Expect A Change

5/1/2024

We have now been walking all over the neighborhood for about 6 months now.  In that time, we have made so many friends.  There’s a dog that we see all the time that looks like Momo from one of our picture books.  We wave at her and call to her and honestly kinda act like she’s Taylor Swift when we see her.  We are huge fans of the mail carrier & he is also a huge fan of us & we wave and call to him whenever we see him, even from far away.  The recycling and the garbage trucks always honk and wave at us and we stop in our tracks to gawk at them till they are out of sight.  People we don’t even know us wave at us or stop to talk to us or honk at us.  Drivers slow down when they see us.  When we cross the street, almost every time there is a car that stops so that all the traffic behind them has to stop to let us pass.  They often turn their blinkers on till we are all the way across.  We are consistently grateful for this kindness.

It wasn’t always like this.  When we first started walking, people were surprised to see us.  Sometimes they didn’t really see us at all.  The walkers would hurriedly cross the street so they weren’t in our way, the drivers would do a double take.  Slowly people have become accustomed to seeing us out & about though.  Momo the dog’s human actually gets her to come greet us every time she sees us now.  The mail carrier looks all around for us.  We are an expected part of the neighborhood.  When people don’t see us they tell us that they missed us.

In the world of environmental education we know that change often takes time like this. We plant trees that we knowing we won’t get to see them full grown.  We fling wildflower seeds knowing that they need time and water and sunlight to sprout.  We also know that it is hard to understand how change will manifest.  Fourteen wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995.  They hunted the elk that were overpopulating Yellowstone.  The elk stopped eating the willow saplings.  Willow saplings rebounded and became healthy again.  Beavers now had a food source and a building material.  So beavers began building dams again which has changed the water ways of Yellowstone.  Nobody predicted this cascade effect of change from those wolves.  When we first started crossing the street, I was really urging and almost dragging the kids to get across as fast as possible because I was frightened of the cars.  I never would have predicted that people would become accustomed to us crossing the street.  That they would stop their cars when we were waiting on the curb to cross and turn their blinkers on so we could cross safely.  Then they would even smile and wave at us.  When we first started walking we were usually the only people out walking.  We would see another walker maybe twice a week.  Now we see people out walking every day, sometimes we see people twice in one walk.  This is not something that I would have predicted. 

This kind of change gives me hope for the future.  There are so many systems in our world that are unjust but also so pervasive that they seem impossible to remove.  Sometimes when I think about the scope of these problems I can get so filled with despair or rage that I feel trapped.  Trapped by my inability to change them, trapped by my own powerlessness in the face of a giant system.  But if we think about injustice differently, we talk about injustice openly, we try to change ourselves - our mindset, our actions, our words, that is a change.  And we don’t know how that change will ultimately manifest.  The cascading effect of our change remains to be seen.

14 wolves

14 preschoolers

Expect a change.