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By Susan Lahey

When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.

In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe

To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.

New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness

Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.

You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.

Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.

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Architecture serves as the timestamp of an era and the largest of ecological footprints.

Architect James Ramsey ’99 spoke at a talk for the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities on Nov. 10, 2022 at the Humanities Quadrangle. The talk showcased recent innovation in architecture through Ramsey’s work on the New York City Lowline and prompted conversation on the anthropocene and the current climate crisis.

“Someday everything we ever build will be gone,” Ramsey told the News. “Can we use architecture and design to sort of communicate impermanence? Or for that matter, communicate to someone viewing these pieces of art or installation the sense that things are transitory; [that we are] miniscule … in the face of deep geological time.”

Having studied both physics and architecture as a Yale undergraduate before ultimately deciding to major in the latter, James Ramsey has an eye for problem-solving and innovation. From commissioned modernist homes and art museums to the New York City Lowline and an upcoming elephant sanctuary in Kenya, Ramsey’s work covers a wide range.

During his time at Yale, Ramsey said he was particularly inspired by the design of the Beinecke Library. He pointed out another “cool architectural moment on campus,” a passageway on the side of Davenport College.

“You have this really subtle architectural transition from Gothic to … Georgian style,” Ramsey said. “And little by little as you walk through it, it’s almost like walking through a time machine.”

Ramsey says he was influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto — one of the game designers of Super Mario Bros. — as well as two of the professors he had during his time at Yale: Stanley Insler and Harvey Weiss.

“[Insler and Weiss] were able to take their experiences of hyperspecialization, but also … their broad knowledge about a great many fields and use those to draw disciplines and realizations together in a way that we’re able to … create these broadly applicable general comments about the world around us and … humanity,” Ramsey said.

The coexistence of hyperspecialization and broad applicability can be seen throughout Ramsey’s projects. While the fundamental techniques of architecture are very precise, they’re fluid in the sense that they transfer to a variety of problems.

The Lowline — an underground park being built in the Lower East Side of New York City — utilizes the design of a Cassegrain telescope to relocate solar energy by transporting it underground. This technology can then be used to grow subterranean vegetation.

“I thought the incorporation of different timescales; human, geolical, cosmological was really interesting,” Anna Lenaker, ENV ’24 told the News. “And I really enjoy thinking about nature as something that consumes human structures.”

During the question and answer portion of the talk, many questions pertained to the potential for the Lowline technology to make advancements in counteracting climate change.

Charnice Hoegnifioh ’24 had thoughts on how such technology could also contribute to concerns regarding food security.

“Seeing how a major part of … his experimentation was testing out … different species of plants, it made me wonder if … there could be other applications of redirecting [concentrated] sunlight from outside to create underground or subterranean … farms and agricultural centers that can be used to really bolster the world’s food supply,” Hoegnifioh said.

Ramsey’s experience and expertise in seemingly disparate disciplines — physics and architecture — epitomizes the mission of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities as stated on their website: “To foster communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.”

“It’s important to hold on to and maintain all of your kooky, disparate interests and curiosities that you have and not think of them in a totally pragmatic way,” Ramsey says, “The more you can grow your base of knowledge and your understanding of disparate fields, the broader the palette is that you can then bring into solve problems … in any field — design or otherwise.”

ABSTRACT:

ISBN: 978-981-16-5787-0

Full text is available at Z-Library.

This book draws on posthumanist critique and post qualitative approaches to research to examine the pedagogies offered by imaginaries of the future. Starting with the question of how education can be a process for imagining and desiring better futures that can shorten the Anthropocene, it speaks to concerns that are relevant to the fields of education, youth and futures studies. This book explores lessons from the imaginaries of apocalypse, revolution and utopia, drawing on research from youth(ful) perspectives in a context when the narrative of ‘youth despair’ about the future is becoming persistent. It investigates how the imaginary of 'Apocalypse' acts as a frame of intelligibility, a way of making sense of the monstrosities of the present and also instigates desires to act in different ways. Studying the School Climate Strikes of 2019 as 'Revolution' moves us away from the teleologies of capitalist consumption and endless growth to newer aesthetics. The strikes function as a public pedagogy that creates new publics that include life beyond the human. Finally, the book explores how the Utopias of Afrofuturist fiction provides us with a kind of 'investable' utopia because the starting point is in racial, economic and ecological injustice. If the Apocalypse teaches us to recognize what needs to go, and Revolution accepts that living with ‘less than’ is necessary, then this kind of Utopia shows us how becoming ‘more than’ human may be the future. “It would be easy to despair about the purpose of education in these times. Pedagogies of the Post-anthropocene offers instead a strong case for its continued relevance. Through three imaginaries: Apocalypse, Revolution, and Utopia Esther Priyadharshini declares that worrying about the future is not enough; students need strategies and skills for a future of different politics and rights. Using empirical research and case study projects into speculative narratives across the three imaginaries, Priyadharshini offers workable ideas for using pedagogies of possibility by teachers committed to preparing students for the futures young people imagine and desire.” — Associate Professor Linda Knight, Director, Mapping Future Imaginaries research network, RMIT University, Australia “In this clearly written and engaging book, Priyadharshini draws our attention to the work of images of apocalypse, revolution and utopia in young people’s thinking and to the challenges and resources that these offer to education. It is a timely and compelling account that merits close reading by anyone interested in the relationship between education and the challenging futures we are facing today. Both theoretically robust and empirically grounded, weaving together young people’s voices, current affairs and literature, the book also opens up lines of inquiry and practice for teaching. Highly recommended.” — Keri Facer, Professor of Educational & Social Futures, University of Bristol.

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By Susan Cosier

Five small islands roughly the size of backyard swimming pools float next to the concrete riverbank of Bubbly Creek, a stretch of the Chicago River named for the gas that once rose to the surface after stockyards dumped animal waste and byproducts into the waterway. Clumps of short, native grasses and plants, including sedges, swamp milkweed, and queen of the prairie, rise from a gravel-like material spread across each artificial island’s surface. A few rectangles cut from their middles hold bottomless baskets, structures that will, project designers hope, provide an attachment surface for freshwater mussels that once flourished in the river.

Three thousand square feet in total, these artificial wetlands are part of an effort to clean up a portion of a river that has long served the interests of industry. This floating wetland project is one of many proliferating around the world as cities increasingly look to green infrastructure to address toxic legacies. In the United States, researchers are conducting experiments in Boston and Baltimore as well as in Chicago, each team sharing best practices with the other to maximize the ecological benefits of their systems. The Canadian government and local municipalities are allotting more funding for innovative projects. Floating wetlands are also multiplying in the United Kingdom, and studies to quantify additional benefits continue in Australia and Brazil.

Floating wetlands filter contaminants and take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones.

Like natural wetlands, floating versions provide a range of ecosystem services. They filter sediment and contaminants from stormwater, and laboratory experiments show that some plants have the ability to lock up some chemicals and metals found in acid mine drainage. These systems take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones, and recent research suggests they could be used to reduce manmade contaminants that persist in the environment. Though it’s difficult to quantify the exact benefits these systems offer, and they have limitations as a tool in remediating polluted waterways, they could provide another option, researchers say.

Nick Wesley, executive director of Urban Rivers, a nonprofit working with the Shedd Aquarium on the Chicago project, believes floating systems are a natural fit for the urban environment. Many urbanized river systems, he says, have the same “steel sheet pile wall, some rough-wrap riprap on the edges. We’re trying to [restore] what the naturalized river would be.” In many cities, he continues, floating wetlands could provide a low-cost alternative to conventional infrastructure projects because they’re modular and easy to install and to monitor.

Wesley’s group began, in 2018, with a floating wetlands project on the Chicago River’s North Branch. Called the Wild Mile, the installation aims to improve water quality and has already begun attracting invertebrates, including mollusks and crustaceans. Last month, the group expanded to the shores of Bubbly Creek. Urban Rivers, Shedd employees, and a team of volunteers bolted together polyethylene and metal frames, draped them with matting, dropped them in the water, added plants, and anchored the islands to the river bottom so they stay in place as the roots grow into the water. The plants will grow for years to come, part of a “riverponic” system, as Wesley calls it, that requires no soil or other substrate for support.

Floating wetlands “are having a bit of a moment,” says Richard Grosshans, a research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development who works on the floating structures. “They function very similarly to a natural wetland: they have the same processes, plants and microorganisms, bacteria and algae, [which] naturally break down toxins. They take up nutrients and provide habitat. It’s kind of common sense to those of us who work with these types of systems.”

Floating wetlands were first tested in retention ponds, the kind often located near developments to hold stormwater, to see if they filtered pollution. “The front end of it was, ‘Will they work? How well do they work? And what plants should we recommend?’” says Sarah White, an environmental toxicologist and horticulturalist at Clemson University who has worked on floating wetlands since 2006. Partnering with researchers at Virginia Tech, White found that the wetland plants she tested not only did well in ponds with lots of nutrient pollution, but the adaptable, resilient plants actually thrived. She did not always choose native plants, opting instead for those that would make the islands more attractive, so that more urban planners would use them.

In the early 2010s, Chris Walker, a researcher at the University of South Australia, began testing floating wetlands in wastewater, quantifying the pollutants that four species of plants took up in their tissues and improvements to water quality. Two species, twig rush Baumea articulata and the common reed Phragmites australis, showed the highest uptake of nitrogen and phosphorus of any floating wetland research to date. “That creates a real opportunity for [the] permanent removal of sequestered nutrients,” says Walker, who is also the principal scientist for a floating wetland company called Clarity Aquatic.

One acre of floating wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution from seven to 15 acres of urban development, one researcher found.

His team also started testing the ability of floating wetlands to filter out emerging contaminants like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are not always filtered by treatment plants and are linked to elevated cholesterol levels, problems with reproductive health, and kidney and testicular cancers. The reed Phragmites australis placed in a floating wetland began absorbing the pollutant into its tissues in less than a month.

Islands anchored in cities are giving scientists an opportunity to study environments that have long been ignored. In Chicago, Austin Happel, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium, is beginning a study on fish near the floating wetlands in Bubbly Creek. Starting in the spring, he’ll use acoustic telemetry to tag fish captured near the wetland and monitor where they go. By the following year, he should be able to see if they use the floating wetlands as a buffet or as a place to hide from predators.

In Boston, Max Rome, a PhD student at Northeastern University, is attempting to quantify the benefits of wetlands that have been floating since 2020 in the Charles River, another historically degraded waterway. He found that one acre of wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution — usually dumped into the river via stormwater — from seven to 15 acres of dense urban development.

Rome is also looking into whether floating wetlands can create small pockets of improved water quality or habitat that allow certain native species, like freshwater sponges, to regain a toehold in the river. To do that, he monitored water quality near the wetlands and compared it to other places in the river.

“The last generation did a really good job of dealing with point source pollution — and it was a huge task,” he says, referring to the success of the Clean Water Act in reducing effluent from discharge pipes. His generation has a new job, he adds: grappling with “ecological restoration of these degraded water bodies at the same time that we do pollution reduction,” something the wetlands could help address.

Despite the benefits of floating wetlands, obstacles to widespread adoption remain. They require time and energy to install and monitor, and they could potentially cause flooding if they become unmoored and interfere with water flow. A city would also need hundreds of floating wetlands to clean up the most polluted stretches of waterways and manage the contaminants that continue to flow into them.

Another potential drawback is the threat of invasive plants colonizing a floating wetland, which would then require maintenance. One species that effectively sucked up PFAS in the Australian study, for example, is an aggressive invader already colonizing wetlands across the U.S. In addition, if the goal of a floating wetland is to permanently remove phosphorous and nitrogen from an ecosystem, managers may need to remove and compost plants so they don’t release the nutrients back into the environment when they go dormant, though ongoing research suggests that biofilms that form on plant roots and on the bottom of wetlands could continue to remove nutrients even after plants start to senesce. Plants that remove PFAS would likely need to be incinerated.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore is planning to expand its 400-square-foot floating wetland to 10,000 square feet by 2024.

Still, say researchers, floating wetlands do benefit the environment. “I think we’re just looking for one more tool in our toolbox to help manage water quality,” says Clemson’s White. “This gives us another place in the landscape where we can actually have a technology that will do it.”

The types of places that could be improved by these projects are growing more varied. The National Aquarium in Baltimore was the first place in the U.S. to test floating wetlands in a tidal system, and today 400 square feet planted in saltmeadow hay and smooth cordgrass float in the city’s Inner Harbor. The project has been so successful at lowering levels of nutrients and bacteria and at creating a refuge for wildlife — including American eels, gizzard shad, and ghost anemones — that the aquarium now plans to expand the islands to 10,000 square feet in 2024, says Charmaine Dahlenburg, the aquarium’s director of field conservation.

The Harbor islands are the National Aquarium’s fourth attempt at creating a thriving wetland system, demonstrating how difficult it can be to tailor a floating wetland to a specific location. When the aquarium first installed wetlands in 2010, geese invaded them and ate the plants. A similar problem occurred with a second version two years later. The third attempt fared better, thanks to fencing that excluded geese, but the fourth iteration — which incorporates a channel that prevents algal blooms from killing plants — fared the best.

National Aquarium researchers investigating how the floating wetlands help mitigate such blooms found that microscopic organisms on plant roots and on the bottom of the wetlands help move nitrogen from the water and through the food chain — from barnacle to crab to fish. There are ecosystem benefits above the waterline, too: Night herons and otters visit the islands, finding refuge in the grasses. Research on fish, birds, and mammals attracted to floating wetlands is not well developed, but these structures clearly provide habitat in places where buildings, bulkheads, and riprap have replaced natural wetlands.

