Nature, science, language, values, feral beliefs...

The confusing notion of "human nature" persists for a number of reasons. It is an effective conversation and thought stopper. The conversational factoid "human nature always finds ways to mess things up" could either introduce or end a discussion. Everyone can shrug "knowingly" and declare: "Well, that's just human nature". That's handy when you want to move a conversation on to some other topic - or divert it from a closer investigation. That's also far, far easier than coming to grips with the fact that much of what gets dismissed as "human nature" is actually learned behaviour.

Human behaviour is shaped by what individuals learn to think of as "true", "false", "fair", "right", "wrong", and so on. Scientific, evidence-based analysis is the best method humanity has developed to distinguish between what is actually true and what is actually false. Unfortunately, many groups gather to embrace stories that deny any scientific evidence that those groups have learned to think is disturbing. Can it really be called human nature to believe in myths, when so many people do not? Children are raised on stories from an early age - so it is even questionable to claim that it is human nature to think with stories. The point is that most of what is attributed to human nature is more accurately described as the product of learning.

The loose colloquial usage of the term "human nature" is similar to the misuse of other terms in everyday language. For example, people might say colloquially: "I believe in evolution". However, that is not actually a "belief" in any sense similar to a faith-based belief, or a belief in magic or the tooth fairy. Like many other words, the single word "belief" gets applied to a number of different concepts that are not really comparable. What the colloquial language obscures is that a person who says they "believe in" evolution knows and accepts the explanatory evidence - from many fields of science - for the evolution of plant and animal species. Many details of this complex interaction of multiple processes have gradually been discovered, revealing an amazing world that no simple story can possibly describe.

Is such (mis)use of language expressing confusion, or causing it? I think it is doing both, and perhaps there is a kind of "linguistic inertia" that can delay understanding as vocabulary usage lags changes in evolving concepts. When we communicate with each other, we often cannot be sure which versions of key words are assumed to be employed by each party. Of course, those who feel threatened by complexity will want to keep their internal vocabulary as restricted as possible. A simplistic belief in "human nature" can make a lot of complex problems seem to disappear.

Last week, without any reference to the history of the philosophical concept of utilitarianism, I mentioned that most of us are "trained utilitarians". By that, I mean that we seem to have learned to evaluate natural processes in terms of how "useful" they seem to us humans. It's anthropocentrism all over again. Trees are seen to be valuable because they can be sold for money that can be exchanged for...eventual happiness. Trees can be fashioned into shelter for humans. Or trees might be valuable for aesthetic reasons - they look pleasing or calming to us, or provide shade on hot days. Forests might be valuable because they can provide medicinal substances, clean water, or game to hunt. And so on...nature valued for important or essential services it can "provide" to us.

Is it "human nature" to define our surroundings in such utilitarian terms? I find the notion of "human nature" to be very confusing. It does seem to be the case that many people tend to exhibit similar behaviour in similar circumstances. Often, enough people behave in concerted ways to establish a kind of social momentum that helps perpetuate practices that other related practices evolve to depend on. But of course, other humans don't share those values and practices, and don't behave in those ways. The idea of "human nature" seems like extreme over-simplification to me.

Much of what gets shrugged off as "human nature" seems to actually be learned behaviour. People learn that it is better to "get ahead", and then they try to learn the best ways to do that given the circumstances they are living in. One obvious way is to exploit the exchange value of "natural resources". Their values are learned as part of the process. Problems arise when their values become incompatible with changing reality.

For those who are concerned about the "well-being of nature", there is a fundamental flaw in relying on utilitarian valuations of natural processes. Clean water produced by healthy ecosystems is clearly essential, but some other greater "utilitarian good" for more people (lumber, hydro power, oil drilling) can easily take precedence. The incremental effects of this social process of value construction narrow future options - both behavioural and conceptual.

