Author Archives: tmurphy

Chickadee Explosion

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Chestnut backed chickadee adult tending to a brood in one of my “rustic” nest boxes.

As I’ve brought up before, when contemplating the pros and cons of low infant mortality for humans, chickadees invariably come to mind. Part of the reason for this is that I have made and installed a number of nest boxes tailored for tiny birds. The most frequent tenants during breeding season are chestnut-backed chickadees, but I also get violet-green swallows, red-breasted nuthatches, and less often black-capped chickadees and Bewick’s wrens.

In fact, a recent article in the New York Times—in questioning the overall value of feeding birds in the UK—cites the apparent chick-rearing “success” of one of their chickadee equivalents (blue tit), boosted by bird-feeding practices. The article indicates that the tit’s “success” is upsetting biodiversity by displacing other woodland cavity-nesters, thereby leading to decline and threatening the survival of other species. I had already planned to write a post on a hypothetical chickadee explosion, and this article reinforced that impulse as a real-live case-in-point.

In this post, we’ll explore the absurd consequences that would obtain if medical intervention somehow eliminated fledgling mortality among chickadees, so that all the birds in a brood reached reproductive age. The results become disastrous in a shockingly-short time. Go ahead and make a guess as to how long before chickadees overwhelm the entire Community of Life. I may have biased you already by saying it’s shockingly short. But given that I call the 10,000 year period since agriculture began “a flash” on ecological scales, who knows what I even mean by “short.” Ignoring my characterization, then, what does your intuition say?

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In the Name of Science

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Was it good for you? By IslandVita (Wikimedia Commons).

Few among us question actions done “in the name of science” when said actions are carried out by credible groups or individuals. It goes without saying that the acquisition and expansion of knowledge is highly valued. As long as the pursuit is not directly harmful to people, it generally gets a pass. But one level deeper, what is science itself done in the name of?

Not surprisingly, much of science is in the service of modernity: producing remarkable short-term advantages for humans—generally at the expense of the rest of the Community of Life on both short- and long-term scales. A great deal of the scientific enterprise concentrates on technology. Market systems assure funding for efforts that will facilitate continued growth: accessing more energy, more materials (and novel ones, to boot), more indispensable gadgets, and longer lives for affluent humans whose ecological footprints are already monstrous (let’s keep those ones going the longest, yeah?).

But you know me, I can find fault even with “good” science whose focus is on the more-than-human world. I am reminded of a statement a grad student once started to make: “The problem with trees…” Another student, seizing on the humor of the moment, adopted an official tone as if a debate moderator: “The Problem with Trees: GO!” Yeah, so the problem with conservation biologists…

Let’s see how much I step in it, here.

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Safety in NIMBers

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By Catboy69 (Wikimedia Commons)

I live in an area not yet entirely trampled by modernity. Wildness still has a waning foothold, here. In late spring, fawns get “the zoomies” in the open space around our house. Newts hunt worms on the driveway when it’s wet out. Douglas squirrels are busy in the trees. Raccoons, possums, and coyotes make reliable nocturnal appearances. A cougar once traipsed through the wooded area between our house and the street. Bears are periodically spotted in the neighborhood. A chorus of frogs provides a soundtrack for summer nights—complemented by the occasional owl. A variety of other birds abound, including bald eagles nesting year after year in trees behind our house. Bats, various pollinators, dragonflies, and garter snakes add to the variety. It’s a real treat and privilege to be at least a witness in this Community of Life.

One downside is that roadkill is not uncommon in this interface region, and wildlife loses the contest every time. Deer, possums, and newts are the most visible to us. Every time I move a smashed newt off our street, I am close to tears and apologize to the departed critter: this should never have happened; you did nothing wrong; you didn’t deserve this end. It’s particularly painful when the flattened newt is on the very driveway that I try keep clear of visually-confusing leaves and other material—and exercise hyper-vigilance when driving through. Even if it was not me whose tires did the deed, I know that I failed in my watch, and feel it deeply. The core fault lies in operating a vehicle across newt habitat: an alien novelty in ecological terms.

Frequent exposure to roadkill prompts my wife to say that this is why we should all live in cities. Leave the hinterlands to wild creatures. It’s selfish to want to live amongst the wildlife. Confine us all to what I might term designated hell-holes, or feed lots.

A clear logic accompanies this argument, and it’s hard for me to efficiently articulate why I am diametrically divergent. It just seems viscerally clear that cities are not “the answer” for dialing back the host of threats perpetrating a sixth mass extinction. In this post, I will attempt to make the case.

