Carbon-Eating Buildings, Zen Ecology, Gary Snyder, and Microbial Intelligence

Dennis Dollens

I • Introduction: Zen Ecology / Mindset

Mind regarded as an element of nature enables us to recalibrate life/cognition locating earth as a complex organism as well as a phenomenal force. In these pages, I look to Gary Snyder’s vision of nature, matter, and Zen through his concept terms: wild and wilderness. I apply his classifications to design and urban practices filtered through environmental sciences to approach climate change as an existential crash. Then, in response, I recategorize how buildings and cities can biologically act as working parts of nature’s nature. And, do so in line with natura naturans — “nature doing what nature does; literally, ‘nature naturing.’”42. In that sense, Snyder’s thought, “wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture”40p74 stays in mind and recalls Spinoza’s 1670 “Deus sive Natura”24a (God or Nature) as a strain of Western philosophy compatible with Southeast Asian Buddhism.

To that weave, Snyder’s Buddhism4.9 is responsive to design theory and worldly bioscience, ecology, autopoiesis,8.9 AI,8 and ELMs (engineered living materials).5.15.29. As Peter Matthiessen wrote: “In Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or flower petal.”21.p86. For this paper seashells and flower petals (or myriad analogues) are data sources I study to fill/empty cognitive realms with knowledge/observations referencing earth’s unicellular and multicellular intelligences and bio-performance.

In this endeavor I then use biomimetic stances to nurture theory/actions from which we can read seashell and flower petal stillness/fullness for morphological and behavioral properties in a context reflecting 60s, 70s, and 80s theory and Zen mindset/ecology. Those years fortified Snyder’s Beat and counterculture legacy and now serve our setting-up ecodialectic practices evolved from them. At the same time, I take note of his dharma-inspired sensibilities cultivating mind’s-eye visualizations useful to inventing biointelligent buildings, streets, forests, texts, and biomes. As Robert Hass wrote, Snyder’s 1990, “‘The Practice of the Wild’. . . is an example of the practice of the wild.”40pXXIV.

The above makes me think that for Snyder writing prioritized ethics, mindset, ecology, and dharma while homesteading40p84 the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To accommodate home building for forest/farm living, community, and contemplation — co-builder friends formed his work crew and early-on commandeered a small barn for group meditation. Eventually, their sangha-impulse replaced barn-sitting with a community-built hall declared the Ring of Bone Zendo.59. Referencing neighboring communal, back-to-the-land movements, Snyder wrote:

Many other young settlers found their place in northern California in the early seventies, so eventually there was a whole reinhabitory culture living this way in what we like to call Shasta Nation.”35p279.

To this day, that impulse operates in the zendo’s DNA — its energy expressed — in the care of design and materials in its building — whereafter, a poem by Lew Welch (Beat poet and Snyder’s good friend) celebrated its physical/phenomenal “reinhabitory” existence:

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the — clear stream

of it all

and vowed,

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

and then heard

“ring of bone” where

ring is what a

bell does.51p91.

The stanza, “ring is what / a bell does,” cues perception for what the zendo and meditation do — that is, reverberate with wild clarity in mindset and forest spaces. It speaks to cognition sounded, communicated, by organisms and inanimate objects. Likewise, The Practice of the Wild40 speaks of animate/inanimate being. Echoing Hass, it’s a handbook impacting ways-of-being in one’s head as well as being in nature. Contemplated as place-to-word exchanges between nature/cognition/culture it functions as tool and technology extended beyond thought to shape, form, and being.

Those qualities help us cope with today’s “wild edge” existential threats humans brought on themselves with global dependence on petroleum/coal. New design pathways on which to navigate and deploy sentient, cellular biology, technology, and teachings against menacing pollution and petroleum industries are now able to map/track and deliver activist responses. Bioremediating cellular life strengthens climate-change eradication by cultivating bacteria that can eat-and-metabolize airborne CO2 and CH4 contaminates. Snyder interwove mindset for arts/poetry as “wilderness areas” with:

I am intrigued by the sense that culture itself has a wild edge. As Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked years ago, the arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving . . . in the midst of civilized minds.35pXXIX.

II • Microbes and Bioremediation

Snyder’s thoughts encompass civil/wilderness mindsets for envisioning bioremedial actions in which the use of tools, devices, and dwellings — even if differently developed — run consistent with evolutionary time and animal-built structures. Interrelated science, tech, environment then rewards human knowledge with insight into functions divulging, for example, cells metabolizing CO2 for their own energy expenditure. The task is thus sustainable — and passive energy production with bacteria and fungi are subjects for design implementation necessitating research capable of bringing metabolic life to materials ranging from biofilms to skyscraper skins.

The dialectic is thus intended to develop research ideas for metabolically-driven design for large-scale conservation projects, architectures, reforestation, and repurposing26 refineries. They implicate domestic, city, and forest performance/health when their homeostatic behaviors join in pollution reduction. Those studies would then backup remediation protocols exploring how to reign-in other biochemical polluting activities and industries — mining, drilling, and refineries26 etc. — to make way for passive carbon-capture on the scale of wind and solar production. That notwithstanding, the 8 May 2024 Nature Perspective, cautions us that:

There are clear paths for renewable electricity to replace fossil-fuel-based energy, but the transport fuels and chemicals produced in oil refineries will still be needed. We can attempt to close the carbon cycle associated with their use by electrifying refinery processes and by changing the raw materials that go into a refinery from fossils fuels to carbon dioxide for making hydrocarbon fuels and to agricultural and municipal waste for making chemicals and polymers.50.

Nature’s editorial wrote:

In the net-zero scenario used by the authors, demand for conventionally produced carbon-based transportation fuels is still expected to exist, at around one-third of today’s levels. Such fuels will be needed in part to satisfy future energy needs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as countries there continue to develop economically. Use of fuel in aviation, which is difficult to electrify, will also increase as the tourism industry continues to boom. Some projections forecast less demand for conventionally produced fossil fuels, but all scenarios suggest that alternatives to the production of such fuels are needed.26.

For climate-change decarbonization31a — propositions offer to radically transform crude-oil/gas/coal extraction and burning through biological means of production — while eradicating or repurposing large segments of petroleum infrastructures by “electrifying refinery processes and by changing the raw materials that go into a refinery.”50. That vision, involving research and design, will be vastly aided if we comprehend the magnitude and potential of earth’s biodiversity as partners brining living intelligences to city infrastructures that increase nature’s abilities to metabolically harvest carbon emissions.18.21. Consider “a million trillion trillion”28 microbes biochemically eating CO2 molecules. Or, contemplate the quotation coming up where we learn of engineered living materials (ELMs)5.15 that breakdown plastics only when triggered by bacteria in landfills or compost. Those ELMs demonstrate always-on, 24/7 bioperformative technologies that may be candidates to jumpstart architectural/urban innovation — framed for instance, with Nature Briefings’ reminder that weather emergencies . . .

‘are driven by microbes, disturb microbes, or can be solved by microbes.’ It’s time their influence was recognized . . . [so that] different aspects of microbes and climate . . . are modulated by the environment and the urgent need to include the domain in climate discussions.25.

Considering that conclusion, research needs to detail the biological consumption or breakdown of plastics when dormant microorganisms are timed to wakeup and sprout at the end of a product’s lifespan. Nature Briefing: Microbiology, described the process where:

Bacterial spores added to plastic might help degrade plastic waste, but only once it reaches landfill. Most bacterial enzymes have not evolved to digest polymers, so the researchers selected a soil bacterium, Bacillus subtilis, that can degrade thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU).15.

