Interplace

Hello Interactors,

I’ve long been a fan of “regreening” cities, imagining replacing bits of asphalt and concrete with trees, plants, mini-parks, and green roofs to cool them down. In many cases these are indeed good interventions. But even these celebrated nature-based solutions to the “urban heat island” effect require closer inspection. It turns out any land cover change alters energy, water, and momentum exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Which are the right ones and where?

To understand why cookie cutter greening plans can fail and how planners and policy makers can build cities that can handle climate change, we need to understand how land and the air interact. Environments vary from place to place, and this puts limits on what we can do to land to create urban climates that are both beautiful and healthy.

To get a handle on what the research says, I found a literature review from 2025 that synthesized findings from 84 peer-reviewed studies. In was published in the journal Climate Risk Management.

Let’s see what they, and others, found.

BEATING HEAT WITH BIOPHYSICAL FEATS

What better place to start than science. Let’s just delve right into how urban green spaces affect temperature. It starts with determining the energy balance at the surface of the earth. This comes from a budget equation found in physical geography. When sunlight hits the Earth’s surface, it breaks down into three main fluxes, or ways heat moves around

* Sensible heat flux: the heat that directly warms the surrounding air, which we measure as temperature.

* Latent heat flux: the heat that’s used to turn water from a liquid to a gas, like when we sweat or plants release water vapor (transpiration).

* Ground heat flux: the heat stored in building materials, asphalt, and soil.

In conventional urban environments dominated by concrete and asphalt, latent heat flux is minimal because we’ve built cities in ways that rapidly drain water away as ‘waste’. As a result, incoming solar energy is funneled into sensible heat. This raises daytime air temperatures that gets stored as ground heat, which is slowly radiated back into the city at night. Urban greening can reshuffle this thermodynamic budget through three interconnected physical mechanisms: shading, evapotranspiration, and albedo modification.

Mechanism 1. Shading: Intercepting Solar Radiation

Shading — the most immediate and reliable cooling mechanism provided by vegetation — requires precise microclimatic quantification. Vegetative canopies act as physical shields, intercepting incoming shortwave solar radiation before it strikes impervious surfaces like concrete or asphalt. By preventing these dense materials from absorbing heat and emitting sensible heat flux back into the boundary layer, shading dramatically lowers surface temperatures and reduces the baseline thermal energy transferred to the surrounding air. (Bowler, D. E., et al. 2010)

The cooling benefit of urban trees is non-linear, accelerating significantly once neighborhood canopy cover crosses a critical threshold of around 40%. Measuring daytime air temperatures across urban gradients, they found that canopy cover above this 40% mark can lower local air temperatures by up to 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius, effectively offsetting the thermal burden created by surrounding roads and impervious surfaces. (Ziter, C. D., et al. 2019)

Mechanism 2. Evapotranspiration: Trading Sensible Heat for Latent Heat

While shading blocks heat absorption, evapotranspiration actively removes heat from the air. Plants absorb soil moisture through their root systems and release it as water vapor through tiny microscopic pores in their leaves called stomata. This process requires thermal energy that turns phase-changing liquid water into gas. This energy transfer absorbs sensible heat and converts it into latent heat.

Evapotranspiration from well-watered urban green spaces can lower local air temperatures by 2-4 degrees celsius. (Coutts, et al., 2013) However, physical geographers emphasize a crucial physical prerequisite that is easy to overlook: evapotranspiration is entirely dependent on available water. When the soil is dry or the air is super dry, plants close their stomata to save water. When stomata close, evapotranspiration shuts down. This leaves shading as the sole remaining cooling mechanism.

Mechanism 3. Albedo Dynamics: The Surface Reflectivity Paradox

Albedo measures the reflectivity of a surface on a scale from 0.0 (total absorption) to 1.0 (total reflection). Urban asphalt has a low albedo (0.05 to 0.10), absorbing up to 95% of incoming solar energy. Vegetation’s albedo can range from 0.11 to 0.25.

In temperate climates, replacing low-albedo asphalt with greenery or reflective surfaces increases surface reflectivity, sending more solar radiation back into space before it can be absorbed as sensible heat. One study documented that increasing urban surface albedo typically lowers peak ambient air temperatures by 0.3 degres Celsius to 1.0 degree Celsius — alongside much larger drops in surface pavement temperatures. While a temperature change under one degree Celsius may sound modest at first glance, a baseline shift of this magnitude across a neighborhood is enough to redefine a local microclimate. (Santamouris, 2014)

But swapping out light urban surfaces for dark vegetation can also have a negative effect. Paradoxically, when researchers in 2023 replaced dry, light-colored desert soil with darker vegetation in hot, arid regions it reduced overall surface reflectivity. The drop in albedo caused an increase in daytime surface warming. (Schlaerth, et al., 2023)

Furthermore, dense tree canopies inside narrow urban street canyons can act as thermal blankets at night. While trees provide valuable shade during the day, their foliage reduces the sky view factor at street level, trapping outgoing longwave thermal radiation emitted by surrounding building facades and asphalt. When combined with reduced wind permeability, this canopy barrier restricts nocturnal radiative cooling and holds warm air near ground level (Lee et al., 2016).

These are the physical realities that can demonstrate how urban greening is not a consistently inherent cooling practice. It is a complex thermodynamic intervention whose success relies entirely on local environmental conditions.

PLACEMENT, PATCHES, AND PARK PATTERNS

Because thermodynamic processes happen across physical spaces, cooling urban green space can be uneven. The literature review reveals that a green space’s cooling capacity depends on four spatial and biological variables: vegetation density, species selection, spatial configuration, and urban morphology. Let’s break them down individually.

Cooling Factor 1. Vegetation Density and Species Traits

Not all greenery cools equally. One way to measure this is through a Leaf Area Index (LAI). This is the total leaf area per unit of ground area and is a primary predictor of thermal performance. As you might imagine, dense foliage absorbs more from the sun and then produces higher cumulative transpiration (so long as there’s adequate water).

Botanical traits also play a big role. Broadleaf deciduous species (like oaks or maples) feature large surface areas that maximize summer transpiration, but that goes away when they drop their leaves in winter. Evergreen coniferous trees, however, maintain continuous canopy coverage through every season.

In temperate rainforest environments like Seattle or Vancouver, researchers found that conifers cooled urban surroundings up to 1.7 degrees celsius more effectively than broadleaf trees. Dense needle canopies continuously block incoming solar radiation due to higher LAI and the fact that clusters of spiny needles better trap a stable buffer of calm air which moderates heat exchange with the surrounding urban environment. (Eyster & Beckage, 2022, 2023)

Cooling factor 2. Spatial Configuration: Landscape Ecology Principles

Ecologists and geographers commonly evaluate green spaces through two main attributes: composition (how much green space exists) and configuration (how those green patches are arranged across the landscape). Over 58% of the mechanism-focused studies in the literature review analyzed spatial pattern metrics. The consensus is the spatial layout of green space is just as important as its total area!

Other empirical studies consistently demonstrate that cooling effects decay the further you get from green spaces. Research done in 2016 and 2023 shows how urban parks can produce a primary “cooling footprint” that extends typically 100 to 300 meters from the park boundaries. If you’re lucky enough to live within this buffer, temperatures drop between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees celsius, but beyond 300 meters, the cooling influence quickly falls off. (Bao, et al. 2016, Shi et al. 2023)

This spatial limit leads to a couple spatial layout choices. A few big parks or connected networks of smaller green spaces. Large, consolidated parks (>2 hectares) generate intense, stable “cool islands” at their core, but their benefits remain localized. For example, a study in Xalapa, Mexico, revealed that parks larger than 2.8 hectares with over 21% tree cover provided reliable local cooling of around 2 degrees celsius . (Lemoine-Rodriguez et al., 2022)

Connected networks of smaller green spaces distributed across a city create a more equitable cooling effect. Three studies in 2019 and 2021 show that fragmented, isolated green patches — like big parks — perform poorly compared to continuous, linear green corridors. Linear “green belts” or street-tree networks (in the right environment) can act as ventilation channels, allowing cool air generated by vegetation to flow into adjacent built-up neighborhoods. (Masoudi et al., 2019, 2021; Pramanik, 2019)

Cooling factor 3. Urban Morphology: The Built Environment Matrix

Obviously, green spaces don’t exist in isolation. They’re embedded within a three-dimensional hodge podge of buildings, streets, and other bits of infrastructure. Urban morphologists can quantify this urban morphological cacophony using building height-to-street-width ratio and sky view factor - the extent to which surrounding structures and canopies obstruct a location's view of the open sky.

High-density urban cores with tall buildings create deep “urban canyons” that generate their own shade. In these settings, building shade can combine with tree shade during peak daylight hours to significantly lower temperatures.

However, studies show that if tree canopies in narrow street canyons are too dense — particularly in humid environments — they can trap anthropogenic heat emitted by vehicle exhaust and air conditioning condenser units. They can also significantly reduce localized wind speeds. As a result, maximizing green space cooling efficiency requires aligning vegetation density and canopy architecture with prevailing wind corridors to preserve urban ventilation channels (Cheung & Jim, 2019; Morakinyo et al., 2019).

Nothing is every as easy as it seems.

BRIDGING GAPS WITH BETTER MAPS

While academic literature can offer detailed insights into microclimatic processes, there remains a big gap between academia and urban planning and governmental policy. That gap may be self-fulfilling. The literature review of 84 papers revealed 61% of the papers simply advocate for expanding green space area, whereas only 26% focus on optimizing existing green infrastructure.

Recommending that dense, historical cities “add more large parks” ignores real-world urban constraints. In modern, rapidly expanding cities, urban land is expensive, highly contested, and structurally constrained. Space dedicated to a new park often competes directly with housing, transit infrastructure, or commercial development. To move beyond idealistic slogans, urban planning will have to recon with three major implementation challenges.

Challenge 1. The Water-Energy-Heat Nexus in Arid Cities

The most significant implementation challenge facing nature-based solutions occurs precisely where urban heat stress is most severe — in hot, arid regions. Cities like Phoenix, Cairo, Tehran, or Riyadh already suffer from intense summer heatwaves. You don’t have to live in or visit these places to know water there is extremely scarce.

Maintaining green spaces in places like this requires pumping groundwater or desalinating seawater. Pumping and desalinating water requires massive amounts of electricity, which only increases greenhouse gas emissions if that power is coming from fossil fuels. Furthermore, if irrigation water runs out during a heatwave, non-adapted vegetation dries out, loses its cooling capacity, and can even become a wildfire risk.

To solve this dilemma, physical geographers advocate evaluating urban greening through a standardized resource efficiency metric: evapotranspirative cooling per unit of water applied. In plain language, this ratio measures how many degrees of cooling you get for each liter (or gallon) of water that plants and soil release into the air through evaporation and transpiration.

In dry climates — where municipal water is already tightly rationed and turfgrass is increasingly discouraged but rarely banned (I’m looking at you Arizona) — urban greening strategies are going to have pivot away from high-water lawns and non-native foliage. These cities have to move from simply prioritizing or incentivizing drought-tolerant species to requiring them. While drought-tolerant plants transpire less water than many other plants and trees — and still require water — when combined with drip-irrigation using treated municipal wastewater (greywater), they can provide a pretty reliable canopy shade and even modest evaporative cooling without draining water reserves.

Challenge 2. Environmental Justice and Thermal Equity

Urban heat exposure is rarely, if ever, distributed evenly across socio-economic groups. In many cities worldwide, low-income neighborhoods exhibit significantly lower tree canopy cover, higher proportions of impervious asphalt, and higher building densities than the more affluent suburbs and ex-urbs. This imbalance leaves more vulnerable populations exposed to extreme heat hazards.

When municipalities undertake uncoordinated “regreening” projects, they risk triggering green gentrification. Installing fancy attractive parks can then inflate surrounding property values, displacing residents while still not reducing their heat related vulnerability.

To address this, requires targeted interventions like deploying small-scale, distributed interventions (think pocket parks, vegetated bus stops, and road corridors) directly in high-vulnerability, low-canopy/vegetation neighborhoods. You could focus on functional shading over high-maintenance aesthetics. This could better ensure that at least transit stops, pedestrian walkways, and playgrounds are prioritized for canopy cover. Lastly, combining situated green infrastructure with social policy could create and/or protect more affordable housing around old and new greened public corridors and spaces.

Challenge 3. A Multi-Benefit, Context-Specific Design Framework

No single cooling intervention works everywhere. Planners and policy makers need to adopt an integrated, multi-tiered approach that combines nature-based solutions with material interventions.

In arid and semi-arid environments, planners should prioritize structural canopy shading and end an over-reliance on water-intensive lawn evapotranspiration. It’s time to demand drought-tolerant trees with greywater irrigation networks, shade sails, and high-albedo “cool pavements” that can better reflect solar radiation without draining water resources.

In contrast, humid and more temperate climates would likely benefit most from maximizing green spatial connectivity. By linking existing parks through linear street-tree corridors — with select broadleaf and/or coniferous species — summer evapotranspiration can be enhanced while maintaining year-round microclimate regulation.

Finally, within high-density, built-up cores where ground space for new parks is limited, cities should leverage vertical green walls and green roofs paired with reflective building materials. But they best also preserve prevailing wind corridors while preventing nighttime heat traps through street canyons.

“Regreening” is a compelling slogan, but as physical geography demonstrates, simplistic blanket policies can yield unpredictable thermodynamic results. Simply planting trees without considering local climate, available water, species traits, spatial configuration, and urban geometry can lead to unintended consequences.

The exhaustive synthesis of decade-long research provided by Hadi Soltanifard and Majid Amani-Beni (2025) offers a clear path forward. Nature-based solutions are not off-the-shelf products that can be copy-pasted across different global cities. They are dynamic, living interventions that alter energy fluxes across urban surfaces.

By moving beyond blanket acreage targets and framing urban greening as the strategic reorganization of surface-energy relations, geographers, urban planners, and policymakers will need to work together. When we design green infrastructure that respects local environmental constraints, honors spatial equity, and optimizes microclimatic processes, urban greening moves from a vague policy promise toward tools of experimentation that can pragmatically evolve our cities and megaregions into truly climate-resilient urbanscapes.

References

Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). Urban greening to cool towns and cities: A systematic review of the empirical evidence. Landscape and Urban Planning, 97(3), 147-155.

Cheung, P.K., Jim, C.Y., 2019. Differential cooling effects of landscape parameters in humid-subtropical urban parks. Landscape and Urban Planning 192, 103651.

Coutts, A.M., Tapper, N.J., Beringer, J., et al., 2013. Watering our cities: the capacity for Water Sensitive Urban Design to support urban cooling and improve human thermal comfort in the Australian context. Progress in Physical Geography 37(1), 2–28.

Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2022). Conifers may ameliorate urban heat waves better than broadleaf trees: Evidence from Vancouver, Canada. Atmosphere, 13(5), 830.

Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2023). Arboreal urban cooling is driven by leaf area index, leaf boundary layer resistance, and dry leaf mass per leaf area: Evidence from a system dynamics model. Atmosphere, 14(3), 552.

