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In a world of advanced AI, how do you self-augment to stay economically relevant?

What follows is an essay I wrote in response to the prompt in the title above. It’s on the long side, but if you want to see what the line “You aren’t so much you as you are an ambulating scaffold for microbial life” has to do with job-stealing AI, read on!

1. John Henry

Our exploration of how to stay relevant in an economy powered by artificial intelligence starts with a folk song:

When John Henry was a little tiny baby

Sitting on his mama's knee,

He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel

Saying, "Hammer's going to be the death of me, Lord, Lord,

   Hammer's going to be the death of me."

The Ballad of John Henry tells the tale of a classic American folk hero. As with all legends, the details of the story diverge widely in its myriad variants, but they all agree on this: an African-American man competed with mere brawn and hand tools against a steam-powered drill at some point in the 1870s. The man ekes out a victory over the machine through sheer determination, but the enormous effort costs him his life.

John Henry said to his captain,

"A man is nothing but a man,

But before I let your steam drill beat me down,

I'd die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord,

   I'd die with a hammer in my hand." [1]

John Henry is rightly remembered as a paragon of strength and determination, and for his altruism to his fellow workers. But his story is also a near perfect anti-parable for how to intelligently deal with job-stealing technologies, including our bogeyman du jour: artificial intelligence.

The Ballad of John Henry is Luddism lionized. No folk myth does more to celebrate fighting the emergence of new technologies. However, the real lesson should be that desperate attempts to preserve the old ways are both self-dooming and as Quixotic as tilting windmills.

Our first conclusion in how to stay relevant in an AI economy is this: stubborn stasis is death. Steam drills supplanted the ‘steel-driving man,’ Mr. Henry’s victory proved pyrrhic, and the broader war was no contest. Emerging technologies simply represent new stable equilibria in the way things are done, and only through exceptionally distortionary policies can their inevitable tide of progress [2] be forestalled.

Further, the Ballad of John Henry nicely highlights how long this sort of job displacement has been occurring. It is but one dot on a continuous, interwoven timeline of advancement that stretches at least from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the current explosion of AI. Recently, many breathless think pieces have been written about the perils of robots taking our jobs, but the reason for this wave of hand-wringing is not that the job-displacing automation is categorically new, so much as it is because the types of white-collar workers who write think pieces are now feeling the pressure of job displacement. It’s no longer just the manual laborers like John Henry that need fear the coming of the robots.

Nowadays, the breadth of jobs at risk has increased because AI rather than steam powers their displacement, but the challenge of flourishing in a changing economic environment is the same as it has always been. Now, as before, we must use the shifts in the landscape to find better ways to actualize our values and achieve our goals. To more richly elucidate the features of this strategy, we should look for inspiration in a system that has been undergoing these dynamics for not just hundreds of years, but billions.

2. The Red Queen

In my field of ecology and evolutionary biology, a revolutionary idea emerged in 1973, called the Red Queen Hypothesis. Taking inspiration from a line in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Leigh Van Valen noted that species cannot persist for very long unchanged. Only by adapting constantly to environmental vicissitudes and innovations by predators, pathogens, and prey could a species carry forth over geologic time [3]. A lineage had to (metaphorically) run as fast as it could just to stay in the same place.

Staying economically relevant in the face of job-displacing technologies is also a Red Queen conundrum, and the parallels run deep. In this analogy, an occupation is the equivalent of a species and an automation technology is the novel adaptation of a second species that causes ripples in the fitness landscape for the first. As an example, consider a viper population facing decline because its rodent prey stumbled upon a mutation that confers venom resistance. In this case, the viper is John Henry and other ‘steel-driving men’, and the rodent’s newfound resistance is the steam drill. Just as species in nature must continually adapt, move, or go extinct in the face of change, so too must workers augment their relative fitness through adaptation to maintain the same employability.

Despite essentially guaranteeing unending extinctions, the biological Red Queen does not mean total doom, and neither does the economic Red Queen--quite the opposite in fact. Despite the constant elimination of whole professions by new technologies, per capita GDP has been on a secular increase since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and employment has stayed fairly high because new technology can directly or indirectly create as many jobs as it kills [4]. Similarly, the loss of fitness for one species means opportunity for others (in our viper-rodent example, the venom resistance could ultimately mean more prey for other species). Despite the extinction of 99.9% of all species that have ever existed, there has been a largely steady increase in the number of species on Earth for close to 4 billion years, with only a few major blips along the way.

Here is where AI fatalists, famously including Yuval Noah Harari, say ‘Aha! AI is the blip--the job displacements it causes will be so extreme that a more appropriate biological analogy is a mass extinction event!’ And indeed, the emergence of AI shares many features in common with one of Earth’s six mass extinctions, specifically our current one, which kicked off with the evolution of us, Homo sapien sapien. AI-powered automation is antiquating so many jobs because of AI’s overwhelming versatility and the unprecedented computing power of their processors. Likewise, humans are causing a mass extinction event because of our unprecedented versatility and the overwhelming computing power inside our skulls. Two fundamental challenges of both AI and anthropogenic environmental change are the speed at which they cause displacement and the breadth of the chasms they create between old niche and new opportunity.

However, these strong similarities do not entirely justify the fatalism of Harari and others. Thus far, humans have caused far more population declines than true extinctions. There is still time to avert the worst of our current extinction crisis, and the potential solutions (if not the political willpower) are already well established. Similarly, the unemployment rate is currently quite low globally despite more than a decade of AI-driven automation, and a suite of public policies have been shown to help turn job displacement into job translocation. Progressive taxation and strong social safety nets, retraining incentives, relocation funds, and investments in STEM education and infrastructure all hold promise in maintaining high employment in advanced societies despite technological churn.

But for the sake of argument, let’s consider the case where AI proves to be as severe of a net job killer as Harari predicts, and our collective failure to enact sensible policies leads to a catastrophic hemorrhaging of jobs. Looking to the biological world can still provide a blueprint for how to flourish on an individual level. That’s because even though humans are projected to commandeer enormous swaths of the Earth’s surface and capacity for biological productivity, new opportunities for species will still emerge. Indeed, some already have.

3. Opportunities in the Anthropocene

The characteristics underpinning the success stories of species in the Anthropocene [5] might not be what you expect. Case in point, rule #1 is don’t be a tiger. Megafauna were the first and hardest impacted species after the emergence of humans, and their often extreme specialization and large resource demand is precarious even outside of mass extinctions [6,7]. Maintaining economic relevance in an AI economy by not over-specializing may be surprising, particularly given that some of the most highly sought careers are hyper-specialized disciplines that require enormous investments and sacrifices to achieve. But this lesson is born out by researchers at McKinsey, who predict most types of doctors will be replaced by AI before nurses [8].

