Interplace

Hello Interactors,

There’s a lot of talk of states these days. Palestine and Israel, one state or two? Ukraine and Russia. One state or two? The United States. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one…right? What about that one D.C. federal district, or those five territories, and a bunch of ‘minor’ islands? And don’t forget the many tribal nations within the nation-state of the United States which can often spread across many state borders!  

I started writing about all this and it got long, so I’m broke it two. Ex uno plures, from one, many. I suppose there’s a lesson in all this. No matter how fixed a given state of affairs may appear, we have to be prepared for bifurcations and reconfigurations.

Let’s dig in!

THE RISE OF STATES

I easily confuse states with nations. Nations are loosely defined as a group of people with a shared identity. A nation-state is a political structure represented by a territorial boundary claiming to contain a common identity. I used the words ‘loosely’ and ‘claim’ because so many territorially bounded areas or nations contain a multitude of identities. The United States, a notoriously diverse country, is a great example.

Nations and nation-states seem to have chicken-and-egg origin story. I believe those who claim the nation-state rose out of folks like those early European colonizers. Fueled by the thought of amassing wealth, land, and power once only believed to be wrangled by feudal lords and monarchs, influential and enterprising European intellectually ‘entlightened’ elites pooled their resources and got to work.

The idea of a nation-state, and their bordered geographic territories, began to take shape through 14th-17th century Europe. The late Middle Ages and the rising Renaissance witnessed a gradual decline of feudalism and the rise of centralized monarchies who were incented to consolidate power within defined territorial boundaries. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe, is often cited as a key moment in the history of nations as it established the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity fundamental to the nation-state concept.

The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of nationalism, a significant driving force behind the nation-state concept. Nationalism emphasized a shared identity based on language, culture, and ethnicity, often aligned with a specific geographic territory. The French Revolution (1789–1799) and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars accelerated the spread of these ideas across Europe.

Language invention and reconstitution burgeoned across Europe. One example is from 1820 Finland. Born out of an interest in Finnish tradition and culture a groundswell of nationalism by Finnish writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys took hold. They stitched together their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides that differentiated them from the Swedes. This forged a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.

In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior. By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first Ukrainian nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.

The 19th century also saw the unification of various nation-states. Notable examples include the unification of Italy in the 1860s and Germany in the 1870s. These unifications were driven by shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic identities, as well as by political and economic interests.

It took Germany just 40 years to rise as a dominant and powerful nation-state in Europe. This led to tensions around Europe, especially with France and Britain. But it was a Serbian nationalist group and their assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914 that triggered war. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and Europe erupted into World War I.  

The United States entered the war in 1917, in part fearing a potential alliance between neighboring Mexico and Germany. This was also the same year they began preparing for peace agreements and the redistricting of territories of nation-states.

In 1918 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson boarded a ship for Paris bringing with him a team of cartographers to create materials for the Paris Peace Conference. This included chief cartographer Mark Sylvester William Jefferson who had invented a form of thematic mapping based on ethnography, demography, and population distribution called anthropography.

Comfortable with nearly thirteen languages, he and a team of ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists set up offices in a Paris hotel. They drew convincing maps used by Wilson and his allies to sell other world leaders on the formation of nation-states that would best serve their interests. U.S. interest in one of those nation-states invented in Paris remains today — Ukraine.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER, ALLIED BY RANCOR

Out of this conference emerged the first worldwide intergovernmental organization, the League of Nations. With it came a set of treaties that shifted power principally to the United States, Great Britain, and France while mandating political power to newly drawn, U.S. directed, and ethnically and linguistically determined nation-state maps.

Just four years after the formation of the League of Nations, in 1923, the League of Nations turned their attention to the Middle East declaring Palestine a state. A British mandate, it was based on a cartographic line originally drawn in 1906 by the British and the French between Palestine and Egypt. This was the first internationally recognized boundary in the Middle East.

Having already colonized Egypt as part of their growing empire, England then wanted control of the Suez Canal. So they invented another border that awarded them the Sinai Peninsula. Then, in 1916, the English and French met in secret to create a dividing line between Egypt and Turkey. They decided Egypt would go to England and Turkey would go to France. Four years later they determined Lebanon and Syria would go to France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia to England.

It took the end of the second World War in 1947 for the League of Nations, now rebranded the United Nations, to recommend a plan to divide Palestine into two “independent Jewish and Arab states.”

The Jewish organization that had long been helping resettle the area begrudgingly accepted the proposal, but most of the Arab contingent did not. In 1948 the British mandate expired, hundreds of Palestinians were expelled, 78% of the land was handed to Israel, and before the year was up the region had their first Arab-Israeli war. And here, again, like in Ukraine, today we have borders and states defined by the West roiled in controversy and war.

History reveals how European and American colonialism spread the concept of the nation-state globally. And economics were a central theme. Local and regional agrarian and mercantile economies of the 17th century led to regional specialization, with certain areas developing specific industries based on their geographic advantages. This specialization then influenced economic structures within nation-states and their interactions with other states. Those with common religion, language, or cultures conspired against the ‘others’.

Natural resource acquisition, deprivation, and distribution brought needs for trade routes and resource accessibility at a time when the world was being both mapped and explored by Europeans. Geographic features that facilitated or hindered trade, such as rivers, seas, mountains, and plains, all impact the development and power of nation-states. For example, access to trade routes along the Dnieper River has played a critical role in trade and distribution from Greece to Kiev dating all the way back to the first millennium BC.

The Suez Canal was built it in the late 1800s by the French and remains an important international trade route to this day. The industrial revolution and subsequent urbanization and modernization that followed all hinge on economic geography. And its nation-state status that awards a nation’s entry into competing and cooperating or demoralizing and destroying.

I’d like to think cartographers like Jefferson, and social scientists like him, were well-intentioned and hopeful they could use human identities forged from language, culture, ethnicity, race, creed, or tribes to empower and protect vulnerable peoples politically and socially. Perhaps they believed these cartographic mandates, sensitive to human geography, could lead to peaceful and eternal coexistence.

But it seems fictitious fixed borders drawn on a map fail to convey, capture, and contain the amorphous and pluralistic panoply of peoples. Maybe identities can’t be drawn by a Cartesian map using political philosophies rooted in Cartesian dualities. Maybe nations and nation-states shouldn’t be defined by one common shared identity. Maybe they can’t. Maybe these concepts have run their course and we don’t yet know what comes next.

Hello Interactors,

A series of U.S. federal legislation under the Biden administration has spawned a manufacturing boom at a scale not seen in decades. Unfortunately, the country is repeating the same socio-economic, land use, and transportation policy mistakes that have lead to many of the ills we’re seeking to remedy. Are we missing an opportunity to build back better?

A MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE

Clearcut a forest and build a factory. Now build an even bigger parking lot around the factory for workers and make them drive from miles around to work. Parts and supplies? Yeah, those will have to be trucked in too. Now, stand here in front of the camera and wave this earth flag alongside a U.S. flag and brag about job growth and how EV’s are going to re-green the earth.

This scene captures what’s currently unfolding across the United States. Legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, alongside increased Department of Defense spending, is catalyzing a 'manufacturing renaissance' in the United States with a supposed emphasis on infrastructure improvement, clean energy, and national security.

Paradoxically, this familiar pattern in economic geography is partially responsible for the historical socio-economic inequities and environmental destruction the U.S. is struggling to remedy. Research by Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, in cooperation with the Aspen Institute’s Latinos and Society Program, is investigating the spatial dimensions of this shift, seeking to enhance opportunities for minority-owned businesses within this new economic landscape.

They’ve uncovered how the burgeoning manufacturing boom in the United States is showcasing a remarkable geographic distribution of investment and industry specialization significantly benefiting a diverse array of states and metropolitan areas. A substantial portion of funding aimed at bolstering the semiconductor supply chain is pouring into states like Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, and Indiana.

Additionally, to streamline supply chain efficiencies, battery plants are emerging alongside automotive factories in a vertical alignment from Michigan to Georgia. On the energy front, the Eastern seaboard is focusing on offshore wind power, while states such as California, Arizona, and Texas lead in solar panel production. This broad dispersion of high-tech manufacturing indicates a shift towards a more equitable distribution of economic growth across the nation.

This industrial transformation is not only geographically dispersed across many states and regions, but also spread to the outskirts of metropolitan areas. This raises challenges in harnessing this growth for the benefit of all, particularly Black- and Latino-owned firms and workers. It’s shaping into another form of ‘white flight’ where firms seek the cheapest land away from populated areas, which typically are exurban and rural farmland and forests, toward smaller cities and towns which are predominantly white. And mostly poor, offering a needed economic boost.

However, these regions, cities, and towns have also historically deprioritized public transit alongside decades of car dependent land use policies. So whatever jobs and growth these new manufacturing facilities bring, they’re destined to also bring more cars, which means more traffic, more pollution, and more time alone in cars isolated from interactions with community members. Meanwhile, the decades of neglect and decay of our rail network also means more truck traffic.

I’m reminded of geographer David Harvey's concept of the 'spatial fix'. It suggests capital movement, including the re-shoring of manufacturing, seeks new low-cost geographical frontiers to overcome drains on profit and expansion. This exploitation of geographical ‘space’ through industrial policy and investment reflects a 'fix' for capital investments and investors. By now, however, the meaning of the word 'fix' has less to do with a correction and more to do with an addiction.

There’s an addiction to a dynamic complex interplay of local and global economic geographies — a form of economic development and spatial restructuring that has shown to bring about both positive and negative outcomes. Parking lots and roads may have paved the way for many to cruise to a better quality of life, but the quality of the paradise we call home — our communities, cities, health, and environments — are suffering, if not lost, from decades of addiction.

This boom, while creating opportunities for some, may continue to be a bust for many. They may also spawn new forms of social stratification. The concentration of certain industries in specific regions, for example, could lead to a polarization of skill sets and economic opportunities. This, in turn, may result in localized booms benefiting a segment of society while leaving others behind, thereby reinforcing regional disparities rather than truly leveling the playing field and remedy the disparities that already plague this country.

Furthermore, the inter-regional competition for investment can spark a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and environmental regulations. The suburbanization of industry, while beneficial for regional decentralization, often neglects urban cores leaving central areas, and underprivileged members of society, to grapple with the growing donut hole of decay from decades of lack of investment and attention.

This shift raises questions about the urban-rural divide, land use, and environmental sustainability. The dispersion of these new manufacturing initiatives does indeed offer opportunities for restructuring regional economies. There is potential for the country to move towards a multi-nodal metropolitan model where economic activities are spread across a wider area, including existing urban centers. Provided it is managed with an eye towards sustainability and inclusivity…and today it is not.

