“These natural ecosystems, existing by themselves — why should we protect them?”
I agree very much with your rational approach. The plain truth is that as a globalised industrial civilisation we are both destroying our ecological life support systems and, apparently, headed for nuclear annihilation… unless we change course.
I would like to think that people have a survival instinct.
Most immediately, reforestation and regenerative agriculture are critical. Our challenge is to bring this into the public conversation.
Thanks for this concise summary of a very complex matter. It was an honor having you speak at the workshop and I'm glad to see you following up with these pillars of preservation. Current forest practices views older forests as "overstocked" with "fuels" and therefore a fire risk, so developing an alternative narrative is really important right now.
One element that I've been grappling with is biotic intelligence. I suspect established or recovered forests have developed over time more sophistication in how and when they transpire, aimed at producing more rain and holding more water at the right times. Heavily disturbed forests would likely lose this ability, with young, replanted tree-plantations shown to hyperventilate, respiring at high levels with no sense of timing to produce rain. Your work in the Amazon showing how the forest primes the atmosphere a month or two prior to the onset of the rainy season, to help it get started, seems an example of this biotic intelligence at work. Are you aware of other work showing similar capacities in other forest types? If forests learn as they age, how do we prove that, and how do we quantify the loss of something like forest intelligence? These are questions I am wresting with.
Hi Rob, I would suggest that established forests have a greater arsenal of CCN and ICN at their disposal along with greater evapotranspiration rates. The amazon gets a large proportion of its water from the nighttime jet which results from the contraction of the air mass over the warmer daytime forest, this then accumulates as the season changes toward the monsoon up to the point of full biotic pump activation would be my guess at the priming part of the equation. The intelligence is the evolved release of the ICN and CCN depending on humidity and stress which all have different pathways to produce cloud or rain as needed. Evolutionary beneficial relationships broken in disturbed forests.
Thanks, Theodore. So you are saying an established forest has evolved to "know" how and when to release rain nuclei according to factors like humidity to create rain. Of course, this could happen mechanically without any "decision-making" on the part of the forest, but that seems unlikely since every individual living thing in the forest is constantly making decisions. How it works in individual plants is easily demonstrated. Coordination between the different organism involves a whole new level of intelligence, which I suspect is there, just not sure how it all works.
I think the key phrase is evolutionary beneficial relationships. These relationships evolve toward function. John Liu put it like this in a recent interview: "Biology self organizes over prodigious time to alter the physics." This is how it seems to me. Biology uses the physics it encounters to perpetuate itself. The more time and freedom life has to work at this, the more sophisticated its abilities to shape its climate.
Is a forest community like a human body, which manages itself without the intervention of the thinking mind? The body isn't intelligent in the way the discursive mind is, yet it manages a complexity beyond which the mind could ever handle.
Perhaps, Descartes had it backwards, rather "I think therefore I am," it's I am therefore I think.
Hi Rob I like to see the individual and the whole being represented in the Mandelbrot set with the core being reflected through our DNA which hold the essential structure of evolved stability and the tendrils as the conscious interactive mediums with our environment. Our mind and our focus are two different aspects of the whole where we function on stability but also peruse interactions down the tendrils for growth through interactions. Some could say the best scientists live down the ends of the tendrils and need the stability of the core for tethering there research. An individual structure in essence of stability is a reflection of the whole but on a different level of magnitude. Ecosystems can work in the same regards where the possibility for adaptive change is tied to the stability of the whole so can be both adaptive and proactive in its mechanisms of exploration as long as it has the stability of the core. The medium as a whole then has the ability to test hypothesis through interaction so long as it is essentially stable and this can be fed back into the core to increase this stability. A reproducing loop that we call consciousness. We dismantle this stability and we give the ecosystem Alzheimer's as you rightly point out in much of your work. The key then is the understanding that the individual and the whole are just different reflections of the same being. Thanks for your reply.
River systems on this planet are equally important to Earths healthy climate and environmental infrastructure. They are no different in their ability to provide services as do our forests.
Rivers that have been fragmented, detained, and dammed even for short periods of time have been severely injured in their ability to serve the Earth as an essential part of our planets infrastructure that maintains climate and healthy environment for llife
At present almost all out planets major waterways have been obstructed and fragmented to one degree or another. Until we gain some depth in understanding the the role MOVING WATER plays on our planet we will continue pouring large quantities of heat through water vapor and evaporation into our atmosphere. And at the same time some people call hydroelectric clean and renewable energy. This is nothing more than an illusion! An illusion mainly effecting science
I have been wrestling with the notion that the irregular nutrient pulses in the broader ocean are now lost from the biological pump of bioaccumulation due to them having quicker degradation times than a depleted environment can capture and use them. I wrote a short piece explaining how Instead of adding the nutrients and the problems associated with this, we prime the system for the capture of these pulses we may have a much better and cost effective safe route for ocean regeneration.
