As a young boy in 1960s Newcastle, it was always a drama in my house when Proctor & Gamble’s advertising whiz kids came to dinner.

My father, as P&G’s Chief Engineer, basically designed factories – but he was also curious about the consumer advertising that these clever ad men (they were all men) were pioneering. (This was not so long after the first ever television commercial was aired, in 1941)

I remember a furious exchange about a tv commercial for Fairy Liquid and its immortal line, “Mummy! Mummy! Why Are Your Hands So Soft” . The ad men at our dinner table pronounced it to be genius. My feminist mother, outraged, said it was completely amoral.

I was reminded of that moment when reading Biju Dominic’s MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion.

A startling and thought-provoking new book, it challenges a widely held assumption about human behaviour: that we think before we act. The book describes, in contrast, how most decisions are made non-consciously through fast emotion-driven processes that operate beneath awareness. Biju Dominic’s radical approach is to use MicroStimuli, measured in milliseconds, to change our behaviour.

Awareness-action gap.

The promise of MicroStimuli, which grabbed my attention, was of “powerful solutions to the world’s most persistent challenges”.

One challenge in particular has preoccupied me for all my adult life: the dire condition of life on earth. Might MicroStimuli be the solution we need to help us fix the planet’s social and ecological systems?

Along with millions of fellow environmental campaigners, I had long assumed that that providing stronger arguments, and harder evidence, would change how people acted.

That approach failed. Yes, we raised the world’s awareness. But – in the absence of telling people what to do with this terrifying information – we also created widespread fear and anxiety along the way.

Biju Dominic calls this the awareness-action gap – and he has developed MicroStimuli as a way to close it.

Drawing on insights from neuroscience, artificial intelligence, consumer research, and design, MicroStimuli are nonconscious persuasive stimuli—tiny precision triggers – deployed in the final moment, often milliseconds, before an action. They activate the brain’s fastest pathways to influence behaviour.

Because MicroStimuli speak directly to the non-conscious processing system, Biju reckons that they “bypass the logical aspects entirely”.

The context for the book is the global smartphone environment. With smartphones now constantly in our hand, and always connected, the old advertising model of reaching people during predictable moments, like while they watch television in the evening, is now obsolete

We look at our phones 4,500 times a day, usually for just a few moments each time. Ninety nine per cent of smartphone interactions last just a few fleeting moments. But the number of such moments is vast.

In today’s always-on, always-with-you smartphone-filled world, MicroStimuli can “prompt desired behaviours throughout the day”

MicroStimuli for public good

The book contains many admirable examples of MicroStimuli used successfully for public good.

The best-known of these, the Railway Trespassing project, aimed to prevent sixteen deaths per day among pedestrians crossing railway tracks illegally in Mumbai.

Years of effort to halt the carnage had been ineffective. Pedestrian bridges had been added. Warning signs proliferated at accident black spots. But the deaths continued.

Then, after weeks of patient observation, Biju’s team made a life-saving discovery. The human brain finds it hard to judge the incoming speed of a large object, such as a train, correctly.

Based on that insight, simple and inexpensive solutions then proved effective. When a few sleepers were painted yellow at regular intervals, the speed of approaching train could be judged more correctly from a distance. Changing locomotive horn patterns – fast/repetitive or staccato sequences – further increased the alertness of trespassers. Many lives were saved.

MicroStimuli that stop you stepping in front of a train is a public good, of course. The book contains other examples behaviours being changed in a positive way: non-adherence to medication; the health benefits of walking a little more; he need to drink enough water; getting proper sleep; driving more safely.

Biju Dominic is justifiably proud. “Leveraging non-conscious brain processes to shape behavior is the responsible application of modern neuroscience to improve lives around us”.

MicroStimuli for consumption

But a second class of “behavioural problems” addressed by MicroStimuli is less obviously, for me, a problem we need to solve. This is the failure of hundreds of millions of people to click ‘Buy” when shopping online.

Although global brands spend two trillion dollars a year on marketing, millions of consumers, when shopping online, do not make it past the awareness stage and actually click “Buy.” Even when we are aware of a product, and its benefits, a phenomenon called Cart Abandonment runs at a steady 70 per cent.

In 2025, around 18 billion online shopping carts were cruelly abandoned. With twenty to forty per cent of all retail sales now online, this means that transactions worth an astounding seven trillion dollars were begun, but never completed.

These numbers are impressive, but I’m troubled by a question: does it matter?

If Cart Abandonment means you do not buy something online that you may really not have needed – and whose production, sale and use impacts the planet negatively – in what sense is it a ‘problem’?

For the Argentine writer Jorge Alemán Lavigne, rampant overconsumption drives many of our biggest social and ecological problems. “Consumer society has turned us into atomised individuals whose task is not to support each other, but to consume” he writes. “Decades of deregulation and privatisation have cultivated insecurity, individualism and status anxiety – and on a a mass scale”.

Libidinal operators

Around the world, malign political actors are tapping into fears and anxieties fostered by life in consumer society. Lavigne describes these populist leaders as libidinal operators.

With a focus on those who feel powerless, libidinal operators channel the desire for exclusion of the Other. They then offer diverse ways to be nasty, vindictive and cruel towards those the most vulnerable.

To the millions among us who are socially isolated, they offer a sense of belonging, meaning, and self-esteem.

To those who feel fearful, they promise order and security – often by the use of force.

