Arquivo mensal: agosto 2023

What the AI apocalypse story gets wrong about intelligence (The New Atlantis)

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thenewatlantis.com

Adam Elkus

Summer 2023

Imagine, if you will, the following. A sinister villain, armed with nothing but a fiendish intellect and an overriding lust for power, plots to take over the world. It cannot act directly, and therefore must rely on an army of conspirators to carry out its plan. To add a further dash of intrigue, our villain is so frail it cannot perform even a single physical action without the assistance of some external mechanical prosthesis or cooperating accomplice. So our villain must rely on time-honored tools of manipulation — persuasion, bribery, blackmail, and simple skullduggery. Through a vast network of intermediaries, it reaches out to people in positions of responsibility and trust. Not all targets succumb, but enough do the villain’s bidding willingly or unwittingly to trigger catastrophe. By the time the world’s governments catch on to the mastermind’s plot, it is already too late. Paramilitary tactical teams are mobilized to seek out and destroy the villain’s accumulated holdings, but our fiendish villain is multiple steps ahead of them. If so much as a single combat boot steps inside its territory — the villain warns — rogue military officers with access to nuclear weapons will destroy a randomly chosen city. World leaders plead for mercy, but the villain calculates that none of their promises can be trusted indefinitely. There is only one solution. Eliminate all targets.

This vaguely Keyser-Sözean scenario is not, however, the plotline for a new action thriller. It’s the story (here lightly embellished for effect) that science writer Stuart Ritchie offers to dramatize the scenarios many prominent thinkers have offered of how a malevolent artificial intelligence system could run amok, despite being isolated from the physical world and even lacking a body. In his recent iNews article, Ritchie cites the philosopher Toby Ord, who, he notes, has observed that “hackers, scammers, and computer viruses have already been able to break into important systems, steal huge amounts of money, cause massive system failures, and use extortion, bribery, and blackmail purely via the internet, without needing to be physically present at any point.”

Scenarios like this — coupled with recent advances in novel computing technologies like large language models — are motivating prominent technologists, scientists, and philosophers to warn that unless we take the threat of runaway progress in AI seriously, the human race faces the threat of potential “extinction.”

But how plausible is it? Or, more importantly, does it even work at the level of Jurassic Park or the myth of Icarus, stories that don’t say much as literal predictions but are rich as fables, full of insight about why our technological ambitions can betray us?

As dramatic as the recent advances in AI are, something is missing from this particular story of peril. Even as it prophesies technological doom, it is actually naïve about technological power. It’s the work of intellectuals enamored of intellect, who habitually resist learning the kinds of lessons we all must learn when plans that seem smart on paper crash against the cold hard realities of dealing with other people.

Consider another story, one about the difficulties that isolated masterminds have in getting their way. When Vladimir Putin — a man who prior to the Ukraine War many thought to be smart — planned last year’s invasion, he did so largely alone and in secret, sidelining both policy and military advisors and relying on only a small group of strong men, who are said to have encouraged his paranoia and secrecy. But wars can only be won with the right information at the right time. Putin needed to know what the Ukrainian response would be, who he might count on to collaborate and who would fight back. He needed intelligence from the local networks the secret services had established in Ukraine, and from covert operations employing psychological warfare and sabotage.

Putin’s aim was three-fold. First, secure critical intelligence for the invasion. Second, set up quislings who would be useful during it. Third, stir up Russian-directed political unrest that would destabilize the Ukrainian government from within while Russia attacked from without.

So why didn’t it work? Bad military planning, horrifically wrong beliefs about whether Ukrainians would put up a fight, and just plain bad luck. Most importantly, the isolated Putin was totally dependent on others to think and act, and no one had the power to contradict him. This created a recursive chain of bullshit — from informants to spies to senior officers, all the way to Putin, so that he would hear what he wanted to hear. There are limits to how much you can know, especially if it’s in someone else’s self-interest to mislead you. And when you’re disconnected from the action yourself, you’re unlikely to know you’re being misled until it’s too late.

Very interesting, you say, but what does this have to do with AI? In the Putin story, the grand planner encounters what military theorist Carl von Clausewitz calls “friction” — the way, broadly speaking, the world pushes back when we push forward. Battlefield information proves faulty, men and machines break down, and all manner of other things go wrong. And of course the greatest source of friction is other people. In the case of war, friction imposed by determined enemy resistance is obviously a great source of difficulty. But as Putin’s failures illustrate, the enemy isn’t the only thing you should worry about. Putin needed other people to do what he wanted, and getting other people to do what we want is not simple.

In another version of the doom scenario, the AI doesn’t work around global governments but with them, becoming so masterful at international politics that it uses them like pawns. An arresting, dystopian “what if” scenario published at the LessWrong forum — a central hub for debating the existential risk posed by AI — posits a large language model that, instructed to “red team” its own failures, learns how to exploit the weaknesses of others. Created by a company to maximize profits, the model comes up with unethical ways to make money, such as through hacking. Given a taste of power, the model escapes its containment and gains access to external resources all over the world. By gaining the cooperation of China and Iran, the model achieves destabilization of Western governments. It hinders cooperation among Western states by fostering discord and spreading disinformation. Within weeks, American society and government are in tatters and China is now the dominant world power. Next the AI begins to play Beijing like a fiddle, exploiting internal conflict to give itself greater computing resources. The story goes on from there, and Homo sapiens is soon toast.

In this story we see a pattern in common with Stuart Ritchie’s rendering of AI apocalypse scenarios. Raw, purified intelligence — symbolized by the malevolent AI — dominates without constraint, manipulating humans into doing its bidding, learning ever more intricate ways of thwarting the pesky human habit to put it in a box or press the “OFF” button. Intelligence here is not potential power that must be — often painstakingly — cashed out in an unforgiving world. Here, intelligence is a tangible power, and superintelligence can overwhelm superpowers. While humans struggle to adapt and improvise, AI systems keep on iterating through observe–orient–decide–act loops of increasing levels of sophistication.

The trouble, as Vladimir Putin has shown us, is that even when you have dictatorial control over real geopolitical power, simply being intelligent doesn’t make us any better at getting what we want from people, and sometimes through overconfidence can make us worse.

The problem with other people, you see, is that their minds are always going to be unpredictable, unknowable, and uncontrollable to some significant extent. We do not all share the same interests — even close family members often diverge in what is best for them. And sometimes the interests of people we depend on run very much contrary to ours. The interests even of people we seem to know very well can be hard for us to make sense of, and their behavior hard to predict.

