Underpinnings

 Mushrooms and moss, Tallman State Park, New York

 photograph by the author

Everything that you can see is supported by things you can't.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek —  the world's first microbiologist — first peered through the lenses of his microscopes in Delft, he revolutionized the world in a way that his contemporary, Johannes Vermeer, also did — he saw things in a new way. What he saw, however, had much more profound and exciting implications than anything Vermeer was able to observe on the macroscopic scale.

In van Leeuwenhoek's time, it was fundamentally impossible to appreciate just what this extraordinary "new" world of microbes meant. Initial investigation was largely a matter of cataloging. It hasn't been, in fact, until the 21st century, with the advent of DNA analysis, that we begin to know microbiology at the extraordinary level of detail that it's necessary to have in order to understand what is going on. This linked article about the understanding of what gut bacteria are doing in termites is an example of exactly what I mean by this.

 The bottom line is that microbes appeared to be novelties, zoological specimens for aesthetic appreciation, for the first few centuries we knew about them. It was only when it became understood that they cause disease ( see the germ theory of disease), which took place only in the 19th century —! — that human beings outside the immediate scientific community of microbiologists (who up until then had been considered, no doubt, a small community of obsessive cranks engaged in pointedly pointless studies) began to take a much more active interest in these communities in order to understand just what they meant to us. We began to see that microbes have a huge impact on us.

Plague diseases like the bubonic plague and cholera are specifically caused by bacteria; not only do they wipe huge swathes of human population out, they have, as William Hardy McNeill pointed out in 1976, major impacts on world history. The strange and under-appreciated fact is that who we are — our societies, governments, cultures, and history — has been determined to a significant extent by the microbes we share the globe with. People don't think about this in their day-to-day life, but if a plague breaks out — it's all they think about.

 The underpinnings of human culture and society are determined to an even greater extent by microbes, whose action in society is not limited to disease alone. Fungi such as Amanita Muscaria and psilocybin have influenced religious practices for thousands of years; the Mediterranean practice of fermentation of milk into cheeses through the action of bacteria has had a major worldwide impact on food culture; and other forms of fermentation are equally important in other cultures. Perhaps the most important and pervasive type of fermentation is the production and distillation of alcohol; this process is dependent on yeast microorganisms.

What this means is that no matter what you do, and no matter where you are, on a daily basis, you are interacting with foods and beverages that depend on microbiotic communities for their very existence. Disruptions to the microbial communities which make these processes possible would spell, perhaps, the end of the processes themselves. It may seem alarmist to suggest that invasive bacteria could create situations where something this drastic takes place, but the possibility is certainly there.

More important, perhaps, than the fact that microbes and their activity pervade our food culture is the fact that they live on us; and they live not only on us, but in us. The sheer number of microbes living in any human body is staggering, numbering in the trillions. There are thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of different species of bacteria inhabiting every human body; from their point of view, we are their ecosystem, their habitat. Habitat and ecosystem, you see, are a matter of scale: from our point of view, we live in the jungle, or the desert; from a microbe's point of view, it lives in the gut, or on the skin. The analogies are apt; the gut is dark and moist, with a rich and diverse community of microbes, like a rain forest; the skin is relatively dry and has a much smaller population, like a desert.

 We'll talk about this more in the next post.

Pea soup

West Lake, Hangzhou, China 2007

Photograph by the author

While we fracture the habitat we can see — that is, the environment that larger organisms live in — the smaller one is turning into pea soup.

What I mean by this is that microbes, which are far more portable and perceive no real overall barriers to movement other than temperature and Ph, are spreading out of their micro-environments into new ones all over the planet at the greatest rate in the history of earth.

 This is because mankind carries and microbes with him wherever he goes, in his body, on his body, and in and on the artifacts, plants, and animals that he moves from place to place. Left to themselves, most of these objects (for example, floating logs) and creatures (land-based animals) don't move very far, or, if they do, carry a community of microbes that is in many ways specifically limited to the habits of their organism and the niches they frequent.  So a sea turtle, an albatross, a migratory herd mammal, do move microbe populations around, but within a describable set of boundaries.  The vast majority of microbes don't travel to completely new and novel environments so rapidly; their sheer size and attunement to the immediate surroundings prevent it.

