Pushcart at the one-third point

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, short stories, poems, collections

The cover logo for each year's Pushcart Prize volume has a different color scheme. This year's is red on low-key gray-blue, as seen here. The volume is 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson, leading "the Pushcart Prize editors."

I have sometimes wondered why the Pushcart emblem was chosen. It evokes a food cart. Were there ever itinerant booksellers that used hand carts? Anyway, the idea gets across.

In the past week or so I have (usually) read 22 of the 70 items. Ten are poems, as poems are currently understood: slightly evocative prose with line breaks at semi-regular intervals. No rhyme, no rhythm (I check, by reading aloud).

I have a marking scheme that I use on a copy of the Table of Contents:

• + , I'm glad I read it (I use as many as three pluses).
• ~ , It's OK. Well enough written, but nothing gripping.
• - , It wasn't worth reading.
• x , After a sentence or two, skipped the rest, for any of a variety of reasons.

So far I have just one story marked "+" and two poems marked "x". I'll comment a bit on that one story, and follow with some general comments.

"Epithalamium" by Bill Roorbach" seems initially to be about a dog, but it is actually about healing a relationship. The word "epithalamium" refers to a poem written for a bride just before her marriage. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out if there is even a bride involved in this story; I didn't find one, but I think I know what the author is getting at anyway.

I would characterize most of the other stories with, "Getting nowhere at no particular speed." In some cases, the author's point seems to be to present a slice of life from a culture that is familiar to the author, but not to an English-speaking readership. I considered the Introduction to the volume: the editors impress upon us the relative freedom of "small presses" compared to the big book or journal publishers. This is true. It also ensures that most of the pieces will appeal to niche audiences. That's OK. Based upon my reactions to so many stories, I am not in most of those niches.

Am I getting curmudgeonly as I approach the end of my Seventies? Somewhat, I suppose. But each Spring I seek out the latest Pushcart Prize volume, for the nuggets I find within. There could be a nugget or two in the next 48 items…

SF (mostly) the way I like it

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories, anthologies

A few days ago I reviewed (here) a volume of science fiction and fantasy short stories. I didn't care for most of them, and rejected even reading nearly half of them, based on the opening sentence or two. And this for one of those "Best of" volumes! Fortunately, I had a volume of more satisfying stories to follow: New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with fourteen stories and only one that I skipped. This image, produced via Dall-E3, doesn't match the theme of any of the stories; I just happen to like it.

A word about where fantasy fits in. Whether it is about space or not, fantasy tales tend to eschew the rules of physics, any physics. In a fantastical story, physics only works when the author wants it to, so the characters are usually subject to gravity, for example, but a select few—or sometimes all of them—can zip about, seemingly gravity-free, as needed. In science fiction, including space fiction and space opera, the primary physical law to be broken, in a myriad of ways, is the speed of light. There is typically some explanation for how this speed limit is broken or sidestepped, so that the world of the story has consistent physics. In fantasy, physics need not be consistent.

Space Opera, in particular, relies on some kind of FTL (faster-than-light) mechanism, because the stage of a typical story spans at least a few dozen light-years. The last story in this volume, "The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir" by Karin Tidbeck, is one of my favorites, and relies on a kind of enormous spacefaring crab that ducks below spacetime—one of many versions of "subspace" or "hyperspace"—and then emerges to land on this or that planet, using some slower means of propulsion. This space crab is analogous to a hermit crab, except that the host "shell" that needs to be replaced from time to time is typically a large apartment building. This is a unique idea, one of the best I've encountered in decades.

The first story, "Zen and the Art of Spaceship Maintenance" by Tobias S. Buckell, is my other main favorite. The protagonist is a robot, really a type of android, a human mind in a powerful mechanism. Such servitude is temporary (but can last centuries), and the android is constrained to human-favoring laws similar to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" (look 'em up). Android as he is (my surmise as to gender), he manages to outwit an evil human. All it takes is a nearby black hole and some fine-tuned astrogation.

