We were going to a meeting in the local community space, and happened upon a demonstration in progress: the playback of a live recording of a rainforest using multiple sophisticated microphones and sound systems. It sounded too irresistible to pass up.
The actual presentation was gorgeous. All of the lights were shut off in the ballroom, and the audience was treated to an incredibly rich soundscape, an audible artifact to take away from several of nature's equivalents of great cities: some of the greatest rainforests in Africa and South America.
The sounds were rich and symphonic. The listener was treated to a landscape of a dizzying array of species, all calling to each other, occupying distinct audio niches with their methods of communication. One can make out birds, insects, land mammals, rustling trees, thunder...
After detailed analysis of the audio, the scientists concluded that each species within this ecosystem had evolved communications methods which avoided competition on a given frequency, so various species could call in everything from low bass tones to high treble tones, the distribution of which eventually produces what sounds like an organic symphony.
Just incredible! What an amazing store of knowledge, and what incredible technologies that made it possible.
But there was a fundamental tension lying just beneath the surface. The subtext of the presentation warned of a coming sixth mass extinction: it was in the rainforests that alarming and rapidly accelerating species die-offs were most noticeable.
Here we have an earnest desire to observe natural phenomena and spread awareness of troubling trends, but this process of observation implies a far out extension of technological complexity that requires massive inputs of energy, inputs which are dooming the very entities under observation.
We're talking about multi-dimensional spatial mics, huge
scaffoldings for recording perches, sophisticated computer analysis and
eventual plans for geodesic domes that house immense sound systems to
provide rich atmospheric sound.
This exposes a tragic and fatal irony: the incredible instruments of measurement, the technologies that make these observations possible, and which spread awareness through wonder, are themselves part of a gargantuan ideological, technological, socio-economic infrastructure whose very operation threatens the ecosystems it is so enchanted with, and more importantly, ultimately sustain it.
One can't pick and choose one's favored high technologies and groups and amputate them, to perpetuate them unscathed into a green utopia. Their very existence depends on the entire edifice, the totality of uninterrupted human activity.
We are treated to a wide-eyed immersion into an infinitely complex eco-system, and the richness of our experience of it only grows. We just keep on finding out more and more. The potential for knowledge is bottomless; its endlessness beckons us further and further into the abyss.
We find ourselves on the knife edge between extreme technological complexity and the mad ideological wilderness that accompanies it, and the sublime intellectual communion with nature that its exquisite instruments make possible.
The presentation was incredibly beautiful and brilliant, yet terrifying. One felt as though one was watching Icarus as his wings were beginning to catch fire.
Or alternatively, a stark meaning arises concerning Ernest Hemingway's Old Man of the Sea: a man bent on following his destiny to its completion, to catch a great fish in the sea, undergoes a harrowing struggle to catch his prize, ultimately triumphing. However as he returns to his village, dragging the prize with him behind his boat, the fish is destroyed by various predators and the elements of the sea from which it came, and he returns with nothing but a shredded skeleton.