Mankind has changed that a great deal, because he is extraordinarily mobile, especially in the past several centuries. Diseases have traveled with him; the introduction of smallpox to the Americas led to a holocaust which is only now being fully appreciated by archaeologists. It's possible that as much as 9/10 of the native populations, which used to be enormous, died off in a very brief period of time. More recent examples are the outbreaks of unique and objectively terrifying diseases such as AIDS, SARS and Ebola virus, which were originally resident in wild animal populations (monkeys, civet cats, and bats, respectively) but entered the human population due to increasing contact between wild animals and expanding communities of human beings.

These examples of dangerous diseases are just the ones that have come to our attention; and we are generally more preoccupied with diseases that affect us directly. Diseases such as white nose syndrome, which is wiping out bats on the East Coast of the United States, are equally destructive, but the overall tendency of the average person is to ignore what happens to animal populations.

What is completely under-appreciated is that similar outbreaks of disease, invasion, and the crippling and fundamental alteration of species mixes is taking place on a microbial level. Human beings are carrying microbes into every corner of the globe and having dramatic impacts on the microbe mixes in those communities.  When highly active agencies such as human beings arrive on the scene, size, which used to limit the spread of bacterial and microbial populations, is no longer a liability when it comes to dispersal— it is an advantage. Remember this phrase — highly active agencies — we'll get back to it.

There are invasive microbes, just as there are invasive types of grass, birds, snakes, and so on. Because these invasions and "species disasters" are taking place on a microscopic level, we are completely unable to appreciate them—unless they directly affect us, or another large creature.

The difficulty here is that we are unable to evaluate the mixing and fundamental alteration of microbial communities until it is far too late to understand it.

In order to understand why this is vitally important, it's necessary to understand the role that microbe communities play in the existence of larger ecosystems. This, also, has been largely ignored in the biology community until the last decade or two, because microbes and fungi were considered to be small and relatively insignificant. The study of them is esoteric and limited to a tiny cadre of experts; intensive study of microbes for over a century meant the study of infectious diseases, and almost nothing else. One might argue that it was only the advent of the understanding of extremophiles that led mankind to understand there were extraordinary things outside of the questions raised by the medical field going on in the microbe community.

 In the next post, we'll engage in a brief discussion about the role of microbes and the larger communities they live in. In the meantime, keep in mind that we are creating a kind of pea soup around us, in which bacteria mix in completely novel ways, fundamentally altering the way that our ecosystems function.

These alterations are microscopic, and will take many centuries to play themselves out, but they are poised to have a profound and fundamental long-term impact on the mix of macroscopic species that we share our environment with.

Fractured habitats and the long time scale

In an earlier post, I explained that carving the landscape up into smaller and smaller fractions of itself with highways, barriers, fences, malls, and other forms of developments causes a greater and greater impoverishment of habitat and a steady deterioration of the entire environment, to the detriment of all species... not just the glamour species, that is, the attractive ones we love to celebrate (think pandas.)

This article in the New York Times  and this one in science daily news—bring the point home from a scientific point of view. It's not just paranoia; the evidence speaks clearly. When habitat is carved up by real estate developers and highway engineers like birthday cake, populations don't just suffer; eventually, they die off. The effect is the same whether water or concrete is the separating medium; genes can't mix, populations can't circulate, and animals and plants eventually loose the overall vitality they must have in order to remain viable.

Circulation of wildlife and plant material through the natural world is, you see, a form of breathing. It brings vitally needed materials from one place to another in exactly the same way that breathing delivers oxygen to cells. The majority of cells in your body are in a more or less static position: they need nutrients, that is, energy sources, brought to them by outside agents. If that circulatory mechanism is damaged—let's say, for example, that we tie off a limb with a tourniquet—in short order, cells begin to die. Soon enough disaster ensues.

The difficulty with the effect our fractured landscape is having on our world is that the effects are not immediate. The fact that die-offs, like other evolutionary processes, take place over what are geologic time scales ensures, unfortunately, that we can't actually see what we are doing.