I had a bit of fun with the premise of "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime" by Charlie Jane Anders. See, there's this really enormous space creature named Vastness, described as "half the size of a regular solar system". It is apparently telepathic, and holds millions (trillions?) in thrall to satisfy its rather gargantuan needs. I thought, "OK, could it really be half the size of a solar system? Can it avoid becoming a black hole?" A few simple calculations showed, not really:

• The radius of Neptune's orbit, one possible measure of the size of our solar system (and the smallest possible such measure) is about 30 AU, or 4.5 billion km. Got a better choice for a "regular" solar system? Anyway, the term ought to be "stellar system".
• For simplicity, let's go just below half of that, and posit that the radius of Vastness is 2 billion km.
• The volume of Vastness is then 33.5 billion billion billion cubic km, or 3.35E28 km cubed. (The E stands for "ten-to-the")
• In cubic meters, that comes to another factor of a billion, or 3.35E37 cubic m.
• Flesh is just a little denser than water, so we'll use water for a stand-in. A cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kg.
• The mass of Vastness is thus 3.35E40 kg.
• The Sun's mass is just under 2E30 kg. Vastness weighs almost 17 billion times as much as the Sun.
• At this website we find that the Schwarzschild Radius (event horizon radius) of a 17-billion-solar-mass black hole is just over 50 billion km. That's about 25 times the radius of Vastness and about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

QED Vastness is a black hole with a Schwarzschild Radius about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

Furthermore, here, near the end of the page, we see that a black hole of 4.3 billion solar masses would have a density of 1 g/cc, or 1,000 kg/cubic meter. The mean density of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, so heavier black holes are less dense. Vastness is too heavy to be "only" half the size of a "regular" solar system.

Onward! Another interesting idea is found in "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Posit a whole-body Oculus Rift or similar system, that also projects an avatar of your choice around you to at least partly mask your appearance. Will such a system mediate your experience of the world to the point that you cannot function without it? Consider how many of your friends would find themselves utterly inept at everything without their phone. Or how about you? Could you function for a whole day without it?

Space opera is my favorite SF genre, because it removes enough limits on the author's imagination, while still requiring a modicum of realism, that the ideas can range farther and probe deeper than in any other genre.

My Flying People experiment

 kw: generated art, ai experiments, surveys, simulated intelligence, prompts, prompt adherence

Introduction

This is quite long so I include headings.

I remembered a science fiction story that I read decades ago, about a planet of creatures that looked a lot like humans, but had wings and flew about. Pondering a way to illustrate the central idea of the story, after some experimentation, I came up with this prompt:

On a planet with low gravity and dense air, many winged men and winged women are flying into and out of very tall buildings with doorways and landing platforms at every level

I was primarily interested in the great variety of imaging Models offered by Leonardo AI, and I had thousands of credits available. I surveyed nearly all the possibilities in Classic State, which yielded 184 images, all based on a particular Seed; more on that anon. I also used the prompt to produce much smaller suites of images with Dall-E3, DesignStudio, Gemini, and ImageFX. To jump ahead to a useful conclusion, I found that Dall-E3 produced images closest to the meaning of the prompt; in the lingo of the field, it has the greatest Prompt Adherence. Here are two examples, the best of the 24 images I gathered from Dall-E3:

I am showing two images because the first has the best people and the second has better buildings. When prompting an art generating program, it takes persistence and cleverness to get good adherence to a complex prompt. BTW, did you notice the figure with wings on backward?

Models and Styles

Leonardo AI (henceforth Leo) has thirteen Models or Presets and each has a number of Styles, as many as 23. This is a list of the 13, with the number of Styles each includes, and the cost in credits per four images, the usual number. The free program assigns 150 credits daily. It is easy to use them up pretty fast! The basic monthly subscription assigns 8,500 credits per month for $12. These pile up fast unless you are very active. I wish there were an in-between subscription level such as 3,000 credits for $5.

