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Hello Interactors,

Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective.

I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it?

EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURES

The dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere.

Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals.

Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2)

Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves.

From 1348-1349, the bubonic plague killed perhaps half of England’s population. This created a labor shortage that gave surviving so-called peasants leverage. For the first time they could demand higher wages, refuse exploitative landlords, or move to find better conditions.

The elite mobilized state violence to reverse this. In 1351 the state passed The Statute of Labourers — an attempt to freeze wages and restrict worker movement. This serves as an early signal that reverberates today. When property and people come in conflict, the state sides with property. Over the next two centuries, landlords steadily enclosed common lands, claiming shared space as private property. Peasants who resisted were evicted, sometimes killed.

Initial conditions mattered enormously. England had a relatively weak monarchy that couldn’t check landlord aggression like stronger European states did. It also had growing urban markets creating demand for food and wool and post-plague labor dynamics that made controlling land more profitable than extracting rents from secure peasants.

As historian J.M. Neeson details, enclosure — fencing in private land — destroyed social infrastructure.(3) When access to common resources disappeared, so did the safety nets that enabled survival outside of market and labor competition. People simply lost the ability to graze a cow, gather fuel, glean grain, or even rely on neighbors’ obligation to help.

This created a feedback loop:

Each turn made the pattern stronger. Understanding how this happens requires grasping how these complex systems shaped the very people who reproduced them.

The landlords driving enclosure weren’t simply greedy villains. Their sense of self, their understanding of what was right and proper, was constituted through relationships to other people like them, to their own opportunities, and to authorities who validated their actions. A landlord enclosing commons likely experienced this as “improvement”. They believed they were making the land productive while exercising newly issued property rights. Other landlords were doing it, parliament legalized it, and the economics of the time justified it. The very capacity to see alternatives was constrained by relational personal and social positions within an emerging capitalistic society.

This doesn’t excuse the violence or diminish responsibility. But it does reveal how systems reproduce themselves. This happens not primarily through individual evil but through relationships and feedback loops that constitute people’s identities and sense of what’s possible. The moral judgment remains stark. These were choices that enriched someone by destroying someone else’s means of survival. But the choices were made by people whose very selfhood was being constructed by the system they were creating.

Similarly, displaced peasants resisted in ways their social positions made possible. They rioted, appealed to historical customary rights, attempted to maintain the commons they relied on for centuries. Each turn of the spiral didn’t just move resources, it remade people. Peasants’ children, born into a world without commons, developed identities shaped by market dependence — renting their labor in exchange for money. What had been theft became, over generations, simply “how things are.”

By the mid-16th century, England had something new. They’d created a system where most people owned no land, had no customary rights to subsistence, and had to compete in labor markets to survive. This was the essence of capitalism’s emergence. It wasn’t born out of markets (they existed everywhere for millennia) but as market dependence enforced through dispossession. Out of this emerged accumulated actions of actors whose awareness and available alternatives were themselves being shaped by the very system they were simultaneously shaping and sustaining.

REPLICATING PATTERNS OF PLANTATIONS

Once capitalism emerged in England through violent enclosure, its spread wasn’t automatic. Understanding how it became global requires distinguishing between wealth extraction (which existed under many systems) and capitalist social relations (which require specific conditions).

Spain conquered vast American territories, devastating indigenous populations through disease, warfare, and forced labor. Spanish extraction from mines in the 16th century — like Potosí in today’s Bolivia — were worked by enslaved indigenous and African peoples under conditions that killed them in staggering numbers. Meanwhile, Portugal developed Atlantic island sugar plantations using enslaved African labor.

This expansion of Portuguese agriculture on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé became a blueprint for plantation economies in the Americas, particularly Brazil. The brutally efficient system perfected there for sugar production — relying on the forced labor of enslaved Africans — was directly transplanted across the ocean, leading to a massive increase in the scale and violence of the transatlantic slave trade.

Both empires generated massive wealth from these practices. If colonial plunder caused capitalism, Spain and Portugal should have industrialized first. Instead, they stagnated. The wealth flowed to feudal monarchies who spent it on palaces, armies, and wars, not productive reinvestment. Both societies remained fundamentally feudal.

England, with virtually no empire during its initial capitalist transformation, developed differently because it had undergone a different structural violence — enclosure of common land that created landless workers, wage dependence, and market competition spiraling into self-reinforcing patterns.

But once those capitalist social relations existed, they became patterns that spread through violent imposition. These patterns destroyed existing economic systems and murdered millions.

English expansion first began close to home. Ireland and Scotland experienced forced enclosures as English landlords exported the template — seize land, displace people, create private regimes, and force the suffering to work for you. This internal colonialism served as testing ground for techniques later deployed around the world.

When English capitalism encountered the Caribbean — lands where indigenous peoples had developed complex agricultural systems and trade networks — the Spanish conquest had already devastated these populations. English merchants and settlers completed the destruction, seizing lands indigenous peoples had managed for millennia while expanding the brutal, enslaved-based labor models pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese for mining and sugar production.

The plantations English capitalists built operated differently than earlier Portuguese and Spanish systems. English plantation owners were capitalists, not feudal lords. But this was also not simply individual choice or moral character. They were operating within and being shaped by an emerging system of capitalist social relations. Here too they faced competitive pressures to increase output, reduce costs, and compete with other plantation owners. The system’s logic — accumulate to accumulate more — emerged from relational dynamics between competing capitalists. The individual identities as successful plantation owners was constituted through their position within the competitive networks in which they coexisted.

New location, same story. Even here this systemic shaping doesn’t absolve individual responsibility for the horrors they perpetrated. Enslaved people were still kidnapped, brutalized, and worked to death. Indigenous peoples were still murdered and their lands still stolen. But understanding how the system shaped what seemed necessary or moral to those positioned to benefit helps explain how such horror could be so widespread and normalized.

This normalization created new spirals:

This pattern then replicated across even more geographies — Jamaica, Barbados, eventually the American South — each iteration destroying existing ways of life. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz showed, this created the first truly global capitalist commodity chain.(4) Sugar produced by enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples — on their stolen land — sweetened the tea for those English emerging factory workers — themselves recently dispossessed through enclosure.

At the same time, it’s worth calling attention, as Historians Walter Rodney, Guyanese, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Malawian, have point out, that African societies weren’t passive.(5,6) Some kingdoms initially engaged strategically by trading captives from rival groups and acquiring weapons. These choices are often judged harshly, but they were made by people facing threats to their very existence. They were working with frameworks developed over centuries that suddenly confronted an unprecedented system of extractive violence.

Historians Linda Heywood and John Thornton show that African economic strength and political organization meant Africans often “forced Europeans to deal with them on their own terms” for centuries, even as the terms of engagement became increasingly constrained.(7) This moral complexity matters. These were real choices with devastating consequences, made by people whose capacity to perceive alternatives was constrained by their eventual oppressors amidst escalating violence by Europeans.

Native American scholars have documented similar patterns of constrained agency in indigenous contexts. Historian Ned Blackhawk, Western Shoshone, shows how Native nations across North America made strategic choices — like forming alliances, adapting governance structures, and engaging in trade — all while navigating impossible pressures from colonial expansion.(8)

Historian Jean O’Brien, White Earth Ojibwe, demonstrates how New England indigenous communities persisted and adapted even as settler narratives and violence worked to wipe them out of existence.(9) They were forced to make choices about land, identity, and survival within systems designed to eliminate them. These weren’t failures of resistance but strategic adaptations made by people whose frameworks for understanding and practicing sovereignty, kinship, and territorial rights were being violently overwritten and overtaken by colonial capitalism.

Europeans increasingly controlled these systems through superior military technology making resistance futile. Only when late 19th century industrial weapons were widely wielded — machine guns, munitions, and mechanisms manufactured through capitalism’s own machinations — could Europeans decisively overwhelm resistance and complete the colonial carving of Africa, the Americas, and beyond.

LOCKING-IN LASTING LOOPS

Once patterns spread and stabilize, they become increasingly difficult to change. Not because they’re natural, but because they’re actively maintained by those who benefit.

Capitalism’s expansion created geographic hierarchies that persist today: core regions that accumulate wealth and peripheral regions that get extracted from. England industrialized first through wealth stolen from colonies and labor dispossessed through enclosure. This gave English manufacturers advantages. Namely, they could sell finished goods globally while importing cheap raw materials. Colonies were forced at gunpoint to specialize in export commodities, making them dependent on manufactured imports. That dependence made it harder to develop their own industries. Once the loop closed it became enforced — to this day through institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

Sociologists Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy show how these hierarchies get naturalized through moral categories that shape how people — including those benefiting from and those harmed by the system — come to understand themselves and others.(10) Core regions are portrayed as “developed,” “modern,” “efficient.” Peripheral regions are called “backward,” “corrupt,” “informal.” These aren’t just ideological justifications imposed from above but categories that constitute people’s identities. They shape how investors see opportunities, how policy makers perceive problems, and how individuals understand their own worth.

Meanwhile, property rights established through colonial theft get treated as legitimate. They are backed by international law and written by representatives of colonial powers as Indigenous land claims continue to get dismissed as economically backward. This doesn’t happen through conscious conspiracies. It’s because the frameworks through which “economic rationality” itself is understood and practiced were constructed through and for capitalist social relations. People socialized into these frameworks genuinely perceive capitalist property relations as more efficient, more rational. Their (our?) very capacity to see alternatives is constrained by identities formed within the system in which they (we?) exist.

These patterns persist because they’re profitable for those with power and because people with power were shaped by the very system that gives them power. Each advantage reinforces others. It then gets defended, often by people who genuinely believe they’re defending rationality and efficiency. They (we?) fail to fathom how their (our?) frameworks for understanding economy were forged through forceful and violent subjugation.

INTERRUPTING INTENSIFICATION

Viewing capitalism’s complex geographies shows its evolution is not natural or even inevitable. It emerged, and continues to evolve, as a result of shifting relationships and feedbacks at multiple scales. Recognizing this eventuality creates space for imagining and building more ethical derivatives or alternatives.

If capitalism emerged from particular violent interactions between people in specific places, then different interactions could produce different systems. If patterns locked in through feedback loops that benefit some at others’ expense, then interrupting those loops becomes possible.

Even within capitalist nations, alternative arrangements have persisted or been fought for. Nordic countries and Scotland maintain “Everyman’s Right” or “Freedom to Roam” laws. These are legal traditions allowing public access to private land for recreation, foraging, and camping. These represent partial commons that survived enclosure or were restored through political struggle, showing that private property needn’t mean total exclusion. Even in countries that participate in capitalist economies.

In late 19th century America, Henry George became one of the nation’s most widely read public intellectuals. More people attended his funeral than Abraham Lincoln’s. He argued that land value increases resulting from community development should be captured through land value taxes rather than enriching individual owners. His ideas inspired single-tax colonies, urban reform movements, and influenced progressive era policies.

Farmers organized cooperatives and mutual aid societies, pooling resources and labor outside pure market competition. Urban communities established settlement houses, cooperative housing, and neighborhood commons. These weren’t marginal experiments, they were popular movements showing that even within capitalism’s heartland, people continuously organized alternatives based on shared access, collective benefit, and relationships of reciprocity rather than pure commodity exchange.

Or, consider these current examples operating at different scales and locations:

Community land trusts in cities like Burlington, Vermont remove properties from speculative markets. These trusts separate ownership of the land from the buildings on it, allowing the nonprofit land trust to retain ownership of the land while selling homes at affordable prices with resale restrictions. While they’re trying to break the feedback loop where rising prices displace residents, gentrification and displacement continue in surrounding market-rate housing. This shows how alternatives require scale and time to fully interrupt established feedback loops.

Zapatista autonomous municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico governed 300,000 people through indigenous forms of collective decision-making, refusing both state control and capitalist markets — surviving decades of Mexican government counterinsurgency backed by US military support. In 2023, after three decades of autonomy, the Zapatistas restructured into thousands of hyperlocal governments, characterizing the shift as deepening rather than retreating from their fundamental rejection of capitalist control.

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement has won land titles for 350,000 families through occupations of unused land. These are legally expropriated under Brazil’s constitutional requirement that land fulfill a social function. Organizing 2,000 cooperative settlements across 7.5 million hectares, this movement has become Latin America’s largest social movement and Brazil’s leading producer of organic food. They’re building schools, health clinics, and cooperative enterprises based on agroecology and direct democracy.(11) Still, titled arable farmland in Brazil is highly concentrated into a minuscule percent of the overall population. Meanwhile, capitalist state structures continue favoring agribusiness and large landowners despite the movement’s successes with organic food production.

Indigenous land back movements across North America demand return of stolen territories as restoration of indigenous governance systems organized around relationships to land and other beings rather than ownership. Through the InterTribal Buffalo Council, 82 tribes are restoring buffalo herds. The Blackfeet Nation is establishing a 30,000-acre buffalo reserve that reconnects fragmented prairie ecosystems and restores buffalo migrations crossing the US-Canada border, reclaiming transnational governance systems that predate colonial boundaries.

These aren’t isolated utopian fantasies, and they’re not perfect, but they’re functioning alternatives, each attempting to interrupt capitalism’s spirals at different points and places. Still, they face enormous opposition because for some reason, existing powerful systems that claim to embrace competition don’t seem to like it much.

Let’s face it, other complex and functional economic systems existed before capitalism destroyed them. Commons-based systems, gift economies, reciprocal obligations organized around kinship and place were sophisticated solutions to survival. And extractive and exploitive capitalism violently replaced them. Most of all them. There are still pockets around the world where other economic geographies persist — including informal economies, mutual aid networks, cooperative enterprises, and indigenous governance systems.

I recognize I’ve clearly over simplified what is a much more layered and complex evolution, and existing alternatives aren’t always favorable nor foolproof. But neither is capitalism. There is no denying the dominant forms of capitalism of today emerged in English fields through violent enclosure of shared space. It then spread through transformation of existing extraction systems into engines of competitive accumulation. And it locked in through feedback loops that benefit core regions while extracting from peripheral ones.

But it also took hold in hearts and habits. It’s shaping how we understand ourselves, what seems possible, and what feels “normal.” We’ve learned to see accumulation as virtue, competition as natural, individual success as earned and poverty as personal failure. The very category of the autonomous ‘individual’ — separate, self-made, solely responsible for their own outcomes — is itself a capitalist construction that obscures how all achievement and hardship emerge from relational webs of collective conditions.

This belief doesn’t just justify inequality, it reproduces it by generating the anxiety and shame that compel people to rent even more of their time and labor to capitalism. Pausing, resting, healing, caring for others, or resisting continue exploitation marks them as haven chosen their own ruin — regardless of their circumstance or relative position within our collective webs.

These aren’t just ideologies imposed from above but the makings of identity itself for all of us socialized within capitalism. A financial analyst optimizing returns, a policy maker promoting market efficiency, an entrepreneur celebrating “self-made” innovation — these aren’t necessarily cynical actors. They’re often people whose very sense of self has been shaped by a system they feel compelled to reproduce. After all, the system rewards individualism — even when it’s toxins poison the collective web — including the web of life.

Besides, if capitalism persists only through the conscious choices of so-called evil people, then exposing their villainy should be sufficient. Right? The law is there to protect innocent people from evil-doers. Right? Not if it persists through feedback loops that shape the identities, perceptions, and moral frameworks of everyone within it — including or especially those who benefit most or have the most to lose.

It seems change requires not just moral condemnation but transformation of the relationships and systems that constitute our very selves. After all, anyone participating is complicit at some level. And what choice is there? For a socio-economic political system that celebrates freedom of choice, it offers little.

To challenge a form of capitalism that can create wealth and prosperity but also unhealthy precarity isn’t just to oppose policies or demand redistribution, and it isn’t simply to condemn those who benefit from it as moral failures. It’s to recognize that the interactions between people and places that created this system through violence could create other systems through different choices. Making those different choices requires recognizing and reconstructing the very identities, relationships, and frameworks through which we understand ourselves and what’s possible. Perhaps even revealing a different form of capitalism that cares.

But it seems we’d need new patterns to be discussed and debated by the very people who keep these patterns going. We’re talking about rebuilding economic geographies based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and a deep connection to our communities. To each other. This rebuilding needs to go beyond just changing institutions, it has to change the very people those institutions have shaped.

As fall deepens and we watch leaves and seeds spiral down, notice how each follows a path predetermined by its inherited form. Maple seeds spin like helicopters — their propeller wings evolved over millennia to slow descent and scatter offspring far from competition. Their form has been fashioned by evolutionary forces beyond any individual seed’s control, shaped by gusts and gravity in environments filled with a mix of competition and cooperation — coopetition.

Then reflect on this fundamental difference: Unlike seeds locked into their descent, we humans can collectively craft new conditions, consciously charting courses that climb, curl, cascade, or crash.

References

Chibber, V., & Nashek, M. (Hosts). (2025, September 24). The origins of capitalism. [Audio podcast episode]. In Confronting Capitalism. Jacobin Radio.

1. Thompson, E. P. (1971). The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, 50(1), 76–136.

2. Gudeman, S. (2016). Anthropology and economy. Cambridge University Press.

3. Neeson, J. M. (1996). Commoners: Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge University Press.

4. Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. Viking Penguin.

5. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture.

6. Zeleza, P. T. (1997). A modern economic history of Africa: The nineteenth century (Vol. 1). East African Publishers.

7. Heywood, L. M., & Thornton, J. K. (2007). Central Africans, Atlantic creoles, and the foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. Cambridge University Press.

8. Blackhawk, N. (2023). The rediscovery of America: Native peoples and the unmaking of US history. Yale University Press.

9. OBrien, J. M. (2010). Firsting and lasting: Writing Indians out of existence in New England. U of Minnesota Press.

10. Fourcade, M., & Healy, K. (2017). Seeing like a market. Socio-Economic Review, 15(1), 9–29.

11. Carter, M. (Ed.). (2015). Challenging social inequality: The landless rural workers movement and agrarian reform in Brazil. Duke University Press.

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Hello Interactors,

My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves.

At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth.

Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us?

THE COSMIC WAVE

Beneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells.

So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls into turbulent foam piqued in curious but dangerous beauty, only to dissolve back into undertow, bubbles, and silence. Our own cosmos follows the same rhythm, driven by the logic of entropy — the tendency of energy to spread, of order to give way to disorder. In the beginning, we know the universe was astonishingly simple and ordered: a hot, uniform plasma, almost featureless in its smoothness.

Imagine the origin of life sitting at origin of a graph. It exists orderly in low entropy and low complexity. But entropy is restless. As it advanced diagonally up and to the right disorder increases in a straight line. This opens space for complexity to emerge. Early on in the cosmos tiny quantum fluctuations stretched into patterns, atoms gathered into stars, stars fused new elements as galaxies spun, coalesced, and collided. Imagine this as the complexity line on our graph. It also grows with time but takes the shape of a parabolic wave climbing upward to a smooth crest as it increases in complexity. Meanwhile, entropy ticks steadily up and to the right as a straight arrow of time forever growing in disorder as our universe continues to increase in complexity.

We are now somewhere on this complexity curve. And this is the paradox of our middle epoch. Entropy never reverses course — disorder always increases — yet along that trajectory the complexity within we live crests, like a wave gathering its final height. For a sliver of cosmic time, the universe has been rich, complex, and with structure. On at least one world in the cosmos, life emerges and even creates complex organisms like us. But if entropy pushes inexorably forward, complexity will not hold indefinitely. Stars will exhaust their fuel, galaxies will drift into darkness, and matter itself may decay. This diagram reminds us that complexity rises only to fall again, tracing an arc back toward simplicity even as entropy continues its steady climb.

In this framing, the universe is not a march from order to chaos but a cycle of simple-to-complex-to-simple played out against entropy’s one-way slope. We live in a fleeting middle where complexity momentarily flourishes. Like the wave at Nazaré, born as a long low swell, steepening into a towering wall of water, then dissolving again into foam, undertow, and silence, our cosmos crests only once. The question is not whether entropy wins — it does — but how we dwell, and what we make of meaning, within the brief surge of complexity it permits.

It took a lot to get us to this point. This complex space that entropy has carved within cosmic time leaves room for novelty. Complexity flourishes locally even as disorder deepens globally. Out of this novel initial imbalance, life emerged — fragile metabolisms harvesting energy from their surroundings, weaving temporary order against the grain of entropy. From single-celled organisms to multicellular bodies, from photosynthesis to predation, biology layered new strategies of survival atop older ones. Evolution diversified life into forests and reefs, wings and fins, neural nets and circulatory systems. These proliferations multiplied niches where order could briefly hold, even as the larger cosmos drifted toward disorder.

Only much later did consciousness arise, one of evolution’s rarest experiments: a capacity not merely to metabolize energy but to reflect upon the arc of complexity itself. With awareness came memory, imagination, culture — tools for navigating the turbulence of entropy’s middle chapter. Entropy still holds the reins: the universe will drift back toward simplicity, whether into a thin uniform haze or some other quiet ending. Yet here, in the middle, entropy’s detour has produced extravagant complexity — including beings capable of gazing back at the wave that carries them and wondering what it means.

THE INDIFFERENT EARTH

This same gaze can also induce speculation. Like speculative realism. Emerging in the early 2000s as a reaction against a tendency to keep reality tethered to human thought and language, its central claim is stark: the world is indifferent to us. Planets orbit, tectonic plates shift, and waves break whether or not anyone is there to see them. From this view, complexity arises from imbalances in matter and energy, from unfinished processes that unfold far beyond human agency. The wave doesn’t care whether it is surfed or feared; it builds from wind, water, and terrain, cresting and dissolving with no meaning to maintain.

Animated globe of tectonic plates shifting across hundreds of millions of years, reminding us that Earth’s movements unfold indifferent to human presence or perception. Source: Reddit. And below is where we go from here:

This speculation hits another conscious reality — optimism. Human optimism is as hard to contain as its constant refrain. Born of the Enlightenment but rebirthed amid the industrial expansion, world wars, and scientific breakthroughs of the early 1900s, modernist optimism leaned confidently on reason and science — a conviction that human ingenuity could transcend natural limits and bend uncertainty toward progress. Time and again, human ingenuity has found ways to stretch the boundaries of what seemed natural limits. Agricultural revolutions multiplied food production beyond what Malthus thought possible. Industrialization transformed energy regimes, substituting fossil carbon for dwindling forests. Urban innovations — from sanitation to electrification — allowed cities to grow far past the thresholds that once doomed them to collapse. Each leap suggested that collapse was not destiny but averted through cleverness.

This pattern sustains modernist faith: that humans can intervene wisely in the unfolding of complexity. Where speculative realism emphasizes the indifference of natural forces — entropy driving stars and systems toward disorder regardless of our designs — modernist thought wagers otherwise. It insists that ingenuity allows us not merely to endure the swell but to ride it, to carve temporary stability out of turbulence. In this view, the challenge of complexity is not simply to recognize its inevitabilities but to cultivate the foresight, restraint, and imagination that let human life persist in its fragile middle.

That is if humans “don’t do dumb things.” In other words, humans can and should preserve the conditions that let life and intelligence persist locally, even as the universal drift of entropy continues.

Armed with the mathematical models that fuel both scientific confidence and human hubris, the world can appear elegant — even in its ugliness. Amidst entropy following a relentless trajectory we see scaling laws enfold organisms, cities, and civilizations alike. The planet itself is rendered as a singular complex system drifting through cosmic time. The physicist’s gaze simplifies this by design — reducing frictions, stripping away differences, until only lawlike arcs remain. As the polymath Heinz von Foerster once put it, “Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”

Geography, by contrast, cannot ignore what falls through those cracks. The sweep of cosmology may remind us that complexity is not uniquely human — stars ignite, galaxies cluster, black holes churn — but such vistas stretch horizons so far that human lifetimes blur into insignificance. Civilizations, like waves, crest and crash in an instant against the span of cosmic time.

To move closer in, at a planetary scale, complexity narrows to the thin envelope where oceans, land, and atmosphere intertwine. It is within this fragile band that agriculture took root, cities rose, and civilizations flourished. Yet scientists, equipped with hard science, warn that this Holocene balance has already been breached. The “safe operating space” is no longer secure; the planetary is already in transition.

But even “the planetary” is too smooth a category. These upheavals are not shared evenly across the globe. They are bound to the ground — to places where histories sediment and lives unfold. From colonial dispossession to infrastructures of extraction, from economic logics that amplify inequality to political systems that harden vulnerability, complexity here is never neutral. It is situated, entangled with geographies of power and precarity.

What some describe as “geography envy” names this tension: physicists are drawn to Earth as a rich arena for testing universal models, yet in the process often flatten the contextual and uneven dynamics that geographers insist cannot be ignored. Geography refuses such reduction. It insists that the Earth is not merely a planetary system but a lived ground, fractured, uneven, and resistant to smooth incorporation into law-like arcs.

Speculative realism cuts deeper. It reminds us that both elegant arcs and messy ground are parts, never the whole. Reality is not exhausted by smooth models or contextual accounts; it exceeds them both. The planetary is not a canvas awaiting inscription, nor a kaleidoscope of situated and entangled stories. It is a force-field of matter and relation, where floods, famines, extinctions, and upheavals erupt whether or not we have the language to make sense of them.

Our minds, perhaps not yet evolved past binary thinking, want to declare one frame the winner: cosmic order or earthly mess. Modernism sought mastery through universal reason; postmodernism countered by unraveling every claim to stability. But metamodernism, a paradigm emerging in the 2010s, tries to move differently. It oscillates between these poles. It yearns for universal arcs while acknowledging the irreducible particularities of lived experience.

To see the “planetary” through this lens is to move between entropy’s inevitability and the instability of farmers, migrants, and city dwellers negotiating disrupted climates, markets, and states. Flows of capital expose some regions more than others, while systems of governance distribute or intensify that exposure. Human choices, bounded by perception and culture, compound these structural forces in ways behavioral geographers have long traced. All this unfolds across terrains and climates that set the boundaries of risk, while the distribution of plants, animals, and microbes reveals how even the nonhuman world is entangled in shifting geographies of survival.

DWELLING IN DUMBNESS

Complexity, then, cannot be abstracted into a question of whether it will continue. It will — cosmically, biologically, and geologically. The sharper question is how the continuities of our lived complexity register unevenly: whose livelihoods collapse, whose infrastructures crack, whose communities adapt or perish. Physics asks what the laws are; geography insists on whose lives are caught in them, whose ground is destabilized, and at what cost. Speculative realism pushes both disciplines to admit they never touch the whole: the real always exceeds our grasp, even as we are swept inside its turbulence.

Even as we oscillate, it’s unsettling to accept that the Holocene’s narrow band of stability — the “safe operating space” — is already behind us. The so-called Great Acceleration shows that nearly every Earth system indicator — from carbon concentration to biodiversity loss, from ocean acidification to nitrogen cycles — has surged beyond Holocene bounds in the span of a single human lifetime. More specifically, the lifetime of my parents and/or me. These curves do not slope gently toward some distant tipping point; they spike upward, marking thresholds already crossed. Talk of future risk obscures the present tense: destabilization is not looming; we are living it. The rhythms of climate, soil, and water no longer conform to the stable backdrop against which civilizations emerged.

And yet, here again, we are re-inscribing the Earth as a backdrop through statistics. This triggers a tendency to mother our “Mother Earth”. We’ve taken her thermometer out, read the value, and have reasoned her temperature is life threatening. Humans can’t resist caring for ailing life. But branches of geophilosophy warns us to wake up. The planet is no patient and we’re no doctor. Fires, tectonics, and oceans act with or without us, indifferent to notions of care, justice, or intention found in advanced organisms. The Anthropocene is not solely the record of human decisions but the scene of inhuman forces that have long shaped life’s precarious conditions. Here speculative realism returns — reality unfolds beyond our categories, whether in cosmic entropy, metabolic scaling, or the volatile indifference of a sick and angry Mother Earth…or the violence of an impending wave.

I recognize this indifference but also recognize it does not absolve us. If anything, it should sharpen the ethical demand. To dwell within dumbness is to accept that the wave is already forming, but also to recognize that some bodies are naturally positioned closer to its break, some can’t surf, and others are made to suffer the buffering effects of a crashing wave. Metamodernism’s pendulum of tragic optimism may just offer a way through the wash. We need not kneel to the naïve belief in perpetual progress, nor retreat into ironic despair, but foster an ethic of persistence that takes seriously both human responsibility and inhuman indifference.

Like Nazaré’s canyon, the Anthropocene multiplies force from conditions already set in motion. Swells crest into walls that thrill the few who ride but have long drowned those with fewer choices. Complexity will continue, but justice requires asking not only how we dwell in turbulence, but whose lives are lifted, and whose are pulled under. The wager is no longer whether to master the wave. It is whether we can learn to inhabit it without denying the unequal costs it exacts.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.”

INVASION, IVY, AND ICE

As I was contemplating this essay in my car at a stop light, a fireweed seedling floated through the sunroof. Fireweed is considered “native” by the U.S. Government, but when researching this opportunistic plant — which thrives in disturbed areas (hence it’s name) — I learned it can be found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It’s “native” to Japan, China, Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, and all of Northern Europe. Because its primary dispersal is through the wind, it’s impossible to know where exactly it originated and when. And unlike humans, it doesn’t have to worry about borders.

So long as a species arrives on its own accord through wind, wings, currents, or chance — without a human hand guiding it — it’s often granted the status of “native.” Never mind whether the journey took decades or millennia, or if the ecosystem has since changed. What matters is that it got there on its own, as if nature somehow stamped its passport.

As long time Interactors may recall, I spend the summer helping water “native” baby plants into maturity in a local public green space. A bordering homeowner had planted an “invasive species”, English Ivy, years ago and it climbed the fence engulfing the Sword Ferns, Vine Maples, and towering Douglas Fir trees common in Pacific Northwest woodlands. A nearby concerned environmentalist volunteered to remove the “alien” ivy and plant “native” species through a city program called Green Kirkland. Some of the first Firs he planted are now taller than he is! Meanwhile, on the ground you see remnants of English Ivy still trying to muster a comeback. The stuff is tenacious.

This is also the time of year in the Seattle area when Himalayan Black Berries are ripening. These sprawls of arching spikey vines are as pernicious as they are delicious. Nativist defenders try squelching these invaders too. But unlike English Ivy, these “aliens” come with a sugary prize. You’ll see people walking along the side of roads with buckets and step stools trying their darnedest to pluck a plump prize — taking care not to get poked or pierced by their prickly spurs.

This framing of “invasive” versus “native” has given me pause like never before, especially as I witness armed, masked raids on homes and businesses carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These government officials, who are also concerned and deeply committed citizens, see themselves as removing what they label “invasive aliens” — individuals they fear might overwhelm the so-called “native” population. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, they work to secure the “Homeland” from what is perceived as an invasion by unwanted human movement. In reflecting on this, I ask myself: how different am I from an ICE agent when I labor to eradicate plants I have been taught to call “invasive” while nurturing so-called “native” species back to health? Both of us are acting within a worldview that categorizes beings as either threats or treasures. At what cost, and with what consequences?

According to a couple other U.S. agencies (like the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) species are considered native if they were present before European colonization (i.e., pre-1492). The idea that a species is “native” if it was present before 1492 obviously reflects less a scientific ecological reality than a political opinion of convenience. Framing nativity through the lens of settler history rather than ecological process ignores not only millennia of Indigenous land stewardship, but prehistoric human introductions and natural migrations shaped by climate and geology. Trying pin down what is “native” is like picking up a squirming earthworm.

These little critters, which have profoundly altered soil ecosystems in postglacial North America, are often labeled “naturalized” rather than “native” because their arrival followed European colonization. Yet this classification ignores the fact that northern North America had no earthworms at all for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated. There were scraped away with the topsoil. What native species may exist in North America are confined to the unglaciated South.

What’s disturbing isn’t just the worms’ historical presence but the simplistic persistent narrative that ecosystems were somehow stable until 1492. How is it possible that so many people still insist it was colonial contact that supposedly flipped some ecological switch? In truth, landscapes have always been in motion. They’ve been shaped and reshaped by earth’s systems — especially human systems — long before borders were drawn. Defining nativity by a colonial decree doesn’t just flatten ecological complexity, it overwrites a deep history of entangled alteration.

MIGRATION, MOVEMENT, AND MEANING

If a monarch butterfly flutters across the U.S. border from Mexico, no one demands its papers. There are no butterfly checkpoints in Laredo or Yuma. It rides the wind northward, tracing ancient pathways across Texas, the Midwest, all the way to southern Canada. The return trip happens generations later — back to the oyamel forests in the state of Michoacán. This movement is a marvel. It’s so essential we feel compelled to watch it, map it, and even plant milkweed to help it along. But when human beings try to make a similar journey on the ground — fleeing drought, violence, or economic collapse — we call it a crisis, build walls, and question their right to belong.

This double standard starts to unravel when you look closely at the natural world. Species are constantly on the move. Some of the most astonishing feats of endurance on Earth are migratory: the Arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year; caribou migrate thousands of miles across melting tundra and newly paved roads. GPS data compiled in Where the Animals Go shows lions slipping through suburban gardens and wolves threading through farmland, using hedgerows and railways like interstates. Animal movement isn’t the exception; it’s the ecological norm.

And it’s not just animals. Plants, too, are masters of mobility. A single seed can cross oceans, whether on the back of a bird, in a gust of wind, or tucked into a canoe by a human hand. In one famous case, researchers once proposed that a tree found on a remote Pacific Island must have arrived via floating debris. But later genetic and archaeological evidence suggested a different story: it may have arrived with early Polynesian voyagers — people whose seafaring knowledge shaped entire ecosystems across the Pacific.

DNA evidence and phylogeographic studies (how historical processes shape the geographic distribution of genetic lineages within species) now support the idea that Polynesians carried plants such as paper mulberry, sweet potato, taro, and even some trees across vast ocean distances well before the Europeans showed up. What was once considered improbable — human-mediated dispersal to incredibly beautiful and remote islands — is now understood as a core part of Pacific ecological and cultural history.

Either way, that plant didn’t ask to be there. It simply was. And with no obvious harm done, it was allowed to stay.

We humans can also often conflate our inability to perceive harm with the idea that a species “belongs.” We tend to assume that if we can’t see, measure, or immediately notice any negative impact a species is having, then it must not be causing harm — and therefore it “belongs” in the ecosystem. But belonging is contextual. It can be slow to reveal and is rarely absolute.

British ecologist and writer Ken Thompson has spent much of his career challenging our tidy categories of “native” and “invasive.” In his book Where Do Camels Belong?, he reminds us that the “belonging” question is less about biology than bureaucracy. Camels originated in North America and left via the Bering land bridge around 3–5 million years ago. They eventually domesticated in the Middle East about ~3,000–4,000 years ago to be used for transportation, milk, and meat. Then, in the 19th century, British colonists brought camels to Australia to help explore and settle the arid interior. Australia is now home to the largest population of feral camels in the world. So where, exactly, do they “belong”? Our ecological borders, like our political ones, often make more sense on a map than they do in the field.

Even the language we use is steeped in militaristic and xenophobic overtones. Scottish geographer Charles Warren has written extensively on how conservation debates are shaped by the words we choose. In a 2007 paper, he argues that terms like invasive, alien, and non-native don’t just describe, but pass judgment. They carrying moral and political weight into what should be an ecological conversation. They conjure feelings of threat, disorder, and contamination. When applied to plants, they frame restoration as a battle. With people, they prepare the ground for exclusion.

Which is why I now hesitate when I yank ivy or judge a blackberry bramble. I still do it because I believe in fostering ecological resilience and am sensitive to slowing or stopping overly aggressive and harmful plants (and animals). But now I do it more humbly, more questioningly. What makes something a threat, and who gets to decide? What if the real harm lies not in movement of species, but in the stories we tell about it?

MIGRATION, MYTHS, AND MATTER

The impulse to define who belongs and who doesn’t isn't limited to the forest floor. It echoes in immigration policy, in the architecture of the border wall, and in the sterile vocabulary of "population control." Historians of science Sebastian Normandin and Sean Valles have examined how science, politics, and social movements intersect. In a 2015 paper, they show that many conservation policies we take for granted today — ostensibly about protecting ecosystems — emerged from the same ideological soil that nourished eugenics programs and early anti-immigration campaigns. What began as a concern for environmental balance often mutated into a desire for demographic purity.

We see this convergence in the early 1900s, when the U.S. Dillingham Commission launched an exhaustive effort to classify immigrants by race, culture, and supposed “fitness” for American life. Historian Robert Zeidel, in his 2004 account of U.S. immigration politics, details how the Dillingham Commission’s findings hardened the notion that certain groups — like certain species — are inherently better suited to thrive in the nation’s “ecological” and cultural landscape. Their conclusions fueled the 1924 Immigration Act, one of the most restrictive in U.S. history, and laid groundwork for a century of racialized immigration policy.

These ideas didn’t stay in the realm of policy. They seeped into science. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, built racial categories into the very fabric of biological classification. Historian of science Lisbet Koerner, in her 1999 study of Carl Linnaeus, shows how his taxonomy reflected and reinforced 18th-century European ideals of empire and control. His system sorted not only plants and animals, but people. Nature, under his framework, was not only to be known but to be ordered. As Linneaus often said, "God created, Linnaeus organized." Brad observes that Carl also spoke in the third person.

The Linnaeus legacy lingers. Legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts and anthropologist Robert Sussman both argue that modern science has quietly resurrected racial categories in genetic research, often under the guise of ancestry testing or precision medicine. But race, like “nativity,” is not a biological fact — it’s a social construct. Anthropologist Jonathan Marks and geneticist David Reich reach the same conclusion from different directions: the human genome tells a story not of fixed, isolated groups, but of constant migration, mixing, and adaptation.

This is why defining species as “native” or “invasive” based on a colonial timestamp like 1492 is more than just a scientific shortcut. It’s a worldview that imagines a pristine past disrupted by foreign intrusion. This myth is mirrored in nationalist movements around the globe — including the troubling MAGA blueprint: Project 2025.

When we talk about securing borders, protecting bloodlines, or restoring purity, we’re often echoing the same flawed logic that labels blackberry and ivy as existential threats, while ignoring the systems that truly destabilize ecosystems — like extractive capitalism, industrial agriculture, and global trade. But even these forces may not be purely ideological. As complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam, founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute, has argued, large-scale societal and ecological patterns often emerge not through top-down intent, but through the bottom-up dynamics of complex systems under stress.

These dynamics are shaped by entropy— not in the popular sense of disorder, but as the tendency of energy and influence to disperse across systems in unpredictable ways as complexity increases. In this view, what we experience as exploitation or collapse may also be the inevitable result of a world growing too intricate to govern by simple, centralized rules.

Consider those early Polynesians. Perhaps we best think of them as complex, intelligent, tool-bearing animals who crossed vast oceans long before Europe entered the story. They didn't defy nature, they expressed it. They simply scaled up the same dispersal seen in wind-blown seeds or migratory birds. Their movement, like that of camels, fireweed, or monarchs, reminds us that life is always pushing outward, but because it can. This outward motion follows physics.

Even in an open system like Earth, the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds sway. Energy flows in and life finds ever more complex ways to move it along. A sunbeam warms a rock, releasing energy into the air above. That warmth lifts air, forming wind. The wind carries seeds across fields and fence lines, scattering the future wherever friction allows. Seeds take root, drawing in sunlight, water, and minerals. They build structure to move energy forward. Muscles twitch as animals rise to consume that energy then follow warmth, water, or instinct. Wings of the bird lift so it may fly. Herds of the plain press so they may migrate.

These patterns stretch across microseconds, minutes, and millennia — creeks, crevices, and continents. And eventually, humans launch canoes in the ocean tracing the same thermodynamic pull, riding currents of wind, wave, desire, and need. None of it defies nature. It is nature. It can be seen as different forms of energy dispersing through motion, life, and relationship at different scales.

One of the first scientists to recognize this was a Belgian chemist in the 1970s who saw something radical in the chaos of fluctuations and energy flows in nonequilibrium chemical systems: that complexity could arise not despite entropy, but because of it. Ilya Prigogine called these emergent forms dissipative structures — systems that spontaneously self-organize to transform and disperse energy more efficiently. A familiar example is a snowflake, which forms highly ordered crystal structures as water vapor crystallizes under just the right conditions. This beautiful pattern represents order emerging directly from the molecular chaos of a winter storm.

Extending this idea, we might begin to see migration, dispersal, and adaptation not as disruptions or disturbances, but as natural expressions of complex systems tirelessly working toward order. These processes are ways in which living systems unfold, expand, and improvise — dynamically responding to the flows of energy they must transform to sustain themselves and their environments.

To call such movement unnatural is to forget that we, too, are part of nature’s restless patterning. The real challenge isn’t to freeze the world in place, but to understand these flows so we might shape them with care, rather than react to them with fear.

To be clear: not all movement is benign. Some species — like kudzu or cane toads — have caused undeniable ecological damage. But the danger lies not in movement itself, but in the conditions of arrival and the systems of control. Climate change, habitat destruction, and globalization create the disturbances that opportunistic species exploit. They don’t “invade” so much as arrive when the door is already open.

And entropy doesn’t mean indifferent inevitability, and complexity doesn’t mean plodding passivity. Living systems are capable of generating counter-forces like cooperative networks, defensive alliances, and feedback loops. This form of collective actions resists domination and reasserts balance. Forests shade out overzealous colonizers, coral fish guard polyps from overgrazers, microbial webs starve out pathogens. Agency, be it a fungus or a human community, operates within the same flow of energy, shaping it toward persistence, resilience, and sometimes justice.

So, when I pull ivy or water a fern, I do it with a different awareness now. I see myself not as a border guard, but as one actor in a much older drama — a participant in the ceaseless give-and-take through which living systems maintain their balance. My hands are not outside the flow, but in it, nudging here, ceding there, trying to tip the scales toward diversity, reciprocity, and resilience. It’s not purity I’m after, but possibility: a landscape, human and more-than-human, capable of adapting to what comes next.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the floodwaters recede, what remains isn’t just devastation — it’s a lesson. One about a changing water cycle, a shifting climate, and a stubborn way of thinking that still dominates how we plan for both.

DROUGHT AND DELUGE

Is Texas drowning due to climate change? Just three years ago, we were told it’s drying up. That’s when a record drought emptied reservoirs and threw aquifers into steep decline. From 2011 to 2015, 90% of the state was in extreme drought. This seesaw between soaked and scorched is the kind of muddled messaging that lets climate deniers laugh all the way to the comment section.

The truth is Texas is drying up AND drowning.

This paradox isn’t just Texas-sized — it’s systemic. Our habit of translating global climate shifts into local weather soundbites is failing us.

According to hydrologist Benjamin Zaitchik and colleagues, writing in Nature Water in 2023, two dominant narratives frame how these events are explained. Public and policy reporting on patterns like those in Texas usually falls into two camps:

• The "Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier" (WWDD) hypothesis — climate change intensifies existing hydrological patterns, bringing more rain to wet regions and more drought to dry ones.

• The "Global Aridification" (GA) hypothesis — warming increases the atmosphere's "thirst," drying out land even where rainfall remains steady.

Both frameworks can explain real conditions, but the recent Texas floods expose their limits. If a region long seen as drying can also produce one of the most intense floods in U.S. history, are these ideas flawed — or just too rigidly applied?

WWDD and GA aren’t competing truths. They’re partial heuristics for a nonlinear, complex water system. Yet our brains favor recent events, confirm existing beliefs, and crave simple answers. So we latch onto one model or the other. But these simplified labels often ignore scale, context, and the right metrics. Is a region drying or wetting based on annual rainfall? Soil moisture? Streamflow? Urbanization? Atmospheric demand?

Texas — with its sprawling cities, irrigated farms, and dramatic east–west gradient in rainfall and vegetation — resists binary climate narratives. One year it exemplifies GA, with depleted aquifers and parched soil. The next, like now, it fits WWDD, as Tropical Storm Barry — arriving after days of relentless rainfall — stalled over saturated land, unleashing a torrent so fierce it overwhelmed the landscape.

Zaitchik and his team call for a clarification approach. Instead of umbrella labels, we should specify which variables and timeframes are shifting. A place can be parched, pummeled, and primed to flood — sometimes all in the same season. And those shifting moods in the water set the stage for something deeper — a mathematical reckoning.

MATH MEETS MAYHEM

This debate boils down to three basic equations — one for the land, one for the sky, and one for how the system changes over time. But that means prying open the black box of math symbols still treated like sacred script by academics and STEM pros.

Let’s be clear, these equations aren’t spells. They’re just shorthand — like a recipe or a flowchart. The symbols may look like hieroglyphs, but they describe familiar things.

Precipitation falls (P). Water evaporates or gets sucked up by plants — evapotranspiration (E). Some runs off (R). Some sinks in (S). Time (t) tells us when it’s happening. The 'd' in dS and dt just means "change in" — how much storage (S) increases or decreases over time (t). The Greek letters — ∇ (nabla) and δ (delta) — simply mean change, across space and time. If you can track a bank account, you can follow these equations. And if you’ve ever watched a lawn flood after a storm, you’ve seen them in action.

You don’t need a PhD to understand water, just a willingness to see through the symbols.

• LAND: The Water Balance EquationP − E = R + dS/dtPrecipitation (P) minus evapotranspiration (E) equals runoff (R) plus the change in stored water (dS/dt).

• SKY: The Vapor Flux EquationP − E = ∇ ∙ QThis links land and atmosphere. ∇ (nabla) tracks change across space, and Q is vapor flux — the amount of moisture moving through the atmosphere from one place to another, carried by winds and shaped by pressure systems. The dot product (∙) measures how much of that vapor is moving into or out of an area. So ∇ ∙ Q shows whether moist air is converging (piling up to cause rain) or diverging (pulling apart and drying).

• SYSTEM: The Change Equationδ(∇ ∙ Q) = δ(P − E) = δ(R + dS/dt)This shows how if vapor movement in the sky changes (δ(∇ ∙ Q)), it leads to changes in net water input at the surface (δ(P − E)), which in turn changes the balance of runoff and stored water on land (δ(R + dS/dt)). It’s a cascading chain where shifts in the atmosphere ripple through the landscape and alter the system itself.

In a stable climate, these variables stay in sync. But warming disrupts that balance. More heat means more atmospheric moisture (E), and altered winds move vapor differently (∇ ∙ Q). The math still balances — but now yields volatility: floods, droughts, and depleted storage despite “normal” rainfall. The equations haven’t changed. The system has.

Texas fits this emerging pattern:

• Rainfall extremes are up: NOAA shows 1-in-100-year storms are now more frequent, especially in Central and East Texas.

• Soil and streamflow are less reliable: NASA and USGS report more zero-flow days, earlier spring peaks, and deeper summer dry-outs.

• Urban growth worsens impacts: Impervious surfaces around Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas accelerate runoff and flash floods.

These shifts show how climate and land use intersect. It’s not just wetter or drier — it’s both, and more volatile overall.

In 2008, hydrologist Peter Milly and colleagues declared: “Stationarity is dead.”For decades, water planning assumed the future would mirror the statistically stationary and predictable past. But flood maps, dam designs, and drought plans built on that idea no longer hold.

We laid out land with rulers and grids, assuming water would follow. But floods don’t care about straight lines, and drought ignores boundaries. Modern hydrology rested on Cartesian geometry — flat, fixed, and predictable. But the ground is moving, and the sky is changing. The first two equations describe water in place. The third captures it in motion. This is a geometry of change, where terrain bends, vapor thickens, and assumptions buckle. To keep up, we need models shaped like rivers, not spreadsheets. The future doesn’t follow a line. It meanders.

And yet, we keep describing — and planning and engineering — for a world that no longer exists.

Somehow, we also need journalists — and readers — to get more comfortable with post-Cartesian complexity. Soundbites won’t cut it. If we keep flattening nuance for clarity, we’ll miss the deeper forces fueling the next flood.

VAPOR AND VELOCITY

If Texas is drying and flooding at once, it’s not a local contradiction but a symptom of a larger system. Making sense of that means thinking across scales — not just in miles or months, but how change moves through nested systems.

Cartesian thinking fails again here. It craves fixed frames and tidy domains. But climate operates differently — it scales across time and space, feeds back into itself, and depends on how systems connect. It’s scalar (different behaviors emerge at different sizes), recursive (what happens in one part can echo and evolve through others), and relational (everything depends on what it touches and when). What looks like local chaos may trace back to a tropical pulse, a meandering jet stream, or a burst of vapor from halfway across the world.

Zaitchik’s team shows that local water crises are often global in origin. Warming intensifies storms — but more crucially, it shifts where vapor moves, when it falls, and how it clusters[1]. The water cycle isn’t just speeding up. It’s reorganizing.

Thanks to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship — a principle from thermodynamics that describes how warmer air effects vapor — each 1°C of warming allows the atmosphere to hold about 7% more moisture. That supercharges storms. Even if rain events stay constant, their intensity rises. The sky becomes a loaded sponge — and when it squeezes, it dumps.

But it’s not just about capacity. It’s about flow. Moisture is moving differently, pooling unpredictably, and dumping in bursts. That’s why Texas sees both longer dry spells and shorter, more intense storms. Systems stall. Jet streams wander. Tropical remnants surge inland. These aren’t bugs. They’re features.

The July 2025 Texas flood may have begun with Gulf moisture: its roots trace to warming oceans, trade wind shifts, and a migrating Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) — the low-latitude belt where trade winds converge and drive global precipitation patterns. As these systems reorganize, mid-latitude regions like Texas face more extreme rains punctuated by longer droughts[1]. More extremes. Fewer in-betweens.

So Texas’s water future isn’t just about reservoirs and runoff. It’s about vapor, velocity, and vertical motion and the hidden machinery of a water cycle behaving in unfamiliar ways.

This NOAA satellite (GOES-19 captures imagery every 5-10 minutes) loop captures the moisture swirling through the mid-atmosphere (Band 9 is ~20,000 feet) as the Storm pushed inland from July 3rd to the 6th. The darker blues show vapor pooling and stalling over Central and East Texas. This loaded sky, unable to drain, setting the stage for the deadly flash flood. It’s a visceral glimpse of vapor in motion, moving slowly but with devastating impact. A changing water cycle, playing out above our heads. This is what vapor, velocity, and vertical motion look like when they converge.

And then there’s us.

While climate reshapes water, human decisions amplify it. In 2023, hydrologist Yusuke Pokhrel and colleagues showed how irrigation, land use, and water withdrawals distort regional hydrology.

Ignoring these human factors leads to overestimating runoff and underestimating atmospheric thirst. In some basins, human use matters more than what falls from the sky.

Texas proves the point:

• Irrigation in West Texas raises evapotranspiration and disrupts seasonal flow. Large-scale withdrawals from the Ogallala Aquifer reduce groundwater availability downstream, shifting the timing and volume of river flows and accentuates drought conditions in already water-stressed regions[4].

• Urban sprawl accelerates runoff and raises flood risk. Expanding suburbs and cities pave over natural land with impervious surfaces, reducing infiltration and sending stormwater rushing into creeks and rivers, often overwhelming drainage systems and increasing the frequency and intensity of flash floods[5].

• Aging reservoirs can worsen both floods and droughts. Designed for a past climate, many are now ill-suited for more volatile conditions — struggling to buffer flood peaks or store enough water during prolonged dry spells. In some cases, outdated operations or degraded infrastructure magnify the very extremes they were meant to manage.

Texas is a dual-exposure system. The climate shifts. The land shifts. And when they move together, their impacts multiply.

Texas isn’t an outlier — it’s a harbinger. A place where drought and deluge don’t trade places, but collide — sometimes within the same week, on the same watershed. Where the sky swells and the soil gives way. Where century-old assumptions about rain, rivers, and runoff crumble under the pressure of converging extremes.

The story isn’t just about rising temperatures. It’s about a water cycle rewritten by vapor and velocity, by concrete and cultivation, by geometry that flows instead of fixes. As climate shifts and land use compounds those changes, our past models grow brittle. And our narratives? Too often, still binary.

To move forward, we need more than updated flood maps. We need a new language rooted in complexity, scale, and feedback. One that can handle the meander, not just the mean. And we need the will to use it in our plans, our policies, and our press.

Because the future isn’t forged only by what we build. It’s shaped by what we burn. Roads and rooftops matter amidst a rising CO₂. When vapor collides with concrete, we’re reminded disasters aren’t just natural — they’re engineered.

This isn’t just about preparing for the next storm. It’s about admitting the old coordinates no longer work and drawing new ones while we still can.

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Hello Interactors,

Happy Fourth of July and welcome to a brand new season of Interplace! We’re kicking things off with a video of my cross-country rail trip that took about four days to ride…and nearly twice as long to edit and produce. This first ever Interplace video launches our summer focus on physical geography and the environment. I hope you enjoy a slow journey through space, place, and the unexpected beauty between the coasts.

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Hello Interactors,

My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.

In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.

Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.

FLASH FEEDS

My daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently.

Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.

This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It’s a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.

In this context, the West Village girl isn’t just a person — she’s a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn’t arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management." He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn’t just for others in the room. It’s for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.

As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what’s lived and what’s posted collapses.

This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn’t just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.

These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.

So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn’t already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.

PULSING PATTERNS

If Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It’s what holds meaning when spectacle fades.

If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It’s not always radical. Sometimes it’s just choosing a different coffee shop.

Back in Seattle’s University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don’t serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They’re not aesthetic first. They’re relational. These are small gestures that build culture.

Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory. We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It’s a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.

So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn’t just about caffeine addiction. It’s about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.

Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren’t arbitrary. They’re optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.

People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn’t only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that’s easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.

My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.

These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn’t organized around visibility. It’s organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.

Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they’re engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.

You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.

They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn’t just critique. It’s care enacted. And care takes time.

Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.

UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONES

Undertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn’t just rhythm. It’s the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.

They don’t dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they’re the ones your heart and lungs make.

Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend’s story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn’t follow trends, but it does remember them.

Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren’t glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are what hold everything together.

Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.” In his work on ordinary urban life, he writes that much of what connects us isn’t spectacular. It’s what happens when people brush past one another without ceremony: the steady hum of life happening without the need for headlines. Cities function not just because of design, but because of everyday cooperation — shared rhythms, implicit trust, systems that keep working because people show up.

It can seem mundane: a delivery driver making the same drop, a retiree watering the sidewalk garden they planted without permission, the clatter of trash bins returning to their spots. These moments don’t make the city famous, but they do make it work.

Even the flashiest loops rely on them. The West Village girl’s curated brunch only happens because someone sliced lemons before sunrise and wiped the table clean before she sat down. The Starbucks habit loop in the U-District clicks into place because the supply truck showed up at 5 a.m. and the barista clocked in on time. They’re the dominant undertone of cities: loops so steady we stop noticing them...until they stop. Like during the pandemic.

A synthesist might point to an LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. These make slow drones that hum under a syncopated rhythm; a pulsing sub-bass holding space while textures come and go. The mundane in a city does the same: it holds the mix together. Without it, the composition falls apart.

If you’ve ever heard a modular synth set, you know it doesn’t move like pop music. The loops aren’t clean. They evolve, layer, drift in and out of sync. They build tension, release it, then find a new rhythm. Cities work the same way.

Their beauty isn’t always in sync — it’s in polyrhythm. Like when two synth voices loop at slightly different speeds: a saw wave pinging every three beats, a filtered drone stretching over seven. They collide, resolve, then drift again. Like when a car blinker syncs to the beat of a song and then falls out again. In modular music, this dissonance isn’t a flaw. It creates a sonic texture.

City rhythms don’t always align either. A delivery truck pulls up as a barista closes shop; protest chants counter a stump speech; showtimes shift with transit delays. These clashes don’t cancel each other out — they deepen the city’s texture, giving it groove.

Sociologists Scannell and Gifford call this place attachment: the slow accrual of meaning in a space through repetition, emotional memory, and lived interaction. It’s not always nostalgic. Sometimes it’s forward-looking. The act of building the kind of city you want to live in, one relationship at a time.

And beneath all of this, the city continues its own loop: subways running through worn tunnels, trash collected on quiet mornings, someone sweeping a shop floor before the door opens.

Both protest and performance rely on this scaffold. The Starbucks picket line doesn’t just appear. It’s supported by planning, scheduling, and shared labor. The music scene doesn’t just materialize. It's shaped by decades of flyers, friendships, and repeat customers.

The viral and the intentional both need the mundane.

Cities, when they work, are made of all three: the flash of now, the pulse of choice, and the undertone of the necessary. Like springtime flowers, the city creates blooms that emerge at the surface. They draw attention, cameras, and admiration. These blossoms don’t just attract the eye, they draw in pollinators who carry influence and energy far beyond the original scene.

But none of this happens without the rest of the plant. It’s the leaves that capture sunlight day after day, the roots that pulse the unseen through tunnels, the microbes that toil in the grime and dirt to nourish those all around them. Urban life mirrors this looping ecology. Moments that flash brightly, pulses that quietly sustain, and undertones that hold it all together. The bloom is what gets noticed, but it’s the layered and syncopated life below — repeating, decomposing, reemerging — that make the next blossom possible.

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Hello Interactors,

This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper’s Hawk hacking the city’s traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one.

HISS, HUM, HUNT

I first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It’s a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day’s hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation.

DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWN

Perched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain’ calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls.

As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slipstream peels off the 7AM wave of commuters. I spot a sparrow in a vortex that spirals from the garbage truck’s wake at 07∶13. That acoustic shadow beneath that florist’s van is one place I could pass unseen. But is a sparrow worth it?

What I am doing — unknown even to myself — is what spatial scientists call real‑time kernel‑density estimation. At any point on a simple 2D path I can plop a small mathematical bump — a kernel. I can then reason about the density mapped below me by stacking up every bump’s contribution at a particular spot. That once scatter of points on a map morphs into a smooth curve that shows where meaningful observations truly cluster. I continuously weight a landscape of pigeons, cyclists, and idling SUVs by situational context rather than simple Euclidean distance.

Complexity geographer David O’Sullivan calls this kind of adaptive map a narrative model — a story the system tells itself so it can keep acting. My mental basemap obeys what is adjacent to what on this map. After all, a three‑meter hedge is more impenetrable than thirty meters of empty air; therefore straight‑line distances can lie and deceive. When humans try to simplify distances by saying, ‘as the crow flies’, they have no idea what they’re leaving out.

BRAKES BUILD BARRICADES

At 07∶26 a stainless‑steel button is pressed; I hear the relay’s metallic click 3.2 seconds before the little white pedestrian blinks alive. I am perched here because I anticipated this poke by pedestrians on their morning commute. Vehicles will now queue as these bi-peds spill into the cross walk. The stacked metal boxes of steel, rubber, and plastic will form a barricade forty meters long…potentially.

Brake‑lights align into a pulsing crimson corridor whose half‑life I have calculated and averaged across nineteen previous dawns. Humans call the coming congestion a nuisance, but I call it camouflage. For twenty‑two seconds the asphalt canyon’s turbulence drops below an acceptable range. I can now hover as if among cedars.

A scientist has been watching from the opposite curb. They will soon begin recording this trick in their field book as so: a hawk anticipates the signal pattern and times its dives to the red‑phase distribution of brake lights.

Because most queues are short, but occasionally very long, I have to be careful to time this properly. If I dive for prey based on the overall mean of the lineup, I will arrive while half the cars were still rolling to a stop — dangerous. So instead, I consider just the top-10% longest lines. Scientists marvel that I learned this algorithm in a single winter. I marvel that they need calculators to compute it.

ZEBRA STRIPE SLALOM STRIKE

I drop. The scent of hot rubber folds swirls with the cedar‑resin on my breast feathers as the warm air fills my plumage. The slowing bumper of a school bus becomes a landing spot — a moving parapet. Fresh into the dive, the thermoplastic zebra stripes flash white‑white‑white like a stroboscopic speedometer. None of this was made for me, yet every dimension matters for my survival. The curb‑to‑planter setback of 0.9 meters sets my glide angle; the bollard spacing — installed last year to calm e‑scooters — creates a slalom that funnels starlings toward an ornamental plum in a front lawn.

Urban design handbooks invoke words like livability and placemaking, as if these geometries were some kind of neutral toolkit. But for me, in the instant before impact, this curb‑to‑planter setback, this bollard slalom, adjudicates more than legal fiction — it means life and death.

Urban forms may look passive, yet every angle, radius, and dwell time means someone has won and someone has lost — wide curb radii speed cars through a right-turn but lengthen the crossing exposure for a toddler. Urban geometry is power cast in concrete; it never clocks off, and is both political and ecological: a three‑second refuge for a starling is a three‑second targeting solution for me.

FORCE AND FEATHERS FACES FEEDBACK

Impact. Feathers erupt like dark gray confetti. The starling crumbles under thirty‑four newtons of closing force — about the weight of a brick slammed into its ribcage. While I mantle the prize, a more philosophical bird might wonder: Who authored this death? Was it my neuromuscular burst alone? Or the person whose fingertip initiated a forty‑second cascade of stopped traffic? Or the traffic engineer who — chasing level‑of‑service targets — extended the red phase by six seconds last fiscal year?

Philosophy of science warns against naïve linear causation; urban events rarely run in neat A → B lines. Herbert Simon, writing on complex systems, described cities and organisms as “nearly decomposable hierarchies,” where slow, macro‑scale layers — like signal‑cycle regulations, curb geometries, and commuter habits — set the boundary conditions within which rapid micro‑events unfold. My talon snap and a starling’s dodge happen inside those higher‑order constraints, even as countless such micro‑acts, in aggregate, keep the larger structure of life humming along.

My strike, therefore, is a city‑scale phenomenon folded into tendon and keratin — street grids, signal cycles, and global supply chains compressed into one ballistic gesture. In the metallic tang of blood this mystery unfolds. I taste data: adipose fat tissue infused with fryer grease, feather sheaths dusted in brake dust, hormone ratios ticking through molt stage like seasonal code. Each swallow becomes a lab assessment — an unwitting biopsy of the urban food web — revealing how corn subsidies, restaurant waste, and airborne microplastics percolate up the trophic ladder. To devour a single starling is to audit the metabolic ledger of the Anthropocene, one protein strand at a time.

All of which reminds me that agency, mine, yours, the starling, is relational: the prey’s demise is over‑determined by a network whose nodes include asphalt viscosity — how a petrochemical blend modulates surface friction, drainage, and midday heat plumes — and municipal bond ratings that decide whether this intersection receives fresh pavement or another crosswalk. Chemistry, finance, and instinct co‑author every kill I make, and every step you take.

FIBERS, FOSSILS, AND FIRMWARE REFRESH

Dusk now drapes the mast in violet. Streetlamps flicker on; LED headlight arrays begin tinting the roadway cyan. Beneath the darkening asphalt, copper once meant for a clicking telegraphs now pipes broadband; beneath that, bricks baked when canals were high‑tech cradle those cables like red‑clay fossils. Media archaeologist Shannon Mattern argues that cities have always computed — tallying grain on cuneiform tablets, ringing bell‑tower hours to synchronize labor, routing mail through pneumatic tubes — only the substrates keep shifting, from clay and bronze to fiber optics and silicon. And trust me, nature was doing math long before humans claimed to invent it.

From my perch, epochs overlay transparently: timber palisades, horse drawn carriage tracks, fiber conduits. My hunting tactic is merely firmware patch v.2025 in a 5,000‑year old operating system. Your protocol tomorrow may be Li‑Fi pulses from a smart pole — a future where streetlamps won’t just illuminate, they’ll whisper streams of data in rapid-fire flashes — or the hiss of an autonomous shuttle that brakes at frequencies human reflexes never reach.

And you’ll be impressed with yourself. Meanwhile, I listen, map, and adjust — in my world here, survival goes to whoever learns faster, not whoever hits harder. Every fresh tactic buys a heartbeat of advantage, yet it also tightens the ratchet: the prey adapts, signals change, habits shift. Humans follow the same spiral — each smarter signal controller, each app‑driven reroute, plugs one gap while opening two more, slipping us all a step deeper into the city’s endless, restless loop.

OF DASHBOARDS AND DAGGER-WINGS

Humans may obsess over their dashboards and digital twins, yet a hawk that weighs less than a laptop already runs a live cognitive twin of the urban systems you built. Your impressed with monthly model updates while my model is updated at wingbeat resolution. If Homo sapiens hope to build a resilient future they might start where I perch: by listening for weak signals, mapping contingencies as well as coordinates, and recognizing that every curb, click, and feather participates in these nested conversations of forces.

The next time you press that crosswalk button and that electromechanical relay inside the signal‑control box snaps the circuit closed, ask not only whether it is safe to cross but what other intelligences have read that clue before you.

Meet us in the hush of those red taillights — inhabit that brief, engine‑silent interstitial where the white pedestrian man shines — then test what flickers in your own peripheral “bird brain”. Listen for the thin rustle of variables you once called noise; trace how a single press of that button ripples through nerves, budgets, buildings and beaks. Hold the silence long enough to notice how even I, a vicious dagger‑winged stalker, leave scraps for ground‑feeders and vacate a block after one clean kill so others may eat. If you can rest in that hush without lunging for your phone or some manically measured meaningless metric, you may begin to practice reciprocity — paring appetite to need, letting leftovers seed the next cycle — while stalking your own assumptions with the same taloned precision I bring to feather and flesh.

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Hello Interactors,

I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.

This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him.

TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONE

Musk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.

VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google Earth

This isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.

That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.

Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That’s exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he’s using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they’re employees.

VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google Earth

Quinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago.

It isn’t new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida’s Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren’t launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.

Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that’s beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn’t some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.

And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.

ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LAND

Elon Musk isn’t just shaping towns — he’s engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren’t just feats of engineering. They’re tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn’t need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.

Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.

And it’s not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?

Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.

VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: Starlink

The result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can’t enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.

Now let’s go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They’re built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.

Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk’s empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They’re not overseen by voters. They’re not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.

Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means.

Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren’t mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.

This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn’t always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we’re not just dealing with infrastructure. We’re dealing with rule.

And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.

AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUS

Elon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren’t outliers. They’re part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.

The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it’s early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let’s just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.

Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.

According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored the institutional architecture that makes company towns possible in the first place: incorporation laws, zoning frameworks, municipal codes, and districting rules. These aren't neutral bureaucratic instruments. They're jurisdictional design tools, capable of reshaping sovereignty at the micro-scale. And when used strategically, they can be wielded by corporations to create functional states-within-a-state — governing without elections, taxing without consent, and shaping public life through private vision.

From a critical geography perspective, the problem is just as stark. Scholars have long studied the uneven production of space — how capital reshapes landscapes to serve accumulation. But here, space isn’t just produced — it’s governed. And it’s governed through techniques of legal enclosure, where a patch of land becomes a jurisdictional exception, and a logistics hub or tech campus becomes a mini-regime.

Starbase, Snailbrook, Reedy Creek, and even Google’s Sidewalk Labs are not just spatial projects — they're sovereign experiments in spatial governance, where control is layered through contracts, tax breaks, and municipal proxies.

But these arrangements don’t arise in a vacuum. Cities often aren’t choosing between public and private control — they’re choosing between austerity and access to cash. In the United States, local governments are revenue-starved by design. Most lack control over income taxes or resource royalties, and depend heavily on sales taxes, property taxes, and development fees. This creates a perverse incentive: to treat corporations not as entities to regulate, but as lifelines to recruit and appease.

Desperate for jobs and investment, cities offer zoning concessions, infrastructure deals, and tax abatements, even when they come with little democratic oversight or long-term guarantees. Corporate actors understand this imbalance — and exploit it. The result is a form of urban hostage-taking, where governance is bartered piecemeal in exchange for the promise of economic survival.

A more democratized fiscal structure — one that empowers cities through equitable revenue-sharing, progressive taxation, or greater control over land value capture — might reduce this dependency. It would make it possible for municipalities to plan with their citizens instead of negotiating against them. It would weaken the grip of corporate actors who leverage scarcity into sovereignty. But until then, as long as cities are backed into a fiscal corner, we shouldn’t be surprised when they sell off their power — one plot or parking lot at a time.

Highsmith argues that these structures demand scrutiny — not just for their economic impact, but for their democratic consequences. These aren't just quirks of local law. They are the fault lines of American federalism — where localism becomes a loophole, and fragmentation becomes a formula for private rule.

And yet, these systems persist with minimal legal friction and even less public awareness. Because they don’t always look like sovereignty. Sometimes they look like a housing deal. A fast-tracked zoning change. A development district with deferred taxes. A campus with private shuttles and subsidized utilities. They don't announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.

We’ve been trained to see these projects as innovation, not governance. As entrepreneurship, not policy. But when a company owns the homes, builds the roads, controls the data, and sets the rules, it’s not just offering services — it’s exercising control. As political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism reshapes civic life around the image of the entrepreneur, replacing democratic participation with market performance.

That shift plays out everywhere: universities run like corporations, cities managed like startups. Musk isn’t the exception — he’s the clearest expression of a culture that mistakes private ambition for public good. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

In a New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying his science fiction books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’”

The issue isn’t just that we’ve allowed these takeovers — it’s that we’ve ignored the tools enabling them: incorporation, annexation, zoning, and special districts. As Brian Highsmith notes, this quiet shift in power might not have surprised one of our constitution authors, James Madison, but it would have troubled him. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned not of monarchs, but of factions — small, organized interests capturing government for their own ends. His solution was restraint through scaling oppositional voices.

“The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed...and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”— James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)

Today, the structure meant to restrain factions has become their playbook. These actors don’t run for office — they arrive with charters, contracts, and capital. They govern not in the name of the people, but of “efficiency” and “innovation.” And they don’t need to control a nation when a zoning board will do.

Unchecked, we risk mistaking corporate control for civic order — and repeating a pattern we’ve barely begun to name.

We were told, sold, and promised a universe of shared governance — political, spatial, even orbital. But Madison didn’t trust promises. He trusted structure. He feared what happens when small governments fall to powerful interests — when law becomes a lever for private gain. That fear now lives in legal districts, rocket towns, and infrastructure built to rule. Thousands of satellites orbit the Earth, not launched by publics, but by one man with tools once reserved for states. What was once called infrastructure now governs. What was once geography now obeys.

Our maps may still show roads and rails and pipes and ports — but not the fictions beneath them, or the factions they support.

References:

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.

Highsmith, B. (2022). Governing the company town: How employers use local government to seize political power. Yale Law Journal.

Madison, J. (1787). Federalist No. 10. In A. Hamilton, J. Madison, & J. Jay, The Federalist Papers. Bantam Books (2003 edition).

Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Metropolitan Books.

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Hello Interactors,

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often?

STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATED

The urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.

Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.

I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.

These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?

Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O’Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it’s neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.

This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger’ not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don’t float in space, they’re grounded in the social fabric around them.

You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don’t just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.

As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who’s spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic.

He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren’t just solving inefficiencies. They’re hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.

The question isn’t just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn’t be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.

COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALM

If you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you’ll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it’s a policy question. For everyone else, it’s about dignity.

As Walker puts it, coverage isn’t about efficiency — it’s about “a sense of fairness.” It’s about living in a place where your city hasn’t written you off because you’re not profitable to serve. Walker’s point is that coverage isn’t charity. It’s a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.

That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn’t about joy or euphoria. It’s about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.

There’s a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That’s what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.

And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don’t say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It’s a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren’t luxuries — they’re part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.

My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn’t just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy’. They feel held.

Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn’t about dopamine hits — it’s about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won’t be stranded if you don’t have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don’t make it work for you.

In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They’re shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They’re saying: we share space here. Don’t be loud. Don’t cut in line. Don’t treat public space like it’s only for you.

That kind of city can’t be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That’s not some socialist’s idea of utopia. It’s just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.

But sometimes we’re just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it’s not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.

Once you’ve laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you’ve shaped what comes next. Changing course isn’t impossible, but it’s costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we’ve got.

Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They’ve shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you’re probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.

CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CARE

There’s a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that’s made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one’s entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.

If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won’t stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.

Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There’s long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.

But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn’t a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.

If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That’s how you’d tune an engine or write software. But cities aren’t machines. They’re messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They’re more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that’s where complexity science becomes useful.

People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don’t have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict.

Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn’t just technical — it’s ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system’s design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.

This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can’t do both. Not on a fixed budget.

Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that’s also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.

These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.

That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren’t neutral containers. They’re environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.

I’m an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I’ve learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don’t have to engage — but you’re not invisible either.

There’s a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.

In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here’s the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.

Or they don’t.

And that’s the real test of infrastructure. We’ve spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we’ve neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you’re not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.

Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that’s working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you’re sharing something. Space. Water. Time.

You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They’re not luxuries — they’re civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don’t have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn’t perform.

But cities don’t have to choose between quiet and joy. We don’t have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There’s something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.

Even Jarrett Walker, who’s clear-eyed about transit, doesn’t pretend it solves everything. Transit isn’t always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he’s quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.

So no, I’m not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I’m arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.

REFERENCES

Castellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.

David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.

Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].

O’Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.

Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.

Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.

West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.

Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth’. The New York Times Magazine.

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Hello Interactors,

This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.

Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.

The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.

So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.

PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTION

I still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.

But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.

I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.

This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.

But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.

These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn’t emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.

Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn’t just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren’t neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.

Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn’t seen, classified people he’d never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren’t observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.

Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.

Maps followed suit.

What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren’t just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.

Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn’t just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn’t about understanding space — it’s about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it.

Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren’t shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn’t a place — it’s a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.

In other words, the map’s loss of innocence wasn’t just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He’d learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.

These shifts in reality over centuries weren’t necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?

FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLE

As early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.

Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.

Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.

Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.

You didn’t just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn’t just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.

In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn’t just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn’t cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.

Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.

He mapped four stages of this logic:

• Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.

• Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.

• Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn’t America — it’s the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)

• Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don’t reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.

We don’t follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.

And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don’t manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. The streetscape is marketing collateral and neighborhoods are optimized for search.

Even money plays this game.

The U.S. dollar wasn’t always king. That title once belonged to the British pound — backed by empire, gold, and industry. After World War II, the dollar took over, pegged to gold under the Bretton Woods convention — a symbol of American postwar power stability…and perversion. It was forged in an opulent, exclusive, hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. But designed in the style of Spanish Renaissance Revival, it was pretending to be in Spain.

Then in 1971, Nixon snapped the dollar’s gold tether. The ‘Nixon Shock’ allowed the dollar to float — its value now based not on metal, but on trust. It became less a store of value than a vessel of belief. A belief that is being challenged today in ways that recall the instability and fragmentation of the pre-WWII era.

And this dollar lives in servers, not Industrial Age iron vaults. It circulates as code, not coin. It underwrites markets, wars, and global finance through momentum alone. And when the pandemic hit, there was no digging into reserves.

The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet with keystrokes — injecting trillions into the economy through bond purchases, emergency loans, and direct payments. But at the same time, Trump 1.0 showed printing presses rolling, stacks of fresh bills bundled and boxed — a spectacle of liquidity. It was monetary policy as theater. A simulation of control, staged in spreadsheets by the Fed and photo ops by the Executive Branch. Not to reflect value, but to project it. To keep liquidity flowing and to keep the belief intact.

This is what Baudrillard meant by simulation. The sign doesn’t lie — nor does it tell the truth. It just works — as long as we accept it.

MOOD OVER MEANING

Reality is getting harder to discern. We believe it to be solid — that it imposes friction. A law has consequences. A price reflects value. A city has limits. These things made sense because they resist us. Because they are real.

But maybe that was just the story we told. Maybe it was always more mirage than mirror.

Now, the signs don’t just point to reality — they also replace it. We live in a world where the image outpaces the institution. Where the copy is smoother than the original. Where AI does the typing. Where meaning doesn’t emerge — it arrives prepackaged and pre-viral. It’s a kind of seductive deception. It’s hyperreality where performance supersedes substance. Presence and posture become authority structured in style.

Politics is not immune to this — it’s become the main attraction.

Trump’s first 100 days didn’t aim to stabilize or legislate but to signal. Deportation as UFC cage match — staged, brutal, and televised. Tariff wars as a way of branding power — chaos with a catchphrase. Climate retreat cast as perverse theater. Gender redefined and confined by executive memo. Birthright citizenship challenged while sedition pardoned. Even the Gulf of Mexico got renamed. These aren’t policies, they’re productions.

Power isn’t passing through law. It’s passing through the affect of spectacle and a feed refresh.

Baudrillard once wrote that America doesn’t govern — it narrates. Trump doesn’t manage policy, he manages mood. Like an actor. When America’s Secretary of Defense, a former TV personality, has a makeup studio installed inside the Pentagon it’s not satire. It’s just the simulation, doing what it does best: shining under the lights.

But this logic runs deeper than any single figure.

Culture no longer unfolds. It reloads. We don’t listen to the full album — we lift 10 seconds for TikTok. Music is made for algorithms. Fashion is filtered before it’s worn. Selfhood is a brand channel. Identity is something to monetize, signal, or defend — often all at once.

The economy floats too. Meme stocks. NFTs. Speculative tokens. These aren’t based in value — they’re based in velocity. Attention becomes the currency.

What matters isn’t what’s true, but what trends. In hyperreality, reference gives way to rhythm. The point isn’t to be accurate. The point is to circulate. We’re not being lied to.We’re being engaged. And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Which through a Baudrillard lens is why America — the simulation — persists.

He saw it early. Describing strip malls, highways, slogans, themed diners he saw an America that wasn’t deep. That was its genius he saw. It was light, fast paced, and projected. Like the movies it so famously exports. It didn’t need justification — it just needed repetition.

And it’s still repeating.

Las Vegas is the cathedral of the logic of simulation — a city that no longer bothers pretending. But it’s not alone. Every city performs, every nation tries to brand itself. Every policy rollout is scored like a product launch. Reality isn’t navigated — it’s streamed.

And yet since his writing, the mood has shifted. The performance continues, but the music underneath it has changed. The techno-optimism of Baudrillard’s ‘80s an ‘90s have curdled. What once felt expansive now feels recursive and worn. It’s like a show running long after the audience has gone home. The rager has ended, but Spotify is still loudly streaming through the speakers.

“The Kids' Guide to the Internet” (1997), produced by Diamond Entertainment and starring the unnervingly wholesome Jamison family. It captures a moment of pure techno-optimism — when the Internet was new, clean, and family-approved. It’s not just a tutorial; it’s a time capsule of belief, staged before the dream turned into something else. Before the feed began to feed on us.

Trumpism thrives on this terrain. And yet the world is changing around it. Climate shocks, mass displacement, spiraling inequality — the polycrisis has a body count. Countries once anchored to American leadership are squinting hard now, trying to see if there’s anything left behind the screen. Adjusting the antenna in hopes of getting a clearer signal. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe, the question grows louder: Can you trust a power that no longer refers to anything outside itself?

Maybe Baudrillard and Tocqueville are right — America doesn’t point to a deeper truth. It points to itself. Again and again and again. It is the loop. And even now, knowing this, we can’t quite stop watching. There’s a reason we keep refreshing. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. The performance persists — not necessarily because we believe in it, but because it’s the only script still running.

And whether we’re horrified or entertained, complicit or exhausted, engaged or ghosted, hired or fired, immigrated or deported, one thing remains strangely true: we keep feeding it. That’s the strange power of simulation in an attention economy. It doesn’t need conviction. It doesn’t need conscience. It just needs attention — enough to keep the momentum alive. The simulation doesn’t care if the real breaks down. It just keeps rendering — soft, seamless, and impossible to look away from. Like a dream you didn’t choose but can’t wake up from.

REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)

Baudrillard, J. (1986). America (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Hind, S., & Gekker, A. (2019). On autopilot: Towards a flat ontology of vehicular navigation. In C. Lukinbeal et al. (Eds.), Media’s Mapping Impulse. Franz Steiner Verlag.

Linnaeus, C. (1735). Systema Naturae (1st ed.). Lugduni Batavorum.

Perkins, C. (2009). Philosophy and mapping. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.

Raaphorst, K., Duchhart, I., & van der Knaap, W. (2017). The semiotics of landscape design communication. Landscape Research.

Roberts, L. (2008). Cinematic cartography: Movies, maps and the consumption of place. In R. Koeck & L. Roberts (Eds.), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image. University of Liverpool.

Tocqueville, A. de. (2003). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans., H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835)

Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1905)

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Hello Interactors,

Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels.

History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s clues, peek through some fresh conceptual lenses, and consider why the way we frame these shifts matters — maybe more now than ever.

PRESSURE POINTS AT URBAN JOINTS

Let’s ground where we all might be historically speaking. Clues from long-term historical patterns suggests social systems go through periodic cycles of integration, expansion, and crisis. Historical quantitative data reveals recurring waves of structural-demographic pressure — moments when inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain converge to produce instability.

By quantitative historian Peter Turchin’s account, we are currently drifting through some kind of inflection point. His 2010 essay in Nature anticipated the early 2020s as a period of peak instability that started around 1970. That’s when people earning advanced degrees, entering law, finance, media, and politics skyrocketed from the 1970s onward. Meanwhile, the number of elite positions (like Senate seats, Supreme Court clerkships, high level corporate positions) remained fixed or even shrank. This created decades of increased income inequality, elite competition, and declining public trust that created conditions for events like the rise of Trump, polarization, and institutional gridlock.

The symptoms are familiar to us now, and they are markers that echo previous systemic ruptures in U.S. history.

In the 1770s, colonial grievances and elite competition led to a historic revolutionary realignment. It also coincided with poor harvests and food insecurity that amplified unrest. The 1860s brought civil war driven by slavery and sectional conflict. It too occurred during a period of climate volatility and crop failures. The early 20th century saw the Gilded Age unravel into labor unrest and the Great Depression, following years of drought and economic collapse in the Dust Bowl. The 1960s through 1980s unleashed social protest, stagflation, and the shift toward neoliberal governance amid fears of resource scarcity and rising pollution. In each case, ecological shocks layered onto political and economic pressures — making transformation not only likely, but necessary.

Spatial patterns shifted alongside these political ruptures — from rail hubs and company towns to low flung suburban rings and high-rise financialized skylines. Cities can be both staging grounds creating these shifts and mirrors reflecting them. As material and symbolic anchors of society, they reflect where systems are strained — and where new forms may soon take root.

Urban transformation today is neither orderly nor speculative — it is reactive. These socio-political, economic, and ecological shifts have fragmented not just the city, but the very frameworks we use to understand it. And with urban scale theory as a measure, change is accelerating exponentially. This means our conceptual tools to understand these shifts best respond just as quickly.

Let’s dip into the academic world of contemporary urban studies to gauge how scholars are considering these shifts. Here are three lenses that seem well-suited to consider our current landscape…or perhaps those my own biases are attracted to.

Urban Political Ecology. This sees the city as a socio-natural process — shaped by uneven flows of energy, capital, and extraction. This approach, developed by critical geographers like Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, highlights how environmental degradation is often tied to social inequality and political neglect. Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer who blends political theory and environmental history, adds to this view. He shows how infrastructure — from water systems to waste networks — shapes urban nature and power.

The Jackson, Mississippi water crisis, for example, revealed how ecological stress and decades of disinvestment resulted in a disheartening breakdown. In 2022, flooding overwhelmed Jackson's aging water system, leaving tens of thousands without safe drinking water — but the failure had been decades in the making. Years of underfunding, political neglect, and systemic racism had hollowed out the city’s infrastructure.

Or take Musk's AI data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s adjacent to historically Black neighborhoods and uses 35 methane gas-powered turbines that emit harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other pollutants. It’s reported to be operating without proper permits and contributes to air quality issues these communities already have long experienced. These crises are vivid cases of what urban political ecologists warn about: how marginalization and disinvestment manifest physically in infrastructure failure, disproportionately affecting already vulnerable populations.

Platform Urbanism. This explains much of the growing visible and invisible restructuring of urban space. From delivery networks to sidewalk surveillance, digital platforms now shape land use and behavioral patterns. Urban theorists like Sarah Barns and geographer Agnieszka Leszczynski describe these systems as shadow planners — zoning isn’t just on paper anymore; it’s encoded in app interfaces and service contracts. Shoshana Zuboff, a social psychologist and scholar of the digital economy, pushes this further.

She argues that platforms are not just intermediaries but extractive infrastructures. They’re designed to shape behavior and monetize it at scale. As platforms replace institutions, their spatial footprint expands. For example, Amazon has redefined regional land use by building vast fulfillment centers and reshaping delivery logistics across suburbs and exurbs. Or look at Uber and Lyft. They’ve altered curbside usage and traffic patterns in major cities without ever appearing on official planning documents. These changes demonstrate how digital infrastructure now directs physical development — often faster than public institutions can respond.

Neoliberal Urbanism. Though widely critiqued, this remains the dominant lens. Despite growing backlash, deregulated markets, privatized services, and financialized real estate continue to shape planning logic and policy defaults. Urban theorists like Neil Brenner and economic geographer Jamie Peck describe this as a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial cities — where the suburbs sprawl, the towers rise, and exclusion is reproduced not by public design input, but by tax codes, ownership models, and legacy zoning. Like many governing systems, the default is to preserve the status quo. Institutions, once entrenched, tend to perpetuate existing frameworks — even in the face of mounting social or ecological stress.

For example, in many U.S. cities, exclusionary zoning laws have long restricted the construction of multi-family housing in favor of single-family homes — limiting supply, reinforcing segregation, and driving up housing costs. Even modest attempts at reform often meet local resistance, revealing how deeply these rules are woven into planning culture.

These lenses aren’t just theoretical — they are descriptively powerful. They reflect what is, not what could be. But describing the present is only the first step.

NEW NOTIONS OF URBAN MOTIONS

It’s worth considering alternative conceptual lenses rising in relevance. These are not yet changing the shape of cites at scale, but they are shaping how we think about our urban futures. Historically, new conceptual lenses have often emerged in the wake of the kind of major social and spatial disruptions already covered.

For example, the upheavals of the 19th century. This rapid industrialization, urban crowding, and public health crises gave rise to modern, industrial-era city planning. The mid-20th century crises helped institutionalize zoning and modernist design, while the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century elevated market-driven planning models.

Emerging conceptual lenses of the 21st century are grounded in complexity, care, informality, and computation. These are responses to the fragmented plurality of our planetary plight — characteristic of the current calamity of our many crises, or polycrisis. Frameworks for thinking and imagining cities gain traction in architecture and planning studios, classrooms, online and physical activist spaces, and experimental design projects. They’re not yet dominant, but they are gaining ground. Here are a few I believe to be particularly relevant today.

Assemblage Urbanism. This lens views cities not as coherent wholes, but as contingent networks that are always in the making. The term "assemblage" comes from philosophy and anthropology. It refers to how diverse elements — people, materials, policies, and technologies — come together in temporary, evolving configurations. This lens resists top-down models of urban design and instead sees cities as patchworks of relationships and improvisations.

Introduced by scholars like Ignacio Farias, an urban anthropologist focused on technological and infrastructural urban change, and AbdouMaliq Simone, a sociologist known for his work on African cities and informality, this approach offers a vocabulary for complexity and contradiction. It examines cities made of sensors and encampments, logistics hubs and wetlands.

Colin McFarlane, a geographer who studies how cities function and evolve — especially in places often overlooked in mainstream planning — shows how urban learning spreads through these networks that cross places and scales. As the built environment becomes more fragmented and multi-scalar, this lens offers a way to map the friction and fluidity of emergent urban life.

Postcolonial and Feminist Urbanisms. This lens challenges who gets to define the city, and how. Ananya Roy, a scholar of global urbanism and housing justice, Jennifer Robinson, a geographer known for challenging Western-centric urban theory, and Leslie Kern, a feminist urbanist focused on gender and public space, all center the voices and experiences often sidelined by mainstream planning: women, racialized communities, and the so-called Global South. These are regions, not always in the Southern Hemisphere, that have historically been colonized, exploited, or marginalized by dominant empires of the so-called Global North.

These frameworks put care, informality, and embodied experience in the foreground — not as soft supplements to be ‘considered’, but as central to urban survival. They ask: whose knowledge counts and whose mobility is prioritized? In a world of precarity and patchwork governance, these lenses offer both critique and more fair and balanced paths forward.

Typological and Morphological Studies. These older, traditional lenses are reemerging through new tools. Once associated with the static physical form of cities, these traditions are finding renewed relevance through machine learning and spatial data. These approaches originate from architectural history and geography, where typology refers to recurring building patterns, and morphology to the shape and structure of urban space. Scholars like Saverio Muratori and Gianfranco Caniggia, both architects, emphasized interpreting urban fabric as a continuous, evolving record of social life.

As mentioned last week, British geographer M. R. G. Conzen introduced town-plan analysis, a method for understanding how plots and street systems change over time. Today, this lineage is extended by Laura Vaughan, an urbanist who studies how spatial form reflects social patterns, and Geoff Boeing, a planning scholar using computational tools to analyze and visualize urban form also mentioned last week.

AI models now interpret urban imagery, using historical patterns to predict future trends. This approach is evolving into a kind of algorithmic archaeology. However, unchecked it could reinforce existing spatial norms instead of challenging them. This stresses the importance of reflection, ethics, and debate about the implications and outcomes of these models…and who benefits most.

While these lenses don’t yet dominate design codes or capital flows, they do shape how we think and talk about our cities. And isn’t that where all transformation begins?

CHOOSING PATHS IN AFTERMATHS

Concepts don’t emerge in a vacuum. History shows us how they arise from the anxiety and urgency of uncertainty. As historian Elias Palti reminds us, frameworks gain traction when once dominant and grounding meanings begin crumbling under our feet. That’s when we invent or seek new ways to make sense of our shifting ground.

Donna Haraway, a pioneering feminist scholar in science and technology studies, urges us to stay with this mess and imagine new futures from within it. She describes these moments as opportunities to 'stay with the trouble' — to resist closure, dwell in complexity, and imagine alternatives from within the uncertainty.

Historically, moments of systemic crisis — from the 1770s to the 1840s, the 1930s to the 1960s — have sparked shifts not just in spatial form, but in the conceptual tools used to understand and design it. Revolutionary and reformist movements have often carried with them new ways of seeing: Enlightenment ideals, socialist critiques, environmental consciousness, and decolonial frameworks. We may be living through another such moment now — where the cracks in the old invite us to rethink the categories that built it.

In 1960, five years before I was born, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech called “Wind of Change”. It was a public acknowledgement of the decline of British empire and the rise of anti-colonial nationalism around the globe. Delivered in apartheid South Africa, it was a rare moment of elite recognition that a global shift in political and spatial order was already underway. Britain’s imperial dominance was fading just as American dominance was solidifying.

Today, we see echoes of that moment. The U.S. is facing economic fragmentation, growing inequality, and diminishing global legitimacy, while China asserts itself as a counterweight. Resistance and unrest in places like Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Kashmir, (and many more) mirror the turbulence of previous historic transitions. Once again, the global “winds of change” are shifting, strengthening, and unpredictably swirling. It can be disorienting.

But the frameworks I’ve outlined above are more than cold attempts at academic neutral observations, they can serve as lenses of orientation. They help guide what we see, what we measure, and what we ignore. And in doing so, they shape what futures become possible.

Some frameworks are widely used but lack ethical depth. Others are less common but are full of imagination and ethical reconfigurations. The lenses we prioritize in public policy, early education, design, and discussion will shape whether our future systems perpetuate existing inequalities or purge them.

This is not just an academic choice. It's a civic one.

While macro forces of capital or climate are beyond our control, it is possible to shape the narratives that impact our responses. The question remains whether space should continue being optimized for logistics and financial speculation, or if there is potential to focus on ecological repair, historical redress, and spatial justice.

Future developments will be influenced by current thoughts. The most impactful decision in urban design may come down to us all being more intentional in selecting the concepts that guide us forward.

REFERENCES

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Hello Interactors,

Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.

When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.

This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.

URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALES

As cities grow, they remember.

Look at a city’s form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital.

In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest.

As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”

In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed.

In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann’s renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution.

Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the car. Planning became machine logic — form as efficiency.

Each of these shifts marked the arrival of a new spatial calculus — ways of organizing the built environment in response to systemic pressures. Over time, these approaches came to be described by urbanists as morphological regimes: durable patterns of urban form shaped not just by architecture, but by ideology, infrastructure, and power.

The term “morphology” itself was borrowed from biology, where it described the structure of organisms. In urban studies, it originally referred to the physical anatomy of the city — blocks, plots, grids, and streets. But today the field has broadened. It’s evolved into more of a conceptual lens: not just a way of classifying form, but of understanding how ideas sediment into space. Today, morphology tracks how cities are shaped — not only physically, but discursively and increasingly so, computationally.

Urban planning scholar Geoff Boeing calls urban form a “spatial script.” It encodes decisions made long ago — about who belongs where, what gets prioritized, and what can be seen or accessed.

Other scholars treated cities like palimpsests — a term borrowed from manuscript studies, where old texts were scraped away and overwritten, yet traces remained. In urban form, each layer carries the imprint of a former spatial logic, never fully erased.

Michael Robert Günter (M. R. G.) Conzen, a British geographer, pioneered the idea of town plan analysis in the 1960s. He examined how street patterns, plot divisions, and building forms reveal historical shifts. Urban geographer and architect, Anne Vernez Moudon brought these methods into contemporary urbanism. She argued that morphological analysis could serve as a bridge between disciplines, from planning to architecture to geography.

Archaeologist Michael E. Smith goes further. Specializing in ancient cities, Smith argues that urban form doesn’t just reflect culture — it produces it. In early settlements, the spatial organization of plazas, roads, and monuments actively shaped how people understood power, social hierarchy, and civic identity. Ritual plazas weren’t just for ceremony — they structured the cognitive and social experience of space.

Urban form, in this sense, is conceptual. It’s how a society makes its world visible. And when that society changes — politically, economically, technologically — so does its form. Not immediately. Not neatly. But eventually. Almost always in response to pressure from the outside.

INTERVAL AND INFLECTION

Urban morphology used to evolve slowly. But today, it changes faster — and with increasing volatility. Physicist Geoffrey West, and other urban scientists, describes how complex systems like cities exhibit superlinear scaling: as they grow, they generate more innovation, infrastructure, and socio-economic activity at an accelerating pace. But this growth comes with a catch: the system becomes dependent on continuous bursts of innovation to avoid collapse. West compares it to jumping from one treadmill to another — each one running faster than the last.

What once took centuries, like the rise of industrial manufacturing, is now compressed into decades or less. The intervals between revolutions — from steam power to electricity to the internet — keep shrinking, and cities must adapt at an ever-faster clip just to maintain stability. But this also breeds instability as the intervals between systemic transformations shrink. Cities that once evolved over centuries can now shift in decades.

Consider Rome. Roman grid structure held for centuries. Medieval forms persisted well into the Renaissance. Even Haussmann’s Paris boulevards endured through war and modernization. But in the 20th century, urban morphology entered a period of rapid churn. Western urban regions shifted from dense industrial cores to sprawling postwar suburbs to globalized financial districts in under a century — each a distinct regime, unfolding at unprecedented speed.

Meanwhile, rural and exurban zones transformed too. Suburbs stretched outward. Logistics corridors carved through farmland. Industrial agriculture consolidated land and labor. The whole urban-rural spectrum was redrawn — not evenly, but thoroughly — over a few decades.

Why the speed?

It’s not just technology. It’s the stacking of exogenous shocks. Public health crises. Wars. Economic crashes. Climate shifts. New empires. New markets. New media. These don’t just hit policy — they hit form.

Despite urbanities adaptability, it resists change. But when enough pressure builds, it breaks and fragments — or bends fast.

Quantitative historians like Peter Turchin describe these moments as episodes of structural-demographic pressure. His theory suggests that as societies grow, they cycle through phases of expansion and instability. When rising inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain coincide, the system enters a period of fragility.

The ruling class becomes bloated and competitive, public trust erodes, and the state’s ability to mediate conflict weakens. At some point, the social contract fractures — not necessarily through revolution, but through cumulative dysfunction that demands structural transformation.

Cities reflect that process spatially. The street doesn’t revolt. But it reroutes. The built environment shows where power has snapped or shifted. Consider Industrial Modernity. Assuming we start in 1850, it took roughly 100 years before the next regime took shape — the Fordist-Suburban Expansion starting in roughly 1945. It took around 30-40 years for deregulation to hit in the 80s. By 1995 information, communication, and technology accelerated globalization, financialization, and the urban regime we’re currently in — Neoliberal Polycentrism.

Neoliberal Polycentricism may sound like a wonky and abstract term, but it reflects a familiar reality: a pattern of decentralized, uneven urban growth shaped by market-driven logics. While some scholars debate the continued utility of the overused term 'neoliberalism' itself, its effects on the built environment remain visible. Market priorities continue to dominate and reshape spatial development and planning norms.

It is not a wholly new spatial condition. It's the latest articulation of a longer American tradition of decentralizing people and capital beyond the urban core. In the 19th century, this dynamic took shape through the rise of satellite towns, railroad suburbs, and peripheral manufacturing hubs. These developments were often driven by speculative land ventures, private infrastructure investments, and the desire to escape the regulatory and political constraints of city centers.

The result was a form of urban dispersal that created new nodes of growth, frequently insulated from municipal oversight and rooted in socio-economic and racial segregation. This early polycentricism, like fireworks spawning in all directions from the first blast, set the stage for later waves of privatized suburbanization and regional fragmentation. Neoliberalism would come to accelerate and codify this expansion.

It came in the form of edge cities, exurbs, and special economic zones that proliferated in the 80s and 90s. They grew not as organic responses to demographic needs, but as spatial products of deregulated markets and speculative capital. Governance fragmented. Infrastructure was often privatized or outsourced. As Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge City demonstrates, a place like Tysons Corner, Virginia — a highway-bound, developer-led edge city — embodied this shift: planned by commerce, not civic vision. A decade later, planners tried to retrofit that vision — adding transit, density, and walkability — but progress has been uneven, with car infrastructure still shaping much of daily life.

This regime aligned with the rise of financial abstraction and logistical optimization. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue in Underground Empire, digital finance extended global capitalism’s reach by creating a networked infrastructure that allowed capital to move seamlessly across borders, largely outside the control of democratic institutions. Cities and regions increasingly contorted themselves to host these flows — rebranding, rezoning, and reconfiguring their form to attract global liquidity.

At the same time, as historian Quinn Slobodian notes, globalism was not simply about market liberalization but about insulating capital from democratic constraint. This logic played out spatially through the proliferation of privatized enclaves, special jurisdictions, and free trade zones — spaces engineered to remain separate from public oversight while remaining plugged into global markets.

In metro cores, this led to vertical Central Business Districts, securitized plazas, and speculative towers. In the suburbs and exurbs, it encouraged the low-density, car-dependent landscapes that still propagate. It’s still packaged as freedom but built on exclusion. In rural zones, the same logic produces logistics hubs, monoculture farms, and fractured small towns caught precariously between extraction and abandonment.

SEDIMENT AND SENTIMENT

What has emerged in the U.S., and many other countries, is a fragmented patchwork: privatized downtowns, disconnected suburbs, branded exurbs, and digitally tethered hinterlands…often with tax advantages. All governed by the same regime, but expressed through vastly different forms.

We’re in a regime that promised flexibility, innovation, and shared global prosperity — a future shaped by open markets, technological dynamism, and spatial freedom. But that promise is fraying. Ecological and meteorological breakdown, housing instability, and institutional exhaustion are revealing the deep limits of this model.

The cracks are widening. The pandemic scrambled commuting rhythms and retail flows that reverberate to this day. Climate stress reshapes assumptions about where and how to build. Platforms restructure access to space as AI wiggles its way into every corner. Through it all, the legitimacy of traditional planning models, even established forms of governing, weakens.

Some historians may call this an interregnum — a space between dominant systems, where the old still governs in form, but its power to convince has faded. The term comes from political theory, describing those in-between moments when no single order fully holds. It's a fitting word for times like these, when spatial logic lingers physically but loses meaning conceptually.

The dominant spatial logic remains etched in roads, zoning codes, and skylines — but its conceptual scaffolding is weakening. Whether seen as structural-demographic strain or spatial realignment, this is a moment of uncertainty.

The systems that once structured urban life — zoning codes, master plans, market forecasts — may no longer provide a stable map. And that’s okay. Interregnums, as political theorist Christopher Hobson reminds us, aren’t just voids between orders — they are revealing. Moments when the cracks in dominant systems allow us to see what had been taken for granted. They offer space to reflect, to experiment, and to reimagine.

Maybe what comes next is less of a plan and more of a posture — an attitude of attentiveness, humility, and care. As they advise when getting sucked out to sea by a rip tide: best remain calm and let it spit you out where it may than try to fight it.

Especially given natural laws of scale theory suggests these urban rhythms are accelerating and their transitions are harder to anticipate. Change may not unfold through neat stages, but arrive suddenly, triggered by thresholds and tipping points. Like unsuspectingly floating in the warm waters of a calm slack tide, nothing appears that different until rip tide just below the surface reveals everything is.

In that sense, this drifting moment is not just prelude — it is transformation in motion. Cities have always adapted under pressure — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. But they rarely begin anew. Roman grids still anchor cities from London to Barcelona. Medieval networks persist beneath tourist maps and tangled streets. Haussmann’s boulevards remain etched across Paris, shaping flows of traffic and capital. These aren’t ghosts — they’re framing. Living sediment.

Today’s uncertainty is no different. It may feel like a void, but it’s not empty. It’s layered. Transitions build on remnants, repurposing forms even as their meanings shift. Parcel lines, zoning overlays, server farms, and setback requirements — these are tomorrow’s layered manuscripts — palimpsests.

But it's not just physical traces we inherit. Cities also carry conceptual ones — ideas like growth, public good, infrastructure, or progress that were forged under earlier regimes.

As historian Elias Palti reminds us, concepts are not fixed. They are contingent, born in conflict, and reshaped in uncertainty. In moments like this, even the categories we use to interpret urban life begin to shift. The city, then, is not just a built form — it's a field of meaning. And in the cracks of the old, new frameworks begin to take shape. The work now is not only to build differently, but to think differently too.

REFERENCES

Dilke, O. A. W. (1985). Greek and Roman Maps. Cornell University Press.

Boeing, Geoff. (2019). “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(2), 208–220.

Conzen, M. R. G. (1960). “Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town Plan Analysis.” Institute of British Geographers Publication.

Moudon, Anne Vernez. (1997). “Urban Morphology as an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field.” Urban Morphology, 1(1), 3–10.

Smith, Michael E. (2007). “Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning.” Journal of Planning History, 6(1), 3–47.

West, Geoffrey. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. Penguin Press.

Turchin, Peter. (2016). Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.

Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday.

Farrell, Henry, & Newman, Abraham. (2023). Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. Henry Holt.

Slobodian, Quinn. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books.

Hobson, Christopher. (2015). The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics since 1776. Edinburgh University Press.

Palti, Elias José. (2020). An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Columbia University Press.

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Hello Interactors,

Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics.

FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORS

Let’s start with these two charts recently shared by the historian of global finance and power Adam Tooze at Chartbook. One shows Amazon passing Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time. The other shows a steadily declining drop in plans for small business capital expenditure. Confidence shot up upon the election of Trump, but dropped suddenly when tariff talks trumped tax tempering. Together, these charts paint a picture: control over how people buy, build, and shape space is shifting — fast.

It all starts quietly. A parking lot gets fenced off. Trucks show up. Maybe the old strip mall disappears overnight. A few months later, there’s a low, gray building with no windows. No grand opening. Just a stream of delivery vans pulling in and out.

This isn’t just a new kind of facility — it’s a new kind of urban and suburban logic.

Platform logistics has rewritten the rules of space. Where cities were once shaped by factories and storefronts, now they’re shaped by fulfillment timelines, routing algorithms, and the need to move goods faster than planning commissions can meet.

In the past, small businesses were physical anchors. They invested in place. They influenced how neighborhoods looked, felt, and functioned. But when capital expenditures from local firms drop — as that second chart shows — their power to shape the block goes with it.

What fills the vacuum is logistics. And it doesn’t negotiate like the actors it replaces.

This isn’t just a retail story. It’s a story about agency — who gets to decide what a place is for. When small businesses cut back on investment, it’s not just the storefront that disappears. So does the capacity to influence a block, a street, a community. Local business owners don’t just sell goods — they co-create neighborhoods. They choose where to open, how to hire, how to design, and what kind of social space their business offers. All of that is a form of micro-planning — planning from below. France, as one example, subsidizes these co-created neighborhoods in Paris to insure they uphold the romantic image of a Parisian boulevard.

But without subsidies, these actors are disappearing. And in the vacuum, big brands and logistics move in. Not softly, either. Amazon alone added hundreds of logistics facilities to U.S. land in the past five years. Data centers compete for this land. Meta recently announced a four million square foot facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana. It will be their largest data center in the world.

These buildings are a new kind of mall. They’re massive, quiet, windowless buildings that optimize for speed, not presence. This is what researchers call logistics urbanization — a land use logic where space is valued not for what people can do in it, but for how efficiently packages and data can pass through it.

The shift is structural. It remakes how land is zoned, how roads are used, and how people move — and it does so at a scale that outpaces most municipal planning timelines. That’s not just a market change. It’s a change in governance. Because planners? Mayors? Even state reps? They're not steering anymore. They're reacting.

City managers once had tools to shape growth — zoning, permitting, community input. But logistics and tech giants don’t negotiate like developers. They come with pre-designed footprints and expectations. If a city doesn’t offer fast approval, industrial zoning, and tax breaks, they’ll skip to the next one. And often, they won’t even say why. Economists studying these state and local business tax incentives say these serve as the “primary place-based policy in the United States.”

It forces a kind of economic speed dating. I see it in my own area as local governments vie for the attention (and revenue) of would-be high-tech suitors. But it can be quiet, as one report suggests:

“This first stage of logistical urbanization goes largely unnoticed insofar as the construction of a warehouse in an existing industrial zone rarely raises significant political issues.”(2)

This isn’t just in major cities. Across the U.S., cities are bending their long-term plans to chase short-term fulfillment deals. Even rural local governments routinely waive design standards and sidestep public input to accommodate warehouse and tech siting — because saying no can feel like missing out on tax revenue, jobs, or political wins.(2)

What was once a dynamic choreography of land use and local voices becomes something flatter: a data pipeline.

It isn’t all bad. Fulfillment hubs closer to homes mean fewer trucks, shorter trips, and lower emissions. Data centers crunching billions of bits is better than a PC whirring under the desk of every home. There is a scale and sustainability case to be made.

But logistic liquidity doesn’t equal optimistic livability. It doesn’t account for what’s lost when civic agency fades, or when a city works better for packages than for people. You can optimize flow — and still degrade life.

That’s what those two charts at the beginning really show. Not just an economic shift, but a spatial one. From many small decisions to a few massive ones. From storefronts and civic input to corporate site selection and zoning flips. From a lived city to a delivered one.

Which brings us to the next shape in this story — not the warehouse, but the mid-rise. Not the loading dock, but the key-fob lobby. Different function. Same logic.

HIGH-RISE, LOW TOUCHYou’ve seen them. The sleek new apartment buildings with names like The Foundry or Parc25. A yoga room, a roof deck, and an app for letting in your dog walker. “Mixed-use,” they say — but it’s mostly private use stacked vertically.

It’s much needed housing, for sure. But these aren't neighborhoods. They're private bunkers with balconies.

Yes, they’re more dense than suburban cul-de-sacs. Yes, they’re more energy-efficient than sprawl. But for all their square footage and amenity spaces, they often feel more like vertical suburbs — inward-facing, highly managed, and oddly disconnected from the street.

The ground floors are usually glazed over with placeholder retail: maybe a Starbucks, a Subway, or nothing at all…often vacant with only For Lease signs. Residents rarely linger. Packages arrive faster than neighbors can introduce themselves. There’s a gym to bench press, but no public bench or egress. You’re close to hundreds of people — and yet rarely bump into anyone you didn’t schedule.

That’s not a design flaw. That’s the point.

These buildings are part of a new typology — one that synchronizes perfectly with a platform lifestyle. Residents work remote. Order in. Socialize through screens. The architecture doesn’t foster interaction because interaction isn’t the product. Efficiency is.

Call it fulfillment housing — apartments designed to plug into an economy that favors logistics and metrics, not civic social fabrics. They’re located near tech centers, distribution hubs, and delivery corridors, and sometimes libraries or parks outdoors. What matters is access to bandwidth and smooth entry for Amazon and Door Dash.

And it’s not just what you see on the block. Behind the scenes, cities are quietly reengineering themselves to connect these structures to the digital twins — warehouses and data centers. Tucked into nearby low-tax exurbs or industrial zones, together they help reshape land use, strain energy grids, and anchor the platform economy.

They’re infrastructure for a new kind of urban life — one where presence is optional and connection to the cloud is more important than to the crowd.

Even the public spaces inside these buildings — co-working lounges, shared kitchens, “community rooms” — are behind fobs, passwords, and management policies. Sociologists have called this the anticommons: everything looks shared, but very little actually is. It's curated collectivity, not true community.

And it's not just isolation — it’s predictability. These developments are built to minimize risk, noise, conflict, friction. Which is also to say: they’re built to minimize surprise. The kind of surprise that once made cities exciting. The kind that made them social.

Some urban scholars describe these spaces as part of a broader “ghost urbanism” — a city where density exists without depth. Where interaction is optional. Where proximity is engineered, but intimacy is not. You can be surrounded by life and still feel like you're buffering.

The irony is these buildings often check every sustainability box. They’re LEED-certified. Near transit. Built up, not out. From a local emissions standpoint, they beat the ‘burbs’. But their occupant’s consumption, waste, and travel habits can create more pollution than homebody suburbanites. And from a civic standpoint — the standpoint of belonging, encounter, spontaneity — they’re often just as empty.

And so we arrive at a strange truth: a city can be efficient, dense, even walkable — and still feel ghosted. Because what we’ve optimized for isn’t connection. It’s delivery — to screens and doorsteps. What gets delivered to fulfillment housing may be frictionless, but it’s rarely fulfilling.

DRONES, DOMICILES, AND DISCONNECTIONI admit there’s a nostalgia for old-world neighborhoods as strong as nostalgia for industrial cities of the past. Neighborhoods where you may run into people at the mailbox. Asking someone in the post office line where they got their haircut. Sitting on the porch, just waitin’ on a friend. We used to talk about killing time, now we have apps to optimize it.

It’s not just because of screens. It’s also about what kinds of space we’ve built — and what kind of social activity they allow or even encourage.

In many suburbs and edge cities, the mix of logistics zones, tech centers, and residential enclaves creates what urban theorists might call a fragmented spatial syntax. That means the city no longer “reads” as a continuous experience. Streets don’t tell stories.

There’s no rhythm from house to corner store to café to school. Instead, you get jump cuts — a warehouse here, a cul-de-sac there, a fenced-in apartment complex down the road. These are spaces that serve different logics, designed for speed, security, or seclusion — but rarely for relation. The grammar of the neighborhood breaks down. You don’t stroll. You shuttle.

You drive past a warehouse. You park in a garage. You enter through a lobby. You take an elevator to your door. There’s no in-between space — no casual friction, no civic ambiguity, no shared air.

These patterns aren’t new. But they’re becoming the norm, not the exception. You can end up living in a place but never quite arrive.

Watch most anyone under 35. Connection increasingly happens online. Friendships form in Discord servers, not diners. Parties are planned via private stories, not porch swings. You don’t run into people. You ping them.

Sometimes that online connection does spill back into the real world — meetups, pop-ups, shared hobbies that break into public space. Discord, especially, has become a kind of digital third place, often leading to real-world hangouts. It’s social. Even communal. But it’s different. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Less rooted in place, more tied to platform and notifications.

None of this is inherently bad. But it does change the role of the neighborhood as we once knew it. It’s no longer the setting for shared experience — it’s just a backdrop for bandwidth. That shift is subtle, but it adds up. Without physical places for civic life, interactions gets offloaded to platforms. Connection becomes mediated, surveilled, and datafied. You don’t meet your neighbors. You follow them. You comment on their dog through a Ring alert.

This is what some sociologists call networked individualism — where people aren’t embedded in shared place-based systems, but orbit through overlapping digital networks. And when digital is the default, the city becomes a logistics problem. Something to move through efficiently…or not. It certainly is not something we’re building together. It’s imposed upon us.

And so we arrive at a kind of paradox:We’re more connected than ever. But we’re less entangled.We’re more visible. But we’re less involved.We’re living closer. But we don’t feel near.

The irony is the very platforms that hollow out public space are now where we go looking for belonging. TikTok isn’t just where we go to kill time — it’s where we go to feel seen. If your neighborhood doesn’t give you identity, the algorithm will.

Meanwhile, the built environment absorbs the logic of logistics. Warehouses and data centers at the edge. Mid-rises in the core. Streets engineered for the throughput of cars and delivery vans. Housing designed for containment. And social life increasingly routed elsewhere.

It all works. Until you want to feel something.

We’re social creatures, biologically wired for connection. Neuroscience shows that in-person social interactions regulate stress, build emotional resilience, and literally shape how our brains grow and adapt. It’s not just emotional. It’s neurochemical. Oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin — the chemistry of belonging — fire most powerfully through touch, eye contact, shared space. When those rituals shrink, so does our sense of meaning and safety.

And that’s what this is really about. Historically cities weren’t just containers for life. They’re catalysts for feeling. Without shared air, shared time, and shared friction, we lose more than convenience. We lose the chance to feel something real — to be part of a place, not just a node in a network.

What started with two charts ends here: a world where local agency, social spontaneity, and even emotion itself are being restructured by platform logic. The city still stands. The buildings are there. The people are home. But the feeling of place — the buzz, the bump, the belonging — gets harder to find.

That’s the cost of efficiency without empathy. Of optimizing everything but meaning.

And that’s the city we’re building. Unless we build something else. We’ll need agency. And not just for planners or developers. For people.

That’s the work ahead. Not to reject the platform city. But to remake it — into something more livable. More legible. More ours.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s March Madness time in the states — baskets and brackets. I admit I'd grown a bit skeptical of how basketball evolved since my playing days. As it happens, I played against Caitlin Clark’s dad, from nearby Indianola, Iowa! Unlike the more dynamic Brent Clark, I was a small-town six-foot center, taught never to face the basket and dribble. After all, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era of back-to-the-hoop skyhooks.

By college, however, I was playing pickup games in California, expected to handle the ball, shoot, dish, or drive. Just like Caitlin! The players around me were from East LA, not Indianola. Jordan was king, and basketball wasn't just evolving — it was about to explode. It’s geographic expansion and spatial dynamism has influenced how the game is played and I now know why I can’t get enough of it.

BOARDS, BOUNDARIES, AND BREAKING FREE

There was one gym in my hometown, Norwalk, Iowa, where I could dunk a basketball. The court was so cramped, there was a wall right behind the backboard. It was padded to ease post layup collisions! But when I timed it right, I could run and jump off the wall launching myself into the air and just high enough to dunk.

This old gym, a WPA project, was built in 1936 and was considered large at the time relative to population. It felt tiny by the time I played there during PE as a kid and on weekend pickup games as a teen — though it was still bigger than anything my parents experienced in rural Southern Iowa.

Basketball began as a sport of spatial limitation. James Naismith invented the game in 1891 — 45 years prior to my dunk gym’s grand opening. The game was invented to be played in a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts. This building dictated the court's dimensions, movement, and strategy.

Naismith’s original 13 rules emphasized order—no dribbling or running, only passing to move the ball. Early basketball wasn’t about individual drives but about constant movement within a network of passing lanes, with players anticipating and reacting in real time.

The original peach baskets were hung ten feet high on a balcony railing, with no backboards to guide shots. Misses bounced unpredictably, adding a vertical challenge and forcing players to think strategically about rebounding. Since the baskets had bottoms, play stopped after every score, giving teams time to reset and rethink.

Soon the bottom of the basket was removed, and a backboard was introduced — originally intended to prevent interference from spectators batting opponents shots from the balcony. The backboard fundamentally altered the physics of play. Now a player could more predictably bank shots of the backboard and invent new rebounding strategies.

When running while dribbling was introduced in the late 1890s, basketball’s rigid spatial structure loosened. No longer confined to static passing formations, the game became a fluid system of movement. These innovations transformed the court into an interactive spatial environment, where angles, trajectories, and rebounds became key tactical elements.

According to one theory of spatial reformulation through human behavior, structured spaces like basketball courts evolved not solely through top-down design, but through emergent patterns of use, where movement, interaction, and adaptation shape the space over time.

By the 1920s, the court itself expanded—not so much in physical size but in meaning. The game had spread beyond enclosed gymnasiums to urban playgrounds, colleges, and professional teams. Each expansion further evolved basketball’s spatial logic. Courts in New York’s streetball culture fostered a tight and improvisational style. Players developed elite dribbling skills and isolation plays to navigate crowded urban courts.

Meanwhile, Midwestern colleges, like Kansas where Naismith later coached, prioritized structured passing and zone defenses, reflecting the systemic, collective ethos of the game’s inventor. This period reflects microcosms of larger social and spatial behaviors. Basketball, shaped by its environment and the players who occupied it, mirrored the broader urbanization process. This set the stage for basketball’s transformation and expansion from national leagues to a truly global game.

The evolution of basketball, like the natural, constructed, and cultural landscapes surrounding it, was not static. Basketball was manifested through and embedded in cultural geography, where places evolve over time, accumulating layers of meaning and adaptation. The basketball court was no exception. The game burst forth, breaking boundaries. It branched into local leagues, between bustling cities, across regions, and globetrotted around the world.

TACTICS, TALENT, AND TRANSNATIONAL TIES

The year my ego-dunk gym was built, basketball debuted in the 1936 Olympics. That introduced the sport to the world. International play revealed contrasting styles, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that basketball became a truly global game — shaped as much by European and African players as by American traditions.

Europe’s game focused on tactical structures and spatial awareness. In the U.S., basketball was built within a high school and college system, but European basketball mimicked their club-based soccer academy model. It still does. In countries like Serbia, Spain, and Lithuania, players are taught the game from a tactical perspective first — learning how to read defenses, move without the ball, and make the extra pass. European training emphasizes court vision, spacing, and passing precision, fostering playmakers wise to the spatial dynamics of the game.

Geography also plays a role in the development of European basketball. Countries like Serbia and Lithuania, which have a strong history of basketball but relatively smaller populations, could not rely on the sheer athletic depth of players like the U.S. Instead, they had to refine skill-based, systematic approaches to the game. This helped to ensure every player developed what is commonly called a “high basketball IQ”.

They also exhibit a high level of adaptability to team-oriented strategies. European basketball exemplifies this, blending the legacy of former socialist sports systems — which prioritized collective success — with contemporary, globalized styles. This structured process explains why European players like Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, and Giannis Antetokounmpo often arrive in the NBA with an advanced understanding of spacing, passing, and team concepts.

Jokić’s story is particularly revealing. Growing up in Serbia, he didn’t just play basketball — he played water polo, a sport that demands high-level spatial awareness and precision passing. In water polo, players must make quick decisions without being able to plant their feet or rely on sheer speed. Although, at seven feet tall, Jokić could probably sometimes touch the bottom of the pool!

These skills translated perfectly to his basketball game, where his passing ability, patience, and ability to manipulate defenders make him one of the most unique playmakers in NBA history. Unlike the American model, where taller players are often pushed into narrowly defined roles as rebounders and rim protectors (like I was), European training systems emphasize all-around skill development regardless of height.

This is why European big men like Jokić, Gasol, and Nowitzki excel both in the post and on the perimeter. Europe's emphasis on technical education and tactical intelligence fosters versatile skill sets before specialization. This adaptability has made fluid, multi-positional play the norm, prioritizing efficiency and team success over individual spectacle.

If European basketball emphasizes structure, the African basketball pipeline fosters adaptability and resilience — not as inherent traits, but as responses to developmental conditions. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized this as habitus, where individuals unconsciously shape their skills based on their social and material environments. With limited formal infrastructure, many African players learn in fluid, improvised settings, refining their game through necessity rather than structured coaching.

Unlike U.S. and European players, who train in specialized systems from an early age, African players often develop versatile, positionless skill sets. Their careers frequently involve migrating through different leagues and coaching styles.

A great example is Joel Embiid. He didn’t start playing basketball until he was 15. Growing up in Cameroon, he initially played soccer and volleyball. These sports both contributed to his basketball development in unexpected ways. Soccer helped him refine elite footwork, now a required trait of the post game, while volleyball sharpened his timing and hand-eye coordination — hence his dominance as a shot-blocker and rebounder.

This multi-sport background is common among African players. Many grow up playing soccer first, which explains why so many African-born big men in the NBA — Hakeem Olajuwon, Serge Ibaka, and Pascal Siakam — have exceptional footwork and agility.

Like Jokić’s water polo background shaped his passing, soccer’s fluidity influences how many African players move on the court. Beyond skills, migration plays a key role, as many leave home as teens to develop in European leagues or U.S. schools. Constant adaptation to new environments builds mental resilience, essential for professional sports. (just ask Luka Dončić after suddenly being traded to the Lakers!)

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes this as evolving ethnoscapesand howglobalization drives global cultural flows. Practices, traditions, and ideas reshape both new destinations and home cultures as identities become blended across cultures and borders. African players embody this, adapting their games across multiple basketball traditions.

Look at Embiid moving from Cameroon to the U.S., adapting to American basketball while retaining his cross-sport instincts. Or Giannis Antetokounmpo, he was born in Greece to Nigerian parents, played soccer as a kid, and now blends European teamwork and fancy footwork with NBA strength training and explosiveness. Like the game itself, basketball is shifting as players from diverse domains deliver new directions, playing patterns, and philosophies.

CULTURE, COURTS, AND CROSSOVERS

The influx of European and African players has not only changed the NBA, it’s also changed how American players play overseas.

Sports psychologist Rainer Meisterjahn studied American players in foreign leagues, revealing struggles with structured European play and coaching. Initially frustrated by the lack of individual play and star focus, many later gained a broader understanding of the game. Their experience mirrors that of European and African players in the NBA, proving basketball is now a shared global culture.

While the NBA markets itself as an American product, its style, strategies, and talent pool are increasingly internationalized. The dominance of ball movement and tactical discipline coupled with versatility and adaptability have fundamentally reshaped how the game is played.

Media has help drive basketball’s global expansion. Sports media now amplifies international leagues, exposing fans (like me) to diverse playing styles. Rather than homogenizing, basketball evolves by merging influences, much like cultural exchanges that shaped jazz (another love of mine) or global cuisine (another love of mind) — blending styles while retaining its core.

The game is no longer dictated by how one country plays; it is an interwoven, adaptive sport, constantly changing in countless ways. The court’s boundaries may be tight, but borderless basketball has taken flight.

Basketball has always been a game of spatial negotiation. First confined to a small, hardwood court, it spilled out of walls to playgrounds, across rivalrous cross-town leagues, to the Laker-Celtic coastal battles of the 80s, and onto the global stage. Yet its true complexity is not just where it is played, but how it adapts. The game’s larger narrative is informed by the emergent behaviors and real-time spatial recalibration that happens every time it’s played.

Basketball operates as an interactive system where every movement creates new positional possibilities and reciprocal responses. Player interactions shape the game in real time, influencing both individual possessions—where spacing, passing, and movement constantly evolve — and the global basketball economy, where styles, strategies, and talent migration continuously reshape the sport.

On the court, players exist in a constant state of spatial adaptation, moving through a fluid network of shifting gaps, contested lanes, and open spaces. Every pass, cut, and screen forces a reaction, triggering an endless cycle of recalibration and emergence.

The most elite players — whether it’s Nikola Jokić manipulating defensive rotations with surgical passing or Giannis Antetokounmpo reshaping space in transition — don’t just react to the game; they anticipate and reshape the very structure of the court itself. This reflects the idea that space is not just occupied but actively redefined through movement and interaction, continuously shaped by dynamic engagement on and off the court.

This logic of adaptation extends to the community level where basketball interacts with urban geography, shaping and being shaped by its environment. Urban basketball courts function as micro-environments, where local styles of play emerge as reflections of city life and its unique spatial dynamics.

The compact, improvisational play of street courts in Lagos mirrors the spatial density of urban Africa, just as the systemic, team-first approach of European basketball reflects the structured environments of club academies in Spain, Serbia, and Lithuania. As the game expands, it doesn’t erase these identities — it integrates them. New forms of hybrid styles reflect decades-old forces of globalization.

Basketball’s global expansion mirrors the complex adaptive networks that form during the course of a game. Interconnected systems evolve through emergent interactions. And just as cities develop through shifting flows of people, resources, and ideas, basketball transforms as players, styles, and strategies circulate worldwide, continuously reshaping the game on the court and off.

The court may still be measured in feet and lines, but the game it contains — psychologically, socially, and geographically — moves beyond those boundaries. It flows with every fluent pass, each migrating mass, and every vibrant force that fuels its ever-evolving future.

REFERENCES

Hillier, B. (2012). Studying cities to learn about minds: Some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design.

Naismith, J. (1941). Basketball: Its Origins and Development. University of Nebraska Press.

Baur, J. W. R., & Tynon, J. F.(2010). Small-scale urban nature parks: Why should we care? Leisure Sciences, Taylor & Francis.

Callaghan, J., Moore, E., & Simpson, J. (2018). Coordinated action, communication, and creativity in basketball in superdiversity. Language and Intercultural Communication, Taylor & Francis.

Meinig, D. W. (1979). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. Oxford University Press.

Andrews, D. L. (2018). The (Trans)National Basketball Association: American Commodity-Sign Culture and Global-Local Conjuncturalism.

Galeano, E. (2015). The Global Court: The Rise of International Basketball. Verso.

Ungruhe, C., & Agergaard, S. (2020). Cultural Transitions in Sport: The Migration of African Basketball Players to Europe. International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Meisterjahn, R. J. (2011). Everything Was Different: An Existential Phenomenological Investigation of U.S. Professional Basketball Players' Experiences Overseas.

Ramos, J., Lopes, R., & Araújo, D. (2018). Network dynamics in team sports: The influence of space and time in basketball. Journal of Human Kinetics.

Ribeiro, J., Silva, P., Duarte, R., Davids, K., & Araújo, D. (2019). Team sports performance analysis: A dynamical system approach. Sports Medicine.

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Hello Interactors,

From election lies to climate denial, misinformation isn’t just about deception — it’s about making truth feel unknowable. Fact-checking can’t keep up, and trust in institutions is fading. If reality is up for debate, where does that leave us?

I wanted to explore this idea of “post-truth” and ways to move beyond it — not by enforcing truth from the top down, but by engaging in inquiry and open dialogue. I examine how truth doesn’t have to be imposed but continually rediscovered — shaped through questioning, testing, and refining what we know. If nothing feels certain, how do we rebuild trust in the process of knowing something is true?

THE SLOW SLIDE OF FACTUAL FOUNDATIONS

The term "post-truth" was first popularized in the 1990s but took off in 2016. That’s when Oxford Dictionaries named it their Word of the Year. Defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, the term reflects a shift in how truth functions in public discourse.

Though the concept of truth manipulation is not new, post-truth represents a systemic weakening of shared standards for knowledge-making. Sadly, truth in the eyes of most of the public is no longer determined by factual verification but by ideological alignment and emotional resonance.

The erosion of truth infrastructure — once upheld by journalism, education, and government — has destabilized knowledge credibility. Mid-20th-century institutions like The New York Times and the National Science Foundation ensured rigorous verification. But with rising political polarization, digital misinformation, and distrust in authority, these institutions have lost their stabilizing role, leaving truth increasingly contested rather than collectively affirmed.

The mid-20th century exposed truth’s fragility as propaganda reshaped public perception. Nazi ideology co-opted esoteric myths like the Vril Society, a fictitious occult group inspired by the 1871 novel The Coming Race, which depicted a subterranean master race wielding a powerful life force called "Vril."

This myth fed into Nazi racial ideology and SS occult research, prioritizing myth over fact. Later, as German aviation advanced, the Vril myth evolved into UFO conspiracies, claiming secret Nazi technologies stemmed from extraterrestrial contact and Vril energy, fueling rumors of hidden Antarctic bases and breakaway civilizations.

Distorted truths have long justified extreme political action, demonstrating how knowledge control sustains authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Jewish-German intellectuals who fled the Nazis, later warned that even democracies are vulnerable to propaganda. Adorno (1951) analyzed how mass media manufactures consent, while Arendt (1972) showed how totalitarian regimes rewrite reality to maintain control.

Postwar skepticism, civil rights movements, and decolonization fueled academic critiques of traditional, biased historical narratives. By the late 20th century, universities embraced theories questioning the stability of truth, labeled postmodernist, critical, and constructivist.

Once considered a pillar of civilization, truth was reframed by French postmodernist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard as a construct of power. Foucault argued institutions define truth to reinforce authority, while Baudrillard claimed modern society had replaced reality with media-driven illusions. While these ideas exposed existing power dynamics in academic institutions, they also fueled skepticism about objective truth — paving the way for today’s post-truth crisis.

Australian philosophy professor, Catherine (Cathy) Legg highlights how intellectual and cultural shifts led universities to question their neutrality, reinforcing postmodern critiques that foreground subjectivity, discourse, and power in shaping truth. Over time, this skepticism extended beyond academia, challenging whether any authority could claim objectivity without reinforcing existing power structures.

These efforts to deconstruct dominant narratives unintentionally legitimized radical relativism — the idea that all truths hold equal weight, regardless of evidence or logic. This opened the door for "alternative facts", now weaponized by propaganda. What began as a challenge to authoritarian knowledge structures within academia escaped its origins, eroding shared standards of truth. In the post-truth era, misinformation, ideological mythmaking, and conspiracy theories thrive by rejecting objective verification altogether.

Historian Naomi Oreskes describes "merchants of doubt" as corporate and political actors who manufacture uncertainty to obstruct policy and sustain truth relativism. By falsely equating expertise with opinion, they create the illusion of debate, delaying action on climate change, public health, and social inequities while eroding trust in science. In this landscape, any opinion can masquerade as fact, undermining those who dedicate their lives to truth-seeking.

PIXELS AND MYTHOLOGY SHAPE THE GEOGRAPHY

The erosion of truth infrastructures has accelerated with digital media, which both globalizes misinformation and reinforces localized silos of belief. This was evident during COVID-19, where false claims — such as vaccine microchips — spread widely but took deeper root in communities with preexisting distrust in institutions. While research confirms that misinformation spreads faster than facts, it’s still unclear if algorithmic amplification or deeper socio-political distrust are root causes.

This ideological shift is strongest in Eastern Europe and parts of the U.S., where institutional distrust and digital subcultures fuel esoteric nationalism. Post-Soviet propaganda, economic instability, and geopolitical tensions have revived alternative knowledge systems in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, from Slavic paganism to the return of the Vril myth, now fused with the Save Europe movement — a digital blend of racial mysticism, ethnic nostalgia, and reactionary politics.

Above ☝️is a compilation of TikTok videos currently being pushed to my 21 year old son. They fuse ordinary, common, and recognizable pop culture imagery with Vril imagery (like UFO’s and stealth bombers) and esoteric racist nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies.

A similar trend appears in post-industrial and rural America, where economic decline, government distrust, and cultural divides sustain conspiratorial thinking, religious fundamentalism, and hyper-masculine mythologies. The alt-right manosphere mirrors Eastern Europe’s Vril revival, with figures like Zyzz and Bronze Age Pervert offering visions of lost strength. Both Vril and Save Europe frame empowerment as a return to ethnic or esoteric power (Vril) or militant resistance to diversity (Save Europe), turning myth into a tool of political radicalization.

Climate change denial follows these localized patterns, where scientific consensus clashes with economic and cultural narratives. While misinformation spreads globally, belief adoption varies, shaped by economic hardship, institutional trust, and political identity.

In coal regions like Appalachia and Poland, skepticism stems from economic survival, with climate policies seen as elitist attacks on jobs. In rural Australia, extreme weather fuels conspiracies about government overreach rather than shifting attitudes toward climate action. Meanwhile, in coastal Louisiana and the Netherlands, where climate impacts are immediate and undeniable, denial is rarer, though myths persist, often deflecting blame from human causes.

Just as Vril revivalism, Save Europe, and the MAGA manosphere thrive on post-industrial uncertainty, climate misinformation can also flourish in economically vulnerable regions. Digital platforms fuel a worldview skewed, where scrolling myths and beliefs are spatially glued — a twisted take on 'think globally, act locally,' where fantasy folklore becomes fervent ideology.

FINDING TRUTH WITH FRACTURED FACTS…AND FRIENDS

The post-truth era has reshaped how we think about knowledge. The challenge isn’t just misinformation but growing distrust in expertise, institutions, and shared reality. In classrooms and research, traditional ways of proving truth often fail when personal belief outweighs evidence. Scholars and educators now seek new ways to communicate knowledge, moving beyond rigid certainty or radical relativism.

Professor Legg has turned to the work of 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose ideas about truth feel surprisingly relevant today. Peirce didn’t see truth as something fixed or final but as a process — something we work toward through questioning, testing, and refining our understanding over time.

His approach, known as pragmatism, emphasizes collaborative inquiry, self-correction, and fallibilism — the idea that no belief is ever beyond revision. In a time when facts are constantly challenged, Peirce’s philosophy offers not just a theory of truth, but a process for rebuilding trust in knowledge itself.

For those unfamiliar with Peirce and American pragmatism, a process that requires collaborating with truth deniers may seem not only unfun, but counterproductive. But research on deradicalization strategies suggests that confrontational debunking (a failed strategy Democrats continue to adhere to) often backfires. Lecturing skeptics only reinforces belief entrenchment.

In the early 1700’s Britain was embroiled in the War of Spanish Succession. Political factions spread blatant falsehoods through partisan newspapers. It prompted Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, to observe in The Art of Political Lying (1710) that

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."

This is likely where we get the more familiar saying: you can't argue someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into. Swift’s critique of propaganda and public gullibility foreshadowed modern research on cognitive bias. People rarely abandon deeply held beliefs when confronted with facts.

Traditionally, truth is seen as either objectively discoverable (classical empiricism) — like physics — or constructed by discourse and power (postmodernism) — like the Lost Cause myth, which recast the Confederacy as noble rather than pro-slavery. It should be noted that traditional truth also comes about by paying for it. Scientific funding from private sources often dictates which research is legitimized. As Legg observes,

“Ironically, such epistemic assurance perhaps rendered educated folk in the modern era overly gullible to the written word as authority, and the resulting ‘fetishisation’ of texts in the education sector has arguably led to some of our current problems.”

Peirce, however, offered a different path:

truth is not a fixed thing, but an eventual process of consensus reached by a community of inquirers.

It turns out open-ended dialogue that challenges inconsistencies within a belief system is shown to be a more effective strategy.

This process requires time, scrutiny, and open dialogue. None of which are very popular these days! It should be no surprise that in today’s fractured knowledge-making landscape of passive acceptance of authority or unchecked personal belief, ideological silos reinforce institutional dogma or blatant misinformation. But Peirce’s ‘community of inquiry’ model suggests that truth can’t be lectured or bought but strengthened through collective reasoning and self-correction.

Legg embraces this model because it directly addresses why knowledge crises emerge and how they can be countered. The digital age has resulted in a world where beliefs are reinforced within isolated networks rather than tested against broader inquiry. Trump or Musk can tweet fake news and it spreads to millions around the world instantaneously.

During Trump’s 2016 campaign, false claims that Pope Francis endorsed him spread faster than legitimate news. Misinformation, revisionist history, and esoteric nationalism thrive in these unchecked spaces.

Legg’s approach to critical thinking education follows Peirce’s philosophy of inquiry. She helps students see knowledge not as fixed truths but as a network of interwoven, evolving understandings — what Peirce called an epistemic cable made up of many small but interconnected fibers. Rather than viewing the flood of online information as overwhelming or deceptive, she encourages students to see it as a resource to be navigated with the right tools and the right intent.

To make this practical, she introduces fact-checking strategies used by professionals, teaching students to ask three key questions when evaluating an online source:

• Who is behind this information? (Identifying the author’s credibility and possible biases)

• What is the evidence for their claims? (Assessing whether their argument is supported by verifiable facts)

• What do other sources say about these claims? (Cross-referencing to see if the information holds up in a broader context)

By practicing these habits, students learn to engage critically with digital content. It strengthens their ability to distinguish reliable knowledge from misinformation rather than simply memorizing facts. It also meets them where they are without judgement of whatever beliefs they may hold at the time of inquiry.

If post-truth misinformation reflects a shift in how we construct knowledge, can we ever return to a shared trust in truth — or even a shared reality? As institutional trust erodes, fueled by academic relativism, digital misinformation, and ideological silos, myths like climate denial and Vril revivalism take hold where skepticism runs deep. Digital platforms don’t just spread misinformation; they shape belief systems, reinforcing global echo chambers.

But is truth lost, or just contested? Peirce saw truth as a process, built through inquiry and self-correction. Legg extends this, arguing that fact-checking alone won’t solve post-truth; instead, we need a culture of questioning — where people test their own beliefs rather than being told what’s right or wrong.

I won’t pretend to have the answer. You can tell by my bibliography that I’m a fan of classical empiricism. But I’m also a pragmatic interactionist who believes knowledge is refined through collaborative inquiry. I believe, as Legg does, that to move beyond post-truth isn’t about the impossible mission of defeating misinformation — it’s about making truth-seeking more compelling than belief. Maybe even fun.

What do you think?

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Hello Interactors,

Since his return to office, Trump hasn’t just taken power — he’s trying to reshape the landscape. From border crackdowns and sick real estate fantasies to federal purges by strongman stooges, his policies don’t just enforce control — they seek to redraw the lines of democracy itself.

Strongmen don’t wait for crises — they create them. They attempt to manipulate institutions, geographies, and public trust until there’s so much confusion it makes anything they do to ease it acceptable. I dug into how authoritarianism thrives on instability and contemplate some ways to alter it.

DEMAND DOMINATION THROUGH DOUBT AND DISORDER

I was once a strongman, or at least I could summon one when needed. I could override the part of my brain that protects me from injury and tap into something primal — something that made me feel invincible. A surge of adrenaline convinced my brain I could not only hurl myself into another person but through them, painlessly.

I played rugby. What I experienced is known as Berserker State, or berserkergang—a shift in brain activity and hormone surges that cause extreme arousal and altered perception. Rugby is a sport where people spend over an hour pretending they’re not hurt. That’s in contrast to soccer, where people spend over an hour pretending they are. 😬 But while rugby is violent, it’s not played with violent intent. Players may be tough, but they don’t seek to hurt each other — at least, not permanently.

That’s in stark contrast to figures like Trump or the new FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino — men who cultivate a different kind of "strongman" identity. They like to wield aggression not as a tool for sport, but as a weapon against others. Bongino is a tough guy on steroids — literally, or at least he acts like it. His wide-eyed rage on his online show suggests a performance of strength, a constant need to assert dominance.

But people like Trump and Bongino weren’t born this way; they were molded by insecurity, myths, and a long history of toxic masculinity.

Psychologist Brian Lowery challenges the idea that identity is something stable and fixed. Instead, in his 2023 book, Selfless, he argues that identity is socially constructed—shaped by interactions, cultural narratives, and institutions. In times of stability, people feel secure in who they are. But when faced with economic instability, cultural shifts, or political crises, identity becomes fragile and unstable. Some people lash out. Some, like myself on the rugby field, may go berserk. Others — like Trump and Bongino — build their entire personas around control. In the end, it’s just bluster, bravado, because they behave like a jerk.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this argument further, showing how growing inequality and precarity drive people toward authoritarianism and fundamentalism. When the world feels chaotic, strongman leaders and rigid ideologies provide the comforting illusion of order and control — even if they fail to address the root problems. Bauman warns that these leaders scapegoat the vulnerable, suppress truth, and mystify the real causes of inequality — all while presenting themselves as the only force capable of restoring stability.

But authoritarianism isn’t just about psychology — it’s also shaped by real-world conditions. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that authoritarian rule isn’t just about individual strongmen — it’s embedded in systems that use violence and spatial control to uphold racial and class hierarchies. Identity insecurity isn’t just a feeling; it’s a reaction to real structural forces like economic displacement, aggressive policing, and militarized borders. Strongman leaders don’t just exploit insecurity — they thrive where instability is built into everyday life.

In 2020 Journalist Shane Burley examined how white nationalist groups tap into these anxieties, embedding themselves in mainstream politics by offering disaffected individuals a sense of belonging through authoritarian ideologies. The Alt-Right doesn’t just recruit based on political beliefs — it recruits based on a fear of displacement and loss. Authoritarianism isn’t just ideological; it emerges from instability, reinforced by systems of control like aggressive policing and restrictive immigration policies.

Strongmen don’t just seize on fear — they stoke, sculpt, and steer it, spinning crises into control. Through media manipulation and crisis narratives, they mold public perception and then mandate obedience.

SPINNING STRIFE INTO SUPREMACY

Once fear is felt — it can be harnessed. Political elites capitalize on uncertainty, framing crises in ways that make authoritarian measures seem necessary. Feldman & Stenner, political psychologists specializing in the study of authoritarianism and ideological behavior, argue that authoritarian attitudes intensify when people perceive instability, whether real or exaggerated.

Their research highlights how threat perception — not just personal ideology — activates authoritarian tendencies, leading individuals to prioritize conformity, obedience, and strong leadership in times of social or political uncertainty. By defining threats and controlling the narrative, leaders turn uncertainty into urgency, making repression feel not only justified but necessary.

Crisis narratives work because they reshape reality. Right-wing populists blame immigrants, global elites, and cultural change, painting national identity as under siege. Meanwhile, progressive authoritarian movements often frame reactionary forces, corporate elites, and slow-moving institutions as existential threats, demanding immediate, drastic action.

Mikhail Bakunin, a 19th-century anarchist and revolutionary who was both a friend and fierce critic of Karl Marx, warned that revolutionary leaders who claim to act in the people’s name often end up seeking power for themselves. He accused Marx and Engels of designing a system where they, not the workers, would ultimately rule. In 1873 he wrote,

“The Marxists maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to them is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but to perpetuate itself.”

Both right and left-wing authoritarianism use fear to rally supporters, silence opposition, and create a sense of emergency where only their leadership can restore order.

Media control plays a key role in reinforcing these crisis narratives. In 2019, it was exposed how Trump advisor Stephen Miller deliberately inserted white nationalist rhetoric into U.S. policy. He used far-right media to amplify unverified crime statistics and frame immigration as a civilizational threat. This wasn’t just ideological posturing — it was a calculated effort to embed fear into governance, making xenophobia a political weapon.

But crisis narratives don’t just shape perception; they translate into policy. ICE raids and the Muslim ban turned entire communities into symbols of danger, reinforcing the idea that certain groups are inherent threats. Militarized borders, aggressive policing, and detention centers didn’t just enforce laws — they reinforced the notion that outsiders must be feared. The state stands as fear’s fierce enforcer, embedding oppression in order and power in place.

This dual strategy — controlling the narrative and enforcing it through space — creates a self-reinforcing cycle. When people see more policing in "dangerous" areas, they assume the danger was real all along. When borders become militarized, they don’t just frame outsiders as threats — they enforce state power over Indigenous lands.

The U.S. foundation stands on the reservation system, the suppression of the American Indian Movement, and the crackdown on Standing Rock from 1890 to 2016. This is how authoritarianism isn’t just imposed — it’s sustained. Fear becomes a governing principle, and governance becomes a system of control. Crises are never solved — only maligned, magnified, or momentarily managed.

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF CRISIS AND CONTROL

Authoritarianism feeds on instability. It thrives in moments of crisis, when people feel insecure about their place in society, fearful of rapid change, and unsure of who to trust. As historian Alexandra Minna Stern shows in Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, far-right groups have mainstreamed authoritarian rhetoric, repackaging extremism as populist conservatism and framing strongman rule as the only defense against societal collapse.But authoritarianism is not confined to one ideology. Different movements, across the political spectrum, use crisis narratives to justify coercion.

Some frame threats as coming from the outside, while others see danger emerging from within. But the burden of these crisis narratives is not evenly distributed — the historically marginalized powerless pay the price when panic fuels policy.

• Nationalist movements depict outsiders — immigrants, racial minorities, queer communities, and religious groups — as existential threats. Border militarization, mass surveillance, and authoritarian crackdowns are justified as necessary to preserve “national security” and maintain cultural homogeneity. These policies disproportionately harm those already marginalized. They deepen structural inequalities through exclusion, criminalization, and violence.

• Radical movements on the left often focus on reactionary forces — corporations, conservative institutions, or privileged elites — as dangers to progress. While calls for justice are vital, ideological purity tests and coercion can sometimes alienate marginalized activists. People of color, queer individuals, and various other members the poor working class are forced to navigate rigid expectations. They’re not always accepted or embraced for their own lived experience and material struggles.

While both reactionary nationalism and ideological rigidity can rely on crisis-driven politics to justify control, the scale, methods, and impact differ. Authoritarianism, in any form, thrives by exploiting social fractures — especially those along lines of race, class, and identity. Resisting this requires dismantling not just strongmen but the very conditions that allow these crisis narratives to justify exclusion and repression in the first place.

Instead of centering political resistance around individual leaders, what if democratic societies addressed the root causes that make authoritarianism attractive or inevitable. That would require focusing on solutions that break the cycle of crisis-driven politics.

We need pluralistic national identities that aren’t rooted in exclusionary fears.

I can imagine a stable democracy that creates belonging without requiring an enemy. But too often, we’ve seen reactionary nationalism frame identity through exclusion —out-groups are viewed as threats to be feared. At the same time, skewed ideological purity tests along a spectrum of progressive movements can create new kinds of exclusion, pushing aside marginalized activists who don’t perfectly conform to rigid political expectations — a fate and flaw of America’s binary governmental system.

What if, instead, national identity was rooted in civic participation, shared democratic values, and social trust? Imagine a society where people feel secure in their belonging — where they are less susceptible to politicians or movements that demand fear-based loyalty.

The weakening of democratic institutions allows more authoritarianism to creep in under the guise of stability. Like DOGE. We’ve seen it happen elsewhere: courts stacked with political loyalists, journalists jailed or silenced, maps gerrymandered, or elections rigged under the pretense of "security."

When institutions are compromised, strongmen don’t need to overthrow democracy outright with tanks in the streets and MAGA banners unfurled at the White House — they dismantle it from within. Hitler’s rise in 1933 didn’t begin with a coup but with the erosion of institutional checks — using crises like the Reichstag Fire to justify emergency powers, purging opposition, and bending the judiciary to his will. Strengthening judicial independence, free media, and election protections ensures that bad political actors — and their enablers — can’t weaponize fear to dismantle democratic norms.

Economic insecurity is one of authoritarianism’s most powerful recruiting tools. When people can’t afford rent, healthcare, or basic necessities, the appeal of a leader who promises order — no matter the belief or the cost — grows stronger. But anyone who’s ever tried to grow a plant knows that real long term security for growth comes not from repression but from investment. Here are a few examples:

• Denmark’s “flexicurity” model protects workers by ensuring job loss doesn’t mean desperation, balancing labor rights with economic adaptability.

• Finland’s universal basic income pilot tested how direct financial support can reduce crisis-driven populism.

• Portugal’s harm reduction approach to drug policy shows that community-driven safety programs reduce crime more effectively than militarized policing.

We can’t afford to keep fighting authoritarianism after it takes hold — we must build a society where it has no room to grow. The best barrier to crisis-fueled control is building a world where crisis takes no toll. When fear isn’t fed and panic isn’t planned, strongmen lose their grip on the land.

Rugby, like any sport, taught me that rules aren’t just constraints — they’re what make the game possible. Without them, it’s not a sport, just a free-for-all where the strongest dominate. But rules alone aren’t enough. The game works because players believe in them, because they trust that everyone is playing under the same conditions, that power has limits, and that fairness is enforced.

Democracy isn’t so different. It’s not just laws or institutions that hold it together — it’s the shared belief that the system works well enough to be worth preserving. But what happens when people stop believing that? We can see what happens when people think (or know) the game is rigged, that the rules only serve the powerful, or that breaking them is the only way to win.

That’s when authoritarianism thrives. It doesn’t rise because people love oppression — it rises because people fear disorder more than they fear control. When strongmen present themselves as the only ones who can restore stability, they’re assuming we’re willing to sacrifice a few freedoms along the way.

The strongman’s power isn’t just enforced by words — it’s mapped onto other countries, cities, borders, and institutions. As Indigenous and Black resistance scholars reminds us, control isn’t only about who governs — it’s about who is allowed to move, who is confined, and whose communities are turned into sites of surveillance and fear. When authoritarian leaders redraw the boundaries of belonging, they don’t just control laws; they control the ground people stand on.

So, the real question isn’t just how to resist authoritarianism. It’s how to ensure people don’t give up on the game altogether. How do we build a society where order doesn’t require coercion, and freedom doesn’t lead to chaos?

There’s obviously no single answer, but maybe it starts with refusing to let fear dictate our choices. Democracy shouldn't be about choosing between control and collapse — it should be about maintaining the fragile, necessary balance between them. And that balance isn’t automatic. It’s something we have to constantly pr

minnotect, defend, and — when needed — rebuild, brick by brick, border by border, rule by rule…without being a jerk or going berserk.

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Hello Interactors,

The land on which we stand can demand where we politically stand. But what happens when that land shifts, shakes, burns or blows away? Recent Southern U.S. floods displaced thousands. Disasters don’t just destroy — they can redraw political lines.

With second round of Trumpster fires deepening divides, geography and ideology matter more than ever. As climate crises, economic upheaval, and political struggles intensify, the question isn’t just where people live — but what they’ll fight for. History shows that when the ground shifts, so does power.

SHIFTING LANDS AND LOYALTIES

From fertile fields to frenzied financial hubs, geography molds the mindset of the masses. Where people live shapes what they fear, fight for, and find familiar. Farmers in the Great Plains worry about wheat yields and water rights, while coastal city dwellers debate rent control and rising tides.

But political geography isn’t just about climate and crops — it’s about power, privilege, and the collective making of place. No space is neutral; as evidenced by the abrupt renaming of an entire gulf. History and the present are filled with examples of territories being carved and controlled, gerrymandered, and gentrified.

The recent floods in the South serve as a stark reminder of how geography has historically upended political identity. Especially during Black History Month. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was a devastating deluge that displaced thousands of Black sharecroppers, washing away not only homes but also old political loyalties.

The Republican-controlled federal government, led by President Calvin Coolidge, took a hands-off approach, refusing to allocate federal aid and instead relying on Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to coordinate relief efforts through the Red Cross.

However, aid distribution was dominated by white Southern landowners, who withheld resources from Black communities. They forced many into quasi-forced labor camps under the guise of relief. Hoover, later touting his role in disaster response to win the 1928 presidency, was ultimately seen by many Black voters as complicit in their mistreatment.

This failure accelerated Black voters’ gradual shift away from the Republican Party, a realignment that would deepen under FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. The flood was not just a natural disaster — it was a political reckoning. Who received help and who was abandoned shaped party loyalties for generations to come.

Yet, history proves that political realignments are rarely one-sided or uniform. While Black voters were shifting toward the Democratic Party, another Southern political identity crisis was brewing. Southern white conservatives — longtime Democrats due to the party’s historical ties to segregation — began their own political migration in the mid-to-late 20th century.

The Civil Rights Movement and desegregation led many white Southerners to feel alienated from the Democratic Party, pushing them toward what was once unthinkable — the Republican Party. This shift cemented a racialized realignment, with Black voters backing Democrats and Southern white conservatives reshaping the GOP into today’s right-wing stronghold.

Both political shifts were responses to crisis — one to environmental disaster and racial exclusion, the other to social change and perceived status loss. The fact that geography remained constant but political identities flipped highlights a crucial truth: where people live matters, but how they respond to change depends on identity, history, and power.

The political path of any place isn’t just shaped by its space — it’s who claims the land, who crafts the law, and who casts a crisis as chaos or cause.

SORTED, SEPARATED, AND STUCK

Geography shapes political identity but doesn’t dictate it. Human agency, economics, and psychology influence where people live and how they vote. Over time, self-sorting creates ideological enclaves, deepening polarization instead of fostering realignment.

Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s Social Identity Theory explains why people align with in-groups and see out-groups as threats, as identity shapes self-esteem and belonging. This leads to in-group favoritism, out-group bias, and polarization, especially when power or resources feel like a zero-sum game.

But Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (ODT) adds another layer to this understanding. Developed by Marilynn Brewer, building on Social Identity Theory, ODT proposes that people need to feel a sense of belonging to a group while also maintaining individuality within it.

This balancing act between assimilation and uniqueness explains why political identities are not just about partisanship — they encompass culture, lifestyle, and even geography. Individuals self-sort both by community and distinction within their chosen political and social environments.

Modern political sorting has made partisanship an all-encompassing identity. It aligns with race, religion, and even consumer habits. This process has been amplified by geography, as people increasingly move to communities where they feel they “fit in” while also distinguishing themselves within their political faction.

ODT helps explain why urban progressives might distinguish themselves through niche ideological positions (e.g., Socialists in Brooklyn vs. Tech libertarians in San Francisco), while rural conservatives in swing states may lean into Christian nationalism or libertarianism (e.g. Christian nationalists in rural Pennsylvania vs. Tea Party libertarians in rural Wisconsin).

American political power is unevenly distributed. The Senate majority can be won with just 17% of the population, and the Electoral College inflates rural influence. The 10 smallest states hold 3% of the population but 20% of Senate seats and 6% of electoral votes. This imbalance amplifies rural conservative power, giving certain regions outsized political sway.

ODT also helps explain why political polarization has deepened over time rather than softened with economic shifts. Historically, political realignments occurred when crisis moments forced cross-cutting alliances — like when poor white and Black farmers joined forces during the Populist Movement of the 1890s to challenge banking and railroad monopolies.

However, these coalitions often fell apart due to racial and regional pressures. The Populist Party was ultimately absorbed into the Democratic Party’s white Southern wing, leaving Black farmers politically stranded. They still are. Around 1890 Black farmers made up an estimated 14% of farmers in America, now it’s fewer than 2% due to racist lending practices, discriminatory federal policies, land dispossession, and systemic barriers to credit and resources.

Today, realignments are rare because identity-based partisanship satisfies both belonging and distinctiveness (ODT). Rural conservatives see themselves not just as Republicans but as defenders of a distinct way of life, reinforcing identity through regional pride, gun rights, and religion. Urban liberals, meanwhile, develop sub-identities — progressives, moderates, democratic socialists — within the broader Democratic Party. This illusion of uniformity masks deep internal ideological divides.

This sorting shapes where people live, what they watch, and which policies they support. The false consensus effect deepens political silos, as rural conservatives and urban progressives assume their views are widely shared. When elections defy expectations, the result is shock, anger, and further retreat into ideological camps.

This explains why U.S. political alignments resist economic and geographic shifts that once drove realignments. Where hardship once built coalitions, modern partisanship acts as a psychological refuge. The question is whether climate change, automation, or mass migration will disrupt these patterns — or cement them. Will today’s anxieties redraw party lines, or will political sorting persist, turning geography into a fortress for the familiar, deepening division and partisan pride?

FROM REALITY TV TO ALTERNATE REALITY

If geography and identity sketch borders of polarization, then media is the Sharpie darkening the divide. The digital age hardens these political divides, where confirmation bias runs rampant and algorithms push people to one side of the ideological line or the other.

In a recent interview, political psychologist and polarization expert Liliana Hall Mason, known for her research on identity-based partisanship and rising affective polarization, recalled a 2012 TiVO study that analyzed TV viewing habits of Democrats and Republicans. The study found that among the top 10 most-watched TV shows for each party, there was zero overlap — Democrats and Republicans were consuming completely separate entertainment. Cultural, and presumably geographical, divergence was already well underway in the 2010s.

Republicans favored shows like Duck Dynasty while Democrats gravitated toward satirical cartoons like Family Guy​. While it predates TiVO, I was more of a King of Hill fan, myself. I thought Hank Hill humanized conservative rural life without glorifying extremism while critiquing aspects of modernity without being elitist. Hulu has announced its return sometime this year.

But Republicans and Democrats today don’t even consume the same reality — they don’t watch the same news, follow the same influencers, trust the same institutions, or even shop at the same grocery stores. Will both tune into watch Hank Hill walk the tight rope of a pluralistic suburban American existence?

This media-driven fragmentation fuels geographic sorting, as political preferences influence where people choose to live. A person might leave a liberal city for a conservative suburb, or vice versa, based on what media tells them about their “kind of people.” Over time, partisan enclaves harden, reducing exposure to opposing viewpoints and making political shifts less likely.

When political identities are so deeply entrenched that losing an election feels like an existential crisis, the risk of political violence rises. Mason’s research on rising authoritarian attitudes and partisan animosity shows that political opponents aren’t just seen as rivals anymore — they’re seen as enemies.

January 6th, 2021, wasn’t an anomaly — it was the inevitable explosion of years of identity-based sorting and status-threat rhetoric. The rioters who stormed the Capitol weren’t just protesting an election loss; they saw themselves as defenders of a nation slipping from their grasp, fueled by a deep-seated fear of demographic change, progressive policies, and shifting cultural power.

Studies show that people who feel their group is losing influence are more likely to justify violence, particularly when they perceive existential threats to their way of life. Right-wing media reinforced these fears, political leaders legitimized them, and geographic and social sorting further entrenched them. In an era where partisan identity feels like destiny, and grievance is turned into a rallying cry, the potential for future political violence remains dangerously real.

History teaches us that political geography isn’t destiny — alignments shift when necessity forces cooperation. As the world faces climate crises, economic instability, and mass migration, new political realignments will emerge. The question is whether they will lead to solidarity or further strife.

At the end of the Mason interview, she mentions the role anger and enthusiasm play in political motivations. This concept is part of the Norwegian philosopher and social theorist, Jon Elster, who is best known for his work on rational choice theory, emotions in politics, and historical institutionalism. He has written extensively on how emotions like anger, enthusiasm, resentment, and hope shape political behavior and social movements, especially in historical contexts like the French Revolution and modern populist movements.

Anger mobilizes movements, making people willing to fight for change or push back against it. The Populist farmers of the 1890s, the labor activists of apartheid South Africa, and the displaced communities of Partition-era India all channeled rage into resistance. At the same time, enthusiasm — a belief in the possibility of transformation — is what sustains coalitions beyond crisis moments. The formation of the EU, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and Brazil’s leftist labor movement all survived because hope outlasted grievance.

Political movements often begin with anger, but only survive through enthusiasm. This is why some burn out quickly (Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party) while others reshape history (the Civil Rights Movement, Brexit, Trump’s populism).Looking ahead, the political geography of the future will be shaped by whichever emotion proves stronger.

Will fear and resentment deepen polarization, or will shared enthusiasm for economic justice, environmental sustainability, and democratic resilience create new cross-cutting alliances? The past suggests both are possible. But if history has one lesson, it’s that the lines on the map are never as fixed as they seem — and neither are the people who live within them.

Bibliography

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Hello Interactors,

In 2002, when I was at Microsoft, Bill Gates launched an initiative called Trustworthy Computing (TwC). The internet was fresh, ripe for malicious attacks, and Microsoft was a big target. Memos were issued, posters were printed, teams were formed, and code was fortified. And in the case of hidden Easter Eggs in Windows and Office — removed. Internal hacks weren’t a good look.

Trust is everywhere these days — politicians vow to restore it, social scientists try to measure it, and brands continue to demand it. U.S. money says to trust God, and it seems we’re now asked to trust Musk. Clearly trust isn't universal; it's shaped by our views of and interactions with power, place, and institutions.

Lately, trust feels harder to hold onto. It's not just social media, politics, or government failures — the spaces where trust once thrived are disappearing. Town squares, shops, and local newspapers are vanishing, replaced by fragmented digital alternatives. Trust may be declining; but it's mostly shifting, and not always for the better.

Trust won't simply "return" with a memo from Bill. Nor from Trump, Zuck, Musk, or Jeff. Even if they did, they’d likely soon be tossed in the Trumpster Fire. These figures make us question who is gaining trust, who is losing it, and what these new patterns mean for democracy and social cohesion?

SELF-TRUST LOST TO CIVIC COST

Trust begins with confidence in what we know and perceive. We rely on self-trust to navigate the world — to make decisions, assess risks, and interpret so-called reality. Self-trust relies on the brain’s ability to process uncertainty and predict outcomes. The prefrontal cortex (the brain’s decision-making hub) assesses risks based on past experiences, while the anterior cingulate cortex (a small but crucial center between hemispheres) detects conflicting information, signaling when to doubt or adjust beliefs. When these systems function well, self-trust remains stable.

But in an era of conflicting information, the brain is flooded with competing signals, making it harder to form confident judgments. Chronic exposure to uncertainty and misinformation can overstimulate these networks, leading to decision paralysis or over-reliance on external authorities.

Yet self-trust isn’t just a cognitive process — it is also shaped by social and epistemic (knowledge-related) factors. Prominent NYU philosopher Miranda Fricker, known for her work on epistemic injustice, argues that trust in one’s own knowledge isn’t formed in isolation but depends on social reinforcement and being recognized by others as a credible source of knowledge.

When individuals experience repeated epistemic injustice — being dismissed, ignored, or denied access to authoritative knowledge — they internalize doubt, weakening their own cognitive autonomy. Without reliable social validation or consistent feedback from their surroundings, self-trust erodes. This is not just a psychological state, but a consequence of power structures that shape who gets to "trust" their own judgment and whose knowledge is devalued.

In the past, people validated their understanding through direct experience and social reinforcement. I remember watching TV anchor Walter Cronkite as a kid with my family in Iowa. He was the source of authoritative knowledge for us all. We also learned from trusted local voices and community newspapers. The Des Moines Register was won of the most influential and trusted regional papers in the country. It won 16 Pulitzer Prices from 1924 to 2010 — the first being for the work of syndicated editorial cartoonist “Ding” Darling.

Now, those anchors have weakened. These knowledge sources have been replaced by curated digital landscapes, where information is sorted not by credibility, but by engagement metrics and algorithmic amplification. One case study shows that this shift can lead to a growing public reliance on self-reinforcing information bubbles, where trust in knowledge is shaped more by network effects than by institutional credibility. This creates a paradox: people have more access to knowledge than ever before yet feel less certain in what they know and trust.

This crisis of self-trust extends beyond information. It is not just about struggling to determine what is true, but also about uncertainty over how to act in response to a changing political and social landscape. Despite declining trust in political leaders, there is evidence public support for democracy remains strong. We may doubt the players, and even the game, but our faith in democracy mostly stays the same.

This gap — between distrust in leadership and belief in the system — creates the sense of civic uncertainty we all feel. It’s not hard to find those who once trusted their ability to participate meaningfully in democracy but now feel disengaged, disoriented, or discombobulated. They’re unsure whether their actions can have any real impact.

Voting, town halls, and community groups used to feel like meaningful ways to engage, but when institutions seem distant or unresponsive, they lose their impact. At the same time, digital activism and decentralized movements offer new ways to get involved, but they often lack clear legitimacy, accountability, or real influence on policy.

Rising polarization, disinformation, and the decline of local journalism have made it harder for people to trust democratic institutions. Many still believe in democracy but doubt whether their actions make a difference. This uncertainty fuels disengagement, creating a cycle where institutions fail to respond, deepening distrust. The real crisis isn’t about rejecting democracy — it’s about struggling to find meaningful ways to participate in a system that feels increasingly unresponsive.

STRANGERS ONLINE, NEIGHBORS OFFLINE

If trust in ourselves grounds what we know, trust in others helps it grow. We nurture it through everyday interactions — recognizing familiar faces, exchanging small favors, and feeling a shared connection to the places we live. But as communities change and people become more disconnected, those trust-building moments start to wither.

Many neighborhoods once relied on deep social networks woven through personal relationships — longstanding ties between neighbors, trust built through shared spaces, and informal support systems that provided stability. Small businesses, community centers, and local institutions weren’t just places of commerce or service; they were gathering spots where people formed relationships, exchanged information, and reinforced a sense of belonging. But economic restructuring, gentrification, and urban development have disrupted these networks, dismantling the infrastructure that once sustained social trust.

As housing costs rise, longtime residents are pushed out, taking with them the relationships and shared history that held communities together. Gentrification swaps deep local ties for a more transient crowd, while big corporations replace small businesses that once fostered real connections. Where shop owners knew customers by name, now it’s all about quick transactions, leaving fewer chances for meaningful interaction.

Adding to this shift, the rise of online shopping and door-to-door delivery has further reduced the need for everyday in-person interactions. Where people once ran into neighbors at the local grocery store or chatted with shop owners, now packages arrive with a quick doorstep drop-off, and errands are handled with a few clicks. This convenience comes at a cost, replacing casual, trust-building encounters with isolated transactions, further weakening the social fabric of neighborhoods.

Car dependency doesn’t help. Car dependence doesn’t just reduce social interactions — it reshapes them. As urban sprawl spreads people further apart, longer commutes and car-centric infrastructure leave less time for community engagement, weakening neighborhood ties. Public transit, one of the few remaining shared civic spaces where people of different backgrounds interact, has been deprioritized, reinforcing isolation.

Yet, denser urban living isn’t necessarily the fix. While some advocate for more compact, walkable communities to counteract social fragmentation, there is research that shows density alone doesn’t guarantee stronger social bonds. High-rise developments and mixed-use neighborhoods may put people physically closer together, but without intentional social infrastructure — such as well-designed public spaces, accessible community hubs, and policies that foster local engagement — denser environments can be just as isolating as car-dependent sprawl.

At the same time, digital life has transformed how we interact. Social media and online communities have expanded the scope of connection, but often at the cost of place-based relationships. Online, people tend to engage with those who already share their views, reinforcing ideological silos rather than broadening social trust. Meanwhile, interactions with strangers — once the foundation of civic life — become more fraught, as society sorts itself into parallel realities with fewer common reference points.

Yet social trust is not entirely collapsing. While some forms of trust — particularly trust in strangers and diverse social networks — are declining, alternative forms of community trust are emerging. Digital spaces, local activism, and mutual aid networks offer new avenues for rebuilding trust, even as traditional community bonds weaken. The question is not whether trust exists, but what kinds of trust are flourishing, and at what cost?

CONNECTED OR CONNED

At the broadest scale, institutional trust is what binds societies together — it’s the belief that governments, media, and public institutions operate with some level of fairness, competence, and accountability. But in many places, that trust has been unraveling for decades.

This isn’t just about political polarization or disinformation. Much of the erosion of trust in institutions comes from lived experience. Local governments used to be the most trusted level of governance, but years of budget cuts and privatization have left them struggling to provide basic services. To stay afloat, many cities have outsourced essential services to private companies, prioritizing short-term cost savings over long-term community needs.

As a result, public services have become more uneven, with some neighborhoods getting what they need while others are left behind. Instead of feeling like a reliable support system, local government now often seems distant, underfunded, and unable to truly serve the people who rely on it most.

In the United States, "austerity urbanism" has led to mass school closures in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, cuts to public transportation in Detroit, and the deterioration of water infrastructure in places like Flint and Jackson. Public housing budgets have shrunk, forcing cities to rely on private-public partnerships that often lead to rising rents and displacement.

Rather than being experienced as sources of support, local governments are increasingly perceived as punitive forces. In some cities, emergency financial managers — appointed to balance municipal budgets — have slashed services and sold public assets with little public input, reinforcing a sense that government is distant, unaccountable, and incapable of serving its residents. The result is a feedback loop of distrust: as public services decline, citizens disengage, reinforcing the very conditions that make institutions seem ineffective or absent.

The decline of trust in representative institutions does not mean trust in governance itself has collapsed. Research shows that while trust in elected officials and legislatures is declining, trust in implementing institutions — such as courts, police, and civil services — has remained relatively stable in many democracies. This suggests that while citizens may distrust politicians and their decision-making, they still believe in the structural functions of governance itself, even if that trust is increasingly conditional and unevenly distributed.

However, as local trust declines, people are looking elsewhere for authority. In some cases, this has meant turning to charismatic leaders who position themselves as restorers of stability in response to perceived governmental dysfunction. Right-wing populist movements like Trumpism — with authoritarian-leaning politicians funded by libertarian-leaning capitalists — have capitalized on this distrust, framing themselves as defenders of "the people" against an out-of-touch political elite.

Meanwhile, others have sought alternative governance structures to fill the void left by failing institutions. For example, food policy expert Katie Morris highlights how some cities, fed up with national inaction on food insecurity, are taking matters into their own hands. She highlights how “Right to Food Cities” are stepping up to provide food assistance and support local food systems, proving that even when higher levels of government fall short, local action can still make a difference. Seattle’s Food Action Plan is one example.

While these efforts demonstrate local governments’ ability to function as alternative governance models, they also highlight the fragmentation of trust — where some communities invest in grassroots action while others retreat into authoritarian appeals for order.

It seems trust isn’t disappearing — it’s being redistributed. Some find security in bureaucratic institutions like the courts and civil service, while others seek top-down leadership in populist figures or create community-driven governance alternatives. Either way, this redistribution deepens political fragmentation, making it harder to achieve widespread institutional legitimacy.

Each of these crises — self-trust, social trust, and institutional trust — feeds into the others. When people struggle to trust their own judgment, they become more hesitant to engage with their communities. When social networks weaken, people feel more isolated and disconnected from larger institutions. And when institutions fail, people turn inward, relying on personal networks or ideological affiliations over collective governance.

But just as these crises reinforce each other, so too can their solutions. Restoring trust isn’t about recreating an idealized past — it’s about understanding how different visions of community shape trust today. Many people look to historical models of social cohesion, whether rooted in low-density suburban stability of the 1950s or high-density, transit-oriented neighborhoods of the late 1800s, as templates for rebuilding trust.

These views, rooted in social capital theory — the idea that strong community ties build trust and cooperation — recognize that our surroundings shape how we connect. While social capital can foster civic engagement, it also has a darker side.

Political analyst Adam Fefer, who studies democratic resilience, highlights how tight-knit networks have fueled anti-democratic movements in the U.S., spreading misinformation rather than broadening trust. The January 6th attack wasn’t spontaneous — it was driven by organized groups leveraging veteran organizations and faith communities to mobilize action. Historically, exclusionary civic groups have also reinforced segregation and voter suppression, showing that not all social capital strengthens democracy.

However, these same civic networks can protect democracy, as seen in union-led economic shutdowns and business leaders opposing political extremism. This highlights a crucial fact: the impact of social capital on civic well-being varies based on its structure, who it empowers, and its intended purposes.

Rather than looking backward, we need to build trust in ways that fit today’s world—both digital and physical. That means strengthening local knowledge networks, rethinking where and how we connect, and recognizing that much of life now happens online, from social interactions to doorstep deliveries. While shared public spaces still matter, we must also find ways to foster trust in a world where community, commerce, and governance are increasingly digital.

And it means rethinking governance, not as a distant authority, but as something more active and responsive—an ongoing process that truly gives people a stake in shaping their communities. Perhaps the real challenge isn’t in longing for a past version of civic life, but in asking how we can create the conditions today that make people feel connected, capable, and truly invested in the future of their neighborhoods. How do we build a world where trust isn’t just a distant trace, but a tangible part of our daily interactions with people and place?

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Hello Interactors,

Artificial intelligence divides us. To some, it’s a miracle waiting to solve humanity’s greatest problems. To others, it’s a creeping force, stealing our skills, jobs, and even autonomy. The truth, as always, is more complicated.

From sharpened sticks to smartphones, humans have always loved their tools — but at what cost? Plato feared writing would weaken memory; now we worry GPS dulls our sense of direction, calculators erode our math skills, and AI chips away at our ability to think creatively and critically. Are we creating marvels that strengthen us, or are we outsourcing so much that we’re making ourselves vulnerable?

What if the answer isn’t rejection or blind adoption, but finding a smarter balance? Let’s dive into what we gain, what we lose, and how interdependence with technology might just be our greatest strength.

DEPENDENCY WEAKENS COGNITIVE AGENCY

Let’s start with Plato. He famously criticized writing for weakening human memory. His complaint, though seemingly dramatic today, nonetheless echoes across centuries. Modern tools like calculators, spellcheckers, and GPS extend our cognitive reach — a concept known as extended cognition, where tools function as external parts of our thought processes.

These tools are marvels of convenience, but they come at a cost. As geographer Paul Torrens highlights in his work on behavioral geography, tools like GPS don’t just help us — they sideline us. By reducing direct interaction with our environment, they bypass processes like navigating landmarks or forming mental maps. Over time, the skills we’ve refined for millennia quietly wither under the glow of our devices.

But there’s more to the story than atrophy. Torrens points out another subtle trap: the loss of what “small geographies” offer when we overly rely on tools like GPS and vehicles, both forms of extended cognition. “Small geographies” — our immediate, lived, day-to-day interactions with space — are rich in sensory details that inform navigation and spatial awareness. Walking through a neighborhood engages embodied perception, helping us notice landmarks, smells, textures, and even microclimates that shape our understanding of place.

Yet, when we succumb to technologies that abstract these experiences into rationalized systems of larger geographies — like cities planned for efficiency rather than experience — we sacrifice this richness. GPS reduces navigation to turn-by-turn instructions, while vehicles reduce us to a brain in a box shielded from tactile, sensory feedback. This abstraction reshapes not only how we move through space but also how we sense and value it, distorting our relationship with our surroundings.

History has plenty of warnings about over-reliance on rigid, top-down systems. During the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850), societies that had shifted to monoculture farming or depended on specific trade routes faced catastrophe when the weather turned erratic. Crops failed, rivers froze, and with them, the mills that powered daily life ground to a halt. Communities that had abandoned adaptive skills like crop diversification or local food storage found themselves particularly vulnerable, left scrambling to cope with nature’s prolonged unpredictability.

Catastrophes are brutal. Especially when our capacities are brittle. It’s the same trap we risk falling into today, as natural disasters increase in intensity and sometimes duration. We are more dependent than ever on our systems, certainly more than the Little Ice Age. We depend on power, electrodes, and grids of digital nodes embedded in a global network of interdependent modes.

Unlike in the 19th century, most of us don’t have a clue about growing food, let alone storing it. We’ve increasingly prioritized the efficiencies and abstractions of our institutionally driven lives over a more fundamental biological existence. Are we at risk of losing the cognitive and sensory richness that smaller, localized environments, or “small geographies”, uniquely offer? Would we survive an arid hell scape or another ice age?

STRENGTH IN INTERDEPENDENCE

Dependency is not a weakness — it’s indistinguishable from life. Humans exist because we rely on mutually dependent organisms — our gut microbes help us digest food and produce vital nutrients, our skin microbiome protects us from harmful pathogens, and even the mitochondria powering our cells were once independent organisms that became integral to our survival. Together, these partnerships form the foundation of our health and life itself. Our very bodies are home to incredible systems that operate as internal biological technologies, silently and effortlessly aiding our survival and navigation.

Take grid cells in the brain, for example. These specialized neurons, part of the brain’s spatial navigation system, act like an internal GPS. Grid cells encode distances and directions, enabling us to navigate our environment and construct mental maps of space without conscious effort.

Recent studies demonstrate how these grid cells work together in a way that forms a torus-like (donut) structure. The patterns of cognitive activity match up with the animal's movements as its position in the environment gets mapped onto a toroidal shape. Imagine a rat navigating a flat surface. As it moves, this research show its 2D planar coordinates are being translated to and from a 3D toroidal surface mapped on the inside of a gridded donut in its mind.

Our neurons interact with sensory inputs, seamlessly guiding us through environments through 3D biolelectric GPS wetware. Sensory modalities like kinesthetic and vestibular senses integrate with our neural systems to inform our perception of space and movement. In essence, our biological organs and limbs come equipped with intricate systems of extended cognition, working in coordinated harmony with the world around us. Just as our plastic and silicon devices extended our biological cognition, our cognition — our bioelectric calculators and wetware GPS — are extended forms of our environment.

The study of bioelectromagnetics spans biophysics, cellular biology, neuroscience, and regenerative medicine. It explores how electrical signals within and between cells govern critical processes like neural communication, cell behavior, and tissue regeneration. Biophysics examines the principles of ion flow and membrane potentials, while cellular biology investigates how bioelectric signals guide growth and differentiation. Emerging areas like systems and synthetic biology expand its applications and bioelectricity is key to understanding and engineering life’s electrical foundations.

These decentralized processes mirror key features of intelligence: sensing, processing information, and acting in a goal-directed manner. From resolving cellular disputes to coordinating regeneration, these bioelectric communication systems demonstrate how interdependence fosters adaptability.

Research already shows how synthetic technology can mirror these biological processes. Software acts as an extension of human adaptability rather than an artificial facsimile. Can we depend on this tech to instruct, not corrupt, the systems that make us up?

TOWARD ETHICAL TECHNICAL INTEGRATION

Electrobiology and the synthetic merging of technology with biology may seem futuristic, but it’s here. Moreover, we humans have a long tradition of infusing technology into the biological systems to sustain life. From vaccines to pacemakers, humanity has a history of cautiously adopting innovations that enhance our biology. While these technologies have saved countless lives, their integration hasn’t come without apprehension.

Take vaccines, for instance. While vaccines are now widely regarded as one of the greatest public health achievements in history, there have always been skeptics. Even now, after COVID-19 vaccines demonstrated the speed and efficacy of mRNA technology, new waves of fear and misinformation have followed.

These concerns echo a broader unease about technological advancements, seen not only with vaccines but also with the rise of AI. Obviously, a system that mimics human cognition raises questions about control, autonomy, and unintended consequences. Especially as it becomes infused with our biology.

But this dynamic mirrors the communication and deliberation found at the cellular level. Just as cells exchange bioelectric signals to coordinate action and solve problems, society deliberates at a larger scale, navigating conflicting viewpoints to determine whether and how to adopt new technologies.

Scale Theory offers a lens by looking at how systems and processes shift when moving between different scales, from the cellular to the societal. At one scale, bioelectricity reveals cells working collaboratively to heal wounds or regenerate tissue, a process both decentralized and adaptive. At a larger scale, society’s responses to new technologies — vaccines, AI, or bioelectric tools — follow a similar pattern of negotiation, fear, and eventual coordination.

The Eames Power of Ten explores how perspective shifts across scales—from the subatomic to the cosmic—reveal interconnected systems. Similarly, Scale Theory highlights how changes in scale reshape our understanding, ethics, and interactions, emphasizing the need to navigate complexity at every level. Together, they underscore the web of relationships that define our world.

While the scale differs, the core idea remains: complex systems deliberate and act in ways that ripple across their networks, whether they’re composed of cells or people. How much of this is metaphorical versus empirical is the work of complexity science.

I recently heard this sobering example of a synthetic creation rippling to cells: dating apps. These services use pair matching algorithms, made by an arbitrary human and influenced by networks of arbitrary people, actively manipulate our gene pool when certain biological pairings result in newborns. The same rippling occurs with zoning laws and the design and location of a bar or café…or even a town? My own biology came about when a decision to put a grain elevator in a small Iowa town rippled to my parents being paired resulting in three newborns.

Despite fears of these integrations rippling at various scales, history shows they can succeed when grounded in careful research, ethical oversight, and good intentions. Not every actor has good intentions, and not every rippling action is cause for celebration. After all, we can see with X and now Meta how quickly social media algorithms can be weaponized…and let’s be honest, that grain elevator in Iowa, while well intentioned, was constructed on stolen land.

Still, vaccines efforts can ripple to boost immune systems without fears of replacing or bypassing them; pacemakers can stabilize hearts without fear of replacing them; antibiotics can work with the body to fight infections and then disappear. These are rippling actions filled with good intentions and outcomes.

Tools like calculators and devices equipped with AI can also act with good intentions. They extend our cognition, enhance our ability to solve problems, and process information without replacing our underlying cognitive systems. Could bioelectric technologies follow this same path, amplifying natural cellular intelligence without overriding it?

Aristotle provides a counterpoint to Plato’s skepticism about writing. While Plato worried that writing would erode memory and internal knowledge, Aristotle saw value in external aids to thinking, such as writing and diagrams, as tools to organize and extend thought. In the same way, technologies like AI, GPS, and bioelectric tools have the potential to act as extensions of our cognition rather than replacements — but only if we integrate them thoughtfully.

The challenge lies in designing technologies that enhance human intelligence without bypassing the lived, embodied experiences that make us who we are. And even though spell checkers make us lousy our lazy spellers, and GPS lousy or lazy navigators, we are able to regain these skills when need be. We’re also able to coexist and even be enhanced by these synthetic extensions.

In nature and medicine, we find inspiring examples of how synthetic scaffolding can seamlessly integrate with natural systems. In regenerative medicine biodegradable scaffolds are used to repair damaged bones. These synthetic frameworks made of polylactic acid polymers provide a super structure for bone cells (osteoplasts) to grow into. As they guide the regeneration the scaffold gradually degrades, leaving behind only natural bone.

In coral reef restoration, artificial structures made of eco-friendly substances like calcium carbonate attract coral larvae and coastal creatures. Over time, these synthetic reefs become living ecosystems, blending seamlessly with their natural surroundings. If synthetic scaffolds can usher tissue repair and issue biocoenosis, can we align technology with biology? Can we merge artificial minds with organic matter? Can we complement our natural abilities without negating sensibilities? I think we can, because we already are.

