It might not have been your intention when writing this, but the line "None of these records survived because people knew exactly what they would reveal. They survived because someone decided the thread was worth keeping alive." Started my wheels spinning.
I've been asking myself for a long time how can we teach people to live at the pace of the natural, real world? Lightning exists for a moment, a fruit fly lives for a few days, a flower blooms for a few weeks, a gust of wind can chase low pressure systems for months.
And that one line suggests that maybe we do it by teaching people to embrace unspecific desire rather than hyperfocused exact expectation.
We've tried having a world where pressing a button has a predictable and specific desire fulfilled immediately. And this need for immediate specificity is destroying so much.
Maybe we're better off just embracing the variable temporality of the unspecific desire to keep threads alive.
Love this reflection. I don't have a good answer but I 100% agree that we should be operating in sync with the natural world. That's very much part of my wider vision for this work. I'd been thinking more about longer timescales (intergenerational and multi-year) as well as seasonal, but your point about the shorter, fleeting moments is also really important. This begins to connect more with living a more natural life, and a more mindful life. Focusing on the little, fleeting things. Which actually requires us to slow down anyway. Great thoughts.
Do you see slowing down as a path towards this vision?
When I was you,.my mother kept telling me to live at the pace of nature, and I thought she meant I needed to slow down.
It took years before I finally realized that the pace of nature isn't always slow.
I wrote about how we can approach our understanding of coordination using different kinds of time in different contexts about a year ago. If you ever have the time, I hope you'll read it.
Absolutely lovely post. I have thought about this in other regards… it’s like planting trees or restoring soil. Both take a long time to come to fruition. You don’t necessarily do it for yourself. You do it because it should be done.
Thank you, Kristine! Appreciate that. Yes, there are many cases where this type of thinking plays out. I've enjoyed writing about these ideas in other forms in the past. Happy to dig up if useful. It's a shame that it seems less and less common to think this way these days.
When I was in grad school, I was horrified that research was chopped into bits that were the length of a dissertation. Not all good ideas or important work take place on that time scale. I also think of the Keeling curve…
Yes, and one of the major challenges we face in academia is the sheer volume of new research being pumped out, flooding the peer review system with research that has been salami sliced into the smallest publishable unit. The incentives are all over the place.
Yes and the despair of wasting data in academia where humans have given their time to writing in survey fields or talking in focus groups and it languishes in the cell of csv's because time or money runs out. I've become very committed to the idea of reusing old data before gathering new data for my research, and I've salvaged some that goes back to 2020. It's never fun joining 47 CSVs for longitudinal data, but I feel that I can say I did my best to use what was previously gathered and stored through human and digital energy.
HI Jonathan, I recently posted a couple of follow on pieces around nutrient mobility in rivers and its open ocean dispersal all focused on riparian planting and flood debris mobilization of both contained nutrients and from biofilms and microbes that can colonize this as they move between zones. These are evolutionary nutrient pathways that can be completely dismantled within a single lifetime of which we are now seeing the consequences. The proposal at the end may be of interest which revolves around the inoculation of substrate for the intentional inclusion in this flow for the purpose of nutrient transfer outside the points of dangerous accumulation. They are quick Ai summaries but the essential mechanisms behind them to tackle excess nutrient loads in Australian rivers both into areas like the great barrier reef and as a directional look into causes of the problems in South Australia and their deadly toxic outbreak. Have a read if you wish. Can we float inoculated substrate like biochar to help clean up our rivers and offer open ocean nutrient transfer as an added benefit?
Hi Theodore. Getting a bit beyond what I know in terms of removing nutrients out of rivers, but I'd be surprised if floating biochar would remove any meaningful percentage from the water to be honest. A better question for a freshwater biogeochemist though.
Great topic! This is the one thing humans must grasp. Nature is for almost all purposes an accurate enough record, even preserving our sins if we look correctly. For me this is a very comforting thought. Human history counts for little by comparison.
