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.

Augmented Reality

Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles have taken augmented reality (AR) to the next level. Rather than trying to put digital content onto the real world, they convert the real world into digital content and augment that. (This, at least, is my reading of the ‘virtually lag-free’ statement on Apple’s web page.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series occasionally riffs on the potentially dystopian aspects of AR, such as in the episode ‘Men Against Fire‘ and ‘White Christmas‘. But AR has some interesting implications from an ecocyborg perspective.

These googles are effectively augmenting their humans — they, like many everyday IT tools we take for granted — turn us into cyborgs while using them. Critically, however, they are a ‘shortcut’ to ecocyborgs. They can change our perceptions of the environment around us digitally, rather than through engineering. Do ecocyborgs necessarily have to be meat (and/or veg) ware? Must they be entirely physical phenomena, rather than at least partly virtual? By altering how we see the world around us, these kinds of tool might be able to help us live comfortably in spaces we would ‘naturally’ find uncomfortable. It is not so difficult to imagine a company running your habitation telling you to leave your goggles on for ‘the best user experience’…

Much more interesting, however, is that the virtual augmentation of physical space manifests multiple realities. If everyone is wearing goggles, there is no longer a single, common, shared world-out-there to discuss. Instead there are multiple, independently constructed realities — parallel digital overlays on the (single) physical world — that cannot necessarily be unified. Ecocyborgs are the death of nature; augmented reality the death of science. Sort of. You’ll still die if you walk off a physical cliff your goggles have told you is a more pleasing plain. But maybe your grieving friends can use simulations of you to continue to interact with their conceptualizations of you after you are dead. (Another theme explored by Black Mirror.) Perhaps this can be done so seamlessly that they don’t even know you are dead — for them, you are still alive, so long as they keep the goggles on.

The potential of AR is immense — imagine visiting a ruin and being able to see it restored. The meeting use case explored on the Vision Pro website could render travelling for conferences a thing of the past. However, the ability to wilfully alter one’s reality is a power that can easily be misused. Your goggles could, for example, ensure all the people you see are beautiful people — which is the thin end of a potentially very sinister and/or creepy wedge.

A central principle behind the ecocyborg is the coevolution of (post-)humans, (post-)environments and technology. We change our environment, supposedly imposing our will on it — making it more ‘us’ — but forget that changing our environment changes our ‘selves’, which logically and ironically makes us less ‘us’. The self that made the decision to change its environment is not the self that ends up living those changes. Each of these changes is mediated through technology, which also coevolves with humans and their environments in accordance with demand, materials, trade and pollution.

AR allows us to change at least the appearance of our environment with no more physical effort than the click of a button or the swipe of a hand. How will that change us? Will it make us more tolerant of deficiencies in unaugmented reality? Why go to the effort of mowing the lawn when AR can just show you your garden with a mown lawn rather than the ‘unsightly’ long grass? Or will it make us less satisfied with the way things are because AR is always showing us something better? Will we become so attached to AR devices that we wear them habitually, or even start to experience mental or physiological symptoms when the devices are switched off or run out of power? Are there religious uses for AR? Maybe fundamentalists could use AR to show demons and angels fighting over strangers’ souls, or perhaps even censor material around them that is contrary to dogma. Flat earthers can see the world as though it really is flat. Could AR mean the end of the beauty industry? Perhaps we will generate avatars of ourselves for others in AR to see us how we would like to be seen… Will it then be rude — even discriminatory — not to use AR to see people how they want others to see them? And what about the clashes of different people’s augmentations of reality? Will we fight over them? Will we hack others’ ARs to force them to see things our way — or even to see a flat plain when there is a cliff? At a larger scale, will companies pay AR manufacturers to cover up evidence of environmental misdeeds — nobody sees the polluted river unless they take their headset off — by then a sort of ‘red pill‘ experience?

More importantly, does AR mean the ecocyborg is no longer necessary? I think not. The Vision Pro is to sight what the Sony Walkman was to hearing. But humans have many other senses and needs, which ecocyborgs will be required to satisfy: hunger, thirst, thermal comfort and immune system training at a basic level, but also gadgets and the energy to power them, sanitation, circular consumption and distribution of materials, and space to allow free expression.

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?

Non-sense

A bear’s sense of smell is several hundred times better than a human’s. An eagle’s eyesight 4-5 times better. Birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins, bats and elephants have amazing hearing. The superior senses of various animals to those of humans emphasize to me how much more embedded they are in their environment. If we do not sense our environment in such depth, we cannot process information about it. If we cannot process information about it, what are we perceiving? How ‘off’ can our perceptions be and us still expect to survive in the environment?