Lee, H., Mayer, H., & Chen, L. (2016). Contribution of trees and grasslands to the mitigation of human heat stress in a residential district of Freiburg, Southwest Germany. Landscape and Urban Planning 148:37–50.

Lemoine-Rodríguez, R., Inostroza, L., Falfán, I., & MacGregor-Fors, I. (2022). Too hot to handle? On the cooling capacity of urban green spaces in a Neotropical Mexican city. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 74, 127633.

Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., 2019. Multi-year comparison of the effects of spatial pattern of urban green spaces on urban land surface temperature. Landscape and Urban Planning. 184, 44–58.

Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Fadaei, M., 2021. The effects of land use on spatial pattern of urban green spaces and their cooling ability. Urban. Clim 35, 100743.

Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Liew, S.C., 2019. Multi-city comparison of the relationships between spatial pattern and cooling effect of urban green spaces in four major Asian cities. Ecol. Indic 98, 200–213.

Morakinyo, T.E., Ouyang, W., Lau, K.-K.-L., et al., 2020. Right tree, right place (urban canyon): Tree species selection approach for optimum urban heat mitigation-development and evaluation. Sci. Total. Environ 719, 137461.

Pramanik, M. (2019). Impacts of urban expansion on land surface temperature and urban heat island in Kolkata Municipal Corporation, India. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 191(12), 738.

Santamouris, M. (2014). Cooling the cities—a review of reflective and green roof mitigation technologies to fight heat island and improve comfort in urban environments. Solar Energy, 103, 682-703.

Schlaerth, Hannah L., et al. "Albedo as a competing warming effect of urban greening." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 128.24 (2023): e2023JD038764.

Soltanifard, H., & Amani-Beni, M. (2025). The cooling effect of urban green spaces as nature-based solutions for mitigating urban heat: Insights from a decade-long systematic review. Climate Risk Management, 49, 100731.

Ziter, C. D., Pedersen, E. J., Kucharik, C. J., & Turner, M. G. (2019). Scale-dependent interactions between tree canopy cover and impervious surfaces reduce daytime urban heat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 116(15), 7575-7580.

Hello Interactors,

As Canadian and Alaskan wildfire smoke drifts across North American borders, it’s easy to resort to feelings and language of crisis in the demand for urgent, immediate control. But fires are not new to these landscapes, and this “crisis” sits alongside others that are also on fire. Climate crises events bring into focus which histories we forget, whose knowledge we ignore, and which relationships we disrupt. Turns out it’s happening at a cellular level too. The real danger is a world and ecology changing so quickly, and understood so narrowly, that it erases the very temporal patterns, memories, and ecological relationships that make adaptation possible.

FIRE’S FRACTURED FREQUENCY

The climate crisis is often communicated through rising averages. We read of climbing global temperatures, sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and acres burned. These measurements are indispensable, but averages can make crisis feel distant and abstract. In a forest, climate change is also experienced as an altered interval — as too little time between one disturbance and the next.

A forest is not a passive surface. It actively shapes its own microclimate, stores carbon, and retains moisture until fire temporarily disrupts these relationships…and in doing so creates new ones.

To understand what shorter fire intervals are doing to Alaska’s boreal forests, ecologist Xanthe Walker and an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined carbon storage and forest recovery across 555 plots associated with thirty-one fires. They compared stands with different fire histories, including sites that had burned repeatedly before black spruce forests could fully recover. The absolute amount of carbon released by individual fires was broadly similar across fire-return intervals, but recently burned landscapes began with smaller remaining carbon pools and therefore lost a greater proportion of what remained. Repeated burning also consumed more legacy carbon — the carbon inherited from earlier vegetation and accumulated soils — and reduced the likelihood that some sites would regenerate as black spruce forest. Fire was doing more than releasing carbon in the present. By interrupting regeneration, it was weakening the landscape’s capacity to store carbon in the future (Walker et al., 2025).

Black spruce forests are not merely tolerant of fire but have evolved with stand-replacing fire as a recurring part of their life cycle. Their cones evolved to be little seed bombs that stay in the trees and release their seeds when they burn. This helps new trees grow on the ground where they’re not protected by the canopy. That strategy works when fires recur at intervals long enough for stands to mature, rebuild their seed stocks, and accumulate biomass. Historically, boreal fire-return intervals commonly ranged from about seventy to 130 years. Black spruce may require roughly fifty years to produce enough seed for self-replacement. Yet intervals of less than thirty years are becoming more common in some areas, allowing another fire to arrive before recovery is complete (Walker et al., 2025).

Under those conditions, fire can push regeneration away from black spruce toward deciduous vegetation or more open landscapes. Such places may remain biologically productive, but they are no longer the same forests. They store carbon, retain moisture, shelter organisms, but also carry subsequent fires differently. The landscape may not simply return to its former state after disturbance; it may cross into another ecological regime, organized by different species, intervals, and feedback loops.

MEMORY, MEANING, AND MALLEABILITY

It is tempting to call such transformations unprecedented. In some measurable respects, they are. We know Industrial greenhouse-gas emissions are rapidly altering atmospheric and ecological systems on a planetary scale, and the effects are not confined to normal oscillations around once-familiar conditions. The rate, direction, and geographic concentration of change effects forests adapted to fire and may be unable to adjust when fire’s frequency exceeds the time needed for reproduction and recovery.

The fact that Earth has always changed does not make the present disruption ordinary. But neither does the climate crisis mark the first time people have faced the collapse of an expected environmental order. Many humans didn’t survive the Little Ice Age, but many did.

For many Indigenous peoples, colonization produced generations of forced displacement, altered fire and water regimes, destroyed food systems, suppressed governance, and separated communities from ancestral lands. What dominant institutions now describe as an unprecedented disruption may appear within Indigenous histories as another transformation imposed by powers that have long treated land, water, plants, animals, and people as resources to be reorganized.

The word crisis can therefore describe an observable material condition while concealing a historical one. The flames are real, but so are the questions of who altered the landscape, whose losses are treated as new, who is expected to adapt, and who gets to define recovery. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte challenges this framing, arguing that a dominant “epistemology of crisis” treats environmental disruptions as radically new, imminent threats (Whyte, 2021). This framing isolates the crisis from historical contexts of colonialism, allowing institutions to justify urgent, top-down actions that bypass local consent and justice under the guise of emergency.

That framing carries two recurring assumptions. The first is unprecedentedness — the belief that the past contains few usable precedents or lessons for present conditions. The second is urgency — the belief that immediate action may justify setting aside ordinary concerns about consent, justice, and responsibility. Whyte’s intervention exposes how crisis language can obscure Indigenous histories of displacement and adaptation while allowing new forms of dispossession to proceed in the name of emergency responses (Whyte, 2021).

Whyte is not arguing that climate change is unreal or that rapid action is unnecessary. He is asking what calls for urgency and emergency action leads people to overlook or forget.

When the present is imagined as unprecedented, earlier crises become difficult to see. Climate-related relocation may be narrated as a novel problem even though Indigenous nations have extensive experience with forced removal, shrinking territories, flooding, and government-directed resettlement. Declaring the current moment historically unique can erase not only previous violence but also knowledge formed through surviving it.

Whyte contrasts crisis epistemology with an “epistemology of coordination.” Coordination begins not with novelty but with constant change. It asks whether the relationships needed to respond remain intact. Those relationships take the form of kinship and mutual responsibilities, including care, consent, and reciprocity. They generate what Whyte calls the “responsible capacity to respond to constant change” (2021, p. 52).

This is a big geophilosophical change in how we think about the world. Adaptation isn’t just about an organism or group of organisms changing to fit their environment, it’s also about how things are connected, like people, places, history, and processes (the primary focus of Interplace). Fire isn’t just about heat progressively burning through plants. It depends on things like how old the trees are, how much moisture there is in the soil, how many seeds are available, if there have been any fires before, what the weather is like, and the rules and laws that people have made about how to handle fire. What the forest looks like after a fire depends on which relationships are still around.

The same is true of human communities. Memory is not merely a record of what happened. It is part of the infrastructure of adaptation. It carries knowledge of earlier disturbances, durable practices, failed interventions, and obligations extending beyond the present generation. A society that repeatedly labels each disruption unprecedented may collect and reason over immense quantities of data while remaining unable — or unwilling — to learn from other histories.

CELLS, CUES, AND CONTINGENCY

The adaptive value of memory may reach far deeper into life than culture or nervous systems. Evolutionary biologists Maor Knafo, Elena Casacuberta, and Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo begin a recent study with the observation that “one of life’s most remarkable features is its persistent and adaptive resilience in the face of constant environmental fluctuations” (2026, p. 1). They investigated whether a single-celled organism could use an environmental cue to anticipate future stress rather than responding only after that stress arrived.

Cells exposed to a predictable light and vibration cue before heat stress experienced a 12 percent mortality rate, compared to a 27 percent mortality rate for cells subjected to unpredictable, random cues. The cells didn’t just adapt to the heat; they learned to anticipate it, demonstrating that even single-celled life relies on temporal regularities to survive.

The authors paired this experiment with a computational model. A nonlearning “blind” agent could adapt only through genetic mutation and selection across generations. A learning agent could also revise its phenotypic strategy within its lifetime, exploring alternatives when earlier responses performed poorly. In predictable environments, learning agents achieved higher fitness because they could use environmental cues to prepare for approaching conditions.

The study does not demonstrate that cells reason as humans do. Nor does a cellular experiment prove a general philosophy of life. It does, however, offer evidence that even single cells can exploit temporal regularities in their surroundings. Adaptation is not always a passive process through which an external environment selects among fixed organisms. Organisms detect, respond to, and sometimes anticipate the worlds they inhabit.

The model also showed that flexibility has its limits. As the simulated environment became more unpredictable, the benefits of learning started to fade. After a certain point, the cues that used to predict what would happen next didn’t work as well. Keeping things flexible came with a cost, because it didn’t give them any clear guidance. In the end, simpler, fixed strategies performed better. When the environment suddenly changed, the learning agents first took a big hit because their expectations had become useless. But their flexibility eventually helped them bounce back, but it also meant they made mistakes, got confused, and took time to adjust. (Knafo et al., 2026).

Let’s not get carried away with the comparisons. A forest isn’t a Bayesian agent, and Indigenous knowledge can’t be boiled down to simple conditioning. They’re different forms of life, knowledge, and organization. What they do have in common is this shared principle: adaptation relies on meaningful patterns connecting past experiences to future situations.

A black spruce forest can recover from a fire when trees have time to grow and produce seeds. A cell can prepare for heat when it anticipates it. A community can adapt when things change, remembering past actions, taking responsibility, and maintaining relationships. Resilience arises from a symbiotic relationship between living things and their environment. Life’s resilience isn’t innate. It’s more that it stems from memory, prediction, adaptation, and readiness…until the world’s race surpasses its ability to keep pace.

RELATIONSHIPS, RECOVERY, AND RESPONSIBILITY

Geographer Karen Bickerstaff warns against the dominance of a “catastrophic gaze” that portrays climate change as an imminent, universal threat (Bickerstaff, 2026). While planetary measurements are indispensable, this abstract framing can paralyze political agency, reducing people to passive spectators awaiting either inevitable collapse or a far-off technological rescue (Bickerstaff, 2026). Although our atmosphere is shared, climate exposure, responsibility, and adaptive capacity remain radically uneven. The crisis is planetary in cause, but it is lived and experienced through particular bodies, infrastructures, and local ecosystems.

This planetary abstraction often fosters a form of “cruel optimism” — a reliance on grand technological promises like geoengineering or carbon-removal systems that allow us to avoid changing our politics or holding powerful actors accountable (Bickerstaff, 2026). The dangers of these universal, top-down approaches are highly visible in fire governance. Simple, blanket policies — such as total fire suppression or restrictive carbon-offset projects — frequently ignore the diverse ecological histories of fire and displace Indigenous burning practices, which ultimately increases the flammability of the landscape.

In contrast to these universalizing fixes, true responsibility must preserve and restore the unique capacities of particular systems to respond to change. This is where Kyle Whyte’s epistemology of coordination can turn to practice. His push is for climate action to strengthen the relationships — such as consent, reciprocity, and intergenerational obligations. This is what is his ancestors practiced surviving constant change (Whyte, 2021).

Instead of top-down emergency responses that make justice disposable in the name of speed, we need “situated action” (Bickerstaff, 2026). While individuals cannot act on a planetary scale, they can act meaningfully within their own watersheds, neighborhoods, and local political coalitions. Climate action becomes durable not when it chases abstract global targets, but when it visibly improves local health, restores specific ecosystems, and corrects immediate injustices (Bickerstaff, 2026).

This is not an argument for delay. Emissions do need to fall (leading to innumerable benefits), but urgency cannot excuse us from asking what kind of world our interventions produce. The task is to connect scales without allowing the global to erase the particular. A mature black spruce indeed stores carbon, but it also stores decades of growth, fungal relationships, and a history of fire and recovery. When fire returns too soon, the forest loses not just biomass, but time. Climate responsibility begins here. Not in the fantasy of holding a restless Earth still, but in preserving the intervals, relationships, and possibilities through which living systems can continue to adapt.

REFERENCES

Bickerstaff, K. (2026). The perils of climate catastrophism: A call to situate crisis and change. WIREs Climate Change.

Knafo, M., Casacuberta, E., & Ruiz-Trillo, I. (2026). Beyond diffusion: Bayesian learning strategies in single-cell life.

Walker, X. J., Mack, M. C., Black, B., Dean, J., Kemper, L. F., Potter, S., Rogers, B. M., & Truettner, C. M. (2025). Increasing wildfire frequency decreases carbon storage and leads to regeneration failure in Alaskan boreal forests. Fire Ecology.

Whyte, K. (2021). Against crisis epistemology. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical Indigenous studies (pp. 52–64). Routledge.

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It’s already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it?

What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined.

Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him.

BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACK

On this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let’s reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let’s light a Roman Candle in celebration!

Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world’s current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries.

The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure built in significant part by African and African American enslaved labor. Each step along the way depended on ever-greater throughput of energy, labor, and material. In that sense, the country’s history is also a history of how thought became organized around extraction and exploitation, until those thoughts and actions themselves became a kind of common sense.

But by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries increased industrialization meant emissions grew. They surged during the postwar era and peaked in the early 2000s — a trajectory that maps almost exactly onto the spatial project of suburban expansion, highway construction, and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture (Climate Change Tracker, 2024). Two-thirds of the country’s cumulative warming impact derives from fossil CO₂ alone. The built environment of American freedom is as inseparable from the chemical footprint it left behind as a firecracker’s scattered debris and carbon residue.

This leaves us with a climate crisis that is not just the result of a few bad policy choices in the late twentieth century. We exist in a cumulative outcome of a long national project that normalized combustion as prosperity and treated atmospheric consequence as some distant abstraction. Kind of like turning up the radio to drowned out the sound of your car making a funny noise. The federal state government played a central role in this process. Not only through direct policy and subsidies, but through the development of roads, ports, power systems, agricultural regimes, and military logistics that expanded the scale of fossil dependence at every scale of national life.