The briefing alerted me to John Timmer’s report in Ars Technica46 confirming “one of the biggest problems” for the production of bacteria-infused materials is evolving organisms that can withstand the heat required for TPU manufacturing:

The materials often don’t provide an environment where living things can thrive. Spores, on the other hand, are used by bacteria to wait out otherwise intolerable conditions, and then return to normal growth when things improve. The idea behind the new work is that B. subtilis spores remain in suspended animation while the TPU is in use and then reactivate and digest it once it’s disposed of.46.

Nature Communications, was Timmer’s research source — the article was titled: “Biocomposite Thermoplastic Polyurethanes Containing Evolved Bacterial Spores As Living Fillers To Facilitate Polymer Disintegration.”15.46.

III • Decoupling Reincarnation

Theoretically compatible with the above experimentation and, amenable with Maturana and Varela’s take on cognition, I look to secular Buddhism as an autopoietic8.9 conciliator (see: p13). Associated design formulations then helps identify sentience as affinitive with biomaterialization, cellular intelligence, and technology. Doing so, for instance, when looking to prokaryotes and/or eukaryotes and positing cellular-life, hybridized and embedded within machines/materials, as autopoietic-composite unities. Thereafter, Buddhism becomes a mediator suitable to next stage mindset and research oversight necessary for deploying carbon-capture agents enacting CO2 / CH4 reduction.16. From these scenarios, we can identify/select microorganisms for testing their sensory/metabolic capacity when living/acting as parts of facades, roofs, beams, bridges, and towers.

Sentient microbes15 (e.g. Bacillus subtilis) can, for example, be transferred — or some of their metabolic properties can — to materials/objects for environmental and architectural pollution mitigation. Here then, as mostly eukaryotic lifeforms ourselves — we are cellular coalitions contributing/maintaining our wellbeing by joining with a world of co-federated soils, microbes, waters, and plants. What I’m proposing, is to cultivate the abilities of those microbes as co-dependent agents and logistically setup their abilities in material forms to battle climate change.

To do that, I see certain realms of phenomena as unverifiable data, materials, or beliefs and illogical. For instance, in our fragile state of individual minds/beings, we spend differently-timed lives that degrade at various rates to recycle our biochemical selves into the seas,44 soils,25 and sky. Ultimately returning us to wild atoms and molecules. Consciousness is therein a temporary condition of being we occupy — hosted by cellular bodies/brains. To our fleeting states of mind, secular Buddhism is a vast ruleset teaching us that all sentient beings are planetary allies — now endangered by the crisis of accumulating greenhouse gases and microplastics, et al. In this light, Snyder thought:

Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark. . . . And, there is a world of nature on the decay side, a world of beings who do rot and decay in the shade.40p118–119.

The case for eco-dharma speaks through sutras to our state as biodegradable microcosms of earth-matter and cellular life evolving along with culture and thought. I categorize some of those sutras as esoteric strictures — specifically reincarnation41 — as too remote from empirical science for consideration here. I advocate substituting verifiable data following for instance, on Owen Flanagan’s, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized.9. For this text then, biological bodies are comprehended as recyclable17 — but, minds are not.42. In this matter, Snyder’s notions of life recycled, while not directly addressing reincarnation, is suggested by his blunt description of physical decomposition:

Human beings have made much of purity and are repelled by blood, pollution, putrefaction. The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.40p119.

More directly, when Jim Harrison asked him what he through of reincarnation during filming for The Etiquette of Freedom, he replied: “I think it’s a charming metaphor. It’s an as-if proposition . . .”39. With metaphor in mind, I remember Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1850 line, “nature red in tooth and claw”45 and accompany it with its near-contemporary, survival of the fittest. I then introduce Snyders’ wild/wilderness words to Tennyson’s line with the Darwinian meme in tow.

Doing so timestamps these thoughts as materialist wild/wilderness and ready for expression in design as hybridized matter-to-place-to-intelligence. Wild intelligences makeready the mixture of intelligences from species, nature, art, dharma, and ecology as components-of-being. Co-resident cellular intelligences are then positioned to be “active in the generation of new forms of life and mind10” as propositions for environmental bioremediation. As John Bellamy Foster, quoting John Durant, wrote:

Darwin elaborated his views on nature and human nature within a larger vision of a world continuously active in the generation of new forms of life and mind. This was materialism, and Darwin knew it; but it was a naturalism that humanized nature every bit as much as it naturalized man.10.

For this essay, a strong materialist continuum includes Snyder’s activist projects transposed from ideas refined in texts to theories of designed materials and hybrid biointelligent machines. Resulting forms then radiate or embody conventions from eco-dharma and species’ rights to wide-ranging bioremediation restoration policies, products, and artistic creations.

My Tennyson/Darwin alliance strengthens recognition of those practices by rejecting reincarnation as not pragmatic. For this text, that disavowal points Buddhism in secular directions merging ethics and interrelationships to elaborate existence explored in The Practice of the Wild — and, on a more recent wavelength, in Flanagan’s Bodhisattva’s Brain.9. Snyder’s thoughts, deliberated through dharma, then remain in accord with non-theological teachings as they keep pace with breakthroughs in science/technology/computation.

So by defusing some of its precepts, I read Buddhism as compatible with autopoiesis8.9 and then read autopoiesis as compatible with ecoMarxism10.29a related to Snyder’s writing. This subjective unification opens other philosophies or sciences to groundings in bio-regeneration and material performance in design practices. Articulated as fundamental principles in Marx’s Nature, Foster writes, that for Marx nature and human nature/labor/tools are interlinked, interdependent, and under social and ecological stress. Forster tell us:

In his developed political economy, as presented in Capital, Marx employed the concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel) to define the labor process as ‘a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.’ Yet an ‘irreparable rift’ had emerged in this metabolism as a result of capitalist relations of production and the antagonistic separation of town and country. Hence under the society of associated producers it would be necessary to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way.’. . . Moreover, Marx’s concept of metabolic rift in the relation between town and country, human beings, and the earth allowed him to penetrate to the roots of what historians have sometimes called the ‘second agricultural revolution.’. . .10.Kindle p217.

Metabolic rift10 surfaces as a phrase denoting life disruption and is spot-on for naming species loss in a climate of excessive airborne and waterborne contaminates emphasizing the existential points that:

. . . nothing comes from nothing and nothing being destroyed can be reduced to nothing. All of material existence [is] interdependent, arising from (and passing away again into) atoms — organized in unending patterns to produce new realities.10.

IV • Autopoiesis Meets Buddhism

Snyder’s decades of writing and advocacy are underpinned by his years at Reed College (Portland, OR), UC Berkeley for Asian Studies (languages/cultures), and non-consecutive residencies in Kyoto monasteries where, in 1962, he received his dharma name of Chofu. Discussing that period toward the end of The Practice of the Wild, he recalled temple life and Zen training that from the start, bridged to his Pacific Coast, Beat poetry, and environmental experiences and sensibilities. Like the Ring of Bone’s bell, that practice still resonates where:

Zen training [is] a model of hard, clean, worthy schooling. I’ll describe my experience as a koji (lay adept) at the monastery of Daitoku-ji, a Rinzai Zen sect temple in Kyoto, in the sixties. We sat cross-legged in meditation a minimum of five hours a day. In the breaks everyone did physical work — gardening, pickling, firewood cutting, cleaning the baths, taking turns in the kitchen. There were interviews with the teacher, Oda Sessō Rōshi, at least twice a day. At that moment we were expected to make a presentation of our grasp of the koan that had been assigned us.