Living ‘in’ the environment rather than ‘on‘ it means perceiving it in depth, and responding to those perceptions. Yet in comparison with non-human animals, it seems our perceptions of the environment are anything but deep. However, there is a fascinating podcast about spiders I highly recommend. In it, we learn about how a spider’s web is part of its ‘umwelt‘, an extension to its body that enhances its perception of the environment. The web is, in other words, a part of the spider — even if it seems separate. Technology has done the same to us. I can know about a fire or a flood on the other side of the world through the internet (the World-Wide Web). That web is part of my umwelt, and my senses extend far beyond the immediate environment my eyes can see, my skin can feel, my nose can smell, or my ears can hear. In a way, technology has corrected for the lack of sensory depth provided by nature. If I so choose, I can learn about the environment from the microbial to the galactic, all through the internet. There is even a livestream of the view of the earth from the space station — something no non-human animal could ever have seen.

The separateness of the spider and its web emphasizes a further point: while we may see cyborgs in sci-fi as the melding of meatware and hardware, there is in fact no need to go as far as surgical implants to become a cyborg. We can extend our umwelt through physical interaction with external technology. Thus, using technology, be it a land-line phone, radio, television, or the internet, already makes us cyborgs: our sensory perceptions have been enhanced; neurones in our brains are storing knowledge we could not access without these technologies, as well as information on how to use them. Humans began to become cyborgs with the invention of the telegraph.

There is another, more interesting lesson from the spider and its web. Unlike spiders, we share the technology used to extend our umwelt. Hence, in a way that was never possible previously, our umwelts intersect. Specifically, if a web is part of the spider’s sensory machinery — not to be seen as separate from the spider, and the internet is similarly part of ours, then since we don’t each have our own internet, we are now parts of each other, and the internet has made us so. Our consciousnesses are now interconnected. This is an astonishing thing for me to find myself writing — a sort of techno-mysticism (I am not the first to coin that term).

To separate us from the internet is to deprive us of a sense, like losing a sense of smell. But more than this, it deprives us of a connectivity with each other that is now part of our everyday existence. No wonder people joke about WiFi (and, funnily enough, battery life — something only a cyborg would worry about) needing to be added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I suggested earlier that we can have superior, deep, senses of the environment through technology, emphasizing ‘if we so choose’. The internet also contains a huge amount of material that is nothing to do with sensing or learning about the environment; indeed it contains active misinformation, as well as fantasy. The internet can be used to escape from the environment rather than perceive it in greater depth. It can subsitute our senses of the environment with senses of alternative realities — non-sense. These alternative realities are now parts of our realities, affecting our neural wiring, discourse and behaviour. As much as the internet can enhance our awareness of the environment, then, it can also enhance our misperception of it, and how ‘off’ our behaviour is, as I raised in the opening paragraph. The question remains, then, of whether we can still expect to survive in the environment…

Systemic gaslighting

Gaslighting is a form of abuse in a relationship by which one partner psychologically manipulates the other into believing they are mad. Wikipedia tells me it’s from a 1940s film called ‘Gaslight‘, which is why I sometimes find the term difficult to remember: I haven’t watched the film.

Though mainly focused on abusive sexual partnerships, gaslighting can also happen in the workplace as a tool for controlling employees when managers’ systems don’t work, or simply because some people are unpleasant and enjoy that sort of thing. For a brief spell, I acted as a union rep: the role is essentially to act as a companion for people when the workplace relationship has broken down. It is surprising how often people internalize problems that workplace management systems have failed to anticipate or handle well. Sometimes, people do go a bit mad — most commonly over-interpreting behaviours of others to look for signs that they are being singled out. (I hesitate to use the term ‘paranoia’.)

Managers of workplaces design systems to ensure they run smoothly and achieve the organization’s goals. Into those designs, they bring their worldview, culture and way of thinking. Coupled with the authority they are accorded, it can be hard for them to admit that their perfectly reasonable seeming system is flawed in a way that systemically prejudices some people from thriving in it. Hence, there is ‘something wrong’ with those who do not, and the temptation to abuse the power that comes with their authority in defence of the designed system.

Beyond the workplace, this can scale up to the national level, where laws are made that, to some extent or another, favour some people over others — not necessarily intentionally so. Unintentional discrimination isn’t on the same level as gaslighting. But the tools of psychological manipulation used by abusers to gaslight their victim are deployed by states and media corporations through propaganda and debating styles: withholding information, countering information that does not fit the abuser’s perspective, discounting information provided to them, jocular verbal abuse, and trivializing people’s sense of self-worth.

This is not to allow that every individual has a sacred right to behave how they please, with no regard for the welfare of others. This is not about ethics and moral conduct: the Global Ethic Project is about finding universal values that cut across all the world’s religions. Rather, this is a concern about how systems of management and governance can lead to individuals whose moral conduct is no worse than anyone else’s ending up believing there is something wrong with them, arising simply from ‘arbitrary’ personal characteristics. Further, it is the about the efforts taken by those wanting to defend the systems to reinforce such beliefs.

