Probably the last time most of us built a terrarium was in fourth or fifth grade. If you haven’t gone through the exercise, it’s about creating a self-contained ecosystem. It’s usually built in a closed container. The trick is to not have everything die over time. This is inherently challenging because without the right mix of plants, water, and other activities the whole ecosystem collapses.
We don’t generally see terrariums, in their truest sense, regularly. Still, we live in one on a giant ball 93 million miles from the sun. It’s a delicate balance of water, breathable air, and life. It all has to work together within a closed system. As far as we know other than a few asteroids, every atom that ever existed on Earth is still here in one form or another.
It’s important to think about our lives, our work, and our planet in terms of a Terrarium, but there are also dangers along the way.
The Individual Terrarium
I grew up on a farm a few decades ago. We had a garden the size of a basketball court and a walk-in freezer. Fresh milk was just a few steps away, and steak or a roast was regularly on the menu. We still went to the grocery store regularly, but it wasn’t a daily requirement. Some people take this to the extreme. There’s a difference between preparing for a rainy day and preparing for the end of the world. One of the things we learned from Covid is that when the food supply chain is interrupted, whole regions run out of food. There’s somewhat of an urban myth that the average city only has about 3 days of food available. The number is somewhat higher, but not much.
If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, tornados, or floods it’s probably a good idea to have a few extra days worth of food on hand. Being able to raise your food is always a good idea. It’s good for you, it’s good for the local area and it’s good for the planet. It’s not a perfect terrarium, but perfect terrariums rarely exist.
Business Terrariums
When we built a terrarium as a child, we started with the container and added the elements. In the real world, the boundaries are a bit more ambiguous. Sometimes they are real, and sometimes they are implied. Often we don’t know where the boundaries are. The Return To Office (RTO) mandates are a good example of leaders not understanding the boundaries of their terrarium. They think an office is a closed system, but the boundaries are often well beyond the walls of the building. When the building was at full occupancy, it worked a certain way. Cleaning crews knew how many people they needed. The cafeteria knew how many people they were going to feed. The HVAC system knew how to heat and cool the building based on how many people were in the building.
When people are only visiting the office a couple of days a week, the ecosystem of the office terrarium is out of sync. It’s hard to find someone to run the cafeteria because they can’t do it profitably. Cleaning becomes a challenge because you need to cover the same floor space, but it’s no longer about daily dirt being brought into the building and removing trash, it’s about dusting and seeing if there’s enough trash to empty. And if you ever went out to lunch, or out for drinks after work, many of those places closed. Many businesses’ office terrarium’s ecosystem has collapsed. Leaders need to look beyond the boundaries of their buildings to rebuild the ecosystem for offices to work correctly. It’s going to require changing the size, the structure, and rethinking where the boundaries are for it to operate.
Governmental Terrariums
Boundaries are central to the nature of governments. They also don’t always continue to make sense over time. Ever so often, the subject of Texas being broken up into 5 states comes up. There have been various plans to do this for over 150. They might make sense geographically, but they don’t make sense economically. Even our state structure doesn’t make sense for a lot of things. The concept of state rights is front and center on many issues in the media these days. But at what cost? It’s not efficient, and no other country in the world works this way.
If I want to have access to marijuana or get a medical procedure that’s not offered in my state, I just take a little trip. If I don’t want to pay property taxes or other state-specific taxes, I move to another state. Insurance companies typically take 18-24 months to go through all the regulators in all states to offer a new policy. And who do you think pays for that?
Even within states, the terrarium boundaries are being breached. Many towns don’t have enough students to maintain their schools so they bus them to nearby communities. Police and emergency services are becoming increasingly shared between communities. It’s time to rethink the boundaries and how our various terrariums work.
The Big Blue Marble
Even if we mess up everything else, we still have one closed system we have to get right. The Earth is the ultimate terrarium. Most kids are lucky to keep their terrarium alive for a few months before things turn brown and die. The Earth has been a functioning ecosystem for billions of years. That was until we started messing with it. We ship our waste to other states and other countries, but it doesn’t go away because we live in a closed system. Pollution from Asia will eventually end up in North America. And just like in our childhood terrariums, if you raise the temperature a couple of degrees, eventually bad things happen.
Even if you don’t happen to believe in climate change, you have to see our planet as a closed-loop system. No one is going to swap out the air, or add new resources if we exhaust the ones we have. We have to fix the terrarium from the inside. Ultimately, that means redefining the various physical and logical terrariums that make up our world. All systems are self-organizing and we need to recognize when they are changing and adapt accordingly. The terrariums of tomorrow may not look like they do today. And that’s ok. We just need to work within that framework and keep them functioning.