This is a typical feature of man's psyche: we only register the immediate. Our awareness of long time scales has steadily deteriorated because of electronic technologies. Before the rise of secularism, scientific discourse, and modernsim... before the advent of electronic communication and the generalized collapse of "traditional" civilizations... man passed on his awareness of the long time scale, the existence of humanity throughout essentially ageless, or eternal, cycles, through a process of myth that penetrated the collective unconscious. Most of the romance and appeal of ancient and primitive cultures that still remains is attractive to us specifically because of its awareness of the long time scale. Yet we don't quite understand that, either; short time spans and sound bites, attention-destroying short term temporal phenomena, are as addicting as crack, and act like it: they overstimulate the nervous system, leading to a craving for more, and more. This accelerating phenomenon is taking over cultures everywhere.

The inability to see the long time scale has led to a lack of respect and even outright disregard and dismissal for the landscape and natural systems we inhabit. We don't see how what we're doing chokes off the circulation of the natural world; and we insist, perversely, not only that it isn't actually happening, but that all of the chaotic, destructive sprawl we generate is not only necessary, but desirable. Strip malls, superhighways, fast food restaurants, backyard barbecues: all are now for many people the better choice over lush forests and birdsong.

This is an extreme form of short term thinking, one that societies are not coming to grips with. The issue is that over the next several hundreds of years, a massive number of the plants and animals that enrich the environment, our lives, and our very psyches themselves are going to die out. Anyone who doubts this ought to pay a visit to the eastern seaboard of China— a place where I have spent years of time over the past three decades—and take a look at the paucity of plants, animals, and birds. It's not just the lack of diversity that is appalling—it's the lack itself. Spend a month there and you'll see that wildlife, as we know it in America, has nearly ceased to exist.

And, as a result of habitat fragging, that's where we're headed if we don't wake up.

Cycles of myth and the long time scale

The human psyche wasn't built to think in a long time frames.

While it has the ability to do so, because of our intellectual capacities and our memory, the fact is that it evolved to deal mostly with the immediate. Time frames over hundreds and thousands of years simply aren't meaningful to human beings; they are, that is, theoretically meaningful, but they don't have any immediate effect on survival from day today. The long time scale is not a part of our ordinary psyche. It lies in the realm of the extraordinary; that is, outside the boundaries of our own lives. No matter how we parse it, it brings us to the edge of the unknown, and drops us off there as time marches off into territories where we can never follow.

Only man is, so far as we know, capable of having such thoughts.

This has both phenomenal and noumenal implications. The awareness of both short and long-term thinking are necessary in terms of biological survival; but they affect our emotional, our spiritual, life as well—those parts of us that don't yield so easily to the cold probe of the intellect.

We need short-term thinking in order to know what to do in the next minute, or hour, or day. This ensures survival in the moment. But precisely because of our ability to impact the environment and our overall surroundings over millennia— after all, we are the species that evolved complex culture as the means of passing technology on — long-term thinking is absolutely necessary.

Nature, which serves higher purposes we can't be quite aware of under ordinary circumstances, understood this, and produced mechanisms in order to provide the psychological underpinnings for a long-term thinking. We know these underlying thought structures as religions; as mythologies. Their mutually supportive traditions of storytelling and the positioning of man in eternally recurring cycles of event and experience are the mechanisms that position man in the landscape of time.

This is important because man needs to know where he is not only from the point of view of his immediate surroundings, but where the culture—where the tribe, the species—will be 1000 or even 10,000 years from now. Our romantic attraction to Native American traditions, for example, is because they see the big picture — they understand the long scale of time. The long scale of time, passed down through myth and tradition, connects us to the landscape, and to the natural environment we are currently in the process of destroying.

The advent of the so-called "modern" psyche, with its increasing and ever-accelerating emphasis on the short-term, on soundbites and fractured attention spans, is in the process of destroying this mechanism. 

With it are going most of the natural systems that keep us alive.

Human beings, in a word, have forgotten where they are. Both the philosophies and economics of modernism are in the process of destroying that which created them; and Western societies are unable to see this. 

The terrible violence we see emerging from tribal societies is almost certainly an immune system reaction from the planet to this distraction of the awareness of the long scale of time. They are, without a doubt, a terrifying thing; but we must imagine for a moment the desperation that births them, which is a misguided, last ditch attempt to defend essential and vitally important traditional cultures from the destruction of the long time scale of myth and religion. 