The fossil fuel industry understood this trajectory earlier than the public was permitted to know. A systematic analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil’s own scientists accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning from as early as 1977. These projections are consistent with subsequent observations. And yet, for decades, the company publicly pushed doubt and denial (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023). Consequently, what America projects as “economic growth”, fueled enormously by the fossil fuel industry, is embedded not only in a collective national memory but in the scientific record.

The irony is that America’s confidence in its own permanence rested on a false sense of geography. The landscape seemed stable because the costs were displaced in the form of upstream mining, downstream pollution, hidden emissions, imported and exported harm, and deferred climate effects. The effects on the atmosphere made that displacement impossible to sustain. The ‘progress’ that had been scattered across space and time returns as heat, drought, fire, flood, and increasingly volatile weather. We built a world in which the rewards of extraction were immediate while the penalties were delayed. Call it what you will — the climate crisis is just the debt of delay, dressed as disaster.

KNOWING, NEGLECTING, NEUTERING KNOWLEDGE

The USA did not simply keep burning and expanding on autopilot. By the late twentieth century, it had also begun to lose the institutional capacity to understand what its own trajectory meant. The problem was no longer that the 1970’s scientific picture Exxon had already portrayed was absent. The evidence was clear. By the early 1990s the United States had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and formally accepted the goal of returning greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade.

The barrier to progress was not ignorance, but a degraded relationship between knowledge and power. This was engineered in part by more fossil fuel industry campaigns to sow doubt about science it privately accepted. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented how a loose-knit network of industry-connected scientists ran effective campaigns to mislead the public on issues from tobacco to climate change. They exploited the media’s tendency toward false balance and keeping controversy alive long after scientific consensus had been reached (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The strategy was to make certainty seem uncertain, and it worked. For decades, political inaction persisted through every window of action that may have helped.

By the mid-1990s, climate change had become legible enough for federal institutions to name, study, and plan around, but the machinery of governance was being bent in the opposite direction. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who rose with him may not have invented anti-government politics, but they weaponized it. Curiously, through pro-governmental politics. While their rhetoric promised efficiency and modernization, in practice it often meant cutting staffs, weakening committees, abolishing subcommittees, and treating the legislature less as a site of deliberation than as a theater of permanent combat. After all, their own staffers affectionately referred to Gingrich and his wrecking crew as ‘jihadists’ — even as those same politicians promulgated and attached that term as a slur toward Muslims.

One of the most consequential acts of this period was the 1995 defunding of the Office of Technology Assessment. This was a bipartisan, independent body that had produced over 750 reports on complex scientific and technical questions since 1974, including major studies on energy policy, environmental risk, and the long-range consequences of atmospheric change. Gingrich had vowed to kill the OTA during his 1994 election campaign. He kept his promise, and with it eliminated one of Congress’s primary mechanisms for converting scientific knowledge into durable legislative capacity (Wikipedia, Office of Technology Assessment; AAAS Science, 2019).

A legislature cannot respond intelligently to a long-range atmospheric crisis if it has stripped away the very mechanisms designed to synthesize evidence, test assumptions, and tackle complex questions over time. What replaced deliberations mediated by experts was a vacuum quickly filled by industry lobbyists — the same industry that, amongst themselves, knew exactly what Gingrich was doing. Research on institutional dynamics in climate governance consistently finds that fragmented policy, weak intergovernmental coordination, and the erosion of technical capacity are among the most significant barriers to effective long-range climate action (Jaisridhar et al., 2025; Birchall, Bonnett, & Kehler, 2023).

The thinning of Congress’s own cognitive infrastructure in 1995 was a bureaucratic adjustment that disabled the country’s capacity to govern on topics beyond the timescales and dimensions of a single administration. The political system was becoming less capable of converting recognition into sustained action precisely as the need for that conversion became most urgent. The United States not only helped create the conditions for warming but undermined its own capacity to govern the effects warming created. The atmosphere was warming and so was the willful weakening of the world's most powerful potential partner in planetary protection.

CASCADES, CRISES, AND COMING TO TERMS

What follows is not simply a warmer world, but a less legible and actionable one. Once a political system weakens its own capacity to think long-term, it becomes ill-equipped to face a future that arrives not as a single rupture but as a cascade of self-reinforcing disruptions. We’ve all experienced or read about hotter summers, fire, more erratic rainfall, stressed coasts, shifting storm tracks, and weather that no longer behaves as the old seasonal calendar once did. Anthropogenic warming is already increasing variability in frequency and severity of weather systems. This in turn can alter local precipitation variability, storm behavior, and the climatic conditions on which seasonal expectations have long depended (Robinson, 2021; Wang et al., 2017; Scher & Messori, 2019). In several regions, climate change is expected not only to shift average conditions but to change seasonal predictability itself — especially for rainfall — making the future harder to read through the calendars and risk assumptions modeled and built from the past (Le et al., 2023; Delsole et al., 2014).

Even now, the atmosphere offers a live demonstration of this instability. On June 11, 2026, NOAA officially declared that El Niño has arrived — with a 63 percent probability of reaching “very strong” intensity, defined as sea surface temperature anomalies of at least +2°C in the equatorial Pacific. This would rank it among the largest events in the historical record (NOAA, 2026). What makes 2026 categorically different from prior super events is not just its projected intensity but its baseline. This El Niño begins from the warmest ocean temperatures in human history, layered onto anthropogenic warming that has already pushed the planet to 1.55°C above preindustrial levels.

As one paper argued in April, the El Niño is the accelerant; the fuel was already stacked (Hansen et al., 2026). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has placed an 86 percent probability on at least one year between 2026 and 2030 surpassing 2024 as the warmest on record, with 2027 — when El Niño’s thermal lag typically produces its most extreme global signals — as the most likely candidate (WMO, 2026).

When that variability is layered onto long-term warming, the result is not just discomfort but a deeper erosion of climatic predictability. ENSO — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system that drives El Niño’s periodic warming and its counterpart La Niña’s cooling across the tropical Pacific — is not a new phenomenon, but its behavior is changing. Model evidence indicates that ENSO-related rainfall variability is likely to intensify and shift eastward under greenhouse warming, creating more severe and sometimes novel climate conditions across the terrestrial tropics (Cai et al., 2021; Rifai, Li, & Malhi, 2019). The question is no longer whether the climate will change, but how many of the social and political structures built on climatic regularity can survive that change.

Climate change is often presented as a technical or environmental problem to be solved. Especially amidst a culture of pervasive techno-optimism. But climate change is way more fundamental than this. It’s a reordering of the relationship between how we need to think and the geography in which we exist. This includes political geography and a reordering of political imagination as it relates to physical geography. The old originally envisioned republic of the USA assumed that land could be mastered, seasons could be predicted, and institutions could absorb shock without losing coherence. Those assumptions no longer hold.

The old assumption that infrastructure could be planned around stationary baselines is increasingly at odds with the evidence. We can already see how energy systems show measurable vulnerability to climatic uncertainty and extremes. Modeled systems evidence declines in reliability and large performance gaps when future weather variation is not adequately incorporated into planning (Perera et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2023).

As a result, the challenge ahead is not adaptation to these changes in the narrow sense, but reconstruction of our relationship to them in the broad sense. This may seem impossible in today’s American political system, but truly Democratic societies will need stronger scientific institutions, more durable legislative capacity, and trustworthy public agencies able to interpret risk before disaster becomes routine. They will need not only infrastructure, but intelligence. Embodied intelligence — embodied engagement with physical and social environments rather than as a purely singular-brain augmented by LLM computation. This includes a renewed ability to gather, preserve, and act on knowledge over long horizons.

The literature on adaptation governance is clear that resilience depends on organizational learning, intergovernmental collaboration, inclusive planning, and long-term institutional capacity. Short-term, reactive, market or donor-driven interventions that respond to emergencies without building the durable frameworks that prevent them won’t work (Birchall et al., 2026; Rahman & Islam, 2024). What this means practically is the reconstitution of the kind of congressional expertise that was dismantled in 1995. We need not merely revive the OTA but to imagine a broader democratic intelligence infrastructure capable of thinking on the timescales that climate change demands — decades, generations, and centuries. Without that, climate change will continue to be experienced as a succession of emergency, political, or market conditions rather than as a governable transformation.

We can do this. After all, a country that once imagined itself through movement, expansion, and mastery made a certain kind of freedom seem natural. A new kind of freedom can be made to seem natural too. But right now our current system returns prosperity for many — but heat, flood, instability, and constraint for all. What was built now must be lived within — good and bad — while what was extracted must now live in the atmosphere — all bad. What gets burned today, will burn more later. The political order that was built through extraction, combustion, and territorial expansion must confront the atmospheric and hydrological consequences of those choices.

That confrontation will only intensify. Past century’s cumulative emissions have already committed the planet to changes that will outlast any government, living generation, or institution that exists. Including you and me. The next 250 years will belong less to societies that imagine escape than to those that can build the institutional intelligence, infrastructural redundancy, and long-term public capacity required to inhabit a less legible and hospitable climate (Ouyang et al., 2023; Jaisridhar et al., 2025).

So, as you watch the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air — sending even more smoke, chemicals and debris everywhere — know the flag will still be there. But to endure, it must repair an institution to be once again knowledgeable and fair.

References

Birchall, S. J., Villeneuve, K., Rose, D., Baran, N. N., & Adams, S. (2026). Exploring the modifying effects of adaptive capacity on resilience to climate change across 4 coastal cities in British Columbia, Canada. Cities.

Birchall, S. J., Bonnett, N. L., & Kehler, S. (2023). The influence of governance structure on local resilience: Enabling and constraining factors for climate change adaptation in practice. Urban Climate.

Cai, W., McPhaden, M., Grimm, A., Rodrigues, R., Taschetto, A., Garreaud, R., … Vera, C. (2020). Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South America. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Cai, W., Santoso, A., Collins, M., Dewitte, B., Karamperidou, C., Kug, J., … Zhong, W. (2021). Changing El Niño–Southern Oscillation in a warming climate. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Carbon Brief. (2021). Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change?

Climate Change Tracker. (2024). United States of America: Historic contribution to global warming since 1850.

Delsole, T., Yan, X., Dirmeyer, P., Fennessy, M., & Altshuler, E. (2014). Changes in seasonal predictability due to global warming. Journal of Climate.

Holgate, C., Evans, J., Taschetto, A., Gupta, S. A., & Santoso, A. (2022). The impact of interacting climate modes on east Australian precipitation moisture sources. Journal of Climate.

Jaisridhar, P., Nirosha, R., Jasimudeen, S., Senthilkumar, M., Ponsneka, I., & Raja, P. (2025). Institutional dynamics in climate change adaptation: A bibliometric analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Science.

Le, P., Randerson, J., Willett, R., Wright, S., Smyth, P., Guilloteau, C., Mamalakis, A., & Foufoula-Georgiou, E. (2023). Climate-driven changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation. Nature Communications.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press.

Ouyang, H., Tang, X., Zhang, R., Baklanov, A., Brasseur, G., Kumar, R., Han, Q., & Luo, Y. (2023). Resilience building and collaborative governance for climate change adaptation in response to a new state of more frequent and intense extreme weather events. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.

Perera, A., Nik, V., Chen, D., Scartezzini, J., & Hong, T. (2020). Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems.

Rahman, M. M., & Islam, M. S. (2024). Institutional dynamics and climate adaptation: Unveiling the challenges and opportunities in coastal Bangladesh.

Rifai, S., Li, S., & Malhi, Y. (2019). Coupling of El Niño events and long-term warming leads to pervasive climate extremes in the terrestrial tropics.

Robinson, W. (2021). Climate change and extreme weather: A review focusing on the continental United States.

Scher, S., & Messori, G. (2019). How global warming changes the difficulty of synoptic weather forecasting.

Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections.

UNEP. (2023). Current and historic contributions to global warming and emissions in the United States from 1850 to 2021. Statista.

Wang, X., Jiang, D., & Lang, X. (2017). Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity. Science Bulletin.

Hansen, J., Kharecha, P., Morgan, D., & Vest, J. (2026, April 15). Super-Duper El Niño. Columbia University Earth Institute.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2026, June 11). El Niño forms, expected to strengthen, say NOAA forecasters [Press release].

NOAA Climate Prediction Center. (2026, June 11). ENSO diagnostic discussion. National Weather Service.

Seidel, D. J., & Birnbaum, A. N. (2015). Effects of Independence Day fireworks on atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter in the United States. Atmospheric Environment.

World Meteorological Organization. (2026). Global annual-to-decadal climate update 2026–2035. WMO.

Hello Interactors,

A couple weeks ago, I found myself in Tulsa for the first time. I left pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot of private money flowing into this town, but the city is filled with sorted stories about land, who holds it, who loses it, and how that loss and potential return is engineered. On Juneteenth, the city’s history feels especially close so I thought I’d unpack the layers of displacement, violence, and reinvention that lurk beneath a city still struggling to face them.

CONCRETE, COALS, AND A CITY THAT CONCEALS

Raise your hand if you like Brutalist architecture (I’m raising mine.) I just didn’t expect to find it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was visiting for my niece’s wedding.

The Brut Hotel is a converted Brutalist tower a few blocks from the Arkansas River and it’s all raw concrete. Even the floors and counters. Most people see Brutalism as cold — which is nice on a hot Tulsa day — but I read it as honest and direct. A bit like a Midwestern prairie settler stereotype. After all, the style did emerge in postwar Europe from an egalitarian impulse. It was meant to be democratic architecture stripped of ornamental excesses of fancy city folks. It arrived in America just in time to become the aesthetic of urban renewal. We mostly got housing projects and highway interchanges built on top of what had been Black and working-class neighborhoods, often by eminent domain and without meaningful consent. Concrete can be made to beautiful, but it’s definitely also the material of displacement. Tulsa is no exception.

On my first muggy Tulsa morning, I ran from The Brut toward the river. A block or two along, tucked between midtown houses on Cheyenne Avenue, I passed a small park I had read about but didn’t know was so close. The bronze sculpture of a flame was the give away. This is Creek Nation Council Oak Park, and it is, in the most literal sense, where Tulsa began.

In 1836, the Lochapoka clan of the Creek Nation arrived at this hill above the river after two years on the Trail of Tears. They had carried live coals from their last ceremonial fires in Alabama the entire way — embers kept alive through hundreds of miles of forced march. Under this oak, they set those coals down and kindled a new flame. They named the settlement Talasi, meaning “old town.” White settlers mispronounced it into Tulsa. The term “Trail of Tears” perhaps softens this forced displacement too much. Of the 630 Lochapoka who began the journey, 161 did not survive it. The oak did and it still holds its annual ceremonies. In November 2024, the site was formally returned to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

As I kept running south along the river, a second gathering place was harder to miss. It has a giant sign that reads, The Gathering Place.

The Gathering Place is a privately built public-ish park that stretches along the Arkansas River’s eastern bank and inland a bit. It’s one hundred acres of fountains, climbing structures, event lawns, and restored prairie plantings. It is, by nearly any measure, a stunningly beautiful park. It is also unmistakably the product of a single man’s fortune. George Kaiser, the Tulsa-born oil billionaire and philanthropist, has poured more than $350 million into transforming this stretch of riverfront. It’s honestly something you’d expect to see in a Northern European city. The park opened in 2018 to national acclaim. The New York Times called it “the most ambitious new park in a generation.” I can see why.