When we design the ecosystems in which we live, is there any reason to believe that similar phenomena will not occur? Think about how some engineers treat users of computer software who don’t understand how it works. When you log a helpdesk call, is there not a tendency for them to give you the impression you’re the one with the problem, not the software? What will happen when we live in designed ecosystems, then? When we have a problem with the way things work, with the ‘services’ ‘provisioned’ by the ecosystem (language too awful to comprehend but nonetheless used), won’t we be made to feel like we are the ones at fault? “No-one else has this problem,” you can hear them saying. And bit-by-bit you’ll be undermined and either learn to live with a permanent sense of discomfort that something about the whole world in which you live is wrong, or go mad.

Think about the portrayal of environmental protesters in the media: not typically as rational, sensible, ‘normal’ humans with legitimate concerns, but as luddites, NIMBYs, crusties, anarchists, marijuana addicts, and tree-huggers. Whether effective in making the individuals concerned feel undermined or not, isn’t it at least attempted gaslighting? And isn’t it really about defending a system that works very well indeed for some, but not for others, and especially not the environment?

At the same time, it is not as though Nature is entirely neutral, except, perhaps insofar as lacking intentionality implies neutrality. There’s a reason we have innovated over the millennia to make our lives more convenient, to cure the sick and to ease suffering. As a mother, Nature is somewhat harsh. The weak, the sick, the reckless, the unlucky: all can be victims of her whims. As humans I think we have the ambition at least ideally to be more compassionate and forgiving. Some ecosystems simply do not provide for the needs of humans without modification and invention. Arguably, and perhaps in her efforts to defend herself, Nature also has some gaslighting behaviours: she withholds information and certainly does little to give one the impression of being worth anything.

3%

The Brazilian dystopian sci-fi series 3% imagines a future where selection for a life of luxury (as opposed to one of squalor for the 97%) is based on a supposedly meritocratic ‘Process’ taken by twenty year-olds each year. The Process reminded me of taking exams and going to job interviews, with the Krypton Factor and the Hunger Games thrown into the mix. The desperation to succeed, with all that meant for a relatively easy life, is certainly reminiscent of the pressure young people are put under to find their place in society. Thankfully some of the more sadistic and potentially fatal elements of the Process are not typically part of the process of getting qualifications and a job in contemporary society.

But I was less interested in what might be seen as a commentary on our shared ‘belief’ in the system that ends up with a few having lives of privilege and many not. It was the architecture that fascinated me. The Wikipedia page on 3% says the location for filming scenes depicting the Process are at a stadium in São Paolo called Neo Química Arena. The Process is brutal — it seems amazing the eponymous 3% who make it through don’t spend the rest of their supposedly privileged lives needing therapy for PTSD. What I found interesting was how believable it was that such a Process could take place in the building depicted.

I doubt there are many buildings that have not, at some point or another, been the scenes of one or more acts of violence or dehumanization. But clearly, to me at least, some buildings provide a context in which such things are more plausible. There’s more to it than that, however. While any house, even ones depicted on chocolate boxes, could be places where domestic abuse happens, only certain buildings get the special status of being places where systemic dehumanization occurs: where people are given identification numbers, and are measured, assessed, quantified, and traded off against each other. To me, rightly or wrongly, such buildings are scrupulously tidy, with glass, concrete and steel much in evidence. There are long corridors, big spaces, high ceilings, and the audible ‘clop-clop’ of power-dressed women strutting about in high-heels.

Does architecture beget violence? At the risk of tripping myself up over Godwin’s Law, Nazis (and fascists generally) had distinctive architectural styles, as indeed did Stalinists. Minimally, it’s supportable that architecture and politics are not orthogonal. Space can be used to manipulate your feelings. Maybe large spaces make you feel smaller. Often you have to be careful what you say in such spaces because the sound carries so well. These diminish your ego that bit more — you restrain yourself; who knows whether that might be just enough to topple you over into docility? Perhaps tidy spaces make you anxious about your humanity — the shed skin, hair, snot, burst spots, sweat, farts and earwax you cannot help but leave in a trail behind you everywhere you go. And you adopt behaviours and routines that diminish that anxiety in response; behaviours you would not otherwise have done. The design of the space has made you do that. The architect has controlled you without ever having met you.

Interestingly, however, research by Stephan Trüby reported in an Archinect article points out that right-wing extremists often like remote rural areas, where they can enclose themselves away from the multicultural complexity of urban life. The same article also cites a study by Neeraj Bhatia correlating population density with support for Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US election, and lack thereof with support for Donald Trump. Indeed, in the UK, the results of general elections when depicted on a map often look like a sea of blue (the colour of the Conservative Party) in rural constituencies with a few dots of red (the colour of the Labour Party) in urban areas, even when Labour wins.

