Stewart Brand's Blog, page 6

Can Economic Growth Continue Over the Long-term?

Humanity has had a pretty good run so far. In the last two hundred years, world GDP per capita has increased by almost fourteen times:

But “past performance may not be indicative of future results.” Can growth continue?

One argument against long-term growth is that we will run out of resources. Malthus worried about running out of farm land, Jevons warned that Britain would run out of coal, and Hubbert called Peak Oil.

Fears of shortages lead to fears of “overpopulation”. If resources are static, then they have to be divided into smaller and smaller shares for more and more people. In the 01960s, this led to dire predictions of famine and depredation.

But predictions of catastrophic shortages virtually never come true. Agricultural productivity has grown faster than Malthus realized was possible. And oil production, after a temporary decline, recently hit at an all-time high:

Source: Wikimedia / Plazak

One reason is that predictions of shortages are based on conservative estimates from only proven reserves. Another is that when a resource really is running out, we transition off of it—as, in the 01800s, we switched our lighting from whale oil to kerosene.

But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

In the 20th century, the crucial role of ideas was confirmed by formal economic models. The economist Robert Solow was studying how output per worker increases as we accumulate capital, such as machines and factories. There are diminishing returns to capital accumulation alone. A single worker who is given two machines can’t be twice as productive. So if technology is static, output per worker soon stops growing:

Source: Marginal Revolution University

But technology acts as a multiplier on productivity. This makes each worker more productive, and creates more headroom for capital accumulation:

Source: Marginal Revolution University

So we can have economic growth if, and only if, we have technological progress.

How does this happen? Another economist, Paul Romer, pointed out the key feature of ideas: In economic terms, they are “nonrival.” Unlike a loaf of bread, or a machine, an invention or an equation can be shared by everyone. If we double the number of workers we have and double the machines they use, we will merely double their output, which is the same output per worker. But if we also double the power of technology, we will more than double output, making everyone richer. Physical resources have to be divided up, so as the population grows, the per-capita stock of resources shrinks. But ideas do not. The per-capita stock of ideas is the total stock of ideas.

So we won’t run out of resources, as long as we keep generating new ideas. But—will we run out of ideas?

Romer assumed that the technology multiplier would grow exponentially at a rate proportional to the number of researchers. But another economist, Chad Jones, pointed out that in the 20th century, we have vastly increased R&D, while growth rates have been flat or even declining. This is evidence that ideas have been getting harder to find:

Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” (02020)

Does this mean inevitable stagnation? Maybe we have already picked all the low-hanging fruit. Maybe research is like mining for ideas, and the vein is running thin. Maybe inventions are like fish in a pond, and the pond is getting fished out. But notice that all these metaphors treat ideas like physical resources! And I think it’s a mistake to call “peak ideas.” just as it’s always been a mistake to call peak resources.

One reason, as Paul Romer pointed out, is that the space of ideas is combinatorially vast. The number of potential molecular compounds, or the number of possible DNA sequences, is astronomical. We have barely begun to explore.

And even as ideas get harder to find, we get better at finding them. As the population and the economy grow, we can devote more brains and more investment to R&D. And technologies like spreadsheets or the Internet make researchers more productive.

In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth:

Source: Our World in Data

Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

Now, that’s a problem for another time. But note that in five minutes we’ve gone from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation. That’s because we’ve traded a scarcity mindset, where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset, where it is limited only by our ingenuity.  

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This essay is a transcript of Jason Crawford's 02022 Long Now Ignite Talk.

Conceiving the Future of Reproductive Technology

At 11:47 PM on 25 July 01978, a baby girl was born at a hospital in Oldham, England. She was delivered via cesarean section and weighed five pounds, twelve ounces. A perfectly ordinary birth, save for one extraordinary detail that would herald a breakthrough in modern medicine: the baby, Louise Brown, was conceived in a petri dish.

“I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory,” recalled Robert G. Edwards, the physiologist who co-developed the technique of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that made Louise’s birth, and the births of 8 million people after her, myself included, possible. “It was us.”

In the decades since IVF technology was first pioneered, more and more have gained access to its potential for control over life. As our technology has advanced, so too have the ambitions of scientists and engineers. Instead of merely creating life, technologists increasingly aim to use genetic engineering to shape its future. But are these visions of omnipotent control over reproduction accompanied by an ethical frame worthy of their deep consequences? And who, ultimately, will have access to it?

The miracles of modern medicine come at a steep cost. IVF is publicly funded in countries such as New Zealand and Canada, but in the United States, it's an industry on the frontier of laissez-faire capitalism.  

The average cycle costs between $10,000 and $15,000, making it a lucrative niche for investors and privatized clinics. While analysts expect the market for fertility treatments to reach $41 billion by 02026, infertility remains a limited business.

As the battle for market share heats up between pink-infused boutiques and national chains, reproduction becomes commercialized. Fertility experts sell expensive dreams through false hope, branding themselves as “baby whisperers” or “IVF magicians” or “miracle doctors.” Wellness companies capitalize off biological clock fears. Specialist clinics employ upsell tactics, bundle packs and baby-or-your-money-back deals.

Premium procedures — such as Orchid Bioscience’s preimplantation genetic and polygenic screening packages, which start at $6,000 — are often based on flimsy science. But for parents-to-to-be with deep pockets, add-ons that could “protect your future child from genetic risks” are seen as just too good to pass up. Bridge Clinic takes it one step further, tempting customers with a multi-generational offer: “What if you could help ensure the health of not only your child, but your grandchildren and many generations to follow?”

When it comes to unregulated fertility treatments, Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, says promises of success are “bogus.”

“There’s no guarantees to what these fertility programs are suggesting," he tells me. "IVF is one of the few technologies in healthcare that have come forward as a business without adequate evidence.”

With certain players racking up a poor track record of questionable ethics and technology outpacing regulation, neologisms like “designer babies”and “catalog babies” have gone mainstream. As have fears of a Gattaca-like future.

Research found that 80% of Americans oppose the use of reproductive technology for non-health reasons. Norm violators such as He Jiankui, who altered the genes of twin girls to be HIV resistant, are met with international backlash.

According to Caplan, the resistance and outrage towards “designer babies” is valid. After all, we’re only at the beginning of a messy and divisive new era of reproduction.

Caplan predicts that, in less than 20 years, subsets of existing technology will tempt the privileged towards greater reproductive control, allowing people to cherry-pick and even manipulate embryos for more “desirable” traits: height, eye color, intelligence, hair. “Designer babies” will be justified in the same vein as cosmetic surgery or private school education, with parents leaning on Western liberal ethics to defend against criticism, demanding respect for capable, autonomous decisions, even when inconsistent with the beliefs of others.

Now is the time to adequately resist and regulate, says Caplan, or else welcome a series of double-edged scenarios.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene therapy — a promising genetic editing technique that allows for precise and efficient modification of living genomes — could save lives, reduce strain on the healthcare system and ultimately ameliorate disease in the future. But a tool intended to improve public health may easily be subverted into a system of discrimination. Caplan dreads CRISPR’s potential to fast-track social darwinism and build a future where abnormality and difference becomes less valuable, less than human, less deserving of life. Eradication of “disease” may then include the eradication of so-called “disadvantages” in height, hearing, or sight.

An explanation of the CRISPR-Cas9 method. Bartz/Stockmar - Agrifood Atlas, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Governments will depend on technology for a smarter, healthier, stronger society. Leaders — regardless of nobility of intent —  will interfere with the reproductive process, engineering people to solve whatever problems they created, ignored or inherited.

“Engineering smarter people with better brain power to solve social problems may not be wrong for the ‘collective good,’” says Caplan. “But it will be high stress for the people engineered to do these things.”

Conception sans reproductive assisted technologies could be condemned as a reckless gamble on a child’s life. The “naturally” conceived may file — and win — wrongful life lawsuits against parents who chose to “roll the dice.”  It may soon be seen as ethically negligent to refuse genetic engineering for children, in a similar vein to refusing childhood immunization.

In his work, Caplan ​leans on the four clusters of moral principles outlined by Beauchamp and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics — autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice — to deal with such dilemmas.

He urges us to consider the children of 02045 forced into positions and responsibilities they may not wish to fulfill, the prescribed scientists who want nothing more than to be a harpist, a poet, or a high jumper.

According to futurist Bruce McCabe, dystopian fear must not blind us to the opportunity of future technologies such as protecting people against sickle diseases, cancer, dementia.  

This is easier said than done. Humans are repeat offenders at demonizing technology.

In Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, Professor Calestous Juma, an advocate for sustainable development, tracks 600 years of perceived threats to humanity: humans once feared coffee (“the devil's drink”), refrigeration (“the devil’s instrument”), and frozen food (“embalmed food”).

Resistance, argues Juma, is driven more by the fear of loss — to human nature and sense of purpose — rather than a fear of the new.

Humankind will stave off technological threats to our own existence, McCabe believes, on account of one biological mainstay: our survival instinct.

“People will see germline engineering coming into conflict with our survival as a species, and it won’t be pretty,” McCabe says. “There will be widespread revulsion, a counter movement, even people going to war to stop it.”

While he holds that our biological makeup will rebel before a full Orwellian dystopia is realized, McCabe agrees the future of IVF is fraught with risk.

“Don’t ever think that the future will be binary, and that it’ll be all good or all be dystopian. It will be messy,” he warns. “Germline engineering and gene editing will wreak havoc on a localized level, impacting hundreds of childrens at times. But it will not lead to the emergence of a super species, or transhumanism.”

Still, we should expect some to be blinded to these long-term consequences. The powerful elite may be unable to resist the temptation of technologies that serve their own interests, warned Professor Stephen Hawking in 02018, fearing the loss of humanity.

