So, yes, among the books I've been reading this year is Technological Nature - Adaptation and Future of Human Life. I picked it up after I read about the lead author's nature window experiments, where workers in internal offices (with no outside walls, or windows) were given a plasma screen "window" showing them a live feed from outside their building. Their satisfaction was measured against people with a real windows. The study found that they were better than no nature but not as good as actual nature.
So far, so much as expected. But here's really where the interest starts. The people with the technological windows really liked them. The felt like a significant status item. They would invite people in to look at them. And they could be used for work, too, and as anyone who during lockdown has plugged their work laptop into the TV knows - a biiiiiiiig screen makes such a difference with a complex spreadsheet. The fact that they could be switched to a webcam pointing at a nice exterior view was lovely, and interesting, but it felt invasive of the privacy of the people outside, in a way that a window would not be. He didn't get as far as putting up an exterior screen (window simulator?) so people outside could see into the building. That may have equalised the power imbalance, or made the experience even stranger. But - as his evidence showed really quite strongly - people would probably have gotten used to it.
Adaptation is what Kahn is talking about. How people become accustomed to fewer animals, less greenery, smaller numbers of insects, less birdsong, screens of nature scenes instead of windows looking out onto greens, tidy robot pets instead of furminators like this floof:
In the intriguingly entitled chapter, Thoughts about Windows, Kahn talks about how some people felt manipulated by their nature windows. It felt like a rip-off, a trick. They would prefer a real window. Even one looking onto a brick wall.
There's more in the book. My favourite chapter dealt with the Telegarden, an early internet art/gardening project where people could join a community looking after a (partially!) robot-tended garden where they could make decisions, look at their plants, and even manipulate a robotic planting arm. Kahn lead research on the chat logs, where people mostly talked about the usual stuff they do online, and noted that it didn't seem to be helping people connect with nature very much. But then, aren't gardens more about the flight from nature into a kind of aesthetic playground? Here's Ken introducing his innovative use of an industrial robotic arm:
The chapter where my bookmarks start to forest, though, is the one where Kahn talks about "environmental generational amnesia"which is his own adaptation of Jared Diamond's "landscape amnesia", where people forget the background environment that they or their parents lived in, and accept the current state as baseline normal. Because natural environments are seen as generous and abundant, small changes, little depletions, minor exploitations are conceived of as small harms, not important, and therefore continue until collapse. This is the ultimate outcome of human adaptation, where we adapt to a steadily degrading natural environment, celebrating weeds in cracks in the concrete where our great-grandparents swept hands through fields full of butterflies and wildflowers. And maybe we get as much pleasure from that, who knows?
More significantly he notes that "each generation of ... scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes" - depredation and degradation becoming the norm, accepted, as a matter of course. The proposed solutions don't shy from the banal (get children into nature, tell children how it was - something that is getting easier, perhaps, with immersive high quality video) but also extend into the speculative - imagine the future, develop a descriptive nature language.
Imagining the future is a career in itself nowadays, of course. This one's pretty! I wonder how we can get there from here.
The final chapter is a lovely tangled weedbed of loose shoots heading off in different directions. In it we return to the idea of a descriptive nature language, and try to put a taxonomy onto human/nature interaction. There are interrogations of some ecological concepts - how does "leave only footprints, take only memories" interact with the human inclination to take home interesting stones, seed cases, pine cones, bones or even (as once memorably happened with my sister) an entire dead weasel? How does ecological management of an area for a particular outcome (as our local nature park is managed, to promote diversity, encourage butterflies and fat caterpillars to nurture Cuckoos and ultimately Marsh Harriers) support the human need to feel awed and humbled by the wildness of nature in an enveloping natural, unmanaged landscape? Is putting in an accessible path to a secluded, wild space so everyone can enjoy it the beginning of the destruction of that space?
