Cairns of H.O.P.E. #23
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2000
This issue is a month late because my good old Mac LC111 crashed and transferring addresses from it has taken awhile. Computers are strange. They cost a lot if new but are almost throw-aways if old. Different people have different ideas of what is old. If any of you think a computer is old and needs to be replaced after a year or two, consider throwing it away to me.
The particulars of place
My wife and I sleep outside half the year in a screened room with a
transparent vinyl roof. Each morning, not necessarily at the same time but from the same direction,
a flock of bushtits comes a-foraging past our bedroom. Itís a lovely example of
a lovely phrase that Freeman House (author of Totem Salmon) uses: "engaging the particulars
of place". The existence of that bird route is"ìinvisible" to anyone who doesn't
stay engaged with one place for an extended time. Learning of it makes the place a little more wondrously patterned
and makes one's existence within it a little more knowingly blessed.
A similar thing happened with my students. I was working with a first
grade class, showing them many examples of how flowers develop into seeds. We were examining
a patch of gumplant (Grindela) when one of the kids noticed two insects in the
dry, empty receptacle of one plant. They were mating. I looked in others and found another pair.
I had kids start looking and probably 25% of all the empty receptacles had a pair of mating
Hemiptera. (Reminded me of box elder bugs.) The next week, I was with another group in a different
place with gumplant at a slightly different developmental stage. Kids started examining
them and discovered large
larvae in the seed heads eating the seeds. Could these be the larvae
of the bugs we had seen mating? We brought back some seed heads. Two days later, kids in Alysia's
class noticed the larvae coming out of these classroom seedheads and crawling up and
down the stem. The ensuing discussion inspired Alysia to walk the class back to the patch
of gumplants. The kids found larvae curled up around the stems beneath the seed heads of 50%
of the plants. (At some point in time, this might lead to a discussion of what effect
does this insect have on the gumplant if the larvae eat 50% of all the seeds?)
We look forward to special holidays. And as we learn more of nature, we accumulate more special days such as the return of the salmon or the first swallow or the first monarch. As we continue studying the place, more and more special days accumulate until, presumably, every day many uniquely spectacular things are happening.
Running the River
One of the most enduring questions that junior high and high school
students ask teachers is "Why do we have to learn this?" The worst answer is
"because
it will be on the test." How many truthful better answers can we come up with? The following story
is my coming upon one such answer.
The Chrysalis teachers decided they would like to experiment with finding
out what synergy was possible if all the school were studying the same topic at the
same time. It so happens that two of the new teachers at Chrysalis, Jeff Burgard and Glen Hoxie,
are whitewater river guides. So we decided to have water and rivers be an area of investigation
through the year. To start this off, and to create a sense of community and teamwork, Jeff
and Glen organized a raft trip for their students (the 5th through 8th graders) down a class
3 section of the Trinity River. I went along with the video camera and filmed the rafts going through
several of the rapids
which my daughter, Zephyr, then edited into a 10 minute movie.
Jeff saw the movie and wanted to use it for teaching river dynamics. So he took the video camera, went back, and filmed the rapids looking down from the road. He then showed the two films to his class. With his film, he could show a stretch of rapids. As the camera showed a particular stretch, he could use a write on-wipe off pen to sketch on the tv screen the tongues and eddies and other dynamics of a white water rapid. Or he could ask a student to come up and draw circles on the screen on each eddy they could see. After that he would play the raft trip tape and the students could see how they traveled through the same rapid and how the guides had used dynamics that the class had just analyzed to navigate a safer and/or more thrilling ride. The next day, I was to take Jeff"s class out for field studies. We were talking about the river raft lesson and I suddenly realized that it was a perfect metaphor for what we are hoping to teach at Chrysalis. So I gave a talk that went something like this.
You"ve been studying how the rapids in a river work. What once
you saw as a lot of swirling, chaotic whitewater now looks different. Now you see patterns such as
eddy fences and smiling holes. Now you are learning to use these patterns to move gracefully
and exuberantly through what before would have been a turbulent, dangerous rapid. Life is like
the rapids. The main
thing we are trying to teach here at Chrysalis is seeing and understanding
patterns in the world because the more patterns you see in life, the more gracefully and
exuberantly you can navigate within life. The less you are at the mercy of forces you donít
understand. The more likely that the forces of the universe will help you rather than flip
or hurt you. We want you to have a great ride with life so we are trying to teach you to see and
read the patterns within the swirling river of life.