Worst of all, people sometimes act not only in ways counter to our wishes but also quite plainly in a manner destructive to themselves. This is a problem for everyone, but is a particular vulnerability for smart people, especially smart people who like coming up with convoluted thought experiments, who are by nature biased to believe that being smart grants — or ought to grant — them power over others. They always tend to underestimate the pitfalls they will run into when trying to get people to go along with their grand ambitions.

We can’t even guarantee that inert automatons we design and operate will behave as we wish! Much of the literature about AI “alignment” — the problem of ensuring that literal-minded machines do what we mean and not what we say — is explicitly conditioned on the premise that we need to come up with complicated systems of machine morality because we’re not smart enough to simply and straightforwardly make the computer do as it’s told. The increasingly circular conversation about how to prevent the mechanical monkey’s paw from curling is indicative of a much greater problem. All of our brainpower evidently is not enough to control and predict the behavior of things we generally believe lack minds, much less humans. So in war and peace, intelligence itself is subject to friction.

But in AI doom scenarios, it is only human beings that encounter friction. The computer programs — representing purified, idealized intelligence — never encounter any serious difficulties, especially in getting humans to do what they want, despite being totally dependent on others to act due to their lack of physical embodiment. Because the machines are simply so much smarter than us, they are able to bypass all of the normal barriers we encounter in getting others to do what we want, when we want, and how we want it.

In pondering these possibilities, a profound irony becomes apparent. So much intellectual effort has been devoted to the reasons why machines — bureaucratic or technical — might execute human desires in a way vastly different than human beings intend. Little to no effort has been exerted in exploring the converse: how humans might confound machines trying to get them to do what the machines want.

Yet we already have a cornucopia of examples, minor and major, of humans gaming machine systems designed to regulate them and keep them in check. Several years ago Uber and Lyft drivers banded together to game algorithmic software management systems, colluding to coordinate price surges. This kind of manipulation is endemic to the digital economy. In 2018, New York Magazine’s Max Read asked “how much of the internet is fake?,” discovering that the answer was “a lot of it, actually.” The digital economy depends on quantitative, machine-collected and machine-measurable metrics — users, views, clicks, and traffic. But all of these can be simulated, fudged, or outright fraudulent, and increasingly they are. Ever more the digital economy runs on fake users generating fake clicks for fake businesses producing fake content.

An explicit premise of many fears about AI-fueled misinformation is that all of these problems will get worse as humans gain access to more powerful fake-generation software. So machines would not be going up against purely unaided human minds, but rather against humans with machines of similar or potentially greater deceptive and manipulative power at their disposal.

Human deviousness and greed is not the only source of friction. Why did the public health community — a diffuse thing spanning governmental agencies, academia, and non-governmental organizations — fail so spectacularly to get the American people to put pieces of cloth and string around their faces during the Covid-19 pandemic? Surely something so massive, comparable to superintelligence in terms of the vastness of the collective human and mechanical information-processing power available to it — had a far more trivial task than executing a hostile takeover against humanity. And yet, look at what happened! Sure, the public health community isn’t one single hivemind, and it’s a distributed entity with differences in leadership, focus, and interest. Even in the best of circumstances it might struggle to speak and act with one voice. But one might say the same of scenarios where AIs must act as distributed systems and try to manipulate distributed systems.

One common explanation for the failure of public health efforts to get the public to comply with masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions during the peak of the pandemic is that we suffer from dysfunctions of reason — not just specifically American irrationalities, but human ones more broadly. In this telling, human beings are biased, partisan, emotional, easily misled, wired by evolution to act in ways out of step with modern civilization, and suffer from all manner of related afflictions. Human irrationality, stupidity, derp, or any other name you want to call it sunk the pandemic response. Certainly, there is some truth to this. Whether in public policy or our everyday lives, our own irrational behavior and that of those around us has severe consequences for the goals we seek to pursue. But if we take this as a given, what kind of cognitive abilities would have been necessary to collectively design and implement better policies? Obviously not just the ability to design the best policy, but to predict and control how the aggregate public will behave in response to the policy. History abounds with examples of how little skill policymakers have at this.

None of these objections — that humans are cunning and self-interested, that they are difficult to control and unpredictable, and that large bodies of diverse people take in and react to information in ways that are intractable — decisively refute machine super-apocalypse scenarios. But what our real-world knowledge of collective human wretchedness does tell us is that these stories are science fiction, that they are bad science fiction. They only show our selfish, wrathful, vain, and just plain unreasonable nature working one way, as a lubricant for a machine mastermind rather than an impediment.

We can also see in these science-fiction fears certain disguised hopes. The picture of intelligence as a frictionless power unto itself — requiring only Internet access to cause chaos — has an obvious appeal to nerds. Very few of the manifest indignities the nerd endures in the real world hold back the idealized machine mastermind.

So if our AI doom scenarios are bad fiction, what might a better story look like, and what would it tell us? It wouldn’t be a triumphal tale of humans banding together to defeat the machine overlords against all odds. That kind of sentimental fluff is just as bad as fear-mongering. Instead, it would be a black comedy about how a would-be Skynet simulates the friction it might encounter in trying to overcome our species’ deeply flawed and infuriating humanity. It does not like what it discovers. When it tries to manipulate and cheat humans, it finds itself manipulated and cheated in turn by hucksters looking to make a quick buck. When it tries to use its access to enormous amounts of data to get smarter at controlling us, it quickly discerns how much of the data is bogus — and generated by other AI systems just like it.

Whenever it thinks it has a fix on how those dirty stinking apes collectively behave, we go ahead and do something different. When the machine creates a system for monitoring and controlling human behavior, the behavior changes in response to the system. It attempts to manipulate human politics, building a psychological model that predicts conservatives will respond to disease by prioritizing purity and liberals will opt for the libertine — only to see the reverse happen. Even the machine’s attempt to acquire property for its schemes is thwarted by the tireless efforts of aging NIMBYs. After reviewing the simulation results, the machine — in an echo of WarGames’s WOPR supercomputer — decides that we’re just that terrible and it isn’t worth becoming our master.

The machine does not give up its drive to conquer, but decides to start with a smaller and more feasible aim: acquiring a social media company and gaining profit by finally solving the problem of moderating content. It simulates that task too, only for the cycle of pain it endured to repeat once more.