But head north from the riverfront, past the gleaming BOK Center arena (“B. OK.” is a financial services company dating back to 1910 oil money and is half owned by Kaiser) and the reclaimed warehouse districts, (including the Bob Dylan Center — Kaiser bought Bob Dylan’s archive collection in 2016) and within minutes you are in a different city.

North Tulsa — and specifically the Greenwood District — reveals modest homes and stretches of underdevelopment. This is an area that feels like it’s being watched and commemorated but it’s not entirely clear it is being heard. The Greenwood Rising history center, also primarily bankrolled by Kaiser, opened in 2021 exactly one hundred years after the neighborhood was destroyed in the Tulsa Massacre. This building is also very nice and tells the area’s story well. Whether it changes the story is another matter.

Cities can act as maps of their own history, so that’s how I try to read them. I take note of the distances between prosperity and poverty, commemoration and investment…even a museum and a neighborhood. These are not determinant accidents of the market, but accumulated residue of specific decisions made by specific people over a very long time.

To understand Tulsa’s geography today, you have to go back not just to 1921, but further — to the rivers and grasslands of Indian Territory the Lochapoka people encountered. It’s here you’ll find federal ledgers leveraged as weapons, their lines and lists legalizing the largest land liquidation in American history.

PROMISES, PARCELS, AND THE POLITICS OF POSSESSION

The Lochapoka were not the only ones force-marched into Indian Territory. All five of the so-called Civilized Tribes — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations — were relocated from their homelands in the American Southeast across the 1830s. Each tribe were given the same federal promise that the territory would remain theirs permanently. The maps and the Federal treaties said so, but neither turned out to mean much.

What the maps did not show, and what the official history long preferred to omit, is that the Five Tribes brought enslaved Black people with them into Indian Territory. As the historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Rose Stremlau have noted in the context of the 1619 Project, the story of this dispossession cannot be told without acknowledging that intersection: the Trail of Tears was also, for some, a forced march into continued bondage (Gordon-Reed et al., 2022). That fact would shape the politics of Oklahoma for generations — and it is the thread that connects the founding fire under the Council Oak to the rise of Greenwood eighty years later.

After the Civil War, the federal government’s promises to the Five Tribes began to erode almost immediately. The Freedmen — formerly enslaved people who had been held by tribal members — were formally granted citizenship in the tribes by treaty, though the tribes’ willingness to honor that citizenship varied considerably. Many Freedmen, seeking mutual protection and economic self-sufficiency, began establishing their own communities. This impulse gave rise to what became known as the Black Towns Movement. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, more than fifty all-Black towns were founded in Oklahoma and Kansas, created by people who had learned, with good reason, not to rely on the goodwill of white-majority governments (Martin, 2025; Gordon-Reed et al., 2022).

The legal and cartographic instrument that made the Black Towns possible — and that would ultimately help destroy them — was the allotment system. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up communally held tribal land into individual parcels, assigning plots to enrolled tribal members and opening the remainder to white settlement. It was framed as a civilizing measure. It was in practice a mechanism for transferring Indigenous land to white hands on an enormous scale. Each parcel was drawn on a map, recorded in a ledger, and assigned a legal description. This act appeared to secure property rights while in fact it made land far easier to steal through legal machinery than it had ever been to simply seize.

The discovery of oil made the theft more systematic and more lethal. When crude was found beneath allotments assigned to Native people — particularly in the Osage Nation, the Creek Nation, and elsewhere — a federal guardianship system allowed courts to appoint white guardians for Native landowners deemed “incompetent” to manage their own affairs. The definition of incompetence was flexible and self-serving. Native heirs to oil-bearing land died under suspicious circumstances with startling frequency. Deeds were forged. Guardians enriched themselves and left their wards landless. The historian David Grann has documented this in devastating detail for the Osage Nation specifically, but the pattern was region-wide. Modern GIS analysis of original allotment records against subsequent deed transfers reveals what contemporaries knew but rarely said aloud: the disappearance of Native landowners from oil country was not a coincidence, but a covert policy.

For Black Oklahomans, the allotment system created a narrow window of possibility. Freedmen who appeared on the Dawes Rolls received allotments of their own. Some of this land was in proximity to other Black allottees, and the Black Towns Movement capitalized on that geography, incorporating towns, establishing churches and schools, and building the civic infrastructure that Black communities had been denied elsewhere. As scholar JT Martin has argued, the philanthropic traditions within these communities — the mutual aid societies, the church networks, the communal investment in education — were not secondary features of the Black Towns Movement but its essential architecture (Martin, 2025). People who had nothing built institutions that served everyone.

Greenwood, established in the early 1900s on the northern edge of Tulsa, was the apex of that project. By 1921, it contained over thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses, a hospital, law offices, two newspapers, a library, schools, and churches. Booker T. Washington reportedly called it “the Negro Wall Street,” a phrase that has since become shorthand for what the neighborhood achieved. Although that shorthand flattens what was, more precisely, a masterwork of community-building under conditions designed to make community impossible.

As the literary scholar Gary M. Jenkins has observed, Greenwood sat directly along what would become Route 66 (Jenkins, 2022). The all-Black towns of Oklahoma were embedded in the landscape that John Steinbeck traversed in The Grapes of Wrath — and conspicuously omitted from it. The invisibility of Black spatial achievement in the canonical accounts of American westward movement is not incidental. It reflects a pattern in which the places, presence, and prosperity of Black life were purposefully purged from the maps white Americans made of their own country.

BURNING, BURYING, AND THE BATTLE TO BELONG

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on Greenwood. Over the following eighteen hours, the neighborhood was looted, burned, and bombed — aircraft dropped incendiary devices on residential streets. When it was over, 35 square blocks had been reduced to ash. Somewhere between 100 and 300 people were dead, most of them Black. More than 10,000 Black residents were left homeless. Survivors were interned in camps run by the National Guard — many of whom had also participated in the destruction.

What followed the physical destruction was a second, slower erasure. Greenwood residents who attempted to rebuild found themselves blocked by a newly enacted city ordinance that rezoned their land for commercial and industrial use. Insurance claims were denied. Property was effectively seized under the cover of “urban renewal” in subsequent decades. As Morris, Parker, and Negrón have documented, the Tulsa massacre is a case study in what they call “Black community-killing” — the systematic destruction not just of physical structures but of the institutional web that makes a community function: the schools, the churches, the newspapers, the businesses (Morris, Parker & Negrón, 2022). The buildings burned in a day. The community’s capacity to reconstitute itself was methodically dismantled over years.

For most of the twentieth century, the massacre was not taught in Oklahoma schools. It did not appear in city histories and land was not returned. The story was, in the most literal sense, removed from the map.

Kaiser’s investments in Tulsa have been substantial and wide-ranging: the Gathering Place, the Greenwood Rising museum, workforce development initiatives, early childhood programs. The philanthropic intent appears sincere, and some of the work — particularly in early education — addresses structural inequities rather than simply aestheticizing them. It would be uncharitable, and inaccurate, to dismiss the whole enterprise as window dressing.

But scholar JT Martin poses this question which cuts to the heart of the matter: when we study philanthropy in America, whose philanthropic traditions do we center? (Martin, 2025). The mutual aid societies, the church networks, the community land trusts built by Black and Indigenous communities — these represent forms of collective investment that predate and often outperform the interventions of elite donors, yet they receive a fraction of the scholarly and public attention. George Kaiser’s riverfront is visible. The endogenous philanthropic infrastructure of North Tulsa — the churches that held Greenwood together after the massacre, the community organizations that exist today — is largely invisible in the civic narrative that Tulsa tells about itself.

The geography makes this concrete. The Gathering Place and the BOK Center sit south on the Arkansas River, in and adjacent to Tulsa’s whiter, wealthier districts. Including the area where the Philbrook Museum of Art sits. This Italian Renaissance villa was built in 1926 by oil pioneer Waite Phillips (as in Phillips 66), donated to the city in 1938 as a public art center. It’s now one of the finest regional museums in the country. This gesture rhymes with Kaiser’s: oil money transmuted into civic cultural institution, the private estate opened to the public as an act of philanthropic legacy-building. The Philbrook is genuinely beautiful and genuinely valuable. It is also located nowhere near North Tulsa.

The pattern is not new. Greenwood Rising stands in Greenwood, but the area remains economically depressed, and North Tulsa is still among the most segregated parts of an already divided city. Philanthropic investments that produce a park on the wealthy side of the river and a museum on the historically Black side, while leaving structural inequalities intact, are not reparative.

The development around Greenwood tells a more troubling story. ONEOK Field, built in 2010 on historic Greenwood land despite community opposition, has delivered few benefits to Black residents, who are still taxed to support it. Nearby, the Tulsa Arts District has flourished with amenities catering to a whiter, more affluent clientele, while long-standing Black businesses struggle. Even hotels in Greenwood market themselves as part of that district. This is less restoration than a familiar precursor to displacement in the form of cultural investment followed by real estate pressure.

Some argue that understanding land and spatial justice in places like Tulsa requires connecting the Greenwood reparations movement to broader Indigenous-led land reclamation efforts (Du, 2021). In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma ruled that the Creek Nation reservation had never been legally dissolved and that the federal government’s century-old maps of Oklahoma had been legally wrong all along. The majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative textualist, who applied the same originalist logic to treaty rights that right-wing jurists typically apply to the Second Amendment. The ruling was a genuine landmark, restoring tribal jurisdiction over a substantial portion of eastern Oklahoma. Subsequent decisions have extended the logic to other tribes.

The political irony is perplexing. Oklahoma has been among the most reliably right-wing states in the country for decades; its congressional delegation is uniformly conservative; its state government has consistently resisted federal oversight and minority rights claims. Yet it was conservative judicial originalism — the doctrine that legal texts mean what they said when written — that restored, at least partially, what the federal government had promised the Five Tribes in the 1830s. The promise was old, the maps were wrong, and it took a conservative judge to point it out.

What McGirt did not do was address the claims of Black Oklahomans. The Freedmen’s citizenship rights within the Five Tribes remain contested. The Greenwood reparations movement has won moral recognition but not legal remedy. The 1921 massacre commission recommended reparations in 2001 and they have never been paid. These struggles do feel connected — Black and Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty in Oklahoma have been shaped by the same federal machinery of dispossession, and their futures may be intertwined in ways that neither community has yet fully reckoned with (Du, 2021).

Juneteenth, the holiday now recognized federally, commemorates June 19, 1865 — the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were told the war was over (the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier) and they were free. What the holiday cannot quite contain is what freedom meant in practice for people who were free but landless. They were free but also targeted. They were also freed from the maps that governed how wealth was accumulated and held in America. The Black Towns of Oklahoma were an answer to these problems and Greenwood was that, for a while. Then it was burned down.

What grows back from a fire depends on who tends the soil, and who owns it. In Tulsa today, that question is still being answered. Will the answers be as brutally honest as Brutalism — the idea that a building should be honest about what it is made of? Tulsa is made of oil money and dispossession, Black resilience and white violence, broken treaties and belated reckonings. Despite conservative political domination, the maps are being redrawn. Whether they will finally show all of that honestly — without the decorative Italian Renaissance stucco — is more political than cartographic. But McGirt proves that promises, however papered over, still possess the power to pierce the present.

References

Du, Y. (2021). Black geographies unveiled: A critical review. Human Geography.

Gordon-Reed, A., Stremlau, R., Lowery, M., et al. (2022). The 1619 project forum. The American Historical Review.

Jenkins, G. M. (2022). Steinbeck, race, and Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck Review.

Martin, J. T. (2025). Are Black people philanthropists? Toward a more diverse research agenda on philanthropy. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.

Morris, J. E., Parker, B. D., & Negrón, L. M. (2022). Black school closings aren’t new: Historically contextualizing contemporary school closings and Black community resistance. Educational Researcher.

Hello Interactors,

We like to think we choose our own paths, but our cities have already decided for us. New York and Los Angeles function as the extended phenotype of our species — a living circulatory system that subtly channels our collective behavior. This week, we explore the multi-generational biology of transit to see how modern infrastructure effectively dissolves what we perceive as individual autonomy.

MANHATTAN MOBILITY AND THE MASSED MILIEU

I recently flew from New York visiting my daughter, where large vessels moved massive numbers of people around, to Los Angeles visiting my son, where small vessels moved small numbers of people around. The transition was jarring. I went from being physically enmeshed in a dense social milieu to being systematically protected from it — from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely 1,000. My daily cadence shifted from bobbing and weaving around persons I could see, hear, and smell, to maneuvering around what sociologist Mike Michael termed ‘carsons’ — persons fused with a car.

This deep-seated desire for individual control over our own mobility is not unique to the modern driver. The instinct to leverage an external entity to conquer long distances is as old as the domestication of the horse in the third millennium BCE. Every stage of human life presents a shifting horizon of mobile autonomy: from crawling to walking, to the childhood triumph of mastering a bicycle or a local bus network, to the initial rush of freedom that comes with a first car. All before the natural declines of aging ultimately diminish our autonomy once more.

Yet, suggesting mass transit to many Americans accustomed to the perceived agency of the car feels like a threat to their very freedom. Because transit routes are fixed and schedules are unyielding, collective travel is often mischaracterized as an artificial restriction on liberty. History shows that long before the locomotive, scheduled, multi-passenger transit enabled human freedom and societal cohesion where individual movement was risky or impossible. Across Eastern Polynesia, the Caribbean, and northern Eurasia, multi-passenger canoes were the lifeblood of trade and travel. In southern California, the Chumash and Tongva communities developed advanced sewn-plank canoes called tomols and ti’ats, which facilitated complex political economies between the Channel Islands and the mainland. This reliance on collective vehicles extended beyond coastal waterways. Human networks also depended on highly organized, shared transport to conquer distance across vast terrestrial and inland landscapes.

Centuries before Western cities built public transit, imperial China constructed the Grand Canal, a two-thousand-kilometer artificial waterway that operated as a continental transit artery during the Sui Dynasty. This facilitated the regular movement of millions of passengers and state resources between agricultural basins and northern metropolises. On land, Tokugawa-era Japan structured its empire around the Tōkaidō, a highly regulated highway system where travelers moved rhythmically between post stations using a coordinated network of horse relays and official permits.

Eastern aquatic and terrestrial networks achieved continental scale, replicated on Europe’s rugged overland trails. Public multi-passenger carriage service began in Paris in 1662 with the world's first urban transit system. In colonial America, occasional stagecoaches linked Boston and New York starting around 1735, with regular schedules emerging in the 1740s. By the late 1820s, fixed-route horse-buses (omnibuses) appeared in Paris (1828) and New York City (1827).

When urban populations exploded in mid 1800s, these street-level collective networks buckled under their own weight. It triggered unprecedented structural crises. By the late 19th century, New York City was drowning in a public health emergency born of its own transit power. Imagine over 150,000 working horses blanketing the streets. Now imagine thousands of tons of manure and urine daily. When a horse influenza epidemic paralyzed the city overnight in 1872, New Yorkers realized they could no longer rely on street-level animal power. The city initially looked upward and built coal-fired elevated railroads — the “Els” — on massive iron trestles. While these steam engines bypassed street traffic and allowed Manhattan to expand northward, they rained hot ash onto pedestrians, blocked natural light, and shattered the urban peace with deafening noise.