POWER, PEOPLE, AND PLACE

Now would be an ideal time to update and expand transportation infrastructure like rail and public transit to address decades of decay and neglect. By enhancing connectivity, metropolitan areas and their cities can become more resilient and inclusive, enabling a diverse workforce to access employment opportunities.

This would help mitigate socio-economic inequities while reducing car dependencies and the country’s outsized contribution to local, regional, and worldwide transportation related pollution. While renewable energy investments are worthy, as are roads, bridges, pipes, and electrical grids, most federal, state, and local transportation dollars are spent bolstering car sales and car dependency and all the physical, psychological, social, economic, and environmental health declines it’s shown to contribute to.

These infrastructure deficiencies underscore a more profound need for more adaptive strategies that align with principles found in complexity science, like resiliency. The resilience of these increasingly brittle social systems is tested not only by burgeoning demands but also by the unpredictable shocks like those experienced during the pandemic.

Increasing frequency and amplitude of weather shocks also reveal the fragility of underinvested frameworks. The capacity to adapt to emerging needs and stresses — be it climate change impacts, congestion, or energy supply — requires a systemic rethinking that transcends traditional silos of urban planning and regional economic development.

Moreover, the underrepresentation of minority-owned firms in strategic sectors, as still found in federal spending patterns, hints at an oversight resulting in an exasperation of existing inequalities and social tensions. As the report demonstrates, these will likely persist unless addressed through targeted interventions. As we learned with the BLM movement, and similar social movements in the past, interventions must start by understanding lived experiences and power relationships on the ground, locally and regionally. This is essential to building the socio-economic political systems that enable or disempower them.

Space and place are often viewed by the powerful and by policy makers as neutral, abstracted points, polygons, and numbers on a map or spreadsheet. But they’re more than that.

The work of geographer Doreen Massey reminds us space is a product of interrelations and interactions at all scales across institutions and individuals and therefore can’t be regarded as neutral. In her influential book “Space, Place and Gender” she reveals how space is politically and socially charged — imbued with power relations. She introduced the idea of "power geometry" to describe the complex and dynamic ways in which different social groups and individuals are positioned within the "flows" of the globalized world.

Recent global events and current local investments across the country are examples of power geometry. We can see how different social and political groups have distinct relationships with these new flows and movements — how they are able to command space and assert influence over it. Some have the power to shape networks and connections across space, which includes the ability to accelerate the pace of movement and interaction for themselves, while others are placed in positions where they are restricted or excluded. This can be true even for those who can afford to own cars and those who cannot.

Owning a car, while a necessity for most, is still a form of power that when asserted only serves to diminish the power of those who do not. Many of these new manufacturing hubs are being built to build more cars and computer chips for them by people who need cars to get to work. This reveals the powerful influence the federal government has over the global geographic geometry required to build cars, and their parts, the local geometries needed to build the plants, and the car dependent network of roads needed for employees. Cars are miraculous modern appliances until they are concentrated within clustered collections of cities which then become problem areas for which firms seek a spatial fix.

Even as federal investment feeds the manufacturing of more cars, along with more regional development that requires more roads and maintenance, society laments climbing car related deaths, worry about the effects of social isolation that can lead to decreased physical and mental health, stress over income disparities, all while watching a polluted planet burn. It all seems as counter intuitive as it does counterproductive. The more we invest in perpetuating car dependency the less money and attention is put toward more healthy and resilient alternatives.

As this new industrial sprawl unfolds, sustainable transportation becomes increasingly vital for connecting industrial zones with urban centers, addressing the dislocation of workspaces, and fostering economic and social robustness and resiliency. We need to urge policymakers to consider the broader implications of the current manufacturing boom on the social fabric of the nation. If we don’t take a comprehensive, diversified, and integrative approach to planning our regions and economies we not only risk perpetuating existing social and environmental woes, but also suffering collapse from another unforeseen emergent disaster.

Hello Interactors,

Trick-or-treat! It’s that time of year for Americans, and a growing population worldwide, to dawn a favorite costume and consume copious amounts of candy. It’s also a time for kids to parade for treats and for adults to decorate with ghoulish goblins, ghosts, and other frightful festoons. And excuse to cosplay without criticism.

Americans will spend an ungodly amount of money on this conspicuous occasion. Like most holidays in America, it’s a chance to fire up the capitalist contraption and watch money burn like a Halloween bonfire. But why? How did this holiday emerge and what does it all really mean?

Let’s find out.

CANDY, COSTUMES, AND CONTESTATIONS

I once handed out toothpaste to trick-or-treaters at Halloween. Trick your teeth. My wife’s dad was a dentist and we ended up with a box of toothpaste samples. Realizing we forgot to buy candy to hand out at Halloween, we poured the box of samples into a bowl. Kids loved it, and so did their teeth.

Some parents giggled, many groaned, and some thought it was downright mean. Realizing kids will happily take just about anything from the bowl, some years we’ve even opted for pencils, erasers, and stickers. We’re so mean.

But let’s face it, Halloween, in its modern form, is mostly about candy and costumes. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates 68% of Americans will spend a total of $3.6 billion on candy handouts this Halloween. That’s up from $3.1 billion last year. Burp.

Nearly three quarters of the country are expected to buy decorations to the tune of $3.9 billion dollars. The percentage of folks intent on buying costumes have hit an all-time NRF high of 69%, up from 67% last year, amounting to $4.1 billion dollars. All told, they project the average American Halloweener will spend around $108 this year. It’s all been climbing since Covid. Either we need sugar to sooth each other, or costumes to excuse each other. Or both.

Their data suggests those aged 25–44 are the most eager to spend, claiming social media inspires early costume and decoration ideas and decisions. Adult spending on themselves and their pets dwarfs spending on kid costumes accounting for nearly three of the four billion dollars in total spend…and climbing. Adult spending increased a whopping 18% from a year ago.

The NRF says to expect a lot of Spiderman and princess costumes on kids, pets as pumpkins, and a variety of adult witches, ghosts, and vampires. And Barbie. Lots of Barbie. It seems trendy pop culture is challenging the traditional spooky gothic culture Hallows Eve is known for. Though there are some interpretations of history that suggest Halloween really was more of a moment of merriment among the masses than some pagan spiritual spook fest.

A quick search on the history of Halloween and you’ll quickly learn it comes from Ireland via a Celtic festival called Samhein (pronounced “sow-win”). Irish immigrants then brought it to America in the 1800s and here we are. Searching on Samhein will reveal text that says it stems from a spiritual festival by pagans — a religious celebration with imagery of mysticism and the occult where people on earth attempt connections with the dead through fire and rituals. It was believed to be the interaction of pagan people and place seeking interactions with people of another time and place.  

But a more truthful approximation of historical fact reveals the story of Samhein may be a victim of what one historian calls a combination of “fakelore and folklore”. Professor Robert Davis studies religious and cultural education at the University of Glasgow as it relates to people, place, and social change. He writes that much of Irish history stems from the work of a seventeen-century historian named Geoffrey Keating. Davis joins a chorus of critics who argue Keating's work, while beautifully written, is mostly a form of exaggerated romantic nationalism.

Keating wrote during a time when Irish history and culture were under threat from English influence and rule. Critics believe his narratives therefore assert a particularly noble Irish identity and history, which led him to possibly embellish or reinterpret certain historical events or figures. Keating was also a Catholic priest, which influenced his historical interpretations. Including the notion that these ancient Irish clans and respective nobility were Catholic.

His intertwining of religious and secular perspectives is seen as a reflection of Keating's worldview. But it doesn’t always live up to academic scrutiny expected from histography. But because Keating was also a poet and had a compelling command of the Irish language, his writing was accessible and enjoyable. This further endeared him to readers while also allowing his work to endure. His influence is present today despite his critics, as evidence by the dominant narrative surrounding Sanhein found in history books and online.

Keating’s recalling of this autumnal event is unique in its reference to mythological religiosity by pagans of the past. There are legal and agricultural Irish texts and calendars that indeed show there was a festival on or around November 1, just no mention of any worship for the dead, paranormal occurrences from the ‘underworld’, or the observance of a celebratory ‘Eve’ stemming from some form of ancient pre-Christian calendar. These pagan accounts are commonly associated with Sanhein and thus Halloween and appear to all lead to Keating himself. Meanwhile, his interpretation has since branched into every account of history paraded as historical fact.

Historical records from neighboring regions like Wales and Scotland also show no evidence of Halloween-like celebrations occurring, apart from those areas populated by Irish immigrants! But like in Ireland, there were indeed agrarian celebrations commemorating the end of the harvest season. And those included autumnal festivities we may recognize today as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even New Year.

SONGS, SPIRITS, AND THE SOUL OF TRICK-OR-TREATING

Keating wasn’t alone in weaving pagan lore into Christian mythology and dogma. He probably picked up from the Christian bible. The Roman Catholic Church, especially in its earliest centuries, borrowed heavily from the imagery and ceremony of pagan folklore and fakelore to lure non-Christians into their faith. This summer our family went to see the Swedish rock band, Ghost, who’s leader, Tobias Forge, leverages this history, and its imagery, on stage and in costume to call attention to this appropriation. It’s a presentation, I might add, fit for Broadway.

Indeed, Pope Gregory III of the Roman Catholic Church, established All Saints Days as November 1st in the 8th Century and eventually made its way to the British Isles. Also known as All Hallows Day. The word “Hallow” stems from the Old English word “hālig” which means “holy”. The celebration before All Hallows Days, on October 31st, or on the “evening” or “even” — as commonly shortened in Old English, which could also be written and pronounced as ‘e’en’ — became known as Halloween.

Halloween most likely originates from the rotation of the earth and the shift in seasons. Fall has always been a time of collecting what food you can, sharing any abundance with less fortunate community members, and mourning the loss of organic life that relies on photosynthesis. A requirement for keeping animals like us alive. It’s a time to take stock, hunker down, and hope you survive the impending harsh winter.

It was also a convenient time to take spoiled and fermented fruits to make wine and be merry. Fields and piles of debris were set ablaze in preparation for next season. Migrant field workers, with no rows to plough or crops to pick, went door to door in search of food, clothing, work, or compassion. It’s not hard to see how these rituals stemming from the rhythm of life could be woven into religious tales of death, renewal, and purifying fire — but also compassion and charity.  

