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February 2 - February 8, 2025
We live in a universe where every clean energy technology has drawbacks, whether economic or technical or political. A universe where there aren’t enough rooftops to replace all the fossil fuels we now burn. Where skeptical farmers are fighting to stop their neighbors from switching to solar energy production. Where building solar on canals is wildly expensive, at least so far.
What are you personally willing to sacrifice to bring about a safe climate future? What changes will you make in your life? Will you eat less meat, replace your gas stove with an induction cooktop or lease an electric car? Will you make climate change a top priority at the ballot box, and post about it on Instagram, and bring it up at the dinner table on Thanksgiving?
With this technique, ordinary rocks are transformed into something almost fantastic. They are witnesses, capable of remembering history that occurred long before any humans were around to record it. They are messengers, carrying warnings of how the ice—and the Earth—could yet transform.
As Schaefer settled into the rhythm of camp, his body adjusted to the incessant polar sunlight and the relentless manual labor, leaving his mind free to wander. Often, he found himself fixating on the ice sheet—its incomprehensible vastness, its unfathomable fragility. How could something this immense and forbidding be so vulnerable? How could a landscape so obviously capable of killing a person be at risk because of humanity?
“What can I say?” he murmured into the microphone. “Science—it’s not well paid. It has a lot of problems. But it’s so fulfilling.”
“For every molecule of CO2 that’s being fixed, there’s 300 molecules of water being lost.” In this way, a single large tree can exhale around 150,000 liters (40,000 gallons) of water per year.
As the temperature climbs, so too does the rate of evaporation. At some point the leaf closes its stomata—its mouths—and holds its breath. This stops water loss, but also halts photosynthesis, because the leaf can no longer inhale CO2. Leaves regularly stop photosynthesis during the hottest hours of the day. But rising temperatures could force them to do this more frequently and for longer periods, reducing the trees’ food supply.
Forest changes involve multiple complicated factors and can take centuries to play out, and the lives of human observers are short by comparison.
The Amazon has survived ice ages. It may not survive humans.
a healthy rainforest should be easy to walk through, because the largest trees consume so much light and water that the understory lacks the resources to grow very dense.
It’s hard to shake a popular image of scientists as rigorously rational, unemotional about their work. But Berenguer was not embarrassed to admit that, as she put it, she and her colleagues have their own personal tipping points, too.
Berenguer used the word grandeza, which literally means greatness, but also bigness. The rainforest made her feel small, and she liked this.
plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.
And plants don’t have brains. “When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. Maybe it’s not in our heads. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”
Computers are good at logic, at carrying out long, precise calculations—not exactly humanity’s shining skill. Humans are good at something else: noticing patterns, intuiting, functioning in the face of ambiguity, error, and noise.
“We just don’t even notice that we are adopting a view that is still a hypothesis,”
“4E cognitive science,” an umbrella term for a bunch of theories that all happen to start with the letter E. Embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition—what they have in common (besides Es) is a rejection of cognition as a purely brainbound affair. Calvo is also inspired by a fifth E: ecological psychology, a kindred spirit to the canonical four.
“We are ongoing processes resisting the second law of thermodynamics,” she says. We are candles desperately working to re-light ourselves, while entropy does its damnedest to blow us out. Machines are made—one and done—but living things make themselves, and they have to remake themselves so long as they want to keep living.
“plants are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive, they engage in complex signaling among each other, within species and across species, and they do that within a framework of multicellularity that’s different from animal life but exhibits all the same things: autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, sense-making.”
In evaluating ecological aesthetics, we often reduce judgments to dichotomies—of ugliness and beauty, natural and unnatural—drawn from notions of purity. Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell identifies such distinctions as a legacy of colonialism.