We don't see our behavior, in any set of circumstances, as connected to survival mechanisms for the species; yet all of them are. Even, as paradoxical as it may seem, terrorism. We may not understand that until we consider that the body will kill its own cells if it identifies them as containing pathogens. Cultures act in much the same way; right or wrong, these mechanisms aren't a unique aberration of the psyche. They mirror well known inner processes on a different scale, and in a different way.

In order to survive, it's vitally necessary to know where we are; and only the cycles of myth and a deep, religious understanding can bring us to that place. These traditions have an emotional, not intellectual, appeal; and it is precisely this appeal to the emotions that makes them work for human beings. The intellect is clever, but it doesn't have enough force to reach into the depths where the real decisions are made.

This is why we ignore the cycles of myth and tradition at our peril. They are not just romantic tales; they are deeply tied to our understanding of our long-term presence in this landscape, this habitat, that supports us. 

Both the inner and the outer habitat are bound together by the soul; and we must know this if we wish to live, on any scale of time.

May your soul be filled with light.

Indian rock, now surrounded by a shopping center.

Photograph by the author.

Man and Habitat

Shanghai, China: man's new habitat

Photograph by the author

Generally speaking, we think of habitat as an environment in which animals and plants live. For the majority of urban and suburban populations worldwide, earth is a place to be adjusted and manipulated and exists only to support economic opportunities and, when appropriate, to be exploited for entertainment value. Our habitat, in other words, is no longer the place we live; it’s a thing. So in a certain sense we have succeeded in turning habitat into a consumer item. The majority of modern peoples feel that if habitat value stands in the way of any economic activity whatsoever, the economic activity wins. I encounter this attitude all the time among an arrogant and growing class of people who assert that the interests of human beings must come before any other interests.

In the short term, this is a viable attitude. But it sells the sustainable aspects of our activities very short indeed. We’re an integral part of the landscape, and thinking that places us outside of it runs the risk of assuming that we aren’t dependent on it. Periodically, nature has a way of bringing us back to the brink of an understanding with cataclysmic events; but these are generally natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, not biological collapses.

Yet biological collapses have plagued and even destroyed earlier civilizations; we forget this at our peril. And the idea that we can avoid biological collapses is a dangerous one. 

The distance between understanding and not understanding in these matters is a cultural one. And thereby hangs a tale.

Technology has increasingly distanced man from any connection with his natural surroundings. Human beings evolved to take in impressions of the natural world; Edward O. Wilson’s hypothesis is that mental, as well as physical, health may well be determined not only by the foods we eat but by the visual, auditory, and other sensory material we absorb in day to day living. The increasing alienation of human beings from natural impressions of the environment, in other words, may be making us, quite literally, unhealthy. We need to see birds, plants, flowers; to hear the sound of wind in leaves, to feel the touch of bare earth on the soles of our feet. And when we don’t, we gradually, slowly, ever-so-subtly begin to go insane: depressed, anxiety-ridden, even psychotic. Man’s psyche, in other words, is just as much a product of habitat as physiology.

This disease is progressive; every generation is exposed to a greater degree of alienation. The advent of digital devices that we carry with us everywhere has accelerated a process that began with movie theaters and television sets; and now the majority of impressions we focus our attention on are unnatural ones.

This isn’t to say that man’s natural habitat can’t eventually change over time; and if the natural habitat of man’s psyche is morphing into a digital one, we can presume that over time, man’s psych may adapt accordingly. This is a difficult proposition, however; we’ve been evolving in conjunction with overwhelmingly natural impressions for millions of years, and the transition to technological impressions is taking place over a compressed period, a few short centuries which have produced entirely novel psychic environments which mimic natural ones, but actually provide a drastically reduced fraction of the sensory input that nature provides for us. Adaptation to this new environment may take hundreds of thousands of years, but the deterioration of man’s psyche is unfolding in real time, with entirely unpredictable results.

So what habitat do we choose? It would appear that man’s movement into the virtual habitat of digital realms is already a fait accompli. At the same time, our view of the natural habitat as a consumer product to be manipulated for our own benefit, a commodity to be exploited, drastically devalues it, to the point where we’re willing to do a nearly unlimited amount of damage in order to extract perceived value. 