Professor Davis believes the best image of the history of Halloween can be resurrected by the lyrics of the songs sung in the British Isles on Halloween, Hallows Day, and even a third day of celebration less known today, All Souls Day. These songs were sung at gatherings, but also by beggars going door-to-door seeking food or gifts. It’s a tradition known as “souling”, but today many of us would recognize it as either trick or tricking, thanksgiving feast, or caroling. All three of which, are born — one way or other — out of the loss of sun in the northern hemisphere brought on by a tilting earth.

Here's one song Professor Davis offers up as representative of the spirit of Halloween.

A soul, a soul, a soul cakePlease, good missus, a soul cakeAn apple, a pear, a plum or a cherryAny good thing to make us all merryOne for Peter, two for PaulThree of Him who made us all

God Bless the master of this house, the mistress alsoAnd all the little children who around your table growLikewise your men and maidens, your cattle and your storeAnd all that dwells within your gatesWe wish you ten times more

The lanes are very dirty and my shoes are very thinI’ve got a little pocket I can put a penny inIf you haven’t got a penny, a half penny will doIf you haven’t got a half penny, then God bless you.

This song reveals the fusion of the wants and needs that come with scarcity and misfortune blended with the hope and charity promised by various forms of Christianity. Professor Davis puts it best, Halloween is

“Steeped in the peculiar religious imagery of Halloween, with its refining fires, its muffled imploring voices and its traffic with the supernatural.” Together they attempt to bridge “the past, the present and the future into a momentarily inspiring alignment around the axis of hope.”

I’m reminded that where I grew up in Iowa, home to many an Irish immigrant — including one of my Grandparents — we had to tell a joke before we were given candy while out trick-or-treating. I wonder if this derives from ‘souling’?

My wife and I insist on jokes before little goblins and witches are allowed to dip into the candy bowl. How mean. Maybe this year, we’ll demand a song. Spiderman has a good soundtrack, and so does Barbie. But a song from Ghost might be most appropriate. “Hunter’s Moon” anyone? The B-side is “Halloween Kills”.

Hello Interactors,

This post brings new meaning to the phrase ‘reading the tea leaves’.

Watching my tea diffuse recently, I got to thinking about how humans diffuse around the globe like tea particulates in a teacup. Some migrate intentionally, others are forced, and some are lured across borders — as if by osmosis, like tea through a strainer.

It’s tea time somewhere in the world, so grab a cup and let’s go…

DRINKING DYNAMICS AND HUMAN DIFFUSION

I’m a tea drinker. I relish the ritual of tea-making, watching the clear water transform in hue, be it the gentle embrace of green tea or the profound depths of black. Hydrogen and its oxygen friends, in a fervent state, eagerly extract molecules from the tea elements, diffusing them throughout the cup until a balance or 'teaquilibrium' is reached.

However, this seemingly simple diffusion reflects deeper laws of thermodynamics; it's not merely turning twigs into tea. This transformation is part of a grander system — from the tea leaf's growth in specific conditions, its journey through processing, to ultimately gracing my cup. The tea species' continued evolutionary existence and popularity can be attributed to its taste, aroma, and color. So much so that the fragile leaf bears historical weight — wars have been waged for such traits.

Whether in a teacup, an ecosystem, or an economy, these processes reveal a system's tendency towards certain outcomes, showcasing nature's ceaseless drive for equilibrium and long-term persistence.

This parallels the evolution of humans and how they interact with people and place. Over millennia, humans have been driven to seek better environments, whether they offer more food, safety, or other resources. This behavior, while not consciously directed toward the grand "purpose" of the species, has clear benefits in terms of survival and reproductive success.

Kinetic agitation in the physical and social world is what lead humans to diffuse around the globe — to pass through permeable boundaries intent on achieving equilibrium and long-term persistence. And these days, the world is very agitated and humans are diffusing in record numbers.

Wars and political conflicts, combined with economic hardships, are driving global migrations, including South and Central Americans north to the U.S. border. Political repression and discrimination are pushing individuals to search for more tolerant societies. Environmental challenges, from droughts to rising sea levels, are displacing both intra and intercontinental populations, including inhabitants watching their Pacific Islands become submerged. By the end of 2022 108 million people were forcibly displaced — and growing. That’s up from 40 million in 2010.

But it’s not all crises driven. With some of the largest populations in the world rising out of poverty more and more migrate in search of better educational opportunities and the prospect of a brighter future.

When I was hiring at Microsoft in the early 1990s, the U.S. government was issuing many more work visas than today. The increasing interconnectedness of the world, through technology and transportation, allowed me to hire skilled professionals from other nations. Today people are on massive waitlists hoping to migrate to tech hubs in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Which can be cruel. Some are heavily recruited, offered jobs, and then forced to live in precarity; putting their lives on hold, they wait as the visa lottery unfolds.

But many of those making their way to the U.S. border aren’t being recruited. Not directly anyway. They’re being drawn, through a semi-permeable legal membrane called a border, from areas of low job concentration to high. Agitated by a variety of circumstances, they seek goals and equilibrium in their lives in a quest to persist.

CAPITALISM, MIGRATION, AND THE OSMOSIS OF LABOR

Companies and corporations are also goal seeking. They seek to maximize profits. Just as cells have evolved mechanisms for osmotic balance, capitalism has evolved to maximize capital accumulation. And low-wage migrant workers have evolved as a mechanism to achieve this goal.

Daniel Costa is the Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. In September of 2023 he testified in front of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions on the ‘The Impact of Biden’s Open Border on the American Workforce’.

He said,

“Without immigrant workers, many sectors of the economy would cease to function adequately—whether it be the construction of buildings, crop production, or information technology services.”

And according to the Immigration Research Initiative, the range of jobs is wide:

“the majority of immigrants are in middle- or upper-wage jobs—with 48% employed in middle-wage jobs, earning more than 2/3 of median earnings for fulltime workers (or $35,000 per year) and 17% are in upper-wage jobs, earning more than double the median.”

However,

“immigrants are ‘disproportionately likely to be in low-wage jobs. In all, 35 percent of immigrants are in jobs paying under $35,000, compared to 26 percent of U.S.-born workers.”

As throughout the history of the United States, America runs on immigrants. Even, or at times, especially, undocumented workers. Estimated at just 5% of the overall labor market, a 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Public Policy states

“undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to state and local taxes, collectively paying an estimated $11.74 billion a year.” In California alone, there are an estimated three million undocumented workers accounting for $3.1 billion in state and local taxes.

They estimate

“immigrants nationwide pay on average an estimated 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (this is their effective state and local tax rate). To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent.”

Despite the contributions of nearly eight million undocumented workers, they have no legal status making them ripe for exploitation by employers. And should these workers complain about unfair or unsafe working conditions or unpaid wages, they risk retaliation and deportation.

A 2009 survey of 4300 undocumented workers revealed 37% were illegally paid below minimum wage compared to 16% of U.S.-born workers. And nearly 90% of them said they were not paid overtime wages — a crime that would likely trigger litigation by U.S.-born workers.

One of the primary legal avenues for migrants seeking work in the U.S. is through temporary "nonimmigrant" visas. In 2019, over 2 million migrant workers, representing about 1% of the labor force, were in the U.S. under such programs. Despite their legal status, these workers are highly vulnerable to exploitation, often burdened by illegal recruitment fees that lead to debt bondage. Upon arrival, many find the promised job non-existent, and some even fall victim to human trafficking, including forced involvement in the sex industry.

STEEPING IN THE OSMOTIC TENSION OF CAPITALISM AND MIGRATION

Meanwhile, there are companies across the nation calling on Biden and Congress to fast-track legal authorization of immigrant workers. Just last month, 100 New York CEOs signed an open letter to Biden calling on him to act, stating there is

“a compelling need for expedited processing of asylum applications and work permits for those who meet federal eligibility standards.”

This summer politicians in several states were also calling for the same to fill jobs.

Meanwhile, congress would rather ‘build the wall’. They’ve allocated funding for immigration enforcement at a rate eight times greater than immigration court adjudications and asylum and refugee activities. $37 billion is directed towards Border Patrol and ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, compared to $3.5 billion for immigration courts and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate.

This only leads to more procedural lags that inadvertently promote workplace exploitation, leading to issues like the rise of illicit child labor. Immigrant children don’t choose to work for little to no wages, the uncaring U.S. economic system draws them in — like hot water drawing molecules from a tea leaf.

Some say the United States is ‘swamped’ and can’t accommodate immigrants. And yet Costa Rica has taken in over 270,000 forcibly displaced migrants accounting for 5% of their tiny, and relatively poor, country. Columbia has absorbed two million Venezuelans providing them legal status and a right to remain there for ten years.

I think the immigrant situation in America and the exploitation of the disadvantaged, a hallmark and remnant of the slavery that is the foundation of this country, puts migration and cruel capitalism at a crossroads. The osmotic pull of the capitalist market is triggered by profit seeking maximization that draws vulnerable populations into exploitive roles.

And we consumers are complicit. We have our own selfish maximizing intentions, like seeking and demanding the lowest price. The collective behavior of consumers shapes this market, leading to emergent outcomes like the exploitation of vulnerable populations.

I think about that as I sip my tea. A product most likely grown and processed in unfavorable labor conditions filled with complications and contradictions. All to allow tea-making to be a simple and affordable act. One that also demonstrates an interplay of various forces and principles, from the immediate diffusion of flavor to the broader forces of evolutionary biology and even economics.

These processes exemplify how systems, whether a cup of tea, an ecosystem, or an economy gravitate towards certain outcomes. Whether the actors in these systems act with intentionality or not, the drive towards these outcomes is unmistakable. As we witness people struggling to diffuse through membranes into or within countries, agitated by natural, political, social, or economic forces, I think about their immediate quest for equilibrium and their longer-term quest for persistence.

And then I think about myself and my oxygen counterparts, molecules of the warm clear water, how much are we helping to create this osmotic tension? I fully recognize I am a participant in a form of cruel capitalism that has its own immediate quest for profit maximization and long-term persistence. I too am seeking equilibrium and a longer-term persistence. And it seems for now, in the U.S. anyway, that means more cruel capitalism as both political parties are swayed by this brand of capitalism —intent on maintaining their own equilibrium in their own longer-term quest for persistence.

Hello Interactors,

Cued by shifting hues comes a call for the leaves to fall. Which means Interplace, like the weather, turns to the tumultuous territory of economics. Economics, like fall weather, is not all that predictable — both systems morph in response to layers of interconnected webs of complex systems that adapt, respond, and influence social, environmental, and political interactions.

I recently heard Sean Carroll, an influential theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics, interview Samuel Bowles, an influential economist specializing in economic inequality. They covered an array of topics including the history and future of economics, and physics, in response to growing attention to complexity science.

