The Honey Locusts outside my front window are turning yellow. These trees can be found on many city streets in Chicago. And they are hardy: lines of them thrive a few feet from the lakefront on the South Side. For most of the year I find them less than attractive; something about their long rows of small leaves give me the impression of a tree-sized weed.
W.J. Bean was more enthusiastic about the species, Gleditsia triacanthos. It’s native to North America, and the Englishman wrote approvingly of the prospect of importing it to the U.K. It has “beautiful fern-like foliage,” he noted, “which turns a clear bright yellow in autumn. (291, Trees and Shrubs, Volume II)”
On this I can agree. The tree is more beautiful when it’s shutting down for the season, cycling through a predictable, cascading bright yellow phase for a final few weeks.
Sources
W.J. Bean and George Taylor, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, 8th Edition, Volume II. J. Murray, 1970-1980
I was riveted by this long-form article in the New York Times about the rise of white sharks (aka great white sharks) off the coast of Cape Cod. It may seem like a sensational topic, but that wasn’t how I took it. One has to understand that white sharks were basically unknown in the area until 15-20 years ago. Now they are so numerous during the warm season that, if you know where and how to look, they are everywhere. So the piece is really about how dread creeps onto the surface of a beautiful place, changing how people experience it. Chivers writes that
Risk of attack remains low. But the quantity of large sharks, and fears that have accompanied them, have caused a cultural trauma, reshaping how people experience the ocean and forcing coastal communities into a period of reckoning and adaptation.
I think about fear every day while out in public during this pandemic that is rapidly sliding into status quo. The article discusses what scientists call “fear ecology, a “concept describing the effects predators have on members of a prey species that do not get eaten but whose predator-avoidance strategies carry costs.” That mindset of avoidance, says a doctor who tried unsuccessfully to save a Cape Cod shark attack victim, “hovers over the region: the fear that sharks are going to ruin this idyllic place.”
I don’t avoid some places, people, or situations–bars, for example–because I fear them. It’s more simple than that: I just don’t go to those places. I spare myself the psychic costs of even fear. But what might be worse than fear is forgetting what a place looked like before the fear set in.
John Murphey, "The Perilous Situation of Major Mony, 23
July 1785," Source: Rijksmuseum. Original
(Public Domain).
Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afganistan
Papers,
is based on a trove of formerly unreleased interviews with hundreds of
U.S. officials who participated in the War in
Afghanistan.
What makes Whitlock’s book so great are its minutia, produced by
interview subjects who were thinking on the fly in spontaneous
conversation, and who didn’t necessarily know that their thoughts would
be made public. Many of these details will likely never find a home in
more synoptic accounts, but they add a fascinating texture to the
broadest accounts so far of the U.S. occupation.
Given recent
events,
the book couldn’t have been better-timed. The early sections cover
important questions about the motivation to stay in Afghanistan after
the fall of the Taliban.
From the first chapter: In the war’s first months, the U.S. troop
presence was kept so small and provisional that there were almost no
facilities of any kind. Whitlock writes that “soldiers who wanted fresh
clothes had to fly their dirty laundry by helicopter to a temporary
support base in neighboring Uzbekistan,” and there were no showers
until around Thanksgiving 2001:
Some of the guys had been there for up to thirty days, so they needed
a bath,” Maj. Jeremy Smith, the quartermaster who oversaw the laundry
unit in Uzbekistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. His
superiors didn’t want to send any extra personnel or equipment to
Bagram but finally relented.
“Eventually they said, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead and do this,‘ ” Smith
recalled. “But it was, ‘We’re not sure how long we’re going to be
here, we’re not sure about a whole lot of things, so our presence here
is going to be as small as possible. How few people can you send?’ The
smallest number I could send was two. ‘What’s the smallest shower
configuration you can send?’ ‘Well, it’s designed for twelve, but the
smallest we can realistically send is a six-head shower unit.’ The
mixer and the boiler and the pumps were all designed for a twelve-head
shower, so a twelve-head shower only going through six heads had some
really good water pressure. Everybody liked that.”
Over time, Bagram would balloon in size to become one of the largest
U.S. military bases overseas. When Smith returned to Bagram a decade
later for a second tour of duty, he was greeted by a fully functioning
city with a shopping mall, a Harley-Davidson dealer and about 30,000
troops, civilians and contractors. “Even before the plane stopped,”
Smith said, “I instantly recognized the mountains and after that I
noticed it was the same smell. Then getting off, it was like, ‘Holy
cow! I don’t recognize hardly anything.‘ ”0{#ffn2 .footnote}^
It’s a great anecdote about the initial U.S. reluctance to create the
smallest roots of a permanent base. That first shower stall wasn’t a
meaningful investment in any material sense, but it said something about
the U.S. status as an occupier, more than all the showers that would be
built in the years after.
But even the eventual sunk costs of the war effort–the massive
facilities and aid that marked the long-term occupation–do not add up
to any kind of explanation for why the U.S. stayed so long. This year’s
pullout showed that the U.S. has no
problem
leaving an expensive footprint behind.
The little stuff just makes it easier to get through the next day and
week, to be slightly more comfortable with not making a decision about
whether to leave. The act of building a facility gave the occupiers a
task to avoid boredom, so that they did not ask harder questions to
their superiors about why they were there, and so that, when nothing
else was happening on the ground, they could wait for what’s next. If
the war planners only allowed amenities like laundry and showers with
great reluctance, it says a lot about warding off a symbolically
troubling frame of mind for the war effort: construction, maintenance,
strategy, planning, etc. Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers documents
how this worry plagued the leadership, long after the people on the
ground had started wondering about, and improvising, these very things.
