Rochester Cemetery is not just an active cemetery. It’s a remnant of a once-common sight in Iowa, the place where tallgrass prairie and woodland meet. Faded, crumbling headstones dot its 13 hilly acres. The biggest oaks I’ve seen in my life — gnarled, centuries-old red, black, burr and white — tower over them, keeping watch. And otherwise engulfing the stones is a sea of prairie grasses: big bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass. On the right spring day, there are more blooming shooting stars here — with their delicate pink downturned heads nodding in the breeze — than may exist anywhere else in the state.

The cemetery itself dates to the 1830s, just after the Black Hawk Purchase added Iowa to the Union. But today, Rochester is special because it contains one of the rarest ecosystems in the world: oak savanna. Under a few massive trees, prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered wildlife like Monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees — ecosystem services desperately needed across the Midwest.

Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 80% of Iowa. What remains serves as critical seed banks and blueprints for future restorations. But the continued existence of remnants like Rochester is tenuous in this land where corn is king, and it depends on the stewardship of individuals with very different ideas about what and who the land is for — and how it should be managed.

I arrived at the cemetery on a warm Sunday last May. Jacie Thomsen, a Rochester native, greeted me at the gate in a faded U.S. Army T-shirt. A township trustee and the cemetery’s burial manager, Thomsen carried a binder of old documents in one hand and a long metal rod in the other that she periodically used to probe for forgotten, buried gravestones. 

“A lot of people tend to say we’re disrespecting our dead,” Thomsen told me. “I always tell people, ‘Take what you think you know about cemeteries and leave it in your car, because it does not, will not, apply here.’”

I think of the postage-stamp perfect square cemetery I grew up visiting on Memorial Day in nearby Wapello, Iowa, with its close-cropped turfgrass, ornamental bushes and stones in lines straight as the corn rows that box them in on all sides. With manicured lawns and trimmed trees as the blueprint for cemeteries, I can see why some less well acquainted with prairie plants — including other township trustees here — complain this place looks “overgrown” with weeds and in need of a good mow. But at the same time, it strikes me that if one of the pioneers buried here suddenly rose from the dead, these hills are about the only part of the Iowa landscape they’d recognize.

“When you walk in these gates, you’re seeing Iowa as they saw it when they arrived after the Black Hawk Purchase,” Thomsen told me, gesturing at the prairie.

Prairie is Iowa’s natural landscape insofar as any landscape is natural. Humans have shaped the American Midwest ever since the glaciers retreated. For some 10,000 years, Iowa was a dynamic place. Indigenous Americans lit frequent fires that kept encroaching woodlands at bay, allowing the grasslands that dominate the Great Plains to migrate east into Iowa and Illinois. Only in the last 200 years did farmers transform these acres into neat cornfields.

Today, less than a tenth of 1% of Iowa’s original prairie remains. Plows broke the vast majority of prairie down in the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming a biodiverse ecosystem into a crop factory — what Jack Zinnen, an ecologist for the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, calls an “agricultural desert.”  Set aside before industrial agriculture arrived in Iowa, pioneer cemeteries like this one have become the prairie’s final resting place — one of the few where the land remembers what it once was. Some of these cemetery prairie remnants tower over the surrounding farm fields, long roots holding the rich, undisturbed soil together as the rest of Iowa erodes away under repetitive plowing, flowing downriver.

Compared to other forms of American wilderness, prairies are hard to love — they don’t easily fall into the category of the sublime like giant sequoias or Yosemite waterfalls. You have to get really close to appreciate the complex beauty. It’s probably why (along with the black gold underneath the plants) it was so easy to destroy, acre by acre.

“To the uninitiated, the idea of a walk through a prairie might seem to be no more exciting than crossing a field of wheat, a cow pasture, or an unmowed blue-grass lawn,” wrote Robert Betz, a Northeastern Illinois University biologist and early defender of cemetery prairies. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Aboveground at Rochester, native prairie grasses and flowers and introduced ornamental plants, such as daisies, hyacinths and showy stonecrops, coexist. Black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, milkweed and prairie clovers grow on graves, alongside the usual decorative plastic varieties. Underground, deep roots entwine with the bodies of long-dead pioneers — who pushed out the Indigenous communities who first stewarded this prairie — and generations of Rochester citizens.

The Prairie’s Unmaking

I grew up less than an hour’s drive from Rochester, though I learned of the cemetery’s existence only recently, in a book by the New York landscape photographer Stephen Longmire, who’d stumbled across this place and spent years photographing it with a large format film camera. While he wandered Rochester’s hills in the early 2000s, I was spending my weekends at my grandparents’ farm in Wapello playing in their corn rows behind the barn. Prairie was the setting for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, a thing of the past. I had no idea how utterly transformed Iowa was, or how much we’d lost.

It wasn’t until college that I learned the truth. Prairie once stretched from Montana down to Texas and east into Ohio, over a million square miles. Iowa was once the beating heart of the American Central Grassland.

But “tallgrass prairie is, in many respects, a human construct,” Tom Rosburg, a biologist and herbarium curator at Drake University in Iowa, told me.

Prairie relies on annual cleansing fire to transform dead foliage into usable nutrients. Shortgrass prairie in the dry western plains burns easily, the fires often lit by lightning and fueled by constant wind. Tallgrass prairie, on the other hand, “wants to be trees,” Chris Helzer, The Nature Conservancy’s science director in Nebraska, told me. It only grows in places with enough precipitation that woodland should dominate.

The Central Grassland’s extension into the Midwest, called the Prairie Peninsula, puzzled scientists for decades — they wondered why it wasn’t dominated by forest. Eventually, they arrived at an answer. For thousands of years, grass and trees had waged a war of contrition across the hills that are now Rochester Cemetery — and across much of Iowa and Illinois. But Indigenous peoples sided with the grasses from the beginning, lighting regular fires that rejuvenated the grasses, kept trees at bay and ensured the landscape remained open for easier hunting. Here at Rochester, it was the Meskwaki, who still live nearby on land purchased from the U.S. government after the Black Hawk War.

Most of a prairie plant’s biomass is underground, in the form of deep root systems that allow it to spring back to life after frequent fires. When pioneers arrived in Iowa and Illinois in the early 1800s, they discovered millennia of decomposing roots produced a black, nitrogen-rich, silty loam — some of the most fertile soil in the world. Thus began the prairie’s destruction. Industrialized farming operations moved in, like my family’s, such that less than a century later, it was nearly all gone, turned into monocultures of corn and soy sustained by artificial nitrogen inputs, herbicides and pesticides, which were irrigated by stick-straight ditches and networks of buried drainage tiles.

“It was destroyed piece by piece, farmer by farmer,” Rosburg told me, with some bitterness. “It was the biggest transformation in the history of Earth — and in less than a person’s lifetime.”

The change is so dramatic, it’s hard to imagine what was once there. You can’t unplow a prairie — once you tear through those deep, ancient roots, formed over centuries, it’s over. And despite decades of attempts, it’s nearly impossible to create a restoration that perfectly matches the real thing, with its function, structure and sheer number of species, each with its own complex relationships.

To attempt a restoration at all, you need raw material — seeds. And for that, you need remnants. Scientists have dedicated their lives to mapping the few places where the prairie still exists, scouring the state on foot and sifting through old records as if panning for gold. Rosburg has found and saved more than 65 forgotten remnants through his organization, Drake Prairie Rescue. Many remnants exist on fragments of land deemed too rocky, sandy or steep to plow. Those remnants were often used as pastures — planted with a mix of non-native grasses and heavily grazed by cattle.

Examples of still-intact prairies, on rich black carbon soil, are rare — primarily found in narrow strips along railroad tracks set aside before plowing began and on pioneer cemeteries, where the impediment to plowing was cultural, rather than practical. Those remnants tend to be the last and best records of what’s considered a typical prairie, with its rich, silty, loamy soil.

To date, there are 136 cemetery prairies across the Midwest, according to the Iowa Prairie Network’s list. While an Iowa cornfield’s species diversity can be counted on one hand, some prairie remnants contain as many as 250 species, according to data published last July by the Prairie Research Institute team in Illinois.

Unlike neighboring Illinois, which has an extensive state system to protect its rare native prairies, wetlands and forests, in Iowa, nearly all the state’s land is privately held. In fact, 60% of Iowa’s public land is made up of roadside rights-of-way, or ditches, as they are more commonly known, according to the University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center.

In Iowa, cemeteries with fewer than 12 burials in the past 50 years are officially designated as pioneer cemeteries, which allows counties to relax mowing and restore prairie — although that doesn’t always happen in practice. Still, these township-owned pioneer cemeteries serve as de facto prairie nature preserves, islands of tenuous conservation for rare insects and plants — as long as townships OK it — in a sea of destruction.

Due to climate change, the wet Midwest is becoming even wetter, which means that prairie remnants are slowly transitioning to woodland in the absence of fire. Absent any management, a prairie can disappear in as little as 30 years, Laura Walter, a University of Northern Iowa biologist, told me. “Rescuing” remnants, as Rosburg does, is an active process that involves convincing townships to conduct controlled burns and weed out invasive species in their cemeteries.

And these prairie preserves have come in handy. They’re models for what some scientists call artisanal restorations — small-scale prairies conjured forth on private land, often with great care and dedication to exactly recreating what’s been lost. But remnants like Rochester are also helping bring back prairie at a larger scale. 

In the 1990s, Iowa lawmakers mandated prairie plantings along state highways and provided incentives for counties to do the same to help combat soil erosion and reduce mowing and herbicide use that polluted waterways. But the Tallgrass Prairie Center, which operates the state’s roadside vegetation program, couldn’t find prairie seeds readily available for sale.

So, they had to start from scratch, collecting seeds from cemetery prairies and other remnants, learning to germinate and grow plants in their greenhouse and production plots, and then donating seeds to seed companies while teaching them how to grow them in order to scale up production. 

Before they started, prairie blazing star, a common Iowa prairie flower, could only be purchased from the Netherlands, where it was a popular cut flower, said Laura Jackson, the Tallgrass Prairie Center’s director. Now, she told me, it’s one of dozens of regional ecotype seeds that counties can use to restore prairie along their roads. At last May’s annual spring seed pickup at the center’s warehouse in Cedar Falls, Iowa, trucks from 46 Iowa counties hauled away 19,000 pounds of prairie seed — big bluestem, switchgrass, prairie clover, asters, coneflowers and more — originally sourced from prairie remnants like Rochester. To date, some 50,000 acres of roadsides have been planted with native grasses and wildflowers.

Restoration is about preparing Iowa for the future rather than trying to revert its landscape to the 1800s, Jackson told me. On a practical level, prairies provide myriad benefits, especially in light of climate change, that are more important than ever, including soil stability, carbon storage, flood mitigation, fire resilience, drought resistance and habitat for pollinators. But because it’s so hard to predict what will survive amid a changing climate, it’s crucial to maximize genetic diversity by sourcing seeds from remnants across the state, Jackson told me.

Because Iowa is a relatively young landscape, geologically speaking, only a handful of prairie plants have gone extinct, and most species are still widespread. In parts of the country that haven’t been wiped clean by glaciers as recently, plants have evolved to become highly local, “endemic” to specific niches, Chris Benda, an Illinois botanist who regularly conducts plant surveys, told me.

Even though Iowa’s prairie survives today primarily on scattered fragments, many of its plants once thrived across the state. That means the seeds of Iowa’s great prairie still exist. From pioneer cemeteries, managers can source the original seeds of Iowa’s landscape and use them to grow prairie at scale.

Prairie Or Cemetery?

At Rochester Cemetery, others began to arrive for the day’s garlic mustard pull: Dan Sears, an organizer for the nonprofit Iowa Prairie Network; Walter, who runs the prairie plant research program at the Tallgrass Prairie Center; and a dozen locals. Volunteers tucked their jeans into their socks to avoid tick bites, grabbed bags and donned gardening gloves.

Sears explained what garlic mustard — the non-native species encroaching on this tiny prairie remnant — looks like, with toothed leaves and delicate white flowers. However, Sears added that volunteers should also be on the lookout for another non-native plant, showy stonecrop (which he referred to as “sedum”), which could compromise the quality of the prairie remnant. 

I noticed Thomsen tense beside me as she piped up: “I need to investigate first before you pull sedum!” The cemetery’s prairie is speckled with sedum and other long-naturalized “invasives,” from lilacs to day lilies, that were planted over centuries to honor loved ones. Thomsen relies on those plants to find unmarked graves in a cemetery without formal records, she told me. She even planted a peony bush to help her find her own family’s graves amid the tallgrass. “Just because you don’t see a headstone does not mean there’s not somebody there!”

Sears held up his hands to Thomsen in surrender: “Her word is law today.”

Their interaction was the first hint at a conflict that has come up time and again here — between what’s considered natural or local, and invasive or foreign, among both plants and people. Rochester draws outsiders to an unusual degree for a rural Iowa town. For years, prairie enthusiasts like Longmire, environmentalists, AmeriCorps volunteers and university scientists have taken the Rochester exit off Interstate 80 to visit this cemetery. 

At times, visitors have collected seeds or even plants without permission. The late Diana Horton, who long ran the University of Iowa herbarium and created the most complete list of Rochester’s some 400 species, once cut down several of the prairie’s red cedars, much to Thomsen’s chagrin. The trees are native to the area (“It’s called the Cedar River,” she quipped), but not to oak savannas. Some locals, who come to the cemetery simply to mourn their loved ones, see the outsiders themselves as the invasive species. Of course, it’s a matter of perspective — descendants of pioneers here can trace their ownership back to the original land stolen from the area’s Indigenous peoples.

But the biggest point of conflict, here as at prairie cemeteries across Iowa and Illinois, comes from locals with varying ideas of what a cemetery should be. Rochester Township owns the cemetery, and its trustees manage it, along with most of the town’s affairs. Most of Iowa’s cemetery prairies are no longer active, working cemeteries. That makes it easier for conservationists like Rosburg to make the case to trustees for controlled burns and other active management strategies — the prairie is part of the pioneer history of those cemeteries, something to be preserved. But Rochester still has burials every year, which heightens tensions.

The Nature Conservancy recognized Rochester as a high-quality site for prairie plants back in the 1980s and got permission to do a controlled burn then. But its proposal to cease burials there to prevent damage to prairie plants was “incendiary” to locals, Longmire told me. Since then, fierce debates have arisen repeatedly over proposals to mow more frequently — Thomsen told me that one of her aunts tried to oust an incumbent trustee solely over the need for increased mowing during the 2006 election.

But infrequent mowing is what preserved the prairie. Rochester was hayed for livestock under pioneer ownership and, more recently, due to limited staff time and township funding, mowed annually in the fall so mourners could find their family stones. That cadence mimics the fires and grazing by bison and livestock that historically rejuvenated prairie, keeping woody plants at bay.