They harkened back to the industrial age and a time when physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and newly emerging economists were collaborating — building theories, models, steam engines, looms, and calculation machines. It was a complicated time, rich with invention, but also relatively simple by today’s standards.

Hearing this history in the context of the current U.S. United Auto Workers strike made me wonder if perhaps Biden’s fascination with ‘building back better’ America’s industrial past is rooted in a nostalgic yearning for a simpler past.

This labor action arouses a sense of nationalism and nostalgia for the 'good old days' that Trump ignited but Biden just may have usurped. But the industrial sector, however romanticized, now represents a small fraction of jobs in America.

Humans have a penchant for simplifying complex narratives, yearning for an era where gears of industry moved in predictable cycles much like the changing seasons. But these two scientists highlight how the economy in which we exist has advanced in complexity and is ripe for evolution.

Now let’s go.

FROM CLASSIC TO COMPLEX: THE ECONOMIC SHIFT

In the interview, Bowles talks of the history of economic thought, beginning with Adam Smith, an intellectual pillar of the Industrial Revolution and an acclaimed father of economics. Adam Smith's notion of the 'invisible hand,' lauded for its portrayal of self-regulating markets, is heavily scrutinized today.

This famous metaphor has long been the cornerstone of classical economics and conservative politics, purporting that individual self-interest inadvertently contributes to the overall good of society in ‘invisible’ ways. Bowles explains how Smith could observe, amidst the new factory economy in Scotland — complete with newly built cotton mills and shirt factories — how the shirt buyer and seller both acted according to their self-interest. And then, almost as if by magic, an efficient allocation of resources emerged and along with it a social contract.

In simple transactions, like buying a shirt, Bowles illustrates how Smith's model functions well. The seller sets a price based on the costs of production and a desire for profit; the buyer accepts this price based on their valuation of the shirt. The transaction is smooth, the contract 'complete,' and market forces work to adjust supply, demand, and pricing in a seemingly natural order.

He offers another historical example that perpetuated the illusion of simple economic models of physics in economics. One of the early influential neoclassical economists, Irving Fisher, built a physical hydraulic model in the early 1900s as part of his dissertation. He used interconnected tanks and pipes to simulate supply and demand. It provided a visceral example of a 'complete contract' where the variables are manageable and the outcomes somewhat foreseeable.

Reflecting on this, Bowles offers,

“Now, there are all kinds of models like that in economics in which the metaphor really is transportation, things moving from here to there.”

However, this 'invisible hand' stumbles when confronted with the complex market forces of the labor required to manufacture a good like a shirt. Bowles believes it wasn’t until 1972, when the Nobel prize winner in economics, Kenneth Arrow, complicate the image of the ‘invisible hand’ as it relates to the labor market.

His work, particularly his Impossibility Theorem, mathematically demonstrated the challenges inherent in collective decision-making and the limits of market efficiency. Whereas the transaction of buying a shirt can be fully described and agreed upon by both parties, making it a 'complete contract,' labor contracts often can't offer this level of specificity and predictability.

Contracts in labor markets become fuzzy. They’re incomplete abstractions that only offer one guarantee — that an employee be present on the job. Their performance is harder to guarantee. Without constant observation of performance, the employer has no guarantees a worker is working hard or hardly working.

But the employer, capable of paying more than the minimum wage to ensure good performance, holds sway over the employee’s behavior. So, if an employee wants to keep their job, they’d better work as hard as possible — until, sometimes, it becomes impossibly hard.

Labor unions, like the United Auto Workers, exist to even this power imbalance by bargaining for fair wages and working conditions. How do they bargain? By choosing to not do the one thing their contract requires – be present on the job. This forces a negotiation, a conversation.

And this is where Bowles, and other economists, are looking to take the field of economics, stating,

“…in recent years, some economists, myself included, have been more attracted to the idea that economic interactions are more like a conversation. So, we should really be thinking about linguistics. That is, I'm having a conversation with you, and in saying what I'm saying now, I'm anticipating your response. And very often I'm having a conversation with somebody with some intention that I would like this person to agree to go to see a film with me, or to agree to work on a paper, and so on. But I'm anticipating what that person's intention is too, of course, in endless regress.”

COMPLEXITY OF COOPERATION: GAME THEORY AND THE REAL WORLD

Finding common ground, coming to agreement, typically requires both parties to have to give something up — to compromise. Economists often lean on a branch of mathematics to model these interactions called Game Theory. Game Theory offers methods to analyze scenarios where the outcome for each participant depends on the choices of all involved.

One experiment used to explore game theory is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario, two prisoners must decide whether to cooperate and remain silent upon interrogation or betray each other to the authorities. Although cooperation would yield a better outcome for both, the rational choice for each individual, given the uncertainty of the other's action, is to betray, often leading to a suboptimal result for all involved.

Bowles has spent a good chunk of his career using this dilemma in experiments worldwide to explore issues of trust, collaboration, and the challenges that emerge when incentives may not align with collective well-being. He’s gone so far as to explore whether the human species is genetically predisposed to selfishness or altruism. His conclusions are published in the book "A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution."

Bowles concludes in the interview that there is

“strong experimental evidence that we are generous in many circumstances. We have models and data which suggests that there might even be a genetic predisposition. And of course, we know there are many cultural reasons why we'd be taught to be that way.”

Of course, every critic of altruism will bring up free-loaders — people who contribute relatively little but aren’t shy about taking their fair share. In Bowles experiments, he’s found “free-riders” are routinely punished even at the expense of self-interest.

In a multi-round public goods game resembling an expanded Prisoner's Dilemma, initial contributions to a shared good start off high but dwindle as players notice others free riding. When a punishment mechanism is introduced, like allowing participants to spend some of their earnings to penalize free-riders, contributions to the public good surge back up, eventually rendering punishment unnecessary.

This dynamic suggests that human behavior in such systems is nuanced: while people are initially willing to cooperate, they adapt to avoid being exploited. Moreover, when given the chance, they actively invest to punish free riders, even at a personal cost.

Bearing this in mind, Bowles believes “if you're thinking of a new economic paradigm, you have to come down on that somehow.” Bowles believes there’s enough evidence today to say it’s wrong to believe humans are purely rational, intelligent actors who act in their own self interest. In his words, “You can't say we're selfish and really smart.”

Instead, he says

“The bumper sticker for my paradigm is ‘People are a lot dumber and nicer than economists think.’”

I like Samuel Bowles use of a linguistics lens to explore economic systems. It’s a compelling touchpoint where natural and social sciences converge around interactions. The nuances of real world economics, he suggests, can be explored but not defined by sterile, mathematical models. We need methodologies that unravel those nested webs of complexities influenced by cultural narratives, historical and political context, and social relationships.

These dynamics are exemplified in the ongoing negotiations between the United Auto Workers and their employers and politicians — talks that encapsulate more than mere contractual details but a convoluted and ever-changing web of expectations, intentions, and power dynamics.

As society evolves, Bowles advocates for a commensurate evolution in our economic models, one that can accommodate these rich human interactions. It signifies a shift from seeking objective certainties to acknowledging the inherently uncertain, dynamic, and complex landscape of the intricate systems that define our world.

Hello Interactors,

After dropping our kids at college, my wife and I spent some time on Cape Cod. She had gone here as a kid for summer family vacations to enjoy the sand and salty air, and she wasn’t alone.

Now people come from all over the world to visit this soggy, sandy, stretch of land surrounded by sea. But it’s capacity is being tested, cresting waves are gobbling the coast, as warming water turns sea life into ghosts. It’s survived this long, but how long can it carry on?

ON SCARGO POND

Situated beneath Scargo Hill, the highest point on Cape Cod, is a pond most people call Scargo Lake. With permission from a lakeside homeowner, my wife and I recently descended its bank through the brush and bramble to swim in the calm, warm water. The stairs are supported by partially submerged glacial rocks deposited around 14,000 years ago.

The pond itself is one of hundreds of kettle ponds, giant divots formed by the glacier. After coming to its final resting spot at the edge of what was to be called the Atlantic Ocean, the mountain of ice melted leaving a sandy, spongey cape dimpled with ponds of melted glacier water. The runoff from Scargo Hill now feeds this pond as it makes its eventual journey back into the sky or salty sea.  

One of the rocks deposited near the stairs is the size of a Volkswagon Beetle. Its permanence stands in stark contrast to the drifting fine sand of the famed Cape Cod beaches. No amount of rainfall will budge this boulder, but recent ravenous runoff has reshaped this ravine of late. Another reminder, along with the shifting sands, that despite illusions of permanence earth’s natural forces are unyielding.

Cape Cod is dripping with illusions of permanence. The man who built these stairs was a friend and colleague of my father-in-law. His name was Rudy. He was an esoteric retired dentist, who in retirement, took his proclivity for tinkering with teeth – a profession hellbent on slowing inevitable decay – to nurture nostalgia’s permanence.

His basement was like a touristy roadside attraction with a replica of a small 1950s diner booth, walls adorned with posters and pictures of the past, coin operated amusement park gadgets from the early 20th century, and a favorite of mine – a player piano.

Rudy liked to spool up his appropriately favorite song, the 1957 pop hit song Old Cape Cod. Rudy would sing along with these opening lyrics:

If you're fond of sand dunes and salty airQuaint little villages here and thereYou're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod

The song was written by a Boston-area housewife who, like Rudy, was so fond of vacationing on the cape. New England tourism, including Cape Cod, was just getting underway in the 1950s. A 1953 article in the publication Economic Geography reports,

“To many New England communities, the past few decades have been a time of economic readjustment and expansion…This current reversal of trend is largely the result of New England’s growing tourist industry, the income from which in 1951 amounted to $957,000,000.”

That would be over ten billion dollars today.

Recent analysis from the National Park Service reports over 300 million visitors streamed through Cape in 2022 resulting in $23 billion dollars of direct spending. Clearly a lot of people are fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there, as more and more people fall in love with old Cape Cod.

Not everyone thought Cape Cod would be a tourist destination. One hundred years before the cape’s 1950s popularity, Henry Thoreau wrote in his book, Cape Cod,

“The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them…Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands.”

Thoreau was visiting the Cape at a time when the allusivity of shifting sands posed a real threat to Cape Cod tourists and residents. After chatting with the lighthouse keeper of The Highland Light, the eastern most U.S. lighthouse and the first to greet sailors venturing from Europe to Boston, Thoreau believed even this beacon of permeance was threatened. He writes,

“According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We calculated, from his data, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away at this point, ‘for,’ said he, ‘I can remember sixty years back.’”