Are we then to infer that rural scenery — forests, meadows, marshes, mountains, bogs, lakes, hills, rivers, beaches and fields — somehow inspire right-wing sentiments? Is God a Tory? Nature can make you feel small, but not in a way that is dehumanizing, I think. At least the ‘trail’ I referred to before that you leave behind you is welcomed in natural environments as something will feed on your detritus. I suspect other factors are at play in why rural areas have more right-wing politics. But then, can I sustain the argument that buildings can turn us into compliant little fascists?

Before rushing to the conclusion that violence is everywhere, regardless of space, and besides observing that the emotions and feelings natural environments inspire in us should not automatically be seen as ‘good’, it’s worth asking about the alternative. If we can design spaces that make us violent, can we design spaces that make us peaceful? From a quick search of the internet, it seems this question has been the subject of a conference in 2019, and an initiative in California, with an interesting leaflet articulating some of the ways people are psychologically affected by space, and the potential for them to be discriminatory. Interestingly, that leaflet suggests that views of nature reduce stress and anxiety, making people less inclined to violence.

With apologies to those who are right-leaning politically, as I regret to say I cannot dissociate violence, dehumanization and environmental destruction with such views, it then seems all the more remarkable that those in rural areas would be more rather than less Conservative. I can understand a desire to conserve (with a small ‘c’) the nature that surrounds them every day, and perhaps the fear is that ‘others’ will destroy the nature they hold dear. Another view would be that insofar as such people are lords and masters of all they survey (even if that is just a large garden), they have lost all sense of anything other than themselves. Besides, rural areas are not all natural landscapes; instead (in the UK at least) they are mostly industrial. Nature is no less subdued by insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides, weed killers, muirburn, ploughs and chainsaws than it is by concrete and tarmac. In that sense, rural is just another kind of urban — urban with different materials — and we should ask the same questions about the effects these environments have on our psyche that we do of architects and the environments they design.

Gardens

Gardens are the places where humans live out their fantasies about how their relationship with nature should be. Supposed oases of calm and tranquility in the midst of the ‘juggling’, ‘plate-spinning’ and other metaphorical acrobatics of modern life, they are small areas of designed land where we can exert control. Oases indeed they often are: for wildlife they can offer a refuge from the urban and rural deserts we have made. Hedgehogs, toads, bees, foxes, robins – all are noted to depend on gardens for their survival.

However, gardens can also be quite the opposite of oases. Gardening could be said to be the skill of making something grow somewhere it doesn’t belong whilst carefully removing everything that does. Roses, lavenders, peonies, rhododendrons, rosemary – all non-native plants common in gardens. Many are utterly useless to wildlife – to ‘native’ nature (though the picture is complicated); many cannot thrive on British soils and in British climates without perpetual dousing in lime, fungicides and insecticides. Even if derived from a native species, the cultivars themselves have been carefully bred to highlight those aspects of the wild plant deemed useful or beautiful. The result is a vile, gaudy array of cosmetically enhanced specimens; as fake as silicon breasts, botox smiles and hair implants.

The worst thing that one can ever do to a garden is to leave it to its own devices. A so-called ‘overgrown’ garden is known to reduce the value of the houses in the neighbourhood by several thousand pounds. (What kind of word is overgrown in a world of declining biodiversity?) We all know the kind of people who live in houses with such gardens, and we don’t want them for neighbours. Wild, unkempt people with tattoos; smokers, probably on drugs, with hundreds of illegitimate, neglected, barefoot children all half-siblings of each other, terrorizing the neighbourhood with foul language, greasy hair and second hand clothes. In the UK, Community Protection Notice legislation can be used to criminalize people who don’t keep their garden tidy. Some councils even have webpages where you can report an untidy garden (at the time of writing, four I could find were Barking and Dagenham, Bristol, Gateshead, Newcastle-under-Lyme). Put simply, we cannot bear for anyone to break the illusion that we are the masters of nature, and in some cases, enforce the fantasy with the law.

Far from being patches of peace, gardens are landscapes of violence and oppression. Trees are clipped and pruned, lawns mowed, edges strimmed, hedges trimmed. Each task has a special tool of whirring mechanical blades to keep nature in order. The chemical industry is also on-hand with solutions for problems that blades cannot so easily solve. In garden centres the country over, shelves are stacked with fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, weedkillers and slug pellets. Food for the things we like; poisons for those we don’t. Some gardeners simply give up and opt for convenient, low-maintenance suppression with tarmac, paving and chippings.

