Top Quotes: “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence” — James Bridle
Introduction
“Something seems to be deeply amiss in what we imagine our tools are for. This thought has crept up on me in recent years as I’ve watched as new technologies — particularly the most novel and intelligent’ ones — are used to undermine and usurp human joy, security and even life itself.”
“Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, and the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That’s a description of an Al — it’s also a description of a modern corporation. For this ‘corporate Al,’ pleasure is growth and profitability, and pain is lawsuits and drops in shareholder value. Corporate speech is protected, corporate personhood recognized, and corporate desires are given freedom, legitimacy and sometimes violent force by international trade laws, state regulation — or lack thereof — and the norms and expectations of capitalist society. Corporations mostly use humans as their sensors and effectors; they also employ logistics and communications networks, arbitrage labour and financial markets, and recalculate the value of locations, rewards and incentives based on shifting input and context. Crucially, they lack empathy, or loyalty, and they are hard — although not impossible — to kill.”
“It’s not hard to see why the masters of today’s largest corporations fear their own obsolescence at the hands of artificial intelligence. No longer at the top of the pile, they would be as vulnerable as the rest of us to all-powerful entities which do not share their interests, and which would at best cast them aside, and at worst physically rearrange them into a more useful consistency.
What I understand from this gloomy appraisal is that our conception of artificial intelligence — and thus, being modelled on ourselves, of intelligence in general — is fundamentally flawed and limited. It reveals that when we talk about Al, we’re mostly talking about this kind of corporate intelligence, and ignoring all the other kinds of things that Al — that any kind of intelligence — could be.
That’s what happens, it would seem, when the development of Al is led primarily by venture-funded technology companies. The definition of intelligence which is framed, endorsed and ultimately constructed in machines is a profit-seeking, extractive one. This framing is then repeated in our books and films, in the news media and the public imagination — in science fiction tales of robot overlords and all-powerful, irresistible algorithms — until it comes to dominate our thinking and understanding. We seem incapable of imagining intelligence any other way — meaning we are doomed not only to live with this imagining, but to replicate and embody it, to the detriment of ourselves and the planet. We become more like the machines we envisage, in ways which, in the present, have profoundly negative effects on our relationships with one another and with the wider world.
One way to change the nature of these relationships, then, is to change the way we think about intelligence: what it is, how it acts on the world, and who possesses it. Beyond the narrow framing put forward by both technology companies and the doctrine of human uniqueness (the idea that, among all beings, human intelligence is singular and preeminent) exists a whole realm of other ways of thinking and doing intelligence.”
Nature
“Psychologists Diana Reiss and Lori Marino started exposing dolphins to mirrors at Marine World in California in the 1990s. The dolphins responded immediately: by having sex with each other in front of the mirrors. The researchers referred to these recordings privately as ‘dolphin porno tapes.’”
“Happy is also the subject of a ground-breaking legal case brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project; an animal advocacy organization based in Florida. Since 2018, the NhRP has been seeking Happy’s release to a dedicated animal sanctuary under a writ of habeas cor-pus, the medieval legal doctrine which protects against unlawful detention or imprisonment. Historically, habeas corpus has only applied to humans, but the NhRP is seeking to change this: they have also filed writs on behalf of a number of gorillas and chimpanzees. None have so far been successful, and Happy’s case is still in progress.”
“In order to accommodate the baboons to her presence, Smuts would approach the troop on open ground, slowly moving towards them and stopping any time they seemed alarmed and moved away. As she became attuned to their behaviour, she started to pick up on more subtle signals — mothers, for example, would call their infants closer before a general alarm was sounded — which allowed her to draw closer still. Eventually, she was able to move among them freely.
This ability to move freely among another species, Smuts emphasizes, had less to do with the baboons becoming habituated to her presence, than with her adjusting her behaviour to suit them. She learned to move a little, and think a lot, like a baboon, picking up on their behaviour not merely as a scientist, but as a guest. In return, the baboons started to treat her as a subject of communication rather than an object of fear — that is, they realized that a dirty look rather than a general alarm would suffice to make her move away, and over time a greater range of gestures and signals arose between them. Research scientists, Smuts complained, are often told that they should ignore or move away from the subjects of their study if they come too close or try to interact with them. Such behaviour precludes meaningful interaction, as it would in any social group, so prevents most researchers even seeing the behaviour they’re trying to study.
Smuts soon discovered she could get a lot closer to the baboons if she did not merely react to their sounds and gestures, but returned them. Baboons have a highly developed sense of personal space: they might ignore the proximity of close family members, while taking flight at a glance from a higher-ranking or aggressive member of the troop. When meeting one another, a grunt or a facial expression conveys an expectation of a relationshipso when Smuts returned the grunts and gestures of her companions, they accepted her more. To ignore a baboon — or any other social animal — is not a neutral act.”
“One evening the baboons were making their way to a sleeping place, down a small stream they often travelled along, which was interspersed with many small pools. Without any obvious signal, each of the baboons sat down on a smooth stone surrounding one of the pools, and for half an hour (by human reckoning) they sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, staring at the waters. Even the normally boisterous juveniles slipped into quiet contemplation. Then, again at no perceptible sign, they stood up and resumed their journey in quiet procession.”
“Deep in the forest around Gombe are spectacular waterfalls, which for the chimpanzees seemed to hold a deep fascination: ‘Sometimes as a chimpanzee — most often an adult male — approaches one of these falls his hair bristles slightly, a sign of heightened arousal,’ Goodall recounts. ‘As he gets closer, and the roar of falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. What Goodall calls the ‘waterfall dances’ may last for ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Gagliano’s favourite partner in this research is Mimosa pudica, also known as the ‘touch-me-not’ or ‘sensitive plant. The mimosa displays a particularly startling behaviour: on being touched, with a stick or a hand, it suddenly and quickly rolls up its leaves into a tight bunch. It belongs to a rare class of plants whose movement is visible to the naked eye: only the Venus flytrap, with its snapping jaws, and the Asian telegraph plant, whose dancing leaves entranced Charles Darwin, can rival it for speed.”
“Gagliano kept dropping the plants, over and over again, up to sixty times a session, over multiple sessions. Three hundred and. sixty drops a day: a marathon of bumps and shocks. Thonk thonk thonk. It transpired that it only took a few drops — as few as four or five — for the plants to realize that there was no threat, and that it was safe to keep their leaves open (a side test, involving a different stimulus which still elicited the closing response, revealed that they weren’t simply exhausted by the activity). By the end of the sixty-drop sessions, the plants were entirely unbothered by the drop: they had learned to ignore it.
Understanding a lesson is one thing; its value depends on the ability to recall it later, to put the knowledge gained into practice. So Gagliano and her colleagues rested and then retested individual mimosas, demonstrating that they retained over time the memory of the drop, and their associated change in behaviour.”
