“Authentic to Who?”
I had done the tourist thing in Washington before, starting in 1996 with my first (or maybe second?) Society for Neuroscience meeting and continuing with the family. I’d been to several of the Smithsonians over the years, ridden a rental bike around the National Mall, done the Spy Museum and the Museum of the American Indian (which has a fantastic cafeteria). I might have been to their Chinatown a time or two.
But I had never spent any time out in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.
Washington DC neighborhoods have one of the highest gentrification rates in America at a staggering 16.8 percent as of 2020. As the land becomes increasingly more valuable, many original Chinatown business owners have been forced out due to the cost of living.
The same thing is happening in the row-house areas within sight of the Capitol Building. On a recent trip I crashed with a friend at Avi8ted House, and took a tour of the old Pierce School building, a relic of DC’s segregated school system built in the 1890s and now serving as a party pad / ashram / museum of the weird for a Bitcoin millionaire (who was not in residence at the time of our tour). The full-size stuffed buffalo was one of my personal highlights. It seemed a great bridging analogy for environments urban and rural, built and unbuilt.
… we accept the version of nature we inherit as normal, and we measure any changes we see in our lifetime against that baseline. We watch forests get logged, species disappear. But when the next generation comes along, it merely accepts that depleted condition as their normal. Our vision is narrow and subjective …
Mike Resnick wrote compellingly about this shifting baselines idea in “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” a novella that has a safari scene where the tourists are geeking out over a honey badger because the larger animals are all long gone.
Of course, the planet has been through much bigger changes.
Dinos & Dragons
I’m still turning over ideas for a submission to this anthology. American science and nature documentaries tend to be a bit fluffier than foreign ones. They repeat themselves more often, for one thing.
Doc 1
Dinosaurs of Antarctica was a nice exception. Apparently filmed in IMAX (though I saw it on Tubii), it had good CGI and a lot of information I had never heard before. That’s not hard in one sense, because I never took a single geology course as an undergrad. For instance, I had no idea that Antarctica, in all its plate tectonic wanderings, has ever been much out of the polar zone, so while it was not always frozen — there were forests much of the time — it has always been dark for months at a time. One of my favorite bits described greenhouse experiments with the gingko tree, a living fossil discovered in China a century ago and then planted all over the world as a street tree. Half a dozen of them apparently survived the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima.
We have a double row of them down one lane in the Green Hill Cemetery. I used to collect their nasty-smelling fruits as dog treats. Chloe likes them.
If dinosaurs were involved with the dispersal of ginkgo seeds, it probably would have been carrion feeding scavengers, with teeth adapted to tearing and swallowing flesh, rather than herbivores with grinding dentition that would have crushed the thin-shelled seeds. At any rate, any connection between dinosaurs and ginkgo seed dispersal is, at best, conjecture based on circumstantial evidence.
This BBC piece summarizes work by David Beerling’s group at the University of Sheffield in England, in more detail than the documentary did:
"What we did was grow seedlings of these trees in blacked-out greenhouses where we could simulate Antarctic light conditions", he told the BBC.
"We also raised temperature and CO2 concentration to match ancient growing conditions."
His experiments showed that trees could cope remarkably well with the strange environment. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesise 24 hours per day in the summer.
Beerling’s university profile also links to several of his other paleoclimate papers on the carbon cycle, showing that there are lots of negative feedback mechanisms, especially increased weathering of rock when CO2 is high. There was also some stuff about using those increased mineral levels to boost plant growth and therefore carbon capture. I haven’t had time to dig into it much (and I’m no expert) but I could try, if there’s interest.
Doc 2 (bit of a tangent, but a good one)
This one about the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus was also quite good. It seems that plate tectonics, and the water that lubricates the process, carrying carbon down into the mantle, is the most important of those negative feedback regulators of the climate.
Docs 1.1-1.7 (looping back)
Modern Dinosaurs is a German series about wildlife in New Zealand and Australia. I’ve only seen the first episode about the tuatara and the salt water crocodile, both contemporaries of the dinosaurs who probably survived the darkness after the asteroid by having slow metabolisms that allowed them to go a long time without food.
There was a story I read as a kid, maybe in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology, about an experiment where they surgically “repaired” the hearts of alligators to give them four chambers like mammals instead of three like reptiles. This prevented the mixing of blood fresh from the lungs with blood on the way to the lungs, increasing the amount of oxygen delivered to the body. This of course supercharged the gators, allowing them to grow rapidly into flying monsters that escaped and destroyed human civilization. So as neat an idea as that is, I can’t use that for my own dragon story.
The tuatara is quite cool, however. It has a third eye in the middle of its head. I’m still researching that, but here’s a review of the evolutionary history of the eye, written in a relatively low-jargon style as a public lecture, apparently part of a series.
The existence of eyes is so basic to our profession that we often do not consider how and why vision appeared or evolved on earth at all. Although vision is a principal sensory modality for at least three major phyla and is present in three or four more phyla, there are other sensory mechanisms that could have been and were occasionally selected instead. Some animals rely on other sensory mechanisms such as audition, echolocation, or olfaction that are much more effective in their particular niche than would be vision. We may not believe those sensory mechanisms to be as robust as vision, but the creatures using those skills would argue otherwise. Why does vision exist at all? And why is it so dominant at least in the number of species that rely upon it for their principal sensory mechanism? How did vision begin? What were the important steps in the evolution of eyes? How did eyes differentiate along their various paths, and why?
Have a holly jolly Anthropocene, y’all.
Having just returned from a trip to my ancestral home in KY, shifting baselines apply economically, too.