Let’s talk for a moment about connectivity, about paying attention to the way systems, ecologies, species, habitats and environments engage along the way to some common endpoint, some mutually agreed-to goal. Let’s also include curiosity, awe, wonder, and reverence. 

I’ve been speaking about this theme for years through the nearly 300 episodes of my Podcast, The Natural Curiosity Project. Curiosity matters: I often refer to it as our sixth sense, the power that allows us to make sense of the multifaceted world in which we collectively operate—‘us’ being humans and the other nine million or so species that we share the planet with. 

I hear this all the time, the chanted meme: “We’re all connected.” And while that observation is true for all kinds of reasons, there’s a piece missing, and it’s a big one that no one in the environmental community seems to have really latched onto. So, let me take a swing at it.

I spent my 43-year professional career in the global telecommunications industry, as a consulting analyst. I’ve written dozens of books and hundreds of articles; I’ve taught countless courses on related topics; I’ve given keynotes and workshops all over the world (four million miles on United is the ugly proof); and I’ve consulted with many companies on the best way to get the most return for their technology investment. 

Telecom is complicated stuff, as anyone who has tried to configure their own router knows. But two concepts always float to the top when it comes to understanding how it all works: connectivity and interoperability. They are not the same, but they are equally crucial. And yes, I’ll bring this conversation back to Intertwingled and the environment shortly.

Imagine the following. I pack up my television here in Vermont and take it with me to Spain. I unpack it, set it up, and plug it into a power adapter, which I then plug into the wall.  I attach an external antenna, and turn on the set. It powers on. Perfect! I have connectivity.

However, as soon as the image resolves on the screen, I realize that I have a problem. The picture is distorted, like a funhouse mirror, and it’s black and white. Why? Because I may have connectivity, because I was able to physically plug the set into power and pull a signal down with my antenna. But I don’t have interoperability.

You see, the analog TV standard used in the US, Canada, Mexico, and a handful of other countries was created by an organization called the National Television System Committee, abbreviated NTSC. TV sets that use the NTSC standard “paint” the image on the TV screen using 525 interlaced lines, creating 30 frames every second, using local AC current that runs at 60 Hz. By the way, the NTSC standard is considered by many engineers to be rather sloppy, and they jokingly say that the letters actually stand for ‘Never Twice the Same Color.’ But I digress.

Meanwhile, the standard used in Spain, in Europe, in most of the world, is called PAL, which stands for ‘Phased Alternate Line.’ It assumes 50 Hz current, not 60, and paints 25 frames per second,  Not 30, using a 625-line brush. It doesn’t take an electrical engineer to figure out that NTSC and PAL are incompatible. In other words, we may have connectivity, but we can’t have interoperability.

‘We’re all connected’ is a rallying cry for the environmental movement, and it’s a good one. We all share the same earth, drink the same water, rely on many of the same metabolic processes to maintain life, process the same atmosphere, and take part in the great cycle of life. We have connectivity. Because we’re all connected to the planet.

What we don’t seem to have is interoperability. Or at least, for many of us, it’s a theme that we confidently ignore. Remember the guy holding onto the mattress on top of his car that I discussed in an earlier essay as an example of breathtaking human hubris? 

Think about it. Connectivity is about being physically linked. If I speak Spanish to someone whose only language is Farsi, and they speak back, we have connectivity—our ears receive the signals—but we understand nothing about what the other person is saying. We lack interoperability. Interoperability is about being able to intelligibly exchange information, to understand what the other side is saying. In the world of technology, It’s called protocol conversion. It’s much more complicated than connectivity, and requires significantly more effort, which means that it’s also inconvenient. But if Return on Inconvenience is a valid measure of effectiveness, as I believe it to be, then it’s a worthwhile undertaking.

So, what does that mean? Well, it means paying deliberate attention when you’re out there, engaging all six senses. Being present. It means engaging with the environment the way a four-year-old does. It means asking hundreds of questions every day that start with WHY, listening to the answers, and not being afraid to say, ‘I don’t know.’ It means getting comfortable with not knowing, and looking forward to fixing that. When you go for a walk in the field, or the forest, or the tallgrass, or the beach, engage. Don’t just walk through the environment; strive to be part of it. Walking through the forest with your earbuds in your ears is an exercise in connectivity; your feet do indeed touch the path. But if you return from a walk and you don’t have mud on your knees, or even better, on your chest, then you weren’t behaving interoperably. You may have seen that flash of color on the ground as you walked by, responding to a text on your phone, but you didn’t really get down there to see those amazing fruiting bodies growing out of that lichen, or the snails that were devouring that thumbtack-size mushroom, or the salamander eft hiding under the leaf litter. You weren’t engaged, and you never asked WHY things are the way they are.

Focusing on WHAT instead of WHY is a dangerous, dead-end practice. WHAT leads to blame; WHY leads to understanding and action. As I write this, Southern California burns. That’s the WHAT. Yeah, we know.  But WHY is it happening? Because if we can answer that, really answer that question, then we understand it and can formulate an effective, long-term response. 

Here’s an example. When environmentalists (and I count myself strongly in this camp) rally to point fingers at oil companies for polluting the air with fossil fuel byproducts, I note that they don’t generally arrive at the rally on horseback, in an oxcart, or on a bicycle. That’s a bit hypocritical. And when oil money-backed politicians sneer at environmentalists for wanting to save some tiny, inconsequential species that’s endangered by the warm effluent from a power plant, they’re missing the point. BOTH sides are missing the point. Why? No interoperability. No understanding, and not enough effort to create it.

Consider the timeless lyrics of Stephen Stills’ For What It’s Worth:

There’s battle lines being drawn,

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,

Young people speaking their minds,

Getting so much resistance from behind.

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Listen up: Pointing out the WHAT does nothing useful, and is divisive. Asking WHY leads to the kinds of effective response that true leaders create. WHAT looks to the past; WHY looks to the future. We can’t change the past; that leaves only one option.