These negative social consequences – fear, insecurity, and isolation – are well known to global brands. After all, they study our states of mind obsessively – in order to sell us things. But despite these dire social consequences, they show no signs deviating from their market-fixated ways. They will continue to create new needs, and increase consumption, to the maximum extent possible.

And the explict promise of MicroStimuli? Help them do so with greater precision, and more effectively, than ever before.

A striking example in the book comes when Biju pitches for work at a major chocolate brand. He describes the three slides he presented to the high-level meeting. “On Slide One, we proposed approaching the problem from a neuroscience perspective. On Slide Two, we explained that chocolate, at its core, is glucose. And when glucose levels drop, our bodies instinctively seek replenishment. On Slide Three, we showed how identifying the moments when gluose dips – the real moments of glucose craving- could unlock the exact digital moments most suited for chocolate persuasion”.

Is an insufficiency of chocolate consumption one of the world’s most persistent behavioural challenges? I’m not convinced.

Does this make MicroStimuli unethical?

The author highlights that quandary when he asks, on the book’s first line: ’Is it ethical to influence someone’s behaviour without their conscious awareness?”

This question is not new. The world of marketing has long had the unconscious in its sights. Seventy years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders dramatically raised public awareness of advertising, consumerism, and media manipulation. A worldwide media studies industry, born at that moment, now produces thousands of papers every year.

But growing public awareness did nothing to slow the industry down. On the contrary: according to Grok, when Hidden Persuaders was published in 1978, global marketing/advertising spend was in the range of $50–80 billion. Today, MicroStimuli is being pitched to an advertising economy that, at up to $2 trillion, is 40 times higher than when Hidden Persuaders came out.

Now you may well complain, at this point, that it’s unfair to blame MicroStimuli for the political dystopias now unfolding around the world. And I would have to agree. The capitalist system is to blame, not a pragmatic marketing technique.

Besides,casting blame is not just unfair, it’s ineffective

Ever since those ad men came to dinner when I was a boy, and I witnessed my mother’s appalled reaction, I’ve been sceptical that ad persons will ever turn down the opportunity to increase sales. Indeed, when I asked a marketing expert recently whether or not MicroStimuli are ethical, he replied, “I don’t know, but do they work?”

My point here? Moralistic finger-pointing does not create positive change. Making demands on business, or telling politicians what they must do, are also ineffective.“You must end this obsession with perpetual growth”. “The government must end our dependency on fossil fuels”.

They’ won’t, because they can’t. We all live within a system – capitalism – whose very essence, its basic operating system, is to stimulate consumption, invent new needs, and extract resources from the earth to meet them.

Changing awareness on its own cannot, and will not, change this system. Critique, without action, is a recipe for anxious introspection and debilitating climate guilt.

How positive change happens

After years of ineffective activism, I made a resolution to stop shouting that we must stop doing something (because it’s bad for life on earth, etc etc) without also, at that same moment, pointing to practical acts of care we can do, instead.

The good news is that millions of living alternatives to consumer society – and the means to change the system – are all around us. These millions of grassroots projects – some new, many more the descendants of historical practices – are the seedlings of a replacement for business-as-usual.

These practices are scattered, and for the most part unseen on the world’s smartphones – but they don’t have to be invented from scratch.

I maintain a collection of case study collections on my website. I have also written about 60 new kinds of jobs that you probably never heard of before, but that people are doing now.

Will these myriad small projects wash away capitalism like some giant green tsunami?

On their own, no, of course not. But they don’t have to.

The main reason we’re in a polycrisis now? An intense global debt-energy system has duly reached limits to growth that scientists have been warning us about for decades. The global system – the energy-intense, extractive, grow-to-infinity capitalist system – is degrading of its own accord. Its running up against biophysical forces that are beyond its or anyone else’s control.

Once all the infrastructures, networks and gadgets of modern life are factored in – the cars, planes, factories, buildings, infrastructure, heating, cooling, lighting, food, water, hospitals, information systems, and their attendant gadgets – well, a New Yorker or Londoner today ‘needs’ about 60 times more energy and resources, per person, than a hunter gatherer did, 10,000 years ago.

And these ‘needs’ are escalating. Think, data centres. Think, airconditioning for the masses.

To put it more personally: you and I use more energy & resources in a single month than our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime – and we’re doing so on a finite planet.

It can’t, and won’t, persist.

Practical acts of care

But back to MicroStimuli and my earnest resolution: “never argue that we should stop doing something without also suggesting practical acts of care we can do, instead“.

Rather than get millions more of us to press “Buy”, could they get us to click a button called “Care”?

Care is the essential activity people have always undertaken to raise and educate their families, cultivate their land, and support each other in times of difficulty. Care is how billions of people with low cash incomes meet daily life needs outside the money economy – through traditional networks of reciprocity and gifts.

Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, ironing, consoling, caring for others, listening, value, in this parallel care economy, arises from relationships – not from transactions, and not from things.

A cooperative care ecosystem does not have to be invented from scratch. Myriad examples, as I have shown here, already exist.

But health, care, and wellbeing – whether social, or ecological – are not something ‘delivered’, like a pizza – or ‘produced’, like a car.

What we can do is use can use well-tried design and marketing methods to enhance caring relationships and platforms Maps of actors and resources; product & service prototypes; system architectures; artful meetings; collaboration formats.

As a start, enabling platforms and practical measures can be designed to support the people who already do the bulk of caring, and will continue to do so – from child care, to dementia support..