The total number of Styles is 61, and the number of Model+Style combinations is 194. I did not quite use them all. Several Styles are named Monochrome or include B&W in their name and those don't interest me.

Seeds

Leo also has the option of using a fixed Seed. Leo's help text says that this Seed is used to generate the "noise" that the reverse-diffusion process starts with to produce an image. That is not all there is to it, because the Seed value also influences the Transformer (the routine that figures out object identity and placement, which defines the goal toward which the diffusion algorithm operates). Seeds in Leo (also DreamStudio) have six digits.

When I set a fixed Seed, I tend to pick Seed values that are a multiple of 999,999/7 or 999,999/13, all of which have six digits except 999,999/13, which is 76923. After a period of noodling around, I found the region around 428571 (3*999,999/7) most interesting and settled on 428575. All the images shown here were produced using this Seed.

Selection 1: Leonardo Lightning Style Gallery

No matter how I may group the images, it would be tedious for the reader to wade through a discourse on 184 images. Thus I picked certain themes. I chose primarily certain Styles across all the Models, but I will start by showing the gamut of Styles for the Model called Leonardo Lightning (or LLightning), which runs faster than the others and costs the least—two credits per Medium-size image (1280x720), while for most Models the cost is 3 or 4, and it goes up to 12, and even higher where larger images are available in certain Models.

Forthwith, the gamut of LLightning images, screen-captured three across from File Explorer, so the file names can be seen:

The last image above is from the next set, from the Model Phoenix 0.9.

LLightning is unique among Leo's Models; 16 of the 21 Styles shown here produced things with wings, but only 7 are winged people. The third Style, Cinematic, has what appear to be human-sized bats, but they may be humans with bat wings. It is hard to tell which, even on the full size image. Two others show beetle-like flyers, two have birds, and the flyers in the other 4 images are unidentifiable. Finally, the images from None and Unprocessed are apparently identical, which I find logical: both claim to be doing nothing "extra" to the Model. This is also seen for the Model Cinematic Kino, the only other Model that offers both None and Unprocessed.

Compared to the other Models, this mix in LLightning is interesting. Four Models (the two Phoenix versions and the two Flux versions) adhere to the "winged" part of the prompt 100%, although only the two Phoenix versions have winged persons in all images, while the two Flux versions have more birds and fewer people. On the other hand, two Models (Graphic Design and Stock Photography) never produced wings on anything. Most of the Models yielded low percentages of winged persons. Anime is unique in a different way. Half of its Styles produced images with winged humans and two Styles have airborne humans without wings (one hopes they are floating, not falling). Only two Anime Styles had no wings at all.

Selection 2: Model Galleries for nine Styles

Style 1 = None (10 uses)

Now I will focus on particular Styles as developed in different Models. The Styles to be presented are those having larger numbers of Models that use them, in descending order by usage numbers. The first is None, meaning no Style was applied. This (non-)Style is available for the largest number of Models (10), with a modification to be mentioned below. I used a search to isolate each set of images, and a quirk of the search function is that the images are presented in reverse order.

In the next-to-last row of images, the first two appear identical. Upon very close inspection I find a few tiny differences. In the row above that, the second and third image are, so far as I can tell, identical. This shows that behind the scenes Portrait Perfect and Cinematic Kino use the same engine, as do Graphic Design and Illustrative Albedo. So in this case the 10 Models produce 8 unique images (discounting a few nearly invisible differences in one case). These images show what each Model produces when it is not constrained by a Style.

Style 2 = Dynamic (8 uses)

Dynamic is the default Style for the 8 Models that use it.

For the Dynamic Style, the image I like best is for Phoenix 0.9. It is the best match to the image I had in mind after reading the story, so long ago. Comparing all these images with the prior set, I find that for Flux Schnell the Dynamic Style produces the same image as None. Similarly for Flux Dev, Phoenix 1.0 and Phoenix 0.9. For the other Models, these Styles produce significantly different results. Three of the Models—Illustrative Albedo, Cinematic Kino and Lifelike Vision—have what I call "winged structures", although one of them (for Cinematic Kino) looks like an immense beetle.