On the flip side of the first rule lies the second lesson from Mother Nature: be flexible. The wild animals that are thriving these days are generalist omnivores--the rats, the pigeons, the racoons of the world. But it is not just dietary or behavioral plasticity that has led these species to success, but also their genetic adaptability. Biologists examining various urban wildlife species have amassed a long and ever-growing list of beneficial mutations they have accrued through city living as well as a number of pre-adaptations (traits in their wild ancestors that predisposed them to be able to rapidly colonize) [9]. In humans, occupational resilience comes from being multidimensional and focusing training and learning on widely applicable skills such as evaluating evidence, applying game theory, leadership, which will be ever more important as employment opportunities wink in and out ever more quickly.

A third lesson is the importance of rejecting fear and fatalism. This is an important step for the majority of species riding the coattails of humans in the Anthropocene, but is epitomized by the recent meteoric rise of the mosquito Aedes aegypti. This species had a humble origin as a run-of-the-mill East African forest mosquito that was hardwired to avoid humans. However, at some point a mutation occurred in a subpopulation of the mosquitos on the edge of a village in Kenya, causing females to seek out the smell of humans for their blood meals. Descendents of that first mutant mosquito can now be found in nearly every city around the world within 40 degrees latitude of the equator. Lesson: rejecting the kneejerk aversion to changes wrought by emerging technologies or to AI may be all that stands in the way of wild economic success in the AI era. The fatalism that one cannot change can become a self-fulfilling prophecy (see Henry, John). Self-augmentation on this front is simply a matter of deeply embracing positivism.

The final lesson from biology on the augmentations needed to stay economically relevant in an AI world comes from the biggest group of winners in the Anthropocene: microbes. An average person has 40 trillion bacteria in their large intestines [10]. That’s more than the number of human cells in that same person. In some sense you are not you so much as an ambulating scaffold for microbial life. Despite their simplicity, microbes possess astonishing metabolic creativity and are able to take advantage of nearly every resource that humans cannot directly utilize ourselves, from the dietary fiber in our guts to the contents of our landfills.

The lesson of our microbial world for the future AI world is that there is enormous opportunity to be had in focusing on utilizing and achieving what a machine learning algorithm, by its very nature, cannot accomplish. AI cannot have self-determined values [11], genuine emotions, or be creative, except in copycat or pass-through ways. AI implementation will bring vast new opportunities to create or deploy art full of meaning, to inspire care for the natural world or empathy for others, and to educate and entertain. Capitalizing on these opportunities simply requires one of the most powerful but simple forms of self-augmentation: thoughtful self-reflection and contemplation.

__________________________

Harari posits that at some point AI will become too advanced and a universal basic income will be needed to stave off dramatic social unrest as all the rewards of the AI economy accrue to the already wealthy owners of the technology [12]. He argues that without the task of earning our daily bread will need to find ‘artificial realities’ with which to occupy ourselves. I, myself, choose a final option not yet discussed: to embrace the tools of AI to better explore this reality. For myself and my fellow scientists, such a world where our material needs are met and awesome new tools for investigation are at our disposal would be a dream come true. UBI would perfectly preserve our ecological niche in an AI world. Maintaining our relevance would mean doing what we’ve always done: walking out to the edge of the vast plane of human knowledge and taking the next step forward to explore the unknown. With endless mysteries remaining about the nature of our reality, it is an occupation that is not likely to disappear anytime soon, no matter how many people join in.

[1]  Anonymous. Ballad of John Henry. From Knock a Star (1999)

[2]  And mind you, the steam-powered drill embodied the best kind of progress. From an economic standpoint, it was a means of increasing productivity and economic efficiency, leading to cheaper and faster construction of roadways and tunnels like the one John Henry’s team was working on, and ultimately a stronger economy and greater opportunities for all. Better still, from a public health standpoint, the steam drill saved numerous lives from painful disability or death due to silicosis, a lung condition that develops as a result of occupational exposure to silica dust. The steam-powered drill meant fewer workers needed to breath the deadly air that resulted from explosives being ignited in all those holes they excavated.

[3]  Van Valen, L. 1973. A New Evolutionary Law. Evol. Theory. 1:1-30

[4]  A particularly telling anecdote: for each of its drones flying over Syria, the US military needs 30 operators and 80 analysts (Harari, Y.N. 2017. Reboot for the AI Revolution. Nature)

[5]  Anthropocene refers to the current era in geologic time, so established and termed because regime shifts in the fundamental geologic processes that mark transitions rock strata are now being heavily shaped by human activity.

[6]  Day et al. 2016. J Evol Biol. 29(6):1257-67; Colles et al. 2009 Ecol. Letters

[7]  In South America over the past 10 million years three separate lineages have all independently tried to hack it as a large carnivores--a saber-toothed marsupial, a wolf-like opossum, and a wolf like armadillo--none could compete once the large cats showed up.

[8]  Chui et al.2016. Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet). McKinsey Quarterly.

[9]  Donihue & Lambert. 2015. Adaptive evolution in urban ecosystems. Ambio. 44(3): 194–203.

[10]  Sender et al. 2016. Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body. Plos Biology.

[11]  Indeed, how to ensure that the motivations of super advanced AI with general intelligence is aligned with our own morals and values has been called one of the most pressing existential challenges to humanity.

[12]  Harari. 2017. The meaning of life in a world without work. The Guardian.

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I made a photo book for my parents back in December 2013, and just realized I can share it online. It’s mostly just a collection of photos I’ve taken from the around the tropics organized by geography, but I did put some effort into tracking down as much taxonomic information as I could.

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A short film our team made during the International Wildlife Film Festival LABS program. Start to finish in four days!

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Going #2 too much is the #2 killer of kids globally

A paper I’m a part of just went live on Nature Communications! It’s about how trees prevent diarrhea in kids (no seriously, I’m not even kidding!). It’s open access, so there’s no paywall to prevent the world from learning all about our #EcoImodium discovery.

#MoreGreenLessBrown

The backstory of this paper is a bit of a window into the sausage factory of science, and my hope in sharing it below is to humanize the process of science some; ideally this story is interesting to you, but if not I hope it’s at least weird enough that it’ll be hard to look away.

This paper came out of a workshop series at a magical place called the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESynC) in Annapolis, Maryland. SESYNC is an NSF-funded entity that exists to bring together groups of researchers working on big questions somewhere in the broad nexus of people and nature. Honestly, it feels like it was founded by someone looking at Simon Levin’s career and asking, ‘What’s his secret sauce?’ Let’s see... a heaping spoonful of interdisciplinarity, a healthy layer of collaboration, simmered in a stock of socio-environmental systems, with a sprinkle of generous $$$, and voilà! National Medals of Science all around.

The SESYNC ‘Pursuit’ (as they flashily call their workshop series) was organized by environmental economist Brendan “Eco-Paul Krugman” Fisher and Taylor “I eat, sleep, and drink ecosystem services” Ricketts in 2012. Their idea, more or less, was to take a variety of publically available-ish datasets on anything even tangentially connected to environmental or human health--from vegetation indices to massive public health surveys--put them all in a room with a bunch of bright, experienced postdocs, profs, and career public servants, add some coffee, shake it all up, and see what rolls out.

