Sumana Roy, with an arboreal meditation on time and rebellion against the straight line…
Have you seen the shape of a solitary tree on a mountaintop? There is no arrogance—it is not the monarch of all it surveys; its shape is that of survival, of fighting annihilation. If a morning hints at the DNA of the approaching day, might the shapes of young plants give us an intimation of what they will look like in advanced age? It must be this sense of amorphousness in the tree branches, going and growing, that makes me think of the shape of smoke, rising dark from the mouths of moving machines, marking the air as they travel, annotating their journey. . . . Are there knowledge systems in these shapes that might inform our understanding of art, creativity, knowledge systems, of time and history, of life and the living?
From the foothills I stare at the mountains and watch the evening grow; daylight suddenly ages, then dies. In the moment’s susurration, one could forget that the sun will return in the morning. Lights wink in the houses on the hills, spare sets of eyes for the dark—or like flowers budding, then blossoming. But that analogy doesn’t quite hold, because for those lights to be flowers, the houses need to be treelike. And our houses are not shaped like trees.
It is difficult to compare the shapes of trees with almost anything else. A flag flutters in the wind, and I can sense the longing of my mind to compare the character of that movement with those of leaves annotating the wind. But the flag mast is not a tree branch and no leaf moves like a flag, not even the banana leaf, whose behavior I’ve often mistaken for a Buddhist prayer flag. Sometimes when I watch leaves being tickled by the wind, I look at the tree nervously. It reminds me of a parent throwing their child up to the sky and catching her again, carrying her in so many ways, with risk as much as assurance. In this is a knowledge system of trust, how the branches hold the leaves and allow them to move without fear.
And what can a leaf’s shape tell us about its home? A palm’s leaf is like paper torn into strips that still manages to hold itself up. Where does such a shape come from? Does it offer protection from the wind, preempting what a strong sea breeze will eventually do? I have seen what such wind can do to billboards—puncturing them, tearing the faces of models and actors with unrelenting force, with a kind of strength that one can imagine only of bombs. There’s also the opposite: the shining solidity of a glossy jackfruit leaf confident even against the bullets of tropical rain. And their branches—hardy, patriarchal and solid, fortresslike, for they must hold the many fruits that cling like baby monkeys to their mothers. When I see the branches of different species, it is as if I can see their birth certificates. It is as if the shapes of the branches are a consequence of a negotiation, not only between the tree and the wind, but also between the tree second-guessing the behavior of the wind generally as well as the particularity of the wind in its home. What I see before me, then, is the shape of the creative process—the arrival of an idea in a leaf’s unfurling, followed by the acknowledgement of life’s exigencies and pauses in the influences of wind, water, and light. When it comes to branches, then, nothing beyond the search for sunlight is modular—everything is ad hoc, growth is provisional, spontaneity is not a choice but a compulsion. A tree’s diet is simple—water and light, but often inconsistent, and in its branches we see the shape of improvisation, of how artists and scientists adapt as circumstances change.
I am aware that I am seeking something beyond the botanical when I graze upon these branches. Is there a hidden history about form, about genre or about genealogy that I crave? In trees, I find a unit of time that is different from other kinds of living time—time is visible in the girth and growth of their branches, a history of ingestion manifest in the visual biography of its form. The difference in the ideas of time perhaps comes from our conditioning in stillness and mobility and, of course, from the directions of movement. Trees move, but usually—by which I mean visibly—northward; humans, mammals, and animals in our vicinity travel east or westward. In this, too, is the variety of our experiences of time.
