Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

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Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

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Plants Can Hear The Sound Of Falling Rain

Deep inside the inner ear are tiny calcium carbonate crystals called otoliths that swish around in fluid-filled sacs when we move, helping our brains detect acceleration. Plants have similarly situated calcium carbonate crystals called “statoliths” in their root cells. Instead of detecting acceleration, however, the crystals tell the plants which way is down so the roots can grow in that direction. While the otoliths in our ears don’t help us hear, the statoliths in plant roots could help plants hear, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports. 

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to find out if sound waves from natural phenomena like rain could be energetic enough to jostle the stratoliths in plants and facilitate germination. To test their theory, they used rice seeds, which typically grow in shallow water, an environment that can transmit sound waves more efficiently.

“Water is denser than air, so the same drop makes larger pressure waves underwater,” study author Nicholas Makris said in a statement. “So if you’re a seed that’s within a few centimeters of a raindrop’s impact, the kind of sound pressures that you would experience in water or in the ground are equivalent to what you’d be subject to within a few meters of a jet engine in the air.”

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How Not To Save The Planet

Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:

Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”

I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.

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This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.

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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.)

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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.

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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.”

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What Was The Very First Plant In The World?

The story of plants begins in the water. The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae. You can still see algae today as seaweed along beaches or as green slime on rocks in ponds.

Algae have lived in Earth’s oceans and lakes for over 1 billion years. They can make their own food, using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create sugars. This process is called photosynthesis; it releases oxygen – the gas we need to breathe – as a byproduct.

At first, Earth’s atmosphere had very little oxygen. Over millions of years, photosynthesizing organisms like algae and some bacteria slowly released oxygen into the air. This change, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event, made it possible for larger and more complex life to evolve. Without oxygen-producing organisms, animals, including humans, could never have existed.

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Moving onto land was not easy. Water plants are supported by water and can absorb nutrients easily, but land plants faced new challenges. How would they avoid drying out? How could they stand upright without floating? How would they get water and nutrients from dry ground?

To survive, early plants evolved important new features. One key adaptation was a waxy coating, called a cuticle, which helped keep water inside the plant. Plants also developed stronger cell walls that allowed them to stand upright against gravity. Simple rootlike structures, called rhizoids, helped anchor plants to the ground and absorb water and minerals from the soil.

The earliest land plants were very small and simple. They looked similar to modern mosses, liverworts and hornworts, which still grow today in damp places like forest floors and stream edges. These plants did not have true roots or stems, and they stayed close to the ground. Fossils of early land plants, such as Cooksonia, date back to about 430 million years ago and show small branching stems only an inch or two tall.

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Moss Might Survive Nearly Two Decades in Space

Fujita and his colleagues first challenged the moss species Physcomitrium patens with space-like conditions in a lab, including extreme temperature swings, extreme UV radiation, and vacuum conditions. By assessing the impacts on three different structures from the moss—juvenile moss, specialized stem cells, and spores contained within reproductive structures called sporangium—they determined that the shielded spores had the best chance of making it among the stars. For example, the spores showed around 1,000 times more tolerance to UV radiation than did the stem cells.

The scientists chalked this up to the sporangium, which protects them from perils including UV exposure and extreme temperatures on Earth—a feature that has perhaps enabled them to ride out multiple mass extinction events.

Then, it was time for the ultimate test: In March 2022, the team handed off hundreds of spores to astronauts headed toward the International Space Station on the Cygnus NG-17 spacecraft. Once the crew made it to the ISS, they secured the spores on the station’s exterior. Spores were divided into groups and exposed to one of three different conditions: exposed to visible light uncovered but protected from UV radiation by a filter, blocked from any light (including UV) in a control group, or exposed to all the visible light and UV radiation hitting the ISS. After 283 days in the extraterrestrial elements, the spores returned to Earth.

“We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite: Most of the spores survived,” Fujita said in the statement. “We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells.”

Testing revealed that more than 80 percent of the spores survived the experiment, and had germination rates of up to 97 percent for those not exposed to UV radiation in space. Meanwhile, the spores that weren’t shielded from UV radiation had a germination rate of 86 percent.The paper noted that a form of chlorophyll showed signs of damage in the spores exposed to space light but not in the spores kept in the dark.