The careful reader might note here that during 2012 I was only a first-semester grad student, and would want to know why on Earth I was included in this operation where everyone else already had a PhD + relevant experience. I’ve asked myself this question many times. The short answer is they actually wanted Andy Dobson, but he was busy. The longer answer definitely involves a bit of academic nepotism and the fact that at one point I aspired to be a disease ecologist (the reason they wanted Andy)--and hey, I TA-ed a course on Disease Ecology, Economics, and Policy, so technically I did know as much as anyone in the room about infectious disease dynamics. Ish.

After an introduction to USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys (truly massive undertakings where the US funds big public health surveys in developing countries--this is often the only source of knowledge of everything from the HIV pandemic to food demand to population growth for huge swaths of the world) and much brainstorming, we split up into subgroups. Two were looking at effects of either protected areas or marine protected areas on different human health outcomes, and then there was our group: watershed quality and infectious disease transmission.

Basically we wanted to test the hypothesis that degradation of a watershed upstream from a community is linked to greater risk of diarrhea in kids, even after controlling for other watershed variables (e.g. presence of people and cattle) and other variables associated with the kids (diet, wealth, type of toilet facilities, hygiene, number of siblings, mother’s education, water source, urban/rural, country of origin, astrological sign, alignment of mercury and like 50 other variables). Shockingly, DHS data had almost all of the needed data on the kids baked in. (It turns out that the household matriarchs surveyed by DHS are way more patient than me, because the interviews they are based on have 3.2 million questions and take hours to complete.)

There were two do-or-die hang-ups though: how do we figure out where the clusters of DHS respondents live, and how do we figure out what conditions exist in the watersheds that feed those spots? The first question was tricky because USAID wants to keep their data super anonymized (kudos--no village wants to get labeled ‘Dio Town’), so they throw a 2-10km jitter into all the GPS points that go along with their survey data. Ruh-oh.

The second problem was actually really thorny--we knew we were going to have to throw absolute gobs of data at this question since there were so many variables at play, so drawing out the watersheds for every single data point was not gonna fly. Enter Mark Mulligan, creator of WaterWorld. WaterWorld is a super powerful tool Mark created that automatically calculates not just the watershed for every point on Earth, but also the influence of every point within that watershed on your location of interest based on how much rain falls at every point within the watershed--in other words it knows to weight the influence of rainier sub-catchments more than the drier ones for every spot on Earth. Discovering Mark and WaterWorld was like a three-birds-one-boomerang situation. Waterworld even solved the jitter problem: the program is so robust it could calculate all the watersheds for every point within the 10k radius and average the results for us. WaterWorld is such a cool and powerful tool that Universal Studios really should consider changing the inspiration for their Waterworld ride that’s currently based on the terrible (wonderful) Kevin Costner movie that--true story--was actually my brother’s and my favorite film as tweens.

Several years, and a lot of technical challenges later, we had our results: based on data from ~300,000 kids in 35 countries in the developing world we found that our hypothesis was correct! 

Boom.

A 30% reduction in tree cover in the watershed upstream from a rural community is associated with the same increase in risk of diarrheal disease in kids as going from crapping in a hole in the ground to using a porcelain throne. This relationship disappears when we looked at the data from urban communities, who are typically using water from reservoirs or bottled sources, or in any event are getting exposed to diarrheal pathogens in their environment in ways that swamp out the effect of upstream watersheds. Lots of other expected things popped out from the data also: lower density of people and cattle upstream was good for you, as was education, dietary diversity and most of all wealth. So next time you’re planning on clearcutting a forest, remember this: you could be causing lethal cases of the runs in poor kids downstream.

I think there are three morals to this story: (1) even if you’re early in your scientific career, SESYNC has a lot of great resources and is an amazing facilitator of science (did I mention they fund postdocs and grad student organized workshops?); (2) the enormous dataset that underpins our paper and the rest of the Fisher/Ricketts Pursuit’s projects is now a public good hosted at SESYNC and will soon be available for all researchers to work with, and we hope it’ll open up countless other avenues of inquiry into the relationship between health and the environment; and finally, (3) just because you’re a lowly first-year grad student, don’t be afraid to jump at a chance to get in over your head a little bit, you might just find that you get into some pretty amazing shit.

Herrera et al. 2017. Upstream watershed condition predicts rural children’s health across 35 developing countries. Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00775-2

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Pulp Non-fiction

A story (but careful, there’s a twist):

In 1998 the Costa Rican Sala Cuarta (their highest judicial body) issued a ruling against a company that had dumped 12,000 tonnes (más o menos) of waste orange peels in one of the country’s flagship protected areas, Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). The ruling came at the urging of a prominent Costa Rican environmentalist, and studies had found elevated levels of d-limonene--a suspected carcinogen--in local waterways as a result of the company’s actions, raising tensions with neighboring Nicaragua over the possible pollution of their downstream eponymous lake. The court ruling demanded the immediate removal of the orange peels from where they lay--a site that some had labeled ‘an open air dump.’

A simple case environmental criminals brought to justice?

Despacito, mis amigos.

A keen observer at the time would have noted one immediate hiccup with the court’s order: those 12,000 tonnes of orange waste? They didn’t exist anymore.

Six months of unfathomable ecstasy on the part of four species of flies had converted the mega pile o’ peels into several inches of black, loamy soil, smothering the invasive African grass that had previously dominated the heavily degraded corner of the national park. Oh, and d-limonene? Turns out it’s more of a cancer-fighter than a cancer-causer*, and can now be purchased on Amazon for $0.16/gram (note I do NOT endorse herbal supplements as a general rule--talk to your doctor if you or your transgenic rat suffer from mammary carcinomas).

See, the orange peel dumping was actually part of a grand plan hatched by rockstar ecologist turned conservationist, Dan Janzen (best known for his hit singles like ‘Herbivores and the Number of Tree Species in Tropical Forests’ and ‘Why Mountain Passes Are Higher in the Tropics’, but I prefer his deep tracks ‘How to be a fig’ and ‘Mice, big mammals, and seeds: it matters who defecates what where’). He and his partner Winnie Hallwachs had noted the following upon observing the development of a huge new orange juice processing facility on ACG’s northern border by a company called Del Oro: (1) most people don’t like peels in their orange juice, (2) megatonnes of orange peels probably weren’t the easiest thing to deal with on the cheap, and (3) of the 170,000+ species of creature in ACG’s forests, at least one probably would chow down on some citrus rind. Upon discovering that Del Oro planned to construct a multi-million dollar plant to turn their waste into low-grade cattle feed, Dan and Winnie engineered the following plan:

1. Dump orange peels on former cattle ranches recently incorporated into ACG. 2. Fly orgy. 3. … 4. Profit.

Amazingly this plan nearly worked perfectly! Del Oro was all over the idea of getting a little weird with ACG. After a promising test deposition of 100 truckloads of orange peels in 1996, Del Oro and ACG signed a contract wherein the park would provide waste disposal (and interestingly, formalized water provisioning and pest management ecosystem services that Del Oro enjoyed by virtue of being neighbors with a fat block of mountainous rain-, cloud- and dry forest) in exchange for donating a huge amount of still-forested land that they owned on the ACG border. Janzen threw in some ecological consultation and help in getting eco-friendly certifications as a sweetener. A seeming beautiful win-win deal.

