8th Grade Physics Ending Reflections
The Great Machine, and The Master Tree
This is a final reflection essay I wrote to end a three week block teaching Physics to a great group of 8th graders. I’m so thankful for our common work, which allowed me to form these thoughts:
In the song Phytoplankton by Elizabeth Mitchell, which I love, there is one line that I don’t like. It’s this one: “It strikes me that the world is a machine.”
In the context of the whole song, it becomes more clear what she means when she says, even in the very next line “I could lose myself in its complexity.” She means a “highly complex, living organism”. I just think that doesn’t rhyme very well with “complexity”.
Because in fact the world is not like a machine at all. As we’ve learned in the last three weeks studying Aerodynamics, Hydraulics and Electricity and Magnetism, the modern industrial world is built upon a small number of machines, and none of them is particularly complex or hard to understand. You capture most of the industrial world when you understand hydraulic machines, internal combustion engines, pumps and electric motors (which includes electric generators), and understanding the basic workings of these four is well within the grasp of an 8th grader. And an internal combustion engine is really just an “air pump that breathes fire,” so bring that list down to three.
The application of combinations of these machines bring us such wonders as automobiles, construction machinery, the oil pumping and refinement industry, huge freighters and cruise ships, the building of skyscrapers, the train and trucking industry, ethanol and corn syrup, and modern weapons. Add the jet engine (which is a specialized kind of pump) to the mix and you’ve got all of aviation and most of space travel.
The modern machine world (leaving out a discussion of electronics for now) is truly wondrous and we have accomplished wonderful (and terrible) things with it. In the U.S. many of us own at least one, often more than one, automobile, which is a collection of 10,000 or so parts, and within those maybe 20-40 pumps (including the engine), 25-50 electric motors, and 3-5 complete hydraulic systems.
But we now have a crisis on our hands. Pollution of all kinds from industrial processes once ran rampant, and have now been brought under some form of control in the last 75 years through laws preventing dumping in rivers, etc. But that pollution isn’t gone, it is only better regulated. Meanwhile new kinds of pollution have cropped up in addition to chemical; such as light pollution from ever increasing amounts of roads and cities; and electromagnetic pollution from widespread use of cell networks and wifi. And agriculture has become the major polluter due to the large machines that do our farming for us, and the ways in which they strip the land, over-fertilize, over-apply pesticide, and generally compact and kill the soil. Climate change is indisputably a reaction from our living Earth to the overuse and overapplication of our machine knowledge.
With our machines, we are currently cutting down huge tracts of the largest rain forests in the world for agricultural development. There are more than 1.5 billion automobiles in the world today and nearly 8 billion people. It’s simple math to recognize that every family, let alone every individual, can’t own a car, and so we must find a way for people to live their lives without needing cars all the time. And, we need to stop cutting down trees for other land uses. We’ve studied how engines “breathe” in class, but in a very forced, mechanical way (for example the four stroke engine cycle of intake, compression, ignition, and exhaust). It is a kind of breathing, but, when you listen to a train or car engine, it sounds like a kind of hyperventilation, actually, not true breathing.
Thoughts like these lead me to wondering about our future as human beings. Generally, I feel optimistic, as it’s entirely clear to me that humans can change course and turn their considerable ingenuity toward new ways of living when they realize they need to. And, when I imagine what our future could look like, where we take responsibility for the machine world we’ve built and start to really apply ourselves to a new kind of technology and a new way of living . . . I think we will inevitably need to turn our attention to trees.
Trees are, of course, the ultimate masters of air, water, fire, earth and sunlight. They are our much elder siblings who have mastered the intricate ways of these substances that we have harnessed so far only in our machine way. Not only do I think our future includes planting many, many trees; but I also think that studying and understanding trees is going to bring about a new kind of “tree technology”, or, really “forest technology” that will be the next wave of human understanding. It’s exciting for me to think about it, although I don’t know quite what it will look like. It will be a kind of living technology, although I’m definitely not talking about the current state of our work in genetically modified organisms (GMO’s), which is all about increasing yield and is destroying landscapes and ecosystems just as much as chemical agriculture does.
I don’t know what this “forest technology” will be, but I do think a good start is to contrast the way trees have chosen, over 350 million years, to work with air, water, fire and earth; with our own machine ways of the last 400 years. Giving attention to these contrasts may give rise to all kinds of insights that we sorely need to break our addiction to our industrial creations and start to move to the next level of technology that heals the earth rather than destroying it. Below are the beginnings of that contrasting. I hope that many of us will give attention to these understandings to create the mental and relational capacity necessary to both appreciate and then transcend our current hot, hyperventilating, polluting industrial technologies.
Hydraulic Machines, Pumps and Motors: Work on the concept of pressurized force, allowing movement of huge chunks and gargantuan weights, and complete reshaping of a landscape in a short time.
Trees (especially trees together in a Forest): Do their work using the essence of water. Patience, pressure and time weaves a kind of great strength and resiliency that nevertheless complements, enriches and enhances the landscape
Machines: Create huge amounts of excess heat which ends up warming the air, the land and the water
Trees: Create a net cooling effect on the surroundings. Create shade, block the wind and actually create their own microclimate when together in a forest.
