Anastassia Makarieva: Biotic Regulation in Florence

 

Anastassia Makarieva  (center) receives a gift of appreciation for her talk in Florence, on Dec 11th, 2021, from Nicola and Anna in the form of a jewel made by Nicola, jeweler in Florence.

We had the pleasure of a visit to Florence of Anastassia Makarieva, one of the world's most creative and brilliant scientists in the field of ecosystems. Anastassia, together with Viktor Gorshkov, is the originator of the concepts of "biotic regulation" and "biotic pump" -- both fundamental in our understanding of the functioning of the ecosphere. Together, they mean that the current climate change is only in part the direct consequence of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but in significant part the result of the human perturbation of the ecosystem, and in particular the destruction of the old-growth forests. 

So, Anastassia carries a message: it is vital for the planet to keep forests alive and in their pristine state. And that means just what the word says: forests, not just trees. Those politicians who compete for who plants more trees are just doing greenwashing. They may be harming the planetary ecosystem more than helping it. A tree, alone or as part of a plantation, does not have the same balancing effect and water carrying system that a forest has. A message that's not easy to understand for the current generation of decision-makers, used to the concept that a tree is worth only what profit it can provide once it is cut and sold on the market. Nevertheless, we must try to pass this message. 

For Anastassia's talk in Florence, we experimented with a new format of presentation. To have Anastassia give an "official" talk, I should have gone through I don't even know what mass of paperwork, and then her talk would have been attended only by the few academics who still have some interest in creative research. All that in a super-safe, soulless room. The university, nowadays, has become something like Dracula's castle, with the difference that it is a scary place even in the daytime. 

To say that these official seminars can be disappointing is an understatement. A few years ago I organized a talk by a Russian scientist on the question of the supply of gas from Russia to Europe. You would think it is an interesting subject. Well, the attendees were exactly zero, besides me, the sponsor of the talk, and the Russian scientist herself. And at that time there was no Covid yet to make people afraid even of their shadows.   

So, this time we decided to play it differently: a colleague of mine kindly offered her living room to host Anastassia's seminar and we announced it on the social channels in addition to the regular university channels. We also offered drinks and snacks. We didn't know what to expect and we had no idea of how many people would bother taking a trip to the hills near Florence to listen to a Russian researcher speaking in English about her research. 

It was a remarkable success. Not a big crowd, but we collected about 25 persons, of whom only 3 were professional scientists (I think they were those who would have shown up had we organized the talk in the university). And they all listened with extreme interest to Anastassia's talk, fascinated by the story of how the ecosphere stabilizes climate and how the forest's biotic pump creates wind and rain. When it was the time of telling the story of how Anastassia and Viktor survived for months in the boreal forests in a tent, with bears strolling nearby, the audience was completely captivated. The informal party after the seminar was an occasion to build up friendship among people who share the same views of the world, even though they are not necessarily scientists.  

There is something to learn, here. Science is not a Moloch to worship, nor a dictator to be obeyed. And it is not even a conventicle of hyperspecialists who know so much about so little that they can be said to know everything about nothing. Science is one of the several possible embodiments of the concept of "philosophy," the love of knowledge. It is something that does not belong to anybody, it belongs to everybody. And that was clear at Anastassia's talk. 

h/t Benedetta Treves and all those who helped organize this seminar. To know more about the biotic pump and biotic regulation, see the site https://bioticregulation.ru/

Anastassia Makarieva on the role of forests in Earth's climate

 

If you can, do spend half an hour to watch the talk that Anastassia Makarieva gave at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) on 24.11.2021.

It is not easy stuff if you are not familiar with the field of atmospheric water circulation, but it is worth making the effort. Anastassia and her colleagues are doing nothing less than revolutionizing the way we understand the role of forests in the ecosystem. Rather than being a passive entity for humans to make chairs and cricket bats, forests may actually be what makes life on Earth possible, they are part of the great planetary holobiont that uses forests to regulate itself. 

The Secret of the Long Life of a Good Holobiont

Liliana Lippi, my mother in law, died last week at 101. You see her  in a picture taken for her 101th birthday, last July. with her two daughters and her son (on the left, my wife, Grazia). She also had four grandchildren and two great-granddaughters. What was the secret of her long life? Probably not a single factor, but perhaps the main one was that she managed to attain a certain harmony with the people and the things that surrounded her, as a good holobiont should do. 