There are always residents who want this cemetery to resemble the familiar urban variety, Sarah Subbert, Cedar County’s naturalist, told me. “Well, that’s not what Iowa was … If you mowed it every week, you wouldn’t have that diversity out there at all.”

Some residents take mowing around their family stones into their own hands, having been officially permitted to do so by management rules enacted in 2016. This has resulted in a more traditional-looking patch of close-cropped grass at the center of the cemetery surrounding the most recent burials, encircled by prairie on all sides — a sort of compromise visible on the landscape.

On Nature & Culture

I fell in love with tallgrass prairie as an undergrad at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Not with the plants, as many of my botany peers did, but with the idea of prairie as a human construct. If you try to fence off a prairie and preserve it — freeze it in time — it’ll disappear as woody plants and trees slowly encroach. That was a point of fierce debate in the 1980s and ‘90s, when conservationists like Betz, the early discoverer of cemetery prairies, and Steve Packard in Chicago advocated for controlled burns and more active management of prairie remnants and restorations.

Critics saw restoration as gardening or meddling with nature. I thought of the vast western nature preserves that William Cronon described in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” and the irony of the government ousting the area’s Indigenous peoples — who had been stewarding the land — from their homes to create national parks to preserve now government-recognized wilderness. Nature has always been a part of the human realm. But prairie especially so.

“The whole ‘let nature take its course’ thing, or wilderness as a place without people, all those things break down very quickly in the tallgrass prairie,” Helzer, who manages thousands of acres of prairie in Nebraska, told me.

So I started seeking out prairies and other native ecosystems in Iowa and Illinois as a restoration volunteer. I pulled and cut invasives like buckthorn and multiflora rose and helped prepare for burns. When Rock Island decided to reintroduce prairie in a historic, Victorian-style, manicured park near my college, I dedicated my senior thesis to assessing how community members felt about the effort.

What I learned really surprised me — residents used words like “abandoned,” “unkempt,” “trashy” and “unwelcoming” to describe the unmowed areas. Several told me they felt like the “wild” had “invaded” the park and worried about this inviting “vandalism and crime” or “undesirable” people. That’s a conflation — famously made in New York City’s broken windows policing initiative — that some anthropologists have deemed “trash talk.”

To be fair, the initial restorations were of low quality. The parks department, perhaps unfamiliar with the history of prairie management, which requires careful selection and seeding of native species and controlled burns, took a laissez-faire approach. Later, the city acknowledged the “naturalized” areas weren’t exactly beautiful at first and began to plant more prairie grasses and flowers. But the negative attitudes stuck with me, long after I graduated. The nature-culture divide, established over two centuries of American civilization, is a challenge to bridge in the city.

Parks and graveyards are both “memorial landscapes,” Longmire writes in his photography book about Rochester, “Life and Death on the Prairie,” places where nature is manipulated to human ends. But cemeteries are culturally sacred places. That’s why I had to see Rochester’s cemetery prairie for myself. What way forward — if any — had its managers figured out to help with the coexistence of not just plants but also culture?

People Of The Prairie

Back at Rochester, Thomsen led me away from the garlic mustard pull to show me her favorite part of the cemetery. She grew up just to the north and spent her summers here with her best friend, who once eerily foretold that Thomsen would someday become the cemetery’s guardian. 

In 2011, the township asked her to become a trustee and the burial manager.

Even setting aside its sprangly prairie vegetation, Rochester is a chaotic sort of cemetery. A resident can pick a plot, but that doesn’t guarantee it will be available. (“Somebody might already be there,” Thomsen told me.) On a metal park bench under an oak, Thomsen unrolled a copy of a survey from the 1980s with graves marked with little Xs: “It’s accurate to a degree,” she said.

Thomsen’s found hundreds of unmarked graves with her trusty prod and dug up and restored many broken and long-forgotten stones — as of December 2025, she was up to 1,061. And after 15 years, she knows where all her “residents” are — and all their stories. She’s met their descendants and walked with them to their long-lost relatives. She’s dug through newspaper archives for obituaries and uploaded records to FindAGrave.com. Growing up, she wanted to be an archaeologist.

Surefooted in the tall grass, Thomsen led the way uphill to a spot near the cemetery’s boundary fence, far from the mustard-pulling crew. Here we visited Rebecca Green, who died on Sept. 25, 1838, at the age of seven months. This made her grave the cemetery’s oldest, Thomsen told me. Green is surrounded by pink prairie phlox and purple columbine, as she would have been when her parents, Eliza and William Green, buried her here next to where they’d eventually be laid to rest. Thomsen wondered aloud if they’d picked this place for its colorful flowers. The Greens arrived in Rochester in 1837, just a year after its founding, from Kentucky and Maryland, respectively. Their home served as a hotel for travelers and a stop on the underground railroad. 

“When you come here, you’re looking at what they saw and what made them stay,” Thomsen told me. “This is the pioneer’s gift that they left for us. We are respecting that, even if everybody doesn’t get it, when they’re so used to manicured, boring.” She’s protective of this place, and her job isn’t easy. Sometimes trustees make decisions without her, mowing too early last year, for example, which prevented a controlled burn she was planning. She’s used to having to fight to be heard. She yanks poison ivy off a newer stone that reads “Captain Andrew Walker” — a Mexican and Civil War veteran buried in “a pauper’s grave” after he died at the Mt. Pleasant Asylum for the Insane. Thomsen tracked down his pension file and honored him with a stone on his family’s plot at Rochester.

I asked Thomsen whether she knew where she wanted to be buried. And of course, she did. She’s known since she was a child. The highest hill along the back fence, under an oak — a spot that’s always called to her. Thomsen gets goosebumps thinking about it. “There’s energy to the land, and we all leave our little imprint somehow.” The cemetery remembers the prairie, and the prairie remembers the people buried within it. Like the Greens, Thomsen’s family is mostly here, “four rows of kin” — her grandma and grandpa, her aunt, three uncles, her sister-in-law, two of those lost just last year. Her own staked-out spot is some distance away from the family plot — “Sometimes you can be a little too close to family, even in death.”

When Longmire spent his years in Rochester, he lamented that there was a “dearth of people who could see both sides of the coin,” he told me — to appreciate Rochester as both a natural and cultural wonder. But just as he left, Thomsen arrived on the scene. In her big binder, she keeps a pamphlet from his book talk. She knows all the stones, but she also knows the prairie — the common names (and some she’s made up) for each of the plants and the spots they come up every year, including the secret place the lady slipper orchid grows. She knows each of the towering oaks by name — the bear tree (a burr oak with a burr that resembles a cub climbing one side); the guardian, which stood tallest on the hill before a derecho felled it. She cried and mourned its death.

I had expected conflict at Rochester. But instead, I found someone who cared enough to shepherd compromise. If it can be done here, on hallowed ground, maybe it can be done anywhere.

Life Persists

Lost in thought, I realized Thomsen had taken off down the hill. I waded after her. She wanted to point out a new plant she’d spotted to Sears, the mustard pull organizer. Each little stalk was ringed with a spiraling firework of yellow blossoms.

“Oh, that’s lousewort!” he told her, “Laura would be really excited to see that!”

Thomsen cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted for Laura Walter.

Walter, the scientist, wandered over, a bag overflowing with uprooted garlic mustard invaders tied around her waist. She excitedly knelt to examine the tiny plant, lifting her wide-brimmed hat. Finding lousewort usually means you’re dealing with high-quality remnant prairie, she told me, a “holy grail.” It’s partially parasitic, with roots that penetrate those of other plants underground to pirate water and mineral nutrients. In doing so, it suppresses its victim’s growth and keeps the prairie more open, promoting diversity. That kind of complex relationship is hard to recreate when doing restoration work. The plants nearby did look a little droopy. Had it already raided their nutrients and left a warning sign for others? I asked.

“It’s tantalizing to think about,” Walter laughed. She took a geolocated photo, and later, with the township’s permission, returned to collect its seeds. 

Walter then pointed excitedly at a blooming shooting star a few feet away. As we watched, a large bumblebee hovered upside down under its blossom and landed. In the spring, new bumblebee queens fly great distances to start new colonies, she told me. They depend on a few early blooming prairie flower species, like the shooting star, which have co-evolved to release pollen at specific bumblebee buzz frequencies.

“It’s funny, this is a cemetery, it’s where you honor the dead,” she mused. “But here you can also come and honor an abundance of life.”

Walter has collected shooting star seeds from remnants across the state, but they’re tricky to propagate. In the first growing season, a plant produces tiny seed leaves, a centimeter across. The following year, it gains a tiny tuft of true leaves. It can take five years to flower and produce seeds. Prairie restoration managers typically favor vigorous, fast-growing species that can outcompete invasive species and establish quickly.

Sitting in a prairie, you come to appreciate its beauty. The sheer complexity surrounding us was overwhelming. And it continued, invisibly, beneath the soil — every remnant prairie has a fungal and microorganism community unique to the soil type and plant community.

“Think about all the things that we don’t know, and that don’t come back on their own,” Walter said. “We have to preserve those relationships in the places where they exist until we understand them.”

Fate Of The Prairie

The future of tallgrass prairie remains uncertain. The Midwestern states are speckled with more and higher-quality restorations today than when efforts began in the 1980s; however, Iowa’s unique roadside vegetation program depends on county and state-level support, which is at a low point under the current administration.

The Burr Oak Land Trust, an Iowa conservation group that for years sent AmeriCorps volunteers to Rochester and other remnant prairies to pull invasive species and conduct prescribed burns, lost its funding due to Department of Government Efficiency cuts this year. The Prairie Research Institute in Illinois lost $21 million in federal funding last fall. And opt-in programs, like the Conservation Reserve Program, where the federal government pays farmers to take marginal land out of crop production and return it to prairie or wetland, depend on the whims of the market, Jonathan Dahlem, an Iowa State University sociologist who studies farming conservation practices, told me. When corn and soybean prices rise, like they have over the past two decades, farmers are eager to plow up restorations to seed row crops even if yields aren’t expected to be high. 

Rosburg said he finds hope in the increasing number of remnants discovered each year on forgotten pastures, along roads and in cemeteries. Universities like to talk about the “outsized impact” of small restorations, Jackson told me. But in reality, “every little bit helps a little bit,” she said.

I find my own hope in this place and in these people. At the end of the day, after the garlic mustard pull was over, Thomsen and Walter walked together up the hills, sharing their intimate and yet very different knowledge of the place.

Longmire calls Rochester Cemetery a memento mori — a reminder for living visitors of both their inevitable fate and of what Iowa lost. Funerals, gravestones and cemeteries are for the living — and this is a place that is alive, with plants and humans. Rochester is a time capsule of the past and a key to the future.

As I left, a truck and trailer pulled into the prairie to unload a riding lawn mower. The roar of the engine drowned out the buzz of insects as its operator carefully mowed around their family stone. It’s not a sight you’d see in a typical prairie. But here, it’s what compromise looks – and sounds — like. 

I later learned that the man who had mowed around the gravestones of many Rochester families for years as a public service had passed away that same day. The sea of tallgrass grew unchecked in the following months, surging against the gravestones like waves — a constant reminder that he was gone. Concerned families have started asking Thomsen how the cemetery will be maintained going forward — how nature will be held at bay. A similar series of events sparked the big fight over mowing back in 2006. I worry a little about the prairie’s future and Thomsen’s hold over the fragile balance here.

“But isn’t it wonderful,” Longmire asked me, “to have a place that people take so seriously to fight about how it’s managed?”

The post Where The Prairie Still Remains appeared first on NOEMA.

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Trump was hinting at his desire to annex Canada, an ambition some have dismissed as a joke, but his words were incidentally insightful.

Borders represent a conceptual distinction between the living world as it actually exists and the myriad ways it can be demarcated for particular, often extractive purposes. Astronauts and astronomers have observed how, from above, one sees no lines around states or territories dividing the Earth, only a majestic, unified whole.

This abstraction of the landscapes upon which we all depend, and of which we are part, has contributed to their systematic destruction. In reaction to the unchecked metabolism of modern industrial civilization, the Earth is reasserting its primacy. Extreme weather, biodiversity loss and other mounting calamities promise to undermine our economic and territorial integrity. Humanity now faces the urgent question of how to operate in a more sustainable, reciprocal relationship with our environments.

A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us. Rather than accepting the abstract placemaking of property or state, bioregionalists look to watersheds, biodiversity, human culture and other aspects of physical and social geography. Well-known bioregions in North America include Cascadia (reaching roughly from the southern tip of Alaska to northern California) and the Ozarks (primarily encompassing southern Missouri and northern Arkansas).

After emerging some 50 years ago, bioregionalism lost steam around the turn of the century. Today, however, it is in the midst of a resurgence. In light of the escalating pressures of the Anthropocene, many in the movement are now embracing bioregional finance (BioFi) — new financial systems and decentralized technologies to establish the technical, institutional and cultural bases for bioregional forms of economics and governance.

It’s a grand vision with ideas that may sound naively ambitious or even controversial, like using cryptocurrency to tokenize protected forest lands and incentivize their conservation. Proponents argue that such approaches can provide a means of affording visibility and value to ecosystems too often ignored by mainstream economics. The mission is to leverage existing economic systems in ways that prioritize bioregional regeneration over extraction.

“There’s a kind of dual edge to bioregionalism,” Brandon Letsinger, a leader in the Cascadian movement, told me. “One is short-term and pragmatic, working within existing systems, and the other is long-term and utopian — really working to outgrow, overgrow and build institutions that we don’t currently have, but that we need.”

A Meeting By The River 

It was a cold, rainy weekend outside the Georgetown Steam Plant in late spring 2025; inside was damp and somehow even colder. The loading area of a decommissioned power station would make an unusual venue for most gatherings, but for the inaugural Cascadia BioFi Conference, it was an appropriate setting.

The towering power plant was built in 1906, just south of Seattle. About a mile to the west is the Duwamish River, where for millennia the Duwamish, Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples practiced sustainable ways of life. The Duwamish flows into the Salish Sea, a sprawling system of waterways and watersheds connected to the Pacific Ocean by the broad-shouldered Strait of Juan de Fuca.

As industry insinuated itself around Seattle in the early 20th century, the river was straightened, its mud flats drained, its banks paved over and its biodiversity devastated. The Duwamish is now a registered superfund site. Efforts are underway to restore the life of the river and the areas around it, including the steam plant.

“When we talk about regeneration, that conversation has to start here,” Letsinger, who helped organize the conference, said in his opening remarks. He wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the silhouette of a Douglas fir tree framed by a rainbow, an inclusive variation on the popular symbol of Cascadia known as the “Doug flag,” which was ubiquitous throughout the drafty power plant.