Machines: A single machine can destroy a vast tract of land, knock over, cut down and tear out many, many trees. Land that has been worked by machines is compacted and dead for a long time before plants and trees can enter and start patiently healing it.
Trees: A single tree can do very little alone. Trees are beings that are designed to work together with other trees in forests. The forest is the truly living being, and the forest floor is the most important organ for the health of that forest
Machines: Pollute and dirty the air with their working
Trees: Clean and purify the air with their working
Machines: Water can only be lifted 32 feet on Earth by ambient air pressure
Trees can lift water 300 feet (redwoods of California) without any pump. We still don't really understand how they do this.
Machines: Can only crush and destroy. Any constructing or building they accomplish is only done at the expense of great waste produced in the process. Everything they make eventually crumbles and becomes more waste.
Trees: Can build and grow without creating any waste at all. At the end of their life, they become habitat for billions of other organisms.
Machines: Force huge amounts of hot water into the sky (for example at electric power plants) through evaporation. This excess hot water creates “heat island” effects that create unpredictable rainfall and torrential weather patterns.
Trees: Allow huge amounts of cool water to flow up to the sky through transpiration. Bacteria that live in healthy forests and rise with the rising water seed the clouds for increased rhythmic and predictable rainfall, healing the land.
Machines: The land surrounding factories and industrial areas is entirely dead, and usually polluted. If anything grows there at all, it is turf grass that is mowed and landscaped to “prettify” the ugly structures.
Trees drop many tons of biomass in the form of used needles, leaves, branches and bark, creating ecosystems beneath them for all other living organisms. This creates a beautiful landscape of living soil.
Machines: Because of our addiction to the automobile, we've devoted a large percentage of our land area to roads, which requires a massive investment in maintaining infrastructure
Trees: The land surrounding train tracks is often a site of the return of trees, animals and plants, since trains and their tracks do not require nearly as much footprint as roads, and the area immediately surrounding the tracks can largely be left alone.
Machines: Highways and major roads are one of the hardest obstacles for wildlife to navigate. They cut up the landscape and make it nearly impossible for many animals to naturally live out their migratory lives.
Trees: Forests naturally create paths when animals living their lives go about their daily and yearly activities with ease.
Machines: Turf grass is the third largest crop that we grow in the world (after corn and soy), and is useless to animals and wildlife (as are corn and soy)
Trees: Forests, marshes, and grasslands are places where wildlife thrives, atmospheric carbon is drawn down, and global health is maintained. Turfgrass is found nowhere in nature.
This list is not intended to vilify the industrial world. I do think we’ve built an amazing, complex machine, and we should continue to use it for ever-increasingly noble goals. Yet the time is now to imagine a new technology that learns from, respects, listens to, and emulates the trees and the forests that they make. What ideas do you have? I have many!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if . . .
. . . every time an old building came down or a lot was empty, a forest was planted?
. . . cars were restricted from having free access to everywhere, and many roads and parking lots were converted to forests?
. . . trains became so robust and easy to use, that most of us used them when we needed to go longer distances?
. . . bicycles and walking and electric buses were prioritized in our city and urban planning?
. . . regenerative farming practices eliminated tilling the soil all together and stopped destroying the soil?
All of these are entirely doable steps that we have the technology for already! I feel as excited about this as I once did about space travel when I was a kid, when I had a full-wall-sized mural of the Space Shuttle in my bedroom. The “new frontier” is, I believe, the forest. We should go home to the forest, where, after all, we got our beginnings, and we should bring the forest back to our homes.
Postscript:
A good friend read this essay and rightly pointed out that all of the above are “big things,” that are accomplished by changes in public policy, laws, government, etc. Perhaps one might want to think about “little things” that an individual could do in their own life. It can feel overwhelming and futile sometimes if one focuses too much on how big the problem seems when one watches the news or ponders catastrophes brought on by climate change and erratic weather. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion myself that watching the news and pondering catastrophes is, in fact, a futile practice. The way to bring about the new “forest technology” is to bring about a new consciousness, and the only way to do that is through individual human beings.
I also think we must go beyond the typical backyard composting-recycling-reducing waste-vegetarianism-plant a garden-go solar usual practices. I do all of these things (except vegetarianism), and these things are good, rewarding and definitely a key to the worldwide solution. Yet the solution is also to work on one’s consciousness, and, in particular, to work on one’s feelings of connection, interest and joy. So I will just mention one practice here that you might want to try, and invite you to think of many more things that you want to do. That practice is. . . to make friends with a tree! Find a tree that you pass by often, that you may have already noticed and appreciated for some characteristic or quality it has. When you visit that tree, try greeting it! Give it a name if you want. Perhaps you could find out what species of tree it is. Maybe you could plant the tree yourself! Then visit it, all year round, and notice how it changes, like you would notice a friend's new haircut or outfit. Perhaps you could draw it. Perhaps you could write about it, some observations or poetry. If this practice strikes you as silly, I understand. Our current machine consciousness does not encourage us to make friends with a tree. Yet, each tree is an ancient consciousness, a living being, and a good friend to all of us oxygen-breathers. So, give it a try, see if it makes you a little happier, see if it makes you feel more connected. See if it makes you notice other trees, too. See if it takes you to the forest more often, even if that “forest” is just an “empty lot” somewhere, which is, after all, not empty at all, it is a forest in the making.