“Technology will keep evolving and it will be so powerful that the sky will be the limit, literally," says futurist Gerd Leonhard. "We will be able to connect our brain to the Internet, we will know 50 years ahead of time if we may get cancer or not, and healthcare will be for healthy people, not sick people. Pretty soon we’ll be able to do just about everything. It’s more so now about organizing ourselves and deciding what future we want, not what future we can have.”

Thankfully, humans are naturally predisposed to cooperation. Provided we keep a generous stock of optimism, and amplify a cautious narrative of human ingenuity and resilience, we should be able to strike a balance between social order and innovation; between preparing for the inevitable consequences while embracing the many lives created, saved or improved.

Johanna Hoffman

Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman joins us to talk about Speculative Futures -- a set of design tools that can reorient urban development to help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities.

Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban planning and design should be well positioned to spearhead that work, but calculated rationale often results in urban spaces crafted to mitigate threats rather than navigate the unexpected, leaving cities increasingly vulnerable to the uncertainties of 21st century change. Long used in art, film, fiction, architecture, and industrial design, Speculative Futures offers powerful ways to counter this dangerous trend by moving us beyond what currently exists into the realms of what could be. Far from an indulgent creative exercise, Speculative Futures is a means of creating the resilient cities we desperately need.

Mythmaking for Burning Ground

Iceland is erupting again. Since August 3rd, the Fagradalsfjall volcano has been weaving sulfur, steam, and lava into the planet’s newest stretch of land. Just sixteen miles from Reykjavik and nine from Iceland’s major airport, magma throbs from a fissure the length of three football fields, filling the surrounding valley with rivers of liquid rock and burning flumes. Tens of thousands have flocked to the site in the past month, hiking over old volcanic flows through slashing summer rain, to watch the earth’s molten insides transform into future ground.

The eruption was expected. Thousands of earthquakes tore across the region in the preceding days, activating Iceland’s early warning systems and hazard management teams. Within a day of its appearance, government workers set up informational signs and trail markers. Scientists collected lava samples for testing. The national meteorological office provided regular updates on wind patterns and rates of toxic gas emissions. That the fissure is relatively small, far from crucial infrastructure yet still close enough to the capital that visiting is a feasible day trip, makes the event what Icelanders call a “tourist eruption.” Locals and visitors alike are making the multi-mile hike, traversing slick gravel and fragile magma-laced land as neon-suited search and rescue forces1 patrol nearby, ready with information, supplies, and support.

It’s a level of preparedness Iceland has cultivated in part through mythmaking and story. One of the most volcanically active places on the planet, the island’s recorded history has been stacked with explosions since people first arrived in 874. Yet it was close to one thousand years later, in the shadow of the deadliest eruption to hit the country, that Icelanders began to develop a more proactive management approach to the ground beneath their feet. Known as Laki, the eruption’s devastation struck so deep that it sparked a fundamental shift in Icelanders’ stories about control, landscape, and change. Recovery involved developing a new myth about what it meant to be Icelandic, one that embraced rather than tolerated the island’s volatility, and expanded definitions of what safety in such a place entailed. By reworking shared fictions of identity and land, 19th century Iceland told a different story about its future, one that set the stage for new resilience.

Laki exploded in fire, smoke, and poisonous fumes in June of 01783. Witnesses described how “the earth swelled up, with a chorus of howls, filled with an uproar that made it explode into pieces… like a rabid animal rips something to bits.”2 Drizzle mixed with clouds of ash, creating black streams of airborne sludge. Acid rain began to fall, tearing exposed skin into open wounds. By the time it finally stopped eight months later, Laki had emitted two hundred and eighteen square miles of lava, enough to smother the city of San Francisco five feet deep. One hundred and twenty two million tons of sulfur dioxide, fifteen million tons of fluorine, and seven million tons of chlorine leached from the volcano, subsuming the lower stratosphere, blocking out the sun, and cooling temperatures in places as far afield as North America.3

As deadly as Laki was, the real devastation stemmed from what came after. Icelanders call the event Móðuharðindin — 'the famine of the mist'4 — because subsequent famine was the true killer. Gases released in the eruption clung to moisture in the air, decimating crops and killing over half of the country’s cattle and three quarters of its horses and sheep. The island was suddenly gripped in a food crisis so great that a fifth of the population succumbed to starvation and disease. Trade with neighboring countries might have alleviated the crisis, yet Iceland was a colony of Denmark at the time and prohibited from exchange outside the Danish system.5 It took Denmark until 01785 to send substantial food stocks and support, leaving Icelanders to die in record numbers.6  

As the decades passed, Laki’s legacy became an emblem for the failures of Danish rule. It was an indelible, traumatic reminder that the Danes didn’t understand what living in such a hostile land required,7 and enacted avoidable devastation as a result.8 Being Icelandic, a growing contingent insisted, was fundamentally based on hardship and struggle. Keeping another Laki from occurring depended on the island being controlled by people who not only understood Iceland’s harshness but welcomed it.

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, a cadre of politicians, poets, writers, and painters began to push a new myth of Icelandic identity, one that reframed the intensity of its nature as a source of shared connection and empowerment. Writers Brynjólfur Pétursson, Konráð Gíslason, and Tómas Sæmundsson crafted texts praising the island’s pounding rivers, raging mountains, and deep moors. Painters like Finnur Jonsson depicted the country’s stark, jagged volcanoes alongside bright horizons.9 Poets and political leaders like Jónas Hallgrímsson described in detail “the outcrops of lava”10 that shape the island, openly celebrating its pyrotechnic precarity.

Illustration by Casey Cripe.

The emerging narrative was the kind of mythmaking that underpins all nation-building efforts. To borrow the words of writer Christian Salmon, myths and traditions are types of stories, used as “communication, control, and power technique(s),” for managing opinions, nationalist ones included.11  Philosopher and theorist Roland Barthes takes the sentiment a step further, declaring “there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories.”12 Building new futures depends as much — if not more — on creating shared stories of what’s possible and desired, as it does on access to capital, natural resources, and technical expertise. The stories a given group tells about itself — whether at the community or nation-state scale — dictates that group’s ability to inspire, guide, and execute collective action.13

Notions of nature have shaped the shared myths of societies for millennia, myths which in turn influence how those societies find shelter in shifting ground. Ancient Egyptians saw the Nile River as a source of life and death gifted from the gods, and structured development around its floods accordingly.14 19th century Romantic ideas of sublime nature infiltrated American nationalist narratives, burnished through landscape paintings and poetry that hinted at the limitless plenty of a seemingly untouched continent.15 The concept of Manifest Destiny developed in concert with that narrative, enabling an agenda of westward expansion and conquest so effective that it remade the country within a few generations. While Romantic views of nature influenced 19th century Iceland as well, Icelanders adopted a humbler interpretation. By accepting that some forces, like volcanoes, can never be brought to heel, the country created a new myth, one that positioned its people as uniquely competent in working with the unworkable, making them the undisputed experts of their land.

Celebrating its untamable nature eventually made Iceland independent, more resilient, and increasingly rich.16 Independence from Denmark came first, with home rule achieved in the later 19th century, followed by full recognition as a sovereign state in 01918.17 The end of WWII severed all latent colonial ties. Growing independence coincided with more organized responses to continuing environmental hazards, including new campaigns to combat rampant erosion and soil degradation. A formal department of civil protection and hazard management coalesced in 01962.18 When a surprise volcanic eruption hit an island off the southern coast in 01973, Iceland’s burgeoning proactive protection system helped residents to not just return to the island but improve the local fishing harbor and harvest free geothermal energy in subsequent years.19 Problems reimbursing affected residents in the eruption’s wake led to a national catastrophe fund to compensate future victims.20 A series of deadly avalanches in the 01990s inspired more investment in early warning strategy.21

Improvements in contingency plans and risk assessment models have increased in the decades since, paving the way for the country’s current tourism boom. In 01999, just 250,000 people visited Iceland. By 02009, that number spiked to 1.3 million. By 02016, it was 1.8 million.22 Encouraging people to tour the land of fire and ice has become increasingly profitable, so much that it comprised nearly one third of the country’s GDP in 02019.23 A century ago, Iceland was among the poorest places on the planet. Today, standards of living regularly rank among the highest in the world.24 Reframing aggressive nature as a source of belonging and power created a myth that built a more resilient future.

That myth shapes national discourse to this day. As anthropologist Kristín Loftsdottír notes, it has created “a general and reified sense of an Icelander as a subject capable of enduring… as good at persevering through crisis.”25  The myth isn’t static, however. Its shaping is an ongoing process, one that Loftsdóttir insists “is not simply imposed on docile subjects,” but conducted through a “back and forth, involving active subjects and a diverse group of actors.”26 Like all societies, conversations about what it means to be Icelandic are intrinsically tied to what it means to live on hostile ground.

Compared to many other western countries, Icelanders have developed a very different story about what navigating hostility entails. Because while an embrace of wild nature is deeply embedded in Icelandic identity, it doesn’t follow that Icelanders aren’t interested in trying to control their island. They are. Domination, however, isn’t the goal. As geographer Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson puts it, Icelanders “have a desire to manage and control nature. We just don’t let it go to our heads.”27 That framing has allowed a culture of responsive, scientifically informed risk management to grow.28 Continually preparing for the worst and sourcing opportunity in struggle, practices supported by national myth, are now the Icelandic way of life.29

The black steaming ground around the Fagradalsfjall eruption is among the planet’s most closely monitored pieces of land. Work crews take repeated measurements on air quality, ground composition, and lava movement. Others reconfigure hiking paths as needed, setting up lookout points so tourists who can’t make the walk from the closest highway can still see something of the molten rock. Visitors squint against slashing gravel and sulfuric stench as they make their way towards the magma’s heat, while teams of engineers scope out sites for earthen dams and diversion dikes nearby. The eruption’s high flow rates make it all but guaranteed that, without some form of intervention, lava will quickly subsume the highway’s route. Hence the dams and dikes, intended to guide the flows towards more preferred directions.30

It’s a proactive, organized system difficult to replicate elsewhere. Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and freezing winters have shaped Iceland’s collective memory for over a thousand years, creating an ingrained understanding of what it takes to negotiate hardship, and to have faith when challenges arise. Cultural context plays a critical factor in Icelandic narratives around control and change as well.31 The society is so small and homogenous that a group of students once created an app to prevent accidental dating between relatives.32 Generations of shared history, genetics, and a language spoken nowhere else in the world make for profound degrees of trust and connection — intrinsic aspects of resilience — that can’t be easily reproduced.