The amount of contamination that plants can remove from aquatic environments depends on the amount and type of pollution, the plant species used, and the size of the floating wetlands. But some scientists, including Dahlenburg and Rome, are hoping that as research accumulates, government agencies will consider using such projects to mitigate contamination and wetland development.

In three Boston-area watersheds, a new regulation under the Clean Water Act will require certain commercial, industrial, and institutional properties with one or more acres of impervious surface to reduce nutrient and bacterial pollution in stormwater running off their properties, something never mandated before. Britain recently announced a requirement for homes and water companies to reduce water pollution. Floating wetlands that do that are already growing in London, and plans for other locations are in the works.

Regulations like these could compel cities to take a more aggressive approach to green stormwater infrastructure. “As that begins to happen,” says Rome, “the role that can be played by floating treatment wetlands is going to come into focus.”

The growing use of the buoyant, lush gardens — in cities that range from Australia to Europe to North America — show how even small wetland islands can make a difference. “Our little postage stamp of a wetland isn’t going to solve everything,” says Dahlenburg, of the Baltimore project. “What we’re trying to create is this model urban waterfront. We want other cities to know that there are ways to incorporate natural habitat, to bring back the ecosystem services that were lost because of industrial development.”

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Introduction By 2050, the world’s population is projected to approach 10 billion people. It is projected that global food production will need to increase by up to 56% to meet the nutritional demands of this growing and increasingly affluent population (Figure 1; Godfray et al., 2010; World Resources Institute, 2019). Yet, even today’s food production is unsustainable and insufficient. On land, agriculture provides the backbone of the global food production system; however, its benefits come at the expense of negative impacts on land use and carbon emissions (Figure 1) as well as freshwater resources and biodiversity (Foley et al., 2005, 2011; Tilman et al., 2011; Conforti, 2011; Springmann et al., 2016; Ritchie and Roser, 2019; World Resources Institute, 2019; Zurek et al., 2022). If we look to the ocean for sources of nutrition, most wild-capture fisheries are already fully exploited or over­exploited, and current marine aquaculture practices are insufficiently developed to close the gap between nutritional supply and demand (Cai and Leung, 2017; Naylor et al., 2021). In addition, both often pose environmental and social justice problems comparable to those of terrestrial agriculture (Moomaw et al., 2017; World Resources Institute, 2019; Bank et al., 2021).

FIGURE 1. Projected global population increase from 2010 to 2050 and the corresponding projected gaps in agricultural food production, land use, and climate mitigation. All projections are based on data reported in the World Resources Institute (2019) report. (a) The projected population increase is 3 billion people, a 43% increase. (b) The projected agricultural food gap, assuming a business-as-usual scenario and measured in energy required from all crops intended for direct human consumption, animal feed, industrial uses, seeds, and biofuels, is 7.4 trillion kilocalories, a 56% increase. (c) The projected agricultural land gap, assuming a business-as-usual scenario and measured in land area required to support all agricultural food production, is 0.4 billion ha of pastureland and 0.2 billion ha of cropland, a total 12% increase. Note the non-zero baseline in this panel. (d) The projected agricultural climate mitigation gaps are the differences between the projected level of greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 and the emission levels necessary to achieve the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stabilized temperature increase targets of 1.5°C and 2.0°C. The projected increase in greenhouse gas emissions, assuming a business-as-usual scenario and measured in CO2 equivalents emitted from the food production process itself and land-use change, is 3 Gt CO2e, a 25% increase. > High res figure

Currently, it is estimated that one-​quarter of the world’s population is malnourished, with two billion people consuming diets deficient in micronutrients and over 800 million people unable to secure enough calories to meet their minimum daily energy requirements (Moomaw et al., 2017; World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics, 2018; Willett et al., 2019). Food distribution and waste are a significant part of the problem today; however, even improvements in those areas by 2050 will be inadequate to feed an additional three billion people, most of them populating developing countries (World Resources Institute, 2019). To secure an adequate food supply during the second half of the twenty-​first century, society will need to significantly intensify the output of its food production system while simultaneously reducing its detrimental impacts on the global environment.

Given constraints on increasing agricultural output, many alternative food options are being explored to evaluate how society might sustainably intensify its food production system (Parodi et al., 2018; Duff et al., 2020). Among marine “blue food” options, aquaculture has attracted much attention, primarily because expansion of wild-​​capture fisheries will be­­ unable to keep up with increasing demand (Cai and Leung, 2017; Costello et al., 2020). However, expansion of marine aquaculture as it is currently practiced also has finite limits. Belton et al. (2020) argue that the potential to intensify global food production through marine shellfish and finfish aquaculture is much more limited than its advocates claim. These authors conclude that the future of aquaculture is in freshwater finfish, and that society’s expectations of output from marine aquaculture sources should be lowered.

While Belton et al. (2020) highlight several important issues, we disagree with their primary conclusion on the limits of marine aquaculture. A recent review by Naylor et al. (2021) confirms the dominance of freshwater finfish production in the global aquaculture market: in 2017, it comprised 75% of the 112 Mt of live-weight volume produced. However, during the 20 years since a previous review by Naylor et al. (2000), marine algae-based aquaculture has grown rapidly, having produced 32 Mt in 2017, comparable to that of all aquaculture sectors in 1997 (34 Mt; Naylor et al., 2021). This rapid growth, primarily in the form of macroalgae, highlights the great potential of marine algae-based aquaculture for further expansion. In addition, although there has been some commercial development of microalgae in small-​scale nutraceutical and niche food markets, there has been limited penetration into food, animal feed, and aquafeed commodity markets. Based on recent research (Gerber et al., 2016; Walsh et al., 2016; Moomaw et al., 2017; Beal et al., 2018a; Shah et al., 2018; Lei, 2021), we believe that there is considerable scope for growth in developing such microalgae-​based nutritional commodity markets. Here, we explore the hypothesis that marine algae-based aquaculture has the potential to close the projected gap in humanity’s future nutritional demands and can do so while simultaneously reducing the detrimental climate and other environmental impacts of the current food production system.

A Circular Economy Approach

In October 2020, the Ocean Visions Consortium established the Marine Circular Bioeconomy (MCB) Task Force (https://oceanvisions.org/%E2%80%8Bour-%E2%80%8Bprograms/%E2%80%8Bmarine-%E2%80%8Bcircular-%E2%80%8Bbioeconomy/) to explore marine aquaculture’s potential for sustainably intensifying global food production. The MCB Task Force employs a circular economy approach (de Wit et al., 2020), which emphasizes reducing new resource extraction and increasing end-of-use processing and recycling. In contrast to the “take-make-waste” linear model, the circular economy model is regenerative by design, and aims to decouple economic development from finite resource extraction.

Applied to marine aquaculture (Figure 2), the circular economy approach allows tracking and quantification of energy inputs and the flows, recycling, and reuse of materials. It enables visualization of opportunities for reducing the consumption of new resources and, through recycling and reuse, the production of waste products. It also enables visualization of opportunities for combining processes in novel and more efficient ways to enhance the co-production of food and energy as well as the capture, storage, and utilization of carbon dioxide.

FIGURE 2. The Marine Circular Bioeconomy concept as applied to marine aquaculture. DAC = direct air capture. BECCS = bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. > High res figure A Twenty-First Century Challenge: Expanding the Spatial Extent and Utilization of Blue Carbon

The ocean currently accounts for approximately half of Earth’s annual global primary production, ~50 Gt C yr–1 (Field et al., 1998; Boyd et al., 2014). In contrast to terrestrial primary production, very little of this autotrophic blue carbon makes its way into the human food production system. Most of the ocean’s primary production is carried out by small planktonic algae in the open ocean, where productivity per unit area is relatively low and food chains are relatively long (Ryther, 1969). Both factors set constraints on the potential contribution of open ocean ecosystems to human nutrition.

In contrast to the open ocean, coastal ocean ecosystems have much higher primary productivity per unit area and shorter food chains, especially in upwelling regions (Ryther, 1969). These factors account for coastal ocean ecosystems providing a vast majority of the world’s wild-​capture fisheries harvest. In addition, the coastal ocean is home to benthic macroalgae beds and kelp forests as well as mangrove, salt marsh, and seagrass blue-carbon ecosystems. Despite their high productivity per unit area and large carbon storage capacity, these macroalgae and blue-carbon ecosystems occupy less than 1% of Earth’s surface area (Figure 3). Therefore, although they contribute a large fraction of the primary production in nearshore coastal environments (Macreadie et al., 2019), these ecosystems make relatively small contributions to the ocean’s total annual primary production and carbon sequestration (Nellemann et al., 2009; Scott-Buechler and Greene, 2019).

A primary challenge for marine algae-based aquaculture in the coming decades is to increase the amount of autotrophic blue carbon making its way into the human food production system. At present, most marine aquaculture is confined to the coastal ocean. Because the coastal ocean only makes up approximately 11% of Earth’s surface area (Figure 3), this places a fundamental constraint on the potential contribution of present-day marine aquaculture to human nutrition. This potential contribution is further constrained by the many other human activities in the coastal ocean that reduce the spatial area available to marine aquaculture.

One solution to this challenge is to increase the spatial extent of marine algae-based aquaculture. This can be done by expanding the footprint of marine aquaculture facilities both onshore and further offshore. In comparison to onshore micro- and macro-​algae cultivation, the technological development of aquaculture facilities further offshore, into deeper oceanic waters, is less mature (Buck and Langan, 2017; Buck and Grote, 2018; Araújo et al., 2021). The main challenge to constructing such facilities is the need for new technologies that can withstand exposure to the greater hydrodynamic forces of the oceanic environment while not incurring capital and operational costs that are prohibitively expensive. Neither China, the global leader in marine macroalgae aquaculture, nor the European Union have made significant research and development investments in this area. Recent advances have been made in the United States through the ARPA-E Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources (MARINER) program (https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/%E2%80%8Bprograms/mariner). Nevertheless, sustained research and development, including the assessment of potential environmental impacts (Boyd et al., 2022), will be required to make offshore oceanic aquaculture commercially viable and globally scalable.

Nutritional and Sustainability Advantages of Marine Microalgae-Based Aquaculture

In contrast to offshore oceanic aquaculture, there is a rich, 50-year history of developing aquaculture facilities onshore for the cultivation of both fresh­water and marine microalgae (Benemann, 2013; DOE, 2016a,b; Khan et al., 2018). Although the focus of microalgae-based aquaculture was originally on the production of biofuels and nutraceuticals, research in the field has evolved more recently to investigate the potential of microalgae for producing animal and aqua feeds as well as food for direct human consumption (Moomaw et al., 2017; Lei, 2021; Wang et al., 2021).

Food production from marine microalgae cultivated in onshore aquaculture facilities offers several nutritional and environmental sustainability advantages relative to terrestrial agriculture. As a polyphyletic group composed of thousands of different, mostly unstudied species, marine microalgae represent a potentially large, untapped source of high-quality nutritional protein. Although the range is large, many species possess a protein content greater than 40% dry mass (Wang et al., 2021). In addition, relative to terrestrial plants, marine microalgae provide a better source of essential amino acids and other micronutrients, such as vitamins, antioxidants, omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and minerals (Moomaw et al., 2017; Lei, 2021; Wang et al., 2021).

In terms of direct environmental sustainability advantages, microalgae exhibit primary production rates that are typically more than an order of magnitude greater than the most productive terrestrial crops (Huntley and Redalje, 2007). Thus, with regard to land use, the cultivation of marine microalgae in onshore aquaculture facilities has the potential to produce an equivalent amount of food from less than one-tenth the land area. In addition, because marine microalgae do not require soil and irrigation, their cultivation does not need to compete with agriculture and other stakeholders for arable land and freshwater (Figure 4; Greene et al., 2016; Walsh et al., 2016; Moomaw et al., 2017). Lastly, because the cultivation of marine microalgae is very efficient in its use of nutrients, only losing those nutrients that are harvested in the desired products, the problems associated with excess fertilizer runoff and subsequent eutrophication of aquatic and marine ecosystems can be minimized. Results from a few simple calculations are presented in Box 1A to put these direct environmental sustainability advantages into perspective quantitatively.

FIGURE 4. The land and freshwater footprints for the production of essential amino acids from various nutritional sources. All estimates are based on data reported by Moomaw et al. (2017). Land footprints are reported in hectares per metric ton of product. Freshwater footprints are reported in cubic meters of freshwater per metric ton of product. > High res figure The potential for less direct environmental sustainability advantages should also be noted. By reducing agriculture’s demand for arable land, the cultivation of marine microalgae has the potential to markedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. For example, over the past 50 years, approximately one-fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been cleared, mostly for cattle pastureland and soy cropland (Krogh, 2020). This deforestation has been so extensive that the Amazon has recently transitioned from being a globally important carbon sink to a net carbon source (Gatti et al., 2021). In addition, there is growing concern that further interactions between deforestation and climate change may force the Amazonian rain­forest to cross a tipping point that will jeopardize the greater than 120 Gt of carbon stored in its above- and below-ground biomass (Boulton et al., 2022) as well as its remarkable biodiversity. Results from a few simple calculations are presented in Box 1B to demonstrate marine microalgae’s potential for reducing the pressure to clear Amazonian rainforest for cattle pastureland and soy cropland.