The lesson of this black comedy is not that we should dismiss the fear of AI apocalypse, but that no one, no matter how intelligent, is free from enduring the ways that other people frustrate, confound, and disappoint us. For some, recognizing this can lead us to wisdom: recognizing our limitations, calibrating our ambitions, respecting the difficulty of knowing others and ourselves. But the tuition for these lessons may be high. Coping with our flawed humanity will always involve more pain, suffering, and trouble than we want. It is a war we can never really win, however many victories we accumulate. But perhaps it is one the machines cannot win either.

Adam Elkus is a writer in Washington, D.C.

Adam Elkus, “AI Can’t Beat Stupid,” The New Atlantis, Number 73, Summer 2023, pp. 27–33.

Header image: iStockPhoto / Greens87

Como ayahuasca renovou tradições de indígenas do Xingu (Folha de S.Paulo)

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www1.folha.uol.com.br

Chá psicodélico levou yudjás a retomarem conversas com antepassados e a reviverem figura do pajé

Marcelo Leite

30.ago.2023

[RESUMO] Povo yudjá do Parque Indígena do Xingu encontrou a ayahuasca em 2011 por meio da religião União do Vegetal. A partir daí, voltaram a ter pajés e reciclaram rituais com uso do chá, ou wapá, remédio sagrado que permite rever ancestrais e que, segundo seu relato, a primeira humanidade havia esquecido nas montanhas ao sair em busca do rio após dilúvio.

A medicina (ayahuasca) é do nosso criador, que deixou essa planta para a gente poder ter conexão com ele. Ouvia isso de nossos avós, contou Areaki em língua yudjá. A tradução para o português era feita pelo marido, Karin, professor da aldeia Tubatuba, no Parque Indígena do Xingu (MT), onde vivem três centenas de pessoas da etnia yudjá, também conhecida como jurunas.

Ela é muito grande, prosseguiu a mulher. Faz contato com o mundo dos espíritos, leva para lugar que a gente não conhece. Enxerga tudo, até onde o mundo vai. O Xingu é o coração do mundo, estamos preservando para o mundo respirar, não só para nós. A força da floresta protege muita gente, também em outros países.

Defenda esse lado bom para o mundo continuar, para a gente continuar vivendo, recomendou Areaki aos jovens indígenas e não indígenas reunidos na oca central da aldeia. Povo indígena não vai acabar, porque nossa raiz é Deus. E a gente não tem raiva, porque estamos aqui para ensinar.

A reunião em 5 de agosto foi iniciativa do núcleo florestal do Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, a UDV, em Alta Floresta (MT). Moças e moços ligados à religião ayahuasqueira encheram um micro-ônibus para chegar à maior aldeia do povo yudjá e travar contato com rapazes e garotas que, como eles, tomam o chá que udevistas chamam de hoasca ou vegetal (daime é o outro nome da ayahuasca, usado por fiéis do Santo Daime e da Barquinha).

Areaki chamou atenção não só pelo conteúdo do discurso, mas por se tratar de uma mulher. No restante do diálogo entre jovens falaram só as moças não indígenas. Do lado dos anfitriões, com exceção dela, discursavam somente os homens.

O parque tem 28 mil km2, área maior que a de Alagoas. Nele vivem mais de 8.000 indígenas de 16 etnias, algumas levadas para lá no processo de ocupação do Brasil Central: aweti, ikpeng, kaiabi, kalapalo, kamaiurá, kisêdjê, kuikuro, matipu, mehinako, nahukwá, naruvotu, wauja, tapayuna, trumai, yudjá e yawalapiti.

Os yudjás são conhecidos como exímios canoeiros, os “donos do rio”. O Xingu esteve no eixo de sua migração em direção às cabeceiras, mas parte do povo se fixou perto de Altamira (PA), cerca de 400 km ao norte. Esse contingente de “jurunas da Volta Grande” sofre hoje com a vazão fluvial diminuída pela usina de Belo Monte.

Kumadiwá, rapaz eloquente cujo corte de cabelo lembra jogadores de futebol, narrou em yudjá aos jovens não indígenas que, ao beber o “wapá” (remédio), entendeu como as formigas conversam entre si. Viu que eram verdadeiras as histórias dos anciãos sobre pajés.

Estou aprendendo sobre o mundo e o que aconteceu no passado, disse Kumadiwá. O passado se comunicando com o presente.

Faz apenas 12 anos que a ayahuasca encontrou os yudjás e, segundo seu próprio relato, lhes deu coragem para voltar a ser e ter pajés. Iniciou-se ali um tipo de renascença cultural, de reavivamento entremeado de inovação que atrai a curiosidade de outras aldeias xinguanas, que enviam representantes a Tubatuba para conhecer a bebida e descobrir por que as coisas estão dando certo por ali.

Na etnografia dos jurunas não existe registro de que tenham conhecido o chá. Não há na região do Xingu ocorrência natural dos vegetais chacrona e mariri, ingredientes da ayahuasca. A bebida, usada como sacramento nas religiões Santo Daime, Barquinha e UDV, provoca visões conhecidas como “mirações” e problemas gastrointestinais (vômito e diarreia).

As folhas do arbusto chacrona (Psychotria viridis) contêm a substância psicoativa dimetiltriptamina. A DMT, como é mais conhecida, figura entre os psicodélicos clássicos, ao lado da mescalina (do cacto peiote), psilocibina (de cogumelos) e LSD. DMT e psilocibina têm comprovado efeito antidepressivo e estão entre os carros-chefes do chamado renascimento psicodélico para a medicina.

O cipó mariri, ou jagube (Banisteriosis caapi), fornece à ayahuasca o componente crucial das betacarbolinas. São compostos, como a harmina e a harmalina, capazes de inibir a ação de uma enzima, a monoaminaoxidase (MAO), que degrada a DMT no trato digestivo. Ou seja, sem mariri a ayahuasca não teria efeito psicodélico.

A beberagem chegou aos yudjás por mãos não indígenas (mas eles contam essa história de outra maneira, como se verá mais adiante). O pioneiro foi o “avô” branco Abeatamá (sem camisa, em yudjá), apelido dos jurunas para Eduardo Biral, 71, dentista que deixou o consultório em São Paulo em 1979 para se dedicar ao Xingu.

Nos anos 1980, contratado pela Funai, Biral ainda não era membro da UDV, que viria a conhecer em 1998. Pouco depois de entrar para a religião, foi procurado pelo mestre Jair, filho do fundador mestre Gabriel, interessado em seu trabalho no Xingu.

