash bin, and later on admitted that she only started recycling in my presence just to make me happy. The fact that I had been a vegetarian until age 13, and hadn’t tried a hamburger until 17 was an entirely foreign concept to most of the people I met in my dorm freshman year. These ideas that had seemed so inherent and obvious to me at home were seen as “inconveniencing” and “eccentric” to many people I met. I started thinking about the importance of a person’s awareness of their impact on the environment and how it is difficult to encourage people to change their actions when they don’t understand this connection. I soon discovered Sprout Up, an organization started by a UCSB student that is dedicated to teaching local 1st and 2nd graders about environmental science and sustainability, and signed up right away. Volunteering gave me the opportunity to see how children responded to learning about the environment around them in a fun and creative way, by “showing, not telling” the students. After seeing kids who had no prior knowledge of environmental issues get excited about what compost looked like after a couple weeks, or getting to bring home their own reusable bag, or planting a seed and watching it sprout, I became convinced that a very effective way to inspire environmental value and awareness is to introduce these ideas to children at a young age, when they are forming opinions about the world around them. I believe that an institutionalized environmental education system could solve issues that we have about lack of environmental awareness. The same way that it is required that students learn history and biology, students should be required to learn about the complex interactions between human and natural systems, leading to informed and responsible decision making about their lives and the environment. Children who are curious about nature and learn how environmental systems work can lead to adults who have a baseline understanding of how their actions impact the environment, in turn resulting in more conscientious citizens . Teaching these values to children now could also increase environmental awareness amongst parents who did not learn it in school, as their children will take home the information and share it with their parents, a concept known as bi-directional influence. Ideally, this would create a cycle of learning, and generate necessary change in our societal norms. It should not only be the children who are raised by “hippies” and environmental studies majors who are given the opportunity to recognize and change the way we interact with our environment. |