Provision for wildlife is equally selective. We napalm a dandelion (the seeds of which I have watched goldfinches eating), but import tons of peanuts and sunflower seeds from around the world to feed the birds with. I have seen sparrows dust-bathing in molehills, but we trap and kill moles, and build our own bird baths. Indeed, birds do well out of gardens, because we like their pretty singing. Baths, houses, feeders; a panoply of goods are available to attract them to your ‘space’. It simply doesn’t occur to us to feed the birds by planting native species (or allowing them to seed and grow of their own accord), which not only provide seeds that birds can eat, but also attract insects to provide further food. But that wouldn’t involve buying things; that would mean we weren’t doing our bit for the economy as well as for nature. Mammals fare rather less well. We don’t mind hedgehogs, but rats, mice, squirrels, and moles are not provided for. Amphibians and reptiles are generally forgotten about, and insects and other invertebrates are, if not pests, then just plain disgusting; exceptions are bumble bees, ladybirds, butterflies (not moths or caterpillars) and worms.

Gardens are displays of wealth and power, and hence of self-esteem. The further we can take the larger area of land from whatever would happen to it if we did nothing, and the more maintenance required to sustain it thus, the greater our wealth and power and sense of self-worth. Lawns used to be such a display, because they required teams of gardeners with scythes to maintain them. Pathetically, lawns continue to reflect status, even though machines replace the gardeners. The lawn is a deliberate area of monoculture. One species only is to be there, and that is the particular variety of grass planted. Clover, daisies and moss are not to be present, regardless of the fact that clover is a valuable source of nectar for bees (several species of which are in decline), and the UK’s moss (and other bryophyte species) are of global significance.

Even in the Bible, gardens are scenes of sin and betrayal. From Eden to Gethsemane, gardens are where the perfect is soiled, the godly profaned. Gardens model our relationship with the environment and for once the Bible truly is prophetic. Our sin is excessively focusing on our own aesthetic; our betrayal the direct and indirect destruction of the species that quietly keep our planet alive.

Ecosystem ‘Services’

The concept of ecosystem services has its origin in the desperation of ecologists to provide some means of expressing the value of ecosystems in the dominant language of the day: that of the marketplace. For some reason the values of such things as flowers, crows, oak trees, marram grass, basking sharks, garden snails and millipedes are not apparent unless they can be expressed in monetary terms capturing the contribution they make to sustaining human existence. Without monetary values thus expressed, they are, in economic terms, ‘externalities‘; things that cannot be factored in to the analysis. The proper way to treat an externality is to acknowledge it, and to include that acknowledgement in the decision-making process. In practice, externalities are simply things to be ignored. Many argue, therefore, that ecosystem services, contingent valuation, and other efforts to express the value of the ecosystem in the language of the market place, are pragmatic approaches that at least prevent these matters being ignored by the “blind leaders of the blind“. Nobody seems to talk of doing a proper job of economic analysis in the first place…

The concept of ecosystem services is, however, a compromise too far. The language of ‘services’ is confused with the consumer culture. It implies we have a choice. We do not. We are not customers of the ecosystems we inhabit (even if we are consumers of it); and if we are not happy with the service provided we have only a limited capacity to move: We cannot currently take our custom to another planet, for example; and even within our home planet, people’s capacity to move may be limited by wealth, health, or institutional barriers such as immigration controls. This monopoly of planet Earth over our location breaks the assumptions of market theory; for now, it is one monopoly we are powerless to prevent. But those with paranoid tendencies might suggest it is no coincidence that the hegemony of the market place is responsible for environmental destruction on a massive scale. How else are we to end the tyranny of Nature’s monopoly?

Services also implies substitutability. Suppose we design a machine that performs an ecosystem service more efficiently than that provided by Nature. As rational consumers we should discard the natural system in favour of the newly invented machine. For example, bees provide a pollination service for a number of crops we consume, including almonds. Latterly, however, this service has become unreliable and inefficient. There is a gap in the market for a more reliable pollinator. Perhaps one day this gap could be filled using advances in nanotechnology. Nanobees would be solar powered robots that would collect pollen, and redistribute it where it is needed. These nanobees could be designed to focus on particular species, so that pollen is used efficiently and sent only where it is useful. The nanobees could perform genetic analysis of the pollen to optimise the flowers it fertilises to deliver a better cropped product to the consumer. The nanobees could also collect nectar and deliver it to a honey manufacturing machine. Plus, nanobees would not sting. With the development of nanobees, no-one need ever depend upon unreliable, inefficient natural bees again. The bee would be irrelevant to human existence; if bees could not make a living for themselves from whatever humans do not need, then they could safely be allowed to go extinct. That is progress.