“The field just grows and grows. Plants don’t just hear and remember — they make their own sounds. In another experiment, Gagliano recorded the sound of corn kernels clicking at frequencies far beyond human perception, their purpose still unknown. It turns out plants can smell too, detecting both predators and the warning signals given off by neighbouring plants. They even smell out prey, as animals do: the parasitic dodder vine sniffs out suitable victims, which it then envelops and feeds upon. Plants make decisions based on complex information, such as picking the best response to nearby competition. Grow sideways, root deeper or shoot higher? They can tailor chemical releases to attract or repel animals — poisoning some and creating addiction in others. They have proprioception — the ‘sixth sense’ which enables us to know where parts of our bodies are without looking. They recognize and respond differently to kin and close relatives. In short, plants act, and they act in ways which, when animals do likewise, we call indicators of intelligence.”
“One of the strengths of plants is precisely that they have no central, irreplaceable organs. Plants are modular — they can survive losing 90 per cent of themselves, and many species can reproduce from broken pieces, or cuttings. In particularly harsh environments, like deserts, cuttings are more successful than seeds for raising new generations, which is why many succulents are particularly good at this kind of reproduction.”
“They are one of the largest and oldest individuals on Earth.
Pando was born around 80,000 years ago, or perhaps many, many more: one study puts their age at closer to a million years. Clonal trees can’t be aged by their rings, as each is a mere passing stem of the more ancient root. For most of Pando’s life, conditions were close to perfect for a clonal aspen: frequent forest fires prevented competition from conifers, while a gradual climatic shift from wet and humid weather to drier, semi-arid conditions made it harder for younger aspens to seed and establish rivalries. In fact, hardly any new quaking aspen have grown from seed in the western United States for 10,000 years, yet the aspen remains North America’s most widely distributed tree.
Today, Pando is believed to be dying — albeit very, very slowly. No new growth has been detected for several decades. The possible causes of this are numerous, but all point back to human interference. The establishment of cabins and campsites within Pando’s expanse reduces the likelihood of the cleansing forest fires on which aspen depend, while the disappearance of bears, wolves and mountain lions has led to an explosion of mule deer. The deer, along with cattle, graze on young aspen shoots. Once areas are eaten or cut back, they don’t regrow.”
“The earliest plants were mere agglomerations of cellular tissue, lacking roots or leaves or any of the specialized structures we recognize in plants today. They were the descendants of simple marine algae which washed ashore and found some purchase on beaches and cliffs, sustaining themselves through photosynthesis alone. But around 400 million years ago — at least, that is the date of the oldest fossils we’ve found — these proto-plants began to associate with fungi: to evolve lobes and fleshy organs to house mycorrhizal partners. This is the origin of all plant roots: questing limbs in search, not of food itself, but of partners in the process of producing life.
Plants and fungi don’t merely interact underground, they penetrate one another. Parts of fungi actually live within the cells of plants, and they form in effect an extended root system, more than a hundred times longer than the roots of the plant itself. And these fungal strands, called mycelium, extend everywhere and through everything. What we take to be the soil itself is actually part fungus — somewhere between a third and a half of its living mass. Plant, fungus, and the entire ecosystem on which we and all life on earth depends, is inseparable, right down to the cellular level.”
“This bone-dry region of Ethiopia is, today, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The Depression is formed by the triple junction of three chunks of the planet’s mobile crust: the point where the Indian, Nubian and Somali tectonic plates meet. Once a single slab, the three plates started to separate 60 to 100 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period, the time of dinosaurs and the first flowering plants, before the last mass extinction event. They are still moving slowly apart at a rate of one or two centimetres per year, causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and rifts in the Earth’s surface. As the ground buckles, parts of it collapse, making this the lowest point on the African continent.
The Depression is also one of the hottest places on Earth, with average daily temperatures of 35 degrees, and only a few centimetres of rain each year. The craters of Erte Ale, the ‘smoking mountain’ on the edge of the depression, are filled with lakes of molten lava. In the area called Dallol, meaning ‘disintegration’ in the Afar language, hot springs carry superheated saltwater and minerals to the surface, creating otherworldly scenes: the land is neon green and yellow; smoke billows from sulphur chimneys; iron-streaked stalactites belch green, chlorinated steam; and the ground hisses and crackles underfoot. In places, salt bombs’ detonate under pressure from erupting gases. The waters in some of its lakes are pure sulphuric acid, with a pH of zero, the highest naturally occurring levels of acidity on earth.”
Humans
“She is better known in Europe and America as Lucy, after the Beatles song playing on repeat in the camp at the time of her discovery.”
“Neanderthal genes gave modern Europeans and Asians thicker hair and nails: a useful adaptation for lower temperatures at northern latitudes. Denisovan bequests include a particular adaptation to high altitude in Tibetan peoples, and a unique pattern of fat distribution in the Inuit people of Greenland. Neanderthals and Denisovans were pioneers in what were once considered extreme environments: their adaptations, their genetic legacy, helped our ancestors to outlive them.”
“The avocado may well have evolved its large and apparently inedible seed in response to the presence of giant animals capable of eating and passing them: the ground sloths and elephantine gomphotheres of the Pliocene, over a million years ago. Although these symbiotic partners no longer exist, the avocado has moved on: today, it continues to spread itself through other animals that appreciate its pulp.”
“Studies have shown that elderly people living in care homes have less diverse microbiomes than those living in broader communities, and are as a result more prone to frailty and chronic illness.”
“An organization called the Snowchange Cooperative, based in northern Scandinavia, documents the ways in which indigenous communities read and respond to climate change. A Sámi woman called Gun Aira notes that a lake whose traditional name is Biehtsejávre, or Lake of the Pines, is now entirely surrounded by birch — a sign of changing environmental conditions. In this way, recognition of environmental change is encoded into indigenous history and knowledge. Most of us do not have access to have such extensive cultural memory banks: we are dependent upon the short attention spans of our contemporary knowledge-making technologies. All too often, this blinds us to deeper, longer changes in the world around us.”
“Following the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC in October 1884, the world was divided into twenty-four time zones, with a single mean time determined by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. There was widespread opposition to its implementation. In Bombay, factory workers rioted against the imposition of global time, considering it another colonial affront from Britain. In Beirut, bus schedules were printed in both European and Ottoman time, while public clocks fell in and out of sync with church bells and the call of the muezzins. France adopted a national time, but refused to use the Greenwich mean: French time was calculated from Paris and continued to be so until 1911.”
Nature, Part 2
“What does plant migration actually look like? In part, it is a steady, local effort: creeping roots and floating seeds establishing the next generation in favourable areas along a population’s leading edge, leaving a dwindling trail of less successful plantations in the rear. At other times, it is accomplished in great strides, as seeds are flung into the atmosphere and carried by the winds to establish new and distant colonies, dispersed outlier populations which rapidly expand when conditions become favourable. Forward operating bases for new climatic explorers.