The degradation of the natural habitat, unless it’s reversed, will eventually lead to a seriously impoverished life for mankind. There needs to be a retraining of attention and consciousness back towards natural impressions, and a re-valuation of them, in order to stop this trend. We're not, in other words, just destroying our natural habitat: we are destroying our spiritual habitat.

Whether human beings will be able to preserve the natural surroundings that are so vital to our psyche and navigate this massive transition of habitat without destroying ourselves remains to be seen. 

Just a wee bit more about geologic timescales

Tappan Zee,  Hudson River, New York

 Looking North. The Tappan Zee was carved out of the 220 million year old Newark basin sandstones when glaciers carved the Hudson River Valley during the quarternary glaciation. The Palisades—the cliffs on the left side of the river—are basalt flows of lava that represent the eastern side of the rift that split the Continental Pangaea into North America, portions of Iceland, and Africa.

 Species evolution is determined in geologic time scales. There was never a “first” bird, just as there was never a “first” whale. At any given time, all a human observer would be able to see was a particular creature, occupying a particular niche, which might or might not display some or all of the characteristics of birds or whales.

 Human beings are time-bound by very narrow constraints lasting through, from the individual perspective, a single generation. Historical perspectives afford us a somewhat longer view, but, aside from the fossil record, our experience of living species and what they mean is restricted to our immediate environment and what we can see now. The practice of paleontology and the study of fossils is exotic enough that only a tiny portion of mankind studies it; and it is patently impossible for anyone to predict the future evolution of species.

 As such, we see everything through a tiny, more or less contemporary lens, and consequently feel relative alarm about the loss of individual species or the invasion of a local habitat by a foreign species. (We are, on the other hand, very comfortable with importing specific foreign species and planting them in our gardens—landscapes all over the world are populated with countless numbers of foreign species. Foreign species only tend to cause alarm when they successfully outcompete local creatures or plants. Our habit of moving species around because of their aesthetic values—pets, zoo animals, and exotic landscape plants—has resulted in any number of species invasions, most of them irreversible.)

What we tend to forget is that speciation and evolution take place on geologic time scales, that is, over tens and hundreds of millions of years. These forces are most definitely not under human control, but our interest in micromanaging species events has grown steadily with the environmental movement. While the movement is inarguably well-meaning, and its interest in in preserving biodiversity laudable, our habit of fighting pitched battles in what are going to be objectively losing situations is expensive and pointless. Battles must be fought; slowing and even stopping the extinction of whale species is a wise action. But this does not mean that stopping every invasive species makes sense; or that every species needs to be preserved. Only hubris leads us to believe that we are in control of the natural environment, or have any say whatsoever over the direction that develops in the long-term. Our habit of perceiving ourselves as separated from the natural environment, rather than being—indubitably—a product of it, and an integral part of the way in which it is evolving, has caused us to believe we have powers that don't in fact exists.

If the earth is taking evolutionary directions at the hand of man, these directions are in some ways just as much a natural product of the earth's overall evolutionary pattern as any other direction things might take. That is to say, argued from a cynic's point of view, habitat destruction, pollution, and the extinction of species is a natural phenomenon arising from the habits of a particular product of evolution, and has to be included, in a macroscopic view of the situation, as an entirely natural and acceptable phenomenon.

 Logical reasoning of this kind, which is difficult to refute, gives cold comfort to people like me, who prefer to see living things valued and preserved. I'll admit that perhaps it's the artist in me that believes that there is a fundamental goodness and aesthetic value in nature; and perhaps my affinity for nature itself begins with this aesthetic value, which for me is largely spiritual, rather than commercial or utilitarian. But if the aesthetes are not willing to preserve nature, who will? Those who view it as a commercial or utilitarian opportunity see little value in anything but its exploitation.

 The geologic timescale needs to be applied as a rough measurement of the significance of any evolutionary event, since it can only be measured from that perspective. Indeed, our alarm about the acceleration of extinctions arises specifically because of its association with geological events, the last 5 of which produced extinction rates that drastically altered the planet.

Here, self interest kicks in; what really worries human beings, after all, isn't whether other creatures will survive, but whether they themselves will. And this is a legitimate question. Yet once again, the preservation of individual species does not become the issue here. It's the overall health of the habitat that will ultimately determine survivability for both humanity and other organisms. This may not be seen on geologic timescales, but it is touched on them, because it involves landscapes and weather—both geologic forces—not salamanders and grasses. If the landscape is more intact, and more attuned to weather events, the preservation of canopy, groundcover, coastal buffer zones, etc., both mankind and the habitat benefit. The landscape is better able to absorb, process, and digest the results of man's activity, and the creatures that live in it are better able to survive accordingly.