Later on in the same chapter, on broader motivations for the occupation:
The Bush administration was still leery of getting bogged down. But
the swift and decisive military victories boosted U.S. officials’
confidence and they tacked on new goals.
Stephen Hadley, the White House’s deputy national security adviser at
the time, said the war shifted into “an ideological phase” in which
the United States decided to introduce freedom and democracy to
Afghanistan as an alternative to terrorism. To make that happen, U.S.
troops needed to prolong their stay.
“We originally said that we don’t do nation-building but there is no
way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it,” Hadley said
in a Lessons Learned interview. “ [We] did not want to become
occupiers or to overwhelm the Afghans. But once the Taliban was
flushed, we did not want to throw that progress away.”
By the time Bush gave his speech to the Virginia Military Institute
cadets in April 2002, he had settled on a much more ambitious set of
objectives for the war. The United States, he said, was obligated to
help Afghanistan build a country free of terrorism, with a stable
government, a new national army and an education system for boys and
girls alike. “True peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan
people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” he
added.0{#ffn3 .footnote}^
When it came to ideological justifications for the war, the doublethink
went down a pathway not entirely dissimilar to the intense ambivalence
about the practicalities of maintaining an on-the-ground force. The
country let itself develop ambitious plans for Afghanistan, but it
needed to avoid the most plausible characterization of those plans. For
example, U.S. officials, including President Bush, were especially
reluctant to call their operation “nation-building:”
After the United States invaded Afghanistan, President George W. Bush
told the American people that they would not get stuck with the burden
and expense of “nation-building.” But that presidential promise,
repeated by his two successors, turned out to be one of the biggest
falsehoods uttered about the war.
Nation-building is exactly what the United States tried to do in
war-battered Afghanistan—and on a colossal scale. Between 2001 and
2020, Washington spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in
any country ever, allocating $143 billion for reconstruction, aid
programs and Afghan security forces. Adjusted for inflation, that is
more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall
Plan after World War II.0{#ffn4 .footnote}^
Justifications for the occupation were tied back to the success of the
invasion, which ended after a few months. The toppling of the Taliban,
which scattered Al-Qaeda, was a lot easier to defend (to a domestic
audience, to the world) as a response to September 11th. Everything that
came after was not. And so the U.S. found itself in a position where
nation-building was both everywhere–because the U.S. was indisputably
doing it–and nowhere, because the very people who were doing
nation-building said that it was indefensible, on grounds both
historical and strategic.
Put these two facets about the Afghan war together–the tiniest
implementation details and grandest arguments–and one comes away with
a situation that was only tolerable so long as it could not be accepted
for what it was, a kind of national exercise in procrastination around
policies and objectives that helps to explain how twenty years could go
by without a plan.
[Whitlock, a journalist, first wrote about these interviews in a
well-received series of
articles
for the Washington Post in 2019. ↩︎]{#fn1}
On Sunday night (August 22nd, 2021), this was the view from the Chicago
South Side, looking southeast over the lake, of the four Galilean moons.
They are easily visible through 10x30 binoculars. From a sketch I made
around midnight:
Colors black/white inverted
What attracted my attention about Callisto’s position is that lies well
outside the apparent plane of the other three moons. I usually
see the visible
Galilean lined up with one another, like we are looking at them edge-on
from Earth, in the same orbital plane.
A quick illustration shows how the configuration in the sketch can
occur. None of the four moons orbits in the exact same plane, although
their inclinations are very close to one another. And the orbital plane
of Jupiter is slightly tilted toward Earth. These factors mean that we
see the orbits of the Gallilean moons at a slight angle to us, like we
are looking at very narrow ellipse rather than single-dimension lines:
Orbital paths of Gallilean moons. Apparent tilt of moons'
orbit relative to Earth is exaggerated for illustration. Actual tilt is
between one and two degrees.
Callisto, the outermost moon, has a much larger orbit than the other
three moons, meaning it travels up and down across the largest distance
in both dimensions (see arrow in illustration), and giving it more
latitude to reach an apparent position “above” or “below” the other
moons, as we see it from Earth.
Berenice Abbott and Pierre Mac-Orlan. Atget, Photographe
de Paris (Paris: H. Jonquières, 1930), pl. 4. Public Domain. Getty
Museum.
The story about the library book returned 100 years overdue is one those
lighthearted newspaper pieces that still gets written
up.
Sometimes these overdue books come with an explanation that makes for a
human interest story, but just as often they are returned anonymously,
left on a doorstep or mailed back without return address or explanation.
When we do find out the reason for the return, it’s usually because
because someone is clearing out
belongings,
and has sentimental attachments that lead them to send the old book
back. The library is still there after all these years, and returning
the book connects a dusty past to a living present. If the book was in
the possession of a dead person, the return might be a kind of act on
their behalf.
An article about the old, returned library book gives the public an
occasion to reflect on a private possession. Still, for the most part,
millions of objects, however interesting and worthy of attention in the
distracted present, will never get that much recognition before they are
sold as junk, stored until they rot, or tossed in the trash. But as long
as those artifacts are on still on paper, they have a claim on
existence, awaiting notice by some later passerby. It’s possible to
return century-old books to the library because they are durable and
resilient in storage. Paper, even if stored in degrading conditions,
lasts a long time.
This is not the case for digital objects, whether text, photos or other
media. The old computer or phone stored in the attic may technically
hold a lot of memories, but formidable barriers exist to its
rediscovery.
First, an attic full of digital stuff comes with major concerns about
material breakdown. I am not aware of any digital storage medium that
does well outside of prolonged room-temperature conditions. And failures
are often invisible. The objects in a digital archive, like CDs, may
look fine to the eye, but one can only be
sure
by using them. You needn’t burn the attic down to lose a lifetime of
memories stored on a hard drive. Just let it sit, and it will almost
certainly fail within a few decades at most.
