Urban Evolution

The water flea Daphnia magna — a freshwater crustacean up to a few millimeters in size — is one species busy evolving in cities in response to heat, pollution and even local predators. These zooplankton can prevent algal blooms that overload ponds with toxic cyanobacteria, so this adaptation may have a big effect on freshwater ecosystems, says Kristien Brans, an evolutionary ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, who studies the water fleas.

One basic challenge in such urban investigations is to distinguish between two modes of response to altered environments: evolution (genetic alterations that appear across generations) and phenotypic plasticity (the flexibility to alter physical and/or behavioral characteristics in an organism’s lifetime).

For water fleas, it turns out that both are at play. Fleas raised in lab experiments at temperatures matching urban ponds are smaller, and mature and reproduce more quickly, than fleas reared at rural pond temperatures that tend to be several degrees cooler. (That’s phenotypic plasticity — no genetic changes have occurred.) But over time, urban water fleas living generation after generation in warmer, urban pond waters have genetically changed to have those same kinds of alterations. (That’s evolution.)

[---]

GLUE took white clover’s cyanide production as a model to study three questions. Do instances of urbanization in different cities lead to similar local environments? Do those similar environments lead the clover to evolve along the same lines — display parallel evolution — in a trait of interest (in this case, cyanide production)? And if so, what environmental factors are driving the pattern?

In a new Science paper, the collaborators showed that urban environments do indeed end up quite similar to each other, with less vegetation, more impervious surfaces and higher summer temperatures than their outlying rural areas. (In fact, downtowns of cities such as Beijing and Boston are more similar to each other in such factors than they are to their rural areas, Johnson comments.) Analyzing more than 110,000 clover plants from 160 cities in 26 countries, the GLUE investigators also demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and clover cyanide production. And after sequencing more than 2,000 clover genomes and analyzing the urban-rural differences, the researchers showed that natural selection truly is at work.

[---]

Unfortunately, the genetic biodiversity that can fuel adaptation often dwindles in urban areas. A genetic survey by Chloé Schmidt working in Garroway’s lab, for example, found this to be the case, along with lower population sizes, for North American mammals living in more disturbed environments. That’s a concern during a period when so many populations of animals and plants are seeing their natural habitats degraded or simply destroyed.

Scientists don’t take urban environments as precise models for the impacts of climate change. But they say such studies will provide important clues to how creatures may respond to dwindling access to water and food, and exposure to pollution, heat, drought and other dangers.

“We’re in the Anthropocene, and we don’t understand how we’re changing the environment on every level, from greenhouse gas emissions to changing the evolution of life around us,” Johnson says. “People realize this research is part of the solution.”

- More Here

Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

[---]

Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

[---]

The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.

 

Finding Awe!

I am blessed. 

I lived for over 13 years in a state of Max's Awe and I still do.  has become our awe paradise. 

Thank you my love. "I" became irrelevant living and one day soon dying with you. 

Awe Is Good for Your Brain:

Some attribute the beginning of the study of awe to the Apollo 8 mission. In December 1968, three astronauts entered a small capsule—the vehicle for mankind’s first trip to the moon. (They orbited ten times but didn’t land.) Major William Anders glanced out the window in time to see his blue home planet rising above the stark lunar horizon. “Oh, my God,” he said. Then he took a photo.

Later called Earthrise, the image became one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Fifty years after Anders captured it, he said that the view of Earth changed his life, shaking his religious faith and underscoring his concern for the planet. “We set out to explore the moon,” he wrote about the experience, “and instead discovered the Earth.”

Dubbed the overview effect, the profound experiences shared by Anders and many astronauts helped usher in a wave of academic interest in transcendent events and their attendant emotion—notably, awe. Experimental psychologists tried to induce the emotion in laboratories, showing people pictures of earth taken from space, as well as videos of a flash mob performing the “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Susan Boyle wowing the world when she sang on Britain’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen Boyle doing her thing, look it up; I dare you not to feel some tingles.)

For research purposes, subjects let scientists measure their goose bumps, supplied cortisol samples before and after whitewater rafting, performed tedious cognitive tasks, and were fitted with suction probes to measure something that’s called “awe face.”

Researchers pondered many aspects of awe, including why experiencing it caused some people to feel greater belonging or generosity. They speculated that awe may be the primary pathway through which therapeutic psychedelics help so many patients suffering from trauma, depression, anxiety, and addiction. They even asserted that experiencing awe may be the defining feature of our species.

For an emotion with so much riding on it, what seems surprising is that it took the academic world so long to take awe seriously.

“Science got into the awe game really late,” says Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Keltner grew up in 1960s California, raised by progressive parents. All around him people were exploring Buddhism, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and communing with nature. It was also the golden age of spaceflight. “I was raised in a historical period that was in some sense devoted to awe,” he says. “But it was a neuroscientific and cognitive mystery.”

In 2003, Keltner and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published one of the first academic papers on the experience. In “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” the two scientists tried to pinpoint what exactly awe is. They combed through historical accounts by philosophers and mystics; what they arrived at was both eloquent and expansive.