Across the eastern United States, populations of trees have been migrating for at least the last thirty years, probably much more. Researchers who examined Forest Service data from 1980 to 2015 found that three-quarters of species in the eastern US were shifting north- and west-wards, at an average rate of between 10 and 15 kilometres a decade. Speed and direction is different for different types of trees: the conifers are mostly heading north, while broad-leafed and flowering trees, like oaks and birches, move west. The fastest moving are Picea glauca, white spruce, which clock up over 100 kilometres each decade, almost unswervingly northwards. By contrast, American sweetgums and balsam poplars have barely moved at all, registering shifts of just a couple of kilometres in the same period. This means that the white spruce is keeping well ahead of climatic change for now — but starting as it is from higher latitudes, across the very top of the US, it won’t have as far to run as the sweetgums of Alabama and Georgia when things get tough.”
“Another recent hobby of mine, when not acting as a Fluchthelfer for dandelions, is time-lapse photography. For this purpose I acquired a small, weatherproof camera designed for documenting construction projects: a few inches high, it’s a little monocular homunculus which can sit undisturbed in a corner, observing the world for weeks, powered only by a couple of AA batteries.
For months, I shuffled this little device around my apartment, spending a few days at a time with each of the potted denizens of the living room. When I review the footage, the apparently inert ferns and ficus burst into life; philodendron curls its fingers around the lampshades; monstera bobs and waves its leaves; lilies open and close, turning to follow the sun as it moves across the walls. Each creature has its own pace, its own rhythm, but all move together — flexing, turning, bending and stretching. What appears to me from my dining-table desk as perfect stillness is in reality a frenzy of activity in another register. Nothing could persuade me better that, in the words of the botanist Jack Schultz, ‘plants are just very slow animals!’”
“
“In the 1950s, the Italian government forcibly evacuated the Sassi, the famous dwelling-caves of Matera that had been continuously occupied for 9,000 years, rehousing their inhabitants in modern apartments on the other side of town. Today, after decades of abandonment, the Sassi have been gentrified, with many of the caves re-excavated, smoothed out and refashioned, somewhat incongruously, as expensive restaurants and Airbnbs: the ‘shame of Italy recast as a tourist attraction.’”
“All honeyguides have a rare ability; they are capable of digesting beeswax, which is a potent source of nutrients. However, the outer casing of wild beehives is tough and hard to crack, and the tasty beeswax is well protected. And so they have learned to ask for help.
When they meet humans on the savannah, honeyguides make a distinctive call, different to their usual mating or territorial songs, in order to get the humans’ attention. (Hungry honeyguides will even fly into the Yao’s camps to fetch them out directly.) Once they have a hunter’s attention, the honeyguide swoops, fluttering from tree to tree, calling continuously, to draw the human along behind it. When it comes to a tree containing a wild bee nest, it perches expectantly on a nearby branch — well within reach of the hunter’s arrows.
But though the Yao people regularly kill and eat birds of similar sizes, they don’t shoot honeyguides; rather, they collaborate with them. Following the bird, the hunter locates the bees’ nest, climbs the tree, smokes out the hive and breaks open the comb with an axe to release the sweet honey within. Once they’ve taken what they want, the honeyguide is free to feast on the comb and the bee larvae that remain.
The communication between human and honeyguide is two-way. The Yao honey-hunters also seek out honey-guides, using a distinctive noise: a tongue-rolling brr punctuated with a breathy humph, a vocalization not a million miles from the huffs and puffs of the Viggianello herders.
Brrrrr-hm
Brrrrr-hm
Brrrrr-hm
Researchers recording and replaying this and other sounds in the forest have found that the Yao hunter who repeats the brrrr-hm is more than twice as likely to find themselves a honeyguide than one who makes other noises. It’s more than a sound: it is a specific call, a word even, which is recognized as such by the birds. Moreover, when partnered with a honeyguide, the chance of a hunter finding a hive increases from 17 per cent to 54 per cent — a clear benefit to both partners.
There are other instances of wild animals partnering with humans to increase the hunting abilities of both. Off the coasts of Myanmar and Brazil, wild dolphins show fishermen where to drop their nets, then drive the fish into them and share in the catch. But the honeyguides are the only case we know of in which human and wild animal call to one another in order to undertake a task together. And they appear to have been doing so for some time.”
“In the 1970s, the Norwegian government announced its intention to dam the Álttáeatnu (Áltá river) in northern Norway to create a hydroelectric plant, a plan which would have resulted in the flooding and destruction of a huge area of Sápmi, the traditional lands of the Sámi. In response, thousands of Sámi people came together in what became known as the Ált Action: a campaign of protest and civil disobedience culminating in battles with police at the site of the dam and a prolonged hunger strike in the capital, Oslo. Although the protests ultimately failed, the struggle was a key moment in the reinvigoration of Sámi culture after centuries of racist and religious oppression, as well as wider struggles for environmental and indigenous justice.
The resounding cry of the Áltá Action was Let the River Live, an unprecedented call not merely for environmental respect and justice, but for recognition of the life and autonomy of the river itself, and by extension the communities, human and non-human, who lived with it.”
Languages
“Aleph, the first letter of the Semitic alphabet, was written ‹. Aleph is also the ancient Hebrew word for ‘ox,’ which the letter depicts as a head with horns. It is also related to the Egyptian hieroglyph of that animal. Rotated, it became this letter: A. Likewise, our letter M is derived from Semitic letter mem. The Hebrew word for ‘water,’ mem was drawn as a little wave: . The letter O, made into a vowel by the Greek scribes, comes from the letter ayin, meaning ‘eye,’ while Q derives from the letter goth, which also means ‘monkey.’ The tail of this ‘q’ is a vestigial monkey tail.”
“I mentioned in passing the existence of non-standard, and particularly non-English, programming languages. A favourite example of these is pronounced ‘alb’ or ‘qalb’ and, in English, means heart.
It is a Turing-complete language, meaning it is capable of implementing all existing computer programmes and includes a complete Arabic interpreter and programming environment — the tools for running and writing code. Like Arabic, it is written right to left, and all keywords — usually English terms such as ‘loop’ and ‘function ’— are replaced with meaningful Arabic equivalents.
By time-honoured nerd custom, the standard test for a programming language is to write a short programme which prints the phrase ‘Hello World!’ This is Hello World! created by a Lebanese-American programmer and artist called Ramsey Nasser, specifically to highlight the cultural biases of computer science and challenge the assumptions we make about programming. As all modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin characters and is based on the English language, programming is tied to a particular written culture and favours those who grew up within that culture. Nasser argues that the goal of increasing computer literacy — and thus, rebalancing systemic power — requires the availability of tools in multiple languages. In addition, it demonstrates how altering the language of code can also change its nature.