We were expected to memorize certain sutras and conduct a number of small rituals. Daily life proceeded by an etiquette and a vocabulary that was truly archaic. A steady schedule of meditation and work was folded into weekly, monthly, and annual cycles of ceremonies and observations which went back to Song-dynasty China and in part clear back to the India of Shakyamuni’s [Buddha’s] time. Sleep was short, the food was meager, the rooms spare and unheated, but this (in the sixties) was as true in the worker’s or farmer’s world as it was in the monastery.40p158–159.

Study and meditation then bookended Snyder’s Japan experiences with those of his American West Coast mountains, rivers, indigenous cultures/languages, and Sierra family home and community. As essential groundings, they helped extrapolate new dharma from ancient and apply it to Pacific Rim12 sensibilities and activism — a kind of ecological/philosophical syncretism. But, also a framework for dealing with cognitive/material dialectical challenges.

In the context of an ongoing conversation, Snyder’s poetry/prose initiates us into a meditative frame fitting the autopoietic axiom: life = cognition. That axiom invokes cognition/intelligence as theorized in the early 1970s by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition.8.9. To their concept of life/cognition, I relate dialectic’s role in unfolding living biomes, ecology, and nature in partnership with science testifying through Rachel Carson’s words pointing out the “extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment.” I found that quotation in Marx’s Nature,10 where Foster situated it as:

A dialectical approach . . . [in which] organisms in general do not simply adapt to their environment; they also affect that environment in various ways, and by affecting it change it. The relationship is therefore a reciprocal one. . . . An ecological community and its environment must therefore be seen as a dialectical whole; one in which different levels of existence are ontologically significant — and in which there is no overall purpose [teleology] guiding these communities.10.

“Dialectical whole,” considered where extended cognition, secular Buddhism, cellular life, and autopoiesis establish debate input I see engaging with AI, and biosciences to align against fossil-fuel addiction. Through them, debate readies design propositions working to describe metabolic intelligences suitable for building materials and urban infrastructures and how they can bring life properties to architectures and urban/landscape remediation. I find value in thinking of biologically proactive cities and building examined through a filter of Snyder-influenced pathways exploring microbial performance theorized with autopoiesis and dharma. That range of associations brings his works into the present influencing this text’s discussion of bioremediating architectures in a working frame of wild and wildernesses. (Figs. 1. 2. 3.)

Historically witnessed and dispersed by the trajectory of AI — machine intelligence surpasses what Alan Turing called “thinking machines” in the 1940s and early-1950s (which I come back to), while affirmatively answering his own question “can machines think?”5a.48a. To those roots of programming, add a period during the 1970s when Maturana and Varela with Ricardo Uribe49a tested their theory of autopoiesis22..23 with digital algorithms mimicking life systems. Their beta-models of AL were programmed as cellular automata — CAs — in the mode of John Conway’s Game of Life.2a.56. Those efforts structured digital life to become forerunners of today’s artificial intelligence/life using large language models (LLMs) in digital generation — troublesome/scary as they are — with AI’s role in mind and enhanced-mind discovery.

One opportunity here is in finding tie-ins with Varela’s practice and Snyder’s wild for seeking alternative varieties of life, mind, intelligence to engage with the idea that buildings and infrastructures can include semi-intelligent microbial organisms (life) working metabolically to rebalance the environment. Varela wrote foundations for like definitions in “Patterns of Life: Intertwining Identity and Cognition.”49. The point here: he defined performative expectations for artificial life (AL) and AI early on hinted at through encounters with CAs simulating computational life. That life/intelligence, as they function in LLM-trained intelligences, echoes Turing’s old question, “can machines think?”5a considered here as: can buildings think? when underpinned with autopoietic theory:

An autopoietic system . . . organized . . . as a network of processes of production (synthesis and destruction) . . . such that these components: (i) continuously regenerate and realize the network that produces them, and (ii) constitute the system as a distinguishable unity [a distinct identity/individual] in the domain [environment] in which they exist.49.

With the above contribution, I extend autopoietic qualities between biological and computational life to imagine “an ecological community” consisting of metabolic neighborhoods or ecotones crisscrossed by neural or mycorrhizal pathways and digital/material infrastructures. Those communities are here poised to exist in a biological proposition — part autopoietic theory, part dharma, part cell life. They fit together in a scenario coded and/or hybridized for working out how cellular intelligences can inhabit bioactive architectures, machines, and nature and stay viable for cascading-life generations. To my eyes, engineered living materials (ELMs)5.15.29.46.58 appearing in laboratory tests are proof of concepts fabricated, materials containing/enacting/housing cellular life.

In design terms, I see ELMs segueing-back to Foster’s versions of Marx’s Nature10 by agreeing that concepts of bioremediation are consistent with cellular cognition/intelligences within nature’s “reciprocal” partnerships for understandings of ecoMarxism6 and Darwinian metabolic rift. In that alliance Varela’s Buddhist-tinged “Patterns of Life” becomes part of a search for biological attributes that describe sentience for single-cell intelligence through “simulation and analysis of minimal autopoietic organization.”49. Varela saw that a “distinguishable unity,” (what I read as an individual or living cellular agent), can be computationally or physically demonstrated. If that takes place, they can be joined together as members of a distinguishable community of intelligent, auto-regulating systems, recalling the coming together and breaking apart of the communal nature/cognition of hives, swarms, colonies, flocks, zendos, and populations.

Thereafter, consolidating AI with living agents, communities, or biomes leads to uncovering how bioremedial design could learn from AI’s successes in biomedical research — (e.g. AI’s protein discoveries and mathematics demonstrated by Alphafold and AlphaProof.) What we need are data sources and models as harbingers of generative architectural design-tools capable of providing feasible breakthroughs to visualize “distinguishable unities” or distinguishable communities as part of bioarchitectural dialectics. The intention, is to restart our own thinking in order to produce self-sufficient carbon-eradicating structures that metabolize CO2, CH4 — in a sense, turning most new construction into passive carbon-capture biomachines.

For me, a mindset reboot happened after using ChatGTP as a tool to generate bonelike structural systems (Figs. 1. 2.) that encouraged me to use AI use in design research. I first asked the Perplexity30 app to:

Explain Maturana’s and Varela’s theory of Autopoiesis in relation to Buddhism.30.

Perplexity summarized and delivered this explanation:

Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, which focuses on self-regulating systems, can be related to Buddhism. The concept of autopoiesis aligns with the Buddhist idea of interconnectedness and the self-regulating nature of the mind. Maturana and Varela defined an autopoietic system as a self-regenerating network of processes, which resonates with the Buddhist emphasis on the interconnectedness of all phenomena and the constant flux of the self. This connection has been acknowledged in the context of a classic Buddhist model for the cultivation of ethics and mindfulness. The integration of biology, cognition, and epistemology in Maturana and Varela’s work aligns with the holistic understanding of the mind and reality in Buddhism. Furthermore, Varela himself expressed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. This convergence suggests that Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis shares common ground with Buddhist philosophy, particularly in terms of interconnectedness, self-regulation, and the nature of reality.30.

In a nutshell, the Perplexity quotation shows points for crossover compatibility where autopoiesis functions with systems theories and extended cognition pertinent to Snyder’s biological and ecological wild/wilderness. Combining those forces we may appropriate non-teleological Buddhist thoughts and introduce them to metabolic design governing physical objects and architectures. Together they aid contemplation of earth functions regrouped for integrating intelligence, matter, and organisms as autopoietic unities.8.9. Resulting composites then provide functionality to biointelligent buildings and urbanisms.