**Box 1. *Environmental Sustainability Advantages of Marine Microalgae-Based Aquaculture

A. Examples of Direct Environmental Sustainability Advantages

The 2020 global production of soybeans was 353 Mt/yr from a harvestable cropland area of 1.3 million km2 (FAO, 2021). Assuming a 13% protein content in wet weight biomass (USDA, 2018), this converts to a 2020 global soy protein production of 46 Mt/yr. Assuming an algal protein productivity value of 3.36 × 10–3 Mt/km2/yr (Huntley et al., 2015; DOE, 2016b; Wang et al., 2021), the microalgae cultivation area required to produce a similar amount of protein would be approximately 13,700 km2, saving 95 times as much cropland.

Assuming a globally averaged, blue-water irrigation demand for soybean production of 123,000 m3/km2/yr, the amount of freshwater saved annually could approach 160 billion cubic meters. This is comparable to the current annual blue-water irrigation demand of the United States for all crops (FAO, 2022).

Assuming that soybean production requires 5.5 t/km2/yr of phosphate fertilizer and that 2.3% of this fertilizer runs off (Alexander et al., 2008), then the amount of phosphate saved from fertilizer runoff annually would be ~164,000 t. This corresponds to ~3.2% of the annual North American phosphate fertilizer demand (FAO, 2019).

B. Examples of Less Direct Environmental Sustainability Advantages

The 2020 production of soybeans in Brazil was 128 Mt/yr from a harvestable area of 372,000 km2 (FAO, 2021). Assuming a 13% protein content in wet weight biomass (USDA, 2018), this converts to a Brazilian soy protein production of 16.6 Mt/yr. Assuming an algal protein productivity value of 3.36 × 10–3 Mt/km2/yr, the microalgae cultivation area required to produce a similar amount of protein would be approximately 4,940 km2, providing a potential savings of 75 times as much cropland.

The average 2018–2020 production of beef (equivalent carcass weight) in Brazil was 10.0 Mt/yr from a grazing area of 1.65 million km2 (FAO, 2021). Assuming a 15% protein content in equivalent carcass weight, this converts to a Brazilian beef protein production of 1.5 Mt/yr. Assuming an algal protein productivity value of 3.36 × 10–3 Mt/km2/yr, the microalgae cultivation area required to produce a similar amount of protein would be approximately 446 km2, providing a potential savings of 3,700 times as much pastureland.

Note that complete replacement of Brazilian soy and beef protein with marine microalgae protein is unlikely and not being suggested here. On the other hand, Amazonian biodiversity accounts for over one-quarter of all terrestrial animal and plant species on Earth (Dirzo and Raven, 2003), and a recent study by Allan et al. (2022) determined that 49.3% of Brazil’s 4,206,016 km2 of land area requires some level of conservation attention. By reducing the demand for cropland and pastureland in Brazil, the cultivation of marine microalgae could have a significant impact on the conservation of Amazonian biodiversity. Brazil possesses enough suitable land along its coastline to produce globally significant amounts of marine microalgae protein (Figure 5).

Sustainability Challenges for Marine Microalgae-Based Aquaculture

While the potential environmental sustainability advantages of marine microalgae-​based aquaculture are great, the challenges of scaling it up globally are also significant. Although there are large areas of suitable land with proper topography and insolation available in the tropics and subtropics, cultivation facilities must be close enough to sources of seawater or brackish water to avoid excessive transport costs (Figure 5).

FIGURE 5. (a) Global map of potential onshore marine microalgae biomass production based on annual incoming solar radiation data and a validated growth model. (b) Global map of potential onshore marine microalgae protein production with constraints set by additional environmental criteria, including topography and access to seawater (see Supplementary Materials).

More challenging than finding suitable land is the requirement for carbon dioxide. When growing rapidly, microalgae take up carbon dioxide faster than it can diffuse across the air-water interface of open cultivation ponds. Carbon dioxide must be added to the ponds, and the costs of supplying this gas, both energetic and financial, must be kept low. Ideally, carbon dioxide should be produced on site from non-fossil carbon sources. Several authors have suggested this could be achieved by integrating microalgae cultivation facilities with direct air capture (DAC; Greene et al., 2016, 2017; Wilcox et al., 2017) or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS; Beal et al., 2018b) technologies. Current DAC approaches are prohibitively expensive for this purpose; however, integrating DAC with concentrated solar power or other emerging renewable energy technologies could provide a cost-​effective approach for simultaneously generating power and capturing carbon dioxide (Greene et al., 2017; Baker et al., 2020).

Providing nutrients for cultivating marine microalgae on a global scale also presents a formidable challenge, especially with regard to phosphorus. The scientific community has spent just over a decade trying to predict when global agriculture will become constrained by “peak phosphorus” (Cordell et al., 2009), and microalgae cultivation will not be immune to such a constraint. In fact, the stoichiometric nutrient requirements for microalgae amplify this phosphorus challenge (Lenton, 2014). Fortunately, the efficiency of nutrient use mentioned previously (i.e., no fertilizer runoff) combined with the potential for nutrient recycling through algae-based wastewater treatment make the challenge less daunting. Recovering and reusing phosphorus from waste streams is the kind of challenge that the circular economy approach is well positioned to tackle (Ullmann and Grimm, 2021).

Food for Thought A global analysis of coastal areas suitable for marine microalgae-based aquaculture reveals that, even with conservative assumptions, this untapped sector of the global food production system has the potential to provide greater than 100% of global protein demand for 2050 (see Supplementary Materials). However, all areas of the world are not created equal when it comes to the geophysical requirement for cultivating marine microalgae (Figure 5). Our analysis reveals that much of this sector’s potential lies in the Global South.1 While vast continental areas of Eurasia and North America have traditionally been viewed as society’s global breadbaskets, marine microalgae-based aquaculture provides an opportunity to better balance food production between the two socioeconomic hemispheres.

Geophysical considerations are necessary, but they are not sufficient to ensure the expansion of marine microalgae-​based aquaculture in the Global South. Financial considerations must also be weighed. Fortunately, land and labor costs are relatively inexpensive in the Global South, and they will provide further incentives for development. Perhaps the most important financial incentive, however, is the Green Climate Fund. Formally adopted during the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa, the Green Climate Fund was originally conceived as a mechanism for wealthier countries to assist developing countries in their efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. Implementation of the Green Climate Fund has been difficult because the incentives for wealthier countries to contribute have been modest, especially with regard to adaptation measures. However, marine microalgae-​based aquaculture can offer mutually beneficial investment opportunities for both wealthy and developing countries by providing climate mitigation while simultaneously enhancing global food and water security.

Acknowledgments The authors of this paper acknowledge research support from US Department of Energy Award Nos. DE-EE000791, DE-EE0008518, and DE-EE0009278 to Duke University and US Department of Energy Award No. DE-EE0007091 to the Duke Marine Algae Industrialization Consortium (MAGIC) and US Department of Agriculture/National Institute of Food and Agriculture/Sustainable Agricultural Systems Award No. 2019-69012-29905 to the University of Arkansas and Cornell University. The Marine Circular Bioeconomy workshop was supported by ARPA-E Award No. DE-AR0001520 to the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. CSB received additional support through a Knauss Fellowship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and an internship with the Ocean Visions Consortium. AH received additional support through an internship with Impossible Foods.

FULL ARTICLE: By Richard Schiffman

When people think of landscape architecture, small-scale recreational spaces like urban parks, gardens, and golf courses may come to mind. MacArthur “Genius Award” winner Kate Orff has a grander and more ecologically ambitious vision.

Orff, director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, believes that architects should do more than just create beautiful spaces: They also need to work with nature to create resilient living environments that both help to knit human communities together and protect them against the ravages of climate change.

SCAPE, the New York City-based design firm that Orff founded in 2007, is currently working in Louisiana on a project that will counter sea level rise and land loss in the Mississippi River Delta. SCAPE has also partnered with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a 125-mile-long trail and greenway along the Chattahoochee River, which aims to bring racially diverse communities along its banks together, based on their shared love of the river.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Orff said that it is not enough simply to restore natural systems to their former condition. “There is no ‘pure nature’ that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere,” she said. “We’ve ‘made’ the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. … A big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built.”

Yale Environment 360: What is the role of landscape architecture in an era of climate change?

Kate Orff: Since I went to school in 1997, the world has radically changed, and so have our views on what is necessary and important. So what I’ve done is taken the tools that I’ve learned as a licensed professional landscape architect — horticulture, grading and drainage, shaping the ground and the earth. But I’ve used them with a very different purpose.

One goal of mine is to think of landscape architecture not as a top-down thing where I impose my vision, but much more as a community-driven way to channel many voices. The second goal is to focus on the impact of climate change and to shift the whole profession towards large-scale climate adaption projects.

e360: You set up SCAPE to engage in these kinds of ecological projects.

Orff: That’s right. SCAPE is a private design practice, so we have conventional projects like waterfront parks and gardens, but we also do really large-scale resilience and adaptation planning.

One example is that we worked with Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on a massive plan that essentially looks at the state and helps guide investment and projects for the coastal region.

Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of land to anthropogenic factors like sea level rise. We’ve been helping to develop a master plan for coastal restoration and risk reduction that combines marsh creation with bottomland reforestation, sediment diversions, and related landscape restoration and job-creation strategies.

“What we’re trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger scale systemic approach, into a larger scale resilience plan.”

e360: So basically you are looking at this large region and proposing what to do in various parts of it?

Orff: Yes, so that it all comes together. Often we are only responding in a piecemeal way. We have system collapse, but we address it with single limited projects here and there. What we are trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger-scale systemic approach, into a larger-scale resilience plan.

e360: Tell us about the Living Breakwaters project. What stage are you at, and what are your goals there?

Orff: After Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012, New York City’s Department of Housing and Urban Development started this project called Rebuild by Design. We worked with them to develop the Living Breakwaters project in Staten Island. It’s essentially a stone-core breakwater that is seeded with oysters, a structure that takes that harmful wave action out of the equation and helps rebuild the beach. It’s also bringing a critical intertidal marine ecosystem back into the urban landscape where it has been decimated. Next year oyster cultivation is going to start up.

e360: Oysters were once an important species in New York Harbor.

Orff: Right, they were a keystone species until they collapsed in around 1900. We went from a harbor that was maybe 20 percent oyster reefs to zero. That was a profound physical change. We essentially went from slower, cleaner water to faster, dirtier water, because oysters filter the water, especially of excess nitrogen. It led to a collapse in much of our marine life.

e360: A project like this entails a new way of thinking about landscape architecture, doesn’t it? You are not just designing the physical landscape. You are taking an active hand in designing the biological environment as well.

Orff: Now, with the sixth extinction, we need to think radically differently about what infrastructure means. We need to include life and see that living landscapes are a form of infrastructure in the sense that forests, for example, clean our water and our air. Oyster reefs clean the water and buffer the shore, and mangrove forests help keep our coastal shorelines intact. An exciting change is that we are reframing ecosystems as infrastructure, and we are testing and modeling their efficacy.

e360: This is sometimes referred to as green infrastructure, isn’t it?

Orff: Yes, it is essentially the design and deployment of living systems — reforesting, restoring coral, building bio-swales to capture and hold water. It’s basically thinking about the physical landscape and the ecological systems that sustain us and weaving them back into cities, weaving them back into the fabric of our communities in order to help us adapt in the long term, not just to respond to emergencies.

e360: I’m intrigued that, in talking about such matters, you don’t generally speak about “restoring nature.” You speak instead of something you call “regenerative design.” What’s the difference?

Orff: Restoring nature is trying to bring back nature for nature’s sake. As much as I, too, am guilty of that desire at times, this is simply not possible because our water quality has changed, and our air and water temperatures have changed. What I’m trying to do is rebuild natural systems in a strategic way that reduces climate risk for communities.

“Rather than thinking of design as merely additive or ‘beautifying,’ we need to think about undoing our environmental mistakes.”

e360: You’ve been quoted as saying: “There’s no more natural nature. Now it’s a matter of design.” What did you mean by that?

Orff: We humans are profoundly impacting the planet. There is no “pure nature” that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere. We’ve “made” the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. It is a matter of design in the sense that it requires work, intention, design, funding, political skills. It’s not a naive or nostalgic attempt to restore the past. Instead, it’s layering up natural systems to reduce risk, building this hybrid future of stewarded nature.

e360: In Staten Island you are building a breakwater offshore, but in other places you have advocated tearing down some built structures to allow water a place to go during floods.

Orff: We have to soften our shorelines, we need to remove roadways from critical migration paths. Otherwise, flash flooding will get worse, and our biodiversity will continue to plummet. So a big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built. Rather than thinking of design as something merely additive or “beautifying,” we need to think about undoing our environmental mistakes, like damming rivers, bulkheading our shorelines, and concretizing streams. We need to start making room for rivers and floods.

e360: We’ve tried to control nature with big infrastructure projects. But that can backfire, can’t it?

Orff: For decades, infrastructure has been constructed as “single-purpose,” often designed by engineers to isolate one element of a system and to solve one problem. For example, on Staten Island, during Superstorm Sandy, a levee designed to keep water out was overtopped, resulting in a “bathtub effect” that trapped water inside a neighborhood rather than keeping it out and resulted in several deaths. We try to lock natural systems in place. But, of course, that is not the way that natural systems respond, and it is wholly insufficient for a climate-changed environment where we’re experiencing more intense rain in many regions, where we are facing more extreme heat, where sea levels are rising. The old rules, frankly, no longer apply.

e360: One region that you’ve thought a lot about is the Mississippi River. You’ve proposed a Mississippi River National Park. How would that work?