At this point note that "doors at all levels with landing platforms" is seldom found, and that is primarily in Phoenix 0.9.

Style 3 = Portrait (8 uses)

As we'll see later for the Fashion Style, Portrait often emphasizes a central figure, although in the case of Illustrative Albedo, that figure is a flying structure, looking like a giant crab with 6 wings. The image from Lifelike Vision has a figure with wings that are more like hang glider wings, rather than bird wings. But, wings they are.

Style 4 = Stock Photo (7 uses)

Stock Photo is the only Style used by the Stock Photo Model. Its image is almost identical to the one produced by Cinematic Kino, but not entirely (one must look hard to find the differences). The other 5 Models all yielded winged things with this Style, but only the image for Phoenix 0.9 has winged people.

Style 5 = Ray Traced (7 uses)

Now we can start to see that certain Models, such as the two Phoenix Models and the two Flux Models, have the primary influence. In other cases, the Style seems to be "stronger" than the Model. Other than having a brighter and more colorful appearance, Ray Traced is similar to Stock Photo. For this Style, only the Phoenix Models produced flying people.

Style 6 = Illustration (7 uses plus "Anime Illustration")

It is more clear with these, compared to the prior sets, that the Style is paramount for LLightning, Illustrative Albedo, and Lifelike Vision. Here, Anime Illustration Style in the Anime Model joined the Phoenix Models in producing flying people.

Style 7 = Fashion (7 uses)

Here is a Style that produces winged people, almost 100%! Lifelike Vision's person has a winglike, flowing robe. Perhaps the presence of about 8 wings on the person in the Cinematic Kino image makes up for that… As one might expect from the name, a "fashion model" is front and center.

Style 8 = Creative (uses = 7)

Following trends we've seen above, some of these differ from other Styles for a particular Model, while a couple of them are more similar. Only Flux Dev and the Phoenix Models produced flying people. The flying things in the LLightning image seem to be huge insects though one of them has feathered bird wings. I don't know why a scattering of these images feature hot air balloons.

Style 9 = 3D Render (7 uses, with two added sizes)

As mentioned earlier, most of these images were generated for the Medium 16:9 size, which is 1280x720 for most Models, but is 1184x672 for the Phoenix Models and the Lux Models. I did a side experiment to show the effect of changing image size with Phoenix 0.9. You can see in the file names for "LPhoenix09" the numbers 01a, 01b, and 01c. The image sizes are 1184x672, 1376x768, and 1472x832. When I want to use any Phoenix image for a 16:9 wallpaper, these sizes are a little off. Leonardo can upscale an image so it is larger than 1920x1080 (full HD), but then trimming is needed to get an exact ratio. Changing the size causes changes in the overall image, though the three images are similar.

For this Style, the Phoenix Models produced flying people, but the others differed: LLightning and Flux Dev made flying beetles, Flux Schnell made birds, while Illustrative Albedo and Lifelike Vision produced lots of balloons but nothing with wings.

Wrap-Up

The Leonardo AI Models definitely have minds of their own. Only images produced by Phoenix 0.9 had both elements, flying people and towering buildings with landing pads at upper levels. Few other Models had the buildings as I had asked. Generally, the images are somewhat inspired by the prompt, sometimes rather distantly. It would take a lot more investigation, letting the Seed be randomly produced, to see whether any particular Model+Style is capable of better compliance.

I use art generating software as a "commissioned artist". A few of the Models in Leonardo, the more costly ones, are reasonably compliant. Programs other than Leonardo vary in their Prompt Adherence, and Dall-E3 is probably the best. The rest of Leo's Models, in most of their Styles, are fun to experiment with, but are unlikely to yield results that well match anything but the simplest queries.

I did not test a rather new way of using Leonardo AI, Flow State. It has a different way of doing things. Neither did I turn on "AI Enhancement" for my prompt in those Models that offer it. What we have here is complex enough already.