With the data gleaned from the lab and space experiments, the team estimated that these moss spores could survive up to roughly 15 years in space. Now, this moss joins the ranks of other rugged Earthlings who have endured the space elements, including tardigrades and fungi.

The researchers say they hope that moss can aid extended human missions to other planets by providing oxygen and boosting soil fertility for crop growth on long cosmic journeys or on extraterrestrial outposts. 

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Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

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The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

How To Be A Lichen

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

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Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space. 

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Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

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Is God a Mushroom?

After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated. Like many other animals, we also seem to possess what the psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel calls an “intoxication drive” — an impulse to seek inebriation in order to alter or expand our consciousness, equal to “the basic drives of hunger, thirst, or sex.” 

“Drug-induced alteration of consciousness preceded the origin of humans,” psychedelics researcher Giorgio Samorini writes. “It is an impulse that manifests itself in human society without distinction of race or culture; it is completely cross-cultural.”

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In the cognitive science of religion, the dominant explanation for the origin of the belief in gods has long been to blame a “hyperactive agency detection device”: in other words, an inclination, coded into our brain, to imagine threats where there are none — to imagine an active threat behind a rustling bush or bubbling water. But recent studies have challenged the viability of this explanation. 

Hyperactive agency detection is not correlated with religious belief, they say. Besides, our cognitive models are, ultimately, based on our embodied experiences. Why would we presume agency behind every undetermined stimulus, they ask, without past experience to inform our caution? And just how could our god-belief be so universally, cross-culturally encoded, if it is based on something we have never, in any capacity, experienced?

But what if God had already shown his face to us, had been here from the very beginning? What if God wasn't a man, or a power, or a hidden threat — what if God was, this whole time, a mushroom?

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One of the weird things about the mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelics is how universal and non-sectarian they tend to be. “It’s not uncommon for subjects to report encounters with symbols or deities that have not been part of their process of enculturation,” the pioneering psychiatrist William Richards writes in Sacred Knowledge, his book on psychedelic research. Midwestern atheists report seeing visions of Islamic architecture; Baptist priests hear Sanskrit liturgies in their ears. “When you get into the symbolic, archetypal realm… good agnostics are seeing images of the Christ,” he told me.

This goes some way to justifying the theory that our religious impulses may be born of these fungi, rather than simply activated by them. But such a conclusion, for the theologically inclined, would be revolutionary. What if our revelations — our relics, temples, and testaments — came not from God, but from an evolutionary dance with fungi? Can God still be said to exist if we accept that as true?

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Very Good Sentences

This is not to say that human design has no place in nature. But it does mean that our models — rooted in symmetry, hierarchy, and predictability — are often a poor fit for systems that thrive on variation and response. The more we learn from ecology, the more we see that strength often lies not in perfect order, but in the capacity to bend, absorb, and shift. Nature’s designs are not clean, but they work — and they last.

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To see beauty in nature is easy when it fits our expectations — when a flower is symmetrical, a bird unblemished, a landscape orderly and undisturbed. But much of the natural world does not conform to these standards.

This kind of beauty isn’t immediate. It asks for more attention, and a willingness to look past surface regularity. In biology, what may seem imperfect often reveals a hidden logic — structures shaped by use, behavior, or necessity rather than by visual appeal. A limpet’s uneven shell tells of wave exposure; the patchiness of a savanna shows where animals have grazed or fire has passed through. The landscape holds memory, but it does not preserve it cleanly.

Learning to recognize this kind of beauty means shifting our sense of value. It means seeing that irregular forms often tell us more about how life works than polished ones do. The complexity, resilience, and history embedded in these structures is not ornamental — it is essential. And when we begin to see that, the natural world becomes less like a picture and more like a living record.

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Habitat Destruction & The Extinction Debt

My dear Sapiens; I will see, when I see you. 

And yeah, I am part of this moronic species who celebrates self-destruction. 