Due to the properties of Arabic script, any word can be extended in length by drawing out the connecting strokes between letters. This is the basis of Arabic calligraphy, in which words and sentences can be shaped into complex patterns while retaining their meaning.
The same is true of the language’s commands and keywords can be extended in such a way that the code itself forms new artistic patterns, marrying aesthetics and function. Algorithms become concrete poetry — literally, in the case of Nasser’s associated artworks, which present working code in the form of traditional Arabic mosaics, which in turn emphasize the recursive and repetitive nature of code itself.”
“Serious efforts are underway to facilitate animal-machine communication, although these are still in their infancy. At MIT, researchers have developed a system for classifying marmoset calls, which is capable of distinguishing between more than a dozen of the monkey’s cheeping and trilling calls. Google announced in January 2020 that it had developed a programme to isolate whale calls in the deep ocean, using a network of hydrophones and machine analysis to identify patterns within their songs. Computer scientists at the University of Arizona are building a system to classify the calls of prairie dogs, which have a complex language that includes names for different predators as well as modifiers related to different colours. The scientists claim that such a programme would be able to translate prairie dog calls into human language, and might be applied to other animals, such as dogs and cats.
Such work is largely speculative. Despite claims made about ‘advanced Al’ in each of the above accounts, there have been no breakthroughs in using such analysis to translate animal calls into human language.”
“One of Lorenz’s longest-lasting relationships was with a raven he called Roah. Ravens have a particular call-note, which they use to invite other birds to fly with them. In adults this is, as Lorenz describes it, “a sonorous, deep-throated, and, at the same time, sharply metallic “krackrackrack” ”— but in younger birds it sounds more like ‘roah,’ hence Lorenz’s name for his friend. As a mature bird, Roah would accompany Lorenz on long walks along the Danube — but he showed a particular aversion to strangers, as well as places where he had once been frightened or had some unpleasant experience. If Lorenz lingered in such spots, Roah would urge him on, flying down behind him and passing close over his head, shaking his tail feathers and looking over his wing to check whether he was being followed. This is exactly the same behaviour a raven would exhibit to other ravens when encouraging them to fly along with them — with one key difference. Instead of uttering the usual call-note of krackrackrack, Roah would utter the name Lorenz had given him, with human intonation: ‘roah! roah! roah!’ Lorenz never trained him to do this: he believed it was the bird’s own insight. Roah believed ‘roah’ to be Lorenz’s call-note. ‘Solomon was not the only man who could speak to animals,’ Lorenz wrote, but Roah is, so far as I know, the only animal that has ever spoken a human word to a man, in its right context.
While Roah’s ability to reproduce a human word is remarkable, what’s key here is the context. Roah did not merely mimic a sound, like the parrots which Lorenz also knew; he employed it meaningfully.”
“In 2010, a slime mould called Physarum polycephalum revealed itself to be a highly effective city planner, when it recreated one of world’s most robust and efficient transport networks. The Japanese rail system is a masterpiece of complex engineering, involving decades of work by designers and planners, and reliant on complex trade-offs between cost, resources and geography. But when researchers placed oat flakes — a Physarum delicacy — in the pattern of the cities surrounding Tokyo, and released the mould, the slime mould quickly reproduced their efforts. At first, it spread itself evenly across the map, but within a few hours it had started to hone its web of threads into a highly efficient network for distributing nutrients between distant ‘stations’, with stronger, more resilient trunk routes connecting the central hubs. This wasn’t a simple, join-the-dots exercise either, but a realistic map where patches of bright light — which Physarum dislikes — corresponded to mountains and lakes, requiring the mould to make the same kind of trade-offs that engineers have to implement. After a day of adapting itself to its environment, the resemblance to an actual map of Greater Tokyo was unmistakeable.”
“The Army Corps of Engineers constructed a series of models of watersheds around the country, in order to better understand the water supply system and to study the impact of dams and bridges. The first of these was a model of the entire Mississippi River drainage area, including its major tributaries, the Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri Rivers. This model covered some 200 acres, and was constructed over a period of twenty years on the outskirts of the city of Jackson. The scale of the model was 1:100 vertical, and 1:2000 horizontal, making the Appalachian mountains twenty feet higher than the Gulf of Mexico, and the Rockies thirty feet above that. Painstakingly carved concrete slabs reproduced 15,000 miles of river over a few hundred metres. By placing suitably scaled models of structures along its length, or by digging new channels between branches, it was possible to almost perfectly simulate the effects of new levees, spillways and drainage canals on the actual environment of the river basin.”
“Subsequently, further models were constructed at Portsmouth, Virginia, and Sausalito, California, to simulate the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bays respectively. The latter is still operational (although for demonstration purposes only) and can be visited. It is a thing of wonder. In a huge hall, the whole of San Pablo Bay, Suisun Bay, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Pacific Ocean for seventeen miles beyond the Golden Gate are laid out across an area the size of a football field. The Bay Model includes ship channels, rivers, creeks, sloughs, the canals of the Delta, major wharfs, piers, slips, dikes, breakwaters and San Francisco’s famous bridges: every type and specimen of hydrological engineering. Every hour on the hour, with a great gurgle like a gigantic bathtub, the tide is turned and the water flows into the bay at a rate exactly one hundred times faster than the world outside, and then flows out again.”
Politics and Randomness
“If any one individual became too powerful, or was considered in some way a threat to the good running of the city, then their ostracism could be called for by the populace and put to a vote. If enough votes were cast in favour of the ostracism — contemporary sources put the number at around 6,000 — then that person was exiled from the city for ten years, on penalty of death.
As a mechanism to prevent the emergence of new tyrants, ostracism was relatively successful.”
“This is a major problem for all sorts of industries which rely on random numbers, from credit card companies to lotteries, because if someone can predict the way in which your randomness function operates, they can hack it, akin to a gambler sneaking marked cards into the game. This is in fact the way many such thefts have been performed. In 2010, an Iowa State Lottery official manipulated the lottery’s random number generator in such a way as to be able to predict the draw on certain days: he picked up at least $14 million before he was caught. In Arkansas, the Lottery Commission’s own deputy director of security stole more than 22,000 lottery tickets between 2009 and 2012 and won almost $500,000 in cash, again by manipulating the underlying code which picked the numbers.
To repeat, computers are incapable, by design, of generating truly random numbers, because no number produced by a mathematical operation is truly random. That’s precisely why many lotteries still use systems like rotating tubs of numbered balls: these are still harder to interfere with, and thus predict, than any supercomputer. Nevertheless, computers need random numbers for so many applications that engineers have developed incredibly sophisticated ways for obtaining what are called ‘pseudo-random’ numbers: numbers generated by machines in such a way as to be effectively impossible to predict. Some of these are purely mathematical, such as taking the time of day, adding another variable like a stock market price, and performing a complex transformation on the result to produce a third number. This final number is so hard to predict that it is random enough for most applications — but if you keep using it, careful analysis will always reveal some underlying pattern. In order to generate true, uncrackable randomness, computers need to do something very strange indeed. They need to ask the world for help.