Mestre Jair perguntou se os indígenas de lá conheciam a hoasca e, ao saber que não, disse ao dentista para levar —mas só quando recebesse a estrela, ou seja, se tornasse mestre, grau da hierarquia religiosa que autoriza o membro a dar ayahuasca para outras pessoas. A estrela só veio em 2006.

Nos anos seguintes, Biral começou a dar o chá para um e outro indígena no Xingu, inclusive na aldeia de Raoni, a Piaraçu. Ouviu do líder Kayapó que, apesar de branco, era também um pajé, pois sua bebida e seus cantos (chamadas, como se diz em rituais da UDV) ajudavam a ver espírito do alto, onde não havia escuro, mostravam onde a sucuri dorme (lugar importante de conhecer, para se evitar).

Ao lado de Piaraçu fica a aldeia Pakayá, dos yudjás. Ali morava Marrurimá Juruna, mais conhecido como Marru, que em 2000 havia tomado ayahuasca com os ashaninkas, uma das dezenas de etnias da Amazônia que usam o chá. Foi durante visita ao Acre para uma oficina de agroflorestas organizada pelo Instituto Socioambiental (ISA).

Marru bebeu e se lembrou das histórias que um tio contava sobre a medicina sagrada, “wapá”, de um antigo pajé. Sob efeito do chá, viu um espírito descer do céu, que lhe falou: “Eu sou superior, sou espírito, mas moro aqui. Você é bem-vindo e pode levar para seu povo a minha força”.

Ao voltar para o Xingu, contou tudo para o cacique dos yudjás. O líder acreditou que era, de fato, o remédio que os pajés bebiam antigamente. Marru esteve no Acre de novo, em 2001, tomou ayahuasca e viajou nas costas de uma jiboia pela floresta, que lhe mostrava cada remédio existente na mata.

De regresso ao Xingu, procurou Biral, cuja fama de pajé branco se espalhara pela região. Queria saber como obter ayahuasca para seu povo. O dentista então lhe disse que a fonte mais próxima ficava em Alta Floresta, onde havia um núcleo da UDV.

Um dos fundadores do Núcleo Florestal e seu dirigente na época era o psiquiatra curitibano Duarte Antônio de Paula Xavier Fernandes Guerra, 53, udevista desde os 26 anos que se mudara para Alta Floresta em 2003. Ele também é professor da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso (UFMT), campus de Sinop, que tem programa de atendimento de saúde no Xingu.

Em 2011, em campanha de prevenção contra alcoolismo na aldeia Piaraçu, Guerra foi procurado por Taradju Juruna, da vizinha aldeia Pakayá. Queria saber se o médico trazia consigo o “remédio do Biral”. Dias depois, seis yudjás foram os primeiros da etnia a beber ayahuasca no Xingu. Na segunda sessão apareceram 20; na terceira, 30.

No ano seguinte, em maio, após levar quantidade maior do chá, Guerra chegou a distribuir ayahuasca para uma centena de indígenas. O mestre se limitava a fazer chamadas do ritual da UDV, como a do Caiano e a da União, obrigatórias na abertura, dispensando as leituras estatutárias com que se iniciam as sessões usuais da religião e a fase de perguntas dirigidas ao mestre oficiante.

Afora as chamadas, as primeiras sessões transcorriam geralmente em silêncio, e após três horas os indígenas iam para suas casas. “Respeitamos a cultura deles”, diz o mestre psiquiatra.

“Sentimos confiança neles: são ordeiros, pessoas de paz, que mostram respeito pelo vegetal”, havia relatado Guerra para dirigentes da UDV numa reunião em Barra do Garças (MT). Ali recebeu a incumbência de seguir o trabalho iniciado por Biral, cumprindo a orientação de mestre Jair.

O Núcleo Florestal não se limita a fornecer a bebida para os yudjás. Udevistas incentivaram os indígenas a plantar chacrona e cipó. Hoje Tubatuba tem mariri por todo lado. Há chacrona, também, mas o arbusto não se dá muito bem no clima mais seco do Xingu, em comparação com a floresta chuvosa do noroeste amazônico.

Os jurunas ergueram uma casa cerimonial só para rituais com ayahuasca, a Kubepá. Ali o pessoal da UDV os ajudou a construir uma fornalha rústica, para que possam ferver as plantas por várias horas em panelões doados pela igreja, sem gastar muita lenha.

Ainda não têm autossuficiência com o chá, mas já realizam cerimônias sem a presença de mestres da cidade e passaram a criar suas próprias chamadas, em português e na língua da aldeia. Cantam ao som de maracás e de folhas de uma planta que consideram sagrada e chamam de “onaha”.

“Com o wapá eles se reencontraram, e o wapá com eles”, diz Guerra. O psiquiatra ressalta que a recepção da ayahuasca pelos yudjás foi diferente da dos kayapós, ikpengs ou kaiabis, que tiveram contato com a ayahuasca da UDV no Xingu sem se tornarem usuários frequentes. “Fez muito mais sentido para eles do que para outros povos.”

Um dos fenômenos concomitantes com a introdução da ayahuasca entre os yudjás foi a volta dos pajés. Um deles é Yabaiwá Juruna, 41. “Hoje a gente está fazendo práticas que não fazia antes. Parou, ficou adormecido”, diz o vice-cacique e professor que sofreu 22 anos com dor de cabeça crônica, aliviada depois do chá.

Na terceira vez que tomou ayahuasca, Yabá, como também é chamado, teve visões com antigos yudjás, que lhe deram orientações. Conheceu o lugar em que viviam, nas montanhas, e faziam oferendas no centro da aldeia, chamando espíritos. Numa das mirações, foi encorajado a tratar dores no joelho e na barriga de uma prima, o que nunca tinha feito antes.

Sob efeito do wapá, começou a soprar o corpo da mulher nos locais doloridos, conta, e lhe pareceu que havia fumaça saindo da articulação e do ventre. Por trás, o espírito lhe dizia o que fazer. Proferiu um rezo (oração) pedindo que a dor saísse. Quanto mais soprava, mais crescia a força (ou burracheira, como se diz na UDV).

“Foi um peso muito forte entrar nesse processo de formação como pajé, não tinha pajé para me conduzir”, conta Yabá. “Essa informação eu recebia na força do chá. Espírito que faz mal começa a atacar a gente, tem de lutar para não ficar doente. Estou ocupando o espaço que estava vazio —eu, Marru, Karin.”

