In the last few days, a large part of Jasper, Alberta, in Jasper National Park, has been destroyed by a wildfire. It's not the first town to burn in a wildfire in western Canada. Outside here, thick smoke from hundreds of wildfires throughout the Pacific Northwest has currently made breathing difficult and formerly scenic vistas invisible. Evacuations due to fire danger are becoming ever more common, and denialism is getting more desperate. People who say the smoke "doesn't really affect" them are forgetting the [epidemiological] reasons cigarette smoking in public has been restricted for years. They are also not recognising that all the increased fire activity is due to global heating, which affects every living thing.

Although rarely reported, in addition to the houses and buildings destroyed in these raging fires, there is also widespread damage to ecosystems. Usually the area burned gets the most attention. Reporting of further details is generally lacking - perhaps because that would seem too complicated. Almost never is there reporting of the significant wildlife losses involved, even in cases where endangered species might be affected. ..

We often hear that "fire is good for forests", or at least some forests. Fire can apparently help some tree species propagate, but any notion of a "good" or "healthy" forest can only come from human judgment, based on human values and objectives. Humans coexist with forests, but understand them poorly. For a species that has such a huge global impact on natural systems, humans seem blythely uninformed about their place in nature. Second only to lightning strikes, humans cause a high proportion of wildfires, so there are some hints there.

Although we haven't yet come to the point where we have embraced "artificial authenticity" (AA)...oh, wait.

Predictably, there continues to be a great deal of confusion about so-called AI ("artificial intelligence"): including about what it really is, and it's potential place in society. On one hand, as a data analysis technology, these programs might prove helpful finding hard to identify patterns in various areas of academic research, but on the other hand they will more commonly be used to mass-produce propaganda, malignant social messaging, and endless lies. In a multitude of contexts they will be "weaponized". If applied to prescriptions for natural systems, they will be capable of doing much damage.

Back in the 1960s, some people working on natural language machine translation projects had come to the conclusion that what they needed were much more powerful computers capable of processing much larger look-up tables. They weren't imagining anything like "artificial intelligence". They weren't even imagining computers anything like the physically small, powerful ones we are familiar with today. But Alan Turing had been dreaming about something like "artificial intelligence" even before that. In the 1950s he came up with some speculation that is now referred to as the "Turing Test". My understanding of this test is that if a computer-generated conversation can fool an uninformed human observer into thinking that they are conversing with another human, then the computer must be "intelligent". By "uninformed", I mean any human who would bother to engage in such a test. People are easily fooled. That "test" seems to be based on an incredibly narrow caricature of any concept of intelligence.

There is and has been widespread disagreement about what the definition of "intelligence is". It seems to be a word in need of a meaning (or, if worse comes to worst, maybe even a few meanings). All the linguistic disagreement has led to the embarrassing point where some people want to accept a simple machine-oriented definition: "intelligence" is just anything that can result in output that looks like what a human might produce. Such people seem to think that "intelligence" is some kind of commodity that doesn't require human perception, development, and maturation over time, and that it can just be conjured out of really fast binary bits flipping in silicon circuits. These same sorts of people think that human brains work like this too - and that human brains don't really need a body with a life and everything that includes. Machines programmed to combine words selected correctly from a massive database of prerecorded text examples do not exhibit any intelligence - they just recombine old text fragments. If people use language that is appropriate for human actions and abilities in attempts to describe output from computer programs, they will inevitably deceive themselves and others.

In Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia, there is a Centennial Square, and in the square there is currently a giant sequoia tree, approximately six decades old, shown in the photo above. It is not quite a street tree - set back from a very busy street by 20 metres or so - but apparently it was planted in fill that was dumped on top of the still-buried asphalt of a former street that was replaced by the square. According to multiple reports in local media, planning has been in the works for five or more years to redesign the Centennial Square, and make it more attractive to crowds of people in various ways. This giant sequoia sapling will have to go.