Letsinger made the case for how, if properly organized and mobilized, the Cascadian bioregion could leverage significant resources and influence. Home to many leading technology companies as well as a significant proportion of the logging industry, it is also host to an outsized concentration of carbon-storing forests and some of the scarce remaining old growth on Earth. Washington state alone boasts one of the largest economies in the country.

Despite this bounty, a persistent problem facing the bioregionalist agenda — in Cascadia and beyond — is a lack of funding. On the lips of many of the 200 people in attendance was the impending “great wealth transfer,” a reference to the investments and financial holdings of baby boomers that will be redirected over the coming years. The hope is to establish the means of directing those funds to bioregional ends, and to leverage various new and innovative funding models for the cause.

Punctuated by the occasional roar of nearby jets, presentations were held in different chambers of the power plant. Visitors tucked away plates from a Thai food truck while perusing the booths of bioregion-aligned organizations, and peered at large Cascadian maps and artworks displayed throughout the cavernous space.

The gathering was fairly diverse, though mostly white, with a small degree of Indigenous representation alongside Cascadian elders, Bay Area finance professionals and digital developers. The crypto contingent were especially easy to spot, with their distinct fashion sense and laconic vibe. The scene put into perspective bioregionalism’s renewed momentum — and its considerable evolution over the decades.

Bioregionalism’s First Wave

Rooted in environmentalist counterculture, bioregionalism was popularized in the 1970s by activists and writers such as Peter Berg. It emerged from nascent ecological and permaculture research, back-to-the-land movements, appropriate technology, localism, forest defense and other activist communities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a network of grassroots bioregionalism groups flourished across North America. With hubs in places such as the Ozarks, the Great Lakes, Maine, the Ohio River Valley, South and Central America as well as Cascadia, they agitated for and organized around principles of environmental restoration and defense, Indigenous sovereignty and a regenerative relationship between planet and people.

Berg described the idea of the bioregion as “a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.” It has also been called a “two-eyed” approach, meaning it is compatible with both western science and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Bioregionalists believe that communities with the most direct and deepest connections to the land — in particular, Indigenous communities — know best what is needed within a region. They therefore encourage communities to map their own bioregions, highlighting which aspects they find most important to recognize and protect. In this way, a bioregion is said to define itself, as the people living there identify with and organize around it. 

“Bioregional boundaries stand forth as ‘convergent thresholds’ where many dynamics converge and contexts change,” David McCloskey, a former sociology professor credited with coining the term Cascadia, told me via email.

There are numerous active bioregional communities around the world. The Ozarks have been a hub of bioregional organizing for decades. The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is leveraging a range of bioregional organizing and funding strategies to protect 86 million acres of rainforest from extraction. A nongovernmental organization called Ashoka is supporting bioregional projects in Europe and the U.S. The Design School for Regenerating Earth, led by author and researcher Joe Brewer, is spearheading bioregional organizing in Colombia and elsewhere.

The Cascadian movement has long been one of the most visible expressions of bioregionalism. Historically, Cascadia has also been the center of a marginal secessionist effort, though there is little apparent overlap with Cascadian bioregionalism, which is defined by broader environmental and community-based goals that have persisted and evolved for decades.

“The true Cascadia seems to sing itself over and over in different ways in different contexts over generations,” McCloskey said. 

Bioregionalism initially gained traction through independent publications such as Planet Drum and Rain Magazine. It also formed communities through a series of congresses beginning in the early 1980s. These gatherings brought together bioregional activists from around North America, who debated and voted on collective vision statements that guided each cohort in their own regional agendas.

In the summer of 1986, the first Cascadian Bioregional Congress took place in Olympia, the Washington state capital and countercultural epicenter. The gatherings generated a great deal of discourse and energy, but ultimately quieted down in the late 1990s as the people involved aged and transitioned.

“It just kind of had a natural life cycle,” said Lansing Scott, a former editor at Rain Magazine who was heavily involved in the early congresses. “There’s only so many times you can come together and craft a vision statement and change this sentence to that or whatever before it gets a little boring.”

While the larger bioregionalism movement has waxed and waned, it has never vanished. Scott describes its last couple decades as a “mycelial stage,” growing and forming connections in an underground fashion, largely unseen until recently.

As bioregionalism has experienced its recent flush of renewed interest, it has also embraced new financial and technical concepts that show a potential path to building impactful, sustainable social infrastructure according to bioregional principles.

The BioFi Era Begins

The current wave of activity and enthusiasm around bioregional organizing was largely catalyzed by the adoption of bioregional finance. Launched by an organization called the BioFi Project, it is a framework that “organizes the flow of financial capital and other multi-capital resources to the regeneration of ecosystems, culture, and communities in bioregions.”

In 2024, the BioFi Project published “The BioFi Book,” which argues for prioritizing the regeneration of damaged ecosystems in economics, introducing various innovative financial instruments designed to reorient the systems of capital that undermine them. The book also offers a range of strategies and case studies demonstrating the principles in practice.

Though still nascent as a concept and community of practice, BioFi has garnered a great deal of excitement around bioregionalism, bringing into play an array of financial tools and innovations. At the core of the BioFi concept are bioregional finance facilities (BFFs). In essence, these are grassroots financial institutions emerging from bioregional organizing to make a community’s projects and priorities legible to larger financial systems and sources of investment.

“If we’re going to protect these ecosystems that are highly endangered, we need to set up financing facilities that are governed by local people, and we need to get money to them quickly,” said BioFi Project director and former World Bank sustainable finance consultant Samantha Power (no relation to the famous diplomat). 

“In our theory of change, we really believe that people living in relationship to place — who know that place, are paying attention to the ecological changes of that place, are connected to the culture of that place — these are the people that are best positioned to implement regenerative programs.” 

Regenerate Cascadia, a nonprofit co-founded by Letsinger, British Columbia-based artist Clare Attwell and development consultant Taya Seidler, is a clear example of what a BFF could look like. The trio and their partners have been developing the organization to eventually incubate, fund and coordinate projects throughout Cascadia. This could include riverkeeping organizations, watershed or forest restoration and preservation, regenerative farms, banking cooperatives or bioregional learning centers.

Regenerate Cascadia is structured as a framework for flowing money to landscapes from larger sources of capital — primarily philanthropic funds — through various nonprofit services meant to support decentralized, on-the-ground regeneration work. 

Such a project may be the acquisition and stewardship of land, the launching of a regional bank or other place-based initiatives. A BFF like Regenerate Cascadia could gather these projects into a portfolio of regenerative assets and bring them into the reach of fund managers with growing interest in allocating investments to regenerative ends.

Regenerate Cascadia is already fielding applications for its own nascent BioFi program, with plans to launch in 2026 with a group of projects operating under three tiers of resourcing and commitment: seed groups, landscape groups and landscape hubs. Each tier would determine how much money a project could independently raise and the amount of support it would receive from the nonprofit. 

The organizing principle of a BFF requires that decision-making be maintained locally. To curb the tendency toward gridlock among groups of opinionated, highly engaged stakeholders — a problem common to activist spaces — Cascadian organizers employ various conflict aversion strategies, such as sociocracy, a non-hierarchical democratic consensus structure. 

“What became quickly apparent is that there are people out there doing the work, but they are not being supported to do it,” said Seidler. While there are many potential approaches to attracting and directing capital into bioregional organizing, Regenerate Cascadia is currently geared toward philanthropic investment. Investment capital, however, is the largest source of potential funding.

“Only 3% of global capital is philanthropic funds,” said Cheryl Chen, CEO of Salmon Returns, a finance ecosystem for the Salmon Nation bioregion. “If we’re going to really try and change the course of humanity, or create an economy based on regeneration, we have to unlock the other kinds of capital.”

New Tech, Old Growth

In recent years, the bioregionalism movement has been experimenting with cryptocurrencies, blockchains and other financial technologies. One example is Kwaxala, an initiative of the Kwiakah First Nation in British Columbia. In May 2024, the Kwiakah First Nation announced the establishment of the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area, a 140,000 acre section of forest secured not through purchase — the land is owned by the Canadian Crown — but rather through logging rights.

Since securing these rights, Kwaxala has worked with the provincial government to designate the region as a special forest management conservation area, and has converted the license from a right to extraction to a right to regeneration. Held by a recognized, Indigenous land title holder, it is effectively an asset whose value is pinned to the prevention of extraction.

“Essentially we’re creating a reverse logging company,” said Gavin Woodburn, Indigenous science advisor to Kwaxala and a member of its board who presented at the Cascadia BioFi conference. The forest under Kwaxala’s management is currently valued based on carbon credits, with plans to deploy an “eco credit” called a Centree. This digital cryptocurrency token will be issued for every 100 acres protected under the program. Should more acres be added to the protected territory, more coins will be issued, with their value underwritten by the health of the forest. 

Within the territory that makes up Kwaxala’s Living Forest Fund, local Forest Partners — communities positioned to steward a portion of the total forest — are majority equity holders and contractual partners who carry out the day-to-day work of overseeing the protected forest. In essence, Kwaxala coordinates offset sales and fund investments, supporting the Forest Partners by building and maintaining underlying systems and services. Akin to Regenerate Cascadia’s distributed structure, the revenue from investment goes to paying for these operations, but 90% is retained by the smaller partner groups. 

Centree value is currently assessed by way of the narrow metric of carbon sequestration, playing into the existing carbon credit market, but the hope is for more holistic and bioregion-specific measures of health and value to be introduced as bioregional financing concepts are further established and tested.

“Over time, the idea is that we can create more and more of these opportunities, whether it’s attached to forests or to watersheds, or to regenerative agricultural lands so that people can invest in regeneration,” said Chen of Salmon Returns, which is working directly with Kwaxala. “Carbon credits were once just like an idea, and now it’s a big thing, a tens of billions of dollars market. Kwaxala is a good, living example of what we could do if we were able to propagate that model to local conditions and terms.”

Many in the regenerative economics space also advocate for a kind of distributed, sovereign, public infrastructure managed as a commons. The technological architecture most often cited to achieve this is the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

A DAO is essentially a system of encoded contracts that “live” among networked computers through a blockchain registry, rather than by way of state-enforced systems of law — a contract that runs itself, in essence, as long as the power stays on. Such a system could theoretically integrate with the overarching system or operate independently and even in its absence.

Legal logics such as the rights of nature, and of course the millennia of Indigenous tradition and practice, offer the basis and precedent for envisioning how such perspectives can be developed into existing and emerging systems.

Making Nature’s Value Legible

There are obvious questions as to whether cryptocurrencies and even finance at large are compatible with nature. Capital and innovative technologies tend to extract and to abstract, after all — the very things bioregionalism seeks to counteract.

In using these technologies, the goal is to design systems that can help to bootstrap the beginnings of bioregional self-governance, separate from the detrimental proclivities of capital. The basic reasoning is this: Modern society is governed and organized through systems of technology and finance. However, neither meaningfully prioritizes the well-being of the living world, and so the choice is between renouncing such systems or finding ways of making the living world legible to them. 

The question of how to value any aspect of a living ecosystem is also thorny and complicated. No less tricky is the question of representing and organizing that value through complex technologies such as blockchains, which in addition to being known as environmentally deleterious, are strongly associated with speculative finance.

“We’re so habituated into auditing things into discrete boundaries that we lack resources to understand from an economic perspective how to define value as anything other than a commodity,” said Austin Wade Smith, executive director of the Regen Foundation.

Smith carries the air of a visionary, seeing ways that emerging technologies could encode fundamental values of human-nature reciprocity into the systems we use. At the BioFi conference, they delivered a presentation on the possibility of leveraging DAOs as the basis of new commons. They described these systems as “living covenants” enacted as public infrastructure that inherently incentivize stewardship of landscapes and ecosystems.

“People get really frustrated with regenerative economics or credit systems,” Smith said, “which is understandable, because in a way it just seems like it’s an on-ramp to the commodification of the living world, but that is not what we’re trying to do.” Sitting on the staircase outside the power plant after their presentation, they explained the importance of bringing economics and other human systems into alignment with the living planet.

Blockchains, in their view, are “addressing” technologies that make it possible to represent anything from a tree to a watershed in systems of valuation and verification. This is a first step toward affording nonhuman beings and ecosystems a degree of rights and protections of the sort already granted to abstractions such as states and corporations. 

“By seeing it, you can’t ignore it, and you make it a necessary part of the balance sheet in a way,” Smith said. “So legibility is a kind of core question around how might we make our socio-technical systems — law, economics, technology, politics — work in service to not just us, but an expanded definition of the so-called social, which might include animals, forests or even waterways, lakes, rivers.”

Indeed, an oft-mentioned aspect of the Cascadia movement and broader bioregional projects that can be difficult to grasp is one of enfranchising the more-than-human in decision-making as well as in the economic life of a region. As Smith notes, if we valued something like chlorophyll for its scarcity the way we do something like gold, then the former would be far more valuable, and the protection of forests would be something that any system of valuation should reward.  

“If I say a Douglas fir has a treasury and has an endpoint in a digital addressing system, that’s possible, and we don’t have to inherit whether or not Chase Bank allows you to open an account for nonhuman entities,” said Smith. “Many of the systems that people have built are also inherently ecological and living systems, too. It’s not just ourselves, but socio-technical systems; our infrastructure can also be recast and understood as living systems if we understand that there isn’t a separation between nature and people.” 

Technology has profoundly shaped how humans relate to the Earth and to one another. Systems of commerce and governance have run for centuries on paper and word of mouth, on trust and on the threat of violence. The basic pitch for DAOs in this context is that the blockchain may enable sensing, consensus generation and other complex functions to be encoded into systems that inherently value and uphold the well-being of ecosystems and the people who rely upon them, running constantly and in real-time.

Technology and industry have deepened abstraction from the living systems upon which all humans depend, from which we emerge and within which we are inescapably interwoven. Bioregionalists are now leveraging novel technologies to reorganize social and economic life into alignment with nature, and to reverse the immense damage done by traditional forms of capital. 

This may seem counterintuitive; however, culture, tradition, law and other systems that profoundly impact nature have long operated as technologies in and of themselves. Through a bioregional lens, perhaps better technologies are possible.

The post Inside Bioregionalism’s Tech-Driven Revival appeared first on NOEMA.

The dog’s human colleague, a stocky, white police officer, is uniformed, armed and visibly irate. He is yelling at a young woman of color in a bikini. She walks away but the cop storms after her with the dog as other people gather around and shout.

It’s unclear what prompted the mayhem, which is captured in part in a shaky video. A young Black male, who looks to me like a high schooler, appears to try to defuse the situation, but the officer is not calmable. He grabs the kid by the back of the neck, then throws him to the ground and pins him down.