But of course, we can’t have nice things.

You may have already pieced together what happens next: after executing the first year of the contract wherein Del Oro trucked in ~12,000 metric tonnes of peels and pulp into a heavily degraded corner of ACG that was seemingly caught in a state of arrested succession, a rival orange juice company caught wind of the party, and did as one does when they get spurned by a guest list omission: they sued.

And won.

:(

What seemed to get lost in the debates that raged at the time though, was what effect all these orange peels would have on the forest itself. Dan and Winnie had the intuition that killing off the fire-prone grass and adding nutrients to a plot of land that had been continuously trampled by bovid beasties for a couple hundred years would be a positive change for an aspiring forest, but that wasn’t a certainty.

After the fallout from the lawsuit and the court ruling, it’s understandable that Dan, Winnie, and ACG’s staff didn’t want to draw too much attention to the site (a couple of ACG officials nearly were thrown in jail for failing to adhere to the court order). They visited a few times early on to photograph the progress, and sent a botanist in the very early years to write down what species of plants were occurring in the fertilized area and the surrounding pasture, but other than that the project was more or less consigned to the quirky annals of ACG history (alongside such fascinating historical tidbits as a starring role in the Iran-Contra Affair--you should all read Green Phoenix by Bill Allen for the full fascinating history of the park).

The reason I’m relating this story is that some collaborators and I started revisiting this site a few years ago, and we were so blown away by what we saw that we had to tell the world. The area where the orange peels had been? It had become just about the lushest forest I’d ever seen. Literally vines on vines on vines. And the surrounding pasture? Still pretty much looked the same as in old photos.

In the summer of 2014, I set up Princeton senior thesis student Jon ‘call me Chinito again, Sr. Policia, and I’ll gouge your eye out with a soil corer’ Choi at the site, and let me just say, he scienced the crap out of it.** We set up some vegetation transects and developed a soil sampling regime, and then he went full Tasmanian Devil in a labcoat. We’re talking camera traps, audio recorders, pitfall traps, and theoretical modelling of ecological state transitions--the whole nine meters. It truly impresses me that he managed to say so much about what ultimately boils down to a very simple observation: orange peels jump-started forest recovery--where there would otherwise be a stunted savanna, there’s now forest so thick you literally have to hack your way through with a machete.

After a few years of trying to distill this work into something palatable to reviewers, journal editors, and our team of co-authors, we are proud to finally drop our LP: ‘Low-cost agricultural waste accelerates tropical forest regeneration,’ available exclusively from our record label, Restoration Ecology.

In all seriousness, I really do believe there’s an incredibly exciting idea at the core of this project: it wasn’t just a win-win initiative. It was win-win-WIN. Carbon was sucked out of the atmosphere, biodiversity was increased, and soil quality improved. All FOR A PROFIT! Despite this, we couldn’t find a single other example of ag waste being used to speed forest recovery. We hope that changes. The world really shouldn’t contain both nutrient-starved degraded lands and nutrient rich-waste streams.

*See Asamoto et al. 2002 Mammary carcinomas induced in human c-Ha-ras proto-oncogene transgenic rats are estrogen-independent, but responsive to d-limonene treatment. Japanese Journal of Cancer Research

**Jon managed to do all this despite having to commute daily from the opposite side of the 140,000 ha ACG, passing each morning or afternoon through two casually racist police checks. He sure earned those senior thesis awards!

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On complex adaptive systems, externalities, and growth

Below is an essay on the prompt “What are alternatives to growth?” I submitted for a contest. [Footnotes in brackets]

I. Complex Adaptive Systems

Dr. Simon Levin of Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology recently received a National Medal of Science, the highest honor his country could bestow upon him. He received the award for a body of work that springs from the idea that the natural world is a ‘complex adaptive system.’ By demonstrating that local interactions lead to otherwise unpredictable ‘emergent properties’ [1] across a wide swath of biological processes and scales, Levin revealed non-linearities, tipping points, and deterministic chaos to be the norm rather than the exception for the biosphere. He thereby opened the eyes of a generation of ecologists that had been searching for simplified, elegant rules and equations that could explain nature in the way that Newtonian physics describes the motions of the heavens. While one can predict the position of Neptune in ten thousand years with incredible precision, predicting the extent of tropical rainforest on the same time frame, or the exact positioning of fish within a school after just ten seconds is nigh impossible.

[1]  [Emergent properties are large-scale characteristics of a system--say cloudiness on a particular day on Earth--that are generated huge numbers of tiny interactions between individual units within the system (in the case of cloudiness, atmospheric gas molecules and photons). They are unpredictable in the sense that you would be unlikely to anticipate the characteristic of the system a priori, and would not be able to calculate its exact value from a first principles basis.]

The global biosphere is not Earth’s only planetary-scale complex adaptive system. In fact, it is now profoundly intertwined with another: human society. Just as there are a wealth of emergent properties in nature, so too are there a wealth of emergent properties within the complex adaptive system of human society. [2]

[2] [A few examples of emergent properties of nature following a theme: the distribution of a termite species in Africa as a function of interactions between individual termite colonies and all other organisms in their environment; the patterning of termite mounds across a savanna as a function of interactions amongst termite colonies; the structure of a particular termite mound as a function of behavioral interactions between nestmates; the behavior of a single termite as a function of interactions of billions of cells and quintillions of molecules.]

And these emergent properties of society are not just idle curios of purely academic novelty. Rather, they are characteristics that a just world ought to care about deeply. Among them are the distributions of educational opportunities, health care availability, famine, the ability to vote, technological innovation, war, and the most important of all: human well-being and opportunity to thrive. As emergent properties, these aspects of society are created and shaped by the innumerable local interactions taking place amongst individuals, and between individuals and their environment. And because human society is a complex adaptive system, even subtle changes in these interactions can lead to wildly different outcomes.

The complexity underpinning these emergent properties hinders our ability to predict outcomes and thus hasten or avoid them as appropriate. However, data- and experience-driven short-term predictions can be made (e.g. weather forecasting), and robust, insightful models help constrain long-term projections of likely outcomes (e.g. the global climate models within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports). Rich and sustained focus on emergent properties of moral relevance is profoundly important for maintaining a course toward the best possible future. The key phrase, though, is ‘of moral relevance’.

II. Gross Domestic Product

Which brings us to the topic du jour--growth. Growth is not itself an emergent property. Growth is a scalar summary statistic abstracted from a single societal emergent property lacking in any direct moral relevance: Gross Domestic Product (GDP--the inflation-adjusted, year on year change in the sum total of the goods and services produced by an economy). Growth is obsessed over because it is crudely correlated with trends in emergent properties that we do care about, such as employment levels, poverty, and funding for public services like education.