I think of tree branches that, in search of light, have moved in the same direction. I will never know whether they wanted to meet—their crowns are, of course, shy, as the name of the phenomenon reminds us. The arrangement of branches might, for a moment, remind us of railway tracks, but there is no intimation in the latter of the death, the knowledge system we are all moving toward. Adulthood is the realization that time does not die with our death, and though one might be penniless and without possessions, one will always leave behind something: time, memories, an inheritance, for strangers to use. The absence of humans to the eye when looking out at the landscape from a train also does something—when humans do appear, they feel like numerals on a large clock, something upon which the eye may rest upon, but only for a moment, no longer. I don’t know of any tree whose branches are arranged around the trunk like the numbers on a dial. Sometimes I see a flight of stairs. They seem to disrupt the flow of time. I gradually begin to see that the uneven branches of trees, of varying lengths and thickness, do the same. Sometimes black smoke billows out of chimneys of brick kilns. In its sturdy curving, it has the arrogance of a statue—it stays in that position, as if it were holding its breath underwater, refusing to move. It looks ominous at first and comical in the end, like ambition does. How is its waywardness different from those of tree branches? Does it move like the branches of a tree, seeking something that it needs, or is it without hunger? The smoke will dissipate, of course, but the branches remain. But do they behave similarly in occupying the sky? The heads of the tea shrubs in the tea estates, growing beside the railway track—the youngest leaves picked by human hands keep the bushes flat as does the annual trimming in winter. In the difference of height and growth between the well-endowed shade trees and the tea plants is a quantifiable measure of a history of oppression.
Think of how branches get thinner as they move away from the earth. In this, they are not unlike air itself, in that the form of the trees becomes mirror images of roots. What does that do to our consciousness, for there is no resemblance between our feet and our head? Thin trees—young, planted recently—are straighter than older trees, in that they are like humans themselves, erect when younger, then slouching with age. Is Time erect like that? When does Time grow like grass? See how the branches touch the sky—poking, punctuating, even puncturing it. In these shapes also is some kind of constant self-revision, like a river that is constantly changing its course. Or at least that is what it seems like to an outsider species such as myself. In every knot, in every hole, in every bend, in every stop, in every pause, in every crest, in every depression, in every curl is a history of resistance offered by its surroundings. Form, then, is the result of a negotiation with the world, both of affiliation and disaffiliation, of support as much of antagonism. A history is revealed to us without any middleman or interpretation—a history that is so direct it surprises us, for we are not used to it. The shape of these branches—of history itself—is a rebellion against the straight line, against its autocracy. It reminds me that nothing can be reversed, that “undo” is a capitalist scam, that W. S. Merwin could not “unchop” a tree by assembling its branches together again…
As Gary Snyder reminds us, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.”
* Herman Hesse
###
As we learn from our elders, we might send fruitful birthday greetings to Nehemiah Grew; he was born on this date in 1641. A plant anatomist and physiologist, he is known as the “Father of Plant Anatomy.” Grew trained, then practiced, as a physician; but his passion was plants. In 1665, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his paper The Anatomy of Vegetables begun. In 1682, he published what is considered his most important work, Anatomy of Plants…
It was divided into four books, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, Anatomy of Roots, Anatomy of Trunks, and Anatomy of Leaves, Flowers, Fruits and Seeds, and was illustrated with eighty-two plates, while appended to it were seven papers mostly of a chemical character.The Anatomy is especially notable for its descriptions of plant structure. He described nearly all the key differences of morphology of stem [or trunk] and root, showed that the flowers of the Asteraceae are built of multiple units, and correctly hypothesized that stamens are male organs. Anatomy of Plants also contains the first known microscopic description of pollen. – source
From the piece featured below: “GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth” (image source)
It’s easy to feel hope in the advances that the world has made in eraditcating extreme poverty over the last several decades. But as Max Roser writes, unless the poorest economies start growing, this period of progress against the worst form of poverty is over…
In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 billion people.
This means on any average day in the last 35 years, about 115,000 people left extreme poverty behind.1 Leaving the very worst poverty behind doesn’t mean a life free of want, but it does mean a big change. Additional income matters most for those who have the least. It means having the chance to leave hunger behind, to gain access to clean water, to access better healthcare, and to have at least some electricity — for light at night and perhaps even to cook and heat.
Can we expect this rapid progress to continue?
Unfortunately, we cannot. Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.
To understand why the rapid progress against deep poverty will not continue into the future, we need to know why the world made progress in the past.