“We said that awe is really an emotion you feel when you encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world,” he says. The vastness part, he explains, doesn’t have to be literally vast, like a view from a mountaintop. It can be conceptually vast, like the anatomy of a bee or string theory or a late-night stoner realization that every mammal on earth must have a belly button.

In the two decades of research that followed, an even more remarkable conclusion emerged: that this state of mind could potentially alter us by unleashing feelings like humility, generosity, and a desire to reassess our lives. And sometimes even existential terror. Whether it’s cataclysmic or gentle, an awe experience could be an effective antidote to burnout, post-traumatic stress, heartbreak, and loneliness.

[---]

I had to admit, I hadn’t really been thinking of this spectacle from the plant’s perspective. It suddenly seemed a totally reasonable thing to do. Most of these plants have been around a lot longer than humans have. The seeds that created this bloom were made in the past. They finally germinated during this precious wet year, but the whole thrust of the extravagant effort was to make seeds for a future bloom in an outrageous cycle of hope. Godoy and I were standing, accidentally, in the middle of a space-time continuum that had absolutely nothing to do with us. We humans just need to not screw it up.

Then it hit me: the risk of chasing awe, of making it about personal growth, is that you dilute its strongest power. Because improving ourselves really isn’t the point of awe at all. I’d been doing it wrong, and it had taken a 27-year-old human and a cluster of yellow tickseeds to help me realize it. The point is this: by listening, we find a small seam in the universe through which to feel ourselves entirely irrelevant.

 

Practicing Deeper Gratitude via Geology

Yet most of us Anthropocene Earthlings are barely aware of the rich legacy of natural history that envelopes us. We are like squatters living amid the remains of earlier empires, worlds defined by different geographies, governed by alternate rules, inhabited by other residents. Consider the variety of ancient realms represented by a few North American cities: Milwaukee lies on a teeming coral reef; Minneapolis is perched on the edge of a vast volcanic rift; Montreal and New York City rise from the roots of great mountain belts; San Francisco sits, unsteadily, on rocks churned in an ancient subduction zone; Mexico City, also precarious, on the bed of a vanished lake. All vividly remember other versions of Earth.

We self-absorbed humans, meanwhile, mostly ignore the stories that lie just beneath our feet, believing them to be irrelevant, subordinate to our own reality, reducible to the convenient cubbyhole of “prehistory.” If we bothered to notice it, Earth’s crinkled crust would reveal how the past not only persists but in fact shapes the present. The rock record would show us that earlier iterations of the world are no less real for having occurred before we happened onto the scene. Rocks would remind us that we too live in geologic time, that our own moment will one day be long ago.

When we do pay attention to rocks, it is usually because of their utility, not their long memory. Although we humans like to think that we are in charge of our own destiny, the technological ages of humankind—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, and yes, even Digital—have always been dictated by rocks, and our own short-lived empires have risen and fallen in the pursuit of their riches. The science of geology has of course been entangled with all of this looting, but along the way, as geologists hammered at rocks, they began to understand that each gold vein and coal seam was part of a grand illuminated manuscript recording the history of the world. In an ironic twist, geology’s richest discovery is arguably an intellectual and philosophical one—an understanding of Deep Time.

Like all creatures on Earth, we need to use the planetary materials at hand to make a living, and our species has been exceptionally clever at appropriating those materials for our own purposes. As our technological prowess has grown, however, our respect for these works of time has declined. We rarely pause to consider that rocks and minerals have their own life stories—that they are emissaries bearing messages from across eons.

[---]

It occurred to me later that that house on a Croatian hillside embodies the way we in the modern world thoughtlessly scavenge the monuments of the geologic past. Our cities are just scaled-up versions. Every asphalt roadway and concrete structure contains fragments, often still readable, from the chronicles of prior geologic regimes, irreverently blended and reconstituted. The metals in our cars, phones, and computers, having been separated from their source rocks, are more akin to individual letters in a shredded manuscript, but still whisper of their deep geologic origins. All the coal, oil, and natural gas we’ve burned—the photosynthetic memories of earlier ecosystems—hovers now in the air, the ghosts of combustion that haunt us in the Anthropocene.

Does it matter whether or not we acknowledge the histories of nonliving components of nature? Not every rock in Earth’s time-wrinkled crust can be treated as a precious artefact, and we Earthlings have no option other than to use what the planet provides. But simply developing an awareness of the deep history that enfolds us—and the immense amount of time embodied in the planet’s generous gifts—can foster a perceptual shift with radical psychological and practical implications.

[---]

Becoming familiar with Earth’s monumental autobiography, and getting to know the characters and plots that fill the vast expanses of geologic time, forces one to abandon the notion that the only stories that matter are those with human protagonists. Once free from that deep-seated prejudice, one begins to see even the nonliving components of the Earth, including rocks and rivers, atmosphere and ocean, not as dumb matter but rather as part of a dynamic, animate, evolving—and self-documenting—collective.

Although there is a tendency to think of biological evolution as a steady march of progress, with primitive organisms being systematically replaced by more sophisticated ones, the fact is that when new lineages of organisms have emerged, they have simply joined the other branches on the Tree of Life. Bacteria and archaea, the progenitors of all subsequent life-forms, are still very much with us, as are myriad other microorganisms and invertebrates, as well as fish, amphibians, and reptiles, all living together in the wide crown of the tree with Johnny-come-lately species like us.