Meanwhile, the school continues investigating the world around us. The
5th-6th graders made an interesting discovery. California Wild Grape contains 1-4 seeds
(usually 1 or 2). However, the seeds within each grape always form a sphere. So if there is one
seed in the grape, it is spherical. If there are two seeds, they each are hemispheres. If there
are three seeds, they are shaped into "thirds". And seeds from a four seed grape
have a quarter sphere shape. The 3rd and 4th graders also discovered that the cottonwood trees tend to drop
their smaller leaves before their larger leaves. I"m sure this has something to do
with position upon the branch and
tree; we will investigate that next year. Also, we discovered that
the snails in the Sacramento River laid a jillion egg masses at about the time we noticed the first
salmon coming back upriver in October. Were the snails always laying the eggs and we just
happened to notice because salmon draw us to the river edge or is there a surge in egg-laying
and it just happens to coincide with the salmon or is there a surge in egg-laying because
of the salmon (perhaps because salmon carcasses increase algae growth) or is there a surge
in egg-laying because of a factor which is also a factor in the timing of the salmon? (Correlation
is not causation.) Stay tuned; we will find out a bit more next year.
Teaching feedback loops to kids
One of the concepts we want to teach at Chrysalis is feedback loops.
One of the best kid-experienceable examples of a snowballing positive feedback loop
happens at the front end of a group of walking kids. If several kids want to be the ìleaderí,
one of the kids who is in the lead will start walking faster. This makes a second kid walk faster
which makes the other one walk faster and, if there are other kids wanting to be at or near the
front, they all start hurrying. Under the "proper circumstancesî" within seconds, the
front of the group can burst forward into an out-of-control buffalo stampede. I"ve started using this
example to explain the dynamics of
feedback loops to kids.
The Earth, the Brain, and the Computer
In Cairns #8. I shared thoughts that had grown from an intuitive insight
years ago that the earth is somehow conscious. Two months ago my thoughts on this topic changed
direction. For decades, I"ve been trying to make sense of that insight by thinking
of the earth"s processes as analogous to the neuronal processes in the brain from which, I assume,
mind and consciousness emerge. But I think this was backward; a more exciting
way is to think of the neuronal processes in the brain as an evolved biochemical analogy to
the processes of this earth. That just as the computer has evolved as a mimic of the brain,
so the brain has evolved as a mimic of the earth.
Before I go further with this, I need to warn you that Alysia, my wifely
editor, found the first draft of this section quite opaque. As we discussed it, she asked,
"Are you saying that we humans are playing the role of the earth evolving
self-consciousness?"
No. That is a concept that is growing within our culture but that is not what I am talking
about here. I"m not opposed to that idea but its greater familiarity could pull your understanding
of my words away from what I am actually exploring here. "Then what are you trying
to express here?" she asked. We both love the expression "The map is not the territory."
I think what I am trying to express is
founded on the following analogy: "The map" is to our
experience of self-consciousness as "the
territory" is to some fundamental characteristics of the universe.
My understanding of this is elusive. It comes and goes. I look around our house and I notice concentrations of daddy longlegs near the lights and windows and compost can. And for a few seconds, I understand perfectly how this cascade of different causes and effects converging to produce this distribution of arachnids is an example of that aspect of the world analogous to consciousness. But a few minutes later, it is just a neat distribution of arachnids again.
I was looking up at a grove of cottonwoods and by following the branch shapes, I could see how growth extended along a certain line until something happened (wind damage, insect damage, or, most intriguingly, encountering shade from another branch) and the growth got rerouted onto another direction. And for a minute, I can see a fundamental similarity between the growth of those branches and the development of learning within an individual. One is powered by sunlight, the other by the juice of curiosity but the dynamics and the ensuing shapes are analogous.
Or I study the streambed running through our homestead. The rock size varies depending on location within that streambed. The shape of the banks also vary depending on their location. The plant growth on the banks varies depending on the shape and history of that stretch and its orientation to the sun. The plant growth within the streambed varies depending on the rock size. However, the growth of the streambed plants alters the flow of water which changes the size of rocks dropping out around the plants. The converegences and loops and diffusions of sequences of cause and effect feel just like the flow of neuronal firing through the brain. The same patterns are happening, not because the earth is like a brain but because the brain is made of the earth and has used this fundamentally connective stuff to replicate in miniature the fundamental nature of the earth.
So I think of the brain as this evolved miniaturization of the earth itself. For example, what a life empowering change it was for early life forms to evolve the ability to detect the presence of food beyond their immediate contact and somehow move towards that food. Even if the initial distances were a few angstroms, that ability would lead those life forms to a dramatically greater abundance of food than random drift would.
What is evolving is the ability to map a fundamental relationship with the outer world into the chemistry of the organism. Prey-indicative chemicals coming in contact with the organism creates a series of movement-generating biochemical reactions in the organism that are coordinated enough that the organism moves towards the food. Aspects of the world are being mapped as a bio-chemical program within the organism. What is being mapped is not something simple like "edible bacteria at two o'clock". The map contains a vast web of relations. It contains how each "food organism" gives off chemical signals of its presence, how these chemicals diffuse through the surrounding medium, how reception of these signals by the predator communicates a direction, and how the predator's biochemistry can then coordinate movement in that direction. And the reason all these things can be made into a map is because the universe works in a certain causal way. Multiple interacting layers of cause and effect creates a glorious paradox: in one way the world is completely predictable and replicable; in another way it is always novel and unique. The same thing is found with neuronal firing in the human brain. In one way, it is completely predictable and replicable; in another way, it is not.
