THE GET GREEN SLOW SCHEME. I’ve learned a lot about nature at Evergreen Brick Works. But what surprises me more is how much I've learned from nature.
Nature has a way of teaching you about resilience (the ability to recover after a disturbance), creativity (finding new solutions to the same problem) and curiosity (there’s always something you haven’t noticed before).
But my deepest lesson is patience.
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience," said 19th-century American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson argued that nature operates through constant, unhurried intelligence, rather than human-style anxious, overthinking impatience.
Adopting a deeper, steadier rhythm can be helpful no matter the problem you’re facing. It’s a lesson I take for something as simple as exercising and as existential as tackling the climate crisis.
Climate change is the ultimate slow, long-scale problem. The irony is that it has taken something like 200 years of accumulation to arrive as an acute and urgent crisis. It makes sense that we’d be wired to search for quick solutions. Grey infrastructure, like seawalls or covered walkways, can provide immediate and high-capacity protection.
But maybe the best solutions are the ones that match the scale. Research shows that nature-based solutions outperform grey infrastructure over longer time horizons. In urban areas these might look like rain gardens and bioswales, floodplain restoration, green corridors and connected green spaces, daylighting buried streams, community gardens and more. They may not always deliver instant results, but nature-based solutions actually improve over time. A tree provides more shade in year ten than year one. A restored wetland filters more water as it matures. Grey infrastructure degrades. Green infrastructure grows.
Evergreen’s work is the act of starting. We may not fully see the impact of planting tiny forests, transforming school grounds, connecting trails and building low-carbon third places right away. But the slow fix is worth beginning.
Emerson's call to adopt the pace of nature is ultimately about how lasting things grow. It just happens to ward off anxiety too.
🖊️ ETHAN ROTBERG, SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST | EVERGREEN