Similarly, old rocks are not merely relics of the distant past but active participants in current events and ecosystems, thanks to the way that Earth has crumpled rocks of all ages into the crust. Rocks young and old take part with equal vigor in present-day earthquakes. Strata that formed as desert dunes a hundred million years ago lap up today’s rain, having found new careers in middle age as aquifers. Schists that remember the dawn of Life carry on intimate discourse with modern microbes and root systems, on their way to becoming soils of the future. Basalts that were erupted as lavas eons before Homo sapiens appeared now attempt valiantly to absorb our carbon emissions.3 In other words, even the oldest rocks are responsive to new conditions, taking note of changes in the air, interacting in real time with the present.

This view of Earth’s rocky crust as dynamic and reactive—an ancient archive with comments to make about the current state of the world—suggests that we need a radical reappraisal of the way we live, farm, and build infrastructure on it. Even over human timescales, rocks and landscapes are not static but instead inherently mutable, and their capacity for shape-shifting will only increase in the face of anthropogenic changes in the surface environment. Yet most training for designers and engineers is still predicated on the view of rocky matter as timeless and inert. This reflects certain aesthetic preferences that were adopted early on in the history of Western science.

[---]

There is a new and powerful generation of engineers and entrepreneurs who believe that humans can simply opt out of time—not appreciating the irony that their worldview is in fact an antiquated misconception from a bygone era. These are the moguls who think that “colonizing” Mars is not only possible but in fact right and inevitable, who advocate for stratospheric sulfate injection as an instant solution to the long-brewing climate crisis, and who actually seem convinced that they personally will be exempted from dying.5 At the same time, in another irony, obsolescence is a constant threat in their world, where someone who has been in the business for two decades is regarded as an ancient sage.6 All of these delusions are symptoms of temporal dysmorphia, or more bluntly, time illiteracy.

This condition is harmful to any human but particularly pathological when it afflicts the rich and influential. Spewing sulfate into the upper atmosphere to correct for a century’s worth of fossil fuel burning is considered by geoscientists to be madness, sure to have a torrent of unintended consequences not only for global weather patterns but also geopolitical stability.7 Time illiteracy seduces otherwise intelligent people into believing a planet with no soil, oceans, or active tectonics could become an Earthlike Eden in a matter of decades—somehow overlooking the fact that even if we could homestead on a new planet, we would still be us: the same flawed creatures expelled from the first Eden.

[---]

The spiritual solace we crave may lie in the records of deep time that are our common heritage as Earthlings. The rocky archives have been patiently awaiting our notice. In them, we may find reassurance in the persistence of earlier worlds all around us; a sense of wonder at how extraordinary their preservation is; gratitude for the way they permeate the present with mystery, gravitas, and the promise of continuity. A spirit of evolutionary camaraderie may come from the knowledge that we have shared the arduous journey to the present with so many other long-lived lineages and have kin everywhere in nature. Accepting that we too live in geologic time can free us from narcissism. Letting go of the illusion that only the present is real, allowing the undulations of time to wash over us, may carry us with less fear into the future.

- More Here

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

Trees Through Peter Wohlleben

I never read Peter Wohlleben (nor heard of him) but I am glad I did now. 

His 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World and his new book The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them. 

I ordered both. 

Review of his new book; looks like trees are much wiser than us. They raise their kids to be anti-fragile plus they are anti-coddling.  

The Hidden Life argued that trees are social and sensate. The Power of Trees shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. We are doers by constitution. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.

Anyone who has planted a tree in their garden knows that it has a profound effect – it makes your garden cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Forests do that on a grand scale. A deciduous forest in summer is often as cool as a lake. Berlin is 15C warmer than the ancient forests nearby. The coniferous monocultures so beloved of commercial foresters are not such good coolers: they’re up to 8C warmer than their deciduous counterparts.

[---]

Crucially, trees learn from their past traumas and produce offspring programmed with those lessons. Trees that have narrowly escaped drought are more prudent in the future: they slow their growth and ration their drinking. They have two main methods for influencing their children: the first is good parenting. Mother trees regulate their children’s growth by changing the rate at which they drip-feed them with sugar solution through root networks, and children growing in the rain and light shadow of the mother won’t drink heavily or overeat. The second is epigenetic inheritance, which enables useful behavioural traits to be passed on fast to future generations.

[---]

If we don’t learn to leave the trees alone, the trees will eventually be alone anyway – but without us.

How To Discover Aliens

This is the simplest pictorial representation I have every seen plus Lisa Kaltenegger's explanation and her passion is contagious. 

The goal at the time was to compare spectra from rocky, temperate planets to what Earth’s spectrum would look like from far away, seeking conspicuous signals like a surplus of oxygen due to widespread photosynthesis. Kaltenegger’s objection was that, for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, its atmosphere had no oxygen. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to build up to high levels. And this biosignature hit its highest concentration not in Earth’s present-day spectrum, but during a short window in the late Cretaceous Period when proto-birds chased giant insects through the skies.