 Civilization is peppered with the remains of earlier civilizations that believe they could manage nature effectively. Every single one of them ultimately came up against weather events they did not have any control over; in most cases, it led to a collapse. The bottom line is that our idea of how much control we have over our environment is exaggerated.  For example, when the US government undertook the massive water management projects in the western states at the beginning of the 1900s, after spending the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars, and building countless dams, the amount of arable land was increased by a paltry 1% or so at best, and it turned out that even this meager improvement was marginal and difficult to sustain over any long periods of time. One of the world's largest environmental engineering programs has been, in other words, of little value. The majority of the West is, as it always was, desert of one kind or another. Other major transformational projects such as Egypt's Aswan dam have proven to be equally suspect in the long run; if they do succeed in altering the local environment, as the dam did, they do so only at great expense, inflicting substantial long term damage in order to achieve what are fleeting, short term successes.

The odds are that the vast majority of human attempts to micromanage ecosystems and environments will, over the very long run, have a weak effect–that is, they will be nearly 100% ineffective, to the point where results will not be discernable.

Watershed stress

Yellow Sea, Shandong, China, as seen from Qingdao

Photograph by the author

Today I thought I'd say a little bit about habitat preservation in terms of watershed stress, a subject we'll come back to over and over again as we examine the overall impact of human activity on the planet.

The latest study on this subject reveals some alarming news about how we're managing water habitats, and water quality, all over America. Readers interested in the condensed version of this report can refer to the Huffington Post article.

Water supplies are dwindling all over not America, but the planet. And in areas where there is less and less water, one single unexamined fact stands out. The less water there is in any given area, the more polluted the water base becomes.

This is because pollution is measured in parts per million, or fractions of pollutant per gallon, to put it in simpler terms. Given the fact that in most areas, the amount of pollutants being input into the water system is either static or rising, the less water there is to dilute it into, the more concentrated the pollutants are. Natural "water-cleaning" ecosystems consisting of plants, filtering aquifers and microbial degraders of polluting runoff are more and more taxed, and less and less able to filter or purify the contaminants they receive. The same is true of manmade treatment systems. In both cases, the processing of human pollutants—chemical waste, human waste, medically hazardous microbial contaminants, and so on—is less and less effective over time. Both nature and man, in other words, rely on a steady and predictable relatively high level of clean water in order to handle the pollutants we produce.

Anywhere that water supplies are stressed and dwindling, this problem becomes greater and greater over time. The net result is that the plants, animals, and microbes dwelling in the water ecosystems are subject to greater and greater stress from contaminants with every passing year.

This situation is directly analogous to the air pollution in Beijing. Anyone who believes than man can tolerate an unlimited amount of pollution in an environment needs to think again, because Beijing proves that it isn't actually all that hard to pass tolerable levels and move into dangerous territory.  The exact same thing is happening to our waterways, only it's less visible and immediate. This is doubly dangerous, because it is hidden from both public consciousness and direct experience. Not only do we not appear to directly suffer from it; we don't even think about it. Problems of this nature tend to grow so large that by the time anyone does anything about it, it is far too late. It's the equivalent of an undiagnosed cancer which is steadily metastasizing.

While it's true that global warming, with the consequent addition of dramatically larger amounts of circulating (and therefore fresh) water to the world ecosystem, will deliver far more water to some portions of the planet, there are also heavily populated regions where it will deliver far less, as we are already seeing. Excess amounts of water produce equally devastating pollution problems by overwhelming and flooding out treatment systems and sewers, thus contaminating the area with biohazards and chemical contaminants that under ordinary conditions will remain isolated from the resident populations.

There is no absolutely substitute for excellent water treatment system management. It may not seem as important as preventing the operation of nuclear power plants in your area, but statistically speaking you're far more likely, over the course of your lifetime, to be exposed to waterborne hazards in the form of disease and chemical contaminants than you are radiation.

Yet no one mounts protests against bad water management.