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Hello Interactors,

The weight of winter up north can have its cozy comforts, but cold, damp, and dark can take a toll. We also continue to face a convergence of daunting global challenges — climate change, inequality, political instability, and health crises — each amplifying the other straining our ability to find meaningful and sustainable solutions. So much for ‘Happy Holidays’.

A recent article on avoiding despair turned to the concept of “tragic optimism.” This can sometimes be offered as a way to avoid our human tendency to seek “doom and gloom” while also not succumbing to “toxic positivity.” These topics struck me as a decent lens to kick off this winter’s focus: human behavior.

Let’s unpack the emotional geographies that shape us. How do spaces and norms influence how we feel, process, and express emotions?

SPACES, SMILES, AND SOCIAL SCRIPTS

When I was in seventh grade, I was the lead in our middle school musical, Bye Bye Birdy. It featured the song, Put on a Happy Face that employed this cheery, but pushy, line: “Spread sunshine, all over the place…just put on a happy face.”

Dick van Dyke played the starring role on Broadway from 1960-61 earning him an Tony award. He then appeared in the movie in 1963, launching him to stardom. In that role, many other roles, and in real life, he is a man who appears perpetually happy. Even now at age 98!

But under that smile, lurks a darker side. Soon after his early success, Van Dyke became an alcoholic. The alcohol may have helped him put on a happy face society expected, but it came at a price. This insistence on relentless optimism regardless of circumstances is called “toxic positivity” — and it’s more than a personal behavior. It reflects societal norms that prioritize surface-level harmony over emotional complexity. These norms shape how we navigate feelings and influence our individual well-being.

But shared spaces, like our workplaces or homes also influence these emotional dynamics. Have you ever walked into a place knowing how you were expected to act? At work, you might slap on a smile and say “I’m fine” even when you’re not. At home, you might feel the pressure to play the part of the cheerful parent, partner, or roommate. These emotional scripts don’t come out of nowhere — they’re baked into our cultural expectations about what different spaces are “for”.

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explains that spaces acquire “moral properties” through societal norms, values, and cultural narratives. Workplaces, seen as sites of productivity, often suppress emotions like frustration, while homes, idealized as places of comfort, pressure individuals to adopt roles like nurturing parent or cheerful partner. These norms shape how people are expected to behave and feel within these spaces.

America itself, as a cultural and geographic entity, carries its own "moral properties." These are reinforced by media narratives that frame the nation as a land of optimism, resilience, and emotional stability, projecting these expectations onto its citizens and then exported to the world to consume.

Take one of the most-watched television programs in America from 1962 to 1992, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. His late-night TV persona was examined in a recent New York Times piece by Jason Zinoman. He described Carson as America’s calm, neutral host, soothing the nation with his polite humor. He wasn’t just a TV personality; he was part of a larger cultural push for emotional stability, especially during times of uncertainty. His show became a space where people could escape the messiness of real emotions.

But these expectations aren’t just about comfort — they’re about control. By promoting harmony and cheer, society nudges us toward emotional conformity, discouraging anything that might feel too “messy” or unpredictable.

This pressure doesn’t fall on everyone equally. Women often bear the brunt of emotional labor, expected to keep things “pleasant” for others. Cultural geographer Linda McDowell highlights how professional women are frequently required to maintain an upbeat attitude at work, regardless of personal circumstances. This expectation extends beyond the workplace, shaping how women are perceived and allowed to express themselves.

On The Tonight Show, Joan Rivers, a trailblazing comedian, faced this constraint. Despite her sharp, satirical wit, Rivers was often limited to lighthearted banter and self-deprecating humor to align with Johnny Carson’s carefully neutral persona. Similarly, Carol Wayne, as the flirtatious “Matinee Lady,” reinforced the idea that women on the show were there to amuse or adorn, not disrupt. These portrayals reflected societal norms that confined women to roles as caretakers or decorative figures, both publicly and privately.

SUPPRESSING SORROW WITH A SMILE SUCKS

Putting on a happy face might seem harmless, but it can take a toll. When we suppress feelings like sadness, frustration, or anger, they don’t just disappear — they build up, creating stress. They can even impact our physical health. Neuroscientists have shown that suppressing emotions can increase activity in the brain’s fear center (the amygdala) while dampening the rational, problem-solving parts (like the prefrontal cortex). Basically, pretending you’re okay when you’re not can mess with your head and your body.

James J. Gross, a psychologist and leading researcher in emotion regulation, has shown that suppressing emotions can heighten stress levels, activate the brain’s fear center (the amygdala), and disrupt cognitive processes critical for resilience and problem-solving. Recent brain imaging studies by Wang and Zhang (2023) support this, demonstrating that expressive suppression, where feelings are actively withheld, triggers heightened amygdala activity and diminished prefrontal regulation. These findings highlight the significant physiological toll of emotional suppression, further validating Gross's work.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and existential psychologist, offers a valuable framework for regulating these emotions with his concept of “tragic optimism.” Frankl introduced tragic heroism in his 1978 book, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, drawing on the existential and Greek tragic tradition of resilience in the face of suffering. He later expanded this with tragic optimism in a 1984 essay, emphasizing hope and meaning-making even amidst life’s inevitable hardships.

Drawing on his experiences from the Holocaust, he explores the human ability to confront inevitable suffering while maintaining hope and finding meaning. For Frankl, this approach was not about denying pain but about embracing life’s full spectrum — its joys and its tragedies — as integral to human existence.

But his view of suffering has been criticized as overly universal and idealistic, assuming that all individuals can derive purpose from adversity. His emphasis on personal responsibility may inadvertently shift blame onto individuals for not overcoming circumstances beyond their control. Constant pressure by systemic oppression can exist even in a society that claims to be free.

Migrant women in caregiving roles, as McDowell highlights, often lack the freedom to balance suffering and hope on their own terms. Instead, they are required to project resilience and positivity, even under exploitative conditions, effectively masking systemic inequities.

Similarly, Joan Rivers and Carol Wayne were cast into narrow roles that demanded cheerfulness, ensuring they complemented rather than challenged societal norms. These portrayals reflected the broader expectation that women embody emotional steadiness, regardless of personal circumstances.

Frankl’s insights remind us that the ability to engage with hardship meaningfully is a privilege that societal expectations often deny to those at the margins. Understanding the toll of suppression and the uneven distribution of emotional freedom is crucial in challenging the norms that perpetuate these dynamics.

COMBATING CONFORMITY WITH COMMUNITY

Thankfully, norms aren’t set in stone — they can be, and have been, resisted and redefined. Sara Ahmed, a feminist scholar, critiques what she calls the “happiness duty.” She shows how this duty pressures marginalized groups to appear cheerful, suppressing feelings like anger or pain to uphold the status quo. Movements like Black Lives Matter reject this demand, openly expressing grief and frustration to confront systemic injustice. Through “collective effervescence”, as sociologist Émile Durkheim describes, collective emotions in protests turn individual pain into powerful demands for change. Ahmed and Durkheim offer examples of how breaking free from the pressure to "stay positive" transforms emotions into tools for meaningful resistance.

But even this kind of resistance can make those in power uncomfortable, so they demand order, calm, and happiness. When collective effervescence calls people to, as Public Enemy’s song decries, ‘fight the powers that be’, another collective encourages everyone to spread ‘sunshine all over the place, and just put on a happy face.’

But in the face of this “toxic positivity” that Public Enemy mocks as, “'People, people we are the same'”, they respond ‘No, we're not the same / 'Cause we don't know the game’. They can’t justify putting on a happy face when most of America refuses to wrestle with poverty and race. Summoning an inner Johnny Carson can be seen by some as not a neutral, but as just another way to paternally placate — to pat down incivility. It can be seen more like Jack Nicholson’s infamous “Here’s Johnny!” in The Shining — a menacing veneer of cheer masking a deep, dark, and discomforting societal reality.

Ananya Roy, a geographer and urban theorist, takes a hard look at this in her work on the “rescue industry.” In Poverty Capital, she critiques how even well-intentioned aid organizations often portray marginalized communities as helpless and in need of saving, while ignoring the structural problems that keep them oppressed. These narratives don’t just undermine real change — they also place emotional expectations on those being "rescued." They demand gratitude and resilience while leaving the bigger systems of inequality intact.

Roy’s work shows how this approach reflects a long history of paternalism and American exceptionalism, where those in power maintain control by shaping how others should act and feel.

Geography plays a big part in how these expectations are enforced. Relief camps, aid programs, and even microfinance initiatives often create spaces where people are expected to behave a certain way — thankful, hopeful, and compliant. In the U.S., similar patterns show up in low-income neighborhoods, where anger or frustration is often punished, reinforcing norms that demand harmony and silence over real emotional expression.

If we want to resist these dynamics, we need to rethink the spaces where care and support happen. Instead of controlling emotions or enforcing positivity, these spaces should allow for shared agency and the full range of human feelings. By rejecting savior narratives and making room for emotions like grief and anger, communities can start to challenge the systems that hold them back and move toward real change.

From Johnny Carson’s seemingly cheerful neutrality to the "happiness duty" imposed on marginalized groups, societal norms can slowly prioritize control over connection, faux harmony over brutal honesty. But resistance is possible.

Movements like Black Lives Matter, the Women's March, Chile's protests for constitutional reform, and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations highlight how group effervescence can channel collective emotions into impactful resistance. However, these movements also reveal the limits of protest alone in achieving enduring change. Systemic barriers to change require sustained efforts beyond the initial wave of mobilization.

As Ananya Roy reminds us, breaking free from narratives of saviorism and exceptionalism requires not just challenging these norms but rethinking the spaces where they take root. How can we build geographies of care that empower, rather than constrain? Perhaps the answer lies in acknowledging that resistance begins with feeling — and making space for emotions, no matter how “messy” they might seem.

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Hello Interactors,

As the year ends, I reflect on 2024’s top five essays and a shared theme emerges: the systems that define our lives. These systems intertwine nature and nurture, machines and morality, and markets and minds.

From evolution’s harmony to the moral balance of economic power, the co-opting of language to the divides between prosperity and precarity, our journey has revealed deep connections between people, place, and power.

Let’s rewind and reweave these connections into a broader narrative that sets us on our way to another trip around the sun.

NATURE, NURTURE, AND NODAL NETWORKS

In “DEVO, Darwin, and the Evo-Devo Dance,” we explored how evolution reflects the eternal interplay between biology and environment, progress and adaptation. The evolution of synthesizers — as my daughter’s playful experiments with sound reminded me — offers a metaphor for humanity’s relationship with technology.

This relationship echoes the broader theme of systems and evolution. Iterative changes and interactions between tools and users offer the potential to create new possibilities. As noted in the essay,

"DEVO’s fusion of human and machine echoes these evolutionary dynamics, where both biological and technological systems evolve through reconfiguration and integration, creating emergent complexity that Darwin could not have imagined."

Just as synthesizers blend natural sound waves with human creativity, humanity’s interaction with technology evolves in cycles of adaptation and transformation, shaping both the tools we use and the societies we build. We shape our tools, and they shape us in return.

The blend of nature’s design and our technological imprint creates an ecosystem of mutual influence, much like the Evo-Devo theories of biology, where small tweaks in developmental genes lead to dramatic evolutionary outcomes.

This interplay of creation and transformation mirrors the cycles of human progress. Just as Hox genes orchestrate body plans, societal changes—spurred by technology or ideology—reshape our collective body. Whether it’s the mechanistic choreography of DEVO’s performances or the emergence of Evo-Devo in biology, the boundaries between human and machine blur.

Are we programming nature, or is nature programming us? Perhaps the answer lies not in drawing distinctions but in understanding common patterns. These questions highlight the complexities of how we, and other organisms and systems, grow, adapt, and evolve in a world increasingly interwoven with introduced technology.

From the mechanized rhythms of industrialization to the organic flow of natural systems, human -- and nonhuman -- there exists a tension and balance between stability and change. The teleonomic goal-directed behavior of living systems together with society’s driving pulse of technology has fused into an unrecognizable but somehow familiar new existence. Even as we invent tools to navigate this existence, we become part of the systems we create—both shapers and shaped.

The orchestration of evolution — like the many-layered songs of a many-player band — shows a world of many, connected, but not always planned.

MARKETS, MACHINES, AND MORALITY

The Industrial Revolution brought unparalleled progress but also profound moral dilemmas. In “Markets, Machines, and Morality,” we reflected on Adam Smith’s dual identity as both an economist and a moral philosopher. For Smith, markets were not just mechanisms of exchange but reflections of human nature. His “Theory of Moral Sentiments” reminds us that sympathy, justice, and prudence are vital governors of economic power — like James Watt’s centrifugal governor, which balanced the speed of steam engines.

But history shows us that unchecked systems, whether economic or mechanical, often prioritize efficiency over empathy. From Bentham’s utilitarian calculus to the exploitative practices of modern capitalism, we’ve seen how the quest for profit can erode the moral underpinnings of society. Today’s tech-driven economies, much like the Industrial Age’s steam engines, require careful regulation to prevent runaway consequences. Smith’s ideals of community benevolence and fair markets resonate more than ever.

The unchecked growth of industrial power also highlights the tensions between human ingenuity and ethical responsibility. The centrifugal governor’s simple elegance stands as a metaphor for our need to impose limits on excess, whether in economic policies, technological innovation, or social systems. Without these balancing mechanisms, we risk spiraling into inequity, instability, and dehumanization — a lesson as relevant today as it was in Smith’s time.

Moreover, the moral fabric underpinning economic actions — sympathy, justice, prudence — often fades in the shadow of profit-driven systems. Yet, these values remain the quiet governors ensuring that society’s engines run not just efficiently but equitably.

Smith’s vision was never limited to wealth accumulation; it was about creating a society where individual pursuits align with collective well-being. Unlike today’s economic practices, which often prioritize short-term profit over long-term societal health, Smith emphasized the importance of moral virtues such as sympathy and justice in guiding market dynamics.

His insights are less about the "invisible hand" and more reminders to steer not only by the metrics of progress but also by the compass of morality. Like a finely tuned machine, morality should govern the obscene, in a more steady and fair routine.

LANGUAGE, LANDSCAPE, AND LOSS

Language has the power to shape identities and wield influence. These were the themes in “Woke and Wealth” and “Molding Minds Through the Markets of Material Worlds.” Words like “woke” and “decolonize”—once rooted in justice—have been distorted, co-opted by power to serve as tools of division. Similarly, capitalism’s framing of “Homo Economicus”—the rational, self-interested individual—has reshaped not just our identities but the very landscapes we inhabit.

These constructed identities reflect the power dynamics embedded in economic and geographic systems. The urban centers that thrive on globalized knowledge economies are mirrored by rural regions left to grapple with stagnation and decline, as explored in “Main Street to Metropolis.” As noted in that essay,

“Rural areas have become Republican strongholds, drawn to promises of reversing globalization, reshaping economic policies, and making their communities great again.”

These places — shaped by policies, demographics, and technology — become symbols of our collective divisions. Yet even amidst these fractures, alternative identities emerge. “Homo Ecologicus,” focused on environmental stewardship, and “Homo Absurdum,” embracing creativity and imagination, remind us of humanity’s potential for resilience, community, and connection.

The co-opting of language — turning tools of empowerment into instruments of division — illustrates the ongoing struggle for control over cultural and political narratives. When words like “woke” are weaponized, the original call for awareness and justice is lost in a haze of ideological conflict.

Meanwhile, the landscapes shaped by economic systems mirror these distortions, transforming places of shared community into arenas of exclusion and competition. Consider, for example, the gentrification of urban neighborhoods. Once vibrant hubs of diverse community life, these areas often transform into exclusive enclaves where rising costs push out long-time residents, replacing shared culture with economic segregation.

Yet, within these landscapes of loss lies the potential for renewal. Rural areas, often overshadowed by urban centers, remain spaces where alternative identities thrive. These identities, rooted in stewardship, creativity, and resilience, offer glimpses of a world where humanity’s diversity can flourish.

The challenge lies in amplifying these voices, reclaiming the power of language, and reshaping the spaces we inhabit to reflect our shared values. Language shapes, landscapes mold — our shifting sense of self is an ancient story retold.

CLOSING THE LOOP

Looking back at these essays, a recurring theme emerges: the interplay of systems that define our lives is not a one-way street. Nature and nurture, markets and morality, language and identity are all intertwined, multi- referencial, and dynamic webs with mirroring interdependencies. Progress is not linear; it’s a cycle of creation, transformation, and sometimes regression where changes to one aspect ripple through the entire system.

This echoes the recurring themes explored earlier — from the evolving interplay between nature and technology to the moral balance necessary in markets and machines. Together, these cycles reveal how change, though uneven, can guide us toward resilience and renewal when approached with awareness and intention. Herein lies hope. We all possess the potential, and these systems the possibility, to recalibrate the systems we control to balance human progress with equity, efficiency with empathy, and innovation with ethics.

These systems remind us that resilience lies in adaptability. Fire, when controlled, can foster growth and create fertile soil. Uncontrolled fire destroys. Water can unite by sustaining life, connect ecosystems, and enable communication and trade through rivers and oceans. But it can also erode, rot, create barriers, or flood habitats and communities.

As we humans innovate and advance, we can pause to reflect on the systems we create. We can ensure they serve not just the few but the many. Like water and fire, the narratives we construct, whether through language, policy, or technology, have the power to unite or divide.

Our collective task is to craft stories that inspire connection and foster growth built on shared values. As we step into a new year, what questions should we ask about the systems we create? How can we ensure they unite rather than divide? What would it take to build systems rooted in equity, empathy, and sustainability? Perhaps, most importantly, how do these systems reflect who we are—and who we aspire to be?

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Hello Interactors,

Happy winter solstice!

Today, the northern hemisphere experiences its shortest day and longest night, a celestial event rooted in the planet's axial tilt. This seemingly simple astronomical fact has profound implications for economic geography. It influences everything from agricultural productivity to social traditions of sharing and reciprocity.

SOLSTICE AND SHARING

I recently visited the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre at Whistler. These two tribes are part of the Squamish River watershed that flows into Howe Sound, a fjord located just around the corner from Vancouver, British Columbia. This watershed is central to their traditional territories and plays a vital role in their culture and economy.

From an economic geography perspective, the tilt of the earth underpins the seasons and, by extension, patterns of production and scarcity that shape human economies. In regions where winter brought agricultural dormancy, societies had to develop systems to store, preserve, and share resources to survive until the next growing season.

The winter solstice symbolizes the end of this scarcity. It promises returning light, a pivotal moment in the annual cycle for societies historically reliant on natural rhythms. For the Squamish and Lil’wat peoples, this period was a time of reflection, gratitude, and redistribution. Ceremonial gatherings and potlatches reinforced community bonds by ensuring that the resources harvested in times of plenty were shared equitably during the lean winter months.

I saw evidence of these community bonds at the cultural center. The five visitors from West Virginia and myself, were the only white folks in the place. I was happy to see and hear a group of teen Squamish or Lil’wat boys gathered, talking, and giggling. There was a table of older Indigenous women sharing tea and treats. I asked one of our guides if she was doing anything special for the upcoming holiday. She said, “Well, I have presents for my mom’s side, but not my dad’s. And I have presents for half my siblings, but not the other half! So, it looks like that’s what I’ll be doing!”

Practices of reinforced social cohesion and mitigating disparities can be seen in both Indigenous and early European traditions. These lessons of reciprocity and redistribution remain vital amidst the gulf between extreme wealth and pervasive poverty. That too became apparent during my visit.

As I was browsing the gift shop, I overheard an Indigenous employee ask a friend, “How has work been?” Her friend responded, “It’s ok. This time of year comes with a lot of Christmas clean ups, people getting their Whistler places ready…it’s hard work, but good money.”

As we mark the winter solstice and conclude this fall series on economic geography, it is worth considering how the natural cycles dictated by the earth’s tilt continue to influence modern economies. Even in an age of surplus for some, the rhythms of scarcity and abundance persist, challenging us to find equitable ways to share resources.

The traditions of the Squamish, Lil’wat, and countless other cultures remind us that sustainability and justice are not just matters of economic policy but also of values deeply connected to the natural world. This solstice invites us to honor those lessons, seeking balance and light amid the darkest days.

The widespread, worldwide post-harvest behavior — like the Squamish and Lil’wat spiritual renewal through prayer and ceremonies; the community bonding with feasts, potlaches, and storytelling; the observance or celestial cycles and gratitude for earth’s gifts; and the artistic creations for ceremonial dances and rituals — has been happening for millennia.

SATURN AND THE GREEK SAINT

I thought I’d reshare a relevant excerpt from a post I did a few years ago that explores the roots of Christmas. It started with a communal approach to abundance with celestial-triggered ancient traditions like Saturnalia in Rome. Saturn, the god of agriculture, inspired events where feasts, gift-giving, and the symbolic inversion of roles served to address the inherent inequalities of agrarian economies.

“It was so baked into the fabric of society that even the church began painting it with Christian imagery and metaphor. Because the celebrations occurred on or around the end of November and into December there were many elements of Christianity to which they could attach the events.

During Roman times, December 17th marked the day of the Saturnalia – a festival honoring the god of agriculture, Saturn. All work halted for a week as people decorated their homes with wreaths. They shed their togas to dawn festive clothes, and they drank, gambled, sang, played music, socialized and exchanged gifts. It was a celebration of their agrarian bounty and the return of light at Winter solstice. It was also a time to invite their slaves to dinner where their masters would serve them food.

One Christian Saint affiliated with early December – and the one most honored today in the form of a plump jolly man wearing a red velvet suit – is Saint Nicholas. December 6th is St. Nicholas Day. For many European countries this marked the official end of the harvest season. And even today it’s recognized in some countries as a kind of warm-up act to the more official and accepted Christmas day, December 25th.

Nicholas of Bari was a Greek Christian bishop from modern day Turkey. Also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, he earned a reputation during the Roman Empire for many miracles; all of which, were written centuries after his death and thus prone to exaggeration. But he was most famous for his generosity, charity, and kindness to children, the poor, and the disadvantaged. He was said to have sold his own belongings to get gold coins that he’d then put in the shoes outside people’s homes. This is the origin of the tradition of putting shoes or stockings out on Christmas Eve.

They say he also saved the lives of three innocent men from execution. He chastised the corrupted judge for accepting a bribe to execute them. And he certainly would have been watching over the peasant farmers and slaves to insure they were treated fairly. He seemed to always have an eye out for inequities and justice for common people. Maybe that’s what made him a saint. Or maybe he was just born that way. After all, Nicholas in Greek means “people’s victory.”

The Puritans obviously lost at their attempts to ban Christmas. Lacking any evidence from the Bible, the Christian powers that be eventually settled on the 25th of December as the day Jesus was born. They most likely picked the 25th because that was the day winter solstice landed on the Roman calendar.”

Happy solstice, everyone. Whether from St. Nick or the Squamish ways,let’s remember through these darkest days: sustainability and justice aren’t just decree, they’re rooted in values that connect you and me.

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Hello Interactors,

Language shapes power, but it can also obscure and manipulate. Words like woke and decolonize, rooted in justice, are now tools for distortion by figures like Trump and Modi. In this essay, we’ll explore how these terms connect to economic and political geography, tracing their co-opting, parallels to colonialism, and the need to reclaim their transformative potential. Let’s dig in — and stay woke.

STAY WOKE, START TALKING

Are you woke? It’s a provocative question these days. Especially since this term was co-opted by the right as a pejorative since the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Even last June Trump said regarding so-called woke military generals, “I would fire them. You can’t have woke military.”

And then there’s Elon Musk. He’s been increasingly waging a war on what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’. It seems he started abusing the term in 2021, along with other political rhetoric he’s been ramping up in recently. The Economist reports a “leap in 2023 and 2024 in talk of immigration, border control, the integrity of elections and the ‘woke mind virus’.”

Folks more on the left are also starting to distance themselves from the term or use it as a pejorative. Including some of my friends. Even self-described leftist and socialist, Susan Neiman criticized "wokeness," in her 2023 book Left Is Not Woke. She argues, as do many, that it has become antithetical to traditional leftist values — especially as it becomes a weapon by the right.

According to the definition in the Cambridge dictionary, I am decidedly woke. That means I’m “aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” It worries me that people are eagerly running from this word. I’d rather they interrogate it. Understand it. Find it’s meanings and question the intent behind its use. We should be discussing these nuances, not shushing them.

Using the word in a sentence (in an approving manner), Cambridge offers hints at one of the original meanings: “She urged young black people to stay woke.” In 1938 the great blues legend Lead Belly also urged “everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro, Alabama) – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." Those are spoken words in his song "Scottsboro Boys", about nine young Black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama seven years earlier in 1931.

Not a decade before, the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey wrote in 1923, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!" Fifty years later that inspired playwright and novelist Barry Beckham to write “Garvey Lives!”, a 1972 play that included this line, “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke.” #StayWoke was trending on Twitter the summer of 2020.

In 1962, ten years before Beckham’s play, novelist William Melvin Kelley wrote this headline for a piece in the New York Times Magazine: “If You're Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today's Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You're Woke You Dig It.” The article, which is an uneasy glimpse of how mainstream media regarded Black people in 1962, is about how white people co-opt terms from the Black community. His target was white woke Beatniks of the 1960s.

Awakening others to injustice in the United States may have originated with white folks inspired by Abraham Lincoln. In the lead up to the his 1860 election, the, then woke, Republican Party helped organize a paramilitary youth movement in the Northern states called the ‘Wide Awakes’. These activists, which included some Black people, were inspired by Lincoln’s fight to abolish slavery and promote workers’ rights.

They took up arms to defend Republican politicians who brazenly awakened others to injustices in America in their campaign speeches. This armed aggression — especially armed Black men — in part is what woke the South to the dawning wokeness across the North. Frightened as they were, they organize their own paramilitary and soon a civil war broke out.

RECLAIM, RESIST, REVIVE

Words can have unusual lifecycles. The term "queer" evolved from a pejorative label for homosexuals to a term of empowerment. Particularly after the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Stonewall Riots. Its reclamation was reinforced by academic queer theory, which critiques societal norms around sexuality and gender. Today, "queer" is widely embraced as a self-identifier that reflects pride and resistance against stigma.

Christopher Hobson, of the Substack Imperfect Notes, suggested in a post about the word polycrisis, this progression of terminology:

Proposed — A new word or meaning is introduced through individuals, cultural interactions, academia, or mass media.

Adopted — A word or meaning is embraced by a community, shaped by social relevance and media influence.

Spread — Diffusion occurs through social networks and media exposure, leading to wider acceptance.

Critiqued — As words gain popularity, they face scrutiny from linguistic purists and cultural commentators. The appropriateness of a term can be questioned, highlighting the intent behind its dissemination.

Institutionalized — Widely used words become institutionalized, appearing in dictionaries and everyday language as standards.

Hobson adds one other stage that is particularly relevant today, ‘pipiked.’ It’s a term he ‘adopted’ as ‘proposed’ and I’m now ‘spreading’. It comes from Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Hobson writes:

"A useful concept she introduces is ‘pipikism’, which she takes from Philip Roth’s, Operation Shylock, one of the texts about doppelgangers that Klein engages with. She quote’s Roth’s description of ‘pipikism’ as ‘the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.’ This captures the way in which the concepts and frames we use to help understand our world are rendered useless by bad actors and bad faith, caught in ‘a knot of seriousness and ridiculousness that would never be untangled.’" (3)

This lifecycle certainly applies to the word woke, but let’s turn to a term more closely related to economic geography that’s also in the cross-hairs of being ‘pipiked’ — decolonize.

Like woke, the term decolonize began as a call to dismantle injustice, exposing the deep roots of exploitation in European colonial systems. It symbolized hope for liberation and justice for the oppressed. Over time, like many critical terms, its meaning shifted. Once radical, decolonize risks becoming performative as its potency weakens through co-optation, especially by bad faith actors.

Narendra Modi exemplifies this, using decolonization rhetoric to promote Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist agenda. His government renames cities, revises textbooks to erase Muslim rulers like the Mughals, and marginalizes minorities, particularly Muslims, under the guise of rejecting British colonial legacies. This parallels America’s own rewriting of history to reinforce a white Christian narrative. Protestant colonizers replaced Indigenous names and erased Native perspectives, reframing days like Thanksgiving, a time of mourning for many, into celebratory myths.

DOCTRINES, DISSENT, AND DOMINION

Early colonial educational curricula framed colonization as a divine mission to civilize the so-called savages. Native Americans were often depicted as obstacles to progress rather than as sovereign peoples with rich cultures and governance systems. Systems, like the Iroquois League, impressed and inspired the early framers of American government, like Benjamin Franklin.

But it was Christian dogma like the Doctrine of Discovery, a theological justification for seizing Indigenous land, that was integrated into educational and legal frameworks. Slavery was sanitized in textbooks to diminish its horrors, portraying it as a benign or even benevolent system. Early 20th-century textbooks referred to enslaved people as “workers” and omitted the violence of chattel slavery.

Early colonizers established theological institutions like Harvard University, originally intended to train ministers and propagate Christian doctrine. My own family lineage is culpable. I’ve already written about Jonas Weed (circa 1610–1676), a Puritan minister who helped colonize Weathersfield, Connecticut. But there’s also the brother of my ninth Mother, Jonathan Mitchell (1624–1668). He was a Harvard graduate and Puritan minister who played a pivotal role in shaping the Protestant-oriented writing of American history.

He promoted a Christian God-given view of history, framing events as manifestations of God’s will. He emphasized covenant theology that cast Puritans as a chosen people. As a fellow at Harvard, he shaped the intellectual environment that influenced figures like Cotton Mather, who’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) depicted New England as a "city upon a hill" destined to fulfill a divine mission. JFK ripped this quote from history, as did Reagan and Obama to further their campaigns but also to ingrain messages that started with people like Mitchell and Mather.

Institutions like the church and universities advanced Christian-nationalist ideologies that justified colonial rule, marginalizing Indigenous, African, and non-European cultures by framing European Christian values as superior. European imperial powers reshaped local economies for their gain, turning colonies into sources of raw materials and markets for goods. Monocultures like sugar and cotton left regions vulnerable, while urban centers prioritized resource export over local needs, fostering uneven development.

By the mid-20th century, America had risen to global dominance, cementing its power through institutions like the IMF and World Bank, which reinforced economic dependencies. Decolonization movements emerged in response, with nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean seeking justice and sovereignty. Yet many former colonies remain trapped in systemic inequalities shaped by imperial and American influence. While initiatives like the G-77 — a UN coalition of developing nations promoting collective economic interests and South-South cooperation — aim to reshape global systems, progress remains slow and resistance strong.

Today, Project 2025 seeks to revive Christian-nationalist doctrines, echoing colonial practices. Signs of rising authoritarianism, white Christian nationalism, and silencing dissent are evident. The Levant, too, reflects another iteration of the colonial Doctrine of Discovery — seizing land and subjugating oppressed populations under theological justifications.

Even in the early days of American colonization, there were woke voices. One of them happened to be another ancestor of mine. My tenth grandfather, Stephen Bachiler (circa 1561–1656) was an English clergyman and an early advocate for the separation of church and state. His life exemplified the struggles for religious autonomy in early American history, but also the importance of sustained critique of power and injustice.

Educated at St. John’s College, Oxford, he became the vicar of Wherwell but was ousted in 1605 for his Puritan beliefs. At nearly 70, he left to New England in 1632 to establish the First Church of Lynn near Boston. It was there it is assumed he cast the sole vote against the expulsion of Roger Williams — a proponent of equitable treatment of Native Americans and a fellow Separatist.

Both men showed a commitment to religious freedom, tolerance, and fair dealings. While they were clearly colonizers and missionaries, each with their own religion, they were also relatively woke. They showed the importance of a sustained quest for liberty and justice amid prevailing authoritarian orthodoxies.

Trump wields language as a tool to cement his prevailing authoritarian orthodoxies. He surrounds himself with figures who reduce substantive critical discourse to noise. His media allies, from Fox News to populist voices like Joe Rogan, amplify his rhetoric, diverting attention from systemic injustices. These platforms trivialize urgent issues, overshadowing genuine grievances with performative derision and bad faith gestures.

When language meant to confront injustice is co-opted, maligned, or muted, its power is diminished. Performative actions can “pipikize” critical terms, rendering them absurd or hollow while leaving entrenched problems untouched — many rooted in centuries of European colonization. Yet Trump’s alignment with a new breed of colonization deepens these issues.

Figures like Elon Musk and JD Vance, champions of libertarian techno-optimism, feed into Trump’s agenda. Musk dreams of private cities and space colonies free from governmental oversight, while Vance benefits from Silicon Valley backers like Peter Thiel, who pour millions into advancing deregulation and creating self-governing enclaves.

These visions are the new face of colonialism — enclaves of privilege where exploitation thrives, disconnected from democratic accountability. They mirror the hierarchies and exclusions of the past, dressed as innovation but steeped in familiar patterns of dominance.

In this age of populism — another word twisted and worn thin — vigilance is essential. Language must be scrutinized not just for its use but for its intent. Without this, we risk falling into complacency, lulled by superficial gestures and farcical displays. Stay awake. Words can preserve the power to transform — but only when their intent remains grounded in uprooting injustice and inhumanity.

References:

• Cambridge Dictionary. Definition of woke.

• Economist. (2024). Immigration, border control, and the ‘woke mind virus’: Tracking political rhetoric.

• Hobson, Christopher. (Sep 13, 2024). Imperfect Notes: In conversation with Pete Chambers.

• Klein, Naomi. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Macmillan Publishers. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

• Neiman, Susan. (2023). Left Is Not Woke. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

• New York Times Magazine. (1962). Kelley, William Melvin. If You're Woke You Dig It; No Mickey Mouse Can Be Expected to Follow Today's Negro Idiom Without a Hip Assist.

• Press, Eyal. (2012). Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Roth, Philip. (1993). Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• Time Magazine. (2023). India’s textbook revisions spark controversy over history and ideology.

• Walker, Corinne A. (2024). Aeon. What is behind the explosion in talk about decolonisation.

• Dull, Jonathan. (2021). Post-Colonialism: Understanding the Past to Change the Future. World History Connected, 18(1), 125–142.

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Hello Interactors,

Beneath the surface of election fatigue and endless punditry lies a deeper story — one rooted in the economic geography of this nation. It’s a tale of two Americas: the urban hubs thriving on growth and globalization, and the rural heartland struggling to hold on. One of those hubs allowed my career and family to grow and the other allowed me to grow.

The outcome of this election is well timed with Interplace’s fall theme of economic geography. Let’s step back from the noise to explore how decades of policy, technology, and shifting demographics have redrawn the map of opportunity.

This isn’t just about red versus blue — it’s about who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.

DIVIDED VOTES, DIVIDED LIVES

The 2024 presidential election highlighted many things, but one that really resonates with me is the growing urban-rural divide in American politics. Trump dominated rural voters and Harris dominated urban centers. This contrast is reminiscent of 2016, but has been building through decades of economic divergence: urban areas thrive on knowledge economies and globalization, while rural regions face stagnation and demographic decline. This enduring divide underscores the differing opportunities and values of urban and rural voters that renders as blue and red election maps.

The U.S. operates on division. It’s driven by a political and economic duopoly. Two major parties dominate, limiting ideological diversity and reducing complex issues to binary debates. This unfairly ignores the nuanced solutions needed to bridge these yawning economic and human geography gaps. Economically, we can see corporate power’s concentrated influence, with dominant industries in technology, finance, and healthcare shaping policy, market dynamics, and communities. Smaller players, including local businesses and alternative voices, are often overshadowed, ignored, or silenced.

The effects are visible in places like King County, Washington where I live. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon attract and fuel thriving, diverse, and mostly progressive communities. Meanwhile, in rural Adair County, Iowa, where my parents grew up and where I still have relatives, residents rely heavily on government transfers. They’re struggling to support growing aging populations and reeling from closures of vital services, including retirement homes. My own uncle faced this fate, forced into a failing trailer home to die after his Baptist church-financed retirement home was sold in 2022 to a private equity firm who promptly and callously shut it down.

These rural areas have become Republican strongholds, drawn to promises of reversing globalization, reshaping economic policies, and making their communities great again. With a 75.68% turnout of 5,423 eligible voters in Adair County, Iowa, 71.47% of them went to Trump in 2024. Sadly, their vulnerabilities are exploited by false narratives framing urban elites as adversaries to rural traditions and values. Though, these narratives aren’t entirely false. Both parties of our duopoly largely ignore, disregard, or patronize the realities of rural successes, strivings, and struggles — as do most urbanites.

ROOTS OF THE RURAL RIFT

Growing up in Warren County, Iowa, in the 1970s and 1980s provided a firsthand view of some of these rural and urban transformations. Suburban to Polk County and Des Moines, Warren County was close to economic growth from finance, insurance, and some manufacturing. My father worked as a financial analyst at Massey Ferguson, while my uncle held a blue-collar factory job, representing the industrial stability of the area at the time.

My parents grew up in a far more rural Orient, Iowa, in Adair County where Massey Ferguson tractors had already been hard at work for decades. They shared stories of their little town being a vibrant agricultural hub with a bustling grain elevator next to a train track and a lively Main Street. I saw remnants of this economy as a boy, but by the time I reached high school in the 1980s, it was already in decline. That decline was punctuated on June 10, 2024, when the Orient school board voted to dissolve the school where my parents went and grandmother taught due to ongoing enrollment and financial issues.

Orient is not alone; the 1980s marked widespread economic decline across rural America. The so-called "Green Revolution," which introduced advanced agricultural technologies, prioritized efficiency through mechanization and consolidation. While it modernized farming and boosted crop yields, it also drove smaller farms out of business and accelerated rural depopulation as large agribusinesses dominated.

Adair County exemplified these changes, losing its economic backbone as family farms were replaced by larger operations, leaving Main Streets struggling. In contrast, Warren County benefited from its proximity to Des Moines' expanding economy and has become one of Iowa's fastest-growing counties in recent years. The disparity between suburban and rural areas continues to grow.

I see now how the Reagan era of the 1980s helped to hammer in the political and economic wedge of today’s divide.

Reagan’s economic agenda, focused on deregulation, tax cuts, and free-market principles, favored urban areas that were better equipped to leverage these shifts. Urban centers like Des Moines diversified into finance and insurance, while rural regions like Adair County became vulnerable to agricultural volatility and light-industry manufacturing.

This era also saw a transformation in the political alignment of what some call the ‘rural petite bourgeoisie’ — also known as ‘small business owners’ and local elites rich with real estate capital. These, overwhelmingly men, traditionally held moderate views, blending New Deal liberalism with pragmatic conservatism. Facing economic pressures from rural decline, this group turned towards Reagan’s low-tax, deregulatory policies as vital for their small businesses' survival in a challenging economy. Meanwhile, large farm and property owners benefitted from skewed farm bills sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley. “Chuck” was first elected in 1981 and is still in office. He is the longest serving member of congress at age 91.

In contrast to urban counterparts who increasingly supported redistributive policies, rural elites opposed government spending and regulations they viewed as threats to their businesses. This shift fostered a rural political identity closely linked to the Republican Party, deepening the divide as local leaders endorsed short-term beneficial policies that often worsened structural challenges in their communities.

Reagan’s emphasis on reducing government intervention also weakened the social safety net that many rural areas relied on during economic downturns. This period marked significant wealth redistribution away from struggling rural economies, as policies favored global trade and technological advancements benefiting urban industries. Free trade agreements like NAFTA, initiated under Reagan and expanded under Bill Clinton in the 90s, further destabilized rural manufacturing and agriculture.

Reagan’s rhetoric of self-reliance resonated with rural voters who saw these values reflecting their traditions. However, these policies sowed the seeds of economic decline that later led rural areas to depend on government transfers, especially as populations aged — nearly one quarter of Adair County’s residents are over 65.

Medicare and Medicaid dominate government transfers in these areas. For those in their prime, the shift towards deregulated markets and globalization has left their economies vulnerable. As the gap between urban and rural widens, questions remain about whether Trump's promise to end NAFTA will improve or worsen their circumstances.

PROSPERITY AND PRECARITY

The urban-rural economic and demographic divide was worsened by the "China Shock" of the 2000s, which laid the groundwork for Trump’s political strategy. This "China Shock" refers to the economic disruption following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, resulting in a surge of cheap imports and offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Rural communities suffered greatly. They faced accelerated job losses and industries already weakened by NAFTA collapsed.

Trump's populist critiques of globalization and free trade, along with his promises to revive manufacturing, resonated with rural voters disillusioned by years of economic decline. His focus on preserving Social Security and Medicare appealed to the swell of aging Baby Boomer populations in rural areas, where government transfers — mostly in the form of medicare and social security — have become vital for personal income.

Trump also used immigration as a fear tactic, employing anti-Asian rhetoric to foster suspicion of China and Chinese immigrants while extending this narrative to immigrants from Mexico, and Central and South America. Many of these immigrants fled due to policies supported by Reagan in the 1980s that destabilized their regions. The Reagan administration backed authoritarian regimes and aided military interventions aimed at combating pro-social movements, which led to violence and economic hardship still roiling Central America as effects of climate change ravage.

NAFTA further worsened this situation by enabling U.S. companies to exploit workers with low wages and displacing small farmers through large agricultural projects, echoing the impacts of the “Green Revolution.” These policies, together with the effects of a changing climate, have disrupted livelihoods and forced many to migrate north for survival.

Trump shifted blame for stagnant wages and reduced opportunities in rural America onto immigrants, claiming they were “stealing” jobs. However, the true issues often stemmed from systemic exploitation and corporate priorities aimed at suppressing wages. Rural workers, predominantly White but also Black and Brown legal immigrants, faced declining opportunities due to U.S. companies’ refusal to raise wages. Instead, especially with low-wage agricultural and meat packing jobs, they hired, directly and indirectly, illegal immigrant labor.

By framing immigration and globalization as adversaries, Trump obscured the structural causes of economic distress, deepening cultural divides while rallying rural voters with a narrative of racism, grievance, and mistrust.

The story of America’s divide is not just about economic shifts or political realignments—it’s a nation grappling with what it means to belong, prosper, and endure. Beneath the surface lies a deeper truth: the urban-rural rift mirrors our struggles with identity, purpose, and interdependence.

I see myself in this divide. Place profoundly shaped my life — not just through opportunities but in the values it instilled and the dreams it inspired. The urban skylines of the Seattle area, driven by innovation, look outward to a globalized future, while the rural landscapes of my childhood, rooted in tradition, look inward to preserve what they hold most dear. These differing perspectives underscore the ugly and unjust tensions and diverse and defining beauty of America’s existential, albeit bewildering, struggle.

Can we rediscover the common threads that bind us? The prosperity of the metropolis cannot endure without the resilience of Main Street, just as rural values lose meaning without the context of a connected world. Division is not our destiny — its what forces our decisions.

But the contours of our physical, human, and economic geographies, though disparate, need not dictate our future.

Like Iowa’s farmlands, where soil renews through struggle, and Seattle’s economy, thriving on adaptability, our future can grow stronger through enduring hardship and embracing a transformative, just, and inclusive tomorrow.

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Hello Interactors,

We often think of the economy as a fixed, objective force, separate from who we are. But what if it actually shapes our identities? Like a DJ mixing a set, economics amplifies certain behaviors and silences others. I saw this firsthand last summer when Calvin Harris performed live in Scotland, dynamically controlling thousands of people with a turn of a dial or push of a button…on tracks he’d already mixed in the studio!

Brett Scott, in his recent Substack Remastering Capitalism, uses this music mixing metaphor to show how human nature is molded — elevated or suppressed — by economic systems. His insights remind me of social constructionism, which reveals that what we see as “natural” is often constructed by institutions, including the economy. Our many identities aren’t just reacting to the system — they are being shaped by it.

But what if Homo Economicus, the rational, self-interested individual, isn’t who we truly or solely are? What if these systems are muting our most moral and communal parts? With my last three posts on economics in mind, let’s explore how economics and geography construct — and limit — who we become.

MARKETS MOLDING MINDS

At the heart of social constructionism is the idea that reality isn’t something we passively experience — it’s something actively constructed through our social interactions, power dynamics, and the institutions that shape our lives. One of the most powerful institutions in modern society is the economy, which shapes not just markets but the very way we see ourselves and our place in the world. And, as with all social constructs, it is influenced by those who hold power.

In Econ 101, we’re introduced to Homo Economicus, the rational, self-interested individual who makes perfectly reasoned decisions geared toward maximizing utility without emotional interference. Think Spock from Star Trek. This figure is more than a character or abstract concept; it reflects the values that the market rewards and those in power promote. In environments dominated by capitalist systems — corporate boardrooms, stock exchanges, financial districts — the behavior of Homo Economicus is not just encouraged, it’s essential for success. These spaces reinforce particular versions of selves, constructed by the systems that surround them.

Critical geographer David Harvey emphasizes how geography and power intersect, asking us to

“Imagine, for example, the absolute space of an affluent gated community on the New Jersey shore. Some of the inhabitants move in relative space on a daily basis into and out of the financial district of Manhattan where they set in motion movements of credit and investment moneys that affect social life across the globe...”

These elites embody Homo Economicus and reinforce the power dynamics of capitalism, constructing an economic landscape where rational self-interest reigns supreme.

But Homo Economicus is not an innate human identity. Like the concept of the “divinely appointed king” in medieval Europe, it is constructed by the economic and social systems around us. Modern capitalism creates and rewards this notion of the self. But this doesn’t mean we’re trapped in this role — other tracks of human nature are waiting to be heard. The question is, can we turn up the volume on those other selves?

MAPPING MONEY’S MIGHT

The dominance of Homo Economicus is not just theoretical — it plays out in real, physical spaces. Economic geography shows us how capitalism manifests in cities, financial hubs, and industrial centers, creating environments that reward certain behaviors while suppressing others. As Doreen Massey, a feminist geographer, notes, social relations are constructed across all spatial scales — from global finance to local communities — and these spaces, in turn, construct us. She writes,

“’The spatial’ then…can be seen as constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales, from the global reach of finance and telecommunications, through the geography of the tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within the town, the settlement, the household and the workplace.”

Having recently returned from New York and London last summer, I was surrounded by buildings and infrastructure designed to facilitate rapid decision-making and profit maximization. These financial districts are the birthplace of Homo Economicus, where competition, efficiency, and rationality are not only celebrated but engrained in the fabric of the city. But these aren’t just neutral places where economic transactions happen — they were actively shaped by human identities to shape other human identities, constructing versions of selves.

Yet, capitalism’s steady beat doesn’t stop at the thumping urban centers. It ripples outward, reshaping rural areas, natural landscapes, and global trade routes. In these spaces, a different identity might have flourished. For example, where I grew up in Iowa, rural areas are shaped by industrial agriculture where economic pressures push farmers to adopt monoculture practices, prioritizing profit over sustainability.

My father worked for farm equipment maker, Massey Ferguson in the 1970s and 80s where the company had to respond to John Deere’s introduction of industrial-sized articulated tractors sold to increasingly dominant large-scale farmers. Here, the track of Homo Ecologicus — the part of us that values balance and environmental stewardship — was quieted. Meanwhile, the relentless beat of industrial capitalism continues to drown it out.

However, these tracks aren’t erased. In more peripheral spaces — rural farms, local markets, and environmental movements — Homo Ecologicus still survives, embodying a different approach to the world, one that capitalism often suppresses.

A 2023 study showed that if 25% of institutional buyers sourced fresh food from local farms, it could generate an $800 million impact on Iowa's economy, supporting over 4,200 mid-sized farms and creating numerous agricultural jobs. In 2024 alone, Organic Valley, a cooperative that supports organic farmers, brought 40 new family farms in just the first four months of the year and was expected to add 70 more by year-end.

The geography of capitalism constructs these different forms of capitalism and the human identities behind them. Where we live and work reminds us that we are shaped by the spaces we occupy. Our identities are far from static — they are deeply influenced by the economic forces, choices, and physical landscapes we inhabit and navigate — the Interplace, if you will, the interaction of people and place.

INDUSTRY INFLUENCED IDENTITIES

Although capitalism has amplified Homo Economicus in both urban and rural spaces, other aspects of human nature persist. Social constructionism teaches us that while dominant systems shape our identities, they can also be resisted. And in moments of rebellion or creativity, tracks like Homo Ecologicus and Homo Absurdum emerge, reminding us of the full spectrum of the human experience.

Homo Ecologicus embodies our connection to nature and the desire for harmony with the environment. In communities focused on re-greening — whether through small urban efforts, rural sustainability, or the traditional ecological practices of the Coast Salish, which I’ve explored previously — these identities resurface. The Coast Salish, like many Indigenous cultures, emphasize balance and stewardship, a mindset echoed in the research of architect and sustainable urbanist, Steffen Lehmann. For example, Lehmann highlights ‘nature-based solutions’, as defined by the EU, are

“‘inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience (…) and bring more, and more diverse, nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes, through locally adapted, resource-efficient and systemic interventions’.”

Both Lehmann’s findings and the Coast Salish practices show that environmental stewardship and economic growth can coexist, challenging the dominance of Homo Economicus.

Homo Absurdum, the playful and imaginative side of human nature, similarly pushes back against the rigid logic of capitalism. My recent piece featuring DEVO, for example, showed how embraced absurdity, irony, and satire could form a critique of conformity and dehumanization wrought by modern capitalist society.

DEVO’s music wasn’t just about self-expression — it was an act of resistance. They reminded us that creativity and play are as fundamental to human nature as rationality and profit-seeking. Homo Absurdum thrives in moments of rebellion, where we reject the idea that our worth is tied solely to economic productivity.

Even Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern economics, understood that human identity was more complex than the rational self-interest of Homo Economicus. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith emphasized empathy and care, reminding us that

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”

Smith was also a product of his time, and his economic theories were socially constructed, shaped by the social and political environment of 18th-century Scotland, including the strong influence of Protestant religious values, which emphasized moral responsibility, hard work, and empathy toward others.

This brings us to an important realization: Homo Economicus is not the inevitable endpoint of human identity. It’s one track, amplified by the systems that hold power today. The human playlist is far more diverse, with room for care, play, connection, and environmental stewardship if we create the conditions to let these tracks play.

Economics is more than just markets and numbers — it’s a powerful force that shapes who we are. Through the lens of social constructionism, we see how economic systems construct certain identities, amplifying some parts of ourselves while suppressing others. In a world dominated by capitalism, Homo Economicus reigns supreme, but this doesn’t mean other tracks of human nature — like Homo Ecologicus, Homo Absurdum, or Homo Communis — are lost. These tracks are still present, waiting to be heard and made part of our collective human experience.

Immanuel Wallerstein, in his World-Systems Analysis, reminds us that historical moments like the French Revolution disrupted the structures that had previously determined the dominant identities of the time, legitimizing power in the hands of the people instead of monarchs or legislators.

He writes,

“The French Revolution propagated two quite revolutionary ideas. One was that political change was not exceptional or bizarre but normal and thus constant. The second was that ‘sovereignty’ — the right of the state to make autonomous decisions within its realm — did not reside in (belong to) either a monarch or a legislature but in the ‘people’ who, alone, could legitimate a regime.”

In the same way, we too can challenge the dominant economic structures of today by reshaping the various ‘selves’ that make ‘ourselves.’

I agree with Brett Scott when he challenges us to remaster our economic tracks based on these potentialities. To bring forward the voices of care, creativity, and environmental consciousness, and let them play a stronger part of the mix. Homo Economicus may be the dominant track for now, but we have the power to remaster the mix. Let’s strive for all the tracks of the human experience to play their part in creating a new, shared, and well-balanced harmony.

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Hello Interactors,

On October 12th, the United States observed Indigenous Peoples' Day, a recognition first proposed in 1977 during a UN conference in Geneva. Indigenous delegates called

“to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an international day of solidarity with the indigenous peoples of the Americas”

drawing attention to the broken treaties between Indigenous nations and the U.S. government. Thirty years later, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirmed that these treaties are of international concern, though the United States and a few other countries initially refused to endorse the declaration, and the resolution remains non-binding.

On Indigenous People’s Day, the satirical news outlet, The Onion, used the occasion to post a story with this headline:

“Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths Of Land Returned Immediately”

Today, there are 574 recognized Indigenous nations within the U.S., many of which still struggle for recognition and rights. As trade agreements like NAFTA dominate discussions on labor, immigration, and environmental impact, little attention is paid to the intricate trade systems Indigenous nations developed long before European contact. Here in the Pacific Northwest, societies like the Coast Salish had sophisticated economies driven by geographic access to key resources, especially salmon. Their control over rich fishing sites shaped trade, reinforced social hierarchies, and created territorial dynamics that predated modern trade systems.

Yet, colonization disrupted these Indigenous networks, imposing disorienting and often exploitative systems of land ownership and resource extraction. This week, I hope to explore how the adaptive strategies of Indigenous nations—despite the hardships imposed by colonization—can inspire decentralized solutions to today’s environmental and socio-economic challenges, just as these nations did for millennia.

COASTAL CONTROL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY

The Pacific Northwest is one of the most ecologically diverse regions in North America. It was this natural abundance that enabled the Coast Salish peoples to establish rich, complex societies. Unlike the simplistic and often nomadic image of hunter-gatherers, the Coast Salish exhibited a diversity of approaches to resource management that reflect an intimate knowledge of their environment.

According to Colin Grier, an anthropologist and archaeologist known for his research on Indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest, there are expanded and diverse notions of hunter-gatherer strategies. His research demonstrates how the Coast Salish were able to create surplus production, social hierarchies, and sophisticated trade networks due to their advanced understanding of the ecological systems they lived within.

At the heart of Coast Salish society was the salmon fishery, a resource so abundant and predictable that it allowed for the development of semi-sedentary communities. Grier emphasizes that their use of ecological niche construction — such as the creation of clam gardens and fish weirs — enabled the Coast Salish to actively shape their environment to increase resource availability.

These inventions and engineered environmental modifications were essential for producing the surpluses that underpinned the region’s complex social and economic systems. Unlike the traditional view of hunter-gatherers as passive foragers, the Coast Salish were active managers of their environment, designing and building a system that could support a large population through environmental and economically sustainable practices.

The abundance of salmon, clams, and other marine resources also enabled the Coast Salish to develop highly stratified societies. Social hierarchies were reinforced by cultural practices such as the potlatch, where surplus wealth was redistributed by elites in ceremonial gatherings that solidified their social status. As Grier points out, the ability to control key resource sites — such as salmon fishing locations — allowed some families to accumulate wealth and power. This led to a clear division between elites, commoners, and slaves.

The behavioral ecology of the Coast Salish extended far beyond simple resource extraction, encompassing complex social and economic strategies that allowed them to thrive in a resource-rich environment. Through kinship-based alliances and trade networks, coastal tribes maintained social cohesion and managed environmental variability, including managing large swaths of inland crops. These resources gave coastal tribes a significant advantage over inland freshwater groups, leading to unequal trade exchanges and the subjugation of inland tribes.

This dynamic of resource exploitation created internal socio-economic imbalances, as coastal elites reinforced their power and prestige through their dominance over resource-poor inland tribes. While this form of resource-based exploitation was characteristic of the Coast Salish, it foreshadowed the more rigid and racialized systems of chattel slavery that would later be imposed through European colonization, where individuals were commodified as property and permanently stripped of their freedom and rights.

SETTLER SYSTEMS AND STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY

The arrival of European settlers in the Pacific Northwest, beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, marked the beginning of a profound transformation in the social, economic, and environmental landscape of the region. As Cole Harris, a renowned historical geographer, details in his book The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change, European colonization imposed new systems of land ownership and resource extraction that displaced Indigenous peoples and fundamentally altered their relationship with the land.

Harris's work focuses on how colonial forces reshaped the geography and socio-economic structures of Indigenous communities, leading to the dispossession of their traditional territories and resources. Harris’s analysis of the colonization of British Columbia reveals how Indigenous resource management systems, which had been developed over millennia, were systematically dismantled and replaced by European notions of private property and capitalist resource exploitation.

The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, including the Coast Salish, relied on communal access to resources, particularly salmon fishing grounds. Control over these resources was a crucial element of their social and political organization. However, as European settlers arrived, they imposed new territorial boundaries and claimed ownership over key resource areas, such as rivers and forests. The imposition of colonial land policies eroded Indigenous control over their traditional territories, leading to the displacement of Indigenous peoples from the most productive fishing sites and hunting grounds.

Harris’s work highlights the environmental degradation that came with European settlement. The introduction of intensive logging, fishing, and agricultural practices by settlers led to the over-exploitation of resources that had once been sustainably managed by Indigenous societies. Salmon populations, which had been the lifeblood of Coast Salish society, were drastically reduced by the construction of dams and the depletion of spawning habitats. The environmental changes wrought by European settlers not only disrupted the ecological balance of the region but also undermined the socio-economic systems that had sustained Indigenous peoples for generations.

The loss of control over their lands and resources had profound social consequences for the Coast Salish and other Indigenous groups. As Harris notes, the colonial imposition of new economic systems — rooted in the extraction of natural resources for profit — displaced Indigenous peoples from their traditional economies and marginalized them within the emerging capitalist order. This dispossession of Indigenous lands and the environmental destruction that accompanied European settlement prophesied the global dynamics of resource exploitation that would come to define modern systems of trade and capitalism.

GLOBAL GREED AND GEOGRAPHIC GRAB

The dynamics of resource control and dispossession seen during European colonization are reflected in today’s global economic systems. World-Systems Theory, developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, a prominent sociologist and economic historian, explains how wealthier core nations dominate peripheral regions by extracting their resources and labor. This global division of labor, where core nations exploit the natural resources and workforce of less developed regions, perpetuates global inequalities—a system rooted in colonial practices and still evident today.

Trade agreements like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) highlight these core-periphery dynamics. NAFTA, implemented in 1994, aimed to increase trade between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico by reducing tariffs and promoting economic growth. However, the benefits were unevenly distributed, with the U.S. and Canada, as core nations, reaping most of the profits, while Mexico, a peripheral nation, became vulnerable to economic and environmental exploitation. This mirrors the power imbalances between coastal and inland Indigenous tribes, where coastal elites controlled key resources and exerted dominance over less powerful inland groups.

NAFTA’s impact on Mexico’s agricultural sector illustrates this exploitation. Industrial agriculture, particularly in crops like corn and avocados for export, expanded under NAFTA. U.S. and Canadian corporations capitalized on Mexico’s cheap labor and weak environmental regulations, resulting in significant environmental degradation. This includes soil depletion, overuse of water, deforestation, and pollution from pesticides and fertilizers. Large-scale farming operations prioritize profit over sustainability, depleting natural resources and harming local ecosystems.

The environmental damage is compounded by severe social consequences. Small-scale Mexican farmers struggle to compete with the rise of large agribusinesses, leading to widespread displacement. Many are forced to abandon their land and migrate to urban areas or across the U.S. border in search of work. This displacement mirrors the historical marginalization of Indigenous peoples during European colonization, where resource loss left communities economically vulnerable and socially marginalized.

NAFTA’s exploitation of Mexico exemplifies the core-periphery dynamics described by Wallerstein. Core nations extract resources and labor from peripheral regions, reinforcing global inequalities. Mexico, economically marginalized within the global system, provides cheap labor and raw materials to wealthier nations while bearing the brunt of environmental and social costs.

Much like Indigenous peoples displaced by European settlers, Mexico remains trapped in a global system of resource extraction and dependency, a legacy of exploitation that continues to shape the world today.

The story of the Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest reminds us of how deeply we can connect to the land, each other, and the resources that sustain us. For millennia, these societies thrived by adapting to their surroundings, developing diverse ways to live in balance with the environment. Their ability to nurture the land and build lasting communities offers important lessons for the challenges we face today.

As we confront climate change, inequality, and environmental collapse, these ancient strategies of cooperation and sustainability offer perspective. The Coast Salish thrived by embracing diversity—in localized resource management, relationship-based trade, and communities rooted in reciprocity. They show us it’s possible to prosper without exploiting the earth or one another.

Though exploitation existed in these societies, its legacy continues today. Resource monopolies and social hierarchies remain short-sighted responses to complex issues, with global profit-seeking leaving behind destruction — exhausted soils, polluted waters, and displaced people.

Still, there is hope. Indigenous strategies — focused on coexistence and sustainability—prove that a different path is possible. We need to stop seeing the earth as something to conquer and start caring for it, as these early societies did. Their adaptability and long-term focus on communal survival offer valuable lessons.

The core message is simple: survival is about finding balance — between people, communities, and the earth. By learning from these Indigenous societies, we can build a future that’s not just sustainable but flourishing, where diversity is our strength and guide forward.

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Hello Interactors,

We’ve entered fall here in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means — pumpkin spice everything, cozy sweaters, and … economics! That’s right, as the leaves change color (at least for those above 40°N latitude), it’s the perfect time to explore how the changing seasons mirror shifts in human interaction, from the flow of resources to the balance of power and progress.

This week, it’s time to cozy up with Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and James Watt —three names you probably didn’t expect to find together, but trust me, they make quite the trio. So grab your favorite fall beverage and join me on a journey through the Industrial Revolution, steam engines, and the forgotten role of moral feedback loops in economics.

Let's find out why balancing wealth and well-being is harder than finding a public restroom in an old university.

PURGING THE URGE FOR SYMPATHY

I needed to pee. More specifically, the stretch receptors in the walls of my bladder, which monitor the volume of urine inside, became activated. That sent sensory signals to the spinal cord and brain through my pelvic nerves. The pons in the brainstem (which includes a dedicated urination control center) processed this information in coordination with my prefrontal cortex, which allowed for conscious control over my decision to urinate.

It was a Sunday, and the campus was dead. Lucky for me a door was open, so I ducked in and began my search for a potty. The hallway was musty and narrow. The walls were old, but not as old as the 250-year-old structure surrounding it. There was no immediately visible sign for a restroom, but there were numerous potential doors and directions for me to attempt. As I approached one of them, the industrial grade door magically opened before I could even touch it. I cautiously inched forward half wondering if it would lock behind me.

Now inside another chamber further in the interior, I was met with another set of mysterious doors. I stepped inside another narrower hallway that twisted suddenly to a sign above another door that read WC. Whatever Potter-esque ghosts had guided me here clearly had sympathy. And so did my parasympathetic nervous system. It simultaneously signaled the detrusor muscle of my bladder wall to contract and my urethral sphincter to relax. I stood there in relief wondering if I could find my way out.

I was visiting the University of Glasgow, hoping to learn more about its famous figures, especially Adam Smith, whom I see as an important moral philosopher rather than just the “father of economics.” A few days later in Edinburgh, I tortured my family by leading them on a search for his gravestone. I was pleased to find it acknowledged his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where sympathy balances self-interest, as well as his more popular The Wealth of Nations. Unsurprisingly, the nearby tourist plaque focused only on Wealth of Nations, reflecting the emphasis on economics over his broader moral philosophy.

Adam Smith's moral philosophy was central to his life's work, with The Theory of Moral Sentiments being his enduring focus, while The Wealth of Nations but a brief but significant interlude. For Smith, economics was not just about market mechanics, but deeply intertwined with human nature, ethics, and the broader pursuit of communal well-being. He was more concerned with the motivations behind human actions than with the technical details of market forces, which came to dominate modern economics. Smith believed that the drive for self-betterment was not solely about personal wealth but was intrinsically linked to the well-being of communities, where self-interest was balanced by sympathy for others.

In Smith’s view, economic actions should be guided by moral virtues, such as prudence and justice, ensuring that individual efforts to improve one’s own life would ultimately contribute to the greater good of society. His exploration of economics was always part of a larger moral framework, where community engagement and ethical behavior were essential for both individual and societal progress.

Today, this broader moral context is often overlooked, but for Smith, economics was inseparable from philosophical inquiry into human behavior. He emphasized how the improvement of human life goes far beyond just the accumulation of material wealth.

MORALS MEET MARKET MANIPULATION

Many conservatives today may brush this interpretation as being too ‘woke’. Well, some eventually did back then too. As the British economy was expanding in Smith’s later years, he spoke in favor of capping interest rates with usury law. Usury is defined as the practice of making unethical or immoral loans that unfairly enrich the lender, often involving excessive or abusive interest rates. He believed exorbitant rates could lead to preying on the disadvantaged during a time of need resulting in growing disadvantages to the larger community.

Historically, many societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist communities considered charging interest of any kind as wrong or illegal. Smith was rooted in elements of Christian morals, but critics claimed he was being hypocritical. They pointed to examples in his publications, often out of context, of where he suggested government can’t know better than individuals about their own risks, costs, and benefits and thus should not meddle.

But even in The Wealth of Nations Smith was clear about three conditions necessary for an effective economy and with each he paired moral values also found in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

• State-Justice: Smith argued, “Commerce and manufacturers…can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice,” emphasizing the need for laws that ensure security and regulate excessive accumulation of wealth.

• Market-Liberty: He valued the “liberty of trade…notwithstanding some restraints,” while warning that monopolies “hurt…the general interest of the country.”

• Community-Benevolence: Rooted in moral sentiments, Smith believed in a shared commitment to community, where “many reputable rules…must have been laid down and approved of by common consent.”

Smith’s main usury critic was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, known for developing the philosophy of utilitarianism. A letter written to Smith in 1787 stated:

“Should it be my fortune to gain any advantage over you, it must be with weapons which you have taught me to wield, and with which you yourself have furnished me…I can see scarce any other way of convicting you of any error or oversight, than by judging you out of your own mouth.”

Bentham is most famous for the idea of “maximizing the greatest happiness for the greatest number” which helped promote legal reforms and social progress including welfare, equal rights for women, the separation of church and state, and the decriminalization of homosexual acts. But his ultimate focus of utilitarianism was on the practical outcomes of policies going so far as to develop mathematical formulas, called felicific calculus, to determine how much pleasure or pain must be inflicted in society to achieve the most happiness for the greatest number.

He was also a staunch economic expansionist, believing, as verified in his calculus, that it would expand good for most. It would be his student, John Stuart Mill, who expanded on but also critiqued Bentham’s utilitarianism later in the mid 1800s.

“I conceive Mr. Bentham's writings to have done and to be doing very serious evil. It is by such things that the more enthusiastic and generous minds are prejudiced against all his other speculations, and against the very attempt to make ethics and politics a subject of precise and philosophical thinking.”

Mill too was an expansionist, but acknowledged utilitarian reasoning could be used to defend exploitive and immoral colonial practices, including slavery. Mill believed slavery "effectually brutifies the intellect" of both slave and the enslaver and condemned the notion that certain races were inherently inferior and required subjugation.

Nevertheless, early colonizers and imperialists, as well as modern day neo-liberals weaponized elements of utilitarianism much like they did with The Wealth of Nations. They used (and continue to use) select elements to justify laissez-faire economics, deregulation, and the exploitation of labor, often prioritizing economic efficiency over moral considerations such as fairness and social equity.

For example, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both used utilitarian logic believing their policies would maximize overall economic growth and prosperity, benefiting society as a whole, even at the expense of rising inequality and social welfare. Their consequentialist approach justified market-driven reforms for a perceived greater good. Given today’s historic wealth imbalances, the result of that calculus is less than convincing.

Bentham also failed to convince Smith in that fateful letter, but to many it marked a notable shift in economic thinking and philosophy. Smith passed away three years after his exchange with Bentham and theoretical mathematical utilitarianism became the ultimate measure of right and wrong in governance and ethics in the UK and the US.

Smith’s morality, which emphasized moral virtues guiding economic actions, lost out to consequentialisms focus solely on outcomes, often justifying exploitation and suffering if it maximized societal gain and economic expansion for the expansionists — despite John Stuart Mill’s, and countless others, objections.

ECONOMIC ENGINES IN MORAL MACHINES

During Adam Smith’s lifetime, the Industrial Age rapidly emerged, transforming economies and wealth structures. Technological advancements, like the steam engine, fueled industrial capitalism, driving unprecedented economic growth and wealth accumulation. This focus on efficiency relied on maximizing productivity, whether through steam-powered machines, the exploitation of enslaved people, the working poor, or the displacement of Indigenous populations, prioritizing economic gain over human well-being.

In 1783, while Smith and Bentham were debating economic philosophy, James Watt was at the University of Glasgow, focused on regulating unchecked power —specifically the excessive speed of steam engines which he helped to invent. To prevent mechanical failures from fluctuating steam pressure, Watt invented the centrifugal governor. This device used weighted iron balls that spun outward with centrifugal force as the engine’s speed increased, raising a spindle that adjusted a valve to control steam flow.

By automatically reducing steam when the engine ran too fast and increasing it when it slowed, the governor ensured safe and efficient operation. Watt's invention, introduced in 1788, was in full production by 1790, paving the way for innovations like the first steam locomotive in 1804.

Watt's governor symbolized the need to impose limits on unchecked mechanical power, ensuring the engine operated within safe and efficient parameters. This technological innovation mirrored a broader theme of the Industrial Revolution — the balance between harnessing new, powerful technologies for economic growth while recognizing the risks of unregulated force, whether in machines or the rapid, unrestrained accumulation of wealth and resources in society. Watt’s governor was an early acknowledgment that unchecked power, whether mechanical or economic, could lead to instability and disaster.

"I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model of the subject I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. Otherwise, I do not."

– Lord Kelvin

Our brains also act as a kind of governor on the unchecked power of our kidneys, just as moral feedback loops serve as a governor on unchecked economic ambition. Like the stretch receptors in our bladder sensing when fluid volume builds, moral reasoning, as Smith envisioned, detects the social and ethical consequences of unfettered economic expansion. These signals, akin to the centrifugal force moving the governor's spindle, prompt individuals and society to regulate their actions, guiding decisions based not only on self-interest but on moral duty.

In contrast, Bentham's utilitarian calculus, much like a theoretical mathematical model divorced from natural systems, ignores these ethical feedback loops. By relying solely on abstract calculations of happiness and efficiency, Bentham's approach, like a machine operating without awareness of its environment, risks distorting human and social behaviors. Where Smith's model calls for moral constraints on economic behavior, much like the body’s signals to prevent overstretching, Bentham’s framework lacks the necessary human safeguards, leading to potential exploitation and imbalance in pursuit of theoretical utility maximization.

I do wonder what our economic systems would look like if, like our bodies, they were designed to self-regulate, ensuring that the pursuit of wealth doesn’t come at the expense of human well-being? Just as our bodily functions rely on natural feedback loops to maintain equilibrium, why have we allowed our economies to run unchecked, often leading to exploitation and inequality? Adam Smith believed in moral constraints on ambition, yet today, much of our economic thinking prioritizes growth without those safeguards.

As walked off campus that day, I reflected on Watt’s governor regulating the steam engine and the moral feedback loops Smith envisioned. I wondered if Smith and Watt made the metaphoric connection in their encounters with one another, maybe even on their way to relieve themselves in the very building in which I found myself. Perhaps they each happened on this connection in their own thought experiments, which makes me wonder why more don’t today? Surely there’s a morally sound way to balance personal gain with the greater good — a bit like public restrooms.

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Hello Interactors,

My daughter has developed a keen interest in synthesizers. She has even created illustrated characters named Morg and Snorf, inspired by keyboard brands like Korg and Nord. Recently, she borrowed an old Korg synthesizer and has begun composing her own music during what she calls, “Korg time”.

The evolution of electronic music has been remarkable since its inception, with even classical composers now embracing technology in their work. Notably, Ada Lovelace, one of the earliest computer programmers, foresaw in 1842 that computers would eventually be used for music composition — a prediction that has come to fruition.

The blending of acoustic music and computer-generated sounds prompts me to reflect on how we shape our environment, which in turn shapes us. This interplay mirrors the story of evolution: nature nurturing nature ad infinitum.

However, I wonder if technology as we know it today will ever truly integrate into the fabric of nature. Will we see human-like robots or robot-like humans? What if technology is already embedded within nature, and we are on the brink of learning to program it just as we would a computer?

Let’s find out…

MAN OR MACHINE?

“Are we not men?” This was a question presumably posed to and by members of the band DEVO who masquerade as part human and part machine. The answer by the humorous humanoids was “We are Devo!”. This question and answer became the title of their first album in August of 1978. It served as both a declaration of their band name, DEVO, but also as a rhetorical question that questioned humanity during the early rise of digital technology and its perceived, and actualized, dehumanization.

DEVO is an abbreviation of the term de-evolution. The band’s founding member, lead singer, and keyboardist, Mark Mothersbaugh had come across a 1924 pamphlet produced by Rev. B.H. Shadduck titled “Jocko-Homo Heavenbound” which critiqued, often humorously, Darwinian evolutionary theory.

“Jocko-Homo” translates to Ape-Man which refers to human’s evolution from apes. The critique is born out of teleology — the belief organisms are the design of a Christian god…and may be subject to evolutionary decay. Some claimed that by not adhering to the moral precepts of strict forms of Christianity, like dancing or drinking alcohol, that you could pass along devolving genes to your children. As a society, it could lead to a backwards slide of humanity, a devolution.

As art students at Kent State, Mothersbaugh and co-founding member and friend Gerry Casale were mostly drawn to the satire and comedic illustrations in ‘Jocko-Homo’. But the book’s premise came to the fore when they witnessed the killing of student war protesters in 1973. It made them wonder if perhaps humans really were devolving. After all, the Ohio National Guard had acted more like killing machines, not thinking or feeling humans. They seemingly failed to ask themselves, “Are we not men?”

Mothersbaugh and Casale had already begun experimenting with guitar laden punk rock when Mothersbaugh saw Brian Eno perform a synthesizer solo with the band Roxy Music. He’d heard plenty of synth solos from other bands of the 1960s and 70s, but no one played it like Eno — bending and twisting electronic knobs and dials like guitarists and singers bend strings and larynx muscles. Eno sounded and dressed like he’d been transported from the future or another planet.

Just a few years later, Brian Eno became the producer for DEVO’s first album, “Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo!”. The album included the song “Jock-Homo” which featured short bursts of monkey sounds Eno synchronized with the machine-like beat of the song. Much like acts of the time, like Roxy Music and David Bowie, DEVO leveraged stage theatrics to convey their message. Their performances featured matching futuristic outfits, often with their red signature energy dome hats. Their choreographed robotic movements reinforced a cyborg-like identity serving as a visual critique of modern society's mechanization.

As AI and robots of today have captured the attention of a global society seemingly in decay, it may sound cliché to say, but they, and their contemporaries, were ahead of their time. While I don’t believe we are devolving, I do think DEVO accurately portrays, both theoretically and practically, a blending of man and machine that may just be part of developmental evolution — though perhaps not exactly as Darwin had envisioned.

Interestingly, DEVO could not have known their band name would become part of a branch of evolutionary biology, called Evo-Devo, or evolutionary developmental biology. That abbreviated term emerged in the early 1980s, perhaps inspired by DEVO.

GEOGRAPHY GUIDES GROWTH

Evo-Devo, which evolved from 19th-century embryology, explores how the development of an organism grows and matures from a single cell into a fully formed adult. It considers how cell division, their differentiated specialization for specific functions, the development of the resultant organism’s shape, and body structures and organs shape evolution.

Early thinkers like Karl Ernst von Baer and Ernst Haeckel recognized how species shared similar early developmental stages but then differentiated at later stages. The genetic underpinnings of this wouldn't be fully understood until much later. Darwin recognized these genetic developments as potential drivers of evolutionary change, but it took the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s — which focused on genetics and natural selection — to realize these ideas.

By the 1970s, the discovery of mutation genes like Hox genes (which control the body plan of animals) reignited interest in the connection between development and evolution. This research demonstrated how small tweaks in developmental processes could lead to dramatic changes in form. In the 1990s, Evo-Devo solidified as a field, with researchers like Sean B. Carroll emphasizing gene regulation’s critical role in shaping life’s diversity.

Today, Evo-Devo has expanded, embracing genomics and epigenetics to explain how organisms evolve through the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, reflecting a broader and more dynamic vision of evolution. In a sense, DEVO’s fusion of human and machine echoes these evolutionary dynamics, where both biological and technological systems evolve through reconfiguration and integration, creating emergent complexity that Darwin could not have imagined.

While Darwin spent years observing the interplay between biology and the physical environments of the Galápagos and beyond, he also could not have fully anticipated the extent to which physical forces directly influence biological development and shape natural selection.

Physical forces play a crucial role in shaping the development of complex biological structures. Mechanical stress, for instance, influences how cells behave during growth and regeneration. Cells respond to tension and pressure in their environment through mechanotransduction — where physical signals are converted into biochemical ones — allowing tissues to adapt to their surroundings.

This process is essential, for example, for the simple healing of a small cut to the complex formation of organs where precise force patterns ensure proper development. Similarly, physical stressors like fluid dynamics and gravity are critical in determining the structural features of organisms. In mollusks, for example, the formation of their shells is heavily influenced by the mechanical forces exerted by water currents and the mollusk’s own movements.

These physical inputs guide how calcium carbonate is deposited, shaping the unique curvature and strength of their shells. These examples highlight how environmental forces and biological development are deeply intertwined, driving evolutionary change through the interaction of physical and genetic processes.

This view aligns with the work of researchers like Michael Levin, who propose that environmental cues, including bioelectric and biochemical signals, play a crucial role in guiding the development and behavior of organisms. Michael Levin is a pioneering figure in the field of developmental biology and regenerative medicine, where his groundbreaking work explores how organisms use bioelectric signals to guide growth, regeneration, and even behavior.

His research has expanded our understanding of how cells communicate beyond traditional biochemical and genetic pathways, showing that electrical signals between cells play a critical role in shaping an organism’s development. Levin, and his collaborators, has demonstrated how manipulating these bioelectric signals with computer programs, they can reprogram biological processes — enabling, for example, the regeneration of complex structures like limbs in animals.

This represents a major shift in biology, as it challenges the conventional view that genetic blueprints alone dictate development, highlighting instead the role of bioelectricity as an under appreciated but vital component of life’s regulatory networks. In other words, genes can be thought of as hardware and they communicate, collaborate, and compete through bioelectronic circuitry, or software.

BLURRING BOUNDARIES, REDEFINING LIFE

Michael Levin's research, and others, emphasize that biological systems — whether single cells or complex organisms — operate through networks of bioelectrical, biochemical, and biomechanical signals, processing information much like computers. Cells communicate and make decisions through these signals, allowing them to respond to their environments. In this way, living organisms already function as computational entities, capable of performing sophisticated tasks typically associated with artificial systems.

Levin’s vision extends into synthetic biology, where organisms might be engineered to function like programmable devices. By manipulating bioelectric and cellular signals, scientists could design organisms capable of performing specific tasks, responding to commands, or adapting their behavior, effectively merging biology with computation. This concept could, for example, blur the distinction between biological pets and programmable machines, imagining a future where living systems are fully customizable.

This integration of biology and technology is further reflected in the development of soft robotics and biohybrid systems, where machines incorporate biological tissues for enhanced sensory and adaptive functions. Levin's work on bioelectricity supports the idea that these biological machines could operate through naturally occurring computational processes, challenging traditional distinctions between organic life and artificial intelligence.

Clearly these developments raise profound ethical questions, and Levin is the first to say it. It poses many questions about the nature of intelligence, the potential for sentient machines, and the rights of biologically-based computing systems. But these developments could also help advance some of our most pressing health problems.

Including in the brain. There’s already a brain grown in a petri dish that can learn to play Pong. Called organoids, these are lab-grown, miniature models of human organs, developed from stem cells, can replicate structural and functional characteristics of actual organs.

Brain organoids, in particular, mimic basic aspects of brain architecture and neural activity, allowing researchers to study development, disease, and neurological functions in controlled environments. These "brains in a dish" have advanced to the point where they can exhibit learning behaviors, like playing Pong.

In this experiment, a brain organoid was connected to electrodes, which allowed it to interact with a simplified version of game. Over time, the organoid learned to play the game by modulating its neural activity in response to feedback from the game environment. This groundbreaking demonstration revealed the potential of organoids not only for studying brain function but also for creating neural systems capable of learning and adapting, pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and bioengineering.

Such advancements highlight the possibilities of merging biological neural systems with computational tasks, a direction that may influence both neuroscience research and the future of AI. I wonder if DEVO ever imagined their man-machine themes and robotic humanoid movements would have emerged, in experimental form, in their lifetime.

DEVO and their contemporaries didn’t just create music; they engineered an evolutionary shift in sound that mirrored both cultural and biological processes. By blending analog instruments with emerging technologies like synthesizers and drum machines, their work reflected the modularity featured in Evo-Devo, where biological traits evolve through the recombination of existing genetic modules.

Just as Evo-Devo shows how small adjustments in developmental pathways lead to novel evolutionary outcomes, DEVO’s music was a synthesis of tradition and innovation, where new soundscapes emerged from reconfiguring the familiar all influenced by the culture and environment in which they exist. This creative evolution parallels biological processes, where complexity arises not linearly but through recursive adaptation and innovation often resulting in sudden unexpected leaps.

Much like geography’s dynamic role in shaping biological evolution, DEVO’s sound was also shaped by external forces — cultural, technological, and industrial. In biology, physical environments like mountains, rivers, and urban landscapes impose selective pressures that drive adaptation, and similarly, DEVO’s music arose at the intersection of human creativity and technological advancement.

These external forces didn’t serve merely as a backdrop but as active, reshaping elements, much like how geographic isolation on islands drives rapid speciation. The adaptability of organisms to urban environments mirrors how DEVO adapted the rigid precision of machines into organic, expressive art, blending the mechanical with the human, much like how species blend with their changing habitats.

This fusion of man and machine is now emerging in the cutting-edge field of synthetic biology, where organisms are engineered to function like programmable devices. In the same way that DEVO’s music blurred the lines between human creativity and machine precision, synthetic biology allows for living systems to be designed with programmable traits, merging the biological with the technological. Maybe Morg and Snorf will not just be 3D models on a 2D screen, but real bio-sythentic musical pets that invent and collaborate on music together — and with us.

These biohybrid systems, where living organisms can perform tasks traditionally associated with machines, further illustrate the evolution of complexity through reconfiguration. Whether in music or existence, the distinctions between what is natural and what is artificial are growing more ambiguous, illustrating the continuous evolution driven by adaptation, creativity, and the interaction with outside forces.

References:

Fortner, Stephen. "Devo: The Masters of Subversive Synth Rock Return." Keyboard, 1 Sept. 2010, https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_keyboard-sep10.html.

Wanninger, Andreas, and Tim Wollesen. "The Evolution of Molluscs." Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 6 (2018): 1-22. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6378612/.

Conversation with ChatGPT on intersections between Evolution, Geography, and Biological Computing. September, 2024. https://chatgpt.com/.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s been awhile. I’ve been off getting our kids settled at college…including a transfer to Los Angeles. And I may have also been seduced by the lazy days of summer.

After dropping our son in LA, my wife and I took some time to return to Santa Barbara where we first met. I was reminded of how uniquely beautiful that place is. It’s also host to a unique collection of physical geography. And while it mostly enjoys a cool, calm environment, it can also endure bouts of destruction and renewal. A bit like all of us.

Let’s reflect, shall we…

MIGRATIONS, MOUNTAINS, AND MEMORIES

Traversing the globe dropping offspring is as old as humanity. As far as we know, early hominins like Homo erectus first stepped out of Africa two million years ago. The oldest human skeletal remains outside of Africa to date were found in Eurasia (now the country of Georgia) and are 1.8 million years old. These waves of migrations were likely driven by changes in climate, resources, societies, and technologies — the same factors driving migration today.

Our oldest kin dispersed widely across Eurasia, reaching as far as Southeast Asia. Some may have even used primitive boats to navigate to and between islands. This all set the stage for later migrations of other hominins, including Homo sapiens, as they spread across globe over the next million years.

I was reflecting on this on a hike my wife and I recently took in the foothills of Santa Barbara (where we had our first date 34 years ago!). The Santa Ynez Mountains were uplifted during the late Miocene (23.03 million years ago) to early Pliocene (2.58 million years ago) due to the tectonic interactions between the Pacific and North American plates. This exposed a complex layering of ancient marine and terrestrial sediments that were deposited over millions of years in a marine basin stretching from current day central valley of California to Northern Mexico.

These sandstones, shale, and conglomerates are revealed along the trails, cliffs, ridges, and valleys we traversed, all formed by folding, faulting, and fanning of eroded debris. The mountains continue to be pushed upward at a rate of 1 to 4 millimeters per year due to the ongoing compression between the tectonic plates along the dynamic San Andreas Fault — the same fault that originally formed them millions of years ago.

The Miocene epoch, with its warmer and more humid climate, supported dense forests of subtropical and temperate species in the Santa Ynez Mountains. As tectonic activity uplifted the region, new habitats emerged, setting the stage for diverse vegetation to develop. This period laid the groundwork for the ecosystems that would later evolve as the landscape continued to change.

By the Pliocene, global cooling led to drier conditions, favoring the transition from these lush forests to the more arid-adapted plant communities found today. The chaparral, oak woodlands, and coastal sage scrub we hiked through are products of this shift. These plants adapted to the region's famous Mediterranean climate, characterized by hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, and further shaped by the ongoing geological forces at work in the area.

The resultant Santa Ynez Mountains significantly influence the weather patterns in Santa Barbara by acting as a barrier to the Pacific Ocean's marine air. Unlike much of the California coast, the Santa Barbara area faces south. During the summer, these south facing mountains trap the marine layer — a cool, moist air mass that forms over the ocean—leading to fog and low clouds along the coast. This marine layer helps keep temperatures in Santa Barbara cooler than in areas further inland, providing a mild and comfortable summer climate. Additionally, in winter, the mountains enhance orographic lift, causing moist air blown from the south to rise, cool, and condense, resulting in increased rainfall on the windward side of the range and benefiting the coastal regions. I recall one brisk winter morning in Santa Barbara in 1990 when frost appeared in the shadows on the roads and snow dusted the peaks of the Santa Ynez mountains.

However, these mountains also create a rain shadow effect on their leeward side, where descending air becomes warmer and drier, leading to less precipitation. This topographical influence also contributes to the occurrence of sundowner winds—warm, dry winds that descend from the mountains into Santa Barbara. These winds can cause rapid temperature increases and lower humidity levels, sometimes creating critical fire weather conditions. My wife, then girlfriend, and I ran a 5k in 1991 that was overcome with smoke from fire stoked by these sundowner winds.

BLAZE, BURST, AND BLOOM

Similar winds, Santa Ana winds, stoked a more and recent severe fire, the Thomas Fire, in 2017. These winds form east of the Sierra Nevada mountains over inland deserts and west towards the coast. Hot and dry winds channel through mountain passes and canyons, gaining speed as they descend across Southern California — and they can amplify even the smallest fire. The Thomas Fire was one of the largest wildfires in California history burning over 280,000 acres of wildlife and more than 1,000 buildings. Firefighters in Montecito, the northern-most destination, battled for days to save homes and lives.

This left big chunks of the Montecito foothills charred. As crews worked to clear debris over the next month, the area was hit with a torrent of rain. While rainfall in Montecito was relatively minimal on the morning of January 9th, 2018, rainfall further up the mountain, enhanced by the mountain’s orographic lift, was more severe. Residents were caught off guard as waves of water gained speed through canyons and creeks picking up charred debris and uprooting trees loosened by saturated soil.

These post-fire debris flows, which included mud, rocks, and tree branches, reached heights of up to 15 feet speeding an estimated 20 miles per hour. The disaster resulted in 21 fatalities, two missing persons, and about 163 people hospitalized. Property damage exceeding $177 million, emergency response hit at least $7 million, and another $43 million was slated for cleanup and restoration.

Six years later, hiking in these same hills, we saw evidence of county crews still restoring and re-shoring the foothills. We also saw evidence of plants re-emerging. Some of which are descendants of the same ancient plants that emerged in the Pliocene in the very same soil we were walking on.

Hiking, and sometimes running, through the recovering foothills of Montecito, I was struck by how much this landscape mirrors a story of resilience that extends far beyond these hills and long before our time there. Over the previous two weeks my wife and I had crisscrossed the USA, east to NYC and west to LA, dropping our kids far away — modern migration with echoes of long ago, still alive still today.

Like other humans that moved across vast distances, we and our kids are adapting to new environments and new stages in life. Just like the chaparral and black sage of these foothills.

The plants that now re-emerge from the scorched and scarred earth are descendants of those that first appeared in the Pliocene. They use fire to propagate and regenerate in challenging terrain. Chaparral species, like black sage, evolved to thrive in this fire-prone environment. Fire-stimulated germination allows seeds to lye dormant until they’re exposed to heat which triggers germination. Sprouts emerge from underground lignotubers, which are complex energy-storing structures that quickly regenerate new shoots — even amidst scorched soil. Serotiny, another adaptation, turns seed cones into popcorn like capsules that only open when exposed to fire's heat giving them a head start on invasive competition. These strategies enable chaparral plants to not only survive but to capitalize on the aftermath of wildfires and hillside scraping floods.

In the charred and healing soil beneath our feet, I saw the enduring connection between past and present, nature and nurture — a reminder that our journeys, like those of the landscapes we inhabit, are shaped by the unyielding push and pull of time — of adaptation, and resilience. Just as the chaparral plants of the Santa Barbara foothills have evolved mechanisms to thrive after fire, our kids, too, will develop new strategies to adapt and flourish in their new environments. In the face of life's inevitable challenges, they will learn to not only survive but to rise stronger, just as the ancient mountains of Santa Barbara continue to do. All the while, the landscapes beneath our feet continue their unbroken cycle of destruction, renewal, and growth amidst ever evolving climates, resources, societies, and technologies.

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Hello Interactors,

Flying provides a great opportunity to catch up on books and podcasts, but it also brings feelings of guilt. My recent trip likely contributed about 136 hot air balloons' worth of CO2 to the atmosphere. Should I feel guilty, or should the responsibility lie with airlines, manufacturers, and oil companies? We all contribute to global warming, but at least our destination was experiencing an unusually cool July. However, globally, the situation is very different and worsening faster than expected. What’s to be done?

Let’s dig in.

CLIMATE CONUNDRUMS CONFOUND CALCULATIONS

There are two spots on the planet that are not affected by climate change, and I recently flew over one of them. It’s a patch in the ocean just off the coast of Greenland that our plane happened to fly over on a family vacation to Scotland. The other is a small band around the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. I likely won’t be visiting that one.

I learned this on the plane listening to a podcast interview by the physicist Sean Carroll with climate scientist and Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt. Gavin has been at the forefront of climate science, spearheading efforts to quantify Earth's climatic fluctuations, develop sophisticated models for projecting future climate scenarios, and effectively communicate these findings to the public and policymakers.

In this discussion, they talked about the methods currently employed in climate research, while also offering insights into the anticipated climatic shifts and their potential impacts in the coming decades. Gavin is known for bridging gaps between complex science and accessible information. I’m writing this piece to bridge some of my own gaps.

For example, there’s often mention that climate change has created more extreme swings in temperature — that the weather is increasingly varying from extreme heat to extreme cold. In statistics, this is called variance. Some argue this variance may be hard for us to detect because temperatures have been shifting — a phenomenon known as shifting baseline syndrome.

Gavin says there’s more to this question than people realize. He notes that it is relatively straightforward to detect changes in the mean temperature because of the law of large numbers. Temperature varies across three dimensions - latitude, longitude, and altitude. We can calculate an average temperature for any two-dimensional slice of this 3D space, resulting in a single representative value for that area.

This video is a conceptual simulation showing a 3D volume of temperature readings (warmer toward the ground and cool toward the sky). The 2D plane ‘slices’ the cube averaging the values as it encounters them and colors itself accordingly. Source: Author using P5.js with much help from OpenAI.

With enough data, it's clear that there has been a significant warming trend almost everywhere on Earth since the 1970s. Approximately 98% of the planet has experienced detectable warming, with a couple exceptions like the ones I mentioned.

But determining changes in the variance or spread of temperatures is more complex. Calculating variance requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire distribution of data, which requires a larger dataset to achieve statistical confidence. Schmidt points out that while we have enough data to confirm that the distribution of temperatures has shifted (indicating a change in the mean), we do not yet have sufficient data to conclusively state that the variance has increased.

Recent temperature spikes tell this story well. For the last decade or more, many climate scientists have been confident in predicting increased global mean temperatures by looking at past temperatures. The global mean has been predictably increasing within known variances. But in 2023 their confidence was shaken. He said,

“Perhaps we get a little bit complacent. Perhaps we then say, ’Okay, well, you know, we know everything.’ And for the last 10 years or so, [that’s been] on the back of both those long-term trends, which we understand…”

He goes on to explain that they’ve been able to adjust temperature predictions based on past trends and the cyclical variances of El Nino and La Nina. Scientists have boldly claimed,

“’Okay, well, it's gonna be a little bit cooler. It's gonna be a little warmer, but the trends are gonna be up. You know, here's the chance of a new record temperature.’ And for 10 years that worked out nicely until last year. Last year, it was a total bust, total bust like way outside any of the uncertainties that you would add into such a prediction.”

How far outside of known uncertainties? He said,

“…we were way off. And we still don’t know why. And that's a little disquieting.” He added, “…we ended up with records at the end of last year, August, September, October, November, that were, like they were off the charts, but then they were off the charts in how much they were off the charts. So, they were breaking the records where they were breaking the records by a record-breaking amount as well. So that's record breaking squared, if you like, the second order record breaking. And we don't really have a good answer for that yet.”

There is ongoing research into why and some have speculated, but none of them add up.

For example, we’re currently nearing a solar maximum in the sun's 11-year cycle which increases solar irradiance, but that small increase doesn't fully explain the observed changes. Other factors may be at play. For instance, there have been significant shifts in pollution levels in China, and the shipping industry has transitioned to cleaner fuels, which, as hoped, could be influencing climate patterns.

However, Schmidt notes that the quantitative analysis of these factors hasn't yet matched the observed changes. Identifying potential contributors to climate variations is one thing, but precisely quantifying their impacts remains a challenge. Schmidt said climate and planetary scientists hope to convene in December to share and learn more, but the extreme shift remains concerning.

CALCULATING CLIMATE'S COUNTLESS COMPONENTS

The amount of data required to model the climate is daunting. In a separate TED talk, Schmidt reveals that understanding climate change requires considering variables that span 14 orders of magnitude, from the microscopic level (e.g., aerosols) to the planetary scale (e.g., atmospheric circulation). These accordingly have their own orders of magnitude on a time scale, from milliseconds of chemical reactions to weather events over days or weeks to long term changes over millennia, like ice ages or long-term carbon cycles.

Climate models must integrate processes across these scales to accurately simulate climate dynamics. Early models could only handle a few orders of magnitude, but modern models have significantly expanded this range, incorporating more detailed processes and interactions.

Schmidt highlights that climate models reveal emergent properties—patterns that arise from the interactions of smaller-scale processes. For instance, no specific code dictates the formation of cyclones or the wiggles in ocean currents; these phenomena emerge naturally from the model's equations.

But there is a staggering amount of data to model. And it all starts with the sun.

The sun provides 99% of the Earth's energy, primarily in the visible spectrum, with components in the near-infrared and UV. This energy interacts with the atmosphere, which contains water vapor, greenhouse gases, ozone, clouds, and particles that absorb, reflect, or scatter light.

The energy undergoes photolytic reactions. Photolytic reactions are chemical reactions that are initiated or driven by the absorption of light energy which breakdown molecules into smaller units. We couldn’t breathe without it. The earth’s ozone is decomposed into oxygen in the atmosphere through these reactions, which is initiated by sunlight — especially in the stratosphere. This too must be tracked as the Earth rotates, affecting sunlight exposure.

Upon reaching the ground, some sunlight is reflected, by snow for example, or absorbed by oceans and land. This influences temperatures which is then radiated back as infrared energy. This process involves complex interactions with clouds, particles, and greenhouse gases, creating temperature gradients that drive winds and atmospheric motion. These dynamics further affect surface fluxes, water vapor, cloud formation, and associated chemistry, making the entire system highly intricate. And this doesn’t even remotely begin to approach the complexity of it all.

To simplify Schmidt says they capture what they can in a column roughly 25 kilometers high and wide to study the inherent physics. Most of which he says,

“…is just vertical. So, the radiation you can think of as just being a vertical process, to very good order. Convection is also just a vertical process. So, there's a lot of things that you can do in the column that allows you to be quite efficient about how you solve the equations.” Schmidt adds that “each column [can] sit on a different processor, and so you can do lots of things at the same time, and then they interact via the winds and the waves and those kinds of things.”

He said most of the calculations come down to these two sets of equations: Euler and Navier-Stokes. Euler equations are a set of partial differential equations in fluid dynamics that describe the flow of non-viscous and fluids, absent heat exchange. Named after the Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, these simplify the analysis of fluid flow by neglecting viscosity and thermal conductivity, focusing instead on the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy.

Navier-Stokes, named after the 19th century French civil engineer Claude-Louis Navier and the Irish physicist George Gabriel Stokes, is based on Euler’s work but adds viscosity back into the equation. Schmidt says these equations are sometimes used to measure flows closer to the surface of the earth.

This video is a conceptual simulation showing a 3D volume of vectors (randomly changing direction and magnitude) with particles entering the field of vectors. Each particle (e.g. dust, rain, aerosol) gets pushed in the direction of the vector each encounters. You can clearly see the emergent swarming behavior complex adaptive systems, like our atmosphere, can yield. Also present are the apparent challenges that come with measuring and predicting these outcomes. Source: Author using P5.js with much help from OpenAI.

These complex computational models are inherently approximations. They are validated against observations but remain simplifications of reality. This inherent uncertainty is a critical aspect of climate science, emphasizing the need for continuous refinement and validation of models.

And while human-induce climate change denialists like to say the climate models are wrong and not worth considering, Schmidt has a clever retort,

“Models are not right or wrong; they are always wrong, but they are useful.”

NAVIGATING NATURE'S NEW NORMAL

Many wish climate change predictions had the kind of certainty that comes with basic laws of physics. While there are indeed efforts in complexity science to identify such laws, we’re still in the foothills of discovery on a steep climb to certainty.

For example, to even achieve the current level of climate prediction took approximately 30 years of research, involving multiple methods, replication, and more sophisticated physical modeling. This led to accurate calibration techniques for the paleothermometers that measure ice cores which reveal temperatures from around the planet dating back three million years.

While there is some empirical certainty in this — derived from the periodic table, fundamental laws of physics, or observed correlations from spatially dispersed ice core samples — recent extreme variations in global temperatures give reason to question this certainty. These relationships were based on spatial variations observable today, but failed to account for change over time, which behave very differently.

Schmidt says,

“…it turns out that the things that cause things to change in time are not the same things that cause them to change in space. And so empirical relationships that are derived from data that's available rather than the data that you need can indeed lead you astray.”

It begs the question: how far astray are we?

We know over the last one hundred years or so the planet has warmed roughly an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is a number that has been contorted in the media to mean some kind of threshold after which “something” “might” happen. But Schmidt cautions there is no way to know when we hit this number, exactly, and it’s not going to be obvious. Perhaps it already pushed passed this threshold, or it may not for another decade.

He says,

“we are going to continue to warm on the aggregates because we are continuing to put carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Until we get effectively to net zero, so no more addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, temperatures will continue to climb. The less we put in, the slower that will be. But effectively, our best estimate of when global warming will stop is when we get to net zero.”

Getting to net zero involves significant and radical changes in energy production, industrial processes, and consumption patterns. Moreover, it will require an unprecedented comprehensive and coordinated worldwide effort across all sectors of the economy, institutions, and governments.

This is true even for hypothetical and speculative climate engineering solutions like injecting sulfates into the atmosphere in attempts to cool the planet. According to Schmidt, not only would this require cooperation across borders, so long as we keep spewing emissions into the atmosphere, we’d be forever trying to cool the planet…for eternity or at least until we’ve exhausted all the planet’s fossil fuels.

It’s hard to imagine this happening in my lifetime, if ever. After all, climate change is already disrupting and displacing entire populations and we’re seeing governments, and their citizens, becoming increasingly selfish and isolationist, not collaborative.

As Schmidt admits,

“We're not on the optimum path. We're not on the path that will prevent further damage and prevent the need for further adaptation. So, we're going to have to be building climate resilience, we're going to have to be adapting, we're going to have to be mitigating, and you have to do all three. You can't adapt to an ever-getting-worse situation, it has to at some point stabilize.”

Schmidt says he derives no joy in telling people

“that the next decade is going to be warmer than the last decade and it was warmer than the decade before that.” He says, “It gives me no joy to tell people that, oh yeah, we're going to have another record-breaking year this year, next year, whenever. Because I'm not a sociopath. I'm a scientist, yes, but I'm also a person.”

Schmidt's words resonate deeply, reminding us that behind the data and predictions are real people—scientists, citizens, and future generations—all grappling with the weight of our changing world. As we stand at this critical juncture, we're not just passive observers but active participants in Earth's unfolding story, a story that's leaving its mark on nearly every corner of our planet.

The butterfly effect, as meteorologist Edward Lorenz proposed, isn't just about tornados in Texas being set off by a chain of events from the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil; it's a powerful metaphor for our collective impact. Each of us, in our daily choices and actions, creates ripples that extend far beyond our immediate sphere. In a world where only two small patches—one off Greenland's coast and another near Antarctica—remain untouched by climate change, our individual actions carry profound significance.

The path to net zero isn't just about grand gestures or technological breakthroughs. It's about millions of small, intentional actions coalescing into a force powerful enough to alter our trajectory. As we face the challenges ahead, let's remember that our individual agency, when combined, has the potential to create tsunamis of change, even in places we may never visit ourselves.

In the end, it's not just about preserving a habitable planet — it's about preserving our humanity, our connection to each other and to the Earth that sustains us. As we navigate this critical decade and beyond, let's carry with us the knowledge that every action, no matter how small, contributes to the larger narrative of our planet's future. We are all butterflies, and in a world where climate change-free zones are becoming as rare as a family vacation to Antarctica, our wings have never mattered more.

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Hello Interactors,

I recently read an intriguing article about unexpected forms of life thriving deep within the Earth's crust. These discoveries are revitalizing environmental theories and processes that mainstream science has long tried to dismiss—yet I've been exploring them over the past few summers. While working outside, I realized that some of these processes are unfolding right under my nose...and possibly even inside it!

On that note, this might sound a bit awkward, but...

Let’s dig in!

WORLDWIDE WEATHERING WHISPERS

I’m behind on my pressure washing. This can have detrimental effects here in the predominantly damp Northwest as moss spores, tiny lightweight travelers, are lifted and lofted by the wind’s wings until they land on damp concrete. A new home for moss to roam.

Upon contact, the spores absorb moisture and germinate, developing into a protonema — fine lines of sprawling verdant vines. As the structure crawls through the creviced concrete an anchored lace unfolds. Atop it grows a carpet of green and gold, down below tentacles grab hold.

The rhizoid roots anchor mounding moss, absorbing food and water nature has tossed. As the concrete crumbles into nutrient stores, the soft moss blossoms with chromophores. Over time, atop the luscious mountains and rocky moistened pours, the wind releases more lofting spores.

It turns out the contrasting boundary between soft squishy plants and hard concrete is as pronounced as the divisions between the disciplines of biology and geology. But advances in Earth System Science are starting blur these boundaries, as integrative science tends to do. Like moss softening concrete.

My expansive moss colonies, part of the plant kingdom, house communities of tiny microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and microscopic animals like rotifers and tardigrades. Many of these communities have symbiotic relationships with moss. For example, some bacteria promote moss growth through the production of the plant growth hormone auxin using specific enzymes in plant tissues.

As the moss and its associated microbes grow and expand, they can penetrate small cracks or pores in the concrete, potentially widening them and exposing more surface area to weathering processes. This can be accelerated by certain bacteria and fungi that produce organic acids as metabolic byproducts. These acids can slowly dissolve or weaken calcium carbonate and other minerals found in concrete.

The biogeochemistry contributing to rock weathering and sediment formation reveals the intricate connections between biological processes and geological phenomena. At massive space and time scales they can not only affect the meteorological conditions above ground, but also the layers of sediment below ground.

In a recent New York Times piece, Ferris Jabr, author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life” reveals how

“Within the forest floor [of the Amazon rainforest], vast symbiotic networks of plant roots and filamentous fungi pull water from the soil into trunks, stems and leaves. As the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon drink their fill, they release excess moisture, saturating the air with 20 billion tons of water vapor each day. At the same time, plants of all kinds secrete salts and emit bouquets of pungent gaseous compounds. Mushrooms, dainty as paper parasols or squat as door­ knobs, exhale plumes of spores. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen grains and bits of leaves and bark into the atmosphere. The wet breath of the forest — peppered with microscopic life and organic residues — creates conditions that are highly conducive to rain. With so much water vapor in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, clouds quickly form. In a typical year, the Amazon generates around half of its own rainfall.”

Below ground, he describes work by Earth scientist Robert Hazen and colleagues.

“When Earth was young, microbes inhabiting the ocean crust were likely dissolving the basalt with acids and enzymes in order to obtain energy and nutrients, producing wet clay minerals. By lubricating the crust with those wet byproducts, the microbes may have accelerated the dissolution of both mantle and crust and their eventual transfiguration into new land.

The geophysicists Dennis Höning and Tilman Spohn have published similar ideas.

They point out that water trapped in subducting sediments escapes first, whereas water in the crust is typically expelled at greater depths. The thicker the sedimentary layer covering the crust, the more water makes it into the deep mantle, which ultimately enhances the production of granite.

In Earth’s earliest eons, micro-organisms and, later, fungi and plants dissolved and degraded rock at a rate much greater than what geological processes could accomplish on their own.

In doing so, they would have increased the amount of sediment deposited in deep ocean trenches, thereby cloaking subducting plates of ocean crust in thicker protective layers, flushing more water into the mantle and ultimately contributing to the creation of new land.”

LOVELOCKS LIVING LOOPS

This kind of Earth System Science has been given a name by one of first contributors, James Lovelock — geophysiology. Lovelock describes geophysiology as a systems approach to Earth sciences, viewing Earth as a self-regulating entity where biological, chemical, and physical processes interact to maintain conditions suitable for life. It integrates various scientific disciplines to understand and predict the behavior of Earth's systems, aiming to diagnose and prevent environmental issues by considering the planet as a cohesive, self-regulating system.

This concept, rooted in Lovelock’s initial Gaia hypothesis, emphasizes the feedback mechanisms that stabilize Earth's environment, akin to physiological processes in living organisms. Gaia is named after the primordial Greek goddess who personifies the Earth. This naming occurred in the context of Lovelock developing his ideas about Earth as a self-regulating system in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Lovelock had been working on methods to detect life on Mars at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led him to consider how life might be detected on a planetary scale. This work eventually evolved into his hypothesis about Earth functioning as a complex, self-regulating system maintained by the community of living organisms.

As Lovelock was formulating these ideas, he was looking for a suitable name for his hypothesis. It was during this time that William Golding, Lovelock’s neighbor and renowned author of "Lord of the Flies", suggested using the name "Gaia".

In Greek mythology, Gaia is considered the ancestral mother of all life and one of the first beings to emerge from earliest chaotic stages of Earth's formation. She is often depicted as a maternal, nurturing figure who gave birth to the Titans, the Cyclopes, and other primordial deities. Gaia is associated with fertility, the earth's abundance, and the cycle of life and death.

In ancient Greek religion, Gaia was worshipped as the Great Mother and was sometimes referred to as "Mother Earth." That title, and her influence, extends beyond Greek mythology, perpetuating the concept of Earth as a living, nurturing entity — a concept that has resonated in various cultures for Millenia.

Elements of the Greek notion of Gaia likely have roots in earlier Middle Eastern knowledge. Several ancient cultures had earth goddesses that predate or are contemporaneous with the Greek Gaia. For instance, in Mesopotamia, Sumerian mythology offers Ki is the earth goddess, and in Akkadian mythology, there is Ninhursag.

It turns out “Mother Earth” birthed similar concepts all around her. Egypt had Isis, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) had Cybele, India’s Hinduism had Parvati and Durga, Pre-Columbian American cultures featured Pachamama, Celtic cultures had Danu and Brigid, while Norse mythology features Frigg and Freyja.

In 1960’s and 70’s America, “Mother Nature” and “Gaia” emerged among some environmentalists as New Age mystical beliefs associated with alternative spiritualities. Lovelock’s decision to use the word “Gaia” thus made him and his ideas a target among many Western trained scientists and his Earth system concepts endured harsh criticisms.

It’s worth mentioning that when Alexander Humboldt put forth similar ideas in his book "Cosmos" (first published in 1845), taking a holistic view of nature, exploring connections between various Earth systems and life forms, he was heralded as the greatest scientist of his time. Even Charles Darwin took a copy of Cosmos with him on his famous Beagle voyage. Humboldt, like Lovelock, uniquely and successfully integrated knowledge from diverse fields like astronomy, geology, biology, meteorology, and even art and literature.

But the specialization, reductionism, and quantification of dominant Western science distanced itself from these holistic approaches viewing them as too spiritual and outdated. By the twentieth century, the growing New Age interpretation of Gaia often personified the Earth as a conscious, living entity, drawing on both Lovelock's scientific hypothesis and ancient mythological concepts. Many modern religions and philosophical concepts about the origin of life still incorporate anthropomorphic elements, such as the idea of a creator with human-like qualities or intentions.

These mainstream images can lead to engrained tendencies to see humans and other living organisms as being born:

• into a world as separate entities from the world they inhabit

• onto a physical plane as a separate, tangible reality

• unto which they individually acquire and consume energy to live and grow.

This perspective sees living beings as somewhat separate from their environment, rather than as integral parts of a larger system. It’s a view consistent with traditional Western science that emphasizes reductionist approaches, breaking systems down into component parts. But it contrasts with more holistic perspectives, such as those found in ecological theories like Geophysiology, other branches of Earth System Science, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge which see earth’s components, including humans, as inseparable parts of their environments.

This was confirmed at the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration, signed by the Chairs of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP), World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and DIVERSITAS at the 2001 ‘Challenges of a Changing Earth’ conference. The declaration concluded:

“The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components, with complex interactions and feedbacks between the component parts.”

Integrative Western scientists have now amassed enough data to recognize that living matter is born:

• into a living, interconnected Earth system,

• onto a dynamic web of relationships,

• unto which we belong as integral participants, exchanging energy and matter in a continuous cycle of life and growth.

In this view, my moss colonies and their microbial companions emerge as vital threads, weaving together the living and non-living elements of our planet. These intricate communities, from the tiniest bacteria to the visible expanse of moss, exemplify the self-regulating nature of Earth's systems that Lovelock envisioned.

As they slowly transform concrete through their metabolic processes, they participate in the larger process of biogeochemical cycling. They influence not only my cinderblock walls and concrete surfaces, but they also contribute to the broader patterns of weathering, sedimentation, and even microclimate regulation.

This interplay between the microscopic and the global, the biological and the geological, embodies the essence of Humboldt’s and Lovelock’s theory — a planet alive with interconnected processes, where every organism, no matter how small, plays a role in maintaining the delicate balance of life.

In this living system, my moss and its microbiome, like me and the symbiotic communities of microorganisms in me and on me, are not mere passive inhabitants, but active agents in the ongoing story of Earth's evolution. Together we demonstrate the profound interconnectedness that defines our planet's unique capacity for self-regulation and adaptation.

Now where’s my pressure washer?

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Hello Interactors,

We’re fully into Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the earth tilts toward the sun, Interplace tilts toward the environment. And what a crucial moment to do so. Just last week, the Supreme Court made sweeping decisions that could unravel over fifty years of environmental legislation, threatening to plunge us into chaos. This upheaval comes precisely when our world’s natural boundaries desperately need regulatory stability and security to make any meaningful progress in combating global warming.

Let’s dig in…

POLLEN, POLLUTING, AND POLITICS

I recently returned from the Midwest visiting family. I like looking out of the airplane window at the various crop patterns from state to state. Trying to discern which state I was over; I was reminded of a corny Midwest joke.

Why do Iowa corn stalks lean to the east? Because Illinois sucks and Nebraska blows. Folks in Illinois tell the same joke, but it’s Ohio that sucks and Iowa that blows. You get the idea.

The truth is the wind does commonly blow from west to east oblivious to state borders. It sends whatever it wants across the border — clouds, dust, seeds, pollen…pollution. And if there’s money to be made, borders become porous or disappear altogether.

Those rivalrous corn jokes mirror an economic reality. Bordering states all compete for federal subsidies and access to markets — mostly across international borders. Access to these markets can be impacted by corn pollen drifting from one state to another.

With the widespread adoption of genetically modified (GMO) corn varieties, there’s potential for contamination of non-GMO corn fields by pollen from GMO corn fields on state lines. One study suggest cross-pollination could be detected up to 600 feet away from the source, although counts dropped off rapidly beyond 150 feet.

But the more pressing concern isn’t pollen drift, but pollution drift. As part of the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a “Good Neighbor” rule designed to reduce air pollution that crosses state lines. It requires "upwind" states to reduce emissions that affect air quality in "downwind" states which can cause significant health problems.

Last week, on June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court's ruling in Ohio v. EPA temporarily blocked this rule.

Fossil fuel companies and industry associations celebrated the decision as a win, viewing it as a check on the EPA's regulatory power. Meanwhile humans with a heart and lungs worry the decision leaves upwind states free to contribute to their neighbors' ozone problems for years.

It's worth noting that this is a temporary stay, not a final ruling on the merits of the case. The legal challenge will continue in lower courts, with the possibility of oral arguments as soon as this fall. But this ruling can also be seen as part of a pattern of the Supreme Court's conservative majority expressing skepticism towards federal regulatory authority, especially in environmental matters.

Take, for example, the ruling that came the very next day on June 28, 2024. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, curtailed EPA, and other executive agencies', power by overturning the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council precedent. This shift endangers numerous regulations and transfers authority from the executive branch to Congress and the courts. Chevron has been a cornerstone in American law, cited in 70 Supreme Court and 17,000 lower court decisions.

The case began with fishermen challenging two similar rulings, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. These involved a 1976 law requiring herring boats to carry federal observers to prevent overfishing. A 2020 regulation mandated boat owners to pay $700 daily for the observers. Fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island, supported by conservative groups opposing the "administrative state," sued, arguing the law didn't authorize the National Marine Fisheries Service to impose the fee.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported the fisherman case was brought

“by Cause of Action Institute, which says its mission is ‘to limit the power of the administrative state,’ and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which says it aims ‘to protect constitutional freedoms from violations from the administrative state.’”

Liptak also reports these institutions are funded by Charles Koch, the climate change denying billionaire who has long supported conservative and libertarian causes.

It's curious how the Environmental Protection Agency came from a conservative libertarian and the first most dishonest president in my lifetime, Richard Nixon. The EPA will likely be obliterated should the least trusted former president get reelected — Felonious Trump.

GORSUCH'S GRIM GREEN GUTTING

I wrote about the formation of the EPA in July of 2021. 👇

“There was growing concern entrusting those very institutions responsible for the destruction of the environment with devising schemes to save it. The country’s air, water, and land were being smothered in waste. Something needed to be done. So, on July 9th, 1970, 51 years ago today [in 2021], the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was proposed by Republican President Richard Nixon.

This agency was intended to focus on short-term fixes targeting violators of the law, so Nixon appointed Assistant Attorney General, Bill Ruckelshaus, to the post. Ruckelshaus promptly ordered a steel company to stop dumping cyanide into Cleveland, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River. It was so polluted that it had caught fire at least thirteen times. Ruckelshaus also banned the use of DDT.”

Ruckelshaus served from 1970 to 1973 when he left public office to become a private environmental attorney. He was replaced by Russell Train who served as the second EPA administrator under Nixon and continued under another Republican President, Gerald Ford. During his tenure, he supported the expansion of EPA's international affairs, approved the catalytic converter to reduce automobile emissions, and implemented key environmental legislation.

Then came Douglas Costle, the EPA’s third administrator, serving under the Democrat President Jimmy Carter. His administration faced significant environmental challenges, including the Love Canal disaster and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. One of the most notable achievements during his tenure was the creation of the Superfund cleanup program by Congress.

In 1981, Republican President Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch Burford, current Supreme Court Judge, Neil Gorsuch’s mother. She was the first woman to hold the position but was forced to leave in 1983 amid growing controversy and concern.

Gorsuch slashed the EPA's budget by 22%, eliminating 3,200 personnel and reducing the agency's workforce by 30%. This raised concerns about the impact on environmental programs and staff morale.

Foreshadowing her son’s actions, she rolled back environmental regulations, like clean air and clean water rules and other environmental protections and decreased environmental enforcement cases. The number of cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters declined by 79%, and cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice dropped by 69%.

Her approach to policymaking led to open conflicts with career EPA employees and several congressional committees investigating allegations of mismanagement of the Superfund program under her leadership. The House voted to cite her for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed records related to the program[5].

Reagan couldn’t escape the fall out and forced her to resign in 1983, less than two years into her tenure. He then asked Ruckelshaus to return to his duties as head of the EPA. Ruckelshaus promptly fired most of her leadership team and got back to work protecting the environment running the EPA until 1985.

Nearly fifty years after being appointed by a Republican president to become the country’s first EPA administrator in 1970, fighting for environmental justice at the international, federal, state, local levels – and in the private sector – Ruckelshaus passed away at his home in my neighboring town, Medina, Washington in 2019.

And here we are, five years after his passing, with a Supreme Court intent on returning to the policies of Anne Gorsuch Burford with the help of a son who holds a grudge and a host of billionaire activists intent on institutionalizing libertarian law.

Neil Gorsuch not only joined the majority in a 6-3 decision to overturn the Chevron deference, he wrote a 33-page concurring opinion emphasizing the importance of this ruling. In his concurrence, Gorsuch stated,

"Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss."

A cornerstone of environmental protection became a tombstone.

Perhaps hinting at his mother’s tenure and committing to his originalist interpretations of the constitution, Gorsuch argued that the decision simply means the courts will continue do ‘as exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.’[6]

Gorsuch, like his mother, has long been a vocal opponent of the government siding with the protection of the environment, which he believes grants significant regulatory leeway to federal agencies over the judiciary. This opinion clashes with President’s Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), George H. W. Bush (R), and Clinton (D) who all enthusiastically supported the need for agency oversight.

CONGRESS, COURTS, AND CLIMATE CHANGE

This ruling is seen as a significant shift in administrative law, potentially curtailing the power of federal agencies and changing how regulations are interpreted and enforced in the United States. Which is an administrative attitude that began with President George W. Bush.

His administration refused to advance a meaningful strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and opposed committing the United States to the Kyoto Protocol. He and his administration increased hostility towards climate science and resistance to significant policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

He prioritized economic considerations over environmental concerns, focusing on the potential costs of environmental policies. This approach marked a shift from the environmental legacy of his father and those before him, moving away from bipartisan cooperation on environmental issues that are unthinkable in today’s congress.

Optimists look at this ruling and claim it puts pressure on congress to write more specific and actionable legislation obviating the need for agency oversight or a need to go to court. The ruling could also clean up isolated cases of corruption between businesses and some government agencies.

But the EPA was created in part because members of congress lack the necessary scientific knowledge needed to write actionable legislation. Also, advances in science tend to outpace notoriously long legislative procedures. Besides, many members of congress today, especially on the Republican side, would rather not sponsor or partner on environmental legislation seeing it as a partisan issue.

I’m not advocating for more top-down government bureaucracy or believe federal agents necessarily always act in good faith, but this shift would transfer significant power from regulatory experts in agencies to judges. Given that many current Supreme Court judges tend to favor corporate interests, this shift likely weakens necessary regulatory oversight. Agencies, despite their imperfections, often have specialized expertise and are designed to protect public interests. Therefore, this transfer of authority to the courts may ultimately benefit large corporations at the expense of effective regulation and public welfare.

Looking back, the creation and support for the EPA reflected a broader trend in the tumultuous late 1960’s. The unease of the Viet Nam war coincided with the publishing of Rachel Carson’s literary environmental blockbuster, “Silent Spring”. The collective mood of the country yearned for solutions from environmental science to address complex environmental issues and their impacts on society. The creation of the EPA was a response to decades of rampant and highly visible pollution indicating that complex environmental problems required specialized agencies to address them.

But CO2 and other fine particulates and gasses wafting in the wind aren’t as visible as the smog of the 1970s. Nor are the effects of ozone depletion and acid rain of the 1980s. Now, with an activist Supreme Court with no term limits intent on weakening protective powers, we’re forced to breath the shifting winds of regulatory authority and environmental policy. In search of a view that embraces intention, action, and dynamism, I’m inclined toward Bruno Latour’s geophilosophy.

Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) underscores the agency of both human and non-human actors. It’s an approach that embraces the interplay between various entities—from legal bodies and industries to natural forces like wind and pollution—that shape our environmental reality.

The recent Supreme Court decisions, viewed through history and Latour’s lens, reveal a complex network where power is constantly negotiated and redistributed. The winds of the Midwest, carrying pollen or pollution across borders, symbolizes the intricate and often invisible connections that bind us. This includes regulatory changes that cross state and federal lines, impacting ecosystems and communities alike.

In this interconnected world, Latour reminds us that environmental and social issues cannot be compartmentalized or tackled in isolation. The rise of the Keeling Curve, recording raw and relentless increases in atmospheric CO2, serves as a stark reminder of the cumulative impact of countless actors and actions across the globe. It highlights the necessity for a holistic approach to environmental stewardship, recognizing the entangled nature of our existence.

Embracing Latour’s pragmatic realism, we best foster adaptive and resilient strategies, acknowledging the multiplicity of actors involved in environmental governance whether we like it or not. This perspective urges us to move beyond simplistic binaries of nature versus society, instead advocating for a collaborative effort to address the many crises we face. Until there’s a national bi-partisan rallying cry that unites divisions, we best integrate diverse voices and acknowledge the agency of all actors. Only then, in theory, can we better navigate the complexities of our environmental and social challenges and strive for a more sustainable, albeit ever changing, future.

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Hello Interactors,

The lengthening northern days have unleashed verdant chaos in my yard and it’s challenging my desire for order. Some unruly growth demands surrendering control, embracing life's rhizomatic entanglements — an invitation to honor multiplicity over singularity, relation over individuality, and emergence over stasis.

Let’s dig in…

FERN FRENZY IN FULL FORCE

Those skinny unattractive immigrants are invading. They’re nudging their way through every nook and cranny stealing resources and opportunity from those already here. Before long, they’ll be taking over the place. I’m talking about Leptinella squalida (Derived from the Greek "leptos" meaning slender and the Latin “squalid” meaning unattractive). That is the scientific name for a New Zealand native ground cover commonly referred to as ‘Brass buttons’ and it’s taking over my garden.

Leptinella squalida is rhizomatous. It sends rootlike horizontal shallow subterranean stems — a rhizome — in a multitude of unpredictable directions. At various intervals in its journey, it progressively produces small nodules that send whisker roots below while sprouting shoots vertically to the surface to form miniature fern-like fronds — sometimes green and other times ‘brass’ colored. Once a year it produces a yellow ‘button’ blossom that can send seeds aloft leapfrogging the host to colonize another territory.

I planted it in a shady moist area of my small backyard after ripping out a grass lawn. Liptinella squalida makes an even carpet that can withstand a fair bit of foot traffic, making it an attractive alternative to grass. Unfortunately, other plants can’t withstand is aggressive propagation, starving them of light and nutrients. That’s exactly what this exponentially expanding rhizome is doing to the slower growing, less aggressively sprawling Sedum rupestre 'Angelina' — a variety I also helped colonize from Western Europe.

I suspect strict immigration laws should be applied to my little rambunctious rhizomatous island ferns. Last week I eradicated an entire section at the border with a shovel and then carefully extracted the spindly rhizomes from the starved roots and foliage of the ‘Angelina.’ I’m contemplating building a subterranean Trump-like wall to resist the invaders. I may even perform widespread extirpation and dig it all up — especially given the primary section of Brass buttons have also been colonized. They are slowly being overtaken by another aggressive invasive species — clover.

I didn’t plan for this, but I did create the conditions for it to occur. In place of a grass lawn — which offers nothing to ecology in any shape or form — I planted a variety of low growing ground covers, sedums, and clumping ornamental grasses. Many of these ground covers have now intermingled. Some are more dominant in areas than others forming a diverse kaleidoscope of height, color, and texture.

There’s little strict cartesian geometric control I can apply to this tufted tapestry without hard physical barriers. And even then, their airborne spores can gleefully fly where the wind may carry them — oblivious to any tyrannical terrestrial territorial triangulations I may map in my head.

Rhizomes are their own kind of experimental map. They randomly route with their roots. Their genes map the way as MicroRNAs modulate their sway. Meanwhile, subterranean phytohormones signal route initiation and elongation in a coordinated but random multi-directional, non-linear physical cartographic network.

Rhizomic networks have no real beginning or end. They make connections in a non-hierarchical, decentralized way without a single origin or terminus. It is in a continual emergent state of being in the middle of having been made and becoming something new. There is no dualistic hierarchical parent/child branching that dominates Western mental images of hierarchical networks — like a family tree or even a real tree where a trunk sprouts limbs with branches that terminate with leaves. Rhizomatous networks defy rational Cartesian logic.

I’ve been reflecting on the tension I’m experiencing as I wrestle and reason with my garden. On the one hand, I’m drawn to the top-down control of crafting a particular order and aesthetic as an amateur landscape architect. The same desire explains my affinity for urban and transportation planning and design…and I suppose my three decades of user interface design. I like attempts at bringing clarity to complexity.

Modern urban planning tries to achieve the same thing. Urban planning has historically relied on hierarchical models characterized by centralized control and top-down implementation. These traditional approaches often use structural or generative frameworks to shape and represent urban spaces. Emphasizing coherence and order, urban planning typically adheres to mapped zoning regulations and legally controlled growth patterns. The focus is usually on achieving defined end-states or visions, imposing order through marginated space with bordered zones and predetermined paths dictated by urban transportation planning policies.

The same can be said for the planning of countries and states. Colonial powers imposed structured urban plans to assert control and organize territories. Their maps, laws, police, and military impose order through variegated spaces at larger scales characterized by bordered zones and throughways. This reflects a continuity in the desire to manage and control urban growth and development of entire regions and even continents.

FRICTION FORMS FLUID FRAMEWORKS

The rhizome rejects arborescent structures, favoring non-linear, decentralized networks and connections, incompatible with traditional models. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's influential "A Thousand Plateaus" introduced the "rhizome" philosophical concept - a non-hierarchical, decentralized network characterized by multiplicity, heterogeneity, and non-linearity. Challenging Western metaphysics, it proposed rethinking reality as a dynamic, interconnected assemblage, embracing a rhizomorphic approach of continuous transformation and new connections over linear thinking.

Insisting on mapping reality through open-ended experimentation rather than tracing existing structures, the concept embraces spontaneous ruptures forming new connections within emergent cultural networks resembling rhizomes. Having no beginning or end, existing in a constant state of becoming, it resists linear urban narratives and stagnant pure identities. Encouraging "lines of flight," the rhizome breaks from constraints of traditional thinking. The urban as a "smooth space" occupied by the rhizome contrasts sharply with hierarchies of Cartesian power and order.

Human cultures also show evidence of embracing this mode of thinking. They too form new connections regardless of imaginary borders. Jean-Loup Amselle is a French anthropologist known for his studies on African societies, cultural hybridization, and postcolonialism. He introduced the concept of "branchement" (branching) to describe the fluid and interconnected nature of cultures that remind me of what I’m witnessing in my back yard.

Amselle's analysis of the N'ko movement in West Africa, which aimed to "debranch" the Manding culture from Arabic and European influences, offers parallels to the Palestinian context and others like Sudan and Ukraine.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination and cultural preservation resists perceived Israeli/Western dominance by asserting Palestinian identity and drawing on global solidarity networks. It shows how local struggles are part of broader global narratives surrounding identities and cultures.

This conflict fuels identity-based movements reflecting Amselle's "identity wars" brought on by globalization and strict mapped borders. Amselle's framework rejects fixed identities, emphasizing the interconnections shaping Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, and Arab identities. The concept of "branchement" highlights the complex entanglements of histories and global forces in the Palestinian conflict, challenging simplistic narratives of cultural purity and separation.

The same desire for purity and separation is what led me to ponder border control in my own backyard. I’m even contemplating extermination. All because I saw friction at a border where one plant was not ‘plugging in’ to the existing root network, but ‘debranching’ another plants by taking over their lives and land.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s known for her interdisciplinary work on globalization, ecology, and the Anthropocene, and for her acclaimed 2005 book "Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection,"

She writes,

"Cultures are continually co-produced in the interaction I call 'friction': the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference."

Tsing argues that global connections and universalizing projects like dominant forms of Western capitalism, science, and politics do not spread seamlessly but encounter friction and resistance when they engage with specific localities and cultures. These interactions produce new articulations and connections that challenge the universalizing claims of global forces. This, like Amselle, emphasizes the entanglement and co-production of cultures through these encounters.

These "zones of awkward engagement" or "cultural friction" are sites where universals collide with particular situations, producing unexpected outcomes and articulations. That’s what I witnessed between my “brass buttons” and “Angelina”.

“Zones of awkward engagement” and “cultural friction” exist at a city level too as immigrant populations integrate (“plug in” or branch) into established neighborhoods. This can create “cultural friction” as neighborhoods become “zones of awkward engagement”. Zoning and racial or socio-economic redlining are attempts at legal, cartographic, and cultural purity and separation that create awkward zones of friction.

But Tsing highlights the importance of collaborations and coalitions that emerge from these zones of awkward engagement. She says,

"Despite imperial standards for civil society, I have wandered into coalitions built on awkwardly linked incompatibilities."

These collaborations create new interests and ways of being, challenging the singularity of global forces and enabling practices of collaborative knowing and working.

PLANETARY PATHS, RHIZOME ROUTES

I’m starting to see that local urban frictions, be they down the street or in the streets of Cairo, Chicago, Caraco, or Cape Town, are complex entanglements of histories and global forces. They branch like rhizomes in local frictions of awkward engagement, but also branch to entire other parts of the world. My backyard is a reflection of this. I created a ‘branchement’ by planting plants native to vastly separated parts of the globe — New Zealand and Western Europe.

Neil Brenner is a critical urban theorist at the University of Chicago and Christian Schmid is a sociologist and urban researcher at ETH Zurich. They’re known for the influential concept of "planetary urbanization." They claim urbanization processes today are no longer confined to the traditional boundaries of cities, but rather extend across the entire planetary surface.

They argue the classic "city-centric" view is inadequate to capture the multiscalar and multiterritorial dynamics of contemporary urbanization.

Instead, they propose that urbanization today is a planetary phenomenon that cuts across the urban/rural divide and transcends the boundaries of individual cities or metropolitan regions. Urbanization unfolds through the constant production, transformation, and operation of socio-spatial configurations at multiple geographic scales, from the body to the globe.

This includes the urbanization of seemingly "non-urban" zones like oceans, deserts, and wilderness areas being operationalized and transformed through various urbanization processes. While cities remain vital arenas for urbanization processes, they are embedded within and co-constituted by broader planetary urbanization dynamics that extend far beyond their boundaries. They argue urban theory must move beyond the city as its primary unit of analysis and develop new frameworks, methodologies, and cartographies to grasp the multiscalar and multiterritorial nature of planetary urbanization.

This starts by recognizing the rhizomatic interconnections and interdependencies shaping urbanization at various scales, from local to global, and the diverse socio-spatial configurations and infrastructures that form the "urbanization fabric" across the planet. They argue that the "urban" is no longer a bounded condition but a generalized, planetary condition of socio-spatial transformation.

The rhizomatic approach emphasizes non-linear and decentralized networks. It offers a valuable framework for urban planning, ecological management, and cultural integration. And even my garden. Just as Leptinella squalida defies linear control in my garden, urban spaces and cultural landscapes resist traditional hierarchical planning. This perspective promotes adaptability and inclusivity, fostering environments that evolve organically and embrace multiplicity and spontaneous connections. They reject unfair dominance or ‘debranching’ or mechanisms by which dominant cultures or systems attempt to appropriate, assimilate, or subjugate other cultures or elements within their sphere of influence.

Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and plateau concepts critique cultural dominance and embrace multiplicity, diversity, and coexistence without imposing dominant structures. Applying these ideas to urban integration highlights the potential for hybrid solutions and collaborative networks that recognize fluid identities and dynamic cultural interactions. Amselle's "branchement" and Tsing's "cultural friction" emphasize productive tensions from encounters, challenging narratives of purity.

Randomly routing rhizomatous roots, their genes mapping the way, are like the informal settlements and migrant networks. Their sways are modulated by global flows of capital with labor signaling route initiation and elongation in random multi-directional, non-linear physical and virtual networks that reject cartographic convention. Ultimately, this rhizomatic approach aligns with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's concept of planetary urbanization by acknowledging the interconnected and multiscalar nature of urban and cultural processes. It calls for new frameworks to understand and address the complex socio-spatial transformations shaping our world. How do we move beyond hierarchical, top-down models that use structural frameworks to shape urban spaces through regulated mapped zones, centralized control, and predetermined paths?

Instead of aiming to impose order and coherence by striving to achieve defined end-state visions of bordered, marginated spaces, how might we embrace the interconnected rhizomatous roots and vines of the global urban interlacement — without one crowding out another? Maybe it’s time we accept the woven flows of cultures, resources, and infrastructures of the past — and the ever-emerging present middle of rhizomatous networks — made from interplace, the interactions of people and place.

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Hello Interactors,

In an era where Western leaders craft policies that oscillate between harsh border controls and selective humanitarian aid, our understanding risks being clouded by data-centric approaches. Through the lens of critical cartography, we see how enhanced data collection can reduce displaced individuals to mere numbers, obscuring their complex human stories behind cold statistics.

Insights into the disorienting effects of domineering multinational capitalism further illuminate how these data practices, though aimed at clarity, often mask the real experiences and struggles of those displaced.

I explore some contradictions in these policies—how they promise to protect yet perpetuate power imbalances, offering a guise of support while fundamentally failing to address the root causes of displacement.

Let’s go…

DISORIENTED BY DOMINANCE

The Dutch government recently took a giant political step to the right. Some say this is as far right as a democratically elected Dutch government has ever been. It’s probably the most intolerant since Hitler installed a Nazi occupation regime from 1940-1945 implementing racist policies which persecuted not just Jews but other minorities as well.

The Dutch government leaned right as recent as 2010-2012, when the right-wing politician Geert Wilders was Prime Minister. Wilders is now back in office, though not as Prime Minister, and has formed a coalition government seeking to implement racist immigration policies that echo an ugly past.

In one of his campaign speeches he said he desires a strict and harsh Netherlands where

"people in Africa and the Middle East will start thinking they might be better off elsewhere".

Wilders joins the ranks of intolerant European populists like Le Pen of France, Meloni of Italy, and Hungary’s Orban, using anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric as rallying cries. Meanwhile, here in the Americas, Biden and Mexico’s López Obrador have deported tens of thousands of migrants to Mexico despite known risks of kidnapping, extortion, and assault. Biden has been silent on the matter while López Obrador erodes democratic institutions by undermining judicial independence, demonizing critics, and shielding the military from accountability for abuses.

The EU practices its own repressive transactional diplomacy to evade human rights duties to asylum seekers and migrants — especially from Africa and the Middle East. While numbers fluctuated, there has been a significant overall increase in asylum seeker rates into EU countries since 2010 when Wilders first came to power. That surge was driven by conflicts like the Syrian war, which Western governments were complicit in intensifying, and broader regional instability — including detrimental environmental effects due to climate change.

The Syrian conflict triggered a surge in asylum applications to EU countries, peaking at over 1.2 million annually in 2015 and 2016. Following a dip between 2017 and 2020, applications rebounded to 962,160 in 2022, a 20% increase from 2021, with Germany receiving the most (243,800), followed by France, Spain, Austria, and Italy. From 2010 to 2022, EU asylum applications rose from approximately 259,000 to over 962,000, a near fourfold increase. The primary asylum seekers in 2022 were from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Venezuela, and Colombia.

It’s curious how fear of immigration coincides with declining EU fertility rates. The average number of children per woman in the EU was 1.46 live births in 2022, well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain population levels without migration.

It could be these politicians, and the populist rhetoric they spew, are suffering from a kind of globalist vertigo. As political theorist and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University, Frederic Jameson puts it,

“a profound sense of disorientation and inability to cognitively map their position within the larger global system of economic and social relations.”

As a Marxist, he pins this dilemma on “the immense complexity and abstraction of multinational capitalism.” A primary historical feature of global capitalism is indeed to offload deleterious effects of human labor exploitation and natural resource extraction to regions far from those privileged enough to enjoy the prosperity capitalism can yield. Pushing unwanted labor and development elsewhere is a kind of global “Not-In-My-Back-Yard.” Out of sight, out of mind.

This geographical and cultural distance mirrors the historical migration of freed slaves to the industrial North after the U.S. Civil War. Much like today, these migrants and their descendants faced (and continue to face) a starkly different world of affluence and encountering significant social and economic challenges. History illustrates how geographical and cultural distances can hinder societal understanding and integration, especially when newcomers seek better lives in regions of prosperity.

When those ‘distant others’ appear at the regional doorstep of relative opulence seeking a better life, it can be uncomfortable and disorienting to those who prefer to keep them ‘distant’. In the words of Jameson, it “transcends the individual's limited experiential sphere.”

What may be even harder to imagine is the ’experiential sphere’ most of these people inhabit or inhabited. Much attention is given to asylum seekers beyond their own borders, but most of those ‘distant others’ are forced or choose to stay within, or nearby, their own regions.

A DISPLACEMENT DILEMMA MAPPING THE MASSES

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's latest report reveals an unprecedented 75.9 million people were internally displaced across 116 countries in 2023, a significant increase from 71.1 million the previous year, driven primarily by escalating conflicts, violence, and disasters in various regions.

In terms of conflict and violence, the report notes a record high of 68.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), with the most affected regions being Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Colombia, and Yemen. These countries alone host nearly half of the world's IDPs. The report discusses specific conflicts such as those in Sudan and Palestine, which have led to massive displacement figures due to escalated violence.

Regarding disaster-induced displacement, the report records 7.7 million IDPs attributed to disasters by the end of 2023. It mentions that disasters triggered 26.4 million new displacements in 2023, with significant events occurring in China and Turkey due to severe weather events and earthquakes. The shift from La Niña to El Niño has altered global disaster displacement patterns, particularly affecting the number of people displaced by storms and floods across various regions.

The ’experiential sphere’ is unique as displacement contexts vary in different parts of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, heavily impacted by both conflicts and natural disasters, remains the most affected region, with increasing frequency and severity of these events. The Middle East and North Africa experienced more displacements, notably from the conflict in Palestine and disasters like earthquakes and floods. Europe and Central Asia saw a significant rise in disaster-related displacements, primarily from earthquakes in Turkey and other natural events, while the conflict between Russia and Ukraine dominated conflict-related displacements. East Asia and the Pacific had the highest global disaster displacements in 2023, with ongoing conflicts like Myanmar exacerbating the situation. South Asia, particularly Afghanistan, faced substantial displacements from both conflicts and natural disasters, with significant impacts on women and girls, highlighting the continuing challenges in the region.

The IDMC report emphasizes the complexity of displacement, where many individuals face multiple displacements due to recurring or simultaneous occurrences of conflict and disasters. It highlights the need for durable solutions and calls for improved data collection to better address needs and facilitate more effective response and recovery efforts. The report concludes with a call for increased visibility and support for IDPs to ensure more sustainable solutions to displacement, stressing the critical role of international cooperation and national governance in mitigating the impact of displacement.

Through a critical cartography lens the call for enhanced data collection risks reducing displaced people to mere data points, stripping them of their individuality and complexities. This data-centric approach, while valuable in assessing the scale and magnitude of suffering (including for essays like this), can lead to surveillance and control, masking the human experience behind numbers and charts.

Frederic Jameson’s critique of the modern world’s disorientation in the face of the negative effects of multinational capitalism also reflects how such data practices might obscure the truth more than illuminate. Jameson might contend that these efforts, while well-intentioned, still fail to construct an accurate mental map of those displaced. Without being on the ground with them, technologies like remote sensing, GIS, mapping, and imaging alone can’t represent an experience that can be cruelly embedded within larger socio-economic systems that contribute to their plight.

Instead of offering clarity, the accumulation of data might reinforce the power imbalances between those with power and money and those without.

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: GUIDING OR GOVERNING?

The push for international cooperation and governance, as advocated in the IDMC report, could be seen as a continuation of Western dominance under the guise of humanitarian aid. This can perpetuate a form of moral superiority, fostering dependency rather than empowerment, and embodying cultural imperialism that imposes Western values on diverse cultures.

Such humanitarian efforts are frequently designed to align more with the interests and visions of donors from those in wealthier countries, rather than addressing the actual needs of communities in poorer countries and regions. Furthermore, these aid practices can economically benefit the donor countries more than the recipients, sometimes tying aid to the purchase of goods and services from the donor country or using it as leverage to open markets in recipient countries.

The portrayal of aid in media typically emphasizes the generosity and heroism of donors while depicting recipients as passive and helpless. This only further distorts and perverts the complex socio-economic dynamics while undermining the agency of local communities.

These structures often propose top-down solutions that do not align with the needs or the agency of the displaced. They perpetuate a cycle where the root causes of displacement—often tied to the actions and policies of powerful nations—are inadequately addressed.

This critique aligns with Jameson’s observation of a global system where the affluent West remains disconnected from the repercussions of its policies on ‘distant others’, who are left to navigate the dire consequences of conflicts and climate change that are disproportionately caused by those in distant lands of prosperity.

It seems the challenges of addressing global displacement are not merely logistical or political but deeply ideological. What’s needed is a fundamental shift in how data is perceived and used and how international cooperation is structured, executed, and monitored. Only through transformative approaches can we hope to genuinely address the root causes and complex realities of displacement, ensuring solutions that are both just and effective.

Geert Wilders' resurgence signals a concerning trend where Western leaders adopt harsh anti-immigration and asylum policies, paradoxically coupled with a 'white savior complex' towards displaced people within their borders. They assert repressive border control, blocking humanitarian aid while projecting a narrative of benevolence through selective aid packages to 'distant others'.

Ironically, their military interventions, sanctions, and outsized climate change contributions exacerbate displacement crises, yet they deny resultant asylum seekers protection, claiming to 'save' their nations from this self-inflicted burden. Leaders across the spectrum from Biden to Wilders promote a narrative of moral superiority by mapping and surveilling the very displacement their policies precipitate.

This dual approach lays bare a profound hypocrisy at the heart of the Western response to global migration and displacement crises. It illustrates a cavernous disconnect between the root causes we perpetuate and the public stances of moral righteousness we profess on asylum and humanitarian issues.

In confronting this contradiction, we are called to a deeper reckoning — to evolve beyond paternalistic narratives and embrace an ethics of humility, context, and care. True progress demands forging genuine partnerships that respect local cultures, knowledge systems and self-determined priorities. It compels us to support sustainable, community-led development rather than perpetuating cycles of upheaval through military adventurism and plundering the planet's resources.

Only through such a reorientation — by taking full accountability for our complicity while deferring to the resilience and wisdom of those we have displaced — can we hope to transcend the white savior paradigm. In its place, we must cultivate an ethos of global solidarity, one which honors our shared humanity and the inherent dignity of all people, regardless of borders. For it is in this spirit of radical empathy that the path to lasting justice and healing can be found.

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Hello Interactors,

Biden’s recent reflective quip got me thinking about how European colonial doctrines like the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "civilizing mission," continue to justify the dominance over Indigenous peoples, including those in Papua New Guinea.

These lingering narratives not only influence contemporary struggles for self-determination, they also impact global politics and economic globalism. Join me as I unpack the complex interplay of decolonization, sovereignty, and the roles international actors, and their maps, play(ed) in shaping these dynamics.

Let’s go…

MAPS MARK MYTHS

Biden recently suggested his uncle was eaten by "cannibals". Reflecting on World War II war veterans, he said,

"He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea."

Military records show that his uncle’s plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea for reasons unknown and his remains were never recovered.

Papua New Guinea's (PNG) Prime Minister James Marape didn’t take kindly to Biden's remarks, stating that

"President Biden's remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such."

Marape reminded Biden that Papua New Guinea was an unwilling participant in World War II. He urged the U.S. to help locate and recover the remains of American servicemen still scattered across the country.

President Biden is a victim of depictions of "cannibals" in Papua New Guinea that are part of a deeply problematic colonial and post-colonial narrative still debated among anthropologists. These often exaggerated or fabricated historical portrayals of Indigenous peoples as "savage" or "primitive" were used to justify colonial domination and the imposition of Western control under the guise of bringing "civilization" to these societies.

During the age of exploration and colonial expansion, European explorers and colonists frequently labeled various Indigenous groups around the world as “cannibals.” These claims proliferated in PNG by early explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to shock audiences and underscore the perceived necessity of the "civilizing mission" — a form of expansionist propaganda.

European colonial maps like these served as vital weapons. They defined and controlled space to legitimize territorial claims and the governance of their occupants. In the late 19th century, German commercial interests led by the German New Guinea Company, expanded into the Pacific, annexing northeastern New Guinea and nearby islands as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. In response, Britain established control over southern New Guinea, later transferring it to Australia. After World War I, Australia captured the remaining German territories, which the League of Nations mandated it to govern as the Territory of New Guinea. Following World War II, the two territories, under UN trusteeship, moved towards unification as the Independent State of Papua New Guinea in 1975.

Today, Papua New Guinea is central to Pacific geopolitics, especially with China's growing influence through efforts like the Belt and Road initiative. This is impacting regional dynamics and power relationships involving major nations like Australia, the US, and China resulting in challenges related to debt, environmental concerns, and shifts in power balances.

The Porgera gold mine, now managed by a joint venture with majority PNG stakeholders, had been halted in 2020 due to human rights and environmental violations but is resuming under new management. While the extractive industries are largely foreign-owned, the government is trying to shift the revenue balance toward local ownership and lure investors away from exploitative practices. Meanwhile, Indigenous tribes remain critical of the government's complicity in the social, environmental, and economic disruption caused by centuries of capitalism and foreign intrusion.

SUPREMACY SUBVERTS SOVEREIGNTY

Early Western explorers used a Christian religious rationale, rooted in the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "civilizing mission" concept, to justify the subjugation and "taming" of Indigenous peoples in lands like Papua New Guinea. This doctrine deemed non-Christian peoples as lacking rights to their land and sovereignty, positioning European powers as having a divine mandate to take control.

The "civilizing mission" substantiated a European moral and religious obligation to convert Indigenous populations to Christianity, underpinned by a profound sense of racial and cultural superiority. Terms like "savages," "beasts," and "cannibals" were used to dehumanize Indigenous peoples and justify their harsh treatment, with the belief that this would elevate them from their perceived primitive state and save their souls, legitimizing the colonization process and stripping them of autonomy.

Indigenous peoples around the world continue to fight for their autonomy and right to self-determination. Papua New Guinea's path to self-determination has been fraught with the complexities of defining "peoples" and their rights to form a sovereign state. The concepts of state sovereignty and the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the context of decolonization, were significantly influenced by international leaders like Woodrow Wilson. (for more on how the U.S. was instrumental in drawing the boundaries for Ukraine and other European states, check out my 2022 post on how maps are make to persuade 👇)

He promoted national self-determination near the end of World War I with the dissolution of empires and the creation of nation-states, though initially focused on Europe. This idea was further developed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and embedded in the United Nations charter, helping to fuel global decolonization movements in the post-war era.

However, there are intrinsic tensions between the sovereignty of states and the rights of peoples to self-determine. The rise of the US and USSR as superpowers after WWII, both of whom (at least rhetorically) supported decolonization, put pressure on European nations to decolonize. But both powers also supported autonomous self-determination only if it did not infringe or threaten their own domination. This Cold War context further influenced decolonization as newly independent nations were often courted by both blocs in the global struggle for influence and access to resources.

Newly independent states, such as India and Israel, became vocal supporters of decolonization within the UN. Meanwhile, Arab countries in the Middle East, including founding UN members like Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, played pivotal roles in shaping the Arab response to regional issues, particularly the Palestinian question. Collectively, these nations have used their UN membership to influence international discourse and actions related to the region.

The momentum for independence became unstoppable in many regions, particularly in Africa and Asia. However, economic interests, often aligned with former colonial powers, continue to influence the trajectories of independent states. In PNG, the extensive involvement of multinational corporations in mining and resource extraction poses questions about economic self-determination, intertwining with political self-determination. The struggle for self-determination in PNG is an ongoing process of negotiation among internal groups, the state, and external actors.

President Biden's recent gaffe could be seen as another instance of insensitivity toward Indigenous peoples, rooted in a "civilizing mission" mentality. Perhaps these unconscious biases influence Biden’s actions regarding other Indigenous populations lacking rights to their land and sovereignty. This mindset echoes the historical justifications used by European colonial powers to subjugate and control Indigenous societies — especially across the country he leads.

In fact, the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s and 70s played a pivotal role in inspiring the International Indian Treaty Council, which advocated for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. Much of the legally binding language used in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the United States initially opposed but has since endorsed, was written in the original treaties drafted by the United States.

These efforts were instrumental in forming the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) established in 1975 to address the rights of the Palestinian people, particularly their right to self-determination. However, the United States has not supported the CEIRPP. Curiously, while Ukraine initially found solidarity with the Palestinian cause they left the council under Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s first Jewish president.

These shifting geopolitical alliances reflect the ongoing complex dynamics surrounding the Palestinian issue. Microsoft (who opened its first R&D office outside of the U.S. in Israel in 1991) recently announced a $1.5 billion investment in a United Arab Emirates artificial intelligence holding company G42. This suggests capital interests are also shifting towards Arab countries.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been leading negotiations with Palestinian contingents, other Arab states, and Western corporate leaders putting pressure on Israel to consider a future that includes Palestinian independence, self-determination, and autonomy.

It's worth mentioning from 2018 to 2022, Saudi Arabia was the second largest arms importer globally, accounting for 9.6% of worldwide arms imports. During this period, the United States was the principal supplier, providing 78% of the total arms imported by Saudi Arabia. This included 91 combat aircraft, hundreds of land-attack missiles, and over 20,000 guided bombs.

Perhaps the rise of AI data centers is a new form of "divine mandate" — a quasi-religious techno-utopian vision of progress and control cloaked in the language of innovation and efficiency. Just as Christian missionaries once sought to "civilize" and convert Indigenous populations with surveyors of land and resources, today’s tech purveyors seek energy sucking AI data centers in pursuit of loose regulations and a new frontier of cultural and economic domination.

Have we learned anything, or will this phase of technology and global capitalism be the next chapter of environmental and human exploitation at the expense of just and equitable futures? Maybe the globally networked AI overlord many preach can teach us how to better prioritize the rights, needs, and aspirations of local communities seeking their own visions of self-determination. Or will those in control fear that may itself cannibalize capitalism?

References:

Özsu U. Fixing Selves. In: Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82. Cambridge University Press; 2023.

Slobodian, Quinn. Crack-Up Capitalism: The Deep Roots of the Disastrous Tilt. New York: Random House, 2023.

SIPRI. "SIPRI Fact Sheet: Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022." March 2023.

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Hello Interactors,

The horrific acts of violence in Palestine have prompted acts of violence on university campuses around the world. This post is about one thing they have in common — maps. Maps legally define territory, the rights of those who occupy it, and the rights of those in power to silence them, displace them, or ‘invisible’ them. A pattern we also see with America’s unhoused.

Let me try to map this out…

CAMPUS CONFRONTATIONS ECHO

Citing "clear and present danger," Columbia University recently called for the New York Police to intervene. On April 18th, students had set up tents on a small patch of grass on campus — a form of protest calling for the university to divest from Israel due to the violence in Palestine. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the President of the school claimed their presence was menacing and that they were trespassing. Evidently, parts of campus are closed to students during certain hours. The incident resulted in the arrest of 108 students. But many returned and were joined by more upon their release.

Nearly a week passed before House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the school’s President to resign if she can’t suppress the war protests at her school. He went on to threaten federal funding for colleges that he sees are creating unsafe environments for Jewish students. Many equate opposition to the state of Israel as opposition of Jewish people.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Voice for Peace is claiming the university is making it unsafe for both Jewish and non-Jewish students in their actions. Of the 85 students suspended for protesting the actions of the Israeli state, 15 are Jewish. The Jewish Voice for Peace writes,

“Yesterday’s statement by the White House, like the administrators of Columbia University, dangerously and inaccurately presumes that all Jewish students support the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians. This assumption is actively harming Palestinian and Jewish students.”

Restrictions on student rights have also led to Jewish students being obstructed from observing their religious events and blocking access to their Jewish community.

Columbia University, named after Christopher Columbus and echoing his legacy of exploration and exploitation, has experienced similar conflicts before. In 1968, protests erupted over the university's plan to build a segregated gym, viewed as oppressive by Harlem residents. There was also significant discontent with Columbia's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a center providing support to the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War.

Columbia’s recent protests spawned more across the country. The National Guard have been called to many campuses to sweep protesters away echoing the deadly protests at Kent State 54 years ago. Or Yale in 1986 when police extracted a student who had erected a replica structure found in South Africa’s shantytowns protesting apartheid.

One student protester said at the time,

“We find the Administrations actions highly ironic in light of the continuing efforts of the South African Government to remove the squatter committees with which our shanties expressed solidarity.” In defense of the school, a spokesman said of the protesters, “No group is permitted to have a monopoly on the space.”

No group except, perhaps, the administration.

These university confrontations are part of a larger pattern of forceful takeovers and displacement evident in various forms, including the routine 'sweeps' of homeless encampments in cities across America. These sweeps often involve the removal of homeless individuals from public or private spaces, displacing them without providing long-term solutions to homelessness. Critics argue that such actions not only fail to address the underlying issues of poverty and housing insecurity but also perpetuate a cycle of displacement and marginalization.

Similar critiques are leveled against these universities who in many cases have been pressured by powerful donors and alumni to silence voices speaking out against the ongoing violence in Palestine. A pattern consistent with conservative efforts to squelch diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the teaching of alternative views of history and race. Such actions also serve to perpetuate, and propagate, cycles of protest against oppression.

This practice highlights how power dynamics continue to affect those with less power. From students choosing to sleep outside in solidarity to the most vulnerable populations sleeping outside in poverty. It’s a self-enforcing system where those without property and/or rights are subjected to repeated eviction from their makeshift homes. In the case of those unhoused, it only serves to further entrench the disparities and social stigmas associated with homelessness. In this broader context, both the struggle over property at a university or an urban park reflect the ongoing contention over who has the right to occupy and claim space within our communities.

MAPPING AUTHORITARIAN DISPLACEMENT

These relatively small local campus disputes over territory and legality mirror the larger geopolitical conflicts over land, territory, and displacement they are protesting.

In the Levant or Ash-Shaam (ٱلشَّام ) region of the Middle East, the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel led to the first Arab-Israeli War. In the period from 1948 to 1951, approximately 688,000 Jewish people immigrated to Israel. Many of these were survivors of the Holocaust and from refugee camps across Europe, as well as Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

This period is known as the "mass immigration period" in Israeli telling of history. In Palestinian Arabic history this period is called "Nakba" meaning "catastrophe" or "disaster" referring to the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs.

Here’s a short video from the Jewish Voice for Peace explaining how this early history has led to current events…including the role of maps.👇

For more history on international recognition of territories in the Middle East through maps drawn by European governments, check out my post 👇 from 2021 on:

The mass displacement of Jewish people from Europe came as part of the Nazi’s European territorial expansion for resources called “Lebensraum” or “living space.” The term was coined by geographer Friedrich Ratzel in 1897 believing nations must expand their borders to acquire the resources necessary for their survival.

While written as part of a political geography text, it was a biological argument inspired by Darwinian theories of how species expand their habitats in the natural world. The concept had become a political weapon for German colonial expansion prior to World War II but was most exploited by Hitler.

Cartography was integral to the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum, underpinning its aggressive expansionist policies with maps that were used to justify and facilitate the annexation of territories. Nazi cartographers produced maps illustrating overcrowded Germanic lands to rationalize the need for territorial growth.

Historical claims were visually asserted through maps highlighting ancient Germanic territories or regions with ethnic German populations, while ethnic and racial maps of Europe reinforced narratives of Germanic superiority and the 'right' to conquer Eastern European lands. Furthermore, detailed maps served as vital tools for the strategic military planning of invasions, outlining the logistics necessary to secure Lebensraum for the perceived future prosperity of the Aryan race.

Cartography facilitated the Nazi's economic exploitation of conquered territories and orchestrated the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans while planning the expulsion of others.

This manipulation of geographical information extended into the realm of propaganda, with maps depicting an expansive and resource-rich 'Greater German Reich' designed to instill a sense of national destiny among the populace. Cartography thus transformed from a tool of navigation and exploration into a mechanism of propaganda and oppression, actively contributing to the enactment of the Nazis' genocidal and imperialist objectives.

Left leaning political and ideological groups, including students, criticized the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum and other aspects of Hitler's regime. These groups were staunch opponents of fascism and were among the first to be targeted by the Nazis for suppression due to their opposition and potential to organize resistance against the regime.

In Alberto Toscano’s book, “Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis” he writes,

“Fascism faced the necessity of making a void around itself, of making a tabula rasa of every organized force, whether political or syndicalist, proletarian or bourgeois, trade unions, cooperatives, workers’ circles, Labour Exchanges.”

After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime moved swiftly to neutralize all forms of political opposition. The Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was a period of significant political involvement for Jewish people in Germany. They were active in various political parties, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), both of which had strong connections to labor movements and were integral to the republic's parliamentary democracy.

The KPD and SPD, and other leftist organizations were soon outlawed under Hitler, their leaders and members arrested, and their publications banned. The Nazis viewed the left as one of their main political enemies, associating them with Bolshevism, which they portrayed as a Jewish conspiracy against the Aryan race and the antithesis to their own nationalist and racial ideologies.

Within days of the Reichstag fire in February of 1933, an estimated 4,000 Communists were arrested. The ensuing months saw a dramatic escalation in the numbers of those arrested, with estimates ranging into the tens of thousands. By the summer of 1933, the number of political prisoners—Communists, Social Democrats, union officials, and other perceived or actual leftists—are reported to be over 100,000.

Many leftist leaders and activists were incarcerated in the early concentration camps, where they were subject to brutal treatment. The purges were not limited to the political elite; rank-and-file members of these parties, as well as trade unionists and others who represented the workers' movement, were also persecuted.

THE TERRITORIAL ROLE OF SOCIAL CONTROL

During the later stages of the regime, especially in the years leading up to and during World War II, the Nazis intensified their crackdown on any remaining leftist elements or dissidents, many of whom were sent to prison, forced labor camps, or executed.

Resistance activities continued, albeit at great risk, and those discovered were often summarily executed, particularly as the war progressed and the regime became increasingly paranoid and repressive.

Nazism managed to garner support from the German masses not solely based on pre-existing antisemitic and authoritarian tendencies, but rather through a systematic campaign that cultivated such ideas as part of a broader nationalistic and exclusionary ideology.

Hitler, effectively used propaganda, charismatic rhetoric, and the manipulation of societal fears and prejudices to gain political power. The Nazis' antisemitic and authoritarian doctrines were indeed not uniformly accepted across the entire population at the outset so he appealed to certain ideas and emotions within a diverse population. And Lebensraum was the pretense to spread these ideas and emotions throughout Europe.

The inherent racism, economic exploitation, and violent suppression of Lebensraum are hallmarks of colonial projects throughout history. Such historical and contemporary conflicts illustrate the painful reality of colonial projects, which are often marked by forceful takeovers and the displacement of people, revealing the stark power imbalances that still shape many societal and geopolitical structures today.

Cartography is a potent force, merging power with place. Maps do more than chart lands—they govern perceptions and control hierarchies. By defining territories, maps have historically empowered states over indigenous lands and interests, solidifying rulers' authority. Trespassing laws, working alongside maps, secure landowners' wealth and status, perpetuating a system that privileges property ownership above all else.

Legal instruments like maps once laid the foundations for empires, enabling harsh extractive economies. Their influence endures in today's urban design and surveillance, with satellite imagery and GIS optimizing resource control and shaping cultural views, often sidelining marginalized groups and deepening social disparities.

The current landscape of protest and civil unrest, as seen in the widespread student demonstrations calling for divestment and decolonization, reflects a continuation of this struggle over space and representation. When Columbia’s President invoked the specter of "clear and present danger" to dismantle peaceful protests, it was a stark reminder of the power that comes with controlling space.

The reaction of institutions across the globe, echoing Columbia's, highlights a pattern where those in authority use spatial control as a means to suppress dissent. The encampments, from New York to Sydney, stand as testaments to the resilience of those fighting for a fairer world, even as they face the prospect of being swept away by the forces of order.

As echoes of historical confrontations reverberate, from Kent State to the anti-apartheid struggles at Yale to present day Columbia — or past and present brutal bombings from Yemen to Ukraine or Pakistan to Palestine — they remind us of the stakes involved in the cartographic and legal delineation of our world.

These student movements illustrate the ongoing relevance of emancipatory theories found in all three Abrahamic religions that advocate for the reweaving of our social fabric, aiming to construct an inclusive society that empowers individuals to stand in solidarity against the divisive and oppressive applications of spatial law. The fight for a more equitable social order continues, a challenge to the entrenched hierarchies of land and power.

References:

Statement on Columbia University’s discriminatory and repressive treatment of Jewish students. The Jewish Voice for Peace. 2024.

78 Are Arrested in Yale Protest Over Apartheid. The New York Times. 1986.

Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum. Woodruff D. Smith. German Studies Review. 1980.

Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. 2023.

The New German Chauvinism – Part II. Bue Rübner Hansen. LeftEast. 2024.

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Hello Interactors,

Behind every map is intent. When it comes to making plans for a city, streets are more than mere passageways; they are the cartography of power, exacting politics and ideology for the unfolding of urbanity.

Paris is the blueprint of social order and control portrayed as a symbol of beauty and progress. I wanted to unravel the threads of intent, from communal aspirations to the heavy hand of authoritarianism — a kind of narrative map of a city renowned as much for its revolutions as for its romance.

Let’s go.

COMMON ROOTS, CONTRASTING COMMUNITIES

I’ll offer a word and you examine your emotional reaction to it. Communism. If you’re like me, you’ve been trained to have negative thoughts. Maybe even stop reading. Communism has been associated with authoritarian, repressive regimes that denied basic freedoms and human rights. Ask anyone who lived under these conditions and you can see why it’s been ideologically blackballed in America.

Now I’ll offer another word. Community. Ah, yes, good vibes. Who could possibly be against community? It’s strange how two words with common origins can differ so much by changing two letters.

The word Communism comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Kommunismus as early as 1847 and is derived from the French word communisme which first appeared three years earlier in 1843. This word comes from the Old French word comun meaning "common, general, free, open, public."

A group of people in common, “the common people” who are not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, is from the 14th century French word comunité meaning "commonness, everybody" or community.

I had the experience of checking my own reaction to the word communist while reading about how communist ideals helped a politician in Paris help his community.

The French Communist senator, Ian Brossat, lead housing policy in Paris for a decade. He said his

“guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the city must have the right to live in it.”

He and the local government under Mayor Hildago are doing their best to live up to this. Over the past decade, the French Communist Party has emphasized social justice and economic equality, advocating for stronger public services, wealth redistribution, and workers' rights. They've also focused on environmental sustainability, aligning with broader movements to address climate change and social disparities.

People from all over the world are drawn to Paris for its diverse array of small shops, cafes, expansive boulevards, monuments, and museums. It exudes old-world charm complete with cobblers, tailors, jewelers, and luthiers tucked in and among various neighborhoods — some more manicured than others. It’s a dappled array of diverse color and verdant softscapes that when viewed from afar offers an impression of a picture-perfect pointillist painting.

Paris exists as a seemingly organic and emergent unfolding of placemaking complete with public spaces and parks for the taking — by all walks of life. For many, it’s a composite of ideals that harken back to romantic images of a fashionable and stylistic ‘pick your favorite’ century in Europe making it a perennial favorite destination for tourists.

But surrounding the parks where healthy blossoms glow are stealthy property plots where wealthy funds grow. Amidst the green where healthy plants are planted longtime residents squirm as their neighbors are supplanted. Despite the city building or renovating “more than 82,000 apartments over the past three decades for families with children”, 2.4 million people are on the waiting list for affordable housing.(1)

This isn’t the first time economically disadvantaged people have been displaced from Paris. In 1853, one year after Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Napoleon III declared himself emperor in a successful coup d'état, he wasted no time embarking on what many believe to be the biggest ‘urban renewal’ project in history.

It was famously led by a former prefect administrator, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. His swift and heavy hand pushed powerless Parisians to the periphery to build the Paris so many adore, only to have them return. A pattern that exists today.

Napoleon III, exiled in England, was reluctant to return to a France in decline, marred by unemployment and poverty. By 1848, a massive influx of laborers had swollen Paris's population to over a million. Despite its picturesque image today, 19th-century Paris was a labyrinth of dilapidated buildings and narrow streets, lacking modern infrastructure, and grappling with increasing crime and deadly outbreaks, including a cholera epidemic that claimed 20,000 lives in 1832.

The French author Honoré de Balzac wrote of Paris at the time,

“’Look around you’ as you ‘make your way through that huge stucco cage, that human beehive with black runnels marking its sections, and follow the ramifications of the idea which moves, stirs and ferments inside it.’”

By 1848, France was besieged by societal strife as the monarchy's resurgence fueled public outrage, contrary to the Republic's ideals of liberty. Mass protests and strikes became common, culminating in a tragic clash at the Foreign Ministry where troops fired on protestors, killing 50. The slain were symbolically paraded through Paris, highlighting the oppressive turn of events.

This ignited the Revolution of 1848; a diverse coalition, from students to disillusioned aristocrats, took to the streets, overwhelming the army and storming the King's palace. This mass uprising prompted the formation of a provisional government while monarchist officials, including Haussmann, fled the turmoil.

In the power struggles of post-revolutionary France, neither Socialists nor Republicans could stabilize the economy or improve living conditions. As a result, calls for Napoleon III's return gained traction. He pledged to serve if elected, mirroring the American democratic elections model. He won a four-year term by a wide margin, but he did not have dominant support within the Assembly.

Facing political opposition and public discontent as his term ended, Napoleon III dissolved the Assembly, fired his adversaries, and named himself emperor. A government for the people and by the people was attempted and failed. Long live the King. Authoritarianism was back to the cheers of many in the streets as Napoleon was pulled through the streets by carriage for three hours amidst roars of support.

PARIS: FROM SIEGE TO CHIC

By 1848, Parisians had erected numerous barricades, limiting Napoleon’s access through the city. Originating in 1588 as a defense against soldiers, these barricades evolved from rudimentary stone walls into complex structures capable of withstanding cannon fire, serving both practical and symbolic roles in the city’s history of civil resistance.

Amidst the dawn of the Industrial Age in 1848, Napoleon III aimed to modernize Paris, differentiating it from the neo-gothic style of London's "Albertropolis." Preferring the era's new materials like iron and glass. Dismissing the gothic aesthetics, Napoleon, with Haussmann—a disciplined administrator with similar architectural sensibilities—set out to reshape Paris into a contemporary urban jewel.

In the words of Hausmann reflecting in his memoir,

“We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighborhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the most impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece.”

In Balzac’s 1843 book Lost Illusions he captures the contrasting existence of society revealing the class Hausmann sought to favor at the expense of the other.

The proletariat

“live in insalubrious offices, pestilential courtrooms, small chambers with barred windows, spend their day weighed down by the weight of their affairs.” While the bourgeoisie enjoy “the great, airy, gilded salons, the mansions enclosed in gardens, the world of the rich, leisured, happy, moneyed people.”(2)

Haussmann, satirically termed the "Artiste Démolisseur," enacted a policy akin to 'creative destruction' to achieve it. This is a concept Karl Marx alluded to and the Austrian Economist Joseph Schumpeter later popularized. In Marx and Friedrich Engels popular 1848 book “The Communist Manifesto” they used the term Vernichtung which describes the continuous devaluation of existing wealth to pave the way for the creation of new wealth.

During the 1830s and '40s, monumental ‘devaluations’ came at the expense of land and rivers paving the way for infrastructure like railroads and canals. Including other parts of the world. Americans, Indigenous and colonized, saw over 3000 miles of canals being dug by 1840 and 9,000 miles of railroad by 1850. We can all think of examples of ‘creative destruction’ today — be it from bombs that fall or a wrecking ball.

This 19th century period of transformation also saw France's first passenger train and the spread of a national railway network, all under Napoleon III's ambition to fortify France's economic stature. He promoted and founded new national banks to fund these transformations, fueling Marx's view that economic efficiencies could be gained through improved transportation.

The rise of capitalism and the concept of 'the world market,' as Marx termed it, pushed for more efficient movement of people and goods, a task complicated by Paris's antiquated layout. Although Napoleon and Haussmann are credited with modernizing Paris, initiatives to improve urban circulation were already underway. Prior to 1833, significant canals, roads, and railways were constructed, and post-1832 cholera outbreak, efforts were made to expand the city and reduce congestion.

Architectural and urban planning, including the design of the Place de la Concorde by Jacques Hittorff, aimed to push the city's boundaries. In 1843, Hippolyte Meynadier proposed major urban changes to improve air quality and circulation. Haussmann later embraced and amplified these existing plans with and without Napoleon's support. For example, Napoleon did not see the need to bringing running water to Paris, but Hausmann did it anyway.

Hausmann was fond of expanding. Whereas these earlier plans were certainly grander than any in Paris, or possibly the world, Hausmann multiplied dimensions. Hittorf had drawn plans for some streets be obesely wide, even by today’s standards, but Haussmann tripled the dimensions. For example, the road leading to the Arc de Triomphe, known now as the Champs-Élysées, was first drawn to be 120 feet wide. But Hausmann insisted it be 360 feet wide with an additional 40 feet of sidewalks on each side. He tripled the scale of a project that had already been tripled.

What resulted was a diagonally criss-crossing web of stick straight boulevards with massive monuments strategically placed at nodes and termini. The Arc de Triomphe from above looks like a shining star with roads and boulevards as glimmering spires. Some scholars believe Hausmann, and his coconspirators, were the first to view the city as a technical problem to be solved from the top down.

It was a civic product to be worked on with little regard for the people who were working within. This view of a city may have been influenced by the aerial photographer Nadar who from 1855 to 1858 perfected aerial photography in France. He patented the use of aerial photography for mapmaking and surveying in 1855.

A WHOPPER OF A TRANSFORMATION

Soon after Hausmann finished the complete remaking of Paris in 1870, Friederic Engels published his 1872 book The Housing Question where he explored the housing crisis facing industrial workers of the 19th century. He criticized what became known as the Hausmannization of cities, writing,

“By ‘Haussmann’ I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood”

Groups of people struggling to live in a city, “the common people”, those who were not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, began organizing as a community. Property owners spared by Hausmann’s utter destruction saw their applications for building improvement permits rejected. In the years leading up to 1871, tensions were once again mounting in a city that had yet to form a municipal government.

Meanwhile the Francho-Prussian War erupted in July of 1870 as France sought to assert its dominance in Europe fearing a pending alliance between Prussia and Spain. During the war, the French National Guard defended Paris. Given their proximity to growing working-class radicalism, sentiments began to be shared among soldiers.

After a significant defeat of the French Army by the Germans, National Guard soldiers seized control of the city on March 18, killing two French army generals and refusing to accept the authority of the French national government. The community became a commune — common, general, free, open, and public.

The commune governed Paris for two months, establishing policies that tended toward a progressive, anti-religious system of their own self-styled socialism. These policies included the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labor, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner.

Predictably, the Commune was ultimately suppressed by the national French Army at the end of May during "The Bloody Week” when an estimated 10-15,000 Communards were killed in battle or executed.

The Commune's policies and outcome had a significant influence on the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who described it as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without it, it’s unlikely Ian Brossat would have a Communist party fighting for fair living conditions. A modern day nod to those Communards slaughtered in 1871.

Meanwhile, today’s City Hall also ensures the persistence of the bucolic, romantic, idealistic — and perhaps classist — proprietors who help to sustain the manicured experience Hausmann set out to achieve nearly 200 years ago. Just as the government plays a role in controlling rent so less financially privileged can live and work there, so too does the government subsidize select city shops and restaurants that attract the well heeled. But they have their limits.

The counselor in charge of managing commercial holdings said, “We don’t rent to McDonald’s, we don’t rent to Burger King and we don’t rent to Sephora.”

These stores obviously exist, so clearly landlords across the city have long sold out to ‘world market’ chains even Hausmann may frown upon. Even as the city take steps to ensure curated theme shops continue to exist. Hausmann may not have planned for this, but Paris did become a kind of a public theme park to the world.

Given the history of radicals and conservatives toiling in a tug of war for centuries over what exactly the city should be and for whom, perhaps the conservative former housing minister now commercial developer, Benoist Apparu, put it best —

“A city, if it’s only made up of poor people, is a disaster. And if it’s only made up of rich people, it’s not much better.” (1)

I, for one, was pleased to find a Burger King on the Champs-Élysées during my first trip to Paris as a teenager in 1984. After a few days of European food, I was ready for a Whopper. Of course, I was unaware of any of the socio-political or psychogeographical implications and ramifications of all this — both historically and in that moment.

I was a middle-class mini-bougie white American eating comfort food while obliviously participating in the exploitive world of ‘rich, leisured, happy, and moneyed people’ on a boulevard designed for it. But I was also in city that birthed liberty, the potential for revolutionary change, and the promise and struggle of egalitarian policies.

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Hello Interactors,

We are fully into spring and that means a shift toward cartography. I’ll be exploring how abstract symbols, lines, and colors can both represent and misrepresent people, politics, and the physical environment. Maps are tools of power and persuasion, which can shape perceptions of space and reality, influence behavior, and maintain or challenge social norms and power structures.

Today’s post bridges Winter’s focus on human behavior with the maps, plans, and politics of cities. In this case, Los Angeles and their attempts at curbing rising traffic related fatalities through safer forms of transportation infrastructure…but not without a fight from some unlikely foes.

Let’s go…

CURBSIDE CASUALTIES LEAD TO ASPHALT ACTIVISM

Angelinos recently passed a controversial measure intended to save lives. It won 63 percent in favor to 37 percent opposed. Maybe it wasn’t so controversial after all. Why should helping save children from being violently killed be controversial in the first place? And why were firefighters leading the charge to kill a measure that saves lives.

Car collisions were the leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles County in 2022. Drug overdose and homicide have been in competition with ‘motor vehicle collisions’ for the top kid-killer spot over the last few years. Drowning, another preventable killer my wife is focused on eradicating, was the number three killer in 2021.

In January, the hyperlocal newsletter Crosstown reported data from the Los Angeles Police Department that 2023 was the “deadliest year on the roads in at least a decade, with 337 fatalities.”

More than half of these were pedestrians. In 2022, 160 pedestrians died from being struck by a motor vehicle. It’s been getting worse for some time.

If you’re not already depressed, this might push you over the edge. Hit and runs are also climbing.

In October of 2022, the County of Los Angeles Public Health Department published the “Leading Causes of Death and Mortality Rates (per 100,000) by Age Group” in Los Angeles County from January to June for 2019 to 2022. During these years, of those aged 0-17, 73 have been killed by motor vehicles. In 2022, it was the number one killer.

Alarmed by the trend, former Mayor Eric Garcetti formulated a “Mobility Plan 2035” in 2015 that “incorporates ‘complete streets’ principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets.” This follows California state’s 2008 Complete Streets Act (AB 1358), which requires local jurisdictions to

“plan for a balanced, multimodal transportation network that meets the needs of all users of streets, roads, and highways, defined to include motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, seniors, movers of commercial goods, and users of public transportation, in a manner that is suitable to the rural, suburban or urban context.”

The rise in traffic deaths reveals that the aspirational goals set in various levels of government often represent legal fictions—idealized plans that simplify complex issues, but don’t always lead to action. These legal frameworks, while not intentionally misleading, can result in a disconnect between policy intentions and outcomes, promoting a status quo bias due to the complexities of change, systemic inertia, and established interests — including those of firefighters.

But a group of citizen activists organized to bring action to the fiction and gain traction amidst the friction. They drew attention to the fact that although L.A. had laid out a progressive ‘complete streets’ plan, they had only executed 5% since its inception nearly a decade ago. At that rate they calculated it would take 160 years to build a minimum network of safe streets. All the while hundreds upon thousands would die while the legal fiction would continued to paint a different picture.

So, they devised Measure HLA, the Healthy Streets L.A. initiative, inspired by other cities to bring action to ‘complete streets’ fiction. The measure states every time a street is resurfaced, any corresponding Network Mobility Plan improvements must be implemented. For example, if a street has been designated as a segment of a bike network and is due to be resurfaced, the city must install the protected bike lane (or other complete street infrastructure) needed to fulfill the city’s Mobility Plan 2050. Common sense exceptions are included to ensure public works could still fix things like potholes, utility cuts, or emergency repairs.

But installing 560 miles of pedestrian paths, 300 miles of enhanced transit lanes, 520 miles of bike lanes safe enough for an eight-year-old, 830 miles of neighborhood enhancements, and 800 miles of bike networks for all levels of cycling requires some sacrifices. Motorists will have to sacrifice space on roadways to accommodate these changes. In doing so many roads will be narrowed and speeds lowered thus sacrificing speed of vehicles.

And this is where the firefighters come in. There’s a common misperception among many firefighters and emergency responders that safe streets, that is slow streets, lead to slower response times resulting in people dying. The hundreds of people, including young people, they scrape off the pavement or extract from a car after being obliterated by a ton of metal charging at excessive speeds seem to be excluded from this calculus.

It is true there was a time when speed bumps were added to slow speeding vehicles that also slowed first responders. But civil engineers and urban planners worked through these challenges and now speed cushions can be installed that permit fire trucks (and other large vehicles) to proceed through gaps in the speed bumps. There are also ways to design safe street networks in ways that allow speeding emergency vehicles to move quickly through road networks protected from or free of pedestrians and cyclists…and clogged traffic. In many cases, it’s the same paths carved out of stalled traffic for buses.

FIRST RESPONSE AND EMERGENCY OBJECTIONS

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) seemingly haven’t gotten the memo from the Federal Highway Administration on how to calm traffic while not reducing response times. One LAFD Captain, Frank Lima, was quoted as saying “Firefighters are opposed to Measure HLA…[because] response times from 911 resources will increase…Every second in our profession means [life or death].” But Mr. Lima then exposes what is perhaps the true source of his opposition which is not related at all to his expertise or profession but likely a personal conviction.

“It’s going to hurt small businesses and it’s going to take away parking spaces,” he said. “It’s one of those projects that sounds good on paper, but when you put it in reality, it’s going to have a negative impact.”

He is right that legal fiction does sound good on paper, and on-street parking spaces may be taken away on some streets, but if done well other cities have shown small business improves as does property value. It turns out everybody wants to live on a safe and quiet street, expect maybe this LAFD Captain.

Mr. Lima is also a member of the International Association of Firefighters and presumably the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 (UFLAC) who claim they spent $100,000 fighting this measure. Their president, Freddy Escobar, said Measure HLA “is full of lies…all these confusing lanes, dangerous bike lanes, pedestrian medians, and all the chaos - and nobody is using 'em." If that was extreme enough in his attempt to scare voters, he added, “If we pass HLA we're going to see chaos all over the city.”

Not to be out done, the president of the California Professional Firefighters, Brian Rice, also revealed his personal convictions while presumably speaking on behalf of all California firefighters stating,

"I hate to tell you men and women, California - and Los Angeles in particular - this is a car community. You may not like it, but it is."

He then took a shot at bus drivers and riders who are stuck in traffic today but will benefit from bus priority signaling and bus only lanes as part of the complete streets plan. He asked,

"Do you really think you're going to see buses go faster than 12 miles an hour?"

And then, he fully exposed his motivations for wanting to deny Angelinos safe streets. Dog whistling conservatives across L.A., he claimed the initiative came from “a small group of elite...Democratic Socialists.”

It might seem unusual for firefighters to be so misaligned with most people they serve (the measure passed by a 2 to 1 margin) or for their personal convictions or biases to seemingly conflict with their egalitarian duty to serve all members of the community, but it’s not.

Firefighters are unique. They’re the only profession that attracts people who need to be trained NOT to immediately run into a burning building. As one fire chief said to his trainees,

“Risk a lot to save a lot. Risk a little to save a little. Risk nothing to save nothing. We’re all here to help people... but you need to have your priorities straight: life safety first, incident stabilization second, and property conservation last.”

These people must not only endure and survive extreme physical conditions, but they are also exposed to human pain and suffering, mutilations, and death. All of which require a healthy support network and relationships to maintain their mental health. This is why their training and work environment also includes indoctrination an institutional culture that instills comradeship, respect, and devotion to service — for each other and the communities they serve.

But within any group of people each individual member shows up with their own implicit or explicit biases toward minority members of any community they may serve, be it class, race, ethnicity, gender, or apparently pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and those with opposing political views. How might these biases interfere with their duty to serve all community members?

Much of our behavior is subtly influenced by unconscious biases, deep-seated preferences we're often unaware of. These hidden biases can significantly impact daily decisions and societal dynamics, especially in critical areas like healthcare, where they contribute to disparities in patient treatment and outcomes.