It is one thing to discard an old car for a new one that is more efficient, or to throw away a phone and replace it with a shinier model with more features. Surely it is a different thing altogether to discard a species in favour of a machine? Clearly there is a moral dimension. Another ‘externality’ then, but one that has in the past enabled us (albeit not without a significant struggle) to legislate against slavery despite enormous economic incentives not to. That said, slavery is still a significant contemporary problem. John O’Neill, now at the University of Manchester, has made a damning critique of contingent valuation, arguing that it is either bribery (if you are paid to compensate you for the loss of an ecosystem amenity), or extortion (if you are asked to pay to stop someone destroying it).

But the moral dimension disappears when all the consumer sees is the (fiscal) price. Suppose nanobees could be mass-produced for a fraction of a penny each. All you will see in the shop is better quality produce at a lower price. Bee-pollinated fruit won’t be as good, and it will cost more. How much more will you be prepared to pay for the poorer quality product just to save the bee? There is the extortion. Not in your face, not backed up with menaces, but side by side on the shelf, passively waiting for you to decide which to buy. Is this scenario so far-fetched? Exactly the same phenomenon occurs today with fair-trade produce (how much more are you prepared to pay to ensure the producer got a fair price?), and similar ‘ethical’ labelling: organic, cruelty-free, labour behind the label; there’s one for every flavour of do-gooder. And if you can’t afford to pay the extra? Thus the marketplace corrupts concern for anything other than money into something bourgeois. Ethics is merely status-signalling.

Ecosystems are not our servants; indeed, given our dependence on them, the relationship should be quite the opposite. The problem comes when we evaluate ecosystems and their constituent parts in terms of the transformations they achieve – their function: the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, sunlight and water; the manufacture of salicylic acid; the pollination of almonds. Function can be seen in quite mathematical terms – the domain of the function is a series of chemicals in particular locations, and any physical resources (sunlight, heat, etc.) before the transformation made by an organism; the range is the same after. The transformation is the mapping the function performs. If we see things purely in terms of functions, we can ask ourselves whether a particular transformation can be achieved in a different way. An ecosystem is thus simply a series of functions that, if it is sustainable, forms, in broad terms, a circle – a loop where the domains of each function in the ecosystem are the ranges of others – for every producer of oxygen, there is a consumer.

The services culture takes this further, attributing human values to functions. These values give purpose to an ecosystem that is otherwise without purpose (simply a self-perpetuating loop that repeats until it can’t). Functions that have high human value are preferred to functions that have low human value. Where humans have the power to interfere, the circle is distorted: the distortion of the circle shows the values, the degree of distortion the power. Hence the forest becomes a field, the meadow a motorway, and the floodplain a housing estate. Ecosystems are circles within circles – each life its own self-replicating loop. What is distorted in the ecosystem is also distorted in the organism, all to reflect human values. So it is that the aurochs becomes the cow, the jungle fowl the broiler chicken, the boar the pig; thus does grass become wheat, rye and oats; and jungle becomes cattle ranch and palm oil plantations. Everything, from individual plants and animals to biomes, is distorted according to its utility. The circle is broken and becomes a line: the line of human progress, leaving in its wake chemicals that are not broken down or used by other parts of the system.

We Walk Among Them

The belief that one is an alien is usually associated with some form of insanity presumably brought on by reading too much science fiction; and, it may be imagined, with a desire to attract attention in a society where it is all too easy to feel ignored. Yet I feel like I think an alien might. I dwell less in my environment than on it. I look around the surrounding countryside, and I have no idea how to survive in it. I don’t know what plants are safe to eat or where to find them; I don’t know how to catch prey; I don’t know how to build a shelter from local materials; I don’t know how to treat illness; I don’t know how to light a fire or make tools. To be honest, I don’t particularly want to know either – it is interesting in an abstract, academic way of course, but I don’t think I would enjoy suddenly being forced to live a hunter-gatherer existence on a permanent basis. Instead, my head is filled with knowledge about computers, technology, brands, celebrities, insurance policies, TV shows and power tools.

All things that sustain me come from somewhere else that, as far as the ecosystem I inhabit is concerned, may as well be from another planet. The power that heats my house is generated elsewhere; the food I eat is grown elsewhere; the water I drink treated elsewhere; my medicines manufactured elsewhere; my waste disposed of elsewhere. My home planet is the global supply chain and the infrastructure that allows me to access it. It is a fragile planet I can just about survive in, as opposed to the natural environment on which my home is layered, which is a planet in which I stand no chance of survival (in the long if not medium term). It has nothing to do with the rock, the water and the earth where I am, which is only there to provide aesthetic and recreational amenity.