Second, there are the concerns about the technology itself. Technology
changes fast today, and while certain standards may look the same on the
surface (e.g., the plain text file), more subtle issues like archaic
encoding formats might still render today’s data practically
inaccessible to future computers. If you want to read a file on my
computer a few decades from now, you may need to supply not just an
ancient copy of software to run it–you’ll need to provide the
hardware, too.
The consequence is that very little of the ordinary digital present in
the attic is likely to survive.
And that’s OK. The world is overwhelmed as it is by the information it
creates. And to be fair, very little of the richness of the past has
survived, too. But some of today’s digital world, some nth fractional
sub-unit of all the bits being produced today, likely will make it into
the long future. And like in past eras, the stuff that survives won’t
necessarily be what was deliberately preserved.
Consider this phenomenon in archaeology: there is little trace of most
dwellings in ancient England or Ireland. One guess about why is that
these peoples built their houses with
turf, basically dirt from a bog,
that was quickly reabsorbed into the earth once the houses were
abandoned. These people weren’t thinking about documenting their
lifestyle for posterity–turf was what they had lying around. Compare
this archeological record to that of the cliff dwellers of the U.S.
desert southwest, who also built
with what they had available: clay and mud (adobe brick), which has in
many cases lasted thousands of years. In this sense the cliff-dwellers
got lucky when it comes to the archaeological discoverability–and the
historical record–of their civilization. They lived in a place with
ready-to-hand materials that were made last.
I suspect that what survives of the digital world in the future will be
just as accidental as the objects that archaeologists have already
discovered about past eras. Let’s imagine that the next few decades see
a burst of innovation in the electronic drive storage industry. Many
more storage media exist than we have today, some made with exotic and
rare elements, others with old standby technology, and all with various
trade-offs. Or maybe a few varieties of solid-state drive take advantage
of the atomic properties of some ultra-durable element like iron or
lead. In any case, anyone who happens to have used a certain type of
drive will have created data that lasts for 100,000 years under the
right conditions.
Or, imagine the archival equivalent of the mosquito in amber from the
Cretaceous period, some natural disaster, an asteroid creating a plume
in the desert that buries a cloud data center in an old-school cloud of
dust and rock. One data center might be a tiny fraction of the
information stored on today’s cloud, but still a huge chunk of material
for the archaeologists of the future to pore through with their
paleo-digital forensic tools.
It’s anyone’s guess what will be preserved–and what, if anything, it
will represent to later eons of intelligent life. Ever-more
attention is being given to the
fragile materiality of digital life, but it’s still just as likely that
what does get preserved will endure by accident rather than deliberate
selection. Monks and scribes have saved much of what we have from the
last few thousand years, but who has inherited that calling today?
Perhaps a set of text messages that someone sends this afternoon will
survive a hundred million years after a play by Shakespeare. We can’t
rule it out. A lot can happen in a future that–whether to not people
are around to see it–will last a long time.
This
article
in the New York Times summarizes the recent scientific research on a
problem I wondered about a few months
ago: what happens to animals that
navigate by starlight, when the stars are washed out by the city? As it
turns out, there are many other animals that rely on celestial phenomena
to move about. Dung beetles may walk a straight line by looking at the
trail of the Milky Way. Seals appear to swim with consistency toward
bright star-like objects in the sky.
They also mention the study I discussed previously, about Indigo
Buntings. The birds were taught in artificial conditions to treat the
bright star Betelgeuse as the pole star instead of the current north
star, Polaris. Stephen Emlen, the scientist responsible for the study,
is quoted interpreting the results this way:
This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not
derived from some star map encoded in their genes…In the glittering
dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up,
studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.
If we accept his theory, it suggests that the birds may be clever enough
to deal with the perpetual, gradual change in alignment of the night
sky. They did not evolve with some fixed blueprint of specific stars.
Even better, they were born with a rudimentary awareness of how
celestial rotation works. 26,000 years, the period over which the
Earth’s axis wobbles to point at different stars across the sky, is
enough time for evolution to change an organism, but not that long a
period when compared to the one hundred and fifty million years or
more
over which modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Here’s an off-the-cuff definition of animal learning to make sense of
this situation. Learning is what animals do to survive when there is no
time or opportunity to evolve. Animals learn when something about their
environment changes too quickly for selection pressure to make a better
bird, or beetle, or seal. At this point they can either (1) use their
existing biological equipment to make use of the environment they have,
or (2) die out or retreat from the environment that has changed.
Learning and evolution cooperate. Those individuals that learn are more
likely to contribute their genes to the species, thereby increasing the
pool of genes that contribute to learning. This suggests that an
environment that changes quickly is likely to select not for any
particular trait, but for beings that learn to live with change. In
interesting times, only the smart animals survive. In a sense, it’s
another way in which humans are making the world in their own image. If
there is anything that distinguishes Homo sapiens besides the ability
to think, it is the ability to cause environmental change on a different
order of time than the cosmological, geological, or evolutionary
timescales that preceded them. Thinking is fast by nature. Rapid change
gives an advantage to learned adaptation over instinctive fitness. And
when the environment changes really fast, within even the memory of
living Homo sapiens, it may it favor animals who learn, too.
No one decides who gets to be a naturalist. There are no degrees or
governing bodies. The term is distinctive, in that it describes an
activity that is very demanding and absorptive, yet inclusive. A person
is on the way to becoming a naturalist when he, for example, takes
pictures of biological samples in the field and contributes them to an
open population database like
iNaturalist. And the “New Naturalist
Library” series has for 75 years published detailed
surveys by top
scientists, who study the natural world, from climate and
weather
to
butterflies.
