Ecology – Harmonia Philosophica

Trees dying… Don’t care…

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

Joshua trees facing extinction: They outlived mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. But without dramatic action to reduce climate change, new research shows Joshua trees won’t survive much past this century. (1)

What does it matter?

Trees are eternal.

We die.

Worms live forever.

The universe is Ephemeral.

The world doesn’t care for existence.

It is existence that cannot be without the cosmos!

Look at the tree dying.

You aren’t watching it.

It is not dying.

It is watching you.

As you are being born…

Asteroids. Death. Opportunities.

When the asteroid hit, dinosaurs weren’t the only ones that suffered. Clouds of ash blocked the sun and cooled the planet’s temperature, devastating plant life. But fungi, which decompose dead stuff, did well. So what happened to the lichens, which are made of a plant and fungus living together as one organism?

“We thought that lichens would be affected negatively, but in the three groups we looked at, they seized the chance and diversified rapidly,” says Jen-Pang Huang, the paper’s first author, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum now at Academia Sinica in Taipei. “Some lichens grow sophisticated 3D structures like plant leaves, and these ones filled the niches of plants that died out.” (1)

Some die. Some live.

Should the first worry about living?

Should the latter worry about dying?

You are what you are.

You do what you do.

In the cosmos chess of existence, every move is valid.

For the game is fixed. And at the end, we will all go back to the beginning.

How can we do something we have not done already?

Dying. Only because we have lived.

Living. Only because we have died.

The chessboard. Look at the chessboard! This is the game!

Natural. Unnatural. How natural…

To find out which sights specific neurons in monkeys ‘like’ best, researchers designed an algorithm, called XDREAM, that generated images that made neurons fire more than any natural images the researchers tested. As the images evolved, they started to look like distorted versions of real-world stimuli. (1)

Round and round we go. Trying to understand where we are by getting away from where we are. Can you find anything not made by wood inside a forest?

See the unnatural. It will catch your attention.

Not because it is unnatural.

But because of how natural it looks!

That is the greatest secret nature taught us. A secret we once knew. A secret we chose to forget. Look at the great mysteries of life. Behold the great occurrences of randomness inside a cosmos governed by change…

There is nothing natural… nature whispers in the night.

But we do not trust the night anymore. We worship the sun.

We opened our eyes to see. And we saw a different cosmos.

Stable. Full of patterns. Laws. Order.

We like that cosmos now. Too afraid to let it go.

But one day, we will sleep tired.

Floating on the silvery moon light…

One day we will dream again…

Knowing that light only creates shadows…

One day we will stand in the midst of nature.

One day, nature will look so unnatural…

Lightning strikes twice. Life. Death. A storm still raging…

Photo by **Sebastian Voortman** from **Pexels**

Scientists have used the LOFAR radio telescope to study the development of lightning flashes in unprecedented detail. Their work reveals that the negative charges inside a thundercloud are not discharged all in a single flash, but are in part stored alongside the leader channel at Interruptions, inside structures which the researchers have called needles. This may cause a repeated discharge to the ground. (1)

Repetition.

The silent signals of One in a seemingly changing cosmos.

Everything different.

Everything the same.

Where life has existed before, life will rise again.

Where death manifested once, death will always be.

In a cosmos full of existence, being defined the forest.

In a cosmos defined by being, the forest always is.

Look at the rainbow.

Take pleasure from the sunny sky.

Fear not, but rejoice.

For the storm is not over yet…

Rain falls down.

But you do not feel wet.

Falling upon the cosmos.

Over and over again.

You are that rain.

Can you feel the dirt?