An important cause of extinction of any species is the destruction of the habitat that it needs to survive.

From Wiki: 

The term extinction debt was first used in 1994 in a paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak, although Jared Diamond used the term "relaxation time" to describe a similar phenomenon in 1972.

In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.

Extinction debt occurs because of time delays between impacts on a species, such as destruction of habitat, and the species' ultimate disappearance. For instance, long-lived trees may survive for many years even after reproduction of new trees has become impossible, and thus they may be committed to extinction. Technically, extinction debt generally refers to the number of species in an area likely to become extinct, rather than the prospects of any one species, but colloquially it refers to any occurrence of delayed extinction.

Extinction debt may be local or global, but most examples are local as these are easier to observe and model. It is most likely to be found in long-lived species and species with very specific habitat requirements (specialists). Extinction debt has important implications for conservation, as it implies that species may become extinct due to past habitat destruction, even if continued impacts cease, and that current reserves may not be sufficient to maintain the species that occupy them. Interventions such as habitat restoration may reverse extinction debt.

1994 paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak:

Abstract

Habitat destruction is the major cause of species extinctions. Dominant species often are considered to be free of this threat because they are abundant in the undisturbed fragments that remain after destruction. Here we describe a model that explains multispecies coexistence in patchy habitats4 and which predicts that their abundance may be fleeting. Even moderate habitat destruction is predicted to cause time-delayed but deterministic extinction of the dominant competitor in remnant patches. Further species are predicted to become extinct, in order from the best to the poorest competitors, as habitat destruction increases. More-over, the more fragmented a habitat already is, the greater is the number of extinctions caused by added destruction. Because such extinctions occur generations after fragmentation, they represent a debt - a future ecological cost of current habitat destruction.

 

Moss Medicines: The Next Revolution in Biotech?

Ever since we moved into Max's Walden, I started growing moss wherever I can (and we have a lot of natural moss) too. They look so beautiful and I read a lot about their benefits. 

Now finally Ralf Reski saw their potential as future medicine plus other non-animal based solutions!

Moss is an often-overlooked, ancient plant that is far from insignificant. Among the first to colonize land, mosses greened the planet and transformed Earth’s climate, providing an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve.1 These hardy pioneers can even filter and clean the polluted air of cities.2,3

Where others see a natural air purifier, Ralf Reski, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Freiburg, saw untapped potential in moss. In addition to the range of valuable compounds they produce naturally, Reski believed it made an ideal culture system to grow recombinant human proteins at scale.

Reski first worked on moss as an undergraduate, studying their genetics. He immediately fell in love with the tiny plants, so much so that he asked his supervisor if he could continue working on them for a PhD project. From those early days, his peers quickly dismissed the notion, pointing out that mosses didn't have to do anything with biotechnology. “You will never become a professor in Germany unless you work with real plants. Nobody is interested in mosses,” Reski recalled the caution from senior professors.

But he persisted. According to Reski, it is much easier to scale up the production of plant cell cultures in general. Mosses, specifically, require no complex media, lack any viruses that are associated with mammalian cell culture systems, and can be grown in large bioreactors in a cost-efficient manner. Over the past several decades, Reski has harnessed the power of moss to produce a variety of beneficial compounds for use in skincare, therapeutics, medical devices, and more.

“I always say that, additionally, [our moss culture systems] are vegan, kosher, halal, whatever you like, because we don't use any animal products,” he added.

 

This Tree Wants to Be Struck by Lightning !

When lightning strikes a tree in the tropics, the whole forest explodes.

“At their most extreme, it kind of looks like a bomb went off,” said Evan Gora, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Dozens of trees around the one that was struck are electrocuted. Within months, a sizable circle of forest can wither away.

Somehow, a single survivor stands, seemingly healthier than ever. A new study by Dr. Gora, published last week in the journal New Phytologist, reveals that some of the biggest trees in a rainforest don’t just survive lightning strikes. They thrive.

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From 2014 to 2019, the system captured 94 lightning strikes on trees. Dr. Gora and his team visited sites to see which species had been struck. They were looking for dead trees as well as “flashover points,” where leaves are singed as lightning jumps between trees. From there, the canopy dies back, and the tree eventually dies.