Orff: We need to think more comprehensively about the American landscape. We used to do that — even if it was Route 66, which went across the country, or when we set up the National Park System. There was a time when we were thinking at a bigger scale. Now we are so polarized, so fragmented, that we’re only able to think about the next thing that is immediately possible in a small area.

So the Mississippi River National Park was an idea that proposed a larger vision, connecting the river back to its floodplain and connecting its stakeholders — from the Iowa pig farmer to the Louisiana shrimper — and, in my mind, ultimately reducing the risk that some of these communities would be facing.

“The [Chattahoochee] project is also about bringing people together from communities that don’t always have much interaction.”

e360: The national park framework would be a way of bringing the river back to a healthy state?

Orff: The national park framework, as flawed as that might be, is a way to pull together these lands for recreation and climate adaption purposes and to bring the river back as a living system. Because right now it is not. The river is fragmented and exists in the lower Mississippi as a pollution drain, and the upper river all runs behind constructed levees so when we do have a flood it is just massive.

e360: On a somewhat less ambitious scale, you have a project in the Atlanta metropolitan area called the Chattahoochee RiverLands, a 125-mile-long bikeway and greenway that passes through both white and Black communities. You’ve said that such projects can help bring polarized communities together.

Orff: For this project, we cut through red tape, charting a path of access through a mosaic of public and private lands. It’s a radical effort to stitch together a historically fragmented public realm that showcases the river’s ecology and history. Beyond its physical footprint, the goal of the RiverLands is to raise public awareness, improve connections and access, address a long legacy of environmental racism, expand mobility for underserved communities, and build on a strong regional legacy of water resource conservation and protection.

It is also about bringing people together from communities that don’t always have much interaction — and that is already working. Rivers have such power to bring people together, to link up disjointed places, and bring life back into cities.

FULL ARTICLE: by Janet Marinelli

The Hempstead Plains Preserve is a place where you can imagine the presence of creatures past. Birdfoot violets, now gone, once colored the landscape with a wash of purple in spring. The heath hen, a large grouse that went extinct 90 years ago, performed its elaborate courtship dances on the Plains.

On a late afternoon in October, the slanting autumn sun lit up in a blaze of gold the grasses and wildflowers on this narrow, 19-acre sliver of land — almost all that is left of the tallgrass prairie that once covered more than 50 square miles at the heart of Long Island, New York, a fish-shaped island that stretches east into the Atlantic Ocean. “This place wants to be a grassland so bad, but so many obstacles are in the way,” says Rob Longiaru, the preserve’s habitat director.

In 1741 an English physician traveling in the Hempstead Plains lost his way on trails that meandered through the towering wild grasses and was forced to “blunder about a great while.” A century later, when the poet Walt Whitman explored the grassland as a boy, it was a vast grazing commons. “I have often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown,” Whitman wrote, “and can yet recall in fancy the interminable cow processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air.”

Conservation gardens may seem small and inconsequential, but added together they can have a major ecological impact.

However, even the tenacious grasses that grew as tall as a horse’s shoulder proved no match for the demographic revolution that began in this globally rare natural community on the doorstep of New York City — urban sprawl. When World War II ended, real estate developer William J. Levitt constructed Levittown, an instant suburb of more than 17,000 modest, single-family homes for returning GIs. The development spawned copycat communities, creating the template for urban sprawl in the United States, and beyond.

The most striking thing about the remaining rectangle of grassland is the sheer improbability of its presence in the commercial core of suburban Nassau County, hemmed in by the Nassau Coliseum sports arena, a Marriott Hotel, Nassau Community College, a police academy, warehouses, and several multi-lane highways. Not only has the Plains shrunk drastically, but invasive plants from around the globe have taken root and pose a major threat to the native grassland denizens.

Many unique and disappearing landscapes like the Hempstead Plains endure only because dogged advocates struggle to raise funds to restore and maintain them. Now, a growing body of research is demonstrating that “conservation gardens” — planted in places like commercial zones, residential yards, schoolyards, and corporate landscapes — can help bolster these hotspots of urban biodiversity. The authors of a paper published in Landscape and Urban Planning last June sum up the new research: “While urbanization is a major contributor to declines in native biodiversity worldwide, ecological research across the Global North and South has demonstrated that yards can provide crucial habitats for birds, pollinators, and other wildlife within urban regions.”

Residential yards make up about 50 percent of the total green space in U.S. and western European cities. “That’s a significant amount of land with potential to provide quality wildlife habitat,” says Susannah Lerman, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist. In fact, these areas may seem small and inconsequential, but added together they can have a major ecological impact.

Lerman was one of the lead researchers of an ambitious five-year study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published last year in Ecological Applications, which concluded that conservation gardening, when adopted on a wider scale, can help boost biodiversity. Lerman and her coauthors posited that when located adjacent to urban wildland fragments, these yards, planted with a variety of species and designed to attract wildlife, can help support resident flora and fauna by increasing the size of the available habitat and its connectivity to other natural areas. With the world urbanizing rapidly, she says, understanding how to conserve biodiversity in such human-dominated landscapes “is one of the century’s greatest challenges.”

When Betsy Gulotta arrived at Nassau Community College as a young biology professor in 1969, large swathes of the surrounding Hempstead Plains were still intact. While out exploring, Gulotta and her students would encounter nests of the upland sandpiper, a black, brown, and white-mottled grassland specialist known as the shorebird of the prairie. But in the early 1970s, she says, “when they started building the Coliseum and the Marriott Hotel and Charles Lindbergh Boulevard,” an eight-lane gash through the grassy Plains near where Lindbergh took off on the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, “those birds just disappeared.” The same fate befell the grasshopper sparrows, box turtles, and countless other creatures that made their home in the ancient landscape.

A 2018 appraisal of the remaining Hempstead Plains ecosystem found 14 rare and vulnerable plants.

In 2001, with the wild grassland teetering on the brink of extinction, Gulotta and a group of colleagues formed Friends of Hempstead Plains. They persuaded the Nassau County executive, who by happy coincidence was Gulotta’s husband, to include two parcels in the county’s “perpetual preservation plan”: a 19-acre fragment on the Nassau Community College campus that is now the Hempstead Plains Preserve, and a more overgrown 26-acre, county-owned tract nearby, named the Francis T. Purcell Preserve. Today, the Friends manage both places. “Our dream,” says Gulotta, “was if we could preserve the college’s land and do what we could with the Purcell Preserve, maybe that’s enough to allow some of the wildlife to return.”

Like an increasing number of urban wildland fragments, the two preserves are a refuge for vanishing regional biodiversity. They harbor species unique to rare sandplain grasslands found only along the northeast coast of North America, including the state-threatened bushy rock rose, a low-growing perennial with large buttery yellow, five-petaled flowers. “The diversity that is still maintained in the Hempstead Plains is incredible,” says Polly Weigand, executive director of the Long Island Native Plant Initiative, an all-volunteer effort to protect the island’s botanical diversity by establishing commercial sources of local “ecotypic” plants — genetically distinct geographic varieties — for use in habitat restoration and by nurseries, landscape designers, and home gardeners.

A 2018 appraisal of the remaining Plains ecosystem by the New York State Natural Heritage Service found 14 rare and vulnerable plants. Alarmingly, the botanists also documented 34 invasive non-native plants that threaten Plains natives, up from six in the 1980s.

Although the Friends have been successful at protecting imperiled plants and removing opportunistic woody shrubs, controlling mugwort, cypress spurge, and other herbaceous invasives has been a critical challenge. Longiaru, a conservation biologist with the Town of Hempstead who moonlights as the Friends’ habitat director, mows and hand cuts regularly to keep down the problematic plants. Boy Scouts and other volunteers help. Gulotta, the group’s conservation project manager for 18 years, hopes there is enough money left from a BAND Foundation grant to burn a portion of the preserve next year to suppress woody vegetation and stimulate the native wildflowers and grasses. “We don’t have a lot of money,” she says. “We do what we can.”

Anthony Marinello, who grew up in West Hempstead in the early 2000s, discovered the Hempstead Plains as a biology student at Nassau Community College. “I stumbled upon the preserve one day when I was bored between classes,” he says. The grassland piqued his interest, and two years ago Marinello established Dropseed Native Landscapes, a nursery and landscape design business. Every Saturday from April through November he can be found at the farmer’s market at Crossroads Farm on Hempstead Avenue. Surrounded by his potted milkweeds, pussytoes, switchgrass, and other inhabitants of the grassland community, he encourages the locals “to plant their own little pocket of the Plains.” According to Marinello, “Most people around here are completely unaware that it even existed.”

“There are hundreds of papers now that look at the conservation role that residential yards can play,” says a researcher.

Conservation gardens, like those that Marinello plants for schools and individuals, are starting to appear in countries around the globe. Although still far outnumbered by manicured lawns, in the U.S. there are now more than a million pollinator gardens, over 40,000 registered “Waystations” for declining monarch butterflies, and 283,000 wildlife gardens certified by the National Wildlife Federation. What’s more, the interest in conservation gardening is growing. “In 2020 we saw a 50 percent increase in people creating and certifying wildlife gardens,” says Mary Phillips, head of the National Wildlife Federation’s Garden for Wildlife program. In the past two years, she adds, that number has held steady.

In 2001, before starting her PhD, Susannah Lerman, of the Forest Service, was driving around Phoenix through desert and residential areas when she had a revelation. Back then, she says, biologists saw the struggle to preserve nature as an epic clash between cities and rural wildlands. They were convinced that “the wild places are where all the biodiversity is, and urban development is bad,” Lerman recalls. “I came to this realization that we can’t stop urban development so we need to figure out how to make it less bad.”

Twenty-plus years and a doctorate later, she is one of the pioneers of conservation gardening research. “There are hundreds of papers now that look specifically at the conservation role that residential yards can play,” she says.

In their five-year NSF study, Lerman and her colleagues analyzed the differences in breeding bird use of private yards and natural areas in parks in Baltimore, Boston, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix and Los Angeles. The yards were either typical lawn-dominated suburban properties or were managed for conservation. Many of the latter landscapes were wildlife gardens certified by the National Wildlife Federation.

The highly maintained lawns tended to host common “generalists,” such as house sparrows and house finches, which are not fussy about food and nesting places and therefore thrive in disturbed urban areas. In contrast, rarer “specialist” birds with specific food or cover requirements were found in the certified yards, including species of conservation concern such as curve-billed thrashers in Phoenix and wood thrushes in Baltimore. In addition, while similar collections of birds were observed at lawns across most of any given city, and to some extent even across the country, different bird species often turned up in each certified yard because the plants in them varied, creating a variety of habitat niches. Lerman points out that this diversity, combined with the synergistic role that the home conservation gardens can play in bolstering urban wildland fragments, indicates they have the potential to help reverse the loss of biodiversity in urban areas.

“There is no downside to growing appropriate native plants in urban landscapes,” says a conservationist."

Studies suggest that conservation gardens can be a boon to native flora as well as fauna. In a paper published in Nature Sustainability in May, researchers in Germany, Portugal, and the Czech Republic note that global measures for saving plants, most notably by safeguarding habitat in large protected areas, “have failed to halt systematic widespread declines in plant species.” While these efforts are key to successful plant conservation, they add, new approaches are urgently needed. The new approach they propose is to mainstream conservation gardening.

Using Germany, where 70 percent of plant species are in decline, as a case study, the scientists documented how horticulture has already played a key role in the recovery of some species. In recent decades, for example, planting in home gardens has increased the total numbers of two natives: grape hyacinth, classified as vulnerable on the German Red List of threatened species, and common bluebell by 65 and 1,104 percent, respectively.

In Germany, as in other countries, several obstacles are slowing the continued growth of conservation gardening and decreasing its ecological value. One stumbling block is that the native-plant industry caters primarily to the needs of large-scale ecological restoration. And while the demand for natives in consumer horticulture has grown, the emphasis has been on producing “nativars,” specimens with unusual ornamental traits — showy flowers with extra petals, say — and using propagation techniques such as cloning that preserve the desired characteristics but diminish the plants’ genetic diversity and resilience. The authors of the Nature Sustainability paper recommend labeling standards to make it easy for nonprofessionals to identify plants suitable for conservation gardening.

“There is no downside to growing appropriate native plants in urban landscapes,” says Polly Weigand of the Long Island Native Plant Initiative. “It is only beneficial.”

On a crisp, sunny day in November, bumblebees feasted on late-season nectar and pollen from brilliant goldenrod blooms in one of Anthony Marinello’s residential gardens, a pocket prairie backed by a white picket fence on a quiet suburban block in Floral Park at the western extreme of the historic Hempstead Plains. Every afternoon the garden “is completely filled with songbirds eating the seeds,” he says.

Conservation gardens such as this can provide the vital connective tissue that enables ancient natural communities to survive and even thrive. Brimming with native grasses, sundrops, dotted horsemint, and other wildflowers, the pocket prairie can help link the Hempstead Plains and other patches of sandplain grassland that dot the south shore of Long Island east to its terminus at Montauk Point. “You can’t knock down the shopping malls and subdivisions,” Marinello says, “so we need to incorporate these species back into our landscapes.”

FULL ARTICLE: By Evan Bush

Bees play by rolling wooden balls — apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse fish appears to recognize its own visage in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid settings where they likely experienced past pain.

All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.

That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.

Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated.

The declaration says there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals have conscious experience, and a “realistic possibility” of consciousness for all vertebrates — including reptiles, amphibians and fish. That possibility extends to many creatures without backbones, it adds, such as insects, decapod crustaceans (including crabs and lobsters) and cephalopod mollusks, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish.