Chances are I think you are an alien too. Before you scoff, how irresponsible does it feel to go for a hike in the wilderness (or as close to wilderness as you can access) without the following: a waterproof jacket, stout footwear, warm clothes, a hat, sunglasses, suncream, GPS-enabled mobile phone? Of course, even these items are in some ways not specific enough – your clothes should be multiple layers, constructed using special breathable man-made fibres that won’t soak up your sweat and put you at risk of hypothermia. Your waterproof jacket would likely also be made of advanced materials. Even suncream now contains nanoparticles. All this technology is designed to protect you from the elements. Adventures into the wilderness even involve taking space food with us: dried food that we can reconstitute on a camping stove with carefully boiled water (the only resource we trust ourselves to collect from the environment, and interestingly, a resource that would need to be abundant on any other planet we might one day colonize). We must be the only animal to go to such lengths before venturing into the environment.

How would you recognise an alien species that had been living on a planet for several thousand years? Certainly initially you might find them living in geodomes, leaving them only carefully in space suits. But over time, given enough resources, perhaps they might have bred plant species that could survive outside the geodomes, and the aliens themselves might have evolved a little (or modified their genome) to tolerate better the differences in environmental conditions between their home planet and the colonized planet. The atmosphere might have been adjusted using industrial processes. There could be networks of tunnels, perhaps. Technology might have been developed to enable the aliens to roam more freely – for longer time periods and further distances from the geodomes. We are reaching a point where in principle we might not be able to tell the difference between an alien planet that humans had colonized for a few thousand years, and our habitation of our home planet.

This boundary becomes more blurred when the weather is extreme. When I visit hot countries (and personally, I start to feel uncomfortable when the temperature reaches 25C), I find myself moving between one air-conditioned space after another: from my air-conditioned hotel room to the air-conditioned public transport network to the air-conditioned conference venue that is usually the reason I am in the ‘hot’ country in the first place. Every minute spent in the open air is a minute longing for the next air conditioned space. Equally, in winter in Scotland, I move from my centrally heated house to my car with the hot air blowing on maximum, to my centrally heated workplace. If my car, house and workplace were air-sealed, and I moved between them in a space suit, I might as well be on the moon! If Passivhaus design takes off, buildings will soon become more air-tight. And if the predictions of climate change scientists are right, extreme weather will become more and more normal and we will need to adapt our homes and infrastructure to cope.

The alienation of humanity from its environment is reflected in the fact that we see ourselves as separate from it in the first place. The conceptualisation of the relationship between humans and their environments using terms such as ‘coupled’ (as in: ‘coupled’ human and natural systems) suggests such separation. More than this, it not only suggests that human systems can be decoupled from natural systems, but that they were so at some point in the past, and have only recently been joined! Even scientists think we are aliens!

Though we ourselves are aliens, we are (ironically) increasingly concerned with aliens in our environment. Aliens that we have introduced to our local ecosystems from other ecosystems: some harmless, others dangerous, denoted by the use of the adjective ‘invasive‘. It is not just species that are aliens in our environment, but also manufactured chemicals and biochemicals. These ‘pollutants’ defile our conceptions of the purity of the natural environment – by which we are horrified even as we decadently consume the goods that are responsible for it. It is a kind of prurient Victorian hypocrisy.

It may seem like playing into the hands of those who work to belittle concerns of environmental activists to reframe pollution as a hypocritical attitude to the myth of the pristine ecosystem. Particularly if it were then argued that pollution is an ‘opportunity’ for evolution (the linked articled doesn’t) – a shock to the ecosystem that sends it on a journey to another supposedly ‘harmonious’ equilibrium. Conservation efforts are essentially methods of preserving what we think ‘ought’ to be present in the environment – though well-intentioned perhaps, they are in some sense no less industrial than activities traditionally regarded as environmentally exploitative. Indeed, sometimes conservation efforts are just as damaging as the supposed problem they aim to solve. And conservationism doesn’t have an entirely comfortable political history. Nowadays, conservationists could be seen simply as extorting ‘penances’ from the public to assuage their guilt about environmental ‘sin’, and using them to create an environmental commodity: a nature ‘reserve’, a species ‘saved’ from extinction. Yet the species chosen are those regarded as valuable to humans – usually mammals. There are not offers to adopt a threatened slug, insect, bacterium or virus as there are for snow leopards, dolphins, tigers, elephants, gorillas, orangutans. (Though there is this blog and a joke both of which I came across whilst searching the internet for such things as ‘adopt a smallpox virus’ and ‘adopt a Yersinia pestis‘.)

Instead, perhaps we should recognise that endochrine disrupting compounds, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, carcinogens, dioxins, parabens and C8 are now irrevocably a part of the global ecosystem, and species that cannot cope with them are irrelevant; they are the dinosaurs of the present day. And since dinosaurs evolved into birds, perhaps we should wait and see what interesting species evolve from the new chemical soup we are creating. (Assuming we are not among the dinosaurs…) The same applies to introduced species, frankencrops, and the other ghouls and ghasts of ecoarmageddon. Conservationists need to embrace change.