Without a good theoretical model for how Earth’s own spectrum has changed, Kaltenegger feared, the big planet-finding missions could easily miss a living world that didn’t match a narrow temporal template. She needed to envision Earth as an exoplanet evolving through time. To do this, she adapted one of the first global climate models, developed by the geoscientist James Kasting, which still includes references to the 1970s magnetic-tape era it originated in. Kaltenegger developed this code into a bespoke tool that can analyze not only Earth through time but also radically alien scenarios, and it remains her lab’s workhorse.

The Lost Art of Staying Put

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

Max and I stayed put in one place having the time of our lives for 13 plus years.  

Lucy Ellmann wrote this piece, The Lost Art of Staying Put in 2017 but yet even with COVID humans are incapable of sitting in one place quietly. This is a modern disease.

We are not talking about big governments nor big corporations. These are common people unleashing  tragedy of the commons at economies of scale. 

The crazy thing about this modern disease is that these common people are convinced that they are "poor" victims who work hard and "just" need a break. The core traits driving this insanity are self pity and pure signaling to up the number of places they visited in the name of "I love to travel". 

Animal suffering, ecological and biodiversity destruction, spreading disease, diminishing localized uniqueness (replaced by global chains), accelerating climate change, airlines delays - these are only the known suffering these "love to travel" common people unleash. There are tons of localized unknown sufferings which we cannot comprehend. 

Any country which depends on travel for their economic growth is always doomed to fail. A country cannot outsource their fundamental livelihood to the fantasy of people in other countries. 

Your reward is that you then must fly. During the airless, comfortless journey that follows (for which you more and more wondrously have to pay), amid air contaminated by engine oil and other toxic substances, you will also be at risk of radiation, congestion, constipation, nausea, dizziness, headaches, hypoxia, jet lag, flatulence, the flatulence of all (and I mean all) the people around you, deep vein thrombosis, fleas, bedbugs, and whooping cough. No one delays a flight because of illness anymore—that would be costly and cowardly. Instead, they leap on board in the service of their microbes, dutifully coughing, sniffing and exuding right next to you for hours. If you’re very unlucky, you may catch Ebola or TB while innocently trying to untangle your gratis audio set; to be capped by Montezuma’s revenge on arrival at your destination.

[---]

Travel is killing as much culture as it spreads. Languages, dialects and accents die out whenever Cloaca-Cola, Pizza Hurt, and Brook No Brothers arrive. To ensure this, all major cities now offer the same chain hotels, stores and restaurants, the only acceptable receptacles for the unthinking on the move. But if Prada, Superdry, Nike, and H&M are everywhere, what the hell is the point in city-hopping shopping?

In her best book, The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler deals with the ardent belief of many American travelers that they can remain completely untouched by the places they visit. In Trump’s case, it seems highly possible: he takes his own steak supply everywhere he goes. My uncle from Birmingham, Michigan, would not visit anywhere in Europe that didn’t have a Holiday Inn, and spent his trips to England correcting the pronunciation of Birmingham. There is an American blind spot to other cultures that really gets in the way of deriving any discernible benefit from travel. So why go? Stay home and eat ham in Birmingham. And what’s with the sneakers, the raincoat, the Bermuda shorts, the camera, and the fanny-pack? Is it some kind of Pop Art joke? In this getup, Americans descend on foreign places like boulders, speaking in very loud voices and squashing flat any locals who get in the way.

[---]

But you simply must see the Taj Mahal, pussycat, or Machu Picchu, or Outer Mongolia, before you peg out, we’re told again and again and again. All exotic places must be trampled immediately. It torments people to think of leaving a single one in peace. Just mention the Galapagos, or the Faroe Islands, and watch them jump—because they’ve got to get there before everyone else. Before it’s ruined. By people like them. The seagrass meadows of the oceans are disappearing at the rate of two football fields an hour, just so people can soak up the sun or bother a turtle in some unfamiliar hemisphere.

What’s the big deal? Locusts, too, have bucket lists. They, too, want to see the world before they die. The truth is you don’t personally have to survey every spot on earth, no matter what the reams of newspaper and magazine travel porn tell you. What is more important in all of this than reading Dickens? Humankind should be your business, not mass hypnosis.

If only people would stay home and read about foreign lands—that’s what books are for! But now every single work break, school break, birthday, divorce, death, bicycle accident, and basketball game have to be acknowledged (and drained of meaning) by a long, hazardous flight or drive somewhere. There are a million family occasions that require your presence—as if we all still lived in villages and the bris or graduation ceremony were only a block away. One blogger in the sad world of online airline fetishism flew with his wife from Houston to Frankfurt on his own nickel, just to try out United’s new Business Class perks. They probably flew straight back again afterward. “This flight was also special,” he claimed, “because my wife—who is an entrepreneurial coach—would become a United Million Miler. I can think of worse ways to celebrate.” I can’t.

