Back to the basics

Here’s Tim Flannery talking about climate change, from earlier this year (mp3 audio). Towards the end of the talk, he said something that caught my attention:

“.. and as we approach these treaties, that are going to deal with the [climate] problem, you think about the longer history of time .. think about four billion years of our planet. Does anyone ever wonder how the atmosphere stays clean and how the oceans stay clean. That’s a result of evolution by natural selection. This Gaia organism as James lovelock has called our planet, has evolved to be a self cleansing and self regulating entity. And for four billion years, the blind watchmaker, you know, the evolution by natural selection, has regulated that process. Sometime this century, for the first time in four billion years, some of the regulation is going to be ceded to our species, and we will regulate some aspects, such as the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, through our intelligence. It is an incredible moment to be alive on our planet, i believe, a moment of great significance”.

“We will regulate some aspects such as gaseous composition of the atmosphere, through our intelligence”. That prompted me to ask myself “What else are we consciously regulating and controlling ?”. The answer ofcourse is that we change, regulate and control lot of processes on this planet. How about our food system, through a meticulously engineered process called Agriculture. How about our health system ? We are hardly leaving all the defense mechanisms to “nature” isn’t it ? We have vaccines, we have anti-biotics. Regulate the flow of rivers for electricity. Dig up mountains to get necessary material to drive our economies. Air condition homes. Use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to increase agricultural productivity. Inject growth hormones and anti-biotics into cows for more milk. Engineer at the gene level with an aim to further gain control over nature. Change .. manage .. engineer .. regulate .. control. We do it a LOT. Just look around your shoulders .. we live in highly highly engineered environments. (Unless you are reading this from an old growth forest ). Welcome to the anthropocene. We have been engineering on a large scale ever since we came out of pure hunter-gatherer mode of living, and started clearing forests for agriculture thousands of years back. So change is nothing new. It has been happening for thousands of years. The more we change complex systems, more is the likelihood of repercussions of that change. What we call “environmental problems”. The history of environmental problems is the history of unintended consequences of our mucking around with systems at various levels. The systems we’re dealing with are so complex, we are caught off-guard on countless occasions.

The above train of thought allowed me yet again to see our “environmental issues” from the most basic angle — As an inevitable result of the mindset of engineering-the-world. From this view point, its clear that what we call “environmental problems” are not some new phenomenon of the last two hundred years. We are simply continuing an old paradigm into the present days. But what is troubling in the present times is that we are doing it on increasingly complex scale. From gross to subtle. From the grosser physical land use level — the cities, the suburbs, industries, roads, deforestation, dams, mines, desertification etc; To the subtler chemical level — pesticides, herbicides, co2’s, cfc’s, plastics, you know the whole slew of industrial chemicals and products; To still subtler level — genetically engineered plants, organisms, nanopollutants etc. The deeper we go, the riskier it is. Its like in a software system. If you muck around at the application level, you may be ok. At the most, the application might crash. But when you go and muck around at the operating system level, beware !

Only recently, genetic engineering caught my attention. Looked from the point of view of ever-increasing-engineering, its clear why its an important environmental issue. Its mucking around with nature at operating system level. The speed with which we are deploying genetically engineered products into the market, gives a hint of how we as a society will approach the environmental crisis — with same old paradigm. More technology and more engineering. Take climate change. There is so much talk about cutting green house gas emissions, only because there is no reliable engineering solution yet. Its not that we have suddenly become responsible about our actions and decided to backoff. Its simply because there is no good engineering muckup solution available. But i wouldn’t be surprised if we end up paying lip service to voluntary co2 cuts, and tilt towards Geo-engineering solutions like cultivating phytoplankton in oceans, installing giant sunlight reflectors in space, and adding sulphate particles to stratosphere.

Nature has evolved systems over millions of years. Our puny intellect is trying to wrest control of and manage more and more of these complex systems. Can we do it ? (Hey, we haven’t even managed to construct or widely deploy a good bug-free virus-proof commercial desktop operating system, yet).

Brilliant-to-the-power-of-n

‘Ecological conversation’ by Stephen Talbott

I normally try to have original content, and not simple link ups. But this one is exceptional.

what’s that energy ?!

As usual, I took a power nap of twenty minutes this afternoon. I make it a point to setup an alarm everyday. It was totally refreshing ! Almost everyday, iam surprised that i had slept for only twenty minutes. It always feels like hours ! I read somewhere that some Japanese companies have quiet and comfortable power nap rooms to refresh the employees. By the way, i think the trick is to make it short like twenty minutes or so. Anything longer might make you feel dull. If you have any research info on this, dear reader, please pass it on. Not in a mood to do anything productive, i then made some coffee and settled down to watch India-Srilanka test match for half an hour. Quite an interesting test series this has been. I then headed off to my music class. I have been trying my hand at keyboard for the last six months, just as a hobby .. and to exercise the “creative” right brain a bit .. and to prevent some of those neurons from rusting off . Part of the inspiration to do music has come from reading the book “Mind and Brain” by Jeff Shwartz. “Use ‘em or Lose ‘em”, “Survival of the busiest” seem to be good rules of thumb about preserving neurons. Iam at a stage where i can play some filmi tunes on keyboard . I’ve never been a music buff, never owned an ipod .. but enjoying playing first hand. Its an interesting experience. After the class, walked back home, and fixed up a quick snack, and headed off to the gym. Had a very good workout, with some fast desi tunes playing in the background. Now, what are those chemicals released when you have a good workout ? Adrenalin , endorphins ? Whatever they are, they seem to have been released more than a fair proportion, because i was sort of on a high much longer after the exercise. Came back home and took a cool shower, and sat down for daily meditation. Iam currently just practicing the most basic concentration exercise, to focus on in-out breath. Its meant to focus the mind, and prepare for further meditation. Anyway, i just couldn’t do it today ! There was too much energy .. too much enthusiasm about life and its possibilities .. too much positivity. I don’t know where it came from .. maybe those endorphin’s from exercise. I decided not to fight it too much, and just called the meditation off for the day.

If you’ve come so far in the post, great ! you are endowed with lot of patience ! If you’r wondering if there’s some point to this post, iam sorry to disappoint you . As the blog so far has been too serious, too many funda’s .. i felt it would be nice to put out some truly raw data out there ! The 1’s and 0’s of an evening in my life