Yet Iceland’s evolution over the past two hundred years still provides lessons for other places looking to navigate increasingly uncertain ground. For one, continual learning, investment, and preparation is valuable. With each eruption, earthquake, flood, and windstorm, the national government invests in improving management tactics, monitoring tools, early warning systems, and response plans. Those improvements have made the country increasingly capable of handling the unexpected and profiting from intense events. While Icelanders acknowledge that total preparation against catastrophe is impossible, their widespread culture of proactive planning helps. With more familiar hazards, like volcanoes or avalanches, response plans account for ranges of possible scenarios and develop tiered arrays of backup plans.33 Officials use similar tactics to prepare for new hazards. Climate change, for example, is rapidly melting the island’s glaciers, forcing an exploration of life in Iceland without ice. Because glaciers help to keep volcanoes cool, scientists are anticipating far more frequent eruptions in coming decades. The government is creating new models on volcanic impacts, updated response plans, and revised hazard management systems to prepare.34 Having the resources to enable that learning, investment, and preparation is likewise key. Without certain degrees of socio-economic stability, committing to the continual refinement and adaptive response that resilience requires becomes increasingly hard, if not impossible, to do.

Whether those factors flourish is dictated in large part by underlying social attitudes towards environmental change. Abilities to proactively, and equitably, adapt are shaped by stories of whose security and safety is deemed important, what safe and secure conditions look like, and how much control is required to make them real.

As 19th century Icelanders showed, shifting those stories of security and change is possible. Collective myths spur and shape collective action. Fiction and imagination are extraordinary shared tools, ones that allow us to craft new identities and ideas about what we value most. Regardless of age or size, all nations, cities, and communities are the product of shared fictions. Those fictions are both constantly re-written and fundamentally shape the directions we choose to take. Challenging ideas of identity and land can be a powerful means of telling new stories about the paths we want to take moving forward.

For some, the trail to the Fagradalsfjall fissure offers a version of what those new stories could be. Getting close to the lava makes many hikers cry. Groups stand with mouths agape, hands pressed against their cheeks. They sit, sometimes for hours, mesmerized as the lava unfurls. Maybe it’s the force of the planet revealing itself that sparks their awe. Maybe the magma pulses remind them of the bigger geological picture, that human life exists on thin crusts of rock and soil floating on molten metals burning nearly as hot as the sun. People cling to each other as they watch, reaching out as the earth flames and shifts before them, making itself anew, building its future from its past.

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Johanna Hoffman is an urbanist, researcher, and writer working in the space between design, planning, fiction, and futures. Her first book, Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need (02022), is distributed by Penguin Random House.

Notes

1. The search and rescue teams are part of ICE-SAR (Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue).

2. A priest named Jón Steingrímssonar documented much of Laki’s impact.

3. Thordarson, 01993; Jacoby, Workman and D’Arrigo, 01999; Klemetti, 02013.

4. Oslund, 02002.

5. Gunnarsson, 01983; 01980.

6. The Danish government was hesitant to provide foodstuffs and support without significant documentation of Icelandic conditions, population statistics. Much of the famine was mitigated thanks to improving weather in Iceland in the summer of 01785 and resulting harvests (Weiners, 02020; Gunnarsson, 01983).

7. A multi-year Danish study of the Laki event argued that the most effective, long-term means of helping Icelanders depended on permanent relocation to a Danish peninsula, away from their inherently wild and dangerous island (Weiners, 02020; Gunnarsson, 01983; Oslund, 02011).

8. Oslund 02011.

9. Oslund, 02011.

10. A 01835 Hallgrímsson poem of mentions deadly blizzards casually, as a basic context for finding and taking care of a lover: “Hingað gekk hetjan unga heiðar um brattar leiðir, fanna mundar að finna fríða grund í hríð stundum” [The young warrior went here over the steep paths of the heath, in a blizzard sometimes, to meet a lovely “ground of the ‘snows of the hand] (Ringler, Hallgrímsson and Ringler, 02002).

11. Salmon, 02010, p. 34.

12. Barthes, 01975, p. 237.

13. Smith, 01986.

14. Badawy, 01967; Wilson, 02013.

15. Madsen, 01998; Miller, 02007.

16. That the country is filled with white-skinned people and likely benefited from European and American support as a result, arguably shaped Iceland’s development into the wealthy, educated and technologically advanced society it is today. In contrast, within the Danish colonial system, the people of the West Indies had a much harder time moving into the modern era, possibly because they did not benefit from white privilege in the same way Icelanders did (Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 02016).

17. With World War II and Denmark’s occupation by Nazi Germany, Iceland finally severed all latent colonial ties.

18. While the department was initially created as a response to rising nuclear tensions from the Cold War, the government quickly complemented military defense plans with defense from natural hazards, creating a uniquely Icelandic definition of civil protection (Grzela, 02020).

19. McPhee, 02011.

20. Torfason, 01998.

21. Keylock, McClung, and Magnússon, 01999.

22. Fer ðamálastofa 02016.

23. World Data Atlas, 02022.

24. World Population Review, 02022.

25. Loftsdóttir, 02019.

26. Loftsdóttir, 02019.

27. Johannesson, 02022.

28. Much of the work is conducted by government officials in the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management, who conduct ongoing scenario planning efforts to fine-tune response strategies for ranging hazard impacts. Those scenarios are formed in concert with findings from the Icelandic Meteorological Office, which tracks shifts in Icelandic weather and volcanology.

29. Dugmore, 02022.

30. Kyzer, 02002.

31. This isn’t to say that Icelandic attitudes towards disaster and change are monolithic. They’re not. Differences in educational access and social outlooks create wide ranges of understanding across sectors of the population when it comes to ideas about vulnerability, exposure to natural hazards, and what to do during emergency situations (Elíasson, 02014).

32. Subbaraman, 02013.

33. The majority of response plans in Iceland are developed by professionals, primarily in government agencies. Experts may work with local communities but this is not always the case, creating situations where some residents know less about adaptation plans and can feel unprepared when hazards occur (Alderman, 02016; Elíasson, 02014).

34. Although the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management develops the bulk of the country’s response plans, it works closely with the Meteorological Office, taking its scientific information into consideration.

References

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Alderman, L. 02016. What Worries Iceland? A World Without Ice. It is Preparing. The New York Times. August 9, 02019. Retrieved August 4, 02022. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/business/iceland-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change.html

Badawy, A. 01967. The civic sense of pharaoh and urban development in ancient Egypt. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 6, 103-109.

Brinded, N. 02015. The myth making of nation building: Walden and the technological sublime. Myth & Nation, 23. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_404379_smxx.pdf

Dugmore, A. 02022, August 3. Personal communication. [Email correspondence].

Elíasson, J. 02014. Katla volcano in Iceland, potential hazards and risk assessment. Natural Science, 2014.

Fer ðamálastofa (Icelandic Tourist Board). 02016. “Tourism in Iceland in Figures.” Department of Research and Statistics.  https://www.ferdamalastofa.is/is/tolur-og-utgafur/fundir-og-radstefnur/ferdamalathing-2016

Grzela, J. 02020. The role of the police in Iceland’s system of civil protection and emergency management. Przegląd Policyjny, 139: 54-66. http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.ceon.element-6808e870-14ef-3600-94d2-f5bcce4602cf

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Breaking a Vicious Circle of Climate Change in Zimbabwe

Nicholas Mukundidza, a farmer from a small village in eastern Zimbabwe, watches as a swarm of African palm swift birds catch tiny flying insects on a sparsely-cloudy afternoon. In the distance, white puffy clouds hang atop a lush mountaintop, giving the immense peak an exceptional natural splendor. The mountain range forms part of the Eastern Highlands, a region straddling the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border that is known for its glut of rivers, vast vegetation, and a plethora of animal species.

Mukundidza, who is also a respected beekeeper in the area, is animated as he explains the wildlife that is unique to this part of the country: samango monkeys, bushbuck and blue duiker antelope, birds such as the African olive-pigeon and lemon dove. The bateleur eagle, known in the local dialect as chapungu, is sacrosanct here. The farmers believe it to be a good omen that brings protection to the farming community. But lately, Mukundidza says, the bateleur eagle and other wildlife have vanished.

“I think habitat destruction is forcing some of the birds and animals to migrate from here to other areas,” Mukundidza says.

This forced migration is the result of another. Over the past decade, amid severe droughts brought on by climate change, thousands of hard-up farmers from Zimbabwe's parched lower regions have migrated to the highlands in search of water, fertile croplands and livestock pastures. Driven by climate-induced food scarcity, and without the privilege of considering the long-term impact of their actions on the environment, climate migrants are now burning and clearing vast tracts of land, with some occupying water sources, wetlands and riverbanks, and clogging dams and rivers with silt and debris. Experts warn that the animals and birds of the highlands are under serious threat due to habitat loss and poaching. Human activities are also affecting aquatic life in the highlands, though the numbers and distribution of birds, invertebrates, fish and amphibians in the region remain unknown.

Left: a blue duiker antelope (photograph by Bart Wursten). Middle: a bateleur eagle (photograph by Derek Keats). Right: a samango monkey (photograph by Chris Hodges).

What’s unfolding in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands is a vicious climate change circle whose dynamics will play out in more and more regions across the world in the coming decades. Without effective management, migration due to climate change leads to environmental degradation in the areas to which refugees migrate. This, in turn, threatens not only the wildlife of the new host area, but the livelihoods of the people already living there, which could lead to increased tension and competition over resources and, ultimately, further migration.