A million new reasons to travel are manufactured every moment. Pageants, banquets, fairs, and jamborees. Courses for this, courses for that. You can, you must, attend a week of weaving, and maybe weeping, in Wales—or for the more myopic, a five-day dolls’-house furniture-making workshop. Or you might do a writing cruise; a hill-walking, pottery, juggling and watercolor course; a yoga, Pilates or karate retreat; a crash course in straw-hat manufacture, the I Ching, sock-knitting, croissant twisting; wildflower and mushroom differentiation; or even scything. Scything! What they need is a creative writhing course.

[---]

The New York Times, hopelessly behind on the ethical travel fad, continues to pedal the wonders of Cornwall or India. But The Nation’s now offering $6,000 trips to Cuba, as if there’s something extra responsible or heartfelt involved in gadding about a country America tried to boycott out of existence. These do-gooding olive-branchers would presumably never dream of sacrificing six thousand bucks each to help Cuba.

Another popular destination for the conscience-stricken tourist is the European concentration-camp circuit. What a great day out for all the family! Sergei Loznitsa has covered this new leisure pursuit in his new movie, Austerlitz. The Nazis themselves put fossil fuels to previously unimaginable uses, and you too can use some up by (voluntarily) transporting yourself to Auschwitz to gawp at gas chambers in a Hawaiian shirt.

World-saving travel is one realm in which the means almost always defeat the ends. Apart from the opthalmologists who fly around Africa fixing cataracts (hoorah), and maybe a few UN or Peace Corps employees here and there (hard to verify), it’s time to consider the real possibility that there is no altruistic travel. Ever tried to save a stray cat or mistreated donkey in some foreign country? It’s not easy. They don’t have passports. No, your trip is much more likely to damage an animal. A young sniffer dog was shot dead at Auckland airport in New Zealand, for capering around loose on the runway, delaying flights. This is what you unwittingly commit to when boarding a plane: the diktat that all animals that threaten flight schedules will be executed (and not just to make beef medallions).

Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef dies for us. It’s eighty percent bleached already, cooked alive. You’d do more good if you would just stay put and use the cash to help somebody who hasn’t got any disposable income. In 1999, a friend of mine took his fiancée to Istanbul for a romantic tryst. They arrived just in time for the earthquake. He was moved to help dig people out; she wasn’t, and when they got home she dumped him. She hadn’t enjoyed twiddling her thumbs in the hotel while he was out being noble. That’s amore.

The wealthy-and-mobile 20 percent are causing most of the environmental damage in the world. As Bob Hughes observes in The Bleeding Edge, his book about the ways in which technological liberation has failed to liberate anybody, bikes and even horses are not only cleaner forms of transport, but quicker, if you calculate the actual time and energy invested. Airlines claim that ever-bigger aircraft are more egalitarian and environmentally friendly, but they never add in the costs of enlarging runways, building the damn things, and hiring enough goons to flatten all those passengers—I mean, to protect passenger safety.

So there’s nothing admirable about getting your ass on an Airbus. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, George Monbiot says long-distance travel should be accomplished slowly, if at all. We should all try walking those love miles.

Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic The Irony of American History captured these traits brilliantly

Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.

The Last Tourism

The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater ability we have to understand and contribute to our environment, the less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate the larger ecosystem of which we are a part. 

Peace is when we realize that victory and defeat are almost identical spots on one long spectrum. 

Peace is what allows us to take joy in the success of others and to let them take joy in our own. 

Peace is what motivates a person to be good, to treat every other living thing well, because they understand that it is a way to treat themselves well. 

We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one. 

We are the same. 

Still, too often we forget it, and we forget ourselves in the process.

- Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

I stopped traveling because I couldn't spend a day without Max. So we never flew except spending occasional days in the wilderness alone with Max and serenity - which lead having our own Walden in the wilderness which Max would have adored! 

My despise for travel has now, turned into hatred. In the past 2 decades "travel" has become a fad. It has risen to moronic levels that people work 80 hours a weeks to save dollars  to spend few mind numbing days taking selfies for the sole reason of signaling.  They are not screwing themselves but screwing the entire ecology and cause animal suffering (think bullfighting in Spain). 

A new documentary, aptly titled The Last Tourist  came a decade too late but still never too late. 

This film is a wake-up call.

We need to dramatically rethink the way we travel.

In 1950, there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. In 2020, that number was expected to be 1.6 billion. That means more people traveling than at any other point in history.

Travel is in an unfortunate state – and that’s even before COVID-19 brought it to a temporary standstill. Overtourism magnified the increasing impact on the environment, wildlife, and vulnerable populations around the world. Unintentionally, tourists have been destroying the very things they have come to see. Tourism reached a tipping point.

Yet, travel is also an opportunity. It can be leveraged as a force for good – to promote conservation, alleviate poverty, and positively transform the lives of people living in host communities, while fostering cultural connection and understanding between people from all walks of life. Tourism can spread peace and be the greatest form of wealth distribution the world has ever seen. This forced pause has presented us with the opportunity to reshape the travel industry as we know it.

This poignant film explores our ability to harness tourism’s power in a way that creates shared value for all – travellers and host communities alike – while preserving the places and natural resources we treasure most.

Change starts with us.

The one thing you can't escape in your life is yourself.

A plan ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a shortcut. What you seek will come if you sit and do work, if you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience.