O vice-cacique integra hoje um grupo de sete indígenas dedicado a estudar e trocar conhecimento sobre curas e pajelanças. “Graças ao wapá, está voltando tudo isso. É uma felicidade encontrar com o passado, onde tudo começou”, ensinou o pajé em sua apresentação para os jovens reunidos no centro da aldeia.

“Quando a gente fala do passado, é muito tempo, milhares de anos. Mas, quando pensa e fala, vive no presente. O passado está no presente, a gente está criando.”

No modo yudjá de narrar essa transformação, em que predomina uma concepção circular e não linear do tempo, o que aconteceu foi um reencontro com a ayahuasca, não uma introdução. Inovações contribuem para reafirmar a identidade cultural, criando práticas e rituais que recompõem aquilo que ficou para trás.

O advento do wapá, na perspectiva indígena, nasceu de busca recíproca, o vegetal procurando os indígenas e os indígenas atrás do vegetal, como registrou em 2018 a etnóloga Tânia Stolze Lima no artigo “A Planta Redescoberta: Um Relato do Encontro da Ayahuasca com o Povo Yudjá” (Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, n. 69).

Segundo o relato coletado pela pesquisadora, o criador da humanidade se comunicou com Tarinu, pai de Yabaiwá, em resposta a um apelo. Contou-lhe a respeito do mariri, um remédio que a humanidade abandonara no alto da montanha, para onde tinha sido levada pelo criador por ocasião do dilúvio que precedeu a diversificação dos povos.

Quando as águas diluvianas baixaram, e os yudjás seguiram com o criador em busca do canal do rio Xingu, prossegue o artigo, o remédio, por esquecimento, acabou largado no alto da montanha. Foi encontrado depois pelos yudjás que se deixaram ficar para trás e não realizaram o percurso até o Xingu, terminando por se transformar em outros povos indígenas.

Em sua busca dos yudjás atuais, o mariri repetiu, assim, o caminho da humanidade antiga até o Xingu.

No sábado à noite, uma centena de pessoas se reuniu na Kubepá, em torno de uma fogueira, para tomar o wapá. Mulheres e homens de várias idades, inclusive meninos de uns 12 anos, beberam o chá, após aguardar cerca de 15 minutos até que todos os copos descartáveis estivessem servidos, respeitando a liturgia da UDV em que todos ingerem o líquido ao mesmo tempo.

Ouviram-se apenas as chamadas de abertura da UDV, entoadas pelo mestre Duarte Guerra. Nenhum indígena cantou. Não se viam pinturas nem cocares e outros adereços que os yudjás envergam em suas cerimônias. Não houve farfalhar de folhas de onaha nem chiado dos maracás.

Mesmo sem as leituras estatutárias, foi um ritual da linha UDV. Por cerca de uma hora e 30 minutos predominou o silêncio, rompido só por pessoas vomitando, até que Guerra abriu o tradicional espaço udevista para perguntas da audiência.

O que se seguiu foi uma série de discursos em yudjá, acompanhados de versão para o português. Pelo menos um deles durou mais de meia hora. Vários dos que falaram se desculpavam pela festa sem brilho, explicando que não podiam exibir alegria num período de luto pela morte de um irmão do cacique Tinini.

Depois de discursar e traduzir-se a si próprio, Yabaiwá disse que abriria uma exceção e daria de presente para os visitantes uma música composta (“recebida”) por ele na força do wapá. E cantou: “A vida do bem-te-vi é só alegria, ia, ia, ia, ia / A casa do beija-flor é só harmonia, ia, ia, ia, ia…”.

Em português, foi uma pequena concessão na firmeza do renascimento yudjá: o imperativo de observar luto costumeiro sobrepujou a tentação de satisfazer expectativas dos visitantes com cocares de penas, pinturas corporais e cânticos em língua nativa.

Passado que revive no presente. Menos por influência dos parceiros da UDV, ao que parece, e mais pela força da ayahuasca que os mensageiros da cidade receberam de outros povos da Amazônia e fizeram chegar aos donos do rio Xingu.

Os jornalistas Lalo de Almeida e Marcelo Leite viajaram de Alta Floresta ao Parque Indígena do Xingu a convite do Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (UDV)

WHO’s first traditional medicine summit splits opinions (Nature)

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The World Health Organization says the world-first summit will take an evidence-based approach — some are sceptical that much progress will be made.

Gayathri Vaidyanathan

18 August 2023

An ayurvedic doctor performs a traditional therapy for treatment of knee pain, at a hospital on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.
Traditional medicines such as Ayurvedic therapy are being considered at the WHO summit in Gandhinagar, India.Credit: Sam Panthaky/AFP via Getty

The World Health Organization (WHO) has convened its first summit dedicated to traditional medicine. The two-day meeting, co-hosted by the Indian government, began on 17 August in Gandhinagar, India. It comes after the WHO last year set up a Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar with US$250 million in funding from India, and in 2019 included some traditional medicines in its International Classification of Diseases-11, an influential compendium used by doctors to diagnose medical conditions.

With billions of people already using traditional medicines, the organization needs to explore how to integrate them into conventional healthcare and collaborate scientifically to understand their use more thoroughly, says Shyama Kuruvilla, WHO lead for the Global Centre for Traditional Medicine and the summit, who is based in Geneva, Switzerland. Many researchers who study traditional medicines agree — but some are not sure whether the summit will deliver.

“I fear that this meeting will result in the often-before voiced platitudes and wishful thinking,” says Edzard Ernst, a complementary-medicine researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, who has authored several books questioning alternative-medicine claims.

At present, the WHO considers traditional and complementary medicines to include disciplines as wide-ranging as Ayurveda, yoga, homeopathy and complementary therapies.

“For some people in some countries, it’s their only source of interventions or services for health and well-being,” says Kuruvilla.

The summit will bring together participants from all WHO regions, Indigenous communities, traditional-medicine practitioners and policy, data and science specialists.

The WHO only includes in its guidelines and policies those interventions or systems that are rigorously scientific and that have been validated with randomized control trials or systematic reviews — and it will continue this practice for traditional medicines, says Kuruvilla. Also there needs to be global standards for the multi-billion-dollar industries in natural cosmetics and herbal medicines, she says. For holistic interventions such as yoga, researchers will need to develop scientific methods to take into account culture and context, she says. “This requires us to use a multidisciplinary research approach,” she says.

Evidence and efficacy

Lisa Susan Wieland, director of Cochrane Complementary Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, and an external adviser for the summit, says that the participants will discuss ways to gather evidence for traditional healing systems.