While the challenges posed by climate migration have been discussed in various fora in the country, the plight of wildlife affected by the influx of the refugees has not gained much traction among environmentalists and policy makers, and remains an underreported consequence of climate change in Zimbabwe. I traveled throughout the Eastern Highlands to speak with farmers, climate migrants, wildlife experts, and climate change researchers to better understand the scope of the issue — and what, if any, long-term solutions are being explored to address it.

According to a World Bank report released late last year, Africa will be the continent most impacted by climate change, with up to 86 million Africans migrating within their own countries by 02050. In Zimbabwe, the mass migration has already begun. Since the devastating famine of 01991-01992, Zimbabwe has suffered from intermittent severe drought episodes that have increased in frequency, with three occurring in the past seven years. The latest drought, which began earlier this year and is ongoing, has wiped out crops, particularly the staple maize. Rainfed agriculture is increasingly becoming unsustainable, with up to 60 percent of the country’s population expected to be food insecure by the end of 02022.

It is against this backdrop that more and more farmers are migrating to the lush Eastern Highlands, which still receives good rainfall and has fertile soil for agricultural activities. While this migration has the potential to be an effective adaptation strategy to climate-induced food insecurity, it comes with a cost. And it’s the flora and fauna of the Eastern Highlands that are paying the price.

“We’re no longer seeing large numbers of wild animal and bird species in this area as before,” says Leonard Madanhire, a farmer in the Mpudzi area of the Eastern Highlands. “Even the stubborn wild boars and warthogs are disappearing too; the large troops of baboons and vervet monkeys are also disappearing. There is no place for the animals to stay and the situation is becoming grim.”

Left: A climate migrant’s homestead in the Eastern Highlands, Zimbabwe. Right: Leonard Madanhire, a farmer legally settled in the Eastern Highlands, Zimbabwe. Photos by Andrew Mambondiyani.

Like many farmers whose presence in the Highlands predates the current upswell in climate migration, Madanhire was legally resettled here by the government in the 01980s. Until 01980 — when Zimbabwe attained independence from Britain — most of the sprawling farms in the Eastern Highlands and other fertile parts of the country were owned by colonial white commercial farmers. After the country became free, the Zimbabwean government seized most of the farms under the land reform program to resettle landless Indigenous Black people. The farms expropriated from white farmers are now legally owned by the government. Black Indigenous farmers are given permits, offer letters or 99-year-leases by the government to lawfully occupy and utilize the land.

In the Eastern Highlands, climate migrants have upended this system. Some are settling on areas once reserved for livestock grazing, wildlife and timber plantations, while others inhabit river banks, wetlands and river sources. New crudely-built homes constructed by the climate migrants now scatter precariously on steep mountain slopes and river banks. Parts of the previously verdant forests in the highlands are now broken by mosaics of charred vegetation and land cleared for crops.

“These new settlers are clearing large pieces of land for their crops and destroying habitats for animals,” Madanhire says. “Some rivers are no longer perennial due to siltation forcing some bird species to migrate to a neighboring country [Mozambique] where there is still a lot of water.”

Wildlife experts are worried as anecdotal evidence shows that the number of climate migrants in the highlands is ballooning with each passing year. (In 02015, the government estimated that more than 20,000 migrants had settled in the area.) With Zimbabwe experiencing another devastating drought this year, fears abound that there might be an implosion of new settlers.

Sue Fenwick, a wildlife expert, says she believes that "illegal settlers" [climate migrants] anywhere can present an issue for ecosystems if they don’t take long-term responsibility for the land.

“In worst case scenarios, they plunder both the land and the animals [for] short term gain,” says Fenwick, who is also one of the trustees of Friends of the Vumba Trust, a community environmental organization based in Zimbabwe. “Clearing natural indigenous forests for crops not only depletes forest, but all the plants, animals and birds that are part of that unique ecosystem.”

Fenwick says she has witnessed new farmers abandon pieces of land after a season or two because the land isn’t suitable for the crops they plant. Invasive plant species, such as the vernonanthura phosphorica, can then move in, creating a new problem. Fenwick says her organization has also seen an increase in illegal hunting and snaring of the few buck species remaining in the natural pockets of forest and savannah — bushbuck, blue duiker and common duiker — as well as the iconic samango monkeys.

“Birds also suffer as they are added to the pot [cooked],” she says.

The protection of all of the above, Fenwick says, is the focus of the Friends of the Vumba Trust.

“Needless to say, we believe this protection to be of great importance to the tourist industry, which supports many in our community,” she says. “Ultimately, these 'illegal settlers' threaten this too.”

The Zimbabwean government has maintained that the climate migrants are “illegal settlers” or “squatters” who are occupying mostly state land. And on numerous occasions, senior government officials have threatened to evict the climate migrants but have not yet followed through with the evictions. The climate migrants, on the other hand, have nowhere else to go.

Lloyd Gweshengwe, a climate migrant who relocated and settled in the Eastern Highlands about a decade ago, says his area of origins has become too bone dry to sustain any meaningful rain-fed crop farming.

Lloyd Gweshengwe, a climate migrant in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. Photo by Andrew Mambondiyani.

“Now I can harvest enough food to feed my family and sell the surplus,” says a visibly cheerful Gweshengwe. “I don’t regret migrating to this place."

Gweshengwe’s small new home is built on a treacherous mountain slope, exposing the dwelling to possible mudslides in the event of heavy rainfall. This is a real risk in eastern Zimbabwe, where extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. In 02019, Cyclone Idai pummeled this part of the country, displacing 60,000 people and necessitating $1.1 billion to restore infrastructure and livelihoods. The resulting loss in GDP of 4.2% led to Zimbabwe ranking second behind its neighbor Mozambique in the Global Climate Index of countries most impacted by climate change. (Another cyclone, Eloise, struck Zimbabwe in 02021.)

Widespread tree-cutting by climate migrants also increases the risk of flooding when such cyclones strike.

“It's a serious issue affecting the province,” says Phillip Tom, a manager for the Zimbabwe Forestry Commission in Zimbabwe's Manicaland province. “If the ground is left without trees, it poses serious risks in the event of a disaster like Cyclone Idai. We’re doing our best to educate [the migrants] about the dangers of cutting down trees indiscriminately.”

Since the climate migrants have nowhere to go, it remains a challenge for the government to evict them without providing alternative pieces of land for their sustenance. Passmore Nyakureba, a human rights lawyer based in Zimbabwe’s city of Mutare, says authorities cannot simply evict the climate migrants without following proper legal procedures.

“[The Zimbabwean] constitution prohibits arbitrary evictions without a court order,” Nyakureba explains. A court order would also be necessary, Nyakureba says, before the government could use the police or army to forcibly remove the climate migrants.

Though Gweshengwe grudgingly acknowledges that he and other climate migrants were posing a serious threat to the environment and wildlife in the once pristine area, he vows to remain.

“I’m here to stay. We hope the government will assist us with the construction of roads in this area,” Gweshengwe says as he toys with his long dreadlocked hair. “I’m not here to kill animals. I just want to grow enough food to feed my family.”

Nyanga Mountains in the north of the Eastern Highlands. Photo by Tatenda Mapigoti on Unsplash

Because climate migration to the highlands is relatively new,  the cash-strapped Zimbabwean government does not yet have a clear policy on how to address the issue. Efforts to get a comment from Zimbabwe’s Environment, Water, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry minister, Nqobizitha Mangaliso Ndlovu, on the government's plans or policy regarding the climate migrants in the Eastern Highlands were fruitless. Ndlovu did not respond to questions sent on his Whatsapp number though the message was delivered and read.

In the absence of meaningful action at the state level, current interventions are mostly led by nongovernmental organizations. Because of the legal issues surrounding the climate migrants’ occupation of parts of the Eastern Highlands, NGOs are hesitant to openly support them. Instead, much of the interventions focus on slowing down migration through climate change mitigation and adaptation programs in drought prone areas. By providing these farmers opportunities for enhanced livelihoods at their places of origin, the hope is that fewer will migrate to the Eastern Highlands and affect wildlife in the area.

In drier parts of Chimanimani, Chipinge and Buhera districts in Zimbabwe's Manicaland province, the Enhancing Nutrition, Stepping Up Resilience and Enterprise (ENSURE) program has helped to improve the nutrition of women of reproductive age and children under the age of five, increase and improve agricultural production and marketing, and increase communities’ resilience and response to disasters and shocks.

The program is implemented by World Vision Zimbabwe in partnership with other NGOs, such as Care, SNV and SAFIRE with funding from USAID’s Food for Peace program.

The program trained hundreds of communities to increase their capacities to adapt to natural and other disasters which affect food security in the country. It also helped communities to improve their resilience capacity through the Food for Asset program, where communities construct dams, irrigation schemes, wells and nutrition gardens. This program, which can be spread to other drier regions in the country, has the potential to improve food security of farmers in drought prone areas.

Some experts have suggested that the government should harness water from large dams like Osborne and Mpudzi in the province to irrigate crops in drier areas and possibly reduce the number of farmers who are migrating to the Eastern Highlands. And with the rainy season becoming shorter, a small number of farmers in the drier areas are now harvesting rainwater for irrigation and livestock. At the same time, the government is encouraging farmers to start growing drought-resistant small grain crops like pearl and finger millets and sorghum.

Anna Brazier, an independent climate change researcher based in Zimbabwe, acknowledges the importance of promoting drought-resistant crops, and adds that growing a diverse mixture of crops together rather than a monoculture helps to conserve soil moisture and improve fertility while reducing the risk that the entire crop will be lost due to drought or pest and disease. One such project in Zimbabwe is the Livelihoods and Food Security Project coordinated by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Another, spearheaded by Foundations for Farming  involved the use of mulch and cover crops such as velvet beans, lablab beans and jack beans to conserve soil moisture.