“These natural ecosystems, existing by themselves — why should we protect them?”
I agree very much with your rational approach. The plain truth is that as a globalised industrial civilisation we are both destroying our ecological life support systems and, apparently, headed for nuclear annihilation… unless we change course.
I would like to think that people have a survival instinct.
Most immediately, reforestation and regenerative agriculture are critical. Our challenge is to bring this into the public conversation.
Andrew Gaines FRSA
League of Evolutionary Catalysts
Thanks for this concise summary of a very complex matter. It was an honor having you speak at the workshop and I'm glad to see you following up with these pillars of preservation. Current forest practices views older forests as "overstocked" with "fuels" and therefore a fire risk, so developing an alternative narrative is really important right now.
One element that I've been grappling with is biotic intelligence. I suspect established or recovered forests have developed over time more sophistication in how and when they transpire, aimed at producing more rain and holding more water at the right times. Heavily disturbed forests would likely lose this ability, with young, replanted tree-plantations shown to hyperventilate, respiring at high levels with no sense of timing to produce rain. Your work in the Amazon showing how the forest primes the atmosphere a month or two prior to the onset of the rainy season, to help it get started, seems an example of this biotic intelligence at work. Are you aware of other work showing similar capacities in other forest types? If forests learn as they age, how do we prove that, and how do we quantify the loss of something like forest intelligence? These are questions I am wresting with.
Hi Rob, I would suggest that established forests have a greater arsenal of CCN and ICN at their disposal along with greater evapotranspiration rates. The amazon gets a large proportion of its water from the nighttime jet which results from the contraction of the air mass over the warmer daytime forest, this then accumulates as the season changes toward the monsoon up to the point of full biotic pump activation would be my guess at the priming part of the equation. The intelligence is the evolved release of the ICN and CCN depending on humidity and stress which all have different pathways to produce cloud or rain as needed. Evolutionary beneficial relationships broken in disturbed forests.
Thanks, Theodore. So you are saying an established forest has evolved to "know" how and when to release rain nuclei according to factors like humidity to create rain. Of course, this could happen mechanically without any "decision-making" on the part of the forest, but that seems unlikely since every individual living thing in the forest is constantly making decisions. How it works in individual plants is easily demonstrated. Coordination between the different organism involves a whole new level of intelligence, which I suspect is there, just not sure how it all works.
I think the key phrase is evolutionary beneficial relationships. These relationships evolve toward function. John Liu put it like this in a recent interview: "Biology self organizes over prodigious time to alter the physics." This is how it seems to me. Biology uses the physics it encounters to perpetuate itself. The more time and freedom life has to work at this, the more sophisticated its abilities to shape its climate.
Is a forest community like a human body, which manages itself without the intervention of the thinking mind? The body isn't intelligent in the way the discursive mind is, yet it manages a complexity beyond which the mind could ever handle.
Perhaps, Descartes had it backwards, rather "I think therefore I am," it's I am therefore I think.
Hi Rob I like to see the individual and the whole being represented in the Mandelbrot set with the core being reflected through our DNA which hold the essential structure of evolved stability and the tendrils as the conscious interactive mediums with our environment. Our mind and our focus are two different aspects of the whole where we function on stability but also peruse interactions down the tendrils for growth through interactions. Some could say the best scientists live down the ends of the tendrils and need the stability of the core for tethering there research. An individual structure in essence of stability is a reflection of the whole but on a different level of magnitude. Ecosystems can work in the same regards where the possibility for adaptive change is tied to the stability of the whole so can be both adaptive and proactive in its mechanisms of exploration as long as it has the stability of the core. The medium as a whole then has the ability to test hypothesis through interaction so long as it is essentially stable and this can be fed back into the core to increase this stability. A reproducing loop that we call consciousness. We dismantle this stability and we give the ecosystem Alzheimer's as you rightly point out in much of your work. The key then is the understanding that the individual and the whole are just different reflections of the same being. Thanks for your reply.
River systems on this planet are equally important to Earths healthy climate and environmental infrastructure. They are no different in their ability to provide services as do our forests.
Rivers that have been fragmented, detained, and dammed even for short periods of time have been severely injured in their ability to serve the Earth as an essential part of our planets infrastructure that maintains climate and healthy environment for llife
At present almost all out planets major waterways have been obstructed and fragmented to one degree or another. Until we gain some depth in understanding the the role MOVING WATER plays on our planet we will continue pouring large quantities of heat through water vapor and evaporation into our atmosphere. And at the same time some people call hydroelectric clean and renewable energy. This is nothing more than an illusion! An illusion mainly effecting science
I have been wrestling with the notion that the irregular nutrient pulses in the broader ocean are now lost from the biological pump of bioaccumulation due to them having quicker degradation times than a depleted environment can capture and use them. I wrote a short piece explaining how Instead of adding the nutrients and the problems associated with this, we prime the system for the capture of these pulses we may have a much better and cost effective safe route for ocean regeneration.