Among other possibilities:
Enable people to become active participants in ecological repair, or biodiversity restoration
Enable local communities to share resources, collaborate, and develop new livelihoods.
Transform community participation, optimise engagement, personalise interactions on social networks,.

Nature reconnection

The Spanish theologian Raimon Pannikar explains this moment beautifully: ”A truly just transition will happen when we see nature differently, experience nature differently, and understand our purpose here differently.”

Recent ecological research confirms an important truth: the vitality of ecological and social systems is determined by the quality of social and ecological relationships.

I believe MicrosStimuli at the service of care could enhance the health of those relationships.

In diverse combinations with AI, science, design, and art – MicrosStimuli, can become a medium of experience and learning that can help us realise everything in the living world is connected.

As an example: A new app called Okio – described as “your AI-powered field companion” – connects you with nature experiences, based on location. It’s your AI-powered nature guide for exploring, identifying, and learning about the living world around you.

But re-connection – with nature, and with each other – is not just about words; it’s about encounter and community.

The philosopher and theologian Martin Buber counseled just such activity in his book I and Thou of 1923. “All knowledge is dialogic”, he wrote – but he did not just advocate talk. Conversations needs to be embodied, and situated. At a social level, we need to talk to each other more face to face.

How will MicroStimulii help us reconnect in such a way? That, respectfully, is for you to design.

NOTE

MicroStimulii: the New Science of Persuasion
https://www.linkedin.com/in/biju-dominic-5a08764/

What would it be like to be in and amongst a flock of crows?

In a soundscape called The Cave, it’s as if you are surrounded by crows and even interact with them.

At different moments one hears the call of a solitary crow; a communal chorus; the sound of mass fluttering when they all take off at once; or the barely audible cheeps of what seem to be intimate conversations.

You experience the soundscape inside a darkened translucent dome made of layered gauze screens that is bathed in multiple projections. The sounds are composed of 72 field recordings that you hear through eight concealed speakers.

We design people are not the first to seek new ways to spend time in, and learn about, these other worlds.

But by designing new ways knowing, design can add a new dimension to relationships with worlds we have all neglected for too long.

* Qingyu Zhang is a designer at Tongji University, D&I, Ecology and Cultures Innovation Lab
ecology.shanghai-visual.org

 

This three-way dialogue – Karin Fink, Marguerite Kahrl, and John Thackara –
took place on the occasion of
HABITAT: THE RELATIONAL SPACE OF BEING
at Simondi Gallery in Turin
(September-November 2024 HABITAT)

Marguerite Kahrl: The collective exhibition Habitat: The Relational Space of Being probes the visible and invisible networks surrounding and connecting living systems. It provides an opportunity to reflect upon advocacy and embodied experience as we consider how to repair and maintain the infrastructure on which we and other nonhuman entities depend. For example, soil health is the foundation of our habitat and health, yet this vital connection has often been overlooked. While some people maintain a distant relationship with soil and may consider it unclean, we now understand that soil microorganisms are essential for the evolution of our gut microbiome and immunological resilience 1. How do we determine our soil’s health 2, and what insights can we gain from it as we reframe our relationship with the natural world?

John Thackara: This exhibition has been a timely incentive for me to reflect on my own changing relationship with soil. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life as an author and curator trying to understand why we humans continue to trash the planet with such careless abandon. Several decades on – I’m a slow learner! – the notion of a metabolic rift between us humans and the living world now makes good sense. We’re cognitively and culturally separated from the living systems we live among. Seen in this way, I don’t think that I “maintained” a distant relationship with nature. Rather – along with a few hundred million of my fellow over-educated humans – I was preoccupied with other concerns – and these concerns existed mainly in my head: ideas, concepts, arguments, language, reputation, and money. The biggest revelation for me is that we don’t have to argue for a better relationship with nature or provide evidence that it would be a good idea. Those relationships are innate in us all. We just need to do it – reconnect. There’s soil a few centimeters under these typing hands. A few meters from this desk, I can walk on soil in my bare feet. I just need a trigger to do so. And that’s where art comes in.

Karin Fink: I believe that we have gradually distanced ourselves from the natural world, prioritizing intellect and technological advancements. Now, we long for a connection with nature and wilderness. Slowing down and incorporating our capacities could help us create a different presence in the world. Human curiosity and willingness to build and explore (which triggered the distancing development) are still necessary resources. By combining technological, infrastructural, and organizational abilities with a slower pace of life, both as individuals and communities, we could make room for a different way of living. The current societal and ecological crisis presents us with many uncertainties, and we can learn something from the field of soil science.

The Swiss government writes: “In Switzerland, the majority of soils recorded to date are agricultural soils. Today, however, sufficient qualitative soil information is only available for around 13% of agricultural land, which means there is no solid ground for making decisions on the sustainable use of soils. In 2020, in addition to adopting the Swiss Soil Strategy, the Federal Council therefore also issued a mandate for nationwide soil mapping.” 3

Why do I quote this? I find it interesting that even in 2024, soils are a big unknown to us humans. Even more, it makes me quite hopeful that the government is willing to explore and expand its range of knowledge. The program is quite costly, and the Swiss Confederation is willing to pay for it. Bruno Latour sketched this out in Down to Earth:

“What to do? First of all, generate alternative descriptions. How could we act politically without having inventoried, surveyed, measured, centimeter by centimeter, being by being, person by person, the stuff that makes up the Earth for us?” (…) We must agree to define a dwelling place as that on which a terrestrial depends for its survival while asking what other terrestrials also depend on it. (…) It is a matter of broadening the definitions of class by pursuing an exhaustive search for everything that makes subsistence possible. As a terrestrial, what do you care most about? With whom can you live? Who depends on you for subsistence? Against whom are you going to have to fight? How can the importance of all these agents be ranked?”. 4

These questions help us gain a better understanding of soil and learn how to navigate when the knowledge produced by industrialized society is being reconsidered. We are beginning to recognize its limitations. As Latour writes, “We need alternative descriptions.” What might these alternatives look like?