Brazier is optimistic that if these interventions by NGOs are scaled up and replicated in various drought areas in Zimbabwe, they can help stem the mass movement of people due to climate change, and help conserve the wildlife at risk by their migration.

As is often the case in the domain of governance, in Zimbabwe it has been the social sector, rather than the government, that has stepped in to serve what Stewart Brand once called the “larger, slower good.”

Handmade

I have a piece of stone sitting on my desk. It’s a Clovis end scraper. Many thousands of years ago, it was used to separate meat from hide.

It has a perfect weight to it. It’s heavy enough to put some momentum into your swing, but not so heavy that cleaning a hide would wear you out.

I found it on a beach on Long Island Sound. Just sitting there. Someone dropped it and it banged around in the sand and the surf for centuries. It could be very old. Scrapers emerged 40,000 years ago at the start of the Upper Paleolithic. (I’m guessing this means the warranty has expired.)

To make this scraper someone had to take a small rectangle of granite and give it 7 new planes. Tricky. A work of very precise sculpture without any of the tools now available to the sculptor. The maker was making something by hand that would help the scraper make two things by hand: dinner and clothing. Teaching the hand new tricks, that was the way we made a place for ourselves on the planet.

For a stretch of time so long it dwarfs our sense of scale, we made things by hand. It was only in the last several hundred years that we turned machines into an external self and asked them to take over. And, boy, did they take over. “Satanic mills” ran all day and night, turning the factory into air you couldn't breathe and noise you couldn’t stand. Increasingly hand-made was a reminder of “the world we have lost,” as Peter Laslett called it, the world before the advent of the industrial. It was the marker of the world before the machines came.

The artisan works by hand. This is a guarantor of imperfection. This is true because most human hands can’t make things without making them a little bit crooked. Hand work is charmingly crooked. It is also a guarantor of scale. Working by hand obliges us to keep it small.  

Making things by hand is an almost eccentric thing to do when so much of our world is abstract and immaterial. Thomas Stewart introduced us to the idea of “intellectual capital.” And we have been encouraged to think of our work as “digital content” created for an “attention economy” and a “creative class” in the formation of an “information society” and the age of the “Infovore.” All of this happens without hand work. Well, except for the tapping of fingers on key boards. This work happens in the head, not the hand.

Handmade objects are material. They come from a hand. They come to rest in a hand. They act on the world through the hand. Much of the rest of the day we bathe in 1s and 0s streaming from computers, entertainment centers, and smart speakers. There is something more actual about the artisanal.

Matthew Crawford is worth reading on this and other artisanal matters.  Here’s what he says in Shop Class as Soulcraft:

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.

Crawford detects in hand work what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” This is the moment when we are so completely absorbed by what we are doing that we lose track of where we are in time and space. We can only stop the flow experience by falling out of the embrace of the moment. “Oh," we say, “Sorry. I was miles away.” From a creative point of view, this is deep space, the place we are able to bring the best of our problem solving to bear on the problem at hand (“should I cut it this way or that way?”) and the larger issues of life (“How do I make myself make sense to a 15-year-old?”)

As Crawford points out, we were inclined to scorn hand making in the later 20th century.  We got rid of shop class for computers and coding. We encouraged kids to give up trades for a berth on the global economy. Only lonely figures like Mike Rowe and his show Dirty Jobs were prepared to stand for manual labor. Everyone else seemed to think this was beneath the dignity of a professional class to which everyone else seemed to aspire.

Handmade things are material. But working by hand is an intensely cerebral exercise. We learn to make the hand sentient. Artisans “listen” with their hands. They “see” with their hands. For some, hands are the way to discover. We follow them to knowledge. They lead us to understanding.

There is a “conversation” between the hand and the material being worked. The craft person proposes a shape for the wood. The wood disagrees and makes a counter offer.  The two of them work out a compromise. This will sometimes rise to an inspiration. Neither party knew what would come of their interaction until, magically, something remarkable did.

But discovery and conversation doesn’t stop when the artisan is finished. They carry into the people who buy the object. They too now listen, see and discover with it. They say the object is alive. They can hear it “speak.” (Certainly that Clovis scraper speaks to me. Mostly, “Man, you have it so easy”.) We can hear the object chatter, murmur, declaim according to the instructions of the Artisan.

We admired how perfect things were when made by machines. Recall little Jerry Seinfeld’s love of the perfect rectangularity of the PopTart. Recall those toiletry kits that people used to bring home from trans-Atlantic flights for their kids. All sleekly designed with zippers and compartments and things inside. A dream for any 8-year-old, an immaculate creation, and now gloriously theirs, a promissory note from adulthood of the glory and glamor to come. I have heard of people sending products back when the packaging was punctured. Apparently they want things to come straight from the factory with the perfection intact. They say they want things “factory fresh.” Factory what?

But now we love things that are immaculate because untouched by machines. Once scorned, the manual is back. The handmade object can assume extraordinary powers. So we are still learning what it means to make something by hand. There is a mystery at the heart of the artisan experiment.

—

"Handmade" is an excerpt from Grant McCracken's Return of the Artisan (Simon and Schuster, 02022).

The Mammoth Steps

Editor's Note: "The Mammoth Steps" was originally published December 02018 in Terraform. This story and others like it can be found in Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. "Talking to Terrestrials" was originally published July 02021 on WorldWeaverPress.com.

Introduction: Talking to Terrestrials

It’s very clear—from science, from anecdotes, from viral videos on the Internet—that humans share this planet with alien intelligences. I don’t speak of skrulls or reptoids, of course, but of dogs, dolphins, apes, whales, corvids, cats and elephants. And countless others, animals with their own subjective inner lives, with opinions, desires, emotions and even language.

And yet, where is the highly funded, intergovernmental, Arrival-esque research effort to establish meaningful communication with these terrestrial alien minds? Plenty of science is done on animal communication, but nothing on the scale of what’s depicted in blockbuster movies and sci-fi novels as a natural response to encountering beings from outer space. We giddy at the thought of universal translators—they’re in everything from Star Trek to Marvel movies to Barbarella—but we seem disinterested in applying such a device to the non-humans already on our planet.

I don’t want to dwell on why this is—our speciesism, our anthropocentrism, the artificial hierarchies we create to set ourselves apart from other kinds of minds—but rather propose a sci-fi “what-if.” What if our priorities were different? What if, instead of using Big Data to optimize social media ads, we used that enormous computational power to interpret the sounds, signs, and body language of animals? What if, instead of automating weapons of war, DARPA and similar used artificial intelligence to create tools of connection? What if our schools taught us how to listen—with our ears, eyes, nose and touch—to beings who don’t look like us but nonetheless likely have something interesting to say?

Some of this hypothetical backgrounds my story “The Mammoth Steps.” In it, translation technology and norms of interspecies communication make possible a deep friendship between a boy, Kaskil, and a de-extincted mammoth, Roomba. More than that, they create a world in which Roomba is not a pet, not confined or controlled or enslaved, but rather has the agency to pursue his own dreams and desires. He, with Kaskil’s help, journeys across the human world, and he is mostly left alone, allowed to live his own life, go his own way. It is merely science fictional flare to tell this story with a mammoth, rather than a chimp or a beluga or an African elephant.

In our “what-if” scenario, it is not hard to imagine that interspecies communication tech doesn’t just empower humans, but empowers non-humans as well. Imagine visiting a city where everyone speaks a foreign language. You see things that interest you—museums and shops and public transit and restaurants—but you can’t express that interest to the locals, can’t even get them to let you in the buildings. But with our translator, all that is changed! Is it so hard to imagine that with real communication, rather than reward-and-punishment training under regimes of animal captivity and slavery, some non-humans could similarly become flourishing parts of our civilization, perhaps our cities? Could even, with the right technological assistance, do jobs, get paid, rent apartments, participate in the economy, enjoy leisure, express opinions, create art?

We don’t know what’s really possible here. We lack the civilizational priorities to find out. We don’t know how much of any consciousness is instinctive and how much is learned, relational, materially constructed. We can train elephants to paint, and chuckle at their little drawings, feel impressed that an animal could do this, while also feeling safe in knowing that it will never compare to great human art. But we have never let an elephant go to art school, never created the material and social conditions for elephant art to unfold over generations.

In my “Mammoth Steps” what-if of translation apps, visual talking boards, and touchscreen interface balls, humans and animals have started to explore what might be possible. Working together to care for the environment? Yes. Non-human freedom of movement across a whole continent? Within reason. Clothes and healthcare to bring comfort to those with different bodies? Worth trying. Shared politics, economics, communities? Contentious, but we’ll never know until we try.

The Mammoth Steps

In his young days, Kaskil would hide from Roomba in the tall, chilly grass. He crouched down, stifled his laughs, listened for the slight crunches of Roomba’s great feet compressing the ice and soil. Kaskil knew Roomba could track him by scent, but the old mammoth humored him, played along, pretending to be confused, trunk swishing the steppe grasses right over Kaskil’s ducked head. When Roomba looked away, Kaskil would jump up and sprint off to a new spot. On they went for hours, criss-crossing the tundra until the sun got low and the deep cold crept in, and Kaskil would climb up Roomba’s clumped fur and doze there in the musky warmth as the mammoth carried him home.

Kaskil’s family moved with mammoths across the Siberian grasslands, paid by the carbon traders to play doctor and ambassador for these new-old beasts. The mammoths needed Kaskil’s commonage for their nimble hands and rapport with the Yakut towns, where young calves often found trouble raiding sun-swollen vegetable gardens. Humans needed the mammoths to roam, to compact and scrape away the snow that kept the cold of winter from penetrating the deep soil, and to spread the seeds of grasses that would insulate the permafrost from summer thaw. And, more each year, the humans needed the mammoths for their sly humor and bitter milk.

