Neuroplasticity is the ability of the human brain to adapt to new kinds of learning, a subject studied by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In an interview with Clare Wilson in New Scientist magazine (15 May 2021), he makes the passing comment that, “Mother Nature is taking a sort of gamble with humans, in that she drops our brains into the world half-baked and lets experience take over and shape them. Our babies have much less well-developed brains than other animals do at birth. All in all, this has been a successful strategy. We’ve taken over every corner of the planet, invented the internet—even gotten off the planet to the moon.”
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The Quadra Project: Dying Trees
We don’t know what death is, perhaps because we really don’t know what life is. The living have life, of course, as do trees. But the words “life” and “death” don’t explain anything. Some profound change happens when living things die, a mystery to which we give a great deal of thought when it pertains to ourselves, but we don’t give much thought to how trees die.
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The Quadra Project: Tree Huggers
Marina Abramovic is an internationally known performance artist. She teaches her fans “art pieces that experiment with time, metaphysics and the human body.” These creative exercises, which are instructions in “endurance, concentration, self-control and willpower” are intended to “reboot your life” (Guardian Weekly, 18 February, 2022). In 2020, she convinced a group of volunteers to try tree-hugging as an antidote to the isolation caused by the Covid pandemic.
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Critique of Mosaic’s 2022 Forest Stewardship Plan for Quadra Island (P3)
Originally published on the Discovery Islander
“Noise is the amount of disagreement between people who make professional judgements.” This is the definition supplied by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural scientist and Nobel Prize winner, and his two fellow scientists, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, who were trying to understand and explain why “a lot of professional judgement actually has no connection to reality.”
Their studies were initially inspired by a survey of 208 federal judges in the United States. On convictions for the same offence that received an average of 7 years incarceration, sentences varied by as much as 50%. Another study found that the value estimates of insurance underwriters varied by 55%, a large enough range that made their assessments almost useless. Psychiatry is particularly “noisy”. So is forestry.
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The Quadra Project – Carbon Credits
Environmental scientists have long argued that the most serious of our global climate problems could be solved if we just planted a trillion trees to absorb our excessive carbon dioxide emissions—trees are the best known device for this purpose. Yet, just as we desperately need them, we are busy cutting them down.
Now Mosaic, one of Canada’s largest timber companies, has just announced (Globe and Mail, March 22, 2022) that it intends to end logging in 40,000 hectares of British Columbia’s coastal forests in exchange for carbon credits—at least for 25 years.
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