Thoreau surmised the lighthouse keeper would likely outlive the lighthouse. While it indeed was moved a short distance and rebuilt, it remains today as one of many Cape Cod tourist attractions. It’s not just the lighthouse that’s been preserved all these years, but the very grounds that surround it.

SAND DOOMS

One hundred years before Thoreau’s visit, the harbor just north of the Highland Lighthouse, East Harbor, – at the narrowest segment of the cape – was erased. Tides from a powerful storm had sucked the eastern sands to sea breaching the harbor and severing the narrow, but contiguous, land mass in two. Provincetown, at the tip of the cape, was stranded on a newly formed island.

Alarmed by this development, the federal government rushed to plant sea grass and install fencing to build sand dunes and fill the gap. As part of the restoration program residents were encouraged, and threatened by law, to plant beach grass every spring. Within a few years expansive dunes began to form.

Over the proceeding decades and well into the 1800s of Thoreau’s visit, the practice of planting grass and installing fences had created another problem. The dunes had grown so extensive that the East Harbor was filling in with sand. In 1826, the state government issued a study that determined the dunes had extended more than four miles. This prompted the government to encourage more grass planting to block the spreading sand.

As Thoreau wrote,

“I was told that about thirty thousand dollars ($1,000,000 today) in all had been appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part of it was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots...Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom.”

Beach grass planting is what has kept Cape Cod from becoming a total wreck and the beaches intact. But that 1826 report also noted that it was the removal of trees and shrubs that compounded the spread of sand in the first place. It was European settlers wrecking East Harbor in the eighteenth century by cutting down trees, letting the wind blow the sand away, resulting in the East Harbor being breached by the sea due to too little sand. And then, a century later, more settlers were wrecking East Harbor with too much sand through the planting of beach grass – destining it to be a vast sand dune.

Today East Harbor is hemmed in on the west by a highway atop a dike and sand dunes to the east still protected by sea grass. The highway was part of a reclamation project completed in 1868, just three years after Thoreau was there. This thin band of highway atop decades of accumulated sand and sod has turned the harbor into what some call Pilgrim Lake.

Since 1868 this body of water has gone from a salty marine environment into a manmade freshwater pond with a host of environmental problems. The stagnant water caused massive sand fly outbreaks, the proliferation of non-native plants, and large-scale fish kills. In 2001 one such kill prompted the installation of a 700 foot long, four-foot diameter culvert equipped with a valve for one-way drainage of stagnant water to the sea. After a year of little progress, authorities decided to keep the valve open to let salty tide water back into the harbor. By 2005 the invasive carp and cat-tail populations had declined, shellfish, sticklebacks, silversides, and sea squirts returned, and the water turned clear again.

Tourists have also bloomed to nuisance levels on Cape Cod. They’re drawn to sand dunes and salty air with quaint little villages here and there. My father-in-law’s friend, Rudy, wasn’t the only one intent on preserving the past. Much effort, with private and government money, has gone into preserving a certain historic cultural and environmental ideal of Cape Cod rooted in a colonial past. Out of Boston you pass Plymouth rock on Pilgrim Highway all the way to Pilgrim Lake. One of the roads I run down on the cape is called Whig, the nineteenth century conservative political party.

There is a lot of talk of conservation, preservation, and recreation on Cape Cod, but not so much about reservations. Even though the state is named after the Massachusett people. The Wampanoag people have lived in and around what is now Cape Cod since soon after that glacier melted. And they’re still there. One tribe resides on an island once connected to the mainland called Martha’s Vineyard. The other is on Cape Cod in Mashpee where nearly three thousand Mashpee Wampanoag are enrolled in the tribe. Mashpee is an anglicized word for Mâseepee: mâs means "large" and upee means "water" referring to the largest lake on Cape Cod – Mashpee Pond – where they were forced to settle by colonizers.

For the native humans to thrive in the harsh conditions the cape for nearly ten thousand years required a way of living that worked with or mimicked nature. You’d think the ‘enlightened’ European colonizers would have recognized this. Surely some did, especially in the beginning, but clearly, we’re still learning.

THE SHIFTING SANDS

My wife and I saw a significant reshaping of one beach we have frequented over the years. Waves had clearly taken a bigger bite than usual. To remediate and maintain the beach for tourists, the city had imported a swath of sand to supplant the loss. But it wasn’t the fine white sand that makes Cape Cod beaches so attractive, it was the brownish, dirty, gritty sand used to make concrete.

It seemed a desperate and uncertain attempt at holding on to the allusive certainty of the past – a temporary patch covering the truth in a nostalgic myth of sand dunes and salty air. It’s a story that props up quaint little villages here and there. Should the truth be known of the impermanence of the cape, people may stop falling in love with old Cape Cod.

I couldn’t help noting the conflicting and contrasting nature of Cape Cod. Like the beach grass planted to preserve their primary tourist attraction – beaches – from the effects of wind, only to be thwarted by a rising and increasingly hostile sea. Or the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History’s display on the Wampanoag people portrayed as a distant past even though they thrive today. And the quaint neighborhood road signs that occasionally read Thickly Settled amidst a cape that itself has become thickly settled.

The tourism industry props up a nostalgic illusory image of a past that reaches just far enough back in time to perpetuate the story of colonial control, but not so far as to recognize a more native coexistent past. It’s part of a coordinated effort, buoyed by private and public dollars, to futilely maintain the physical geography of a sea-bound land mass largely made of sand and marsh. And for the most part, it’s all done for the tourism industry.

I can’t help but see it as a snake eating its own tail. The commodification of nature that is being destroyed by commodification. The increased commercialization of “local” only serves to increase property prices thus pushing out locals. Overcrowded tourism degrades the tourism experience. And a depleting of the very resources on which they depend, like water. And it’s all occurring amidst a changing climate.

In recent years Cape Cod has experienced levels of coastal hypoxia not recorded prior to 2017. Coastal hypoxia, or "dead zones," involves a decrease in oxygen levels in coastal waters. Most evidence points to the cause being – surprise – human-induced factors such as nutrient pollution from freshwater runoff and wastewater discharge.

In the last few summers, the bottom waters in Cape Cod Bay have suffered from low oxygen levels, which is unusual. Factors like warmer water, layering of water temperatures, and altered wind patterns are creating an environment prone to low oxygen near the seabed. These climate shifts are seriously affecting the types of plants and animals in and around Cape Cod. My wife and I would not have been swimming Scargo Lake last summer due to an outbreak of a harmful bacteria.

Cape Cod, like most of the colonized world, is a victim of cultural and environmental disruption. The influx of tourists since the mid twentieth century, like the influx of European colonizers centuries before, have disrupted the lifestyles and cultures of the very local communities they sought to enjoy. Instead, locals, like the Wampanoag before them, have been exploited and expunged leaving Cape Cod enshrined in a commercial haze of cultural hypoxia and an influx of mono-cultural human species. And it’s all surrounded by a coastal dead zone, an increasingly angry sea, shifting and volatile wind, and an uncertain future.

I can see centuries of colonial behavior more like an invasive species. We’ve been introduced to new habitats where we didn't historically exist, and we have disrupted native ecosystems. We grow our populations rapidly and seek to outcompete native species, natural resources, and ecosystems. Like invasive species we exploit and deplete local resources, alter food chains, and ecosystem dynamics. It’s all led to the transformation of landscapes and widespread habitat alteration.

But we humans, as native populations demonstrate, have unique capacities for complex decision-making, culture, and technology, which can be harnessed for both positive and negative impacts on ecosystems. Moreover, humans have the capacity to recognize and mitigate their impacts, making conscious efforts toward conservation and sustainability. And indeed, the ongoing restoration of East Harbor shows how possible this can be.

But to do this on a global scale requires us to not think of ourselves or the past as a stationary rock deposited by a glacier, but as a grain of sand at the beach. Grains of sand, when combined, give rise to complex emergent phenomenon like dunes and beaches. These emergent structures are not present in individual grains but emerge from their interactions with others and their co-arrangement.

Let’s grow even fonder of the sand dunes and salty air. If we want to maintain quaint little villages here and there, embrace uncertainty and reject despair. Let’s fall in love with the cape as the Wampanoag did, not the allusive nostalgic one experienced as a kid.

References

The Impact of Tourism on the Economy of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Lewis M. Alexander. Economic Geography. 1953.

Tourism to Cape Cod National Seashore contributes $750 million to local economy. U.S. National Park Service. 2023.

Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Neeland Media LLC. Kindle Edition.

Unprecedented summer hypoxia in southern Cape Cod Bay: an ecological response to regional climate change? Scully, et al. Biogeosciences. 2022.

Hello Interactors,

Our family got sucked into watching the Amazon Prime show, Clarkson’s Farm. As a suburban Iowa boy who knew just enough farmers to know how hard it is, I found this show relatable. Apart from the entertaining allure of many staged reality shows, I realized it also highlights topics I investigate here on Interplace. Especially the interaction of the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’…or lack thereof.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve watched this show and what you think!

I’ll be taking a little break from writing in the coming weeks and will return in September.

Until then, let’s go!

THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE

My son is a car guy. As such, he turned our family onto the pied piper of car guys, the British journalist turned media celebrity, Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is most known for his part in the shows ‘Top Gear’ and ‘The Grand Tour’ but has turned his attention to farming in recent years complete with his own show called "Clarkson's Farm." It’s a simple yet complicated narrative that unfurls like the intricate English countryside hedgerows he commissioned for his farm in an episode we watched recently.

The show chronicles Jeremy, a controversial climate change denying fossil fuel lover who expresses glee at polluting the natural environment, fulfilling a fantasy of becoming a farmer. A city boy naively embarking on a journey to become a farm boy. “How hard can this be?”, he insinuates, as his hired companion, Kaleb, a true farm boy, continually saves him from one disaster after another. Kaleb left the show earlier this year to help the Royal Agricultural University teach young people how to farm. A move that appears to be motivated by what Jeremy’s farm manager called his ‘stupidest idea yet’ – to raise pigs.

Clarkson is comfortable with stupid ideas leading to disasters having been sued, fired, and defamed on countless occasions for making racist, misogynistic, and other statements in bad taste while joyfully wallowing in the attention, fame, and revenue that comes in the aftermath. An enigmatic media magnet with sociopathic tendencies.

But I’m finding Clarkson’s Farm oddly intriguing as a snapshot of the interaction of people and place. It weaves threads of common human endeavors, the natural environment, and the evolving rhythms of modern society. He, and the show’s producers, intertwine personal, social, political, and environment struggles like meandering streams of the show’s British rural landscape. Clarkson is a bit like the menacing disease spreading badger featured in another episode – a curious creature exploring and exploiting the winding lanes and hidden corners of a quiet countryside. Both a bane and a boon. A nuisance and a neighbor.