Roomba was the oldest mammoth traveling with the commonage, one of the first born of de-extinction splicing. Unlike the younger generation, which romped and piled together in complex socialities, Roomba had few peers. Humans were his company, and Kaskil, who he’d known since birth, was his favorite. Kaskil, for his part, couldn’t imagine life without the mammoth. Kaskil rode him when the commonage travelled, did chores with him, read his studies aloud sitting in the crook of Roomba’s forelegs. And sometimes he noticed when Roomba stopped and stared south, trunk raised to smell the wind.

Kaskil wanted to ask Roomba what was wrong, but such an abstract question posed a challenge. Roomba knew Kaskil’s body-language, recognized many words and gestures, and likewise could signal his feelings and opinions with a nod or trunk swing, a trumpet or harrumph, or the thrumming infrasonic rumbles that Kaskil’s phone registered as pictographs or emojis. But the syntax of longing was beyond the capacities of their translator app; it would be another generation, Kaskil’s father said, before they had enough language data to train their algorithms to fluency.

So instead they played with a projected talking board, gathering clouds of concepts. Camp and family danced together into home. Where, walk, and want were counterveiled by fear. Finally Roomba’s trunk tapped on a loop of gifs representing mammoths before mammoths.

Kaskil started when he got it; he searched up videos of elephants, played them on the canvas tent. Roomba nodded, waggled his head, dug his tusk into the snow in excitement.

The commonage had no hold on Roomba; the old timer could go where he liked. But Kaskil was only fourteen, with fretful parents. Still, they knew the bond the two shared, and were grateful to Roomba for helping raise their son. After a week of Kaskil’s begging, they relented, and they helped pack saddle bags for the long journey.

At first it was much like one of their camping trips, but the days counted on and the trees grew thicker. Below the arctic circle it was slower going. They wound half-abandoned logging trails connecting the mushroom towns that foraged fungal delicacies for far-off luxe provision houses. Occasionally there was no trail south, and they forced their way through, Roomba pushing aside trees, the ground made soft by permafrost thaw.

In Ulaanbaatar they enquired after the trains that crossed the Gobi south to the industrial wonderlands of Shaanxi and Chengdu. But the trainmasters balked—Roomba was much too big, they said, to fit in the sleek compartments. Kaskil hailed at trucks, but the automated rumblers were always too full to stop for them.

So on they walked, into the desert, begging water from the seeps where the solar painters camped. Winter had turned to spring, and the sun was hot in the sky. Roomba’s wool matted with sweat. His feet dragged in the sand. One day he would not leave the shade of their tent. Kaskil went to the painters, snapping together black tiles, and borrowed shears and an ancient, shaking shaver. All day he cut at Roomba’s fur, tossing the chestnut curls in feathery piles.

The next day Roomba danced and charged with relief, Kaskil laughing at his friend’s ridiculous haircut. They made good time, but by the afternoon they realized their mistake. Under the wool Roomba’s flesh was delicate, unaccustomed to the sun. He pinked and burned, and began to trumpet with discomfort.

Kaskil again begged help from the painters. Taking pity on Roomba, they offered salve, but this was a temporary fix. Then a dusty wind gusted the camp, and Kaskil saw the painters pull robes over their faces. The white sheets, which wrapped the solar tiles, snapped and fluttered. Kaskil had an idea. For a week he attended Roomba as a tailor, measuring with his phone and following patterns projected from a stitching site. When Roomba’s sunburns had peeled, Kaskil dressed him in the white robe, and off again they went.

Walking along the busy Chinese highways, Roomba was a strange sight. In the cities children crowded around him, taking pictures and tugging at his robes. Kaskil and Roomba marveled at the chromey towers and ivy statues. They’d seen pictures, of course, but up close each city seemed grander than the next.

But the alleys were too narrow for Roomba’s bulk, and often they waited hours in bicycle gridlock. More than once officials hassled them out of parks, and old women scowled at the crates of food they took from provision houses. So much of the land was terraced crops, and the farmers did not like Roomba grazing.

They followed the Jinsha River south, both splashing in often to escape the heat. Summer was coming, and the commonage would be roaming north to the grass beaches of the Kara Sea. Kaskil messaged his parents every night, but still he missed them. He wanted to hear Russian and Sakha, not these unfamiliar languages, parsed awkwardly by his translator. The quiet, playful presence of the mammoth was a comfort, but there too was an otherness, a difference bridged by solidarity but not quite by understanding.

And Roomba, Kaskil thought, must have his own doubts and loneliness—the only mammoth for a thousand miles. Why make this trip to see the elephants? Roomba was spliced from elephant genes, born from an elephant womb. But what did that mean for a mammoth? What question could provoke such a journey, here at the sunset of his massive, new-old life?

The subtropics turned to tropics, and on they walked, until they began to pass gilded shrines where monks served milky curry. Everywhere was the image of the elephant: on flags and logos, as statues and painted murals. But, where were the elephants? Missing.

Missing too were the selfie-mobs and rubberneckers they had gathered in the northern cities. Here the humans they passed shied away—furtive glances and upset muttering. Once a nun approached them from a shadowed stall, asked if they bore instructions or news from the front. She fled when Kaskil betrayed their confusion.

Finally they found a bored constable, pestered her to explain. It’s all politics, she said, both nervous and dismissive. Thai elephants demanding money and land, accommodation and autonomy, freedom from electric fences and ear hooks; Thai humans reacting badly, not wanting a change in the order, terrorizing demonstrations with chili sprays and angry bees. Here, not so bad, she said, but they should be careful further south, where the elephants retreated and seized Phuket.

Kaskil told Roomba the news as best he could, and asked his friend if they should stop. Roomba looked north, raised his trunk to smell the wind, but then he shook his massive head, kept walking. To avoid attention they slept by day, travelled by night. They ate at temples, which stayed neutral in the dispute. Miles melted by in eagerness for a destination.

Sarasin Bridge was barricaded by protesters, a blockade of supplies to the occupied island. The crowd shrunk back as they approached—a strange-looking boy atop a huge-tusked, white-clad creature, more massive by half than the elephants they knew. But there was no getting through. Kaskil’s heart dipped with frustration and sorrow, and he knew, in the heavy rumble of his friend beneath him, that Roomba felt the same way.

Then, in a rush, the nuns holding the Phuket side moved forward, surrounded Roomba with linked arms. Smiling at the mob they escorted Kaskil and Roomba across.

The pair could hardly believe it. They thanked the nuns, Roomba bowing low to the earth. They had finally arrived.

Phuket now was different than the mainland. Elephants roamed the streets, lounged in squares. Some worked with allied humans constructing elephant-sized buildings, communicating with script and hieroglyphs, drawn with trunks in the sand or on touchscreen beach balls. When Roomba rumbled at them, they seemed amused.

A procession formed, and the elephants led Roomba to the beach. Kaskil dismounted and sat in the warm sand, watching his friend touch the ocean. It had been worth the journey, he thought, to see this meeting: free elephants and a free mammoth, both new-old in their own ways, at the end of a long life and the start of a new way of living.

The elephants were oddly small next to the mammoth’s bulk. They disrobed Roomba, felt his splotchy, shaven wool with their trunks. Then, as a herd, they plunged into the surf. The old mammoth stepped south, and swam.

Jonathan Haidt

Join us online to watch the YouTube Premiere of this Long Now Talk

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality.

In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt presses on questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last.

Prompted by Haidt's piece on Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book; release slated for the fall of 02023.

Four Poems

To Frank, Within the Pope-Leighey House

Your house is here, Frank.
I sit in your architecture.
I observe your texture.
A groundhog comes to the window
sticks his nose right on the glass
looks me in the eyes.
Could’ve been you.
I don’t know much
but it could’ve been you.
We measure our lives with algorithms
the groundhog just looks for food
I just sit and write here inside of you.
Your algorithm was on paper
in geometry
gliding graphite along graphs.
I sit here in your structure.
I step into your construct.
I see the backside of your ribs.
You don’t know my ribs, Frank
but I measure my time just like you.
You built order
among particles.
I sit in the architecture
of your immortality
Frank.
I teach high school.
I don’t know about building homes
I don’t have millions
nor does anyone know me.
I have no Wrightian style
no unique accent of verse

to be analyzed here.
But I see the backside of your ribs
and your heart is clear.
I see your stomach churn behind the wood
the veins in the grain
your still blood liquid here.
Are you in love
or just the groundhog passing by
or the red fox—ears perked—listening?
Is my presence unsettling
or do I comfort old fingerprints
on old brick bones?
I consider your dark eyes
smooth forehead
and thin lips.
I see how many years you’ve lived
within the rings of the wooden soul
and watch condensation drip.
If you knew decades ago
I would be here
aware of your time
aware of your wives and your
architectured life—
if I watched you in the morning
laying next to you—
had just woken up
watched you yawn in sync
with the dew
on your windows
outside
would that be Wrightian
or am I just measuring time?
There have been families inside of you
yelling
loving
children
death in a pond

and tea on the stove
sweat in the night
and hands
on the inside of your eyes
leaving stains against the glass.
I sit inside as a tourist
walks by
taking pictures
through that glass.
I am bothered, Frank.
I sit and consider you—
your skeleton I applied to.
We have a deal
you never agreed to.
We are together
you and I
and the wandering photographer
doesn’t know that I know when you were born
and if you are still alive in the past
in that other dimension—time—
I know when you die.
I know about
Catherine
Mamah
Maude
Olgivanna.
I know how Mamah will die
and the morphine within Maude.
Your architecture remains.
Leave skeletons alone.
This will do
we can talk like this.
I can warn you now
to not worry about death
to leave the houses unbuilt
to leave the woods to the groundhog and the fox.
But there is no message I can send
no rewriting an algorithm
no truth against the world
to reach into the reverse

and tap you on the shoulder
to feel something other than.