Similarly, in the criminal justice system, implicit biases affect law enforcement actions, with studies indicating varying responses based on race. However, the connection between these unconscious biases and actual discriminatory behavior remains a topic of debate, with some research suggesting the link is weaker than previously thought, emphasizing the complexity of addressing such ingrained biases.

One researcher embedded himself in a fire crew in a small town in the southern United States to explore these complex behaviors. To be accepted as ‘one of the guys’ the researcher went through training and served on calls with the crew. It took weeks, but he eventually earned his insider status where he felt everyone was acting normally should he not be observing them. It wasn’t pretty.

AMIDST FLAMES OF PREJUDICE, A BROTHERHOOD IN THE BALANCE

As a member of a white crew serving a racially and ethnically diverse community, he indeed uncovered some alarming and explicit individual biases. In a banter of stories about various calls, he observed a trend in one-upmanship among story tellers. “Tall tales” is a form of bonding among groups of humans that have existed across time and culture. Each story becomes increasingly exaggerated and in the case of the culture of this group of firefighters, explicitly racist, sexist, and/or classist. One such crescendo culminated with this alarming tale (trigger warning, some nasty and disturbing language in here),

“Green Village is the worst because you’ve got all those Mexicans who don’t f*g speak English. At least at Friendship Haven, you can say, ‘Listen, bro, I’m gonna call the fg cops,’ and they scurry off. [He simulates running, while holding up pants] These f**g Mexicans don’t speak English, so they’re a pain in the ass. Those Jose Cuervos think they are doctors. There was that one call at Green Village, where there was this woman. It was toned out [dispatched] as a cardiac arrest, but we got there and the woman was having a seizure.

Anyway, it was me and Kelly and we pulled her out of the bed to this little spot on the floor between the bed and dresser and her two sons were like standing over her. One was flashing a light in her face, like a flashlight. And she was fat, obviously. And the other one was pulling her shirt down to cover up her fat, while yelling, “She dead. She dead.” The woman was fine. I walked out and called police on that f*g Beaner. If I would have had a gun, I would have shot those two Speedy Gonzalezes.”

In another story, a Black woman in a hijab arrived at a residence where the crew was cleaning up after a call. Laughing, one of the firefighters asked his crew,

“Did you see what they were cooking? There were bones in that pot.” His colleague responded, “What was it? A cat? Rats? Hamsters?”

Amidst the laughter another story was shared.

“Remember we were at that fire last weekend, over in Africa, and that woman slapped the s**t out of that guy?” One of the Lieutenants replied how hilarious it was while stomping his foot performing a racist caricature and mimicking an African language saying “…she was yelling and really going off on him in Black.”

Upon hearing this, the researcher reported, one of the firefighters laughed so hard he lost his breath. As the laughter subsided another firefighter said of the neighborhood they were serving, “Friendship Haven can burn down and I wouldn’t give a fk. Fk. That. Hellhole.”

It’s hard to read this and imagine why these bigoted firefighters bother even showing up to help these people. But according to the researcher, this is how a fraction of these “white, male, working-class firefighters cope with stress and forge solidarity” while most of the others passively laugh and follow along.

He claims these individual beliefs don’t interfere with their duty to serve because the one thing that would exclude a firefighter from the ‘brotherhood’ is allowing a human to suffer or die — regardless of how they may personally feel about them. He said that while this Southern white “working-class, locally raised, politically conservative peer culture dominates the social space…prejudiced beliefs take a back seat to enacting excellence on the fireground.”

He says because these extremely discriminatory words and actions are portrayed in private and only among other firefighters they entrust, and issued by those in command, there is little opportunity for disciplinary action. He also believes “it is a tall order to exorcise prejudice from individuals.” The best remedy to counter these individual beliefs, the researcher writes, is to start by “educating staff about the populations they serve and teaching nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution.” He also believes “organizational incentives that encourage grassroots competition to provide optimal service or community engagement can stymie discriminatory behavior.”

In the case of the LA firefighters, they are clearly more ethnically and racially diverse than those this researcher observed in the South, so attacks on minority races is unlikely happening in the open. And what discriminatory prejudices these L.A. firefighters do have are clearly not just private. After all, they just spent $100,000 to make them public.

Should a social psychological researcher embed themselves in any number of these L.A. squads, I’m sure they’d reveal disparaging language there too. Their quasi-militaristic allegiance to the ‘brotherhood’ is evidently forged in a shared disdain for ‘cyclists’, ‘pedestrians’, liberal ‘elite social democrats’, and/or some ‘others’ outside their tribe.

As for those firefighters who may be partial to, or members of, these ‘other’ tribes, and perhaps even chided for being one of ‘them’, the group likely accepts them because even if they’re a negatively branded a ‘liberal socialist’ they’d still risk their life to save another crew member or community member.

American firefighters are portrayed as heroes in America. Movies like Backdraft or television shows like 9-1-1 portray firefighters as tough, rugged, fearless public saviors. The heroic narrative can attract those seeking action, adventure, and camaraderie awash in a glamorous glow of danger. But perhaps society’s hero worship can also insulate those with hateful and bigoted views from public scrutiny. They will perform heroic acts to society’s benefit, but perhaps with a bit more education, less bravado, and more tolerance they could become better firefighters and heroes.

One veteran of emergency services, fire marshal, and U.S. Marine Desert Storm war veteran, Daniel Byne, made a plea in 2007 to,

“Take off the macho T-shirts. Take down the pictures and posters that paint our profession in an unrealistic light and encourage our firefighters to take unwarranted chances in the pursuit of living up to an unrealistic image.”

He is echoing criticisms from a Swedish firefighter Dr. Stefan Svensson, a PhD in fire engineering. He says in many countries the ‘heroic deeds’ many American firefighters are lauded for “would probably had led to inquiries, changes in training manuals, the dismissal of the fire fighter and probably even prosecution of the fire fighter for causing immediate danger to others.” Perhaps the bigoted attitudes may also.

Curiously, some of these other countries happen to be social democracies like Sweden. After this country of nearly 10 million people instituted similar ‘complete streets’ initiatives in 1997, their pedestrian deaths dropped from 134 in 1990 to 25 in 2020. Sweden and Norway have the smallest numbers of traffic related deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the world, thanks to Vision Zero and ‘complete streets’ initiatives.

Sweden’s Svensson’s message for American firefighters is this:

“Bravery and heroic deeds must result from knowledge, not from illusions.”

Perhaps it’s time more firefighters get educated on the negative effects of outwardly expressing hatred toward others, trust their fellow public service colleagues like city planners and engineers, and learn to operate their equipment on streets designed for all — even if that means learning it from people they disparage as ‘social democrats.’ After all, as that fire chief in the South said, “We’re all here to help people... but you need to have your priorities straight.”

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Hello Interactors,

Continuing on the theme of the brain being embedded in the world in which ‘we’ interact, I explore how the brain is also embodied in a biological system with which ‘it’ interacts. The brain conjures this sense of itself inside this thing called ‘me’. How do these illusions come to be inside a tangible body?

Let’s find out…

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so please do something for my brain… Share it’s thoughts with people you trust.

CONSTRUCTING BRAD

I read a passage in a book a few years ago that fundamentally changed how I think about myself. We were fully into the pandemic, and I had started walking…a lot. I would pick a green patch on Google Maps, put my earplugs in, launch a book, and walk to my little green polygon. Some journeys stretched to 15 miles roundtrip.

So, when I was browsing one of my favorite little independent bookstores, you can imagine my attraction to a book positioned to get my attention called, “In Praise of Walking”. It’s a book on the neuroscience behind walking by the experimental brain researcher at Trinity College, Shane O’Mara. I also recommend his Brain Pizza Substack.

Walking, for me (and him), is a treat. For anyone able to walk, it should be considered a treat.

I learn a lot by walking. But walking is no longer something I need to learn. I already learned how to walk. We are not born knowing how to walk, we must be taught. We are not born knowing much at all. That includes who we are.

I was born Brad. Had I popped out with internal plumbing, I learned I would be named Becky. Here is something else I learned: I was born with a body that had already learned how to pee. That’s what I apparently did in the face of the doctor who pulled me out of the womb.

I am half constructed out of the same DNA that built that womb. Though every cell that constructed that baby Brad are long gone. The body I have today is made of different cells — a result of continuous cell division and renewal processes. Something cells have they already learned to do.

I was born a unique self only in that those cells remembered how to recombine genetically out of DNA passed down for generations. My uniqueness over my life arises out of mutations — random events in the sequencing of my own DNA. Other outside events, like what was in my Mom and Dad’s blood stream just prior to conception, can also randomly cause one gene to turn on and another to turn off.

Those random mutations, some stemming from other random events, continued as I went from being enveloped in a warm viscous fluid shielded from light to my blinding, cold, stark reality. I was so happy or angry I peed on a human urinal. Every planned or random event that happened after that continued to shape my biological makeup — including the arranging, refining, and pruning of the 86 billion neurons in my little brain.

I can’t remember any of this. I can’t even remember learning to walk. But I apparently did. Once out of the womb, the world around us continues to shape us. Like those early moments of DNA expression, some genetic expression is baked into our physical genes. But the constructions of those genes are influenced through biochemical reactions which are influenced by our environment. This can lead cells to communicate and conspire to create unique and differentiating genetic expressions. Even genetically identical twins evolve to have differentiated biology — including physical skills, health outcomes, and the development of ‘self.’

Early brain development is a particularly sensitive period to environmental influences. The brain undergoes development, with processes that move neurons from their place of origin to their final position in the brain, guided by molecular signals. The formation of synapses between neurons allows for the transmission of electrical and chemical signals across the brain, enabling learning and memory​.

Our neurons are then wrapped in long slender microscopic tubes made of a fatty substance that helps neurons communicate with other neurons, muscles, and glands. They can be an inch long or several feet with tiny junctions that branch off laying the groundwork for cognitive and socioemotional functions…and how to walk.

As we grow and engage with our environment, our brains evolve the ability to control our body's movements accurately and adaptively well into our adolescence. Learning to walk, we’re not just building muscle strength and balance, but creating and reinforcing the neural pathways that make walking a fluid, automatic process. These processes also underlie the brain's ability to adapt and learn from experience. Each successful step taken strengthens the neural pathways associated with walking.

As adults, the neural pathways we associate with walking become so well-trodden that they are almost automatic, requiring minimal conscious thought for each step we take. This allows the brain to shift its focus from the mechanics of walking to the navigation of the path ahead. What concerns us most these days isn’t the act of walking itself but where our feet are taking us.

BIOLOGICAL RUBE GOLDBERG

The brain uses sensory information—sights, sounds, and the feel of the ground beneath us—to map out our environment, guide us around obstacles, and towards our intended destination in life and in the world.

And this is where Shane O’Mara formed an image in my brain that changed how I think about my brain and myself. I, like most in the West, was raised being exposed to Christian traditions and philosophies that teach the ‘self’ is an immutable soul that is unique. Christians believe the soul is God-given, inherently present from birth or even conception and this belief guides much of our social norms and laws. Many people thus grow up believing we possess some essence that makes up our identity. Lady Gaga’s 2011 hit might sum it up best in that people tend to have an oversized belief that they were ‘Born This Way.’

Another view is that the ‘self’ is continually constructed to form an overlapping Venn diagram of many ‘selves’. For me, oneself is a son, oneself is a brother, a friend, a husband, a father, a former employee, a member of a community, a nation, a society, and any other ‘oneselves’ that any given situation demands. Together, they make ‘oneself’. These have all been developed, like my genes, through socialization, communication, and cultural and environmental context — through inter-place, if you will, the interaction of people and place.

More broadly, think of a human as a system of assembled biological parts, each with its distinct function yet systematically interdependent. We have a bony skeleton that supports and protects a complex array of organs. These organs include a powerful cardiac muscle—the heart—that pumps blood infused with oxygen and nutrients through a vast fractal-like network of vessels, reaching to the very edge of existence.

This circulatory system not only delivers life-sustaining substances but also carries away the metabolic byproducts with clever ways for them to be expelled. It’s coordinated with specialized systems for intake and digestion of nutrients, transforming food into fuel. The gastrointestinal tract is a winding pathway designed for the efficient processing of food, extracting vital nutrients, and compacting waste for disposal.

Containing all these gooey bits is a bag of skin. It’s the largest organ and much more than a bag. It is a reactive, dynamic interface that interacts with the world through touch, temperature sensation, and protection against environmental threats. It also plays a role in thermoregulation, maintaining internal climate through sweat and the subtleties of blood flow.

The muscular system is a Rube Goldberg web of fibers capable of delicate manipulation of tweezers to the powerful thrusts for jumping. It all remains suspended with tissue connecting muscles to bones and to each other enabling both movement and stability.

At the core is another set of muscles that operate the respiratory system, expanding and contracting to draw in air rich in oxygen and expel air laden with carbon dioxide. Lungs, nestled within the ribcage, serve as the sites of this gaseous exchange that literally breathe life into us.

Skin allows for the injection of sensory organs without springing a leak. Eyes capture light and render vision, ears detect vibrations and translate them into sound, and olfactory receptors decode molecular messages into scents and tastes.

The nervous system is an internal communication network, a lightning-fast array of signals that governs everything from the reflexive yank or a staggering reel to a cognitive think or emotional feel. It is the electrical wiring that animates our being, rooted in the brain, an organ of such complexity that it conjures consciousness itself.

When I look at these systems together, they make ‘me’. They sustain the biological necessities that enable what we call the human experience. I am a being of both strength and vulnerability, an assemblage of interdependent systems I call 'self'.

This image of myself came into focus with a simple passage from Shane O’Mara:

"As far as your brain is concerned, your body hangs down from your head, until it makes contact with the ground through your feet. You're not built from the soles of your feet up - it's more like your head is a 'castle in the air', with scaffolding reaching down to the ground."

I imagine my brain being the one going on a walk by coordinating with my body to make sure it survives the journey. This ‘castle in the air’ takes input from the world and prunes its own neural network. In the walk of life, the brain conjures an image and belief that ‘I’ exist by enacting and interacting in ways that serve changing social contexts unfolding in front of me. Part of this image of myself leads me to imagine I exist so the brain itself can survive.

‘I’ am more like an evolutionary experiment conjured in a brain working on behalf of, and in coordination with, a biological system within which it is embodied. And ‘I’ exist in a world in which my brain is embedded, attached to scaffolding that touches the ground on which it walks. Sometimes, in search of little green patches on a map waiting to be visited.

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Hello Interactors,

All the talk and evidence of AI, chips in the brain, and robotic overlords has created emotions ranging from hysteria to malaise to clinical depression. How much of this is caused or influenced by narratives spun by favored voices telling tall tales of proximal parables and are there other ways to think about our brain than just a processor?

Let’s find out…

THE MENTAL MYTHS OF SILICON AND SYNAPSES

Our brain is an energy intense organ. It consumes 20% of our energy but accounts for just 2% of our body weight. To manage this high demand for energy, the brain employs various strategies to simplify tasks and processes. One of those is to simplify how the world works. Like dividing it into discernable individual component parts.

In a world increasingly seduced by these crisp edges of in groups and out groups, there exists a tribe of techno-optimists, guardians of an old tale, who look to the brain as humanity's ultimate processor and a promise and desire for digital immortality. This romanticized notion of the “mind as computer” is facing competition as feats of AI reveal a seemingly superior capability to their own self-assuming super-intelligence. So, they want their outdated hardware upgraded. It's all positioned as cutting edge and futuristic but harks back to the clockwork dualistic and mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment.

We’ve been preached a digital gospel that suggests the warm wetware within our skulls operates like baked silicon chips, crunching data of daily existence with the cold precision of a CPU. Yet, simmering in the biochemistry that hosts these digital dreams are ripples of evidence captured and crunched by computers and displayed in the form of MRI’s, fMRI’s, PET scans, SPECT scans, NIRS, and MEG’s. These images lead some cognitive scientists, with the help of various forms of AI, to slowly dismantle the mechanistic metaphor of ‘the brain as CPU’, piece by intricate piece.

The metaphor of the brain functioning as a processor is as old as Alan Turing and the mid-20th century computational theories that birthed computer science. These ideas and experiments propagated as mass media proliferated and now serve as common conceptions of how the mind works. Other historical and cultural factors contribute to the persistence of this metaphor and perpetuated among teachers, scientists, and attention seeking tech moguls.

But it was centuries before, during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, that a significant shift towards rationalist, determinist, and mechanistic views of nature were put forth by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The world and its phenomena, including human beings and human thought, began to be understood in terms of mechanical laws and principles, laying the groundwork for comparing the brain to a machine.

The advancements in machinery and technology during the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the mechanistic view of life processes, including human cognition, making it easier to draw parallels between the operations of machines and the functions of the human brain. I recently wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example from that period.

Fast forwarding a century later, to the 1970s, I remember watching the “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV as a kid. This show was based on a Martin Caidin novel called Cyborg depicting an astronaut who survives a plane crash and is brought to life by replacing body parts with robotics. The “Six Million Dollar Man” was soon joined by “The Bionic Woman” and episodes that featured the faces of human robots being ripped off to reveal a computer inside. Naturally, these two computer-powered bionic superpowers worked as secret agents in U.S. Office of…wait for it…“Scientific Intelligence.”

Source: YouTube

This was all occurring alongside emerging discoveries in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, further cementing the brain-CPU analogy. Like science fiction writers and directors, early AI researchers and scientists aimed to replicate human cognitive processes in computers, leading to conceptual overlaps between how brains and computers function in science and society.

The CPU metaphor provides a simplified way to understand the complex workings of the brain, making it accessible to people without specialized knowledge in neuroscience or cognitive science. This metaphor continues to be used in educational contexts to teach basic concepts about brain functions, reinforcing its prevalence.

The tendency toward reductionism — to reduce complex phenomena to their simplest components — is present in many scientific and engineering disciplines and has long contributed to the organ-as-part metaphor. Viewing the brain as akin to a computer's CPU aligns with reductionist approaches reminiscent of those early Enlightenment thinkers seeking to understand biological systems by dissecting their individual parts and drawing useful, but also isolated and simplified conclusions.

While the brain-CPU metaphor has historical roots and provides a convenient framework for understanding some aspects of cognitive function, many believe it is ultimately flawed. It can overlook the brain's integrated and dynamic nature, its entanglement within a larger biological organism, and its continuous interaction with a complex environment. These are themes under exposed and under explained in popular science, media, and most of the tech industry.

The growing recognition of these limitations, particularly within fields like 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition), is leading to the development of more nuanced and holistic models of cognition that transcend simplistic mechanical analogies.

Do we have the energy to spare our brain so we may better understand it?

EMBODIED MINDS EMBEDDED, EXTENDED, AND ENACTIVE

The 4E framework in cognitive science highlights the brain's integrated and dynamic nature. Advances in neuroscience have shown that the brain is not a static organ with fixed functions but is highly malleable, capable of reorganizing itself in response to learning and experience. This plasticity allows for adaptability and resilience necessary for its survival, characteristics not accounted for in the rigid structure of a CPU.

The brain's structure is composed of complex, interconnected networks that support a wide range of functions, from basic sensory processing to higher-order cognitive tasks. These networks do not operate in isolation but are dynamically interacting and reconfiguring based on internal and external demands.

The brain's function is also modulated by a variety of neurotransmitters that influence mood, cognition, and behavior. This biochemical layer adds a level of complexity to brain function that is absent in computer CPUs today. This means the brain is intimately connected to the biology of the body, receiving continuous sensory inputs and sending commands to our organs and limbs. This sensory-motor coupling is foundational to cognition, emphasizing the role of bodily interactions with the world and how our brain processes it.

Research supports this concept. Cognition is something that is embodied in us, where cognitive processes are grounded in sensory and motor systems. For example, studies on mirror neurons suggest that understanding others' actions involves simulating these actions in our own sensory-motor systems.

For instance, when a child observes an adult using a tool, such as a hammer, the mirror neurons associated with the motion of hammering may fire in the child's brain, despite the child not physically performing the action. This neural activity can help the child understand the action and later replicate it, contributing to the learning process.

Another example is in the understanding of emotions. When we see someone smiling or frowning, our mirror neuron system may activate the same facial muscles involved in smiling or frowning, contributing to an empathetic response. This internal mimicry can help us to 'feel' what the other person is feeling and develop a better understanding of their emotional state.

The brain is in continuous interaction with the complex environment in which we exist. It is embedded in an environment that it continuously interacts with, influencing and being influenced by it. This interaction is not merely passive; the brain actively constructs perceptions and meanings based on environmental inputs.

This enactive perspective posits cognition arises through a dynamic interplay between an organism and its environment. Cognitive processes such as perception and action are therefore inseparable and co-determined. In the example of a child learning to use a hammer, they learn to grasp the handle not just by observing but through a process of trial and error. This involves actively engaging with the object and learning from the outcomes of these interactions thus enacting cognition through interactive processes.

These dynamic interactions are extended beyond the brain and body to include tools, like a hammer, but also computers, mobile phones, and automobiles. These tools become part of the mind's cognitive architecture. This perspective challenges traditional notions of cognition as being confined within the boundaries of the individual, proposing instead that objects and devices in our environment can function as extensions of our cognitive system when they are deeply integrated into our mental activities.

As the brains of neuroscientists interact with each other, their embedded and embodied brains are synthesizing an ever-evolving understanding of cognition that is more integral than dichotomous, more holistic than dualistic. Even as the brain employs cost-cutting simplification strategies, a rich emergent complexity emerges that further defines our cognitive reality.

The old metaphor of the brain as a CPU, once a middle 20th-century marvel, is gradually yielding to a perspective that sees the brain not as a solitary processor but as part of a dynamic, integrated system of organism and environment. As techno-optimists laud AI and digital immortality, praying to dualistic gods, the minds of some neuroscientists are extended by imaging tools powered by CPUs, presenting a model of cognition far from the mechanistic. Instead, they argue our brains are enmeshed in a dynamic and fluid biological existence.

It is here, in the flowing network of neurons and scientific narratives, that the future of understanding the human mind is taking shape. Even as I write this and you read it, we are moving our brain from the rigidly digital dualistic understanding to the fluidly enactive. In doing so, our brains are redefining our place within this emergent organism-environment system we call life using as little energy as necessary.

References:

Knyazev, G. G. (2023). A Paradigm Shift in Cognitive Sciences. Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology. DOI: 10.1007/s11055-023-01483-9

Newen, A., De Bruin, L., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press.

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Enactivism. In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

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Hello Interactors,

A Frankenstein announcement from Musk this week punctuated my recent fascination with the author of that popular novel, Mary Shelley. Her isolated lived experience in a time of intense technological discovery, social and geo-political unrest, AND a climate crisis rings true today more than ever.

But she also was subtlety representing a scientific movement that is largely ignored today, but just may be experiencing a bit of a resurgence in areas like biology and neuroscience.

Let’s dig in…

FRANKEN-MUSK

“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

Mary Shelley was intrigued, and maybe a little scared, by the idea of electrifying organs. She admits as much in her 1831 forward of her famous novel, “Frankenstein”, first published January 1, 1818. She wrote,

"Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth."

Bioelectrical experimentation had been happening for nearly 40 years by the time Shelley wrote this book. Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician, physicist, and philosopher demonstrated the existence of electricity in living tissue in the late 1780s. He called it ‘animal electricity’. Many repeated his experiments over the years and ‘galvanism’ remained hotly debated well into the 1800s.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Shelley and her “Frankenstein” lately. The hype and hysteria surrounding AI, human-like robots, and biocomputing make it easy to imagine. Just last week Elon Musk tweeted that his company, Neuralink, implanted its brain chip in a human for the first time. He wants to make ‘The Matrix’ a reality. Here we are some 200 years later, wanting to believe ‘perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’

‘Vital warmth’ seems a borrowed phrase from another scientific movement of the time, ‘vitalism’. Vitalism is the belief that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities, like computer chips, because they are governed by a unique, non-physical force or "vital spark" that animates life. A kind of teleology for which some contemporary biologists now have empirical evidence.

One prominent vitalist of the 18th and 19th century, the German physician, physiologist, and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, is best known for his contributions to the study of human biology. He developed the concept of the "Bildungstrieb" or "formative drive," which he proposed as an inherent force guiding the growth and development of organisms. Contemporary science explains these processes through a combination of genetic, biochemical, and physical principles like encoded DNA, gene expression networks, and morphogenesis — the interactions between cells and their responses to various chemical and mechanical forces.

THE INDUSTRIALIST’S VITAL SPARK

‘Formative drive’ was a vitalist response to the mechanistic explanations of life that were prevalent in the Enlightenment period. The same mechanistic fervor that endues so many technologists today, like Musk, with vital warmth. Blumenbach argued that physical and chemical processes alone could not account for the organization and complexity of living beings. Instead, he suggested that some other vital force was responsible for the development and function of organic forms.

Vitalists had their skeptics. Chiefly among them was Alessandro Volta. He was critical of Galvani’s ‘vital spark’. In Galvani’s frog leg experiments, he discovered that when two different metals (e.g., copper and zinc) were connected and then touched to a frog's nerve and muscle, the muscle would contract even without any external electrical source. Galvani concluded that this was due to an electrical force inherent in the nerves of the frog, a concept that challenged the prevailing views of the time and eventually laid the groundwork for the field of electrophysiology.

Volta, however, believed the electrical effects were due to the metals used in Galvani's experiments. Volta’s work eventually led to the development of the Voltaic Pile, an early form of a battery. Hence the term ‘volt’. The Voltaic Pile enabled a more systematic and controlled study of electricity, which was a relatively little-understood phenomenon at the time. It provided scientists and inventors with a consistent and reliable source of electrical energy for experiments, leading to a deeper understanding of electrical principles and the discovery of new technologies.

One such technology was the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s. The availability of electric batteries as power sources is what made it possible for Samuel Morse to revolutionize long-distance communication, profoundly effecting commerce, governance, and daily life. As he wrote in his first public demonstration, “What hath God wrought?”

The mechanists gained further favor as more and more scientists, inventors, and eventually economists succumbed to the allure of reductionism. They believed understanding complex phenomena could be done by studying their simplest, most fundamental, and mechanistic parts. Including body parts.

ECHOES OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

It was around the time of Morse’s tinkering that Mary Shelley reissued ‘Frankenstein’. She revealed in her 1831 forward how she was influenced by the scientific and philosophical ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This included galvanism, the debates around vitalism, and the Romantic movement's reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and science.

This was also a period marked by significant political, social, and technological upheavals. The consolidation of nation-states and the expansion of political power were central themes of this era, leading to debates over government intervention and the balance between order and liberty. Shelley's narrative, set against this backdrop, can be seen as a reflection on the consequences of unchecked ambition and the ethical responsibilities of creators, themes that are increasingly relevant in today's discussions about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other forms of technological innovation.

Moreover, Shelley's personal history and the socio-political context of her time deeply informed the themes of her novel. As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist thinker, Shelley was exposed from an early age to, what were then, radical ideas about gender, society, and individual rights. Her own experiences of loss, isolation, and vulnerability were compounded by the societal upheavals of the Little Ice Age and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. "Frankenstein" is imbued with a profound sense of existential questioning. It critiques the dehumanizing aspects of technological and industrial progress — themes that resonate with many today.

Like the early parts of the Industrial Revolution, we are living in a period of transforming economies, social structures, and daily life, ushering in new forms of labor, consumption, and environmental impact. The creation of Shelley’s ‘Creature’ can be seen as a metaphor for the unforeseen consequences of industrialization, including the alienation of individuals from their labor, from nature, and from each other.

Shelley's narrative warns of the dangers of valuing power and progress over empathy and ethical consideration, a warning that remains pertinent as society grapples with the implications of rapid technological advancement and environmental degradation. Mechanistic reductionism, with its emphasis on dissecting complex phenomena into their most basic parts, undeniably continues to dominate much of science, technology, and conventional thought.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," while serving as a cautionary tale about the hubris and potential perils of unchecked scientific and technological ambition, has paradoxically also fueled the collective imagination, inspiring generations to dream of creating a human-like entity from disparate parts and mechanisms.

Yet, there is an emerging renaissance that harks back to the holistic perspectives reminiscent of early vitalism. As scientists increasingly traverse interdisciplinary boundaries, embracing the principles of holism and complexity science, they are uncovering new patterns, principles, and laws that echo the intuitions of early vitalists.

The groundbreaking research of Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its focus on bioelectric patterns and their role in development and regeneration, offers a compelling empirical bridge to Blumenbach’s ‘formative drive’. While Levin's work eschews the metaphysical aspects of a "life force," it uncovers the intricate bioelectric networks that guide the form and function of organisms, echoing vitalism's fascination with the organizing principles of life.

This shift acknowledges that life's essence may not be fully captured by reductionist views alone. Levin shows how it’s not the mechanisms of DNA that unlock the mysteries of biological organization but the communication between cells and their environment. It points towards a more integrated understanding of the natural world that respects the intricate interplay of its myriad components.

Shelley’s pondering remains relevant today, “perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth." Either way, "Frankenstein" continues to remind us of the need for humility and ethical consideration. After all, as we navigate the complex frontier between mechanistic ambition and our fragile, emergent, and interconnected life neurobiology tells us our own neural connections are being reshaped by both environmental interactions and cognitive activity, reflecting principles of embedded cognition those early vitalists would surely endorse.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s been a while since we’ve been together. I took some time over the holiday break. We often think of parents spoiling kids upon their return from college, but I’m the one who feels spoiled.

We’re squarely in the winter season up north and that means I’ll be exploring human behavior. With all the talk of AI, I thought I’d start with its root inspiration — the neuron. How did these come to be?

Let’s find out.

As I stand here today, the earth’s declination angle is slowly inching toward zero as its orbital tilt brings us closer to spring. This will trigger a host of biological and biochemical chain reactions. Plants awake, buds break, birds migrate, insects propagate, amphibians’ mate, seeds germinate, furs abate, and soils emanate. Algae plumes bloom, and our own metabolism’s resume.

This shared sensing of environmental change makes common sense because we can sense it with our own senses. Less common is making sense of what we can’t sense. That’s what I’m trying to make sense of. Let’s start with cells.

Cells can also make sense of their environment, and of each other. Consensus belief says cellular life emerged nearly 3.7 billion years ago on a rotating and orbiting earth that had already been oscillating in a predictable pattern for 750 million years.

Early cellular organisms learned to predict these patterns, as the theory goes, getting an evolutionary leg up on the competition. This knowledge was then stored in the cell. I was surprised to learn a cell can store information.

Ricard Solé is a prominent researcher who applies complex systems concepts to biology. He explained in a recent podcast how cells perform associative learning through reactions to different external stimuli — a process fundamental to the evolution of cognition. This learning involves associating a specific signal with a stressor in a cell’s environment. Over time, they learn to respond to the signal, even in the absence of the original stressor. A bit like a Pavlovian response.

This information is then stored within the cell. Cells have complex signaling networks that gather information from the cell membrane and transmit it internally from the membrane to the genome or nucleus. These signals act as boolean "genetic switches." The switch involves pairs of genes that negatively regulate each other, creating a kind of memory storage system. As one gene tries to regulate the other, that gene is trying to do the same. Like two magnets competing to repel or attract. This leads to a binary outcome — the conflict produces a specific protein, or it does not. This process is akin to the binary electronic circuitry found in signaling networks used to process and store information on a computer. (more on that in future posts on this topic)

Cells that can respond to the environment, or conditions within itself, can secrete something into their environment. But if there are no other cells to receive them as signals or with the intention to propagate their stored information, this operation serves no function. Over evolutionary time, however, cells began to form functionalities. For example, through expressions formed from their genetic circuitry, the cells that make up your liver and kidney evolved to conduct basic metabolic functions. Meanwhile, the cells that make up neurons in your brain evolved to send and receive information — to communicate with each other. A major step in evolution.

Another major evolutionary step, according to Solé, came with interneurons. These are neurons that form connections between sensory neurons to process information between them. Many neurons connected by many interneurons form arrays of neural circuits capable of more complex information processing. Organisms that don’t have interneurons, like plants, pose a real biological and evolutionary disadvantage among energy competing biological organisms. Though, they created their own biological functions that are so wondrous they induce jealousy, like photosynthesis. Imagine getting fed by lying in the sun with your feet in the sand. Did I mention it’s winter in the gloomy northwest?

Solé believes the invention of interneurons provided the critical step toward a key component in the evolution of complex organisms like us, but also organisms that came before us like jellyfish. Jellyfish are made of a distributed ‘nerve net’ composed of sensory neurons, motor neurons, and interneurons similar to ours. This network conducts basic processing for various sensory and motor functions. For example, it can sense elements of its environment, like water currents and temperatures, which then trigger responses like swimming or eating.

Directed locomotion in response to sensory information processing serves as another critical step on the path of evolution — predation. Not only is the jellyfish sensing the water around them, but they’re also sensing the presence of predators and their nervous system conspires to act accordingly. As remarkable and complex a jellyfish is at storing information that allows it to predict and act to internal and external stimuli, it took another evolutionary leap to yield the kind of complex neural networks and biological systems we humans rely on.

In the words of Ricard Solé, “we tend to think [we humans], unfortunately for our planet, [] have been very, very successful.” He considers humans ‘ecological engineers’ because we can “transform the planet by changing flows of energy and matter at massive scales.” The question remains (as we transform the planet in ways that make it harder for us and the organisms we rely on to survive) is our evolutionary journey entering a phase transition? Are we teaching our cells a new lesson to be stored away for future generations, or another failed biological experiment nearing the end of the relentless and brutal path of evolutionary trial and error?

Paraphrasing the esteemed biologist E. O. Wilson, Solé offers that “if humans were not here, there would be the planet of the ants”. Ants have a form of collective intelligence that also allow them to transform the planet at massive scales, but to also survive seemingly insurmountable odds.

Is there something to be learned from ants? An ant, on its own, is as unremarkable as it is doomed. Can the same be said for us? Who are we without other humans? And even when we’re alone, are we really? We host an entire ecosystem of microorganisms for which we are mutually dependent for survival. Some feed on us, some try to kill us, while others conspire with our cells in competition and collaboration to make sense of each other — including the cells that make neurons. What kind of intelligence will they we need to survive another trip around the sun?

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Hello Interactors,

It’s been a great year hear at Interplace with subscriptions hitting (and hovering) around 1000 subscribers! Thank you!

And thanks to Substack’s recommendation engine, the vast majority of those came from Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software newsletter. Thank you!

Sadly, the utility of this recommendation engine also means those Nazi newsletters Substack chooses to sponsor will also spread. It’s their choice of free speech as a publisher and seller. Just like this 1930s Aryan bookstore who was fine attracting Nazi customers because, like Substack, they believed select, uncensored ‘truth brings liberation’.

I’m not thrilled to be sorted alongside such publications, but I’m also not thrilled to be embedded among local and national right wing extremists in a country that has yet to fully come to terms with it’s own racial ideology. An ideology that intermingles jingoism and militarism propped up with related economic policies. Yes, I have the choice (and privilege) to move, but finding places void of right-wing extremism and zombie neoliberalism is getting harder and harder these days.

2024 is a big election year in the U.S. One that will surely influence this course and our nation’s discourse. Abusive forms of AI is sure to play a role in it. So, I was curious what would happen if I took my top five most viewed posts of 2023 and ask ChatGPT to provide connections between them and summarize a conclusion.

I’m impressed. Not only with the how Large Language Models (LLMs) emulate perceived human intelligence, but with the consistency with which my own convictions and intentions emerge throughout these five posts. ChatGPT, like a good LLM, is providing an illusion of consistency and coherency in my writing! It’s a reflection of external linguistic patterns arranged in a literary image of my internal goals for Interplace — an emulation of perceived intelligence! Be careful out there.

I hope everyone has a healthy and happy 2024. Please remember this interpretation of my own intention as you set your new year’s resolutions:

“our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.”

And now, ChatGPT’s Interplace summary of 2023.

The five blocks of text you provided seem to be excerpts from different discussions or articles that, although varied in focus, share common themes about the intersection of human behavior, spatial cognition, and the environment, whether it be through the lens of a television show, research in geography, urban planning, psychological studies, or societal needs.

• Clarkson’s Farm: The Grand Tour of the Rural-Urban Divide:

This text illustrates how a TV show can provide a microcosm of the broader societal issues, including the divide between rural and urban life, environmental impact, and social stratification. It suggests that the antics of the show's host, Jeremy Clarkson, inadvertently reveal the interconnectedness of society and the environment.

• A Geography Revolution: Complexity and Connection in Successor Evolution:

This section discusses the advancement in cognitive geography, moving away from traditional, rigid spatial models to those that account for the complex, iterative interactions between people and their environments. It challenges conventional Euclidean views and advocates for a more dynamic, holistic approach to spatial cognition.

• The Universal Uniformity of Urban Mobility:

Here, the focus is on urban mobility and how patterns of movement within cities are universally similar, as demonstrated by visitation power laws. The text raises concerns about equity and inclusivity in urban planning, suggesting that current models serve those with resources while potentially neglecting others. It also touches on how legislative changes can influence urban structure and the potential for creating more walkable neighborhoods.

• Will Work for Food. A Quirk or Accrued?:

This text compares human behavior with that of rats in a study about driving and satisfaction. It draws parallels between the cognitive benefits of novel experiences and the laborious nature of maintaining a car, suggesting that there may be more rewarding alternatives to driving, such as walking, which provide more cognitive stimulation and a sense of agency.

• Hierarchy of Needs or Just More Greed?:

The final text reflects on the individual's power to enact change within large-scale systems, as evidenced by shifts in behavior during the pandemic. It questions whether adherence to traditional socio-economic constructs serves our needs and posits that conscious, alternative choices could lead to significant societal transformations.

Summary:

The amalgamation of these texts presents a nuanced examination of human-environment interactions. At the core is an understanding that our spaces, whether physical like farms and cities or conceptual like cognitive maps, are not static but are shaped by our interactions, decisions, and movements. From Clarkson's representation of rural life to the universal patterns of urban mobility, we see a pattern of uniformity in our behaviors that transcends geography and culture.

The discussion on cognitive geography suggests that embracing complexity in our understanding of space can lead to more equitable and representative models of human-environment interaction. This is echoed in the exploration of urban mobility, where data reflects not just how we move, but also the socio-economic hierarchies that dictate our movement. The potential for change is highlighted by the example of legislation affecting urban density, indicating a path towards more sustainable and equitable urban living.

The comparison of human behavior to that of rats reveals a deeper commentary on our choices and their psychological impacts. The reward system driving both rats and humans to undertake certain tasks like driving is complex and influenced by our environment. This complexity is further unpacked in the final text, which suggests that individual choices can lead to macro-scale changes in society. This ties back to the first text, where a television show, through its portrayal of the rural-urban divide, unintentionally showcases the interconnectivity of our choices and their impact on the world.

In essence, these texts argue for a more conscious and nuanced approach to how we view and shape our environments. They call for a departure from reductionist thinking, advocating for a recognition of the complex, interconnected nature of our world, and a reevaluation of our choices and their ramifications. Whether through the lens of a TV show, urban planning, geography, psychology, or societal behavior, the message is clear: our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.

Thank you for reading Interplace. Feel free to share it.

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Hello Interactors,

On the day before many around the world pull out ‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ to read to their kids, maybe drop a little context to the origins of this tale. This is an excerpt from a longer post I did in 2021 on Black Friday.

It touches on how the rising wealth in New York leading up to 1900 brought about shifts in attitudes around how the powerful elite should deal with ‘the masses’ of poor, and increasingly urban, immigrants. Included are themes emerging today like immigration, laws outlawing voting to non-property owners, and even calls for an end to democracy.

‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ was intended for the elite literate ruling class. It can be interpreted as a nostalgic romantic tale about how Christmas should be less about sharing with ‘the unruly masses’ — communally seeking good tidings — and more about barricading private homes from potential invasion and keeping your wealth to yourself. It’s a fantasy about letting a poor, kind peddler in a red tattered coat labor to bring gifts to affluent kids, quietly and calmly through the chimney of a fancy New York apartment.

Merry Christmas!

CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT

But the dawn of a new century, and the industrial age, brought a shift in attitudes around Christmas. The elite, like in centuries past, distanced themselves from the occasion. As urban cities grew and jobs shifted from the farm to the factory, winter brought new dynamics to the onset of the season. Some factories closed in the cold months as did shipyards along frozen waters.

This brought unemployment and idle time to laborers. Whereas historically wealthy farm owners were willing to amuse the working class in a societal roll reversal – through transient and theatrical wassailing – the urban elite power structures were unwilling to participate. But it didn’t stop the working class from venting.

The once faint mockery of their employers – imbued with subtle hints of revenge should they not offer them gifts, food, or alcohol – turned fierce and riotous in the 1800s. Papers in both England and the United States barely mention Christmas at all between 1800 and 1820. But that was about to change.

In the first decade of 1800, one of New York’s most influential men, John Pintard, became particularly peeved by the seasonal banditti. He reminisced on ‘better days’ when the rich and the poor got drunk together. And while he wished his wealthy friends reveled more among themselves, he grew concerned that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…”

And in a familiar tone, echoed to this day by many, he feared “thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.” Which is why he helped create the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. This was an organization that sought to curb money directed at care for the poor, but to also stop them from begging and drinking. The white elite ruling class of the 1820s –- as well as many in the 2020s – complained of what one New York paper described as, “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.”

Pintard was also hopelessly nostalgic. He founded the New York Historical Society in 1804 and was instrumental in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, and Columbus Day as national holidays. Pintard also introduced America’s icon of nostalgia, Santa Claus. Seeking a patron saint for the New York Historical Society, and for all of New York City, he commissioned an illustration to be painted of St. Nicholas giving presents to children. While the icon was not intended to be seasonal, it was nonetheless printed on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, in 1810.

He pined for the days when the rich and powerful could rule over what was becoming a burgeoning working class. In 1822, as Jefferson had just passed a law allowing non-property owners to vote, Pintard wrote to his daughter,

“All power is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy.… Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”

WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR

1822 was also the year his friend, and wealthy land owner, Clement Clark Moore, wrote what was to become the most influential Christmas poem ever: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or as it is known today, “T’was The Night Before Christmas.”

This single poem, written for the elite upper class, encapsulates the nostalgia of wassailing Pintard and his friends pined for, while self-indulgently feeling good about themselves for ‘giving to the needy.’ Moore did this by substituting the unruly lower working class, begging for gifts from their master, with children expecting presents on Christmas morning.

He kept the gift giving mysticism of the centuries old St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but removed the judgmental elements of a Bishop who may make them feel guilty for maintaining class divide by making him “merry”, “droll”, “rosy”, and “plump.” He also made him a lower class “peddler”. And while Santa made a loud noise “on the lawn” with a “clatter”, just as a lower class wassailer would have, he was but a small and unthreatening “right jolly old elf” who kindly left toys he had labored over for the children.

And he asked nothing in return. With a “wink of his eye” and a “finger aside his nose” (a gesture meaning “just between you and me”) Moore gave the privileged class, who were fearful of home invasions at Christmas time, assurance they “had nothing to dread.” All they needed to do, was keep their wealth within the family and buy their kids and friends gifts at Christmas time. Forget the poor, they thought, they’re as hopeless as democracy.

The vision and version of Christmas and Santa Claus that Moore provided his haughty affluent peers, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was soon to be read by a growing middle class and an increasingly literate lower class. That’s as true then as it is today.

And while Moore was a country squire who never worked a day in his life, and hated the gridding up of property in a growing New York City, he grew to love the money he earned selling off family property he inherited. Geographer Simeon DeWitt was chopping Manhattan into a Roman style grid to make room for a population that grew from 33,000 in 1790 to nearly 200,000 by the time Moore’s poem was written in 1822. He even included a chimney in his poem for Santa to climb down as a way for city folk to better relate to a scene he’d rather have happened in his bucolic hills of a New York of yore – an area today we call Chelsea.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

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Hello Interactors,

This is the last post on economics for 2023. Next up for winter is human behavior. This post bridges where we left off with traditional colonial nation-states by talking about how similar philosophies are motivating the formation of neocolonial micro-states. What causes people to seek freedom in new places by limiting the freedom of those found in such places?

Let’s dig in…

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

In 2009 the venture capitalist, techno-optimist, and libertarian political activist Peter Thiel ‘reasoned’.

“[he] no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He said,

“The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”

Back then Thiel was introducing his ‘seasteading’ project — building or repurposing platforms in ocean waters not covered by international law as micro-nations.

He continues to lead his friends and followers, like tech mogul Marc Andreessen, toward these promised lands. They seek sophisticated legal spaces opportunistically drawn inside pre-existing territories with curious jurisdictions, legal structures, and rights. They take on names like ‘innovation hubs’ or ‘high-tech parks’ — techno-libertarian utopian ‘enclaves’ and ‘havens’ for those willing to adopt and adhere to their techno-optimist religion.

My last two posts talked about the creation of nation-states by powerful governments over the centuries and how they contributed to the current wars in Ukraine and Palestine. But there are also battles in the courtroom between these neocolonial libertarian venture capitalists and the people resisting colonization.

This is why, as The Economist says,

these libertarian colonies “will have their own government, write their own laws, manage their own currency and, eventually, hold their own elections.”

And they have the backing of powerful European and U.S. governments. Sound familiar?

The original European colonial nation-states were qausi-governmental entities conceived by rich and powerful private entities to further enrich themselves — often at the expense of local people and land. It’s a concept that emerged out the European Enlightenment boosted by new scientific discoveries, technologies, and philosophies.

Thinkers like John Locke advocated for the concept of natural rights, including life, liberty, and property, which belonged inherently to individuals. These ideas inspired people to seek places where they could express personal autonomy and the freedom to pursue one's own goals and desires free of rule. This contrasted with long held beliefs that placed collective or communal goals above individual aspirations.

The Enlightenment is also often associated with the Age of Reason. Influential philosophers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant emphasized the role of reason in understanding the world and making decisions. They argued that individuals should use their capacity for rational thought to question traditional authorities and beliefs, thus promoting a more individualistic approach to knowledge and truth. Reason is the hallmark of libertarian political philosophy today.

But they’re not alone. Rationalism has long been a cornerstone of human understanding, though faces many challenges today. Advances in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy reveal that rationality is not a neutral tool but is often influenced by power structures, cultural biases, and subjective experiences. What is considered 'rational' can vary across different cultural and social contexts.

For example, the ‘rational actor’ theory on which mainstream economics rests doesn’t factor in confirmation bias — favoring information that confirms preexisting beliefs. A growing number of neuroscientists are revealing confirmation bias triggers activity in brain regions involved in reward processing, suggesting some biases may be rooted in fundamental neural mechanisms.

One of the preexisting beliefs of early Enlightenment thinkers, theologians, and colonial settlers is the idea that morality and ethics are not solely dictated by external authorities (like the church or state) but can be discerned through personal reasoning and rational introspection. This led to a more personal and individualistic approach to moral decisions. This may a form of confirmation bias suggesting moral principles should be followed out of a sense of personal duty over a duty to the community.

This shift played a crucial role in shaping modern Western societies, influencing everything from political theory to personal identity.

These ideas are intermingled in European colonialism and state-making. European powers, perceiving themselves as more 'civilized' and 'rational', used these beliefs to legitimize the domination of other peoples, whom they considered less enlightened or rational. This paternalistic view was used to rationalize the spread of European control and influence across the globe, often disregarding the autonomy and cultural values of colonized peoples.

While Enlightenment thinkers championed personal freedom and autonomy, these ideals were selectively applied. Colonial powers often deny these rights to the people in their newly formed colonies, leading to a glaring contradiction between Enlightenment ideals and colonial practices. This paradox is what fuels anti-colonial movements to argue for independence and self-determination just as colonizers did against their religious, feudal, and imperial tyrants.

The individualistic approach to morality and ethics of the Enlightenment era led to significant debates and critiques regarding the moral implications of colonialism that are alive today.

Some Enlightenment thinkers, like Denis Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire and later the abolitionists, criticized colonialism and slavery on moral grounds. Even early American colonizers like Roger Williams, John Woolman, and Thomas Paine criticized the inhumane treatment of Native Americans and the unjust rights of exploitation of land and labor. However, the cloak of moral and civilizational superiority ultimately justified colonial practices then and now.

LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

Are these neocolonial ‘zones of opportunity’ just another cloak of moral and civilizational superiority that ultimately justifies total disregard for the autonomy and cultural values of the local people and land? And like other attempts to support colonization, are they endorsed by powerful governments and Western financial institutions? Yes, they are.

In 2013, the Honduran government under President Juan Orland Hernández, after controversially reconstituting its Supreme Court, passed the "ZEDEs law" to create "Zones for Employment and Economic Development." These zones, inspired by former World Bank Economist Paul Romer's Charter City concept, involved selling Honduran territory to foreign investors at low costs.

The Society for the Socioeconomic Development of Honduras, later known as Honduras Próspera LLC, was established in Biden’s home Company State and tax haven, Delaware.

Próspera is funded by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen and was envisioned as a libertarian utopia.

They want to develop a ‘zone’ in Crawfish Rock, a small, historically significant community located on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras. Its English-speaking origins can be traced back to the early 19th century when the British Empire exerted influence over the region, leading to a significant influx of English-speaking Black Caribbean descendants.

Over the years, Crawfish Rock has maintained its unique cultural and linguistic identity, with English remaining the primary language, a testament to its historical ties to the British colonial era and the diverse migration patterns in the Caribbean. An organization has formed to protect these people, their homes, and their heritage — as well as other areas like it in Honduras from ‘neocolonial invasion’.

The Vice President of the Crawfish Rock governing council Venessa Cardenas Woods put it plainly,

“If you take away our land, if you take away our cultural heritage, our way of living, you take away everything, the entire identity of the group as English-speaking blacks, then you would be eliminating an entire people.”

Meanwhile, Prospera’s President, Joel Bomgar, who also happens to be a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, believes,

“The concept of free private cities and charter cities, specifically what Próspera is trying to do, is the most transformative project in the world.”

Bomgar previously started and then sold a remote access software company for support technicians.

Lest you think this is purely a conservative GOP libertarian affair, it was the Obama administration that created a “U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America.” Optimistically stating,

“While the United States will need to invest significant resources in such an effort, the success of the strategy will depend far more on the readiness of Central American governments to continue to demonstrate political will and undertake substantial political and economic commitments to bring about positive change in the region.”

Their efforts and dollars instead supported a government coup and the rise of Hernández which ultimately reshaped the Honduras constitution, reassembled the supreme court, and forced the formation of U.S. backed ‘zones’ into law. The coup was unanimously condemned by the UN General Assembly.

In a made-for-tv twist, fast forward to 2022, Honduran President Juan Orland Hernández was arrested, detained, and then extradited at the request of the United States government on drug and arms charges. The Hondurans then elected Xiomar Castro as the country’s first female president. She is also the wife of Manuel Zelaya who was ousted in the coup. Her mandate is political platform, social justice, poverty reduction, and opposition to neoliberal policies.

She wasted no time. The Honduran Congress voted unanimously to repeal ‘zone’ laws and appointed a committee to oversee their elimination. Próspera also wasted no time. Months later the corporation filed a $10.7 billion dollar claim against the Honduran government. This equates to 80% of the Honduran total governmental expenditures. They claim it’s a violation of the U.S. Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR).

Members of the U.S. Congress and Biden administration sought to defend and expand CAFTA provisions to further protect U.S. investments. This system of public-private strong-arming of weaker countries is embedded in U.S. bilateral investment treaties. It can create legal and power imbalances that allow corporations to sue governments for regulations affecting profits without reciprocal accountability for corporate crimes — including violations of the very labor laws and environmental protections Libertarians seek to avoid in the creation of their so-called ‘havens’.

The Biden administration's approach to international trade law and the ongoing case of Honduras challenges existing trade norms. Honduras is actively resisting this system, with President Castro's government seeking to reform the international trade system and restrict corporate power from neocolonial expansion.

As Honduras prepares to lead the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2024, this issue is set to become a central topic in hemispheric discussions. The case underscores the importance of eliminating unfair provisions from U.S. trade agreements to safeguard democracy against corporate interventions. The stakes are high, not just financially but also in terms of the autonomy of cultural values, community identity, and environmental protections.

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Hello Interactors,

Part 2 talks about the failures of borders, some recent alarming and revealing data about America’s ‘shared identity’, and some potential paths toward embracing the shaky state of states.

Let’s get into it…

NEWLY PROMISED LANDS

Part 1 left us at the Paris Peace Conference and Western-style cartographic geo-political mandates. Amidst these mandates was an admission by one leader that these arrangements would need subsequent alterations. Take this quote, for example:

“There are many complicated questions connected with the present settlements which perhaps can not be successfully worked out to an ultimate issue by the decisions we shall arrive at here.

I can easily conceive that many of these settlements will need subsequent reconsideration, that many of the decisions we make shall need subsequent alteration in some degree; for, if I may judge by my own study of some of these questions, they are not susceptible of confident judgments at present.”

These are the words of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in January of 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. Sadly, ‘subsequent alterations’ over the last century have proven a tougher challenge than Wilson may have fully appreciated.

Whether his intentions were noble or not, rigidly draw borders on maps are obviously failing to truly encapsulate and represent the diverse and multifaceted spectrum of human communities — especially in a world where the negative effects of climate change know no such borders.

Could it be that identities and experiences resist being neatly delineated by Cartesian maps inherently based on political philosophies steeped in Cartesian dualities? Is it conceivable that nations and nation-states should not be confined to a singular, homogeneous identity?

Perhaps they are incapable of such definition. It may be these concepts have reached their limits. A suggestion that can compound feelings of uncertainty about what lies ahead in tumultuous times. This discomfort drives many to search for past eras that seemed more safe and certain — a time when there appeared to be a common shared national identity.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) seeks such shared identities among those living in the United States in their annual ‘American Values Survey.’ It’s one of the more respected surveys offering a pulse on American views of religion, culture, and politics. They recently released their 2023 results which can serve as one pulse on national identity. They project, based on their statistically valid sample, that

“Three in ten Americans (31%) agree that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world. Just less than half of Republicans (49%) agree with this, compared with 26% of independents and only 18% of Democrats.”

PRRI data also reveals,

“Those who most trust conservative media (66%) and Fox News (54%) among television news sources are much more likely than those who choose no television source (29%) or mainstream media sources (24%) to agree that God intended America to be a new promised land.”

“Two-thirds of Republicans (66%) believe things have changed for the worse since the 1950s, compared with half of independents (50%) and only 30% of Democrats.”

The 1950s are often remembered as a time of economic prosperity, cultural growth, and the rise of the middle class in America. This era is seen as the embodiment of the 'American Dream,' with a booming post-World War II economy, expanding consumer culture, and significant advancements in technology and suburban living.

The period is characterized by strong family values, community cohesion, and distinct gender roles, often contrasted with the rapid social changes and complexities of modern life. Television, automobiles, and household appliances symbolize this era's progress and American ingenuity, reflecting a sense of unity and optimism about the United States' role in the world.

However, this romanticized view of the 1950s overlooks many critical social and political issues of the time, including racial segregation, gender inequality, and the fear and paranoia of McCarthyism. The decade, while remembered for its strong leadership and perceived lack of political division, also faced significant challenges.

The popular nostalgia for this era often represents a simplified and selective interpretation, failing to fully recognize the complexities and struggles that defined the 1950s, and inadvertently promoting a cartoonish, oversimplified version of history.

This difference in opinion is increasingly leading more Americans to embrace violence as a means of establishing a ‘shared identity.’

“Americans who believe that the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s are more than twice as likely as those who say that it has changed for the better to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country (30% vs. 14%).”

MAPPING THE AMORPHOUS

The idea “that God intended America to be a new promised land” is what many believe is the ‘shared identity’ representing the nation-state of America. It’s derivative of visions across centuries of European expansionism and colonialism prior to dominance of the United States of America as a nation and economic juggernaut.

Just as feudalism marked the beginning of a new social order and the political-economic apparatus of the nation-state, I wonder if our modern-day lords of geopolitical economic power are similarly controlling the toiling vassals and serfs — especially in regions with particularly low-wage labor.

The modern-day dynamics between the economically dominant Western and Northern Hemispheres offer metaphors to feudalism. Much like the concentration of wealth among feudal lords, powerful nations hold a significant portion of global wealth and resources, leading to pronounced economic disparities with less developed areas.

This situation mirrors the decentralized power structure of feudal times, where today's global landscape is fragmented, with Western and Northern countries wielding substantial influence, creating varying levels of power and development worldwide.

The strong economic and political alliances within these hemispheres, akin to feudal loyalties to local lords, often exacerbate global divisions leading to patterns of regional allegiances and wider communal divides.

Furthermore, the influence exerted by these dominant regions over global policies, economic trends, and cultural norms is reminiscent of the control feudal lords had over their territories. They shape international trade, governance, and cultural exchanges in ways that echo the hierarchical and power-centric nature of feudal societies. This power and dominance, under the guise of a ‘shared identity’ is then used as leverage in exchange for military and monetary protection for survival.

Survival was very much on the minds of those living through the 15th-17th centuries. Generation after generation witnessed catastrophic meteorological events brought on by the Little Ice Age. This had devastating impacts on people around the world and played a significant role in shaping the social, political, and economic structures that followed. Might we be on the verge of a new world order?

Survival is also on the minds of those suffering the travesties of wars nation-state border disputes create. Including those living the through the lead up to and aftermath of World War I and World War II.

I wonder how those feelings of uncertainty compare to feelings of uncertainty today. Scholar, podcaster, and fellow Substack writer Christopher Hobson recently reflected on quotes from intellectuals struggling to make sense of the aftermath of World War I and II. Here’s a quote from the 1922 Austrian writer, Robert Musil, in his book ‘Helpless Europe: A Digressive Journey’ that could just as easily be written today.

“And so we arrive at the present day. The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts.”

Cartesian maps of nation-states are politically charged, legally binding ordering concepts, but their certainty is imagined. When Woodrow Wilson cautioned the agreements at the Paris Peace Conference are "not susceptible of confident judgments" he was suggesting the matters in question were too intricate, uncertain, or evolving to allow for definitive, confident decisions.

Wilson is indicating that, due to the complexity and fluidity of the issues, any judgments or decisions made during the conference might be provisional and subject to change.

Let’s consider some alternatives traditional mapping of nation-states.

• Could psychogeographic maps, reflecting the emotional landscapes of diverse groups, provide a more nuanced understanding of human geography?

• Perhaps powerful nations and states should be leading exercises in participatory mapping offering communities themselves more accurate and meaningful representations of their own spaces and identities.

• Maybe counter-mapping or decolonial mapping practices that challenge the established narratives and power structures inherent in traditional cartography could offer new perspectives to those so sure of a ‘shared identity’?

• Critical Geographic Information Science can reveal underlying patterns of inequality and socio-political dynamics commonly overlooked, shifting conceptions of what could be?

• And in a world increasingly influenced by feminist perspectives, how might feminist cartography reshape our understanding of spaces and places, especially in relation to gender dynamics?

These questions, rooted in the alternatives to Cartesian cartography, invite us to consider new paradigms in mapping and understanding of human geography. They are emerging as new tools just as anthropography was emerging at the time of the Paris Peace Agreements.

We are clearly in need of a new shared understanding that could offer new directions in our politics, economics, and global societies, but we should heed the advice of Woodrow Wilson and be cautious of our confidence.

Christopher Hobson encourages mindfulness and carefulness as we attempt to make sense of what comes next. He suggests we

“…resist the lure of comfortable frames and easy explanations, and instead to fully reckon with ‘the brittleness of the world’ and what potentialities might be present in these conditions.”

Perhaps it’s best to embrace the shaky state of states and the ambiguity of the unknown as we try to make sense of the state of our world. As Hobson offers,

“The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase.”

We live in…

“A time defined by what it is no longer, what is ‘not quite here, but yet at hand’.”

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Hello Interactors,

There’s a lot of talk of states these days. Palestine and Israel, one state or two? Ukraine and Russia. One state or two? The United States. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one…right? What about that one D.C. federal district, or those five territories, and a bunch of ‘minor’ islands? And don’t forget the many tribal nations within the nation-state of the United States which can often spread across many state borders!

I started writing about all this and it got long, so I’m broke it two. Ex uno plures, from one, many. I suppose there’s a lesson in all this. No matter how fixed a given state of affairs may appear, we have to be prepared for bifurcations and reconfigurations.

Let’s dig in!

THE RISE OF STATES

I easily confuse states with nations. Nations are loosely defined as a group of people with a shared identity. A nation-state is a political structure represented by a territorial boundary claiming to contain a common identity. I used the words ‘loosely’ and ‘claim’ because so many territorially bounded areas or nations contain a multitude of identities. The United States, a notoriously diverse country, is a great example.

Nations and nation-states seem to have chicken-and-egg origin story. I believe those who claim the nation-state rose out of folks like those early European colonizers. Fueled by the thought of amassing wealth, land, and power once only believed to be wrangled by feudal lords and monarchs, influential and enterprising European intellectually ‘entlightened’ elites pooled their resources and got to work.

The idea of a nation-state, and their bordered geographic territories, began to take shape through 14th-17th century Europe. The late Middle Ages and the rising Renaissance witnessed a gradual decline of feudalism and the rise of centralized monarchies who were incented to consolidate power within defined territorial boundaries. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe, is often cited as a key moment in the history of nations as it established the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity fundamental to the nation-state concept.

The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of nationalism, a significant driving force behind the nation-state concept. Nationalism emphasized a shared identity based on language, culture, and ethnicity, often aligned with a specific geographic territory. The French Revolution (1789–1799) and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars accelerated the spread of these ideas across Europe.

Language invention and reconstitution burgeoned across Europe. One example is from 1820 Finland. Born out of an interest in Finnish tradition and culture a groundswell of nationalism by Finnish writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys took hold. They stitched together their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides that differentiated them from the Swedes. This forged a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.

In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior. By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first Ukrainian nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.

The 19th century also saw the unification of various nation-states. Notable examples include the unification of Italy in the 1860s and Germany in the 1870s. These unifications were driven by shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic identities, as well as by political and economic interests.

It took Germany just 40 years to rise as a dominant and powerful nation-state in Europe. This led to tensions around Europe, especially with France and Britain. But it was a Serbian nationalist group and their assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914 that triggered war. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and Europe erupted into World War I.

The United States entered the war in 1917, in part fearing a potential alliance between neighboring Mexico and Germany. This was also the same year they began preparing for peace agreements and the redistricting of territories of nation-states.

In 1918 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson boarded a ship for Paris bringing with him a team of cartographers to create materials for the Paris Peace Conference. This included chief cartographer Mark Sylvester William Jefferson who had invented a form of thematic mapping based on ethnography, demography, and population distribution called anthropography.

Comfortable with nearly thirteen languages, he and a team of ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists set up offices in a Paris hotel. They drew convincing maps used by Wilson and his allies to sell other world leaders on the formation of nation-states that would best serve their interests. U.S. interest in one of those nation-states invented in Paris remains today — Ukraine.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER, ALLIED BY RANCOR

Out of this conference emerged the first worldwide intergovernmental organization, the League of Nations. With it came a set of treaties that shifted power principally to the United States, Great Britain, and France while mandating political power to newly drawn, U.S. directed, and ethnically and linguistically determined nation-state maps.

Just four years after the formation of the League of Nations, in 1923, the League of Nations turned their attention to the Middle East declaring Palestine a state. A British mandate, it was based on a cartographic line originally drawn in 1906 by the British and the French between Palestine and Egypt. This was the first internationally recognized boundary in the Middle East.

Having already colonized Egypt as part of their growing empire, England then wanted control of the Suez Canal. So they invented another border that awarded them the Sinai Peninsula. Then, in 1916, the English and French met in secret to create a dividing line between Egypt and Turkey. They decided Egypt would go to England and Turkey would go to France. Four years later they determined Lebanon and Syria would go to France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia to England.

It took the end of the second World War in 1947 for the League of Nations, now rebranded the United Nations, to recommend a plan to divide Palestine into two “independent Jewish and Arab states.”

The Jewish organization that had long been helping resettle the area begrudgingly accepted the proposal, but most of the Arab contingent did not. In 1948 the British mandate expired, hundreds of Palestinians were expelled, 78% of the land was handed to Israel, and before the year was up the region had their first Arab-Israeli war. And here, again, like in Ukraine, today we have borders and states defined by the West roiled in controversy and war.

History reveals how European and American colonialism spread the concept of the nation-state globally. And economics were a central theme. Local and regional agrarian and mercantile economies of the 17th century led to regional specialization, with certain areas developing specific industries based on their geographic advantages. This specialization then influenced economic structures within nation-states and their interactions with other states. Those with common religion, language, or cultures conspired against the ‘others’.

Natural resource acquisition, deprivation, and distribution brought needs for trade routes and resource accessibility at a time when the world was being both mapped and explored by Europeans. Geographic features that facilitated or hindered trade, such as rivers, seas, mountains, and plains, all impact the development and power of nation-states. For example, access to trade routes along the Dnieper River has played a critical role in trade and distribution from Greece to Kiev dating all the way back to the first millennium BC.

The Suez Canal was built it in the late 1800s by the French and remains an important international trade route to this day. The industrial revolution and subsequent urbanization and modernization that followed all hinge on economic geography. And its nation-state status that awards a nation’s entry into competing and cooperating or demoralizing and destroying.

I’d like to think cartographers like Jefferson, and social scientists like him, were well-intentioned and hopeful they could use human identities forged from language, culture, ethnicity, race, creed, or tribes to empower and protect vulnerable peoples politically and socially. Perhaps they believed these cartographic mandates, sensitive to human geography, could lead to peaceful and eternal coexistence.

But it seems fictitious fixed borders drawn on a map fail to convey, capture, and contain the amorphous and pluralistic panoply of peoples. Maybe identities can’t be drawn by a Cartesian map using political philosophies rooted in Cartesian dualities. Maybe nations and nation-states shouldn’t be defined by one common shared identity. Maybe they can’t. Maybe these concepts have run their course and we don’t yet know what comes next.

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Hello Interactors,

A series of U.S. federal legislation under the Biden administration has spawned a manufacturing boom at a scale not seen in decades. Unfortunately, the country is repeating the same socio-economic, land use, and transportation policy mistakes that have lead to many of the ills we’re seeking to remedy. Are we missing an opportunity to build back better?

A MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE

Clearcut a forest and build a factory. Now build an even bigger parking lot around the factory for workers and make them drive from miles around to work. Parts and supplies? Yeah, those will have to be trucked in too. Now, stand here in front of the camera and wave this earth flag alongside a U.S. flag and brag about job growth and how EV’s are going to re-green the earth.

This scene captures what’s currently unfolding across the United States. Legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, alongside increased Department of Defense spending, is catalyzing a 'manufacturing renaissance' in the United States with a supposed emphasis on infrastructure improvement, clean energy, and national security.

Paradoxically, this familiar pattern in economic geography is partially responsible for the historical socio-economic inequities and environmental destruction the U.S. is struggling to remedy. Research by Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, in cooperation with the Aspen Institute’s Latinos and Society Program, is investigating the spatial dimensions of this shift, seeking to enhance opportunities for minority-owned businesses within this new economic landscape.

They’ve uncovered how the burgeoning manufacturing boom in the United States is showcasing a remarkable geographic distribution of investment and industry specialization significantly benefiting a diverse array of states and metropolitan areas. A substantial portion of funding aimed at bolstering the semiconductor supply chain is pouring into states like Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, and Indiana.

Additionally, to streamline supply chain efficiencies, battery plants are emerging alongside automotive factories in a vertical alignment from Michigan to Georgia. On the energy front, the Eastern seaboard is focusing on offshore wind power, while states such as California, Arizona, and Texas lead in solar panel production. This broad dispersion of high-tech manufacturing indicates a shift towards a more equitable distribution of economic growth across the nation.

This industrial transformation is not only geographically dispersed across many states and regions, but also spread to the outskirts of metropolitan areas. This raises challenges in harnessing this growth for the benefit of all, particularly Black- and Latino-owned firms and workers. It’s shaping into another form of ‘white flight’ where firms seek the cheapest land away from populated areas, which typically are exurban and rural farmland and forests, toward smaller cities and towns which are predominantly white. And mostly poor, offering a needed economic boost.

However, these regions, cities, and towns have also historically deprioritized public transit alongside decades of car dependent land use policies. So whatever jobs and growth these new manufacturing facilities bring, they’re destined to also bring more cars, which means more traffic, more pollution, and more time alone in cars isolated from interactions with community members. Meanwhile, the decades of neglect and decay of our rail network also means more truck traffic.

I’m reminded of geographer David Harvey's concept of the 'spatial fix'. It suggests capital movement, including the re-shoring of manufacturing, seeks new low-cost geographical frontiers to overcome drains on profit and expansion. This exploitation of geographical ‘space’ through industrial policy and investment reflects a 'fix' for capital investments and investors. By now, however, the meaning of the word 'fix' has less to do with a correction and more to do with an addiction.

There’s an addiction to a dynamic complex interplay of local and global economic geographies — a form of economic development and spatial restructuring that has shown to bring about both positive and negative outcomes. Parking lots and roads may have paved the way for many to cruise to a better quality of life, but the quality of the paradise we call home — our communities, cities, health, and environments — are suffering, if not lost, from decades of addiction.

This boom, while creating opportunities for some, may continue to be a bust for many. They may also spawn new forms of social stratification. The concentration of certain industries in specific regions, for example, could lead to a polarization of skill sets and economic opportunities. This, in turn, may result in localized booms benefiting a segment of society while leaving others behind, thereby reinforcing regional disparities rather than truly leveling the playing field and remedy the disparities that already plague this country.

Furthermore, the inter-regional competition for investment can spark a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and environmental regulations. The suburbanization of industry, while beneficial for regional decentralization, often neglects urban cores leaving central areas, and underprivileged members of society, to grapple with the growing donut hole of decay from decades of lack of investment and attention.

This shift raises questions about the urban-rural divide, land use, and environmental sustainability. The dispersion of these new manufacturing initiatives does indeed offer opportunities for restructuring regional economies. There is potential for the country to move towards a multi-nodal metropolitan model where economic activities are spread across a wider area, including existing urban centers. Provided it is managed with an eye towards sustainability and inclusivity…and today it is not.

POWER, PEOPLE, AND PLACE

Now would be an ideal time to update and expand transportation infrastructure like rail and public transit to address decades of decay and neglect. By enhancing connectivity, metropolitan areas and their cities can become more resilient and inclusive, enabling a diverse workforce to access employment opportunities.

This would help mitigate socio-economic inequities while reducing car dependencies and the country’s outsized contribution to local, regional, and worldwide transportation related pollution. While renewable energy investments are worthy, as are roads, bridges, pipes, and electrical grids, most federal, state, and local transportation dollars are spent bolstering car sales and car dependency and all the physical, psychological, social, economic, and environmental health declines it’s shown to contribute to.

These infrastructure deficiencies underscore a more profound need for more adaptive strategies that align with principles found in complexity science, like resiliency. The resilience of these increasingly brittle social systems is tested not only by burgeoning demands but also by the unpredictable shocks like those experienced during the pandemic.

Increasing frequency and amplitude of weather shocks also reveal the fragility of underinvested frameworks. The capacity to adapt to emerging needs and stresses — be it climate change impacts, congestion, or energy supply — requires a systemic rethinking that transcends traditional silos of urban planning and regional economic development.

Moreover, the underrepresentation of minority-owned firms in strategic sectors, as still found in federal spending patterns, hints at an oversight resulting in an exasperation of existing inequalities and social tensions. As the report demonstrates, these will likely persist unless addressed through targeted interventions. As we learned with the BLM movement, and similar social movements in the past, interventions must start by understanding lived experiences and power relationships on the ground, locally and regionally. This is essential to building the socio-economic political systems that enable or disempower them.

Space and place are often viewed by the powerful and by policy makers as neutral, abstracted points, polygons, and numbers on a map or spreadsheet. But they’re more than that.

The work of geographer Doreen Massey reminds us space is a product of interrelations and interactions at all scales across institutions and individuals and therefore can’t be regarded as neutral. In her influential book “Space, Place and Gender” she reveals how space is politically and socially charged — imbued with power relations. She introduced the idea of "power geometry" to describe the complex and dynamic ways in which different social groups and individuals are positioned within the "flows" of the globalized world.

Recent global events and current local investments across the country are examples of power geometry. We can see how different social and political groups have distinct relationships with these new flows and movements — how they are able to command space and assert influence over it. Some have the power to shape networks and connections across space, which includes the ability to accelerate the pace of movement and interaction for themselves, while others are placed in positions where they are restricted or excluded. This can be true even for those who can afford to own cars and those who cannot.

Owning a car, while a necessity for most, is still a form of power that when asserted only serves to diminish the power of those who do not. Many of these new manufacturing hubs are being built to build more cars and computer chips for them by people who need cars to get to work. This reveals the powerful influence the federal government has over the global geographic geometry required to build cars, and their parts, the local geometries needed to build the plants, and the car dependent network of roads needed for employees. Cars are miraculous modern appliances until they are concentrated within clustered collections of cities which then become problem areas for which firms seek a spatial fix.

Even as federal investment feeds the manufacturing of more cars, along with more regional development that requires more roads and maintenance, society laments climbing car related deaths, worry about the effects of social isolation that can lead to decreased physical and mental health, stress over income disparities, all while watching a polluted planet burn. It all seems as counter intuitive as it does counterproductive. The more we invest in perpetuating car dependency the less money and attention is put toward more healthy and resilient alternatives.

As this new industrial sprawl unfolds, sustainable transportation becomes increasingly vital for connecting industrial zones with urban centers, addressing the dislocation of workspaces, and fostering economic and social robustness and resiliency. We need to urge policymakers to consider the broader implications of the current manufacturing boom on the social fabric of the nation. If we don’t take a comprehensive, diversified, and integrative approach to planning our regions and economies we not only risk perpetuating existing social and environmental woes, but also suffering collapse from another unforeseen emergent disaster.

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Hello Interactors,

Trick-or-treat! It’s that time of year for Americans, and a growing population worldwide, to dawn a favorite costume and consume copious amounts of candy. It’s also a time for kids to parade for treats and for adults to decorate with ghoulish goblins, ghosts, and other frightful festoons. And excuse to cosplay without criticism.

Americans will spend an ungodly amount of money on this conspicuous occasion. Like most holidays in America, it’s a chance to fire up the capitalist contraption and watch money burn like a Halloween bonfire. But why? How did this holiday emerge and what does it all really mean?

Let’s find out.

CANDY, COSTUMES, AND CONTESTATIONS

I once handed out toothpaste to trick-or-treaters at Halloween. Trick your teeth. My wife’s dad was a dentist and we ended up with a box of toothpaste samples. Realizing we forgot to buy candy to hand out at Halloween, we poured the box of samples into a bowl. Kids loved it, and so did their teeth.

Some parents giggled, many groaned, and some thought it was downright mean. Realizing kids will happily take just about anything from the bowl, some years we’ve even opted for pencils, erasers, and stickers. We’re so mean.

But let’s face it, Halloween, in its modern form, is mostly about candy and costumes. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates 68% of Americans will spend a total of $3.6 billion on candy handouts this Halloween. That’s up from $3.1 billion last year. Burp.

Nearly three quarters of the country are expected to buy decorations to the tune of $3.9 billion dollars. The percentage of folks intent on buying costumes have hit an all-time NRF high of 69%, up from 67% last year, amounting to $4.1 billion dollars. All told, they project the average American Halloweener will spend around $108 this year. It’s all been climbing since Covid. Either we need sugar to sooth each other, or costumes to excuse each other. Or both.

Their data suggests those aged 25–44 are the most eager to spend, claiming social media inspires early costume and decoration ideas and decisions. Adult spending on themselves and their pets dwarfs spending on kid costumes accounting for nearly three of the four billion dollars in total spend…and climbing. Adult spending increased a whopping 18% from a year ago.

The NRF says to expect a lot of Spiderman and princess costumes on kids, pets as pumpkins, and a variety of adult witches, ghosts, and vampires. And Barbie. Lots of Barbie. It seems trendy pop culture is challenging the traditional spooky gothic culture Hallows Eve is known for. Though there are some interpretations of history that suggest Halloween really was more of a moment of merriment among the masses than some pagan spiritual spook fest.

A quick search on the history of Halloween and you’ll quickly learn it comes from Ireland via a Celtic festival called Samhein (pronounced “sow-win”). Irish immigrants then brought it to America in the 1800s and here we are. Searching on Samhein will reveal text that says it stems from a spiritual festival by pagans — a religious celebration with imagery of mysticism and the occult where people on earth attempt connections with the dead through fire and rituals. It was believed to be the interaction of pagan people and place seeking interactions with people of another time and place.

But a more truthful approximation of historical fact reveals the story of Samhein may be a victim of what one historian calls a combination of “fakelore and folklore”. Professor Robert Davis studies religious and cultural education at the University of Glasgow as it relates to people, place, and social change. He writes that much of Irish history stems from the work of a seventeen-century historian named Geoffrey Keating. Davis joins a chorus of critics who argue Keating's work, while beautifully written, is mostly a form of exaggerated romantic nationalism.

Keating wrote during a time when Irish history and culture were under threat from English influence and rule. Critics believe his narratives therefore assert a particularly noble Irish identity and history, which led him to possibly embellish or reinterpret certain historical events or figures. Keating was also a Catholic priest, which influenced his historical interpretations. Including the notion that these ancient Irish clans and respective nobility were Catholic.

His intertwining of religious and secular perspectives is seen as a reflection of Keating's worldview. But it doesn’t always live up to academic scrutiny expected from histography. But because Keating was also a poet and had a compelling command of the Irish language, his writing was accessible and enjoyable. This further endeared him to readers while also allowing his work to endure. His influence is present today despite his critics, as evidence by the dominant narrative surrounding Sanhein found in history books and online.

Keating’s recalling of this autumnal event is unique in its reference to mythological religiosity by pagans of the past. There are legal and agricultural Irish texts and calendars that indeed show there was a festival on or around November 1, just no mention of any worship for the dead, paranormal occurrences from the ‘underworld’, or the observance of a celebratory ‘Eve’ stemming from some form of ancient pre-Christian calendar. These pagan accounts are commonly associated with Sanhein and thus Halloween and appear to all lead to Keating himself. Meanwhile, his interpretation has since branched into every account of history paraded as historical fact.

Historical records from neighboring regions like Wales and Scotland also show no evidence of Halloween-like celebrations occurring, apart from those areas populated by Irish immigrants! But like in Ireland, there were indeed agrarian celebrations commemorating the end of the harvest season. And those included autumnal festivities we may recognize today as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even New Year.

SONGS, SPIRITS, AND THE SOUL OF TRICK-OR-TREATING

Keating wasn’t alone in weaving pagan lore into Christian mythology and dogma. He probably picked up from the Christian bible. The Roman Catholic Church, especially in its earliest centuries, borrowed heavily from the imagery and ceremony of pagan folklore and fakelore to lure non-Christians into their faith. This summer our family went to see the Swedish rock band, Ghost, who’s leader, Tobias Forge, leverages this history, and its imagery, on stage and in costume to call attention to this appropriation. It’s a presentation, I might add, fit for Broadway.

Indeed, Pope Gregory III of the Roman Catholic Church, established All Saints Days as November 1st in the 8th Century and eventually made its way to the British Isles. Also known as All Hallows Day. The word “Hallow” stems from the Old English word “hālig” which means “holy”. The celebration before All Hallows Days, on October 31st, or on the “evening” or “even” — as commonly shortened in Old English, which could also be written and pronounced as ‘e’en’ — became known as Halloween.

Halloween most likely originates from the rotation of the earth and the shift in seasons. Fall has always been a time of collecting what food you can, sharing any abundance with less fortunate community members, and mourning the loss of organic life that relies on photosynthesis. A requirement for keeping animals like us alive. It’s a time to take stock, hunker down, and hope you survive the impending harsh winter.

It was also a convenient time to take spoiled and fermented fruits to make wine and be merry. Fields and piles of debris were set ablaze in preparation for next season. Migrant field workers, with no rows to plough or crops to pick, went door to door in search of food, clothing, work, or compassion. It’s not hard to see how these rituals stemming from the rhythm of life could be woven into religious tales of death, renewal, and purifying fire — but also compassion and charity.

Professor Davis believes the best image of the history of Halloween can be resurrected by the lyrics of the songs sung in the British Isles on Halloween, Hallows Day, and even a third day of celebration less known today, All Souls Day. These songs were sung at gatherings, but also by beggars going door-to-door seeking food or gifts. It’s a tradition known as “souling”, but today many of us would recognize it as either trick or tricking, thanksgiving feast, or caroling. All three of which, are born — one way or other — out of the loss of sun in the northern hemisphere brought on by a tilting earth.

Here's one song Professor Davis offers up as representative of the spirit of Halloween.

A soul, a soul, a soul cakePlease, good missus, a soul cakeAn apple, a pear, a plum or a cherryAny good thing to make us all merryOne for Peter, two for PaulThree of Him who made us all

God Bless the master of this house, the mistress alsoAnd all the little children who around your table growLikewise your men and maidens, your cattle and your storeAnd all that dwells within your gatesWe wish you ten times more

The lanes are very dirty and my shoes are very thinI’ve got a little pocket I can put a penny inIf you haven’t got a penny, a half penny will doIf you haven’t got a half penny, then God bless you.

This song reveals the fusion of the wants and needs that come with scarcity and misfortune blended with the hope and charity promised by various forms of Christianity. Professor Davis puts it best, Halloween is

“Steeped in the peculiar religious imagery of Halloween, with its refining fires, its muffled imploring voices and its traffic with the supernatural.” Together they attempt to bridge “the past, the present and the future into a momentarily inspiring alignment around the axis of hope.”

I’m reminded that where I grew up in Iowa, home to many an Irish immigrant — including one of my Grandparents — we had to tell a joke before we were given candy while out trick-or-treating. I wonder if this derives from ‘souling’?

My wife and I insist on jokes before little goblins and witches are allowed to dip into the candy bowl. How mean. Maybe this year, we’ll demand a song. Spiderman has a good soundtrack, and so does Barbie. But a song from Ghost might be most appropriate. “Hunter’s Moon” anyone? The B-side is “Halloween Kills”.

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Hello Interactors,

This post brings new meaning to the phrase ‘reading the tea leaves’.

Watching my tea diffuse recently, I got to thinking about how humans diffuse around the globe like tea particulates in a teacup. Some migrate intentionally, others are forced, and some are lured across borders — as if by osmosis, like tea through a strainer.

It’s tea time somewhere in the world, so grab a cup and let’s go…

DRINKING DYNAMICS AND HUMAN DIFFUSION

I’m a tea drinker. I relish the ritual of tea-making, watching the clear water transform in hue, be it the gentle embrace of green tea or the profound depths of black. Hydrogen and its oxygen friends, in a fervent state, eagerly extract molecules from the tea elements, diffusing them throughout the cup until a balance or 'teaquilibrium' is reached.

However, this seemingly simple diffusion reflects deeper laws of thermodynamics; it's not merely turning twigs into tea. This transformation is part of a grander system — from the tea leaf's growth in specific conditions, its journey through processing, to ultimately gracing my cup. The tea species' continued evolutionary existence and popularity can be attributed to its taste, aroma, and color. So much so that the fragile leaf bears historical weight — wars have been waged for such traits.

Whether in a teacup, an ecosystem, or an economy, these processes reveal a system's tendency towards certain outcomes, showcasing nature's ceaseless drive for equilibrium and long-term persistence.

This parallels the evolution of humans and how they interact with people and place. Over millennia, humans have been driven to seek better environments, whether they offer more food, safety, or other resources. This behavior, while not consciously directed toward the grand "purpose" of the species, has clear benefits in terms of survival and reproductive success.

Kinetic agitation in the physical and social world is what lead humans to diffuse around the globe — to pass through permeable boundaries intent on achieving equilibrium and long-term persistence. And these days, the world is very agitated and humans are diffusing in record numbers.

Wars and political conflicts, combined with economic hardships, are driving global migrations, including South and Central Americans north to the U.S. border. Political repression and discrimination are pushing individuals to search for more tolerant societies. Environmental challenges, from droughts to rising sea levels, are displacing both intra and intercontinental populations, including inhabitants watching their Pacific Islands become submerged. By the end of 2022 108 million people were forcibly displaced — and growing. That’s up from 40 million in 2010.

But it’s not all crises driven. With some of the largest populations in the world rising out of poverty more and more migrate in search of better educational opportunities and the prospect of a brighter future.

When I was hiring at Microsoft in the early 1990s, the U.S. government was issuing many more work visas than today. The increasing interconnectedness of the world, through technology and transportation, allowed me to hire skilled professionals from other nations. Today people are on massive waitlists hoping to migrate to tech hubs in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Which can be cruel. Some are heavily recruited, offered jobs, and then forced to live in precarity; putting their lives on hold, they wait as the visa lottery unfolds.

But many of those making their way to the U.S. border aren’t being recruited. Not directly anyway. They’re being drawn, through a semi-permeable legal membrane called a border, from areas of low job concentration to high. Agitated by a variety of circumstances, they seek goals and equilibrium in their lives in a quest to persist.

CAPITALISM, MIGRATION, AND THE OSMOSIS OF LABOR

Companies and corporations are also goal seeking. They seek to maximize profits. Just as cells have evolved mechanisms for osmotic balance, capitalism has evolved to maximize capital accumulation. And low-wage migrant workers have evolved as a mechanism to achieve this goal.

Daniel Costa is the Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. In September of 2023 he testified in front of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions on the ‘The Impact of Biden’s Open Border on the American Workforce’.

He said,

“Without immigrant workers, many sectors of the economy would cease to function adequately—whether it be the construction of buildings, crop production, or information technology services.”

And according to the Immigration Research Initiative, the range of jobs is wide:

“the majority of immigrants are in middle- or upper-wage jobs—with 48% employed in middle-wage jobs, earning more than 2/3 of median earnings for fulltime workers (or $35,000 per year) and 17% are in upper-wage jobs, earning more than double the median.”

However,

“immigrants are ‘disproportionately likely to be in low-wage jobs. In all, 35 percent of immigrants are in jobs paying under $35,000, compared to 26 percent of U.S.-born workers.”

As throughout the history of the United States, America runs on immigrants. Even, or at times, especially, undocumented workers. Estimated at just 5% of the overall labor market, a 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Public Policy states

“undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to state and local taxes, collectively paying an estimated $11.74 billion a year.” In California alone, there are an estimated three million undocumented workers accounting for $3.1 billion in state and local taxes.

They estimate

“immigrants nationwide pay on average an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (this is their effective state and local tax rate). To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent.”

Despite the contributions of nearly eight million undocumented workers, they have no legal status making them ripe for exploitation by employers. And should these workers complain about unfair or unsafe working conditions or unpaid wages, they risk retaliation and deportation.

A 2009 survey of 4300 undocumented workers revealed 37% were illegally paid below minimum wage compared to 16% of U.S.-born workers. And nearly 90% of them said they were not paid overtime wages — a crime that would likely trigger litigation by U.S.-born workers.

One of the primary legal avenues for migrants seeking work in the U.S. is through temporary "nonimmigrant" visas. In 2019, over 2 million migrant workers, representing about 1% of the labor force, were in the U.S. under such programs. Despite their legal status, these workers are highly vulnerable to exploitation, often burdened by illegal recruitment fees that lead to debt bondage. Upon arrival, many find the promised job non-existent, and some even fall victim to human trafficking, including forced involvement in the sex industry.

STEEPING IN THE OSMOTIC TENSION OF CAPITALISM AND MIGRATION

Meanwhile, there are companies across the nation calling on Biden and Congress to fast-track legal authorization of immigrant workers. Just last month, 100 New York CEOs signed an open letter to Biden calling on him to act, stating there is

“a compelling need for expedited processing of asylum applications and work permits for those who meet federal eligibility standards.”

This summer politicians in several states were also calling for the same to fill jobs.

Meanwhile, congress would rather ‘build the wall’. They’ve allocated funding for immigration enforcement at a rate eight times greater than immigration court adjudications and asylum and refugee activities. $37 billion is directed towards Border Patrol and ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, compared to $3.5 billion for immigration courts and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate.

This only leads to more procedural lags that inadvertently promote workplace exploitation, leading to issues like the rise of illicit child labor. Immigrant children don’t choose to work for little to no wages, the uncaring U.S. economic system draws them in — like hot water drawing molecules from a tea leaf.

Some say the United States is ‘swamped’ and can’t accommodate immigrants. And yet Costa Rica has taken in over 270,000 forcibly displaced migrants accounting for 5% of their tiny, and relatively poor, country. Columbia has absorbed two million Venezuelans providing them legal status and a right to remain there for ten years.

I think the immigrant situation in America and the exploitation of the disadvantaged, a hallmark and remnant of the slavery that is the foundation of this country, puts migration and cruel capitalism at a crossroads. The osmotic pull of the capitalist market is triggered by profit seeking maximization that draws vulnerable populations into exploitive roles.

And we consumers are complicit. We have our own selfish maximizing intentions, like seeking and demanding the lowest price. The collective behavior of consumers shapes this market, leading to emergent outcomes like the exploitation of vulnerable populations.

I think about that as I sip my tea. A product most likely grown and processed in unfavorable labor conditions filled with complications and contradictions. All to allow tea-making to be a simple and affordable act. One that also demonstrates an interplay of various forces and principles, from the immediate diffusion of flavor to the broader forces of evolutionary biology and even economics.

These processes exemplify how systems, whether a cup of tea, an ecosystem, or an economy gravitate towards certain outcomes. Whether the actors in these systems act with intentionality or not, the drive towards these outcomes is unmistakable. As we witness people struggling to diffuse through membranes into or within countries, agitated by natural, political, social, or economic forces, I think about their immediate quest for equilibrium and their longer-term quest for persistence.

And then I think about myself and my oxygen counterparts, molecules of the warm clear water, how much are we helping to create this osmotic tension? I fully recognize I am a participant in a form of cruel capitalism that has its own immediate quest for profit maximization and long-term persistence. I too am seeking equilibrium and a longer-term persistence. And it seems for now, in the U.S. anyway, that means more cruel capitalism as both political parties are swayed by this brand of capitalism —intent on maintaining their own equilibrium in their own longer-term quest for persistence.

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Hello Interactors,

Cued by shifting hues comes a call for the leaves to fall. Which means Interplace, like the weather, turns to the tumultuous territory of economics. Economics, like fall weather, is not all that predictable — both systems morph in response to layers of interconnected webs of complex systems that adapt, respond, and influence social, environmental, and political interactions.

I recently heard Sean Carroll, an influential theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics, interview Samuel Bowles, an influential economist specializing in economic inequality. They covered an array of topics including the history and future of economics, and physics, in response to growing attention to complexity science.

They harkened back to the industrial age and a time when physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and newly emerging economists were collaborating — building theories, models, steam engines, looms, and calculation machines. It was a complicated time, rich with invention, but also relatively simple by today’s standards.

Hearing this history in the context of the current U.S. United Auto Workers strike made me wonder if perhaps Biden’s fascination with ‘building back better’ America’s industrial past is rooted in a nostalgic yearning for a simpler past.

This labor action arouses a sense of nationalism and nostalgia for the 'good old days' that Trump ignited but Biden just may have usurped. But the industrial sector, however romanticized, now represents a small fraction of jobs in America.

Humans have a penchant for simplifying complex narratives, yearning for an era where gears of industry moved in predictable cycles much like the changing seasons. But these two scientists highlight how the economy in which we exist has advanced in complexity and is ripe for evolution.

Now let’s go.

FROM CLASSIC TO COMPLEX: THE ECONOMIC SHIFT

In the interview, Bowles talks of the history of economic thought, beginning with Adam Smith, an intellectual pillar of the Industrial Revolution and an acclaimed father of economics. Adam Smith's notion of the 'invisible hand,' lauded for its portrayal of self-regulating markets, is heavily scrutinized today.

This famous metaphor has long been the cornerstone of classical economics and conservative politics, purporting that individual self-interest inadvertently contributes to the overall good of society in ‘invisible’ ways. Bowles explains how Smith could observe, amidst the new factory economy in Scotland — complete with newly built cotton mills and shirt factories — how the shirt buyer and seller both acted according to their self-interest. And then, almost as if by magic, an efficient allocation of resources emerged and along with it a social contract.

In simple transactions, like buying a shirt, Bowles illustrates how Smith's model functions well. The seller sets a price based on the costs of production and a desire for profit; the buyer accepts this price based on their valuation of the shirt. The transaction is smooth, the contract 'complete,' and market forces work to adjust supply, demand, and pricing in a seemingly natural order.

He offers another historical example that perpetuated the illusion of simple economic models of physics in economics. One of the early influential neoclassical economists, Irving Fisher, built a physical hydraulic model in the early 1900s as part of his dissertation. He used interconnected tanks and pipes to simulate supply and demand. It provided a visceral example of a 'complete contract' where the variables are manageable and the outcomes somewhat foreseeable.

Reflecting on this, Bowles offers,

“Now, there are all kinds of models like that in economics in which the metaphor really is transportation, things moving from here to there.”

However, this 'invisible hand' stumbles when confronted with the complex market forces of the labor required to manufacture a good like a shirt. Bowles believes it wasn’t until 1972, when the Nobel prize winner in economics, Kenneth Arrow, complicate the image of the ‘invisible hand’ as it relates to the labor market.

His work, particularly his Impossibility Theorem, mathematically demonstrated the challenges inherent in collective decision-making and the limits of market efficiency. Whereas the transaction of buying a shirt can be fully described and agreed upon by both parties, making it a 'complete contract,' labor contracts often can't offer this level of specificity and predictability.

Contracts in labor markets become fuzzy. They’re incomplete abstractions that only offer one guarantee — that an employee be present on the job. Their performance is harder to guarantee. Without constant observation of performance, the employer has no guarantees a worker is working hard or hardly working.

But the employer, capable of paying more than the minimum wage to ensure good performance, holds sway over the employee’s behavior. So, if an employee wants to keep their job, they’d better work as hard as possible — until, sometimes, it becomes impossibly hard.

Labor unions, like the United Auto Workers, exist to even this power imbalance by bargaining for fair wages and working conditions. How do they bargain? By choosing to not do the one thing their contract requires – be present on the job. This forces a negotiation, a conversation.

And this is where Bowles, and other economists, are looking to take the field of economics, stating,

“…in recent years, some economists, myself included, have been more attracted to the idea that economic interactions are more like a conversation. So, we should really be thinking about linguistics. That is, I'm having a conversation with you, and in saying what I'm saying now, I'm anticipating your response. And very often I'm having a conversation with somebody with some intention that I would like this person to agree to go to see a film with me, or to agree to work on a paper, and so on. But I'm anticipating what that person's intention is too, of course, in endless regress.”

COMPLEXITY OF COOPERATION: GAME THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD

Finding common ground, coming to agreement, typically requires both parties to have to give something up — to compromise. Economists often lean on a branch of mathematics to model these interactions called Game Theory. Game Theory offers methods to analyze scenarios where the outcome for each participant depends on the choices of all involved.

One experiment used to explore game theory is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario, two prisoners must decide whether to cooperate and remain silent upon interrogation or betray each other to the authorities. Although cooperation would yield a better outcome for both, the rational choice for each individual, given the uncertainty of the other's action, is to betray, often leading to a suboptimal result for all involved.

Bowles has spent a good chunk of his career using this dilemma in experiments worldwide to explore issues of trust, collaboration, and the challenges that emerge when incentives may not align with collective well-being. He’s gone so far as to explore whether the human species is genetically predisposed to selfishness or altruism. His conclusions are published in the book "A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution."

Bowles concludes in the interview that there is

“strong experimental evidence that we are generous in many circumstances. We have models and data which suggests that there might even be a genetic predisposition. And of course, we know there are many cultural reasons why we'd be taught to be that way.”

Of course, every critic of altruism will bring up free-loaders — people who contribute relatively little but aren’t shy about taking their fair share. In Bowles experiments, he’s found “free-riders” are routinely punished even at the expense of self-interest.

In a multi-round public goods game resembling an expanded Prisoner's Dilemma, initial contributions to a shared good start off high but dwindle as players notice others free riding. When a punishment mechanism is introduced, like allowing participants to spend some of their earnings to penalize free-riders, contributions to the public good surge back up, eventually rendering punishment unnecessary.

This dynamic suggests that human behavior in such systems is nuanced: while people are initially willing to cooperate, they adapt to avoid being exploited. Moreover, when given the chance, they actively invest to punish free riders, even at a personal cost.

Bearing this in mind, Bowles believes “if you're thinking of a new economic paradigm, you have to come down on that somehow.” Bowles believes there’s enough evidence today to say it’s wrong to believe humans are purely rational, intelligent actors who act in their own self interest. In his words, “You can't say we're selfish and really smart.”

Instead, he says

“The bumper sticker for my paradigm is ‘People are a lot dumber and nicer than economists think.’”

I like Samuel Bowles use of a linguistics lens to explore economic systems. It’s a compelling touchpoint where natural and social sciences converge around interactions. The nuances of real world economics, he suggests, can be explored but not defined by sterile, mathematical models. We need methodologies that unravel those nested webs of complexities influenced by cultural narratives, historical and political context, and social relationships.

These dynamics are exemplified in the ongoing negotiations between the United Auto Workers and their employers and politicians — talks that encapsulate more than mere contractual details but a convoluted and ever-changing web of expectations, intentions, and power dynamics.

As society evolves, Bowles advocates for a commensurate evolution in our economic models, one that can accommodate these rich human interactions. It signifies a shift from seeking objective certainties to acknowledging the inherently uncertain, dynamic, and complex landscape of the intricate systems that define our world.

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Hello Interactors,

After dropping our kids at college, my wife and I spent some time on Cape Cod. She had gone here as a kid for summer family vacations to enjoy the sand and salty air, and she wasn’t alone.

Now people come from all over the world to visit this soggy, sandy, stretch of land surrounded by sea. But it’s capacity is being tested, cresting waves are gobbling the coast, as warming water turns sea life into ghosts. It’s survived this long, but how long can it carry on?

ON SCARGO POND

Situated beneath Scargo Hill, the highest point on Cape Cod, is a pond most people call Scargo Lake. With permission from a lakeside homeowner, my wife and I recently descended its bank through the brush and bramble to swim in the calm, warm water. The stairs are supported by partially submerged glacial rocks deposited around 14,000 years ago.

The pond itself is one of hundreds of kettle ponds, giant divots formed by the glacier. After coming to its final resting spot at the edge of what was to be called the Atlantic Ocean, the mountain of ice melted leaving a sandy, spongey cape dimpled with ponds of melted glacier water. The runoff from Scargo Hill now feeds this pond as it makes its eventual journey back into the sky or salty sea.

One of the rocks deposited near the stairs is the size of a Volkswagon Beetle. Its permanence stands in stark contrast to the drifting fine sand of the famed Cape Cod beaches. No amount of rainfall will budge this boulder, but recent ravenous runoff has reshaped this ravine of late. Another reminder, along with the shifting sands, that despite illusions of permanence earth’s natural forces are unyielding.

Cape Cod is dripping with illusions of permanence. The man who built these stairs was a friend and colleague of my father-in-law. His name was Rudy. He was an esoteric retired dentist, who in retirement, took his proclivity for tinkering with teeth – a profession hellbent on slowing inevitable decay – to nurture nostalgia’s permanence.

His basement was like a touristy roadside attraction with a replica of a small 1950s diner booth, walls adorned with posters and pictures of the past, coin operated amusement park gadgets from the early 20th century, and a favorite of mine – a player piano.

Rudy liked to spool up his appropriately favorite song, the 1957 pop hit song Old Cape Cod. Rudy would sing along with these opening lyrics:

If you're fond of sand dunes and salty airQuaint little villages here and thereYou're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod

The song was written by a Boston-area housewife who, like Rudy, was so fond of vacationing on the cape. New England tourism, including Cape Cod, was just getting underway in the 1950s. A 1953 article in the publication Economic Geography reports,

“To many New England communities, the past few decades have been a time of economic readjustment and expansion…This current reversal of trend is largely the result of New England’s growing tourist industry, the income from which in 1951 amounted to $957,000,000.”

That would be over ten billion dollars today.

Recent analysis from the National Park Service reports over 300 million visitors streamed through Cape in 2022 resulting in $23 billion dollars of direct spending. Clearly a lot of people are fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there, as more and more people fall in love with old Cape Cod.

Not everyone thought Cape Cod would be a tourist destination. One hundred years before the cape’s 1950s popularity, Henry Thoreau wrote in his book, Cape Cod,

“The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them…Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands.”

Thoreau was visiting the Cape at a time when the allusivity of shifting sands posed a real threat to Cape Cod tourists and residents. After chatting with the lighthouse keeper of The Highland Light, the eastern most U.S. lighthouse and the first to greet sailors venturing from Europe to Boston, Thoreau believed even this beacon of permeance was threatened. He writes,

“According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We calculated, from his data, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away at this point, ‘for,’ said he, ‘I can remember sixty years back.’”

Thoreau surmised the lighthouse keeper would likely outlive the lighthouse. While it indeed was moved a short distance and rebuilt, it remains today as one of many Cape Cod tourist attractions. It’s not just the lighthouse that’s been preserved all these years, but the very grounds that surround it.

SAND DOOMS

One hundred years before Thoreau’s visit, the harbor just north of the Highland Lighthouse, East Harbor, – at the narrowest segment of the cape – was erased. Tides from a powerful storm had sucked the eastern sands to sea breaching the harbor and severing the narrow, but contiguous, land mass in two. Provincetown, at the tip of the cape, was stranded on a newly formed island.

Alarmed by this development, the federal government rushed to plant sea grass and install fencing to build sand dunes and fill the gap. As part of the restoration program residents were encouraged, and threatened by law, to plant beach grass every spring. Within a few years expansive dunes began to form.

Over the proceeding decades and well into the 1800s of Thoreau’s visit, the practice of planting grass and installing fences had created another problem. The dunes had grown so extensive that the East Harbor was filling in with sand. In 1826, the state government issued a study that determined the dunes had extended more than four miles. This prompted the government to encourage more grass planting to block the spreading sand.

As Thoreau wrote,

“I was told that about thirty thousand dollars ($1,000,000 today) in all had been appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part of it was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots...Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom.”

Beach grass planting is what has kept Cape Cod from becoming a total wreck and the beaches intact. But that 1826 report also noted that it was the removal of trees and shrubs that compounded the spread of sand in the first place. It was European settlers wrecking East Harbor in the eighteenth century by cutting down trees, letting the wind blow the sand away, resulting in the East Harbor being breached by the sea due to too little sand. And then, a century later, more settlers were wrecking East Harbor with too much sand through the planting of beach grass – destining it to be a vast sand dune.

Today East Harbor is hemmed in on the west by a highway atop a dike and sand dunes to the east still protected by sea grass. The highway was part of a reclamation project completed in 1868, just three years after Thoreau was there. This thin band of highway atop decades of accumulated sand and sod has turned the harbor into what some call Pilgrim Lake.

Since 1868 this body of water has gone from a salty marine environment into a manmade freshwater pond with a host of environmental problems. The stagnant water caused massive sand fly outbreaks, the proliferation of non-native plants, and large-scale fish kills. In 2001 one such kill prompted the installation of a 700 foot long, four-foot diameter culvert equipped with a valve for one-way drainage of stagnant water to the sea. After a year of little progress, authorities decided to keep the valve open to let salty tide water back into the harbor. By 2005 the invasive carp and cat-tail populations had declined, shellfish, sticklebacks, silversides, and sea squirts returned, and the water turned clear again.

Tourists have also bloomed to nuisance levels on Cape Cod. They’re drawn to sand dunes and salty air with quaint little villages here and there. My father-in-law’s friend, Rudy, wasn’t the only one intent on preserving the past. Much effort, with private and government money, has gone into preserving a certain historic cultural and environmental ideal of Cape Cod rooted in a colonial past. Out of Boston you pass Plymouth rock on Pilgrim Highway all the way to Pilgrim Lake. One of the roads I run down on the cape is called Whig, the nineteenth century conservative political party.

There is a lot of talk of conservation, preservation, and recreation on Cape Cod, but not so much about reservations. Even though the state is named after the Massachusett people. The Wampanoag people have lived in and around what is now Cape Cod since soon after that glacier melted. And they’re still there. One tribe resides on an island once connected to the mainland called Martha’s Vineyard. The other is on Cape Cod in Mashpee where nearly three thousand Mashpee Wampanoag are enrolled in the tribe. Mashpee is an anglicized word for Mâseepee: mâs means "large" and upee means "water" referring to the largest lake on Cape Cod – Mashpee Pond – where they were forced to settle by colonizers.

For the native humans to thrive in the harsh conditions the cape for nearly ten thousand years required a way of living that worked with or mimicked nature. You’d think the ‘enlightened’ European colonizers would have recognized this. Surely some did, especially in the beginning, but clearly, we’re still learning.

THE SHIFTING SANDS

My wife and I saw a significant reshaping of one beach we have frequented over the years. Waves had clearly taken a bigger bite than usual. To remediate and maintain the beach for tourists, the city had imported a swath of sand to supplant the loss. But it wasn’t the fine white sand that makes Cape Cod beaches so attractive, it was the brownish, dirty, gritty sand used to make concrete.

It seemed a desperate and uncertain attempt at holding on to the allusive certainty of the past – a temporary patch covering the truth in a nostalgic myth of sand dunes and salty air. It’s a story that props up quaint little villages here and there. Should the truth be known of the impermanence of the cape, people may stop falling in love with old Cape Cod.

I couldn’t help noting the conflicting and contrasting nature of Cape Cod. Like the beach grass planted to preserve their primary tourist attraction – beaches – from the effects of wind, only to be thwarted by a rising and increasingly hostile sea. Or the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History’s display on the Wampanoag people portrayed as a distant past even though they thrive today. And the quaint neighborhood road signs that occasionally read Thickly Settled amidst a cape that itself has become thickly settled.

The tourism industry props up a nostalgic illusory image of a past that reaches just far enough back in time to perpetuate the story of colonial control, but not so far as to recognize a more native coexistent past. It’s part of a coordinated effort, buoyed by private and public dollars, to futilely maintain the physical geography of a sea-bound land mass largely made of sand and marsh. And for the most part, it’s all done for the tourism industry.

I can’t help but see it as a snake eating its own tail. The commodification of nature that is being destroyed by commodification. The increased commercialization of “local” only serves to increase property prices thus pushing out locals. Overcrowded tourism degrades the tourism experience. And a depleting of the very resources on which they depend, like water. And it’s all occurring amidst a changing climate.

In recent years Cape Cod has experienced levels of coastal hypoxia not recorded prior to 2017. Coastal hypoxia, or "dead zones," involves a decrease in oxygen levels in coastal waters. Most evidence points to the cause being – surprise – human-induced factors such as nutrient pollution from freshwater runoff and wastewater discharge.

In the last few summers, the bottom waters in Cape Cod Bay have suffered from low oxygen levels, which is unusual. Factors like warmer water, layering of water temperatures, and altered wind patterns are creating an environment prone to low oxygen near the seabed. These climate shifts are seriously affecting the types of plants and animals in and around Cape Cod. My wife and I would not have been swimming Scargo Lake last summer due to an outbreak of a harmful bacteria.

Cape Cod, like most of the colonized world, is a victim of cultural and environmental disruption. The influx of tourists since the mid twentieth century, like the influx of European colonizers centuries before, have disrupted the lifestyles and cultures of the very local communities they sought to enjoy. Instead, locals, like the Wampanoag before them, have been exploited and expunged leaving Cape Cod enshrined in a commercial haze of cultural hypoxia and an influx of mono-cultural human species. And it’s all surrounded by a coastal dead zone, an increasingly angry sea, shifting and volatile wind, and an uncertain future.

I can see centuries of colonial behavior more like an invasive species. We’ve been introduced to new habitats where we didn't historically exist, and we have disrupted native ecosystems. We grow our populations rapidly and seek to outcompete native species, natural resources, and ecosystems. Like invasive species we exploit and deplete local resources, alter food chains, and ecosystem dynamics. It’s all led to the transformation of landscapes and widespread habitat alteration.

But we humans, as native populations demonstrate, have unique capacities for complex decision-making, culture, and technology, which can be harnessed for both positive and negative impacts on ecosystems. Moreover, humans have the capacity to recognize and mitigate their impacts, making conscious efforts toward conservation and sustainability. And indeed, the ongoing restoration of East Harbor shows how possible this can be.

But to do this on a global scale requires us to not think of ourselves or the past as a stationary rock deposited by a glacier, but as a grain of sand at the beach. Grains of sand, when combined, give rise to complex emergent phenomenon like dunes and beaches. These emergent structures are not present in individual grains but emerge from their interactions with others and their co-arrangement.

Let’s grow even fonder of the sand dunes and salty air. If we want to maintain quaint little villages here and there, embrace uncertainty and reject despair. Let’s fall in love with the cape as the Wampanoag did, not the allusive nostalgic one experienced as a kid.

References

The Impact of Tourism on the Economy of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Lewis M. Alexander. Economic Geography. 1953.

Tourism to Cape Cod National Seashore contributes $750 million to local economy. U.S. National Park Service. 2023.

Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.

Unprecedented summer hypoxia in southern Cape Cod Bay: an ecological response to regional climate change? Scully, et al. Biogeosciences. 2022.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Our family got sucked into watching the Amazon Prime show, Clarkson’s Farm. As a suburban Iowa boy who knew just enough farmers to know how hard it is, I found this show relatable. Apart from the entertaining allure of many staged reality shows, I realized it also highlights topics I investigate here on Interplace. Especially the interaction of the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’…or lack thereof.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve watched this show and what you think!

I’ll be taking a little break from writing in the coming weeks and will return in September.

Until then, let’s go!

THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE

My son is a car guy. As such, he turned our family onto the pied piper of car guys, the British journalist turned media celebrity, Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is most known for his part in the shows ‘Top Gear’ and ‘The Grand Tour’ but has turned his attention to farming in recent years complete with his own show called "Clarkson's Farm." It’s a simple yet complicated narrative that unfurls like the intricate English countryside hedgerows he commissioned for his farm in an episode we watched recently.

The show chronicles Jeremy, a controversial climate change denying fossil fuel lover who expresses glee at polluting the natural environment, fulfilling a fantasy of becoming a farmer. A city boy naively embarking on a journey to become a farm boy. “How hard can this be?”, he insinuates, as his hired companion, Kaleb, a true farm boy, continually saves him from one disaster after another. Kaleb left the show earlier this year to help the Royal Agricultural University teach young people how to farm. A move that appears to be motivated by what Jeremy’s farm manager called his ‘stupidest idea yet’ – to raise pigs.

Clarkson is comfortable with stupid ideas leading to disasters having been sued, fired, and defamed on countless occasions for making racist, misogynistic, and other statements in bad taste while joyfully wallowing in the attention, fame, and revenue that comes in the aftermath. An enigmatic media magnet with sociopathic tendencies.

But I’m finding Clarkson’s Farm oddly intriguing as a snapshot of the interaction of people and place. It weaves threads of common human endeavors, the natural environment, and the evolving rhythms of modern society. He, and the show’s producers, intertwine personal, social, political, and environment struggles like meandering streams of the show’s British rural landscape. Clarkson is a bit like the menacing disease spreading badger featured in another episode – a curious creature exploring and exploiting the winding lanes and hidden corners of a quiet countryside. Both a bane and a boon. A nuisance and a neighbor.

His show also echoes intriguing themes explored among urban and rural geographers alike. They, like Clarkson, are playing with what it means to blend the rural with the urban. Jeremy's personal, social, and political journey within the pastoral tapestry of the Cotswold’s north of Oxford is interwoven with the ecosystems found in the mosaic of fields, woodlands, and waterways that define its countryside. A strand of a larger tapestry that challenges, like Jeremy has, the notion of rural and urban in the growing urbanization of our planet.

Planetary urbanization, as a thesis, has drawn scrutiny among some critical human geographers who call for a profound shift in the approach to understanding 'urban' and 'rural' spaces on a global scale. The origins of planetary urbanization can be traced back to Henri Lefebvre's pioneering hypothesis, first introduced in his 1970 work "The Urban Revolution" suggesting society has undergone complete urbanization. He subsequently furthered the notion that globalization has created a complete integration and interdependence of urban and non-urban spaces each with their own boundaries and borders.

Jeremy's agricultural odyssey unfolds in this realm where these distinctions of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ become pronounced as Jeremy’s lack of comfort and knowledge of the ‘rural’ is set against the younger Caleb’s lack of experience and familiarity of the ‘urban’. The show attempts to script a blurring and harmonizing of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ only to be foiled by the unrelenting rhythm of uncertainty and emergent behavior of human and non-human nature – including a global pandemic, local politics, and global and local economics.

Clarkson’s Farm, and the concept of planetary urbanization, is challenged by the spatial boundary urbanization has artificially created. It legitimizes Lefebvre's proposition that urbanization extends far beyond traditional urban centers, suggesting that rural spaces, as well as elements such as wilderness areas, oceans, the atmosphere, and even the planetary sub-surface, contribute to a global urban fabric. After all, anyone in the world can go to Jeremy’s website to buy his food products and swag.

But the show also raises questions about the specificity and boundaries of the 'urban' and underscores the need for a renewed urban theory that transcends the traditional confines of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘country’ and ‘city’, or ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. Scholars have raised concerns about the potential intellectual colonization and methodological biases inherent in theories of planetary urbanization. Particularly, the erasure of the 'rural' in socio-political power and in this theoretical framework has lead to 'rural' becoming a marginalized category.

Indeed, Jeremy does his fair bit of this in the show where he frequently looks down his nose at Kaleb’s lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ urban culture. Meanwhile, Kaleb is not shy about looking down his nose at Jeremy for his lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ rural culture. But ultimate, Jeremy – and by extension ‘urban’ culture – wield the most power and influence over the world and people like Kaleb. Just as ‘urban’ research and theories dominate academia, the media, and public culture.

BLURRING BORDERS

Critics contend planetary urbanization’s exclusive focus on the urban sphere risks overshadowing the critical importance of rural spaces as nodes in global networks of resource provisioning. Post-colonial scholars highlight the dangers of perpetuating colonialist narratives by centering solely on urban processes and ignoring the rich histories and contributions of rural societies.

"Clarkson's Farm" and the planetary urbanization thesis, rooted in the ideas of Lefebvre, becomes like the bordered farm properties in the show, with blotches of natural occurring landscapes, networks of roads mingling with streams each flowing through the countryside. Just as theories of planetary urbanization seek to uncover the power dynamics and class struggles that shape our urban and rural landscapes while also perpetuating them, Jeremy's farming journey does the same.

While planetary urbanization has led to many insights, its grounding in neo-Marxist political economy has also led to a certain reductionism. It neglects the rich interplay of life and agency found in species beyond humans in dimensions that extend beyond the surface of the earth into the atmosphere and below the ground. This exclusion stems from a perspective that normalizes and justifies the slow creep of urbanism that further entrenches artificial boundaries with the rural.

This fusion offers yet another lens into Clarkson’s farm that reveals the delicate balance between individual actions of Jeremy and other human actors, livestock and other animal actors, plants and other organism actors, the weather and other atmospheric actors, and the soil and other chemical actors. Each of which contributes and reacts to unfolding and unpredictable systemic behavior creating an intricate weave of complex adaptive systems.

In our acceptance of reductionist thinking, we may inadvertently be overlooking the holistic potential of planetary thinking. Planetary thinking extends beyond human interactions on the Earth's surface, embracing verticality and encompassing not only terrestrial but also atmospheric and subterranean connections.

The ideology more aligned with this perspective comes from the French philosopher’s Deleuze and Latour. Their ideas offer a contrasting perspective that challenges the boundaries between human and non-human, urban and rural. Just as Lefebvre's thesis emphasizes the societal shift toward complete urbanization, the Deleuzian and Latourian lens blurs these distinctions entirely arguing everything is constantly changing and evolving and everything is connected, with no clear boundaries between humans and non-humans. In the interplay between these ideologies, we find a dance—a dance that mirrors the shifting, and often awkward, patterns of human-world interaction observed in "Clarkson's Farm."

Geography and sociology researchers Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski at Lancaster University introduce the term 'planetary multiplicity' to describe a planet capable of self-transformation influenced by the interactions of these blurred external forces. They argue that in the wake of unyielding forest fires, rising seas, the changing composition of soil, water, and atmosphere, and even altered adaptation of species, that the planet is being forced to transform itself in multiple ways – and in ways we human’s may not be accustomed to or able to control. This reminds me of Jeremy, a man of wealth, privilege, and control, forced to deal with an unyielding multitude of natural and human-made external forces in ways he may not be accustomed to…or able to control.

For me, “Clarkson's Farm" has transformed from a mere show about a controversial but entertaining car journalist into a thought-provoking journey — a proxy for some of the academic insights describing real-world complexities I find myself drawn to. It's a well filmed and produced journey that invites us to the beautiful but complex British countryside – invariably traversing beyond Jeremy’s crooked farm rows and groomed hedges, to venture into realms that echo the timeless wonders of rural life.

As we meander through the countryside of nosey neighbor narratives, local politics, and the drama of farm life – all in the comfort of a Land Rover or Lamborghini tractor – I’m reminded, in multiple interdependent ways, that despite the intricate pretense of a choreographed TV show, we exist individually as but a small part of a larger vibrant ecosystem that is ever-evolving, ever-surprising, and ever-enchanting. But collectively, especially as urban masses, we are no doubt a large part of an ever-increasing, ever-consuming, and ever-uncertain outsized geological and atmospheric force.

Meanwhile, mainstream society, like Clarkson, remain fixed in reductionist thinking that continues to empower a few in the name of exploitation and marginalization of many. Kaleb left the show to be a dad and help teach young farmers while Jeremy attempts to continue to leverage his money, power, and influence in his fantasy of jumping over the imagined border of an urban elite to an everyday farmer. But maybe by exposing the world to rural life, Jeremy inadvertently demonstrated just how interconnected we all are with the world.

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Hello Interactors,

Summer is waning and nature’s energy is draining. Meanwhile, record heat and fires in the northern hemisphere remind us the sun has yet to relent. But plants know what to do to prepare.

They slow down and repair. They store and restore through the winter snore for when the sun comes back for more. Why can’t we humans, and our societies, learn this rhythm of life? Maybe we’re just not as smart as plants. Yet.

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Now let’s go…

IS A FALL UPON US?

I can sense summer ending. And so can plants. They’re in the waning days of the growing season as they deftly adapt their metabolism – triggered by subtle shifts in the environment. As the sunlight fades and temperatures dip, the once vibrant act of photosynthesis slows – a signal from a rotating earth to take a pause. The production of glucose, their lifeblood, drops, but the tireless rhythm of respiration continues its steady beat.

Plants astutely sense the inevitable chill embarking on a strategic storage mission, hoarding precious energy and nutrients in their vaulted roots and stems. Stiffening to embrace the chilling challenge, they undergo a metamorphosis augmenting their resilience to freezing temperatures. Some species, like many of my sedums, channel their remaining vigor into blossoms and seeds before a winter's nap.

A plants' photochemical metabolic efficiency and prowess not only evokes wonder and admiration, but a bit of jealousy. Imagine being able to generate energy just by lying in the sun.

Metabolism is a biological process that determines how fast energy is exchanged between an organism and its surroundings. It transforms what's around us into fuel for maintenance, growth, and reproductive abundance.

This concept isn't just limited to individual organisms, but collections of organisms. Like groups of social humans. 'Sociometabolism' expands the idea of biological metabolism to human societies – how energy flows between a society and its environment, and how it's used within that society.

The sources of energy are different for each context. Biological metabolism relies mostly on light captured by plants which is then consumed by other living beings. A continuous metabolic flow through the entire food chain.

Sociometabolism can be more versatile. Sure, it involves consuming biomass for food or fuel, but it also encompasses energy generated from other sources – like fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, and wind power.

Both biological metabolism and a big chunk of sociometabolism depend heavily on consuming biological materials, whether it's plants or animals. This connects them closely to the flow of essential elements, like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Metabolism on earth is interconnected in a massive web of resource exchange.

Geographer Yadvinder Malhi wondered how much metabolic energy flows through the biosphere. He took a stab at estimating in a 2014 paper on “The Metabolism of a Human-Dominated Planet.” With the sun as the primary source of energy for the biosphere, he calculates about 174 petawatts (PW) of solar energy reaches the planet's upper atmosphere.

To put that in perspective, an old-fashioned 100-watt (W) lightbulb requires .1 kilowatts (KW) of energy. A 1000-watt drill requires 1 KW of energy. If one kilowatt is 103 W, then one petawatt is a whopping 1015 W. The sun is giving the planet 1 followed by 15 zeroes times 174 watts worth of energy! Plants and bacteria capable of photosynthesizing capture a portion of this solar energy through photosynthesis and store it as carbon-based chemical bonds.

This captured energy is quantified as Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), and the biosphere's GPP is approximately 210 petagrams of carbon per year. Converting GPP to energy units, the global photosynthetic metabolism is estimated at 265 terawatts (TW) or 1012 W. Sixty percent of that productivity comes from the land biosphere and 40% from the marine biosphere, representing only 0.2% of total surface solar energy.

Of that 0.2%, around 50-70% is used by plants and phytoplankton to metabolize and 30-50% is directed towards growing biomass. This biomass, in turn, is gobbled up by plant eaters, bacteria, and fungi. Fueling the ecosystem then requires about 75 TW of energy on land and 57 TW in the oceans to generate all the biomass energy available for other organisms to consume. Including humans. Given these numbers, how does our human metabolism stack up?

Imagine an 11x17 (A3) piece of paper sitting atop a leafy tree in a tropical forest in South America with the sun directly above. The amount of solar energy hitting that paper equals the energy required for an average sized active adult to metabolize one of our primary fuel sources – sugar. The equivalent of a 120 W light bulb. Cut the paper in half and that’s what would be required for an average-sized adult human to metabolize sugar while resting.

Any other mammal our size would require roughly the same amount of energy. However, we allocate energy differently than other mammals due to our relatively large brains. Nearly one-quarter to one-third of our energy, when resting, goes to feeding our brain. As a result, we dedicate proportionately less energy to growing biomass than a mammal of our size. In fact, we grow at a rate more akin to a reptile with similar mass. Malhi offers up a boa constrictor as a suitable comparison.

FROM HUNT AND FARM TO THE FAT FARM

That big brain of ours invents creative ways to consume energy relative to our biosphere family members. Especially when we humans congregate, socialize, and invent. Human sociometabolism has increased over our existence from hunting and gathering as other organisms do (preagriculture age), to controlling, appropriating, and domesticating plants and animals (agricultural age), to the use of biomass, fossil fuels, and other forms of energy to power inventions that feed our growing, and seemingly insatiable, sociometabolism (industrial age).

Even as increasingly more energy is now required to fuel servers to feed the current global wave of AI hysteria (information age), all three of these previous stages of sociometabolism still exist. It’s not so much that humans went from one stage to another, but more we added each stage to the other. Today, some communities and societies do more or less of hunting and gathering, farming, powering machines, or running software than others. Taken together, we are all part of human sociometabolism.

To quantify humanity's sociometabolism, Malhi considers both energy flows, which can be obtained from energy statistics in those societies that collect and publish them, and material flows, specifically the flow of biomass used for human or livestock nutrition. While energy flows are more easily accessible in contemporary contexts, material flows were a crucial aspect of the metabolism in pre-industrial societies and continue to hold significance in modern societies as well.

Malhi took some numbers from another study in 2008 that puts aspects of these sociometabolic transitions into perspective.

• In a measure of population density per square kilometer, humans went from one human per 0.02–0.10 square kilometers in Preagricultural, to 40 in Agricultural, to 400 in Industrial.

• Farmers as a percentage of the human population went from zero in Preagricultural, to greater than 80% in Agricultural, to less than 10% in Industrial.

• Sociometabolism as watts per capita went from 300 W in Preagricultural, to 2000 W in Agricultural, to 8000 W in Industrial.

• Total energy use per unit area (W per square kilometer) went from 6-30 W in Preagricultural, to 82,000 in Agricultural, to 3,300,000 in Industrial.

• The share of plant and animal metabolism required to feed our own sociometabolism went from 0.0002% in Preagricultural, to 3-6% in Agricultural, to 210% in Industrial.

However, our big brains did invent ways to become more efficient with energy use. The percentage of biomass energy needed to fuel human sociometabolism went from greater than 99% in the Preagricultural age – that is, if you didn’t use your limited energy to hunt or gather – and/or socialize – you’d likely die, to greater than 95% in Agricultural – in other words, farming reduced the area needed to find food but still required a lot of energy, to 10-30% in Industrial – now those humans most advantaged by machines could use less of their own energy to live (and presumably store more energy in the form of fat).

Human sociometabolism, for a vast and growing segment of the world’s population, has emerged as significantly smaller than the biological metabolism of the African savannah landscape where our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared. By Malhi’s calculations, our sociometabolism differs from theirs by six orders of magnitude.

For over a million years, Homo sapiens, and its ancestral Homo species, lived as hunter-gatherers. They improved little in resource gathering efficiency, despite gradual brain expansion and technological advancements. In this period, our metabolic impact on the planet remained relatively modest, likely lesser than that of much larger mammals like elephants and mammoths. However, a significant shift occurred about ten thousand years ago with the Neolithic revolution and the introduction of farming, marking a pivotal moment in human history.

The question is, is there enough energy on this planet to feed growing insatiable sociometabolisms? The trends don’t run in our favor unless human societies evolve as plants did. To survive, they cued into the natural rhythm of a rotating earth to form their own rhythm of life. Some ancient plants failed to ease their hyperactive, energy consuming process of photosynthesis. They didn’t take a break, conserve energy in their vaulted roots, repair damaged cells, and prepare for another trip around the sun. And evolution punished them. Now they’re fossilized carbon buried deep in the ground fueling our human sociometabolism.

Are we humans, as a species, future fossils in our waning days of a failed evolutionary experiment? Have we learned to slow our pace of consumption, conserve and store our energy? Can we evolve our sociometabolism by inventing rhythmic ways to seasonally repair and prepare ourselves and our societies for another growth spurt later in the journey around the sun? Are we, as a global society and species, adaptive thriving plants with an evolving future, or another example of failed future fossils?

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Hello Interactors,

Our family took a trip to San Diego to visit friends. We got to spend some time in the warm Southern California water at a time when the news was filled with stories about sensational oceanic anomalies. Was the warm water we felt an anomaly? How certain could I be and how certain can anyone be about climatic statistical anomalies?

Let’s unpack it.

BOOGIE WOOGIE FREAK OUT

I felt the current sucking my legs out to sea as a wave formed behind me. I struggled to hurl myself, and my boogie board, toward the beach to meet the momentum of the rising wave. “KICK, KICK, KICK”, I yelled to my son who was next to me.

Then came the welling and humbling sensation born out of the magnitude of a swelling ocean wave. As it crested a smile crossed my face and the force propelled me down the wave’s sloping curve. I looked over and realized not only had my son caught the wave, but my daughter and wife had too. The whole family was giggling and kicking amidst the seafoam of an exhausted but rewarding wave.

I’d forgotten how exhilarating boogie boarding is. I was first introduced to it when I lived in Hermosa Beach, California in the mid-eighties. I’m kicking myself for not learning to surf that year. I didn’t even try until a few years later at the very beach we found ourselves boogie boarding – Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California.

I spent a summer working at a newspaper there in 1987 laying out ads on their newly purchased Mac SE alongside the art director and one full-time designer. They were both surfers and decided to take me out one day. I remember my shoulders being sore for a week from paddling. Let’s just say I paddled more than I surfed.

The water is relatively warm in San Diego which makes it a nice place to surf and boogie board. Not only is it the southern most major city in California and thus the warmest, it can also be the recipient of warm water flowing up the coast from Mexico.

It was cloudy, cool, and a little rainy the day we were boogie boarding with friends making the water feel particularly warm. I wondered how much warmer the water there might be compared to when I was feebly attempting to stand on a surfboard for the first time. I wondered if climate change had demonstrably warmed the surface water after all these years.

Ocean flow and temperatures have been all over the news in the last week or so. Take, for example, this ABC news story that was amplified by a post from John Gibbons, aka @thinkorswim, on that site we’ll all continue to call Twitter. According to John’s profile he likes to ‘freak out and speak out’ on the ‘climate emergency’ but warned he didn’t want to sound ‘alarmist’ when he shared a graph one scientist called ‘gobsmacking’.

It’s a chart of a set of standard deviations — the number of points a number falls above or below an average number. How much it deviates from an average. In this case the number represents the average extent ice has covered a particular area in the Antarctic Sea from 1989 to 2023 as compared to the average between the years 1991-2020.

From 1989 to 2022 the number didn’t deviate from the average much more than 3 or -3 standard deviations, but by June of 2023 it deviated well below -6, or ~6.4 standard deviations.

It makes 2023 look like an exceptionally bad year thus far for a really important element of our climate system: sea ice. These sheets of ice play a significant role in how the Earth's climate behaves. For example, we know it affects how much sunlight is reflected into space (planetary albedo), how the atmosphere moves (atmospheric circulation), the productivity of ocean life, and how heat and salt circulate in the ocean (thermohaline circulation).

Which gets us to another big piece of oceanic news this week; the fate of AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock). The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a large-scale ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean and Danish scientists predicted it’s flow will slow or even stall before the end of the century.

Like polar ice sheets, AMOC is also a critical component of the Earth's climate system. It’s responsible for transporting warm, salty water from the tropics to the northern latitudes and then returning cold, less salty water southward through currents deep in the ocean. This circulation pattern helps regulate the climate by redistributing heat while also influencing weather patterns across the North Atlantic region and beyond.

One of the authors of the study, Susanne Ditlevsen, is a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen. She told the New York Times that “climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.” Given this, she was surprised they could predict the timing of a collapse.

NUMBING NUMBERS

Should we be shocked by statistics yielding whacky numbers or suspicious of the models that produce them? Some scientists are calling for scrutiny of climatic models, encouraging more nuanced discussion of these alarming predictions.

While there is reason to be scared, we should not be scared to reason.

‘Gobsmacking’ numbers from scientists and mathematicians make for good click bait, and indeed can offer legitimate alarm bells, but they also can give the illusion of certainty and can distract us from all that remains uncertain, nuanced, or all together unknowable.

This view was expressed by the climate scientist John Kennedy who scrutinizes the mythology of mathematical certainty and lionizes the phraseology of scientific humility. He called out the gobsmacked scientist ABC quoted about the ‘six-sigma event’ in the Antarctic who was quoted as such,

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said, “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”

To show just how cautious we should be with these numbers, while Dr. Doddridge translated the standard deviations into a 1 in 7.5-million-year event, another math professor and climate watcher noted “6.4 standard deviations would correspond to odds of about 1-in-13,000,000,000 (1-in-13 billion).”

Kennedy, who is decidedly not a climate denialist, also cautions that tracking ice extent in Antarctica has only been occurring for 45 years. This doesn’t mean the once-in-the-lifetime-of-the-Earth’s-existence event isn’t happening, but that it’s derived from a relatively miniscule time span. He suggests we might be better served to let people know that there is much more we don’t know about trends of the ice extent around Antarctica than we do know.

Furthermore, there isn’t a scientist out there who will say what this all means, how it happened, and when it might happen again. For all we know, within the next few years we may see an equally anomalous event in the other direction. After all, Kennedy points out,

“Up to around 2014, extent had been trending gradually upwards. Not by a huge amount, but it definitely wasn’t dropping. It hit a record high in 2014. Then it dropped off a cliff. By 2017, it was record low. It bounced back to “normal” in 2020 and now we are where we are.

He goes on to note the cautious language the IPCC uses to describe these changes.

“In conclusion, the observed small increase in Antarctic sea ice extent during the satellite era is not generally captured by global climate models, and there is low confidence in attributing the causes of the change.“

and

“For Antarctic sea ice, there is no significant trend in satellite-observed sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 in both winter and summer, due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability. Due to mismatches between model simulations and observations, combined with a lack of understanding of reasons for substantial inter-model spread, there is low confidence in model projections of future Antarctic sea ice changes, particularly at the regional level.“

and

“There remains low confidence in all aspects of Antarctic sea ice prior to the satellite era owing to a paucity of records that are highly regional in nature and often seemingly contradictory.”

Kennedy concludes that,

“My concern is that because Antarctic sea ice has suddenly dropped, a lot of people have forgotten what we don’t know. This feeds into the alarmingly large, shonky, yet definitive-sounding numbers like one in 7.5 million years, which then get into headlines, and spread across social media like the clappers. When Antarctic sea ice inevitably does its next weird thing, everyone will suddenly remember what we don’t know and that isn’t, it must be said, a great look.”

He's got a point.

SEA ANOMOLIES

So, what of the warming waters of San Diego? Has the temperature demonstrably changed since I was swimming there 36 years ago? Like all ocean water, it is warming. However, on any given day it may be warmer or cooler relative to past years. It’s this cyclical variability of complex systems coupled with spotty, uncertain, and incomplete data that makes predictions and smoking guns so hard to pin down.

It’s hard to tell what pattern is emerging from this chart dating back to 2000. The peak temperature in 2016 was due a record heat wave, but as you see it was followed up a year later with a significant drop. However, there were measurements in June that indicated “a weak El Niño was associated with above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean” as part of another oceanic circulation pattern known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). So, it’s possible these warm waters made their way to Encinitas. It’s hard to tell.

It's also possible ENSO is partially responsible for Antarctica’s sea ice variability. Climate scientist Zack Labe writes that,

“These patterns of climate variability modulate the transport of heat in the Southern Ocean, storm activity, and patterns of low-level surface winds – all of which significantly affect Antarctic sea ice (a lot more than air temperature does).”

He continues,

“If we see a dramatic change in the large-scale atmospheric circulation in the next few weeks/months, it is very possible that sea ice levels could return closer to average. This is good news, as it implies that we are not necessarily guaranteed to see another new minimum record at the end of next summer.”

But Zack is one the of scientists John Kennedy praises for his humility and willingness to not have definitive answers no matter how attractive they may be to media outlets and their consumers. He writes,

“…even though many scientists (including myself) are often responding with I don’t know for why Antarctic sea ice is so low right now, we do know quite a bit. It’s just that this is very complicated to disentangle so quickly, and there is no simple one-way causal factor to communicate. We have many clues, but scientists need more data and experiments to state their conclusions more confidently (“we” are cautious to avoid making sweeping conclusions by nature of training).

Attributing the why is also very challenging in real-time, especially for understanding the role of climate change in the Antarctic. The normal scientific research process is so much longer than the media cycle. Studies just focusing on 2023’s Antarctic sea ice levels, for instance, will likely be published for at least the next five years or more.”

This much we do know: Antarctic sea ice has been gradually increasing over the past four decades, but there have been some record low levels of sea ice. As we’re seeing now. These changes vary in different regions of Antarctica, with some areas experiencing more ice while others have seen decreases. Wind patterns play a significant role in driving these changes, but the observations are limited, and climate models still struggle to fully explain them.

The annual growth and melting of Antarctic sea ice is a unique and regular phenomenon amidst the year-to-year variations. It plays a crucial role in the exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean, providing a habitat for the diverse ocean ecosystems. Including the habitats I was swimming in last week. Understanding and modeling these processes is essential given their significance but doing so is admittedly very tricky.

The factors contributing to extreme sea ice events include both atmospheric and oceanic drivers. They’re influenced by local changes within Antarctica and remote impacts from other regions like the Pacific Ocean. The combination of anomalous winds and upper ocean heat can lead to significant sea ice deviations and records at specific times. While predicting summer sea ice conditions based solely on the previous winter is challenging, changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation might bring sea ice levels closer to average, offering hope to avoid new minimum records.

Researchers will obviously continue to study sea ice trends to better determine if it's driven by internal variability or unexpected responses to circulation trends in the Northern Hemisphere. But given all these anomalies and uncertainties, it's important to dig into reliable sources, seek knowledge of our complex ecosystems, and be cautious of, or avoid all together, unnecessary hype.

It’s a bit like trying to catch every wave you see. It can become exhausting, disappointing, and with time…depressing. But when you learn to read the ocean from experts, gain some experience, and have some patience, rewards – sometimes exhilarating – do come.

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Hello Interactors,

My last post on fractals led me to refamiliarized myself with the man who coined the term, Benoit Mandelbrot, and his influential work on the fractal-like wonders of nature. I didn’t realize he was following in the footsteps of 19th century mathematicians critical of the absolutist purity of Euclidean geometry – themes I recently explored here and here.

My journey led me to a memory of a plane landing on a plane and the complexities that surface on the surface.

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Now let’s go…

I have a childhood memory, fueled by a crayon drawing, of watching a plane land at the Des Moines airport. My dad was returning home after a business trip. Over time, this memory transformed into a riddle most likely inspired by high school calculus. The riddle posed a question: as the distance between the plane and the runway progressively decreases, when does it equal zero? My pondering was rooted in the observation that, at a microscopic level, the rubber of the tire and the rough surface of the concrete never truly merge into zero. The presence of black streaks on the tarmac from rubber left behind served as evidence. According to classical physics, at an atomic level, the distance between a landing plane and the runway approaches zero but never truly reaches it.

This is because the outermost electron clouds of the atoms in both the tires and the runway surface repel each other due to electromagnetic forces, creating a minute gap between them, measured in angstroms (10 to the power of -10 meters). However, from a practical standpoint, classical mechanics tells us that at a macroscopic level, the plane does make contact with the runway and eventually comes to a stop. Classical mechanics focuses on the behavior of objects on a larger scale, which outweighs the effects observed at the microscopic level. The mechanics of "touchdown" do not rely on atomic physics to achieve zero distance for the safe arrival of our loved ones.

In my childhood crayon drawings, I depicted the runway as a straight line and the plane's wheels as a circle. Yet, this representation itself is a macroscopic interpretation of reality. If we were to examine my marks with a magnifying glass, we would see fragmented wax resting on the textured paper's peaks and valleys rather than perfectly straight lines or round circles. Similarly, we would find fragments of rubber deposited on the peaks and valleys of the concrete runway.

In the realm of high school calculus, the line representing the runway and the circle representing the wheel would be precisely drawn on rigid gridded paper using a plastic flowchart template, akin to the tools my dad used to pseudocode his COBOL programs he no doubt was debugging with his colleagues in Toronto.

Mathematically, I would have described the landing as the height of the plane decreasing as a function of time, incorporating concepts like velocity and acceleration. This interplay between decreasing height and time signifies the plane's motion until it decelerates and reaches a minimum altitude, indicating touchdown. I would have positioned the circle of my plastic template precisely on the flat line, accompanied by an equation describing the moment of touchdown.

However, in 1982, two years before I was in calculus and the year I was learning geometry, mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot published "The Fractal Geometry of Nature," a highly influential book. Mandelbrot's work highlighted the importance of mathematics that deviated from the traditional Euclidean curves and shapes. Introduced by ‘modern’ mathematicians like Georg Cantor and Giuseppe Peano a century earlier, the days of regarding mathematics as absolutely pure and unquestioning were being questioned.

Mandelbrot offers why we were set on this smooth, well-worn trajectory of Euclidian mathematical purity,

“The fact that mathematics, viewed by its own creators as ‘absolutely pure,’ should respond so well to the needs of science is striking and surprising but follows a well-worn pattern. That pattern was first set when Johannes Kepler concluded that, to model the path of Mars around the Sun, one must resort to an intellectual plaything of the Greeks–the ellipse. Soon after, Galileo concluded that, to model the fall of bodies toward the Earth, one needs a different curve–a parabola. And he proclaimed that ‘the greatest book [of nature]...is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures…without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’ In the pithy words of Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson: ‘God always geometrizes.’”

Of the work of Cantor’s set theory and Peano’s space-filling curves, the theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman J Dyson wrote,

“These new structures were regarded by contemporary mathematicians as ‘pathological.’ They were described as a ‘gallery of monsters,’ kin to the cubist painting and atonal music that were upsetting established standards of taste in the arts at about the same time. The mathematicians who created the monsters regarded them as important in showing that the world of pure mathematics contains a richness of possibilities going far beyond the simple structures that they saw in nature.”

Mandelbrot's research delved into the exploration of fractals, which he described as broken shapes, distinct from the smooth Euclidean curves. These fractals opened new possibilities, allowing for the modeling of complex phenomena found in nature. Mandelbrot's fractal geometry was brought to life through computer-generated images of landscapes and clouds, reflecting the generative algorithms found in nature. These images showcased the jagged, impure, and fractured lines that emerged, challenging the simplicity of Euclidean shapes.

Mandelbrot emphasized that drawing a line between just two points on a square Euclidean plane oversimplifies reality. Instead, he considered the fracturing that occurs when lines connect every point in a square or a cube. In fact, the term "fractal" itself derives from the Latin adjective "fractus," meaning "broken." Mandelbrot highlighted the relevance of fractals lying between the shapes of Euclid, akin to fractions lying between integers.

Mandelbrot offers that

“When mathematicians concluded about a century ago that the seemingly simple and innocuous notion of ‘curve’ hides profound difficulties, they thought they were engaging in unreasonable and unrealistic hairsplitting. They had not determined to look out at the real world to analyze it, but to look in at an ideal in the mind. The theory of fractals shows that they had misled themselves.”

Mandelbrot's work demonstrated that the seemingly simple crayon drawing of my dad's plane landing concealed profound difficulties. My self-imposed brain teaser was was not an exercise in unreasonable hair-splitting, but rather an analysis of the real world. Fractals, I now know, provide a mathematical framework to quantify irregularities found in natural structures and allow for the analysis and modeling of complex systems exhibiting patterns at different scales.

Mandelbrot's groundbreaking ideas expanded on Cantor and Peano to illuminate the vast possibilities and richness of mathematics beyond the limitations of traditional Euclidean structures. These concepts empower us to better understand the complexities of the natural world and prevent us from being misled by overly idealized notions. Thanks to their work, we are better equipped to explore and comprehend the intricate beauty of the natural world. Even the jagged wax deposits of the line depicting a runway in my childhood drawing.

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Hello Interactors,

We’re officially in the summer season here in the northern hemisphere, and that means we transition to physical geography. Much attention has been given to the staggering heat in the U.S. lately, so I thought I’d start there.

Please give me like, if you like. And share if you dare!

Now let’s go…

On June 19, 1889, Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother,

"Finally, I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky."

It is largely believed van Gogh was referring to his now famous painting, ‘The Starry Night.’

The date of this painting closely corresponds to the month and day of the recent heatwave across much of the United States. It serves as a poignant reminder of the passage of time and the centuries of human-induced climatic change that separate us. Astronomers have confirmed the date of that painting by noting Venus would have been visible in the night sky, which appears as the brightest moon in the painting.

On June 20th, 2023, meteorologist Jeff Beradelli out of Tampa Florida tweeted:

“When I look at this jet stream the word insane comes to mind. It's even more astonishing when you consider it's mid June! This configuration, likely enhanced by climate heating, is fueling a record heat dome so extreme that even experts are astonished!”

Which prompted Pennsylvania State University's climate scientist, Michael Mann, to respond.

“I'm honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern. Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh”

Mann poetically likened the image of jet stream configurations to the vivid brushstrokes of van Gogh's masterpiece. This analogy underscores the significance climate scientists attach to understanding atmospheric intricacies. The behavior of the jet stream, a sinuous belt of air encircling the Northern Hemisphere, has become enigmatic, eluding conventional expectations, and impacting extreme weather events.

The jet stream's undulating pattern exerts considerable control over climatic conditions in North America. However, recent deviations from its usual behavior have led to enduring heatwaves and other extreme weather events, affecting millions of people. Scientists attribute these phenomena to the influence of climate change, which distorts the flow of the jet stream, trapping regions in prolonged periods of extreme heat. This raises concerns about the frequency and intensity of future extreme climatic episodes.

Amidst the exploration of the jet stream and its effects, questions arise about our representation and understanding of the Earth. Satellites have revolutionized data capture and analysis, offering invaluable tools for various applications. However, feminist geographers and critical remote sensing scholars argue that these technologies should go beyond mere data capture and prediction. They propose using satellite imagery and data to explore different perspectives and imagine alternative worlds, challenging traditional views of representation.

Researchers Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann call for a polyperspectival image of Earth, characterized by a single Earth depicted from multiple perspectives. This notion, linked to fractals, emphasizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the Earth's systems.

They echo environmental humanities scholar Thomas Lekan, who offers a visual grammar of "fractal topographies" that accounts for the complexity unfolding at different scales of analysis. This view challenges the desire to homogenize by merging local data, complete with climatic and meteorological effects, into a more detached, abstracted, and aggregated image resulting from global satellite feeds. Conventional imagery thinks globally but does little to cause us to act locally. New approaches call for inter-mediations between Earth sensing processes, massive digital datasets, and the visual products and perceptions they can produce.

These researchers also recall the work of Wilson Harris, a Guyanese writer known for unconventionally using multiple narrators and intermingling points of view. He further emphasizes the importance of fractals in acknowledging repetition, connection, and specificity without erasing diversity. He wrote,

"Fractal scaling is used here precisely because of its specificity: it highlights dynamic, shifting relationships, but at the same time insists on a measurable self-similarity... this allows one to insist on the partiality of self-similarity, that is, to see repetition and connection over time and space without a complete identification that would remove diversity and specificity."

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" exemplifies both the polyperspectival and fractal-like qualities in its composition and representation. The painting incorporates multiple viewpoints, offering a sense of depth and dimension. Its swirling brushstrokes and vibrant colors create a rhythmic pattern resembling fractal geometries found in nature. Like the Earth's systems, the painting invites viewers to engage with it on multiple levels, appreciating its beauty and symbolism while contemplating diverse interpretations.

Perhaps unknowingly, Michael Mann’s nod to van Gogh invites us to consider these possibilities. By merging multiple perspectives and fractal-like elements, "Starry Night", like many other Impressionist paintings, presents a multi-layered representation of the natural world, reflecting its complexity and interconnectedness.

This aligns with the goal of many climate scientists and researchers who look to move beyond simplistic notions of abstract uniformity afforded by normalized aggregated data to embrace more inclusive and nuanced understandings. Van Gogh's artwork serves as a reminder of the power of imagination and artistic expression in conveying the intricacies of our changing planet.

Earth's systems, atmospheric dynamics, and climate change calls for alternative frameworks of representation. A single Earth conceptualized through multiple perspectives using a fractal-like grammar is one way to offer new ways to capture the complexity, diversity, and interconnectedness of our planet. Van Gogh's "Starry Night" embodies these concepts through its multiple perspectives and fractal-like patterns, reminding us of the importance of embracing inclusivity, complexity, and the transformative power of imagination in our evolving understanding of the Earth.

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Hello Interactors,

We’re now into summer, but I wanted to sneak in one last cartography post. It’s a leap from last week’s post into the field of human dynamics.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing (shame on you 😉), I asked ChatGPT to make a poem out it.

In the realm of spatial analysis, behold the shift, From mere location's grasp to a deeper rift. No longer bound by cartographic tradition's way, We delve into place's essence, where dynamics hold sway.

In the web of relational space, where connections thrive, Topological ties and precise locations come alive. Place identity emerges within this network's embrace, As photos shared online from cherished spots find their place.

Technology, a symphony woven in our lives' thread, Enmeshed in our cities, transportation's spread. This integrated framework, a beacon to guide, Distinguishing each entity, its role in the network's stride.

Geography, propelled by innovation's flame, Unveils spatial relationships, humanity's vibrant game. From Tobler's law, a profound truth first unfurled, To Shaw and Sui's framework, where dimensions swirl.

Absolute space, relative space, and relational bonds, A tapestry of interplay, where connection responds. With each advance, our understanding deepens, The dance of human interactions, geography reopens.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BRIDGING LAWS

"Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things."

This principle, known as the "first law of geography," was first articulated by my former cartography professor, Waldo Tobler, when I was just four years old in 1969. While initially presented as an idiom, it eventually gained recognition as a law. Some speculate that this classification arose during a period when geography was becoming increasingly quantitative and mathematical.

Essentially, the law suggests that the further apart two locations are on Earth, the less likely they are to physically interact. However, when we attempt to determine and measure what is considered "near" and "distant" on a 2D aerial map—an abstract representation of mathematical space—we may unintentionally detach ourselves from the physical reality of these places and the spaces between them.

Consider the route you might take by car to a destination that is 500 miles or kilometers away. It would likely involve twists and turns, ascents, and descents, and passing through various towns, villages, or natural landscapes. On a topographic map, you would observe squiggly lines that traverse a multitude of elevations. Now, envision flying to the same destination. After takeoff, the plane banks left or right and then follows a more or less straight path. On a map, it would appear as a direct line between two points. If you were to draw lines connecting all the places you have visited on a map in a year, you would likely observe Tobler's law in action. Those locations closest to you—where you live, work, shop, eat, and play—are all more closely related than those that are farther away.

These drawings of points and lines can be understood as network diagrams, representing measurable and mathematically describable relationships between objects. By examining the properties, connectivity, and patterns within these graphs, we can analyze various phenomena and solve problems across disciplines ranging from computer science to social science. Network analysis is integral to mapping software, guiding us with routes and directions on our phones or in our cars. It serves as a fundamental component of Geographical Information Systems and Geographical Information Science. Moreover, this approach is employed by software algorithms to recommend friends in online social networks or deliver advertisements that align with our distant yet related interests.

As critical as these spatial mathematical methods are to our modern everyday lives, they fall short when it comes to considering the surrounding factors that influence outcomes. For instance, while Google Maps may account for the time required to climb a hill when determining the most efficient route by foot, bike, bus, or car, it fails to consider factors such as circuitous routes, neighborhood safety and quality, or the presence of dedicated bus and bike lanes or sidewalks.

Furthermore, wouldn't a city with multiple direct flights to a particular destination challenge Tobler's law? If a city offers ten direct flights a day to a faraway location, wouldn't it be considered more related than a city that only provides one daily flight? The same holds true for direct flights themselves. I can fly directly from Seattle to Dublin in nine hours, while the cheapest ticket to my hometown in the middle of America would take twelve hours with one stop. However, the trip to Ireland would cost five times more. Of course, not everyone has the time or financial means to embark on such journeys. Nevertheless, for those who do, air travel has the potential to bring distant things closer, particularly when compared to a century ago.

Throughout history, technological advancements have continuously challenged the frictions imposed by physical distance, as encapsulated by Tobler's law. From the invention of boats and wheeled carts to the advent of the telegraph, airplanes, and the internet, the barriers posed by geographic separation have been progressively diminished. Increasingly, distant things possess the potential to become more connected to nearby entities. Technological innovations have alleviated the frictions imposed by the rugged terrain of the Earth, the impeding winds and waves of the sea, and the extremes of temperature.

And now, with the internet and widespread video conferencing, distance is brought to our doorstep or displayed on a screen just inches from our face. Those who have the means to do so are witnessing an ever-unfolding significance of "space" and "place" in our globalized world.

THE PRAGMATICAL, DYNAMICAL, AND GEOGRAPHICAL

Within the field of geography, there is a subfield that investigates this intersection called human dynamics. It explores human behavior, interactions, and patterns within the context of the physical environment. Human dynamics considers how individuals, communities, and societies shape and are shaped by the spatial distribution of activities, such as migration, urbanization, land use, and socio-economic processes.

Two prominent figures in this field, Shih-Lung Shaw from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Daniel Sui from Virginia Tech, introduced a space-place framework that integrates previously compartmentalized studies of abstracted space with physical place. They refer to this integrated framework as a "splatial" framework, which draws inspiration from the four main schools of Western spatial thought discussed last week.

Shaw and Sui argue that humans, as dynamic entities, are influenced by four key dimensions of space:

• Absolute Space (Location): Absolute space pertains to fixed locations in space and investigates questions such as "Where do different objects exist?"

• Relative Space (Locale): Relative space revolves around locations relative to a fixed or moving object and focuses on inquiries like "What surrounds us?"

• Relational Space (Place Identity and Dynamics): Relational space examines the relationships between objects and concentrates on questions such as "What is connected or associated with us?"

• Mental Space (Sense of Place): Mental space explores the cognitive and psychological aspects of space, centered around inquiries like "What perceptions and thoughts do individuals hold in their minds?"

They represent these four dimensions as bubbles arranged in a circle, with the human being at the center. Each bubble is connected by lines, demonstrating the interdependent interactions and the organic unity of these dimensions, rather than viewing them as separate entities.

Their framework is also influenced by geographers Doreen Massey and John Agnew. In 1991, Massey advocated for a global and dynamic perception of place, asserting that places are characterized by multiple identities rather than a singular one. These identities constantly evolve over time and lack clear boundaries that distinctly separate the inside from the outside. In 2011, Agnew introduced a comprehensive understanding of the concept of place, incorporating three fundamental pillars: location, delineated by latitude and longitude; locale, encompassing the physical/environmental and socio-economic/cultural context; and a sense of place, rooted in subjective human perception and attachment to a specific location or locale.

Within the realm of spatial analysis, the emphasis has shifted towards examining place identity and dynamics, surpassing the traditional focus on mere location or locale prevalent in cartography and GIS. Given that relational space encompasses topological relationships and precise locations, the notion of place identity assumes significance within a relational network, such as an online social network where people share photos from specific locations. As technology becomes increasingly embedded in our personal lives, transportation, and cities, this integrated framework becomes crucial for differentiating each entity and comprehending their respective roles within the network.

In my lifetime, the field of cartography – and geography more broadly – driven by advancements in technology and evolving conceptual frameworks, has expanded our understanding of spatial relationships and the dynamics of human interactions. From Waldo Tobler's "first law of geography" to the space-place framework proposed by Shaw and Sui, we have come to recognize the complex interplay between absolute space, relative space, relational space, and mental space. This challenges traditional notions of distance and emphasize the significance of place identity, connectivity, and the cognitive aspects of space.

As we navigate a globalized world, the study of human dynamics in geography provides a valuable lens through which we can comprehend the intricate relationships between individuals, communities, and their physical environments. By embracing this integrated framework, we gain insights into the ever-unfolding significance of our special splatial interconnected and technology-driven society.

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Hello Interactors,

Who would've thought that R.E.M.'s hit tune "Stand" held the secrets to Western spatial thinking? This week I break it down for you. From Aristotle's "Stand in the place where you live" to Newton's "Carry a compass to help you along," it's like they were dropping knowledge bombs all along! So next time you get this '80s hit stuck in your head, remember, you're getting a crash course in geographic philosophy. Rock on!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

IT’S FIXED

R.E.M.’s 1988 hit single, Stand, starts with this chorus:

Stand in the place where you live

Now face north

Think about direction

Wonder why you haven't before

Now stand in the place where you were

Now face west

Think about the place where you live

Wonder why you haven't before

Followed by this verse:

If you are confused, check with the sun

Carry a compass to help you along

Your feet are going to be on the ground

Your head is there to move you around

Without knowing it, they outlined what one researcher regards as the complete set of Western thought on space and place. In 1996, history and philosophy of geography professor Michael Curry identified just four distinct, but relational, notions of space that emerged two thousand years ago but continue to shape Western thought today.

Curry's four main categories of space provide a framework for understanding different conceptualizations of space. These notions have influenced philosophical and scientific perspectives on space throughout history. Here they are:

1. Static, Hierarchical, and Concrete Space (Aristotle 384-322 BC):

This notion of space was influenced by Aristotle. It suggests objects and events have their natural places within the world. Aristotle associated the elements of earth, air, fire, and water with their respective natural places – a rock falls back to earth, water finds its way back to water, air flows to air, and fire moves upwards.

This perspective views space as fixed and objects, and their elements, as being in specific positions within it. Curry reminds us that despite what modern science may say about the atomic structures and behavior of the world, we can see – as Aristotle did – that a bubble rises through water to find air like a frightened toddler running to their mother. And even with the best throw, there’s no separating a rock from its mother earth. Aristotle embraced a qualitative notion of science, informed by what he perceived to be true. Even when we may know we’re deceived. For example, we have to remind ourselves that the earth is not fixed and the sun does not set, even though it appears to be true.

Aristotle’s notion of space remained in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and guided all thought and action. But even though this Aristotelian common-sense view of the world can be seen even today, Curry notes that in 1277 the Church did its part to stamp it out. The Catholic church’s passing of Condemnation of 1277 aimed at eradicating Aristotelian teachings. The Church also embraced mathematics in the Middle Ages, though later challenged advances in math that conflicted with religious doctrine, recognizing its truth, contribution to education, and sensing the economic and intellectual power it wielded.

As the Enlightenment awoke, and with it the rise of Church-backed European geopolitical power, a more exacting view of space emerged. Surveying was ripped from the Roman ages and with it the gridding of land for political, economical, and military organizing and domination.

Then, in the mid to late 1600s, Descartes further quantified space by marrying elements of algebra to geometry imbued with Christian religiosity. He, and the Church, preached – like Plato did – that this model of mathematical certainty is the bases of all knowledge. So, while the common sense, observational, and qualitative views of Aristotle are still with us today, they don’t have nearly the influence over science Cartesian approaches do. Which leads us to Curry’s second big influence on our notion of space.

2. Absolute Grid Space (Newton 1642-1727):

The second notion of space is most often associated with Isaac Newton. This conceptualization of space is influenced by Descartes and views space as an absolute grid. In this view, space is considered an infinite and independent entity within which objects exist and events occur. It is a framework where positions, distances, and directions can be precisely defined, a fixed reference frame allows for the measurement and calculation of an object’s position and movement. Curry reminds us that Newton is largely regarded as a secular contributor to science, but like Descartes his work is riddled with religious overtones.

His Christian view of space as infinite and eternal, where objects and motion are the work of an omnipresent God, are found in his 1686 Fundamental Principles of Natural Philosophy. He says God

“is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient…He endures forever and is everywhere present. He is omnipresent not virtually only but also substantially…In him are all things contained and moved, yet neither affects the other; God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies, bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God.”

But Newton’s voice and influence was not alone. Which gets us to number three.

IT’S ALL RELATIVE

3. Relational Space (Leibniz 1646-1716):

The third notion of space was influenced by Newton’s contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He argued for a relational understanding of space. While adopting the scientific outlook of Newton, Leibniz attacked Newton’s absolutist approach tinged with Christian orthodoxy. Whereas Newton rejected the senses, as they may deceive God’s power and will, Leibniz emphasized the importance of considering how we sense relationships among objects and events. Because our eyes (with the help of our brain) can sense objects moving relative to one another, Leibniz argued space is fundamentally defined by these relationships. The positions and properties of objects are interdependent. This relational view highlights the dynamic and interconnected nature of spatial relationships that comes from motion of one object relative to another.

This notion of spatial relationships, that some objects appear to move in absolute space while others remain stationary has echoes of both Descartes and Newton but without metaphysical religiosity. It also embraces elements of a human-centeredness that culminates in unique and individual spatial perceptions. This opened the door to number four.

4. Imposed Form Space (Kant 1724-1804):

The last notion of space, associated with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, challenges the previous perspectives by positing that space is something imposed on the world by humans. Kant argued that space is not an inherent quality of the external world but rather a framework through which humans perceive and organize their experiences. In this view, space is a subjective construct that shapes our understanding of the world.

Kant very much believed in Descartes and Newton’s mathematical truths in how to describe the world and how objects behave, but in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason he questioned what we can really know about the world given it’s all skewed by our perceptions. Curry recalls that Kant himself regard this shift in thinking as a ‘Copernican Revolution’. Just as Copernicus reoriented the universe by centering planets around the sun, Kant believed his critique of reason shifts the center of knowledge from what was thought to be known to the perception of the knower. He observed that even though something can be shown to be mathematically true, like gravity, we can’t see gravity. We can calculate wind speed, but we can’t see what caused the air to move. Kant’s revolution opened the door for radical alternatives to describing the world, including the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry just thirty years after Kant’s publication.

Curry’s four notions of Western spatial thought just may have culminated in a pop hit single in the 1980s. Aristotle would have liked that R.E.M. suggest we “check with the sun” given his version of space is all about the fixed positions of natural elements. Newton would commend them on advising to “carry a compass to help you along” an absolute grid space. Leibniz would remind the confident compass holder that while “your feet are going to be [at a point] on the ground, your head is there to move you around” relative to that point. And Kant would have told everyone to just stop and “think about the place where you live, wonder why you haven't before.”

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Hello Interactors,

I’ll admit it, the early summer weather here in Seattle has been a distraction. So, I turned to a writing companion this week to help. I took my notes from a talk I saw at the AAG conference in March, and you know what comes next…I pasted it in ChatGPT.

I then took some papers referenced in the talk, grabbed their abstracts, and pasted those in ChatGPT. After a few iterations of ‘expand on this’, ‘merge these…’ and ‘shrink this to three sentences’ I had all the working components needed to form an essay roughly 1000 words long.

I pasted that into Word and began editing in my own voice and adding bits of my own thoughts. When I’d get stuck on a concept or blending of concepts, I’d ask ChatGPT to blend them for me. When I was unsure or dubious of its confidence, I’d turn to Google Scholar and Wikipedia for further reference or content to be rewritten more evidentially.

I find ChatGPT a valuable writing companion. Some facts are often way off and downright fictional at times, but it is good at taking a jumble of ideas, lists of points, or disparate topics and putting them into cohesive starting points. Especially when the sun is shining and it’s 72 degrees outside.

Let me know what you think and what your thoughts are on using ChatGPT for this kind of thing. Here’s what ChatGPT says are three takeaways from this post.

Key Takeaways:

• Grid and Place Cells: Researchers have discovered specific patterns of neuron firing in the brains of rats, mice, bats, and humans, known as place cells and grid cells. Place cells are found in the hippocampus and respond to specific locations in the environment, while grid cells in the entorhinal cortex form grid-like patterns representing the overall layout of space.

• Non-Euclidean Geometries: The discovery of grid cells and cognitive maps challenges the dominance of Euclidean geometry in understanding spatial cognition. Grid cells exhibit a hexagonal grid pattern, highlighting the non-Euclidean nature of cognitive maps in the brain.

• Computational Models: The integration of computational models such as reinforcement learning and successor representations, inspired by the research on place cells and grid cells, offers a deeper understanding of spatial cognition. These models capture the complex interactions between cognition, decision-making, and the environment, reflecting the non-Euclidean nature of grid cells and challenging traditional geometric frameworks. By incorporating these computational approaches, researchers can develop more comprehensive and inclusive models of spatial cognition that consider the interconnectedness and dynamic nature of cognitive processes and the environments we navigate.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TELLTALE CELLS OF RAT TRACES

In my last post, I talked about how Platonic and Euclidian geometric purity and gridded Cartesian planes may have overly influenced Western thought, beliefs, and actions. Scientific thinking may have been errantly seduced by the certainty and accuracy of rational proofs to describe not only the physical world but how our minds and body interact with it and each other. We now know it’s likely the world is constructed of layers of indeterminant, interrelated complex interactions occurring at atomic, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, astronomical, and cosmological levels.

And yet theoretical and observable patterns emerge amidst this chaos that can and are described and understood through both Euclidean and non-Euclidean patterns. For example, patterns found in the brain. Cognitive scientists studying rats in the 1970s discovered a collection of neurons fired when a rat entered a particular place in a maze. They called these neuron firing locations place cells.

This video shows a rat running around in a circular environment (black line) and any time a particular cell is active (red dots). The red dots cluster around one location, which is the place field of the cell. (Source: Jankowski M, O’Mara S (2015) via Wikipedia)

Place cell patterns are found primarily in the hippocampus region of the brain. They’re derived from a collection of firing neurons that selectively respond to specific locations or places in an environment. Place cells are influenced by environmental cues and play a crucial role in spatial memory formation, allowing for the association of specific memories or experiences with particular places. They are instrumental in the formation of cognitive maps, which are inherently non-Euclidean because they can include unpredictable shortcuts, deviations, and distortions.

As research continued in the 1990s, the arrangement of these patterns began showing signs of grid-like regularity. Some speculated the brain was forming a kind of rectangular grid. And then in 2005, scientists discovered grid-like patterns firing in an area neighboring the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex – also involved in spatial processing and memory. They termed these grid cells and they indeed resembled Euclidean regularity.

These collections of neurons fire at regular intervals as a rat moves about the environment. As it nears a node of its virtual lattice, neurons fire in the entorhinal cortex. These nodes make a grid-like pattern, but it’s not a regular rectangular grid. It instead is comprised of hexagonal shapes. Unlike place cells, which have specific firing fields for distinct locations, grid cells offer a continuous representation of space, capturing the overall layout and virtual hexagonal geometry of the environment in the brain.

By establishing a kind of coordinate system, scientists theorize grid cells are used to monitor movement and position relative to the surrounding space. This supports path integration and reinforcement which helps maintain a sense of direction and distance traveled. While the eyes play a crucial role in strengthening these patterns, the lattice is nonetheless present even when traversing in the dark – absent of external cues.

While this phenomenon has been found in the brains of rats, mice, bats, and humans, similar findings exist in insects, albeit sparse and more static. Neurons in their antennal lobe encode the identity of odors through patterns formed by synchronized oscillating feedback loops with other neurons responsible for olfactory processing and learning.

Research on place cells, grid cells, and other brain structures involved in spatial representation and learning can provide valuable insights into how humans perceive and navigate space. By understanding the neural mechanisms underlying spatial cognition, researchers can refine and validate cognitive models of space.

MOST CERTAINLY A CERTAIN UNCERTAINTY

While I was attending the American Association of Geographer’s conference in Denver last March, I attended a session aimed at a body of research called behavioral and cognitive geography (BCG). This discipline has opened new avenues for understanding the links between human cognition, behavior, and the environment. This interdisciplinary field combines concepts from geography, psychology, neuroscience, AI, and other disciplines to explore how individuals and groups interact with space and make decisions individually and collectively.

One important aspect of BCG is decision making. Researchers in this field aim to develop more representative models of decision making by incorporating insights from disciplines such as judgment and decision making. This involves moving away from unrealistic assumptions grounded in traditional, rational interpretations in geography using Euclidean geometry. Two of my professors at UCSB, Reg Golledge and Waldo Tobler, both called for non-Euclidean investigations after forays into their groundbreaking research in cognitive maps in the 1970s.

Advancing this knowledge will require accounting for the context of spatial decision making. This includes social norms, institutions, and the physical environment that influences us. Additionally, acknowledging the heterogeneity among decision makers and considering cultural values is crucial for developing comprehensive decision models that are representative of all groups.

Collaborations with fields such as artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and social physics are contributing to expanding the scope and ambition of BCG. One researcher in this area from the University of Leeds, Ed Manley, presented at the conference. He is developing new analytical methods that blend topological and computational neuroscience, like those found in grid and place cell research, to account for both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries and explanations.

His recent research integrates both cognitive and behavioral geography using advanced agent-based modeling and spatial analysis. By leveraging the availability of large-scale, rich data on human mobility with computational models of spatial cognition he sees opportunities for deepening our understanding of how people interact with place.

There are two computer-based models he is currently exploring – reinforcement learning (RL) and successor representations (SR). These concepts are influenced and inspired by advancements in neuroscience – including place cell and grid cell research. Reinforcement learning is a general framework for learning optimal behavior through interactions with an environment while successor representations are a specific method used within reinforcement learning.

Reinforcement learning involves an agent that learns to make decisions and take actions in an environment to maximize cumulative rewards. The agent interacts with the environment, receives feedback in the form of rewards or penalties, and adjusts its behavior based on this feedback. The goal is to learn rules that map states to actions to maximize the expected cumulative reward.

Successor representations represent the state transitions and expected future rewards associated with different states. Instead of directly representing states and their values, successor representations capture the underlying structure of the environment. Probability scores are mapped to transitions between states and the expected cumulative reward that can be obtained from each state.

The modeled probability values of a state relates to the expected cumulative reward obtained by starting from that state and following a particular set of rules. By representing states in terms of their expected future rewards, successor representations provide a more compact and informative representation of the environment.

COMPLEXITY AND CONNECTION IN SUCCESSOR EVOLUTION

In the context of reinforcement learning, successor representations can be used to facilitate learning and decision-making by providing a structured representation of the environment's dynamics. This allows computer-based agents to make better-informed decisions based on the expected future rewards associated with different states.

Manley’s integration of SR into cognitive geography holds promise for understanding the construction of spatial knowledge and its connection to cognition. This method captures the idea that previous choices inform future decisions, mirroring the cognitive processes involved in spatial learning. This approach is closely linked to the spatial-dependent nature of tasks, which arise from geographic processes – including the formation of the natural and built environment.

This research also shows potential for tailoring learning processes to known demographic and background factors, allowing for more fair, accurate, and representative models of spatial cognition. This enables researchers to account for the diverse influences that shape decision-making and spatial behavior among different populations and their environments.

Moreover, the utilization of these methods in cognitive geography provides an avenue to develop models of space that blend metric and topological representations systematically. This integration allows for a more comprehensive understanding of spatial environments, capturing both the quantitative measurements and the qualitative relationships between locations.

This approach to geography represents a departure from dominant Platonic, Euclidean, and Cartesian thinking, embracing complexity and connectedness. These computational approaches reflect and acknowledge the dynamic nature of cognition, where the iteration of past choices inform future decisions.

It highlights the interconnectedness between cognition and the environment, challenging compartmentalized views and fostering interdisciplinary approaches. This departure from fixed and predetermined paths echoes a broader shift towards embracing complexity in our understanding of the world. It encourages us to view spatial cognition as a dynamic process influenced by a multitude of factors, rather than relying solely on rigid geometric frameworks and dogma.

It invites us to move away from rigidity and instead embrace the dynamic, interwoven nature of our cognitive processes and the environments we navigate. By doing so, we can foster a more nuanced, inclusive, and holistic understanding of spatial cognition and representation that aligns with the intricacies and interdependencies of the world we inhabit.

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Hello Interactors,

As I was preparing for my talk at Harvard last month, I was finishing a book called The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. He explores how culture shapes values, and those values shape history. Hat tip to Kasey Klimes over at rhizome r&d for the recommendation.

Lent uncovers the history and evolution of dominant Western culture through the lens of evolutionary biology and neuroscience and the role patterns play in cognitive and cultural development. He then compares it the lesser examined evolution of Eastern, mostly Chinese, culture, philosophy, and scientific history.

He found discrepancies in dominant Western thought, and how it sometimes is incongruent with select examples of more recent advances in science. Especially the degree to which the world is increasingly understood as a nested array of interdependent and indeterminate complex systems.

Quantum physics, complexity Science, and other various branches of the physical and social sciences, are revealing evidence of a pervasive interconnectedness that can often get lost or overlooked in some more traditional methods and beliefs of dominant Western science and culture.

“Divide and conquer” is one such example of how we routinely attempt to simplify to resolve problems. And yet, it seems divisions are what may be contributing to our global problems. Lent’s book made me wonder how much Western thinking and culture may be keeping us from solving our most perplexing problems. What happened to ‘united we stand, divided we fall?’

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FRANKENSTEIN V.2

Descartes once said,

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."

The breaking down of problems does simplify challenges. At the same time, I wonder if divisions can also introduce challenges. Consider the division of today’s global crises into economic, social, and environmental problems. It’s feasible to divide these even further but is it necessary to resolve them? What if instead of resolution division and partitioning is contributing to our ruin?

We’re good at division. Economic inequality divides the wealthy from the poor, political polarization has unraveled civil discourse, increased hostility, and a growing distrust of democratic institutions. Climate change exposes these divisions and imbalances as those more vulnerable to its effects suffer more than those most responsible for its existence.

This is all amidst an age group divide. Rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and reduced opportunities make it harder for younger people to avoid financial precarity let alone secure family wealth. The gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is widening.

Cultural polarization also divides communities along cultural and religious lines leading to a rise in hate crimes and extremist movements. Age can reveal differing attitudes towards social issues further solidifying divisions leading to more hostility and distrust. Divisions regarding the role of technology in society can also divide along age lines, but also wealth.

Digital divides can exacerbate social and economic inequalities, as the pandemic quickly revealed. We also witnessed how those without access to technology disproportionately struggled to access education, healthcare, jobs, and other essential services.

Fear and distrust in technology is currently directed at AI. As with seemingly every fast-approaching technological innovation in human history, many fear it while many revere it. Jeremy Lent notes that advances in artificial intelligence are particularly encouraging for futurists who see AI as furthering the quest to disembodied intelligence.

Transhumanists imagine a fusing of machines with physiology – the brain supplanted by a connected web of universal artificial intelligence. In the words of a leading advocate and enthusiast, Ray Kurzweil,

this transformation would upgrade “the frailties of these Version 1.0 bodies we have.”

Sounds like a modern-day Frankenstein to me.

Lent also reminds us that futurist visions can also look more like the science fiction classic, The Matrix. Human bodies are relegated to biological livestock consumed for energy so a global matrix of software can run a simulated existence – a virtual world, a meta-universe, or metaverse. Sound familiar? Most of today’s technology CEOs from Musk to Zuck subscribe to various forms of these visions of the future and they’re not alone.

A crude modern-day demonstration of this separation exists with remote work. While physically present in one place, people interact virtually with 2D representations of other humans to perform collaborative cognitive operations – information work. I spent my career helping to develop software tools to enable this mode of working.

Now imagine instead of looking at a computer screen people are wearing a headset or special glasses, as often envisioned by leading tech firms. These attempts, in varying degrees, separate the functions of the mind from the body. Our mind can exist in a virtual world while our body remains planted in the physical world.

The idea of separating mind and body is not new. These ideas are rooted in ancient Greek philosophical notions that the mind can be separated from the body. It then permeated Christian religions which influenced Western cultures leading to yet another example of division in our present-day society. These philosophies separate the brain – a seemingly computer-like organ – from the physical reality of our biological physiology.

Plato viewed the mind as divine, and the body as a polluted swamp. Purity and truth existed only in the mind. He believed the earth to be perfectly round and light rays perfectly parallel. The physical world was constructed with combinations of pure geometry. For him, this reality only exists in mathematical abstractions present in the mind. But for Plato, what is in the mind is what is true. He believed the eye, the physical senses, were not to be trusted. They deceive. He was so adamant in this geometric virtual existence that he had these words carved in stone above the entrance to his academy: “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.”

DIVIDED WE STAND

Aristotle later rejected this strict dualistic separation. While he is interpreted to believe the mind indeed operates differently than most organs in the body, including processing the immaterial in the form of cognition, the mind and body are nonetheless more uniformly connected.

This Aristotelian view was picked up in the middle-ages by the influential Christian theologian Thomas Aguinas. He treated intellect, and the soul, as independent but unified physical forms. While separate entities, he believed separation would starve the soul and the intellect of the necessary memories contained in the brain. The mind was for reason and free will while the physical body was but a vessel.

But as the Enlightenment unfolded, it was Plato’s ideas that took hold. His dualistic beliefs were prominently elevated by the mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes. His form of dualism came in the existence of two substances: mind and matter. A person only exists – they only matter – because they can think. Hence is famous phrase, “I think therefore I am.”

Descartes rejected the notion that the universe is comprised of atoms. He was a mechanist, believing the body to be like a machine made of specially formulated parts predetermined and preassembled by a God. He believed the body’s parts – the pumps, pullies, and gears, were controlled by processing unit in the brain – a power gifted by a Christian God – the pineal gland. We now know this part of the brain is primarily responsible for producing the sleep regulating hormone, melatonin.

This idea of the brain as the ‘central processing unit’ serves as the prevailing metaphor of conventional Western thought to this day. Just as Descartes’ theories emerged out of Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and modern mechanistic technological advances, by extension, so too do today’s intellectual and scientific influencers.

Descartes’ influence was surely substantiated, and perhaps – like Plato – influenced, by his contributions to mathematics. Moreover, his Cartesian coordinate system provided mathematical language and visualization that further enabled deduction, detection, and delineation. It made it easier to draw borders and boundaries; to bisect and bifurcate with the exacting detail and believability that can come with mathematics. The certitude of mathematics can sometimes delude us into conflating the certainty of a truth with the truth. Plato was right, the senses, via the brain, can deceive. But so can math.

Descartes mechanistic view of the world, together with the language of mathematics, meant the universe could now be calculated and communicated with extreme precision. This gave his beliefs and philosophies an added tinge of proof – of the truth. His work helped to unite an understanding of the world by mechanistically dividing the universe “into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”

The proliferation of printing presses in the 17th century helped to spread and perpetuate his perspective. It was the Cartesian coordinates that helped project the complex three-dimensional world onto a simple two-dimensional surface accelerating the craft of cartography and European global exploration. Soon, those with the means and power to draw maps did so.

European powers could now easily and abstractly divide land, in their mind, conquering invaded lands into as “many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve.” They could control how they believed people should interact with each other, economies, and their natural surroundings.

These Cartesian maps, plans, and projections continue to legally manifest and define so much of how we think, live, and exist in the world. Our modern society has been shaped by various forms of rigid Platonic and Cartesian concepts steeped in a desire to separate the mind from body, pure from putrid, place from space, physical from virtual, us from them, and what we think from what we feel. And it all churns on at various scales of governments and societies with seemingly little regard for how these separations may be deceiving, limiting, or destroying us.

I wonder how this way of thinking contributes to the litany of divisions around us – economic divides, political divides, digital divides, gender divides, race divides, cultural divides, urban-rural divides, transportation divides, age divides, education divides, and more. We’re primed to divide, categorize, clump, group, sort, filter, slice, and dice who we are, where we live, and thus how we interact with each other and the physical world.

In the sixth century, another Greek philosopher, Æsop, shared a parable on division. An old man pointed to a tied bundle of sticks and ordered his eldest son to break it in half. The boy picked up the bundle and strained to crack it but failed. His younger brothers, hoping to show him up, also tried and failed. The old man then instructed the boys to untie the bundles and each take a stick. “Now, break”, he said, and the sons triumphantly broke each stick. The moral of the story is union gives strength, or as it’s commonly transposed today: united we stand, divided we fall.

It's easy to imagine this as an origin of an intellectual path to Descartes’ interpretation and desire to divide into “as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve.” But is the universe really a bundle of sticks tied by a string? Are our worlds constructed as machines made of discrete, discernable, and dissectible parts with a CPU as a brain? Perhaps the metaphor has led us astray. Perhaps Descartes did error.

PARTLY INDETERMINENT

Through it all, I worry we underappreciate, ignore, or deny that all of it, including our minds and bodies, are connected in ways that are not so easily divisible. Descartes, and later Isaac Newton, believed all problems could be subdivided into tiny bits of matter whose behavior could be described by physics in the language of mathematics. These are all important and necessary tools to understanding the world, but as Nobel-award winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said,

“Imagine how difficult physics would be if electrons could think.”

The uncertainty of human behavior, our free will, our human interactions, are unaccounted for in Cartesian and Newtonian forms of scientific inquiry – including physics. So are issues surrounding values and beliefs. Our behavior does not neatly contain the determinism Platonic, Cartesian, and Newtonian theories require. It’s this observed complex uncertain behavior of systems, compounded by interactions, that led to discoveries in quantum mechanics, relativity theory, non-linear dynamics, and other fields of complexity science.

What would our world be, what could it be, should we shift our thinking to reflect a closer approximation of how the world, and our minds and bodies, may actually work? Instead of focusing on divisions, what if we investigated the connections, the interactions, the overlaps? The crises we face today tend to be framed categorically as economic, sociological, and environmental problems. In a fit of Cartesian inquiry, we tend to “divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary”.

Of course, subdivision can be useful, as can the Cartesian mathematics to describe it. Simple components, the results of subdivisions, exist – and are most informative – not in isolation but as part of systems of systems. An ant is most interesting, not just an ant but as an ant in a colony. Humans are best understood not alone but as members of a family, a city, or a society.

Mainstream science continues to struggle with how best to account for the interaction of these components and their complex, nonlinear, and unpredictable nature. Individual components are still largely studied in isolation, divided from their reliant systems. And yet, the actions and interactions of component parts are greater, different, and potentially more impactful than their cumulative sum.

It’s hard to predict, let alone control, the outcomes of these complex systems. After all, these components, including humans, are not centrally controlled. Our limbs are not controlled by the puppeteering pineal gland nor by a distinct ‘central processing unit’ encased in a Body v.1. There is no central control of our bodies, brains, cities, or societies. Even our free will is not to be trusted.

What if we better scrutinized the emergent behaviors resulting from the countless interconnected outcomes of our world that can’t be understood by looking at individual clusters, components, or categories alone? Making better sense of this remains the ongoing work of complexity science.

This fundamental shift in thinking, and in science, remains contentious. Even Descartes had his detractors. I often wonder what course humanity may have taken had Enlightenment philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mathematicians more interested in connections than divisions had won favor.

Such is the case in ancient Chinese philosophy and science. Those of us most influenced by Western thought may want to better understand the prominent thinkers that came long before the Enlightened Europeans. For example, it was the nineth-twelfth century Song dynasty polymaths and philosophers, like Shen Kuo, who invented the first compass, mapped the seas and stars, and helped to unleash geologic, geographic, chemical, meteorological, and astronomical discoveries. All while the Europeans were just coming out of Medieval times. One unsourced Wikipedia entry even claims Kuo was the first to hypothesize about gradual climate change.