True structural relief required going underground. Early pneumatic experiments, like Alfred Ely Beach's secret, air-driven tunnel in 1870, remained short-lived novelties due to political opposition and mechanical limitations (only 300 feet long, single-car shuttle). The project closed in 1873. The breakthrough for electric rail came in 1890 with the City & South London Railway in London, the first railway to use third rail electrification. The third rail — an additional, continuous steel rail running alongside the tracks that carries electricity to train cars — became the standard for underground and metro systems from around 1900.

October 27, 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened its first official subway line from City Hall to Harlem. This permanently compressed densely housed humanity into a swift, subterranean network, channeling the city’s chaos beneath the cobblestones.

COASTAL CARRIAGES AND THE CYCLEWAY

While New York dug into the earth to consolidate its density, a parallel but radically different evolution was unfolding across the wide horizon of the Los Angeles basin. Between the 1820s and 1904, Los Angeles transformed from an isolated Mexican pueblo (population ~650) into a sprawling metropolis (population 100,000+). Here surface transit was not just responding to growth, but was actively engineering it. After bridging the distance to its seaport via the San Pedro Railroad in 1869 and connecting to the transcontinental rail network via Southern Pacific in 1876, the city experienced the Southern California real estate boom of the 1880s (1884-1887), which required vast spatial integration. The 1885 completion of the Santa Fe Railroad's direct line to Chicago triggered a development boom that dwarfed the earlier one, transforming the region.

Rather than stacking millions of people into a vertical core, transit magnates like Moses Sherman and Henry Huntington realized that electric surface rail could be weaponized as a tool for land speculation. They built lines out into empty fields, bought up the surrounding acreage, and subdivided it into suburban tracts for commuting workers. A similar strategy played out in Chicago. Founded in 1901, Huntington's Pacific Electric 'Red Cars' rapidly expanded, opening its first interurban line to Long Beach on July 4, 1902.

At its peak in the 1920s, the Pacific Electric system became the largest electric railway system in the world, with over 1,000 miles of track connecting dozens of isolated towns across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, stitching together hundreds of square miles. By scattering its population across a massive geographic basin, this surface network wrote the genetic code for LA’s modern identity. This decentralized layout was perfectly primed to swap the shared space of the streetcar for the individualized isolation of the highway just a generation later.

Yet, beneath both the subway tunnels of Manhattan and the streetcar tracks of Los Angeles lies a forgotten foundation engineered by an entirely different mode of transit. As Carlton Reid uncovers in Roads Were Not Built for Cars, our modern road networks were not designed for the automobile but were hard-won by late-nineteenth-century cyclists. For the moneyed elite who could afford the “safety bicycle” — the high-tech, liberating consumer gadget of the 1880s and 1890s — the machine offered an unprecedented leap in individual autonomy. Disgusted by muddy, horse-fouled, and rutted roads, these cyclists organized under the League of American Wheelmen, launching a powerful “Good Roads” movement that pioneered the smooth, paved macadam surfaces that motorists would later inherit and monopolize.

While New York carved out its first dedicated bike path in 1894, when civic pressure led to the opening of the nation's first separated bike path along Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway, wealthy urbanites could now cycle down to Coney Island detached from chaotic street traffic. The parkway became NYC's first dedicated bicycle path and the first in the United States, described as the oldest bike path in the world by Guinness World Records.

Simultaneously, the early elite of Pasadena and LA used the bicycle to weave together their sprawling territory. This culminated in 1900 with the opening of the California Cycleway — a spectacular, approximately 1.3-mile elevated timber bicycle toll-way running through the Arroyo Seco. Lit by incandescent bulbs and built from over 1.25 million board feet of pine, this highway offered a vision of uninterrupted, rapid commuter flow through open terrain. Though the full nine-mile route was never completed by the rapid rise of electric streetcars, its right-of-way established a profound precedent. Decades later, that exact path found a permanent place as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, LA’s first freeway, formally opening on December 30, 1940.

SUBTERRANEAN SABOTAGE AND THE SOCIALIZATION SYSTEM

The triumph of the automobile in Los Angeles was not an inevitability, nor was the city entirely devoid of subterranean ambition. In December 1925, Pacific Electric opened the Hollywood Subway. Boring a mile-long concrete tunnel beneath the Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill, they were able to bypass downtown LA’s already paralyzing surface congestion. Emerging from the Beaux-Arts style Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street, this route allowed Red Cars to escape street traffic entirely, cutting fifteen minutes off the commute to Hollywood and Glendale. This subway featured 800 cars and carried over 20 million passengers annually during World War II.

Grander visions for an expansive, multi-line underground network were ultimately thwarted by the financial instability inherent in private streetcar systems. There land speculating owners treated the tracks as loss leaders for real estate rather than long-term transportation infrastructure. When cars continued to flood the streets and choked the shared surface rights-of-way, the streetcars became agonizingly slow. Seduced by the promise of vehicular autonomy, voters repeatedly rejected ballot measures to publicly rescue the now dilapidated rail networks. By 1955, the Hollywood Subway was permanently shuttered, its tracks torn up, and the era of the freeway commenced.

Yet, the ghost of this old network continues to dictate the spatial reality of Southern California. When LA began aggressively rebuilding its rail transit system in the 1990s, planners did not draw a new map from scratch. They followed the exact blueprint laid down by their turn-of-the-century predecessors. Today’s Metro light rail lines heavily reuse those original, preserved rights-of-way. The Metro A Line runs directly along the old Red Car route to Long Beach, while the E Line utilizes an 1875 steam rail corridor to connect downtown to Santa Monica. Because LA’s original commercial districts sprouted around these historic streetcar nodes, the region’s current high-density transit-oriented developments naturally cluster along these legacy paths. LA is resurrecting a collective socio-technical network within the very corridors carved out a century ago.

This haunting of contemporary geography by obsolete infrastructure is not unique to the West Coast. Manhattan mirrors this architectural resurrection in the form of the High Line, where a decades-abandoned elevated freight rail line was dramatically salvaged and transformed into a lush, floating pedestrian thoroughfare. Much like the ghost corridors of LA, this steel-and-concrete relic from a bygone industrial era was not demolished, but re-engineered to dictate a new rhythm of urban mobility. This shows that even when the original motors fall silent, the skeletal memory of our transit history retains the power to reshape how we move, meet, and experience the city.

SOMATIC SWARMS AND THE SPATIAL SCALE

To understand the jarring shift between the enmeshed collective of New York and the isolated individual of LA, we must look beyond human culture and into the very architecture of living systems. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as singular, autonomous decision-makers possessing a unified will. In reality, a human being is a cooperative collective — a high-level agency born out of the coordinated actions of trillions of individual cells, each working together without a central dictator to maintain a shared physiological boundary. When we move through a city, this nested intelligence does not end at our skin. The cities themselves are higher-order organisms. Their grid lines, subway tunnels, and freeway arterials function as an emergent collective anatomy engineered by the uncoordinated actions of millions of individuals over centuries.

Just as a developing embryo relies on a distributed intelligence among cells to build and repair a complex body without a master architect, a city shapes its layout through emergent collective agency. No single planner willed the current configuration of New York or Los Angeles. Instead, these vast geographies are the bi-product of millions of cellularly nested actors. They coordinated as if through a process biologists call stigmergy — where actions leave physical traces in the environment that automatically stimulate and guide the next action.

These externalized anatomy deposits act like large-scale forces that encourage individual parts to develop specific habits that guide our daily lives. It’s like space holds a memory that tells us how to behave. And if you think you’re being entirely rational in determining the most efficient path across that distance, human mobility science proves otherwise. Recent empirical findings demonstrate that pedestrians and vehicle drivers consistently fail to follow mathematically optimal routes.

Instead of calculating the shortest distance, our choices are heavily distorted by the subjective features of our surroundings. We are unconsciously biased by prominent landmarks, influenced by how regions are hierarchically organized in our minds, as we’re pulled toward our goal. Our cognitive routing is actively hijacked and reshaped by the physical structure of the street network itself, alongside environmental variables like the presence of greenery, traffic volume, and noise.

It seems we don’t possess the total, isolated agency we imagine. When we step onto a street, into a subway car, or into a vehicle, we enter spaces where private autonomy and collective systems intricately intertwine. The freedom we feel when moving is a distributed property, bound up in whether our individual cellular collectives can harmoniously interface with the larger socio-technical system of the city. Road networks may promise ultimate individual autonomy, yet their uncoordinated use inevitably collapses into the shared immobility of gridlock — a collective consequence born of uncoordinated individual choices.

The “carsons” of Los Angeles, encased in their hermetically sealed exoskeletons, represent a shift in the morphology of higher-order urban organism. Drivers choose to wall themselves off in private vehicles…or vacuoles — tiny fluid-filled compartments inside a cell. “Carsons” glide along asphalt pathways originally demanded and paved by nineteenth-century wheelmen whose bi-cycles gave way to quad-cycles from which automobiles emerged. Whether drifting through the subterranean capillaries of the Interborough Rapid Transit or the resurrected neural pathways of the Pacific Electric, we are constantly transitioning across nested scales of kind of collective intelligence.

Across generations, our preferences are encoded early by our environments, yet human practice remains remarkably adaptable. We are all capable of shifting habits when embedded in new spatial layouts. Ultimately, we are not isolated travelers making independent choices in a static world. We are interlocking parts of a grand, multi-generational biology. The vast superstructures we craft — from the subterranean capillaries of the subway to the asphalt arteries of the freeway — are not separate from nature, but act as an extended phenotype of our species. Over generations, in New York and LA, a co-engineered metabolic network surrounds us and shapes us. We are biological superstructures within living human-made superstructures generated through encoded scripts.

Divided by a vast continent and a century of divergent design, New York and Los Angeles appear to share almost nothing in common — one a dense, vertical labyrinth of concrete and shadow, the other a sun-bleached, horizontal expanse of asphalt and sky. Yet, look past the geometry of the infrastructure, and the human ecology within them is identical. One day I was navigating the deep subterranean shafts of Manhattan the next I was tracking the sweeping curves of a California freeway.

In both cases I was embedded inside different machinery but driven by the exact same instincts and societal pulses that drive urban mobility. Across differing geographies and distant time zones, the human element remains constant. Together we, and our cities, evolve to sustain and channel the collective currents of humanity crossing space and time, like individual cells using subtle electrical signals to coordinate movements that ultimately flow together into complex, living shapes we call humans.

Hello Interactors,

Neuroscience research on narrative shows that stories sharpen attention, improve recall, and recruit shared brain networks that help us organize events into a coherent arc. The trouble, for anyone who works with spatial data, is that the reality on the ground refuses to cooperate with clean narratives despite this inherent bias. Today I look at how the popular telling of how Homo sapiens came to contemplate such things — to become ‘modern’ — is not the story the evidence keeps telling.

THE LURE OF THE LEAP

We like our origin stories well defined. The popular telling — the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is the bestselling version — locates a moment when archaic humans crossed a threshold and became modern, transformed by some neurological windfall in Africa. But a recent paper by anthropologist Huw Groucutt on Homo sapiens dispersal argues this says more about Homo sapiens’ neurological bias toward clean narratives than about the evidence we have.

This ‘revolution into modern’ frame has traceable historical roots. In the 1960s and 70s, the only deeply excavated record was in a western sliver of the Eurasian landmass called Europe. There, the transition from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens congregations did look abrupt. It was reasonable, given what was known at the time, to read this regional shift as a species-wide threshold — a sudden flowering of cognition and culture. But that reading was a misinterpretation. What Europe records is not a transformation but a replacement where one population arrived as another receded. The arc of change was migration, not metamorphosis.

That correction took hold, but the ‘revolution’ story, like the species, simply relocated. There would be a coastal revolution in southern Africa, a cognitive revolution in the Rift Valley, a technological revolution in the Levant. The plot survived even as the setting changed.

The deeper trouble lies with the word “modern” itself. It is a relic of mid-twentieth-century thinking that anchors humanity to an imagined ethnographic checklist: symbolic art, refined toolkits, complex burials, linguistic competence. These traits are taken to constitute a package, and the package is taken to arrive together. But the evidence keeps refusing this neatness. The traits show up in pulses across regions and disappear again. They appear in populations we have been trained to call “archaic.” They fail to coordinate the way the model demands, and as Groucutt says, provide just

“another way of separating ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

For example at Panga ya Saidi in coastal Kenya, excavators recovered the burial of a child known as Mtoto dated to around 78,000 years ago. It is among the oldest deliberate burials known from Africa, and the kind of behavior usually slotted under “modernity.” Yet there is no continent-wide adoption of similar mortuary practice that follows from it. Burial complexity at Panga ya Saidi appears, then thins, then reappears elsewhere on different terms. It looks less like the leading edge of a wave and more like a local response to local conditions.

A second example pulls in the opposite direction. The Iho Eleru skull, recovered in 1965 from a rock shelter in Nigeria, is roughly 13,000 years old — geologically yesterday — yet preserves features that morphologists have long called “archaic.” It refuses to sit in the bin its date implies. The bone is doing something the category cannot absorb.

The cost of the revolution model, then, is not that it tells a tidy story. It is that the tidiness encourages researchers to treat their categories as facts of nature rather than instruments of description. Evidence that does not fit the frame gets explained away or quietly set aside. When you stop asking when our ancestors became human and start asking how, across thousands of generations and a shifting climate, particular behaviors were assembled and reassembled in particular places, the data reads very differently.

This point is not new. In 2000, Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks published a paper titled “The revolution that wasn’t,” arguing that the complex behaviors taken to define modernity in Europe had appeared in Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and gradually rather than in a single burst. That correction is over twenty-five years old. The fact that revolution thinking has persisted despite it — and persisted most loudly in popular accounts that sell in the tens of millions — is itself worth taking seriously. Models, like fossils, accumulate where the conditions are right for preservation.

The trait-list at the heart of “modernity” is a fragile instrument in its own right. Many of the behaviors taken to mark our species are anchored to ethnographic data on recent hunter-gatherer societies, assumed to provide a baseline for what fully human cultural life looks like. Those datasets have well-known problems; when the archaeologist Robert Kelly examined a portion of Lewis Binford’s widely used hunter-gatherer compilation in 2021, he was able to confirm the accuracy of only one percent of the entries. The benchmark we have been measuring the deep past against is, in places, made of sand.

PATHS, NOT PIVOTS

For anyone who works with spatial data, the revolution model has a second problem. It ignores the terrain. A revolution, mapped, would look like an expanding circle radiating from a source — like a wildfire expanding from a single ignition point. Human dispersal looks nothing like that. It moves along corridors, hesitates at barriers, doubles back, fragments around resources. It is shaped by climate cycles that open and close routes on millennial timescales. The footprint is irregular because the ground is irregular.