These scientists, specialized and rigorous as they are–they call
themselves naturalists, too.
The plant biologist Oliver Rackham writes in the preface to his book
Woodlands:
I was brought up on such classic New Naturalist books as London’s
Natural History by R.S.R. Fitter, Mushrooms and Toadstools by John
Ramsbottom and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. In that tradition I deal
mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and
that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can
still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and
culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down
the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades.
Rackham makes no attempt to wall off the naturalist’s calling from the
ordinary public. Quite the opposite, he suggests that the amateur can do
more than participate in naturalistic activities. The amateur can, in
fact, contribute to an activity defined by “observation,” provided
that he is willing to keep at it over the long term.0{#ffn1
.footnote}^
Today the ideal of the naturalist is often integrated with formal
scientific expertise.0{#ffn2 .footnote}^ Getting out in nature
takes time, and scientists are the ones with grants that pay the bills,
university positions with flexible schedules, and a vocational
expectation that includes going out into the field and looking around.
Everyone else is of course not barred from study, but just being out in
nature does not quite make one a naturalist. Then again, there are many
field scientists doing their own specialized work, “locked into their
own ethos and culture,” as Rackham puts it, who are not really engaged
in naturalistic pursuits, either. So what makes a naturalist? Consider
this description, by the biologist Bernd Heinrich, about the process of
taking field notes:
After so many years of making observations, there is hardly a thing I
encounter that does not connect me in one way or another to familiar
ideas or observations. However, I am most interested in the seemingly
anomalous. In taking field notes, the way to find these peculiarities
is to keep track of many observations that may not appear at the time
to be relevant at all. Similar to the way a subtle twist in a blade of
grass may betray the presence of game, a single observation in my
field notes may stand out against a backdrop of sentences standing in
an ordered array. The way that I keep a journal now reflects the
chaotic nature of this type of chase. I cannot afford the luxury of
presorting data. I don’t walk around with a notebook. But I often
carry a piece of folded paper in my shirt or pants pocket, along with
a pencil stub. The information flow as I jog down our driveway and up
our country road may be infinite, and I cannot stop every few feet and
record everything. I simply remember most observations while I jog,
though I may still record mundane things that catch my eye and that
might be useful in identifying something in- teresting. At these times
I’m not trying to solve a problem; instead, I’m open to signs of
one.0{#ffn3 .footnote}^
Heinrich describes an observers’ routine that is honed by trained
scientific curiosity. But the act of observing cannot only serve an
existing scientific agenda. Field notes are not a record of what is
important. They are a minimal record of what rises to the level of being
noticeable, a translation of an “information flow” that is
“infinite” into a set of recoverable mental traces. “I cannot afford
the luxury of presorting data,” he writes. There is no template for the
field observer. The naturalist only sees what he records, and field
notes are the written, recoverable proof that he has not just seen, but
noted too. All his training does not change their mundane character.
Real expertise stands on a continuous, stubborn, unbored openness to
detail.
A consequence of the naturalist’s unflappable commitment to actual
observation is that she avoids two oscillating dangers of the modern
relationship to nature. The naturalist is not a romantic who ascribes
soft spiritual forces to the not-human, who needs to sustain the
illusion of a wild or untouched nature to value it. And the naturalist
is not really a scientific materialist, either, who seeks to dissect
natural processes in terms of physical laws, models and forces. Another
feature of naturalistic observation is that while it requires a total
commitment to detail, there is also a holistic quality to it, a tendency
for the mass of detail to start out as a collection of incongruous parts
but end as a system.
Consider the last book by book by Oliver Rackham, The Ancient Woods of
the Helford River, published after his death from a partially-finished
manuscript. In one chapter he reviews individual patches of woods in a
schematic sketch. Here is how he begins his description of the
Calamansack Wood along the Helford:
A house was built in the wood in 1918. Much of the wood is mown in
August on a two-year cycle. This favours bluebell at the expense of
bramble. Two mowings kill holly, resulting in a characteristic empty
bottom to the wood. This wood is on a steep south-east-facing slope
with a plateau at the top; it is very exposed to the east, except in a
deep narrow ravine down to Pill Cove. In the west are two houses of
the 1930s, one of which is a period piece with its green pantile roof;
their gardens have increased at the expense of the wood. A
foot-holloway zigzags down to the pill, at the mouth of which is an
elegant granite boathouse.0{#ffn4 .footnote}^
Rackham sees no problem with building his naturalistic account on a
description of an old house. To see this wood is to begin with the
outlines of human activity around which it has grown. Neither the human
nor the wood has priority here. He will write of how they grow through
one another.0{#ffn5 .footnote}^ Then, following his own advice,
he steps back further in time:
The wood is clearly divided, and has been for at least two hundred
years, into a coppice on the exposed slopes and a timberwood in the
ravine. The coppice was last felled between 1820 and 1860, apart from
an area c.1930 and a few small patches since. The timber trees appear
to date from the 1770s. The ancient stools are up to 10 ft in
diameter.
Calamansack Wood is a natural process that coexists with a human past.
For Rackham it begins with the first mention in the record, and with the
earliest signs of human activity:
Calamansack Wood is well recorded back to 1249, the longest certain
documented history of any Helford River wood. With Merthen and Gweek,
it is one of the earliest woods in England to be shown on a map. It
has an ancient boundary bank and an internal earthwork corresponding
to a sixteenth-century subdivision (see page 62, Fig. 4.1). There are
at least three charcoal-hearths.