Onlookers scream. “He didn’t do nothing!” The dog has had enough and attacks the person behaving aggressively — the dog’s own handler — biting the arm of the officer. When the clip is posted online, the dog is celebrated as the hero of the day for upholding justice and fairness. 

The well-being of our societies depends on such qualities, which some assume to be uniquely human. But research has emerged showing that animals can be moral beings, too. In a world where power is misused, public morality has become slippery and dishonesty lurches sickeningly through public speech, animals can offer vital lessons for human ethics, political wisdom and social health.

Some animals display a sense of right and wrong, as that police K-9 demonstrated at Panama City Beach, and of fairness. A dog may shake a human’s hand with his paw — repeatedly, without treats — because he enjoys doing so. But if a second dog is invited to join in and is given a treat, the unrewarded dog may show signs of stress and refuse to keep playing: It isn’t fair. 

Similarly, in a famous experiment by researchers Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan, female capuchin monkeys trained to barter made their feelings about fair treatment clear. The researchers rewarded one capuchin with grapes (which the primates love) and another with cucumbers (which they care less for). When the second capuchin saw the other getting a grape, she refused to play along. Years later, the researchers videotaped the task in monkeys who had never done it before to see if the reaction might be stronger: The second capuchin reacted furiously, shaking the cage and hurling cucumber slices at the experimenter.

Fairness matters to dwarf mongooses, too. In the daytime, while they forage in groups, one must stand guard to watch out for predators. They take turns in this sentinel role. In the evening, when they all groom each other, those who spent more time on guard duty get more grooming: Fair’s fair. Dwarf mongooses also care about justice. If one has been mean during the day, perhaps shoving another away from food, the other mongooses take note and groom that one less.

Many animals mete out punishment for perceived wrongs, including some big cats, canids and primates. A troupe of baboons was reportedly near a mountain road in Saudi Arabia in 2000 when one was hit and killed by a car. The whole group gathered in grief and fury, watching every vehicle that went by for three days until the car that had killed their friend passed again on that stretch of road. They chucked rocks, forcing the car to stop, then shattered the windscreen. The driver, fearing for his life, had to flee. Tigers too have been known to enact revenge, specifically targeting those who have provoked them.

Canids know that honesty matters. Biologist and animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff notes in “The Emotional Lives of Animals” that while canids sometimes “lie” — for example, they might perform a “play bow” to indicate friendship, then attack — they may face consequences for dishonesty. Coyotes who lie are ostracized by the pack. Dogs who “cheat” may be shamed and avoided by others.

Honesty, justice, fairness and the moral behavior shown by the police dog are part of the ethics that make societies healthy. Even in small ways, ethics matter. The word “etiquette” means “little ethics.” This is not some dainty and spurious curlicue of arbitrary human behavior, but rather a demonstration of respect for others, important for social health. We humans are not the only animals to embrace it. 

Chimpanzees in Arnhem’s Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands had learned zookeepers’ rule that meals wouldn’t be served until all had assembled. But one day, as reported by Time magazine in 2007, two teenage chimps were more interested in staying out to play than coming in to eat. The others had to wait for hours, getting hungrier and angrier. When the two errant chimps finally showed up, zookeepers protected them from the others’ wrath in a separate enclosure overnight. But when they joined the group the next day, the others pummelled them, teaching them some manners. That night, those two were the first in for dinner.

Following Animals’ Lead

Many Indigenous philosophies consider that we humans are the “younger brothers of creation,” including animals, and that they have lessons to teach us. For millennia before we showed up on the scene, social animals — those living in societies and cooperating for survival — had been creating cultures imbued with ethics. As Bekoff writes, “The origins of virtue, egalitarianism and morality are more ancient than our own species.”

In the opinion of some Australian anthropologists, notes ethologist Temple Grandin, early humans watched wolves and were educated by them. Indigenous Australians put it more directly, saying, “dogs make us human.” Millions of years before us, wolf ethos included babysitting the pups, sharing food with those too injured, sick or old to hunt and including friends in their packs, beyond the genetic kin. Wolf ethics also included being both a good individual and a good pack member. 

Human societies, while often quite different from one to the next, generally have a shared ethos similar to that of wolves: Look after the young; protect the tribe; consider the needs of the sick, injured or old; and value the cooperation of others who may not be kin (friends, in other words). It is biomimicry applied to the ethical world. Wolves were doing it first, and we aped them. 

In ancient folktales and medicine stories, animals are often at the heart of an ethical pivot. Many deal with issues of societal healing after the hero has been treated unethically and morality needs to prevail once again. In the Grimm fairytale of the Goose-girl, the heroine has been cheated and lied about, but her horse, Falada, has moral authority in speaking the truth of her situation. In Puss in Boots, the miller’s youngest son has been wrongly disinherited, but Puss, avenging that wrong, creates a fortune for him far beyond expectation.

The medicine presented in these stories is often an ethical remedy for social ills. The wisdom of folktales aligns with the perception of Indigenous philosophy to tell us: Look to the animals for morality.

Animals Policing Humans

Many societies have overtly attributed to animals the job of policing human behavior. An Ancient Greek legend tells of a thief who attacked a poet and left him for dead. With his little remaining strength, the poet called out to cranes flying overhead, who became police-birds. They followed the thief, circling over him until he felt forced to confess.

Widespread Indigenous belief speaks of an animal archetype, often called the Master, Mistress or Owner of the Animals, who guards animals from hunters’ mistreatment and, by doing so, regulates human ethics. For the Ojibwe (or Anishinaabe, as they call themselves), the most populous group of First Nations in America, this figure is the Sky Bear, an archetype of a real bear, who is born in a Sky den and lives in Sky lodges. The bear approves of generosity and disapproves of selfishness and excess.

Among many other Native people of North America, the archetype is known as the Bear Master, who polices hunting: People must not take more than they need or disrespect the animals. Insulting or wasteful behavior also offends the Master of the Animals. These ethics are remarkably common: rewarding respect and generosity, punishing greed. They are also apparent in folktales of the animal helpers.

Across the Amazon, the Master of the Animals is also a guardian who protects his creatures from overhunting. The Master of Animals may appear to a hunter in his dreams, troubling his conscience. The worried dreamer may then talk to a shaman, who underlines and reemphasizes the warning. If the caution is disregarded, the Master of Animals may punish the hunter, making the animals scarce or withdrawing them.

When I was in the Amazon in 2000, I was struck by the parallels between this figure and the Greek god Pan, who guards his animals and whose presence makes people nervous, causing them to watch their step and behave well. 

According to Chisasibi Cree belief, hunters must treat caribou well and never overhunt. Caribou were around the Chisasibi Cree lands regularly, being hunted with respect until, early in the 20th century, people went out armed with novel weaponry, repeating rifles and, said Elders, they lost control of themselves and killed more caribou than they could carry away.

The caribou disappeared for decades. But in the winter of 1982 into 1983, a few returned. The following winter, they came in large numbers to an area that the hunters could reach by road, and over the course of a month or so, a huge and frenzied hunt took place. People shot wildly, leaving many animals injured and once again killing more than they could take away. The Elders were upset, warning that if the animals weren’t respected, they wouldn’t return.

The following year, there were indeed almost no caribou. The Elders reminded the hunters of the last long absence of the caribou. Were these hunters of the 1980s going to be the ones to lose the respect of the caribou? Chastened, the young hunters took heed and, according to wildlife biologist Peter Miles, this had far more impact than any government regulation or legislation.

The powerful actions of animals may be recognized as a form of natural law governing morality. Perhaps modernity, in its increasing severance from the minds of wild, free animals, has also cut ties to something utterly precious and necessary — a public, shared and visible conscience.

Animal Models Of Healthy Politics

Healthy societies need healthy politics and animals can be good role models. Some may operate their own kinds of referendums, taking amenable account of each other’s wishes. Red deer will move off after a period of resting or feeding when 62% of the adults get to their feet. When African buffaloes make a collective decision to move, only the females’ votes count, expressed by standing, gazing in the direction they want to take, then lying down again. They watch each other, and when enough females want to move, they do.

In his book “Honeybee Democracy,” Thomas Seeley describes honeybees’ intricate decision-making processes for finding a new hive or leading fellow bees to feeding sites for nectar and pollen. The decisions depend on good research and on each bee communicating as truthfully as possible. Scout bees fly out to reconnoiter for a new site, and they dance to convey their findings. Other scouts check out the reports of good sites, returning to dance for the best. They listen to disagreement and recheck the sites. The new nest is chosen when all the scout bees are in agreement, dancing for the same site.

The bees offer a model for the consensus-building politics of citizens’ assemblies that help people reach cooperative decisions after careful deliberation. Healthy human societies could use some political medicine from honeybees. Tell the truth. Don’t suppress dissent. Listen to the experts. Always dance.

Fieldfares, gently speckled honey-colored birds, also demonstrate remarkable cooperation. They are much smaller than their enemy, the hooded crow, which snatches eggs from fieldfare nests. The first principle of political action is this: Find allies. So fieldfares gather together, fly above the hooded crow, and do a huge synchronized poop, bombing the bird, who has to exit the scene and clean its oily feathers.

When we think of political systems, we usually turn to human processes. But some animals model political practices that we could learn from to improve the health of our societies.

Rethinking Anthropomorphism

Fieldfare collective action? Baboon retribution? Dwarf mongoose sanctions? Dog fairness? Is there an issue of anthropomorphism here?

The term “anthropomorphism” is too often robed in a peculiar and partial rationalism that prefers “mechanomorphism,” treating animals as machines oiled by automatic response and fired by reflexive instinct.

An accusation of anthropomorphism is commonly used to pour scorn over all who regard animals with a fullness of intelligence — those of us who think with both logic and metaphor, who perceive with both measurements and intuitive sensitivity, who unlimit ourselves and embrace a possibility (never a certainty) of coming to knowledge through empathy, observation, self-forgetting and kinship.

Humans don’t know with certainty what is happening in other human minds, so we gently engage in the habit of twice-listening, where we hear someone and let their experience find resonance in ourselves. We listen to our gut. We watch our own responses. The juror in empathy steps into the skin of the alleged victim, knows that pallor and sweat, knows and believes her. Our kinship with other humans gives us license to guess and to feel our way into their minds.

We are akin to other animals in shared common ancestry, in the continuum of evolution, and when we see animals (especially mammals) acting in a certain way in a certain situation, we can infer something of their minds. The accusation of anthropomorphism loathes the attribution of human traits or emotions to non-humans, but our characteristics and intentions are so very often held in common with other animals.

Our emotions are fundamentally theirs, as are our ways of expressing them. Love is warm, close and cuddling. Anger is a hot, violent rush of blood. Fear is a chilling freeze. Humans share so much with other animals — humor, language, culture, friendship, spirituality, art, politics, mother-love and a sense of home.

After a while, it feels silly to claim as “human” characteristics that are so manifestly shared with other creatures. Among the human traits that do not appear to be shared are capitalism, genocide and ecocide, and perhaps the divine right of kings (though queen bees may have something to say on that). 

Wise thinking uses what has been termed “critical anthropomorphism,” not directly translating animal behaviors into human terms, but using empathy to help make interpretations.

Critical anthropomorphism embraces as context an animal’s worldview — what that creature needs, feels, knows and wants — and blends that knowledge creatively with a human response. It subliminally attends to shared common ancestry and the inherent relatedness of living beings. Coined in the mid-1980s, the term critical anthropomorphism was useful to consider animals properly as living, subjective beings rather than as little more than robots with reflexes.  

It’s very far from being an exact science, which is perhaps why some scientists, steeped in the Enlightenment’s necessity to divest itself of anything with a whiff of uncertainty, mysticism or Indigenous culture still go vinegar-mouthed at it. It’s an art. It’s a philosophy. As a working hypothesis, it is generous, and as an aid to understanding animals, it is legitimate. Critical anthropomorphism is not an enemy of the scientific process but a friendly adjunct.

Many animal observers are now arguing that those who attack anthropomorphism are suffering a nihilistic shutdown in their thinking, trapped into anthropodenialism. This term was coined by de Waal, who described it as “a blindness to the human-like characteristics of other animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” The onus now is on the sneerers to prove that animals don’t experience responses and emotions comparable to ours.

Animals As Social Medicine

Animals can offer social medicine by their mere physical presence. When people stroke a cat, their oxytocin levels rise. When they interact with their dogs, the levels of oxytocin in both the human and the dog can nearly double. This is good not just for the individual, but for society. American neuroscientist Paul Zak calls oxytocin the “moral molecule” because it motivates people to treat others with compassion. He refers to his work on oxytocin as pioneering the study of the chemical basis for human goodness.

The effects of pet-keeping may also be a social prophylactic for the simplest of reasons, as the company of pets is a remedy for loneliness. (Pet-keeping is, incidentally, an ancient human universal; Indigenous people from the Arctic to the Amazon have kept pets.) I have often found my loneliness assuaged by my cat. Research backs up their salutary effect: In a 2013 study of elderly dog owners living alone, 75% of the men and 67% of the women said their dog was their only friend.

This matters to a society’s political health because when people are lonely, they become vulnerable. Loneliness increases the risk of strokes by 56%; it is more dangerous than smoking; it is a strong contributory factor in heart disease and the lonely are more likely to have serious mental health problems.

By safeguarding so many of us against loneliness, animals help inoculate us against these ills, providing preventative medicine for our individual and collective well-being. They also give us a steady continuance of existence, a dependable self-sameness.

This world-hour is one of flux and havoc; a white-water, white-knuckle ride of hectic technological and political change; a weakening of social ties as a result of the precarity of jobs and housing. The future looks fearful and foreclosed as a buckling and breaking climate holds us all in jeopardy. It can make us feel seasick and disturbed, with no sure footing.

In this state of chaos, we need animals desperately. They give us a sweet and fundamental gift in that they stay reliably the same. The dove that returned to Noah and settled for Picasso flies across your mind’s sky. A donkey is a donkey is a donkey, offering a stable stillness in a rupturing storm, the constancy of their being. Animals help us keep our paws on the ground as individuals. 

We can better our collective health if we are willing to learn from animals modeling consistent ethics and a constancy of morality. It is a reassurance that when truth and wrong and right and lies are smudged to toxic sludge, some creatures may offer us a clear-eyed view of good behavior.

The post The Moral Authority Of Animals appeared first on NOEMA.

