Tiny Ticks to Large Desire

Climate Change and Human Health Certificate | Yale University | March 2021

I grew up on the east coast with a general awareness of Lyme ticks and tick-borne diseases. You could say there was an archetypal air to them. Being accustomed to general best practices: showering and head-checking after hiking or being in the woods, tucking pants into socks, wearing hats were customary to living in the woods in Maryland. My awareness of ticks and fear of Lyme disease increased as I got older, alongside did my anxiety, as both tend to do. This uptick of obsessive thinking happened to correlate to increase in disease prevalence, and the coinciding population of Lyme-disease carrying ticks in the area. 

The most effective current mitigation strategy against Lyme and the vector which carries it, is enhancing surveillance techniques and educating the local population about prevention. Arguably more important is the shift in human housing behavior. Suburban building creates sectioning off of landscape and moves vectors of lyme disease further into human centers, proliferating the disease.  If we treat the roots not the branches of this— it would be a foundational change in housing policy. Ideally, communities would build differently and not splice remote land in ways that increase vector-borne diseases. Therein, the most impactful shift would be that of human desire, a move away from land-grabbing practices and anthropocentric land usage. If homogeneity in land use were shifted toward more biodiversity, and simultaneously became less human-centered; we may have a chance here.

The deer tick’s main reservoir host is the white-footed mouse, and a central incompetent host is the white-footed deer, both of which are driven by fragmentation and suburbanization of land. The more we sprawl-out and desire the parceling of land while population grows, the more these habitats are at risk of disrupting toward spread of disease. Suburban encroachment in wooded areas is not only a driver of this fragmentation and deforestation that increases host population, but it also promotes more direct contact between ticks and humans. Currently, tick season is mostly relegated to spring through summer, and will be impacted by climate change and its rise in temperatures, with likely other climate uncertainties. These variables compounded will shift the life cycle of the tick itself. Even still, so much of this vector-borne disease is proliferated by human activity. A direct, yet cumbersome, mitigation effort seems to be shifting the way people live and want to live. 

This vector consideration, this incredibly small creature with enormous impact, begets for me the deeply rooted interconnectedness that arises with and between human activity and climate change, and the maladaptive techniques that arise within mitigation and adaptation strategies. It is proof our experiment is going horribly wrong- when a solution also comes with it another cost, or several. In this, we must consider what can foster incredible systemic change. I am uncertain about the ethics, or housing policies that might shift thinking toward more community-based, more biodiverse landscapes. My question then, I suppose, is: How do we disrupt the myth of the American Dream? 

Resilience is often talked about at micro- and individualistic scales, especially when therapeutically considering how the human psyche can withstand, or process, traumatic events or circumstances. Meanwhile, we are actively-unconsciously creating the most traumatic milieu to date for our (and other) species. “Resilience” becomes a convenient afterthought that shields us collectively from the larger issues at hand. In previous eras, humans were more nomadic, flexible beings. Part of the call here is to unhook humans from the obsession of space, sprawl, and materials–and reorient to a community mindset that encourages flexibility in an attempt to survice the myriad shifts to come.

Per the tick, we might start with the bite-sized and more approachable–enacting shifts in policy, or large-scale ecological thinking which employ incrementalism. On adjacent task could be to create incredibly-regional thinking from a community-building and strengthening perspective. Shrinking infrastructure responsibly down to a scale that becomes more visible to a person, neighborhood, community, city—to create accountability and awareness in the creation and management of its systems. The old R. Buckminster Fuller adage Think Globally, Act Locally. After the Texas freeze, I thought I keep meaning to get my rainwater catchment set up. Not even considering the fact that I am also ostensibly installing a mosquito farm. I digress without a solution here, it’s just a reminder of interconnectedness. There seems to be no one solution for climate change—be it large-scale policy, shifting infrastructure to adapt or mitigate, and/or hyper-personal adaptation—that does not impact another category of climate change or human health. Even still; we must consider things at the scale of human desire, and how to quickly disrupt its grasp and presumptions at a collective and cultural level.