Turn Place into Career Opportunity

While wondering why I sometimes see the moon in the West when I go to bed and then see a faint moon in the South, when I get up, I realized I never thought about anything like this when I lived in cities. Living with a clear sky over a wide open space in Wisconsin, I was motivated to find a book that explained how the Earth's rotation interacts with the location of the moon as the Earth orbits the Sun.

     Place has the power to influence the problems a person, animal, insect, or plant might choose to solve. For example, I remember seeing a documentary about an insect living in the desert survived on one drop of water a day. The bug figured out how to tip its body forward on a slant in order for the water that condensed on its body overnight slid down into its mouth. In a similar manner, South Africa's drought inspired a school to use overnight condensation to provide drinking water for its students.

     Researchers, living in a place where two species, coyotes that usually kill red foxes, interact in peace, observed that coyotes and foxes had no reason to compete when an area had an abundance of resources. Other researchers living in a place where mice carry the deer ticks that cause Lyme disease found the number of ticks could be reduced by providing mice with nesting materials treated with pesticide.

     Sadly, many who live in places where they have the advantage of knowing the most about a problem fail to think about solutions. In fact, they often choose to contribute to the problem. Drugs and crime go hand-in-hand from West Africa to Amsterdam and from Mexico to New York and places in between. Coal miners are not known for embracing a switch to alternate energy sources. Religious differences lead to conflict rather than peace.

     "(F)ar too many of us see the economic status quo as normal. It is not normal," writes John Hope Bryant in his book, The Memo. Then, he asks, "What are we going to do about it?" Bryant was writing about recognizing and changing poverty-prone neighborhoods, but the same can be said about political instability, gender inequality, or heating up the planet. Wherever we are, our places have large and small problems that are not normal. We are in the best place to understand these problems and to change them for the better.