The next time we feel the urge to flee, to hit the road or bury ourselves in work or activity, we need to catch ourselves. Don't book a cross-country flight - go for a walk instead. Don't get high - get some solitude, find some quiet. There are far easier, far more accessible, and ultimately far more sustainable strategies for accessing the stillness we were born with. Travel inside your heart and your mind, and let the body stay put. 

- Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Earth 200-300 Million Years Ago !

Ridiculous egos, clashes, hatred, death and destruction for land which was attached once upon time and will do so again in due time - ad infinitum or until earth is no more. 

But most commonly opinions, debates, ideology, and arguments fall into the ridiculous bucket. 

- More Here

Emerging Field Of Soil Bioacoustics - Life In Soil Isn't Quite

Ecologists have long known that the ground beneath our feet is home to more life, and more diverse life, than almost any other place on Earth. To a layperson, soil seems little more than a compact layer of dirt. But in fact, the ground is a labyrinthine landscape of tunnels, cavities, roots and decaying litter. In just a cup of dirt, researchers have counted up to 100 million life forms, from more than 5,000 taxa. Underground denizens range from microscopic bacteria and fungi and pencil-dot-sized springtails and mites, to centipedes, slugs and earthworms that can reach several meters in length, to moles, mice and rabbits in their tunnels and dens.

“It’s a staggering amount of biodiversity,” says Uffe Nielsen, a soil biologist at Western Sydney University in Australia. It’s also a vital one: Collectively, these subterranean communities form much of the basis for life on our planet, from the food we eat to the air we breathe.

Today, in a relatively new field known as soil bioacoustics — others prefer terms such as biotremology or soil ecoacoustics — a growing number of biologists are capturing underground noises to open a window into this complex and cryptic world. They’ve found that something as simple as a metal nail pushed into the dirt can become a sort of upside-down antenna if equipped with the right sensors. And the more researchers listen, the more it becomes apparent how much the ground below us is thrumming with life.

Eavesdropping on this cacophony of underground sounds promises to reveal not only what life forms reside below our feet but also how they go about their existence — how they eat or hunt, how they slither past each other unnoticed, or drum, tap and sing to get one another’s attention. Life underground “is a black box,” says Nielsen. “As we open it, we realize how little we know.”

- More here

Jeremy Adelman Revisits Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty On The Occasion Of The Book’s 50th Anniversary

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was influenced by all of these inputs: Hirschman’s misjudgment in Nigeria; Moscovici’s analysis of the power of small groups that speak loudly; and Nader and the consumer movement. The book is like a road map through the intricacies of disappointment. What to do when your government stops listening, your car dealer sells you lemons, or the local public school cuts after-school music to save some money? For Hirschman, there were three options. One was exit. You could leave your country. (Hirschman was familiar with this option. He had fled tyranny, war, and intolerance on many occasions, starting in the spring of 1933, when he fled the Nazi takeover in Germany at age 17.) You could give up on Chevy and buy a Ford. You could withdraw from the public school and opt for a private one. In our day, examples of exit include General Mattis’s resignation from Trump’s cabinet, the decision by the majority of Britons to part ways with the European Union, and the flight of 70 million refugees worldwide from persecution and obscene neglect.

Another option was voice: expressing anger in a letter to the editor or making a complaint to the sales rep or, as many of the students at Stanford were doing the year Hirschman was in residence, protesting the Vietnam War. When demonstrators clashed in the streets of Paris and outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968, or marched on Washington in the summer of 1963 to push for equal rights for African Americans, they exercised what Hirschman called voice: proclaiming one’s discontent loudly and publicly, in the hope that rulers got the message and changed their ways. In our day, we see voice when citizens hang a banner over a police station in Seattle declaring, “This Space Is Now Property of the Seattle People,” or pressure the governor of New York to make public the records of abusive police officers, or take to the streets of Beirut to denounce a corrupt and kleptocratic regime.

There was a third option: stay loyal. Hirschman didn’t think too much about loyalty. It wasn’t really an active option, more like a default setting. To this day, it remains the weakest conceptual leg of his famous tripod.

[---]

Hirschman also noted that deaf and overgrown institutions were vulnerable to “laziness, flabbiness, and decay.” He contended that small and medium-size countries were more inclined to adapt and reform to keep exit-tempted citizens at home. The Dutch Republic had to pay attention to its citizens in early modern Europe or risk losing its painters and patricians. Bigger powers with more resources could afford to tune out for longer, but the consequences were never too far behind. Just look to France, where pent-up grievances eventually exploded in revolution.

People with choices can wield stronger voices. What prevents institutions from going the French route is their ability to listen, their tolerance or support for voice, and, ultimately, the fact that they cannot close off the exits. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty can be read as a case against monopoly, with the goal of not only protecting consumers—as Nader proclaimed—but keeping ruling institutions responsive.

- More Here. Hirschman is one of my favorite people and his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States has timeless insights.

What I've Been Reading

Everything I am now is because of Max. I had nothing when Max into my life, he gave me everything. Now, I have everything but I don't have Max. That's the irony and brutality life played with me. But that's how of the law of impermanence works.