We in the West can sometimes be accused of being over-confident and reluctant to admit when we may have been deceived. We shouldn’t be surprised when AI systems like ChatGPT echo back the same over-confident and sometime deceptive words we’ve fed it. It’s a bi-product of attitudes and beliefs that just may be contributing to our many differences and divisions.

But I’ll give Descartes the last word. It was he who said, “It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.” And, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

I doubt it’s possible to divide our way out of the problems we face. My bet in on understanding the dynamics of the component parts. Let’s better understand, communicate, and represent what it is that emerges from the interactions of the divided parts. And we’ll need AI, and Cartesian and Newtonian computations, to help us know what it is we’re seeing and where it is we might be going. After all, we’re all nothing more than collections of systems bound by natural laws determined to adapt, change, and evolve into something beyond our knowing.

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Hello Interactors,

I recently returned from an extended trip back east for a talk at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). I also threw in quick visits to Boston and New York to visit my kids, and then stopped over in Kansas City to visit family on the way back to Seattle.

I was invited to keynote a two-day symposium hosted by the Laboratory for Design Technologies on the role of technology in micro-mobility in urban environments. My friend and colleague, Allen Sayegh, has been tracking my work on Interplace and thought my perspective was worth sharing. I was joined by two other speakers:

Carole Turley Voulgaris, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the GSD. Carole focuses on explaining what influences decisions on travel through cities. She considers how transportation planning institutions utilize travel decision making to inform their plans, policies, and infrastructure design.

Bryan Boyer, cofounder of the architecture and strategic design studio Dash Marshall. Brian is also an Assistant Professor of Practice in Architecture and Director of the new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology degree at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of the GSD.

The title of my talk was a riff on one of my first essays about my time at Microsoft: A Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every Garage: How Bill Gates and Herbert Hoover Altered How We Interact with People and Place.

It was the PC revolution that enabled virtual interaction with others around the world – all while seated behind a glass screen. Meanwhile, automobile proliferation further isolated others from their neighbors and immediate surroundings enabling a virtual interaction – all while seated behind a glass screen. Given these trends, what are the implications for land use, the built environment, and collective mental, physical, and societal health? How did we get here, and where do we want to go…today?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Thank you for reading Interplace. Please share!

GSD, LDT, AND THE LCGSA

“Technology is accelerating profound changes throughout society, affecting everything we do — how we live, work, produce, build, and think.”

These are the words that frame Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design’s (GSD) Laboratory for Design Technologies. The GSD has a long-storied history. It was the first in the country to offer a landscape architecture class in 1893 and the first in the world to offer landscape architecture degree in 1900. The program was founded by Fredrick Law Olmsted, Jr., the son of the more famous Frederick Law Olmsted. That same year Harvard offered the country’s first urban planning courses and by 1929 expanded to become the first urban planning degree in North America.

In 1936 the official Harvard Graduate School of Design was launched housing schools of architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture. A year later, the famous modern architect Walter Gropius became faculty chair in architecture and the GSD’s reputation as a modernist powerhouse was established. In 1972 that reputation was solidified in the iconic concrete brutalist architecture of the GSD’s new home, Gund Hall.

But in the shadows of the looming starchitects climbing the stairs to the tiered terraces of sundrenched cubicles teaming with design students, was a computer lab. It was here technology minded design professors and students were incubating the foundations of software we repeatedly use everyday to find our way around the world – computer generated maps.

In 1965, the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (LCGSA) was formed by a Harvard trained architect, Howard Fisher. He was enamored by the work of a University of Washington urban planning professor, Edgar Horwood. The University of Washington geography department had already established itself as a center of excellence in quantitative geography and computer cartography as part of geography’s quantitative revolution. Horwood’s use of computer cartography spread to Harvard, the LCGSA, and throughout the GSD for years to come.

Fisher’s program attracted grant money that helped it grow to forty researchers. In the 1970s, the Harvard administration encouraged the commercialization and licensing of research across the university. The LCGSA continued to innovate licensing software and graduating entrepreneurs that fed the infancy of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) industry and discipline of Geographical Information Science (GIScience). In 1969, one GSD landscape architecture graduate went on to create what is now the world leader in GIS software, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

As more staff left for industry, funding also subsided. By the 1980s Harvard cooled on the commercialization of research, funding was curbed, and the GSD was encouraged by the administration to focus on pure research. The last director of LCGSA, which closed in 1991, was the late Dan Schodek.

Dan continued to provide a place for technology minded designers and directed the Laboratory for Design Technologies. I was introduced to Dan by a Microsoft colleague and GSD student in 2007 and Dan invited me to spend a year at the GSD as a visiting fellow. I traveled back to Boston regularly to explore ideas for computer interaction design curricula inside the GSD. It was there and then I was introduced to Allen Sayegh.

In the years since, Allen has turned his attention more toward my past – interaction with technologies – while I’ve turned my attention toward his past – interaction with the built environment. And it is precisely this kind of incongruent and serendipitous collaboration that keeps the GSD, and its technology lab, a fertile source of exploration and discovery. This symposium was no exception. With invited attendees from the University of Bergamo in Italy, who also study urban mobility, students and faculty spent a few days exploring the role technology plays in the built environment and the interaction of people and place.

This topic is perhaps more pressing today than in human history, thanks to a worldwide pandemic and the PC revolution. In March the U.S. department of labor released their 2022 survey results on remote work. It reveals nearly seventy percent (67.2%) of information workers continue to choose to work remotely some or most of the time. This contrasts with more traditional industries that require a physical presence like those related to the built environment, including transportation (13.6%) and construction (10.5%).

A gulf has formed between those able to chose to work in the ‘virtual’ world and those required to work in a ‘physical’ world. What does this split say about how we move and interact between and within the physical world and its occupants…or not? How will it impact how cities plan? To unravel how we got here, we should start with Bill Gates. His company, Microsoft, was the primary catalyst for enabling a new way of working and communicating on a tool many now take for granted – the PC.

When I started at Microsoft in 1992, the graphical user interface was just taking off and computers stood alone, disconnected from each other. I worked on designing micro-interactions, on micro-computers, in micro-spatial environments. It was microcomputer software, Microsoft.

Sharing information between computers required physically walking or mailing a floppy disk to another person. But that was short-lived. By the end of my first year, Windows for Workgroups released which connected computers through growing local area networks (LANs). The ‘sneaker network’ was replaced by the ‘ether network’. But this ‘virtual’ sharing of information was mostly contained within buildings and campuses. Still, Microsoft Windows enabled microcomputers to share information virtually at a microspatial scale through PCs that were growing in popularity.

USER FRIENDLY

As popular as they were, computers were still relatively hard to use. I was hired as part of a growing team of usability engineers and user interface designers tasked with making them easier. Complex software made for complex behavior, observed scientist and Nobel Prize winner Herb Simon in his quote, “The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

Through a bit of luck, ingenuity, and design iteration, progress on more learnable user interfaces was made. And by 1995, the advent of the ‘Start’ button in Windows ‘95, a desktop icon labeled ‘The Internet’, and software offered in many languages, Microsoft and the PC industry quickly grew globally. This growth coincided with, and was aided by, the widespread sociopolitical and economic expansion of globalism in the 1990s. Microsoft enabled and inspired people around the globe to consume, produce, and share information virtually at an historical scale. Micro-software at a macro-scale. This global reach prompted Microsoft’s ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, to invent the Microsoft tagline, “Where do you want to go today?”

This worldwide virtual connectivity worked in both directions. While people were connecting and collecting, Microsoft was too. For those who elected to do so, we anonymously collected software usage data from far reaches of the world. A feat unimaginable just a few years prior. We could now see what features were being used, how often buttons were clicked, and statistically model how people were interacting with our software. We paired big-data quantitative analysis through remote telemetry with high-touch qualitative analysis from on-site usability labs.

Addressing expanding markets and satisfying endless varieties of user goals, demanded more and more new features. By 1998, three years after Windows and Office 95, Microsoft software was perceived as slow and bloated with features. Recalling Herb Simon, the apparent complexity of user behavior was largely a reflection of the complexity of the software environment which we found ourselves creating.To better understand the issue, a colleague and I even sponsored a multi-day workshop at a conference that resulted in a paper paradoxically titled, “Too much of a good thing?” Customers and end-users would complain of too many features out of one side of their mouth and request three more out of the other.

In the eyes of Microsoft and its shareholders, too much was a good thing. Between 1990 and 1997 the percent of U.S. households owning computers more than doubled across all demographics. Similar growth occurred throughout other parts of the world with necessary communication infrastructure and wealth. It took 25 years for Bill to achieve his domineering capitalistic dream of ‘a computer on every desk and in every home.’ The PC had become a household appliance and Microsoft a household name. The world would never be the same again.

Meanwhile, another successful vision of economic and product domination was already over 75 years old and was sweeping the country and parts of the world. In I928, future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, and the Republican party, ran on this campaign promise – ‘a chicken in every pot and a car in the garage.’ That promise led to a flood of automobiles that reshaped our land, our behavior, and our society – including how we interact with people and place. The world would never be the same again.

Transportation and how we use land are trapped in a perverse self-supporting spiraling circularity from the center outward. As urban populations grow, housing creeps to the fringes of the city center. This spawn’s transportation needs to further away places where more development welcomes new homes and businesses. These new developments require even more transportation which in-turn attracts more growth. More growth requires more transportation. It’s a cycle that leads to sprawling urban metropolises and leap frog developments.

America is known for its sprawling metropolitan areas, but Europe sprawls too. While 75% of Europeans live in dense urban areas, satellite imagery reveals many of their cities also creep and leap. Paris is currently the darling of championing a more walkable and bikeable “15-minute city”, but just beyond the urban core are the same car dependent suburbs you find in America. Sprawl exists around the world. Many factors play into the self-perpetuated circular calculus of sprawl, but it’s broadly a function of income, population, agricultural land value, transportation costs, other socio−economic factors, and climatic and geographic realities.

Attempts have been made over centuries to address sprawl with movements like ‘New Urbanism’. We have ‘new’ urbanism circa 1950s to the 1980s, ‘new’ urbanism of the 1990s to 2000s, and ‘new’ urbanism of today. One could argue that even the walled cities of ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Chinese, and American civilizations were also deemed ‘new’ forms of urbanism. We humans seem to always be struggling with needing more space while wanting less sprawl. Bloat. Too much of a good thing?

IMAGINING CITIES

City planners, managers, and policy makers have long rationalize planning schemes through quantitative reasoning. For example, in more modern times, beginning in 1826, Johann Heinrich von Thünen devised a model for urban planning in his book The Isolated State. With the city center as the middle of a bullseye, he articulated rings of land use for optimal agrarian economic development. The first ring was reserved for those items that may spoil the fastest or had the highest need, like dairy and market goods. Then came the forest for fuel, grains and crops, ranching, and finally ‘wilderness’…aka, optimal land for new urbanist sprawl.

This model was improved upon by Walter Christaller and his Central Place Theory in 1933. I recently wrote about how his theory now has some empirical validity with the Universal Visitation Law of Human Mobility which states the frequency of visits to a location is inversely proportional to their distance.

Top down, economic spatial reasoning remains the dominant method of urban planning to this day. And while it’s served the economy well, it hasn’t necessarily served humanity all that well. One notable critic of this style of planning was urban planner and author Kevin Lynch. Lynch was interested less in the top-down, God-like, cartesian, cartographic image of a city. He advocated for leveraging the mental maps people had of their surroundings. His popular book, Image of the City, included maps of the Boston area derived from the mental maps of area residents.

Another popular and influential critic of traditional urban planning was urban activist and author, Jane Jacobs. She was a voice of the people – the occupants, users, and shapers of urban spaces. In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote,

“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

She frequently spoke out against the patriarchal, top-down, carving up of cities like a monopoly board. And yet, here we are, still playing monopoly on a board carved with lines optimized for the flow of money, private wealth accumulation, and the moving and parking of cars. It’s a game that results in players stuck in traffic, often in their car, waiting their turn, with this question in their mind – “Is this where I want to go today?”

Sitting in that car, moving in physical space, motorists are increasingly digitally connected to a virtual world out there – just beyond the glass of their automobile. Many of them just came from sitting at a desk digitally connected to a virtual world out there – just beyond the glass of their computer.

Embedded in our cities is the digital promise of the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, autonomous driving, and the pervasive, embedded, ubiquitous technology that has turned the automobile into a PC on wheels. And just as with software, a reciprocal relationship occurs. All those connected sensors embedded in the urban fabric, in our phones, and in automobiles make it possible to instrument and monitor how we interact with people and place.

It’s this very capability that enabled those scientists to turn Christaller’s theory into power law through anonymized mobile phone data. But at what price? Both sitting at a PC and sitting in a car, humans are trapped in a physical bubble. The world is virtually available to them at an arms length distance to a mouse, keyboard, and computer screen or a steering wheel, dashboard, and windscreen. All while being inaccessible to the real world. Interactions are relayed through metal, plastic, glass, and silicon that virtually connect us to faraway people and places around the world on a PC, while physically separating us from our family, friends, neighbors, and neighborhoods in a car.

It's also led to a digital divide. An estimated 90% of high-income earners in the world have accessed the internet in the last three months versus 20% of low-income earners. If wealth attracts, encourages, and perpetuates car and digital dependency that in-turn is shaping the form of our cities, what impact does this have on societies? It’s impossible to predict, but this much we do know: The apparent complexity of our environment is largely a reflection of the environment we find ourselves in. That environment has grown in complexity, and so has our behavior. What emerges next depends, in part, on how each of us answer these questions: Where do I want to go today, how will I get there, what choice do I have, and who is most impacted?

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Hello Interactors,

I’ve been absent the last few weeks. First our kids were back for spring break and then I was off to the American Association of Geographers (AAG) national conference in Denver, Colorado. Both were fun, exhilarating, and inspiring and I’m bursting with things to write about!

We’re officially in spring here in the northern hemisphere. I now turn to cartography and the role mapmaking plays in shaping how we interact with people and place. There will be themes of cartography in this initial spring post, but first I’m offering my impressions of the conference.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BURRITO BOYS

“It’s got a nice kick to it”, he said, as I sat down to join him for breakfast. He introduced himself as Mark. He lifted his attendee badge that hung around his neck. It read, Mark Schwartz. We broke the awkwardness by talking men’s basketball. The Kansas Jayhawks, my mom’s beloved team, had recently been eliminated from the NCAA tournament. He informed me he got his PhD from Kansas in 1985 and is now teaching and researching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in the geography department.

Mark is a climatologist. More specifically, he’s one of the foremost experts in phenoclimatology which looks at the effects of climate change on seasonal variability. We humans look to the calendar to tell us when spring arrives, but what if you’re an ant or a plant? They already know, so phenologists look for the biological responses to seasonal changes. Phenology comes from two Greek words that roughly combine to mean ‘the study of bringing to light’.

Mark co-founded the National Phenology Network (NPN). This is where the world turns to see when spring is officially arriving across the United States. Including journalists. Here’s a story in the Washington Post on this spring’s arrival and the NPN website. It features quotes from Mark.

“‘What I like to tell folks is that you still need to be prepared for considerable variation from year to year. You won’t simply be able to start planting your garden earlier each year…”

Before long, another gray-haired man joined us. I observed older attendees at this conference naturally congregated. Gerontology...from geron and logia (the study of old men). Our new guest introduced himself as Ron. I could tell he was older than Mark and myself and I was right. When I was three years old, in 1968, Ron Abler was getting his PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota. Soon after, in 1971, he was the lead author on an influential geography textbook on spatial organization. He went on to teach and conduct research at Pennsylvania State University and was the President of the AAG from 1985-86. There’s an AAG award named after Ron, the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors. Mark was a recipient in 2005.

We were soon joined by another older gentleman, but closer to my age. He introduced himself as Joseph and I read his badge as Joseph Oppong. He was the recipient of the Abler award in 2021 and studies medical geography at North Texas State University. He received his masters in 1986 and PhD in 1992 from the University of Alberta in Canada and his bachelor’s at the University of Ghana in 1982. Joseph was one of a few at the conference of African descent, but like the rest of America the geographic, cultural, and biological diversity of this academic community is increasing. This was apparent in my first session of the first day of the conference.

JUST GEOGRAPHY

The morning before my breakfast with the burrito boys, I attended a panel consisting of four young academic women of Indigenous, Hispanic, Black, and mixed heritage. It included Fantasia Painter, an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine, Elyse Hatch-Rivera, a student seeking a law degree at Macalester in Minnesota, Gabriella Subia Smith, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Colorado, and Dr. Danielle Purifoy, a geography professor at the University of North Carolina with a law degree from Harvard.

Fantasia’s paper: Our Lands, Your Lines: How Inter and Intra National Borders Try and Fail to Contain Indigenous Land. She argues “that inherent in the idea of “the desert” is the undoing of the settler colonial bordering project. This is not a desert. This is O’odham land.”

Elyse’s paper: The Right to Secure: The 100 Mile Border and the Making of a Carceral Geography. She “explores the emergence of the 100-mile border zone (HMBZ) in order to argue that the U.S. has expanded its borders inward and redefined notions of national security and our modern understanding of human rights.”

Gabriella’s paper: The Evolution of Colorado's Third District. She argues “Looking at the evolution of congressional districts can help us to better understand both the possibilities for equitable political representation and the limits of borders for fixing politics in place.”

Danielle’s paper: Setting [Futile] Boundaries: Black Municipalities in the White Settler State. She uses two case studies showing how decades work of “scholars of law, geography, and political science have taken up the social, political, and environmental impacts of this largely white municipal practice of geopolitical exclusion on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.”

Here’s a video of Fantasia introducing herself and her work at UC Irvine

The conference theme was Toward More Just Geographies and this session was a fitting kick-off. It was titled Futile Borders: Why Borders Fail and How Borders Function in the Incomplete Project of Settler Colonialism. These scholars, all of whom have a legal focus to their work, challenged the popular and simplified notion of borders as articulated in both popular culture and the legal text of the United States. They drew attention to the violence these words perpetuate through legal acts of interdiction, deterrence, and deportation.

The panel description cites research pointing to “[s]ettler state violence and legal-spatial violence” that “permeate borders through border enforcement practices of surveillance and detention and also through attempts to map over Indigenous lands and nations by creating colonial certainty over jurisdiction and national membership.”

While these laws exists to protect the rights of some “it is through law, legal decision-making, and formal processes, policies, and practices that legal-spatial border violence is enacted and sustained.” It is the law, as currently written, that “help to form, manage, and control borders and mobility [that] weaponize state violence and operate to assert settler legal authority.”

During the discussion, one of the presenters positioned legal text as a form of fiction that feature fantasy borders on maps that ignore the non-fiction realities of plant and animal existence, persistence, and relationships – including with humans. These fictions provide the “legal reach of the state [to] extend externally and outwards in order to preserve imperial power while regulating and restricting immigration and mobility through racialized strategies.”

This panel was a powerful introduction to the conference. It featured perspectives of bright, ambitious academic women of color who are bringing miles and piles of fresh knowledge to the academy and students. Many similar sessions were offered by women and BIPOC scholars who seek to challenge traditional institutional geographic histories, knowledge, and perspectives pervasive in the field of geography. I attended at least one a day for five days straight, but there were so many I couldn’t attend them all.

The field of geography, and cartography in particular, was invented in large part to discern and delineate the natural world for the purpose of dispossession and ownership of land and people for and by private and government actors. As one attendee told me, “Cartography barely has a just leg to stand on.” Consequently, these forums and platforms act as a mirror to the discipline of geography. They offer opportunities for scholars and practitioners to become more self-aware, reflective, and critical of geography’s past and future. If sustained, this focus, attention, and prioritization of pluralized perspectives has the power to transform the discipline – to tilt the world toward more just geographies.

It’s a tilting earth that brings about seasonal change. Mark Shwartz and his team of geographers maintain a map that chronicles the bringing of light to the natural world. It offers no human bias, no imperial agenda, and reveals just how fictional borders really are. Phenoclimatology reveals human-induced climate change is causing spring’s arrival to become increasingly meteorologically erratic and extreme.

Many scholars at this conference pointed to how settler-state induced human and environmental violence have contributed to these climatic changes. They also showed how these forms of legal, economic, and spatial geographies are causing increasingly erratic and extreme societal injustices and imbalances. They’re chronicling and remapping a discipline by bringing light to the world of geography.

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Hello Interactors,

I’ve been delayed getting this one out after being hit with a stomach bug. But I’m back in business and back to looking at urban behavior. This time, I dig into a power law that proves a Geographer right (again) while making the dizzying array of diversity in human urban mobility look shockingly similar.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A THEORY CENTRALLY PLACED

A few days after meeting with a group concerned with rapid urban development, I found myself in another meeting, in the same room, with a group who thinks it’s not rapid enough! Meanwhile, Washington state legislators are proposing and passing legislation aimed at addressing the impacts of increased population growth, housing shortages, and transportation.

We were meeting to discuss what kind of housing density and transportation infrastructure is necessary to get people walking, biking, or rolling within 10-15 minutes of their nearest store or transit stop. As I wrote last month, getting people to drop their car is easier said than done. For starters, people need jobs and businesses to walk to in the first place. However, businesses only thrive when there are enough customers to keep them alive. More potential customers walking, biking, or rolling only comes when there is more dense housing.

Like that found in downtown Paris. Over the last three years Mayor Anne Hidalgo has been made famous championing the 15-minute city concept. She’s restricted car use to certain areas and has built hundreds of miles of bike lanes. Her efforts made the Paris core so desirable property value increases started to squeeze poorer people out of the area. In response she built affordable housing.

However, just outside this urban core Paris continues to remain car dependent. The same can be said for Olso. In fact, despite 75% of Europeans living in dense cities, while also declining in population, their major cities continue to sprawl.

There are many variations of land use and transportation configurations around the world, but they all emerge toward, or are influenced by, by central place theory. This concept was developed in 1933 by the German geographer, Walter Christaller and became influential in how cities were planned around economic activities.

To illustrate the concept, he drew an array of hexagons each with their own center around a center hexagon representing a core city center. Imagine a hexagonal flower. He used this diagram to then describe these three principals governing behavior within and between geographic regions:

Consumer choice. Each of us have a choice to make around much time and money we’re willing to spend to arrive at a particular destination. Like any forager, we can choose the cheapest path at a risk of reducing our choices of goods or we can invest in a longer journey in exchange for more or better choices.

Firm agglomeration. A company offering goods to these consumers must decide whether to operate further away from their competition or cluster nearby. They’d be sharing more customers while also saving in delivery costs other economies of scale.

Functional hierarchy. As with natural systems, complex hierarchies emerge from these actions that are self supporting and become embedded in the environment. When governmental and commercial power is concentrated, functional hierarchies are strong. When power is diffuse and distributed individual agency weakens the hierarchy.

Christaller theorized that if a person within a hexagonal cell sought a good or service, they would first seek one within their boundaries if available. He added that if this cell happened to be the center cell, home to the densest population and services, the resident would rarely leave their own cell for routine activities. We’ll call ‘shopping within my own cell’ level-one.

If the service is not available within their hexagonal cell, they’d decide to go to next nearest cell with the available service. Let’s call that level-two. Those in level two most likely would go to the center cell, the city center, given it has the most consumer choice due to agglomeration. It is also relatively nearby.

Those living in level-three hexagons likely travel to the center cell for some activities and the level-two cells for others. Should they choose level-two instead of the center, more than one level-two cell may contain the same service within the same or similar distance. It’s assumed some of the people will choose one location some of the time and others the other location another time.

This model fits with my experience recently when our roof started leaking amidst a torrential downpour. Living in a tier-two area, I had two Home Depot stores equidistant from my home from which to purchase a pump. Each within their own tier-two areas featuring agglomerated retail.

I needed to quickly siphon swelling standing water from our flat roof that has recently acted more like a tub. The website said the one to the north had three pumps in stock, so off I went. Nope, there was no product to be found. So off to the one toward the south. They had one, though the website said they had none. My cost of travel more than doubled, but at least my drip stopped!

It was the ‘functional hierarchy’ of city planners, developers, and politicians that used central place theory to place these agglomerations of stores where they are. It’s the same theory used to decide where hospitals, fire stations, and Starbucks should go.

A LAW CENTRAL TO THE THEORY

For decades geographers and city planners have primarily used one of two laws to determine these locations and the movement of people between regional levels. One is called the gravity law and the other the radiation model. Both methods have a fundamental flaw in that they only consider aggregations of residents moving across the region. This doesn’t afford the ability to look at the frequency of individual trips to a given location. There are other models that look at fine grained behavior, but they lack the ability to then consider the patterns of the larger population.

But in 2021, a group of spatial, urban, and complexity scientists landed on a preferred method. What they discovered is central place theory is more than a theory. Using anonymized cell tower time stamp data from cell phones, they were able to determine individual origins and destinations across a large region and population. They divided the study area into a grid and counted how many times people entered a given cell. This provided them with frequency of trips to and from various destinations – the granular data amidst an aggregate that has thus far been missing.

They found, with astonishing regularity, what Christaller assumed. Both frequency and distance to a destination are the sole determining factors in predicting behavior. For example, people travel a museum or mall less frequently and may travel a great distance to get there. Their data shows that not only are these special function locations visited less frequently, they address a larger radius of travel distances. The travel distance per visit is thus inversely proportional to the visitation frequency.

The opposite is also true. Trips to more common destinations, like a grocery store or restaurant, are not only visited more frequently, but they are visited in higher numbers by those living nearby. Their data also supports Christaller’s notion of functional hierarchy. Travel between the various levels of hierarchy is supported by both consumer choice and the agglomeration of services. It also out performed both the gravity law and radiation model.

What is most miraculous is these findings are consistent regardless of the city scale or location. Singapore, Boston, Dakar, Lisbon, Toyko, New York, you name it, they all exhibit these universal visitation power laws. The results were so surprising it prompted the authors to state,

“Given the extensive literature on and detailed analyses of movement and transport in cities, it is surprising that the simple but powerful visitation law derived here had not yet been discovered.”

It should be noted, however, not everyone can afford a cell phone. So, this data, and the power law, reflect the strong functional hierarchy embedded in our cities. That is, our cities have been planned and built by powerful functional social hierarchies that encourage clustering of businesses to efficiently allow for consumer choice for those with greater means. I wonder what patterns emerge for those without cell phones and less served by nearby services. It would sure raise questions of equity.

I’m also curious how this breaks down by mode of transportation. That is, how many trips were by car or transit and how many were by walking or biking. Their results are robust scaling from grid cell sizes 250m to 2km. Though they admit the model wouldn’t perform at smaller levels.

Two-hundred and fifty meters is about three city blocks. That’s less than a 10- or 15-minute walk. The frequency law they uncovered would suggest if sufficient and attractive services were agglomerated within a short walk people would choose them for many trips over a further distance. But as Central Place Theory states, this requires sufficient agglomeration and density. The data reveals that sprawling Greater Boston has a wide distribution of distance covered to destinations relative to number of visitors compared to dense Singapore where the distance covered is more concentrated. If the data included elevation, it would reveal more Singaporeans also travel more up and down high rises for daily activities than those in Greater Boston! A vertical 10-minute neighborhood.

For a walkable 10-15 minute city or neighborhood to exist will likely require all three elements highlighted by central place theory. For walking to be a consumer choice, agglomeration is needed. The cluster of businesses can only be justified when there is a sufficient number of consumers. The only way consumer density can occur is if it is zoned and built into the fabric of the region’s functional hierarchy. Just this week the state of Washington passed a bill legalizing duplexes or fourplexes in areas historically zoned for single-family homes only. Should it become law, will it provide sufficient density to spawn a corner grocer, a neighborhood bakery, or hardware store? Or will the price of eggs, muffins, and lightbulbs keep people driving to Costco?

Lawmakers may hold the power to pass the laws, to strengthen the functional hierarchy which includes zoning for more density. We control our own consumer choice. But it will all come down to developers building density and firms agglomerating. Meanwhile, one law has been passed — the universal visitation power law of human mobility.

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Hello Interactors,

I’ve recently been sucked into a conflict over the fate of a cherished section of our small downtown area. Emotions ran hot, but I think they ought not. Everyone has reasons for why they react they way they do, but I wondered what they are. I don’t like seeing distress, so into the rabbit hole I went.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

IS IT A PARK OR A LANE?

I walked into the room hearing the end of this tirade, “WHAT DOES SHE KNOW? I’VE LIVED HERE FIFTEEN YEARS AND SHE’S BEEN HERE SIX MONTHS? HOW DARE SHE THINK HER OPINION MATTERS AS MUCH AS MINE!” The room was tense, people were nervous, and this was the first hour of the first day of two weeks of daylong 15-minute stakeholder ‘listening sessions.’

Our city government hired a consultant to determine the fate of less than one block, about 200 feet, of our quaint little downtown business district. It’s a stretch of road was once called Commercial Street. This offers a clue as to what the original city organizers had in mind for this strip of concrete just steps from Lake Washington. A ferry once docked there bringing affluent Seattle folks to shop at the local J. C. Penny’s and buy fresh produce. Now they drive over a floating bridge to buy multi-million-dollar lakefront homes.

The 1970s brought a rebuilding of this area. Local entrepreneurs refurbished dilapidated downtown stores, paved over of marshlands to make parking lots, and renamed Commercial Street to Park Lane. Select members of the organizing committee envisioned a pedestrian-oriented, tree-lined boulevard. Instead of a road, there was talk of regreening the creek that once fed the marshland at the shore’s edge but had since been channeled in a culvert underground. In the end, the road was preserved and made to be one-way with angled on-street parking on each side. More of a lane than a park.

But nature has a way of protesting. For decades the subterranean slough cracked and buckled the streets, the trees became waterlogged and diseased, and maintenance was troublesome and routine. In 2015 the city beefed up a water pump, remodeled Park Lane in the image of a Dutch ‘Living Street’ – a road that puts cars and pedestrians at the same level so the space may be shared. The roadway is curved or has obstacles to slow cars to the pace of the people.

In the Netherlands, you’ll sometimes find two or four spots for parking or deliveries on a stretch this long. Park Lane has seventeen. The Dutch would have a hard time calling this a true ‘Living Street’. It’s more like a small parking lot with a meandering lane down the middle.

But it is far better than a conventional road. It features bioswales to absorb floods of runoff and restaurants have just enough space for limited outdoor seating. Like so many other restaurants around the world, that seating was expanded when COVID hit. In a controversial move, the city allowed restaurants to spill into the parking spaces during select times, blocked cars from entering the lane, and gave the entire space over to pedestrians.

Now that emergency COVID measures have lifted and people – and cities – are attempting a nostalgic return to a so-called ‘normal’, a decision needs to be made on the future of Park Lane. It seems many residents, if not most, would like to see Park Lane as some did in the 1970s – a more natural, people-oriented place. Not a parking space. But not everyone agrees.

The business owners have mixed opinions. Some restaurants enjoyed the increased revenue, some had trouble scaling staff, and others are indifferent. Retailers and service providers care less about what happens after hours. They support whatever restaurants want in the evenings, but are adamant parking remain during business hours.

Like so many places around the world, Park Lane has become a contested public space. It’s an area zoned for commercial use, so business and property owners believe their opinions should be given priority. But this area is also contained within a much larger neighborhood filled with a growing number of residents who believe their opinions matter most. The neighborhood sits within a city, surrounded by a county, encompassed by a federally mandated regional metropolitan planning organization (MPO), which coordinates between the federal, state, and many local governments on how best to grow. All of which are in a state united with others under the power of a federal government.

The citizen run, and city government ordained, neighborhood association has a neighborhood plan with multiple policies calling for fewer cars, less parking, and more – and safer – transit, biking, and walking. And so does the city’s master plan.

Meanwhile, the city competes with neighboring cities to attract more businesses which bring more revenue. This city has also applied to the MPO for this downtown area to be delegated a ‘Regional Growth Center’ which will bring denser housing, many more people, and a chance to qualify for federal funding. The population of this area is expected to double over the next 12 years bringing more diversity of people and business.

A decision is pending in June on the fate of how these 200 feet of public space will be used. But in many ways, this is a proxy for a larger battle brewing throughout the city, the county, the region, and the state — just as in many other cities worldwide. As expected, sides form and tribes align between business alliances, citizen coalitions, and property rights guardians. It’s getting tense, people are nervous, some are scared, and everyone wants to get their way. This is emblematic of the last few years and perhaps the first of many in decades to come. Get ready for more ‘listening sessions.’

NIMBYS GO BANANAS

Notice I used the word ‘battle’ to describe this ordeal. It’s a popular metaphor. There’s a book called ‘Street Fight’ about these conflicts over space, and another called ‘Neighborhood Defenders’. You can subscribe to a podcast called the ‘The War on Cars’. What is it about place that makes people want to defend it or upend it like a battlefield? Why not append it or amend it like a constitution? Or tend it and mend it like a garden?

There’s a pejorative term for those attempting to protect a place from change, NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). For a variety of reasons, they feel compelled to protect their property against any nearby changes that might impact them, their property, or their values. Like anyone who has a pejorative term attached to them, they reject it.

When confronted, they might say things like, “It’s not that I’m against more space for walking, but…” or “It’s not that I’m against renewable energy, but…” or “It’s not that I don’t like Black people, but…” And the ‘but’ is usually followed by a proposed project nearby that makes them uncomfortable. Sometimes this can become extreme and people go BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

(Below is a video that illustrates what many public comments sessions sound like)

But curiously, some research shows a different NIMBYISM can exist called “inverse NIMBY syndrome.” It’s been shown that some who live near certain developments can sometimes be more accepting than those living further away. They have the most intimate knowledge, experience, and discourse allowing them to cope better with the change.

YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) are often critical of NIMBYs because they believe these folks are just ignorant of the facts. Researchers call this ‘information deficit’ and it can inspire proponents of new projects to attempt to educate the opposition in hopes of persuading them. But there’s data that shows NIMBYs can often be very well informed and oppose projects not on lack of facts, but out of self-interest. They may even agree on the facts but reject the change on personal grounds. However, this is also problematic as it’s been shown that often times the ‘self-interest’ argument masks larger issues around self-perpetuating social, racial, or economic inequities.

That is, while they may have a right to reject a proposed project, they may be doing so from a position of unfair power. They have an individual right, but they also have a duty to their fellow society members. Individual rights are granted only when their duty to fairly honor the rights of others are observed.

What is at the root of one’s desire to protect a place? Research in the field of environmental psychology claim these people are not just protecting a place, they’re protecting their own identity which is associated with that place. Their defense, sometimes aggressive, may be a coping mechanism stemming from denial of eventual, inevitable change. There is a fear that a potential disruption of a coveted place could lead to a potential disruption in their life.

The questions I put forth in the survey last week are a common method of getting at this sense of identity attached to place. Eleven out sixteen Interactors said they agree or strongly agree that they feel the place they call home is a part of them. When asked if they identify strongly with this place five out of fifteen were neutral, four agreed, and three strongly agreed.

I’m reminded of these sayings, ‘you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl’ or ‘home is where the heart is.’ These strong, emotional associations can either emerge from within or be reflected by society. For example, “I feel like Rome is a part of me” versus “I feel completely Roman.” These attitudes and behaviors can also develop, morph, and strengthen over time. Communication, language, and how a place is portrayed in media and politics can also influence individual differences in how one identifies with a place.

When these places are disrupted naturally (like natural disasters and fire) or by humans (like burglaries, voluntary migration, or redevelopment projects) people experience psychological trauma. Just the fear of changes to a place or threats of loss can induce anxiety. This can be revealed or compounded over time contributing to multiple stages of grief.

COPING WITH THE CONCRETE

Researchers have uncovered a three-stage process of trauma associated with disruption of place:

• Pre-disruption: Anticipating possible outcomes or imagining potential futures.

• Disruption: Immediate feelings of anxiety and grief from loss or disruption.

• Post-disruption: Anxiety associated with adapting to change.

These are often found to correspond with varying levels and stages of ‘emotional volatility’ from shock of the eventuality of change, to anger and depression of the actual event, to residual feelings that come with coping with post-change adjustments.

In the case of natural disasters or fires these stages of trauma can be sudden, pronounced, and rushed, while urban redevelopment projects can stretch these emotions over months or years. How those who are impacted communicate with one other, and those around them, can influence the collective and individual emotional volatility.

One way of managing these emotions is to manage the communication. One technique used in Europe more than the United States is a socio-psychological approach called social representation theory. This involves sitting down with groups of people to first orient them to their own shared beliefs and knowledge – an anchoring. With a shared understanding, new abstract concepts and ideas are then presented in concrete ways that associate change with their shared understanding – objectifying change. The group can then have a conversation over which elements represent threats and which offer opportunities.

Patrick Devine-Wright is a professor of human geography at the University of Exeter who incorporates environmental psychology into his research. He believes social representation theory offers a holistic approach to understanding and reducing the adverse psychological effects that come with changes in place. He proposes a staged approach that considers both the social and psychological factors associated with place-based conflicts and traumas.

It starts with becoming aware of what kind change in a place might occur. With a shared awareness, the next stage is interpreting the potential implication to the proposed change. The shared interpretation leads to evaluating the potential outcomes, both positive and negative. Addressing the inevitable stress and anxiety that can come with these results, he moves to coping – how one can deal with change in a healthy way. And the final stage is acting on those healthy means of coping.

He believes this

“framework provides a psychological account of public responses that should be seen within a larger multi-disciplinary context of economic, political and sociological factors that shape the histories of places, the policies and procedures shaping development and the abilities of individuals and groups to actively support or oppose change.”

I think he’s on to something. As I consider how local governments announce public projects, seek public input, and execute on new projects, I see how each stage of his proposed process is either side-stepped, performed inadequately, or unintentionally avoided. It’s no wonder sides get formed, emotions run high, and frustrations, distrust, and anxieties become perpetually present with each propose change to public space.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but is it impossible? Perhaps it is. It takes concerted effort to hold even the most rudimentary public forums to discuss propose changes to place. It may be even harder now knowing how divisive civic discourse has become. I can see where cities would rather not even ask.

Perhaps cities shouldn’t do on their own. It could be that the process professor Devine-Wright devised is both divine and righteous. If I squint at his process, it looks a lot like a well-functioning democracy by the people, for the people, so long as it’s executed by a government that cares for people. But expecting that to occur brings about my own kind of frustration, fear, and anxiety!

I’ve been sucked into this problem, so how am I coping? I’m starting by sharing in hopes of gaining a shared understanding. I’m working to interpret the implications of changing our little Park Lane and evaluating the potential outcomes. I’m trying to do it with people I know may be suspicious of me or what I believe. But I know change is coming because the only thing permanent is change. So I’m doing my best to cope, aid others with how they may cope, and encouraging actions that can reduce our collective psychological trauma. Maybe you can too!

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Hello Interactors,

I asked you last week how you get your groceries. It led to some good discussions! Thanks to all who contributed to the poll and left comments. This question was prompted by recent local events in my town around why more people don’t walk to shop when they can. But it raised bigger questions in my mind about how other animals seek food and how we’re different. It turns out our brains have evolved to work nearly 99% like rats and raccoons. And those living in a city may have an edge over country folk.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CITY SLICKERS AND COUNTRY BUMPKINS

We have an outdoor camera that sometimes captures nighttime activity of our animal neighbors. A mouse here, a rat there, here a rabbit, there a rabbit, everywhere a rabbit, rabbit. Recently the camera caught our racoon friends sniffing around. Cute little things, and crafty too.

I mentioned my encounter with raccoons in week one of Interplace two years ago. They were politely rolling back the turf on our lawn in search of grubs…which were happily feasting on the roots underground. I would roll the turf back in place and a few days later those little rascals would pull it back again. I installed a sprinkler with a motion detector to scare them away. That worked for a while.

Until one evening I heard the sprinkler go off. I ran to see if I could spot them. There one of them sat perched on their haunches, arms to their sides staring at me in the doorway. Water was dripping from their perked ears, un-phased by the staccato rat-a-tat-tat beat of the oscillating sprinkler. A nice moisturizer for their furry frocks. Spa day in the lawn. Made complete with earthly scented, protein-packed pupae. I removed the lawn, and with it the grubs, but the raccoons still come sniffing for a snack.

Raccoons are notoriously smart critters. And these raccoon visitors, and their family and friends, are getting smarter the more my sleepy suburban town of Kirkland, Washington becomes increasingly urbanized. Comparative psychologist Suzanne MacDonald at York University in Toronto studies the behavior of raccoons. She hopes to uncover ways for us to coexist. She conducted a multiyear project tracking raccoons with GPS-collars in urban and rural settings. One location was in an area that had overlapping travel boundaries for both rural and urban raccoons.

She baited two different containers. One was a container familiar to both city and country coons – a trash can with a bungie cord securing the lid. The other was a novel container to both – a bucket suspended 30 cm above ground by ropes tied to nearby trees. What she found surprised her. Both the rural and urban raccoons were able to deplete the weird hanging bucket with ease. The situation may have been novel, but once they got to the bucket it was relatively easy to extract the food. But the trashcan, while more familiar, proved to be a problem for rural racoons.

She recorded 17 of the 22 urban raccoons successfully consumed the contents of trashcan, but not one rural racoon could successfully rid the familiar trashcan of its bungie cord despite multiple attempts. The urban raccoons demonstrated they were better at experimenting, iterating, and manipulating the can. This was as true for males as females, old and young – as young as five or six months old. She speculates that “Persistence, neophilia [the love of new things], and high levels of exploratory behavior may result in increased survival and reproduction in the urban setting, and thus we may be observing cognitive evolution in action in this species.” Cities, it seems, have made them, and their offspring, smarter. Which could explain why they continue to flourish in the face of increasing human induced urbanization and climate change while extinctions of other species grow by the day.

Ok, fine, we’re talking about racoons. What about humans? Yep, similar evidence has been found for humans. Educational psychologists recently conducted a study in Brazil between rural and urban children comparing cognitive abilities. They found both wealthy and poor kids from urban areas scored better on two separate intelligence measures than poorer kids from rural areas. They didn’t have sufficient data to make claims about heritability and admit the small sample size doesn’t make the findings conclusive, but they did confirm what is already known about the brain. The more novel experiences it encounters, the more capable it becomes at dealing with them. City raccoons, like human city dwellers, are exposed to more novel situations and volatile environments. It seems they’re cognitively, and possibly evolutionarily, rewarded for it.

My sprinkler was no match for those silly, city raccoons.

A CAT IS A CAT IS A CAT

Our senses are feeding our brain an incomprehensible amount of information as we interact with people and place. Brains are like a biological statistical learning machine making inferences based on cascading levels of probability of risk and reward. It’s seeking a path with the fewest surprises as a way of optimizing performance and survival amidst an environment of infinite variability. An environment for which it is tightly coupled. Our brain actively constructs a model of the environment for which is exists; against which it infers probabilities for survival in a myriad of situations over space and time and then stores the information in DNA.

These neural inferences are happening constantly in the background of our lives so often and so quickly we’re not even conscious of them. The neuroscientist John Krakauer offers examples in the form of anticipatory postural adjustments – small micro movements our body makes in anticipation of situations our brain has inferred on our behalf.

He says,

“I can have you hold onto a handle and just crouch while holding onto it and then unbeknownst to you, suddenly the handle will pull on you and you'll have a very quick intelligent, reflective response to stay from falling over.”

“Now I put a cup of coffee in your right hand and do the same thing. Your very short latency reflective response will take into account that you're holding a coffee cup in your right hand and your quick reflective anticipatory postural adjustment will be intelligent and will change in the context of having that conversation. You have no conscious idea about what you just did. You have no concept that you did it, you have no conscious awareness of it, but you made a flexible adjustment that was very intelligent.”

But Krakauer believes the human brain is more than just an advanced statistical reasoning mechanism. He agrees our brain shares similar control of our biomechanical structures as other animals. And he admits the brains of a mouse, rat, rabbit, or raccoon are all just as miraculously marvelous, cunning, and adaptable as the human brain. However, he also believes we are distinct from every animal on the planet. He said,

“…if you are a cat in Istanbul and you are a cat in Boston, you basically look exactly the same. You do very similar things. There may be some adaptations, but a cat is a cat. Whereas humans can be trapeze artists, they can be machine learning programmers, they can be composers.”

He believes some mutation in our brains occurred in our evolution, and we don’t know what, where, or when it happened. He doubts we ever will given none of the species of humans that connect us to primates survived. But something enabled us to dominate the animal world; harness, hoard, and destroy resources – and potentially slow or accelerate our own extinction. That certainly would make us unique to other animals.

As Krakauer says,

“you can be intelligent in many different ways using really smart dumb algorithms that get 99% of the lifting required to exist on this planet…”

But what about that 1%? There’s a lot packed into that tiny fraction of difference in humans that makes our behavior so bewildering. It’s what keeps rats, he demurs, from “ever having to do podcasts, write books, and send probes up into space.”

LAZY RATS

It’s easy to imagine the probability algorithms at work as those rural and urban racoons wrestled with that garbage can. Curiosity, the attraction to novelty, can get one in trouble, but it also has its rewards. Rewards help teach us and condition us to behave in particular ways. The classic rat and pigeon experiments of the 1960s and 70s by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner taught us the principle of reinforcement – that future behaviors can be reinforced and even strengthen when a certain action is rewarded.

Skinner, and many others since, showed rats are more willing to pull a level many times, or harder, or longer, to get a reward than feast from a free buffet. It’s the same mechanism at work in game design, gambling, and other addictions – like drugs. Or those little icons that count your likes and number of new emails in your inbox. Stimulus, response, reward, repeat. How addictive.

It made me wonder how hard we work for our food. My shabby little survey last week revealed 53% of 34 Interactors drive a car for their food. Another 32% walk, 9% take a bike, and 6% find another way. Nearly three quarters of these respondent’s report living less than one mile (1.6 km) from a grocery store. That’s roughly a twenty-minute round trip walk for an able-bodied adult without many hills, wind, sleet, snow, or heavy items.

I then asked why drive when one could walk? Sixty-seven percent (~23 of 34) said they include grocery shopping with other car trips. And 22 percent clicked my cheeky choice claiming they are ‘lazy.’

That choice got me in trouble with my former statistics professor. He commented, “Oh dear, Brad, I guess I should have taught you a little better on survey design. I'm lazy? Talk about a loaded question!” Loaded indeed. I asked him to expand on why such a question is loaded. He’s written many academic papers on exactly why it’s hard to pin down travel choice behavior.

He said, “so much depends on individual attitudes, perceptions, beliefs.” Right there we see three words raccoon, rat, and cat researchers don’t (yet) deal with. He notes, “These [elements] are hard to observe and can vary from individual to individual in ways that are not necessarily correlated with the easily observed things like age and income of the traveler, and cost and time of the trip.”

But there’s more…

“Layer in constraints that are in theory observable but in practice costly to collect – and that vary in a chaotic fashion from trip to trip and day to day…” Much travel choice research also relies on surveys that require participants to recall or predict their behavior…both of which are notoriously flawed and often inaccurate.

But then he gets into what I think is a particularly stubborn trait of humans – “the effects of habits that are hard to dislodge…” My professor admitted to driving to get groceries when he could walk or bike. Clearly, he didn’t choose ‘lazy’ on the poll, and he rightfully should not. He has good reasons for using a car and they’re probably shared with many other people.

Car drivers can sometimes get cast as being lazy. If given the choice of acquiring food with least effort, why not take the car? But wait, what about rats preferring to work for food? They surely wouldn’t take a car if given the choice, right? Wrong.

Researchers out of Virginia found that rats trained to take a custom-made car to get food were less stressed than those who did not. It was even more calming for driver than the passenger. They also found the only rats successful at achieving this task were raised in a more complex environment, complete with more novel environmental stimulation — like a city.

Researchers wondered if these rats were getting the same satisfaction from learning a new skill, we humans get. A reward in the form of satisfaction, stress reduction, and what psychologists call agency – the ability to read a situation and make decisions that best suit your goal.

A human’s choice to drive requires money. The act of driving is lazy compared to the labor required to own or rent one. Forget for a second the effort of learning to drive. Even a rat can learn to drive. Consider instead the amount of work required to amass the necessary money to purchase, own, operate, insure, and store a car. That says nothing of the labor required to build it and repair it. Or consider the labor needed to build the infrastructure required to operate it. The labor of first responders called to the scene of horrific collisions.

That is a lot of lever pulling for the reward of private car ownership. It’s hard to call car owners and drivers ‘lazy’ given how much labor goes into owning and operating them. And this says nothing of the satisfaction amassed in the social status or the pleasure of being propelled through space with little to no effort.

I suspect the more the car is used, the more reinforced the behavior becomes. Heck, it may even become an addiction. I, for one, have found the less I use my car the less rewarding it is to own or drive one. I admire them, use them when I need to, and remind myself of the privilege to own and drive one. But the less I drive, less rewarding it is. I’d rather walk if I can. As an urban animal walking, I encounter more novel situations, more environmental stimulus, and thus more cognitive stimulation. Just like a rat, I have agency. It’s making me smarter, right? I think not, I can’t even out smart a raccoon.

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Hello Interactors,

Winter break is drawing to a close for my two kids who just wrapped up their first semester at college on the east coast. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what it’s like living in a new city. My daughter is particularly impacted having moved to New York City from a relatively small town near Seattle. But she’s not alone. More and more people are moving to urban areas, but does it necessarily make them happier?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BIG CITY, LITTLE PRETTY

Stepping out our front door with my daughter who was just home from New York she proclaimed, “It’s nice just walking out the door and seeing trees. No twenty-story elevator trip, no concrete, no noise, no high rises, no pollution…just easy, calm, and quiet nature. It’s beautiful.”

She loves the city; she hates the city. I asked her what New York could do to make it more pleasing, she recommends more green spaces. More Central Parks. Humans do need nature; some more than others.

I’m reminded of my philosophy professor at UC Santa Barbara for an aesthetics class. It was his first-year teaching and first-time outside of New York. There he was on one of the most beautiful coastline campuses in the world buttressed by green foothill mountains. He was shocked to learn his student’s thought nature was ‘beautiful’. He didn’t get it. Or so he claimed. He kept quoting Woody Allen who complained about not being able to sleep in the country because it was too quiet. Allen once quipped, “I am two with nature.”

Some proclaim “cities; can’t live with them, can’t live without them” while others groan, “Nature; can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” More and more people are choosing to live with cities, not nature. The United Nations estimates 55% of the world’s population live in urban areas. It’s estimated that number will grow to 75% by 2050.

The rate of growth varies by country or region as does the share of the total population. Japan is the most urbanized, United States is number two, followed by Europe. But number four has the fastest urbanization growth rate – China.

But what constitutes an urban area? Don’t ask me. I screwed up my poll last week by providing widely inconsistent ranges of population size. It turns out I’m not the only one confused about quantifying urban areas. Despite the U.N. making claims and predictions about urbanization, there is no agreed upon definition of an urban area. Japan says it’s 50,000 people or more while Sweden says it’s 200. Singapore’s entire population is considered urban while Uruguay leaves it up to the city to decide whether it’s ‘urban’.

Either way, the trend is clear. More people are moving to urban areas than ever before. Even my ill-formed poll of Interactors shows most live in bigger and the biggest metropolitan areas. And I just dropped my daughter off at the airport where she’ll soon be back in the city and away from nature.

Why are so many people choosing to live in large cities? Are they happier? Most of the 36 Interactors responding to my poll report being happy. And most have moved to seek happiness. About half of the 36 responders still live in the country in which they were born (47% or about 17 people), a few live in the same state or similar (17% or about six people), and even fewer live in the same city (11% or about four people). Another 25%, or about nine people, have moved to a different country all together.

People move. It’s a defining characteristic of our species. We move to satisfy our basic human needs. However, there’s also disagreement over what constitutes ‘human needs.’ What explanations do exist are largely defined and propagated from a Western perspective from the study of WEIRD people (Western (mostly White) Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

One of the most popular and enduring needs models comes from a simple pyramid drawn by the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow. His ‘hierarchy of needs’ posits that human needs are built on top of one another going from ‘physiological’ needs like breathing, food, and water to ‘safety’ then ‘love and belonging’ to ‘esteem’ and finally ‘self-actualization.’ But is this an oversimplification? Is it just an easy-to-understand graphic that puts the lofty concepts of ‘morality’, ‘creativity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘problem solving’, and ‘acceptance of facts’ at the top of a mountain of over-achievers? Is the hierarchical path to happiness achieved only by those with ‘confidence’, ‘respect of others’, and high ‘self-esteem’?

Does one really need ‘security’, ‘employment’, and ‘property’ to have a happy life filled with loving ‘friendship’ and ‘family’. Some families moving to cities risk physical and psychological security, induce precarity by change jobs, and pay rent on the most affordable apartment they can find – all to satisfy basic physiological needs. But are they not creative, spontaneous, problem solvers who may indeed be happier than before their move? Must everyone earn ‘achievement’ awards or the ‘respect of others’? Must they exude ‘confidence’ to be happy?

It seems Maslow treated needs as a series of hierarchical problems to conquer. One must climb a particular ladder of self-actualization rung by rung. It’s a convenient pseudo-psychological symbol to American idioms like ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, ‘upper class’, or ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’.

A NEED FOR A BETTER CREED

Like the word ‘urban’, there is not one definition of ‘human need’. But with so many people flocking to cities, the running assumption among most, including researchers, is that people do so to become wealthier, healthier, and happier. But are these still biased toward climbing some kind of economic ladder? Are they held up by surrounding socio-political systems, structures, and norms largely fueled by Western capitalistic ambitions? Yes, certain amounts of wealth accumulation are needed to satisfy basic needs, but are there hidden assumptions that more money buys more happiness? Were the Beatles wrong? Does money really buy love? What is required to satisfy our needs?

Experts generally agree on these four categories of human need: personal, economic, social, and political. We all require certain physical and psychological safety in pursuit of our goals and happiness. How we interact with people and place plays a vital role and is dictated by the social and economic systems influenced by politics. Increasingly, it appears more and more people seek places that most complicate these requirements – cities. So, is widespread urbanization making people safer, healthier, richer, and happier?

It varies, but in the aggregate, more humans are safer, healthier, wealthier, and presumably happier than in the known history of civilization. And as countries become richer, they also become more urbanized. As cities increase in scale, as with biological systems, naturally occurring scaling laws dictate they also become more efficient. When an animal doubles in size, it’s operating efficiency more than doubles – about 15% more. When a city doubles in size, it also gains from scaling efficiencies. Wages, innovation, and infrastructure, for example, all more than double with population size. These efficiencies tend cities toward better sanitation, water quality, cleaner fuels for cooking, and better nutrition – all requirements to fulfill basic human needs.

However, these positive effects are not evenly distributed, and the wealth correlations found in the aggregate may be due to inequalities. Large cities can yield and attract extreme wealth giving the illusion bigger is better and wealthier is healthier. As most everyone witnesses, if not endure, urban areas are also home to extreme poverty, accentuated inequalities, and politicians in search of a cure.

Indeed, those same geometric power laws that can more than double the positive effects of cities can also more than double crime, garbage, illness, and disease. Which has people yearning for quiet, natural spaces inside and outside the city, just like my daughter.

Access to nature seems to be a basic human need hidden from the surface of Maslow’s pyramid. It sits under a category of needs my old philosophy professor may have an issue with – aesthetics. Nature features more prominently on a competing model of basic human needs made by the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef.

He was Frustrated by the negative social effects influenced by the U.S. backed conservative economic policies of the so-called “Chicago Boys”. This was a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman on conservative neo-liberal philosophies and policies. They went on to hold prominent positions under the military dictatorships of Chile in the 1970s and 80s. Max-Neef lived with and studied those stricken by failed attempts at fashioning the Chilean economy after American neoliberal forms of capitalism. He observed the negative effects of debt and ecological destruction brought on by privatized economic and social systems modeled after and funded by the United States and top U.S. corporations.

After decades of experience and research living and traveling around South America in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he wrote a book in 1989 on Human Scale Development. It centers on the organic and messy human needs diagnosed at street level in contrast to the clean, mechanistic, and abstracted top-down, state and/or corporate led approach. Max-Neef’s findings became foundational to what we might now call ‘urban sustainability’. In 1992, in the publication Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation, he published a human needs framework that shuns the strict hierarchical structure of Maslow’s while adhering to those needs scholars largely agree exist among humans.

Max-Neef identifies nine needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom. These fall under these four categories that define our existence: being in psychological state, having assets, doing actions, and interacting with and in places with or without other people. Because cities increase chances of social interaction, offer more opportunities for doing actions in exchange for money, the opportunities to have assets increases, leading to a desired state of being.

WINGS OF A BUTTERFLY

Max-Neef observed that while human needs are universal, getting them satisfied is contingent on particularities of a given city and how it functions. For example, a well equipped and staffed police force may satisfy the fundamental human need to feel safe, but it can also limit freedoms, perpetuate unfair power inequities, or dissuade community interactions.

But for Max-Neef, community engagement and participation between the powerful and the powerless was at the heart of satisfying the needs of all humans. He was interested in practical solutions to problems at scales ranging from neighborhoods to cities and regions to countries. Thus he devised his model to be flexible and adaptable to unique situations at the micro and macro level – each dependent on the other.

A group of Dutch urban studies researchers recently published a paper calling for planners and elected officials to consider the Max-Neef model as a guide. They reveal how it’s uniquely suited to better plan and shape or reshape cities toward a more just, equitable, and environmentally sound future. This is due mostly to the synergies between fundamental human needs and the elements of cities that can satisfy them.

But it would be wrong to say these associations and synergies necessarily guarantee the satisfaction of needs. Simply moving to a city, with all it’s social potential for interactions, does not automatically lead to a better life. Max-Neef says,

“The articulation between the personal and social dimensions of development may be achieved through increasing levels of self-reliance. At a personal level, self-reliance stimulates our sense of identity, our creative capacity, our self-confidence and our need for freedom. At the social level, self-reliance strengthens the capacity for subsistence, provides protection against exogenous hazards, enhances endogenous cultural identity and develops the capacity to generate greater spaces of collective freedom. The necessary combination of both the personal and the social in Human Scale Development compels us, then, to encourage self-reliance at the different levels: individual, local, regional and national.”

But he also warns it is not his

“intention to suggest that self-reliance is achieved simply by social and economic interaction in small physical spaces. Such an assumption would do nothing but replicate a mechanistic perception which has already been very harmful in terms of development policies.”

Instead, he calls for

“Complementary relationships between the macro and the micro, and among the various microspaces, [that] may facilitate the mutual empowering of processes of socio-cultural identity, political autonomy and economic self-reliance.”

This requires government systems to flexibly empower individuals and local communities so they may satisfy their basic human needs as they see fit. Instead of a rigid top-down, mechanistic, hierarchical system geared toward economic growth and private wealth accumulation, a more flexible system spanning many nested hierarchies is required that fosters personal growth in the pursuit of human needs. A system that is resilient to the variability of external forces. Like a pandemic.

The pandemic appears to have changed all the historic economic, cultural, and political assumptions surrounding the physical social interaction of people in cities. With more and more people working, socializing, and shopping online what are the implications for the social aspects of human needs? Last summer, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published the results of their 2021 American Time Use Survey. On days “employed persons” worked, 38 percent did some or all their work at home and 68 percent did some or all their work at their workplace. In 2019, before the pandemic, workers were 24 percent less likely to work at home and 82 percent more likely to work at their workplace.

Workers 25 years old and older with an advanced degree were more likely to work at home than those without. Sixty-seven percent of those with an advanced degree worked at home versus 19 percent with a high school diploma and no college degree. Will those advanced degree earners get their human needs fulfilled working from home? Is online social interaction better or worse at fulfilling basic social needs or are those getting fulfilled outside of work hours? Will those without college degrees find that interacting physically offers more opportunities for doing? Will they find the necessary opportunities to have the necessary assets needed for a desired state of being?

My daughter goes to school in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world and my son in a sparsely populated wooded suburb. As they finish their first year of college, I wonder what they’ll face a few years from now as they seek to fulfill basic human needs on their own. Will cities and governments morph to meet to what appears to be one of the most transformative moments in the history of urbanization? How much adapting and compromising of their desires will be required to satisfy their basic human needs?

One thing is clear, and Max-Neef seems to have gotten this right. While macro-scale political and economic systems may appear to muster control over people, it took a pandemic to reveal the power of individual micro-scale behavior. It seems when most of those individuals with the means to chose how to work, to do, to have, to satisfy their needs differently, they acted. They chose how to interact with society in a new way that indeed forced large-scale macro changes to worldwide economic, social, and political systems.

What would happen if instead of blindly following the course set by centuries of a particular socio-economic construct, of which increased urbanization is a biproduct, we all chose to act differently? What if instead of feeling the need for speed, we all slowed down to succeed? What if in pursuit of a basic need, we shun the allure of greed? Surety is not decreed and only uncertainty is guaranteed. So, let’s be what we want to be, have what we want to have, do what we want to do, and interact with the world. After all, small acts by a few ripple through and through bringing changes to a world anew.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Happy 2023! Today we launch into a season on topics related to human behavior. So much of how we interact with people and place comes down to language. It shapes how we communicate with one another, but how much does language shape our behavior? And if one language dominates, how much does that domination shape our global society?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who left Microsoft soon after I did. He was a technology executive and is now pursuing a degree at Cambridge on ethics in artificial intelligence (AI). His coursework is very different from his engineering past and Taiwanese education. Fewer numbers, more words. He is reading multiple philosophy papers a week, sometimes 30 pages long. He must then write his own analytical essays. Predictably, these papers he is reading are written in English – his second language.

It can be challenging enough to read philosophy in a native language. When he encounters a word, he doesn’t understand, he often consults his Chinese dictionary to better understand the concept. But then when he compares that definition to the English dictionary definition, the meaning is sometimes different. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote,

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

For my bi-lingual friend for whom English is his second language, it seems the language is the battle against intelligence by means of the bewitchment of philosophy.

This is an increasingly common phenomenon around the world as English is the dominant language of higher education. An estimated one in six people on this planet speak some form of English. While seemingly small, it is the largest population to speak a common language in the history of our species. Still, with over 7000 different languages spoken around the world language diversity dominates.

In the United States 80% of households speak English only at home. Those homes are likely to remain monolinguistic. But as immigrant populations in America grow and Indigenous languages resurface the number of bilingual or multilingual households is expected to increase. When the first wave of immigrants came to America in the late 1800s, many children were encouraged to drop their native language in favor of English. My American born Italian father-in-law was discouraged to speak Italian and thus never learned it. Meanwhile, the cost of learning English was too great for his mother, so she was discouraged to learn English. They never shared a richly common language.

Even though the United States has never declared English the official language, it is often assumed. As a result, there exists not only a monolingual bias, but an English bias. Given the last two global trotting colonizing superpowers have English as the dominant language, it follows the English language dominates. As a result, schools, including higher education replete with international bilingual diversity, is also dominated by the English language and all that comes with it. That includes the branches of the field of cognitive science intent on understanding how language affects how the brain works.

It was my father-in-law’s strict dad that insisted he speak English only. His attitude was ‘you’re an American, so you’re speaking English.’ It was common for immigrant parents during these times to attempt to erase their past in hopes of appearing more ‘American’. But this attitude may have been buoyed by a long-held belief there exists a cognitive cost of switching between two or more languages. A belief that was surely substantiated by the high cost of learning a second language proficiently. It seems advantageous to just pick one and stick with it. And for many of those early immigrant children in America, that choice would have been English.

But I’m reminded of another friend who grew up in Malaysia learning English and Malay while speaking her native cultural language and English at home. Malaysia’s population is a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Indian descendants, and the informal language, Manglish, blends words from English, Chinese, and Tamil. She is so comfortable jumping between these languages that when she and her sister talk, they sometimes use words from multiple languages in a single sentence. For her, there is no cognitive cost in switching. In fact, she may even benefit from using many languages at once.

YES, UH-HA, I AGREE

Some research in cognitive science points to a ‘bilingual advantage’. Multi-lingual speakers showed a greater “ability to plan, focus, and execute a wide array of tasks’ compared to single language speakers and the effect was pronounced among older adults. As a result, replicated studies show performance varies greatly depending on the task, age, language experience, and frequency of switching languages. Still, as cognitive research increases in parts of the world where bilingualism is more common, more is sure to be learned.

The bulk of knowledge in cognitive science comes from studying WEIRD people. They are predominantly White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The ‘E’ could just as well stand for ‘English-speaking’. The discipline is dominated by English-speaking researchers, studying a sliver of the English-speaking population, writing papers in English, and in countries that that are culturally Anglocentric. This flaw has been recognized for nearly a decade. But increasingly more research uses diverse sample populations, in more diverse locations, and is conducted by less Anglocentric researchers who use English as a second language.

In 2022, a group of scholars published a paper investigating how over-reliance on English may hinder cognitive science. It included a chart that illustrates a sampling of differences emerging from these more diverse studies. It shows how aspects of the written and spoken English language differ culturally, linguistically, and cognitively from certain other languages. For example, English speakers tend to frequently rely on words of gratitude to maintain healthy social relations. One study revealed English speakers were four times more likely to say ‘thank you’ than other languages. A language in Ecuador, Cha’palaa, doesn’t even have a word for ‘thank you’. Even ‘please’ is avoided without conflict. Thirsty? ‘Give me water’ is sufficient and considered polite.

Conversely, languages other than English tend to use words more frequently that promote and sustain social cohesion. One of the more extreme versions of this is Japanese where attention to social behavior is more closely monitored by all members of society. During conversation, the person whose ‘turn’ it is to speak is listening and looking for short affirmative confirmation, like ‘yes’, ‘uh-huh’, or head nods without losing their ‘turn’. Meanwhile the listener is listening and watching for breaks in phrasing to offer forms of affirmative confirmation. Linguists call this ‘back-channeling’ and can be found in cultures rich in social cohesion. Perhaps the English language and the American egocentric culture isn’t helping to heal our societal divisions.

The ordering of words in Japanese versus English has cognitive implications too. All languages have a linguistic ‘head’ that determines certain properties of a phrase. The Japanese language puts the head at the end of a phrase while English puts it at the beginning. This has implications for differences in working memory between Japanese and English speakers. When recalling a sequence of figures, like numbers, objects, plants, or animals, Japanese speakers have higher precision on the last item in the list and English speakers the first.

Cognitive differences in ordering arrangements can extend beyond listed figures to spatial reasoning. For example, English speakers use their own relational viewpoint as a frame of reference when describing spatial locations, like ‘left’ or ‘right’. In contrast, certain native languages in Australia and Namibia use cardinal directions like ‘west’ or ‘east’. These differences in linguistic encoding are shown to influence learning of spatial configurations, search and find tasks, and tracking moving objects. Again, the apparent egocentrism of English speakers is seemingly creeping into even how we see ourselves in the world.

ADVERSITY TO DIVERSITY

The ’left-right’ bias shows up not only in space, but also time. English speakers typically think of a timeline as going from left to right. This ‘left-to-right’ bias can be attributed to many factors, including the ordering of words in a sentence or a math equation. Solving a math problem or writing a sentence in English involves ‘starting’ on the left and over time ‘ending’ up on the right. Those taught to read and write or do math in English or similar languages thus have a linguistic coding in the brain that associates the past with the ‘left’ and the future with the ‘right’.

But those who have not been exposed to these encodings have no such associations. And given there are 7000 languages spoken in the world, that accounts for a lot of humans. As more humans gain access to the internet, more and more of these languages and cultures will be exposed to the 1.2 billion internet users speaking English. The fastest growing languages online are Chinese (0.9 billion), Spanish (0.4 billion), and Arabic (0.2 billion). More people in America speak Spanish than all of Spain.

Given this growing linguistic diversity, these researchers conclude cognitive science is not doing nearly enough “to live up to its original mission of developing an interdisciplinary exploration of ‘the mind’”. They say English language dominance may be the field’s “original sin” and call for a commitment “to research that seeks to systematically explore, generalize, and falsify our models of human cognition by exploring non-English-speaking peoples and societies.”

As we enter a new year, English speaking students, like my continuing adult education friend, will be returning to classes and campuses dominated by the English language. Others will be drawing that timeline planning the next quarter. Many spent this holiday season exchanging in culturally supported niceties perpetuated by language. Santa only delivered the presents if the child had been saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all year. We will spend the next year looking to do the same as we all struggle to keep those new year’s resolutions.

The words ‘spent’ and ‘spend’ bring up another peculiarity of English – tenses. It turns out those living in countries using languages that don’t have an obligatory future tense like English may be better at keeping their resolutions. They tend to smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. And, hey, tax time is also just around the corner in the United States. It turns out those not obliged to use future tense in their language also save more.

But these researchers admit these studies deserve scrutiny. There is much debate about how culture and history shape language and how language shapes culture and history. Teasing out language from cognition and culture will continue to confound scholars, researchers, and practitioners. However, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging together with increased diversity of research subjects, locations, and researchers are sure to yield more practicable results. These tools didn’t exist at the onset of the study of language.

In 1863, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and brother of the more famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, wrote three volumes on comparative linguistics after studying the Kawi language of Java. He noted then there “resides in every language a characteristic worldview.” One day we may be able to discern just what elements of worldview cognition are common to all human brains – and the brains of other animals – regardless of language and culture.

Until then, this is all that is left to write for today. In English. While my sentences have flowed from left to right, the beginning is at the top and the end is here at the bottom. I wish to ‘thank you’ for reading or listening and invite you to ‘please’ click ‘like’ or leave a nice comment. If you feel so obliged. It’s been my ‘turn’ to speak, now it’s yours.

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Hello Interactors,

[This is a repost from last Christmas eve. It’s a great story worthy of another share!]

For all you Christmas celebrators out there, happy Christmas Eve. Since many will be gathering ‘round a Christmas tree, I thought I’d tell the story of its origin. And like so much of American history, it has ties to immigrants and slavery; but in this case — anti-slavery.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A TREE SO YEE MAY BE FREE

“If the morning drives are extended beyond the city, there is much to delight the eye. The trees are eased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly, the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow,—dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbour spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink.”

These are the words of Harriet Martineau. She was a English writer, journalist, and social theorist who pioneered observational methods that came to influence the field of sociology. One of her more popular books came at the end of her travels through the United States in the 1830s titled, Retrospect of Western Travel. The passage above describes what she saw as she left the Boston city limits in the snow the winter of 1835.

You may have images of her bundled up in a one horse open sleigh, over the hills she went, dashing all the way. But according to Martineau, you can let go of any such romantic inclinations. Here’s her take on sleighing.

“As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels,—except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance.”

And if that’s not enough to convince you, she offers up a quote from unknown source that puts a finer touch on the realities of sleighing.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring board out in the porch on Christmas-day: put your feet in a pail full of powdered ice: have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows,—and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

Martineau was on her way to a Christmas evening celebration at the home of a former Harvard German language professor, Charles Follen. Although, due to scheduling conflicts the event was actually on New Years Eve and not Christmas Eve. The cozy holiday scene that Martineau proceeds to unfold came to be the most, though not the first, read articulation of what came to be the center piece of American Christmas celebration – the Christmas tree.

Follen was a German immigrant so perhaps it’s not that surprising that a Christmas tree would feature prominently in her story. It’s been a long held belief that German immigrants brought their time-honored Christmas tree tradition with them. Though, as we’ll soon see, the evolution of the Christmas tree tradition in America paralleled that of Germany.

Martineau’s account of that evening, while factual, leaves out important historical details as to why she was celebrating Christmas with Follen and his family that night. These were two radical Unitarian abolitionists who bonded over their insistence that slavery be eradicated totally and immediately. Northerner’s, and New England Unitarians, were split on the matter of abolition. Follen’s convictions are what got him fired from Harvard a year prior.

As for Martineau, she was a well known and respected journalist but not yet a public activist. But after attending a women’s abolitionist meeting that November, she was convinced she needed to act. She was asked at that meeting to write publicly avowing her beliefs. Being one of the only women writers of her time to sustain herself through writing and still requiring access to America’s mainstream elite for her book, she faced an ethical dilemma.

Later she wrote, “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy.…”

News leaked of her position on slavery and Boston newspapers ridiculed her. Their headlines spread across the country and she was forced to alter her itinerary. The event she was attending at Follen’s home wasn’t just a Christmas celebration, but an anti-slavery strategy session. That spring, she (in the company of Charles Follen) took to the road not as journalist, but as an activist.

CHRISTKINDLE AND BELSNICKEL

Historians and folklorists have determined that the first Christmas tree in America was most likely in the home of a German immigrant in Pennsylvania. But it’s unlikely to have occurred anytime before 1810. The first known sketch of a family celebrating Christmas, featuring a small tree atop a table, was not printed until recent decades but dates to either 1812 or 1819.

Recall from my November posts on the origins of Thanksgiving, this was also the time when St. Nicholas was also entering the picture in New York. The Christmas tree tradition was also just emerging in Germany at this very same time. The Christmas tree, like Santa Claus himself, wasn’t a long held German tradition but a story told by a select group of elites who latched on to a small, isolated, and obscure holiday event that was occurring in what was then Strasbourg, Germany but is now part of France.

It was established sometime in the 17th century as a quasi-religious way of judging children on the basis of them being naughty or nice. If you were nice you got a visit that night from Christkindle (i.e. the Christchild) and if you were naughty you got a visit from Hanstrapp; Strasbourg’s equivalent of what became known as Belsnickle (roughly translated: St. Nicholas in Fur).

This character has echo’s of behavior seen by Wassailers during Thanksgiving celebrations where men, often of lower class, would dress up and go door to door, often times even welcoming themselves in. Perhaps this offers a clue into how Santa became a home invader. Though, should Belsnickle determine a child in the home had been naughty, he gifted the parents with a stick with instructions to whip the poor child.

The Christmas tree tradition expanded beyond Strasbourg around 1750. Its spread may have been accelerated by a young up and coming writer, naturalist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771. Recall from my October post, that by the dawn of the 18th century Goethe had established himself as the go-to guy by the German government for writing, organizing, and evangelizing his opinions and observations on everything from gardening, to parks management, to economics.

He had spent some time in Strasbourg and “discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision.” His 1774 novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, is a story of a love triangle that ends tragically. And in the lead up to this tragedy, Goethe writes how young Werther “spoke of the pleasure the children would feel and remembered how in times long past he had himself been transported to paradise by the surprise opening of a door and the appearance of the decorated tree with its candles, sweets, and apples.”

It wasn’t until 1810 that the Christmas Tree tradition made it’s way to Berlin. It was introduced in Munich in 1830 by the Queen of Bavaria. Goethe had inspired a string of writers publishing stories of Christmas trees that were disseminated throughout Europe and the United States. And it was all happening at the same time of the first recorded evidence of a Christmas tree in America – 1820.

And then, in 1836, came the first printed image of a Christmas tree in America. It was titled “Christmas Eve” and was featured in a story called The Stranger’s Gift. It was written, as you might expect, by a German immigrant. But not just any German immigrant. It was written by Herman Bokum, the professor who replaced Follen after Harvard let him go for his public opposition to slavery just one year earlier.

YOUR BOUGHS CAN TEACH A LESSON

After Follen lost his job at Harvard he was hired by a family to home school their two children. Follen strictly followed a progressive teaching method derived from a Swiss educational reformer named Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi had a child-centered and directed educational philosophy. He believed every child is born with inherently good qualities and it’s the teachers role to find them and cultivate them. It’s unclear whether Follen’s enemies convinced the family to reconsider, the family themselves had a change of heart, or Follen, ever dogmatic in his principles, refused to budge on his teaching approach, but two weeks before Christmas of 1835 he was terminated.

It is in this context that Harriett Martineau attended the Christmas celebration in Follen’s newly built home on the corner of Follen Avenue outside of Boston. Martineau did not mention Follen by name in her retelling of their Christmas tree celebration, only Follen’s son who everyone called “Little Charley.” She writes,

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley, and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show…I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect…The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart, dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig; which had not something sparkling upon it… Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy.”

It was two years before Martineau’s book was published. She continued her friendship with Follen until his tragic death in 1841. He was killed when a steamship he was traveling on exploded. His photograph hung on the wall of her home until she died in 1876.

And in the intervening years of her book being published, a writer friend of theirs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a fictional story called “New Years Day” that included a brief mention of a Christmas tree celebration akin to what actually took place at the Follens. It was published that same year, 1835, making it the first piece of American literature to mentioned a Christmas tree.

It’s unfortunate America’s Christmas tree origin story doesn’t start with the telling of Charles Follen and Harriett Martineau and their New Years Eve anti-slavery strategy meeting around the Christmas tree. Not only is their relationship full of intrigue, but the idea of the Christmas tree immortalized as an historic symbol of freedom from slavery seems an appropriate American Christmas tale. Perhaps the story of Follen and Martineau is what we should be reading to children every Christmas eve and not just T’was the Night Before Christmas.

Both the story of the Christmas tree as a time-honored German cultural tradition and America’s favorite Christmas time fable, T’was the Night Before Christmas, were largely fabricated and perpetuated by a select group of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Clement Clark Moore, the author of T’was the Night Before Christmas, — and his reactionary New York Episcopalian Knickerbocker friends — were interested in imbuing their Christmas tales with aristocratic authority. In contrast, Bollen and his Unitarian Christmas tree literary acquaintances used the Christmas tree to add momentum to the swelling progressive reformist movement of the 1830s.

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his book The Battle for Christmas, explains the similarities between the unfolding of these two events, American traditions, and these two men,

“There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)”

He continues,

“In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.”

And in both cases, literature, and access to it, played a starring role. Nissenbaum, writes,

“As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.”

It seems another mythical folk tradition is still propagated from the top down more than experienced from bottom up. Recalling Harriet Martineau’s American observation that “As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms.”

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Hello Interactors,

As winter solstice nears in the northern hemisphere, this week brings a close to my explorations of economics. Next up is human behavior. I decided to stitch together this season’s economics posts into a single composite narrative. Upon reflection, I see a path my posts tend to take though it’s never premeditated. At least to my knowledge! In keeping with the theme of this post, it seems the uncertain path my essays take is a form of emergence.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE TREE OF MORAL SYMPATHY

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and with it comes this decision to volley. Real tree or fake tree? Or no tree at all. Such is the dilemma many find themselves in, at least in those places dominated by Christian tradition or influenced by Christian culture. The ‘real or fake’ Christmas tree analysis is how I was first introduced to ideas related to a circular economy.

It came through a class called “Sustainable Transportation from a Systems Perspective” as part of my master’s degree program. We were introduced to a 2009 study titled, “Comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Artificial vs Natural Christmas Tree”. It came from a sustainable development consultancy in Montreal. Life Cycle Analysis looks at the environmental impact of the full lifecycle of a product or service from ‘cradle to grave.’

While the United Nations’ International Standardization Organization has determined a standard for how to conduct an LCA (ISO 14040), the interpretation of results can often include creative interpretations and conclusions.

This is particularly true if the LCA is conducted by a corporation or industry that may benefit from favorable LCA results. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn most LCAs are conducted or funded by private companies. LCA’s started popping up in the 1960s, but now they’re commonplace as companies jostle to present themselves as being environmentally sustainable and socially just through responsible and ethical governance – ESG. But measurements, evaluations, and analysis to determine an ESG score, like LCA’s, are also open to interpretation and manipulation. Consequently, ESG has lost its luster.

Sadly, the concept of a ‘circular economy’ is following a similar path. Circular economies take limited raw materials used to make goods and loops them back into the economy instead of throwing them away. The idea is to reduce, reuse, and recycle the inputs of an LCA and then repair the outputs to extend their lifecycle. But the term and practice of ‘circular economy’, like ESG, has also become diffuse and trendy.

A group of Industrial Ecologists, people who track the physical resource flows of industrial and consumer systems at different spatial scales, wrote in 2021,

“In seeking to maintain a growth-based economy, critics argue, the circular economy ‘tinkers with the current modus operandi’ of “consumerism, extractivism and (liberal) capitalism, while bearing the unrealistic expectation that the individual consumer will be able to mobilize largescale change. The circular economy is considered to encourage a reboot for capitalism that requires no radical change to institutions, infrastructures, and markets.”

Calls for radical change concerning capitalism are strewn throughout history. The naturalist and scientist Alexander von Humboldt warned in 1800 of human induced climate change. He observed widespread systemic negative ecological impacts originated with infectious colonialism fueled by European and American profit seeking capitalists and imperialists. Between the abduction and trade of human slaves from Africa and local Indigenous populations to the overworking of soils to grow monocultural crops, Humboldt would not have been handing out top ESG scores to those very institutions who funded his explorations around the world.

Humboldt remained critical of colonialism and the brand of capitalism that came with it until the day he died. Ten years after Humboldt died another future critic of capitalistic colonialism was born, Mahatma Gandhi. By the time he was 76, in 1945, he called on his economist friend, Joseph Kumarappa, better known as J. C. Kumarappa, to further his ideas on Gandhian economics – a kind of circular economy.

Like Humboldt and other naturalists, Kumarappa observed the cyclical patterns in nature and sought economic practices that echoed them. He advocated for maintaining an economy of continuity and circularity with nature. Using the bee as a metaphor, he wrote,

“The bees etc. while gathering the nectar and pollen from these plants for their own good, fertilize the flowers and the grains, that are formed in consequence, again become the source of life of the next generation of plants.”

Kumarappa studied at Columbia University under the progressive economist Edwin Seligman – a critic of exploitive forms of capitalism himself. Seligman encouraged Kumarappa to further his own ideas and critiques of traditional capitalistic economic orthodoxy. And he did. He wrote, “The Western plans are material centred. That is to say, they want to exploit all resources.”

Kumarappa and Gandhi also observed Western plans are to exploit all human resources for labor as well. In this regard, Kumarappa found inspiration in elements of Marxism. Marxism also provided a sociological explanation for why some Indians, Kumarappa included, rose to higher social class more than others. Though I suspect the passivist Gandhi probably would not approve of Marxist calls for civil disobedience. Marx himself was hardly socially obedient.

SHUN THE VICES OF PRODUCTIONSWEISE

When Karl Marx was a freshman at a university in Bonn, Germany he was thrown in jail for drunken disorderly behavior. He joined a poetry club that was a front for a group of young radical’s intent on overthrowing the local government. There was also class conflict. Marx, the son of a modestly wealthy Jewish father, was considered a ‘plebian’ by the so-called ‘true Prussians and aristocrats.’ It got personal and led to a dual resulting in a bullet glancing the forehead of Karl Marx.

Marx went on to study law and philosophy in Berlin and was a prolific writer. After leaving college, Marx became a journalist exposing elements of power structures present in the Christian led Prussian government. He believed their oppression suppressed the individual’s right to reason, engage, and speak with freedom of thought. His writing was radical enough to get him kicked out of the country.

He fled to Paris but was soon kicked out of France as well. He settled in England writing as a European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. He immersed himself in the work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith in the reading room of the British Museum. He also witnessed the negative working conditions and poverty in burgeoning London factories that he attributed to Adam Smith’s single publication on economics, The Wealth of Nations.

Marx’s primary critique was summed up in a single German word: Produktionsweise. This can be translated as "the distinctive way of producing" or what is commonly called the capitalist mode of production. Marx believed this system of capitalism distinctly exists for the production and accumulation of private capital through private wealth. Private wealth accumulation allows for the purchase of land, buildings, natural resources, or machines, to produce and sell goods and services. This creates a wealth asymmetry between those who accumulate the wealth and capital and those laborers needed to produce the goods. This asymmetry yields profits that contribute to more private wealth accumulation which allows for the purchase of more capital. The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer.

But a closer reading on the moral philosophies of Adam Smith suggests Marx may have exaggerated the emphasis Smith had on the negative effects of industrial age economics. Reading the work of Adam Smith, and of his teacher and mentor Francis Hutcheson, reveals a good amount of the importance of sympathy for others who have suffered injustice. Smith writes, “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished.” He goes on to articulate the importance of justice for a society, and its economy, to be healthy and wealthy while recognizing few in power act to remedy injustices. He says,

“But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”

Smith envisioned, as he wrote in Wealth of Nations, that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.” A great deal of emphasis has been placed on two words that appear in a single instance in Smith’s popular book – “invisible hand”. But they first appeared in his earlier book The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he describes a selfish landowner’s moral decision to share a portion of his crop yield with the farmers who produced it. He writes,

“They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life…”

Economics soon took a turn from Smith’s more prosaic philosophical economic interpretations. Instead of Smithonian ruminations on the moral justice of the state, liberty of free markets constrained by government, and the benevolent necessity of a cooperative societal collective, attention turned to the quantitative measuring of economic growth amidst a growing global British political economy. In 1862 W. S. Jevons published an essay titled "Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy" and declare in an 1872 essay on principles of economics that its study "must be mathematical simply because it deals with quantities". Soon economics reduced complex human behavior, like the subjectivity of the value of a good or service, to a simple variable in an algebraic expression.

THE ONLY THING CERTAIN IS UNCERTAINTY

The atomization, classification, mechanization, and quantification of complex naturally occurring phenomena had long been popular with European Enlightenment thinkers. Isaac Newton believed in preformation – the idea that a Christian god had preformed every past, current, and future living being and packaged them up in miniature form into the male sperm. Every organ, limb, and joint were like components of a watch packed neatly in a microscopic vessel waiting to be released through the mystical act of intercourse.

He, Rene Descartes, and others believed everything in the universe could be explained mathematically. The quest for certainty came both from these influential thinkers, but also religious authority. This came at a time of social revolutions, debates, and contestations over human rights, freedoms of religion, and ‘we the people.’ Mechanists married the certainty of mathematics with the certainty of their Christian god to explain the world. If nature and society lacked the linear precession of clocks, compasses, and mathematical calculations, they feared such uncertainty would unravel societal order and unleash chaos.

This video shows Richard Feynman lecturing on the importance of solving complex problems though a ‘Babylonian’ approach. This is in contrast with pure mathematics, as derived by Descartes and Euclid, that yields universally consistent solutions within the context of an abstracted world.

This love affair with mathematical algebraic abstraction and certitude seduced economists of the last three centuries. But one prominent British economist in the 1930s questioned this classical approach, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was no stranger to mathematics; he was awarded a scholarship to study it at Cambridge. But he believed it was being dogmatized, misused, and misconstrued to bolster the legitimacy of economics by wrapping it in perceived certainty, logic, and accuracy. In his 1936 groundbreaking book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he offers this criticism of traditional economics:

“our criticism of the accepted classical theory of economics has consisted not so much in finding logical flaws in its analysis as in pointing out that its tacit assumptions are seldom or never satisfied, with the result that it cannot solve the economic problems of the actual world.”

Instead he called for “at least a partial attempt to incorporate the fact of uncertainty into an economic theory.”

He must have been on to something. Every capitalistic government in the world suffering from the 1930s depression instituted his policies until the 1950s. After World War II dominant economic theory shifted to the United States and the work of Milton Friedman and away from the recently deceased Keynes. Friedman erased the progress Keynes had made by embracing uncertainty in his economic models and returned to classical economic theory that deceptively models certainty. These theories assume humans act rationally and possesses perfect information that inform predictable decisions. These ‘new’ or neo-classical economists reduced the complexity and uncertainty of life to satisfy their calculations.

Economics cannot be explained with simple algebraic formulas. Complex economies call for an understanding of complexity. Enter complexity economics. Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to economics. Instead of assuming reductionist states of equilibria not found in the real world, complexity economics treats economics as a complex system of interdependent interactions. Out of these nested relationships emerge spontaneous uncertain outcomes that then loop back into the system in unpredictable ways.

One of the pioneers in complexity economics, Brian Arthur, writes, “Complexity economics thus sees the economy as in motion, perpetually “computing” itself – perpetually construction itself anew.” This approach is reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes, but also of Alexander von Humboldt and other naturalists of the Enlightenment. It seems the history of the study and embrace of complex natural systems and spontaneous emergence of uncertain actions from an ‘invisible hand’ also perpetually constructs itself anew. Perhaps the looping nature of complexity in economics over time should be the central focus of what we now call ‘circular’ economy.

Still, the attraction of certainty never escapes us. Nature always seeks efficiencies, and we humans are part of nature. Perhaps this explains why many people are attracted to fake Christmas trees. These take the essence of a complex natural organism and reduce it to atomized parts that can be predictably assembled on a yearly cycle. A neo-classical Christmas tree. But as it happens, at least according to that 2009 LCA, like neo-classical economics, the fake tree has the bigger negative environmental footprint. Not by a lot, and certainly not compared to a daily driving habit, but it seems when it comes to getting a Christmas tree, we’re best to embrace the uncertainties and imperfections that come with finding that ‘perfect’ tree. Our family chooses to be like the naturalists and marvel at the complexity of the branches of a real tree and embrace its imperfections and uncertainties. Perhaps it’s time our economic models do the same.

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Hello Interactors,

The social sciences sometimes unfairly get a bad wrap for being a ‘soft science’. But are they? In pursuit of a better understanding the role uncertainty plays in economic analysis, I stumbled across some research that ties John Maynard Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty with a resolute defense of the ‘soft sciences’ by one of the heroes of the ‘hard sciences.’ And you thought physics was hard.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CYBERSAIL

“The hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; the soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”

This quote is by the groundbreaking Austrian American polymath, Heinz von Foerster from his essays on information processing and cognition. He went on to state:

“If a system is too complex to be understood it is broken up into smaller pieces. If they, in turn, are still too complex, they are broken up into even smaller pieces, and so on, until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.”

This strategy, he’s observed, has proven successful in the “hard sciences” like mathematics, physics, and computer science but poses challenges to those in the “soft sciences” like economics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and others.

He continues,

“If [social scientists] reduce the complexity of the system of their interest, i.e., society, psyche, culture, language, etc., by breaking it up into smaller parts for further inspection they would soon no longer be able to claim that they are dealing with the original system of their choice.

This is so, because these scientists are dealing with essentially nonlinear systems whose salient features are represented by the interactions between whatever one may call their “parts” whose properties in isolation add little, if anything, to the understanding of the workings of these systems when each is taken as a whole.

Consequently, if he wishes to remain in the field of his choice, the scientist who works in the soft sciences is faced with a formidable problem: he cannot afford to lose sight of the full complexity of his system, on the other hand it becomes more and more urgent that his problems be solved.”

Von Foerster studied physics in Austria and Poland and moved to the United States in 1949. He started his career in 1951 as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. In 1958 he received grant funding from various federal government agencies to start a Biological Computer Laboratory.

Von Foerster understood the cognitive process humans use to break down large complex problems into smaller discrete linear steps. With the advent of computers, they then typed those instructions into punch cards and fed them into the computer to process. A linear process of which humans and computers can both do. He and his lab then devised a way for a computer to do something humans cannot – conduct multiple calculations at the same time by breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces “until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.” With that they invented the world’s first parallel processor.

While von Foerster helped to bring about a machine that could do what a human could not, they also discovered what a human can do that a machine cannot. Indeed, a parallel computer can break down and execute calculations across a network of instructions, but it can’t take in additional input from its environment and decide to adjust course depending on the nature of the results. It operates in a closed system with the information it has been given and with limited input.

I like the metaphor of sailing to better understand this. When I’m at the tiller of a sailboat steering with a course in mind, I must continually monitor the environment (i.e. wind speed, direction, tides, currents, ripples, waves), the sails (angles, pressures, sail shape, obstructions), the crew (safety, comfort, skill, attitude, joy, fear, anxiety) and the course and speed of the boat (too fast, too slow, tack, jibe, steer). I am using all my senses which continually input information as conditions change. My brain is making calculations and judgements resulting in decisions that in turn impact the conditions. For example, a sudden turn and the sails will fail, the water under the boat will be redirected, air and water pressure gradients will shift, and a crew member may fall or go overboard. All these shifts in conditions in turn impact my subsequent calculations and decisions instant by instant. It’s a persistent feedback loop of information created by human interactions with the boat, the crew, and with nature.

A computer cannot yet steer as a human would in such conditions. They lack the necessary level of sensory input from changing environmental conditions as well as judgement and control over the information these senses provide. The study of the information derived from these complex phenomena derives its name from the Greek word for “navigator”: κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs), or as it has come to be called – Cybernetics. How we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’ I’m not sure, but I have a hunch that is about to be revealed.

KEYNESIAN BRAIN CHAIN

One of the founders of Cybernetics in the 1940s, Norbert Weiner, defined it as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” Other founders said it is the study of “circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems." Another member of the founding group, the influential cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, said it’s "a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."

Von Foerster’s seminars in Cybernetics grew to be very popular at the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 70s. But these early adopters were not the first to use this term to describe complex social information exchanges creating causal feedback loops. In 1834 the French mathematician, inventor of the telegraph, and namesake of the electrical current measurement Amp, André-Marie Ampère, used the term cybernétique to describe the “the art of governing or the science of government.” Perhaps that’s how we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’.

Either way, whether it’s political science, economics, or other social sciences of so-called “soft sciences” these early cross-discipline thinkers felt the urge to find ways to solve hard problems. Problems so complex they become impossible to deal with or track ­– they become intractable. One economics professor emeritus out of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Robert Delorme, encountered these intractable problems in his work. He has since sought ways to establish a framework to deal with such problems that draws on the work of von Foerster. But also, on someone we mentioned last week, the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Delorme was studying institutional patterns in public spending between Great Britain and France over long time periods. This yielded a great deal of quantitative data, but also qualitative data including behavioral differences between how governments and markets interacted with each other and within each country. Delorme also studied traffic fatality data between the two countries and hit the same challenge. While there were mounds of quantitative data, the qualitative data was quite specific to the country, their driving cultures, the individual accident circumstances, and the driver’s individual behavior. In trying to break these complex problems down into smaller and smaller pieces, he hit the dilemma von Forester spoke of. The closer he got understanding the massive mound of data in front of him, the further from his initial research economic question he got.

To better model the uncertainty that culminated from behaviors and interactions in the system Delorme turned to the tools of complexity economics. He considered real-world simulation tools like complex adaptive systems (CAS), agent-based computational economics (ACE), agent-based models (ABM), and agent-based simulation (ABS). But he realized this tool-first approach reminded him of the orthodox, or ‘classical’ style of economic inquiry Keynes was critical of. While he recognized these tools were necessary and helpful, they were insufficient at explaining the complexity that arises out of the events in “the real world”.

Delorme quotes Keynes from his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money where he recognizes Keynes’s own need to break complex problems into smaller and smaller pieces while still staying true to the actual problem. Keynes acknowledged, “the extreme complexity of the actual course of events…” He then reveals the need to break the problem down into “less intractable material upon which to work…” to offer understanding “to actual phenomena of the economic system (…) in which we live…”

According to Delorme, Keynes, his economic philosophy, approach, and writings have been criticized over the years for lacking any kind of formalization of the methodologies he used to arrive at his conclusions and theories. So, Delorme did the work to comb through his writing to uncover an array of consistent patterns and methodological approaches which he’s patched back together and formalized.

He found that Keynes, like a helmsman of a boat, adapted and adjusted his approach depending on the complexity of the subject matter provided by the economic environment. When faced with intractable problems, he applied a set of principles and priorities Delorme found useful in his own intractable problems. The priority, he found, was to take a ‘problem first’ approach by confronting the reality of the world rather than assuming the perfect conditions of a mythical rational world common in traditional economics.

Again, using sailing as a metaphor, imagine the compass showing you’re heading north toward your desired destination, but the wind is to your face and slowing you down. It’s time to decide and act in response to the environmental conditions. Disregard the tool for now, angle the boat east or west, fill the sails, and zig zag your way toward your northerly goal while intermittently returning to the tool, the compass.

What Delorme found next was Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty. Instead of finding comfort in atomizing and categorizing to better assess risk, Keynes found comfort in acknowledging the intricacies of the organic interdependence that comes with interactions within and among irrational people and uncertain systems and environments. He rejected the ‘either-or’ of dualism and embraced the ‘both-and’ open-endedness of uncertainty. In other words, when there is a sudden shift in wind direction, the helmsperson can’t either ram the tiller to one side or adjust the sails. They must both move the tiller and adjust sails.

REPLICATE TO INVESTIGATE

To better deal with complex phenomena, and to further form his framework for how to deal with them, Delorme also found inspiration in the work of one of my inspirations, Herb Simon.

What Delorme borrowed from Simon was a way “in which the subject must gather information of various kinds and process it in different ways in order to arrive at a reasonable course of action, a solution to the problem.” This process, as characterized by the cybernetic loop, takes an input by gathering information and assesses and decides on a reasonable course of action. This solution in turn causes a reaction in the system creating an output that is then sensed and returned into the loop as input. This notion of a looping system made of simple rules to generate variations of itself is reminiscent of the work by a third inspiration for Delorme, John von Neumann.

Von Neumann was a Hungarian American polymath who made significant contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science. He developed the mathematical models behind game theory, invented the merge-sort algorithm in computer science, and was the first known person to create self-replicating cellular automata. And for all you grid paper doodlers out there, he first did it first on grid paper with a pencil. Now these simple processes are done on the computer.

By assigning very simple ‘black and white’ rules to cells in a grid (for example, make a cell white or black based on whether neighboring cells are black or white) one can produce surprisingly complex animate and self-replicating behavior. One popular example is Gosper’s gliding gun. It features two simple cellular arrows that traverse back and forth left to right across the screen on a shared path. When they collide, they produce animated smaller and simpler cellular offspring, an automaton, that rotate as they animate themselves diagonally to the lower right corner of the page or screen.

Delorme noticed von Neumann used this self-replication phenomena to describe a fundamental property of complex systems. If the complexity of automata is under a certain threshold of complexity, the automaton it produces will be less complex or degenerative – as is the case with Gosper’s arrow. However, if the threshold of complexity is exceeded it can over produce. Or, in the words of von Neumann, “if properly arranged, can become explosive.”

What Delorme’s research suggests, I think, is that to address complex intractable economic problems one must devise a looping recursive system of inquiry that self-replicates output intended to affect the next decision by the researcher. This makes the researcher both an observer and a participant in the search for solutions. The trick is to maintain a certain threshold of complexity such that the output doesn’t, again, become overwhelming or explosive.

In other words, instead of pointing tools at a mound of data in attempts to describe a static snapshot of what is in the world, create a circular participatory system that recursively produces something that affects how one might adjust what it produces in near real time.

As Delorme writes, “Complexity is not inherent to reality but to our knowledge of reality, it is derivative rather than inherent.” He then quotes science philosopher Lee McIntyre, who offers, “complexity exists ‘not merely as a feature of the world, but as a feature of our attempts to understand the world.”

I’m not sure what this kind of system looks like practically speaking, but I think the software tool developed by the economist Steve Keen, Minsky, is a start. Keen created this dynamic simulation software to model approaches to macroeconomics after he predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He hopes to entice people away from the static, equilibrium-fixated style of economics taught and practiced today.

The amount of data available to dynamically assess economic outcomes involving complex human behavior, human-made systems, and the natural world continues to push thresholds of complexity. We are creators, observers, and interactors of information in our own self-perpetuating recursive constructions of reality. But as von Forester suggested, even as we break down complex problems into parts, we can’t lose sight of the whole.

That reminds me of a quote from another ‘von’ the linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt – the younger brother of the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. In 1788 he wrote,

"Nothing stands isolated in nature, for everything is combined, everything forms a whole, but with a thousand different and manifold sides. The researcher must first decompose and look at each part singly and for itself and then consider it as a part of a whole. But here, as often happens, he cannot stop. He has to combine them together again, re-create the whole as it earlier appeared before his eyes."

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Hello Interactors,

Last week we explored the role naturalists brought to a more open, flexible, and pragmatic approach to the Enlightenment. Today we expand on how our dominant economic ideology remains beholden to dogmatic, sterile, and abstract mathematical models the naturalists were trying to shake. One of the more popular figures in popularizing and perpetuating this pernicious economic perspective was Britain’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

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Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

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THE TINA SCHEMA

As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was gaining traction with her hardline policies many of her conservative colleagues thought she was too harsh. In response she began calling them ‘wets’ which in Britain meant ‘inept, ineffectual, and effete’. She was famously proud of her resolute, often binary, moral convictions. In response to the economic disarray Britain was facing as she came to power, she said these words in a speech at a conservative women’s conference in 1980,

“There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative…What's the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment."

The phrase “there is no alternative” became a refrain for Thatcher. It was used so often it prompted one the ‘wets’, Norman St John-Stevas, to abbreviate it forming a retaliatory derogatory name for Thatcher – TINA. He, and other ‘wets’, took to calling her ‘Tina’. He later wrote in a book that Thatcher saw "everything in black and white [but] the universe I inhabit is made up of many shades of grey".

I suspect Thatcher was confident in her resoluteness because the neoclassical economists she relied on, both in the UK and the US, were themselves certain there was no alternative. Their confidence was, and still is, buoyed by the certainty that can come with the mathematics behind their economic models. But that certainty can be an illusion that can lead to delusion.

Education researcher, Don Ambrose, says it can start early in math education and over time this “dogmatic thinking can trap professionals, policymakers, and others into perceiving only the sterile certainty of the surface of mathematics while remaining oblivious to its messy, creative inner workings.”

He continues,

“While mathematics provides us with a considerable amount of analytic precision it still is at least somewhat susceptible to the vagaries of the human mind and open to impressive creativity.”

He quotes the prominent economist Thomas Piketty who in his 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, saying,

“For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.”

He says it can create a ‘scientific illusion’ that ignores the messy realities that, again, Adam Smith viewed as essential to a healthy economy; a shared cultural understanding, a socially just labor market, and a trustworthy government.

But even some mathematicians agree mathematics can lead one astray. The mathematician William Byers, who researches dynamical systems and the philosophy of mathematics, writes,

“What we usually call mathematics—results, proofs, and structure—is the unambiguous face of the subject…[But] looking at mathematics as a human activity, as mind-dependent, forces one to confront the ambiguous dimension of math.”

These are the very ‘shades of grey’ the ‘wet’ set Tory’s unsuccessfully settled with Margaret ‘Tina’ Thatcher. And the man Thatcher liked to blame for the economic mess she inherited was someone who would have agreed with the uncertainty these ‘wets’ were pointing to – Britain’s most famous 20th century economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes made a name for himself in the 1930s devising economic policies that proved to ease the effects of the depression that had wracked the world. His ideas were counter to neoclassical ideas, and those later championed by Thatcher. He believed, like Adam Smith, that markets should include some governmental intervention to minimize the adverse effects of recessions and depressions.

Every capitalistic government in the world had instituted his policies until the 1950s, soon after he passed away. From that point until now, the neoclassical ideology of America’s most famous 20th century economist, Milton Friedman, reigns supreme. A philosophy that promotes free-wheeling, free-trade, and free markets that are free of government restraint, and are backed by rigid and sterile mathematical and statistical models.

Keynes was no stranger to mathematics; he was awarded a scholarship to study it at Cambridge. But he did believe that it was being dogmatized, misused, and misconstrued to bolster the legitimacy of economics by wrapping it in perceived certainty, logic, and accuracy. So much so, it led people to believe there is no alternative.

In Keynes’s 1936 groundbreaking book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, he asserts this as his criticism of neoclassical economics.

“our criticism of the accepted classical theory of economics has consisted not so much in finding logical flaws in its analysis as in pointing out that its tacit assumptions are seldom or never satisfied, with the result that it cannot solve the economic problems of the actual world.

THE NEWTONIAN BABYLONIAN

Keynes’s General Theory was to generalize existing neoclassical theories and methods. In other words, marry the ‘shades of grey’ of the real world with existing mathematical methods and analysis. He was particularly focused, as much economic work is, on being able to predict economic outcomes in the future. A future that is uncertain. And with that, Keynes called for “at least a partial attempt to incorporate the fact of uncertainty into an economic theory.”

He believed this required an approach that embraced the uncertainties of the real world as clues or observed evidence that could then be scrutinized with analysis, reason, and mathematics. One person he believed personified this approach was a man he idled, Isaac Newton. His thoughts were captured in a lecture he wrote to celebrate the life of Isaac Newton in 1946 but was unable to deliver. He died three months before the event.

He wrote,

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt...”

Some scholars have latched onto Keynes use of the word ‘Babylonians’. This term is associated with an ongoing controversy in academia about two logical approaches to the social sciences. Finance, economics, and philosophy professor, Mark Stoh, characterizes it like this:

“There are two basic approaches. The first, the Cartesian-Euclidian approach, is ‘the familiar axiomatic one in which the fundamental principles of a science are taken as axioms, from which the rest are derived as theorems.’ Because it comes closest of all the social sciences to attaining this axiomatic ideal, economics has occasionally been considered to be the queen of the social sciences. The second approach is the Babylonian. According to it, there is no single logical chain from axioms to theorems; but there are several parallel, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing sets of chains, such that no particular axiom is logically basic.”

In this context, Keynes views on uncertainty fall more in line with the Babylonians. Further, Keynes characterizes Newton as using methods of inquiry that date back to the ancient times of the Babylonians. Because the mathematics and economics of Babylonian times were captured in stone and since translated, we know a great deal about how they solved mundane and complex problems. Many scholars believe they used pragmatic problem solving that embraced uncertainty and holistic approaches of various mathematical constructs.

Another famous great mind of the 20th century concurs, the renowned physicist Richard Feynman. In a 1965 lecture he talks about the distinction between what he called ‘Babylonian’ and ‘Greek’ approaches to mathematical problem solving. He asserts students learning math in these times were taught different techniques for calculating various mathematical problems. They were then given practical problems whereby they had to determine which techniques were to be linked in a chain to solve a particular problem.

Feynman describes it as a constellation of techniques that could be linked together in a variety of ways to arrive at an answer. For example, the equivalent of the Pythagorean theorem could be linked to calculating the volume of a cube. It was a holistic approach to pragmatic problem solving given the context of the situation at hand, even if the situation were to change.

What Descartes came along and did was reduce the common elements of these constellations to form a set of ordered axioms. Mathematics was then taught from the bottom up as ordered steps, each layer of the constellation building on itself to form theorems. Mathematical problem solving was then taught as ordered and deterministic with no regard for how one might leap from one technique to another should the conditions of the problem set change.

Feynman says,

“the method of starting from [the bottom] axioms is not efficient in obtaining the theorems…Working something out in geometry is not very efficient if you always have to start at the axioms, but if you had to remember a few things in [the constellation] of geometry you can always get somewhere else [in the constellation] which is much more efficient than if you do it the other way.”

Feynman believed solving problems in physics requires a Babylonian approach due to the changing nature of the natural physical world. This is in contrast with pure mathematics, as derived by Descartes and Euclid, that yields universally consistent solutions within the context of an abstracted world.

OPEN TO ALTERNATIVE SYSTEMS

In the context of economics, British economist Sheila Dow offers that in a constellation of economic mathematical tools “One chain of reasoning might rely on statistical analysis, while another might rely on historical research, for example.” Dow is a Post-Keynesian economist who expands on the work of Stoh and Feynman in her paper on the “Babylonian Mode of Thought”.

Dow expresses ‘Mode of thought’ as “the way in which arguments (or theories) are constructed and presented, how we attempt to convince others of the validity or truth of our arguments.” Her interpretation of Keynes reflection on Newton was that he “relied on intuition in order to arrive at explanations for natural phenomena, on the one hand, with the rational proofs he constructed after the fact, on the other.”

This was his ‘mode of thought’, she argues, that enabled him to make the discoveries he did. And like Feynman, she implores others to learn and apply this more ‘Babylonian’ approach to solving complex problems. That is, a pragmatic and wholistic approach through the practical application of an array of mathematical methods which are traversed over time as situations, contexts, and variables change.

Dow equates the Babylonian approach with an open system – a system of infinite unknown variables that change in relation and response to each other, and the environment in which they exist, over time. This is contrast to a closed system where all the variables, their interactions, and relationships are known and isolated in the environment in which they exist. Closed systems are divided into dual atomic parts, the internal, or endogenous, and the external, or exogenous.

Dow believes,

“Babylonian thought is neither dualistic nor atomistic. The categories used to account for social life in an evolving environment are not seen as readily falling into duals. Indeed vagueness of categories is seen to have the benefit of adaptability within a changing environment where institutions, understanding and behaviour undergo change. In a system of thought with a variety of incommensurate strands of argument, variables may be exogenous to one strand but endogenous to another.

Knowledge is in general held with uncertainty (by economic agents and by economists), so the analysis points to degrees of uncertainty. Further, some strands of argument may refer to individuals, and others to the group level, since causal forces may act in either direction. Indeed individuals are not seen as independent, and their behaviour may change as the environment changes.”

She continues,

“Similarly, Babylonian thought provides a rationale for pluralism. It justifies both methodological pluralism (methodologists analysing a range of methodologies) and pluralism of method (economists using a range of methods).”

Dow then warns that many who subscribe to conventional economic approaches, or Cartesian modes of thought, sometimes claim that ‘pluralism’ is just an excuse for sloppiness leading to an ‘anything goes’ approach and attitude. But she argues, as Feynman illustrates, that

“Babylonian mode of thought requires some criteria by which to choose segmentations of the subject matter for analysis, the chains of reasoning to pursue, and the methods employed to pursue them.”

In this regard, not only is there is a high degree of mastery of various methods required, but that their application is highly structured. This leads her to claim Babylonian modes of thought are not ‘pure pluralism’, but ‘structured pluralism.’ She adds, as did Feynman, this may require not only traversing within the domain of mathematics, economics, or in the case of Feynman, physics, but also into other domains of science and humanities.

Sorry ‘Tina’, in the pursuit of answers in complex, uncertain, and changing environments it seems alternatives are not only desirable, but necessary. Those alternatives, however, have yet to be pursued despite record income inequality. After Thatcher came John Major who, despite being responsible for a raft of immoral behavior known as ‘Tory sleaze’, was part of Britain’s longest running economic prosperity.

He was replaced in 1997 by the opposition Labour Party candidate Tony Blair. Three years into his term Thatcher was asked what she thought her greatest accomplishment was. She replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour" because he, like U.S. Democratic President Bill Clinton, adopted most of her policies. She said she "forced [her] opponents to change their minds."

The irony of the Iron Lady, and all those who cling to the belief there is no economic policy alternative, is that the illusion of certainty represented by neoclassical and Cartesian closed systems has created more social and environmental uncertainty than ever. We live in organic, ever changing open system in uncertain times, in an uncertain world. If ever there’s a time for an alternative, it seems it would be now. It’s time we change our ‘mode of thought’ and convince others that the pragmatic and wholistic Babylonian approach is a viable alternative. Let’s turn ‘TINA’ into ‘TAMA’ – There are many alternatives.

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Hello Interactors,

Today is part one of a two-part exploration. I was curious as to why conventional economics continues to rely so heavily on deterministic mathematical models that assume perfect conditions even though they know such inert situations don’t exist in nature. It may tie back to the Enlightenment and the popular beliefs of Newton and Descartes who merged Christian beliefs with mathematic certainty – despite viable alternative theories they helped squelch.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE SPERMISTS

Isaac Newton and René Descartes were spermists. They believed they entered this world through preformation. This theory states every future organism is wrapped up in a seed or sperm as a preformed miniature version of itself. This was the dominant belief among Europe’s most respected Enlightenment thinkers. They believed not only did a Christian god create all the plants and animals, including humans, but all the future ones too. Intercourse, they surmised, is a magical act that initiates the growth of microscopic animacules which then grow until they are fully formed. It’s easy to brush this off as a point in time lack of knowledge and excuse these brilliant minds. We might say, “They just didn’t know any better.” But it turns out there were other brilliant minds at the time who thought they were crazy.

But powerful people are not easily persuaded. They, along with the church, continued to push the idea that preformation is as elementary to evolution as mathematical axioms are to theorems. A mathematical certainty that one day seduced many scientists, and later economists, into similar deterministic expressions.

One of the early preformation influencers was the Dutch philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, Bernard Nieuwentyt (1654-1718). Three years before his death, he published a soon to be popular book, The Religious Philosopher: Or, The Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator.In it he writes,

“This however is sure enough…that all living Creatures whatever proceed from a Stamin or Principle, in which the Limbs and Members of the Body are folded and wound as it were in a Ball of Thread; which by the Operation of adventitious Matter and Humours are filled up and unfolded, till the Structure of all the Parts have the Magnitude of a full grown Body.”

His book was translated into English in 1724 and its influence spread. In 1802, the English clergyman and philosopher, William Paley (1743-1805), expanded on the ‘Ball of Thread’ analogy with his infamous watchmaker analogy. Using examples of mechanistic functions of the human body like joints and muscles, he expanded the popular notion that this is the work of a supreme designer – their Christian god. He writes,

“Contemplating an animal body in its collective capacity, we cannot forget to notice, what a number of instruments are brought together, and often within how small a compass. It is a cluster of contrivances.”

But Paley wasn’t alone, nor was he the first. Both Descartes and Newton had already remarked as much. Newton once wrote, “like a watchmaker, God was forced to intervene in the universe and tinker with the mechanism from time to time to ensure that it continued operating in good working order."

The confidence of spermists was buoyed when spermatozoa was discovered by the Dutch microscopist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek in 1677. But the seed of the idea dates all the way back to Pythagoras. He believed male semen is fluid that collects and stores different elements from the body like the bone and brain. He said, “semen is a drop of the brain.” The woman provided a host and nourishment so the male semen could unfold inside her body.

Another Greek philosopher, Empedocles, refuted the Pythagorean claim 100 years later noting offspring often inherit characteristics of the mother. He proposed there was a blending of male and female root reproductive elements in plants and animals that has the potential to produce blended varieties as their offspring. Empedocles was on to something, but his theory was overshadowed by a more popular theory and powerful name, Aristotle.

THE OVISTS

Aristotle believed both men and women provided different forms of reproductive purified blood in the form of semen and menstrual fluids. Because semen appeared more pure than menstrual fluids, he surmised it must have the advantage. Therefore, the male provided the instructions, design, or blueprint for formation and the woman provided the material. The ‘blood’ metaphor is alive today despite our knowledge of genetics. J.K Rowling did her part in her Harry Potter series to perpetuate and popularize the blood metaphor with ‘pure-bloods’ and ‘half-bloods’ or the derogatory ‘mud-bloods’.

Aristotle’s ideas were brought to life in the 17th and 18th century by the spermists nemesis, the ovists. Ovists were rallying behind the discoveries of William Harvey (1578-1657) and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) of female eggs in female bodies, the union of the sperm and egg, and the formation of an embryo which in turn unleashed the production of various parts of the body. Harvey called this cellular formation of individual parts in plants and animals epigenesis. An idea Aristotle also suggested.

But one Dutch spermist, Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680), used this to further the preformation theory, but with a twist. Evidence of the union of egg and sperm, he suggested, must mean the future organism is embedded inside the head of the sperm in miniature form waiting to become whole with the help of the egg. A century later, this prompted a Swiss scientist, Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), to offer a counter ovist preformation theory. He suggested a Christian god planted future generations not inside the sperm, but inside the egg – like nested eggs within eggs.

Meanwhile, a group of naturalist scientists opposed these Cartesian and Pythagorean, mechanistic preformation theories. The French naturalist, mathematician, and philosopher, Pierre Louise Maupertuis (1698-1759), further rejected theological explanations and believed both the male and female possess particles that come together to form unique characteristics in their offspring. He is credited with being the first to observe evolutionary hereditarian changes in organisms over time suggesting some characteristics are dominant while others are recessive.

The German physiologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-1794) expanded on this work and revived Harvey’s theory of epigenesis. By observing chick embryos, he discovered a supernatural action occurs once the sperm is implanted in the egg. This sparks what he called a vital action “vis essentialis” that culminates over the period of gestation creating a fully formed body. This is the origins of what we now call embryology.

Those in the mechanistic and theological Cartesian camp weren’t having it. They, like the church, rejected talk of indescribable, supernatural, and immaterial ‘vital actions.’ It was not only heretical, but suggested science was going backwards to embrace medieval miracles of the occult. Either way, if there were forces at work on matter, the preformation mechanists believed it too would have been preordained by a Christian god. The co-inventor of differential calculus, German polymath and theologian, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), reasoned like this,

“But if in truth an intelligible explanation is to be sought in the nature of the thing it will come from what is clearly apprehended in the thing…for the success of the whole system is due to divine preformation.”

THE NATURALISTS

Toward the middle of the 18th century the French naturalist and mathematician, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), began publishing his work on natural history, Histoire Naturelle – an opus that amassed 36 volumes that continued to be amended even after his death. By looking at the history and evolution of the natural world, Buffon was the first to articulate patterns of ecological succession – the successive structural change of species over time. He rejected Christian Creationism and theories of the preordained mechanistic unfolding of nature and provided vivid and expertly rendered illustrations to the contrary.

He took elements of Aristotle’s blood theories, qualitative approaches to inquiry, and aspects of both spermists and ovists to merge them with empirical evidence and compelling writing to make convincing arguments for unexplainable actions vital to the creation and evolution of the natural world.

As the late professor of history and Director of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies at UCLA, Peter Hanns Reill, wrote, Buffon “emphasized the primacy of living over inanimate matter, asserted the existence of inner, active forces as central agents in nature, envisioned a world of new creation and leaps in nature, and proclaimed the ineffable quality of individuality and the manifold variety of nature.”

Through “comparison”, “resemblance”, “affinity”, and “analogical reasoning” he “revitalized and historicized nature without denying the existence of a comprehensible order.” This provided a path for science to embrace qualitative reasoning without foregoing the rigor, language, and quantitative aspects of mathematics embraced by mechanists like Newton and Descartes.

It wasn’t only ecological communities that could be explained this way. Society and politics could too. This admission further worried mechanists and theologians. They feared any acknowledgement that mysterious random events, be it at a particle or societal level, that could lead to a ‘vital action’ creating unforeseen mutations accuses the Christian god of not understanding his own creations. It would reject both ‘divine preformation’ and ‘God’s will’.

This came at a time of social revolutions, debates, and contestations over human rights, freedoms of religion, and ‘we the people.’ Mechanists married the certainty of mathematics with the certainty of their Christian god to explain the world. If nature and society lacked the linear precession of clocks, compasses, and mathematical calculations, they feared such uncertainty would unravel societal order and unleash chaos.

Naturalists continued to point to ‘internal’ vital forces that created perceptible ‘external’ microscopic and macroscopic evolutions that countered the dominant inert, deterministic, and mechanical philosophies and beliefs. But the seduction of certainty remains with us to this day, even when we know it not to be true.

The Scottish philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), suggested as much writing,

“Our notion of order in civil society is frequently false: it is taken from the analogy of subjects inanimate and dead; we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature; we think it consistent only with obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the hands of a few.”

Ferguson goes on to use a brick wall as an analogy. He continues,

“The good order of stones in a wall, is their being properly fixed in places for which they are hewn; were they to stir the building must fall: but the order of men in society, is their being placed where they are properly qualified to act. The first is a fabric made of dead and inanimate parts, the second is made of living and active members. When we seek in society for the order of mere inaction and tranquility, we forget the nature of our subject, and find the order of slaves, not of free men.”

Buffon’s new modes of inquiry transformed fields formally beholden to mechanistic dogma like medicine, physiology, and chemistry. But it seems economics remain seduced by the determinism of linear, mechanistic, mathematical approaches despite it being a branch of the social sciences. While it may have dropped religion, it has yet to fully embrace the “notion of order in civil society is frequently false.” It’s time conventional economics acknowledge there are mysterious ‘vital forces’ internal to nature and society resulting in external perturbations that propagate indeterminant permutations.

Tune in next week as I explore what that might look like.

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Hello Interactors,

Last week’s post on Karl Marx introduced issues he had with the Scottish philosopher and so-called father of economics, Adam Smith. I found myself digging into Smith’s life and work before his contributions to economics. Which, as history shows, was barely recognized until 1942. His name is now more popular than ever.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAKING SENSE OF THE SENSES

Visiting his grandfather in Strathenry, the four-year boy wandered to the banks of the River Leven. He was a weak boy, shy, and prone to talking to himself. He’d lost his father three months before he was born and was being raised by his mother, whom he adored, alone.

When the boy did not return to his grandfather’s home, he and his mother went looking. Surely in a panic assuming the worst, they soon encountered a man who had just witnessed something suspicious. He had come across a group of nomadic people heading toward a nearby town that included a woman struggling to hold onto a screaming child.

A search crew was dispatched immediately. And there, in the town of Leslie, nearly a mile from Strathenry, the woman was spotted with the boy. As the crew approached the woman, she dropped the screaming child who ran to his saviors. The crew then returned the boy to his mother. He never left her side again. He did, however, like keeping to himself until the day he died. And he never stopped talking to himself either. It’s hard to know if he was traumatized by that event, but it didn’t stop him from becoming one of Scotland’s most famous academics. Had that group of nomads managed to kidnap that young boy, the founding father of economics would not have been Adam Smith.

Smith was born in 1723, entered school in at age six, and began learning Latin as early as 1733, age ten. He was sent to one of the best secondary schools in Scotland, the Burgh School in Kirkcaldy. Kirkcaldy was a port town with a population of 1500 people. Though Smith was shy and kept to himself, he was nonetheless engaged and observant. He kept track of the town’s activities and was familiar with some of its local characters. The town was home to shippers and traders and thus full of tall tales from journey men and smugglers.

It also had multiple nail manufacturers that young Adam liked to visit. It was there and then he was first exposed to division of labor and how the value of labor was compensated. Nailers, he observed, were paid in nails which they would then exchange for other goods at local stores. Perhaps these observations, and his high marks in mathematics and classics, were the first seeds to grow as he entered the University of Glasgow in 1737 at the ripe age of 14.

Smith continued his studies in mathematics and Latin but added Greek and Moral Philosophy. This was the glimmering beginnings of the enlightenment and he himself was about to be enlightened. His math professor was Robert Simson, an eccentric man made famous through Europe as the “Restorer of Grecian Geometry”, as his tombstone reads. The Simson line in geometry is named after him and he also noted a curious relationship among Fibonacci numbers. As the values increase, the ratio of adjacent numbers approaches the golden ratio of 1.6180... But his most influential professor was Thomas Hutcheson, his Moral Philosophy instructor – a discipline Smith went on to become famous for himself.

But when Smith was in school, Hutcheson was the popular one in Britain. He was one of Britain’s premiere moralists and key figure in a long line of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including his professor, Thomas Locke. He was also the first professor in Glasgow to lecture in the native tongue of his students and not in Latin. This alone made him an easy target among conservative faculty, but it was what he was teaching that really rattled them.

Hutcheson believed, contrary to the established and prevailing belief, human action does not descend from the will of God, but from one’s own mind. And even then, we have little to no control over our own actions but are instead influenced by our complex interactions with people and place.

He believed we form images and beliefs in our mind by sensing the environment around us through our five physical senses. We then formulate ideas which lead to feelings either pleasure or pain. This, in turn, leads to the creation of other senses internal to our mind – though still interrelated and interdependent on our five external senses. He believed there are many mental senses generated, but three emerged as particularly notable – especially as we learn more of Adam Smith’s own philosophies.

The first is a public sense for the happiness of others and the pleasure it brings, but also the sadness that comes with observing misery in others. The second is the moral sense upon reflection of our own good or evil, and perceived good or evil in others, and the feelings of pleasure or pain that ensue. And the third is a sense of honor that comes from the admiration from others who observe the good in us for the positive actions we may have taken – the very actions of which are necessary for sensing the pleasure that comes when seeing others are happy.

Hutcheson observed these emotions are not willed. We cannot will ourselves into happiness, but we can will ourselves to take actions that create public conditions that enable feelings of pleasure to arise. These pleasurable feelings arise, as a moral sense, out of complex interactions among others, to instill a public sense of pleasure, which upon reflection of our own behavior instills pleasure in us as a sense of honor. Good behavior toward ourselves and toward others makes us and others feel good. We are all then rewarded with a sense of honor which in turn motivates more good behavior.

A SENTIMENTAL MOOD FROM A PRUDE DUDE

Hutcheson’s ideas shock the religious establishment who believed goodness can only come through getting in the good graces with God through worship. One 19th-century biographer noted Hutcheson was “bitterly attacked by the older generation outside the walls of the College as a ‘new light’ fraught with dangers to all accepted beliefs, and at the same time worshipped like an idol by the younger generation inside the walls, who were thankful for the light he brought them, and had no quarrel with it for being new.”

His views were also in opposition to another influential philosophical figure during these times, Thomas Hobbes, who believed our will to act was rooted not in altruism, but in selfishness and egoism. Though Hutcheson admitted there is virtue in tempered self-love, taken to an extreme could erode not only one’s moral sense, but also public sense and a reciprocal sense of honor. Clearly, Hobbesian beliefs made their way into colonial America and are present in cultural norms and beliefs today, especially in the neoliberal tradition that helped pull Smith, and the single occurrence of the words ‘invisible hand’, from obscurity.

But many of Hutcheson’s teachings also made their way to colonial America. His book, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was used as a textbook at Harvard in the 1730s. It included familiar U.S. declaration of independence constructs, like “unalienable rights are essential Limitations in all Governments” (his italics) and the public has a right to resist oppressive governments. The professor of Moral Philosophy at the College of Philadelphia, Francis Alison, was a student of Hutcheson and three signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence were Alison’s students, Thomas McKean, George Read, and James Smith.

But Hutcheson’s most famous student became Adam Smith. And his fame and impact are attributed to the teachings and reading of Francis Hutcheson. Smith’s primary contribution to philosophy extended Hutcheson’s ideas of ‘senses’ in his book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, that was written in 1759, seventeen years before his more popular economic treatise, Wealth of Nations. Smith believed that when we see another suffer, it makes an ‘impression of our own senses’ by relating to a similar situation in which we’ve been in. He writes, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person”.

These feelings of sympathy are expanded on in later revisions of his theories to address injustice. If one witnesses an act of injustice, one feels sympathy with the victim but not with the perpetrator. This is grounds for punishment against the perpetrator. Smith writes, “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished.” He continues that as true as this may be, there’s a tendency not to attribute this to a necessary condition of a society. He adds, “But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”

This sentiment was directed toward politicians (or statesmen) and industrialists (or projectors, people who build projects) in a document that predates Wealth of Nations but contains its central themes. Smith writes, “Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as the materials of a sort of political mechanics. Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations on human affairs, and it requires no more than to leave her alone and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs…Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degrees of affluence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Smith no doubt was a free market and free trade advocate, but also preached modesty, temperance, and justice. And he routinely ran to the defense of those with lesser means or who were victims of injustice. For example, when wealthy consumers of foreign garments sought Smith’s support in abolishing a ban on imported yarn, he surprised many by supporting the embargo. And it wasn’t the flax farmers or domestic yarn corporations he was protecting, but the women living and spinning yarn in their homes scattered across the country.

And in the Wealth of Nations, he defends the right for poor people in cities to earn enough to by clothes and shoes fit enough to blend in with society. He writes, “But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt…in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessity of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them.”

Smith also suggested sumptuary laws, taxes on consumable high-end goods, to limit luxurious or immodest behavior. He writes, “The high price of such commodities does not necessarily diminish the ability of the inferior ranks of people to bring up families. Upon the sober and industrious poor, taxes upon such commodities act as sumptuary laws, and dispose them either to moderate, or to refrain altogether from the use of superfluities which they can no longer easily afford.”

For an economy and a society to function well, Smith believed, one must put themselves in the shoes of others and act in accordance to bring about the three internal senses Hutcheson spoke of: a public sense for the happiness of others, a moral sense to reflect on the good feelings that come with doing good things, and a sense of honor that comes when others admire you for your good intentions and actions.

WAS THE SENTIMENTALIST AN ENVIRONMENTALIST?

Smith’s insight into markets, especially in the dawning of the industrial age, was that technology helped to reduce the price of goods making them affordable to more and more people. This increased the flow of money to manufacturers to buy more capital goods, like machines and energy, thus reducing the need for, and time needed to, produce handcrafted goods. This created a win-win situation for the society at large so long as people cooperated and were sympathetic to each other’s needs through trust in each other, business, and the government.

This was not something Smith believed should be left to a free-wheeling, laissez-fare market economy free of interventions. Smith believed three conditions were necessary for an effective economy and with each he paired a moral value:

• State-Justice: “Commerce and manufacturers” he wrote, “can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice…” This is achieved, he believed, through the administration of laws that inspire security through enforceable regulation and redistribution of tax derived revenues. For Smith, trust in government is a requisite for a healthy economy.

• Market-Liberty: “Trade opens a new market…” The “causes seem to be: the liberty of trade…notwithstanding some restraints…”, he said. The freedom to create, market, and compete on value or price, comes with prudence and protection from monopolies. He wrote, “It is thus that the single advantage which the monopoly procures to a single order of men is in many different ways hurtful to the general interest of the country.”

• Community-Benevolence: It is here Smith relies on his philosophy of ‘moral sentiments” and a shared commitment to each other across a community. To do so, he, albeit naively, admits, “many reputable rules and maxims for the conduct of human life, must have been laid down and approved of by common consent…” The Dutch economic pluralist, Irene van Severan, reminds us that social economists may refer to this as ‘group cohesiveness’ or ‘social cohesion’, institutional economists might call it ‘the management of common pool resources’, and some feminists economists might simply call it ‘caring’.

There is much debate on whether Smith would attribute the same care and moral sentiments to other animals and the natural environment. I suspect he would have. I would imagine over exploitation or seemingly extravagant indulgences to benefit a few, or even many, would have been met with questions of reciprocity, modesty, benevolence, and prudence. He would have walked in the shoes of those hurt by economic, environmental, or social exploits and demanded justice be served.

At the same time, Smith encouraged industry, consumerism, and growth, albeit restrained, yet all three are the engines of our environmental demise. Could it be Smith’s social cohesion is an unachievable ideal beyond groups of a certain size? Perhaps free trade among industrious people has its limits beyond a certain scale or application of technology. Then again, he may look at the innovation curves of renewable energy, signs of an invigorated green economy, and declare the liberty of market competition is again leading to a better future for all. It also wouldn’t be lost on him that it was the state funded subsidies that helped feed that momentum. At the same time, he likely would have been screaming for a carbon and luxury goods tax long ago.

I think there are lessons to be drawn from Smith, and his mentor Hutcheson, that could be used to frame a green, moral, or circular economy, just as the neoliberals from the 1940s to now drew from Smith for the economic systems we currently have.

I do wonder if that kidnapping incident as a four-year-old indeed scared him into a need to feel secure. He never married and lived with his mom, in the same house he grew up in, until the day she and he died. I can imagine he must have ‘walked in the shoes’ of those poor nomadic people as an adult and surely felt moral sentiments – maybe even empathy. He might have even imagined himself walking alongside them had he been captured. He may have, in his own words, “entered as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person”.

Did that incident motivate him to pursue the path he did, to ensure his own fate, and to devise philosophies and theories that allowed for the least suffering of the most people? He envisioned, as he wrote in Wealth of Nations, that “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.” That vision may be naïve, and perhaps not be achievable, but the path toward it is a worthy moral sentiment.

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Hello Interactors,

I stumbled across a book that picks ten influential economists and teases out elements from each that contribute to ideas circling the circular economy. It turns out bits and pieces of what many consider a ‘new’ idea have existed among notable economists, left and right, for centuries.

The first is a name known to most worldwide, even if they only get their history from Fox News. But had a gun been aimed more accurately, his name nor his global influence would have been a part of history at all.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE DUEL AT SCHOOL

Class boundaries come into focus in college towns as diverse clusters of first-year students descend, mingle, and sort. Such was the case for one young man in Germany. It’s not that he was poor, but to the über he was. Having been born to Jewish parents, he was used to being bullied. Though he thought violence was an absurd remedy for injustice – after all, he went to college to study philosophy and belonged to a poetry club – but he also believed that sometimes one must stand their ground by whatever means.

And so there he stood, 18 years old, with his back to his adversary, about to engage in a duel. As he breathed in, I imagine he could feel the cold pull from the barrel of the pistol pointed to the sky inches from his chin. With each step his pulse must have quickened. He must have felt the gun handle twist in his sweaty palms as he gingerly rested his tremoring finger on the trigger. He knew at any second, he must turn quickly. He must not flinch. And he must not die.

In his final steps I imagine his world must have slowed down. And then, in a blur, he whirled around and fired at his challenger. The blast must have lit his face, punctuated by the sound of a whirring bullet. He felt the skin just above his eyebrow burn. I can see him lifting his shaking hand to his forehead expecting blood. But it was just an abrasion. The bullet had grazed his skull. That bullet was millimeters from ending Marxism before it even started. Had it landed, Karl Marx would have been dead at 18.

My sense is that when most people read the word Marxism, they think Communism. He’s best known for two massive publications, The Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital – or often simplified and anglified to just Capital. But he eventually distanced himself from the direction Communism and even Marxism had taken. As we shall see, he was a professional journalist for most of his adult life and thus a staunch free press and free speech advocate – two freedoms communist authoritarianism eradicated.

The word, ‘Marxism’, today is often used by some to discredit progressive pro-social political and economic ideas given its connotations to communism. A holdover from American Cold War McCarthyism. It turns the disparaging came long before the 1940s and 50s. It was used the same way in France and other parts of Europe in the late 1800s. So much so that Marx’s collaborator on The Communist Manifesto, Fredrich Engels, once wrote,

“What is called ‘Marxism’ in France is certainly a very special article, to the point that Marx once said to Lafargue [Marx’s son-in-law]: "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist."

Marx’s economic work is less well-known and Das Kapital remains the most accurate and lucid critique of the negative effects of capitalism. Marx was first and foremost a philosopher and his arguments take aim at the moral and ethical implications of capitalistic systems. Which is why circular economic advocates often turn to Marx for their own philosophical underpinnings.

Coincidently, the man credited with capitalism, and whom Marx often took aim, Adam Smith, was also a philosopher. In fact, he mostly wrote about liberal philosophy and relatively little about economics. I wonder if today these two philosophers, who many see representing the left and the right of political economics, would be unsuspecting allies or dueling advisories?

Karl Marx’s first year at university in Bonn, Germany was like many freshmen. He partied a lot. But Bonn was also home to radical politics at the time. Students were heavily surveilled by the police due to semi-organized radical attempts by student organizations to overthrow the local government. It turns out the poetry club he had joined was not about poetry, it was a front for a resurgent radical political movement. Though, having already spent a night in jail for drunken disorderly behavior, Marx may have mostly been interested in the social side of the club.

Paralleling political turmoil was class conflict between the so-called ‘true Prussians and aristocrats’ and ‘plebeians’ like Marx. The near fatal event came about when an aristocrat challenged Marx to a duel. Marx indeed thought dueling was absurd, but evidently, he, like many men in those days, thought it a worthy way to ‘man up’. His dad certainly didn’t think so and accelerated the plan to transfer his son to the University of Berlin to study law.

HEGELIAN REBELLION

While in Berlin, Marx also continued to study philosophy and wrote both fiction and nonfiction on the side. One of his most influential professors was Eduard Gans. Gans had been brought to the university by none other than the influential German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had died just four years before Marx arrived in Berlin, and Marx, like many, was fascinated by his work.

After Hegel’s death, Hegelians (as his disciples were called) became divided between Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians. The right interpreted Christian elements in his philosophy seeking to associate his ideas and popularity with the Christian-led Prussian political establishment. The left embraced aspects of reason and freedom of thought they believed Christianity and the Prussian government limited. Gans’ lectures tended more toward the left and so did Marx who joined a radical group of Young Hegelians seeking revolution.

After graduating, Marx left for Cologne, Germany in 1842 to become a journalist for the Rhineland News. He expanded on Hegel’s ideas around the role of government in providing social benefits for all and not just the privileged class. He openly criticized right leaning European governments and his radical socialist views garnered the attention of government sensors. Marx said,

“Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear."

He also became interested in political economics and became frustrated with other Young Hegelians who continued to focus the movement on religion.

His critical writing eventually got him kicked out of Germany, so he fled to Paris. There too his writing got him in trouble. The Prussian King warned the French interior minister of Marx’s intentions and was expelled from France. On to Belgium he went where he, again, was kicked out. Marx eventually took exile in London in 1850 where he familiarized himself with the writing of Europe’s leading economists, including Britain’s most famous, Adam Smith.

His research passion project brought in no money. Risking extreme poverty for him and his family, he took a job as European correspondent writing for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1850. After ten years, he quit when the paper refused to publicly denounce slavery at the start of the civil war. During that decade, he continued to research in the reading room of the British Museum amassing 800 pages of notes which became the source material for his first successful 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. At the time, he was also witnessing firsthand the deplorable conditions London factory laborers endured at the dawn of the industrial age and the destruction of nature with it.

Marx’s primary critique was summed up in a single German word: Produktionsweise which can be translated as "the distinctive way of producing" or what is commonly called the capitalist mode of production. Marx believed the system of capitalism distinctly exists for the production and accumulation of private capital through private wealth, hinging on two mutual dependent components:

• Wealth accumulation by private parties to build or buy capital, like land, buildings, natural resources, or machines, to produce and sell goods and services

• A wealth asymmetry between those who accumulate the wealth and capital (employers) and the those needed to produce the good or service (laborers) in a way that yields the profits needed to accumulate the wealth (i.e. cheap or free labor)

Capital accumulation existed in markets long before Karl Marx and Adam Smith, but the accumulation was limited, including by nature. For example, let’s say I start a garden next year growing zucchini. Zucchini grown in the Northwest United States can become overwhelmingly productive. I would likely yield more zucchini than my family could consume. I could decide to exchange the remaining zucchini for money at a local farmer’s market. In economic terms, I grew a commodity (C) and would be exchanging them for money (M) thereby turning C into M.

Let’s imagine while at the market I am drawn to another commodity that I’m not willing to make myself, honey. I can now use my money (M) to buy a commodity (C1) grown by someone else. The beekeeper could easily take the money I gave them (M1) and exchange it for a good they’re unwilling to grow or make themselves (C2). This chain of exchange could continue throughout the entire market.

This linear exchange of money through markets was common leading up to the industrial age. Money was the value exchanged but the generation of money only happened at the rate of natural production or extraction of natural commodities or by industrious human hands. Wealth accumulation could indeed occur by saving it or exchanging it for something that may rise in value faster than, say, zucchini, like property or gold.

THOSE DUTCH DO MUCH

With the dawn of the industrial age, Marx observed capitalists showed up to the market with large sums of accumulated wealth at the outset. Wealth often came through inheritance, but also rent of property (sometimes stolen, as occurred during colonization) or profits from an existing or past enterprise. This money (M) is then used to invest in the means necessary to produce, or trade, a good or service (C). The capitalist themselves need not want or need their good or service, they may not be interested in it at all. Their primary concern, according to Marx, is to covert their initial investment (M) into more money (M+) through profit made on the sale of the good. They then take their accumulated money (M+) and use it to invest in the production of, or trade with, another good or service (C+).

Due to the efficiencies gained through the advent, invention, and innovation of energy and machines the rate of production greatly increased in the industrial age. And with it profits. This inspired entrepreneurs to take risks into new ventures thereby diversifying the market while creating additional engines of wealth and capital accumulation. Herein lies the Marxist claim on the primary motivation of capitalism – turn capital into more capital through one or many forms of profiteering.

Again, this concept predates Marx or Smith. In the 1600s the Dutch created a market expressly for the exchange of money for a piece, (also known as a stock or share) in a company. It was another way to accumulate wealth for the purpose of building capital. The first to utilize this market in 1602 was the Dutch India Company leading Marx to comment, “Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the seventeenth century.”

Marx predicted the eventual outcome of unbridled wealth accumulation would be monopolistic behavior. Those who accumulate wealth also generate the power to buy out competitors leading to not only consolidation of wealth, but power. And not just economic power, political power too. We all know too well how wealth and power can sway election results and lobbying strength.

Those sucked into capitalism need not necessarily be greedy. It’s the nature of the pursuit of business in a capitalist system to compete on price. This was particularly apparent in what Marx observed. One way capitalists lowered the price of a good was to flood the market with it. The only way to do that is to increase production. But to earn necessary profits to accumulate necessary capital on a lower priced good meant lowering the amount of money spent on capital (i.e. real estate, raw goods, or machines) and/or labor (i.e. employee wages). This led to increasing wealth disparities and further strengthened the asymmetry Marx claimed was necessary in the capitalist mode of production. It’s not necessary to be greedy to win, but you can’t win without competing on price. And too often it’s the workers who pay the price. This was Marx’s biggest beef with capitalism.

Wealth disparities are now the greatest in history and the number of natural resources needed to create low-cost goods in the competitive global race to bottom barrel prices are nearing earthly limits. Meanwhile, as more people are pulled out of poverty and urban areas grow exponentially, more natural resources are demanded. Including for the necessary energy to make, move, and manage the mess we consumers create. We seem compelled to continually capitulate to creeping capitalism.

It leads many to wonder, do we need capitalism? Marx concludes in Das Kapital that capitalism cannot exist forever within earth’s natural resource limitations. But he may be surprised to find that it has lasted as long as it has. To reject capitalism, or assume, as Marx did, that capitalism is a natural evolution on a path toward some form of communal economically balanced society, does not necessitate rejecting markets. Nor does it necessarily imply going ‘back’ to pre-capitalist times, like 16th century Holland.

But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to the Dutch. They may be onto something yet again. A Dutch company called Bundles has partnered with the German appliance manufacturer Miele to create an in-home laundry service. Instead of, or in addition to, Miele racing to making more and more washing machines, selling to more and more people, at lower and lower prices, they lease the washer and dryer to Bundles who then installs and maintains the appliances in homes for a monthly fee. The consumer pays for a quality machine serviced by a reputable agent, Bundles and Miele get to split the revenue, and Miele is incented to make high quality and long-lasting appliances to earn higher profits. They’ve since expanded this idea to coffee and espresso machines. It’s an attempt at a more circular economy by reducing consumption, energy, and resource extraction, all while utilizing existing markets in a form of capitalism. It’s a start.

But perhaps not enough of a change for Marx. Or maybe so. In 1872, eleven years before his death and twenty-two years before Miele was founded, he gave a speech in Amsterdam. He acknowledged, “there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.” As in his youth, it appears he found violence to be an unworthy course of action for injustice. But also consistent with that eventful day in Bonn, 1836, as he was challenged to a duel, he also has his limits. His speech continued, “This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.”

REFERENCES:

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (RLE Marxism). Boris Nicolaievsky, Otto Maenchen-Helfen. 2015. Published originally in 1936.

Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists. Irene van Staveren. 2021.

Letter to E. Bernstein. Friedrich Engels. 1882. [“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi je ne suis pas marxist” (Friedrich Engels, “Lettre à E. Bernstein,” 2 novembre 1882. MIA: F. Engels - Letter to E. Bernstein (marxists.org).]

La Liberte speech. Karl Marx. The International Working Men's Association.1872.

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Hello Interactors,

I took a break traveling to the Midwest and East Coast of the United States visiting family and friends the last few weeks, but am back now. Today I continue my inquiry into the ‘circular economy’ by exploring its history. While it is often portrayed as a recent phenomenon, the origins date back to 1945. And since then, it’s traversed a vast landscape of economic and political ideas and philosophies that are as seemingly polarizing as today’s politics and economies!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE ECONOMY OF PERMANANCE

The guest room was void of furniture and the pungent stench of the squatting toilets punctured the hot humid air. Joseph’s appointment wasn’t until 2:00PM, so he waited outside along the cool banks of the Sabarmati. This significantly religious Indian river would have been free of garbage and toxins in 1929.

When it was time for his meeting, he climbed the riverbank. His steps were aided by a long walking stick. As he crested to flat ground he looked up and saw an old man under a tree spinning in circles. He stood there leaning on his stick watching the man twirl for what felt like five minutes or more. Suddenly he stopped and looked at Joseph with a toothless grin and said, “You must be Joseph.” It was then Joseph realized his 2:00 meeting was to be outside. For standing before him was the man he was to meet – Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi sat on the ground, legs crossed, as his white robe draped over his knees. Joseph felt compelled to join him. As he sat, he felt the dirt skid under his pressed trousers as he loosened his starched white shirt and black tie.

Joseph Kumarappa, better known as J. C. Kumarappa, was there at Gandhi’s request. Gandhi had read a paper he had written on the role public finance played in poverty-stricken India and wanted him to write a column in Gandhi’s weekly magazine called Young India. By the time of this meeting, Gandhi’s revolutionary movement left him fearful he’d be imprisoned at any moment. He wanted his magazine to continue carrying his message with Kumarappa as a contributing writer.

After years of publishing successful articles, Gandhi asked Kumarappa to turn his work into a small pamphlet for further dissemination. He agreed and asked Gandhi to write the forward. Soon there after, Gandhi was imprisoned. As was Kumarappa.

Gandhi wrote the forward on a train to Bombay in August of 1945. It began, “Dr. Kumarappa's on ‘The Economy of Permanence’ is a jail production.” He continued that it is through “Plain Living and High Thinking” that “we shall arrive at the economy of permanence in the place of that of the fleeting nature we see around us at present.”

J. C. Kumarappa was one of Gandhi’s closest collaborators and chief economist. Kumarappa observed,

“There are certain things found in Nature which apparently have no life and do not grow or increase, and so get exhausted or consumed by being used. The world possesses a certain stock or reservoir of such materials as coal, petroleum, ores or minerals like iron, copper, gold etc. These being available in fixed quantities, may be said to be 'transient' while the current of overflowing water in a river or the constantly growing timber of a forest may be considered 'permanent' as their stock is inexhaustible in the service of man when only the flow or increase is taken advantage of.”

He advocated for maintaining an economy of continuity and circularity with nature. Using the bee as a metaphor, he wrote,

“The bees etc. while gathering the nectar and pollen from these plants for their own good, fertilize the flowers and the grains, that are formed in consequence, again become the source of life of the next generation of plants.”

While Kumarappa was trained as an economist in the West at Columbia University, he was critical of its exploitive orthodoxy. He said, “The Western plans are material centred. That is to say, they want to exploit all resources.” He was encouraged to pursue his economic philosophies by his professor and progressive economist, Edwin Seligman. Kumarappa’s book, The Economy of Permanence forms the foundation for Gandhian Economics and is one of the first known precursors to what we now call Circular Economy.

SPACE COWBOYS OF THE COMMONS

The critique of over exploitive economies returned in 1966 when the economist and cofounder of Systems Theory, Kenneth Boulding, described it as a “cowboy economy”. He chose the image of a cowboy because,

“the cowboy [is] symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior...” He offered that “systems may be open or closed in respect to a number of classes of inputs and outputs”

and that the ‘cowboy’ mentality assumes earth to be an open system filled with limitless natural resources as inputs for outputs – namely, products for consumption.

Instead, he offered another metaphor gaining in popularity in the late sixties – a “spaceman”. He said, “the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, [is] without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution…therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system…” His ideas for such a circular economy were summarized in a short, but influential, paper titled, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.

Two years later, in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote a paper for the publication Science that popularized a century old dilemma regarding the economic use of shared natural resources. It is called The Tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy, he theorized, is that any shared natural resource will become over exploited or polluted because people would act out of self-interest versus sharing and caring for the common good.

He wrote,

“Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

He called for “coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.” Hardin’s primary study was population growth as was the British economist William Forster Lloyd who first introduced the theory of the commons in 1833. Hardin wasn’t the only one concerned with population growth and its impact on nature.

The same year Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons, 1968, a Stanford biologist and his wife, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published a book on the effects of population growth called The Population Bomb. It warned of a worldwide famine and social upheaval due to human overpopulation on a planet of limited resources. They called for “legislation to stop the wasting of resources” asking governments to “move toward creating a vast waste recovery industry, an industry that might well make ‘trash’ obsolete. Reusable containers might be required by law for virtually all products”, they believed.

More technological solutions began creeping into precursors to circular economy four years later in a 1972 report called The Limits of Growth. The lead author was Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist, professor, and writer who started as a research fellow under Jay Forrester at MIT. I mentioned Forrester back in May; he is the founder of the field of system dynamics – the study of nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time. The Limits of Growth was the culmination of a computer simulation using the World3 model developed by Forrester.

The researchers used “population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources" as five primary variables in computing the effects of exponential population and economic growth in a world of limited resources. It predicted that

"the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity."

They surmised, like the Ehrlich’s, that “technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state” including “new methods of waste collection to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling.”

Throughout the 1970s came more calls for ‘ecological design’, ‘steady-state economics’, and studies of ‘deep ecology’ aimed at staving off a catastrophic ‘overshoot’. In 2020 a group of researchers compiled a literature review of publications from 1945 to 2020 and developed a typology of circular economy discourse that includes a timeline. This early work marked what they called the ‘Preamble Period’ of circular economy research stretching from 1945 to 1980. Much of the research leading up to the 80s focused on ‘techno-fixes’, like recycling and water treatment, to deal with increased waste.

DOUGHNUTS OF REFORM OR BUILD THE WALL?

The 1980s then marked the beginning of what they call the ‘Excitement Period’ which includes the first use of the conjoined words ‘circular’ and ‘economy’ by David Pearce and Kerry Turner in their 1989 book Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment. This period lasted through 2010 with research focused on ‘connecting input and output in strategies for eco-efficiency’. It included inquiries into ‘biomimicry’, ‘closed-loop supply chains’, and ‘industrial metabolism’.

This period also saw the introduction of the ‘first holistic circularity frameworks.’ This includes the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, research into complex systems to conduct ‘regenerative design’, and ideas around the fusing of ‘ecological integrity’ with ‘business acumen’ through ‘natural capitalism’. The literature review revealed these were all early forays into ‘reformist views on circularity’ that ‘integrated socio-economic approaches to resources, consumption, and waste.’

Those efforts continued from 2010 into the current period these researchers call the ‘validity challenge period’ which include ‘new holistic views on circularity.’ This includes one of my favorites from the British economist Kate Raworth in her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics. She describes a visual framework that envisions a doughnut shaped economy combining elements of planetary and societal boundaries to create a ‘safe and just space for humanity’. Other research uses color as a metaphor. The ‘blue economy’ seeks a regenerative economy that avoids debt cycles that lead to people to living in the ‘red’ through a more practicable approach than offered by the environmentalist’s ‘green’ economy.

The literature review also uncovered more radical ‘transformational views of circularity’ that call for ‘degrowth’, ‘eco-socialism’, and ‘voluntary simplicity’. The Pope’s 2015 ‘Laudato Si’ even gets a nod. Transformational views also included non-western visions from the ‘Global South’ like the Ecuadorian government’s 2008 constitution – the worlds first codified ‘Rights to Nature’. Zimbabwean educator Overson Shumba offers a call for Commons thinking, ecological intelligence and the ethical and moral framework of Ubuntu as “an imperative for sustainable development.” Also included is a 2019 collection of over 100 essays offering “radically different worldviews and practices from around the world that point to an ecologically wise and socially just world” and call for a ‘pluriverse’ – a society “where members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups can maintain and develop their own traditional culture or special interest within the confines of a common civilization.”

The researchers who assembled this timeline of influential papers, books, and essays then constructed a two-by-two matrix of themes found in the work. On the horizontal axis are ‘approaches to social, economic, environmental, and political considerations’ that divide into two categories: ‘Holistic’ and ‘Segmented.’ On the vertical axis is ‘technological innovation and ecological collapse’ divided into the categories of ‘Skeptical’ and ‘Optimistic’.

This forms a quadrant with the upper left corner being ‘optimistic’ and ‘holistic’ framing a ‘reformist circular society’. This society assumes a ‘reformed form of capitalism is compatible with sustainability’ with the help of technology that decouples ‘ecology’ from ‘economy’. The goal would be ‘economic prosperity and human well-being within the biophysical boundaries of the earth’. The means would be ‘technological breakthroughs and new business models that improve ecological health, resource security, and material prosperity for all.’

The upper right quadrant is ‘optimistic’ and ‘segmented’ through a ‘technocentric circular economy’. This assumes capitalism is already compatible with sustainability and, like the ‘reformists’, relies on technology innovation to prevent ecological collapse. The goal is ‘sustainable human progress and prosperity without negative environmental externalities.’ This would require ‘economic innovations, new business models, and unprecedented breakthroughs in circular economy technologies.’

The lower left is made up of ‘skeptical’ and ‘holistic’ creating a ‘transformational circular society’. Unlike the last two quadrants, this assumes ‘capitalism is incompatible with sustainability and socio-technical innovation cannot bring absolute eco-economic decoupling to prevent ecological collapse.’ The goal would be ‘a world of conviviality and frugal abundance for all, while fairly distributing the biophysical resources of the earth.’ To get there would require ‘complete reconfiguration of the current socio-political system and a shift away from productivist and anthropocentric worldviews.” Humanity’s ecological footprint would need drastic reduction to ‘ensure that everyone can live meaningfully and in harmony with the earth.’

Lastly, the lower right consists of ‘skeptical’ and ‘segmented’ creating a ‘fortress circular economy’. This assumes ‘there is no alternative to capitalism and socio-technical innovation cannot bring absolute eco-economic decoupling to prevent ecological collapse.’ The goal would be to ‘maintain geostrategic resource security and earth system stability in a global condition where widespread resource scarcity and human overpopulation cannot provide for all.’ This would rely on ‘innovative technologies and business models combined with rationalized resource use, imposed frugality and strict migration and population controls.’

As I suggested in my last piece on challenges to corporate and economic environmental and social governance, and as these researchers have discovered, attempts at moving toward elements of a circular economy run the risk of also being met with a ‘validity challenge’. With this literature review and subsequent typologies of academic discourse over the last 77 years, these researchers hope to provide academics and practitioners with a framework to “better analyse current policies and practices on circularity and sustainability transitions in general.” They do warn, however, that “if corporate and government actors continue to use a Circular Economy framing that doesn't consider systemic socio-ecological implications, the term could easily become discredited as a refurbished form of greenwashing.”

It’s not hard to see how the holistic optimists and skeptics may perpetually be disappointed in progress toward reformation and transformation as the current U.S. fortress of economic authority is reinforced. Meanwhile, the segmented holistic and skeptical capitalistic technocrats will continue to pray to the Gods of innovation, casting environmentalists as hysterical scare mongers perennially ‘crying wolf’ on ecological collapse – even as worldwide social, political, environmental, and economic systems become increasingly erratic, unpredictable, and vulnerable.

I, for one, prefer to draw a square in the middle of their matrix labeled ‘pragmatic adaptive economy’. This would be home to those who accept the future is increasingly unpredictable, where all ideas of certainty should be viewed with skepticism, pessimistic there is some magic technology or top-down government action that will save us, and optimistic that individual humans at the fringes of society will continue to come together seeking solutions to guarantee their permanence.

Joseph Kumarappa concluded his Economy of Permanance by warning that until society’s are based “on nonviolence and truth there can be no hope of any permanence in our economic, social or political life.” He said, “The present type of organization based on competition and centralized industries lands us periodically into terrific upheavals.” He believed, “These have to be avoided if nations are to progress steadily towards a set goal, which will bring peace amongst nations and prosperity to the citizen.”

Gandhi wrote the forward to this book just a few days after the United States drop an atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Showing little remorse, the act was legitimized as a “necessary evil” and marked the beginning of U.S. worldwide military and economic domination. Some argue that the environmental destruction at the hands of the current economic system is also a ‘necessary evil.’ Evidently that is true, because the prospect of a globally agreed upon alternative in this highly segmented and polarized political and social environment seems bleak.

But surely prospects for a bright future were much worse when Kumarappa and Gandhi were summoning their own optimistic words as nuclear fallout from two atomic bombs circled the globe at the end of a second world war. While Kumarappa, a trained economist, indeed envisioned an economic model that sought ‘justice for the common man’ and a society that doesn’t have ‘the glamour of ill-gotten gains’, in the end it wasn’t some top-down governmental scheme on which he hinged success for an ‘economy of permanence’. His final words called for individual introspection. I'm with Kumarappa when he concludes, to “enable us to see the advent of the economy of permanence”, what today might be called a just, fair, and ecologically viable circular economy, “calls for a considerable amount of self-discipline and self-control.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This is the first of a series of posts where I wrangle, disentangle, and find an angle on an alternative sustainable economy. My starting point is circular economy. It’s a seemingly straight forward concept — reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair. If only it was that easy.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

ESG DISHARMONY

It’s been a confusing week for the green economy. The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, was the source of some of the biggest news. BlackRock has made strides in recent years to be a world leader in environmental, social, and corporate governance, or as it’s commonly called – ESG. ESG is a framework of metrics companies pledge to follow intended to identify, assess, and manage environmentally and socially sustainable, but still profitable, risks and opportunities through investments, corporate culture, and practices. This can typically, or ultimately, lead to divestments in the fossil fuel industry as more and more investors, customers, and employees desire and demand reductions in CO2 emissions.

But the state of Louisiana isn’t having it. They announced this week they’re pulling $749 million from BlackRock funds. Their state treasurer said BlackRock has “blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies” that damage the state’s energy industry and thus state revenue. It’s not just fossil-fuel fans who are unhappy with ESG. Elon Musk famously quipped that ESG’s are “an outrageous sham.” Tesla was initially praised for their leadership on the environment, “E”, but were removed from the S&P500 ESG index because of their lackluster reputation for “S” and “G”. Last April a judge and jury found Tesla to be liable for promoting a racially hostile environment at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California.

Dust ups like these have caused many companies, investors, and independent ESG rating firms to soften their language, add or subtract certain metrics, change the parameters, or rebrand their rating schemes. As a result, ESG, a segment of worldwide investment accounting for 1/3 of total assets worth around $35 trillion, has become extremely murky. In July, The Economist wrote,

“As it is, measurement of the size of the ESG market is confusing, the ratings are too subjective, and the industry over-promises and under-delivers.”

They went on to cite research that found

“ESG rating agencies are the veritable acme of inconsistency. A study of six of them found that they used 709 different metrics across 64 categories. Only ten categories were common to all—and they do not include such basics as greenhouse-gas emissions.”

In September, Dilbert predictably joined in the chorus of criticism.

Sadly, the concept of a ‘circular economy’ is following a similar path. Circular economies take limited raw materials used to make goods and loops them back into the economy instead of throwing them away – reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair. But the term ‘circular economy’, like ESG, has also become diffuse and trendy. The occurrence of these two words together, ‘circular economy’, doesn’t show up in the books Google has scanned until around 1990. It grew steadily until a dip leading up to the financial crisis in 2008. But since 2014, it has skyrocketed.

Even Wall Street now has funds popping up branded ‘Circular Economy’. In 2019 BlackRock launched a fund called “BlackRock Global Funds Circular Economy”. Its top holdings include two waste management companies, a Coca-Cola subsidiary, a water filtration company, and…wait for it…Microsoft? I guess that’s because of their public commitment to negative CO2 emissions. Not sure. If so, I’m suspicious of their noble, and needed, effort. Having watched the over-produced press announcement in person, I left feeling it was one part a greenwashing PR stunt and one part Microsoft seeing dollars signs selling cloud services to companies running toward their own vague, but earnest, ESG goals.

For example, running complicated AI models in the cloud to determine emission reductions, simulating breakthrough renewable energy technologies, or simply using Microsoft Teams so companies can cut their travel budgets while reducing CO2 emissions. In other words, to hit ESG goals – or attempt a circular economy – requires new technology; new technologies need software; and increasingly that software is run on Microsoft servers in the cloud…or in local data centers. Going green yields greenbacks.

Two other companies on that BlackRock list also give me pause. Both Republic Services and Waste Management profit from collecting, processing, and recycling industrial and consumer waste. More waste equals more money. One of the basic principles of sustainable and environmentally conscious business practices is reducing consumption and thus waste.

Are these companies ok with their customers cutting back on their garbage? Probably not. But they, like Microsoft, see opportunity in building ‘green’ processing plants, creating a market for recycled materials, and then reaping the profits. All of which would welcome – possibly even encourage – even more consumption. And that would yield more resource extraction and more garbage to process – resulting in more profits. That doesn’t sound very sustainable or ‘green’, unless you’re a chief financial officer.

MIND THE GAPS OF MIND TRAPS

In a 2021 paper titled Critique of the Circular Economy three researchers in the field of industrial ecology offer a critical look at the current state of the theories and practices of circular economies. Industrial ecologists track the physical resource flows of industrial and consumer systems at different spatial scales. They aim to reduce environmental impacts while enabling human well-being through more circular flows of resources instead of the more traditional linear flow of extract, produce, and dump. They write,

“In seeking to maintain a growth-based economy, critics argue, the circular economy ‘tinkers with the current modus operandi’ of “consumerism, extractivism and (liberal) capitalism, while bearing the unrealistic expectation that the individual consumer will be able to mobilize largescale change. The circular economy is considered to encourage a reboot for capitalism that requires no radical change to institutions, infrastructures, and markets.”

In this regard, they conclude,

“Without this transition, the new economy will simply maintain the current status quo.”

These researchers, writing in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, believe,

“Circular economy is based on an ideological agenda dominated by technical and economic accounts, which brings uncertain contributions to sustainability and depoliticizes sustainable growth. Bringing together these critiques demonstrates that the circular economy is far from being as promising as its advocates claim it to be.”

This begs the question, what do advocates promise? In 2020, another group of researchers writing in the journal, Resources, Conservation & Recycling write,

“While there were only 116 academic articles published on the topic [of circular economy] from 2001 to 2008, this number has grown exponentially to over 4900. Nevertheless, most of the [circular economy] discourse has actually been developed by actors in the government and private sectors, which have specific political and economic agendas, and have often used the [circular economy] as a narrative device for greenwashing.”

In their paper they seek to identify research gaps while also developing a classification scheme for the different beliefs and approaches to describing and articulating circular economies. In doing so, they hope to avoid the disillusion the ESG movement is witnessing by identifying shared beliefs, approaches, and missteps and their deficiencies.

In the set of research papers they evaluated, these five gaps were identified:

1. Systemic thinking on entropy, growth, capitalism, and decoupling

They found no coherent systemic economic or social theory underlying the circular economy. This makes for fertile ground to establish one, but it also leads to fuzzy thinking, confusion, disarray, and skepticism. There is seemingly no agreement on the physics of entropy given laws of thermodynamics. Materials degrade over time through recycling processes which means they can’t be recycled indefinitely. There is no ‘perpetual recycling machine’. New raw materials must then be extracted and injected into recycled materials to boost their value.

They note the ‘biggest elephant in the room’ is how to decouple growth and capitalism from the circular economy. Capitalism only works with growthism. Because the circular economy is a degrowth strategy, is it incompatible with capitalism or does the idea of capitalism need to adapt to the limits of earth’s resources?

1. The materials, energy, and biodiversity [interconnections]

The promise of the circular economy is to recover materials which requires less energy, find nature-based solutions that contribute to increased biodiversity, and thus reduce the overall demand on raw materials while bettering our ecosystem and quality of life. This is the essence of the metaphorical circle in a circular economy. However, we still need material and energy to build a renewable energy infrastructure. Waste incinerators, as one example, keeps garbage out of the earth while generating energy but at a cost to air quality.

An abundance of energy is also needed to run all the recycling and processing plants intended to feed reused materials back into the economy. In addition, when done at scale, a circular economy could become so efficient that it encourages more pollution, energy demand, and renewable resources. Increased energy production, say through biofuels, could lead to further biodiversity loss, which is needed to improve soil health, reduce erosion, and improve air and water quality. Raw materials, energy, and biodiversity are interconnected and can’t be addressed in isolation or in a linear flow on the path toward a circular economy.

1. Evaluating and assessing the full impacts of a circular economy

We’re not always as clever as we think, so we need ways to evaluate, assess, and adjust as we go. This is especially true given a common misnomer that increased efficiencies lead to reductions in resource consumption. Imagine all the inventions throughout history that promised more leisure time at home when in fact they often led to more to more production and consumption. For example, laundry machines led to more laundry.

This is known as the Jevons paradox. Increased efficiencies lead to falling costs which increases demand leading to more consumption. Circular economies that promote eco-efficiency run the risk of creating rebound effects. That’s the paradox. Attempts to slow down and reduce leads to the opposite — accelerated extraction, consumption, and destruction. Cost reductions from cheap renewable energy, for example, could increase demand for it. Meanwhile, that cheap energy may allow a cheaper widget to be made increasing demand and consumption of the widget. Humans need self-regulating evaluative safeguards on our ingenuity if we want us, and our circular economy, to thrive and survive.

YOU CAN’T FLEE ESG

1. Governance, social justice, and cultural change

A 2017 study looked at 114 different definitions of circular economy and only 18-20% considered social equity. Looking at nearly 5000 academic papers, researchers found just 804 from the fields of social sciences and humanities. Most were from environmental science, engineering, and energy sciences. Yet, as researchers found in 2018, those attempting to put the circular economy into practice identified the main barrier to adoption is cultural acceptance and changes to consumer beliefs and behaviors. Technology was the least of their concerns.

They concluded that “circular economy is a niche discussion among sustainable development professionals.”There’s also the issue of power. In the race toward energy and economic transition, once again dominant states will forcibly instill technocratic top-down governmental and corporate agendas. Meanwhile, historically marginalized stakeholders will continue fighting for social, environmental, and economic justice. Sounds like ESG won’t be going away any time soon…or ever.

1. Alternative visions of circularity

The lack of attention on cultural and social dimensions could be addressed by including likeminded visions and existing practice. The concept of circularity and ecological reciprocity is fundamental to Indigenous cultures around the world. Many have extended, modified, and adapted sustainable ancestral hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and pastoral ways of living — and some still do. They also tend to adopt pluralistic ideals that enable and foster mutual coexistence and largely avoid ethnocentric economic and environmental agendas. And they don’t seek global dominance of resources and cultural assimilation.

For centuries Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism have also promoted harmonious societies complete with ecologically sound philosophies and practices. Some of those philosophies are alive today. Since 2000 Japan has adopted a “Fundamental Plan for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society” which tracks

“how effectively materials are used in industrial activities and people’s daily lives, in terms of creating more wealth using fewer resources.”

There are many alternative ways to reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair that all include elements of circularity, reduced consumption, and measures of growth. And it’s likely our diverse planet will need more than one flavor of circular economy.

These five gaps illustrate both the diversity and complexity surrounding conceptions and implementations of the circular economy. The Economist magazine highlighted how the subjectivity and size of ESG not only leads to confusion but a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver. It seems the circular economy suffers the same risk. And yet, human history shows examples of how plurality of thought, belief, and culture when coupled with eco-efficient circularity and reciprocity fueled centuries of coexistence with each other and the planet’s complex web of nested systems.

Circularity is not new, and it’s not a trend. Examples are found at all levels of ecologies, and societies, on which we depend. Understanding, situating, and articulating past and existing circular concepts in nature and societies – representing diverse interpretations from all corners of the world – is what is needed to enable a socially just, economically sound, and environmentally sustainable path forward.

ESG is an attempt to lead us there under the current economic model. And while the ‘E’ in emissions should be the key to ESG, we need all three for the circular economy.

Tune in next time as I unpack the history of modern articulations of a circular economy. I’ll map socio-economic, environmental, and political approaches against a range of technological utopias and dystopias.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Fall is upon us and so Interplace transitions to economics. I’ll be writing about how location, distribution, and the spatial organization of economic activities interacts with and affects humanity. The current dominant economic model insists on persistent and endless growth despite acknowledgement of its role in climate change, income inequality, and disappearing limited stocks of natural resources. There’s got to be a better way, and I’m on the hunt to find alternatives.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FLIGHTS OF NASTY

I attended a panel discussion last Friday on environmental justice. One panel member represented a nearby Seattle community called Beacon Hill. It’s a 6.5 mile long stretch just north of the SeaTac airport putting it on a flight path. Roughly 65% of flights land over Beacon Hill when the wind is out of the south. During busy times, a plane descends over their homes nearly every 90 seconds to two minutes. And because it’s on a hill, they’re 300 feet closer to the noise and pollution.

FAA guidelines require a 65-decibel limit, and Sea-Tac claims they comply, but Beacon Hill is beyond the boundary for which they monitor. Even the U.S. Bureau of Transportation and Statistics reported in 2017 levels in this area were between 40-75 decibels. When residents organized and measured noise themselves, they never recorded any plane below 50 decibels and some hit 80. That’s about as loud as a kitchen blender and too loud to hear the person next to you.

But what this panel member shared, sometimes through tears, is it’s not just the noise but the repetition. With each passing plane the stress mounts in anticipation of the next one. It’s hard to concentrate or hold a conversation. She worries about her son. How much does this environmental stress contribute to his ADHD? His trouble at school. Her husband, who rides his bike most places, suffered from esophageal cancer. How much did the air pollution contribute to his condition?

In the time between planes, the ultrafine particles (UFPs) from the last plane have already mixed with the air they breathe. Jet engines uniquely expel plumes of ultrafine particle pollution. A recent University of Washington (UW) study confirms similar studies in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, New York, and Amsterdam. Flight paths are home to high concentrations of ultrafine particles raining down over unsuspecting victims. In Los Angeles, 90% of school children in the flight path are exposed to these particulates one hour out of every school day.

These particulates are smaller than the PM2.5 typically found from fossil fuel combustion and tire and brake dust. They’re also not as widely studied. Nobody really knows what kind of long-term effects they may have on the human body. However, there is animal evidence showing long-term exposure to ultrafine particles leads to adverse health effects, including neurological. A 2019 study published by the Washington State Department of Health reports,

“UFPs have many unique qualities that make them possibly more harmful to human health than larger particles. UFPs are able to travel deeper into the lung than larger particles. They are also small enough to avoid the body’s attempts to clear particles from the lungs, allowing them to stay in the body longer, to build up, and to cause damage. They can also move from the lungs to the bloodstream and to other organs.”

Evidence of short-term effects on human health are conclusive. The study warns,

“Certain groups of people are more sensitive to UFP exposure. These groups include people with pre-existing heart and lung disease, infants, older adults, people with diabetes, communities with a lower socio-economic status, and pregnant women.”

Beacon Hill is a place where 70% of residents identify as Black, Indigenous, multiracial, or persons of color. More than half speak a language other than English. They’re also flanked by two major interstates and have another smaller airport, King County International Airport (KCIA) (aka Boeing Field), between them and Sea-Tac. The UW study showed anyone living within 150 meters of the freeway would also be exposed to ultrafine particles from passing vehicles, especially semi-trucks on their way to and from Sea-Tac.

In 2021, the Puget Sound Regional Council published a Regional Aviation Baseline Study. There are 27 public-use airports in Western Washington’s Puget Sound region, and the three biggest are Sea-Tac, King County International Airport, and Paine Field just north of Seattle. Scheduled passenger service is only available at Sea-Tac and Paine Field. In 2018 these two airports served 24 million enplanements. One enplanement is a single passenger per airplane. By 2027 they project this number will grow to 29 million. By 2050 it will double, 49 million at the low end and 56 million at the high end.

That’s just commercial passenger traffic. What about cargo? In 2017 540 thousand metric tons of cargo flew through Western Washington. Eighty-five percent goes through Sea-Tac. By 2050, it too is projected to double to 1.5 million metric tons. However, these peak loads are seasonal. During harvest time, Washington State’s value crops, like cherries, increase cargo demands. So how is this increased demand to be met?

FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

To assess solutions to growing demand, the 2019 Washington State Legislature formed the Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission (CACC). Their objective is to recommend a new primary commercial aviation facility and additional ways to add capacity to six existing airports across the state to accommodate future demand.

To get an idea for how governments intend to shape outcomes of commissions they assemble, it’s good to look at the backgrounds of invited commissioners. In an era of increased awareness and needs for environmental, economic, and social justice, a good commission should be comprised of a diverse set of points of view and expertise. Especially given the current and historical economic, social, and environmental injustices existing power structures have created.

Through this lens, the list of commissioners is disappointing. Of the fourteen voting members, there are just two women, one person of color, and only one has a background in environmental law. The rest are white men, with one of Asian decent raised in England. Their bios read like a who’s-who of business leaders, economic development advisors, aviation enthusiasts, airport directors and developers, military leaders, and even representatives from Southwest and American Airlines. One member offered no bio at all and seemingly has no presence on the internet.

The remaining twelve non-voting members must then balance this majority of aviation zealots geared toward economic development. Nope. More of the same – former senators, regional transportation directors, air cargo specialists, a member of the Civil Air Patrol, an aviation officer…the list goes on. They do have a state senator, Tina Orwall, who has “20 years of experience working in the public mental health system.”

So, two people out of 26, an environmental lawyer and a left-leaning woman senator, may offer a voice for environmental justice and sustainable economic development. The rest will be fighting for state and federal dollars for airport and economic expansion. While public documents give lip service to ‘community engagement’ and ‘the environment’ history shows there is little likelihood this collection of people will have environmental justice as a top priority.

Every level of government wants the number of flights to increase, despite having goals to reduce carbon emissions. With increased flight traffic comes increased ground traffic, despite also having goals to reduce congestion. If this weren’t so tragic, it would be a comedy.

This is the essence of environmental justice; the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized people and places to harms associated with an economy these people and places are least responsible for – an economy which disproportionately benefits the prosperous and mainstream members of society. It’s an economic model, to which we’re addicted, requiring unlimited growth despite relying on the extraction of natural resources which are limited.

The environmental scientist, complex systems icon, and author of Limits of Growth, Donella Meadows, offers a series of questions these commissioners and elected leaders should ask whenever arguments for economic growth are put forth. She said,

“Growth is one of stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture. We’ve got to have enough. Always ask: growth of what and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough?”

Meadows, and many environmental justice activists and scholars, are calling for system change in the fight against climate change.

Reading Washington State’s plans for addressing its aviation woes, it’s clear system change is not on their radar. If Washington’s economy were a plane, elected leaders and assigned commissioners believe this plane can climb to infinite heights.

Imagine a plane gradually ascending beyond its physical limits and the bodily limits of its passengers. Now imagine cries to pilots to please level-off from suffering passengers first and most impacted. They’d be met with quizzical looks and ignored while most passengers would gleefully encourage the plane to climb faster and higher. That’s what it’s like when individuals in impacted communities cry and call for limits on the pain, suffering, and pollution at the hands of our economy.

Apart from a few local elected officials, they mostly are ignored. Most are too busy trying to grow the economy. Which in turn will increase the number of flights to Sea-Tac, the area’s economy, suffering, and the number of premature deaths due to air and noise pollution. Meanwhile, many Beacon Hill residents are too busy holding multiple jobs, too weary from the fight for justice, and too disempowered or discouraged to speak up.

The assembled aviation and business experts no doubt have good intentions, but it’s clear they’re tasked with one thing: tip the nose of the economic plane upwards while steadily increasing the throttle. After all, the model dictates that the state must remain competitive in a national and international race upwards toward a misleadingly infinite extractive consumer economy. This assumes there is no limit to growth despite empirical planetary evidence to the contrary. What’s the worse that could happen? Evidently, so far, nothing bad enough to prompt leaders to change the system.

To be fair, this commission and the Puget Sound Regional Council, do consider the air quality studies out of the University of Washington. They also consider another UW study exploring alternative ground transportation, including high-speed rail. There are other ‘sustainable’ elements the state is exploring, including biofuel and electric planes. However, creating a pipeline of biofuel to Sea-Tac they admit has its own challenges. Though, they pale in comparison to the struggles sourcing enough biofuel to meet demand. So that leaves electric planes, like electric cars, as the great savior.

ANOTHER INLAND LOGISTICS EMPIRE

Just this week, the dream of electric flight made one stride toward reality. A prototype of an electric nine-seater passenger plane successfully took off, circled the airport, and landed. A Washington first and a necessary first step toward certification. The plane was assembled in Washington state, made of engines and parts largely made in Washington state, and by a Washington state company called Eviation. Their CEO, Greg Davis, said “What we’ve just done is made aviation history. This is about changing the way that we fly. It’s about connecting communities in a sustainable way…ushering in a new era of aviation.” He may be right. But when?

When asked if this flying equivalent of a large Tesla, with 21,500 battery cells accounting for half of the plane’s weight of over 4 tons, is ready for passenger flights, he quipped, “The answer is no, absolutely not.” At least he’s honest. I optimistically believe some of our regional transportation problems can be solved by sustainably leveraging the thousands of municipal airports under-utilized across America. But it’s decades away.

Meanwhile, I believe this flight was mostly a PR stunt. The airport chosen for this historic flight was the Grant County International Airport at Moses Lake. Until this flight, most of Washington state didn’t know there was even an airport at Moses Lake. But it’s one of the top choices by the commission for expansion and they’ll need public support to pay for it.

Back in 2016 a group of senators formed a ‘roundtable’ to examine the growing air cargo industry. This is what eventually became the Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission. They noted, “The top five air cargo commodities through Sea-Tac are cherries, seafood, footwear parts, aerospace components, and aluminum alloy and graphite.” All of these serve the Washington economy except for footwear parts which likely serves Nike and the footwear economy in Portland.

Knowing back then Sea-Tac had reached capacity, the attention turned to Eastern Washington. A Spokane roundtable member offered they had “Plenty of capacity and land reserved…to be developed for cargo…”, but then asked “How do we make strategic corrections?” There was a recognized need to make Eastern Washington attractive to air cargo carriers. Building or expanding alone doesn’t lead to success, you need private companies to believe it will succeed. Enter Moses Lake and the Grant County International Airport.

Ideas were thrown out. “Cold storage [for locally grown produce…like cherries and apples]…may be an incentive.” They imagined cargo planes could “Park in Moses Lake then” rail and trucks could “go back and get cargo.” They imagined “This would help open the runways in Sea-Tac,” but wondered “Would this financially work?” Before concluding the ‘roundtable’ they agreed they needed “to hear from businesses and companies.”

So, they commissioned the ‘Joint Transportation Committee’ to conduct a “study of air cargo movement at Washington airports” with a 2018 deadline. In that 2018 report seven airports were identified as targets for expansion, including the Grant County International Airport at Moses Lake which is right smack between Spokane and Seattle…and close to nearby produce.

In 2018, a “Washington State Air Cargo Movement Study” offered this as a recommendation:

“To attract the logistics/distribution market, the State of Washington should promote to individual airports the “inland port” or airport logistics park model…branding themselves ‘Global Logistics Centers.’”

This reminds me of a piece I wrote last year about Southern California’s ‘One Click Buy’ Empire. Moreno Valley, California is building out a World Logistics Center. Forty-five percent of the nation’s imports are already trained, trucked, or flown into this “Inland Empire”, unpacked, sorted, and reloaded onto trains, trucks, and planes then fanned out again across the nation. California’s South Coast Air Quality District estimates the new logistics center will add an additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks to area roads per day.

Heavy-duty diesel trucks emit 24 times more fine particulate matter than regular gasoline engines. Those living closer to the freeways will be affected more. And we all know who lives next to freeways…predominantly poor and people of color. Just like in Beacon Hill.

This last August the state conducted a survey across six counties in Western Washington seeking input on potential expansion and brand-new airports around the Puget Sound region. From 56-77% of participants, depending on county, said ‘No’ to new airports. Only Paine Field received support for expansion averaging 58% in favor.

Environmental concerns are the overwhelming reason for why people oppose more airports or airport expansion. It seems everyone who can afford it wants cheap and available flights, next day deliveries, and fresh Washington cherries. And those lucky enough to have a 401K or stock portfolio want the market and the economy to grow, grow, grow. But nobody wants more flights or more pollution. That’s particularly true for those already suffering from environmental injustices – like those in Beacon Hill and countless other homes in the path of jets jettisoning plumes of particulate pollution. Far flung fumes consumed by our lungs triggering affects unknown.

How do we change this system so we all can prosper under economic vitality while minimizing the negative environmental and socio-economic impacts? If we’re going to grow, what are we growing and why? For whom? Who pays the cost? How long can it last? What’s the cost to the planet? How much is enough?

This is what I intend to explore throughout this fall as I unpack what I believe to be the front runner for a new economic model: the circular economy. I’ll look at not just the theory but attempts to put it into practice. Perhaps our economy can be like the journey of an airplane after all – take off, level off, land, take off, level off, land – an infinite circle flown within the limits of the plane, the earth, and its occupants.

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Hello Interactors,

Last week my daughter showed us a glimpse of the Empire State Building from her friend’s dorm room. Every time I see that building, I think of the original black and white movie, King Kong. The image of that poor animal atop what was then world’s tallest structure getting pummeled by machine gun fire sticks with me for some reason. Maybe it’s because it was unfair. That creature was captured from his homeland and brought to America only to be gunned down? What kind of society does this?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FAREWELL TO THE KING

Merian C. Cooper got the idea of King Kong from the French-American explorer and anthropologist, Paul Du Chaillu. He was the first of European origin to confirm the existence of Central African gorillas in 1860. This made him a much sought-after speaker in the late 1800s, and his books were immensely popular. Cooper’s uncle gifted the then six-year-old nephew with one, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. It tells of one gorilla locals noted for its “extraordinary size”:

“They believe, in all this country, that there is a kind of gorilla — known to the initiated by certain mysterious signs, but chiefly by being of extraordinary size — which is the residence of certain spirits of departed natives. Such gorillas, the natives believe, can never be caught or killed.”

And then, while Du Chaillu was out hunting with locals, an encounter occurred. As Du Chaillu recalls,

“When he saw our party he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.”

And so, they did what they believed to be impossible but predictable. Du Chaillu continues,

“[The gorilla] advanced a few steps— then stopped to utter that hideous roar again- advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired, and killed him.”