“When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the declaration says. “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and a principal investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, is among the declaration’s signatories. Whereas many scientists in the past assumed that questions about animal consciousness were unanswerable, he said, the declaration shows his field is moving in a new direction.

“This has been a very exciting 10 years for the study of animal minds,” Birch said. “People are daring to go there in a way they didn’t before and to entertain the possibility that animals like bees and octopuses and cuttlefish might have some form of conscious experience.”

From 'automata' to sentient

There is not a standard definition for animal sentience or consciousness, but generally the terms denote an ability to have subjective experiences: to sense and map the outside world, to have capacity for feelings like joy or pain. In some cases, it can mean that animals possess a level of self-awareness.

In that sense, the new declaration bucks years of historical science orthodoxy. In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were merely “material automata” — lacking souls or consciousness.

Descartes believed that animals “can’t feel or can’t suffer,” said Rajesh Reddy, an assistant professor and director of the animal law program at Lewis & Clark College. “To feel compassion for them, or empathy for them, was somewhat silly or anthropomorphizing.”

In the early 20th century, prominent behavioral psychologists promoted the idea that science should only study observable behavior in animals, rather than emotions or subjective experiences. But beginning in the 1960s, scientists started to reconsider. Research began to focus on animal cognition, primarily among other primates.

Birch said the new declaration attempts to “crystallize a new emerging consensus that rejects the view of 100 years ago that we have no way of studying these questions scientifically.”

Indeed, a surge of recent findings underpin the new declaration. Scientists are developing new cognition tests and trying pre-existing tests on a wider range of species, with some surprises.

Take, for example, the mirror-mark test, which scientists sometimes use to see if an animal recognizes itself.

In a series of studies, the cleaner wrasse fish seemed to pass the test.

The fish were placed in a tank with a covered mirror, to which they exhibited no unusual reaction. But after the cover was lifted, seven of 10 fish launched attacks toward the mirror, signaling they likely interpreted the image as a rival fish.

After several days, the fish settled down and tried odd behaviors in front of the mirror, like swimming upside down, which had not been observed in the species before. Later, some appeared to spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror, examining their bodies. Researchers then marked the fish with a brown splotch under the skin, intended to resemble a parasite. Some fish tried to rub the mark off.

“The sequence of steps that you would only ever have imagined seeing with an incredibly intelligent animal like a chimpanzee or a dolphin, they see in the cleaner wrasse,” Birch said. “No one in a million years would have expected tiny fish to pass this test.”

In other studies, researchers found that zebrafish showed signs of curiosity when new objects were introduced into their tanks and that cuttlefish could remember things they saw or smelled. One experiment created stress for crayfish by electrically shocking them, then gave them anti-anxiety drugs used in humans. The drugs appeared to restore their usual behavior.

Birch said these experiments are part of an expansion of animal consciousness research over the past 10 to 15 years. “We can have this much broader canvas where we’re studying it in a very wide range of animals and not just mammals and birds, but also invertebrates like octopuses, cuttlefish,” he said. “And even increasingly, people are talking about this idea in relation to insects.”

As more and more species show these types of signs, Reddy said, researchers might soon need to reframe their line of inquiry altogether: “Scientists are being forced to reckon with this larger question — not which animals are sentient, but which animals aren’t?”

New legal horizons Scientists’ changing understanding of animal sentience could have implications for U.S. law, which does not classify animals as sentient on a federal level, according to Reddy. Instead, laws pertaining to animals focus primarily on conservation, agriculture or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories and pet retailers.

“The law is a very slow moving vehicle and it really follows societal views on a lot of these issues,” Reddy said. “This declaration, and other means of getting the public to appreciate that animals are not just biological automatons, can create a groundswell of support for raising protections.”

State laws vary widely. A decade ago, Oregon passed a law recognizing animals as sentient and capable of feeling pain, stress and fear, which Reddy said has formed the bedrock of progressive judicial opinions in the state.

Meanwhile, Washington and California are among several states where lawmakers this year have considered bans on octopus farming, a species for which scientists have found strong evidence of sentience.

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Environmental scientist Danielle Stevenson is pioneering an alternative to the costly “dig-and-dump” approach that simply moves contaminated soil elsewhere. At fire sites across California, Danielle is harnessing fungi and native plants through a process called mycoremediation—using nature itself to break down pollutants, pull heavy metals from the ground, and help devastated landscapes heal.

Women of the Earth, produced by Summer Moon Productions, featuring stories of women across America who are leading a new movement to restore and protect the land. By focusing on women in land stewardship roles, the series will explore women’s unique relationship to the earth and their innovative undertakings to heal the earth from climate change.

FULL ARTICLE & CITATIONS:

At the risk of sounding redundant: The roots of deep ecology in Norway run deep. As the Norwegian philosopher Gunnar Skirbekk has asserted in a publication from 1981 titled “Nasjon og natur, eit essay om den norske veremåten” (“Nation and Nature: An Essay on the Norwegian Way of Being”): “We ourselves are small and vulnerable, and we must understand that we do not stand outside of nature as all-powerful engineers, but that we belong to nature, as a part of the whole. … [Norway is a] state that to a great degree builds its national identity on nature” (ctd. in Reed and Rothenberg 1993, 6). Even the literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgård, who tends to dismiss nature as a cultural “cliché” and a phenomenon irrelevant to his artistic existence (see 2015, 68, 417), experienced a kind of epiphany when he moved to northern Norway after high school. Here he was overwhelmed by the elemental force of this alien environment, which clashed with the more subdued natural setting of his childhood spent in southern locales like Tromøya and Kristiansand. As he further remarks in book four of the now classic, yet still controversial, Min kamp (My Struggle), published between 2009 and 2011:

Beyond the last house the mountain soared straight up. There was no intermediate stage, which I was used to where I had grown up, those diffuse, hard-to-define places, which were neither private property nor open nature. This was real nature, and not the low, gentle Sørland type of nature but wild, harsh, windswept Arctic nature, which confronted you as soon as you opened the door (2015, 34–35).

Here, Knausgård problematizes the basic schism between nature and culture, the human and nonhuman. Though he can hardly be considered a spokesman for the natural world, which generally looms large in Norwegian literature––even in the work of more cosmopolitan writers like the nineteenth-century playwright Henrik Ibsen and the contemporary mystery-master Jo Nesbø––he serves as living testimony that the sheer presence of nature in Norway simply cannot be ignored. Including by someone who would otherwise disavow it.

If Ibsen, Nesbø, Knausgård, and the deeply nature-oriented Knut Hamsun rank among the top literary luminaries of Norway, Arne Næss (1912–2009) is surely the most renowned philosopher to have emerged from this Nordic nation. In 1939, at the age of twenty-seven, he became the country’s youngest professor––and, in fact, the only one employed in the discipline of philosophy at the time––and would go on to publish profusely for the next seventy years of his über-active intellectual as well as outdoor life. Though his publications would range widely in terms of philosophical subjects, his initial focus on empirical semantics and argumentation theory eventually developed into a sustained engagement with environmental ethics. More specifically, he is credited with launching the movement of deep ecology, a term that he coined somewhat unwittingly in 1973. However, the roots of this nature ethic run much “deeper” in the Norwegian cultural imaginary; its documented traces can be found in such diverse discursive realms as literature, painting, mountaineering, and polar exploration. On a broader popular––in the literal sense of “belonging to the people”––level, the outdoorsy lifestyle fostered by the untranslatable hyttekultur (the Norwegian custom of retreating to rented or privately owned huts) has perhaps contributed more to the ethos of deep ecology than the arctic exploits and artistic endeavors of national icons like Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, Ibsen, and Hamsun. To Næss’s credit, he continually tweaked his idea of deep ecology, which soon devolved into a catchy and even catchall concept, one that risked becoming philosophically naïve, romantically panpsychic, and––despite its best intentions––inextricably anthropocentric. Rather than discussing deep ecology in this generalized and, at times, amorphous sense, this article remains in more immanent fealty to Næss’s philosophical theories and their relation to distinctive Norwegian cultural traditions and environmental practices. These range from, and, in effect, build on one another in logical progression: ecosophy, self-identification or self-realization, friluftsliv (life in the open air), and allemannsrett or allemannsferdselsrett (everyman’s law or everyman’s travel law). From a more overarching supra-national standpoint, the conceptions of re-inhabitation and bioregionalism are also intimately connected to deep ecology; indeed, they can be considered its inevitable consequences.

Næss’s 1973 seminal article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary” distinguishes “shallow” ecology as an anthropocentric view that ascribes only instrumental value to nature from “deep” ecology, an attitude that recognizes the intrinsic worth of all living beings and regards humans as but one of many strands in the intricate fabric of life. He often summarizes this holistic ethic as “biospheric(al) egalitarianism.” Throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, even right up to his death in 2009, Næss revisited and refined his fundamental notion of deep ecology, elaborating an array of theories, rubrics, and models to illustrate his core environmental-ethical vision. His “eight-point platform,” formulated together with George Sessions in 1984 while the two were camping in Death Valley, California, offers a convenient overview of deep-ecological principles. It runs as follows:

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes. (Devall and Sessions 1985, 70; Drengson and Inoue 1995, 49–50)[1]

The upshot of this eco-manifesto is that the traditional partitions between human life and nonhuman life-forms should be erased, so that all living beings can prosper to the greatest extent possible. Furthermore, it is incumbent upon humanity to create the necessary nonutilitarian (infra)structures to help bridge the gap between these two ostensibly separate but ultimately interdependent ontological realms: the human and the nonhuman. In other words, taking up Næss’s original terminology from over a decade earlier: long-term biocentric “deep” thinking must prevail over the longstanding “shallow” and anthropocentric-myopic mindset.

Over the years, Næss preferred to employ the term “ecosophy” over “deep ecology,” the latter of which was sometimes faulted for possessing a certain open signification; more specifically, for lacking a coherent theory or advocating an effective practice.

Deep ecology can mean everything and yet nothing. As one critic has summarized the problem: “Indeed, deep ecology has not just been rapidly converted (in part through overuse) into a conceptual bog, but is well on its way to becoming all things to all interested parties” (Sylvan 1985, 2). Næss himself has expressed similar concerns in this regard: “Is there a definite general philosophy of deep ecology, or at least a kind of philosophy? Or is it essentially a movement with exasperatingly vague outlines?” (Næss 2008b, 105). In recent years, more extreme posthumanist camps have modified or outright rejected deep ecology. The American ecophilosopher David Abram, for instance, proposes the corrective term “depth ecology,” which replaces the shallow vs. deep binary with a flat vs. deep model. That is, it contrasts “a detached way of seeing that looks at nature from outside” vs. “an embedded way of seeing (and feeling) that gazes into the depths of a nature that encompasses and permeates us” (Abram 2014, 103). According to the more radical position of Bruno Latour, whether implicitly in We Have Never Been Modern or more plainly in Politics of Nature (see 2004, esp. 26–29), deep ecology never truly transcends modernism, since it is unable to free itself from the entrenched dualisms of nature and culture, object and subject, matter and spirit, and other dichotomous human-fashioned constructs.

Again, Næss himself never failed to revisit and revise his foundational concept of deep ecology. His environmental philosophy is more strictly known as “ecosophy,” which can be defined as “one’s own personal code of values and a view of the [natural] world which guides one’s decisions” (Næss 1990, 36). It is furthermore tied to Næss’s central notion of “identification” whereby the narrow self or ego yields to the comprehensive (and capitalized) Self, which includes, if not encompasses, the nonhuman domain of nature. According to his more precise definition: “Identification is a spontaneous, non-rational, but not irrational, process through which the interest or interests of another being are reacted to as our own interest or interests” (1988, 261). In alternative terms, the individual should not engage in an anthropocentric “ego-trip,” but rather strive to cultivate the biocentric “ecological self” (see 2008c). Self-identification or the synonymous Self-realization thus mean, for Næss, a broader experience of oneness with nature in all its (bio)diversity. Here he remains adamant in distinguishing his philosophy from mysticism, which stresses the dissolution of the individual self into a non-diversified supreme (read: divine) whole. On the other hand, as evidenced in his teachings and writings, he often draws on (Mahatma) Gandhi’s idea of self-realization (maha-ātman) and Spinoza’s monistic ontology of Deus sive Natura for the theoretical underpinnings of his ecosophy. He thus insists on a critical, and indeed reciprocal, balance between subjective individuality and objective diversity such that the Self continually crosses boundaries between the human and nonhuman but does not fully dissipate in either (the basis of Latour’s critique is obvious here). Ecosophy thus implies an “identification so deep that one’s own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism. One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life. Each living being is understood as a goal in itself, in principle on an equal footing with one’s own ego. It also entails a transition from I-it attitudes to I-thou attitudes––to use [Martin] Buber’s terminology” (1990, 174). But this kind of bio-equality means nothing in the philosophical abstract (e.g., “in principle”), whether filtered through Gandhi, Spinoza, or here Buber. In a paper reminiscent of the more scientific-inflected writings of Aldo Leopold, “Self-Realization in Mixed Communities of Humans, Bears, Sheep, and Wolves,” Næss discusses the “maximal realization of potentials among the maximal diversity of life-forms” (my paraphrase) in an explicitly Norwegian environmental context. In more conventional terms, he grapples with the problem of human-fauna coexistence or “species egalitarianism” (1979, 240) from a complex of perspectives, including philosophical, ecological, and governmental. A further takeaway from this article is that one’s ecosophy must be more narrowly defined by one’s own compass of inhabitation, by the physical space or geographical place to which one belongs––whether philosophically, ethically, or ecologically. In a word: bioregionally. Thus, we all have our own particular “Ecosophy X,” whereby X designates our specific bioregional home or personalized sense of belonging. Or what might best be called our “deep-dwelling.”