Eighty-five species had been struck and seven survived, but one stood out literally and figuratively: Dipteryx oleifera, a towering species that had been struck nine times, including one tree that had been hit twice and seemed more vigorous. D. oleifera stands about 30 percent taller than the rest of the trees and has a crown about 50 percent larger than others, almost as if it is an arboreal lightning rod.

“It seems to have an architecture that is potentially selecting to be struck more often,” Dr. Gora said.

All the struck D. oleifera trees survived lightning strikes, but 64 percent of other species died within two years. Trees surrounding D. oleifera were 48 percent more likely to die after a lightning strike than those around other species. In one notable die-off, a single strike killed 57 trees around D. oleifera “while the central tree is just happy and healthy,” Dr. Gora said. Lightning also blasted parasitic vines off D. oleifera trees.

The clearing of neighboring trees and choking vines meant struck D. oleifera trees had less competition for light, making it easier to grow and produce more seeds. Computer models estimated that getting struck multiple times could extend the life of a D. oleifera tree by almost 300 years.

Before the study, “it seemed impossible that lightning could be a good thing for the trees,” Dr. Gora said. But the evidence suggests that D. oleifera benefits from each jolt.

“Trees are in constant competition with each other, and you just need an edge relative to whatever is surrounding you,” said Gabriel Arellano, a forest ecologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study.

The physical mechanisms that help trees survive intense lightning strikes remain unknown. Different trees could be more conductive or have architectures that escape damage, Dr. Gora suggested.

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The Languages Lost To Climate Change

Scientists and linguists have discovered a striking connection between the world’s biodiversity and its languages. Areas rich in biological diversity also tend to be rich in linguistic diversity (a high concentration of languages). While this co-occurrence is not yet fully understood, a strong geographic correlation suggests multiple factors (ecological, social, cultural) influence both forms of diversity, which are also declining at alarming rates. These high-diversity areas are also often at the front lines of the climate crisis. Where plant and animal species are disappearing, languages, dialects and unique expressions often follow a similar pattern of decline.

The Arctic may not be an obvious biodiversity hotspot, like the Brazilian Amazon or Tanzania’s coastal forests, but it plays a critical role in regulating and stabilizing the Earth’s climate and supporting life on our planet. Scientists often say that “what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” and any disruption to its habitat has far-reaching consequences for humanity.

Indigenous communities have deep relationships with the land they have occupied for generations, and this close relationship is reflected in the languages they speak — how they talk about the landscape, and how they express the beliefs and customs in which those languages developed. When their relationships with the land suffer, so can their languages. 

For example, Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation with the highest density of languages on the planet (110 languages across 4,707 square miles), is home to 138 threatened plant and animal species. It is also one of the countries that is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and climate-related natural disasters. Scientists warn that the climate crisis has become the “final nail in the coffin” for many Indigenous languages, as coastal communities are forced to relocate.

When they can no longer depend on the land, communities may be forced to emigrate to other areas where their languages aren’t spoken, leaving behind not just their mother tongue, but all the wisdom contained in it. There is also evidence to suggest that in cases where a language begins to decline — due to economic or social factors, for example — people may gradually stop caring for the land. When languages are abandoned, the traditional ecological knowledge they carry is also left behind.

“Our language and traditional practices are closely tied to the land,” a community leader from Dishchii’bikoh, a tribally controlled school, in Cibecue, Arizona, told researchers in a 2016 study.“In many ways, it is used in describing objects, teaching moral lessons, and expressing our purpose on this land. Since the loss of our traditional language … our traditional ecological knowledge has become more and more threatened.”

Increasingly, Indigenous communities are pointing to the inextricable link between language and biodiversity as evidence that humans are not separate from nature, but very much a part of it.

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Linguistic diversity can be seen as an indicator of cultural diversity more broadly, Gorenflo says, which has traditionally been more difficult to define. “For a long time, anthropology was considered to be the social science that studied culture. But nobody could come to an agreement about what culture was,” he says. “Linguistic diversity is really what we’re using as a proxy for cultural diversity.”