A case study in true machine randomness is ERNIE, the computer used to pick the Premium Bonds, a lottery run by the UK government since 1956. The first ERNIE (an acronym for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment) was developed by the engineers Tommy Flowers and Harry Fensom at the Post Office Research Station, and was based on a previous collaboration of theirs — Colossus, the machine which cracked the Enigma code. ERNIE was one of the first machines to be able to produce true random numbers, but in order to do so it had to reach outside itself. Rather than simply doing maths, it was connected to a series of neon tubes — gas-filled glass rods, similar to those used for neon lighting. The flow of the gas in the tubes was subject to all kinds of interference outside the machine’s control: passing radio waves, atmospheric conditions, fluctuations in the electrical power grid, and even particles from outer space. By measuring the noise in the tubes — the change in electrical flux within the neon gas, caused by this interference — ERNIE could produce numbers which were truly random: mathematically verifiable, but completely unpredictable.”
“Biological randomness is most evident in smaller creatures, as natural selection provides a brake on the amount of alteration larger organisms can tolerate.”
“In recent years, a number of experiments have taken place, testing the effectiveness of sortition — selection by lottery — across a range of social and civic institutions. The results have been fascinating.
One such experiment took place in Ireland in 2016, when the government of the day created a Citizens Assembly to consider some of the thorniest issues faced by Irish society: abortion, fixed term parliaments, ref-erendums, an ageing population and climate change. Ninety-nine people were brought together in a hotel outside Dublin, where over a succession of weekends they listened to expert presentations; took testimony from non-governmental organizations, think tanks and interested parties; held question-and-answer sessions; debated among themselves; and drew up a series of proposals for each of the topics under discussion, which the government had promised to review and act upon. The presentations and discussions were live-streamed on the internet to encourage public interest and awareness of the issues. The proceedings themselves were managed by a chairperson — the 100th participant — as well as a secretariat from the civil service, and drew upon procedural methods created by a handful of political theorists and other national governments and community groups over many years.
There are two points worth emphasizing about this Citizens’ Assembly. The first is that the ninety-nine participants were complete strangers to one another and were selected at random from the electoral roll, in a process akin to jury service. The results of the random selection were moderated to ensure a balance of certain criteria, such as gender, age, location and class. Beyond this, they were as random a collection of people as one could hope to find, with all the differences in experience, bias, background, education, points of view and personal philosophy that exist across any country.
The second point is that the proposals which emerged from the Assembly were more progressive, more radical and potentially more world-changing than the politicians who commissioned it expected, or even believed possible. The Assembly’s recommendation on abortion — which had been made illegal in Ireland in 1861 and remained so following a nationwide referendum in 1983 — was that it should be put to another referendum. Abortion is the most contentious issue in Irish public life, with politicians losing their posts for even suggesting that it should be debated, and this fear of open discussion had strangled the possibility of reform for decades.”
“When the government acted on the Assembly’s recommendations. and put the Eight Amendment, which forbade abortion, to another referendum, the result was overwhelming and historic. A full 66 per cent of the population voted for the legalization of abortion, which was signed into law in September 2018, against all the expectations of the media and the political class.
Six months later the Assembly came to similarly radical condusions, this time on the subject of climate change. After taking testimony from experts and the general public, the Assembly issued a series of recommendations, each one passed by at least 80 per cent of its members, arguing for the institution of an independent body to address climate change; the imposition of a tax on carbon and other greenhouse gases; the encouragement of electric vehicles, public transport, ecological forestry and organic farming; the ending of subsidies to fossil fuels; the reduction of food waste; and support for sustainable electricity micro-generation. All these measures had been proposed to the government before, but had been abandoned or left to languish because politicians thought them unworkable or unpopular, or both. The Assembly’s report reinvigorated environmental campaigning in Ireland, leading to the declaration of a climate and biodiversity emergency by the Dáil, the Irish Assembly, and the publication of an official ‘government action plan’ on climate change in 2019.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of these results, which have been mirrored in the outcomes of similar citizens’ assemblies in Canada, France, the Netherlands, Poland and elsewhere. Not only did ninety-nine complete strangers, from every walk of life and every conceivable social and education background, come together and reach a consensus on some of the thorniest issues facing contemporary society — an almost unthinkable achievement in our age of political distrust, tribalism and division — but the proposals they put forth challenged our common idea of what is politically and socially possible and led to real, unequivocal change in the lives of their fellow citizens, and potentially in the more-than-human world. The assemblies further demonstrated that there is both an appetite and a willingness on the part of a supposedly apathetic public to seriously address some of the gravest and seemingly most intractable issues that we face.
What was the importance of randomness in all this? I think its effects are twofold. First of all, random selection — sortition — returns to the democratic process something which its supporters often claim for it, but which has been largely lost: the approval and consent of the population. Sortition is transparent and verifiable. It bypasses the widely distrusted political class, and it allows each of us to imagine ourselves — even if not one of the ninety-nine — in a position of power and agency. Its legitimacy defer. It has been found, in study after study, that random selection from a sufficiently large group of people — given the appropriate contextual knowledge — produces better answers to complex problems than the appointment of a narrow group of experts.”
“In Venice, a system called the balotte (meaning a small wooden ball, and from which the term ‘ballot’ originates) was used to elect the head of state, the Doge. Although the government was in the hands of a few aristocratic families — just 1 per cent of the population — a complex system of votes and random selection processes kept the peace for more than five centuries and ensured both that popular candidates consistently won out and that minority voices made themselves heard. In Florence, la tratta, or the drawing of lots, decided which members of the ordinary citizenry would occupy key positions in government. Meanwhile, in fifteenth-century Spain, sortition was used in the Castilian regions of Murcia, La Mancha and Extremadura.”
“Sortition is not a solely European invention; neither has it always been administered by, or held captive by, the aristocracy. In the rural villages of Tamil Nadu, a system of governance called kudavolai dates back at least to the Chola period, over a thousand years ago. Its mechanism involves writing the names of committee candidates on palm leaves and then having a child pull them out at random. It is still in use in regional elections today. In North America, sortition was used by the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, a political association of five nations originating around 1100 CE and lasting well into the colonial period until driven off its lands by European settlers. Led by female clan heads, the Confederacy preferred to operate through cooperation and consensus (the word ‘caucus’ comes from an Algonquin word meaning an informal discussion without the need for a vote), but when a vote was called for, it followed the principles of sortition. This ensured that all the clans were represented equally and that none could achieve dominion over any other.”