Næss labeled his ecosophy “Ecosophy T,” based on his preferred abode of Tvergastein, which is the name he bestowed on his mountain cabin situated on a high plateau within the present-day national park of Hallingskarvet (established in 2006) in southwest Norway. The word “Tvergastein” (a compound noun meaning “crossed stones”) derives from the regional dialect for the angled quartz crystals found in this most ancient geological terrain of Scandinavia, and, more proximately, in a tarn right behind Næss’s hut. Tvergastein, which lies at just over 1,500 meters and a good three-hour trek from the nearest town (Ustaoset, located halfway between Oslo and Bergen), is Norway’s highest privately owned dwelling. Næss commissioned its construction in 1938 and eventually expanded it from an eight-by-five-meter shelter to a 100-square-meter lodge, albeit a modest one lacking such amenities as electricity and running water. As if this simplicity and inaccessibility were not enough, Næss built, with his own hands, a three-by-three-meter refuge some 200 meters higher up on the crags of the Hallingskarvet massif, which he dubbed “Skarveredet” (roughly meaning “a nest” in a mountain “notch”). By his own admission, this bivouac-like sanctuary gave him “‘the feeling[s] of being on the very brink of the abyss’ and ‘of a raven perched on the cliff for long periods’” (ctd. in Langlais 1995, 201). Tvergastein can thus be considered Norwegian hyttekultur taken to the environmental and existential extreme. It afforded Næss “a simple lifestyle with maximum self-reliance” (2008a, 54), a bioregional niche where he could cultivate the following philosophical ideals: “unruffledness, equanimity, austerity, distance, aloofness, nonviolence, diversity, egalitarianism” (2008a, 55). Though professionally bound to the University of Oslo, Næss spent as much time as possible at Tvergastein. In fact, he scheduled his lectures from Tuesday to Wednesday afternoon, whereupon he would take the evening train to Ustaoset, hike or ski up to his hut, and then return to Oslo the following Tuesday morning for another two packed days of classes and other academic obligations. In this fashion, he avoided getting caught up in a staid academic routine, instead expanding his philosophical horizons and deepening his ecosophical roots high up on a barren mountain plateau otherwise devoid of human habitation.[2] Indeed, his (Self-)identification with this austere landscape would become so profound that he seriously considered changing his surname from Næss to Tvergastein (see Drengson 2008, 38).

If “Ecosophy T” still comes across as overly abstract or conceptually vague, it can be further concretized in the practice of friluftsliv, which Næss extols as an ethically and ecologically responsible “way of life in free nature that is highly efficient in stimulating the sense of oneness, wholeness and in deepening identification” (1990: 177). Friluftsliv has a storied tradition in Norway and is the subject of countless popular as well as scholarly books and articles.[3] This composite word (fri = free, luft = air, liv = life) was coined by none other than Ibsen, in an epic poem from 1859 that bears the title “Paa vidderne,” which is usually rendered as “On the Heights.” A vidde (literally: “width”) is a distinctive feature of the Norwegian landscape, namely an expansive highland plateau that lies above treeline but that does not resemble the vast glaciated tracts of more northern and maritime mountain ranges. In other words: it corresponds to the topography of Tvergastein. Some sixty years in the wake of Ibsen’s poem, the arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen held a now famous speech, simply called “Friluftsliv,” to the youth section of the Norwegian Hiking Association (Den Norske Turistforening). This 1921 discourse solidified the term friluftsliv in both the Norwegian language and mentality. Nansen’s simple, no-nonsense definition reads as follows: friluftsliv means “getting away from the crowd, the perpetual chase, the confusing noise, whither our lives are all too often led––getting out into nature, out into the great open” (see 1922, 3; 199; my translation). Since then, numerous others have reflected and expounded on this notion, which Næss himself views as a veritable “route towards paradigm change” (1990, 178). That is, as the perfect platform for both an environmentally ethical vita activa and contemplativa.

As Næss’s fellow deep ecologist and climbing companion Nils Faarlund has declared: “Friluftsliv is one of the warmest words in Norwegian––even warmer than love” (1993, 172). According to Faarlund, friluftsliv is both a way of life and a way of thinking that seeks to restore our (lost) sense of home in the wake of modernization and mass culture. It is an undeniably nostalgic sentiment, one that originated during the mid-nineteenth-century cultural movement known as “Norwegian romantic nationalism.” It should therefore not be construed as a term that solely applies to “modern” trends such as outdoor recreation or environmental education. That is, it should not be subsumed under sport or (eco)-tourism and it does not require fancy hiking apparel or expensive climbing gear. Nor does it presume that one seek out remote wilderness or set foot on lofty summits; local landscapes fully suffice for one’s simple and sincere effort to (re)connect with nature and (re)experience a kind of deep-ecological homecoming. In alternative terms, Faarlund makes a case for re-inhabitation and bioregionalism, which are two important outcomes, or better yet offshoots, of deep ecology, even if their origins are more American––and more narrowly, Californian––than Norwegian (Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, and Gary Snyder are prominent exponents of these posthuman modes of dwelling dating back to the 1970s.) Nevertheless, in a similar biocentric vein, Faarlund’s tellingly titled essay “A Way Home” argues that friluftsliv involves “an unselfish ‘I-Thou’ relationship” (recall Næss’s earlier deference to Buber’s interactive dyad) that recreates “nature-consonant lifestyles” amidst “the anthropocentrism of a nature-dissonant society” (1993, 164). Furthermore, friluftsliv does not just operate as an individual outlook or activity. More widely, “it evokes a national identity, a sense of really ‘belonging’ to the land” (ibid.)––whether the local Norwegian landscape or the greater homeland of Norway itself.

In actual fact, friluftsliv has become legally codified on a national level in the (nearly isomorphic) friluftslov or, as it is officially called: Lov om friluftslivet (“law regarding the free-air-life”).[4] In more informal parlance, this governmental decree is known as allemannsrett or allemannsferdselsrett, a kind of Outdoor Recreation Act or “everyman’s law” that was passed by parliament in 1957 but harks back to “commoner’s rights” and “rights to roam” that have long existed in much of central and northern Europe. According to this ruling, people have the legal right to exercise their environmental-ethical creed, more specifically to engage in outdoor activities––whether camping, hiking, climbing, canoeing, Nordic skiing––regardless of prevailing boundaries between public land and private property. Granted, some technical rules apply to this nationally sanctioned ethos of life in the open air. For instance, one must pitch one’s tent at least 150 meters from privately owned structures and can only remain at a given site for up to two days (whereby certain overused areas on the coast and in the mountains are off limits in terms of open camping). Furthermore, Norway has promoted friluftsliv in numerous ways, whether societal, educational, or recreational. Some basic facts about the country already work in favor of this lifestyle: natural spaces are more plentiful and more proximate to a greater percentage of people’s doorsteps than, say, in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere in Europe; diverse means of public transportation can convey open-air enthusiasts to the woods, mountains, and fjords both efficiently and affordably; Norwegians have more free time at their disposal than perhaps any other citizenry (they work an average of 1,342 hours per year as opposed to 1,815 hours in the United States, 1,778 hours in Canada, and 1,581 hours in neighboring Sweden). Furthermore, an extensive network of hostels and campgrounds, many of which are open year-round, enable longer sojourns in the outdoors. In more out-of-the-way areas, the DNT (Den Norske Turistforening) has established a vast infrastructure of marked trails, serviced huts, and organized trips for the benefit of hikers and skiers throughout the year. Youth pedagogy also plays a key role in inculcating an environmental consciousness. Schoolchildren are exposed to the “free air” from an early age, for instance through outdoor recess after every indoor class period and week-long vacations qua nature excursions during the fall, winter, and spring.[5]

Thus, friluftsliv is both a philosophical ideal and a practical mode of existence, both of which are oriented toward a “more-than-human world” (Gelter 2000, 83, 90). In many ways, this Norwegian, and to some extent, broader Scandinavian phenomenon[6] crystalizes deep-ecological thinking, offering a physical field of activity and ethical pattern of conduct for the realization of the Self that Næss postulates as the core of his Spinozan-Gandhian-inspired ecosophy. But Næss was far more than a professional and prolific philosopher; he also pioneered rock-climbing routes in Norway, took part in three Himalayan mountaineering expeditions, and generally spent as much time as possible in the “open air,” even going to great lengths to calculate the number of days he spent at Tvergastein. In 1993, he celebrated his 4,015th day (an exact total of eleven years) at the hut and by the time of his death in 2009 he had abided there for thirteen years overall (see Gjefsen 2012, 332, 371). In accordance with his predilection for the outdoor life in all its plenitude, Næss also published articles on such philosophical-environmental topics as “Climbing and the Deep Ecology Movement” and “Metaphysics of the Treeline” (see 2005a and 1995b). In the end, the example of his thinking and dwelling, carried out under the mantra of deep ecology, seamlessly mesh with the admixture of environmental ethics, bioregional practices, and governmental policies embraced under the mantle of Norwegian friluftsliv. In Næss’s own summative words with respect to both his philosophy and his country:

Has Norway anything to tell the world––something that is more or less specific for Norway and that should be appreciated by the world––before our little nation disappears, becomes just a tiny province among societies of the future superclass? I don’t know anything other than the classic Norwegian friluftsliv: free-air-life. Norwegians walk, run, creep into nature to get rid of whatever represses them and contaminates the air, not only the atmosphere. They don’t talk about going out, but in and into nature. There they find themselves, who they are, what they stand for. And then they come back more whole, more sure of themselves, more ready to face the problems that will inevitably confront them in cities, towns, even in their old local communities.

(Næss 1994, 15; 2005b, 38)

Text by Sean Ireton, an associate Professor of German in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Missouri. His areas of research embrace modern philosophy and comparative literature with a special focus on existentialism and environmentalism.

REFERENCES Abram, David. 2014. “On Depth Ecology.” The Trumpeter 30 (2): 101–4.

• Devall, Bill, and George Sessions, eds. 1985. Deep Ecology. Living As If Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith.

• Drengson, Alan. 2008. “The Life and Work of Arne Næss: An Appreciative Overview.” In Drengson and Devall 2008, 3–41.

• Drengson, Alan, and Bill Devall, eds. 2008. The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Næss. Berkeley: Counterpoint.

• Drengson, Alan, and Yuichi Inoue, eds. 1995. The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

• Faarlund, Nils. 1993. “A Way Home.” In Reed and Rothenberg 1993, 157-69.

––––––. 1993. “Touch the Earth: A Conversation with Nils Faarlund.” In Reed and Rothenberg 1993, 169–75.

• Gelter, Hans. 2000. “Friluftsliv: The Scandinavian Philosophy of Outdoor Life.” Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 5 (Summer): 77–92.

• Gjefsen, Truls. 2012. Arne Næss: Et Liv. Oslo: Cappelen Damm.

• Gurholt, Kirsti Pedersen. 2008. “Norwegian friluftsliv and Ideals of Becoming an ‘Educated Man.’” Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 8 (1): 55–70.

• Knausgaard (Knausgård), Karl Ove. 2015. My Struggle. Book Four. Translated by Don Bartlett. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books.

• Langlais, Richard. 1995. “Living in the World: Mountain Humility, Great Humility.” In Sessions 1995, 195–203.

• Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

––––––. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• “Lov om friluftslivet (friluftsloven).” Lovdata: http://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1957-06-28-16. (Accessed June 5, 2021)

• Nansen, Fridtjof. 1922. “Friluftsliv: Tale på Den Norske Turistforenings møde for skoleungdommen, juni, 1921.” Den norske turistforenings aarbok, 3-5. Kristiana: Grøndahl & Søn. Reprinted in 1978. Friluftsliv fra Fridtjof Nansen til våre dager, edited by Gunnar Breivik and Haakon Løvmo, 199–200. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

• Næss, Arne. 1979. “Self-Realization in Mixed Communities of Humans, Bears, Sheep, and Wolves.” Inquiry 22: 231–41.

––––––. 1988. “Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes.” In Deep Ecology, edited by Michael Tobias, 256–70. Revised second printing [1984]. San Marcos, CA: Avant Books.

––––––. 1990. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

––––––. 1994. “The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology.” In Nature: The True Home of Culture, edited by Børge Dahle, 15–18. Oslo: Norges Idrettshøgskole. Reprinted in 2005b. The Trumpeter 21 (2): 38–41.

––––––. 1995a. Det gode lange livs far: Hallingskarvet sett fra Tvergastein. Oslo: N.W. Damm & Søn.

––––––. 1995b. “Metaphysics of the Treeline.” In Sessions 1995, 246–48.

––––––. 1995c. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary.” In Drengson and Inoue 1995, 3–9.

––––––. 2005a. “Climbing and the Deep Ecology Movement.” The Trumpeter 21 (2): 57–60.

––––––. 2005b. “The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology.” The Trumpeter 21 (2): 38–41.

––––––. 2008a. “An Example of a Place: Tvergastein.” In Drengson and Devall 2008, 45–64.

––––––. 2008b. “The Basics of the Deep Ecology Movement.” In Drengson and Devall 2008, 105–19.

–––––– . 2008c. “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World.” In Drengson and Devall 2008, 81–96; Drengson and Inoue 1995, 13–30; Sessions 1995, 225–239.

• Næss, Arne, and George Sessions. 1985. “Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement.” In Devall and Sessions 1985, 69–73. Reprinted in Drengson and Inoue 1995, 49–53.