But there are records kept by humans as stories that are passed down for many generations. We most often don't give them credit because we don't know how to interpret them, and we are just as likely to destroy any physical evidence.
This is a bit of a tangent, but your point about the passing down of stories through generations is quite timely, given all the hype around the Odyssey movie. I've not watched it as I want to read the book first (I know I probably should have already). But I'm reading it with my son. To see something so in depth penned after generations of it being passed down through stories speaks to our ability to think beyond our own generation and keep things of value.
It is really interesting how much interest that movie has generated. But then the latest Spiderman movie is making as much money. Great idea to read the book with your son. I and my wife did the same with other books when our son was growing up. I think it's a great way to prepare a young mind to use imagination as well as learn to love reading.
Indeed! My son is a book fiend. It took me months to read Lord of the Rings to him and then he read it in a week after I finished it. Similar with the Harry Potter books. It's a great way to enjoy the experience with them.
Those were the two biggies in our days as well. But since you have the New Zealand landscape to travel over (I assume he has seen the movie also) I imagine it inspires some hiking as well. By the way, my son went on the get a Doctorate degree in ecology. It sounds like yours will be on top of what catches his interest also.
Very cool, Brian. What area of ecology? Yes, he's since seen the movies, but we held off for a while for him to read the book a few times to allow his imagination to work its magic. And, yes, one of our favourite spots is Mt Sunday, which was Edoras in the films.
What a way to grow up, a merging of great story and characters taking place in your homeland!
Wales enjoys fieldwork and has worked mostly with birds, but his PH.d work involved the metabolism of migrating birds. He is very comfortable, like his Mom, with math and statistics. Unfortunately the US is in such a mess being being run by science deniers that jobs are almost non existent in research or academics. A lot of very qualified people have lost jobs, so there is a lot of competition. We encourage him to look overseas and he does keep an eye on some job listings.
It might not have been your intention when writing this, but the line "None of these records survived because people knew exactly what they would reveal. They survived because someone decided the thread was worth keeping alive." Started my wheels spinning.
I've been asking myself for a long time how can we teach people to live at the pace of the natural, real world? Lightning exists for a moment, a fruit fly lives for a few days, a flower blooms for a few weeks, a gust of wind can chase low pressure systems for months.
And that one line suggests that maybe we do it by teaching people to embrace unspecific desire rather than hyperfocused exact expectation.
We've tried having a world where pressing a button has a predictable and specific desire fulfilled immediately. And this need for immediate specificity is destroying so much.
Maybe we're better off just embracing the variable temporality of the unspecific desire to keep threads alive.
Love this reflection. I don't have a good answer but I 100% agree that we should be operating in sync with the natural world. That's very much part of my wider vision for this work. I'd been thinking more about longer timescales (intergenerational and multi-year) as well as seasonal, but your point about the shorter, fleeting moments is also really important. This begins to connect more with living a more natural life, and a more mindful life. Focusing on the little, fleeting things. Which actually requires us to slow down anyway. Great thoughts.
Do you see slowing down as a path towards this vision?
What do others think?
When I was you,.my mother kept telling me to live at the pace of nature, and I thought she meant I needed to slow down.
It took years before I finally realized that the pace of nature isn't always slow.
I wrote about how we can approach our understanding of coordination using different kinds of time in different contexts about a year ago. If you ever have the time, I hope you'll read it.
https://powercoord.substack.com/p/temporal-coordination?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5jmc2y
I absolutely will, Pieter! Thanks.
Absolutely lovely post. I have thought about this in other regards… it’s like planting trees or restoring soil. Both take a long time to come to fruition. You don’t necessarily do it for yourself. You do it because it should be done.
Thank you, Kristine! Appreciate that. Yes, there are many cases where this type of thinking plays out. I've enjoyed writing about these ideas in other forms in the past. Happy to dig up if useful. It's a shame that it seems less and less common to think this way these days.