Future Song

Infinite trees
with infinite leaves
spread
to the horizon
and shutter in the wind thick air
vibrating.
Lightning above.
Infinite trees
we live below
look down and see our shadows.
We smoke with our backs against your bark
as your skin falls apart
behind us
hair is rigid on the neck
when we feel the static—
burnt wood.
Infinite trees
in a gasp of lightning:
some belong to families
others belong to houses
some belong to the woods
some belong to children
and some are crushed with vines
others don’t grow just right
some die slowly in the night.
Infinite trees
with infinite leaves
now saturated with rain—
your unyielding smoking wood
we turn into tabletop art—
can’t stop dancing beneath shade
or smoking with backs against bark—

widespread leaves
keep me down below
keep me from climbing
and keep me here.
The infinite trees
with their infinite leaves—
we are skeletons of wood
just like the rest
waiting for a future song
act of alchemy—energy—
your hand that has
just been touched for the first time.
Your smile
that is real beneath the leaves.
There is the smell of thunder
like wet smoke
like your skin absorbing the night
through a window
absorbing quiet humid streets
in the summer heat.
You know what the thunder smells like
but you don’t know me
until the rain is there in the dark.
I don’t know you
but I know what the thunder smells like too.
I’ve seen lightning twist wood around
into muscle or split it through the middle
set fire to the stillness.
And I could know the future
if I went far away—
looked at a blackhole so closely
in the warped time and space.

I could come back to the earth
and hold your hand again
and kiss you purple.
But old eyes can’t read lyrics
when eyes drift like leaves—
expedited time to hold your hand
if you were ninety then like the trees
and lived a life staring up
singing a future song
waiting for the air to vibrate.
So I reach over now
to set my glasses down
beside the wooden bed
and lay still
to wait for the lightning as well
next to the hyacinths
and the can of beer.

The Commuter

The burnt cigarette
becomes concrete
as I walk down K Street
like homo erectus
disintegrating into dirt
asphyxiating in the halitosis of cars.
I see his grey knees everyday—
his naked torso with its sinuous frame.
He travels east beneath a torn blanket
each morning
we could make a home of a moment
if I ever waited there for him
for long enough.

Blood Bag

This is blood.
When it’s red thick
stabilized in plastic.
When it’s next to pigeons
collecting cigarettes on sidewalks
moving within slovenly hands
disembodied from clothes
found in trash bags.
A hand touches your face—
makes you feel like you belong
to your feet to your blood
within the conversation of synapses—
lightning separate realities.
When it seeps through bandages on backs
and it scabs or it stains the sheets
like berries and wine made from bones
drinking and thinking for love—
hand that touches your face again
makes you feel okay about it
makes you feel okay about it.
There is blood in the clouds
blood in the air
blood in love and in revisions
and incisions.
There is blood in the sun
and in the moon.
You injected it into everything
when you were born.
Blood that drenches the body
coming down like rain in the night.
Blood bag in a hospital bed
baby singing for something sweeter than this
so much human in one container.
This is blood.

When it carries life
in between bones
through bodies
you feel safe
and the blood that lifts
the hand to touch your face
makes you feel okay about it.

Living in Mangrove Time

The memory begins like this: an endless expanse of open water, the cloudless counterpart sky stretching into its own still eternity, the tides’ metronomic rocking against the shell of my sunbleached kayak. There is a prickling warmth of salt spray and heat where my skin would eventually flush pink, burn, and peel. I paddle against that nudging pull taking me out to sea, steadying myself in the suspension of salted spray so I can take in the electrifying verdant bloom of a mangrove canopy and its arching roots which frame the shoreline with intricate buttressing.

I get closer, navigating my kayak into a dead-end tunnel as far as I can go without knocking my paddle against their limb-like wood or getting a faceful of ovular leaves and branches. I float, alone, in a moment of speechless quiet, letting the continuous pulse of the water and the ripple of darting fish and the rustling of startled lizards and cautious birds fill the gaps between my slightly dehydrated breaths. Eventually, I will make my way out of this cool, shaded opening in the mangrove forest and drift back out into the harsh glare of the sun. As I paddle my way back to the sandier, built-out shoreline, the mangroves blur into patterned bands of brown and green suspended between two mirrors of blue.

Nearly half a century before my teenage, sunburnt self made my way into this tangled shoreline, Rachel Carson also found herself along the coast of the Florida Keys with its crocheted mangrove forests and patchwork of rooting tree islands. Her 01955 book, The Edge of the Sea, collected her observations about the mangroves’ resiliency along Florida’s hurricane-battered shore, the tidal migrations of seedlings, and the trees’ role as nurseries for native wildlife. For all of their apparent strength as island-builders, shelters, and anchors of the shore, Carson saw the mangroves’ continued survival as a marginal ecosystem already threatened by rising waters:

“As the years pass, and the centuries merge into the unbroken stream of time, these architects of coral reef and mangrove swamp build toward a shadowy future. But neither the corals nor the mangroves, but the sea itself will determine when that which they build will belong to the land, or when it will be reclaimed for the sea.”

What Carson does not mention: that human action has intervened in the slow timescale of changing tides, leaving the mangrove’s fate on the periphery of Florida’s shorelines still uncertain.

Mangroves are peculiar beings. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, mangroves are amphibious halophytes, surviving in both salt and freshwater wetlands that would drown and erode other kinds of root systems. Over 50 species of true mangroves have been found around the world although only three—the red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), the black mangrove (Avicennia germinans), and the white mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa)—can be found growing along the coast of Florida. It is believed that mangroves reached the North American continent 66 to 23 million years ago by way of the Atlantic’s Equatorial Current. Very little is known about the life expectancy of mangroves, although it’s estimated that they can probably live up to a hundred years or more. This uncertainty about a mangrove forest’s potential age is unsurprising given that mangroves can remain uniquely undisturbed in stable soil for centuries, have been at the mercy of tidal waters, hurricane-force winds, and shifting coastlines long before humans encountered them (although over a century of various acts of man-made destruction certainly doesn’t make things easier).

A mangrove’s life cycle begins with a reproductive ability known as viviparity. Young seeds can stay attached to the parent tree for over a year while they germinate before dropping into the waters below. These propagules are then swept away by the tides, drifting with the currents until they find brackish water and shallow mud flats to sink into and take root. This stage of growth can last over a year as the finger-like propagule survives on the open water, biding its time for an ideal habitat to spawn in. From there, the mangrove saplings rise, stretching their vascular scaffolding up and out into the water. Juvenile red mangroves can grow up to 5 feet in a single year, a fast rate of growth that has enabled mangrove forests to bounce back quickly from extreme weather events like hurricanes. Compared to other mangrove forests, which have been documented at heights as tall as 80 feet, Florida’s mangroves are often more like thickets of shrubs with black mangroves reaching the tallest heights of 15-20 feet. Over the course of a decade, as more mangrove saplings begin to accumulate, the beginnings of a forest emerge. With their approximate 100-year lifespan and a maturation period of 10-20 years, mangroves’ life cycles and migration patterns surprisingly parallel our own.

Mangroves are able to thrive in these anaerobic environments through their stilt-like system of exposed roots known as pneumatophores by taking in oxygen through these porous, water-repellent surfaces at low tide. Different species of mangroves have developed their own systems to expel the salt in the water they absorb. Red mangroves have built-in barriers that can block 90 percent of salt in sea water from entering their vascular system. Other species, such as the black mangrove, can push salt out through glands in their leaves. As water evaporates, their leaves begin to glitter in the sun with the white crust of salt crystal excretions. Annie Dillard puts it best in her essay ‘Sojourner’: “If survival is an art, then mangroves are artists of the beautiful.”

Mangroves have earned many nicknames for their unusual morphology: “walking trees,” “dead man’s fingers,” “snorkel roots.” They’ve also been dubbed the “kidneys of the coast” for their vital role in sustaining coastal wetlands. Thanks to the filtration power of their root systems, they keep the water clear of harmful phosphate and nitrate pollutants, benefitting the corals and seagrasses oftentimes growing nearby. Mangroves act as houses, as kitchens, as cleaners. Give a mangrove forest enough time and creatures begin to take up residence among and on their submerged roots. Oysters contribute to this aquatic clean-up, eventually joined by barnacles, sponges, starfish, and anemones that cling like ornaments to the mangrove’s network of roots. Decomposers like jellyfish, algae, insects, and worms feed on fallen leaves and plant matter, recycling the nutrients of the dead to feed the living. The cagelike structure of this forest is vital for protecting breeding grounds and nurseries for thousands of juvenile marine species such as snook, barracuda, snapper, tarpon, redfish, smalltooth sawfish, crabs, and shrimp. Endangered and vulnerable species such as manatees, dolphins, hawskbill sea turtles, sharks, and crocodiles have all passed through the shelter of these botanical hoop skirts. Above water, the mangroves’ branches have acted as rookieres for migratory and native coastal birds including brown pelicans, herons, roseate spoonbills, kingfishers, cormorants, egrets, and frigatebirds. Even larger mammals like Key deer and Florida panthers have been spotted in this forest of multispecies entanglement. It’s no wonder that mangroves are considered to be some of the most productive and complex ecosystems in the world.

What is less visible to the naked eye, yet vital in the fight against climate change, is the mangrove’s powerful ability to capture carbon dioxide emissions and store them in its carbon-rich soil under the water. Mangroves only comprise about 2% of the world’s marine ecosystems, yet they account for 10 to 15 percent of total carbon burial. This kind of sequestration is known as “blue carbon” and it’s estimated that the mangrove forest’s sink is 4 times more effective at trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses compared to other kinds of terrestrial trees, including rainforests.

Mangroves are the living architects of the shore. Their roots accumulate and retain sediment deposits, building up mud and peat soils that help strengthen and stabilize Florida’s coastal wetlands against erosion. As more species make their way to the mangrove forest, building on its amphibious network of roots and branches, a kind of island can begin to emerge from the shallows where there was once just water. “A society grows,” Dillard muses, “interlocked in a tangle of dependencies.”