Perpetually chilly, this part of the Atlantic Ocean courses around the islands off Portland. Even in summer, I find it best to swim at high tide, after the briny bay has climbed half a dozen feet over sun-cooked sand and rock. But water temperatures in the wider Gulf of Maine have been steadily climbing — it’s an average of two degrees Fahrenheit warmer here than it was 30 years ago. In fact, the gulf is warming more rapidly than 99% of the world’s oceans due to bathymetric and atmospheric conditions.

Those two degrees of additional warmth are a shocking, life-altering change for some of the marine life in the intertidal waterways — including Maine’s primary edible ocean product, the lobster, which is showing signs of moving north in search of colder seas. Taking lobsters’ place as lucrative fishery offerings are bivalves — oysters, mussels, scallops — which appreciate waters a little warmer than lobsters do. 

Green crabs, an invasive species that also thrives in warmer water, have proliferated as well. They come up in lobster traps and appear in the tide pools I used to squat down to examine as a child. And these days, in many spots along the coast, if you look down you’ll see their muddy green-brown shells scuttling off in all directions.

So prolific are green crabs on Maine’s coast now that they outnumber native rock and Jonah crabs, which they eat, along with snails, soft-shell clams and other bivalves that are vital economic products in a state that relies heavily on its fisheries. Even juvenile lobsters have been found in the stomachs of green crabs.

This has caused serious issues for businesses like Nauti Sisters Sea Farm, which floats in the water off Little John Island. Its rows of plastic oyster cages bob between buoys in the shifting tides. Each is home to a hundred or more growing oysters. Alicia Gaiero maintains the farm with her sisters, Amy and Chelsea.

Nauti Sisters uses fine-mesh floating oyster cages for larger oyster seed and bigger sunken cages for smaller seed. These bottom cages, or “condos,” as they’re called in the biz, are unfortunately accessible for the green crabs, which can simply crawl in and gorge on tiny, growing oysters. They also make the cages heavier, which gets problematic when you have to lift them out of the water dozens of times a day.

On a skiff out by the oyster cages in late June, Gaiero expertly hooked a buoy and hauled up one of this year’s bottom condos. “Last year we were so overwhelmed,” she said as she worked. “We just started filling crates with green crabs.” People sometimes would come to take them, she went on, but Nauti Sisters doesn’t have refrigeration and the green crab distribution network is inconsistent, so they don’t know who might show up looking for some, or when. 

Gaiero plopped the condo onto the deck of the skiff. Crabs of all shapes and sizes scattered out. One green crab snapped its front pinchers in the air defensively. She grabbed it and tossed it into a five-gallon bucket. Like most oyster farmers, she and her sisters usually smash the crabs and compost their remains back on land.

Native to coastal Europe and North Africa, green crabs arrived in North America in the 1800s, likely via the ballast water of merchant ships. They can now be found on every continent except Antarctica, and are one of the 100 most harmful invasive species worldwide.

Viciously versatile, green crabs grow quickly, may reproduce multiple times in a season and are comfortable in a wide range of ocean temperatures. The harsh conditions that once kept their populations in check — really cold winters, sea ice — are growing milder. And as Marissa McMahan, the senior director of fisheries at Manomet Conservation Sciences, explained, in warmer waters, green crabs will reproduce more quickly and begin to do so at a younger age, causing a population explosion. 

Green crabs are such aggressive predators they cost shellfisheries on the East Coast an estimated $22.6 million annually in lost revenue. “They love bivalves. They love soft-shell clams. They’ll beat up on small lobsters, they beat up on native species, they mow down eel grass,” Jason Goldstein, the research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, told me. “So there really aren’t too many good things we can say about them, right?”

But for intrepid fishermen and creative chefs, there may be just one good thing to say about them: They can taste pretty good.

Humans can be very effective at controlling animal populations when motivated to do so. We have hunted native species to extinction, so one approach that scientists and chefs are experimenting with is the consumption of invasives — also known as invasivorism — to try to control their expanding numbers.

The strategy of “beating by eating” unwelcome creatures has been embraced around the world. Humans have reshaped entire ecosystems with their appetites.

One of the most famous examples is the Asian carp, sometimes called “the most hated fish in America.” They are well-established in the Mississippi River basin and found as far north as the Great Lakes region. High-jumping carp evade low dams and other attempts to control their population and they compete with local fish for resources.

Carp can have a muddy taste and are considered by many Americans to be a “trash fish,” but this is partly due to a misunderstanding. The muddy association may come from our tendency to associate all carp with the Asian carp’s bottom-feeder cousins. Some reports suggest the flavor of Asian carp, which feed typically on plankton and algae in upper levels of rivers, is rather light. And when properly prepared they can be tasty. 

Similarly, the feral hogs that plague Texas and the Southern United States can be eaten just like any other pig. And if you’re a fan of the bright green seaweed salad often found at sushi restaurants and in Asian buffets, you are doing your part: The wakame variety of seaweed used in those salads is an invasive species that is, in my opinion, truly delicious. Other edible invasives include some species of crayfish, the nutria (a semi-aquatic rodent), lionfish and the armored catfish.

Many of these species are commonly consumed where they are native; distaste for them in new places is often cultural, due to their being unfamiliar to palates where they invade. All that’s required to enjoy them is a good recipe. And unlike some consumption that can come with a side of guilt, preparing an invasive species for the dinner table can bring a feeling of comfort in helping native habitats.

Although eating green crabs would make only a dent in their overall population, harvesting them is still a way to support the local community and ecosystem. This is part of the appeal for Evan Montellese, who got his green crab fishing license from the state for $10. He’s autistic and finds the experience of green crab fishing particularly satisfying — he keeps his own hours and can manage just fine with his kayak.

Montellese sets some of his crab traps off pilings at the wharf in Scarborough Marsh, just south of Portland. Others he puts in the marsh’s intertidal waters, paddling out to get to them. After participating in a research project with Manomet last year, he started reaching out to local restaurants about whether they were wanting any green crabs. “A lot of them were,” he told me, “and it just kind of grew from there.”

Maine’s waterfront can be a hard place for outsiders to start a career. The state’s fisheries are well regulated, with only a certain number of licenses for lobstering and commercial fishing. Of the state’s roughly 7,000 lobster licenses, many remain in the same family generation after generation. Few become available for new fishermen.

Many fisheries, particularly the cod and Northern shrimp fisheries, have suffered dwindling harvests as the gulf warms, and whether you want to fish in the deep sea or farm shellfish on the coast, the investment required to start from nothing is huge: boats to buy and maintain, traps to purchase, leases to obtain, license fees, mooring charges. And the chances of making a viable living are deeply uncertain.

But Montellese’s biggest challenge, at least at first, was convincing chefs to put green crabs on the menu.

Once named Bon Appétit’s Restaurant City of the Year, Portland has a high concentration of top restaurants and is a mecca for foodies. Seafood, for obvious reasons, is the city’s specialty. 

If you want to eat a green crab, your primary problems are their tough shells and small size. Unlike with larger crab species and Maine’s iconic lobster, breaking a green crab shell at the joints will release only a thimbleful of meat. So cooking them and plopping them down on a diner’s plate is basically out of the question. 

Chefs are learning that there’s a better way to use them in the kitchen.

“They make a killer broth stock,” Damian Sansonetti, a chef and co-owner at Chaval, in the West End, told me. “We break them down, roast them, mix them with some tomato products. It’s intense.”

When I visited Chaval recently, Sansonetti opened the lid of a container to reveal a deep brownish paste that released a blast of fishy aromas. I touched a small dollop to my tongue, sparking an explosion of fervent briny, oceanic flavor. Sansonetti uses this concentrate as a flavoring agent in numerous sauces and broths.

Doing this with lobster or other crabs, which cost around $12 a pound, would not be the most cost-effective use of prized crustaceans. Green crabs, though — at $1-$2 a pound in Maine, according to Sansonetti — are ideal. 

Farther downtown from Chaval, Jordan Rubin, a James Beard-nominated chef who runs the restaurants Crispy Gai and Mr. Tuna, echoed Sansonetti’s enthusiasm. “There’s not really meat you can use, but the flavor!” he said with excitement. 

With green crabs that are big enough, however, you can crack into them and poke out freshly cooked meat. Another way to enjoy a green crab is if they’re harvested during their molt, when their shells are soft enough for teeth to break through. In Italy, green crabs are native and even prized, especially for preparing a dish called moeche, which involves battering and frying the soft-shell crab and often serving it alongside fried polenta. 

But harvesting them at the right time is tricky. Their soft-shell stage lasts only about a day. “It can be a headache because it’s unpredictable,” Montellese told me. “There are a couple of people in Maine who are experimenting with harvesting the crabs [at the hard-shell stage] and keeping them until they shed, then selling them at that moment. It’s difficult from a sale or financial perspective, because they don’t all shed at the same time. Every crab is a little bit different depending on how fast they grow.”

Whether green crabs are soft-shelled or hard-shelled or boiled down into a concentrated paste, one of the challenges is getting consumers used to the idea that they are edible in the first place. 

There are, however, potential uses for green crabs outside the kitchen. One is to use them as fertilizer. Lobstermen often grind up the bodies of green crabs they find in their traps and toss them in their gardens. Montellese is experimenting with a liquid fertilizer, trying different balances of crab to essential oils to get the smell right.

As invasive species continue to move north with warming oceans, the waters are muddied further by another crab. 

Blue crabs — the star of Chesapeake Bay cuisine — have flat blue-gray bodies and dazzling sapphire legs. They can stretch more than 9 inches across, and when they shed they provide Marylanders with a delicacy that is as synonymous with Bay living as a lobster cookout is to Maine’s coastline: deep-fried soft-shell crab. 

As a predator, blue crabs are even more alarming to oyster farmers and lobstermen than green crabs. Their larger size and aggressive hunting means they can consume small lobsters, larger shellfish and any other crab species they can track down. 

As with green crabs, running a soft-shell blue crab business requires keeping them in tanks and a good deal of patience. But unlike with green crabs, the market for soft-shell blue crabs is established and lucrative, making the tank and time investment worth the trouble.

They’re already popular, Montellese told me, so if they do establish themselves in Maine, it will likely be easier to make a business out of harvesting and selling them. And, McMahan said, as they “start to exert more predatory pressure on green crabs,” they may even drive green crabs off. 

Back on the island, away from the bustle of curious tourists at Chaval and Mr. Tuna and just a skiff’s quick journey past the floating cages of Nauti Sisters Sea Farm, green crabs darted sideways across a pebble-strewn beach made bare by the receding tide on one of the hundreds of islands in Casco Bay.

With a bucket in one hand and a glove on the other, I scooped up a dozen green crabs in a few minutes. Their tiny claws snapped and pinched, but not tightly enough to break skin. I usually spotted them scurrying across mud that came up to my ankles, and as I parted the thick webs of seaweed that plastered barnacle-crusted rocks, a half a dozen scattered for the nearest dark corner. You have to be quick to catch one, but there are plenty for the taking. 

Once I gathered enough, I rustled up a campfire with bits of dried driftwood. I warmed up a large pot of fresh water, then added the green crabs to the cauldron. From a cooler, I added vegetables and savory essentials — garlic, carrots, onions, a splash or two of wine and broth. After the water started bubbling, I let the dish simmer for over an hour.

A savory green crab stew goes nicely with a piece of crusty bread. I taste the sea and a certain sweetness that is unique to this little adventurous crustacean, a persistent tidal predator that is determined to make Maine its home.

The post The Push To Get Invasive Crabs On The Menu appeared first on NOEMA.

The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.

According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”

In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.

Systematizing Collapse

When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.

Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.

For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.

According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.

Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)

Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.

What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”

Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.

Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’

In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”

Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.

Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”

At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.

Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”

In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.

It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.

Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.

‘Hobbes’ Delusion’

“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”

“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”

For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.

But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.

To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.

If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.

But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?

What Fuels Goliath?

In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.

A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.

Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”

To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.

But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.

The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”

Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.

The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.

The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.

In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”

“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”

In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.

Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.

In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”

The 1% View Of History

Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”

Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”

Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.

It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.

Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.

From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.

The Curse Of Inequality

If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.

Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.

This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.

The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.

Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.

Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.

In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)

All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.

Better Off Stateless

As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.

Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.

In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.

Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”

Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)

Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.

It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”

Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.

At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.

Endgame

In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.

As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.

Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.

We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.

Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.

The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”

Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.

Lootable Silicon

All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.

“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”

Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.

The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.

Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.

Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”

Slaying Goliath

Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.

In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.

As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.

Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.

I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.

His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.

The post Humanity’s Endgame appeared first on NOEMA.

Then, after breakfast, the Italian-led team of scientists would get to work coaxing a towering aluminum drill into the ice. For three weeks in April 2023, their little compound of tents atop Holtedahlfonna, a glacier in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, was home.

Although it is more than 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Svalbard is warming about six to seven times faster than anywhere on Earth, driven in part by warm Atlantic currents and rapid loss of sea ice. Melting glaciers are a potent symbol of global warming as well as a rich resource of planetary history. The ice inside them is a natural time capsule of our atmosphere, containing microorganisms, pollutants, pollen and viruses from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. 

“It is a library with chapters in the past,” said Catherine Larose, a Canadian microbiologist who was part of the Holtedahlfonna expedition. Deep ice cores communicate information that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth; some are essentially frozen slices of the atmosphere untainted by plastics, lead or other pollutants. “You can go back into these archives of 600 years ago, and you can get that,” Larose said. 

That’s why one of the ice cores her team extracted is set to travel to the other end of the Earth. A nonprofit called the Ice Memory Foundation is sending samples from melting glaciers around the world to be preserved in Antarctica for generations to come. 

This initiative, among many others, is part of a new approach to preservation that has emerged as nations around the world whiz past the climate limits set to prevent imminent collapse. Back on Svalbard, for instance, a facility called the Global Seed Vault houses millions of crop seed samples to be used in the case of war or climate calamity. And it’s not just climate efforts. Linguists and historians are making similar attempts to save various forms of cultural knowledge as they begin to disappear.  

Unlike other preservation efforts to forestall coming crises, the underlying logic of this approach quietly says: Disaster is already at our doorstep. 

Like the Biblical Noah loading pairs of animals onto his ark, scientists and archivists are salvaging fragile bits of our world that are at risk of disappearing forever. They’re doing everything from drilling ice cores in the Arctic and freezing endangered species’ cells to encoding ancient languages onto tiny disks sent into space. And in the process, these new Noahs are posing profound questions about what humans believe is worth saving — and how to preserve something for a distant future that we can’t quite imagine.

Frozen In Time

By the time a group of French and Italian glaciologists founded the Ice Memory Foundation in 2015, glaciers worldwide were shrinking at an accelerated rate. That same year, the State of the Climate report called the ice loss “without precedent on a global scale.” Already, cumulative mass loss since 1980 had reached 18.8 meters, or “the equivalent of cutting a 20.5 meter [67-foot] thick slice off the top of the average glacier.” 