Extreme poverty declined in the last three decades because, back in the 1990s, the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries that subsequently achieved very fast economic growth. In Indonesia and China, more than two-thirds of the population lived in extreme poverty. But these economies then grew rapidly, so that by today, the share has declined to less than 10%. Other large Asian countries — including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines — also achieved strong growth, and as a consequence, the share living in extreme poverty declined rapidly. Much of the progress happened in Asia, but conditions in other regions improved too: the share living in extreme poverty also declined in Ghana, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Panama, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries.
This chart shows the economic change in these countries over the past decades. As incomes increased, the share of people in extreme poverty declined.
Share of population living in extreme poverty vs. GDP per capita, 1990 to 2024 (World Bank, Eurostat, OECD, IMF)
What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time.Consider the case of Madagascar. In the long run, the country has not seen any growth at all: GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth. In richer countries, it is possible to reduce poverty by reducing inequality through redistribution, but a country like Madagascar cannot reduce its share of people in extreme poverty through redistribution. This is because the mean income is lower than the poverty line; if everyone had the same income, everyone would be living in extreme poverty.
The situation is similar in other countries, as the chart below shows: in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, more than half of the population lives in extreme poverty. As their economies have stagnated, the deep poverty that most people live in has remained largely unchanged for decades.
This is why we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty based on current trends. If the poorest economies remain stagnant, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.
Share of population living in extreme poverty, 1992-2022 (World Bank)
I’m always skeptical when people say that we are at a juncture in history where the future looks much different than the past. But when it comes to the fight against extreme poverty, I fear it is true. Today, the majority of the world’s poorest people are living in economies that have not achieved economic growth in the recent past… Based on current trends, we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty…
… It’s no news that we should expect an end to progress against extreme poverty. This article is an update of an article I published in 2019, in which I wrote the same: the fact that the poorest economies are not growing means that the rapid progress against extreme poverty seen in the last decades will end.
Although this prospect has been known for years, it has hardly received the attention it deserves. Progress against extreme poverty was one of humanity’s most outstanding achievements of the past decades — the end of it would be one of the very worst realities of the coming ones.
Importantly, however, these projections are not predictions; their purpose is not to describe what the world in 2030 or 2040 will certainly look like. These projections describe what we have to expect based on current trends; they tell us about our present world rather than the reality of tomorrow. Current trends don’t have to become future facts: many countries left extreme poverty behind in the past, because they had a moment at which they broke out of stagnation.
What these projections tell us, however, is that if the poorest countries do not start to grow, a very bleak future is ahead of us: a future in which extreme poverty remains the reality for hundreds of millions for many years to come…
As we put our shoulders to the wheel, we might spare a thought for a man who contributed mightily to our capacity to feed humanity, Kenneth V. Thimann; he died on this date in 1997. A microbiologist, he was a pioneer in plant physiology (especially the hormones that control the development of plants). Building on the thinking of Frits Went, he identified the first plant hormone to be discovered– the first auxin, a class of growth hormones, and revealed its chemical structure– which proved very important to agriculture and its yields.
As we keep an eye out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that US disc jockeys were sent boxes of animal crackers wrapped in promotional material touting The Animal’s second single, “The House of the Rising Sun,” which had just entered the UK charts. The gambit worked (though, of course, it didn’t hurt that the song was, as Cashbox described it, “a haunting, beat-ballad updating of the famed folk-blues opus that the group’s lead delivers in telling solo vocal fashion”); the tune reached #1 on U.S. pop charts.
… But then, what would it be like to be a bee? In the tradition of Thomas Nagel (bats), Peter Godfrey-Smith (octopuses), and Kristin Andrews (crabs), Lars Chittka explores…
Understanding the minds of alien life-forms is not easy, but if you relish the challenge, you don’t have to travel to outer space to find it. Alien minds are right here, all around you. You won’t necessarily find them in large-brained mammals—whose psychology is sometimes studied for the sole purpose of finding human-ness in slightly modified form. With insects such as bees, there is no such temptation: neither the societies of bees nor their individual psychology are remotely like those of humans (figure 1.1). Indeed, their perceptual world is so distinct from ours, governed by completely different sense organs, and their lives are ruled by such different priorities, that they might be accurately regarded as aliens from inner space.