I already wrote about Liliana's Longevity in a previous post published for her 100th birthday. Here is a longer and updated version.

Liliana Lippi was born in Florence, Italy, in 1920. She arrived into a completely different world from the one she left. When she came of age, in the 1930s, there were no TVs, no refrigerators, no supermarkets, no fast food, few homes had phones, very few people had cars. And her home had no central heating system: in winter she would sometimes wake up in the morning seeing that the water in the washbasin near her bed had frozen solid at the top. 

Her life as a young woman was typical of that age, when middle-class women, as she was, were supposed to be housewives and no more. She could cook, sew, clean, and perform other household skills. She never learned how to drive a car -- she couldn't even ride a bicycle. As most Florentines at that time, she couldn't swim and she was always a little afraid of the sea. No one remembers having ever seen her in a swimsuit. 

That doesn't mean her life wasn't rich in emotions and satisfactions. She had several suitors and the one who finally could touch her heart was a young Sicilian student who was studying at the Art Institute of Florence, close to where she lived. You may wonder how courting could take place in an age without telephones and social media: Liliana told me that the boy she eventually married would walk up and down along the street where she lived until she noticed him! You can find the same technique to get the attention of girls in Boccaccio's Decameron, written six centuries earlier! Probably, Sumerian boys would do exactly the same thousands of years ago. 

Liliana's sentimental life was adventurous. One reason was that, at the time, it wasn't so usual for a Florentine girl to have a Sicilian fiancé. Southerners were often shunned in Florence, just like Africans are, nowadays. Consider that the family of the boy (Giovanni) was not rich, and you have a recipe for contrasts in the family. Liliana's father, Mario, was never happy about this prospective marriage, but one of the characteristics of Liliana's personality was that she was stubborn about her choices. She wanted that boy and she had him, despite all that happened, including the war starting, Giovanni being drafted and sent to fight in Africa, then coming back to Florence and being wounded at a leg in a gunfight among the factions battling in the civil war. 

Eventually, Giovanni and Liliana did manage to get married in 1946. Then, they both moved to Sicily over a slow steam train that took two days to travel from Firenze to the city of Messina, where Giovanni's parents lived. Liliana remembers Sicily as an exotic place: a sort of wonderland. She and Giovanni were met at the train station by Giovanni's relatives who had arranged their transportation using a traditional, brightly colored Sicilian cart pulled by a donkey. And the Sicilians, in turn, were awed by this Florentine girl whom they considered a princess, of a sort. 

It seems that Liliana had a good time in Sicily, the problem was that there was no job there for Giovanni and that the home where they were living hosted the whole family, Giovanni's parents, and his sisters and brothers. When Liliana got pregnant of her first child, they came back to Florence where they settled in the house that her grandfather had bought for the whole family. Giovanni worked as a woodcarver, a skill he had learned at the Art School, while Liliana was a housewife. She had children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Giovanni died in 2003 at 89, Liliana survived him for almost two decades, dying at 101 in peace at her home, in her bed, surrounded by her children. She had been living in that same home since 1929. 

Despite some problems typical of old age (mainly arthritis), Liliana lived a reasonably healthy life up to her last 2-3 weeks. Remarkably, up to the last moments, she showed no signs of dementia, so common with old people nowadays. Of course, she would forget things and sometimes lose track of the conversation, but 15 days before dying, she was still sewing without needing glasses. Up to the very last day, she recognized her children and she was obviously happy to have them close to her. 

So, what was Liliana's secret for such a long life? Diet, exercise, medicines? Or what?

Let's start with food. Among the things she never ate there was junk food: pizza, hamburgers, Chinese food (she didn't even know what Chinese food was), or soft drinks. She didn't drink alcohol, not even wine. About what she ate, hers was a relatively high-protein diet in the form of eggs, chicken and rabbit meat, and also the boiled meat used to prepare the soup, a habit reported to have scandalized the British travelers who visited Florence at the time of the "Grand Tour. She also loved the fat part of the meat, including the fat coming with prosciutto (ham). She also drank milk every day, in the morning and before going to bed. About carbohydrates, she ate bread, very rarely sweets, and she was also fond of the kind of Italian soup we call "minestra in brodo." Personally, I hate it but maybe should reconsider after seeing how well it worked with her! In terms of vegetables, Finally, she was not especially fond of vegetables, which always appeared cooked at her table-- she seemed to be somewhat suspicious of salads. In short, not a ketogenic diet, but surely not vegetarian.