The Ice Memory Foundation’s goal was deceptively simple: take samples from 20 glaciers over the course of 20 years and store them in Antarctica for the coming centuries. The first mission took place on the Col du Dôme in the French Alps, where ice loss is especially dramatic. Glaciologists estimate that the Alps have lost a third of their volume in just the past 20 years. Since then, research teams have partnered with Ice Memory to collect samples from Tanzania, Bolivia, Italy, Russia, Tajikistan and elsewhere. 

“Polar ice caps are truly the archives of our planet,” Claude Lorius, one of the founders of modern glaciology, once said. “When you dig deep, you can recover ice samples that formed during the time of Charlemagne. If you dig 100 meters, that’s from the time of Jesus Christ.” The deepest samples represent 150,000 years of history, according to Lorius — making them older than the written word by tens of thousands of years.

The ice doesn’t just keep a record of the atmosphere as it once was; it silently transcribes man’s havoc upon the world. Scientists can essentially see when the Industrial Revolution began just by studying glaciers. Cores containing European atmosphere from the mid-1800s bear the traces of heavy fossil fuel burning. Some samples from the 20th century show signs of radioactivity, Larose told me. Many contain the ubiquitous micro-plastics of our age. 

Climate scientists can compare different layers of a glacier to understand how a warming climate affects biodiversity. Even historians can learn from the glaciers. One 6,000-year-old sample in Greenland provided clues about ancient volcanic activity.

Getting the ice samples, however, can be incredibly dangerous. The drill site on Holtedahlfonna was about 50 miles from the closest town, so Larose and her colleagues had to lug 1.5 tons of material — drills, replacement parts, tents, first aid and three weeks’ worth of vacuum-packed lasagnas — on snowmobiles through whiteout storms. 

Since help is so far away, the scientists even trained with the Red Cross to learn everything from CPR to how to treat burns from the snowmobiles or cuts from the drills. The temperatures atop the glacier, even in the spring, reached minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. The mess tent was heated, but the individual sleeping tents were not, nor was the drill tent where they worked all day. 

Only a few days into the expedition, when the drill had reached around 80 feet into the glacier, the usual sound of crunching through layers of ice changed. Now there was a sloshing noise. They had hit water. The team tried to drain the firn aquifer, doing anything they could to press on to their goal depth. In the process, they lost two drill motors because of water damage. 

This was a disaster. Had they arrived too late? One of the drill operators, an Italian scientist, later said it felt like seeing the effects of climate change in real time.

As the water gushed from the heart of the glacier and the wind and snow still whipped outside, the team didn’t know what to do. Should they try to push on? Should they wait until the weather cleared? After much discussion, they made the painful decision to move the drill to another part of the glacier and start over. 

“We couldn’t see anything,” Larose said, recalling what it was like to man-haul the drill across the ice. “We were just in a cloud.” By the time they dragged everything to the new location, her shoulder-length blond hair was entirely white, frozen over with snow.

After that, things went more smoothly: Within a few weeks, they were able to secure their deepest cores of about 250 feet — representing 300 to 400 years of atmospheric history.

It was a perilous endeavor, but a necessary one, the team says. “The science of the present is also built on the science of the past,” Larose said. “You’re standing on the shoulders of the previous generations.” And therefore, future generations will need to stand on her shoulders, too.

When early glaciologists such as Lorius first traveled to Antarctica in the 1950s, they likely could not have imagined that someday someone like Larose would be able to study antibiotic resistance genes within a glacier. We can’t know what questions future scientists will ask. All Larose and her colleagues can do is send their samples from the white-capped mountains of Svalbard — like frozen messages in a bottle — into the future.

What Comes After Extinction?

More than 4,000 miles from Svalbard, in a room no larger than a two-car garage, Marlys Houck has been handling a different kind of frozen material for the past 38 years. Houck is the curator of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo. The collection holds the frozen cells of 1,300 animal species or subspecies kept at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit — all packed into a single room.

Houck, a petite blonde with straight bangs, radiates the patient, steady demeanor of someone used to guiding school-aged visitors through complex ideas. These aren’t just DNA samples, she told me. Each pellet in each vial contains 1 to 3 million cells. 

“They’re living cells,” she explained of the cell samples in nitrogen-cooled tanks dotting the room. “They’re just frozen living cells.”

Her team preserves animal genetic material, especially that of endangered species, both for current genetic restoration and for future research. Here’s how it works: After an animal dies at the San Diego Zoo — or sometimes while undergoing veterinary care — the Frozen Zoo will take a tissue sample. (The Frozen Zoo also receives samples from other partnerships, such as through U.S. Fish and Wildlife.) From there, the team cuts the tissue into many smaller samples, then “feeds” each with a nutrient broth. When the cells have multiplied enough for cryopreservation, they’re introduced into the collection. 

The Frozen Zoo has the largest collection of frozen genetic material in the world, but they’re not the only ones doing this. Similar efforts are being made in Cincinnati, Berlin and London. In Australia, scientists are even cryobanking coral sperm.  

Each day is different at the Frozen Zoo. The all-female team comes in at staggered times so that someone is available to “feed” the samples throughout the day. The women even have to get babysitting coverage when they go on vacation, as each sample stays in the incubator phase for about a month before it’s frozen. Whoever arrives first in the morning double checks the collection, making sure there’s enough nitrogen and that everything is functioning properly. 

“It’s not all that different from our animal care staff in that you come in and you check on the babies,” Houck said. She scans through the growing samples to see which of the “babies” need food and which ones have grown large enough to be transferred to storage.

I asked Houck how they choose which animals to preserve. Who decides what survives, and how? She told me they don’t choose: They take what they can get. She estimates that they add about four species to the collection every month.

“There’s really very little forewarning, so we have to stay in this weird kind of triage capacity, taking everything we can, but with room to really stretch and take something else if we have to,” she said. It’s a question of opportunity, more than anything. The Frozen Zoo is especially keen to get samples from endangered species, but even that is a designation that’s often in flux.

“We never know when the most critical thing might die,” Houck explained.

This is a reality she has encountered firsthand. She remembers the moment precisely: It was Thanksgiving weekend in 2004. She received a call from the bird curator asking her to come in straight away. Usually, the ambiance in the Frozen Zoo is collegial, with the women helping each other out and monitoring the samples. But this day was different.

In the necropsy room, it was just Houck, the bird curator and the head pathologist. On the table in front of them was a tiny songbird with mottled white and brown feathers and a shock of black on the head. He weighed about an ounce. It was a po’ouli bird.

For years, scientists had been engaged in a mad dash to save the po’ouli. They scoured the corners of Maui’s Hana rainforest to find the rare Hawaiian finch a mate. But nothing had worked. Lying on the necropsy table in front of Houck was the last known po’ouli on Earth.

She couldn’t save the species from extinction, but she could save the cells from a second, more final death — and allow scientists to continue learning from them.

At the time, however, the zoo’s collection was mostly mammals. Houck knew how to collect an effective sample from mammal skin, but her team had struggled to do the same with birds unless they had a growing feather. She checked the po’ouli — there were none. So she made an educated guess. Her predecessor had once grown cells from a whale’s cornea. But this po’ouli had only one eye, and it was the size of a blueberry. Houck tried anyway. She wasn’t confident at all.

“We talked about it, about what it meant to lose the last bird, and the importance of trying to grow the cells,” she recalled. Exchanging glances, Houck, the pathologist and the bird curator reckoned with what this moment represented. “We don’t have cells of the dodo or the passenger pigeon or the Tasmanian tiger because these methods weren’t known then,” Houck said.

Within a few weeks, it became clear: The eye sample had worked. Houck was eventually able to grow the cells into a large enough sample to be stored. The po’ouli became the first extinct animal to have its living cells archived in the Frozen Zoo.

“Part of what we’re doing is avoiding that tragedy,” Houck said. “We want to bank cells now, while the animals are more in abundance, because we don’t know which one will be the next one to decline rapidly, right?”

In 2020, scientists were able to use a cell line from the Frozen Zoo to create an embryo for a black-footed ferret clone. The cells came from Willa, a ferret that died in the 1980s. This endangered species, which is native to the Pacific Northwest, has seen its population shrink to the point that all living black-footed ferrets are descended from just seven individuals. This poses a real problem when it comes to genetic diversity. But the cloned ferret introduced an entirely new gene pool — a major win for species restoration.

This kind of patience and persistence in the face of the unknown is key to what all of these ark-builders are doing. When Houck’s predecessor painstakingly preserved Willa’s DNA in the 1980s, she couldn’t know what it would be used for. The first successful clone of any species was about a decade away from being born. 

Kurt Benirschke, the founder of the Frozen Zoo, liked to quote the American historian Daniel Boorstin whenever people asked him what the zoo’s purpose was. The quote, which now hangs on a poster in the zoo, reads: “You must collect things for reasons you don’t yet understand.”

Those who preserve things can never quite know how they’ll be used. For more than 30 years, the tiny pellet of Willa’s cells sat in a vial no larger than a ChapStick tube. And then one day, they were plucked from the collection, thawed and put to use. Just last year, Willa’s genetic daughter, Antonia, gave birth to two healthy kits.

Saving Cultural Knowledge

Trying to safeguard the things we hold dear for future generations is a profoundly human impulse. Like Houck’s predecessors, humans have always stored cultural knowledge for posterity. 

This work has often accelerated in the face of a threat: a species on the brink of extinction, an archaeological site in the path of a hurricane. Think of the Irish monks more than 1,000 years ago who smuggled a collection of manuscripts to the European continent to protect them from Viking invaders. Or the real-life “Monuments Men” who hid art collections from Nazi looting.

There’s a certain tendency to believe that the things we cherish as humans have been equally cherished by our ancestors: art, poetry, literature, music, mathematical proofs and sacred texts. But what is preserved often bears the idiosyncratic thumbprint of whoever decided to store it away in the first place. 

Take the seventh century Library of Ashurbanipal, named for the Assyrian king of the same name. Located in Nineveh (what is now present-day Mosul, Iraq), the library contained a collection of some 30,000 clay tablets recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh and other literary works as well as scientific and legal texts. 

Ashurbanipal wasn’t a level-headed scholar calmly collecting texts, however. By most accounts he was power-hungry and paranoid, known for putting a chain through the mouth of a vanquished king and keeping him in a dog kennel. His library is full of sentimental items and many supposed magic spells aimed at maintaining his power.

A fire consumed Nineveh in the seventh century, reducing much of the city to ash. The fire had the opposite effect on the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library, however. Much like a kiln, the fire baked the tablets, making them harder and more durable. It is perhaps thanks to this fire that the collection remains one of the best preserved of Mesopotamia, according to historians.

These ancient examples carry with them hope but also many warnings of all the ways precious collections can be destroyed: by fire, by flood — even through sheer and improbable accident. Consider the 13th century monk who erased a text by the Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes — just because he’d run out of parchment.

What lasts throughout the centuries is a mixture of evolving values, resistance to natural disasters and chance — or fate, perhaps. Even when we decide that something’s worth saving, there’s the challenge of how to keep it safe for 10 — or 100 — generations to come.

This is precisely what the Long Now Foundation, another group of ark-builders, is trying to achieve. Long Now created The Rosetta Disk: a nickel disk covered in microscopic text that looks like glitter. Each of the 250 Rosetta Disks in existence — ranging from the size of a dime to about 3.5 inches — was engraved with texts from more than 1,500 languages: Swadesh lists (words like “mother,” “water” or “sneeze” that exist in every language), maps showing where those languages are spoken and translations of texts such as Genesis I and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The theory is, if you spoke one variant of the 1,500 languages that are on the disk, that you can go to the biggest library in the world and unlock all the information in that library, given enough time and study,” said Andrew Warner, special projects director at Long Now. “It’s kind of the ultimate decoder ring.”

The Rosetta Stone, a slab of granodiorite stela from ancient Egypt, served as the inspiration for this linguistic project. The text engraved onto the stone was banal, describing an edict. What was important, however, was that the text existed in multiple languages, including hieroglyphs — which no one understood at the time — and Ancient Greek, which scholars still read just after the Rosetta Stone was discovered in the 18th century. This allowed Egyptologists to crack the code of hieroglyphs and begin to learn this ancient language of symbols that had been completely incomprehensible for hundreds of years. 

Like other ark-building projects, the Rosetta Disk was born out of loss. Linguists predict that by the end of this century, somewhere between 50% and 90% of all human languages will disappear. The reasons for this are multiple and include globalization and the increasing dominance of languages such as English and Mandarin. 

These lost languages hold more than cultural traditions. Crucial, environmental knowledge is often passed down through oral traditions. Just think of the hundreds of tribes native to North America who lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, developing sustainable land practices such as controlled burns and the cultivation of native plants. As ecosystems degrade, the native folks living within them often move away, leaving fewer speakers of their language. In turn, the climate knowledge held in those languages deteriorates, too. 

“We’re living in this mass linguistic extinction, for which there’s also this corresponding cultural and ecological extinction that goes along with it,” Warner said.

Protecting languages is therefore not just about protecting dialects — it’s about preserving those cultures’ ecological knowledge, their literature and their wisdom. This can’t be reliably achieved by simply encrypting thousands of languages onto a database and leaving it in a bunker. The Long Now Foundation brainstormed for years about the best way to preserve knowledge for generations — and ideally, for many centuries.

One of the main issues was the speed at which technology becomes obsolete in the digital age. Consider all the documents, songs and movies that we stored on floppy disks, cassette tapes or even CD-ROMS that are now effectively lost. The evolution and subsequent obsolescence of those technologies took place in the span of about 40 years — not 400. 

This is why the Long Now Foundation decided to nano-etch their work onto nickel disks. Anyone who discovers a Rosetta Disk in the future will never need technology more complex than a magnifying glass to read it.
Long Now then sent these tiny disks to libraries around the world — and to more far-flung places, too. A Rosetta Disk exists on the moon. Another is orbiting the sun on the back of a comet, waiting for someone to come along to read it.

Letters To A Distant Future

In thinking about how to store something far into the future, the Long Now Foundation turned to an unlikely source: nuclear waste management. Nuclear waste lasts for an almost inconceivably long period of time. The half-life of uranium isotope U-235, for instance, is more than 700 million years. Preserving something for thousands of years — or, as in nuclear waste management, protecting people from it — requires a similar capacity for imagination.

Methods that seem like obvious ways of marking something to protect it — “please keep this safe” or, in the case of nuclear waste, “stay away if you want to remain safe” — are often not obvious at all. Some ancient Egyptians marked their graves with dire warnings that said, “Don’t go here. Curse unto thee for all your generations,” Warner said. And what did explorers do a few centuries later? Just barge right on in.