Finally, he ends by speculating on the name of the wood itself:
What did the name Calamansack mean? The 1249 form, Kylmoncote, makes
no sense in Cornish and is evidently a misspelling. Kylmonsek occurs
in 1308 and 1331, Kyllymansak in 1442, and in 1478 we meet a John
Kyllymonsek. The first part of the word is probably kyl ‘corner’;
monsek is a word of unknown meaning with the adjectival ending -ack.
The place-name therefore means ‘Something-y Corner’. By 1442 the name
had been reinterpreted as if it contained kelli, ‘grove’, perhaps
because of the wood. The hamlets of Calamansack Wartha and Wollas were
both in existence at least by 1365 and finally the Kyllymonsek family
was named after them.
I make no claim that Rackham’s account of the Calamansack wood is a
model for the naturalist’s approach to observational practice. A
naturalist gets to invent, in some sense, an idiosyncratic genre of his
own. Rackham’s model is an original synthesis of details which could
have been put to other purposes. But its essence, as he wrote in the
Preface to Woodlands, is being attentive to the factor of time,
being willing to decompress the present as far as the details of the
total environment (ecological, historical) will allow.
[That Rackham calls upon people to observe nature “over the long
term” brings up the related idea of natural history, and its
connection to the naturalist tradition–a worthwhile question for
later. ↩︎]{#fn1}
[The entry for “naturalist” in the OED suggests one definition
close to what I mean: “an amateur concerned more with observation
than with experiment.” This sense appears to have arisen in the
mid-19th century, in parallel with the professionalization of
science. Cf. one OED example from Charles Darwin’s Origin of the
Species, where he writes that “every naturalist knows vaguely what
he means when he speaks of a species.” ↩︎]{#fn2}
[Bernd Heinrich, “Untangling the Bank,” in Field Notes on Science
and Nature (33) ↩︎]{#fn3}
[The following passages are taken from Chapter 7 in Helford Woods,
“Individual Woods,” pp. 107-110. ↩︎]{#fn4}
[In the Forward to Woodlands, he confesses that “I write as a now
rather old-fashioned botanist, concerned with woodland as an
ecosystem with a life of its own, in which human agency is one among
many environmental factors. In this book trees are themselves
wildlife, rather than merely a habitat for wildlife.”
↩︎]{#fn5}
Sources
Bernd Heinrich, “Untangling the Bank.” In Field Notes on Science and
Nature, ed. Michael Canfield. Harvard, 2011
Oliver Rackham, Woodlands. New Naturalist Library (100). Collins,
2010.
Oliver Rackham, The Ancient Woods of The Helford River. Little Toller
Books, 2019.
James Scott writes
convincingly
about the tendency of large institutions, like states and private
enterprises, to pursue their own interests by abstracting away the
complexity of the actual world:
The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic
institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the
actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that
they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice
to the world that they purport to describe.0{#ffn1
.footnote}^
According to Scott, any organization that works on a large scale, across
different populations or a wide geographic area, will find systematic
ways to work on its own terms. This could be people, natural resources,
land–it doesn’t matter. The point is that large organizations work
with the tools they have available: standardization, which is achieved
through quantification and measurement, and control over the environment
that makes up the local system. Large organizations pay very close
attention to all these variables so that they can exclude or pay a lot
less attention to everything else on the ground.
Scott argues that no state has ever come into existence through asking
all its people what they need and want. Instead, it brings people under
its control, who already have purposes, goals, and ideas of their own
, and treats them according to what it thinks they need to do and be. In
the past, this meant making them grow crops or serve in a military.
Today, these same states might get people ready for compulsory
schooling, provide employment, and supervise their health and wellness.
Some aspects of these programs may be beneficial, but still, the state
only offers the benefits that it has the tools to
administer.0{#ffn2 .footnote}^
Most of Scott’s research focuses on how states use their power, but he
does devote some attention to how private enterprise has reached a
status similar to the state. I could not read Scott’s account of
scientific forestry and agriculture without thinking of modern
computing. Everything that has become digital over the last few decades
has also become some combination of simpler, more abstract, and more
amenable to what can be logged in a database (i.e., measured) and
represented on a screen (e.g., images, videos). The face of a powerful,
expansive-as-a-state private industry today surely has to be the
company known
Facebook–and
“big tech” in general.
But the state persists. As a result every locality is now caught in
multiple forms of abstracting, monolithic power, from federal and
regional government, to globe-level tracking and
surveillance, to the expansion of
warehouse-based
logistics
and ever-more-concentrated factory farming.
Once multiple schemes of rationalization compete, interesting things
happen. Scott writes that “today, global capitalism is perhaps the most
powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some
instances be the defender of local difference and
variety.“0{#ffn3 .footnote}^ I think of the recently
passed
French law to protect the sounds and smells of the countryside, or the
policies many other countries have to protect distinctive regional
cultures.
The average person lives under multiple centralizing forces, and this is
a good thing–maybe one of the basic escapes from what would otherwise
be an unbearable life dominated by a single authority. Most institutions
of modern life acknowledge, in principle, that even they have limited
powers, and that there are other legitimate spheres of action over which
they ought to cede control. Scott notes, for instance, that the original
justification for classical economic liberalism (i.e., “the free
market”) was “not only that a free market protected property and
created wealth but also that the economy was far too complex for it ever
to be managed in detail by a hierarchical
administration.“0{#ffn4 .footnote}^ According to this version
of events, earlier states, which sought to control the use and
allocation of resources, simply could not be as productive as those
which ceded control over economic decision-making to local economic
actors in the field. In an authentic free-market economy, local peoples
achieve some independence because it is in the ultimate interests of the
state to let individuals exercise their judgment.