From along the ridges at the top of the watershed, above timberline, I can try to imagine a valley filled with glacial ice which then melts and floods the bare slopes with huge amounts of rushing water. Silt, clay, sand, gravel and tumbled-smooth rocks are washed down to settle along the low points. Down at the outflow of the watershed, after thousands of years, a forest grows on top of all the alluvial deposition. When I look at that forest I try to remember that I am looking at a relative moment in a long, slow process - long on a human time scale. Ten thousand years ago humans hadn't yet begun to imagine feller-bunchers, or even "ecosystem services".

The mountain slopes all around the alluvial fan are presently covered in forests of mixed species, which vary by elevation and slope exposure. In the valley bottoms, starting at about 500m, among other species there are maple, birch, cottonwoods, aspen, western hemlock, yew, western red cedar, Douglas fir, Grand fir, western larch, ponderosa, white, and lodgepole pine. At higher elevations there are Englemann spruce, subalpine fir, subalpine larch and whitebark pine. It took quite a while for all those species to reach their present locations.

For one thing, perhaps 6-8 thousand years ago, and long after the glaciers melted, there was an extended period of warming in the Northern Hemisphere called the Mid-Holocene Climactic Optimum. During this time of lower precipitation and higher temperatures, there is evidence that the lower elevations of the region's valleys became grasslands. The tree species mix and extent would have been quite different from that of the present, as would the undergrowth and wildlife. You can't see complex change on these time scales when you just look at a forest.
 
As trained utilitarians, we learn that the complexity of nature is overwhelming rather than reassuring, fascinating. What's it "good for"? It's almost as if we have been asking nature: "but what have you done for us lately"? There are so many trees! We have to do something with them. We simplify, and just call them another "natural resource". Much too slowly, we are learning that utilitarian values have unintended long-term consequences that are amplified by the numbers of people who hold them.

The alluvial fan with all the rounded boulders is now partly covered with the ragged remnants of a "second growth" forest. There are a few isolated older trees, but most of the larger remaining conifers are now only a bit over 100 years old. The old growth forest that preceded these trees was stripped and burned by early miners and homesteaders for various reasons. It must have been very smokey for a while back then, and from looking at old photos, not at all what we would currently call scenic. In a short period of time the slopes had been denuded.

People look at trees and decide whether they are picturesque, and usually do not think about how they came to look the way they do. It is hard now to imagine what the old growth forest on this alluvial fan would have been like. The vast area of the Province of British Columbia has very little old growth forest left uncut, and none in the local region with a similar aspect and elevation. The people who live on this fan appreciate the trees that still surround their homes, as long as they don't appear to create any danger - say, from falling down or burning up.

The old photos from the first few years of the twentieth century, showing vistas of denuded slopes sprinkled with burned, still-standing snags seem potentially seriously misleading. They might seem to imply that forests - and all they include - are miraculously resilient and can easily (if slowly) recover from any amount of devastation. Yes, most of those slopes are now covered in trees - wherever they haven't been removed by more recent wildfires and mechanised timber cutting operations. But back at the beginning of the twentieth century, the region was much more sparsely populated and the forest-devastating technologies available were much less efficient. And of course the climate crisis had not become apparent.

To the extent that humans interacted with nature differently back then, it was apparently due more to their limited technology than to their limited understanding. It still seems difficult to understand the extensive effects of the ways in which our current conceptualisation of nature is mediated by our technologies. And of course, so is our sense of our selves.

As I mentioned last week, when looking down into valleys from surrounding mountain peaks, I have sometimes attempted to visualise the protracted effects created by the shrinking glaciers at the end of the last ice age. One thing that prompted my efforts was actually a jumble of boulders down in a valley bottom. At the outflow of a relatively short, steep watershed there is a broad, convex alluvial fan that a creek flows across before entering a lake. At varying distances on either side of the present creek bed there are apparent former creek channels that are now dry and overgrown with vegetation.

When I first encountered this creek and the empty channels, I was impressed with all the large, rounded boulders strewn across the alluvial fan - some very large and moss covered, some encircled with tree roots and some in the current creek channel. That first encounter was over half a century ago, and those boulders on dry ground are still sitting there - except for a few that have been moved by people. In the last five decades there have been two significant debris-flow flood events in the creek, and those caused some of the smaller boulders in the creek channel to roll downstream, but none of the larger ones.

