Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  chapter ten

  WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US!

  WE ARE WELL AWARE of how individual components of the Earth’s complex biosphere can play a role in security. Hannibal invading Italy with an army of elephants. Lawrence of Arabia leading guerilla fighters on camelback. Apache raids on war horses. Carrier pigeons delivering top-secret messages across occupied Europe. Bomb-sniffing dogs. Drug-sniffing dogs. Even cancer-sniffing dogs. Dolphins finding submerged mines in harbors. Chimpanzees testing space capsules. Mice testing antidepressants. Chicken eggs that incubate viral vaccines that prime our immune systems for coming epidemics. The direct use of nature to ensure our security, usually through trained or confined organisms, is rooted in our legends and history, our technological triumphs, our greatest successes in social medicine, and discoveries both vitally important to our survival and highly controversial in their methodologies. In every case, nature helped us stretch beyond our own abilities, providing a cheaper, easier, and more reliable way to do things we couldn’t or wouldn’t do on our own.

  Despite the profound influence these organisms have had on our survival, the use of nature in this way has become so commonplace that it almost fades into the background, hardly worth calling out for special attention in a discussion of innovative ways to use nature in security. Or perhaps, because we imposed our own clever modification on these organisms, we’ve even forgotten their identities as natural organisms, considering them merely as tools, not essentially different from an MRAP or a crash-test dummy or any other pill from the pharmacy. And yet these natural tools, largely taken for granted, only represent a small fraction of the ways nature provides security for us every day. Our most important natural security systems are those that haven’t been deliberately changed by us at all. They are just there, doing their natural thing and keeping us safe.

  This chapter focuses not on nature-inspired security systems, but on natural security systems that have developed wholly in the setting of biological evolution. These are a subset of what has been called “nature’s services”—things of high value to humans that are provided free of charge by nature. In keeping with a key theme of this book, they can be found at every level of biological organization, including deep within our own bodies. Some of these services have been long forgotten, some are just being discovered, and some have been recently revalued at a much higher rate following tragedies that struck in their absence. All of those that we have some control over, I argue, are still vastly undervalued and underutilized. In our haste to let experts design and then deploy security systems, we often ride roughshod over these truly natural security systems, irrevocably damaging them. Even worse, we often modify these systems in the name of greater security, and our intelligently designed security systems usually turn out to do worse on the balance than nature in its unmodified state.

  Take our feet. They are a wonderful security system that keeps us balanced, allows us to move fast and are almost always our first responders to the changing environment we move through—and we’ve been busy breaking down and replacing them with our modern (and inferior) technology. Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, which is part ethnography of the long-distance running Tarahumara Indians of the Copper Canyon in Mexico and part scathing indictment of the running shoe industry, makes the case that our feet have always been the first and best way our species has interacted with the world. Our emergence from the rest of the primate line co-occurred with a body well-adopted not just for an upright gait but adapted like no other animal for running long distances. McDougall argues that the Tarahumara can run nearly endless distances in some of the roughest terrain in the world without injury—well into old age, by the way—because of, not despite, the fact that they run barefoot or in the thinnest rubber sandals. By contrast, most of us have bought into the idea that we need to protect our arches by supporting them (but have you ever seen an architectural arch with support under it?), massively pad our heels, and then (probably because our heels and arches are now unnaturally high off the ground) augment this protection with all sorts of “stability” devices, springs, air pouches, gel inserts, torsion control bars, and the like. To “safely” go running, we’ve got to drop $100 or so for something we used to be able to do for free. What’s worse, according to McDougall and a growing number of peer-reviewed studies, these shoes aren’t protecting us from all our knee and hip and Achilles tendon and plantar fasciitis injuries, they’re causing them.

  So, how can our bare feet protect us? The same way as other natural security systems—with a lot of redundancy and remote sensing. McDougall’s description of the foot’s architecture nicely blueprints the redundancy: “Buttressing the foot’s arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eight muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.”1 This redundancy, when allowed to work, does a great job of shock absorption, but that only explains part of why barefoot running works. Instead of accepting one centralized direction to pound down and through the heel and maintain that exact heel strike no matter what the terrain (as a super-cushioned running shoe was intentionally designed to make the leg and foot do) a bare foot lets all those redundant muscles and tendons and joints and bones (not to mention the many sensitive nerves of the sole) take over as semi-independent agents sensing the ground. Like Geerat Vermeij “seeing” shells with his fingertips, barefoot runners start to “see” the complex terrain with all the sensory equipment of their feet. McDougall recalls a Nike researcher filming barefoot runners and coming to the ironic conclusion that running barefoot was a lot better than running in Nikes: “He was startled by what he found: instead of each foot chomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.”2

  Of course, it’s certainly up to individuals to determine how much they want to trust their own body versus how much they want to trust Nike and Doctor in a Box. I will say that after struggling through early middle age with a growing number of running injuries, I decided to take a leap and try running barefoot. Almost instantly, all of those nagging knee pains, Achilles strains, and a bad recurring case of plantar fasciitis disappeared and haven’t plagued me for two years, so on a personal level I’m a convert. But individual success using natural security systems doesn’t automatically scale up to institutional conversion. Public health, for example, could benefit enormously from utilizing natural services but has been slow to embrace them.