The exact reasons behind the connections between languages and nature are not entirely clear, Gorenflo told me. Previous studies have suggested that areas with a high number of resources create linguistic diversity because people must adapt to more complex environments. But others have argued that it’s because more plentiful resources reduce the likelihood of having to share them and communicate with neighboring groups in times of need. Meanwhile, some research has suggested that the reasons behind this co-occurrence are far more complex and differ from one area to another. Gorenflo emphasized the need for more research. “Understanding this connection is important because it would change how we manage the relationship between Indigenous people and biological diversity — and nature.”

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For Gorenflo, the factors driving the co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity, which were initially puzzling, are now becoming even more evident. “I see languages as an extension of the cultural system, which itself is part of the broader ecology of the world,” he told me. “So, it’s less and less of a mystery to me, and more about exploring what this ecology looks like.”

The preservation of endangered languages is about more than saving words — it could be vital to safeguarding centuries of human knowledge and understanding the systems that sustain us.

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Where Did Trees Come From?

Trees are considered to be an evolutionary descendant of ferns, one of the oldest types of plants currently around today. These early trees were much shorter than the average tree today and also reproduced with spores rather than seeds. The first known tree fossil dates back to about 385 million years ago during the Middle Devonian. During this time period, no plant grew higher than roughly waist height. However, in order to grow higher, plants would need to develop a stronger form of tissue.

The development of wood was a big evolutionary leap and took millions of years to accomplish. Wood is useful for several reasons. The most obvious is the structural support, but wood is also useful for allowing more efficient transport of water. With this new development, early trees could out-compete with their neighbors for precious sunlight and store more water to survive in droughts.

These early trees formed the backbone of Devonian and Carboniferous forests. This includes varieties like the Wattieza above, and their relatives the Lepidodendrales. The forests that grew and died during this period are the primary source material for all modern coal deposits. Without trees evolving at this time, the Industrial Revolution may have never happened! Even hundreds of millions of years ago, trees were laying the groundwork for modern human advancement.

These trees also grew fairly differently from modern trees. Instead of gradually growing continuously throughout its life, these plants stay at a low height for a while. Once it has built up sufficient resources, it will “rapidly” shoot up in height to rise above its neighbors and expose itself to lots of sunlight. Rapidly here means faster than a modern tree, but still slow to our eyes. Another difference is the quality of wood; ancient trees used a variety of wood that was easier to create but much less structurally sound. As a result, these trees could not grow very tall and did not have branches.

Trees were due for another evolutionary shift during the Triassic Period. Their method of reproduction shifted from spores to seeds. This is where we see the first example of a gymnosperm. Gymnosperm is Greek for ‘revealed seed’ or ‘naked seed.’ This class consists of many trees that we would recognize today, including any tree that has cones. Gymnosperms include cedars, Douglas-firs, cypresses, firs, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces, and yews. While gymnosperms became dominant in the Triassic Period, they first appeared sometime during the Carboniferous Period.

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How Some Trees Evolved to Birth Live Young

Typically, a seed’s number one job is to have patience. Before it grows into a new clover or pumpkin vine or oak tree or hydrangea, it has to wait. Only when conditions are just right will the seed sprout, which gives it the best chance of survival.

Yet for a few tree species, the seed’s job is different. It doesn’t wait. It starts growing right away, while still attached to its parent plant, and only separates later. Trees that do this are called viviparous, or live-bearing. It’s the same name scientists give to animals, such as humans, that birth live babies instead of laying eggs.

Despite the unexpectedness of this trait, researchers studying the genetics of viviparous trees recently showed that the pathway to their evolution might have been surprisingly simple.

While viviparity is rare among trees in general, it’s common among the mangroves, roughly 80 species that live on warm coastlines around the world. These trees are already unusual, as they absorb water that’s up to 100 times saltier than what most plants can tolerate.