I eventually started wondering where those boulders had come from and how they could have become so smooth and rounded, and that got me thinking about the glaciers that filled all the valleys in the region during the last glaciation. It seemed to me that an immense amount of water, silt, sand, gravel, rolling rocks and time would be required to produce the millennia-old boulder piles on this alluvial fan. Considering the current benign hydrology in the area, it's hard to imagine how much cascading water must have been involved, eroding glacial moraines, tumbling and polishing large rocks. There's probably far more to the story - including higher former glacial lake levels - but those boulder piles at the bottom of the valley that are currently obscured by forest vegetation sparked my attempts to imagine a much broader picture. It does seem that change on time scales of many millennia require special effort to comprehend.

What sort of perspective can you gain from the top of a relatively "minor" mountain peak (one that no one would bother to brag about climbing)? Why would you want to climb such a "nondescript" mountain? Half Dome doesn't really fit in that category, but as I said last week, when I was sitting at the top of it so many years ago, I knew almost nothing about the complex biogeomorphological processes that shaped it and the rest of the world. So I didn't really know what I was looking at. I still don't know enough about those processes, but what I have learned has completely changed my perspective - and what I am now able to "see" from a "modest" summit.

Some of the higher peaks in the Pacific Northwest of North America have persistent snow fields, or even glaciers, on their north-facing upper reaches. While these have been continuously shrinking as the climate increasingly heats up, they can still provide reminders of the effects of the immensely thick layers of ice that blanketed this part of the Northern Hemisphere during the last ice ages. After all that grinding ice had carved out valleys and future lakes, the vast amounts of meltwater moved silt and gravel and boulders down all the slopes. Millennia of subsequent erosion further shaped the landscape.

North of the fiftieth parallel there are a series of mountain ranges between the Pacific Coast and the Rocky Mountains. When I have managed to scramble to the top of some peak, I have tried (however poorly) to visualise the changes that have occurred since the ice began to diminish ten or twelve thousand years ago. Whether my mental images of newly bare ground, fracturing ice, landslides, torrents of water and emerging lakes is at all accurate I will never know. I imagine that grasses and shrubs gradually covered the bare ground where the ice had been and then helped to form soils. I try to imagine the trees gradually progressing northward from their glacial refugia to the south beyond the maximum extent of the ice. I now know something about the subduction zones and terranes that formed the mountain ranges, and the isostatic rebound of the earth's crust after the weight of the ice sheets was removed, so that adds to the complexity. What I can "see" from the heights is the result of a number of very long processes.

The top of a peak can be a "viewpoint". From there, you can see some of what was not visible from somewhere down below. You could take some photographs to help remember the view, but what it means to you will depend on what you have learned - or might still learn - about the physical and biological processes spread out beyond that viewpoint.

"Overtourism", including in national parks where people can look at nature, has been in the news lately. For example, several accounts of crowding on the climb up Half Dome in Yosemite National Park in California have appeared in the media. During the high season, this crowding happens despite the permit system that reduces the daily number of people who have access to the climb to several hundred. In dry conditions, the coarse granite provides a fairly easy ascent for any reasonably fit person wearing appropriate footwear. There are fixed cables and some wood planks to increase safety on the steepest section. The top of the dome is very broad and relatively flat, providing enough room for lots of people to gather and look around.

I scrambled up Half Dome once by the cable route about 60 years ago, in the decade following the first ascent of its north face. Things were different then: many, many thousands of people have trooped up to the summit since. (Back then, that first north face ascent and the subsequent challenging north face routes were a big deal, in some circles.) On the pleasant, sunny fall day that I was there, only a handful of other people were around. From the top, the view was expansive - and perhaps enhanced by the fact that most of California's human artifacts had disappeared into the distant haze to the west. At least I was able to find some solitude in a secluded spot where I could better appreciate the many qualities of the location. (On the other hand, I didn't know much about geology, or glaciation - and nothing at all about plate tectonics - so most of what I could see was beyond me.)

