10.07.2024 - Was the Amazon forest created by humans? AI is already an existential risk to young women everywhere
And what is intelligence, anyway?
Is the Amazon forest a human and more-than-human co-creation?
This tantalising possibility is ventured by David Wengrow - co-author of the astounding Dawn of Everything with the late and much missed David Graeber - in this longish, but entrancing essay:
Beyond kingdoms and empires (Aeon)
There are increasing reasons to think it might have been - radar surveys have found thousands of ancient structures hidden beneath the canopy. It’s now widely accepted the Amazon basin was extensively populated for thousands of years.
But there are other reasons too. The Amazon’s soil is often in two distinct layers: a lower one that is poor, and then a highly fertile layer on top - so-called “terra pretta” - where the earth is mixed with the ashes of burnt vegetatation, which could only have been done by humans. Also, the distribution of tree species in the Amazon is far too irregular to be natural in many areas.
So it increasingly seems that ancient people, of which we know virtually nothing, may have over generations carefully nurtured the Amazon rainforest into existence. All this at a time when neolithic peoples in what we now call Europe, were cutting down roughly a third of their own habitat’s wood.
Wengrow explores the soaring possibilities of our deep history when we leave our enlightenment-rooted – and largely unenlightened – assumptions about empire, power and hierarchy behind.
And here’s another long, excellent essay from the same source:
What is intelligent life? (Aeon)
…..brought to my attention by my friends at:
AI news is getting worse. Again.
Existential risk of AI is not a future threat; it’s a very real and present risk to young people, especially young women - non-consensual abusive and pornographic images of anyone are now terrifyingly easy to create.
This is a profoundly shocking story - but this is happening everywhere:
Spain sentences 15 schoolchildren over AI-generated naked images (The Guardian)
What are the benefits of AI that make these harms an acceptable price for young women to pay? I haven’t heard a remotely satisfactory answer to that question.
Google’s approach is to ignore the problem - how can they get away with this?
Google’s Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse (Wired)
This seems to me plainly criminal behaviour.
And while Google relentlessly hypes AI benefits, its own internal reports on AI take a very different line:
Google Says AI Could Break Reality (404 Media)
And this is the kicker – the AI bubble could burst pretty soon:
AI industry needs to earn $600 billion per year to pay for massive hardware spend — fears of an AI bubble intensify (Tom’s Hardware)
You may have noticed that we just shot through 1.5 degrees….
Actually by quite a long way – between july 2023 and june 2024, by 1.64 degrees.
Global Warming Alert — Earth Has Passed 1.5° Celsius Milestone (Clean Technica)
But no one of any significance said anything, no political leaders, or business leaders, or even those august international climate bodies, like the IPCC.
The media barely covered it.
That’s because it’s all just a little but awkward, like when a well-loved footballer is convicted for domestic abuse.
It happened, but we don’t have to go on about it.
After all, there are thousands of corporate PR campaigns still in progress imploring us all to “keep 1.5 alive” and similar. But if we all acknowledged that 1.5 is not just dead, but deeply, utterly and irreversibly buried – well, just think of all that wasted advertising budget.
When pressed, officials and scientists respond with something about how, actually it can only be officially declared 1.5 degrees when there is an average above 1.5 degrees over 10 years.
So there it is - we should hang on for another 10 years to be sure.
Seriously. Was that in the Paris Agreement’s small print?
It’s from developments like this that we can really understand the sincerity and commitment of governments and businesses to their own climate targets.
It’s not there.
They are just not serious people on this topic.
We should treat them accordingly.
But that’s OK because one man can save the world…...with geo-engineering
With global plans to reduce carbon emissions looking increasingly like a cruel joke, in the coming months we’ll be hearing a lot more about geo-engineering.
An awful lot more.
So we should probably get familiar with it.
There’ll be a lot of well meaning people saying we need to give it a shot. After all, nothing else has worked (cutting global carbon emissions might, of course, but we’re not about to try that), and things are looking, well….desperate.
They have a point.
And then there’ll be the people pushing these schemes. Like this guy: David Keith.
Inside the University of Chicago’s controversial solar geoengineering initiative (Grist)
He is not well meaning, at all.
People in geo-engineering, like those in carbon removal, claim their solutions “cannot replace meaningful reductions to carbon emissions”. But all of them know that’s exactly what their schemes will set out to do, because that’s precisely why their backers invest in them.
These schemes are thereby dishonest from the outset - and they are also astonishingly dangerous. They have every possibility of causing unimagainable harms to billions of people. In the extremely unlikely event that they work in some way (it certainly won’t be as planned), we’ll be locked into pumping substances into the atmosphere for ever.
Incidentally, and certainly not coincidentally, Keith was also behind Carbon Engineering – a carbon removal scheme that could only be made viable by helping the oil industry extract more gas, which is why Occidental Petroleum bought them, as chronicled by the excellent Michael Barnard here:
Carbon Engineering Was Always A Figleaf For Fossil Fuel Industry, Now It’s Owned Outright By Them (Clean Technica)
The Pantanal wetlands is on fire
The Pantanal is one of the most astonishingly biodiverse places I have ever visited - and now much has already been destroyed.
Devastation as world’s biggest wetland burns: ‘those that cannot run don’t stand a chance’ (The Guardian)
I once stepped out into the Pantanal after lunch – and promptly found myself completely lost for something like 4 hours. Everywhere I looked looked exactly the same - all trees, no reference points. I was bare foot; most likely not recommended - there are an awful lot of snakes there. But the ground was soft, so soft – and as a cacophony of bird song enveloped me, I felt earthed to it…
I had no water, which was a concern. It was really hot.
I did wonder if I’d ever make it back. But I was OK with it.
Lost. But also not at all lost.
Eventually, somehow – after hours of presumably walking in circles, I saw my hacienda in the distance.
No one had even noticed.
Which was fine by me.
Now I wonder are those trees still there – do those birds still sing? And if they do, for how long?
And…..there will always be space for fungi in this newsletter:
Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi (Yale e360)
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And let me know what you think about this newsletter - I plan to add some different types of content soon….so would love to hear your thoughts