Trail Trials

Cycling is one of the most efficient modes of transport there is. On a flat, smooth surface, the effort required to cycle is almost negligible. Mountain biking, by contrast, is a sport involving the use of bicycles on terrain unsuitable for bicycles. It can qualify as an ‘extreme sport’, at least insofar as it entails risks of injury and even death, when going down a mountain rather than up. Naturally, it requires a few thousand pounds of specialist equipment, not to mention lycra clothing. God forbid that one should take an ordinary bicycle to a mountain – one lacking suspension, disc brakes, titanium this, specially reinforced that, and Shimano the other – or wear street clothes.

There are, I imagine, many schools of thought as to what mountain biking is all about. To me, unqualified though I may be to comment, if one takes a bicycle to a place unfit for bicycles in order to test one’s bicycling skills, then there should be in the mind of cyclist a degree of acceptance of the unsuitability of the terrain. In other words, rather than wishing the terrain were other than it is, the ‘true’ mountain biker negotiates it successfully through their exceptional dexterity and mastery of the bicycle. If you’re going to wish the terrain were different, then surely you would be better off cycling elsewhere than in the, for want of a better word, wilderness.

An alternative perspective on what mountain biking is all about is evidenced by the introduction of special mountain biking trails in areas fortunate enough to feature appropriate topography. Here, what there is of ‘nature’ is simply a backdrop to a manufactured cycleway that has been engineered to provide the cyclist with the means to self-administer a dose of adrenalin. Berms, jumps, table-tops, and drop-offs are all constructed and maintained, and at quite some expense, with the usual justifications of providing an ‘experience’ and a ‘destination’ that will boost the local economy, put the location on the map, and so forth. Multiple such trails then compete with each other for the attention of the local, regional, national and even global community of adrenalin-junkies to parade their respective equipment, lycra, sunglasses, death-wishes and mid-life crises. Were it not for the skills and mastery of the bicycle that are also required to navigate them without injury, such trails might as well be roller-coasters. Both are fun, though.

This is what ‘nature’ can become. Not a place to be, not a place to adapt to, but a place to be adapted so that people can have a thrilling ‘experience’ from educating themselves to risking their lives, usually signed by some idiotic flapping sail-shaped signs and accompanied by a cafeteria, gift shop and/or visitor centre. Somewhere to ‘go to’ with your bikes strapped to the roof of your SUV, wearing special clothes you wouldn’t wear every day. Or which you do wear every day as a sign to others that you’re the kind of person who might head off on an adventure at any minute, or have just come back from one.

The two different attitudes to mountain biking, then, reflect a fundamental dichotomy in how we relate to nature as humans. In one, we learn to accept what is there and work with it. In the other, what is there is not good enough, and we change it so that it fulfils its ‘purpose’ to us better. The former is how we live in nature and see ourselves as part of it; the latter is a trail to the ecocyborg we have already ridden a long way along.

Cognition and Hypocognition

With my colleague, Bruce Edmonds, I have finally managed to publish a paper mentioning the ecocyborg. Putting a concept that has, to some extent been something personal, into a scientific article — particularly a co-written one — felt a bit like an ‘exposure’. Was this thought something that could withstand the scrutiny of peer review? Seemingly yes (though not without major revisions…).

How on earth did I end up writing the piece with Bruce? The context is a special issue of Futures on ‘Simulation and Dissimulation’ put together in the Covid crisis, in which various governments from local to national used computer simulations as part of the decision-making process. Though a potential source of consternation, it seemed important to emphasize that decision-making processes not using simulation are no less potentially flawed. After all, in complex systems, whatever makes us think humans necessarily have the cognitive wherewithal to make ‘the right’ decisions? ‘Hypocognition’ is a term apparently coined by social anthropologist Robert Levy in a study of Tahitians. It has been adopted by Kruger and Dunning to describe the psychological phenomenon in which people with insufficient knowledge can overestimate their capability. It is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from. It seemed a bit hypocognitive to implicitly assume that humans would definitely make good decisions without computers by raising the issue of dis-simulations in the first place. (Not that we should necessarily trust computer simulations any more than we should trust other humans…)

That’s all very well, but where does the ecocyborg come in? Once we accept that we need to augment our cognition with computer simulations, we have crossed a line. Computers have become embedded in decisions about humans’ relationships with the environment. We think and behave differently in the environment as a result, and the environment itself is then other than it would have been had we not used computers. This isn’t necessarily full ecocyborg yet, but it’s certainly a step on the path.

It felt a bit like a ‘revelation’ that there were no social-ecological systems as such — when microplastics exist at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the top of Mount Everest, and in placentas, technology has embedded itself everywhere. Just as there are no ‘pristine’ ecosystems untouched by humanity, there are no ‘pure’ social-ecological systems untouched by technology. That seems to be a radical claim to make, but I realize as I write this that I believe it.