All that mapping – of soils or relations – might make us see, but what will make us do? What will make us heal the metabolic rift? And in what ways? We are trained mappers but need to be trained healers. And here, art can build a bridge… What might contemporary mapping of the unknown look like? How can we draw from human curiosity, the love for building and creating and making, and the desire to achieve more? How might art help us process it?

JT That Swiss government statistic is startling: “qualitative soil information is only available for about 13% of agricultural land”. That number raises questions: what does ‘qualitative’ mean? And why does it matter that so much land remains so thinly understood?

I would like to think, Karin, that your government recognizes that soil care and repair are not just technical matters but also social and cultural ones. If that is correct, then I commend a new word to your colleagues that I recently discovered— “ethnopedology” 5 . It’s a research practice that compares local people’s knowledge about their soils to scientists’ knowledge.

There’s enormous interest and investment at the moment in planetary observation at different scales – from satellite observation to microbiome analysis. It’s now becoming possible to monitor every forest, every tree, and every city block on Earth on a daily basis. Its advocates say such real-time ecological dashboards can be a game-changer in planetary care. I’m not so sure. For me, it is a contested question whether (or not) exposure to more (and new kinds of) data causes citizens to behave differently – for example, to care more for their local soils and ecosystems.

MK The process of mapping data supports policy-making and enables us to gain insights that can help us protect our ecosystems. However, to change our behavior, we need to do more than simply rely on short-term measurements and analytical tools. The need a variety of responses to transform our culture and explore new forms of shared action and coexistence. Many artists and designers have taken up this challenge with local projects emphasizing care, repair, maintenance, and adaptation of the commons. We must move past observing the climate crisis to feeling it in our bodies and processing this with actions. Collective actions can help us untangle colonial paradigms and shift emphasis from ‘rational knowing’ and power-over dynamics to ‘embodied knowing,’ intuitive skills, connection, and touch.

This new paradigm of action is showcased in “The Great Repair,” 6 , a publication and traveling project examining the contradictions between growth and ecology. It addresses how architecture can be a reparative force for the socioecological crisis and investigates whether repairing politics and aesthetics from a decolonial, feminist, and posthuman perspective can offer a meaningful alternative. Kader Attia, one of the contributing artists/curators, touches on repair as a form of agency.

“Thinking about repair has become a tool for revealing the ways in which we are all still living in the colonial laboratory. But I think it is important for research into this topic to always begin with a physical object or tangible context – an object, a building – and then slowly branch out into theoretical reflection. Not vice versa. What often happens today is that we theorise a lot and then grasp for examples that incarnate what we are arguing. It is like the idea of care. We talk about care, and then we organise dinners. We should organise the dinner first and get in touch with the materiality of that tangible experience. And then, slowly, through a collective individuation process, we share ideas and feelings and dare to imagine.” 7

I see ethnopedology as one of Latours’ “alternative descriptions.” It combines local and scientific knowledge about soil while acknowledging different cultural conventions, perceptions, uses, and management styles.

For Irrigators: Underground Conversations, I built and buried irrigation vessels in neighbors’ gardens to investigate and share irrigation and cultivation practices. Within a 10-km radius, I noticed significant differences in soil types, management, and absorption. The objects served as a tool to access local knowledge, build soil fertility, create a network of users, and showcase their diverse gardening techniques.

KF We have enough knowledge about our soils and the ecosystems at risk. Nevertheless, I still see the old ways of observing, mapping, and charting as a way to learn about the otherness of an entity (a body, a system?) like soil. I watch scientists take their samples – to do so, first, they have to access the land and converse with the landowners and farmers. This “nationwide” exercise is as much about gathering data as it is about conversations between different worlds. As you, Marguerite, did in Underground Conversations, I hope that the scientists not only measure humidity and pH but also collect information about the long-term observations from the people they meet on the land. Setting out to chart the unknown territory of soils is as much about the storytelling as the facts. Over time, a picture of the land will emerge, revealing areas where the soil needs restoration or protection from erosion and where the chemical properties are out of balance and need rest. Repairing soils is extremely time-consuming, sometimes requiring decades to replenish. To overcome such long periods, we need good stories to tell – stories that pass on knowledge about what is going on in a specific patch. Objects like the irrigation pots may act as a reminder.

JT It’s not about more data or less – it is about the social contexts in which data is collected, discussed, and acted upon. The same lesson applies, I think, to discussions about ‘nationwide’ and ‘local’. We need to operate at both scales. I recently met someone involved in efforts to clean up Chesapeake Bay in the US – a forty-year-long effort. More than 200 organizations are involved in just one platform, Choose Clean Water. After years of people blaming each other for causing the problem, a focus on hyper-local stream repair seems to be providing common ground. Finally, instead of talking about nutrient reductions in a Bay many miles away, they can talk about improvements in streams where their kids and grandkids play. According to Karl Blankenship, in the piece I just read, the following actions are local, too: targeted areas are typically stream segments that are only a couple of miles long and drain watersheds of 1,000–5,000 acres with 10–15 landowners. 8 Acts of care are local and embodied – but when many of those actions are added together, the results can be system-wide.