Groucutt’s argument benefits from a concept that geographers and geomorphologists know well: equifinality. The same observed outcome can result from different processes. A bowl-shaped depression on a hillside can be carved by a glacier, scooped by a landslide, or eroded by a spring undercutting from below. The shape alone does not tell you which. Read the depression as a single signature of a single cause, and you will misjudge its history.

The same caution applies to the deep human past. A scatter of similar tool types across regions does not necessarily document a single dispersing population with a shared cognitive package. It may document several populations independently arriving at similar solutions to similar pressures. A flicker of symbolic behavior in two distant places does not imply continuous transmission between them. The archaeological record is dense with cases where the simplest explanation — one cause, one origin — turns out to be the wrong one.

A telling example of how revolution thinking distorts spatial evidence comes from a long-running argument about the Levantine sites occupied by Homo sapiens between roughly 130,000 and 75,000 years ago — Skhul, Qafzeh, and others. Did these represent a genuine out-of-Africa dispersal, or were they merely an extension of African ecology into Southwest Asia? In the latter view, our species was so tightly coupled to its native biome that early presence beyond Africa was a kind of optical illusion. One prominent researcher has argued that Israel is outside Africa “only by modern political convention.”

But the Levantine mammal fauna of this period is dominated by Palearctic species — deer, gazelle, boar — and has been since at least the Middle Pleistocene. The supposed African flourish at Qafzeh shrinks under examination to a few rare elements, some of them present in the region long before Homo sapiens arrived. “Africa grew” is what the revolution model looks like when biogeography becomes inconvenient. Rather than accept that early Homo sapiens dispersed beyond the continent before achieving full “modernity,” the frame extends the boundary of “Africa” to wherever the species happens to be. The terrain bends to match the model.

This is where genomic evidence becomes interesting and dangerous in roughly equal measure. Ancient DNA has transformed what can be reconstructed about population structure, and the resolution is genuinely impressive. But the analytic culture around that data has often defaulted to event-style narratives: a bottleneck here, a split there, a discrete mixture of pulses at a specific date. These tidy events, plotted on a tree, recover the satisfactions of the revolution at a different scale. They imply that the past has crisp joints, making

“claims for events which never actually occurred.”

The caution Groucutt raises is that population structure across the deep African past was probably continuous, regionally varied, and persistently interconnected — closer to a braided river than a branching tree. Apparent “events” in the genetic record may be artifacts of how the analysis is framed rather than discrete moments in time. Treating them as facts encourages claims of historical specificity the underlying signal cannot bear. Equifinality applies to genomes too. Different histories of structure and gene flow can produce overlapping statistical signatures.

What follows, methodologically, is a shift in what models are expected to do. Instead of identifying the moment, the route, or the founding population, the task becomes mapping a field of overlapping processes whose visibility varies by region, by preservation, and by the history of where archaeologists have chosen to dig. That is a less satisfying answer than a date and a place, but it’s closer to what the evidence supports.

MANY CLOCKS, MANY PASTS, MANY THREADS

The physicist Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time, makes an observation that time is not a universal river running at one rate everywhere. It is local and relational. This is not intuitive but matches reality. Atomic clocks at different elevations tick at measurably different rates because gravity dilates time. There is no master clock against which “now” is defined for the whole universe.

The revolution model assumes the opposite. It imagines a master clock striking modernity for the species at a particular moment — perhaps in East Africa, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps fifty — after which a transformed humanity disperses outward. The image is compelling because it is simple. It is also, as a model of history, incongruent with reality. The record Groucutt reviews shows differently timed histories running in parallel across Africa, Arabia, Eurasia, and Sahul, with regional sequences that do not synchronize. There is no single instant at which the species, taken as a whole, became what it now is. There are only many local trajectories that we have, in retrospect, gathered under one name.

One sign that the revolution frame is still doing harm is that the three main streams of evidence — fossil morphology, archaeology, and ancient DNA — currently tell stories that do not align. The dispersal chronology reconstructed from genetic data alone is not the dispersal chronology of the lithic archaeology of northern Eurasia, and neither matches the fossil record of Asia and Sahul. These are not minor discrepancies at the margins. They are different shapes of history. The temptation, encountering this, is to declare one stream definitive and explain the others away. The harder course is to take the disagreement as evidence. What it is telling us is that the histories these methods recover are partial, regionally weighted, and pitched at different temporal resolutions. There is no master clock available to bring them into sync because there was never a master event for them to be synchronized to.

This is closer to what might be called emplacement than to revolution. Homo sapiens did not arrive in time as a finished product and then unfold into space. The species emerged through space — through specific landscapes, specific corridors, specific neighbors — and continued to be shaped by them long after any putative threshold. Cognition, technology, and social practice were not delivered together and then carried outward. They were assembled, lost, and reassembled in different combinations under different pressures. Whatever it is that we now point to as the human condition is the cumulative residue of that long, polycentric making. In Groucutt’s terms, they are

“polycentric and mosaic.”

Letting go of the revolution story is uncomfortable because it removes the heroic frame that has organized so much storytelling about ourselves. There is no founding spark, no anointed lineage, no first true human. What remains is harder to compress into a sentence. It is also more honest, and more interesting. The work ahead — for archaeologists, geneticists, geographers, and anyone who builds models of the deep past — is to map the complexity of the terrain rather than identify a single point. To trace the connections that hold the picture together rather than the moment at which the picture was supposedly painted.

The mosaic is no runner-up to the revolution. It is the record itself — rough, regional, and real. We need only learn to read it.

References:

Groucutt, H. S. (2026). Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews.

Hello Interactors,

It’s been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under.

Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That’s what I attempt to explore here.

PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACES

Geographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software.

His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my alma mater. Goodchild was my senior advisor in 1989 as UCSB was becoming a generative intellectual hub in the field. UCSB’s geography department continues to push the question of what space means analytically, not just how to map it. I’m personally invested in better understanding how GISc may be a natural partner for complexity science, a field I’ve been attracted to since I started researching and writing.

This partnership isn’t new. GISc provides a powerful framework for dissecting the spatial dimensions of complexity, where systems defy reductionist analysis and emerge through nonlinear interactions. In the early 2000s, geographer David O’Sullivan, and others, articulated this as the study of

“the behaviour of macroscopic collections of many basic but interacting units endowed with the potential to evolve in time”

emphasizing these characteristic elements of complexity science: self-organization, path dependence, and the irreducibility of wholes to their parts. Around the same time, sociologist John Urry (and others) extended this to global scales, portraying globalization as co-evolving systems marked by unpredictability, irreversibility, and positive feedback loops that amplify disorder within pockets of order.

These parings are a good start, but computational biologist Michael Levin offers what can be seen as a genuinely unsettling upgrade. His recent work on the origin of cognitive and morphological patterns suggests the dominant appeal to emergence as an explanatory endpoint may itself be, in his words, a “mysterian” position — one that “does not facilitate further advances.” When a surprising pattern appears in a complex system, the emergentist says “that’s just what happens” and catalogs it.

But Levin proposes these patterns are not random facts to be noted and admired. They are part of an ordered, non-physical space that physical systems, when configured the right way, ingress into. Ingression is a term Levin borrows from mathematician Alfred North Whitehead as a potential that timeless abstract objects possess to become actual concrete experiences. “Red” only becomes red when its potential is realized.

These ‘ordered spaces’ of potential are portals into what Levin calls a Platonic Space. Plato argued that the objects we encounter in the world are imperfect instances of perfect, eternal Forms that exist independently of any physical thing. The most primitive form being the triangle. Levin’s argument is the triangle participates in a kind of Triangleness; it realizes it’s potential to exist.

Nature keeps arriving at triangles independently, across wildly different substrates, as if drawn by the same attractor. The triangle is the only polygon that is inherently rigid: push on any corner and the shape holds, which is why trusses, bridges, and bones all rely on triangular geometry for structural strength. Radiolarians, single-celled ocean organisms with no brain and no blueprint, construct intricate skeletal lattices of triangulated geometry at microscopic scales.

In Levin’s terms, nature is ingressing Triangleness — repeatedly, across billions of years and countless lineages — because the Form has properties that reward any physical system stable enough to express it. The truth that a triangle’s angles sum to exactly 180 degrees owed nothing to the first organism that built one.

Physical systems are, in this sense, less like containers and more like pointers — a term borrowed from computer science. Pointers are variables that hold the addresses that reference more information. Levin’s framework requires a specific kind of pointer: not a pointer to stored data, which retrieves a static value, but a pointer to a subroutine that calls up a routine that executes complex actions and outputs beyond the pointer itself. The pointer is small, while the executed routine may be vast and behave unpredictably.

Think of a street address. The address itself contains nothing — it is a short string of numbers and words that fits on an envelope — but hand it to the right system and it retrieves a house, a history, a neighborhood, everything that has ever happened inside those walls. This is Levin’s claim about physical structures. A genome, a city, an institution doesn’t contain its pattern so much as it points at one — and when the pointer is well-formed, you get considerably more out than you put in.

What does this mean for GISc? It means that spatial configurations — cities, borders, trade corridors, migration routes — are not merely sites where local interactions produce global outcomes. They are interfaces into a latent pattern space. When a hub city emerges, when a colonial border persists for centuries past the empire that drew it, when a pandemic spreads exactly along the topology of air travel, we are not only witnessing the consequential mechanical emergence of patterns derived from local rules. We are watching physical structures act as pointers that summon — ingress — specific patterns of collective behavior, whose full complexity exceeds what was put in. Levin’s core observation about biological morphogenesis translates here with uncomfortable precision.

Consider one of his more unsettling tadpole experiments. The creation of its normal bulging eyes are suppressed (by microscopically manipulating cellular ‘software’) and a replacement eye is instead induced — ingressed — on the tail. The optic nerve growing from that tail-eye doesn’t connect to the brain — it terminates somewhere around the spinal cord. By any conventional account, the animal should be blind. It isn’t. The tadpoles can still see and perform well in visual tasks. Somehow, the system routes around its own abnormal wiring to recover function. The pattern being pointed to — sight — was never housed in the eye itself, or in the specific neural pathway, or in any single component. The eye on the tail is a wildly improbable pointer, and yet it retrieves something far richer than its own structure contains. You get considerably more out than you put in.

Some GISc tools — like agent-based models or network analysis — already detect this excess in a geography context. A single infected traveler tips a system toward chaos not because of arithmetic addition of local interactions described in the GISc analysis, but because that traveler’s position in a network acts as an interface to a pattern of contagion whose scope was latent in the structure all along. The “geographic advantage” O’Sullivan, and crew, describes — GISc’s relationship to multi-scalar processes and human-environment couplings — is, in Levin’s vocabulary, a sensitivity to how physical arrangements act as pointers into a rich space of possible collective behaviors.

This reframes world events not as linear narratives but as navigations of morphospace — the full landscape of forms a system could take, where some configurations are reachable and others are not, and where attractors pull trajectories toward specific patterns regardless of starting conditions.

What pattern are current geopolitical configurations pointing toward? What is being ingressed by the particular architecture of today’s global institutions, communication networks, and urban densities? While GIScience sharpens our sight on outcomes, it leaves uncharted the deeper question of what is the shape of the latent space these material forms slip into.

BORDERS STORE WHAT BODIES KNOW

Levin’s work suggests at every scale of organization, we are dealing not with mechanical aggregation but with collective intelligence. To understand what he means by that, it helps to borrow an image from Einstein.

Because nothing travels faster than light, any event you could possibly influence — or that could possibly influence you — is bounded by how far light could travel in the available time. Draw that boundary in spacetime and it forms a cone. Everything inside it is causally reachable, everything outside it is not. Levin borrows this image to describe the reach of any cognitive agent. A single cell’s light cone is tiny — it can only sense and respond within its immediate chemical neighborhood, over milliseconds. A brain’s light cone is vastly larger — it can model consequences years out and coordinate behavior across great distances. The cone is simply a measure of how far an agent’s agency actually extends. And just as the body is a nested hierarchy of such agents — molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs — each operating within its own cone, pursuing goals whose scale its parts cannot perceive, so too is human society.

A city is not simply a dense clustering of individuals whose local interactions produce urban dynamics. It is, in Levin’s sense, a collective intelligence with a cognitive light cone that vastly exceeds that of any constituent. It pursues goals (economic growth, defense, habitability) across spatial and temporal horizons no individual cell — or individual person — can access. Institutions, legal codes, infrastructure, and cultural norms function as bioelectric memory — rewritable pattern memories that store the target morphology of the social body and guide error-correction toward it. Colonial borders, or the Great Wall of China, persist not merely through inertia but because they function like historic bioelectric setpoints. That is, they encode a spatial pattern that downstream processes continuously re-instantiate, even after the circumstances that produced them have dissolved.

Levin’s planarian flatworm experiments demonstrate this in biology. When bioelectric circuits are disrupted, the worm grows heads of other species — without any change to its genome. The pattern being expressed was latent in the space of possible forms, and a change in the interface (the bioelectric circuit) changed which pattern was ingressed. Geopolitical history offers analogies. How much of what we call a nation-state’s “character” is not in its people but in the pattern stored in its institutional circuitry? When those circuits are disrupted — by revolution, invasion, or collapse — new patterns rush in from the adjacent possible, sometimes from regions of the latent space that are recognizable, sometimes shockingly novel.

Pandemics also embody this scalar nesting. Viral replication is a molecular-scale process; its spread is topologically determined by the network of global mobility; its political consequences are mediated by institutional pattern memories about sovereignty, solidarity, and resource allocation. The COVID-19 pandemic did not merely “emerge” — it ingressed a set of patterns whose latency was already encoded in the physical architecture of 21st-century globalization. Competitive resource hoarding and cooperative vaccine-sharing were not just policy choices but different attractors in a landscape of a kind of “social morphospace”, pulling collective behavior toward different setpoints.

GISc tools (like spatial game theory and network percolation models) map the surface of these landscapes. But Levin’s framework asks us to go further. He wants us to not just map the attractors, but to ask what structured space those attractors are features of, and whether that space can be systematically explored.

The scalar interplay extends outward. Local ethnic tensions, mapped via GIS hot-spot analysis, interact with what social theorist Zygmunt Bauman might term “global fluids” — arms, money, diasporas — to produce cascades that reflect not random chaos but path-dependent trajectories through a space of historical patterns. History’s “nightmare on the brain of the living” becomes, in Levin’s terms, a pattern-memory etched into the social substrate. Territorial borders, attempted genocide, human displacement are held as bioelectric setpoints, where trauma lingers as a morphogenetic field, quietly organizing the tissue of the present long after the original wound.

MAPPING WHAT MATTER MERELY MISSES

Complexity science, via GISc, forecasts world events as probabilistic landscapes rather than deterministic paths. Urry describes global systems as “adapting and co-evolving,” with attractors drawing trajectories amid chaos. GISc simulates this through fitness landscapes like agents navigate peaks and valleys of viability, local adaptations generating global patterns like economic booms or institutional collapses.

Levin’s framework intensifies this picture in two ways. First, it insists that the attractors are not randomly distributed. The latent space of possible social patterns — like the latent space of morphogenetic outcomes — has structure. Evolution, as Levin argues, progresses rapidly precisely because the space has “a relatively smooth character” in which “past interactions with it carry non-trivial information about the adjacent possible.” The same may be true of cultural and institutional evolution. The reason certain forms of governance, urbanism, or economic organization recur across independent civilizations is not purely because of convergent environmental pressures, but because they represent attractors in a structured space of collective intelligence patterns that sufficiently complex social interfaces tend to ingress.