For some people, one of the attractions of what we call "wilderness" is that they are better able in such surroundings to notice how they are alive - when they are removed from all the distractions of everyday life in their typical daily environment. It's obviously an important element in their development, and can be a source of much pleasure. While the top of Half Dome might appear to be quite solid and remote from human preoccupations, crowds of people scrambling around might detract from anything like a "wilderness experience". Of course, present day crowds don't seem to be looking for that sort of experience, and are more intent on consumptive viewing.

Present day Yosemite, or even the Sierra Nevada (and many other mountain regions), are obviously not the same kind of "wilderness" that Ansel Adams photographed, or that John Muir described...or anything like the place where the Ahwahnechee people once lived. Not only is every place much more crowded, but our concepts (and expectations) of "wilderness" and "Nature" have mostly changed. (This is not a veiled claim that there were ever any "good old days".) Before the internet and smart phones, far fewer people ever became aware of many places it has now become cool to be seen to have seen - but even back then there were already too many "visitors" to allow the continued existence of qualities that made the places special. That's not even accounting for the many costs of transporting all the visitors to all the destinations. Humanity's relationships with nature seem to be increasingly perplexing and degrading. What might it take to readjust current trends for the benefit of the viewers and the viewed?

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.

We have big trees and small ones, short ones and tall ones...what more could we want?  For extremists, we have giant sequoias and tiny dwarf willows (Salix herbacea). We also have a few blue whales and tons of Tardigrades for any animal lovers impressed by size. Everyone is impressed by something. 

Urban street trees can't be really big or really small if they are to be useful. Mature broad leaved street trees make a huge difference to the livability of a city. It doesn't work very well to try to plant them on the spur of the moment when you notice you need some shade - it takes decades worth of foresight to ensure the trees are in position when they are needed. Maintaining the continuous beneficial effects of that leafy cover also takes considerable planning and adjustment to address the ever-changing conflicting goals of urban renovation and expansion. Urbanised areas are constantly changing and, like the rest of the world, are not what they once were. For many city dwellers, street trees can be the closest they normally come to "nature", but changes to buildings and infrastructure take precedence over trees.

Street trees provide an obvious moderation of daytime high temperatures as well as aesthetic values for anyone who takes the time to notice. (If the trees have blossoms in the spring, that can be even more pleasing.) The cooling effect of urban street trees is instructive. Similarly, a natural forest floor can be significantly cooler and moister than adjacent non-treed areas. The aerosols emitted from mature forest canopies can influence the amount of precipitation that is available for a wide area beyond. The biodiversity and general health of many natural ecosystems depends on the effects of extensive mature forests that may actually be far away.

Pursuing trophy trees - tall or tiny - is actually missing the point, or a lot of points. The geographic extent and mix of species matters; size alone is irrelevant. A city with a well-chosen and well-maintained mix of street tree species will benefit greatly from their presence, even as they can only hint at the importance of natural forests in undisturbed nature. (There might be an unintended metaphor lurking in there somewhere, but if you spot one, just ignore it. Metaphors are untrustworthy.)

The photo above shows a bonsai plantation of Ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba). We don't have to worry about "not seeing the forest" for these trees...or do we? Ginkgo species have lived for hundreds of millions of years, and were widespread in what is now North America until a few million years ago, when they disappeared. During the last few centuries, populations of surviving Ginkgos were planted throughout southeast Asia, and seeds and seedlings eventually exported to the rest of the world. The trees can live thousands of years, are extremely resilient, and can grow to more than 40m in height - and apparently can be pruned and kept to less than 40cm, judging by the photo.