MK Social context matters. Community engagement is crucial for local development, but what happens when it is driven by fear of pollution, outsiders, climate change, or maintaining privilege? What if we genuinely had to adapt to our chosen habitat? How can such hyper-local repair acts influence the “Not in My Backyard” movement- which opposes or resists change in communities? Dr. John Todd, the founder of the New Alchemy Institute (NAI) 9 , believes that by combining the knowledge accumulated in the last 100 years, we can achieve things we never thought possible. He emphasizes that “we don’t have to invent anything; we just have to pay attention to what’s been learned.” 10 NAI interpreted ecosystems, such as the ‘living machine,’ to filter water by imitating the functions of marshes, ponds, and streams. This type of design can help us sense whole systems and their qualities, patterns, and potential.

So, how can we pay attention and become enchanted to act? This is where artists come into play. With their ability to question, confront, engage, and captivate, we may better understand and interpret our habitat and its environmental and social contexts.

NOTES

1 Marja I. Roslund, “Scoping review on soil microbiome and gut health—Are soil microorganisms missing from the planetary health plate?”, British Ecological Society, (2024): (online).
In besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10638 (last accessed 01/08/2024)

2 We have discovered that soil and human gut bacteria share functional similarities. Soil-tasting ceremonies or the Museum of Edible Earth could be interesting parameters to monitor and accentuate this relationship.

3 Karin Fink translation from bafu.admin.ch/bafu/de/home/themen/boden/fachinformationen/bodenkartierung.html (last accessed 18/07/2024).

4 Latour, B. (2018), Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Paris: Polity Press.

5 N. Barrera-Bassols, J.A. Zinck. “Ethnopedology: a worldwide view on the soil knowledge of local people,” ScienceDirect (2002): (online). In sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001670610200263X (last accessed 25/07/2024).

6 The Great Repair – Politics for the Repair Society (online).
In archplus.net/en/archiv/english-publication/The-Great-Repair/#article-7081 (last accessed 15/07/24).

7 Kristina Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia”. The Architectural Review, (2024): (online).
In architectural-review.com/essays/profiles-and-interviews/interview-with-kader-attia.(last accessed 15/07/24).

8 Karl Blankenship, “Will A Focus On Stream Health Help Boost The Chesapeake?” Bay Journal (2024): (online).
In thebaynet.com/will-a-focus-on-stream-health-help-boost-the-chesapeake/ (last accessed 22/07/2024).

9 newalchemists.net/publications/new-alchemy-1971-1991/(last accessed 22/07/2024).

10 Steve Rose, “The New Alchemists: Could the Past Hold the Key to Sustainable Living?” The Guardian (2019): (online).
In theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2019/sep/29/the-new-alchemists-could-the-past-hold-the-key-to-sustainable-living (last accessed 22/07/24).

c. 2,750 BCE: The World’s oldest book, the Epic of Gilgamesh, portrays tension between the wild and the civilised in its hero, who violates the Goddess’ wishes by felling an ancient cedar forest but in consequence suffers “death” of his wild side.

500 BCE: The Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Buddha taught the interconnection of all things – “mutual interdependence.” Old Testaments prophets warned of ecocide (e.g. Isaiah 24) and laid out a land ethic (e.g. Leviticus 25).

300 BCE: Plato’s Timaeus (110-111) depict the ecological degradation of ancient Greece in terms that display advanced understanding. He goes on to depict the world as being “a living god” created by God eternal. Plato, however, sets reason above feeling, presents God as male in preference to female, and presumes a dualistic worldview.

33 CE: A Hebrew prophet turns recriminative violence on its head, predicating heart and hand over mere cleverness of head.

570-632 CE: Prophet Mohammed establishes Islam embodying concern for social and ecological justice (including giving rights of education, property ownership, etc. to women). The story of the thirsty dog at the well illustrates that compassion for animals mattered more than the perceived sin of adultery. Islam retains a lunar calendar. Meanwhile, in Europe, Rome has fallen and the “Dark Ages” are in full swing, but with philosophy and theology flourishing in the Islamic and Celtic worlds.

1255-1274 CE: Thomas Aquinas (and the Scholastics) reintegrate Greek rationalism (conserved by Islamic scholars) with Christianity – the start of the “Renaissance” (or rebirth) of Greco-Roman Classical thought during the late “Middle Ages.” Feudalism morphs to early modernity, and European nation states consolidate, governed by cross and sword, and directed by the compass laying the ground for later empires.

1560: The Reformation (Scotland’s date). Salvation a question of individual righteousness and not a matter controlled by the spiritual community (“church”). John Calvin “accommodates” usury = deferred gratification. Economy freed from church.

1603 CE: Advent of early modernism as the “father of modern science,” Francis Bacon, chancellor to King James VI & I, anticipates biotechnology and suggests nature’s secrets should be prised out of her like confessions are tortured from witches. Decartes (1596-1650) consolidates Platonic dualism in the rationalist mind-body split. The 17th century represents the start of “managerial environmentalism,” with royal advisors like John Evelyn urging forest conservation and regeneration to preserve timber for the admiralty, and shifting industry out of London to reduce appalling air pollution. Environment must serve the newly invented capitalist/imperialist endeavour of building an Empire. Pollution can be exported, for instance, by locating iron works in New England. The immanence of God in nature (cf. Job 36-39; Psalms 104) is downplayed; the Platonic transcendent God is emphasised. With Ireland firmly under colonial yoke since 1601, empire building expands overseas.