His show also echoes intriguing themes explored among urban and rural geographers alike. They, like Clarkson, are playing with what it means to blend the rural with the urban. Jeremy's personal, social, and political journey within the pastoral tapestry of the Cotswold’s north of Oxford is interwoven with the ecosystems found in the mosaic of fields, woodlands, and waterways that define its countryside. A strand of a larger tapestry that challenges, like Jeremy has, the notion of rural and urban in the growing urbanization of our planet.

Planetary urbanization, as a thesis, has drawn scrutiny among some critical human geographers who call for a profound shift in the approach to understanding 'urban' and 'rural' spaces on a global scale. The origins of planetary urbanization can be traced back to Henri Lefebvre's pioneering hypothesis, first introduced in his 1970 work "The Urban Revolution" suggesting society has undergone complete urbanization. He subsequently furthered the notion that globalization has created a complete integration and interdependence of urban and non-urban spaces each with their own boundaries and borders.

Jeremy's agricultural odyssey unfolds in this realm where these distinctions of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ become pronounced as Jeremy’s lack of comfort and knowledge of the ‘rural’ is set against the younger Caleb’s lack of experience and familiarity of the ‘urban’. The show attempts to script a blurring and harmonizing of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ only to be foiled by the unrelenting rhythm of uncertainty and emergent behavior of human and non-human nature – including a global pandemic, local politics, and global and local economics.

Clarkson’s Farm, and the concept of planetary urbanization, is challenged by the spatial boundary urbanization has artificially created. It legitimizes Lefebvre's proposition that urbanization extends far beyond traditional urban centers, suggesting that rural spaces, as well as elements such as wilderness areas, oceans, the atmosphere, and even the planetary sub-surface, contribute to a global urban fabric. After all, anyone in the world can go to Jeremy’s website to buy his food products and swag.

But the show also raises questions about the specificity and boundaries of the 'urban' and underscores the need for a renewed urban theory that transcends the traditional confines of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘country’ and ‘city’, or ‘rural’ and ‘urban’.  Scholars have raised concerns about the potential intellectual colonization and methodological biases inherent in theories of planetary urbanization. Particularly, the erasure of the 'rural' in socio-political power and in this theoretical framework has lead to 'rural' becoming a marginalized category.

Indeed, Jeremy does his fair bit of this in the show where he frequently looks down his nose at Kaleb’s lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ urban culture. Meanwhile, Kaleb is not shy about looking down his nose at Jeremy for his lack of exposure to more ‘sophisticated’ rural culture. But ultimate, Jeremy – and by extension ‘urban’ culture – wield the most power and influence over the world and people like Kaleb. Just as ‘urban’ research and theories dominate academia, the media, and public culture.

BLURRING BORDERS

Critics contend planetary urbanization’s exclusive focus on the urban sphere risks overshadowing the critical importance of rural spaces as nodes in global networks of resource provisioning. Post-colonial scholars highlight the dangers of perpetuating colonialist narratives by centering solely on urban processes and ignoring the rich histories and contributions of rural societies.

"Clarkson's Farm" and the planetary urbanization thesis, rooted in the ideas of Lefebvre, becomes like the bordered farm properties in the show, with blotches of natural occurring landscapes, networks of roads mingling with streams each flowing through the countryside. Just as theories of planetary urbanization seek to uncover the power dynamics and class struggles that shape our urban and rural landscapes while also perpetuating them, Jeremy's farming journey does the same.

While planetary urbanization has led to many insights, its grounding in neo-Marxist political economy has also led to a certain reductionism. It neglects the rich interplay of life and agency found in species beyond humans in dimensions that extend beyond the surface of the earth into the atmosphere and below the ground. This exclusion stems from a perspective that normalizes and justifies the slow creep of urbanism that further entrenches artificial boundaries with the rural.

This fusion offers yet another lens into Clarkson’s farm that reveals the delicate balance between individual actions of Jeremy and other human actors, livestock and other animal actors, plants and other organism actors, the weather and other atmospheric actors, and the soil and other chemical actors. Each of which contributes and reacts to unfolding and unpredictable systemic behavior creating an intricate weave of complex adaptive systems.

In our acceptance of reductionist thinking, we may inadvertently be overlooking the holistic potential of planetary thinking. Planetary thinking extends beyond human interactions on the Earth's surface, embracing verticality and encompassing not only terrestrial but also atmospheric and subterranean connections.

The ideology more aligned with this perspective comes from the French philosopher’s Deleuze and Latour. Their ideas offer a contrasting perspective that challenges the boundaries between human and non-human, urban and rural. Just as Lefebvre's thesis emphasizes the societal shift toward complete urbanization, the Deleuzian and Latourian lens blurs these distinctions entirely arguing everything is constantly changing and evolving and everything is connected, with no clear boundaries between humans and non-humans. In the interplay between these ideologies, we find a dance—a dance that mirrors the shifting, and often awkward, patterns of human-world interaction observed in "Clarkson's Farm."

Geography and sociology researchers Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski at Lancaster University introduce the term 'planetary multiplicity' to describe a planet capable of self-transformation influenced by the interactions of these blurred external forces. They argue that in the wake of unyielding forest fires, rising seas, the changing composition of soil, water, and atmosphere, and even altered adaptation of species, that the planet is being forced to transform itself in multiple ways – and in ways we human’s may not be accustomed to or able to control. This reminds me of Jeremy, a man of wealth, privilege, and control, forced to deal with an unyielding multitude of natural and human-made external forces in ways he may not be accustomed to…or able to control.

For me, “Clarkson's Farm" has transformed from a mere show about a controversial but entertaining car journalist into a thought-provoking journey — a proxy for some of the academic insights describing real-world complexities I find myself drawn to. It's a well filmed and produced journey that invites us to the beautiful but complex British countryside – invariably traversing beyond Jeremy’s crooked farm rows and groomed hedges, to venture into realms that echo the timeless wonders of rural life.

As we meander through the countryside of nosey neighbor narratives, local politics, and the drama of farm life – all in the comfort of a Land Rover or Lamborghini tractor – I’m reminded, in multiple interdependent ways, that despite the intricate pretense of a choreographed TV show, we exist individually as but a small part of a larger vibrant ecosystem that is ever-evolving, ever-surprising, and ever-enchanting. But collectively, especially as urban masses, we are no doubt a large part of an ever-increasing, ever-consuming, and ever-uncertain outsized geological and atmospheric force.

Meanwhile, mainstream society, like Clarkson, remain fixed in reductionist thinking that continues to empower a few in the name of exploitation and marginalization of many. Kaleb left the show to be a dad and help teach young farmers while Jeremy attempts to continue to leverage his money, power, and influence in his fantasy of jumping over the imagined border of an urban elite to an everyday farmer. But maybe by exposing the world to rural life, Jeremy inadvertently demonstrated just how interconnected we all are with the world.

Hello Interactors,

Summer is waning and nature’s energy is draining. Meanwhile, record heat and fires in the northern hemisphere remind us the sun has yet to relent. But plants know what to do to prepare.

They slow down and repair. They store and restore through the winter snore for when the sun comes back for more. Why can’t we humans, and our societies, learn this rhythm of life? Maybe we’re just not as smart as plants. Yet.

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Thanks, Interactors, for your energy and care. While I do this mostly for my own education, it’s nice to see people join the journey. Please give me a like and a hello so Interplace can continue to grow!

Now let’s go…

IS A FALL UPON US?

I can sense summer ending. And so can plants. They’re in the waning days of the growing season as they deftly adapt their metabolism – triggered by subtle shifts in the environment. As the sunlight fades and temperatures dip, the once vibrant act of photosynthesis slows – a signal from a rotating earth to take a pause. The production of glucose, their lifeblood, drops, but the tireless rhythm of respiration continues its steady beat.

Plants astutely sense the inevitable chill embarking on a strategic storage mission, hoarding precious energy and nutrients in their vaulted roots and stems. Stiffening to embrace the chilling challenge, they undergo a metamorphosis augmenting their resilience to freezing temperatures. Some species, like many of my sedums, channel their remaining vigor into blossoms and seeds before a winter's nap.

A plants' photochemical metabolic efficiency and prowess not only evokes wonder and admiration, but a bit of jealousy. Imagine being able to generate energy just by lying in the sun.

Metabolism is a biological process that determines how fast energy is exchanged between an organism and its surroundings. It transforms what's around us into fuel for maintenance, growth, and reproductive abundance.

This concept isn't just limited to individual organisms, but collections of organisms. Like groups of social humans. 'Sociometabolism' expands the idea of biological metabolism to human societies – how energy flows between a society and its environment, and how it's used within that society.

The sources of energy are different for each context. Biological metabolism relies mostly on light captured by plants which is then consumed by other living beings. A continuous metabolic flow through the entire food chain.

Sociometabolism can be more versatile. Sure, it involves consuming biomass for food or fuel, but it also encompasses energy generated from other sources – like fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, and wind power.

Both biological metabolism and a big chunk of sociometabolism depend heavily on consuming biological materials, whether it's plants or animals. This connects them closely to the flow of essential elements, like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Metabolism on earth is interconnected in a massive web of resource exchange.

Geographer Yadvinder Malhi wondered how much metabolic energy flows through the biosphere. He took a stab at estimating in a 2014 paper on “The Metabolism of a Human-Dominated Planet.” With the sun as the primary source of energy for the biosphere, he calculates about 174 petawatts (PW) of solar energy reaches the planet's upper atmosphere.

To put that in perspective, an old-fashioned 100-watt (W) lightbulb requires .1 kilowatts (KW) of energy. A 1000-watt drill requires 1 KW of energy. If one kilowatt is 103 W, then one petawatt is a whopping 1015 W. The sun is giving the planet 1 followed by 15 zeroes times 174 watts worth of energy! Plants and bacteria capable of photosynthesizing capture a portion of this solar energy through photosynthesis and store it as carbon-based chemical bonds.

This captured energy is quantified as Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), and the biosphere's GPP is approximately 210 petagrams of carbon per year. Converting GPP to energy units, the global photosynthetic metabolism is estimated at 265 terawatts (TW) or 1012 W. Sixty percent of that productivity comes from the land biosphere and 40% from the marine biosphere, representing only 0.2% of total surface solar energy.

Of that 0.2%, around 50-70% is used by plants and phytoplankton to metabolize and 30-50% is directed towards growing biomass. This biomass, in turn, is gobbled up by plant eaters, bacteria, and fungi. Fueling the ecosystem then requires about 75 TW of energy on land and 57 TW in the oceans to generate all the biomass energy available for other organisms to consume. Including humans. Given these numbers, how does our human metabolism stack up?

