How Change Happens

Earlier this week, I listened to a podcast on the life of Wangari Maathai. She was a Kenyan political activist and environmentalist. She believed that deforestation was the major cause of poverty in rural Kenya. Maathai explained that lakes and rivers were drying up because the large trees, whose roots dug deep into the ground cracking up rocks and allowing easy flow of underground water were being cut down. As a feminist, she saw how all of these connected: the environment, poverty, and the living standard of women. Lack of water meant that mothers had to travel hundreds of kilometers to fetch water and so had little time to learn new skills or even work other jobs.

Wangari believed that by planting more trees and changing the way crops were being planted, she could change the immediate environment and, as a consequence, change the fortune of her people.

I thought about the interaction between the environment and humans: how one affects the other. But it wasn't just the flora and fauna that made up the environment. The interactions among humans also create an interesting ecosystem.

I saw the movie "Rob Peace" this week too. While I understood Rob’s messiah complex, I was also intrigued by how much we carry our environment with us, how much it affects our outlook on life, and how much it colors our ambitions. Oftentimes, it defines our idea of what is possible.

One thing that was mentioned in the movie that got my attention was the tumor microenvironment. Rob was a student of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and he believed that he could change the destiny of people in his poor neighborhood by changing their immediate environment.

The concept of the tumor microenvironment as a metaphor for one’s neighborhood is interesting, especially for people who grew up in very disadvantaged environments.

The rate of growth of every cancer depends on the activity of its microenvironment.

The tumor microenvironment consists of all molecular and cellular structures that surround the tumor. These include the immune cells, the extracellular matrix, the blood vessels, etc.

To study the rate of growth of cancer, scientists study the potency of the tumor microenvironment. A tumor and its microenvironment always interact and influence each other. This interaction could be either positive or negative.

There is current research by Dr. Ferri-Borgogno to understand the interaction of tumors and their microenvironment in the treatment of cancer.

The research shows that the immune response of a system is dependent on the interactions between the immune cells, the cancer cells, and the tumor microenvironment. Their findings basically show that it matters where tumors are, what relationship they have to each other and to the other cells in the microenvironment, rather than how many tumors are present.

So, in essence, by changing the tumor's microenvironment, you can kill the tumor causing the cancer.

I recently read an essay by Paul Graham titled The Anatomy of Determination. In one paragraph, he explained how the environment shapes and bolsters ambitious people.

He wrote:

Ambition seems to be quite malleable; there's a lot you can do to increase it. Most people don't know how ambitious to be, especially when they're young. They don't know what's hard, or what they're capable of. And this problem is exacerbated by having few peers. Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.

So, basically, by changing the environment of the ambitious, they too could begin to become even more ambitious.

While it is true that when you change the environment you bring out the best in individuals, I'm also trying to understand how managing the microenvironment can begin to starve the tumorous attitudes that hold back a lot of people. Rob understood this. He wanted to build wealth within his community, believing that improving the outlook of his environment will improve how the people saw themselves and thus what they are capable of. But it seemed there were just so many forces within and outside his environment that fought and opposed what he was trying to do.

In a conversation with J, she mentioned how exhausting it is to be in a space with people who do not see beyond what is available. I wanted to tell her that ambition is a gift. It is random. But then, in another conversation with Q, she pointed out how she developed her ambition by reading, watching, and listening to certain people whom she admired. Could it be that ambition isn’t as random as we like to think? While it is true that some people are born strong-willed and often with natural proclivities to be determined and ambitious, I also think that ambition can be induced in other people as well.

There is a reaction process in chemistry called an "induced reaction," which is essentially a chemical reaction that proceeds more rapidly than it ordinarily would because of the influence of a second, faster reaction in the same system. Maybe this, too, can be said of humans within a space. Can one become ambitious by being with another ambitious person?

It can be discouraging initially. Most times, when we integrate the less ambitious with the more ambitious, it doesn’t yield immediate results. There is something called the induction period in chemical kinetics. This occurs in catalytic reactions, when there is an initial slow stage. But the good news is that after the induction period, the reaction accelerates within a short time.

This is why I think Wangari’s work in Kenya was important. Beyond stopping deforestation, she was also changing the microenvironment of what women could aspire to become. Of course, she faced opposition, even from her own husband, but she persisted and believed she could ignite the same fire she carried in the hearts of many other Kenyan women and, by extension, young girls and women all over Africa. For her work she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Between 1901 and 2018, only 52 Nobel Prize awards were given to women, while 852 Nobel Prize awards have been given to men. Through her significant efforts, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Peace Prize.

So, I think it is entirely possible to change a person by changing their environment. And by environment, it doesn’t necessarily have to be geographical. It could be as simple as exposing the mind to new and better information—by reading better books, watching interviews of more ambitious people, and learning to think in new ways by watching others who are already thinking in new and better ways.

But I like to think that beyond the allure of a new environment and beyond exposing the mind to better information, one important microenvironment that must change before any real transformation can occur is the change in the thoughts and mental models of the individual. Leo Tolstoy said it best:

All the great changes in the life of one man or in the life of the whole of humanity begin and are achieved in thought only. No matter what external changes may take place in the lives of men, no matter how men may preach the necessity of changing their sentiments and acts, the lives of men will not change, unless a change takes place in their thoughts. But let a change take place in thought, and sooner or later, according to the importance of the change, it will take place in the feelings and actions and lives of men, and just as inevitably as the ship changes its direction after the turn of the rudder.