Spittballing on Human Habitat

(Note, this post represents me kicking these ideas around, and beginning an initial exploration of them... as such, it will not be heavily cited beyond what I think readers may need to understand a given point)

Recently, some thoughts have arisen in the lab I belong to about a different way to think of cities: as human habitat, modified by humans through all our ecological behavior to suit us.

It's a given that all species alter their habitat.  They may do this through herbivory, nest building, tunneling, alteration of biogeochemical cycles, even by changing the local climate.  The impacts of many species are relatively minor compared on their own.  A handful of species directly produce large changes in their environment through their behavior that other organisms have to reckon with.  Beavers, elephants, and humans spring to mind.  For the bulk of our few million years on the planet hominins have been no more of a force to reckon with than most other species.

Even after the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens--possibly the most versatile and hardy animal to grace the face of the Earth--we didn't tend to have too outsize an impact.  We may have cleared some land, burned grasslands in a purposeful way, and eaten a number of species into extinction, but we have otherwise lived within our niche as omnivorous apex predators without massively disturbing the Earth at large.

This would largely seem to be because humans historically lived in a relatively integrated manner within other ecosystems, making both intensive and extensive use of resources as necessary, and often being highly mobile (whether residentially or logistically).  The high mobility and relatively small numbers of humans kept us from doing too much damage to the ecosystems we inhabited.  Our versatility and cleverness occasionally enabled us to abuse our surroundings in ways other species cannot.  After all, wolves can't switch to shellfish and tubers after all the giant flightless birds have been eaten.

A brief poem-like observation, about crows

The crows roosted outside my office window in Bloomington tonight. 
They called and scolded and begged each other, high up in the cold trees. 

And when they seemed settled, for reasons known only to them, 
hundreds would suddenly leap into the air, silent except for the rush of black wings.

c. 1625–50 / 
Anonymous 
Japanese Artist 
SEATTLE ASIAN ART MUSEUM

Day Two: Themes

Today has been a day of themes emerging from the apparent randomness of the various talks.
One hopes that this was planned by the organizers, but one never really knows.

The day began a bit late, with the Consuming Better: What Neuroscience Says About a Sustainable Future which echoed some of the sentiments of the keynote from Tuesday.  The primary gist is this:  You cannot expect humans to stop acting like humans.  The only thing you can do is engineer systems that take into account how humans actually behave and make decisions.

And that's an important idea.  Much of the root cause of a lot of the failures in environmental policy thus far have been because we try to push for how people to behave the way they should act, even when that seems to be in direct contradiction with how they do act. Most people simply don't want less. They don't want to live in a low energy society. The previous people who did live in such a society opted to create this one, and people make the transition from an agrarian life style to an urban one at an astonishing rate every day.

Neuroscience is showing us that human brains are not rational devices, but that they are somewhat predictable. Most humans tend towards outcomes that lend them perceived status relative to their peers, even if that means they are worse off, in absolute terms. This means that our brains will fool us: wine we believe to be expensive tastes better than wine we think is cheap.  We engage in conspicuous consumption.

Another interesting fact is that when you provide people with feedback, they shape their behavior to optimize that feedback signal.  Thus we drive a car more efficiently when we can see the mileage instantaneously (the Prius Effect).

If we can manage the energy problem (which is no small feat) and take these things about human nature into consideration, then we can go a long way towards having a more sustainable society.