Imagine an 11x17 (A3) piece of paper sitting atop a leafy tree in a tropical forest in South America with the sun directly above. The amount of solar energy hitting that paper equals the energy required for an average sized active adult to metabolize one of our primary fuel sources – sugar. The equivalent of a 120 W light bulb. Cut the paper in half and that’s what would be required for an average-sized adult human to metabolize sugar while resting.

Any other mammal our size would require roughly the same amount of energy. However, we allocate energy differently than other mammals due to our relatively large brains. Nearly one-quarter to one-third of our energy, when resting, goes to feeding our brain. As a result, we dedicate proportionately less energy to growing biomass than a mammal of our size. In fact, we grow at a rate more akin to a reptile with similar mass. Malhi offers up a boa constrictor as a suitable comparison.

FROM HUNT AND FARM TO THE FAT FARM

That big brain of ours invents creative ways to consume energy relative to our biosphere family members. Especially when we humans congregate, socialize, and invent. Human sociometabolism has increased over our existence from hunting and gathering as other organisms do (preagriculture age), to controlling, appropriating, and domesticating plants and animals (agricultural age), to the use of biomass, fossil fuels, and other forms of energy to power inventions that feed our growing, and seemingly insatiable, sociometabolism (industrial age).

Even as increasingly more energy is now required to fuel servers to feed the current global wave of AI hysteria (information age), all three of these previous stages of sociometabolism still exist. It’s not so much that humans went from one stage to another, but more we added each stage to the other. Today, some communities and societies do more or less of hunting and gathering, farming, powering machines, or running software than others. Taken together, we are all part of human sociometabolism.

To quantify humanity's sociometabolism, Malhi considers both energy flows, which can be obtained from energy statistics in those societies that collect and publish them, and material flows, specifically the flow of biomass used for human or livestock nutrition. While energy flows are more easily accessible in contemporary contexts, material flows were a crucial aspect of the metabolism in pre-industrial societies and continue to hold significance in modern societies as well.

Malhi took some numbers from another study in 2008 that puts aspects of these sociometabolic transitions into perspective.

* In a measure of population density per square kilometer, humans went from one human per 0.02–0.10 square kilometers in Preagricultural, to 40 in Agricultural, to 400 in Industrial.

* Farmers as a percentage of the human population went from zero in Preagricultural, to greater than 80% in Agricultural, to less than 10% in Industrial.

* Sociometabolism as watts per capita went from 300 W in Preagricultural, to 2000 W in Agricultural, to 8000 W in Industrial.

* Total energy use per unit area (W per square kilometer) went from 6-30 W in Preagricultural, to 82,000 in Agricultural, to 3,300,000 in Industrial.

* The share of plant and animal metabolism required to feed our own sociometabolism went from 0.0002% in Preagricultural, to 3-6% in Agricultural, to 210% in Industrial.

However, our big brains did invent ways to become more efficient with energy use. The percentage of biomass energy needed to fuel human sociometabolism went from greater than 99% in the Preagricultural age – that is, if you didn’t use your limited energy to hunt or gather – and/or socialize – you’d likely die, to greater than 95% in Agricultural – in other words, farming reduced the area needed to find food but still required a lot of energy, to 10-30% in Industrial – now those humans most advantaged by machines could use less of their own energy to live (and presumably store more energy in the form of fat).

Human sociometabolism, for a vast and growing segment of the world’s population, has emerged as significantly smaller than the biological metabolism of the African savannah landscape where our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared. By Malhi’s calculations, our sociometabolism differs from theirs by six orders of magnitude.

For over a million years, Homo sapiens, and its ancestral Homo species, lived as hunter-gatherers. They improved little in resource gathering efficiency, despite gradual brain expansion and technological advancements. In this period, our metabolic impact on the planet remained relatively modest, likely lesser than that of much larger mammals like elephants and mammoths. However, a significant shift occurred about ten thousand years ago with the Neolithic revolution and the introduction of farming, marking a pivotal moment in human history.

The question is, is there enough energy on this planet to feed growing insatiable sociometabolisms? The trends don’t run in our favor unless human societies evolve as plants did. To survive, they cued into the natural rhythm of a rotating earth to form their own rhythm of life. Some ancient plants failed to ease their hyperactive, energy consuming process of photosynthesis. They didn’t take a break, conserve energy in their vaulted roots, repair damaged cells, and prepare for another trip around the sun. And evolution punished them. Now they’re fossilized carbon buried deep in the ground fueling our human sociometabolism.

Are we humans, as a species, future fossils in our waning days of a failed evolutionary experiment? Have we learned to slow our pace of consumption, conserve and store our energy? Can we evolve our sociometabolism by inventing rhythmic ways to seasonally repair and prepare ourselves and our societies for another growth spurt later in the journey around the sun? Are we, as a global society and species, adaptive thriving plants with an evolving future, or another example of failed future fossils?

Hello Interactors,

Our family took a trip to San Diego to visit friends. We got to spend some time in the warm Southern California water at a time when the news was filled with stories about sensational oceanic anomalies. Was the warm water we felt an anomaly? How certain could I be and how certain can anyone be about climatic statistical anomalies?

Let’s unpack it.

BOOGIE WOOGIE FREAK OUT

I felt the current sucking my legs out to sea as a wave formed behind me. I struggled to hurl myself, and my boogie board, toward the beach to meet the momentum of the rising wave. “KICK, KICK, KICK”, I yelled to my son who was next to me.

Then came the welling and humbling sensation born out of the magnitude of a swelling ocean wave. As it crested a smile crossed my face and the force propelled me down the wave’s sloping curve. I looked over and realized not only had my son caught the wave, but my daughter and wife had too. The whole family was giggling and kicking amidst the seafoam of an exhausted but rewarding wave.

I’d forgotten how exhilarating boogie boarding is. I was first introduced to it when I lived in Hermosa Beach, California in the mid-eighties. I’m kicking myself for not learning to surf that year. I didn’t even try until a few years later at the very beach we found ourselves boogie boarding – Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California.

I spent a summer working at a newspaper there in 1987 laying out ads on their newly purchased Mac SE alongside the art director and one full-time designer. They were both surfers and decided to take me out one day. I remember my shoulders being sore for a week from paddling. Let’s just say I paddled more than I surfed.

The water is relatively warm in San Diego which makes it a nice place to surf and boogie board. Not only is it the southern most major city in California and thus the warmest, it can also be the recipient of warm water flowing up the coast from Mexico.

It was cloudy, cool, and a little rainy the day we were boogie boarding with friends making the water feel particularly warm. I wondered how much warmer the water there might be compared to when I was feebly attempting to stand on a surfboard for the first time. I wondered if climate change had demonstrably warmed the surface water after all these years.

Ocean flow and temperatures have been all over the news in the last week or so. Take, for example, this ABC news story that was amplified by a post from John Gibbons, aka @thinkorswim, on that site we’ll all continue to call Twitter. According to John’s profile he likes to ‘freak out and speak out’ on the ‘climate emergency’ but warned he didn’t want to sound ‘alarmist’ when he shared a graph one scientist called ‘gobsmacking’.

It’s a chart of a set of standard deviations — the number of points a number falls above or below an average number. How much it deviates from an average. In this case the number represents the average extent ice has covered a particular area in the Antarctic Sea from 1989 to 2023 as compared to the average between the years 1991-2020.

From 1989 to 2022 the number didn’t deviate from the average much more than 3 or -3 standard deviations, but by June of 2023 it deviated well below -6, or ~6.4 standard deviations.

It makes 2023 look like an exceptionally bad year thus far for a really important element of our climate system: sea ice. These sheets of ice play a significant role in how the Earth's climate behaves. For example, we know it affects how much sunlight is reflected into space (planetary albedo), how the atmosphere moves (atmospheric circulation), the productivity of ocean life, and how heat and salt circulate in the ocean (thermohaline circulation).

Which gets us to another big piece of oceanic news this week; the fate of AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock). The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a large-scale ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean and Danish scientists predicted it’s flow will slow or even stall before the end of the century.

Like polar ice sheets, AMOC is also a critical component of the Earth's climate system. It’s responsible for transporting warm, salty water from the tropics to the northern latitudes and then returning cold, less salty water southward through currents deep in the ocean. This circulation pattern helps regulate the climate by redistributing heat while also influencing weather patterns across the North Atlantic region and beyond.

One of the authors of the study, Susanne Ditlevsen, is a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen. She told the New York Times that “climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.” Given this, she was surprised they could predict the timing of a collapse.

NUMBING NUMBERS

Should we be shocked by statistics yielding whacky numbers or suspicious of the models that produce them? Some scientists are calling for scrutiny of climatic models, encouraging more nuanced discussion of these alarming predictions.

While there is reason to be scared, we should not be scared to reason.

‘Gobsmacking’ numbers from scientists and mathematicians make for good click bait, and indeed can offer legitimate alarm bells, but they also can give the illusion of certainty and can distract us from all that remains uncertain, nuanced, or all together unknowable.

This view was expressed by the climate scientist John Kennedy who scrutinizes the mythology of mathematical certainty and lionizes the phraseology of scientific humility. He called out the gobsmacked scientist ABC quoted about the ‘six-sigma event’ in the Antarctic who was quoted as such,

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said, “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”

To show just how cautious we should be with these numbers, while Dr. Doddridge translated the standard deviations into a 1 in 7.5-million-year event, another math professor and climate watcher noted “6.4 standard deviations would correspond to odds of about 1-in-13,000,000,000 (1-in-13 billion).”

Kennedy, who is decidedly not a climate denialist, also cautions that tracking ice extent in Antarctica has only been occurring for 45 years. This doesn’t mean the once-in-the-lifetime-of-the-Earth’s-existence event isn’t happening, but that it’s derived from a relatively miniscule time span. He suggests we might be better served to let people know that there is much more we don’t know about trends of the ice extent around Antarctica than we do know.

Furthermore, there isn’t a scientist out there who will say what this all means, how it happened, and when it might happen again. For all we know, within the next few years we may see an equally anomalous event in the other direction. After all, Kennedy points out,

“Up to around 2014, extent had been trending gradually upwards. Not by a huge amount, but it definitely wasn’t dropping. It hit a record high in 2014. Then it dropped off a cliff. By 2017, it was record low. It bounced back to “normal” in 2020 and now we are where we are.

He goes on to note the cautious language the IPCC uses to describe these changes.