Growth, however, does not tell us how the well-being of people has changed; it does not tell us about epidemics of depression and substance abuse nor of trends in childhood obesity and diabetes; it does not tell us about the yawning maw between the haves and have-nots that threatens to swallow up societal stability. Growth does not tell us about the specter of global war in an age of nuclear weapons; it does not tell us about precipitous declines in the irrecoverable diversity of life on Earth.

Divorced of context, growth can be worse than useless. Obsessing over it can be downright dangerous. Consider the case of China, where an opaque and often brutal authoritarian government has tacitly pinned its legitimacy on the ability to deliver exponential growth that doubles their economy every decade, a feat certifiably unsustainable in a finite world. There, policies of growth at all costs have led to the violent suppression of dissent at home, empowerment of deplorable regimes around the world, and to environmental laws so lax that citizens breath air that clogs the arteries and face rivers poisoned with toxic benzene and filled with the bloated carcasses of swine. Even pulling out all the plugs, China’s efforts to prop up its growth rate are stumbling, as dramatic overcapitalization of state-sponsored industries and the resultant inevitable slowdown has triggered many of the economic shudders felt round the world in recent months.

Yet despite all this, growth should not be demonized.

Growth is intimately tied to the emergent property of development status, progress in which has lifted billions out of grinding poverty. What is more, the emergent properties of GDP and development are born of trillions of freely entered upon agreements that basic economic theory tells us leave both parties involved better off than they were before. [3] Those railing against growth too often overlook this fact and thus fail to realize that what they are advocating is a restriction on the basic freedom of individuals to continue to pursue the best possible life for themselves, as they themselves define it.

[3]  [an observation that dates back at least to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations]

III. Externalities

The key element missing from the cult of growth dogma (and what anti-growth activists typically focus on to the exclusion of all else) is the role of externalities--the unpriced, incidental impacts of economic interactions. Builders of coal plants think only about the costs and revenue of generating electricity, not the health and climate implications of the gases and particulates they spew from their smokestacks, even though the societal costs of those impacts can be far greater in magnitude than the revenue generated from selling excited electrons. Growth is largely blind to externalities, particularly those associated with long time horizons, like chronic health impacts or deteriorating environmental conditions.

So what, then, is the alternative to growth? The only possible literal answer to that question is non-growth (zero, or negative growth), but trying to manipulate GDPs on a global scale is surely not the end-goal for anyone asking that question. [4] Surely, the true root of the question is actually ‘how can we alter our economic system to maximize sustainable human well-being?’ or ‘how can we ensure all of humanity has the opportunity to thrive far into the future in a finite world?’

[4]  [Pointing out that the question is literally ‘what are alternatives to growth in GDP?’ reveals how odd this question is. Imagine replacing GDP with any other emergent property: ‘what are alternatives to growth in forest cover/auto sales/voter turnout?]

The answer to these meatier, more tractable questions, begins with the deceptively simple idea of internalizing externalities, which is the process of factoring in the costs and benefits of an economic transaction to all of society of any given economic transaction. With internalization of externalities, the accrual and integration of local interactions would generate an emergent property of GDP that is no longer morally dubious. [5] Growth would be a morally laudable affair. Internalization would harness the world-moving force of capitalism--the trillions of individual interactions between the 7.1 billion utility-maximizing people on Earth--and funnel its irresistible energies toward the emergence of the most thriving society possible.

[5]  [It is important to note that the only way to endogenously reshape an emergent property of a complex adaptive system is to alter the nature of the local interactions that generate it, thus doing something to change the nature of individual economic interactions is the only way to ensure that our economic system delivers emergent properties in line with our goals and values.]

But how can we internalize an infinite variety of economic externalities? Ay, there’s the rub!

IV. Camay

Before diving in deeper, permit me a detour.

The detour takes us two millennia into the past, to a desert plateau in what is now Southern Peru. There, a people called the Nazca created their eponymous Lines--hundreds of geometric shapes and depictions of animals etched into the very landscape, some spanning more than a kilometer. How an ancient society achieved this feat is relatively straightforward; they simply flipped over the oxidized red stones beneath their feet to reveal whiter minerals below.

What is contentious about the Nazca Lines is why they were created. One explanation may hold a key to solving the conundrum of how to achieve widespread internalization of externalities. It involves the idea of something called camay.

According to Thomas Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art at Harvard University, camay is a belief common to many Andean peoples, including the Nazca. The term refers to the unique animating spirits present in all places, objects, and people, and represent a greatest achievable potential of its host. Importantly, once the camay of something has been observed, a spiritual or moral imperative to release it is engendered. This, contends Cummins, is the explanation for the Nazca Lines. The largest artwork ever created, which has lasted since the birth of the Roman Empire, was the product of a person or persons looking out across a rocky desert and seeing a canvas smoldering with unpainted strokes.

What would we see if we looked for camay today?

We would see dormant in the great swaths of abandoned, degraded lands of the world, the potential for massive restoration, and through it strengthened biodiversity, climate-stabilizing carbon sequestration, and revived economic productivity.

We would see unbuilt clinics and hospitals across the Global South, which silently wait to give everyone on the planet the benefits of evidence-based medicine, without the need to assimilate into Coca-Cola Culture.

We would see youth innovation competitions in all countries that both let students of every culture and economic strata realize that they have answers to their most pressing problems, as well as provide them with a platform to actualize those solutions.

At a finer resolution we would see many unexpected patterns of camay; in the United States, we would see penitentiaries lit with the glow of green-job training centers; in the abandoned neighborhoods of her Rust Belt we would see urban farms so fecund they feed and fuel self-sufficient cities.  

In every economic transaction the world over, we would see not just the costs and benefits to ourselves, but to every amalgamation of stardust on our planet with the miraculous ability to contemplate the universe. Thus a steady diffusion of belief in camay would begin the work of internalizing externalities.

Finally, in our national and international institutions we would see appropriate measures to enforce the principles of internalization of externalities. Thus a diffusion of belief in camay need not be complete before it begins fomenting broader change.

The alternative to growth is not shoehorning the global economy into a steady-state dynamic. The alternative to growth is to realize we only cared about growth in the first place because it was a clean, convenient, numerical anchor in a wild and confusing sea of non-linearity and chaos. The true ‘alternative to growth’ is to cast aside growth obsession and growth demonization and adopt an orthogonal framework, wholly growth-agnostic, that is premised around an understanding of human well-being as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system. By doing so we would redirect misspent focus and energy toward purifying the local dynamics that shape the emergent outcomes in our world that are imbued with moral relevance, while simultaneous purging the dark side of GDP growth through internalization of externalities. Such a framework requires attaching potentialism and morality to even the most commonplace of local human interactions and transactions. That is why camay should be our alternative to growth.