When I was in grad school, I was horrified that research was chopped into bits that were the length of a dissertation. Not all good ideas or important work take place on that time scale. I also think of the Keeling curve…
Yes, and one of the major challenges we face in academia is the sheer volume of new research being pumped out, flooding the peer review system with research that has been salami sliced into the smallest publishable unit. The incentives are all over the place.
Yes and the despair of wasting data in academia where humans have given their time to writing in survey fields or talking in focus groups and it languishes in the cell of csv's because time or money runs out. I've become very committed to the idea of reusing old data before gathering new data for my research, and I've salvaged some that goes back to 2020. It's never fun joining 47 CSVs for longitudinal data, but I feel that I can say I did my best to use what was previously gathered and stored through human and digital energy.
HI Jonathan, I recently posted a couple of follow on pieces around nutrient mobility in rivers and its open ocean dispersal all focused on riparian planting and flood debris mobilization of both contained nutrients and from biofilms and microbes that can colonize this as they move between zones. These are evolutionary nutrient pathways that can be completely dismantled within a single lifetime of which we are now seeing the consequences. The proposal at the end may be of interest which revolves around the inoculation of substrate for the intentional inclusion in this flow for the purpose of nutrient transfer outside the points of dangerous accumulation. They are quick Ai summaries but the essential mechanisms behind them to tackle excess nutrient loads in Australian rivers both into areas like the great barrier reef and as a directional look into causes of the problems in South Australia and their deadly toxic outbreak. Have a read if you wish. Can we float inoculated substrate like biochar to help clean up our rivers and offer open ocean nutrient transfer as an added benefit?
Hi Theodore. Getting a bit beyond what I know in terms of removing nutrients out of rivers, but I'd be surprised if floating biochar would remove any meaningful percentage from the water to be honest. A better question for a freshwater biogeochemist though.
Great topic! This is the one thing humans must grasp. Nature is for almost all purposes an accurate enough record, even preserving our sins if we look correctly. For me this is a very comforting thought. Human history counts for little by comparison.
But there are records kept by humans as stories that are passed down for many generations. We most often don't give them credit because we don't know how to interpret them, and we are just as likely to destroy any physical evidence.
Thanks Brian. Yes -- so true.
This is a bit of a tangent, but your point about the passing down of stories through generations is quite timely, given all the hype around the Odyssey movie. I've not watched it as I want to read the book first (I know I probably should have already). But I'm reading it with my son. To see something so in depth penned after generations of it being passed down through stories speaks to our ability to think beyond our own generation and keep things of value.
It is really interesting how much interest that movie has generated. But then the latest Spiderman movie is making as much money. Great idea to read the book with your son. I and my wife did the same with other books when our son was growing up. I think it's a great way to prepare a young mind to use imagination as well as learn to love reading.
Indeed! My son is a book fiend. It took me months to read Lord of the Rings to him and then he read it in a week after I finished it. Similar with the Harry Potter books. It's a great way to enjoy the experience with them.
Those were the two biggies in our days as well. But since you have the New Zealand landscape to travel over (I assume he has seen the movie also) I imagine it inspires some hiking as well. By the way, my son went on the get a Doctorate degree in ecology. It sounds like yours will be on top of what catches his interest also.
Very cool, Brian. What area of ecology? Yes, he's since seen the movies, but we held off for a while for him to read the book a few times to allow his imagination to work its magic. And, yes, one of our favourite spots is Mt Sunday, which was Edoras in the films.
What a way to grow up, a merging of great story and characters taking place in your homeland!
Wales enjoys fieldwork and has worked mostly with birds, but his PH.d work involved the metabolism of migrating birds. He is very comfortable, like his Mom, with math and statistics. Unfortunately the US is in such a mess being being run by science deniers that jobs are almost non existent in research or academics. A lot of very qualified people have lost jobs, so there is a lot of competition. We encourage him to look overseas and he does keep an eye on some job listings.