The ecology aspect of my experience technically happened when I entered the marta station. The Midtown station is just so plantless. I go down there and every time, I feel like I am a thousand miles from plants. The only hint of the existence of vegetable matter is the leaves on track and bits of veggie in food. Other than that. It looks like an alien planet. I read the book “Dune” once. That is what I believe a desert planet underground looks like. Side note: Dune is a book about ecology. Sorry for the spoiler. But the book is surprisingly and painfully able to show how humans treat natural resources. It is also written like a psalm. Absolutely dense with vocabulary. But the lack of vegetation really is what was scariest to me about Marta when I was younger. I remember going into the Decatur station for the first time and seeing the sun disappear around a bend. What I didn’t realize was that this lack of sunlight during the day is a scary thing to a regular land dwelling creature such as myself. If one tried to create an ecosystem in a lightless Marta station, there wouldn’t be enough energy coming in for sustaining life. The environment would take up all of the energy eventually. The Monotonic Sequence Theorem tells us that a non decreasing bounded above 0 converges to 0. I cannot imagine living as a homeless person in Marta. It is not a sustainable living. It does nothing but take energy in exchange for shelter. Survival is not enough. 

Once I got to the West End train station, I walked past the soccer fields to see what I could. I knew the area somewhat and I didn’t want to invade their game. Little did I know that the coach, Buddy, was also hosting the garden party. Working in the dirt was fun but working with kids was the best part of the whole experience. I like little kids. They are so strange. They’re like us except they aren’t averaged out yet. As you take the average of higher and higher sums, they tend to converge to the theoretical average. That is why we feel that we can group adults by demographics; the people in each group begin to average out to their demographic with each experience and interaction. But kids, especially in our interconnected electronic world, are all over the place. They say culture is simply imitation. Animals other than humans don’t have culture because they don’t imitate each other as much. They may have a brilliant and innovative idea but it will die out after a few generations. Tik Tok is unironically the peak of human existence because it is humans imitating each other and spreading new ideas. I was watching (and listening) to some little kid. For a while. He kept on going about I don’t even know what. Out of nowhere, I realize I know what he is drawing; scenes from a horror video game. In depth. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my bench. I absolutely thought he was drawing some innocent, and quite frankly braindead, content. Kids are not brain dead. They are some of the smartest units we got. Brains don’t get much better after a certain age. I realize that they will have unique interactions with nature as well. I told this same dude that pine cones fall from trees. Naturally, he wanted to know how they wouldn’t break. I started to try and explain that they are light and make up nonsense to sound smart. But he wanted to be a little more direct. When I let him pick a pinecone, he sized it up for about a second and then, with as much might as he could muster, yeeted it up into the air. Not to see how high it could go but to see how it could survive a fall. Genius. Kids are pretty complex. More complex than I or many people give them credit for.