• Reed, Peter, and David Rothenberg, eds. 1993. Wisdom in the Open Air; The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology. Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis Press.

• Sessions, George, ed. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala.

• Sylvan, Richard. 1985. “A Critique of Deep Ecology.” Radical Philosophy 40: 2–12.

• Vikander, Nils. 2007. “Feet on Two Continents: Spanning the Atlantic with Friluftsliv?” In Nature First: Outdoor Life the Friluftsliv Way, edited by Bob Henderson and Nils Vikander, 8–20. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books.

[1] For a slightly different version of these eight platform principles, as reformulated later without Sessions, see Næss 1990: 29; 2008b: 111–12.

[2] For these biographical details related to Tvergastein, I am indebted to Gjefsen 2012: esp. 93, 121–22; and Næss 1995a. This latter source is an illuminating and at times stunning mix of autobiography, philosophy, and photography (courtesy of Johan Brun) revolving around Tvergastein and its mountainous environs.

[3] For perhaps the best overview of this cultural phenomenon written in English, and one that moreover reflects on the issue of gender, see Gurholt 2008.

[4] For the precise details and wording of this law, see the Norwegian governmental Lovdata webpage:http://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1957-06-28-16.

[5] For much of the above information, I am indebted to Vikander (2007), who goes into greater detail regarding Norwegian free-air pedagogy on various levels, ranging from preschool to the (usually) post-secondary Folkehøgskole.

[6] On some differences between Norwegian and Danish-Swedish notions of friluftsliv, see Faarlund 1993: esp. 163–64.

FULL ARTICLE: Wood is a well-known insulator: it does not let current or heat flow through easily. But when wet, it can conduct electricity because of water and the dissolved minerals and salt it contains. And now, researchers report a simple chemical route to change the microscopic structure of wood and boost the electricity it produces when wet.

The amount of electricity is still small, but enough to run LED lights or a calculator. Using larger pieces of wood or connecting multiple smaller devices could produce enough power for a laptop, said Yuanyuan Li, a professor in the Department of Fiber and Polymer Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

“If we wanted to power a laptop, we would need about one square meter of wood about one centimeter thick, and about two liters of water,” she said in a press release.

The concept is called hydrovoltaic energy. “A big issue with hydrovoltaic energy harvesting from organic materials is the extremely low power output [with] which it is difficult to power practical devices,” says Jonas Garemark, a doctoral student and co-author of the work published in Advanced Functional Materials. “In our work, we can reach microwatts per square centimeter, which provides useful power outputs.”

Natural wood contains long, empty channels called lumen that conduct water. These channels can be micrometers to millimeters wide. There has been a lot of research on nanoengineering wood to change its chemical makeup and nanostructure, which impart unique properties such as elasticity, pliability and transparency. But, says Garemark, “no one has so far attempted to utilize the empty spaces within natural wood.”

The KTH researchers decided to fill these voids with even smaller porous structures. The thought was that this would speed up the flow of water through the structure and increase the effective surface area between water and wood.

Making the efficient wood-based generator involved a one-step chemical treatment. The researchers immersed a piece of balsa wood in a water-sodium hydroxide solution for 48 hours at –6°C. This causes the cell walls in wood to partly break apart, causing a dense jumble of tiny cellulose fibers to collect in the lumen.

The dense network of fibers creates many smaller pores, which boosts water uptake and surface area charge, just as the researchers predicted. Their measurements showed that the modified wood produced 10 times more electricity than natural wood when soaked in pure water.

Until now, researchers have most commonly used materials such as graphene, carbon black or porous metal oxides for hydrovoltaic energy harvesting, Garemark says. All these require a lot of energy to prepare.

The new wood-based generator is a low-cost, sustainable alternative for low-power devices. “This material is made completely from wood, and the preparation requires only one single step following green chemistry principles,” he says. Plus, this is just the beginning for hydrovoltaic energy harvesting from wood. “This is a relatively new topic and there are many exciting possibilities that has not been explored yet.”

Source: Jonas Garemark et al. Advancing Hydrovoltaic Energy Harvesting from Wood through Cell Wall Nanoengineering. Advanced Functional Materials, 2022.

FULL ARTICLE: At first glance, these nine sites scattered across the globe seem unremarkable. A peat bog in Poland’s Sudeten Mountains. Searsville Lake, in California, and Crawford Lake, in Ontario. A stretch of seafloor in the Baltic Sea, a bay in Japan, a water-filled volcanic crater in China, an ice core drilled from the Antarctic Peninsula, and two coral reefs, in Australia and the Gulf of Mexico.

But these sites share a significant characteristic: they are all finalists in a remarkable scientific competition that’s expected to announce a winner in the next few weeks. The selected location will — if accepted by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the scientific body that names the Earth’s eras and epochs — both define and represent what scientists are calling the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch that reflects how profoundly humans have altered the planet.

While naturalists and scientists have pondered humanity’s impact on the Earth for centuries, it took until 2000 for the term Anthropocene to gain traction, propelled into the public by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch-born atmospheric chemist who, in 1995, shared a Nobel Prize for research on the depletion of the planet’s ozone layer, and the American ecologist Eugene Stoermer. In 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed to determine if a new epoch — marked by human-caused changes — was, indeed, warranted.

Human-made climate change is one of many reasons given by the working group to support its case for the Anthropocene. Humanity has also flooded the planet with synthetic chemicals and new radioactive isotopes that will be measurable far into the future, the group argues, and has derailed the natural course of evolution by moving species between continents. In this long view, cities, industrial sites, tunnels, and mines are geological formations in their own right, packed with “techno-fossils” that will long outlast current civilizations.

While almost all of science accepts the severity of recent environmental change, some geologists oppose framing it as a new geological epoch. Debate is ongoing, but after painstakingly compiling and publishing evidence, the 40 scientists of the AWG have determined that the Anthropocene is sufficiently distinct from the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago.

“We see a clear, abrupt, and global transition from the previous Earth epoch to something new,” says Colin Waters, the AWG’s chair and a former member of the British Geological Survey.

While Crutzen and Stoermer originally proposed the onset of the Industrial Revolution as the Anthopocene’s starting point, scholars continue to debate when human impacts became significant enough to change the chemical composition of sediments and rocks, the metrics of epochal change. After much deliberation, the AWG homed in on the 1950s.

That’s when a wave of nuclear tests released exotic radioactive elements and isotopes into the atmosphere, and their fallout settled into soils and sediments. The 1950s also marked the beginning of rampant consumption, which injected millions of tons of plastic, processed metals, and synthetic chemicals into the Earth’s systems.

Before the Anthropocene can be officially proclaimed, the AWG must name a single site that permanently captures the epoch’s novelty.The scientific markers include the presence of fly ash and carbon isotopes typical of fossil fuel combustion, increased levels of nitrogen and phosphorus — two elements used in fertilizers — or radioactive elements and isotopes previously absent from the geological record. The site will be declared a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), and it will play a similar role for geology as type specimens, housed in museums, do for describing species of plants and animals.

Other chapters in Earth history have their own GSSPs. The onset of the Jurassic period, for example, is represented by a site in the Austrian Alps where certain species of ammonites and foraminiferes first appear as fossils. Such sites — there are scores of them around the world — are marked with a “Golden Spike” rammed into the rock and an explanatory sign.

According to the rules of geology, a GSSP site needs to meet a long list of criteria. Most importantly, it needs to preserve indefinitely the most typical changes in the chemical composition of sediments and rocks, or in the organisms that have turned into fossils. Sites with a high risk of being washed away or disturbed by either animals or humans are not suitable. Also, a site must be adequately thick and accessible, so it can be examined by scientists.

Of course, there are plenty of places that reflect how humans have altered the biosphere and its geology — including megacities, with their glomerations of minerals, metals, asphalt, glass, and eroded landscapes. A GSSP, however, needs to show characteristics that can be found worldwide, not just in particular spots.

The Ediacaran Period, which ended some 540 million years ago, is marked by a gold spike in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. The Ediacaran Period, which ended some 540 million years ago, is marked by a gold spike in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. James St. John

Once the call for proposals went out in 2019, scientists began sifting through data from past expeditions and measurement campaigns. Some sites were quickly discarded, including Berlin’s Teufelsberg, an 260-foot-high hill made of rubble from World War II and municipal waste. “Such a manmade elevation looked like a good candidate, but then it turned out that this hill was created directly on sand from the Pleistocene,” says Reinhold Leinfelder, a Berlin-based biogeologist and member of the AWG. “The Holocene was totally missing, and that’s not good for a reference point, [which] needs to offer a continuous geological record.”

After much careful vetting, the contest has now been narrowed to nine sites, and the researchers behind each candidate have presented their site’s special features in scientific publications and to the AWG’s twenty-three voting members.

The Śnieżka peatland, situated 4,700 feet above sea level in the Sudeten Mountains in southern Poland, looks like a natural bog. But it tells a history of human interference, says geologist Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. According to her analysis, from about 1950 on, the bog shows “sharp changes in the deposition of multiple, independent geochemical markers” reflecting fossil fuel combustion, industrialization, and nuclear weapon tests, along with signals of climate change.

Francine McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University, in Ontario, reports that the lakebed under Crawford Lake, in Ontario, “is the only site with undisturbed annual laminations over centuries,” including remains from an Indigenous settlement, European colonization, Canadian logging operations, and modern agriculture. She stresses that beneath the lake, “there are no burrowing organisms to disturb the sediments, allowing the precise calendar age of sediments to be determined by layer counting, just like tree rings.”

The team proposing Searsville Lake, south of San Francisco, emphasizes the site’s human origins. “Searsville is a compelling paradigm for the Anthropocene because the construction of a dam … created this depositional environment,” says Allison Stegner, a palaeobiologist at Stanford University. She describes the lake’s sediments as an “exceptionally detailed Anthropocene archive accumulated via natural geologic processes” with layers of plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 datable to individual seasons of specific years. Many different chemicals typical of human activity have been blown and deposited here by Pacific Ocean winds, she says, which “means they originate from all over the planet and constitute a repository of global dimensions.”

In China, geologist Yongming Han, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, submitted a former volcanic crater called Sihailongwan Maar. While mercury does occur naturally, here its levels increased sharply after 1860, in line with industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, which contain the heavy metal.

In Japan, paleobiologist Michinobu Kuwae, of Ehime University, has submitted Beppu Bay, located on Kyūshū Island. Surrounded by urban sprawl, spas, chemical industries, and fruit orchards, the bay is a microcosm of humanity’s impact. Kuwae has identified a significant increase in nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into the bay from anthropogenic sources. The nutrients have spurred the growth of dinoflagellates, a phytoplankton known to thrive in conditions of marine ecological degradation. Kuwae has suggested that the increase of dinoflagellates could be a significant signifier of the new epoch.

Two scientists from Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research have taken a core sample at a depth of 790 feet in the Baltic Sea that shows a pronounced change in color. The oldest layers of sediment “were generally well-oxygenated, mixed by organisms, and of a homogenous, light gray color,” says senior scientist Jérôme Kaiser. After being “significantly impacted by human activity in the mid-1950s,” he adds, the core turned dark “due to a significant increase in the content of organic matter preserved in the sediments.” The sharp color change was caused by a huge influx of nutrients from agriculture and the spread of so-called “dead zones,” where a lack of oxygen prevents the degradation of organic matter.

Clearly, the most beautiful of the sites that might symbolize the Anthropocene are two coral reefs. North Flinders Reef lies 90 miles north of the main band of the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia’s northeastern coast. West Flower Garden Bank in the Gulf of Mexico is considered one of the healthiest coral reefs in U.S. waters, with 50 percent live coral coverage. Both sites look untouched by humans and are far removed from cities and industrial sites. But when geologists took samples from the coral reef structures, they discovered evidence of human impact.

“North Flinders Reef has been impacted by humans since the end of the 19th century through ocean warming, changes in ocean salinity and nutrient cycles, and carbon uptake from [burning] fossil fuels,” says Jens Zinke, a paleobiologist from the University of Leicester, who compiled the proposal. Kristine DeLong, a marine scientist at Louisiana State University, examined a sample drilled at a depth of 70 feet at West Flower Garden Bank, a 10-hour boat ride from the mainland, and found evidence of nuclear explosions, fertilizer, and the burning of fossil fuel.

Even the continent farthest from human population centers now tells the story of the Anthropocene. Liz Thomas, a paleoclimatologist with the British Antarctic Survey, has nominated a site in the Palmer Land region of the Antarctic Peninsula. The closest area of human activity is a scientific research station more than 400 miles away, she says. Yet when she and her colleagues drilled and extracted an ice core there in 2012, they found radioactive and chemical traces similar to those in other candidate sites, though at lower concentrations. Because the oldest layers of her core contain bubbles of air with much lower concentrations of CO2 and methane than the current atmosphere, she says, her site offers a “truly global perspective for the Anthropocene.”

Naming one representative place is the AWG’s last big task before handing matters over to a senior group of scientists in the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the timekeepers of Earth’s history. Should the Anthropocene later be formally recognized by geology’s top scientific body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the winning site will act as a stark reminder of human impact.

The scientists who have submitted proposals hope that giving a single site this status might raise awareness of threats to ecosystems and the need to preserve them. Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł hopes that the GSSP title for the Polish bog she has nominated would be “motivation for better protection of peatlands in general.” Kristine deLong, who submitted West Flower Garden Bank coral reef, says that the still-healthy reef will “hopefully be a survivor in 100 years, such that divers in the year 2100 will see a live coral and not a dead coral as the GSSP.”

As chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, Colin Waters is neutral on which site ought to represent the Anthropocene and is focused on organizing a well-informed vote that leads to a 60 percent majority for the winning site. If the International Union of Geological Sciences formally proclaims the Anthropocene, Waters thinks, the public will take notice.

“It is a big step if the most important geological bodies confirm, after long consideration, how radical the change in the geology of the planet is due to us as a human species, and that the crucial changes have taken place within 70 years,” he says. The recognition would also make it clear “that we cannot simply return to the Holocene world.”

Nearly half of the planet’s bird species are in decline, according to a definitive report that paints the grimmest picture yet of the destruction of avian life.

The State of the World’s Birds report, which is released every four years by BirdLife International, shows that the expansion and intensification of agriculture is putting pressure on 73% of species. Logging, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources and climate breakdown are the other main threats.

Globally, 49% of bird species are declining, one in eight are threatened with extinction and at least 187 species are confirmed or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500. Most of these have been endemic species living on islands, although there is an increase in birds now going extinct on larger land masses, particularly in tropical regions. In Ethiopia, for example, the conversion of grassland to farmland has caused an 80% decrease in endemic Liben larks since 2007. Just 6% of bird species globally are increasing.

Since 1970, 2.9 billion individual birds (29% of the total) have been destroyed in North America. The picture is just as bleak in other parts of the world – since 1980, 600 million birds (19%) have been destroyed in Europe, with previously abundant species such as the common swift, common snipe and rook among those slipping towards extinction. Europe’s farmland birds have shown the most significant declines: 57% have disappeared as a result of increased mechanisation, use of chemicals and converting land into crops. In Australia, 43% of abundant seabird species have declined between 2000 and 2016.

Dr Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International, said: “We have to stop these declines and start getting on track for recovery. Our future, as well as the world’s birds, depends on it. If we continue to unravel the fabric of life, we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat.”

The report is made up of a compendium of other studies, and because birds are the best-studied group on the planet, it gives an idea of the state of nature more generally. “Birds are useful for telling us about the state of the planet. What they say is that nature is in poor condition, lots of species are in decline,” said Butchart.

Birds are cornerstones of healthy ecosystems, so their disappearance is likely to have myriad negative knock-on effects. Hornbills, for example, disperse large seeds in tropical forests; turkey vultures dispose of organic waste, while seabirds help in the cycle of nutrients between sea and land, keeping coral reefs healthy.

The previous State of the World’s Birds report, released in 2018, found 40% of bird species worldwide in decline.

Wildfires feature more prominently in this report than previous editions, having increased and ravaged previously unaffected habitats. The succession of heatwaves, droughts and floods in recent years will lead to widespread species extinctions if they continue, researchers warn, highlighting the importance of addressing the nature and climate crises at the same time.

Growing evidence links the health of bird populations to human health. Covid-19 is a warning of what could happen if we continue to destroy the natural world, with 70% of zoonotic diseases originating in wildlife. A highly pathogenic variant of avian flu – the result of intensive farming – has driven rapid declines in some bird populations this year. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies.

The report comes ahead of the Cop15 meeting in Montreal in December, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create new legislation to tackle the biodiversity crisis. Butchart hopes the findings will feed into the final statement from Montreal. “The key action needed now by governments is to make sure a really ambitious and bold global biodiversity framework is adopted. We’ve got to bend this curve, so by 2030 we’re on a mission of being nature positive,” he said.

This means increasing the number and quality of protected areas, conserving remaining habitats and restoring those that have been degraded. Preventing the illegal killing of birds, managing invasive species, reducing fisheries’ bycatch and preventing overexploitation of natural resources will all help.

The report is not all gloom. According to BirdLife, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct since 1993 without conservation work. It cites the creation of a new seabird haven the size of France in the North Atlantic, estimated to protect 5 million birds.

Juliet Vickery, chief executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, who was not involved in compiling the report, said: “The fact that nearly half of all bird species are declining and one in eight is at risk of extinction reinforces the fact that we are living through a biodiversity crisis. It requires action at every level, from local to global. This carries a strong warning about the health of our natural world.”

Birds in trouble The South American harpy eagle, which stands 1 metre (3 feet) tall and feeds on monkeys and sloths, is one of the world’s largest birds of prey. It was uplisted from near threatened to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list in 2021 because of a combination of forest loss, hunting, poaching and collisions with power lines. It has declined by 50% in 60 years.

The secretary bird, a raptor from sub-Saharan Africa, went from being vulnerable to endangered in 2020 after habitat degradation driven by the burning of grasslands and intensive livestock grazing. Birds are also captured for the wildlife trade.

The lesser florican, a species endemic to the Indian subcontinent whose males perform leaping rituals to get the attention of females, has declined by 90% in 20 years, mainly because of the loss of grassland habitats and the predation of its chicks by feral dogs. There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 mature individuals left, and it is now critically endangered.

The impressive vocal abilities of the Central American yellow-naped Amazon has made it one of the most sought-after parrots in the pet trade. It has declined by more than 80% in 30 years, mainly due to poaching and the expansion of agriculture, and as of 2022 is critically endangered.

The Bahama warbler was badly affected by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, especially on Grand Bahama, where 95% of its habitat is believed to have been destroyed. It was listed as endangered in 2020.

Excerpt:

**Clifi Will Not Save Us – Turning Narrative Theory on its Head

On climate fiction, or clifi:**

Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise. [i]

This is one of the foremost anglophone clifi authors working today, whose work is both consistently influenced by climate crisis and who has achieved a pinnacle of literary fame, Jeff Vandermeer. As a fan of his work, I was extremely excited to read this polemic of his, published just over two years ago in Esquire. In it he traces the lineage of the term clifi and sketches its relationship to speculative fiction, expresses his thoughts and opinions on his own works and other key clifi texts of the past half century, and he critiques Amitav Ghosh, so he really doesn’t leave much to ask for.

As a scholar who works on econarratology and science fiction in particular, my attention was captured by Vandermeer’s auteurist perspective on this issue in literature, in genre fiction, in the publishing industry, and ultimately in terms of policy and lifestyle. Econarratology and unnatural narratology have offered some really interesting thoughts on how people engage with narratives, from the cultural, the material, to the cognitive turn from the work of Erin James on Postcolonial Econarratology to Jan Alber on unnartual narratology. And while various genres have their theorists and practitioners, it is those of us working in and around clifi that feel a mounting pressure to make the stories do something. Nobody that works on detective fiction is expected to prevent murders.

But as Vandermeer points out, stories don’t work that way. So here I want to offer some remarks on climate narrative more generally that pushes against the archaic idealism of calls for clifi to provide a solution for the technical issues that surround us in the form hope.

I offer that a self-consciously fictional genre cannot provide a framework for change. This is because there are all sorts of narratives that work in various ways to influence power structures, politics, and policy, and clifi must be multiply mediated through various metadiscourses to access these power structures, to become political and turn into policy. This transformation relies on methods of narrative dissemination and various registers of affective engagement. Clifi can, over time, provide a conduit for transforming empirical circumstances to artistic representations and finally to ideology, something that can provide a framework of common sense that can interface with the political and economic institutions that can actually avert climate disaster. Maybe.

Here I identify four types of climate narrative:

I want to begin with what most people likely think of when they think of clifi, especially in its speculative mode, that is, the dystopia, or as I prefer to think about it, the failed utopia. My example here is the TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Obviously, this hellscape is no utopia for June Osbourne, but it may be for the various commanders, their wives, and so on. The TV series makes more of the climate catastrophe that haunts Atwood’s novels as we see inside the colonies. Peter Hajdu also points out that “As a cautionary tale, the 1985 novel chiefly warned about the dangers of an ideological climate and a toxic environment metaphorically, but today both that novel and its sequels solicit readings that focus on the literal toxicity of the environment which, lacking a prompt reaction, can bring about answers rather similar to what Gilead did.” [ii]

Another register of clifi that is neither utopian nor dystopian, so I refer to Vandermeer’s fiction as simply Topian, that is, the narrative takes place in a world where the climate presents challenges to characters through an uncanny flux in literary space and time, or chronotope as narratology might have it. His Southern Reach series revolves around Area X, a place of mystery and danger located in the Florida swamps that evokes the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the same time as it references the uncanniness and ambient danger of American wetlands.

Another way of articulating climate catastrophe is through utopian literature proper, and here I want to offer Everything for Everyone, an Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. This book, from an indie press and written in the form of an oral history, adheres to the traditional Jamesonian formula for a utopia: essentially a how-to manual, according to Gabriel Burrow.[iii] The book is way outside the mainstream With that, I want to transition to the fourth type of climate narrative I wish to investigate, the empirical. First, emergent climate narratives are those that arise from media discourse about climate events: storms, floods, and other catastrophes, but also the technological, legislative, and cultural developments around climate. While each piece of the puzzle is self-contained to some degree, emergent climate narratives cohere with one another to become grist for the mills of other narratives, including the three I list above. The other side of this empirical continuum is the institutional. These are narratives, real or imagined, that are adopted by governments, industries, NGOs, and cultural milieus. As an example, I present Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii’s work on Japanese narratives around CCS technology. The viability of CCS as a means of solving global warming caused by carbon emissions is famously dubious, and although there is strong evidence that Japan, in particular, is not employing CCS technology at anything near a rate that could positively impact climate, the official narrative in Japanese government and industry is one of techno optimisim and techno nationalism. These metadiscourses unite in the story of CCS’s potential to mitigate climate change with the fantasy of leaving the fossil fuel industry intact, uniting environmentalists and capitalists in the myth of a technological curative granted to a uniquely industrious people.[iv]

This narrative is indispensable to these institutions precisely because the technology is not working – clifi that is doing some actual lifting. How this works is partially disclosed by Saskia Brill in their article A story of its own: creating singular gift commodities for voluntary carbon markets.[v] Here, Brill points out the peculiar economic form taken by Carbon Credits, which function all at once as commodities, singular items, and autonomous gifts. A crucial aspect of carbon credits is that, contrary to how the characteristic of the commodity form is its neutrality in regards to origin of the product, carbon credits rely upon a certain morality or ethical imperative to grant them value in the first place. It’s almost a rhetorical form of labor that the credits must have access to for their value to be valorized.

To try and understand this process, the move from emergent to institutional climate narrative and the role in this move played by clifi as a self-consciously fictional genre, I want to stand clifi on its head a bit and disambiguate the metadiscourse of climate narrative writ large. As we’ve seen from Brill’s work on Carbon Credits, and as we see in many facets of the carbon capture economy that perpetuates a fiction – that market interventions can attenuate the worst excesses of fossil capitalism – the stories around these technologies, products, etc. are in some sense real fictions; carbon credits pretend to value in ways that are very similar to Marx’s own ideas of “fictitious capital,” that is, debt, in volume III of Capital.[vi]

These more technical interpretations of Marx’s key texts coincide with some interesting philosophy that links materialism with the affective and political, and remember that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the arts create percepts and affects.[vii] Jason Read is one philosopher who uses pop culture to demonstrate the link between Marx and Spinoza to understand counterintuitive political phenomena. Read’s work fleshes out a theory of ideology that accounts for the often-self-destructive actions by individuals and institutions. One of Read’s favorite interlocutors, Yves Citton, makes a number of compelling contributions here in terms of the interface of the personal and political vis a vis desire, the importance of the attention economy to late capitalism, and the constitution of ideology through an assemblage of narratives that are at least heterogenous, and often contradictory in his work Mythocratie.[viii] This process of narrative bricolage is a general notion that guides more specific processes outlined above, particularly the case study of Japanese narratives around CCS technology, which harnesses the passions involved in techno optimism and nationalism in such a way as to subvert the obvious contradiction between the CCS’s reality and the institutional narrative of its potential to unfetter a mode of production that is fueled by oil and coal.

To conclude, Jeff Vandermeer is correct when he claims that clifi cannot and will not save us. Far from a gesture of false humility in acknowledgement of his own centrality in the genre, Vandermeer is pointing to the constructed nature of the subgenre and its subtle and nuanced connections to our climate reality. As Citton points out, there is a metalepsis inherent to narrative that demands we situate ourselves inside and outside the narrative at once, and this metalepsis is all the more pronounced within the framework of self-conscious genre fiction and non-fictional narratives that nevertheless fail to correspond to reality. Emergent narratives about climate, employment, global markets, etc. assail us via social media, curated by predatory algorithms. This becomes the grist for the mill of cultural production, providing the foundations for – and limits to – the imaginary of clifi authors. And while hope itself can never solve a problem of this magnitude, over time narratives of many types are assimilated to ideological persuasions and even adopted by institutions, which can then become essential to legislation, market innovations, and similar interventions that have a chance at saving our skins.[ix]

[i] “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, April 19, 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.

[ii] Hajdu, 305.

[iii] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); Gabriel Burrow, “The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022),” n.d.

[iv] Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii, “Selling Stories of Techno-Optimism? The Role of Narratives on Discursive Construction of Carbon Capture and Storage in the Japanese Media,” Energy Research & Social Science 31 (September 2017): 50–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.010.

[v] Saskia Brill, “A Story of Its Own: Creating Singular Gift-Commodities for Voluntary Carbon Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (May 4, 2021): 332–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1864448.

[vi] Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).

[vii] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1994).

[viii] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010).

[ix] “The Handmaid’s Tale,” SVOD, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2025 2017); M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Annihilation, SVOD, Science Fiction (Netflix, 2018); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, First Edition, Southern Reach Trilogy 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).