“We just don’t have ways of really transmitting information across thousands of years without some kind of shared culture,” Warner said. This challenge seems to have only accelerated in the present-day. The hustle of modern life is vastly out of step with the slowness required to think deeply about both the distant future in general and climate change in particular. 

I spoke to Vincent Ialenti, an anthropologist and author of the book “Deep Time Reckoning,” about this problem. “When time accelerates, moments blur together; we lose track of how they fit into broader arcs of history,” he said. “And then modalities like wonder and curiosity, introspection start to erode because they’re slower modes of cognition, and we forget how to reflect and be still.”

Ialenti argues that all people — not just scientists or scholars — need to get better at thinking through deep time. He spent years observing Finnish nuclear authorities as they envisioned Earth 10,000 years in the future, and he has also implemented nuclear waste programs for the U.S. Department of Energy. 

If knowledge is to be successfully passed on to future generations — and if Earth is to survive at all — this kind of thinking about time is necessary. 

The most successful protection of cultural heritage tends to occur when it’s held up as a “vocation” or “sacred knowledge,” according to Ialenti. He gave the example of the so-called “keeper of the fabric,” the person whose job it is to maintain cultural knowledge of a specific cathedral. It’s a position that’s been passed from person to person for centuries in British cathedrals, and it’s a mix of maintenance, protection and oral history. 

“Why would it ever go away if ritualistically you have to do this?” Ialenti said. “So myth, legend and ritual is the way to communicate things.”

But what does it mean to create and maintain rituals in a secular world? Does the repetitive, iterative world of scientific inquiry form a ritual?

Larose, the glacier microbiologist, said we can look to the past for clues about the future. She suspects future scientists may use her ice cores in much the same way she and her interdisciplinary colleagues do now: studying everything from pollen to pollution, just with better machines. Or they could do something else entirely — something she can’t even imagine. 

“What they’ll actually measure in [the ice], hard to say,” she said with a small shrug. “Who knows?”

Nearly all the ark-builders had a similar answer when asked why they do this work. It was always inevitably vague, requiring a real leap of faith.

There’s something profoundly trusting in this shared unknown. These new Noahs do what they do because they think that someone should. And they know full well that nothing may come of their efforts. Climate change could very well cause the naturally sub-freezing storage in Antarctica to warm. The samples — so painstakingly drilled and preciously stored — could eventually melt into puddles.

The glacier sample extracted from Holtedahlfonna will eventually board an ice-breaker boat in Italy, crossing many thousands of miles to Antarctica. (The timing remains unclear, given the expense and complexity of such voyages.) A tractor sled will then drag it across the tundra. Another scientist from Ice Memory, a “keeper of the fabric,” if you will, will place the ice core deep into a snow cave. 

The Ice Memory Foundation calls this man-made cave its “sanctuary,” a word that struck my ear in a certain way. It’s not a “bunker” or a “strongbox” or any of the other words we use to describe some precious thing that we are safeguarding from an imminent threat. Rather, sanctuary connotes a sacred place, hallowed ground, a peaceful place to quite literally bury the remains of a dying natural world. 

There’s an inherent loss here. But there’s something else, too. A sanctuary is a place of safe haven, not a final resting place. And in this word, in this place, there’s hope baked in: that someone, someday might see a glimmer of what we saw in the ice. Or perhaps, something we didn’t see.

The post The Ark-Builders Saving Fragile Bits Of Our World appeared first on NOEMA.

Outside, the bar was unremarkable. Inside, it teemed with the weirdest collection of people: a socioeconomic grab bag of college kids and yuppies, seniors and empty nesters, bikers and cowboys, liberals and conservatives, locals and visitors. That’s what I loved most about Crossroads — it was an “all kinds” kind of place.

Now defunct, it had all the hallmarks of a great southern dive bar: neon lights glowing green and blue; beer bottles lining the bar shelves, all cheap domestics; a perpetually sticky floor; oscillating fans mounted on the walls to keep the heat at bay. The place was tiny, a single room with a stage lifted two feet off the ground in a corner and the bar across the back wall. It had a handful of two-top tables scattered around, but mostly everything was swept to the edges so there was room for dancing and carrying on. It’s been 10 years since I was last there. 

Beyonca Deleon, the drag queen who ran the karaoke machine, still remembers her first night there. “I looked out at the crowd and was like, ‘Holy shit, someone’s gonna die.’ Because you had bikers, rednecks, twinky little gays walking around, just all types,” recalls Deleon, who now identifies as a trans woman. Soon, though, she realized her fear was misplaced. “It was a come-as-you-are bar,” she says. “Nobody cared.” 

Everyone I talk to who spent time at Crossroads remembers it the same way: a lovefest of humanity singing at the top of their lungs, a place that made you believe this American melting pot experiment could actually work.

Unfortunately, the bar couldn’t weather the pandemic; it shut down in 2021. But there is a lesson in its legacy. Today, at a time when we’re increasingly siloed by class, race, politics and algorithms, places like Crossroads perform a sacred service. They invite us to embrace something essential to our collective well-being: social friction. 

We humans can have a low tolerance for social friction, tension that may arise when people from different backgrounds, worldviews or values interact. It can be awkward, uncomfortable and unnerving. These feelings of intergroup anxiety sometimes stem from things like prejudice and fear of rejection or judgement. Subconsciously or otherwise, we tend to avoid outgroups and instead stick to people and experiences that feel familiar and safe to us. We go the long way around if it means we won’t encounter encumbrances.

And so, for a variety of reasons, we divide ourselves. The majority of white Americans report that their core social networks include only other white people, according to a study in 2020 by the Survey Center on American Life. Similarly, the survey found, most Black Americans’ core social networks are composed of only other Black people. The same pattern is true for Republicans and for Democrats. These kinds of homogenous social networks can result in a doubling down of partisan belief in stereotypes and assumption as fact. 

Social media exploits this human impulse to sort ourselves by slices of our identities. In our online world, we have access to a practically limitless range of people and ideas right at our fingertips. And yet, we are often drawn into filter bubbles and echo chambers that reinforce our existing beliefs, biases and ideals. Now that we can access whatever (and whomever) we want in the palm of our hands — the perfect dinner, the finest products, an ideal lover — it’s easy to avoid anything that doesn’t meet our explicit preferences or that falls outside our comfort zone. 

This optimization comes at a cost. When we can pick and choose whom we engage with, click by click, we become further sorted into weak tribes exploited by grievances that drive us apart. We lose the ability to wade through the muddy waters of forgiveness and repair, accountability and justice. And when we are unable to navigate social friction, we lose our ability to function as a society and a democracy. 

We are also siloed in our offline world, where residential segregation by class has been on the rise for decades. Between 1970 and 2009, the percentage of American families living in either predominantly low-income or affluent areas more than doubled, with families in marginalized communities experiencing disproportionate residential isolation. (In Nashville, where I now live, 99% of median housing is financially out of reach for Black and Hispanic families.)

Increasingly, wealthy communities stay wealthy while poor communities stay poor, a stratification perpetuated by what researchers call the “opportunity gap.” The American promise of upward mobility has largely become a myth for poorer communities, perpetuated by segregation across class lines. 

This lack of cross-class interaction impacts the way we view each other. Limited contact between groups can breed mistrust and contribute to polarization at a time when we are already fiercely divided. Nearly half the U.S. electorate thinks members of the opposing political party are “evil,” recent polling shows, and a growing number of Americans believe political violence to be “necessary” to restore American values.

People often think the work of strengthening democracy means thrusting people in a room together to have meaty, critical conversations. But according to Bridget Marquis, director of Reimagining the Civic Commons, this is a misunderstanding. 

“Civic infrastructure — parks, trails, libraries, community centers, neighborhood main streets and the like — has the unique power to serve as literal common ground in our communities to counter both loneliness and socioeconomic segregation,” she says. 

And it serves to strengthen our civic life. Communities that have more access to socially-shared spaces, such as parks, libraries, museums and community centers, report feeling more connected to their community, have more close friends on which to rely and engage in more civic participation in the form of local meetings, social events and volunteerism. 

Physically bringing people together, however, is not enough. The places where socioeconomic classes mix the most, according to new research, are casual restaurant chains like Olive Garden. But inside these establishments, diners generally interact almost only with those at their own table. What Marquis has found is that within community spaces, shared activities such as singing and dancing supercharge bonding and trust building across diverse socioeconomic groups. 

It’s an idea with roots in intergroup contact theory, which suggests that contact between disparate groups serves to reduce the effects of prejudice between them, as long as appropriate conditions are met. In other words, under the right circumstances, there can be a healing power to social friction.

This was the magic of Crossroads. It had no one identity and belonged to no one group. Bikers decked out in leather would mingle with gays decked out in crop tops and spandex. Cowboys would two-step with college students if someone was singing a country song with a good beat. My pal, Hutch, would bring down the house every night with his rendition of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop.” We lived for the part when he sang the lyric, “Girls, what’s my weakness?” and the whole bar got to shout back: “Men!” 

It truly was the karaoke that made Crossroads so special, contends its former owner, Richard Underwood. “Everybody always asked me if Crossroads was a gay bar,” he says. “I always said it was a karaoke bar. Yes, I’m gay, but it’s a karaoke bar.” Underwood now manages a different bar, Dusty’s, that has become another melting pot of identity centered around karaoke music.

“We still mix the way we do,” he says. “I had a show [recently] with bikers and cowboys, a table of lesbians and a table of people just getting brews and everybody was getting along and having a good time.”

Crossroads was what is known as a “hub space.” Community spaces tend to form around three H’s, Marquis says: havens, hangouts and hubs. Havens are protected spaces of belonging, where identity matters and the exclusivity of that protection is what creates safety for those in the in-group. Hangouts are neutral spaces where people can simply be but may not interact. Hubs are the spaces that encourage cross-pollination of identities and socioeconomic mixing across race, class and ideological lines. 

Healthy communities need a balance of all three types of spaces, Marquis says. But algorithmic sorting and other forms of segregation effectively shove us into boxes, potentially making every space we identify with feel like a haven, devoid of social friction, and every space outside of that experience feel like a threat.

Third spaces — the hub spaces — need to be physically designed for conversational distance (a literal rubbing of elbows) and they need to incorporate intentional programming that creates opportunities for spontaneous, unpredictable communication and connection. The necessary work of bridging societal divides to strengthen democracy, then, may be achieved not just through policy intervention, but perhaps inside your local karaoke bar, bowling alley, library, public transit or church.

When I think of my childhood church, religion is not what comes to mind. What I remember most are the hymns, the atonal drone of dozens of farmers’ voices singing out of tune, the organist missing key notes but getting most of them right, the group chant of the Lord’s Prayer before the adults lined up to receive communion, the shape of the men’s muddy boots poking under their dress slacks as they kneeled at the altar and the pastor tipped wine to their lips from a shared cup. 

We were a small congregation in a one-room wooden church in the middle of Central Texas, a ranching community of scattered houses and open land. The church was built in the 1900s with the arrival of the train tracks, and the same descendants of that original congregation (my family included) still attend today. When I return to that church, I am enveloped by history, generational memory and tradition. 

I picture my childhood church without the hymn song, the rituals of communion, the picnics and barbecues and prayer. Quiet people keeping to their sides of the fence, perhaps suspicious of the neighbors on the other side of the barbed wire. I picture Crossroads without the karaoke and I struggle to feel the same amount of love between the disparate communities. I imagine people grouped and siloed, nervously eyeing the room before deciding they don’t belong, tossing a couple dollars on the table and leaving. Both would be quieter places, sadder, scarier and unsure. An integral piece would be missing.  

Tech boasts a frictionless existence, but friction is part of what makes life worth living. Every time we exchange our fallible, friction-filled world for a smoother, more convenient, more predictable experience, we are chipping away at what makes us human: our souls.  

We forget that we have souls. Which is understandable, considering how much of our lives we spend interacting with technology. Our screens do not have souls. ChatGPT has no soul, no matter how much it says it understands our frustration. We appeal to our phones as if they are friends, mediators, mentors and therapists, scrolling through them for some semblance of good news, something to laugh about, something that makes us feel seen. We pull the feed down to refresh with our thumbs the way we pull the handle on a slot machine. Maybe this time will be the jackpot. Maybe this time I’ll see something that makes me feel whole.

But what is a soul? How is a soul different from a conscience? To me, a soul and a conscience are two completely different entities, the conscience being that nagging inner voice of your duty to others and the soul being that nagging inner voice of the duty to yourself. But the soul does require that you attend to others, because attending to others is how we heal ourselves. 

Attending to others is inconvenient. We can’t schedule catastrophe to coincide with our personal schedules. We can’t put a deadline on grief. We can’t predict with 100% certainty that we will always say just the right thing at just the right time. We have to embrace the friction of uncertainty. We have to operate on faith. 

“There is a horizontal and vertical relationship of our life and faith,” says Pastor Nate, the pastor at my old church. He is a young man just one year older than I am. He came to our church a decade ago, at the end of his 20s. I remember thinking that he would have a hell of a time wrangling these old timers, my father especially — a red-blooded Texas cowboy with a long stubborn streak.

But Pastor Nate had no trouble fitting in, a testament to his ability to make all feel welcome, regardless of their beliefs or identity — not unlike Underwood, the unofficial collector of lost souls at Crossroads and Dusty’s. 

“The vertical relationship is the parts of our life lived toward God; the horizontal is the parts of our life lived toward our neighbor,” Pastor Nate says. “You need the vertical in order to not be disappointed by the horizontal.” 

Whether we want to admit it or not, humans live in a physical, emotional and spiritual realm. We attend readily to the physical and emotional health of our being, but when it comes to the health of our souls? We who do not seek to commune in some way with some greater sense beyond ourselves will find ourselves rambling, isolated and lost. 

I stopped attending church long ago. While I haven’t missed the church itself, I have missed the feeling of church. What I am really desiring is the feeling of an embodied experience of communion. Being in physical space with other humans. I don’t have to know all these humans, identify with them or even agree with them, but I do have to feel welcomed by them. They have to be willing to sing with me. 

These days, I find that feeling at a dive bar called Fran’s. Just like Crossroads once was, Fran’s is a modest, come-as-you-are type of place with free-wheeling karaoke nights. My friends and I arrive early because once the music gets going, it’s impossible to talk. Which is fine, because the point of this bar isn’t to talk, it’s to blow off steam, scream and sing with a motley crew of revelers. 

Fran’s used to reside in the more inner side of East Nashville but got priced out to the outskirts of Dickerson Pike, a part of the city still in flux with half-constructed luxury condos looming over day-rate motels. Inside are two low-lit pool tables, a mish-mash of card tables and metal chairs and a long bar with one woman (not Fran) working the drinks. They serve only bottles and cans and they take only cash, sorry honey. 