“In conclusion, the observed small increase in Antarctic sea ice extent during the satellite era is not generally captured by global climate models, and there is low confidence in attributing the causes of the change.“

and

“For Antarctic sea ice, there is no significant trend in satellite-observed sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 in both winter and summer, due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability. Due to mismatches between model simulations and observations, combined with a lack of understanding of reasons for substantial inter-model spread, there is low confidence in model projections of future Antarctic sea ice changes, particularly at the regional level.“

and

“There remains low confidence in all aspects of Antarctic sea ice prior to the satellite era owing to a paucity of records that are highly regional in nature and often seemingly contradictory.”

Kennedy concludes that,

“My concern is that because Antarctic sea ice has suddenly dropped, a lot of people have forgotten what we don’t know. This feeds into the alarmingly large, shonky, yet definitive-sounding numbers like one in 7.5 million years, which then get into headlines, and spread across social media like the clappers. When Antarctic sea ice inevitably does its next weird thing, everyone will suddenly remember what we don’t know and that isn’t, it must be said, a great look.”

He's got a point.

SEA ANOMOLIES

So, what of the warming waters of San Diego? Has the temperature demonstrably changed since I was swimming there 36 years ago? Like all ocean water, it is warming. However, on any given day it may be warmer or cooler relative to past years. It’s this cyclical variability of complex systems coupled with spotty, uncertain, and incomplete data that makes predictions and smoking guns so hard to pin down.

It’s hard to tell what pattern is emerging from this chart dating back to 2000. The peak temperature in 2016 was due a record heat wave, but as you see it was followed up a year later with a significant drop. However, there were measurements in June that indicated “a weak El Niño was associated with above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean” as part of another oceanic circulation pattern known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). So, it’s possible these warm waters made their way to Encinitas. It’s hard to tell.

It's also possible ENSO is partially responsible for Antarctica’s sea ice variability. Climate scientist Zack Labe writes that,

“These patterns of climate variability modulate the transport of heat in the Southern Ocean, storm activity, and patterns of low-level surface winds – all of which significantly affect Antarctic sea ice (a lot more than air temperature does).”

He continues,

“If we see a dramatic change in the large-scale atmospheric circulation in the next few weeks/months, it is very possible that sea ice levels could return closer to average. This is good news, as it implies that we are not necessarily guaranteed to see another new minimum record at the end of next summer.”

But Zack is one the of scientists John Kennedy praises for his humility and willingness to not have definitive answers no matter how attractive they may be to media outlets and their consumers. He writes,

“…even though many scientists (including myself) are often responding with I don’t know for why Antarctic sea ice is so low right now, we do know quite a bit. It’s just that this is very complicated to disentangle so quickly, and there is no simple one-way causal factor to communicate. We have many clues, but scientists need more data and experiments to state their conclusions more confidently (“we” are cautious to avoid making sweeping conclusions by nature of training).

Attributing the why is also very challenging in real-time, especially for understanding the role of climate change in the Antarctic. The normal scientific research process is so much longer than the media cycle. Studies just focusing on 2023’s Antarctic sea ice levels, for instance, will likely be published for at least the next five years or more.”

This much we do know: Antarctic sea ice has been gradually increasing over the past four decades, but there have been some record low levels of sea ice. As we’re seeing now. These changes vary in different regions of Antarctica, with some areas experiencing more ice while others have seen decreases. Wind patterns play a significant role in driving these changes, but the observations are limited, and climate models still struggle to fully explain them.

The annual growth and melting of Antarctic sea ice is a unique and regular phenomenon amidst the year-to-year variations. It plays a crucial role in the exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean, providing a habitat for the diverse ocean ecosystems. Including the habitats I was swimming in last week. Understanding and modeling these processes is essential given their significance but doing so is admittedly very tricky.

The factors contributing to extreme sea ice events include both atmospheric and oceanic drivers. They’re influenced by local changes within Antarctica and remote impacts from other regions like the Pacific Ocean. The combination of anomalous winds and upper ocean heat can lead to significant sea ice deviations and records at specific times. While predicting summer sea ice conditions based solely on the previous winter is challenging, changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation might bring sea ice levels closer to average, offering hope to avoid new minimum records.

Researchers will obviously continue to study sea ice trends to better determine if it's driven by internal variability or unexpected responses to circulation trends in the Northern Hemisphere. But given all these anomalies and uncertainties, it's important to dig into reliable sources, seek knowledge of our complex ecosystems, and be cautious of, or avoid all together, unnecessary hype.

It’s a bit like trying to catch every wave you see. It can become exhausting, disappointing, and with time…depressing. But when you learn to read the ocean from experts, gain some experience, and have some patience, rewards – sometimes exhilarating – do come.

Hello Interactors,

My last post on fractals led me to refamiliarized myself with the man who coined the term, Benoit Mandelbrot, and his influential work on the fractal-like wonders of nature. I didn’t realize he was following in the footsteps of 19th century mathematicians critical of the absolutist purity of Euclidean geometry – themes I recently explored here and here.

My journey led me to a memory of a plane landing on a plane and the complexities that surface on the surface.

Please don’t be shy. Leave a comment or a like. Or just hit reply with a smiley face and a hello!

Now let’s go…

I have a childhood memory, fueled by a crayon drawing, of watching a plane land at the Des Moines airport. My dad was returning home after a business trip. Over time, this memory transformed into a riddle most likely inspired by high school calculus. The riddle posed a question: as the distance between the plane and the runway progressively decreases, when does it equal zero? My pondering was rooted in the observation that, at a microscopic level, the rubber of the tire and the rough surface of the concrete never truly merge into zero. The presence of black streaks on the tarmac from rubber left behind served as evidence. According to classical physics, at an atomic level, the distance between a landing plane and the runway approaches zero but never truly reaches it.

This is because the outermost electron clouds of the atoms in both the tires and the runway surface repel each other due to electromagnetic forces, creating a minute gap between them, measured in angstroms (10 to the power of -10 meters). However, from a practical standpoint, classical mechanics tells us that at a macroscopic level, the plane does make contact with the runway and eventually comes to a stop. Classical mechanics focuses on the behavior of objects on a larger scale, which outweighs the effects observed at the microscopic level. The mechanics of "touchdown" do not rely on atomic physics to achieve zero distance for the safe arrival of our loved ones.

In my childhood crayon drawings, I depicted the runway as a straight line and the plane's wheels as a circle. Yet, this representation itself is a macroscopic interpretation of reality. If we were to examine my marks with a magnifying glass, we would see fragmented wax resting on the textured paper's peaks and valleys rather than perfectly straight lines or round circles. Similarly, we would find fragments of rubber deposited on the peaks and valleys of the concrete runway.

In the realm of high school calculus, the line representing the runway and the circle representing the wheel would be precisely drawn on rigid gridded paper using a plastic flowchart template, akin to the tools my dad used to pseudocode his COBOL programs he no doubt was debugging with his colleagues in Toronto.

Mathematically, I would have described the landing as the height of the plane decreasing as a function of time, incorporating concepts like velocity and acceleration. This interplay between decreasing height and time signifies the plane's motion until it decelerates and reaches a minimum altitude, indicating touchdown. I would have positioned the circle of my plastic template precisely on the flat line, accompanied by an equation describing the moment of touchdown.

However, in 1982, two years before I was in calculus and the year I was learning geometry, mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot published "The Fractal Geometry of Nature," a highly influential book. Mandelbrot's work highlighted the importance of mathematics that deviated from the traditional Euclidean curves and shapes. Introduced by ‘modern’ mathematicians like Georg Cantor and Giuseppe Peano a century earlier, the days of regarding mathematics as absolutely pure and unquestioning were being questioned.

Mandelbrot offers why we were set on this smooth, well-worn trajectory of Euclidian mathematical purity,

“The fact that mathematics, viewed by its own creators as ‘absolutely pure,’ should respond so well to the needs of science is striking and surprising but follows a well-worn pattern. That pattern was first set when Johannes Kepler concluded that, to model the path of Mars around the Sun, one must resort to an intellectual plaything of the Greeks–the ellipse. Soon after, Galileo concluded that, to model the fall of bodies toward the Earth, one needs a different curve–a parabola. And he proclaimed that ‘the greatest book [of nature]...is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures…without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’ In the pithy words of Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson: ‘God always geometrizes.’”

Of the work of Cantor’s set theory and Peano’s space-filling curves, the theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman J Dyson wrote,

“These new structures were regarded by contemporary mathematicians as ‘pathological.’ They were described as a ‘gallery of monsters,’ kin to the cubist painting and atonal music that were upsetting established standards of taste in the arts at about the same time. The mathematicians who created the monsters regarded them as important in showing that the world of pure mathematics contains a richness of possibilities going far beyond the simple structures that they saw in nature.”

Mandelbrot's research delved into the exploration of fractals, which he described as broken shapes, distinct from the smooth Euclidean curves. These fractals opened new possibilities, allowing for the modeling of complex phenomena found in nature. Mandelbrot's fractal geometry was brought to life through computer-generated images of landscapes and clouds, reflecting the generative algorithms found in nature. These images showcased the jagged, impure, and fractured lines that emerged, challenging the simplicity of Euclidean shapes.

Mandelbrot emphasized that drawing a line between just two points on a square Euclidean plane oversimplifies reality. Instead, he considered the fracturing that occurs when lines connect every point in a square or a cube. In fact, the term "fractal" itself derives from the Latin adjective "fractus," meaning "broken." Mandelbrot highlighted the relevance of fractals lying between the shapes of Euclid, akin to fractions lying between integers.

Mandelbrot offers that

“When mathematicians concluded about a century ago that the seemingly simple and innocuous notion of ‘curve’ hides profound difficulties, they thought they were engaging in unreasonable and unrealistic hairsplitting. They had not determined to look out at the real world to analyze it, but to look in at an ideal in the mind. The theory of fractals shows that they had misled themselves.”

Mandelbrot's work demonstrated that the seemingly simple crayon drawing of my dad's plane landing concealed profound difficulties. My self-imposed brain teaser was was not an exercise in unreasonable hair-splitting, but rather an analysis of the real world. Fractals, I now know, provide a mathematical framework to quantify irregularities found in natural structures and allow for the analysis and modeling of complex systems exhibiting patterns at different scales.

Mandelbrot's groundbreaking ideas expanded on Cantor and Peano to illuminate the vast possibilities and richness of mathematics beyond the limitations of traditional Euclidean structures. These concepts empower us to better understand the complexities of the natural world and prevent us from being misled by overly idealized notions. Thanks to their work, we are better equipped to explore and comprehend the intricate beauty of the natural world. Even the jagged wax deposits of the line depicting a runway in my childhood drawing.