I started thinking and writing about the giant sequoias in Victoria, B.C. more than a year ago because their presence in that urban setting seemed to suggest some interesting questions about human relationships with nature. There are also Ginkgo trees in Victoria - planted as street trees and in parks, providing welcome shade and bright yellow fall foliage. They are very interesting trees, and aesthetically pleasing to look at - for those who haven't already decided that they are "bad" because their fruit can sometimes be foul smelling. The trees' resilience apparently allows them to survive the stressful environment provided by extensive surrounding pavement, but they are far from unique in their ability to survive the stresses of bonsai confinement. A large number of tree species that naturally grow to great heights have been displayed as miniature bonsai specimens in many gardens - maybe in one there is even the oldest smallest giant sequoia in the world.

There seems to be an almost endless number of ways for humans to "use" aspects of nature, but far fewer ways to appreciate its complexity. Appreciating the welcome shade of street-planted Ginkgo trees on a hot, sunny day and knowing something about their complex origins might be a mix of both. The bonsai Ginkgos would obviously not be useful for shade, but might precipitate additional contemplation.

"We can't see the forest for the trees" is a well-known metaphor, most often applied to non-forested locations and circumstances. As I have noted, we also have trouble seeing the trees for their size and age - and of course their market value. And if we get past that, we have to consider that most of the non-metaphorical tree is invisible to us. We can't really "see" a tree, let alone a forest, because so much of it is underground or microscopic. Of course, with the aid of all the studies that have been done, we are better able to "visualise" a tree. We can imagine some of the parts we cannot see directly. To a much lesser extent, we might be able to do some of that with forests too. To what extent can we "see" nature?

Okay, perhaps the word "see" is a bit fuzzy in this context: often it implies some degree of understanding whichever object it is focused on. Everyone assumes they know what a tree is when they look at one, even if they only "understand" it a little - or don't even know what species it is. What they may be "seeing" are leaves, branches, trunk, bark, and maybe height and girth. That might be enough for a painting or a photograph - a static image - but it is not actually a tree. I'm not suggesting that you need to know everything possible about trees in order to see them, but that the more you have learned, the more you will be able to "see".

Of course, those who want to see less can easily do so, aided by a surfeit of distractions and social incentives. But I think increased knowledge and understanding of natural processes can lead to a sense of perspective that results in unique pleasures, partly because it counteracts the on-going stresses of human preoccupations. Nature isn't hiding. It's out in the open. We just have to learn how to see it.

Above is a photo of a ground squirrel, just below timberline in the Canadian Rockies, eating an almond someone has thoughtfully provided. It is a long way from the nearest almond tree grove, but the squirrel seems to know how to handle the nut. In fact, since it is along a popular, scenic, hiking route, this squirrel has probably handled plenty of nuts and other high-energy snack food commonly carried by hikers. The fact that this squirrel sat right by the side of the trail completely un-bothered by passing hikers as it munched on the nut, suggests that it was very familiar with humans and their odd handouts. While this might be wilderness in winter, during the height of summer tourist season it becomes something else.

I could say that the setting was natural, if not wilderness, but that the squirrel feeding was unnatural, and just leave it at that. But it seems remarkable that some individuals of various species have developed novel feeding behaviours that depend on the transient activities of human visitors. In addition to the squirrels, some ravens patrol parking lots in search of insects recently squashed on automobile front bumpers. Canada Jays hang out at picnic areas and campgrounds looking for discarded leftovers or handouts. And bears...well bears are actively discouraged from sharing our snacks, but often know where and how to look for them.

The vast majority of each of these types of creatures in the Rocky Mountains still never (or very rarely) encounter humans and their foods, so they pursue their traditional foraging methods in traditional ways. It seems that whenever humans introduce a potential energy source (a food) to a location, there are likely soon to be some other organisms attracted to it. You can fence a garden or orchard to keep deer, and rabbits and raccoons out, but not birds and voles, and certainly not insects. None of those creatures know what a garden is, just as a squirrel could not know where almonds come from - such things are unnatural. And yet it seems quite natural for creatures to adapt to such unnatural, transient feeding opportunities. Or is there another way to think about it?

While other creatures can sometimes seem surprisingly adaptable, there are also serious limitations to those abilities. It is important to remember that impressive small scale accommodation to some changes can easily be overwhelmed by more disruptive, major change.