The silence and the staying at home give time for reflection.  That is something I have missed during the last few years.  My inner voice.  Where did it go?  Like a dreamless sleep, it leaves me wondering, what happened?  My inner voice is my waking dream, one that I have a dialogue with instead of a monologue of responses to needs from the outside world.

So during the past few days, I was thinking about what to write next and - what is my voice?  You who are reading this, and I hope there will be readers other than myself, will have to be part of the discovery because there is no way for me to find my voice unless I do this or get up and speak to an audience.  There are no public gatherings aloud, so here we are.  My guess is that, suddenly, you will be hearing my voice as I discover it, like in “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.  Not that I am the literary genius of James Joyce.  But close, I tell myself.

Yesterday was Easter.  My wife and kids and I colored eggs, walked along the beach, had an Easter hunt, and ate a lot of candy and food.  The egg hunt is still popular with teens.  That’s because my wife, Andrea, upped the prize to five dollar bills in some of the eggs.  I told them that I put “edibles” in some of them. That got some laughs and was even more motivating.  I didn’t.  But I might next year.

I was talking with my daughter about a new enzyme that eats plastic.  You could say that she suffers from “climate anxiety”.  This is a real thing that many people suffer from.  When I was her age, it was anxiety over the nuclear holocaust, so this is their world-ending challenge they must stare down. More on that later.

A group of scientists discovered an enzyme that breaks down plastic. They discovered it in a pile of leaves.  No surprise, but nature made a remedy for our mess.  For the past several years, scientists have been genetically modifying this enzyme to be better at eating plastic, and they are successful.  Now the enzyme breaks down plastic in 10 hours and makes it ready for recycling into food-grade plastic.  This is a big achievement.  Previously you could make only a few items from recycled plastic.  Now, this creates a low-energy solution for complete recycling.  It’s not earth-shattering news to most people, but maybe if there was a video of the process starring Kim Kardashian, it would get people's attention. Look for that soon.

Of course, I think plastic should mostly go away, definitely single-use plastic.  China has rolled out a plan to ban single-use plastic by the end of this year, as Asia has the worst problem with plastic pollution.  This morning I learned that it is mostly plastic straws and plastic bags. It’s a start, but the ban needs to go much further.

So I walked through this with my daughter, what a complete ban on single-use plastic would look like.  So, Starbucks has started using washable mugs.  This removes paper cups and plastic lids, even the compostable ones, which are still not very sustainable in reality, but better.  It creates a lot of new jobs but uses much more water.  Now we have a different problem, depletion of the local aquifers.  She pointed out that more people are bringing in reusable mugs they wash at home.  Except now they are banned due to the virus, and I am guessing that will not change any time soon, as the virus, or the fear of it, will be with us for a long while.

It’s a trade-off, sustainability.  One thing affects another.  Push on one side of the scale, and another goes up. Except it's more like a circular scale, where any weight on one point affects the other point in the opposite. It’s rare to find something that brings down many depletions at once. I think the one common factor is human behavior.  Alter that, and it’s the most likely way to restore balance.

Look for Kim Kardashian to explain all of this to Donald Trump very soon.

It’s very quiet outside.  I can hear all the birds singing.  No cars or motorcycles on Beach Drive.  What is normally a sleepy beach town near the city is even more sleepy.

I was on a conference call yesterday - the only way to work in groups now - with New York, Bogota and Barranquilla, Colombia.  The loan broker from New York had the same comment that the birds were out, and you could actually hear them singing.  The same in Bogota: silence, bird songs and animals venturing out into the city.  I said they were wondering, “Where have all the humans gone?” The seaport builder in Bogota said, “Unfortunately, they may be saying to themselves, thank God the humans have gone!”

William and I are closely aligned in our thinking about the planet, the environment and sustainability. On my first trip to Barranquilla to learn about an infrastructure project called Royal Port that I would be working on, we made a great connection during a break in the meetings.  William was my interpreter, and I welcomed the chance to speak English for a moment, as holding a meeting in Spanish and not knowing much of the language, especially the local dialect of Costegna, was intense and challenging.  

So yesterday, he reminded me again of why we have that connection: always consider our environment.

The coronavirus is awful.  It kills indiscriminately and preys on the weak and strong alike.  It has completely upended most lives on the planet, all at once, and we have all had to stop what we are doing, stay home, and in the US, stop buying things.  This hurts many people, but the planet seems to be taking a deep breath.  The air is clean, most notably.  No smokestacks, no tailpipes.  The planet has found a way to force sustainability on us: the virus.

It is funny that this real-life story for all of us has been played out in stories written by great authors in the past about repelling alien invaders.  War of the Worlds.  How did the aliens die?  A virus.  Independence Day?  A computer virus.  We all saw it coming, but nature is too powerful to be contained.

I am enjoying the virus outage in many ways.  Of course, no one in my household has it at the moment, and no one I know has succumbed to it, so I don’t have that tragedy close at hand.  What I have today is less stress from working and commuting, more time with family, less spending, and more time to exercise - more quality time as it’s referred to.  More time to be a human that lives and not one that works and consumes so much.

The world's leaders have organized great summits for sustainability, and political battles have raged over these issues, but nature has finally made the call on how to do it and how to live more in balance with nature.  Humans could never conceive of a strategy that would halt most activity worldwide.  Nature made that move and reminded us who our host is in the house we live in.