The surprising bit of the article to me was the conclusion. It was Bruce who wrote the text for the concluding sentence of the article, “An alternative to being prejudiced against these strange new beings is to embrace them and educate them to be well-adjusted and useful members of our society.” This was so different to my instinctive reactions, which I think could be largely characterized as fear and grief. But however much we may be afraid of the power of technology (most major human innovations from agriculture to the internet have been the subject of anxiety) and grieve the loss of Nature, there needs to be an acceptance that we are all, through our daily choices and behaviours, eliminating Nature, changing the climate, and radically altering our relationship with the environment. Wouldn’t it be better to do that mindfully, rather than by ‘accident’ as a by-product of making our lives more convenient and comfortable? And if our minds are not up to the job, is it so wrong to augment our cognition with computation?

Becoming gods

The other day I was a virtual attendee at a workshop in Colorado. The main topic of discussion was ‘climate intervention‘. Climate intervention is deliberate human activity aimed at changing the climate – typically with a view to ameliorating the effects of climate change. There are various technologies that could be used for this purpose, from planting trees through injecting chemicals (such as sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere, to putting giant reflectors in space.

I was not ready for the impact the discussion of all this would have on my emotional state. Though I have attended academic events on the general theme of sustainability for several years, this was the first climate change specific event I’d been to. Though I see from my smartwatch data that my heart rate was no greater than normal when working, I did find myself experiencing a rising sense of panic. A lump was in my throat, and I could not settle in the evening. I did not want us to undertake these interventions.

Neil Stephenson‘s book ‘Termination Shock‘ explores a scenario around geoengineering. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the main point I want to make anyway is that this meeting I was attending was essentially discussing seriously something that has been the subject of a relatively recent science fiction novel. Neil Stephenson foresaw the metaverse in my favourite book, Snow Crash. I hope Termination Shock isn’t another dystopian prophesy.

The motivation for undertaking such drastic action is clear in the opening passages of another cli-fi book, The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. These passages contain a scene in which millions are killed by a heat wave that is unsurvivable without air conditioning, which leads to a power cut. We concentrate a lot on temperature when discussing the climate. It is 1.5C we are trying to limit ourselves to, and when we fail as we are expected to do before the end of the decade, every 0.1C of mean annual global surface temperature increase we prevent is still important. No mention of humidity, however, which is important for two reasons. First, increasing mean annual temperature and increasing humidity are expected to coincide as warmer air can hold more moisture. Second, the combination of heat and humidity is what kills us through hyperthermia.

So-called ‘wet bulb’ temperatures above 35C lead to the human body being unable to cool itself through sweating, and breaching this threashold is made more likely through climate change. Of course, it’s not like a 34.9C wet-bulb temperature is fine, and 35C is fatal. Heatwaves with 28C wet bulb temperature led to high excess deaths in Europe. However, 35C wet bulb is the point at which even a healthy person cannot maintain their body at the right temperature due simply to the laws of physics, with death in hours.

There is, then, a risk as the climate warms, that more parts of the world will become uninhabitable to humans without appropriate accommodation and technology. Since higher humidity is associated with coastal areas, where many of the world’s largest cities are located, these problems will be faced by more populous areas, creating pressure for migration, building and infrastructure design, energy use, technology development, and geoengineering. Essentially, we build ecocyborgs in these areas, people living there run away to more inhabitable parts of the world, and/or we modify the whole world’s climate in the opposite direction to that we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution. Of these, only migration avoids choices that entail learning how to make uninhabitable areas inhabitable on the kind of large scale that would be needed for humans to live on other planets than Earth. Our behaviour is putting us into a corner in which ecocyborgs and planetary-scale geoengineering become necessary for our survival.

Time Travel

Einsteinian physics apparently tells us to conceive spacetime as a single concept rather than space and time as distinct. Even so, it seems to be the case that we can choose to travel in space in a way that we cannot do in time. The human sensory experience of spacetime is, at first glance, one in which there are at least practical differences between space and time as concepts.

Storm Arwen, which swept down the UK from the north on Friday 26 November 2021 gave me an opportunity to look again at the experience of space and time. Winds gusting at 150km/h and more from an atyical direction (gales usually come from the southwest) blew trees down near powerlines, and hundreds of thousands of people, including me, lost electricity for several days. The trees’ suicidal protest against the ecocyborg saw them entangling themselves in wires, posts and transformers throughout Scotland, but especially in the northeast.