Related, Wikipedia cites Snyder’s 1973 New York Quarterly interview voicing his desire to “tie together biology, mysticism, prehistory, and general systems theory.”54. In that sphere, an earlier 1992 statement associates him with non-linear dynamics:

Our understanding of nature has been radically altered by systems theory as applied to ecology, and in particular to the very cogent subdisciplines called.35p270.

Along with non-linear dynamics and complexity, present understanding and concepts of reality continue to be altered by discoveries in genetics, AI, biology, medicine, and instrumentation figuring in microscopy, communications, and laser technology. Those fields gradually infiltrate public perception for mindset change when comprehended as sometimes producing non-invasive feedback/feedforth directed toward earth stewardship.

Regarding earthcare/interbeing in the above mode where cultural and environmental reality differ (e.g. Tibet/California) — I look to William deBuys4.7 on Roshi Joan Halifax.13a. DeBuys’s book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, plays a part in a worldview of activist engagement and biological/cultural diversity where personal attention and compassion toward traditional cultures (and crafts and mindset) manifests response in community/environment service — e.g., for deBuys and Halifax, journeying to Nepal for dispensing medical aid village by village.

Consequently, I find physical energy and compassionate mindset consistent with views on intelligent cellular sentience/existence based in earthcare and related disciplines spoken to by dharma,7 genetics, and firsthand paradigmatic observations. Here too, we must remember compassion is often driven behind-the-scenes by scholarship and actions derived from research in science, engineering, history, and the arts communicating empirical data/philosophy to remote regions and alternative realities. Then, making that journey is a two-way exchange of data, perspective, traditions, and world outlook that must be consulted. The transformative distribution of information — that is knowledge — thus bridges compassionate actions by opening recipient-to-recipient impact.

Above knowledge-sharing includes songs, poems, scrolls, and mandalas as quoted below. Therefore, it’s to the transference of mindset/nature I turn, looking to the cultural direction of ink-and-brush painting as Snyder spoke of them in The Practice of the Wild, is to also acknowledge his thoughts on the relationship of mandala mapping to calligraphy and sumi painting. He wrote:

While the Buddhist tradition of North India and Tibet made the mandala — painted or drawn charts of the positions of consciousness and cause-and-effect chains — their visual teaching aids, the Chan tradition of China (especially the Southern Song) did something similar (I will venture to suggest) with landscape painting. If a scroll is taken as a kind of Chinese mandala, then all the characters in it are our various little selves, and the cliffs, trees, waterfalls, and clouds are our own changes and stations [outposts]. (Swampy reedy thicket along a stream — what does that say?) Each type of ecological system is a different mandala, a different imagination. Again the Ainu term iworu, field-of-beings, comes to mind.40location1198.

The takeaway is in the expansion of terms to integrate mandalalike strategies in imagery/mapping with representative states of placeness. As topological markers it’s extended here to autopoietic theory/design for secular Buddhist ways-of-communicating and ways-of-being — Buddha-fields — or as Snyder pictures, as “fields-of-being.” Intersected with the below, we meet up with Wen C. Fong’s words on ancient calligraphy and painting. His text looks through microbiology for “cause-and-effect chains,” I link to bioremedial design/actions in reforestation or CO2 mitigation:

. . . considered a kind of DNA imprint — along with [their] genetic mutability — from which all subsequent [design] idioms emerge. This artistic process of replication parallels the anthropological concept of genealogy.10a.p34.

Fong’s is a metaphorical reading of DNA — epigenetic more than biogenetic. Nevertheless, from his thinking/writing metabolic options appear possible for discovering markers leading to change and materialized living intelligences that result in devices/images/procedures affecting decarbonization-design and the impetus to experiment with mindset as akin to cellular matrices, mandalas, and design bioremediation. Finding a plan for thinking, we can equip individuals and communities to analyze, halt, and retool their own violations against nature by equipping buildings, electronics, and machines with functioning metabolic abilities.

V • Calligraphic and Ink Painted Nature

The Practice of the Wild “investigate[s] the meaning of wild” gauged in matter and cognition, culture and species. Snyder wrote,

The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.”40.

I read his take on “ordering of impermanence” to differentiate beliefs/understandings of decay in living agents, environments, houses, and cities when counted as the workings of wild nature. A deep trait in Buddhism. In that frame, unraveling raw data challenged my own stereotypes when they demonstrate how Dōgen’s (1200–1253) metaphysic/metaphoric riffs are used. For instance, when contrasting “trees, mountains and walls”38 (or similar) as distinguishable unities where “practice is the path”40 use puzzles/riddles/koans as mind/associative expanders. Therein, Koans are methodological tools. Snyder explained koans in an Earth House Hold footnote:

Koans are usually short anecdotes concerning the incomprehensible and illogical behavior and language of certain key Chineses Zen Masters of the T’ang Dynasty. The koan assigned to the student is the subject of his meditation, and his understanding of it is the subject of sanzen, an interview with the Zen Master. Very advanced students are also required to relate koan-understanding to the intellectual concepts of Buddhist philosophy.37a.Footnote 2.p45.

In related instances, Snyder voices Dōgen’s writing in recordings38 that I pair here with Chinese/Japanese handscroll paintings as aids to practice reading images as words and states of being. In the shadow of Dōgen teachings, Snyder’s study of ink and brush painting expands his own work, for example, in his poem “Endless Streams and Mountains.”34p595. There, calligraphic paintings depict nature side-by-side with poems and art-historic narratives that accomplish an autopoietic unity comprising nature/culture/mind. That framing organizes meanings, making it receptive — if retrospectively — to Fong’s 2014, Art as History: Calligraphy and Painting as One. For instance Fong thinks:

. . . calligraphy and painting present pictorial diagrams (tuzai) done by artists throughout the ages, these . . . words help us to cross over to the Chinese visual world of seeing artistic representations of objects in nature (zhuang wuxing) as artists’ presentations of their own expressive Selves (biao wuyi). . . .

The eight-century Tang master Zhang Zao (active ca. 766–778) described his landscape painting as “reaching outward to emulate Creation, and turning inward to master the Mind.” By this dualistic way of thinking, Chinese painting has always been, at one and the same time, a representation of the Object and a presentation of the Self. The key to Chinese painting is its calligraphic brushwork. The subject of a calligraphic painting is known as the trace (mark or touch) of brush or ink (biji or moji) — that is, an extension of the artist’s own bodily presence.10a.p20.

A few pages on Fong addresses the writer/artist discussed by the 8th-century historian of calligraphy — Zhang Huaiguan — arguing that:

. . . the image as sign resides not only in the image but also in the body and the mind of the painter or the calligrapher as the sign maker. Thus, both Chinese calligraphy and painting, as autographic signs, are referred to as xinyin, or images of the mind.10a.p22.

The Practice of the Wild is thus xinyin — autographic words as semiotic worlds referencing Dōgen and the ancestry of ink/brush “traces.” Snyder came to those words through attraction met with scholarship and meditation embodying the persona of a Beat traveler and woodsman rendered in the scrolls.

Looking to Hugo Munsterberg’s Landscape Painting of China and Japan24 (a text Snyder conceivably knew) further tells us of scroll paintings’ two-thousand-year+ heritage. Acknowledging historic inheritance, Snyder consulted the art ancestry of Zen/Chan to understand previous generations of Asian meditative-art as continuous with nature/mind portrayed in transmissions of mountains, streams, trees, villages, and wayfarers on paper and silk. What Fong called the “representation-presentation dialectic,”10a.p20 Snyder intuitively applied to wild/wilderness mindset.