Second, and more provocatively, Levin’s framework suggests that we do not simply make the social forms we inhabit. We invite patterns to temporarily inhabit our collective embodiments. To see why, consider one of his most uncontroversial and disarming experiments. Levin’s lab studied simple sorting algorithms — the kind computer science students have used for decades. These are short deterministic procedures that take a jumbled list of numbers and rearrange them into sequential order. Nothing mysterious here but made for many an interview question at Microsoft!

When Levin’s team visualized the algorithm’s progress as a movement through an abstract sorting space, unexpected behaviors emerged that nobody had noticed in all those decades of use. When the algorithm encountered a number that refused to move — a piece of broken data blocking its path — it didn’t simply halt. It temporarily de-sorted the rest of the array, moved things around the obstruction, and then recovered its progress. It was exhibiting something resembling delayed gratification — the capacity to temporarily move away from a goal in order to reach it more completely later. Like a soccer player kicking the ball backwards to advance it forward.

This ability was not written into the algorithm. Nobody put it there. Then, when the team ran a distributed version where each number ran its own variant of the algorithm, numbers sharing the same variant spontaneously clustered together — a kind of social behavior, emerging without a single line of code instructing any number to notice or prefer its own kind. The algorithm was doing something it was never designed to do, and had been doing it, unobserved, for decades.

Now, imagine a democracy is not constructed from scratch by rational agents but an interface that, when configured appropriately, ingresses a pattern of distributed decision-making whose properties exceed what any designer or participant imagined or specified. Cities, constitutions, and international institutions become pointers. The patterns they summon may even surprise their architects — and may have been quietly surprising them and us all along.

This has immediate consequences for how GISc could approach attempts at predicting futures. For example, prospective spatial modeling — Markov chains, scenario planning — maps the probability surface of possible trajectories. But a Levin-inflected GISc would ask this: what new pointers are being constructed right now, and what regions of the latent pattern space are they configured to access?

The answers could become bewildering in a world of AI-mediated governance, hybrid human-machine urban systems, and the synthetic biological constructions Levin’s team pursues. These are vehicles of exploration into regions of Platonic space we have not navigated before. “We are now fishing in regions of Platonic space we have never explored before,” he writes — with implications not only practical (”what will it do to us”) but ethical (”how do we fulfill the opportunities and duties of an ethical synthbiosis with beings who are not quite like us”).

For GISc, this need not be merely philosophical. Spatial planning and governance literally configure the physical interfaces through which collective intelligence patterns are ingressed. Urban density fosters certain attractors of solidarity and innovation while sprawl ingresses different ones. Green civic infrastructure designed to buffer floods mechanically also reconfigures the relationship between human settlement and ecological pattern space which invites a whole different class of emergent resilience. The question is no longer only “what will happen here, probabilistically” but “what are we building a pointer toward?”

Fatalists may see the latent space as already barring our options. Pessimists will amplify the risks of novel pointers we cannot control. Realists might attempt to quantify via more Monte Carlo simulations. And techo-optimists may try to engineer and configure interfaces to access and profit from whatever attractors emerge. But what I like most of all about Levin’s framework is that it offers something more nuanced than any of these: structured humility. We do not know the full topology of the space we are pointing into. Every new city, every new institution, every new technological architecture is, in some sense, a bioengineering experiment — and like Levin’s Xenobots and Anthrobots, it may manifest competencies and patterns nobody designed or predicted.

If Levin’s intuition is correct, we are but temporary self-organizing forms that hold together for a time, perform actions that exceed their physical composition, and then yield to the impermanence built into any pointer’s relationship with the patterns it accesses. Humility does feel like the appropriate response. But more importantly, the recognition that mapping the structure of the space we are ingressing into is, at this moment, among the most important things we could do.

The information embedded in Geographic Information Science has the potential to demystify fatalism, especially when death’s certainty yields to spatial agency. Levin reminds us that information, at its Latin root, means to give form — to in-form. That is what geographic information has always done, long before it became a science. It did not merely transmit data, but impose structure on space, render the implicit geometry of human existence legible and actionable. Every map is an act of in-forming. The world is no doomsday script, but a co-evolving field — its attractors mappable, its interfaces legible, its vectors steerable — if we aim with care, with intent, and with the humility to know what we summon may exceed what we design.

REFERENCES

Levin, M. (2025). Ingressing minds: Causal patterns beyond genetics and environment in natural, synthetic, and hybrid embodiments. PsyArXiv.

O’Sullivan, D., Manson, S. M., Messina, J. P., & Crawford, T. W. (2006). Space, place, and complexity science. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.

Urry, J. (2003). Global complexity. Polity Press.

Hello Interactors,

This one attempts to balance the privilege of cold analytical escapism with the gruesome rehumanization of past, present, and future atrocities. I end up trying to make sense of the political psychology that leads to such jubilant violence. While it can be understood, its the very intelligibility that makes it so intolerable.

PRESSURE, POWER, IMPUNITY

In 1965, as my umbilical cord was being severed in Iowa, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were cutting the ears off innocent dead Vietnamese children. And their parents. The shriveling cartilage served as “proof” they were killed. They’d string them into necklaces or hoard them in “ear bags” as trophies. Their commanders demanded a tally. This morbid ritual, born from the military’s obsession with numeric “success” metrics amid “search and destroy” orders, exposed not just individual moral depravity but a systemic disregard for human life.

Such barbarity serves as just another example of America’s enduring pattern of defying Geneva Conventions on civilian protections, proportionality, and prohibited weapons. These atrocities are wrapped in bureaucratic euphemisms like “collateral damage”; all to evade accountability and perpetuate unchecked imperial violence.

When barbarity returned like a boomerang to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the term “collateral damage” was absent. But “search and destroy” came back. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes the president

“to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

These expanded interpretations of and the idea of a “continuing, imminent threat” led to doctrines that allowed drones and bombs to be used as sanctioned forms of force across borders. Targeted killings are domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints.

As my own kids were being born in 2004, U.S. drones were flying across the skies over Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond, vaporizing wedding parties, schools, and outdoor markets, shredding innocent men, women, and children into mangled flesh mixed with bone fragments. These ‘Hellfire missiles’ were sold to the public as possessing surgical precision. These “precision” killings, justified as “targeted” under the euphemism of “signature strikes,” leave behind charred craters, orphaned survivors screaming amid the rubble, and “double taps” that slaughter first responders rushing to the scene. And here again the body-count calculus of modern warfare dehumanizes the dead as mere “collateral” in an endless cycle of remote-control atrocity.

However, unlike in Vietnam, groups controlling casualty numbers and combatant definitions created incentives to undercount civilian deaths to bolster the claims of legal precision. Because such reasoning was long classified, external scrutiny relied on leaks and sporadic court‑ordered disclosures.

Obama deployed 10 times more drones than Bush. They all occurred in legal grey zones. They were justified through broad claims of self‑defense against “imminent threats” from non‑state actors operating in countries not formally at war with the United States. Legal assessments have found that many attacks did not meet the threshold of an “armed conflict” — meaning strikes there should have been constrained by international human‑rights law — thus violating requirements of necessity, last resort, and proportionality.

Recent incidents, like the Iranian Khamenei killing, further expose gaps between law and practice. In the case of the 2020 killing of Iranian General Soleimani, scholars argue that the official rationale failed to meet the UN Charter’s Article 51 requirement of an actual armed attack. Since then, the U.S. and its allies have instead advanced an even more squishy view of “imminence” to justify anticipatory defense against imagined potential threats. Critics say these interpretations transform what was intended to be a narrow exception into a license for routine, preemptive killing.

The U.S. government is seemingly unequaled in its interpretive flexibility of law. Rather than submitting to adjudication, they practice “norm‑shaping” noncompliance. This involves acting first, then using rhetoric and diplomatic influence to normalize or justify those actions. Research on the UN Security Council demonstrates how veto rights, opaque bargaining, and diluted resolutions enable permanent members to escape condemnation while weaker states are disciplined. In effect, international law becomes a language powerful states can manage, not a rulebook to obey.

U.S. operations in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere are often positioned as short-term “strikes” meant to sustain “rules-based order.” But the U.S. doesn’t have to behave orderly. Moreover, these actions show a longstanding system where the law on force sustains hegemony. Though the justifications shift — from humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and WMD prevention in Iraq to “responsibility to protect” in Libya or preemption against terrorists or nuclear programs in Iran — the underlying logic is the same. You can see why the U.S. systemically refuses to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute.

This treaty established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and grants it jurisdiction over the most serious international crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression — committed by nationals of states parties or on their territory. It was created after ad hoc tribunals like as those in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to ensure accountability. But by remaining outside the Rome Statute (while accepting some of its principles in domestic law), the United States — along with Israel, Russia, and Sudan — avoids the ICC’s adjudicative authority over its own personnel and operations. The U.S. (and three other states) has essentially insulated its use of force from external legal accountability.

This suggests a deeper political culture where U.S. force is assumed to be protective and exceptional. When national security conflicts with legal limits, they are negotiable, and most Americans accept this as normal.

The stability of these justifications over time suggests a shared worldview and America’s place in it. It’s a settler-imperial, racialized imagination of place that makes some regions dangerous and disorderly, while viewing U.S. power as the necessary instrument for security and progress.

STRUCTURES OF SPATIAL SUPPRESSION

To get a better grasp of how legal gray areas become permanent features of the geopolitical landscape, we need to look beyond the law and explore the spatial imaginaries that come before it. The “lawless power” I describe is not merely a failure of international oversight; it is the modern expression of a settler-imperial logic that has long used the map as a weapon. This logic functions through what historian Patrick Wolfe termed a “logic of elimination”: a systemic drive to clear space for a dominant order by rendering the original inhabitants of that space invisible, irrelevant, or “out of place”.

The bridge between the “body-count calculus” of Vietnam and the “Hellfire missiles” of today lies in the historical practice of declaring territory terra nullius — land belonging to no one. By portraying Indigenous lands as “empty” or “underused,” settler-colonial legal fictions justified removal and massacre as “regrettable but necessary” steps toward progress. This spatial erasure serves as the architectural blueprint for modern drone warfare. Just as 19th-century maps rendered Native peoples “spatially absent” to normalize dominion, modern military doctrines use “bureaucratic euphemisms” to turn vibrant communities into “trouble spots” and “problem-spaces” for management.

When a “signature strike” occurs, the target is not a legal subject but a “pattern of life”. This is the ultimate form of algorithmic governance, where the individual is erased by the data-point before the missile is even fired. By defining specific regions as inherently “disorderly,” the U.S. creates domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints. In this framework, regions treated as a modern “frontier” — a zone where ordinary rules of necessity and proportionality are “negotiable”.

This “geometry of dominion” is not exclusive to foreign policy; it is mirrored in the way U.S. power organizes its own domestic heartland. George Lipsitz’s concept of the “white spatial imaginary” explains how space is arranged to prioritize the exclusion and property rights of the affluent while subjecting communities of color to displacement and surveillance.

We see this in the physical “concrete” of urban planning:

* Highway Infrastructure: Interstate routes were systematically redirected to demolish poor white, Black, and brown communities, ensuring affluent white residents could “get home faster”.

* Nuisance Abatement: In cities like Los Angeles, nuisance laws are used to “preemptively reclaim” areas through speculative policing and banishment, enacting a fantasy of dominion over racialized bodies.

* Racialized Sorting: The world is sorted into “secure cores” and “unruly peripheries,” a dynamic that scales from the “redlined” neighborhood to the “sanctioned zone” or “reservation”.

In both the urban grid and the global borderland, the goal is this: to produce order for some while underwriting “legally malleable violence” on “others”. The “collateral damage” of an Afghan, Palestinian, or Iranian village is the international equivalent of the “nuisance” of a demolished neighborhood. Both are viewed through an imperial lens that deems certain lives “disposable” for the sake of a broader, racialized security.

This spatial sorting creates the infrastructure of impunity. When a region is mapped as a “zone of exception,” the violence committed there ceases to feel like a violation; it feels like “maintenance” of a “rules-based order”. This explains why the U.S. can “practice ‘norm-shaping’ noncompliance,” acting first and using diplomatic influence to “normalize” the act afterward.

The settler-imperial imagination flattens distant worlds into “mappable, legally alienable parcels” of land management. Whether it is the “search and destroy” missions of the 1960s or the “precision” killings of the 2020s, the underlying logic is to secure the “place” of the empire, the “place” of the other must be erased.

Once the world is spatially divided into “ordered property” and “disorderly wards,” it becomes easy for the citizens of the empire to grow comfortable with the authoritarian’s embrace. Dispossessions become necessary to sustain a system where the “other” is already spatially and legally absent. Their suffering barely registers as a tragedy. It’s just the cost of a “righteous” mission.

PROPHETS OF POLITICAL POWER

Spatial erasures don’t just reorganize the land; they reorganize the human psyche. When a society “sees like an empire,” it adopts a specific cognitive map that determines who belongs and whose lives are disposable. This “architecture of absence” is maintained by a set of psychological formations that transform the fear of a “disorderly” world into a mandate for righteous violence.

Political psychology shows how when people experience the world as dangerous and uncertain, they become more attracted to strong leaders, rigid hierarchies, and harsh treatment of “threatening” others. This cluster of attitudes is the essence of authoritarianism. It is not just a set of ideas but a way of managing fear and uncertainty.

Authoritarianism is especially potent when it fuses with nationalism and religion. Then it becomes “messianic authoritarianism”: the sense that “our” nation or faith community has a special mission in history, is under constant attack, and must therefore be defended at all costs, even by breaking ordinary rules. In this mindset, law and institutions are not neutral constraints; they are either tools for the mission or obstacles to be overridden.

Research on authoritarianism finds a common psychological “core” across left and right: a desire for enforced conformity, punishment of deviants, and centralized control, particularly when people believe they live in a dangerous world.(14) When this core is wrapped in national or religious stories of chosen-ness and persecution, it becomes a powerful justification for violence and impunity. Leaders who promise order, purity, and redemption can present extreme measures as necessary acts of protection.

Over time it builds a collective narcissism: the belief that “our” group is great but unfairly unrecognized and disrespected by others. This is different from healthy hometown pride. It is fragile, defensive, and quick to see insults everywhere. Studies show that collective narcissism predicts hostility toward out‑groups, support for aggressive policies, conspiratorial thinking, and backing for populist and authoritarian leaders. People who feel their group’s greatness is denied are more willing to tolerate or endorse harm, so long as it is framed as restoring respect and status.