What else? She didn't smoke, she drank a little coffee, but that was her only recreational drug. She had an active life, but she wouldn't even dream of "exercising" in a gym or running along the street. She did watch TV, a little, when she was free of the various chores at home. But she never was interested in the news or in politics. Not an intellectual, she was nevertheless a voracious reader of all kinds of books, newspapers, and magazines.  

In terms of medicines, she avoided them as much as possible. When she was in her 70s she was found to have very high blood pressure and her doctor had her taking the full spectrum of pressure-lowering drugs: beta-blockers, diuretics, and other stuff that I can't exactly classify. I don't know how effective these drugs were. In any case, she never took statins to reduce her cholesterol level which was supposed to be in the normal range. Or maybe not, I have no idea of when she last checked that, possibly 10 years ago or more. 

During the Covid period, her physician insisted to vaccinate her with the Pfizer thing, last spring. I don't think it had any effect, good or bad, we never had her tested for the coronavirus since she showed no symptoms of it. What I can tell you is that we never isolated her, never had her wear a mask, her relatives newer wore a mask when staying with her, and we never prevented her from seeing her great-granddaughters. She enjoyed their company a lot, nearly up to the last moments of her life.

In the end, I don't want to stretch too much the analogy with holobionts, but there is something in living a good and long life that has to do with attaining that kind of harmonious equilibrium that is the characteristic of holobionts. They are creatures living in symbiosis with each other in a non-hierarchical network. We humans can do that if we are well connected with the other humans surrounding us. Of course, there does not exist a perfect set of interactions but, on the whole, is the way we are built to live: part of the human social holobiont. 

Liliana surely was a good social holobiont. I told you that she was stubborn, but that was when it was about herself. With the others, she was very flexible, never trying to impose anything on anyone, accepting things as they came.  And she had a rich social life: her home was always open to relatives and friends coming for lunch -- she was the hub of a remarkable network of interactions among people. No one seems to remember her going mad at something or someone. Maybe this is the secret of a long life, maybe not. And so it goes. 

Here is Liliana for her 100th birthday. You see with her daughter (Grazia) granddaughter (Donata), and great-granddaughter (Aurora). All of them are daughters of the Goddess Gaia, connected over nearly one century of life, a snapshot of the great chain of beings that keeps turning and turning, and has been doing that for billions of years, and will keep doing that for many more years. 

Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket!

Maybe this image is not so impressive as you would expect the Goddess of Earth, Gaia, to be. Still, it is remarkable that nowadays you can walk into a supermarket and then, suddenly, be exposed to an epiphany of the Goddess herself. 

No doubt, it is her. Gaia, sometimes compassionate and merciful, and sometimes cruel and ruthless. She who rules the ecosystem, she who embodies the ecosystem, she who is the ecosystem. Gaia, the supreme holobiont, the ultimate living being, the apex of the great ecosystemic fractal, the product of billions of years of evolution. 

And there she is, smiling and at ease among the aisles of a suburban supermarket. Perhaps just the place where she should be as the Goddess of abundant life. 

Anastassia Makarieva Speaks About the role of Forests in Protecting Earth's Climate

 

Anastassia Makarieva in a recent talk recommendsed the preservation of the natural forest holobiont:

International climate discourse mentions forests in two contexts: as carbon deposits and as renewable sources of materials and energy.

If implemented in global policies, this narrow view on forests can, contrary to expectations, worsen climate destabilization. Two crucial aspects are undervalued and understudied.

The first is the major role of forests as regulators of the various aspects of the water cycle, including cloud cover (a major source of climate uncertainties) and ocean-to-land and transcontinental transport of atmospheric moisture.

The second is the difference in the environmental functions of primary forests, largely unperturbed by anthropogenic activities, versus exploited tree stands. While the former have evolved to maximize environmental homeostasis, the latter were selected to maximize economic productivity. The two cannot be maximized simultaneously.