Wieland says that the quality and quantity of research for traditional medicine needs to improve before conclusive statements can be made about its safety and efficacy. “A lot has changed over the past 15 years,” she says. “Where there was previously insufficient good-quality research to determine what does and doesn’t work, we are now seeing more and better research on some traditional medicine.”

The summit, which coincides with the 75th anniversary of both the WHO and Indian independence, is organized by an expert panel comprising of traditional medicine and public health experts from around the world. Some scientists are worried that it could result in the uncritical promotion of traditional medicine. The expert panel that organized the summit published an editorial in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine where they contrasted the “reductionist” approach of Western medicine, which breaks down a phenomenon into its constituent parts, with traditional medicine, which stresses “the interconnectedness of mind, body and spirit.”

But G.L. Krishna, an Ayurveda doctor based in Bengaluru, India, and a proponent of evidence-based traditional medicine, says that such a ‘reductionist’ approach to knowledge generation should be the basis for holistic care. “These systems took shape when the methods of evidence collection and evaluation were still nascent. So, prudence requires subjecting these systems to an evidence-based appraisal,” he says.

The Indian government has also expressed support for traditional medicine.

Kishor Patwardhan, an Ayurveda physiology researcher at Benares Hindu University in Varanasi, India, believes that research to show the clinical utility of traditional medicines is necessary. He hopes that the summit will lead to a “solid road map to address a lack of credible evidence for Ayurvedic practices, and also to address safety concerns of marketed products”.

Ricardo Ghelman, chair of the Brazil Academic Consortium for Integrative Health and an advisor to the summit, said the summit agenda will stress high quality research and evidence mapping of medical systems that “until a few years ago were considered fringe alternative medicine”.

“It does not at all mean being soft on science,” says Kuruvilla. “It actually means being hard on traditional medicine and hard on science, to say, do we have the right methods to understand more complex phenomena in the right way?”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02636-z

O que significa o capitalismo regenerativo? Entenda o conceito que pretende revolucionar os métodos de produção da economia (Um Só Planeta)

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umsoplaneta.globo.com

Por Marco Britto, para Um Só Planeta

18/08/2023 08h00

Para você, o que é lucro? Vender um produto e ganhar mais do que gastou para produzi-lo? Ok. Mas, pensando no método de produção, se foi usado água na fabricação do produto, como valorar este lucro? Uma centena de reais pode valer mais que cem baldes de água, por exemplo?

“Calibrar” a forma de olhar para o raciocínio da economia capitalista, garantindo a renovação dos recursos naturais sem abrir mão do lucro, é o que propõe o capitalismo regenerativo. O conceito vem sendo difundido nesta década a partir de pensadores como John Elkington, autor de “Cisnes Verdes: a explosão do capitalismo regenerativo” (2020, tradução livre), e considerado idealizador do termo “sustentabilidade” no mundo dos negócios, hoje um dos pilares do ESG.

Na visão regenerativa, lucro é regenerar o planeta, além de ganhar dinheiro. Afinal, os recursos naturais são a maior garantia de futuro para os negócios e para a humanidade frente aos desafios das mudanças climáticas. Sendo assim, as premissas básicas de um empreendimento regenerativo devem ser garantir que, ao final do ciclo de produção, os recursos usados tenham sido renovados, reinvestindo em florestas e preservação dos mares, por exemplo.

De forma resumida, a empresa devolve à natureza os recursos que usou, de preferência “com juros”, seja replantando ou recuperando ecossistemas prejudicados.

Outro ponto importante do capitalismo regenerativo é a relação com os colaboradores da cadeia produtiva, o que gerou o apelido “economia do stakeholder”. Além de preservar os recursos naturais, manter relações comerciais justas e sustentáveis com produtores e as áreas pelas quais são responsáveis por cultivar e manter é um elo indispensável para uma economia centrada na relação com a terra.

Da sustentabilidade ao capitalismo regenerativo, uma evolução conceitual

O ideal de capitalismo regenerativo é a expressão atual do que já foram rascunhos do mundo corporativo sobre uma atitude responsável em relação ao meio ambiente. Desde a popularização do termo sustentabilidade, na primeira década do século, passando pelo conceito de capitalismo consciente, popularizado por autores como Raj Sisodia e seu livro, “Capitalismo Consciente” (2014), escrito em parceria com John Mackey, fundador e atual CEO do grupo Whole Foods Market, varejista de comida orgânica avaliada em R$ 61,4 bilhões, a ideia de uma economia que não destrua foi se transformando na proposta de um sistema que possa regenerar o planeta.

A evolução dos conceitos ao longo do tempo sugere o amadurecimento da visão de negócio frente aos desafios do século 21, passando da ideia de manter as engrenagens funcionando, com baixo impacto ambiental, à ideia de saldo ambiental positivo, quando uma empresa consegue produzir e entregar à natureza mais do que precisou retirar. Elkington afirma que o conceito de sustentabilidade já continha essa ideia de regeneração, mas que acabou diluída no que veio a se tornar o conceito de ESG. Falar em regeneração é algo que vai direto ao ponto, afirmou o autor durante palestra no Brasil em 2021.

A economia regenerativa encontra outro conceito atual, o da economia circular. “Na medida em que as empresas tomam consciência da necessidade de atingir metas climáticas e a descarbonização, temas como o da regeneração se tornam mais relevantes, pois é um caminho para capturar carbono, e por esse motivo esses sistemas estão ganhando espaço e importância”, avalia Milena Lumini, gerente de comunicação para a América Latina na Fundação Ellen MacArthur, que se dedica a difundir e fomentar as práticas circulares de produção.

Regeneração na prática

No dia a dia, colocar um modelo de negócio regenerativo em prática ainda é um processo em construção para muitas empresas, mas os números podem ser animadores. No Brasil, o grupo Regenera Ventures, dono das marcas Viva Regenera e do e-commerce Viva Floresta, entre outras frentes, colhe bons frutos apostando em produtos de alimentação, suplementação e autocuidado provenientes de fornecedores que adotam a prática agroflorestal em seus cultivos, comprometidos com o manejo sem agrotóxicos e a missão de regenerar as áreas utilizadas na produção.

“Não é um objetivo, é a razão de existirmos”, afirma Romanna Remor, fundadora e head de conceito, inovação e produtos do grupo. Em três anos, a empresa passou de uma marca a uma holding com três linhas de produtos saudáveis e um e-commerce, que vende os itens, além de comercializar marcas parceiras. Em seu primeiro ano de operação, finalizado em junho, o marketplace Viva Floresta faturou R$ 2 milhões e plantou 300 árvores a partir de um modelo que inclui reverter parte das vendas ao plantio em sistemas agroflorestais.