Cooper went on to call this creature King Kong and made a movie about him. He wanted King Kong to be portrayed as being 50-60 feet tall. After all, he was kidnapped from a fictional small island that was also home to dinosaurs.

It turns out a gorilla that size is biologically impossible. For every doubling of height comes a tripling of weight. The joints and bones of a creature of this size simply could not bear his weight. King Kong was also impossible to portray on the big screen. Animators and cinematographers had difficulties portraying an animal of that size in the 1930s. Consequently, King Kong ends up appearing much smaller. Instead of weighing a couple hundred tons, let’s assume this mythical beast was shorter and weighed something more like 15 tons.

Still huge, that would be about two times the mass of an elephant requiring about 12,000 watts of metabolism to survive. And that is just the energy required to keep the organs running and nothing else. Around the time the original King Kong was being released, a biologist named Max Kleiber was plotting various animals’ metabolic rate and mass on a graph. To his surprise, the dots on the graph loosely aligned along a straight line sloping upwards with a mouse near the origin and an elephant to the upper right.

Kleiber had discovered a scaling law in nature known now as Kleiber’s law. For most animals, their metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass. Put another way, for every doubling of size the energy needed to survive decreases by ¼. Theoretical physicist and former President of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West, and his colleagues, believe ¾ scaling occurs due to the nutrient distribution through the efficiency seeking fractal-like structures of the circulatory system. The ‘3’ in ¾ comes about, it is believed, because the particles needed to arrange these mechanisms exists in a three-dimensional geometric universe.

Animals observed in the wild maximize their energy to survive. Every bit of energy spent above and beyond what is required for their body to function only pushes their caloric needs into debt. GPS tracked tigers, for example, reveal highly optimized search strategies over space and time in their hunt for prey. A lounging cat may appear lazy to us, but their maximizing their energy.

Early human hunter-gatherers were seemingly not that different. For similar reasons, they had to be deliberate about the energy they used. However, as their cultures evolved, along with their brain, they became increasingly effective at harnessing that energy. They used some of their energy to fashion spears, arrows, and hooks out of wood, bones, and rocks. They also used wood to make fire for heating, cooking, and controlled grassland burns to promote plant harvest renewal. In doing so, they were not only expending their own energy, but also the energy stored in that wood and other forms of biomass.

The appropriation of elements of the ecosystem for energy to support biological and social well-being, like plant harvesting, animal domestication, or consumption of biomass like wood and coal, is called social metabolism or sociometabolism. The social metabolism of these early societies sometimes had small effects on the ecosystem, but other times catastrophic. For example, the misuse of fire could lead to imbalances in ecosystems with detrimental cascading effects on plant and animal populations.

The arrival of North America’s first homo sapiens, as another example, coincided with the extinction of 33 species of large animals. Similar extinctions occurred upon the arrival of humans in South America and Australia. It turns out even the earliest human colonizers had detrimental impacts on the environment.

PLOTTING THE PLODDING AND MARAUDING

By studying existing hunter-gatherer societies, scientists can estimate the social metabolism of ancient hunter-gatherers. Geographer Yadvinder Malhi analyzed this data and determined,

“The energy use per capita of a hunter-gatherer is about 300 W, and this is almost entirely in the process of acquiring food for consumption, and to a much lesser extent other materials and the use of fire. This sociometabolism is greater than the 80–120 W required for human physiological metabolism, because of the inefficiencies in both acquiring foodstuffs, and in human conversion of food into metabolic energy, and also in the use of biomass energy sources for fuel.”

Malhi then plotted where a hunter-gatherer would sit on a Kleiber plot relative to the biological metabolism of other animals. A typical hunter-gatherer’s combined biological and social metabolism puts them just between a human and a bull.

The social metabolism of homo sapiens continued to grow steadily, and along with it their capacity to harness nature for their lifestyle. And then, 5,000-10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic revolution, a simultaneous innovation occurred around the world – farming. The start of the Holocene witnessed the emergence of agriculture in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the Yangtze valley, New Guinea, West Africa, Meso-America, and the Andes. The end of the ice age softened the earth, human language and communication had evolved and spread, and coincidently the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems.

Agriculture, the colonization of plants, allowed for geographically condensed energy to be grown which could support larger populations of people. This put a huge dependency on area of land needed to support and grow plants and animals. But these new densities of biomass reduced the amount energy required to roam large distances hunting and gathering. As a result, many hunter-gatherer societies could not compete, and Iron Age plant and animal farmers came to dominate. These clusters of agrarian societies grew around the world and with them languages and cultures. Soon the age of the agrarian came to dominate human existence. Using data from a well documented 18th century Austrian agrarian society, Malhi went to work to plot where a typical ‘agriculturist’ may fit on the Kleiber plot. He surmises:

“Compared to the hunter-gatherer sociometabolic regime, by the 18th century human sociometabolism per capita had increased by one to two orders of magnitude.” Given the population density such a society could support, the “per unit area energy consumption” grew “three to four orders of magnitude greater than that of a hunter-gatherer society.”

This plops the typical human agriculturalist below a rhino on the Kleiber plot. In other words, an active member of an 18th century agrarian society would have consumed as much energy as a resting animal nearly 10 times their mass. It seems over-consumptive human habits started early in our evolution.

Agrarian societies and hunter-gather societies were both constrained by land area. While agriculturalists were more efficient with land use than hunter-gatherers, they were nonetheless constrained by land. This is especially true for their primary source of fuel for heating and cooking – trees. That all changed with the birth of the Industrial age and the discovery of coal.

The potential energy in trees is stored solar energy from the relatively recent past. Coal is solar energy stored in biomass that accumulated and fossilized over millions of years in the deep layers of the earth’s outer crust, the lithosphere. For the first time in history, humans could exploit energy stored in deep time. Coal could more easily be transported over great distances. In theory, this would reduce the need to further exploit land and wood, but instead their destruction increased.

The Industrial age brought new forms of locomotion and transportation networks accelerated the expansion of colonization, land development, and the destruction of grasslands, swamps, and wooded areas. Healthy, thriving ecosystems were sacrificed for new and expanding cities and farms. Coal powered machines extracted elements from nature to make fertilizers, sawed, split, and planed trees into lumber, and stamped, squeezed, and shipped goods around the world feeding growing economies and their consumers. Fossil fuels accelerated and intensified the destruction of the biosphere and continue to do so to this day. The energy use of the biomass past to support today’s social metabolism puts in question the biomass of the future, including its human consumers.

CAPITALIZING ON A MONSTER APPETITE

Malhi identifies two key factors of industrial social metabolism:

The amount of biomass needed for biological metabolic survival (i.e. food) is small compared to fossil fuels and other high-density energy sources.

Fossil fuels used for building transportation networks meant population centers need not be co-located with food and energy production.

So where does the typical ‘industrialist’ sit on the Kleiber plot? Just above an elephant. That is, the amount of metabolic energy needed for a human to lead a typical industrialized lifestyle today is the equivalent of a resting elephant. Imagine the streets of the most populated cities being roamed by humans the size and weight of an elephant. Streams of cars on the freeway being driven by a five-ton mammal with an insatiable appetite. That’s us. Well, many of us, anyway.

Those numbers are for the average ‘industrialist’ in the UK where Malhi teaches. American’s stereotypically love our exceptionalism, and we are certainly exceptional in this regard. Sorry, Canadians, you’re implicated too. North American’s are the King Kong’s of energy consumption. Our dot on the Kleiber plot sits where a mythical 15-ton mammal would sit. The typical human in the United States and Canada consumes energy like King Kong. That’s well over 100 times the mass and energy needed for basic survival and 10 times more than agriculturalists that existed just 200 years ago.

When Du Chaillu and his native guides shot the king of the forest, Du Chaillu did not exploit the energy of that innocent animal as food. He instead chose to eat the deer they also killed. But the local hunters, who allegedly had long pursued the so-called king of the jungle, did. Including his brain. Eating the brain from the skull of a gorilla, Du Chaillu reported, was believed to bring “a strong hand for the hunt…and success with the women.”

Perhaps this played into Cooper’s storyline in King Kong. After all, it was a native tribal king on Skull Island who offered to trade six tribal women for the attractive American blonde woman, Ann Darrow, accompanying the crew on their expedition. She is then captured by a band of natives and offered up to King Kong as a sacrifice. But King Kong is felled by a gas bomb by American explorers and shipped back to New York to be put on display. King Kong then breaks from his chains and hunts down Ann. That’s what leads to the iconic scene of King Kong getting massacred atop the Empire State Building. War pilots fire machine guns from their planes as King Kong swats at them like flies while intermittently fondling the captive heroin, Ann.

King Kong, the movie, has since been interpreted as a story of race (King Kong as a metaphor for a Black man stolen from his homeland in bondage), sex (a white blonde woman who, fetishized as a sexual object pursued by Indigenous and Black men, must be saved), and rebellion (King Kong, as a Black man, breaks from his shackles and must be violently subdued). He has rebelled and therefore must be killed.

But before this interpretation, King Kong was said to represent FDR’s ‘New Deal’. Cooper was a devote anti-communist and conservatives like him regarded the New Deal as a menace – an imprisoned import of a policy from a faraway land unleashed on society. Just like King Kong. It must be killed.

I’ll offer my own interpretation:

King Kong is an outsized mythical beast so absurdly huge that it can’t bear its own weight. When it does manage to move, it destroys the environment in its path. What is erected before us, since the dawn of the Anthropocene (or is it the Capitalocene), is an over exploitive and consumptive way of life that is off the charts. It has ‘an immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms.’ It has ‘fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face.’ It ‘seems to me like some nightmare vision.’ What stands before us is this king of environmental destruction. And it must be killed.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

I was interviewed!

Big thanks to my friend and former Wavefront colleague, Mark Sylvester, who is now the Curator, Host, and Executive Producer at TEDx Santa Barbara.

Check it out!

https://tedxsantabarbara.com/.../brad-weed-we-need.../

The unedited version that was streamed live is here on FB:

https://fb.watch/fz9nyudo5r/

Last week I left off Part I introducing a new science proposed by two scientists affiliated with my favorite multidisciplinary institution, and leader in studying complexity adaptive systems, The Santa Fe Institute. Today I draw from their paper published in August that includes links to a recent book that has shook the scientific academy. Science is adapting to a new world, a new climate, and new future. This proposed new scientific field aims to accelerate that adaptation.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

EVOLVING FAST AND SLOW

“What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.”

These are the words of David Graeber and David Wengrow from their recent epic myth-busting book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity. They paint a picture of human history that debunks many assumptions underlying the contributions of theoretical ‘great men’ that dominate recollections of history, scientific discovery, and human evolution. But two great women stepped forward in August to offer a new center for systems of knowledge that complements Graeber and Wengrow’s theories.

Recent technological and collaborative advances in anthropology, archeology, ecology, geography, and related disciplines are sketching new patterns of interactions of people and place. Complex webs of far-flung and slow growing networks of social interactions, spanning large swaths of the globe over millennia, are coming into focus.

Graeber and Wengrow claim “the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms.” This interpretation offers a radical counter to existing “drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.” Contrary to popular belief, they offer that

“Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.”

Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis offer an alternative understanding of the nearly 300,000 years of homo sapiens’ existence. And Stefani Crabtree and Jennifer Dunne, both affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, wrote a recent opinion piece that builds on their position. “Towards a science of archeaoecology”, published in the journal, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, calls for integrating elements of archeology and ecology under the term archeaoecology to further understand these pasts.

By sharing approaches and data of related fields they hope to form a more complete picture of the unfolding of humanity and ecosystems so that both may continue to unfold into the future. They hope to intertwine two interrelated trends that emerged over the last 60,000 years of humanity. Some findings of which, were also highlighted by Graeber and Wengrow. These two trends are:

The slow evident far-flung dispersal of homo sapiens across regions and around the globe.

The increasingly rapid development of tools and technologies that enabled it.

Together these contributed to the gradual and pervasive spread of complex social networks fueled by the interaction of people and place – and other animal species. However, as Crabtree and Dunne remind us, “As humans spread to new places and their populations grew…their impacts on ecosystems grew commensurately.”

ARTIFACTS, ECOFACTS, AND SCALING MATH

The subfield of archeology that studies these impacts is environmental archeology. While much of this research focuses on a reconstruction of past climates, it doesn’t always consider the larger ecological context. But the combined fields of paleontology (the study of fossilized plants and animals) and ecology does, under the name of paleoecology. However, it misses human elements of archeology just as environmental archeology sometimes ignores aspects of ecology.

But new sensing technologies, increased computing power, advances in ecological modelling, and a growing corpus of digitized archeological records is providing bridges between these disciplines. Now scientists can construct integrated understandings of how people interacted with place through deep time. Instead of fragments of artifacts, ecofacts, and trash deposits uncovered through disparate stages of time amidst localized climatic conditions, a more thorough and dynamic representation emerges.

How do the interactions of people and place impact ecosystems and cultures and in turn influence their respective evolutions? It’s questions like this that led Crabtree and Dunne to call on earth and human researchers to “confront pressing questions about the sustainability of current and future coupled natural-human systems” under the banner of archeoecology.

It was archaeologists and paleoecologists who first coined this term. It described scientists or studies that relied on varieties of data, like geological morphology or climatology, to form interpretations of the archeological past. But they weren’t intent on necessarily forming a systematic understanding of historic dynamic interactions of natural-human systems. Moreover, they weren’t, as Crabtree and Dunne propose, providing an “intellectual home” for a new integrative science bridging these three disciplines:

Archaeology: the study of past societies by reconstructing physical non-biological environments.

Palaeoecology: the reconstruction of past ecosystems based on fossil remains but often excluding humans.

Ecology: considerations of the living and nonliving interactions among organisms, mostly non-human, in existing ecosystems.

The new home they suggest is filled with a growing assortment of tools and technologies which can be shared among them. They range in scale from the microscopic analysis of plants, animals, and tree rings to vast ecological and social networks through the distribution of species amidst cascading patterns of extinction. Computer models can represent everything from cellular structures that mimic behavior of biology to modelling individual and group behaviors based on quantitative data found across a range of space and time.

In May I wrote about how this kind of modeling, led by another Santa Fe affiliate, Scott Ortman, uncovered new findings regarding the Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality in my Interplace essay called City Maps and Scaling Math.

This array of interdependent tools conspires to generate the Crabtree and Dunne definition of archeocecology:

“The branch of science that employs archaeological, ecological, and environmental records to reconstruct past complex ecosystems including human roles and impacts, leveraging advances in ecological analysis, modeling, and theory for studying the earth’s human past.”

NATURE OR NURTURE

The aim of this new science is to reconstruct interdependent networks of human mediated systems that mutually depend on each other for survival. This offers clues, for example, into just how many plants and animals may have migrated and propagated on their own through earth’s natural systems versus being transported and nurtured by highly mobile, creative humans amidst networks of seemingly egalitarian bands. Crabtree and Dunne offer one such example from Cyprus where scientists used archeoecological approaches to discover how that area’s current ecosystem came to be.

Using species distribution models and food webs the research showed how settlers in the later part of the Stone Age (Neolithic period)

“brought with them several nondomesticated animals and plants, including fox (Vulpes vulpes indutus), deer (Dama dama), pistachios (Pistacia vera), flax (Linum sp.), and figs (Ficus carica), to alter the Cyprian ecosystem to meet their needs. These were supplemented with domestic einkorn [early forms of wheat] (Triticum monococcum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare), as well as domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa), sheep (Ovis sp.), goat (Capra sp.), and cattle (Bos sp.).”

The coincidental dating of these human settlers, plants, and animals suggests not only the introduction of new species to the area, but the intention to create a niche ecosystem on which they could survive. Elements of that Neolithic ecosystem are alive in Cyprus to this day. Crabtree’s own research into the ecological impacts of the removal of Aboriginal populations in Australia corroborates these theories.

Her work highlights the need to marry the high-tech scientific approaches of archeoecology with Traditional Ecological Knowledge…otherwise known as Indigenous Knowledge or Indigenous Science. As I wrote last week in Part I, stitching together past and present Western science requires collaborations with Indigenous people, their knowledge, culture, and traditions.

To strategize the survival of the natural world, of which we humans are linked – amidst a changing and increasingly volatile climate – requires honoring, respecting, and collaborating with people and cultures as varied and complex as the ecosystems on which we coexist.

Crabtree and Dunne show how archeoecology can reveal “how humans altered, and were shaped by, ecosystems across deep time.” By collaborating, sharing, and synthesizing diverse bodies of knowledge across artificial academic and cultural boundaries and beliefs we can “explore implications for the future sustainability of anthropogenically modified landscapes.” This is particularly imperative “given scenarios such as changing climate, land-use intensification, and species extinctions.”

This treatise on archeoecology by Crabtree and Dunne offers a set of tools necessary to present “a new history of humankind.” Much like Graeber and Wengrow set out to do, it also encourages “a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity.”

Collaborative science, like collaborative music and sports, spawns unexpected, serendipitous discovery through systems of human tension, tolerance, intimacy, and cumulative joy and sorrow, setbacks, and steps forward. This is the nature of unbridled egalitarian play observed among young people unaltered by prejudice, politics, fright, and might.

It’s felt in us all through lifetime acts of negotiation and negation, rejoice and reproach, exaltation and anguish, or creation and destruction. It is the nature of humankind. And it is, like our ecosystems, in constant mutualistic flux.

As is the work of Crabtree, Dunne, Graeber (RIP), Wengrow, and others like them. But as they have already shown,

“The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.”

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Hello Interactors,

I’m back from planting our kids at college. Now we watch our not-so-little Weed’s grow from a distance. I had a recent visit from a plant scientist friend last week that inspired me to dig into the blending of traditional Western science and Indigenous knowledge. Each have a lot to offer human adaptation strategies to the effects of climate change, but to do so will require new approaches and increased sensitivities to generations of abuse, neglect, and disrespect. This is part one of a two-part series that starts with a grounding in what integration exists today and why it’s important.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TEARS OF JOY AND SORROW

It was cause for celebration, but hers were not tears of joy. It was the ten-year anniversary of the largest dam removal in United States history. The Elwha Dam was completed in 1921 to dam the 45-mile-long Elwha River for electricity generation under the settler colonial banner of “Power and Progress.” A second larger dam was built in 1927. The Elwha is the fourth largest river on the Olympic Peninsula that sits on the western most Pacific coast of Washington State. It was once home to the country’s second largest salmon run behind Alaska. After the dams were built, they robbed these fish of 40 miles of habitat.

They also robbed the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe - ʔéʔɬx̣ʷaʔ nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ – “The Strong People” of their food source and economy while submerging their spiritual land and identity in 21 million cubic yards of sediment. That’s over one million dumpsters full of rocks and sand. If you stacked them, they’d reach over 700 miles into the air. Placed end to end they’d stretch over 3000 miles across America coast to coast.

And now, ten years later, the salmon are running again, habitat is getting restored, and the sediment is redistributing. So why the tears? For scientists to accurately measure the successes of dam removal – and further justify the removal of more dams worldwide – the federal, state, and tribal governments agreed to a moratorium on fishing the returning salmon. It seemed a worthwhile compromise to the tribal community, but after over one hundred years of suffering their losses – and seeing the fish run as their elders had once seen – their yearning for a return to their cultural heritage has intensified over the last decade. Recent years of healthy salmon runs have tested their patience with colonial powers continuing to dictate their way of life – even as they simultaneously celebrate their joint successes.

It was the U.S. Congress who passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in 1992 to restore dwindling salmon populations, but it was the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe who had fought to have those dams removed even as they were being built. They also helped fund the research necessary for successful removal. And now they want to live as they once did – in a self-determined and self-sustaining autonomous but integrated coexistence with their neighbors.

A friend of mine is a plant scientist for the project who attended the celebration event in Port Angeles, Washington last week. The early economic growth of this city depended on the electricity generated by those dams. He told me the words and subsequent tears by the woman representing the tribe was the most gripping and poignant moment of the event. It left many scientists conflicted about the proper path forward.

Continued research will help with planning of future dam removal projects, including what would displace the Elwha project as the largest dam removal effort in history on the Klamath River. This project involves the removal of four dams that stretch across the Oregon and California border.

But what is more important? More data collection and academic papers supporting future dam removals or resuming the human rights of an abused and afflicted Klallam community? The answer won’t come from the scientists, but from deliberations between multiple levels of governments, agencies, and departments strewn across many jurisdictions.

BRIDGING BARRIERS

The Elwha dams are representative of countless ecological discontinuities brought on by colonial expansion and attempted erasure and conversion of Indigenous cultures and populations around the world. The Elwha dam removal indeed created a precedent that inspired ecological restoration projects worldwide. And while the collaboration between members of the Klallam people and U.S. government officials, volunteers, and scientists has largely been healthy, the tension that spawned the removal in the first place still remains – competition for fishing rights.

These dams posed an immediate threat to the Klallam people and their way of living, as they still do for the Klamath people and others like them. But a greater compounding threat grows more imminent every day – the effects of climate change. Despite minimal contributions to causes of climate change, Indigenous populations suffer the greatest risks of the effects. This is most apparent and acute right now in Pakistan as one third of that country remains flooded.

Pakistanis are indeed in need of outside help. But too often Western aid swoops in with relief and then disappears leaving them with little support for how to survive the next disaster. Just as profit seeking colonists left the Klallam people with little support for survival. But instead of resorting to fatalistic language and traditional paternalistic hero mentalities that portray Indigenous communities as helpless and hopeless, some scientists and activists are shifting toward community-based adaptation strategies. These efforts start by first experiencing and understanding how these communities are affected, but then recognizing many of them also have deep ancestral knowledge and history of how to adapt to a changing climate.

To strike a healthy balance between Western government aid and scientific knowledge and local needs and culture will require increased sensitivities to historical traumas inflicted by colonization, extreme capitalism, and forced acculturation. There is a myriad of language, linguistic, and cultural gaps that challenge the documentation, translation, and integration of Western scientific approaches with Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge so that it is accurate, complete, and fair. Meanwhile, the planet is warming, the environment is shifting, and the pressure for adaptation systems and mechanisms is mounting.

To bridge these knowledge gaps requires a concerted effort around the globe to establish consistent approaches to Indigenous knowledge integration in scientific literature. In 2020 a group of researchers started by asking this fundamental question:

“How is evidence of indigenous knowledge on climate change adaptation geographically and thematically distributed in the peer-reviewed literature?”

What they found is the number of publications per year focusing on Indigenous knowledge and climate change adaptation has grown considerably over the last ten or so years. Between 1994 and 2008 their search yielded just six scientific publications that included evidence of Indigenous knowledge. There were that many in 2009 alone. Ten years later, in 2019, the number grew sevenfold to 42.

The majority, 133 of the 236 sampled, came from the field of Environmental Science. Social Sciences (97) and Earth and Planetary Sciences (50) had the second and third most publications respectively. Then came Agriculture and Biological Sciences (36), Medicine (22), and Health Professions (14). The word-cloud they generated from the corpus ranked these as the most common words: ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, ‘drought’, ‘community’, ‘perception’, ‘impact’, ‘food security’, ‘agriculture’, and ‘adaptive capacity’. Given the most repeated words all relate to health and survival, researchers in the health and human services academy and industry have some work to do.

In terms of geographic distribution, a large proportion of publications study regions in Africa and Asia. The most studied countries are India, Zimbabwe, and Canada. There is no worldwide count of Indigenous populations and most studies don’t mention tribal names, so it’s hard to determine fair distribution. However, based on the data available, the authors suggest the biggest gaps may be in central Africa, northern Asia, Greenland, Australia, parts of South America and Polynesia.

Of the attributes of Indigenous knowledge represented, most publications (170) included “Factual knowledge about the environment and environmental changes” like precipitation, temperature, ice thickness, and wind speed. Two of the least represented attributes were:

“Cultural values and worldviews (61) like relationship to land, stewardship, values of reciprocity, collectiveness, equilibrium, and solidarity.

“Governance and social capital” (61) like food sharing and social networks as well as informal social safety nets.

These seem to me to be valuable sets of knowledge in the face of worldwide human ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘capacity to adapt’ to the effects of climate change. Some scientists are shifting from describing the facts of climate change toward better understanding of human mitigation, migration, and adaptation.

BLENDING BARRIERS

One of the reasons Indigenous communities are so helpful is their cultural lineage and oral history traditions include solutions, strategies, and innovations of past human adaptations to a changing climate. This all despite past attempts by evil colonizers to suppress and destroy their knowledge, traditions, and even their existence. But these people and civilizations gained and sustained through generations of ecological experimentation. They benefited from innovations in grassland growth, fire management, and crop alteration.

Over decades and centuries, they evolved countless trials of seed germination, hybridization, and dispersal to achieve maximal crop yields. (e.g., symbiotic ‘Three Sisters’ crop clustering). They also developed predator management schemes enabling them, and their crops, to survive and thrive. Their mediation of the environment provided a mutualistic food web rooted in natural forms of ecological reciprocity. But this knowledge was not and is not static.

They had to endure and adapt to environmental dynamism at varying scales of time and space. Change occurred at a local level with daily shifts in the weather but also at a regional level from sudden climatic and geological perturbations like earthquakes, floods, droughts, and volcanoes. All of which had effects lasting decades and centuries.

These events led some populations to hunker down and innovate new methods of survival amidst a changed but familiar environment, while others migrated near and far to survive. For those who didn’t make it, their knowledge is lost. However, some traces of their existence, their paths of migration, shelter, and food habits do, and we rely on archeologists to bring those facts and interpretations to light.

But even in the best of situations, as evidenced with the Elwha project, balancing hard quantitative science with qualitative humanitarianism while in search of adaptation and survival strategies poses a host of challenges. Not the least of which is the fact that within these works exist many gaps in human and environmental knowledge across the spectrum of global space and time.

But a new approach in archaeology and ecology is emerging called ‘archaeoecology. It strives for a more robust intellectual understanding of the interaction of people and place that spans the globe and the past 60,000 years of existence. It’s a proposed blending of ecological and archaeological research that, when augmented with Traditional Ecological Knowledge, can fill gaps of the past so that plans can be made now for how humans can survive in the future. And as the Klallam people have reminded us, regardless of the past, the time for healthy adaptation to a changed environment needs to start now.

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Hello Interactors,

The next couple episodes will be a little off beat as I’m coming to you from the east coast of the United States. It’s time to deliver our little birdies from the nest so they may build their own. Dorm room nesting is a common sight this time of year among many young human adults seeking knowledge and independence. It can be observed in the towering cities of New York City and the smallest lowland wooded enclaves of Waltham, Massachusetts.

For this momentous trip I’m listening to a book about a young man who launched to places further away than this. It’s a book I wish I had consumed long before now – The Invention of Nature by historian Andrea Wulf. It tells the tale of a man few have heard of but have most likely have heard the name – Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt. His name graces more geographic places, plants, and animals around the world than any other. That’s because he was the first person to travel the world scientifically articulating what traditional Indigenous knowledge keepers have known for millennia – that all of nature is connected by an intricate web we now call an ecosystem.

Born in Germany in 1769, he was the most celebrated scientist of his time. Upon his most famous and influential trip to South America, in his twenties, he observed how Spanish colonialism had ravaged the land. Acres of native vegetation had been cut and burned to make way for monoculture cash crops like sugar cane, wheat, and corn where all profits were then sent to the Spanish monarchy. Streams and rivers had been diverted to water these thirsty crops leaving lakes, ponds, and subterranean reservoirs dry. Local plants and animals, including Indigenous populations, were suffering as a result.

The local Spaniards and Creoles believed there must be a leak in the earth causing these conditions, but it was Humboldt, through meticulous geographic, geological, and meteorological observation, who determined it was the crops that had caused the devastation. He surmised that between the increased temperatures caused by the loss of trees and vegetation (that naturally cool and release moisture into the air) and the drying up and hardening of the soil (thus depleting the earth of groundwater) that significant damage was being done to the area.

He posited that such destruction at larger scales around the world may alter climatic patterns. He introduced the idea of human induced climate change in 1800. He further observed that these negative effects originated with infective colonialism of European and American profit seeking imperialist machines that relied heavily on the abduction and trade of human slaves from Africa and local Indigenous populations to work the fields of these monocultural crops.

Governments and corporations didn’t just ignore Humboldt’s warnings, they accelerated the pace of production and destruction. That insistence continues to this day as countries and corporations fight for access to natural resources and cheap labor – far out of the reaches of complicit eyes and ears – to feed the beast of rampant worldwide consumerism. As Humboldt warned, over 200 years ago, at the peril of earth’s resources and their interconnected web of life. You can’t say we weren’t warned.

Alexander von Humboldt remained a harsh critic of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery until the day he died. He witnessed firsthand the early devastating impact greed was having on the planet and its inhabitants – most especially Black and Indigenous people. Humboldt was a heartfelt man, but his true love was science. He abhorred politics and politicians though remained popular among them all, except Napoleon.

Thomas Jefferson was particularly enamored with Humboldt. They shared a common affinity and thirst for botanical, astronomical, and geographical knowledge. Humboldt shared with Jefferson all he knew of South America and Mexico who was starved by the Spanish of any information at all. While he shared in the spirit of two science loving naturalist friends, that knowledge turned out to be instrumental in helping Jefferson, and the United States, increase their imperial standing in the world and its widespread ecologically damaging capitalistic dominance. Humboldt endeared himself to Jefferson mostly because he was impressed with Jefferson’s commitment to liberty.

Though he disapproved of Jefferson’s adherence to slavery, he was wary of criticizing Jefferson directly for fear of disenfranchising their friendship. However, his diary, and the diary of others, reveals he did so in private to Jefferson’s friends and colleagues. Some history scholars criticize Humboldt for not using these opportunities to sway the opinions of these powerful men, but Humboldt believed science should rise above politics and the best way to share science was to share it with everyone who would listen regardless of their political or governmental affiliation.

Humboldt worked tirelessly, day and night, wherever he happened to be living. Scientific luminaries and academics could not understand how a single man could be so well versed in so many subjects, be seen in so many places on a given day or night, while continuing to discover new insights about the world – all with boundless energy. He spoke so fast and on so many topics, in three languages, that people said one could learn in two hours of listening to Humboldt what would take months to master on their own.

He was a slight and nimble man with thin delicate hands. These attributes served him well squeezing into caverns and mines and placing sensitive miniscule blossoms into tiny glass vials. But he also had the strength and determination to endure extreme altitudes climbing rocky trails with shoes ripped to shreds. Upon total failure, he would hike barefoot. With his feet sometimes bleeding, he would stop every few hundred meters to take measurements with his barometer, altimeter, and sextant while collecting rock and plant specimens, drawing diagrams, and illustrating landscapes. It was he who first speculated on plate tectonics two hundred years before their full understanding by observing common plant species and geology between, say, a western coast of one continental land mass and the eastern coast of another.

It's unfortunate that one of the most intriguing, intelligent, and ecologically committed scientists to have ever lived, who inspired everyone from Charles Darwin to Henry David Thoreau, eventually succumbed to the realities of endless European wars and political turmoil. These ordeals limited his travels to other lands he desperately wanted to visit, explore, and further connect his web of knowledge and the web of life.

Given his broad and groundbreaking studies, travel, and international fame makes one wonder why Humboldt is not a household name today as it once was in the 1800s despite being in countless scientific books, journals, and maps. Is it that the complex connections and relationships that make life possible and sustainable are too difficult to teach or comprehend? That can’t explain why Newton or Einstein are so popular. Maybe it is just easier to teach the memorization of the scientific facts of biology and physics and the strict classification schemes of rocks, plants, and animals, than the rich interdependent interactions on which each of them relies.

Or perhaps we’ve grown ambivalent. Have we grown too comfortable to care about the workings of the world? Maybe Humboldt’s ideas are too threatening to the very institutions of colonialism, unbridled capitalism, and the over exploitation of natural and human resources he warned everyone of. Has overt capitalism made us too comfortable, complacent, and complicit? Perhaps those in power think it best not to perpetuate the ideas of a man critical of those systems that maintain the power of few, the comfort for some, and the education of many.

Napoleon thought so. He tried to have Humboldt banished from Paris, the heartbeat of scientific discovery and individual liberties at the time, suspecting him a subversive threat to Napoleonic domination. After all, it was politics and power struggles by the Napoleonic Wars that interrupted Humboldt’s continued quest to document, communicate, and share the scientific knowledge of ecosystems; the roots of which exist in traditional indigenous knowledge colonists squelched, shunned, or stole. Perhaps the same power and politics that held Humboldt back continue to hold us back today.

But we’ve had over 200 years to adjust course and have done nothing. Is it too late? I think not. Besides, there’s too much at stake for us all to remain ambivalent. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend this book. May it mark the beginning of your own journey. Let’s all follow in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt and share with our web of connections the ecological web connecting all of life.

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Hello Interactors,

Quite a week in political news. The United States, the second biggest CO2 emitter behind China and 12th per capita, is finally making progress on climate change legislation. It’s not perfect, but it’s cause for celebration if you care about healthy air and water, the survival of life on this planet…or getting a rebate on a brand new car! Don’t get me wrong, these laws are important and necessary achievements AND they will likely fill American roads with even more cars. Yippee!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

LET’S MAKE A DEAL

“We on the Left are very good at criticizing people”, Washington Senator Pramila Jayapal once said, “but we need to build the base to pull people to the Left.”

As the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and chief drafter of the Inflation Reduction Act, she did just that. President Biden is set to sign it into law. It’s the country’s largest climate legislation ever. Jayapal worked with a cadre of climate experts who have been waiting for this moment for decades. The law is expected to drive down inflation while dropping U.S. CO2 emissions 40% by 2030. It’s more modest than hoped, but is a HUGE first step. No surprise, not a single Republican voted for it

However, 41 Republicans did vote to fight climate change, they just won’t admit it. The bi-partisan CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS) was signed it into law last week. It includes a $280 billion investment in American semiconductor research and development, but nearly one quarter ($67 billion) is for zero-carbon industries and climate change research. Between last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Law, CHIPS, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States has made serious strides to fight climate change. It’s not enough, but it’s more than ever before achieved. By investing in clean energy and renewables they not only become increasingly affordable, but they also reduce demand for fossil fuels.

Republicans also continue to vote for clean energy in their home states. Between 2010 and 2019, six of the top ten states with the largest increase in wind electricity generation were red states. Including Texas. Nearly one quarter of their energy comes from wind. This saves Texans $20 million dollars a year in energy costs. Reducing carbon, saves money. Including cars. Charging an electric vehicle (EV) today costs the equivalent of filling a gas tank with $1 per gallon gas. EVs, like traditional cars, also need safe and reliable roads.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed into law last November includes $110 billion in new spending for highways, roads, and bridges, compared to $39 billion on public transit. This is a HUGE investment in public transit and our roads and bridges need repaired, but the ratio of spending on roads relative to transit is roughly the same as it’s always been. Policy makers continue to believe adding more roads will ease congestion. Adding road capacity to ease traffic is like loosening your belt so you can eat more. But Americans do tend to overeat and most like their cars.

One of the big drivers of the CHIPs law were automakers. There are still hurting from supply chain snafus strangling their supply of semi-conductor chips needed to make cars. Automotive News reported, since the start of 2021, 13.5 million vehicles were cut from factory schedules due to chip shortages. Nearly 4.3 million of those were to be assembled in North America. Increasingly more chips are needed in cars as they strive for advances in autonomous driving. Bosch, a German supplier of car technology, says chips account for about $200 of value in a car sold today, but by 2030 it’s expected to grow to $800 per vehicle. Carmakers need more chips, and they need onshore guarantees they can get them. Hence the CHIPS law.

Electric vehicles are like giant phones on wheels. And like phone makers, automakers hope to one day make money on software subscriptions and services. Until then, the only way to make money is to sell large volumes of cars. Increased volumes drive prices down. Lower EV prices mean even more people can afford a car. Electric vehicles are also more affordable to own due to low energy rates and fewer repairs. But they’re still expensive. Norway, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has the highest EV per capita of any country. But owners admit that is largely due to government incentives. Hence the U.S. focus on EV rebates and automaker deals found in the Inflation Reduction Act.

CARS CAN BE EXHAUSTING

EVs charged with clean energy not only reduce CO2 emissions, they also reduce Nitrogen Oxides (NOx). These are gases produced when fossil fuels explode. They then float into the air and become smog and acid rain. Floating in the ambient air they can trigger or compound asthma, lung disease, heart disease, and diabetes. They not only reduce birth rates they also increase death rates.

Noxious gases are only part of the air quality problem. So are particulates. Especially those measuring 10 and 2.5 micrometers or smaller. For comparison, fine beach sand is 90 micrometers in diameter, human hair is 50-80, and dust or pollen particles are about 10 (PM10). Like Nitrogen Oxides, Particulate matter at 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) or less can also come from exploding fossil fuels.

PM2.5 is the number one environmental contributor to human mortality with disparities along racial-ethnic and socio-economic lines. One recent study took data from 2014 and found four out of the top six sources of PM2.5 are the same for POC, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Those are: industry, light-duty gasoline passenger vehicles, construction sites, and heavy-duty diesel vehicles. The only sector where Whites were disproportionately exposed to PM2.5 were coal mining and agriculture. Getting to clean energy powered EVs will reduce exposure from passenger EVs, but construction equipment and heavy-duty vehicles are destined to be diesel for decades.

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports a national downward trend in PM2.5, exposure rates vary by region. One recent study divided the nation into 8.6 million gridded cells to get a more accurate account of the spatial distribution of PM2.5. Looking at data over the last 36 years, they found the national average has indeed gone down. However, those areas with the least PM2.5 and those with the most are unchanged since 1981. This suggests the transition to EVs will most benefit those areas where PM2.5 is already low – predominantly White sparsely populated suburbs and exurbs. Meanwhile, those areas where construction and heavy-duty diesel vehicles are most concentrated – predominantly poor, ethnically, and racially diverse urban areas will continue to be disproportionately exposed to PM2.5.

But another source of PM2.5 and PM10 is non-exhaust related. It comes from dust made from car brakes, tire wear, and decomposed concrete. The heavier the vehicle, the more dust is created. Unfortunately, EVs are heavier than traditional cars due to a chassis full of weighty battery packs. However, EVs also come with optional regenerative braking. Letting off the accelerator triggers a generator that charges the battery while also slowing the car. Hitting the brakes on an EV can also engage the generator which further reduces dust accumulation. Some automakers also have ways to collect the dust as it’s generated so it doesn’t hit the pavement or fly into the air. But it’s not standard and some drivers choose to turn off regenerative braking because they don’t like how it ‘feels. But when used, it can help reduce particulate matter.

One study out of the UK shows that for urban driving, with the right amount of regenerative braking, EVs can reduce PM10 by ~26%. But on the freeway, they found “no level of regenerative braking can mitigate against the increase in PM10 due to increased vehicle weight.” Some of that increase in PM10 comes from increased tire dust from heavy passenger EVs. Vehicle weight would have to drop 22% for PM10 improvements like those found in urban environments. And while a reduction of ~27% was estimated for PM2.5 across all road types, those figures assume 90% of braking comes from regenerative brakes.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume EVs are cleaner and healthier. And through the magic of innovation, competition, and incentives more people can afford a car than ever before. Let’s also optimistically assume income disparities will lessen worldwide, more people will rise out of poverty, move to the city, and one day even own a car (many associate higher social status with car ownership). In addition, urban populations are growing exponentially – a trend expected to continue until 2050. The promise of an EV future – as aided by the passing of three new U.S. laws – will then result in increasingly more cars on the road. If you like sitting in traffic, you’re going to love the EV future. If you survive.

The United Nations reported last month nearly 1.3 million people a year die in road traffic crashes. It’s the leading cause of death among children and young adults. While interior car safety technologies reduce motorist deaths over time, they do nothing for pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists. And the poorer you are the greater the chance of death. And probably worse than we know. Little data is collected in the poorest countries, and many don’t bother reporting them anyway.

While these three relatively green U.S. laws will indeed reduce CO2 emissions, they will also increase car related injuries and deaths. Worse yet, investments in an EV future only strengthens car dependency locking in perpetually more traffic, traffic related fatalities, and continued poor air and water quality. It’s a system of car dependency embedded in our culture, technology, and governments.

AUTOS MAKE THE WORLD GO ‘ROUND

Here's how this self-sustaining systems works. Car companies need a ton of capital to make the steel, plastics, and chips comprising a car. To offset these costs, they must sell large volumes of cars. When the economy is growing, they sell more cars because car dependent societies require more vehicles to meet the demands of economic growth. When there is a downturn, there always is, carmakers suffer because they can no longer cover the cost of production. So, what do car companies do when they’re in financial trouble? They ask their governments to bail them out and/or provide incentives to spur more people to buy more cars. Both the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act do this. And remember when Obama saved GM from bankruptcy after the 2008 financial crisis?

Democrats and Republicans both routinely save the auto industry. Why? There are many factors, but here are two. Democrats want to support union jobs that feed factory labor and Republicans want to perpetuate the rugged-individualist mystique and lifestyle that comes with private car ownership. Car addicts on both sides of the aisle believe there are two kinds of people: those who own cars and those who wish they could. Both parties also insist on a mythical infinite economic growth curve despite being limited by the natural resources and ecosystems to achieve it.

Once there are cars, roads are needed. Roads are presented as an economically easy and obvious answer to transportation efficiency. The only requirement is they be mostly free of cars. Roads with no cars is a waste of money, but roads full of cars is a waste of time. Time is money, so society accepts efforts made to ease congestion. Part of that acceptance is to prioritize the use of public roads for the movement of cars. As roads fill up, society demands more of them, and governments and road construction companies happily oblige; more union jobs for the Democrats and more space allocated to the rugged Republican individualist. Private vehicle ownership lifestyles propped up by union jobs and taxpayer dollars.

But public road space is constrained by private property. The only apparent way to make room for more cars is to take space away from others. For example, pedestrians and cyclists. Politicians, policy makers, and civil engineers (all steeped in, educated by, and benefactors of car culture) characterize this social demotion as ‘pedestrian safety’. The more cars there are on the road, and the more space they demand, the more ‘safety measures’ are put in place for pedestrians. i.e. more crosswalk paint for peds and bike lane paint for bikes. These are smart people, but an eight-year-old can tell you paint is not only a weak safety measure, it’s unjust. This paternalistic pandering signals to poor little pedalers and pedestrians that the best way to keep them safe is to relegate them to the gutter. ‘Pedalers’, ‘peddlers’, and ‘pedestrians’ – what unpleasant peasantry. Evidently, these well-intentioned people missed that day in kindergarten when most of us learned ‘sharing is caring’. To show they care, cities sometimes provide park benches at select corners and sidewalks so one can marvel at the safe roads made for those marvelous machines while breathing deathly fumes and particulate matter in dreary anticipation of witnessing a car accident. An endless stream of drivers solemnly staring through the glass of a windshield – or their phone.

It's enough to scare you into taking the bus. Good idea. Where do I catch one? Good question. How long do I have to wait? Who knows? Are they clean? Sometimes. Are they safe? Mostly. How about we just take a car? Ok. This is precisely the line of reasoning car culture conspirators have engineered. Because public dollars are transparently spent on enabling mass transit (which some argue should be a public utility…like providing safe, reliable, and clean water), it’s easy for public officials and the ‘road gang’ to point out just how expensive it is to operate. Less evident, intentionally hidden, and ridiculously complex is the public finance calculus behind the myriad of finance schemes, tax havens, kickbacks, rebates, incentives, and old-fashioned back-room dealings between hundreds of members of the ‘road gang’ and every level of government. All messaged and sold to society as an economically rational ‘public good.’ Private vehicle, good. Public transit, bad. Got it?

And when economic times turn bad, the interconnected and interdependent ‘road gang’ schemes for more financial complexity which ultimately includes more money from a government who is incented to keep them afloat. More jobs lead to more consumer spending which increases GDP which leads to more votes. But where in the budget does one find more money? The ‘road gang’ has ideas. How about pulling from an obvious expenditure they’ve already convinced the public is a bad investment by underfunding it – public transit. Especially if that money can be spent to create jobs in the auto and road construction industry. There’s a reason the infrastructure legislation is called the ‘Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.’ Yes, this law increased spending on transit, but it also boosted spending for the ‘road gang’. The rich get richer – more tax dollars funding more cars and more roads – and the poor stay poor – busses stuck in traffic, bus stops inconveniently placed, timetables unpredictable, busses uncomfortable, and sometimes unsafe. It not only locks in car culture, but it also locks in where people live.

Land use policies are also intent on perpetuating car dependency. Real estate companies seek land to be converted into car-oriented neighborhoods, city planners and lawmakers arrange for plenty of parking, and gas stations are strategically plopped in prized plots. TV shows, movies, books, cartoons, brochures, and advertising promote images of bucolic suburban lifestyles coupled with messages of wealth and status. The more land is developed this way, the more attractive it becomes to own a car. Sprawling and sparsely populated areas make mass transit inefficient, and cash strapped transit agencies are forced to cut service to better serve the needs of the urban carless. This makes car ownership in these areas not only a luxury, but the only viable option. That is, if you’re able to buy, own, or drive one in the first place. Those unable or willing to own a car are relegated to lower social status with little to no alternatives. Peasantry. Just as intended.

I’m sure nobody in the Progressive Caucus set out to intentionally perpetuate car culture when crafting this recent legislation, it’s just how our society has evolved. These new laws are intended to create local jobs, lower costs of living, and cut CO2 emissions. They’re not intended to dislodge a hegemonic, human slaughtering, car cabal. In fact, these laws are feeding the car beast with trendy green technology. These laws are also not intended to significantly alter how public land and road space is allocated. In fact, twelve new highways are already slated to be built.

And while transportation equity advocates were finally at the bargaining table with progressive Democrats, these laws are not intended to shift our urban areas toward equitable public space for all. Yes, the air in cities will be cleaner, but they won’t be free of harmful particulates. And the streets will most assuredly become more congested and dangerous. It seems we are sacrificing fewer lives to air pollution, more lives to traffic fatalities, so that ultimately all life on this planet has a future. It can be hard to see human sacrifice as progress, but I suspect members of the Progressive Caucus are intent on reversing this. The language in the Inflation Reduction Act begins to expose the inequities and unfairness stemming from decades of dominant car-oriented economic, societal, governmental, and physical systems. It could be the ‘road gang’ is in their sites and they’re using the widespread electrification transition as a gateway to a new possible future.

Perhaps, if given a chance in the next six years, they not only can continue transitioning to green energy, but also regreening cities. This will require the reversal of inequitable, dangerous, and unhealthy car-dependent patterns of public and private land use. The sure-fire way to slow cars in urban areas is to skinny the streets. This frees space for protected bike lanes and wider sidewalks, so wheels and feet of all sizes feel safe sharing public roadways. The more people are pulled from their cars, the more space is created for those who must drive.

Damaged ecosystems must also be reestablished, and urban landscapes and neighborhoods must be reconnected with paths that connect people with each other and their regreened city. Every human life is best lived when connected to nature, but car culture, EV or otherwise, not only isolates people from each other but from their natural environment. It’s time to make concrete jungles actual jungles.

Whether we like it not, the damaging effects of climate change are forcing human connections with nature. Floods, droughts, high winds, and heat are all natural phenomena that are best mitigated with systems of integrated nature-based solutions. Nature is our best teacher. Infrastructure funding and chips and EVs incentives will help us all to go green, but it doesn’t stop there. To ‘go green’ also means to regreen cities, and to do that requires fewer cars. The best public good a government can provide are those for the common good. Those goods are uncommon today, but Pramila Jayapal and the Progressive Caucus eased their criticality, compromised, pulled centrists Left, and made good progress on the common good. Let’s hope they set a good example and can continue to make progress.

Otherwise, 2024 could send these three steps forward two steps back. Although, when it comes to energy, red states look blue. Meanwhile more and more members of the ‘road gang’ are increasingly all-in on electrification and renewables. Who knows, maybe automaker’s next private vehicle for the rugged individualists will be a sporty electric two-seater convertible skinny enough to fit in a bike lane. If so, you can bet they’ll lobby to have that lane protected. Safety measures, and all. They’ll insist on protection from the peasantry in their old bloated, road-hogging cars and trucks.

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Hello Interactors,

Unexpected extreme meteorological events on Biblical scales are happening all around the globe. Their intensity and frequency is only going to increase. Who will survive and who will die may come down to who chooses the right path.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

ONE IN A THOUSAND

“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.

For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.

Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.
Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”

Matthew 24:37-42

At 2 a.m. their Lord came. And then the flood. A woman, Amber, and a man, Riley, rushed to wake two boys and two girls: Madison, Riley Jr., Nevaeh, and Chance. Ages eight, six, four, and two. The water was filling their trailer home like a bathtub. But this was not just any flood.

Civil engineers plan for floods like this. Flash floods. They mold networks of linear concrete channels directing water to rush into cavernous catchments…sometimes at blistering speeds. Civil engineers take great pride in trying to control nature. The British civil engineer credited with birthing the discipline, Thomas Tredgold, once said, “Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man.” The power of these floods could not be directed. The cleverly engineered network of pipes, culverts, and catchments were eviscerated. Useless. Inconvenient to man.

Seeing the water rise around them, gushing from all directions, the family of four headed for higher ground – their roof. But it wasn’t high enough, so onto a dangling limb they climbed. The water followed. Chunks of their home ripped from its frame as they clung to the tree. They watched as their home rose from its footings and swirled in the torrent.

Have you ever submerged a rubber ball to the bottom of a pool, released it, and watch as it rushes to the surface with a pop? That’s the work of buoyancy force. It’s the same force that works against you swimming to the bottom to release it. It takes just two feet of flood water to exert 1500 pounds of buoyancy force. Imagine the force of 20 feet of rushing water? This flood was tossing SUVs like pool toys. Those four kids didn’t stand a chance. Only mom and dad survived.

The U.S. Southeastern state of Kentucky was hit with a series of sudden thunderstorms last week. The death toll has climbed to 37. The town of Jackson, just west of Lexington, saw their entire average August rainfall of four inches pour down in just 12 hours. The National Weather Service estimated a storm like this may occur just once in 1000 years.

They said that in 2015 about a rainstorm in South Carolina. Two regions there saw 10 and 26 inches of rain fall over four days. Twenty people died. Another “once in 1000 year” event happened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2016. Thirteen people died. Over ten times more houses in that area had major flooding (18 inches or more) than the last storm of this magnitude in 1983. That’s 33 years ago, not 1000. Suffice it say, the Southeast United States will have ‘once in 1000 year’ flood events at least once every five years, if not every year. What are the odds experts will stop calling them ‘once in 1000 year’ weather events? One in 1000?

In 2015 Pope Francis sent a letter to all Catholic churches titled, Laudato si' (Praise Be to You). The subtitle read, “on care for our common home”. It was a seething critique on consumerism, globalism, addiction to continual economic growth, and the social and environmental degradation it has caused. He doesn’t mince words when he writes that it is,

“easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”

He observes it’s resulted in a form of “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.” Especially those who are poor. He says, “the poor and the earth are crying out.” Imagine the sound of cacophonous rushing floodwaters, the clap of angry water-logged thunder clouds, punctuated with screams of terror from a family of four left with two. They clung to an equally terrified tree as their sole possessions rushed away in a gushing deluge. Deranged droplets running scared from the canyons, crevices, and creeks of the battered and bewildered hills of Appalachia.

Kentucky is home to perennially poor people. The first Europeans to settle there most likely lived like resident Cherokees. For millennia Indigenous communities hunted and fished in and around the streams and rivers that carved grassy areas amidst hickory-oak forests. They hallowed out poplar trees to make canoes traversing vast networks of rivers and streams to hunt, travel, and trade. Cherokee women were expert horticulturists. They cultivated seeds using slow-burning fires to clear underbrush and germinate seeds, experimented with seed alterations to improve yields, farmed strawberries, and harvested North American native onions, called ramps. Their mountain plateaus were rich with rows of ‘Three Sisters’; beans, corn, and squash grown in clumps of biological reciprocity.

Europeans and enslaved Africans then brought sweet potatoes and peaches which Cherokees also adopted. They did all this, as history professor Gregory Smithers learned,

“not to commodify and claim possession over the landscape and rivers, but to constantly renew their commitment to living in balance and harmony with local ecosystems.”

However, living in harmony with nature ended when European imperialists started competing for land and natural resources in the 17th and 18th centuries. As Europeans immigrant populations grew in the 19th century, so did commodification. By the late 1800s fresh-water mussels of Tennessee and southwest Virginia fed a burgeoning international pearl market. Within a few decades Tennessee was leader in marketing and selling pearls.

After the Civil War and the formation of the New South, dams were built, roads were constructed, and timber became easier to extract. Corporations from the North bought large swaths of land. By 1930, over 60 percent of Kentucky land was owned by European, Canadian, and Northern United States companies. Families were forced to sell their land. Companies arranged sophisticated legal schemes in Washington D.C. forcing private land foreclosures they quickly then swooped up.

The domination and oppression these Kentuckians experienced is what all Indigenous people had already endured, and continue to endure, across the continent. The taking of land and resources was dehumanizing and starved them of their dignity. Corporations played into these visceral emotions labeling and portraying people of the South, just as they did Indigenous, African, and lower-class European slaves and servants, as backwards, dirty, uneducated, lazy, and violent. The stereotype stuck and is alive to this day. The Pope is right, poor people of Appalachia are crying out alright. But many are crying in anger directed at another stereotype who hear mother earth crying: ‘environmentalists’.

DISSONANCE DIFFUSED

Kentucky is a deeply red state. Most love Trump and members of the Trump Republican party who gleefully dismantle environmental regulations. As Trump pulled from the Paris Peace Accords many Kentuckians cheered when he trumpeted that he represents the people of “Pittsburgh not Paris”. These people what their land back from corporations but vote for the party who hands land over to those very corporations. They want to farm, fish, and hunt in clean mountains and streams and for their houses to not float away, but many deny climate change and despise environmentalism. To enact revenge on the ’coastal elites’ of ‘the North’ they are inflicting material damage on their own soil and air, their livelihoods, and their mental and physical health. But when identities are threatened, so is reason.

And it turns out, distraught, individualist, conservative cisgender male Christians who value patriarchy and masculinized manual labor (like logging and mining) have an especially hard time accepting this essential fact: addressing the effects of climate change will require communal collective action across global, socio-political, cultural, and gender boundaries. This approach is antithetical to their identity, and they feel threatened by it. So how does one teach such a person the hard realities of climate change contributing to their destruction?

Scholars working at the intersection of learning sciences and social psychology find it starts with diffusing the dissonance. They advise avoiding threats to identity or attempts to ‘win them over’ through argumentation or value judgement. Researchers also found an educational path into conservative homes may best be through children. One study showed daughters educated on aspects of climate change were particularly effective in educating their fathers.

A group of educators in conservative Oklahoma manage to subvert laws restricting the teaching of aspects of climate change by talking openly in the class about its social controversy. This problem-based approach to learning has shown embracing controversy in meaningful dialog opens the door to collective problem solving among conservative students.

Professor David Long at Moorehead University in Kentucky takes this approach in his introductory physics class for non-physics majors. He also does research on how political and religious ideology can be used to mediate science education. His class is called “Modern Issues and Problems in the Physical Sciences”. Being in coal country, he focuses on the carbon costs of energy production. Using project-based learning techniques students grapple with the science behind energy production, consumption, and CO2 atmospheric outputs – both the opportunities and the threats.

He says

“a small number of (always) white male Morehead State students present themselves in class adorned with various types of neo-facist para-military and white supremacist shirts, hats, and other coded iconography that have burgeoned among the political right in recent years.”

To diffuse dissonance, he starts the class by identifying as the son of a father who worked in the coal-fired energy industry on the eastern Appalachian slopes of Pennsylvania.

He wraps up the course by having the class write up an ‘official’ news release on a future energy policy based on what they learned. To encourage unbiased writing, he exposes them to the realities of media bias by using the ‘ad fontes media’ bias chart. This indirectly teaches them to be more critical of their own personal information choices on climate change. He says that so far only three people “have chosen energy policies which retain high CO2 emissions, and even in these cases, the students have chosen natural gas as part of a larger suite of energy choices in what they describe as a pragmatic stopgap as we move away from carbon.”

FROM REDNECK TO RED’S NEXT

“People look down on Appalachians, and some people are saying the hillbillies got what they deserved…But it’s not like that. These were good people, God-fearing people that loved their neighbors and looked out for each other. People don’t realize how much has been lost.”

Those are the words of Tonya Gibson, a nurse practitioner in Knott County, Kentucky. She’s been dealing with people mourning the loss of those rescued but not saved from the flood. She spoke to the stereotypes that plague people living in this region as a form of her own crying.

These are the same God-fearing people Pope Francis knows suffer most from the effects of climate change. Effects due to a fossil-fueled exploitive form of capitalism the Pope is critical of. For his next memo, perhaps the Pope should reflect on the role Catholicism and Christianity played in the unfolding of overly extractive capitalism. He should contemplate the exploitation of Indigenous and African people in pursuit of gold for centuries of Pope’s like him and the nation-states they, and other Christian churches, controlled.

The origins of the complete dominion over natural resources in pursuit of prosperity for Kings and their Christian enablers is rooted in interpretations of the Bible. The English Standard Version of Genesis 1:26. reads:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”

Other versions say ‘rule’ instead of ‘dominion’. And rule they did. Many still do and authoritative rule has become a part of their identity. But Christians who follow principles of ecotheology believe this is a misinterpretation or poor translation of the original Hebrew text. They contend for humans to be granted ‘dominion’ does not mean they have permission to gluttonously exploit, defile, or destroy it – just the opposite. Ecotheologians believe their God gave humans the gift of nature and they are obligated to apply the abilities God instilled in their big brain to creatively maintain, care, and sustain the gifts of nature.

The word ‘dominion’ appears elsewhere in the Bible in plural form. ‘Dominions’ are Christian angels tasked with keeping the natural order of the universe as their God designed it, by enforcing universal laws of nature. Curiously, atheist environmentalists are in fact, in Christian terms, Dominion Angels doing what God told them to do. But getting ‘rednecks’ to listen to these ‘whackos’ won’t be easy. But not impossible.

In 2003, two researchers published a paper studying faith-based environmentalism in 20 churches in Appalachia. They found these churches successfully promoted “a transformation of personal values, attitudes, and conduct in support of an environmental ethic of care.” Further, they were able to convince traditional Christians that beliefs surrounding ‘dominion as domination’ are “key reasons for continued environmental degradation.” Other efforts like the ‘Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology’ continue to foster faith-based communities “where religious and spiritual traditions join together for the shared wellbeing of ecosystems.”

Whether you’re a secular civil engineer who believes we just need more concrete to control nature or an evangelical God-fearing Christian ruling over your God-given domain, the forces of nature don’t care. That is a cognitive dissonance that needs diffused. The Cherokees have never been confused; they know what needs to happen. Cherokee historical knowledge teaches the importance of gudugi – working together for the good of all. This is done with reverence for all living things while walking the right path – duyvkta.

Many scoff at Indigenous knowledge and science. They write it off as primitive and that to embrace their principles somehow would throw us back centuries. But these people survived by adapting to ebbs and flows of nature. They were quick to adopt new technologies, knowledge, and tales and then harmonized them with nature with reverence and reciprocity. They walked the right path so that others after them could too.

Before the Cherokees were forced off their land in the 1830s, a knowledge keeper named Thomas Nutsawi (Deer in the Water) would share some of their creation stories with missionaries who were there to share theirs. Reciprocity. As 1830 approached it’s reported he warned them of a time “when the world became ‘full of people who were very wicked. They disregarded all good instructions and would not listen to any thing [sic] good that was said to them’.”

Recall the Biblical story of Naoh’s Ark. It was the wicked people, sinners, that led God to flood their land. Nutsawi continued,

“an old man was instructed by ‘a certain dog’ to place ‘all kinds of animals’ into a vessel. The old man obeyed, and shortly after closing the door on his vessel ‘rain commenced, and continued forty days and forty nights, while the water at the same time gushed out of the ground, so that as much water came up, as fell down from the clouds. The wicked people could swim but little before they would sink and drown’.”

Cherokees didn’t just synthesize European fruits and vegetables into their diet, they syncretized missionary Christian tales into their knowledge transfer. Nutsawi was integrating the Biblical stories with Cherokee concepts of ecological cooperation between man, animal, and nature as a lesson to European missionaries and his people. As we all face what even the Pope sees as undeniable and unmanageable meteorological forces stemming from wicked people and their sinful ways, Nutsawi’s words offered what may be a prescient ending to his story. He said,

‘the family saved in the ark were Red…the Red people are the real people…’ Nutsawi made his point by reminding us all that their forebearers, the original inhabitants of the land, survived harsh and intense climatological and geological upheaval, both sudden and enduring, because they rejected selfishness. But Europeans, he observed, were ugasalesgi – greedy. And for that, they drowned.

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Hello Interactors,

EVs made headlines this week as members of the U.S. Congress continue to chase their tail in search of remnants of the Green New Deal. I talked about cobalt last week as a key ingredient for lithium-ion batteries, but a new bill offered by congress this week has implications for another, more obvious, mineral — lithium. The biggest source is in an environmentally sensitive area of Bolivia, and U.S.-Bolivian relations are equally sensitive.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE PARADOX OF NATURAL STOCKS

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. These words appeared on a ceramic plaque in the shape of a tea kettle that hung in the kitchen of my grandma’s house. Why do we worry about tomorrow? Is it because we don’t know what it brings? No way to control it? We wake up every day in a past tomorrow living in a future yesterday. Today’s tomorrows are becoming increasingly worrisome on a warming planet that needed help yesterday.

Democrats in Washington DC worried about tomorrow focused their action, in part, on Electric Vehicles (EV) this week. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, they hope to expand EV tax credits and invent $10 billion in investment tax credits to build clean-technology manufacturing facilities.

There’s a provision on the EV tax credit regarding the sourcing and processing of the minerals needed to make the lithium-ion batteries found in EVs. It says, “with respect to the battery from which the electric motor of such vehicle draws electricity,” a certain percentage of the “critical minerals contained in such battery” must be ‘‘(i) extracted or processed in any country with which the United States has a free trade agreement in effect, or (ii) recycled in North America.”

This might explain why Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for more ‘friend-shoring’ while in Seoul South Korea earlier this week. That’s a term she uses to woo countries into trade practices agreeable to the U.S. She chose South Korea because we need their lithium-ion battery production. In April, LG announced plans for a $1.4 billion battery plant in Queen Creek, Arizona. They are the number two battery producer in the world behind China.

The provision isn’t just about the source of the battery, but the source of the materials in the battery. Their key ingredient – lithium – will most likely come from one or more of three countries in Latin America. They’ll need to be ‘Friend-shored’ if America wants to dominate the EV market. The country with the largest and most accessible source, Bolivia, has no shore and recently have not been friendly with the United States.

The world’s largest lithium reserves sit in the Atacama Desert which forms a triangulated region known as the “Lithium Triangle”. It sits within the geopolitical boundaries of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile which were drawn in the 19th century. Bolivia, now home to the largest population of Indigenous people, became land locked when Chile crushed them in the War of the Pacific from 1879-1884. They took away land that gained Bolivia access to the Pacific Ocean. Bolivia lost even more land in the Gran Chaco region to Paraguay after the Chaco War from 1932–35

Much of the international law that governs these disputes were written to advantage American and European colonist expansion. They were part of a neoliberal agenda by the global North to ensure the rights of these borders and those legally living within them, but also to exploit their natural and human resources. Latin American countries rich with natural resources were eager to participate in the global economy. Many in these Latin American countries viewed their natural resources as an economic blessing – a way to secure and grow their new nation’s economic prosperity amidst a burgeoning global economy.

But for most, it was a curse that invited environmental degradation and poverty at the hands of outsiders. This paradox was observed as early as 1711 in a British publication, The Spectator, "It is generally observed, that in countries of the greatest plenty there is the poorest living." In 1995 economist Richard Auty saw this geographical pattern occurring in East Asia, Africa, and Latin America and gave it a name: ‘Resource Curse’.

Auty observes the curse is often explained away by neoliberals as a factor of work ethic; they are simply too lazy to keep up with ‘advanced’ economies or lack the necessary resources. But he says politics are blamed as well. The U.S. has spent centuries of time, energy, and money backing Latin American neoliberal regimes and schemes toward their globalist agenda. Both overtly and covertly and always rhetorically. Authoritatively from the right, ‘Peace through Strength’, or diplomatically from the left, ‘Friend-shoring.’

The United States has long envisioned an American continent that mimics the United States. University of Iowa international law professor, Christopher Rossi, writes,

“Latin Americanism emerged from a deeply circumspect nineteenth century regard for hegemonic foreign policy intentions of the United States, which had weaponized the defensive construct of its Monroe Doctrine (1823) with the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), and an assortment of turn of-the-century interventions and power plays in the Caribbean and Central America over future control of the Panama Canal.”

One of the most recent power plays came with the suspected ousting of one of only two elected Indigenous leaders in the history of colonized America, in a country rich with lithium, Bolivia’s 65th president, Evo Morales.

REAGAN BIRTHS A POLITICIAN

Evo Morales was born in western Bolivia in a small Indigenous Aymara village to farmers in 1959. As a young boy he helped his dad grow coca and trade it in the markets of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city. It took two weeks by foot to get there. Coca is an Aymaran word, “Khoka” – ‘the tree’. It is most associated with cocaine, but the leaf has been central to Andean culture for thousands of years. It’s one of the oldest cultivated plants in South America and has been used as currency, tea, and was even the original ingredient in Coca-Cola. (Kola is a caffeinated African nut) Coca is also commonly chewed by Andeans. Saliva breaks down the leaf to release alkaloids; none of which produce the euphoric effects of processed coca for cocaine but are believed to have health benefits.

Growing up, Evo Morales learned Spanish and attended the Agrarian Humanistic Technical Institute of Orinoca (ITAHO), but never finished. After his military service, he became a coca grower. As cocaine gained popularity in America in the 70s, the price of coca increased and farming coca became popular. Morales soon joined a farmers union protecting Indigenous rights to farm coca for traditional Andean purposes in the face of competition among many, and hostilities toward some, coca growers.

In 1980 a far-right, anti-union, military dictator, Luis García Meza, became displeased with Bolivia’s turn toward a more pro-civilian communitarian government. He also sensed the decline of the Carter administration in the U.S. and gambled on the country swinging to the right in line with his beliefs. So, as Reagan entered the White House Meza took military control of Bolivia. A year later soldiers kidnapped a coca farmer accusing him of trafficking cocaine, beat him up, and burned him to death. This event is what spurred the young Evo Morales into politics.

Reagan distanced himself from Meza, who was eventually pressured to resign. His replacement was a leftist moderate, Hernán Siles Zuazo, who had served previously as president in the 1950s. Amid widespread poverty he came to the U.S. for aid. They agreed under the condition Bolivia would adopt their neoliberal economic plan. That plan involved the privatization of Bolivia’s natural resources – including the coca plant.

With Siles back in office in the 1980s, Reagan had a neoliberal ally and a partner in his infamous War on Drugs. Reagan pressured Siles to use military force to suppress coca growers. The U.S. sent troops to help burn coca fields. There were reports of beatings should owners resist. Farmers were offered $2500 an acre to voluntarily eradicate their crops. Morales was one of them and he refused. In that moment, the coca plant became a symbol of Bolivian natural resources, and his Indigenous Andean ancestral heritage, and he didn’t like U.S. imperialists threatening to control it. Activists protested chanting, “Long live coca! Death to the Yankees!"

Evo Morales organized similar protests throughout the 1980s and 90s and rose through the ranks of various union groups. He took leadership of MAS (Movement for Socialism) – “an indigenous-based political party that calls for the nationalization of industry, legalization of the coca leaf ... and fairer distribution of national resources." By the 2002 elections MAS became Bolivia’s second largest party gaining 20% of the popular vote.

In 2003, more protest erupted after a U.S. company offered to buy a nationalized natural gas pipeline for below market value. Activists took to the street resulting in 80 people dead. Morales called for President Sánchez de Lozada to resign. Lozada fled to Miami, Florida and was replaced by Carlos Mesa who had ties to U.S. In 2004 he resigned fearing a civil war between the upper-class White Bolivian elites concentrated in major cities and the rural working and middle class. In 2005, 85% of Bolivians turned out to vote. Evo Morales earned 54% of the total. This was the first victory by absolute majority in Bolivia in 40 years and the highest national vote percentage of any presidential candidate in Latin American history.

President Morales maintained focus on state sovereignty over natural resources. His administration nationalized Bolivian oil and natural gas, telecommunications, electricity, and restructured a state-owned mining company. Thanks to high international commodity prices, for the first time since its borders had been ratified, Bolivia experienced a continuous economic public-sector surplus between 2006-2013.

Because of his extractive agenda, Morales is sometimes regarded as capitalist; but a communitarian one. Instead of the profits going to privately held companies and select shareholders, they fund social programs. Morales is also regarded as an environmentalist and a voice for climate justice. His philosophy links to Andean Indigenous heritage and a widely held Amerindian belief in natural rights called “Buen Vivir” or “Living Well”. He ensconced many of these philosophies into the Bolivian constitution. His actions made Bolivia a world leader in encoding Indigenous and natural rights into law.

His ‘Living Well’ Bolivian laws, were simply following international law. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth is part of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. It was this ratification that declared April 22 as International Earth Day. The Declaration is intended to spur every country in the world to enact laws and practices that recognize

“Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well.” (my italics)

There is a difference between ‘living well’ and ‘living better’. The current dominant economic philosophy encourages competition between individuals to live better then another, but Morales, and the UN are asking, what if we all could live well?

BATTERY POWERED COUP

The aim to for all to live well is why Morales included laws like:

“The State and any individual or collective person must respect, protect, and guarantee the rights of Mother Earth for the well-being of current and future generations”

There are 58 articles intended to help countries regulate ‘Living Well’, including:

“non-commercialization of the environmental functions of Mother Earth; integrality; precautionary action; guarantee to restore Mother Earth; guarantee to regenerate Mother Earth; historical responsibility; priority of prevention; plural participation; water for life; solidarity among human beings; harmonious relation; social justice; climate justice; plural economy; complementarity and equilibrium; and dialogue of traditional knowledges and science.”

It also includes a ‘Right to Development’ that Morales was following with his extractive economic policy.

“the right to development [as] an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”

The Organization of American States (OAS), an organization largely funded by the U.S. government and headquartered in Washington D.C., helped draft these declarations which Morales inserted into the Bolivian constitution. It’s derived from the 2007 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that

“provides a shared framework for improving temporary situations where two opposed interests collide, that is, the rights of indigenous peoples and State politics.”

There are 148 countries who ratified this declaration in 2016, but the United States, Canada, Colombia, and Brazil are not among them. They have issues with ideas of “free determination, consultation, and consent, collective rights, and natural resources, land, and territories.” Which is why the United States may have had issues with Morales.

Seeing Bolivia’s lithium stores were the next natural resource to be exploited by the United States, Morales turned his attention to developing lithium according to his ‘Living Well’ constitutional articles. But some Indigenous separatists, and Indigenous people most impacted by lithium extraction, became critical of Evo Morales and his eagerness to capitalize on this economic opportunity.

The first attempts at extraction were privatized, but seeking to avoid the ‘resource curse’, Morales formed the state-owned YLB, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos, for the sole purpose of lithium development. However, seeing Venezuela’s failure to effectively drill oil without outside investment or expertise, he decided to ease his stance on sole state-ownership and sought public-private partnerships. In 2014 and 2017 he invited a French and a Chinese company to build battery plants. In 2018, he signed on a German company, ACI Systems. And in 2019, the Chinese Xinjiang TBEA Group became a strategic partner to explore new extraction opportunities.

In October of that same year, 2019, came the national elections and with it another Morales victory. But he was accused of election fraud. (It’s still disputed, but findings fall along political, ethnic, and cultural lines) Around election time protests erupted in the city where the German plant was built. Locals claimed to unhappy with the ACI deal. In November, Morales cancelled it. A week later the military ousted Morales in what is widely believed to be a far-right coup not unlike the one that spurred Morales to political action in the 80s. Morales escaped in exile to Mexico and then Argentina. He also claims his life had been threatened by U.S. CIA operatives.

Predictably, the interim government was led by an opposition senator named Jeanine Áñez. The Catholic pink bible carrying former news anchor not only put lithium projects on hold, but criminal liability for police brutality against protesters enraged by the coup. She also cut off ties to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba and became cozy with the United States. A year later, October 2020, elections were held again and Morales’s former Minister of Economy, MAS candidate Luis Arce, won in a landslide.

Arce is viewed as a pragmatist but also an adherent the principles Morales instilled in the constitution. Including upholding his 2006 implementation of the Productive Community Social Economic Model which distributes economic surpluses to all Bolivian people so they may ‘live well’.

Arce said in a recent interview, “Parallel to the economic growth achieved, we managed to reduce moderate poverty from 60.6 percent in 2005 to 37.2 percent in 2019; extreme poverty from 38.2 percent to 12.9 percent and inequality," And just this week Bolivia micro-mobility startup, Quantum, said they hope Arce’s plans to build Bolivian batteries plays out soon, they want to put them in their tiny electric urban micro-cars and motorcycles. They operate out of Cochabamba where Morales traded coca for corn with his dad in public markets decades ago. Bolivian elections come in just three years but even Arce’s allies don’t believe their facilities can bring Bolivian batteries to market before 2030.

In the meantime, outside investors continue to court Bolivia, including the United States. But the U.S. hasn’t had an ambassador in Bolivia since Morales kicked Rob Goldberg out in 2008 on counts of espionage. And I’m sure American companies won’t want to legally adhere to the ‘Living Well’ laws of the Bolivian constitution; just as the American government doesn’t want to ratify the UN’s versions into international law. It may be hard for the U.S. to ‘Friend-shore’ Bolivia. Especially when their shore was taken by Chile. Meanwhile environmentalists worry the state’s ambition to curb poverty through extractive mining will continue to harm the environment.

Massive amounts of water are needed to lure lithium from their salty beds. Mining operations can use as much water in one day that a single family would use in twenty-two years. Alpine runoff is the only source of water in the ‘Lithium Triangle’ and La Niña can bring extended periods of drought. Furthermore, this area is home to three of the world’s six species of flamingos. Both plants and animals in this rich avifauna area are sensitive to ecological extremes risking further depletion of biodiversity.

Little attention is given to the environmental impacts of lithium mining. The largest number of scholarly research on the subject overwhelming comes from the three countries who seek to exploit and consume it the most for the worldwide lithium-ion battery market: The United States, China, and Germany.

But if Arce keeps to the laws of his own constitution, as ensconced by his friend and colleague Evo Morales, he must balance “precautionary action”, “guarantees to restore Mother Earth”, “guarantees to regenerate Mother Earth”, and respect “water for life” with “economic, social, cultural and political development” so that “all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”

There’s a mind twisting saying associated with ‘Living Well’ that reminds me of that plaque in my grandma’s kitchen. It says, “that which already is, is that which will be, without yet being what it already is.” Today, that which already is, is the tomorrow, that which will be, that you worried about yesterday, yet being what it already is. We may worry what tomorrow brings on the horizon of life, but this much is for sure: it depends on the recognition, and lawful ratification, of Mother Earth as the source of life, nourishment, and learning because it provides everything we need to live well.

Podcast Music:

1. Loca de Remate: Ronny Lovy.

2. Queremos Saya: Los Kjarkas.

3. Huellas de Mi Llamita - Grupo Aymara.

4. Tarpuricusum Sarata - Captain Planet Remix: Luzmila Carpio, Captain Planet.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s easy to be seduced by the rise of the electric vehicle. I admit I’m a fan. But amidst the glimmer and sheen ugly truths go unseen. Most people pat themselves on the back for switching to an EV, and they should. But don’t pat too hard, there are some evil goblins lurking in those battery cells.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BLUE FAIRY DUST

It was 91℉ degrees (32℃), the asphalt 140℉ (60℃), and body temperatures were hitting 104℉ (40℃). The wind was blowing toxic hot smoke in their face. As if a grueling three weeklong Tour de France isn’t hard enough, riders had to contend with record heat and a nearby forest fire this week. The fire had been blazing for two weeks in a southwestern region of France. It had destroyed an area the size of 35 football fields and displaced 34,000 people. And like football fields, these forests are man-made.

These pine plantations, nearly one million hectares in all, the largest on the continent, are used to make paper, lumber, and other wood products and chemical biproducts. But they are also carbon stores. Stores so big that when they’re ignited, they become what experts call a ‘carbon bomb’. Because these trees are the same variety, fires spread faster. This makes them not just carbon bombs, but carbon carpet bombs.

Carbon stored in these trees are also used to make a liquid bomb, biodiesel. The production of biofuels in Europe, of which Germany and France are the biggest producers, is more commonly derived from used cooking oil and animal fats than plant material. France was already at capacity for growing plants for biofuels. The EU limits the percentage of available land to grow biofuels to protect land for food production and preserve natural habitats. Besides, most believe electric vehicles will be the most and practical way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while displacing internal combustion engines. Biofuel is likely to make contributions to renewable energy, but it will be small relative to batteries. Of course, batteries have their own issues. And they’re not just environmental.

One of the necessary ingredients in lithium-ion batteries that power our devices and cars is cobalt. Cobalt takes its name from Germanic fairytales. A kobald, also a goblin or hobgoblin, are little mythical fairies or sprites. German miners believed they lived in the earth and formed a blue streak when they flew away. Others wore blue striped shirts and some a blue hat. These were called blue caps. When German miners came across blue minerals, they would call them goblin ore or kobald. Today we call it cobalt.

This metal is mostly produced through the process of copper and nickel mining. The largest quantities in the world are found in central Africa on the border of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a string of copper mines called the Copperbelt. An estimated 50-70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC. Over the last ten years global demand has tripled and is expected to double again in the next decade. It’s currently the safest, best performing, and efficient ingredient for powering electric vehicles (EV). But extracting this metal is no fairytale.

There are two ways to extract cobalt from the earth’s crust. One is through industrial mining and the other by hand. Artisanal or Small-scale Mining accounts for 20-30% of total DRC cobalt extractions. Cobalt is so close to the earth’s surface it can be easily discovered. In 2014, one man was said to have discovered cobalt digging a hole for his water cistern. Once discovered, it’s not long before others are digging for this blue gold.

But handling this mineral is dangerous. And its high market value and availability can lead to human exploitation. In 2015, Amnesty International and Afrewatch conducted interviews with artisanal miners in southern DRC. What they found should give anyone pause reading this on a device with a lithium-ion battery or is a proud of their ‘sustainable’ EV. One woman talked of dragging 110-pound bags (50kg) of cobalt ore up rickety stairs of makeshift mines 32 feet (10m) deep or more – all prone to collapse. Between 2014 and 2015 the UN reported 80 artisanal mining fatalities in the former province of Katanga. They wore no helmets, gloves, or masks – no protective equipment at all. The woman said,

“We all have problems with our lungs and pain all over our bodies.”

Paul, aged 14, said in 2015 that he started working in the mines at age 12. He said he’d “spend 24 hours down in the tunnels. I arrived in the morning and would leave the following morning.” Some children reported working 12-hour days. If kids did go to school, many would work before and after school and then 12-hours on Saturday and Sunday. One 15-year-old, Dany, said “There is lots of dust, it is very easy to catch colds, and we hurt all over.” For some, that pain comes from being beaten.

Children reported being beaten, or witnessing beatings, by mining company security guards accusing kids of trespassing on their mining territory. They would also demand payment. Kids made to collect, sort, wash, crush, and haul cobalt ore had no way to weigh their bags. Traders would pay them whatever they wished, if at all. These kids said they usually earn $1000 or $2000 Congolese Francs or $1-$2 U.S. Dollars a day.

A 2018 study revealed high concentrations of cobalt in the blood and urine of child miners compared to area kids who were not involved in mining. They also found exposure-related DNA damage which makes them more prone to cancer. Children the world over are more prone to environmental pollutant exposure due to physiological characteristics, like high gastrointestinal absorption. Playing in toxic dirt and then bringing their hands to their mouth could make them sick or kill them. Children’s lung molecules are also uniquely susceptible to asthma from air pollution.

CORPORATE VICTIM BLAMING

This is not a good look for the auto industry who is desperately trying to cast EVs as sustainable. It’s also not good for their “Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance” (ESG) ratings or any company in their supply chain. The same could be said for electric grid energy storage companies using lithium-ion batteries. So, the energy extraction industry has taken a two-pronged approach toward what they claim to be a more ethical and reputable path toward a renewable energy transition.

The first approach comes on the advice of the World Bank. The World Bank was formed in 1944 to bring economic order to the West after WWII. The United States invited Western delegations and Japan to a luxury hotel in the woods of New Hampshire to hash out a scheme. The group wanted a way to establish global monetary order among friends while also providing the United States global access to its free trade ambitions. Their stated and current goal is to make loans to struggling countries, like the DRC, in hopes of reducing poverty. However, they’ve been criticized for exploiting and damaging the natural and human resources of these countries and their local communities. They’re accused of contributing to destabilizing their political order and perpetuating income disparity between the global North and the global South.

The World Bank recommends the extraction industry ‘formalize’ these artisanal miners. They claim bad actors are involved in trading corporate dollars for cobalt mined by artisanal miners. They would rather see energy extraction companies themselves engage with artisanal and small-scale miners. This puts these corporations on the hook for upholding the ethical and moral ESG values their shareholders increasingly demand of them.

This leads to the second prong of the two-pronged approach. It’s what some researchers call “corporate outsourcing of responsibility”. Knowing they’ll inevitably face legal risk for directly funding cancer inflicted kids peeing cobalt, they are shifting cobalt extraction risks away from themselves onto the men, women, and children they’re enabling.

These two shifts by extraction companies have indeed resulted in opportunities for safer mining conditions. But researchers visiting ‘model mines’ see lax enforcement of protective equipment and practice. They write,

“In mining shafts where basic safety regulations are rarely enforced, the sight of gloves, uniforms, hard-hats, safety glasses or steel toed boots is a welcome, but largely symbolic improvement.” They observed “some workers not wearing the equipment properly or failing to wear it at all.”

As these companies clear the land and provide access to safer mining conditions it attracts more informal artisanal miners to the area. This pits ‘legal’ against ‘illegal’ miners living and working in the same community. But only one has legal protection. To enforce legal extraction, companies’ hire security guards, or fund local authorities, which can result in more beatings, exploitation, and dispossession. Meanwhile, corporations are legally exonerated. They outsourced their responsibility.

The presence of both artisanal and industrial miners makes it difficult to know the true source of cobalt in a battery. Researchers heard from one local NGO,

“model mine is just a name (…) At the end of the day, all minerals are bought [by the companies], irrespective of their origin.”

This means only a subset of the overall artisanal mining population receive access to corporate benefits – including legal protection.

Filipe Calvão, a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in culture and capital in postcolonial Africa, and his colleagues, conclude, “Though in response to increased corporate scrutiny and as part of responsible mining initiatives, these formalization strategies in the DRC risk exacerbating the vulnerability and insecurity of these populations in a context of outsourced corporate responsibility.”

In a 2019 World Economic Forum report, “A Vision for a Sustainable Battery Value Chain in 2030”, they say “between 10 and 12 million [DRC] people depend directly or indirectly on mining and 80% of exports are mining products.” While they acknowledge most cobalt comes from large industrial mines, they also admit “an estimated 40.5 million people globally were directly engaged in artisanal mining, compared to 7 million in industrial mining.” They warn these miner’s internationally recognized human rights are being violated. Including kids. Of the 250,000 people estimated to be working in dangerous mining conditions, 35,000 are children. But an estimated one million children are affected one way or another by the DRC’s mining industry. The World Economic Forum calls for action at every stage of the value chain, but also at every level of government

.

There’s an accepted view among human rights and environmental scholars and activists that corporations, and their national governments, intent on formalizing artisanal mining must move away from their legalist attempts to outsource their ethical and moral responsibility. They advocate for a bottoms-up approach that focuses on the interaction of people and place. They call for attention on the local workforce, their workplace, and the myriad of practical arrangements among and between workers, traders, and corporate and governmental stakeholders.

As early as 2010 the U.S. Congress appeared to be listening. That’s when they passed the Dodd-Frank Act which issues “rules requiring certain companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals if those minerals are ‘necessary to the functionality or production of a product’ manufactured by those companies.” It came about due to “concerns that the exploitation and trade of conflict minerals by armed groups is helping to finance conflict in the DRC region and is contributing to an emergency humanitarian crisis.” It identifies these minerals: tantalum, tin, gold, or tungsten. But there is not a single mention of cobalt. The supply chain of copper and uranium also remain largely unregulated. Where you find copper mines, you often find cobalt mines.

It's not just EVs in the crosshairs. Batteries are also needed to buffer and store renewable energy generated from wind and solar. The World Economic Forum estimated in 2017 that 850 million people worldwide lack access to electricity and could benefit from off-grid solar electricity augmented with battery storage. A majority, 67%, of these nearly 1 billion people live in Africa. The cobalt these people are mining in the DRC could better their own lives and the lives of millions of other Africans. But not until their human rights are respected by far flung corporations.

DOPAMINE WEANING

Both off-grid energy storage and electric vehicles are core components of the Paris Agreement. Transportation and the power sector account for 40% of all GHG emissions. We’re talking about a lot of EVs. The World Economic Forum estimates over 250 million electric passenger cars will be on roads by 2030. They also believe the only way to hit those Paris Agreement targets is to move battery production to a circular economy model. Raw mineral extraction could be greatly reduced by creating markets for component recycling and reuse throughout the battery value chain. They believe it will save money too. They estimate, with the right circular economic levers, vehicle manufacturers legally required to adhere to end-of-life management of EV batteries could save an estimated $7 billion a year.

This all sounds promising, and I fully support moves to circular economies. I also admit EVs can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and I even think they’re fun to drive! But they’re only ‘green’ when their charged with clean, ethical electricity; when their parts are made and shipped with clean electricity; assembled with clean electricity; and shipped to dealers with clean electric ships, trains, and trucks. Even then, they will still clog our roads and tire particulates will pollute the water. Meanwhile, cobalt extraction will continue to be done by kids in the DRC so long as money can be found by digging a hole in the ground in search of blue dust. Meanwhile, corporations legally shame and blame them, and their parents, for putting cobalt in their pee. There’s no getting around the ugly fact that any consumer participating in this modern technological society are part of the problem. Including me. I’m reminded of a U.S. Marine’s response to the question, “Did you ever kill anyone?” His response: “If I did, you paid me for it.”

Here's an idea, what if we also reduce the reliance on, and cure the addiction to, cars? Yes, we need batteries and renewable energy to wean us off fossil fuels – and it must be done ethically – but what will it take to wean over-consumers off over-consumption?

We humans have but one reward system – dopamine. It’s a little chemical reaction in our brain that triggers us, among other things, to seek food when we’re hungry. Without it, we’d starve to death. These reactions reinforce the behavior that produce them. The greater the reward the more dopamine is needed for our brains to be satisfied. Eat a donut and you get a dopamine spike. And then a crash as it falls to a baseline. But that baseline has inched higher than before the brain was introduced to the pleasure of a donut. So, not only does the craving increase but it may take two donuts to achieve the same reward next time.

This is how addiction works. Amphetamines and cocaine are dopamine super boosters that progressively raise the baseline. Soon addicts are free basing. Buying things is also a dopamine booster, albeit much milder. Consuming goods, or feeding on social media, can also be addictive. The more we consume the more prone we are to desire it more. It’s the hedonic treadmill on which capitalism relies. Unchecked, it leads to disaster. Just like drug and alcohol addiction.

Exercise can release dopamine too, but not for everyone. For some, it’s more pleasurable to sit and store energy, than to exercise and burn it. Even if they try to workout, the brain won’t be satisfied until the more pleasurable action is taken. In this case, inaction. Those who enjoy getting exercise, the opposite is true. Going for a walk releases more dopamine than sitting on the couch. But those habits get reinforced as well. Sometimes it takes more exercise to get the same dopamine high – even if it hurts. No pain, no gain. To make the pain pleasurable, one must tell the brain that the pain is not necessarily inane. Staying fit is fun, so get off your butt and walk, bike, or run.

For those athletes in the Tour de France to achieve their super-human feats, they have conditioned their brain to believe climbing 15% mountain grades in sweltering heat, on melting asphalt roads, with a fever is fun. It not only takes a special physical body to achieve this, but a disciplined mind. However, in the end, despite what the brain thinks, their bodies have limits.

So does our earth, no matter what our brains think. Our brains are as miraculous as they are mysterious. They can invent biofuels and batteries so they can then seek addictive and reinforcing pleasures. One of which is the pleasure of acceleration, power, and domination that comes with driving a car (especially an EV). But for most, getting stuck in traffic, going slow, driving a wimpy compact car does not release dopamine and so people crave the opposite. Another strange paradox: The more pleasure-seeking motorists there are the less satisfying driving is. Until everyone stuck in traffic starts telling themselves ‘this is fun’, motorist brains will not be releasing dopamine. Until walking, rolling, or riding is pleasurable, or we con our brains into believing it is, car owner’s brains will tell the hands to grab the car keys. Even if that dopamine hit only comes from flooring it on a freeway on-ramp on the way to a traffic jam or an accident…the ultimate dopamine crash.

Those addicted to cars may have to convince their brain that being inconvenienced by a walk and wait for a bus is a good thing. I, for one, take pleasure in reading and writing on the bus. And I feel more connected to my people and my place. Sure, I get a dopamine hit with sudden acceleration of my car, but it’s so infrequent my baseline keeps dropping. I get more pleasure telling my brain that my choice to walk or bike may save a life, reduce the odds of inducing childhood asthma, or even save the planet. Even if some believe those are all myths, my dopamine dealer doesn’t need to know that. It can believe anything. Like the blue dust of the earth that powers an EV comes from the exhaust of a blue-capped magical mining sprite.

References:

Cobalt mining and the corporate outsourcing of responsibility in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Filipe Calvao, Catherine Erica Alexina Mcdonald, Matthieu Bolay. The Extractive Industries and Society. 2021.

Sustainability of artisanal mining of cobalt in DR Congo. Célestin Banza Lubaba Nkulu, et al. Nature Sustainability | VOL 1 | SEPTEMBER 2018.

A Vision for a Sustainable Battery Value Chain in 2030. World Economic Forum. 2019.

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Hello Interactors,

This has been a wild week in our neighborhood. It was a car enthusiasts dream. Too bad our family’s biggest car enthusiast, my son, was busy working his summer job. It was guys like him that got America hooked on cars. And now our planet is cooked. Is it a lost cause?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET A HORSE

Flying down the freeway I see a woman climb out of the sunroof of her car. She’s alone. A semi-truck pulls alongside as she leaps from the car onto the bed of the trailer. Pulling alongside the car in front of her, I see the driver put on a black blindfold. He crosses his arms across his chest like he’s preparing for a collision. Just then, the truck in front of him slams on their brakes. His car comes to a screeching halt as does the woman’s empty car behind him. The man lifts his blindfold, stares into a camera mounted on his dashboard, and gruffly states, “I guess it works.”

This isn’t a stunt I watched on Tik Tok, but a Hyundai Genesis ad from 2015. It starts with a voiceover from the sacrificial stuntman in the lead car, “The challenge is to show the driver assist features in an exciting way. But you guys, it seems, are a little hard to excite. Maybe the only way is to put our own lives on the line. Proof, through jeopardy.”

Our neighborhood was blocked off this week to film a Genesis car commercial. Nothing this dramatic, they just drove their luxury cars around the block. They descended a hill that features an unobstructed distant view of the Seattle skyline beyond a glistening blue Lake Washington. Fancy cars in a fancy suburb. A suburb whose name features prominently on the Costco toilet paper most of you wipe your fanny biscuits with – Kirkland. Maybe we’re not so fancy after all, but our neighborhood does have nice views.

We didn’t see stunt doubles hurling themselves from the sunroofs of luxury cars that day. In fact, we barely saw a single human being. The windows were tinted black, and the streets were empty, except for the police and production assistants. I stepped on the sidewalk to walk down the street and got yelled at by a Kirkland cop. “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” They, like the drivers, were being instructed by the commercial’s director on a walkie-talkie from inside a customized SUV. It had a massive camera boom stretching from the roof over the front end – like a carrot dangling in front of a mule.

The truth is, it’s not just car commercials that wish there were no pedestrians on the street. Anytime any of us get behind the wheel of a car we wish the streets were free of people. And bikes. And, yes, other cars and busses too. It’s no wonder most every car commercial features a single driver on a smooth open road…void of people and cars. What bliss. No worries, no conflicts, no delays, just me on my street going between my house and my Costco to hoard my toilet paper.

But believe it or not, people needed to be convinced automobiles were useful – let alone desirable. It wasn’t a car commercial that convinced them of this. It was their neighborhood car enthusiasts. People needed to be convinced of the promise of new machines. Innovation doesn’t just sell itself. Sociologists who study social movements say innovations that shape society are framed by “ideological activists who exploit political opportunities to mobilize resources.” They participate in what sociologists call ‘meaning-work’ which demonstrates their ideology as being meaningful, valid, and appropriate.

New industries become broadly legitimized only after these industry activists are successful in converting radical concepts into something useful. Elements of a larger belief system must be framed in the context of daily life. So, automobile clubs organized events that demonstrated the benefits of the automobile. This idea was taken from bicycle clubs of the 1800s who used bicycle races to demonstrate the utility, reliability, and health benefits of cycling. Most automobile clubs were born out of bicycle clubs. Both were elite modes of transport using the latest industrial technology. The first automobiles were simply motorized quadricycles. Those motors were especially useful for getting up a hill.

Biking up hills is hard. Biking for long distances requires endurance. And what happens if your bike breaks down? Reliability of both bikes and horse carriages was a big deal. These challenges of everyday life were just what automobile industry activists (i.e. automobile clubs) needed to demonstrate the benefits of an automobile. So, they organized demonstration events that included hill climbs and races pitting one car maker against another to see which was the fastest and most reliable.

The first was on Thanksgiving of 1895 financed by the Times-Herald. Eleven cars were invited, five showed up and only two managed to finish the event. The winner was awarded $10,000 ($350,000 today) and it went to the Duryea Brothers –America’s first automaker. Their gasoline car topped out at 8MPH in below freezing temperatures…in the snow. Reminding people of the challenges of taking a horse and buggy through the snow, the Times-Herald reported that the car made it “through deep snow and along ruts that would have tried horses to the utmost.”

But these events weren’t universally convincing. In 1896, an event organized by the Rhode Island State Fair Association featured an electric car. The Riker Electric won the race and $5,000 but the crowd was underwhelmed. They began chanting, “GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE.” That refrain became a popular expression used to make fun of automobile drivers. For years people would yell as they passed, “GET A HORSE!”

By July of 1905, the publication Horseless Age, declared the beginning of the American dominant car culture. After a national reliability event by the American Automobile Association (AAA), The Glidden Tour, they reported that it “proved the automobile is now almost foolproof. It has proved that American cars are durable and efficient...it has strengthened our belief in the permanence of the motor car.’’

A year later, in 1906, Munsey Magazine also declared the end of making fun of the automobile by writing, the “uncertain period of the automobile is now past. It is no longer a theme for jokers and rarely do we hear the derisive expression ‘Get a horse.’” And three years later, in 1909, Charles Duryea atoned that the “novelty of the automobile has largely worn off.” Soon Ford started pulling out of demonstration events and became the first mass produced reliable car in the world. The belief system of those early innovation activists had taken hold. Their meaning-work was done. They had demonstrated and convinced the public that their once radical inventions were more useful, usable, and desirable than horses, buggies…and bikes.

THE GENIE GETS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

With the public convinced and nationwide reliability events tapering off, automobile activists turned their attention to roads. The Good Roads Movement had been around since the 1880s and was started by a bicycle club, the League of American Wheelman. But in 1910 that organizations efforts were overshadowed by the Automobile Association of America (AAA). By the 1920s, automobiles were competing for space with streetcars that were ubiquitous in cities big and small across the country. Streetcar systems were so vast you could almost traverse the country by streetcar city to city. But for the first time, funds and space for public rail infrastructure had competition. Should tax dollars be spent on developing and maintaining rail for trains and streetcars or roads for bikes and automobiles?

Meanwhile, large motor coaches were also being produced. One of the first manufacturers and operators in America was John D. Hertz of Hertz rental car fame. He had been operating busses in Chicago since 1916, and in 1923 started the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of another popular name, the Yellow Cab Company. He went on to start other companies with visions of bringing busses and busing to all of America.

In 1925 General Motors (GM) bought a controlling stake in Yellow Coach and changed the name to Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company. Then, in 1926 Yellow Coach purchased the struggling New York Railways Corporation with the idea of converting it to a bus company. By 1930, the depression put added pressure on the competition for infrastructure funds. Financially struggling streetcars companies were often forced by local governments to lease street access and pay for rail maintenance and services (like snow removal). Companies were also sometimes forced to cap fare prices to protect lower income residents from getting priced out of public transportation by private firms. By the 1930s most streetcars were worn down and their companies bankrupt. It made them easy prey for companies like General Motors to buy them out.

And so they did. GM started a subsidiary called United Cities Motor Transport (UCMT) with the sole purpose of buying out streetcar companies and converting them to bus lines in small cities. They succeeded in Saginaw, Michigan, and Springfield, Ohio and then tried Portland, Oregon. But the American Transit Association, a public transit advocacy group, stepped in and the UCMT was forced to dissolve in 1935. But it didn’t stop General Motors. That same year they converted a streetcar in New Jersey to a ‘trackless trolly’ – a bus attached to an electric wire that could detach to pick up passengers in lower populated areas. An idea that is alive to this day.

The conversion from tracks to wheels was catching on. In 1936, two brothers in Minnesota who had been modestly busing school children and miners since 1920, either decided or were ‘encouraged’ to expand. They announced a reorganization of their company, National City Lines, "for the purpose of taking over the controlling interest in certain operating companies engaged in city bus transportation and overland bus transportation."

That same year, 1936, this tiny outfit bought 13 streetcar companies in three states in the Midwest. They pushed westward and south to three more states in 1937. They also formed a subsidiary in Oakland, California called Pacific City Lines (PCL) with the intention of converting streetcar operations on the west coast to bus lines. In 1938 they approached GM’s Yellow Coach company to help finance further expansion. By 1939 they had secured funding from not only GM, but Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks. By the end of 1939, just three years after owning and operating a couple rural busses in Minnesota, National City Lines took control of 29 local streetcar and public transportation companies in 27 cities across 10 states. By 1947 that grew to 46 systems, 45 cities, and 16 states.

That also marked the end of the buying spree. In 1947 they were indicted on these two counts of conspiracy by the Federal District Court of Southern California: 'Conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly' and 'Conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines.' In 1948 the case was appealed by the U.S. Supreme Court and they ordered the case be moved to the Midwest in the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.

A year later, in 1949, General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone and others were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by National City Lines and other companies. But they were acquitted on charges of conspiracy to monopolize the ownership of streetcar and other public transportation companies. GM was fined a paltry $5000 ($62,000 today) dollars for their involvement. Their treasurer, also the director of Pacific City Lines was fined $1. That almost seems like a wink and nod more than a punishment. That one man single-handedly dismantled a $100 million electric public transportation system up and down the west coast of the United States.

In Los Angeles alone, 280 million passengers a year were using the electric streetcar system. They were forced into buses or cars – if they could afford them. By 1953, just four years after the great General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy people were already complaining of traffic in LA. Within a decade, nearly four million cars were crawling around the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. The era of automobile dependency in the United States was in full swing. And there’s no getting that genie back in the bottle.

SAFETY FOR WHOM?

The CEO of GM, Alfred P. Sloan, wasn’t just pooling money with his cronies to buy out electric streetcar companies. Back in 1932, the same time he was conspiring to monopolize, he also created the ‘National Highway Users Conference’. He filled it with automobile, oil, and highway construction executives as a non-profit lobbying group intent on bringing an end to the government funding of mass transportation. This resulted in the creation of the U.S. Highway Trust Fund which was then used to fund the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Between 1952 and 1970 the U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars on highways. Rail systems got just one quarter of a million.

1970 also marked the year the ‘National Highway Users Conference’, ‘Automotive Safety Foundation’, and the ‘Auto Industries Highway Safety Committee’ were merged to form the ‘Highway Users Federation’. In 1995 the name was changed to the 'American Highway Users Alliance’ which to this day is “dedicated to more successful and aggressive issue advocacy on behalf of the highway community.” They went on to lead a “successful national lobbying, media and grassroots advocacy campaign to enact legislation officially designating and funding the National Highway System.” A year later, in 1996, Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner for climate change advocacy, keynoted their 40th anniversary conference. An inconvenient truth.

This organization was also the member of the Global Climate Coalition from 1989 to 2001. This was the largest climate policy group in the world. It was an international coalition that opposed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and challenged the science behind climate change. They also played a significant role in the United States denying ratification of the 1992 Kyoto Protocol.

In 2004 a former U.S. Federal Highway Administration staffer, Greg Cohen, became the CEO of the organization. He was behind the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, better known as SAFETE-LU. This George W. Bush administration bill included funding for the purchase of land in Illinois for freeway expansion. Bush worked directly with the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, on the bill. It turned out Hastert owned the very land slated for freeway expansion. The celebration of the passing of the bill was held at the headquarters of the road construction equipment maker, Caterpillar.

Four months later Hastert enjoyed a 500% profit in the sale of his land and his net worth went from $300,000 to over $6 million. Hastert went on to be convicted on felony charges, but not for swindling taxpayers’ dollars. He was sent to prison for serial sexual molestation of young boys. He is the highest-ranking U.S. elected official to serve a prison sentence. Will Trump dethrone him? Just last April, the former Highway Alliance CEO, Greg Cohen, received an award by the ‘Road Gang’ (as those in the organization like to call themselves) for his “significant, exemplary contributions to the highway industry.”

In 2009 the ‘Road Gang’ opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. This was the first U.S. bill passed by a branch of the U.S. Federal Government intent on curbing heat-trapping gases responsible for the climate crisis. The ‘Road Gang’ said the “bill will dramatically raise the price of highway fuel through a hidden tax” and that it may “raise the price of gasoline by 77 cents over the next decade.” Worse yet, they worried “none of the revenue raised will be spent on highways.”

These caustic climate curmudgeons, car conspirators, tire tycoons, and oil and gas goons are the modern-day automobile enthusiast club. In sociological terms they are ideological activists who exploit financial and political opportunities to mobilize resources. For over a century their ideologically vacuous, homogenous, and one-sided promise of automobility is alive and well but it is also killing us – even as it perpetually promises to save us.

Yet we still need demonstrations to convince us. Now safety and reliability are demonstrated by professional stunt drivers filmed on a smooth open road. Desirable luxury automobiles are filmed in a bucolic low-density suburban neighborhood void of cars and people. Ironically, our Kirkland neighborhood was planned and designed in the 1800s – complete with alleys designed to hide buggies, bikes, and carbon belching Buicks. Streets were public spaces where kids could play, and neighbors talked to one another. As car enthusiasts took over so did city planners and city councils hellbent on accommodating there promises. Now these enthusiasts are our elected officials, city planners, and civil engineers. In their mind, most of them anyway, the only meaningful, valid, and appropriate use of the street is for cars. A place where to be safe you need Hollywood production assistants on every corner and a cop in the intersection yelling, “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” It makes me want to yell back, “GET A HORSE!”

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Hello Interactors,

There have been huge advances in how food is grown over the last decade. A new revolution in agriculture. It just may be coming at the right time. The world’s population is skyrocketing, and more and more people are pouring into cities. We’ll need more food and more ways to make it accessible and new techniques look promising. But at what cost?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A BERRY BIG PROBLEM

The red dot caught my attention; hidden in the soil of a bed once forgotten. Rain drops wiggled on the fervent green leaves as I lifted the cold pale yellow-green vine with ease. It was hugging its red friend in the shadows of the sun. My fingers surrounded the plump little ball as I tugged it loose of its clutches. On to my tongue enveloped in warmth as my teeth clamped down in the darkness. A cool and wet sugary burst lit my mouth with summer’s first gift. No sooner did the strawberry’s sweet secretion burst were my eyes darting for another with thirst.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she reminds us that strawberries are like “gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

Like the naturally occurring strawberries of her childhood, my strawberries just appeared one year. Probably a gift from a bird. Or, more likely, a rabbit. Most years the rabbits beat me to their splendor, but not this time.

I get nostalgic around gardens. I’m not sure why. I never much liked being hunched over in the sweltering humidity pulling weeds and picking beans as a kid. Bugs buzzed erratically – irritably itchy inching near my ears. Heat seeking mosquitos swarmed my sweaty shins poking their needle through my white knee-high tube socks searching for red blood. But there’s pride in growing your own food and there’s no denying it’s better for you and better tasting.

We always had a large garden in our backyard. Sometimes we’d have a plot in a field in the country next to a small farm. Most of those small farms are being sold off to large commercial farmers these days. The small-town rural agriculture of my Iowa childhood in the 70s and 80s gave way to large-scale rural agriculture. The Green Revolution was just gaining speed.

Between 1960 and 2000 the world’s population doubled while the output of cereal grains like wheat, rice, and corn tripled. And it did it by only increasing croplands by 30%. Improvements in genetics, fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization were fueled by increased private capital and tax-funded public subsidies. Globalization and the Green Revolution enabled unprecedented growth in rural agriculture. Crops could easily be shipped to markets and cities far from where they were grown. For the first time, wheat produced in Mexico found its way into bread sold in Tokyo.

These advances lowered the price of food and provided much needed relief to a growing world population. But it came with a cost to the environment and biodiversity. Unchecked, it will only get worse. The world’s population is expected to grow exponentially until 2050 and over 70% will live in urban areas. To feed all these people will require 56% more food than what was produced in 2010. That means an additional 593 hectares of cropland – an area the size of India.

But if we were to reverse the Green Revolution and rely on smaller organic farming practices, even more land would be needed as yields are mostly smaller. It’s believed two to three times as much land would be needed to produce as much wheat, corn, and potatoes as the conventional agriculture of today. If the world switched to organic farming using current areas of croplands only one half of the world’s population could be fed.

Meanwhile, the world also needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten percent of which comes from agriculture – including soils and rice production, 27% percent transportation – including the transport of food and grain around the world, and 24% from Industry – including the petrochemicals needed for Green Revolution farming. We also need to use less water. The UN says agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater. In dryer areas (like Arizona) that number increases to 90%, due to water extracted from rivers (like the dwindling Colorado River), and aquifers (like the declining Ogallala).

In 2007, these worries increasingly came into focus. Within four months the price of wheat inexplicably doubled, rice prices tripled, and corn shot up 50%. Food riots broke out for the first time since the 1970s. Egypt put their army to work baking bread. Rice hoarders in the Philippines were threatened by sentences to life in prison. This marked the end of the Green Revolution as we knew it. Just as the world had grown accustomed to seemingly guaranteed cheap food, a new dynamic had set in.

In 1979, according to the World Bank, the percentage of global money going to food assistance peaked at 18%. By 2004 it had dropped to 3.5%. Private donations to relief efforts relaxed. They assumed the Green Revolution had cured worldwide famine. Governments reduced spending on agricultural research assuming hunger was a thing of the past. Farmers in developed countries also dissuaded their governments from assisting farmers in developing countries fearing competition. If poorer countries began providing for themselves, they’d miss out on selling to those markets.

The environmental movement had also gained momentum and status. Investors and donors began pressuring the Ford Foundation, the original seed funder of the Green Revolution in the 1950s, to reduce the use of petrochemicals in agriculture. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, became frustrated when his effort to bring green-revolution practices to Africa was thwarted by protests by environmentalists.

Then, highly populated countries like China and India began reducing agricultural exports so they could feed themselves. In 2006, India even began importing food again. Renewed concern over food security inspired governments worldwide to re-fund agricultural research. Venture capitalists fed startups keen to apply new technologies to food production. Beginning in 2010, the number of academic research papers on agricultural innovation exploded with topics like “indoor agriculture, remote sensing, vertical agriculture, hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic and soilless agriculture, precision agriculture, and other novel technologies.” A second Green Revolution was unfolding.

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO GREENING

The second Green Revolution aimed to be a Green Green Revolution. The original Green Revolution was born out of the 1950s institutional patriarchy found in government, urban planning, civil engineering, and agricultural. They sought, and continue to seek, to centralize, industrialize, and capitalize. These efforts led to prosperity and food security for many, but they have also balkanized, disenfranchised, and ghettoized many places in the world. Glamorized westernized ways have meticulously metastasized. Colonized earthly crust, of countries with cautious distrust, find temporary prosperity crushed when exhausted land goes from soil to dust.

But the new Green Revolution, backed by a flux of venture capital greenbacks, hopes to bring agriculture’s ‘green’ sheen back. And like most high-tech ventures, these efforts are mostly urban. Researchers define Urban Agriculture as “the production, process, and distribution of food and other products by plant and/or livestock raised in and around cities to meet local needs.” By that definition, our family garden in suburban Iowa was a form of urban agriculture. My wild strawberries gifted here in Kirkland, Washington are too.

In fact, after our town’s founder and chief colonizer, the British industrialist Peter Kirk, failed at attempts in the 1800s to turn Kirkland into a steel town – the ‘Pittsburgh of the West’. Kirkland then became known as a farm town. Summer fruit would be packed onto a ferry headed to Seattle’s growing urban metropolis. Soon real estate companies sold Kirkland’s agricultural land to developers. Kirkland went from a source of urban agriculture to a Seattle suburb.

Seattle area farmland was also getting converted to suburban development. In the 1920s, the Picardo family, who had immigrated from Italy in 1890, secured 20 acres to continue farming. This acreage came to be called the Picardo Patch, or P-Patch. The city then bought the land in the 70s to preserve its use and the word P-Patch is now commonly used to refer to a community garden. The original P-Patch now boasts 259 community plots.

But one of the more popular, and controversial, P-Patches in Seattle sits atop a parking garage below the Space Needle. Called the UpGarden, it converts 25,000 square feet of concrete into 98 gardening plots. There have been recent attempts to sweep the dirt away, but intense community protest saved it. It even inspired a rededication last summer.

Both P-Patches are forms of urban agriculture researchers call Uncontrolled Environment Agriculture. They rely on the uncontrolled, or loosely controlled, variability of soil and climate conditions. The Picardo community farm resembles more traditional rural farming but in an urban environment. The UpGarden is a rooftop garden that mimics a traditional garden on the roof of a concrete parking structure. It also resembles a form of Controlled Environment Agriculture known as building-integrated agriculture.

These are typically enclosed greenhouse structures inside a dedicated or mixed-use building. They’re plant factories. They draw on the innovations cited in the growing body of research literature and are a form of what some call Innovative Urban Agriculture. In dense urban areas, where space is a premium, they take on the form of indoor vertical gardens.

These methods of indoor farming rely on less water and soil. In some cases, no soil at all. Hydroponic horticulture plunges roots to a small amount of nutrient rich water that can yield tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, and lettuces. A similar method, aeroponics, suspends plants in the air and can be grown by misting them with nutrient rich compounds forced through high-pressure mist heads. Tanks or artificial streams of water can also be used to grow fish (like shrimp) and aqua plants (like seaweed). This is known as urban aquaculture. Hydroponics and aquaculture can also be combined to create aquaponics. These are systems that take nutrient rich water from aquaculture tanks to feed trays of hydroponic plants.

This method, although less high-tech, has been around for centuries. Since as early at 5 AD various forms of integrated polyculture rice-fish farming took place in Eastern Asia. Evidence of this practice existed well into 13th century China. Around that same time, the Mesoamerican Aztecs built islands, sometimes movable, on top of wetlands, shallow lake beds, and canals. These methods were used to meet personal, family, and local market needs. That’s as true of innovative urban agricultural in developing countries today as it was centuries ago

.The poorest people in the world today spend upwards of 85% of their household revenue on food. It’s hard to tell how much urban agriculture is done today to offset these costs. In our highly industrialized and globalized agricultural economy, there’s little interest – and thus little data – on agricultural techniques outside the norm. One 1993 study estimated 15-20% of the world’s food was produced by some form of urban agriculture. A more recent 2010 study looked at 15 developing countries and determined urban agriculture made up anywhere from 3-27% of their total yields.

While there are indeed individually motivated urban farmers in developed countries today, like in backyards, front yards, decks, empty lots, rooftops, and parking lots, most commercial innovative urban agriculture is motivated by social desire and market opportunity. Some claim hydroponic systems have the potential to grow 11 times more lettuce per acre than conventional means. One study suggests 1.5 times more tomatoes could be grown. And what about those little bursting red bundles of taste bud bliss? An estimated 13 times more strawberries could be grown through these new techniques.

And don’t count out rooftop gardens. If you happen to be blessed with the climate of Bologna, Italy, you could be growing heaps of food from the heat on your roof. One rooftop garden produced an estimated 12,000 tons of vegetables in a single year – enough to round out meals of 77% of urban dwellers. One study estimates that if the industrial rooftops of Montreal featured hydroponic systems, they could grow 277% of that city’s total demand – at a fraction of the cost. A 2011 study suggested a 20-story “SkyFarm” high-rise in Egypt, equipped with vertical aeroponic greenhouses on every floor, could produce 200 times as much rice as that country’s most productive conventional rice farm.

HOW HARMONIC ARE PONICS?

These statistics can cast innovative urban agriculture as a panacea. And it just may be. But the Green Revolution was also cast in those same terms. In fact, over the last two centuries societies have routinely been seduced by the promise of technology, the adoration of the individual “great inventor’ who will finally, once again, save us from ruin. People glamorize and valorize individualistic human accomplishment while disguising and patronizing community and environmental suffering. Hypnotized by success and desensitized to distress.

There is no doubt these new approaches to agriculture show great promise. They indeed use less water and land while producing more yield for less money. They are closed systems that can be optimized for efficiency. One aquaponic experiment featured a double recirculating system. One cubic meter of recirculated water could increase fertilizer efficiency by 24% compared to conventional aquaponic methods. It even managed to produce the same quantity and quality of tomatoes per cubic meter of water. As a bonus, that same quantity of water also produced 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of tilapia fish. But all systems come at a cost.

These systems require buildings made of sophisticated construction. The growing supplies are made of plastics, processed metals, and synthetic fertilizers. Electricity to power their highly controlled climates, lights, computers, pumps, misters, and filtration systems must run around the clock and throughout the year. How clean is that electricity? Will increased yields induce profit seeking companies to package and ship even more food around the world? Few, if any, studies have been conducted on the upstream and downstream lifecycle costs of innovative urban agriculture.

Furthermore, this is all new. And while there are many successful greenhouse and hydroponic companies out there selling vegetables today, cereals, grains, and proteins are also needed to balance the food basket. Aquaponics hold promise for efficiently growing diverse nutritious foods, but commercial scale is in its infancy. A 2016 survey in Europe revealed that 75% of commercial aquaponic enterprises were built on or after 2010. Nearly half of the employees were researchers working at universities. One-third were government funded, one-fifth were true commercial endeavors, but only 12% had sold fish or plants in the previous 12 months.

Currently the U.S. leads in research and development of innovative urban agriculture. These investments seed similar efforts around the world in both developed and developing countries. There is no question these new forms of commercial agriculture will have an impact on how the world’s food is grown. But I also know the experience of eating that strawberry I plucked at my feet can’t be imitated. Sorry Driscoll’s.

Driscoll’s strawberries, the world’s leading strawberry producer, are genetically engineered to yield a certain experience. Their farmers, or “strawberry manufacturers” as Driscoll’s calls them, all adhere to a certain standard to uphold their vision of what a strawberry is supposed to be. They ship a billion plastic clamshells of strawberries around the world. They have a room at their headquarters in California filled with monitors that track every truck carrying their red, heart-shaped berries across North America. They have two weeks to get their product from harvest to destinations across the country and around the world. They are so popular in China, their price and availability influences international trade relations.

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that my opportunistic strawberry plant had “in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased.” The more attractive nature makes that little bundle, the more likely an animal like me will eat it and spread its seeds. I guess to do my part to further this plant’s evolutionary fitness, I’ll need to poop in the nearby woods. Kids, don’t try this at home.

But the Green Revolution changed these uncontrolled evolutionary elements of agriculture. The Green Revolution turned food evolution into a controlled ‘Big Ag’ volution. Strawberries are now engineered and their seeds are dispersed by ships, planes, and trucks. Once consumed, they’re flushed into wastewater treatment plants.

The new Green Green Revolution, or Innovative Urban Agriculture, is the next stage in agriculture’s own technological evolution. But don’t forget, old fashioned residential and community gardens are part of it. But new technologies have the potential to maximize space, water, and energy to produce even more locally grown yummies. Perhaps we’ll even see Controlled Community Gardens.

Maybe these new techniques could transform who we are, our relationship with our food, and how we interact at a local level. It’s up to us. Perhaps food production can be made local again. New forms of urban agriculture could be a gift. Like a backyard wild strawberry. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it:

“It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal.”

If done right, I might add, maybe even the evolutionary fitness of the planet and us all.

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Hello Interactors,

We’re staying in Russia this week because the United States sticks with Russia. At least they used to. And boy did they need it. The famines that have swept through that region over the years have taken the lives of tens of millions of people. Even though Russia was home to the world’s leading seed expert. But the U.S. was always there to bail them out. If the U.S. fell into a food crisis, would Russia return the favor?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

SEEDS OF CHANGE YIELDS DEEDS OF THE DERANGED

Joseph Stalin liked Trofim Lysenko. He grew up poor far away from Moscow just like him. Stalin was from Georgia and Lysenko Ukraine. Both identified as proletariats. They despised the bourgeoisie imperialistic West. Including highly educated and trained scientists. Lysenko was a horticulturist, studied agricultural, and then worked in the department of physiology at the Ukrainian Genetics Laboratory. But he wasn’t like other scientists.

He devised his own homegrown, unproven experiments. He invented theories with pseudo-scientific names like “jarovization” or “vernalization” from Latin’s ‘vernum’ or spring. His claims became known as “Lysenkoism.” Other Russian scientists looked the other way. Russia’s most respected biologist, geneticist, and geographer, Nikolai Vavilov, thought Stalin’s new friend was a crackpot. It wouldn’t end well.

Lysenko got lucky with ‘vernalization’. He tricked wheat seeds into blooming early by treating them with moisture in cold temperatures as a way to produce yields in the spring. The trick had already been performed by American John Hancock Klippart in 1857, but Lysenko gave it a name. He also believed the deceived seeds from these plants would magically inherit the ability to do the same on their own.

His theory ran counter to empirical evidence and to the knowledge and experience of Vavilov. Vavilov worried Lysenko’s tricks, unproven theories, and over promises to Stalin and the Soviet government could lead to catastrophic errors and the worsening of the routine famines Russia was trying to escape.

But Stalin embraced Lysenko’s folksy and unorthodox ways. He believed in his salt-of-the-earth intuition and grew suspicious of the world-renowned and respected science of Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was the winner of the Lenin Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in science, and was respected worldwide. He traveled the globe successfully identifying the geographic genetic origins of cultivated plants. He guest-lectured and rubbed elbows with those Western imperialists Stalin despised. Vavilov also spoke poorly of the former Ukrainian peasant come pseudo-scientist Stalin had grown fond of.

In 1936 Stalin replaced Vavilov with Lysenko as the head of the Soviet Academy of Agriculture. Six years later, in 1941, Stalin sentenced Vavilov to execution on claims he was trying sabotage Stalin’s agricultural plans. His sentence was then reduced to a prison term. Vavilov, who grew up fearful of starvation in a village prone to crop failures and food rationing – a scientist who dedicated his life to eradicating famine – died in prison in 1943 of starvation.

Famines had been ravishing Russia for a century already. The large-scale farm practices of today started in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But missteps led to widespread famine, displacement, and environmental damage. Technological advancements allowed expansive grasslands to be converted to cropland around the world, including Russia, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and the United States.

An explosion of European immigrants to the United States in the mid 1800s, together with The Homestead Act of 1862, pushed immigrants into prairies to the West and North. Some ventured into Canada. The Civil War ended in 1865 and four years later the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Both increased the number of agrarian colonizers to the Great Plains.

But the climatic patterns in these areas played a role in the evolution of these plains. The grasslands are arid with periods of intense rainfall followed by drought. Settlers could be deceived into believing these rainfalls were routine only to witness periods of extreme drought. Farmers in the 1870s and 1880s witnessed regular rainfall only to see it disappear in the 1890s. Instead of consulting with Indigenous farmers on how they farmed the land for millennia, the colonists instead expanded area croplands and intensity to make up for short yields. Some used the land to graze cattle leading to even more elimination of the natural grasses needed to nourish and sustain the soil.

The U.S. government accelerated farm expansion by altering the Homestead Act to include larger plots of land. The rain returned in the 1920s which attracted another wave of farmers. Farmland in a section of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico doubled in the two decades between 1900 and 1920 and tripled in just five years between 1925 and 1930.

Russia saw similar expansions of large-scale agriculture. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, groundbreaking research by soil scientist and geographer Vasilii Dokuchaev, the father of soil science, revealed for the first time the role climate and topography play in soil health. He went on to develop the world’s first soil classification system. Some farmers, including immigrant German Mennonites, adopted drought tolerant farming practices Dokuchaev recommended.

Meanwhile, most of Russia, like the United States, continued large-scale overly intensive farming techniques – though Russia lagged in mechanization. Both the United States and Russia, set on expansion, growth, and domination, gambled with the climate, soil, plants, and the crops they yielded. They ignored both emerging science and age-old sustainable practice that likely would have mitigated inevitable crop failure, famine, and long-lasting and long-ranging environmental and social devastation. Destruction so severe they compounded the effects of natural disasters.

Between 1921 and 1923 extreme droughts and winters led to plant disease, insect infestation, and soil erosion throughout the converted grasslands of Russia, Ukraine, and surrounding regions. Famine ensued causing millions to die of starvation. Ravaged by WWI and the Russian Civil War, the Soviet government, then under Vladimir Lenin, was forced to import food and organize relief efforts.

In 1921 Lenin called on the United States to help. The American Relief Administration, headed by future President Herbert Hoover, employed 300 Americans and a 120,000 Russians to provide relief. It was an extension to European relief from WWI. They provided daily meals for over 10.5 million people while also administering medical aid to typhus sufferers – a feverish epidemic claiming even more Russian lives.

GO GREEN

The relief from America worked. By 1923 the Soviet government was able to stockpile enough grain to organize their own relief efforts and the U.S. stepped away. But Russia continued to be hit with episodes of drought. In 1924 another wave hit and the Soviets were once again forced to organize relief efforts. Again, they stockpiled enough to make it through 1925 and 1926 only to be hit again in 1928. Convinced traditional farming techniques were unsustainable, the Soviet government initiated programs that mimicked industrialized farming techniques in the United States.

Another drought came in 1931 and 1932 and with it more famine. Joseph Stalin had risen to power amidst the Russian Revolution. Unlike Lenin, he refused support from the outside. By 1933, when food stocks began to rise again four million more people had died from famine. But the United States would have been in no position to help this time anyway. In 1930, widespread drought spread through the Great Plains stretching from Canada to Mexico.

The natural grasses that once protected soil from blowing away had either been tilled for crops or consumed by cattle. The Industrial Age had given way to industrial farming. A substantial gamble with colossal consequences. The Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties, a natural disaster compounded by poor agricultural practices and imperialist hubris, impacted over 100 million acres. It intensified the Great Depression. If the dust storms didn’t destroy homes and farms, failed mortgages and loans did. Between 1930 and 1940 nearly 3.5 million people evacuated the lands they had only recently colonized and practically destroyed. Including their native inhabitants.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, Stalin made another gamble in 1936. He bet on “Lysenkoism”. He believed it would solve the Soviet agricultural malaise sending the one man capable of potentially solving the region’s, maybe the world’s, agricultural problems to starve to death – Nikolai Vavilov. But soon came WWII and more geopolitical disruption in a Soviet Union still trying to figure itself out. And then, in 1946 and 1947, another Russian famine emerged. Again, Stalin refused aid and two million more died of starvation.

But little did Stalin know, many of the scientists that worked under Vavilov had hidden his seed collection and continued to conduct experiments in private. One esteemed plant breeder, Pavel Luk’ianenko, drafted off the work of Vavilov and bred a variety of semi-dwarf wheat seeds in 1950 that would change the course of Russian agriculture forever. By the time of his death in 1972 he was credited with breeding or co-breeding 15 different varieties of regionalized winter wheat seeds.

His work was Russia’s contribution to a larger global Green Revolution, a systematic and coordinated effort in the 1950s and 1960s between genetically modified seed breeding, chemical fertilizers, land use policy, public and private capital, and mechanized technology that massively increased crop yields. The American scientist and Nobel Prize winner credited with birthing this revolution, Norman Borlaug, said in 2000 that

“Had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion hectares of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used – to equal the current global harvest".

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. Khrushchev was Russian but had ruled Ukraine for a decade. He witnessed struggling farmers endure famine and invented what he called “agro-towns” – small villages in remote rural areas with a library and stores where farmers could live and be better supported. But during the drought of 1946, he had to beg Stalin for aid after over-estimating Ukrainian crop yields. It was a fissure that cost him his post in Ukraine. However, his dismissal led to a position in Moscow closer to Stalin that surely cemented his rise to power seven years later.

One of Khrushchev’s first programs was “Virgin Lands”. He proposed the conversion of 25 million hectares of arid grasslands to croplands in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Within a year this region became a significant contributor to Soviet grain yields. But they soon diminished and in 1962 and 1963 came another drought. In an echo of the Dust Bowl, winds picked up and blew away most of the topsoil that had previously been secured by grassland. Again, a massive shortfall of wheat forced Khrushchev to seek foreign aid. Ten million tons of grain were imported from Canada and the United States. Quantities of this magnitude were likely the result of the crop yield successes of the Green Revolution. But they were also making up for the environmental failings of the Green Revolution.

NUT JOB

It can be hard accepting curses that can come with blessings. Such is the damaging and delicious duality of modern agriculture. We can’t seem to live with it, and we don’t dare try to live without it. But we do have a choice over how large-scale agriculture is implemented. This is unlike the effects of climate change where we can’t live with them, and we don’t have a choice to live with out them.

These historical environmental extremes that plagued the former Soviet agricultural lands continue to this day. In 2009, Russia was on course to export record amounts of grain. Then, in 2010, a wildfire brought on by severe drought turned acres of golden grain to ash. Vladimir Putin was forced to cancel exports. And like those before him, was forced to import food to stave off widespread famine.

Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other surrounding countries continue to adjust to extreme weather patterns. Still, much of that ‘Virgin Land’ once converted to cropland over the past 50-60 years has been abandoned due to soil depletion brought on by large-scale intensive factory farming. Just a small fraction of the original ‘Virgin Lands’ are farmed in Kazakhstan today. But they continue to learn and adjust…as we all must.

The effects of climate change are global in scale, but differ in variety, intensity, and regularity at a regional and local level. So does the impact on people and place. As a result, responses to these effects must also differ in variety, intensity, and regularity. But intent matters. I’m convinced scientists like Vavilov, Lysenko, Luk’ianenko, and Borlaug were intent on saving people from starvation. They all witnessed firsthand real suffering of starving individuals and the loss of entire populations.

But I’m less convinced of the intentions of politicians like Stalin and Putin. I’m also skeptical of the intentions of Western coalitions backed by corporations who prioritize capital, political control, and short-term quarterly earnings. They seem more intent on feeding growing GDP figures than the starving figures of the emaciated. Stuff pockets of greed over hungry mouths to feed. Let the soils blow away, so long as the board boosts my pay. Shrink operating expenditures amidst rising temperatures. Large-scale government schemes feed delusional utopian dreams. Avoid political disruption by funding criminal corruption. Intention matters.

As an example, in 1947 the British Government wanted to increase peanut production to sell as oil on the world market. So, together with Unilever, then went to the East Africa territory of Tanganyika to convert the wooded plains to peanut farms. An area England had militarily occupied since 1916. No one involved in the project bothered to study the soil and topography. They had to remove Mvule trees to make way for croplands, but they didn’t account for their deep, stubborn, thirsty roots. Their tractors were ruined in the process. New tractors damaged the soil with their weight. Their engines were too weak to churn the hard soils.

In two years, they had only cultivated 16% of what they had planned. By 1951 the British government called it quits. They had spent six times the value of the crops they had grown. The director of the program was a former Russian who applied techniques of his communist past. Leaders at Unilever demanded immediate results to fit their revenue goals. Both of their approaches were insensitive to local people and place leaving it ravaged as they wrote off the loss and flew away amidst the arid soil they had unearthed. They abandoned the people and place most impacted by their imperialistic Groundnut Scheme.

A railroad was constructed to ship the elusive nuts to a harbor the British had built so they could float nut oil around the world. The port remains, but the rail was dismantled. The global transportation network is what allows those locally impacted by natural disasters to receive aid. Parts of Africa continue to be cut off from these networks.

But it were not for these networks, millions more would have died of starvation over the past 200 years. The U.S. and Ukraine blame Russia for clogging those very networks today. Meanwhile, Putin blames the West for blocking fertilizer and grain imports into Russia. Both are true. And it’s also true that Russian wheat exports were up 80% in April over last year and rose 27% in May. They just may be the winner in Wheat sales this year, unless another drought hits and the fields turn to fire. But if Russia was hit with a famine inducing drought, would Putin ask Ukraine and the West for relief? Would America offer relief? What if America is hit with a famine inducing drought? Would China and Russia come to our aid?

On June 27th, President Biden and members of the G-7 met in Austria to discuss a plan to massively invest in infrastructure throughout the developing world. They aim to thwart nonmembers like China and Russia from introducing future disruptions by controlling more infrastructure, like transportation. It’s a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Biden said,

“This isn’t aid or charity, it’s a chance for us to share our positive vision for the future…because when democracies demonstrate what we can do, all that we have to offer, I have no doubt that we will win the competition.”

That hubris reminds me of the British Groundnut Scheme. Will the West be applying lessons learned from the devastating and deleterious effects of centuries of colonization? Are leaders any more sensitive to the needs and desires of the local people and places these schemes are sure to impact? These investments are long overdue, and China has a head start, but they must be done with the right intentions.

Lack of adequate adoption of agricultural practice and needed infrastructure is what leaves regions most vulnerable to the negative agricultural effects of climate change. The way our food is produced, distributed, and sold heavily relies on transportation networks. The millions of people who were saved from starvation in the former Soviet Union is testimony to this fact. But responses also require acknowledgment, understanding, and support of local people and place…and their governments. Whether they share a common vision with the West or not.

People situated in their places possess the necessary local and practical knowledge and ingenuity needed to augment the abundance of science that rests on centuries of historical successes and failures. Capital investment from the West is needed and necessary, but not sufficient or welcomed should the intent be to strengthen power, bolster profits, and exploit people and land. In other words, to repeat history. To learn the lesson, past sins must not be repeated. Instead of killing people, animals, and plants in the interest of political ideology, we should seek their engagement and invest in their ecology. In the words of Nikolai Vavilov in 1932, nine years before Stalin issued his execution sentence:

“Many historical problems can be understood only because of the interaction between man, animals and plants.”

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Hello Interactors,

This episode kicks off the summer season on the environment and our interactions with it and through it. I’m starting with food. Food is a big topic that impacts us all, albeit in uneven ways. It got me wondering about the global food system and how it’s controlled. Who are the winners and who are the losers? And why is there competition for nourishment in first place?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

АТАКА БОЛЬШОГО МАКА (ATAKA BOL'SHOGO MAKA)

Верните Биг Мак! Срочно верните Биг Мак. Мы требуем этого прямо сейчас. Прямо сейчас. Прямо здесь. Биг Мак!

(Vernite Big Mak! Srochno vernite Big Mak. Moy trebuyem etogo pryamo seychas. Pryamo seychas. Pryamo zdes'. Big Mak!)

“Bring back the Big Mac! Bring back the Big Mac. We demand it right now. Right now. Right here. Big Mac!” Holding a handwritten sign that read “Bring back the Big Mac” a protestor in Moscow took advantage of a press conference a couple weeks ago at the reopening of McDonalds under a new name. Albeit a bit tongue in cheek, he was demanding the return of one popular product not on the menu. The Big Mac name and special sauce are both copyright protected. But the new owner of the new McDonald’s, Alexander Govor – who was a Siberian McDonald’s franchise owner before buying the entire Russian chain – promised he’d find a suitable replacement for the Big Mac. As for a new name, I vote for Большая говядина (Bol'shaya Govyadina), Big Beef. Or given the new owners last name how about just Bol’shaya Gov – Big Gov.

Govor claims he paid below market price for the world’s most recognized fast-food chain and he’s already slashed prices. McDonald’s priced the double cheeseburger at 160 rubles ($2.95) but it’s now 129 rubles ($2.38). The fish burger was 190 rubles ($3.50) and is now 169 rubles ($3.11). The composition of the burgers stays the same as does the equipment, but they did add pancakes, omelets, and scrambled eggs to the morning menu. However, the golden arches are gone, and the name has changed to Vkusno & tochka's (Delicious and that’s it or Delicious, full stop).

After 32 years, that’s it for McDonald’s in Russia but it’s promised to remain delicious. Back in 1990 the American based company had to import all the ingredients to fulfill the promise of a true McDonald’s. It made for an expensive introduction of the American icon. French fries were a problem. The Russian potatoes were too small, so McDonalds had to import seeds to grow larger russet potatoes locally. Apples for the McDonald’s ‘apple pie’ had to come from Bulgaria. After three decades McDonald’s managed to source just about everything locally and ultimately employed 62,000 Russians throughout their operations. But those McDonald’s branded red, yellow, and blue uniforms have been replaced with just red ones. Judging from the lines and enthusiasm at the grand opening, I suspect the new MickeyD’s will continue to be popular…and delicious, full stop.

McDonald’s was popular in Russia from the day it opened in 1990. The Berlin wall had come down, perestroika was nearing its peak, glasnost embraced a blend of socialism and traditional liberal economics that allowed more U.S. companies to enter the former Soviet Union. It was the age of exceedingly fast globalization. A year after McDonald’s showed up Microsoft offered a Russian version of DOS. Just as I was starting at Microsoft in 1992, localized versions of software were flying on floppy disks around the world. By 1996 localized versions of Windows and Office 95 were on a computer on every desk a new McDonald’s was being built every three days. 1996 was the first year McDonald’s made more revenue from outside the United States than within.

And McDonald’s wasn’t just pushing their McMunchies on unsuspecting countries. Many were clamoring for their own MickyD’s. James Cantalupo, president of McDonald's International at time, said,

“'I feel these countries want McDonald's as a symbol of something -- an economic maturity and that they are open to foreign investments. I don't think there is a country out there we haven't gotten inquiries from. I have a parade of ambassadors and trade representatives in here regularly to tell us about their country and why McDonald's would be good for the country.'”

There were some who believed the proliferation of McDonald’s symbolized the spread of freedom and democracy. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times offered in 1996 a “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention -- which stipulates that when a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald's, it becomes a McDonald's country, and people in McDonald's countries don't like to fight wars; they like to wait in line for burgers.” There goes that theory. Though, Russians are still waiting in line for a burger…just not from McDonald’s.

I’m reminded of the “freedom fries” scandal from 2003. That’s when the Republican senator from Ohio, Bob Ney, changed the name of ‘French Fries’ to ‘Freedom Fries’ in three Congressional cafeterias. It was in response to French opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. The name was changed back in 2006 after Ney was forced to retire. He was implicated in a scandal involving a group of lobbyists that swindled $85,000,000 from Native American tribes. Ney was bribed by one of the guilty lobbyists. On the satirical Saturday Night Live news show Weekend Update, Tina Fey quipped, “‘In a related story, in France, American cheese is now referred to as 'idiot cheese.'"

SEEDS OF GREED

Of course, McDonald’s wasn’t the only multinational food company spreading fast food around the world. I, for one, was grateful to come across a Burger King on the Champs-Élysées in Paris back in 1984. It was my first trip to Europe and my 18-year-old palette wasn’t quite tuned to fine French cuisine. Truth be told, my 56-year-old palette isn’t either. I find French food to be highly overrated. I remember my 18-year-old self thinking that “Le Whopper” and Pepsi with ice, amidst pumping French disco, was both surreal and comforting.

Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Taco Bell are found in all corners of the world today. Except Mexico. Despite many gallant attempts, Taco Bell can’t seem to crack the Mexican market. I suspect Mexicans find their interpretation of the taco insulting…and gross. But it’s not just fast food. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellog’s, Kraft, and Mars are all American companies that make a plethora of processed and packaged products marketed as food. There are other multinational companies outside of the U.S. doing the same. Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo is where Thomas English muffins, Orowheat, and Sara Lee treats come from. They also own Colonial bread: a white bread that originated in colonized America by a Scandinavian immigrant and is now run out of colonized Mexico by the grandson of a Spanish immigrant who could pass as just another white billionaire CEO.

And who hasn’t heard of Switzerland’s Nestlé products? They are so big there’s a wiki page just to list their products. Chips Ahoy cookie anyone? What about the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever? They bring us Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Dove Bars, and Hellman’s mayonnaise. Have you ever had Nutella? That comes from the Italian company Ferrero. That single company consumes one quarter of the world’s supply of hazelnuts. Increasingly those nuts are coming from my neighboring state, Oregon. I love Oregon hazelnuts, so save some for me Ferrero.

This select group of companies produce, market, and sell most of the food around the world that is baked, canned, chilled, frozen, dried, and processed. Adding to the fat and sugar found in fast-food chains, they make dairy products, ice cream, meal replacements, bars, snacks, noodles, pasta, sauces, oils, fats, TV dinners, dressings, condiments, spreads, and an array of beverages. This gives them massive market leverage over the source ingredients produced by farmers around the world.

The very seeds needed to grow these crops are also controlled by a select group of multinational companies. The food policy advocacy group Food and Power reported:

“In 2020, the top four corporations, Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DuPont), Syngenta (part of ChemChina), and Limagrain together controlled 50% of the global seed market, with Bayer and Corteva alone claiming roughly 40%. And when it comes to genetic traits, this control is even more pronounced: Bayer controls 98% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant soybeans, and 79% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant corn.”

Carlos J. Maya-Ambía, a professor of Political Economy and Agriculture at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, uses an hourglass as a metaphor to explain the control these companies have over the food making process. Imagine the top of the hourglass are the world’s farmers producing edible plants and animals and the bottom are the world’s human inhabitants – consumers. Both are wide and round. The middle of the hourglass is relatively narrow. These are the few multinational companies mentioned above who control most of the flow from the top of the hourglass (the farms) to the bottom (our tables).

Because these seeds are engineered for largescale monoculture farm productions that these corporations require. They tend to rely on agrochemicals to achieve desired yields. It’s a short-term positive yield strategy optimized for quarterly earnings reports, but with severe long-term negative consequences. And guess who controls an estimated 75 percent of the global pesticide market? Those same top tier seed companies.

These chemicals are largely petrochemicals, so the fossil fuel industry also profits from global food production and consumption. These processes, genetically modified seeds, and chemicals no doubt have helped bring countless people out of poverty and starvation. Especially where increasingly harsh conditions make it hard to grow crops. But at what cost? These industrial scale schemes not only leach nutrients from the soil and pollute water supplies, but exposure to these chemicals can also cause neurological disorders, birth defects, infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and multiple forms of cancer.

Worse yet are the inequities. Many of these chemicals and genetically modified foods are banned in developed countries. Before Monsanto was purchased by Bayer, massive protests across Europe led to the company pulling out of parts of the EU. Those countries with the most organized farmer and consumer protests had the biggest effect. It’s testimony to the power of democracy and organized protest. But Monsanto, and companies like them, just move on to more willing governments or vulnerable people and places. They seek lands far away from the peering eyes of consumers with a conscience. Many of whom who sit there munching snacks, and tapping on their phones to make that next online fast-food delivery. Guilty as charged. Sad as it may be, when the exploitive interdependent global food system is out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

As Maya-Ambia puts it,

“the scenario becomes clearer if we consider agriculture as a global system and as a long global value chain, composed of several links where agents interact and connect with the whole economy, nationally and globally. Accordingly, the global economy is formed by a complex web of value chains, whose links are located in different places around the world. Therefore, it is correct to speak of…the global value chain of agriculture that does not begin at the production process, but rather with the appropriation of nature and the transformation of natural objects into economic inputs, including the current land-grabbing in several places by transnational corporations. Driven by profit, these corporations have appropriated land, resulting in disastrous ecological effects.”

He continues,

“These practices of appropriation and consumption have created a ‘new international division of labor’: the Global South has become the place of appropriation of nature and in some ways a type of dumping ground.”

FAIR TRADE LAY BARE

Many of the same places these powerful corporations exploit are also the first to be hit with food insecurity. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Association (FAO) reported last year that “the number of undernourished people in the world continued to rise in 2020. Between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger in 2020.” This includes 480 million people in Asia, 46 million in Africa, and 14 million in Latin America. Food insecurity has been climbing steadily over the last six years. One in three of the world’s 2.37 billion people do not have adequate access to food. This isn’t a supply issue. The world has enough food to feed everyone. This is about fair access.

Many of the same people responsible for producing food exported to more developed countries are the one’s who reap the smallest rewards from the value chain. The smallest share of value goes to those farmers in developing countries. And the smaller the farm, the worse the effect. This fact is revealed by observing stagnating long-run trends of producer prices compared to rising consumer prices. These prices are controlled through governance schemes that squeeze the middle of the hourglass. Firms can exert extreme market power, leverage advanced financial and technological mechanisms, influence local, regional, and state leadership, and assert a particular cultural influence. My Parisian “Le Whopper” influenced the culture of the Champs-Élysées. American fast-food culture in Russia lives on in the new ‘Delicious’ McDonald’s. Full stop.

Inequities are also found in the devastating effects of industrialized agriculture at the hands of these powerful firms. Large swaths of sensitive and diverse habitat in developing countries are violently destroyed – like in the Amazon. They’re making space for more croplands and pastures to grow more food and animals, to make more food products, that are sold to increasingly affluent populations who are rising out of poverty in search of the famed Western consumer lifestyle. This only further destroys the land and water making living conditions in these already poor areas even more stressed. As criminal as it is to live poor in a developed country like the United States, it’s not nearly as worse as living poor in unfairly exploited countries. Especially when it comes to acute food insecurity.

On the other hand, living in developed countries – or desiring to adopt a similar lifestyle – comes with a higher risk of death by obesity…in large part due to fast and junk food. In 2021 the World Health Organization reported that worldwide obesity has tripled since 1975. More people in the world are likely to die of obesity than malnutrition. And because the globalization of high calorie junk and fast-food production exists to drive prices as low as possible, it makes it more accessible to poor people in both developing and developed countries. This puts poorer people at higher risk of both malnutrition and obesity.

Naturally occurring factors, like the pandemic and a changing climate also unfairly impact those most vulnerable. As does war. How naïve to believe countries with a McDonald’s would never take arms against one another; that French fries, freedom fries, would somehow united the world. Russia and Ukraine have proven otherwise. Conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have resulted in millions of people fleeing for safety and starving in the process. Many of whom were farmers. Much of the food needed to feed these refugees historically came from Ukraine and Russia but that is all at risk now.

But American farmers might be able to help. In a rare bipartisan partnership on Capital Hill, just this week President Biden signed into law the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA). U.S. agricultural shippers complained to the federal government that the world’s top ocean carriers unfairly denied them container space. Shippers on the West coast found it more profitable to return empty boxes to Asia so they could be re-loaded for the next round of more profitable exports back to the U.S. Of course, this is all fed by increasing consumer demand by overconsuming Americans. But these interruptions made it difficult for farmers and shippers to predict when their time sensitive goods should be delivered to ports before they spoiled.

But with the passing of this law, ocean shippers are required to report to the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) how many exports they’re loading and from where. The bill also includes rules that determines what makes a denial to export agricultural goods unreasonable. Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Co., and Transfar Shipping have already offered container space for U.S. agricultural shippers and others are soon to follow. Hopefully, food grown in America can stand a better chance of making it to those in most need in Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond.

The world seems to be swimming in so many crises that the word has somehow lost urgency. But between war, climate change, and economic inequalities the global food system needs transformation. Here are six ways the FAO believes the global food system could be made more healthy, sustainable, and inclusive:

Integrating humanitarian, development and peacebuilding policies in conflict-affected areas.

Scaling up climate resilience across food systems.

Strengthening resilience of the most vulnerable to economic adversity.

Intervening along the food supply chains to lower the cost of nutritious foods.

Tackling poverty and structural inequalities, ensuring interventions are pro-poor and inclusive.

Strengthening food environments and changing consumer behaviour to promote dietary patterns with positive impacts on human health and the environment.

These steps read a lot like the steps McDonald’s took 32 years ago after entering the Russian market. The introduction of fast-food chains was believed to be a peacebuilding exercise in a conflict-affected area. Freedom fries brought hope and russet potatoes to Russia. McDonald’s scaled up a resilient food system by investing in local farming. They optimized food supply chains within the region. Impoverished Russian’s adjusting to a post communist reality were given jobs growing McDonald’s produce, delivering goods, and working in restaurants. They strengthened the local food environment and changed consumer behavior. And while McDonald’s may not be the healthiest food, not the healthiest habit, it may have been better than what was offered before and it certainly made people happy.

“Delicious and That’s It” just might make it even better. It could be their menu alterations make it a healthier version of McDonald’s. They’ve already made it cheaper. But judging from the Hugo Boss shirt one customer was wearing at the grand opening in Moscow, I have a hunch the new MickeyD’s just might be an elite treat. Still, they may be on to something. Perhaps this is a model that could be used in other places. Maybe more globetrotting fast-food restaurants and junk food producers should be selling out to the locals.

Pizza Hut in Japan already offers squid as a pizza topping, but maybe a Japanese owned franchise would result in even more localized interpretations of a food that originated in Italy. After all, flatbreads exist in a variety of forms all over the world. Imagine مناقيش بيتزا (Manakish pizza), pisa bing 披薩餅 (Bing pizza), or a Catalonia coca? They could all be made with local ingredients, sourced from smaller sustainable farms, sold in locally owned franchises, employing local residents with wages high enough to live on. Who knows where the next Big Mac could be invented? Maybe Russia. Bol’shaya Gov anyone?

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Hello Interactors,

Where, how, and when people work continues to shift. Meanwhile, scores of people are moving to urban regions in search of opportunities. Some of which are more accessible than others. It’s putting stresses on how cities plan, how we move, and what kinds of freedoms are afforded and to whom. But hidden in the complexities of societies are patterns of hope.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

REMOTE CONTROL

The workplace will never be the same again. What it becomes won’t either. But don’t tell Elon Musk. He threw a temper tantrum last week accusing employees at Tesla of slacking off working from home. In a company-wide email he became the over-controlling parent and grounded everyone. He wrote, “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week” and that they “must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office.” He claimed had he not been on the factory floor “working alongside” his employees that Tesla would have “long ago gone bankrupt.” I’m sure every factory floor worker he has replaced by a robot might have something to say about that.

Some work does require a physical presence. Teeth cleaning comes to mind. But there is something to coming together physically that is hard to replicate online. There are also many kinds of service jobs that require a physical presence, though some of those are getting replaced by robots. Last year, a Dallas restaurant turned to a Robot called Bella when they had trouble filling waiter jobs. The owner said, “They don’t complain and they’re happy to do it!” It even happily sings Happy Birthday.

But even white-collar jobs require some together time. I heard one academic say he worked two years during COVID on a joint research project over Zoom. When the team finally came together physically, they accomplished more in a single day than they did in those two years.

Every company from Tesla to Target are feeling the reverberations of pandemic induced workplace alterations. Even Microsoft, a company that has long envisioned the promise of hybrid-work, is struggling through a new rhythm and workplace model. Mandatory in-office strategies like Musk tried aren’t practical. Even senior leaders are choosing to move to remote locations. Meanwhile, some high-tech teams were already distributed around the world. Despite these trends, companies continue to build new office space. Cranes loom on the horizon all around Seattle. While some of these high-rises will be housing, much of it is office space. What will they do with all this space?

I met a new friend last week who is trying to figure that out. She works as a product designer for a company headquartered in Rotterdam called MapIQ. They build software and services that allow companies to optimize the space they have. She’s been busy conducting research. She talks to employees, facility managers, IT departments, human resources, and corporate realtors who are struggling with a new workplace reality. She told me one of the most acute issues for facility managers is space utilization. These companies pay a lot of money to have attractive and effective workplaces. Seeing them empty is troubling financially but also psychologically. She said, “Employees are struggling to know when it is best to come to the office. They don't want to be the only one at home in a hybrid meeting and they don't want to be in an empty office either.”

Facility managers are scrambling to find ways to make the most of what they have. She said one popular outcome is subletting workspace. But even subletters will only use it occasionally and sporadically. They use software and sensors to better manage who is using it, when, and for how long. This was not how these buildings were designed and not how these companies were envisioned to be run. MapIQ has identified five trends emerging in the workplace:

The office as standard. Most all employees work four or five days a week in the office.

Local hybrid. Most people work two or three days a week in the office.

Remote friendly. Most employees are in the office only once or twice a week.

Remote first. Working in the office is completely optional with no geographic requirement.

Fully distributed. There is no office at all and everyone works wherever they want.

The nature of work in the foreseeable future is decidedly different than the past. It will take some time for optimizations to emerge. Meanwhile, how will this affect our built environment and how cities plan? Our roads, rails, wires, and spires, boulevards, buildings, drains and ditches were all planned and produced with a certain permanency and predictability that surrounds our economies, societies, and psychologies. These features of the physical and social landscape were assumed to be towering rocks anchored and resolute. But it turns out it was a mirage. They are made of sand and the winds of the pandemic has created a sandstorm. What shape these forms of fortune take is unknown and possibly unknowable.

The landscape of living amidst this storm is hard to predict and control. The best way to know what direction we’re headed is to look where we came from. Only then can we understand how we got here. A lot has changed in how and where we live. Since the end of WWII, the world’s population has more than tripled. Over half alive right now live in urban areas and nearly three-quarters will by 2050. North America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world. In 2018 82% of the population lived in urban areas. And it’s growing every day. Europe is 74% urbanized and their cities are also growing. Half of the world’s population lives in Asia and half of those live in urban areas.

Not all regions grow at the same rate. The fastest growing areas are projected to continue to be in low-income and middle-income nations. Thirty-three of the fastest growing countries between 2000 and 2020 were in Africa. Twelve were in Asia. But urbanization is both a blessing and a curse. Access to better public health, nutrition, and education improves the lives of those who suffer most, but puts increased strains on housing, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure systems. This is having widespread, varying, and compounding impacts on all who live in urban areas. But these growing pains are not equally felt by all. Understanding these sensitivities will be necessary if we’re going to find ways to solve them.

SUPER SIZING THE SUPER RICH WITH SUPERLINEAR WEALTH

Urban scientists have found naturally occurring mathematical patterns in growing cities. They mimic power-laws found across a diverse array of cities just as they do across plants and animals. For example, as cities grow in population their GDP, number of patents, and productivity grow at a predictable scale. However, congestion, crime, and contagious diseases also predictably grow. Doubling the size of a city will increase wages, wealth, and innovation (as measured by number of patents) by roughly 15 percent. But so will garbage and theft. Population growth has a predictable superlinear positive and negative effect on urban areas. It’s the great paradox of urbanity.

There are big advantages to scale. With each doubling of population there’s also a 15 percent savings in total length of rail lines, electrical lines, water lines, and roads. This sublinear effect predictably leads to a city of 10 million people needing 15 percent less infrastructure than a city half its size. It pays to grow.

But these numbers, as predictable as they are, can also be misleading. Whenever population datasets get crunched and averaged the analysis ends up crunching the realities of the average person. Hidden in the convenient clustering of ‘low-income‘, ‘middle-income’, and ‘high-income’ are varying degrees, durations, and directions as diverse as those lived experiences of the people behind the numbers. This realization has led some of those same urban scaling researchers to scrutinize their own findings. Increased wealth disparities, for example, got them wondering. If wage growth is so predictable compared to urban growth, and more people are predictably moving to urban areas, why aren’t all wages predictably growing?

They wondered if there are similar scaling laws that predict income inequality based on city size. How are incomes different among the rich and the poor compared to the size of the city? After adjusting for cost-of-living differences, are poor people in a big city better off than poor people in a small city? Are rich people richer the bigger the city?

To answer their questions, they broke down income brackets into percentiles. Traditional economic inequality research looks at dispersed distributions across income or wealth. Meaningful individual differences are hidden in these distributions. What they found is the wealth of the poorest 10% scales almost linearly with population size. In contrast, the top 10% shows superlinear growth. This means poor folks moving closer to the city in hopes of becoming wealthier may find themselves to be continually poor compared to those in higher income brackets. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.

They conclude that “much has been written about the apparent increasing gains of large cities, such as greater GDP, higher wages, and more patents per capita.” But in the end, “the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.” For example, they found the ratio of housing costs to income is a function of city population size. The poorer the income brackets, the greater the proportion of income is spent on housing. This results in sharp increases in costs with city size. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest brackets the proportion of income spent on housing stays level.

So whatever superlinear growth in GDP, innovation, and wage growth that comes with increased city size is highly concentrated in the upper income brackets. Existing research in urban scaling and innovation points to empirical evidence that these gains are due in large part to the increase in social interactions and sharing of ideas. Larger and more diverse pools of people co-located in urban areas results in an explosion of creativity, opportunity, and resources. The accumulation of shared knowledge and passion only increases the potential for innovation.

This theory is found in the work of economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness – those who share a common social context have an embedded relationship that drives a desire to provide for one another. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

And one of the most influential economists in the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter, described these acts of economic invention and innovation as ‘creative destruction’. For every new innovation that brings increased wealth another must be destroyed or devalued. Capitalists celebrate it as the unfortunate inevitability of social and economic progress while Socialists deride it as the inevitable annihilating force of capitalism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto that,

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells… In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

This grim prognosis from one of Capitalisms only inciteful critics is, sadly, all too relatable these days. Marx would not at all be surprised to hear there’s now empirical evidence to back his 174-year-old theory. But he would probably also be shocked to see China rising as a global superpower by combining elements of Capitalism with Socialism. Markets seem to have a way of formalizing Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness. He believed we all have the desire and creative ability to contribute to each others success and well being as part of our livelihoods. It’s not just goods and services that need exchanged but also values, moral concerns, and relationships. But to do that we must remain connected.

CONNECTING THE DOTS TO FREEDOM

Those urban scaling researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons income inequalities are so pronounce and unfairly propagated in our wealthiest cities is because the various income brackets have become increasingly geographically and socially segregated. Like ecosystems, the less diversity there is the greater the propensity to collapse. These researchers warn that urban regions that “inhibit mixing between diverse populations, will underperform with respect to income scaling.” If lessening income inequality is a goal, the research suggests “cities that are better mixed, allowing diverse parts of the population to be exposed to one another, should be overperforming with respect to urban scaling.”

Connecting diverse sets of people across urban regions seems a more productive, and fun, way to tackle income inequality than redistribution of wealth through a government program. Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard University’s Growth Lab. They uncover international growth diagnostics and develop economic complexity research methodologies. In a recent interview he said,

“In my mind, the real solution to inequality is not so much redistribution as inclusion – as incorporating people into the possibility of mixing what they are…that leads to a very different agenda for inequality reduction. Do you send people a check or do you connect them to the urban transport network?...Do you connect it to the labor market? Do you connect to the schooling system?”

He was joined in this interview by J. Doyne Farmer. He is the Director of Complexity Economics at the Oxford Institute of New Economic Thinking. Farmer points out that when economists look at the distribution of productivity, they commonly use a statistical technique that lops off a chunk of a giant tail of the distribution curve that is seemingly inconsequential to their analysis. This gives them a distorted point of view of productivity. And to underline Hausmann’s point about the importance of diversity needed to be connected, he said, “that there's a huge diversity out there” hidden in the fat tails those distribution curves. He adds, “And we really have to cope with that because it's inherent to the economy.”

The question is, how connected physically do people have to be, how often, and for how long to achieve optimal productivity gains? These are questions being asked by companies around the world and firms like MapIQ are there to help answer them. But how many of these companies are already segregating themselves from the socio-economic diversity of their headquarters, satellite offices, or shared urban and suburban workspaces?

Arjun Ramani, a Stanford economist and journalist for The Economist, said last year in an interview by Leesman, a leader in workplace research, that “people are now willing to live an hour away in exchange for a bigger house, because they don’t have to commute in every day.” He believes it’s leading to the ‘donuting’ of cities which I mentioned may be occurring in Des Moines, Iowa. Ramani also reminds us that in the 1800s 40% of workers were working from home. He said, “working from home was quite common. Workers would go into a city or to a market to get raw materials and goods and return home to work – for example in the manufacture of clothes.”

Today that just may be a 3D printer in a suburban garage or a rural toolshed, but the materials would probably be delivered to their door or flown in on a drone. But there’s no question some segment of jobs will require a more centralized physical presence. I’m not yet ready to have my teeth cleaned by a robot, though it looks like that also may be around the corner too. Even farming is moving toward robots.

Regardless of what kind of job is available or desired or how much physical presence needed, there is little question getting more people connected – regardless of where they live – increases the odds of diverse interactions. My own experience tells me, and mounds of research supports, diverse collections of people and ideas yield unexpectedly miraculous outcomes. It’s not always easy or pleasant working with people of differing backgrounds, beliefs, and inclinations, but out of contention come good ideas.

It's also hard to imagine how we become more connected amidst increasing geographic segregation, political polarization, religious ideology, and economic disparities. This may be today’s most perplexing social dilemma. It seems each opportunity to come together is met with an excuse to move apart. Meanwhile, there are powerful forces alive today bent on suppressing individual freedoms. And yet we live in a time when personal freedoms to choose where to live and where work are reignited. But those freedoms are not afforded to all which is an unjust outcome of an unjust history. And so the struggle continues.

It’s sometimes hard to remain optimistic as the sand dunes of our institutions are shaped by the unpredictable storms of change. But hidden in the complexities of distribution curves, growing populations, and the shifting sands of urbanity are predictable patterns that offer us clues – kernels of clarity and certainty; pathways to pursue, and lessons to learn. It’s the certainty we need if we want to uphold our freedoms.

When Polanyi wrote about the great transformation occurring in 1944 it was during a dark time. He started the book during the depression in the 1930s and had lived through political and economic upheaval in England. A world war preceded his writing, and the book was published during a second. He recognized the complexity of society and spoke of the freedoms that come with it.

In the final chapter titled, Freedom in a Complex Society, he writes,

“Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.”

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Hello Interactors,

I ended up walking almost six miles in two days last week that included two trips by bus and light rail. I’m always surprised by the rich experience that comes with choosing to walk, bike, or bus. But it’s not always pleasant. A car is comfortable, quiet, and convenient but can be experientially anemic. I’m fortunate to have these choices. Not everyone does. And what choice they do have can be unfair and even dangerous. Is that the American way?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

DO THESE ROADS MAKE ME LOOK FAT?

She slammed on the brakes and my bag slid to the floor. My knees slammed against the seat leaning inches from my kneecaps. Just as I grabbed my bag, she floored it. Careening around the curved onramp I felt the gravitational pull suck my head tight against the window as I struggled to right myself. As she merged with flowing traffic on the freeway I saw her glance in the rearview mirror. She wore dark, reflective wrap-around sunglasses and a grimace. Teeth clinched, she pressed the accelerator to the floor. She was on a mission. And I was along for the ride.

I generally cut bus drivers some slack. They don’t have it easy. These herky-jerky driving patterns are often due to the strict schedule they’re incented to keep. Frequency and ease of access to bus stops are two of the more effective ways to get people to use transit. For those who can’t afford a car, or are unable to drive, walking, biking, or bussing is the only real affordable alternative to getting around. There are some, like me, who own a car but sometimes choose to walk, bike, or bus. After all, America is the ‘land of the free’ where we freedom of choice.

But those choices are not equitable. American cities and our countryside were planned by men who favored a single mode of transportation: cars. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it quickly turned out to be good for some, bad for most, and worst for the environment and our health. Charlie Chaplan once said one of the ironies of life is doing the wrong thing at the right moment. America’s transportation history is riddled with irony.

Cars and roads are not categorically bad. But too much of a good thing often is. Besides, not everyone can, should, or wants to own a car and yet the ‘Made in America’ landscape and economic structure dictates you must. If not, then you must suffer the inconveniences, inequalities, and risks that come with a lack of equitable choices. If you’ve ever visited or lived in a city or country with equitable, convenient, and comfortable transportation choices (I’m looking at you Switzerland) you can see the possibilities. It’s a choice. And America, the land of the free and home of the brave, is, ironically, afraid to choose freedom of choice when it comes to transportation.

Which exposes another irony of American transportation. Those who most covet and defend their independence from society and the government – and thus choose to isolate themselves away from dense urban areas and in private vehicles – are thus dependent on the whole of society and the government to finance, design, build, and maintain their roads and vehicles. Both of which rely on government subsidies that make such choices economical in the first place. And in a final twist of the irony knife, most of the natural resources, parts, materials, and manufacturing come from socialistic governments they despise. And they’re made by ethnicities many of them fear, but are also granted more transportation choices than they are.

America’s insistence on car ownership is in a sense, pardon the pun, autocratic. And given the amount of government subsidies flowing to the auto and fossil fuel industry, especially when they need bailing out, can make America look pretty socialistic. I just wish we could all get a return on those investments the government made to private companies using our public tax dollars.

The truth is, we are all dependent on forms of socialism (i.e. economy, military, utilities, transportation, and communication) and capitalism (i.e. free markets, freedom to enlist, freedom to go off-grid, freedom to choose transportation, and freedom to choose a mobile carrier). They can, and do, coexist to varying degrees. But restricting the ability to viably and equitably move within and between our communities to a single choice feels like an impingement on freedom. And yet the number one symbol of American freedom, prosperity, and democracy around the world is the automobile. Car symbolism may be one of the biggest determining factors for America’s addiction to the autocracy of automobility.

No sooner were the post World II freeways built were they filled with American made automobiles. Bucolic car-dependent suburbs filled with carbon consuming contraptions purchased by affluent consumers (mostly white men) swept up in a euphoric post-war economic boom. Hollywood was releasing movies depicting glamourized ideals of American suburban life. The car served as a literal and metaphorical vehicle for the virtues of freedom, independence, comfort, power, speed, and exhilaration. It propagated this myth: car ownership brings social superiority, security from the ills of society, and a path to the future. And yet reality told a different story. Just below the famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles where these movies were being made traffic jams were forming as early as 1950.

Just as these new car owners were about to buy their second vehicle some wondered if indeed the wrong decision was made at the right time. People were dying in violent car related deaths, roads were clogged during rush hour, and skies turned yellow with smog. So they made more wrong decisions at the right time by building even more roads. In 1955 the social and urban historian and critic Lewis Mumford wrote in the New Yorker,

“Most of the fancy cures that the experts have offered for New York's congestion are based on the innocent notion that the problem can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes, multiplying the number of ways of getting in and out of town, or providing more parking space for cars that should not have been lured into the city in the first place. Like the tailor's remedy for obesity—letting out the seams of the trousers and loosening the belt—this does nothing to curb the greedy appetites that have caused the fat to accumulate."

For decades the fat kept creeping and the belts keep loosening. The greedy appetites of car owners, urban planners, and civil engineers proved insatiable. Then came the 1973 oil crisis and inflation. Gas imports plummeted, prices climbed, and commuters sought alternatives. Carpooling became popular again after first being introduced during World War II as a gas rationing strategy. One poster from this era read, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” Imagine this government issued roadside billboard today: “When you ride alone, you ride with Putin.”

DROWNING IN A POOL OF DEPENDENCIES

But the 1970s saw both the reintroduction of carpooling and its peak utilization. Still, transportation experts knew it reduced the number of cars on the road and thus eased congestion. So they studied ways to incent people to keep doing it. In 1977 two civil engineers from Boston published a paper that analyzed various carpool incentives. Their paper continues to be referenced by researchers 45 years later…probably because not much has changed.

Their four main findings were:

Carpooling “incentives” will attract transit as well as drive-alone commuters. However, the potential area-wide increase of ride sharing is small; therefore decrease of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is small.

Auto “disincentives” are far more effective than carpooling “incentive” in increasing ride sharing and transit use. However, these policies are less acceptable to the public and therefore less likely to be implemented.

Therefore, a coordinated programme package of both “incentives” in increasing ride sharing and “disincentives” could effectively increase carpooling and reduce congestion, VMT and fuel consumption. In particular, significant parking incentives and disincentives appear to be the most effective way of increasing carpooling.

Carpooling strategies directed at work trips result in increased auto travel for non-work purposes because of increased auto availability during work hours for non-working members of a household. The increased non-work VMT offsets by approximately one third the reduction in work VMT.

They also introduced a transportation choice hierarchy describing the long, medium, and short range travel-related decisions. Long range decisions are major locational decisions like a change in a workplace, residential location, and the type of house chosen. Medium range include the decision to buy a car which is “highly interdependent” on the “usual mode of travel” to work (i.e. owning a car is highly correlated with your decision to use it every day). And short range decisions are “non-work travel decisions.” They note the “frequency, destination, and mode” for these trips should be considered alongside other transportation choices in the household. This is evidenced in the non-intuitive conclusion of number four above. Namely, congratulations on carpooling, now your stay-at-home spouse or partner will be driving more than you think - and possibly more than your commute.

We can see how the urban planning and design of the built environment can impact these decisions. Deciding where to live is a long range decision impacting transportation choice. Not everyone can afford a car or afford to live where cars are necessary for commuting. At the same time, people may work where a car is not needed, like next to their employer, but can’t afford to live there. Such is the case in Seattle right now. So they’re forced to live where they can afford to live, but not make enough money to own and operate a car. Not all of these places are well served by transit which limits their freedom of choice and unduly burdens them relative to other more affluent members of society. Therefore, car ownership, socioeconomics, and the built environment all play a role in the decision to use a car get around.

‘Socioeconomic status’ influences ‘where to live.’ Both ‘socioeconomic status’ and ‘where you live’ can each independently influence ‘car use.’ For example, someone may be able to afford to own a car but not the gas needed to use it. Somebody else may have enough money to own many cars, buy much fuel, and drive excessively. In addition, a person may live where a car is not needed and thus use it less. Or they may live far from work and use a car every day.

However, while ‘socioeconomic status’ influences ‘where to live’ and both of those factors independently influence ‘car use’ they also influence the decision to own a car in the first place. And this factor, ‘car ownership’, is emerging as a primary mediating factor in ‘car use.’ That is, even if someone can afford to live in a dense urban area full of places to walk to, including a job, just the fact of owning a car plays a nonsignificant role in the decision to use it or not. Consequently, while cities increasingly are making plans to densify and make their cities and towns more walkable and bikeable, if residents happen to be car owners these changes in ‘the built environment’ may not change their patterns of ‘car use.’ Especially if they’re affluent enough to not be greatly impacted by the cost of car ownership.

There’s another important mediating factor often overlooked in transportation research. It may also be the most influential, the most deep seeded, the hardest to pin down, and the hardest to change: the psychological attachment and addiction to cars.

The University College of London transportation professor, Peter Jones, offers graduated distinctions of car dependency among people and society. Starting from the top:

Car-reliant trip: Alternative forms of motorized transport are not available and the journey distance is too long for walking or cycling

Car-reliant activity or journey - Difficult to make the journey in a different way because of purchases (goods) and/or complex multidestination trips

Car-reliant lifestyle - Impossible to access a given destination by other transport mode than car

Car-reliant person - Unable to use other transport than car

Car-reliant society - High levels of car use among population, necessity of car to participate in essential social activities

Car-convenient society - Car is most convenient choice

Car-dependent person - Car is statement of status or linked to self-esteem or personal identity

Car-addicted person - A car “fanatic,” whose life revolves around cars

FEARS, FRIGHTS, FLIGHTS, FIGHTS, AND RIGHTS

Stefan Gössling of Lund University in Sweden take these one step further offering a distinction between “real” and “perceived” dependencies in his 2017 book called The Psychology of the Car. He says, “’real dependencies’ refer to basic life needs.” These include the need to “commute to work, to shop, to visit a doctor, see friends and family, to transport goods, to participate in social work, go to church, or to make leisure trips.” The car is treated like an appliance for utilitarian purposes. In contrast, “’perceived’ car dependency arises out of emotions involved with the car, or where alternative transport is considered ‘dysfunctional…’” For example, the anxiety that can come with determining the right bus, scheduled times, bus fare or getting on the wrong bus and getting lost. Some are fearful being around controlled environments patrolled by security. Others fear confrontations with people with mental health issues, drug and alcohol addictions, or being trapped in smelly, noisy and claustrophobic spaces.

Gössling reminds us there are many fears and phobias that can trigger fright-flight-fight responses which results in car use becoming an addiction in itself. In America, where guns are prevalent, homelessness is rampant, and drug addiction and alcoholism is on the rise there are many reasons to be afraid and anxious. Cars, like guns, can make people feel safe and protected, even though they are both the most dangerous weapons there are.

Gössling suggests fear or anxiety and safety or security aren’t the only psychological concerns wrapped up in transportation choice and car addiction. There is also identity and social status, trauma, and even obesity. He notes obese people are even more reliant on cars even though their condition would benefit from walking or biking. Even if it was to a bus stop…if there is one.

Automakers tap into these insecurities with advertising and car design. They know a bigger car can make people feel safer, elevate them above others and boost inferiorities. They reflect and signal power, size, and strength which are all recognized as symbols of superiority throughout society…and the entire animal kingdom. Attempts by the government to impede on any of these psychological crutches is therefore viewed as a threat to their identity. Smaller, slower cars are deemed inferior. Wimpy. Raising prices on gasoline, car tabs, or parking by authorities is a threat to their perceived superiority and control. Encouraging the use of public transit diminishes their social standing. Building dense housing near single family residences threatens their independence and increases the odds of awkward social encounters that may trigger fear and anxiety prompting grasps for safety and security.

And yet, we can’t keep loosing the belt because it is only making us fatter. Besides, most residents in most cities oppose street widening. We have a fixed amount of space for cars and trucks with an increasing number of urban residents. The only answer is fewer additional cars on our roads and less car use by current car owners. We also need those with unhealthy attachments and addictions to face their fears.

Policy makers and politicians know backlash comes from threats to these very real and complex socio-psychologies. Public interventions are threats to private habits, regimes, identities, and values. Many cities have progressive plans to tip the transportation and land use balance, but executing these plans can trigger very real deep-seeded fear that leads to fierce opposition. It’s easier to just loosing the belt than hit the gym.

But experts agree changes to the built environment are necessary if we’re going to save ourselves from increased congestion and pollution. We need to make all neighborhoods more walkable and shoppable. Everyone should insist on a grocery store within a 10 minute walk. To make these businesses work in our capitalistic reality, requires more customers. More customers can only happen when there is more dense housing – even if it’s duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes.

Exurban and rural residences should insist on some form of public transit even if it’s on-demand. For example Denmark offers, in coordination with AARP, a “coordinated demand responsive transportation system” that “keeps older Danes, especially those living in the rural areas, aging in place.”

But solutions don’t have to come from the government. Recently the New York Times featured a story about a carshare coop in New York called “The Drivers Cooperative”. They are “a driver-owned ridehailing cooperative” where “drivers make more on each trip, all profits go back to drivers, and drivers have democratic control over the decisions that affect their lives.”

If this reeks of socialism don’t tell one of the reddest and most rural and sparsely populated states in the country, North Dakota. They enjoy some of the fastest internet speeds in the country due to their high-speed broadband ‘community network’ that is a federal tax exempt cooperative. It’s also generally cheaper than the competition. It may be hard to imagine now, but farm cooperatives in America were once hotbeds of socialist ideals and ideas. That independent and pro-social spirit just may be rekindling in rural America. It could bring new meaning to the ‘red’ counties of America. Greetings comrades.

Changes to the built environment are necessary, but not sufficient. Socioeconomic inequities have to be rebalanced. The human right to move about this world should not be impeded by ability, race, religion, ethnicity, or social status. Safe, secure, accessible, comfortable, and efficient transportation must be made equal for all members of society.

But the psychology of car owners must not be overlooked. Car ownership is the key mediating factor in whether it is used and by how much. Policy makers can’t ignore the psychological needs, real and perceived, of car owners. Car addicts will resist change so long as they feel threatened by it. This requires communication strategies that don’t antagonize, diminish, or create cognitive dissonance among them.

Those cities successful in shifting norms and behavior of car owners combine multiple approaches. First and foremost they make infrastructure changes that improve conditions for cycling, walking, and transit. They also do what those Boston researchers and engineers suggested in 1977 to most effectively induce carpooling. They impose restrictions on car use.

But they are also mindful of the psychology of those attached and addicted to cars. They appeal to car owners by using values they can relate to like speed, efficiency, relaxation, and cost. When cycling, walking, and transit is improved and endorsed using these rational values social norms and habits indeed shift. As these changes demonstrate reductions in congestion their adoption and acceptance grows. Fewer cars on the road also means less noise, cleaner air and water, fewer deaths, and happier, healthier people which are things everyone wants.

As professor Jones in London says,

“We need to work out what society we want to live in, and build the connectivity that delivers that vision (think healthy, socially cohesive, compact, local).”

What I found last week walking with my friends around Seattle is a city built for cars. That was the society people wanted to live in back in the 1950s and 60s. But I also found the light rail was at capacity during off-peak times, cyclists were flowing down protected bike lanes, ride-share bikes and scooters were rolling, and we saw parts of the city unseen from a car. We walked and talked, giggled and wriggled, and trudged up some stairs. We hunted for haunts and restaurants as the rain moistened the air. And on the way home I glanced out the window from the “bus-only” lane. I peered into the cars stuck in traffic waiting for my “bus-only” light to change. What I saw saddened me. There they sat; single occupants in a single car, but not one single smile. They were surely comfortable in their safe and silent spaces, but what should we make of those sad and lonely faces?

And then suddenly I was thrown back in my seat. That bus driver had a schedule to keep.

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Hello Interactors,

There’s but a short window of time When the dirt is in its prime Not too cold or wet Or the seeds will not set Last week the fields were lakes This week the soil bakes Gone is the mud and grime So into the tractors they all climb

It’s time to get those seeds in the ground! If you have the space. The state of Iowa, where I grew up, has this as their slogan: ‘A Place to Grow’. But those places are being displaced by homes at a record pace.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GROW BABY GROW

We bought our first corn on the cob this week. It’s from California. Growing up in Iowa we didn’t see corn until late summer. To get corn stalks to be ‘knee high by the fourth of July’ meant getting the seeds in the ground by the end of May. That’s now. Iowa farmers have been stressed out these last couple weeks. The planting window was closing fast and the state was getting unseasonable rain and cold temperatures. Ten days ago one farmer in northeast Iowa said he could ride his boat across his fields.

Such is the life of a farmer. But the weather turned in their favor this week. They’ve been busy. On May 23rd the USDA reported 86% of Iowa’s corn crop had been planted and 47% of seeds planted earlier are already sprouting. But corn, soybeans, and oats are all behind schedule. Let’s hope the wacky weather patterns don’t wreak havoc on these weathered wonder-workers. I like my corn tortillas, tofu, and oat milk. Though, most Iowa grains and soybeans are fed to livestock, not people.

And we know people like their burgers and bacon. Increased commodity prices are the number one reason some farmers give for why farmland value in Iowa is through the roof. Last year a farmer in Eastern Iowa’s Johnson County made headlines when he sold 40 acres of two 80-acre tracts for $26,000 per acre. That’s over $2,000,000 for 40 acres (the equivalent of 20 soccer fields).

But that pricey southern most 40 acres is comprised of Klinger soil – a claylike sandy substrate formed by glacier tills. This soil is perfect for the native prairie grass but crops struggle. So this opportunistic farmer decided to plant a more profitable crop that has no agricultural value at all. Houses. He sold the worst soil for the most money to a developer who is expanding the sprawl of a nearby small town city called Swisher; population 914. It’s a 15 minute drive south of Iowa’s second largest city, Cedar Rapids.

The conversion of farmland into housing developments is a common sight across Iowa. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does an agricultural census every five years and the last one was done in 2017. The 2022 version is due later this year. From 2012 to 2017 Iowa lost 2,533 farms. That leaves 86,104 farms remaining. There were over 10,000 more farms in 1997 and nearly 20,000 more when I left Iowa in 1984. The amount of land dedicated to farming shrank by 59,000 acres.

Much of this reduction is from consolidation. The number of large farms (>2000 acres) grew 15% to 1,892 over five years. By comparison, there were barely 300 large farms in 1987. From 2012 to 2017 large farms had gobbled 10% of up mid-sized farms (500-999 acres). Small farms (fewer than 9 acres) grew 36% to 9,120. That’s a big jump in five years, but only 1000 more than 30 years ago.

These figures from the USDA tell the story of farmland consolidation across Iowa since the 1980s. But to get a picture of how farmland sold to developers contributes to the sprawl of urban areas, more and more researchers are turning to satellite imagery. In 2018 two researchers from Iowa State University were lead authors on a paper demonstrating novel image processing techniques for mapping the dynamics of urban growth. They took a series of satellite images from 1985 to 2015 of a region encompassing the Des Moines Metropolitan Area. They then trained software to differentiate between the natural and built environment by looking at the color of the pixels in the images. Pixels turning from looking ‘natural’ to looking ‘urban’ over time revealed a growing gray blob of concrete known as urban sprawl.

They found, with 90% accuracy, that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area urban boundary more than doubled between 1985 and 2015. Over those thirty years the area grew linearly from 58 square miles in 1985 to just over 135 square miles in 2015. Most of which, of course, was farmland. At this growth rate, it will continue to double again every 30 years.

Area growth like this is usually the result of an increasing population. The Des Moines Metropolitan Area is no exception. From 2010 to 2020, the population in this area grew 17% from 606,465 to 709,466. You might imagine the city of Des Moines being at the heart of this growth given it’s the center of the metropolitan area, but you’d be wrong. Of the top ten most populated cities in the area, Des Moines proper grew the least at 5.3% and has been relatively flat for decades. The fastest growing city from 2010 to 2020 was a town just north of Des Moines called Grimes. It grew a whopping 87%. Another town to the north, Ankeny, was second at 49% and my home town, Norwalk, just to the south, grew the third fastest at 43%.

These are some of the fastest growing cities in the country. Impressive. Until you consider the overall population of the state of Iowa only grew 4.8% compared to the U.S. population rate of 7.4%.

It's a curious fact that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area is growing in population at a rate far greater than the state is. This means Iowans are 1) moving to metropolitan areas from rural areas, 2) between cities within a metropolitan area, or 3) to another state all together. I reached out to a friend who recently moved from West Des Moines to Des Moines after they became empty nesters. He said they didn’t need as big a house and wanted to be closer to restaurants and entertainment. His wife added that they looked at surrounding suburbs but the house in Des Moines offered the best value.

I then contacted another friend who sells real estate in the area. She told me people are obsessed with new construction. Her clients repeat the same refrain, “I want a new kitchen with granite countertops, white cabinets, and a tile floor.” My friend has an eye for houses with good bones and an affinity for mid-century classics. She tries to sell their vision to her clients by fixing up these older homes, but there’s little interest. She said, “It’s like so much else in their life. Out with the old, in with the new. Why fix it when a new one will due?” So she spends a lot of time driving to the fringes showing new construction in cities like Grimes, Ankeny, and Norwalk.

THE RADICAL, THE DYNAMICAL, AND THE MEGLOMANIACAL

The hollowing out of city centers as people move to the fringes, the ‘donuting’ of metropolitan areas, is common. Especially in the Midwest. Detroit gets all the attention, but the rust belt is filled with them. It occurs in cities around the world.

In 1969, a professor from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Jay Wright Forrester, developed a theory and computer model for this phenomenon in a booked titled Urban Dynamics. If you’ve ever played the computer game SimCity then you have Forrester to thank. The game is built on his model. We have many things for which to thank Forrester. He helped to invent random access computer memory (RAM). He was also a pioneer in computer graphics before computers; he figured out how to get a ball to bounce on an oscilloscope screen. And the current reverberations of supply chain perturbations is called the Forrester Effect as described in his 1961 book called Industrial Dynamics. Forrester is thus the founder of the field of system dynamics – the study of nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time. And cities are indeed complex systems…mostly due to the complexities of human behavior.

Forrester’s book was groundbreaking but also controversial. To validate the theory with an actual city, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) – which was also five years old at the time – sponsored a two year study. Four cities were chosen as cites in 1971 and they were all within a 40 mile radius of MIT. The first experimental city was Lowell, Massachusetts.

Louis Alfeld was the Director of the program. In 1994 – on the 25th anniversary of the publishing of Urban Dynamics – he reflected on the execution of the experiments and the lack of progress since. The effect of human behavior on complex systems is apparent even in the administration of the study. HUD assigned the harshest critics of the theory to be on the committee which complicated things from the start. Alfeld recalls,

“Although we attempted to engage the committee in a constructive dialogue concerning the model’s utility, the members had neither the time nor the inclination to study system dynamics. Criticisms concerning data and validation techniques displaced issues of system structure and user needs. Neither side understood the other’s point of view.”