Going further, it seems to me that the battle to achieve some level of
local control is one of the most important and contentious issues in
politics today, one that arguably cuts across both the developed and
developing world.0{#ffn5 .footnote}^ To stick with my own
country, much of the dysfunction in American politics can probably be
explained by looking at what local control looks like to real people,
who is allowed to achieve it, how much of daily life is conducted
outside the view of distant authorities, and how local peoples think
about the centralizing structures in their lives. Scott’s argument made
me think harder about some tentative answers to each of these questions.
Two schools of thought in the U.S. about the reason for local control
I see two main flavors of argument used to justify local control in the
U.S. The first is that a group needs local control because it is in the
best interests of the country or wider society to do so. The second is
that local control is a foundational good in itself.
To give an example of the first type, one of the highest collective
goods in the US is the economy (i.e., “the market”). Favorable
treatment of financial entities and liberal capital allocation are
justified by the belief that they allow worthy smaller actors to receive
investment that might later have broad national rewards. This can be
seen in the “startup” model of US corporation. The startup is a
business model in which ambitious, innovative small groups operate
within a relaxed field, outside of existing corporate or other
bureaucratic structures. Investor support relieves this group from the
normal business pressures of breaking even, allowing them to take risks
and pursue unconventional measures according to their own judgment about
what is valuable. The eventual expectation is that the business will
meet or exceed the normal standard of success (monetary profit). And the
country will benefit by allowing this form of temporary local
decision-making through increased economic competitiveness and greater
wealth. It is no accident that the character of the free-spirited,
eccentric, brilliant software engineer is tied to the paradigmatic
modern startup, the software company, the field where creativity appears
to promise greater profit, faster, than almost any other business ever.
Other justifications of the first type that come to mind include:
The working conditions of the professions (e.g., doctors, lawyers),
who have been traditionally enjoyed greater autonomy and respect for
their professional judgment.
The U.S. military special forces, an ever-greater part of active
wartime operations, who enjoy a greater freedom from traditional
military disciplinary codes, and more latitude to make decisions out
in the field
The American “small business owner”
The second argument for local control, that it is an intrinsic good, can
be seen in the American historical tradition of religious freedom, and
the small religious sects that was the basis for many local communities
in the early American republic. The idea remains in action today,
whether through distinctive regional communities like the Amish or as an
idea like the “Benedict
Option.” The idea
that religious peoples are a unique group whose interests are
fundamentally different than the mainstream, secular United
States,
carries a lot of weight with Christian groups in the US today.
The American emphasis on individualism also represents the maximization
of the principled argument for local control. By this logic, if every
locality is itself composed of individuals, each with their own slightly
different positions and stakes within the locality, then the individual
is the purest expression the most particular local interest. But there
are more powerful reasons to reject the individual’s connection with
localism which I will discuss below.
Arguments made on behalf of local populations are often nationalized in the U.S.
In the Federalist Paper
#51, James
Madison writes that any nation will be composed of many interests, some
more powerful than others–but most will still be in the minority.
Therefore the best chance that any minority has to thrive is to seek out
the umbrella protection of a strong centralized authority, i.e., the
state. Madison’s assumptions may still be true, but he was perhaps not
aggressive enough in imagining the relationship between central power
and the minority. It is one thing for a minority seek out the protection
of central authority on the grounds of neutral principle, but why should
the minority limit its ambition, when it can influence the
decision-making processes of that authority, or even take it over? The
capture of state and federal decision-making power by “special
interests,” whether through lobbying or elected officials with ulterior
motives, betrays a situation where specific local interests seek to
permanently tilt government power in their direction. Perhaps this is an
inherent tension in a democratic republic, where the citizens elected to
government are supposed to act on behalf of “the people” in general,
but of course also come from a locality of their own, with interests of
their own from both before and after their time in government.
One interpretation the American “Culture Wars” is that they are an
attempt to elevate local social mores to centralized structures of
authority (the legislature, the courts). The issue goes in the reverse
direction, too. It might equally be the case that national and regional
authorities have taken more interest in social issues that were formerly
left untouched by the state.
Even in an age of large bureaucracy, the number of truly centralized powers is small
There are only so many nation-states, and likewise, only an elite few
private industries that can exert state-like monolithic power.
Therefore most groups–even many powerful ones–are in a position to
claim a local standpoint for their interests. Large corporations, for
example, do not necessarily acknowledge their control over immense
funds, employees, capital, or resources. Instead, corporations present
themselves as representatives of one local interest which faces threats
from all the others, from equivalent industries in other nations, and
from state policies that might disfavor them relative to other groups.
In this way, even entities with a global reach appear to be narrow
actors with very limited goals and aims. The special interests of any
given group become, in effect, its locality.
New powers often get their start by serving state power; over time they compete with it
A member of the New York Times editorial board wrote a few weeks back
about tech companies that seek to take on the powers of
governments.
He was thinking of Amazon’s purported nationwide contest over the
location of its second headquarters, or Facebook’s new “Supreme
Court” that reviews controversial policies like Donald Trump’s ban.
Those are high-profile examples which go to a more general point:
centralization as a process of power consolidation is never moving in
just one direction, and it is never finished. New players are always
possible, and new forms of control threaten ones that are already
established. And there is no difference in principle between the state
and other abstracting powers. We are now seeing an accelerating force,
“information technology,” that consolidates information across
national borders, creating new fault lines along the old human networks.
The internet, which originally began as a research project by the
state, now promises to be an abstracting, centralizing force to rival
it.