Successful strategies of climate change mitigation should prioritize preservation of still extant self-sustainable natural forests for humanity to continue benefiting from their climate stabilization potential.

How Will our Descendants Remember us?

 

You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication.

Anastassia Makarieva 

The Memesphere as a Holobiont (the Mousetrap Experiment)

 

Ilaria Perissi with our mechanical model of a fully connected network. You may have seen this set-up as a way to demonstrate the chain reaction that takes place in nuclear explosions. It is simulated here with 50 mousetraps and 100 wooden balls. When you trigger one mousetrap, it releases two balls that may go trigger two more mousetraps, and the reaction rapidly flares up and then subdues when it runs out of mousetraps.  And here is what happens

This experiment is a lot of fun (apart from the pain when one trap snaps as you are loading it). But it is not just about nuclear reactions: we engaged in this demonstration because we wanted to show that what happens with the mousetraps is much more general than that. What you have here, is a kind of network that's called "fully connected." The traps are nodes of the network, the balls are elements that trigger the connection between nodes. It is a kind of communication based on "enhanced" or "positive" feedback.

Imagine that the traps oil wells. Then, the balls are the energy created by extracting the oil. And you can use that energy to dig and exploit more wells. The result is the Hubbert curve, nothing less! We found this kind of curve for a variety of socioeconomic system, from mineral extraction to fisheries (for the latter, you can see our (mine and Ilaria's) book "The Empty Sea." 

But there is more: imagine that traps are people while the balls are memes. Then what you are seeing is a model of a meme going viral in the Web. It works exactly like that: ideas (also called memes) flare up in the Web when they are stimulated it is the power of propaganda that affects everybody.

It is an intelligence because it can amplify a signal -- that's the way it reacts to an external perturbation. You could see the mousetraps as an elaborate detection system for stray balls. But it can only flare up and then decline. It can't be controlled. That's the problem with our modern propaganda system that exists in the memesphere. It is dominated by memes flaring up out of control.  The main actors in this flaring are those "supernodes" (the Media) that have a huge number of long-range connections. That can do a lot of damage: if the meme that goes out of control is an evil meme and it implies, say, going to war against someone, or exterminating someone. It happened and keeps happening again as long as the memesphere is organized the way it is, as a fully connected network.

Now, let's go to the holobiont part: you could call the mousetrap network a holobiont because holobionts are non-hierarchical networks of entities that communicate with each other. Yes, but this kind of holobiont is not a good holobiont. That is, it exists in nature. Think of a flock of birds foraging in a field. One bird sees something suspicious, it flies up, and in a moment all the birds are flying away.

It is a chain reaction. In a sense, the flock is endowed with a certain degree of intelligence. It can process a signal and act on it. You can see in the figure the measurement of the number of flying birds. It is a logistic function, the integral of the bell-shaped curve that describes the flying balls in the mousetrap experiments

But holobionts in Nature are not normally fully connected. Their connections are short-range, and signals travel more slowly through the network. It is often called "swarm intelligence" and it can be used to optimize systems. Swarm intelligence does transmit a signal, but it doesn't amplify it out of control, as a fully connected network does, at least normally. It is a good control system: bacterial colonies and ant colonies use it. Our brains much more complicated: they have short range connections but also long range ones and probably also collective electromagnetic connections. 

All that means we are stuck with a memesphere that's completely unable to manage complex systems. And yet, that's the way the system works. It depends on these waves of out-of-control signals that sweep the web and then become accepted truths. Those who manage the propaganda system are very good at pushing the system to develop this kind of memetic waves, usually for the benefit of their employers. 

Can the memesphere be re-arranged in a more effective way -- turning it into a good holobiont? Probably yes. Holobionts are evolutionary entities that nobody ever designed. They have been designed by trial and error as a result of the disappearance of the unfit. Holobionts do not strive for the best, they strive for the less bad. It may happen that the same evolutionary pressure will act on the human memesphere. 

The trick should consist in isolating the supernodes (the media) in such a way to reduce their evil influence on the Web. And, lo and behold! Haven't you heard of how many people say that they don't watch TV anymore, they don't connect to CNN, and the like? That's exactly the idea. Do that, and things will be better for everyone.