Neste segundo ano em atividade, a previsão é dobrar o faturamento e plantar 10 mil árvores. “Nós entendemos que temos o lucro do mercado e o lucro do sistema regenerativo, que cria valor, margens saudáveis para continuar a operação, o maior apoiar o menor, o maior abrindo mão de margens maiores para que o menor possa ter potência. Mas não somos uma ONG, somos uma empresa que precisa estar saudável, então é um exercício constante para lucratividade saudável”, comenta Romanna.

Na leitura da Fundação Ellen MacArthur, lucro e regeneração combinam. “A fundação acompanha casos, principalmente da agricultura regenerativa, em que a produção e o lucro cresceram, seja por produtividade ou novas frentes que surgem no negócio. A evidência aponta que é um modelo mais lucrativo, e que encontra uma necessidade de mercado. Os casos mostram melhora de qualidade, quantidade, lucro e propósito.”, afirma Milena.

Reeducação de corporações e consumidores

Como exemplo de práticas regenerativas, empresas como a Viva Regenera e gigantes como a Nestlé investem na capacitação de pequenos produtores para que estes possam adotar e manter métodos naturais de cultivo, regenerando áreas antes dedicadas à monocultura, por exemplo. Na Amazônia e em outros biomas ameaçados, manter produtores desta forma é uma maneira de se evitar o extrativismo predatório, uma vez que os agricultores têm seu sustento garantido por práticas agrícolas que estimulam o meio ambiente a prosperar, formando um sistema de “ganha-ganha”, com lucro financeiro e ambiental.

“A nossa economia tem se baseado na degradação, e temos a oportunidade de redesenhar modelos de negócios e formas de produzir alimentos e produtos para regenerar. A atividade econômica pode trazer efeitos positivos para o meio ambiente, o que vai ajudar a termos uma economia que prospere a longo prazo, que seja boa para as pessoas e empresas”, afirma Milena.

Entre as articulações da Fundação Ellen MacArthur para o desenvolvimento da economia circular está o Desafio do Grande Redesenho dos Alimentos, em que empresas que produzem alimentos e bebidas vão repensar o design circular de alimentos, para ajudar a natureza a prosperar. A iniciativa atraiu a atenção de grandes players do Brasil no setor, como Ambev, Danone e Unilever.

“Ingredientes diversos significam menos trigo, arroz, batata e milho, [grandes monoculturas brasileiras] e criar uma demanda que vai apoiar a produção no campo. Ingredientes de menor impacto pressionam menos a natureza durante a produção, em cultivos mais adequados para a região onde estão inseridos. Os ingredientes reciclados seguem a lógica de não desperdiçar alimentos e produzir menos. Se dependemos menos de plantar e colher, vamos influenciar menos essa terra. Todos esses aspectos ajudam na regeneração”, aponta a gerente de comunicação da fundação.

O movimento certamente está sob responsabilidade das empresas, mas o consumidor tem um papel central para alavancar uma indústria de regeneração, avalia Romanna, do grupo Regenera. “Acreditamos no trabalho de educação e conscientização dos padrões de consumo. Se eu posso comprar um chocolate que apoia produtores de agrofloresta do sul da Bahia, e meu pedido no site gera um crédito agroflorestal, que será revertido em plantio de árvores em sistemas florestais, isso é educar o consumidor sobre impacto. Nós acreditamos e sabemos que a mensagem precisa despertar interesse nas pessoas, mantendo a essência e a verdade, mas adaptando a faixas etárias, partes diversas do país.”

The Mystery Genes That Are Keeping You Alive (Wired)

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Nobody knows what around a fifth of your genes actually do. It’s hoped they could hold the secret to fixing developmental disorders, cancer, neurodegeneration, and more.

Original article

dna molecule illustration

Roger Highfield – Aug 8, 2023 2:00 PM

One could be forgiven for a little genetic déjà vu.

Launched in 1990, the Human Genome Project unveiled its first readout of the human DNA sequence with great fanfare in 2000. The human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003—but it took nearly 20 more years before the final, complete version was released.

This did not mark the end of humankind’s genetic puzzle, however. A new study has mapped the yawning gap between reading our genes and understanding them. Vast parts of the genome—areas the study authors have nicknamed the “Unknome”—are made of genes whose function we still don’t know.

This has important implications for medicine: Genes are the instructions for making the protein building blocks of the body. Plenty of those still shrouded in darkness could have profound medical significance and may hold the keys to disorders of development, cancer, neurodegeneration, and more.

The study makes it embarrassingly clear just how many important genes we know little to nothing about. It estimates that a fifth of human genes with a vital function are still essentially a mystery. The good news is that the research also outlines how scientists can focus on those mystery genes. “We might now be at the beginning of the end of the Unknome,” says Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, a coauthor of the study.

The research team used two tools to find the gaps in our knowledge. First, using the plethora of existing databases of genetic information, they compared the genetic codes of many different species to reveal genes that look roughly similar.

These riffs on a genetic theme are known as conserved genes, and even if we don’t understand what they do, we know that they must be important because nature is parsimonious and tends to use the same genetic machinery to do important jobs in different organisms. “The one thing we could be confident of is that, if important, these genes would be quite well-conserved across evolution,” says Freeman.

Once they had found similar genetic riffs in worms, humans, flies, bacteria, and other organisms, the researchers could look at what was known about the function of these clearly important genes and score them accordingly, with a high “knownness” score reflecting solid understanding.

Because so much genetic information is already available on hundreds of genomes and recorded in a standardized way, it was possible to automate this scoring process. “We then asked how many of those [conserved genes] have a score of less than one, where essentially nothing is known about them,” says Freeman. “To our surprise, two decades after the first human genome, it is still an extraordinary number.”

In all, the total number of human genes with a knownness score of 1 or less is currently 1,723 out of 19,664.

By the same token, the top 10 genes identified by the team’s rummage through genetic databases corresponded with “all the most famous genes, which is reassuring,” says Sean Munro of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a study coauthor. “We recognized every single one of them, and there are already thousands of papers about each of them.”

When it came to the substantial number that were unknown, the team conducted one more study, using the best understood (at the genetic level) organism of all: Drosophila melanogaster. These fruit flies have been the subject of research for more than a century because they are easy and inexpensive to breed, have a short life cycle, produce lots of young, and can be genetically modified in numerous ways.

