Posts Tagged ‘ecology’
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished”*…
Paul Constance on a chain of dedicated scientists who are building data sets on the natural world around us, and how– coupled with emerging new nature apps that enable citizen scientists– they are expanding our ecological attention span into the long now…
Every two weeks from March to November, Chris Halsch walks a ten-mile loop near the Donner Pass, high up in California’s Sierra Nevada, for the sole purpose of counting butterflies.
It is one of five sites at various altitudes that Halsch, a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, has been visiting with metronomic regularity for the past five years. At each one he retraces his steps, pausing every so often to jot down species and numbers in a notebook.
Along the way, he sometimes meets recreational birders or hikers who take photographs and use nature apps to identify species for fun. But unlike those random snapshots, Halsch’s notes are a coveted resource for scientists. Once he types them into a spreadsheet, each of his data points adds a new segment to a chain of observations that has been growing without interruption for half a century, in one the world’s longest-lived efforts to monitor butterfly populations. Like a relay runner, Halsch is extending a marathon of sustained attention that began 20 years before he was born.
Multi-decadal time-series of field observations are among the rarest and most valuable artifacts in ecosystem science because they help to overcome a peculiar weakness in our ability to perceive and interpret the natural world. Humans have developed powerful methods for reconstructing events in the distant past, from the birth of a galaxy to mass extinctions in the Devonian. We have built instruments that can parse the present down to the zeptosecond. But when it comes to the modest timescale of our own lifespans, we are like near-sighted moles.
Weren’t there more birds in this meadow when we were kids?
Doesn’t it seem like spring is a lot rainier than it used to be?
Are you sure it’s safe to eat fish from this river?
Our answers to these types of questions are notoriously unreliable. Think of the tendency to describe a single weather event as evidence for (or against) climate change, or the panic caused by invasive zebra mussels that, 20 years later, turns out to have been misplaced. Perceptions are distorted by selective memories, cognitive biases, political agendas and shifting baseline syndrome—the propensity of each generation to gradually forget past environmental conditions and accept present ones as normal. In an essay published in 01990, the zoologist John J. Magnuson wrote that this temporal myopia can trap us in the “invisible present,” a space where we fail to see slow changes and are unable to interpret effects that lag years behind their causes. “In the absence of the temporal context provided by long-term research, serious misjudgments can occur not only in our attempts to understand and predict change in the world around us, but also in our attempts to manage our environment,” he warned.
Magnuson was echoing a group of mid-century scientists who believed that some of the biggest questions in ecology could only be answered with field observations that were carefully structured and repeated at the same sites for at least two decades. The longer the time-series, the greater likelihood that the invisible present will “melt away,” exposing the complex and often unexpected dynamics of ecosystem change….
[Constance describes a variety of efforts underway…]
… Collectively, these efforts are widening the aperture of our ecological attention, enabling scientists to find and stitch together scattered fragments of temporal data into panoramas that tell a more illuminating story about the interactions that drive change. Unfortunately, the emerging picture is still largely focused on wealthy countries—particularly ones with long histories of field-based science. A map of the International LTER network, an association of 750 field stations that, like their U.S. counterparts, are making long-term observations, shows that more than two thirds are concentrated in Western Europe. Numerous countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have no stations at all. Moreover, even as scientists like Moran and Grames are exploiting the new wealth of temporal evidence, it is not clear how this research will influence the wider culture, where the blinkered perceptions of the “invisible present” are still pervasive.
The trend that may ultimately overcome both of these limitations is driven, paradoxically, by smartphones. Non-scientists have long been a critical source of field labor for long time-series, most famously for the Audubon Society’s 122-year-old Christmas Bird Count, but also in hundreds of smaller projects that monitor other kinds of flora and fauna. Now, smartphones with powerful cameras and apps such as eBird, iNaturalist, Seek and Picture Insect have enabled millions of casual observers to supplement this pool of dedicated volunteers. Despite the lively debate on whether smartphone usage in the outdoors enhances or interferes with people’s appreciation of nature, one fact is clear: because nature apps automatically time-stamp, geo-reference and store each observation in a robust database, they are generating potential time-series at an unprecedented scale.
In the 20 years since the Cornell Lab of Ornithology launched eBird, the app has amassed more than one billion observations by 700,000 birders from every country in the world. Carrie Seltzer, who heads stakeholder engagement at iNaturalist, says that more than 2.4 million people have made observations on the app, at a rate that has grown between 50 percent and 100 percent per year since 02012… This torrent of raw field data vastly exceeds what even well-funded researchers could ever dream of gathering with traditional methods…
Understanding the world around us: “Peering into The Invisible Present,” from @presentbias and @longnow. Eminently worth reading in full– then browsing the other remarkable pieces available on the Long Now website.