Because HUD committee members were trained in traditional economics and only trusted well-cited existing academic literature, they continually dismissed and rejected every premise of systems theory. It prompted Forrester himself to respond with these words,

“It is unfortunate that you have not found it possible to spend more time with us in order to better understand system dynamics and its application to the dynamic modeling of social systems. Many of the issues you raise seem to rest on assumptions that reflect practices in other kinds of modeling but which do not apply in the same way to system dynamics models. In fact, the strength of system dynamics arises from these differences.”

In contrast to HUD’s skepticism, Forrester and Alfeld found the leadership at Lowell to be more open to these theories. Their city was in decay after falling ungracefully from a century of manufacturing success. Their buildings were crumbling and the city faced a persistent 12% unemployment rate. They were eager to try something new.

One of the foundations of urban dynamics centers on available land as a resource. Defined as a nonlinear function, it says the rate of construction is constrained by the amount of land on which to build. New cities start out with abundant land, but being the first company to build comes with risk. Will employees follow? Will the resources be available to turn a profit? But one building can attract more buildings and if all goes well the competition for good land increases and growth, fueled by demand, explodes. This in turn inflates the price of attractive available land. Inflation then slows growth until all the land is consumed and new construction halts. Over time these buildings decay, businesses fold, and the city begins to decline economically and socially as people and customers leave. The only way a city constrained by space can maintain equilibrium in this closed system is to tear down old buildings and build anew on existing land. This was the fate Lowell faced.

The city government enacted policies that reflected the theory of urban dynamics. They created incentives to local companies to remodel existing buildings and expand business. They took steps to curb further deterioration of existing housing left vacant by affluent residents who fled. This in turn made more housing accessible to lower income residents who rushed the city like a flood. These policies resulted in strict codes that forced a refurbishing and reinvestment in the city.

After two years Lowell showed signs of improving. Alfeld and the city were encouraged to keep experimenting. But HUD had encouraged the city to set the parameters of the model to mimic metrics from Lowell’s previous historic economic boom the century prior. Falling short of these expectations in two years, the committee was not convinced Forrester’s theory of urban dynamics resulted in sufficient enough of an improvement to continue.

Hard quantitative evidence these traditional economists demanded was indeed lacking, in part due to HUD’s inability to operate a mainframe. But in the end the committee seemed more interested in the numbers than in the positive qualitative effects evident in the city and its residents. As Alfeld grimly summarizes,

“The interface gap between model and critic contributed to the communication gap. In the final accounting, neither our success in Lowell nor our outpouring of reports and papers could bridge that gap. HUD judged that we had nothing to offer and urban dynamics dropped out of academic sight, its potential contribution to resolving America’s urban crisis ignored for the past quarter-century.”

THE AGING ARIAN AGRARIAN

The Des Moines Metropolitan Area is not space constrained like Lowell, Massachusetts. And while the city of Des Moines has reinvigorated the downtown area, the seemingly unlimited surrounding land availability and patterns of sprawl reveal no intention to contain the sprawl, protect farmland (or natural grassland) and reinvest in what is already built. This will likely lead to each inner concentric ring of the donut hole to age and decline just as the city of Des Moines did. This will create a larger donut hole in the center as the outer perimeter of the donut continues to encroach on more and more prime farmland. Land that is owned by dying farmers.

One Iowa State University study revealed that “in 2017, over half the farmland (60 percent) in Iowa was owned by people over the age of 65. This was five percentage points higher than in 2007, and twice the level in 1982. In addition, farmland owners who were 75 years or older owned a record 35 percent of all acres in Iowa as of July 2017.”

A 2021 study showed that “Iowa farmland owners are older than the general population. On average, the full-time and part-time farmers in [the] study were 62 years old. The retired farmers were, on average, 77.7 years old, and the non-farmer owners were 68.7 years old.” Non-farmers can include surviving spouses who don’t farm or off-farm heirs to the land. Also, “Of the farmland [] analyzed, 29.5% was owned by full-time farmers, 12.9% by parttime farmers, 22.7% by retired farmers, and 34.9% by non-farming owners.” With 60% of farmland owned by soon-to-be retirees and a sizable portion of 35% owned by heirs who’d rather have the money than to farm, what does this say about the future of farming in Iowa?

Iowa, and the country, has a farming succession problem. One study suggests that lack of knowledge transfer and co-creation of crop yields will be one of the biggest challenges facing the foodscape of the Midwest. But when it comes to succession strategies, the Iowa farmers in this study,

“were on average motivated strongly by social factors—e.g., desires to maintain agrarian cultures, rural communities, and family farms. (It is worth mentioning that these sentiments could be colored by the fact that these were also established growers—e.g., those privileged by policies like the Farm Bill—who were well capitalized and could afford to focus on non-economic factors.)”

That’s not to say these farmers haven’t suffered economic hardship. And the economics of farming are complicated and messy. But this researcher found new farmers to more interested in the sustainability of the land and in farming than those who inherited a farm. Those farmers are now looking to retire and their children typically aren’t interested in farming. The author continues,

“Intergenerational knowledge transfer, from one generation to the next (though not necessarily within the same family), is a critical element in the creation of foodscapes populated with farms of all scales and commodity profiles and by farmers from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, including farm/nonfarm backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and religions.”

This requires building communities that welcome this kind of diversity, which most do not. People from Myanmar is one of Des Moines fastest growing minority groups, but an ethnic minority advocacy group says,

“It's very challenging. I talk to my friends on the coasts. People (without family here) don't want to move to Iowa…In Iowa, we don't have investments and resources for immigrants, for refugee-led, community-based groups."

There are groups trying to help. For example, The Practical Farmers of Iowa have been working since 1985 to “equip farmers to build resilient farms and communities.” Also, there’s the Women Food and Agriculture Network whose “mission is to engage women in building an ecological and just food and agricultural system through individual and community power.” Many of those fast growing small farms in Iowa fit the profile of these groups. It’s an encouraging sign for the health and diversity of small scale farming in Iowa.

But there are only 600 minority farmers in Iowa. What are the odds these aging white male farmers of selling their property to a Myanmar farmer or an ambitious woman graduate from the Iowa State College of Agriculture? How likely is an aging retiree willing teach a black family from the south with farming experience how to grow soybeans in Iowa? If a farmer isn’t willing to co-create or sell their farm to a first generation farmer who isn’t a Christian white heterosexual male who’s interested in perpetuating the ‘old-boys club’, then they’ll likely just sell it to another aging white male farmer like them. This will further consolidate Iowa farmland that will likely end up in a trust fund for their heirs. Many of whom will wait for the expanding urban gray blobs to reach their land and then they’ll likely cash in on a $2,000,000 offer from a real estate developer.

And with 81% of Iowa being white, with an estimated 90% of them living in the suburban fringes away from what little diversity there is in Des Moines, you can bet the person buying that newly built white home with granite countertops will be as white as their kitchen cabinets. At the same time, it’s great these families found a good home. I grew up on fertile Iowa soil as part of Norwalk’s first round of sprawl and it benefitted me.

Either way at least the seeds got in the ground on time. They can eat that yummy corn on the cob this summer with their hamburger made from Iowa beef. It will all take place on a grassy lawn that once grew the corn they’ll be eating…or the corn that fed the cow in their burger. Come to think of it, maybe their corn will come from California too…and the hamburger.

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Hello Interactors,

Most people think roads were planned, designed, and built for cars, but that’s not true. They’re public spaces intended to bring social and economic benefit by increasing mobility. Economically they’re successful, but socially they not only are failing us…they’re killing us.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WALKING AND BIKING TO DEATH

Today is “Bike Everywhere Day” in the Seattle area. Once known as “Bike to Work Day”, it would typically inspire an estimated 20,000 people to grease the chain, pump up the tires, strap on the helmet, and tepidly merge into the smooth, rolling polluted river of concrete nestling up alongside menacing machines of masculinity hastily rushing to work. Commuting patterns have been disrupted by Covid the last couple years. But with the League of American Bicyclists declaring May as “Bike Everywhere Month” commuting to and from work isn’t the only reason to slide onto the saddle. If you dare to do so.

According to the CDC, “bicycle trips make up only 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicyclists account for over 2% of people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle on our nation’s roads.” It’s important to note the CDC use the human-centered word ‘bicyclist’ to describe the victim but an object-oriented word ‘motor vehicle’ to describe the killer. It’s not the motor vehicle’s fault these people died, it’s the fault of motorists. As gun enthusiasts like to remind us, ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ The same is true for cars and both machines can be violent killers. The CDC report “Nearly 1,000 bicyclists dying and over 130,000 injured in crashes that occur on roads in the United States every year.” But that’s only those reported. Most cyclists, especially in disadvantaged communities, don’t bother reporting crashes. And not all police nor hospitals report or rate car-related bike and pedestrian injuries consistently…if at all. And different sources report different numbers.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports “425,910 emergency department-treated injuries associated with bicycles and bicycle accessories in 2020.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations reports “932 bicyclists were killed in motor-vehicle traffic crashes in 2020, an 8.9% increase from 856 in 2019.” The U.S. Department of Transportation announced this week that 43,000 people died on roadways in 2021 – the highest since tracking began in 1975.

That’s a 10% percent increase over 2020. Pedestrian fatalities were up 13% and bicycle fatalities were up 5%. They note that during Covid speeding offenses climbed causing a 17% increase in speed-related fatalities between 2019 and 2020 and a 5% increase prior to 2019. It’s unclear how speed factors in the increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths during this time, but there is no denying that speed kills.

The Transport Research Laboratory out of the UK compared multiple datasets of ‘pedestrians killed’ by the ‘front of a car’ (again comparing people to an object) to better understand the relationship between speed and risk of fatal injury to pedestrians. They concluded

“The risk increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, risk increases rapidly – the increase is between 3.5 and 5.5 times from 30 mph to 40 mph.”

This applies to cyclists as well. Choosing to bike on roads in America comes with a risk of dying that is nearly five times greater than choosing to drive a car. And the odds of dying in a car accident are already relatively high – 1 in 101 – the eighth largest risk just behind suicide and opioids in 2020.

The ugly truth is the ongoing and rising deaths and injuries to cyclists and pedestrians at the hands of motorists is a seemingly necessary cost to uphold the freedom, comfort, and convenience of automobility that many enjoy. Our political and public administrative services care about saving lives, but evidently not if it means changing road designs, land-use policies, travel patterns, restricting access to some roads, or – heaven forbid – creating viable ways to ditch the car should you choose.

But this country did once care about saving lives on the road. As the post-WWII boom in cars and roads continued to balloon so did car-related deaths. Federal, state, and local governments rallied to make cars and roads safe for motorists. The same is true for new bikes purchased for baby boomers. When kids were getting injured and killed on their bikes in the 60s and 70s due to poor design and construction, consumer protection agencies cracked down on manufacturers and the federal government almost made it illegal to bike on the street.

It was a bike enthusiast out of Davis, California, John Forester, who fought for a cyclist’s right to use public roads. But as a confident cyclist, and self-proclaimed engineering expert, who prided himself on his ability to ride in traffic, he advocated for ‘vehicular cycling’ which meant treating a cyclist more like a motorist than a pedestrian. He even claimed protected or separated bike lanes were more dangerous than riding with traffic. He was making that claim up until he died in 2020.

But he mostly was a bike snob who didn’t want to be burdened with having to share space with kids and slower everyday cyclists on a bike path, so he made it his lifelong ambition to tank efforts to build safer bike infrastructure. Though, it was elite bicycle enthusiasts like him we have to thank for the existence of paved American roads in the first place.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

“Every person has an equal right to travel on the highways, either on foot or with his own conveyance, team, or vehicle. This right is older than our constitutions and statutes … The supreme rule of the road is, Thou shalt use it so as to interfere as little as possible with the equal right of every other person to use it at the same time …”

This was written in 1897 by a patent attorney named Charles Pratt. He was one of three men who started the League of American Wheelman (L.A.W) in 1880. Now called the League of American Bicyclists, they’re the leading sponsor of today’s “Bike Everywhere Day.” Pratt was joined by a bike importer, Frank Weston, and writer, adventurer, conservationist, Kirk Munroe. Together they grew the L.A.W. to become one of the most influential and powerful organizations of their time. They are also the originators of America’s paved roads.

In 1888 the L.A.W. members voted to fund the National Committee for Highway Improvement. Their first publication served as a textbook for road construction called, Making and Mending Good Roads & Nature and Use of Asphalt for Paving. Fifteen-thousand copies were printed and sent to state legislators as well as county, city, and town officials. But they also solicited bike manufacturers and dealers, road construction and pavement companies, and equipment manufacturers. Asphalt and pavement companies eagerly offered their support and financial contributions to the effort.

One of the members of the L.A.W., Civil War Colonel and bicycle manufacturer (who later made electric cars), Albert Pope, was one of the most eager supporters of what became the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ In 1889 he offered an upfront contribution of $350 with an offer to fund whatever was necessary to build good roads writing: “Go ahead with the work…and we will pay the whole or any part of the expense you desire.”

If this sounds like a bunch of wealthy cycle enthusiasts coming together to design, fund, and build public roads across America, it is. Recall this is the same model used to build the rail system across the United States in the 1840s. Federal or state funding, or government sponsorship of any public transportation, was not on the minds of elite power brokers of the 19th century…or the 18th century for that matter. Road and highway design, construction, and maintenance was believed to be the job of local governments in partnership with private parties. One L.A.W. member from New York, A.J. Shriver, wrote in 1889 that federal funding of roads was “Socialistic” and thereby “unconstitutional.”

But these beliefs and attitudes were largely coming from wealthy urban elites. Bicycling, after all, was something the privileged class enjoyed as a kind of hobby. But in the rural countryside attitudes were different. Most farmers were responsible for maintaining the roads along their property and believed they ‘owned’ them. They were also leery of wealthy city-slickers offering opinions on how ‘their’ roads were to be designed, used, and by whom.

The L.A.W. drafted legislation in 1889 calling for a state tax to fund the highway commission for the creation of maps and plans for the construction of ‘good roads.’ The legislation was adopted by nine states, but failed to garner the necessary votes. Farmers were speaking out against this infringement on ‘their’ property. One Michigan farming coalition wrote, “The farmers must bear the expense while bicyclists and pleasure-riding citizens will reap the larger benefits.”

The defeats at the state level sent the L.A.W. back to the drawing board. They realized they needed a different approach. Their president wrote, “We must concentrate first on education, then agitation, and finally legislation.” They created a monthly publication that was an “Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Public Roads and Streets” that hit a peak circulation of 75,000 copies by 1895.

In 1898 the L.A.W. then published a 41-page book titled, Must the Farmer Pay for Good Roads?. They mailed 300,000 copies to farmers and members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It worked. The book’s author, Otto Dorner, later wrote in The Forum magazine that,

“… the farmers of the United States are beginning to thoroughly appreciate the need [for] better highways; and the work of the League of American Wheelmen in the direction of State aid is receiving much support from the more progressive among them … The Farmers’ National Congress … [commended] the efforts of the League of American Wheelmen to bring about the general introduction of the State Aid system.”

The Model T was just around the corner, but it was the bicycle and bicyclists that made that corner. In 1902 these words appeared in a magazine called The Automobile:

“The effect of the bicycle on road improvement has been … phenomenal in the past 10 and 15 years …” …Directly and indirectly the bicycle has been the means of interesting capital in road building to the extent of millions of dollars, and of spreading abroad more accurate and scientific data concerning road construction than was ever before done in so short a time. The bicycle practically paved the way for automobiling.”

IT'S ONLY FAIR

Cyclists today get little gratitude for the early lobbying efforts to build smooth, safe roads. But it should also be noted that these early wealthy and influential cycling enthusiasts quickly became motoring enthusiasts. Henry Ford tends to get all the credit for automobile manufacturing, but it was the early bicycle manufacturers who converted bike factories to car factories. Henry Martyn Leland, before he created Cadillac and Lincoln, was making bike transmission parts for Colonel Pope’s bike company. A car, after all, is just a glorified motorized quad-cycle.

Men like these are often portrayed as the protagonist in the power and glory of the early story of bikes, but women rode too. And it wasn’t just high-society women biking either. In 1872, Louise Armaindo, set the American long-distance record, covering more than 600 miles in 72 hours. In 1890, Kittie Knox became the first African American woman to become a member of the League of American Wheelman. She didn’t stop there. She became a successful bike racer and became the first woman to be seen racing in ‘bloomers’ instead of a skirt. Sadly, she still faced fierce discrimination. And while the bicycle plays a huge role in the liberation of women, and a symbol of the suffrage movement, women are still fighting for recognition, acceptance, and necessary leadership opportunities in a the current burgeoning cycling movement. They are also unrepresented in determining the design and use of our roads.

Not much has changed since the 19th century. The design of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, and the transportation infrastructure they require, is still very much dominated by Western, mostly white, men. Just as those early bicycle and pavement businessmen came together around the L.A.W. to “organise capital accumulation, advanc[e] elite entrepreneurial agendas, and consolidat[e] urban regimes”, so too are today’s, mostly white male, CEOs of automobile, oil and gas, chemical, concrete and asphalt, and road construction companies.

And they’re all in collusion with legions of civil engineers, elected officials, and administrative workers at the federal, state, and local level to provide a transportation system that perpetuates our insatiable need to make more money to buy more things; this requires more roads to move more people and more things by car or truck; which in turn creates more waste, more pollution, and more traffic-related deaths.

This approach to planning public land has led to uneven urban and suburban development, perpetuated ethnic and race privilege, and is rooted in attitudes and beliefs stemming from a culture of patriarchy. As a group of transportation researchers out of Belgium observe,

“…how across strikingly diverse cities, urban regimes hide and legitimize these logics by applying the discourse of sustainability, framing infrastructural investment as a largely technical and rational response to the problems of congestion or low quality of public space. Instead, approached critically, transport is an essentially political issue of distributing social and spatial benefits and costs of urban development.”

That’s from their February 2022 paper, Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport. They call for a critical assessment of the study of transportation, adding that such a “perspective departs from analysing and juxtaposing specific transport modes (e.g. airplanes and private cars against public transport) and related lifestyles (e.g. mass tourism, suburban life and work against cycling and walking), and instead demonstrates their role in sustaining socio-economic structures that enable the capitalist mode of producing urban space and society. Therefore, in sum, being critical about transport means analysing it as a key component of capitalism.”

They go on to prove their point by querying existing transportation research for terms like “capitalism” or “capitalist”, “neoliberalism”, “feminism”, and “race” and find there are few results. The words “equity” or “equality”, and “gender” return just 2% of existing publications found in the hundreds of thousands of leading academic transportation and mobility journals. In the larger corpus of over six million Social Science publications the percentage of reports with those three words doubles to 4%.

They also point out “unravelling and analysing power and ideology underpinned and reproduced by transport in urban settings is by no means an exercise that hinges on a particular theoretical lens (Marxist, anarchist, feminist etc.) or focuses on a specific social group or factor (class, gender, ethnicity and race, age). But they nonetheless remind us that any critique of a system that has led to a climate-crisis and obscene income disparities has to be grounded in some social theory “because investigated facts are the result of human actions displayed within a given society.”

Only with this analytical lens, they write, will we be able to “rais[e] the fundamental question of whether the role of public transport is to provide a public service to its passengers, or rather to generate profits for its shareholders.” We should also raise the question of whether we want to continue to use public land in the form of streets to be a place where too many people fear they will die or become injured. Is that a necessary price for our social system?

Richard Van Deusen, an interdisciplinary researcher of the interaction of people and place writes: “Public space must be understood as a gauge of the regimes of justice extant at any particular moment.”

Is the comfort, convenience, and luxury of car-oriented travel patterns worth interrupting in the interest of improving the lives we live, the air we breath, and the water we drink? And for all those who are forced to live where a car is needed to earn a living wage, or those with impairments, where are the plans for fair, equitable, and just transportation and/or housing alternatives?

When the freedom to choose comes with nothing to lose, the costs of social and spatial benefits diffuse. Escape the snare, get out in the air, let’s make our roads more fair. Equitable places in our public spaces means biking and walking everywhere. That may sound utopian, but as Geographer Don Mitchell once wrote,

“Utopia is impossible, but the ongoing struggle toward it is not.”

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Hello Interactors,

Cities are sprawling, the climate crisis is appalling, left and right are brawling, and politicians are stalling — leaving many in a corner bawling. It’s enough to lead some star-gazing billionaires to want to colonize space. But we planned for this with cunningly precise maps. Have we always been this dim? The evidence suggests yes and no, opinions vary on why, but scaling laws offer clues on calculating a plan.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET ME OUT OF HERE

I am not a happy camper. I’m only really a happy camper when I’m far away from other campers – whether they are happy or not. It’s been awhile since I’ve camped, but I prefer solitude when seeking solitude. But as regional populations grow and more people are also seeking solitude, it’s harder and harder to ‘get away from it all.’

Car-camping definitely doesn’t do it for me. Especially now that most everyone has a phone blasting music through a Bluetooth speaker. I’ve seen some campers with solar panels, a satellite dish, and a TV blasting the news or sports. As night falls, and the alcohol comes out, I imagine I’d be laying there wondering where the nearest hotel is. And as the sun rises the kids start crying, hangry parents begin yelling, and cars fire up as people start heading out…presumably to get some rest.

I admit it’s more fun when you’re with a bigger crowd of family or friends. The revelry is more tolerable when it’s coming from within your circle. Sure that one uncle may be a bit obscene, but he’s family. These kids running around may seem obnoxious, but weren’t we all? I can imagine indignantly brushing off our loudness with, “at least we’re laughing.”

I remember as a kid growing up in Iowa camping with a friend and his family in their spacious camper-trailer. They had been doing it years and had made friends with other camper-trailer families. They’d roam together from campsite to campsite over the camping season. On the first night, around dinner time, I remember being handed a wooden spoon and sauce pan. My friend’s dad looked at me holding a skillet in one hand and a hefty metal BBQ spatula in the other, and said, “Just follow me.”

He stepped out of the trailer and started banging the spatula against the skillet. I followed along with the rest of the family playfully pounding my pot. It was then I realized we were being subsumed by a cacophonous cavalcade of culinary clanging campers. As we descended upon the campsite of an unsuspecting family, I realized I was participating in some kind of tribal ritual. It turned out this was their first night camping in their shiny new trailer; another member of the tribe, initiated. After everyone retreated back to their campers for a proper use of utensils, we regathered again; but this time around a common fire. We shared and prepared ingredients for another North American tribal ritual – S’mores.

The desire to come together around a campfire in the great outdoors is as old as Homo sapians. The welcoming ritual I participated in signaled cooperation; it acknowledged a trust between people who were not blood related. It’s an interaction of people and place that consecrates a common bond that is strong enough to incent people to repeat this ritual of cohabitating, and sometimes confabulating, around a fire.

These people share common ideals, backgrounds, desires, and sometimes even food. But for our prehistoric hunter-gather ancestors, the gathering and sharing of food was the top priority. The concentration of other families and tribes in a common space evolved to be a worthwhile endeavor. Close proximity with cooperative individuals resulted in sharing knowledge. Locals could offer advice on growing or gathering edibles and how best to hunt animals. (or assemble S’mores)

Labor could be divided, exchanges could be made, and rich – though often simple and informal – socio-economic systems could flourish amidst the interaction of people and place. Soon bonds are formed, breeding between families occurs, and the circle grows. Evolution rewarded this agglomeration of people and commiserate growth of a concentric area of shared space. It formed the basis of permanent human settlements, so long as balances were struck.

Over-crowded campsites, like contemporary cities, can be annoying. People are loud, some are rude, violent or selfish, and others steal – and anyone can spread illness and disease. Conflict is inevitable. Eventually, individuals and small groups decide to break away from it all. They set out to make temporary camps far away from concentrated populations of people. They may roam and hunt and gather for themselves making temporary settlements along the way. Sometimes they’d form their own settlements, while other times remain mobile. Evidence of this exists around the globe and across the history of humankind.

For centuries researchers have been uncovering evidence that leads to these theories. They’ve uncovered community plans, maps, and descriptions of place. Archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have written countless descriptions and interpretations of found artifacts, ecologies, and environments from research sites around the world. Over the years these fields have agreed on what they call a ‘settlement scaling theory’ – a systematic study of the conditions leading to the population dynamics of human settlement. Research demonstrates that there are traits and conditions universally common to all of humanity, but that there are also cases of particularities and uniqueness as well.

SCALE IN PLACE OR SCALE YOUR SPACE?

Recently an interdisciplinary group of archeologists and urban scientists decided to contribute quantitative evidence to these theories of settlement scaling. So they compile a database of over 1000 different ethnographic studies conducted and published over centuries from around the world. In February of 2022, they published a paper called Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality that proposes a mathematical model that can be used to measure human population dynamics of settlement.

They derived and observed three mathematical scaling relationships looking at both settled and mobile hunter-gatherer societies.

Super-linear Growth: As concentrated populations increase it induces a greater than proportional increase in the area of the settlement. Imagine a campsite growing in population and needing to expand to make room for others.

Linear Growth: When populations remain equal (or nearly equal) the area remains equal. For example, the number of campers and the size of the site remains constant.

Sublinear Growth: Despite a population growing, the area remains the same or shrinks.

The first two are easy to imagine, but the last one less so. If we speculate these laws could be loosely applied to our current cities, it’s easy to point to examples where the footprint of a city grows or stays the same as the population grows or stays the same. But populations growing within an existing footprint is rare. I suppose one great example is Hong Kong. They built high into the sky to house a growing population and dug deep into ground to transport them with multiple levels of trains – all while keeping the perimeter of the city proportionally relatively constant.

A more ancient example offered by the researchers was found right here in the Pacific Northwest. The Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Tlingit people along the Northwest coast all built permanent or semi-permanent settlements with growing populations despite the area of their settlements growing accordingly. They write,

“Mollusk collecting, harvesting of salmon and acorn stocks, organized communal hunting of sea mammals or terrestrial large game, gathering of nuts and berries, developed storage technologies, and a variety of sociopolitical and ritual institutions enabled societies on the Pacific Coast of North America to support semipermanent or permanent settlements that were inhabited for multiple years. The sublinear relationship between population and area observed in these settlements suggests that in larger settlements houses were spaced more closely together, contained more people per house, or both.”

This should be a rallying cry to density advocates everywhere!

These researchers claim to have included plan maps of settlements as part of their data collection, though I’m not certain how they were interpreted or coded. Sadly, most prehistoric maps are lost. Countless maps have been made by humans throughout history sketched in the dirt with a stick, marked on bark with charcoal, or inked onto animal skin. Often times maps were intended to be ephemeral or kept secret. While there are archeologists who confidently claim the rationale and meaning behind these prehistoric plan maps, some cartography historians claim they often lack the necessary surrounding evidence to be convincing.

One of the oldest examples is of what archeologists have interpreted to be of a settlement along a river that are etched in the tusk of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age 25,000 years ago. Found in 1966 in Ukraine, the ‘map’ features four shapes that are thought to represent dwellings along the Ros River. But cartography historian Dr. Catherine Delano-Smith finds it difficult “to see a close resemblance between the features scratched onto the bone and the excavated mammoth bone dwellings whichever way the drawing is oriented.” In other words, it’s unclear whether this is really a map.

A better candidate for a true surviving prehistoric map are the plan view maps from the Stone Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, in the petroglyphs of Mont Bégo in the Maritime Alps of Southern France. According to Delano-Smith these maps satisfy six or seven of the ten criteria needed to be considered a plan map by cartography historians: “Two (at least) hut signs; five enclosures (or four enclosures, one with a path across it); and three land-use signs (two forms of stippling and unstippled areas).”

But another Neolithic map found on two walls in Turkey helps boost evidence of prehistoric plan maps. Delano-Smith notes that,

“It would be difficult to see in this rectangular pattern anything of cartographic relevance were it not for the extraordinary resemblance of the rectangles in the wall painting to those drawn by the archaeologists as part of their excavation plan.”

While Delano-Smith believes there is “no neat evolution from one type [of map] to another, either from prehistoric to historical contexts or even within the historical period,” she believes there are shared concepts and purpose of maps. This is as true for prehistorical maps as it is for, as an example, the historical medieval maps of Europe. And while there are few surviving maps from that period as well, we know more about the history that surrounds them.

Of the few maps of medieval cities that remain, they all share something in common with maps that had been made for millennia prior – they feature orthogonal grids. Even the Stone Age plan map found in Turkey conforms to a loose grid. Well before surveying was invented, it appears gridded plan maps were convenient ways to virtually slice and dice land. Mapmakers, and their patrons, need not even visit the site to determine how it was to be used. One such Medieval example is a 1306 plan map of the town of Talamone in Tuscany on the west coast of central Italy.

ESCAPE OR ENGAGE?

As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, 15th century city plan maps proliferated alongside burgeoning European cities. They, and other historical artifacts, offer cultural clues that suggest elements of settlement behavior consistent throughout human history. For example, in 1551 a new residential development called The Strada Nuova was requested to be planned by a clan of nobility in Genoa, Italy. They wanted a neat little enclave tucked into a hillside where they wanted to move “in the proximity of relatives and dependents to a residential area based on class rather than blood.”

Like suburban residential developments of today, these lots were drawn with generous amounts of room and were neatly arranged. These plots were designed by Bernardino Cantone, a city administrator who not only assessed the value of property but arranged them next to the streets he was also planning. You have to wonder if these wealthy elite suburbanites were wanting ‘to just get away from it all’ and escape with their friends from the riff-raff in the city center.

It could be they were also seeking protection. Forty-four years after The Strada Nuova was first designed, nobleman Pietro Battista Cattaneo came along and modernized and fortified development. Cattaneo brought a new approach to urban planning that was rooted in survey technology. His plans included specific dimensions and were oriented like a proper map complete with a compass rose. His transformation plan for the Strada Nuova Development is considered the oldest surviving example of a full city plan.

The complex and detailed city plans of the Renaissance are a graphical record of a built environment that a) affords privacy to concentrated settlements of unrelated people and b) regulates interactions between people and place. These two factors in the emergence of permanent settlement suggest to those urban scientists in search of scaling patterns a watershed moment “in human development that made possible the open-ended accumulation of social products, in the form of stocks of knowledge and goods.”

They “conclude that longer-term camps and eventually permanent settlements require both energetically and socially favorable conditions, which can be realized in different ways in different physical environments and through cultural/social conventions/structures. Failure to realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously will lead to periods of alternating group fission and fusion.”

They also emphasize their mathematical models are just that – models. They warn against a polarizing of interpretations of human behavior that is hard to describe and explain mathematically. Nonetheless, their research, like the traditional research they drew from, “steers a course between claims of universality for common human social and cultural traits and claims of particularism and uniqueness for individual cases.”

I do wonder how these scaling laws relate to the fact European cities today continue to sprawl despite their populations declining. Have they failed to ‘realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously?’ Are we seeing an alternating from the ‘fusion’ of populations in these cities starting with the Renaissance to a recent ‘fission’ of settlements that are leap-frogging from the ill effects of the so-called Anthropocene? Or are elites just seeking another Strada Nuova?

And surely there’s something to be learned from those coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest who managed to grow and prosper as a population and as a culture without increasing their footprint. Perhaps more investigations into urban sublinear scaling are what is needed for us to draw new plan maps of our cities to achieve sustainable living. If we don’t do something, none of us will be happy campers. We’re already becoming loud, rude, and annoying. And that’s before the alcohol. The plan maps of the 50s and 60s, their dependency on cars, the insistence of developing countries to emulate them, and a collective human desire to increase consumption and comfort in settlements worldwide has led to humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of our only campsite – planet earth.

There are some who want to escape and colonize Mars, but I’m sticking with the evidence and opinion of these researchers when they conclude that the societal costs of agglomeration, “must be overcome through social or technological innovations.” Those innovations include “property rights, food production, group rituals, political institutions, substantial shelters, and more.” Only when these transformations occur will the “open-ended densification [of] permanent settlements [] emerge.” Only then will we be happy campers.

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Hello Interactors,

Do you ever walk through a neighborhood and wonder where all the people are? It happened to me last weekend. What’s worse, it was a 1960s planned development that reminded me of the suburb where I grew up. I don’t remember the streets being this quiet, but maybe these planned communities were meant to be this way. Or maybe we’ve changed. Or both.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A DASH TOWARD THE PAST

There it sat in the driveway, a brawny black pickup truck with an NRA sticker in the rear window and TRUMP plastered on the bumper. The protruding chrome tailpipe was gaping wide. Black exhaust dust clung to its edges. Three late-model cars were parked askew in the front lawn. Two doors down and across the street I saw a pride flag hanging next to a Black Lives Matters sign that read, “WHITE SILENCE IS WHITE VIOLENCE.”

I passed more houses and heard a barking dog approaching angrily. It ran alongside a taco truck parked in a driveway with the name of a Mexican restaurant painted on the side. Two other cars were in the driveway and one in the lawn behind a chain-link fence that restrain the dog. I had walked nearly an hour in this suburban neighborhood and had yet to see a single human being.

I was at my son’s track meet last Saturday in a town near Tacoma called Federal Way. I had some time to kill so I decided to take a walk. I picked a green patch on Google Maps that appeared to go down to the water and headed off to explore. The sidewalk from the High School ended 50 feet from the parking lot and I never saw another. The streets were quiet in this 1960’s neighborhood scattered with single story ranch-style homes intermixed with two-story split-level boxes.

Melancholy reflected off of these beige, white, and brown painted homes. They all featured a yard, a driveway, assorted overgrown shrubs and a tree or two. These homes are identical to the homes I would run in and out of as a kid in small town suburban Iowa. They were all built as part of the post-war building boom during America’s economic heyday when ordinary, mostly White, middle class folks could buy into the American Dream.

This housing development was built to accommodate a booming population drawn to jobs at the Tacoma Port, nearby Boeing factories, lumber yards, and paper mills. As the 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan states,

“…certain areas in King County, such as Federal Way, will have a population boom partially due to the employment opportunities that exist or are contemplated in the Tacoma area.”

Development was happening so fast that in 1958 the State of Washington purchased a 300-acre swath of land at nearby Dash Point for $185,000 to make it a state park. That’s $1.7 million in 2022 dollars and about what you’d pay for a single home near Dash Point today. Indigenous people lived on these shores before being displaced to a nearby reservation as part of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. The Puyallup people are still fighting for access to surrounding private land to fish; their lawful right as written in the treaty. Most, if not all, treaties fail to honor Indigenous notions of shared use of land and resources that fly in the face of more self-centered and guarded Western ideals and philosophies of individual property ownership and rights.

The state’s 1958 purchase of the Dash Point property was from a company aptly named the “Modern Home Builders.” That same year natural gas pipelines were laid and fire hydrants were getting installed every 600 feet. In 1959 a sewer plan was revised to keep up with the rapid development.

In 1960 a 600-acre “Residential Park” began showing their 650 homes to buyers – many of whom were likely war veterans who were enjoying cheap government subsidized mortgages. Churches were being erected, bowling alleys were being laid, and ‘American Concrete’ had their grand opening featuring “Free Washed Sand for the Kiddies.”

This Federal Way neighborhood I was walking in wasn’t the only one going through this transformation in the 1950s and 60s. It was happening across the country. I grew up in one and benefited from it. It was easy for me to imagine these homes as brand new. I could close my eyes and smell fresh white American concrete, I could see kids riding their bikes, new cars pulling into the driveways, and smoke rising from the backyard barbeques. Life was good.

By 1966, when most of this neighborhood I was walking through was built, the U.S. stock market had peaked. Nobody would have believed it then, but this marked the beginning of a long slow economic decline. The stagflation of the 1970s and the area’s shift toward software in the 1980s and 90s froze much of Federal Way in the past. Beginning in 1990 with the Washington Growth Management Act suburban sprawl was curbed, then much of Boeing left the area, mills closed, and Western Washington jobs shifted from blue collar to white.

Meanwhile, today the tech industry continues to push home values across the region upward while most incomes remain stagnant. The median price of a home in Federal Way is $580,000 and has grown 16% year over year for the last five years. The estimated yearly median income between 2013-2017 was around $62,000 and the per capita income was only $30,288. That’s well below the 2020 median household income in the United States of $67,521 which had dropped from $69,560 the year prior. Federal Way may be lagging economically, but it is extremely rich with diversity. The Federal Way School District reports over 111 different languages spoken in family homes. But not in the streets where I was walking. Not a peep.

This is a common sight in many suburban neighborhoods, and this one was no exception. Though, seeing one to five cars per household led me to believe these people must be home. I can imagine each of these homes filled with people glued to a screen. But should they ever leave, they’ll surely get in a car given the walkability score of 22 out of 100. Besides, there aren’t many places of interest within walking distance. Unless, of course, you’re a walking fanatic like me.

CURVESOUS CARTESIAN CUL-DE-SACS

This area, like so many others, was designed to be anthropocentric – it puts the individual self at the center. Just as cars do. America is made for cars and driving a car conjures a belief that the ‘self’ is most important. This is my car and my road so get out of my way. Automobile advertising repeatedly reinforces the image of being alone in comfort in a climate controlled moving cocoon made of metal and plastic. It’s hard to deny, a good car is comfortable.

And most of them comfortably reside at these single family homes which are also designed to put the ‘self’ and the ‘single’ family first. The handful of Christian churches I walked by also stress the power of the individual. The Bible’s Book of Genesis verse 1:26 states:

“God” said “Man” has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Does that not sound kind of creepy?

Civil Engineers and Urban Planners were, and still are, the gods who hold dominion over city plans that often encourage cities to creepeth upon the earth. Federal Way itself crept out of sprawling Seattle and Tacoma. Planners made sure to plan for demand and single family homes on a large piece of land is what people demanded…and developers happily lent a hand. These demands have not receded. The 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan addressed ‘Residential Land Use’ with these words,

“Over the years and especially after World War II, the continued construction and upgrading of highway facilities has consistently improved accessibility to major employment centers. Since there has been ample suitable residential land available in relation to the demand, the effect of improved accessibility has resulted in residential development being located farther and farther out from major centers of employment. From the earliest times of the history of King county, a larger percentage of its residents have shown a preference to living in single family dwellings as opposed to multi-family structures. They could always afford this preference.”

They noted that in 1960 Seattle used 36 acres per 1000 persons, but by 1964 were planning to double that to 72 acres per 1,000 persons outside the ‘Urban Area’ of Seattle. They said,

“In the past, the grid iron pattern resulted in more acreage in streets than recent development.”

And since the 1950s and the expansion of freeways and highways there would be less need for the grid and compact development. They said,

“In the future, a large percentage of the streets and highway system acreages will consist of freeway type facilities rather than local streets.”

And to make sure developers, for whatever reason, didn’t attempt to build more dense housing on these sprawling acreages they included language that protected residents who may resist such attempts. They draw special attention to “URBAN CENTER DEVELOPMENT” (their emphasis), They wrote,

“residential densities should decrease at greater distances from an urban center…Some areas of the County should be kept at a lower density even though close to an urban center. These areas include locations where a pattern of large lot sizes is already established or is desired and where residents need the assurance that the character of their neighborhood will be stabilized.” (my emphasis)

There is a discernable distaste for uniform Cartesian grids in the language of this plan. Part of the modernist post-war vision was to move away from compact urban development of the 19th century that favored neighborhood stores, modest property allocations, and use of public transit. Multi-family structures had connotations of poor, often ethnically diverse, residents which by today’s standards are read as thinly veiled racist and classist biases. The 1950s and 60s pushed for more rural and pastoral land use that attempted to blend a growing middle class into a natural landscape connected to a freeway.

They wrote,

“The grid form of layout, while easy to design on the drawing board, can result in inharmonious relationships with the site. It can, however, add clarity to an otherwise confusing street pattern, but should be used judiciously to avoid monotonous rows of houses.”

They instead called for more organic street and lot layout saying,

“Depending on topography or other natural features affecting street design…an infinite number of variations exist in the arrangement of lots and houses and can be used to take advantage of natural features of the landscape.”

The cul-de-sac is called out in the plan as one example to follow.

“A third general form may be called a court, cul-de-sac, or cluster, and features a grouping of buildings which have service orientation at the street but privacy to the rear.”

I grew up on on a cul-de-sac and can vouge for the design goals these planners set out to achieve. But we now know that these dead ends can lead to overly circuitous routes should people choose to walk, bike, or bus to their destinations. They were planning for the automobile as the only viable and desirable choice of transport.

“residential neighborhoods should be designed with long blocks in order to avoid excessive cross streets which are costly to construct and maintain…Pedestrian crosswalks should be required only where necessary such as through blocks over 900 feet in length or where access to a school, park, or shopping area is essential.”

While they did recommend providing a sidewalk on at least one side of the street, it read more as a suggestion than a requirement. Under a section titled, “Street Design Factors” they said this about sidewalks,

“Even though sidewalks may be used less for walking in residential than in business areas, their hard surfaces provide children’s play areas close to home.”

THE APPRAISAL OF THE SOCIO-SPATIAL

The words “close to home” say a lot about these city plans and the desires and demands of home owners and builders. These places were designed and engineered by professionals from ‘above’ using maps and diagrams. They remained detached from the people and places they were planning for. And the very ‘townscapes’ these people were designing were intended to detach the occupants of these spaces from the larger, messy, and complex society that surrounded them.

They made plans for homes with ‘privacy in the rear’ where children play ‘close to home’. Architects and builders designed structures that insured privacy – in the words of ‘High Modernist’ Le Corbusier – they were “machines for living.” These properties included ‘service orientation at the street’ that included a driveway leading to a garage where the other ‘machine for moving’ could be stored.

This methodically mapped, measured, and mechanized ‘mecca’ is the making of well meaning men dating back to Mercator. The 17th century father of Cartography used techniques of triangulation to turn the earth into a scientific measuring instrument. The centuries old Mercator projection, which distorts northern land masses to give priority to the Dutch sailing distances between them, is still the most popular and familiar projection used today.

Then came Newton who saw the entire universe as a kind of machine – “a container for objects and facts.” He married his Newtonian physics with Euclidean geometry. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also taught physical geography, argued “space and time were inner conditions of the human…ordered by logical categories.”

Starting in 1747, and over the course of 50 years, the Cassini family drew a highly precise map of France using geodesic triangulation – the first of its kind. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) expanded on these techniques to measure and delineate land across the United States. But theses topographical maps were also used for the erasure of certain natural elements and to eliminate certain people. After all, their primary purpose was, and still is, to wage war or defend against it. These maps also remain the basis for mapping, planning, and ordering urban areas in the United States to this day.

This Western anthropocentric, mechanistic, objectification of spaces, and the use of maps and drawings to represent them, is alluring and seemingly addictive. It’s also part of the reality of everyday urban life. Ali Madanipour, a Professor of Urban Design at Newcastle University, separates urban spaces into two dimensions: physical and social.

The ‘physical’ is what garners the most attention, probably because it’s most visible and easy to understand. The arranging and grouping of buildings is at the scale of an urban planner and politician, the form and function of buildings are the domain of architects and developers, and the patterns and construction of spaces in between these structures, like streets, alleys, highways, freeways, and parking lots, is the domain of the civil engineer.

These objects are arranged in space creating places where people interact with each other and the natural and built environment – the interaction of people and place. But these interrelationships extend to the people who build them and those who control how, when, and where they’re built. This complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected social dimension over space and time is hard to see, harder to visualize, and thus hardest for us all to understand.

Madanipour summarizes,

“A study of urban form therefore refers to the way physical entities, singly or in a group, are produced and used, their spatial arrangements, and the interrelationships, and also how monetary and symbolic values are attributed to them.”

The way men mapped and arranged the physical entities in that Federal Way neighborhood were produced for the monetary gain of developers, the city, county, and state. The symbolic values were codified in that 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan that encouraged interrelationships between individuals to be in the home, close to home, or in a car – all while guaranteeing the ‘character of their neighborhood’ would be stabilized.

It was all planned on a map that men loomed over like a god or a general staging a battle over territory. But they were also giving people what they wanted. Weyerhaeuser wanted trees for paper and profit, developers wanted stolen land in exchange for money, and people wanted what many believe is entitled to them: individual ownership of their land. After all, it’s written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

The GPS I used to navigate these quiet curvilinear roads, carved into the earth then cauterized with concrete, is rooted in the same Western history of cartography, science, and philosophy that assisted in building its physical urban form. But the space I was visiting was not designed to be used as I was using it. That is why, to some degree, I didn’t see a single person. This environment was not built to foster interactions between people and place, but for cars to move individuals through space.

This place was designed for these people to be ‘close to home’ and in the home. These residents were probably socializing and forming interrelationships, but in a virtual environment. There were being entertained on a screen in their hand, on a desk, or on a wall. The culmination of combined technologies as old as their homes.

And when they did finally decide to leave their home, they likely tapped their destination on their phone. They climbed into their ‘machine for moving’, and were instructed to drive to clusters of physical structures of their choosing. They then glided on surfaces of ‘in-between’ spaces across America’s concrete places. The American dream financed by a loan. Blessings of liberty, that has left them alone.

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Hello Interactors,

Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HIGH FASHION

I can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.

But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?

Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.

But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.

If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.

Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.

Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,

“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”

Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernismwhich is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.

The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.

Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,

“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”

That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our Housethat elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’

In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.

As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,

“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”

FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLING

It was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.

By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.

The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.

The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’

It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.

Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:

“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”

The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.

The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’

There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that

“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”

Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”

I HAVE A CITY IN MIND

Sprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”

As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”

These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:

Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.

Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.

Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.

A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.

The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:

“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”

Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’

But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.

The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,

“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”

But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,

“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”

He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,

“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”

As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.

His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill.

If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.

As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:

“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks…

…In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.”

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Hello Interactors,

Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAPPED OUT

Spring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades.

The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess Ēostre who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them.

People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion.

And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds.

Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called redistricting. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from FiveThirtyEight.

It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies.

The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that,

“Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.”

WIGGLE ROOM

There are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent.

The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines.

Compactness is another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at Texas!

Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated their guidelines and criteria stating:

“There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.”

Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’.

But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine?

It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day.

While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted.

Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap.

Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation?

For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’

And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality.

MAPPING SPACE AND TIME

There are some who have been calling for a shift from this stiff short shrift. From as early as the mid 1990s, a leading voice in this choir of change is Michael Batty. He is an urban planner, geographer, spatial data scientist, and professor at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. In 2002 he wrote an editorial in the Journal of Environment and Planning titled Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events.

In it he writes,

“It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.”

He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density.

In his 2018 book, Inventing Future Cities, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a,

“’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.”

He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, Doreen Massey was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the Open University in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space.

In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that.

Her research and writing aimed,

“to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.”

She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space.

She surmises that,

“Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.”

Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but dynamic mapping continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes.

One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day.

And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this.

Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles.

When I take the bus I use an app called OneBusAway that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination.

There are also companies like StreetLight Data who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy.

At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators.

In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer John Bartholomew created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day.

There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future?

I’m with Michael Batty when he says,

“I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.”

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Hello Interactors,

I ran into a friend last week who shared a bit of neighborly news. A border dispute is brewing in our neighborhood and you can bet maps are soon to be weaponized. It’s nothing new in border disputes around the world, but do maps really lead to a shared understanding of people and their interaction with place? It may be time cartography gets radical.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMMUNITIES DEMANDING IMPUNITIES

I step quietly as I near the end of the private lane. Ahead there’s a beige colored fence, barely six feet high, blocking the pathway. It’s attached adjacently to a fence bordering the owner’s yard. As I gently approach the fence I see a dingy string innocently dangling from a small hole in the upper right corner near the fence post. A slight tug on the string and I hear a metal latch release on the other side. It’s not a fence after all, but a secret gate.

I push it open and slither through sheepishly looking around to see if I’d been caught. I’m careful to lift the cold black metal latch to silence it as I gently close the gate behind me. I scurry past the driveway glancing at the house. My pace quickens down the remainder of the private lane before me. I self-consciously scurry by neighboring homes and scamper up a steep hill before triumphantly stepping onto the territory of public domain: a city street.

This secret passage along a private drive is known to longtime locals in the neighborhood like me. The gate sits on private property connecting two private lanes that connect two public parks at each end. Adventurous out-of-towners looking to walk or bike from one park to the other usually see the gate masquerading as a fence and turn around. But for as long as these roads have existed, locals have hastily snuck through the graciously placed gate.

But the fate of this gate is a question as of late. Do they have the right to block a pedestrian route that connects public parks even though it’s on private land? Or do they have the duty to honor the traditions of a community that has relied on this path for decades if not centuries? To answer these questions, governments, corporations, and individuals turn to legally binding property maps. Instead of arming themselves with their own maps in a race to the court, perhaps they should join arms around one map seeking mutual support.

The word map is a shortened version of the 14th century middle English word, mapemounde. That’s a compound word combining latin’s mappa, “napkin or cloth”, and mundi “of the world” and was used to describe a map of the world that was most likely drawn on an ancient cloth or papyrus.

This etymology resembles cartography from latin’s carta "leaf of paper or a writing tablet" and graphia "to scrape or scratch" (on clay tablets with a stylus)”.

Given modern cartography’s reliance on coordinates, the word cartography easily could have emerged from the word cartesian. That word is derived from the latin word cartesius which is the Latin spelling of descartes – the last name of the French mathematician, René Descartes. Descartes merged the fields of geometry and algebra to form coordinate geometry. It was a discovery that, as Joel L. Morrison writes in the History of Cartography, formed the

”foundation of analytic geometry and provided geometric interpretations for many other branches of mathematics, such as linear algebra, complex analysis, differential geometry, multivariate calculus, and group theory, and, of course, for cartography.”

This two dimensional rectangular coordinate system made it easy for 17th century land barons and imperial governments to more easily and accurately calculate distance and area on a curved earth and communicate them on a flat piece of paper. The increased expediency, accuracy, durability, and portability of paper allowed Cartesian maps to accelerate territorial expansionism and colonization around the world.

But rectangular mapping of property, Cadastral Mapping, dates back to the Romans in the first century A.D. Cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration...”

Even as Descartes was inventing analytical geometry in the 1600s, European colonizers in the Americas were using rectilinear maps in attempts to negotiate land rights with Indigenous people. For example, between 1666 and 1668 a land deed clerk filed a copy of a map detailing a coastal area in what is now as Massachusetts near Buzzards Bay. The original map was drawn by a Harvard educated Indigenous man named John Sassamon who was also a member of the Massachusett tribe.

Sassamon was respected by colonizers because he represented the ideal of an assimilated native but he was also held in high regard by local tribes…including the Wampanoag for which this map served as a legal document. He was an asset to both populations and served as an interpreter in a wide range of negotiations between tribes and colonizers.

This map was used by the Plymouth colonists to negotiate terms over Wampanoag land with their leader Metacom (or as he was also known as, King Phillip). It shows a rectangle featuring a river on the left side of the map labeled, “This is a river”, a line drawn at the top and the bottom labeled, “This line is a path”, and on the right side is a vertical line that encloses the rectangle. Surrounding the area are names of tribes and a body of text at the bottom describing the terms of the deal.

Herein lies a controversy, the intention of the map, and the fate of the mapped land. The text can be read one of two ways:

“Wee are now willing should be sold” or “Wee are not willing should be sold”.

The full statement in the records reads:

“This may informe the honor Court that I Phillip arne willing to sell the Land within this draught…I haue set downe all the principal! names of the land wee are not willing should be sold. ffrom Pacanaukett the 24th of the 12th month 1668

PHILLIP [his mark]”

Nine years later, in January of 1675, Sassamon warned the governor of the Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, that Metacom (King Phillip) was planning an attack. The Wampanaog, and other tribes, had become frustrated and threatened by encroaching colonists. Days later Sassamon’s body was found in a pond.

At first many thought he had drowned fishing, but further evidence revealed his neck had been violently broken. A witness came forth claiming to have seen three Wampanoag men attack Sassamon. The three men were tried before the first mixed jury of Indigenous people and European settlers. They ruled guilty and all three men were hung.

This created increased tensions and mistrust between Metacom and the Puritans leading to the King Phillips War in the summer of 1675. The battle lasted three years, most of which was without Metacom. In August of 1676 he was hunted down and shot by another Indigenous man who had converted, forcibly or voluntarily, to Puritan ways. Metacom’s wife and children were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. Metacom was cut into quarters and his limbs were hung from trees. His head was put on a post at the entrance to the Plymouth colony where it remained for two decades.

LABORERS MAPPING WITH NEIGHBORS

Violence against and dispossession of Indigenous people by colonists and industrialists usually involves a map. That’s as true today as it has been at least since the Romans. But it hasn’t stunted attempts over the years to reduce or eliminate these injustices. For example, at the end of World War I, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and his Inquiry team were remapping Europe at the Paris Peace Conference, the League of Nations was born.

Out of this organization came the International Labor Organization (ILO) with representatives from Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was chaired by the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers. Founding members were made of representatives from government, employers, and workers. In the interest of creating a peaceful, safe, and just world, they intended to establish fair labor practices around the world, including fair pay for women – a provision Gompers brought to the table himself. Two lines of their founding preamble stand out amidst today’s international social disorder,

“Whereas universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice…

Whereas also the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries.”

Social justice and historic income inequality are conditions that need improved among most countries today as they did in 1918. But when it came time to ratify the permanent ILO members, the U.S. Congress voted to deny Gompers a seat at the ILO table. U.S. politicians were suspect of the League of Nations and many feared these international labor rights may interfere with privatized labor in the United States. It wasn’t until 1934 that the U.S., with the urging of FDR, was allowed to take a seat at the ILO by the U.S. Congress.

Nonetheless, during the 1920s the ILO conducted several studies concerning labor conditions around the world. That including the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples as a result of widespread colonization. In 1930 ILO 29 was passed drawing much needed attention on forced labor of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people.

For the next two decades the ILO continued to conduct research and create programs throughout their conventions. In 1951 the ILO Committee of Experts on Indigenous Labour devised a 20 year blueprint that addressed land and labor rights of Indigenous populations. They brought together various UN organizations like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. It culminated in the publishing of a 1953 report on the core social and economic conditions facing Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.

Four years later this work made its way into the passing of ILO 170 as part of the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957. The preamble includes language that admits there exists,

“in various independent countries indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations which are not yet integrated into the national community and whose social, economic or cultural situation hinders them from benefiting fully from the rights and advantages enjoyed by other elements of the population…”

This was the world’s first attempt to codify Indigenous rights into international law through a binding convention. These conventions included government made maps that were used as legally binding documents. Up to this point in history almost all legally binding maps were produced by governments. But with the spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the 1950s, mapping efforts began to be outsourced from governments to private firms and corporations. This shift was amplified by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Point Four Program that offered technical assistance to developing countries, especially Latin America, and was largely funded by private institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Neoliberal economists out of the University of Chicago, Chicago Boys, were also embedded in Latin American governments in hopes of spreading neoliberal policies that favored U.S. industries. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the Cold War, also feared these countries may turn to socialism or communism; especially given the majority of the founding members of the ILO and the League of Nations favored social programs as a means of protecting and providing social justice and stability. The U.S. stood alone in opposition to these principles and policies, but remained influential nonetheless given the U.S. military and monetary domination.

But the privatization of legal and technical documents by neoliberals, including maps, resulted in unintended consequences. If within the ILO trifecta of “government, employers, and workers” governments and employers could provide legally binding maps and documents, so could workers. This opened an opportunity for Indigenous communities, and their advocates, to provide their own maps that countered centuries-old border claims and land rights made by expansionist governments and industrialists, both of which are inextricably linked.

The language in ILO 170, while groundbreaking, was still drenched in paternalistic chauvinism and assumed assimilation of Indigenous Peoples as the binding element. One example is shown in the preamble above, “not yet integrated into the national community.” Over the course of the following 40 years Indigenous Peoples worked with the international community to revise the language. In 1989 the ILO passed ILO 169 which “takes the approach of respect for the cultures, ways of life, traditions and customary laws of Indigenous and tribal Peoples who are covered by it. It presumes that they will continue to exist as parts of national societies with their own identity, their own structures and their own traditions. The Convention presumes that these structures and ways of life have a value that needs to be protected.”

However, the word Indigenous Peoples was footnoted. In a compromise to include language of Indigenous self-determination, the ILO asked that the United Nations take up the matter on self-determination claiming it was beyond the scope of the ILO.

Indigenous people continue to advocate for their rights as “workers” through labor organizations in the ILO trio of “government, employers, and workers.” Only 23 of the 187 countries in the ILO have ratified ILO 169 and the United States and Canada are not among them. Most all are in Latin America and one of the most lethal legal weapon Indigenous people have continue to be counter-maps – maps that counter centuries of exploitive hegemonic colonialism.

FROM FALLABLE MAPS TO TANGIBLE RAPS

After decades at successful attempts at counter-mapping, it may have run its course. Governments and corporations have come to use maps to gain further legal control over Indigenous lands through abundant resources and political maneuvering. If the courtrooms of international law were a knife fight, governments and corporations show up with laser guided missiles. Labor unions in those 23 countries that ratified ILO 169 struggle for leverage, representation, and a voice – especially unions representing Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. And if they’re suffering, imagine the masses of unrepresented workers in the remaining 164 countries who have not ratified ILO 169.

Meanwhile more and more natural resources are sought in increasingly sensitive environmental areas, like the Amazon forests, where the majority of biodiversity and CO2 sucking vegetation is protected by Indigenous communities and their way of life. And as global warming increases, their living conditions will likely lead to more dispossession and even extinction.

Mapping technologies since 1989 have also become progressively democratized. They’ve empowered even more people to take to cartography to get their voices heard, claim their land, and their way of life. There has also been a steady increase in members of these Indigenous populations earning degrees in science, social science, technology, and law. They’ve also found increasing numbers of likeminded scholars, intellectuals, activists, and practitioners from the around the world to help.

Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale are four such examples. They are editors of a recent book called Radical cartographies : participatory mapmaking from Latin America published by the University of Texas Press. It “sheds light on the innovative uses of participatory mapping emerging from Latin America’s marginalized communities”. It’s a “diverse collection” of maps and mapping techniques that “reconceptualize what maps mean”. They argue what is missing, even in counter-mapping, are “representations of identity and place”.

The lead editor, Bjørn Sletto, is a native of Norway, was educated in the United States, and has lived and researched in Indigenous communities and border cities in Latin America. He writes in the introduction that

“Beyond making claims on the state, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities appropriate participatory mapping technologies to strengthen self-determination, local governance, and resource management within their own territories…”

What he’s found over decades of experience is that,

“This fundamental rethinking of the role of maps and the different ways they can be created, analyzed, and remade is driven in large part by inhabitants of the territories themselves, rather than by Western scholars or NGOs.”

These scholars have compiled a book that gives these Ingenious people voice and representation through their own methods of cartography. They’ve been allowed to describe geographies “in their own language and on their own terms.” By “describing and depicting the natural and built environments emerging from Indigenous, Black, and other traditional groups in Latin America” they are able to “demonstrate that these radical mapping practices are as varied as the communities in which they take place”.

María Laura Nahuel is one contributor in the book. She is a resident of the Mapuce Lof (Community) Newen Mapu, Neuquén, Argentina and received her undergraduate degree in geography from the Department of Humanities at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. She writes that,

“the current political, economic, cultural, and judicial context of our work has led us to think carefully about how the state’s historic monopoly over cartography has served to subjugate the ancestral and millenary wisdom of our people, the Mapuce. In particular, new multinational resource extraction projects, which are endorsed by the Argentine government, threaten our livelihood and subject us to a constant state of tension and uncertainty. This reality has led us to develop territorial defense strategies as well as plans for achieving kvme felen, or a state of good living. Mapuce participatory cultural mapping plays a key role in this process.”

Co-editor Joe Bryan is another contributor in the book. He is the associate professor in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he focuses on Indigenous politics in the Americas, human rights, and critical cartography. He asks in the book’s concluding commentary:

“What is a territory? The question pops up repeatedly across the chapters in this volume. After all, what are mapping projects if not attempts to define territory? The problem, as several of the authors suggest, is that mapping affords a partial understanding of territory at best. At worst, mapping runs completely counter to Black and Indigenous concepts of territory with potentially devastating results. That outcome makes the question of what a territory is all the more pressing...”

He goes on to observe that,

“We are used to thinking of territory as a closed object, a thing that can be mapped, recognized, and demarcated. The dominance of this concept is reinforced by mapping, beginning with the use of GPS units and other cartographic technologies to locate material instances of use and occupancy... Legal developments reinforce this approach, pushing titling and demarcation as a remedy to the lack of protection…”

The owner of the property on which that gate I sometimes sneak through wants to build a new home. Their plans don’t leave room for a gate nor are they particularly interested in maintaining a right of way for the public. It’s caused a kerfuffle in the neighborhood. Home owners on this private lane want their privacy while their neighbors want to maintain access between parks.

It’s a battle of territory and maps are the weapon. Individual home owners show title maps that reveal there is no public easement on the private lane. The city acknowledges there is no easement in their maps either, but are acting in the interest of the majority and asking owners to grant easements so the path may remain. It may come down to the courts to decide and you can bet maps will be involved. But as Joe Bryan says, maps afford only a partial understanding of territory.

I’m not suggesting the problems of affluent suburban property owners are of equal consequence to the existence and rights of Indigenous and Black communities or the protection of vanishing natural resources. But what they do have in common is the insufficiency of traditional Cartesian maps to adequately represent interests of governments, corporations, and individuals in battles over borders and territories. Especially when their weaponized.

A primary trigger of the King Phillip War in 1675 was the encroachment of European colonizers. This led to misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication of territory use and rights on a Cartesian map drawn by an Indigenous member of the Massachusett tribe supposedly seeking shared understanding between cultures. Here we are in 2022 where technology and enlightened cultural sensitivity abounds, and rigid Cartesian maps are still leading to dispossession and violence of under-represented and vulnerable communities.

But like the Europeans that colonized these lands over 500 years ago, we are turning to Indigenous people for guidance on how best to map and understand territories. We are again asking them to use maps as a way to best interact with people and place through what the editors of that book call radical cartography. Perhaps it’s time we put down our weapons of maps destruction and draw a map together. It just may draw us all closer together. How radical is that?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAP

On the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. They still do. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS).

I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using stereoscopic glasses pointed at two LANDSAT images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery.

But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was thematic mapping. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). This was, after all, the real focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government.

The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like Geographical Information Science). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB.

By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry.

I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship.

Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the U-S-A chant was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride.

We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated.

The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor Timothy Barney writes,

“An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘Seven Days Over the River Rhine’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.”

The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician Casper Weinberger, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending.

To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘Soviet Military Power’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.

The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘public diplomacy’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which.

The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror.

The Iran–Contra affair provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President.

Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations.

The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s Point Four Program (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the Chicago Boys (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread right-wing libertarianism around the world. That included backing a military dictatorship in Chile.

REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSIS

By the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord.

Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In 1988 he republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’ with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps.

One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it.

Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to

“Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.”

And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that

“Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.”

Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack.

Gervasi notes,

“This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.”

Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, The National Interest, debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s,

“Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…”

In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed.

The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said,

“It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.”

In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps:

“Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.”

We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now?

We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade.

Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’.

Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination.

With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, Sir Malford MacKinder – The Geographical Pivot of History. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry.

One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says,

“His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.”

These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes,

“Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.”

Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 2018. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées.

Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes,

“By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.”

During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader.

Martin concludes,

“The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.”

The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921.

Martin retired in 1924 and selected Samuel Whittemore Boggs to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes.

Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board.

That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography.

In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “On the Progress of War”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said,

“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.”

But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become. He continued,

“That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war."

Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion.

He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, Cartohypnosis. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says,

“Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.”

He continued,

“In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.”

In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says,

“And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.”

All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that,

“Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.”

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

View Details

Hello Interactors,

This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.”

The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”

They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans.

If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary.

The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.

Biden addressed the committee with these words,

“…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.”

The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.”

In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks.

The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly the size of Texas, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the Russian-American Company was established – organized by Emperor Paul I of Russia. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the Alaska Purchase. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959.

Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase.

Biden gave reference to the purchase in his Foreign Relations subcommittee pre-amble by joking,

“the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.”

The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did,

“these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.”

The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of United States Coast Survey, and premiere geographer of the time, George Davidson.

He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. Mt. Ellinor is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers.

His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress.

Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians.

Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal.

The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, United States Coast Pilot. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey.

Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905.

Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – thematic mapping.

Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies.

One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, Sir Halford John Mackinder. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In the introduction here he writes,

“In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.”

His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia.

Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. Timothy Barney, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.”

Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center.

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Hello Interactors,

This is the last week of winter. Next week I’ll start writing about cartography. Today’s post just may whet your appetite. All of the dislocation maps resulting from the war in Ukraine got me thinking about a pervasive human behavior; the ultimate interaction of people and place – migration.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOWLING FOR BALLERS

I was on a walk last weekend and as I approached an Indian restaurant I noticed two families gathered a car in the parking lot. The parents were saying their goodbyes as the kids tussled about impatiently. Just then a perfectly spherical white ball of wadded up paper came rolling down the parking lot entrance and on to the sidewalk in front of me. Chasing behind was boy, maybe thirteen years old, with his shirt untucked, coat half on, and out of breath. He glanced at me, swopped up the ball, swiveled around, and threw it back toward his family like a skilled cricket bowler.

A generation ago this would have been a rare sight. More likely it would have been a boy, probably White, winding up and pitching like his favorite pitcher on a baseball mound. I did a bit of pitching when I was that kid’s age. I was taller than most at that age and could throw pretty hard. So they put me on the mound. I threw hard alright, but batters trembled with fear. I had a control issues.

Give me a glove today and I’ll spare you the fast ball, but I still throw a mean knuckle ball. I kept a couple gloves at Microsoft and would occasionally go out and play catch with anybody willing. It was fun introducing that sport to team members from other parts of the world. At some point we decided to introduce each other to our respective national sports. First up was India and cricket.

Guess who volunteered to be the bowler – or pitcher in baseball terms. Me. The guy who pitched as a kid, but also hit a fair number of them too. We played on a patch of artificial turf on the Microsoft soccer field. That field has since been torn up to make way for more buildings and an on-campus cricket pitch.

Cricket balls are quite hard and travel at great speeds so we decided a tennis ball would be best. I took to it pretty fast, according to my Indian teammate Deepak. The bowling motion is very different than a pitching motion, but he was a good coach. The arm is kept straight and is rotated around the shoulder joint. Much like Pete Townsend of The Who strumming his guitar.

I loved it. Until the next day...and the next. Ok, for a full week my arm, shoulder, and back were wondering what the hell I was thinking. That was the last of cricket. The next international sport came from a Dutch teammate, Martijn. It’s called Fierljeppen (or far-leaping). It’s basically pole vaulting over a canal. We had a nearby canal designated, but a proper pole never materialized. Probably for the best. I was pushing it on the liability front. Somebody was sure to end up in the water.

The would-be canal to be leapt was in Redmond, in the county’s biggest and oldest park, Marymoor Park. While Feirljeppen is unlikely to ever occur there, cricket soon will. Microsoft isn’t the only one building a cricket pitch in Redmond. Just a couple weeks ago the county approved a 20-acre Marymoor Cricket Community Park. Here’s what the King County Council Chair, Claudia Balducci, had to say,

“As our region grows, we see more interest in cricket, which is one of the most popular sports in the world. I can’t think of a better place for a world-class cricket pitch than East King County and especially Marymoor Park.”

When she says ‘world-class’ she means it. The city of Redmond and the county are partnering with Major League Cricket (MLC) to build the facility. Construction is expected to start in 2023 and may one day host professional cricket, the U.S. National Team, and maybe even the World Cup. If you didn’t know, the Cricket World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world. An estimated 2.2 billion people tuned in during the 2019 cup.

The first international cricket match was actually between the U.S. and Canada in 1844 and was played in New York City. It was contested at the St. George’s Club Bloomingdale Park in front of 20,000 people. That site is now the NYU Medical Center. A decade later baseball began displacing cricket as one of America’s favorite sports.

American football was hitting the scene then too. It eventually displaced rugby in popularity in the U.S. after the American’s won the first gold medals in Rugby in 1920 and 1924. But like cricket, that sport is also hugely popular outside of the U.S. But rugby is again gaining popularity in the United States. One survey claims participation grew 350% between 2004 and 2011. In 2018, over 100,000 fans showed up in San Francisco for the World Cup Sevens tournament. The United States is bidding to host the Rugby World Cup in 2027.

Both rugby and cricket originated in England and spread throughout the world through colonization. Baseball also started in England and American football is a derivative of rugby. The forward pass was perfected and popularized by the Indigenous American Wa-Tho-Huk, or “Bright Path.” But he was named and baptized at birth as "Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe" – Jim Thorpe.

His father was half Irish and half Sac and Fox (two Great Lake area tribes forced to settle in Oklahoma) and his mother was half French and half Potawatomi. They were both practicing Catholics and so was their son until the day he died. Jim Thorpe and his Carlisle Indian Industrial School teammates are largely responsible for the style of American football you see today. Thorpe was also the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal and was a professional baseball player.

Baseball, cricket, and rugby – and it’s American Football derivative, originated in England but spread with White colonial settlers. Like a ball tossed from it’s origin to it’s destination. And now after generations of colonization, kids of parents born in those far away colonies – like the kid in that parking lot – will be tossing them to players with heritage as mixed as Jim Thorpe…on soil Bright Path’s Indigenous ancestors once called their own.

Colonization really did toss people as if they were balls. It very much was an origin and destination game. Slaves and indentured workers were pulled from their homes to imperial origins while White administrators and ‘adventure’ seekers were tossed to colonial outposts to ‘settle’ land and people. And then before long, in a postcolonial world, people from those extended territories began migrating to colonial origins.

It's what the Jamaican poet Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or “Miss Lou” referred to in her poem as, Colonization in Reverse. The first stanza reads:

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in Reverse

HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE

Much of social science has dwelled on this concept of migration being about people going from ‘here’ to ‘there’. This has drawn excessive attention to these locations and the effects of the movement of people from place to place. It leads some people to wonder what will happen to that place over ‘there’ when people leave? But even more people wonder what will become of this place ‘here’ as a result of them immigrating? Immigration is one of the most polarizing and thorny societal issues wrought with emotion and socio-political implications. People seem to be most concerned with the immediate situation and seek political near term solutions fearing their own lives and cultures may be threatened.

But there’s a growing number of postcolonial thinkers and researchers challenging the ‘here’ and ‘there’ obsession and the impulse to seek near-term solutions. One group of diverse cultural geographers assembled by the American Association of Geographers settled on two major themes of interrogation of postcolonial migrations. They relate to time and place:

Broaden the temporal lens. Before jumping to remedies aimed to cure local symptoms of migration, reach back to its colonization origins to better understand it’s roots.

Reassess the ‘here’. What is ‘here’ today is a product of the relationships it formed with ‘there’. The people and the land of colonizers have been shaped by the people and lands of those distance territories.

Within this framework, ‘here’ and ‘there’ no longer exist or have lost their distinction. Centuries of colonization and migration have created a multi-faceted tapestry of trans-territorialism and mix-ethnicities in a beautiful, albeit complex, cross-cultural milieu.

This blurring and multiplicity is a very hard sell in a world that is becoming increasing polarized and nationalized. Nationalists would like a Hogwarts-style sorting hat from Harry Potter fame. They’d like to place this hat upon the head of every immigrant so they may be sorted into ‘here’ or ‘there’ categories. Many immigrants, if not most, feel the pressure to act, look, and speak in ways that reduce the chances of people wondering are they one of us or one of them? They’re forced to reduce their vibrant, complex heritage to fit a binary ‘here’ or ‘there’ dichotomy with questions of race intertwined.

Meanwhile, those Western colonizers who were sent or ventured to faraway lands absorbed, stole, interpreted, and profited from those distant cultures and traditions. Their kids went to school there, made friends, and maybe even stayed, married a local, and raised their own mix-ethnicity family. And of these countless families, many returned to their colonial homeland but few are asked to place the sorting hat upon their head. They then wrote books, told stories, and painted pictures of people and places of faraway lands – and still do – while the people of those lands are often denied entry to their country.

And what do we make of the effects of territories carved, fractured, and divvied up among Western imperialists? Susan P. Mains, a professor of Geography at Dundee University in Scotland, is the lead author on a 2013 paper Postcolonial Migrations. She quotes two historians writing on the partitioning of Indian and other South-Asian territories by the West. They write that,

“’...18 million [Indian refugees who] struggled to resettle themselves and the energies of at least two generations were expended in rebuilding lives shattered by the violent uprooting caused by the partition’.” Mains continues, “Displacement and ongoing territorial conflicts are the legacy of this fracture.”

In 1947 the British divided the subcontinent into two independent states, India and Pakistan. The partition was largely along Muslim and non-Muslim lines. Those religious tensions and divisions have been reignited recently as India’s Prime Minister, a Hindu, has increasingly been blending his politics with his religion. His critics accuse him of being Islamophobic and say he’s guilty of igniting hate crimes against Muslims. Human rights watchdogs are seeing more evidence of this and warn it may get worse – especially in impoverished neighborhoods. The sorting hat, a British import, seems to have followed a well trodden path to India.

This current conflict will no doubt cause Muslims to migrate creating even more displacement and fracturing of family and friends. Again, the focus by most media and academics will be on where they are from and where they are going. Are those people over ‘there’ coming over ‘here’? But little attention will be given the diaspora within the sub-continent, the historic origins of conflict and violence by imperialists, and the impact on the individual human lives.

For many, the fear of where these migrants will land outweighs their concern for their well-being. This fear strips them of the curiosity needed to assess how their own actions, and those of their ancestors, contribute to the plight of the disenchanted, disowned, and dislocated.

GO WITH THE FLOW

In 1885, the Geographer and German immigrant to England, Ernst Georg Ravenstein published what he called “The Laws of Migration”. It was a paper that appeared in the Journal of Statistical Society. But, as my former Geography professor, Waldo Tobler, pointed out in 1995 (the 100 year anniversary of Ravenstein’s laws) Ravensein failed to provide a single mathematical equation to support his so-called laws.

It seems, like his contemporizes in Economics, he was seduced by the mathematical certainty of Physics. He sought laws to describe the migration patterns he observed in 19th century England, but forgot the math. Or perhaps he knew, like many economists, that human behavior lacks the certainty of physics and these laws were more suggestive than declarative. Either way, this lack of certainty and clarity doesn’t keep social scientists from continuing to borrow metaphors, research techniques, and language from physics.

For example, Tobler says,

“It is most curious that the literature on migration is replete with this kind of [fluid physics] terminology. We speak of "migration flows" and "migration streams" and "counter-currents", and refer to intellectual or cultural "backwaters", as if there were eddy currents. One can be "outside of the mainstream". And there are "waves of immigration", etc.”

Tobler also found an 1885 map Ravenstein created for his paper that “seems to have been completely ignored by scholars, historians, and cartographers.” The map is titled, as expected, “Currents of Migration." Tobler was a pioneer in computer cartography, but even he admitted it would be “difficult to see how one could program a computer to produce this map using the kinds of statistics available [in 1995]. Certainly it would be a challenge.”

Mapping migration continues to be a challenge for cartographers. As Putin seeks to reassemble a former Soviet Union partitioned into independent nation states in the early 1990s, he’s induced mass migration. Different media outlets use different ways to communicate these migrations with varying degrees of success.

James Chesire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography at University College London and he took to Twitter a couple weeks ago critiquing the BBC’s crude interpretation of the crisis. He wrote,

“It’s time to innovate the ways we show people fleeing war. 8 arrows for 874,026 human beings is not good enough.”

He goes on to illustrate how arrows imply ‘flow’ in a particular direction from ‘here’ to ‘there’. As you can see, even today, we seem to be stuck using centuries old flawed physics metaphors while continuing to emphasize place based abstractions that imply binary flows from one place to another. Lost are the heartbreaking stories, the historicity that lead to mass movement of people, and cultural and ethnic complexities that define the region.

One map he points to from 2016 is by the mapping company ESRI. It attempts to bridging the gap between stories, images, and cartography in communicating what they title, “The Uprooted: War, sectarian violence, and famine have forced more than 50 million people from their homes—the largest number of displaced people since World War II.”

But somehow it still portrays the movement of people solely as a crisis. People indeed are suffering crisis, but migrations and movement of humans, of all animals, doesn’t have to be articulated as perpetual crisis. We don’t have to keep focusing on the spatiality, the borders, the nations, the states, and the cascade of political and social hierarchies they instill. Migration is an artifact of human existence – of animal existence – whose fate can be reduce to arrows.

Arrows typically show movement in one direction. What about migrants that return? Where are their arrows? In the Handbook of culture and migration Dr. Julia Pauli, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, writes,

“In all regions of the world, state policies frame human migration by enabling, encouraging, restricting, punishing and hindering movement. Major events like the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ have made this very visible…New policies and programs worldwide aim to encourage migrants to leave their host and destination countries and return to their original communities.”

She cites other researchers who point out, “’there is a significant overlap between the latest surge of interest in return and efforts to remove unwanted immigrants from destination countries.’” And many countries are capitalizing on return migration. Citing Asia as an example, Pauli says “Countries like Vietnam perceive wealthy and well-educated migrants more and more as a resource that needs to be returned home.”

You can bet the state policies Pauli cites will include government sponsored technologies to track, trace, and true these flows of humanity. Trump is as crude as the wall he wants built. Meanwhile, Biden is as stealth as the cameras, drones, and biometric AI technologies he’s funding on the southern border of the United States. A report titled The Deadly Digital Border Wall was jointly created and published between Mijente, Just Futures Law, and the No Border Wall Coalition. They write,

“By exposing these technologies, this report aims to empower border activists, organizers, and residents to challenge the corporate tools used for border control and immigration enforcement by U.S. government agencies, and to more effectively advocate for a surveillance-free world.”

It's striking that Ukraine had the second fastest declining population in the world in 2018. Russia’s birthrates climbed after the fall of the Soviet Union but they too have declining birthrates. Coupled with high mortality rates, especially among older men, from alcoholism, depression, accidents, homicides, and suicides most of the former Soviet Union states were barely holding on to citizens well before this war.

Russia was offering families money to have two or more kids. Payments were not in cash, but in a ‘mother’s trust fund’. Women could draw from the fund at a later date to pay for a mortgage, education, and a small pension. Few found that offer attractive. Since 2014 Ukraine has been offering $1,500 cash over a 3-year period for every kid a woman births. Critics warned this may only lead to more orphaned kids as parents may prefer take the money and abandon the kids. Another potential dislocation migration story waiting to happen.

China’s birthrate dropped for the fifth year in a row last year despite their lifting of the ‘one child policy’ in 2015. It’s their lowest rate since 1949 and the birth of Communist China. Rising living expenses is the number one reason parents give for not having more kids. Two centuries ago, women in the U.S., China, Russia, and India all would have had five kids or more, but now they’re all clumped together around two births per woman – just below the world average of 2.44.

Meanwhile low income countries are declining but average 4.34 children per woman. Many of these countries will also be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, war, and increased risks of poverty.

Nationalists around the world, including the more powerful U.S., China, Russia, and India, cling to a narrative that roots their feet in the ground of a given homeland, as if ordained by their God to take root. They then build border walls that restrict, repel, or release people based on their own delusions of righteousness. This grasping of false identity, yearning for elusive security, hungering for more land, money, and resources, and fretting over dwindling birthrates of their ‘chosen ones’ only makes them tighten their grip on faith, pump their inflated egos, and deepen their roots of nationalism.

Meanwhile, for a myriad of simple and complex reasons, people move. We like to draw lines to form borders and arrows on maps. Draw attention to binary origins and destinations – ‘here’ and ‘there’. But Susan Mains and her colleagues believe arrows are forms of “intellectual violence” and remind us that

“Lines do not determine boundedness of the communities from which folk came; or those to which folk are moving. Instead lines acknowledge that circulation, movement and cultural transfer have been integral to human populations, their cultures and society.”

Cricket, rugby, baseball, and even Jim Thorpe’s American football are all demonstrations of circulation, movement, and cultural transfer. Even the passing glance between me, a middle-aged man of mixed European ethnicity and a boy likely of mixed sub-continental Indian ethnicity is an acknowledgement of cultural transfer. Our age difference broadens the temporal lens of our own colonial origins. Soon he’ll be playing on a cricket pitch in Redmond on colonized land shaped by the people of distance territories.

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Hello Interactors,

Wars, gas prices, eventual food and mineral shortages, inflation, a nagging pandemic, homelessness, immigration, migration, social and economic inequities, rising health prices, home prices, climate change, and natural disasters. What am I missing? Global society needs a hug but we’re all afraid to offer one. We need fixed, I believe, but we are fixed in what we believe.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TWISTED UP AND HOG TIED

As bombs dropped across Kyiv and surrounding areas last Saturday causing destruction in their path, large missiles were also descending on portions of the state Iowa. These were trees and debris launched by a series of tornados moving at a groundspeed of 45 miles an hour generating winds upwards of 170 miles per hour. They swept across a swath of land 117 miles wide. The storm was rated at a level 4 on a five point scale. Level 4 tornados create devastating damage. Well-constructed houses are leveled; structures with weak foundations are blown some distance away; cars are thrown; large missiles are generated.

This storm swept through the town where I grew up, Norwalk. None of my friends or family were impacted, but seven people died just south of Norwalk in neighboring Lucas County. Another nearby county, Madison – made famous by the book and movie The Bridges of Madison County – was also hit. The National Weather Service said, “This is second longest tornado in Iowa since 1980.”

March is a little early for tornados in Iowa and July is a little late. But last July twelve swept through the state with top wind speeds of 145 miles an hour. And on July 18th of 2018 they had 21 twisters hitting 144 miles per hour.

In 2020 the state was hit with a derecho – a long-lasting wide-spread blast of tornado-level winds that destroyed tens of millions of bushels of corn. Together with the stresses of the pandemic, this event pushed many farmers over the edge. It was enough to prompt Iowa State University to create a program called, “I Worry All the Time: Resources for Life in a Pandemic.” It offers steps to help people answer the question posed by the university’s outreach director, David Brown: “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

These natural events and human adaptation programs signal what the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms worldwide, “Globally, climate change is increasingly causing injuries, illness, malnutrition, threats to physical and mental health and well-being, and even deaths.” The panel of climate experts warn,

“The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments. They are causing severe and widespread disruption in nature and in society; reducing our ability to grow nutritious food or provide enough clean drinking water, thus affecting people's health and well-being and damaging livelihoods. In summary, the impacts of climate change are affecting billions of people in many different ways.”

You would think existential threat would be a top concern. Especially among citizens of the United States given our outsized per capita-consumption of energy, goods, and resources. Nope. After President Biden’s recent State of the Union Address, Pew Research reported on a poll taken in January examining American’s views on major national issues.

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said ‘strengthening the economy’ should be the top priority for the president and Congress to address this year. Second was ‘reducing healthcare costs’ at 61 percent. ‘Dealing with climate change’ came in 14th out of 18 topics with 41 percent believing it is something government should address.

Survey participants who lean both politically Left and Right believe the economy is most important. Though, Republicans believe it more than Democrats. But not my much – 82% versus 62%. A 20 point difference. But on climate change the differential is the largest of all 18 issues surveyed. Only 11% of Republicans surveyed believe the government should prioritize reducing effects of climate change versus 65% of Democrats. That’s a 54 point difference in opinion. This suggests that of all the things Americans are divided on, the one that poses the biggest threat is the one with which we differ the most.

This survey targets adults age 18 living in the United States. I’ve been thinking about those youngest and oldest surveyed. I try to imagine what effects climate change will have on them in 20 years. The IPCC paints a grim picture. They created three periods of time that reflect what life will be like on planet earth given where we are today.

The three periods are near-term (up to 2040), mid-term (2041-2060), and long-term (2061-2100). By 2040, the near term, a good chunk of the upper end of baby-boomers (who dominate federal government) will be dead or nearing death. Those ages 18 today will be 36 in 2040. The year 2100 seems far off, but if that 18 year old is lucky they’ll be 96 in 2100. A child born today will be 78 years old.

They’ll read about those suffering Iowa farmers devastated by natural disasters, economic hardship, and a pandemic with envy. The IPCC says

“children aged ten or younger in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100, and a five-fold increase under 3°C warming. Such increases in exposure would not be experienced by a person aged 55 in the year 2020 in their remaining lifetime under any warming scenario.”

We are most likely too late to avoid this reality. The focus now is on adaptation. Our multi-legged, winged, and gilled friends are already trying. There is ample evidence of species climbing to higher land, shifting to cooler regions, or diving to greater depths in the ocean. This will have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem on which every living being relies – including humans. We have the mental capacity to do more than other animals than just adapt, but appear unable to do so.

The IPCC says, “Adapting successfully requires an analysis of risks caused by climate change and the implementation of measures in time to reduce these risks.” They ask these five questions:

Is there an awareness that climate change is causing risks?

Are the current and future extent of climate risks being assessed?

Have adaptation measures to reduce these risks been developed and included in planning?

Are those adaptation measures being implemented?

Are their implementation and effectiveness in reducing risks monitored and evaluated?

On the first they claim there is increased awareness that climate change is causing these risks. Anecdotally, I see historically climate denying institutions, companies, and individuals calling for adaptation and mitigation strategies and technologies. It’s hard to say how many of them are acknowledging climate change out of fear or just seeking financial gain. Like our healthcare industry, many see opportunity in human suffering as a result of climate change.

But the IPCC also says “given the rate and scope of climate change impacts, actions on assessing and communicating risks, as well as on implementing adaptation are insufficient.” These IPCC reports can’t get any more direct. They conclude,

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

GET ALONG LITTLE DOGGIE

Norwalk, Iowa is home to two movie star super-heroes, the lead in “Aquaman” Jason Momoa and Brandon Routh who played Superman in “Superman Returns”. Another famous actor was born in nearby Winterset, Iowa in Madison County – home of the covered bridges. His name is John Wayne.

Or Marion Morrison, as he would have been known back in Winterset. His family moved to California when he was nine. He got the nickname ‘Duke’ when a local fireman started calling him ‘Little Duke’ after frequently seeing him walking his dog, Duke. ‘Duke’ sounded better than Marion and soon everyone was calling him by his nickname, Duke. His stage name, John Wayne, came with his first leading role in the 1930 film The Big Trail.

John Wayne claims to have been a socialist while attending USC pre-law, voted for FDR in 1936 and supported Woodrow Wilson. But by 1944 he became concerned with communism and helped create the politically conservative organization Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. He and its members believed the motion picture industry, and the country, was being infiltrated by communists.

But critics said the organization sympathized with fascists, was anti-Semitic, against unionization, and endorsed the Jim Crow laws of the South. It broke up in 1975, but by then John Wayne’s views were well publicized. He told Playboy magazine in 1971 that

“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”

And it’s fitting he often played a cowboy because he believed America was not

“wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Playing leading roles as both cowboy and war hero, John Wayne became the symbol of American exceptionalism, individualism, strength, and masculinity. When Kirk Douglas played the role of Vincent van Gogh in a 1957 film Wayne told him,

“Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not these weak queers."

On welfare John Wayne said,

“I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living.”

Ronald Reagan was a close friend of John Wayne. They were both actors, shared conservative worldviews, and had a shared vision for the American ideal that each of them personified. They remain idols of the Republican party to this very day. I’m guessing roughly one-third of the country still align to their worldview. It’s a view that holds hierarchy and authority, usually male authority, in high regard. They believe individuals control their destiny, government should not hold them back, and are skeptical of what John Wayne called ‘well-educated idiots.’

This would likely include the scientists who authored that IPCC report I keep quoting. By extension, they are largely skeptical of the risks of climate change. And they see attempts by the UN, EU, or any governmental agency to enact mitigation measures as impeding individual, industry, and economic progress.

But those who favor a more egalitarian and communitarian worldview see many of these strict social hierarchies and entrenched capitalistic traditions as the sources of social, economic, and environmental inequities and destruction. They seek restrictions on individual gluttony, corporate excesses, and industry exploitation.

This group, often characterized as ‘The Left’, tend to believe that if they could just ‘educate’ the public, especially their counterparts, ‘The Right’, they’d come to realize the threat that we face. They’re convinced education is the answer. Clearly this isn’t working.

In 2012 a group of scientists decided to test this education theory. What they found is that not only is the theory wrong, but that

“Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.”

We believe what we want to believe based largely on which crowd we want to be affiliated with and experts are not immune. And ordinary people on both ‘The Left’ and ‘The Right’ use the best available science to justify their beliefs. And the more knowledge we accumulate the more entrenched we become.

This study confirms what others have shown which is we are polarized in our beliefs about climate change. But it also reveals that those who claim to be politically ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ don’t necessarily share worldviews despite be co-located on the political spectrum. Those who ‘lean Republican’ or are ‘slightly conservative’ and those who are ‘Independent’, ‘lean Democrat’, or are ‘slightly liberal’ showed their respective opinions on climate risk were exceedingly different than those claiming to be decidedly ‘conservative Republicans’ and ‘liberal Democrats.’

In other words, their study suggests polarization isn’t just about Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, or the Far Right and Far Left, it’s about our individual worldviews and the communities we pick. And, importantly, what opinions members of those communities deem acceptable to believe and communicate. The risk of be ostracized by your in-group is so great that we resist admitting we may agree with some of what the out-group believes – even if deep down we believe it to be truthful.

Here’s an extreme example inspired by the study. Imagine a diehard Republican Iowa farmer, Scott, who lost a family member in one of those tornados. Perhaps he heard of a farmer friend of a friend who had crops damaged by those storms in 2020 and became bankrupt. Scott may have become so troubled and anxious that he even attended one of those therapy sessions Iowa State University holds.

Somehow these unfortunate life events eventually convinced him climate change is real, but he largely keeps his opinion to himself for fear of not fitting in. Then one day he gets invited to go on a hunting trip in North Dakota by an old high school friend who works on a fracking rig. There he is surrounded by his buddy’s work pals, oil guys, talking s**t about liberals who get riled up over climate change. How likely is Scott to admit to these guys that he believes in climate change? It makes no difference that he’s a Republican or they are, he knows it’s his clan and he knows the social cost of speaking his mind. He knows climate denial is part of what keeps him in the club.

On the other side, the environmental science community and some activists, across the mostly liberal spectrum, are splintering over mixed worldviews on energy policy. Many environmental scientists weigh the risk of human lives due to climate change against accidents from nuclear energy reactors and are coming out in support of nuclear energy. They get skewered on Twitter for advocating in favor of nuclear power even though they’re doing it in the name of saving lives and the planet. The “No Nukes” movement of the 70s is so strong to this day among the environmentalist crew that anybody who dares to say “Yes to Nukes” is shamed, blamed, and defamed.

It turns out that when we feel bounded in our rationality, we are really good at seeking knowledge to unbind it. Psychologists and sociologists called it ‘motivated cognition’. Our memory does it on our behalf. For example, we tend to remember our successes more than failures. And if a recollection of an event doesn’t match our current worldview, we’ll unknowingly reshape the memory to suit our current motives.

We also tend to preference and ingest new and novel information when it suits our immediate interest and desires. We tend to want to believe a study even when we know the sample size is too small or is poorly designed. This makes bite sized social media fed by our social feeds perfect appetizers for the full meal deal found in a longer article, news report, podcast, or talk show.

But this study – that my own motivated cognition led me to – points to an even more weighty form of cognition: ‘cultural cognition’. This theory is frequently used to better understand how we evaluate risk. It states that our personal values are what lead us to seek facts so we may conduct our own risk analysis. And we are more likely to believe what our in-group wants us to believe than what may actually be true.

LOVE ‘EM UP

We live in a diverse society of conflicting opinions. For us to minimize the effects of climate change, to make kids born today not suffer more than they have to, we’re going to have to come together now. Yesterday.

So what do we do? Sadly, there are more studies identifying these behaviors and theories explaining them then there are confirming solutions. But the authors of the study offer a clue. It has to do with minimizing the self-threat people feel when confronted with information they disagree with…or more specifically, with opinions and knowledge they deem representative of the out-group.

When we are presented information that affirms our beliefs, we use that as evidence to bolster our position in our in-group. This is referred to as self-affirmation bias. It’s what keeps us polarized in our camps. It makes us feel good and raises our self-esteem. But there are many things that can raise our self-esteem that aren’t related to our consumption of self-affirming sound bites.

When we’re presented with information that feeds our self-affirmation bias we have a choice to make. We can gobble it up as another self-esteem boost or we can interrogate, question, and evaluate it. We have agency to choose whether this is true or not or even worthy of consideration.

And studies have shown that the best way to get ourselves in this frame of mind is to find another way to boost our self-esteem before consuming the information. Just by writing down one thing that we value about ourselves or others value in us is all it takes. That self-esteem boost is sufficient enough that we loose the craving for that self-affirming nugget of information being fed to us from members of our tribe.

For example, in one study they found

“a capital punishment proponent should feel more open to evidence challenging the death penalty’s effectiveness if he or she feels affirmed as a good friend or valued employee. Self-affirmations, [they] argue, trivialize the attitude as a source of self-worth and thus make it easier to give up.”

This reminds me of the Seattle Seahawks head coach approach to coaching. Pete Carroll is known for signing players who excelled at one position in college or professionally and then convincing, converting, and committing them to become equally proficient, or more, in a different position. They are invariably resistant. After all, they have their ego, identity, and paycheck wrapped up in their history as a certain kind of player in a particular position. They’ve even created their own in-group fan club they don’t want to disappoint.

Carroll’s solution is very easy and unorthodox for a football coach. Instead of focusing on what new skills they need to learn, an anxiety he knows they already possess, he reminds them of what they’re good at. He builds up their self-esteem by focusing on them as humans or on their athletic skills unrelated to the position. As Pete says, “I love ‘em up.”

He finds that within a short time they are the ones that come to him saying, “Coach, I think I’m ready to try that position.” He barely has to mention it. By boosting their self-esteem Coach Carroll puts them in a frame of mind whereby they no longer need to rely on their ego boosting, self-affirming biased past to feel good about themselves. And, by in large, they’re better for it.

This demonstrates that we need not wait for others to find alternative ways to build self-esteem. When confronted with people who you find resistant to your position on issues to do with the environment, economy, or equity try offering them a compliment. Maybe ask them what makes them feel good in the world. Ask them what they like doing, what they’re good at. Maybe even ask them what they fear.

You’ll be triggering pangs of self-esteem in them. You’ll be reminding them of how special they are. And let’s face it, we’re all special and we’re all afraid of something. My experience is that when I do, I may not win them over right there and then – or ever – but I just might find what we have in common. You may find, as I have, that just by this act you’ve boosted your own self-esteem such that you may be open to their opinions.

I wonder what would happen if our friend Scott, the right-wing farmer in Iowa, reminded a couple of those North Dakota frackers what makes them special. Maybe it’s a hidden talent, hobby, or award they earned at work. And I wonder if in doing so he would have found an opening to ask them about what they really felt about fracking, fossil fuel, and the impact it was having on the land they were walking on and the animals they were hunting. For all we know, they’re all afraid of the effects of climate change but fear the backlash from their peers more than the world ending.

The latest IPCC report emphasizes the complexities surrounding the interaction of people and place and the role these interdependent interactions play in the cause and effects of climate change. They write, “This report has a strong focus on the interactions among the coupled systems climate, ecosystems (including their biodiversity) and human society. These interactions are the basis of emerging risks from climate change, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss and, at the same time, offer opportunities for the future.”

They go on to state that “Human society causes climate change…impacts ecosystems and can restore and conserve them.” [my emphasis] They also remind us that

“Meeting the objectives of climate resilient development thereby supporting human, ecosystem and planetary health, as well as human well-being, requires society and ecosystems to move over (transition) to a more resilient state.”

A sizable chunk of disadvantaged members of our global community have been forced into a perpetual and exhausting resilient state for centuries. All at the hands of generations of a relatively small advantaged few. The outreach director at Iowa State asked weary farmers, “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

Our increased polarization is taxing the resiliency of our respective out-groups. It’s time we restore and conserve them, embrace the diversity of opinion, recognize all worldviews are coupled systems that make up the messy but necessary human condition. Yes we have a climate crisis, but we also have an empathy crisis. Planetary health starts with mental well-being. Let’s boost our own self-esteem, the esteemed members of our clan, and even those you can’t stand. Those born today will appreciate it when they’re your age.

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Hello Interactors,

The 80s band Tears for Fears released a new album recently. Their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World has new meaning this week. What is it about empire building sociopaths in the West and the East that makes everybody want them to stop trying to rule the world?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHRONICLING THE TRUTH OF THE RUS

Rurik, a Norse Viking prince, made his way south from present day Denmark, to establish a ruling government in Novgorod in what is now Russia. He was invited by Slavik and Finn-Ugrik people to apply his governing skills to their feuding tribes.

Rurik then extended his presence further south to a city called Kiev in 850. It took another 1000 years for Kiev to be pronounced Kyiv in Ukrainian. In Russian it’s still pronounced Kiev. This outpost became the center of what became the Kievan Rus; a loose collection of Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic peoples of Eastern and Northern Europe. The city was well positioned on a visible bank on a northern edge of the Dnieper River. Its convenient and defensible position allowed Rurik to reign over what became the Rurik Dynasty.

The people of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all stake claim to this origin story.

Rurik was replaced in 882 by his kinsman Oleg. It was Oleg that declared Kiev to be the capital of the Kievan Rus. Given the nexus of trading activity in Kiev it became a contested region. Oleg led many wars against semi-nomadic tribes from the south and the east.

One hundred years later one of those leaders from the east, the Byzantine ruler Basil II, came asking for money. Then leader Vladimir of Kiev agreed so long as he could marry his sister. Basil II gave his sister over on the condition Vladimir, a pagan, convert to Orthodox Christianity. He not only agreed, but insisted everyone in the region convert as well. He baptized the people of Rus in 988 and just like that Christianity was spread throughout the region.

This Rus-Byzantine religio-political arrangement was no doubt influenced by the Roman Catholic Church who sought influence over this important Eurasian borderland. By 1054 there came an East-West schism in the church. Eastern Orthodox churches in Constantinople and those in Rome each viewed the other as drifting from the ‘true church’. They split between Orthodox Catholics of the East and Roman Catholics of the West. Though they both continued to largely share the same beliefs and practices.

There is no central Orthodox Church in Ukraine any longer. It has since splintered into a variety of denominations along with a myriad of other religions. It’s estimated 75% of Ukrainians believe in a Christian God. But another East-West schism has emerged this week as Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill seek to pull Ukraine back from the allure of the West. They both seek a centralized Russian Orthodox Church under Kirill and a central government under Putin. A forced religio-political unification of the people of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under a single language, religion, and government. Echoes of Oleg and Rurik and historic east-west tensions – Vladimir of Kiev meets Vladimir Putin.

In 1113 a document called The Primary Chronicle was written from which this history is documented. The first sentence reads,

“These are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus’, the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus’ had its beginning.”

Seventy-four years later came another source of regional history, the Hypatian Chronicles, and with it the first printed occurrence of the word Oukraina – Ukraine.

The etymology of this word is debated to this day. The most popular interpretation comes from a Slavic word for ‘borderland’ or ‘frontier region’ but others argue it’s more possessive as in ‘territory’. Perspectives are as variable as their lineages.

A Dutch map from 1645 shows the word Okraina in the middle of wilderness. Wild indeed. By this time in history this region was known to be wild with wars fought over its land, riches, and strategic position between Europe and Asia. From the days of Rurik to today territories in western Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova have cyclically been claimed by Germany, Astro-Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These boundaries have been contested, drawn, and redrawn since the invention of maps.

Maps played a significant role in attempts to ‘permanently’ define the boundaries of territories, and so did the proliferation of books that defined their historic narratives. The Gutenberg press, invented in the late 1400s, offered those with power and money to write and disseminate narratives coincident with territorial boundary maps that fit their view of the world and of history. This was the world’s first use of mass-media to control a particular geo-religio-political narrative and competing counter-narratives concerning regional communities. Many of which were communities of the imagination.

NATIONALISM; JUST IMAGINE

Imagined Communities is the title of a book by a Cornell political scientist, Benedict Anderson. He addresses the still vague notion of ‘nationalism’ – a squishy idea with a powerful force. He argues for a definition that transcends historical attempts to define it by self-interested ideologues. The word ‘nationalism’ was not widely used until the 19th century. It has since become a term we insist on ascribing to every human just as we do gender, race, or ethnicity

The Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn wrote,

“’Nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual…and largely incurable.’”

Anderson proposes this definition of nation: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” By imagined he means even the most sparsely populated nation will include enough people that one will ever be able to know, meet, or even hear their fellow residents. And yet, everyone claims to be able to imagine who they are. The British-Czech social anthropologist, Ernest Gellner succinctly writes,

“‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’”

Imagined communities became sovereign nations during ‘The Enlightenment’. Faced with historical dominion by religions while simultaneously discovering the multitude of religions in the world, even the most devote elite came alive with dreams of their own imagined free nations – accepting they must also fall under the guise of a given God. Hence the existence of the United States – one nation under God.

A God that some interpret as encouraging, excusing, or mysteriously ignoring communal inequalities and exploits in the name of national identity and comradeship that runs as deep as it does wide. As Anderson surmises,

“Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

One of the unifying elements of these imagined communities is language. In the 18th and 19th century the people of the northern Balkans witnessed the invention of a number of literary languages. In the 18th century the Ukrainian language was ‘tolerated’ by the more dominant Russian speaking population as a folk language spoken by yokels in Ukraine – or “Little Russia” as it was called.

But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky, a Ukrainian writer, wrote a poem in Ukrainian about life in Ukraine. It became very popular. Six years later, in 1804, the Kharkov University was founded and became the literary hub of Ukraine. In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior.

By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.

Language invention was happening in many places during this time. In 1820 Finland, for example, an interest in Finnish tradition and culture emerged and was written in Latin and Swedish. This created a groundswell of nationalism by writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys. They stitched their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides. They forge a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.

These writers, lexicographers, folklorists, and composers were not acting solely out of national pride, but to feed a burgeoning print market. And who were they selling to? Affluent and powerful families. Only half of the most advanced states in Europe were able to read in 1840. Over ninety percent of Russians could not read.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling classes and nobility that were becoming literate. A rising middle class was emerging. Former plebes and appendices amassed wealth and become professionals in a growing worldwide commercial and industrial economy. And with it a growing number of wealthy upper class – the nouveau bourgeoises.

As the number of capitalist and wealthy land owners increased through the rise of the industrial age, so did the number of languages they spoke. Latin was displaced by local dialects. This enhanced the bond between commercial and political elite separated by distant cities but united by their language, national identity, and status. Status is what they shared with those in other nations that may not speak their language. Whether it was across a border or an ocean, they knew they were dealing with another well-educated, wealthy man beaming with national pride just like them.

And with this growth in wealth and status came increased investment, bureaucracy, and debt in budding nation states. Infrastructure, civil and social services, and militaries were needed. Between 1830 and 1850, Russia’s expenditures grew 44 percent, 75 percent in America, and over 90 percent in Netherlands. All amidst the proliferation of print media in a local vernacular aimed to strengthen the bonds of a growing population of literate masses; imagined communities forged together in a shared belief of an illusory nation, identity, and an expected entrenched in-group allegiance to an irregularly shaped border drawn on a map by someone invested in securing it.

TRUST EMPATHY

The national borders of Ukraine were absorbed into the larger Soviet Union in 1944. The Dnieper River forms a natural east-west boundary that also divides ethnicities. Putin has strategically captured those cities in Ukraine that already have sizable ethnic Russian populations. These cities have a long history of bouncing back and forth between more ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ ruling nation states.

My brief version of this rich and complex history cannot be reduced to east versus west, good versus evil, or Russian versus Ukraine. And yet that’s what mass media does every single day. Our brains seek efficiency, our short attention spans lead us to crave easy answers – a team to root for, a nation to blame, a person to hate. An imagined community which to affiliate.

Whether it’s The Primary Chronicle of the early Rus, the dissemination of Gutenberg pressed books, invented languages, or mass-media pumping out sound bites they all share a common goal. They propagate propaganda from a group of selected, elected, or protected imperialists and (usually) capitalists invested in perpetuating, protecting, and expanding imagined nations. They speak, act, and plot on behalf of a group of diverse collections of people; portions of whom believe they share something in common, a common identity, an imagined community. Nationalists.

But another portion of whom see these imaginary nations as vacuous, illusory, and increasingly weakened by a growing global cyber-connected mass of humanity. They are introduced to, awakened by, ‘woke’ to the widespread voices of the historically squelched, discarded, sidelined, and suffering. Individual lives directly impacted by powerful, greedy, and imperialistic power brokers.

The three most dominant modern-day authors of nationalism, select sorcerers of imagined communities, and cunning cartographers of calculated cartesian colonies are China, Russia, and the United States.

Their influence can come in three flavors:

Formal geo-politics by academics, intellectuals, and think tanks. One example is The Pentagon’s New Map of 2004.

Practical geo-politics by politicians. For example, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ or Obama’s ‘world without weapons’ – a drone policy that targeted and killed innocent people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

Popular geo-politics by filmmakers, artists, and musicians. These geo-political messages target ordinary people in books as inert as Readers Digest or as overt as James Bond books and films. Not to mention the more obvious Captain America.

These catalysts of nationalism contain messages that create unhealthy biases in ways that only neuroscience can detect. Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau dedicated his academic and professional career to achieving peace in the world by understanding the negative effects of bias, often fed by governments through media, can have on behavior.

As an undergrad he worked as a counselor in Ireland with a non-profit that brought troubled youth riddled with the historic tensions of their Protestant and Catholic upbringing. After a week of successful trust building between these kids, the staff were patting themselves on their altruistic backs for a job well done.

And then, unexpectedly, a fight broke out between two boys. The next thing they knew all 129 kids were wailing on each other. He left that experience convinced he and his fellow counselors had somehow made their condition worse. He sought neuroscience to help him uncover the biological evidence behind what he experienced.

What Bruneau’s novel research techniques have revealed are three aspects of our intuition that we should evaluate with care, caution, and suspicion: trust, empathy, and dehumanization.

Trust: For the first time those Irish kids trusted each other despite their differences. But the instance that trust was broken betrayal set in and with it violence toward the perpetrator. The greater the trust, the greater the fall at the first sign of betrayal. Altruism isn’t always true nor is it always permanent.

Empathy: Having empathy is a prized virtue especially in intergroup conflict. Western media has clued into this. Muslim terrorists are portrayed as violent and selfish sociopaths who lack even an ounce of empathy for others. And yet the first woman Palestinian suicide bomber, Wafa Idris, was one of the most caring, sensitive, and selfless members of her community. She even trained as a volunteer medic. Bruneau discovered the measure of one’s empathy is not a predictor of violent behavior. But what is a consistently strong predictor is the gap between empathy for your own in-group relative to the empathy for the out-group.

Dehumanization: The sure fire way to reduce empathy for an out-group is to dehumanize them. History is ripe with nation states bombarding their imagined communities with images and words depicting their enemies as animals. As the British colonized Ireland they portrayed the Irish as monkeys. The Germans portrayed Jews as rats. The US pulled, and continue to pull, from a veritable zoo of animals to portray Japanese, Germans, Iranians, Mexicans…the list is embarrassingly long.

When the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran Mike Huckabee was quoted as saying, “I think we underestimate the radical nature of these animals who run Iran.” The accompanying graphic, presumably from Fox News, included an illustration of a sewer drain over Iran with insects streaming from it.

Bruneau used this occasion to conduct an online experiment. He presented Americans with a picture of the evolution of humans from the hunched chimpanzee to upright homo sapiens. Beneath it were three sliders; one for Americans, Europeans, and Iranians. He then asked them to slide the slider to the appropriate stage in evolution from animal to human for each group. Iranians fell 13 points shy of the reportedly 100% human Americans and Europeans.

He conducted similar experiments while people’s brains were being scanned by an MRI machine. When people were shown imagery of out-groups or people in social classes lower than their own, like the homeless, the same region of the brain was activated for those people as for animals.

But here’s the good news. Bruneau said he can find small sets people where these effects are minimized. They’re people whose occupations lead them to have empathy for out-groups. For example, Israeli peace activists brainwaves match those of Palestinians. They’re indistinguishable.

Bruneau discovered that just five minutes of explaining what happens in our brains is enough for people to shift their behavior toward empathy for members of an out-group. If you reveal the fact that bias exists in all of us, we’re motivated to overcome it.

As we continue to be inundated with words and images by academics, intellectuals, think tanks, politicians, pundits, broadcasters, artists, cartoonists, mapmakers and other creators of mass-media, be mindful of how they portray Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. Know that Russian, Ukrainian, American, and European political and commercial institutions have a vested interest in preserving their imagined communities.

Those representing the interest of the geo-political states of Russia, China, and the United States will, as always, be using dehumanizing tactics as a way to reduce empathy for members of out-groups while boosting empathy for their own in-groups. It’s this gap, Emile Bruneau warns, that we need to mind.

I feel pressure every day to take a side in this war, but I’m trying to resist. Putin must be stopped, that much I know. But if I must choose, I choose ordinary people and other members of our animal world. I choose empathy for the Russian mother whose son is being forced to commit crimes against humanity; empathy for the Jews throughout Ukraine who have experienced extermination attempts at the hands of both Russian and Ukrainian hate groups over the years; empathy for those fighting for their lives in Ukraine, seeking asylum in other lands, and the brave souls who continue to share real images and stories from a living hell brought on by yet another sociopathic imperialist.

I am suspicious of attempts by governments and corporations that ask me to trust them, to side with them, given centuries of betrayal. Yet I need government and companies to live a safe and comfortable life. And I need them to act on behalf of the living world and not imagined communities. I seek empathy for all creatures who feel depressed, suppressed, or oppressed by their political and commercial institutions, contained by their imaginary borders, and routinely manipulated through dehumanizing mass media propaganda that only serves to widen humanity’s collective empathy gaps.

It is believed that the Slavic people seeking peace in their land said to Rurik, 'Our land is great and rich, but there’s no order in it'. Those words have never been more true. Though, I suspect a Viking ruler lacked empathy for out-groups. But, then again, it was Christians who painted horns on the helmets of Norse sailors to dehumanize them as the devil.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

There’s talk of turning a nearby hotel into transitional housing for the homeless. Everyone agrees the county needs to address the homeless crisis, but they never imagined the solution would impact them. What is it about people that makes them reluctant to share their space with those who have been displaced and disgraced?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET OFF MY LAWN

I joke that Bellevue – once a sleepy Seattle suburb – will one day become the Manhattan to Seattle’s Brooklyn. If real estate prices are an indicator, it’s already happened. The median price of a Bellevue home is now $1.56 million compared to Manhattan’s $1.25. It’s even greater than San Francisco’s median price of $1.33 million. But San Fran’s own wealthy suburb, Sunnyvale, has a median price of $1.69 million which some believe will be eclipsed by Bellevue by the end of this summer.

The population in western Washington’s Puget Sound region has grown exponentially in the last 60 years – from 1.5 million people in 1960 to 4.3 million in 2020. King County, which includes, among others, Seattle, Bellevue, and Kirkland, is just one of five counties in the country to add more than 300,000 people in the last ten years.

These two factors, record high home values and exponential population growth, has created a housing and homelessness crisis. King County estimates “about 40,800 people in 2020 and 45,300 people in 2019 experienced homelessness at some point in the year.” It prompted the creation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Their “mission is to significantly decrease the incidence of homelessness throughout King County, using equity and social justice principles.” The organization is led by Marc Dones.

Dones recently spoke at a U.S. Congressional hearing on “Addressing Challenges in Serving People Experiencing Homelessness.” Dones talked about how prior investments “have been over focused on service systems” and not on actually housing the homeless. They said, “it simply doesn’t matter how many social workers attend to a person’s needs…if we don’t have anywhere for them to go.”

They continued,

“homelessness disproportionately impacts people of color as a direct result of this country’s history of racialized exclusion from housing. While Black people represent only 12% of the general population, we routinely make up 30 – 40% (or more) of the homelessness population. Native people, who make up only 1% of the general population, often make up 3 – 6% of the population experiencing homelessness.”

“Homelessness is an economic issue. It’s about not having the money to pay the rent.”, Dones said. It’s long been a problem, but Dones is calling for the county to respond as if it is a crisis. They recommend acquiring and repurposing hotels and motels. Dones says, “it’s critical to double down on supporting communities to engage in this work now, to rapidly online housing and shelter options that can bring people inside.”

One such acquisition the county is considering is a La Quinta Inn that sits right on the border of Kirkland and Bellevue. It’s conveniently located near a major highway onramp to Seattle, close to a transit hub, and has easy access to bike paths. But it’s also next to a handful of daycares, private schools, and affluent, predominantly White, neighborhoods.

It’s rumored one of the La Quinta employees leaked the news the county was considering the purchase. The Kirkland City Manager was forced to issue a public statement ahead of the typical public review process. As you might imagine, it exploded. Parents of children who’s kids attend nearby schools became terrified of the thought of homeless people being housed next to their kids. Area residents fumed over what this might do to their neighborhoods and home values. Over 3,000 people signed a petition opposing the purchase. Others expressed gratitude that the county was finally acting on the crisis and applauded Kirkland’s willingness to work with the county on making this location a success.

Most of the public comment I witnessed dwelled on drug use, gun violence, and sex offenders. These are legitimate concerns grounded in real fear that are not to be diminished. Alcoholism, domestic violence, and sex abuse can all increase the risk of becoming homeless, but they can also be introduced and perpetuated because of homelessness. People can also turn to alcohol and drugs in the lead up to loosing a job or a home. Substance abuse can become a means of numbing the pains of living on the street. The bodily discomfort of sleeping on the ground, the mental anguish that comes with being ignored or shamed by society, and the physical and cognitive stress that comes with increased vulnerability to crime and violence would make anyone seek comfort from drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, one 2021 study reveals how “homeless youths frequently engage in survival sex as a means to get their basic needs met…The literature suggests that coercion, economic necessity, substance use, and having friends and peers involved in survival sex are key factors...” The researcher concludes that solutions should not only focus on getting these youth trauma-informed care and treatments for substance abuse, but also jobs and to “help secure transitional or stable housing.”

It's what leads Marc Dones to stress,

“The reality is that every day we allow someone to experience homelessness, the harder it will be for us to connect them with the resources they need.”

Homelessness in America increased notably in the early 80s. In 1983 there was a sudden and dramatic increase in homelessness after the 1981-82 recession. It resulted in the formation of the Emergency Food and Shelter Program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It specifically calls for "sensitivity to the transition from temporary shelter to permanent homes and attention to the specialized needs of homeless individuals with mental and physical disabilities and illness and to facilitate access for homeless individuals to other sources of services and benefits."

Long time Urban Institute researcher Martha Burt was asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the program in the early 80s. She said it was too convenient to blame the recession alone for this increase. Others pointed to the Reagan administration policies that cut funding for social services and mental healthcare facilities that were more abundant in the 1970s. But she resisted attempts to pin causes on any one single factor. She said,

“The causes of homelessness include structural factors, personal factors, and public policy. Most important, homelessness is associated with poverty and the accompanying inability to afford housing…”

She found the housing problem fell into two buckets: One, some cities simply have a housing shortage. Two, those with sufficient housing have units that are too expensive. Those who can’t make rent or mortgage payments typically exhibit physical, mental, addictive, educational, or social disabilities and deficits. This makes them more vulnerable than the rest of the population. She found this to be a “failure of social and mental health support programs, and the absence of any coordinated efforts that include government housing resources.”

After 40 years of continually increasing homelessness, King County is finally trying heed her advice and are coordinating efforts with city governments and private parties to provide government housing resources. We may actually be on a path to bringing relief to victims of homelessness – to our King County neighbors who are suffering and vulnerable. So why are so many Kirkland and nearby Bellevue residents insistent on casting themselves as suburban victims of a government that is attempting to solve an urban problem everyone admits we have?

Is it because these people believe their suburban space is being invaded by what they perceive to be strictly urban problems? The homeless and homelessness are both undesirable elements of society that many see as an urban problem. Modern suburbia was invented as a place nearby desirable urban resources but detached from ugly urban realities. But it wasn’t always that way.

MY SPACE

The word suburb comes from Latin: sub- ‘near to’ + urb ‘city’. Early suburbs were areas outside the walls of cities that hemmed in the privileged and weeded out those engaged in undesirable, polluting, dangerous, and agricultural pursuits. By 17th century England, especially around London, the suburbs were considered “inferior, debased, and licentious”. A suburban sinner was slang for “loose woman, prostitute.” In 1613 Shakespeare wrote, “There’s a trim rabble let in, are all these your faithfull friends o’ th’ Suburbs?”

In the United States suburbs began appearing in the 1820s as ‘borderlands’. Then by 1850 they became picturesque enclaves in response to the ill-effects of the industrial age. That prompted the expansion and development of rural land connected by rail called ‘streetcar buildouts’ in 1870. Then came Sears and Roebuck ‘mail-order’ homes that resulted in ‘self-built’ suburbs starting in 1900. By 1940 mass-produced ‘sitcom’ suburbs emerged which were accelerated by freeway and highway expansion. This allowed for faster commuting in private vehicles from developments far from urban cores creating the ‘edge nodes’ of the 1960s. And by the 1980s suburbs stretched into the ‘rural fringes’.

Each of these periods of suburban development were catalyzed by responses to the conditions the previous periods created. Each sought to escape the other. The last three periods of which were aided by federal subsidies like the home mortgage interest deduction. But these schemes locked out poor people and especially people of color and other ethnic and religious minorities. Meanwhile, local governments and private developers created restrictive zoning laws and covenants that dictated what kind of homes could be built and who could live in them. Those unqualified were confined to urban regions and systematically blocked from living in the suburbs. The effects are alive today.

Black home ownership in the Puget Sound has declined from 36% in 2000 to 30% today. Even in once segregated areas of Seattle Black home ownership is down as increasing housing prices force them further from the area. But there are only so many places they can go.

In 1990, in response to ever expanding suburban developments in the ‘rural fringes’, the state passed a Growth Management Act that curtailed further conversion of rural land into yet another suburb. As the population increases in an area restricted spatially, it puts pressure on building more housing on existing land. But zoning laws in single family neighborhoods restrict duplexes, triplexes, or even small apartments and condos from being built. As a result, problems once contained to urban areas, like homelessness, spill over into these neighborhoods and surrounding suburban areas.

When Seattle created their first suburb, they annexed a remote area around an algae plumed lake called Green Lake. Some Seattle residents fumed that officials would waste resources on such a remote area. Meanwhile, others were eager to escape an increasingly bustling Seattle for a shiny new suburb to the north. No one today would recognize or regard Green Lake as a suburb. Most Green Lake home owners would scoff at the accusation they live in a suburb! But they’re also scoffing at their homeless neighbors residing in the tents pitched in the popular park that surrounds it. A plight they could have never imagined.

Nor could residents of Bellevue and Kirkland imagine transitional homeless accommodations in their backyards. Many chose to live in the suburbs because they feared aspects of city life, like the homeless. Some of those same people also fear those who look, pray, or act different from them. They bristle at the thought of them becoming ‘their’ neighbors, frequenting ‘their’ stores, and walking ‘their’ sidewalks. Choosing to live nearby the city also meant living apart from ‘those’ people. They thought, “Give me my space, because this is my place.”

This distinction between space and place is vague practically and linguistically. Space requires context and can shift in granularity from a place on a shelf to my place in the universe. But for the purpose of this essay, let’s stick to the dictionary of geography. It offers a space-oriented definition of place that says they are spaces “’organized into places often thought of as bounded settings in which social relations and identity are constituted’”.

These relations and identities are shaped over time. Kirkland and Bellevue, as prime examples, were created as White suburbs of Seattle especially after the timber, steel, and coal industries dried up. But even housing for these workers were segregated. It’s now unlawful to segregate suburbs, but zoning restrictions and property values still create ‘bounded settings’ that indirectly create and maintain certain ‘social relations and identity’ found in that definition of ‘place’. A place that historically and still predominantly centers on exclusionary White culture – a culture currently being challenged by undeniable shifting demographics.

The Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says places are “archives of fond memories.” “’To know the place’”, he says, “’is to know the past.’” The Canadian geographer Edward Relph says places are “’the present expressions of past experiences and events and of hopes for the future.’” Tuan says, “’it is only the repetition of experiences that turn[s] space into place.’”

This repetition enhances memories that also serve a spatial cognitive function – orientation and navigation. Our memory forms cognitive maps that not only organize and arrange components of the environment in our mind, but also the ordered pattern in which they come together to get us from point A to B. These relative locational assignments of places are triggered by memories and help cement these divisions between urban and suburban spaces. For suburban dwellers, homeless encampments become physical geographic landmarks ‘over there’ relative to ’here’. That space is their place over there and this space is my place over here.

An uncomfortable interaction with a homeless person in a specific geographical location can form a memory that gets cataloged as a landmark. These experiences give meaning to places. We want to be distanced from locations formed by negative experiences while seeking safety, security, and comfort in places shaped by positive experiences. In the book, Sense of Place, Fritz Steele writes,

“’place is created by the setting combined with what the person brings to it. In other words, to some degree, we create our own places; they do not exist independently of us.’”

LANDING IN A PEACEFUL PLACE

The geographer’s John Agnew and James Duncan highlight “three major elements of place:

locale, where the social relations are constituted;

location, which is the geographic areas…that frame the localized social actions and networks;

and sense of place, which is defined as the ‘local structure of feeling.’”

One of the ways to structure feelings of place is by shaping the social relations of a given locale. One way to do this is for local governments to pass ordinances that shape the environment through law. It’s what the geographer Susan Massey calls “politicized space” and it’s what redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and rigged home mortgage agreements were all about.

The Civil Rights Law of 1964 makes it illegal to create such outwardly biased laws and legal agreements. But intentional and unintentional biases still exists. To help make progress on more equitable housing, the state of Washington signed into a law last year a provision requiring cities to eliminate barriers that could provide emergency or transitional housing. It also requires by law that cities incorporate solutions to affordable housing in their city’s comprehensive plans.

But local politicians and staff intent on perpetuating a certain “culture of place” find creative ways to do so. Medina appears to be once such city. Medina is a sleepy little wooded enclave abutting Lake Washington just west of downtown Bellevue. It’s home to some of the region’s super-wealthy, including Bill Gates. The median price for a home in Medina is $7.15 million.

On Valentine’s Day last week, the city of Medina issued a memo that included draft revisions to some of their zoning ordinances in response to the new state law. While they can’t outright restrict attempts to build transitional or affordable housing, they can limit them. It’s still debatable as to whether this language will be deemed too restrictive. One proposal says “permanent supportive and transitional housing facilities are permitted”, but under certain conditions.

The list of conditions is long but here are a few,

The number of “standard dwelling units” on a given piece of land must be limited…presumably to one given the strict single family home zoning laws.

The units cannot exceed a maximum of “eight residents at any one time, plus up to four resident staff.”

Facilities must be a “24-hour a day facility where rooms or units are assigned to specific residents for the duration of their stay” with a minimum stay of 72 hours.

Meals, laundry, and social programs “are limited to the residents and not available for drop in use by non-residents.”

No facilities “may be located within half a mile of another” facility “calculated as a radius from the property lines of the site.”

I can’t help but imagine small high-security pseudo prisons as I read these restrictions. But on the positive side, it’s a start. And a big step for a city like Medina.

I don’t know who’s crafting these words but I can imagine they’re keen to uphold a certain suburban nostalgia of an idyllic, bucolic, and affluent reserve. But let’s not forget this is a plot of land stolen from Indigenous people, raped of old growth forest for timber, tilled to grow crops for Seattleites, and then carved up by developers to build a golf course and fancy homes a short distance across the lake from the Emerald City. An itty bitty bit of pretty nearby but distant from the nitty-gritty city.

In the Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography, Pragya Agarwal, summarizes that,

“Place is inherently spatial. However place is not static, and time cannot be detached from place.” She adds, “Not only is time associated with change in the physical aspects of place, but also the meanings of place are variable and dynamic…”

The separation of place and space is inherently vague and ever changing. We are all experiencing morphing societal normality, increasing population reality, forcing an adaptation of our spatial capacity. Our emotions are informed by our experiences, shaped by the interactions we have with people and place. As Herb Simon says,

“The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

It's true nobody dreamed the Kirkland La Quinta would become a single occupancy transitional home to hundreds of victims of homelessness. But then again, nobody born into this world dreams of becoming homeless. For all of us to get comfortable, we should consider the patterns of suburban sprawl and recognize there is no escaping the complex and bitter realities that surround us.

It’s the yearning to escape that these nearby places take shape. But suburban formation breeds urban damnation. Spatial attempts to avoid distress, leads to contempt of places of homelessness. Let’s drop the pretense and nostalgic purity, and gift our neighbors with housing security.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Hints of loosening COVID restrictions are wafting through the air like a contagious air-born disease. Does this mean people will be heading back to work? Some can’t wait, some would rather not, and others would love to have such a luxury to consider. Is remote work here to stay? And if so, are we sure it’s healthy?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMFORTABLE BUSINESS

He had just returned to the office for the first time in two years. I asked him what it was like. I wondered how many people were there with him. He responded, “Let me put it this way, when I pulled into the parking garage I counted maybe six cars.”

I was having lunch with a couple Microsoft friends recently. Our conversation started there and then turned to the current hiring climate in the tech industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a dizzying array of startups are all vying for talent. They’re offering insane starting salaries, stock grants, and signing bonuses. But there seems to be one non-negotiable with tech workers – flexible working arrangements.

Before we knew it, the three of us were talking about what cities would be best to live in knowing employers don’t really care where you live. But even among well-paid tech workers, cost of living became the most salient factor in choosing an ideal city. Rising real estate prices pose the biggest challenge, but optimal internet speeds were up there too.

One friend, who had recently left Microsoft for a startup, mentioned the downsides of remote work. She said it’s really hard getting to know a team you’ve never met in person and even harder for them to get to know you. She senses judging and fields odd questions that aren’t about her, but about her role and what she’s being asked to do. And broad communication from their CEO seems to always fall flat. She said he comes across as disingenuous, less human, and overly focused on short term deadlines and quarterly results. Reflecting on our time working together she’s said she really valued the ‘non work’ interactions that happened on our team. We did feel more like a ‘family’ than a ‘squad.’

Two years of disrupted work practice has led to a combination of ‘the great shuffle’ – people swapping companies in search of higher pay and benefits, ‘the great displacement’ – rising cost of living involuntarily pushing lower paid workers from their homes, or ‘the great resignation’ – cost cutting companies incenting early retirements or aging workers opting to retire early. It’s left companies wondering if this is a phase or if people have habituated to increased flexibility. The CEO for Stitch Fix, an personal apparel shopping service, said they’re seeing customers looking to replace a third of their wardrobe with what they call “Business Comfortable” clothes. She says their customers want to stay working in sweats, but want them to look more ‘professional’ when on Zoom calls.

Cities and local businesses are impacted too. Can they count on workers coming back in droves to commercial districts buying breakfast, lunch, coffee, and drinks? Or even haircuts. Nikita Shimunov owns a barbershop in Manhattan where he once saw 50 to 60 men pass through his shop in a day. It’s trickled to 10 to 15 customers daily and he’s been forced to reduce staff by half. His financial future hinges on the empathy of his landlord.

Many cities rely on these tax revenues to fill their coffers. But if masses of people stop going in to work, it has huge implications on urban planning. Microsoft is wrapping up the final touches on a massive new corporate campus in Redmond at a time when many, maybe even most, may remain working remotely. It’s next to a brand new light rail stop planned and designed to serve thousands that now may never come.

Not all flexible work arrangements are the same or even desirable. Flexibility can introduce or amplify home and work conflicts for individuals, teams, companies, cities, and regions. Technology, especially mobile technology, has been blurring work and home boundaries for decades. What does it mean to achieve a work/life balance when the boundary disappears? And for those with young children, the burden of parenting, home schooling, and working can become overwhelming. And given our social norms, that burden largely, and unfairly, falls on women.

Women are also unfairly expected to conform to certain traditional workplace ideals that focus on physical appearance and presence. For example, wrestling with a screaming toddler on a Zoom call with un-brushed hair, no makeup, and no sleep can make some people judge her as ‘not being professional’. And come review time, how might some managers reflect on these interactions when it comes time to hand out pay increases or offer new opportunities for growth? Meanwhile men get to poke fun at each other for wearing pajamas and having bed head.

I had a remote employee years ago and my biggest fear was that she seemed to always be available. Remote workers can sometimes over communicate or stretch their availability. They can over compensate for not being physically present. But being always ‘on’, ‘available’, and ‘connected’ can lead to burnout. These pressures, self-inflicted or induced, can also lead to exhaustion and mental duress. Some anthropologists believe humans did not evolve as we did by working even eight hours a day, let alone 12 or more. It doesn’t necessarily lead to optimal team performance either.

Individual suffering can spill over to co-workers which creates even more stress and burnout. Team members can become withdrawn which exasperates feelings of isolation and loneliness. Quiet, more subdued, colleagues can also feel excluded or overlooked. Some choose to turn their cameras off to combat feelings of personal intrusion or surveillance. Or maybe they’re hiding their bed head. This can ultimately lead to job dissatisfaction prompting them to seek another team or company.

I know from experience how attrition can spread like an infectious infliction as those who leave prompt others to do the same. Perhaps ‘the great shuffle’ we’re experiencing isn’t just people running toward opportunity, but impunity.

IS FLEXIBILITY THE FIX?

Flexible working arrangements can take on a variety of flavors and can be called many things. Even before the pandemic, Microsoft had always had what they called ‘flex-time’. It simply means your manager doesn’t really care when you come and go so long as you get your work done. But these days flexible working arrangements can be called names like “remote work”, “tele-commuting”, “tele-work“, “mobile work”, or “virtual work”. There are also those who are “self-employed”, “on-call”, “on-demand”, or working in “shared spaces”.

A group of business school researchers at the University of Reading in the UK just published a literature review on research focused on flexible work practices. They came up with a taxonomy that clumps arrangements into four categories:

Remote, Spatiotemporal, On-demand, and Self-directed. Remote work is like the COVID caused ‘work from home’ many are experiencing today. Spatiotemporal work includes shared spaces, ‘touch down spaces’, ‘office clubs’, and even ‘job sharing’. On-demand work is for workers who are on-call like Uber or Grubhub drivers. Self-directed workers own their own companies, freelance, or contract.

Each of these come with their own advantages and disadvantages. Working from home, or Remote work, is what most people think of when considering flexible working arrangements. Products like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and a growing list of alternatives, make it easy to ‘plug-in’ remotely. Like, for example, joining a meeting from wherever you may be.

I was on a walk one summer morning before sunrise in some nearby woods when I had to join a meeting scheduled in another time zone. So I sat on the limb of a fallen tree over looking a wooded ravine and took part in the meeting as the sun rose. Halfway through, however, the limb snapped and down I went. Good thing the camera was off. And, yes, I was muted.

But these remote work products, including Slack, Teams, Zoom and others, allow for both synchronous and asynchronous communication. This can lead to days and evenings filled with either a meeting, interruptions from notifications and alerts, or the dreaded FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – a fear that addicts people to be constantly checking and dealing with email, channels, or text message threads. In other words, constantly working.

This invariably infringes on time spent with family and friends. These prolonged stresses can drive some people to withdrawal and become isolated. And for those who seek control and domination over others, like manic micro-managers, it means they can wield these real-time, always on, communication tools like a weapon. And the quicker people respond to their seemingly psychopathic needs, the more fervent their interruptions become. It’s a cycle that can leave people anxious, depressed, and looking to get away. Those feeling violated in their own homes sometimes seek a shared workspace elsewhere.

Sharing work spaces over different times and places is what researchers call Spatiotemporal work. This style of working hit the news a few years ago when the shared workspace company WeWork failed its initial public offering (IPO). Started in 2008 as GreenDesk – an “eco-friendly coworking space” – it became WeWork in 2010 with an infusion of cash from a wealthy real estate developer. By 2014 it was “the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York”. They grew too quickly and imploded in their 2019 IPO, refinanced and went public in 2021, and are now leveraging rising COVID driven real estate prices to recoup some of their losses. While their memberships still remain low, the pandemic has created a growing need for humans to come together physically to collaborate and bond. Especially as team members are scattered across regions, countries, and the globe.

Microsoft, like many organizations, have long used ‘off sites’ as temporary ways to pull teams together for a day or more – a kind of spatio-socio-temporal team building field trip. Some I attended were more sashay to build cachet than work with a perk, but some companies are now using these excursions as more routine means of encouraging more physical collaboration. New software tools like Cloudfare make it easier for managers to schedule and arrange gatherings of geographically dispersed employees in places like AirBnb’s, employee’s homes, or even existing offices – an on-site off-site.

Some companies are even allocating money to teams so they can book these off-sites themselves as a way to bring team members together physically – even if it’s just for a picnic, a walk in a park, or a bike ride. Some companies are even buying apartments or hotel suites as more permanent ‘off-site’ locations. The Wall Street Journal reports that one 26 person startup, Aidentified,

“rents two corporate apartments, one in Boston and one near San Francisco, in lieu of offices, so employees can gather when needed. Each apartment is equipped with a conference table, seating areas, a kitchen and bedrooms where out-of-town employees can stay.” The 3,000-square-foot, three bedroom, multi-level Boston apartment has an outdoor terrace overlooking the Boston Public Library.

If this sounds extravagant, it is. Companies rich with cash can often become embarrassments of riches. This competitive hiring climate exists within a grossly disproportionate wealth disparity that compounds these excesses as each company seeks to out do the other in attempts to lure and retain employees. But these off-sites need not always be entirely self-serving. The nonprofit Forté Foundation, a women’s business leadership advocacy group, took some time during their three-day off-site in Austin, Texas to build bikes for a local nonprofit…in between pamper parties, luxury lunches, and extravagant excursions of course.

For those laboring behind the scenes to prop these posh parades of privilege, it’s hard to see any of this as actually being ‘work’. Many managers funding these fun fests often wonder the same thing. In order for managers to know whether these remote employees are actually working or not requires more software. Task management and planning tools like Confluence, Trello, Project, Planner, or Basecamp let managers keep an eye on task completion, deadlines, and engagement. But this can make some employees feel like they’re being watched, scheduled, and controlled. The opposite of flexible, but still far from indentured manual labor most of the employed world endures.

AN ANT ANTEDOTE

Shared work, space, and calendars are sold and celebrated by the software industry as new cultures of openness and inclusion, but not everyone is equally comfortable sharing their locations and schedules. Others find the overhead required to fill out forms, schedule tasks, and report progress inhibits their ability to actually be productive. And when tasks are shared among team members, it’s not always clear who was responsible for doing what. Often times the bulk of the work falls on those most conscientious or those seeking glory and control. Managers are then stuck with no clear way of evaluating contributions fairly. That is if they can get employees to actually fill out their forms in the first place.

In addition to rogue, power hungry, and individualistic workaholics dominating a team, sporadic sharing work practices centered around short-term deliverables can also lead to groupthink. In an effort to complete tasks, individuals can be prone, even encouraged, to taking the path of least resistance instead of finding more creative and effective solutions that may be out of the norm. These can all have financial implications for companies as product quality may suffer, or those less geared for these sharing cultures and workspaces could suffer a loss in compensation or opportunities.

The results of that UK literature review revealed that researchers have been trying to tease apart the impacts of flexible work practices since the emergence of so-called ‘Smart Cities’ and ‘Sharing Culture’ around 2010. Within a year social science researchers were already looking into aspects of social isolation. By 2012 themes of gender inequality and work-family conflict entered the scene. Then came financial costs, lack of visibility, blurred spaces, and health impairment. And then, after COVID came to town in 2019, these topics blew up. And by last year, 2021, the themes of dispersed spaces and employer-employee tensions were added to the decade old list of concerns.

These researchers observed that, “while almost all the studies have explored both the positive and negative consequences of technology use, none have examined the downsides of changes in (or to) technological platforms on employee behavior and work.” They were surprised to find that

“researchers have not explicitly focused on the changes in traditional hierarchies and the dynamic nature of manager–employee relationships as a result of technology-enabled [Flexible Work Practice].”

They say existing research aims to understand technology as a facilitator of flexible work “thus perpetuating the instrumental view of technology.”

Given this finding, they call on a shift in perspective. Instead of just explaining the role technology is playing in enabling flexible work practices, seek to describe the social force it plays in shaping our behavior which in turn shapes our networks of relationships. They wrote, “Given the active role that technological platforms continue to play in organizational life, other conceptualizations of technology are required…” One theory they suggest leveraging is Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography describes Actor-Network Theory as a

“unifying thread [that] constitutes the central line of connection to the field of human geography.”

It’s an ever evolving social theory that argues

“all manner of things (as many as you can imagine) are variously entangled together in specific formations or networks in the making of the world.”

As I stand here in Kirkland, Washington on the 18th birthday of my son and daughter, I can look back over those nearly two decades and see the role technology has played in bringing that central line of connection in human geography into focus. The combination of the internet, mobile technologies, and geo-political globalization have connected an assortment of ever expanding networks of people and place. And then, in the final three years of my kid’s high school existence I can see how that technology has both granted them needed flexibility but also robbed them of social opportunities.

But despite it all, they have flourished. And yet not all kids have – nor have adults. As affluent, mostly white, remote workers enjoy their ‘flexible working arrangements’ – like next day Amazon orders, late night GrubHub ice cream deliveries, and TaskRabbit handy man assignments – those ‘on-demand’ workers on which they rely suffer their own perplexing paradoxes. While ‘on-demand’ work has supplanted needed income for many struggling to make a living, it’s also taken a toll on their health.

Because laws lag in defining and representing the rights of these workers, they’re prone to exploitation by corporate overlords and overly demanding and consuming customers. It can lead to job related and economic anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. And because they operate alone, without a tightknit team – a family – it leaves ample time to reflect on their plight. They can become preoccupied with how society, their government, their companies regard, treat, and abuse them.

As I walked home from that lunch with my friends last Friday, I looked around my little town of Kirkland. It’s been shaped by nearly a century and a half of people – actors – enrolling, transforming, and interacting within nested networks of natural and engineered environments. Kirkland was intended to be a steel town. Peter Kirk’s vision was for it to be “The Pittsburgh of the Northwest.” The Peter Kirk building is now the Kirkland Arts Center. Ole Pete could never have imagined any of this. Just as we never imagined we’d be forever shaped by a measly virus.

I looks like my next lunch with friends will likely be unmasked. Washington is currently planning for mask free restaurants at the end of March – more flexible eating arrangements will soon be meeting flexible working arrangements. I’ll be curious to see whether more Softies return to the Redmond campus over time or whether the future of their work remains primarily remote. It’s hard to tell without a string of caveats.

This tiny microbe has disrupted an entire global actor-network. Just how much our behavior has been changed permanently is unknown, but there’s no going back to some semblance of ‘normal’. The future is as uncertain as predictions for how far into the future the global pandemic will continue to circulate. As Dr. Heidi Brown, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona said recently,

“Until the epidemiologists can tell you what’s going to happen in the future without massive uncertainty caveats, then we’re still in an epidemic-type situation.”

Hold on to your hats, and your masks, we’re all about to learn there is not such thing as a free lunch.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

The Olympics are in full swing. I admit I’m staying up later than I probably should be, but I’m a sucker for the Olympics. Yes it’s strange seeing a white strip of snow down a brown windy hill or watching big air competitions against a dystopian industrial waste site, but hey, that’s Beijing! But maybe I’m being too judgmental. Surely there’s more than meets the eye.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GU GLUE

Jubilant in her successful landing, the Chinese skier put on the brakes spraying snow over the blue padded barriers as the camera centered her in the frame. She had just landed her first jump in the Olympics’ big air competition. She pulled off her goggles and beamed a big, immaculate toothy smile into the camera. My first thought was, “This girl is not Chinese.” I had never heard of Eileen Gu, but that was about to change.

She had just landed a right double 1440. That’s four full gravity defying rotations in the air after descending a hill 20 stories high and then launching off a curved ramp pointed to the sky. She was the first woman to land a similar double cork 1440 just two months prior. That prompted the French skier, Tess Ledeux, to counter in January by being the first woman to land a 1620 – four and a half rotations.

Ledeux managed to land that same jump in her opening run at the Olympics in Beijing earlier this week and held the top spot until Gu’s third and final jump. While Gu was at the top waiting her turn, her mom called from the stands at the bottom of the hill. Yan Gu introduced Eileen to skiing in Lake Tahoe where she sometimes worked as a ski instructor. She told her daughter to play it safe and stick to the 1440. Eileen responded,

“Mom, executive call here, vetoed. I am going to make the 16, and you are going to deal with it.”

After visualizing the trick when her eyes closed, arms swaying, shoulders jerking, like a dog running in their sleep, she aimed her skis down the slope. High in the sky, confident in her 1620 launch, Gu grabbed the bottom of her ski – a safety grab – a trick she had never attempted before this run. She landed triumphantly and the judges launched her into first place. As she threw her fist in the air in celebration it was rewarded with a loud cheer from the Chinese fans sprinkled throughout the stadium. Her mom, of course, being one of them.

Yan Gu was born in Shanghai and grew up in Beijing. The Olympics are in her home town. Her mom, Eileen’s grandmother, still lives there. When Yan was in her twenties, she did what many other Chinese students did, and continue to do. She sought an education in America. After receiving a degree in chemistry from Peking University in Beijing, she enrolled in a master’s program in biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University in the late 80s. She went on to be a research associate at Rockefeller University before going on to earn an MBA at Stanford in 1994. She now works at an investment firm in San Francisco where she specializes in Chinese investments.

The director of an extreme outdoor sports high school in Mt. Hood Oregon, Mike Hanley, said “Yan is very pleasant but one of the most intense human beings I have ever met in my life. She smiles and tells you how great you are. But then you find out, after the fact, what the requests are. She loves her daughter and wants her daughter to get priority.”

Getting priority attention from coaches and trainers in America means paying more money. Extorsion? Maybe. But money talks. Yan, a single parent, was willing to pay whatever it took to secure the right training to match her daughter’s ability and her own drive to insure her child’s success. Not many parents of talented kids can afford to do this without striking deals with big name extreme sports brands, like Red Bull or Burton, on behalf of their kids. Child labor? Maybe. But it pays the bills.

But Yan has been off the hook for paying much at all since her daughter started striking her own lucrative modelling and endorsement contracts. She’s was a millionaire before hitting 18. She not only landed Red Bull, but Cadillac, Apple’s Beats by Dre headphones, Tiffany’s, Louis Vuitton and Victoria’s Secret. Those are some big names. But in China she’s also paid to represent the Bank of China, China Mobile, a milk company, and Starbucks of China. She is estimated to command $2.5 million per deal. With over 20 modelling, spokesperson, and endorsement deals she must be worth over $50 million dollars at age 18. And that was before she won the gold medal.

In addition to being beautiful, talented, and rich, she is also smart. She scored 1580 on the SAT out of a perfect score of 1600, was the first to graduate early at her private high school in the Bay area, and will attend Stanford next fall. Oh, and did I mention she plays the piano and was one of the top distance runners in the state of California before turning her attention to the Olympics? She is what overly competitive parents the world over wish their kids to be. Sorry kids of demanding parents, Eileen has set the bar high. And for Eileen, good luck living through the onslaught of Western chauvinism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Not to mention a healthy dose of wealth, ability, and beauty resentment and jealousy.

Gu decided, supposedly with her mother’s urging, to compete for China three years ago when she turned 15. She had grown up fluidly splitting her time between China and Chinese language and culture and the U.S. and American culture. As she said in a press conference this week,

“in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”.

But reporters, mostly male, weren’t satisfied with the answer. The English sports reporter, Oliver Brown, thought that line was “a cute line, but sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.” Gu refuses to indulge reporters on admitting whether or not she renounced her U.S. citizenship or whether the Chinese government made an exception for the girl the Chinese media call “Snow Princess”. Insistence by Western media, and many others, on making a bi-racial teenage woman pick one side or the other will likely not relent any time soon.

REPRESENTATION ORIENTATION

I’m reflecting on my own initial reaction to learning Gu wasn’t representing America. My first thought, like many, is she’s a product of American culture, education, coaching, and lavish ski schools and resorts. Other athletes are saying the same thing. Jen Haduk, a Winter X Games gold medalist and a former member of the U.S.A Women’s team, told the New York Post that

“[Eileen Gu] became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China…I think she would be a different skier if she grew up in China. This makes me sad.”

Eileen Gu admits the access she had to snow, coaching, and opportunity allowed her to pursue her dreams and potential. In an interview on NBC, they show her giving a speech in middle school on the impact Title Nine had on women and sport. She also reveals in that interview that every trick she learned in America she took to China where throngs of young Chinese girls were eager to learn from her.

A Chinese-American girl fluent in Mandarin teaching Chinese girls to do tricks on skis also helped her become the athlete she is. Eileen Gu would not have been the skier she is had she grown up in China, but Chinese girls will now grow up trying to become the skier she is. And you can bet the Chinese government will see to it they have what they need to succeed. In fact, some believe it was the money and support China offered Eileen Gu three years ago that may have contributed to her decision to represent that country. An offer the American team I’m sure could not match. Another Yan Gu deal made on behalf of her daughter? Perhaps. But you can bet other parents of bi-racial or dual citizenship kids would be tempted to do the same.

Eileen Gu was born with rare athletic abilities. She was also born fearless. It was one of the reasons her mother made sure she had ski lessons. She could see as a young child that her daughter lacked the kind of fear most of us have skiing fast down a mountain of snow and ice. After suffering a concussion as a young teenager on a practice run, an injury that put her out of commission for a week, she couldn’t wait to get back to jumping. These natural abilities cannot be taught regardless of where you grow up.

And we shouldn’t be so quick to diminish Eileen’s lived experience as a Chinese-American routinely visiting her family in China. While it has only accounted for five or six years of the 18 she’s been alive, it’s undeniably part of who she is, what she does, how she thinks, and what she believes. But I, like so many others, didn’t consider that in my initial reaction and judgement of Eileen Gu. I jumped to seeing her as representing a country and only after did I question my reaction and come to see her as a human being.

As geographers Alan Latham and David Conradson wrote in 2003, even the field of human geography is “Dominated by an obsession with the politics of representation.” Little interest has historically been given to “considerations of the place, or the productiveness, of practice” by individual human beings.

By seeing Eileen Gu as Chinese-American, bi-racial, or dual citizen can lead to objectification and categorization. There is a growing understanding and recognition in the social sciences that race categories often lead to either feelings of fear or desire. For example, unkept asylum seekers crossing the border from Latin America may elicit fear leading many to want to kick them out. Meanwhile, a super-model, Chinese-American, Olympic gold medal athlete elicits a desire to claim her as ‘theirs’.

As we sit and watch Eileen Gu smile for the camera after performing death defying feats with sublime grace or see a magazine cover graced with her face, we are reduced to dwelling on her race. Those of us in the West have grown up being barraged with pictures, paintings, movies, comics, and text that portrays races different from our own in insufficient and often inaccurate ways.

For China and the Chinese it’s a form of Orientalism. The word Orient is derived from a Latin word oriēns which can mean anything originating from the East, including the sky, sun, or lands and people East of Europe. Orient was thought of as the East and it’s antonym, Occident, was thought of as the West.

This word and it’s denotations and connotations allowed Western scholars, writers, artists, and designers to divide the world between ‘us’, the West, and ‘them’ the East. The Orient was portrayed as a place far away with exotic customs, cultures, and people – ‘Other-than’ or ‘Other-worldly’; a place to be explored, conquered, and diminished. Consequently, its people were portrayed as ‘Others’ who were to be either ‘saved’, slaved, exploited, or killed. It’s a portrayal that continues to this day.

James Bond is the suave savior from the West who is shaken by exotic foreigners but stirred to action through acts of either violence or sex. And while we know it’s fiction, it’s filmed in a pseudo-authentic way that often includes a wink or a nod from Bond into the camera. Indiana Jones does the same thing. Steven Spielberg told it’s creator, George Lucas, it’s a “James Bond film without the hardware.”

MIND AND BODY EQUALITY

The late Jamaican-British sociologist, Stuart Hall led efforts beginning in the 1960s to include race and gender in the scholarship of cultural studies. He observed in 1993 that social scientists, including post-colonial geographers, continue to downplay the role text, images, and symbols play in how we relate to the representation of cultures foreign to Western tradition. He believed representation should be considered within a wider cultural context. Hall believed the

“processes of artistic production and ownership, use of media technologies, practices of distribution, government legislation and regulation, as well as different forms of audience consumption across the globe, influence how an image is ‘read’ and understood.”

For highly produced imagery like Bond films or pictures of Eileen Gu in an advertisement, there is an intent by the producer of the image to encode a particular message to the viewer. But how viewers then decode and interpret that message is as variable and complex as humanity itself. The geographical context that informs an individual consumer’s identity influences the meaning of that message.

The imagery in Bond Films or stylized photos of Gu also don’t provide a voice to the displaced or marginalized people that make up the bulk of these ‘foreign’ populations. The West can use the power of imagery to impose meaning which only perpetuates the idea that the West controls the rest. ‘We’ hold dominion over ‘them’. As geographer Anoop Nayak puts it,

“The power of whiteness to continually narrate the existence of racialised Others is a violent reminder of the privilege that comes with being located as the architects and inheritors of modernity.”

Eileen Gu just may be fashioning these Western media mechanisms into a weapon of her own. She has the potential to use her talent, intelligence, and good looks – and the dominant Western style media platforms – to give voice to those in China who do not. If we’re to believe Eileen Gu, she wants to inspire and empower young Chinese-born girls to use sport as a way to give them a voice.

She knows they don’t have Title Nine to help them in China, so she’s using her Chinese language skills and her individual beauty, elegance, intelligence, and grace as a substitute. All under a Chinese flag. She is using the media tools of traditional Western domination not to hush or misconstrue but to crush what oppresses young girls so they can see what they can do.

Eileen is outspoken and well spoken. She’s come out against increased Asian hate crime in America and supports the BLM movement. But she remains silent on human rights abuses in China. This really bothers people. Especially reporters.

Meanwhile Tesla sells more cars in China than anywhere in the world. Where are the calls for Elon Musk to speak out? Microsoft was the first software company allowed to open an office in China around the same time Eileen’s mom was coming to America. It remains a highly productive, innovative, and influential subsidiary for Microsoft. I’ve witnessed myself. I don’t see reporters demanding Satya Nadella or Bill Gates to come out against China. Eileen, just like Elon, Satya, and Bill, know that to do so means disadvantaging their chances for influence from inside China.

Could it be that these Western, mostly male, reporters only see Gu as a two-dimensional, bi-racial American girl? Are they put off by how she expertly and effortlessly dodges their questions? Are they frustrated they can’t dominate this woman, this girl, this Asian-American who can look and sound Western one moment and Chinese the next?

When the British reporter Oliver Brown writes how her well crafted and practiced line, “in the US, I’m American, and when I’m in China, I’m Chinese”, came across as ‘cute’ to him, is that not only condescending but patronizing, paternalistic, and misogynist? And did he not politicize, objectify, and perhaps ‘Orientalize’ her by insisting her words were “sadly impractical, for the simple reason that China does not recognise dual citizenship.”? There is nothing simple about any of this.

And am I guilty of doing the same when my first reaction was to judge her on her appearance without knowing anything about her, her life, her family, her culture, or her intentions?

Who knows what her real citizenship is. Maybe China turned a blind eye to their policy that refuses dual-citizenship. It’s a practical move on their part if it means they get a world renowned Snow Princess Chinese ambassador out of it. I wouldn’t put it passed Eileen and her mom to scheme and arrange such a deal. Her mom is a professional Chinese deal maker, after all. Just as Musk, Nadella, and Gates are. Who knows what arrangements these successful Western businessmen have with China, but you can bet they’re practical.

When the ski coach from Oregon – who knows a thing or two about dealing with Eileen and her mom – was pressed on what he thought of Eileen choosing to ski for China he said, “It’s a decision that seems practical and pragmatic, just like every decision she makes.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, a French aristocrat interested in the history and sociology of sport toured America and England learning about sports administration. His name was Pierre de Coubertin. He was particularly fascinated by rugby. He believed it best demonstrated how “organised sport can create moral and social strength” and how it could “help to set the mind and body in equilibrium”. As a former rugby player, I concur.

He took his learnings back home and with the help of the French government organized the first Olympic committee in 1894. By 1896 the first modern Olympic games took place in Athens. It attracted the largest contingent of international athletes of the time.

As I watch the remainder of the Olympics I’m trying to see through the media veils that distort and disorient portrayals of people. Instead of being just another American rooting for Americans, I’m marveling at the athletically gifted, courageous, and tenacious humans participating in ‘organized sports that have shaped their moral strength.’

Maybe if we all do that together we can also build social strength. Watching Eileen Gu twirl through the air while dodging the admonishing stare can be dizzying — and then some. But seeing her as a human first and an athlete second sets my mind and body in equilibrium.

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Hello Interactors,

While the media dwells on border disputes like Russia and Ukraine or Trump’s wall, COVID, climate change, and the global economy thumb their nose at territorial boundaries. Are these borders we obsess over even real or are they products of our imagination?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A CASTLE WITHOUT HASSLE

On Sunday I pulled the beast from the closet. It had been awhile. Probably too long. It pulls with a heaviness that always takes me by surprise. Its long neck, standing tall above its body, awkwardly slumped over my shoulder as I drug its head from the darkness. I walk down the hall with its neck strung out behind me tugging on its short, stout resistant body that pressed heavy with resistance.

I don’t know why we keep it. Nobody in the family likes it. It’s not that it eats incessantly; that’s why we got it. It’s more that it’s so damn heavy and awkward. No wonder we keep it in the closet longer than we should. But there’s only so much dust and dirt one can tolerate in a house. It was time to vacuum.

We tolerate a fair amount of dust in our house. Lazy? Maybe. Is it so bad that we let a little dust accumulate? As the comedian George Carlin once said,

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

I grew up, like many people I suppose, learning to have anxiety around dust accumulation. But I was raised Methodist and it was John Wesley, Mr. Methodism himself, who most likely coined the phrase, “cleanliness is next to godliness.” He had a thing about remaining clean. But this idea dates back to the Old Testament. Cleanliness for the Hebrew people wasn’t about the home, it was about the body. That’s how we got baptism, foot washing, hand washing, and, yes, circumcision. Either way, to be clean was to be pure.

By dragging this weighty, electrified, menace with its dust breathing head across floors, window sills, and furniture I am not only sucking up undesirables into a bag, I am purifying the home. And just to make sure these impurities don’t escape the menace of this machine it features a HEPA filter on its exhaust. Why do people feel the urge to purge these dusty hombres from our home?

There are practical reasons, I am sure, just as with washing our bodies. But it’s different with our homes. These unwanted microscopic interlopers have made their way inside our home and we want them outside our home. As they invade we become territorial. We sweep dust into a bin, under the rug, or out the door. There is a spatial differentiation to ‘cleansing’ the home of ‘undesirables’. Get out and stay out!

As a child, were you not allowed to take food into certain rooms? Do you take your shoes off at the door? How about, “No pets upstairs!” Growing up I had friends where entire living rooms were off limits to kids. Parents are known to issue all kinds of spatial regulations to their families. “Go to your room!” “Get out of the kitchen!” “Take it outside!”

But rooms can also house fond thoughts. Some of my best memories were in my basement. I played pool, the piano, and with trains. I watched home movies, made art, or pulled an Encyclopedia from the shelf and was transported to another world. I told this story to someone on a Zoom call last week and they leaned into the camera looking not at me but around me and asked, “And where are you now?” “In my basement”, I replied.

But not everyone has fond memories of their homes. If they had one. For victims of spousal and/or child abuse, or even slavery, recalling memories of home – or certain rooms in a home – brings on discomfort, anxiety, and pain. Response to that anguish varies by person.

The influential feminist author, professor, and social activist bell hooks (a pen name borrowed from her grandmother’s name Bell Blair Hooks and reduced to lower case out of deference) writes in her book Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics that black women, during her childhood in the south,

“constructed their homes as places of care, nurturing and retreat from a harshly racist society in which most of them also worked outside their own homes, in domestic service at the homes of white people.

Making their own home, hooks believed, however modest or temporary had ”radical potential” to regain “their ‘subjectivity’ (their personal human identities) in a society which tended to categorize them oppressively by gender and ethnicity as ‘women’ and ‘black’.”

This interpretation of and relationship to ‘home’ can be complex. For some “a man’s home is his castle” so long as ‘he’ is the ‘master’. This phrase first read as “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” Which is to say “An English person’s home is a place where they may do as they please and from which they may exclude anyone they choose.” It was popularized after appearing in the book The History of the Norman Conquest of England in 1868 by the English historian Edward Augustus Freeman. However, it had been ensconced in British law since 1505. The law read,

“If one is in his house, and he hears that such a one wants to come to his house to beat him, he can well make an assembly of folk among his friends and neighbours to assist him, and to aid in safeguard of his person...”

But if an assembly can’t be made, or one can’t escape, then

“the house of one is to him his castle and his defence, and where he properly ought to remain…a servant can beat one in defence of his master…a servant can slay one in saving the life of his master, if he [the master] cannot otherwise escape.”

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

When the home comes to be known as a place that offers comfort, solace, independence, privacy, and the legal right to harm – even kill – an intruder you deem threatening, it also becomes a place that excludes. The ‘head of the household’ can assert their superiority; especially when coupled with traditional gendered roles. It’s where phrases like, “Are you the man of the house?” or “Who wears the pants in this family, anyway?” serve to validate and perpetuate male superiority and dominance in the home. At its worst, can even lead to domestic violence.

What, then, does this say of homelessness? If Western social norms, legal text, and financial incentives favor home and property ownership, imagine what kind of insecurities or negative connotations come with being without one? Many fear the homeless, but the fears of the homeless – or nearly homeless – are surely greater.

And what about homeless people who call their city their ‘home’? Imagine living in a city your whole life, renting as an adult, maybe even saving to buy a house, when suddenly a rent increase pushes you out to live in your car, on the street, under a bridge, or in a park. These people have not left home, but are considered ‘homeless’. ‘Houseless’ is more accurate, but does little to ease the feelings of loss, anxiety, and pain that comes with losing a roof over your head and the status that comes with it.

If homes are a place of inclusion for the owner and its occupants, a place of’ belonging’, what places outside of the boundary of the home do we ‘belong’? We perceive our environment through the most intimate of senses; touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, and to the least intimate, seeing. But we are bounded in our ability to absorb and reason over the barrage of information our senses provide. We are thus influenced by our abilities and reasons for being in particular places.

These inputs form mental images that help navigate space, are shaped by perceptions, preconceived notions, and relationships with people and place. Each individual understands and relates to their environment in unique ways. Environments, territories, places, and the people in them, do not exist in some objective ideal but in a subjective reality informed by our senses, beliefs, and histories.

Humanistic geographer David Ley, who leveraged the work of the French geographer Vidal de le Blache, asserts that ‘home’ is a combination of the very real, regional physical environment with which we can see, touch, hear, and feel – our objective reality – and the social environment formed by the lives we lead – our subjective reality – which can be influenced by our imaginations and our emotions.

Humanistic geography relates ‘home’ to a sense of ‘belonging.’ This sense or feeling exists at multiple scales from our body, abode, neighborhood, town, region, county, state, or country. We talk of ‘home towns’, ‘home field advantage’, or ‘hangin’ with my homey’s.’ And when we’re far away from them for a long time we often yearn to ‘go home.’ We become attached to these ‘homes’. They become a part of who we are – a slice of our identity and pride. The way we think of our ‘homes’ is how we would like others to think of us. There’s a word for this ‘belonging’ that combines the Greek words ‘love’ and ‘place’: topofilia.

But this sense of ‘belonging’ is more than identifying with our physical surroundings. It’s more than the senses detect as you return ‘home’ from a long journey; it may be the smell of rich soil, the humidity enveloping your body, the cool mist absorbed by your thirsty pores, the arid sun radiating your closed eyes, or that songbird signing in the tree. ‘Belonging’ can also mean belonging to the people of that place – real or imagined.

These people and places with which we feel ‘belonging’, at scales ranging from our bodies to homes, neighborhoods to cities, or states to countries become defensible. We become territorial. This need and desire to defend ourselves, our people, and our place is an act of control that aims to exclude others.

Territories are defined by boundaries. Boundaries, when seen from the inside are protectors but from the side or the ‘others’ are rejecters. National borders, for example, are not natural and often have no physical demarcations at all. Nor are they fixed in space or time. These imaginary boundaries are created and maintained by various people over the course of history who make determinations on who is inside and outside the border. And it’s based on a this elusive notion of ‘belonging’. In the case of national borders, it’s based on a national identity – a ‘homeland’.

BORDER DISORDER

A nation-state is an idea that is grounded in a fabricated ideal created by a select group based on the identity they assigned to a particular set of people. This manufactured idea and it’s origins, like any idea, is contestable, changeable, and continually in flux. Like the borders themselves. To give the illusion of permanence to these unnatural homeland borders, and the national-identity they suggest, requires a constant propagation of ‘myths’ – propaganda. To reduce or eliminate contention of a fabricated national-identity, or the borders they represent, people need to be convinced these territories must be be defended. Just as they would their own body or home.

Geographer Stephen Daniels suggests that both these real physical geographies and perceived national identities are interdependent. He says,

“…national identities are ‘coordinated, often largely defined, by “legends and landscapes”, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery’.”

UCLA Geographer John Agnew calls this a “territorial trap”. He says that by “regarding states as fixed units of territorial sovereign space, unchanging through time; separating domestic (inside) from foreign (outside) political spaces; [and] treating the territorial state as a container of society” we are committing a conceptual error.

It is this very trap that Trump tapped to prop himself up as president. He would repeatedly say, “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.” To make the invisible border visible, he focused on building a wall. He encouraged his disciples to chant, “Build the wall, build the wall.” Staged political performances at the border drew the attention of the world. While making the intangible tangible, he strengthened the territorial trap. He perpetuated the myth that this border represents a “fixed territorial sovereign space unchanging through time”.

But the United States didn’t even have a border patrol until Herbert Hoover in 1924. It too was largely a performance with the same racist goals as Trump – sweep those dirty, dusty Mexicans outside. That same meager border patrol of the 1920s remained meager until the 1990s. And remember, Texas, a state that shares a border with Mexico, was its own country, the Republic of Texas, under President Sam Houston for nearly a decade before the U.S. annexed them in 1845. There is nothing fixed or permanent about borders or territories.

This fetishizing of territorial boundaries has fueled a rise in border walls over recent decades. Guggenheim Fellow and political geographer Reece Jones writes,

“Two thirds of the seventy border walls that exist today were built in the past twenty years by countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, South Africa, and Norway.”

In the 2020 book Borders and Border Walls, Élisabeth Vallet shows how border walls have gone from nearly zero in 1940 to over 72 in 2020. What’s more telling is 47% of those are built by democratic governments, 35% authoritarian, and 18% a hybrid of both. I’m assuming the U.S. is in the democratic bucket, but indeed may be slipping into hybrid.

In a 2020 paper called Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State, British historian Aristotle Kallis writes that it leads to

“economic nationalism and an embrace of protectionism, political chauvinism, isolationism, reassertion of strict border controls, reversal of previous international commitments, and an expansive range of discriminatory measures targeting those excluded from the narrow definition of ‘the people’.”

Reece Jones puts it like this,

“Since states the world over are threatened by the dawning of a global consciousness—a global awareness of economic, political, and environmental connections—states everywhere are responding with increasingly violent efforts to signify their control over their borders. Indeed, the border has become the location for the performance of the territorial sovereignty of the state, par excellence.”

Populist, nationalist politicians and parties are behaving like a homeowner who’s convinced their home is soon to be invaded. The dust collecting around their ‘homeland’ are people who look different and share different beliefs and ideals. In America, Black and Indigenous scholars are surfacing alternative territorial and societal histories that intrude on traditional “legends and landscapes” many in this country believed to be fixed. These people are ensnared in a territorial trap, scared the rope is about to snap. So they build walls and political clout, they make calls to keep it all out.

But the dust they fear isn’t going away. Try as they may, global consciousness is here to stay. So they best remember what George Carlin had to say.

“Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

We all intuitively feel the world is falling into selfishness, defensiveness, and pettishness. Me, my, and eye for an eye. If the words we see in the books we read are any indication, it’s not just intuition but fact. And the shift started right around 1980.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WE PRAY FOR NOT FOR US, BUT ME

Do you use words like believe, hope, fear, sense, feel, pray, soul, or mystery? Or are you more likely to use words like science, technology, model, method, fact, data, analysis, transmission, or system? If you’ve read even one Interplace essay, then I believe that my preference is no mystery! And I hope and pray you’ll read more than one. After all, I search for facts and data and then perform some analysis of the science of systems.

What if I asked whether you use the words I and me more than we and us? One look at social media and it would be apparent. All the social strife, climate fright, or COVID concern has many people screaming into the digital void or retreating to the nearest corner curled up mumbling to themselves and their rectangular shiny black mirror of a screen. This is a very personal and individual reaction that commonly begins with the word “I” followed by “hope” or “pray.”

What if I told you the world has both been increasingly using feeling words, like sense and soul and individual words, like I and me since 1980? What’s more intriguing is these two uses are correlated. The band R.E.M. was sending us clues back in 1987 when they released their song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it – [and I feel fine]. In it they sing,

“Save yourself, serve yourselfWorld serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed”

A paper came out just last month that provides evidence of this dialectical drift. The researchers, led by Martin Sheffer, of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, assembled a massive corpus of text from millions of books found on Google Books dating from 1850 to 2019. Reading and analyzing the text of this many books is humanly impossible, so they put machines to work. They used text analysis tools to search, count, find correlations, and detect sentiment.

A simple example of this can be done by anybody with access to the internet. There are websites that will count the occurrences of a given word in a body of text and then arrange them into a word ‘cloud’. The largest word in the cloud represents the most frequently used word and the smallest the most infrequent. Here's a word cloud of the over 130,000 words I wrote on Interplace in 2021.

But these simple clouds don’t say anything about what kind of words they are or what associations they may have with other words or ideas. And they don’t lend insight into what words are likely to occur together. But there are statistical methods and software tools that, if given enough clean data, can cluster words of similar meaning and correlate them to the occurrence of other words.

What these researchers discovered is that “words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined.” Words to do with senses, spirituality, emotions, and personal relationships are “sentiment” laden words that reflect a “personal world view.” Over time, they were displaced by “fact based” words used in argumentation of “societal systems”. They also found this pattern correlates with the rise of we and us and the decline of I and me after 1850.

And then, starting around 1980, this trend peaked and then flip-flopped and the trend accelerated in 2007. That is when, the authors write,

“across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”

Of course, explaining why this happened is much harder than finding the evidence, which is also no small feat. The researchers speculate that 1850 was a time when the Industrial Revolution was hitting its stride. Science and technology were credited with economic prosperity and the promise of logic and rationalistic determinism seeped into culture and then books. Out with the mystical and in with the technical. It’s what the sociologist Max Weber called a process of “disenchantment”.

But sociologist and political theorist, Steven Lukes, researched and wrote a book on the origins of “individualism.” He reveals the word ‘individualism’ has multiple ‘semantic histories’ and meanings. It entered the scene in the nineteenth century along with two other big ‘isms’ – ‘socialism’ and ‘communism.’

The first use came in 1820 in France in response to the French Revolution. Because conservative elites, especially religious leaders, viewed the revolt against the establishment as a result of Enlightenment thinkers and doers, individualism was a derogatory term. Lukes writes,

“Conservative thought in the early nineteenth century was virtually unanimous in condemning the appeal to the reason, interests and rights of the individual.”

Put simply, it was seen as the beginnings of anarchy. According to French dictionaries, it remains a pejorative word in France to this day. There were reasons for suppressing individualistic thoughts, principles, and beliefs and they had everything to do with maintaining political, social, and religious order.

Meanwhile, for the socialists of the 1800s, the term ‘individualism’ offered a counter to their ideal ‘collectivism.’ They believed that individuals who drift from the herd become prey to exploitive laissez-faire industrial capitalism. Lukes points to the French philosopher and economist, Pierre Leroux, who argued individualism would lead to

“’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor’, which atomized society and made men into ‘rapacious wolves’…”

Individualism as a counterweight to collectivism is also what the British latched onto well into the late nineteenth century. So both the political, religious, and philosophical left and right had their own reasons for squelching individualism and their associative words in the nineteenth century.

THE BELOVED RUGGED HUG

After the French aristocrat and politician, Alexis de Tocqueville, extensively toured America in 1831 he concluded democracy, of which he was dubious, is rooted in individualism. Lukes writes that Tocqueville warned that individualism led to

“the apathetic withdrawal of individuals from public life into a private sphere and their isolation from one another, with a consequent weakening of social bonds. Such a development, Tocqueville thought, offered dangerous scope for the unchecked growth of the political power of the state.”

As we sit her nearly 200 years later amidst rising authoritarian threats, he may have a point.

As the nineteenth century came to a close collectivist social and political structures were weakening. This is what Lukes claims gave rise to the beginnings of a turn toward individualism. He writes, “For the last quarter of the century was the period in which the market-driven politics of neoliberalism swept across the globe.” He notes that it was the “crisis of the welfare state and the spectacular fall of communism” that led to a “depletion of the meaning of ‘socialism.’” He says the term could no longer be “used with the same confidence” especially “in contrast to its two traditional antonyms, ‘capitalism’ and ‘individualism.’”

And then, in 1922, then U.S. Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, published a small but influential book called “American Individualism.” He then campaigned on the idea of ‘rugged individualism’ and the romantic, though overstated, idea of the self-reliant American frontiersman. Having spent time in Europe at the end of WWI witnessing its devastation he returned to write in his book that there were “’two convictions … dominant in [his] mind.’

The first was that “the ideology of socialism, as tested before his eyes in Europe, was a catastrophic failure.” “Socialism”, he wrote, went against “the fundamental human impulse of self-interest” and “was unable to motivate men and women to produce sufficient goods for the needs of society.”

The second conviction was that America, “The New World” as he called it, was far removed from European “imperialism, fanatic ideologies, ‘age-old hates,’ racial antipathies, dictatorships, power politics, and class stratifications.” And to be fair, Hoover’s book portrays a fairly progressive stance on individualism. He believed there is a limit to individualism and warned that

“We shall never remedy justifiable discontent until we eradicate the misery which the ruthlessness of individualism has imposed upon a minority.”

Of course, his actions spoke otherwise as he blamed the depression he failed to remedy as President on low wage minority Mexican immigrants southern farmers relied on to keep costs down. He deported one million Mexican Americans after enacting a program he called “American jobs for real Americans.” Sound familiar? I guess individualism matters only if you’re white. And perhaps, ruthless.

Many different philosophers, politicians, and practitioners have nuanced variations and interpretations of the word ‘individualism’ over the last 200 years, but Lukes found that only these three have survived. The far right believes individualism leads to anarchy, the far left believes individualism is a symptom of selfishness, and hardcore capitalists believe individualism breeds progress and prosperity for all.

Which makes it all the more difficult to pin down what happened around 1980 that marked a shift from collectivistic ‘we’ to the more individualistic ‘me’? The authors of the study offer a clue: The Information Age. The 1980s was when the information age was just getting rolling. In 1980 Microsoft had been around for five years already. The Apple II, the first mass-marketed personal computer, had been selling for three years. And a new internet consortium was formed called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They quickly invented and adopted three very familiar suffixes: .com, .gov, and .edu. By 1985 Prodigy, Compuserve, and Quantum Computer Services – later named America Online (AOL) – were connecting people with access to a computer to the internet.

People with such means started expressing themselves to people around the world using words and pictures over the internet. By the time 2007 rolled around the iPhone had come out and with it the ability to tap, type, and shoot from a pocket-sized super computer/phone. We may fret over the time spent on screens passively consuming massive amounts of information, but we forget not all of it is passive. If you consider all the thumbs and fingers typing into chat boxes, messaging apps, and comment streams, or posting and broadcasting pictures and videos on social media platforms, there are more people writing and publishing than ever in the history of humanity. It’s bound to have an effect on the language we use.

The 1980s also marked the beginning of what has become out-sized income inequality in America. While Jimmy Carter had spent four years making peace in the world, trying to get us on solar power, and adopt the metric system, he struggled to make progress on inflation. Meanwhile, neoliberals from both parties had grown tired of attempts of social reform since the 60s and 70s. Just as in the 1800s, neoliberals became disenchanted with the passivist and collectivist attempts at another FDR style Great Society that wreaked of socialism.

Instead, they stood on principles of American exceptionalism, classical liberalism, traditional family values, free markets, free trade, Judeo-Christian values, limited government, moral absolutism, natural law, rule of law, protectionism, Republicanism, and tradition. It was the celebration of the individual, singular beliefs, and individual gain – I/me – over the promise of a diverse collective; a systematic community of reciprocity – we/us.

WISELY AND SLOW; THEY STUMBLE THAT RUN FAST. — SHAKESPEARE

What held constant through a string of both Democrat and Republican presidents are neoconservative economic policies that have left the United States with the most extreme wealth disparity in its history. For those who have benefitted the most, it may be easy for them to point to individualism as the reason for their success. This fits with Hoover’s idea of the rugged individualist who ‘earned’ their way to the top through no means but their own effort. Like Frank Sinatra’s song, “I did it my way.” It’s just as Leroux warned in the 1800s, ’everyone for himself, and…all for riches, nothing for the poor.’

For those who have seen their relative income decline since 1980, it may be easy for them to feel, as the socialists of the 1800s worried, that they were exploited by capitalism and corporate America. Perhaps they may feel, as Tocqueville warned, an apathetic withdrawal from public life from unchecked growth of a political power that has seemingly turned their back on them over the last 40 years.

The economists at Oxford’s Our World in Data show that from 1980 to 2014, “independently of where you are in the US income distribution, those who are richer have seen larger income growth.” But they go on to point out that this hasn’t always been the case. In 1980, “independently of where you were in the income distribution, those who were poorer used to enjoy larger income growth.”

Trump preyed on the beliefs and emotions that surround this science and these facts and it got him elected.

Meanwhile, other fears and anxieties have led many more to retreat to hyperbolic emotion and self-righteousness. A pandemic hit stoking fear and uncertainty. Climate change has caused extreme variability in weather patterns heightening existential anxiety in many. The list goes on and on.

Consequently, we all have reasons to be afraid of something and it can influence the words we use. The authors of the paper lean on what some scientists believe are two different cognitive modes of operation: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow). System 1 is intuitive, effortless, and without control. System 2 is deliberate, effortful, and rational. The researchers plotted System 1 words that relate to “belief, spirituality, sapience, intuition, and senses” and System 2 words that are rooted in “science, technology, and quantification”. They show the frequency of System 1 words decreased after 1850 and then increased after 1980 while System 2 words increased after 1850 and then declined after 1980. They plotted words found in American English, British English, German, French, Italian, and Russian and similar patterns emerged.

Could it be the more connected we become and the faster we consume and react to information, the more reliant we become on System 1? Are we too quick to respond, leaning on our beliefs, intuition, and senses? But what does it mean to slow down and let System 2 kick in? Is it even possible to slow down a global society connected through a vast and complex digital network?

Or did the lethargy of the tools, technology, and social and political structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century slow us down enough to reason and rationalize? Or maybe rational thought is an illusion. After all, these bi-modal cognitive scientists claim 98% of our daily cognition is System 1. We react, they claim, more than we ponder.

It was Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize for his advances in bi-modal cognitive research. It led to a best selling book called, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” But in subsequent interviews he reveals more nuance into what is happening. He’s beginning to believe our choice of beliefs and the words we use to describe them are more chance than anything. Kahneman asks,

“What does it mean to know something?...It has very little to do with actual evidence…it is anchored psychologically by the fact that other people you trust also believe in this thing. And it is only then that you invent reasons for it. It’s because the reasons that they cite for their beliefs have very little to do with their actual beliefs, which are usually informed by chance social factors.”

He claims it’s what makes people create nonsensical associative beliefs. For example, those who are against gay marriage also typically don’t believe in global warming. He says,

“It has an associative and emotional coherence, that’s all.” System 1. Emotion, intuition, and belief. Kahneman believes, for example, that “if you want to influence people about global warming, you have to speak to System 1 – we overestimate the influence of speaking to System 2. It’s quite disturbing when you realize people consider facts irrelevant.”

I’m no Nobel prize winning cognitive psychologist, but I question whether we can boil cognition down to two modes. But, I have no evidence; though others are collecting it. And in a global vote between ‘we’ and ‘I’, I doubt the ‘I’s’ have it. Just as our own eyes can’t see themselves, an “I” can’t be itself alone. The only way an eye can see an eye is by looking into the eye of another being. We did not come into this world alone, we did not survive birth alone, we did not learn to walk, talk, learn, or earn alone. And we’re not alone, around this world. Many, though not all, are on social media, blogs, newsletters, or podcasts writing and saying words that we believe – in volumes unparalleled in human history. We are alone together, bounded by words, tethered forever. Even if we are just echoing the people we trust.

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Hello Interactors,

Two years ago yesterday, the first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported just north of Seattle in Everett, Washington. By the end of the month, my town, Kirkland, became famous for more than just the brand of Costco toilet paper. It was the site of the first serious outbreak of COVID in the United States. How many more years will this last? It all depends on if we’re honest with each other and behave ourselves.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

I WANT YOU

It wears many crowns: multae coronae; this virus, this disease. CO-VI-D. COVID. We watched as its thorny tips gripped the tender tissue deep in the lungs of unsuspecting Chinese victims in Wuhan. Replicating, mutating, devastating. Like many crowns before, it sought expansion; new territories to explore, humans to exploit, and lives to destroy. But not the impenetrable America, we thought. Not immutable Americans. Epidemics are for poor countries. Others. What collective stupidity.

Viruses know no borders. America’s first serious outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus occurred in a health center just over a mile from my home in Kirkland, Washington. Like any invader, it scared people into their homes. First reactions were to stay clear of the facility from whence it was spreading…and anyone who may work there.

Doctors and nurses at the home were early spreader suspects. Would they spread it to hospitals, other patients, or their families? Not yet knowing how it spread or how to avoid it, early advice was to simply wash your hands. Wash everything – your clothes, your groceries, and even your Amazon packages. Masks were regarded as ineffective by many U.S. medical pundits and practitioners. Wash your hands, they said.

The United States has a history of denial when it comes to epidemics. When the Spanish Flu was first reported in 1918 in a U.S. Army camp in Kansas, the U.S. had just entered World War I the year prior. Citizens of warring countries in Europe, including Great Britain, were experiencing outbreaks of the flu but were loathed to report it. They feared their enemies would know their troops were vulnerable and weakened. They also didn’t want the public, especially draftees, to fear both the war and an epidemic. And they wanted the media to focus attention on the war, not public health.

Spain, who’s King had contracted the flu, was neutral during War World I so freely reported the outbreak that was soon to be ravaging Europe. The Spanish flu did not originate in Spain, just the honest reporting of it.

The U.S. government, and its high ranking military, were equally hush on the outbreak. It didn’t help that two months after the first reported case, Congress passed the 1918 Sedition Act. This made it a crime to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States." Newspaper editors may have had their own reasons for not reporting on the epidemic, but fear of legal action by the federal government may have topped the list.

By the end of summer, the flu had spread enough that doctors became increasingly worried. For example, in September of 1918, doctors in Philadelphia asked the press to advise the public against attending an upcoming “Liberty Loan” parade. Local papers refused to run the articles. Doctors pleaded with Philadelphia’s public health director to cancel the parade, but their pleas were dismissed. The parade became a super-spreader event. Over the course of the next month, over 12,000 people in the Philadelphia area died from the Spanish Flu.

President Woodrow Wilson didn’t help. Wilson, borrowing a page from the Europeans, chose a combination of censorship and propaganda. This was America’s first real governmental threat to the freedom of the press. He demanded “loyalty” from all Americans in the lead up to World War I and his administrations pursuit to “make the world safe for democracy.” Days after Congress declared war in April of 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating an agency called the Committee on Public Information. It was led by the journalist, George Creel, and was intended to persuade Americans to support the war and recruit soldiers.

One of the departments was called the Division of Pictorial Publicity and included volunteer artists and illustrators. One of those illustrators was James Montgomery Flagg. Perhaps drawn to patriotism with a name like Flagg, he made one of the most enduring illustrations in American history. It’s the ubiquitous poster of Uncle Sam sternly pointing his finger at the viewer with the face of an angry father, with words in all-caps, “I WANT YOU…FOR THE U.S. ARMY.”

Wilson’s PR man, Creel, was not unlike the over controlling press secretary’s that Trump appointed. Creel demanded the White House only publish good news, flattering reports of the government and the country, and, most of all, propaganda supporting America’s efforts in the war. Mentioning the spread of infectious disease across America did not fit the agenda. Especially when, as in Europe, the bad news included soldiers being infected. Many of whom, were being shipped to Europe where they continued the spread of the virus.

