This is a photo I took at Belle Isle State Park in Detroit, Michigan, in 2020, and it brings to mind many aspects of connectivity. If you stop and think about it for a bit, a lot is going on here. But the first step is just that – stop and think. Aside from the visual symbolism, even the time it was exposed contributes. After all, it was exposed in June 2020, when most of the human-populated areas of the planet were experiencing a global pandemic brought on by a threat we can’t even see without technology.

For those unfamiliar with the area, the domed structure near the center is the Anna Scripps-Whitcomb Conservatory. It is a greenhouse / mini-ecosystem of its own, housing many exotic plants, from trees to cacti, and reliant on the stewards there to keep them healthy and alive. Outside the conservatory are gardens that attract and support insects, birds, and other wildlife. This is on an isolated island, with many different features and habitats, in a waterway modern humans call the Detroit River – the United States on one side, Canada on the other. Just off the end of this island, towards 7 o’clock, is a significant drinking water intake.

At the 10 o’clock position of the conservatory, there is some fairly extensive flooding, which is connected to high Great Lakes water levels at the time. On the river is a bulk freighter, just one of many that use the waterway for commerce, hauling Earth elements mined elsewhere daily. It uses fossil fuels to generate transfer energy to propulsion to move those elements. The skyline of Detroit is at the top border at 1 o’clock, but even its borders are permeable and arbitrarily drawn on the landscape.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

Alan Watts

Surrounding this relatively small sphere is an atmosphere that supports all life. The blue-green water, the island’s greenery, and the blue sky all look rather pleasant (disregarding the concrete). But, like all photographs, they are small representations of a specific area, a specific point in time, and a specific view. And, if I had the web programming smarts to allow you to take a finger and rotate this sphere downwards a bit to go south on the Detroit River (Up in the sphere photo), ala Google Earth, the picture could change quite dramatically. Approximately 8 miles (12.8 km) away is another island, which one could say has quite a bit of symbolic and visual contrast to the one above.

I can practically hear the “Eww”‘s through the screen. It is quite horrific, but also reality. The river in the top third of the photo here, the Rouge River, is one of the rivers that caught fire in the late ’60s, combined with a sequence of events, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring earlier in the decade, that finally caused enough outrage to lead to the formation of the first Earth Day and ultimately the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s.

While these seem like dramatically different photos of dramatically different landscapes, they, too, are connected in many ways. Someone could easily draw connections between the coke production and steel manufactured on this island and the steel structures of the conservatory on Belle Isle or the coal power plant (now shut down) providing electricity. Someone could also say it is a fairly heavy price to pay, one that never considered the connectivity of all these decisions to the planet itself.

I often wish it was as simple as picking one photo over the other. Recognition of these connections does take stopping to think for a bit. But even that is hindered by our collective ignorance of the time, our understanding of how things are connected, our understanding of consequences near and far, and our motivations. It CAN get better. That river does not catch fire now (at least that I am aware of), but the area still struggles with pollution and the consequences of more than a century of being blind to them.

We don’t have any perfect or ideal solutions to all of this, and we’ve wedged ourselves into quite a sticky pickle. We’ve become reliant and dependent on many luxuries and conveniences. of modern life and their associated high costs to the environment. But it is a bit sad if the actual limitations of understanding the connectivity of everything is that we advance at a pace of “well, at least the river doesn’t catch fire anymore.”

It is easy to want to think about the first photo. It is also easy to get sucked into the depression of the second. Both are islands wrongly thought of as being isolated in some way or another. But islands do not exist in complete isolation of each other, no more than one person, one backyard, one neighborhood, one city, one county, one state, one country, one continent. And as with this and every Earth Day, the more we stop and think about one planet, the sooner we can leave the burning rivers of the past behind.