Finding My Place in Nature
By Rolf Halden
Maybe it was because I grew up in the 1960s near Braunschweig, Germany, just west of the death strip of the German Inner Border, which sliced through my divided birth country. Or maybe it was because my manic-depressive father of split identity created an ever-changing environment in my childhood home, where sunshine—without warning—could turn into a violent storm, triggered by the slightest irritation imperceptible to those who had not yet experienced it or developed an awareness for such a force of Nature, such uncontrolled wrath.
Be careful. Always pay attention. Be vigilant of your surroundings or things may turn deadly. My siblings and I had seen our fair share of close calls at home. To be home does not mean to be safe. When everything around you is constantly at risk of being taken away, taking things for granted becomes much harder. To be cognizant and wary of my environment, by necessity, became second nature to me from early childhood on.
Getting out into Nature provided relief. An escape of sorts. It still does. Through fog-covered fields of sugar beet and rapeseed, dotted by the few native trees and bushes that had been allowed to remain in this 1970s German landscape dominated by agriculture and violated by “Flurbereinigung” (land consolidation), my legs and bicycle would take me away from home, transforming a fearful child into a fearsome explorer—or at least so I felt, in my naïve mind.
Maybe it was then, at that early age, when the desire was instilled to go out and see the world. To explore far-flung places and cultures, to trade the familiarity and trappings of one’s home for the freedom and danger to shape an environment different from one’s origin.
The year is 1988. I am clinging to a nearly vertical rockface of an icy mountain in the Andes at 18,000 feet altitude. My knees are shaking uncontrollably and the realization has set in that my powers soon will expire, and my loosening grip will put an end to the precious privilege of life.
No rope. No plan. No future.
How on earth did I get here? How stupid!
It’s ironic, but true: We value things fairly and squarely only when they are about to be taken away from us.
Luckily, my death was postponed on that mountain face. Cooperation from an unlikely source saved my life and helped me to descend into safety from the ice-covered rockface.
“Getting out into Nature provided relief. An escape of sorts. It still does.”
One hundred miles east of my hometown, Meine—a village across the Iron Curtain in a part of Germany that was created by slicing the homeland in two from 1952 to 1990—another boy my age grew up. He read books penned by South American mountaineers and dreamed of seeing parts of the world other than the Soviet Bloc.
Risking his life, he crossed unharmed the death strip of the Inner German Border. After saving up a sufficient amount of money, he boarded a plane to Ecuador to fulfill his dream of climbing the legendary Chimborazo mountain, of reaching its peak and with it, the point farthest from the center of the earth. While his dream would not come true, he did arrive in time to save my life.
We met at the mountain’s base camp, the Whymper refuge at 16,400 feet altitude. Two maverick travelers, used to relying on ourselves alone, yet deciding to climb together for an exploration of routes alternative to the main path up the mountain that was plagued by an onslaught of falling ice and rock mobilized by the sun’s rays. I can still hear and see a rock the size of a baby’s head zipping by a couple of inches from my right ear the day earlier, traveling at a hundred miles per hour.
Stuck on the icy rockface without a rope and with my ice pick out of reach strapped to the top of my backpack, the East German refugee, now a free citizen of the world, risked his life all over again, climbing my way without a safety rope to unfasten my ice pick, placing within reach the lifesaving tool, and then guiding me across the hazardous ice channel I had crossed so much more easily on the ascent, down the mountain and into the safety of the basecamp shelter below.
“I am clinging to a nearly vertical rockface of an icy mountain in the Andes at 18,000 feet altitude. My knees are shaking uncontrollably….”
I can’t recall his name and remember his face only vaguely. But I owe him my life. A second chance. How could I make something of the new lease on life I was so lucky to have?
Perhaps the change in my country’s border, an artificial division, offered insight. On November 9, 1989, that border opened for Eastern Germans and, soon after, the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Metaphorically and literally the streets were filled with people who could travel for the first time in decades.
Strangers from East and West, meeting for the first time that weekend in November, drew each other in for a celebratory, anonymous embrace. Hopes were soaring high, for a happy reunification of the two halves of our long-divided nation, for a future of collaboration, joy and prosperity. The future was in our hands.
Looking back some 30 years later, I can see how my travels through places and time have transformed the frightened German boy into a global citizen, now living in my adopted home state of Arizona. Nature still provides me relief and comfort when I’m walking, running and teaching, yet these days our roles have been reversed.
Offering protection now falls to me, as she has withered and turned vulnerable from human-caused exploitation and destruction. Wounded, Nature has lashed out in response to the chokehold placed by our populous and gluttonous species, reminding us of her raging power. As we slowly regain our footing crawling out from underneath her pandemic breath, the future now is uncertain.
“I have seen this truth again and again. The environment is not simply ‘out there.’”
But one thing, to me, is clear: The boundaries we have internalized and observe are imaginary. They do not exist. The concept of self and the surrounding environment is a cherished delusion.
Now, more than ever, we can see that individual health is global health, and that human health is interconnected with the health of our home planet. By studying toxic chemicals, plastic pollution, wastewater and more, I have seen this truth again and again. The environment is not simply “out there.” We breathe it. We eat it. We drink it. We wear it. We create it. We and the environment are one and the same.
This is an adapted excerpt from Rolf Halden’s book, Environment, published by Bloomsbury and part of its Object Lessons series.
Rolf Halden is a Professor at Arizona State University and Founding Director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, the nonprofit OneWaterOneHealth and the ASU startup company, AquaVitas LLC. An expert in water-based epidemiology, Halden authored the popular science book Environment in 2020.