Military doctors pleaded with their superiors and the President to stop sending troops overseas, suspend the draft, and quarantine soldiers. All Wilson was willing to do was temporarily suspend a single draft and reduce the numbers of troops headed to Europe by 15%. By the end of 1918, 45,000 soldiers died from the Spanish Flu. That’s just over one-third of 116,000 who died fighting.

In November of 1918, during one of the epidemics largest spikes, the war came to an end. Some believe the Spanish Flu brought World War I to an end. But far be it from any nation’s leaders to admit as much. While Wilson was in Paris in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, he came down with a bad case of the Spanish Flu. The White House tried to hide this fact from the public issuing a statement saying the nasty Paris weather had given him a cold.

MASKING REALITY

Not all leaders ignore the advise of medical professionals reporting from the field. Just a few years prior to the Spanish Flu epidemic, in 1910, a plague was ravaging Northern China. All those infected were certain to die within 24-48 hours. In a race with Russia to claim scientific and medical superiority in a cure for the disease, the Chinese Imperial Court assigned a little known doctor, Lien-teh Wu, to head eradication efforts.

Dr. Wu had discovered through an autopsy that the disease was spread through the air and not by fleas, as suspected. Wu had spent time in Europe as part of his training and observed surgeons using gauze masks during surgery to avoid sneezing or spitting into open wounds. If the mask prevented particulates from escaping the nose and mouth, he thought, perhaps it could prevent them from entering. He began experimenting with his own masks by layering cotton with gauze and fitting the mask close to the face.

But there were skeptics. One was an experienced French doctor who was practicing in China at the time. Dr. Wu explained to the doctor his theory of the plague being spread airborne and that his mask reduced spreading. The Frenchman responded, “What can we expect from a Chinaman?” To prove he was right, the racist doctor visited a hospital housing victims of the plague without Wu’s mask. He died two days later.

News of the efficacy of Dr. Wu’s invention spread around the world. Mask use was commonplace in the medical profession by the time the Spanish Flu hit. Even ordinary citizens were aware of its effectiveness. While it’s impossible to prove at this point, populations in U.S. that wore masks faired better than those that did not. Seattle was one such city that embraced mask wearing.

But just like today, there were detractors. The same excuses were used one-hundred years ago as we hear today. People complained they couldn’t breath. Others felt it was a challenge to their civil liberties. Businesses worried mandatory mask wearing would hurt business while some thought masks would offer a false sense of security.

San Francisco passed a law mandating mask wearing, but enforcement posed challenges. One over zealous enforcer shot a man who refused to wear a mask. And when a photo emerged of the mayor and other public officials not wearing masks at a boxing match, citizens revolted; especially when they were not charged or assessed fines that ordinary citizens faced. Still, San Francisco stood out as the mandate resulted in a significant decline in cases.

The widespread prevalence of mask wearing in America, and news of San Francisco’s success abating the disease, spread to other parts of the world. Most notably, Japan. In February of 1919 their National Public Health Bureau pushed local health workers to wear masks while tending to flu victims. Later they added guidelines for mask wearing by the public in crowded places like trains and trams. By the fall of 1919 Japan was distributing free masks to those who could not afford them. They then included cinemas and busses to the list of suggested public spaces for mask wearing.

As the Spanish Flu subsided in America, so did mask wearing in public spaces. But it stuck in Japan, and other East Asian countries, to this day. Maybe we’ll be seeing more of it in the West even after COVID subsides. If it ever does.

As the COVID pandemic unfolded, we witnessed a proverbial passing of the buck as the world searched for answers. The finger pointing started at the origin. Doctors and nurses were put on the spot as people demanded clues as to what it was and how it spread. Western medicine has taught us to view doctors as omniscient beings, fountains of knowledge – surrogate paternal or maternal oracles of comfort. But through three surgical masks and a plastic shield they said, “Don’t look at me, you need to talk to the virologists. Besides, I’m just trying to stay alive myself. Now excuse me, this person can’t breathe.”

The virologists, a bit removed from the mess, summoned their knowledge of microscopic distress. They spoke of gamma phage, viroids, prions, and nano plagues. And when peppered for clarity amidst the hysteria – to get the gist on this viral mist – they pointed to epidemiologists.

These fine folks are the furthest from the pain. People become numbers and points on a plane; Statistical patterns that seek to explain; hints at causation of a transmission chain. But the models they use assume we’re the same. They think we behave like lemmings in a game.

Epidemiologists (as well as virologists and physicians) perform mathematic experiments using a fixed set of variables that assume humans behave, and react, the same across diverse populations. Those assumptions are largely modeled after behavior Western science has been most focused on over the centuries:

WEIRD people. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

And as we know, even within the WEIRD community, there is a lot of variation in behavior!

When statistical models assume idealized behavior of the so-called, rational man – people who consistently and optimally perform subjective but rational acts – they ignore the fact people do not largely act rationally. This makes it hard to then predict how the virus will behave across diverse sets of populations. Especially when those who do act rationally are randomly exposed to interactions with people who may not act rationally. Human social behavior, especially at the scale that epidemiologists study, can be more random than not.

THE COMPLEX ALTERNATIVE

But there are those seeking to change this. A November 2021 study by a diverse set of researchers, mostly out of the University of Illinois, introduced randomness into the more traditional and relatively inadequate epidemiological models to simulate human social behavior. Instead of using variables that assumed people would act rationally and predictably, they seeded them with a distribution of random numbers that more accurately account for the random interactions we have with people and place.

By capturing multiple features of COVID outbreaks they discovered a “small fraction of individuals were responsible for a disproportionately large number of secondary infections.” Traditional models assumed this would lead to herd immunity. This has not shown to be true even among those areas hardest hit by the first wave. They also discovered another “puzzling aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.” They observed frequent regional plateaus with an “approximately constant incidence rate over a prolonged time.”

They reasoned it is human behavior that likely causes this pattern. They surmise that what causes “both suppression of the early waves and plateau-like dynamics is that individuals modify their behavior based on information about the current epidemiological situation.” They also suggest these epidemical dynamics of “long plateaus might arise because of the underlying structure of social networks.”

What they claim is happening is local outbreaks cause people to adjust their behavior, either voluntarily, through social pressures, or both commercial and governmental restrictions. When people move less the cases plateau. But as soon as they start trending down, everyone starts moving again. Some of these people, even during the peak, travel to different regions that may be experiencing a slump of outbreaks. A portion of whom are carrying the virus and inadvertently spread the disease creating a new wave of cases in that locale.

These short-term localized waves, and commiserate behavior, repeatedly occur around the world. They create, and perpetuate, persistent long-term waves of the pandemic. These researchers claim these longer-term waves have the potential to stretch out for years given current human behavior.

When the pandemic first started to unfold, the Santa Fe Institute started a podcast series called Transmission. It looked at the pandemic from a Complexity Science perspective. The host, Michael Garfield opens by stating, “The coronavirus pandemic is in one sense a kind of prism: it reveals the many interlocking systems that, until disrupted, formed the mostly invisible backdrop of modern life…” He continued, “The virus acts on, and invites new understanding through, the complexity we only take for granted at our peril.”

The Institute took the transcripts from those episodes, and other Santa Fe Institute reports, studies, and insights from a set of international complexity thinkers, and published them in a recent book titled “The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 pandemic.” It invites the authors of these early reports to reflect on what they got right and what they didn’t.

Garfield recently interviewed the two editors, the current and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, David Krakauer and Geoffrey West. He had them reflect on the book, but also on what they believe Complexity thinkers got right and where there’s more to be learned.

Krakauer mentions a split in opinions and hints at what is the essence of the study I quoted from before,

“There are those who will say we have to get behavior into the mathematical models. Otherwise they're going to be useless, right? And we've talked about this before; the early phase of infection being quite biological and well-behaved exponentially, and then going nuts with human behavior dominating rather than biology.”

But he goes on to point out that it’s not that mathematicians have thrown in the towel.

“But then there are others who said, no, we just have to find the new course grain models. We just have to be more sophisticated. Drop the deterministic mass action, put the stochasticity [randomness] in, and then we get the causality out. We don't get prediction out, but we get causality out. So there, even the community is internally riven on the question of what the right response should be.”

Near the end, Krakauer concludes by saying, “I think we do not understand how collective intelligence works.” but that over the last two years, “we were all schooled in collective stupidity.” He thinks “we haven't even begun to understand what's going on here” and that we’re “not even in the foothills of understanding how complex reality works.”

Geoffrey West reminds us that “we can't solve these problems unless we have everybody together.” And he’s not just talking about the scientific community, he includes “society in terms of the shakers and movers [like policy makers] who are thinking about these problems from a completely different, and usually non-scientific viewpoint.”

I sit here in Kirkland on this inauspicious anniversary and reflect on my non-scientific point of view. Sadly, what the virus of multae coronae has taught me is this: Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. That’s Latin for “Generally people believe what they want.” But beliefs, like viruses and mask wearing adherence, has the potential to change locally in the short-term while spreading globally in the long-term.

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Hello Interactors,

Our family hit a snag in the transportation department last week. Our routine was disrupted making us scramble for remedies — including possibly needing a new car. It all came at a time when the state of Washington released its 2021 figures on automobile related deaths. It made me wonder and reflect on car dependency, the Covid funk, and the psychology of cars.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

“It’s making a strange noise, shifts awkwardly, and smells funny,” my son and daughter exclaimed. There had been similar reports previously, but things had worsened. “It seems ok on the straights, but sounds and feels worse going down hill,” they added. Then, as my daughter got in the car to go to swim practice, she soon came back inside and said, “I’m taking the other car. Uno is making an awful noise and smells even worse than before.”

Our kids call our 2006 Audi A3, Uno. The Washington State Licensing authority named it when it was born. They even sent us two rectangular plates with its name stamped into it, along with a few appended random numbers. We mounted one on its nose and the other on its rear-end. Our kids use Uno to commute to school 12 miles away as well as other errands, appointments, and events. They both have a bit of an emotional attachment to this aging little black hatchback. Uno even becomes Dracula during Halloween when they affix dangling white fangs on each side of the license plate frame.

I’ve had an emotional attachment to Audi’s since I was a kid. I saw my first Audi in the mid-70s. It was Audi’s first car sold in the United States – The Audi Fox. A guy down the street owned one. His name was Delbert Woody. I was drawn to Delbert. He was a World War II veteran who personified the post-war male mystique. He rode a dirt bike in the open field behind his house, was an avid hunter and fisherman, drove construction trucks for a living, was a life long Teamster Union member, and loved pecan pie and Pepsi. He, like so many other war veterans, got married after the war and settled in the suburbs. They were the first to move into one of Norwalk, Iowa’s first subdivisions in 1960. Their single story ranch house, nestled neatly in a line of others just like it, sat on a hill below the water tower at the edge of town on a street aptly named: Edgemont.

Also in keeping with post-war tradition, he had a fascination with cars. I remember him owning more than one and this was during the 1970s gas crisis and recession. Audi entered the U.S. market selling the Fox as a ‘solution to the gas problem.’ The Fox was marketed as a sports sedan with a sporty suspicion, front-wheel drive, and an engine that could get 25 miles to the gallon. All for $3400. That’s roughly $20,000 today. I can see how a masculine blue collar gearhead like Delbert was attracted to this car, despite it being German.

I’m not sure what I liked about it. Maybe it was the novelty of a foreign car in small Iowa town, the European styling, or maybe it was the cool fox emblem on the back. Probably all the above. The truth is, Delbert and I, and all auto-dependent motorists, share something in common. We all have brains that contain two separate modules that combine to form relationships with automobiles.

One of these cranial circuits uses cool calculating rational thought that views a car as a utility – an appliance. It’s sensitive to numbers: miles per gallon, range, price, 0-60, reliance ratings, and a myriad of other self-justifying statistics. The other side of the brain tugs on our heart strings. Emotional affections warm our heart in the comfort of a climate controlled cocoon. It makes our heart go pitter patter with the status cars provide, or cause our pulse to quicken at the sudden and effortless acceleration through space.

Both of these neuro-negotiators conspire to construct our comforting and sometimes conniving relationships with cars. And automakers have learned how to manipulate both of these brainy battles through design and marketing.

Uno got its name from a random license plate generator, but automakers are less random. For Delbert Woody’s Audi Fox, Audi wanted to associate that car with a fox. A fox is agile, strong, fast…and cunning. Many animals are. Which is why it’s not hard to find cars named after animals. Here are just a few: Plymouth Barracuda, Mercury Sable, Buick Skylark, Corvette Stingray, Pontiac Sunbird, Ford Thunderbird, Dodge Viper, AMC Eagle, Chevrolet Impala, and who can forget the Ford Pinto.

As you can see all of these are American made cars. U.S. automakers also like aggressive macho sounding names. Especially Dodge, with names like Challenger, Ram, and Avenger. Europe and Japan have a few examples like the Fiat Spider or Suzuki Samurai, but nothing like the U.S. You may be thinking to yourself, what about the iconic Volkswagen Beetle? Sorry, but that’s a nickname. It’s official name in Germany was Volkswagen Type 1. What about the Volkswagen Rabbit? It was the Volkswagen Golf in Europe. And Delbert’s Audi Fox would have been called the Audi 80 anywhere else but America.

The design of vehicles are also expressive. When Uno dawns his fangs at Halloween, the gimmick only works because the headlights make the eyes and the grill its mouth. Different cars take on different personalities when viewed from the front, or more commonly, when viewed in your rear view mirror. There’s speculation by some psychologists that these personalities may even be reflected in the owners and their driving behavior. There is certainly evidence that some car design and some drivers have become more aggressive over time. But it’s equally true that some aggressive looking cars are sometimes driven by passive people. Or maybe they’re using the design of their vehicle to hide or express some other hidden or deep seeded emotion or personality trait.

RAGE DISPENSED THE MACHINE

Stefan Gössling is a professor of social science at Lund University in Sweden. He researches and writes extensively on transportation. In 2017 he released a book called The Psychology of the Car. He says there are a wide range of emotions that relate to the power and dominance that play a central role in car culture. He cites research affirming “that driving powerful cars is generally understood as a means of expressing macho personalities.” Driving a powerful car exudes superiority and control.

He lists different aspects and levels of control we have driving cars:

Agency: To be able to decide when to leave at any point in time, and for any given destination

Semiotics: Being in charge: control of inside (music, temperature) and outside environment (navigation system, speed), and car physics (fuel levels, revolutions per minute)

Haptics: Holding the steering wheel, pushing pedals, shifting gears

Smells and soundscapes: Choice of smell or music, interior

Physics of movement: Being able to drive fast, to accelerate

But he also quotes the sociologist, John Urry. He too wrote extensively on the sociology of mobility, especially regarding the loss of control that can come with controlling a fast moving machine. The automobile, while offering us much control, can also rob us of critical experiences. He writes,

“Dwelling at speed, car-drivers lose the ability to perceive local detail, to talk to strangers, to learn of local ways of life, to stop and sense each different place. Sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells get reduced to the two-dimensional view through the car windscreen and through the rear mirror, the sensing of the world through the screen being the dominant mode of contemporary dwelling. The environment beyond that windscreen is an alien other, kept at bay through the diverse privatizing technologies incorporated within the car. These technologies ensure a consistent supply of information, a relatively protected environment, high quality sounds and increasingly sophisticated systems of monitoring. They enable the hybrid of the car-driver to negotiate conditions of intense riskiness on high-speed roads.”

Our roads are designed to drive at high speeds. They even include optical illusions to put you at ease. For example, the length and distance between dashed lines on highways are designed to trick your brain into believing your body is moving slower than it really is. And while there have been many amazing safety advancements in the engineering of roads and cars for those inside the vehicle, they’ve inadvertently made them increasingly dangerous for those outside of the vehicle.

Washington state ended 2021 with the highest number of road fatalities in 15 years. There were more than 540 fatal crashes killing over 600 people. One hundred and eighteen of whom were walking or riding their bike. An additional 2,411 crashes were estimated to have caused serious injury – a 16% rise over 2020. Thirty one people were killed in Seattle alone in 2021.

While the design of our infrastructure and vehicles encourages speed, other factors are at play as well. Alcohol and drug related crashes have continued to climb 25% since 2019. Speed also was a major factor climbing 18% since 2020.

There are a multitude of interrelated factors that lead to increasing numbers of motorists killing and injuring people – especially cyclists and pedestrians. But given the social malaise that has overcome us all over the last few years, anger and aggression are likely key factors. Whether it’s lockdown lunacy, income inequity insanity, racial reality, gender gut checks, or fights between the lefts and the rights there are ample reasons for us all to be disturbed.

There are also threats to the status quo. Increasingly cities are seeing bike and bus lanes squeezing out car lanes, rising gas prices, and talk of congestion fees. Meanwhile, automakers are ditching the traditional internal combustion engine for progressive green machines. These are levels of social change that many welcome, while others reject – especially those adverse to change or who feel their individualism is threatened.

So they take it out on others on the road. We’ve all witnessed, or are guilty of perpetrating, acts of aggression on the road: dodging and weaving through traffic, tailgating, flashing lights, running red lights, honking, flipping the bird, or yelling out the window. Worse yet, extreme forms of road rage where people take chase in a fit of anger to inflict harm or intimidation. There are more passive aggressive examples too, like parking in a bike lane, stopping in a cross walk, or failing to yield to a blinkering merging bus.

In 1994, Jerry Deffenbacher, a Colorado State psychology professor who studies correlations of anger and anxiety with behavior, created a Driving Anger Scale that scientists have been using since. Results as recent as 2016 suggest personality traits like “impulsiveness, narcissism, and normlessness” confirm studies from 2013 that link narcissism to aggressive driving. One researcher concluded:

“driving anger of narcissistic individuals may result out of threats to perceived power, control, and position rather than to image and attention seeking.”

Results also vary by age, gender, driver experience, and culture. In a country who’s culture flaunts and breeds narcissism, individualism, and macho maleness – possibly even overly tolerant of outward expressions of anger as an acceptable emotional response – we should not be surprised to see increased aggression on the part of some motorists.

Sometimes anger directed at strangers can take the form of contempt. The car then becomes a way to separate one’s self from others deemed inferior or from an anxiety inducing changing environment. Here’s how one geography researcher, Jason Henderson of San Francisco State University, described an SUV driver in a 2006 study looking at the politics of automobility in Atlanta, Georgia.

“After spitting into a toll collection device on the highway, the angry white male described his disdain at the possible alternatives to his SUV — a compact urban form with intensive transit infrastructure containing pedestrian and transit spaces where people would have physical proximity to ‘others’ of different racial, class, gender or sexual orientation. Seen in this context, his SUV was more than just an instrument for traveling through the city. It was an instrument of secession from what he scorned in contemporary American urban space.”

WITH URBAN FRICTION COMES CAR ADDICTION

We took Uno to the doctor. We had a sneaking suspicion it may be done for. When my wife pulled into the shop they said, “You best turn that off, it doesn’t sound good. You probably should have had it towed.” But after waiting a few days for the prognosis, it turned out to be a couple bad spark plugs, failing coils, and noise inducing broken catalytic converter.

When my son heard this news, he said, “Let’s straight-pipe it!” Straight-piping is when you remove emission reducing mechanisms so that the sound, and pollution, from the engine goes straight out the tailpipe. Both my son and my daughter have an affinity for loud cars. My son can tell you the make and model of a car just from the sound of the exhaust. He’s a combusting carbon connoisseur. And lucky for him, there seems to be an increasing number of loud tailpipes these days.

I’m more aghast at the uproarious racket. I grumble and mutter under my own exhaust as these cars rumble by, “There goes another UAS. Urban Attention Seeker.” And it seems I’m right. Overly loud modified exhausts, or even some motorcycles (I’m looking at you Harley Davidson), are symbols of rebellion. They signal to anyone in ear shot opposition to authority and social norms. They scream, “NOTICE ME!”

In Gössling’s book he cites the research of Robert Merton who is regarded by many as the founder of modern sociology. He also studied criminology where he developed strain theory which says strain in an individual can come about in a society that pressures people to attain more than they can possibly achieve. So they seek forms of rebellion. More recent advances in this theory by the criminologist and social psychologist Robert Agnew point to three factors that lead to criminal acts of rebellion. They largely stem from childhood stress, trauma, victimization, and neglect:

The inability to achieve positively valued stimuli (e.g., money, status, autonomy)

The loss of positively valued stimuli (e.g., loss of romantic partners, property)

The presentation of negatively valued or aversive stimuli (e.g., verbal and physical abuse)

But loud cars, or motorcycles, can just as easily be driven by financially successful people at the top of the social status hierarchy. These are the cars my son most admires. They’re hyper or super cars made by companies like Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Mercedes Benz. One of his favorites is the throaty land yacht by Mercedes Benz – The G Wagon. These are less emblems of rebellion and more signals of status. Both are forms of attracting attention.

And so is an Audi A3. Even though it was the cheapest car Audi sold at the time, it is still a luxury German automobile. And while it is a brand I dreamed of owning since childhood, I can’t deny my purchase also helped to signal my status. If my rational brain had one out, and I viewed the purchase of the car as an appliance for mobility, I could have easily put myself into a more affordable hatchback. As one friend put it, the A3 is really just a Volkswagen Golf for grown ups. Works for me.

We decided to keep Uno in the family. And sorry, son, Uno won’t be straight-piped. It’s getting a new catalytic converter…even though replacing it will cost more than the car is worth. This is the last year our kids will be driving Uno to school together and they want that little car to be a part of it.

Our kids could ride a public bus to school, but it takes an hour to go 12 miles and they have afterschool activities at locations far and wide. My son took the bus for a year and it left him exhausted with little time for homework. We chose to put them in this school, but we didn’t chose the car dependent design of our surrounding cities.

When it comes to car dependency, it turns out there really are two sides of the brain at work; one rational and one emotional. Gössling breaks them down into ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ dependencies. ‘Real’ dependencies are like what I just described. There are aspects of urban planning and design that intentionally require people to have a car to live a modern, happy, healthy, and productive life. The car is an appliance that gets you to the doctor, practice facility, grocery store, or school on time – places that require a car and are practically inaccessible by anyone who cannot or choses not to drive a car.

‘Perceived’ dependencies are rooted in fears and emotions where, as Gössling says,

“alternative transport is considered ‘dysfunctional,’ i.e., creating anxieties related to complexity (buying tickets, finding ways), claustrophobic spaces, monitoring in ‘militarized’ environments (control, security), encounters with marginalized people (homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts), or specific smells and noises. Car use may also be related to status, fright-flight-fight responses, or other fears and phobias. In such situations, car reliance may be considered an addiction.”

Automakers feed this addiction through advertising, marketing, and design. As Gössling summarizes in his list of car industry appeal strategies. I can imagine these being whispered seductively to the emotional side of our brain:

The car will be good: The car is increasingly less polluting and safer in traffic

The car is your home: Home and car melt into one space

The car is your partner: You are a more capable person in cooperation with your car

The car will protect you: It is a dangerous world

You need the car: Appeals directed at subconscious

Be aware of government: Someone is trying to take away your car

I for one am ready to break the addiction. Who knows, once our kids leave the house for college, maybe it will be time for Uno to graduate too. That someone trying to take away the car may just be me. Unless, of course, Audi releases an electric retro Audi Fox!

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Hello Interactors,

Welcome to 2022. Or, as my son likes to say, twenty-twenty also. Today we begin our winter journey through human behavior as it relates to the interaction of people and place. As we further divide, we seem to also be drifting apart. So I turned to one of our leading philanthropic philosophizing musicians, Bono, for the answer.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BONO SCRATCHES

The holidays have a way of making you reminisce. I was thinking back 14 years ago when I met Bono at Microsoft just before the 2007-2008 holiday break. He was promoting his RED giving initiative and a small group of us in Windows were meeting with him and his team on ways to incorporate RED into Windows as a cross promotional scheme. Bono thought it especially relevant given we were in REDmond, Washington.

I was an early U2 fan. I bought their third album, War, on vinyl in 1983 when it first came out. So I brought it along to the meeting to see how Bono would react. As we filed into the Microsoft board room being greeted by members of the RED team and Bono, I was watching his eyes through his yellow tinted glasses. He immediately latched on to the album in my hand, walked over to me and said, “You just don’t see many of these.” And he took it from me as I followed him to the conference table. He asked me my name, pulled out his red pen and wrote on the back of the album cover, “It took 24 years but we finally hooked Brad. See you…” He then drew his signature profile of his long nose, glasses, and a straight smile and signed it, “Bono.”

He was shorter than I imagined. But genuine and endearing. He shared the space and time in that meeting with everyone. But, at the end, he couldn’t resist taking jabs at the Windows logo. “Look,”, he said. “I’m not a business person, I’m an artist.” He then stood up and approached the white board. He talked about how awful the Windows logo was. “Why is the Windows logo a flag?”, he asked. “It bothers me.” He then grabbed a pen and drew a simple four pane window and said. “See, a window. How hard can that be?”, he demanded. And sat down.

He had a point. And within a couple years, he got his wish. Pentagram, a design firm in New York, designed a new Windows logo. And with it came a new Microsoft logo that looks more like the sketch Bono made. But it turns out, as is often the case, even that idea was not new. Pentagram had proposed that same logo years before, but it was rejected.

But I admit, I was a bit distracted during his loquacious logo lecture. It was hard taking him seriously in his skin tight gold pants. He was distracted too. While Bono was pacing along the whiteboard with pen in hand, his other hand was routinely futzing with his crotch. He looked like a baseball player stepping out of the batters box to adjust his cup or scratch an itch. It’s not the image of a rock star you want lingering in your head.

I prefer to remember Bono as a 20 year old kid on MTV bellowing protest songs from the album he signed.

U2’s album, War, is noted for its harsh departure from their previous two albums, both musically and lyrically. They set out to tackle themes of war as Ireland had seen its fair share in his lifetime. Their biggest hit from that album, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, leads in with drums resembling a military march and features the blending of physical and emotional impacts of war. It includes lines like, “The trench is dug within our hearts.” It goes on to address the apathy around war and how our defiance against it is lessened by the numbing of the everyday violence mixed with fictionalized versions on TV.

And it's true, we are immuneWhen fact is fiction and TV realityAnd today, the millions cry We eat and drink while tomorrow, they die

The song, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” refers to a particularly bloody conflict in 1972 called Bloody Sunday. On Sunday, January 30th, 26 British soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors in Northern Ireland killing 13 on the spot. One other died later from wounds. Many of these 14 people were either fleeing or helping other injured civilians.

These lyrics are about the effects of Northern Ireland conflicts that had been occurring for more than two decades by the time U2 released this album. The conflicts occurred mostly in Northern Ireland over political and nationalistic opinions between two warring factions. On one side were Unionists and loyalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and on the other Irish Nationalists and republicans, who sought to abandon the United Kingdom to create a United Ireland. Those seeking to stick with the United Kingdom were mostly Ulster Protestants, and those seeking independence were mostly Irish Catholics which added further religious and historic dimensions to what the Irish called The Troubles.

GROUPIES

These two factions created what sociologists call in-groups and out-groups. In-groups are defined as “a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member.” Out-groups are “social groups with which an individual does not identify.” It’s easy to imagine how these two groups in Ireland could formulate in-groups and out-groups along historical, social, religious, and political lines. And looking around today, it’s easy to spot scads of in-groups and out-groups all around us and around the world.

In many cases these attributes and divisions are real. In the case of the Irish conflict, who is a Protestant and who is a Catholic, for example, is empirically verifiable. But often times out-groups are created through fabrications of identity traits. They simply become reinforcing prejudicial stereotypes rooted in an underlying fear. Members of the in-group come to feel threatened and build elaborate cases for why the out-group should be feared.

It happened in the United Kingdom with Brexit and in the United States with the swell of conservative in-group and out-group identification that Trump helped to solidify. It continues today on the topic of global warming. Many conservatives refuse to believe global warming is a fact. They fear making multi-national corporations accountable for environmental destruction would hurt the economy and America’s dominant position on the world stage. So they invent Anti-American ‘liberal’ out-groups and throw scientists, environmentalists and anyone who agrees with them into the groups. They then sprinkle combustible myths over the lot of them and then strike the match of Fox News and watch it burn.

Many sociobiologists, like the recently deceased E.O. Wilson, would argue these people are simply executing on a well established evolutionary strategy. They’re protecting their own in an act called kin selection. It’s defined as “the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction.”

When an in-group feels threatened, they turn to their members and seek protection while simultaneously turning their back on the out-group. Regardless of which group you’re in, you can’t help but feel threatened by some aspect of the effects of globalization. And so you turn to your in-group for comfort, protection, and strategies for survival.

E.O. Wilson extends this argument further to include group-selection theory. Where as kin theory is an individual evolutionary act singled out as favorable through natural selection, Wilson also argues the same can be applied to groups. Those groups that amass the largest in-groups come to dominate the progressively weakening out-groups.

It turns out these theories are hotly debated. Arguments against group-selection theory question how a group could possibly survive natural selection if they’re hellbent on self-destruction. It turns out, like the over reliance on the physical sciences to simplify economics, Darwinian ideas, while revolutionary and sound on their own terms, fail to extend to the complexities of the modern human psyche.

The intricacies in the balance or tension, for example, of selfishness and cooperation in socio-psychological interactions are unlikely to be explained simply through evolutionary histories. Sociologist, Brian Castellani, studies the complexities of place and health and he reminds us that,

“as recent developments in the complexity sciences have made rather clear (e.g., Byrne & Callaghan 2013; Capra & Luisi 2014), psychological existence and more widely social psychology and socio-anthropological existence are different forms of emergent self-organization, which require interdisciplinary understanding beyond just the biological sciences or physics or any such attempts at reductionism.”

E.O. Wilson would likely agree as these are themes he covers in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. It’s there that he concludes,

“The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences. Conversely, the material world exposed by the natural sciences is the most important frontier of the social sciences and humanities. The consilience argument can be distilled as follows: The two frontiers are the same.”

Humans are social animals. We survived and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by dealing with the tensions and conflicts between individuals and groups with whom they lived. Castellani writes,

“given that we are resolutely social organisms, it is better stated that our human capacity for altruism, cooperation, competition, aggression, and social commitment are, for the most part, a function of the fact that we have evolved, as a species, in highly complex social groups – group selection true or not.”

He continues,

“…the psyche’s evolution did not produce the tension between individuals and civilization; instead, the psyche’s evolution is a function of this tension.”

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE; PREJUDICE, ABUSE, BUSINESS CYCLE

Success, or happiness, of an individual or a group, in evolutionary terms, most likely came down to a realization that in order to survive one must choose to sacrifice. Any of us who ever played on a team, a band, or worked in a group knows that collaboration through cooperation can only work with individuals who make certain sacrifices for the team. Hence the old adage, “there is no ‘I’ in team.”

We indeed are hardwired, evolutionarily speaking, to act in our own self interest to survive against an imminent threat. Fight or flight instincts are real. Yet we are equally hardwired to choose self-sacrifice. If such a sacrifice is deemed too extreme, we have the ability to choose to leave the group. Such a choice in the early days of homo sapiens came with its own risk; the group may not survive nor may you. The odds of survival are in favor of the natural forces of both local and global societies. These odds advantage the survival of groups over the survival of individuals thus discouraging such selfish behavior.

And yet it still happens. We need only look at voluntary military service as evidence of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the group. And the draft is a great example of an in-group, the government, sacrificing individuals for the survival of the larger group, the country. But such cases are rare, especially with regards to heroes, relative to the general population. But there are smaller, less drastic altruistic sacrifices people make everyday. It’s a group of people that form their own in-group.

This in-group makes small sacrifices for the betterment of the planet; they recycle, walk, bus, and cycle, drive less, buy less, fly less, downsize, or simply conclude they must grow their own food. These actions are also driven by fear of the effects of globalization. Think globally, act locally. These people perceive a global threat and fear that if they don’t make some sacrifices for the good of the group, they, nor the group, will survive.

But such sacrifices are only effective at a scale larger than one’s own home, business, or even city. It needs to scale globally. We know how to scale for powerful impact. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, developed theories on the relationship between power and knowledge. He noted two different forms of technologies of power. (He’s using the term technology broadly to mean the practical aims of changing the human environment) First there are the technologies of self which is the power to make your own decisions. The second are the technologies of power and government. For example, even if you decide not to wear a mask in public, institutions hold the power to oblige you to do so.

We are pressured individually by our in-groups, or defiant in opposition to an out-group, to behave a particular way. Yet, overlaying it all – even in the presence of fierce hatred and animosity between groups – are human invented policies, procedures, laws, treaties, and obligations that find a way to mend, connect, skirt, or correct the differences between groups. Technologies of power.

And even at a psychological level, we posses as humans innate concerns for our global commitment in our day-to-day lives. Technologies of self. Sigmund Freud, in his book titled Civilization and its discontents, talks of roles that Brian Castellani generalizes as “conforming,” “cooperative,” “cohesive,” “common identity,” and “let’s-work-together-and-figure-out-how-to-get-along.” These are the very roles civilizations have relied on to survive and thrive throughout our existence.

History has a pretty good track record of societies and governments coming together despite our differences. The outcomes are not perfect, but we made it through the Cold War, civil rights movements globally, and ongoing negotiated tensions between the United States and China or even North Korea. The social-psychologist Anselm Strauss summarizes it like this,

“The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements.”

Any unhappiness or fear we may feel is of our own doing. And we’ve invented social super structures, technologies of power, to address them while knowing full well they also perpetuate our unhappiness. It’s what makes people want to retreat to a simpler past. Some wish to escape to a primitive natural oasis as Thoreau did around Walden Pond while others want to retreat, like Trump does, to the 50s and 60s as a way to “Make America Great Again.”

BONO IS NO HIPPIE

Thoreau discovered retreating to nature and isolating himself from society did not yield the happiness he expected. He too, after all, was a social animal. And while many in America, especially White men, reflect nostalgically on how much better it was for them in the 50s and 60s they forget, or don’t care, to remember it was a time of rampant spousal abuse. Wife beating was not made illegal in all states until 1920. It wasn’t until the 1970’s women’s movement that it got the attention it deserved. The term ‘domestic violence’ didn’t appear until 1973.

In 1930 Freud addressed our attraction to the chimera of nostalgia by observing “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we [believe we] should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” Considering he wrote this at a time when Nazism and Stalinism was on the rise, it’s clear his observations would have been very real.

In 2018, the British comparative religion writer and former Roman Catholic sister, Karen Armstrong, noted

“that such nostalgia remains the primary motivator for the rise in religious, cultural, and political fundamentalism throughout the world—all a reaction to the perceived “ills” and “inequalities” of globalization and global civil society, which these nostalgic thinkers “read” as resolutely global, secular, elitist, bourgeois, liberal, harmful, and blasphemous.”

It’s not hard to identify such in-groups: nationalist movements in Europe, Muslim Fundamentalists and extremists, and the Alt-Right movement in America – which is dangerously neighboring the in-groups of the Christian right, the Tea Party, and increasingly the majority of the Republican party.

But there are also groups who want to move toward a more global civil society. They see the tolerance and blending of religions, cultures, and traditions as a way to advance the global community. These are people who live in the now and believe advances in income inequality, race relations, gender spectrum awareness, health and wellness, and reducing global warming can yield a better future for all. And they embrace the global network society introduced through the rapid advancement of the information age.

As Brian Castellani says, “at no previous point in our history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens have humans had the capacity to engage in, perpetuate, or share their social commitments (global or otherwise) on such a global scale.”

And while some dream of a utopian network society – a massive global in-group – any dip into social media will tell you it’s unlikely anyone will get that many people to agree on a set of binding principles and sacrifices.

But the global network society has proven effective at rallying local acts of defiance that lead to compromise. The worldwide BLM movement is the most immediate example. And as unpleasant as it is, defiance in the spirit of altruistic progress toward a better future may be our only choice.

It is this very progress that defines an out-group in the eyes of conservatives. The ills of globalization, in their eyes, are the progression, recognition, release, and rise of the historically oppressed. They invent scapegoats in the form of brown skinned immigrants or encroaching Asian wealth and dominance. Many in this in-group fear the grip of the mythical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant slipping away and yearn for a nostalgic Western dominance that they believe their Christian God ordained them to execute.

Progressives define conservatives as an out-group. They feel the ills of globalization are the result of over-exploitive capitalistic dominance wrapped up in Western expansionist dogma. Their scapegoats are business men, White male politicians, and toxic masculinity. They fear an allegiance to ever rising GDP will result in a collapse of natural resources and increasing climate instability that threatens the existence of all living beings. Many in this in-group yearn for a nostalgic return to local living and simpler lives that depend less on the globalist infrastructure of over-exploitive capitalism.

Castellani believes it comes down to this,

“As such, in the face of this misery, we really only have two options: bring peace and happiness into the world through civil disobedience and brutal compromise (both within ourselves and in relations to our bodies, nature and others); or allow our fear of the global to draw us into nostalgic retreat, which often quickly turns our best dreams and intentions into global nightmares.”

Track 4 on U2’s album, War, is a piece entitled “Like a Song.” It’s one of the least performed songs by the band, but its lyrics speak to today’s divided groups. In Verse Two Bono nods to in-group signaling that can trigger nostalgia while also calling us to rebel against our divisions, seek connections with others through agreeable terms, and strive to help one another.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniformAnd we love to fly a flagBut I won't let others live in hellAs we divide against each other and we fight amongst ourselvesToo set in our ways to try to rearrangeToo right to be wrong, in this rebel song

Those are some wise words from a group of 20 year old wannabe punk rockers. And after all these years, Bono continues to acknowledge that the struggles for peace and justice, while motivated by altruism, can only happen through defiance, resistance, and compromise. It is, after all, the natural order of complex systems.

In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview he’s quoted as saying,

“When you get bleak about things and think, Gosh, is there an end to this? Yeah, there is, it just takes lots of work, lots of time. I was never a hippie— I’m punk rock, really. I was never into: “Let’s hold hands, and peace will come just because we’ll dream it into the world.” No, peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world. But it can be done, I’m sure of that.”

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Hello Interactors,

The first year of Interplace is nearly complete. I want to thank everyone who supported me through 2021 by subscribing, reading, listening, commenting, and sharing. I also want to thank the London Writers’ Salon and all faithful writers who showed up on Zoom with me every morning at 8:00 Pacific time. It brought companionship, accountability, and miles of smiles.

Evolutionary biologists call interactors the individual traits that are so uniquely beneficial that they lead to natural selection. You are my interactors ­– special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. Thanks to you, that journey will continue through 2022. I’m keeping to the same structure, but may summon the courage to do occasional interviews as well.

A year ago I kicked off Interplace. In the winter I wrote about human behavior, then moved to cartography in the spring, physical geography and the environment in the summer, and economic geography this fall. This is post number 50 and the last of 2021. Should Interplace 2021 be a book, it would be comprised of four sections, 50 chapters, nearly 740 pages, and over 130,000 words.

To celebrate, I thought I’d share excepts from the most read posts from each of the four seasons. I also included titles and links to all 50 pieces at the end.

But before I start, I thought I’d share a quote from the legendary leader the city of Seattle was named after, Chief Si'ahl (siʔaɫ). These words appeared in my first newsletter and continue to serve as an inspiration for Interplace today. They’re worth sharing again as we reflect and contemplate the constellation of interactions with people and place we all had throughout 2021 and imagine what’s ahead in 2022.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.We are but one thread within it.Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.All things are bound together.All things connect.”

And now, excerpts from the top four most read Interplace posts of 2021.

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Take Your Head for a Walk

Your brain makes maps on your behalf. But if you want a good one, take a hike. Your brain will love you for it, and your future self will too.

It turns out walking and cognitive mapping are mutually dependent systems that are only optimized when done together. Driving or riding as a passenger are poor substitutes for enhancing our interactions with place. In the words of neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara,

“The brain’s navigational and mapping and memory systems are so intertwined as to be almost one and the same. Walking to somewhere depends on the brain’s navigational system, and in turn walking provides a vast amount of ongoing information to the brain’s mapping and navigation systems. These are mutually enriching and reinforcing systems.”

Our cities don’t make it easy to walk. A century of car culture has kept people from interacting with place. We can deduce from the research I’ve cited, that this is a bad thing. Not only do we have a biased and hazy image built in our minds of the environment in which we live, sitting in a car or a chair does not facilitate happy thoughts.

We all succumb to what these two Iowa State researchers referred to as the ‘dread effect’. The thought of expending more energy than necessary can make one dread walking. It’s all too easy to tap a destination on Google maps, hit the ‘walking distance’ tab, shutter at the time and effort it would take to walk, and then grab the keys and drive there. But since Covid hit, I instead grab my headphones, take a step, and feel the cells in my brain come alive. I am interacting with place, with a smile on my face, as a cranial cellular symphony traces a map of the space.

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

You Are What You Map

How triangles, topology, quadrangles, and cartography yield maps that can skew both messages and time

The Renaissance accelerated the field of cartography. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names.

Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from.

There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking.

He was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring.

Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s the word they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew.

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

Calamity in Klamath

Mukluks suffer over water for suckers

California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized.

But their success made them a target. The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

I’m convinced that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well.

FALL: ECONOMICS

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

Untangling economic supremacy through heresy while offering an alternative destiny

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA offers that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment, like those Ruddick has pioneered. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Following is an index of all the pieces I’ve written over the last year. Thanks, again, for the support. I’ll see you all next week and next year.

FULL LIST OF INTERPLACE 2021

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

THE INTERACTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACE

My First Subscribers

Raccoons Destroyed My Lawn

What the World Needs Now is Love

The Lone Star Is in a Frozen State

WASPs and Weeds Gone Wild

A Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every Garage

Bill and Brad's Excellent Adventure

Take Your Head for a Walk

SPRING: CARTOGRAPHY

I'd Rather Be Spinning Logos

A Groma from Rome Finds a New Home

A Nation Squared

Miami Priced, Ohio Diced

Guns, God, and Gold

Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day

You Are What You Map

The U.S. Census: Mapping a Sense of Us

Boomtown Maps

Winning Over the Windy City with Watercolors

Maps as Logos; Atlases that Impose

Spring 2021 Cartography Review

Cul-de-sacs, Caucasians, and the Kansas Garden City

SUMMER: ENVIRONMENT

The Obscene Man

A New Chapter to Behold as the Network of Life Unfolds

Ruckelshaus and Hickel Get us Out of a Pickle

Big Science Meets Big Ecology under the Big Sky

Muggy Conditions, Buggy Coalitions, and Collegiate Ambitions

Nature, Nurture, Math, Art and Virtue

An Olympic Sized Metabolism

An Ancestor's Garden

Solar Powered Imperialist Addictions

Charlie Watts and the Strange Attractor

Calamity in Klamath

Ditches, Wells, and Dams. Riches, Cartels, and Scams.

Lay Dung; Feng Shui

FALL: ECONOMICS

The Wealth of Generations

Space Cadets and the Earthy Crunchies

Only a Nobody Walks in L.A.

From a Shoe Lust Hit, to 'Just Do It'.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Hitler and the Capitalist's Fix

Supply Chain Pains as China Gains

Bond, Bezos, Gates, and Musk

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 1

Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 2

The ‘One Click Buy’ Empire Needs an Umpire

Hoops, Groups, and Feedback Loops

Cryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic Urgency

WINTER: BEHAVIOR

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your Story Has Many Branches

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Hello Interactors,

For all you Christmas celebrators out there, happy Christmas Eve. Since many will be gathering ‘round a Christmas tree, I thought I’d tell the story of its origin. And like so much of America history, it has ties to immigrants and slavery; but in this case — anti-slavery.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A TREE SO YEE MAY BE FREE

“If the morning drives are extended beyond the city, there is much to delight the eye. The trees are eased in ice; and when the sun shines out suddenly, the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow,—dressed in a brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of in England. On days less bright, the blue harbour spreads in strong contrast with the sheeted snow which extends to its very brink.”

These are the words of Harriet Martineau. She was a English writer, journalist, and social theorist who pioneered observational methods that came to influence the field of sociology. One of her more popular books came at the end of her travels through the United States in the 1830s titled, Retrospect of Western Travel. The passage above describes what she saw as she left the Boston city limits in the snow the winter of 1835.

You may have images of her bundled up in a one horse open sleigh, over the hills she went, dashing all the way. But according to Martineau, you can let go of any such romantic inclinations. Here’s her take on sleighing.

“As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels,—except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance.”

And if that’s not enough to convince you, she offers up a quote from unknown source that puts a finer touch on the realities of sleighing.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a spring board out in the porch on Christmas-day: put your feet in a pail full of powdered ice: have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows,—and you will have an exact idea of sleighing.”

Martineau was on her way to a Christmas evening celebration at the home of a former Harvard German language professor, Charles Follen. Although, due to scheduling conflicts the event was actually on New Years Eve and not Christmas Eve. The cozy holiday scene that Martineau proceeds to unfold came to be the most, though not the first, read articulation of what came to be the center piece of American Christmas celebration – the Christmas tree.

Follen was a German immigrant so perhaps it’s not that surprising that a Christmas tree would feature prominently in her story. It’s been a long held belief that German immigrants brought their time-honored Christmas tree tradition with them. Though, as we’ll soon see, the evolution of the Christmas tree tradition in America paralleled that of Germany.

Martineau’s account of that evening, while factual, leaves out important historical details as to why she was celebrating Christmas with Follen and his family that night. These were two radical Unitarian abolitionists who bonded over their insistence that slavery be eradicated totally and immediately. Northerner’s, and New England Unitarians, were split on the matter of abolition. Follen’s convictions are what got him fired from Harvard a year prior.

As for Martineau, she was a well known and respected journalist but not yet a public activist. But after attending a women’s abolitionist meeting that November, she was convinced she needed to act. She was asked at that meeting to write publicly avowing her beliefs. Being one of the only women writers of her time to sustain herself through writing and still requiring access to America’s mainstream elite for her book, she faced an ethical dilemma.

Later she wrote, “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy.…”

News leaked of her position on slavery and Boston newspapers ridiculed her. Their headlines spread across the country and she was forced to alter her itinerary. The event she was attending at Follen’s home wasn’t just a Christmas celebration, but an anti-slavery strategy session. That spring, she (in the company of Charles Follen) took to the road not as journalist, but as an activist.

CHRISTKINDLE AND BELSNICKEL

Historians and folklorists have determined that the first Christmas tree in America was most likely in the home of a German immigrant in Pennsylvania. But it’s unlikely to have occurred anytime before 1810. The first known sketch of a family celebrating Christmas, featuring a small tree atop a table, was not printed until recent decades but dates to either 1812 or 1819.

Recall from my November posts on the origins of Thanksgiving, this was also the time when St. Nicholas was also entering the picture in New York. The Christmas tree tradition was also just emerging in Germany at this very same time. The Christmas tree, like Santa Claus himself, wasn’t a long held German tradition but a story told by a select group of elites who latched on to a small, isolated, and obscure holiday event that was occurring in what was then Strasbourg, Germany but is now part of France.

It was established sometime in the 17th century as a quasi-religious way of judging children on the basis of them being naughty or nice. If you were nice you got a visit that night from Christkindle (i.e. the Christchild) and if you were naughty you got a visit from Hanstrapp; Strasbourg’s equivalent of what became known as Belsnickle (roughly translated: St. Nicholas in Fur).

This character has echo’s of behavior seen by Wassailers during Thanksgiving celebrations where men, often of lower class, would dress up and go door to door, often times even welcoming themselves in. Perhaps this offers a clue into how Santa became a home invader. Though, should Belsnickle determine a child in the home had been naughty, he gifted the parents with a stick with instructions to whip the poor child.

The Christmas tree tradition expanded beyond Strasbourg around 1750. Its spread may have been accelerated by a young up and coming writer, naturalist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1771. Recall from my October post, that by the dawn of the 18th century Goethe had established himself as the go-to guy by the German government for writing, organizing, and evangelizing his opinions and observations on everything from gardening, to parks management, to economics.

He had spent some time in Strasbourg and “discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision.” His 1774 novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, is a story of a love triangle that ends tragically. And in the lead up to this tragedy, Goethe writes how young Werther “spoke of the pleasure the children would feel and remembered how in times long past he had himself been transported to paradise by the surprise opening of a door and the appearance of the decorated tree with its candles, sweets, and apples.”

It wasn’t until 1810 that the Christmas Tree tradition made it’s way to Berlin. It was introduced in Munich in 1830 by the Queen of Bavaria. Goethe had inspired a string of writers publishing stories of Christmas trees that were disseminated throughout Europe and the United States. And it was all happening at the same time of the first recorded evidence of a Christmas tree in America – 1820.

And then, in 1836, came the first printed image of a Christmas tree in America. It was titled “Christmas Eve” and was featured in a story called The Stranger’s Gift. It was written, as you might expect, by a German immigrant. But not just any German immigrant. It was written by Herman Bokum, the professor who replaced Follen after Harvard let him go for his public opposition to slavery just one year earlier.

YOUR BOUGHS CAN TEACH A LESSON

After Follen lost his job at Harvard he was hired by a family to home school their two children. Follen strictly followed a progressive teaching method derived from a Swiss educational reformer named Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi had a child-centered and directed educational philosophy. He believed every child is born with inherently good qualities and it’s the teachers role to find them and cultivate them. It’s unclear whether Follen’s enemies convinced the family to reconsider, the family themselves had a change of heart, or Follen, ever dogmatic in his principles, refused to budge on his teaching approach, but two weeks before Christmas of 1835 he was terminated.

It is in this context that Harriett Martineau attended the Christmas celebration in Follen’s newly built home on the corner of Follen Avenue outside of Boston. Martineau did not mention Follen by name in her retelling of their Christmas tree celebration, only Follen’s son who everyone called “Little Charley.” She writes,

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley, and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show…I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect…The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart, dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig; which had not something sparkling upon it… Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy.”

It was two years before Martineau’s book was published. She continued her friendship with Follen until his tragic death in 1841. He was killed when a steamship he was traveling on exploded. His photograph hung on the wall of her home until she died in 1876.

And in the intervening years of her book being published, a writer friend of theirs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a fictional story called “New Years Day” that included a brief mention of a Christmas tree celebration akin to what actually took place at the Follens. It was published that same year, 1835, making it the first piece of American literature to mentioned a Christmas tree.

It’s unfortunate America’s Christmas tree origin story doesn’t start with the telling of Charles Follen and Harriett Martineau and their New Years Eve anti-slavery strategy meeting around the Christmas tree. Not only is their relationship full of intrigue, but the idea of the Christmas tree immortalized as an historic symbol of freedom from slavery seems an appropriate American Christmas tale. Perhaps the story of Follen and Martineau is what we should be reading to children every Christmas eve and not just T’was the Night Before Christmas.

Both the story of the Christmas tree as a time-honored German cultural tradition and America’s favorite Christmas time fable, T’was the Night Before Christmas, were largely fabricated and perpetuated by a select group of elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Clement Clark Moore, the author of T’was the Night Before Christmas, — and his reactionary New York Episcopalian Knickerbocker friends — were interested in imbuing their Christmas tales with aristocratic authority. In contrast, Bollen and his Unitarian Christmas tree literary acquaintances used the Christmas tree to add momentum to the swelling progressive reformist movement of the 1830s.

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his book The Battle for Christmas, explains the similarities between the unfolding of these two events, American traditions, and these two men,

“There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)”

He continues,

“In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.”

And in both cases, literature, and access to it, played a starring role. Nissenbaum, writes,

“As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.”

It seems another mythical folk tradition is still propagated from the top down more than experienced from bottom up. Recalling Harriet Martineau’s American observation that “As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This is the last full week of fall and so the last episode on economic geography. Happy early winter solstice everyone. Soon we in the North start tilting toward the sun. I’ve learned a ton this season and hope you have too. Today I conclude with a summarization of the history and effects of capitalism as we know it today and offer a glimpse at alternatives. We like easy answers to hard problems, but I’m here to tell you it’s messy and complex. And that’s just the good stuff.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE URGENCY OF CRYPTOCURRENCY

Cryptocurrency was trending as a topic again this fall. It spiked in October. I still see residual evidence of this in my social media feeds where debates rage on over whether it’s a legitimate form of currency or just a speculator’s delight.

Cryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.

Money in the U.S. is commonly believed to come from the government, but most greenbacks issued today come from banks. They order currency from the Federal Reserve based on public demand which is then put into general circulation – which is growing worldwide. In fact, there are more U.S. dollars circulating outside of the U.S. than in it. Much of which is used by people struggling financially around the globe.

Meanwhile, those not struggling are using cash less and less. Recently, some New York retailers even attempted to go cashless. It prompted the city to pass a law requiring food establishments to accept cash or face a $1,000 fine.

Still, increasingly we see people paying for items with their phone. In this digital, post-cash society it’s easy to imagine an alternative virtual currency sneaking in. If our democracy can be challenged, why not our currency? A recent New York Times article by Peter Coy on the slipping grip of cash notes that “Some economists believe there is a risk that we’ll someday find ourselves with nothing that is universally accepted as a medium of exchange.” He goes on to remind us that is was Socrates who “originated the concept of a noble lie, which is a myth that elites propagate for what they view as the good of the public.” He then quotes Michael Dorf of the Cornell Law School who believes “the solidity of money is one such lie.”

The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.

It’s been in circulation since 2009 and 250 area shops accept it. Workers in Brixton also get paid with it and you can even settle your utility bills with it. It’s a hyper-local monetary scheme that incentivizes local residents to shop local, buy local, and live local. The Brixton Pound has inspired cities across the UK to do the same and now Bristol, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, and Plymouth all have their own alternative local currencies.

Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.

Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.

So in 2010 he launched an alternative local currency experiment called Eco-Pesa in three informal settlements in Kenya. That experiment became permanent in Bangladesh with the creation of their own currency; the Bangla-Pesa. Unlike the Brixton Pound, this alternative currency can’t be exchanged for the national Kenyan currency. It’s a closed system of money creation that serves one purpose: support a shared willingness among community members to accept and trade money in exchange for goods and services.

It has over 2000 members and 220 businesses and has helped fill the settlement with money, eliminate market instability brought on by outside nationalistic forces, provide opportunities for investment, and grow Bangladesh businesses that generate jobs.

He went on to found Grass Roots Economics which is a resource and platform that supports and inspires experiments like his. The platform has launched seven different forms of local currency in poverty stricken informal settlements across Africa, including two in South Africa and one in Congo. Last year the Red Cross leveraged the organization to establish more local currencies during Covid helping to grow the number of registered users of local currencies to over 50,000 people. Ruddick sees no reason why it can’t continue to scale regionally and even nationally. Maybe even across the second largest continent in the world. And he has the track record and models to substantiate his claim.

GREAT DIVIDE; WHITE PRIDE

The primary obstacle to such schemes taking hold too pervasively is the default global capitalocentric economic system of the West; a scheme that relies on places like Bangladesh to perpetuate its dominance. It’s a form of power and control that has existed since the spread of European colonialism starting in the 1400s.

Europe had yet to be introduced to capitalism. Which means, contrary to popular belief, they didn’t invent it. There’s now ample research pointing to evidence of capitalist trade and profit already occurring across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Folks like Christopher Columbus would have tripped over these capitalist trade routes as he stumbled his way upon their shores. In fact, it’s more likely European colonial scouts like Columbus were in the untenable position of trying to convince these well established economies that they should allow lowly Europeans to even participate in their capitalistic schemes.

The Ming dynasty in China and the Mughal Empire of South Asia would have been two of the more established world centers of economics at the time. Medieval Europe, in comparison, would have looked primitive and backwards by their standards. But over the course of centuries, the Europeans managed to disrupt (often violently) existing capital structures creating what has been called the Great Divergence – a socioeconomic shift in balance to the West.

Just how ‘great’ it was is a matter of perspective, of course. To Amer-Europeans it was great. I certainly grew up learning that. I was taught Europeans were fortunate geographically, gifted intellectually, and superior culturally. Their ‘enlightened’ selves rose above the paltry ills of feudal medievalism to erase an embarrassing historical stain. Their inventiveness gave rise to free and fair democracy and capitalism that eventually spread from America’s sea to shining sea. Not so fast.

A new book by Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow show compelling evidence that it was actually a visit from the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman, Kandiaronk, who planted the seeds of ‘enlightenment’ with European philosophers in his eloquent and observant criticism of European ways. Here is a fragment of a speech he delivered to a group of French philosophers and statesmen in 1703:

“I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?”

The heart of Kondiaronk’s critique is what fueled the ‘great divergence.’ Their ‘slaughterhouse of the living’ is what disrupted existing Asian economic dominance. It wasn’t ‘enlightenment’ but well documented, practiced, and executed forms of slavery, racism, and war-instigated establishment of European controlled capitalism. They re-centered economic activity around themselves through force, but convinced themselves, and others to this day, that their actions were justified. The British and American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA puts it like this:

“The stories Europeans told themselves, and imposed on others, amounted to a self justification of their role as a uniquely civilizing force, marginalizing the colonized (from Ireland to India and the Belgian Congo) as less-than-civilized, in order to justify their less than-human treatment by self-described liberals.”

In the late 1800s, after the U.S. slaughtered 3,000 Filipinos as part of an overnight raid in the colonization of their land, America’s favorite poet at the time, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a poem that emblemizes the racist, violent, and self-justified imperialistic sentiment of the time:

Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness,On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

It was published in the New York Tribune, New York Sun, and San Francisco Examiner. It was also loved by President Theodore Roosevelt who sent a copy of it to his close friend and Massachusetts politician, Henry Lodge, with a note that read:

“Rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”

Capitalism is rooted in racism and its emergence was tied to the colonization of captured territories over seas through militaristic invasions. By the time Roosevelt was putting it in practice in the U.S., it was a centuries old well-oiled machine. The rights of European territories to claim sovereignty and organize captured territories first emerged in Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Westfalia in 1648. After 80 years of European territorial and religious wars, this peace treaty forced the Holy Roman Empire to divvy out sovereign states (countries) across Europe and allowed them to also choose their own official religions.

This event coincided with the emergence of political economists in Scotland, England, and France who had been debating and writing socioeconomic theories for years. Especially after the visit from Kondiaronk. They seized the opportunity to imbue their concepts with a secular vision that allowed capitalism to thrive between diverse European countries, and religions, for their mutual benefit. One such economic theory to eventually emerge was Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’

With a European model of economic abstraction established, it was then tied to government controlled nation-state territories. It was a no-brainer to replicate this model for any remote territory conquered, bartered, and stolen overseas. And just like that, global colonization had taken hold. The emergence of the great divergence.

It is from this confluence of events that the Western educated world has come to believe capitalism as conceived in the minds of Enlightened European thinkers. And because they self-justified themselves as intellectually and spiritually superior to other races and religions, including Kondiaronk, they believed, and we’ve been taught, that the European colonial and capitalistic expansion was for the good of humanity.

But let’s be honest, this is fantasy. And it’s dangerous to abstract away capitalism from the real and documented horrors of racism, slavery, rape, persecution, theft, exploitation, and extermination that allows it to flourish to this day. It shouldn’t be sanitized as a ‘great divergence.’ It should be chastised as a hate insurgence.

With the rise of Trumpism we are witnessing the sheen of capitalist oriented racism shining through decades of opaque but fading layers of failed attempts and promises of liberty and justice for all. And it’s in the spirit of domineering nationalists taking up Kipling’s distant, but misguided, call to accept the ‘White Man’s burden.’ And how much better is the Biden administration when kids captured at the border under Trump still remain in cages like ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.’ In the words of Kondiaronk, “the world’s worst behaviour.”

Both the left and the right, who are still smarting from Covid supply chain woes and wringing their hands over increasing inflation, are both viewing the global economic juggernaut their parties helped to construct with suspect for the first time. They’re not alone. Every country in the world is scrambling to reconsider their local economy as it relates to Western capitalistic global domination. No wonder the world is suffering a collective anxiety attack.

DON’T CRINGE AT THE FRINGE

We are witnessing an array of identity crisis across the socio-political spectrum. From far right nationalistic white-supremacy authoritarianism to the far left hopes of reconstituting socialist theories of idealized utopias. Both of which are different forms of top-down autocratic attempts at organizing social order and economies – one through neoliberal capitalistic oligarchies and the other through socialistic governmental central control. And because our poor human brains are attracted to binary polars, seek simple answers, and loath the messy middle, we suffer.

Meanwhile, fringe experiments in alternative economic schemes continue to flourish as they always have. But some encroach on the establishment more than others. And one in particular operates at a scale big enough to challenge the West’s strangle hold on global economics – China. China’s global Belt and Road Initiative, while China-centric, is also undeniably globally inclusive.

They have been dispersing their investments in infrastructure and commodity creation and extraction in a myriad of countries – big and small, rich and poor – around the world since 2013. At home they operate a hybrid Socialist and Capitalist government that then orchestrates attempts at controlling a global economy. If a hybridist socioeconomic experiment is seriously challenging the default world economy of the last 50-60 years, shouldn’t the U.S. and Europe consider conducting experiments of their own? Or has hubris and denial taken too strong of a hold? Only history will tell.

It’s safe to say that the days of claiming Western style capitalism and U.S. exceptionalism have been exposed and debunked. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has come into the light and it’s empty. And the neoliberal free market economy is anything but free and has financially imprisoned millions for decades. Also gone are the Eurocentric interpretations of history. It’s time we stop insisting that the capitalistic scheme dominating the world today, while not perfect, is the least-bad option and therefore every country must adopt it. It’s rhetoric like this that the global North uses to twist the arms of the poorer global South to align them with their socio-political and economic agenda.

Our beloved binary brains, again, are attracted to global North versus global South battles of theories and victories. The same can be said of East versus West. But most countries caught in this polarization have their own theories, some invented, and some borrowed or influenced – good or bad – by centuries of globalization, education, and financing from the global North. It’s no fun, but we need to wrestle with the messy middle.

We in the West are so trained to assess and judge other geographies, cultures, and economies from our ivory towers of exceptionalism – as if surveying a globe from a godly perch – labeling, cataloging, and objectifying human and non-human entities, that we forget the interaction of people and place. As the late great economist, Herb Simon, says, (as illustrated on my about page)

Those folks in Kenya stand at the fringe of a global economic system that either ignores them, exploits them, or starves them to death. It’s what it means to be marginalized. But with the help of a friend, they are discovering their plight is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which they find themselves. They have found a way to stand up, recognize and accept the apparent complexity, and act out of respect for each other’s position relative to one another…and the selfish globalized economic apparatus that put them there.

Professor Sheppard concludes that he and his Western educated colleagues, “suffer from a particular set of geographical blinders.” He says, “they look at our world in ways that normalize the European perspective on how development happens.” It’s a perspective he’s critical of because it’s a model of economic geography that “fails to deliver on its promise of development for all, everywhere.”

He goes on to offer that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”

To help combat his own implicit bias, he planted himself in Jakarta to do his research. “Thinking through Jakarta”, he says, “the raggedy fringes that matter are the hybridity of Indonesia’s political economy, informality and biophysical processes.” Instead of hypothesizing over concepts or proselytizing projects from the canons of capitalism, he’s asking that we recognize, as those in Bangladesh and Brixton did, that “relations with Capitalism are crucial to understanding how” emerging alternative economies embedded on the insides of dominant systems “coevolves with its outsides.”

Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”

Cryptocurrency is likely to trend again. Our anxiety has us looking for easy answers and social media likes shiny technocratic objects. Meanwhile, I’m rooting for Will Ruddick and his grass roots economies. A humane form of reciprocity that even the brilliant, eloquent, and enlightened Kondiaronk would recognize. And maybe even support.

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Hello Interactors,

The field of economics is stuck in the past. They need to move on, and they need to do it fast. Stop standing around, get in on the bustle. MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! HUSTLE, HUSTLE, HUSTLE!

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BE ON THE VERGE TO SURGE

I recently attended my first full length high school basketball game. The last time I saw a high school game I was playing in one. Not much has changed in thirty-seven years. But I did notice more standing around than when I was playing. Watch any NBA game these days and you see a lot of standing around. Maybe these stagnate high school players are just trying to be cool.

When you stand in one place on the court, there’s little interaction with your teammates, the player guarding you, the ball, or the floor. It easy to predict what’s going to happen. Not much. My coaches always told me to move without the ball. Later in life, when I played in adult leagues, I found myself yelling to my teammates, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL, MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL.” I didn’t like games where guys just ran to the corner and stood there waiting for the ball or for someone to shoot. Bor-ing.

Moving around the court without the ball brings dynamism to the game. It increases the chances of interacting with your teammates, your competition, and the ball – across various parts of the court. Coaches design plays expressly to move players around the floor in coordinated orchestration just to get players open. Only then can they interact with the ball and hopefully score.

But plays quickly break down and improvisation ensues. It’s what I love about playing and watching basketball. When players are dynamic, new situations and interactions continually emerge and they’re constantly different. But then when a player gets the ball, the attention, interaction, and players converge on that one person. And as soon as they pass the ball or shoot it, everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence are continually in motion and each intentional or random action from any player, the ball, or even the referee or crowd, can send the cycle spinning in another trajectory.

Participating in this continual transformation of conditions yields a constant flow of new sensory inputs. They serve as raw material for the brain to invent new and novel interactions. The creative capacity of any player to introduce novelty based on their knowledge of the rules, the split-second state of players interactions, the location of the ball, the time on the clock, and hundreds of other sights, sounds, touches, and smells is what makes basketball work. It’s a continual flow of interactions with people and place that is constantly evolving based on adaptations to ever-changing novel situations.

Here are three examples of different layers of interaction happening in a game of basketball. While elements within a layer interact with each other, elements between layers do too.

One is happening between the players and the structure of the game. Any one player has the potential to have influence in the game, but they also have the choice to do so. And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to the game and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

Another is happening at a locational level; in the painted rectangle under the basket, inside and outside the three-point line, half-court, and full-court – even out of bounds or at the circles for jump balls. There’s also home court versus away within a conference, advancing post-season to play teams in a district, or even, if you’re lucky, to play distance teams in a state tournament. My sister was lucky enough to do that. She sunk a last second jumper from the sideline to win the Iowa girl’s state tournament in 1981.

A third layer are the social and interpersonal interactions and transactions that occur between competitors, coaches and their players, and between referees, coaches and bench officials. These interactions also have a spatial component. Casual banter between a player and a referee under the basket during a free-throw takes on a different timbre than a referee angerly signaling a technical foul in the face of an out of control coach on the sidelines.

And then there are the physics of the game. In high school a math nerd friend of mine and I would try to determine the equation for the parabola of our jump shots. “You need to adjust your slope to be more like -.07 if you’re going to shoot 14 feet from the hoop.”, we’d joke. Through years of practice, professional shooters like Steph Curry can dial in each variable of a jump shot, including velocity and spin, to achieve the perfect 48-degree angle needed for a swoosh.

Dribbling a basketball up and down is predictable because physics is predictable. Hold a basketball in your hand and it possesses potential energy. Rotate your hand and gravity pulls the ball to the earth. When it hits the floor, potential energy converts to kinetic energy. As the ball returns to the hand kinetic energy transforms back to potential energy. Repeat. You can even do it while running – which involves yet more physics like acceleration and velocity.

These tangible and physical aspects of the game, while mathematically decipherable and predictable, are also intuitive. A kid can learn to dribble or shoot a Nerf ball into a hoop at age two. We marvel at players who can do physical feats well not only because we know how hard they are, but because they’re easy to understand. They’re rooted in physics that can be observed and measured. And in the case of free throws, where other variables influencing the outcome of the shot are minimized, statisticians can even calculate the probability of the ball going in based on known physics and the player’s historical record of free throw shooting. My sister shot 72% from the free throw line. Impressive.

LET’S GET PHYISICAL; IT’S COMPLEX

Physics is what inspired the field of economics.

Physics was the most respected science in academia and society at the time, so economists legitimized their social science by drawing associations to physics. They borrowed language from physics and built clean, rational mathematical models to communicate their ideas. It gives the illusion economics is as predictable as physics, but it turns out not to be true. And most of them know it, but it doesn’t keep them from perpetuating the myth.

While it’s officially now basketball season in the U.S., it’s also nearing the end of the year. That means more basketball to watch, but it also means more prognosticators making predictions for 2022. Including financial predictions. And just like basketball, economists and journalists focus on what’s most intuitive and calculable. The easy stuff rooted in static statistics.

A recent New York Times article talks about how Covid has demonstrated the difficulty of predicting the future, yet Wall Street analysts can’t help it. They’re already trying to predict the state of the economy a year from now. As the article says, “It’s time again for analysts to gaze into their crystal balls.” Even the analysts have trouble taking themselves seriously.

Here’s how the head of research at one global bank, BNP Paribas, puts it, “’The numbers are meaningless in a sense,’ he said, and continued with an engaging smile, ‘Whenever I make a forecast, and I have done this for a number of years, I know it is going to be wrong.’ But, he added, “The numbers are an illustration of where things are going; And they provide grounding, he said, to ‘have a thematic discussion with our clients.’”

You’d think their clients would have clued in by now. Last year Wall Street predicted 2021 would end with the S&P 500 at 3,800. They were off by 20%. Even after taking a hit from the Omicron scare last week, it was hovering around 4,500.

These people are using the same general techniques for predicting a global financial market as those predicting whether an NBA star will make their next free throw or win their next game. And they do it knowing full well there are infinite variables and inherent complexity in the myriad of interactions in a global economy. It would be like a sports analyst predicting who will win the NBA championship and by how much at the start of the season. Some still try, but they, and we, all know it’s a lark. Yet, when it comes to making financial forecasts, most mainstream economists (and universities) lead us to believe their methods are sound and that the economy is as predictable as physics. It’s not.

That’s not to say predictions of complex phenomena are worthless. People around the world rely on weather forecasts to plan their day and their businesses. Predictions have improved greatly over the years thanks to better technology and modeling, but also because meteorology, a branch of geography, knows they’re dealing with a complex system. They recognize, as do their models, that it’s more complex, for example, than just physics and that a successful prediction requires knowledge of the initial conditions of a storm. Which is literally unknowable. So they start with what they know, observe and understand the interactions, and update their model. Mainstream economists have yet to even admit they’re dealing with a complex system, let alone how to identify and verify initial conditions of catastrophic economic events.

The weather, the economy, and basketball are all complex systems. Weather is a natural system and economics and basketball are social systems. While they operate at vastly different scales and don’t share all the same attributes, they still have much in common.

One defining attribute is that complex systems are comprised of non-linear interactions between its parts – like elements of those layers of interaction I described in basketball. It’s impossible to fully understand a complex system by reducing it to its component parts – like just shooting or dribbling, for example, doesn’t fully explain a basketball game. And yet, that’s what mainstream economics continually tries to do as it clings to simplistic models and diagrams that try to mimic the laws of physics – like the ‘law’ of supply and demand, for example.

But the economy, like basketball, is an unpredictable system made up of decision makers (or agents in economics and players, coaches, and referees in basketball). The output of their interactions yields more than what is put into them which is what makes them non-linear. For example, a team of basketball players don’t simply stand in fixed positions passing the ball in a linear predictable fashion. They’re agents who take in a fixed set of inputs and decide how to make the most of them with the knowledge and skill they possess.

And these agents are not perfectly rational in their decision making, as mainstream economists assume them to be. Their rationality is limited, or bounded, by their capabilities, emotions, time, circumstances, or myriad of other distractions, preferences, or constraints. But they learn and adapt, often through interactions that are in constant motion and always changing. And each little micro-movement of behavior that comprises an interaction yields a new, novel, and emergent outcome that sometimes reveal patterns.

Because structure is imposed on the game (or the economy), order emerges from those micro-movements of activity creating a rhythm or pattern at a macro-level. For example, the rhythm and cadence of a basketball game that can sometimes emerge out of a fast break, or successive fast breaks. The opposing team’s coach recognizes that pattern; often times prompting them to stand up and call a time out just to disrupt the pattern. These continual sources of novelty self organize and perpetuate creating evolutionary momentum – like a hot shooter swept up in the flow of a game.

INTERACTION GAINS TRACTION

The global economy behaves much the same way and can be described by the same three layers of matrixed interactions mentioned earlier.

One layer of interaction is happening between the decision makers (or actors) in an organization and their teammates and competitors within the structure of local, state, and international law. Any one employee has the potential to be effective in the game of commerce, including the choice to do so. And they can’t do just anything, there are rules to commerce and certain social constructs that influence their behavior.

More interactions happen at a locational level; at local, regional, national, and global scales. Even at a local level there are interactions between employees within an office, floor, or building or between buildings in larger corporations. Regional managers in large institutions interact with a network of affiliates across a diverse set of geographies who in turn are interacting locally and with other regions. Global corporations interact at a national level, but also around the globe with other states and regions who are in turn interacting with networks of countries and areas everywhere.

A third layer includes social, political, and economic interactions and transactions between people and institutions in a vast complex array spread across territories near and far. Small business associations interact with local elected officials to enact laws and regulations while CEOs of mega-corporations convene and conspire with international monetary organizations and world leaders to control and evolve world economic policies.

There are interactions occurring within and between each of these layers creating a matrix of interconnections. In basketball, we tend to be drawn to a particular player or their jump shot and not to the interactions they have had, are having, or are about to have between them and their teammates, coaches, and referees across the entire expanse of the court, over the course of the game, or across locations over the course of season.

The same is true in economics. We tend to focus on a CEO or a company’s performance or a political leader and their nation’s GDP. We’re not obsessing over the interactions occurring within and between the various relationships that interconnect corporate structures, policies at different scales of geography, or interactions between economies, societies, and their various localities.

Distinguished Professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Henry Wai-chung Yeung quotes two researchers studying how organizations relate and interact. He uses it to make an argument for why it’s more important to focus on the interaction between entities than the entities themselves.

“Taking a relational orientation suggests that the real work of the human organization occurs within the space of interaction between its members. Thus, the theorist must account for the relationships among, rather than the individual properties of, organizational members.”

Though Yeung also reminds us these theories too are drawn from physics. Quantum physics. It turns out there have been attempts by economists to pull away from Newtonian comparisons for also most as long as they’ve been around.

It was the British economist, William Stanley Jevons, who in 1871 devised the first ‘law of demand’ by drawing a graph that mimicked Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 graph depicting his theories on the laws of motion. Borrowing Newton’s idea of an atom as the single foundational unit that defines the laws of motion, Jevon’s invented the ‘single average individual, the unit of which population is made up.’

It is from this oversimplification that he arrived at what he called the ‘calculating man’ — a perfectly rational human who maximizes the utility of their decisions. Jevons then came up with the ‘law of diminishing returns’ which states the more something is consumed, the less desirable it becomes. We don’t have to look far to see that is not universally true. Certainly not as true as the laws of motion.

But going back to the 1870s, I can imagine the allure of this theory. As evidenced in how Jevons’ describes markets being pulled into equilibrium just as gravity pulls a pendulum to rest,

“Just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets.”

But he goes on to admit that economists did not yet have the tools to measure this dynamically.

“I know not when we shall have a perfect system of statistics, but the want of it is the only insuperable obstacle in the way of making Economics an exact science.”

I suspect if Jevons were alive today, he would be scratching his head as to why more economists have not embraced complexity science to inch economics closer to an exact science. He’d be dismayed at how mainstream economists have resorted to just standing in the corner of the court arrogantly waiting for the ball to be thrown to them. He’d be screaming, “MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL! MOVE WITHOUT THE BALL!”

And they would; because he’s Jevons – one of the first economic stars in the league. And when they do, they’ll immediately experience how new situations and interactions continually emerge and how their reactions will be constantly different. And when they get the ball, the attention, interaction, and other economists will converge on them.

And then, as quickly as the moment arises, they pass to the next person and everything diverges again. These split-second cycles of emergence, convergence, and divergence of economic thoughts, theories, and actions would swirl in continual motion. Each intentional or random action from any economist, the market, politicians, or society would send the cycle spinning in another trajectory. A complex system of complexity economists lost in the perpetual momentum of the flow of the game.

And there, sitting at courtside, would be the great Sir Isaac Newton rising from his chair with his hands over his head and then sitting down. Only to rise and do it again. A single initial condition that would surely prompt others to do the same. Soon a pattern emerges as other fans join in. Pretty soon a self-organized wave propagates among the crowd and around the gym.

Each individual deciding to interact in response to a changing condition they observed in their environment constrained by the structure of the gym to forms a perpetual wave. Another complex system initiated through a set of initial conditions through the act of a single individual who decided not to just arrogantly stand there.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

As the holiday season calls on us to shop online, it’s worth considering the cost. I’m not talking about the price of the item your mouse is hovering over, but the hidden cost of getting it delivered to your doorstep.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GETTING HIP TO A TIMELY TIP ON A CALIFORNIA TRIP

“I think you’re transporting drugs”, my cousin said casually. “Why else would they send a 20 year old kid to New Jersey from L.A. just to drive an old station wagon across the country?” “You’re the perfect foil…a 20 year old blond kid from Iowa just doing his job…no cop would ever think to search for drugs.”

It was on my mind the whole trip. Especially when I was pulled over in Nebraska for speeding. A portly County Mounty waddled his way to the car as I deftly stashed the radar detector under my seat. I watched him in my side mirror as he put on his hat while approaching the car. Cold winter wind rushed in as I rolled the window down and greeted him with the best rural “howdy” I could muster. I then asked him how fast I was going. He pulled his glasses down over his nose, looked me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know, son, but it took me 10 minutes to catch up to you.”

He was indeed curious about the New Jersey plates and why I was headed to California, but he let me go with a warning. “Take it slow, son, I’m sure those folks out West want to see you make it ok.”

By the time I got to the California border, I was ready to be done. I decided to take the southern route into L.A. – the famed Route 66. I had hit a lot of snow in Colorado and was eager for sunny, dry roads. But that would have to wait. A massive ice storm met me in the high desert town of Victorville, California. I was barely able to find a place to stay for the night as the freeway was lined with cars in the ditch.

The next morning the roads were bare and wet as I headed west through the pass dividing the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains and into the vast San Bernardino valley. It was named by Spanish colonizers who took the same route in the late 1700s, then more Europeans a century later, and fellow Iowans soon after that. This valley was once home to sprawling citrus groves that attracted winter weary farmers from the Midwest. It was still agricultural when I was inching my way toward L.A. in 1985 in a blue Oldsmobile station wagon – a suspected innocent drug smuggler.

And then just last week there I was, over 30 years later, plodding my way toward L.A. down the same Interstate 10. My family and I took a trip to Southern California to visit schools for my son. A lot has changed. They paved paradise and put up parking lots, warehouses, and sprawling housing developments too. The freeways were crammed with semi-trucks as commuters blinkered their way through the lanes. They were competing for space in their hour-plus long trek to jobs in the L.A. basin.

It’s a long commute to and from what is known as the Inland Empire, but the average selling price of a home is $482,000. That’s nearly half of what you’d pay in Los Angeles ($841,000), further south in Orange county ($983,000), or San Diego ($802,000).

While four hundred grand is relatively low for Southern California, prices are climbing. The average price is already above what it was before the financial collapse of 2008. That’s when average single family home prices in the Inland Empire plummeted to under $200,000. The region was home to some of the worst foreclosure stories in the country. At one point, one in five homes in the area were in foreclosure. People were literally walking away from their homes. Even though housing is booming again, inventory is actually lower than it was before the collapse.

Wall Street backed firms like the Blackstone Group, the Lewis Group, and Oak Tree Capital Management swooped in and bought large swaths of foreclosed homes. They’ve been renting them to those who can’t afford to buy until the price of the home reaches a level they feel they can best profit by selling. Buy low, sell high and wish the struggling family good bye.

(Incidentally, the founder of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, who is worth around $21 billion, was one of a handful of billionaires who continued to support Trump financially after the raid he incited on the capital. And when the Obama administration suggested Wall Street fund managers like Schwarzman pay at least as much in taxes on earned interest as ordinary wage earners, Schwarzman said Obama was waging war on the wealthy and added, “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” What an odd and insensitive comparison for a Jewish man to make. But, Trump has a way of attracting odd and insensitive people.)

As billionaire backed firms competed for foreclosed housing stocks, there was no chance a single individual seeking to buy a home could get in on the competition. One man in Rancho Cucamonga bid on over 200 houses but failed on all accounts. And while these outside firms were scooping up homes at $200,000 a pop as late as 2012, new housing construction was selling at $300,000 to $800,000. While this was a small fraction of the total, it incented even more developers to build more expensive homes which continue to drive up prices across the region.

WORLD HYPOXIC CENTER

But the 2008 housing crisis wasn’t the first to hit the Inland Empire. Trouble was brewing even as I lumbered through the valley in the mid 1980s in that New Jersey station wagon. In 1978 California passed Proposition 13 which altered how property taxes were calculated. The law was intended to reduce property tax burdens on residents already being forced to the more affordable periphery of desirable urban centers across L.A. The Inland Empire absorbed many of those people throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s – and continues to attract more to this day.

Proposition 13 also changed the financial dynamics between state, regional, and local economies as local tax revenues plummeted. Local governments had to find new sources of revenue resulting in these three primary (and familiar) outcomes;

“1. the appearance of auto malls and big-box retail stores, and the disappearance of ‘mom and pop’ shops in virtually every community in the region;

1. new relationship between land developers and municipal authorities;

2. the creation of private/public development projects as potential revenue generators.”

It didn’t help when a steel factory shut down in 1983 eliminating 10,000 jobs. Then, in 1991, as the Cold War threats diminished, George H. W. Bush shut down the Norton Air Force base and closed a nearby missile factory. Then, in 1993, the March Air Force base was also trimmed. Over 30,000 jobs were lost accounting for nearly seven percent of the area’s population.

By the mid 1990s multi-national corporations were moving manufacturing hubs and jobs overseas. As trade imbalances mounted container ships began piling up at the Long Beach Port due south of the Inland Empire. Portside storage facilities were overwhelmed and distributors began looking to the Inland Empire for land to build new, large, modern distribution centers.

Within a decade vineyards and dairy farms were replaced with warehouses. One month residents were driving by signs advertising fresh fruit and then next a block long gray box with an Amazon sign bolted to the wall. Sketchers has a single facility stretching 1.8 million square feet and hopes to expand their footprint as part of an area wide 41.6 million square feet warehouse expansion. By the end of 2013 the Inland Empire had become the Warehouse Empire of the nation accounting for 1.6 billion square feet of distribution, logistics, and warehouse facilities.

Forty five percent of the nation’s imports are trained, trucked, or flown into the Inland Empire, unpacked, sorted, and reloaded onto trains, trucks, and planes that then fan out again across the nation. It’s like a logistics heart that pulses goods purchased with a single click through the veins and arteries of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

The city of Moreno Valley is building what they call the World Logistic Center. It’s a 41.6 million square foot $3 billion expanse that will feature a 2,600 acre corporate campus. While they claim it will be one of the most sustainable corporate campuses in the nation, the South Coast Air Quality District estimates the project will add an additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks to area roads per day. That’s nothing but dollar signs for some, but nothing but trouble for most.

Heavy-duty diesel trucks emit 24 times more fine particulate matter than regular gasoline engines. These are the chemical compounds that are so small they easily seep into the lungs and pollute blood streams. The State of California and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have identified more than 40 different toxic pollutants in diesel emissions.

“In 2003, the Riverside and San Bernardino counties ranked first and second, respectively, in the nation for total particulate pollution.”

Between 2000-2002 Riverside’s particulate matter concentrations were 1.75 times the federal limit and more than twice the state’s standard.

One 2007 study conservatively estimated that the “logistics industry expansion will cause 32-64 cases of excess mortality and morbidity valued at $247-455 million per year.” Those living closer to the freeways will be effected more. And because housing is cheapest along the noisiest and most polluted roadways, those most impacted will be those most vulnerable physically and financially – which historically are people of color and the elderly.

PROPOSITION UNSEEN

The Inland Empire is a regional microcosm of economic geography. It’s part of a global experiment – a worldwide economic capitalistic petri dish – that has been festering and bubbling at different scales since the 1970s. As residents were pushed out of settled areas in the L.A. basin due to rising property values, the Inland Empire became a target for sprawl. The passing of Proposition 13 cut funding for public health, education, and infrastructure forcing local governments to pursue public/private partnerships.

Proposition 13 also included special provisions for commercial development, attracting opportunistic capitalists and politicians. To this day, city and county government officials across the Inland Empire continue to be investigated, charged, and tried for bribery, corruption, attempts to destroy documents, and guilty pleas. While the gentrification attracts jobs and provides much needed housing and flows money through the region, it also increases commute distances, clogs roads, and contributes to some of the worst air pollution in the country.

That flow of capital into the Inland Empire is coming from state and national economic policies that started in the 1970s. Seeing an end to the post-war growth of the 1950s and 60s, the United States and their allies instituted financial deregulation that reoriented their capitalist economies. Globalization was on the rise at the same time the U.S. allowed for more foreign investment on American soil.

When I was living in L.A. in the 80s, it was private and commercial Japanese investors grabbing up property and high rises in L.A. Now the top three foreign investors come from Canada, Mexico, and China. And they’re largely interested in suburban areas like the Inland Empire.

The very financial regulation that created the necessary funds to build the seaports, airports, railways, and freeways that provide our economy’s circulatory system have been diminished by both parties over the last 50 years. The 1978 California Proposition 13 was a warm up act for Reagan’s failed tax-cut, trickle down theories he claimed would bring prosperity to every American. Every president since has been promising as much yet income disparities continue to grow. Jeff Bezos’ net worth has grown $65 billion since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, even a hint of inflation threatens to push millions more into poverty and thousands to live in their cars or on the streets.

It should be noted that the logistics business in the Inland Empire would likely not exist if it weren’t for a federally funded air force base that has since been converted to air cargo airports where streams of cargo planes land 24/7. Not to mention the federal and state funded freeways crisscrossing the valley that private heavy-duty trucks use and abuse with little to no restrictions. Trucks that are driven by drivers who continually fight for their right to organize for fair wages and healthcare. And let’s not forget the federally funded internet that makes it all too easy to click a ‘buy’ button and have a package magically arrive the next day…most likely through a sprawling warehouse in the Inland Empire.

Globalization – and the functional regulation of the world economy by select countries – has complicated the flow of capital through regions like the Inland Empire. It’s left small town governments stretched and starving for funds. They’re stuck begging for crumbs from money-rich corporations in exchange for favors. It’s led to criminal activity among conspiring opportunists – some of whom are simply trying to secure funds for schools.

I doubt I was trafficking cocaine. I was working for one of L.A.’s oldest company’s, Platt Music Corporation. They started out selling sheet music but had morphed into a consumer electronics distributor – also known as a middle-man. If you bought a TV in a California department store in the 80s, it likely went through Platt. They had just gone public a year before I started running errands for them across the far reaches of L.A. – and the country. But then big-box stores like Circuit City and Best Buy appeared and increased competition for consumer electronics. Soon department stores were forced to negotiate their own prices directly with manufacturers. Platt folded in 1987 after 82 years of doing business in L.A. Another ‘mom and pop’ shop gone. Capitalism eating itself.

CAPITAL ARREST

Geographer David Harvey put it best when he said, “Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.” And the Inland Empire, a struggling locus to distribute and focus the country’s goods, is a prime example that leads Harvey to conclude, “The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space.”

Many economic geographers contend that both perceived and real economic and social crisis are necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. Circuits of capital flowing inside the Inland Empire interact with circuits flowing outside in ways that transform the culture and shape of it’s cities. The constant expanding and contracting creates inequities and uneven development that capitalists then exploit. We often think of capitalism as a constant that can be universally applied, but in reality it thrives off of localized geographic and economic upheaval and repair – starve one area to reduce it’s value, buy low; boost investments through private capital and governmental lubricants, sell high; then seek or create the next devalued area.

This process is sold to us as job creation. It can, but often at the expense of jobs elsewhere. Production of goods and services is a social process while the ownership of production, and the profits that come with it, are largely privately held. Unless there are laws in place to distribute portions of the wealth accumulation in support of the social process of production, streets crumble, cities stumble, and angry residents rumble. We’re witnessing how the concentrated accumulation of capital and misery indeed go hand in hand.

We humans are really good at calculating the price of convenience, but are terrible at measuring the cost. For example, privileged car owners happily jump in the driver’s seat knowing how comfortable and convenient it is. But few stop to consider how much space a car takes up on the road, how much their tire dust is floating into the mouths of fish, or how many toxic exhaust chemicals are sucked into the lungs of that kid standing on the corner.

And how many of us hesitate to click ‘buy’ knowing how nice it is to have a package delivered to our doorstep in 24 hours or less? We don’t consider the additional 30,000 heavy-duty trucks that will rumble down the local roads and freeways of the Inland Empire. Or the how local warehouse workers will make ends meet when Amazon replaces them with robots. Or what about the critters living in the foothills of the valley?

Someone is thinking of them. In 2020 the Friends of the Northern San Jacinto Valley, sued Moreno Valley over further expansion of their Global Logistics Center into sensitive areas. They settled just a few weeks ago. Six hundred acres will be added to the endangered-species reserve system in exchange for enough land to build the equivalent of 40 shopping malls worth of warehouse space. The Inland Empire really is the Warehouse Empire.

Maybe it’s time we pull consumerism over and slip on our hat as we saunter up to the speeding capitalist. And when they roll their window down asking how much damage they’ve done, we peer over our glasses and earnestly say, “I don’t know, son, but it’ll take generations to fix it.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Today is Black Friday. It’s one of the most anticipated shopping days of the year. In Part 1 of this two part series, I talked about how the Christmas holiday season is rooted in consumption and classism. Its origins had little to nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with establishing social order. Black Friday is no different.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

VISIONS OF SUGAR-PLUMS DANCED IN THEIR HEADS

American colonial settlers debated Christmas celebrations well in the 1700s. Bouts of drunken caroling, groveling, and fallacious philia raged from harvest season’s end through December. While the practice was as old as the Roman Saturnalia, Puritan settlers hoped to sever the European connection.

One Puritan, Reverend Increase Mather, “accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so ‘thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].’”

The harvest parties only increased until the colonists overthrew England’s Dominion of New England in 1689. One Connecticut almanac producer, John Tully, wrote in 1688,

“The Nights are still cold and long, which may cause great Conjunction betwixt the Male and Female Planets of our sublunary Orb, the effects whereof may be seen about nine months after…”

Tully also bravely printed Christmas Day on the 25th alongside his weather predictions.

There was not another mention of Christmas until 1711 when Increase Mather’s son, Reverend Cotton Mather (who applauded Indigenous massacres because they “brought Indian souls to hell”) wrote in his December 30th diary,

“I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance].…”

The following year, around Christmas time, he preached from the Bible criticisms of faux Christians who used religion to veil ungodly sexual acts, “‘giving themselves over to fornication’—'ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.’”

Despite Mather’s routine attempts to curb young people’s desire to turn religious events into parties, such at weddings or Sunday night revelry, it only increased. Population data from this time period shows a marked increase in unwed pregnancies. Records show seven month old marriages that featured an addition to the family a couple months later. Also, there’s a notable swelling of births roughly nine months after Christmas. That’s when I was born.

By the early 1700s, Cotton Mather gave up. He reluctantly accepted that Christians could be both Christmas revelers and Christian reckoners; a weakening of Puritanism and a concession his father surely would have admonished. But it set the stage for moderation as evidenced in Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, James Franklin’s, 1733 couplet:

“Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.”

James was the one who trained young Ben to become a printer. Benjamin Franklin is also remembered as the nation’s model of self-restraint, but perhaps less so as a philanderer. He fathered an illegitimate child before entering a common-law marriage with his housekeeper’s daughter. Perhaps his rustles in the sheets started with a little wassail in streets.

In December of 1734, Franklin wrote this in his second edition of his famed Poor Richard’s Almanac:

“If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.”

Then again five years later:

“O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”

What Benjamin Franklin, and prolific almanac producer Nathanial Ames, aimed to do throughout the 1700s was to cast Christmas, through printed word, as a time to be merry – but in moderation. Slowly, by the late 1700s, Christmas carols began sneaking into America’s first printed hymnals. The Christmas celebration had finally made piece with Christianity. The Universalists were the first to hold a December 25th service in 1789.

CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT

But the dawn of a new century, and the industrial age, brought a shift in attitudes around Christmas. The elite, again, distanced themselves from the occasion. As urban cities grew and jobs shifted from the farm to the factory, winter brought new dynamics to the onset of the season. Some factories closed in the cold months as did shipyards along frozen waters.

This brought unemployment and idle time to laborers. Whereas historically wealthy farm owners were willing to amuse the working class in a societal roll reversal – through transient and theatrical wassailing – the urban elite power structures were unwilling to participate. But it didn’t stop the working class from venting.

The once faint mockery of their employers – imbued with subtle hints of revenge should they not offer them gifts, food, or alcohol – turned fierce and riotous in the 1800s. Papers in both England and the United States barely mention Christmas at all between 1800 and 1820. But that was about to change.

In the first decade of 1800, one of New York’s most influential men, John Pintard, became particularly peeved by the seasonal banditti. He reminisced on ‘better days’ when the rich and the poor got drunk together. And while he wished his wealthy friends reveled more among themselves, he grew concerned that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…”

And in a familiar tone, echoed to this day by many, he feared “thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.” Which is why he helped create the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism. This was an organization that sought to curb money directed at care for the poor, but to also stop them from begging and drinking. The white elite ruling class of the 1820s –- as well as many in the 2020s – complained of what one New York paper described as, “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.”

Pintard was also hopelessly nostalgic. He founded the New York Historical Society in 1804 and was instrumental in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July, and Columbus Day as national holidays. Pintard also introduced America’s icon of nostalgia, Santa Claus. Seeking a patron saint for the New York Historical Society, and for all of New York City, he commissioned an illustration to be painted of St. Nicholas giving presents to children. While the icon was not intended to be seasonal, it was nonetheless printed on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, in 1810.

He pined for the days when the rich and powerful could rule over what was becoming a burgeoning working class. In 1822, as Jefferson had just passed a law allowing non-property owners to vote, Pintard wrote to his daughter,

“All power is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in this city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy.… Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”

WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR

1822 was also the year his friend, and wealthy land owner, Clement Clark Moore, wrote what was to become the most influential Christmas poem ever: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or as it is known today, “T’was The Night Before Christmas.”

This single poem, written for the elite upper class, encapsulates the nostalgia of wassailing Pintard and his friends pined for, while making themselves feel good about themselves for ‘giving to the needy.’ Moore did this by substituting the unruly lower working class, begging for gifts from their master, with children expecting presents on Christmas morning.

He kept the gift giving mysticism of the centuries old St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but removed the judgmental elements of a Bishop who may make them feel guilty for maintaining class divide by making him “merry”, “droll”, “rosy”, and “plump.” He also made him a lower class “peddler”. And while Santa made a loud noise “on the lawn” with a “clatter”, just as a lower class wassailer would have, he was but a small and unthreatening “right jolly old elf” who kindly left toys he had labored over for the children.

And he asked nothing in return. With a “wink of his eye” and a “finger aside his nose” (a gesture meaning “just between you and me”) Moore gave the privileged class, who were fearful of home invasions at Christmas time, assurance they “had nothing to dread.” All they needed to do, was keep their wealth within the family and buy their kids and friends gifts at Christmas time. Forget the poor, they thought, they’re as hopeless as democracy.

The vision and version of Christmas and Santa Claus that Moore provided his haughty affluent peers, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was soon to be read by a growing middle class and an increasingly literate lower class. That’s as true then as it is today.

And while Moore was a country squire who never worked a day in his life, and hated the gridding up of property in a growing New York City, he grew to love the money he earned selling off family property he inherited. Geographer Simeon DeWitt was chopping Manhattan into a Roman style grid to make room for a population that grew from 33,000 in 1790 to nearly 200,000 by the time Moore’s poem was written in 1822. He even included a chimney in his poem for Santa to climb down as a way for city folk to better relate to a scene he’d rather have happened in his bucolic hills of a New York of yore – an area today we call Chelsea.

What also changed was the gifts exchanged. Traditional Christmas gifts consisted of hand made food and goods forged from natural countryside surroundings. But as Christmas moved to the city, handmade gifts were displaced by store bought presents.

The first known American Christmas advertisement came from one of the country’s busiest ports, Salem, Massachusetts in 1806. Then two more in 1808 in both Boston and New York in the New York Evening Post. By the 1820s they were everywhere. In 1834 a Boston magazine wrote,

“’All the children are expecting presents, and all aunts and cousins to say nothing of near relatives, are considering what they shall bestow upon the earnest expectants.… I observe that the shops are preparing themselves with all sorts of things to suit all sorts of tastes; and am amazed at the cunning skill with which the most worthless as well as most valuable articles are set forth to tempt and decoy the bewildered purchaser.’”

It went on to warn shoppers to “’put themselves on their guard, to be resolved to select from the tempting mass only what is useful and what may do good…’”

Sounds like Black Friday.

THE LUSTRE OF MID-DAY TO OBJECTS BELOW

While there was aggressive advertising as early as the 1800s, there was a social stigma around being too showy with luxury purchases. It was a sign of European aristocracy that the colonists, of all economic strata, were keen to avoid. But Christmas time had long been a cyclical excuse to overconsume. Shopkeepers and manufacturers latched on this association tempting even the most tempered to exult in excess through advertising, promotions, and sales.

It was the Puritans who invented Thanksgiving as way to celebrate the harvest separate from the religiosity of Christmas time. The specific day on the calendar bounced around until the late 1700s when regional governors dictated it be celebrated as close to Christmas as possible. It was even held on December 20th one year.

It didn’t take long for Thanksgiving to become commercialized either. New England farmers and merchants would strategize on how to best profit from the carnival-like drunken festivals that surrounded Thanksgiving just as it did Christmas.

Once Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be the official day of Thanksgiving in 1863, retailers could plan their profits around a firm date. Then, in 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved it back a week during the depression to extend the Christmas shopping season an extra week so retailers could reap more profits. It was a controversial ruling and FDR’s date came to be known as Franksgiving. Happy Franksgiving, everyone!

The 1900s was also the time when the marauding tradition of parading through the streets became a sponsored event by department stores. Eaton department store sponsored the first in Toronto in 1905 and then Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came along in New York City in 1924. These parades began an unwritten rule among retailers to refrain from advertising Christmas sales until the parade had commenced. That made the Friday after Thanksgiving the first day shops were open for business and the start of holiday shopping.

The term ‘Black Friday’ didn’t enter the picture until 1961 in Philadelphia. ‘Black days’ were customarily days marking bad events. So much like the dread of the chaotic colonial traditions of parading wassailers, the Philadelphia police came to describe the traffic, congestion, and shopping hysteria the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday.’

But retailers didn’t much like the negative association. It took 20 years before a new association was cemented. And it was, again, Philadelphia that led the charge. A November 28th, 1981 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to describe Black Friday as the day when retailers, who suffered ‘in the red’ for most of the year, could move their ledger into the ‘black’ during the holiday shopping season.

Black Friday triggers an event, just as solstice did for the Romans, that offers an opportunity for those in power, capitalists in the form of retailers, to open their doors just as the wealthy land owners did, and offer great deals to those who can’t afford various luxuries, like figgy pudding, rum spiced pie, perry, or wassail.

Just as Roman slave owners used the Saturnalia to remind slaves of their place in society, or wealthy land barons to remind peasant laborers of theirs, capitalists use the holiday season as an chance to remind us all who’s in charge. And what Pintard, Moore, and their band of wealthy Knickerbockers did was wrap it all up in a fairy tale that portrays it all as benevolence by tying it to the Christian saint known for charity – Ole St. Nick.

They feared the masses becoming educated and empowered with the right to vote. They railed against democracy sensing it would only loosen their grip on power. And here we are on Black Friday of 2021, the start of the holiday shopping season, as powerful conservatives in Washington are drooling over ways to carve up a bill that represents the biggest investment in America’s most needy since FDR like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. Pass the wassail, please.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This is part one of a two part series on the role of economics in the holiday season. We’re a week away from Thanksgiving, but Christmas has already started to enter our lives. If it feels like it keeps creeping closer to Halloween, that’s because it is. Little did I know, it actually started out that way.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HOUSE INVASION

It was 9:00 on Christmas night when four men forcibly entered the house. John Rowden, his wife, their adopted son, and a live-in helper, Daniel Poole, were all home. The four men made their way to the living room, sat on the couch in front of the fire, and starting singing Christmas carols. Clearly drunk, at some point one of the men turned to Rowden and said sarcastically, “How do you like this, father?” They demanded alcohol as payment for their ‘entertainment’. Rowden didn’t like it at all and asked them to leave.

They had heard Rowden had fine wine in his collection. They said they’d happily pay him for the alcohol later, but demanded the wine now. Rowden’s wife stepped in reminding them that their house was not a bar and they should leave. Much to their surprise, the men did; only to return minutes later claiming they had the cash to pay for the wine.

Fearing the scoundrels would break in if they didn’t take the money, the Rowden’s decided to sell them a bottle of their prized wine. But first they demanded proof that the men had the money. Rowden cracked open the door and one of the men shoved fake money in his wife’s face as the others tried to enter the house.

The Rowden’s, with the help of Daniel Poole, managed to push them back and secure the door. The four men appeared to have given up. But moments later they heard them yelling sardonically from outside, “hello.” Poole tried to reason with them. He reminded them that it was Christmas night and they should be home. They saw this as a provocation and challenged Poole to come out and make them go home.

Poole refused, of course, so they began throwing rocks at the house. They pried away siding, destroyed rockery, fences, and tore down poles. After an hour and a half of persistent vandalism, it finally subsided and the family was safe and sound. The house? Not so much. Merry Christmas.

This true story is from 1649 and took place in Salam, Massachusetts. Two of those four men were later implicated in the Salem witch hunts. These intrusions were a common occurrence in the colonies during the holiday season, but more so in England. These four men were wassailing. Today we might call it caroling, but at the time it was really more a combination of Thanksgiving, Mardi Gras, trick-or-treating, and caroling. We don’t run into many drunk carolers these days, but we would have in 17th century England and their colonies.

The Puritan settlers outlawed wassailing after colonizing. In fact, they banned any celebration of Christmas. Because the bible makes no mention of the birth of Jesus on any particular date, there was no cause for celebration. Of course, there was little cause for celebration among the Puritans at all; especially excesses of revelry, alcohol, and sex.

The Puritans tried banning Christmas in London too. It prompted a book to be written in 1686 called The Tryal of Old Father Christmas. It featured a Puritan jury made up of “Mr. Cold-kitchen”, “Mr. Give-little”, and “Mr. Hate-good.” Perhaps these characters inspired Charles Dicken’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge, 150 years later.

TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET, GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT

The Rowden’s were a relatively affluent family who owned a pear orchard from which they made pear wine or cider, known as “perry”. Those four young men were of a lower class, possibly even laborers for his orchard, and they came to Rowden’s house to be merry with his perry.

It was common practice throughout Europe and England for wealthy land and farm owners to treat their lower class workers to a meal and/or gifts in late November and early December. After what must have been an intense and laborious season of harvesting, canning, slaughtering, and preparing for the coming winter months, December marked an end to a fruitful season worth celebrating. December 6th was the customary end of the harvest season in Western Europe, just a week and a half after America’s modern-day traditional harvest celebration – Thanksgiving.

To recognize and honor their hard work, it became customary for workers to exchange gifts with their masters or employers. Some exchanges were initiated from the lower class workers and other times by the upper class employers. But every wealthy land owner knew that if they didn’t so something to commemorate their worker’s labor, they risk workers taking it upon themselves to come knocking. Just as those four men did to old man Rowden, singing,

Come bring, with a noise,My merrie, merrie boys,The Christmas log to the firing;While my good dame sheBids ye all be free [i.e., with the alcohol]And drink to your heart’s desiring…

The upper class quickly learned that it’s best to open their doors to the peasant class, feed them, entertain them, and send them on their merry way…or else. As evidenced in this little jingle,

We’ve come here to claim our right…And if you don’t open up your door,We will lay you flat upon the floor

While I’m sure there were examples of benevolent exchanges between classes, the ritual also served as an explicit reinforcement of social order. You’re down there and we’re up here. Don’t think that we’re equals. We have the goods and you come begging. And begging they did, singing,

Again we assemble, a merry New YearTo wish to each one of the family hereMay they of potatoes and herrings have plentyWith butter and cheese, and each other dainty

Christmas was a time when the poor were excused for begging. If they were not happy with what was offered, they took revenge. Again, a bit like Halloween. Give me a treat, or you’ll get tricked. The privileged class knew they could do little to stop the raucous revelers, just as there’s little to be done should some kids decide to toilet paper your trees or egg your house on Halloween.

THE POPE PULLS A TRICK, WITH OLE ST. NICK

Another hallows eve refrain was dressing in costumes. Often it was the lower class mocking the upper class by dressing and acting like them. Men would sometimes dress as women and women as men. Others would use it as a way to mock religious leaders or politicians.

And it was almost always a rowdy and drunken celebration because one of the substances the merry bands would be begging for was alcohol – usually the cidery punch known as wassail. They’d run door to door and through the streets singing this familiar holiday tune,

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green;Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door;But we are neighbours' children whom you have seen before.Love and joy come to you, and to you our wassail, too.And God bless you and send you a Happy New YearAnd God bless you and send you a Happy New Year

This widespread postharvest behavior had been happening for thousands of years. It was so baked into the fabric of society that even the church began painting it with Christian imagery and metaphor. Because the celebrations occurred on or around the end of November and into December there were many elements of Christianity to which they could attach the events.

During Roman times, December 17th marked the day of the Saturnalia – a festival honoring the god of agriculture, Saturn. All work halted for a week as people decorated their homes with wreaths. They shed their togas to dawn festive clothes, and they drank, gambled, sang, played music, socialized and exchanged gifts. It was a celebration of their agrarian bounty and the return of light at Winter solstice. It was also a time to invite their slaves to dinner where their masters would serve them food.

One Christian Saint affiliated with early December – and the one most honored today in the form of a plump jolly man wearing a red velvet suit – is Saint Nicholas. December 6th is St. Nicholas Day. For many European countries this marked the official end of the harvest season. And even today it’s recognized in some countries as a kind of warm-up act to the more official and accepted Christmas day, December 25th.

Nicholas of Bari was a Greek Christian bishop from modern day Turkey. Also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, he earned a reputation during the Roman Empire for many miracles; all of which, were written centuries after his death and thus prone to exaggeration. But, he was most famous for his generosity, charity, and kindness to children, the poor, and the disadvantaged. He was said to have sold his own belongings to get gold coins that he’d then put in the shoes outside people’s homes. This is the origin of the tradition of putting shoes or stockings out on Christmas Eve.

They say he also saved the lives of three innocent men from execution. He chastised the corrupted judge for accepting a bribe to execute them. You can bet St. Nick would have made sure old-man Rowden had shared his perry before things got too scary.

And he certainly would have been watching over the peasant farmers and slaves to insure they were treated fairly. He seemed to always have an eye out for inequities and justice for common people. Maybe that’s what made him a saint. Or maybe he was just born that way. After all, Nicholas in Greek means “people’s victory.”

DON’T GO HIDING, OFFER GOOD TIDING

The Puritans obviously lost at their attempts to ban Christmas. Lacking any evidence from the Bible, the Christian powers that be eventually settled on the 25th of December as the day Jesus was born. They most likely picked the 25th because that was the day winter solstice landed on the Roman calendar. And while much is made of Christmas day, a certain song reminds us there are actually 12 days of Christmas. Maybe more.

It may feel like Christmas creep when you see holiday decorations appear the day after Halloween, but historically speaking that’s when the party starts. Trick-or-treating kicks off two months of gorging on goodies, making merry with perry, and pleading, pestering, and pining for presents from parents. Just as peasants begged for bounty from their overlords.

Christmas tradition is mostly a months long after-work party that celebrates wealth accumulation while reinforcing a certain economic relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Yes, there are “good tidings to you and all of your kin” and it is a celebration from the heart that can feed the soul with some warm “figgy pudding.”

But lingering under the guise of generosity on the part of the giver is a threat of violence if it’s not shared equitably. “For they’d all like figgy pudding, so bring it out here!” And if you don’t, then “they won’t go until they get some, so bring some out here!”

Maybe think twice before feeling too smug plopping a penny in the Salvation Army’s red pot while making pleasant with a nearby peasant. If your flush with funds this holiday season, and pay people to serve you, be mindful of who you snub.

Tip graciously and share wisely. The ones who deserve it the most, may be the one’s who could do you the most damage. You’d hate for a worker’s revolt where the disadvantaged come knocking on the doors of rich people carrying a yule log, some drunken friends, a bit of angry resentment, and a nearly empty bowl of wassail.

Reference:

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

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Hello Interactors,

Most of you probably heard about Bill Gates’ recent over the top 66th birthday celebration. The images conjured up visions of a Bond film. It got me thinking about Bezos and Musk and how they could easily be cast as villains in a Bond film. Maybe real-life really is stranger than fiction. Or maybe they’re one in the same.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOND MEETS ELON

The scene opens in Monaco with the bay crowded with boats. James Bond has just climbed aboard a private mega yacht and is snooping around. With a single hand he pulls open a glass sliding door on the upper deck and steps inside an opulent room filled with fine furniture.

He glances out a window to reveal a long gray military frigate docked at shore with a helicopter perched on top. Speeding toward it is a motor boat that mysteriously vanishes under water 10 meters shy of the hard chined towering frigate.

Bond squints with suspicion. He then notices a reflection in the shiny brass compass housing just in front of the window. Somebody is approaching him from behind. He quickly grabs a towel and somehow manages to kill his assailant with piece of white cotton terry cloth fabric that he then uses to dab the sweat from his brow.

The scene cuts to a celebration on the French frigate. The military’s top brass and dignitaries arrive in chauffeured Mercedes Benz sedans as a Navy brass band plays in the background. We cut briefly to see a closeup of two identification cards being swapped by black leather gloved hands. Back to Bond on the boat and he’s just stumbled across a dead man that stiffly falls from a closet stripped of all his clothes – presumably the previous holder of one of those ID cards we just saw.

We cut back to shore and are introduced to an attractive woman who just arrived for the ceremonies. And now back to Bond who puts two and two together and jumps from the super yacht onto a high speed tender. The camera zooms in on the throttle as we’re treated to the throaty roars of a muscular V12 engine. Bond shoves the throttle forward and jets towards the celebration.

We cut to a speech by a French bureaucrat standing on the frigate. He’s spouting off the technological features of a new helicopter that is about to be demonstrated. He calls it “Europe’s answer to the electronic battlefield.” The Tiger helicopter, he says, uses “stealth technology.” It’s “hardened against all forms of electronic interference, radio jamming, and electromagnetic radiation.”

We then cut to two pilots making their way toward the helicopters below deck on the frigate. But, they’re interrupted by the beautiful woman we were just introduced to. After some flirty back and forth dialog, she raises her gun and kills them both.

Next we see her wearing one of their helmets and uniform as she’s joined by her companion Bond saw dip below the surface in the motorboat moments earlier. They make their way out onto the helicopter pad where the Tiger awaits. The announcer says, “Please welcome the pilots!” They climb in and start the propellers whirling as we cut to Bond making his way up the steps of the dock and through the crowd.

He runs toward the frigate to stop them, but is halted and thrown up against the wall of the ship by two French navy officers. A gun is held to his sun soaked face as he watches the Tiger helicopter whir away.

I couldn’t help but recall this scene from the 1995 Bond film, GoldenEye when I read reports and saw pictures of Bill Gates’ rented yacht docked in a remote bay somewhere in Turkey shuttling guests by helicopter to his beachside 66th birthday bash.

There’s no question Bill lives the life similar to those mega rich and powerful international men of mystery that Bond films cast as antagonists. He lives in a sprawling high tech compound on Lake Washington with a Bond-like subterranean garage. When he’s not around to commute by car to his nearby office, he has a barge tugged into a secluded cove where his helicopter can land. A small boat shuttles him to shore. He escapes up a mysterious private elevator in a midrise office building overlooking the lake and the Seattle skyline.

For his Turkish birthday bash, Bill paid upwards of $2 million dollars a week to rent one of the world’s largest yachts, “Lana”. One of his guests, Jeff Bezos, also rented a yacht. Some speculate he actually owns it, but the “Flying Fox” rents for over $3 million a week. It too had helicopters shuttling people to the beach party.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wasn’t there but we can imagine he would not have been out done. Perhaps there was a shortage of yachts to rent. Or maybe he was in the Space X control room rattling off all the technological wonders of his new rocket perched on the platform outside.

I can imagine the scene cutting to 007 careening down the tarmac in his Tesla Cybertruck. Flying just above him, a bodacious, musclebound, blond bombshell leaning out of an unmanned drone. She’s firing rounds of thermonuclear plasma from her space pistol as the countdown clock to launch ticks toward zero. Will 007 make it to Musk in time, or will the double agent vixen sabotage the launch?

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC TRIUMPHANT SEXIST

These three men have more in common than being billionaires, they’re all science fiction junkies who pursued a path of technocratic, world dominating, capitalistic monopolies. They’re also rational egoists. They believe their selfish actions to be perfectly rational. In fact, in their estimation, any action on the part of any human is only rational if and only if it maximizes one's own self-interest.

The libertarian darling philosopher and writer Alice O’Connor, or better known as Ayn Rand, a favorite of theirs I’m sure, said “it’s not only irrational to act against your own self-interest, but it’s also immoral.”

She was a big fan of 007 books, but not the films. She didn’t like how the humor diminished the glory of individualism. She said the movies “undercut Bond’s stature, to make him ridiculous.” At least she wasn’t alone.

The inventor of the character, Ian Fleming, thought he was ridiculous too. He believed Bond as a “blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get into bizarre and fantastic situations […] he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man.”

Billionaires today are villainized as rather unattractive men. Like Bond movies, they celebrate and flaunt the excesses of mass-consumption and capitalism. We can track the rise of this behavior with the rise of the Bond franchise. From the early books in the 1950s to the most recent Bond flicks, we are offered superheroes of a technologically driven mass-consumer society.

But it’s not a society of the masses. It’s a glamorized vision of a small exclusive society that props itself up so it can look down at the rest of the world’s global population. Without whom, through their toils and disenfranchisement, the elite exclusive little society would not exist. Nor would villainous billionaires. Or maybe not as many.

Bond films divide the world into workers, buyers, and capitalists. All three of those characters are presented in that single helicopter scene in GoldenEye. Two navy pilots (workers) killed point blank by a hired villain (worker) so she could fly a technologically advanced machine built with blue-collar labor (workers) and purchased by the government (buyer) from a corporation (capitalist) using tax dollars collected largely from workers.

And it was Bond’s job to represent the public’s interest, squash the entire operation, and save capitalism.

And the audience cheers him on. The audience, of course, is made mostly of people who have a vested interest in a government secret agent protecting the laws that maintain their private ownership of property, consumption of goods, and privilege over those tasked with serving them. They give permission to Bond to do things that go against the grain of Western democracy and its Christian roots.

He’s allowed to break the law, promote misogyny, destroy property, and even commit murder. So long as the dominant social order is upheld, mass-media consumers turn a blind eye.

Social scientist, Toby Miller calls it a “popular endorsement of overt governmental processes through the publicly-ratified rule of law.” It’s exactly what many in Europe and America want.

The former New York Times movie critic, Vincent Canby, wrote in 1971 that Bond is a “steadfast agent for the military-industrial complex, a friend to the C.I.A. and a triumphant sexist.” In 2012 the American Conservative magazine said “Bond’s Britain is relevant, wealthy, and influential, still a beacon of Western ingenuity.”

Gates, Bezos, and Musk are all beacons of Western ingenuity. But they’re also cartoons of capitalism, just as Bond is a cartoon of Western hegemony. Film critic and painter, Manny Farber wrote that Bond films are “a catalogue of posh-vulgar items for licentious living.” The former Head of Media at The Guardian and now professor, Jane Martinson said in 2012 that

“feminists were sick of a long-running multibillion-pound franchise that left a series of beautiful women as little more than roadkill in the path of the spy we never loved.”

History professor Theodore Roszak called Bond the “embodiment of technocracy.”

These critiques could have just as easily been leveled against Gates, Bezos, or Musk and their lifestyles and beliefs. And for most of the effects of neoliberal economics for that matter.

LORDE EDGE TAKES AIM

GoldenEye was filmed 26 years ago. Bill Gates would have been 40 years old. That’s about the same age the actor playing Bond, Pierce Brosnan, would have been. Pierce was born in Ireland. His father abandoned him and his mother at infancy. At four they moved to London where he was raised by his grandparents while his mom worked as a nurse. When they died he was put in a boarding house. He was ridiculed by British kids for being Irish. He went on to learn commercial illustration at 16, then acting, and worked as a busker breathing fire on street corners. Not exactly the path of a true 007.

Gates was born into wealth and privilege and admits to reading his fair share of science fiction. But unlike Bezos and Musk, he isn’t that interested in taking up life on Mars. His mom instilled a strong since of philanthropy in Bill as a young boy that many have benefited from today. His wealth created my own, so I can’t be too hard on him.

He’s unquestionably the smartest men I’ve been around, but he can’t be the world’s 007. He’s not that smart or ingenious. And while his giving is commendable, I can’t help but wonder if Seattle would have a homeless crisis had a larger fraction of his billions been siphoned off over the last 40 years for the public good. Maybe had the government taken more of his income to circumvent global problems, he wouldn’t have to spend as much money trying to solve them.

Bezos comes from a broken family. He excelled at math, computer science, and engineering. He built an alarm as a kid that would sound should someone try to enter his room. Sounds like a budding 007 to me. Upon graduating as valedictorian, Bezos told a local paper that he hoped

"to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park."

Bezos loves the Iain M. Banks science fiction novels, Culture series. They’re about humanoid aliens occupying artificial habitat on planets strewn across the Milky Way.

But what was lost on Bezos, a fierce libertarian, is that Banks was a committed socialist. In a recent New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying the books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’

Musk was born into wealth, but his parents divorced when he was nine years old and he lived with his dad. A decision he came to regret calling him “a terrible human being.” He was teased as a young boy and was hospitalized once after being thrown down a flight of stairs. He wrote and sold his first software at age 10, when on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in economics and a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1989. He was accepted at Stanford to do a PhD in materials science, but opted to ride the internet startup wave instead.

He too was a fan of Iain Banks. Jill Lepore also noted that Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” That makes two renowned libertarian brainiacs who somehow missed Iain Banks’ socialist agenda.

Last weekend Musk changed his Twitter name to “Lorde Edge.” The speculation is that it’s a derivative of the word edgelord which is “Someone, especially posting on the internet, who uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” It’s a character trait you might expect in a Bond anti-hero.

Pierce Brosnan saw his first Bond movie, Goldfinger, in 1964 when he was 11 years old. His stepfather took him to see it in London. I wonder what the 11 year old Brosnan thought of Pussy Galore and her band of merry lesbian aviators.

The movie ends with Bond and Pussy Galore on the ground having just survived parachuting from a plane. Helicopters are coming to rescue them, but he leans over her and says, “This is no time to be rescued” and pulls the parachute over himself and Pussy Galore as they kiss.

I can imagine Brosnan’s stepdad leaning over and whispering to the young Pierce the words of the character’s creator, Ian Fleming, “Pussy only needed the right man to perform the laying on of hands to cure her psycho-pathological malady.”

The discrepancy between Brosnan’s life and the fictional life of the character he played is metaphorical. England had long played the leading role in world power and dominance but it had been cracked by the U.S. and the fire breathing working class identity was starting to show through. Ayn Rand’s biggest fear was coming true. The grand singularly focused empire was becoming diminished by the tragedy and comedy of the commons.

The talented set designer for the Bond films, Ken Adam reflected in 2008 that Goldfinger was a time when “when the British took off their handcuffs and said: ‘F**k, the Empire doesn’t exist any longer. Now, we will take over.’” Pussy Galore not only signaled liberation, she provided proletariat comic relief.

Gates, Bezos, and Musk all play the leading role of the enterprising, multi-national capitalist. They’re protagonists to many and antagonists to most. Either way, they’re flawed and troubled humans with troubled beginnings but also brilliant and talented men who have brought much good – an allegory for neoliberal economics.

Modern neoliberal economics has brought, and continues to bring, unmatched prosperity to underprivileged people around the world. But, it’s also created historic income disparities, social strife and anxiety, and it’s destroying the planet. The real psychopathological malady isn’t in the form of lesbianism, it’s in unbridled capitalism.

Truth be told, my entire family love watching Bond movies. Pre Daniel Craig, anyway. I can’t handle the glorified violence in mainstream movies anymore. My daughter laughs at the misogyny, but relishes the moments women rule over men. My son loves the chase scenes, but is outraged by the sexism. My wife rolls her eyes at the absurdities, but cheers on the fleeting female power. I marvel at the set design and gadgetry, but wonder how my teenage kids are interpreting these messages.

My daughter summed it best when I asked her why she like Bond films. She said,

“Sometimes it’s entertaining to watch something you know is just classically bad.”

There are people outside the United States, and some inside, who think that as they watch the absurdities of American gluttony. Perhaps we’ve reached that point England did in the 60’s when the masses realized the empire doesn’t exist anymore.

Many are entertained watching Bill, Jeff, and Elon fly and float as they falter, flaunt, and philander. They are what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call the hyper-competent US businessman: “part James Bond, part Henry Ford.”

But what their exploits do, just as Bond films do, is perpetuate a particular cultural narrative that substantiates a societal norm. They lead most members of the dominant ruling class to believe that Bill, Jeff, and Elon’s unique individual contributions, be it corporate or philanthropic, are benefitting society as a whole when in reality they’re mostly benefitting themselves and the dominant ruling class.

Or maybe the joke’s on us and Musk really is casting himself as a real-life sociopathic anti-hero, “Lorde Edge.” After all, the objective for Bond in GoldenEye was to circumvent a space weapon that was destined to blow up the planet with an electromagnetic pulse.

Let’s hope the battery in that Tesla Cybertruck 007 is driving down the Space X tarmac doesn’t run out of juice. That rocket Elon is about to launch just may contain a space weapon he plans to aim back at the planet; fulfilling Jeff’s sadistic boyhood dream of a planet earth free of humans.

Reference

Toby Miller. Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure. From the book The Cultural Life of James Bond.

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Hello Interactors,

It’s hard to miss news about global supply chain woes these days. Between Covid, natural disasters, and strained trade relations with China it seems unlikely we’ll see anything that looks like normal for some time. But companies aren’t waiting to find out. They’re taking matters into their own hands. Or so they think.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MARIA CANTWELL AND THE CHAIN GANG

“There are some people who are saying, ‘Look, what I need is short term because this is never going to happen again,’ ” she said. “Then there are other people who are saying, ‘This is going to happen more often than we think.’ The world is a very different place, and it’s not just the pandemic. It’s natural disasters. It’s the floods down in the South. It’s tornadoes, it’s hurricanes.”

These are the words of Ellen Kullman. She’s the CEO of Carbon Inc., a 3-D printing company. She’s also the former CEO of DuPont, sits on the board of directors for Goldman Sachs and Dell, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recognized leader in global science and engineering, and once chaired the US-China Business Council.

She knows a thing or two about global supply chains; which have had their fair share of attention recently. As global corporations have pushed their employees to work Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger. They must appease shareholders demanding perpetual growth, even at the cost to people and the environment. To do so, they rely on other parts of the globe for raw materials and labor – a spatial fix.

Covid has taken a 200-year capitalism strategy believed to be immune to disruption and has created a supply chain pandemic. Just as the disease is testing our body’s immune system, it’s also testing the resiliency of networked global supply chains.

The onset of the pandemic showed early signs of vulnerability when global corporations were hit by governmental restrictions. Without notice borders around the world were closed, lockdowns prevented employees from working, and no sooner were facemasks recommended did we run out of supply. Dr. Gary Gereffi from Duke’s Global Value Chains Center said,

“China accounted for about 60% of U.S. face mask imports prior to the pandemic, but China suspended its exports of face masks worldwide as it dealt with its own outbreak of COVID-19 cases in early 2020.”

It wasn’t until late August that the supply gap was filled by U.S. producers.

Gereffi was testifying on July 15, 2021, in a hearing chaired by Democratic U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell on “Implementing Supply Chain Resiliency.” The meeting was in reaction to one of Biden’s first executive orders. It launched a 100-day review identifying vulnerabilities in the nation’s supply chains and how to address them.

The witnesses in the hearing included Gereffi from academia and five others from government agencies and the business sector. Their testimonies paint an accurate state of the country’s complicated over reliance on the global supply chain. They also had asks of the government that you might expect; more government funding, private-public partnerships, subsidies, or for the government to get out of the way. Or, in the case of Lex Taylor, a confusing mix of all the above.

William A. (Lex) Taylor III runs The Taylor Group of Companies, Inc. It was founded in 1927 as Taylor Machine Works in Louisville, Mississippi. Did I mention the ranking member and co-chair seated alongside Cantwell was U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi?

The Taylor Group is now a privately held holding company for Taylor Machine Works (heavy industrial forklifts), Taylor Power Systems (power generators), and Taylor Defense (remanufactured military material).

Taylor complained about the lack of resiliency in the global supply chain. He said the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) had quickly come up with a plan for how to circumvent the Covid caused supply chain conundrums called operation “Floorplan”. It was modelled after what he deemed a “successful Payroll Protection Program the Congress instituted at the Small Business Administration.” A clear nod to a government success story by a devote capitalist.

But he claimed operation “Floorplan“ failed “because of the political wrangling and failure of the government to understand the big-picture consequences of letting supply chains falter.” Yet the association seemed ok asking the government to bankroll his “Floorplan” program.

He went on about how every private company involved in his vast and deep supply chain began raising their prices to control their limited and dwindling supplies – a tried and true trick of the free-market system.

Compounding inflation among suppliers forced him to ultimately raise his prices too; all the while trying to stay afloat. He said, “we have kept our lines running but are facing 30% to 75% price increases either from our vendors or the transportation companies, or a combination of both.”

What gouged him the most was unbridled free-market pricing; a practical solution driven by the private sector. At the same time, he wanted federal dollars to fix the problem with a government subsidized “Floorplan.”

But while he and his employees benefitted from the government run Payroll Protection Program – and he wished the federal government would have funded his “Floorplan” – he would rather the free-market solve his problems. Even though the free market created the bulk of his financial pain.

In his closing remarks he said,

“My request is that this committee not act to overcorrect with solutions that may cause unintended consequences. Rather, I encourage you to support the free-market system and allow it to do what it does best and find solutions that are practical and driven by the private sector.”

Price gouging is a practical mechanism of the free-market. A solution? Maybe not.

BOEING BOEING GONE

In her opening remarks, Maria Cantwell said, “I would say, Senator Wicker, I'm not sure 20 years ago, if we would've had the same hearing.”

Twenty years ago Cantwell was in her first year as a U.S. Senator. Amassing independent wealth from her time in the software industry, she threw a lot of her own money into her campaign against the eleven year incumbent, Republican Slade Gorton. Microsoft was her biggest donor, followed by two law firms, and the fourth largest campaign contributor was Boeing.

Six months later Boeing sought their own spatial fix and announced they were moving their corporate headquarters to Chicago. By September of 2001, after being headquartered in Seattle since 1916, the Boeing corporate offices fell vacant.

Eight years later, in 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, Boeing applied another spatial fix moving an assembly plant from Washington to South Carolina. North Charleston’s economy had been devastated by the closure of a naval shipyard and the Great Recession. They were experiencing record high unemployment rates.

So the state offered Boeing an incentive to move their factory. If Boeing could create 3,800 jobs and invest $750 million over the next seven years, the state would pitch in another $450 million.

Boeing had already been dealing with ugly union strikes in Washington. Four of their last seven contract negotiations ended in strikes. Conservatives blamed the machinists while liberals blamed Boeing. Either way, South Carolina was union free. An unorganized labor force is attractive to corporations because they can dictate the terms of pay uncontested. Some states, and nations, will even suppress or ban unions in hopes of attracting businesses to their regions.

Frank Larkin of the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said in 2009, “It became clear early on that the company was less interested in making a deal than they were in getting more incentives out of South Carolina…The longer they sat at the table with us, the more South Carolina offered them."

Just 2.7% of South Carolina’s labor force is unionized – the lowest in the United States. Since the plant opened in 2011, Boeing has been fighting attempts by employees to unionize. In 2017, 3,000 employees tried and failed to unionize. A year later they succeeded despite Boeing funding a widespread media campaign against it.

So, Boeing took them to court. Because litigation slows down unionization, it buys time for Boeing to continue to use their wealth, power, and strength to disrupt the momentum of organizers. It also provides opportunities to fire employees as a way of sending a message to workers.

In November of 2018 they fired air force veteran, Richard Mester and two others for failing to report a bird strike on a Boeing engine. Mester had been doing this line of work for 30 years and knows a bird strike when he sees it. The Guardian reported, “He had just bought a house and had two daughters in college when he was terminated.” Mester said, “It was easy to see it was because we were union members…Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”

Despite the dwindling Boeing presence in Washington state, Maria Cantwell did mentioned in her opening remarks, “I can say for me in the state of Washington, aviation supply chain is something we're very proud of. More than 150,000 people work in that supply chain that continue to innovate and create new products…[this] is where the innovation is happening in the supply chain.”

She’s referring to an insight offered in a testimony by Richard Aboulafia, the VP of Analysis at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. Out of the gate he exposed the realities of the aviation supply chain by talking about value, innovation, and vulnerability.

He said, “For a typical Boeing jetliner, 80% of the value gets added at the supplier level…When Boeing sells a jetliner…suppliers, collectively, realize more revenue than [Boeing does].”

He added, “the innovation that takes place in aviation happens at the supplier level, and not at the prime level. Boeing’s 737 jetliner [has] been in production for around half a century. But the…successful transformation of these aircraft is because of the tremendous innovation that has taken place at the supplier level.”

Perhaps this explains why Washington state has not fought to win back the union heavy airplane assembly business. As Microsoft rose in the 90s and Amazon in the 2000s, the area attracted higher paying white collar engineering talent that fed into the aviation supply industry. Washington’s aviation history catalyzed a new industrial trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Aboulafia continued, “As with most complex manufactured products, an aircraft production system is only as strong as its weakest link. The supply chain, crucial to industry success, is also its greatest Vulnerability.”

China is fully aware of this vulnerability. Aboulafia said, “China, notably, is not a significant source of aircraft components, even from transplant factories. In fact, at the peak level of U.S.-China aerospace trade, the trade balance between the two countries was 17-1 in the U.S.’s favor.”

This does not bode well for U.S. aviation suppliers. Aboulafia said, “The only area of serious concern, outside of Covid-19 itself, is China, the biggest single export market (and tied with the US for biggest single market). At the peak level of deliveries to China, 2018, the country took 23% of all jetliner deliveries worldwide. This has fallen precipitously, for both market reasons and due to geopolitical factors. This trade is under threat, due to slowing in-country growth rates, China’s reluctance to recertify Boeing’s 737MAX, and the U.S. Government’s decision to put Western components for China’s ambitious national aircraft programs on a possibly restrictive export list.”

Furthermore, Covid put a real dent in the airlines biggest revenue generator – international business travel. It’s forced them to ground planes and halt new orders. And while business is picking up again, the companies bringing supply chains closer to home will be taking fewer overseas business trips to Asia.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Italian apparel company, Benetton is planning to “cut its Asia-based production by half in the next 12 to 16 months and move the work to countries on the Mediterranean.” It’s an end to a decades old reliance on Asian labor and supply chains that “requires regular visits to make sure manufacturing and materials meet quality standards and some aspects, such as production timing, aren’t under the company’s control overseas.” (1)

HOG TIED ON THE SUPPLY SIDE

Reading and watching the testimonies from Cantwell’s hearing, I couldn’t help notice the yearning for the glory days of the 20th century Fordist era when America dominated manufacturing and supply chains. The Duke professor, Dr. Gereffi, gushed over the reemergence of the furniture and textile industry in North Carolina and how his state excels at efficient pig processing.

Lex Taylor sees dollars signs with a “Floorplan” that can build more trucks, generators, and recycled military parts. And while Boeing has all but ceded the airline market to AirBus, Cantwell wants the 150,000 aviation experts in Washington state to at least be supplying parts.

Some of these aging, all male except Cantwell, boomers testifying at the hearing are of the age where I can imagine them reminiscing on the golden years of the nationalist “America First” sentiment that Trump tapped into in 2016. Wicker would have turned 16 in 1967, the end of the Fordism era.

But there were also testimonies that looked to a Post-Fordist industrial era. IBM’s Dr. Dario Gill talked about their semiconductor lab in New York and how their public-private partnership will produce new chips out of the factory in Malta, New York. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York, helped seal that deal with the $110 billion Endless Frontier Act; $10 billion of which goes toward hubs like those in New York. The North Carolina Research Triangle hopes to get on that money as well. Dr. Gereffi talked of how North Carolina’s booming weaving loom know-how could transmogrify from cotton into silicon.

The Endless Frontier Act is a bipartisan bill intended to counter China’s semiconductor dominance. But, again, it falls victim to this outdated notion that America can return to our Fordist days. I know I’m over simplifying, but it takes a special combination of hubris and ignorance to believe you can replace 30 years of global supply networks, throughput, and intellectual property with a ‘Made in America’ stamp. Federal funding is needed to remedy our supply chain woes, but chest pounding nationalistic protectionism won’t get us there.

The most reasoned testimony in Cantwell’s hearing came from James A. Lewis. He’s a Senior Vice President and Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said, “Two things broke that global supply chain. The first is the rise of a predatory China that will use any means to displace competitors in its quest for global primacy. The second is the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced an understandable desire in many nations to reduce their dependence on foreign suppliers and instead rely on national capabilities.”

He talked about how America got spooked when we realized how much we relied on China for necessary medical supplies. It prompted many in the U.S. to “want to move some critical production back onto their territories.” He’s right.

Atlanta home builder PulteGroup got fed up with delays and is building an automated assembly plant in South Carolina. Majestic Steel USA is opening new facilities across the country to avoid impediments in the supply chain. Climate calamities are also forcing companies to rethink supply chains. Paint powerhouse Sherman-Williams got fed up with Hurricane delays at southern ports. They bought a company with sites in Oregon and South Carolina to handle the load.

But as Lewis point out, in many ways this is just copying China and may be short sighted. Even the knee jerk reaction from Schumer and the Endless Frontier Act. He said, “This supply chain nationalism is reinforced by growing and powerful competition for technological leadership and by events like the semiconductor shortage.”

He continues, “Twentieth century American innovation was national, but today’s innovation base is international, with strong research and commercial links between the United States, Europe, and Asia.” And he rightfully concludes, “A country that cuts itself off from this international innovation system will fall behind.”

China has assumed America, and Europe, have been in decline since the end of the Cold War in 1989. They recognized the strategy of the U.S. and our allies was to seek regions to either invade, persuade, or buy. And then, theoretically, establish a Western style democracy to further build out a global supply chain, buy labor, and manufacture and sell goods and services.

So they invested heavily in industry within China and then expanded globally investing in 70 countries worldwide in infrastructure. Their One Belt One Road initiative has been building mines, dams, ports, railroads, airports, solar installations and more around the world to control the extraction and flow of resources and capital.

It’s like a parasitic super-structure on top of the West’s established global supply chain. It grows their dominance by feeding off of Western consumerism and neoliberal economic policies; all the while continuing to spoon Chinese made goods to the perpetually hungry mouths of American consumers.

John A. Lewis concluded his remarks with a stern directive:

“The U.S. must respond to China’s hostility, but we can no longer rely on market forces alone to advance the national interest. Defensive actions alone will not suffice. These themes all point to the need for a renewed industrial strategy, but it cannot simply duplicate previous policies because we are now in a world where the private sector leads. This means the task [for America] is to find where government intervention can best support a multinational commercial innovation base.”

A renewed industrial strategy is needed, indeed. But, so is a new economic creed that doesn’t breed greed.

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Hello Interactors,

I was reminded that three years ago this week I was on a trip visiting remote Microsoft development centers overseas. Those trips afforded me the luxury of observing and understanding diverse geographies, societies, and economies. But it also drove home both the pleasure and pain imposing political and economic structures can bring.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

FLY OVER AND DIVE IN

It was the model concentration camp. Shaped in an equilateral triangle made of 10 foot high stone walls painted white, it featured machine guns mounted high at the corners; fixed on the lowly prisoners. The sidewalk leading to the entry is pleasant and tree-lined; an attractive and seemingly innocent approach to a place that is anything but. It stirs a morbid twist of emotions. The perversity is punctuated by the words forged in iron bars on the entry gate: Arbeit Macht Frei – work makes you free.

To get to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp you disembark the train in a small nearby village and walk one mile to the entrance. The same path the prisoners would have taken. You pass by houses where whole families would come out to hurl rocks and spit on fellow humans; some were Jews, some homosexual, others with a mere limp, and occasionally even a relative.

That place reminded me of how easily a government can invent a structure motivated by domination and impose it on a region and it’s citizens. It demonstrates how a small group of people can create the necessary conditions for the production of labor, death, and destitution through extreme exploitation; a top-down political and economic structure masterfully and morbidly executed by masterminds who firmly believed there actions were for the good of humankind.

These camps bring us closer to the worst human suffering imaginable. But they also draw attention the to seemingly innocent complicit behavior lurking in the shadows. Hitler had regional aspirations for the structures he imposed that elicited reactions on a global scale. His actions also influenced individual behavior and shaped the culture of citizens and cities at a local level.

This site is short train ride north of Berlin. I was in town on business, so two of my colleagues and I decided to visit before flying home. My job took me around the globe visiting remote Microsoft development centers. In a single trip, I once flew from Seattle to Ireland, on to Israel, then China, and back home to Seattle.

From Haifa to Hyderabad or Bangalore to Berlin, I’ve observed structural societal patterns from high in the sky that are shaped by a global economy, and I’ve also experienced emergent forms of adapted human and cultural behavior on the ground. A single short trip around the world can bring into focus how environments have been shaped by people over millennia – both natural and manufactured – and how in turn those environments have shaped the people.

Glancing out the window as I descended into these major cities I could spot the warm autumnal colored patchwork blocks of agricultural land stretching into the distance. They gave way to increasingly dense dendritic spars of cold concrete roads slicing through clusters of steel buildings dotted with piercing lights as ant-like traffic pulsed its way though the tangled bustle.

I imagine these monstrous metropolis’s rising out of ancient embryonic farming, fishing, or mining settlements reminiscent of the neighboring landscape; a form of economic development termed, environmental determinism. Indeed that is true for many cities and towns, big and small, around the world, but in the last two hundred years a new ‘ism’ has been determining the development environment more than natural resources – capitalism. It’s led to uneven and inequitable development and settlement.

For example, while Indonesia’s 17,000 islands is home to some of the world’s richest resources, their per capita income is under $4,000 per year. Meanwhile, the tiny island city-state of Singapore, a place with few natural resources at all, has a per capita income of over $100,000 per year.

Many are quick to assume Singapore advanced it’s economy because it modeled itself after the West. Some regions did do this voluntarily, but it was also a common justification in the 1950s and 1960s for Western powers to swoop in to ‘improve’ so-called “Third World” countries. Powerful rich Western nations would introduce, often forcefully, Western democracy and then hand over economic development of resources and industry to private firms.

Indonesia was one such experiment. It’s now not only one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and Oceana, but their dense forests continue to be converted to agricultural fields by outside firms making it the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. And just last year, their government passed deregulation laws that provide incentives for the coal industry to build dozens of power plants. Imposing Western style capitalism is destroying both their environment and their livelihood.

Global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization all pull from this play book. They seek poor and underdeveloped regions of the world and seduce, or coerce, them into believing that the way to the promise land is through both Western style democracy and industrial production. They then encourage mass consumption. The Global Plastics Action Partnership writes,

“Seventy percent of [Indonesia’s] plastic waste, an estimated 4.8 million tons per year, is considered mismanaged in ways such as being openly burned, irresponsibly dumped, or left to leak into oceans and waterways…the flow of plastic waste into Indonesia's oceans is projected to increase by 30% to around 800,000 tonnes by 2025.”

AN ADDICT GETS THEIR FIX

Economic systems, in a very basic form, are ways of creating value and distributing it. The simplest economy could mean just putting food on the table. Some are more feudal-looking where value is created for a landlord. Others are communal economies where value is created among the group and then shared between members.

Capitalism, the dominant system in the world today, creates value through waged labor and the private ownership of assets, like accumulated wealth and property. All it takes is a small group of people, capitalists, to own the assets needed to produce the value. They buy labor from people in exchange for the production of that value. Both the labor and the outputted value are bought and sold through a market system.

With wealth accumulation as a primary motivator, capitalist economic systems are engineered to grow profits. If growth lags, profits decline and competitors swoop in to recruit labor and buy cheapened assets. Capitalists are therefore incented to continually seek new means of gaining profit.

Profit comes from the value created by labor beyond which they are paid. For example, if I pay an employee $10 an hour, and it takes them an hour to produce value, if I sell that value on the market for $10 I am breaking even; no profit. If I sell the value for $15, I make a $5 profit.

But if the market demands the value to be sold at $10 (for example a competitor is selling the same value at $10) then a capitalist is incented to find a labor pool willing to create value for $5 an hour or less.

If $5 an hour is not enough of a wage for a worker to buy clothes, food, put a roof over their head, or raise a family – and is not empowered to demand a higher wage – capitalists seek labor pools in regions where they can. And raising a family is also important to a capitalist because the kids are potential future labor.

This idea of extracting more value out of labor than what a capitalist is willing to pay is called exploitation. Because capitalists own the assets or the means necessary to create the value – be it land, machines, material, facilities, software, or intellectual property – they hold power. Capitalists are motivated to accumulate wealth because wealth offers the ability to own assets and property. And with ownership, comes the power to exploit labor.

Social classes sort along these divisions in capitalist societies. Capitalists own the assets that create value and they buy labor from the working class. This simplistic description may conjure up images of slaves or migrant workers hunched over in fields with their shoulders being pulled by the weight of their yield as the sun presses down on their backs, or child labor in the dangerous steel factories of the industrial age, or overworked Asian women tediously assembling mobile devices in China.

But corporations seek to exploit white collar workers too. There’s a reason I was flying to remote parts of the world for Microsoft. There are software developers in the world willing to do the same work as American engineers for less pay. China and India were the first, but as labor prices climb in those regions software companies quickly go on the hunt for the next set of skilled labor to exploit, like Africa.

Geographer David Harvey termed this hunt for lands of cheaper labor a spatial fix. The concept was first related to a problem of overproduction of goods. Imagine a small town where the workers are producing more goods than they can buy. The surplus of goods begin to pile up creating a problem of overaccumulation. Capitalists then seek to expand to another territory to sell and produce value while fixing the problem of slowed growth, hence the term spatial fix.

This reveals the paradox of Capitalism. As soon as a region is established to produce value from labor, it starts a clock of degradation. Take Detroit, for example. As soon as Henry Ford started buying local labor to produce value for consumers using property and assets he owned, the countdown clock to the region’s demise began.

Evidence of spatial fixes that then decline exist wherever colonialism is found: Manufacturing clusters of the Northeast United States, the rust belt in the Midwest, textiles in North Carolina, metal working factories of Connecticut, mining towns in the West, agricultural clusters across the country. Japan has theirs, so does Germany. And now, the most grand example of wealth accumulation in history – China.

China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) was rural just 40 years ago, much like the Detroit area would have been when Henry Ford showed up. But,

“The PRD now hosts nine major mainland cities in addition to the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau. Two of those cities – Guangzhou and Shenzhen – are both home to over 10 million people. With more than 66 million residents in 2017 in total, the PRD has been designated by the World Bank as the world’s largest megacity, rivalling France and the United Kingdom in population terms. Its gross domestic product (GDP) of over $1.2 trillion puts it on a par with Russia, Australia, or Spain, and exceeds that of Indonesia, which has four times the population. In terms of trade levels, the region is only exceeded by the United States and Germany. The region attracts one‐fifth of China’s inward foreign direct investment (totaling over $1 trillion since 1980), and accounts for over 10 per cent of its GDP and 25 per cent of its exports. All this in a region that accounts for less than 1 per cent of China’s land area and 5 per cent of its population.”

ABSOLVE, RESOLVE, AND EVOLVE

But a spatial fix is mounting in the PRD too. Fewer Chinese are migrating to the area and the cost of labor is rising, so firms are starting to relocate elsewhere in China and Southeast Asia. Thus begins the decline of the PRD.

Companies also seek other ways to grow profits, such as technology innovations. Japan’s foray into robotic assembly lines in the 1970s and 1980s is the perfect example. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are constantly finding ways to improve efficiencies in server farms around the globe through innovations in software and hardware – and cheap labor.

But these efficiencies can result in a surplus of labor. And if people are out of work or their wages are held too low, the demand for products starts to decrease. As container ships continue to backup at ports around the world, you can imagine how over-accumulation can become a crisis for capitalism. Or recall during the early outbreak of Covid when dairy farmers had to poor milk down the drain and livestock famers were forced to slaughter hundreds of animals when demand for those products plummeted.

There’s a tendency for economists, capitalists, and spin doctors to portray a spatial fix as a good thing. It’s growth, after all, and remember from last week’s post – up means good. But you can see the tension and instability capitalism can introduce. Pay workers too much and you lose profit. Work them too hard and they’ll quit. Pay them too little and they can’t afford housing, goods, and services – or property. Companies then produce more than they can sell, machines and workers go idle and there goes hope of further growth.

Capitalism is inherently volatile and prone to instability and rife with tension and contraction. Labor wars, unemployment see-saws, too much inventory or too little, prices are increased or slashed. I live in a city with more wealth than some nations, while more homeless tents pop up everyday.

We’re led to believe these crisis of instability are temporary. Everyday we’re fed statistics on GDP, earnings reports, employment rates, and an alphabet soup of climbing or falling stock symbols. We’re told that disruptions to any of these are the result of outside forces: viruses, weather, logistics, war, social unrest, power outages, or that servers have been hacked. Something else must be wrong, because we’ve been led to believe the economic system we have is for the good of humankind. Capitalism has been good for some humans, and it isn’t always kind. It’s time to adjust and evolve.

The families now living in those homes in Germany outside of Sachsenhausen did not hurl rocks at us. They adapted to new cultural norms, moved on, or died out after liberation. The camp itself morphed into a prison for Nazi war crime criminals, and then it became a museum. The town went from the destination of Hitler’s elite visiting the model camp, to a town for tourists seeking understanding and solemn, sobering solace.

As fascism and Nazi power came to this village, before Sachsenhausen was built, self-interested elites collaborated and colluded in the process. They rounded up their political enemies and intellectuals challenging the movement and forced them into labor. Their properties and assets were possessed by the government or colluding private entities. It was for the good of humankind, they argued.

This is what Western governments and capitalists do when they find a new region to exploit. They seek self-interested parties with which to collaborate and collude. Those who resist are jailed, silenced, displaced, or killed. The devalued property and assets are then bought in an act of accumulation through dispossession and the locals sell them their labor for whatever price they demand. And it’s done for the good of humankind, they argue. Work will make your free.

But like concentration camps, long after the choreographed chaotic and volatile exploitation, disruption, death, and destruction of people and land, cities and regions heal. They transform and evolve through new and novel interactions between people and place. Their history, no matter how awful it may be, becomes a catalyst for a new trajectory; what evolutionary economists call path dependence.

Soaring over cities and diving into their current and past histories reveals capitalism’s influence on the shape and form of their urban tissue at different scales. Flying into Beijing you see high-rises towering next to rice fields. On the ground, one minute you’re walking in Ancient China, and the next you’re transported to the future. You see the powerless and penniless on one corner and powerful and prestigious on the other.

Up against the fence surrounding the Microsoft building in Hyderabad – that looks like it belongs in Redmond – you see cardboard homes and mud and garbage running through their belongings.

Jerusalem is split down the middle with one side lush and green with new, stylish Western style architecture and the other in near ruin with crumbling, dilapidated homes.

I saw evidence of effects of dominant and imposing structural governmental and capitalistic priorities playing out at a global scale down to the local level. But, in the ashes of the dying and the unwanted I also witnessed the genesis of societal transformation through the interactions of people and place.

The unbridled structures of global capitalism may have dominated, exploited, and devastated vulnerable people and places for the last 200 to 500 years, but I sense a need for a fix – a liberation from this well-meaning but dangerous and destructive economic tyrant.

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Hello Interactors,

As the rain returns to the northwest it’s time to summon even more motivation to get outside for exercise. I established a bit of a fitness pattern this summer and I’m motivated to keep it up. But the rain isn’t the only thing holding me back, so is my body and my mind.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

As part of my Monday fitness routine, I begrudgingly slog jog up a steep hill in my Market neighborhood, zig-zag my way through gravel alleys, down calm side streets, and through occasional narrow easements that snake between homes guarded by fences and barking dogs. Some called this route the ‘Market wiggle’.

It drops me onto an arterial road that skirts along a wooded wetlands. I suffer as I shuffle on a rolling narrow strip of painted bike lane for about a half a mile where I’m presented with a decision. Do I keep running up a gradual hill to achieve more distance or do I face the challenge of ascending a wall of over 100 steps that climb up a steep grade to my destination. It’s a short cut, but also a glute burn.

My destination is an outdoor gym plopped on a patch of asphalt nestled in the corner of an expansive park made of grassy ball fields and scattered pines. I have my routine: a series of upper body exercises on machines that leverage my body weight. I do pull-ups (kind of), seated bench press, and sit-ups. I usually have the place to myself. Though I was once surprised by an eager and excitable white toy poodle. As I was doing sit-ups he ran up behind me and licked the salty sweat off my face.

Upper body fitness has never been my favorite. It’s a necessary evil that seems to be getting harder all the time. But I have my repetition goals and I’m determined to improve. Pullups are the hardest. After a summer of just holding my chin above the bar, I’m finally getting to a point where I can actually pull myself up. (kind of)

My forearms don’t much like supporting my weight. I finish my routine and head back home. Just across from the park is a the middle school track. It’s a cinder track; a relic in the rainy northwest where most tracks have turned artificial. On the weekends I do a timed mile. I can’t help but be disappointed in my time and progress. I just can’t run as fast as I used to.

I also beat myself up over my lack of progress. I should be getting faster by now. I should be able to do more pullups. A battle in my brain ensues.

DEVIL: If you lose weight, maybe you can run faster and do more pullups.

ANGEL: Yeah, but you’re not really overweight – in fact, you’re maintaining a healthy weight because you’re running.

DEVIL: Unless, of course, the extra weight is coming from the added muscle mass from all those stair climbs, and upper body work.

ANGEL: But you can’t stop doing upper body work. You know you’ve been losing muscle mass since the day you turned 30.

DEVIL: C’mon, dudes older than you can run faster than this. You can’t run faster until you start running faster. And you just have to keep doing more pullups if you want to do more pullups!”

Then an independent interloping inquisitor interrupts; “Why are you trying to run faster? Why is the number of pullups important? What is your goal? Is it to increase the number of pullups and decrease your running speed, or is it to maintain your health?”

It’s hard to rally behind asymptotic performance plateaus. Just ask any aging professional athlete. And it’s depressing to consider that as long as that plateau may be, its end is punctuated by a certain mortal decline. I am fully aware of my body’s limitations in this race with mortality, but my mind is trained to expect, and even crave harder, better, faster, stronger.

WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN

We are all trained by a culture infused with metaphors that lead to a desire to increase growth and optimize time. In 1980, two cognitive linguists, scientists, and philosophers, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a seminal book called Metaphors We Live By. They give examples of how orientation concepts and words like up and down shape how we think and act.

You can see evidence of it in the words I’ve already written. I was beating myself up and feeling down because the number of pullups wasn’t going up. I get depressed when my running times fall off. My athletic abilities are declining as I near the height of my physical abilities. Have I reached a peak? I am now longer in top shape. As my age slowly climbs up, my abilities will be sinking fast. What if I come down with an illness? My health will decline. And one day, I will drop dead.

They suggest other metaphorical orientation concepts by category:

HAPPY IS UP AND SAD IS DOWN.I’m feeling up. I fell into a depression.

FORESEEABLE FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (and AHEAD)What’s up on the agenda? I’m afraid of what’s ahead of us.

HIGH STATUS IS UP, LOW STATUS IS DOWNShe’ll rise to the top. He’s at the bottom of the hierarchy.

MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWNThe GDP rose. My income fell.

GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWNThings are looking up. Things are at an all time low.

RATIONAL IS UP, EMOTIONAL IS DOWNHe couldn’t rise above his emotions. The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane.

Another metaphor their book highlights also runs deep in our culture:

TIME IS MONEYYou’re wasting my time.I don’t have the time to give you.I’ve invested a lot of time in her.You’re running out of time.Is it worth your while?He’s living on borrowed time.You need to budget your time.Thank you for your time.

The Bible is as riddled with these metaphors as Christianity is with our culture. The great sociologist and political economist, Max Weber, claims Protestantism is at the root of capitalism in his book,The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

"In these cases the choice of occupation and future career has undoubtedly been determined by the distinct mental characteristics which have been instilled into them and indeed by the influence on them of the religious atmosphere of their locality and home background."

Here are some quotes from the bible that urge followers to work their butts off, or else.

Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.The diligent hand will rule, but laziness will lead to forced labor.Fools fold their idle hands, leading them to ruin.

Here’s one from the King’s bible that lends insight into perhaps why the American workforce is overworked, has too few days off, and is led to shame should they loose their job.

How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. Proverbs 6:6

It may come as a surprise, but not every culture lives by these metaphors. The culture I was raised in certainly did. It’s also one that views the more innocuous concept of future as ahead, but another culture may view it as behind — or up, down, through, under, or over for that matter. Perhaps some cultures have no orientation metaphors at all, or use them differently than, say, the Bible does.

When these two researchers came together to write their book, they “discovered that [these] certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics have been taken for granted…since the Greeks.”

Substantiating the role cultural metaphors play in shaping thought and action “meant rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth.” Those absolutisms, including those found in the Bible, are assumed in so much of Western tradition and contemporary belief systems.

The alternative, as outlined in their book, is to suggest the human lived experience plays a more central role than some religious, mythical, or universally constant human objective truth.

Our current economic system relies heavily on a belief in rational choice theory. This idea, in keeping with the Western tradition Lakoff and Johnson sought to debunk, says that humans – also known among neoliberal economists as homo economicus – routinely conduct perfectly objective and absolute rational cost-benefit analysis before deciding how to spend money or accumulate wealth.

If what Lakoff and Johnson suggest is true, and I’m inclined to believe it is, there is no such thing as objective or absolute truth in decision making. Our decisions are guided by our culturally engrained metaphors. The so-called invisible hand that neoliberal economists turn to as a self-interested magical motivational source of individual wealth and prosperity is actually the invisible mind; a mind influenced by embedded conceptual metaphors that guide our emotions which in turn trigger our thoughts and actions.

IN EXCESS WILL END SUCCESS

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that if you want to find evidence of irrational behavior in self-reported rational people, study their entrenched dogmatic positions – it’s there you’ll find their irrational behavior. In our currently divided society, you don’t need to look far to see evidence of the myth of perfectly rational behavior in human decision making.

“Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” Those are the words of British ecological economist, Tim Jackson. To illustrate the myth, he offers that “People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.”

Aristotle observed as much in the 4th century and wrote about it in a set of eight books on the philosophy of human affairs called, Politics. He wrote,

“For, as their enjoyment is in excess, they seek an art which produces the excess of enjoyment; and, if they are not able to supply their pleasures by the art of getting wealth, they try other causes, using in turn every faculty in a manner contrary to nature…some men turn every quality or art into a means of getting wealth; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end they think all things must contribute.”

There are ongoing debates about what Aristotle would think of today’s economy. Both capitalists and communists draw on Aristotle as the genesis of their philosophies. But suffice it to say, Aristotle was not a fan of individual wealth accumulation. Any accumulation should be shared back to the society in support of a healthy community.

Some scholars believe Aristotle would say “the lending out of money to acquire more money is merely the most unnatural and corrupting way to employ money.” As corrupt, they claim, as using human sexuality to sell sex.

They believe Aristotle would not have made it a “question of the market value of your gold.” But instead, “what kind of man your gold makes of you.”

It also seems Aristotle would not have been very impressed with the damage we inflicted on the earth in our pursuit of wealth accumulation. He was aware of the negative aspects of “unintended consequences” due to human activity, but he also found them to be “generally bad and disappointing.” That, for sure, is a departure from our current neoliberal stance.

It was Adam Smith, the father of the capitalist economic system that dominates the world today, who said,

“[People are] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”

By this logic, the plastics industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, a path toward more plastic in the ocean than fish), which was no part of their intention. The oil industry is led by an invisible hand to promote an end (for example, climate collapse), but is not part of their intention. Even though they’ve known this for over 30 years.

The aerosol industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, a hole in the ozone, which was not part of their intention; but the world rallied to curb its use. The tobacco industry was led by an invisible hand to promote an end, addiction to a cancer causing drug, which was not part of their intention; but the U.S cracked down on them anyway.

British economist, John Maynard Keynes – an advocate of the free market, but also of instituting limits, put it best by issuing this sober warning,

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

LEAKS AND PEAKS; GO WITH THE FLOW

Influential American economist Milton Friedman started to distance himself, and U.S. economic philosophy, from Keynesian ideas in the 70s. The country was in a recession and personal wealth accumulation had stagnated.

This American ideal of wealth accumulation began in American economics in the late 1940s after two world wars and a depression. Personal and national wealth accumulation was as much a need as it was a desire. It only follows that the model of economics we have with us today puts personal and corporate wealth accumulation at the center, above all else. (note the orientation metaphors I inadvertently used: follows, center, above all else!)

This economic model was drawn in a diagram by economist and Nobel prize winner, Paul Samuelson, for the canonical economic text book, Economics, in 1948. It has sold over four million copies and is still used by many schools today.

That book became standard issue for Econ 101 in universities across the country that were flooded with men returning from WWII. It’s a simple diagram that shows Circular Flows of money being exchanged between households and businesses.

Households flow labor into businesses which in turn crank out goods and services. Businesses flow wages to households that flow that money back to businesses through consumer spending on their goods and services.

There are also leakages in this central flow from households; savings leak into banks, taxes to the government, and imports to trade. These leaks are converted into value and flowed back to the business side as injections into the economy; investments flow from banks, spending from government, and exports from trade.

As economist Kate Raworth points out, missing from the diagram is the earth and the resources necessary to sustain this economic flow. But many advocates of this model believe resources are endless.

In the 1980’s University of Maryland business professor and neoliberal, Julian Simon, believed that

“Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.”

He imagined competitive market prices would keep resources from being over exploited and novel inventions would efficiently reuse and recycle any wasted matter and energy. That doesn’t appear to be working.

Instead improvements in technology have accelerated the rate of extraction resulting in environmental degradation and collapse. Take the fishing industry. With improved sensing technologies, they’re able to fish small and sparsely populated schools of fish. It can lead to collapse and extinction.

What’s more, these small populations are vulnerable to effects of climate change which challenges both their survival and ability to repopulate. And sure enough, if they do recover, the fishing industry pounces and the cycle of over exploitation begins again.

Systems thinker, environmentalist and Dartmouth professor, Donella Meadows, states:

“Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate. But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.”

In contrast,

“Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.”

Indigenous cultures have known this for millennia. That’s why they leave harvestable crops behind. If they didn’t, they know there would not be any seeds for next season.

We have been led to believe, and our current economic systems substantiates, nonrenewable resources are limitless. We’re taught that even though our self-interest in accumulating wealth may come with unintended consequences, those negative effects are a matter of “value judgement.”

For example, valuing profit over the health of the planet and it’s occupants is a matter of judgement. It’s a line of thinking that values capitalism and corporate and individual wealth accumulation over all else – even the prospect of the collapse of entire species; including humans. Will capitalism seek to out live human existence? You be the judge.

We’re reminded every day that economic indicators can only go up because our culture evolved to associate up with good. If an economy can only be deemed good by a limitless line that goes up for eternity but relies on limited resources that require periods of flattening of that curve to be renewed, we need to extend the metaphor for good to include flat and even declining.

Up is good. Growth is good. And we don’t have time to waste. But even though the Bible tells us otherwise, we might want to sit down and take a breather sometimes and call it good.

My aging body reminds me, there are limits to up. I struggle with accepting this fact. Most do. It also shows there are exceptions to metaphors. Just because our age goes up, that doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good.

My body is a renewable resource but with a limited and declining life span. It can’t support the extraction of resources indefinitely, but it can maintain a finite flow of energy equal to my body’s, albeit declining, regeneration rate.

But if I push too hard and exploit my resources; and equate increased pullup reps or faster running speed with good, I’ll drive my resources below a critical threshold and they’ll become nonrenewable.

So now when I’m feeling up for a run. I don’t let myself get too depressed when my energy starts to fall. Instead of digging deep in a yearning for peak performance, I change my goal and shift my metaphor. I push that irrational ‘growth at all cost’ dogma to the side, bring the joy of a flat and slightly declining curve to the foreground, and feel my energy levels and my spirit rise.

You see, I have a rational mind after all. Aristotle believed our ability to reason with our feelings is what makes us human. It’s what sets us apart from other animals. I have a rational choice to make when presented with a curve that flattens out or declines. I can succumb to the cultural belief and emotion that a line that curves flat or trends down is always bad, or I can shift my thinking that it is sometimes good and even necessary for survival.

If I can do this with my fitness routine amidst a mid-life crisis, surely we can for an imbalanced economic regime amidst a climate crisis.

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Hello Interactors,

My wife and I took our daughter on a trip down Interstate 5 earlier this week so she could tour the University of Oregon. It’s a beautiful lush campus in a funky college town that is speckled with fancy new structures financed largely by Nike founder and alum, Phil Knight. Upon the completion of the new track stadium last year, his total contributions to the school is nearing one billion dollars. Where did it all come from?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TIGER TRACK TREADS

He dominated his races. He’d jump far in the lead at the sound of the gun challenging his competitors to keep up as his fans chanted “GO PRE, GO PRE, GO PRE”. They’d often be wearing the pervasive shirts that said the same. At the end of one race he grabbed a shirt from sarcastic fan and stretched over his sweaty chest for his victory lap; it read, “STOP PRE!”

Running for the University of Oregon between 1970-1973, Steve Prefontaine never lost a collegiate race in the 3 mile, 5,000 meter, 6 mile, or 10,000 meter events. But internationally he wasn’t so fortunate. He came in a disappointing fourth at the 1972 Munich Olympics in the 5K. Afterwards he said,

“I felt exhausted. They didn't allow me to run the race the way I had planned to, I was chasing them all the way."

He lost three times in his senior year in the one mile event. This same year he challenged the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) that ruled athletes representing the United States at the Olympics must not receive payment or be endorsed. Prefontaine, a charismatic athlete on and off the track, grew huge crowds wherever he ran. He knew companies would benefit from his abilities, so why shouldn’t he? He also knew he was receiving free shoes and clothes from another Eugene legend – Nike.

By the mid-70s Nike was a decade old and was just getting rolling. Prefontaine’s coach, Bill Bowerman, was the co-founder and a legend in his own right. Preferring to be called teacher instead of coach, Bowerman taught 33 Olympians, 38 conference champions, and 64 all-Americans in his 24 years as head coach. He retired at the end of Prefontaine’s senior year. One of his runners was Nike founder, Phil Knight.

Knight was a middle distance runner at the university until graduating in 1959. While he ran a respectable personal best of 4 minutes 13 seconds, he was not the best runner on the team. Which made him a good candidate for testing the shoes his coach was experimenting with.

Bowerman was obsessed with athletic performance and was frustrated by the poor quality of American running shoes. So, he made his own and asked his athletes to be subjects in his experimental pursuit of the perfect shoe. Sometimes they’d make their feet run faster and sometimes they’d make them bleed. Bowerman didn’t want to risk injuring his top runners, so Knight was often a subject.

The shoe fetish must have rubbed off on the young Phil Knight. After graduating from the University of Oregon he went on to get his MBA at Stanford. There he learned how Japanese companies were overtaking the camera market from Europeans and wrote a paper about how they were about to do the same for the shoe market.

After earning his MBA in 1962, he worked as an accountant while tinkering on the weekend with the idea of being a shoe distributor. He hopped on a plane to Japan to visit shoemaker, Onitsuka after seeing their Tiger brand at the Olympics. He presented his Stanford paper and they were impressed. They wanted to break into the U.S. market and saw this as their chance. When asked what the name of his company was, Knight invented the name on the spot recalling the ribbons he had won competing as a kid – Blue Ribbon Sports.

In 1964 the first shoes arrived and Knight sent a couple of pairs to his shoe sorcerer and former coach, Bill Bowerman. The two shook on a deal to become business partners; Phil would run the business and Bill would design a shoe with just the right stiffness. By 1970 Knight was selling Tiger shoes across the country. As the Japanese Tiger shoe started to dominate the U.S. market, Knight cut ties with Onitsuka, renamed his company Nike, asked a Portland State University graphic designer to design the now ubiquitous ‘swoosh’, and grabbed Bowerman’s first attempt at a Nike shoe, the Nike Cortez.

The shoe was released at the height of the 1972 Olympics after the world witnessed the USA Track and Field team wearing the shoe. Knight and Bowerman made $800,000 selling the Cortez, a 100% increase over selling the Onitsuka Tiger. In 1980, the year they went public, Nike already had 50% of the U.S. market. Today the company is valued at $32 billion and is the largest supplier of athletic equipment in the world.

PHIL AND BILL SPLIT THE BILL

Phil Knight and Bowerman’s success are now enshrined in what I claim is the most beautifully designed sports facility in the country – Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is known as Track Town USA because of the success of Bowerman, Prefontaine, and the string of track and cross country athletes the University of Oregon has cranked out over the years. It all happened on Hayward field. A $270 million renovation opened last year and Phil Knight led the funding.

We were just there last weekend on a campus visit with our daughter. You don’t have to look far to see the financial impact Phil Knight has had on that campus. Outside of the oval track crowned jewel he contributed $27 million for a major library renovation that now bears his name, $25 million for new law school building that also endows 27 chairs and professorships, numerous upgrades to the football stadium, $500 million pledged for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, and another $41.7 million for a student-athlete tutoring center. And don’t forget the basketball arena named after his son who died unexpectedly in a scuba accident, the Matthew Knight Arena.

That initial collaboration between Knight and Bowerman led to one of the most successful companies in the world. What they did together is a perfect example of two of the most critical ingredients to a dynamic economy: innovation and entrepreneurship.

Innovation is invention with impact. Bowerman personifies the image of the mad scientist tinkering in the garage in pursuit of the perfect solution. He spent so many hours breathing the toxic fumes emanating from his exploratory rubber compounds that he eventually succumbed to nerve damage. The man who wrote a best selling book on jogging in the 1970s became unable to follow his own advise due to the loss of control in his limbs. He sacrificed the speed of his own feet for the swiftness of others.

Phil Knight was born a competitor and entrepreneur. As a teen his dad refused to hire him at the newspaper he ran. He wanted Phil to struggle to find his own job. So he did. He took a job at his dad’s competing newspaper running seven miles each way to get to work. In graduate school he had a sixth sense that the Japanese approach to product development was worth emulating.

He was also savvy enough to make sure his partnership with Bowerman gave him a 51% stake in the business and Bowerman 49%. He knew he could use that leverage to make sure it was a business they were running and not laboratory for running shoes.

ECONOMOUS ANONYMOUS

The role of place should not be overlooked in their collaboration. Economic geographers point to the trust and norms that develop between individuals through close collaboration among local social networks. Personal relationships don’t adhere to a higher order economic structure, they emerge from an accumulation of shared knowledge and passion that increases the potential for innovation.

The idea stems from the great economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

Phil and Bill were also participating in an act of creative destruction. This term comes from one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter. Shumpeter pointed out that for an invention to become an innovation, it has to have impact through capital investment and also lead to the rise of new businesses. Blue Ribbon Sports started in Bowerman’s garage with a rubber sole made from his wife’s waffle iron and a $500 loan from Knight’s dad. But as Nike they outsource manufacturing to factories around the world, thus avoiding having to spend capital dollars owning a single building or piece of equipment.

Had these two been tinkering in Eugene two or three decades earlier, it’s likely Eugene would have become the Detroit of athletic equipment and apparel. Known in economic circles as Fordism, Henry Ford perfected the practice of building mass produced products systematically using locally sourced labor, usually men, who could theoretically earn enough to afford the products they were assembling. This wasn’t always the case. Women, especially women of color, were often forced to take side jobs to make ends meet.

But Nike was emerging in the Post-Fordist era of the 1960s and Phil Knight had already clued into the manufacturing advantages Japan had pioneered after WWII. In post-war Japan, the government played a critical role in shaping their industries. They controlled imports and exports, but also “national systems of innovation” by creating “formal and informal institutions” to facilitate the “coordination and promotion of technology transfer.”(Economic Geography), A national form of embeddedness.

But as Japanese companies were growing, they were also getting pressure to maximize profits. A popular way to do this is to pay workers less. So during the sluggish stagflation of the 1970s, Japan introduced ‘non-regular employment’; or more generally, the temporary worker. Which, by in large, were, and still are, adult women.

These workers are not only paid less, they “have much less job security than regular employees,” have “no considerable protection from dismissal”, their “average job tenure is significantly lower than for regular employees”, and they “have limited access to on-the-job or formal training and weak career prospects.”

Karl Marx once noted in the 1800s that capitalism always seeks to eliminate the worker. Nike achieved this by sourcing near slave labor in poor countries so far away from the customer that the worker appears to have been eliminated. They let some poor nameless and faceless woman in a foreign land risk nerve damage making their shoes, so they, or their fellow community members, wouldn’t have to.

Much has been written about the overseas Nike sweatshops since they were exposed in the 1990s. The CBS program “48 Hours” did a piece titled, “Just Do It – Or Else”, where they showed workers in Viet Nam getting swatted over the head by their supervisors for making errors in the stitching of a Nike garment.

Or how about the 1997 New York Times article where they revealed Vietnamese workers were exposed to the odorless carcinogenic chemical toluene at 177 times the legal limit. And who can forget the Life Magazine photo of the 12 year old Pakistani boy stitching the laces into a Nike soccer ball? Just Do It.

FACE THE FACELESS, EMPOWER THE POWERLESS, HEED THE GREED

Seeking cheap labor in regions far away from the eyes of consumers not only hid these exploits from Nike customers, but it absolved Phil Knight of responsibility. By outsourcing capitalism to a faraway land, Nike abstracts it way and disassociates from it. Clemson University political and moral philosopher, Todd May, puts it like this,

“It is of the character of transnational capitalism that the source of economic oppression is often thousands of miles away, separated from those it exploits by many levels of bureaucracy, language, and national borders.”

In 2001 a Nike representative reacted this way to accusations of reported worker abuse, “It’s not within our scope to investigate. We’re about sports, not manufacturing 101.”

Nike has tried to curb these abuses. In 2005, they were the first apparel manufacturer to disclose the names and locations of its nearly 500 plants. They’ve created watchdog groups in many of these locations to monitor progress, but many contractors and subcontractors pack up and move to a different location away from the surveillance.

One effective way to draw attention to these exploits is to empower employees to pool their knowledge, organize, and act; a united worker’s rebellious version of embeddedness.

Companies like Nike can fold up shop at the spur of the moment and find a new supplier. They don’t own the equipment, nor do they have any obligation to the plight of the workers or effects on the local communities. Workers are cluing into this reality and instead put pressure on local, regional, and national governments to do the protesting of exploitive capitalism on their behalf.

Here’s how Thai activist and labor organizer Junya Lek Yimprasert describes it,

“We found out that the factory and the equipment already belonged to the bank. If the workers were to demand a share of the proceeds of the sale, they would get zero, so they decided to change the strategy. First they would hold the employer responsible; second the government; and finally the brands they had produced for.”

It seems to be working. In Sri Lanka, one union organizer observed,

“Auditors from Nike visited the factory and finally the company recognised our union. It had an impact on all [of the] free trade zones. The Board of Investment governing the zones amended its guidelines to allow for unions and make employers recognise them.”

Back in the 70s when Prefontaine was squabbling with the AAU, he was demanding athletes be recognized and compensated for their labor. And just a couple weeks ago, Phil Knight helped organize a company called Division Street, Inc., that will help Oregon student athletes monetize their own name, image, and brand.

I can’t help but be impressed with the new buildings and support Phil Knight is lavishing on his alma mater. Especially, the Hayward Field renovation. But I also feel discomfort knowing it all came at the expense of near slave labor at the hands of nameless and voiceless humans, mostly women, tucked away in a sweatshop.

And I’ve grown weary of public universities, and city governments, begging billionaires to throw us some spare change in hopes of making our communities as rich as they are. Celebrating philanthropy, the contributions of great men, and even star athletes only accentuates the socioeconomic malaise that divides us and unsettles us.

I have an idea. What if instead of lavishing the Oregon campus with another chunk of change or fancy building, Phil Knight took a stand. What would happen if, in an homage to Steve Prefontaine’s “STOP PRE” self-effacing sardonic strut, Phil grabbed a shirt from a Nike fan, pulled it over his suit as the crowd chanted “NI-KEE, NI-KEE, NI-KEE”, and he ran a victory lap around Hayward Field in a bright green Nike shirt with neon yellow lettering that read: “STOP GREED!”

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Hello Interactors,

I was stuck needing a car this week to meet a friend for coffee, but didn’t have access to one. So, I grabbed a bus and was there nearly as fast as a car would have taken me. That isn’t always the case, of course. The incident brought back some challenging memories of a time when I was suddenly carless in a region known for cars — Southern California.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PACIFIC COAST MY WAY

I couldn’t have been in a better mood. It was my 22nd birthday, the sun was shining, and I had just passed a spectacular view. Fields of strawberries stretching out to the Pacific Ocean. And just beyond was an orange and pink gradient sky as the sun dipped behind the dark silhouetted Channel Islands.

I was heading to L.A. from Santa Barbara where I was going to school. I was driving my silver 1983 Dodge Colt with an all maroon interior and vinyl seats. I had splurged on a sheepskin driver’s seat cover to keep my bum and back cool in the relentless southern California sun. My cousin had planned a birthday dinner at her home in Los Angeles, complete with a chocolate cake. I was trying to make good time.

As I climbed out of the flat agricultural valley on Highway 101, up the pass through the Santa Monica Mountains, and into the San Fernando Valley, I heard a loud clunk come from my engine. With my foot all the way to the floor, the car slowed to about 45 miles an hour. It didn’t sound right either. I pulled over and popped the hood, but didn’t know what to look for.

I got back in the car and inched my way to the nearest exit with my hazards flashing, pulled into a gas station, chatted with a mechanic and called my cousin to inform her and her husband to go ahead and celebrate without me. My engine had blown one of it’s four cylinders and I was going to be awhile. I puttered my way 50 miles west on side roads from the valley to the coast. Happy birthday to me.

I ended up selling my car to a scrap yard.

It was a life lesson that was just getting started. Stranded in L.A. without a car, all I could think of was that song, Nobody Walks in L.A., by the 80s band, Missing Persons.

“Walkin’ in L.A. Only a nobody walks in L.A.”

It was still in rotation on L.A.’s famed radio station, KROQ, at the time. But, without a car radio I was stuck humming it to myself as I walked in L.A – a nobody.

American roads are designed to make you feel like a nobody unless you’re in a car. It’s baked into the laws and rights of our roadways. Transportation engineer manuals guide street design to marginalize pedestrians. It’s no accident that nobody walks in L.A., it’s by design. They’re made to humiliate you and scare you into buying a car. Only then will you be somebody.

My first choice to get down to L.A. from Santa Barbara was the train. It took me from a beachside station in Santa Barbara to a gorgeous central station downtown L.A. where my girlfriend would pick me up. It was mostly commuters or vacationers so I felt like I was somebody. But it rarely got up to 50 miles per hour and would stop every 10 or 15 minutes to let another train pass or pick up more passengers. It was the slowest option. Luckily the coastal scenery made it tolerable.

Then I discovered I could take the airport shuttle from Santa Barbara to LAX and she could pick me up there. That was more expensive, but it was fast and went along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. And it was also filled mostly with business travelers so I felt like I was somebody.

The worst option was the Greyhound bus. The L.A. station was in a rough neighborhood and was filled with some aggressive panhandlers and dealers. My girlfriend was always scared to drive away from that place alone. The ride itself to Santa Barbara was comfortable enough, but was often late at night. I was usually the only White person. There were a lot of Hispanic folks headed to stops near where the strawberry fields were.

One time the driver, also Hispanic, pulled off the freeway, turned onto a gravel road and stopped in what looked like the middle of a strawberry field. It was dark and desolate. He opened the door and on hopped a friend or family member he clearly knew. He got back on the freeway and we were off. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized the driver made that person feel like he was somebody. It made me feel that way too. But I felt like a different somebody than when I was with mostly White affluent business travelers on their way home from LAX. Was I valuing airline travelers more than bus travelers?

Living without a car in a car-centric world shifts your perspective. You encounter life differently and are exposed to more personal interactions. They need not be direct interactions; sometimes just watching a blind person navigate a public space or seeing someone suffering with a mental condition is enough to contemplate your particular plight.

Relying on public transportation hurls you into humanity whether you like it or not. You’re forced to reckon with the reality that you are sharing space and time with people different from you; but it also makes you one of them. A fellow human. Somebody.

But it can be uncomfortable grappling with this truth, so many people seek an escape from reality. And for most Americans, that means buying a car. As Gary Numan says in another new wave hit from the 80s,

Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to live

In cars

THE NOTORIOUS GDP

There is one form of public transportation that people seem to tolerate above all others – the airplane. Airports are a lot like train and bus stations, except they’re occupied by people who can afford to be there. And while the airline industry is highly subsidized – making it more affordable to those with modest incomes – the price of an airline ticket is out of reach for most of the world’s population.

Still, large airports provide private lounges for those seeking an escape from even the modestly privileged. I’ve been in these lounges and they can be very nice. Especially on an overseas trip. But as nice as they are, I’m always reminded there are some, now more than ever, who deem even those exclusive sanctuaries to be below them. Even sharing a ride with other first class passengers is a step too deep into humanity. So they buy their own jets. Maybe it’s time for Gary Numan to update his lyrics.

Here in my Lear

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It's the only way to fly

In Lear’s

All human beings occupy the same physical space on an earth that rotates at the same rate for all of us. We are all granted at birth access to the same space and time. A true natural born right. But societies and governments place different values on space and time. Including monetary value. Property value is more commonly understood; especially in the United States where owning property is much like owning a car – you’re not really somebody until you own one.

You’re also not really somebody until you have a job. At least in the eyes of most economists. And not just any job. A legitimate job. Sorry stay-at-home parents, most of whom have been and are women, your work is not valued. Economies originated as gendered concepts and still are. As a student, I was also a nobody. At least in terms of contributing to the economy.

If a monetary value can’t be placed on an activity, it’s not counted. The activity has to include money being exchanged through a price fixed market economy of some kind. Some company has to be siphoning money from the activity to be valued and calculated. Otherwise, it’s considered not worth counting.

Those activities include transportation. Each time you take a trip on a plane, bus, shuttle, or car your time is being valued by the government. Walking and biking to your legitimate job has zero value because no money has been exchanged in the activity. It turns out walkers are not only a nobody socially, but economically too. Walking and biking is considered an uncomfortable burden to economists.

The most common way to measure the economy is through a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Countries calculate GDP in different ways, but the most straightforward and common method is actually rather simple. Which also makes it dubious given how complex human behavior is to understand let alone measure.

The equation takes all the recorded money spent on goods and services within a given region. This money may have been privately spent on individual consumption, like a cup of coffee or a bus ticket. Let’s call that C – for Consumer spending.

The money could have been spent on an investment, like property or stock in a company. Let’s call that I – for Investment.

Don’t forget the government spends money on our behalf as well. They spend money on roads, hospitals, libraries, schools, military, police and other services. Let’s call that G – for Government spending.

There’s also money flowing in and out of the country from abroad through exported and imported goods. That’s an easy one to calculate too. They take the value of exports; let’s call that X – for eXports and subtract the value of imports; we’ll call that M – for iMports.

Now we can do simple arithmetic to assess the value of a country’s economy.

Gross Domestic Product = Consumption Spending + Investment Spending + Government Spending + (Exports minus Imports). More tersely,

GDP = C + I + G + (X – M).

In other words GDP is a measure of a place full of people generating wealth through a series of complex monetary interactions.

As you might imagine, it’s more complicated than that in reality. Consumer spending we understand. Investment too, if you’re fortunate enough to have such means. But even that starts to get murky. Exports and imports are complicated, and so is government spending. It’s also inequitable. Since we’re talking transportation, let’s focus on transportation spending.

In order to balance inequities in government spending, the U.S. government relies on the same thing I did when weighing my different transportation options – cost-benefit analysis. I was constantly doing cost-benefit analysis in my head after my car croaked.

I would think to myself, “What does it cost to take the airport shuttle? What is the benefit to doing so? If it costs twice as much as the bus, will it get me there in half the time? It will be more comfortable, but what’s the price of comfort? What’s the price of convenience? Do I have enough money to even be doing this analysis?” It’s exhausting. Relying on public transportation in a country built for cars tests both your sanity and your vanity, but also your patience.