The loss of electricity meant different things for different people, but for me: no lighting, heating, hot water, cooker, internet, television, or mobile phone signal. Burning wood in the open fireplace provided a little heat, and we could toast crumpets on the fire. Candles provided a little light in the long nights of the late Scottish autumn. The Storm had taken us back in time over a hundred years, to when houses had no electricity.

While the ecocyborg frantically repairs itself to restore what we might laughably (given its unrecognizability to our ancestors) call ‘normality’, it doesn’t need to take a storm to travel back (and hence also forward) in time in similar ways. Mobile phone signal coverage on various bands means you can travel in space and go back to a time when you couldn’t stream films on a mobile phone, further back to when you could barely use the internet, or further still to when communication of any kind with a mobile phone was not possible.

Travel further in space, and you can reach times when households in the UK typically had no electricity. For millions of people, mainly in the Global South, life without electricity is just life. Access to safe drinking water is also a daily reality for one in three people globally, while two thirds of children aged 3-17 have no internet access at home. Hence, from a sensory experience perspective as humans, we can travel to the future and to the past simply by moving in space over the surface of the planet.

Clearly, people have lived, and do live, their whole lives without facilities that I take for granted, and find myself struggling when they are taken away. The technology permeating our everyday environments changes who we are, what we do, and what we expect. It shifts our skillset and adjusts our thinking. We are physically and mentally different as a result of technology in comparison with a counterfactual world where that technology is absent. Technology, through supposedly empowering us, also changes us: it is not, then, our pre-technology selves that are empowered; that self ‘dies’. Rather, it is our post-technology selves that are empowered – who that self is, is a function not only of the pre-technology self, but also of the technology itself, and in ways we do not control.

At some point, we may find ourselves in a position whereby the pre-technology self cannot be rediscovered. For example, if we did not have a fireplace in our house, or anywhere outside where a fire could be lit, or indeed anything to burn, or if lighting fires were illegal, then we could not ‘rediscover’ selves that used fire rather than electricity to keep warm and cook food; the skills and knowledge would eventually be lost. This critical threshold is the transition to cyborghood, and we become entirely dependent on the ecocyborg to maintain us. We are simulacra, being simulated on the ecocyborg.

Why

I started this blog with a view to giving expression to a discomfort I feel in the relationship(s) between humans and their environment; perhaps more specifically, the relationship the humans belonging to the culture and society to which I belong have with their environment. I am not sure whether it is possible to be precise about that discomfort, not least because (I have always found) feelings and emotions to be inconsistent, imprecise and transient. Scientists (and I claim to belong to that profession) are not supposed to like such things. It’s not as though they can be usefully applied or relied on. Further, there is a normative imperative to ‘objectivity’, though perhaps a little old-fashioned: a cold statement of facts, evidence and theory that supposedly exist irrespective of who discovers them or communicates them. This leads to over-use of the passive voice. Well, I wanted a space where I could write publicly about the ‘irrational’ reactions I’ve had to the facts, evidence and theory to which I have been exposed. The kind of material you can’t put in a paper to a journal.

The best metaphor for the discomfort I feel is an experience I had many years ago spending 24 hours with a tube running through my nose, down my oesophagus and into my stomach, connected at the other end to a data monitor keeping an eye on the pH of my stomach acid. It was bearable – sometimes you could even forget it was there – but it wasn’t comfortable. It was the intrusion of a machine into my daily routine, an ever-present augmentation of my physicality that was there to watch over me. The discomfort of the ecocyborg manifesto is like that, but without knowing or being able to see that the monitor or tube is there.

Putting emotions to one side, as I reflect on this discomfort, I have also found myself often to be in two minds (sometimes more…): are these really things to feel uncomfortable about? How should things be otherwise such that I might feel better about our relationship with the environment? And would that really be ‘better’? In sharing these thoughts, therefore, I share a conflicting mess, a confused bundle of half-thoughts and distracted imagery, a flickering screen channelling a noise-polluted signal. It is, for others who have read the works of A. A. Milne, the thoughts that occur in the gaps between life’s bumps as I am dragged downstairs, held by one ankle.

A manifesto is usually associated with a series of promises made by a political party, with a view to persuading the electorate that said party should be put in government. Manifestos thus, in some sense, outline the policies of their authors. The ecocyborg manifesto is, however, not mine; it is instead an observation, a manifesto I ascribe to my social, ecological and physical environment. Insofar as this environment is inanimate, such ascription could be open to the same criticisms as are levelled at Dennett’s Intentional Stance, or to non-animal agents in Actor Network Theory, or indeed, to any religion interpreting environmental outcomes in terms of the whims of fickle deities. I don’t particularly care: this is a mirror I hold up to the environment – if it is capable of decision-making, let it react as it sees fit. For now, the mirror is more important to me than the reaction. Sometimes, emotions and feelings beget insight.