I fish $2.50 worth of quarters out of my pocket because $2.50 gets you a PBR and $10 at this bar can still get me good and drunk. The regulars sit in the corner and hassle the woman, who hassles them back. They are a collection of old men, white, Black, all looking like this bar is their home and they’re just happy to have company. 

The karaoke officially opens. Reading the room, I choose “Blue” by LeAnn Rimes. After all, we’re in Nashville and this is still a country bar — but not for long, because the gays have arrived and are clamoring for Britney and Chappell Roan. The pool tables fill up; a few elder millennial dads run up to sing “Teenage Dirtbag” in between shots. My friend Yurina sings her favorite, “Maniac,” as she dramatically whips her hair around in a circle and does the running man to great acclaim. I get back up and sing “Neon Moon,” sticking to my country roots, and the regulars nod and toast me. 

One of them takes the mic and the room goes wild for him. He’s mid-50s, though he looks a decade older because of hard living. He is skinny with bones poking under his tattered T-shirt, dirty jeans held up by a belt. He talk-sings “I Love This Bar” by Toby Keith and doesn’t even have to look at the screen for the words. Eyes closed, euphoric smile, hand on his heart — the epitome of a man singing to his love, and we all feel it, we all cheer for him.

It’s hard to imagine this strange collection of people finding each other outside this bar and feeling the same kind of love that we feel here. But after tonight, if we were to run into each other on the street, there would be smiles, possibly even hugs. Maybe an agreement to see each other again soon at the mic. We are so much better when we are singing together.

Correction: On Nov. 3, 2025, this essay was edited to reflect the correct term for spaces that encourage cross-pollination of identities and socioeconomic mixing. These spaces are known as “hubs,” not “hugs.”

The post The Healing Power Of Social Friction appeared first on NOEMA.

Like Theseus’s ship, living entities are constantly replacing the components that make them up, engaging in self-sustaining and self-organizing behaviors to maintain their continued existence in relation to an environment that seems, at best, indifferent to their ongoing survival. As the Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela put it in the early 1970s, this continuous self-regenerating behavior, or “autopoiesis,” is the crucial distinction between life and nonlife.

For just about as long as scientists have understood autopoietic behavior as a feature of living systems, it’s helped guide questions about life and its enigmatic beginnings. But what if autopoietic behavior is not exclusive to living systems? What if this tendency for self-preservation could be found in physical substrates usually considered to be inert and lifeless? Could we then make better sense of that inexplicable transition from inanimate matter to animate life?

By investigating analogous examples in minimal physical systems of what life does, a new movement of scientists and philosophers are trying to tell a more plausible story regarding the origin of life’s complex behavioral repertoire, and perhaps the origins of life itself. This is the intuition that has guided a new approach to understanding the puzzle of life’s emergence on our rocky world some 3.5 billion years ago — an approach that applies the tools we use to study the mind to the mystery of abiogenesis.

First Life

For as long as the origin of life (OOL) has been a subject of scientific inquiry, it has most often been framed as a chemistry problem.

In general, two approaches have defined the investigation of the deep, complex riddle of life’s origins. The first is concerned with understanding how geochemical conditions on the newly formed Earth could have created early iterations of the universal biomolecules we see in every living organism today. The second, paleogenetics, starts with sequencing DNA from modern and extinct organisms and working backward to reconstruct ancient genomes based on shared genes. So far, paleogeneticists have been able to trace the tree of life back to a last universal common ancestor — LUCA — that lived some 300-400 million years after the Earth formed.

But just as cosmologists cannot peer all the way back to the Big Bang, biologists cannot see beyond LUCA. LUCA, therefore, can only tell us so much about the OOL since it existed many millions of years after life first emerged on Earth. 

As it stands today, researchers in the OOL field tend to disagree about the setting in which life may have gained its initial foothold (among much else). Some think it was surface geothermal ponds, others deep-sea hydrothermal vents. A small minority thinks it’s plausible that life was delivered to Earth via an astronomical source.

The disagreement largely stems from different ideas about what is needed to get life going in the first place. Warm surface ponds are thought to be more hospitable to the synthesis of information molecules like RNA, while the hydrothermal vent scenario is favored by those who see the first living entities as needing a primitive form of energy-giving metabolism.

Michael Wong, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Carnegie Science, and Stuart Bartlett, of Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, have an analogy for this way of thinking about the OOL: the cellphone. “What’s universal about modern cellphones?” Wong asked rhetorically when I talked to him recently. Well, they all have cameras and touchscreens. Should we then assume that the first cellphones possessed cameras and touchscreens?

“Just because you see something that’s universal in life today doesn’t mean that particular molecule was responsible for the origin of life,” Wong said. You could think of the modern cellphone as the eukaryote of communication technology, with touch screens and cameras starting off as free-living species that eventually became incorporated like organelles into a complex information-processing device.

It’s now generally accepted that presumed conditions on the early Earth could have created lipids, sugars, amino acids, nucleobases and possibly even RNA. The surface pond hypothesis is attractive because this environment would have received a steady source of organic products from the atmosphere, undergone wet-dry cycles that can support chemical combination, and would have been exposed to organic compounds delivered by meteorites. 

But whether those conditions actually existed on the early Earth is a topic of intense debate, and even if all the necessary ingredients for life were there, there is no guarantee they could spontaneously assemble into a fully fledged lifeform. Having all the ingredients for a tasty dinner is one thing, but undergoing the processes that combine them into a meal is another. “It’s not just about the material,” Wong said. “It’s about what the material is doing. It’s the processes of life that matter.”

Artificial Life 

Matthew Egbert, a computer scientist at Auckland University in New Zealand, has spent the last 15 years building computational models of autopoietic systems in their most basic form. These “cellular automata” help test ideas like autopoiesis outside of the complicated world of biology, where disentangling all the complex chemical machinery of living cells is nearly impossible. 

Egbert is fascinated by an idea called “viability-based behavior,” which he described as “something special autopoietic systems can do that non-autopoietic systems cannot do.” Unlike, say, a rock or even a complex machine, autopoietic systems actively behave in ways that promote their own survival. This could be as simple as a bacterium moving toward warmer, more hospitable conditions. In this case, the organism modifies its immediate environment to promote its own health. 

This notion echoes a characteristic of living systems called niche construction, whereby organisms actively regulate and modify features of their environment to create conditions that enhance their survivability. Humans build houses, beavers build dams, birds build nests. But even the simple act of movement, of choosing to take one path toward a more favorable location, is a minimal example of viability-based behavior. “It’s not just that the environment is posing a problem that the organism has to solve, but the organism is also affecting the environment, influencing it and selecting it,” Egbert said.

Outside of his computational simulations, Egbert highlights the emerging field of “wet A-Life,” where complex systems scientists study viability-based behavior in basic, chemical systems. Think of oil droplets and waxy, fatty chemical structures floating around on a water surface. Like living systems, these structures maintain a flexible boundary with their environment.

These chemical entities are far less complex in terms of their molecular structure than even basic biomolecules like RNA, and yet the striking thing is that such incredibly simple systems are still capable of surprisingly complex self-preservative behavior. Behavior that seemingly suggests a capacity for learning, memory and decision making. Behavior that we tend to associate with cognition — with life. 

When it comes to typical accounts of the OOL, prebiotic chemicals that were subject to a wide set of contingent environmental factors had to serendipitously find themselves in the same place at the same time. But this is an extremely high bar to reach. Instead, the chemical systems that wet A-life researchers study hint that even before entities we would recognize as life emerged, chemical structures that maintain a boundary with their environment were behaving in ways that we tend to associate with life.

Rather than relying on an astonishing confluence of chemical and environmental factors, it’s possible that life arose out of dissipative chemical systems carrying out self-sustaining behavior, modifying their environment and actively selecting for conditions that were agreeable to them. In this way, the fact that basic “life” eventually emerged may come down to the self-preservative behavior of simple chemicals.

“Could these ideas precede even Darwinian evolution?” Egbert wondered. “Because we have systems that are so simple that they could spontaneously emerge without any genetics … it really changes the way we start to think about the origins of life.”

Persistent Life

For over a century, scientists have been studying the self-propelling behavior of chemical structures called camphor boats. Small camphor pellets, which are made of a waxy chemical substance, are placed on the underside of a boat-like structure and dropped onto a water surface. As the camphor reacts with its environment, the boats spontaneously zip around on the water’s surface in complex patterns.

Initially, chemists like the pioneer of surface science Agnes Pockels were interested in how camphor affected the surface of water to generate Marangoni flows — fluid motion driven by gradients in surface tension. The study of camphor, however, has seen a recent resurgence in complex systems science and active matter research.

Richard Löffler, an OOL researcher at the University of Copenhagen, studies camphor boats precisely because of their self-propelled movement and behavior that mimics what life does. For instance, in some of Löffler’s initial experiments, he found that camphor boats would aggregate into collectives as the chemical dissipation of their waxy surfaces drove them around on a water surface.

In later collaborations with pioneering chemist Martin Hanczyc, Löffler conducted experiments investigating the behavior of motile oil droplets and dye on water surfaces. Similar to camphor, oil droplets maintain a boundary, are capable of movement as they react with their environment and are much simpler than even the most basic biomolecules. Löffler and Hanczyc found that the droplets had the ability to selectively move toward conditions that allow the active surface chemistry of the oil droplet to persist. 

It’s easy to consider the behavior of camphor boats and motile oil droplets as akin to a rock rolling down a hill, except the hill in this case is a chemical gradient as opposed to a gravitational one; the boats and droplets, in other words, just go wherever the laws of physics propel them. But Löffler and Hanczyc see it slightly differently. The droplets, they argue, carry their own “fuel” in the form of chemical potential, which they use to move toward conditions that enable subsequent movement. “As it runs out of fuel,” Löffler told me, “it can ‘detect’ where more fuel is and move to absorb it and basically refuel itself, digest it and dissipate for a longer period of time.” As a rock tumbles down a hill, on the other hand, it can’t selectively stop, slow down or change direction. 

There are thus two ways to describe the behavior of the droplet. In purely physical terms: A reaction takes place at the interface of the droplet and its aqueous environment; chemicals and water move along the interface, which drives a convective flow, with environmental conditions influencing the rate of the reaction and therefore the movement. These factors combine to create a surface tension on one side of the droplet, which causes the flow of materials to propel it toward environments that are more conducive to continued motion. 

Or in proto-cognitive terms, where the droplet’s actions seem intentional: It runs out of fuel, it becomes slower, it becomes “hungry,” it detects a new source of fuel, it moves and absorbs it, it keeps going. This tendency for the system to actively seek conditions or environments that allow it to “survive” and selectively avoid conditions that hasten its demise represents what Löffler calls a minimal form of goal-directed behavior. In order to persist, then, the droplet senses and acts.

For Löffler and his collaborators, this research is at the precipice of two ontologies — deterministic physics and intentional, cognitive agency. The cognitive description of the droplet’s activity is akin to what philosopher Daniel Dennett described as the “intentional stance,” where a system’s behavior becomes complex enough for outsiders to describe it as having its own goals, internal states and agency. In other words: a minimal mind.

The emergent decision-making of the droplet — behavior that supports its continued existence — represents what the initial fork in the road at the OOL might have looked like. Seemingly deterministic chemical action began to achieve lifelike, goal-directed persistence.

Scaling Up 

If we accept that basic nonliving chemical entities are indeed capable of behaviors that faintly echo the cognitive capacities of living systems, how then did they gradually transition into the complex forms we associate with life? Interestingly, complexity is not always an indicator of longevity or successful self-replication for any system: As researchers from the Scripps Research Institute demonstrated in a 1994 experiment, simple synthetic RNA molecules outcompeted longer ones that had a higher chance of breaking, misaligning or mutating. 

And yet, life has inexorably continued to grow more complex. As Bartlett’s own experiments have shown, you don’t need to climb the ladder of molecular complexity very far before chemical agents become capable of simple forms of associative learning, such as conflating the presence of a new chemical with a source of food. Such agents, however, are driven to develop more complex internal models of their environment in the presence of competing chemical agents that use the same source of energy. Survival requires the incorporation of variables into extra layers of complexity and more developed responses, a feedback loop that incentivizes more sophisticated learners competing against one another. The result: complexity ratchets up. 

Recently, biologists and philosophers have been extending components of cognition — learning, memory, decision making — to entities once considered to be more like mindless machines than mind-bearing lifeforms like fungi, bacteria and plants. Even organs and cells show hints of behavior once reserved only for beings labeled “intelligent.” So, how far down the scale of complexity does cognition actually go?

Wet A-life researchers like Löffler have taken this research agenda one step further, probing for the signatures of mind in chemical systems that do not meet our criteria for what it means to be “alive.” And yet, they exhibit a surprising array of behaviors we usually only attribute to things we think of as living. 

As Löffler told me, “I don’t want to rule out something like cognitive aspects of very simple systems, which are clearly nonliving systems, because it might be helpful to wonder if something is there.”

Cognition can usually be evaluated from three different perspectives: What is the physical information-processing circuitry of a system (neuroscience)? How does the system interact with its environment (behaviorism)? And what does it feel like to be that system (phenomenology)? Of course, ascribing cognition to basic chemical entities depends on our definition of cognition itself. If we adopt a more stringent view that requires some sensory apparatus and internal representation, then these systems may only resemble cognition. Still, in scaled-up lifeforms like ourselves, part of how we determine cognition is through an assessment of capability, which suggests that we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that simple behaviors by simple systems are the precursor elements of more sophisticated intelligence.

The OOL doesn’t just signal the beginning of complex self-replicating chemistry — it also represents the origins of agency, mind and consciousness on our planet, which, as far as we know, are the only such examples in the universe. While understanding the chemical and environmental contexts in which living systems may have emerged on Earth is no doubt important, unleashing new methods when it comes to the study of the OOL may help us make better sense of the features of life that remain the most impenetrable — consciousness and the mind. 

If inanimate physical systems, systems that at face value seem dead and dumb, are actually capable of behaviors that require basic cognitive elements, then how does this change the view of the origin of our own conscious capacities and the presence of mind in other entities? 

Consciousness is something that we have struggled to square with the physical and chemical laws of the universe. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have attempted to make sense of how the features of the mind emerge from cold, dead, mindless material. The investigation of the ingredients of mind in the most basic physical substrates thus forces us to reconsider our assumptions about where minds reside. 

It could also help reframe the origins of our own internal worlds — not as a mysterious feature that “emerged” at some sufficient point of chemical and behavioral complexity in our evolutionary history, but as part of a more ancient, gradual process, one that expands the behavioral repertoire of organisms as they navigate an increasingly complex, uncertain world.

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