“In the French village of Savigny-sur-Etang, in 1457, the gruesome murder and partial consumption of a five-year-old boy was attributed to a local family of pigs. The seven suspects — a mother and her offspring — were arrested, indicted on charges of infanticide and held in the local jail for trial. A lawyer was appointed, witnesses were called, evidence. was presented and legal arguments were made before a packed courtroom. Eventually, the mother pig was pronounced guilty and ordered to be hanged — a sentence carried out at the local gallows — while the piglets received a judicial pardon on account of their age.
Such trials were far from uncommon at the time and were adapted in unusual ways to the non-human offenders they sought to bring to justice. Humans and animals were often tried together as co-conspirators, the animals routinely having lawyers appointed to represent them at public expense, and they were given the right of appeal. In some cases, particularly those involving pigs, the defendants were dressed in human clothes at their trials and at their executions. But these weren’t mere show trials, or opportunities for lawyers to hone their skills: they were respected, utterly serious processes, products of societies which believed that animals bore moral responsibility for their alleged crimes.
When in 1597 weevils in the Savoyard village of St Julien were indicted for the crime of destroying the local vineyards, their lawyer wasted no time in arguing — successfully — that the weevils had every right to eat the grape leaves, having a prior claim to them, based on God’s promise to animals in the Book of Genesis that they should have all the grasses, leaves and green herbs for their sustenance. In 1522, the village of Autun in Burgundy was overrun by rats that devoured stores of barley and terrorized the village maidens. The town crier issued a summons for the rats to appear in court. When they failed to answer it, the judge refused to condemn them in absentia, and sent the crier once more into the fields. When the rats again failed to appear, their lawyer argued that they had good reason not to attend, because they were scared of the local cats. The judge was forced to issue an order that they vacate the fields within six days, on penalty of extermination and eternal damnation.
The rats’ lawyer in this case was a jurist named Bar-tholomew Chassenée, who would go on to become a chief justice and a pre-eminent legal theorist. In a legal monograph written late in his life, Chassenée argued with persuasive force that animals, both wild and domesticated, should be considered lay members of the parish community in which they resided. In other words, the rights of animals were similar in kind to the rights of people?
These trials served to confirm the inherent, inhuman evil of certain animals, and may even have echoed ancient rituals of sacrifice and atonement. Yet they also emphasize the way in which pre-Enlightenment societies saw animals as belonging to a political community, a community in which each and every member was subject to due process and the rule of law. In this, they represent the last gasp of animistic belief systems as they fell into line with the Cartesian view of animals as beasts and machines — for if animals lacked real feeling, souls, intelligence or political will, then they could neither stand trial, nor take any other decisive role in the community. But while the trials slowly petered out — Topsy’s execution being a very late, and tragic, example — the wilful behaviour of their non-human subjects persisted.
This creative and rebellious agency remains particularly evident whenever we attempt to use and imprison animals against their will.”
“Red deer live in large herds and frequently stop to rest and ruminate. Studies have shown that they only move off once 60 per cent of the adults stand up again; they literally vote with their feet. This 60 per cent majority does not have to include the dominant males, even if they have previously shown good judgement: the herd prefers democratic decisions to autocratic ones. The same goes for buffalo, although here the signs are more subtle: the female members of the herd indicate their preferred direction of travel by standing up, staring in one direction, and lying down again. Only adult female votes count, and if there’s a sharp disagreement, the herd may split apart and graze separately for a while before reconvening.”
“All bees are descended from one species of wasp which decided to go vegetarian some 100 million years ago.”
“More and more bees would begin to dance the same location, until in the last hour or so before the whole swarm took flight, all the dancing bees would be indicating the same spot, with the same patterns of movement. If Lindauer was correct, this final pattern indicated the new nesting site — and to test his theory, he had to wait until the exact moment the bees took flight, then sprint after them through Munich’s streets and alleys to their new home, a feat he accomplished on several occasions. Each time, the new dwelling place matched the final, unanimous dancing vote. The bees were coming to a communal decision: they were acting politically.”
“In India, following a 2014 case in which cows were being beaten as part of a religious festival, the Supreme Court stated that all animals have both constitutional and statutory rights. The NhRP are, at the time of writing, bringing another case in India on behalf of an elephant to test the law — but in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, in 2018, the high court already affirmed the judgment in regard to the mistreatment of horses, further stating that ‘that every being with wings and every being who swam was also a person in that province.’”
“The same province, Uttarakhand, which affirmed the Supreme Courts decision on animals, has also declared that the river has its own ‘right to life’ — and thus constitutes a legal person. This ruling is particularly interesting when it’s applied to ecosystems rather than individuals. When activists come to the defence of a natural entity such as a river, they usually have to prove that its degradation is a risk to human life: this is how anthropocentrism plays out in law, to exclude the interests of the more-than-human world. By declaring the river a person in its own right, however, activists only have to show that the river itself is damaged — by pollution, fertilizer runoff or mining spoil, for example — in order for it to be protected in law. This decision has already resulted in a blanket ban on new mining licences along the Ganges, as well as the closure of hotels, industries and ashrams which discharge sewage into it.”
“India is not alone in this attitude. A new Ecuadorian constitution, formalized in 2008, was the first national constitution to guarantee the Rights of Nature. It recognized the inalienable rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish, gave people the authority to petition on behalf of nature and required the country’s government to remedy violations of these rights. In 2018, Colombia’s highest court declared that the Amazon rainforest was a legal person. And in 2017, the government of New Zealand granted personhood to a river system too: the 290-kilo-metre-long Whanganui.
The Whanganui rises on the northern slopes of Mount Tongariro, one of the three active volcanoes of the central plateau of New Zealand’s North Island, or Te Ika-a-Maui to its Mãori population. For centuries, the Mãori have considered the river sacred: its waters nourish their crops and communities, and they recognize its intrinsic being, its life force or mauri. It was the Mãori who led the fight, over centuries, to protect the river, and when New Zealand passed the Te Awa Tupua Act in 2017 — recognizing not only the river but its tributaries and watershed as ‘an indivisible and living being — they were given special recognition and influence over its governance. Future decisions about the river will be made in consultation with two people selected to speak on behalf of it: Dame Tariana Turia, an influential Mãori political leader, and Turama Hawira, an experienced Mãori adviser and educator.”
“Although they’d had trouble tracking wolves in the past, Paquet and his team expected Pluie to stay relatively close — after all, she obviously belonged to one of the Banff packs that roamed the nearby national park, an area of some 6,500 kilometres. Previous studies in Montana had shown that some wolf ranges covered an area of a few hundred square kilometres, or at most a thousand in the wilder territory surrounding the park. Pluie, however, would go a lot further than that.