A live-birthed baby mangrove doesn’t look like a chubby infant, or like a miniature adult mangrove. Instead, it’s like a string bean with a bulbous cap, topped by a little crown of roots. The babies hang from their parent tree in clusters, and when they reach a certain stage of development they drop straight down into the mud or sand below, says Yingjia Shen, a researcher at China’s Xiamen University. 

If the tide is out when the baby mangroves fall, their roots grow rapidly, Shen says, with the plants starting to take hold within a few hours of hitting the ground. In other cases, though, the young plants may take a journey. Baby mangroves are buoyant, and “those that fail to root in the mud can drift in the ocean currents for several months,” Shen says, “potentially reaching coastlines thousands of kilometers away and taking root there.”

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The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static — we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in their path.

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If static charges aid pollination, they could shift plant evolution, too. “Maybe some fundamental features of flowers are actually just in service of generating the correct electrostatic field,” Dornhaus said, “and because we can’t see them, we’ve ignored that whole dimension of a flower’s life.” The idea isn’t so far-fetched: In 2021, Robert’s team observed petunias releasing more compounds that attract bugs (opens a new tab) around beelike electric fields. This suggests that flowers wait until a pollinator is nearby to actively lure them closer, Robert said.

“Humans are very visually oriented, so we tend to emphasize flowers that are showy and large,” Dornhaus said. But we already know that flowers transmit strong invisible signals, like scents or ultraviolet patterns. “It may well be that for some flowers, the electric field is actually a more prominent signal to bees than color is.”

However, evolutionary details surrounding electrostatic ecology remain murky at best. “It’s amazing, really, how little we know,” said Wainwright, the insect evolutionary ecologist. Even within better-understood visual and acoustic systems, ecologists are only beginning to connect evolutionary dots.

Because electrostatics has flown under the radar, England worries that humans unknowingly hinder the ability of animals to use these forces. “We’re spitting electrostatic stuff into the environment all the time,” he said. Electronic devices, appliances, power lines, fertilizers (opens a new tab) and even clothing bear static charges. “If [insects are] sensitive to the wingbeat of a wasp, they’re probably sensitive to a power line, and it might be messing up that entire system.”

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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.

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“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.

 

The Hidden Language Between Flowers and Bees

In short, the team discovered that bumblebees can sense a flower’s electrical field, distinguish between fields formed by different floral shapes, and tell whether another bee recently visited a flower.

See, both flowers and bees have electrical fields. As they fly, bees bump into charged particles, such as dust and other small molecules. The friction of these tiny collisions knocks electrons off the bee’s surface, leaving them with a positive charge.

Meanwhile, flowers usually have a negative charge, particularly during mild weather. A plant’s roots in the ground give it a slight negative electric charge. The higher the plant grows, the higher the electric charge it has because the air around the plant also has an electric charge that increases every meter above the ground. This creates a faint electric field around the plant.

Now for the fun part.

One interesting observation is that pollen will hop from the flower to the bee when a positively charged bee approaches the negatively charged flower. Robert told National Geographic:

“We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed.”

Further, the positively charged bees slightly increase the charge of any flower they land on beginning just before landing and lasts for just shy of two minutes — much longer than a bee usually spends visiting a flower. The team demonstrated that when a bee lands on the stem of a petunia, its electrical potential increases by approximately 25 millivolts.

Bees sense this slight change in a flower’s electrical field, which communicates that the flower has recently been visited and is likely low on nectar. It’s sort of like the flower is telling the bee, “I’m out of stock. Check back later.” Meanwhile, when a bee makes contact with a flower, it cancels out the single — which tells other bees, “I’m occupied.”

No one knows for sure how bees actually sense electrical fields. But Robert and others believe the electric fields affect part of a bee, like its antennas or the tiny hairs on its body. 

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One of the best things about this knowledge is that you don’t have to travel or book a vacation to see it. From now on, you’ll know the miraculous interaction happens anytime you see a bee and flower interacting. You can watch the interaction and know there is an exchange between these two vastly different species, one we humans can only observe and not experience.

Not only does this knowledge make previous mundane observations more magical, but it’s also a humbling reminder that as brilliant as the human species can be, other animals experience the world wholly differently than we do and are capable of doing things we may never fully understand.

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