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Is Cognition Inherently Dangerous?

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By Andrzej Barabasz (Wikimedia Commons)

Has anyone noticed the blasphemous tendency in my posts to belittle cognition? The position is that brains are imperfect and tiny subsets of the universe that are not remotely up to the task of supplanting time-tested ecologies with cognitive constructs involving agriculture, writing, money, and legal systems. Paraphrasing Frank Egler, it’s not that nature is more complex than we think, but more complex than we are capable of thinking. Brains can’t be expected to fool Mother Nature, in the end.

Does that mean cognition as a whole is ecologically worthless and inherently destructive? Of course not! Lots of creatures—even crickets—rub neurons together to make thought. Moreover, non-neural forms of cognition take place among plants, fungi and microbes to help figure out how to cope with varied situations. These neuron-free beings even learn (see examples of amoebas and plants). Clearly cognition itself is not ecologically disastrous—demonstrating compatible utility over eons. Humans used top-shelf brains for millions of years without precipitating ecological disaster. Yet human brains are also key players in staging the current disastrous path.

How can we tell what sorts of human cognition are safe, then? I propose a metaphorical framing that helps identify when cognition “goes rogue” that I hope will also be useful for others.

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Academic Prison

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The Ivory Tower behind bars (E. Jason /Getty Images).

You may have noticed a recurring theme on Do the Math that involves prisons. Inspired by Ishmael, I compare modernity to a prison whose bars few inmates can even detect: prison life is all they’ve ever known. The brain creates a prison that for many becomes more real than the universe itself. The last post cast Richard Feynman as a prisoner of modernity. If challenged about the hypocrisy of eviscerating modernity while enjoying a house, car, grocery store, and internet I tend to point out that a prisoner can offer perhaps the most legitimate complaints about prison or even the entire penal concept. Moreover, if I tried to live an authentic ecological life in my location, I would soon end up in an actual prison after violating any number of property rights and other laws that function to keep people in the modernity pen. Likewise, we know what happens to people who take direct action to disable infrastructures and institutions of modernity, right?

I did, at least, manage to break free from one major harness of modernity. I left my academic job at age 53. In doing so, I took a 75% paycut and effectively said no-thank-you to perhaps millions of dollars of cumulative income. Granted, this is different from a 100% paycut. But I hope it can be appreciated as a substantial step away from the treadmill, imposing a much simpler and lower-impact lifestyle. I don’t pretend to be living in right relationship to the Community of Life, but neither do I feel that I, personally, must accomplish the full journey if I can use my time to help many others start the journey themselves. It will take generations—facilitated by the inevitable dynamic duo of death and replacement. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

Academia is its own sort of prison, which is what we’ll examine here. You’ve no doubt heard much ballyhoo about academic freedom, which sounds great. But maybe that’s akin to a prisoner being allowed unsupervised time in the prison library on account of good behavior. The ostensible freedom has both soft and hard limits.

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Feynman's Sentence

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Wikimedia Commons

On the second page of the first volume of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (Lecture 1, Section 2), we find the paragraph:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you want to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

That sentence exposes another type of sentence: a sort-of prison sentence Feynman was serving—as most of us are—confining us to our cells within modernity. In the Epilogue to my energy textbook, I raised this point and suggested an alternative along the lines of “Treat nature at least as well as we treat ourselves.” It’s sort of a golden rule that extends beyond the usual boundaries of human supremacy. Today I would go further.

As for Feynman, let’s take a look at how one of the broadest thinkers in physics can still be held captive in a narrow rut.

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Big Picture Questions

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From Wikimedia Commons

I normally don’t write a whole post in response to a comment, and can’t predict whether it is any more than a one-off phenomenon. But isn’t that just like the universe to change things up once in a while?

A reader (Robert) of the last post asked three “big picture” questions that I felt warranted responses inappropriately long for a comment thread. We may as well just dive in…

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The Smartphone Hypothesis

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By MIKI Yoshihito (Wikimedia Commons)

It was about two years ago when the global downturn in fertility came onto my radar, falling out of my attempt to reconcile the disconnect between observed population trends that suggested a possible peak before 2050 and UN projections that put it in the 2080s (see initial post). As made clear in subsequent posts and a video, year after embarrassing year, UN projections kept failing to anticipate tanking fertility around the globe.