Argos isn’t very accurate — it can pinpoint an animal to around a mile — and it could be flaky, failing to report a viable signal for weeks at a time. When Pluie’s signals started to come in, at first they seemed unbelievable, then jaw-dropping. For the first few months after her June capture she stayed relatively close to the tagging site, but in the autumn she suddenly upped and left the area, passing through Banff’s parklands before turning west into British Columbia, and then south across the US border, into Glacier National Park. Passing east of the town of Browning, she entered the Great Plains. She travelled through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a million-acre, roadless expanse of forests and mountains north of Missoula, before crossing the rest of Montana and the northern part of Idaho to reach Mount Spokane in Washington State — some 500 kilometres, as the crow flies, from Browning. A while later she headed north again, re-entering Canada from Idaho, somewhere near Bonners Ferry. By December 1993, she had made it at least as far as Fernie, in British Columbia, in a round trip covering more than 100,000 square kilometres.”
“Pluie’s journey became the inspiration for one of the world’s most ambitious environmental projects: the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y. This project aims to bridge an expanse of some 3,200 kilometres, covering both National Parks and the land which connects them, via an interconnected system of wild lands and waters. The central idea is what’s known as a wildlife corridor: a clear pathway, or network of pathways, along which animals and plants can move, unimpeded by human activity, in order to migrate, feed and maintain diversity.
Wildlife corridors can take many forms, from a simple hedgerow along the edge of agricultural fields to preservation areas stretching for thousands of kilometres across national borders. Sometimes the term refers to open spaces, and at other times to infrastructure, such as underpasses and bridges, designed specifically for wildlife, which allow them to move safely across roads and railways. In support of such corridors, fences can be used to direct wildlife away from danger and towards safe passages and crossing areas; land can be cleared or left fallow and development shifted or reoriented, all to better accommodate the needs of animals, in place or on the move.”
“The reality of a wildlife corridor, even one on a continental scale, is a patchwork of different processes and practices: keeping private lands free of pesticides and fences; wildlife-proofing human population centres; constructing bridges, tunnels and other crossing points; purchasing new plots to set aside; and ongoing studies of wildlife and human activity.
The Y2Y coalition is currently working across multiple states, provinces and parks in the US and Canada, advocating for better traffic management, safer roads, wildlife education and the end of coal mining, metal refining and clear-cut logging, as well as the designation of specific protected areas. While the larger network will continue to develop and interconnect, local initiatives are already seeing successes: in early 2020, the first grizzly bear in eighty-eight years was seen in Central Idaho’s Bitterroot Wilderness, meaning that North American bear populations are reconnecting, reassociating and on the road to recovery.
Across the world, wildlife corridors not only make it possible for animals to survive and thrive in landscapes dominated by human activity; they also show us that we can negotiate and adapt to allow them to do so. In the Russian Far East, the Sredneussurisky Wildlife Refuge stretches across the provinces of Primorsky and Khabarovsk Krai, and over the border into northeastern China. This 72,700-hectare preserve links Russia’s Sikhote-Alin mountain range with China’s Wanda Mountains, two key habitats of the critically endangered Amur tiger, which is now able to move across international borders without human obstruction.
In the Netherlands, a network of more than 600 man-made corridors, including an 800-metre long green bridge, the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailoo, transforms one of the most densely populated countries in Europe into a haven for deer, wild boar, badgers and other forest creatures, as well as other species of animals and plants whose existence depends on them. On 26 January 2011, an elephant named Tony became the first elephant to walk the length of a new corridor through the Ngare Ndare Forest, connecting Kenya’s second-largest elephant population in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy with their compatriots around Mount Kenya, passing en route through Africa’s first dedicated elephant underpass, beneath the Nanyuki-Meru Highway.
Wildlife corridors can also be part of human healing processes. Europe’s largest nature reserve, and one of the longest wildlife corridors in the world, is the European Green Belt, a 7,000-kilometre network of parks and protected lands following the line of the Iron Curtain, which once separated Western Europe and the Soviet bloc. The Green Belt was first proposed by German conservationists in December 1989, just a month after the Berlin Wall fell; today, it stretches all the way from Finland to Greece. In places, old minefields still keep visitors on the paths but the former ‘death strip’ is now a flourishing habitat and migration path for more than 600 species of rare and endangered birds, mammals, plants and insects. One day, the same might be true of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea, a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide strip of land that has been virtually untouched by humans for more than six decades and is now home to millions of migratory birds and flourishing plant species, as well as endangered animals such as Siberian musk deer, cranes, vultures, Asiatic black bears and a unique species of goat, the long-tailed goral. As in the thirty-kilometre exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which scientists have called ‘an unintentional nature reserve,’ wildlife has flourished when humans have withdrawn. Despite high radiation levels in the zone, populations of elk, boar, foxes and deer are at least as high as in other preserves in Ukraine and Belarus while one study suggests that wolves might be seven times more abundant.”
“In Oslo, a network of rooftop hives and gardens atop office blocks, schools and housing developments creates an aerial highway for bees to criss-cross the city, coordinated in such a way that there is never more than 800 feet between pollen-rich foraging sites.”
“These mostly open lands are now blockaded by hundreds of kilometres of concrete and steel pipe, with devastating effects on animal as well as human mobility. The eastern terminus of the wall splits in two the 200,000-acre Lower Rio Grande Valley wildlife refuge in south-eastern Texas, a vital corridor for endangered birds, as well as ocelots and jaguarundi cats. In the Madrean Sky Islands of Arizona and New Mexico, the wall’s construction will close off a vast tract of land which has recently seen the reappearance of the North American jaguar (which went extinct in the US in the 1960), as well as blocking migration routes for grizzly bears and grey wolves. Although the wall’s future is unclear at time of writing, some areas have already been permanently affected, such as the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which have been partially drained to provide concrete for the wall.”
“In the Middle East, extensive studies have shown that the apartheid wall constructed by Israel through the occupied West Bank has had a devastating effect on the local environment. The wall follows an ancient ecological corridor that runs from the Judean Mountains in the south to the Sumerian Mountains in the north. Not only does the wall block East-West migration, it also cuts across North-South routes as it zigzags around Palestinian territory. A 2010 report to the Palestinian National Authority identified sixteen species which face local extinction as a direct result of this barrier, including foxes, wolves, ibexes, porcupines and the unique Palestinian mountain gazelle. Birds and insects are also threatened by the burning of forest areas to provide space for settlements behind the wall. In places, the wall’s construction has been slowed by environmental orders from Israel’s High Court, and special s-shaped sections have been designed to allow small animals to pass through — but not larger mammals, or people.”
“In 2008, a group of Kuwaitis who had been detained at the US base on Cuba since 2002 applied to the Supreme Court to have their cases heard. Their lawyers made an application for habeas corpus — the same principle that had been tried for Happy the Elephant and other animals by the Nonhuman Rights Project. And, as in the NhRP’s cases, they needed to convince the court that habeas corpus applied to these particular detainees — which had been previously denied on the basis that Guantánamo Bay was not within the jurisdiction of the court. But in this case, the situation was reversed: remarkably, non-humans testified on behalf of the humans.