Now multiply this example by a billion years of evolution. What we have is evolution taking the stuff of the universe and sculpting within the genes and nervous system of each living thing a map at the molecular level by which that particular organism can navigate a productive life within that part of the universe surrounding it. Strong selective advantages will drive the development of deeper and deeper biochemical maps. Deeper maps make possible the niche of the ecological generalist whose map can not be of any particular place or any particular role. What this niche must evolve is a map of the meta-nature of the world itself so that the organism can, in interaction with the place of its birth, create a suitable program to run. We are an example of such a species. A human newborn is hardwired to turn towards the nipple. There might be some hardwiring aversion to snakes and such. But the main thing that has evolved is a brain hard-wired for the detection of pattern, hard-wired for loading a huge diversity of programs, hard-wired for the novel generation of solutions. One of the ways the human brain and a computer are analogous is that though both systems have hardwiring in magnificent abundance, the hardwiring is not the program. The hard-wiring creates a platform capable of a myriad programs. The same computer can be a word processor, a drawing program, or a robot operator with a switch of programs. The same person can be a rice farmer in Thailand, a fisherman in Lake Tanganyika, a trapper in the Far North, an urban worker in Dallas with a switch of birthplace.
Our nervous system has evolved as a map of our relation with the universe. What is it a map of? When we look at lifeforms in narrower niches, we can see how their responsiveness is sensitive to temperature ranges within its range or to sounds of certain predators or ability to process certain soil chemistry. But our ability to detect patterns and generate novel thought arises from a unique nervous system map that has encoded deep meta-relationships of the universe. This leads me to think it is inaccurate and limiting to say that the world or universe is self-conscious (or to say that we are the earth becoming self-conscious). It is more accurate to say that self-consciousness is the experience generated by our inherited nervous system which is a map of certain aspects of the world. But the map is not the territory. To think of the earth as self-conscious is to confuse properties of the map with properties of the territory. What are those properties of the earth which, mapped into our nervous system, leads to our experience of self-consciousness?
Back to the cottonwood trees and their branching pattern. Whenever I study a place long enough to become visually aware of several layers of patterns, the place becomes vibratingly unique. It expresses in each moment an incredible depth of history and relationships and mysterious potential. It grows beautifully evocative of a mystery which contains us both. Somehow, in a way I will explore all my life, that mystery is the territory.
Cyber book sales
Here is a strange fact from cyber world that I'm not quite sure
what to make of. My book, Seeing Nature, is available at Amazon.com. The web site has an automatic
calculation that tells what the current position of a book is in terms of total book sales
at the site. Back in February, my book held position 1,766,311. Last month it was 631,178. My book
leapfrogged over a
million books (but sold far less than a million copies). But it is
still more than 600,000 from first place. That is too weird. How many books needed to be sold to
jump a million other books? Hey, if I can do that million book leapfrog just one more time,
I well be 400,000 books ahead of the best seller. (One month later, the book is now at 572,232)
If you can enthusiastically give my book a 5 star review and would like to help
the game of leapfrog, I would appreciate your helping make this happen by going to the following
URL http://www.chelseagreen.com/buy/SeeingNature.htm and click on "write
a review" underneath "Share your thoughts" and write a wonderful, personal
review.
Stream Experiment
In an earlier Cairns, I mentioned experimenting with an ecological
heresy, adding phosphate to the ephemeral stream that runs through our homestead in the hope it
would stimulate plant growth that would shift the balance from erosion to deposition and
heal an eroding channel. In 1997, I recorded 8 willows growing along an approximately 1 mile stretch.
In 1999, I counted 15 willows, 1 baby cottonwood, and about 50 sedge plants. I went counting
yesterday: 20 willow plants, 2 cottonwoods, and about 450 sedge plants. I'm
going to bring the older Chrysalis students out and we will set up a more controlled experiment
in the next drainage
over in which students will determine phosphate content of the stream
water.
Parable from Martin
I went hiking with Martin Ogle, a park naturalist from the Washington,
DC, area. He told me a story that I found significant at so many levels that it takes on parable-like
qualities. His park used to offer a program called the Beaver Cruise. People would come
and take a ranger-led paddle through the parkís marsh. Every time, they would see
lots of wildlife. Maybe a bald eagle or geese or beaver or muskrats or .... Every time something wonderful
happened. But they wouldn't always see beaver. And if they didn't see
beaver, some people left feeling disappointed - even though lots of other wonderful things had
happened. So they changed the
name of the program to the Wildlife Cruise. And now everyone is happy.