 
Considering the location and underground obstacles, it seems remarkable that this isolated tree has survived as well as it has, but it is not surprising that it is no longer seen as...fashionable? While this giant sequoia might have seemed an impressive addition to that public space in the 1960s, it is now seen as an aesthetic and functional liability. The latest plans do include the planting of multiple trees of "appropriate scale" in the redesigned square to help mitigate the heat island effect. Media reports about the removal of the giant sequoia also note that the new design for the square will attempt to provide more "whimsy". Actually, it is hard to imagine something more whimsical than planting a giant sequoia that would naturally live for several thousand years in the middle of a city, but maybe that sort of whimsy would take too long to become apparent to passersby.

City trees get cut down all the time, of course, when they "get in the way". Sometimes, as in the context of Centennial Square, it seems reasonable to remove them despite arguable aesthetic judgments. (Many trees are also cut down to widen highways, which is necessary to make room for more lanes to fill up with traffic.) Trees, like many other things, and many other aspects of nature, can outlive their perceived attractiveness as human technologies develop and proliferate, and then lead to new expectations. One tree more or less might not seem very important in this conflicted world, but the case of the awkward giant sequoia in Centennial Square offers some hints regarding humans' relationships with nature.

We've just passed a couple of national holidays in North America - celebrations of rather superficial social self-appreciation that have become ritualistic in their repetitive, tentative self-confidence. It's not much of a time for serious self-reflection. Fireworks are far more attractive - mesmerising, actually - than any glance at why the educational system does a poor job of preparing students to understand and appreciate nature, for one example. This is an (obvious) observation, not a complaint. Any remediation would require far more comprehensive analysis than could be contained in any complaint. Of course, those who think they benefit from poorly informed populations are content with such limited systems - at least until the fireworks set off a major destructive conflagration in hot and windy conditions.

The commodification of nature seems to have had a long and traumatic history. To a large extent what we generally call nature has been subjected to the same sorts of commodification that, for example, housing and labour have undergone more recently. No surprise there, nor should there be any at the result. When a population goes from thinking of the place one lives as their home to thinking of it as just an investment that they will temporarily occupy, there are consequences - some of which are quite negative. When a society views the physical results (water, trees, etc.) of natural processes as just so much depreciating financial opportunity that could temporarily be converted into "profit", some of the consequences are far more pervasively negative. We could just blame it all on "the dollar", but I don't remember any analysis of the unintended effects of commodification in the secondary school curriculum. (Instead, people are told that they should aspire to be "Number One!".)

Throughout human history, entire forests have been cut, thousands of watersheds have been altered, and many species decimated, while the cumulative effects of all the interventions have been consistently underestimated when they weren't unrecognised. This mindset has delivered us into the reality of our devastating climate crisis. It's not possible to respect natural processes that you don't know exist. It's also not possible when you don't understand what you do know exists.

People generally pay little attention to street trees unless it is a hot sunny day and they are walking under them, or the trees are in bloom - or maybe during a big wind storm. Sometimes some people complain that street trees are "untidy", particularly when the leaves are falling in the autumn. There is a person I know of who goes out several times a day for weeks in the fall and sweeps and rakes up every leaf littering the sidewalk and boulevard in front of their house. Trying to keep trees tidy sure takes a lot of time. Some people want to try to keep entire forests tidy. Maybe they did that in the UK, where they don't have forests now.

Street trees can be even more untidy than people realise. The leaves can be left full of holes and ragged by foraging insect larvae. How unsightly, if you happen to look up. Natural processes just don't seem to respect human standards of tidiness - they haven't been trained to value hyper-simplification. The birds and other creatures that forage on the insect larvae are also necessarily oblivious to tidiness. And then, most people are oblivious to the natural processes - involving everything from birds to bacteria - taking place in the trees along their streets. Naturally.

Wherever people go, near or far, they inevitably encounter elements of what is broadly called "nature". Weeds poking up through cracks in pavement might be considered somehow "natural", despite the extremely unnatural setting. Beyond the urbanised areas, the proportion of "naturalness" in the surroundings increases, but often goes largely unnoticed. It's reduced to a kind of a background of amorphous greenery, punctuated occasionally by a "wildlife" sighting. Maybe a squirrel, or a rabbit, or a deer. I don't think it is quite the case that people take all the greenery "for granted", but rather that it doesn't really mean much to them. It's just "there". Most people never get to learn enough about natural processes to recognise and appreciate them.