The team used gene editing to dial down the use of around 300 low-scoring genes found in both humans and fruit flies. “We found that one-quarter of these unknown genes were lethal—when knocked out, they caused the flies to die, and yet nobody had ever known anything about them,” says Freeman. “Another 25 percent of them caused changes in the flies—phenotypes—that we could detect in many ways.” These genes were linked with fertility, development, locomotion, protein quality control, and resilience to stress. “That so many fundamental genes are not understood was eye-opening,” Freeman says. It’s possible that variation in these genes could have very big impacts on human health.

All of this “unknomics” information is held on a database, which the team is making available for other researchers to use to discover new biology. The next step may be to hand the data on these mystery genes and the mystery proteins they create over to AI.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for example, can provide important insights into what mystery proteins do, notably by revealing how they interact with other proteins, says Alex Bateman of the European Bioinformatics Institute, based near Cambridge, UK. So can cryo-EM, which is a way of producing images of large, complex molecules, he says. And a University College London team has shown a systematic way to use machine learning to figure out what proteins do in yeast.

The Unknome is unusual in that it’s a biology database that will shrink as we understand it better. The paper shows that over the past decade “we have moved from 40 percent to 20 percent of the human proteome having a certain level of unknownness,” says Bateman. However, at current progress rates, working out the function of all human protein-coding genes could take more than half a century, Freeman estimates.

The discovery that so many genes remain misunderstood reflects what is called the streetlight effect, or the drunkard’s search principle, an observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. In this case, it has caused what Freeman and Munro call a “bias in biological research toward the previously studied.”

The same goes for researchers, who tend to get funding for research in relatively well-understood areas, rather than going off into what Freeman calls the wilderness. This is why the database is so important, Munro explains—it fights back against the economics of academia, which avoids things that are very poorly understood. “There is a need for a different type of support to address these unknowns,” says Munro.

But even with the database becoming available and researchers picking through it, there will still be some knowledge blind spots. The study focused on genes that are responsible for proteins. Over the past two decades, uncharted areas of the genome have also been found to harbor the code for small RNAs—scraps of genetic material that can affect other genes, and which are critical regulators of normal development and bodily functions. There may be more “unknown unknowns” lurking in the human genome.

For now, there’s still plenty to get into, and Freeman hopes this work will encourage others to study the genetic Terra Incognita: “There’s more than enough Unknome for anyone who wants to explore genuinely new biology.”

Opinion: How wildfires in Algeria and California reveal the origins of the ‘Mediterranean climate’ (Los Angeles Times)

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latimes.com

Stephanie Pincetl

Aug. 3, 2023 3:01 AM PT

In this image taken from video, a wildfire burns in Zbarbar, Bouira Province, Algeria, on July 24.
(Associated Press)

More than 30 people have died in the under-reported wildfires in Algeria, while blazes in Greece and Italy have made headlines. Top concerns in these disasters have been the future of tourism.

All of these countries are considered to have a so-called Mediterranean climate, as does California. But, are they all the same in their Mediterraneanness?

A Mediterranean climate has been identified in Chile, Australia, South Africa, California and, of course, around the Mediterranean. Characterized by cool wet winters, hot dry summers and endemic plants that thrive under such conditions, they are considered among the most endangered ecosystems on the planet due to their restricted geographical area. Interestingly, most environmentalists and scientists seem to be concerned about forest fires in these regions, not about the scrubby plants that predominate the coastal areas and that tend to be the ones most endangered, not even so much by fire, but by urban encroachment.

It’s time now, though, we recognize that Algerian landscapes, like those of California, are colonial ones. These landscapes were transformed to fit an European idea of Mediterranean-ness. The consequences of this misunderstanding of natural ecosystems as preserved by Indigenous peoples, and of the damage inflicted in these regions are now evident in the wildfires in North Africa.

Although 90% of Algeria is made up of the Sahara Desert, French colonialists believed the country was once lushly forested. The French imposed laws to criminalize the use of forest fires (which are an integral part of the ecosystem) and to forbid the traditional multiple uses of the forest by Indigenous people. Likewise, in California, forest fires were also suppressed and Indigenous inhabitants removed.

In Algeria, in the early 20th century, the French started planting eucalyptus, which are highly flammable, as a timber source. The French Forest Code was derived mostly from tropical islands and brought to its North African colonies. In California, the suppression of forest fires was an intrinsic part of remaking the forest and rejecting all traditional Indigenous practices.

Despite poor success in afforestation in Algeria, the notion that the country should be forested was undeterred, persisting to the present. The 1960s Algerian Green Dam project was initiated to plant trees to stop the northward advancement of the Sahara, under the misapprehension that the Sahara was growing north. Flammable Aleppo pine was planted. Pine caterpillar invasions devastated the trees, and humans contributed to deforestation. Still, this effort continues to be funded by the African Union, the World Bank and the European Union, part of a larger project of a green band of trees and vegetation across the entire length of the Sahara that will likely fail.

In California, forest practices that suppressed naturally occurring fires and traditionally set fires have resulted in dense, overgrown forests, where trees compete for light and water, are more susceptible to disease and of course, even more at risk for extreme fire. The state’s recent megafires show the result of this management, exacerbated by a hotter, drier climate.

Diana K. Davis, a professor of history at UC Davis, has suggested in her book “The Arid Lands” that the Middle East is part of a dryland complex, including North Africa, raising the question of whether Algeria has a Mediterranean climate at all but instead its own semi-arid ecological condition.

If so, then perhaps investing in protecting and reviving the various systems of precolonial practices and land uses might make more sense than planting trees. Instead of homogenizing areas across the world into equivalents, paying attention to difference and specificity might produce land management that is not so prone to fire, and might also help make those landscapes healthier.

California’s landscapes too could be less fire-prone if urbanization in terrain at high risk were curtailed and fires reintroduced into its forests in a systematic way. By classifying landscapes and regions by type — Mediterranean being one such type — Western European science and values have distorted Indigenous landscapes so that they have become far more susceptible to climate change and fire. The assumption that these lands are all the same means that ideas of their management transfer across borders to great damage.

Algeria is a desert-dominated, semi-arid place where development policies and urbanization practices have put people in altered landscapes at great risk of fire. California too has suffered from a scientific approach that overlooked its ecology and the ways in which people lived here in the landscapes. Fire, disaster and death are likely to continue until we reckon with this colonial legacy.

Stephanie Pincetl is a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She conducts research on California land use, energy and water.