Figure 1.1. The strangeness of the bee’s world
Insect societies may look to us like smoothly oiled machines in which the individual plays the part of a mindless cog, but a superficial alien observer might come to the same conclusion about a human society. Over the course of this book, it will be my goal to convince you that each individual bee has a mind—that it has an awareness of the world around it and of its own knowledge, including autobiographical memories; an appreciation of the outcomes of its own actions; and the capacity for basic emotions and intelligence—key ingredients of a mind. And these minds are supported by beautifully elaborate brains. As we will see, insect brains are anything but simple. Compared to a human brain with its 86 billion nerve cells, a bee’s brain may have only about a million. But each one of these cells has a finely branched structure that in complexity may resemble a full-grown oak tree. Each nerve cell can make connections with 10,000 other ones—hence there may be more than a billion such connection points in a bee brain—and each of these connections is at least potentially plastic, alterable by individual experience. These elegantly miniaturized brains are much more than input-output devices; they are biological prediction machines, exploring possibilities. And they are spontaneously active in the absence of any stimulation, even during the night.
To explore what might be inside the mind of a bee, it is helpful to take a first-person bee perspective, and consider which aspects of the world would matter to you, and how. I invite you to picture what it’s like to be a bee. To start, imagine you have an exoskeleton—like a knight’s armor. However, there isn’t any skin underneath: your muscles are directly attached to the armor. You’re all hard shell, soft core. You also have an inbuilt chemical weapon, designed as an injection needle that can kill any animal your size and be extremely painful to animals a thousand times your size—but using it may be the last thing you do, since it can kill you, too. Now imagine what the world looks like from inside the cockpit of a bee.
You have 300o vision, and your eyes process information faster than any human’s. All your nutrition comes from flowers, each of which provides only a tiny meal, so you often have to travel many miles to and between flowers—and you’re up against thousands of competitors to harvest the goodies. The range of colors you can see is broader than a human’s and includes ultraviolet light, as well as sensitivity for the direction in which light waves oscillate. You have sensory superpowers, such as a magnetic compass. You have protrusions on your head, as long as an arm, which can taste, smell, hear, and sense electric fields (figure 1.2). And you can fly. Given all this, what’s in your mind?…
As we buzz, we might spare a thought for a successful entrepreneur whose empire depended on bees (and their capacity to pollinate plants), Washington Atlee Burpee; he died on this date in 1915. A horticulturist, we turned his childhood interest in the selective breeding of poultry, and his passion for research in the genetics of breeding into Burpee Seeds, the world’s largest mail-order seed company.
I knew, setting out to do this, that I would have to at some point, as a writer about intelligence, define what I meant by intelligence. But I was very frustrated by the lack of what seemed to me to be clear, good definitions of what it is we’re all talking about. You can get all these lists of what people mean when they talk about intelligence, and it’s a kind of grab bag of different qualities that changes all the time: things like planning, counterfactual imagining or coming up with scenarios, theories of mind, tool use, all these different qualities. People pick from them according to whatever their particular field is, but they all come from a human perspective. That seemed to me to be what actually united almost all our common discussions about intelligence: that it was just whatever humans did. And so all our discussions about other potential forms of intelligence, other intelligences that we encountered in the world, or intelligences that we imagined, were all framed in terms of how we understood ourselves and our own thinking. It really struck me that this became an incredibly limiting factor in how we were thinking about intelligence more broadly—and not just intelligence, really, but all relationships we have in the world that are so often mediated by our own intelligence. On the one hand this has restricted our ability to recognize the intelligences of other beings—and I think we’ll probably come to that—but it’s also deeply shaped our history of technology, and particularly AI…
As we investigate intelligence inclusively, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that the first telephone directory was issued. Consisting of a single piece of cardboard, it listed 50 individuals, businesses, and other offices in New Haven, Connecticut that had telephones. There were, as readers will note on the photo below, no numbers, as callers had to be connected by an operator.
You must be logged in to post a comment.