When the detainees’ lawyer, Thomas Wilner, took part in an interview for TV show 60 Minutes, the producers told him that when they visited Guantánamo, they’d discovered that the local Cuban iguanas were actually made safer by the base. If they wandered off it, they might be eaten by the locals — but on the base itself, they were protected by US law, in the form of the Endangered Species Act, with military personnel liable to fines of up to $10,000 if they harmed the animals. At the hearing, Wilner argued that it was impossible for US law to apply to iguanas but not to people — and the Supreme Court subsequently agreed to hear the case. When the Solicitor General repeated the argument before the court that the detainees were not within its jurisdiction, Justice David Souter replied, ‘What do you mean? Even the iguanas at Guantánamo are protected by U.S. law.””
Conclusion
“In 2017, a semi-trailer truck hit a whole herd of pronghorn antelope on the move, killing twenty-five of them.”
“Many of these animals are now wearing tags, and thanks to monitoring by organizations like the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which has brought together data from multiple studies, the places where they cluster and the locations they are trying to reach are suddenly much more visible.
One upshot of this visibility is a new infrastructure for wildlife support. In 2012, Wyoming constructed a new green bridge at Trapper’s Point on US Highway 191. Its location was selected after reviewing GPS data from hundreds of pronghorn antelope, which revealed the exact path of their bi-annual trek between their winter range in the Red Desert and their summer grounds in the Grand Teton National Park. Now known as the ‘Path of the Pronghorn,’ and in use for at least 6,000 years, this critical migration path is blocked at several points by roads and railways, but since 2012 there has been one less obstacle. The Trapper’s Point overpass, placed right in their path, is now used by thousands of pronghorn and deer every year — and fatalities on the roads have dropped accordingly. Wyoming is currently exploring more locations for crossings and collecting more data to find out where they’re needed.”
“The ICARUS system extends the scope and range of animal tracking once again — beyond radio and beyond GPS. Because of the weight of even the smallest GPS transmitters, animals weighing less than 100g can’t carry them, meaning that some 75 per cent of bird and animal species — and all insects — have remained invisible to digital data collection. And GPS collars and harnesses, despite improvements, are still prohibitively expensive for many applications.
ICARUS changes all of this: its lightweight, solar-powered tags can be fitted to a much greater range of creatures, with a corresponding increase in the number of animals we can track, monitor — and listen to. If such efforts are tied to real attempts to improve the lot of non-humans, then the extension of this legibility is in effect an expansion of suffrage. The more non-humans who join the internet of animals — and perhaps one day of fungi, plants, bacteria and stones as well — the more votes are counted, the more voices join the demos, and the wider and more equitable our more-than-human commonwealth becomes.”
“When Mount Etna erupted at 10.20 p.m. on 4 January 2012, the team looked back over their data and saw that the goats had become abnormally agitated six hours previously. Over the course of a two-year study, they were able to predict another seven major eruptions. They found the same was true of earthquakes in L’Aquila: in the days and hours before earthquakes, the sheep, cows and dogs would behave in unusual — but measurably unusual — ways. The closer they were to the looming epicentre, the more agitated they became. Together, they constituted an early warning system more powerful, more accurate and more advanced than any other mechanism humans have devised. And these experiments were conducted with traditional radio tags.”
“Its a small farm, but unlike any I’ve seen before. This farm grows metal.
In the 1990s, a number of mining firms funded research into a newly identified family of plants — in fact, several families — called hyperaccumulators. These plants had a very unusual property in common: they were capable of growing in soils rich in various kinds of metals, either naturally occurring or as a result of industrial pollution; soils which are toxic to most other kinds of life. What the research discovered was that these plants drew up the metal from the soil through their roots and stored it above ground in their shoots and leaves. In the process, they actually remediated the soil, cleaning it of the metals and making it more hospitable to other plants.
The metal farm in the Pindus is one result of this research: an experiment to see if it’s possible not only to repair damaged soils by planting hyperaccumulators, but to harvest metal just as we harvest other crops.”
“Research into hyperaccumulators is taking place around the world. In Malaysia, Phyllantus balgooyi, a shrub native to the equatorial rainforest, draws up so much nickel that its sap is bright green: it bleeds metal when cut. In New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, the rubber sap of Pycnandra acuminata contains as much as 25 per cent nickel by dry weight. And it’s not just nickel which can be mined this way: Indian mustard, or Brassica juncea, forms an alloy of silver, gold and copper in its leaves; rapeseed removes lead, zinc and selenium from contaminated soils. Even lithium, a core requirement for the batteries in everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles, can be found in the leaves of Apocynum venetum, the sword-leaf dogbane, long known in traditional medicine for reducing hypertension. Many more such abilities remain to be discovered.
Agromining is in its infancy, and its potential for altering the ways we extract all kinds of metals, as well as for repairing the damage we have done to the Earth, has yet to be fully realized. That being said, it will never come close to supplying the world’s current metal needs: it is far less efficient, far slower and requires far more care than simply ripping into the earth with drills and explosives. Nor would we want it to succeed unduly, for in doing so it would require the kind of destructive, industrial-scale agriculture that is the unfortunate hallmark of soybeans, biofuels, palm oil and other once lauded miracle crops.
Nevertheless, hyperaccumulators point us towards an understanding and accommodation with non-human life which might in the long run be much more valuable than our particular material desires. What strikes me most about these plants is that they have evolved, over vast stretches of time, in particular locations, to address specific questions of survival in their own ways. They are knowledgeable about the soil and have developed ways to endure and thrive in it. Meanwhile, we have ignored them for most of that span — considered them as weeds and pests — until we realized that they were aligned with our own needs. When, eventually, we set out in search of other, less destructive ways of finding what we needed in the earth, we discovered that the plants had got there long before us.”
“At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in Cali-fornia, scientists are engineering strains of mouse-eared cress — Arabidopsis thaliana, the same plant that showed us, when assailed by caterpillars, that plants could hear sound — to demonstrate another extraordinary ability. By transferring genes from cork trees into the cress, the researchers found that they could encourage it to grow much deeper, denser root structures, packed with su-berin, an impermeable, cork-like polymer which stores huge amounts of carbon. If they can repeat the feat with widely grown crops such as wheat, rice and cotton, then vast areas of arable land might be transformed into engines of carbon sequestration: pulling climate change-accelerating carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it safely underground for decades, even centuries.
This approach seems far more promising than the kind of megascale geo-engineering schemes proposed by global tech corporations: vast stacks of reactors and chimneys which pull carbon directly from the atmosphere, while producing ever more soon-to-be-obsolescent infrastructure and material waste. Our common future demands less industrial hubris and more cooperation with existing, and deeply knowledgeable, biological systems.”