People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.

Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet.  I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.

Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths -  symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been - and continue to be - a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve on their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungi (mykes) and root (rhiza) - which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web." This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of the plants and fungi to form healthy relationships. 

[---]

The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy. 

Robert Macfarlane last year with this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (which I still have to finish) opened our minds to new truths and in turn, his book turned out to be one of the top books of the 21st century.  Merlin Sheldrake repeats history this year with this book with this story of mycorrhizal networks.

One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."

The World Wide Web appeared to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than a Swiss watch. Today, network science is inescapable. Pick any field of study - from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies - and the chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.

Simard's paper and her catchy concept of wood wide web found its way into James Cameron's Avatar as Pandora where symbiotic networks and relationships thrive.



It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!

No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.

It's the narrative that we tell that needs to be examined. I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon. Once again, it may be more helpful to ask why this behavior has evolved in the first place: who stands to benefit.

Today, the study of shared mycorrhizal networks is one of the fields most commonly beset with political baggage. Some portray these systems as a form of socialism by which wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to older and larger "mother trees". Some describe networks in terms of "biological markets," in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange, engaging in "sanctions," "strategic trading investments," and "market gains."

Yes, it is that ridiculous and hilarious how our language biases us into mindless ideologies that affect our thinking and makes it close to impossible to change our minds.

On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.

We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.

One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.

The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?

East to Eden - History of Apple

In the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan range, the new apple found itself in a genuine paradise. Bears, deer and wild pigs lived in the spreading woodlands, eating the wild fruit in autumn and selecting the sweeter, juicier apples while bees laboured in the pollination department of the same evolutionary project. The bears, living in the abundant caves of the Tien Shan, were avid fruit-eaters, and pips could pass through their guts unharmed to germinate in the dung. As Juniper pointed out, the baseball-glove claws of bears are perfectly suited to the grasping of apples. He had seen how enthusiastically they will vandalize a tree bearing a favourite sweet apple, dragging off whole branches in a kind of rough pruning. Out on the steppe, huge herds of wild horses and donkeys also browsed on the ripe apples and helped them spread westwards and south along the range towards what is now Almaty. Like the bears, they kept on selecting the larger, juicier, sweeter apples, so that as it spread west, the apple gradually became larger. At the same time this evolutionary pressure changed it from a ‘bird’ fruit with edible seeds to a ‘mammal’ fruit with poisonous seeds. The bitter taste of apple pips is cyanide, and the smooth, hard, teardrop seed coat evolved as the perfect streamlined vehicle to pass intact through an animal’s guts.

Juniper believed that by the time the ‘new’ apple had populated the northern slopes of the eastern Tien Shan and reached near Almaty, it had evolved into something like its present size and culinary appeal. Later, as human populations began to travel back and forth along the old animal migration routes between east and west, they helped to spread the new fruit. People call these routes ‘The Silk Roads’, but they were in use five or six thousand years before the discovery of silk, which lent its name to the route only during the period from ad 0 to 400. In the early days, said Juniper, camels would have been the means of transport along the routes, but, although they are as fond of apples as any other herbivore, their digestive system is so efficient that not even apple pips will survive it. Then, around 7,000 years ago, something momentous happened on the plains of Kazakhstan. The horse was domesticated, and soon started to travel the trading routes. The more direct northern trade routes led from Shanghai and Xian via Urumchi in north-west China to Almaty, Tashkent and Bokhara, then through Anatolia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. During winter the Tien Shan Mountains were impassable in the snow, so traders took the long way round to the south. But when the snows melted in July, the caravans turned north and until the first snows in November travelled through the Ili Valley and the Tien Shan range via Almaty, passing through fruit forests on the way.

- More here from Late Roger Deakin with a brilliant introduction and postscript by Robert Macfarlane.

The food we eat is divine and it is god. But yet most don't respect and worse waste so much.

There is a wise story in Mahabratha on wasting food; Lord Krishna would fill his hunger with a single grain of rice which was going waste.

I always carry these beautiful lines from Wendell Berry's essay "Pleasures of Eating" in my wallet as a constant reminder:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. 

What Lies Beneath - Robert Macfarlane Travels 'Underland'

The underland keeps its secrets well. Last December scientists revealed their discovery of a vast “deep life” ecosystem in the Earth’s crust, twice the volume of the world’s oceans, containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, and teeming with 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms – hundreds of times the combined weight of all living humans. Only in recent decades have ecologists traced the fungal networks that lace woodland soil, joining individual trees into intercommunicating forests via a “wood wide web” – as fungi have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. The notion of discovering a new mountain in Britain is laughable, but in Derbyshire in 1999 cavers broke through into a cavern now named Titan, since confirmed as the biggest known natural chamber in Britain, large enough to hold St Paul’s Cathedral four times over. It was as if another Ben Nevis had been found, somewhere near Chesterfield. A thousand feet below ground in northern Italy, I rappelled into a huge rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand. Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.