Munsterberg’s 1955 text describes how handscrolls were traditionally consulted in lieu of outdoor, wild experiences. As invocations of nature, time, and vision they referenced wild-mind domains reflected by Snyder’s thinking captured in “Endless Streams and Mountains.”34.p595. Furthermore, those experiences join cultural history, time/place, and antecedent/consequence through which Munsterberg concluded that by the 10th/11th centuries: “the monochrome scroll . . . was fully developed” to the extent that “landscape painting made its greatest strides.”

Up to [that] time Buddhist and Taoist painting had been equally important, but now landscape was supreme, and the emphasis upon it led to one of the most glorious creative epochs in the history of Chinese or, for that matter, any other art. While the T’ang painters [618 to 907] had always seen the landscape in relation to human activity, the tenth-century artists created a pure landscape in which the figures were subordinate to the natural setting. Their inspiration came from nature, and many accounts tell how the painters of these magnificent scrolls would wander for days in the wilderness, seeking inspiration among the mountains and valleys, though their ambition was never to describe a particular scene but to interpret the spirit of nature itself, the mysterious essence which vitalizes the whole of creation.24.

With reinforcement from Fong’s10a and Munsterberg’s24 studies, I look to the first poem in Snyder’s book, Mountains and Rivers Without End.34. Titled, “Endless Streams and Mountains,”34.p595 the poem pays tribute to the handscroll, “Streams and Mountains Without End,” housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art,6.p10 (not currently on display). Unfurled, the scroll reveals a thirty-six-footlong panorama with colophons. It’s an antecedent to Snyder’s poetic mindset as he considered streams and mountains and trees and travelers and ink paintings. In that rollout, he cognitively journeyed over and chronicled imagery depicting waters, cliffs, trees, forests, settlements, and inhabitants — where, in Munsterberg’s words, “figures were subordinate to the natural setting.” Giving visual credence, The Practice of the Wild states:

‘Mountains and waters’ [are] a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. As such it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial. The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs.40p109.

The totality of nature as a mindmap allows charting a course for integrative thinking of holistic systems and a new reading of pancognition as in superorganism earth. A few lines earlier, Snyder wrote:

In common usage the compound “mountains and waters” — shan-shui in Chinese — is the straightforward term for landscape. Landscape painting is ‘mountains and waters pictures.’ (A mountain range is sometimes also termed mai, a ‘pulse’ or ‘vein’ — as a network of veins on the back of a hand.) One does not need to be a specialist to observe that landforms forms are a play of stream-cutting and ridge-resistance and that waters and hills interpenetrate in endlessly branching rhythms. The Chinese feel for land has always incorporated this sense of a dialectic of rock and water, of downward flow and rocky uplift, and of the dynamism and ‘slow flowing’ of earth-forms. There are several surviving large Chinese horizontal handscrolls from premodern modern eras titled something like ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End.’40p109. My italics.

By positioning emptiness/fullness in the above’s “dialectic of rock and water,” Snyder set give-and-take measures we can use to debate rights of earth, water, and trees as participants in wild, sentient nature. I identify that dialectical search6 for instigating design of life-systems (e.g. microbes, soils, and computation) unseen but at work in real mountains and rivers.34. However, in the poem, (and elsewhere) Snyder’s words metaphorically mirror brush strokes — artistic markings (traces in Fong’s10a world), that chronicle a painter’s mindset and the scene’s aura, not landscape fidelity. Those markings are here seen as elements/phenomena explored for buildup/breakdown of natural thought — ink depictions read as design-environment input/feedback.

For our consideration, brush and ink artworks prompt visualizing wild/wilderness matter and being in our mind’s-eye. Not only contemplation of dharma and images, but theory-of-mind2 tells us visions/aura of nature impact art, literature, cities, architectures, and existential practices when transferred from mind to physical creations. Snyder maintained that the art of the scroll — painting-as-calligraphy and calligraphy-as-painting10a — was synonymous with wild mindset as components of meditation. Progressive lineages suggest migrating painting-to-thought and poem-to-thought to bond biology, computation, and AI with earthcare and mindfulness practices. Practices then contributes to generative dialectics brought to the aid of design theory addressing landscape recovery, water purification, urban agricultures, and new constructions.

In related ways, Mark Gonnerman, analyzing Snyder in his introduction to A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End,11 stresses that “Ekphrasis — a term from Greek rhetoric” — means “to tell in full . . . ”

. . . ‘the verbal representation of a visual representation.’. . . [when a] poem takes its inspiration from one of the visual arts, usually painting. In his note on ‘Endless Streams and Mountains,’[34p595] Snyder mentions that ‘East Asian landscape paintings invite commentary. In a way the painting is not fully realized until several centuries of poems [colophons] have been added’ . . . . [In this sense, Snyder’s] Mountains and Rivers [Without End] is yet another commentary that again brings this painting — its words and images — to life.”11.

Contemplated by inquiring minds, ink/brush paintings, realized through long apprenticeships and demanding learning curves, depict qualities of fullness/emptiness in meditative sweeps of nature and human existence. To differently conjure such sweep, biohybridized machine/life, considering technologically inspired 2D, 3D, and AI-assisted design is a logical proposition. Bioremedial design, as an extension of mind thus looks to future-oriented dialectics to generate discussions that makeready for non-toxic machine and hand-built creation that sequesters or metabolize CO2. (Figs. 1. 2. 3.)

VI • Extended Phenotypes — Extended Cognition

Built or manufactured objects and buildings, conceived as nearing sentience, become extensions of our ways-of-thinking where, in theory, all constructions and infrastructures are designated extended phenotypes.2. Those works are sheltered within the wild as well as within human thought processed in eye-to-hand, hand-to-tool, and tool-to-machine procedures. They show us to be future-oriented, tool-augmented, beings — existing as builders/thinkers benefiting from eons of evolutionary craft implemented in tools/dwellings/earthworks.

Therefore, generalizing from the above locates AI within the scope of biological-to-mechanical tool making and autopoietic hybridization.18. That occupation theoretically sets up biointelligent-machines, tools, materials, electronics, and buildings as extended phenotypes in the linage of animal-extended phenotypes: e.g. burrows, hives, cocoons, webs, shells, and anthills. Published in 1982 by Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype3 claimed that differing built/extruded forms are dependent on evolutionary biology realized in physical matter participating in nature. I see that proposition as including the products of human design and construction. Likewise, and equally powerful, J. Scott Turner’s The Extended Organism48 extends Dawkins’s theory with further analysis of metabolic and physiological impact. Turner writes:

. . . animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as, the more conventionally defined organs such as kidneys, hearts, lungs, or livers48p2 . . . these mechanisms involve structures built by the colony inhabitants, structures which harness and transform both metabolic energy and physical energy in the environment to power the external physiology that social homeostasis requires.48p187.

Think of how we relate to houses, apartments, and huts. In kindred ways, bees are related to hives; birds to nests, termites to termitaries; spiders to webs. At core, we find lessons in biologically-built, cross-specie architectures exposing intelligent material/method selection as sustainable precursors for diagnosing then redesigning our own compromised urban/wild environments. In that script, planet-wide climate-change unmasks most of our buildings and infrastructures as energy liabilities — unlike animal-built dwellings that decompose or revert back to wild states. Insult to injury . . . our buildings depend on toxic processes to fabricate, transport, erect, and maintain — then, years later, we reverse construction — demolishing, carting away, and dumping them.