SWEAT AND THE JET SET

The biggest benefit of transportation is the amount of time saved getting from point A to point B. Time is what is most valued. But when the government values that time, they don’t assign equal values to different modes of transportation. The faster the mode of travel, the more valued it is. When the government conducts cost-benefit analysis, they value transport by air at $63 per hour while transport on the surface is valued at $25 per hour using median salaries as their basis.

Government economists call this: efficient. Zachary Liscow, an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, explains it like this:

“Rich persons can earn more in that hour saved. But since the time of the rich is valued at such a higher rate, this policy pushes funding toward the rich instead of the poor, making it harder for low-income people to access jobs.”

The more money you have, the more choices you have to travel from point A to point B faster. This is a big motivator for the ultra-rich to buy their own airplanes. Take it from the guy who started the Microsoft research group at Microsoft in 1991, Nathan Myhrvold. He penned an article in a 1998 Vanity Fair article that stepped through his rationale for his first private jet purchase. It was written anonymously, but he’s since admitted he wrote it.

He says,

“I was, in effect, hostage to the air-travel system for the equivalent of three months a year. You’d have to be a career criminal to earn that much jail time—and the food would be better. If I had my own jet, I’d get that time back. I’d come and go without schedules or the fear of missing a flight. My time in the air would be spent in an office with wings, where I could work or relax. I would finally have 12 months to live the life that, in effect, I had been cramming into 9 months of non–airline time. This perspective made it hard not to like a jet.”

Owning your own jet is insanely expensive. But it would be even more expensive if the fuel wasn’t subsidized through the government. Myhrvold puts this reality into stark perspective:

“A jet can easily consume 3,000 pounds of fuel an hour, the equivalent of a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke every second. Fortunately, in bulk, jet fuel—essentially the same stuff as kerosene or diesel fuel—is actually cheaper than Diet Coke. All told, direct flying cost is about $2,500 ($4,000 in 2021 dollars) per hour.”

Private planes emit 10 times more carbon than conventional airlines. Four hours equals the average amount your or I emit in an entire year. One in ten flights departing France are private jets. While conventional airline flights were down 60% in 2020, due to Covid, the number of private flights by private jet increased.

A form of travel economists would call the most efficient also happens to be one of the worst things you could do to the environment. And it all gets measured and reported as positive contributions to the economy and the GDP.

I can’t deny flying in a private jet would be nice. Especially if they didn’t pollute. I think most everyone would agree. But owning a car is pretty nice too. And for most of the world’s population, owning a bike would be a luxury.

But I do think a more equitable distribution of government spending on transportation would benefit more people – especially those disadvantaged. That’s more true today than ever before given the sorry state of our bus and rail systems across the country. And despite the spending airports do get, many are also in a sorry state.

Measurements like GDP and economic political mechanisms like cost-benefit analysis have become a means to an end. Every administration since Nixon has used cost-benefit analysis to either increase or decrease regulation. Cost-benefit analysis started as a tool to benefit industry, then became a device for environmental regulation, and has since become an array of political levers either party uses to advance legislation or block it.

These engines of political and economic power have been used to measure and manipulate the wealth accumulation of a select and privileged few. But as this machine is climbing the hill of prosperity, a loud bang of inequity is reverberating from under the hood. The Biden administration has pulled over, popped the hood, and is examining what’s inside; often not knowing what to look for. Meanwhile, we keep climbing the hill, albeit cautiously. If we can’t find a way to make the engine of economic mechanisms and measures result in a more equitable distribution of wealth, it just might be time to scrap it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

Most people’s awareness of the economy starts with three letters: GDP. It seems every news report about the health of any nation starts with their GDP. And there is only one direction it can go for anyone to be satisfied and that is up. Even though we all know that as those numbers go up the health of our environment goes down. How did we get here?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BEN AND ARIES

In 1817, German poet, playwright, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote,

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.”

Goethe himself fell victim to this, but it’s unlikely he considered his ideas stupid. No member of any school of dogma does. He considered himself a cut above the rest; a genius in fact. At least as defined by his more famous German peer, philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Goethe was a naturalist and believed his genius was his ability to translate his knowledge of the natural world into manmade civic matters – like economics. He was equally adept at using words like “budget, balance, economy, law and order” in describing the workings of the German government as he was describing his gardens. Or mines. Goethe was put in charge of managing area parks, mines, and forests which gave him ample opportunities to marry elements of botany and geology with economics.

He was following in the footsteps of the French economic school of thought from the mid-1700s, The Physiocrats. They too believed in the order of natural law. They thought “the only choice humans had was either to structure their polity, economy and society in conformity with the ordre naturel or to go against it.” Talk about being dogmatic.

There were some big names in this school of thought; including Benjamin Franklin. He sided with the Physiocrats arguing the only real productive contributions to a nation’s economy was naturally – through land ownership and farming. It’s a school of thought that propelled Thomas Jefferson, also a land loving naturalist, to push for land grabs across the country for the purpose of farming and land taxation. It’s also what separated the industrial mercantilists of the America’s North and the agrarian agriculturalists of the South which eventually led to a civil war.

Colonialization, at its heart, was about land acquisition for agriculture, industry, transportation, international trade, and real estate. It was also about ethnic, racial, and gendered economies, and eventually the development of urban form. It set out to dominate the interaction of people and place. It was also the emergence of the field of economic geography.

But long before the Enlightenment and colonization, in 4th century BC, the State of Qin in western China developed timber maps that included locations and distance measures to the sites. These are some of the oldest economic maps in the world. And then along came the Greek philosopher Strabo. He published a book called Geographica just before his death in 24 AD. It was found and reprinted in Latin in 1469 and describes the interactions of people and places from around the various parts of the world Strabo visited, including their economies.

This reprinted work proved more influential to the burgeoning Enlightenment thinkers of 15th century, than Strabo’s first century contemporaries. Either way, economic geography took hold in Europe throughout the Enlightenment and into the 19th century as Goethe was writing erotic plays, listening to Beethoven live, and dabbling in economics between trips to the garden.

NEW-MATH MEETS HU-MAN

Strabo’s work would have been picked up by another German, Alfred Weber – the brother to one of the founders of modern-day sociology, Max Weber, who believed capitalism came to exist through the protestant work ethic. Max ended up winning the ‘who will be most famous’ yearbook prize, but Alfred likely would have been more popular at the time.

He made a name for himself as an economist developing some of the first theories on industrial location in 1929. He wanted to know why and how industries, cities, and farms determine where to locate. So, he developed analytical and interpretive methods to do so.

Citing agglomerations, a collection of contiguous cities, industries, and labor pools, Weber was likely influenced by one of the most prominent British economists of the time, Alfred Marshall. He authored the 1890 book, Principles in Economics, and was the founder of yet another economic school of thought – The Cambridge school of neoclassical economics. We’ll learn more about Alfred later.

Weber and Marshall were also influential outside of Europe. Weber’s work made its way to North America by way of a young mathematician named Walter Isard in the 1940s. Isard was a Quaker and thus a conscientious objector during World War II. His civil service was then satisfied as an attendant in a mental hospital.

He had recently earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago where he was inspired by Weber. He spent his time at the hospital translating Weber’s work from German into English. He went on to teach regional science at MIT, started the first doctoral program in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania, and rounded out his career at Cornell in 1979. He died in 2010 as one of the most influential quantitative geographers in the field.

But while Isard was still a young boy, another strand in economic geography had already been started in America; but from a humanist standpoint. Geographer and geologist, Wallace Atwood, also a University of Chicago graduate, had published a book in 1920 called Teaching the New Geography. It was targeted at elementary school teachers and encouraged a more progressive method of teaching geography to young people that avoided rote memorization of place names.

Page one states that Atwood believes,

“the study of geography in the elementary-school stage should do more than…provide geographical facts – it should give them a real understanding of…a definite power of interpreting their effect on human life.”

He goes on to state,

“Fortunately, we have now learned to teach the facts of place, political, physical, economic, and commercial geography in association with the more vital, more interesting, and more thought-provoking topics of human geography. In other words, we have come at last to focus the study on people, not things.”

Atwood became the founding editor of the journal of Economic Geography out of Clark University in 1925 and eventually became the school’s president. The journal continues today to “redefine and reinvigorate the intersection between economics and geography” and is the discipline’s leading academic journal.

HEAD AND TAILS

These two schools of thought and approach, technical and naturalist, were both indicators and influencers of the larger field of economics and politics. But they were also two sides of the same coin. On one side, there was a top-down, mathematical interpretation and explanation for what was occurring spatially as goods and people moved through space and time. This approach to economics emerged out of the work of Weber, Isard, and others in Europe and North America who are fondly referred to as the ‘space cadets’. There work complemented another emerging field in economics called econometrics – the application of statistics to economic relationships.

On the other side of the coin were the earthy-crunchy, naturalists. The roots of the French Physiocrats grew into Germany creating sprouts of ideas tended to by people like Goethe. Seeds then spread to America and were planted by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Their land rights and agricultural economic beliefs blossomed into a gridded patchwork of townships, farms, cities, roads, and waterways that stretched across a continent.

Colonial settlers toiled and tilled yielding fruits of labor in the form of property taxes and crop revenue. The funds of which built a military that protected industrialists seeking access to sacred Indigenous land to lay tracks for trains and mountains for mines.

Cities grew across the oceans connecting the northern hemisphere with diverse populations of people cross-fertilizing ideas, yielding new seeds of inventions and innovation, that continued to spread around the world through interconnected vines of nutrient rich endeavors. All of which were extracting natural resources and exploiting human labor at rates never seen in the history of the world.

By the 1900s the industrial age had lined the pockets of the economic elite, coal fired steam stoked success, but also paired pollutants to particles that penetrated the lungs of those less lucky. Trees were toppled, canyons collapsed, and sand stripped of their sediment. It was enough to prompt the Republican naturalist President Teddy Roosevelt to regulate railroads and conserve natural resources; an attempt to give Americans and the environment a “square deal”.

His actions encouraged people like Wallace Atwood to pause and grow concerned. Atwood hoped to inspire a generation by asking children of the 1920s to be thoughtful about the power people have over interactions between physical geography, politics, place, and the effect they have on human life. Imagine where we’d be today if Atwood’s books and words actually took hold. I don’t know about you, but my primary geography education was still pretty much about memorizing Anglo-American names of cities and states around the world.

This coin of economics offers mathematical quantitative spatial and econometric measures that include indicators of success for world-wide economies, on one side, and the other a naturalist-inspired human-environmental articulation of the potential positive and deleterious effects on physical geography and life. The measures of one side of the coin are even inspired by words of the other, like ‘health’ and ‘growth’.

But the two sides suffer from a perverse cycle of codependency that lingers to this day. For example, we live in a society that measures, rewards, and celebrates how increased sales of automobiles contributes to the ‘growth’ of an economy knowing full well their presence is destroying the ‘health’ of the environment and its inhabitants.

As gas prices plummet, economies grow – and so does the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Higher wages mean more consumerism and economies grow; and so does the size of toxic landfills and islands of plastic in the ocean. More cars on the road yield more accidents and more injuries and deaths. But they also yield economic growth in the insurance, auto, and healthcare industries as insurance, repair, and medical bills pile high. Economic indicators that rise, also measure our demise. We need no better proof that humans do not act logically nor rationally.

THE AIMS AND PAINS OF KEYNES

But that would have been a tough argument to make in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most mainstream economists today would still argue. Arguments that stem from the principles of the preeminent 20th century British economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Remember Alfred Marshall, the father of the Cambridge school of neoclassical economics? Keynes was a family friend and protégé of Marshall’s and expanded on his ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. One of which was the notion that people’s subjectivity in decision making plays a small role.

In his 1921 Treatise on Probability Keynes wrote that when we are faced with a decision, we weigh the facts based on the knowledge we have. The decision that follows is “fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion.” A probable choice “is not probable” just because we think it is. Some mythical natural law has determined it.

I don’t know about you, but despite the knowledge I possess about the negative effects of sugar, it’s probable that I’ll have dessert because in the opinion of my sugar craving brain, I deserve it. And while I know the ocean is full of plastic, it is probable that I will continue to buy plastic products because, in my opinion, I think I want that product. But who am I to judge an Eton grad and one of the most influential people in the history of economics? He must be right. Right? In my opinion, not really.

Keynes’ biggest contribution to economics, and the world we live in today, came in his 1936 book, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Here he outlined how an economy could be a nationwide entity bounded by certain governmental policies. These policies act as levers, to use a industrial metaphor, that control prices, interest rates, and even consumer demand – consumers who are governed by natural laws of objective logic uniformly identical to any other human.

By positioning humans as yet another cog in a machine, economists could more easily substitute human behavior into their mathematical models. While some, like Cambridge Philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, disagreed with Keynes, and developed alternative mathematics to demonstrate it, Keynes beliefs survived. In large part because should each individual act on their own accord, subjectively, it would be seemingly impossible to mathematically model the outcome. And where’s the fun in that?

Economists across Europe and North America agreed. By the end of World War II, Keynesian economics dominated economic scholarship and practice. It’s the model we have today and can be characterized in these four economic processes:

Economies are external to our lives. One of the most efficient ways to trick people into believing this fallacy is to put the word ‘the’ in front of Economy. The mechanical metaphors also help to position economic processes as something external to our lives; just like machines.

Economies operate under their own internal logical and objective rules. Entire cultures and societies may come and go, but economies are unaffected. Political parties come and go, but economies remain omnipresent. Diverse societies and religions may rise and fall throughout space and time, but economies remain constant and monotheistic.

Economies operate on a national scale. The mathematical techniques and apparatus surrounding the analysis and reporting of economies represent the success or failure of an entire nation. It was as early as the 1940s that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the primary indicator of a nation’s economic health. These measures allowed for inter-national comparisons and worldwide economic systems like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Economies must be operated and managed through governmental intervention. This is the key to perpetual economic growth. Governments not only can make it possible but it is their duty to do so. Politicians latched on to this idea quickly, which is why Republicans and corporations stacked collegiate economic departments with Keynesian thinkers and funded their research.

It’s been 100 years since Keynes published his economic treatise. That’s ten decades of Keynesian economists convincing each other their school of thought is right by pointing to perpetually climbing GDP numbers while ignoring the climbing curve of carbon dioxide concentration. The words of Goethe still ring true:

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.”

It’s not hard to look around to see the students of this school of economics have failed. Our social foundations have been rocked. Our food, water, health, energy, education, social networks, income, work, housing, gender equality, peace and justice, social equity, and political voice are all suffering. And all that surrounds us too: climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, biodiversity loss, freshwater withdrawals, chemical and soil pollution, and ocean acidification are pushed to their limits.

But here’s what gives me hope. If it took just 80 years to dig this hole we’re in, I’m confident we can find our way out in less time than that. I’ve painted a narrow and bleak picture of mainstream economics, but know there are many economists around the world with alternative theories and practices. I’ll be exploring some in future posts.

But the Keynesian school is what I want to replace. So here are some things to embrace. My school says: economies are embedded in the interactions of people and place. Economies emerge as people converge in a perpetual swirling of reactions. Social foundations and friendly relations are what make the economic milieu. But without clean air and water too, any economy is doomed. So embrace the patterns as complexities emerge among people and place interactions.

References:

Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction, 3rd Edition. Neil M. Coe, Philip F. Kelly, Henry W. C. Yeung.

Goethe's Economy of Nature and the Nature of His Economy. Myles W. Jackson. University of Cambridge. 1992.

The History of Economic Thought. Gonçalo L. Fonseca. Institute for New Economic Thinking.

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Hello Interactors,

This week kicks off the fall series on economic geography. My introduction to economics started with a room full of giggling girls. Its founding began by exploring a common moral sympathy, but it has become anything but. This evolution has been relatively fast; occurring throughout the lives of a rural postman pioneer and his pioneering punch card punching son.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

STUFF IT

As I walked in the door, the girls awkwardly spun around and grinned with a tinge of embarrassment. And then back to their friends as giggles percolated across the room. I tried to play it cool as the teacher welcomed me and led me to a special desk against the wall. She sat down next to me, maybe a little too eager, and helped me to get started.

It was 1984 and Claus Oldenburg had recently finished a civic sculpture, Crusoe Umbrella, for what was then called Nollan plaza in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. My friend’s dad, Charles “Chick” Herbert, designed the concrete plaza featuring a shallow pool across from his angular stark white Civic Center. The sculpture is an homage to the umbrella Robinson Crusoe built from sticks and plants. Oldenburg thought the plaza looked like an oasis amidst the high-rise buildings in a state that felt like an island in the middle of a continent that most people only see while flying over on their way to New York or Los Angeles.

The neon red animating Travelers Insurance logo atop one of the buildings also served as an inspiration – an umbrella. The curved handle of the base also reminded Oldenburg of a backhoe sometimes seen on the ubiquitous tractors grooming the fields of Iowa. And the long skinny shaft that connected the umbrella to the handle reminded him of the road through downtown Des Moines where he saw High School kids cruise on Saturday nights as they ‘scooped the loop’. I was one of them.

Come Monday it was back to school. For the senior art project we got to choose our own medium for our entries into the spring art show. I had Claus on the brain. In addition to large public sculptures, Claus was also known for his oversized stuffed everyday objects. The Des Moines Art Center collection had one; a massive three-way plug made out of blue vinyl that lazily drooped from the ceiling partially stuffed with filler. I decided I was going to do a giant soft sculpture of my own for the spring show. I choose to make a wall mounted hand-cranked pencil sharpener – a staple of every classroom in those days and a farewell homage to my final year in the Norwalk School District.

Des Moines was home to more than just insurance companies. It’s still a major center for insurance and financial services. And publishing. If you’ve ever flipped through a magazine in America, it was most likely printed by the Meredith Corporation. Growing up it was also home to the farm equipment manufacturer, Massey Ferguson. Through the 1970s their factory made mostly lawn tractors and snowmobiles, but it was also a center for the company’s legal, financial, and marketing departments. My Dad worked there for twenty five years.

You can’t really make a soft sculpture in most art rooms. Their set up for drawing, painting, printing, and ceramics. So during art period, I’d grab my cheap beige muslin fabric from my art locker and walk down the hall by shop class where guys would point at me and laugh as they tinkered with an old clunker locals would donate to the school. I’d proceed through the black double doors, hang a left down a long empty hallway, pause at the door, peek through the relight, and slowly open the door. I’d walk through a class full of giggling girls, sit down to the sewing machine against the wall, and start sewing. The only dude in my four years to ever to set foot in a high school home economics class.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

The word economics in English-speaking worlds was born out of home economics. There are still hangers-on, like ‘economy sized’ goods at big-box stores or ‘economy-sized’ rental cars. Economizing in this context means to be miserly or frugal. That was certainly what I grew up learning. Both of my parents came from humble beginnings.

My Mom’s mother is the daughter of German immigrants and her father the son of Irish immigrants. Both farming families had to scrape to get by. My Grandmother survived the Spanish Flu; even after caring for parents who both had it.

My Dad was born into the depression in his mother’s bed in 1933. He was the second youngest of twelve. His dad served in both World Wars and was the town postman; he started out delivering mail by horse.

They both lived in a small town in southern Iowa called, Orient. They were born into an era and area dominated by a small scale farming economy. There wasn’t a lot of need to think beyond the economics of the household. Having a large family meant that many more hands for labor. The area was settled by farmers with homesteaded land offered by the government. Orient was mostly there to support the local farmers.

This small Iowa town was founded in 1882 during the great swell of America’s industrial age. It’s marquee feature and primary reason for existence was a grain elevator in the center of town. It was part of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Also known simply as the Burlington. This company started as the Aurora Branch Railroad and was created by the Illinois state government in 1848. It grew to dominate tracks through western Illinois, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, across Nebraska, and extended its reach far north and west into Montana.

Eight years later, in 1900, the American federal government had traded, stolen, or bought enough land and offered incentives to corporations like Burlington to run trains coast to coast. Their tracks divided herds of buffalo, countless Indigenous communities, and were built on the backs of mostly by low-wage Chinese immigrant laborers.

In 1882, the year Orient was founded, the U.S. government thanked these people by instituting the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned further Chinese immigration and blocked naturalization. It is what started the so-called Yellow Peril – an anti-Asian sentiment that has resurfaced in recent years in the form of racist hate crime.

MORAL UTILITY

By the late 1800s the Western world had been putting theories of division of labor to practice for over one hundred years. It’s what fueled the Industrial Revolution. It all began the same year the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and the publishing of A Wealth of Nations. This highly influential book was written by a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, Adam Smith.

He was an awkward and absent minded man who is said to have "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment." Smith himself agreed he was no looker saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."

Despite his speech impediment and awkwardness, he found success lecturing. He began writing and lecturing on economic topics in 1748, but from a moralistic standpoint. He expanded on what he deemed obvious and simple principles of natural liberty. An idea that had been around since the Greeks; and likely the Zoroastrians before that; one of the longest running religions in the world out of Persia that espouses three core principles I think we can all get behind: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.

Natural liberty, or natural law, was a feature in many Enlightenment thinkers of Smith’s era and is ensconced in the U.S. Declaration of Independence – "all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". His lectures also concerned the increasing opulence in England during this period. It led him to write his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 that explored “moral sympathy” or what today we might call empathy – the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society.

It was after this that he turned toward more explicitly toward economics and the inclusion, exclusion, and overlap of natural law with manmade legal laws that were beginning to be written by Western societies and nations. He theorized it was the legal power of the state to control labor that brought about wealth, dominance, and control and not the accumulation of silver and gold. It led to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A book who’s name has shortened over time to the Wealth of Nations.

That book became his most famous and leads many to call Adam Smith the father of the field of Economics. In it he reveals how the division of labor in scaled up industrial enterprises leads to growth and wealth accumulation. By having teams of specialized skilled workers conducting interdependent tasks, industries could scale production more efficiently and profitably – in large part through slave or low-wage labor.

This mechanized view of labor divisions echoed scientific theories and discoveries in biology and physics that would have been swirling around Smith during the Age of Enlightenment. The influence is evident today by looking at the language of economists and business professionals. Money flows through economies; especially when there are waves of prosperity. Economics is a mechanism that uses the gravitational pull of consumers and sellers. Unless, of course, there is friction from far away resources or customers. Markets seek equilibrium. So long as we avoid inflation.

Economics can even be described in farming and biological terms. A market can be fertile. Every day on the radio, tv, and social media you hear about the health and growth of the economy. Goods can be in circulation, products can be reproduced; come Black Friday in November consumers will be triggered by herd instincts. In the end, economies are a function of natural selection. Only the fittest companies and strongest governments will survive.

By the late 1800s scientists were on a roll. They had discovered an underlying uniting principle of physics that also unified the discipline: all matter in the universe is connected by a unifying force – energy. The burgeoning field of economics, eager to model itself off science and math, sought their own unifying principle and settled on an economizing word – utility.

ECON ONE-BY-ONE

Prior to the industrial age, the production of goods required the labor of an individual farmer, merchant, blacksmith, baker, carpenter, or cobbler which was harder, slower, and more expensive to scale when demand became greater than supply. To maximize profits, firms had to maximize the utility of their workers. And they did that by creating specialized divisions of labor.

But that quaint image of a farmer and merchant, could be recognized in Orient even when I visited my Grandparents as a kid in the 70s and 80s. It had a single tiny grocery store, a hardware store, and assorted repair shops. Nearly everyone in town had a garden and the city was surrounded by fields and farms of corn, beans, hogs, and heifers. And running straight down the heart of town was a railroad.

Nestled next to it was a grain elevator five stories high that would get filled with area corn and soybeans waiting for the next train to come to haul it away; a cog in a nationwide industrialized economic machine in the middle of small-town Iowa on an island of a state within a vast continental land mass that stretches from sea to shining sea.

The wealth of this nation, in keeping with Smith’s theory, grew from the federal and state laws that, in cooperation and sometimes collusion with private firms, controlled the price of land and labor to build the nation’s largest industries; including the railroads that ran through Orient, the steel used to make the trains, tracks, and railcars that were fueled by what seemed like endless supplies of coal, oil, and gas. Industries also controlled the seed the farmers bought, the fertilizers and pesticides they spread, and the equipment they used to till, plow, plant, and harvest – like Massey Ferguson.

My Dad was a Computer Audit Analyst at Massey Ferguson. He exceled in math, majored in it, taught for awhile, got married to my Mom, and then landed a job in 1969 writing COBOL programs for a small financial software firm in Des Moines. He soon moved to Massey Ferguson where he wrote more COBOL on punch cards. He’d bring them home for me to play with and draw on as a small boy. I can still see them stacked under the piano bench in my room on Jackson street that looked out to the elementary school across the street.

My Mom and Dad and their Mom and Dad bridged generations of economies. My Grandpa Weed was born in 1889. The Ford Motor company was still a twinkle in Henry Ford’s eye. My Mom and Dad were born in the thirties into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Era; when Democrats were the party of protecting people over banks and not the party of protecting banks over people. FDR must be rolling in his grave. He famously quipped, "I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong."

By the time I was born, my family had entered the ranks of the middle class FDR had imagined. My parents experienced old-fashioned agrarian economies that even Adam Smith would have recognized. They rose with the White educated middle class and settled into the comfortable suburban sprawl of the post World War boom to raise a family. They witnessed the growth of American industries that cranked out planes, trains, automobiles, and rockets. And, yes, Massey Ferguson tractors, snowmobiles, and riding lawnmowers too.

But my Dad also bridged the industrial economy and the knowledge economy by becoming one of the first software professionals in 1969 as part of a newly burgeoning high-tech industry. Within my lifetime, the lives of my parents, and of theirs the formal discipline of Economics was born overseas, grew larger in America, and has metastasized into a global economic instrument void of any of the moral foundations its founding father, Adam Smith, envisioned. Where’s the empathy? Where is the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society?

Our world economy has come to resemble the soft sculptures of Claus Oldenburg. A parody of mass production and mass culture that has ballooned to comedic scale and is sagging mournfully from the gravitational pull of its own weight.

Maybe what we need is to step away from our classes, march into the void, open a new door, endure the ridicule and laughter, and sit down to sew us a new moral economy that can be stuffed with good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

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Hello Interactors,

This is the last post on the subject of physical geography. Starting next week and through the fall I’ll be digging into economic geography and how the interaction of people and place relates to inequality, instability, and sustainability of local and global economies.

This final post of the season ushers in a windy wet fall by focusing on the forces of wind and water; and our sometimes intimate relationships with nature.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PUZZLING PILES IN THE PARK

I paddled my kayak two miles across a calm Lake Washington this week to a park where I water baby native plants. I realized I move through fluid water at about the same pace as I walk on solid ground. Kayaking is a lot like swimming that way. But dryer. You’re in the water extending one arm forward, grabbing water with the paddle, pulling it behind you while pushing your other arm forward so it can do the same. I lean sideways slightly on each extension rotating the boat, extending its length, rocking back and forth with each stroke. Just like swimming. But dryer.

I’m not much of a misty spiritual type, but there is a oneness with water that I experience when swimming or kayaking that is hard to explain. I feel it when I sail too. So does the boat. Sailboats hum with vibration when the force of wind on the sail is balanced by the forces acting on the keel underwater. These invisible forces propel the boat forward, but can also slow it down.

Polynesians were some of the best, if not the best, sailors and navigators in the world. To sense the subtle cues of shifts in the current on the vast Pacific waters, the men would put the tiller between their legs and let the most sensitive nerves in their body sense the changes. Their scrotum. Now that’s being one with your boat – and the water.

Most people have lost touch with this kind of intimacy with nature. The closer we get to embracing urban life, the more distant nature recedes. I’m reminded of this every time I beach my kayak at the waterfront park I’m helping to restore. I pull the boat ashore, strap on my work gloves, slip on my branded Green Kirkland hat, and set out to water baby native plants under a canopy of firs and old growth cotton woods. But invariably, in my periphery, I’m distracted by a bleach-white pile of toilet paper clumped just beyond the trail.

People pooping in public parks is as much pernicious as it is puzzling. One day I became curious how widespread in the park this was. Perhaps this stand of trees is just a particularly pleasant place to poop. So I walked the park. Crossing over a footbridge, I spotted two juice boxes tossed to the side of the creek. I walked down the bank and under the bridge to see more wads of white waste.

I collected the juice boxes and tissue and heard a mom on the bridge say to her kids, “Oh look, that nice man is picking up litter!” I had a moment of pride bolt through me, but it was displaced by rage that almost made me want to holler back, “Yeah, so why don’t you and your kids get your butts down here and help!” I didn’t, of course. But I wanted to yell at somebody.

As I walked further up the creek, I could see the bank leading up to the restrooms was spotted with white. The closer I got to the building, the more clumps of toilet paper I found. What compels people to walk into a restroom stall, pull more toilet paper from the roll than a single human needs to wipe their fanny, stride outside and into the woods, and poop. Or pee. I found more evidence of pee-pee than poo-poo. Which tells me it’s those with the internal hardware doing most of the doo-dooing in the dirt.

I suppose you could cry, COVID! And it’s true. I could see where some would be concerned with being in a public restroom for too long. And let’s face it, it’s nicer in the woods than in a public facility. I’d rather be looking at a tree than a stall door with graffiti etched into it; breathing air that surrounds with a nasty stench to it. But park staffers tell me it was happening long before Covid and it’s been getting worse. While doggy doo-doo is their number one park problem, a close second is public plops from people.

The BBC wrote a piece about these dastardly deeds of the terrible turds. They interviewed a forensic psychologist who gets called onto scenes of crimes where someone has dropped some dung. The first thing he asks the police officer is this, “Is it soft or hard?” They think this psychologist is in need of psychiatry. It’s the number one indicator of intent. If it’s soft, the person was anxious, stressed, and realized they either drop trough or poo their pants. So they landed a pile in the middle of the living room and then made off with the TV. If it’s hard, then this person is most likely angry and bitter about the world and this is their way of expressing it.

He says the reasons for these episodes range from anxiety, alcohol, illness, rage, or, as one anger management expert put it, people want to make a statement: “Life is s**t, so stand in it.”

Either way, these psychologists warn us that shaming is the last thing we should do to remedy this rectal ruse. In any form, it’s a sign of anti-social behavior that most likely stems from some kind of trauma in these people’s lives. I’ve stopped picking it up and instead snap a photo with a description of the location. The city is trying to track occurrences so they can be more targeted in their solutions. I’ve also come to muster compassion for the sources of these pearly piles of paper that pop out amidst the brown brush.

WIND AND WATER

This park experience has offered me a whole new angle on the interaction of people and place. Defecating in public I think we’d all agree is a social taboo. Taboo is Polynesian word. It’s formed from the word ta – to mark and pu – an adverb of intensity. It can be spelled tabu or tapu. The Polynesians used this word in many contexts, but one was conservation of natural resources. They would mark reefs, groves, plants, and animals as taboo when they became overfished or overly picked, plucked, or hunted.

Numerous anthropologists noted this elsewhere in the world among Indigenous societies; typically with religious overtones to sacred edicts. The Kayapo people of Brazil have religious sanctions as a way of managing groves of trees. Maya’s Huastic people protected sacred groves as did Moroccans and the Chinese.

China’s ancient practice of feng shui 风水 is alive today. Search for feng shui on Amazon books and you’ll be greeted with over 40,000 books to choose from. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and cultural ecologist, Gene Anderson, spent years researching behavior of poor laborers in Hong Kong. His first encounter with feng shui was in 1965. A hospital was being built on a nearby hill where he was staying. As he interacted with area farmers and laborers, they would remark on how bad it was to build there. The elders would tell him, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” He studiously noted the comment, but found it an odd thing to say.

Soon after, a typhoon struck. Two feet of rain in two days brought water that turned to mud as it came gushing down the mountain. The newly built hospital foundation was wiped out and homes were buried in mud at the foot of the hill. The next time he saw his farmer friends, they said, “See? This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” Geologists would say it was “slope failure” due to “over steepening.”

After ruminating on the catastrophe, Anderson wrote,

“A light went on in my head. The Chinese, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges.”

Anderson never thought of facts the same way again. Feng shui guides people to not put houses on a slope or rise. A year later, Anderson observed the effects of another natural disaster – the great floods of 1966. He noticed the only houses to survive, were those that obeyed the principles of feng shui.

While he had ample empirical evidence that feng shui works, he could never quite square with the mystical connotations. He had trouble relating to “dragons in the hills”, “tigers in the ridges”, “veins of subtle circulating force”, and “wavelike flows of good and bad luck.” But with time, he’s discovered and appreciated the interdependence of hard-nosed pragmatic empiricism and the more spiritual cosmology of ancient Chinese tradition.

The literal meaning of feng shui combines “wind” and “water”. It is the ancient Chinese science of how people interact with place in a way that minimizes damage from natural forces. It guides the planning of houses, buildings, villages as well as ways of getting around: roads, bridges, waterways, and highways. Natural forces in traditional Chinese culture is called ch’i (qi 气) – a force vital to life but can’t be seen. It’s literal meaning is “air” or “breath”; both invisible vital forces that should not be impeded. Feng shui exposes principles that avoid blocking or disrupting that invisible vital force – or ch’i.

Wind, in my mind, is the perfect spiritual and empirical example. You can’t see wind, but it’s best not to impede it. And when I’m sailing, wind can bring bad luck – no wind, too much wind, or wind in an unhelpful direction. And it can also bring good luck – a consistent gentle wind blowing in a helpful direction. Harnessing and channeling the invisible force of wind balances forces between the sail and the keel causing fluid turbulence that makes a boat hum and a sailor smile. (Though the turbulence can also create drag, so is best appreciated only momentarily if you’re in a hurry!)

Water holds both empirical and mystical and metaphorical truths as well. One look at a drainage map of any massive river system reveals a fractal-like network of tributaries, creeks, and streams that feed into progressively larger rivers. Like the capillaries and veins that gradually grow in diameter as they approach the two largest veins in our bodies – the superior and inferior vena cavae. These connect to the heart that pulses at precisely the right rhythm to send blood all the way to the extremities where the smallest capillaries in mammals deliver oxygen and nutrients to surrounding cells.

River systems in tidal zones and floodplains work much like our circulatory systems. The natural cycle of seasonal drought and floods or ebb and flow of tides distribute water, nutrients, and organisms through what is known as a flood pulse. And like wind, these forces cannot be seen, are best not impeded, and can be described by many as bringing good or bad luck. A drought stricken flood plain flush with forgotten water is good luck for plants and animals reliant on the pulse. A tidal rush from a tsunami is nothing but bad luck.

S**T HAPPENS

It’s not hard to imagine an undulating mountain ridge with piercing rocks silhouetted against the sky appearing like the scales on the back of a curvaceous dragon. It’s also not hard to imagine the streams running through the steep crevices and valleys and into the flood plains; pulsing like the veins of a mountain dragon. Describing naturally occurring forces this way is both pragmatic and poetic. Empirical and mystical. Especially in the absence of any other explanation.

But the first Western scholars to encounter these people lacked such imagination and grace. J. J. M. de Groot was one such person. He was a Dutch missionary and religion instructor at Leiden University in Germany. Here’s how he described what he heard and observed when he spent time in China in the 1800s,

“Feng shui is a mere chaos of childish absurdities and refined mysticism, cemented together, by sophistic reasonings, into a system, which is in reality a ridiculous caricature of science.”

These words resonated with other Western explorers, scholars, and writers so they copied them. They considered feng shui a form of superstition or religion; a belief that propagated through generations of text books throughout the Western world. But in recent decades that has changed. Most scholars now regard feng shui as scientific. In 1996, Gene Anderson described it like this: “a system of empirical observations and pragmatic knowledge, bound together by an overarching theory that is supposed to be naturalistic.”

If you’ve ever been backpacking, you’ve likely pooped in the woods. My climbing friend told me you don’t really have a climbing partner until you’ve pooped next them while dangling from a rope on the face of a cliff high above the mountain floor into what they call a poop-tube. And I’ve spectated at enough cross-country and endurance events to know emergency pooping happens in the woods, on the trail, or even on the bike. S**t happens.

But as more people flood urban areas around the world and cities struggle to maintain open, natural spaces, we can’t be leaving grunts on the ground. Besides, it’s not like this is the only form of environmental degradation humans are inflicting on the world. We are unquestionably impeding vital natural forces. Wind, water, and other natural forces are getting chocked. A widespread blockage of the world’s ch’i.

The Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest imagined salmon as humans wearing fish skins. When I put on my wetsuit and swim in Lake Washington, I am a human wearing a fish skin. These people have their own spiritual and cultural beliefs that are also bound together by pragmatism and naturalistic theory. The salmon – and the seas, lakes, and rivers they occupy – bind with the native people and their sense of place. They believe they are here to take care of the salmon, because the salmon take care of them.

Lake Washington used to be home to countless salmon. They would have been running under my kayak on their way to Juanita Bay this time of year. There would be so many of them that they’d clog the entry to Forbes Creek; a floor of wiggling salmon so thick you could have walked on top of them. The last time a salmon was spotted trying to spawn here at Forbes Creek was 2001.

The lake level dropped in 1910 when they cut a path to Seattle’s Lake Union so ships constructed in Kirkland could make their way to sea. Upstream the creek’s water is polluted from lawn fertilizer runoff, pesticides, and tire dust and oil from the flow of traffic on the freeway under which the water flows. Tire particulates have shown to be particularly harmful to baby salmon. And while that electric car may look green, the added weight of the battery and increased torque from engine results in even more tire wear and particulate matter. We all breath it and the salmon do too. Cars and trucks are defecating in our streams.

Lake Washington is as deep as it is wide. It was carved by a giant receding glacier. Creation stories passed down through generations of the Puget Sound’s coastal tribes tell of chaotic natural forces of the post ice-age. Glaciers retreating, rivers flowing in both directions, volcanoes, earthquakes, and freezing temperatures. It took thousands of years for things to settle down to where salmon could populate the region and fir trees could climb to the sky. But the spiritual and pragmatic words to describe the anxiety and fear felt by this dynamic changing environment have endured through millennia.

The native Puget Sound word dookw is a root word that means “to change” or “transform.” Out of it grew words that describe worry, dissatisfaction, and anger; all words that could describe feelings most of us feel as we ponder the ferocity of wind, the slowing riparian pulse of cyclical drought and rain, or the rising sea water as the northern ice melts. It’s the pervasive anger and worry those psychologists said could can lead to hard stools.

Indigenous people have lived through a lot of s**t, but they don’t leave it there for us to stand in. Dookw is also the root word for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” A positive sign that if we all find a connection to the sometimes violent vital forces of nature, we will live to see another day while charting courses to the future.

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Hello Interactors,

I’ve started to making my own milk again. It’s not really milk. It’s creamy colored water made from pulverized remains of nuts or grains that I sweeten with a little maple syrup. Invariably I get lazy and real dairy creeps back in. But every time I look at that carton, I know what’s inside didn’t come from that cute cow or that stylized farm on the label. And however it got here, I know it came at a cost greater than what I paid.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MILK MAN

Rick has a phone to his ear with one hand while he clicks his mouse in the other. He’s searching websites for a hay baler part while calling neighboring farmers to borrow theirs until his part arrives. He clicks a browser tab that is already open to the weather forecast. Rain is coming. Tension mounts as friends and relatives kick into gear. The hay has to be cut before that rain comes.

Have you ever had milk straight from the cow? It truly tastes like milk you’ve never had. It was so good, I was warned to not drink too much or too fast. Gluttonous dairy consumption can lead to an upset tummy. But I was assured that if I ever wanted more, there was always a fresh container waiting in the refrigerator.

Chances are if you grew up with milk, your refrigerator has milk in it. It’s probably not straight from the cow, and it may just look like milk (oat milk is all the rage – especially once Oprah and Jay-Z got in on the action), but the West likes their milk and milk products. But consumer demand is worldwide. The more Taco Bells and Pizza Hut’s pop up on streets around the globe demanding cheese, the more milk supply is needed. Starbucks sells more milk than they do coffee. People like their milk and coffee.

I was in Mexico City once eating breakfast at a local eatery with a friend. The waitress sauntered around with a carafe of coffee in one hand and a pitcher of milk in the other. She’d walk up, make eye contact, and start pouring coffee until you said stop. She’d fill the rest with milk. I miss Mexican coffee.

It was hard for me to imagine a dairy farm in a mostly arid Mexico. Growing up in Iowa, I have images of vast grassy fields dotted with milk cows; a winding grove of water thirsty trees clinging to a creek or river bordering the farm. A&E Dairy was the only brand of milk I ever knew. They’ve been bringing milk to Iowans since 1930. We had an actual milkman as a small child. A gray sheet metal box with a blue A&E logo on the front sat nestled in the corner of our doorstep. He’d raise the hinged lid and gently place a glass container of milk inside.

By fourth grade, in 1976, that all had changed. We took a field trip to the A&E bottling plant in Des Moines, Iowa. I remember watching an industrial sized see-through bin full of white plastic pellets the size of ball bearings funneling into a heated form. After a couple seconds, a plastic one-gallon milk container emerged. The glass jar delivered by the milk man had been replaced by crates of one-gallon milk jugs. They’d load them into a semi-truck and off they went; onto a freeway that was as old as me.

A&E, like all American dairy producers, were just beginning to scale up their farms. President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz sent this message to American farmers, “get big or get out.” It was the beginning of the end for small and medium sized farms across the country as milk production steadily climbed from around 54 million tons in 1976 to nearly 100 million tons in 2018. It doesn’t show signs of stopping.

MILK: THE MAN

Rick, his wife Terri, and a team of extended family members were able to get the hay in the barn before the rain started to fall. But there was no time to rest. A semi-truck had backed its long shiny silver milk tanker up to the barn and was waiting patiently, though a little stressed, for some help. It was time to mix their milk with that of other producers in the Delaware River Valley just north of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Both milk and water flow from this watershed south to an increasingly thirsty New York metropolitan area where urbanites peek up from their steaming molten chocolate cake at trendy restaurants to ask their waiter, “Got Milk?”

With milk production continuing to ramp up over my lifetime, these New Yorkers must not be the only ones craving milk. The entire country must be hankering for more. Not true. Despite American momma cows producing more and more milk every day, the average American milk consumption per capita in 2018 is equal what it was when I was born in 1965 – 256 kilograms per person per year. That’s around 65 gallons a year or just over five gallons per month. That includes cheese, but not butter.

If a growing American population doesn’t account for the growth of dairy production in America, that tells you American dairy farmers interested in endless growth and profits are relying on exports. But Milk is very expensive to ship given its weight. One gallon weighs 8.6 pounds. Because it’s 87 percent water, 9 percent skim solids, and 4 percent milk fat it needs to be broken down into dry ingredients. Dry milk and dry whey make it easier and cheaper to ship. Once it reaches its destination, it’s reconstituted into milk or cheese by adding water.

This has led to an explosion in commercial exports. The United States has become the world leader in nonfat dry-milk and dry whey exports. Their biggest markets are Mexico, China, Philippines, and Indonesia. To meet consumer demand and a growing food processing industry in China, a 2020 Department of Agriculture report expects exports to continue to grow.

To meet this demand, the dairy industry continues to expand. And like Nixon’s Earl Butz “get big or get out” advice, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in 2019, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.” He said that in a speech at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin – a state known for cheese – where they lost 800 dairy farms that same year to consolidation.

Licensed dairy farms across the country numbered just over 70,000 in 2013 and is now a little over 31,000. A 55% decline in seven years. Meanwhile, the amount of milk they can get from a single cow has increased. Cow milk production has increased 11.5% since 2011 and the USDA is expecting increases to continue.

To get your head around how production increases while the number of dairy farms decreases, consider one of a half a dozen companies providing most of the milk to the world – Riverview. Based in Minnesota, their website seems corporate but kind. Maybe even a little innocent. It says,

“[They] utilize both rotary and parallel parlors. Each site is a little different from the others, but the activity is the same: milking cows. Each cow produces about eight gallons of milk per day which is sent to processing plants to make cheese.”

But they don’t talk about the farmer they approached proposing a 24,000-cow dairy near his farm in Minnesota. They were hoping to buy his corn to feed all these cattle. He couldn’t imagine a 24,000-cow operation and turned them down. In addition to worrying about the odor, damage to roads, and pollution, he was most concerned about the amount of water that would take.

One researcher estimates Riverview uses nearly one quarter of all the water used for hog and dairy farms in Minnesota. And they’re not through. State records show permits for two farms of over 10,000 cows. Minnesota isn’t the only state they’re interested in. They’ve extended into one of the most unlikely places to raise and milk cows (given my bucolic ideal of farm country) – the deserts of Arizona.

COCHISE CHEESE PLEASE

Rick and Terri started their farm from scratch. They raise three kids, endured and recovered from a house fire, and have managed to raise some amazing kids, award winning cows, and by my standards, some very tasty milk. But it’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Their youngest son is interested in continuing the farm, but prospects of survival are grim.

New York was the fourth biggest producer of milk in 2020 behind California, Wisconsin, and Idaho, but they were also fourth behind Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in the number of dairy farms lost. New York state lost 240 small dairy farms last year. The pandemic didn’t help. And mega-farms have seized the opportunity to prey on financially vulnerable farmers – like Terri and Rick. But also farmers in Arizona where wells are running dry.

Riverview was most likely attracted to Arizona because of its lax water laws. If you’re a farmer in rural Arizona, there is no limit to the water you can use. But scoot your boots too close to roost near Phoenix or Tucson, and you’ll be wrestled, metered, and hog tied. So they picked a location made popular by California pistachio farmers who got there before they did – Sunizona, Arizona.

This town sits in the Willcox basin in Cochise County. It’s a dried lake bed, Lake Cochise, named after an ancient Indian culture that existed 9,000 – 2,000 years ago. In keeping with America’s enigmatic ways, it’s both a National Natural Landmark and a designated bombing range for the U.S. military. But it’s also home to acres of crop circles in a desert that is prone to dust cyclones. Sounds like a perfect place for a dairy farm.

Below this dusty playa is a vast underground water source. Sometimes. Its replenishment cycle has turned sporadic since large-scale agriculture came here in the 1940s. Before big-ag hit it had enough water to satisfy demand for residents of nearby Tucson for 970 years. And in more recent decades, the effects of climate change have resulted in the nearby mountains getting pounded with rain some years and other years nothing. Farmers are forced to dig deeper and deeper wells to capture a steady supply of water. In 2015 area farmers used four times more water than was being recharged. It’s created a race to the bottom. But digging wells isn’t cheap and the more money you have the deeper you can dig.

Imagine a friend offers to buy a drink to share. They sit down with a tall glass of your favorite icy concoction and then slide you a straw across the table as they dip theirs into the depths of the drink. You plunge yours in and take a long cool draw. Halfway through the drink you realize you’re only siphoning ice melt from the pile of cubes that have become exposed. Meanwhile your friend is happily slurping away from a straw longer than the glass. That’s when you realize your friend gave you a straw shorter than theirs. Some friend.

The farmers in the Willcox basin have built short-straw wells over the years to grow everything from nuts, to cotton, to alfalfa. But many can’t afford to dig deeper. So Riverview swoops in and buys them out. Many are happy to take the money and run, some are hoping Riverview’s money will spill over into the community, and others feel isolated, stressed, and bewildered.

Riverview is taking over the place. A money-rich mega-dairy from Minnesota who showed up with a straw twice as long as their neighbors. More short-straw farmers see wells run dry as desert dust turns green with grain to feed the thousands of Riverview cattle.

To get as much milk out of their cows as possible, operations like Riverview load 90 cows into a carousal that slowly spins in constant motion. Cows enter, get milked as it turns, and then get dropped off. An area that used to get treated to a deep dark night sky lit only by the milky way is now blinded by the light pollution of a 24-7 dairy operation. A water sucking corporate machine who will surely deplete this ancient basin of its water and then move on to the next aquifer. If there are any left.

WAVES OF WATER

You can see why my wife’s cousin, Terri, and her husband, Rick, can’t compete. They’re playing a different game. Having spent some time with them on the farm, I can tell you they have a love and respect for their cows and their land. And they’re proud of the thought somebody down the road, even in another state, is drinking milk they produced. In the presence of factory farming, in an era of ‘go big or go home’, Terri and Rick’s method of dairy farming is receding. That quaint, romantic, idealized grassy farm with a single cow that dairy’s print on their containers is vanishing faster than our water supply. And it will likely not return.

I remember a slogan from an ad campaign paid for by the American Dairy Association that read, “Milk does the body good.” It indeed does. It’s tied with eggs as one of the highest quality, efficient, and micro-nutrient rich foods you can consume. There’s evidence that the earliest domestication of cattle was by nomadic hunter-gatherers who discovered how handy it was to have a food source walk alongside you. Talk about efficient.

Energy we get from cow biproducts is minimal compared to what it takes to generate it.

Feeding livestock requires tons of grain which requires tons of water. In the United States, roughly half of the water for agriculture comes from irrigation and the rest from local ground sources like the aquifer in the Willcox basin. But not all feed can be grown locally, so it’s grown elsewhere and trucked or shipped in. When I was born in 1965, 2.5 million acres of U.S. land was irrigated for corn and soybeans. In 2017 that had grown to 12 million.

California, the country’s biggest milk producer, draws far more water than any other state. But most of that water is drying up. As the West dries up, irrigation moves east.

Nebraska leads the country in the amount of land used for irrigation. California is number two.

But Nebraska is drawing from the Ogallala reservoir. This High Plains aquifer is one of the largest in the world. But it too is getting depleted. Conservation efforts have helped. Programs have been underway for years and together with new genetically modified corn that requires less water, depletion rates have lessened.

Increased in demand is coming from many sources: housing developments, corn and soybean crops, natural gas fracking, and hydraulic drills for oil pipelines to name a few. This, coupled with variation in replenishment rates from climate change, means natural habitat is at risk. A 2017 study used satellite imagery to examine the effects on wildfowl. Measuring multiple years of water inundation during replenishment cycles, they came to this conclusion:

“These results indicated that realized inundation was well below the capacity of the landscape as indicated by maps of potential playas. Thus, even when holding water, the observations here indicated the area of available open-water habitats, for waterfowl, for example, was below the potential capacity described by wetland maps.”

MILKING THE ALTERNATIVES

Back in 2001, Rick and Terri drove their kids across the country in an RV. They passed by 3000 miles of farm country; over the Ogallala and across the arid West to our home in Kirkland, Washington. I was drinking soy milk at the time and had them all try their first swig of the so-called milk. Let’s just say not a single glass was emptied and the kids all looked at me sideways for awhile.

Plant-based milks are growing in popularity, but it’s mostly an elite urban phenomenon right now. And you can bet most of those oat milk drinkers still like their cheese. Most of the milk from Riverview’s tens of thousands of cows goes toward cheese production.

The truth is, we don’t have enough land and water to meet a growing worldwide demand for dairy products. Especially amidst exponential population growth. We’re facing a choice between sliced cheese on a dish or trees and the fish; ice cream in a bowl or a stream that meets the shoal. The Colorado River once rushed into the shoals of the salty Pacific Ocean, but now it runs dry inland in Mexico.

I can’t say I’m doing very well myself. I’ve reduced my dairy consumption and sometimes make my own Oregon sourced hazelnut ‘milk’, but I’m not fortifying it with the nutrients I get from dairy. And I’ve tried plant-based cheese. It’s not there yet.

Perhaps I shouldn’t beat myself up. Maybe U.S. farmers should stop chasing profits found in lucrative foreign markets and conserve the natural resources this country depends on. Maybe grow more food for people and less food for livestock. More milk and cheese for me please, let them find their own dairy over seas. I now that sounds dogmatic, but maybe it’s just pragmatic. Besides, rainfall is getting sporadic and population growth is dramatic. Meanwhile, the amount of freshwater in the world remains static.

Or maybe I stop hanging on to my Western dairy diet and seek appetizing alternatives. I may be better for it. Remember Rick and Terri’s advice? Gluttonous consumption of dairy can lead to an upset tummy. Greedy consumption of natural resources can lead to an upset global ecosystem. It’s time for a change. Terri and Rick are having to adjust to a new reality that challenges their past, maybe it’s time we all do. Especially companies like Riverview.

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Hello Interactors,

What a wild water filled week. From too much water coming too fast to not enough coming too slow, the United States is bearing witness to the schizophrenic behavior of an angry imbalanced ecosystem. Our mother earth isn’t the only one with schizophrenia. The United States, and other eco-wrecking countries, can’t decide if Indigenous people — the historical stewards of this planet — should be silenced and contained or begrudgingly ordained as the knowledge keepers and leaders of how best please our angry mother earth.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

IN COMING

It was eight o’clock on a sunny morning when Kelly Minty Morris received a notification on her phone that read “extreme alert”. A missile was headed straight for her. This must be some mistake, she thought to herself. This was something that she didn’t think of having to deal with in her country. She and her husband were in Hawaii where he was about to compete in a 100 mile trail running endurance race called the HURT100. Missiles can bring a whole new level of hurt; but, as she looked around, to her surprise, nobody was scrambling or panicking. Not even herself. They all believed it must be some kind of blunder.

There is no mistaking that this summer has had its fair share of climate scares. The Northeast have had nothing but rain all summer. Just this week New York’s Central Park was dowsed with six inches of rain in as many hours. A once in a 500 year event.

The Northeast continues to be battered by wind and rain killing over a dozen people in its path. It’s the fallout of hurricane Ida, the fifth most severe hurricane on record, that slammed Louisiana’s coast earlier in the week but was barely phased by its landfall. Now a new hurricane is brewing as climatologists predict a 60% chance that more extreme hurricanes will follow this year.

Meanwhile, water in the west is wanting. California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

Kelly Minty Morris sat for a half an hour, there in Hawaii, fretting. But she was more concerned with the lackadaisical response to an incoming ballistic missile than the actual damage it may inflict. “It really did feel surreal,” she said. “I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t anxious, I wasn’t upset, my brain kept telling me, ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real.’” And then it happened. Another text buzzed her phone. The alert was a mistake. A state employee had pushed the wrong button. I suspect that’s a former state employee.

Kelly left that incident reflecting on the collective apathy she witnessed. She began to wonder what it would take to get people to actually act in the face of an emergency. Upon her return home to Oregon, she vowed as a Klamath County Commissioner to put steps in place that encourage people in her area to respond appropriately to an emergency. She said, “You don’t want to be waiting for an actual emergency to then figure out what you should have done.”

KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

These people did live well. For thousands of years area bands and tribes — bound by loyalty and family — fished, hunted, farmed, and ranched the land in a perpetual act of reciprocity that respected and honored the land and its occupants. From the marshy banks of Oregon’s Klamath Lake and up the Sprague Valley, south along the rivers feeding California’s Lower Klamath Lake, across the lava beds and all the way down to Shasta Mountain, the Klamath tribes prided themselves on their industriousness.

But by the 1800s, the word industrious took on a different tenor. The industrialist fueled American imperialism swaggered on to the scene with their own slogan: No thanks, we’ll help ourselves; so that we will live good.

In 1826 The Hudson Bay Company trappers invaded Klamath territories and conflicts ensued. By 1838, the company had made maps of the region making it easier for John C. Frémont to lead an expedition into the area in 1843 as part of the country’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

If you’ve even been to California, you probably have seen Fremont’s name. In addition to the city of Fremont in northern California, there are dozens of streets and places that bear his name. He was a civil war general; one of four appointed by Abraham Lincoln. He was also the first nominee to run for presidential office by the Republican party. But he was decommissioned by the military in 1856 for his ‘unorthodox ways’.

Ten years prior, on April 6, 1846, Fremont massacred between 120-200 Indigenous people on the Sacramento River. A month later, May 12, 1846, led by his trusty scout Kit Carson, they raided a Klamath village killing over fourteen people. Kit Carson had been killing and scalping Indigenous people from Colorado to California for nearly twenty years by this point. His first was when he was nineteen years old in 1828.

After two decades of wars waged against the Klamath Tribes by the United States, they agreed to a treaty in 1864. In exchange for the 22 million acres these people had cared for over thousands of years and for hundreds of generations, the United States granted them the right to continue to hunt, fish, and gather within a designated 1.2 million acre reservation. Less than one tenth of their land. The treaty also included rights to the water.

Article 6 of the treaty read:

“To each head of a family shall be assigned and granted a tract of not less than forty nor more than one hundred and twenty acres, according to the number of persons in such family; and to each single man above the age of twenty-one years a tract not exceeding forty acres.”

The treaty was ratified in 1870. With a signature at the bottom of a string of legalese I can barely understand, these people lost nearly 99 percent of their land and ancestral heritage.

The dispossession created tension between the Klamath and Modoc leading to the Modoc War between 1872-73. The Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people mostly remained loyal to one another; and they remained industrious. As part of the treaty, the United States agreed to provide services and support aimed at assimilating these native people into Western culture and livelihoods. Article 5 of the treaty states:

“The United States further engage to furnish and pay for the services and subsistence, for the term of fifteen years, of one superintendent of farming operations, one farmer, one blacksmith, one sawyer, one carpenter, and one wagon and plough maker, and for the term of twenty years of one physician, one miller, and two school-teachers.”

Elders encouraged young people to learn the new ways of living and farming; including farming timber. By 1870 they constructed a lumber mill and began selling timber back to settlers. They even sold lumber to the United States to build Fort Klamath – a U.S. military outpost used to deter attacks from Indigenous people on encroaching settlers.

KILL THE TRIBES, STEAL THEIR MONEY

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized.

But their success made them a target. The 1950s marked the beginning of the Cold War as communist paranoia swept through the United States. The reservation system the government had thrust upon Indigenous people was suddenly deemed communist. These people, and their alien ways, were seen as anti-American. Worse yet, most tribes were dependent on a central government – clear evidence of communism. This is the same central government that stole their land, attempted genocide, and forced the remaining survivors onto reservations.

America was also building highways at this time and needed land; they were selling cars and needed oil; they were building atomic bombs and needed uranium; and they needed money to fund wartime debt and nation building of countries we had destroyed or help to destroy in two World Wars.

The United States surveyed the country in search of valuable land and resources and the reservations and treaties they had invented were getting in the way. They needed that land to tax, sell, and exploit for natural resources and money. In the words of former Cheyenne Senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell:

“In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.”

In 1952 the House of Representatives issued Joint Resolution 698 which called for a list of tribes to be terminated. The focus was first on tribes that had demonstrated self-sufficiency, had been adequately acculturated, and were willing to accept the termination of federal assistance.

The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon – an unlikely preacher of morality and legality – issued this statement of repudiation to Congress:

“Because termination is morally and legally unacceptable, because it produces bad practical results, and because the mere threat of termination tends to discourage greater self-sufficiency among Indian groups, I am asking the Congress to pass a new Concurrent Resolution which would expressly renounce, repudiate and repeal the termination policy as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108 of the 83rd Congress.”

Since the end of termination, as of 2013, “78 of the 113 terminated tribes have been recognized again by the United States government and 35 now have casinos; 24 of these tribes are now considered extinct; 10 have state recognition but not federal recognition; and 31 are without land.

GAMBLING OUR EXISTENCE

In 1974, a Federal Court ruled the right of the Klamath Tribes to their Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. They also ordered that the tribe be consulted on land management matters that may infringe on their Treaty rights. In 1986 the Reagan administration restored their Federal recognition, but did not return their land. They were then asked to come up with a plan for how to remain self-sufficient if they were to remain in the area.

They were determined to honor their commitment to their ancestors who, like them, cared for the land they lived on for thousands of years. And already demonstrating their ability to coexist with colonial settlers, they also wanted to adhere to their belief, “We help each other; We will live good.” So they proposed building a casino.

In 1997, 45 years after termination, and the Reagan administration’s approval allowing tribal casinos, they opened the doors to the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino. While casinos indeed infuse money and resources into challenged tribal communities, there’s also evidence casinos lead to gambling addictions – especially among economically vulnerable residents – including aging tribal elders.

The Klamath Tribes water rights are front and center as wells run dry in the Klamath River basin. For millennia, people of the Klamath Tribes celebrated the return of fish in the spring after long harsh winters had drained their food supplies. Two of the most prominent species they welcomed home were the c’waam and koptu – also known as Lost River and suckers.

Since 1991, the number of juvenile c’waam has all but vanished. In recent years, Klamath tribal biologists have begun a program to rebuild their populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started their own program in 2018. But it may be too late. Over 75% of the fish habitat is lost. Dams have reduced their territory, runoff from agricultural chemicals have polluted the waters, and irrigation systems have drained the marshes they need to survive. The same marshes the Klamath people had cared for and depended on for generations – alongside their finned friends.

The federal government has been working with the tribe to rehabilitate the marshes by pulling water from the lake. But with extreme drought conditions, there’s little water to go around.

As residents and ranchers see their wells and irrigation pipes dry up, they’re calling on the government to release more water from the lake. But both the state of Oregon and the U.S. Federal Government have determined the Klamath Tribe has superior rights to the water. The last time conflict over water rose to this level was back in 2001. That was when three White men drove through a local town firing 12-gauge shotguns yelling, “SUCKER LOVERS.” The local sheriff called it an act of terrorism.

Surely Klamath County Commissioner, Kelly Minty Morris, has prepared her community for this “extreme alert." I’m afraid not. Once again, Kelley has been taken off guard echoing the same words she used just three years prior when dealing with the thought of an airborne missile attack. “This is something that you don't really think of having to deal with in a country like ours," said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. "It's unimaginable to me even though it's going on right in my community."

Having to drive for water is not something people like Kelley are accustom to, but the descendants of this land’s caretakers have been doing it for hundreds of years. Just ask residents of America’s largest nation within our nation, the Navajo Nation. To combat the spread of Covid-19 that ravished this area, hand washing stations were installed that people had to drive or walk to just to wash their hands.

It can take two hours to drive to the nearest voting box in Navajo Nation. But that didn’t keep the U.S. Supreme Court from recently upholding voting rights legislation in Arizona that will make it even harder for these people to cast a vote for change. The judges 6-3 vote claimed a two hour drive doesn’t exceed the “usual burdens of voting.” That’s what systemic racism looks like.

I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of people in Klamath County, including Commissioner Morris. Human suffering knows no history, social standing, or ethnicity. After all, some of the ranchers and residents who need the water are also Klamath Tribal members.

Water will become increasing scarce in the arid West. It’s time we stop pretending we can build more housing developments, plant more lawns, water thirsty crops, feed more cattle, frack more gas, green more greens, sprinkle more sprinklers, or build more dams. It’s clear the climate will change faster than our behavior, but we don’t have time.

The recent IPCC report highlights water as a pressing global issue. It warns that in addition to increased rainfall like we’ve seen in parts of the United States recently, droughts will also increase in some regions, fire weather will become more frequent, and oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds will become warmer and more acidic.

Since 1991, the Stockholm International Water Institute has been studying water governance, transboundary water management, water and climate change, the water-energy-food nexus, and water economics around the world. They remind us that by 2050, our plant could be home to 10 billion people. Even as populations grow, the amount of freshwater remains constant. Here are five ways they recommend we avert a global water crisis:

VALUE WATER

If we increase the value of water, we will reduce use and pollution. All sectors of society must learn to manage water in a way that strengthens the water cycle.

SHARE WATER

Competition over water will only increase, so we need to manage it together. The better prepared we are for erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods the better we can handle the fallout.

TRANSFORM AGRICULTURE

Agriculture must be massively transformed. To avoid mass hunger from degraded lands, we need to make freshwater available for alternative uses – food production practices today account for 70 per cent of freshwater withdrawals. Those practices are the main drivers of water pollution and global warming.

RESTORE ECOSYSTEMS

A mass extinction of species, like the threatened c’waam, koptu, and salmon, could threaten human existence. We depend on healthy ecosystems for food, water, and livelihoods. By protecting and restoring ecosystems we can limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, and improve water security.

BUILD RESILIENCE

Droughts, heat waves, floods, and rainstorms are expected to become more frequent and more severe. All sectors of society need to redesign for resilience. Communities that protect their local watersheds and manage forests in a way that improves groundwater recharge tackle several of the world’s greatest challenges simultaneously.

It’s taken a team of Western educated PhDs and three hundred years of ‘enlightenment’ to arrive at five things the Indigenous populations around the world have known for thousands of years. We chose, and continue to choose, to silence them. But the tide is turning.

I’m convinced, as these Swedes are, that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well. Expanding on the words of Kelley Minty Morris: we don’t want to be waiting for the edge of human extinction to then figure out what we should have done to avoid it.

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Hello Interactors,

I spent this week listening to my favorite Rolling Stones songs and fretting over whether democratic infighting in Washington would end our best, and perhaps only, hope of climate change legislation. I can’t get no satisfaction and my sympathy for the devil is wearing thin. I hate to be the beast of burden, but can somebody gimme shelter?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAINTAINING ORDER

The drummer for the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, passed away this week at 80 years old. The Stones have been around longer than I have and Charlie was their only drummer. He was never the flamboyant type, seeking drum solos or surrounding himself with racks of drums to satisfy some insatiable percussive proclivity. He just sat there in his suit doing his job – keeping rhythm for a singer who dances like he has ants in his pants.

Drummers never get the credit they deserve. They live in the shadows of vanity seeking vocalists and guitarists grasping for glamour. They’re always the brunt of sinister jokes about lacking the intelligence or talent to play a ‘real instrument’; so they’re stuck beating sticks on thin bouncy membranes stretched over cylindrical cannisters.

But having played in bands with no drummer, I can tell you it’s no fun. It’s hard to find drummers, and even harder to keep them. I wonder if Mick and the boys knew how good they had it? Keeping a beat is no easy feat. A good bass player helps, and while we’re all drawn to a pleasantly sounding harmony, it’s the lowly drummer who sets tone. Without a steady beat, music quickly unravels into a chaotic cacophonic calamity.

The world could use a drummer right about now. Nature, humans, society, and the climate have lost the beat. After decades of operating in regular 4/4 time, with occasional key changes or transitions to alternating rhythms, the universe has devolved into a seemingly extended random free-form improvisation. Pure chaos. How does this happen?

Learning new songs with a band hints at how it unravels. Humming along and feeling good about yourself, out of no where some band member misses a chord or drifts off beat. Everyone starts glancing around at each other in search of the culprit as you sense it getting worse. As the piano player and band leader, I’d sometimes start to pound my keys a little harder — emphasizing the beat in the process. Kind of like speaking louder and with a DIS-TINCT CA-DENCE TO SOME-ONE WHO DOES NOT SPEAK YOUR LANG-UAGE in hopes they’ll suddenly clue in.

But invariably another band mate would follow my lead and start playing louder to match my increasing volume. The next thing you know the drummer does too. It’s hard to play drums loud and slow, so the pace of the song quickens. Each change from one single individual results in corresponding feedback from other individuals in the group; that, in turn, induces more reactions from individuals – a dynamical system in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Soon things evolve into a loud frenetic chaos. That’s when you understand how punk music was born.

Eventually everyone realizes that while playing fast, loose, and loud is fun for awhile it’s also exhausting and futile. Especially when learning songs like the sanguine but melancholy jazz standard, My Funny Valentine. We managed to learn enough songs to be hired for a wedding once, but we’d joke that music critics probably would have slotted us somewhere between jazz, R&B, and comedy.

Many classic jazz standards start out steadily predictable, but then cascade into chaotic frenzied solos that pass from one instrument to the other. I suspect even the subdued Charlie Watts took his turn soloing in his early days as a jazz drummer. Another standard of jazz standards is to collectively return to the steady state of the song’s uniform pattern played in unison — restoring order after the disturbance.

Many jazz conventions are rooted in the 12-bar Blues. Blues is recognized as blues, and jazz as jazz, because there are strict underlying rules governing the controlled creative chaos of soundwaves emanating from instruments and vocal chords. The Rolling Stones knew as much. That’s why Mick Jagger described their work on the 1972 album, Exile on Main St., as "runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world.” That album took the world by storm and is the highest ranking Stones album on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. That’s one storm nobody could have predicted.

THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR

That same year, 1972, MIT mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, published a paper on the challenges of predicting storms titled, Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas? His paper was the first to describe chaos theory. And the premise of his paper’s title has been shortened to what we now call the Butterfly Effect. Poetically, a certain set of values in an equation that exhibits a concept central to chaos theory called a strange attractor yields a plot that resembles a butterfly.

While studying mathematical models of weather systems, he discovered one small change in these dynamical systems could result in disproportionate and unforeseen effects. It was a major discovery. Chaos theory is believed by some to rank up there with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as three of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century.

His research showed prediction of dynamical systems is dependent on an initial condition. He posited the gentle small flap of a butterfly’s wings could be an initial condition that could lead to a massively destructive typhoon on the other side of the globe. That’s not to say weather systems actually work this way, but his point was no meteorologist can accurately predict the weather without first knowing the initial condition of the weather system.

When our band would spiral into chaos, it was the result of some initial event; a band member playing too slowly or quickly, off melody, out of tune, or a myriad of other mitigating circumstances. It could have even been the locally brewed Hefeweizen we were drinking or the spicy green curry we sometimes ate before practice at the hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street.

Dynamical systems are complex systems that change over time and are fundamental to chaos theory; weather systems are just one example. We are surrounded by dynamical systems. Our own bodies are dynamical. Ecosystems, societies, companies, local, state, provincial and national governments, continental regions, and global institutions all exhibit elements of dynamical systems.

And like members of a band playing from the same sheet music, they don’t stand on their own in isolation, but instead are connected and bonded through mutual interactions. They influence each other and are in-turn influenced. But complex systems are also self-healing systems. If a single component is removed, the system can carry on. Just as many bands do when they lose a drummer.

People who study complex dynamical systems, like Lorenz did, use mathematical models – equations that represent a simplified model of real phenomena – to simulate the behavior of these systems. One such model is called a logistic model.

Not to be confused with military or freight logistics, this word was offered by the Belgian mathematician, Pierre François Verhulst in 1845. He presumably chose the word logistic to both contrast and relate it with the more well known term logarithmic which he used to describe a curve that today we’d call an exponential curve – a curve that shows a greater increase in growth over time.

A logistic curve appears ‘log-like’ or ‘log-ish’ in its appearance because it starts out looking like an exponential curve but then flattens out over time. Some believe Verhulst merged log with istic the same way we merge simple with istic to form the word simplistic, hence the word logistic. But by now some of you are thinking, “Brad, nothing about this is simplistic and the growth of my confusion is growing exponentially over time. At what point does my confusion level out and become more logistic?” Not yet, I’m afraid.

Logistic models can be used to simulate population growth, just as Verhulst was when he discovered it. Human populations around the world are growing exponentially and aren’t expected to level off until 2050 or 2060. Non-linear population growth is hard to fathom. The only compound growth we seem to relate to are our savings accounts. But with disappointingly low interest rates, even those are hard to imagine growing.

There’s also the issue of carrying capacity in studying population growth. Limited space and resources impact growth rates. So do viral diseases like COVID-19 – a deadly nonlinear dynamical system that is so dumbfounding that even the most reasoned people refuse to take steps to stunt its growth.

Epidemiologists, biologists, demographers, pathologists, economists, and climatologists all use mathematical models, and other elements of chaos theory and complexity science, to find patterns amidst what appears to be random disturbances within these dynamical systems.

In the 1980s two scientists expanded on the work of Lorenz’s logistic model. Lord Robert May, a theoretical biologist, and Mitchell Feigenbaum, a theoretical physicist, discovered a way to map variables of the logistic model to create a simple equation that when iterated over time can predictably display chaos. It was a discovery that displaced Newton’s idea that the universe operates like clockwork in an infinitely predictable fashion.

A universe that ends in chaos sounds scary. Learning that dynamical systems are mathematically proven to yield chaos makes good ole’ mother earth seem more like a tyrannical erratic witch. The work of the devil. But what May and Feigenbaum discovered, as did the French team of Pierre Collet and Charles Tresser a year later, is there is order to be found in the chaos.

They were able to mathematically determine the rate at which predictable patterns of disruption reorganize until the next point of disturbance. The time between these self-healing disturbances become shorter over time leading to what is called ‘the edge of chaos’ — the strange attractor. After which, predictability vanishes into chaos.

If I had a recording of our band spinning into chaos learning a new tune, I suspect I could probably predict when we were on the edge of chaos. But while we could all feel those moments of disturbance that returned to a steady state, and even the edge of chaos, there is no way we could have predicted them in the moment. Given the frequency of climate calamities, it sure feels like we’re approaching the edge of chaos, even if we can’t predict when.

THE TIPPING POINT

The abrupt change that occurs after the edge of chaos can sometimes be called a tipping point. The Paris Agreement includes a series of legally binding pledges various countries have taken to avoid a climatic tipping point. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), refer to the tipping point like this:

“An abrupt change is defined in this report as a change that takes place substantially faster than the rate of change in the recent history of the affected component of a system. In some cases, abrupt change occurs because the system state actually becomes unstable, such that the subsequent rate of change is independent of the forcing. We refer to this class of abrupt change as a tipping point, defined as a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”

When you hear reports like this of researchers using models to predict the effects of climate change, many of them are using these same techniques. Building models that more accurately simulate the real world offers better predictions of how long we have between periods of self-stabilization on a potential path to chaos.

The good news is improvements in large scale computing power enables nests of multi-variate differential equations to be calculated faster than ever. But some argue the divergence from the historical norm is often so great, that using the past to predict the future may be futile.

This graph of the recent Tennessee flood shows the time it took to achieve record flood levels over the last 1000 years. These record rainfalls were measured over a two day period. This area of the state reached a ‘once in a thousand years’ flood of 13 inches in just eight hours. By the end of the second day of measuring, it had peaked at a new record high of 17 inches.

We’re in a race between using mathematical models that leverage events of the past to understanding what’s happening to us now, and perhaps the future edge of chaos. But current events are nothing like we find in the past. This makes it all the more necessary and urgent to turn the Paris pledges into American action.

Step one is to pass the budget reconciliation bill the Democrats were hashing out this week. It includes most of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, including the recent bipartisan infrastructure package out of the Senate. We may have lost Charlie Watts, but our elected officials have a chance to get the beat back. This package includes what is needed for us to meet our end of the Paris Agreement and hopefully return to some kind of climatic stability. If not, we face the edge of climatic chaos – the tipping point.

Future generations will look back at this week and either credit us with being sinners or saints. I’m reminded of a Rolling Stones tune Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote off of the 1968 album, Beggars Banquet. It’s a song I sang with my buddies one summer nearly a decade after its release called Sympathy for the Devil. Mick sings in the first person as the devil; a metaphor for the historical devilish British behavior as he chronicles throughout the song. But, the mention of the Kennedy’s reveals the sentiment extends overseas to the Yanks as well.

The first verse introduces the devil embodied as a stereotypical Christian colonial capitalist. The final verse exits with a vision of a hellish wasteland of chaos the devil is willing to inflict if we don’t do some serious reflecting, repenting, restraining, and repairing. We need to restore the natural earthly rhythms, or else. It goes like this:

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste

I've been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man's soul and faith

I was 'round when Jesus Christ

Had his moment of doubt and pain

Made damn sure that Pilate

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer

'Cause I'm in need of some restraint

So if you meet me, have some courtesy

Have some sympathy, and some taste

Use all your well-learned politesse

Or I'll lay your soul to waste

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Hello Interactors,

It’s been a troubling week in international news as we all watched Afghanistan unravel. That country has been through a lot over the last two decades and centuries; most of which is due to Western invasion and intervention. To make matters worse, the effects of climate change are compounding their problems. I hope we can learn how to better help, they’re going to need it.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GOING SOLAR

Soon after absorbing the tragic scenes in Afghanistan this week, I was reminded of an article I read around this time last year. It was about successful deployments of solar technology by poor Afghan farmers to pump water from desert wells to grow crops. Afghanistan ranks among the lowest on the Global Adaptation Index making them one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. As if they needed more problems.

Solar energy can be transformational, even when deployed at small scales. We’re not talking about massive solar farms plastering the desert paid for by corporations, governments, or non-governmental organizations (NGO) through some kind of ‘Go-Green’ initiative. These are installations by rural farmers struggling to survive. The first remote solar array was notice back in 2013, but soon local towns were piled high with solar panels.

The panels are not cheap. Seed money usually comes from a dowry – money given from a bride’s family to the groom at the time of marriage – which is roughly $7,000. A single solar panel costs $5,000, so it’s a big chunk of money. But the panel pays for itself in just two years. They simply set it up, plug it into the provided pump, kick aside the old, expensive, and troublesome diesel motor and watch the water come streaming out of their well.

The number of solar panels has doubled every year since 2012 tapping wells far into the desert. By 2019 there were over 67,000 installations dotting a single narrow region in southern Afghanistan. And for every diesel conversion to solar comes an increase in productivity. The blue areas of these maps show less productive cultivation and light green as more productive. In addition to the increase in the number of farms, you can also see an increase in yield. Their success attracts even more people to the desert. Between 2012 and 2019, 48,000 new homes were built. Increased competition for a water supply that climate change has already diminished, the introduction of solar pumps has started a countdown clock as to when they’ll all run out of water.

Which, in one way, may be a good thing. While one of the crops farmers choose to grow in the desert are sun hungry plants like tomatoes, their main, and most profitable crop, is opium. The majority of opium is refined to make heroin. Afghanistan is the world’s leader in opium production making it the leading source of heroin, one of the most illicit addictive drugs there is. And this region of Afghanistan, Helmand, produces 80% of the Afghan supply to the world. Most of it to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Before solar entered the fray in 2013, Afghanistan was producing 3,700 tons of opium a year. By 2017, a record year, their production nearly tripled to 9,000 tons. It created a glut in the market and prices fell, reducing production among farmers still on the more expensive diesel pumps. Meanwhile, solar farmers continued to produce and profit at 2017 levels.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED : MISSION ADMONISHED

The opium market has been growing in Afghanistan since the 1990s, with the exception of one outlying year – 2001. That was the last time the Taliban took control and one of their many bans was on growing opium.

When the United States infamously invaded Afghanistan in 2002, opium production quickly bounced back to pre-Taliban levels, and has been growing since. England joined in the invasion, in part to curb the supply of heroin to the UK and other parts of Europe. They’ve found that as production of opium increases, the demand for heroin also increases; and with it crime as addicts resort to breaking and entering and aggravated assault to fund their habit. England’s biggest war casualties occurred in the region of Helmand, the world’s hotbed of opium and the country’s highest concentration of solar panels.

What a bitter twist of wartime irony this is. Britain was the first country from the West to invade Afghanistan in the mid-1800s; in part to increase the production and trade of opium to the Chinese through the East India Company as part of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China.

Opium in China was first used for medicinal purposes, but by 1840 millions of Chinese were addicted. The United States saw this as an opportunity and a few decades later were dropping cigarettes from airplanes in China in an effort to supplant the Chinese addiction to opium with an addiction to nicotine. Journalist and East Asian writer, John Pomfret, notes that in the

“1890s, only a few people smoked. By 1933, the Chinese were puffing on a hundred billion cigarettes a year, more than any other nation except the United States.”

Great Britain invaded Afghanistan from India, a country they colonized a century earlier. Still smarting from their failure to gain control in the Americas, they reluctantly turned to the east. To conquer Afghanistan, they enlisted poor Indians as low ranking infantry and invaded Afghanistan in 1839. The British claim they were fearful the Russians would take control of this strategic trading route, but Afghans on the ground tell a different story. It seems what the British were really worried about was parts of India being invaded by growing numbers of Persians and Afghans who opposed British imperialism.

Indians put up a fight when England invaded India, just as Indigenous Americans did. Afghanistan was no different. War is ugly by any dimension, but the Europeans (and Americans) have an established reputation among victims of invasion for being particularly ruthless. Much attention is given to the atrocious behavior of the Taliban against women, but very little to none is given to how British, and their low ranking Indian infantrymen, treated women upon invading Afghanistan. Women of this region were formidable fighters during this time, leading thousands in battle and inspiring many more through poetry to take arms in defense of their homeland from encroaching colonial imperialists.

In 2018, Farrukh Husain, a Muslim Afghan history researcher, published a book called Afghanistan in the Age of Empires: The Great Game for South and Central Asia. It is one of the few, if not only, books written by a Muslim Afghan for a Western audience about the history of this region as told from someone with ancestral ties to these events. He reveals the power and leadership Afghan women held in those days. He writes of a battle near Helmand, where solar panels now dot the desert,

“…no contemporary author has written about the first such charge by a burka clad woman against the British, during May 1842, to avenge her husband’s death at the head of thousands of Afghans, which took place…in…Helmand.”

One month later, on June 17, 1842, British Brigadier General Thomas Monteath led troops into a peaceful remote village called Ali Baghan where they proceeded to rape and plunder.

The English language newspaper out of Calcutta, India, the Bengal Hurkaru, reported,

“To ravage and burn villages, and to violate the women inhabiting them, are not precisely the best measures calculated to restore the honour of Great Britain. We talk about national disgrace, and begin ravaging villages and violating helpless women, as though any misfortunes could disgrace us so irredeemably as these crimes. A miserable hamlet about six miles from Jellalabad, on the Peshawaur side, is assailed by a brigade of British troops, who happen to find some accoutrements belonging to the men of the 44th; the village was given up to plunder, the women were violated, and the tenements burned.“

Atrocities like this and violence against women continue to this day in Afghanistan. The United States is no better as evidenced by the methods of torture throughout the United State’s so-called ‘War on Terror’. And while we continue to be bombarded with stories through Western media about how the United States was in Afghanistan helping to liberate Afghan women, I suggest you read this May 2021 article by Farrukh Husain as an alternative and local narrative.

Or if you have trouble trusting a Muslim Afghan man writing on Afghan women, check out this bit of ethnographic research from Dr. Teresa Koloma Beck, called Liberating the Women of Afghanistan: An ethnographic journey through a humanitarian interventionwhere she asserts the West’s

“humanitarian engagement further politicized the category of gender and, hence, amplified its importance. Yet, as in other places of the world, it also served to perform and reproduce ideal-typical images of the Western Self.”

CLIMATE MATTERS MORAL TATTERS

Climate change is expected to bring more unrest to Afghanistan and areas like it around the world. One report from the United State’s National Institute of Health reports, “both short-term shocks, such as natural disasters and associated losses of livelihood opportunities, as well as longer-term stressors, such as growing scarcity of resources associated with drought, can increase the risk of instability.” That instability can include armed conflict, as evidence by one Syrian conflict that “at least partially driven by drought, has, estimated conservatively, resulted in over 143,000 deaths as of 2016.”

These poor countries will need the help of rich countries if we care at all about saving the lives of humans and non-humans alike. But the West has to reckon with our past if we’re to be trusted with the future. We’re not very good at owning up to our mistakes or rubbing our own noses in the atrocities we inflicted on innocent people through an unbridled need to perpetuate our greed. Claiming moral superiority while killing people already suffering the effects of climate change – as Obama did with over 540 drone strikes during his presidency – should make us pause and reflect on our ethical standing. Whether it’s in the name of God or in pursuit of gold, the United States (and many other countries, clans, and conquerors) have a way of conveniently justifying colonial conquest, rape, abduction, torture, slavery, or genocide.

The 18th century English feminist writer and philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, put it efficiently and accurately when she wrote:

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks.”

To sell our message of ‘good’, the United States also has what our victims of evil don’t have; a well crafted and well funded media machine – spanning the political spectrum – to lull the masses into a sometimes angry and sometimes celebrated, numbing complicity. But like any addiction, the more you feed it the harder it is to break. And this country, and our military, is addicted to aggression.

But Norway is one country that is taking a step back. As current chairs of the UN Security Council they issued a public statement on the recent plight of Afghanistan on August 16th asking the international community to be “willing and able to relate to, co-operate with, and support a future, new Afghan government in which the Taliban participates.”

But long before that, sensing the confluence of social and climate induced unrest and reflecting the West’s track record on foreign interventions, the Norwegian Minister of International Development funded research to better understand the successes and failures of climate mitigation strategies and efforts from the West. Their report titled, Adaptation Interventions and Their Effect on Vulnerability in Developing Countries: Help, Hindrance or Irrelevance?, came out in May of this year.

The study’s highlights read like this:

“Adaptation interventions may reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnerability.

Retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas risks maladaptation.

Overcoming these challenges demands engaging more deeply with the local context of vulnerability.

Real involvement of marginalised groups is required to improve use of climate finance.

Unless adaptation is rethought, transformation may also worsen vulnerability.”

What they found among the 60 internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability are four consistent themes:

Shallow understanding of the context of local vulnerability;

Inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation;

A retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas;

A lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined.

Inequality is evident everywhere we look: income, race, religion, gender, social status, cultural norms, transportation, and so many more. Add to that environmental inequality. What these researchers concluded is that unless we start by first focusing on equality, no amount of government, private, or corporate funding of technological or financial fixes will matter. For example, building a sea wall, dam, or dike to stem flooding rivers or rising seas can easily be celebrated and manipulated into appearing to make progress on climate change. But if those efforts steal water from an Indigenous tribe, or limit physical access to schools of disadvantaged families, then simply throwing money at them or subsidizing a move to the city does not constitute an equitable solution that is sensitive to their local context of vulnerability. But it’s easy to see where such engineering feats would fit an existing corporate or governmental agenda, possibly even win sustainability awards, or get endorsed by a Western celebrity complete with a selfie that goes viral.

Don’t get me wrong, getting solar technology scaled to the point where a poor Afghan farmer could afford it is a marvel of technology and a demonstration of the positive effects of innovation in free-market capitalism. But if it also results in the increase of heroin worldwide, how can we feel good about the outcome? The vast majority of heroin in the United States doesn’t come from Afghanistan, it comes from the deserts of Mexico where surely solar pumps are also being sold. In 2018, marijuana sold for $80 per kilogram in the United States. Meanwhile, heroin sold for $35,000 per kilogram. What would it take to persuade those Mexican farmers to grow vegetables instead of opium? And what kind of moral standing can America have as we lead the world in drug disorders and are the number one consumer of opioids – with heroin as the second leading cause of overdose behind pain relievers.

Afghan women are number two behind United States women in drug disorders. Is that what we mean when we claim we liberated Afghan women? Few women in Afghanistan, especially under Taliban rule, have access to their own land; a clear inequality that needs addressed. But there was a bright spot for Afghan women and farming in recent years in a good example of what appears to be a more equitable climate intervention.

Ghuncha Gul, and Afghan farmer, always dreamed of owning her own farm. With the help of the United Nations Development Program she fulfilled that dream in 2018 by offering her training, land, and resources for her own greenhouse and beehives. Her village friends now affectionately call her ‘honey’ عسل. She proudly admitted,

“Women in villages work just as hard as men. In fact, we work alongside the men." Two hundred years ago, she just may have been leading the men.

As money wielding climate adaptation efforts take shape by the privileged and powerful around the world, let’s ensure people like Ghuncha are given equal rights and their knowledge and customs are understood and respected. In the process of co-designing and implementing climate adaptation strategies in the context of local inhabitants of their land, let’s also make sure we leave the exchange more enlightened than the Age of Enlightenment, more righteous than Western imperialism, and more informed than the Western propaganda machines leave us believing we are. Maybe if we do, these people will return the favor when we discover our own crisis have left us equally, if not more, vulnerable.

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Hello Interactors,

This has been an eventful week, but also a week of more extreme heat and smoke. Just when climatologists warned of the certainty of more extreme weather patterns. I’m ready for fall and we’re barely halfway through summer. My plants are struggling too. Does anybody out there know how we’re going to adapt?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE RIGHT TURNS LEFT FOR RIGHTS

Monday of this week, August 9th, was International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Did you know that? What about Tuesday, August 10th. That was the anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt in what we now call New Mexico. In 1680, the Pueblo people forced 2000 Spanish colonial settlers off their land. Given this was the first example of American people rejecting European rule, some consider this to be America’s first Revolutionary War – nearly 100 years before the more popular version. Oh, and on Wednesday, August 11th my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. But even fewer people know about that historical date.

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was created by the United Nations in 1994. The date honors August 9th, 1982; the first day of meetings for the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. This group’s mandate was to:

Promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous peoples;

Give attention to the evolution of international standards concerning Indigenous rights.

August 9th celebrates the achievements and contributions Indigenous people have made, and continue to make, to governance, stewardship of the environment, and knowledge systems aimed at improving many of the challenges our world’s environment’s face today.

Indigenous people make up 5% of the world’s population and use one quarter of its habitable surface. But, they protect in reciprocity 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

The UN defines Indigenous People as:

“Inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment.”

The United Nations’ recognition of the sovereign rights of Indigenous people stems from the International Indian Treaty Council which grew out of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 70s. The United Nations recognized the rights of Indigenous people before the United States did. In fact, when the United Nations put the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to vote in 2007, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia voted against the declaration. They have since reversed this vote, but the American Indian Movement had long recognized the United States was in violation of treaties signed over the last 300 years. So acting as sovereign nations – that happen to reside within a larger, dominant, and controlling nation – they turned to the United Nations for recognition.

Much of the legally binding language used in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples comes from the legal language written into the original treaties by the United States. Which is why the conservative originalist from the West, Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, sided with liberals last year in a landmark ruling over McGirt v. Oklahoma. The Supreme Court determined that much of that state was legally ceded to Indigenous people by the United States Federal government two centuries ago and it was high time the country obeyed their own laws. The year prior, Gorsuch did the same in the state of Wyoming. Oddly, the recently deceased Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a darling of the left, has a mixed record voting in favor of Indigenous people. A 2021 article from Cornell University states,

“During Justice Ginsburg’s first 15 years on the court, 38 Indian law cases were argued. The rights of Indigenous nations prevailed in only seven of those cases. Indigenous nations lost in eight of nine Indian law cases for which she wrote the court’s decision.”

After the Oklahoma ruling, John Echohawk from the Native American Rights Fund – an organization that has spent 50 years fighting for Indigenous rights – was quoted as saying,

“This [case] brings these issues into public consciousness a little bit more…That’s one of the biggest problems we have, is that most people don’t know very much about us.”

It seems Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of those people.

John Echohawk is following in the footsteps of those who kicked off the American Indian Movement back in 1968, drawing attention to Indigenous rights. Their focus was on the systematic poverty and police brutality toward Urban Indian’s who had been forced off of their land and into cities for generations. This Indigenous grassroots movement rose out of the city that was recently put the international map for its display of obvious police brutality – Minneapolis, Minnesota.

GRANDMA KILLS A CHICKEN

I was not yet three years old when the American Indian Movement was born. I grew up about 250 miles due south of Minneapolis, in Norwalk, Iowa. It’s a suburb of Des Moines surrounded by farmland – much of which is being converted to housing developments. We didn’t live on a farm, but we always had a garden. I wasn’t that keen on gardening as a kid, but I wasn’t shy about eating the beans, corn, and potatoes that Iowa’s rich soil and climate yielded. My Mom’s surefire way to get me motivated to weed the garden or pick beans was to say, “Ok, you’re going to want to eat these beans once their picked, so maybe you should be the one picking them.”

My parents learned to garden from their parents. My Grandma on my Mom’s side always had a big garden. It ran the width of her backyard and was flanked by a dirt alley on one side and a shed on the other. Off to the side of the yard was a rusty barrel I remember being as tall as me. That’s where we’d burn her garbage; now that was a job I enjoyed. I’d haul a bag full of stuff to the barrel, step up on a log nestled next to it, dump in the combustible waste, and drop a fiery wooden match on top of it. Poof. Those trips to the barrel also included carrying a bucket of kitchen scraps into the garden. We’d dig a hole with a shovel, dump the smelly scraps into the hole, and cover it up. Direct injection composting.

My grandparents also kept chickens in the backyard. Our trips to grandma’s house on Sundays usually included a fresh chicken from her yard and vegetables from her garden. She’d walk out back, chase down a chicken, wring its neck, chop its head off, and get to pluckin’.

Occasionally, my uncle Bud would show up with a pheasant or two (or three) strung out in his trunk, shot with his shotgun on his way to grandma’s house. I was always careful to avoid eating the lead shot dotting the glistening meat like embedded peppercorns. In the summer, dinner ended with a bowl of fresh berries and cream from a cow just down the road. But most of the time, it was pie. My grandma made a pie – using lard for the crust – almost everyday until the day she died.

My grandparents on my Dad’s side had a garden and a few apple trees too. My Dad was born in the depression into a family with 11 siblings in the same town my Mom was born. He and his brothers and sisters lived off of the eggs from the chickens they kept. In the dead of winter, they’d hunt squirrels and hang them from the clothesline in the backyard where they’d freeze stiff; more protein to feed hungry mouths during Iowa’s harsh winters. My grandma Weed made a loaf of bread everyday to feed all those hungry tummies.

I am one generation removed from that lifestyle and I’m having trouble keeping a single pepper plant alive. My parents were not farmers, and we did not hunt, but they had learned how to grow and hunt enough food to keep a family alive. Sure their childhood tables were also augmented with store-bought foods, but there was a concerted effort to grow, eat, can, and store as much food as possible. That desire and knowledge seems to get lost with every generation.

Many of the techniques my parents and grandparents used to grow food was taught to them by their European ancestry – knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation. Settlers settling farms and homesteads across America brought with them agricultural methods taught to them in their European homeland. One such convention are rows of segregated crops; a row of beans, a row of squash, and a row of corn, for example. But that’s not how those crops were being grown by people they found here already farming this land.

THREE SISTERS SHARE

Colonial settlers were clueless as to what to do with corn when they first arrived. The locals did teach them to farm corn, a plant first domesticated 10,000 years ago by the Indigenous people in what we now call Mexico. But, in return, some puritanical settlers thought they could show these folks a thing or two about farming. Dismayed by the untidiness made from the climbing clumps of squash at the base of corn stalks gently strangled by spiraling bean vines, the settlers went about mansplaining how to properly plant plants in neat tidy rows – one for corn, one for beans, and one for squash.

But it turns out planting each of these crops to grow alone yields fewer ears of corn, beans, and squash. What the native farmers had learned over those 10,000 years is that when you plant these three plants next to one another, they uniquely help each other above and below ground to grow and prosper. Native people call this method of planting The Three Sisters and it was often planted in waffle-like gardens that create gridded microclimates.

The first sister born is corn. It peaks its head out of the soil in the spring and shoots up straight like a pole. With enough growth to stand on its own, sister bean is born. Bean vines quickly start swirling in circles in search of something to cling on to – like a blindfolded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey. It latches onto the knees of it’s older sister, corn, and they grow toward the sun together. Then comes baby sister squash, crawling along the ground eager to choose its own path in the shadows of its older siblings.

The baby sister, with its broad abundant leaves, helps shade the soil trapping water destined for the three sister’s roots in its water retaining waffle divot. It also keeps sun from tempting pesky weeds from popping up. All three sisters need nitrogen to grow, but lack the ability to siphon it from the air – despite the fact our atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen gas.

What these Indigenous people learned over centuries of ecological observation and experimentation is that beans are the secret to providing the missing nitrogen. And Western science has proved it by providing the tools necessary to observe and understand the microscopic biological mechanisms that allow this genesis to unfold. Indigenous people knew it to be true, and Western science allowed it to be seen and described in consistent, repeatable, mathematical, and physical terms that transcend languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries.

What we now know is that nitrogen comes from a fastidious underground bacteria called Rhizobium. It loves to make nitrogen, but only under special conditions. For starters, it needs to be free of oxygen. Given soil is filled with oxygen, it needs to find a suitable host willing to provide an oxygen free environment. As sister bean sends her many roots in all directions it invariably encounters the lingering Rhizobium nodules. Through microscopic chemical communications, the two strike a deal. In exchange for the much needed nitrogen, the bean root provides an oxygen-free nitrogen manufacturing facility for the bacteria; the benefactors of this underground nitrogen source are not only the beans, but her sisters, corn and squash, as well.

I learned all this from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member as well as the Distinguished Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, at the State University of New York. She sums up this symphony of familial biological reciprocity in her landmark book, Braiding Sweetgrass, with a lesson for us all – not just plants. A lesson taught and practiced by Indigenous people for generations. She writes,

“The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others. Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.”

There was one more big event this week from another UN organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a team of climate researchers from around the world and they came out this week to report what they’ve been saying all along about climate change, but this time with an unequivocal warning. The extreme weather events we’re experiencing is indisputably caused by humans. Oh, that’s us. Past reports have used words like may and could but scientists have tossed away their gloves and came out swinging this week. We’re in trouble and it may not be reversible.

Three years ago I ripped out my lawn and planted drought tolerant succulents. Well, the raccoons had the idea first I just went along with it. When the Northwest had its hottest June on record, the sun sucked the life out of plants that are naturally equipped to withstand prolonged heat. Some of the leaves didn’t just shrivel, they nearly evaporated. My backdoor neighbor’s peppers looked like they had roasted on the vine.

On Wednesday night I was talking to a restoration ecologist who works for the City of Kirkland. He organizes teams of volunteers across the city to help eradicate invasive species and plant natives in their place. When I asked him about one park filled with tall lush cedars and firs along Interstate 405 that also features a mining pit at one end where the state dug for gravel to build the freeway, he talked of the struggles getting plants to grow on this compromised soil. He went on to explain how they’ve decided to pick a species that can handle not only the rocky soil, but also the increasing temperatures in Western Washington. So they’re trying a tree more commonly found on the more arid side of Washington state, the ponderosa pine.

One of the big takeaways in listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book is that while we humans have a way of beating ourselves up over the damage we’ve caused the environment, we also have the capacity (and the obligation) to help heal it. When we care for the earth, it cares for us in return in a symbiotic act of reciprocity. Indigenous people figured this out eons ago and the hubris of “Enlightened” European colonial settlers regarded their ways as “savage”. I’m not advocating for some romantic pastoral nirvana where we all trade our homes for huts, tend to our own chickens, and live off the land. But I do believe we live among millions of people who possess ancestral knowledge that, when paired with modern science and technology, could yield a more fruitful outcome. Many cultures living together on the same soil exchanging nutrients and knowledge in an act of reciprocity that benefits us all as individuals and as a global community faced with few alternatives for survival.

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Hello Interactors,

I’ve spent many a night this week watching the Olympics. I’m also trying to get back into running shape; which to me feels like training for the Olympics. It demands a lot of energy and patience, but also reaps a lot of rewards — like ice cream. But I’ve also been thinking back to the energy my family consumed flying across the country and then driving all over New England. We rarely give it a second thought, but we humans expend a lot of energy. And we’ve been doing more and more of it for some time.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WINNING GOLD ON THE COUCH

I love watching athletes compete at the Olympics. The power and grace exhibited by the world’s best athletes is a wonder. I imagine burgeoning, and aging, every-day athletes around the world running, jumping, gunning, pumping, throwing, and rowing just a little harder over these few weeks – inspired by super-human performance. It takes an amazing amount of skill and energy to run 23 miles an hour over 100 meters; as the world’s fastest human, Usain Bolt, did in 2012.

To go fast requires generating force that is transferred from the body into the ground. Athletes competing for gold in the 100 meter dash create five times the force of their body weight to hit that those speeds. This week I watched Athing Mu win the first U.S. Olympic medal since 1968 in the Women’s 800 meter. I marveled at her ability to generate the required force to hit the speed necessary to both lead the race and win while conserving just enough to endure the full 800 meters (two laps around the track). This event is eight times longer than the 100 meter race, but Mu was still creating upwards of 3.5 times her body weight in force.

Sprinters spend more time in the air then they do on the ground. Generating 5 times their body weight in force requires them to lift their knees high enough to transfer energy through their feet and into the ground. Marathoners, in contrast, spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. They have to spread the necessary force to win running over 42 kilometers or 26 miles in two hours. To do this, they lengthen their stride to conserve energy thus minimizing the time their feet spend in the air. This excellent interactive piece by the New York Times breaks it all down with videos and graphs.

Having evolved from hunter gatherers, our bodies are tuned to conserve energy. We take well advantage of the first law of thermodynamics: in a closed system (like our bodies) energy isn’t created or destroyed, but is instead transferred. Metabolism is a good example. It takes energy from the food we consume and transfers it to energy the body needs to function. Our ability to sweat, while sometimes annoying and uncomfortable, is another example of the first law of thermodynamics. It gave us a sizable advantage over other species by cooling our body while tracking prey on the wide open savannah; or chasing down a competitor for an Olympic gold medal.

I too was expending energy sitting on the couch with my bowl of ice cream watching 19 year old Athing Mu dominate her competition. I was creating around 100 watts of energy just sitting on my butt, whereas Athing Mu would have been generating 20 times that at 2000 watts. Active humans moving about the earth expend an average of 120 watts of energy a day – enough to power a very bright old fashioned light bulb. But I was actually expending way more energy than Athing Mu. There was electricity powering my TV, my satellite receiver, and the amplifier powering my speakers. That says nothing of the triangulated satellites circling the earth, the equipment in Tokyo broadcasting the signal, and all the cameras, microphones, and computers needed to entertain me.

And what about the energy that went into my ice cream. The oil extraction for the fertilizer for the grain that fed the cows, the gas in the tractors that grew the grain, the trucks and trains that delivered the grain, the lights in the barn, the machinery for milking, the truck that picked up and delivered the milk, the cascading energy flowing through the steely factory that made the ice cream, the many trucks (and their refrigerators) that delivered the product, the energy to run the freezer and lights in the store, the energy in our car that drove to the store and back, and our own refrigerator keeping it cold. All so I could satisfy a craving for sugar while pressing buttons on my remote control. Sugar: a product that requires delivery on container ship from an island half in the middle of the Pacific half way from my home to Japan where the race was unfolding.

THE MEASURE OF PLEASURE

Simply sitting there I generated way more watts than an Olympian. Gold medal for me! In addition to our body’s naturally occurring metabolism, we’re all part of what is known as social metabolism. This is the flow of energy through and between nature and our global societies. In addition to biological ecosystems and metabolisms made of plants and animals, the globe’s human occupants have created an industrial ecology with its own metabolism. To fulfill our lifestyle industries extract natural resources, transform them into products and services, and we humans gobble them up. The more people on the planet yearn and earn the money needed to climb out of poverty and up the social ladder, the more energy and materials flow through the system. Just like animals, the more we eat the greater the waste; the faster the pace, the greater the heat. So, hooray for humanity, we’re winning the poverty race! But, boo for humanity, we can’t sustain this commodity consuming pace.

Commodity is derived from the Latin word commoditas which means amenity or convenience. Most commodities are raw materials extracted from the earth like oil, iron, or gas. But they can also be basic resources that are grown and farmed like the milk and sugar in my ice cream. Prior to the practice of agriculture, humans were left to feed off of the fruits of the naturally occurring landscape. They had to walk or run in search of their commodities. It meant having to spread out in small bands roaming the earth for basic energy providing resources.

But once humans figured out how to colonize plants and animals the amount of metabolic energy available from food became proportional to the land available to them. The practice of agriculture represents a fundamental shift in biological metabolism that occurred in select spots around the world soon after the ice age over 10,000 years ago. Within 1000 years the dispersed geographies of New Guinea, East Asia, West Africa, the Amazon, and the Andes – all places completely cut off from communication with each other – discovered the practice of agriculture.

They could also concentrate and conserve their energy within a designed and confined space. The more land they had the more food they could grow, animals they could raise, and time and energy they could spend on other things. This allowed for the invention of improved farming equipment, optimized farming techniques, and conflict resolution over available space.

Quantitative historians like Ian Morris and Jared Diamond study the intersection of resources, energy, and societies over time and narrow in on geography as a major driver of increased social metabolism. Morris documents his methods in his 2013 book, The Measure of Civilization. With empirically derived models, Morris landed on the premise that it was physical geography that determined the West’s rise in global domination more than the great White man’s intellect, religion, politics, or genetic lines.

Oxford Geography professor, Yadvinder Malhi, has taken the data Morris provided and calculated the social metabolism of societies over time. You might imagine a steady linear growth of social metabolism as nomadic hunter-gatherer societies morphed into organized agricultural societies, but the curve is more exponential featuring anomalous peaks and valleys here and there. There’s also evidence that the West indeed had a bit of a jump on the East stemming from the Mesopotamia’s initial forays into agriculture. (Morris considers Mesopotamia as West in his historical analysis) But once China latched onto agricultural practices 1000 years later, the social metabolism of the East and West more or less rose together.

But clearly the data shows something significant has happened in the last few thousand years. From roughly 2000 BCE/BC to today we see a steep exponential climb in social metabolism, from around 1000-1500 Watts per person to 2000-2500 leading up to the first century CE/AD and then a precipitous decline back down below 2000 Watts person. The decline halted sooner for the East than the West and then the East began to rise again as the West continued to fall.

In examining that period more closely we see social metabolism stagnated at around 2000 Watts per person from 500 CE/AD until the 1700’s when social metabolism began a meteoric rise – shown as nearly vertical lines on an exponential curve – to over 4000 Watts per person today. Shown together in the context of historical societal development, Malhi shows the peak of that metabolic mountain occurred in the middle of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. But as both of these dominant realms declined, so did their social metabolism.

Around 500 CE/AD the data shows the West continued to decline as the East began to rise. Then, in 900 CE/AD, China’s Song (Sung) Dynasty emerged. There is increasing evidence revealing how much more advanced Chinese civilizations were during this era than in Europe. China’s national income was triple that of Europe in the 12th century as their population doubled over the preceding two centuries. By the end of the Song dynasty around the 13th century China had over 200 million people – the largest population in the world. Europe’s Middle Ages population peak is estimated to be only 75 million people.

THE HUMAN’S RACE

The growth of the Song dynasty led to the increase in cities, the invention of the world’s first paper money, and the decline of centralized governmental control of the bank. The first movable-type made of ceramics allowed for broad dissemination of knowledge and culture; as did the invention of the first compass depicting true north. Coupled with the world’s first organized and sustained navy and the first chemical formula for gun powder, it’s easy to see how China was a formidable power capable of expansion around the world. And a growing social metabolism.

Their growth came about through the expansion of commodities. They perfected the cultivation of rice in the regions of central and southern Song and created markets and exchanges that utilized early ripened rice from southern regions. Soon rice products and other foodstuffs could be created and sold as commodities in an economy that was expanding in numbers and complexity as the population swelled.

Malhi theorizes the decline and stabilization of social metabolism through the Song dynasty, and China through to the 1700s, was a limit on the land necessary to grow agricultural energy. It’s a plight that can be argued for medieval feudalism in Europe as well during roughly the same time period. Societies that enter into a metabolic limit become vulnerable to various economic, societal, and climatic shocks to their system. We are all witnessing just how devastating the spread of disease can be to a society; or how income inequality can lead to societal strife; or a single storm can wipe out 90,000 square miles of farm land creating $13 Billion of economic loss in a single day.

But humans adapt when our potential goes untapped. With the dawn of the 16th century came the European age of enlightenment and a shift in societal, economic, and intellectual dominance from the West. We also learned energy for fuel need not only come from the carbon stored in the wood that surrounds us, but from ancient deposits made of fossils buried deep in time and in the ground. The industrial age introduced fossil fuels — a source of energy more dense than any society had ever experienced prior. And today, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we still rely on oil and coal to fuel a seemingly insatiable appetite for increasing social metabolism.

But things are changing. This week the Wall Street Journal reported banks, including Chinese banks, are curtailing funding for new coal-fueled power plants in countries like Viet Nam and Bangladesh. However, within the borders of China and India — the world’s largest populations of rising social metabolism — they still have plans to expand coal-fueled power plants.

And while oil companies are enjoying their biggest profits since the onset of the pandemic, they’re deciding not to invest this windfall in additional oil exploration and refinery expansion. Facing pressure from investors, they’re instead assessing the shift to renewables. While predictions of peak-oil have stymied prognosticators since 1919, perhaps we’re entering a time when the market will decide when enough is enough.

Speaking of predictions. I could have predicted the U.S. men’s 100 meter relay team would have not made even the semi-finals this week. A country (and sport) known for its individualism, our U.S. Track and Field organization routinely struggles with coming together to run as a team for the Olympics. The great American sprinter, Carl Lewis, agrees in a Tweet he issued just after the race while coaching some young amateur athletes.

It wasn’t so much a matter of metabolic performance, these were some of the fastest and physically trained men on the planet, but it was a matter of failed hand-offs in the transition zone. You lose the race if you can’t master handing the baton to the next athlete on your team. Any relay athlete will tell you that and it requires a lot of discipline and practice.

Looking at the data and analysis Morris and Malhi provided, each generation in the East and the West, from the 17th century to today, have successfully handed the baton to the next generation in a progressive race of growing industrial and social metabolism. With the help of historical and predictive modelling, many historians, climatologists, and ecologists have identified the finish line of our biosphere. We’re all a part of a generational relay race and the finish line is fast approaching. Let’s all do future generations waiting to run their leg of human endeavor a favor and not botch the hand off.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

My family and I are safely back home in Kirkland, Washington. It feels good to be home and dry and mosquito free. Reflecting on our visit to assorted colleges and the words uttered by students giving campus tours and admission counselor pitches, I imagined my kids embarking on their collegiate journeys. It’s a grand opportunity to pattern-match what you know and what you love with what a school can offer. The trick is finding a pattern that is close and then adapting to the environment or finding an environment that can adapt to your pattern. Is there such a school?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

RELIGHTING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

We’ve all experienced movies and TV shows where the camera slowly pans across a vast landscape, often with mountains and steep valleys. And then, just as your eye registers wilderness, our visual sense is rewarded by the sound of a screeching, soaring bird echoing through the valley. It’s a Hollywood convention that blends suggestive artistry with the absoluteness of nature. Sometimes the sound of the screech is accompanied by the image of an eagle. That’s when my daughter and I look each other and roll our eyes and think to ourselves, “That’s not an eagle.”

We got to witness the true marrying of the bird with that sound while sitting on the deck at my sister-in-law’s house in Connecticut. And right on cue, my daughter and I looked at each other with jaws agape only to return our squinting gaze back to the sky as a hawk soared above us unleashing that familiar sound. Our senses, primed by the repetitive artificiality of film, were substantiated by the naturally occurring biology of a bird. The blending of art and science.

Arts and humanities have been separated from math and science through decades of academic and societal tribalism. But don’t tell our brains that. It really can’t tell the difference. Our family can’t either. My wife and I found this overlap to be our grounding attraction. Separately growing up finding fascination and success in blending the arts with mathematics; we continue to insist the braiding of these individual strands yields a stronger rope. Nature and nurture has seemingly put our kids on similar paths.

Our daughter is equally adept at communicating with the environment as she is drawing it. She recently went to the Seattle Zoo to draw some animals. When she approached the tiger cage, alone, the tiger rose, stretched, and chuffed – an audible non-threatening breathy snort through the nose typically reserved for another feline friend or zookeeper. The big cat then proceeded to pose for her. She has a way with animals. She also immerses herself in the mystical ancient worlds of Chinese fiction and then exquisitely draws the scenes from memory. As she focuses her college search, she’s attracted to programs that will teach her mind to invent and her hands to make interpretations of both natural and imaginary worlds.

Our son is more interested finance and economics. As a self-proclaimed car nut, perhaps he’s driven by the immediate desire to amass enough money to own his own exotic car collection. Or maybe as a budding car photographer he too is attracted to programs that celebrate the blending of arts and sciences. After all, despite attempts in recent decades to attach economics to rational mathematical certainty, it is still a branch of the social sciences. And it’s confounded by the interwoven and interdependent uncertainties of human behavior who’s desire to attain worldly possessions is bounded by the limits of our natural resources.

In the words of esteemed biologist, E. O. Wilson, from his book Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge:

“But the theorists cannot answer definitively most of the key macroeconomic questions that concern society, including the … strength of ”externalities” such as the deteriorating global environment. The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have no where else to turn.”

Wilson goes on to argue that of all the fields in social science, economics, as it was intended to be studied and practiced, is furthest along the path of integrating the arts and sciences. Economics has embraced the lucidity of calculus and analytical geometry that advanced fields like physics, chemistry, and biology.

But it was the behavior of the physical environment that inspired Newton to invent the language of calculus to describe it. It was through the manipulation of environmental conditions that he arrived at the mass and distance laws of gravity and three laws of motion – all in the span of just three years. For the first time the world had a way of consistently and empirically describing and understanding astronomical orbs in motion and earthly sand in the ocean. Poet Alexander Pope summed up Newton’s nudging of the world from darkness in two lines:

"Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

FROM NEWTON TO NEEDHAM

Newton’s influence on the age of Enlightenment cannot be understated. Once great thinkers of the time realized the power of analyzing and describing complex phenomena in repeatable, fundamental terms, they sought ways to apply it. In 1835 Belgian astronomer and mathematician, Adolphe Quetelet, asked why not apply these methods to social phenomena? Soon the field of “social physics” was born; what we now call sociology. Quetelet was interested in applying statistical methods to the social sciences believing they could help explain phenomena like crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.

He was criticized by other scientists for assuming such events had an explanation other than freedom of rational choice. Here we are 186 years later and many in the social science of economics still believe humans are rational actors and insist personal choice will ultimately lead to our collective good; despite a world economy with historic income inequality, exploitive labor practices, fragile global supply chains, extractive capitalistic markets, and dwindling natural resources. Their math does not compute.

The enlightenment’s insistence on precise reduction of the natural world into mathematical minutia was the work of Newton’s predecessor, the inventor of algebraic geometry and modern philosophy, and France’s preeminent scientist, René Descartes. He believed that because the world exists in three dimensions, it should be described in three dimensions. I spent last spring focused on the chopping of America into a grid made of dots named after Descartes: the Cartesian coordinate system.

Descartes vision for a unified knowledge grounded in a fundamental reduction of the world into mathematical terms came to him in 1619 in a single night of successive dreams. He recognized everything in the world, from rainfall to reasoning, results from cause and effect. This rational description of naturally occurring phenomena is what led him to marry the idea of physics with medicine to create the field of biology.

But as a devote Catholic and a believer in God as the perfect creator, he had a conflict to resolve. He solved it by creating the separation of mind and body. With one phrase, I think, therefore I am, he was able to justify the idea of God as being all powerful in his head while his body was of this world and thus scientifically testable and mathematically measurable.

Some historians believe is was this logical and rational separation that fueled the explosion of scientific discovery throughout three centuries of Enlightenment in a Europe dominated by religious belief, power, and control. An era of discovery unique to Europe. British scientist and historian, Joseph Needham, spent most of his career trying to understand and explain why countries like China and India didn’t have their own ‘Enlightenment’ given their advancements in science that predated European discoveries.

In 1969 he posited what has become known as “The Needham Question.” He asked,

“Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo.”

He was particularly interested in why the same discoveries “had not developed in Chinese civilization.” After all, Needham pointed out later, in 1985, that even one of the founders of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon,

“had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more than (anything else), he thought, to transform completely the modern world and mark it off from the antiquity of the Middle Ages. He regarded the origins of these inventions as ‘obscure and inglorious’ and he died without ever knowing that all of them were Chinese.”

In 1937 three Chinese students came to study at Cambridge where Needham was doing work in biochemistry. One of these students, Shen Shih-Chang, studied under Needham, another, Wang Ying-lai, went on to be the first to create a synthetic insulin, and the third, Lu Gwei-djen, was a biochemist and historian who taught Needham Chinese and went on to co-author the influential book, Science and Civilisation in China with Needham.

Their knowledge of science and history inspired him to take many extended trips to China to meet and consult with an array of Chinese scholars, artists, and scientists. His commitment to this cross-cultural exchange is what led him to co-found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945.

Needham concluded that China’s

“focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.”

[Wilson: Consilience] As Needham’s interpretation of the history of Chinese science unfolded, he became increasingly convinced the ancient spiritual belief of Taoism played a central role in their discoveries and advancements.

THE TAO OF YOU

The word Tao is a Chinese word that can have many meanings depending on tonal variation. According to one Chinese dictionary, said one way it has 39 meanings all related to “way” or “path”, but if said with another variation it has six meanings related to “guide” or “lead.” Etymological scholars seem to agree on the root meaning: “to tend in a certain direction.” The Traditional Chinese characters for Tao pictorially construct such a meaning: 迪. 辶 ti "walk" and , 由 yu "to proceed from”. Taken together they can mean "follow a road," "go along," "lead", "direct", or "pursue the right path." Maybe we could add another popular English word the western world adopted, “enlightened.”

Like Needham, my daughter was also influenced by the presence of Chinese students. What started in middle school as an obsession with K-Pop has morphed into a fascination with a genre of Chinese fantasy novels called 仙侠, Xianxia. The literal translation is 仙 xian “immortal” 侠 xia “hero” and the novels feature mortal protagonists known as ‘cultivators’ who nurture life experiences and resources through struggle and pain to become immortal beings or xian. Like Needham’s interpretation of Chinese science, this genre draws heavily on Taoist beliefs and also Chinese martial arts. Cultivators are often students of Tao philosophy and they’re “following a road” in “pursuit of the right path”.

My daughter is enamored with the Taoist doctrine of living simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. It’s what she experiences in her Dr. Doolittle-esque interactions with animals, drawing them in their habitat, or even recreating scenes depicting twisted plots from one of 300 chapters found in her voluminous Chinese novels. The word plot was first meant to mean a building site. Then directors came along to plot areas on a stage for actors to enact a scene — for a story that we now refer to as a plot.

We humans have been plotting through the visual arts, depicting stories of animals and humans interacting with people and place, for at least the last 30,000 years. Caves have allowed these images to remain all this time, but many scholars believe people were drawing on whatever they could find; countless images washed away by weather and time. What my daughter is doing is in her DNA. It’s in yours too.

Drawing is what provided a shortcut through Darwinian evolution. Before our brains were able to draw, pre-human creatures were stuck evolving at the same evolutionary rate as any other species. But once our brains became powerful enough to take what we saw in the world and then draw it, that knowledge could be stored for generations. Over successive iterations, the plot thickened.

By drawing scenes and telling stories humans could communicate between tribes and generations about what worked and what didn’t. The sound of the hawk screeching across the sky. What does it look like? What does it mean? We cheated the system of evolution through maps, drawings, and depictions of life and death; humans in search of advancement, economic utility, with minimal negative externalities. We drew images of struggle on the path of mortality in search of the right path; cultivating a journey to the immortality of our species through artistic genetic shortcuts. Without images our species would have evaporated ages ago. Given the climate crisis, and our economy that fuels it, what stories will the images tell to future generations?

Epigenetics is the study of how our behavior and our environment influence how our genes work. We shape our environment and our environment shapes us. We all inherit a set of DNA from nature, but epigenetic environmental changes alter how a DNA sequence is influenced. Nature and nurture. My wife and I have given our kids the genes they have and we’ve provided the environment for their DNA to be influenced. In another year they’ll be embarking on journeys into environments of their choosing learning new ways to shape their own DNA and the environment around them. Like the bird flying high in the sky, let’s hope they find ways to live simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. Let’s hope we all find the right path.

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Hello Interactors,

This week’s post is coming to you from Avon, Connecticut as we’re about to head north to Maine. We’ve experienced some unseasonably humid days (and nights), a waiter serving bug spray in Cape Cod, and a hot and sticky college campus visit in Rhode Island. I can hear the locals now, “Welcome to New England.”

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WHATA WET SUMMA

I’ve become a weather wimp. Or, maybe I always have been. Summers in my native Iowa were hot and humid. I remember nights when the temperature would actually increase as I lay in bed, spread eagle, staring at the ceiling waiting for just a single puff of air to waft through my window. I’m not sure I was ever dry during those Iowa summer months.

Humidity makes me sweat more than most. I’m sweating just thinking about it. Perspiring makes me perspire. So you can imagine what I was thinking this week as I, with my family, were descending a long hill downtown Providence, Rhode Island, with air so thick and a sun so hot that it felt like I was walking on a treadmill in a steam bath with a heat lamp over my head. As we approached the banks of the Providence River, we read a sign on one of the buildings that that visitors of the Rhode Island School of Design should check-in at the admissions building. You guessed it, it was at the top of the hill we had just descended.

Just two steps up the hill and I had sweat gushing from my head. Part way we encounter a fountain. I soaked the cooling towel I tucked in my backpack and draped if over my skull and was rewarded with a cool tingling sensation down my neck. The bliss was short lived as we trudged up the final steps of the admissions building featuring a sweeping view of Providence and a sign on the door that read, “Closed”.

The Northeastern region of the United States is known for its humidity, but July has been unseasonably wet. This is good news for the one thing that everyone agrees is more dreaded during summer than humidity. Mosquitoes. Cape Cod has been hit hard, especially the small town of Wellfleet. The fleet of white vans marked with the name “Mosquito Squad” parked in a lot on the way in to town should be the first clue this area is prone to these ‘Swamp Angels’. The word mosquito is Spanish for ‘little gnat’. I prefer ‘mini-beast’. Bart Morris of the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project said, while spraying larvicide amidst clouds of mosquitoes, “This is about as bad as I've seen it…biblical in size.” Gabrielle Sakolsky has been with this organization since 1993 and she’s never seen a population boom like this. Dry air usually controls mosquito populations, but not this summer. It’s been a wild July in the Northeast. And it’s not over.

Cornell University’s Northeast Regional Climate Center reports all but two days of the first half of July included a flashflood somewhere in the region. July kicked off with a tornado in Delaware and a week later New York subways were flooded. Then came two days of Tropical Storm Elsa with severe thunderstorms and torrents of rain. Connecticut, where we are now, and Maine, where we’re headed next, were hit with five inches of rain and flash flooding. The coasts were slammed with 67 mile per hour winds while New Jersey whipped up another two tornados as winds howled over 100 miles per hour. Then, on July 12th, 10 inches of rain dowsed southeastern Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey causing major flash flooding. That’s a lot of extreme weather in less than two weeks. And a lot of moisture.

In the first 15 days of July, portions of the Northeast have seen rainfall that is 300% above normal. The Cornell climate center tracks 35 weather sites that stretch from West Virginia to the south to northern tip of Maine in Caribou, which actually was only at 57% of their normal rainfall. Boston was another story. They were 574% above normal. You can see why the mosquitoes were doing a happy dance in Cape Cod.

“Eight major climate sites experienced their wettest first half of July on record and another 17 of the sites ranked this July 1-15 period among their 20 wettest on record. In fact, for 12 of the major climate sites, it is already one of the 20 wettest Julys on record.”

ABNORMAL MEMORIES OF NORMAL

It’s hard to know what normal is anymore. But the climate change explainers at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) remind us their analysis includes previous normal weather patterns. They adjust for the effects of climate change periodically and the last time they adjusted was 2011. That’s when the baseline for normal had shifted from the period starting in 1971 and ended in 2000. They created a handy map that demonstrates what plants and animals already knew – the planting zones across the United States had shifted north in latitude and up in elevation as normal temperatures warmed over that 30 year period.

The point of analyzing and reporting on weather normals is to reflect what is normal today, and not how the values have changed over time. So NOAA updates their models every decade or so to reflect the “new normal”. It turns out reporting and understanding temperature normals is easier than precipitation normals.

NOAA has collected 10 sets of these U.S Climate Normals dating back to 1901. The map below shows how the United States has warmed over the course of these ten segments of time. The blue zones are areas where the temperature was cooler than the 20th century average and the red zones are those areas warmer than average.

Looking at these maps tells the story anybody born between 1901-1940 will tell you – generally speaking, it used to be cooler. Though, unfortunately, they can’t really. It’s called generational amnesia and it inflicts all of us. As climate and energy writer David Roberts writes, reflecting the research from two researchers at Columbia: “”extremely hot summers” are 200 times more likely than 50 years ago. Did you know that? Can you feel it?” It’s also part of what is called shifting baseline syndrome. We can’t relate to the baselines of the past. That’s true for temperatures, plant and animal populations, and the more fickle baselines of precipitation.

NOAA’s same 10 time segments for U.S. Climate Normals for precipitation don’t show the same gradual nation-wide pattern temperatures do. Even before climate change, precipitation patterns varied greatly across different regions of the U.S. Unlike temperature normals, where we can say its generally getting warmer, we can’t say it’s generally getting wetter or dryer over time. We’re stuck with the more unsatisfactory answer, “It depends.”

Take the Southwest as an example. It’s easy to think it’s just been getting gradually drier, but it’s a mixed bag. For the first two sets, 1901-1930 and 1911-1940 it was wetter than the 20th Century average. And then the next four segments were dryer until the 1961-90 segment which shows a mix of wetter and dryer across a mix of zones. The two most recent periods, including 1981-2010, have been wetter than average. This regional precipitation variation is evident even in the Northeast precipitation numbers Cornell provided for the first half of July. Caribou, Maine was drier than usual while Boston blew the normal out of the proverbial water.

Given how dry and hot the Southwest has been, recency bias – the tendency to favor recent events over historic ones – will probably will keep people from believing that is true; before, that is, generational amnesia and baseline syndrome take over. But some weather events leave a lasting impression. As it did for my father-in-law, John Pappalardo, who grew up in Winsted, Connecticut.

In August of 1955, John’s sophomore year at the University of Connecticut on his way to becoming a dentist, the Mad River running through Winsted flooded. “There’s a reason we called it the Mad River”, John told me, as he recalled the images of the flood:

“Our two story house was flooded with water as high as the thermostat on the wall. We stayed up all night on the second floor as water ran down our street. It took a full day before someone came by in a boat, rowed in our front door, and rescued us from the staircase. But we were lucky, my friend’s house was split in half. You could see the dishes sitting in the cupboard from the street, just as they had left it.”

Two hurricanes in as many weeks had ripped through Southern New England. First came Hurricane Connie between August 11th to the 14th which dumped four to six inches in two days saturating the land with water. Then, three days later, on August 17th, came Hurricane Diane dumping nearly 20 inches of rain in two days. Both exceeded New England records. With the land already saturated with water from the first hurricane, the banks of the Mad River couldn’t contain the onslaught of water from the second. Thus began a cascade of flooding through Winsted, down the Mad River, and into the Farmington River – Connecticut’s largest tributary feeding into the Northeast’s largest river, the Connecticut River.

EVAPORATION NATION

Stretching 410 miles long, the Connecticut River Basin stretches through four New England states; it forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire and divides Massachusetts and Connecticut. The river provides 70% of the water to New England; 41% of which comes from Vermont, 30% from New Hampshire and Connecticut, and the remainder from another six New England states. It collects water as far north as the Canadian border and spills it into the Atlantic Ocean to the south at Long Island, New York. Like much of the Northeast, a lush tree canopy covers 80% of the basin. It’s health is vital to the Northeast Region making it a target of study for the effects of climate change on the region.

Laying awake at night here in Avon, Connecticut, tucked under a canopy of trees, saturated soil, and a mosquito dive-bombing my ears, the still presence of humidity surrounds my body and engulfs my mind. I contemplate animals like me sweating – perspiration; plants sweating – transpiration; and the soil sweating – evaporation. Just then, the rush of rustling leaves permeates the stagnant calm as buckets of rain come pouring down. Precipitation – the source of perspiration, transpiration, and evaporation.

The trees, like me, struggle to transpire amidst the invisible gaseous vapors of humidity – the most abundant greenhouse gas there is. Humidity is the measure of the amount of water vapor in the air and is a primary player in the water cycle – and in cooling the planet. Just as sweat pulls heat from our body to be transported to the air, humid water vapors suck water and heat from animals, plants, soil, lakes, streams, and puddles and ferries it around the globe.

Humidity is also invisible to the sun as radiation dances through the vapors and is absorbed by the earth. The soil in Avon is pregnant with fifteen days of record July rainfall and the sun’s stored energy radiates back into the atmosphere long after the sun has set; steaming me on the mattress like a plump white sticky bun. This nighttime reheating process explains why those hot Iowa nights would grow warmer as the night progressed. As the rich Iowa soil emanated stored heat, I wasn’t the only one sweating. So was the abundant Iowa corn. One acre of corn will transpire 3,000-4,000 gallons (11,400-15,100 liters) of water a day making significant contributions to the state’s humidity. Back here in Avon, the oak trees above me will contribute 40,000 gallons (151,000 liters) of water a year to the atmosphere. And I thought I sweat a lot.

Scientists will sometimes combine the measures, and the letters, of evaporation and transpiration to form the term: evapotranspiration. Global climate models tell us evapotranspiration increases 2% for every degree of warming. Given global precipitation amounts must be balanced by evapotranspiration under a warming planet, it follows that the world should be seeing less frequent and shorter durations of precipitation. That is, we should also be seeing more and longer periods of dry days so that the atmosphere can be replenished with water vapors from evapotranspiration.

But this is why it’s important to not just study the whole with aggregated data, but the highly variable parts as well with contextual data. Measures of specific regions can deviate significantly from a global mean. A 2014 study, quotes researchers from 2008 who “noted that over the period of 1895–1999, annual precipitation averaged over New England increased by 3.7% while the change of annual precipitation for individual states in New England varied between −12% and 29.5%.”

This same study compared various sections of the Connecticut River Basin for each season. They analyzed the evapotranspiration, surface runoff, baseflow (stream flow between precipitation events), and soil moisture and found data to “support the theory that extreme precipitation events are becoming more common in a warming world.” Their “results show a clear increase in precipitation intensity for the Connecticut River Basin in the latter half of the 20th Century and early 21st Century.” While being careful to note it’s not always the case, they also find it “interesting to note” that “as precipitation intensity increases, frequency of precipitation is likely to decrease.”

Another thing that kept me awake on that humid night in Connecticut was smoke. A good example of the nuanced and variable climate conditions regions can bring. Smoke from fires in drier areas of the Midwest United States, and parts of Canada and Pennsylvania drifted over the Northeast in a toxic smog that created an atmospheric red filter to the moon. A grim reminder of what may greet us in our return west to Seattle next week, through August, and well into October. Meanwhile, sorry Northeast, NOAA predicts “above normal precipitation is likely for the central and eastern Gulf Coast region and from the Appalachians to the Atlantic Coast” for August through October. Sounds like those mosquitoes will continue to do their happy dance.

But before we head home, we stop in Maine to visit my sister and a couple more schools. Then back to water logged Boston to board a giant jet-fueled mosquito headed back against the prevailing easterly winds to the dry west coast. I’ll be ready to dry out in the mosquito-free air of Kirkland, Washington. Minus the smoke, of course. I also need to water the soil around the baby native ferns, firs, and vine maples I’m nursing to health in my nearby Kirkland park. Water that will start a cycle of evapotranspiration that, when combined with my perspiration, will form water vapors headed for the sky joining clouds drifting in from the Pacific Ocean headed east for more record setting precipitation in New England. Perhaps next year, they’ll be joined by my kids too.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This week I’m coming to you from Cape Cod. Yesterday we saw “red tide” algal plumes stretching a quarter of a mile along a flat sandy beach against a receding tide. This is a common occurrence in Massachusetts, but the frequency of occurrences of “red tide” are increasing worldwide. The last couple weeks have seen extreme weather events in unsuspecting places worrying even the most conservative climate scientists. Perhaps it’s time we put less attention on the drama of the consequences of climate change and more on educating the public on the science behind it.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CSU AND TENNEESEE TOO

Our family is on a trip visiting family on the east coast – and also few colleges for two rising seniors. I never visited my first college, Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was mostly following a friend who, like I, wanted to study graphic design. CSU had a notable program, but it was mostly known as an agricultural school. It’s closer to the state of Wyoming than it is Denver and is flat with rolling plains of grassland that spread out below the foothills of the Rocky Mountains – cow country. A fact that becomes obvious when the wind blows from the east carrying the stench of livestock fields in neighboring Greely, Colorado.

I had no idea Colorado State was also home to an international ecosystem research center, the National Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL). Ecology was not a new thing, but most ecological research was conducted by researchers in isolation of one another. This program, however, aimed to bring different disciplines together – like ecology, soil science, and climatology – to study their mutual effects on each other. This program was nearly as old as I was when I showed up there as a wide-eyed eighteen year old Iowa boy.

Initial plans for this lab were formed in 1966 with initial seed funding coming from the Ford Foundation and then the National Science Foundation (NSF) soon after. It was run by one of the most influential and gregarious pioneers in the field of systems ecology, George Van Dyne. Systems ecology is a quantitative approach to studying, integrating, and synthesizing entire ecosystems made of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components. And Fort Collins was the first U.S. site of a larger International Biological Program dedicated to exploring and combining big science and ecosystem ecology.

Van Dyne grew up in south eastern Colorado as a true cowboy working the ranch by horseback. He satisfied his love and curiosity of western land and animals by studying animal science at CSU as an undergrad and range science for his masters degree from South Dakota State University. Continuing his focus on total ecological systems, he went on to earn a PhD at the University of California, Davis developing mathematical models of ecological data.

After completing his PhD in 1963 there were few places in the world with the necessary computing power to crunch George’s differential equations that weaved a varied matrix of ecological variables. So he headed to Oak Ridge Tennessee to join the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); home to one of the country’s largest mainframe computer centers at the time.

Van Dyne joined two professors at nearby University of Tennessee, Knoxville who had created the first systems ecology course in the United States. He would go on to author four papers a month, double the expected rate of a research scientist, all while enthusiastically teaching. In one noontime course he could be seen

“writing on the chalkboard with his right hand, eating a sandwich with the left, and talking in his soft, intense baritone voice about many exciting developments in ecosystem modeling.”

Many of Van Dyne’s over 120 refereed papers were written during his eighteen months in Tennessee.

MAINFRAME MATHEMATICAL MODELLING

Van Dyne’s work at Oak Ridge was on a nearby grassland, and the expertise he garnered analyzing the data led him to edit a seminal 1969 book entitled The Ecosystem Concept in Natural Resource Management. It was his love of the grasslands and his knowledge of the quantitative study of systems ecology that led him to run the National Resource Ecology Lab in Fort Collins focused on the west’s Grassland Biome – lands dominated by grasses. There he would assemble and analyze data coming in from grassland sites strewn across a rectangular block west from Oklahoma to California north to Washington and back east to South Dakota.

Each site had researchers in the field estimating plant biomass from pre-determined and equivalent plot sizes. They all used the same statistical methods in attempts to maintain similar sample sizes across sites. The IBP program goals were to collect and estimate averages within 20 percent with 80 percent accuracy by leveraging models created by mathematicians and teams of postdoc researchers from a variety of backgrounds.

Van Dyne and team were interested in the role abiotic factors play in the ecological health of grasslands. The model included over 180 internal state variables. For example, the number of herbivores or amount of organic minerals found in the sample sites. The model also included abiotic driving variables like rainfall or processes stemming from photosynthesis like radiation. Their work culminated in 4400 lines of computer code that included 500 parameters. It took seven minutes to compile and run a program that simulated two years of effects of grassland under the modelled conditions on a state of the art mainframe computer from the Computer Data Corporation, the CDC 6400. The follow-on to this model was the CDC 6500 which cost $8 million in 1967 – or over $63 billion in 2021 dollars – and weighed over 10,000 pounds. This same mathematical model would run almost instantaneously on a ordinary laptop today.

In hindsight, the model is considered overly complex but it did satisfy the goals Van Dyne set out to achieve;

“to create a model that would serve as a communications device and organizer of information, be useful as a research tool, and yield results that could help in elucidating biological phenomena in grassland ecosystems.”

There were four basic questions the model was intended to address:

What is the effect on net or gross primary production as the result of various abiotic disturbances?

How is the carrying capacity of a grassland affected by these disturbances?

Are the results of a simulation model like this consistent with field data taken in the Grassland Biome Program, and if not, why?

What are the changes in the composition of the producers as a result of these disturbances?

The model didn’t prove to be robust enough to be a reliable predictor of the future, but it did succeed in demonstrating a systems approach to modelling an ecosystem.

This was a highly controversial endeavor that was seen by many conservative practicing biologists and ecologists as obtusely abstract, misguided, expensive – and competitive. They witnessed large amounts of NSF money going toward Van Dyne’s ‘grand experiment’ and they began to worry their own individual research would dry up.

Traditional ecological research had been a solitary endeavor and many of the older practicing scientists preferred the more conservative individualistic approach to science. Meanwhile, the younger liberal scientists were encouraged by the more open and collaborative approach of systems ecology Van Dyne encouraged. They preferred the teamwork required in collecting, analyzing, and publishing what was shared among a diverse array of contributors. It was a split in belief and approach that mimicked the cultural attitudes of the sixties and seventies.

As a result, established scientists began speaking out and became critical of the big science approach to ecological systems research – and Van Dyne’s program in particular. They questioned the quality of data collected across so many sites by a variety of scientists of differing backgrounds and were dubious of the aggregation of data needed to conform to the models Van Dyne and his team of mathematicians had devised.

Van Dyne did not give in easily, however, and by 1972 he had hired teams of ‘integrators’ to work with site directors and scientists to synthesize the large amounts of data in preparation for analysis. One of the original integrators and organizers was Jim Ellis. He was second only to Van Dyne in his understanding of the interaction of ecological processes with human societies. By encouraging standard methods of defining variables and measuring outcomes, the work these people did is considered by some to be some of the first examples of organized software quality assurance.

By 1974, Van Dyne had amassed a team of over fifty researchers and integrators. By then, however, the NSF had been swayed by the critics and they seized funding the Grassland Biome Program. But some of this undoing was Van Dyne’s own making. While he was a dedicated scientist who gave much of his time to young scientists, he also created a confrontational work environment inviting competing opinions and relished in fostering heated debates. He also had a notorious top-down management style and many of the younger scientists chose to move to other projects than continue working in such an environment.(1)

A MAN OF ACTION AND A CALL TO ACTION

The roughly seven years of the IBP Grassland Biome Program was fast, inventive, and impactful producing mounds of scientific papers. The computer model the team devised was never able to answer the grassland questions they had hoped, but it marked a special point in ecological systems research and sparked the development of future ecological simulation modeling and research programs. Including centers at the University of Georgia, Colorado State University, Utah State University, San Diego State University, and Oregon State University. Ecological simulation models, and research programs, have improved over time and are now considered an essential part of ecological science. Any multi-variate questions being asked through today’s planetary ecological simulation models would likely not be possible without George Van Dyne and the IBP.

Large scale, heavily funded ecological programs like the one Van Dyne choreographed do not exist today. Big science attention and dollars tend toward the human genome project, astronomy, interplanetary exploration, and biochemistry. And members of the mainstream media don’t help. They’d rather report on Bezos, Branson, and Musk comparing the size of their rockets and how far they can reach into the stillness of space. Not to take anything away from the innovations that have stemmed from the infusion of private money into the amazing advancements in modern-day rocket wizardry, but all three seem to have given up on planet earth. Perhaps the advertising industry and the mass media consuming public have too.

But ecological systems scientists have not given up. Programs like the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) employ nearly 2000 scientists across 28 U.S. sites and includes an international component. Started in 1980, this program is funded by the NSF and data from their research can be found through the Environmental Data Initiative and DataONE. There’s also a program operated by Battelle called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Also funded by the NSF, this program was conceived in 1999 and has been fully operational since 2019. Their mission is to “advance the ability of scientists to examine and understand the interactions between life and the environment at the scale of an entire continent.” Just like George Van Dyne, they seek to quantify ecological processes over time across large spatial extents through complex sampling across space and time.

And the National Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) continues to function today out of Colorado State University in Fort Collins; as does the Fort Collins Science Center (FORT) as part of the United States Geological Society (USGS). They “develop and disseminate research-based information and tools needed to understand the nation’s biological resources in support of effective decision making.” My friend and former college roommate, Pat Shafroth, is a Research Ecologist there and was instrumental in studying the impact on riverside vegetation upon the destruction of the Elwha Dam, the opening of the Elwha River, and the return of spawning salmon.

George Van Dyne was ahead of his time. His intuition to first study abiotic factors like rising water temperatures come into focus in light of this summer’s climate catastrophes. We no longer need simulations to tell us the Sacramento River is “facing a “near-complete loss” of young salmon, which cannot grow beyond their egg stage in waters heated by extended temperatures of over 100 degrees.” Abiotic perturbances from a warming planet have clearly effected the life of the living.

Flooding is another abiotic perturbance that impacts the lives of living creatures across a large geographic area over a short period of time. The grieving families of the 122 Belgian and German lives that were lost in the flooding this week no longer need a mathematical model to warn them of the dire consequences of human-induced climate catastrophes. And that says nothing of the nonhuman lives taken by the insufferable rushing water.

But dwelling on despair only breeds despair. If there’s one thing ecological systems scientists like George, and even my friend Pat, have taught us is that making one small change in a network of interdependent ecological variables can have a large scale impact. We just need to know where to make the change.

Scientists know where to focus, but we need big government to act on the big investments they’ve made in big science and big ecology to enable big changes. Collective individual behavioral at the tips of fractal like ecosystem networks helps, but even if everyone on the planet did their part to reduce CO2 emissions, it’s still only four percent of total emissions. We need governments to enact legislation that gets us to clean energy policies quickly – small changes, further up the fractal chain that have big cascading impact through the network of life.

So if you want to do your part to help, go to call4climate.com or dial 202-318-1885. Just punch in your zip code and you’ll be presented with the necessary talking points and then connected to your representative Senate offices. Do like George Van Dyne and take action.

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Hello Interactors,

After enduring a few days of record heat that burnt my drought tolerant plants to a crisp and likely claimed the lives of two of our favorite wild birds that would frequent my daughter’s window feeder, my new pair of shoes arrived I had ordered from Canada. As did a new monitor and other odd consumer goods. And soon I will be boarding a plane that will spew another chunk of the estimated 22 tons of CO2 our family will contribute to the atmosphere this year. That’s four and a half hot air balloons full. I know I’m heating up the planet with my shoes and trips. You probably do to. It seems we not only need to protect the environment, we need protection from ourselves.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE RIVER’S ON FIRE

As an early teenager in the 1970s, just entering middle school, I remember getting a pair of “Earth Shoes” as part of my back-to-school get up. They featured a tread that read, “GASS”, which stood for Great American Shoe Store. Most, if not all, of our shoes back then came from the Great American Shoe Store – Kinneys. I felt pretty cool in my new kicks; especially when that first snow fell and I could see the GASS imprint in my foot tracks. Gas was on the minds of many in the 70s, as it was becoming increasingly hard to come by. It was also increasing pollution.

Kinneys was capitalizing on a burgeoning environmentalist trend that had been growing since the publishing of Rachel Carlson’s, Silent Spring in 1962. By 1970, water and air pollution was prevalent, the federal government was forced to intervene. On January 1st, 1970 the Council on Environmental Quality was created with the signing of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This requires Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) of all federal agencies who are planning projects with major environmental ramifications.

Either recognizing they may be a target of the government or perhaps seeing consumers being drawn to environmentalism, the American auto makers also got in on the environmental action. A January 15th New York Times article read, “Detroit has discovered a word: “Environment.”” The General Motors (GM) CEO, Edward Cole, promised an “essentially pollution free car could be built by 1980.” Engineers from GM, Ford, and Chrysler attending the 1970 convention of the Society of Automotive Engineers were all pitching anti-pollution technologies. GM’s CEO was probably influenced by his son, David Cole, who was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He co-authored a paper for that convention entitled, “Reduction of emissions from the Curtiss Wright rotating combustion engine with an exhaust reactor.”

There was growing concern entrusting those very institutions responsible for the destruction of the environment with devising schemes to save it. The country’s air, water, and land was being smothered in waste. Something needed to be done. So on July 9th, 1970, 51 years ago today, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was proposed by Republican President Richard Nixon.

This agency was intended to focus on short-term fixes targeting violators of the law, so Nixon appointed Assistant Attorney General, Bill Ruckelshaus, to the post. Ruckelshaus promptly ordered a steel company to stop dumping cyanide into Cleveland, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River. It was so polluted that it had caught fire at least thirteen times. Ruckelshaus also banned the use of DDT.

After being jostled around in various appointments and governmental positions, including the head of the FBI, he was reappointed to head the EPA in 1983 by Republican President Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration grew concerned over the faltering reputation of the EPA after Ruckelshaus’ replacement, Anne Gorsuch Burford, (Neil Gorsuch’s mom) cut the EPA’s budget, eliminated jobs, and neutered enforcement policies. The EPA and the environment was slipping backwards, so once again it was Ruckelshaus to the rescue. He promptly fired most of her leadership team and got back to work protecting the environment running the EPA until 1985.

Upon leaving government, Ruckelshaus moved to Seattle and was a practicing attorney and continued to prosecute environmental crimes. In 1993, Democrat President Bill Clinton appointed him to the Council for Sustainable Development and throughout the 90s he worked as a special envoy in the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the United States and Canada and was chair of the Salmon Recovery Funding Board. Republican President George W. Bush then appointed him to the United States Commission on Ocean Policy in 2004. The commission was terminated that same year but in 2010 became part of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative which Ruckelshaus co-chaired. Ruckelshaus endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama in 2015. Nearly fifty years after being appointed by a Republican president to become the country’s first EPA administrator in 1970, fighting for environmental justice at the international, federal, state, local levels – and in the private sector – Ruckelshaus passed away at his home in my neighboring town, Medina, Washington in 2019.

FROM DUST TO THE SEA WITH WALLY AND ERMALEE

When the Nixon administration created the EPA, they decided to put it under the Department of the Interior. This executive department’s mission is to, “protect and manage the Nation’s natural resources and cultural heritage; provide scientific and other information about those resources; and honor its trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and affiliated Island Communities.” For the first time in our nation’s history, it is headed by a person indigenous to these natural resources and cultural heritage; native American, Deb Haaland. The department dictates how the United States “stewards its public lands, increases environmental protections, pursues environmental justice, and honors our nation-to-nation relationship with Tribes.”

When the EPA was created in 1970, the Secretary of the Interior was Alaskan land developer and politician, Wally Hickel. Instead of creating a separate administration for the EPA, Hickel urged Nixon to fold the designated 15 offices under the Department of Interior and rename it the Department of the Environment. It’s hard to know if Hickel’s suggestion was genuinely thoughtful or an egoist attempt to gain power. After all, Hickel was a controversial pick for the post of Secretary of the Interior in the first place. Many activists, journalists, and even the Sierra Club, mounted campaigns to thwart his appointment.

Walter Joseph “Wally” Hickel was born in Kansas in 1919 where he and his family endured both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Given the heat waves this summer, we’d be wise to reflect more on the Dust Bowl. It’s was the era’s most devastating man-made environmental disaster. Stripped of their native grasses by cattle and sheep or farmers making room for wheat, White settler farmers ignored Indigenous dryland farming methods that used the grasses to anchor, moisten, and nurture the fervent soil – even during droughts. When a record drought swept across the country and the wheat dried up, farmers tilled it under. Void of organic matter the land became susceptible to the winds sweeping across the plains.

The term “Dust Bowl” came from Denver based Associated Press writer, Robert Geiger, reporting on his own personal account of a particularly pernicious dust storm. On April 15th, 1935 he wrote,

"Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—'if it rains.'"

He was reporting on a severe dust storm that occurred the day prior – “Black Sunday”. “Black blizzards” of dirt and dust hurled themselves across Oklahoma south to Texas lifting and mislaying an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil. Dust storms such as this went on from 1935 to 1941 sucking soil particulates from the ground darkening the skies in clouds of dust that blew as far east as Maine. It also scattered people in all directions across the country in a climate migration crisis of their its own making. Wally Hickel was one of the displaced.

Wally was an athlete in High School and taught himself how to box by watching newsreels of Joe Louis. He became the Class B Golden Gloves champion in 1938 at age 29. Two years later he found himself in California fighting the welter weight champion, Jackie Brandon. Brandon broke his nose in the first round, but Hickel knocked him out three rounds later. Evidently struck by wanderlust, Hickel wanted to then hop a ship headed for Australia but lacked a passport, so instead he boarded the S. S. Yukon headed for Alaska.

He returned to Kansas and married, but lost his first wife to illness. He worked as an airplane inspector that included occasional trips to Alaska to inspect privately owned planes – including Russian planes. It was in an airplane hangar that he met his second wife, Ermalee Strutz, and moved to Alaska. Hickel described her as “beautiful as a butterfly, but as tough as boots.” Her father was a United States Army Sergeant stationed in Anchorage and her family had ties to Alaska’s largest financial institution – National Bank of Alaska. She pushed Wally to enter the race to become Alaska’s second Governor.

Hickel struggled with dyslexia, so Ermalee was tasked with doing most of his writing, including his campaign speeches. She remained a powerful influence on his career, including pushing Hickel to support the Alaska Permanent Fund. This is a state-owned corporation that invests at least 25% of the money flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in a fund that sends dividend checks to each resident of Alaska. In 2019, this yielded an annual check in the sum of $1600. This government run basic income guarantee was devised, implemented, and executed by a string of conservative Republican Governors starting with Wally in 1966 and continues today with the Republican far-right Christian conservative, Mike Dunleavy. Maybe this is where liberal socialist-leaning politicians like Bernie Sanders got the idea for a nationwide Universal Basic Income.

In 1968, Hickel was told by Nixon that he would have to leave his post as Governor of Alaska to become the Secretary of the Interior. Wally cried. He probably cried again two years later when Nixon fired him for his “increasingly militant defense of the environment.”

Hickel led a string of pro-environment policies in his short two years as Secretary:

Preserved some of the Florida Everglades: He established the Biscayne National Monument preserving the ecological development of 4,000 acres of keys and more than 90,000 acres of water in the bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Delayed the Alaska oil pipeline to study its effects on permafrost: Heat generated from the pipeline would melt the permafrost leading to unknown damage to the ecosystem and the piping system.

Halted the drilling of oil in the Santa Barbara channel: After a 1969 oil spill, Hickel removed 53 square miles of federal tracts from oil and gas leasing. (Later Reagan hoped for more platforms to be built in the channel because he liked how they reminded him of Christmas trees flickering in the dark. Locals call the oil rigs Reagan’s Christmas Trees)

Cracked down on oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico: After this oil spill in the gulf, also in 1969, Hickel asked the Attorney General John Mitchell (the man who recommended Ruckelshaus for the EPA position) to convene a grand jury to investigate violations by Chevron and 49 other companies in nearly 7,000 oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

Stopped imports of commercial whaling products: After placing eight species of whales on the Department's Endangered Species List, Hickel halted imports of oil, meat and any other products from these species. In 1969, roughly 30% of the nation’s soap, margarine, beauty cream, machine oil, and pet food came from whale oil.

The final straw for Nixon was Hickel’s public opposition of the administration’s policies on the Viet Nam war and their fatal handling of the Kent State student protests. Hickel wrote,

“I believe this administration finds itself today embracing a philosophy which appears to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans – our young people."

Hickel was promptly let go. With him went the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Dr. Leslie Glasgow, who was in charge of Fish, Wildlife, Parks, and Marine Resources. Glasgow took a leave of absence from Louisiana State University, where he taught marsh wildlife, to assume his post under Hickel in Washington, D.C.

He exceled at educating, convincing, and cajoling corporations, companies, and governmental agencies into environmental conservation practices. He was loved by both hippies and hunters and represented widespread hope that the nation could finally begin to heal the land it had wrongly wounded. But those hopes were dashed when it became clear Nixon would rather appease corporations than heal the environment.

In a December 12th, 1970 New York Times article Glasgow said he was

“pushed out of the Department of the Interior by political and business interests in a shake up that represented a “definite step backwards for environment.””

In anticipation of running for a second term in 1972, Glasgow supposed Nixon thought “the changes and dismissals had been made early in hopes that the people would forget them before the Presidential campaign.” What everyone remembers, is not what Hickel and Glasgow did for the environment but what Nixon did to himself and the country as the first evidence of the Watergate Scandal started the summer after their firing.

AMERIGNIGMA

Glasgow went back to teaching and Hickel went back to real estate. He was not about to make the same mistake his dad made in not owning property, so he bought as much as he could. He started Hickel Investment Company that is now run by this son, Wally Jr. They own and operate hotel rooms, food and beverage outlets, office and retail spaces, and residential lots around Alaska. They, like all residents of Alaska – including poverty stricken Indigenous tribal members – benefit from increasing profits from extractions of natural resources like oil and fish.

It makes me question Hickel’s sterling environmental track record as Secretary of Interior – a post that demands a lot of reading and writing. Perhaps he relied heavily on, and was influenced by, his environmentalist and academic assistant secretary, Dr. Glasgow. Maybe he diddled a dyslexic Hickel into an environmental clinician the same way his wife shaped him into a politician. Especially if Glasgow was known for his ability to convince corporations that doing good for the environment was also good for business. After all, conservation and conservative are just two letters apart.

The United States is an enigma when it comes to mixing environmental stewardship with commercial profits. The EPA and the National Park Service sit under the Department of Interior which “manages public lands and minerals, national parks, and wildlife refuges and upholds Federal trust responsibilities to Indian tribes and Native Alaskans. Additionally, Interior is responsible for endangered species conservation and other environmental conservation efforts.” But the Forest Service sits under the Department of Agriculture which “provides leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and related issues.” Meanwhile, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sits under the Department of Commerce which “works with businesses, universities, communities, and the Nation’s workers to promote job creation, economic growth, sustainable development, and improved standards of living for Americans.”

Like all slaves to fashion, I likely ditched my eco-kicks in favor of the next cool shoe. Probably a new pair of 1978 Nike Tailwinds, the first to feature an air pocket. They too had a cool tread first made from a waffle iron. I don’t recall what kind of imprint they left in the first fallen snow, but I know now the imprint my habitual consumerism has on the environment. And I need help.

Environmental protection, conservation, and restoration are necessary to limit the greed that seems to overcome both producers and consumers of limitless goods made from limited resources. Over zealous consumerism will not be quelled by collective action on the part of consumers. Leaders need to lead and act on behalf of future generations of both humans and non-humans. That’s what it means to lead.

The dirt from “Black Sunday” filled ponds and potholes across the plains decimating duck and other wildlife populations. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fervent Democrat, hired a Republican to remedy the calamity. He appointed the famous, well loved Iowa cartoonist and conservationist “Ding” Darling to head the U. S. Biological Survey – what then became the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Department of the Interior. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) putting 2.5 million young people to work restoring natural wetlands and habitats along the nation’s four major flyways. More than 63 national wildlife refuges were established during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That’s what leadership looks like, America, in the face of a man-made climate crisis.

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Hello Interactors,

Today’s post happens to land on my last day at Microsoft. After twenty-nine years of incredible good fortune – that has given me much – it is time I give back. I’ll be spending more time and energy on Interplace and advocating for sustainable transportation and land use policies that enable better interactions between people and place. I’ll also be helping nurse some local native plants and trees back into our parks. Nature has given me much, it is time I give back.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HCI AND ORGANIC NUCLEI

I had a long and successful career in the realm of human-computer interaction design. When I first started in the late 80s and early 90s, the design problems were comparatively simple. Most computers, especially in the home, were isolated appliances with little or no connection to each other or the nascent internet. For the most part, they were isolated and closed systems. The interaction and exchange of information occurred between people and the hardware and software they were using. The only real output was an occasional piece of paper emerging from a printer.

But as I wrote back in March, in A Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every Garage, this all changed as computers became increasingly connected in the mid to late 90s. The proliferation of personal computers coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web and before long email became pervasive and people with access to a PC and a dial-up internet connection were surfing the web. Human-computer interaction was still happening mostly on a PC – often within closed, proprietary software systems like Windows and Office. But the exchange of information was happening between people around the world and increasingly between software as well. An emergent flow of energy and ideas streamed from sole producers of information sitting behind a screen typing, clicking, and altering letters, numbers, and symbols. In addition to isolated and disconnected systems, it also became an open system connecting people around the world. Absent the people, and the system grows feeble.

Ecological ecosystems are also open systems that include isolated and closed systems as well. Unlike human-computer systems where the exchange is with information, ecological ecosystems exchange energy and biochemical processes. Energy is input into the system from the sun and its energy is first exchanged with plants through photosynthesis. These plants in turn provide energy for herbivores who then provide energy for carnivores. The waste and remains of both plants and animals then provide energy for little critters called detritivores. Mice, flies, and worms are well known examples of detritivores that make most people squirm at the thought of consuming, but crabs and lobsters are detritivores too and many people can’t wait to eat them. As an evolved omnivore, that has earned and learned the power of free will, I choose to mostly avoid consuming carcass and poop eating creatures for my energy.

This food chain is thus composed of plants as the primary producer of energy, herbivores as the primary consumer, and carnivores as secondary consumers. Detritivores take care of our waste along the way leaving microbes to finish the job of decomposition. This basic food chain is taught to us at a young age and it’s easy to grasp. But it oversimplifies the ecosystem and gives the illusion of a singular closed system in a sequenced chain of events. It’s like the closed system of the early PC; information is exchanged through human-computer interaction, a document is pooped out of a printer, and then consumed by hungry knowledge seekers then left to decompose or be recycled.

Ecological ecosystems are open because energy flows through the structure with solar energy as its sole input. Absent the sun, the system is done. Light energy becomes heat energy through cellular processes like photosynthesis and respiration and is turned into heat energy. Once heat is generated it dissipates; gone forever, never to be recycled.

Growing plants then absorb and capture elements like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus from the atmosphere, soil, and water. Animals also acquire some of those same elements, but they obtain even more by gobbling up plants and animals. These elements are then decomposed creating carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, and minerals. These components are all then endlessly cycled and recycled within a closed system. We have all the water we have, for example, we can’t make more. We give these lowly restricted natural components and bi-products of a closed system a powerful and lofty name – nutrients.

DESIGNING THE SYSTEM THAT DESIGNS YOU

Throughout my career designing software there have been debates on who and what controls personal computing systems; the people who buy and use these systems or the people who make them. As a human centered design and research manager, I was biased toward – and empathetic of – people using these systems. I was committed to getting out in the world, observing general behavior in the wild, collecting data through qualitative and quantitative field research in search of patterns and clues. These clues could then be studied in a laboratory setting gathering qualitative insights. My intention was to yield a bottoms-up approach to the control of the design of software; observe, gather, analyze, understand, communicate, prototype, and iterate. This is the hallmark of human-centered design; assess the needs and necessity becomes the mother of invention.

But there was a competing notion that was controlled from the top down. Blending novel ideas with familiar constructs, creative individuals could invent solutions that solved problems people didn’t even knew they had. This would sometimes yield entire products, but also failed solutions in search of problems. Microsoft hired a lot of smart and creative people; many of whom were also aggressive and predatory; preying on the ideas of others and consuming competitors. But by thinning the herd of competing ideas, and sometimes colleagues fleeing whomever he or she is, the fittest ideas, and people, were left to survive. This allowed new ideas and individuals to emerge and even thrive.

These ideas came together in the form of the dominant information producing products of the information age – Office and Windows. And information from the human brain is the sole producer of the personal computing ecosystem. Absent the user, and the system’s a loser.

As much as we all like to take sides and declare clear winners, be it top-down or bottoms-up, it’s a like air and water – you need a little bit of both to survive. The same debate around control of systems exists in ecological ecosystems as well. Advocates of the bottoms-up approach will claim it’s the availability of nutrients to plants that controls abundance. As the primary producer, the more plants there are the more primary consumers emerge. With more primary consumers (herbivores) come more secondary consumers (carnivores). The more food that is added to the food chain, the more energy and natural elements will flow through the system.

But top-down advocates say control of the system is dictated by predators. As the number of carnivores increase, the number of herbivores decrease. This allows primary producing plant populations to grow. Another mechanism that has been observed isn’t top-down or bottoms-up but subsidized across ecosystems. For example, wild predators feeding on controlled populations of livestock or animals in protected rain forests sneaking over to palm plantations to gather more food. In both cases, the interaction between wild and controlled ecosystems increases energy and material production.

Again, a food “chain” is an misleading metaphor. It’s less of a chain made of sequential links and more like the internet – a worldwide web of nodes connected by links. Everything is connected to everything else. But not everything has equal influence. As my cartography professor, and geography legend, Waldo Tobler states in what became Tobler’s First Law of Geography, “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." He was referring the cost of interactions between two places that increase with distance, but there are costs to ecological interactions too. If I were a monkey expending energy swinging between trees in a lush Amazon canopy and happened upon a palm plantation three swings into my journey, I’d be stalking up on fruit too. And maybe in an act of reciprocity, I might also gobble up a pesky protein rich rat sneaking their own nibbles of picked or fallen fruit.

BIG COMPANY, BIG INDUSTRY, BIG SCIENCE, BIG CHANGE

Through the course of my nearly thirty years of humble contributions to the shaping of the world’s most used information and knowledge creation tools – in a vast web of a worldwide personal computing ecosystem – a critical examination of the field of ecosystem ecology was emerging. One of the first seminal books on the history of this earth science was written in 1993, just one year after I started at Microsoft: A history of the ecosystem concept in ecology by University of Georgia professor, and Washington State University alumni, Frank Golley.

He reveals just how young the roots of ecological science are, noting the term ecosystem didn’t even emerged until 1935 when the famous British botanist Sir Arthur George Tansley coined it. Emerging out of the science of ecology and biology, the discipline of ecosystem ecology – like so many things in the world – was shaped by world wars, competition, and international politics.

And then in 2010, also at University of Georgia’s esteemed Odum School of Ecology, professor David Coleman published another influential book called Big Ecology: The Emergence of Ecosystem Science. This book is a deep dive into the development of ecosystem science and the role Big Science played in its formation from an insider’s point of view. As big budgets from big nations were filled with big money to fund big wars, big governments had a big influence over science by funding big labs running big computers crunching big numbers.

Those in control and in power were the primary producers of information and they held it close. Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. And as the Dutch-American preacher, reformer, writer, and editor Reverend Dr. Thomas DeWitt Talmage once said, “the pen is the lever that moves the world.”

To start my new chapter in life, I have heeded the good reverend’s advice by wielding a pen to move the world. Perhaps it’s hubris to believe such a thing, after all, Microsoft can breed its fair share of arrogance. But as I stroll down the aisle of airplanes – having gifted the detritivores with my waste – I look over the shoulders of passengers busily typing words and numbers, poking symbols and buttons, and dragging clumps of knowledge across the screen. Most all of them are using products I’ve touched in one way or another.

Settling into my seat, I can feel the energy dissipating from the brains of humans filling the cabin with heat as they turn information into knowledge. I close my eyes and imagine countless others around the world doing just the same and am humbled that my little Microsoft pen moved a small piece of their world. I take a deep breath and think to myself; the world has given me much, it is time I give back.

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Hello Interactors,

Today we begin the summer series on the environment. I didn’t seek learning about the physical world intentionally; I was more interested in maps. But as a geography major it’s unavoidable. Now I’m glad I was exposed to the workings of the natural world as we’re confronted with its wrath on a daily basis. Which begs the question, When did this calamity all start and what should we call it?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE FROM SNOWY JEFF DOZIER

I typically didn’t sit in the front of the class, but I was running late and the seats in the circular shaped domed Campbell Hall were full. It was a required class, Physical Geography 101, taught by geography legend, Jeff Dozier. By this point, Jeff had already earned a reputation for being a snow expert. Students would clamber to join him as a research assistance climbing up and skiing down Mt. Shasta studying snow hydrology. Nobody knows snow like Jeff. Who did Disney call to explain the dynamical elements of snow crystals to animators of the popular movie, Frozen? Dozier.

I ended up sitting in the front row from that point forward; not so much because I was interested in the topic, but because I wanted to see if I could hear what he was mumbling before the start of every class. He would pace back and forth on stage talking to himself as if nobody was there. Occasionally our eyes would lock, he’d blink a couple times staring at me, and then unexpectedly snap out of it. I think he clued on to me later in the term as the blank catatonic stare morphed into a sly grin and a gentle nod. Maybe I was more interested in observing this star-studded snow expert than I was physical geography.

His research over the last 40 years has been groundbreaking. In addition to dangerous and difficult field work in the nooks and crannies of mountainous cliffs and creeks revealing marvels of the molecular structure of snow, Jeff was equally comfortable behind a screen as a pioneering pixel prognosticator. As high quality digital imagery of the earth started flowing from satellites circling the globe, he realized much could be gleaned from the array of tiny white dots of varying intensity shining back at him through zoomed-in pictures of snow covered mountains; much of which inaccessible by foot or by ski – even by the most motivated graduate student.

With the radiance of a single pixel at one end and the physics of the silicon imaging sensor at the other, Jeff could determine mathematically how the atmosphere effected the radiation of light reflecting off the microscopic ice crystals that make up a snowflake. Later, with the help of a colleague, he also discovered this technique could be used for the opposite of snow – fire. Examining pixelated satellite imagery from the Persian Gulf, they detected anomalous glowing spots that dotted the landscape. These dots turned out to be small methane burn-off flames used in oil refineries. It was 1980 and for the first time a tiny fire could be detected from space. Soon he was able to determine land surface temperatures just by analyzing a satellite image. Remote sensing, spectroscopy, and biogeochemisty have come a long way in 40 years; so have fires – as dire global warming melts precious snow away like teardrops rolling down the creeks on the face of mother earth.

DIRTY SNOW AND ALLUVION FLOW

While Dozier was looking at the earth’s surface for climatic clues, other researchers were digging deep. Since the late 60s scientists have been extracting two-mile long ice cores out of snowpack in Greenland and Antarctica. More cores around the globe have been plucked out of glaciers before they all recede. Stacked in these cylindrical cores are stratified lines representing a geological timeline. Toward the top are layers of white loosely granulated snow crystals with barely discernable lines of annual layers of snowfall, then come darker compressed layers of rock, silt, and sand, with the bottom layers typified by dense dirty-brown ice. Some of these cores contain 750,000 year old natural elements.

These layers of ice allow scientists to travel back in time revealing snow fall levels, the direction the wind was blowing as the snow drifted, and the air temperature. By looking at the ratio of ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ atoms found in oxygen trapped in the ice, scientists can’t discern exact daily temperatures, but they determine average air temperatures or identify trends over select periods of time.

Other clues can be found as well; like elements in the atmosphere. As snow piles miles deep they compress lower layers ice pockets of atmospheric gas that become securely enshrouded. These gassy envelopes reveal to scientists the amount of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time of the snow fall. As water turns to snow the process captures other atmospheric particles like dust, smoke, pollen, or ash from volcanic plumes as they crystalize and fall to the earth.

Taken together scientists can correlate volcanic ash concentrations, for example, with rising carbon dioxide levels. By carbon dating the ash particles, they can determine when the volcano occurred. These can then be cross-referenced with other sediment layers found in past oceans and land forms to create a more complete picture of the earth’s physical history.

Imagine what future paleontologist and paleoclimatologists will discover in future layers of snow and rock. Sure there will be the usual fossilized remains of the disappearing and evolving species of plants and animals; biomass that took what was given from the earth and then gave it back in a natural symbiosis of reciprocity; and then is all blended together in piles of swirling dust, decomposed carcasses, sticks, and leaves in compressed layers of time. But what will stand apart from the medley of bio-miscellany will be the detritus of an animal that has taken more from the world than it was given. Humans.

LET’S PLAY THE NAME GAME

There’s a proposed term that describes this geological period of profound human impact; a marker for future generations denoting an impression on the world that is different from any other in the history of time. The proposed term is Anthropocene. But there’s a problem. Scientists can’t agree on the term. They can’t even agree on the motivations to name such a period, when it began, or if it has even begun. As recently as March 2021 the two biggest stakeholders on the topic, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), both refused to approve and adopt the term as submitted by the Anthropocene Working Group, a subcommittee of the ICS.

One of the most contentious issues is determining exactly when the outsized human impact on the world’s systems began. The more scientists uncover and learn, the earlier the proposed starting date becomes. Other questions remain around the scale of impact, exact start dates, and the period of time over which the impact occurred.

Some argue that it began with the discovery of fire coupled with the cooking of meat. This combination increased caloric protein for developing brains which led to fires used to manipulate local living conditions. Or maybe it was the period of mammalian extinction when the world lost over half of its large animals; a time when Homo sapiens emerged out of Africa to spread throughout the world. Or was it just ten thousand years ago when farming emerged independently and coincidently in Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, and New Guinea? Perhaps it was two thousand years ago and the organization and formation of societies like the Roman’s in Europe, the Han dynasty in China, and others in India, Mexico, and Peru. After all, these societies, like ours today, clear-cut land and mined for minerals at large, albeit isolated, scales.

This leads to the period I wrote about in my spring series on cartography – the sixteenth century’s European colonization around the world. This facilitated interactions between people and place across oceans resulting in a global exchange of regional fruits, vegetables, and animals; evidence of which is visible in our sedimentary strata. It also created a world economy that America and Europe relished as they exploited land, radically diminished Indigenous populations through disease, slaughter and war, and stole humans from their homes in Africa and beyond for free slave labor. All of which gradually intensified energy consumption with the dawn of the industrial age.

But most seem to be focusing in on the Great Acceleration that began around the 1950s. This time marks obvious shifts in social and earth systems – all resulting from the interaction of people and place. It’s the point on exponential behavioral, economic, and physical geography curves that feature steady linear growth throughout human history and then sudden sharp climbs up dangerously steep slopes.

Complex interdependent systems exhibiting exponential growth become unpredictable on their way to a tipping point. We are sitting on a slope made of the outcomes of unprecedented and unpredictable global inputs and outputs from interdependent social and environmental systems too complicated to describe or fully understand. Which leads some scientists to contend perhaps we have yet to even begin a true Anthropocene given we don’t really know what we’re dealing with.

TAKE A CUE FROM A SNOWFLAKE

It’s worth mentioning that much of this hang wringing, research, discussion, and debate is dominated by the very societies that induced this monstrous blow to our existence. This has led to the emergence of satirical derivative names like:

“Capitalocene, highlighting the dominant role of the capitalist economy;

Plantationocene, highlighting the important seminal role of colonialism capitalism, slavery, and the plantation economy;

Technocene, emphasizing the role of technological systems;

Anthrobscene and Manthropocene, highlighting a male logic of resource exploitation and the largely male composition of expert panels deciding on the Anthropocene;

“Anthropo-not-seen”, highlighting indigenous perspectives and role of colonialism;

Anglocene, noting the dominant role of the English-speaking world in producing the earliest industrial greenhouse gas emissions and also dominating the contemporary debate about the definition of the Anthropocene…”

I’ll add a couple more —

Anthropomorphicene, the attribution of human traits to earthly processes. Perhaps our nurturing mother earth isn’t a mother figure at all, but a fierce planetary tempest exacting indiscriminate damage on all it encounters.

Egocentricene, the obsession with our own well-being at the expense of other humans and non-humans. Perhaps we are getting what we deserve as we continually amuse ourselves to death. Sorry other plants and animals. Is it possible the human race, along with many more species, will expire before our greedy capitalistic consumerist ways do?

Maybe there is more uncertainty than there are species on the planet. It’s as complicated as the earth we inhabit. Perhaps more explanations exist than the ones we are handed.

I did learn one thing in Jeff Dozier’s Physical Geography 101 class; while snowflakes all have six arms, no one snowflake is ever like another. They all have a common symmetrical beauty that typifies the order molecules can produce as they take their rightful place in crystalline formations. But they are all unique.

As we seek to better understand the role human interaction has on this place, or even how we name it, let’s all acknowledge what we have in common while celebrating what makes us different. Nobody wants the human race to end, but no single answer will ever emerge for how to avoid it. So as you grumble to yourself in contemplation of your own existence, don’t forget to occasionally look up, make eye contact, nod, and smile at those around you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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Hello Interactors,

This is the last post of the Spring 2021 cartographic portion of Interplace. My recent trip to Kansas City got me thinking about the role land use mapping and planning played in the formation of select surrounding suburbs.

It’s also a bit of a teaser for the Summer season as Interplace moves toward the environment, physical geography, and its role in urban planning and design.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

LIFE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SACK

One glance out the window as you fly into the Kansas City airport and the gridding of American land becomes apparent. A array of crops, fields, and irrigation circles all stitched in and bordered by hard edged polygons but also gently meandering rivers and streams. It’s all part of the grand plan to divide the organically occurring hills and valleys of America into artificial two dimensional polygons. A tapestry of maps for settling colonists that doubles as a ledger for settling government’s finances.

The patterns are apparent at the street level too. The main arterials are uniformly distributed and connected at intersections; east-west and north-south thoroughfares that reach far beyond the core of the city. But just off these axes of expansion are sweeping tree lined curvilinear roads featuring large deciduous trees with canopies of leaves floating over a pool of manicured Kentucky bluegrass. And nestled within are the beloved single family homes. A community planned from above on a map that sells an illusion of a naturally occurring pastoral ideal. A residential product planned, designed, and manufactured for settling White suburban colonists. Like me.

I grew up on a cul-de-sac in a planned community in Norwalk, Iowa. It doesn’t get anymore suburban than a cul-de-sac. I admit, it was nice. The center of the street featured a domed grassy circle that the neighborhood kids would all use to play kick-the-can. We’d place the can atop the center of the mound and then run and hide behind the surrounding houses and bushes. Cul-de-sacs are great for families because they’re dead ends. The literal French translation is ‘bottom of the sack’. The only cars, which was rare, were driven by the parents of the kids playing in the street. Parents of this generation knew the benefits of playing in the road because it was a lawful thing to do when they were kids. But with the rise of the automobile came laws that made it illegal to play in the street. Sadly, it still is.

Our little cul-de-sac was part of Norwalk’s first annexation; just four years after I was born. After we had all grown, my parents moved to Overland Park, Kansas to retire. Overland Park was founded around the same time Norwalk was incorporated in 1905. And like Norwalk, its founding was driven by the railroad, but its expansion was driven by the automobile. The growth of roads in suburban America correlates with the annexation of land throughout the 50s and 60s. Favorable home loans from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) helped too. As did redlining – the discriminatory delineation of red lines on ‘residential security maps’ where home loans were denied due to the area resident’s racial and ethnic origins.

Overland Park annexed developments for decades making it the second most populous city in Kansas (behind Wichita). This area of Johnson Country was developed primarily by the Kroh Brothers Development Company after World War II. They, like the more famous area developer J. C. Nichols, were deemed “community builders” and benefited from building subsidies flowing from the FHA. But the communities they were building were strictly White. Using harsh racist covenants and deeds, they controlled who could buy homes in these suburbs.

Here’s how the deed read for Leawood Estates, a community that shares the eastern border of Overland Park.

“None of said lots or portions of lots shall ever be sold, conveyed, transferred, devised, leased or rented to or used, owned or occupied by any person of Negro blood or by any person who is more than one-fourth of the Semitic race, blood, origin, or extraction, including without limitation in said designation, Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Turks, Persians, Syrians, and Arabians, excluding, however, from the application of this paragraph partial occupancy by bona fide domestic servants employed thereon.”

EBENEZER’S POLAR PLUNGE

These satellite cities just beyond the reach of the city are associated with the post war rise of wealth and the automobile. But this method of mapping and planning had been around much longer. Ebenezer Howard introduced the concept of a ‘Garden City’ in 1895 in England in response to the overcrowding, congestion, and pollution that came with the industrial age. It’s a method of city planning that was cross-referenced by the City Beautiful Movement found in Chicago’s Burnham Plan.

Howard himself had lived in Chicago working as a reporter before returning to England. He was a writer, not an urban planner or architect. His Garden City vision was inspired by a science fiction utopian novel called, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by American Edward Bellamy. It’s a story that starts in the year 2000 in an America that had morphed into a socialist utopia. It was in response to the rising wealth, power, and control of overreaching monopolists and oligarchs that had been taking hold in America in the late 1800s. It may be a good time for us all to be looking backward to Bellamy. Just this week Lina Khan was confirmed as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission — a bi-partisan appointment to an agency that enforces antitrust law by a woman with a reputation for going after oligopolies. Read more about the significance of the appointment of this progressive woman in Matt Stoller’s piece here.

Howard’s vision for Garden Cities was amplified by his diagrammatic conceptual maps that accompanied his utopian ideas in his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-morrow. In keeping with the European cartographic tradition of fixed, top-down, graphical and mathematical overlays atop a morphing organic landscape, he advocated not for a gridded Cartesian plan, but a circular arrangement along polar axes. His idea was to plan self-contained smaller circles of cities around a larger central city all connected by rail creating what he called a “Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities.”

Like his contemporaries, and many today, his view was that the earth is here to be exploited and controlled. In keeping with industrialist and neo-liberal capitalist traditions, he believed the earth to be an endless well of resources and the duty of the White man was to coerce or seize control of the ‘savages’ that had tended to it in reciprocity for millennia. Here’s Howard in his book Garden Cities of To-morrow,

“The planet on which we live has lasted for millions of years, and the race is just emerging from its savagery. Those of us who believe that there is a grand purpose behind nature cannot believe that the career of this planet is likely to be speedily cut short now that better hopes are rising in the hearts of men, and that, having learned a few of its less obscure secrets, they are finding their way, through much toil and pain, to a more noble use of its infinite treasures. The earth for all practical purposes may be regarded as abiding for ever.”

The countryside, with “land laying idle”, was one of the attractions Howard envisioned for his satellite cities. He created a diagram illustrating what he believed were three magnets influencing people’s decisions on where to live and work. The three magnets were Town, Country, and Town-Country. Each magnet included words that described the benefits and detractors of each. Town’s were rich in attractions, but was also full of ‘Slums’ and “Gin Palaces”. The Country “Lacked Amusement” and “Long hours and low wages” but was home to “Wood, meadow, and forest” that was in “Need of reform”. The Town-Country provided the best of both worlds:

“Beauty of Nature, Social opportunity. Fields and Parks of Easy Access. Low rents, High wages. Low prices, no sweating. Field of enterprise, Flow of capital. Pure air and water, Good drainage. Bright homes and gardens, No smoke, No slums. Freedom. Co-operation.”

Sounds pretty good. Utopian, almost. No such utopia has ever been accomplished, but Howard’s ideas continue to inspire designers today. In 2014, British urban design firm, URBED, won the Wolfson Economics Prize for their envisioning of a modern-day garden city, Uxcester.

FEDERAL FINANCING FIX

Howard was intent on making the Town-country attractive to lure people who abandoned the countryside for jobs in the city.

“Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation. It is the purpose of this work to show how a first step can be taken in this direction by the construction of a Town-country magnet; and I hope to convince the reader that this is practicable, here and now, and that on principles which are the very soundest, whether viewed from the ethical or the economic standpoint.”

The Kroh brothers were convinced and saw country “land laying idle” just outside the an increasingly over-crowded Kansas City. They also had visions of a “new civilization” for White residents. But ethical? I don’t think so. Economic opportunity? Absolutely. Long before they set out to plan and build their White suburbs, Kansas City and the U.S. Federal government were already fashioning their own magnets.

As Tulane University’s Director of Urban Studies, Kevin Fox Gotham, writes in his paper, Missed Opportunities, Enduring Legacies: School Segregation and Desegregation in Kansas City, Missouri,

“From the 1920s through the 1950s, the Kansas City Real Estate Board (formed in 1900) subscribed to a national code of real estate ethics that endorsed the view that all-black and racially mixed neighborhoods were inferior to all-white homogenous neighborhoods.”

“During this time, the FHA's Underwriting Manuals referred to the "infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups" as "adverse" to neighborhood stability and advised appraisers to lower the rating of properties in racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods. Although the FHA removed explicitly racist language from its manuals in the 1950s, later manuals continued to refer to the necessity of maintaining "homogenous" neighborhoods and warned of the risk of "dissimilar" groups as "unstable" and "inharmonious".”

Between 1934 and 1962 the FHA insured more than seventy-seven thousand homes in the Kansas City area, but just one percent of them went to Black families. In another paper entitled, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, Gotham quotes a mortgage company president who was Chairman of the board from 1934 to 1965,

“The FHA and VA wouldn’t insure any guarantee loans [in the Kansas City area] unless there was a [racial] restriction involved, and most lenders on residential property were relying heavily upon the FHA and VA for their protection. So that as long as that remained their position, the lender really had no choice but to observe the restriction.”

With local and Federal Government on their side, the Kroh brothers could confidently conjure and craft curvaceous cartographic corridors and cul-de-sacs atop a topographic map of the Kansas countryside. A green garden suburb made up of White people. Their plan also coincided with federal laws dictating the geometry of street design. Streets wide enough to accommodate free parking and a fast flow of traffic, connected curb-cut driveways leading to a garage connected to a cookie-cutter home who’s design was pre-approved by the FHA to streamline bulk lending processes. The Kroh brothers may have been called “community builders”, but it wasn’t so much a community that was being built, but a pre-packaged residential product that was being sold to White people seeking a “new civilization.”

The Kansas City area remains highly segregated to this day. Mostly down the north-south racist dividing line of Troost Avenue. But it wasn’t always that way. In 1950 seventy five percent of the population east of Troost was White. By 1970 that area dwindled to 25 percent. Over ninety-two thousand White people fled to the west side of Troost while nearly sixty-two thousand Black residents moved to the east side. There were, and are, many contributing factors to these facts like skewed school segregation schemes, self-segregation, job availability, and, of course, generations of lucrative loans guarantees to White people.

It’s not clear where race and ethnic origin fit in Ebenezer Howard’s ideas for a garden city utopia. But he did envision idealized democratic communities that were planned and structured in a way as to eliminate social divisions. There is no question people of all races and ethnic origins would like opportunities to live in a idyllic garden suburb. Maybe even on a cul-de-sac featuring a grassy domed circle where children of mixed heritage could race to kick the can.

Given America’s founding fathers believed the United States to be an ongoing democratic experiment for humanity at large — a country that has long beckoned the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free — perhaps we should all take a piece of Ebenezer Howard’s idealism to heart as we seek equitable access to housing in towns of all sizes and locations:

“Besides, as those persons who migrate to the town are among its most energetic and resourceful members, it is but just and right that their more helpless brethren should be able to enjoy the benefits of an experiment which is designed for humanity at large.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io