And if nature is too slow to adapt, industry (a hotbed of positive thinking) can exploit the ‘opportunities’ it creates for the benefit of its customers. For example, reduced fertility arising from endochrine disruption can be handled by in-vitro fertilisation. Cancers caused by dioxins can be treated with chemotherapy drugs. Probiotics can replace the bacteria removed by antibiotics. Vitamin and mineral supplements can compensate for the decreasing nutrition in food. Pharmaceuticals are part of the human adaptive process to living in the environment we are creating, just as anxiolytics, antidepressants and virtual realities are there to help us bear it. Instead of seeing medication as a sign of ill-health, we should see it as a positive expression of our adaptation to the new environmental reality, and a further step on the path of our transition to full alien-ness: intergalactic citizens of nowhere.

Nature, the Replicator and the Holodeck

Nature is typically cast as a mother. As such can be seen along the lines of the feminist charicature of the stages in the life of a woman. As a virgin, we see a pristine ecosystem, a bounty waiting to be exploited. As a mother, Nature’s provision is bountiful and sufficient, and her authority beyond question. As a whore, nature’s resources are exploited and spoiled. As a crone, the exploitation has gone on long enough that she has dried up: withered, wrinkled and infertile, Nature’s bounty is no longer enough. There are two trajectories after that – one is death; the other, resurrection: ‘Nature’ is rebuilt to serve human needs.

Many years ago, I listened to a talk given by Dr. Keith Farnsworth, an ecologist now based at Queen’s University Belfast. It has stuck in my mind. He did not use language such as the above, but the parallels in his theorization of stages of human-environment interaction are striking. The first stage he described as ecosystem occupation — humans move in to an ecosystem. The second stage is ecosystem adaptation, in which humans make alterations to the ecosystem so it better meets their needs. The third and final stage Dr. Farnsworth outlined is ecosystem domination: humans completely control the ecosystem so it meets only their needs.

His theorized trajectory, which I cannot find written up among his extensive list of publications, could be refined with a fourth stage: ecosystem elimination. Ecosystem elimination occurs in two ways: destruction and substitution. The cause of the former case is simply that the control the humans have exerted over an ecosystem in the domination stage is temporary because we have not fully understood the processes by which the resources we rely on are renewed and regenerated. The domination is unsustainable and after a period of time, the ecosystem collapses. There are plenty of examples of this in the history of agriculture, especially where agricultural practices that have evolved in one biome have been transferred to another. That’s beside the point that domination of any kind seems rarely to be sustainable indefinitely. Worms turn.

Ecosystem elimination by substitution is still in the realms of science fiction; but it happens when we no longer need ecosystems to sustain human life. In Star Trek, ecosystems have disappeared into a machine, the replicator, that creates food presumably from waste, by decomposing the latter into its constituent atoms and reconstructing it as a meal. This is the ultimate junk food; quite literally, eating shit! (This is not entirely fantasy I suppose, since faecal coliforms have been found in hamburgers.) Recognising the amenity value provided by ecosystems, a holographic projection suite with haptic enhancements, the holodeck, is provided for the crew of the Starship to enjoy some recreation. These simulated spaces presumably have none of the inconveniences of real ecosystems (unless requested by the user): no biting insects or ticks; no poison ivy; no allergens or pathogens; never too hot or too cold. Instead, simulated wind in simulated trees on a simulated balmy evening; breathing simulated fresh air while listening to simulated birds singing simulated songs as they go to a simulated roost. All available at the push of a button, whenever the mood takes you, without having to wait for the sun to set. This is Eden made real, or as real as needed to pass the environmental equivalent of the Turing Test.

Are contemporary cities much different from space ships in science fiction? Instead of replicators, we have supermarkets. Supermarkets are increasingly moving away from selling fresh ‘raw’ ingredients to providing ready-meals. These have more ‘value-added’ than raw ingredients, and hence better profit margins. One could almost pretend the microwave oven was a replicator. Of course, supermarkets obtain their produce from farms, arguably dominated ecosystems, but for how much longer? Architects have already designed skyscrapers where each floor is given over to hydroponic systems for growing food. Hydroponics are indeed already widely used for growing fruit and vegetables under glass, allowing their availability on the shelves even when not in season.

If supermarkets are replicators, then parks (or ‘green spaces’) are holodecks. These spaces, which are too small and too disconnected to support much in the way of wildlife, often consist of an expanse of lawn with a few trees growing in them. Sometimes there are shrubs and flowerbeds, and a pond, lake, river or stream. Paths will be provided so we can walk and enjoy the amenity without getting our shoes muddy. The countryside is not really needed. This matter was brought into sharp focus for me when I left an employer based in London to take up a position in Aberdeen. My colleagues were mystified as to why I would want to move away from the UK’s capital. “What is there in Scotland,” they asked, “that you could not get in London?”