The underland’s impenetrability to vision and its obstructiveness to entry have long made it a means, across world cultures, of alluding to what cannot easily be seen or said: trauma, memory, grief, death, suffering, the afterlife – and what Elaine Scarry calls the “deep subterranean fact” of pain. Deliberately to place something in the underland is often a strategy to shield it from view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland often requires effortful work, physical or psychoanalytical.

For nearly two decades I have been writing about the relationships of landscape and the human heart. I began on the summits of the world’s peaks, wishing to solve a personal mystery (why I was so drawn to mountains when young that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them) but also a historical one (why the western imagination underwent a revolution of perception concerning mountains in under 300 years, from superstitious fear to secular worship). From that high ground, over the course of five books and 2,000 pages, I’ve followed a downwards trajectory, exploring the storeys of matter that lie beneath the surface of both land and mind. “The descent beckons / As the ascent beckoned,” wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem.

[---]

“Deep time” is the phrase coined by John McPhee in 1981 to denote the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch in all directions from the present moment. It echoes James Playfair’s description of the “abyss of time” he glimpsed while viewing a strata unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, when geology was first emerging as a science. McPhee and Playfair’s phrases both evoke a temporal vertigo. For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.

There is a perilous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does human behaviour matter when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of deserts or oceans, morality looks absurd, crushed to irrelevance. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin.

We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking action not apathy. The shock of the Anthropocene requires a new time literacy, a rethinking of what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls “our place in time”. This is already happening. Deep time is the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America. A deep-time perspective requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us. It asks a version of Jonas Salk’s arresting question: “Are we being good ancestors?”

- Robert Macfarlane writes about his new book Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Fourth National Climate Assessment (Detail and Summary)

Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Extreme weather and climate-related impacts on one system can result in increased
risks or failures in other critical systems, including water resources, food production and distribution, energy and transportation, public health, international trade, and national security. The full extent of climate change risks to interconnected systems, many of which span regional and national boundaries, is often greater than the sum of risks to individual sectors. Failure to anticipate interconnected impacts can lead to missed opportunities for effectively managing the risks of climate change and can also lead to management responses that increase risks to other sectors and regions. Joint planning with stakeholders across sectors, regions, and jurisdictions can help identify critical risks arising from interaction among systems ahead of time.

- Read the full report here or the summary here

Wisdom Of The Week

- Extreme Personalities at Work and in Life

Wisdom Of The Week

On October 30, 2008, Worsley, Gow, and Adams arrived in Punta Arenas, on the southern tip of Chile. They went to a warehouse owned by a company named Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions. During the summer, between thirty thousand and forty-five thousand tourists visit the continent, nearly all of them travelling on small cruise ships. Worsley’s party had hired A.L.E. to provide logistical support, which included transporting them by airplane to their starting point on Ross Island.

At the warehouse, Worsley and his companions collected freeze-dried meals for the expedition. They faced the same predicament that had bedevilled polar explorers for generations: they could haul only so many supplies on their sleds, a situation that left them vulnerable to starvation. Shackleton, during the Nimrod expedition, wrote ruefully, “How one wishes for time and unlimited provisions. Then indeed we could penetrate the secrets of this great lonely continent.”

Worsley estimated that the journey would take nine weeks. Each of the men would be limited to about three hundred and ten pounds of provisions, including a sled, and so they whittled down their kit to the essentials. Worsley packed his portion of the food, which was sealed in ten bags—one for each week of the journey, plus an extra in case of emergency. His clothing included two pairs of pants, a fleece shirt, a down jacket with a hood, gloves, a neck gaiter, a face mask, two pairs of long johns, and three pairs of socks. He brought cross-country skis and poles; for climbing, he carried crampons and ropes. As the only member of the team with first-aid training, he transported the medical bag, which contained antibiotics, syringes, splints, and morphine. He made room for his diary and a copy of “The Heart of the Antarctic.” And he carefully stored what he considered the most vital piece of equipment: a satellite phone with solar-powered batteries, which would allow the men not only to record short audio dispatches but also to check in every day with an A.L.E. operator and report their coördinates and medical condition. If the team failed to communicate for two consecutive days, A.L.E. would dispatch a search-and-rescue plane—what Worsley called “the most expensive taxi ride in the world.”

- The White Darkness: A solitary journey across Antarctica

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Nick Lane's fascinating book The Vital Question; each page is power packed with so much new (to me) information that I am reading it very slowly.

Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that have been touted as possible settings for the origin of life: warm ponds (sadly Darwin was wrong on that), primordial soup, microporous pumice stones, beaches, panspermia, you name it. But it does not rule out hydrothermal vents; on the contrary, it rules them in. Hydrothermal vents are exactly the kind of dissipative structures that we seek – continuous flow, far-from-equilibrium electrochemical reactors.

[---]

We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!

Annals of Seismology - Kathryn Schulz

Brilliant piece by Kathryn Schulz on -An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when:

Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance department. Inside the lab is a walk-in freezer. Inside the freezer are floor-to-ceiling racks filled with cryptically labelled tubes, four inches in diameter and five feet long. Each tube contains a core sample of the seafloor. Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has ruptured, how often, and how drastically.

Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The science part is fun,” Goldfinger says. “And I love doing it. But the gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding. Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland”—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. “Let’s just say I would rather not be here.”