18th century: The “Enlightenment” era of mid-modernism as the power of reason is fully focussed into industrial revolution. Progress and salvation reside in reasonable men acting in rational self-interest – Adam Smith. The “Protestant Work Ethic” (Weber) equates material success with Godly blessing, and vice versa as applied to those on the losing side as the last of the European commons is stitched up for privatisation, and the world colonised for spices, gold, sugar, tobacco, slaves and glory.

19th and 20th century: late modernism. Massive improvements in life and world population growth. Churchill saw both war on horseback and the first atom bombs. Both production and killing become industrialised. An era of technology, advanced capitalism and globalisation in context of “God is dead” (Nietzsche).

1968: Early postmodernism: Black civil rights, Vietnam, psychedelic experience opening of inner space, women, eastern religious influence etc inspire new thought. Garret Hardin writes of the “tragedy of the commons.”

1972: An axial year. Four things of CHE-related interest.
a) “Blueprint for Survival” – editors of The Ecologist recommend stabilised populations, living within carrying capacity and processes that work with nature.
b) “Limits to Growth” – Club of Rome (Meadows’ report) uses simple computer model to show that exponential growth cannot continue.
c) The Stockholm Conference – formally, The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment with a 26-point Stockholm Declaration. This was the world’s first UN environmental conference. 119 countries agreed to set up the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), led by Canadian oil “billionaire” Maurice Strong (but don’t judge too quickly!).
d) The School of the Man-Made Future founded in Edinburgh University as a futures school and think tank, later renamed The Centre for Human Ecology (the CHE).

1980: International Union for Conservation of Nature produces World Conservation Strategy, predicating maintenance of life support systems, biodiversity and “sustainable utilization” of species and ecosystems.

1980: UN Brandt Report: North-South: a Programme for Survival, says that economic growth cannot spread without justice.

1983: Caroline Merchant publishes The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution – a core text advancing “ecofeminist” critique of modernism. (I mention this to indicate a “parallel polis”.)

1987: UN Brundtland Report – Our Common Future. Says that sustainable development – integrating social and environmental dimensions, is that which proceeds “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

1988: UNEP and the World Meteorological Association jointly set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), destined to become the gold standard by which climate science is aggregated and evaluated in Assessment Reports (AR) roughly every 7 years. As of 2022, it is completing AR6.

1992: The UN Rio “Earth Summit”. Involved 30,000 people and 100 heads of state. Dubbed the “Summit of Hypocrisy”, but driven by the vision and energy of Maurice Strong, it laid down Agenda 21 – the agenda for integrating social and ecological justice in the 21st century (albeit within free market principles). It established the Convention on Biological Diversity, principles of sustainable development and forest policy, and of particular emergent importance, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

1995: COP 1, Berlin, the first of the annual Conference of the Parties, the “parties” being governments signed up to the principles of the UNFCC, the primary objective set at Rio being, “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

1997: Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCC – agreement of most countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

2007: Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to the IPCC and US Vice-President Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

2009: COP 15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, being the 15th Conference of the Parties. As Obama, Gordon Brown and other leaders gathered, initial high hopes were sabotaged as “Climategate”, cooked up by anonymous climate change deniers, burst upon the world’s press.

2015: COP 21 in Paris, salvaged the carnage of COP 15 resulting in The Paris Agreement, the most significant environmental treaty so far of the 21st century. Although lacking a binding enforcement procedure, world leaders agreed to: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

2021: COP 26 in Glasgow. For the mostpart, and particularly for the host Boris Johnson: They came. They saw. They decided not to conquer.

2022: 50th anniversary of the founding of the Centre for Human Ecology – www.che.ac.uk – 8 Oct. Symposium.

Source: www.AlastairMcIntosh.com, updated 2022 at the request of www.che.ac.uk)

The following is a transcript of my keynote talk on 29 May at Quantum(Quantum(Quantum()))): Artificial Imagination – the 2022 aai International Conference on art(ai) hosted by Tongji University in Shanghai.

[The video is here.] Six months ago, in a talk titled Beyond Calculation, about AI and Sustainability, I asked whether artificial intelligence could be enough, on its own, to drive the ecological transition we so desperately need. My key point then: a just transition will happen when we see nature differently, relate to nature differently, and understand the purpose of development differently. That’s a big challenge. Transformation on that scale can seem un-imaginable from the perspective of today.

So can AI change the way we experience and understand the world? Can it help us stop treating the world as some kind of machine that we can control, and realise, instead, that that everything is connected in this living world – and that we are part of that? Whether it’s sub-microscopic viruses, mosses, and mycorrhizae – or trees, rivers and climate systems – modern science has confirmed an ancient wisdom: All natural phenomena are not only connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things -including us. This change in perception has profound consequences for notions of ‘development’. We are beginning to realise that ecological restoration is not just a remedial activity – repairing the machine. It’s more about learning how to coexist with nature in a spirit of reciprocity and kinship. The health of nature, and the wellbeing of people, become a single story. So that’s the question: Can AI foster new ways of knowing and being in the world? As medium of attention; as a medium of connection; and as a medium of relationship with the living world?