The folders of images I produced are a useful Gazetteer of possibilities that I can use in the future to select an image generation routine.

A mixed bag of an SF anthology

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, collections, short stories, anthologies

The volume is The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, edited by Hugh Howey. 20 stories. I skipped 8, 4 were at best so-so, leaving 8 that I enjoyed reading. Two of these I gave a ++ in my personal rating scheme, and I'll dwell on them briefly. But I must say, with only this volume to go on, I weep for the state of science fiction and speculative fiction in the US right now. Fortunately, there are other collections, and I'll review another in coming days. Note: this image doesn't pertain to any of the stories. It is a side product of another project, and it has a science-fiction-fantastic feel that I like.

Now, the two stories that had some good ideas:

"The Long Game" by Ann Leckie. Told from the point of view of semi-terrestrial creatures similar to octopuses, on a planet coveted by humans for its resources. These creatures live 2-3 years and die after reproducing, as earthly octopuses do, but they are intelligent, sapient, and a human liaison is caring for their case while fending off mining interests. That latter point is only lightly touched upon, because the crux of the story is the developing awareness of Narr, a natural-born leader among his people. Narr's people are hermaphroditic; all bear eggs and all emit milt. This makes it hard to assign an appropriate pronoun; the author uses "they". Narr is one of the first to develop an awareness of the value of projects that reach beyond one person's lifetime. This reflects the "slow revolution" of human cultural development, which has its most visible expression in the building of complex cities, as distinct from villages with minimal infrastructure. Narr's people build a pond, a significant step in their own cultural development. Narr also takes steps to find out how life can be extended.

"Form 8774-D" by Alex Irvine. In an era of superheroes and those with the whole gamut of "powers" popping up everywhere, an agency has been established to register them, and various "hero leagues" recruit some of them. The story is a few days in the life of a functionary whose only responsibility is to check application forms, which are quite detailed (and in themselves form a significant part of the story). It slowly dawns on her that she just might need her own superhero bodyguard. Saying more would be telling…

Both these stories were great fun, and the other six that I liked were enjoyable, if not quite so ideational.

Spiders via Vietnam go hog-wild

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I entered to add a post and found the highest activity rate to date. This is the past 24 hours (prior to 10:00 am EDT):

In the recent past Hong Kong and Singapore have provided the bulk of activity, but in the pass few weeks they have been overtaken by Vietnam. Almost 33,000 views! I was curious about the ongoing rate, so I checked the "Now" screen:

The scale is views per minute for the past two hours. The "plateau" sits between 0.7 and 1.3 views per second, and just that 80-minute stretch comes to about 5,000 views, more than 90% tagged to Vietnam.

I say "tagged" because I suspect the country has some fast DNS servers and Asian VPN's are using them. So why the activity? I have one surmise: AI training. Perhaps many blogs are being gulped down wholesale for such purposes.

Hey, guys, if you're relying on my writings for AI training, you're in real trouble!! You'll generate Artificial Nerdism. Maybe that's a redundancy.

Wolves making it against all odds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, wildlife, wildlife management, wolves, biologists, naturalists, memoirs

About two decades before wolves were trucked into Yellowstone National Park, a lone female wolf made her way from Canada into the area around Glacier National Park. She was named Kishinena, Later a male wolf joined her, and the pair raised at least three litters of pups. By the time "re-introduction" was officially carried out, the Glacier NP area was host to a few packs of self-introduced wolves.

One woman witnessed it all, and continued to study wolves in and near Montana for forty years. Dr. Diane K. Boyd became the most skilled wolf trapper in America, although she never caught Kishinena. We can be generous and say that she was still learning in those early years.

At first when I was reading Dr. Boyd's memoir A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, my mental image of a wolf trap was the cruel leg-crushing snap trap employed by fur trappers. Eventually I learned that recovery trappers use a cable trap that doesn't break any bones and seldom breaks the skin. A wolf (or mis-caught bear or other animal) that struggles for hours against such a trap can still cut off circulation to the trapped foot to cause permanent injury; this is why a biologist runs the trapline at least twice daily. 