Responsively, architectures in a Snyder-inflected wild gives logic to increase research partnerships with writers, biologists, and programmers to cultivate an architectural wild. Accordingly, I think Jason Wirth’s Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis57 invites us to borrow from dharma and nature to realize potent bioactive mojo.

The Wild . . . is not only in the mountains or [in Snyder’s words] . . . ‘where the bears are.’ It is also found in the depths of our own minds, at the heart of language, repressed even within the heart of our metropolises. . . . The Wild is not something outside of or beyond or wholly otherwise than us. That we think so is part of the nub of the ecological crisis. The landscape within is the landscape without and vice versa.57.

In Wirth’s text and in Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild — depths of our evolutionary and environmental development round out ways-of-being resulting in feedback/feedforth perception and language as generative (analog-to-digital) design data. Those transformations enhance thinking patterns (poems, scrolls, theory, drawings, models, buildings) spawning visualizations from wilderness to wild. Thus situated, theories of metabolic architectures back up sketches and models arrived at through dialectical/meditative/wild practices foregrounding conceptualizations as starting points. (Figs. 1. 2. 3.)

Pushing deeper into social systems, bioremedial-design infrastructures articulate parameters for redressing injustices43 targeting not only forests and mountains but reaching to groups victimized by ethical breaches troubling neighborhoods, dwellings, education, and healthcare. Those violations are intermingled with climate and environmental wrong doings addressable, in part, by redoubling and expanding enforcement of legal rights43 for abused populations and communities. In parallel, enhanced neighborhood education, technologies, and employment must be instituted with services and monetary reparations1 owed to countries, communities, families, and open spaces (or lack of) for persistent and ongoing pillaging. In this figuration, community bioremediation cannot be separated as a tool from environment and global sustainability.

Historic and ongoing violations thus effect habitat recovery pointing out vulnerable species and communities exposed to religious, racial, and environmental discrimination served with overdoses of toxic chemicals. Probing injustices must then deploy forensic52 procedures derived from current and former discriminatory transgressions requiring not only investigation, but acts of contrition and compensation.1. Environmental and social infractions — over decades and centuries — continue to be aggravated by urban red-lining and gerrymandering conducted and condoned using corporate justifications masking destruction by industrial operations typified by petroleum-linked exploration, refining, dumping, and burning. Conditioned politically, bureaucracies flourish in mismanaging public trusts, health, education, and environment. Those victimizations culminate in legacies of hateful and persistent oppression, pathological racism, masked slavery, and induced ignorance — all festering toward social unrest contributing to environmental chaos.

VII • Landscapes Within / Landscapes Without

Bearing in mind that bioremediation includes ethical procedures, I listen to Snyder asking: “Where do we start to resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild?” He continued:

The depths of mind, the unconscious [is] . . . our inner wilderness areas . . . [where] the body is, so to speak in the mind. They are both wild.40.

By locating the depths of mind as regions in which “the unconscious, [is] our inner wilderness.” We may take that identity, and “start to resolve the dichotomy” he speaks of by looking to the emptiness/fullness of mind in the context of human-aggravated contamination and its threat to survival.

Biointelligences dealing within the dichotomies of the civilized and the wild — are partially demystified by the workings of extended cognition2 — contemplated as working within the integrated matter/cells of living systems. For example, with soil and plant sentience dependent on non-neurological cellular intelligence resident in landscapes, forests, oceans, and air. That intelligence, as Snyder relayed, pervades mountains and streams and rivers and soils and us.

Hypothesized by Andy Clark2 (and colleagues), extended cognition is biologically and phenomenally akin to sensemaking by environments, objects, matter, and organisms. In this case, sensemaking is sometimes actively, sometimes subconsciously dispersed throughout nature in things and lifeforms and minds where it works with extended phenotypes. Consolidating abilities, extended phenotypes with extended cognition enrich interspecie communications conducted through vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, speech, thought, electromagnetism, bioluminescence, and biochemical/pheromone signaling. Yet, because of those and alternative input routes, we apprehend properties of cognition coexisting with extended phenotypes while both relate to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’s injunction, not to:

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. . . make the mistake of imagining that the nature of mind is exclusive to our mind only. It is in fact the nature of everything. It can never be said too often that to realize the nature of mind is to realize the nature of all things.41p47.

Then, if wild is “the nature of all things” — our mindsets are wild even while creating new strains of materials, spaces, bodies, buildings, and intelligences. For parallel generation, evolved/evolving life performs mental inner tasks as it participates in physical outer feats of existence. And, as Wirth observed, Snyder’s thoughts were events where “the landscape within is the landscape without.”57p20Kindle. To that state, cognition stimulated by animate and inanimate systems absorbs input from the environment while registering human-caused fossil-fuel proliferation as a pernicious force of biome destruction. That threat, shadowed by similar ones, signals deep cognitive, pathological, and ontological catastrophe for all humans and other species, while simultaneously endangering a vast array of species.

Mindfulness, attending to landscapes within and without, articulates routes to shape design theory aligning it to goals of stabilizing the health of forests, soils,53 seas,44.58 grasslands,53 urban neighborhoods, and the atmosphere. (Figs. 1. 2. 3.) Among design pathways, quietness and compassion act as mental safe-spaces for nurturing rehabilitation consistent with preservation and ecological oversight. They recognize the cognitive need to prioritize the end of oil as a dominant source of energy and the possible destroyer of habitable earth. In consequence, designing states of mind may be tasked to produce prototypes of hybrid autopoietic22.23 ideas and materials that test design foundations where:

. . . every autopoietic systems is a unity of many interdependencies, when one dimension [body, object] in the system is changed, the whole organism undergoes correlative changes in many dimensions at the same time.22p116.

For pollution eradication, the above’s “correlative changes” — exemplified by out-of-wack CO2 and CH4 — is nearing cataclysmic proportions requiring shutdown, bio-reinvention26, and massive cleanup/conversions.25. The resulting dichotomy — fossil fuel vs. planetary health — is then a portrait of oppositional (dialectical) forces charged with overcoming industry in order to stabilize greenhouse-gasses.

VIII • Life = Cognition

Considering buildings as big, inhabitable biomachines, I bring back the earlier discussed autopoietic maxim: life = cognition (p10). Doing so, I project cell intelligences as possible components synced to biologically attuned carbon-capture systems. We can expand this premise to theorize intelligent machines/buildings with both onboard biological sentience watched over by AI monitors whose heritage is shared by engineered living materials.15.46. Then, according to Maturana and Varela, hybrid components can be scripted as “structural couplings”22p75 sanctioning “both organisms and environment [to] undergo transformations.”22p102.

Following, I splice Snyder’s quotation noting dynamic system transformations and juggle time and space to align it with Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura?24a The goal is to recognize Snyder on a philosophical timeline acknowledging earth as a superorganism consistent with Spinoza’s reasoning — God is Nature / Nature is God. This siting does double duty for Snyder in a typology of wild/wilderness where his:

Science . . . rightly propose[s] that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing — by definition — that we do or experience in life is ‘unnatural.’40loc113.

I subscribe to that. It closes The Practice of the Wild’s section, “Larger Than a Wolf, Smaller Than an Elk.”40p113–118. It expresses a cognitive zone where “Systems theory provid[s] equations but few metaphors.”40p116–117 In addition, it sounds a variety of topsy-turvy koan-like18 Buddha-fields (existential enigmas) belonging to Dōgenesque place-, thing-, and being-dynamics. For example, in Snyder’s own topsy-turvy logic.