* Lao Tzu
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As we take the long view, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a man who encourages us to see in different ways, M. C. Escher; he was born on this date in 1898. A graphic artist inspired by mathematics, he created woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, that— while largely ignored by the art world in his lifetime, have become widely celebrated. He’s been recognized as an heir to Parmigianino, Hogarth, and Piranesi.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. And though Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, and the crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.
For more on (and more examples of) Escher’s work, see here.
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”*…
We all know that our behavior has to change if we’re going to continue healthily and happily to inhabit the earth. And we all have a few ideas of changes we can make to make a difference. But they are mostly incremental and remedial. What might a society designed to have a healthy relationship to its environment look like? Spencer R. Scott has some guidelines…
Many see the Industrial Revolution as its own kind of Renaissance. Over the past 300 years it enabled an accumulation of wealth that the world has never before seen. Yet, industrialization and the fossil-fuels that aided its growth did not come without a price. As a recent report warns, six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. This unprecedented material abundance is only enjoyed by some, yet has polluted and put at risk the whole world’s air, rivers, oceans, forests, and food, and has caused two of humanity’s largest crises: climate change and the biodiversity crisis. The era of the industrial civilization is foreclosing on itself, and many are now pointing to the need for an ecological civilization to take its place. This would be a true Renaissance, where human and ecological flourishing alike are at the center of everything we do.
Before industrialization, humanity existed in an agricultural civilization during which productivity was low and people were organized around meeting basic needs. The industrial civilization ushered in a new high-productivity era that inevitably affected peoples’ values, lifestyles, beliefs, and the institutions that governed them. An ecological civilization will similarly necessitate a major paradigm shift. As Jeremy Lent asserts in “What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?”, we need “a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior.”
From Latin, ecology means “knowledge of home” and ecological means the “applied knowledge of home.” While the old industrial system is characterized by an indifference to how life on this planet works, an ecological civilization operates with ecological principles at its core – with behaviors, values, goals, and institutions organized around the applied knowledge of life on Earth.
In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus outlines some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:
Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.
Inspired by Benyus’ Life’s Principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, I created 6 ingredients for an ecological civilization…
Six ingredients for a more resilient future: “An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For,” from @SpencerRScott.
* James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
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As we think systemically, we might spare a thought for Guillaume Amontons; he died on this date in 1705. A physicist who made formative contributions to the understanding of friction, he was also an accomplished designer of scientific instruments– perhaps most notably, the air thermometer, which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature. His approach led to the emergence of the concept of “absolute zero” (long before the advent of cryogenics). These days, there’s more attention at the other end of the scale…
“The unexamined life is not worth living”*…
Diana Gitig reports on research that suggests that some of us agree more actively with Socrates than do others– and for a baked-in reason…
People who enroll in genetic studies are genetically predisposed to do so.
According to the Catalogue of Bias, ascertainment bias occurs when a sample being studied is not representative of the target population. This can produce misleading or even false conclusions, and it can be hard to detect since it cannot usually be identified by examining the sample alone. This is why many studies try to use variables other than participation in the study to make sure their samples are as representative as possible.
Studies examining how a particular treatment affects a particular health outcome often try to handle ascertainment bias by adjusting for “covariates,” things like education level or socioeconomic status, that could affect health outcomes independently of the treatment. But Stefania Benonisdottir and Augustine Kong at Oxford’s Big Data Institute have just demonstrated that we can determine if genetic studies are biased using nothing but the genes of the participants.
And they used that technique to show that there’s a genetic contribution that influences the tendency to participate in genetic studies…
People in a genetic database have segments of DNA in common unexpectedly often: “Want to have your genes tested? It might be genetic,” in @arstechnica.
The Benonisdottir and Kong paper, in Nature Genetics, is here.
* Socrates
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As we battle bias, we might send systemic birthday greetings to Sergei Winogradsky; he was born on this date in 1856. A microbiologist, ecologist, and soil scientist, he discovered chemoautotrophy (now better known as known as chemosynthesis) and the the Nitrogen cycle— which is to say that he pioneered the cycle-of-life concept.
“Everything / is not itself”*…
Toward an ecology of mind: Nathan Gardels talks with Benjamin Bratton about his recent article, “Post-Anthropocene Humanism- Cultivating the ‘third space’ where nature, technology, and human autonomy meet“…
The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux…
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
This is the view, at least, of Benjamin Bratton, a philosopher of technology who directs the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera project to investigate the impact and potential of planetary-scale computation. To further explore the notion of “post-Anthropocene humanism” raised in a recent Noema essay, I asked him to weigh in on the nature of human being and becoming when anthropogenesis and technogenesis are one and the same process.
…
“I can’t accept the essentially reactionary claim that modern science erases ‘the Human.’ Demystification is not erasure. It may destabilize some ideas that humans have about what humans are, yes. But I see it more as a disclosure of what ‘humans’ always have been but could not perceive as such. It’s not that some essence of the Human goes away, but that humans are now a bit less wrong about what humans are,” he argues.