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Description of my research using only common words

I study the groups of animals living on land that used to have animals for eating, but now has growing trees.  I study all the animals that make sound, because I want to know how many different kinds of animals are able to live in this land with the new trees.  I want to know what allows some animals to live in this land.  Does the type of ground matter?  How about the number of tall trees?  I hope to also see if things about the animals matter too: the type of food they eat, where they sleep, whether or not they can fly. All of this is important to know to keep many of these animals from dying.

Via http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

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How did the Plasmodium vivax argue his way around the immune system?  He just kept encysting.

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Moral meat.

The NYTimes held an essay contest recently, challenging readers to come up with an ethical defense for eating meat.  I put together my own 600-word piece, and thought I'd post it here, since it was not selected as one of the finalists.

(Check here for the winning submissions)

Through the course of a half dozen field projects in tropical ecology, I’ve been immersed in cultures that respect, nurture, or outright worship animals. However, it’s only back home in America that I’ve encountered anyone that believes animals can never be morally killed.  The most perplexing part of this belief is the underlying axiom that the suffering of sentient, but non-conscious and non-rational organisms carries dramatic moral weight.  For me, it is only once discussion turns to members of species that can recognize themselves in a mirror, contemplate their place in the world, or knowingly enter into social contracts that serious moral consideration should come into play.

But my goal is not merely to argue the moral ambiguity of eating meat.  What I want to show is that eating meat can be a morally laudable act.

This begins by recognizing a transformation in the state of the world at some point during the 20th century.  Sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s humanity passed the threshold at which we could conceivably claim Earth’s life support systems were being used below capacity.  Since that time, taking more than one’s fair share has become a contribution to the potential failure of human civilization.  And because the idea of allowing even a partial collapse of our globalized society is so monstrous, that excess became morally abhorrent.

Central to that excess is the way we produce our food, particularly our reliance on soil- and ecosystem-degrading agricultural techniques that require heavy use of toxic pesticides, mined phosphorus, and Haber-Bosch nitrogen.  Sure, a diet heavy in factory farmed animals is even worse than one limited to industrially produced grains, fruits and veggies, but that misses the point: they are both immoral in their unsustainability, whereas alternatives that necessarily involve eating some animals are not.

While there is no universal diet that will minimize ecological footprint, there are two key principles that guide such optimization.

The first is utilization of naturally occurring food resources.  Here in my home state of Alaska, the only way to eat sustainably is to consume moose, caribou, salmon, and other wild take. Those populations are productive enough that they could easily provide a healthy supply of protein for the majority of Alaskans.  While wild take is constrained to play a small role in feeding the global population, it’s non-trivial; for agriculturally limited regions like Alaska it’s a cornerstone of the only healthy diet that’s moral under the imperative of sustainability.

The second guiding principle is closed loops.  Modern agriculture seeks to treat food production as a simple linear flow from chemical and genetically-manipulated inputs to industrial-grade outputs.  Contrarily, both traditional agriculture and modern permaculture are structured around the idea of recursion, where as much as possible inputs are limited to the ‘wastes’ of the process.  Sustainable food production is at its best when augmented by manure fertilizers, pastured animals, and high biodiversity at every level (in the soil, between the fields and amongst the crops), all of which require animals.  And lest there be enormous inefficiency in the system, this means eventually eating those animals.

Currently, less than 5% of meat in the US is produced the right way, but that misses the point.  All of it can be.  Strict vegetarianism, however, won’t achieve that goal. Asserting the universal immorality of meat consumption (or its inherent unsustainability) undercuts our most powerful tool for fomenting truly sustainable and moral agriculture: supporting the people who do it right.  American markets are famed for their responsiveness to demand, and I for one am proud to be part of the growing clamor for moral meat.

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Mora et al estimate there are 8.75 million species on Earth, and admit that this number is most likely an underestimate.  They also mention that on average 6,200 new species are described each year, and this number looks fairly constant moving forward into the near future.

Now a thought experiment: assume those numbers are spot on.  Ed 'E.O.' Wilson and others have projected that given the current rate of habitat destruction (particularly within biodiversity 'hotspots') and our abysmal lack of effort in mitigating the effects of global climate change, easily half of all species on the planet could go extinct by the end of the century.  

[8,750,000 (<-number of species on Earth, estimated) - 1,244,360 (<-number of species on Earth, thus far catalogued)] * 50% =

3,752,820 (<-number of undescribed species expected to go extinct over the course of the rest of the century)

3,752,820 / 89 (<-number of years left in the century) =

42,166 (<- number of undescribed species that will go extinct per year on average throughout the rest of the century)

Assuming a roughly constant rate of extinction between now and then (this is not necessarily a good assumption, except perhaps if 'going extinct' is defined as 'becoming effectively doomed to extinction'), we can say that undescribed species, discrete tail ends of independent evolutionary lineages, each with their own unique story to tell, are being killed off about 7 times faster than they are being described.

42,166 / 365 / 24 =

4.8 (<-average number of undescribed species going extinct per hour over the next century)

Approximately every 12 minutes, another never before described species, and all the billions of unique pieces of information it embodies, disappears irreversibly from our planet.

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“One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force.” --Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother July 1880 (as quoted in Andre Agassi's autobiography)

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BIMBYism

My apologies to anyone following this blog: I know I promised a high density of cool bug pics, but unfortunately my CF card reader has broken and I may be limited to text posts for the time being. Not in keeping with any part of the stated purpose of this account, the following post is a musing on a book I just read, Ethical Oil by the Canadian Ezra Levant. Without further ado:

In his book Ethical Oil, author Ezra Levant makes a throaty and fervent case for the development Alberta's oil sands. Stripped of its personal and ad hominem attacks on specific detractors of Canada's 'tar sands', Levant's central argument is that if we don't tap Canada's unconventional reserves, we're faced with worse options—namely continuing to buy from dirty, corrupt, bloody or otherwise authoritarian regimes that largely control the world's conventional oil reserves. My natural tendency is to ignore climate change-denying Islamophobes who have little mastery of literary devises beyond the rhetorical question (which he tries to compensate for by using them ubiquitously), but this time I have to make an exception. Levant's central argument is one everyone ought to consider. It cuts to one of the core of problems of both the modern environmental movement and the political discourse surrounding national decision making.

We live in a time of unprecedented global interconnectedness, global consciousness and global environmental challenges. The crash of the Thai bhat sent reverberations through the world economy; in the court of Western thought, the life of a sheepherder in Patagonia has no less value than that of a billionaire CEO; global climate change, depletion of non-renewable resources, and biodiversity loss pose challenges to all. We can no longer consider the morality of our actions and decisions in a purely local context.

Levant's refrain consists primarily of the conjoined points 'we aren't going to stop using oil overnight,' and 'each barrel of bitumen we boil out of boreal Alberta is one less that we need import from the House of Saud'. Though it may sound simplistic, I think a generalized version of that insight and calculus is precisely what needs to be embraced across the board when dealing problematic industries. First, 'is it indispensible?', and if so, second, 'where can it be done such that the costs to the human health, human rights and the environment are minimized and the profits put to the best use?'