  NATURAL SECURITY AND MEDICINE

  Our bodies have all sorts of other natural defense systems that we often foolishly and deliberately override. These defense systems were developed over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and many can be traced back to organisms long predating humans in evolutionary development, but we dismiss this acquired wisdom in trying to quickly alleviate the temporary discomfort that often accompanies our defensive responses.

  I can remember my daughter’s first fever; not extreme, but it lasted a while and kept her from sleeping, and being a concerned and sleep-deprived first-time parent, I brought her to the Doctor in a Box clinic. The doctor on call took a quick look at her, told me it was nothing serious, and prescribed that I give her some Tylenol to stop the fever. Since it was a slow night at the clinic, I decided to press the issue a bit.

  “Doc,” I asked, “I don’t know much about medicine, but isn’t a fever a sign of the immune system fighting off infection?”

  “Basically, yes,” he replied.

  “So, then might it be better to let it do its job than suppress it with drugs?”

  “Well,” he demurred, “it probably is, for a fever that’s not too high like your daughter’s, but working here I just usually want to get the kids and their parents comfortable as soon as possible, so I tell them to kill the fever.”

  Indeed, both of us were right. Fevers are uncomfortab
le for patients and for their caregivers, but they are also a natural security system that’s been tested over a long time. All our vertebrate cousins, from fish to birds, get fevers, and newer research shows that the vertebrate immune system functions better when it’s hot.3 The fever is essentially prepping the operating room for the immune system to get to work excising an invading pathogen.

  This disconnect between the deeper knowledge of medicine—that is, getting at the roots of why we get sick—and the shallow practice of medicine—basically treating symptoms—is what drives the field of “Darwinian medicine.” Darwinian or evolutionary medicine strives to identify the evolutionary strategies of disease and aims to develop a method of practice that respects the power behind our natural responses to disease. For example, conventional doctors are trained to understand that the proximate cause of jaundice is a buildup of bilirubin, so they work to get rid of it. But bilirubin isn’t just a waste product—it has evolved to function in humans as a powerful antioxidant that slows the ageing process. A more critical example is the over-prescription and over-the-counter use of antibiotics. Evolutionary biologists understand that everything from bacteria to insect pests will, through selection for the hardiest varieties, acquire resistance to broad spectrum attempts to eliminate them. The consequences of this lesson of evolution are beginning to be appreciated by mainstream health practice circles. The rise of super-resistant bacteria, especially in places like hospitals, where antibiotics are highly concentrated, is now recognized as an enormous threat claiming a large proportion of the estimated 99,000 annual infection deaths in U.S. hospitals alone.4 Nonetheless, as I discussed earlier, incorporating evolutionary ideas into other fields of practice has a mixed track record. Although the core ideas of Darwinian medicine have been around for several decades, articulated most clearly in Randolph Nesse and George William’s book Why We Get Sick,5 evolutionary biology is still almost completely absent from medical school curricula.6

  The specter of emerging infectious disease is of grave concern to public health officials. New diseases for which we have little natural immunity are just a few mutations away from being safely contained within animal hosts to something that can infect a huge and available new human population. Already our best defense against these diseases is almost purely natural—basically identifying their character and developing vaccines that are still often cultured in the albumen of chicken eggs (which provide a nice living substrate for growth without having to sacrifice a lot of animals to make large batches).

  But a complementary line of defense would be to lower the chance of infection itself by lowering the prevalence and virulence of diseases. Here nature may provide a very simple solution—just keep the variability of nature intact. At least in cases of some diseases, like Lyme disease and hantavirus, which utilize multiple hosts to spread, having a diverse array of potential hosts around can weaken the strength of the disease overall.7 This is because not all species are equally good at transmitting the disease—for example, 90 percent of mice bitten by ticks transmit Lyme disease, whereas only 15 percent of squirrels bitten do so8—in essence, the total population of the disease gets diluted by passing through a higher proportion of ineffective hosts. Similarly, West Nile virus, which has been gaining a foothold in the United States, increases its prevalence when bird diversity declines. Diseases such as schistosomiasis, which uses aquatic snails to incubate the infective larval form, are reduced in the presence of a healthy population of predatory fish that eat the intermediate snail hosts.

  In general, it follows that protecting the habitats that protect all this diversity is likely to help control disease. Scientists have recently found that clearing forests greatly benefits the mosquitoes that spread malaria.9 Where key habitats, such as the wetlands around New Orleans, Louisiana, are filled or converted for human use, prevalence of West Nile virus increases. Loss of habitat also increases the chances for disease transmission because animals infected with potentially virulent strains are more likely to come into contact with humans as the animals’ habitats are destroyed, fragmented, or bisected by roads.