Bratton goes on: “Instead of science and technology leading to some ‘post-human’ condition, perhaps it will lead to a slightly more human condition? The figure we associate with modern European Humanism may be a fragile, if also a productive, philosophical concept. But dismantling the concept does not make the reality go away. Rather, it redefines it in the broader context of new understanding. In fact, that reality is more perceivable because the concept is made to dissolve.”
How so? “The origins of human societies are revealed by archaeological pursuits. What is found is usually not the primal scene of some local cultural tradition but something much more alien and unsettling: human society as a physical process.
…
All this would suggest, in Bratton’s view, “that cooperative social intelligence was not only the path to Anthropocene-scale agency for humans, but a reminder that the evolution of social intelligence literally shaped our bodies and biology, from the microbial ecologies inside of us to our tool-compatible phenotype. The Renaissance idea of Vitruvian Man, that we possess bodies and then engage the world through tools and intention, is somewhat backward. Instead, we possess bodies because of biotic and abiotic ‘technologization’ of us by the world, which we in turn accelerate through social cooperation.”
In short, one might say, it is not “I think therefore I am,” but, because the world is embedded in me, “thereby I am.”
…
Bratton’s view has significant implications for how we see and approach the accelerating advances in science and technology.
A negative biopolitics, so to speak, would seek to limit the transformations underway in the name of a valued concept of the human born in a specific time and place on the continuum of human evolution. A positive bio-politics would embrace the artificiality of those transformations as part of the responsibility of human agency.
Bratton states: “Abstract intelligence is not some outside imposition from above. It emerged and evolved along with humans and other things that think. Therefore, I am equally suspicious of the sort of posthumanism that collapses sentience and sapience into an anti-rationalist, flat epistemology that seeks not to calibrate the relation between reason and world, but is instead a will to vegetablization: a dissolving of agency into flux and flow. Governance then, in the sense of steerage, is sacrificed.”
To mediate this creative tension, what is called for is a theory of governance that recognizes the promise while affirming the autonomy of humans, albeit reconfigured through a new awareness, by striving to shape what we now understand as anthropo-technogenesis.
In the political theory of checks and balances, government is the positive and constitutional rule is the negative. The one is the capacity to act, the other to amend or arrest action that could lead to harmful consequences — the “katechon” concept from Greek antiquity of “withholding from becoming,” which I have written about before.
An ecology of mind, in the term of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, would encompass both by re-casting human agency not as the master, but as a responsible co-creator with other intelligences in the reality we are making together…
“The Evolution of What It Means To Be Human,” from Nathan Gardels and @bratton in @NoemaMag. Both the conversation and the article on which it is based are eminently worth reading on full.
Pair with: “Artificial Intelligence and the Noosphere” (from Robert Wright; for which, a ToTH to friend MK): a very optimistic take on a possible future that could emerge from the dynamic that Bratton outlines. Worth reading and considering; his visions of the socioeconomic and spiritual bounties-to-come are certainly enticing.
That said, I’ll just suggest that, even if AI is ultimately as capable as many assume it can/will be– by no means a sure thing– unless we address the kinds of issues raised in last week’s (R)D on this same general subject (“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”) we’ll never get to Bratton’s (and Wright’s) happy place… The same kinds of things that Bratton implicitly and Wright explicitly are mooting for AI (as a knitter of minds in a noosphere) could have been said— were said— for computer networking, then for the web, then for social media… in the event, they knit— but not so much so much in the interest of blissful, enabling sharing and growth; rather as the tools of rapacious commercial interests (c.f.: Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification”) and/or authoritarians (c.f., China or Russia or…). Seems to me that in the long run, if we can rein in capitalism and authoritarians: maybe. In the foreseeable future: if only…
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we contemplate collaboration, we might send mysterious birthday greetings to Alexius Meinong; he was born this date in 1853. A philosopher, he is known for his unique ontology and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and axiology– the theory of value.
Meinong’s ontology is notable for its belief in nonexistent objects. He distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them: existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world; subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts; and objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts. See his Gegenstandstheorie, or the Theory of Abstract Objects.
“Trees are sanctuaries”*…
John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home…
Our friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter.
However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours — say when spring hatches out of winter — what would we see?…
Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi and fierce owls. A quick– and delightful– course in woodland ecology: “A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight,” from @JLewisStempel in @Countrylifemag.
* Herman Hesse
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As we deliberate on the deciduous, we might send fertile birthday greetings to John Bartram; he was born on this date in 1699. An American botanist, horticulturist, and explorer, based in Philadelphia for most of his career, he was judged by Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to be the “greatest natural botanist in the world.”
He started what is known as Bartram’s Garden in 1728 at his farm in Kingsessing (now part of Philadelphia)– considered the first botanic garden in the United States. His sons and descendants operated it until 1850; it still operates under a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and a non-profit foundation, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
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