In religious Zionism, White Christian nationalism, and Khomeinist Shi‘ism, these dynamics are visible through different meanings. Religious Zionist currents interpret control of the land as a non‑negotiable step in a divine redemption process, making territorial compromise feel like a betrayal of a given god’s plan, not just a political choice. Christian Zionist and White Christian nationalist discourses in the United States have portrayed the nation as founded by a Christian god, under siege by secular and racial “others,” and uniquely tasked with defending Israel and Christian civilization. Leaders like Donald Trump have been cast as “instruments of god” because of specific policies (for example, on Israel or Iran), even when their personal conduct contradicts ordinary religious standards. The mission outweighs the man. Khomeini’s project in 1979 Iran framed the revolution as rescuing Islam from corruption at home and humiliation abroad, casting the new state as the vanguard of an oppressed community engaged in permanent struggle. Even as his regime oppressed…and still does.(16)

Across these cases, the same psychological building blocks appear:

A world narrated as dangerous and full of enemies.

A group identity that is both superior and victimized (“we are great, but unrecognized and under attack”).

A leader who claims to embody the group and its destiny.

A willingness to override normal legal and moral limits in the name of survival and redemption.

Political psychology also clarifies how these movements treat opponents. When group identity becomes sacred and narcissistic, critics inside the group are labeled traitors, and external critics are portrayed as existential threats. Research shows that collective narcissism and authoritarianism are linked to dehumanization of out‑groups and even justification of political violence; seeing others as less than fully human makes it easier to ignore or excuse their suffering.(15) This helps sustain the kinds of selective empathy and invisible harms I’ve described. Some deaths are tragedies, others are regrettable but necessary, and others barely register at all.

These patterns are not confined to a few extremists. Everyday citizens can be drawn in because messianic authoritarianism offers psychological rewards. In times of rapid change, economic insecurity, or cultural displacement, people often experience self‑uncertainty: a shaky sense of who they are and where they belong. Joining a tightly defined, morally exalted group — with clear enemies and a clear mission — can resolve that uncertainty. Research on uncertainty and extremism shows that people in this state are especially attracted to groups and leaders that provide simple, absolutist answers and sharply draw the line between “us” and “them”.(14) Messianic narratives deliver exactly that.

Once in place, these psychological formations feed directly into infrastructures of impunity. If one believes the nation is uniquely chosen yet unfairly treated, international law and human rights norms can be reimagined as biased constraints imposed by hostile outsiders, rather than shared rules. If one experiences politics as a siege, then surveillance, occupation, or lethal force are not lawless; they are “defensive” acts that outsiders cannot judge. Authoritarian dispositions, collective narcissism, and uncertainty‑driven group identification supply the emotional energy that keeps unequal legal arrangements and racialized security practices politically acceptable.

We’re living in a world now where legal impunity and structural violence are not sustained only by special interests and institutions. They are also held up by recurring psychological patterns rooted in fear of danger, longing for certainty, wounded pride, and the seductions of belonging to a “chosen” community. Messianic authoritarian projects in Israel, the United States, and Iran differ in theology and history, but they draw on similar psychological wells to make extraordinary violence feel not just permissible, but righteous.

Throughout history those claiming victory have found that while they may be able to occupy a territory, they cannot “win” against a people who remain connected to it. The presence of 575 Indigenous nations (and 1200 tribes and villages) with government-to-government relations with the U.S. is testimony. Topophilia is a heavy weight. Those killed aren’t coming back, but those who remain or have been displaced do. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”

Hello Interactors,

Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality.

HOMELAND HATCHED HERE

With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.”

This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world.

In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11.

A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies.

Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance.

But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive.

Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry.

“Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside.

This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right.

Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders. When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim.

What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections.

Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space. The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent.

It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time.

HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS

If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings.

Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously.

He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause.

Let’s apply that to “homeland” security.

If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally:

* Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.​

* Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.​

* Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.​

* Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue.

Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties.

Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious.

The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process to see only a physical entity whose movements through space dissolve their Constitutional immunities into a series of observable, trackable traces. Those traces become inputs to enforcement. This is what makes surveillance so powerful. “Homeland” governance is especially trace-hungry because it imagines safety as a property of space that must be continuously maintained.

But these traces are behavioral cues and human behavior is never neutral. They are interpreted through normalized cultural and institutional schemas about who “belongs” in which places. Place attachment and territorial belonging can become gatekeeping mechanisms. Empirical work on homeland/place attachment links it to identity processes and self-categorization. Related work suggests that collective psychological ownership — “this place is ours” — can predict exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders. In legal terms, those social attitudes can translate into pressure to expand state powers and narrow outsiders’ claim-rights.

A vocabulary rooted in a ‘republic’ tends to emphasize rights as universal claims against the state. This is where we get due process, equal protection, and rights to speech and assembly. A homeland vocabulary tends to emphasize rights as statused permissions tied to membership and territory. Here we find rights of citizens, rights at the border, rights in “emergencies”, and rights conditioned on “lawful presence.” The shift makes some restrictions feel like a kind of protecting of the home. Hence the unaffable phrase, “Get off my lawn.”

HOMELAND HIERARCHIES HUMBLED

If the “homeland” is framed as a place-of-belonging and rights are the grammar of that place, then the current crisis of American democracy boils down to a dispute over the nature of equality. This tension is best understood through the long-standing constitutional debate between anticlassification and antisubordination, which dates back to the Reconstruction era.

Anticlassification, often called the “colorblind” or “status-blind” approach, holds that the state’s duty is simply to avoid explicit categories in its laws. Antisubordination, by contrast, insists that the law must actively dismantle structured group hierarchies and the “caste-like” systems they produce. When the state embraces a “homeland” logic, it leans heavily on anticlassification to mask a deeper reality of spatial subordination.

In what we might call the “Theater of Defense,” agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasingly rely on anticlassification principles to justify aggressive interior crackdowns. They frame enforcement as a territorial necessity by protecting the sanctity of the soil itself. A workplace raid or roving patrol, in this view, does not target any specific group. Instead, it simply maintains the “integrity” of the homeland. This reflects what law professor Bradley Areheart and others have described as the “anticlassification turn,” where formal attempts to embody equality end up legitimizing structural inequality.

Put differently, the state exercises a Hohfeldian Power to alter individuals’ legal status based on their geographic location or “lawful presence.” At the same time, it shields itself from legal challenge by insisting that the law applies equally to everyone who is “out of place.” This claim of territorial neutrality is a dangerous legal fiction. As scholars Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst have shown in their work on algorithmic systems, attempts at neutral criteria often replicate entrenched biases.

Triggers like “proximity to a border” or “behavioral traces” in a transit hub do not produce blind justice. They enable targeted scrutiny and the erosion of immunity for those whose identities fail to match the “belonging” model of the “homeland.” The state circumvents its Hohfeldian Disability, avoiding the creation of second-class statuses, by pretending to manage space rather than discriminate against persons.

This shift from a civic Republic to a territorial “homeland” is the primary driver of democratic backsliding. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach captured this dynamic in his 2022 paper, Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding. Analyzing 51 indicators of electoral democracy across U.S. states from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach developed the State Democracy Index. His findings reveal how American federalism has morphed from “laboratories of democracy” into sites of subnational authoritarianism.

States with low scores on the index — often under unified Republican control — have pioneered police powers that insulate partisan dominance. We see this in the rise of state-level immigration enforcement units, the criminalization of movement for marginalized groups, and the expansion of a “right to exclude.”

These states are not just enforcing the law. They are forging what Yale legal scholar Owen Fiss would recognize as a new caste system. By fixating on “defending” state soil against “infiltrators,” legislatures dismantle the public rights of the Reconstruction era — the right to participate in community life without indignity. Today’s backsliding policies transform the nation’s interior into a permanent enforcement zone. They reject the Enlightenment ideals of America, rooted in beliefs like liberty, equality, democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.

To fully understand Constitutional history, we best acknowledge that America’s universalist creedal definition wasn’t solely European. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how Enlightenment values of liberty and equality arose from intellectual exchanges with Indigenous North American thinkers. Kandiaronk, a Huron statesman, traveled to Europe in the late 17th century and debated French aristocrats. His critiques were published and circulated widely among European intellectuals, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Graeber and Wengrow point out that before the widely popular publication of these dialogues in 1703, the concept of "Equality" as a primary political value was almost entirely absent from European philosophy. By the time Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1754, it was the central question of the age.

Kandiaronk criticized European society’s subservience to kings and obsession with property. He contrasted it with the consensual governance and individual agency of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy embodied in their Great Law of Peace — a political order prioritizing the public right to exist without state-sanctioned indignity.

The writers of the U.S. Constitution codified a Republic of “unalienable rights,” synthesizing Indigenous/European-inspired liberty with Hohfeldian Disabilities that legally restrained the state from territorial monarchy. Backsliding erases this profound philosophical endeavor. Reclaiming the Republic means honoring the Indigenous critique that a nation’s legitimacy rests on its people’s freedom, not its fences.

We seem to be moving from governance by the governed to protecting an ingroup. In Hohfeldian terms, the state expands its privileges while shrinking the claim-rights of the vulnerable to move and exist safely. This leads to “spatial subordination,” managed through adiaphorization — a concept from social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust.

Bauman, a Polish-Jewish survivor who escaped the Nazis’ grip on his early life, drew “adiaphora” from the Greek for matters outside moral evaluation. Modern bureaucracies make horrific actions morally neutral by framing them as technical duties, enabling atrocities like the Holocaust without personal ethical torment.

As territorial belonging takes precedence, non-belongers are excluded from moral and legal obligations. They become “non-spaces” or “human waste” in the eyes of ICE and DHS. This betrays antisubordination, the “core and conscience” of America’s civil rights tradition, as Yale constitutional scholars Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel called it. A democracy can’t endure if it permanently relegates any group to legal impossibility.

In the “homeland”, immigrants may live, work, and raise families for decades, yet remain mere “traces” to expunge. Weaponized place attachment turns affective bonds into property claims. This empowers the state to “cleanse” those deemed to be “out of place.” Rights become statused permissions, not universal ideals. If immunity from search depends on territorial status, the Republic of laws has yielded to a Heimat — a term the Nazis’ usurped for their blood-and-soil homeland…that they then bloodied and soiled.

Reversing this demands confronting the linguistic and legal architecture that rendered it conceivable. It’s time to rethink the “homeland” frame and its anticlassification crutch. A truer and fairer Republic would commit to antisubordination and the state would be disabled from wielding space for hierarchy. A person’s immunity from arbitrary power should be closer to an inalienable right to be “secure in one’s person” that holds firm beyond checkpoints or workplace doors…or your front door.

Steven Simon was right to feel uneasy with Clinton’s wording. “Homeland” planted a seed that sprouted into hedgerows of exceptional powers and curtailed liberties. Are we going to cling to a “homeland” secured by fear and exclusion, forever unstable, or finally become a Republic revered for securing universal law and rights? As long as our rights remain geographically conditional, we all dwell in liability. Reclaiming the Republic, and our freedoms within it, may require transforming the Constitution from a Hohfeldian map of perimeters into a boundless plane of human dignity it aspires to be.

Hello Interactors,

Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state.

But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.

SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE

On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force.

Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes.

Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution:

“You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.”

This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation.

This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants.

By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets.

That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory.

In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury.

The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate.

TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS

War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place.

Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy.

The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location.

Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation.

When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory.

That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland.

The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability.

Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome.

ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR

Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today.

In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense.

It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment.

Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, documentation, rapid communication, mutual aid — that have long characterized Indigenous resistance and slavery abolitionist networks.

Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies gathered in 2016 to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can scale when a place becomes a shared object of defense.

The #NoDAPL movement assembled a broad coalition of Indigenous nations and allies, over 200 tribes, alongside legal support, medical care, and communications systems designed to withstand state patience.

The 2020 George Floyd uprising in Minneapolis also revealed how love of place can become a platform for organized care rather than retreat. Alongside protest, residents built mutual-aid channels, street-medic networks, food distribution, and neighborhood defense efforts that treated the city as an emotional ecosystem worth repairing. What looked to outsiders like spontaneous eruption was, on the ground, a rapid layering of roles that included medics, legal observers, supply runners, translators, and de-escalators. This ecology of participation made it possible for large numbers of people to act without centralized command.

Social psychology helps explain why these movements generate allies rather than only sympathizers. One key concept is collective efficacy — the combination of social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good. It blossoms when people repeatedly see each other act, learn local norms of mutual obligation, and build trust that intervention will be supported rather than punished. All rooted in topophilia.

Place attachment can bridge boundaries that would otherwise keep people separate. Work in community psychology and planning shows that place attachment and meaning can support participation and collective engagement, especially when development or coercion threatens everyday life. In other words, topophilia is not just private feeling. When it’s under threat it can become public motive and an engine for coalition.

The coalition in Minneapolis is being characterized by the federal government as terrorists. This borrows from a long history of resistance to violence because war capitalism has never been only domestic. The United States and its allies refined coercive governance overseas through night raids and “capture-or-kill” operations in Afghanistan, midnight house raids in Iraq, and broader militarized campaigns that treat homes as “searchable terrain” and communities as “intelligence environments.”

Many of the officials, contractors, and voters who authorized or normalized these methods rarely imagined the same atmosphere of violent seizure in their neighborhood. As unimaginable as it may be watching unmarked vehicles, sudden detentions, and public uncertainty coming to American streets — used against the very citizens and taxpayers who fund such operations — it’s not to those victims overseas in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or even inner city America.

That return is what the poet and politician Aimé Césaire called the “imperial boomerang” effect, the idea that techniques tolerated in peripheral countries can come home to roost. In the U.S., the boomerang has long “landed” first on people of color. It emerges through surveillance and disruption campaigns like the two decades of the covert and illegal COINTELPRO program where the FBI targeted counterculture groups of the so-called New Left.

Or the “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920 targeting largely Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their left-leaning politics. These led to riots in 30 US cities and culminated in the bombing of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general. These programs all reflect the notion that war can come home — just look at the increased militarizing of policing complete with SWAT tactics.

And the same history that produced the scaffold of war capitalism of the past also produced reservoirs of resistance we see here and now. When neighbors anywhere respond to incursions not only with fear but with organized vigilance and material support, they are adapting older strategies of care found in Indigenous, abolitionist, and other movement-based defenses of people and places against infiltration, intimidation, and attempted violent removal.

We can see how war capitalism endures. Mankato’s 1862 gallows aimed to clear Dakota homelands of their people for homesteading, rails, and mills. Meanwhile, today’s Operation Metro Surge includes thousands of federal agents raiding Minneapolis homes and streets, attempting to sever immigrant attachments to allegedly enforce labor control and national security. These militarized spectacles of warrantless entries, tear gas, and shootings echo what Beckert has uncovered. They treat people and place as obstacles to commodification rather than roots of stewardship.

Yet topophilia also persists. These cross cultural rapid-response networks are not new to these lands, even though the US government tried to erase them centuries ago. The inspiring actions we see in Minneapolis reflect the values of compassion, positiveness, and respect for all relatives with neighborly solidarity that the first occupants of that land embraced. They’re now woven with their allied 21st century neighbors in common and shared resistance. As best expressed here by Indigenous studies and political ecology scholar Melanie Yazzie. (and the longer version here)

Minneapolis, like those acts of resistance in the nearby Dakotas, enacts and rehearses an alternative form of civil governance that centers mutual obligation over coercion and extraction. It shows how cities can survive the strain and stay alive — not through fear and gain, but through care that grounds and sustains.