New ways of knowing

Major AI projects are already underway that monitor the planet’s ecosystems at multiple scales – such as planetary-scale observation from multiple satellites of Planet Labs. The tools and connectivity are being deployed, today, to monitor the planet’s vital signs in real time. These observational projects are not all top-down and satellite-based. In Switzerland, the Crowther Lab has launched an open data platform, Restor, that connects people everywhere to local restoration activities. Restor connects people to scientific data, supply chains, funding – and each other – to increase the impact, scale, and sustainability of restoration efforts. These multi-scalar visualisations are undeniably striking. Add them all together, display them on a giant screen, and we’d get a wondrous picture of the planet’s health – place by place, patch by patch. The ‘global dashboard’ metaphor is tremendously attractive to business and policymakers – but it contains several dangers. First, the dashboard metaphor reinforces the illusion that nature is like a faulty machine that can be fixed. You could compare a planetary dashboard with intensive care in a modern hospital. The tubes and gadgets surrounding a sick patient are technical marvels of observation – but they tell us little about the reasons the patient got sick in the first place. Another problem with the dashboard metaphor? Being being top-down, and outside-in, it excludes forms of knowledge and experience that cannot be represented in data, and on screens. Its limited representational pallette affords a diminished understanding of living systems in their unique contexts.

The French philosopher Bruno Latour advocates that we move on from the “blue marble’ perspective of earth observation, as seen from by astronauts in outer space . In place of this familiar but distant image – of a blue-and-green globe – we need to experience our places – our lifeworlds – in closer and more intimate ways. A redesign of earth observation is already underway in what scientists refer to as the ‘critical zone’ – a layer of the planet that stretches two or three kilometres in each direction above and below us. All the organisms and interactions important to life are found in this zone. To monitor its vitality , scientists have established critical zones observatories throughout the world – including this one in China. They use sensors and highly technical instruments to collect data in these outdoor laboratories. This work is earth-based, and involves diverse research domains, as you can see in the box: ecology, microbiology, geophysics, and so on. We’re going to need help making sense of this complex interplay of data – and that’s where AI comes in. I don’t know how – but I’m describing an opportunity for AI. Development and ecological restoration, in this context, are less about leaps of the imagination, more about connection:-connection with place; connection with each other; and above all, connection with the living. Ecological thinking is the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole. Designers and artists can use their creative skills to help us experience being part of nature, not outside. The word, experience, I believe, is key. I don’t know how, but I’m certain art and AI can awaken the experience of interconnectedness.

From control, to kinship

The children in this image have spent their morning on a farm. For them, this visit has been a gateway to nature connection. Experiencing the world as a web of connection – between people, place and nature – has been forgotten in most of the West – and is hard to teach in the confines of a classroom, or a computer screen. These connections are best explored at the scale of the farms and bioregions that surround our cities. On a farm visit, one can learn first-hand learn that the health of the soil, and the health of people, are the same story. Soils, one discovers, are the most complex microbial ecosystem we know. In healthy soils, an enormous range of partners interact, and collaborate. Soils are a fantastic example of kinship, among all of life, in practice. A single teaspoon of healthy soil may contain thousands of species, a billion individuals, and one hundred metres of fungal networks: Nature’s Internet. These hidden lifeworlds are invisible not only to to satellites, but also to most of us in the modern urban world.Unseen, they’ve also been uncared for – until now. Now, thanks to the marvels of visualization, the hidden lifeworlds of soils are beng brought into view. Julian Liber, for example studies the rhizosphere – the soil around the root of plants where microbial activity is especially high. Helped by AI, he tracks fungal hyphae – their rate of growth, how often they branch, and other metrics. The “rhizosphere” as scientists to describe the plant-root interface, is a superorganism in its own right. Another good indicator of soil health is the number and vitality of worms. Worm watching is popular among students – and this artist has now developed worm listening, too. Combine low-tech citizen science, with the analytical potential of machine learning, and observations from diverse sources can now be used to make diagnostic maps. Ecological restoration is a current practice, not a promise – and it’s happening everywhere, including in cities.

Civic Ecology (sometimes called ecological urbanism) weds the practice of city design and planning with the insights of ecology. It involves the interplay of multiple environmental disciplines – from climatology, to psychology, – much as we saw at Critical Zones observatories. In cities today, civic ecology is practised in a large number of micro-interventions – as shown on this list. I won’t go through them in detail – but think of this as a Civic Ecology to-do list. Urban forests play vital roles in urban ecologies. They are a home to wildlife, space for recreation, and insurance against flooding. Trees manage carbon emissions, control water flow and air quality, and regulate temperature and energy usage. Planting and maintaining trees also creates jobs and livelihoods. But integrating trees and cities is more complex than most people realize. Fifty percent of urban trees don’t survive after 10 years of life – even though the benefits generated by those same trees increase until they are 50 or older.

TreesAI is a new platform that helps city managers improve the ways trees are planted and maintained in urban forests. The platform helps city managers avoid damage to existing ecosystems when planting urban forests; how to prevent seedlings dying through neglect; how to balance the water needs of new trees with existing water flows. And so on. Platforms like TreesAI are not control systems. Urban forests cannot be automated. But urban forests are a good example of how man’s Internet and nature’s internet, can enable beneficial coexistence – kinship, if you like – between different networks.