Popular American environmentalism in many was is an metamorphosis of the notion of N.I.M.B.Y. ('Not In My BackYard'). It's why garbage transfer stations, sewage treatment centers and coal power plants have so much trouble getting sited. Eventually, those facilities generally do end up getting sited—they have to be put somewhere—except when they do find a home, it's more often than not in the most marginalized or disenfranchised of communities, ones that lack a strong enough voice to themselves say “NIMBY”. Many of the same groups that once used NIMBY as a rallying cry now decry its results, so-called issues of 'environmental justice'.

The items above tend to be the most commonly given examples of environmental injustice, but I think they are quite far from being the most profound. Though he doesn't state it as such, Levant makes the case that the oil sands are one such potential example; failing to utilize the resource in Canada for fear it will pollute local waterways would mean Nigeria would have that much more incentive to continue drilling heavy oil, spilling it from leaky pipelines and flaring the natural gas (there are of course intimately tied social justice issues in any example as well). There's a lot of heated debate about offshore drilling in the United States, and the most prominent detractors tend to be NIMBYist locals and environmental groups. They both tend to argue that the cost of a spill would be too much to risk, but even a spill the size of the Deepwater Horizon disaster off the Atlantic Coast would be considerably less harmful to the environment (probably not a single species would be seriously threatened) than any development at all in the Western Amazon (thousands of species could be driven to extinction, most of them currently lacking formal scientific descriptions), where large-scale oil exploration is underway. Now add to that the fact that a spill is far less likely in the United States, and that the response to a disaster would be many times greater than in Brazil or Peru.

Although the talk so far has focused on oil and unsavory processing plants, in my mind, the most heinous example of the negative consequences of NIMBYism (and I may only say this because it’s something near to my heart at this point) is with timber and forest products. Take the country of Japan, for instance. They are often admired for having the highest percentage of intact forest cover among any developed nation. Kudos. What most people don't realize, however, is that Japan can maintain such high forest cover by importing all of their timber and paper, and thus exporting the environmental costs of forest destruction. That destruction is outsourced to Third World nations with corrupt governments and 'weak institutions' (as I heard some scientists euphemize), like, well, Indonesia (in early centuries, it was the island of Honshu that exported deforestation to the island of Hokkaido). Rather than having what would undoubtedly be carefully regulated and monitored timber operations in Japan, the end result is massive, rampant and unsustainable illegal logging in the Malay Archipelago, fueling corruption and leaving behind reduced economic potential for local communities. Given that Indonesia is one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet, I can guarantee you that more species went extinct here than could have possibly gone extinct in Japan.

Maybe it's an uncommon sentiment, but I think every species of animal or plant on Earth has a more or less equal inherent value to a first approximation, and that the same holds true of every human life on the planet, regardless of country of birth. To me, the direct corollary of this belief is that we should not be halting development or extraction of something currently inescapably vital to humanity simply because we don't want it done in our country, state, or even backyard—not if the end result is messier extraction with greater environmental or social costs elsewhere in the world. Forget NIMBY, I think for those of us in the developed world, it's time to embrace BIMBY ('B' for Better).

Before I feel completely comfortable with the idea of BIMBYism, however, there are, of course, some changes and assurances needed. We need to be sure that proper regulation, management, oversight, and accountability exist within our structure of environmental protection. Agencies like the Mineral Management Services can't allow environmental impact assessments in the Gulf to be copy-and-pastes from reports done for the Bering. Companies like Exxon can't be allowed to throw the brakes on justice for two decades (a period during which one-quarter of the plaintiffs died) after committing one of the worst, and most culpable, environmental atrocities in US history.  

Likewise, we need to be sure that development of those resources does not increase their consumption nor slow down the development of advanced technologies that will lead to the resources' obsolescence.  If we are going to extract oil, coal and heavy metals, we should be aware of their negative externalities and use the inescapable nastiness of their extraction and usage as motivation for their conservative consumption and for the development of cleaner technologies that will one day replace them.  

Once that happens, though, I think it becomes very difficult to argue that in our interconnected system it's OK to outsource the burden of collecting key global resources upon others, especially when that shunting multiplies the burden. I think that world-embracing perspective must become a new principle of modern environmentalism.

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Talking about Europe's forests when you include Russia is like talking about the United States' glaciers or tundra when you include Alaska and several Canadian territories.  The statement "Europe is home to 25% of the world's forests" is ridiculous when 80% of 'Europe's' forests are in Russia (and I'm guessing the vast majority of the remainder is located in Finland, Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine). Silly.

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http://vimeo.com/21993803

The video above is a recording of a lecture given by Jon Chase of the Washington University in St. Louis. It's just over an hour long, so don't start watching it unless you're prepared to nerd out for a solid chunk of time.

I'm posting it here, in part, because I want to reminisce about one of the things at Harvard I miss most: the Biodiversity, Ecology and Global Change lecture series hosted by the University Center for the Environment. It, along with all the rest of the constant stream of outside lectures, was what justified Harvard for me. Though I made incredible friends and took amazing classes, I could have done that at a lot of different institutions. But where else in the world could I have chatted with conservation biology guru Paul Ehrlich on a Monday, listened to the CEO of Saudi Aramco on a Wednesday and closed out the week with a 20 person video-conference call with Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Ag? My biggest regret in college was not attending more.

The reason why I'm posting this specific video though, is because it applies very directly to our project here in Indonesia (and indeed all restoration projects in general). To summarize one of the main thrusts of Professor Chase's presentation, large-scale restoration projects generally end up failing to achieve the original biodiversity at a landscape level as their pristine analogues. Chase posits—and I think correctly—that this is generally because natural ecosystems contain large amounts of biological heterogeneity (both because of variations in the physical environment, and stoichastic ecological factors, but in either case its termed the ecosystem's 'β-diversity') that is lost to uniform degradation, but not recovered through restoration, because those efforts are equally uniform. One of the examples he uses is the introduction of fish to small ponds; despite the initial great diversity in the community composition of the ponds, the fish ends up consuming and extirpating most of the invertebrates and frog species. After simply removing those finned fiends, however, his team found much of the original diversity failed to return; many of the invertebrates and frogs came back, but it was more or less the same subset of the original diversity in each case.

Chase shows this finding to be true of restoration work in many different ecosystem types, though not for tropical rainforests. It seems there weren't any major studies to cite (yet!). I suspect, however, that the same principle holds even more true for tropical forests—after all, they have some of the highest biological heterogeneity of any ecosystem on the planet. If true, it would really lend some credence to the old environmentalist mantra about rainforests: that once their gone, their gone. Sure you can get something back (and if I've learned one thing here and in Costa Rica last summer, it's that there's always potential to get something back), but it won't necessarily be the same as the original.