This was not inevitable. The beginnings of the internet represented a
new potential for centralization, because it required people to accept
standard protocols for how information was received and transmitted
across the network. But how the network would be used (i.e., what would
be shared across it, who would profit from it) and what would be done
with the information that resulted (i.e., who would store it and why)
was still undecided. The internet was mostly unprofitable in its first
decade of existence, because those who sought to control it had not
successfully answered any of those questions. There was not yet a drive
to centralize because it was not clear what the players on the internet
would be centralizing for. Once the business models to profit from
information technology became obvious, the character of the entire
internet changed dramatically within a few years, toward a centralized
model with identifiable goals: aggregation of viewership (advertising
revenue), bulk collection of data flows (surveillance) and standardized
entry points to the network (“platforms”).
The example of the internet shows that the landscape of centralized
power changes dramatically when a new power arrives to consolidate local
difference. Usually this is associated with technological innovation,
but the innovation cannot be for its own sake. When technology
contributes to a problem capable of being measured or achieved (e.g.,
profit), then centralization achieves the human urgency to push for
realization.
Central authority gives individuals the power to understand its inner workings, because it must train some of them as administrators of the system
I wrote above that, at least in liberal societies that have a strong
tradition of individualism, individuals might be considered their own
form of hyper-“locality.”
An alternative explanation is that strong individualism is actually an
abstracting development that makes a good companion to centralized
authority. At the foundational of a modern, contract-based, mass society
is a type of individual who is stripped of stubborn cultural dialects
and local loyalties. The contemporary version of the abstract individual
is the administrative mind, ambitious to seek advantage within systems
that reward indifference to the past, pragmatism, loyalty and an
abandonment of substantive rationality.
On the other hand, even the person who has been thoroughly socialized
into centralized state power still retains her agency. Everyone comes
from somewhere, and few people live such a deracinated life that they
are not in a position to observe local effects–the effects of
centralization–on the ground. Some of the most powerful modern
testaments to centralized power were created by people who got their
start acting on behalf of the state, putting them in a position to
observe and understand it. Orwell was an administrator to British
colonial rule in India before he became a writer about totalitarianism.
In a different time and place, the NSA contractor Edward Snowden was
just one mundane administrator of a new scheme to organize
information–until he started to look around.
From the Preface to The Free World, by Harvard Professor of English
Louis Menand, about U.S. culture during the Cold War:
“Cultures get transformed not deliberately or programmatically but by
the unpredictable effects of social, political, and technological
change, and by random acts of cross-pollination. Ars longa is the
ancient proverb, but actually, art making is short-term. It is a
response to changes in the immediate environment and the consequence
of serendipitous street-level interactions.“0{#ffn6
.footnote}^
[James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 262 ↩︎]{#fn1}
[Among his case studies, Scott uses the beginning of wide-scale
agriculture
in the so-called “fertile crescent,” where he makes the case that
hunter-gatherers, who were deeply skilled at securing a wide variety
of foods, had to be captured and coerced into growing monocrop
grains. He also writes about the beginnings of modern “scientific
forestry” in Europe, where
state authorities took apart complete forest ecosystems, systems on
which many people depended, so that they could consolidated,
inventoried, culled and re-cultivated into regular stands of
“natural resources.” ↩︎]{#fn2}
[For example, Facebook pursues different strategies for growth in
the United States and India, but it is very active–and very
interested–in both. ↩︎]{#fn5}
[Menand, The Free World. Preface. (Epub version).
↩︎]{#fn6}
I started looking at the birds more during the pandemic. So did a lot
of other
people.
Most field guides about birds are written for one purpose: to identify
them. Birding is easy to distill to its basics: you look at a bird, you
figure out the name that somebody else gave it, and you keep lists of
what you’ve seen.
But it would be deflationary to leave it there, that birding is about
mere bird identification. It doesn’t account for why there are so many
people who are
very serious about identifying birds in particular. Sure, almost every
branch of nature has people who take an interest in it.0{#ffn1
.footnote}^ But I know of no other outdoor nature activity centered on
identification that generates anywhere near the same excitement as
birding.
One of the most thoughtful teachers of birding I’ve found in print is
Ken Kaufman. His Field Guide to Advanced
Birding is a
good place to start figuring out what birding is really
about.0{#ffn2 .footnote}^ The “advanced” part of the title is
somewhat misleading. The book is not really trying to define a bar for
experts so much as give a more systematic account of the practices of
modern birding, organized by case studies on, say, a specific feature
(e.g., “Plumages, Molt and Wear”), a habitat type (e.g., “Learning to
Identify Seabirds”), or a genus (“The Empidonax Flycatchers”).
Kaufman writes in the introduction about his experience in the field
teaching beginners to bird:
One revelation was the importance of understanding. It was clear
that birders could memorize dozens of field marks and song
descriptions and still misidentify birds, simply because they didn’t
really understand what they were seeing and hearing. (5, original
emphasis)
Kaufman’s description of the beginner’s pattern-matching approach
shows the problem with the birding-as-identification idea. One issue is
that the beginner trying to select matches against an example is often
wrong, because the appearance of any bird makes for an unreliable guide
to species.0{#ffn3 .footnote}^ “Look closely at the members of
the flock,” Kaufman writes, “and you’ll find that no two are exactly
alike.“0{#ffn4 .footnote}^ But the beginner is also focused on
making the ID, to exclusion, or detriment, of what Kaufman calls
“understanding.” I imagine someone learning about new birds who
becomes so focused on the minute details of a bird’s features that they
remove the bird, imaginatively, from its surroundings, bringing it into
a sterile laboratory of the mind.
What the beginner lacks is all of the birder’s background knowledge
that contributes to making the ID. It’s knowledge that can come in
handy for the purposes of the birding, even if it was gathered from
relaxed and general observation, from the naturalist’s wider experience
with the landscape and seasons, or from intuition without a clear
source. Consider what Kaufman says later on, about habitat:
When an experienced birder glimpses a bird and names it instantly,
it’s probable that the bird’s habitat (and its location within the
habitat) contributed to the speedy identification. Often this happens
at a completely subconscious level, and if asked, the birder might
have to think about it for a minute to be able to describe what he or
she noticed about habitat clues. But especially when we’re in
familiar territory, clues of this type provide a major part of our
initial impressions of birds.