As for towns and cities — they are (to those who can see) old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes, blowdowns and burns, the leavings after floods, coral colonies, paper-wasp nests, beehives, rotting logs, watercourses, rock-cleavage lines, ledge strata layers, guano heaps, feeding frenzies, courting and strutting bowers, lookout rocks, and ground-squirrel apartments. And for a few people they are also palaces.40p118

Coming to terms with koan18 generative logic then identifies a pathway to “insight for Zen [or design] students.” It challenges conceptualizing full/empty and nature/culture binaries in order to contemplate related life/material combinations and neurological and non-neurological intelligences. Matter and typologies of intelligence are therein central to research investigating and distinguishing microbial sentience/behaviors intended to bring a measure of sentience to physical objects on the order of buildings, bridges, and streets. Snyder’s footnote on “koan study” in Earth House Hold37a gives his working definition:

Koans are usually short anecdotes concerning the incomprehensible and illogical behavior and language of certain key Chinese Zen Masters of the T’ang Dynasty. The koan assigned to the student is the subject of his meditation, and his understanding of it is the subject of sanzen, an interview with the Zen Master. . . advanced students are also required to relate koan-understanding to the intellectual concepts of Buddhist philosophy.37a.Note 2 p45.

I think koans are under-utalized perceptual exercises effective for developing interpretive logic skills for unraveling seemingly “incomprehensible” (sometimes off-the-wall) associations and analogies — not head games. Taking koans as puzzles (mind workouts) and applying them to “incomprehensible” biologies of life/matter then loosens us up to imagine design’s existential scenarios for microbe sentience/intelligence in archaea, fungi, protists, plants, etc. — all operative without brains, nerves, and/or hearts.

With life/cognition systems of cellular-to-animal orders — metabolizing CO2 and CH4 — autopoiesis aids in charting ways to write, combine, and then draw theoretical networks — and generative logic to expand mental readiness for designing biointelligent building materials intended to meet new challenges. In a basic historic sense, Turing’s 1950 Imitation Game question “can machines think?” performs like a koan. In an ironic AI twist, now Perplexity (like generations of human scholars) wrote, “Alan Turing asked the question “Can machines think?” in his seminal essay titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” [. . .] published in the journal Mind.”5a.48a.

Turing’s philosophical marker is a landmark resprouting mindset for new generations of design articulating function and fabrication that, in turn, link biology and autopoiesis to extend cognition2 making possible intelligent buildings. It provides receptivity for sourcing scientific literature and data used to inspire behaviors in buildings, cities, and infrastructures associated with organisms underemployed in building-site soils. Reading Snyder’s views now includes biointelligence in step with his mindset where organisms occupy:

. . . ‘thermodynamic’ niches. Whether or not their consciousness is identical with that of the humans is a moot point. Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? ‘Whoever told people that ‘Mind’ means thoughts, opinions, ideas and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses’ says Dōgen.40p21.

Corresponding with that text, Snyder references Dōgen’s “‘The rights of non-human nature’” on page one of The Old Ways33 (1977). At the same time, he remembers themes pioneered in Christopher Stone’s 1972, “Do Trees Have Standing?43. Snyder wrote he would like:

. . . to think of a new definition of humanism and a new definition of democracy that would include the nonhuman. . . . This is what I think we mean by ecological conscience.34p369.

A couple of pages on, Snyder spoke of philosopher/ecologist Eugene Odum’s thoughts on systemic intelligences represented by trees, vegetation, plankton, and macroalgae:

If we can tentatively accommodate the possibility that nature has a degree of authenticity and intelligence that requires we look at it more sensitively, then we can move to the next step. . . . The ecologist Eugene Odum uses the term “biomass.” Life-biomass, he says, is stored information in the cells and in the genes. . . . [Where] more information of a higher order of sophistication and complexity [is] stored in a few square yards of forest than there is in all the libraries of mankind.34p370.

Odum’s projection of biomass as memory bank may be correct. Dennis Overbye reports that in recent calculations biologists and geologists have found:

. . . more living cells on Earth — a million trillion trillion . . . a 1 followed by 30 zeros — than there are stars in the universe or grains of sand on our planet. . . . The overwhelming majority of these cells are microbes, too small to see with the unaided eye; a great many are cyanobacteria, the tiny bubbles of energy and chemistry that churn away in plants and in the seas assembling life as we know it and mining sunlight to manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe.28.

Comprehending that astonishing number — “a 1 followed by 30 zeros” — research is documenting non-neurological soil14.53 collaboratives Odum located in that “few square yards of forest.”13p370. The notion that cellular, non-neurological intelligences are at work in the earth’s soils oxygenating the atmosphere is proceeded by the equally astonishing thought that the earth itself has memory. Those subterranean, microbial ecotones flourish throughout superorganism-earth understood by some observers as proof — contested by others28 — of shared tree/fungal/soil life, energy, and information communities. To Sheldrake’s and Simard’s analyses (next section, IX), mycorrhizal exchanges operate14 in unicellular, multicellular, and interspecie organisms ecologically critical to biomes and the atmosphere — hence, to all life underfoot and overhead.

It therefore makes sense to consider the earth’s biomass functioning as a network to accommodate cities as human/life matrices plugging in our own intelligence embodied by buildings, transportation, and communication systems. And, if that is in fact sensible, it becomes essential to learn the languages/codes those intelligences use to signal each other.

IX • Soil-to-Tree Intelligence

Branching from above, research directs us to determine if lifeforms demonstrate differing types of perception, mobility, nutrient trading (e.g. nitrogen-for-sugar) or biochemical/bioelectric signals. To approach that sphere of cellular research, see Gabriel Popkin’s article, “Are Trees Talking Underground?”31. It’s an entry for contemplating the importance of mycorrhizal nets as akin to neural nets but located in soils/trees/plants/fungi communal exchanges.

For elaboration, see Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.32. Sheldrake’s book tracks his field observations and lab work revealing fungi and their partnerships. Snyder was aware of networks dating from 1990, when he wrote:

. . . the web that holds it all together is the mycelia, the fungus-threads that mediate between root-tips of plants and chemistry of soils, bringing nutrients in. This association is as old as plants with roots. The whole of the forest is supported by this buried network.40p138.

Similarly, seek out Suzanne Simard’s University of British Columbia, tree-to-forest research investigating biochemical messaging between mycorrhizae, compost, plants, and mixed tree communities.6. From Simard’s and Sheldrake’s investigations, mutually engaged colonies of yeasts, molds, mushrooms, and trees — some cooperatively interacting — are reported. That research strengthens Snyder’s words in parallel with autopoiesis to help reshape our thinking on earthcare, soil resuscitation, restitution, and distributed biointelligences. They, in response, bioremedially reposition his poetry and prose, using their identification with earth/intelligent systems to channel activism involving sensory/feral realms sheltered in dharma and nature’s wild.

In a world where nature is sabotaged by oil companies, climate change teaches — forces — us to fight off the toxicity of global oil/coal/fuel addiction. Our continued, passive addiction magnifies violence with climate change as the principal agent of mounting damage in route to future catastrophe. Addiction of our variety, undoubtedly leaves urban and rural areas variously uninhabitable, landscapes unrecognizable, and living organisms dead, struggling, or strung out.

To like scenarios, Bruno Latour, wrote “the earth, which stopped absorbing blows . . . [is] striking back.”20 Latour’s statement seems borderline teleological. It suggests, that the planet’s actions are decision-based retaliation, instead of systemic biochemical and biointelligent reactions. Yet, in this instance his words strike a nerve with us because humans are at fault of taking multitudes of species down with us as we continue fouling and failing earth, species, and atmosphere.