  WATER IS LIFE

  The relationship between biodiversity and human diseases is still a controversial field of inquiry, but an undisputed scientific statement is that water is essential to life. So it’s not surprising that many of the most natural natural security systems are based on water—how to drink it safely, how to store it, where it moves, how it moves, and how we move upon it. The UN estimates that one billion people lack sufficient access to potable water,10 and a number of high-tech and low-tech technologies have been deployed to parts of the world most severely affected. But these technologies are often not accepted or don’t survive the long term in the communities they were meant to serve. It turns out that prickly pear cactus, which thrive in many of the most water-starved places and are already harvested for their flesh and fruit, make excellent water filters. When ground up, their extracts can effectively filter both sediment and bacteria in water.11

  Even when we have access to massive storage and purification systems, water is not always available when and where we need it. In the United States, for example, while the western deserts suffer through years of continuous drought, the Midwest might be flooded from seemingly ceaseless rain. Living at the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona, I’ve become acutely aware of this distributional problem of water. We spend most of the year panting in almost complete dryness. Then, with great fanfare of crashing thunderheads and people literally dancing in the streets with joy, the summer monsoons come like a biblical pronouncement; the sky splits open, the people retreat to their houses, and the streets turn into rivers, the parking lots into lakes. Rain cisterns made of old plastic eighty-gallon pickle barrels and large galvanized culverts turned on end, which sat empty for half a year, are overflowing within minutes. There’s no way to collect it all.

  Instead, rainwater “harvesting” experts talk about slowing it down by converting hard landscapes that slope toward the streets into earthen mazes that funnel water to thirsty desert plants that have adapted well to take full advantage of brief periods of heavy water and long periods of drought. This concept of slowing down and redirecting nature’s excesses is at the heart of many of the ways that nature provides security to us and the ways that we squander this security.

  One of the largest cities in the world, Los Angeles, California, is a madhouse of natural threats to security, according to Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear, a natural and social history of the city and its disasters that has given many an Angelino sleepless nights wondering when the next “big one” will hit (and what “one” it will be). Los Angeles’s native ecology is home to earthquakes, fires, floods, landslides, and even tornadoes.12 It has little water, and what water it gets typically comes rushing down the steep surrounding mountains after intense storms, and floods out across the entire flat Los Angeles basin. But human ingenuity quickly took care of all that. Well, it took care of the flooding problem—the earthquakes, the fires, the landslides, and the tornadoes are still there.

  In fact, both the early agricultural economic base and the whole political power structure of Los Angeles was born over the control of water. Farms on the border of the original pueblo of Los Angeles were fed by zanjas, earthen canals, off the Los Angeles River. By the mid-nineteenth century, control of the zanjas rested in the hands of the zanjero, an appointed position whose power is belied by the fact that his salary was a third more than the mayor’s.13 If you wanted water, you talked to the zanjero.

  Without controlling the episodic flooding of the river through canals, Los Angeles would never have grown in population as it did. But as it grew, agriculture was pushed away into the valleys of the north and east, and the zanjas became less important. Now the goal was to keep the flooding from taking out the factories, train tracks, and houses that were packed right up to the banks of the river. Earthen canals and the natural meandering river course were realigned into huge straight box channe
ls lined on three sides with concrete. To make the walls high enough to contain the high waters after the rains, in some places these channels are over thirty feet tall. In one place you can stand at the bottom of a box channel and look way up to find old hobo graffiti from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It hasn’t been covered up by the more contemporary gangster graffiti because it’s too high, scratched out at the former base of a low overpass that once crossed the true natural bed of the river. Nowhere is the transformation of the river more stark than at the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. The Portola Expedition of 1769, which had plied the pristine coastal lands of California, delighted when they saw these rivers come together, noting, “The beds of both are very well lined with large trees, sycamores, willows, cottonwoods, and very large live oaks,” and considered it the best spot of all they had seen for “a very large plenteous mission.” 14 Now this same spot is a gargantuan monument of concrete walls and freeway overpasses with nary a living thing to be seen, immortalized in the irony-laden website Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures.15

  Of course, not just the river was transformed into concrete, the entire vast growing cityscape was laid out in hard surfaces— sidewalks, parking lots, and eight-lane freeways—and former streams were redirected into concrete pipes and buried underground. Besides being hideously ugly, the net effect of all this poured concrete and asphalt (known to water engineers as “impervious surfaces”) is that rather than slowing the water and letting it hydrate plants and percolate into the ground where it can later be pumped up to use, it now rushes (along with a truly astounding amount of trash, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and fecal coliform bacteria) straight into the Pacific Ocean. Thus, a city chronically starved of water has created the greatest system for getting rid of naturally supplied water as fast as possible, before a drop can be used.