The author tells one story of herself and an assistant, also female, tranquilizing a wolf that had become so exhausted from fighting the trap that it was practically frozen to death, and the foot was solid as a rock. The two women took the sleeping wolf into the truck, laid it across their laps, ran the engine fast and the heater all the way up. Then they took off their shirts and body-warmed the wolf, whose body temperature was about eight degrees below normal by then. Once the animal began to warm, Diane realized it was waking, but for a while it stayed still to enjoy the warmth. She carefully reached to open the door, holding the radio collar they'd put on earlier to keep that mouthful of teeth away from her face, and let the wolf bolt away. Quite a sight they must have made, two half-naked women covered in sweat and black-and-gray fur! Happy to see the wolf on the run. A visit to the area the next day to follow its tracks for a ways confirmed that the wolf didn't just run a quarter mile and drop dead; it was apparently well enough to run long and far. Radio tracking in the following days showed that it covered a lot of territory, and made kills as usual.

During her forty years with the wolves, the author saw their situation come nearly full circle. Wolves were once so universally hated they were destroyed from every square mile of the U.S. "lower 48" except the extreme north of Minnesota and Isle Royale on Lake Superior. By the mid 1990's they were much beloved by many Americans, federal legislation protected them, and they multiplied all across the northern states, from the Great Lakes to Washington state. Over the next decade or so the mood shifted again, and the fear and hatred of wolves was on the rebound. Even today, the pendulum is a bit to the side of "protect livestock" rather than "protect wolves". Nonetheless, the gray wolf has been restored as a major predator in the northern US.

Consider this list: Grizzly Bear, Wolf, Coyote, Fox, Wolverine, Mountain Lion, Bobcat. Five of these seven can easily kill a human. Only wolves are hated in a special way. This came out especially strongly at a public meeting in 2018 in Trout Creek, Montana. For more than two hours a couple hundred wolf-hating folk berated Forest Service members and supporting scientists, including Dr. Boyd. Earlier in the book she calls her treatment among wildlife biologists and forest rangers, as a young, slender blonde woman among "mountain men", a baptism of fire. But this was another thing entirely. When she had opportunity, she spoke reason, but when the crowd is unreasonable—and half are drunk—that's like tossing a snowball into a hot wind.

I don't know what the national mood is today. Where has the pendulum swung in the past seven years? I was once told by a policeman that there's a threshold of 15%: if more than 15% of the population habitually speeds, for example (and the level is more like 75%), speed laws cannot be effectively enforced. I don't know what the present level of wolf-hatred is, but if it's more than about a quarter of us, a lot of wolves are at risk. Poaching has existed all through the past 4-5 decades, but it reached an all-time high within the past decade, and I just don't know if the trend is still upward, or if it is abating.

Duck-Duck-Go's AI Assist tells me this:

As of 2024, the estimated gray wolf population in the contiguous United States is between 14,000 and 18,000, with Alaska having an additional 7,000 to 11,000 wolves. Most of the populations are concentrated in the northern half of the country.

That's a big difference from the near-zero population of the period from 1940-1970. And Dr. Boyd witnessed all of that recovery. She is an admirable naturalist/biologist, and a great storyteller.

Vietnam spiders overtake Singapore's

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After posting a short item I looked at the stats. The past 24 hours saw more than 10,000 views. Very unusual! Here is the breakdown for the past week:

All but a couple of thousand views were in the past day. There must be multiple actors here; this entire blog consists of less than 3,000 pages.

Looking at a one-day view, the views that originated in (or passed through a VPN in) Vietnam ran steady at about 850 per hour for 18 hours, then dropped, just an hour ago. Interesting!