In addition to that general thought, Chase's lecture resonated at an even more immediate level for me. When I first wrote my project proposal over a year ago, I talked about seeking the 'optimal model' for reforestation in this region, and what I had in mind was a proscriptive mix of species and planting techniques that would lead to the fastest, most diverse, and most beneficial regrowth possible. I think what Chase shows rather convincingly is that that kind of thinking needs adjustment; the 'optimal model' for reforestation needs more nuance than that. Perhaps the term 'model' is misleading altogether. Maybe what we need is a 'reforestation algorithm'; given the input variables of project size, degradation type and intended forest use, one should plant X species, in blocks of Y that differ in species composition by Z. I kind of like that.

Adventures in Restoration 3: the Quest for the Reforestation Algorithm!

Coming soon to a rainforest near you.

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Selections from a two month break: Kuching->Kuala Lumpur->Kuwait->London->New York->Boston->New York->Anchorage->Fairbanks->Anchorage->Buffalo->Port Perry->Toronto->New York->Paris->Champoleon Valley->Paris->Kuala Lumpur->Jakarta.

Next it's back to Sukadana!

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Looking back on a replanting season

What follows is a portion of the progress report I wrote for my Richardson Fellowship Committee back in early February. Be forewarned, it might be a little corny...

 As someone who fancies himself an ecologist (at least one in training), and who finds himself working on a project that requires the daily application of ecological knowledge and expertise, I think it's a little strange that I find the most pertinent lecture of my undergrad years was one from a course on Andean History. Bizarrely, it seems that the Nazca of Peru taught me a more useful lesson for tropical reforestation than any of the two dozen professors I studied with in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department. It's a lesson about a way of looking at things.

I arrived here in Kalimantan Barat in October, just in time to join the preparations for the 2010 planting season with a reforestation team affiliated with Yayasan Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI--a truly innovative NGO that yokes a vision of environmental health with quality Western medical care delivered at-cost to a desperately poor region). Before my arrival, the team consisted of a Indonesian reforestation manager employed by ASRI, an American volunteer and a handful of local day laborers, who in the preceding year had busily gathered and reared around 35,000 native seedlings, a mix of valuable rainforest hardwoods and fast-growing pioneer species. Many of these were collected as one of the endless forms of payment accepted at ASRI's clinic. My arrival in October coincided with the end of the dry season, and thus the frantic activity to get the year's replanting underway. Since early November we've orchestrated the planting of 24,000 seedlings, all in a clear-cut area just inside the boarder of Gunung Palung National Park. About a third were planted as a part of ten different experimental treatments designed to answer important questions about the feasibility of different methods in our region, and which will be monitored to help zero in on optimal reforestation techniques. The other two-thirds were planted in the manner determined to be the most successful of the project's pilot work in 2009.

The extremely inhospitable terrain made planting an exceedingly laborious process. Despite its national park status, the site lost all its forest cover in 1998, when the vacuum of power in the wake of President Soeharto's fall allowed an unknown bureaucrat to illegally gazette the area as a logging concession. Any trees that were left standing by the timber company soon succumbed to annual fires that followed the invasion of alang-alang grass. These fires also liquidated the seed bank, meaning even if they were stopped, natural regeneration could only slowly work in from the margins. The lack of woody vegetation cover caused soil erosion and nutrient leeching, and excessive flooding during the rains and arid conditions during dry spells, all to the detriment of local waterways. Not only did the resulting positive feedback loop leave little hope of natural regeneration, but it actually threatened to overwhelm adjacent forest. The few species able to preserver under those conditions were all non-native, unpalatable, and otherwise lacking any use by local communities. In short, barring toxic contamination, there is little else that could make the land more poorly suited for- yet more desperately in need of reforestation.

I did not mean to suggest with my opening statement that my OEB coursework was anything less than deeply satisfying and highly applicable—without that training I'd have been just another pair of hands rather than an assistant manager of the project. Plant Systematics, Mycology, Ethnobotany, Entomology, and Global Change Biology are just a few of the courses that gave me the tools I use here everyday. But there is something that sews all the divergent aspects of restoration together with a unifying vision, and that attaches a motivating spirit to everything we do, and that something most directly ties into a lecture Prof. Tom Cummins gave in Pathways through the Andes about the way a civilization called the Nazca created their eponymous Lines on a desert plateau, over two millennia ago.

The Nazca Lines are the world's most extensive 'geoglyphs'—a term for images that use entire landscapes as canvases. Only fully visible from the air, these mile-long geometic shapes and stylized depictions of animals take advantage of the regions unique geochemistry, and were fashioned by simply flipping over or shuffling aside oxidized red stones, revealing whiter, unoxidized minerals beneath. But despite being arguably the largest, longest-lasting, and most imaginative set of artwork in the world today, the part of Prof. Cummins story that most caught my attention was his explanation for why they were made: a belief in something called camay. In an exciting twist of traditional animism, the Nazca believed that the life-force latent in a person, place or thing represented a greatest realizable potential, and once something's camay is observed, there emerges a spiritual or even moral imperative for the observer to release it. Cummins insisted that the Nazca did not consider themselves to be the creators of the Lines, but merely the agents that revealed what had always been there.

In my mind, it's that sort of vision that imbues all our restoration activities with a greater importance and makes the slow, back-breaking labor seem like more than wheel spinning. Looking through the lens of camay makes the sight of a charred alang-alang field not heart-wrenching, but uplifting, because rather than a biological wasteland, one sees a forest laying dormant, waiting for knowing hands to revive it. Looking for the camay of this project has even clarified the task immensely; all of our experimental treatments, all the nuances of our experimental design are now being built around the elucidation of a particular model of restoration of alang-alang choked swaths of Kalimantan Barat—a model optimized for returns on time, money and energy inputs. We can now see too, that those dividends in turn must be measured with the many metrics of economic and biological recovery, which for Gunung Palung region at least, are the two central pillars of human well-being. The camay of ASRI's reforestation effort is not to just replant, but to show a region something that can and should be scaled and replicated by NGOs, government agencies and local communities alike.

As pertinent as Professor Cummins lesson has been to the battle to reforest alang-alang grasslands, it is perhaps even more applicable to the next phase of my time here: exploring the potential for restoration of partially degraded forest. While there are many areas in and around Gunung Palung that have been overtaken by the grass, there is a much more extensive area that still possesses enough intermittent canopy cover to stave off invasion, but that have been too heavily damaged by illegal hand-logging to show much hope of timely recovery if left to their own devices. This stagnation is the result of five key factors: occasional forest fires, the over-abundance of certain 'pioneer' species, the over-abundance of climbing vines and lianas, the presence of invasive tree species (most notably the recently introduced species Bellucia pintamera as well as the ever present Acacia mangium), and finally the loss of mature rainforest species from the seedbank.

The extent of these challenges varies immensely from site to site and requires a much more flexible strategy to combat, even as the total effort needed pales in comparison to that demanded of alang-alang restoration. It's exactly that kind of heterogeneity for which the lens of camay is most useful. I can't wait to get started.