On a coastline regularly battered by hurricanes, mangroves can soften the blow of violent winds and the slamming waves of floodwaters by dispersing their force across their intricate root systems. This is not to say that mangrove forests always survive storms completely intact—they are still susceptible to drowning  if prolonged periods of flooding and still water cover their exposed roots, and their canopies can still be damaged by high winds and debris—but a study conducted after Hurricane Irma in 02017 found that mangroves prevented approximately $1.5 billion in direct flood damage in their role as arboreal buffer against storm surges. In their essay on the extra-territorial nature of mangroves, Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl write that “in the intertidal and interpenetrating zone of the mangrove, the border between land and sea becomes a choreography of re-crossings.” Chemical exchanges, interspecies interactions, and dances of hydrology all shape the mangrove forest into a site of porous liminality.

Despite their vital role in supporting Florida’s coastal ecosystems and protecting the state’s human and non-human communities, the mangroves’ existence during the age of the Anthropocene has been one marked by continued precarity.

Long before European colonization, Florida’s mangroves sustained the fish nurseries that fed early Indigenous tribes like the Tequesta on the southeast coast of the Atlantic and the Calusa in the southwest. These forests have seen decades of violent conquest, piracy, and Prohibition-era smuggling along the tip of the peninsula. For 40 years, the mangroves watched as formerly-enslaved fugitives set sail from the coast of Key Biscayne to reach the Bahamas, a voyage now known as part of Florida’s Saltwater Underground Railroad.

South Florida’s rapid urban development in the early 19th century brought about the desire to clear the area’s waterfronts and reroute the movement of water for human benefit. The removal of these mangrove forests took its toll, but so did other more indirect construction projects such as canal systems and dam-building that disrupted the ebb and flow of tides that enable mangroves to thrive. Their roots have suffocated under mounds of sand dredged from Biscayne Bay to reshape the land we now know as Miami. Their pores have choked on the slick sheen of oil spills. Their branches have been cut through to make paths into the Everglades marshland, their wood burned by gladesmen and plume hunters in futile attempts to keep mosquitos away. The mangroves have seen wetlands drained for agriculture, watched housing developments crop up and fill with families, then saw how those flat buildings have gradually been replaced by man-made skyscrapers that reach heights unmatched by any tree. Mangroves may take decades to mature and develop into forests, but their destruction takes just mere minutes.

It’s been estimated by local researchers that 86% of Florida’s mangrove coverage has been lost since the 01940s. Between 02000 and 02015, a study found that, globally, the destruction of mangrove forests released 122 million tons of stored carbon into the atmosphere. It wasn’t until the Mangrove Trimming and Preservation Act was passed in 01996 that it became illegal to destroy or damage mangroves outside of already-protected parklands and aquatic preserves. Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection now estimates that 600,000 acres of mangroves line the state’s shores, although its waters once spawned millions. Yet mangroves are still not entirely safe from the threat of destruction in the name of human development. Even after this year’s summer kicked off with severe flooding across Miami from heavy rains (an occurrence that has become increasingly frequent), one of the city’s commissioners proposed an ordinance to ban the planting of mangroves in city parks in order to “protect waterfront views.” Although the proposed ordinance was eventually withdrawn after public protest, it symbolizes a view many still have about mangroves—that they are still impeders of urban progress, despite the fact that Florida’s commercial fishing and marine-based economies would collapse without them, and that mangroves may be the key to Miami’s long-term coastal resiliency.

In 02018, Miami-based photographer Anastasia Samoylova stood on the shores of the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and captured an image of what she saw, later becoming part of her series, FloodZone. In the distance, you can see the stilted ruins of the Cape Romano Dome House’s modular, science-fictional structure, a once self-sustaining home on the water that has since been reclaimed by sea gulls and pelicans as nesting grounds. At the foreground, a ghost forest of a deceased mangrove thicket stands on the sandy shore like spindly skeletones, their gnarled bone-white forms contrasting the smoother, more rotund manmade structure. This photo has stayed with me as a reminder of what’s at stake in these acts of mutually-assured destruction as rising waters threaten to drown everything around us.

If we leave the mangroves to grow in their own time, rather than having to endure and be stunted by the pressures of our own, what stories could they tell us? What lessons of resiliency might we find among their storm-breaking, nourishing roots? Mangroves are not so different from humanity, after all. They mature in the same two-decade period as we do. They, too, adapt their root systems to meet the unique needs of the brackish or saltwater coasts they grow along. Like us, they let their children out into the world, with all of its promise and danger, and hope that the next generation will find a place where they’ll be able to put down their roots and thrive.

The understanding that trees have the capacity for migration is nothing new, yet the mangroves’ movement further up into Florida’s northern coasts and increasingly into more inlands are key indicators of climatic shifts in temperature and sea-level rise that already have and will continue to greatly impact the ecosystems we rely on to survive. Nowadays, many frontline coastal communities in South Florida and beyond are grappling with an existential challenge: keep the water at bay or begin to plan a managed retreat and scatter into an unknown future.

Already, the mangrove’s unique arboreal design has inspired speculative projects and models of infrastructural biomimicry. In 02016, Taiwanese designers Sheng-Hung Lee and Wan Kee Lee unveiled their TetraPOTs, a kind of interlocking coastal defense made of interlocking submerged planters for mangrove saplings to take root in, and Syracuse University-based architecture firm APTUM debuted Rhizolith Island, a concrete breakwater island meant to aid the repopulation of mangrove forests. In 02019, researchers at Florida Atlantic University proposed modifying existing seawalls with mangrove-like cylindrical paneling. In 02020, researchers discovered a way to desalinate water through a kind of synthetic, silica mangrove root that replicates the trees’ porous filtration. Most recently, scientists at the University of Miami have proposed a replacement to the stony riprap found at the base of the city’s sea walls. Dubbed SEAHIVE, this stacked structure of hollow concrete tubes is a marine and estuarine shoreline system designed to dissipate the energy of incoming waves like mangroves and reefs do (and will eventually include its own crop of saplings and planted corals). Where seawalls alone fail in their inefficient, breachable, pollutant, resource-exhausting concrete simplicity (one recent estimate put the cost of raising and repairing Florida’s existing walls at $75 billion to meet the coast’s projected 2 foot sea-level rise by 2060), living shorelines—particularly mangrove-lined ones that can eventually spawn other coastal life—offer innovative alternatives that connect, rather than divide, us from Florida’s local biota and work with the life-cycles of native flora and fauna and local hydrology rather than trying to block them.

Replanting efforts by local environmental groups take place every year up and down the coast, although they vary in their ability to successfully respawn and build new forests. Some sapling replanting projects only boast a success rate of 50% or less. Decisions like planting in an area without the proper intertidal hydrology or putting certain species on land masses and in depths where they have not historically thrived can lead to hundreds and thousands of dollars and local resources wasted. Frequent shore-battering weather events and proximity to continued human activity don’t improve their chances either.

Wetland scientist Robin Lewis has become world-renowned for his mangrove restoration techniques. His strategy is simple: think like a mangrove. Immersing himself in the dynamism of each unique coastal habitat, Lewis watches the water to find the best balance of high and low tide for each species. Sometimes humans have to create ideal conditions where there are none by adding slopes of dirt to ocean shallows and dismantling man-made blockages to bring back natural waterflows. While bulldozers are far less charming than neat rows of seedlings, oftentimes these mangrove forests end up doing the work of replenishing themselves as their propagules find their way to the newly-restored intertidal shores.

How might we embrace the mangroves’ beautiful periphery? What does it mean to shift our thinking away from the short-term, profit-driven interests of accelerated economic growth and embrace a long-term living with the mangroves and all of their delicate, yet strong, restorative ecology? As Ginwala and Ziherl observe, in mangrove time, “human traces cannot survive as a lasting form, for this tropical coastal ecology is a site of continual refiguration.” Already, rising waters threaten many of Florida’s coastal communities. The old ways of measuring the success and health of a community are becoming increasingly absurd and outdated in this time of climate emergency. If we do not give mangroves a chance to truly thrive on our shores and live alongside us, they risk drowning in a matter of decades too.

Ecocritical scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has this idea of “long ecology,” a kind of ecological understanding that “exchanges human life spans as familiar units of counting for more profound durations” and embraces a “more-than-human temporal and spatial entanglement” which brings with it “an affectively fraught web of relation that unfolds within an extensive spatial and temporal range, demanding an ethics of relation and scale.” Considering new temporal protectives is something anthropologist Erin Fitz-Henry also urges, writing that we must “tune back in'' with a scope “as much toward ancient pasts as toward distant futures, according to speeds and rhythms both fast and slow” as this “might allow us to listen more closely to the full range of temporalities with which we are surrounded.” Perhaps living like mangroves will help us listen, to restore an ecological understanding that we have spent centuries unlearning. As Carson notes, the sea may ultimately decide our fate, but we should see mangroves as our kin as we collectively choose how to proceed, intertwined, into Florida’s amphibious future.

On my way to work, now thousands of miles away from the Florida coastline and years after that first kayak trip out into the mangrove forest, I’m listening to an episode of NPR’s Short Wave as I squeeze myself into the throng of morning commuters. Trying to ignore a stranger’s backpack digging into my arm and the way my skin’s already sticky with sweat during this heatwave, I listen to Dr. Alex Moore—a professor and researcher who specializes in coastal wetland ecosystems—liken mangroves to a city for all of the aquatic and terrestrial animals living among its roots and branches.

I emerge from the crowded subway out into the new city I call home. I, too, have drifted with the tides and dug my sapling roots into new soil. I take in the air, wet and soft with the familiar density of humidity, and think about how this land has been designated by climate scientists as subtropical. For a moment, I do not hear the sound of honking cars, nor the chatter of crowds passing by, only the slow, gentle rhythm of waves lapping against a metropolis of submerged root systems slowly stretching out their fingers into the ocean’s eternal unstillness.