It can be hard to tease out the habitat aspect because it is so
intertwined with other clues. For example, if we’re out in midwinter
in the midwest, going past a hedgerow through open weedy fields, and a
little flock of small slim birds flushes from low in the bushes and
flies low along the hedgerow, we might quickly call them American Tree
Sparrows. In this case, the time of year, the size and shape of the
birds, and the fact that they’re in a small flock are all
contributing to our impression of what they are.0{#ffn5
.footnote}^
Understanding is the knowledge of a bird’s world that goes beyond what
you need to make the ID. Yes, it can help you make the ID faster, with
less visual information, in sub-optimal conditions, or even without
witnessing a specimen firsthand. Yet the strict definition of birding,
which takes identification as its calling card and payoff for the
activity, is always in exchange with the naturalist’s more open-ended
prerogative to understand. The traditional birder makes lists, while the
naturalist appreciates, filing away knowledge that might be systematic,
but is without any immediate plans for application. One does not get
better at being a naturalist in the same way that one does a birder.
Naturalists used to take physical specimens, but even if they are more
likely to take pictures and make drawings today and leave the specimens
in nature, they still collect for its own sake.
Think of it this way. On the average winter day in temperate North
America, even a beginning birder can quickly come to identify everything
they see–so what do they do then? You can go out and keep making more
IDs, counting numbers of birds by day and month, visiting different
sites, and generally practicing different variations on the activity of
identifying birds. Or you can work a little less hard, and just think
about the birds that are already in front of you at a given point in
time. What is a bird foraging for? How long does it spend in one spot?
Where does it go next? What do its movements mean, and what are its
patterns? All of these questions arise if for no other reason than as an
effect of the productive boredom caused by disinterested curiosity. Many
of these questions have been studied and, in some cases, answered by
ornithologists and adjacent scientists. These problems, in total, make
up a body of knowledge that both precedes the ID–because it creates
the intuition that makes the ID possible–and follows it, deepening it.
Understanding is what happens after you know what a bird is, but still
keep looking.
Understanding is really another word for an interest in nature that
surrounds the structured, formalized rituals of birding. The birder who
seeks to understand what she is seeing has, whether by accident or love
of birds, gone beyond the boundaries of the activity. You can make lists
of what you have identified, but the same cannot be said of everything
you have seen. Everyone has seen more than they realize. Another
contrast with the naturalist: the naturalist always accumulates more
detail than he or she is able to synthesize in a given moment. She is
full of latent knowledge, which is waiting to be made active when she
is, say, called upon to give a name to a bird.
The birder and the naturalist are useful complements to one another. But
those who take part in an activity with well-established codes, like
birding, will always have an easier time finding companions, forming
associations, and creating recognition for themselves. The naturalist is
probably more likely to be a loner, because of the poorly-defined edges
of the activity. He also stands in a more-or-less subordinate
relationship to modern science: what is appreciation of nature, next to
the scientist’s capacity to direct and control it?
But where do the activities of naturalists tend to lead, other than to
accumulating a store of potential knowledge for other pursuits? One
distinctive realization’s of the naturalist’s calling might be the
nature writer, who organizes his response to nature into an interpretive
flow: personal, aspiring to a temporary significance, without the
permanence of a cooperative, ongoing endeavor like birders who swap
lists and go out in the field together.
One example: I enjoyed Helen McDonald’s recent essay collection,
Vesper Flights. In
the title essay she writes about swifts, which have been known to drift
for hours on thermal currents that carry them thousands of feet high,
into the clouds, where they have been observed by airplanes. These are
called “vesper flights,” because swifts make the ascent at both dawn
and dusk, timing them like the prayer services held in the Catholic
tradition. McDonald eventually comes to understand the activity
analogically, like moving outside the boundary of ordinary life:
Swifts aren’t always crossing the atmospheric boundary layer at
dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick
and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and
drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will
affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and
there to communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on
their realm. So I’m starting to think of swifts differently now, not
as angels or aliens, but as perfectly instructive creatures. Not all
of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper
flights because they are occupied with eggs and young–but as a
community, surely, some of us are required, by dint of flourishing
life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that
are so easily obscured by the everyday.0{#ffn6 .footnote}^
Where the naturalist excels is in the ability to repurpose her
experience, to understand it in unlimited new contexts. McDonald arrives
at her own conclusions. She can only describe her reasoning and ask us
to agree with her. But because she did not undertake her activity for
any particular reason in the first place, there is no necessary end to
her observations. She has no list to keep, only an ongoing response to
allow. Long before this essay, McDonald learned to identify the swift in
flight, but I am convinced that she continues to watch them, gathering
impressions, for reasons she does not yet know.
[See, for examples, societies built on the appreciation of
ferns and moss.
↩︎]{#fn1}
[In addition to the Field Guide to Advanced Birding, I can also
recommend Kaufman’s A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of
Spring
Migration,
which tells the story of his decision to make a home on the southern
boundary of Lake Erie, which he helped put on the map as a
world-class point for observing bird migration, and now (thanks in
substantial part to Kaufman) the site of one of the world’s great
birding festivals.↩︎]{#fn2}
[A related criticism worth exploring: as computers have gained great
skill at pattern-matching over the last two decades (e.g., so-called
“machine vision,” used in some of the most popular birding apps),
the reduction of birding to the recognition of visual patterns
becomes even less appealing. ↩︎]{#fn3}