The trend really is astounding. Over two-thirds of humans on the planet live in countries whose fertility has fallen below replacement levels, and generally still heading downward. In a decade or so, when populations in affluent countries around the world have all peaked and started declining, we’ll realize that we can’t manufacture twenty-something-year-old humans who were never born so that they may pick up the reproductive torch. In this sense, the train has already left the station. Population decline is arriving soon at an affluent country near you. Indeed, it’s already started declining in dozens of countries like Japan, China, Italy, etc.

While these countries are currently buffered by engaging in a still-growing global market, as more join the club there will be nowhere left to hide: the affluent consumer-base will inevitably contract. Add to this an increasing ratio of elder-dependents to working-age people and economies will be circling the drain. Those who worship economic growth are sounding the alarm (e.g., Vance, Musk), justifiable in their panic insofar as money is what matters most. But to the extent that economies wreck ecologies, I’m rooting for the other team—and population decline sounds perfectly peachy, even if the adjustment will be rough.

I can’t tell you how many YouTube videos I’ve watched in an effort to better understand drivers behind these trends. This post was motivated by one such video that seemed worth sharing. The hypothesis involves smartphones, which I had heard before without it making much of an impression: one of many plausible “theories.” Then I saw the data.

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Accepting Loss as Fair

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From Lazarus000 (Wikimedia Commons)

Most of us learn that uncompromising positions seldom work in the real world. We must bend, or risk breaking. As The Stones put it, you can’t always get what you want. The best place to witness such a lesson might be in the aisles of store where a toddler has a meltdown over the denial of something they really, really want. One is likely to even hear the “not fair” charge through tears and contorted facial muscles. It’s what we often say when not getting our way—from a highly-biased perspective.

While it’s true that ice cream might win hands-down against steamed cabbage in a taste test—even among adults—you won’t see (healthy) adults adopt a diet exclusively built on ice cream, or even ice cream plus cake for variety. The adults have figured out that there’s more to life than deliciousness. Narrowing one’s focus to a single quality—or even a few—is a recipe for unfortunate consequences, out of balance in a more holistic assessment.

Following the written conversation between myself and David Murphy, the Planetary Limits Academic Network hosted a seminar for the two of us to discuss our relative positions (some convergence, but dominated by divergence). We each gave an introductory statement of 5 minutes or so, and each shared two graphics. Mine were what I call the ecological cliff edge (or nosedive)—showing wild mammal mass per human plummeting—and the Likes/Dislikes mess (pictured again below). Dave showed infant mortality and poverty reduction, and also spoke admiringly of the demographic transition model waiting to usher the remaining poor toward arrival at “western” standards.

Here, I take on these attributes—mostly infant mortality—as aspects that would appear to be unassailably positive, yet amount to choosing a diet of ice cream and cake. In the end, it’s not even good for us, as humans! I know: the argument may not seem obvious, and even deemed reprehensible by avowed human supremacists. But here we go…

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Galactic Time

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How old is your dog in galactic years? I mean, we have dog years and cat years for expressing time in the context of human lifetimes. Why not go big?

Many of our time units derive from astronomical cycles. The day is based on Earth rotation. The month hails from the lunar orbit (loosely…forcing an integer number into a year). The year, of course, clocks an orbit around the sun. After that, our ten-finger fetish creates decades, centuries, and millennia. Isn’t it interesting that no such convenient names are available for timescales longer than written human history? If that isn’t diagnostic of myopia, I’m not sure what is! Deep time is obsolete, to the modern. It’s like saying only the thin film of oil on top of the ocean holds any interest.

But back to the main thread, two other prominent astronomical timescales relevant to Earth arise once peering deeper into time. The first is precession. The Earth’s axis is tilted approximately 23.5° to the orbital plane, currently pointing darned close to Polaris (will be even closer in 2100, within half-a-degree). But the axis itself rotates around the line perpendicular to the orbital plane, tracing a loop on the starry sky with a period of about 26,000 years. Half-a-cycle from now, Vega will be the “north star,” albeit not nearly as close as Polaris gets (enjoy this golden age in the north!).

The other natural scale is the period of the solar system’s orbit around the galactic center, as the stars comprising the galaxy swirl under the grip of gravity. The period is about 225 million years.

Let’s cast significant developments in terms of these longer astronomical periods. It isn’t the first time I’ve made temporal analogs, and the reason I come back to it now is that it’s super-important to attain a grip on timescales that really matter. Otherwise, our culture’s extreme emphasis on the recent imposes a hyper-hyper-hyper myopia on us, keeping us utterly ignorant on the ecological front.

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