Kahn's proposed nature language reads like loose poetry:
So far, so much as expected. But here's really where the interest starts. The people with the technological windows really liked them. The felt like a significant status item. They would invite people in to look at them. And they could be used for work, too, and as anyone who during lockdown has plugged their work laptop into the TV knows - a biiiiiiiig screen makes such a difference with a complex spreadsheet. The fact that they could be switched to a webcam pointing at a nice exterior view was lovely, and interesting, but it felt invasive of the privacy of the people outside, in a way that a window would not be. He didn't get as far as putting up an exterior screen (window simulator?) so people outside could see into the building. That may have equalised the power imbalance, or made the experience even stranger. But - as his evidence showed really quite strongly - people would probably have gotten used to it.
Adaptation is what Kahn is talking about. How people become accustomed to fewer animals, less greenery, smaller numbers of insects, less birdsong, screens of nature scenes instead of windows looking out onto greens, tidy robot pets instead of furminators like this floof:
In the intriguingly entitled chapter, Thoughts about Windows, Kahn talks about how some people felt manipulated by their nature windows. It felt like a rip-off, a trick. They would prefer a real window. Even one looking onto a brick wall.
There's more in the book. My favourite chapter dealt with the Telegarden, an early internet art/gardening project where people could join a community looking after a (partially!) robot-tended garden where they could make decisions, look at their plants, and even manipulate a robotic planting arm. Kahn lead research on the chat logs, where people mostly talked about the usual stuff they do online, and noted that it didn't seem to be helping people connect with nature very much. But then, aren't gardens more about the flight from nature into a kind of aesthetic playground? Here's Ken introducing his innovative use of an industrial robotic arm:
The chapter where my bookmarks start to forest, though, is the one where Kahn talks about "environmental generational amnesia"which is his own adaptation of Jared Diamond's "landscape amnesia", where people forget the background environment that they or their parents lived in, and accept the current state as baseline normal. Because natural environments are seen as generous and abundant, small changes, little depletions, minor exploitations are conceived of as small harms, not important, and therefore continue until collapse. This is the ultimate outcome of human adaptation, where we adapt to a steadily degrading natural environment, celebrating weeds in cracks in the concrete where our great-grandparents swept hands through fields full of butterflies and wildflowers. And maybe we get as much pleasure from that, who knows?
More significantly he notes that "each generation of ... scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes" - depredation and degradation becoming the norm, accepted, as a matter of course. The proposed solutions don't shy from the banal (get children into nature, tell children how it was - something that is getting easier, perhaps, with immersive high quality video) but also extend into the speculative - imagine the future, develop a descriptive nature language.
Imagining the future is a career in itself nowadays, of course. This one's pretty! I wonder how we can get there from here.
The final chapter is a lovely tangled weedbed of loose shoots heading off in different directions. In it we return to the idea of a descriptive nature language, and try to put a taxonomy onto human/nature interaction. There are interrogations of some ecological concepts - how does "leave only footprints, take only memories" interact with the human inclination to take home interesting stones, seed cases, pine cones, bones or even (as once memorably happened with my sister) an entire dead weasel? How does ecological management of an area for a particular outcome (as our local nature park is managed, to promote diversity, encourage butterflies and fat caterpillars to nurture Cuckoos and ultimately Marsh Harriers) support the human need to feel awed and humbled by the wildness of nature in an enveloping natural, unmanaged landscape? Is putting in an accessible path to a secluded, wild space so everyone can enjoy it the beginning of the destruction of that space?
Kahn's proposed nature language reads like loose poetry:
travelling the winding path, travelling off path, the hunt, waiting, prospect, refuge, investigating, artisitic expression, solitude, approaching carefully, in the flow of nature's dynamics, water on feet and hands, immersed in water, plunging into water, moved by water, playing, dying, gardening, foraging, tracking, combating the destructive forces of nature, using nature to find respite from nature, climbing, running, following the light through a thicket, around a campfire, under the night skyHe has several hundred of these terms, but looking the list already betrays his interests; American, interested by hunter gatherer societies, active - probably prefers trekking holidays. My list would be different, and so would yours; individual nature languages specific to our own environments, interests and upbringings. Perhaps we might both include some things, though I suspect my list will rapidly stray into my own interests; seeing light on running water, picking up an interesting stone, finding a plant that is different to the other plants.
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