Philosophizing AGI

 kw: simulated intelligence, ai, artificial intelligence, companies, philosophy, artificial ethics

In the recent issue of Wired, in an article about the company Anthropic, where the founders plan to develop AGI (artificial general intelligence), this photo and caption appear. The caption reads, "Amanda Askell / A trained philosopher who helps manage Claude's personality". Claude is the AI agent that the Anthropic folks are trying to develop into an AGI that is benevolent and ethical.

The first thought I had was, "Trained philosopher? Huh! What does an untrained philosopher look like?" My inner philosopher immediately replied, "Like a human being."

My second thought: "Who decides what is ethical?" In a hyper-divided America, struggling to stay afloat sociologically in a chaotic world, we find this spectrum (not at all autistic…):

• Radical (these days, Woke Leftists) - The bleeding-edge elites define ethics, to which you'd better kowtow, or else.
• Liberal - Liberty, the most freedom for the greatest number, favoring plenty of government care and oversight.
• Moderate - "Leave us alone."
• Conservative - Don't change what works; keep government out of most affairs.
• Reactionary - Whatever I say is good, is good. Contradict me at your own peril.

This doesn't even touch on religions, which have their own ethical standards, based on whatever god or scripture they believe. BUT! One thing is for darn sure: I don't want any trace of "what is ethical" to be decided within government.

A fresh take on the biosphere

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, life, biology, earth science, philosophy

For many people with a naturalist inclination, this fellow has a dream job. Others might rather be using snorkel or SCUBA in the sea, or perhaps winkling out the scarcer life to be found in deserts (my favorite).

If my memory serves me right, Dr. Peter Godfrey-Smith has taken on the role of naturalist in all three realms, and more. In his new book Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, the third of a series, his vivid writing brings his experiences and musings home to us.

This book is a survey of life on Earth, its history, ecology, and possible futures. How he squeezed so much into a 300-page book is a marvel to me (26 of the pages are end notes, well worth the reading. And he touts a second set of end notes available online).

Contrary to my usual practice, I didn't take notes, nor bookmark any pages. I just read, and read, and enjoyed. There are just nine long-ish chapters. The first is introductory, followed by the obligatory historical survey, which culminates in the debate that's been going on for a couple of generations: How far do we push the Gaia idea? Is it a metaphor, a reality, or a phantom? It introduces a theme of the book as a whole, that biology and geology interact, and they interact a whole lot more than scientists of all stripes usually imagine.

The strong point is made that humans are part of nature, so it's better to speak of our fellow-beings not just as "animals" but as "other animals", because we are animals also. The middle section of the book, "Who We Are", Chapters 5 and 6, reveal how dominant humans have become. The majority of larger animals living today are the cattle, swine, and fowls that we have domesticated, plus our pets. We may not yet have brought a majority of the fishes into "fish farms", but we are well on the way.

In a strong analysis of farming practices, the author points out that the lives of the great majority of domestic animals is, quite simply, a living hell. The only mercy is that such lives are kept short. Though he writes a lot of "humane farming", he isn't sure it is possible on a large scale. I think of Malabar Farm and similar experiments, and I wonder how widespread they could become, and would we be willing to pay substantially more for food produced that way?

Can we re-wild any substantial part of Earth. Should we? Could we do so without taking over the management of all the lives in the new wilds? (For my part, I think of the experiment carried out at Biosphere 2. Keeping the place livable was such a struggle that much of the original agenda had to be scrapped. The problem was concrete; it both absorbs and emits carbon dioxide and oxygen in a somewhat faster-than-geological manner. Nearly every surface that wasn't glass was concrete, or dirt lying on concrete. The land area of Biosphere 1, the Earth, to date is covered by less than 3% concrete. Also the Earth's surface is 3/4 ocean, but B2 had hardly any. A poor semblance of an experiment!)

We are faced with the dilemma that it looks rather hard to be human and ethical. Yet no other animals muse about ethics. Some carry on a tit-for-tat "fairness" stance; only humans have elaborated morality to a high level.

All of us who have children have produced hostages to the future. What kind of taskmaster will that future be? Dr. Godfrey-Smith remains guardedly hopeful.