While burnt-fuel toxicity foreshadows worse turmoil, previewed in defrosting polar ice,13 raising sea levels, and wildfires — we muster actions too small, too uncoordinated to be effective (or, we stage inadequate conferences, e.g. the oil-saturated COP28 and COP29). So, while coastlines are eroded or under water and worldwide corals are facing a bleaching death — hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornados elsewhere are drastically altering, reclaiming, and flooding populated wetlands/farmlands. In landlocked shoreline communities, weather-shifts are inflicting droughts, desertification, and life-threatening heatwaves. For mountains, forests, prairies, and urban life — repercussions range from trial by conflagration proceeded by — you guessed it — torrential downpours, washouts, mudslides, contaminated drinking waters, and heat increasing beyond human endurance.

Seemingly evident, Latour’s appraisal of earth’s “striking back” is misleading. Nature is not intentional — it’s consequential. With that in mind, I slot the concept of consequential within the context of Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. By Newton’s light, the ramifications of greenhouse gases result from cause-and-effect enactments personified in “red in tooth and claw” disruptions and how we know/knew nature.

As a consequence, we can reflect on The New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Simard’s forest-exchange research6 to grapple with how the workings of cooperative biosystems — soil, microbe, and tree interdependences — merit further study for modeling bioremedial behavior. For designers, Simard’s and Sheldrake’s findings expose wild intelligences that underwrite ways we observe how biosystems’ communicate. Tactics we learn from wetlands, forest floors, and soil ecosystems harbor living information /data — part of what Odum34 thought of as “stored information in cells and genes.” They show how specialized underground and microbial communities metabolize toxins and distribute resources (e.g. oxygen) in lessons we have only begun to explore. And, those lessons have untold potential for earth-materialized carbon capture being integrated into earth-materialized buildings/infrastructures.

X • Empirical Wild

In spheres of biological-to-environment response, Sheldrake’s and Simard’s research can be reflected on through Snyder’s concepts of wild. Biosciences and AI consequently sway new, transformative, readings of The Practice of the Wild. Emergence then ensues for design propositions (e.g. updating design education) countering global warming, setting up conditions for preventing biocide and stimulating the regrowing/retrofitting of injured nature.

At the same time, practices native to eco-dharma illustrate ways to fend-off despair and helplessness by facing and addressing the industrial violence we initiated centuries ago with earth/energy exploration and exploitation of coal, oil, lumber, minerals etc. Design research examining soil collaboratives and metabolic practices signals directions for identifying cooperative-earth stances that drives resistance to fossil-fuel production. Conceptually, life/intelligence reveals modes native to trees, fungi, seas, whales, and people in which microbial cells and plants metabolically share sparse assets or warn/signal each other of dangers — a process Snyder was aware of when he wrote: “the web that holds it all together is the mycelia.”40p138.

In “The Social Life of Trees,”14 Ferris Jabr portrays Simard’s analysis as looking to roots, soils, trees, and mycorrhizal cooperation for cross-specie research into signaling and trading in plant/microbe communities. He discusses those communities as interspecie and biological-life exchanges Simard documented taking part in biochemical messaging and shared organic matter. I read those exchanges where mycorrhizal signals and colony intercommunications pose questions for design research thinking of incorporating cell intelligences and their perceptual and enactive abilities into two-way data flows running through wild/wilderness earth. To Snyder’s Practice of the Wild, Jabr’s reporting points out ways design practice can process inspiration to evolve new footings for ecological exploration:

An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity, and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi, and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative, and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms.14. See also 14a.

That exchange opens dialectical struggles between “conflict” and “negotiation” to define rehabilitation influenced by dharma and activism/theory discussing the transformation26 of oil, mining, chemical, and lumber infrastructures. Situationally, Snyder’s eco-dharma reboots our mindset by factoring-in wild intelligences as symbionts — participants with forests, oceans, and soils collaborating to realize microbial and vegetal forms of pollution-abatement.

From within that framework, I project regenerative wild/wilderness actions positively impacting agriculture, wetland creation, urban forestry, and metabolic architectures. To those actions, let’s add metabolic performances found in wild systems connected with our own biochemical production of energy, cognition, and generative inventions. Those interbeing associations warrant investigation and prototyping for new strains re-rooting The Practice of the Wild as the order-of-our-times. Perhaps, more precisely, as the order-of-the-day. They urge us to assume responsibility for expanding and enforcing species’ safeguards while bioremediating damaged nature by revitalizing cities and enlisting cellular sentience to help us beat our addiction, abolish our dependence, and leave fossil-fuels in the ground.References

1. Cheeks, Maura. 2024. “What Do We Owe Black Americans?” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/opinion/black-americans-federal-reparations.html

2. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York. Oxford University Press.

2a. Conway, John. Accessed 12 July 2024. Glider (Conway’s Game of Life.) Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway's_Game_of_Life)

3. Dawkins, Richard. 1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. New York. Oxford University Press.

4. deBuys, William, 2021. The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss. Seven Stories Press.

5. Dollens, Dennis. 2021. “Engineered Living Materials: Toward Microbially Alive Bio-Intelligent Buildings.” AutopoietiX. https://www.academia.edu/85165501/Engineered_Living_Materials_Toward_Microbially_Alive_Bio_Intelligent_Buildings

5a. Dollens, Dennis. 2014. “Alan Turing’s Drawings, Autopoiesis and Can Buildings Think?” Leonardo/MIT. https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-abstract/47/3/249/45872/Alan-Turing-s-Drawings-Autopoiesis-and-Can?redirectedFrom=fulltext

6. Dollens, Dennis. 2020. An EcoMarxist Cast: Biointelligent Architectures: Dialectics, Forests, Forensics, Microbes, AI, Buildings. SITES. https://www.academia.edu/43935816/An_EcoMarxist_Cast_Biointelligent_Architectures_Dialectics_Forests_Forensics_Microbes_AI_Buildings

7. Dollens, Dennis. 2023. “Transform Rage: Secular Buddhas, Old Philosophers, Climate Change, Intelligence, Us.” AutopoietiX. https://www.academia.edu/108541209/Transform_Rage_Secular_Buddhas_Old_Philosophers_Climate_Change_Intelligence_Us

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All climate crises “are driven by microbes, disturb microbes, or can be solved by microbes”, notes coral reef microbial ecologist Raquel Peixoto. It’s time their influence was recognized, argues a Nature Microbiology editorial. In a special focus issue, the journal highlights different aspects of microbes and climate, including the spread and emergence of infectious diseases, how microbial interactions are modulated by the environment and the urgent need to include the domain in climate discussions. • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01534-4?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=161aa8b93b-briefing-dy-20231204&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-161aa8b93b-49751484

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51. Welch, Lew. Forward: Snyder Gary. 2012. Ring of Bone: Collected Poems. City Lights / Grey Fox.

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55. Wikipedia. 2024. “Sky Burial.” 9 February 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

56. Wikipedia. 2024. “Cellular Automata.” 30 April 2024. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton

57. Wirth, Jason M. 2017. Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis. State University of New York.

58. Wong, Carissa. 2023. “Scientists Discover First Algae That Can Fix Nitrogen — Thanks To A Tiny Cell Structure.” Nature. 11 April 2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=5d05e7add1-briefing-dy-20240412&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-5d05e7add1-49751484

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•

The depths of mind, the unconscious [are]

. . . our inner wilderness areas . . .

the body is, so to speak in the mind.

They are both wild.

The Practice of the Wild

Gary Snyder