Microbial urbanism

At an even smaller scale than nature’s internet – in fact, invisible – microbes play a key role in the function of ecosystems – inside cities and outside. They contribute to biodiversity, nutrient cycling ,pollutant detoxification, and human health. Microbes play a crucial role in nature’s material cycles and food webs. They account for most of the biodiversity in urban settings. Here we encouner another profound change in priorities. For hundreds of years, it has been a focus of city design to keep nature, and especially microbes, out. Now, our design task is to welcome beneficial bacteria back and make them feel at home. The purpose of microbial infrastructures, and microbial urbanism, is to enable kinship. Design for kinship with microbes has already started. It has a name: Microbiome-Inspired Green Infrastructure (MIGI). As described by Dr Jake Robinson, MIGI is a nature-centric infrastructure designed to enhance health-promoting interactions between humans and environmental microbiomes – in the air, on plants, in soils, on buildings. The design task is to enable their healthy coexistence. When I told Professor Lou Yongqi about Jake Robinson’s work on MIGI, he asked me: “how would this work at a campus scale?”. The answer is that the Tongji University Campus would be a great site for a variety of MIGI trials. We could test associations between (micro) biodiversity exposure and human health. We could measure the impact of different design interventions on the health of elements. We could test the efficacy of different exposure routes between microbes and humans in a campus context. A tough design challenge remains. If ninety ninety percent of life is invisible – how do we design for that? The good news, once again, is that real-world examples already exist. People are working with bacteria in an environmental context today. This picture, for example, shows a lacto-fermentation kitchen in which foods are preserved using lactobacilli. This sake brewery is an especially good real-world example of people working mindfully with bacteria. Dr Maya Hey, a researcher with the Future Organisms project, has studied how brewers attune to the social, spatial, and temporal scales of life within the brewhouse – including, especially, the microbes that remain invisible. Natural here means that they do not use lab-optimized strains of bacteria or yeast. The fermentation process relies exclusively on ambient and endogenous microbes. They do not add anything. Most of their practices are about skilfully tending an environment that’s conducive to transformation.

Attunement

These are mostly hands-on practices. The brewers engage with microbes interactively .“If fermentation has taught me anything, says Dr Hay, it’s that microbial time has its own pacing”. Rather than abide by a predetermined production schedule, the brewers utilize practices like call-and-response, and work song, to coordinate the fermentation process among human and microbial participants. Hay describes this as attunement – the ability to notice, apprehend, and connect with others in meaningful response. My provocation here: I don’t know how, but I’m confident that AI can be an aid for attunement.

eDNA metabarcoding

On a much larger scale than that sake brewery, we are also designing with microbes in landscape restoration projects – for example, on lands damaged by mining operations. Where mine sites are being rehabilitated back to their native ecosystems, eDNA metabarcoding now helps ecologists determine what insects, pollinators, and bacteria used to live there. Soil restoration is also happening in cities as a feature of the civic ecology I mentioned earlier. A lot of this work involving citizen volunteers working alongside ecologists and soil health experts. eDNA can greatly enrich their work. The information revealed by eDNA analysis is extraordinary. What insects, pollinators, and bacteria used to live there. But deciding how to use this information in the context of ecological restoration – what should be planted there, next – is complex. Once again I don’t know how AI can help with soil restoration – only that surely make a critical contribution.

Indigenous knowledges and AI

Whilst ‘systems thinking’ is a relative novelty for most of us in the industrialised world, sensitivity to ecological contexts is quite natural to shepherds and other pastoralists who have lived on the land for generations. Small-scale herd-owners, for example, practice a form of agriculture productio on arduous drylands that dates back some 6,000 years. The lands they work on are home to approximately 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Indigenous peoples have a closer relationship with the ecologies of their land than those who practice ‘production agriculture’ – or who view landscapes from the window of a high-speed train. But the intimate, fine-grained knowledge of people who work so intimately with the land can always be enhanced. A project in India called

Decentralising Digital, or DEDI, explores the possible roles that tech might play in enhancing ago ecology practices that are already successful. The palette of tools in DEDI: AI, machine learning, mesh networks, the Internet of Things, voice enabled Internet. These small-scale coffee growers in Karnataka, in rural southern India, have developed an holistic, whole-system approach to their land over generations. They have a deep connection with the forest, and preserve biodiversity and soil health as a daily practice – not an afterthought. The design brief in DEDI: how to enhance these farmers’ ability to assess the health of their soil, and their care for biodiversity. The deep experience of the farmers is a starting point, not an afterthought, in DEDI. Farmers are part of the design process, as is the larger community of the village. Indigenous means: “having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment”. This definition surely applies to ecological restoration as whole – not only to small scale coffee growers. Indigenous knowledges are not recipes, as if for a cake. They cannot be extracted, printed on method cards, and applied around the word at will.

From microbiome to bioregion

Indigenous knowledges are situated, place-specific, and relational.They operates at multiple scales – from microbiome to bioregion . They are also shaped by multiple timescales – from geological time, to the bacterial time of fermentation. Reconnecting with the living and the real. To conclude: A new form of development is emerging in which we no longer think of the oceans, fields and forests as ‘resources’ or ‘solutions’. We have started to engage with nature as a complex of constantly changing lifeworlds. We are learning how to experience the health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, as a single story. Ecological restoration – at the heart of this new approach to development – involves multiple interacting practices: Science, Art, Social Innovation, and Design. AI, I believe, can be a medium of experience and learning that enables these practices to interact. Kinship – the work of reconnection with all of life – is not incompatible with innovation, or scientific inquiry. On the contrary: scientific and indigenous knowledge can complement each other. They can expand the menu of what’s possible – from eDNA analysis of damaged soils, or AI that translates indigenous languages. In combination with other forms of knowledge, the true potential of AI is to help us reconnect with the living and the real.